Mistress of the Empire (51 page)

Kamlio looked as though she might spit venom. Then she shook back her pale gold hair, gathered her tawdry, patchwork robe, and swept away in stiff-backed silence. She did not turn her head a hair at the whispered comments and admiring looks of the sailors, but hustled down the companionway into the mate’s cabin she had been given for her quarters.

‘Don’t say it,’ Mara murmured quickly, as she sensed the epithet her Force Commander was about to utter under his breath. ‘You would certainly antagonise her less if you ceased calling her “lovely flower.”’

Lujan looked pained. ‘But she is one. If she were to tear her face and become scarred, her body would still make a man itch and sweat.’ Then he reddened at his frankness of speech, as if only then recalling that the person he so addressed was female, and his mistress.

Mara touched his arm in reassurance. ‘I am not offended that you speak intimately with me, Lujan. You have become like the brother I have lost, since the hour you took service in that distant glen.’

Lujan jammed his helm back over untidy hair. ‘I know you, Lady, as I know my own heart. But that Kamlio confounds me. I don’t know what Arakasi sees in her.’

‘He sees himself,’ the Lady replied. ‘He sees things he recalls from his past, and wishes to spare her the pain he once suffered. That is a powerful attraction.’ She stared off into the gloom, wondering if that was also the reason she
ached so sorely from her strained relations with Hokanu. Silently she pondered whether Lujan, as another man, might understand the reason for her husband’s cold reaction to the birth of his daughter. Were Lujan a brother, and not her Force Commander, she might have asked him. But here, in public on a ship’s deck, traditions and appearance prevented her.

The falling dark spread around them like a curtain of privacy. Mara studied her Force Commander’s face in the gathering twilight. He had new lines, and the beginnings of white at his temples, since she had taken him from his life as a grey warrior. Without her noticing until now, she saw that his face had begun to weather with the hours he spent drilling troops. More and more, his complexion was growing as leathery as Keyoke’s.
We are growing older
, Mara thought sadly.
And what have we to show for our days and our labors?
Her children were no more secure than she had been from their enemies; and if Hokanu had been less skilled at command, he might have had to shed his own family’s blood to keep his pack of cousins at bay.

Mara sighed, knowing that if her brother had survived to inherit, instead of she, the Minwanabi would very likely have succeeded to the Warlordship, and the precarious changes won by the shift in power to the Emperor would never have happened at all. Sometimes Lujan’s teasing humor recalled Lanokota. But her brother had been barely into his manhood, just testing himself against the challenges of life, when she lost him. This man at her side was fully come into his power and maturity as a warrior. The hardness ingrained through his outlaw years had never entirely left Lujan, despite the fervor of his loyalty, and the affection he had won from his predecessor, Keyoke. Struck that such a fine man should have sons, Mara said impulsively, ‘You ought to marry, you know.’

Lujan set his back to the rail and grinned at her. ‘I have
thought, recently, that it might be time to have a son or daughter.’

Made sensitive by what had happened between Arakasi and Kamlio, Mara wondered suddenly if he did have a love, but perhaps one that was not freely his to ask. ‘Have you a woman in mind?’

Laughing, regarding her fondly, Lujan said, ‘I am down to fewer than a dozen.’

Aware that she had been mildly baited, Mara said, ‘You will always be a rogue! Find an understanding woman, else she will take you to task for your flirting ways, Lujan.’

‘She would scold me anyway,’ the Force Commander admitted. ‘I have this terrible habit, you see, of wearing my weapons while in bed.’

He was only halfway joking; events through the years since she had come to power as Ruling Lady had caused all her warriors to take on a battle-ready alertness. There had simply been too many attacks, from too many unseen sources. Now, worst of all, no sword in the Nations could save her. Mara lost her inclination toward humor. She stared ahead, toward the horizon, and wondered if she would find what she desperately needed to ensure Acoma survival on that distant, unseen shore.

The lookout cried from the crosstree, ‘Land ahead!’

Mara rushed to the rail, her cheeks flushed in the morning breeze. Even Kamlio, who moved nowhere with enthusiasm, followed. Off
Coalteca
’s eastern forequarter lay the faintest hump of indigo, the first shoreline anyone on board had glimpsed through the days of a brisk but uneventful passage.

‘Honshoni,’ said Lujan. ‘They say the red-bee honey from those hills is sweeter than any in the Empire.’

Lepala also was famous for silks and exotic dyes, and the beautifully patterned weaving such luxuries encouraged.
Mara sighed, longing with girlish curiosity to pause and explore the wharf markets of the south. Xula, Lepala, and Rujije were places of enchanting tales of spired buildings and scarlet-railed galleries. Lords of Lepala were said to keep rare fish in pools, and harems numbering in the hundreds. Homes there had pierced shutters to shade from the sun and break the force of the sea winds, and gardens with huge, hot-climate flowers which bloomed only at dusk, but which filled the evening air with exotic fragrances until night’s chill caused them to close up again. The streets were paved in a stone that shone like gold when damp. The sailors’ gossip made the vendors’ stalls and bordellos seem exotic. They spoke of drinks of prodigious potency, inns filled with colorful caged birds, and eating establishments where customers were cooled by pretty girls and boys with large feather fans. But
Coalteca
would not make port in any of these busy cities of commerce until Mara’s party had been safely seen ashore in a secluded, uninhabited cove far inside the bay between Honshoni and Sweto. Only a few fishing villages dotted the north and south shorelines.

The Thuril Confederacy claimed the eastern edge of the bay, its only access to deep water; and since the magicians of the Assembly were apt to appear and disappear at whim anywhere within imperial borders, Mara had agreed with her advisers that she must not risk any unnecessary landfall.
Coalteca
’s legitimate cargo would be offloaded on her return trip north, and if the Black Robes or any lurking Anasati spy should come to suspect the deviation in her normal sailing course, the Lady would already be away, deep into foreign territory and, if the gods were kind, beyond reach.

The landing, when it happened a few days later, was in as bleak a site as anything Mara might have dreamed in nightmare. The beachhead where the longboat delivered her was deserted, a grey-blue crescent of flinty, sea-smoothed
shale alive with the scything forms of birds. As Lujan lifted her over the thwart and carried her ashore, white and indigo shorebirds circled overhead. Their cries echoed mournfully above the wind and the crash of breakers. Dust blew across the rugged hills beyond, scrub-covered and forlorn, and high above these, turning grey-blue with distance, rose the tables of the highlands, bordered at the horizon by mountains whose peaks were lost in brooding masses of cloud. The slate-backed spine of the range had proven a fortress impregnable for the Tsurani who had attempted to make war upon Thuril. Time and again the Empire forces had invaded these inhospitable lands, only to be harried back through the foothills by the fierce, naked swordsmen with their dyed skins and their barbarous war cries.

Short, soft-spoken, and wrinkled like the skin of a dried fruit, the guide paused before her and said in his stilted accent, ‘Lady, it were best you command your people to stand out of plain sight.’

‘I will need to give them a reason,’ Mara responded. ‘They are honorable warriors, and would take it ill if they were told they must sneak about like thieves, particularly where there is not so much as a dwelling, even a fisherman’s shack.’

The guide licked the gap where two of his front teeth were missing. He shifted from foot to foot, obviously uncomfortable, then bobbed in a quick bow. ‘Lady, the peace between the Empire and Thuril is uneasy. Only formal envoys and licensed traders cross the border, and only at designated checkpoints. Were your people to be seen within two days’ walk of these shores, or anywhere near the imperial border, you would be taken as spies.’ Whatever the Thuril did to punish spies, by his tautness of expression it was not pleasant.

Knowing that her own people took captured Thuril for the games in the Imperial Arena, Mara no longer argued
the need for secrecy. She beckoned Lujan over to her and murmured in his ear, ‘Force Commander, we will sorely need the knowledge you gained as a grey warrior to keep our presence here secret until we have made our way far inland.’

Beneath the straggle of hair that escaped the brim of his helm, Lujan gave her a wild smile. ‘Ah, Lady, the last of my guileful ways will be known to you! When you learn how well honorable warriors can be made to skulk, will you ever trust them again to guard your valuables?’

‘They may have my valuables with all my blessing, if the purpose of our mission is successfully accomplished,’ Mara replied, too grim for humor, and recognising the first taste of the hardships to come on these strange shores.

There followed several days that put Mara in mind of her race cross-country before her first marriage, to win the alliance of the cho-ja Queen. Then as now, she had slept with minimal shelter on hard ground, amid a small retinue of warriors. Parts of that trip she had travelled on foot, the trail being too rough for her litter. Then, too, there had been urgency, as her party crossed the estates of enemy Lords in the deeps of the night.

But in Kelewan there had been dense forest, almost jungle, to hide in. Low-lying mists had concealed her party at dawn and dusk, and provisions had been carried by her bearers.

In Thuril the stony soil grew only sparse bushes and grass, providing scant cover. At times she had to hike in gullies, chilled by the winds of these higher altitudes, her thin sandals soaked from standing amid peaty clumps of moss. Her ankles became scratched from the sharp-stemmed sedges, and her hands calloused fom using a walking stick to keep her balance. Once they passed a
village, skulking through pastures on their bellies under the moon. Dogs barked at them, but sleeping herd boys did not rouse.

Mara grew accustomed to the taste of tough game brought down by the bows of her warriors. She developed aches in muscles she never knew she possessed, from long hours and miles on her feet. In a strange way, she reveled in the freedom, and in the deep, cloud-scattered bowl of the sky. But her warmest pleasure was watching Kamlio.

The girl let her long hair twist and tangle, uncared for by maids for the first time in her life. She stopped tightening her lips and looking white when the warriors spoke to her; the few who approached her had been rebuffed, and unlike other men she had known until Arakasi, they left her alone as she asked. She went by herself to wash in the icy streams, and shyly began to offer to help at the fireside, where it became plain that she had a knack for cooking. She also asked Lujan to teach her self-defense with a knife. These lessons commenced in the half-dark, each night, where Kamlio’s dulcet tones sharpened in a fish-wife’s cursing as she missed her throw and tried again.

Lujan took her shrewish mood in stride. ‘Really,’ he said, one evening when she seemed to be having a particularly difficult time, ‘you should ask Arakasi to show you knife work. He is a master, and knows the best way to use the wrist.’

Kamlio spun in such fury that the Force Commander grabbed her hand just behind the bare blade of her weapon, unsure she would not sink her knife in him.

‘Gods!’ Kamlio cried, venomously offended. ‘It was that one I sought to defend myself from!’

She tore away and flounced off into the dark. Lujan watched her go, clicking his tongue in reproof. ‘Woman,
against our Spy Master, nobody wins at knives.’ As she vanished, he added softly, ‘You need nothing of defense against him. If you chose to carve out Arakasi’s heart, I believe he would stand still and let you.’

Much later, in the depths of that moonless night, Mara awoke to hear the girl sobbing. Softly she said, ‘You need never see Arakasi again, Kamlio, and that is the problem, is it not?’

The former courtesan said nothing, but her sobs eventually wore themselves out in sleep.

The next morning dawned cloudy and chill. Kamlio returned red-cheeked from gathering wood, her eyes red-rimmed as well. ‘He killed my sister!’ she spat at the Lady of the Acoma, as if in continuation of the words shared in the night.

‘He killed the Obajan of the Hamoi Tong, on my orders,’ Mara corrected. ‘The Obajan’s own darts killed your sister.’

Kamlio threw down her armload of wood onto Lujan’s fledgling fire, sending up a cloud of sparks and smoke.

The herder who was their guide cursed in Thuril. ‘Foolish girl! Your pique could cost us our lives!’

Lujan reacted first, ripping off the cloak he wore over his armor. He cast it over the tiny fire, then leaped and grabbed the water bucket nearby, dousing the cloth before it could flare up. Dull wisps of steam seeped from the folds, amid the stink of burned querdidra wool. ‘Up,’ he snapped to his subofficer. ‘Break camp. No breakfast, and we march at once. That smoke could have been seen, and for our Lady’s sake we must take no chances.’

The little herdsman threw the Acoma Force Commander a grateful glance for his good sense, and within minutes, Mara’s party was back on the trail, hugging gullies and what cover the meager landscape could offer.