Arrows of the Sun (16 page)

“You’re not afraid of her,” he said.

“Should I be?”

He bit his tongue. A beast as large as a small senel, fangs
as long as daggers, claws that could bring down a bull at the charge: a fair
lapcat, that. “She’s not overfond of strangers,” he said.

“I’m hardly that,” said Sidani. “She’s been my blanket, most
nights, since we left Kurion.”

“But—”

“Jealous, child?”

“No!”

Her teeth flashed white in the shadow that was her face.
“Good. Then you won’t mind that she found herself a he-cat in the forest of
Kurion.”

“There are no ul-cats in Kurion.”

“Tell that to the forest king who, at Greatmoon’s full, took
a queen.” Sidani regarded him in high amusement. “Surely you wondered what was
keeping her so long.”

“She goes her own way,” he said stiffly. He looked down into
the green gleam of eyes. They closed, opened again, in lazy contentment. “You
are smug,” he said to the cat.

“Well she might be. She’ll bear her cubs in Kundri’j.
They’ll be purely delighted in the palace, to play host to a nest of ul-cats.”

“Gods,” said Estarion.

“So they will be. Asanians will worship anything, if it
frightens them enough.”

He shook her babblings out of his head. The last of the
darkness went with it. She had meant that, maybe. She was more like Ulyai than
anything human should be.

“Keep her with you,” said Sidani, “until you come to
Kundri’j.”

A great weariness came over Estarion. “You, too? Is everyone
convinced that I’ll fall over dead if I’m not guarded every living moment?”

“You won’t fall. You’ll jump. Or someone will push you.”

“I’m not going to jump,” he said.

“Not tonight.”

She turned her face to the great bloodied orb of the moon.
For a moment he saw what she must have been when she was young. Haughty as a
queen. Free-spoken as a man, or an empress. And beautiful: a beauty that smote
the heart.

None of it surprised him. She was a northern woman. They
were often so, in the kingdoms and among the tribes.

They were formidable when they were young. When they were
old, they were terrible. This one drove him back to his bed with the edge of
her tongue, and sat by him until he slept, and stood guard on his dreams. She
and the ul-cat, one on each side of the gate, and nothing dark allowed to pass.

Induverran was the gate to Asanion’s heart, a city of gold
and lead, flowers and dung, fierce summer heat and sudden stony chill. The
cities that Estarion had seen and heard of in the Golden Empire were all old
beyond reckoning. All but Induverran.

There had been a city of that name in this place for years
out of count, but the walls that framed it, the towers that rose within it,
were none of them more than fourscore years old. Even Endros was older than
that; but Endros was a white city, with a purity that time and men’s habitation
could not sully. Induverran struck Estarion with an air both grandiose and shabby,
as if the land’s weight had overwhelmed the new-raised stones, or memory bowed
and stained them.

That memory was clear always beyond the walls. Induverran
that was now stood apart from Induverran that had been, nearer a little river
that had shifted since the first city was built. The old city stood in ruins
like the charred bones of a demon’s feast, grown over but thinly though the
land was rich round about.

No one walked there. Birds did not shun it, but neither did
they linger, or build their nests amid the fallen pillars.

Induverran’s lord sat his senel on the edge of the ruined
city. He was a prince of five robes, of blood as pure as any in the empire, and
Estarion should have detested him. But he had a hard clear eye in that
yellow-curled head, and when Estarion readied to ride out of the new city and
into the old, he was there waiting, mounted on one of the golden stallions for
which his domain was famous.

The senel switched its silver-tasseled tail and stamped.
Lord Dushai quelled it with a hand on its neck. “There they fought,” he said in
creditable Gileni. “There the mages hurled their blasts of power, and the beast
of their mingled magics stalked and slew. And there,” he said, tilting his chin
toward the open plain, “the armies met.”

“But not in battle,” Estarion said. “My forebears stopped
them: the Asanian and the Varyani, riding down upon them out of the living air,
and raising walls of magic and of light.”

“It was too late for the city,” said Lord Dushai.

“They did what they could,” Estarion said, struggling not to
snap. That battle was nigh a century past. He was its consequence, with his
lion-eyes and his northern face. They had faced one another across the broken
city, the emperor of Asanion and the emperor of Keruvarion, son of the Lion and
son of the Sun, and looked to end their rivalry in blood and fire. But their
children had forged a peace. It had cost the high prince of Asanion his sole
empire. It had cost the heir of Keruvarion far more.

Sarevadin. Estarion said the name to himself, like an
incantation. Neither man’s name nor woman’s, given by a great mage and queen to
the child of her body: manchild as he had been then, tall, redheaded,
northern-skinned prince with a great gift of magery. Woman as she had ridden
out of the Gate between the worlds, heavy with the heir of two empires, mage-wrought
and magebound, but the Mages had had no power to sway her soul to their will.
Only to rend her body asunder and make it anew, as they wished to do to the
empire she was born to rule.

Estarion slid from Umizan’s back. The stallion did not lower
his head to crop the thin pallid grass, but followed as Estarion walked into
the broken city. Others came slowly behind: Lord Dushai on his fretting,
skittering mount, a line of guards, a thin scatter of hangers-on. No one else
had been willing to leave the comforts of the new city for this bleak
battlefield, not even Sidani who, Estarion had thought, would go anywhere.

The stench of blood and burning was long since washed away.
The taint of magery was faded almost to vanishing. And yet a power lingered in
this place.

Here it began. Here the two empires met, fought, were joined
into one. Here, where the grass began to grow green, the emperors faced their
rebel children, and knew what they had done. Treason. Betrayal of all that
their fathers had wrought, in the name of unlooked-for peace.

“They loved one another, the stories say,” Estarion said. He
did not care overmuch who heard, nor expect an answer.

Nonetheless he received one. It came, it seemed, out of a stone,
but in Sidani’s voice. “Only love would explain it,” she said.

She was sitting on the ground, wrapped in a mantle that had
lost its color to years and weather. For once she looked honestly old, a thin
and ancient creature who shivered in the heavy heat of Asanian summer. Or maybe
she was living in another time, in another season, when the wind blew chill
over the plain, and death walked, and powers moved in the earth.

“Were you there?” Estarion asked her, half expecting a lie,
half expecting it to be the truth.

She gave him neither. “Cold here,” she said. “So cold.”

When he touched her, her skin was chill. And the air already
nigh to furnace-heat, even so early, with the sun barely lifted over the
horizon.

“You’re ill,” he said.

She did not hear him. She was in delirium, or in a trance.
He gathered her in his arms. She was as light as a bundle of sticks, and nearly
as fragile, who had seemed as strong as a swordblade.

“Lord,” someone said. Godri. Alidan stood behind him, and
others of the guard, and a handful of Lord Dushai’s men. Lord Dushai kept a
little apart, saying nothing. What the emperor chose to do, his stance said,
was the emperor’s concern. Estarion almost loved him then, though he would
never like so perfect an Asanian.

“Lord,” said Godri, “we can carry her. Let us—”

Estarion ignored him. Umizan waited, unwontedly patient. He
would carry the fire’s child, for so he thought of her. Estarion saw briefly,
dizzily, through the senel’s eye: a shape of flame, red-gold at the heart, but
burning dim now, sinking into darkness and cold.

“She won’t die,” Estarion said fiercely. “Stop thinking it!”

Umizan’s ears were flat, but he did not shift or fret as
Estarion set the shivering, burning body in the saddle. She was conscious
enough to rouse as she felt the senel under her, to grip the beast’s sides with
her knees, to wind fingers in the long plaited mane. He walked softly, as
smoothly as ever senel could, bearing her as if she were made of glass.

o0o

Once she was stripped of her worn clothes and wrapped in a
soft robe and laid in the bed that had been meant for Estarion, Sidani slept
peacefully enough. Her brow when he laid his hand on it toward evening was as
warm as it should be, no sign of fever or of unnatural cold. She breathed well
and easily. Her sleep was deep and quiet, without dreams.

He exchanged glances with Ulyai, who had come to fill a
solid half of the bed. “Watch over her,” he said.

The cat laid her head beside the woman’s and sighed. She had
been negligent. She had let both the bright one and the fire’s child go out
alone while she indulged herself in a fine fresh haunch of plowbeast. An
ul-queen did not stoop to apology, but she could regret an indiscretion.

She would watch over Sidani. Estarion could wish himself as
happily occupied.

Lord Dushai, perhaps mindful that a man could grow weary
unto tears of banquets, had not laid on the usual feast or the usual parade of
beauties. Both were to be had, but he had woven them into a new thing, as new
as the hall into which he led his guest.

That was not the long narrow chamber Estarion was used to.
It was as round as one of the moons, ringed in pillars and topped with a dome
that seemed made of light. Nor was Estarion to sit at a high table, there to be
stared at and remarked upon while he endured the fiery delights of the Asanian
taste. There was a couch placed for him in the innermost of many rings of
couches, a low table set between it and the couch beside, on which Dushai
established himself, and in front of them the open center of the circle.

Others reclined in the widening circles, some alone on their
couches, some accompanied. His mother faced him across the open space, with
Iburan seated upright at her feet.

She raised a brow at him. He twitched a smile in return.

Servants brought food, drink. Estarion found that he was
hungry. He was acquiring a taste for some of the Asanian sauces, though others
were a sore test of his fortitude. The thin yellow Asanian wine went not ill
with the more palatable of the dishes, and it was chilled with snow brought
from mountains in the north and kept in deep cellars.

He had chosen to be cool, though it meant shocking his
many-robed subjects. His kilt was of fine cream-pale silk broad-belted with
gold and great plates of amber as yellow as his eyes. He was bare above it but
for a pectoral of gold and amber and topaz, his hair plaited into the
helmet-braids of the Ianyn kings.

He had almost sacrificed his beard in the name of coolness,
but contrariness forestalled him. Asanians never grew their beards, if indeed
they had any. They reckoned it a barbarism. Therefore he kept his.

Barefoot, bareheaded, lightly kilted, he was as cool as
human body could be, and almost content. The servant who had brought him wine
set the flagon on the table and took up a fan, waking wind where there was
none. He stretched out on the couch, propped up with cushions, nibbling a bit
of spiced sweetness.

People were staring in Asanian fashion, under lowered lids
or out of the corners of their eyes. Poor creatures, wrapped in all those robes,
compelled by custom to wear their hair unbound or knotted at their napes. The
crop-headed, tunicked servants were happier by far than they.

His own people had had a little sense. Those who dared
kilts, or who were entitled to them by blood and breeding, wore them with
relief.

His mother might have worn one herself, but she had greater
care for Asanian sensibilities than he had. Her gown covered her from throat to
ankle but left her arms bare. Its heavy raw silk revealed little of the body
beneath, which was a pity. She had beautiful breasts, firm still and round
though she had borne and suckled a son.

She bowed her head to the compliment, with a slight, wry
brush of vision: himself as she saw him, a slender dark beauty with a noble
breadth of shoulder.

Dark, yes, beyond a doubt. Slender—lean, for a fact, and not
much hope of gaining flesh as he aged, if his mother’s kin were any guide. They
were all as ribby as spring wolves. Beauty . . .

He laughed. Lord Dushai thought him amused by something
someone had said. He let it pass.

His mother was pleased with him. And why not? As far as she
knew, he had given up his corpse-faced commoner and accepted his lot, though
not, yet, so far as to take to bed an Asanian woman.

He did not even know where Vanyi was. Among the priests,
most likely, or in the temple. She did not speak to him now; she did not touch
his mind, nor respond when he sought hers.

No use to try. It only caused him pain. He drained his cup
of snow-cold wine and held it out for the servant to fill.

Lord Dushai addressed him, soft and clear under the muted
murmur that was Asanian conviviality. “I have prepared an entertainment for
you, majesty,” he said, “which perhaps you have not seen before. We call it, if
you will, a concourse of attractive lies.”

Estarion’s brows went up. This was new, and possibly
interesting. He watched as black-clad servants brought lamps into the empty
circle till it blazed as bright as noon. While they did that, others dimmed the
lamps without, casting the hall into twilight.