“Get word to Mazlek that I have announced my Guard of Honor to Vazkor Javhovor.”
Unmasked, I saw his face tauten, then relax. He smiled grimly.
“Well and good,” he said.
“Will you wear my badge?” I asked him.
“Goddess,” he said. I did not understand the familiar emotion on his face; I had seen it so often in others, yet still it made no sense.
“The head of the cat,” I said. “Can you find smiths to cast it? We have only two days.”
He bowed.
“Easily, goddess.”
When he had gone, I sat a long while in the winter-lit room, and passed from my triumph to deep depression. I had the sensation-so often on me now-that having left any place, I should not return there. Even so, I did not understand why it should distress me to quit this city, until the thought came that it was Asren I must leave. I cannot explain this aching super-awareness of his presence, even after I knew him dead. He seemed all around me, particularly in the library, which was so entirely his. I longed to take and hold things that had been his, yet I had nothing of his, except that necklace he had sent me on our marriage night, which possessed nothing of him because he felt nothing for it, had given nothing to it, knowing it was for me. The day wore on, and with my knowledge of impending departure, the sense of no return, I began to pace the room, ridiculously desperate, and unable to be still.
Finally I went to the doors and opened them. Outside, four
226
men, phoenix-masked. I knew they were all strangers to me, yet I could tell even from so small a thing as the line of their bodies as they looked at me that they were mine.
My mouth felt stiff and dry, but I said to them, “The dead lord, Asren Javhovor-where is he buried?”
“Goddess,” one of them said, “it was done swiftly, and with shame. Vazkor’s work. We do not know.”
“But give us time,” another one said. “We can discover.”
“There is no time,” I said.
“Perhaps,” a man said. He hesitated. “Possibly one of the women-Asren Javhovor’s women-might know. There must have been some rights allowed. He was not the steader Shlevakin, after all,” he added with intense bitterness.
“Find out for me,” I said. I touched his shoulder lightly, and felt that peculiar quickening under my fingers that was not sexual but spiritual desire. He bowed and was gone.
The windows blackened. Women entered and lit the lamps, their dresses coiling and rustling on the floors.
Then Dnarl came and two others, and they brought a girl with them, and left her in the room with me.
I had expected to feel jealousy-jealousy of any kind, sexual, mental, anything, I was not sure. Yet I felt nothing of this.
She was very young, fourteen or fifteen, very fragile and lovely; like him, she had reached perfection before her years, and by token of the very swiftness of this achievement, there seemed to be something ephemeral about her. Long icy-gold hair spilled on her shoulders under a dark veil. I would not have asked her to unmask, but I suppose Dnarl had told her she should. The gold thing, some flower shape, dangled from her hand. Her arms and naked breasts were pearly, and quite perfect. She wore no rings or jewelry, though she seemed made for adornment. And, though she was plainly terrified, it would have been useless to tell her not to be.
“I have asked for you to come to me,” I said, “because I want to know where my husband is buried.”
“Yes, goddess,” she said, not looking at me.
“Do you know this?”
“Yes, goddess.”
“How?”
She made a little nervous gesture with her hands.
“Vazkor Javhovor sent a man to tell me. It was a burial of shame, he said, because of what had been done, but only fitting some should remember and go to the place.”
227
“Why were you told?” I asked her.
“Because-” she stammered. “I was his-but I am of no importance. Don’t be angry with me!” And she began to cry out of pure fright. She, it seemed, had also expected my jealousy.
“There is no need for this,” I said gently. “There is no anger in me for you. Will you take me to the place?”
She nodded dumbly, and turned at once.
It was a long journey. Two guards came behind us, and they had a lamp, which at first seemed unnecessary. But soon the lighted corridors were behind us. We went through dark, earth-smelling ways deep under the palace, through old and neglected cellars crusted with dust and misty with hanging gray webs, down worn staircases that twisted round and round on themselves in the shadows. It looked a dangerous way for her to come. I remember it surprised me she did not seem afraid of it. At last there was a level corridor, and, at the end, a great iron door. She moved her fingers in the grooves and it lumbered unwillingly open.
What lay beyond filled me with bitter fury.
Some earth-heap in the desert would have angered me less.
Black velvet draped the five walls of this underground chamber, which reeked of dust and neglect. Despite the drapery, the floor had not been swept clean. Filthy scraps of cloth and glass lay scattered everywhere. Damp would soon eat holes in everything. At the center of the room, a black draped slab-wood or stone, I did not know. On this rested the ornate tomb-cask of a High-Lord-cedar wood plated with gold, ornamented with phoenixes and serpents, set with blue stones and jades, nailed shut with diamond-headed nails. Around the cask flowers had been scattered to wither, adding their decay to the rest, precious oils had been spilled, and now ran sticky, rancid and evil-smelling down the cracks of the floor.
The guards waited in the corridor, the girl slid into a corner, wide-eyed as I walked round and round the coffin until my anger, like a pain, eased a little. The girl had begun to weep again, for him, I think, this time. The aching loss I felt must be unbearable to her; she, after all, had known him and been one with him.
“If you wish to stay a while, I will wait for you in the corridor,” I said, but she choked off her sobs immediately, and ran after me.
So she led us back the long dismal way. We reached my
228
apartments and I beckoned her inside. I thanked her, but she did not seem to understand the thanking.
“Later,” I said, “if I can, I shall have him reburied, openly, and with honor, in the tradition of Ezlann.”
But she did not comprehend, and, anyway, how empty it seemed, all of it, how pointless, for he could not enjoy or suffer anything of it now. Yet I could not get the filthy room from my mind.
I let her go after that. She was so afraid I could not keep her another moment. I had wanted to ask her for something of his, some small thing he had given her that meant less than the others, but I knew she would give me the best and dearest because she was so frightened, and besides this, it seemed such a desolate thing to ask. So, I said nothing and regretted it later.
There were many dreams that night, formless but terrifying. Waking, I recollected only the stone bowl and the flame whose name was Karrakaz, and the words of the curse, and how I cried out that I was stronger, much stronger than the he-she thing in the bowl.
The next day there were preparations for departure, and, at sunset, I must go to the Temple and bless Ezlann for the last time, though, it is true, they expected me to return. As I stood there in the stiff gold things, my eyes never once left the bowl where the flame burned. Yet the flame was very still and no voice spoke unspeaking in my brain: “I am Karrakaz the Soulless One, who sprang from the evil of your race … there is no escape … you are cursed and carry a curse with you … there will be no happiness. Your palaces are in ruins. The lizards sun themselves … the fallen courts let me show you what you are.”
Part IV: War March
1
When I left the village under the volcano, the crowds stood sullen and fearful at my going; women had wept and plucked at me. And later, from the amphitheater of the hills, I had looked back, and seen the scarlet lamp which was the villages’ burning in the volcano’s second aftermath. Now I rode with Vazkor, though not side by side, not even with the remote nearness I had had then to Darak. Hundreds of inanimate and living things separated us: soldiers splendidly clothed; horses incredibly appareled in silken body drapes with purple ribbons plaited in manes and tails, and golden nuggets on harness; wagons of provisions dragged along by mules; even the levies from the steadings, trapped out as soldiers in leather, but unmasked, their eyes and faces dead as I had seen them first.