iron.
The sixth member of the group was a nonhuman, a hulking reptilian Shen, native to the hot lands south of Livyanu, half a continent away. He traded in the flame opals of Pan Chaka and in garnets, commodities which the Shen knew were valued by humans and other races, but which they themselves held in no particular esteem. Although the Shen was friendly enough, his guttural name was unpronounceable-something between a hiss and a snarl. Harsan made do with calling him “companion,” which seemed to please the creature greatly.
It was the afternoon of the seventh day before they saw Tumissa. Once the guardian of the western marches of the Tsolyani frontier, its ponderous bastions and serried battlements had seen no fighting since the two Protectorates, Do Chaka and Pan Chaka, had been wrested from Mu’ugalavya in the great war some three hundred years before. Harsan looked upon the looming rings of concentric walls inlaid with marching rows of serpentine glyphs in the old Classical Tsolyani script, the tier upon tier of red-tiled roofs, and the dizzy turrets of the prow-like fortress which crowned the city’s westernmost hill, and would have greatly liked to spend a few days here. Others in the monastery had had much praise for Tumissa: its goods and shops, its rich palaces and mansions, its great library of hoary fame, the image called “Thumis Ascending to the Sun,” carved long ago by Marya of Tsamra, and many other wonders. They had also spoken of entertainments and displays more to the tastes of a young man-and of pretty clan-girls and courtesans and a dozen things more. But Mnesun gruffly stated that the caravan would journey forth in the morning. Lodgings were arranged outside the walls in the clanhouse of the People of the White Pebble, a mercantile clan allied by both blood and marriage to Mnesun’s own Clan of the Green Reed.
When the party gathered at dawn in the cramped courtyard to curse and coax the caravan’s slaves into wakefulness, Harsan discovered that another small group had been added.. A score of bearers and servitors in an unfamiliar clan livery stood stamping and yawning around a blue-curtained covered litter.
“We are joined by a lady,” Mnesun announced to all within hearing, “one Eyil hiVriyen, of the Green Kirtle Clan of Tumissa, who is on her way to marry her clan-cousin in Bey Sti.”
There was no sign of the occupant of the litter, and thus it remained for a six-day. The party now took the Sakbe road which branched off directly to the east, an endless three-step staircase, the highest level of which faced north towards hostile, distant Yan Kor. The foothills were left behind, dust storms lay ever along the flat horizon, and heat lightning flickered there throughout the summer evenings. All of the visible world consisted of endless fields of standing grain, plots of yellow-brown earth, lone Wes-trees, olive-drab and drooping like lost wayfarers in the tawny yellow desolation, and occasional villages of baked brick, where naked dusty peasants lifted their heads from the perpetual round of toil to watch them pass by.
The lady made but few appearances. Harsan had occasional glimpses of a tall, boyishly slender girl, attired in the embroidered open vest and slit-sided skirt preferred by the women of the western provinces. The Lady Eyil did not come to sit by their fire in the evenings but instead sent her attendant, a grim-faced peasant woman named Tsatla, to get her dinner from the common cookpots.
It had gradually come to be understood that, as the only priest in the party, Harsan would offer the prescribed libation before each meal. This he did with care, choosing words that would give no offence to worshippers of other gods than his. One evening when supper was finished and his comrades had retired to drink wine and gamble or to seek sleep, the woman Tsatla came to Harsan and said that the Lady Eyil would speak with him.
The litter lay in darkness, one curtain thrown back all along one side, forming a little three-sided room. The ochre-red glow of Kashi, Tekumel’s smaller, second moon, turned the gilded orbs of the four comer-posts into ruddy copper coins. Two of Lady Eyil’s attendants dozed upon their haunches nearby, while a little farther away her bearers lay sprawled in shadowed huddles, asleep.
“Worthy priest?” The voice was low and musical, the accent the purring, slurred speech of Tumissa. “I have troubled you that I may ask a question.”
“My lady?”
“You are a servitor of Thumis and not of my Goddess Avanthe. Yet both are of the Lords of Stability. Advise me, therefore, upon a matter of propriety.” A silhouetted hand moved within the blackness of the litter. “I grow bored riding in this conveyence day after day. My limbs ache with its jouncing, and the heat within these curtains is enough to melt even the Shield of Vimuhla, Lord of Fire.” (Harsan thought: the woman is educated, as glib as any temple priestess.) She continued, “Now tell me this: is it fitting for me to join your circle for the morning and evening meals? I wish no dishonour to my clan nor inconvenience to your merchants, yet I do yearn for a chance to move about…”
Harsan hesitated. Some northern Chakan clans, he knew, guarded their womenfolk as zealously as any heap of gold in a treasure-vault, hemming them all about with veils and guards and eunuchs. Those of the south, on the other hand, paid — little heed when their ladies walked abroad bare-breasted and bold amongst strange men. Nor, it was said, did they care overmuch about the paternity of the inevitable results. Custom in Tumissa and the western cities lay somewhere betwixt these two extremes.
He temporised. “My Lady, this must depend upon the practice of one’s clan. While some see nothing amiss in allowing a clan-daughter to exercise her limbs on a long journey and to alleviate the tedium with conversation, others find such behaviour brazen and ill-omened. Surely the tradition of your clan is better known to you than to an outsider such as myself.”
“True, but in this matter I have little to guide me. At home we girls are granted considerable liberty. But this is the first time in my memory that one of us has been married outside Tumissa, and I recall no precedent.”
“What commandments, then, were given to your attendants by your father or clan-patriarchs when you set forth?”
“Why, to serve me, to protect me from harm, and to see me safe into the house of my clan-cousin, noble Retlan hiVriyen of Bey Sii.” There was a hint of what sounded like suppressed amusement in the girl’s voice.
Priestly dialectics came to Harsan’s aid. “If these are the precise words, then the first and last clauses have no application. The second injunction, too, is of little relevance. You are certainly ‘protected from harm’ by your clan’s travel contract with the merchant Mnesun. He and his colleagues will do all possible to honour their agreement, for to act otherwise would bring shame upon their clans; they would be open to a lawsuit and demands for Shamtla — money paid to satisfy a grievance or to compensate for a crime-would follow. None would trust them thereafter. Barring the untoward, thus, there is no question of ill befalling you in this company.”
“Then?”
“Ah-surely the needs of a healthy person for exercise and the desire for decorous and instructive conversation cannot be classified as ‘ill.’ ” Harsan knew not quite where this path led, but logic seemed to point in this direction.
“I see, I see. My thanks for having unriddled the matter so clearly, wise priest. Henceforth I shall join you for meals, and you shall enlighten me further in questions of ethics and theology, areas in which I lamentably lack instruction.”
The Lady Eyil clapped her hands, and Harsan had a fleeting glimpse of slender wrists encircled by golden bangles. One of the attendants rose-the woman Tsatla-and bowed Harsan back to his sleeping mat beside the greying coals of the cook-fire.
All night long he kept seeing images of lithe wrists, tapering fingers, and narrow gold bangles.
Thereafter the Lady Eyil graced their meals. Attired in a voluminous overcloak of blue Giidru- cloth, she sat demurely to one side of the circle, gruff and silent Tsatla ever just behind her. (As one of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers put it: “Like the demon Tusu’u, who hovers ever at the shoulder of the Goddess Dlamelish…”) Lady Eyil took little part in their conversations but listened with apparent interest to their recountings of profits and losses, goods and caravans, cities and peoples. She was unfailingly courteous, using the “you of perfect piety” to Harsan, as was fitting for a priest much more learned than he, and the “you of pleasant dealings” to the merchants, even including the Shen, upon whom such niceties may well have been lost. The thirty-four pronouns for “you” of the Tsolyani language made the maintenance of such social distinctions easy.
None could dispute that the Lady Eyil was a Tumissan. She had the heart-shaped face, pointed chin, wide and mobile mouth, and long, heavy-lashed eyes of the women of the west. She was as long-legged and lithe as Harsan himself, small-breasted, and perhaps a trifle narrow through the hips for Tsolyani tastes. Her mane of black hair often escaped the confines of her cloak, and she restrained it with a headband of blue, proclaiming her allegiance to the goddess Avanthe.
Day pursued day across the hot, fertile plains of the Tsolyani heartland. Harsan walked more and more
