The Enemy of My Enemy (19 page)

• • •

The old man was still piping and muttering, but within Tonoro was the even physical memory that the voice had just departed from his own body. He looked into the
gorum-
man’s golden-glowing eyes. Already they seemed to be filming over. The voice became a thin trickle of sound and then it, too, was only memory.

Cominthal looked at him with an expression that was half leer and half triumph. “So now you know,” he said. “Now you remember and you know.”

“Yes … now I know … .”

“You are a Quasi. Just the same as me and the brockety old woman and all the rest of us. You’re part Volanth, you know that? You know it?” The word he said was
know
but the word he meant was
admit
.

Some faint disappointment showed in his face. Perhaps he had expected Tonoro to cringe, curse, shrink, cower … . Perhaps if the implanted memories were the only ones, Tonoro might have done so. Some shock on this point the newly awakened was aware of, but there were so many other things to engage him — part Volanth. Well, and then, part-Tarnisi, too! He remembered the words of the Craftsman in Pemath,
“Fortunately, you already have long fingers and slender feet.”
Fortunately — but not fortuitously: the gift of his Tarnisi genes.

“I know it now. But — how did
you
know it?”

The look was all triumph now. “At first it was just that something about you kept catching my attention. I didn’t know what. After a while it came to me that the way you sometimes carried your head, that was it, it was reminding me of the way the uncle used to carry
his
head. So I kept looking and I kept watching. Nothing else about you that I could
see
… but you had come back, they said, from abroad. Well, they have big
gorum
abroad, too. With that foreign
gorum
it would be easy to make big changes. Then, after that I spoke to you on the levy, after we came back from that — oh, that was a thing, eh? how did you like that? How do you like it
now?
Now that you
know?
Ah; — then I used to hide and I watched you and watched you when you went swimming.”

“And you saw the scar?”

“I saw the scar. So then I knew for sure. And now
you
know for sure.”

Cominthal his cousin! Something of the boy still remained in the man, now that he, Tonoro, could remember. Something cruel and stunted and yet eager and avid and hungry. There was so much to remember, and so much that —

Gorum!
Yes, it could be said that there was “big
gorum
” abroad, but the supposedly savage, supposedly primitive and brutal and debased (and all the rotten rest of it) Volanth need not shame to compare their own skills with those of any others. Not even with the Craftsmen … . So much to remember. It was making him feel sick and anguished and confused. He didn’t want to talk about it all now, or even part of it. He only wanted to lie down and rest. Rest.

It surprised him that Cominthal understood and was willing. Afterwards, they talked much together.

The raid, that raid of the levy-men upon the village so long ago, had not even the justification of the recent one in which both Tonoro and Cominthal had taken part. No accusation of murder existed; it had been enough that most of the Quasi villagers, being technically Volanth, had required licenses to live outside the Outlands — Outside Volanth country — and most of them had lacked them. This was sufficient excuse. This, and the ever-existent unhealthy urges of the Tarnisi to break loose of their over-sophisticated and boring way of life — break loose, break out, burn and slay and ravish: the beast inside, ravening, always, against mannered restraint, had gotten outside. And had had its way.

Afterwards, the levy-men glutted (for the present while), and boasting of their prowess and of the “lesson” taught, had gone away. Slowly, slowly, the survivors had picked themselves up and, dazed, but as always, acquiescent, begun the job of burying their dead and tending to their wounded. Rebuilding their homes. Rebuilding their lives. Tonoro (he had of course been called something else then, but it hardly seemed important, now, exactly what) had somehow dragged himself at last to the appointed hideyhole, after it was no longer necessary; and there he had been found at last by his father — scalded, burned, anguished, racked by pain and thirst, but withal obedient and faithful.

“He saw that it couldn’t go on,” said Cominthal.

It couldn’t — but it always had. Would it always? The man said,
No
. The boy’s burn was a long time in healing, a healing which had made that familiar scar, left by the Craftsmen to whom it meant nothing, recognized at last by Cominthal. And all the while it was healing the man had gone from friend to friend, from friend’s friend to friend’s friend, mostly at night and always behind closed doors and shut screens, in voice low and stealthy, and had spoken the incredible, impossible, heart-stirring words:
It must not go on forever
. It need not go on. It will be stopped.

It must!

Small coin was added to small coin, tiny hoard to tiny hoard. The harlots’ hire and the profits of pimps. The sweat of those who toiled at the tasks even the Pemathi desired not to do and hired others to do for them. The takings of thieves and the meager profits of shanty traders. A compact was made and a league was formed, oaths taken. Promises. Plans. Hopes that almost did not dare to exist. But only “almost.”

“We bribed Pemathi,” Cominthal recalled (forgetting that at his then age he could hardly have been counted among the
we
), “and got you both aboard a cargo ship. He wouldn’t go without you,” Cominthal said, mouth twisting in remembered envy. “The both of you going off for freedom, and me staying behind to, lie in the dust and the dung — ” It was long before he could be gotten to believe that his younger cousin, too, had lain long in the dust and the dung. “I don’t even remember where the ship was bound for. It hardly mattered. He was to make contact with foreigners.
Any
foreigners. To promise them anything, anything at all, just to get them to help. To help us here. Against
them
. The ones with the Seven Signs.” He ran his tongue out a little ways upon his lips. “To strip every one of those Signs from them … .” His voice descended into whispered obscenities.

“But what happened?” asked Tonoro.

“Ah? What do you mean? — ‘Happened?’ ”

“With my father.”

Cominthal stared at him. “You still don’t know? Don’t remember? Even now?”

Even now. The
gorum
had not restored every lost memory, it became quite clear. It had indeed restored the one dreadful one which the mind had almost succeeded in its attempt to forget. But the boy had been young, then, so very young … and the other memories, which would have, probably, been lost anyway — these stayed lost. “I suppose,” he said now, slowly, “that the cargo ship must have put into Pemath. It wasn’t a good place for a beginning. Anything could have happened to him. He could have been killed for a piece of bread. I wish I knew,” he said, then crying the words: “
I wish I knew!
” To have the memory of a father restored at last, precious gift. Then to find the memory so incomplete, tragic loss. Loss, loss, loss, never to be regained. Some things are lost forever, and, seemingly, this was one of them.

Some things are lost forever.

But Cominthal would not suffer him — and this was good, that he would not — to remain there, wandering and disconsolate in the broken shatters of the past; in Pemath, with all its bitter and its inconclusive memories. Memories which had been so confused … it was not in Pemath, then, that the scald-scar was formed. And not in Pemath that the memories of pursuit were made. It meant nothing to any other victims of the infamous child-hunts of the evil Old Port that this one boy had never been one of them. It meant, somehow, though, much to him.

But Cominthal said, “You see, don’t you … . You saw! It’s still going on! And it must not go on. They still treat us like the Volanth treat fish: snare them, kill them, gut them, eat them. Even though what’s theirs by right of blood is ours by right of the same blood. We have to stop it. Don’t we? All of us? Even you. You know that now.

“Even you.”

Tonoro looked around the crowded, musty mockery of a room. The old man had crawled back into his recess. The mad old woman had gone away somewhere, perhaps to examine for the millionth time her hopelessly ugly, hopelessly hairy face in the mirror. Outside swarmed the jetsam outcasts of the civilized and heedless aristocracy. Across from him sat the cousin of his own blood: by his own testimony, a pander. It was a curious homecoming. Could all these ever be the features of true home? He could scarcely conceive so.

“Yes,” he said.

“Even me.”

Night in the garden at Tonoro’s riverside house lacked, no doubt, the sophisticated charm of the justly famed night gardens of many older estates. Although most of the flowers and trees were diurnals, and no attempts had been made to encourage or maintain nocturnal songbirds, still, walking among his greenery even when it was too dark to appreciate it by sight — save for that revealed by the rare and semi-concealed lamps — had always been a pleasure to him. It was the hour of the first dew. He was alone.

He had much to consider. Confusion had been lessened only a little in one direction, that of his own background, and he had lived with its lapses for so long that they’d ceased to trouble him; confusion in every other direction had only been increased. He was, it now seemed, doubly yoked, for not only was he bound to the Craftsmen and their cause, he was bound to the Quasi and their cause, too. How did the two fit together? Or did they fit together at all? What was the main thing to be achieved? He had to decide on this, and then see if it afforded or could afford a common denominator.

The liberation of the Volanth and the Quasi from the cruelty and terror and stultifying conditions imposed upon them by the Tarnisi: surely this was the point of it all. The back of the aristocratic system had to be broken, the humane elements among the Tarnisi allowed to come forward without fear — Tulan Tarolioth and his supporters — and the work of introducing all three elements of the population into the main stream of human culture and progress had to be begun.

Something of this had passed between the two men there in the ramshackle house where the
gorum
-man hibernated behind his curtain.

“The chance may come very soon,” Tonoro said, cautiously.

“Not ‘may.’
Will
.”

“You … know about it, then? Do we speak of the same thing?”

And Cominthal’s curious comment was, “That remains to be seen. It’s sure that you can help us — you’ve lived abroad. And that’s the place our help will come from — abroad.”

This fit, certainly. But did he, Tonoro, fit? Really fit? Was the tie of blood sufficient? Might it not, after all, simply be better to depart, to go anywhere else, rather than become involved in emotions which might easily be dissipated? True, he had just now committed himself. But need he stay committed?

“I must get back,” he said, abruptly, rising from the bed. Cominthal, looking at him, seemed suddenly disturbed, less assured of him … and of himself.

“You are not going to forget again, are you? It’s been too long — ”

“No, no. I will see you again, soon. Tomorrow.”

And now he paced in the dimness and the darkness, the smell of cool earth and damp grass in his nostrils, thinking, thinking. He passed some hours, thus solitary, then he returned to the house and fell quickly asleep.

But the quiet of the night did not extend into the daytime. Before an hour had passed after his getting up, he had a visitor. And a rather agitated visitor, too.

“Lord Tilionoth! You will honor me by tarrying long, I must hope,” Tonoro said, still smooth in his mouth the polite phrases he had once so much relished — and not so long ago, either.

Abruptly, Tilionoth demanded, “Has Otho been to see you?”

“My lord? Who — ?” He gestured towards a seat piled with smooth green cushions, but Tilionoth just made an annoyed movement, continued his disturbed walking quickly up and down.

“Otho. The man behind anything the Synod of Guardians — Othofarinal: There. Has he
been
here?”

The answer, and the truthful one, was that he had not. But the question, plus Tilionoth’s obviously upset manner, rang warning signals in Tonoro’s mind. What was this about the silver-haired and so-suave political leader and his possible visit here which could have so disturbed the young lord? Othofarinal had of course been here in the past, but it was obvious that the question must refer to the recent, indeed, the immediate past.

“Guardian Othofarinal has not honored the house at all lately. But there is nothing wrong, I must hope … ?”

Clearly, there was much wrong, but Lord Tilionoth’s mind, never deep even when at rest, did not feel any irony or hypocrisy in his host’s polite phrase. If anything, he was able to emerge from his agitation long enough to be a bit surprised that anyone was noticing that he was agitated at all.

“Anything wrong? Oh … . Why do you think … ? Well … . There may be, Tonorosant. I don’t know. I don’t know. One hesitates to — Look here,” he said, abruptly, sitting himself down, suddenly, after all, and clasping his hands around one knee. “I’m asking you because you of your own free will did choose, you know, to ally yourself with us. With the Guardians, I mean. So you know that — it’s been no secret, ever — my family have always been Guardian people and my becoming a Lord made no difference, everyone knows that. It’s always been understood that our position entitled us to representation on both sides, but everyone knows — Well. Look here!” He got up and resumed his restless pacing, his young and rather vacantly handsome face glowing both with his emotions and the reflected coloring of his red robes.

“The other side, you do know, I must hope — the Lords — have of course been the top people for a long while now. I’ve not been the only one who’s felt that things were past due for change. So I’ve been quite pleased to see all the activity in our camp this last while. And Otho’s been in the thick of it all, behind everything. You do know that, I must hope. So when — But now — Well, Tonorosant, here it is: It’s being said that he has sold us out. That he’s actually been working to commit us on behalf of those who lack the Seven Signs. Exactly, the Lermencasi!”