Lord of Emperors (62 page)

She looked away, but not at anything in the room. Said nothing for a time, and then, "And even Anahita weeps? Or the kingdoms would have no pity?"

He nodded, deeply moved, beyond words. A woman such as he'd never encountered before.

She wiped at her eyes with the backs of both hands, a childlike gesture.

Looked at him again. "If you are right, you have saved me twice tonight, haven't you?"

He could think of nothing to say.

"Do you know the amount of the reward they have offered?"

He nodded. It had been proclaimed by heralds in the streets from late in the day. Had reached the Blues" compound before sundown. Treating the wounded, he had heard of it.

"All you need do," she said, "is open the door and call out."

Rustem looked at her, struggling for words. He stroked his beard. "I may be tired of you, but not
that
tired," he said, and saw that her smile this time did touch, very briefly, her dark eyes.

After a moment she said only, "Thank you for that. You are more than I had any right to pray for, doctor."

He shook his head, embarrassed again.

She said, her voice a little stronger now, "But you must know you'll have to say something about this in Kabadh. You'll have to give them
something.

He stared at her. "Something for…?"

"Some results from your being sent here, doctor."

"I don't see… I came to obtain some-"

"— medical knowledge from the west before going to court. I know. The physicians" guild filed a report. I looked at it. But Shirvan never has only one string to a bow and you won't be an exception. He'll have ordered you to keep your eyes open. You will be judged on what you have seen. If you return to his court with nothing, you'll give weapons to your enemies, and you have them there already, doctor. Waiting for you. It isn't hard to arrive at a court with people hating you beforehand."

Rustem clasped his hands together. "I know little about such things, my lady."

She nodded. "I believe that. "She looked at him, and then, as if making a decision, murmured, "Did anyone tell you that Bassania has crossed the border in the north, breaching the peace?"

No one had. Who would have told him that, a stranger among the westerners? An enemy. Rustem swallowed, felt a coldness enter him. If a war began, and he was still here…

She looked at him. "There were rumours all afternoon in the City. As it happens, I am quite certain they are true."

"Why?" he whispered.

"Why am I sure?"

He nodded.

"Because Petrus wanted Shirvan to do this, steered him towards it."

"Wh-why?"

The woman's expression changed again. There were tears still, on her cheeks. "Because he never had less than three or four strings to
his
bow. He wanted Batiara, but he also wanted Leontes taught a lesson about limitations, even defeat, along the way, and dividing the army to deal with Bassania was a way to achieve that. And of course the payments east would stop."

"He wanted to
lose
in the west?"

"Of course not." The same faint, almost indiscernible smile, shaped of memory. "But there are ways of winning more than one thing, and
how
you triumph matters very much, sometimes."

Rustem shook his head slowly. "And how many people would die in achieving all of this? Is it not vanity? To believe we can act like a god? We aren't. Time claims all of us."

"The Lord of Emperors?" She looked at him. "It does, but are there no ways to be remembered, doctor, to leave a mark, on stone, not on water? To have… been here?"

"Not for most of us, my lady." Even as he said that he was remembering the chef in the Blues" compound:
This boy was my legacy.
A cry from the man's heart.

Her hands and body were hidden beneath the sheets. She was still as stone herself. She said, "I'll grant you a half-truth there. But only that much… Have you no children, doctor?"

It was so strange, for the chef had asked him the same thing. Twice in a night, speaking about what one might leave behind. Rustem made a sign against evil, towards the fire. He was aware of how odd this conversation was now, yet sensed that somehow these questions lay towards the heart of what this day and night had become. He said, slowly, "But to be remembered through others, even our own heirs, is also to be… misremembered, is it not? What child knows his father? Who decides
how
we are recorded, or if we are?"

She smiled a little, as if he'd pleased her with cleverness. "There is that. Perhaps the chroniclers, the painters, sculptors, the historians, perhaps
they
are the real lords of emperors, of all of us, doctor. It is a thought."

And even as Rustem felt an undeniably warming pleasure to have elicited her approval, he also had a glimpse of what this woman must have been like, jewelled upon her throne, with courtiers vying for that approving tone.

He lowered his gaze, humbled again.

When he looked up, her expression had changed, as if an interlude was over. She said, "You realize that you must be very careful now? Bassanids will be unpopular when word gets out. Keep close to Bonosus. He will protect a guest. But understand something else: you might also be killed when you go back east to Kabadh."

Rustem gaped at her. "Why?"

"Because you didn't follow orders."

He blinked. "What? The… the Antae queen? They
can't
expect me to have murdered royalty so quickly, so easily?"

She shook her head, implacable. "No, but they can expect you to have died trying by now, doctor. You were given instructions."

He said nothing. A night deep as a well. How did one ever climb out? And her voice now was that of someone infinitely versed in these ways of courts and power.

"That letter carried a meaning. It was an explicit indication that your presence as a physician in Kabadh was less important to the King of Kings than your services as an assassin here, successful or otherwise." She paused. "Had you not considered that, doctor?"

He hadn't. Not at all. He was a physician from a sand-swept village at the southern desert's edge. He knew healing and childbirth, wounds and cataracts, fluxes of the bowel. Mutely, he shook his head.

Alixana of Sarantium, naked in his bed, wrapped in a sheet as in a shroud, murmured, "My own small service to you, then. A thought to ponder, when I am gone."

Gone from the room? She meant more than that. However deep the well of night felt to him, hers went deeper by far. And thinking so, Rustem of Kerakek found a courage and even a grace in himself he hadn't known he had (it had been drawn from him, he was later to think), and he murmured, wryly, "I have done well so far tonight at being careful, haven't I?"

She smiled again. He would always remember it.

There came a knock then, softly at the door. Four times swiftly, twice slow. Rustem stood up quickly, his eyes darting around the room. There was really nowhere for her to hide.

But Alixana said, "That will be Elita. It is all right. They'll expect her to come here. She's bedding you, isn't she? I wonder if she'll be upset with me?"

He crossed the room, opened the door. Elita entered hurriedly, closed the door behind her. Took one quick, frightened look at the bed, saw that Alixana was there. She dropped to her knees before Rustem and seized one of his hands in both of hers and kissed it. Then turned towards the bed, still on her knees, looking at the ragged, dirty, crop-haired woman sitting there.

"Oh, my lady," she whispered. "What are we to do?"

And she took a dagger from her belt, laying it on the floor. Then she wept.

She had long been one of the most trusted women of the Empress Alixana. Took a pleasure in that fact that was almost certainly reprehensible in the eyes of Jad and his clerics. Mortals, especially women, were not to puff themselves up with the sin of pride.

But there it was.

She had been the last person awake in the house, having offered to tend the downstairs fire and put out the lamps before going up to the doctor's bed. She had sat in the front room alone for a time in the dark, watching white moonlight through the high window. Had heard footsteps in the other ground-floor rooms, heard them cease as the others went to their beds. She had remained where she was for a time, anxiously. She had to wait, but feared to wait too long. Finally, she had walked down the main-floor hallway and opened a bedroom door, silently.

She had prepared an excuse-not a good one-if he was still awake.

The steward who ran this house for Plautus Bonosus was an efficient but not an especially clever man. Still, something had been said when the soldiers left-a misunderstanding that could have been amusing but wasn't, at all, with so desperately much at stake. An exchange that might be fatal, if he put the pieces together.

There was a huge reward on offer, incomprehensibly large, in fact, proclaimed by heralds throughout the City all day. What if the steward woke in the night with a blinding thought? If a daemon or ghost came to him carrying a dream? If he realized under the late moons that the soldier at the door hadn't been calling the grey-bearded doctor a whore but had been referring to a woman upstairs? A woman. The steward might wake, wonder, feel the slow licking of curiosity and greed, rise up in the dark house, go down the hallway with a lamp lit from his fire. Open the front door. Call for a guard of the Urban Prefecture, or a soldier.

It was a risk. It was a risk.

She had walked into his room, silent as a ghost herself, looked down upon him where he lay sleeping on his back. Sought a way to make her heart grow hard.

Loyalty, real loyalty, sometimes required a death. The Empress (she would always call her that) was still in the house. It was not a night to take chances. They might trace the steward's murder to her but sometimes the death required was one's own.

"My lady, I could not kill him. I tried, I went to do it, but…"

The girl was weeping. The blade on the floor before her was innocent of blood, Rustem saw. He looked at Alixana.

"I ought to have known better," Alixana murmured, still wrapped in the bed linens, "than to make you a soldier in the Excubitors." And she smiled, faintly.

Elita looked up, biting at her lower lip.

"I don't think we need his death, my dear. If the man somehow wakes in the night with a vision and goes for the door and a guard… you can run them through with a sword."

"My lady. I don't have"

"I know, child. I am telling you we need not murder to defend against this chance. If he were going to rethink that conversation, he'd have done it by now."

Rustem, who knew a little of sleep and dreams, was less sure, but said nothing.

Alixana looked at him. "Doctor, will you let two women share your bed? I fear it will be less exciting than the words suggest."

Rustem cleared his throat. "You must sleep, my lady. Lie in the bed. I will take a chair, and Elita can have a pillow by the fire."

"You need rest as well, physician. People's lives will depend on you in the morning."

"And I will do what I can do. I have spent nights in chairs before."

It was true. Chairs, worse places. Stony ground with an army in Ispahani. He was bone-weary. Saw that she was, as well.

"I am taking your bed from you," she murmured, lying down. "I ought not to do that."

She was asleep when she finished the sentence.

Rustem looked at the servant who had been on the edge of murdering for her. Neither of them spoke. He gestured at one of the pillows and she took it and went to the hearth and lay down. He looked at the bed, and crossed there and covered the sleeping woman with one blanket, then took another and carried it to the girl by the fire. She looked up at him. He draped it over her.

He went back to the window. Looked out, saw the trees in the garden below made silver by the white moon. He closed the window, drew the curtains. The breeze was strong now, the night colder. He sank down in the chair.

It came to him, with finality, that he was going to have to change his life again, what he had thought was to be his life.

He slept. When he woke, both women were gone.

A greyness was filtering palely through the curtains. He drew them back and looked out. It was almost day, but not quite, the hovering hour before dawn. There was a knocking at the door. He realized that was what had awakened him. He looked over, saw that the door was unlocked, as was usual.

He was about to call for whoever it was to come in when he remembered where he was.

He rose quickly. Elita had replaced her pillow and blanket on the bed. Rustem crossed there. Climbed in and under the sheets. There was a scent, faint as a dream receding, of the woman who was gone.

"Yes?" he called. He had no idea where she was, or if he ever would know.

Bonosus's steward opened the door, impeccably dressed already, composed and calm as ever, dry in his manner as a bone. Rustem had seen a knife in this room last night, meant for this man's heart while he slept. He had been that close to dying. So had Rustem, a different way-if a deception had failed.

The steward paused deferentially on the threshold, hands clasped before him. There was an odd look in his eye, however. "My deepest apologies, but some people are at the door, doctor." His voice was practised, murmurous. "They say they are your family."

He broke stride only long enough to throw on a robe. Dishevelled, unshaven, still bleary-eyed, he bolted past the startled man and tore down the hallway and then the stairs in a manner worlds removed from anything resembling dignity.

He saw them from the first landing, where the stairway doubled back, and he stopped, looking down.

They were all in the front hallway. Katyun and Jarita, one visibly anxious, the other hiding the same apprehension. Issa in her mother's arms. Shaski was a little ahead of the others. He was gazing up fixedly, eyes wide, an intent, frightening expression on his features that only changed, only melted away-Rustem saw it-when his father appeared on the stairs. And Rustem knew, in that moment he knew as surely as he knew anything on earth, that Shaski was the reason, the
only
reason, the four of them were here and the knowledge hit him in the heart like nothing ever had.