The Virgin of Valkarion Reheld

robes, workers and artisans in tunics of blue or gray, peasants in clumsy homespun garments and fur caps, swaggering young soldiers in red tunics and polished metal, painted harlots, ragged beggars, near-naked slaves, the others of a city where life still pulsed strong though the days of glory were more thousands of years behind than it was pleasant to count. But there were strangers—robed traders from Tsungchi and Begh Sarrah riding their humped dromade, black-skinned women of Suda and Astrak, coppery feather-cloaked mercenaries from Tollacivatl, fair-haired barbarians from Valmannstad and the Marskan hills —all the world seemed met at Valkarion, in a babble of tongues and a swirl of colors.

  There were many of the tonsured priests of the Moons abroad, in long red and black robes with the double crescent hanging from a silver chain about the neck. After each shaven-pate padded one or more of the yellow slaves, silent and watchful, hand on knife or blowgun. Alfrid scowled, and decided she had best find lodging before venturing out into such company. A trading center like Valkarion necessarily tolerated all creeds—still, someone lead tried to kill her

  She edged out of the throng and followed the captain's directions. They brought her into an unsavory part of town, where moldering blank-walled houses crowded a winding labyrinth of narrow, unlighted streets and stinking alleys. Women of dubious aspect moved furtively through the shadowy maze, or brawled drunkenly before the tawdry inns and bawdy houses. Strange place for a city guardswoman to direct her to.

  But no priests or soldiers were in sight, which was recommendation enough. Alfrid rode on until she saw the sign of the Falhk and Firedrake creaking in the chill gusty wind above a gloomy doorway.

  She dismounted and knocked, one hand on her dagger. The door groaned open a crack and a thin scar-faced woman looked out, her own hand on a knife.

  'I want lodging for myself and my hengist,' said Alfrid.

  The landlord's hooded eyes slid up and down the barbarian's tall form. An indrawn breath hissed through her lips. 'Are you from the northlands?' she asked.

  'Aye.' Alfrid flung open the door and stepped into the taproom.

  It was dim and dirty and low-celled, a few smoky torches throwing a guttering light on the hard-faced women who sat at the tables drinking the sour yellow wine of the south. They were all armed, all wary-—the place was plainly a hangout of thieves and murderers.

  Alfrid shrugged broad shoulders. She'd stayed in such places often enough. 'How much do you want?' lie asked.

  'Ah—' The landlord licked her lips, nervously. 'Two chrysterces for supper now and breakfast tomorrow, one soldar room and boy.'

  The rate was so low that Alfrid's eyes narrowed and her ears cocked forward in an instinctive gesture of suspicion. These southerners all named several times the price they expected to get, but she had never haggled one down as far as this fellow's asking price.

  'Done,' she said at last. 'But if the food is bad or the bed lousy or the man diseased, I'll throw you in your own pot and cut my breakfast off your ribs.'

  ''Twill not be needful, noble sir,' whined the landlord. She waved a thin little slave girl over. 'Take care of the gentlewoman's hengist.'

  Alfrid sat down at a corner table and ate her meal alone. The food was greasy, but not bad. From the shadows she watched her fellow guests, sizing up their possibilities. That big spade smooth fellow—he might be the head of a gang which would find an expert sword-swinger useful. And the little wizened woman in the gray cloak might be a charlatan in need of a bodyguard

  She grew slowly aware of their own unease. There were too many sharp glances thrown in her own direction, entirely too many—too much whispering behind hands, too much furtive loosening of sheathed daggers. There was something infernally strange going on in Valkarion.

  Alfrid bristled like an angry jaccur, but throttled impatience and got up. Time enough to find all that out tomorrow—he was tired now from her long ride; she would sleep and then in the morning look the city over.

  She mounted the stairs, conscious of the glances following her, and opened the door the girl showed to her. There she paused, and her hard jaw fell.

  The room was just a room, small, lit by one stump of candle, no furniture save a bed. Its window looked out on an alley which was like a river of darkness.

  It was the man who held Alfrid's eyes.

  He was clad only in the usual gaudy silken shift, and he sat plucking thin chords from the usual one-stringed harp. His rings and bracelets were ordinary cheap gewgaws. But he was no common tavern bawd—not he!

  Tall and lithe and tawny-skinned, he rose to face her. His shining blue-black hair tumbled silkily to his slim waist, framing a face as finely and proudly chiseled as a piece of ancient sculpture—broad clear forehead, delicately arched nose, full mobile mouth, stubborn chin, long smooth throat running down toward his high firm pectorals. His eyes were wide-set, dark and starry brilliant as the desert nights; his lips were like red flame.

  When he spoke, it was music purring under the wind that whimpered outside and rattled the window sash.

  'Welcome, stranger.'

  Alfrid gulped, licked her lips, and slowly recovered her voice : 'Thank you, my lovely.' She moved closer to him. 'I had not—not thought to find one like you—here.'

  'But now that you have—' He came closer, and his smile blinded her—'now that you have, what will you do?'

  'What do you think?' she laughed. He bent over and blew out the candle.

  II

  Alfrid lost desire for sleep, the boy being as skilled in the arts of love as he was beautiful. But later they fell to talking.

  A dim shaft of moonlight streamed through the window and etched his face against the dark, a faint mysterious rippling of light and shadow and loveliness. She drew his closer, kissed the smooth cheek, and murmured puzzledly: 'Who are you? Why are you working in a place like this, when you could be the greatest courtesan in the world ? Queens would be your slaves, and armies would go to battle with your name on their lips—if they only knew you.'

  He shrugged. 'Fortune does strange things sometimes,' he said. 'I am Frehan, and I am here because I must be.' His slim fingers ruffled her harsh black hair. 'But tonight,' he breathed, 'I am glad of it, since you came. And who are you, stranger?'

  'I am Alfrid, called the Wanderer, daughter of Beodan the Bold, daughter of Asgar the Tall, from the hills and lakes of Aslak.'

  'And why did you leave your home, Alfrid?'

  'I was restless.' For a bleak moment, she wondered why, indeed, she had ever longed to get away from the wind-whispering trees and the cool blue hills and the small, salty, sun-glinting lakes of home—from her mother's great hall and farmstead, from the brawling lusty warriors who were her comrades, from the tall sweet girls and joys of the hunt and feast—Well, it was past now, many years past.

  'You must have come far,' said Frehan.

  'Far indeed. Over most of the world, I imagine.' From Aslak, pasture lands of hengists, to the acrid red deserts of Begh Sarrah, the scrub forests of Astral and Tollacivatl, the towered cities of Tsungchi—along the great canals which the ancient Empire had built in its last days, still bringing a trickle of water from the polar snows to the starved southlands—through ruins, always ruins the crumbling sand-filled bones of cities which had been like jewels a hundred thousand years ago and more.

  His cool hands passed over her face, pausing at the long dull-white scar which slashed across her forehead and left cheek. 'You have fought,' he said. 'How you have fought!'

  'Aye. All my life. That scar? I got it at Altaris, when I led the Bonsonian spears at the storming of the gates. I have been war-captain, sitting beside queens, and I have been hunted outlaw with the garms baying at my heels. I have drunk the wine of war-lords and eaten the gruel of peasants and stalked my own game through the rime-white highlands of Larkin. I have pulled down cities, and been flung into the meanest jails. One queen put a price on my head, another wanted me to take over her throne, and a third went down the streets before me, ringing a bell and crying
that I was a god. But enough.' Alfrid stirred restlessly. Somehow, she felt again uneasy, as if-

  Frehan pulled her face to his, and the kiss lasted a long time. Presently he murmured, 'We have heard some rumors of great deeds and clashing swords, here in Valkarion. The story of the fall of Altaris is told in the marketplaces, and folk listen till far into the night. But why did you not stay with your queens and war-lords and captured cities? You could have been a queen yourself.'

  'I grew weary of it,' she answered shortly.

  'Weary—of queenly power?'

  'Why not? Those courts are nothing—a barbarian ruling over one or two cities, and calling herself a queen and trying drearily to hold a court worthy of the title. The same, always the same endless squabbling, carrion birds quarreling among the bones of the Empire. I went on the next war, or to see the next part of the world, and erelong I learned never to stay too long in one place lest the newness of it wear off.'

  'Valkarion is ever new, Alfrid. A mart could live her life here and never see all there was.'

  'Perhaps. So they told me. And it was, after all, the old seat of the Empire, and its shrunken remnant of territory is still greater than any other domain. So I came here to see for myself.' Alfrid grinned, a wolfish gleam of teeth in the night. 'Also, I heard tales—restlessness, a struggle for power between Temple and Imperium, with the Empress an old woman and the