Spear of Heaven (44 page)

“I mind,” she said, “that I am laying all the burdens on
you, and you so young still.”

He sat up sharply. The cat growled, startled. He soothed her
with an absent hand. “I’m hardly a child any longer.”

“You are a man,” his mother agreed willingly, “and most well
grown. And yet . . .”

“It’s time,” he said. His voice was steady.

“Time and past time,” said the empress regent. “No; that
office I lay down in all gladness. But I am still a mother, and to a mother her
child is always and ever that, though he wear a beard of august silver, and
hold empires under his sway.”

Estarion’s hand went to his chin. There was no silver in the
stubble there, nor would be for a while yet, Vanyi reckoned.

The empress smiled and held out her hand. “Come, Starion.
Your servants have been waiting this past hour and more.”

He was up almost before she finished speaking, kissing her
hand, casting himself upon the mercies of his bath-servants. The empress did
not move to follow him.

Vanyi, who had known better than to think herself forgotten,
restrained herself from pulling the blanket over her head. She met the dark stare
steadily. “Lady,” she said.

“Priestess,” said the empress. Her tone was cool.

“Are you sorry,” Vanyi asked, “that virginity is no longer a
requirement of priesthood?”

“Hardly,” said the empress. “My son would object strenuously
if you were sentenced to the sun-death.”

“Ah,” said Vanyi, “but would you?”

Her heart was beating hard. She had been Estarion’s lover
these past three seasons, and yet she had never exchanged more than brief
courtesy with Estarion’s mother. Vanyi knew what the court thought of her who
had walked straight from the road of her priestess-Journey into the emperor’s
bed. What the empress thought, no one knew.

Vanyi was mageborn and priestess of the Sun. The Lady Merian
was a wisewoman of the north, priestess of the goddess who was the dark behind
the sun, mistress of mages. Her soul was a blinding brilliance, her thoughts a
shape of silence.

She said, “My son is very fond of you.”

“I rather think he loves me,” Vanyi said. There was a snap
in it.

“He has a warm heart,” said the empress. “And you were his
first woman.”

Vanyi’s cheeks were burning. No doubt they blazed scarlet.
It was all the color they ever had. Corpse-woman, people called her here,
because she was as white as new milk, and they were all black or brown or ruddy
bronze. Even the Asanians were, at worst, old ivory.

But Estarion loved her pallor; loved to cup his dark hand
over her white breast, and marvel at the play of blue veins under the skin.

“Yes, he fancies that he loves you,” the empress went on, gentle
and cruel. “He knows he cannot marry you. You are a commoner, and an Islander
at that.”

“You tell me nothing I haven’t long known,” Vanyi said. “Why
didn’t you stop me when I first set eyes on him? I might have gone away then. I
was appalled at myself: that I had such thoughts, and he so high.”

“I trusted in your good sense,” the empress said. Vanyi
stared. The empress smiled. “You know what you are, and what you are not. You
will not be empress: you are too thoroughly unsuitable. But you give yourself
no airs; you claim no advantage, though he would give you the moons if you
asked for them. You bear him no child, nor shall, while the bonds of the
Journey seal your womb. And,” she said, “you are very good for him.”

Vanyi had nothing to say. The words had drained out of her.

“Remember,” the empress said, “how his father died. How he
had taken his son with him into Asanion after too long a sojourn in the east,
for the heir to the throne must know all of the empire he would rule; and how,
when he came to the city of kings, to Kundri’j Asan, his death was waiting for
him. No clean death in battle, but poison in a cup, and malice wound about it,
and sorcery sealed within it.”

Vanyi knew. Estarion never spoke of it, but others did,
round about; and she was a mage of the temple in his city. His father had died
as he watched. He had known the poison for what it was. He found the mage who
had wrought the poison, and mustered all his power of heart and soul and mind,
and made of it a weapon, and killed the man who had killed his father. He lost
his power for that, and nearly his mind.

He was twelve years old. A child, but never a child after.

His power had come back, but slowly, and never in the
measure that it had had. Of memory he had nothing, save that sometimes he
dreamed, and woke screaming. And he would not go to Asanion, or speak of it
save as he must, or grant more than cold courtesy to its people who came to pay
him homage.

“Before you came,” his mother said, “we had begun to fear
for him. He had seemed to be recovered from the black days, in mind if not in
magery; and then once more, as he became a man, the darkness closed in. Never a
night passed but that he dreamed, and dreamed ill. He strove to hide it, to
wall it with such power as was left to him. But we knew. We were in great dread
for his sanity.”

“He is perfectly sane,” said Vanyi, more stiffly than she
liked.

“He is,” said the empress, unruffled. “We owe you a debt for
that.”

“But not enough to give us leave to marry.”

“His empress must be bred to it,” said the daughter of a
mountain chieftain.

“And I was bred to the nets and the boats and the fish.”
Vanyi considered rage, but found it insufficient. “What, when he takes his
proper bride, and I take my leave? What if the dreams come back? What will you
do then?”

“We shall settle that when we come to it,” the empress said.
“No law forbids him a concubine, or a lover of choice apart from the woman who
shares his throne.”

“His empress might have something to say of that,” said
Vanyi.

“She may,” the empress said. “She may not.” She bent her
head. It was almost a bow. “For this day and for the days until he takes his
bride, you have my blessing. Prosper well, priestess of the Sun, Guardian of
the Gates. Cherish my son.”

“Always,” said Vanyi. That much at least she could promise.

o0o

Time was in the north when the king came naked to his
throne, and proved to his people that he was male and whole and fit to rule.
Estarion might have liked that: he had no shame of his body, and he loved to be
outrageous. But the south was a staider place.

Estarion had not wanted excessive ceremony, and he would not
suffer the tenfold robe of the western emperors. In the end he consented to be
a southerner in trousers and embroidered coat, with his hair in the single
plait of a priest, and no ornament but the heavy golden torque of his
priesthood. The high soft boots and the trousers were white unblemished, and
the coat was cloth of gold. Against it he was all the darker, his eyes all the
more brilliantly gold. He did not, for once, try to hide them.

Vanyi, anonymous among the priests and the lesser nobles,
watched as he passed in procession. He was aware of her: a ghost-hand lay brief
against her cheek, a ghost-smile warmed her from within.

Most of him was centered on the rite. For a moment she
walked within him down the long aisle between the white pillars, from sun to
shade and back to sun again, and before him, looming larger as he came closer
to it, the simple chair set on its dais. The wall behind it burst and bloomed
in gold, the rayed sun of his fathers, image and remembrance of the god. But he
saw nothing of the gold, no more than he saw of the people who thronged the
hall and filled the courts without. The throne was waiting.

He had never sat in it. He was too young and it too strong,
his regents had thought, for the fragility of his mind. It was a simple thing,
a chair carved of pale stone, neither silver nor grey but somewhere between.
But there was mighty magic in it. It was carved of dawnstone, the stone that
woke to the coming of the sun, and imbued with the power of his line.

It was glimmering, Vanyi thought. Faintly; difficult to see
from so far, with so many bodies between. But it was more silver than grey.

He was closed to her now. For a moment she was empty,
bereft; then she shook herself, bolstering the wards about her thoughts. Far
behind them, deep and safe, she allowed herself to smile. A year yet, and four
days: that long she had to wait until her Journey was done. Then the oath was
ended. The bonds of her womb were loosed. And she would give him the gift she
most longed to give: an heir of her body.

Let another be empress if it would please his princes and
his lady mother. Vanyi would bear his son.

The throne gleamed clearly now, a pure light that though
pale was never cold, like the sky at the coming of the sun. She could not see
Estarion’s face. She knew that it was rapt, like the rest of him. Drawn toward
it; bound to it.

He paused at the foot of the dais, with the high ones about
him. The empress in royal white, tall and cold and beautiful. The chancellor of
his empire, elegant southern prince with his startling bright hair. Priests of
Sun and Shadow, god and goddess, torqued in gold and in black iron. The lords
of his council in their manifold splendor, from bearded, kilted, glittering
northerner to clean-shaven trousered southerner to robed and turbaned syndic of
the Nine Cities. And one lone westerner in the fivefold robe of a prince,
wearing an ambassador’s fluted hat.

They surrounded their emperor, overwhelming him. Then he mounted
above them. His mother followed, and his chancellor, a step behind, at right
hand and left. On the last step he paused. They passed him and turned. They
were of a height, northerner and southerner, dark woman and bronze-skinned man
with his hair the color of new copper. They bowed to one another and held out
each a hand.

Estarion laid his hands in theirs and let them draw him
upward. He was taller than either, and for a moment he seemed very slight,
almost frail.

He straightened. Vanyi saw his head come up, his shoulders
go back. They were broad, those shoulders, for all the narrowness of the rest
of him. He inclined his head to each of his regents. They bowed in return.

He turned. His face was a shadow against the sudden blaze of
thronelight. His eyes were full of it.

Without great ceremony, but without haste, he sat. The
thronelight blazed like the full sunrise. Vanyi staggered with the power and
the glory of it—the great singing surge of exultation. Terrible, magical, awful
thing: it knew its lord and servant. It took him to itself.

_______________

We hope you have enjoyed this sample of
Arrows of the Sun
by Judith Tarr

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