The Carnelian Throne (2 page)

My feet sloshed and squished in boots filled with silt and water. I sat beside Chayin and emptied them, tearing up handfuls of grass with which to scour the muddied-leather clean. In the puddle I poured out from my left boot onto the ground, a tiny, red-striped fish flopped, wriggled, then lay still. A tremor, then many, coursed over my flesh.

The wall, dour, devoid of feature but for its gate, dwarfed all else. On this inner side, extending from its base three man-lengths outward, the turf was blackened, free of weed or twig. Everywhere else, the shore was wildly fertile. From the dappled forest, gibbering, trilling, came the sunset songs of unnamed beasts. Mewling, snorting trebles mixed with deeper; hissing growls as the rain forest reaffirmed its celebration of life. But the wall spoke not of life. In the blackened, time-and-again-singed earth were set iron stakes. Not more than a pace apart, as high as my knee, they flowered the scathed earth. Like the armies of Chayin’s Nemar formed up for review did the black-iron sentinels flank the sheer brown wall. As far as my eyes could see ran that wall, and the blackened earth, and the sharp, pointed iron stakes.

“Iron rusts,” observed Chayin as I pulled from my boots the last of the muddied, sharp-edged gray grass.

“The sun sets,” I snapped, and winced as a thorned weed made its sovereignty clear to my right thigh. Carefully I disengaged it from my flesh and continued what I had started—the working of wet, muddy feet into wet, muddy boots.

Sereth, who had been doing likewise, gave the task up, as a bad job. Wriggling his toes, he leaned back on his elbows and stretched, grinning at me with that sly, under-the-brows demeanor that has ever boded ill for the universe at large, and for me, especially, has come to signify his readiness to collect that tribute which he chooses to call humor. I bristled, like the countless women before me subject to the tax imposed by such a man.

“I would not, if I were you.”

“Would not what?” he inquired innocently, while hiding his smile with a hand rubbed across his jaw.

I did not answer, but turned to Chayin, who raised up both palms toward me and cringed theatrically.

“I was only going to say that it seerns we have found some sign of man,” spoke Sereth, not to be denied. We had wagered upon this point.

“Not living man. That,” said I, sweeping my hand over gate and wall, “could well be an artifact left from before the rebuilding.” It was a halfhearted objection, even to my own ears.

“Iron rusts,” said Chayin again.

“And it is getting dark. I am wet. I am cold. I want a fire.” I sighed. “And something to eat—you promised me a local meal.” I had grounds for complaint on that score: we had been eating the ship’s stores far too long. Three days past we found this river’s mouth and sailed the Aknet up it, as far as Chayin had deemed safe. There we left her, and her crew, making a twenty-one-day rendezvous. If we did not by then reappear, they were on their own. And the ship’s commander had not been happy; but what objections he voiced had only been wasted breath. These two men, who between them reigned over all Silistra, listened no more to their shipmaster than they had to me. It had made me feel, somehow, less useless when they heeded not the sage council of Neshub, the ship commander. Though I agreed with him, in substance, I was pleased when they ignored his demands that we take an armed party—he was a man, one they respected, and their heedlessness in his case made stinging their heedlessness in mine. It was not that they ignored my advice because I was a woman, but that they ignored all advice that did not agree with their plans. And what were those plans? In sum, they were simple; self-indulgent, if any stranger had been present who might have dared judge them: we had no purpose there, at that time, other than hunting.

Sereth, with a squint at the sky, notched into his bow one of the arrows he had demanded I fletch.

“If your arrow flies, you will have the game meal you crave,” he grunted, rising.

“Straight,” Chayin amended. My first attempts had evinced a marked rightward propensity. Sereth, soundless, slipped into shadowed trees.

I peered around me, taking stock. The shore on this side of the gate rose less steeply. The marsh and riverbed knew no boundaries, but entwined each other’s domains. Just north of us, the shore was treed to the waterline and beyond with white-barked giants (which we would come to call memnis) whose leaves depended in places to trail along the river’s surface. The bend along which we had come, the bend that had revealed the gate, continued its twisting course northward.

“Estri, did you open the gate?” asked Chayin, touching my shoulder.

“No. I was going to ask you.” I turned from the river view.

“Sereth surely did not.” No Sereth would not have set his will to opening the gate. We had pacted with him to refrain from such activities, that we might calm ourselves and the time around us. Nothing was known of this place upon whose banks we sat. Perhaps there was nothing to know here. It would have suited me, had such been the case.

“If you did not,” Chayin pursued it, stretching out on his side, “and I did not, and Sereth did not, then who did?”

“I told you: the wall is doubtless left from before the rebuilding. The lightning hit some old mechanism.”

“Conveniently, just as we happened to be passing by?”

“Coincidence?” I offered.

“Even you know better than that by now.”

“Make a fire,” I suggested. “No fire, no portentous discussions.”

“Without skills? In this all pervasive dampness?” he objected, but rose up with mutters about women on hunting trips and stalked about in the bushes. I turned away, surreptitiously seeking with mind for intelligence secreted near the gate. I found none who might have triggered its opening.

Chayin’s voice, out of the rustling leaves, was determined: “Iron rusts. Those stakes are in good shape. That ground is kept cleared.”

I suppressed a guilty start, momentarily sure that he had caught me seeking—a thing Sereth had forbidden. But Chayin, grunting and cursing as he sought materials for fire in the sopping wood, had not noticed. I watched him, pensive. It was he whose aegis had underwritten this trip. It was he whose couch-mate, Liuma, had been slain by those we hunted. Or would hunt, when spring thaws made the northern rivers navigable. This plausible excuse served us, each one for our own purpose. True, we all hunted here: peace, and nature, and a respite from our concerns. We had left, each of us, all that we had so recently acquired. Or tried to: what we had lost could not be regained, and what responsibilities we fled trailed determinedly at our heels. As in the mythical book of prophecy to which Chayin felt us bound, we had sailed an ocean, bearing with us a sword which might—or might not—be Se’keroth, Sword of Severance, and the material sign of that long-prophesied age, the coming of the divinity of man. Sereth subscribed not at all to that belief. So he said, now, though it had been he who first voiced the possibility. I was uncommitted. Or rather I did not want to be convinced, yet half believed. If the sword that Sereth had acquired with his accession to Silistra’s rule
was
Se’keroth, the blade would be quenched in ice. Until that time, I withheld both support and censure. In this place, I thought, looking around me, ice might be hard to find.

But then, dry wood should have been hard to find.

Chayin unburdened his arms and arranged brush and branch to his satisfaction. He lit it with a flint device, and not his mind, bending low to the piled tinder. Though Sereth was not here to see, Chayin honored his will. I might not have been so patient. It was the third try with the sparking wheel that caught. He blew into cupped hands, cajoling the spark.

By the time I knelt at his side, the spark, judiciously nursed, had become a flame. Chayin sat back, staring into the fire.

“I am very sure that we are being watched, and not by any artifact. Sit still! You might sense it.” Casually, he met my eyes.

“He asked me to forgo such things,” I reminded him, unable to resist. “And you also.”

“So scrupulous? This is no time for it. He asked, yes. Whenever possible, and if we met no men, and not to any extent that might endanger our lives. We are about to meet men.” Out of his loam-dark face the fire shone back at me, red-gold, from enlarged pupils.

It was then that Sereth, with no more sound than a gust of wind between the trees, emerged from the swamp. Over his shoulder were two red-furred, motionless animals, lied together by the tails at his shoulder. Their black muzzles dangled around his knees. Their staring eyes, even in death, were gentle.

“Local meal,” he announced, dropping the two warm carcasses in my lap. “Your arrows are improving.”

I stroked the soft fur of my dinner-to-be. Then I thanked it for its flesh and took my knife to it. “What did you see?” Chayin demanded.

“Plants and animals with which I am not familiar. No men. But man-sign,” added Sereth, taking one of the carcasses into his own lap.

“It has come to me that we are being observed. What think you?” growled Chayin, scratching beneath his tunic.

“I am sure of it,” said Sereth quietly, and nothing more until the little animal lay gutted and skinned before him. Then: “There is a path, very straight, wide, well-tended. It runs northwest from the wall, just.beyond those trees.” He rose, scrutinized my novice’s butchering, and went to cut a spit pole.

By the time the meat spattered above Chayin’s fire, the constellations were beginning to poke their way through the haze. Sereth had helped me with my preparation of the meat; patient, soft-voiced as always when concerned with what he termed “life-skills.” The more deeply I had involved myself, during that long sea voyage, with affairs of mind, the more insistent he had become that I take instruction from him in weaponry, in survival on land and sea, in hunters’ lore. I knew, by then, more than I wished of butchering and the catching of fish; and less than I had hoped of what lay in his heart. Of his turmoil, I had been instructed only by omission: he never spoke of it.

“Why do you think it is that none of these plants and animals are known to you?” I asked him.

“Because I have never been here before,” he answered, hacking off our dinner’s left hind leg. “Chayin, take what you will.” He who hunts eats first of the kill. They observed the old rules ever more closely, with fervor. Perhaps with desperation: that which is invulnerable is unnatural, and though they were not truly immortal, nor as yet all-powerful, they were no longer, even in their own eyes, “normal” men. This deeply troubled them, those reluctant gods. As it had troubled me when I first discovered what latitude I might exercise in this that we call life. So I said not a word while the cahndor and Sereth ripped bites from a steaming joint of the nameless meat, but waited until they were satisfied that no immediate symptoms of illness developed. For only a quick poison, one that could strike in an instant, and catch the victim unawares, could incapacitate such strengths as we now possessed. Between thoughts, must a crippling blow be landed on an intelligence so highly skilled. I waited, hardly tense, sure in my capacity to intervene should the beast-flesh prove deadly. But it did not, and soon I was crunching happily the crisped outer flesh of Sereth’s kill. The meat did hold one surprise, however: it was neither gamy nor tough, but sweet and rich. Even as I thought it, Sereth spoke:

“We may well be expected to pay for this meal when we come upon the owner of this preserve.”

“Why wait?” mumbled Chayin around a mouthful. He gestured with a greasy forefinger. “Our observer still lurks. Let us go greet him. Perhaps we could take a live pair home, and breed up a herd ourselves.”

About us, the insect shrills grew strident and rhythmic. I put down the meat and lay back, stretching full-length on the alien grass. My mind, denied the search of the woods for which it clamored, peopled the forest’s orchestra, gave the nascent choir a sinister aspect as it wailed low, ululent homage to the darkness. From all around us, even echoing back from the river’s far bank, waxed that numinous evening chant. I liked the sound of it not at all.

Further disquieted, I twisted around to face the gate. Thereupon danced a soft nimbus, surely marsh gas rising. Over the stakes it flowed, maggot-white, sentient. I pulled at the clammy straps of my stiffening leathers, shivering, and shifted my gaze back to the fire.

But the foreboding, the ineffable hostility I sensed from the encroaching wilderness, would not be dispersed by that reassuring crackle. Its heat did not warm me, its light could not chase from my flesh the touch of a hundred hidden eyes. Sereth’s fingers enclosed mine where I fumbled with my tunic’s closures. He shook his head, let my hand fall away, and shrugged. Chayin leaned forward, stirred the branches. A knot popped, showering sparks. Somewhere inland, a beast roared. It was a roar of rage and vengeance, hovering long in the air before it tapered to a growl indistinguishable from the forest’s deep-throated mutter.

“Sereth, free me from my vow—let me seek the sense of this place.” My voice, calm, unwavering, did not betray me. The principle on which he had based his decision of noninterference was right. The decision, I had long felt, was wrong.

“Not yet. I would explore Khys’s—this land for what it is, not what I might assume it is, or want it to be.” I did not miss the stumble of his tongue over his predecessor’s name. It was Khys’s work here that he would explore. And alter, if he could. Khys, the last dharen, or ruler, of Silistra, had spent long periods absent from his capital., None knew where, in those days. He had made quite certain that his successor would undertake this journey to the east, to this shore so long isolate from our own culture. And, despite himself, the inheritor had come to take stock of what had been left to him.

“Chayin, let us toss for watch,” suggested Sereth, his head slightly cocked, closing indisputably the subject I had broached. A second roar, fainter than the first, echoed to us from the far bank.

“I will take it. Sleep is not within my reach,” offered Chayin. Sereth grinned, shrugged, sought my side. Before he lay down to sleep, he spent a while staring around him, though it was mind and not eye that could penetrate the mist and darkness and denude them of their menace. But he would not do that. Finally he blew a sharp breath through his teeth and stretched out on the damp ground. I fit myself to him, my head resting on his arm.