“What you do not, clearly,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be going there.”
“Savage territory,” I said. “A city of lost children; an island in the sea with a magic road out to it. A witch-goddess.”
“Lost children,” he said. “Yes.”
A quiet had come on them. The serving girl who all evening had been edging my uneaten food toward me, I then edging it away, said, “One from here, one time. I was three.
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My mother’s sister’s little boy. He had white hair. My mother’s sister, she says, ‘The lady has marked him.’ She put him in his wicker cot and went over the river, and walked to Kainium, and left him there. She had ten children in the house, eight of them sons; it was no loss.”
“Do you mean,” I said, “that the goddess claims albino babies as her own?”
“This wench has no business to chatter,” said the man with the boat.
“It does no harm,” said the girl. “Who’ll hear me?”
The inn door opened behind her, letting in a draft of vicious night ah-. What came out of the night turned me colder.
He was almost my height, built like a warrior, too, though fine made as any silver statue of Bar-Ibithm. He stepped into the light of the oil-wick lamps, and his young face was clean-shaven, arrogant, and handsome; he looked like some prince of Eshkorek. All but the ice-white skin, and hair that grew to below his shoulders that was like a shining cloth of rare white silk, the eyes that were no color but the color of polished diamonds.
The serving girl screamed at this too-perfect answer on her cue.
He, turning elegant as a panther, said quietly to her, “Don’t be afraid. I shall harm none of you.”
Then he looked right at me.
Something moved in the back of those uncanny eyes. It was like staring through crystal at white fire; I could find no floor to his glance, and no veil or screen across it either. Eyes to deflect searchers, sorcerer’s eyes.
He had spoken the village dialect perfectly, like a native, which I part supposed him. Now he flung abruptly at me, in an accent no less perfect, “Sla, et di.”
It was the tongue the cities had used, which I had spoken in Eshkorek, but somehow older, in an original form. He had said, roughly, “As I deduced, you’re here.” It took me a moment to understand him, for I was dumbfounded, like the rest of the room, by the unpleasant suitability of his arrival.
“Et so,” I said eventually. (“I am here.”)
The villagers, sniffing danger from him like a scent, relapsed abruptly into a flawless display of normality. The fisherman at my side nodded to me and went off. At adjoining tables, dice commenced rolling and talk started up. Only the serving girl ran among the pots and pans to hide.
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The white man came and sat facing me. He was well dressed; his shirt looked like velvet. His clothes were all white.
“Well,” he said, in the familiar yet unfamiliar tongue, “you speak languages cleverly. But you haven’t eaten the supper these worthy people have left you.” I said nothing, watching him. “Come,” he said. “The beer is good, they tell me.”
“If it’s so good, my friend,” I said, “you drink it. You’ve my leave.”
His face was almost too beautiful, it could have been a woman’s; yet not really, there was overmuch steel in it for that. There was no scar, no blemish on his albino hide.
“I am past beer and bread,” he told me. “I live on godfood. The air.”
Something caught the light, above and between his white eyes. A little green triangle, some jewel fantastically inserted just under the thin topmost skin; naturally, this bizarre operation had left no mark on his healing flesh.
“Did she birth you?” I said slowly. My hands would have begun to shake if I had let them, thinking I might be opposite my half-brother, one son she had kept by her.
“She?” he said laconically. “Who is she?”
“Karrakaz.”
“No,” he said. “She is my Javhetrix. I am merely the captain of her guard. I am named Mazlek, for another who once guarded her to the extinction of his life. As I should do.”
“But you can’t die,” I said. “Can you, Mazlek, captain of the Bitch’s Guard?”
His eyes grew hot, white hot, then he smiled. He was a spoiled brat, but a strong spoiled brat, a brat with Power.
“Don’t insult her. If it upsets you to think me immortal, I can assure you I’m not. Not quite. Not as she is. She breeds fine herds, but we haven’t her blood. Only one man has that.”
“She sent you, then,” I said. “She anticipated me by sorcery, and let out the dog.”
“What do you want,” he said, “to fight me?”
He was younger than I was, maybe three or four years younger. When I had been at the age at which he had learned to work miracles, I had been thrashing around in Ettook’s battles, rutting and roaring among the tents. But then, this Mazlek had had expert guidance.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I said. “I mean to go upstairs and sleep. What will you do about that?”
He said, “Go upstairs and sleep, and see.”
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When I turned my back on him, I wondered if he would move, but he did not. He was intending to play the game my way. About the inn, they studiously ignored our foreign conversation and our parting.
I went up, through the leather curtain that served as a door, into a dark little room with an oil-wick lamp on the broad windowsill, a wooden slab with rugs (the bed), and a chamberpot hi a corner. The chamberpot amused me. I set it just where he would stumble over it on coming in. Then I lay down, and trusting to my senses, which had become so magical, I sank asleep.
I should have known better. He crept in like the white cat he was. He had a knife lifted over my heart before I came awake, bursting up through an ocean of blackness -and fire. The Power in me reacted quicker than I. I was barely sensible, but the blow shot from me in a pale explosion, sending the knife upward with such force that it stuck in the rafter, knocking my assailant flying till he hit the wall.
I got off the bed and went and stood over him. At the risk of reminding myself of Lellih, I said, “If you have Power, why use a knife?”
“I thought that to use Power would wake you,” he said.
It was not the truth. I realized he was not quite as much the Mage as he would have had me imagine.
He picked himself up, and looked me in the face and said calmly enough, “No, I’m no match for you. Kill me if you like. I’ve failed her.”
“She sent you to execute me, then?”
“No. She didn’t know I was coming here. She will be angry. Her anger could be terrible, but you can’t fear what you love, can you, Zervarn?”
He must have got my name from below. He did not question it either, though, with his grasp of tongues, he would surely notice it was mask rather than name.
“You love her.”
“Not hi the way you mean,” he said. He laughed amiably. “Not that way.”
I recalled Peyuan, the black chief, the man who had been with her by that other sea, how he had said he had not desired her, only loved her. This is how she binds them, then, I thought, not by the phallus, which you can forget when the act is done, but soul and mind.
“You’ll have guessed,” I said, “that I mean to see her.”
“Yes. She guesses it, too.”
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“How many more attempts will you fruitlessly make on my life?”
He shrugged. Now I was recalling Sorem. Sorem had had Power, but not sufficient; it had been simple to forget he was part magician. Still, if I needed proof that Power might be there in all men, and not limited to gods, he had been that proof. She knew, my mother. As her Mazlek said, she bred fine herds.
The light caught him as he turned. It looked unreal, all that whiteness.
“I’ll swear truce,” he said. “Will my lord Zervarn?”
“Very well,” I said. “But you’d better return to your Javhetrix; tell her how near I am.”
“She is aware of that. I think I should guide you to her.”
“You’re a fool,” I said, “If you suppose you can hinder me.”
He went to the doorway and bowed to me.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Sunup on the bank below. Gentle dreams, Zervarn.”
Long before the village was rousing, or perhaps while the village kept purposely dormant, I met him on the pebbled, snow-mottled strand of the estuary. Eastward, out over the sea, a lavender sheen promised the dawn. Everything else was wrapped in a clear deep blue, even the snow, even the white hair of what strolled to meet me. He had been skimming flat stones, making them bounce on the water, remembering he was seventeen; now he was solemn, proud, indicating the scatter of fishing boats and the broad river.