Clinging to the ro-uke, I fought to clear my sight.
Without warning, the nerishi-qa struck—a blow so fierce that it seemed to stun my own heart. His fist flashed forward with all his qa behind it. Under its force, the cloth of the young man’s robe sprang to tatters across his chest, torn thread from thread.
And yet the shin-te did not flinch. His skin had not been touched.
His arms remained wide in sacrifice.
With great care, as though he had found himself on the edge of a precipice, the nerishi-qa stepped back, rising from his stance. After a moment, he snorted under his breath.
“Look at me,” he instructed his opponent.
Obediently the young master opened his eyes.
“You are indeed willing to die,” the White Lords’ champion observed between his teeth.
Lowering his arms, the shin-te shrugged. “Your skill surpasses mine,” he repeated. “Yet my life is my own.”
The nerishi-qa snorted again. “The shin-te are fools to challenge us.”
For the first time in my experience of him, the young master smiled. “So I believe.” Years lifted from his face in an instant. Without transition, he resembled a boy, innocent and unbereaved. “We learn nothing from each other.”
As if at a great distance, I heard Isla sigh, “Well said. Well done.”
The nerishi-qa did not smile in turn. Scowling around his swollen eye, he left the center of the ring to stand before the White Lords on their mounts.
“The contest is ended,” he informed them. The authority of his tone allowed no contradiction. “The shin-te has proven himself against me. I am forced to acknowledge defeat.”
Hearing him, I buried my face against the shoulder of the ro-uke to conceal my tears. The nerishi-qa had studied honor in such depth that I was humbled by it.
Yet I looked up again at once, for the White Lords had raised their voices in a cry as cruel as the clamor of a storm. From within their bright robes, they summoned their power, and thunderclaps answered, rolling among the foothills and over the meadow, gathering fire. Called from the clear sky, lightning hammered downward. Isla, the ro-uke, and I were knocked from our feet, horses were scattered, soldiers and warriors were tossed to the ground.
In the center of the ring, the blast scorched wildflowers and grasses to char—and the young master with them.
But his death was not defeat. The White Lords who struck him down had already ceased to exist.
_______
We did not, however. Instead we stood in the chamber where we had left Argoyne, the three of us, shin-te, mashu-te, and nahia. The Black Archemage was not present. In his place we found three goblets brimming with wine, enough food to satisfy us twice over, and the rich silence of peace.
Like our struggles in the meadow, the Mage War had ended.
My shoulder had been healed, although it still held the low ache of remembered poison. Isla’s lesser hurts had been made whole. And the young master stood intact before us, restored by a Dark Lord’s magery. He had shed his sorrow in fire, and his eyes smiled when his mouth did not.
His memory also had been restored, but he neglected to tell us his name. Perhaps he thought that we already knew it.
Smiling, he raised his goblet to thank us for the part we had played in his victory. “While I live,” he told us with the earnest sincerity of youth, “I am in your debt.”
I bowed to answer him. “As we are in yours.” I was foolishly pleased with myself, and cared not what I said.
Isla also bowed. She smiled as well. Yet the expression in her eyes revealed the trouble in her heart. After a moment, she protested, “But we didn’t do anything.”
The young man laughed—a happy sound which suited him well. “I also did nothing,” he assured her.
Perhaps for that reason shin-te was called the Art of Acceptance.
But her concern was not relieved. With some severity, she observed, “You took a great risk. That blow—” She shuddered, despite her training. “Your heart would have burst.”
He nodded gravely. “I believed that I would die.” Then he added, “But that was a small matter. I was already beaten. Yet when you spoke my own words to me—one of the mashu-te—a student of the Direct Fist—I heard them in a new way. They became”—he rolled his smiling gaze at the ceiling—“how shall I say it? They became simple. Despair is the killing stroke. There is no other.” Lightly he shrugged. “My hazard was no greater than yours.”
That was true. If their champion had killed the shin-te, the White Lords would no doubt have slain both Isla and me, for the help we had given Argoyne.
We lived only because the young man had stepped beyond the circle of his own comprehension.
Still Isla had not named what was in her heart. Instead she asked, “What will become of Vesselege now?”
The wine seemed quick to intoxicate me. I, too, laughed. “Argoyne and the White Lords will endure each other until the contest between them takes another form. Then they will resume their struggle. As for the rule of Vesselege— Sovereigns are easily replaced. Perhaps the new King will profit from Goris Miniter’s example.” I drank more wine so that I would not laugh again. “I would advise him to make peace with both the White Lords and the Dark while he can.”
“And what will you do?” Isla inquired of the shin-te.
He did not hesitate. “I have learned a precious truth. I must teach it.”
She looked to me. “And you, Asper?”
I met her gaze across the rim of my goblet, concealing my mirth. “First I will drink. Then I will sleep. And when I have recovered, I will dedicate myself to the study of dangerous assumptions. There is power in them, which the nahia have neglected.”
She fell silent, frowning to herself.
Seeing her unease, I returned her question to her. “What are your intentions, Isla? The wine is excellent, we are whole, and the sun shines on Vesselege. What disturbs you?”
With an effort, she revealed her thoughts. “I’ve come to doubt the teaching of the mashu-te,” she admitted unhappily. “If nerishi-qa is a false Art, then so are the others. I’ll have to leave my home to study among the shin-te.”
I stared at her. The idea of turning away from the nahia had never occurred to me. Her scruples—her need for the purity of her beliefs—surpassed me.
“Do not,” the young master urged at once. “The shin-te are indeed fools to challenge the nerishi-qa. My Art is as false as any.”
“And as true,” I murmured.
That challenge had been rightly spurned by the nerishi-qa. It resembled the hostility of the White Lords toward Black Argoyne. In the meadow surrounded by enemies, however, the young shin-te had learned his own wisdom.
After a time, Isla nodded.
When she had let her concern go, I sighed my relief, and drank again. In all my life, I had never been farther from despair.
What we were could not endure without honor. And the price of honor was death, in one form or another. I thought of the young man’s acceptance of death—of Isla’s willingness to sacrifice her life—of the nerishi-qa’s surrender to defeat. I thought of the hazards I had faced.
Argoyne had said, It’s always easy to trust warriors. That’s why they’re called “the Fatal Arts.” I believed now that I had begun to understand him.
The Kings of Tarshish Shall Bring Gifts
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.
[The dreamer is] the privileged person to w
hom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
—ISAK DINESEN, OUT OF AFRICA
I have often wondered why there are tyrants, and I have come to the conclusion it is because some men remember their dreams. For what do we know of dreams? What is the truest thing to be said of them? Surely it is that we forget them. And therefore it is also sure that this forgetting must have a purpose. Hungers are conceived in dreams in order to be forgotten, so that the dreamer and his life may go on without them. That is why most men remember nothing—except the sensation of having dreamed.
But men who do not forget are doomed.
Such a man was Prince Akhmet, the only son of the Caliph of Arbin, His Serene Goodness Abdul dar-El Haj.
After a reign enviable in every respect except the birth of male offspring, in his declining years His Serene Goodness at last produced an heir. This, as may be imagined, was a great relief to the Caliph’s wives, as well as a great joy to the Caliph himself. Thus it is easily understood that from the first young Akhmet was coddled and pampered and indulged as though he came among us directly from the gods. In later years, during the Prince’s own brief reign, men looked to his childhood as an explanation for his tyrannies. After all, Arbin had no tradition of tyranny. His Serene Goodness Abdul dar-El Haj, like his father before him, and his father’s father, was a man in whom strength exercised itself in the service of benevolence. Some explanation was needed to account for Prince Akhmet’s failure to follow the path of his sires.
But I do not believe that a childhood of indulgence and gratification suffices to explain the Prince. For with his pampering and coddling young Akhmet also received example. The Caliph was demonstrably benign in all his dealings. Therefore he was much beloved. And the Prince’s mother was the sweetest of all the Caliph’s sweet young wives. Surely Akhmet tasted no gall at her breast, felt none at his father’s hand.
His Serene Goodness Abdul dar-El Haj, however, remembered none of his dreams. His son, on the other hand—
Ah, Prince Akhmet remembered everything.
This was not, of course, a salient feature of his childhood. For him, in fact, childhood was what dreams are for other men—something to be forgotten. But his ability to remember his dreams was first remarked soon after the first down appeared on his cheeks, and he began to make his first experiments among the odalisques in his father’s harem.
That is always an exciting time for young men, a time of sweat at night and fever in daylight, a time when many things are desired and few of them are clearly understood. It is, however, a strangely safe time—a time when attention to the appetites of the loins consumes or blinds or transmutes all other passions. Men of that age must think about matters of the flesh, and if the flesh is not satisfied they are rarely able to think about anything else. So it was only after he had more than once awakened in the bed of a beautiful girl about whom he had believed he dreamed, thus at once deflating and familiarizing such visions, that his true dreams began their rise to his notice, like the red carp rising among the lilies to bread crumbs on the surface of his father’s ornamental pools.
“I had the most wonderful dream,” he announced to the girl with whom he had slept. “The most wonderful dream.”
“Tell me about it, my lord,” she replied, not because she had a particular interest in dreams, but because his pleasure was her fortune. In truth, she already knew how to be enjoyed in ways which had astonished him. But she was also prepared to give him the simple satisfaction of being listened to.
He sat up in her bed, the sheets falling from the graceful beauty of his young limbs. His features were still pale with sleep, but his eyes shone, and they did not regard his companion.
“I can see it now,” he murmured distantly. “I can see it all. It was of a place where there are no men.”
“No men?” the girl asked with a smile, “or no people?” Her fingertips traced his thigh to the place where her notion of manhood resided.
The Prince heard her question, but he did not appear to feel her touch. “No people,” he answered. “A place where there are no people, but only things of beauty.”
The girl might have said again, “No people?” with a pout, thinking herself a thing of beauty. But perhaps she knew that if she had done so he would not have heeded her. All his attention was upon his dream.
“The place was a low valley,” he said, showing the angle of the slopes with his hands, “its sides covered by rich greensward on which the early dew glistened, as bright in the sunshine as a sweep of stars. Down the vale-bottom ran a stream of water so clean and crystal that it appeared as liquid light, dancing and swirling over its black rocks and white sand. Above the greensward stood fruit trees, apple and peach and cherry, all in blossom, with their flowers like music in the sun, and their trunks wrapped in sweet shade. The air was luminous and utterly deep, transformed from the unfathomable purple of night by the warmth of the sun.
“The peace of the place was complete,” murmured young Akhmet, “and I would have been content with it as it was, happy to gaze upon it while the dream remained in my mind. But it was not done. For when I gazed upon the running trance of the stream, I saw that the dance of the light was full of the dance of small fish, and as my eyes fell upon the fish I saw that while they danced they became flowers, flowers more lovely than lilies, brighter than japonica, and the flowers floated in profusion away along the water.
“Then I gazed from those blooms to the flowers of the trees, and they, too, changed. Upon the trees, the flowers appeared to be music, but in moments they became birds, and the birds were music indeed, their flights like arcs of melody, their bodies formed to the shape of their song. And the shade among the tree trunks also changed. From the sweet dark emerged rare beasts, lions and jacols, nilgai deer with fawns among them, oryx, fabled mandrill. And the peace of the beasts, too, was complete, so that they brought no fear with them. Instead, they gleamed as the greensward and the stream gleamed, and when the lions shook their manes they scattered droplets of water, which became chrysoprase and diamonds among the grass. The fawns of the nilgai wore a sheen of finest silver, and from their mouths the mandrill let fall rubies of enough purity to ransom a world.
“I remember it all.” A sadness came over the Prince, a sadness which both touched and pleased the girl. “I would have been content if the dream had never ended.
“Why are there no such places in the world?”
His sadness brought him back to her. “Because we do not need them,” she replied softly. “We have our own joys and contentments.” Then she drew him to her. She was, after all, only a girl, ignorant of many things. She took pleasure in the new urgency with which he renewed his acquaintance with her flesh, and saw no peril in it.
But I must not judge her harshly. No one saw any peril in it. I saw none in it myself, and I see peril everywhere. When he came later into the cushion-bestrewn chamber of his father’s court, interrupting the business of Arbin with a young and indulged man’s heedlessness in order to describe his dream again for the benefit of the Caliph and his advisers, none of those old men took it amiss.
His Serene Goodness, of course, took nothing that his beloved son did amiss. The sun shone for his son alone, and all that his son did was good. And he was entranced by the Prince’s dream, full as it was with things which he had himself experienced, but could not remember. The truth was that the Caliph was not an especially imaginative ruler. Common sense and common sympathy were his province. For new ideas, unexpected solutions, unforeseen possibilities, he relied upon his advisers. Therefore he listened to young Akhmet’s recitation as if in telling his dream the Prince accomplished something wondrous. And he cozied the sadness which followed the telling as if Akhmet had indeed suffered a loss.
With the Caliph’s example before them, Abdul dar-El Haj’s advisers could hardly have responded otherwise themselves. Each in his own way, all of us valued our suzerain. In addition, we were accustomed to the indulgence which surrounded the
Prince. And lastly we enjoyed the dream itself—at least in the telling.
We listened to it reclining, as was the custom in Abdul dar-El Haj’s court. His Serene Goodness was nothing if not corpulent, and liked his ease. He faced all the duties of Arbin recumbent among his cushions. And because none of his advisers could lay even a distant claim to youth, he required us all to do as he did. We were stretched at Prince Akhmet’s feet like admirers while the young man spoke.
When the telling was done, and His Serene Goodness had comforted his son, the Vizier of Arbin, Moshim Mosha Va, stroked his thin gray beard and pronounced, “You are a poet, my lord Prince. Your words give life to beauty.”
This was not a proposition to which the High Priest of the Mosque, the Most Holy Khartim a-Kul, would have assented on theological grounds. Beauty was, after all, a creation of the gods, not of men. As a practical matter, however, the High Priest nodded, shook the fringe around his cap, and rumbled, “Indeed.”
For myself, I primarily wondered whether it was the recitation itself which enabled Akhmet to remember his dream so vividly. Nevertheless I expressed my approval with the others, unwilling to launch a large debate on so small a subject.
But the Prince was not complimented. “No,” he protested, at once petulant and somewhat defensive. “Words have nothing to do with it. It was the dream. The beauty was in the dream.”
“Ah, but the dream was yours, my lord Prince, not ours.” The Vizier was disputatious by nature, sometimes to his own cost. “We would not have been able to know of its beauty, if you had not described it so well.”
“No!” young Akhmet repeated. He was still close enough to his childhood to stamp his foot in vexation. “It was the dream. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Of course,” His Serene Goodness put in soothingly. He liked nothing which vexed his son. “But Moshim Mosha Va is quite correct. He only means to say that your words are the only way in which we can share the beauty of what you have seen. Perhaps there are two beauties here—the beauty of your dream, and the beauty of your description.”