Dark Empress (19 page)

The nearest figure he hadn’t noticed at first and let him to question his eyes. A girl of perhaps seven years of age sat in her ragged clothing on the very rock that had almost fouled them. Her arms reached up, outstretched; beseeching? Inviting? He shuddered once again as he realised he could just make out the reflection of his silhouette at the boat rail in the girl’s glassy, black eyes, sunk deep in her grey face.

This was clearly impossible. Not only could he not imagine the ship managing to get into this strangely cramped position, but the girl had not been there when he’d pushed the oar at the rock. Somehow this whole thing must be some kind of illusion.

Frowning, he picked up a spare belaying pin and cast it at the rock, smiling as he realised how simply he had seen through this trickery.

The wooden pin bounced from the glistening rock with a noisy ‘crack’ and disappeared into the water with a plop. Samir sagged slightly. Impossible, yet definitely real.

The man nearby thumped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Don’t throw things at them. You hit one and you’ll have some bloody bad luck…“ he looked around nervously. “Maybe we’ll all have some bloody bad luck!”

Samir blinked.

He’d been looking forward to seeing this mythical place and suddenly now, while he was this close, something was making the hair stand up on the back of his neck and he would just as rather be almost anywhere else. It felt like he would never be warm or see the sun again, such was the damp cold of the mist that stuck his shirt to his chest and the dismal grey all about them.

“Fucking captain!”

Samir blinked and turned to look at the man that had just smacked him on the shoulder.

“What?”

“Captain Khmun! Came in too fast. Should know better.”

Samir bridled, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Someone with an ounce of sense ought to knock him down and take over. Someone who actually knows how to sail!”

Opportunity knocks so rarely that sometimes you miss it. Samir had seen opportunities slip past him several times in his life, unaware at the time that they were important. The events of the last year, however, had taught him the value of luck and opportunity, and he had been actively waiting for a moment like this for weeks of agonising beatings. Luck presents opportunities, but you still have to grasp them.

“Shut up!” he said, vehemently, and louder than he’d intended.

Without waiting for a reply from the surprised man, he turned, the other belaying pin he’d been grasping on the rail now gripped tightly in his hand. He spun with no warning, his arm swinging out with its heavy timber weapon. His aim was true; his aim was always true.

The narrow end of the foot-long, heavy wooden pin smashed with force into the man’s face. There were two instantaneous cracks. Samir was agonisingly aware that one of them was his finger, caught between the man’s cheekbones and the timber. The other, judging from the explosion of blood that showered his own face, was the man’s nose shattering beyond repair.

Samir straightened and watched as his victim, unconscious instantly from the blow, toppled backwards onto the deck, landing like a sack of grain.

Without turning, he closed his eyes, biting his lip against the pain in his hand. The captain was so close behind him he could feel Khmun’s eyes boring into his neck; almost feel his breath. Opportunity knocks.

“Why?”

“Borderline mutiny, sir. With respect, you need to watch him.”

The captain fell silent, though Samir could almost see him nodding thoughtfully.

“When we’ve docked, clean yourself up and tell the watch that I want to see you.”

Samir turned slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes deferentially low and nodded.

“Of course, captain.”

Khmun laughed.

“The bowed head is a nice touch. You I can use.”

Samir smiled to himself.

All you have to do is answer…

In which pecking orders are established

Asima stood by the golden latticework window and peered down. There were precious few external windows in the royal harem, and most of those were inaccessible to the girls. It had taken her a long time to find a window that looked out toward the rest of the palace complex rather than over the sea. Such a window was to be found in the antechambers of the mistress of the gates.

The woman, whom the girls had privately nicknamed the ‘Witch of Akkad’ was in charge of the security of the harem and the keeping of order and, initially, Asima had run afoul of her several times. She had been trying hard to fit in and to become a model occupant and yet the rules were so strict, or at least, those enforced by the witch were, that Asima’s natural curiosity had led her into conflict until she began to learn how to play the game. Fortunately, over those first few weeks a greater problem arose for the mistress of the gates, in the form of the continually rebellious Sharra who seemed to have little regard for personal safety and no fear of punishment. The girl had made four bungled attempts to leave the harem in the first week, including a laughably traditional ‘blanket rope’ down the walls to the precipitous sea cliffs.

And so Asima’s curiosity had begun to go overlooked. She had explored every place she could get to within the harem, though there were a number of doors that were securely locked and barred that sealed off whole areas.

In this time of adjustment, her opinions of the whole situation here and of the nature of the Pelasian royal household had been changed rapidly, as her eyes had opened to what Pelasia had to offer other than the wicked satrap Ma’ahd. She had taken the natural leap in assumptions that the harem was little more than a decorative prison to contain those women the God-King took to his bed.

How wrong she had been; the harem was so much more. Truly, it was home to those women who were wives and concubines of the God-King or lovers who had the potential to become one of the official companions. But the harem was more than this. It was also the home to the female members of the God-King’s family, including his mother, four aunts, two sisters and six girl children. More than a prison, the harem was a place of protection and seclusion for the royal women, and a place where girls were taught the ways of the court and Pelasian society in order to make them fitting brides for the God-King, or for other nobles or princes if the God-King decided not to take them.

So Asima had learned over those first few weeks that most of her waking time was already allotted to lessons in etiquette, history, deportment, the application of makeup, massage and the use of oils, the geography of Pelasia, literature and so much more. She had never dreamed there could be so much to learn.

It had been at least two weeks before she had settled in enough to plan her time efficiently. There were twelve hours of lessons each day. Given that the daily routine for bathing, dressing and making up took a little over two hours, that meals took up at least an hour of the day, and that the girls were expected to sleep for eight hours to prevent unsightly shadowing of the eyes, that left Asima with less than an hour of freedom each day.

Careful planning had led to a streamlining of the preparation process, which granted her an extra hour in the morning and to the discovery that there were three hours in the late evening, once the girls were assumed to be settled in bed, when the witch and her cronies would play games of dice, drink sweet wines and smoke the water pipe, and the corridors were free to roam.

And so it was the late evening when Asima did her exploring.

Three weeks or so after her arrival, Asima had been sneaking around the upper galleries above the gate area; the night indeed when she had discovered the very window she now stood at, when she had bumped into Yasmin for the first time. She had nearly died of fright as she slowly and silently crept around a corner, walking on the sides of her feet to keep the pressure she applied to the floorboards as narrow as possible, and collided with a smaller girl coming the other way.

They had both made an involuntary squeak; the sort that someone who is where they know they should not be makes when they manage not to shriek.

As the two had picked themselves up, they had looked one another up and down, appraisingly. Yasmin was beautiful, and obbviously lithe. She had to be a little older than Asima, but was clearly still a student here, as Asima had seen her in classes. In a mere glance, the girls had instantly summarized one another, both clearly aware of what the other was up to. A smile had broken the moment and a wary alliance had quickly formed between the two girls.

As the older girl, Yasmin would be presented to the God-King a year before Asima. She would therefore have seniority and a full year to ingratiate herself before Asima became a threat. Thus Yasmin was comfortable with the newcomer for at least a couple of years. Similarly, Asima knew there was nothing she could do about her new ally at this point, short of physical violence, and that Yasmin would know many things about the harem and could be of use. For the moment, the two girls recognised that they were the ‘cream of the crop’ among the young ladies waiting for their time.

After that, things had become easier and much more interesting. Yasmin had warned Asima who to watch for and who could be trusted. Over the following weeks, a campaign of advancement had begun. As far as the other occupants of the harem were concerned, Asima and Yasmin barely knew one another even by sight, and such anonymity granted surprising power. Messages were passed secretly and evidence planted to lower the status of those who currently stood out above the two girls.

Ladies who were so straight and noble Asima wondered how they managed to bend in the middle found themselves disciplined for possession of stolen sweetmeats and smoking pipes. Gradually and slowly, and with infinite subtlety, Asima and Yasmin moved up the ranks of the almost four dozen girls in training.

Each year, on the feast of the maker, the girls of age would be presented to the God-King in the temple and he would choose three, in sacred memory of the three aspects of the creator. Three girls would become wives or concubines, out of perhaps twenty or more. The rest would wait until the next state occasion, when they would all be presented at the palace to the hungry eyes of Princes, satraps and senior commanders of the Pelasian military as potential brides or concubines.

Asima and Yasmin had been determined to be among those chosen and, since they would be selected a year apart they were no threat to one another until they were both in the Royal court.

Almost two months after she arrived at Akkad, Asima had caught sight for the first time of the God-King of Pelasia. He was nothing like she had expected. For no real reason, the picture she had formed in her mind was of an overweight, overbearing and over-dressed fop who would have carpets rolled out before him as he walked and rose petals cast beneath his feet. The ancient tales in the Empire spoke of the Pelasian God-Kings as such.

This man was so far from that, Asima had found she had trouble adjusting her thinking.

She had been standing and recovering with three of her classmates after a gruelling athletics lesson, at the edge of the gardens and close to the gate passage, when the gate had been opened and the light from beyond flooded into the dark aperture, picking out the decoration on the walls and ceiling.

The God-King had come for one of his wives. Asima had learned that no King of Pelasia retained his name; to call him by name was disrespectful. He was simply the God-King. But even he, as a man, was forbidden entry to the harem; not that he would have tried, it seemed.

Pelasia’s absolute ruler was a man in his early sixties at a guess. He could be older and very well preserved, but he was certainly no younger. Tall and lean, he dressed in simple black, almost like one of his soldiers, the only thing that marked him being the symbols of the royal line stitched into his cloak in gold and the very simple gold circlet on his brow. He was clean shaven and with short grey hair and piercing bright green eyes that reminded Asima of a cat caught in the light. Almost the precise opposite of Asima’s imagined ruler, the God-King was a simple and noble man, handsome in an almost indefinable way, who carried such weight and gravitas that even standing in a room full of kings, emperors and princes, he would still stand out.

Asima instantly recognised that this was a rare figure indeed and could understand now why the wives and concubines she had occasionally encountered spoke with such love and reverence of the man. Asima had smiled at that moment and had settled into her role, determined that her future would be at the side of this unsettlingly attractive older man.

Asima and Yasmin, after the second month, began to divide their time better. Now that the order of precedence in the harem had changed enough to move them both close to the top, their campaign of character assassination slowed. Now they need only keep themselves among the top runners, while allotting more time to learning those things that would make them stand out among their contemporaries.

Since that day she had seen the God-King before the harem gates several more times. It transpired that one of his most favoured pastimes was hunting and, once he had returned from a morning out with his court, he would often call at the harem and take one of his wives or concubines with him to the palace until the morning.

Discrete enquiries had further strengthened her resolve and bolstered her favourable impression of the God-King. It would appear that, despite his reputation for his… appetite seemed the most appropriate word, the God-King was charming and respectful and often took one of his favourites merely to spend the evening playing games of towers or listening to poetry or taking night time walks among the gardens.