A Fall of Princes Read online

  He grasped Sarevan by the unwounded shoulder and began to shake him. “Wake,” he said over and over. “Wake, damn you.”

  Cursed barbarian. Son of a fatherless man. Pitiful excuse for a sorcerer, he, who swooned like a maid after the merest wizardly skirmish. Would he die, then, and give Asanion a victory to rejoice in?

  Hirel reared back and struck him, then struck again, ringing broadhanded slaps that rocked the head on the lifeless neck.

  It rocked of its own accord. Sarevan’s body twitched, shuddered. Hirel smote it with all his strength.

  The long limbs thrashed. Convulsed. Surely Hirel had killed him.

  Sarevan sat bolt upright, eyes stretched wide, white-rimmed, lips drawn back from white sharp teeth. Before Hirel could move, the Varyani prince had him, and the strength of those hands was terrible.

  But it did not hold. Hirel braced Sarevan before he could fall; he said half in a gasp, “I can’t—my power—I have no—” He drew a sharp breath, and spoke more faintly but also more clearly. “I have no power to help either of us. When I slew the sorceress, I slew it. That is the law which constrains all mages.”

  “You never used wizardry to feed us, that I knew of.”

  “I walked into my enemies’ hands. I let my temper master me. I let it destroy me.”

  There was a silence. Hirel did not fill it.

  Sarevan closed his eyes as if in pain, but he spoke with some semblance of sanity. “What do we have with us?”

  “Nothing,” Hirel answered flatly.

  “Nothing at all?” Sarevan looked about, and his eyes closed again. “I don’t remember this place.”

  For a long moment Hirel could find no words to speak. When they came, they were as faint and foolish as Sarevan’s own. “You cannot remember? But you brought us here!”

  A spasm crossed Sarevan’s face. His hand went to his brow. “My head,” he said. “It’s an anvil, and Vihayel Smith’s own hammer beating down on it. I can’t think. I can hardly—”

  “We were in prison in Shon’ai,” Hirel said, shaping the words with desperate care. The priest’s face was appalling, struggling so hard to remember, and in such pain, that Hirel could not bear to look at it. “You fought a sorcerer, then a sorceress. We left, and we came here, and you fell. You slept.”

  Sarevan touched his bandaged shoulder. His eyes were open, and they had cleared a little; they were no longer quite so bewildered. “This—this I remember. I’ve served you ill, cubling; I think we’re even farther from your city than we were before. This place has a feel of Keruvarion.”

  “Not of the Eastern Isles? Or the lands beyond the desert? Or the uttermost west?”

  “We’re not dead quite yet, cubling,” Sarevan said dryly; “and even with my well of power gone dry, I know my own country. Somewhere among the Lakes of the Moon, I would guess; though which of them this is, I can’t tell you. My power brought us as far eastward as it could before it failed.” His brows knit. “Us . . . The priestess. I couldn’t heal her. I left her—I forgot—”

  Hirel cut across his dismay. “She died before your battle began. She is safe, if death is safety.”

  Sarevan turned onto his good side, drawing up his knees. Sweat sheened his brow and breast and trickled down his back. Sand clung to him, dimming the brightness of his beard; his hair was knotted with it. He would have been pathetic but for the sudden fierceness of his eyes. “She’s free. I gave her that much. The god will grant her healing.”

  “Add a prayer for yourself,” Hirel said sharply. “You are alive to make use of it. Are these Lakes of the Moon a wilderness, or do people dwell here?”

  “There are people, offshoots of the northern tribes. They wander with the beasts they hunt, and breed seneldi, and worship Avaryan in the free places far from the temples.”

  “Very well,” said Hirel. “We look for them. Lie here and be quiet while I search out a way to carry you.”

  “I’m not an invalid. I can walk.”

  Sarevan proved it. He rose. His lips were nearly white. Stepping with care, as if he walked on glass and not on white sand, he approached the water and waded in.

  Hirel was there when the fool’s knees gave way. The water lightened him, and he was clinging grimly to his senses; Hirel dragged him out of the lake and into the shade of a tree, propping him against the bole.

  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; a
nd 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. “Th
e 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.

  Then again at night they had played together, he and she, in the grass under moons and stars. She was insatiable. She was honey-sweet. She was born to the high arts.