Authors: Tanith Lee
It seemed this man had a son, a very
handsome, unusually sensitive and charming son who, four years ago, had been
shamelessly jilted by his intended marriage partner. “Less than a day after
this shock, my son fell deathly ill—a fever, such as had once struck him in
childhood. His hair dropped out as it had then. We believed he must die. Yet he
turned the corner that very night, and hopes were high he should recover.
Then—horror! Next day he had vanished from the house. Of course instantly I
attempted to have him found. It was obvious enough, his mind had been disturbed
by sickness. One whole year they took to find him. And then—though by now we
knew where he must have gone, and the insane mode of life he had adopted—even
achieving unlikely success in it—once again he gave my men the slip. Since that
time, any I hire to find him have only detected his whereabouts stupidly to
lose him again. Yet he lives still, this I know. I have heard, only yesterday,
he is somewhere in the Mediterranean area, having given up at last, it seems,
his totally unsuitable and unseemly post in the army.”
The father then described his son in
detail. He was slender, white-blond, green-eyed, nearly feminine in appearance,
the father added with some embarrassment. “Though doubtless less so now,”
bitterly. “Dressed as a soldier and hardened by God knows what adventures. And
with a sword at his side with which,” now in distaste, “he has done, I am told,
a great deal of damage.”
The name this absconding youth had
assumed—which was not his true one—was Zephyrin.
Ymil accepted the assignment. Among the
cypress, orange and lemon trees of the Mediterranean sink, he uncovered and set
out on Zephyrin’s track. And hence the ship, which Ymil had learned Zeph meant
to board at Ghuzel.
Prepared for the assorted results other
such cases had presented, Ymil had only
not
anticipated the
instantaneous hatred that sprang to life between Zeph and Mhikal Vendrei.
And not until those last pre-tempest
minutes did Ymil figure out that, on
this
occasion, two and two
indeed
added up to seven.
In
the end it was Ymil, with Dakos and Jacenth, the merchant’s son, who went up
into the woods to cast about for provender.
Crazt meantime had rigged a line from
various debris—boot laces, one of the widow’s two saved hairpins—and baited it
with some small dead sea beast found further along the beach. The old widow and
elderly merchant, (who by now were on the first name terms of Maressa and
Frokash), stayed as sentries of fire and sea.
Ven and Zeph however, stuck to their
prior plan.
Ignoring everyone else, seeming careless
at the lack of breakfast, they swore a sort of pact, publically, watched by the
rest in mixtures of admiration, irritation, contempt and disbelief.
Both enemies were to walk in an opposite
direction along the two arms of the beach, searching there for two suitable
weapons, preferably long blades. “Do they think they will find such hung up on
the rocks?” pondered Frokash.
“Both are deranged.” said Maressa, not
without some enjoyment.
But the two gallants, still splendid
even after total immersion, and lacking portions or entireties of certain
garments, faced each other, white and adamantine.
“Until this evening then, sir,” said
Zephyrin. “When, let us hope, I can curtail your futile life, and thus spare
the world further boredom from it.”
“Till this evening, wretch. Delight in
your last day upon earth. You’ll find Hell much less pleasant.”
Which said, each of them marched off
along the sands, Vendrei to the west, a vision of ruined linen, lace, and icy
rage; salt-stained Zephyrin heading east, face set like a mask, wig-saving hat
crammed down on head.
4
Vendrei
discovered the fishing village with startled abruptness, as if Fate were
jesting, playing games.
By then he had gone about ten miles down
the shore. The cliffs stood high on his right, and the sand was mostly covered
by smooth, round, sea-greened boulders—as if thousands of tortoises had
congregated, and been heartlessly turned to stone by some passing gorgon. The
precarious walkway had also narrowed to the width only of three or four feet,
in places less. Then, slithering and sliding around a bulge in the cliff wall,
Vendrei beheld a hitherto hidden bay, a long apron of glassy blue water, a
broad amble of sand, where distant fisher-craft were drawn up, and small cranky
houses had fixed themselves to the cliff like barnacles.
That the village might be very good news
for his fellow survivors did not immediately cross Vendrei’s mind.
He took the village personally to be,
not only the joke of Fate, but the provider of swords. Why else was it there in
his path at this fraught hour, unless to give most desperately—not sustenance
or rescue, but a means to murder his dearest foe.
It was not that the golden prince was a
solipsistic dunce, exactly. More that life, and other people, had made him
sometimes resemble one.
He had fled from his father’s house in
panic at the strictures of a stern parent determined to have his way. This man
had treated his only son Mhikal as a possession merely. Very much, let it be
said, as he treated also wife and daughters. Yet worse, he valued Mhikal more
highly, thought him
worth
more. What the father ultimately wished from
his son nevertheless was, for Mhikal, intolerable. It was horrible, coercive,
obscene
.
It would have meant for him an end to all he valued at that time, or held dear.
But then, Mhikal Vendrei’s resultant
resistant act, so he himself came to believe, was not only dishonourable and
vile, but in its effect worthy of damnation. He had brooded on it, too. On
nothing else.
Ever since he had spent his life, (truly
spent, like cash or blood), in deliberate dissolution and itinerancy. He had
been afraid for years to put down any root, to form any lasting attachment. He
journeyed, he thought, with less baggage than a herder of camels, and now of
course the sea itself had robbed him of all, even of the books he had stolen
from his father’s library. And even of his sword which here, of all times, he
wanted
as a lover wants the beloved—passionately and obsessively.
From the initial instant he had loathed
Zephyrin, not knowing why. For Vendrei was neither a snob nor physically
unconfidant. Probably, he presently decided, it had been an instinctive
forewarning. Zephyrin’s stares and jibes had soon cut deep beneath his skin,
long before the final calumny—the lie that he was a cheat and thief—propelled
him to claim the satisfaction of a duel.
The worst irony of all, however, was
that he had taken ship for the express purpose of going home, to face his demon
and pay its price.
The
people in the hidden village spoke some sort of oriental Greek that, for all
his knowledge of languages, Vendrei could barely fathom. He struggled to grasp
their words. To make them understand
his
. But they gave him a glass of
wine with milk curdled in it, and then sat him down on a stone in the narrow
street that rambled round the houses up the cliff. After a while an older man
came along, garlanded with a vast grey beard.
“Is you to be look for,” so Vendrei
guessed
the greybeard said, “the drownwards lost off ship-thing?”
“Ah—no—but—are men from the ship here?”
“Some is to be have washed up always
into us place, if ship sunken. We have two man-things since of yester here.
They am drownward. We have of bury them, as is our way with the drown-made
dead.”
“Commendable,” said Vendrei. Repressing
an hysterical urge to bellow with laughter.
Did these villagers think no one else
ever buried the lifeless? This was a primitive place, but surely—
The wine had gone to Vendrei1s head,
straight into his brain. He felt dizzy, and thought of his own near drowning,
and that he might have ended by being swept in too, and buried by one of these
strangers. He
thought
that two men, now beyond his help, might well have
been, each of them, equipped with a useable blade. Which now lay in the grave
with them.
“I should wish—I should like,” he
faltered, “to visit the graves.” And then blushed with shame, (a thing he had
not done for several years), at his own appalling behaviour. For he meant to
investigate the graves,
undo
them,
borrow
—oh, borrow of course
only, he would return his theft, (cheat, thief), replace their swords. Maybe
two gentlemen would not grudge this, in order to settle one like Zephyrin? No,
they would be seated in the best seats in Paradise, applauding.
I’m drunk.
But the bearded man was assisting him to
his feet.
“You come, and I to you show buried. But
a long climb.”
To Heaven?
Yes, for me, now.
Up the wandering street they went and so
reached another treacherous path that teetered on up the cliff. Wild blue and
topaz flowers, and stunted oleanders, grew along the sides of it. And here and
there he saw a shell.
They climbed high above the village, and
then the path snagged down. A rough carving appeared beside the track. It was
of a long-bearded man with the tail of a fish, who held regally in his left
hand the three-pronged trident of the pagan marine god, Poseidon.
An idea of what might be going on
attempted to invest the brain of Vendrei. He wrestled with it, then gave up as
the greybeard drew him aside into a cool tunnel.
“Below,” said the man. “Step careful.
Tall sea come at sun-die. Then go they.”
“They go, do they. Very well. Tall sea.”
The tunnel plainly ran down through the
inside of the cliff. Where it led to must be the village burial ground. That
was strange enough, for at the edge of the village there had stood the usual
church, a ramshackle little stone building with a saint painted above the door.
Normally the graveyard would lie handy. Not here, it seemed.
Turning to ask another unwieldy question
of his guide, Vendrei saw the man had gone, slipped away slick as a shadow.
Vendrei shook his head to clear it.
Which did nothing but make him laugh.
Then he stepped through into the tunnel,
stooping a little for the rocky roof was uneven and low. The route had been,
most likely, a natural one, but hacked out to a greater space by men. Soon he
came to a ledge where rested tapers, flint and tinder. Vendrei had already
begun to see he would need light, for as the tunnel descended it grew
inevitably darker. He struck flame and ignited a taper. And in that moment a
profound sense of the supernormal washed in on him. How long had this
death-road existed? It felt to him old as the cliff. How many unquiet ghosts,
then, flitted through the shade, attracted to a light like moths but, being already
dead, unable to burn. . .
“Steady, you fool,” he said to himself
aloud, and the rock surged with a low, humming echo. “Bloody Zephyrin,” Vendrei
whispered. “I shall—” Yet here was not a spot to utter maledictions. And
Vendrei suddenly remembered the youth of his adversary, his paleness and
handsomeness, and felt a terrible pity at what he meant to do to him. But
Vendrei reckoned himself damned anyway, what did one more young life matter?
What did anything matter.
Come on, fool, find the dead and rob them, take
their swords, go back and kill the wretch and have done.
Ymil,
Jacenth and Dakos returned to the beach in the late afternoon with meat, three
plump conies, slain quick and clean by the boy, who was apt with a stone even
lacking his catapult. They had plucked red grapes from a wild vine, green figs,
and mint and sage for flavouring.
Crazt meanwhile had caught a whole heap
of fish, which were now enticingly toasting on sticks across the fire. Maressa
and Frokash were playing a game with differently marked pebbles. They had seen
no shipping; did not seem to mind.
Of the other pair there was no sign.
“Fell off the land’s edge into the
ocean,” said Crazt under his breath. “To both, our fondest farewell.”
This opining was proved valueless
however when, as the sun itself reached the brink of the sea, scalding it to
carmine, Zephyrin appeared, tramping back along the eastern stretch of sand.
Zephyrin’s hat was off, there was no
breeze at all and the fine white wig hung limply. Hollows smudged beneath the green
eyes. The captain seemed tired out, tired in the manner of an almost grown-up
child. Looking at this, Ymil thought, one might know Zephyrin had been recently
ill, or very ill some years ago, and was left weakened by it.
Coming near the fire, the slender figure
slumped down a short distance from the others.
“I found this,” Zephyrin said, and
rolled a small barrel towards them, “up the beach.”
“French Brandy!” approvingly exclaimed
Dakos and the merchant as one.
“Just so,” said Zephyrin. “There was
flotsam from the ship, or from some other casualty, all over. I expect you’ll
like to go and look, tomorrow.”