The man ducked out of the cave, and another man followed him, tall, spare, dark; under the silver strings of the wolfs head, his own black hair hanging hi long, raw silks. He came around the fire, and stood looking at me. “Welcome, goddess,” he said.
When he spoke, the race of my fear stumbled. I looked back at him bewildered. Not Vazkor’s voice, a stranger’s voice, dry and old, and empty.
Mazlek was at my stirrup, offering his arm to help me down. I dismounted.
“Make the goddess comfortable,” the unknown voice finished. He nodded and turned back into the cave, and was gone.
“So, even he understands defeat,” Mazlek said softly. “It is finished for him, and he knows it.” There was a bitter pleasure in his tone I might have shared if he had said it on the road.
I took my hand from Mazlek’s arm, walked around the blaze, and followed Vazkor into the black mouth of the cave. Far back there was a leather curtain hung up for privacy, and beyond it the slight glow of a wick in oil. I let the flap fall to, and stood staring at the bed, made of one folded
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blanket, on which he lay. He was very still. The mask gone now, his face showed sick pale under the gray-olive skin, and the shadows of his face seemed bruised deeper. Except for his open eyes, which turned slowly to look at me, he might have been dead. His mouth stretched a little.
“Our positions are finally reversed, you see,” he said.
“You are ill,” I said softly, not quite believing it.
“Yes. I am ill. But I will be better soon. I’m sorry to disappoint you, goddess.” His eyes shifted a little to my belly. “Well,” he said, but even that could not anger me. The walls of hate I had built against him had crumbled instantly, of course. His vulnerability stirred me almost into an agony of compassion I could not help. I went to him and kneeled down.
“What can I do for you? Shall I fetch you anything … ?”
I reached out and touched his face with my fingertips, and, as if it were a signal to my body, I began at once to weep, the silent scalding tears of our separate loneliness. He too had lost what was dear to him, however perverse his desires and hopes had been. Lost. He could not even express any pain he felt. He lay like ice under my touch, Darak turned to jade at the bottom of the tomb-shaft because I could not weep for him.
“Let’s put an end to this,” he said after a moment, quite gently. “This is no use for either of us.”
I got to my feet, and he shut his eyes, closing that last door into himself with the finality of stone.
There was another cave place they had found for me, and here I lay, Mazlek across the mouth of it, but his body defenseless in worn-out sleep. It was I who watched that night.
Dawn, ice-chill in the mountains, stippled rock flanks with incandescent red.
There was a beaker of the wine-drink for me that morning. Mazlek, like a child, stretching, rubbing at his eyes, glancing guiltily in at me because he had not stood guard all night.
Vazkor came from the cave as they were saddling and loading the horses. He saw to his own mount, slowly and carefully. The mask hid his face. After a while he mounted, and sat with an unusual stiffness, as if it took much effort to keep himself there. They waited for his signal, and followed after him up the road.
It came to me: I have done this. The storm I turned from Belhannor was the beginning of it. I have smashed the soul
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of Vazkor. Yet I could not quite believe it. Where, after all, was my triumph in the act?
Mazlek and I were some way behind. After a while Vazkor motioned another man into the lead, and waited on the road until we reached him. He turned to Mazlek, and Mazlek dropped back until out of earshot. Vazkor’s black gelding dwarfed the horse I rode.
“I have seen that man before,” Vazkor said after a while. His voice was slightly husky from the fever, yet different from when I had heard it last; how, I was not sure. “Yourcommander. One of Asren’s men who rode with me for a time, I think. In Ezlann.”
I said nothing, could think of nothing to say, since the words I needed to speak he had locked inside me forever.
“You think,” he said, after another little silence, “things are finished with me.”
Hooves bit sharp on the road.
“Well, goddess, the castle fell at the river An, but I can build it again, on its own ruins, out of its own bricks. This is not defeat, goddess, it is delay. We are headed for a mountain fortress that will keep us very safe until the time is right for me. Tower-Eshkorek-my gift from the last Javhovor of Eshkorek Arnor. I hope you will find it comfortable. Our child will probably be born there now.”
Part V: Tower-Eshkorek
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Where the mountains reach toward the City, leveling, they take on the tinge of lions. The great tower-fortress, like Eshkorek herself, was built of this same fulvous rock. Not beautiful, but ugly, it threw its indomitable phallic shadow black across the sunset mesas and the sloping crags. Not beautiful, but very strong, very secure. Yet not to keep things out, but to keep things in. A prison. At once I had the sensation that if I entered I could never again get free, but I thrust it off.
Nearer, I saw how the place was ringed by a huge oval crater, filled to a third of its height by stagnant water, black and impenetrable, a sightless eye. Over this moat there seemed to be no way, except by swimming. Weed lay on the surface in glinting nets, clotted at the base of the tower.
One of Vazkor’s men shouted. The rocks took his voice and split it into many voices, and hurled them at us from every side. A pause then, but as the silence crept back, another sound came in answer, and the silence ran like a hunted man. Grinding, grating, a narrow door was being forced in the tower, and from that mouth a long stone tongue began to thrust toward us. Over the moat the thing angled itself, to vanish with a rasping screech in some slot beneath the crater’s lip: a bridge. It was ten feet wide, at least, but to a man they rode single file, exactly at its center, and led by instinct only I did the same. Riding over the water, my stomach seemed turned to ice. Against my will, I glanced down into the depths, saw nothing, yet looked away swiftly.
Beyond the narrow doorway, a roofed-over courtyard, stables on either side, a dark, primitive, cheerless place. Three men in gray liveries slashed with yellow stood like statues. Another man, fat under his long tunic of furs, bowed deeply.
“Warden,” Vazkor said.
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“My lord, your messenger reached me only a day ago. We are not as ready as we might be.” Behind the silver eagle mask little eyes glinted. But no eagle this, but the mythological demon-toad, well-fed and venomous. Oparr, yet not Oparr. for this stream ran deeper and blacker.
For some reason I had not expected anyone to be here, yet, I supposed now, as a fortress it would be garrisoned to some extent. So I came to look for many men and servants, and. as we climbed the stone flights, toiled through the large oval hall, past storerooms and armories, for the efficiency and crowding of a barracks, and I did not find it. Few people lived here after all, a scattering of the gray-clad soldiers-the Warden’s men-an old woman and a young, both apparently witless from the brief glances I had of them. It seemed a peculiar arrangement, but I was too tired to question it; we had been on the road together long days-I had lost count of how many. Vazkor, for all the last traces of the fever which still hung on him. appeared less exhausted than I-but then there was presumably some purpose for him here; for me, nothing.
I followed the thin, slightly limping servant girl to a small room near the head of the tower, and when she had gone, I sank down on the curtained bed and buried myself in sleep.
I woke again in darkness, tinglingly alert, listening. There was nothing to be heard, only the silent strength of the tower humming to itself. I went to the narrow slit of window, pulled aside the shutter, looked out over bleached crags, black sky, white-eyed stars. I was very tense and did not know why.