Hall of the Mountain King (2 page)

The king bared his teeth, more snarl than smile. “No man
should grieve so for a daughter when such a son has grown to grace his hall. So
men say. They do not know him as I know him.” His fists clenched, hard and
knotted, thin as an eagle’s claws. “Boy! Know you aught of my daughter?”

The young priest had listened without expression. He reached
now into his scrip and brought forth a glitter of metal, a torque of gold
twisted with mountain copper.

The king reeled. Strong young hands caught him, helped him
to a seat on the parapet. Dimly he saw the face close above his own, calm and
still; but the eyes were dark with old sorrow.

“Dead,” he said. “She is dead.” He took the torque in hands
that could not still their trembling. “How long?”

“Five winters since.”

Anger kindled. “And you waited until now?”

The boy’s chin came up; his nostrils flared. “I would have
come, my lord. But there was war, and I was forbidden, and no one else could be
spared. Do not fault me for what I could not help.”

There had been a time when a boy, or even a man grown, would
have been whipped for such insolence. But the king swallowed his wrath lest it
destroy his grief. “What was she to you?”

The boy met his gaze squarely. “She was my mother.”

He had gone beyond shock, beyond even surprise. For that
tale too had come to him, that she had borne a son. And for a priestess wedded
to the god to conceive a child by any mortal man, the penalty was death. Death
for herself, for her lover, and for their progeny.

“No,” said this young stranger whose face in its every line
spoken poignantly of her. “She never died for me.”

“Then how?”

The boy closed his eyes upon a grief as stark and as
terrible as the king’s own; his voice came soft, as if he did not trust it.
“Sanelin Amalin was a very great lady. She came to Han-Gilen at the end of its
war upon the Nine Cities, when all its people mourned the death of the prince’s
prophet, who had also been his beloved brother. She stood up in the midst of
the funeral rites and foretold the fate of the princedom, and the Red Prince
accepted her as his seer. Soon thereafter, for her great sanctity, she was
taken into the temple in Han-Gilen. Within a year she was its high priestess.
There was no one more holy or more deeply venerated. Yet there were those who
hated her for that very sanctity, among them she who had been high priestess
before Sanelin’s coming, a proud woman and a hard one, who had treated the
stranger cruelly and been deposed for it. In the dark of the moons, five
winters past, this woman and certain of her followers lured the lady from the
temple with a tale of sickness only she could heal. I think . . . I know she
saw the truth. Yet she went. I followed her with the prince hard upon my heels.
We were just too late. They threw me down and stunned me and wounded my lord
most cruelly, struck my mother to the heart, and fled.”

His breath shuddered as he drew it in. “Her last words were
of you. She wished you to know of her glory, of her death. She said, ‘My father
would have had me be both queen and priestess. Yet I have been more than
either. He will grieve, but I think he will understand.’”

The wind sighed upon the stones. Vadin shifted in a creaking
of leather and bronze. In the world below, children shouted and a stallion
screamed and a tuneless voice bawled a snatch of a drinking song.

Very quietly the king said, “You tell a noble tale, stranger
who calls himself my kin. Yet, though I may be mad, I am not yet a dotard. How
came a high priestess to bear a son? Did she then lay aside her vows? Did she
wed the Red Prince of Han-Gilen?”

“She broke no vows, nor was she ever aught but Avaryan’s
bride.”

“You speak in riddles, stranger.”

“I speak the truth, my lord grandsire.”

The king’s eyes glittered. “You are proud for one who by his
words is no man’s son.”

“Both of which,” said the other, “I am.”

The king rose. He was very tall even for one of his people;
he towered over the boy, who nevertheless betrayed no hint of fear.

That too had been Sanelin, small as her western mother had
been small, yet utterly indomitable. “You are the very image of her. How then?”
His hand gripped the boy’s shoulder with cruel strength.
“How?”

“She was the Bride of the Sun.”

So bright, those eyes were, so bright and so terrible. The
king threw up all his shields against them. “That is a title. A symbol. The
gods do not walk in the world as once they did. They do not lie with the
daughters of men. Not even with the holy ones, their own priestesses. Not in these
days.”

The boy said nothing, only raised his hands. The left had
bled where the nails had driven into flesh. The right could not. Gold flamed
there, the disk of the Sun with its manifold rays, filling the hollow of his
palm.

The king slitted his eyes against the brightness. A deep and
holy terror had risen to engulf him. But he was strong and he was king; he
reckoned his lineage back to the sons of the lesser gods.

“He came,” said this child of the great one, “while she kept
vigil in the Temple of Han-Gilen where is his most sacred image. He came, and
he loved her. Of that union I was conceived; for it she suffered and came in
time to glory. You could say that she died of it, by the envy of those who
reckoned themselves holy but could not endure true sanctity.”

“And you? Why did they let you live?”

“My father defended me.”

“Yet he let her die.”

“He took her to himself. She was glad, my lord. If you could
have seen—dying, she shone, and she laughed with purest delight. She had her
lover at last, wholly and forever.” He shone himself in speaking of it, a
radiance touched only lightly now with sorrow.

The king could not partake of it. Nor, for long, could the
stranger. He let his hands fall, veiling the brilliance of the god’s sign.

Without it he seemed no more than any other traveler, ragged
and footsore, armored with pride that was half defiance. It kept his chin up
and his eyes level, but his fists were clenched at his sides. “My lord,” he
said, “I make no claim upon you. If you bid me go, I will go.”

“And if I bid you stay?”

The dark eyes kindled. Sanelin’s eyes, set with the sun’s
fire. “If you bid me stay, I will stay, for that is the path which the god has
marked for me.”

“Not the god alone,” said the king. He raised a hand as if
to touch the boy’s shoulder, but the gesture ended before it was well begun.
“Go now. Bathe; you need it sorely. Eat. Rest. My squire will see that you have
all you desire. I shall speak with you again.” And as they moved to obey: “How
are you called, grandchild?”

“Mirain, my lord.”

“Mirain.” The king tested it upon his tongue. “Mirain. She
named you well.” He drew himself erect. “What keeps you? Go!”

They called her the queen who was not. In law she was the
king’s concubine, captive daughter of a rebel from the Western Marches, mother
of his sole acknowledged son. In her own country that would have sufficed to
make her his wife, and her child heir to throne and castle; here where they had
cast aside the old gods and the great goddess to become slaves of the Sun, a
concubine was only that, her son always and inescapably a bastard.

She did not stoop to bitterness. She held the highest title
these apostates allowed, that of First Lady of the Palace; she had a realm of
her own, the women’s quarters of the castle with their halls and courts, barred
and protected in proper fashion, with her own eunuchs to stand guard. Though
those were aging, alas, and his majesty would permit her to buy no more; when
she had been so unwise as to suggest that he send her young slaves of his own
choosing and a surgeon to render them fit for her service, his rage had come
close to frightening her.

They were turning barbarian here. They had few slaves, and
no eunuchs. In a little while, no doubt, they would put on trousers and shave
their beards and affect the dainty accents of the south.

She contemplated her reflection in the great oval mirror. It
had been her father’s shield; she had had it silvered and polished at
extravagant expense, that she might never forget whence she had come. The
lovely maiden it had once reflected was long gone, she of the wild lynx-eyes
and the headlong temper. The eyes were quiet now, as the lynx is quiet before
it springs. The face was beautiful still, a goddess-mask, flawless and
implacable.

She waved away the servant with the paints and brushes,
snatched the veil from the other’s hands and draped it herself. Doliya tarried
overlong in the market; damn the old gabbler, could she never perform a simple
errand without dallying in every wineshop along the way? Not but that the woman’s
delays had often proven profitable; secrets had a way of escaping when wine
loosened men’s tongues, and Doliya’s ears were wickedly keen.

“Great lady.” The voice of her chief eunuch, thin with age.
As was he, a gangling spider-limbed grotesque of a creature, who had never
learned to creep and cringe and act the proper servant. His father had been her
father’s enemy; it had amused the old monster to slaughter all that line save
the youngest son, and to have the child cut and trained and given to his daughter
as a slave. It was a crooked comfort to see how old he was and how much younger
she seemed, and to know that she was a full year the elder.

He was accustomed to her brooding stares, and unafraid of
them. “Great lady,” he repeated, “there is that which you should know.”

His level tone, his expressionless face, told her much.
Whatever tidings he bore, he rejoiced to bear them; which meant that she would
not be pleased to hear them.

Such games he played, he her bitter enemy, he the perfect
faithful servant. Impeccable service, he had told her once when he was still
young enough to blurt out secrets, could be a potent revenge. She would never
dare to trust him completely; she would never dare not to. She had laughed and
taken up his gauntlet and made him the chief of her servants.

“Tell me,” she bade him at last, coolly, sipping iced wine
from a goblet of tourmaline and silver.

He smiled. This was bitter news indeed, then, and he was in
no haste to reveal it. He sat in a chair the twin of her own, commanded wine
and received it, drank more slowly even than she. At last he set down the cup;
laced his long withered fingers; allowed himself a second smile. “A stranger
has come into the king’s presence, great lady. A stranger from the south, a
priest of the burning god.”

For all her control, she tensed; his amusement deepened. “He
brings word of the king’s heir, of her who departed so long ago; some would say
by your connivance, although that surely is a falsehood. You may rejoice, great
lady. Sanelin Amalin is dead.”

The lady raised a brow. “I am to be surprised? Vain hope, my
old friend. I have known it for long and long.”

He continued to smile. “Of course you have, great lady. Have
you also known that she delivered herself of a son? A son of her god, bearing
the Sun in his hand, wrapped in divinity as in a cloak. With my own eyes I saw
him. He has spoken with the king; the king’s folk serve him; he lodges, great
lady, in the chambers of the king’s heir.”

She sat very, very still. Her heart had stopped, and burst
into life again, hammering on the walls of her flesh.

Ginan smiled. She thought of flesh flayed living from bone,
shaped the thought with great care, and thrust it behind those glittering eyes.

They dimmed; he greyed, his smile died. But his satisfaction
could not so easily be vanquished.

All her care and all her plotting—all the women who came to
the king, who could conceive no children to supplant her son; the one whose
spells sufficed to conceive a son but not to bear him alive, who died herself
in the bearing—all for naught. Because she had not gone so far as to dispose of
the heir herself, trusting to the Journey and, if that failed, to the
priestess’ vows. Sanelin would never know man, never bear a child. If she
returned, if she took the throne, how easy then to cast a spell, to distill a
poison, to assure that Moranden son of Odiya of Umijan became king by right of
all Ianon.

Almost, almost, the lady could admire her. Insufferable
little saint that she had been, still she had found a way both to thwart her
enemy and to keep her name for sanctity. It seemed that the barbarians had
believed the lie; the whelp had been suffered to live. Unless . . .

Ginan knew her well enough to read the flicker of her eyes.
His smile returned undaunted. “No, great lady, he is no impostor. He is the
very image and likeness of his mother.”

“Dwarfish and unlovely? Ah, the poor child.”

“As tall as he needs to be, and well above any need of
beauty. He is a striking young man, great lady; he carries himself like a
king.”

“Yet,” she mused, “a priest.”

“A priest who is a king, great lady, may marry and beget
sons. As indeed some had speculated that the princess might do if she were
ruling queen, for the kingdom’s sake. As it seems that she did.”

“He is not king yet.” Odiya said it with great care. She
refilled her cup and raised it. “Nor shall he be while I have power in this
kingdom. May the goddess be my witness.”

oOo

Vadin did precisely as he was bidden. It kept him from
having to think. He did not understand half of what he had heard on the
battlements; he was not certain that he believed the rest. That this foreigner
should be the son of the king’s daughter, of a woman so long mourned that she
seemed as dim as a legend, yes, perhaps he could credit that. But that the boy
should have been sired by a god . . .

Mirain bathed, which truly he had needed, and he let the
king’s servants carry away his ragged trousers and bring him a proper kilt. But
he raised an uproar by calling for a razor.