Arrows of the Sun Page 15

  “It was for that, my lord, that I came.”

  “Then,” said Estarion, “begin.”

  o0o

  The art of wearing ten robes was like that of wearing armor. The seventeen inflections of the imperial salutation made a pretty, if wearing, game for a clever mind. The myriad minutiae of the courtier’s dance needed a lifetime to study properly; Estarion had no patience for them.

  Some of his courtiers went back to Keruvarion, bored with the long sweltering days in a city without useful diversions. Asanian court games wearied them rapidly: most required a command of high court Asanian, and few outside of the bedchamber demanded more of the body than a languid shift from one side of a chamber to another. Hunting did not amuse the exquisites of Asanian courts. That was a sport for winter, they sighed. Water games shocked them: one had to be naked for those. Mounted exercise and sword-practice were difficult where every open space was a garden or a concourse of people, and the plain was a furnace from dawn till sundown.

  Estarion’s soldiers braved it, and those of his escort who were determined enough to cling to him. The rest took their seneldi and their guards and their servants and began the long journey back to, as they called it, civilization.

  He would happily have gone with them. But he was the cause and the source of this exile in Induverran. If he left it, it must be to come to Kundri’j. And that would not be until Lord Firaz, his tutor and his jailer, pronounced him fit for the High Court of his own empire.

  Some things he would not do, here or anywhere, even in Kundri’j. One of them was to sit mewed in his chambers, speaking to no one save through guards and servants, walking nowhere save in walled gardens. That was the way of old Asanion, to keep its emperors as strongly prisoned as any miscreant, to cut them off from any stain of common earth.

  That, he would not endure. “Either I am emperor or I am not,” he said to his Regent. “And if I am, then I go where I will, within the bounds of safety or of reason. I may go guarded—I suffer that. I may go in robes, if you insist. But I will go.”

  There was nothing that Lord Firaz could say to that, except to request that his majesty permit an Olenyas to accompany him. A request from Lord Firaz was a thinly veiled command. Estarion saw no profit in disputing this one.

  He did not like the Olenyai. They were protected by some magic that made his head ache with a constant dull throbbing; it kept him from reading them, or from learning anything about them at all, except what their eyes betrayed.

  “And yet,” he said to Godri, “I think they’re loyal. Not to me, not that, but to the rank I hold.”

  Godri, these days, wore a permanent scowl. “And if they ever take it into their heads to suspect that you don’t hold it any longer, they’ll cut you down without a thought.”

  “The day I let go my kingship, you can be sure I’ll be too dead to care what yonder blackrobes do to my carcass.”

  Godri’s grin was feral. It vanished quickly. “Just have a care they don’t speed the day. I see them sometimes, my lord. Staring at you. Measuring you for your shroud.”

  “Maybe they’re only wondering how I’d look in a black robe.”

  But Godri had no stomach for levity. He muttered something dark.

  “Godri,” said Estarion. “Do you want me to send you home?”

  For a moment Godri’s face lit like a lamp. When it darkened, it was even blacker than before. “I swore oath, my lord. I’ll stay with you till death or your hand set me free.”

  “I’ll free you,” Estarion said.

  “No!” Godri seemed to shock himself with his own vehemence. He stopped, collected his wits and his expression. “My lord,” he said at length, as calmly as Estarion had ever heard him, “you may send me away. You are the emperor. But what is to stop me from coming back?”

  “You hate this place,” Estarion said.

  “But,” said Godri, “my lord, I love you.”

  Estarion had no words to answer that. Godri spoke it as plain fact, with no great passion. It simply was. Like, Estarion thought, the sun’s rising out of the eastern sea; or the dance of the moons; or the silences that shaped the notes of a song.

  Thus Godri stayed. His scowl was a constant of Estarion’s wakings, his caustic observations an antidote to the gagging sweetness of courtiers’ speech. The servants learned to walk softly round him. The Olenyai accorded him a remarkable degree of respect.

  “He has killed, and killed well,” one of them explained. It was all he would say, and more by far than Estarion could get out of the others.

  Of course a tribe of warriors would value a warrior’s virtue. Estarion wondered if that was why they thought so little of him apart from the fact of his kingship. He had never killed anyone. Not with his hands.

  o0o

  Sidani was gone. Estarion had not seen her since he left her asleep in his bed, the second morning in Induverran. He heard of her here and there for a day or two: she was telling her wonted stories, walking her accustomed paths, recovered it seemed from the sickness that had beset her. Then he heard nothing. She was not dead—he would have known, he was sure of it. She had risen one morning, gathered her few belongings, and taken to the road.

  He had not truly known her: she was too prickly for that, her shifts too odd. And yet he missed her presence, her biting wit, her gift for saying the unsayable.

  Wanderers wandered. It was their nature. Talespinners had somehow to gather their tales. And maybe she loved Asanion no more than he did, who had shown the raw wounds of her soul on the battlefield of Induverran.

  Of course she had not fought there. She could not be so old. But she was odd when it came to her stories. She called them memories, and reckoned them her own. These, he thought, had grown too much to bear.

  That she had left was no more than sense. But she had gone without farewell. That hurt. He had thought she valued him a little: enough at least to take her leave when she must go.

  o0o

  Her absence, Vanyi’s continued and relentless coldness, his own gilded imprisonment, came together into a knot of misery. It was another burning morning, another searing day in this cycle of Brightmoon called Anvil of the Sun. He woke from a bleak and lightless dream, as he had been waking every morning since he learned to sleep alone. He went to the bath, which was ready as it always was, and the servants waiting, eyes that would not look into his, faces that would not warm for anything he said.

  The water of the bath was cool on his fevered skin. The servants’ hands were deft and light. One of those behind him, finding the knots across his back and shoulders, worked clever fingers into them: pain melting into pleasure. He was barely awake, or he would have resisted. He wanted those knots. He had earned them.

  He did not know the servants’ names; they would not tell him. This one, a dun-haired eunuch, stroked the tension out of him, saying nothing, offering neither love nor hate. There was a strange comfort in it. Perfect service, nameless, faceless, unobtrusive.

  As his back eased, he felt the rest of him growing calmer.

  All but one part of it. That, sensing his body’s pleasure, rose to claim its share.

  If he had been on his guard he would have quelled it before it began. But he was not entirely in his body. He drifted now in, now out of it, half asleep, half awake, haunted by the dimness of his dream. He watched the banner go up, distantly interested. Proper behavior would bid him do something discreet: sink down into the water in which he stood, exert the discipline he practiced too seldom, master the upstart.

  He did none of those things. He stood slack, back arched into the hands that smoothed it with long slow strokes, and let his eyelids fall. There was a drugged serenity in it, a mingling of exhaustion and heat and hands that knew his most sensitive places.

  How they came from his back to his front, he never knew. But what they did there woke him abruptly and completely.

  He could not bolt. The Asanian held him too firmly. In that appalled instant he saw the whole of the plot against
him. Why take his life if they could take his hope of heirs instead?”

  “No,” he said. Tried to say.

  The Asanian took no notice. The rest of them went about their business; he was aware of them, a prickling in his skin. He tasted no hostility, nor anything but calm preoccupation. This terror, this shame, was no more to them than duty. His majesty had need; this one of their number fulfilled it.

  He was going to start laughing, and once he started, he would not be able to stop. It was pure high comedy to be trapped so, in such a predicament, and no escape that he could see. The nether half of him was delighted. It had been far too long since he took notice of it.

  Very, very carefully he closed his fingers over those clever hands. They froze. “No,” he said much more clearly this time, if no more steadily.

  The Asanian actually raised his eyes. They darted everywhere before they fell, but for a moment they met Estarion’s. “This is not what I wish,” Estarion said.

  “My lord needs,” the Asanian whispered. He was young, little more than a child; he had the nervous look of too much breeding, like a fine stallion or a lordling of the High Court. They bred their slaves here as they bred their princes, and for much the same qualities.

  “My lord needs discipline,” Estarion said.

  “I do not satisfy?” the boy asked. His face was white. He began to tremble.

  “There now,” said Estarion. “There. You satisfy me perfectly. Just not . . . in that. We don’t reckon that a need, where I was raised.”

  The Asanian’s eyes flashed up again in pure incredulity.

  “Not that kind of need,” Estarion said. He still had the child by the hands. He drew him to his feet.

  The Asanian was pallid with shock, but he seemed to have mastered the worst of it. “Ah,” he said. “My lord prefers the higher arts. Will it be a woman, then?”

  Estarion opened his mouth, shut it again. “I don’t need anything. Anyone.”

  He saw the crossing of glances, the silent speech that was not magery, but was as clear as any words. They had decided that he was a witling or worse.

  “Not now,” Estarion said. “Later. Maybe. If it suits me.”

  That mollified them a little. It did not convince them that he was a rational being.

  Maybe they had the right of it. He stood in the shallows of the bathing-pool and knew that if he did not do something, he would run raving through the city.

  “Kundri’j,” he said. “Kundri’j Asan.” They stared at him in Asanian fashion, sidelong and in glances. “I have had enough of this,” he said to them, but in good part to the air and the memory of his Regent. “It is time I left here. I must go. I must come to Kundri’j.”

  18

  Korusan had dwelt all his life in the castle of the Olenyai, in Kunzeran to the north of Kundri’j Asan. He had gone out in his training, ridden on the hunt, gone with the rest of the young Olenyai to the market in the town that was nearest. But he had never been farther than half a day’s journey from the castle, and he had never walked in the city of the emperors.

  To one place he went often, a place that he had made his own: the remnant of old forest that bordered the Olenyai’s lands to north and east. He rode there of a morning in high summer, on the senel that he favored among those in the stable, and he rode alone as it best pleased him to do.

  As he came under the trees he found one waiting for him. To the eye it was simply one of the brothers, an Olenyas like any other in robes and veils and twinned swords. But the carriage of the head and the glint of the eyes could belong to none but the Master.

  Korusan knew the prick of temper, but he quelled it. He did not bare his face, nor did he speak.

  The Master turned his mount beside Korusan’s. They rode under the trees in silence. It was strangely companionable, for all of Korusan’s displeasure at the loss of his solitude.

  There was a place not far within, but off the wonted track, that Korusan had taken as a refuge. It was a clearing, not large, where a house or a small temple had been once. Part of a wall remained, and a bit of the floor, overgrown with creepers that flowered in the spring and fruited sweet in the autumn. Now, in summer, the flowers were gone, the fruit hard and green, but the shade was pleasant. There was water in a stream that ran beside the broken wall, grass for a senel to graze on, quiet to rest in away from the clamorings of duty.

  Korusan had come here more than once with Marid, but he had not made it known to any other. The Master’s presence surprised him in that it did not break the quiet.

  Once he had loosened his senel’s girth and unhooked the bit from the bridle and turned the beast loose to graze, the Master pulled off veil and headcloth. His hair was flax-fair, as tightly curled as a fleece; he dug fingers into it, smiling into the sun. “Ah,” he said. “Here’s a rare pleasure.”

  Korusan, moving more warily, freed his senel as the Master had, and bared his head. If he had been alone as he had hoped to be, he would have uncovered more than that; but modesty restrained him, even when the Master stripped to shirt and loose-cut trousers and waded barefoot in the stream.

  The Master paused in dipping a handful of water, and slanted a glance at Korusan. “Do I shock you, young prince?”

  “That depends on what you wish of me,” said Korusan stiffly.

  “You were always impeccable in your manners,” the Master said: “more Olenyas than the Olenyai.”

  “Am I to consider myself rebuked?”

  “Not at all,” the Master said. “The young ones are always punctilious. It does them credit.”

  “I think,” said Korusan after a moment, “that I am being made sport of.”

  “Is my prince offended?”

  “No,” said Korusan. He unbent sufficiently to put aside his outer robe, if not the inner, and to take off his boots.

  The water was shockingly cold. He did not stand in it longer than he must, to lave his face and drink a little. Safe on dry land again, he sat with knees drawn up, watching the Master out of the corners of his eyes.

  The Master came out of the water and sat a little distance from Korusan, lay back on the grass and sighed. “There will be no such pleasures for me again, I fear. Tomorrow I ride to Kundri’j.”

  Korusan went still, body and mind.

  “Before I am Master of Olenyai,” the Master said, “I am captain of the guard of the Golden Palace. That duty has never beset me: I had but attained the fourth rank when Ganiman died. But now I must take it up.”

  “I had heard,” Korusan said carefully, “that a company of our brothers had ridden from Kundri’j under the Regent’s command.”

  “Yes,” said the Master. “They rode to Induverran, where the emperor is, to await his departure for Kundri’j Asan.”

  Korusan’s heart began to beat hard. “Then,” he said, “it is time. He comes.”

  “He comes,” the Master said. “And I must command his guard.”

  “You should have gone to Induverran,” Korusan said.

  “No,” said the Master, but without rebuke. “I rank too high. It was only the Regent who commanded, you see.”

  Korusan did see. But he said, “The Regent summoned you to Kundri’j.”

  “I summon myself to Kundri’j, to prepare for the emperor’s coming.”

  Korusan was shivering, but his body burned with fever. He did not trouble to curse it. It was only shock. “So soon,” he said, “and yet it has been so long . . .”

  “Did I say that you would accompany me?”

  Korusan met the Master’s gaze. “I say that I will.”

  The Master’s eyes narrowed. “Would you risk yourself so, in the very face of the enemy?”

  “Where else can I be, if I am to destroy him?”

  “Here,” the Master answered. “In safety, under guard, while your servants serve you.”

  “No,” said Korusan. “This, no one can do for me.”

  The Master frowned.

  “I must see him,” Korusan said. “I must know
what he is.” He raised his hand, although the Master had made no move to speak. “Yes, I have seen the portraits, heard the tales, had his every act and thought laid out before me with tedious precision. I know that he favors sour apples, that he rides a blue-eyed stallion, that he has a training scar on his right thigh above the knee. I know all that a spy can know. But I do not know him.”

  “Would you have him know you, and destroy you?”

  “What can he know? I am an Olenyas, a blackrobe, a faceless warrior. And he is no mage, whatever he was in his childhood. He can work magics, if they are small enough, and he can read a soul if it is close and he is undistracted. More than that, he cannot do. So the mages say.”

  “Do you trust the mages, prince?” the Master asked.

  Korusan paused for a breath’s span. “I trust them well enough to believe that they have examined him and found him feeble. That they might have underestimated him, I grant you; but even they cannot read me.”

  “And that, prince, may be a fatal arrogance.”

  “Then I wager that it is not. I must see him, my lord. I must know my enemy.”

  The Master was silent for a long moment, eyes fixed on Korusan’s face as if to limn it in his memory. “You were bred to hate him. Can you bear to stand guard over him, to dwell close to him, to be called his servant? Can you do that, prince? For if you cannot, then you have destroyed us all.”

  “I can do whatever I must,” Korusan said, soft and level. “For if I cannot, then all your training has been in vain, and your hopes have failed.”

  “He is alien, prince. He is taller than any man you have seen. His skin is like black glass. He speaks Asanian with a barbarous accent, in a voice like mountains shifting. And for all of that, my prince, he has your eyes. Eyes of the Lion in the face of an outland beast.”

  “I have seen the portraits,” Korusan said, still steadily, whatever his heart might be doing. “He has no beauty. He is merely strange. Strangeness I can endure, if I know that there is an end to it.”

  “I do not think,” mused the Master, “that the mages would approve. They would call it folly to risk you so openly.”