The Carnelian Throne (21 page)

Deilcrit picked a hangnail until it bled, and the blood ran along the course of dirt that blackened his cuticle. He sucked at it, pondering a way to begin, regretful that he had spoken of his distress. But once started, it poured out of him like a flash flood. Somewhere in that telling the two women entered and set about boiling a brew of steeped leaves. He hardly noticed them. He told of his youth in the forest: when about the Children’s Trial, in his tenth year, he had been separated from the children’s band and first to approach the gates of Nehedra to claim his manhood. As he had come tearing down the path, heart and lungs pounding, a huge form had jumped upon him from the trees. Rolling on the ground; he had found a rock. When he rose and realized that he had smashed the skull of a grown man, he had been terrified. Looking ever and again over his shoulder, alert for the pounding of feet that would be the balance of the children’s band, he had rolled the body (for it was too weighty for his youngster’s strength to lift or even drag) toward the leaves. When with a final breathless grunt he pushed it once more, it fell into the leaves and disappeared with a crash of broken sticks into a pit that the piled leaves had obscured. He stared at the body in the pit, long uncomprehending, until a growl signified ptaiss about, and he raised his tear-streaked face to his death.

But the ptaiss was growling over a man-size corpse which it worried in the brush, and he staggered backward, away from it, toward the trail, his eyes fastened on Nehedra’s mud-brick wall, so close and yet so far ...

Then, when he had gained the road’s middle, the group of which he was member broke from the thickets, all wild-eyed and running pell-mell toward Nehedra and the maturity that lay beyond the tight-shut gates. It was the only Children’s Trial of which he had ever heard during which no children were struck dead by Mnemaat’s henchmen.

“So what?” demanded Quendros. “With the exclusion of Beneguan children, all know how Mnemaat’s culling takes place. There is nothing supernatural about it. So you killed a man who would have killed not only you but also the first three or four children to complete the course. Good luck and good riddance, is all.”

“But you do not see: I was this big!” He laid his hand on the air at about his waist’s height. “And the ptaiss killed the other man, while I struggled with the first. And meekly sat there gnawing while all of us ran by .... I have been saved from death six ... no, seven times by wehrs; and that exempts all of this insanity that has come to pass since the Spirit Gate opened.”

“What other evidence do you have of wehr-favor?”

Then he told all, and as he confessed his conjectures and his fears, his heart lightened. Somewhere in that exposition the women joined the exchange, first offering gourd cups asteam with a sweet infusion, then adding soundly thought postulations as to what Deilcrit’s brushes with Wehrdom and its inarguable predisposition to him might portend. What might in the end be gained concerned them. What risk he ran, what could become of him if Wehrdom’s soft touch in his mind became a strident command which he could not disobey, did not: they sighted his strength of character and his very nature as protection enough.

But Quendros did not add to this lighthearted comfort they offered. His former cellmate grew contemplative and somber. He picked his teeth with a charred splinter and scratched himself, and occasionally his mouth twitched in a grimace whose meaning Deilcrit could not read.

When his words grew bleary and the conversation dribbled to a halt, Quendros supposed that Deilcrit might have the just-departed Amnidia’s bed, a straw heap under a blanket near the hearth. They, Quendros and Lohr-Ememna, made exit through a low, curtained doorway that was set in the hearthside wall, beyond which lay a shallow dormered eave.

Heicrey fussed over the low, banked blaze, her curtate brown robe gathered close, her unbound hair a cascade about her hips.

He looked at the curtain still swaying slightly, behind which her father and mother lay, and softly denied the cup she held out to him almost shyly. Her eyes were deep and dark as new-turned earth, like ancient Amnidia’s.

He shifted uncomfortably and started to pull off the crude canvas boots given him in Dey-Ceilneeth. Astoundingly, she moved to aid him. Not knowing how to stop her, he allowed it, thinking of what the old woman had said to him in her dying breaths.

“Have I taken your bed?” he asked when he could stand the awkward silence no longer.

“No,” breathed she, who scraped with her finger at the mud which caked his boots. “I sleep there.” And she pointed to a second waist-high door, this one of ill-fitting planks, on the hearth’s far side.

“Then you had better do so,” he growled roughly.

With downcast eyes she turned and rose from her knee’s and banked the fire as suits for an easy rest, and rustled wraithlike past him in the gloom. There was a creak from the darkness as she pulled open her dormer’s low door, and then nothing.

He sighed and lay back, hands under his head, and closed his eyes. After much tossing and turning, he sat bolt upright and stripped off the rough sword belt which insisted on jabbing him, and the binding, ill-fitting tunic, then took the rolled blanket at the pallet’s head and spread it over himself.

He was at dream’s elusive gate when a swishing noise resounded in that echo chamber on sleep’s threshold.

He held very still, wishing the embers threw light. Then the blanket was lifted and her firm little breasts burned against his chest. He turned his head slightly and she froze immobile. So did he. After a dozen breaths she eased her length against him and glided one thigh over his own.

It occurred to him that she yet might leave if he pretended not to wake, but he could not suppress the smile that touched him. Unmoving, his hands under his head, lying on his back with her bent leg thrown over him, he awaited what would develop, his eyes wide to the darkness.

She was delicate, persuasive, her movements eloquent. After a time he drew his right hand from under him and wound it in her hair.

Later, he chased her back to her own straw, when the dawn birds whispered their sleepy tentative songs. He slept then deeply, dreamlessly, and awakened to scents of boiling grain and Quendros’ homely banter.

He rose and pulled on his garments amid jibes as to the lateness of the hour, all the while wondering how Quendros’ rawboned, lumbering mass could have spawned anything as delicate and supple as the girl-child Heicrey. Then, only, he remembered to be embarrassed by his near-nakedness before that one’s mother, and abashed at his cozening abuse of the pair’s hospitality.

But it lasted only a moment before the wellbeing he felt, and when Heicrey herself entered, rubbing sleep from her eyes, it was as if a ray of sun had struck him in the face.

Her discreetness shamed him, and he struggled to emulate it, but his eyes repossessed her and he resented with all his heart the knowledge of her that darkness had veiled from him.

It was not long after the meal that he contrived to speak with Quendros alone.

“Tell me about the Laonan faith,” he began awkwardly.

“Which facet?” Quendros teased. They were chopping kindling. Deilcrit attributed the other’s bared teeth and squinting eyes to the sun’s bright rays. In the daylight the hovel was poor, flaking, cracked, a three-humped overturned piece of pottery baking in the sun.
Thunk!
went Quendros’ huge bronze ax.
Thunk!
replied his own.

“What are your betrothal vows?” he blurted out.

“Son,” grunted Quendros between strokes that would have felled whole trees, “you’re a miserable risk, not much in the way of temptation to a woman’s eye. What have you?” He leaned upon the ax and wiped his sweat-soaked hair from his eyes. “Not even your life’s sure. You’d have her to ask, y’know. ’Tis not my place to intervene. But these battle-brink couplings are often born of desperation. Nothing comes of them but grief. If I were her, I’d not hear you till you’re back from Othdaliee. And then maybe I’d not.” He snorted, hawked. “But I’m no woman.”

“And it would not anger you?”

Quendros regarded him narrowly, stroked his just-shaven chin reflectively. “Now, that’s up to you, isn’t it? What you make of it, I mean. If you’re not out to harm her, and if you’d be to her what a woman requires of a man, who am I to object? But if you’re deceiving me ...” He leaned close, so close Deilcrit could gauge the procession of rot in his front tooth. “Then I would ... do whatever seems just. I’m no Wise Woman, to read the future. It’s on you, to read your intent.”

Deilcrit drew in the dust with his booted foot, then met Quendros’ glare once more. “I cannot say what I will do. That is what I have been trying to tell you .... Things are happening to me that I cannot control. I want a thing, and it occurs and brings great trials, and then I must want something else to survive the trial, and then I am in worse straits than before. I cannot say ....”

“Why not wait and see?”

“I cannot.” It was wrenched from him through clenched teeth. “I must either have her, or leave this night.”

“That bad, eh?”

Deilcrit grunted an affirmation.

“Well, ask her mother, boy, is all I can suggest ...” But Kirelli’s abrupt descent wiped the rapine grin from the big black-haired man as if it had never been.

“Oh, Kirelli,”
Deilcrit pleaded silently,
“please, not now.”
And with a soft “Kreesh, breet,” the whelt circled once about his head and was gone heavenward.

Filled with thanksgiving, he squinted after the receding dot until it was lost in the greening sky. Then he turned from Quendros, who again chopped wood with a fervor that spat chips, and hurried to the hut, that he might speak with Heicrey’s mother before his courage left him or Quendros changed his mind.

Lohr-Ememna dashed his hopes into sharp, glittering shards, and as if she sensed this, she was excruciatingly careful as to where her words trod: “Deilcrit, I cannot, as a Wise Woman, condone this match. It is to be hoped that you will understand that Laonan vows are sacred vows, and that if you later care to take up the study, things might change.”

They both knew this to be an excuse. Her tired countenance pleaded with him not to press the matter.

He retired to ponder whether Woman’s Word could be binding upon him if the Woman herself was not bound by his laws.

Then, decided, he chased down Quendros, who wandered by the cliff’s edge where crumbled Nothrace overlooked the sea.

There were tumbled buildings once tall as the maze around Dey-Ceilneeth, great ways of rubble among which quenel and roema, their smaller, scavenging cousins, hissed and spat and slunk. There was a spray salty in his nostrils, a drizzle blown inward from the sea that intensified as midday and its rain approached.

When Deilcrit came upon him, around the twisting of a hovel’s one remaining angled wall, Quendros was seated on a heap of clay bricks, listening to the thunder of the waves as they sought to climb the cliff’s face.

To his right and rear, Othdaliee squatted, as always enwrapped in mist and cloud. She is not high when judged from land’s height, but at the Northrace ledge, where her skirts drop sheer to the sea, her true proportions are revealed.

He sat by Quendros’ side. His face must have bespoken his disappointment.

“We will leave soon, then?” ventured Quendros, scanning the choppy waves far below.

“We, or I.”

“We, lad. You have my word. But the day is half-spent. Rest another night.”

He squeezed his eye shut upon hearing that, and knew he did not have the strength to refuse.

“If you must,” he acquiesced without emotion, suddenly very tired.

Quendros clapped him upon the back and rubbed his shoulderblades. “That’s a good one; it never pays to fight fate.”

“Are you sure?” he retorted, somber.

“No,” murmured Quendros, rising abruptly to stretch. “I am not sure. I am sure of less and less the longer I live. But of one thing I am sure: even one woman cannot flaunt another in matters of the heart. And speaking of matters of the heart, I have some deep matters to discuss with Lohr-Ememna before I take the trail. She is a difficult taskmistress, but her touch fortifies.” And he stretched a stretch that creaked bone, and set off down the ruin-strewn street.

He spent the midday there wandering among Nothrace’s ghosts, turning a chunk of rubble here, a bleached bone there, seeking some feeling that might tell him he was home. He peered in twice a score of empty doorways, even three which were not empty. In one of these the door was slammed in his face. At the lintel of two others he was forced to explain his presence. Each time, he used the Laonan/Laore exchange formula he had heard Quendros use with Amnidia.

Only later it occurred to him that he might have been endangered. At the time, he was calm and secure and unconcerned.

He unearthed a verdigris-eaten knife hilt in an empty, three-windowed but of stones calked with clay. Its floor was three concentric sunken ledges, and it was in the bottommost of these that he was kneeling, scratching among the soft, loose dirt. The top half of a skull and some far-scattered human bones told him how the occupant had died: the skull casing was shattered, bones cracked for marrow. He lounged easy under its mournful stare, digging in the cool sand with the ancient knife.

Outside, the steady drum of afternoon rain commenced, and all around him the shadows, lost definition. But he was dry and warm within the hut, which leaked in only four places. He spent a long time watching the water drip from among the ceiling stones, wondering how the rocks could have been cajoled into assuming the arch of, an inverted bowl.

She tinkled: “Deilcrit, I have searched everywhere,” and ran lightly down the stepped flooring.

Her red-gold hair was darkened, plastered to her head with rain. Water streamed from the end of her braid. She reminded him, in that moment, her face alight with joy and dappled with raindrops, of the spirit power Estri. He shook the specter aside, reached up, and sluiced a drop from her nose. “How dare you chase after me in the rain? Your mother will have both our hides.”