Arrows of the Sun (30 page)

“I could understand that,” Estarion said.

Korusan laughed. It was an uncanny sound in the dark and the
rain: young, hardly more than a child’s, but old as mountains. “You understand
nothing, my lord and emperor. What have you ever lost but what you could easily
lose?”

“My father,” said Estarion, sharp with the pain of it.

“Fathers die,” Korusan said. “That is the way of the world.”

“I gather you never had one,” Estarion said.

“What, you think us born of the earth, or of a mage’s
conjuring? We are human enough, Sunlord, under the veils and the swords.”

“How old are you, child?”

The Olenyas was not to be startled into anger. “I have
fifteen years,” he said calmly. “And you?”

“I thought everyone knew my age to the hour,” said Estarion.

“Twenty-two years, twice six cycles of Brightmoon less two
days and,” said Korusan, “five turns of the glass, and one half-turn.” He
paused. Estarion held his tongue. “They say you will live a hundred years, if
no one kills you first.”

“You’re here to avert that,” said Estarion.

“Oh, yes,” said Korusan. “No one will kill you while I stand
beside you. I keep that privilege for myself.”

Estarion laughed. It was the first true laughter he had
known in Kundri’j. It swept the dark away; it brought back, however dimly, the
light that once had been all he was. “None but you shall take my life,” he
said. “Here’s my hand on it.”

Korusan clasped it. His grip was warm and strong, strong
enough to grind the bones together, had not Estarion braced against him.

Estarion grinned into the night. This was terrible; it was
wonderful. It suited his mood to perfection.

o0o

Korusan had been appalled when he followed the path of a
suspicion and found a figure in Olenyai black, wielding a blade against the Sun’s
get. That was none of his plotting.

He was angry, first, while his body moved to do what was
necessary. If this was one of the mages’ puppets, he would take the price in
their blood. Then he grieved, for he had conceived a liking for the Sunlord’s
servant.

Neither anger nor grief got in the way of his lesser
belt-knife. Swords were too great an honor for an assassin who dared robe and
veil himself like an Olenyas.

After grief came stillness, and certainty. This life
belonged to him. This prey was his; he would relinquish it to no other, no, not
to death itself.

And, having claimed it, he was not about to let it escape
him. He made himself the black king’s shadow. He found himself admiring a
creature who could stand in the rain until dawn, talking of everything and
nothing. Of course he did not understand what Korusan meant by the oath he had
sworn. He was too arrogant for that, and too much a child.

Korusan would be dead before he came to this man’s years.
His bones ached in the damp; old scars throbbed. But if a man could live as
long as this one hoped to, then twenty-two was infant’s years, and lifetimes in
front of him still, and worlds to learn the ways of.

Most bitter of enemies he might be, but he was an engaging
creature. Attractive, even, if one were fond of panthers. The grey morning
showed him wet to the skin, hair a draggled tail, rain dripping from his beard,
and eyes bright gold.

Korusan sneezed.

The lion-eyes went wide. “There now. See what I’ve done.
I’ve caught you your death.”

“I know where my death is,” said Korusan, “and that is not
in this place.”

The Sunlord would not listen. He herded Korusan into warmth
and dryness, got him out of dripping robes but not the veil, played servant as
if he had been born to it. And if he knew what he served, what then would he
have done?

He knew Asanian modesty. He observed it well enough, not
even a glance aside, no touch that was not required. The robe in which he
wrapped Korusan was black, and went around Korusan exactly twice, and trailed
elegantly behind.

The wine he poured was a vintage reserved for emperors.
Korusan was startled that it stayed in his stomach.

“You’re a delicate little thing, aren’t you?” observed his
lord and master.

Well for Korusan that his enemy recalled him to due and
proper hate. He had been deadly close to conceiving a liking for the creature.
“I could snap your neck before you moved to stop me,” he said.

Estarion smiled down from that northern height. “I’ll wager
you could, if a sneeze didn’t catch you. Your toes are blue. Why didn’t you say
something?”

And then, damn his arrogance, he went down on his knees and
rubbed life and warmth into Korusan’s feet. With his own hands he did it.
Grinning, with all his white teeth gleaming. Thinking it a great lark, no
doubt, to play the servant to his servant.

He was not even shivering, naked as he was but for a scrap
of kilt. He was like a hearthfire, hot as fever, but Korusan knew that he was
always so. Beast-warm. Beast-strong. His beard dried in ringlets. He was
covered with curly fleece, breast and belly, legs and arms. But his back was
smooth, and his sides, and his shoulders.

He was beautiful, as a panther is. Korusan shivered.
Estarion leaped to his feet, all long-limbed grace, and fetched a blanket.
Korusan flung it in his face. “Enough! This is unseemly.”

“It will be more unseemly if you drop dead of a fever. I
won’t lose another guardsman, Yelloweyes.”

“Golden,” said Korusan.

A grin was all the answer he gained. Arrogant. Insolent.
Thoroughly unrepentant.

Fool, thought Korusan, to make himself so easy to hate.

So easy, and so unexpectedly difficult. One could despise
his dreadful manners, and shudder at his alien face. But there was still that
innocence of his, that transparent conviction that everyone must love him,
simply because he was himself.

It would be a pleasure to kill him. But not now. Not too
soon. Not until he could know why he died, and who had slain him.

Godri went to his last rest as best he might in this city
of strangers. There was no sand to inter him for the season of the death-vigil,
but fire they could give him, and a pyre in the Court of Glories outside the
hall in which he had lain in state.

Estarion sang the words of the rite, first those of
Avaryan’s temple in Endros, then those of the desert and the tribes. He
sacrificed a fine mare upon the pyre, to bear the soul to its rest, and when it
was time to kindle the flame, he called down the sun.

Estarion watched him burn. How long it was, or who lingered,
he did not care.

He had no tears. That troubled him. He should be able to
weep.

He was walled in guards, surrounded by them, watched and
warded till his nape crawled. And there were magewalls on him. Iburan’s, no
doubt, to defend him against a second assassin. He traced them in the ache
behind his eyes.

His chambers were no refuge. No more was the harem. His
mother was doubly and trebly guarded—they might, after all, strike at her,
since they had failed with her son. In the hall of the throne, no one could
approach him. Even the Regent stood outside the inner wall of watchers,
speaking as Estarion no doubt would speak if he had the wits.

Estarion wondered if Firaz counted this a victory in their
long and almost amiable war, or a defeat. He could not come close enough to
ask, even if the Regent would have answered.

Estarion’s loss was not spoken of. Asanian courtesy. Grief
was a private matter. One’s servants spoke to the servants of the bereaved.
Condolences came attached to gifts of minor value: a perfect blossom, a jewel,
an image of the departed. Estarion was amazed to see how many small figures
appeared in his chambers, the face of each painted with a reasonable likeness
of Godri’s warrior-patterns.

“They wish to be recorded,” Korusan said of the givers, “as
sharing your grief. So that you may suspect them less of wishing to slay him.”

“No one wanted to kill Godri,” Estarion said.

“That is understood,” said the Olenyas.

“There are rites of thanksgiving in all the temples,” said
Estarion, “that I survived the attack. How many people will truly thank their
gods, do you think? And how many will pray that the next attempt succeeds?”

“Do you honestly expect that everyone will love you?”

“I’d be content not to be hated.”

Korusan shrugged. “Perhaps you should have asked to be born
a commoner, or the lord of a little domain, where you could be adored and
petted and never troubled with disagreement.”

“Then I should better have been born a woolbeast. A blooded
ram with nothing to do but grow fine wool and tup the ewes.”

“You say it, not I.”

Was he laughing? Estarion could not see his eyes, to tell.
He was inspecting a tableful of death-gifts. His finger brushed a topaz on a
chain. It was the exact clear gold of his eyes.

“Do you want that?” Estarion asked.

His hand jerked back. It was the first unguarded gesture
Estarion had seen in him, the first that betrayed him as the boy he was.

“You may have it,” Estarion said. “Everyone always gives me
topazes. I have chestsful of them.”

“Do you dislike them?”

“I like emeralds better. And opals of the Isles. Have you
seen them? They’re black or deep blue, and shot with fire.”

“Like your hair with gold in it?”

“And red and green and blue.” Estarion regarded him in some
surprise. “You’re a poet.”

“I am a guard. What is there to do but study my charge?”

“I never thought of that,” said Estarion. “Don’t Olenyai do
anything but guard? They sleep, surely, and eat. And practice weaponry.”

“And unarmed combat, and the arts of the hunt.”

“And the high arts?”

Korusan took up the jewel on its chain. His voice was as
cool as ever. “I can read. I write, a little. I sang before my voice broke. Now
I am like a raven with catarrh.”

Estarion laughed. “That won’t last. You’ll sing deep, I
think.”

“Not as deep as you.”

“That’s northern blood. The priest, Iburan—he can sound like
the earth shifting.”

The topaz was gone, secreted somewhere in the swathing of
robes. Estarion smiled inside himself. Strange how the world, like grief, could
shift and change; how the hated shadow-watcher could become, if not a friend,
then a human creature with mind and wits of its own.

“You didn’t sleep last night,” Estarion said, “and you’ve
been my shadow all day. Don’t you need to rest?”

“I slept while you were in Court,” said Korusan.

“You’ve shadowed me since I came here, haven’t you?” said
Estarion. “It’s hard to tell, if one isn’t noticing. No faces.”

“You see more than you admit to,” Korusan said.

“Don’t we all?”

The Olenyas moved away from the table. “It is a custom,” he
said, “for the imperial Olenyai to choose those who will stand in closest
attendance upon his majesty. I asked to be chosen.”

“Why?”

“I wished to see what you were.”

“And what am I?”

“Interesting.”

“Haliya says the same thing.”

Korusan’s eyes widened a fraction.

“A friend,” said Estarion. “As Asanian as you, and as chary
of showing her face.”

“Your concubine,” said Korusan. His tone dismissed her with
the word. “And I am your servant.”

“She talks like that, too. Or is that too insulting to
contemplate?”

“You are not Asanian,” Korusan said.

“Enough of me is,” said Estarion, “to claim blood-right to
this place. I hated that, did you know? I wanted to forget that I was ever
anything but Varyani. I avoided mirrors, and cultivated hats and hoods, and let
no one address me as Son of the Lion.”

“You could have revoked your claim,” said the Olenyas.

“Of course I couldn’t,” Estarion said. “It’s mine.”

“You are,” said Korusan, “emperor.”

“You hate me for it?”

“Should I love you?”

Estarion grinned and stretched, as if he could widen these
walls with his hands and break through to open sky. “You are interesting,” he
said. “Fascinating. If you study me, may I study you?”

“The emperor may do as he wills.”

“The emperor wills . . .” Estarion turned
full about, dragging his damnable robes. His mood was as changeable as the sky,
now sun, now clouds, now black night.

“Godri is dead,” he said. “I should have died in his place.
And the sun still shines. The clouds run over the vale of the river. The world
cares nothing that I am lord of it, or that my people would cast me down.”

“Or raise you up,” said Korusan.

“I see,” Estarion said in something very like delight. “The
people would be death to me. You would be death to my self-pity.”

“Does it give you pleasure to feel so sorry for yourself?”

“It gives me considerable gratification,” said Estarion, “to
think of throttling you in your sleep.”

“Then we are alike,” said Korusan.

Estarion flashed a grin at him. “Go away,” he said. “Sleep.
I promise I won’t throttle you. This time.”

The Olenyas went away. Estarion had not honestly expected
him to. But he was tired: Estarion saw it in the droop of the shoulders in the
black robe, in the slight drag of the step.

A child, yes. A child who knew the use of the swords he
wore, and who had slain an assassin with ease and dispatch and no slightest
glimmer of remorse.

o0o

Other shadows came on guard. Estarion shut them out of
mind and sight, and flung himself on the bed in the inner room.

The sun sank slowly into the west of the world. He felt it
in his skin.

That much was still his, the sun-sense, the land-sense.
Asanion, and his father’s death, had taken the rest of it away, locked him in
himself. But the sun never left him.

He sat up, clasping his knees, resting his chin on them. He
was smothering. Stifling. And tonight, if anyone came to kill him . . .