“Be long delayed,” Thinal prompted. Her eyes sparkled. “Be long delayed!”
Thinal bowed. “May the Good grow within your house and the Evil diminish. May your men be strong and your women fertile, your children wax in beauty and your elders in wisdom. May your crops flourish, your herds increase, and all your arrows fly true.”
Forest Sleeper—or Dark Lady—clapped her tiny hands joyfully. She looked up at Rap in reproach. “He knows the words!”
“Then he shall teach me.”
“It’s a faunish greeting,” Thinal said, with a smug glance at Rap. He repeated the ritual, line by line, and Rap in turn spoke it to the girl.
She laughed when he had done. Then she became troubled again, stepping very close to Thinal and giving him the same steady stare she had given Rap. “Small One, what is nearest your heart?”
Again Thinal’s eyes flicked to Rap’s for guidance. “Your greatest ambition?” Rap muttered.
“Ah! Dark Lady, I seek to be relieved of a spell placed upon me by a wicked sorcerer.”
The fairy studied him for longer than she had Rap. Then she gave the same reply, but hesitantly. “You do not know!” And now obviously it was Little Chicken’s turn, and the fairy was gaining confidence. She told him that his name was Big Ears, at which Rap and Thinal hastily suppressed grins. The goblin’s slanted eyes widened slightly.
“I term you Beauty of the Night,” he said in his heavily accented impish.
Rap was surprised and gratified. Not bad at all! Knowing how goblins disparaged women, he had been afraid of some surly rudeness.
Beauty of the Night rattled off her ritual welcome, and Little Chicken replied with Thinal’s faunish formula.
Then he was given the close stare. “Big Ears, what is nearest your heart?”
Rap knew the answer to that. He wondered if Little Chicken would be truthful. He was, but he spoke in goblin.
“Kill Flat Nose. Long, long pain.”
This time the scrutiny was longer still. Then the fairy child said, ”Oh!” and held up both hands to the goblin. Rap was astonished to see that her deep jet eyes had brimmed over, her cheeks of polished ebony were glistening with tears.
“You do know!” She tugged at the goblin’s arms. Puzzled and wary, he sank down to his knees. Even then she had to rise on tiptoe to embrace him, to reach up and kiss his cheek.
Rap and Thinal shot each other glances of mingled astonishment and amusement, Thinal rolling his eyes; but before either could frame a suitably ribald comment, Little Chicken cried out and clutched at the tiny form, suddenly gone limp.
He lowered her gently to the ground. Rap knelt to see, but even as he did so, he had no doubt. She was dead.
Just like that—dead.
Faun and goblin stared at each other across the body in mutual horror.
“Did not hurt!” Little Chicken protested. He scrambled to his feet and backed away, paler than Rap had ever seen him, livid green blotches highlighting his cheekbones. “Did not touch!”
“No, you didn’t. I saw.”
Thinal gave a choked cry and vanished. A thong snapped, a loincloth fluttered to the ground, leaving Sagorn naked and absurd—and paralyzed with shock, staring down at the body. All the color drained out of his already pale jotunn cheeks, turning them almost as white as the strands of hair still plastered over his face by the previous night’s rain.
“He didn’t touch her!” Rap said. “She put her arms around him. He did nothing! In fact, he had his hands behind him, like this.”
Sagorn licked sallow lips. “I saw, too. Thinal did.” His bewilderment seemed as great as Rap’s.
“Well?” Rap shouted. “Doctor? You’re the great scholar! Explain this, old man—there’s a dead child here. What did we do wrong?”
“I . . . I have no idea.” Sagorn gazed at Rap in frank dismay. ”No cachexia or morbidity or trauma I have ever encountered . . .” He sank down and felt the tiny neck for a pulse. Then he closed the all black eyes with fingers that seemed cruelly huge. He rose stiffly; seeming to notice his nudity for the first time, he stooped to retrieve the loincloth.
“I have never seen anything like that,” he muttered. “I know of nothing to induce moribundity with such alacrity. Postulation of occult agency must—” He sucked in his breath.
“Well?”
The old man was staring at Rap with pure horror contorting his features. ”Nothing!”
But there was something.
Then there was no Sagorn. He had vanished, calling back Thinal in his place.
Rap roared and stepped over the dead girl to grab the imp by the shoulders. ”What did he remember?”
“What? Rap!”
Rap could barely restrain himself. He wanted to shake Thinal like a dusty horse blanket. “What did Sagorn think of, that made him leave like that? He remembered something, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think, man! Think!”
“Rap, you’re hurting . . . He thought of a book he read—”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t remember! I don’t know! It was years ago, in the Imperial library. Just a book, Rap. About Faerie, I think—” He was lying. Rap was certain of it. But to bully Thinal was to risk Darad. To demand that Sagorn be brought back would be useless, for he would not remain if he did not wish to be questioned. With a great effort, Rap released the imp and swung around to the goblin, whose ugly face bore a strangely bemused expression.
“She spoke to you. Didn’t she? She whispered something in your ear. What did she say?”
The goblin pouted. “Don’t know.”
“You’re lying, trash!”
A dangerous glint shone in Little Chicken’s eye. “Not impish. Not goblin. Didn’t understand.”
He was lying, also. In dismay, Rap stared around at the hot jungle and the pitiful cluster of huts, bereft now of their last pathetic inhabitant. Wanting to hide his tears from the others, he muttered something about a spade and walked away.
He wept.
There was a mystery here that he could not start to understand. He was only a dumb stableboy, or at best a factor’s clerkfar from home and hopelessly out of his depth. Inos seemed farther away than ever and he more lost than ever, trapped with two companions he dared not trust.
He had brought an innocent child to her death. Somehow his blundering ignorance had killed her.
The world was a much stranger place than he had expected.
Some little talk:
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was-and then no more of THEE and ME.
— Fitzgerald, The Rubatyat of Omar Khayyam (§32, 1879)
FOUR
Destiny with men
1
“Steady there, lady,” Inos said. “Steady! Now I take a look at your hoof. All part of the game.” She slid from the saddle, then tried to comfort Sesame, patting her neck and cooing. “Sorry, girl! Sorry!” Sesame champed her bit and backed away rebelliously, clattering on the wind-polished pebbles; she kept that up for several minutes before allowing herself to be soothed. She was one of the sweetest-tempered mounts Inos had ever met, but at the moment she was very mad, and with good reason.
The only vegetation in sight was thorny scrub, useless for tying reins to. Apart from that there was sand and stone as far as the eye could see, hot enough to bake bread. Heat lay on the desert like a lake of molten lead. It shimmered in silver mirages and blurred the rocky ridges, even the closest. It poached the eyeballs. The Agonistes were barely visible ghosts, snowcapped and remote.
Sesame was still fretting, perturbed by the lack of other horses, perhaps not trusting Inos to find the road home again. The last of the hunt had just topped the ridge ahead, disappearing after the hounds; the beaters and dog handlers were leagues back. Timeless silence had returned to the barren hills; the air was still and cruel, too hot to breathe, and smelling of dust.
Inos unhooked the canteen and dropped her veil to drink. She had no objection to covering her face out here in the hills, because everyone did, even Azak. She ought to pretend to inspect Sesame’s shoes, but at the moment there was no one in sight, so she could just say she had done so. She shook the canteen and scowled at it for being so near to empty. The sky was frighteningly huge, and she could imagine herself as a God might see her, an insignificant dot on a great barren expanse of rock.
She replaced the canteen, wiping her face with her sleeve. It had been a tougher day than usual—she wondered again what on earth she was hoping to achieve, broiling herself in the desert. For more than two weeks now she had been imprisoned in Arakkaran, Pandemia’s most luxurious jail, and in those two weeks she seemed to have accomplished nothing at all. Nothing for Krasnegar; nothing even for her own satisfaction, for she had not achieved that monarch-to-monarch talk with Azak that she had set out to win.