Arrows of the Sun Page 19

The child spoke for himself, which was just within the bounds of protocol. “My father,” he said in a clear steady voice, “is dead. He regretted deeply his dishonor. He took his life as the canons prescribe. He died bravely, and courteously.”

  “How can death be courteous?”

  Estarion had never spoken aloud in that place before. He fancied that his voice echoed, deeper than Asanian voices were wont to be, and barbarously accented.

  The child was too young or too scared to be shocked. He answered, “He wished your majesty to know that he atoned for his disgrace.”

  “What was that?”

  “Majesty,” said Lord Firaz, soft and smooth. “His father was that one who, so we are told, dared defy you in your court in Endros Avaryan.”

  For a moment Estarion’s mind was blank. Then memory filled it. An Asanian lord paying homage out of turn. Estarion’s great error, and the Asanian’s greater one as his kind would reckon it, looking direct on the face of his emperor.

  This son had his father’s face, now that Estarion had eyes to see it, though soft yet and unformed. But he had not, it seemed, inherited his father’s recklessness.

  Estarion regarded him in disbelief, and in swelling horror. “He killed himself? Simply because he tested me?”

  “One does not test the emperor.” The child sounded like no child then.

  No, thought Estarion. Let him have his name. He was Nizad of the house of Ushavaar. Nizad said, “We will pay penalty as your majesty decrees. He is dead, his ashes scattered on the midden, and the honor is taken from his name. What more your majesty will have, we will pay.”

  “No,” said Estarion. His heart was swelling, struggling in the walls of his chest. “No. I’ll have them trying to kill me if that’s their pleasure. I won’t have them die for me.”

  “He defied you,” said Nizad. “He deserved his death.”

  “He did not.” Estarion pushed himself to his feet. “There is no dishonor. Do you understand? He only did as he thought best. The shame is mine. I spoke ill to him. I never thought that he would take his life for it.”

  Nizad raised wide astonished eyes. But never, quite, into Estarion’s face.

  Estarion came down, dragging the world-weight of robes, and took the small cold hand. The Court was appalled. Again. He did not care.

  “I give you back your father’s honor,” he said. “All else that was his, I return to you. He was a brave man. I grieve that he took his life for so little a cause.” “

  You are everything,” Nizad said. “You are the emperor.”

  Estarion sucked in a breath. There was no reasoning with them, any of them. “Go,” he said: the first thing that came into his head. “Prosper. Prove that I’m no fool for shocking the Court speechless.”

  A normal child would have laughed, or smiled at least. Nizad dropped down on his face. Even his babble was flawless, not an inflection out of place. Estarion could pause to wonder at it, amid all the rest.

  o0o

  “They are not like us,” Estarion said to Godri. “They are not like me. How can I rule them? I can’t begin to understand them.”

  His squire looked a little strange himself, drawn and silent. “I don’t think they understand themselves, my lord.”

  Estarion wanted to pull off the damnable robes and kick them as far as they would go. But he had done that already, too often. He had done everything that a rebel could do, or a captive, or a spoiled child.

  “And for what?” he said aloud. “They still surround me. They still torment me. They still overcome me, no matter what I do.”

  Godri had nothing to say. Poor Godri. Estarion defeated him as Asanion defeated Estarion. But Godri loved his master, and Estarion hated his.

  Hating it accomplished nothing. Estarion stopped, struck with the thought. It had occurred to him before; it had been beaten into his head. And yet. Suppose . . .

  He began to smile. Godri’s eye rolled like a startled senel’s, which made Estarion smile wider. “Suppose,” he said, “I gave them what they wanted. What then, do you think? Would they let me be, and take the chains from me?”

  “I don’t know, my lord,” Godri said in a tone that indicated that he knew, and that Estarion would not like to hear the truth.

  “You don’t think they will,” Estarion said. “But I have to try it, do you see? I’m trapped whatever I do. If there’s one small chance that I can be free, will you fault me if I take it?”

  “You’ll do what you’ll do, my lord, whatever I say to you.”

  Estarion drew him into a quick, hard embrace. “Oh, my poor friend! Such a trial I am, and you never say more than a word. I do love you for it.”

  “Maybe you should hate me,” Godri muttered. But he smiled as if he could not help it, and when Estarion told him what he meant to do, the smile burst into laughter. Most of it was incredulity, but some at least was mirth. “It may only be another skirmish, my lord. But such a skirmish!”

  o0o

  Fortified by Godri’s approval, Estarion prepared his battlefield with care. The servants surprised him by clothing him in the robes he asked for, and astonished him by bearing his message to the one for whom it was meant.

  Lord Firaz came in good time, unruffled as always. Estarion wasted no time in nonsense. Having seen the Regent served with wine and cakes—both approved by the dun mouse of a taster—he said, “I’ve sent out a summons to the High Court. I’m to marry in Asanion, they say. Well and good. Let each lord and prince present his marriageable daughters. I shall choose as I best may, and get it over.”

  The Regent did not so much as widen his eyes. “Shall we say, then, that the ladies of the Court are to gather in, perhaps, a hand of days?”

  “No,” said Estarion. “Today. At the next turning of the glass.”

  “Sire,” said his lordship with extreme delicacy. “These are ladies of the High Court, not—”

  “Surely,” Estarion said, “they’ve been prepared for this since I crossed the border into Asanion. They’ll come to me in the sixth hour. Or will you tell me that every marriageable woman in the High Court is not now in the city, waiting on just this summons?”

  “Your majesty is perceptive,” said Lord Firaz. His tone was dry. It did not quite imply that his majesty was also precipitous. “Perhaps rather the seventh hour, when the day’s warmth is diminished somewhat, and the hour of rest is past?”

  “I have rested,” said Estarion. He smiled. “Will you stand with me, so that I may choose wisely?”

  The Regent bowed to the floor, not without irony. “As my lord wills,” he said.

  o0o

  The hall of queens lay in the inner palace, behind gates guarded by women of the Queen’s Guard and eunuchs of the Golden Palace, in walls as much of silence as of stone. Here the pillars were carved in intricate fashion with twinings of vines and flowers, and the walls behind them were thick with figured tapestries. The sun that came in, came in through narrow lattices; light here was lamplight, great banks and clusters of them, burning oil scented with flowers.

  Estarion paused in the passage behind the throne. He had not been permitted to come so far before. A company of guards had gone ahead, eunuchs of the Golden Palace, and more of them surrounded him, and still more warded his back.

  What they feared, he could not understand. His father had been murdered in the emperor’s chambers, in that room which Estarion had commanded to be locked and barred, and to which he did not go. If an assassin came, it would be a bold one indeed who ventured the protections of the women’s palace. One who penetrated the outer palace had to fear only death. One who came as far as this would die long and slow, and he would die a eunuch.

  From where Estarion stood, the hall was clear to see behind a shimmer of curtain, and filling with veiled women. They came with little evidence of haste and no more flutter than one might expect. Their fathers and their brothers were not permitted here, but must wait in mounting anxiety in the outer palace. Eunuchs guarded them, and mothers and
aunts and cousins, some old enough, or bold enough, to drop their veils.

  A tall figure moved among them, robed as an Asanian lady, but those slender dark hands were not Asanian, nor that unveiled face. Estarion had not known till he saw her how sorely he had missed his mother’s presence.

  He could not tell if she disapproved of his haste. It was too like him, she had been known to observe. He was like a cat, asleep or idling daylong, then leaping to the hunt, and never a pause between.

  Estarion admitted it. But he was not about to change his mind, even for his mother’s sake.

  The hall was almost full. Estarion’s nursemaids, having ascertained that there were no rats behind the arras, consented to allow him past the door. He could see clearly through the veil, but no one would be able to see him. It was remarkably like being a child and spying on one’s elders through the curtains.

  He was to mount the throne, there to sit while each lady was brought to him and presented with due ceremony. But his mood was purely contrary. He dropped all but the innermost and outermost of his robes, which should be enough to satisfy even Asanian modesty, and left the bulk of his guards staring at the heap of them, and walked calmly round the veil.

  They were, most of them, watching the throne and not the curtain behind it. He was well past the dais before anyone moved. A ripple ran through the hall, a whisper that in Asanion was appalling rudeness.

  And better than that, to his mind, mutters of doubt, objections, even resistance. How could that be the emperor? It was a lanky barbarian in a mere two robes, like a commoner with pretensions.

  His mother turned at his approach. The light in her eyes made him want to weep. He had meant to kiss her hand with cool courtesy, but he found himself embracing her instead, clinging hard if not long. “Mother,” he said in the language of her tribe. “Oh, Mother. They wouldn’t let me go.”

  “You’ve grown thin,” she said in the same tongue. “You’re naught but a rack of bones. What have they done to you?”

  “I’ve done it to myself.” He mustered a smile. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I’ve been out of the sun too long, that’s all.”

  “I should never have forced you to this,” she said.

  A small prick of malice moved him to agree with her, but he mastered it. “Hush now,” he said. He bent to set a kiss in each of her palms. “We’re being rude, you know. Shall we bring out our best Asanian, and set about finding me a wife?”

  “Maybe,” she said, still in the speech of her youth, “maybe, after all—”

  He could not let hope grow, that she would relent, that he could go home, win Vanyi back, be as he was before: innocent, and happy. “Come now,” he said. “Here is Lord Firaz, and he promised he’d tell me who is rich and who is beautifully bred. Will you show me who is sensible, too, and maybe not excessively horrified to contemplate a barbarian in her bed?”

  “Most of them are fascinated,” Merian said, this time in Asanian. She took his hand: the left, that was like any man’s. “Lord Firaz, what pleasure to see you here. Your ladies: are they well?”

  They circled the hall slowly. Lord Firaz, having exchanged courtesies with the empress, proceeded to present each lady, her lineage and her connections and her prospects as a mother of sons, as if she were a mare in his stable and Estarion a stallion at stud.

  Merian was charming, setting the nervous at ease, coaxing smiles out of the shy or the sullen. Estarion did not say anything. He was noticing who darted glances at his face, and who managed to evade him in his course. He had never felt quite so much like a necessary evil before.

  He met a pair of coin-gold eyes in a blue veil. They did not drop at once, or shrink from the sight of him. They belonged to someone whose path never quite crossed his. There was someone else next to her, one of the shy ones, no more than a bowed pink-veiled head and a strayed yellow curl. A very small, bent person in black had them in charge, herding them with skill, determination, and a talent for keeping them out of his majesty’s way.

  His majesty said something to the woman whom Firaz presented, words he never afterward remembered. The blue veil was losing itself in the crowd, and the pink beside it.

  There was one great use and pleasure in the office of emperor. People did not get in his way. Estarion left his mother being pleasant to a woman whose name he had already forgotten, and went in pursuit of the lady who would look him in the face.

  Her duenna was almost too clever for him. The fierce old thing led him a merry chase, making good use of a gaggle of plump startled maidens and a knot of guards and a convenient pillar. Estarion stretched his stride round that, and almost laughed.

  Trapped, and thoroughly: cornered for a fact. He knew how to fill an exit simply by standing straight and gangling less, and letting his shoulders be a wall.

  He tried not to grin. Asanians, like cats, did not show their teeth except to display their armament.

  He bowed as an emperor might, for courtesy: an inclination of the head, a slight tilt of the body. “Ladies,” he said. “Am I so fearful a monster, that you should run from me?”

  The shy one hid her veiled face in her sister’s shoulder. The bold one looked straight at him, and she was laughing, surely, the more her duenna glowered. “You are not handsome,” she said, “as the canons would have it. But you are very interesting.”

  She had a clear light voice, a little sharp maybe, but pleasantly so. Estarion raised a brow, which made her eyes dance the more, and said, “I would rather be ugly and interesting than handsome and insipid.”

  “You are not ugly,” she said. “At all. Just . . . different. Does it come off?”

  He looked down at his bare sufficiency of robes. “I should hope so,” he said.

  She did laugh then, clear and free. “Not those, my lord! That.” She managed somehow, without moving or touching him, to make it clear that she was pointing at his hands, and not at their shape, or even at the Sun’s gold.

  He turned them. They were perfectly ordinary hands, burning brand aside: long and narrow like the rest of him, callused from rein and shieldstrap and sword.

  She set her small round hand beside them, all ivory as it was, with long gilded nails. “You aren’t born that way, my nurse told me. They rub you with soot when you are born, and every day after, till the color takes, and you’re all black, which is what they call beautiful. What color are you really? Nurse said white, like a bone. I think brown. If you were white, the soot would only turn you grey.”

  Estarion had never heard such nonsense in his life. “I’m all as nature made me,” he managed to say. “Here. Touch.”

  He thought that she would not. But she stretched out a hand that shook only a little, and brushed the arm he bared for her. Timidly at first, as if she feared the stain; then more boldly, stroking light but firm, as one should stroke a cat.

  “You have fur,” she said, “like an animal.”

  “Like a man,” he said. He should have been offended. He was merely amused. There was an innocence in her, coupled with a brazen boldness, that one seldom saw even in children, and never in maidens of breeding in the High Court of Asanion.

  And yet slaves and servants did not dress in sky-blue silk sewn with silver, or betray glints of gold at ears and throat and wrists and ankles. The one who must have been her sister was all that she was not, modest and shy and ladylike in every particular, and her duenna was a smolder of resentment.

  “Do you have fur,” she asked, “all over?”

  He had a rush of heat all over, in places he would rather not have thought of. “Not quite,” he said. “Don’t Asanians have any?”

  “Not that they’ll admit to.” She looked him up and down. “I suppose I’ll have my eyes put out, or my tongue, for being so impudent. If I have a choice, may I keep my eyes? I talk too much, everyone says so; my tongue would be no loss. But I do like to look at you. The others are so dull. All the same color, and soft, like bread before it bakes.”

  He laughed. The shy maid su
rprised him: she did not cringe, but lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were softer than her sister’s, more amber than gold, and full of astonishing mirth. “What are your names?” he asked them both.

  “I am Haliya,” said the bold one. “And this is Ziana, and our dragon is Gazi, who thinks that I should marry someone proper, and not an outland conqueror. Ziana and I were born on the same day, to the same father, and our mothers were sisters, which makes us sisters too, twice over. We’re not rich, or not very, though we’re noble enough. Our house is Vinicharyas. It used to be very great in Markad, but now it settles for being middling ordinary in Kundri’j.”

  “You are not ordinary at all,” said Estarion. He liked to talk; too much, some people thought. But she was like a river in flood.

  “We know who you are,” said Haliya. “Are you going to have me punished? Nurse said that people are shockingly free with their emperors in Keruvarion, but she did like to tell stories, and not all of them were as true as one might wish.”

  “Emperors in Keruvarion are people like anyone else,” he said. And at the widening of her eyes: “Well. Maybe not like anyone. But anyone can come up to me and talk to me. Look at me, even. Touch me. Make me feel like something other than a poppet on a stick.”

  “You do hate that, don’t you?” Her sympathy tasted real, if not over-warm. “So do I. I tried to run away to Keruvarion once. My father whipped me himself, with his own hands. He was stiff for days after.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “He didn’t beat me very hard,” she said. “It runs in the blood, you see: running away. Especially the womenchildren. I could hardly help it. I’m older now, of course. I know what’s proper.”

  “I ran away once,” said Estarion. “I wanted to be a tribesman by the Lakes of the Moon, and hunt the spotted deer.”

  “Did your father whip you when they brought you back?”

  The chill that touched him was less than he had expected. He could answer her calmly, even lightly. “My father was dead. My mother decided that I had too little to do. She gave me a princedom to rule for myself, and no one to help or hinder, unless I acted abominably.”