Chapter 6

THE SHADOW OF AKHMIM

The banquet to which we were bound on that particular evening was one of the frequent ceremonial functions tradition required of the Jewel City monarch.

The life of the princess was bound to every side by centuries-old patterns of enormously complicated tradition and ritual. Periodically, the Princess of Phaolon was required to feast representatives of the several aristocracies of her realm; I have no idea as to the reason why. It may have been something in the nature of a renewal of the aristocrats in their rank, or a symbolic token of the interdependency of the sovereign and the aristocracies, ritualized by their sharing of a common meal, or something to do with the national religion, which as yet I understood imperfectly.

At any rate, such occasions were a crashing bore, interminable evening-long meals of thirty or forty courses, interspersed with flowery speeches, ceremonial dances and poetry recitals, elaborate courtesies, and obscure traditional gestures, such as the pouring of three drops from every winecup into silver salvers borne around the banquet hall by an endless succession of pages, for no conceivable reason or purpose.

Certain different incenses were burned during certain courses by Laonese priests in elaborately different robes and accouterments stationed at small altars situated here and there. Something like spruce gum was burned during a course of small cubes of beef-like meat in cream sauce, skewered with tiny silver forks; a thickly odorous incense like myrrh was sizzled in golden pans during a course of breaded fish; a sharp and pungent perfume, like pine needles, was poured on braziers of coals during yet another course consisting of small slivers of sweet white meat cooked in sugary wine.

The elaborately artificial aspects of these interminable banquets was unendurable. Nobody knew why or how these customs had arisen, but arisen they had, and, once hallowed by a few centuries of tradition, a facet of behavior became crystallized in Laonese society and was there to stay.

Luckily for me, during the early phases of my education when I was still largely unfamiliar with the language, no one required me to deliver any of the lengthy speeches, flowery compliments, or recitals of national poetry, which droned on more or less constantly during the succession of courses. I was politely ignored during these banquets, for it was thought that a ritual period of acclimatization was required of one who had but recently returned from the World Above, as the Laonese conception of heaven is termed. So I just nibbled at the various courses, guzzled wine, and tried to ignore the so-called festivities.

Custom, ritual, precedent, and tradition rule the Laonese aristocracies and, to a lesser extent, the common folk, and this endlessly complicated code of ceremonial behavior controlled and governed virtually every phase and detail of everyday life. In this, as in certain other things, it resembled the Chinese civilization of the imperial periods.

I use the plural, “aristocracies,” because the Laonese society was an hierarchical one, made up of a number of different ranks. There were, for example, what might be called the landed gentry-members of ancient families with an hereditary claim to certain territories of the realm. Members of this aristocracy were known as the thurkuz. Their highest ranking member and most vocal spokesman was a stiff-necked old woman, the Kyra Vaonica du Kaikoos, which translates as Lady (or Dame) Vaonica of Kaikoos; she was a sort of duchess.

The second aristocracy was made up of those families descended from Laonese patriots or heroes who had been ennobled for their services to the throne, just as English monarchs have bestowed titles on their war heroes like Lord Nelson or the Duke of Wellington. The custom of honoring outstanding heroes with ranks and titles was popular among earlier Laonese sovereigns, but had died out somewhat lately. However, these honors were of a different kind and nature from those of the thurkuz, the landed gentry. This second aristocracy was called the aophet, which means something like “sprung from the heroes.” In my incarnation as Lord Chong, I belonged to this particular aristocracy myself. In fact, I now took precedence as highest ranking peer and spokesman of the aophet, displacing a suave baron named Iohom who had been senior lord of the aophet before my revivification.

There was a third aristocracy whose difference from the others was a subtle one, so subtle I never quite managed to grasp the difference. It consisted of those with titular honors, some exceedingly fanciful, others thoroughly devoid of meaning as far as I could see. This particular aristocracy, the iophua, held hereditary honors such as Lord Custodian of the Nine Ivory Batons, or Privy Guardian of the Silver Book of Hshan, or High Steward of the Scarlet Flask, and so on.

A tradition-encrusted people, the Laonese! For never once did I see the Lord Custodian with a baton of any kind, much less an ivory one. The High Steward bad a noticeable fondness for the wine flask, all right, but I never saw him with a scarlet one. And as for the Privy Guardian, from the way be usually snored through the poetry recitals, I cannot conceive of him as possessing interest in any book, much less Hshan’s.

There leas one thing that could be said for these formal banquets, and that was that they gave me a chance to see Niamh.

At these functions, the Laonese dine from low taborets while seated cross-legged on cushions. But the princess and I, as only befitting our superior degree, sat in regular chairs at opposite ends of a dais. I thus had the pleasant opportunity to feast my eyes on her while feasting my belly.

How lovely she was! Sapling-slim, demure, exquisite as a fairy princess. I have had little to do with women; during my life on Earth, as a cripple, it seemed to me impossible that I could ever be anything other than an object of either pity or contempt in the eyes of a beautiful woman. Desiring to be neither, I avoided their company, although my appetite was as normal as that of any whole and healthy man. Now I basked in the bliss of her nearness, and the shy sidewise looks she sometimes cast at me, demurely, from under silken lashes, did not escape me. How wondrous strange it was, to feel myself the object of a beautiful girl’s admiration! How thrilling to know myself tall and strong, a hero, a warrior of immortal deeds, in the eyes of all who looked upon me!

At times I questioned my wisdom in lingering here on the World of the Green Star. I was not the mythic Hercules they fancied me to be, but a strange wanderer come hence on a weird voyage, caught in a body that was not my own, enjoying the worship and adulation which belonged to someone else. I feel certain that the old sage, Khin-nom, doubted the truth of my revivification. Suppose questions were asked of me concerning my first life as Lord Chong-questions I could not answer, bearing on a life that I had never lived? Would it not be wiser for me to quit this borrowed body and return to take up the life that was my own?

I hesitatedI lingered-I procrastinated; and can any wonder that I put off returning to the body of a cripple, turning my back on this weird and gorgeous world of mile-high trees, jewelbox cities, and elfin knights mounted on dragonflies? For what was there for me to go home to, but a dreary life of books and dreams, prisoned in a paralyzed carcass that could not take a step without assistance?

And so I stayed on… and lost my heart.

Time and again I puzzled over the meaning of that dramatic scene I had interrupted with my involuntary resurrection. What was the substance of that tense confrontation I had spied upon unseen, when the cold-faced man in robes of eye-hurting yellow, crowned with spiky black crystals, had stood in challenge before the tall throne of Phaolon and hurled his insolence in the fiowerlike face of Niamh the Fair?

The elderly philosopher but tugged at his indigo beard, avoiding my questions by ignoring them and pressing on with our unremitting language lessons. Captain Panthon, usually my prime source of information, seemed oddly reluctant to reply to my queries. I have since concluded that his reluctance was in deference to hallowed tradition: men of the khaweng-ya, the warrior class, do not discuss high matters; the doings of their lords and betters are subjects unfit for gossip or speculation.

Bit by bit I pieced together a patchwork picture of the situation, gathering hints and clues from a careless word let fall in my presence, a scrap of conversation overheard, or veiled references murmured when I was not supposed to be listening.

The man in the yellow robes, it seemed, had been Akhmim, who was the prince of another treecity called Ardha. His ultimatum was a marriage proposal!

It seems that precedent and tradition hallow the masculine gender, alone deemed fit to wield sovereignty. A Queen regnant is a novelty unheard-of in all the placid millennia of Laonese annals. It is not exactly that a woman ruler is forbidden by any law of gods or men: it is simply something new and strange and different. And to the timid, ephemeral Laonese, whose lives are dominated by ritual and antique custom, the new and novel is anathema, or at least highly suspect.

Niamh was a slave to custom, too; but it is the art of a monarch to interpret tradition in support of the royal will. And the will of princes is less subject to the ghostly authority of the past than are the wills of those who are accustomed to being ruled over by princes.

For ages a tension has stretched between the two treecities. Nothing so overt as war-that custom happily is most rare here on the World of the Green Star-but a certain rivalry, an unease. The folk of Phaolon, then, were on the horns of a particularly galling dilemma. On the one

hand, every precept of custom and tradition cried out that a princess could not rule alone; on the other, they loathed the notion of yielding the hand of their beloved Niamh to the unwelcome and unloved Tyrant-Prince of Ardha.

Niamh had weighed the custom of masculine rule against the traditional envy and suspicion the folk of Phaolon felt for the men of Ardha, and had chosen the course of action least offensive to tradition-she would rule alone.

On the day of my resurrection, Akhmim of Ardha had come with an ultimatum. The benign will of the World Above, the unanimous precedent of a thousand regnant kings, the crushing weight of age-old authority, demanded she wed a prince of her rank and yield primacy to him. Only the shadowy divinities of the World Above knew what shattering thunderbolts of calamity and cataclysm would ensue, if a woman maintained her grasp on the throne of Phaolon in blind defiance of tradition and holy precedent. Did the Princess Niamh, in her mad arrogance and folly, possess some secret sign from heaven that the World Above would tolerate her mad ambition? Akhmim cried aloud to the Green Star for some token or omen that heaven favored her in her folly-And in that fateful moment, 1 thundered to life in my tomb!

Small wonder that at the time I sensed my coming forth had disconcerted Akhmim, throwing him off-balance. “Off-balance” indeed! He had been petrified with horror, frozen with unbelieving shock. What sign could have been more dramatic than my springing to life, the shards of my splintered sarcophagus ringing about me on the glistening pave?

None could blame the Princess of Phaolon for interpreting my miraculous return to the lands of the living as a sign from the World Above. The timing of the event alone confirmed it. A more sensationally dramatic affirmation of Niamh’s sacred right to her throne could hardly have been imagined than the sudden reincarnation of the mighty Chong, hero of a thousand legends, the mythic defender of her own great dynasty in the age of her forefathers.

Akhmim, crushed, shaken to the core, had fled the hall in confusion, and no word had come from him since.

But his shadow lay over the Jewel City like a grim pall, like a cold gloom of ominous fate to come. So close had

Akhmim stood to the throne he coveted, so swift had fate snatched it from his grasp, that few could doubt he would not seek again to fulfill his desires. And in his path, I stood alonel

Chapter ?

THE DANCE OF THE ZAIPH

The time came when I had mastered the lovely, musical language of the Laonese.

To tell the truth, the ease and rapidity with which I had learned the tongue of this strange world surprised me. It even frightened me a little.

It was not so much like learning a new language-a dreary process of word drills and memorizing-as it was like remembering a language I had known long, long ago, and all but forgotten with the years.

Could there be any truth to the Laonese belief that I was their mighty hero of old come again? Who was this Kyr Chong the Mighty-how was it that his body had been so perfectly preserved that when I, a wandering spirit, had chanced to wander near, it could be reanimated to live again?

One pleasant result of mastering the tongue was that, now my lessons were done, the old sage Khin-nom permitted himself to be engaged in conversation. The wily old philosopher even granted me the answers to a few questions.

He smiled slyly, and replied to my query in his soft, purring voice: “Surely my lord recalls that he did not ever die, but fell victim to the wizard’s spell!”

“I remember nothing of my former life, Khin-nom; you who have had to patiently teach me the tongue all over again must surely know that! I suspect death must be as shattering a trauma as birth, and spirits thrust forth suddenly on the dark wind disperse, their memories wiped

clean by the cataclysmic experience … but what do you mean, I never died? What wizard-and what spell?”

We were in the sage’s own suite, that day. A cool, pleasant, empty room of whitewashed walls, and many windows open to a murmuring infinity of leafy solitude. A room filled to the brim with peace and calm; a room for contemplation.

From a rack of scrolls he plucked one heavy tube of parchment. Minute rows of hooked characters marched up and down the sheet when he unfolded it, and his narrow finger followed them up and down, down and up-the Laonese script is written boustrophedon, like Hittite: back and forth, as an ox plows a field.

He chanted some poetry at me, but I understood little of it. The bardic epics that form the center of Pbaolon’s national literature, the so-called Eight Classics, are written in an obscure, highfalutin diction very unlike everyday speech.

“What is that, Khin-nom?” I asked impatiently.

He hooded his eyes, voice suave. “The epic of your Thirty Deeds, my lord! The thirtieth and last was to rid the world of that wizard called Kryaphaom, the Lord of Ghosts. ‘Twas he who sundered your spirit from your flesh and hurled it forth into the void of mists beyond the world, beyond the Green Star itself. You struck him down to death in that same moment, but already the death-like sleep of a thousand years was upon you. Our sacred forefathers mourned you, and preserved your flesh in pure crystal against the time ordained, when your spirit should come wandering home from beyond the stars …”

My skin crawled at the sly whisper, and my nape hairs prickled in primal awe. His account was uncanny in its closeness to the facts-for my spirit had in truth come to this world from beyond the stars. From the dim twilight of elder Mars the flickering beacon of the Green Star had called to me with a strange fascination … could it be that 1 remembered it from another life?

Could it be that I really was Chong, or had once been him, many lives before this last? Did the eternal human spirit travel an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth, as the Buddhists taught and the lamas of Tibet believed? But if so, why was it that I remembered nothing of my former life as Chong the Mighty, hero of Phaolon and ancient defender of its age-old throne?

Do the memories of one life fade, under the accumulation of experiences, as life upon life is laid upon the soul like a palimpsest?

The implications of this suggestion were soul-shaking, world-changing: I set them from me firmly, changing the subject.

“How do you, who dwell under eternal mists, know anything of the stars?” I demanded.

“There are rifts in the clouds that veil us from heaven,” he said slyly. “In the same wise, there may come rifts in the forgetfulness that clouds my lord’s mind, and gleams of memory from his life as Chong may shine through ….

..

An even more pleasant result of my mastery of the language was that now I saw much more of the exquisite princess.

And not just at those endless formal banquets which I have described, either; we had several meetings, private audiences they were, for once she learned I had conquered the tongue, she was eager to talk with me. I sweated, dreading questions about my former life which I could not answer. Happily for my peace, old Khin-nom warned her that my memories were yet few and fragmentary, that the many lives I had lived through on far, alien worlds lost in the vastness of the universe had dimmed and drowned out my memories of life in ancient Phaolon. Thank God for Khin-nom’s tact! He had the delicate gift of adroit distortions of unpleasant truths that could have made his fortune in diplomacy.

I could never figure him out, the wily old sage. Was he on my side, or against me? I always wondered what he really thought about me; I can’t believe he thought me truly Chong the Mighty come again, and many were the sly, suave insinuations he delivered in this direction; however, he never sought to expose me for an interstellar impostor, and at times, as above, in preface to my first private audience with Niamh, he subtly protected me from exposure.

Like most philosophers, he was himself an enigma.

My first audience was held under semiformal conditions, in an antechamber to the private apartments of the princess. It was neither a completely informal t”ete-a-tete, nor a completely formal state audience. Curious as any

young girl, the princess merely wanted to talk to me and ask me questions.

She wore a simple robe of some light, clinging white stuff that reminded me of samite, and she sat on a raised cushion, feet curled under her like a child. I was sweating and uncomfortable in the stiff brocades tradition required of one on such an occasion; and, from time to time, irked by the weight of gemstudded cuff-bands and the constriction of a high, tight collar stiffened with gold wire, I twitched about, red-faced and suffering. From the bland expression on her flower-like face and the scarcely concealed flash of mischief in her great eyes, I suspect the girl took an impish relish in my obvious discomfiture.

I felt far more comfortable the next day, when, dressed in warrior’s harness, I accompanied her on a riding expedition. The elf-knights of Phaolon wear begemmed and plumed garments, as I have already described; such fancy dress might make them look suitable for a road show production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the gaudy costumes are hardly fit for fighting in. Fortunately, Chong’s era lay in simpler times, and it was the shrewd notion of the princess that I would feel more at home in the simple scale tunic, swashtopped boots, plate girdle, and cloak of my own epoch. Actually, I still felt rather like a fugitive from a masquerade ball, but the simpler harness of Chong’s period was less confining, less ornate and ridiculous, and afforded me greater ease of movement.

“Riding” on the World of the Green Star is a less-thanaccurate term. Since the Laonese dwell in treecities far above the ground, and shun the land surface due to the terrible predators that prowl the floor of the continentsized forests, their steed of choice is winged rather than hooved. I was somewhat timorous of mounting these fantastical flying coursers, due as much to my inexperience in the saddle as to a natural reluctance to swooping giddily through the air astride nothing more substantial than an enormous butterfly. But there was no hope for it, and a royal invitation is the same as a royal command. And it ill-befitted the national hero of Phaolon to admit he was afraid of heightsl

The princess rode in a floating bubble drawn by immense moths called dhua. These fantastic creatures had long tubular bodies the size of Terrene crocodiles, but

banded with topaz dusted with powdered diamond, their heads great featureless casques of glistening black horn with huge compound eyes like faceted sapphires, and dainty antennae of scarlet, knobbed at the tip with puffballs of velvet. They were weird and exquisite and looked horribly frail to support such weight as human bodies; but then, at a flick of the reins, they unfolded colossal satiny wings of gorgeous emerald and sunset crimson, wings as huge as yacht sails!

The chariot in which the princess rode was a thin fluted shell of glossy pearl drawn by a team of matched dhua. The knights of her entourage and myself were saddled upon the backs of the titanic moths. These saddles were like highchairs, with back supports and high pommels, fashioned of scarlet lizard-hide stretched tightly over weightless wicker frames. We were seated well forward of the immense gauzy wings, directly behind the glistening ovoid heads of our fantastical steeds, and, much to my relief, we were belted securely to the saddles by saftey straps so that it was all but impossible to fall out.

To limber up the lax, long-unused muscles of this new body of mine, I had long since formed the habit of working out with Panthon and the other warriors in my service every afternoon, following the conclusion of each language lesson. I bad practiced with broadsword and buckler, bow and javelin, until my muscle tone was restored and my body glowed with health and vigor.

Employing these antique weapons with which, of course, I had never been familiar, I had noticed an odd phenomenon. That is, while I was not conscious of any familiarity in swordsmanship or archery, the thews and sinews of my body seemed somehow to “know” these weapons and without even thinking about it I blocked the blows of my friendly opponents and dealt them a few shrewd strokes of my own.

It was as if the use of the Laonese weapons had been so deeply ingrained in the habit patterns of the former resident of this flesh, that when I permitted my body to respond automatically to an exercise duel, my very muscles somehow “remembered” their facilities of old. I suppose this is not so remarkable as it seemed to me at the time; after all, the brain of Chong the Mighty still lived, although his conscious mind had been replaced by my own. Still, it was an uncanny sensation, feeling your limbs

react to habit patterns your consciousness knew nothing of!

The same strange feeling of unconscious familiarity took possession of me from the moment I was strapped into the high saddle of my dhua. Chong had flown these fantastical creatures a thousand times, and his body knew to a nicety each delicate flick or tension of the reins, and how to guide the graceful courser of the air in flight. After a brief initial awkwardness, I relaxed, and let my body guide the dhua on its winged way.

We floated through a gold and emerald twilight world of leafy shadows and shafts of shining sunlight. About us in every direction stretched hazy distances of bough and blossom. The air had a crisp, cool tang; the weightlessness of flight was exhilarating; we soared and swooped and floated with the effortless ease of a child’s dream of magic flight. I felt like an elf-knight accompanying Titania on a fairy quest ….

The occasion was an annual event in the court calendar. Once each year the gorgeous gigantic dragonflies the Laonese call zcuph vie to mate with their winged queen. The mating ritual is called “The Dance of the Zaiph,” and it was in truth weird and wondrous, beautiful and strange beyond the reach of words.

The queen was an immense golden thing of shimmering loveliness, twice again the size of the glittering males that strove to win her favors. Elfin huntsmen in velvet green with feathered caps had caged her, awaiting our arrival to release the royal beauty. All about, on the immense branches, male zaiph hovered, trilling their unearthly serenade.

As Niamh floated near in her airy chariot, and gave the signal with a gesture of her dainty silver riding whip, the cage flew open and the gorgeous queen spread wings of sheeted opal and launched her golden flash toward the heavens. In the next instant, half a hundred dragon swains shot from their perches, whirling aloft in a glitter of metallic splendor. We of the court sounded crystal hunting horns and soared to match the ascent of the spiral horde that whirled skyward in a trail behind the golden queen.

The splendid chase was an experience no Terrene hunt could match for exquisite thrill or intoxicating beauty. We rode up vast sunshafts of incandescent jade, through clouds of golden leaves, on the traces of soaring dragonflies as huge as stallions. The wind sang about us, whipping our

cloaks like wings. The enormous vans of our moth-steeds floated like sails of fantastic tapestry. Leaves like sheeted foil swept past us: then we were above the branches in a misty void of opal vapor that fell away to the world’s edge.

Far, far aloft, pinned to the dim emerald star like a winged brooch of flashing gold, the queen hung, outpacing all her suitors save one splendid tawny-crimson brute whose head was a horned helm of blazing amethyst. As we soared below their skyey height they circled each other-then clung, mating in sunshot ecstasy, like brilliant gods. In the moment of their orgasm, their opal vans froze motionless. Locked in dual embrace they fell from that jade eminence, blazing like meteors down the vapory sky; fell flaming from our sight, dwindling below amidst the leafage of the world-tall trees.

I floated beside Niamh’s chariot. Her face was flushed with the thrill of the chase, eyes aflame with rapture. And in that moment our eyes looked deep into each other’s, and her virginal soul was naked to my gaze.

An instant only; then silken lashes veiled the maiden candor of her joy and her heart-shaped face flushed crimson.

But in that instant, I loved her, and she knew it.