The four hundred-odd Tsan from Tumissa to Katalal took them nearly twenty days. It was now the month of Langala, the first month of summer and the fourth of the Tsolyani year. Next would come Fesru, then Drenggar, and after that dread Firasul, “when the earth melts, and the air itself is aflame.” Mnesun hoped to reach Bey Sii before the first day of Drenggar, and in this he was abetted by Bejjeksa and the two Mu’ugalavyani, who planned to hurry on eastward to spend the hottest part of the year in Sokatis in the cooler Chaigari foothills.
They thus took to travelling in the dim hours just before dawn, then resting in an unoccupied guard tower or in the shade of the great roadway itself while the sun blazoned its golden brand upon the fields. In the evening they moved on again until it grew too dark to see one’s footing. At first Mnesun marched whenever there was light from both the moons, but after a slave, confused by the double red and green shadows, slipped and went asprawl, breaking most of his load of glassware-a loss of seven hundred Kaitars — he resigned himself to a slower pace.
At last Katalal lay before them, a splash of green upon a dust-yellow canvas. Its ornate gables, peaked roofs, and pyramided temples rose above a tiny blue lake, fed from an underground spring that nourished not only the city but also long avenues of Gapul-txees beyond the red-and-black-chequered walls. Katalal was justly famed for its roof gardens. As in many of the cities of the plains, it was customary to cultivate cool grottoes of exotic foliage in urns upon the flat roof of one’s house. From a distance, thus, Katalal looked like nothing more than some great jungle ruin, all overgrown with vines, creepers, shrubs, and garish flowers. In the midst of the city the governor’s palace shimmered pearl-white above the lake, and just beyond the temples of Vimuhla and Karakan faced one another across the square like two behemoths before a wrestling match. Here many folk espoused the faith of the Fire God and of his Cohort Chiteng, He of the Red-Spouting Flame. The Lords of Stability, too, had their shrines in Katalal, but of these only warlike Karakan and his Cohort Chegarra were popular.
For all their militant gods, the people of Katalal seemed singularly peaceable. They wore knee-length kilts of red and black chequers and stripes, flat wide-brimmed hats of enameled Chlen- hide, and short cloaks of gauzy Thesun-cloth. This, Harsan was told, was woven from the silk of the Dnelu, a fierce six-legged insect-like creature half the size of a man. These predators built underground dens from whence they leaped out upon smaller game and occasionally even upon unwary humans. The eggs of the Dnelu came wrapped in skull-sized cocoons of flossy grey fibre, and the braver youths of the city vied with one another in provoking the creatures into an attack while others stole their eggs.
The folk of Katalal were less receptive to a priest of Thumis than those of the Chakas, but Harsan found his way without difficulty to the unpretentious temple of his sect in a side street off the main plaza. Here his writ again got him food and lodging. That evening he carefully cut the stitching of his grey robe and brought forth the three gold Kaitars which Prior Haringgashte had advanced him. He then undid his bedroll and contemplated the farseeing device given him by Zaren. There were also his notes on the Llyani language, a painstakingly copied manuscript of the Llyani grammar of Tlu’en of Ssa’atis, and two leaves bearing reproductions of the glyphs upon Kurrune’s map symbol and the waxen hand. He kept the money out, but the rest he bound up in the roll once more.
In the morning he found a merchant in the marketplace and surrendered half of a precious Kaitar for a delicate blue faience amulet of the Goddess Avanthe in her Aspect of Tahele, the Maid of Beauty. When Mnesun’s caravan set forth again on the following day he chose an occasion and presented this to the Lady Eyil. She received it with pleasure and kissed him for it, but she did not wear it much thereafter, much to his hidden disappointment.
Now Harsan walked regularly with the Lady Eyil. Bejjeksa, the Salarvyani trader, made a wager with the Shen that Harsan would abandon his sleeping mat near the fire for another and more enticing bed before they reached Katalal. In this he was the loser, and he paid up with ill grace, muttering about inexperienced boys who could not see when a warm female bosom yearned to receive them.
The Lady Eyil continued to plague Harsan with arguments about theology, but now more of her queries were purely personal, as was the way of a girl attended by an earnest suitor in Tsolyanu- and probably other lands as well.
Her feet, she complained, hurt her and were a misfortune: “big enough to thresh out all the crops in the Empire in the harvest dances.” Harsan gazed upon the supple limb extended for his inspection and demurred strongly.
The Lady Eyil smiled.
The following day she said, “Harsan, think you that my eyes are too large for my face?” Harsan did not and said so volubly.
Still later, she said, “My clan-sisters say my breasts are really too small for my height.” Harsan, who even now had one of these criticised objects pressed warmly against his side as they walked, disagreed.
The next evening, after Tsatla had been summarily dismissed into a silently protesting huddle on the far side of the litter, the Lady Eyil used the “thou of heart’s desire,” as befitted the occasion, and whispered, “Harsan, think you my knees are too close together to accord with the Twenty-seventh Criterion of Beauty enjoined by my Goddess?” Harsan had never heard of these standards, but he knelt now looking down at the delicious length of her within the shadowed litter, and he gladly would have sung an ode to her knees or to any other part she cared to name, if only he had had even a smidgin of versifying. He berated himself for having studied ancient epics instead of love sonnets.
Then, when the fire had died away to a memory of redness, the Lady Eyil turned her head upon Harsan’s shoulder, touched lip to lip, and said, “There are those who might say my teeth are uneven and not worthy of the canon of the Goddess…” Harsan explored the matter for himself with his tongue and pronounced the unknown critics to be fools.
Thus did Bejjeksa win his second wager with the Shen.
Even so, the path to the Lady Eyil was not without its thomy patches. One of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers was an accomplished flute-player who often entertained the party in the evenings with the wistful melodies of his own land. He began to seek out the Lady Eyil’s company, and for a time she walked both with him and with Harsan, much to the latter’s pent-up despair. But then she made a clever pun upon flutes and flute-players, almost certainly within the man’s hearing, and he called upon her no more.
More troublous was the matter of the Livyani, Sa’araz, who fancied himself a courtier. He paid her elaborate compliments in his lisping, accented Tsolyani. One evening he showed her the contents of his leathern wallet: gleaming chrysoberyls, amethysts, camelians, and opals of milky pearl and green inner fire. Some of these, he hinted, might well grace the throat of a noble lady. She fingered them longingly, asked their qualities and prices, and spoke fair words to Sa’araz, who made her a gift of one of his smaller stones. The affair might have been more serious if the Livyani had not been a man of indefinite age and unprepossessing appearance. She smiled upon him and exchanged courtly banter, a game in which he easily outmatched her. But she admitted privately to Harsan that Sa’araz’ polished urbanities and his ageless, smooth skin did not enchant her. His eyes, too, repelled her, she said, being flat and expressionless, looking upon her as though she were but one more glittering gem. Sa’araz soon saw where this road led and contented himself with pretty words and an occasional subtle gibe at Harsan.
One evening, six days out of Katalal and two days before they were to reach the town of Hauma, they stopped beneath one of the watch towers. This one had a small garrison of soldiers. A broad, low, stone platform had been built out from the lowest level of the roadway, and half a dozen parties of merchants, townsmen, and other travellers were encamped upon it. There were several rude stalls where provisions and fuel might be had, a well of good water, and a gaggle of tents filled with singers, dancers, jugglers, and harlots. The caravan-master had his slaves pitch his dun-coloured tent near the wall on the platform.
The mood was almost that of a village fair, and Mnesun purchased a bundle of Khaish, long white tubers as sweet as honey. Sa’araz then outdid him by obtaining three Jakkohl, small edible beasts indigenous to these plains and devilishly hard to catch. Hele’a of Ghaton contributed a clay jug of Ngalu wine, and the Lady Eyil added another. The Shen bought a basket of sugary blue Dlel- fruit, which he himself did not fancy but which he knew would please his human comrades. Bejjeksa and the Mu’ugalavyani brothers walked half a Tsan to the nearest village and returned with fresh-baked loaves of coppery-red bread of Dwa-flour. Harsan alone had no money to spare, but he contributed his forest-learned skills by skinning and dressing the Jakkohl, and no one grumbled.
The feast in Mnesun’s tent was a pleasant success. Afterwards the squat trader would have sent for singers, dancers, and even for harlots to cheer the slaves. All of the entertainers had been reserved already by others, however.
The evening seemed yet incomplete. The Mu’ugalavyani trilled a bright roundelay on his flute, and his brother sang the words in their own staccato language. Then, to the surprise of all, the Lady Eyil sent Tsatla to rummage through her baggage and bring a Sra’ur, a potbellied little instrument with six strings. She slipped silver plectra over nimble fingertips and proceeded to draw forth a Tumissan air. After a moment the flute-player joined in, and she sang the lyric in her low, throaty voice. Harsan would gladly have exchanged his life for the Isles of the Excellent Dead on the spot, had only mighty Belkhanu promised him an aeon or two more of the Lady Eyil and her singing.
She finished, and all snapped their fingers in applause in the Tsolyani fashion. The Shen, whose forelimbs ended in scaled three-fingered claws, contented himself with hissing like a blazing iron plunged into water.
Harsan’s pleasure was interrupted by the merchant Sa’araz, who had seated himself nearby on a bale of cloth. “Worthy priest,” he began, “during our days together you have enlightened us with wisdom and with tales of your Tsolyani gods. Yet never have we heard what you will do when we reach the capital.”
Harsan hesitated. He had wondered when Prior Haringgashte had forbidden him to speak of the Llyani artifacts or of his mission in Bey Sii. Not even the Lady Eyil had been told. Now he replied, “I go to serve as Thumis wills.”
Sa’araz was not satisfied. “I have friends in the Temple of Eternal Knowing and may assist you there. You, on the other hand, can introduce me to your colleagues and thus aid me. ‘Steel and flint make fire together.’ ”
“I know little yet of my duties in Bey Sii.” That was true enough. “I do whatever the Weaver has woven into my Skein of Destiny. ‘A rock rolls downhill until it stops.’ ” He finished, answering Sa’araz’ proverb with one from the Chakas.
“Perhaps Harsan goes to make water in the well of wisdom,” inteijected Bejjeksa in his gruff, guttural accent. He looked flustered when the group burst into laughter. “Is it not the idiom? Is it not to be said thus?”
“Perhaps, Oh learned savant of Salarvya, someone should make water in your ear and thus inject wisdom into it!” This from Mnesun.
“If someone would proffer me one more sip of wine,” Harsan laughed, “I would let the sleep-demons have my soul for the night.”
The conversation turned back to the interminable talk of wares, brokers, and profits. Harsan wandered outside. He hoped that the Lady Eyil would follow, but she sat now on the other side of the fire, all ruddy with its light, eyes sparkling as she related something to Mnesun.
He picked his way through the maze of tents, bundles, chests, and sleeping bodies towards the parapet. From inside a tent a woman giggled, and a man’s voice guffawed in return. Music shrilled from one of the encampments, and there came the rhythmic clashing of wrist and ankle bells. Slaves sat about a fire under the bored watch of a caravan guard. Some played at Den-den, moving the rough-cut wooden pieces from square to square of a board scratched in charcoal upon the stones. Others slept.
He reached the coping at last, drew a breath of smoke-tinged air, and gazed down into the velvet darkness beyond the platform. A rushlight betrayed the presence of peasant huts at the base of the access ramp. Neither moon was up as yet, and the guard tower loomed black upon black, orange light sketching a window upon its massive flanks. From below a baby cried, and a woman’s tired voice sounded a plaintive reply.
“Worthy priest…”
Harsan started and turned to see the thin, bowlegged form of Hele’a of Ghaton behind him.
“Good priest, I mean no fear to you.” The oddly accented syllables whispered forth in a breathy rush. “What you do is of peril, and there are those who are opposed. Do you know this?”
Harsan stared. Hele’a was silhouetted against the campfires, and his features could not be seen. “What-?”
“I am one sent. Be assured.”
“What is this you tell me?” Harsan was still numb with surprise.
“I perceive… feelings. I am-how is it spoken? — a sensitive. I lack the power to see minds, as some priests and scholars do, yet I can see feelings. When you spoke just now, I sensed hatred, worthy priest.”
“From-from whom?”
“In a group I cannot tell. My ability is not directional. But I know that hatred was there.” The shadowed head seemed to twist this way and that.
“Of what use this warning, then, if you cannot see where the danger lies?”
“The one who hates guards his mind. Only if you were to speak to each in turn, alone, might the enmity leak past the barriers and be plain to me.”
A thrill of apprehension crept along Harsan’s limbs. Prior Haringgashte had never hinted that this mission could involve danger. For a moment he wondered if Hele’a’s warning had to do with the Lady Eyil: jealousy from Sa’araz or the Mu’ugalavyani. Moreover, who was this Hele’a anyway? A madman? One who would extract nonexistent money from him?
Hele’a continued. “I feel your doubts. Yet I must protect you if I can. This hatred has naught to do with the girl. It is cold and without pity, a dagger in its sheath, hidden from the eye. Two days remain before we reach Hauma, and my feelings tell me that it will leap forth before then.”
“I have seen nothing to make me think your words are true. But if so, I should go at once to the captain of the tower, sleep there this night, and continue on alone tomorrow.” He knew not whether he was serious or was simply humouring the man. But in his stomach a cold ball grew ever larger.
“Not so. Again, it is only my… feeling. But I sense that this is not the path of safety.” Dry, skeletal fingers brushed his arm, and something hard, round, and cold was pressed into his palm. “What I give you now will protect you. Do you know what an ‘Eye’ is?”
“I do. They are devices made by the ancient sages, long before Llyan of Tsamra ruled, and before the Time of Darkness which preceded him. I have seen an ‘Eye of Raging Power,’ as my tutor named it, in the vaults of our monastery. He. told me that its magic was gone, however-”
“Good, then. I must not tarry, for some may watch. What I give you now is the ‘Unimpeachable Shield Against Foes.’ Can you feel it-carefully now-the little stud on the back?”
Harsan fumbled the device in his fingers. It was of the size and shape of a river pebble-or of a human eye-a shallow, circular depression on one side, a tiny squarish protuberance on the other. “I feel it.”
“If you are endangered, face the iris-the circle-towards yourself and depress the square projection. No weapon can then strike you. The power does not last long, however. Do you comprehend?’ ’
“Yes, but-what does it do precisely? I-”
“We cannot speak further. It will keep you safe from any weapons not charged with enchantments of their own. Now I go, priest Harsan.”
Another figure was picking its way past the huddles of sleeping slaves. A foot grated against a chest of goods, and there was a muffled curse in some foreign tongue. Harsan turned back to Hele’a, but the Ghatoni had gone.
“Good evening to you, priest Harsan.” It was one of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers, the flute-player. “A night without moons is of good omen, eh?”
Harsan found himself sidling away along the parapet, the ‘Eye’ clutched tightly in his fist.
“Is there aught amiss? The Lady Eyil asks after you.” Was there sardonic malice in the man’s tone?
“I thank you for the message. I have just completed my evening devotions and must bid you goodnight.” Harsan’s eye had picked out an unobstructed path back to the comparative security of their campfire. The flute-player was left to stand gazing perplexedly after him.
The Lady Eyil teased him about his preoccupation, complained that the wine must have washed away his lovemaking, pouted, and ended sleeping with her back to him. All that night Harsan lay with the ‘Unimpeachable Shield Against Foes’ but a finger’s breadth away, hidden under a cushion of her litter. He slept little and was relieved when he heard Mnesun barking at his recalcitrant slaves to arise and begin the new day’s journey.
No attack came that day, or the next. Hele’a did not approach Harsan again, nor, for that matter, did anyone else in the party.
They were only a Tsan or so from the town of Hauma when it happened.
It was blazing midday, and a haze of dust hung hot and stifling over the land. Mnesun had chosen to press on, however, saying that the arcaded caravanserai at Hauma offered more relief than an awning spread by the side of the baking Sakbe road.
Harsan had stopped to pick at a blister on his foot. A slave bearing one of Mnesun’s tall baskets chanced to pass close to him, and before Harsan could react, twisted so as to dump his burden of red crystal ewers over onto the surprised priest.
As Harsan fell the man plucked a slender dagger from his breechclout and slashed at him. Taken unawares, Harsan could only sprawl backward into the welter of broken glassware. Biting streaks of pain told him that the jagged shards were taking their toll upon his back. The slave, a burly youth with the tattooes of the Mu’ugalavyani lowlands livid upon his cheeks, hurled himself upon Harsan again.
There was no time to dig the ‘Eye’ from his pouch. Harsan moved as he had learned in his rough childhood games with the nimble Pe Choi. Their chitinous arms might be weaker than a man’s, but they had four of them with which to grapple, and they were as graceful as dancers. He feinted to the left, rolled to the right, struck out with his left hand to seize the slave’s dagger wrist, and brought up a knee for defense.
The man was an experienced brawler. The wrist flipped out of reach, the roll was rewarded by a heavy kick to Harsan’s left side, and the upcoming knee was swiftly dodged. Harsan had to keep rolling, and a blazing line of white pain ran down his left shoulder toward his spine. Glass crunched beneath him. The next thrust would be fatal. He fetched up hard against the parapet, on his back, and kicked out with both feet. The slave took the kick glancingly and jumped back out of range. Time had been gained, and Harsan’s muscles cracked as he threw himself to his feet. He felt the sticky wetness of his own blood slide upon the scorching stones as his wounded shoulder scraped against the parapet.
The entire battle had been fought in silence. Other slaves had stopped to watch, but none made any effort to assist either fighter. Now, however, there was hubbub from behind..Harsan dared not take his eyes from the circling needle point of the dagger. The man feinted-and leaped.
There was a thin twanging sound. The slave opened his eyes and mouth wide, and a gout of blood spurted forth as though he shouted words of vivid scarlet. Then he fell, heavily, upon Harsan. A flanged, red-drenched rod of metal protruded from his throat.
Mnesun stepped forward from behind him, a stubby brown crossbow in his hands.
Harsan tried to push the slave aside, but the circle of openmouthed faces shimmered and danced before him. He felt hands grasping, supporting, proding at him, and somehow he was lying down. Then the babble of voices dwindled away and down a long, white corridor of pain.
He woke again to feel the cushions of the Lady Eyil’s litter lumpy and strangely sticky beneath him. Mnesun was there, and Eyil, and others whom he could not see.
“-He was my slave,” the caravan-master was saying, ‘‘but why he attacked the priest-? I never heard him speak a word to Harsan.”
The Lady Eyil said something unintelligible, and Mnesun replied, “Yes, against animals, brigands, runaway slaves-even disgruntled customers. We merchants must know a little of weapons…”
“I shall give him a drug, a pain-killer…” The voice sounded like one of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers. Something bitter touched his lips.
Harsan wanted to speak with Hele’a, tried to look for him, but then the long hallway unrolled before him once more, and pain reverberated along it like the drums of a temple pageant.
He opened his eyes to find himself looking up at a lacework of geometric designs. These resolved themselves into the ribbed and groined arches of a vaulted ceiling. Cords creaked, and a great sweep-fan swung to and fro overhead through the honey-thick, still air of the room. The pain seemed mostly gone, but when he would have risen a hundred daggers ripped at his shoulders, and he fell back gasping.
A pale oval of a face looked down at him: no one he knew. It said, “Be at peace, priest Harsan. Your wounds are not serious and have been tended. I am Nusetl hiZayavu, priest of Thumis of the Fourth Circle, and you lie in our temple at Hauma.” Something cool and damp touched his face. “Your companions are here and may see you presently.”
The long corridor stretched out before him again, however, and he slept.
It was three days before he could move about the little sleeping room he had been given, just off the temple dispensary. The Lady Eyil sat with him daily, bandaged him, exclaimed softly over the network of lurid but superficial slashes upon his shoulders (“like the back of a man who has been flogged,” she said, and Harsan thought to detect a thrill of fascination in her voice), and promised to wait until he was ready to travel again.
Mnesun also came each day when the temple’s sonorous Tunkul — gong had ceased to call the faithful to the midday ceremonies. The grizzled caravan-master was almost obsequiously apologetic. He insisted upon presenting Harsan with a new grey tunic, much finer than the one he had had, and vowed to make a triple offering to Thumis in the Temple of Eternal Knowing upon their safe arrival in Bey Sii. The two Mu’ugalavyani brothers, Bejjeksa, and even the Shen paid him visits as well, each offering some little gift and their commiserations. When Harsan asked after Hele’a, however, he was told that the Ghatoni had pleaded urgent business and departed for Bey Sii alone.
On the last day of his stay in Hauma the physician priest Nusetl hiZayavu sought him out.
“Priest Harsan, you resume your journey tomorrow?”
“I do. My companions have suffered enough delay awaiting me.”
“It would be a shame to their clans if they did not.” The priest bobbed his long, shaven head. “Before your arrival, one came and left this for you with the guard at our gates.” Gravely he extracted a rolled tube of parchment from within the folds of his tunic.
Wondering, Harsan unrolled it and saw two lines of vertical glyphs: the prickly, sword-edged curliques of ancient N’liissa! Each was printed in a careful, amateurish hand, as though by one who knew little of the language. Harsan recognised the text as a couplet from Tyelqu Dyaq’s “Song of the Sky-Singers of Nakome.” It read:
‘One has come, O Lord, to grasp thy hand,
From a foreign land, from the greater dark; more I know not.’
Harsan studied the parchment in bewilderment. Was the glyph for “hand” not a little larger and bolder than the rest? He turned the scroll over. There was no signature, but on the back he saw a stylised sketch of a long-beaked, plume-tailed bird. He puzzled for a moment. Then he knew.
The bird was the literal meaning of the archaic Tsolyani word Kurrune.
He quite startled the physician-priest by demanding to see his bedroll and other possessions at once. Nusetl hiZayavu produced these from a chest near his sleeping mat, and Harsan tore the roll open. Zaren’s farseeing device was there, as were his notes and the Llyani grammar. And, yes, there were the two leaves with his copies of the glyphs upon Kurrune’s map symbol and the waxen hand.
But these last Harsan had left folded. Now they were rolled, like a scroll.