Cyrion, page 18
“I regret,” Cyrion said, “I cannot.”
Ysemid stared. Then he swore, with disbelieving pleasure. “It is the truth then. This sickness of the vision—you have it now.”
“I have it now.”
“And how long will the affliction last?”
“An hour, perhaps a little longer.”
“You may die blind, then.”
“I hardly think it matters. And if you ever research the disease, you will learn that with the headache one sometimes wishes to be dead. You will be doing me a service.”
“There is another service,” Ysemid said. If Cyrion had been able to see him, he would have perceived that the prince shone now with a radiant joy. The sadistic, rather predictable game that had burgeoned in his mind was irresistible to him. “I have been told of your prowess as a swordsman. Over and over, told of it. And the scout reported to me your words as you were brought into the camp. What were they? It may prove difficult to fight a man I cannot see.”
Eventually Cyrion said tonelessly, “By the codes of your own people, whatever else you do to me, you would spare me that.”
“My people, cat-lynx-jackal. Mine. Not yours. And my father, not your father. And my wish, not your wish.” Ysemid straightened. “I shall tell them you boasted to me that, unbound and armed, you could slay me. I shall tell them I must accept such a challenge. My valor is in question, and I must bring you to humiliation before you are slain in the proper manner. They will agree, and then witness how I out-fight you, while you stumble up and down—like one blind.”
“Any man standing in that ring is close enough to see, once it begins, I cannot fight for that very reason.”
“Then I will send them farther off. I shall say you expect treachery. That you must be shown I can beat you unaided.”
Quickly, Cyrion said, “And Karuil-Ysem also. Send him back with the others.”
Ysemid frowned. He studied Cyrion’s vacant face, its hateful glamour that even now was like a mask, the searching, hopeless eyes.
“Why? What have you fathomed? There is some trick you think you may play—” Ysemid nodded. “No. The old man shall come forward and watch. But only he. You will find, he will not try to help you. Or did you know that, and fear something else? You have only Ysemid to fear. Poor sick-eyes swordsman.”
Ysemid turned and went to the human ring, shouting out at it. Cyrion must have heard some of the words, and the uncertain response, shortly swelling to assent. Then there were sounds, if not the sight, of the ring widening, drawing away. When the sounds stopped, one might judge the distance that had been added. If any in the surrounding ring had yearned to come to the rescue of a man in the circle’s center, it was doubtful they would reach him in time. But who would want such a thing? Only Karuil had dismounted and moved nearer, leaning on the shoulder of a young boy. Karuil who was a demon.
A knife cut through ropes, and Cyrion, losing their support, staggered forward. With a congratulatory curse, Ysemid steadied him, then pushed him away again. Something was insinuated into Cyrion’s right hand. Familiar—a cross-hilted western sword.
As Cyrion raised it, awkwardly for perhaps the first time in its years with him, Ysemid came at him. The advance was leisurely, dancing, almost cloddish with its parody. The noise the sand made under this would give a clue even to one blinded—Cyrion swerved. His arm flung up and retracted, his sword glancing by under the other, clumsily. Like a drunkard, he finished the move by lunging aside. He fumbled at the darkening torch-fretted air with his free hand, trying to balance himself.
And now Ysemid entered swiftly. The sand responded with only the barest hiss at the upsurge. Cyrion heeded it, and spun away, almost falling. Ysemid’s playful sword was cheated of him, by an inch. As Cyrion continued to give ground, uncertainly twisting his head to catch any sound from the sand which was his only friend, Ysemid began to stamp and kick about in it, silently laughing at Cyrion’s bewildered dismay.
Suddenly, Cyrion came lurching after him. Ysemid sidestepped neatly, swirling his sword, then, enraged at such temerity, swung back to cut at Cyrion’s left side. The blow should have hit home. Only Cyrion’s present ungracefulness saved him, sending him into a sprawl before the blade reached him. Trying to rise, he almost put his hand on the curved steel, which would have sliced it to the bone. Some fluke saved him also from this, a shift of sand giving way, throwing him on his elbow, as the nomad’s sword glided upward. The laugh was not quite silent now.
Finding himself with space to rise, seeming to mistrust it, Cyrion dove to his feet. Ysemid gazed at him, at the blond face now wide open and maddened, trying to read everything from the night which useless eyes would deny him. Ysemid’s ecstasy was evident to any who could see. Then he lashed forward, deliberately missing the devastated figure before him, whirling the curved sword into a wheel of torchlight and metallic singing. Ludicrously, without cause, Cyrion ducked. Something in Ysemid overbrimmed. With a cry of pure orgasmic evil, Karuil’s heir threw himself forward, knocking Cyrion once more to the sand. Even the cat will eventually sink its teeth in the spine of the mouse.
Kneeling over him, Ysemid had Cyrion by the hair, a left-handed grip, while the right hand, shortening its grasp on the blade, gathered itself for the initial wound of the death sentence: Castration.
Somewhere in the fume of sand between the two men, there lit two coals of icy fire, two stars—the torchglare on two brilliant eyes. And then a blade almost as bright came up with a wave of sand. A sword of fire, and it burned.
Ysemid found he had not completed the emasculating stroke. Stupidly perplexed, he peered down to seek the reason for failure. And saw his own hand, severed just above the wrist and lying, bleeding and lost, under the edge of Cyrion’s sword.
Before the scream could find its way through Ysemid’s face, a ringed fist hammered upward into his jaw. Ysemid’s teeth met in his tongue like an agonizing vise. He slumped over into a roaring tawny darkness.
The next pain began far away, the awful pain in his ear-lobe—
Cyrion, having taken Ysemid’s severed hand in his own, had clamped its fingers, tong-like, on the sapphire and ripped the amulet free. With a wicked twist, utilizing the gold wires that had formerly held the jewel in Ysemid’s ear, Cyrion bound it to the disinherited fingers. The operation had needed seconds. Now, gaining his feet without effort, Cyrion flung the bloody hand and its gem into the sand before Karuil-Ysem. Who bowed towards it, predatory, and next quite motionless.
From all sides the men of the People were running forward. Their wailing and the grin of their blades filled the night.
Cyrion, his voice dry and eroded, shouted at Karuil.
“Plucked from him by his own hand, and given you by his own hand. Pick it up, damn you, and use it.”
But it was the boy on whom Karuil had leaned who crouched and caught up the hand and its prize. As the boy straightened, gold snaked under his hood. Face unpainted, and in purloined or illusory male attire, the demoness raised the piece of carcass to her lips, then paused.
“You are not blind then,” she remarked to Cyrion.
“No. I shall be dead, however, in a few more moments.”
“And we must save you by revealing the truth here and now?”
Cyrion shrugged. His eyes were clear and still. “Honor among slaves. If you would be so kind.”
“For your beauty, then,” she said. And beside her, Karuil-Ysem opened his mouth in a strangely terrifying yawn.
The first of the nomads were a handful of paces away when they checked. Through the yelling and the howl for retribution a high thin chord seemed to vibrate, and then all sound died. They stood in the attitude of those who grasped the night ways of the earth, respected and abhorred them. There was no fear, only the revulsion of total knowledge.
Karuil-Ysem, the Father of his People, had begun to split, as the robe had split from him under Cyrion’s searching knife. Now skin and sinew parted, and the cloth of the garment fell intact from the bisecting cage of bones beneath. There was no bleeding. Within the dividing bag of the corpse there came a battling motion, a moan of anguish, and then the chrysalis of death was discarded absolutely. A naked and well-made man, physically even younger than Cyrion, bowed to the ground, holding his own body in his arms, his hair black as the sky now was, and showering about him.
Cyrion spoke briefly to the People of Karuil-Ysem, as the demoness embraced her brother, and clutched the bloody hand of the tyrant between them both, where both could see the spark of the vanquished jewel, and scent the warm gore. The story Cyrion told now was credited, and when he had finished, which was swiftly, the men were like statues about him, waiting, avoiding the demons with eyes and speech, prepared to listen only to the inevitable concluding words.
But Cyrion had waited also, for the stirring behind him in the sand, the tiny crying notes which informed them that Ysemid regained his senses.
“He bound demons,” Cyrion said. “We know their pleasure. Perhaps a more fitting death than the lawful sentence, for this patricide. Leave him to them.”
There was no given answer. Except the gradual turning away, even of Ysemid’s court, those who had loved him, in tens and in scores, and then as if the whole night turned its back to depart, bearing the torches with it. The king’s body they abandoned. There had been no choice. It had become one with the dust.
Cyrion heard the muttering of the demons over the hand and the gem and the honey to come. He too had turned. From the sand he drew the robe of Karuil-Ysem, and brushed from it, with quiet, unhurried strokes, the odorless sterile powder that had been a man.
Presently Cyrion put on the robe, and drew it closed under the belt of red leather in which his sword was now sheathed. He did not seem to pay attention, as he did this, to the weeping groans and entreaties, the shrilling upsoaring pipe of terror, nor to the climaxing shrieks of the condemned.
Under the ruthless cold of the gathering stars, Cyrion walked away.
He was a mile off before the shrieking ceased to be audible. That the shrieks were done did not, in any case, mean death had yet arrived.
* * *
• • •
Later, the infant moon arose, and seemed to embroider, over and over in the sand, the symbols of Karuil-Ysem’s last message. Cyrion’s clear-visioned eyes and brain, which no ailment of any sort had ever affected, yet followed these moon-mirages, sought them, lingered on them. Karuil had written thus:
This comes to you by the hand of another people than mine, or yours, yet the man is my messenger. If you recall me, attend. I am threatened. There are troubles in me which are not the troubles of age. I have fallen prey to a hellish phantom which destroys my sight for an hour at a time, and ends in an enduring and grievous pain, covering half the head. My disciplines remain, and I evince no sign of this disease, but I think that one works on me, through a doll or some other witchcraft, to strike me with a bane unknown to me, and for which there is no cause, and no cure, unless you find one and bring it me. It is a fact, I suspect who is my enemy. He has given me to wonder by his sudden concern for my health, and, if it is true he practices on me, by his own randomness of skill, for it seems he looks for my ills, but does not know what form they should take.
I have a plan to be certain, and to bring him out.
You will, if you remember me, remember the sapphire amulet I had always about me beneath the breast of my robe, which could exert such sway over demons and similar spirits. You knew of this talisman, you and one other, a favorite wife who died, but who, I think now, passed on the knowledge. I mean purposely to lose this gem, and leave it where he may come on it, for only he is educated in how it may be used to set demons against me. Only he. I doubt if he will display it while I live, but should he find some way to kill or bind me, then he may flaunt it, a secret jest. So you will know.
I must inform you that if it is he who so hates me, then in my bitterness I will resign my life to him, and to God. Yet if it is to be so, and you ever in your soul, though not in blood, my son—AVENGE ME.
7th Interlogue
“A ghoulish account,” said Roilant, at last.
“But an account of justice.”
“You, of course, will avow it is true.”
“I do not know if it is true.”
“And what of Cyrion’s relationship to the nomads?”
“The story does not explain this. Only that the guesswork of the wicked son was wrong.”
“Quite.”
Roilant rose moodily to his feet. The elderly beggar, father of Esur, remained seated, smiling down at the two gold coins which allegedly he could not see. The whiskery soldier had again ceased to snore, having re-started during the most suspenseful part of the chronicle. Some angle of his position gave the impression that his legs were much longer than they were. Probably this was something he unconsciously arranged even when intoxicated. Such were the ways of mankind, always trying to deceive others, or themselves.
Roilant caught himself, with exasperation, slipping into vacuous philosophy, a sure sign his opinion of life was at its very lowest.
Leaving a superfluous coin for the beggar (Roilant’s fortune would soon be lost to him in any case; why grudge a coin?), the plump young man went to the curtain. Finding the innkeeper supervising the polishing of the Qirri statue by a grumbling slave, Roilant settled his account.
“If Cyrion comes by tomorrow,” said Roilant, “you may tell him to go hang.”
“I doubt if I would tell him, or if he would oblige,” said the innkeeper, pocketing the money with a bow.
Roilant walked up the three steps, once more tripping on them, though less dramatically than before, and out of the door.
The street lay drowsing in the midst of the afternoon. From various points in the biscuity walls, awnings cast their shadow, and not a fringe or tassel moved. Out of a narrow latticed window across the way, came a sad melody on an eastern lyre, and from a nearby garden, the scream of a peacock. A march of buildings rose in the distance to the flaxen fortress of Heruzala, where Malban’s banners, plum and gold, hung lifeless as dead flowers against the cloudless sky. Not a breeze anywhere, and, all that was to be expected, the hot sunset wind blowing off the desert, hours from now. While in Cassireia, fragrant coolness might be wafting inland from the sea, spinning a web about the wooded hills. . . .
Roilant stood tranced a moment, irresistibly picturing the scene he had approached only three times in his life, but which had taken on for him, in the past weeks, such ominous importance. The sweep of the orchard trees, the dark plumes of cypress rising between. Presently the ruined outer wall of a Remusan fort—all that remained, save the renovated bathhouse farther on. Beyond the wall, the green slope, and the mansion. It was built in the eastern manner, and one met, as the leaves of the gate parted, the painted outer courtyard, stemmed by slender pillars, and the strip of water set to reflect them and the ten ancient palm trees, fronds spraying from gigantic bases so like the scaled shells of pineapples. And then, beyond again, in the third fashion of this land of mingled peoples past and present, the four-sided tower, the Westerner’s stone defense, dominating the edge of the cliff. And behind this, the sea.
But the cliff was dangerous—Valia had learned that. And the tower crumbled. And tiles fell like rain from the walls of the house, and the water was stagnant—
“Did you enjoy the wine?”
Roilant started, his heart flexing. A tall slim figure had appeared from the alleyway ahead, and now leaned on a house front across the street.
“Wine—?”
“The wine in the black flask I bought for you. Do you tell me that the brat ran off with the fee after all? It seems the King’s soldiers no longer have any knack for frightening small children.”
Roilant had recovered, and was registering the blond soldier of earlier acquaintance, Foy, who had pretended so, superlatively to drunkenness.
“You sent the wine? Yes, I received it. My thanks,” said Roilant cautiously.
Foy smiled.
“We nabbed the odorous rabble-rouser in the act, and I took him in, with a couple of others to help me, for he wriggled like an eel. I felt I owed you something. Whiskers was useless in the fray, naturally, and is now sleeping off his drink. Officially, he questions witnesses.”
“And are you,” said Roilant, “a soldier?”
“I? What else?”
“Then that,” said Roilant, “is my last hope gone. I thought the wine came from Cyrion, possibly.” Roilant nodded acceptance to the unkind spirit which, he felt, dogged him. “Your friend, by the way, is asleep in the Honey Garden.”
“Is he now?” Foy was tickled. “Went back for more, did he, warlike fellow? When I left Whiskers he was prostrate under the sweet-seller’s awning on Sweet Street. And he confided a dread secret before he swooned.” Foy grinned. “The despicable barber had shorn half his moustache. Whiskers, poor mouse, has no choice but to let go the other half to match. Then he terrorizes the barber into sticking both halves back on with hoofglue. I saw the proof with my own marveling eyes, since Whiskers tore the thing off and waved it about to affright the sweet-seller and all his tribe.”
Roilant demonstrated politic astonishment. He did not, he was afraid, care one way or another for the fate of Whisker’s facial hair, whether lopped, glued back, ripped off or glued on again. Roilant thanked Foy once more for the wine, and walked away up the street.
