“Well,” I said.
The mantle slipped off. She wore a blue dress under it, blue as the ceiling, with her whiteness gleaming under. Her body looked like a fire, trying to burn through that gown to reach me.
But she drew her hand away.
“Zervarn,” she said, “son of Vazkor-”
“No names,” I said. “No more names, Ressa. You led me bere, and I followed most willingly.”
“I did not mean and I did not think-”
“Think now, and of me.”
“Karrakaz,” she said.
“Let her wait. That’s for tomorrow. I’ve forgotten her, as she expediently forgot me.”
“But-” she said.
“Be still,” I said.
Her eyes swam, her mouth, even now trying to speak to me, merged into mine before it could form words, forming instead to welcome me, and draw me in. Her body stretched to me. Her shoulders came free of the blue water of the dress, her breasts rose from the cloth into my hands, each with its central star of fire that became the axis of my palms. She turned her head and cried out softly that this must not be, and yet her arms wound on my back and clung to me as if the world tumbled and only I remained to hold her safe.
I folded her aside and against me and had us down among the mounded furs. Wherever our bodies met, a fresh con-
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flagration stirred our flesh. This is new, I thought, but the thought burned from my skull. The dress had been expressly designed for me to loose it; the fastenings melted. Her limbs were cool and smooth, but a warmth within. The silver fleece on her loins did not look human, nor any part of her spread out before me like a flaring snow in the candle-shine, and jeweled with the smoky flush of mouth, the two pink stars upon her breasts, the rose cave into the ice. She was not virgin, and yet, like some goddess-maiden in a legend, her innocence seemed renewed especially for me. But she was knowing, too.
Her head fell back. She surrendered herself to me with a silent, savage delight, no longer denying anything.
The unpainted lids of her eyes were like fine platinum. I put my lips there, and tasted salt. I asked her why she wept.
“Because this should not have been between us.”
Many a woman has said that, a tedious lament, but with her it was not the same.
“It was bound to be,” I said. “We are like and like, you and I, Ressa.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And can it be that is your objection? Because we came from the same door, brother and sister? No matter. The fathers were different. Besides, it is a tribal way of seeing things, to balk at this little incest. Come, am I to suppose you educated in a tent? I thought a Javhetrix schooled you.”
Her tears were dry. Her eyes, which I had seen blinded by pleasure a minute before, were now once more those large opaque disks, unreadable, but reading everything.
“Then again,” I said, “who will know, since we shall be leaving this magic mountain of your birth?”
“No,” she said. “You must leave. But I remain.”
“You will come with me,” I said. “You know you won’t let me travel alone.”
“I will let you.”
“I will ask the old lady for you,” I said, attempting to lighten this shade across her face like the first shadow of night. “I will kneel to your Karrakaz-”
“No,” she broke in, and her strong, slender fingers dug into my arms. “Never go to her now.”
She is afraid, I thought. She reckons she has betrayed the sorceress by lying with me, and will be punished. So ‘much for our loving mother.
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“She shan’t harm you when I am near,” I said.
Ressaven’s eyes flamed up. And I saw it was anger.
“You are not a fool,” she said. “Do not act one. This I give you is a prophecy, a warning. Abandon the island and make your life elsewhere. Forget this coupling, and forget your search for Karrakaz.” Her anger faded, and she said gently, “Now, let me go.”
“I am not done with you,” I said.
“But I am done with you, Zervarn. Yes, it is half my blame that we are here. And yes, you are my conqueror and I yield to you. But now it is over. Do not make me battle. You are not accustomed to the women of this mountain.”
The argument had made me lust for her again. She did not struggle after all, and when I stirred within her, she moaned. The curve where her shoulder met her throat held a scent of strange flowers, clearer than the orange blossom. It was the last perfume I breathed for some while. My head was full of light one second, then full of black, a painless blow struck from within that ended our couching as surely as a knife in my heart.
I had the last dream of my father that night.
I did not properly grasp its import then; it was only another jagged blade picked up in the cold dawn that woke me alone in that place.
How well do I remember it, as if it were reality, a memory, which maybe it might have been; or in some other life where circumstances are other than in this, perhaps it has been, is.
I was a child once more, in the dream, possibly five years of age. He had taken me to a high window to look down upon a marching of troops in the streets. It was winter there also, snow white on the ground, the men and the horses clattering black against it. He was black, too: black clothing, black prince’s hair, the dark skin and the black jewels on it. Gazing up at him more often than at his troops below, I saw, with the alarming foreshortened image that the child generally has, a leaning pillar of dark with the blank face above it. But when he said, “Look below,” I obeyed him at once. I was five years, yet I knew, I had learned: he was to be obeyed. “You must remind yourself at all times,” he said, “that you accede to this, strive for this, train your body and your brain for this. I will not have you mewling in the hall with a puppy like any peasant’s brat in some steading. You were born my
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son so that you shall become as I am. Do you understand me?” I said that I did. He turned eyes on me that were like dead coals. He moved me about and away from him with his impersonal fingers. I was aware that I hated and feared him, that this was the bond between us, fright and a child’s loathing that one day would be a man’s. Then I should kill him as efficiently as he had killed my dog. Or he would kill me.
When I glimpsed my mother in the doorway, I walked to her-he had persuaded me not to run many months ago. Her face was masked in gold and green gems; I had never seen it unmasked. Yet, despite herself, she was my safe harbor, and I hers, for such a thing one may know at five years of age, for all one could not voice it, nor set it down.
The lights of the mansion window roused me, and the caress of her hands in the dream, which had seemed like the touch of Ressaven.
Part HI
The Sorceress
1
One morning hour saw me across the wooded valley and at the roots of the mountain, the villa hidden far behind in trees. It was a tranquil day, to be sure, the sky clear as glass. A long-necked bird rose from a glow of water as I passed, its wings beating their own winds. It had been drinking there at the brink of the broken ice, not a care in the world, no feuds or aspirations to plague it.
She had left me no footsteps in the snow to follow, no stamp of those agile and beautiful bare feet. She had levitated in order to deceive me, as she had deceived me in the warm candlelight with that little sound of hers that made me forget she was witch before woman. I had not been ready for the onslaught of her Power with which she had stunned me. It was her dread that made her betray me, yet it set my teeth on edge that she had not trusted me, put my strength at least beside the strength of Karrakaz.
Still, she would come to learn. I did not have to depend on footsteps for my guide. I had recollected the marble town on the mountain slope, which she had told me of so incidentally. The moment I pictured it, I knew with the force of divination that the town was the sanctum of the sorceress.