Arrows of the Sun (13 page)

“If that were all it was,” said Shaiyel, in whom the land-sense
was so strong that he could wade in the earth as if in water, “then I could
mend it with a word.”

He flushed under their stares. He was young, younger than
Vanyi, and almost as pale as she. He kept well out of Estarion’s way. He was
half Asanian, and he favored his mother, though his eyes were narrower and his
cheekbones higher and his hair straighter than any proper Asanian’s. He never
could understand why people thought him arrogant. He was like Estarion in that.
He knew what he could do. Why should he pretend that he did not?

“It’s not Estarion,” Iburan said. He lounged on a bench
against the wall, great black mountain of a man, dressed with uncommon
plainness in the white robe that priests of the Sun wore in this part of the
world. His beard was braided but ungauded, and his hair was in a single plait.
In a little while they would all attend the sunset-rite in the temple of this
city—town, rather, as Asanion reckoned it, smaller within its walls than Endros
but thronged with double and treble the people.

“It’s not the emperor,” said Iburan again. “Except that, by
living and breathing and walking in this country, he brings it about. I felt
something like it when his father came here. Asanion never felt itself joined
to Keruvarion in a marriage of equals. It would rule or it would have nothing,
no matter the will of its emperors or their blood-right to its throne.”

“But it accepts,” said Shaiyel. “My mother accepted my
father, though he was a slant-eyed plainsman. We are all one, she told me. We
must be, or the sun will fall.”

Iburan’s smile concealed itself in his beard, but Vanyi felt
it. “Not quite the sun that rides in the sky. But the Sun that rules out of
Endros—yes, that could fall too easily if the half of the prop beneath it
breaks asunder.”

“One would think,” said dour Oromin, “that nigh a hundred
years of inescapable fact would impress itself on an empire’s mind.”

Vanyi faded into the shadows. They were saying nothing that
she had not heard innumerable times already, and never to any purpose. On a
field of battle half-begun, the heir of the Sun and the heir of the Lion,
brought together out of all hope, had wedded their two empires. And spent the
rest of their lives and the lives of their children struggling to keep that
marriage intact.

For a long while, maybe, they had been more successful than
not. Then Ganiman died in Kundri’j Asan, and his son all but died taking
vengeance.

Emperors in Asanion seldom died unaided. It was the way of
their succession. But it was not the Sunlords’ way.

Sunlords were too direct, she thought. They saw the world as
a simple place, a pattern of light and dark under the sway of god and goddess.
They did not understand Asanian complexities. Even that first heir of the two
lands had had his mother’s bright clarity of mind, and too little of his
father’s subtlety.

Estarion had no subtlety at all.

No matter what she thought of, she circled back to him. She
slipped out of that room full of priests and useless chatter, and sought the
way to the gate.

o0o

This was a proper palace, as convoluted as an Asanian’s
mind. She lost herself more times than she cared to count, before she found a
servant to direct her toward escape. The man was subtly, exquisitely
contemptuous.
Barbarian
, he thought
at her, not caring if she heard.

And so she was. She did not thank him: that would have set
her below him. But she bestowed on him a coldly brilliant smile.

She was learning the shape and the taste of an Asanian city.
Villages in the Isles huddled together above the sea, their faces turned inward
toward the well and outward toward the boats and the nets. Towns in the Hundred
Realms warded themselves in walls, but under the peace of the Sun they had
allowed themselves to go to green, in gardens within, in fields and farms
without.

In Asanion the walls were manifold. This town of Shirai had
three, and gates so placed that one had to walk far round the circle from one
to the next. The streets within the circles were an inextricable tangle of
blank walls, twisting turns, sudden squares and crossroads often choked with
market booths, or veiled women chattering at a cistern or worshippers thronging
into a temple.

Keruvarion had conceded mightily in suffering the worship of
the goddess beside the god. Here the thousand gods had yet to diminish their
number, for all the truth that was embodied in the emperor.

So many people crowded so close together could never be
truly clean. The stench of them flooded Vanyi, all but drowning her. Their roar
and seethe swept over her like a storm on the sea.

She was seafolk, skyfolk. She was not made to live in such a
place.

A thin thread of discipline kept her on her feet. She was
tall here, and slight, borne along like a twig in a millrace. She did not try
to fight the current. It fetched her up against a wall that had been the
recipient of too many attentions; it reeked like a midden, or like a tavern in
the morning after a long carouse.

But there was cleanliness within the wall, and quiet. She
worked her way round to the gate. It was shut but not locked. It opened to the
touch of her hand.

Which god was worshipped here, she did not know, nor did it
matter. This was a holy place. Avaryan’s temple would be full tonight, with the
god’s heir in the town, and the high priest from Endros come to sing the rite.
Few people lingered here. A woman with a gift of fruit and flowers for the
altar in the outer court. A circle of boys reciting lessons in front of their
teacher. No priest that she could see, and no priestess.

The inner court would have been closed once to one of her
sex. Maybe it was still. She did not care. The torque about her neck was
passport to any temple in this world, even to the sanctuary, where the god’s
secrets were kept.

She did not need to go so far. This was a local god, perhaps,
or goddess: it was hard to tell. The image above the altar was carved of wood
black with age, clothed in robe upon robe of improbable, royal richness, and
crowned and necklaced and garlanded with flowers. Its face was a mask of beaten
gold, neither male nor female, blank, serene, unreachably beautiful. It had no
eyes, only darkness. Its mouth smiled just perceptibly.

Here, she thought, was Asanion: a golden mask, an androgyne
smile.

Strange how little it repelled her, or even frightened her.
Maybe she had lost fear with the capacity to love, or in truth to feel anything
at all.

She sat cross-legged on the floor. It was swept clean, she
noticed, and sprinkled with scented water. Somewhere in the temple’s depths,
then, were priests with a care for their duty. She was aware of them now that
she stretched her senses.

What she was looking for, she did not know. She had been led
here as she had been led to Endros from the breast of the sea. The god’s hand
was light on her but firm.

It did not ease the bleakness in her belly. Nothing could do
that.

She let her body settle, her power open like a sail to catch
the magewinds. They were treacherous here amid the crowding of so many minds,
on land so long subdued that it hardly knew itself apart from the men who lived
on it. And yet the winds were there, gusting and circling.

Voices. Mageborne, she thought; then shadows fell across the
light. She was not visible, maybe: dark trousers, dark coat, dark cap, sitting
motionless in shadow.

They spoke Asanian softly, barely above a whisper.

“It is so?”

“It is so.”

Men’s voices both. The first was hesitant, the second
eager—she would have said exultant. The eager one went on almost too fast to
follow. “Oh, it is so! Out of the darkness he is come, the golden one, the
Lion’s child.”

Estarion? Even in her half-trance, annoyance stabbed her.
Could she never escape him?

“I don’t believe you,” the first voice said. “The yoke is
heavier than it ever was. And now that one is come—the dark one. They say he
has the eyes, but his face is a barbarian’s face, like a black eagle. An army
rides with him; the high ones bow down to him. How can any power free us from
him?”

“Easily,” said the second. “As easily as a knife in the
dark.”

“Not this time. They were innocents before. Now they know. They
feel the hate we bear them.”

“They are mages, too. And little good it does them.
He
is coming. He will strike them down.”

“With what? Sorcery?”

Scorn, that, and a flash of fear. The second voice laughed.
It was higher than the first, perhaps younger, and something in it spoke to
Vanyi of more than simple courage: wine or dreamsmoke, or darker things. “He
needs none of their sorcery. He is. He will throw down the false king and rule
as the old emperors ruled, true blood and true spirit. No bearded barbarian
mocking the throne of the Lion.”

“You’re dreaming. What did you get into this time?”

“Truth!” sang the younger man. “I saw him. Very well, if you
insist—in my dream. But the prophecy is true. The time is come. The burning god
will fall, and the Golden Empire win back its own again. Can’t you feel it?
Can’t you hear it? It’s coming—it’s almost upon us.”

“I hear the same old wishful wheezes I’ve always heard,” the
first voice said. “It’s been, what? Fourscore years? Five? We’re as strong
under the yoke as we ever were. And now the black king is here. All the high
ones fall in front of him. If there is a Prophet—and I admit it, I’ve heard
people talking, too—what is he but a madman? We’ve had those before. They never
came to anything but a head on a spike.”

“This one is different,” the young one said. “You’ll see.”

“I’ll see him strung up for the crows,” the older man said.
He sounded ineffably tired, but behind the voice was a spark of hope: that
Estarion would fall; that this prophet, whatever he was—dream, delusion, living
lunatic—would set Asanion free.

Vanyi drew a careful breath. They still had not seen her.
The young one went away singing to himself. The elder—and he was old, she saw
as he moved into the light, an ancient yellowed creature in a priest’s
threadbare robe, with a broom in his hands—the old man kept silent but for the
singing in his mind. The same song in both, wordless, wandering, but full of
hatred for the invaders out of Keruvarion. It was worn so smooth, cherished so
long, that it gleamed like a bloodstone in water.

She drew shadows about herself. Even so, she thought that
the old man sensed her presence as the very old can, or the blind, by other
senses than sight.

He tensed, peering. She made herself nothing, no one, wind
and shifting air.

o0o

It took all the courage she had to walk to that guarded
door, to say to the men there, “I would speak with his majesty.”

Men? They were boys, youths whom she knew, who smiled at her
and asked after her. Was she well again?

“We worried,” said the slim brown boy from the Nine Cities.
“He’s going to be glad to see you. All those simpering yellow women are giving
him the jaundice.”

She burst out laughing, though she had thought there could
be no lightness in her. “And of course no one can tell, he being what he is.”

The other guard, a hulking lad from somewhere north of
Ianon, grinned blindingly. “We won’t tell him you said that. Go on, he’s
waiting for you.”

o0o

Vanyi halted in the doorway of the inner chamber, stiff as
a hound at gaze. At first she could not see him for the cloud of veils and
perfumes and golden eyes. There must have been a dozen of them, and a fat
personage beaming at them all and proclaiming in a voice much too sweet to be
natural, “Oh, what joy! What delight!”

“Out.” That voice at least was unmistakable. It had a growl
in it. “Out, I said!”

“But,” said the personage. “Majesty. They came all this
way—all the way from Kundri’j, purely for your majesty’s pleasure.”

“Then let them go back to Kundri’j and give pleasure to men
who want it.” Estarion rose up out of the veils, his eyes hot gold with fury,
and the raw edge of it in his voice. “And tell his gracious lordship—tell him
to pay your full fee. Doubled.”

“Trebled,” fluted the personage, “with additions for our
hardship. To come so far for so little—the roads, the inns, the brigands—”

“Out!”

“Well roared,” said Vanyi dryly in the ringing silence.

Estarion stopped sucking in breath, stopped moving at all.
He stared at her as if he had never seen her before. “Vanyi?”

“So I was, the last time I looked.”

“Vanyi!”

He was on her before she could stop him, arms about her,
stronger than she remembered, whirling her in a dizzying dance. “Oh, love! Oh,
lady! You don’t know—”

Her mind set itself to go rigid, to fight free. But her body
had other intentions. Her arms knew precisely where to go. Her lips knew what
they wanted, which was to silence him. The taste of him was piercing sweet.

She pulled back so abruptly that he staggered. He looked as
drunken as the youth in the temple. Her hands smoothed his hair back from his
face, combed through the curls of his beard, clenched at her sides. “This isn’t
what I meant,” she said.

He blinked. He was always the slower to come to himself.
“Damn those boys to everlasting hells. Bless them for sainted idiots. Among the
three of you, you saved me from a fate worse than death.”

“What was so terrible about it? All those ladies need is a
bath and a few days in the saddle, to make them halfway human.”

“Not my saddle,” he said with honest desperation. “Vanyi,
beloved, whatever I said, whatever I did—”

“I didn’t come here to forgive you,” she said, so sharp that
she brought him up short.

“But—”

“You can’t be anything other than you are. I won’t ask you
to be. And you shouldn’t ask me to do what I can’t do. I can’t be your empress,
Starion. I’ve known that from the beginning.”