That was the first dream.
There were only two. In the second, Uastis had shut me in a burning tower, and I roasted there, screaming, for several centuries.
191
I became aware gradually that the ice had melted in the fire and put it out.
A wonderful stillness filled my body and my mind.
Something shone and gleamed. I puzzled what it could be, but a changing position of her head showed me it was lamplight on the fair hair of a girl. I did not remember for a second. Then everything was with me.
“Isep,” I whispered. At that the bronze hair swung about like tufted grasses, and a face appeared between. “Isep, how well or ill am I?”
She looked me over with a boy’s disparaging candor, and said, “Very ill, lord. But better. They predict you shall be well.”
It was a small chamber, and our talk had roused the physician. He came puttering up, felt my head and peered in my eyes and laid his hand on my heart.
“Yes, it is remarkable,” he said, “a night and a day of the ague, but no purging of blood, and now the fever’s broken. Your constitution is unusually strong, my lord, and the god has smiled upon you. You will recover, I swear to that, but you must be patient. They call you a magician, do they not? Ah, yes. Now I acknowledge it.”
I felt I could spring from the couch and fly. Why not? I was the sorcerer again. I had survived the curse of death. No god had smiled on me but the gods of my ancestry. I could have laughed aloud, then fear sank through me, and I grasped his arm.
“Where is the Empress?”
It was Isep who answered haughtily, “She has kept by you the entire night, and this whole day, till she was dead herself. Be content, man.”
“But is she sick?”
“Sick of you, no doubt, and of your maniac shouting. Otherwise she is herself. They say Yellow Mantle is taking his leave.”
“Yes, it’s true, my lord,” the physician said, bringing a sticky ointment and wanting to plaster my body with it like a joint for basting. “The plague is less. Countless thousands lost, of course, and Sorem, our lord, borne away with them. But fewer deaths this day at least, and no fresh outbreaks, not even among the slums of the commercial area.”
I pushed him off me, and told him to spare me his medicinal muck, but he brought another thing in a shallow dish and put it in my mouth. This swallowed, I slipped back into a
192
shadowy sleep where I seemed to swim along the bright shoals of Isep’s hair.
When I woke again, it was about an hour past midnight, and my purpose lay intact and absolute before me, as if I had planned it in my sleep.
Isep was nodding at her post, and started alert when I called her, angry as some young soldier caught sleeping on watch.
“What is it, lord?”
“This: Find me some water and some clothing, my own or another’s.”
“Clothing? By my right hand, you shan’t stir.”
“Leave off your warrior’s oaths, girl. In this room the man says what is to be done.”
She turned to run for the physician, and for all I knew, for meatier help, and I was not certain yet if I had my Power again or not. I got her wrist and held her and said, “If you had an enemy who worked against you, and slew those near to you, and would have your life, too, if he could, what would you do?”
“Kill him,” she said, and truly I believed her.
“Thus,” I said. “That is what I go to do. And since I may have some extra trouble if I am naked, I prefer to travel with my breeches on.”
“No,” she said, but she was wavering. Finally she asked, “Your enemy is from Hessek?”
“Older than that, but Hessek is in it, too.”
She frowned. I knew by her frowning she would do what I asked.
One moment I had reckoned that Uastis ruled them from the swamp itself. I had reckoned her, another time, far off. My indecision, I thought, was perhaps some part of the web in which she trapped me. Not till Gyest warned me had I understood for sure. But then I had been tranced, the net too tight around me for my struggles to break it. But now . . . now I had fathomed her abode; my dream had showed me. Now, better than any portent, I had outlived her sending. This would be the last meeting. If my Power had deserted me, or was not yet strong enough, I would use my hands as any copper-cash murderer knew how. That was all it took.
I was feverish still, but no disaster in that. It only buoyed me up.
I had crept about in her shade, in a terror, paralyzed. But I
193
lived; the ordeal was past. She had committed her worst, and it was ashes.
There were different foul things to be seen about the streets by night, glimpsed in blackness or smoky red glare. What lights burned did so surreptitiously behind blinds, everything muffled, masked. Four fifths of the Palm Quarter, where formerly it had been day by night, had fled to the hills taking their lamps with them. But the plague fires blazed on, and the carts went stealthily up and down to them, loaded with their speechless multitudes. A watchman, drunk on a tower roof, drew back in fear at my galloping horse. Its hooves rang on the paving and the echoes struck ten streets away, as if twenty beasts went racing.
There was a new pyre near the dock, just beyond the Fish Market. The storehouses had been leveled here on the night of the rising and had not been repaired: now human flesh fried and the blue smoke rose in the starless sky to guide me.
The sick were yet piled about the gates of the temples. If there were less of them, as the physician said, I did not ascertain.
But I had a rare wine in my blood. Expiation was over, guilt washed out, terror canceled.
That wild ride, between darkness and red shadow, was indeed what the watchman had retreated from, the passing of Lord Death.
4
It was simple to appropriate a fishing boat, to row out on the black water under the formless sky. No lookout patrolled the quay. The spars of ships were a tangled water forest without birds. Somewhere, raucous music and tipsy voices slashed and mauled the silence, men praying to a flask of koois to save them.
The Hyacinth Vineyard stood far out from the dock, where the Hesseks had pulled the vessel with their little craft, to keep him from the fire. My southern ship with its soft southern name and its southern male gender. I had foreseen it would lead me to my witch-mother, all those months and days ago on Peyuan’s island.
194
My strength had returned to me in double measure. The oars were light as reeds, and the somber shore, with its burning fire dots, retracted swiftly. I looked over my shoulder and saw the tall outline of the galley. There was a hard pallid light dancing on the upper deck, showing me three or four black figures, who regarded my coming, showing no alarm, unmoving. Even they had let down the ladder for me. They made no remonstration when I tied the boat alongside and began to climb aboard.
It was not exactly like the dream. The masts had no sails, there was no splendor. The harsh uncovered flame tongues leaped and crackled, painting the deck in fitful bleachings. Six Hesseks about the rail, ten squatting aft, escapees of the jerds, for, as I remembered not all Bit-Hessians had been slain that night of the rising. Perhaps others prowled below. No danger to me, for I could kill them when I had to. The witch had failed with me. She dared not use my own Power against me anymore.
I said to them, in their own tongue, “Where is she?”
None of them answered me. It was another voice that called, “Here, oh beloved.”
My hair rose. I spun around, and there she sat, on one of Charpon’s couches. She seemed to have arrived by magic; I had not seen her, though I had glanced that way before.
Her whiteness was the whiteness of the torches congealed to flesh, so white it made me queasy to look at her, as if at something bloodless, unhuman; which, maybe, she was. She had masked her face, as ever, this time in a veil of yellow silk that hung from a diadem of silver in her white hair. Beneath the veiling, what? A cat’s head, or a spider’s? Behind her, almost as I had visualized it in the fever, a man’s body depended from among the shrouds, hanging by its feet, and torn by the gulls. The mutilated remnant of a face was Lyo’s, my messenger.