Only one bright shadow remained, the nightmare dream that had first swung me from my course. I should have been a brave in the krarl to this day, if I had not been haunted and finally mastered by those ghosts of my beginning, one white, one black.
I had nothing to offer Gyest and his people, but they took me in. I made myself useful where I could. Oxen are not horses but you learn their ways and how to handle them. Indeed, I was shortly an excellent groom of Seemase oxen; I have yoked them and bedded them and fed them and led them to water, which they store in belly-sacks, hence their endurance in the waste. Vazkor the groom, drover of cattle, Vazkor who had been villain and dreamer, a healer for a chain of cash, a traitorous messiah, a resurrected necromancer. Vazkor, son of Vazkor. Vazkor, born of a white witch.
The four days of the south road, the forest, the plain’s sweet-water edges, went by like one day checked with fragments of night. I slept seldom, my brain laboring in purposeless grindings to rid itself of what it would never lose. Once, after a moment’s slumber, I woke thinking myself in the sarcophagus. And I felt no terror.
I would lie in the faint glow of the firelight before taking my turn as watch, seeing the man there doze sometimes, I keeping watch already, though on my back. I would examine the lack in me, the surcease of my fears and longings and angers, which seemed to have died where I had not, in the Necropolis. Presently the watchman would come and touch my
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shoulder to “wake” me; it would generally be Jebbo or Ossif, the half-brothers of Gyest, and masters of the sister wagon. The fourth night it was Gyest himself-I had considered the figure unusually alert, though motionless, at its post
“I see Vazkor is also sleepless,” he said. I reckoned he had seen it often. “Come, then, let us talk.”
He stirred the fire up in a foam of red; it was cool under a fringe of trees, damp with the promise of southern rain. His face showed only the eyes, as ever. Jebbo and Ossif went similarly muffled, even among themselves when the women, of whom there were four, were elsewhere. I, too, had taken to Sri garb. Gyest’s generosity had settled on me a suit of breeches and calf-length tunic, both, as I should note, the bleached browned-ivory shade of the Wilderness itself. This camouflage, dispelled by the red head-veil, made me adequately Sri against the hour when we should meet bandits. Nevertheless, I had not aspired to shielding my face and head, the masks of Eshkorek having been enough for me.
I asked Gyest if he would not rather sleep. I even went so far as to suggest his woman Omrah might be missing him. She was a young girl, this one, and a couple of times, mislaying my reverie, I had seen her eyes on me. This I did not care for, for his sake, not liking to think him lessened by a strumpet. He was a deal older than she; no doubt the cause of her glances. Now he surprised me by saying; “My wife is with my brother Ossif tonight, and shan’t miss me, I assure you, in the manner you imply.”
I suspect I was glad to be surprised, even to be angered in a vague, unextensive fashion, some reactions left after all.
“I remember you told me once that your women are free,” I said.
“Not merely our women,” he said, “all, man or woman. Those liaisons we form spring from liking, but in matters of sex, our laws do not fetter us.”
“When your son is born, does he have the eyes of the next wagon?”
“Oh,” he said, “children are not mine or thine among us. They are Sri. Whichever woman has the milk and is the nearest feeds the child, whichever man goes to chop wood takes the child to learn wood-chopping.”
“To whom are the wagons left, and the riches of the man when he dies?”
“To whoever is needy. To the Sri. But why concern your-
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self with death, Vazkor? Of all your troubles, he is surely the least.”
“So, Gyest believes Masrian stories.”
“I look in your face and see the story there, as I saw before the brand of the witch’s curse on you.”
“Not the witch I sought,” I said.
“We must come to that.”
“It’s come and gone for me,” I said. “Vengeance, ghosts, all ground to dust. No more hate. I don’t remember what hate feels like, my friend. I’ve no motive to seek her now.”
“Karraket,” he said. “You asked me if I had met a goddess by that name. I’ve reflected on it, Vazkor, and used the magician’s training made mine by the men of my father’s generation.”
“I am embarrassed by your care of me, Gyest. But I’m done with seeking. Let it go.”
His eyes took me in, then hooded as he looked down into the fire.
I had never asked for news of Bar-Ibithni, yet now he told me news, answers to questions I had never thought to ask. As I had felt the dull surprise brush by, now I felt dull interest, dull rage, dull bitterness, but no more. Not even when he spoke names I knew, or of Malmiranet even; there was just a dim, poignant stirring like light behind a muddied lamp. I was aware he tested me, as the physician tests the feet of a man with a broken back, to discover if there is any sensation there, and much the same unrewarding response he got from me as the physician gets in such a case, for the spine of my senses had well and truly come in twain.
It was, too, much as anyone could have reasoned, an inevitable history acted out.
I had been the last known victim of the plague. There was some apt mythological stuff in that they were quick to make much of. Fifteen days after my secret burial, the city was pronounced free of Yellow Mantle. Six days after that, Basnurmon marched in at the South Gate with an army of hill bandits, hastily conscripted peasants of his own estates in the east, and four and a half renegade and opportunistic jerds from the eastern borders. While Sorem and his council had played at coronations, Basnunnon had set vigorously to work. He would have come in any event, but learning of the plague, had let it decimate the city for him, and once his yellow ally was safely away, he rode in on its heels.
Bar-Ibithni, rudderless and at sea, without even the pre-
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tense of a figurehead, welcomed Basnurmon, her one-time Heir, and five days later he had been made Emperor from the gathered scraps of Sorem’s unused annointing. Patchwork kingship proved better than none. Presently there were reports of the demise of Hragon-Dat, due to ill treatment at Sorem’s hands. One could not help but bow to Basnurmon’s unsubtle genius.
The day he took the throne, Malmiranet ended her life. She was wise, and acted wisely at the last; no doubt she was more a king than any of us, but Masrians do not acknowledge women in the Royal Chair, for all the other privileges they permit them. Basnurmon had already confined her to her apartments on his entry into the city. Guards stood outside the door, and no one unofficial was let in. Even her girls, who had refused to leave her, were taken. Additionally, her rooms were scoured of anything she might put to use, either against her captors or herself. Plainly the foppish heir had a head on his shoulders, and was aware of her mind, or some of it. What he meant ultimately to do with her is conjecture. There was one tale, that he fancied her, and might have kept her for his bed a while, but probably all her roads would have ended at the graveyard gate, and she had no desire to wait on him or his tortures.
The day of the coronation, discipline was lax, and the guards drinking. Malmiranet managed to bribe these swine. Apparently she wished to procure a hairdresser; with Nasmet and Isep gone she had no personal attendant. The guards concluded she meant to titivate herself for Basnurmon’s interest, and were prepared to help her, up to a point, in exchange for a handful of jewels she had somehow hidden during Basnurmon’s earlier visits, and thus retained. What they sent her for the price was an old crone, some beldam off the streets of the lower commercial area, more accustomed to curling the tresses of harlots. The guard reckoned this a fine jest, and hoped to have Basnurmon laughing at it before the day’s end. At length the cavalcade was heard returning from the Temple, and the guard went in the room and found the hag-hairdresser blind drunk at one end of it, Malmiranet dead at the other. She had used the silver-plated trimming knife, not even silver, as I had supposed, though the pride of the whore-server’s collection. Empresslike, she had also left instructions for her burial to be given over to the priests of the Necropolis, where her tomb had been in readiness several years, and she offered Basnurmon her curse if he refused her.