We believed that Lem the Silver Leem was an evil cult. They tortured and killed little children, and this was reprehensible. But in a slave society where a child was mere property, like a chicken, an otherwise normal and decent person would see nothing remiss in these actions. If you could kill and eat a chicken for the gratification of your physical appetite, then to sacrifice a slave for the benefit of your spiritual wellbeing, to give worship to your god, was a perfectly normal act. It could reflect only credit upon yourself, gain you luster, store up treasure in heaven against the day of judgment.
We, Pompino and I, were committed by the Star Lords to oppose Lem the Silver Leem. We would burn the blasphemous temples and scatter the worshippers. But we had to do more than this. We
had
to do more than this. We had to set something better in view; we had to show the adherents of the Silver Wonder that they erred. That was the true task laid on us. That, then, was the battlefield where our future strife would be fought.
Yet, doubts remained. As I’d once been told, oligarchy was giving way to oligopoly. In religion, self-interest in worldly affairs overwhelmed self-interest in spiritual affairs. Once, Phu-Si-Yantong had attempted to obtain domination by his evil and pseudo cult, artificially created, of the Black Feathers of the Great Chyyan. That had failed. Always, the question remained: were the followers of Lem slipping into this materialistic method of gaining power and of retaining it?
Then Lisa the Empoin went into her fainting act, and I was once more in action. Well, by Vox, action is a great anodyne to thinking. And, as they say, wicky-werka.
“What is the matter with her?”
“She is overcome, pantor,” said Quendur, grabbing at Lisa who flopped all over Murgon. He drew back, sweaty, looking offended even in these circumstances that someone of the lower orders had touched him. Lisa let out a beautiful groan and clutched at Murgon.
“Stop!” he bellowed, and banged a ringed hand against the carriage roof. The carriage lurched and halted. The door opened and the loose-lipped face of Dopitka the Deft appeared.
“Pantor?”
“The woman is ill! Get her out of here—”
Lisa furnished up a superb slurping hiccough, quite clearly the prelude — at least to Murgon — of being violently sick all over him. Quendur was shouting out a string of nonsense, and Pompino joined in and managed to nudge Murgon along into Lisa. She retched. She brought up an enormous throat-clearing belching roar and opened her mouth wide — right over Murgon.
“Out!” he shrieked and pushed her away. Dopitka caught at Lisa’s shoulders and she slid sideways. Quendur, still bellowing incoherently, poised and then pushed alongside Lisa. Together they more fell than stepped from the carriage. Shaking with disgust, Strom Murgon took out a yellow silk square and flapped away at forehead and beard.
The door slammed shut.
Just before the wood hit wood and the lock caught, I heard another bang from outside. Murgon flailed away with his silk. Outside a voice — I did not think it was Dopitka’s, but it could have been — shouted: “Drive on, coachman!”
The carriage started. Murgon looked up.
I said: “It is all taken care of, pantor. She was clearly unwell.” Then, steeling myself, I rattled on: “It is very kind of you, pantor, to take care of us.”
“Humph,” he said, or something like that, and wiped away sweat. “Dopitka is not such a fool as he looks. He will make sure they are safe.”
If that thump I’d heard was what I thought it was, Dopitka would be in no position to take care of anyone — least of all himself — for some time.
It began to rain, the drops spitting against the roof and hissing at the closed windows.
The sound of rain did not muffle the grinding of metal-shod wheels on cobbles. That changed to a softer slurching as we rolled along a rutted way. Presently the rain stopped. Or, as the door opened and torchlight flared, to be more accurate, we had entered into a roofed enclosure. We alighted.
I looked back through the gateway. Stark against the lowering sky rose a pinnacled, turreted fantasia, a castle glimmering in the rain, frowning down. Between the gateway and the entrance to the castle the rain hung a sheeting curtain of glancing silver. The smell of damp ferns floated from the gate and the drops bounced like sprites.
“The king’s palace,” said Murgon, shaking his shoulders. He still clutched his square of yellow silk, as though to be ready in case Lisa swooped down on him from the rain, mouth open. “The Chun-el-Boram. I must say it makes a splendid sight in the rain.” A stroke of lightning stitched blindness across our eyeballs; the thunder rumbled moments later.
Hostlers saw to the horses and the carriage trundled away. Murgon led us to a narrow door in the far wall. What the building in which we were might be I had no idea. There was no sign of Dopitka, or of the Chulik; Murgon made no comment. I guessed they were expected to be quick about looking after their lord. I did not think Dopitka would be so quick.
The place appeared to be a deserted palace. The rooms were large and well-proportioned, full of dust and cobwebs, and echoing our footsteps in a chancy fashion.
The Chulik, Chekumte the Fist, marched in after us carrying a torch. The light in its swirling illumination did ghastly things to the shadows to anyone of a nervous disposition.
“Where is Dopitka?”
“I do not know, master. He was not with the coach when I arrived.” The Chulik’s face and pigtail glittered with raindrops.
“That tiresome woman,” said Murgon, and waved us to follow. Pompino glanced at me, and essayed a cheeky smile, and winked, and I kept my battered old beakhead graven as a heathen idol, and we all trailed off along the dusty corridors after Strom Murgon.
We went down stone stairways into the bowels of the earth.
Well, the adherents of Lem the Silver Leem habitually hid their temples. And the bowels, as I may have remarked before, are conspicuously correct for the adherents of Lem. The torch light fleered ahead of us, driving away the shadows, which clustered again at our backs. We shuffled along, heads down; but there was little need. This way had been traversed many times, and I would not have been surprised to learn the dust was carefully scattered by slaves after each secret meeting.
At the closed leaves of the entranceway ahead of us stood a single Chulik. He was armored, clad in brown and silver, and made a most respectful salute when Murgon appeared. The doors opened. Inside lay the temple.
The layout, all flash and glitter and dread horror, was much the same as in previous temples I had seen. Pompino nodded. He knew, too. Murgon led us to a side door, past the iron cage and the altar and the slab. He motioned for us to enter.
“Wait here. I will see the Hyr Prince Majister and tell him you are craving an audience. I do not know how long I shall be. You will find refreshments.”
“Thank you, pantor.”
Murgon and Chekumte went and we looked at the waiting room. “Refreshments?” said Pompino, perking up.
The viands were typically Kregan, fresh fruit, crusty bread, a selection of cheeses, light wines and parclear, palines. A Sybli woman smiled nervously, wiping her yellow apron, and ready to wait on us; but we sent her away and she was pleased to be let off lightly. We slumped down in chairs and set to.
I picked up a round and juicy onion and bit. Splendid!
Pompino went straight for the important business and poured two goblets of yellow wine — a middling Pantuvan — and we drank companionably. A small wooden door under a groined overhang opened and a cloaked figure stepped into the room.
The two lamps on the table flamed upon the blades of two swords that instantly menaced that unexpected figure.
“Who are you?” demanded Pompino. “What d’ye want here?”
“Put up your swords, gentlemen,” said a woman’s voice; mellow and yet bloated with a breathiness I thought might have been occasioned by treading down steep and narrow stairs. “I mean you no harm—”
“I crave your pardon, madam,” said Pompino, ever the gallant where women except his wife were concerned. “Pray, sit down. A glass of wine?”
“Thank you, horter — parclear, if you please.”
This was a pantomime. I just stood there, glowering, as Pompino did his fussy man-looking-after-woman routine. Mind you, he was naturally graceful and good at the task. The dark blue cloak hood concealed the woman’s face; but there was a lot, a damned great lot, of cloak swathing her.
She pushed the hood back only as far as it had to go to enable her to drink. The parclear went down in one gulp and she held out the glass again. “Now, horter, if you please. Wine.”
When two glasses of that middling Pantuvan followed the parclear, she held out the glass again. Pompino poured.
So I said, “The kov has not yet arrived, kovneva.”
The glass in her beringed hand shook, and some slopped.
And, despite all, she drank that third glass of wine before she spoke.
“How do you...? Who are you...?”
The lamp cast me in shadow, and I was grateful for the space it would give me. Pompino smiled. “We are waiting while Strom Murgon—”
“Him!”
She tried to stand up, and her bulk dragged at her, so that Pompino put a hand under her elbow. He grunted as he felt her weight. I felt the weight of the years crushingly upon me.
“I must see the kov!” Her voice indicated no trace of drunkenness. She spoke with that breathlessness habitual to her. I guessed she was never truly drunk: just permanently in a state of lushness.
I said: “How did the kov — how did you — come to believe in Lem the Silver Leem?”
She twisted her head to look at me, and the hood fell away.
I felt the pity and then condemned myself. This was what life did to people. This puffiness under the eyes, this flabbiness of the skin, this coarsening, this trebling of the chins, glistening like vosk-skin, this whole obscene rendering down of a beauty that had once given this woman the sobriquet of The Beautiful.
“We have not exchanged a Llahal—” she said. “What do I know of the Silver Wonder, save what my son has told me?”
“You do not believe?”
“And you will slay me for that, you will kill me for venturing here, where I am forbidden to go?”
Pompino said, “I see!” And, then, with a touch of excitement he could not conceal: “You are safe with us, Kovneva Tilda.”
“Tilda of the Many Veils,” I said. “Tilda the Beautiful.”
Her face, gross and ruined by drink, closed up, glistening, frowning, her befuddlement struggling under a sudden and impossible conjecture. She stared at me, muzzily.
“You...?”
“Oh, yes, Tilda. It’s me. I’ve spoken to Pando... I’ve told him why I left — fat King Nemo had me sent to the swordships. And you—”
She collapsed into the chair. That gross body shook under the enveloping cloak. She would never dance again to make a man’s blood go thump around his body like a cavalry charge.
“You abandoned me — left me—”
“No. I told you—”
“If you loved me you would have come back.”
“But I couldn’t come back. And, if I could have done, I would not. You know that. I told you.” That was brutal and horrible, and the truth.
Her hand reached for the glass again and in a grotesque parody of gallantry Pompino poured wine for her.
I said, “You do not ask me about Inch.”
“I did not love Inch.”
Season ago — seasons and seasons ago — we had met and in all that elapsed time she might have passed but a single hour. Memory rushed back, fresh and scalding. I had expected drama, histrionics, hysteria, not this befuddlement, this puzzled struggle to understand.
“Inch,” I said. “He was sold as slave to the swordships also—”
“Poor Inch... Was that his real name?” Her hand held the glass poised at her lips. Wine glistened there. “Would you tell me your name, if I asked? I often wondered. Pando and I, we met Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor. It was not a happy time for us. He did look a little like you; but he was a smooth, distant, sanctimonious prince—”
“Sanctimonious?” And I swear my mouth hung open, foolishly.
She went on as though I had not spoken, sunken in a reverie that encompassed too many memories and too many years. But when I said men called me Jak, she heard, and nodded, and then went on as before, in a low breathless voice, to talk of those days we had spent together with Pando and Inch fighting to gain his kovnate. Pompino shifted restlessly.
“The damned temple’s here, Jak. There are plenty of materials. I think I’ll take a look around.”
“...he wants her for himself and Murgon wants her for himself, and Pynsi is in tears.” Tilda’s voice droned on without taking the slightest notice of Pompino. Now she began to tell me of the problems facing Pando, of his quarrel with Murgon, which, as is the way of two worlds, concerned the love of a young woman. It all seemed a rigmarole at the time, although frighteningly important later on, as you shall hear, and I wanted to get on and help Pompino. But Tilda held me, held me by what she said, her whole defeated attitude, her dejection. She drank. She drank like a fish. But in that desolate face still remained traces of the beauty that had once conquered without artifice, still she was a woman. I would not admit pity into my thoughts of her — for that would demean us both — I did admit a spontaneous feeling of affection.
The Vadvarate of Tenpanam, whose borders marched with those of Pando’s Bormark, had recently lost its vad. Now a young and charming girl claimed the vadvarate. The Vadni Dafni Harlstam — vivacious, quick-witted and well aware that powerful men would wish to woo her for the sake of her province — appeared to have settled on Strom Murgon as the man for her. Then Pando, seeing great advantage in uniting the houses of Marsilus and Harlstam, had presented himself as a suitor, so that the issue hung in the balance. And the Mytham twins — Pando’s friends of long standing and loyal to Bormark — were in despair; Poldo for the Vadni Dafni, and his twin sister Pynsi for that young scamp Pando himself.
As I say, a rigmarole, droned out by Tilda between healthy swallowings of wine — any wine to hand — and yet a net to entrap the wariest of politicos in the passions and greed of ambitious people.