Behind the noose, the sky was cloudless and hot and impervious, a hard azure blaze in the infinite distance. Suddenly, strangely, Tarl was transfixed by the vastness of the sky. He would end and it would continue. He had a sudden yearning to reach out and touch it, and this desire set his mind racing with confusion. The thought—How can the sky exist yet be impossible to touch?—drifted slowly through his mind like a mossy log rolling in a lazy river. He felt it would take a long time to think this thought to the end, and he did not have it, drat that noose. There was a shout in the Ganxen language, a man's head went into the rope, the wood swung away beneath him with a crash, he choked and struggled and fell silent, his feet dangling on the air. Tarl's exulted. He was so glad the scoundrels beside him were being hung that getting hung with them was a small price to pay for it. Still, it was not quite what one wanted, not quite what one was looking for. But what did it matter, anyway? What did anything matter, he dreamed, except things infinitely vast and strange, like that hard azure sky.
Three left before they hung him... two... one... and then, just as they untied his bonds and led him forward to the noose, there was a cry from somewhere, and the guards froze. They were on the docks of Ganx Gemen, and a broad pier, and several long docks were covered with crowds of people, and boys were swimming to have a better view of the spectacle; there were boatloads of spectators. In the midst of the pier were about a dozen tall men on black horses, dressed in black. One of these was rather elegant in his dress and bearing, his hands covered with rings full of gemstones, on his head a heavy crown of gold and black jade. This one dismounted, attracting all eyes. The people gazed at him with fear and adulation. His bearing was proud, posing, unnatural. Until that moment, Tarl had looked upon the spectators, despite their exotic, drab dress, their short statures and abject countenances and postures, as his betters, for they and honest and free men, he a bloodstained pirate. But when he saw how they admired on this strutting peacock of a king, he felt contempt. Let me alone with him for two minutes in honest combat and he’d beg for mercy, he thought, and almost spat.
But the expression on the king's face was strange to his subjects, and they began to seem disturbed and frightened. They were accustomed to see on their Varannian masters the hard, implacable, stern face of command, but now the king's face wore an expression of pain and bewilderment. There were further conversations in Ganxen, a soldier Tarl remembered from the battle was summoned and questioned right there on the dock, in front of the crowd, it all seemed to take a long time, and then the king made to him the bitter reproaches that were recounted in the last chapter, and Tarl was led away. Nothing was explained to him, but when he was led into the great black pyramidal temple and to a prison cell, he assumed that his execution had been, at least for the moment, postponed. Oddly, he felt indifferent to this, and his main preoccupation was to recover his thoughts about the sky behind the noose, which seemed important. The question "Why can't a man touch the sky?" floated into his mind as a clue, but an unhelpful one. Some mood or insight had come over him… a feeling of infinite distance… a feeling of nostalgia, as if he had for a moment remembered something old and sacred long since forgotten… He kept searching for that mood again, for a long time.
Many days passed. The bars of his cell window, which looked southward, cast shadows first on the left side of his cell, then the middle, then the right, as the sun moved from east to west. The window looked out onto an alley, and beyond that, the line of great, stately trees that surrounded the pyramid, and beyond that, a sprawling shantytown.
Behind the bars, not far off, there was a patch of grass under the trees, and every day, almost, a little girl, seemingly six or seven years old, came with a goat on a rope, to feed it on the grass. It reminded him of how, as a free man, he could never appreciate the superabundance of such simple things but had always been restless—always a fool. What delight he took in them now! How, after a rainstorm, the girl scolded the goat for stepping in mud puddles. How the girl laughed when the goat’s mealtime came and it wanted to play instead. Or when, for a moment, it stood on his hind legs. How the goat rubbed its head against her affectionately and she petted its head with maternal tenderness. Once, a Varannian horseman rode by, patrolling the temple perimeter, cracked a whip and shouted at her something in Ganxen. A line of blood appeared on her cheek where the whip had touched it, and her eyes welled up with tears. Tarl was seized with such rage that, had he a sword and freedom, he would have laid the city waste to avenge her. He clutched the bars so hard that he thought afterwards (but he may have been mistaken) that he had actually bent them.
The sword was his profession and his passion, and he watched with alarm as the calluses on his hands, earned through years of training and battle, reverted to soft flesh. Worse was his waning arm strength. His best techniques required extreme arm strength, without it he was no champion but just an ordinary fighter. But for footwork, which was even more important than thrust, parry, and stab, there was, fortunately, enough room in the cell to practice. The guard who brought him food once caught him at it, the strange obsessive back-and-forth and in-and-out and duck-and-turn of the prisoner, and guffawed at a grown man dancing with himself. Tarl laughed, too: the chuckle of contempt of the expert for the novice.
Tarl was a bad man, a man of dissipation and wrath, and he was glad, now, that prison walls protected him from his own senseless acts. Why was it so different the first time he was in prison? For then he had been desperate to escape. But then it was not just death that was at stake. They had wanted to sell him as a gladiator. He knew, as every Poynese does, that gladiatorial shows are wicked, and he feared to be an accomplice in the bloodthirsty amusements of the Tuvelain rabble.
He had been captured during a raid while he was a soldier of fortune working for Jaffsee Thor, the smuggler. It was a dispute about the opium trade, and one of Jaffsee’s patrons commissioned him to destroy the supplies held by a rival. Eight strong, they entered a fort by a back door opened by Jaffsee’s spy, set fire to the goods, heard the alarm raised, started to make their escape, saw armed men where they didn’t expect them to be yet, turned and ran the other way, were pursued. They were cut off. They managed to give their pursuers the slip for a moment. Jaffsee had a plan. "We can steal a boat and make our getaway—I have a key to the portcullis," he said, meaning the one at the boatyard. "You go to the back gate of the courtyard and fight for dear life. We'll open the gate behind you when the boat is ready. " He dashed off. Two minutes later Tarl with three fellows were fighting at the back gate. Ten minutes later they were still fighting, outnumbered some fifteen or twenty to three (with one down) now.
"Stop!" shouted a greybeard who appeared on the walls. "You can't win. Your friends have got away already. They're not coming back for you. Will you give yourselves up?" And so they became three prisoners, and soon the others were hung; he was left because he old man had seen him fight and decided he would fetch a good price as a gladiator.
What Tarl remembered most about that wretched little fort was the rotten smell and the buzzing of flies, and how they were all half-wits and sluggards. His chief jailer was a slave, a fourteen-year-old boy, rather too small and stupid for his years, and so negligent at his work that Tarl half expected him to fall asleep with the keys on his belt where Tarl could reach them. But he didn’t. Intsead, having no other choice, he set about trying to make the boy an accomplice in his escapoe. Tarl managed to make friends with the friendless boy, wheedling and cajoling him into talking about himself, trying to find a way to persuade him. The boy was loyal, Tarl learned, to his mother, also a slave. She had been sold by her own parents after a bad harvest, and she wanted to see her native village again, after twenty-five years. The three of us will run away together, said Tarl, and she will see it. But the boy was terribly, terribly fearful and irresolute. It was in those interminable, suppliant conversations that Tarl's mind was at last forced to learn the Tuvelain language well. Even when the plans were laid, the boy was always second-guessing and delaying until Tarl was almost out of his mind with impatience. "A gladiator dealer might come to town any day," Tarl kept telling him, "and you'll miss your chance. It will be useful to have a fighting man, a man who knows the world, with you." The strange thing was that while Tarl knew, with self-loathing, that he really wanted to be a gladiator, to find out whether he was really the best, to hear the crowds cheer. That made him even more desperate to escape.
The escape, when it finally came, was anticlimactic. The boy unlocked his cell and the three of them walked out, going by back ways, meeting no one. He returned that night, scaled the walls of the fort, and stole a bow and swords. He had charge of the old woman and the boy, and was determined to do his best for them, but how? The old woman had but one thought: home. As if either she thought the past twenty-five years would just melt away, or as if she had no thought but just to see one glimpse of her beloved village. "You can't just go back," Tarl said. "That's the first place they'll look. They'll send men after you, bounty hunters, men like me." At this her eyes swam with alarm, yet two minutes later she was saying again and again that she wanted to go home. They hid out in the swamp for a while, living off birds shot with Tarl's stolen bow. Tarl tried to persuade her to go somewhere else, and said he would look after them, earn gold and give it to them. A few days later he woke up to find them gone-- no doubt, "home." He thought she must have gotten caught. He wondered if they sold the boy as punishment.
Yes, that time he had been in desperate anxiety to escape, now these slow, silent days seemed no better or worse than any other fate. He wondered if the king had forgotten about him. Yet he had a weary premonition that he was on the threshold of a new adventure. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but think, remember. He was haunted by nightmare images of piracy, villages razed to the ground, old women weeping to see their sons and daughters led off into slavery. To escape that, he tried to reach into the deep past, hoping to find better memories to think about. It was all he had.
Tarl was born in the castle Zadimin, in the southern Marches. The Marches were tied to the kingdom of Poyn by an old bond with the House of Donbold. That hero of yore had federated with some castellans (those who have castles, lords, men of mark) of the Marches in a war long before he became king of Poyn, and three of their sons were his comrades when he challenged the black dragon of the cliff-caves of Nainar and fought him to the death. Later, when the quarreling nobles and people of Poyn, then but an overgrown fishing village, sought out the retired old hero in his mountain retreat, where he tended sheep, and asked him to make peace among them and rule over them, the castellans of the Marches heard that their bravest comrade-in-arms had become a king, and some of them sent messengers to Donbold and asked him to be first-among-equals of their order also. And so the Marches became vassal to the kings of Poyn, and had remained so ever since, though some of them preferred to conduct themselves like independent princes, and they had never ceased their endless feuding one against another.
The Marches were separated from the kingdom of Poyn proper by the Needle Mountains, so named because their peaks were sharp, high, and narrow like needles, but in between them were low passes, so that while the range marked a clear boundary and the beginning of a great change in the land itself, it was but a slight obstacle to travellers. The summit of one of the peaks, Mount Balmim, could be reached by horseback in a half day's ride, along a road that wound around and around its steep slopes and cliffs. From the summit, the outline of the social order of the Marches could be seen in outline, for all the Marches' twenty-four castles were visible.
Nearest was Galandel, with its nine stout towers and its four great walled courtyards and its palace complex, set in the heart of wine country, surrounded by great vineyards and olive orchards that rolled with the hills for miles roundabout. Its happy masters had great wealth from the land, and their sons treated war as a sport and married young, and their daughters danced and dressed in silk, and every evening wine flowed by carved fountains or in gazebos of vine-woven lattice, and the sounds of minstrels and merrymaking continued from sunset to midnight. Galandel's masters were ranked as counts among the Poynese nobility and considered the equals of the neighboring dukes and counts of Poyn proper, yet they did not disdain to be numbered among the castellans of the Marches, among whom they enjoyed pre-eminence. Ravensnest and Thorntree castles, northeast and southwest of Galandel, were also set just east of the Needle Mountains and cultivated the grape and the olive, yet their lords were little more than brigands.
The further east and south one travelled, the drier became the land, the fewer and lower the hills. Elm and sycamore gave way first to pine and scrub oak, then to grass and sagebrush, and finally to the great expanses of sand which, seen from Mount Balmim, seemed to change color with the weather and time of day. White-gold in full sunshine. Pink, orange, red at sunrise. Under stormclouds, a dull blue-grey. On the brightest days there would be mirages, and the desert would seem to be a sea. There were even times when all the Marchlands were covered with clouds and painted in dull, deep hues, but the sun fell on the desert sands and they seemed white, almost azure, and a brushstroke of haze blurred the horizon so that the desert seemed more a part of heaven than of earth.
In pine country, in the "black hills," loomed Vardmoor and Trastel and Mavemarn and several others, all strong siegeworthy stone structures, and also the eerily slender towers of Castle Twyln, and four or five others in the same kind of country in the far distance. Burrisbrer Castle was set amidst scrub oak, and when this turned red in November it seemed to be swimming in a sea of fire. Though the change in the land itself, from pine hills to grassland, was not sudden, yet there was a sharp difference between the nearer hill castles and the further plains castles, for the first kind seemed to grow of the hills and be at home in them, while the latter seemed like things alien, clinging to the land like the claws of a beast to its prey, pinning it down like stakes. Most of their walls were blackened by ancient siege fires. Zadimin Castle lay due south of Mount Balmim, black with sharp stabbing towers rising above the low walls, silhouetted against the desert, as small as a sliver at eighty miles' distance, yet ominous nonetheless.
Meanwhile, in the opposite direction, far to the northeast, rose the Uruit Mountains, whither passed the "Wolfpath," road to Poyn. This road, though broad and well-trodden, and passable in both winter and summer, was hard and high, over cold and windy mountain plateaus where the howls of wolves filled the night, and highwaymen rode in broad daylight. Yet it was possible, by crossing the Five Bridges and the Giants' Stepstones, to reach Poyn by land, which was not possible to do from the kingdom of Poyn proper.
The class system of the Marches had a simplicity that distinguished it from the more polished social order of Poyn, where it had to do with breeding and family and education and protocol and law and above all, manners and courtesy. In the Marches, a man was what he had. If he had a castle, he was a castellan. If he had a horse, he was horseman or hidalgo. If he had nothing, he was nothing, that is, he was a "digger," so called because they spent most of their time "digging" or ploughing-- digging to plant seeds, digging in the mines, digging to lay the foundations of buildings, especially of fortifications-- and also because no other class would, under any circumstances, lower themselves to this degrading kind of work. Castellans were the ruling caste, whose word was law. Castellans and hidalgos practiced a code of honor wherein any perceived insult or insolence could be avenged with death. It could be forgiven, too, but only if this could be done with a special tact or bravado to allay the suspicion of cowardice, otherwise a man's esteem might suffer.
Diggers were not admitted to this system of honor and were expected to submit to insults and physical abuse without complaint. Indeed, insulting diggers was one of the main forms of entertainment in the Marches. And while it was understood that diggers had no right to avenge their injured honor by a duel-- more precisely, they had no right to pretend that they had any honor to be injured-- a certain insolence was often tolerated and sometimes even rewarded. Tarl's father had once been in the company of a castellan who shouted at a digger that he was a "lazy, flea-bitten dog." Immediately, the man began barking, panting, scratching himself, and whimpering in such an astonishingly realistic imitation of a flea-bitten dog that the whole company was reduced to helpless laughter for two full minutes. Tips were given for the performance, and the “flea-bitten dog” earned enough money to buy a horse, and became a hidalgo. Alas, this meant that his extraordinary talents of mimickry were lost to the world forever, for no hidalgo would lower himself to such antics.
In Poyn proper, the peasant's labor was held to possess a certain dignity, and it was said that a man might even be proud that his family had been for several generations in the service of a great, noble house. The Marches could not conceive of this: to be a digger was to be abject. On the other hand, the diggers were free. If a castellan was too cruel and unjust, the diggers in his district could leave, which was not always easy for Poynese peasants. No one would stop them. Moreover, in most parts of the Marches, land itself was a free good, though of such poor quality that a man could scarcely survive by tilling it if he could find no other work. But there was always other work, thanks to the castellans' obsession with building fortifications, the need for grooms and washerwomen, for carving meat and churning butter and spinning and so forth. If they showed "spirit"-- light-hearted bravado, a sense of humor, a love of adventure-- they could easily be given a horse and become a hidalgo in the service of some castellan. It was true, too, that some diggers seemed strangely unbothered by their wretched lot. "New men" often appeared from over the mountains, runaways from debt or marriage or lovers of the wild or just dreamers, usually starting out as diggers. And some did make their fortunes.
The word "knight" was applied in a less disciplined manner in the Marches. All knights were hidalgos (or castellans); not all hidalgos were knights. The sons of the House of Galandel by custom became true knights, dubbed by the king with the oath "to protect widows and orphans, to tell no lie..." and so forth, but this was not typical. Most simply, the word "knight" simply meant a hidalgo who had a sword and preferred to make his living by it when he could, as opposed to hunting or herding cattle. Yet the word also suggested loyalty to Poyn's king and laws, and a preference for honor over money. More than that, it referred to Marchmen who had gone to serve in the kingdom proper and returned. In the past two generations many castellans-- especially second and third sons, who did not stand to inherit-- and hidalgos had found in the king's service a fine opportunity to put their warlike habits to use, and sometimes, too, a way to advance their personal fortunes and those of their families in the Marches themselves. Of Marchmen who had made their names serving the king, by far the greatest was Mardux himself, renouned Marshal of the Realm, son of a castellan of Mavemarn. When Medvelil had purged his father's corrupt campaign cronies, Mardux had remained unscathed, and he had a reputation for stainless honesty. The truth was that Mardux practiced a form of corruption that was invisible to the Poynese because it consisted in steering royal patronage towards the house of Mavemarn and its allies, and away from its enemies. This he had done so successfully that Mavemarn had risen to great influence in the Marches, second only to Galandel itself. But while "knights" who were native Marchmen still understood the clan wrangling of their country as Poyn could not, their reputation was for courage and fighting skill but a certain dullness when it came to intrigue.
Galandel excepted, the castellans of the Marches inhabited a harsh land and were a harsh race. In their cups, they could become sentimental, laughing at old feuds and weeping for dead enemies, calling living enemies "brother" and embracing them, bawling old songs and retelling old stories, upon which such a layer of romantic embellishments had fallen that the outline of the truth could no longer be discerned beneath it. In this mood, they would boast about their caste that "no man could call himself a castellan but the blood of the noble comrades of Donbold flowed pure in his veins, unsullied by thief, rogue, vagabond or villain." But that was only talk. In truth, the castellans respected nothing but power, and the "spirit"-- here the word meant physical courage, a proud bearing, and a habit of decision, mastery, and avenging insults-- which they thought was needed to wield it. The latest proof of this occurred just after Tarl's birth, at Castle Jalljanks, a day's ride to the north from Zadimin. A hunting accident, and a murderous quarrel over a hidalgo's woman, had in the space of a month felled the only two prime-age males of the ancient house of Jalljanks, leaving nothing but the too old and the too young. Jalljanks had let a family of stewards get too strong managing their affairs. Now this family had two middle-aged men, a paterfamilias and a widower, and six strong sons, and had married their womenfolk to most of the hamlet's richest hidalgos. For two years they tolerated the unbalanced situation, growing ever more insolent until they treated their nominal masters with open contempt. It was rumored that a fifteen-year-old daughter, oldest of the children of the House of Jalljanks, had been frightened by the leering eyes of the old widower on her, and had sent a desperate secret message to Galandel, or maybe Burrisbrer, begging them to rescue the family, who were now in effect prisoners in their own castle, from their tormentors. Alas, the message was intercepted, and the treason was punished. On what came to be called the "night of knives," the stewards murdered in their beds all the last dregs of the old castellans of Jalljanks, except the girl whom the old widower took for himself and, without any ceremony, began to call his "wife," and became the new castellans of Jalljanks. It was said that they did not even clean up the blood before they began to celebrate, drinking and shouting until they were so drunk they began to spill and smash bottles of wine, and that by the time the servants cleaned up the mess, the mingled blood and wine had stained the floors of the castle Jalljanks forever-- but perhaps that detail was an invention. The deed was greeted with horror, universally condemned and denounced, and there were rumors, first of war, then (after the castellans thought of Jalljanks' high bastions and the cost of a siege) of ostracism. But that blew over. What could one do? One could hardly deny that they were castellans, after all. That was just a fact. They had a castle, and "spirit." And so they inherited the feuds, and the friends, of the house of Jalljanks. Only Galandel refused, on principle, to give hospitality to the murderers, and one or two brothers-in-law of the old family held grudges.
And so the boy Tarl, ten years old, had been little surprised when, daydreaming, as was his custom, beneath the willow bushes in the creek, he overheard his brothers (or rather his half-brothers) talking.
"The apothecary said he has only a few days left to live," said the elder of his two brothers, a boy of nineteen, in a voice just above a whisper. From these words Tarl knew that they were talking about father, who was ill. For days and weeks there had been comings and goings of apothecaries and wise women and other special visitors, and a somber and scary aura had hung over Zadimin Castle.
"Is that what you brought me here to tell me?" said the younger, and stupider, of his two brothers, a boy of sixteen. "But we knew it wouldn't be long." Tarl had not known. No one told him anything.
"What will become of Zadimin Castle then?-- that is the question," said the elder brother.
"We'll be the heirs," the younger boy answered brightly, as if it were obvious.
"I'll be the heir, you mean," said the elder boy. "But I'm not so sure. No one has seen the will."
"If there is one."
"There may not be one, that's true, and that's fine. But I'm afraid it may turn out that there is one-- and that everything will go to Tarl."
"To Tarl? But he can't inherit. He's a bastard."
"No, he can inherit, because father eventually married his mother, which means that father can legitimize him in his will if he chooses to. At least that's what Brodin told me. He was a public notary in the kingdom." ("The kingdom," in the Marches, means the kingdom of Poyn proper.)
There was a pause. "Hmm. So he can inherit? But why would father do that?"
"Two reasons. First, Tarl’s mother might have made him do it secretly. He had such a passion for her that it gave her an unnatural power over him, you know. Second, he likes the boy. I've heard the servants say that Tarl is his favorite."
The younger boy thought. "It seems unlikely."
"But we can't take the risk."
"What do you mean? We should destroy the will?"
"We can't destroy the will if we don't know where it is. And anyway, he might ask for it and write another one if he can't find it. We have to destroy him. Kill him. You have to kill him."
There was a long pause. "Even if you're right that we have to kill him, and I'm not saying you are, why me? Why should I be the one to do it? It's your idea."
"First of all, because I'm the heir, I'll be more likely to be suspected, so it's more important for me to have an alibi. And since you've been away in Poyn for the last two years, they'll suspect you less. You don't know his habits, for one thing. But I'll tell you. Second... well, I'm going to be the castellan of Zadimin. You have to do what I say."
"You're not the castellan yet."
"But when I am, it will be up to me whether to let you stay or turn you out. Do this for me and I'll have you treated as equal in honor with myself."
Another pause. "But can we just kill him? Won't they discover us? They'll tell father, and he'll give the castle to Uncle Jastabar."
Uncle Jastabar, husband of one of the old castellan's sisters and third son of a castellan of Thorntree, had ridden to the deathbed of his brother-in-law in the hope, though not the expectation, of making his fortune. He was a brave, battle-hardened knight of forty-two, and if the old castellan wanted to have a strong successor who could protect his friends and settle old scores for him after he was gone, it was just possible that he might prefer Jastabar to his cunning but decadent eldest son. This is also why it mattered whether a bastard could inherit. There was no king's court or justice of the peace whose writ ran as far as Zadimin, but Poynese law could serve as a respectable pretext for action. If a will that left the estate to Tarl was clearly illegal, Jastabar might not risk trying to seize Zadimin Castle by pure right of conquest. But if he could represent the castellan's sons as illegally disinheriting their younger brother, the hidalgos, servants, and other dependents of Zadimin might support a usurper, either in Jastabar's own name or as a "regent" or "caretaker" in Tarl's name.
"Yes, we can't kill him while father is alive-- or at least, he can't be known to be dead before then. Nor can we kill him after the will has been found and read, for then he'll be the heir and too important to be left unguarded. And of course, we can't let it be known that we killed him. It has to happen just when father dies, and seem like an accident."
"It sounds difficult."
"No it's not. That fool boy is absolutely indifferent to his own safety. He wanders all day, no one knows where, out in the fields, along the creek, out to the knoll, along the road, even to the bluffs and the swamp. There are outlaws living in the bluffs. Maybe a half dozen. Some of them might kill him for food if they're desperate. Or to see what's in his pockets. Or grab him in hope of a ransom and then kill him when he tried to escape. A bear could get him. A wolf could get him. He swims, he could drown. He climbs rocks and trees. He could fall. You see what I mean?"
There was another pause. "It would take some pretty good staging to make it look like that."
"But it doesn't need to be very plausible. Remember, I'll be castellan. It's not as if I'll let the sheriff conduct an investigation." In the Marches, what few magistrates there were did the bidding of the local castellan. "Look, think it over. Think about the disgrace of losing Zadimin to our little bastard half-brother who can hardly even read. He doesn't like us, you can be sure of that." Tarl had never thought about whether he liked his brothers but he knew they did not like him. "He'll throw us out, we won't be castellans then. We'll be beggars on the road, for we can't dig. Can't you see that we don't have any choice?... Anyway, we can't let people notice that we're out here at the same time, they'll think we're plotting. You go in the front gate. I'll sneak in later, by the back way." And Tarl heard them go away.
It had been, until that conversation cast a shadow across it, one of those fresh, golden, glorious, everlasting days of which there seemed to have been so many in his boyhood, before his own folly made the cup of life bitter. Birdsongs waked him before sunrise, and he stole out of the locked castle, climbing down a stout vine that grew by the south tower, ran and leaped across the dew-strewn grass, exhilarated by the morning freshness, to the knoll where six old pines stood, dark and solemn, like ancient sages, and their dry needles had half covered the lichen-spangled rocks. He watched the turquoise sky fade to white on the horizon of the eastern desert, then the pink and orange splendors of dawn turned the clouds into fiery castles in the air. His heart thrilled with dreams of glory, and he grabbed a stick, representing a sword, and began doing battle with invisible armies of giants, ducking and turning and leaping and retreating and charging, until he found himself by the cattail part of the creek in the slanting sunshine of full morning, not knowing by what way he had come. It was late spring, and his heart, at one and the same moment, pined for the lost freshness of new beginnings, and rejoiced that each day was more lush than the last. He looked at the creek and resolved, as so many times before, to explore it a little further today than he had ever done, but changed his mind when he saw the "whirlpool"-- nothing dangerous, just a bit of deep water in lazy motion, with lilies in the shallow parts along its edges, and imagined it was fuller because of the rain of two nights ago, and waded, ducked, and dived, then rolled on his back deep underwater and saw the sun dimmed and distorted and quivering through the ripples above him. He saw a fish silhouetted against the sun as if it were a bird. But soon he began to be hungry. It was not the best time of year for foraging, but wild onions could be found, and there was one bush whose yellow, tasteless berries came early. He clambered over the rocks until he found it, took the berries by handfuls, then went to the place where the creek spread out and tumbled over rocks and willows grew in the water and there were islands, including the one with the silky grass, the best spot to lie on—where he heard his brothers talk.
After his brothers went away, he decided not to return to Zadimin Castle. He set out on the road, walking for hours, long after all the scenery had become strange. Then he turned back. It was not because of his hunger, which because of his fear he hardly noticed. It was the thought of his dying father. He felt that if his father was dying, he ought to be at his side. And he knew that his mother, three years dead, had loved him. Oh, she had hated him too, the heartless castellan, who, living for a few years in Poyn, a rich and handsome widower, had beguiled her into his lair, raped and ruined her, leaving her with child. And yet it was partly love, even if it was mostly revenge, which made her pursue him with such shameless and desperate tenacity that he fled from Poyn, then ride pregnant in winter over the mountain passes and two hundred miles of the wild Marches on a stolen horse and with stolen gold, to give birth to her son beneath his father's roof, forcing the old scoundrel to accept her as a de facto and finally as a de jure wife. She had bested, beaten, broken him, so that he was now only echoes of the man he had been. Tarl felt somehow that if father were dying, he had to take his mother's place, to hear the old man's last confession.
Milk-white moonshine lay upon the road as Tarl walked home that night, fearing every shadow, knowing that his brother might be lying in ambush to kill him. To bolster his courage, he picked up a stick again, to represent a sword, and sometimes beat the air, still imagining armies of giants, not his brother. But what good was a stick? His hands began to hunger then, and continued afterwards, to hold the hilt of a real sword. And the terror of that night did to him what all his daydreams of battle had never done. He made a resolution, he formed an obsession, to master the sword.
But there was no ambush that night. It occurred to him, much later, that the vigil he kept at his father's bed for the next few days was the safest place he could be. For his brothers could hardly kill him there. And he did hear his father's last confession, or the beginnings of it, but it went on long afterwards. For his father recovered, and lived another eleven years. He credited his recovery to Tarl's vigilance. Tarl became quite openly his favorite son now, almost his only friend and confidant. A brush with death had opened the old man's heart to him, and he would not shut it. Morning, noon, and night, the table was spread, olives and raisins and nuts and meat and bread, and wine, wine, wine, and on and on the old lecher poured out his sins, not caring who heard, but always speaking mainly to Tarl. The stories grew more and more explicit. Tarl, who had never been to Poyn, heard all the place-names of the city in a special light. He heard of the places where girls went to be seen, the places where the mood was romantic, the places where kisses could be stolen. Tarl, who had never touched a girl, had to hear their lips and tongues and necks and shoulders and hands and breasts and waists and legs described and compared, had to hear of how women flirted and inadvertently betrayed themselves, how they resisted a kiss and then yielded, how they moved and the sounds they made as their self-control melted away. Often he laughed. More often he cried, sometimes penitently, remembering a woman whom he had wronged, more often from the desolation of wanting to have it all over again and knowing that he never could. Tarl wondered at himself, for he knew he had physical courage, yet he lacked the moral courage to call a halt to this self-torture.
Worst of all were the reminiscences of Tarl's own mother. It was clear that she was still the queen of his heart, that he worshipped her in his own disgusting way, and he kept returning to the theme of his sins against her. Thus Tarl had the unnatural privilege of hearing the story of his own conception from both his parents. His mother had told him the terrible secret almost with her last breath, demanding from him a solemn oath never to do what his father had done. Though he was only seven at the time he never forgot it. Now he heard his father telling him just how it felt, cursing and abusing himself for his act and calling it shameful, but then suddenly changing tune and calling it "glorious" and even "holy." At this, Tarl became so sick with revulsion that he began shaking and lost conciousness, and his father apologized, yet he often brought up the theme afterwards, indirectly, as if he forgot how it tormented his son, or as if he simply could not control himself.
That Tarl found his father's company so oppressive gave him all the more reason to study the sword, for an hour training with the sword was an hour not at his father’s table. His father approved of his son's ambition to be a swordsman, and tried, without much success, to find instructors for him better than the local hidalgos, but Tarl was mostly self-taught. His next stratagem to escape his father's table at first encountered a veto, but he refused to accept it, and finally had his way. At seventeen, he became a bounty hunter, riding out for weeks across the desert in search of rogues and runaways. Bounty hunting was beneath the knights of Poyn, who were supposed to go on quests for the sake of justice, not money, but the castellans regarded it as honorable.
What a strange place the desert was! You could lose yourself in it because of the sheer sameness of the sand in every direction, though the sand could also take many different shapes, depending on the latest wind. You had to rely on the sun, moon, and stars to guide you. A landscape that looked empty and dead by day would, under the moon and stars, turn deliciously magical and mysterious. Sometimes Tarl was caught in sandstorms, and covered his own and his horse's heads so to protect them from choking in the sand that filled the air, listening to the road and rattle of the storm, and watching the sand climb his horse's legs. One time, though, he had sheltered from a sandstorm by a wall, and took the risk of looking up. He saw the sun shining through the thick sand, could look straight at it for it was dimmed and reddened by the sand, which made it seem weary and old.
That was in the ruined city of Jemari, the strangest of all places in the desert. It was not even a ruined city so much as an abandoned one. Seventy years ago it was the queen of the desert, the leader of a federation of cities that ran the great spice trade. Built on an oasis, it had to be frugal with water to sustain a substantial population, but in every other respect it was wealthy beyond imagining. What did they not gild or stud with diamonds or carve or decorate with tapestries! And still the villas and temples and trading arcades stood, still the domes and turrets and arches of the palace rose out of the desert like a mirage, inhabited now only by ghosts, and assorted desperadoes. Running risks, but not so foolish as to leave his horse, Tarl led it through the halls and beheld the fantastic patterns on the ceilings, and sang an old Jemarin song and heard it echo. Once upon a time, there was so much gold in Jemari that the local pink sweet melon, which grew nowhere else but in the desert oases, and which was considered a delicacy, was bought and sold for two hundred guilders, as much as a Poynese workman could earn in two years. Now they grew like weeds in the empty city, and Tarl would pick them, cut a hole and drain into his mouth the viscous juice, wild-fresh and silky-sweet, and then cut them open and savor the soft spongy flesh. A war and a plague had done their part in ruining Jemari, but mainly, the spice trade had changed courses, going first to the river and later to the distant ocean, and the cities of the desert were no more needed. There had even been a Jemarin speech, to Poynese ears only just intelligible with its strange lisping consonants and singsong rhythms, which had first been a humble, clumsy dialect, born of the intermingling nations in the markets and along the spice trade routes, then learned by children as a mother tongue, then made into an instrument of princes, brought by poets and orators to the highest perfection of beauty and eloquence, studied by the ambitious for hundreds of miles roundabout. Now it lingered only in songs, and in the brothels where it was spoken to create an atmosphere of mystery and romance, to evoke seductive memories of a lost paradise. Bounties often hid in the ruins of Jemari. Tarl hunted the refugees, among the ghosts.
After a few successful bounties, and some unsuccessful ones, after witnessing a suicide upon his approach, after two strangely intimate rides home, sharing a horse with a bound and frightened captive—the ravings of one of Tarl’s captives, driven half-mad after a few days in Jemari, convinced Tarl that the ghost stories about Jemari might be true—Tarl grew bored with chasing runaway servants and pickpockets, and joined a posse led by Jad Nezirbane to hunt down the famous outlaw, Gammon Brole, and his six highwaymen, who rode south after a company of knights smoked them out of their lair on along the Wolfpath. It was the first time he had been part of a company of armed men, and he felt the exhilaration of it, the camaraderie, the shared strength. Four of them were sons of castellans, the others their hidalgos, Nezirbane himself the third son of the castellan of Nezirbane, also hard by the desert but well north of Zadimin. Around the campfire the banter was deceptively casual: boasting; joking mutual insults; tales of exploits in battle and in bed; practical talk of where to ride and how to fight; plans for what they would do with the bounty money. But there was danger in it. One night, a young hidalgo carelessly mentioned a fact that Tarl had not known and about which Jad Nezirbane had probably been deliberately silent: one of Tarl's dead uncles, it seemed, had killed a man from the Nezirbane clan during the Strongbow rebellion, treacherously according to the Nezirbane account. That meant there was an outstanding blood feud between their houses. As a castellan's son, Tarl should have known this, but he had been lazy in mastering the intricate web of blood feuds that bound together the castellan clans. He pretended unsurprise. Now that it was in the open, it had to be dealt with, somehow. For a long time, Jad and Tarl stared at each other, each preparing the tone of nonchalance with which he must answer the other's challenge. Then, suddenly, Jad burst into a great laugh, held out his hand, and said, "What quarrel is that of ours?" and Tarl shook it, and peace was restored, for the moment. But the tension lingered, and the rides and campfires thereafter became awkward and comfortless.
It was in the fight with Gammon Brole that Tarl first had that strange experience to which he later gave the private name the glory. There were times when he fought with consummate skill, when all his training found its fulfillment in his motions and reactions and decisions, when he couldn't have planned it better. There were other times—the glory—when he did not know what he was doing yet did things better than he could ever have planned or thought of, and looked back with wonder later, trying to see how he did them, doubting if he could be the same man who did them. After days of tracking they saw the outlaws ahead, seven strong, in light armor, with bows and swords. The outlaws saw them too and they all began to gallop. Tarl drove his horse into the lead of the others and, at the same time, started putting arrows to his bowstring. While he had never met his match as a swordsman, as an archer he was merely good, not the best. Yet that day his first arrow knocked off an outlaw's hat, and his second hit the leader, Gammon Brole himself, in the back, an amazing feat from horseback, full gallop, at fifty yards' distance. Stunned, the outlaws stopped, and then saw the posse bearing down on them. It was too late to ride. They faced the oncoming posse, loosing a storm of arrows, and one hit Tarl in the shoulder, yet it neither stopped nor slowed him. Next thing he knew, he was alone among the outlaws, swords flashed and clattered and ripped the air but somehow could not touch him, and he slew one outlaw, then, as the posse caught up with him and joined the fight, plunged his sword into Brole himself. Two of the outlaws tried to make their getaway then-- one took an arrow in the back and the other, Tarl learned later, was tracked for days and got away-- three were dead, and two surrendered. Except for Tarl, the posse was unscathed. There were cheers and smiles and whoops of joy, the men embraced each other and leaped and danced with excitement.
And now the moment for Jad Nezirbane's revenge had come. The terms of the bounty were that the whole posse would be paid, but the man who killed Gammon Brole would get a triple bounty. He began by making significant glances at all the men in the posse.
"So who killed Gammon Brole?" he asked.
There was a pause. Then someone said, "You did, sir."
"You did, sir," said another.
"You killed him, sir. Well done."
"It was you who did it."
And so said everyone but Tarl.
"Is it unanimous?" asked Nezirbane, with a cold stare at Tarl.
Tarl's triumph was turned to ashes. He struggled to hide his fury, to think. What could he do? To claim another's deed for oneself might be a compliment of sorts, but to force him declare the lie himself was a degradation worse than any insult, it was to make him a slave. If Nezirbane could do this to Zadimin, it would never acknowledge Zadimin as an equal again. Should he challenge Jad to a fight to the death here and now, then? But how well could he fight with an arrow in his shoulder? And even if he won, what then? Zadimin was ill-prepared to renew the blood feud with Nezirbane right now. His brothers were good at intrigue but worthless in a fight, he had shown promise but was only nineteen, his father was past his prime, their hidalgos were all right but they would be reluctant to ride without a strong leader. And his wound! Any of the posse could have treated it well enough to avert danger, but now they wouldn't, unless he bowed to Nezirbane's blackmail. Untreated, it could kill him.
"Oh, sure, yeah, definitely," said Tarl, mounting his horse. "I mean, if you're hard up, you can tell the bounty commissioner anything you want." Tarl pulled out both of his swords and gazed at them for a moment with an expression of admiration and wonder on his face. "It's amazing what these things can do, isn't it? Well, we've done what we came for, boys, and thanks to you all, you were a great help there for a minute at the end. I think you killed almost half of them. I'll find my own way back. Good luck boys!" He turned, smiled back at them, waved, even blew them a kiss and bowed comically in the saddle, grinned, then rode away into the setting sun.
It was the blackest moment of his life. It was without hope of living that he made his exit from the posse. He would die in the desert, but he had not made Zadimin the slaves of Nezirbane, and he had not renewed the blood feud. Yet as soon as the posse were out of sight a sad, wild, desperate hunger to live filled him, even though he felt that everyone in the whole, treacherous world hated him. He urged the horse on, then blamed himself for cruelty to the already exhausted animal. What friend had he in the world but this? No, there was one other: above him, the great silver orb of the moon, which, though beautiful, had before always seemed to him lonely, cold and aloof, now seemed like a friend, lighting his way through the desert, urging him on, guiding him. Against these two friends, he had two enemies. First was the evil arrow, cutting and scraping inside him as the horse moved his body, straight and grim and malevolent. Second was the pain, not one pain but a great rainbow of pains, dull and stabbing and gnawing and stinging and throbbing, gradually spreading, appearing in unexpected places, head, hands, abdomen, even his feet, each one a fresh riddle. His mind tried to interpret and explain them, seeking danger signals and remedies, even as the pain made thinking excruciatingly difficult. He knew he might lose consciousness, fall from the horse, and die. He felt, too, the beginnings of what he thought was delirium, though it took the form, not of seeing things that are not, as of disbelieving in the existence of things that are. There was no Zadimin Castle. There was no pine knoll and no creek, no Poyn, no wine and raisins on his father’s table. They were only dreams that he had believed in before he met this thing so much more real, the pain. There was the moon, but it would set; the horse, but its strength was ebbing; while the arrow was inexorable, and the pain was swelling into omnipotence. That was all there was in this world of sand that stretched on forever, blank and silent except where it whispered and crunched beneath the horse’s hooves. His friends, the horse and the moon, could not really help him against his enemies, the arrow and the pain. Yet how he loved them! He began to kiss the horse’s neck, weeping, and whispering in its ears, “I love you, I love you, I’ll always love you. Only you have ever loved me. I wish all men were horses.”
And then the land began to change. He saw tufts of grass amidst the sand. He saw a low, scrub cedar. His inner battle intensified, he clung to consciousness. He focused on fixed points: his hand gripping the saddle; his feet in the stirrups; the grass on the ground… but that made him yearn to lie down in it. And he began to think about lying down, about grass growing around him, above him, and he realized he was thinking about death, and he wanted to resist it, but could not. And then, to his amazement, without his bidding, the horse broke into a gallop. How was it possible? How did she have strength? But she knew, somehow, that Zadimin was close, and her master in mortal danger, and she ran, the ground falling away beneath the galloping hooves. And now, as the moon dimmed and the sun rose, and the towers of Zadimin were before him, and the horse whinnied loudly, and there were voices, and as he let go of himself, he heard the scream of their old washerwoman, who had taken him for dead.
