KAR LFORN EZ LFORN KL JAVHOVOR
This way is the High-Lord’s Way
I blinked the rain from my eyes and saw that the inscription was so weathered now, I could not read it at all.
The rain lasted two days, but seemed to do the land no good. It was sucked in and lost, or turned to mud which dried blackly. The road was untouched. Magnificent, it had kept itself countless centuries for the merchants who now used it. For me, it was peopled with ghosts, and the voices and the wills of ghosts.
That was the time of the dreams.
There had been a time before then, when my life had been half dream, when I had lain in the temple or by the water in the ravine. Now my life was awake, and my dreams were little things as I lay by Darak. Yet the road made it otherwise.
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All those first two days of rain, riding with the road, there had been a feeling on me, like oppression before storm, though the storm was here. The third day we made our evening camp at the road’s side by a shallow pool, with a little stream plunging into it, among the stunted stretching trees.
There are no particular laws in the dream places. I was a man, and that did not seem strange to me. I say a man, but not a man like any men I had met since I came from the mountain. I was a man of my own race, that special and arrogant people I did not remember, yet knew in myself.
Things were very different in the dream.
Great gardens, falling in terraces, dark green cypress, rose trees and lemon, behind, the huge mansion, built with an architecture I had seen before in sleep, very white and tall and soaring, its crown far up in the sky. Beyond the garden wall, the High-Lord’s Way, winding on toward the cities of the Mountain Ring.
Walking down between the scented avenues of trees, and ahead the great oval pool set around with marble statues and steps. Fountains tumbled into the pool, and near them, among the marble blocks angularly carved to represent rocks, a girl was splashing water over her body. She was naked, magnolia-colored against the jade-green water, and her hair streamed around her. The man I was walked to the water’s edge and spoke to her. And it was the tongue in which the inscription on the road had been written.
“Di lath samor?”
I desired her, and she was afraid, and her fear was part of my desire. Now, she cowered away from me in the greenness. She was so much smaller than I, and human; lower, less, nothing. But very beautiful. I was aware her foot was chained under the water, and she could not get out. Her bathing actions also had been at my orders.
“Slen ez Kalled-a. Kar aslor tin ez.”
She put her hand up to her face, and began to whimper. I stepped onto the water, which held me lightly. I walked across to her and then allowed myself to sink a little. She began to scream as I caressed her, pushing her sliding cool body back against the slippery silken marble where the water fell. The fountains filled her mouth. She struggled. I held her by her dripping hair, in and out of the fall. The dance of love and death had begun, and both would be fulfilled.
Darak shook me awake and held me quiet in the dark. “What were you dreaming?”
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I stared into his face, in the gloom of the tent which I knew. But I could still smell the splashing water, the scents of the garden and the girl’s wet body; the man’s desire still spread between my thighs. But there was horror, too, waking and knowing.
“A man,” I said, “here, in this place. Drink no water from the pool; one woman at least is rotten mud on the water’s floor.”
Darak shook me again, more gently.
“Wake up,” he said.
“True,” I said, “she was inferior, the lower race. It gave him pleasure, he who could walk on the pool’s surface, to drown her, and take her as her lungs filled with water.”
“You were talking in your sleep-another language.”
“Not I,” I said. “He spoke. He told her what he would do to her.”
Darak’s face, almost invisible in the dark, seemed troubled. He smoothed my hair, and stroked my body, trembling like the body of an animal in fear. But he did not know whether to believe me, or to assure me it was a nightmare and nothing more. I must not tell him another time-for I knew there would be other times-he was stronger and safer to me when he had no doubts that I was human and foolish, a woman who dreamed, and, waking in fright, turned to her man to comfort her. I curled against him to sleep, and there were no more dreams that night.
But more nights followed. For every sleep on that road there was one dream at least. I told Darak no more of them, and when he woke me, as he often had to, from something horrible, I would say I could not remember.
But I learned a lot from those bitter teachings.
How many thousands of years had passed since the ones who bred me had lived their lives in the world? And how far had they stretched their evil and corruption, and their careless cruelty to those who could not match them? In this land, yes, I knew they had been kings, and High-Lords, and empresses. But beyond the sea, too? And beyond other seas? Oh, they were dust now. Except for me. Often, often, I woke from those dreams of what they had done and been, and saw in the dark the knife Karrakaz had shown me, and it must be right to let evil out of the world. It seemed to me that I was not like them, and yet I knew I was. Only my environment and my lack of Power prevented me, and even so I had done well. I had killed without thought, and even Giltt, whom I
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had made mine, I had not considered for an instant, though he was dead because of me.
And they were beautiful, were they not, the men and women of my race? Golden and alabaster, their long hands alight with jewels, their eyes like green stars, masters of every element and magic the world held. Through flames and over waters they walked; they flew with the black wings of great birds, wheeling across the red skies with the moon a white bow beneath them; they vanished, and moved like ghosts. I remember she I once was, riding the back of a huge lion in some desert place, smiling and lovely as the orchids embroidered on her skirt. But she was evil. too.
After seven days of this, I was feverish and strange. We rode all day long, but at every stop I was impatient to move on. At night I would walk up and down the camp, putting off the moment of sleep. But sleep always came, and would not be resisted. I began to bleed, too, Which is natural enough with all creatures that carry a womb, yet it had not happened before with me, and it was painful and distressing. Besides. I feared this fertile womanhood. I knew none of the methods of contraception my race had clearly understood. As for the bandit women, what they did was quite absurd, and achieved nothing, except, I suppose, to keep some witch or other from starving. I did not want to conceive. Any child would have been a misfortune then, and Darak’s seed-a bandit brat, tying me perhaps forever to a life that was not mine-was unthinkable. I did not know what to do. I simply willed myself into barrenness, wildly and hotly, whenever I thought of it.
It was on the ninth day that we came to the city.
“Is this Ankurum?” I asked Barak.
My eyes were swimming with the fever and the heat haze, and I seemed to see on the horizon white walls and towers, and vistas of many buildings behind them.
“No,” he said, “we’re days from Ankurum yet.”
Maggur said: “That’s a ruin, Imma. Only a ruin.”
“Some of the Plains tribes call it Kee-ool,” Darak said. “That means Evil One. They keep away from it, and from the road, or we’d have had company long ago. A place to suit you, goddess.”
There was always a little poison ready in him when he was unsure of me, but I hardly heard what they said.
“We pass through it?” I asked.
“Yes. The road goes through.”
“Then stop there, Darak.”
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He grinned without any good humor. “We have the time,” he said.
It was late afternoon when we reached it. Perhaps we would have stopped here anyway, although some of the men muttered and grumbled. They took out their amulets, and kissed and shook mem, but they did not come to Darak asking to go on. Their leader did not fear Kee-ool, they thought, and would laugh at them. Though Darak was edgy, and did not like this place. Truly, there seemed to be something miasmic about it, apparent even to an unimaginative man.