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She kept her head, as I had trusted she would, and clasped her arms about me.
To ride the terraces below the walls of the Heavenly City is frequently done, but sedately and with care, for as each ledge gives way to another, step-fashion, there will come here and there a drop into space, with the Palm Quarter some hundred feet below. Directly at the lip of the temple terrace, where one of these same drops occurred, I now drove the horse. It plunged and tried to veer, but I cut it around the neck, and with a scream of terror and a pottery clatter of sparks and stones kicked off beneath its hooves, it sprang out from the hill into the enormous void of air.
For a woman who could sound like a man, she now gave a little squeak, like a mouse.
“Hold me, and keep faith,” I cried back to her. Her arms never loosened.
The horse pranced screaming beneath us, striking the sky with its feet while the stars wheeled. I seized with my will on its brain, open on the nude chaos of its fear, and welded it to obedience and silence, while I held us, all three, aloft, effortless, as I had held the wine-jar in the court to make the kitchen girls stare. Shivering to the roots of its extended limbs, as I gripped its flanks with my thighs and its brain with mine, the horse rested motionless, on nothing.
There had been some roaring on the terrace behind us, but now a huge gag had stopped their mouths.
The jewel windows lay below, tiny as beads. The horse’s mane stirred in the breeze of night, still tractable to every law of the weather and the world but one.
I was young, and I was a god. The Power hi me was like a golden shaft.
“Do you yet live?” I said to her.
I felt the movement of her head against my shoulder blade as she nodded, unable to say a word.
I tapped the horse lightly, sorry I had had to beat it. With a vast flying bound it stretched itself, and again and rode over the indigo air as if it were a summer pasture.
That ride, brief as it was, shot straight from a myth. There were stories after, in the city, of the sighting of a falling star, a comet. In the folklore of Bar-Ibithni I think there may have grown the legend of a prince and a princess, borne over heaven on a winged horse. I cannot tell if any truly watched
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that flight beyond the crowd below the Emperor’s walls, who had their motives to forget.
Quickly and coolly I began to reason. I shunned the idea of such an arrival in the Citadel, I am not sure why. Too much furor perhaps, on top of the other; or possibly I considered how she might feel, dropped from the clouds into the lap of her son. She clung to me tight, with some cause. She did not cry out again, or entreat me. She felt what I could do, and had surrendered herself to me, this much I knew. Her surrender was very sweet in the moment of my triumph,. the renewal of my godship.
I brought the horse down, drifting soft as a lady’s scarf, in the open country just outside the Palm Quarter, near where the vineyards start.
There was an aroma of magic everywhere, or so it seemed. The night, the velvet groves, the outline of the old palisade and the glimmering of lights beyond. I let the horse stand for a minute in the long, dark-scented grass, and it put down its head and cropped there, as if we bad come from market.
I said to her, mundane as the horse, “Someone betrayed you to them, Malmiranet. Someone who had observed I was with you, and who knew your mind well enough to guess your action at the temple.”
She said, in a husky fierce voice, blaming me, “Sky-flights, and he speaks of betrayal. I shall lose my wits. Oh, you are right, I shall die of it.”
She let go of me, and slipped down from the horse and walked away a step. I supposed her crying for a second, before I heard it was laughter. I dismounted and dropped the reins over the horse’s head; it was in no mood for running off. I went to Malmiranet and drew her to me and kissed her.
I had been crazy indeed to mistake another for her on the stair, however momentarily. She did not taste of wine or scent, but of the smoky pulsing of the night itself. There was no mouth like hers, and no perfume, and her body shaped itself to mine.
She waited only a heartbeat before she put her arms about me, and held me strongly as she had held me in the sky. Then at length she pushed me gently back, and looked at me, and smiled.
“They told you the koois gets better with aging, did they?”
“Sorem is to be king in the Crimson Palace,” I said to her. “I will make him Emperor. How will you reward me?”
“So little,” she said, “for so much. I am too old for you,
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my magician.” But she went on smiling, not melting but dangerous as high-banked flame. Now she kissed me, holding me by the hair, and the fastening of her boy’s shirt came undone so willingly that I think she had been there before me to help me on my road.
It was the horse which roused us, snorting and pawing at the ground.
I turned, and saw how the western sky was red at its bottom as if the sunset had begun again. I smelled burning, and a low far thunder came abruptly on the wind.
“Fire!” she exclaimed. “It looks to be the docks. What can have caused it?”
A cold snake, running on my skull, made me answer, “Bit-Hessee.”
3
The horse galloped, not through air, but on the hard flagged paving of the Palm Quarter. Crowds scattered before our headlong progress. The bright streets were more full than usual, rippling with an insidious alarm, and the balconied towers bristled with leaning figures, peering northwest toward the scarlet bonfire of the burning docks.
They did not know what had broken loose; they thought it only conflagration, accident. Those with money in ships grew pale and wrung their hands, and ordered their slaves to run that way and get news. There was, too, an uneasy, superstitious, ridiculous thing, the Masrian embarrassment at these blasphemous uncovered flames.
The horse hurtled down the thoroughfares. Bells were mourning on the west wind now, and a taste of ashes. In my mouth also. I was afraid, as if Old Hessek sucked my soul from me. This, coming when I had not been ready, after all my readiness when I waited and they did nothing.
We clattered up the track of Pillar Hill, and the Fox Gate was drawn back for us without a challenge. The vast inner yard of the Citadel was massed with jerdiers and horses, and the red-hot iron flare of caged torches. The men made little sound, but the clamor of bells was louder here, and a distant roar, of fire or voices.
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One of Bailgar’s Shield captains came running over and led us through and up into the Ax Court.
Sorem was in the pillared walk, flanked by his fellow jerdats, Dushum, Denades, and the rock-faced Ustorth, and an ever-moving crowd of rank and file was coming and going about them.
Yashlom appeared, and politely aided Malmiranet to dismount, while I heard her demanding if her girls were safe. He said they were. Then Sorem came up and took her by the arms and thanked his god that she was unharmed.
“We met Basnurmon on the way,” she said.
“By Masrimas, I thought it was more than horses delayed you.”
“The sorcerer took care of it,” she said. “Shall I tell you the wonder now, or save it? You seem busy, my handsome beloved. What goes on here?”
“Sit in on the council and learn, Mother. Vazkor”-he gripped my hand-“you have all my gratitude, but it must wait. You saw the fire?”
“The whole city sees it,” I answered. I felt leaden, devoid of energy, which the activity about made worse. With an effort, I drew myself together and added, “I conclude that BitHessee counts me an enemy, despite my playacting. They moved without sending word.”
“Oh, they sent you word,” he said grimly, “had you been here to receive it.”
“A Hessek messenger, and your men let him go before I returned?”
“Not quite.”
He called a young jerdier over, who had been loitering by the target-fence. The boy looked nervous and gnawed his mouth; when Sorem told him to speak to me he blurted out, “I was on lookout, sir, on the left tower of the Gate. It was just getting dusk, but I saw them come up. They looked like lardy beggars, sir, but after the orders about Hesseks-I calls down, in a friendly way, do they want anything? But they runs off. Still, they’ve left a basket under the wall. I sends one of my mates for it; he brings it in and we open it. Oh, God, sir, I’ve seen some things in my time, but that-“