He told her.
"But you cannot mean that the tales are true?"
"That is just what I do mean, Kiri."
"But G.o.daigo-"
"The rikkagin was not at Tencho this morning."
Her head twisted so that she could see him more fully. "What has Sa"s death to do with tales of beings that are not men fighting our soldiers in the north? My men have already dispatched the murderers."
"Murderers?" Ronin said thickly. "Who?"
"Why, the last men with her, of course, but-"
"Kiri, she was not killed by men."
He felt her quiver and the skin along her arms was raised in gooseflesh. It might have been the strengthening wind.
"How could you know that?"
"Because," he said, "I have fought the creature that killed her. It destroyed a friend of mine in precisely the same manner."
He felt her pull away from him. "I cannot believe that; just as I cannot believe that the war is anything but what it has always been from a time long before you or I were born."
"Still, I ask you to aid me with the Council. I cannot see them without your a.s.sistance.""Why do you believe that the Council can aid you?"
"Tuolin told me of the Council."
A cloud pa.s.sed across her face, fleeting. She shrugged. "I cannot think why he did. The Council will be of little-"
Ronin gripped her shoulders.
"Kiri, I must see them!"
"There is no other way?"
"None."
She tousled his hair. "All right, my warrior. Tomorrow you will be within the Council chambers."
He drew her to him and kissed her hard, feeling her melt as her sinuous body began to writhe slowly against him. The unbound forest of her hair lifted in the wind, a tremulous bridge between their coiling muscles. The lamp sputtered and went out.
She reached under a pillow and her hand lifted, a signpost, long and white and slender, the nails as black as dried blood in the almost-light. Between thumb and forefinger a small black shape, between forefinger and middle finger, its mate. She put thumb and forefinger to her lips, inhaled, then reached out, the arm extending to him, her lips calling, calling in the werevoice of the sea bird flying lonely above the tossing waves. Fingers against his lips. A cold sensation.
"Eat this."
And after he had opened his mouth, "Do you trust me?"
But it was rhetorical and he felt no desire to reply.
The warmth suffused him, friction like a satin glove stroking yellow ivory.
Again and again her open lips, wet and shiny, spoke a kind of litany of sound and motion and form. Words were a distant concept, dim and unremembered, discarded within a far-off cave of bright light and animal smells.
The wind died and the air grew calm, ceasing its dancing. The darkness of night hung like a black velvet curtain, containing them. The atmosphere paused between breaths and he hung suspended, listening to the lapping of the waves, as clear and powerful as thunderclaps, rushing against his eardrums in time with the throbbing of his body.
And his body changed, filled now with a delicious warmth, a s.e.xual ecstasy suffusing his feet, climbing upward through his legs and groin and torso and into his brain, and in that moment the strength of Kiri"s body moving against his became an exquisite physical sensation. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and the visions in the theater of his mind became one while he was made aware of them as totally discrete inputs, savoring them independently and simultaneously, time stretching out before him like a new-found joyous friend, endless and concurrent. A conduit.
He plowed the heaving seas at the prow of a mighty ship filled with warriors benton revenge, the feeling a taste at the back of the mouth, sweet and hot. He climbed the curving neck of the high prow, carved into the sinuous head of a dragon, brandished a long sword, screamed at the wind. He was the ship, feeling the heavy water washing over his flanks, his bow cleaving the seas, sending shivering spume into the bright air, leaving white spray in his wake. Man and vessel, he was both and more.
He plunged into the sea, yellow and turgid, and felt his legs grasp the slick scaly coils. He reached down and triumphantly brought the head up, ineffably exquisite, Kiri"s deep violet eyes, dark as the depths of the sea, platinum flecks like schools of flying fish, with soft seaweed hair and a face as white as snow. The coils writhed beneath him and he rode the Lamiae from out of the shallows of the Sha"angh"sei sea, past the creaming reefs, teeming with life, and out, away, away, on the great westerly currents, into the deep.
It was then that the cold terror came, a dread presence, and he was swept up like an animal in the vortex of a whirlwind. And for the first time he knew its name. From his core, which beat like an incandescent stone and which remained unmoving in the flux caused by that which he had eaten, came the sound: The Dolman. His entire being opened now and attuned, he felt it drawing near. And it was devastation; it was annihilation. A suprahuman observer, he saw the cinder of the world, blasted and lifeless, blown through the fabric of s.p.a.ce by a firestorm of incalculable power. The terror gripped him in its fierce claw and he felt his chest contract until all the air was forced from his burning lungs. He struggled against the coming, feeling helpless.
Hearing what he could not comprehend. Thee, howled The Dolman, the universe trembling. Thee. Thee!
He screamed and came off the bed, stumbling, crashing into the wall. The shutters shivered. He was drenched with sweat. Or sea water.
Kiri came after him, lovely and naked, ivory and charcoal, crouching beside him.
"It"s all right," she said softly, mistaking his reaction. "I had forgotten that you are not used to the smoke; this was much more. I had thought to give you only pleasure."
He put his arms around her, felt the whip of the chill night wind racing in from the water. He looked out at the black sky and willed himself to breathe deeply, oxygenating his body.
"No, no, Kiri," he said, his voice thin and strained. I felt it, more than seeing.
Whatever you gave me created a-connection of some kind. I felt-The Dolman is close, very close." His voice was now a metallic whisper in the rising notes of the wind.
"And it comes for me."
She would not let them rest and he felt the rising terror within her, as deep as anundug wellspring, although he was calm now, the intensity still with him but a sh.e.l.l forming, replacing the aftershock that allowed normal thought.
They dressed and went out into the narrow shiny streets. It was the time of night when the moon was down and dawn had not yet begun to pull upon the last thread of darkness. It had begun to rain and the air was heavy with an acrid active smell.
They raced the downpour to the patiently waiting carriage and the kubaru took off at his steady rocking pace, across the marshy delta of the port and into the black back recesses of Sha"angh"sei.
Lightning wreathed the sky like the twisting branches of a great ancient tree and peals of thunder echoing off the buildings" walls caused the runner to break his stride now and then.
By the storm"s pale flickering light he watched the lovely profile, the eyes pools of shadow, the cheekbones whitely limned, emphasizing the face"s strength and sweep.
They were in what looked to be the most ancient section of the city now, traveling down narrow unpaved streets, earth churned to mud by the rain and the fleet pa.s.sage of the kubaru"s soles, slap-slap, slap-slap, black water splashing in a bow wave, presaging their progress.
Small houses of board and reed grew here as if from the soil itself, dilapidated yet with a peculiar sorrowful dignity that was impossible to define. Perhaps it was merely the congruence of meager dwelling to its surroundings that was sufficient to impart this feeling to him. Nevertheless, he understood without being told that he was seeing Sha"angh"sei as it must have been before the Canton priests and the round-eyed rikkagin had come to the land.
The ricksha halted unbidden before the towering columns of a stone temple, squat and thick, its face slick now with rain, cracked and half covered with climbing plants.
They went into the narrow street, following the kubaru through double doors of bamboo bound in black iron. He took them through a crowd of kubaru who milled about the entranceway and who, Ronin suspected, would turn away those who they did not wish to enter.
The gray stone floor, the arching stone walls, caught murmurings and mutterings, echoing them along their length and height like the desultory flame of a guttering candle. This temple had a completely different feel than the one Ronin had come upon in the midst of his wanderings.
"What is this place?" Ronin whispered.
Kiri turned her face toward his and he saw that she had produced a plum-colored silk scarf from somewhere and had wrapped this around her head as if she did not wish to be recognized, though who here would possibly know her he had no idea.
"Kay-Iro De," she said, using a word that was of the ancient tongue of the Sha"angh"sei people and which had no ready translation into modern speech. It meant variously sea-song, jade-serpent, and she-who-is-without-members, and it perhaps had more meanings of which no one spoke."I have told you that tonight is the culmination of the Festival of the Lamiae," she said softly, her violet eyes shining. "Yet tonight is more. Every seventh year on the last night of the festival comes the Seercus of Sha"angh"sei." A simian-faced woman wrapped in a green cloak, a hairless man by her side gathering in the taels, her clandestine whisperings.
It appeared now that the temple was immense as they followed their kubaru down a narrow, windowless hall that seemed endless. The dank stone walls, beaded with cold moisture, echoed their footsteps. At regular intervals, stone arches were built into the pa.s.sageway and from their apexes were hung iron braziers casting a dim, fitful light. At length they reached a wide stairway down which they descended. He noted with some curiosity that the hall seemed to have no other egress at this end.
They went carefully downward, their way lit now by flaring torches set into scorched metal sconces, encrusted with the detritus of the ages. Fifty steps and then a landing, peopled by kubaru who scrutinized all who pa.s.sed. Down and down they went with the air becoming increasingly humid and chill, the stairs slick with moisture and slime, until he gave up counting the number of landings.
The atmosphere was thick with salt and phosphorus and sulphur by the time they reached the last landing and pa.s.sed through the guard of the kubaru there. The runner motioned silently to them and they stooped, half crawling through a cramped pa.s.sageway, utterly dark, rough-cut from the living rock. Small creatures skittered past their feet in the wetness.
The tunnel gave onto a vast grotto lit by immense guttering torches, crackling and smoky in the damp air. Great natural columns of stone, flecked and streaked with minerals winking metallically in the light, rose up from the craggy floor into the dark reaches of the unseen ceiling.
There were so many people crowding the cavern that at first Ronin did not see that which actually dominated the place. Then, in some unfathomable shifting, the throng parted momentarily and he saw the pool.
He stepped closer, mesmerized. It was an immense oval stripped out of the floor of the cavern by some cataclysmic upheaval eons ago and the water that filled it was of the most remarkable color he had ever seen. Not a trace of blue or brown could be seen in its shifting depths, yet surely no water could exist without at least a hint of these shades.
Yet the water into which he now gazed was the most extraordinary green, halfway between a forest of firs in deep summer and the translucence of the most exquisite jade. Its depth seemed limitless. Surely it led to the vast ocean beyond Sha"angh"sei"s sh.o.r.es.
He thought again of the simian-faced woman and her hissed words, the Seercus, her inflection imparting to them a mysteriousness that Ronin had supposed was merely a part of her pitch. Now he found himself at the Seercus and he wondered.
Kubaru continually poured into the grotto from several low apertures in the walls similar to the one they had used. Almond-eyed, black shining hair pulled back intolong queues, wearing loose suits of dark cotton and coa.r.s.e silk. He felt that he was, at last, viewing the true Sha"angh"sei, naked in the arena of Kay-Iro De on this most sacred of nights. They were free now of the immense burden of the fields and of the war, of intruder and of time. The betrayals were held for this moment suspended.
Ten thousand years had fallen away like so much dead skin to reveal-what? Soon the answer.
He heard chanting, far off and aloft, and the dimness gave grudging way to warm yellow light as the priests entered the grotto from some hidden doorway, carrying before them immense lanterns constructed from the whole skins of giant fish, dried, blown, and lacquered to stiffness. Various pigments had been used to cleverly reproduce and enhance the original aspect, heighten the character of each creature.
The priests wore swirling cloaks of sea-green which left their strong arms bare.
They were long-skulled and yellow-skinned, hairless and quite young.
They set the fish lamps down in prescribed places and now he could see that towering over the pool, on the far sh.o.r.e, was a statue. It was of solid gold, carved most cunningly in the shape of an enormous dragon, its thick coils entwined about a regal throne of gold. But where he had expected a female head to be was carved a skull of semi-canine structure, with long grinning muzzle, sharp-toothed and flaring-nostriled above which large round eyes of sea-green jade sparked in the brighter light.
Kiri gripped his hand in hers and her breathing was heavy as she stared at the priests.
All were a.s.sembled now and kubaru were stationed at each entrance, he supposed to discourage intruders though in all the crowd he had not seen any glint of weaponry save his own.
One of the priests now gave a signal and incense was thrown into a wide bra.s.s brazier. Clouds of yellow steam rose into the black mists of the grotto and spices came to him on the moist air. A young boy appeared leading an animal that Ronin could not readily identify; perhaps it was a young boar. Squealing, the animal was laid out upon a stained stone slab and the chanting began again from the priests and this time it was echoed by the a.s.sembled: "Kay-Iro De. Kay-Iro De."
One of the priests reached inside his cloak and produced a knife with a hilt of yellow crystal. Lifting it high over his head, he spoke in the ancient tongue, words that neither Ronin nor, he suspected, Kiri could understand. Yet the meaning seemed clear and Ronin was not surprised when the gleaming blade flashed downward in a shallow arc and pierced the flesh of the animal. Hot blood spurted from the severed artery, spattering the robes of the priests. Dropping the knife, the priest reached his hand into the still trembling interior of the animal and pulled out the warm heart. This he tied with coa.r.s.e thongs to the knife and cast it into the center of the sea pool while his fellow priests set about collecting the blood of the animal in a glazed yellow bowl. With the splash a kind of sighing went up from the mult.i.tude and the chanting began again.The priests marched silently around the perimeter of the pool toward the golden dragon on the far side and, laying the bowl of blood at the foot of the throne, each in turn bent to dip his hands into the crimson liquid. One by one, then, they climbed the huge throne and daubed the blood onto the eyes of the dragon until it dripped down the muzzle, into the mouth, staining the teeth darkly and thence from the points into the deep green waters.
Now they returned and with them was a young girl in a white robe with silver fish embroidered on it. He felt Kiri against him now, warm and trembling, as they brought the girl before the mult.i.tude. She was white-faced and beautiful, tall and shapely with black almond eyes and dark hair that came down to her b.u.t.tocks. She seemed very young.
Ceremoniously, the priests washed their hands and, at another signal, more incense was thrown into the braziers so that now a green cloud rose into the thick air. Ronin felt then the heat of the throng and the denseness of the atmosphere and he was obliged to take deeper breaths to get sufficient oxygen.
Their hands still wet, the priests donned masks of papier-mache that caused them to take on the appearance of articulated fish, scales gleaming, gills starkly delineated, round eyes staring unblinkingly. Slowly, they moved in a semicircle around the young girl and the chanting from the throng took on volume and urgency. With infinite slowness their hands lifted and unwound the robe from the girl.
Naked she was breath-taking, with wide hips and heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s and firm thighs. In that electric instant, the priests" robes fell away and she collapsed to the floor of the grotto.
The chanting was all but a roar now and Ronin strained along with the others to see clearly as the priests followed the descent of the girl to the cavern"s floor. For many moments the rhythmic movements of the muscular bodies moved to the cadence of the chanting, "Kay-Iro De, Kay-Iro De," and when the priests had finished they rose as one and servants of the temple clothed them once again and removed their fish masks. The girl lay whitely, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaving like waves upon an agitated sea, fists clenched between her legs. Kiri moaned softly next to him.
Up from a small side pool was drawn a flapping sea creature of some kind, black and sleek and gleaming. It was surely not a fish, for when the priests slew it, this time with a knife of purest green jade, the thing bled red blood as an air-breathing animal would. Again the priests caught the blood in a bowl and with it drew near the p.r.o.ne girl once more.
They grasped her arms and lifted her until she was standing, cradling her as they forced her head back and made her drink the warm blood. Choking and gagging, she drank and when it was all gone they took her to the far side of the sea pool and thrust her roughly upward onto the golden throne, so that her legs entwined with the metallic coils. She clung weakly to the dragon"s slippery hide, her head hanging so that the face was concealed by the black forest of her tossed hair. And in no time her body convulsed and she vomited the red liquid so that it drenched the fierce head of the statue.She shuddered and her grip upon the thing loosened and the priests" arms were retreating and, like the sticky spume that now dripped from the fanged mouth of the golden dragon, she slid inexorably from its slippery embrace into the cool green waters of the sea pool, into the bloodstained salt sea.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd and the chanting began once more from the mouths of the priests, "Kay-Iro De, Kay-Iro De."
The girl thrashed in the water, choking, seemingly not able to swim. Her head disappeared, then she surfaced again, mouth open in a silent scream, and with a thrash, descended into the depths.
At that moment the waters of the pool appeared to swirl as if subject to a swiftly pa.s.sing current, fierce and unnatural, and the air above the water seemed to shimmer as if from some terrible heat.
Tension strung the crowd like an incipient thunderstorm and they seemed caught between an urge to press forward and an instinctive feat to pull back. As a result, they milled about chaotically as the chanting of the priests rose to the howl of a tornado, the rock walls of the grotto hurling the sounds back upon their ears.
"Kay-Iro De. Kay-Iro De."
And now, though he could scarcely believe his eyes, a whirlpool was forming in the center of the sea pool and abruptly the green waters darkened. Emerald mists rose from the pool"s sides and salt foam fountained from its core.
"Kay-Iro De. Kay-Iro De."
And the fountaining presaged the presence of something from deep within the sea.
He saw the ill-defined shape, black and monstrous, through the imperfect lens of the water, staining the pool with its bulk.
"Kay-Iro De. Kay-Iro De."
And now it broke the water"s surface, a reluctant, elastic barrier, into the molten atmosphere of the cavern, heavy with incense and freshly spilled blood, hot with the body warmth of the frenzied people. Foam flying from the tangled seaweed of its hair, black almond eyes huge and baleful.
"Kay-Iro De. Kay-Iro De."
Oh, surely not, thought Ronin. The black eyes within the human head surveyed the throng, the body arching upward so that within the green foam and white spray of its thrust could be seen thick, sinuous coils, scaly, encrusted with algae and yellow barnacles. And within those twisting coils, a glimpse of a white broken torso, slim legs.
With a crash like the collapse of a building, the thing shot straight down, merely a ripple, dark and remote now beneath the waves clapping at the sea pool"s edges.
And then nothing, only the trembling of the water, limpid and deep green once again.
For an instant, all sound ceased, and had it not been for the tiny slap-slap of the diminishing wavelets, Ronin might have believed that time itself had stopped.Kiri, shuddering, gripped his arm.
"Look," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "Look."
And his eyes lifted to the far side of the pool, at the immobile dragon. There, instead of the canine head darkly dripping blood, was the golden head of an exquisite woman with almond eyes carved of sea-green jade.
When he awoke, the sun was already past its zenith. He lay quite still for a moment, watching the bright whips of sunlight rippling like molten lead across the floor, listening to the close sounds of singing, hoa.r.s.e shouts, the frenetic slap of jogging feet, the creaking of ships being outfitted, the metallic grate and the splash as a ship weighed anchor.