“You know what you’re getting when you wed a Firvulag bride.” Medor heaved a maudlin sigh. “Virgins! Every last toothsome morsel! And faithful to you forever, once they finally open that adorable vagina dentata. If only my little Andamathe was here . . . You brought your wife, Sharn. It was damned unfair of you to make the rest of us leave our mates behind! Spoils the whole Loving! Pass the sweetbreads grand due.”
“I’m the Queen,” Ayfa said. “I had to come. And the rest of you are supposed to keep your wits about you. This is a mission into the Foe’s territory—deadly serious business. You can exercise your damn gonads on your own time.”
“So we’re to try for Aiken Drum again tonight, then,” said young Fafnor Ice-Jaws. “I presume that we put on costumes and mingle.”
“Not too enthusiastically,”warned the Queen, her dark eyes twinkling. “The Tanu ladies have no teeth where it counts, but rumor has it that when they’ve finished with a man, his filberts are nothing but rattling husks. Don’t be tempted, lad.”
“The Goddess forbid!” said the young ogre, all in a huff.
“We must track Aiken wherever he goes and make our strike right at the magic moment,” Sharn said. “All twelve of us.”
“He’ll be after that young coercer wench, Olone,” Medor said shrewdly. “Her shameless flaunting of herself before the King of the May is the talk of all the Tanu gossips. Pass the ortolans en brochette.”
The King seized the silver dish and slammed it down out of Medor’s reach. “Dammit—will you think of something besides food? No wonder we haven’t been able to work up a decent mind-meld! All the blood deserted our brains for our digestive tracts from the moment we set foot in Goriah!”
“Medor’s in need of distraction,” Old Betularn had a wicked smirk. “And not just because his wife’s in Nionel Guess who we saw at a special table off in a quiet comer of the feast-garden, dining on invalid’s slop with his blood-brother, the Interrogator? None other than Medor’s Grand Combat antagonist, Kuhal Earthshaker! The one we thought was surely dead.”
“Té’s toenails!” exclaimed the King. “That’s bad news Kuhal tied you in the Heroic Encounters, Medor, and his PK talent is—”
“Nil,” the ogrish champion said, grinning around a half-masticated songbird. “His twin, Fian, died and Kuhal is a basket case. He still spends most of the day in Skin. I guess Aiken forced the Afaliah contingent to tote him up here to participate in the rump coronation on the third day of the Loving. Kuhal is a High Tabler, you know. But about as much threat to us as a newborn dik-dik. Pass the poached marrow and the salmon mayonnaise.”
Mimee of Famorel made a face. “Your liver wilt take a month to recuperate.”
“So what?” Medor said. “The war’s not scheduled to start until fall.”
“Silence!” hissed Sharn. His demonic aspect came upon him, the guise of a three-meter albino scorpion with glowing internal organs. His mind dealt a savage correction to the imprudent Medor, who tumbled from his seat onto the grass, pained and shocked and splattered with mayonnaise. Sharn’s body returned to normal. He regarded the Gnomish Council with a bleak expression. “No one knows the day the Nightfall War begins. Not I. Not you. You will never speak of it among yourselves. Never think of it! Do you understand?”
“Yes, High King,” said the others. Over by the table of the King and Queen of May, a kind of fireworks display of fountaining Roman-candle lights had started. It signaled the end of the Moonlight Feast and the imminent beginning of the Night of Secret Love.
“Now get your fancy-dress outfits and sober up,” said Sharn. “Ayfa and I will meet you at the base of the maypole in an hour.”
“You look . . . ridiculous,” said Kuhal. “But in character.”
Culluket shrugged. “I judged it a droll choice of disguise.”
His expression behind the death’s-head mask was perfectly clear to his brother. In light of the idiotic charade taking place out on the dancing ground. Cull’s mocking smile was understandable; but excitement?
“You do surprise me, Interrogator. I had thought you well beyond the simpler styles of concupiscence.”
“Even so. But tonight is a special occasion.”
Death folded his black-clad arms with their painted bones and surveyed the scene. The ball music was becoming more frenzied in its eroticism and the dancers more madcap and abandoned. The young, who scarcely needed the artificial stimulus anyway, were already pairing off and slipping away through the trees in the direction of the Trysting Grounds. Even those traditional Tanu who had entered reluctantly into the masquerade seemed about to surrender to the Dionysian atmosphere. Surely that capering wanton disguised as a purple moth was none other than the venerable Morna-Ia. And the stout, cloaked figure sporting a panther’s head, shamelessly cavorting with a willowy charmer on each arm, bore a suspicious likeness to the Craftsmaster. Aiken Drum was out in the middle of things, of course, dressed inevitably in the particolored outfit of a medieval Jester. He wore a mask with an obscenely long nose, which seemed to have a libido all its own.
“And on the day after tomorrow,” Kuhal observed, “we will acclaim him King! Goddess forgive us. And you have been among his chief supporters, Redactive Brother. You, an elder of the Host! I have the excuse of brain-wreck, at least. But you, for all your quirks of temperament, are a paragon of glacial rationality. Yet you calmly accept this human mountebank— even serve him! It was well known that you and Nodonn were estranged; but that you should pledge fealty to a Lowlife . . . it negates all that the Host of Nontusvel stood for.”
Death laughed. “Who remains of our vaunted Host? Fifteen meager-powered brothers and sisters under Celo’s protection, most of whom survived because they were wounded in the Combat and shipped off to Redactor House to get them out of the way. I myself. And you.”
Kuhal turned away. His gaunt features tightened. An unbidden image rose in his memory, easily perceptible to the Interrogator. “And me Half a mind. Half a man. Widowed and crippled in the same bereavement. Deprived of a love no singleton could ever understand!” The vehemence of his bitterness made him falter, grown suddenly gray-faced. Culluket took his brother by the arm and led him back to his cushioned seat near the clipped hedge, beyond the sight of the revelers. Kuhal sank down, accepted a small tumbler with some medicinal tisane, and sipped at it until the strong herbs took effect. He ventured a wan smile “I almost envy your poor sweethearts their embrace with Death, Brother! Be sure to choose young ones, if you can lure them away from that priapic jackanapes. The young are less likely to know the melancholy history of your nine wives and thirty luckless mistresses.”
“I have my lover already selected,” Culluket said. “And she knows.”
“Go away, then,” said Kuhal Earthshaker. “I can rest here as well as anyplace. In the morning, Boduragol and the other Afaliah redactors will tend to me. Enjoy your Night of Secret Love, Brother!”
Death nodded, raised one skeletal hand, and slipped away to the masquerade.
Sullivan-Tonn danced with his betrothed, the beautiful young coercer Olone, knowing with sick certainty what black impulse from his own subconscious had made him choose the antelope mask with the spiral horns.
“You can’t go with him! I forbid it. Your father gave me his most solemn promise!”
Olone was a vision in a cloak of floating white petals and a tall flowered headdress. Her tiny half-mask was gold, the top margin all decorated with jeweled stamens. She looked down at her elderly fiancé with a smite that blended amusement and contempt.
“Father is dead. And anyway, a King’s wishes overrule those of a city-lord.”
“Olone! My darling child. My untouched flower! I’ll spirit you away—”
She felt the tightening embrace of his great psychokinesis. But all that was needed was a single coercive thrust, and he was crushed and weeping behind his silly antelope head, and they whirled over the soft grass and the music throbbed.
“Father pledged me to you without my co
nsent when I was nothing but a child. You should be grateful that I still agreed to accept a human.”
“No psychokinetic can match my powers!” Sullivan-Tonn blustered.
“Except him. And you’re not such a prize. You’re much too dumpy, and you’re terribly old for one who’s only ninety-six, and I think it was craven of you not to fight at Finiah.”
“Don t talk like that’ I love you so much!”
“Oh, twaddle.” She was guiding the two of them closer and closer to the center of the dancing-ground, where the Fool and his Lady were spinning and soaring. “I know why you want a virgin. Don’t think I can’t read those terrible books you were showing the Interrogator just because the words aren’t Standard English! Do you think we Tanu are incapable of using a Sony Translator? La nouvelle Justine, indeed! You try just one of those Lowlife tricks on me after we’re married, and I’ll coerce you to jelly!”
“My darling, I’d never—”
“Oh, be quiet!”
Most of those couples still on the dancing-ground now gathered about Aiken and Mercy. The Lady of Goriah was scarcely disguised at all, wearing a simple black domino and the Celtic costume that had been her choice for passing through the time-gate. The music had slowed to a languid three-quarter time. The jester and the Irish princess danced at arm’s length. His face was hidden not only by the ludicrous long-nosed mask, but also by a mental curtain. Her lips were colorless, curved in a knowing smile.
The dance ended and they bowed to one another. A new melody began, jagged, eerie, impossible to dance to. The ball was over and the couples hurried toward the shadows.
Olone slipped out of Sullivan’s arms and rushed to Aiken. “My King!” she said breathlessly, and curtseyed to the ground.
The Fool snapped the fingers of both hands and came leaping at her. She rose, dissolving in giggles, to be met by the relentless caress of the nose.
Helpless, Sullivan saw them run away. Mercy was almost alone now in the midst of the great bowl of lawn. The musicians, all human, had slipped into the climactic bars of “La Valse.” Sullivan shivered in premonition. A spectral figure that had been waiting under the plane trees came into the moonlight and beckoned Mercy went to him slowly, then rose on tiptoe and kissed Death’s fleshless mouth.
“Everybody ready?” whispered Sharn.
“Ready,” said Ayfa and the ten ogres.
They meshed minds and flung the bolt.
Olone’s eyes were like stars “Oh, Aiken. I never knew it would be like that.”
The trickster looked slightly puzzled. “I think I surpassed myself! Maybe there’s something to this maypole magic after all!”
Unlike the Firvulag weddings, those of the Tanu took place in broad daylight, beneath the noon sun of May Day. The nuptial pairs, led by Aiken-Lugonn and Mercy-Rosmar, circled around the great golden maypole to a stately processional chorus, climaxed by the Song. The brides and grooms wore gowns or robes of their own heraldic colors, and over them mantles of white. The brides had chaplets of white lilies and the grooms wreaths of male fern. Mercy’s sole innovation in the ancient ceremony had been the inclusion of spigs of rosemary in the nuptial crowns. “It’s a plant used to bless weddings from time immemorial on Elder Earth,” she had explained, “and it’s also my own plant: rosemary of Rosmar. Rosemary for remembrance . . .”
She remembered another wedding.
It had taken place in the middle of last June—not a mass celebration as this was, but a more intimate one, with only the courtiers and the people of Goriah in attendance. She had not worn the blue-green of the Creator’s Guild (she had not yet been initiated) but the rose and gold of her daemon lover. If he had lived, they would have reaffirmed their vow today, leading not the parade of newlyweds but the later procession in the ceremony of renewal.
Nodonn! she cried on his intimate mode. No one heard. Not the solemn little man beside her in his gold-and-black robes, not Eadnar and Alberonn, who walked directly behind them in the place of honor, not any one of the other one hundred and sixty-seven Tanu and gold-torc human couples who followed in measured figures traced around the golden shaft. They danced holding the strings of flowers that depended from the maypole’s tip, weaving the ribbons ever tighter until the betrothed came all together in a tight circle facing the pole, dropped the streamers, and kissed in the final pledge.
Raising her tear-glinting face from Aiken’s, Mercy-Rosmar Lady Creator held out both hands and exerted her metapsychic powers. In a soft miracle, the air filled with a fragrant tempest of tiny white blossoms that swirled about the kissing couples, settled in their hair, spilled from the nuptial cloaks to form perfumed windrows on the emerald dancing ground.
“Sionshal!” cried all the witnesses “Slonshal! Slonshal!”
Then, with ritual finally over, the Grove of May swarmed with thousands of rama servitors and human waiters, all wearing Aiken’s gold-and-black livery. The couples and the throng of guests reclined on shaded grass and partook of a picnic feast, this time with dishes and potations selected for their alleged aphrodisiac effect. There were strolling entertainers, and as evening descended, a great deal of ribald minstrelsy, A gorgeous and sensual ballet served for a final prelude to the love-making.
(By then the Firvulag had gone back to their own encampment, where Sharn and Ayfa and the Gnomish Council gathered around the fire, chaste and furious, and got blind drunk. Culluket kept a farseeing eye on the Foe all that night; but the mossy grottos that Mercy had so carefully prepared went completely unused.)
When the May moon rode high, the Tanu and human couples once again paired off—but more decorously than on the previous night. They came to their bowers and their couches hidden among the shrubs and found them heaped with fresh flower petals. The newlyweds spread their white cloaks, and the old married folk managed in their old familiar way, and even the casual and the desperate found sweet solace in the nightingale-haunted forest.
After everyone else had gone, Aiken and Mercy went to the maypole. They joined hands around the tapering column of gold and began to circle.
“Now you are mine,” he told her.
“But whose are you?” she retorted, breaking into wild laughter as the triumphant grin faded from his face.
His only answer was to crush her hands and dance faster. The maypole was now free of its flowery cords and jutted like some monstrous pylon toward the starry zenith. Its sleek hardness separated them as they left the ground and spiraled upward. They had lost their bridal crowns, but the white cloaks billowed, seeming to become larger and more enveloping, and then form a rotating fluidity like a ring of rising cloud. Mercy tilted her head from side to side as they went faster and faster. The night was a spinning blur except for his golliwog face and her laughing one and always the golden shaft between.
They spun above the apex, wrapped in the moonglow bubble that the capes had become. She felt she would die with the fear of him and the desire, and his eyes were two black bores and he was no longer a little man but enormous. And there was a great golden maypole that brought a great golden light and warmth beyond measure, beyond the Sun, even beyond Death.
“But whose are you?” she heard herself repeat, long after. And then. “No one’s. Poor Shining One.”
But by that time he was gone, and it was dawn. and time to get ready for the coronation.
Traditionally, the Grand Loving climaxed with the gentle deposition of the erstwhile King and Queen of May, after which the loyal Tanu subjects renewed their oath of fealty to the legitimate sovereign. This year, however, things were going to be different. Everyone knew it; the Many-Colored Land had been alive with the news ever since the successful conclusion of Aiken’s progress. There were those who rejoiced and those who despaired and even a few who trusted that the Goddess would intervene at the last minute to solve what had become a grievously untidy state of affairs.
On the morning of May second, Lady Morna-Ia sent out her farspoken summons, and by noon the Conclave of Tanu had assembled
in the grassy bowl of the festival ground. More than 6000 of them were in attendance, perhaps two-thirds of the total number left alive after the Flood. The Fervulag guests were there, too, clustered in a sullen knot, all wearing their obsidian armor and deeply hung-over. At the fringes of the exotic gathering was a mighty mob of humans that spread out into the parkland surrounding the amphitheatre—perhaps 15,000 silver-torcs, grays, and barenecks who had come not only from Goriah and its satellite plantations and mining villages, but also from as far away as Rocilan and Sasaran, expressly invited by the usurper to witness his hour of glory.
The dais had been cleared of its Maytide decorations. The flower-decked thrones were gone and in their place stood two unfamiliar chairs of unadorned black marble.
A single note sounded from a glass carnyx. The crowd fell silent, watching the dais, and abruptly Elizabeth was there. The minds and voices gave an involuntary cry of astonishment. Elizabeth wore Brede’s great black-and-red headdress and costume, and held the glass chain of silence high in her hands. A wave of thought rolled out from her, calming the anxious Tanu minds, reminding them who had given her this role.
And then Aiken was there beside her, wearing his gold-lustre armor. His head was bare.
“Choose freely,” said Elizabeth. “Will you have him as your king?”
The reply was quiet, numb, inevitable. “We will.”
“The Tanu kings have no tradition of coronation.” said the Shipspouse’s successor, “just as they have no tradition of peaceful accession to the throne. For your race, a monarch has always been a battle-champion, his only crown a warrior’s helmet. But this king has asked for a new symbol, and so I give it to him.”