Other than girls, I had few companions, and no individual to trust.
Erran’s gold and silver men gazed askance at the cuckoo in their nest. One second they would mean to treat me as an inferior, a slave like the Dark People, to be despised, that they might kick end to end of the palace and not be called to account for. Next moment they would recollect I had Erran’s protection, his special favor. I was in his store cupboard for future need, and therefore I must not be hurt.
Despite this stamp of immunity, I had myself tutored in Eshkorian swordplay, and found the lessons useful, since once in a while a gang of soldiers would seek me out for discord. There were always bronzes, my supposed class equals, who resented the promotion to their midst of a bastard tribesman-none I think believed I was Uastis’ progeny, though many agreed I might have begun in the loins of Vazkor. There would be caterwaulings, spittings, and presently a merry dance, during which they would learn that, whatever else they do mistakenly, the tribes breed men hard. At length, all of us bloody, and I alone upright, a scatter of silver captains, having observed the fray, would clap me on the back and boot their officers in the breeches, and I should be thankful for the poison-taster at dinner that evening. I managed, after the first, to derive entertainment from these scenes and from the silvers’ condescension. You are the man’s dog, thought I, so be his dog. Bark, snarl, and bite, then wag your tail when the lords pat you. The bones are juicy, are they not? And inside your doggy hide you are still a man, and the son of a greater man than all this pack of curs together.
Erran set a guard around me, day and night. Not only the four bronzes who rode with me about the city or the clothmasks who tested my liquor and meat-none of whom died; their presence was enough to deter the bane-but in addition certain others, infrequently seen yet ever-present, that I had guessed to be Erran’s spies.
One day, when I was riding to the horse-park with my four guards and some fifteen others, down a narrow street gener-
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ally acknowledged Erran’s territory, an arrow with a silver flight shot from the sky. I had not fought krarl wars without some sagacity coming of it; I was from my horse as soon as my ears picked up the whine of the shaft. As well. The thing parted my hair; another second and it would have combed my brains.
Two heartbeats later a swarm of men dashed over the walls.
There is no nicer place for an ambush than a ruined snowy street.
I had been permitted a sword, of Erran’s bounty, and cut around with it to reasonable effect. Then I saw our trouble. The attackers were mostly silver men, and although plainly an enemy, there was a stigma to the bronzes involved in mowing down a superior class. Generally, only captain fought captain, mere soldier fought mere soldier. Although Erran must have tried to hammer the dogma out of them, yet he still expected bron/e to kowtow to silver and to gold in his own palace, and so undermined the teaching at its source. True, they rallied, and true their swords slit up the guts of many a silver-mask, yet their hearts were not in it, and I could foresee a black future as the ambushers were easily twice our number.
Then from over the same walls the ambushers had scaled came bounding city slaves, the Dark Men with their indigostubbled pates and their wood-knob faces, like animated ugly effigies set going by some demented magician. Without a battle cry or a death moan they plunged into the silver-masks’ swords and finished them. The flight concluded, the slaves slunk away.
That night I approached Erran and asked for a guard of Dark Slaves. He told me I had always had one, and who else did I suppose the reinforcements were?
The futile attack, I heard meanwhile, had been set by Orek, Kortis’ man, the kinsman and worshiper of Demizdor. Erran launched no reprisal. I lived, Kortis had lost men he could ill afford, and no doubt Orek would be made to regret his impulse.
Three city months passed, near four of the tribal calendar. Deep in the upper valleys, far east of Eshkorek, the krarls would be waiting out the snows in their tents. That other
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world, with which I had done forever, seemed like a story I had read in one of the Eshkorian books. Only in my dreams did I go back there, fight again in their battles, and live again by their codes. I dreamed of slaying Ettook, not as I had, with a power that came only once like lightning, but with my hands or my knife. Over and over I would wring his fatty neck or drive my blade in his belly; over and over he would rise, laughing blood, and I must grapple him again. There was another nightmare also, one I would start up from in a sweat. In this I saw Tathra, all black, in her dark robe and shireen and her black hair that never, even to the last day of her life, showed any gray. She was standing above a well when behind her. stark white against her blackness and the gray gloaming of the dream would come a woman like a ghoul, white robed, white haired, and with a white cloth over her face. For a long time, or so it would seem, this woman would remain motionless at my mother’s back, and Tathra would not see her. Then, quite slowly, the white woman would draw down the veil from her face, and she would have no face at all, but a silver skull, and that not even of a woman, but of a great cat, a lynx. And at that moment I would understand that Tathra did not stand above a well, but above a grave.
The strength of dreams is very strange. Explain away these symbols as trite and childish as I might, I could not get free of them, and every twenty days or so I would frighten the girls who shared my couch by shouting and striking out as if an army were upon me.
At length there was a night that the dream came in the old way and I began to shake and shudder in my sleep, when suddenly everything was changed. The veil fell from the white woman’s face, and revealed only the blurred, weather-chipped features of a statue under it, mossy and harmless, while my mother Tathra bent to the well, and when she straightened, she was beautiful, as in my boyhood.
That was the exorcism of this dream. I never had it after. The priest who saved me from it was none other than my music girl, the Sparrow. She told me in the morning I had been crying out ia the dark, and she leaned to my ear, and whispered to me all was well, without waking me. It was a trick she had learned long before to calm the nightmares of a
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sister when they slept together in one poor little bed in the lower quarter of Eshkorek.
Despite Erran’s proposals, as far as I know no girl conceived by me in his palace, nor by any other man, for that matter; I never saw a lifted girdle in all my days there, though plenty of lifted skirts to account for it, and there were few children. I suspect the city women grew barren, their wombs shriveled like the brains of their men, by legends and excessive glorious poverty.
The snow broke and the winds came. They roared like ghostly cannon through the city.
The fierce horses liked to race the wind. You could see them do it any day, when they were out on the flats of the park. Tathra had told me in my infancy that to her own tribe the wind god was a black horse; sometimes he would sweep down the slopes and get the mares in foal. It seemed all the Eshkir horses were children of the wind god, and roused at his passing to pursue and follow him.
The So-Essian equerry, Blue-Sleeve, said we should be going on the spring horse-catching through the northern mountain valleys once mild weather had laid hold. He leaned on a thin black cedar tree and whistled after the horses as they ran madly up and down the landscape of brown-bleeding thaw snow, the speed and the gusts fraying out their manes and tails.
Over to our left, the cluster of grooms disbanded and pointed along an avenue of rotting green statuary; Erran was coming on a crimson trapped horse, about thirty of his silvers around him, and a group of golds. There were women, too, their veils and wrappings billowing in the wind.