The 22 Letters (13 page)

The King's face was expressionless as he answered the Chaldean. “Tell us. It is most kind of you to think of the future of our country.”

The sage stood like a rock, fixed his eyes on the King, and spoke on. “O Great King, I have seen the peoples who live on the shores of the sea. I have seen towns and ports and palaces on mainland and island, but nowhere have I seen such flourishing commerce, such royal magnificence as on this your island of Crete.”

“It is kind of you to say so,” said the King. “But this anyone can see. Tell me what you
foresee
!”

“I am not accustomed to doubt, O King,” continued the sage. “But the stars bid me tell things that I do not wish to believe, and still hesitate to speak of. Is not the Bull the sign of your royal house?”

“That is well known,” said the King.

“And is not the Earth-Mother the object of your worship?”

“Of course, who else?”

“These then are the signs. I see the House of the Bull standing in all its magnificence and glory. Then, lo, I see a portent emerging from the body of the Earth-Mother. I see a blinding light flashing from the dark of the underworld, then darkness that covers the face of the sun at noonday. I see a stirring of the body of Earth so that all things standing on it crumble and fall, from the lowliest hut of the peasant to the loftiest palaces of kings. I see much trepidation upon the waters that the sea shall raise itself like the hills and invade the land: all that dwell by the shore shall be swept into the sea and only the high mountains shall be spared. Then I see stillness and the dropping of a rain of bitter ashes.”

There was silence, and as the King stared darkly at the Chaldean, the sage gazed steadily back, while the councilors did not know where to look.

“When will this happen?” said the King at last.

“Before the sun leaves the House of the Bull,” was the Chaldean's reply.

The King looked away, and let his gaze travel round the faces of his courtiers before returning to the Chaldean. The King spoke one word.

“Unless?”

The Chaldean, too, paused before he spoke: “My Lord, I do not understand.”

“Come, come!” said the King, his voice growing petulant. “You understand as well as I do. This is your trade. There is always an ‘unless' to these prophecies. Such catastrophes can be bought off with sacrifices, with building of temples, with placating of gods we never heard of before, and with paying large sums to priests. What is it worth to you?”

“I seek no profit, Most High Majesty.”

“Then perhaps you are well enough paid already. Are you not sent from the Eastern Empire to put fear into the hearts of my people so that your King may come with ships and armies and meet no resistance?”

“Indeed, Lord, this is nothing to my King.”

“Nothing! My palace will crumble, you said. Is that nothing?” The King now spoke angrily. “You see these stones, these beams and pillars! You prophesy that they will fall into dust, and you say it is nothing! Who sent you here?”

“I came of my own accord, Great Majesty. I seek only to learn the truth about the future, and to tell it to those who will listen. I know only that these things will happen, to you and to other peoples who dwell by the sea. Would that they could be prevented!—but the best you can do is to avoid the most terrible consequences—”

“Enough!” cried King Minos of Crete, anger filling his face with blood. He turned to his councilors. “Remove this mountebank! He amuses me no longer! Colonel of the guards, see to it!”

The Chaldean bowed very gravely and backed toward the door. A councilor rose and signaled to the guards, bowed to the King, and left the room too. Nun realized there was only one thing for him to do, and he rose to his feet also, bowed with no great decorum, and joined the Chaldean. He would rather be with him than alone among that crowd of courtiers, whatever their fate was to be. Then they were being hurried through the antechamber full of staring and tittering courtiers, flanked by soldiers and accompanied by the colonel of the guards.

Only the Chaldean seemed to have kept his composure. “I am sorry that His Majesty should take offense in this manner, but I have done what I had to do. Sir,” he said to the officer, “all I now ask is leave for myself and my young friend to depart from this place—”

“Depart!” expostulated the colonel. “Most unlikely, I assure you. You realize His Majesty received you as a guest and an ambassador. You put on an exhibition of what I can only call extremely bad taste, and you think His Majesty will let you depart! I can tell you, my only doubt is to what category of custody I am supposed to consign you!”

“Must be difficult for you, sir,” Nun could not help saying, though he was feeling sick and indignant inside. “Why not just call us former friends of the King?”

The colonel halted in the middle of the corridor and eyed Nun stonily. “And what am I to do with
you,
young man? His Majesty gave me no instructions about you. Where are you accommodated?”

“With the Young Foreign Visitors,” said Nun. “But the chamberlain said it was a mistake.”

The colonel looked him up and down. “I think His Majesty will wish to perpetuate the mistake,” he snapped. “You'll see your young friend in the arena, Chaldean. With the bull!”

And they were marched off down separate corridors into the depths of the palace.

6

The Return of Zayin

Zayin the soldier in the camp of the Scythians—The secrets of horsemanship—Information of impending attack by the Mitannians

Zayin looked down at the figures milling around on the valley floor, and up at the figures outlined like a frieze against the sky. The sun was climbing toward its noonday height, and his head swam from the heat among the rocks. All he could think was that he had found his fabulous centaurs, the man-horses. Or rather, they had found him, for as he watched he could see signals being exchanged between those above and those below. Then a flight of arrows shattered themselves among the rocks where he and the sergeant were hiding.

“You see, sir! They can shoot, too, these monsters,” gasped the sergeant as they ducked for cover again.

But Zayin's eyes, in the shade of a rock, were now more clearly focused on the figures in the valley. He felt his voice must show his disappointment as he replied: “Not monsters, Sergeant. Just as I said. Horse-men, not man-horses.” For he had seen far below, a party of ordinary two-legged men detach themselves from their four-legged mounts and approach the base of the cliff.

“We might as well go down and meet them, Sergeant,” he said, standing up and raising his hands in surrender. “We're caught—but at least they're human.”

The figures below shouted something in a tongue unknown to him and gestured to them to go down. As he neared them, Zayin could see that they were not very skillful mountaineers. They seemed to wear tubes of cloth on their legs, there was a lot of fur about their hats and clothes, their hair and mustaches were wild, and their skin rather yellow than brown. They glared at him as he reached them on the slope, took away his sword, and gestured to him to keep moving downward. He descended with care, not wanting to arrive at the bottom again in a shower of stones.

Even when he reached the valley floor and approached his mounted captors, he still felt an absurd disappointment that his monsters were not monsters after all. Yet these men who seemed to be more at home on the back of a horse than on the ground were almost as strange. The cart had come before the horse in Zayin's experience. He was used to the idea of yoking an animal, ox or ass, to a heavy vehicle. And peasants sometimes even sat on overloaded asses. But these shaggy men sat on these fierce restless animals with nothing but a sheepskin rug between them, and a simple rein and bit to control them. The ox-drover or the peasant had a goad or stick to make the beast move: these riders seemed to have the greatest difficulty in making their mounts stand still. They tossed and chafed, stamped and scraped with their hooves, backed, sidled, and pranced without ceasing while the riders spoke to them with what sounded like low-pitched oaths. The leader of the horsemen, or so he seemed from the size and fierceness of his mustache and his horse, had been glaring at Zayin with piercing black eyes, and now hurled toward him a string of words that meant nothing. Zayin stood erect and stared back. There was a short conversation between the leader and other warriors, then those that were on foot remounted the horses which the others had been holding for them. And from the rear of the group a mounted man led a spare horse toward Zayin and made emphatic gestures at him. They could only mean one thing. He was to get up on it.

Well, if it was a thing a soldier could do, he would do it. At close quarters the brute seemed a lot bigger. Its back was higher than his shoulder. Zayin looked for a handhold: there seemed to be plenty of hair at the base of its neck, and he had seen the other men grasp this and vault on to their mounts. He made a spring, but the horse shied sideways and he lost his grasp and fell forward on the ground. A roar of laughter went up from the rough warriors. Zayin felt his face turning red, but he picked himself up and approached the horse once more, determined at least to get on top of it. He grasped the mane again with his left hand, and with his other hand the strap which went round the animal's back and belly, and heaved himself up and forward, kicking with his legs. But the animal kicked with its legs too, its hindquarters went up, and he felt himself sliding headfirst over its back and on to the ground again the other side.

The peal of laughter from the audience was even more delighted this time, but it only made Zayin the more determined to succeed. There seemed to be more to getting on a horse than appeared at first sight, but a soldier and a general was not to be discouraged by difficulties.

He walked up to the horse again and spoke to it, more to give himself confidence than in the hope that the animal would understand. Indeed, he felt a little foolish addressing a dumb beast, but was comforted by the thought that the men could understand just as little.

“Listen, beast!” said Zayin firmly. “I am Zayin of Gebal, soldier and leader of soldiers. Mountains have I scaled, deserts and rivers have I crossed, foes I have overcome in battle. Do you think that you, a mere horse, can thwart me?”

The horse rolled its eyes. Zayin crouched, took a run, leaped and twisted, and for a minute felt himself on the horse's back with a leg each side. The next instant Zayin saw the horse's head and neck rearing up in the air like the prow of a ship in a great storm, and he found himself sliding backward down over its tail and he landed heavily on the ground again.

This time he was quite severely shaken, and the horsemen, weak with laughter, were themselves nearly falling from their mounts.

Zayin paused to get his breath back. The horse calmed down a little and began casually to eat grass, while Zayin looked at it with respect. He stood up and approached it, remembering all of a sudden pigeons which his little sister kept, and how she fed them with corn. Feeling in the bag at his belt, he found a forgotten crust of bread.

“Oh, horse,” said Zayin in a respectful tone. “You have humbled Zayin the warrior three times in three different ways. I see that you are a beast of great agility and cunning. But Zayin comes in peace. Will you accept peace from me?” He held out the crust of bread, the horse took it and munched, standing quite still while Zayin sprang gently from the ground and twisted himself on to its back. He was up! He was a centaur. Four horse legs connected him with the ground, which seemed a long way down now, while he surveyed the countryside from a commanding height.

The other horsemen burst into cheers of applause, and Zayin looking round saw that the wounded sergeant had been helped on to another pack horse. Then they were moving.

It was surprisingly comfortable at first, moving at a walk over the soft turf. But then something happened and he felt himself being shaken up and down like a rattle. He was jolted forward, jolted backward, jolted to this side and that. One thought stuck in his mind—only a barbarian would ever think of traveling on top of a horse! But then again the pace changed, as the cavalcade broke from a trot to a canter. Now there seemed to be no reason why he should stay with the horse at all. He clung desperately to its mane as it sprung along, leaving the ground at each stride. But when he looked round at the other riders he saw that they were sitting comfortably and easily, their bodies swaying with the movement of the horses. They seemed to be a part of their horses, rather than passengers sitting on them. They might be detachable, these Horse-Men, but when they were together they nevertheless became another species—Men-Horses. But it did not seem to Zayin at that moment that he himself would ever become one.

As their ride went on and on Zayin became less and less sure that the men part of this partnership
were
ordinary men like him. To watch them was a pleasure: to imitate them was torture. This was a thing that he did not so much think with his head, as feel with the whole of his body. His back was wrenched with the unaccustomed movement, his legs ached with gripping the horse's sides and his arms ached with clutching the mane; and no longer was there any comfort in sitting. His thoughts were jolted and jumbled, and he was hardly capable of wondering where he was going or what was going to happen to him. When some of the party set up wild yells and went galloping ahead of the rest crouched over their horses' necks, he only hoped that he was not expected to do the same himself.

Then he saw ahead of them, at the mouth of the valley, some kind of camp or settlement. He could make out huts, the smoke of cooking fires, many horses hobbled or tethered, men, dogs, and even, as they drew nearer, women and children.

The whole party galloped up to the camp with a flourish, coming to a halt by a group of huts. The other riders leaped from their horses and Zayin did his best to look as if he, too, were not merely falling off. Only then, as the strange tribe gathered round, old men, young men, women, children, and dogs, did it come home to him that he was a helpless captive among an outlandish people, with whom he did not even have a word in common. He felt very weary, hungry, and defeated, but he tried to put on a bold front.

“I am Zayin, commander of the army of Gebal,” he said. “I demand to see your ruler.” But his words meant nothing to them. They just stared and laughed a little. The leader of his captors came up to him and felt his muscles approvingly. Either they're going to eat me or make me their slave, thought Zayin. Yet he hardly cared which.

There was a big cooking pot bubbling over a fire of branches near his captor's hut, but it seemed that Zayin was to feed out of it rather than be put into it. For after the leader and the warriors had been fed, followed by the women and children, and the dogs had been given the bones, Zayin was allowed to scrape it out. There was quite a lot of stew in the bottom, and it tasted good to the hungry Zayin. He wondered whether these people ate horses too.

When he had eaten the women made sighs to him that he was to scour the pot out. For a moment Zayin boiled with indignation. He had never washed a pot in his life. That he should finish his quest for monsters by working as a scullion in a camp of barbarians! It was all so casual. He felt he could have stood imprisonment, chains, even torture—these were the common fortunes of war and defeat. Great kings made captive generals wait on them at table at their ceremonial banquets, loaded with golden chains. But there was no ceremony here: these barbarians, once they were off their horses, were a squat and squalid lot of bandy-legged little men. Their homes were made of skins and canvas on poles, and the only things fine about them were the carpets they sat on. And they did not even pay him the compliment of putting him in chains: they just let him sit around the camp with the stray dogs. What was to stop him running away? He was sure he could outrun any of these short-legged savages. But then he looked at the dogs:
any
fugitive would soon be pulled down by them, and every tent seemed to have a horse hitched to it. The camp was in the middle of the plain at the mouth of the valley. If he ran, there would always be someone to leap on a horse and hunt him down. The only thing that was swifter than one of these horses was another horse. Zayin wished he knew the secret of riding them.

In the days that followed Zayin learned to make himself useful around the camp. He carried fuel for the fires, was taught by the women how to scour out a pot properly with water and ashes and hay, chopped meat for the stews, and churned butter in a leather bag. But life was simple and there was not much domestic work to do, so that more and more he was allowed to give a hand with the real business of the tribe—the care and training of the horses.

He began by cutting and carrying green fodder for the tethered horses. These animals, trained and accustomed to being ridden, were hobbled and allowed to graze for themselves. But sometimes the men rode out into the valley, unarmed and carrying ropes with nooses. They went among the grazing herds, singled out the nearly full-grown foals and brought them back, wild-eyed, shying, and bucking, in tow on the ends of their ropes. They were tethered among some older, quieter horses and fed by hand. This became Zayin's job. Skillful horse breakers began training them, making them circle at the end of a rope, accustoming them to being handled and mounted, teaching them the meaning of the controls of rein and bronze bit. Zayin watched every stage of the training with fascination. The hardest lesson, it seemed, for these wild horses, was learning when to stop. It was in their nature to fix their eyes on the horizon and gallop for it; they needed little urging to go forward. But how, Zayin wondered, could a man, mounted on a horse's back, bring it to a halt? He had been on his brother's ship, and to stop it drifting with wind and tide they had thrown out a stone anchor on a rope—but there was no anchor you could use on a horse. There had to be an understanding between horse and rider about starting and stopping, and some horses never seemed to learn.

There was one horse in particular which Zayin began to notice. It came in with a lot of young horses from the valley, but it seemed to be bigger and older than the others. Perhaps it was one that had been missed at the time when it was young enough to train. While the other youngsters were shy and suspicious of everything—of the rope with which they were led, the halter and the tether, even the bundles of fodder Zayin offered them, which they would sniff at for a long time before touching—this one seemed remarkably quiet during its first introduction to the camp. It stood quietly, fed well, and even circled obediently at the end of a long rein. Then the day came for a horse breaker to mount it.