Arrows of the Sun (19 page)

The Olenyai went still. The Guard burst out in a babble of
furious voices.

Estarion’s hand slashed them into silence, and singled out
the decurion of his Guard. “Kiyan. And you—Olenyas. Arc you their captain?”

“I am captain of this watch,” said the voice out of the
veil. A quite ordinary Asanian voice, no power or terror in it. And no title
for the emperor, either.

“Explain this,” Estarion said.

The Olenyas did not answer at once. Kiyan the decurion said,
“Sire, they invaded your chambers, ordered your guards’ dismissal, and informed
me, when I came to settle it, that none but they will guard you. Is that so, my
lord?”

“They have orders to that effect,” Estarion said. And as
Kiyan opened his mouth to speak: “But not from me. I have a matter or two to settle
with the Regent. While you wait for that, let your two commanders come to an
agreement. Both companies will guard me. Both, sirs; together and alike.”

That was not at all to their liking. The Guard scowled;
someone snarled. The Olenyai looked as supercilious as eyes could look in
faceless masks.

A long look quelled the scowls. The Olenyai, who being
Asanian would not meet his eyes, needed more. Estarion said, “My guards, my
Olenyai. You are mine, no?”

“We are the emperor’s,” their captain said.

“Just so,” said Estarion.

He stepped forward. They parted, Olenyai and Guardsmen
alike. He escaped to the sanctuary of his chambers. Such as that was, with
imperial servants infesting it and Godri brooding balefully in their midst.

o0o

Asanian custom permitted an emperor to receive a high lord
in private, with no more than a servant or two in attendance. Estarion was
careful. He put on the robes the servants chose for him, simple as such things
went, inner and outer only, and thin enough almost to be endurable in the heat.
He let them comb his hair out of its braids. He arranged himself as
they—discreetly, politely, firmly—suggested, in a chair in one of the smaller
rooms. It would have been a ghastly cupboard of a place, save that it opened on
the garden. A fountain played just beyond, cooling the air and the ear.

Set up like an idol in a temple, watched over by a glowering
pair of guards, bronze-dark narrow-eyed plainsman and black-robed Olenyas,
Estarion received the Regent of Asanion. Lord Firaz came in unattended, which
marked either very great insult or very great trust; his robes were no more
elaborate than Estarion’s, and his manner was much less stiff than it had been
in the hall.

He insisted on a single prostration, but then he let
Estarion raise him and set him in a chair a little lower than his own. He
sipped the wine that the servant poured: great trust again, not to ask that it
be tasted before he ventured it. He even abbreviated the dance of courtesies,
restraining himself to a few dozen phrases in praise of the wine, the weather,
and the appointments.

The wine was drinkable, the weather wretched, the
appointments no more and no less than they should be; but Estarion did not say
so. It was his part to listen, smile inscrutably, murmur inanities.

After hardly more than a turn of the glass, Firaz approached
the meat of the matter. “Your majesty—”

“Come now,” said Estarion. “We’re kin, or so I’m told. Let
me be ‘my lord’ if you insist; or if you can bear it, let me be myself:
Estarion.”

“My lord,” said Firaz. “I rejoice to see you so well
reconciled to our ways.”

“But,” said Estarion, “I am not. I do turn and turn about as
my fathers did before me: now of the north, now of the east, now of Asanion.
None of them owns me. I belong to them all.”

“You are in Asanion now,” said its Regent.

“I had noticed,” Estarion said mildly.

Firaz took the warning: his nostrils thinned. But he was not
one to be daunted by imperial temper. “May I speak freely, my lord?”

“I would prefer it,” said Estarion.

The Regent’s eyes widened a fraction. Estarion tasted doubt,
and a flicker of respect. “Very well, my lord. If I may say so without risk of
grievous injury to your pride or to mine, your exhibition in the hall would not
have been well received in Kundri’j Asan.”

“No?”

Firaz went on doggedly. “I believe that you knew it, and
that you did it for precisely that reason. Are you determined, my lord, to turn
this half of your empire against you?”

“What if I were?”

“I would understand it,” said Firaz. “I would not condone it.”

“You don’t think Asanion would be better served if it were
rid of its pack of mongrels and upstarts, and an emperor of the pure blood set
upon its throne?”

Firaz astonished Estarion. He laughed. “Should I say yes,
and die for speaking treason? Or should I say no, and be hanged for imbecility?
My lord, you are the Heir of the Lion. It is written in your face. If your
servants are blind, or if they do not know you, then it were best you teach
them to see. But not,” he added, “quite so much as we saw in hall this
morning.”

“Why?” asked Estarion.

“Modesty is not to be explained. It is.”

“I wasn’t naked.”

“You were.” Firaz stopped himself. “My lord, I see clearly
that you are no fool, nor do you do aught but as you choose. I would venture to
ask that when you choose in Kundri’j, you choose the wise man’s portion.”

“And that is to do as you dictate?”

“I do not dictate,” said Firaz.

“Your servants do. They ordered my squire, the chosen
attendant of my journey, out of my presence. Your Olenyai had dismissed my
Guard, at your command and in defiance of my will.”

“It was your squire, my lord, who led me here. I see a
Guardsman out of Endros and an Olenyas of Kundri’j at your right hand and your
left.”

“I discovered,” said Estarion, “that my titles have a
certain worth, even in Asanion.”

“They are your servants, my lord, and your warriors. They
but come to fulfill their duty.”

“So they do. There will be, I hope, no further objections to
my escort or to its disposition.”

“Will your majesty see fit to indulge Asanian eccentricities
in the matter of clothing and of conduct?”

“That depends upon the eccentricity.”

“Will your majesty consent at least to observe the
fundamental proprieties?”

“I will not ride in a litter. I will not wear the mask or
the wig. I will, if I choose, walk outside of the palace.”

Firaz paused, perhaps to gather patience. “My lord, will you
learn to be an emperor in Asanion?”

Cruelly hard, that, to ask so direct a question. Estarion
was almost minded to be merciful. “If you will teach me, I will learn as I
may.”

“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.