The Golden Sword (2 page)

The faces in front of me sharpened, took focus. I tried with my eyes to thank them. I managed a wordless sound. I felt again the bladder’s rim against my lips, the ecstasy of the liquid in my mouth. There was an arm under my head, hands at my throat. The cloak fell away.

“Quiet, little crell, do not waste your strength.” The voice came from above and behind me. I was held, high in the air. Strong arms supported me, as if I weighed nothing. My abraded flesh felt tight-curled hairs, moist and warm, where he held me to him. I remembered. Cahndor, one had called another. “Will of the sand” does that word mean. And crell, one had called me. I tried to protest. I was Estri Hadrath diet Estrazi, former Well-Keepress of Astria, surely no crell. Crell is a Parset word, for nowhere else upon Silistra does such a status exist. A crell is other than chaldless, other than human; that beast of burden which walks upon two legs rather than four. But my protest came out a moan, and I sank back exhausted, my head against the dark chest of the man that held me, my gaze lost in the forest of curling black hair upon it. Tiny beads of sweat meandered among the hairs, split in two by the root shafts, and in two again.

“Will she live, Hael? What think you?” came the voice from above and behind.

A face loomed close to mine; breath tickled my cheek. It was a bearded face, and that beard was curled and dressed and beaded and gray, with dust.

“Would you raise apprei here, and rest the night and day with her? If so, I could be sure of it. Without shelter and attention, I cannot say.”

“I would not lose the time,” the deeper voice of he who held me came again.

“Then, Cahndor, I think her chances slim.” The bearded face receded from my sight. A hand touched my face, my brow, raised the lids of my eyes. There was a roaring in my ears, a great pulsing beat in my head. It seemed unimportant what they said, what they did. Only sleep mattered to me, sleep and escape from my body.

There was silence, then, and I felt the stride of he who held me, he whom the other had called Cahndor. I tried to open my eyes to see, but my lids were weighty beyond my strength.

I smelled the threx before I saw it; the warm-damp musty smell that belongs to the great four-legged omnivore who is the preferred riding beast of Silistra.

I coaxed my lids open once more, as I was shifted from one pair of arms to another. Before me I saw, in the fading light, the carved and tooled Parset saddle, with rolls of bright-colored web-cloth
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strapped around it. The short-coupled back upon which the saddle rested was sand and shadow, dark at the withers, dappling light toward the barrel. The threx’s broad chest, parallel to my face where I was held well off the ground, gave me the impression of immense size. Then my sight of it was obscured by a muscular, dusk-dark back, upon which my father’s cloak, with the Mi’ysten Shaper’s seal, had been carelessly draped. He who wore the cloak swung up in the saddle, and held out his arms from the back of the dancing threx toward me. I was placed in those arms and lifted up onto the threx’s back, laid across the saddle before the great beast’s rider, so that the grip dug into my right hip, and my hair, flowing loose, almost dragged the ground by the threx’s tripart hooves.

The blood rushed to my head, and the red-grained pulsing swallowed my sight.

I felt a callused hand upon the small of my back, large, rough. Then the threx leaped into motion under me, the air was driven from my lungs, and I was glad of the steadying hand. Sand and grit thrown up by its hooves filled my nose and mouth and eyes, pelted my skin. The ground beneath my head rushed by under me, blurred into a dark band. No longer could I see the cracked earth, the jumbled rock, the coarse jeweled sand.

Endlessly did the threx plunge across the barren dead sea floor, endlessly did I suffer the shower of clodded earth its hooves kicked up. When dark was full upon us, when I thought I could not fight for one more breath, the Parset slid the choppy-gaited beast to a halt so abruptly that in its rearing one of those rock-hard hooves grazed my temple.

He who wore the Shaper’s cloak vaulted from the threx’s back. His grip upon me removed, I felt myself sliding. In mid-fall he caught me and laid me upon the crusty, abrasive earth. I heard the blowing of the winded threx, the creak and jingle of harness, the rustle of bodies about their business in the dark. Then the bladder was again at my lips. A horny hand brushed clod-caked hair from my face. Water washed new strength into me. I choked and sputtered. The bladder was withdrawn. A damp cloth caressed my mouth, my eyes, my temples. I winced when it touched the cut I had sustained by the threx’s hoof. Then it too was withdrawn, and I was once again alone. The night breeze had the chill of the abyss about, it, and I did not welcome that coolness. I looked up into the starry night, using the north star Clous as focus. When it ceased to dance and circle above me, when my eyes once again obeyed my mind’s commands, I turned my attention to my body.

With all my strength I tried to move my arms, that I might sit up. I could not do so. As my awareness sharpened, my flesh gave forth its message. My wrists felt their bonds, my waist its encircling loop. My hands were confined by a rope, and that rope passed once around my belly. I did not remember it being done. Perhaps I had been so bound to keep me from falling from the threx’s back as it plunged its way through the barrens. I thought not. But it certainly had not been done to prevent me from escaping or doing harm to my captors. With the realization that this was so, that I was captive, rather than rescued, my mind was suddenly clear, my thoughts coherent. As I lay there upon the rocky ground, I considered all that I knew about the Parsets, while around me the moon rose full and red-ringed and the wind sorted the sand, sighing, and the men’s gruff, rapid exchanges rang unintelligibly in my ears.

I recalled that which had been taught to me in the Day-Keepers’ school. I had learned there, among many others, the Parset language. And I recollected also what I had, heard from the wellwomen, the Slayers, and the Day-Keepers themselves about the flamboyant, tattooed desert dwellers.

I had heard it said that the men of the Parset barrens were the most insular, prideful, arrogant men upon Silistra, and their women the most indolent and imperious. Long ago, when the remnants of Silistran civilization emerged from the hides to rebuild a decimated planet, the Parsets took another path. Their Day-Keepers and forereaders split from their brothers and sisters. History has it that the aniet hide Day-Keepers had engaged in genetic manipulation; that the Day-Keepers of the rest of Silistra had found them out. Whatever the reason, there was from hide days little communication, and only a strained tolerance between the Silistran Day-Keepers, guardians of the past, manipulators of the present, charters of the future, and their Parset brethren. The forereaders, as long ago as my great-grandmother’s time, predicted that someday great harm would come to us all from out of the Parset desert.

So the Parsets had chosen. They speak a dissimilar language, wear a different chald. The chains of chaldra which have bound them from hide days are not the same as those which bind the rest of Silistra. I recalled that the Parsets had instigated no Wells, where a woman might go to get herself with child. I knew also that their jiasks, warrior men, and tiasks, warrior women, were not bound by the Law of Seven, as were the Slayers of the north, east and west. And that they alone, of all the peoples of Silistra, still made war.

I heard the flap and snap of wings about my head, saw a shadow cross the full moon. It was bright as day upon the barrens, but a day sucked dry of color and tone. I recollected stories I had heard about the Parset Lands; that many had entered them and few had returned; that one was better off to give up one’s body to the chaldra of the soil than to walk the Parset barrens uninvited. Because their chaldric chains differ so markedly from those worn upon the rest of Silistra, all not Parset are, to them, chaldless.

Occasionally I had seen Parsets at games or festivals. Once I had been, before I reached my majority and took up the Keepress’ robes in Astria, at Day-Keepers’ Rollcall, that greatest of gatherings held four times a year on the plains of Yardum-Or. With my teacher Rin diet Tron, first of the Slayers’ Seven of Astria, had I been there. I had seen a number of Parset jiasks, swaggering bold among the crowd, with their feather-plumed helmets, their tiasks beside them. At such gatherings they do their trading. They come to barter their woven rugs, their precious metals, their rare drugs. I was standing with Rin beneath the Slayers’ awning when a pelter from Galesh accidentally jostled a tiask woman in the crowd. Her mate turned, aired steel, and struck in one motion, and the pelter’s headless body took several steps before it fell and pumped out its lifeblood upon the grass. I remembered the fury in Rin’s face, how his hand grew white upon his sword hilt, and how he turned away. By the Day-Keepers’ edict, the Parsets had immunity. To the jiask, the pelter was nothing. He struck within his chaldra, as a Slayer might an outlaw in the forest, whom he had hunted for sport, or as a woman the wirragaet sucking blood from her arm. It was well past eighth bell, after evening meal, before Rin diet Tron, of the, Slayers’ Seven of Astria, had again spoken, had regained his good humor.

Occasionally I have seen a Parset man within the walls of Well Astria, there to partake in the normal fashion of the fruits of Silistran womanhood. But never has Astria been petitioned to admit a Parset woman, never have I heard of a Parset man so much as allowing one to compete in the Well testings. How they keep their birthrate at an acceptable level was a question much bandied about. I had seen a number of women, such as Celendra, Well-Keepress of Arlet, who had been sired upon wellwomen by Parsets. It is said among the well-women that the Parsets are the most potent of Silistran men, and that a woman couched by one is almost certain to conceive. Some maintain that this is because of the strong infusion of Gristasha blood in the Parset hide days. When the hide aniet was put into use at the time of crisis, when the Day-Keepers and the forereaders went underground to avoid annihilation, the hide aniet was only half-filled. Then did the Day-Keepers of aniet invite into the hide as many as could be accommodated of the fierce and primitive Gristashas, those anachronistic tribesmen who had kept their line pure from the very beginnings of Silistran prehistory. The Parsets bear strong and clear the Gristasha stamp, even do they still tattoo themselves, as did their ancestors before them.

Again the wind from the abyss blew chill about me as I lay beneath the full moon, though the evening was so warm that the air wavered and rippled in its heat. I did not welcome that cold, which upraised every hair upon me and caused my skin to pebble and crawl. No, I did not welcome the wind from the abyss, which had blown me from the keeps of Astria, whipped around me where I lay with Dellin in the Slayers’ camp, whistled through the halls of Arlet. The cold of it seeped deep inside me, chilling me as it had when it drove me forth into the Sabembe range. It keened in my ears as it had at the death of Tyith bast Sereth. It roared as it had roared beneath the Falls of Santha. Upon Mi’ysten I had been free from it. Until this day had I been free from it, and the evil portents of its fetid breath. Now again it blew around me, and my belly cramped into a knot so tight I drew my thighs up against my chest as the Parset came toward me, silver-gilded in the full-moon light, my father’s cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders.

Where I lay, upon my side, he squatted down by my head and reached out a hand toward me. Upon his chest I saw what I had not seen before, swinging from a heavy golden chain. As he raised me to a sitting position, it swung inches from my face, that palm-sized medallion upon which was worked the likeness of the uritheria, that mythical beast of the desert who is winged and scaled, clawed and horned, and from whose mouth came the fire that ignited the sun in the sky. Its jeweled eyes glittered in the moonlight, cruel, sentient. One of the other men had called this one Cahndor. Such is a title of respect among the Parsets. But this man was Cahndor in the word’s formal meaning—war chief of a Parset tribe, will of the sand, who held sworn death oaths from every man, woman, and child under his protection.

I swayed, dizzy, my weight against the arm that held me upright. His grip upon my shoulder tightened. His hand, horny against my skin, seemed exceedingly large. Black eyes, all pupil under bushy straight brows, examined me minutely, appraising, thoughtful. His other hand was at my belly, at my back, and my bonds fell away.

I rubbed my wrists, crossed my legs under me, felt him withdraw his support. My eyes were caught by his; I felt the insect in the webber’s snare, waiting, paralyzed. I looked away, at my wrists in my lap, at the rope print upon them.

“How is it with you, little crell?” he asked in Parset, slowly, distinctly. I could not place the dialect. He shifted hack on his heels. The silvered light played on his heavy-muscled thighs, upon his thick neck and corded arms. He was a large-boned thick-maned man, in his prime, massive but not clumsy. Tight-curled hair poked through the chain links about his neck, forested his chest, thinning as it approached his navel, where it fanned out on his flat belly, to disappear beneath a metal-studded breech. Over this was buckled his sword belt, which held the undulating Parset short sword, a small sheathed knife, and the coiled length of braided leather.

I did not answer, but only looked up at him.

“Hael, attend me!” he called, and that one came to join him, sitting cross-legged beside his master. Hael was of almost identical stamp, save that his skin seemed a trifle more black, his lips a bit fuller, his nose flatter above his full beard.

The one called Hael brought from his belt a tiny bladder, as small as my palm, and removed the stopper from it.

“This will strengthen you. Open your mouth,” he said. I was sorry that I had done so when the bitter, burning liquid hit my tongue It was fire inside me, and that fire slowly spread through my whole body, calling every artery, every vein, every capillary to my attention.