Hall of the Mountain King (22 page)

“That is a choice?”

“It is all you will have.”

She was silent. Not debating her choice; that was not worth
so much. Considering him. Letting her hate run cold and clear. “I could wish,”
she said through it, “that you had been my child.”

“You can thank all your gods that I am not.”

She smiled. “I choose life. As you knew I would. That is the
great beauty in being a woman: one need not stand on honor, nor fear the shame
of cowardice.”

He bowed low as to a queen, and returned her smile without
strain. “Ah, lady,” he said, “well I know it, who am a king and the son of a
god. Honor binds me, and shame, and my given word. But what they all mean . . .
why, that is the great beauty in what I am. I can make them in my own image.”

She went down lower still, even to the floor, and only half
of it was mockery. When she rose again, he had gone. Even with the sunlight
blazing through the broad window, the chamber seemed dark and dull, drained of
the splendor that was his presence.

They built the pyre of Raban, king in Ianon, in the great
court of his castle, and raised it high up to heaven: all of rare woods, well
seasoned and steeped in oil, scented with the god’s own incense. At his feet
they laid his best-loved hound to guard and guide his way into the god-country;
his head lay on the flank of his red charger, his mount upon the road. He
himself was clad in a plain hooded mantle to deceive the demons who might lie
in wait for a king but not for a simple wayfarer, yet lest he be so mistaken
before the gods’ gate, beneath the cloak he wore all the jeweled splendor of
his kingship.

Mirain stood alone before the pyre. His kilt was plain to
starkness, belted with a strap of leather and dyed the dull ocher of mourning;
he had neither bound nor braided his hair nor put on any jewel. Barefoot and
bareheaded, with no kin to stand at his back, he looked far too frail for the
burden the old king had left him.

The rite of death was long, the sun seeming to hang
motionless in a sky like hammered brass. More than one of Ianon’s gathered
people gave way to Avaryan’s power, or retreated into what shade there was, or
did as Vadin did: made their own shade with their ocher mantles.

Yet Mirain, in the courtyard’s center, sought no relief and
received none. His voice in the responses was as firm at the end as when he
began.

At last a priestess of Avaryan came forth with the vessel of
the sacred fire. All bowed before it. Reverently she laid it on the altar which
stood between Mirain and the pyre.

An acolyte, following her, knelt in front of her with an
unlit torch. She blessed it; he turned to Mirain.

The young king did not move. The acolyte blinked and began
to frown, not daring to prompt him but all too well aware of the waiting
priestess.

Slowly Mirain reached for the torch. His fingers closed on
the wooden haft, raised it. The fire flickered in its basin; the pyre loomed
above him.

Kindle it, the watchers willed him. For the gods’ love,
kindle the fire!

Somewhere within the too-still body, strangeness stirred.
Mirain flung the torch spinning up and up into the sun. His arms, freed, spread
wide; his head fell back, his eyes opened wide to the sun’s fire.

It flooded into him, filled him. Out of the towering flame
that had been his mortal body, a single dart sprang forth. Straight into the
heart of the pyre it flew, and the oiled wood roared into flame.

The priests fled from that great eruption of light and heat.
But Mirain stood full in front of it, oblivious to his peril. His body was his
own again; he sang a hymn of grief and triumph mingled, sacred to the Sun.

oOo

The earth was dull and cold, a dark rain falling with the
evening, quenching the fire. Mirain shivered, blinking, staring without
comprehension at the charred and smoldering heap which had been his
grandfather’s pyre.

How often Vadin had spoken to him since his song faded, the
squire himself did not know. Yet Vadin tried again, and it desperation he
settled an arm around the damp chilled shoulders, tugging lightly. “Come,” he
said, rough with cold.

Mirain heard. He began to move. Swaying, staggering, but
stubbornly afoot, he let his squire lead him away.

Vadin took him not to the King’s chamber which was his now
by right, but to his own familiar room. A fire was lit there, dispelling the
rain’s chill; a bath waited, and dry clothes, and wine and bread to break the
death-fast. He seemed hardly to see who ministered to him, although he let
himself be tended, fed, cajoled into bed.

When he lay wrapped in blankets, his eyes focused at last.
He saw who bent over him. Vadin he regarded without surprise, but the other
made him start, half rising.

Ymin pushed him firmly back again and held him there. “What
is this?” he demanded. “Why are you here?”

She greeted his return to awareness with perfect calm.
“Tonight at least,” she said, “you are entitled to your solitude. I am seeing
that you get it.”

Vadin grimaced. “It hasn’t been easy, either. And tomorrow
it won’t be possible. The king can’t belong to himself; he belongs to Ianon.”

Mirain tried again to rise from his bed; they allied to hold
him down. He glared at them, struggling, but not with any great force. “I have
to go to the hall. The feast—”

“No one looks for you tonight,” Ymin said.

“But—”

“There is no need for the young king to drink the old one
into the god-country. Not when the god’s own fire has set the dead man on his
road.”

“Is that what people are saying?”

“It happened,” Vadin said. After a moment he added, “Sire.”

Mirain sat up, propping himself with shaking arms. “It
happened,” he echoed. “You see how it’s left me. I’m hardly the god everyone
must be thinking me.”

“No; merely his son and our king.” Calmly, matter-of-factly,
Ymin supported him. “If anyone has needed proof of either, you have given it.
Magnificently.”

He tensed, drawing in upon himself. “I can never help
myself. Wherever I turn, whatever I do, the god is there, waiting. Sometimes he
takes me and wields me like a sword; and when he lets me go I’m like a newborn
child. Strengthless, witless, and all but useless.”

“Even gods have their limits.”

“In Han-Gilen,” he said, “they would call that a heresy.”

“There are gods, and there is the High God. My doctrine is
sound enough, my lord.”

“In Ianon. Maybe.” He glanced beyond her at Vadin. “I’m not
a god. I’m scarcely yet a king. I don’t know that I’ll ever be one.”

“Tomorrow you will be,” Vadin said.

“In name. What if my grandfather was deceived? He was a
great king. He thought he had found another like him. He paid for it with his
life. What if he died for nothing?”

“He didn’t,” snapped Vadin with all the force he could
muster, close as he was to tears. “And he knew it. Do you think Raban of Ianon
would have let go the way he did if he wasn’t leaving his kingdom in good
hands?” Between them, he and Ymin eased Mirain down. “There now. Rest. You’ve a
long day ahead of you.”

“A long life.” Mirain’s burst of strength had faded; he
labored even to speak. “I was so certain. That I had the right; that I was
strong enough. That I could be king. I was an utter fool.”

They said nothing. But Ymin smiled and gestured slightly, a
flicker of dissent. He turned his face away from them both.

Vadin’s eyes had overflowed again. They kept doing that; he
had stopped trying to master them. But he was not weeping now for the king. The
old man had gone in glory. It was the young one who made him want to lie down
and howl.

A warm hand touched his arm. He met Ymin’s gaze. “He has the
strength,” she said gently.

“Of course he does!” Vadin flared at her. “But—damn it, it’s
so soon!”

“It is never the proper time for a king to die.” She sighed;
her own eyes were suspiciously bright. “You too should rest, young lord. Have
you even lain down since the Games?”

Vadin could not remember, and he did not care. “I’m not
tired. I don’t need to—”

Before he knew it he was in his cubicle, his pallet spread,
her hand on his belt loosening the clasp. He slapped her away. She laughed,
light and sweet as a girl, and stripped him with consummate neatness. Even as
he snatched at his kilt, she caught him off balance and tripped him into his
bed. She was amazingly strong. “Sleep,” she commanded.

“Or?”

“Or I sit on you until you do.”

It was not an idle threat, nor entirely an unpleasant one.
For an older woman she had a fine figure. Thin, but fine.

Her kiss was as chaste as his mother’s, a brush of lips on
his brow. Her tone was utterly maternal. “Sleep, child. Dream well.”

He growled, but he did not rise. With the last flicker of a
smile she left him.

oOo

Vadin could have slept the moon-cycle through and hardly
noticed it, but Mirain woke renewed from his brief night’s sleep. He even
smiled, rarity of rarities, until darkness touched him. Memory, perhaps, of the
king’s death; of his own kingship.

He rose and stretched and found his smile again, turning it
on Vadin. It swelled into a grin; it swept away, left him cold and shaking.
“Avaryan,” he said very low. “Oh, Father. I don’t think I can—”

“Sire.”

They both whipped about. A servant faced them: an elderly
man of great dignity, dressed in the king’s—in Mirain’s—scarlet livery. If he
was in any way perturbed to see his new lord reduced to a trembling child, he
concealed it well. “Sire,” he said, “your bath awaits you.”

oOo

In the bedchamber Ianon’s king was served by men of years
and standing among their kind; in hall and about his kingdom by pages and
esquires, the sons of great houses; and in the bath, which was a high service
and much honored, by the daughters of Ianon’s highest lords. Every one was a
maiden, young and well-favored and clad practically, if none too sufficiently,
in a wisp of white tunic.

Vadin went in with Mirain. He did not know that it was
allowed, but no one told him it was forbidden, or tried to stop him.

He had fancied himself a man of the world. He was certainly
no virgin. But he stopped short two paces past the door, ears afire, and could
not move another step.

They did not even see him. They were waiting for Mirain.
Modestly, with the dignity of their breeding, but their eyes were bright, their
glances quick and eager. God or half-god or mortal man, he was young and well
shaped and not at all ill to look on. After the aged Raban he must have been a
delight.

Mirain too had stopped as if struck, but he was made of
sterner stuff; he managed to drive himself forward. He even mustered something
like nonchalance, though his back was stiff.

His head turned, scanning downcast faces, pausing once or
twice. One of the maidens had a marvelous tumble of curls. One had eyes like a
doe’s, melting upon him. And one was even smaller than himself, as delicate as
a flower, with eyes as soft as sleep.

She had Asanian blood: she was honey golden, with a hint of
rose that deepened under his stare. But she smiled shyly.

Mirain must have smiled back; her face lit like a lamp.
Lightly then, with royal grace, Mirain gave himself into their hands.

When he was scoured clean, they did not dress him. There was
nothing to dress him in. They shaved him; they combed his free hair and tamed
it as much as they might; they anointed him with sweet oils, touching his brow,
his lips, his heart and his hands, his genitals, his feet. Then they bowed one
by one from least to greatest, and the greatest was the golden princess, and
she kissed his torque and his golden palm.

oOo

The throne of Ianon stood no longer in the hall. Strong men
had taken it in the night, brought it down through the Chain of Courts to the
Court of the Gate, and there set it on a high dais before the people. Spearmen
in scarlet kept free a long aisle from the gate to the throne; lords and
princes stood about it, surrounded by the king’s own knights in all their
panoply.

Between the royal bath and the outer court lay only empty
halls. Mirain must pass them naked and alone, abandoned even by his squire.

Who barely had time to bolt by side ways into the sun and
the crowds and the place kept for him beside the high seat.

Yet it seemed a long wait, those slow moments under Avaryan.
Vadin’s breath eased; he settled himself into some semblance of calm, and tried
not to think of assassins’ knives and ambushes and one lone unarmed unclad
not-quite-king.

The clamor of gathered people stilled slowly. All eyes
turned with his own toward the gate. It was open, empty.

A bell rang, far and sweet. Many glanced toward the sound of
it.

When they glanced back, he stood under the arch of the gate.
Only a shadow from this distance, a shape that said
man
in the breadth of its shoulders and the narrowness of its hips.

Then it began to move, and it became Mirain. No one else had
quite that panther-stride, or that straightness of the shoulders, or that tilt
of the head. Or ever that way of cutting the world to his measure.

He walked Ianyn-tall among them, a man grown, wise beyond
any count of years, and royally proud; yet he was also a youth just out of
boyhood, alone and afraid, without even a rag to cover him. They could see
everything in the pitiless light: the long seamed scar in his side where a boar
had tusked him long ago and almost killed him; the thin grey lines of
sword-scars and the pitted hollow where an arrow had taken him in battle; the
raw new flesh on buttocks and thighs, mark of his wild ride to Umijan. They
could see that he was mortal and that he was imperfect, smaller than any man of
them, not remarkably fair of face; but he was male, whole and strong, without
mark or blemish save what branded him a man and a warrior. No woman in
disguise, no eunuch living a lie, no soft coward laying claim to the throne of
fighting kings.