T
HE TOWN WAS CALLED WASET. IT WAS A GREAT CITY IN THIS country, this narrow line of green between the river and the desert. To Estarion's eye it was little larger than a village, full of small brown people like none he had seen before. They were somewhat like the people of the Nine Cities, but browner, thinner, with long dark eyes in sharp-cut faces. They chattered like birds as he passed, staring, pointing, running after him. And yet the oddity of his breeding that had vexed him all his life, Asanian eyes in the northern face, did not frighten them at all.
They were calling him a god. Gods to them wore the bodies of men and the faces of beasts and birds; he, taller than any man they knew and darker by far, with his eagle's beak and his lion-eyes, was perfectly in keeping with their belief.
Tanit was the queen of these people. There was sorrow in her, for she had lost her husband to the things that ruled the night, but she was not consumed by grief. Estarion, searching in her eyes for the image of a memory, saw a man rather too much older than she for easy companionship, loved more like an uncle than a lover, but she had felt herself well served by the bargain.
Estarion understood royal marriages. He had had nine properly noble wives, and had loved a commoner whom he could not marry. Of all the things that made a man, love was the one he had thought of least since he left his empire behind. Now he could not help but think of it; he had thought of it since first he saw the queen bending over him, with her odd and striking beauty and the clear light of her spirit shining through.
This was a hot country. The women dressed sensibly for the heat: wrappings of thin white cloth about their bodies, baring the breasts more often than not, or if they were young or servants, they went naked but for a cord about the middle. They were easily, casually delighted to be women, and they loved to be admired. Those whose eyes he caught were more likely to smile than to turn away.
Tanit would not meet his glance, unless he startled her into looking up. Yet of them all, only she drew his eye, and she held it for much longer than was proper. She was not the most beautiful and she was far from the most alluring, but when she was there, he could see no other woman.
She saw him settled in her palace, which would have been a middling poor lord's house in his empire, but it was reckoned very great here. Her servants were as adept as he could ask for, and the house was cleanâbright and airy, with painted pillars and a courtyard full of flowers. The food they served him was simple, harsh gritty bread and thin sour beer; they promised a feast later, but this was part of the rite of welcome.
He ate and drank for courtesy, and because he was hungry and thirsty. The servants kept changing. They were all making excuses to wait on him, to look on the god who had come from beyond the horizon.
It had been a long while since he was in a palace, but old habits died hard. The manner, the smile, the habit of charming servants, because servants could make a lord's life either effortlessly easy or unbearably difficult, wrapped about him like an old familiar mantle.
He was offered a bath and a clean kilt; the servants there were women, and young, and frank in their approval. They made him laugh, and be as glad as ever that his blushes never showed.
The queen found him so, clean and decorously kilted, with a pair of maids taking turns combing his new-washed hair. It was thick and it curled exuberantly, even wet; it gave them occasion for much merriment. On a whim he had let them shave his beard with their sharp flaked-stone razors; it had been long years since his cheeks were bare to the world, but in this heat he was glad of it, even as odd and naked as it felt.
He was rubbing his newly smooth chin when she came. Her stride checked; her eyes widened a fraction. That surprised him. He did not share the curse of excessive beauty that beset the boy from Han-Gilen, but it seemed that the canons were different here. She was frankly enthralled; and that made him blush.
She recovered more quickly than he. He was a god, after all, her shrug said. Her words were properly polite. “I trust my lord is well served?”
“Very well, my lady,” he said.
She bowed slightly, regally. She had not the piquant prettiness so common here; her features were more distinctly carved, her face longer, more oval, her nose long and slightly arched. Her skin was like cream intermixed with honey. She was beautiful, and yet she did not know it at all. In her own mind she was gawky, gangling, too long of limb and plain of face to be anything but passable.
He would change that canon. It was fair recompense for her conviction that he was as beautiful as a god. He smiled and bowed slightly where he sat, and said, “Your pardon, lady, that I can't rise to do proper reverence. Your maids are lovely tyrants.”
“I did command them to do their best for you,” she said with her eyes lowered, but her voice had a smile in it.
“Sit, then, lady, and ease my captivity.”
She sat on a stool near the bath, perched on its edge as if poised for flight. As she settled there, a small brown animal came stalking through the door.
It was a cat, or a creature like a cat; but unlike the palace cats of Starios, who had been large enough for a child to ride, this one was hardly longer than Estarion's forearm. Nonetheless it had the same keen intelligence and the same white-hot core of magic. It, unlike the humans here, would meet his eyes, gold to gold; it blinked slowly, deliberately, and said,
“Mao.”
“Mao,
” he replied gravely.
The cat blinked again and crossed the room in three long leaping strides. The third launched it into his lap. He hissed as it landed; its claws were needle-sharp. But he did not recoil, nor would he ever have flung the cat off.
It unhooked its claws from his stinging thigh and sat, and began to bathe itself with great concentration. It did not mind that he ran a finger down from its ears to its tail, finding its fur smooth and pleasingly soft. He found a spot that itched; it began to purr, as loud almost as one of his long-gone ul-cats.
As if that were a signal, a second cat, larger and somewhat darker, appeared from a corner that had been empty an instant before. It coiled about his feet, purring even more loudly than the first.
“The god and goddess welcome you,” Tanit said. She sounded unsurprised and rather pleased.
The maids were less circumspect. “Now we know you're truly to be trusted,” said the impudent one with the flower in her hair.
“I'm honored to be approved by such noble judges,” Estarion said.
“So you should be,” said Tanit. “These are the divine ones, the gods who walk in fur. They graciously accept our service, and bless us with their presence.”
“Yes,” Estarion said. “I see the fire of heaven in them. They're powers in your world.”
“They are gods,” she said.
He inclined his head and slanted a smile that caught her before she was aware. She smiled back. It was a wonderful smile, brightly wicked, though all too swiftly suppressed.
It was not time yet to touch her, but he could say, “Beautiful one, you should never hide your splendor. It well becomes a queen.”
Her lips set in a thin line. “There is no need to flatter me, my lord.”
“I tell you the truth,” he said.
She rose abruptly. “Come, my lord. The feast is waiting.”
His hair was combed but not plaited. He bound it out of his face with a bit of golden cord, and let the rest be. She was already at the door. He followed her with an escort of cats: both of the gods-in-fur of this place had elected to follow him.
It was good to be favored by cats again. He would like to be favored by the queen; but that, the gods willing, would come.
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The court of Waset was waiting for him in a hall of painted pillars, seated at tables banked with flowers. The mingled scents of flowers and unguents and humanity were almost overpowering. He did his best to breathe shallowly as he walked down the length of the hall, beside and a little behind the queen.
The courtiers were not as open in their admiration as the children of the city, but they were wide-eyed enough. He saw the marks of grief on many of them, scars of loss and remnants of shadow. As fierce as the sun of this world was, it still had to give way to night; and in the night came the terror.
But it was daylight still, and they gathered in a guarded city. They dined on roast ox and fresh-baked bread and fruits of the earth, flavors both familiar and unfamiliar, and one great joy of sweetness. This world like his own had honey, and that was very well indeed.
They did not have wine; he regretted that. Their beer was a taste he
had no great yearning to acquire. But he endured it. He had eaten and drunk worse in his day, and lived to tell of it.
He was not asked to entertain this court. That was for the musicians and the dancers, the singers with the voices like mating cats, and last of all, as the shadows lengthened, the small wizened man in the white kilt, whose voice was larger than all the rest of him put together.
He told the tale of the darkness. “It began to come upon us in the days of our late king, may he live for everlasting. There had always been walkers in the night, powers that had no love for the day, but this was a new thing, a terrible thing. It came out of the lands of the dead, from the horizons to the west, running with jackals in the night and vanishing with the coming of the day.
“For a long while no one knew it for what it was. The night was as dark as ever, and there are lions, crocodiles, nightwalkers and things that snatch children from their mothers' arms as they sleep. But this was stronger, darker, hungrier. It crept through villages and stole all the men and women who were young and strong, and slaughtered the weak and the children. Men would wake to find their gardens stripped bare or their herds gone, and the herdsmen gutted and cast before the doors of their houses.
“When our king had been on his throne for two hands of years, the night that had been perilous became truly terrible. Until then the dark things had never come close to the city; they skulked along the edges and raided the border villages, but round about our walls, men were safe. In that year, the dark things raided closer, and took more men and women, and in their wake left a hideous slaughter.
“Word came in from Gebtu, from Ta-senet, from Ombosâeven from the chieftains of the south. They were all beset. It was everywhere, that horror. Traders were few on the river; they no longer came from far away. Every man was driven into his own town or city. Each kingdom had no choice but to protect its own. Trade, embassies, even wars and quarrelsâall were ended. The world had closed in upon itself, and we were shut within our own boundaries like cattle within the fences of a field.
“Here in Waset, as everywhere, people had begun to take refuge in the city, and little by little the villages emptied of their weak and their fearful. The brave and the obstinate remained, and fools who swore that there was nothing walking the night. But none of them walked or sailed far, not any longer.
“In that tenth year of the king's reign, the river's flood that gives us the rich black earth for the tilling, was the lowest that it had been in the memory of the oldest of the river-god's priests. It barely rose above its banks, barely dampened the edges of the fields. The gods' curse was on us, and for all that we did to propitiate them, they only sent us a plague on the cattle and an army of walkers in the night.
“The enemy had no face. It was shadow incarnate, darkness visible. It had no name to give it substance; it was living nothingness. But in that void were claws, and teeth to rend both flesh and souls.
“A priest went out one night. He was a very holy man, consecrated to our lord the sun, and the light of the god was upon him. He thought to speak with this thing if he might, to discover what it was, and perhaps to bless it and invoke the grace of the god upon it, and either overcome or destroy it.
“They found him in the morning with no drop of blood in his body, and his head sundered from it and laid in his lap as he sat against the wall of the city. His eyes had been taken away, made as if they had never been. To this day, men who saw it wake screaming from their sleep.”
There was a silence. Tears ran down the queen's face, tracking through the paint which she wore like a warrior's armor. Estarion did not mean to trespass, but her pain was so strong, her memory so distinct, that he saw what she saw: not the priest who had died before she came to be the king's bride, but the king himself, drained of blood as the priest had been, but not only his head was severed and his eyes unmade. Each separate limb was torn from the rest. They had found every part of him except one, and that seemed a brutal mockery: his manly organ was lost, nor was it ever found.
All of those who went out with him were gone, save the men who
had been nearest him. They had heard nothing, seen nothing in the suffocating darkness, until it was gone and the dawn had come. They were alone, with their king strewn at their feet.
“No one knows what this is,” the queen said at length, “or what it wants of us or of the world. The dark godsâthey want blood and souls. Their needs are simple, their rites known, though spoken of in whispers. This seems to want what the dark gods want, but all efforts to propitiate it have only made the night more terrible. Sometimes it lets a fool or a wanderer live, or satisfies itself with the stripping of a field or the running of a herd. It has no pattern to it, no weaving of earthly sense.”