Танит Ли - Anackire

In the grip of it, Rem felt only an enormous distancing, no terror. He understood he would be aware to the second. He rode on, holding the zeeba steady.

The Avenue widened and gave on to the great square. Ahead, the mighty Rarnammon statue, behind that the Imperial Hill, the terraced rise with the palace, and higher, framed in forest, the oldest temple of the Dortharian Anackire. Across the nearer space, the glint of other caparisons, banners, the figurines of the Storm Lord and his officials. And the crowd everywhere, and more running in to pile up against the buildings. Some had even climbed the Rarnammon to gain vantage from its chariot wheels.

Inside the body of the procession there was abruptly more room. Rem found he was advancing between the chariots as they widened their phalanx, and through them.

Before he was quite through he felt the pulse of the earth stop. That was what it was like. The earth’s pulse, or his own. Then under the cheering and the hubbub, there came a low strong roar. At first, they mistook it for themselves.

Then bells began to ring, the curiously noted stringed bells brought here from Koramvis. The bells knew the grasp of the earthquake, it had shaken them before. They seemed to be crying out a warning. It was recognized.

All at once the screams of excitement turned to shrieks of horror. The crowd pushed against itself. He could hear the prayer-screams, too. “Anack! Anack!” The Xarabians of the entourage were if anything more afraid than the Vis of the city. This was not even their country that they be expected to die in it. Already all was out of control, beasts struggling and rearing, chariots dragged sideways, men tumbled, and the crowd on every side milling and howling, no one able to move. But the ground itself moving.

The zeeba danced to keep its balance. Something of Rem’s iron command came through to it, just negating the primal urge to kick and run. He looked at the sky. A man was falling from the Rarnammon, screeching. He burst down into the crowd. The great statue, however, did not shift, only trembling at its roots, its human cargo clinging to it.

Rem was through the chariots, up to the place where the rear guard of Iros’ soldiery had flanked the procession’s gaudy center, its core Ulis Anet’s ceremonial car. But something had happened to the order of the procession.

One of the Yasmis carts had overturned. One of the Yasmis girls lay dead where a kalinx, expelled from the shafts and its tether snapped, had torn out her heart and stood now, in her blood and the crushed sweets, irresolute between fear and viciousness. No one had killed it. When the quake ended it might attack again. Rem leaned, met its glacial eyes, and swiftly cut its throat. He rode over the cadaver, the zeeba snorting, and into the clamor of mounted men beyond.

The Xarabians were shouting, invoking gods. A sword, drawn to hack a passage somewhere, into another world maybe, where the earth was solid, slashed blind over his unmailed shoulder and drew blood. Rem turned and struck the sword-waver unconscious. As the man slumped, Rem saw across him to the garlanded chariot of the Princess. The driver was gone and the banners had fallen. Caught in the maelstrom it was pulled now one way now another, the panic-stricken chariot-animals, bred for strength in speed and little else, leaping and cavorting in the shafts, screaming as human women screamed all about. The reins were gone, she could not have taken them up even if she had had the weight to hold the team, which she did not. Beyond this, he saw again the flash of metal; swords were out everywhere. Iros and his captains were cutting a way to her through the crowd, their own men and the naked dancing girls.

The quake was almost done, the earth merely shivering now, like a man after sickness. It needed only moments more for the complementary dousing of panic, a cold despairing relief, to come down on them. The beasts would feel it first.

But before the dousing came, the freakish flailing of Iros’ guard had cleared a road before the Princess’ chariot. The animals did at once what they had wished to do all along, bolting forward, their screams trailing like torn flags. The very men who had striven toward her went down before them. Rem saw Iros dashed aside, the long glancing rip of his sword across the breasts of the team serving to madden them further.

Rem touched his spurs against the zeeba. That was all it took. It rushed forward pell-mell as the chariot-animals had done.

The chariot raced ahead, the girl holding to the sides. Ghastly addendum, one of the dancers, caught by her own long hair among the spokes of the wheel, was carried some way in tow over the paving. Her silence was due to death. But Ulis Anet made no sound, either.

Before them, the royal panoply of the King. On foot, hemmed in and pressed against the first steps of the hill, they seemed set only to stare, those figurines, until the chariot ran into them.

The bells had stopped tolling.

Rem had been in enough skirmishes. It was familiar in essence if not in exactitude. And he knew what to do.

Only a little thought went mocking through his occupied mind:

Kesarh would have planned this .

Then he was level with the pelting team.

Swinging over, he brought his sword down on the inside animal’s brain, blade and arm with all the strength behind them he could spare. The beast went over at once, taking the sword with it out of his hand. The others were unable to stop, their momentum carrying them in a snarl across their dead fellow, the chariot slewing behind, all in his path. But he had already kneed the zeeba aside, and as she came by, her volcanic hair flying, he caught the girl up and out and across his mount.

They were away even as the chariot went over. Wrapped in a tangle of traces the animals were flung across it, broken-spined in half a second.

It was as well he had kept up the warrior’s training of Karmiss, Rem told himself wryly. He glanced with pity at the dead team. Wryness, pity—that was all. He felt no more than that.

He stayed his mount and slid down from it smoothly, lifting the woman after him.

She stared at him. “Thank you,” she said.

“An honor, madam.”

The inanity struck both of them. Standing on the square, amid spaces of white paving spilled with blood, a broken chariot, dead bodies, they both laughed bitterly.

There was a tremendous soundlessness all about. Then a ragged cheer went up. The Xarabians, having botched the job, were congratulating a foreign stranger on saving precious Xarabian goods.

From the palace end of the square, men were starting toward them.

“Are you hurt?” Rem said to the Princess.

“No. But you’re bleeding.”

“Some fool with a sword. It’s nothing.”

“It seems more than nothing.”

“I, too, was a soldier, madam,” he said for some reason. “I know when I’m hurt or not. But your solicitude is generous.”

“The quake. . . . Is it over?” she asked him. He had become an authority on things, wounds, rescues, earthquakes. He smiled, nodded.

Irrationally, this private conversation in the middle of pandemonium seemed relevant. Though it meant nothing, he could see how beautiful she was, still spear-straight and self-possessed.

But her eyes drifted to the dead dancing girl and away. Her voice faltered now, before she mastered it.

“Perhaps it’s an omen. I’ve heard when my future husband, the King, entered Anackyra as a boy, there was a violent tremor.”

Something happened. It was intangible, invisible, deep as mortal illness.

“What is it?” she said.

But at that moment the group from the palace end of the square had reached them.

Immediately Ulis Anet was encompassed. Rem discovered himself cordoned by a mass of men, Vis, Vathcrians. He could pick out none of the Lowland race. And then there was another man, exactly in front of him. He dressed in white as Ulis Anet had been, and a white cloak roped with a golden snake, the scales laid on like coins. His hair was whiter than his garments, but his skin was tawny as young wood. He had the beauty one had heard of, Raldnor Am Anackire’s looks, like a god. But there was no discrepancy in height. They were as tall as each other. So Rem looked at him eye to eye, and these eyes were the color of the glass in the eyeplaces of the Rarnammon.