A Fall of Princes (8 page)

Wet though he was, he trembled not with cold but with
exhaustion. “Power,” he gasped. “Power’s price is deadly high.”

o0o

He slept thereafter, or slid into unconsciousness. Hirel
looked at him and thought of despair. He would not be walking while this day
lasted. Nor could Hirel carry him alone. He was too awkward a burden.

Hirel rose and wandered beside the water. Saplings or long
branches; something to bind them with—he could sacrifice his trousers if he
must.

He stopped short. He was going to make himself a beast of
burden. And he had not even thought of it before he had the first straight
weatherworn bough, testing its soundness, snapping the twigs that bristled from
it.

He was becoming what he seemed. Commoner, servant. Degrading
himself for the sake of a greater rival than any of his brothers, the son of
the man who had sworn to bring east and west together under his rule: to cast
down Asanion and consecrate all the world to his burning god.

“No,” he said aloud in the green silence. It was power, of a
sort. Revenge of properly royal subtlety. Debt for debt and life for life. A
weapon in his hands that hitherto had had none.

In the end he found half a dozen branches that would do. He
dragged them back to the place where Sarevan lay, where the shadow was
lengthening from noon, and took off his trousers. The sand was warm under him
as he sat and began to make a litter.

o0o

Sarevan murmured and twitched. When Hirel touched him he
was fire-hot, yet sodden as if he had bathed in the lake.

He would not swallow the water Hirel brought him. As Hirel
dragged and lifted and prodded him onto the makeshift litter, he gasped and
cried out and tried feebly to resist.

Girded with the last ragged strips of his clothing, bare of
aught else, Hirel fitted himself between the bars of the travois and set out
along the lake’s shore. Undergrowth hindered him; hollows opened before him;
fallen trees barred his way.

Slowly but inexorably the earth bent him away from the
water, toward the trackless wilderness. The lashings of the litter wavered and
threatened to work free; the ferns and the leaved branches with which he had
cushioned it thinned and scattered. His feet bruised, his hands blistered and
bled. Thirst rose up to haunt him. Grimly he pressed on.

The land grew rough and stony. Hirel’s breath caught in a
sob. He was too small. He was too weak. He could not repay this debt which
Sarevan had laid on him.

No more could he leave the madman to die. Not now, after so
much pain.

He shifted the bars in his throbbing hands. Sarevan babbled
delirious, sometimes in words Hirel knew, more often in tongues he had never
heard.

The slope steepened, leveled for a bit, dipped and began to
rise again. Hirel’s heart was like to burst in his breast. His sight narrowed
to a lone bright circle directly before him, dimming as the sun sank.

o0o

The litter caught. Hirel tugged. It held. Too weary even
to curse, he turned.

Wild green eyes met his glare, and a great grey body
weighted the foot of the travois. “Ulan,” Hirel whispered in relief too deep
even for wonder. “Ulan!”

The cat growled softly, nosing Sarevan, touching his brow
with the tip of a broad pink tongue. The growl deepened. Ulan’s jaws opened,
closed with utmost gentleness about Sarevan’s wrist and tugged.

Hirel cried out. “No!” Ulan paused, as if he could
understand. “No, Ulan. He is ill. You must not.”

Ulan crouched like a pup in a tug-of-war, and backed slowly.
Sarevan’s body slid from litter to leafmold.

When Hirel would have leaped, the slash of Ulan’s claws
drove him scrambling back. The ul-cat shifted, twisted; and Sarevan lay on the
long grey back, face down, and the cat’s glance was a command.

Cautiously Hirel came to his side and set a steadying hand
on his burden. They began to walk.

They were gods. Almost Hirel could believe that there were
gods.

o0o

Or demons. Ulan led Hirel round a deep cleft in the earth,
dark already with night, and down a long hill.

As the land leveled, a hound bayed perilously close. Hirel
froze. His scars throbbed. A shriek welled from the heart of him.

From a deep covert burst a beast of hell: black hide, white
fangs, red maw gaping wide. Hirel’s scream died behind his teeth.

Ulan raised his head and roared. The hound stopped as if
struck. Its pack, bursting from the thicket, tangled in confusion.

Hunters scattered them, bright barbaric creatures aclash
with copper, resplendent in paint and feathers and embroidered leather. They
were as dark as Sarevan, with here and there a tinge of brown or bronze; their
hair was braided about their heads and down their backs, and their beards were
braided on their chests. Copper gleamed on saddles, on bridles, on the horns of
the stallions; one black giant on a black charger blazed with plates and chains
and circlets of gold.

They drew in in a running circle, slowing, stilling, staring
at the cat and the two princes. Hirel raised his chin and then his voice, sharp
and clear above the blowing of hard-ridden seneldi. “Draw back, I say. Draw
back! Would you slay your prince?”

The riders murmured. The gold-laden chieftain looked long at
the man on the ul-cat’s back.

Suddenly he sprang down. He seized Sarevan’s dangling hand,
turning it, baring the
Kasar
. Breaths
caught all about him. The giant spoke at some length and with no little
intensity; his followers listened, eyes flicking from him to Sarevan.

The chieftain faced Hirel. “We are friends,” he said in
trader’s argot rough with the burr of the tribes. “We follow Avaryan. He sent
us to find you.”

Hirel wavered, tensed against treachery. The giant’s eyes
were steady.

Hirel shrugged lightly. Why not, amid all the rest? Why not
a tribe of savages running errands for a god?

The chieftain raised Sarevan as if the prince had been a
child, and mounted again in a graceful leap, a feat that loosened Hirel’s jaw.
But when a grinning savage swung his stallion toward Hirel, hand outstretched,
Hirel vaulted onto Ulan’s back. The tribesman laughed and veered away.

o0o

They were savages indeed, these folk who called themselves
Zhil’ari, the People of the White Stallion. Their tents stood in a scattered
circle near a jewel of a lake, and their bold bare-breasted women sang as the
hunters returned, a fierce high song that shifted to a wail like the crying of
wolves. Hounds and children joined in it, and the deeper voices of the men who
had stayed behind, and above it all the belling of stallions.

They took Sarevan away. When Hirel moved to follow, no path
opened for him, only a wall of alien faces limned in firelight. Even the
children stood as tall as he, or taller. Giant as he had thought Sarevan, here
the Varyani prince would be the merest stripling.

Again Hirel raised his chin and his voice. “Let me pass.”

His tone was clear, if not the words. White teeth gleamed.
Someone laughed as one laughs at the cleverness of a child or an animal. Hirel
walked forward.

They yielded willingly enough, though some ventured to
touch, a brushing of fingers over Hirel’s hair and down his back.

His skin quivered, but he did not falter. He thought of
Sarevan in Shon’ai, and stood a little straighter for it, and turned where he
had last seen the priest.

The chieftain’s stallion grazed before a tent like all the
others, a dome of painted hides. Hirel lifted the flap and stepped as if from
world to world.

o0o

He stood in darkness after the glow of firelight. The air
was full of chanting, thick with some sweet potent smoke. It dizzied him, and
yet it cleared his brain.

Little by little his eyes focused. He saw the stream of fire
that was Sarevan’s hair, and the chieftain in his gold and his finery, and Ulan
a shadow by the wall; and last of all a woman.

She was old, her breasts dry and slack, her swollen belly
propped on stick-thin legs. It was she who chanted in a startling, sweet voice;
she who fed the fist-small brazier that begot the smoke and the feeble glimmer
of light. She did not pause or turn for Hirel’s entering, though the chieftain
glanced at him.

Hirel moved slowly toward the bed. In this little time
someone had combed out that wild fiery mane and smoothed the tangled beard and
taken off the makeshift bandage. Had Sarevan looked so skull-ghastly under the
sky?

Hirel bent close. The wound of the arrow was closing, a raw
red scar on the dusky shoulder. The fever—

“He cools,” said the chieftain. “The god has spoken. Our
lord is not to die.”

“I do not understand this sorcery. How he could die from
it.”

“It is sorcery. It is for sorcerers to understand.”

Hirel opened his mouth to upbraid the man’s insolence, then
closed it again. The smoke, the keening chant, grated on his senses. He fled
them for the clean quiet night.

o0o

Hirel sat by the water and tried not to be ill. Brightmoon
fled westward, pursued by the great pale orb of Greatmoon, and the light they
shed together was coolly brilliant.

Bright enough to read by, Hirel’s tutor would have said.
Young girls as tall as tall men, trying to be solemn, had brought him food,
drink, salve for his blistered hands, and with ill-suppressed giggles, a
garment.

His gorge rose at the sight and scent of the meat, the
fruit, the strong salty cheese; but his stomach cried out for mercy. Slowly at
first, then with ravenous hunger, he emptied the plates and bowls.

The cup was full of pale liquid; he tasted it and gagged on
its potency, and settled on water from the lake. As the salve worked its
cooling magic on his palms, he deciphered the long strip of leather tanned as
supple as cloth, wrapping it around his middle. He had not even remembered his
nakedness until he was clad, and then he blushed scarlet, here where no one
could see.

A sound brought him about. Another long lithe maiden, but
this one’s eyes were downcast, her gift aglow on her lifted palms. “Take,” she
said in halting tradespeech. “Take, see.”

It was gold, a crescent of the beaten metal, and from its
center hung a claw of golden wire clasping a great teardrop of amber, frosted
under the moons. Hirel took the necklet, held it up.

The girl smiled. Her finger touched the pendant and set it
swinging, and brushed the lid that shielded his amber eye. “Take,” she said,
and more in her own tongue, a swift bright stream.

When he hesitated, she lifted the jewel lightly from his
hands and leaned forward. Her breasts swayed close; gold clasped his neck,
rested cool on his chest.

She was lovely, even with her paint and her braids, her
height and her slimness and her tarry skin. Her ornaments were gold and amber.
Perhaps she was a princess.

Hirel had thought that he could only sit and stare and drown
in nightmare. But she smiled. He smiled in return, shakily.

She touched his hair. He touched one of her gold-woven
plaits, and her cheek that was richest velvet, and her sweet young breast. She
murmured a word. He drew her down to the grass.

o0o

“I must go,” Sarevan said. Two days in deepest dream, with
the shaman chanting and raising her smokes over him, and no sooner had he
walked than he tried to leap up. “I must go. I must speak to my father.”

Weak as he was, even Hirel could hold him down with one
hand. But he would not surrender. “We must ride to Endros. The storm is coming.
I must be with my father before it breaks.”

“If you ride now, it is you who will break.” The wisewoman
cradled his head and held a cup to his lips. “Drink.”

Sarevan drank with perfect obedience, hideous though the
concoction was, herbs and honey boiled in mares’ milk. He hardly even choked on
it. But as soon as the last of it was gone, he began again. “The day I’m too
feeble to sit a senel, that day you can lay me on my pyre. Now let me up; I
have bargains to strike with the one who rules here.”

“Rise, and you strike bargains with none but death.”

“Will you deny a dreamer his dream?”

The wisewoman’s lips tightened. Hirel knew that look. His
physicians had always had it when he was young and sickly, when he would not he
abed like a mindless receptacle for their potions.

Driven by the memory, he slipped out of the tent. Even from
outside it he heard her voice raised in expostulation.

Azhuran the chieftain sat in his open tent hearing a
dispute, while his wives made him hideous with scarlet paint. When he saw Hirel
he rose, scattering wives and warriors.

His great arms swept Hirel from his feet. “Little stallion!”
he roared. “Little goldenhead, you like my daughter, eh? Woman, be gracious,
fetch a cup for Zhiani’s man.”

Between training and plain shock, Hirel took the massive
golden cup. It reeked of mares’ milk.

He steeled himself to sip, set the thing aside with as much
grace as he could muster, faced Azhuran. Seated on the ground, the giant was
still taller than he.

He knew his cheeks were scarlet. Surely, though he dared not
look down to be certain, he was blushing from crown to kilt.

“She likes you,” declared Azhuran, loud enough for the whole
tribe to hear. “You have arts, she says. You’re a lion. A bull. A stallion. A
beardless, braidless, girl-voiced lad—miraculous! Are they all like you in your
country?”

That Hirel did not die then, he ascribed to the malice of
the nonexistent gods. The Zhil’ari were all gaping, and the women were leaning
forward with hungry eyes.

Traitorous Zhiani was not among them. Serpent-supple,
serpent-tongued Zhiani. She had dallied nightlong by the lake, and left him at
sunrise with many kisses, only to bring back half a dozen maids nearly as
lovely as herself, who fed him and adorned him and made much of him.