Samples from books that we have published under the Eartherean Press imprint.
This is another in a series from the second book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: The Divine Queen.
© 1982 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
‘The Wandering Outlaw of His Own Dark Mind’
FOR MANY PASSES after Ennius Kandi had departed Tarendahardil, the Gerso’s servant abode alone in his master’s chambers. At the times for the five meals, he would descend below to the eating halls of the Palace slaves. But otherwise he only paced before the deep blue hangings that concealed his master’s few belongings. Deep concerns wrote themselves upon his simple features as he paced. Finally, upon the second waking of the thirteenth pass, he put upon his head a cap such as sailors wore, and went out from the Palace.
Kuln-Holn went down from the Citadel into the city. He walked the wide Way of Kings, beneath the monumental statues, among slaves and merchants and carters and the litters of the highborn. When he reached the steps leading up to the Brown Temple of Goddess he came to a stop and leaned against a pedestal. Against the sky the aged building loomed, its high beacon terrible with the coruscation of Goddess.
‘How goes it with you, voyager?’
Before him on the first step above the level of the street, a little, frail, wrinkled old woman stood, and regarded him from out of the deep wells of her eyes.
‘Oh, lady, call me not by that name,’ Kuln-Holn moaned. Troubled were his brow and lips.
She smiled, and drew back the mantle overshading her face. Goddess caught up the fine sparse hairs upon her sharply rounded skull, and danced along the gleams. ‘Why do you not enter, then? Or is it that you wait for one to come down from sacrifices to lead you again – your master, perhaps?’ But Kuln-Holn shook his head warily. Now he wished he had not come hither.
‘Tell me then,’ she spoke, ‘if a child of yours took your gold and spent it on vile things, yet then repented, would you wish him hang about outside your house in misery, or enter and ask pardon? Do you not think your love could find forgiveness? Do you not think your master has goodness enough for that? How then could you deem Her love any the less, She who forsook the bed of Her own love so that we whom She guards might have light and life?’ But still, Kuln-Holn shook his head.
‘Well, then. You will not enter. But will you help me a little? For I am old, and these steps loom larger than long ago.’ Kuln-Holn, ashamed, took the old woman’s arm and helped her up to the Temple. ‘Nay,’ she said then, ‘only a little ways farther.’
‘But I cannot enter,’ he groaned.
‘Because you are a poor man, and have not golden vessels to offer for your prayers? Why came you hither, then?’
‘But I have done – oh, I thought I did well, and served Her – but a fear has come over me as if I walked along the dusky border, and I know not – I know not what.’
‘Have you no gifts to offer Her? For She is still a woman, and women like well those men who bring them gifts.’
He said, ‘I have only this.’ From his pouch he drew out a little figure fashioned of bronze, of a fish caught in a net. There was a round hole in the fish’s mouth, where once, perhaps, a pearl had been set; but that was gone long since. ‘I bought it in the marketplace,’ Kuln-Holn said, ‘but it is a wretched thing.’
‘Does it hold some meaning for you?’ the old lady asked, handing it back.
‘Nay, it is but a trinket,’ he mumbled, and looked away.
‘Yet a thing born of the heart is finer than all wealth, to a woman. Surely you have known this before? Now you must come within the Temple and offer it Her. For know, all offerings brought upon the grounds of the Temple are Hers by right even before they touch the altar; and he who takes back such a gift, no matter how worthless it is, he is called a thief of Goddess, and plagues overtake him.’
Kuln-Holn’s eyes widened. ‘That I had not known,’ he muttered.
They went forward a little, and all at once Kuln-Holn stood within the Brown Temple of Goddess where he had never thought to be permitted.
Above him the stones towered, ancient beyond memory. Vinelike carvings rose in all the corners of figures and scenes wondrous and strange beyond his understanding. At the upper reaches of the chamber, so far overhead, the walls were sheathed with beaten gold kept scrupulously clean, which dazzlingly reflected the light from the beacon above. Before Kuln-Holn was the raised stone vessel in which the sacred fire was kept burning, pungent with the sacrificial incense. The idol beyond the flames seemed to look down upon Her suppliants with eyes compassionate and unhuman. In the centers of Her carved eyes were gems of cut yellow crystal, changeable with the flames below, and seemingly alive.
Small and weak at the bottom of that high huge chamber, Kuln-Holn felt a stillness within the tiny room of his body, a quelling of all desire, pain, action, and hope. An immense kindliness encompassed him. Slowly he lowered himself to the floor.
The stones beneath his knees and elbows were worn smooth and slightly hollow. Thousands upon thousands had been there before him, and at the thought of all those voyaged multitudes and all their many prayers, his mind quailed. How had he ever dared to think such big thoughts of himself and appoint himself so highly?
The old woman took from his hands his little offering, and placed it upon the stone before the fire. A bell sounded from within the temple. ‘It is the time of the third burning,’ she told him: ‘a propitious time for offerings. Wait you here and make prayer, and I will seek out the priestesses.’
‘Do you know any of the priestesses?’ Kuln-Holn asked – for she had been garbed in a lora, and he remained ignorant of her identity.
‘All of them, I should think,’ she answered with a smile. At that she left him, alone with the image of Goddess.
Thereat he made prayers, such as his untutored heart could fashion. As he gazed upon the carved image of the idol, he was again reminded of its likeness to that of the Empress. For a moment he saw her before him in two pictures: as he had first beheld her, emerging in proud glory among the nobles of her Council, when Kuln-Holn had stood beside his master when first they had arrived at Tarendahardil; and then as he had last glimpsed her, forlorn and abased here upon these very stones that now touched his own body. Then it was a great weariness, greater than he had ever felt in his life before, swept over him, and he slept as if a stone had felled him there.
§
WHEN THE HIGH PRIESTESS convened the virgins in the chamber they found him curled before the altar like a faithful old dog lying upon the hearthstones of his master’s hall. They smiled, and exchanged gentle jests at his coarse and ungraceful body; but the High Priestess, once again in her ceremonial robes, suffered him to remain so even as they invoked the ceremony of the third burning – though that was perhaps not strictly lawful. In truth, though she could not have told why, the aged maiden had quite taken this forlorn foreigner into her heart. They understood and knew each other, it may be, upon some level beyond all the bird’s-scratchings of poets. So might two lonely mountains of the gods regard each other from far ends of a valley, weathered and humbled by the usages of the skies and years piling round them.
The priestesses took Kuln-Holn in among themselves and let him sleep and eat in a little chamber removed from theirs. They allowed him to enter all the chambers of the Temple save one: that one was beneath the altar, and they did not speak of it. They asked him no questions, but found his manhood and his simplicity delightful. He told them stories of his tribe, and of fishing upon the Ocean of the Dead. Many passes he stayed among them; it tore at his heart to accept their many kindnesses, yet at the same time he could not bring himself to leave. There were no wars here, and no commandments: but the spirit of Goddess was all around him, to be breathed in with the incense of the altars.
And even so, his stay there was not entirely untroubled. Some of his sleeps were unquiet with a smiling dark countenance and scenes from the fall of Gerso he would as soon have forgotten. There at the side of him was where Kuln-Holn’s duty lay, no matter how pleasing were these hours of calm. But surely, he would say to himself, putting it off, surely his master could not have returned so soon.
At length he knew he must return. Now the thought of the city and the multitudes without the Temple walls was ominous to him. But he steeled himself, and making his last offering and prayer before Her, he left the quietude and the incense and upon grudging legs wandered down the many steps of the Temple unto the Way of Kings. But when he came among the crowds and noise this time, he found that all of it had changed. Fear had come among them, and the shadow of Ara-Karn.
§
POSTIO had fallen after many harsh assaults. Now naught but smoky rubble buried the once-fair vineyards that had married Goddess with the sea. Ernthio had been betrayed and taken. The fierce nomads of the Desert had allied themselves with the barbarians and hailed Ara-Karn as their Prophet and their king, and together they made a lesser desert of the upper Delba. The withering heat of high Summer laid the Southland and all her peoples still, but Ara-Karn moved on: and now it was rumored by the tales of the refugees that the barbarian god-king made his way toward the walls of Bollakarvil, the brightmost fastness of the Empire and the very birthplace of Elna. Even as Kuln-Holn stood trying to follow the rapid words, a score of delegations crowded up the steps of the Temple, laden with offerings and leading sacrificial beasts.
Kuln-Holn wandered in the square among the mustering soldiers and the merchants. The heat of Goddess smote against his back, and dust clung to his wet tunic. With difficulty he made his way through the crowds up the slope of the Way of Kings, to the Citadel.
There at least was some calm, and some relief from the heat in the mountain’s winds. Kuln-Holn felt the coolness of the thick stone walls about him, and sighed. Yet at the door of his master’s chambers he hesitated uncertainly. He raised his hand, which still smelled faintly of the altar’s incense, and struck upon the door. A low word answered from within, of a voice he did not recognize. Softly he opened the door and passed within. From the parapet of the balcony at the far end of the chamber his master raised his head, and regarded his servant from out of darkened eyes.
§
FOR A SPACE no words, not even of greeting, passed between them. There were lines upon the face of Ennius Kandi where heat and winds and the sunlight of the Desert had marked him – belike, too, there was something of the horrors of those newfallen cities mirrored in his eyes. His lips were so dark and stiff it was as if they had been stained wood rudely carved. His hands, dark brown and fleshless, toyed idly with his jade-handled dagger. He reclined upon the parapet carelessly, one leg thrown over the edge of the stone, the mountain’s cooling breezes playing with the dark curls of his hair.
‘So, Kuln-Holn,’ he said at length, ‘you are back now? Where have you been – visiting with your whore in the city? You will not see her again unless I give you leave. Or did you think we have come hither for mere dalliance while others died in the dust for our cause?’
Silently Kuln-Holn crossed the chamber and knelt upon a carpet before his master. Gently, miserably, he let bow his head.
‘Lord,’ he said, ‘let us leave this place.’
‘Have you had your fill of her then, or did she cast you out when you ran short of coin? Eh, Kuln-Holn?’ His every utterance was an insult. Kuln-Holn closed his eyes. He might have wept then – but tears had saved none of the others.
‘Lord, let us leave this place. Have we not done enough here? Surely this city shall be left in peace. It is a holy city, lord. She dwells here. They say below that she is the descendant of Goddess, and that God has taken her for His consort. They call her the living incarnation of Goddess upon the face of the world – I saw her in the temple, lord, and – and I think that they are right. She is beautiful and noble beyond earthly things, and not to be defiled by such as we.’
‘She’s a whore.’
For a few moments, Kuln-Holn could neither speak nor believe his ears had heard aright. Even then, all he could find to say was, ‘Lord, she is the body of Goddess.’
‘Does she think I do not know what she has done?’ Ennius Kandi asked of the winds, ignoring his servant. ‘How could I have dreamt she might be the one, returned to me at last? Even now, she does not know me. And how might that be, unless she be some treacherous disguiser?’
In the tones of his voice Kuln-Holn thought he heard tears – or perhaps the screams of burning Gerso. Never before had he beheld his master so wild and reckless. And was this the same one who had faced death so coolly so many times past?
‘Lord, lord, let us leave this place!’
‘No.’
The word was a sneer upon the dark lips, yet at its speaking something of recognition entered the eyes of the master, as if he were reminded of where and who he was. He drew his hand over his face, as if thereby he might have taken grasp of his soul again.
‘Kuln-Holn,’ he said with a trace of weariness, ‘and when we met in the hall of that castle in the snowy mountains, who was it who reminded me of the cause of sacred vengeance? Now I remind you. I said then that I would follow my own path through this. Do you think now I will allow the cant of priestesses or the weakness of your will, to lay a wall across that path? Nay, O Pious One. What is your Goddess to me, or I to Her? Will you be happy with your dreams, Kuln-Holn? – then sleep you on; but bother not me, who have wakened. How dare you wish to be content when I am not?
‘I tell you, this city will be spared by no divine favor. Its temples too shall be razed – its priestesses too shall be raped! Where were your fine deities when Gerso fell, or any of the others? Why should this city live on, when so many others have been crushed? The armies come near, O Dreamer – and why should I lift my hand to stop them? For her sake? Let her husband do that task for her, if the fool know how! But let him not look behind him at the one he strives so gallantly to protect, if he will not see such blood as would send even him across the knife-edged border!’
He stood, and the dusty-stained traveling garb he wore spread the smell of him into the room, an acrid, unpleasant odor. Kuln-Holn dared not look up from the dampened carpet. Calm again as if by fits, the master stepped over Kuln-Holn and walked to the door.
‘O Kuln-Holn,’ he said, ‘I go now upon a mission to do her Divine Majesty’s bidding. Herself, the August One was indisposed; but her husband gave the message to me well enough. I go now to the realms along the dark horizon to deliver messages and wedding invitations for the coming festivities. Do you await me here, for at my return I will have tasks for you. Fear not, Kuln-Holn: the armies of Ara-Karn will not reach Tarendahardil before next year. First they go to the shores of the Southern Ocean, and then darkward. The City Over the World shall be the last attacked. And Kuln-Holn, forsake all thoughts of your whore. Whores are treacherous, Kuln-Holn, when you have run dry of what they fancy.’
Kuln-Holn, abased upon the carpet, still did not look back, as he heard the closing of the door.
§
AGAINST the surging currents of the throngs in the streets of the City Over the World, the Charan Ennius Kandi rode quietly and little-noticed; but that was the quiet of a poison-jade low cloud, after whose passing shepherds will sing thankful prayers to Goddess that it did not loose its fury on their heads. Once again the Gerso left the city and went abroad upon a sending of the Divine Queen, and once again he rode alone the long Imperial highways. But now he traveled toward the dark horizon.
And he took the road northward, and passed through Rukor first.
