Tanith Lee - A Hero at the Gates

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A Hero at the Gates

Tanith Lee

Heroic fantasy hasn't entirely been the domain of male writers. Back in the 1930s Catherine L. Moore

produced a wonderfully innovative series featuring the warrior woman, Jirel of Joiry, and later Leigh

Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley virtually cornered the market in planetary romances. Tanith Lee

(b. 1947) writes material in the entire range of fantasy fiction, and she is almost impossible to define. She

began with books for children, such as The Dragon Hoard (1971) and Animal Castle (1972). Her first

adult book, The Birthgrave (1975), about a woman searching for her true name, blended the fields of

sword-and-sorcery and planetary romance. The Flat Earth series, which began with Night's Master

(1978), mixes the oriental and the exotic in almost Dunsanian tradition. The collection Red as Blood

(1983) reworks well-known fairy tales in darker mode while Sung in Shadow (1983) takes us back to a

Shakespearean Renaissance Italy. And there's a lot more. The following comes from Lee's collection

Cyrion (1982) about a wandering hero who is not quite as traditional as he might at first seem.

The city lay in the midst of the desert.

At the onset it could resemble a mirage; next, one of the giant mesas that were the teeth of the desert,

filmy blue with distance and heat. But Cyrion had found the road which led to the city, and taking the

road, presently the outline of the place came clear. High walls and higher towers within, high gates of

hammered bronze. And above, the high and naked desert sky, that reflected back from its sounding-bowl

no sound at all from the city, and no smoke.

Cyrion stood and regarded the city. He was tempted to believe it a desert too, one of those hulks of men's

making, abandoned centuries ago as the sands of the waste crept to their threshold. Certainly, the city

was old. Yet it had no aspect of neglect, none of the indefinable melancholy of the unlived-in house.

Intuitively, Cyrion knew that as he stood regarding the city from without, so others stood noiselessly

within, regarding Cyrion.

What did they perceive? This: a young man, tall and deceptively slim, deceptively elegant, which

elegance itself was something of a surprise, for he had been months travelling in the desert, on the

caravan routes and the rare and sand-blown roads. He wore the loose dark clothing of a nomad, but with

the generous hood thrust back to show he did not have a nomad's pigmentation. At his side a sword was

sheathed in red leather. The sunlight struck a silver-gold burnish on the pommel of the sword that was

also the colour of his hair. His left hand was mailed in rings which apparently no bandit had been able to

relieve him of. If the watchers in the city had remarked that Cyrion was as handsome as the Arch-Demon

himself, they would not have been the first to do so.

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Then there came the booming scraping thunder of two bronze gates unbarred and dragged inward on

their runners. The way into the city was exposed - yet blocked now by a crowd. Silent they were, and

clad in black, the men and the women; even the children. And their faces were all the same, and gazed at

Cyrion in the same way. They gazed at him as if he were the last bright day of their lives, the last bright

coin in the otherwise empty coffer.

The sense of his dynamic importance to them was so strong that Cyrion swept the crowd a low, half-

mocking bow. As he swept the bow, from his keen eyes' corner, Cyrion saw a man walk through the

crowd and come out of the gate.

The man was as tall as Cyrion. He had a hard face, tanned but sallow, wings of black hair beneath a

shaved crown, and a collar of swarthy gold set with gems. But his gaze also clung on Cyrion. It was like

a lover's look. Or the starving lion's as it beholds the deer.

"Sir," said the black-haired man, "what brings you to this, our city?"

Cyrion gestured lazily with the ringed left hand. "The nomads have a saying: 'After a month in the desert,

even a dead tree is an object of wonder.'"

"Only curiosity, then," said the man.

"Curiosity; hunger; thirst; loneliness; exhaustion," enlarged Cyrion. By looking at Cyrion, few would

think him affected by any of these things.

"Food we will give you, drink and rest. Our story we may not give. To satisfy the curious is not our fate.

Our fate is darker and more savage. We await a saviour. We await him in bondage."

"When is he due?" Cyrion enquired.

"You, perhaps, are he."

"Am I? You flatter me. I have been called many things, never saviour."

"Sir," said the black-haired man, "do not jest at the wretched trouble of this city, nor at its solitary hope."

"No jest," said Cyrion, "but I hazard you wish some service of me. Saviours are required to labour, I

believe, in behalf of their people. What do you want? Let us get it straight."

"Sir," said the man, "I am Memled, prince of this city."

"Prince, but not saviour?" interjected Cyrion, his eyes widening with the most insulting astonishment.

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Tanith Lee - A Hero at the Gates

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