Mistress of Ambiguities

by J F Rivkin

  He had not lost his pride along with his memory, Nyctasia realized. “She’s dead now,” she said. “By her own hand, rather than see the Edonaris united to their enemies, and the city under my rule. She never could reconcile herself to the idea that I would one day have a voice on the council of the Rhaicimate.” She seemed to be speaking more to herself than to Erystalben, now, as if she were trying to understand her own history. “It was of no consequence while my mother lived, since I was to have the title from her, and the women of our family are long-lived. No one expected me to inherit until I was well into my middle years, and had outgrown my youthful notions. Mhairestri’s position looked to be secure.

  She wasn’t of Rhaicime rank herself, but she wielded a good deal of authority in the city nevertheless. The Edonaris dominated the Rhaicimate, and Mhairestri exercised considerable influence over them, especially my mother and elder brother, both of them on the council. But then my mother died unexpectedly, at a young age, and Mhairestri was faced with the prospect of seeing me take possession of my title and my powers as soon as I came of age. That’s when she set out in earnest to make a proper Edonaris of me. I think she hardly knew me by sight before then. But perhaps it was already too late.”

  Nyctasia gave a little shake of her shoulders, recalling herself to her tale.

  “And so I was to occupy myself with young Shiastred, like a dutiful daughter of the Edonaris, and I detested you in consequence.”

  “I regret that my existence was an inconvenience to you, dear ’Tasia, but I think it would have been more just of you to detest your great-aunt.”

  “I couldn’t very well do that, it would have been disrespectful. No, you were to blame that my plans were upset-and that wasn’t the worst of your offenses. Not only would I be prevented from witnessing the Critical Alignment, but I was expected to dress in an elegant new gown of ivory silk, trimmed with rare black pearls.”

  He laughed. “Was that a hardship?”

  “It had tight lacings,” Nyctasia explained, “and stiff brocade drapings down the sides of the skirt, and delicate little slippers stitched with seed pearls. I never gave myself the trouble to wear anything but breeches and blouses and boots, at that age-and I still don’t, if I can help it,” she admitted. “If a garment wasn’t suitable for hunting, it didn’t interest me.”

  “You weren’t always studying or stargazing, then. But I’d not have taken you for a huntress.”

  “You used to tease me about my passion for the chase. You found hunting a bore and a waste of time. But my dislike of long skirts was due as much to considerations of vanity as of comfort. I thought they drew attention to my short stature. I complained to Mhairestri, I’ll look like a dwarf in such a gown!’ but she said, ‘Not if your hair is properly dressed, as it shall be.’ I had hair down to my hips in those days-it had never been cut-and it took hours to arrange it about a cornet. I simply bound it with ribbons or plaited it, when it hampered me. I was willing to tolerate an elaborate weave of braids, at worst, when formality was called for, but I hated a headdress above all things.”

  “And that was my fault too, I suppose?”

  “Naturally. There seemed no end to the amount of bother you were prepared to cause me.”

  “I’d not have thought myself capable of such infamy. However did I appease your wrath?”

  “You didn’t care a straw for my wrath! You were as sullen as I. Your people were no fools, ’Ben; they saw which way the victory would fall, if it came to open warfare, and they didn’t mean to find themselves among the defeated. They’d come to offer their support to our House, and you’d been brought along-much against your will-to cultivate the goodwill of the younger generation of the Edonaris.”

  “Especially that of the Rhaicime-to-be?” he guessed.

  Nyctasia chuckled, remembering the scene. “We were a pair-a brace of wild geese.

  When you were presented to me, you bowed and kissed my hand in an accomplished manner, then said, I’ve been ordered to make myself agreeable to you, my lady, but I must confess that I hardly expected to find my duty such a pleasure.’”

  “What impertinence-I trust you slapped me soundly for it.”

  “I should have, but I was so smitten by your beauty that I forgave you everything, even your disruption of the destinies of the stars. If Mhairestri had but taken the trouble to describe you to me, she’d have had no difficulty with me. Still, I had pride enough to inform you that I had been charged with the same obligation, lest you should think I had any desire to make your acquaintance. Then I suggested, quite coldly, that we both might best accomplish what was expected of us by treading a dance together. ‘Perhaps it will satisfy our elders to see us so engaged,’ I said, but the truth was that I wanted an excuse to touch you.”

  “You’ll make me forget my promise to rest quiet, if you say things like that,” he warned.

  Nyctasia grinned wickedly. “You didn’t seem averse to touching me either, and we began to get on better before long. The situation amused us, we were both fine dancers, and we soon discovered that we had more in common than scheming relations. We both professed to be students of Vahnite philosophy, both our families thought we took insufficient interest in the affairs of our Houses and our city, we both aspired to be scholar-magicians, though your studies of the Art were more advanced than mine. We both wanted to attend the Imperial University, and neither of our families would hear of it. I was enthralled. I’d never met anyone remotely like you-except myself. You seemed nearly perfect to me.”

  “Why ‘nearly’?” he demanded, enjoying himself.

  “You didn’t care for hunting. Still, despite that flaw in your character, I was growing more enamored of you by the moment, and when you proposed that we withdraw to someplace more private to continue our interesting conversation, I agreed with most immodest haste. You said, ‘I’ve heard that the palace gardens here are exquisite,’ and I assured you that they were-especially by moonlight.

  It must have pleased our families no end when we slipped out of the hall hand-in-hand.

  “What a perfect summer night that was… the trees were in blossom, the leaves sighing in the sweet-scented evening breezes, the fountains chiming and shining in the starlight… It was a night meant for young lovers to stroll through the terraces and trellised walks, to cross the arched bridges and tarry on the parapet together listening to the music of the stream murmuring and purling in the darkness below, to linger in the lilac-bowers, hidden by the sheltering branches and clustering flowers… And indeed, we weren’t the only couple enjoying the spiced night air in the arbors and under the willows on the banks of the pools. I’d known those gardens since my childhood, every path and corner, but they’d never seemed so lovely to me before. I was in an enchantment of bliss. It’s not like me to live in the pleasure of the moment, but I felt that I could have wandered the gardens forever with you by my side. Even though you were a stranger to me, I didn’t doubt that I understood your thoughts, that your feelings at that moment were the same as mine.

  “I had a small, enclosed garden of my own, where I grew healing herbs and other useful plants. It was perfectly private, surrounded by a high wall to which I had the only key, and I led you there almost without thinking, as if it had all been foreordained, and we had only to carry out fate’s decree. The door was always locked, for some of my plants were highly poisonous, and I kept the key in a secret niche in the wall, covered by ivy. I’d never revealed that hiding-place to anyone, yet I didn’t try to keep it from you, when I offered to show you the garden. ‘Here no one will observe or overhear us,’ I said. ‘We may be quite alone and undisturbed. If it please my lord, shall we enter?’ And I held out the key to you.”

  Nyctasia paused coyly. “Shall I tell you what you did next, or can you guess?” she asked, giving him a mischievous look.

  “If I didn’t unlock that door and carry you through it, I must have been a madman or an imbecile.”

  “I confess I was expecting something
of the sort,” said Nyctasia. “I thought you might at the least hand me in with a bow, or offer me your arm. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was that you’d say, ‘There is nothing that would please me more, my lady, but the night is yet young. Could we, I wonder, climb the tower yonder? A most interesting conjunction of stars will shortly take place tonight, and the view from up there would be excellent.’”

  “I deny it!” moaned Erystalben, hiding his face in his arms. “You’ve made the whole tale up, to torment me. I can’t have been such a booby, I refuse to believe it.”

  Nyctasia rocked with laughter. “I swear it, on my honor, by the vahn. I remember your every word.” (She stopped herself in time from adding, “And I never let you forget them either.” For she had let him forget everything, had she not?)

  “You’d enticed me out of doors,” she continued, “not for the purposes of romantic, moonlit dalliance, but so as to be able to keep the skies in sight!”

  “I tremble to ask, what did you do next?”

  “Well, my first impulse was to call the guards at once and have you disemboweled, but then I’d have had to face Mhairestri’s wrath. Besides, I was never one to give myself away. The only possible thing to do was to act as if I weren’t at all disappointed or surprised. And then, once you’d reminded me of it, I realized that I did still want to see the alignment myself. So I said, ‘Of course, the Periodic Conjunction! I was so enjoying our talk that I’d quite forgotten it for the moment. Come, the stars won’t wait. I’ve been looking forward to it all the year-’ and more nonsense of that sort, which had the advantage of being true. Only the way I said it was a lie.

  “So we climbed the tower-no easy matter for me in that cursed skirt-and you explained to me a great many things I already knew about the rare and significant event we were to witness.”

  “Mercy,” Erystalben said faintly.

  “Never mind, your zeal for the spectacle quite rekindled my own. We were intent on observing the exact configuration, whether it would appear as bow or lyre, which would determine any number of possible interpretations of matters both material and immaterial. You made involved calculations, which impressed me as favorably as the Shiastred could have wished, since I did such things so poorly myself.”

  “And which pattern was revealed?”

  “At first I saw the lyre, but when you declared it the bow, I became unsure. It was no common bow-as you’d have known if you took a proper interest in hunting.

  Yet it was not like any lyre I knew of either. I had a fit of inspiration and told you exultantly that archery was a true Discipline, as well as a Manifestation of the Principles of Elemental Balance and Harmony, just like the art of harping. I said, ‘It is clear to me that these are but two guises of one Discipline!’ I wanted nothing so much at that moment as to sit down with my commonplace book and record these momentous discoveries.”

  “No wonder I called you Mistress of Ambiguities.”

  “You too were excited by the possibilities of such an interpretation. You said that it would make the Influences twice as powerful. Then you told me the Ahzid legend of Asye’s bow, which was weapon and harp in one, and I was simply staggered at its aptness.”

  “You hadn’t heard of it before?” Erystalben asked, surprised.

  “Most Mainlanders of noble family aren’t schooled in the lore of the Hlann. I only knew of Asye as a name to curse by when I stabbed my thumb, cutting a quill. You’d been told the tale only because there’s Ahzid blood in your family, on your father’s side.”

  “Ah, Descador, of course. An Ahzid name. I thought I must have native Ahzid ancestry, what with my coloring. In Celys, folk sometimes took me for Lieposi, but none of that tribe has eyes like mine.”

  “So you’ve been to Celys! We so wanted to go there in our youth.”

  He dismissed the Imperial City with a shrug. “I knew I was well educated, so I hoped to find someone at the University who knew me. But I had no luck in that cursed city-” He broke off abruptly, making a Vahnite gesture of repudiation awkwardly, with his left hand. “But what of our adventure in the gardens? What followed these revelations of mystical talismanic Principles? Did I come to my senses finally, and throw myself at your dainty, pearl-shod feet?”

  “You might put it that way,” Nyctasia said playfully. “We were neither of us much in our senses by then. We were wild to run to the library and consult some tome of ancient astronomical philosophy. I was impatiently gathering up my skirts, to descend the steps of the tower, and perhaps the sight of my delicate, silk-clad ankles affected you, for you bowed and said, ‘Permit me, Rhaicime,’ then picked me up and carried me down the stairs.”

  “Thank the vahn! I was beginning to despair of myself.”

  “There were indeed powerful Influences at work that night,” Nyctasia said dreamily. “By the time we reached the foot of the stairs, I’d discovered how very well my face fit against your collarbone, and you too seemed to have forgotten our urgent scholarly researches. Instead of setting me on my feet, you whispered in my ear that you still had the key to my garden about you, and I-I said nothing, but only kissed the hollow of your throat, as I’d been longing to do since I’d first seen you.” She sighed. “How you contrived to unlock the garden door and shut it after us without putting me down, I can’t tell you, but you somehow managed it.”

  “You can’t have weighed more than thistledown. But don’t leave off now, pray.

  What happened next?”

  “Oh, it was all so long ago,” Nyctasia said with a grin. “How should I remember every last thing?”

  But of course, Nyctasia remembered that night in the garden as if it had happened mere days, not years, before. Erystalben had been so different from those she knew, from herself and her kin, all of them pale and colorless and cold, with their ice-grey eyes and dull black hair. Erystalben’s burnished, dark skin and piercingly blue eyes had made him seem more intensely alive, more vivid and vital, than other people. Even his hair was a different black from hers, a gleaming raven’s-wing black that the sunlight kindled to purple and blue. And when she was with him she felt that she too was more alive, powerful, imbued with possibilities.

  She and Thierran had made love from time to time, without secrecy or impropriety. They were betrothed, they could visit one another’s chambers unchaperoned at any hour. It was perfectly proper, almost expected of them, and Nyctasia had never known the glamour of the forbidden and unknown, the thrill of a stranger’s embrace. She remembered every detail of that first tryst with Erystalben, the delight of lying with him under the stars in the fresh night air, the scent of the flowering herbs, the feel of the tender, yielding grass beneath her. She remembered picking mint leaves and crushing them against her throat, between her breasts, leaving their keen, intoxicating fragrance for him to savor on her skin. Never before had it occurred to her to do such a thing.

  He had laid her down carefully and knelt over her, a shadow in the darkness, whispering, “Your beautiful gown will be spoilt, my lady.”

  “I don’t care, I hate it,” she’d said, pulling him down beside her and kissing him greedily. “Let it be spoilt.”

  “Oh, you’d best take it off, don’t you think?” he teased, opening his own shirt.

  “Think of the scolding you’ll get, careless girl.”

  “I can’t take the wretched thing off without a lady’s maid. That’s why I hate it!”

  Erystalben gathered her into his arms and began deftly to unlace the back of the tight dress. “Why then I’ll help you,” he murmured into her hair. “You shall see what a good lady’s maid I’d make you. You’ll never have a better.”

  She kissed his jaw, his neck, his throat, as her hands explored the ridges and hollows of his back and shoulders. “I think I’d like you for groom as well as maid,” she said with a contented sigh. There was some point to such bothersome garments after all, she found. It was worth the trouble of wearing them to enjoy having Erystalben remove them. When he undid the ribbons of
her bodice and bent to kiss her small, soft breasts, she felt weak and helpless with pleasure. She could only cling to him with one arm while with the other hand she clutched at the long grass and dug her fingers into the earth.

  Then he was gently loosing the clasps and bands from her hair, freeing it from the hated cornet and letting it flow over both of them in caressing waves. How could she have failed to notice before how wonderful her own hair felt against her bare skin? She showed him how to detach the dove’s-wing draperies that sheathed her hips, and watched in amusement as he laid them ceremoniously over a juniper bush, to be followed by her sash and silken skirts.

  At last he knelt at her feet and drew off the narrow kidskin slippers, then slid his hands beneath her last underskirt to unfasten her gossamer hose. Nyctasia closed her eyes and shivered, reaching out without thought in the darkness, to pluck a sprig of mint.

  ***

  “You told me,” Nyctasia concluded, “that students of Vahnite philosophy were the most desirable lovers, because mastery of the Discipline gives one such remarkable self-control.”

  “No! I must protest, this isn’t fair-I can’t defend myself. I didn’t really say that?”

  “Well, we were very young,” Nyctasia said leniently. “And after all, it was perfectly true.”

  13

  “i must have been sotted,” ’Malkin thought drowsily. “How could I have been so rutting careless…?”

  It was not at all like ’Malkin to allow mere fleshly attraction to interfere with his aims and purposes. As a rule he was thoroughly circumspect, as a courtier must be who hopes for advancement, but to have spent the night in Corson’s bed like this had not been in the least discreet. He knew very well how malicious gossip could be at court-any court. True, the Rhaicime was away, but he did not doubt that she would hear of anything that went on in her absence. He was aware that he already had enemies in the palace, other scholars, jealous of the ease with which he’d gained the favor of the Rhaicime, while they’d been here longer and failed to come to her notice. (And he had Corson to thank for that, he grudgingly admitted to himself.) They’d be all too glad to see to it that Her Ladyship heard of this affair.