The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  “Precisely,” Mother agreed. “And by that same cunning, the people think the Chancellor is a just and able magistrate, even though he is violent and treacherous, and has the blood of my son under his fingernails. So when you hear that the Chancellor feeds the poor, remember that he would starve them if it would serve his purpose to do so. Likewise, if you hear that the young Sun Lord rules justly, remember how he came to the dais. Of the Eight Iniquities, treachery and murder are the worst.”

  She stared at each of us in turn. “But I must remind you again: never say such things outside these walls. Who knows who might be listening? I do not want to be poisoned because of a careless word, so this knowledge must remain our secret. But what, do you suppose, is the best way to keep it hidden? Dilara?”

  My friend said, “The best way to keep secrets is to seem to have none, because then nobody bothers to look for them.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Mother agreed. Then, as if we were coming to the end of a normal lesson, she asked, “Are there any questions?”

  There were not, and she dismissed us. We trooped out, but not as gaily as we usually did. For once, we had seen past Mother’s imperturbable calm, into the fury and grief that ate at her vitals, and glimpsed the craving for revenge that had rooted in that rich, dark soil. Unknown to us, that obsession ruled all she did, and I suspect that even then it had begun to drive her mad. But I would have been outraged if someone had suggested such a thing to me.

  As we crossed the courtyard, Dilara muttered, “Someone should kill them both. The Sun Lord and the Chancellor.”

  “Of course someone should,” I agreed. “But who could do it?”

  “Maybe I could.”

  “Don’t be silly. How would you manage it? Someone would already have done it, if it were that easy. Wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Dilara said, and with that we went in for our dinner.

  According to the birthday Mother had bestowed on me, I was fourteen when Master Luasin and his company of actors came to Chiran.She announced their visit only about four hands before it happened, and the palace staff went into a great fluster, with Mother’s steward and the chatelaine yelling into servants’ ears at all hours of the day and night.

  Not to be outdone, the Literature Tutoress decided we must present a selection from a classical piece for Master Luasin. Because I was tall and slender and had a notable talent for mimicry, I got to play the male character Unsal, the evil moneylender in The House of the Magistrate.

  I was now of a stature to be convincing in the part, for I’d shot up in the past year and had to look down into Mother’s face when I spoke to her. My freckles had disappeared and my hair had become a deeper auburn; I wore it at shoulder length, tied back by a blue ribbon.

  As for the rest of me, although I had become a woman, I still showed little of the shape of one, being composed mostly of knees and elbows. Dilara hadn’t quite matched my height, though she was older than me; on the other hand, she’d acquired some modest curves. I myself wished for the figures of some of the other girls. Kidrin, for instance, who was now fifteen, already had the feminine proportions of the Moon Lady, and I envied her.

  Dilara laughed when I first told her this. We were at a riding lesson in the hills south of Chiran and had halted to rest the horses. The other five students were a little way off, though we were all under the watchful eye of our Heron Guard escort and the even more watchful eye of our Equestrian Tutoress.

  “What’s funny about wanting curves?” I asked.

  “Curves?” she asked derisively. “Why would you want to be all bulges? When Kidrin’s horse trots, she bounces all over the place.”

  This was somewhat exaggerated; Kidrin was womanly but didn’t approach the lavish endowments of the Bee Goddess. “Well, what about finding husbands?” I demanded. “Kidrin says it’s easier if you’re curvy. She says a man doesn’t want a woman who looks like a veranda pillar.”

  Dilara eyed me. “Why are you thinking about husbands all of a sudden?”

  In truth I hadn’t been, or not really. From what I knew of marriages, especially Rana’s to Detrim, husbands had little to recommend them. Still, marriage was what most women did, and most men, too. Indeed, in the three years I’d lived in Repose, Mother had found well-off husbands for several of her daughters, once they were seventeen and had finished their education. This was fortunate for them, since it was usually difficult for either a woman or man without known ancestors to make a good marriage. Even the girls who had to leave Tamurin for new homes in distant places knew how lucky they were.

  We had one great advantage, though, of which other foundlings could only dream: the very best teachers had trained us in the domestic and cultural arts, and in those we matched any great merchant’s or landowner’s daughter. The men who married Mother’s girls were perceptive enough to put ability and intelligence above ancestry; and while they didn’t get a helpful clan of in-laws, they did get a connection to the ruler of Tamurin. This was valuable, since everyone knew how the Despotana doted on her daughters. Furthermore, she provided a dowry, not lavish but not mean either. So, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, her reputation as a savior and teacher of orphan girls had spread well beyond Tamurin, and she was considered to have gained great merit with the Beneficent Ones, especially with Our Lady of Compassion.

  “I wasn’t thinking about husbands,” I told Dilara. Then I remembered certain reflections I’d had about Olaban the new Heron Guard trooper, and my ears got warm.

  “Well, I'm not going to marry anybody,” Dilara told me. “I’ll get Mother to set me up in a trade, the way she did Jathen. I could be a perfumer. Or a weaver—I’d really like weaving.”

  Actually, going into a trade was as possible for us as marriage. Not all of Mother’s girls wanted husbands—some because they had suffered at men’s hands, others simply because of temperament—and Mother was perfectly willing to acconmodate them. After they completed their educations she arranged for their training as a book copyist or a seamstress, or the like. Once they’d mastered their craft, she set them up in their own establishments, sometimes in Tamurin, sometimes in neighboring Despotates. We almost never saw them after they went away, but occasionally Mother would read us the letters they sent her. Some had gotten so good at their trades that they were becoming wealthy. Some had married after all and were happy, or said they were.

  However, not every girl went into a trade or married; for a select few. Mother decided on a religious vocation. This was because she was a devotee of the Moon Lady, and had endowed a sanctuary for the deity up north, at a place called Three Springs Mountain. Being in the wilds, it needed to be supplied from Chiran, and every so often a train of pack asses, escorted by half a dozen Heron Guardsmen, set off from Repose for the highlands. Tossi had already gone there to serve the goddess; in fact, she was the very first of us to do so. Mother chose one or two girls every year to join her, and it was considered an honor. Honor or not, it didn’t interest me, but I reckoned that Mother knew I wasn’t the religious sort, and so I never worried about finding myself at Three Springs.

  “I’d like a trade, too,” I said. “Why don’t we go into one together? We could get rich twice as fast, with both of us working at it.”

  “We should try that,” she agreed. “When it comes time, we’ll ask Mother if we can train together. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to make books.”

  “How tedious. A copyist?”

  “No, a real printer. You know, with the carved wood blocks and the press, like we saw in town last year.” There was one licensed printer in Chiran, and I’d been fascinated by his manufactory with its stacked reams of wheat-straw paper and the smell of ink and binding glue. He’d had six text cutters at work that day, all meticulously carving whole pages onto blocks of wood. Each letter was reversed, of course, which made the carving very difficult. When a block was finished, he’d put it in the press and squash the paper down on it, and when he lifted the
paper there was the whole page. Nobody could hand-copy a book that fast, although cutting a page into the wood was very slow, and if there was one mistake, the whole page had to be carved over again. He got a lot of business from Mother, since he printed all the books we used in the school.

  “I don’t want to do that. You know how books bore me.”

  “Well, maybe we can think of something we’d both like,” I said. “We don’t have to decide for quite a while yet.”

  We got back to Repose just before the evening meal. We clattered through the main gate into the fortress, turned left at the gardens, and rode into Horse Yard where the stables were. And there the unexpected met us: Master Luasin had arrived, two days early.

  I reined in and stared. Five big covered wagons with tall spoked wheels stood in the center of the yard, surrounded by stable hands and strangers. Our grooms were still unhitching the horses, enormous golden beasts with white manes and tails. Kidrin cooed at the sight of them, but I’d never been much interested in horses except as transportation; what I found fascinating were the wagons. They were boat shaped, as though they were built to float across rivers. Three of the five had windows covered with translucent sheets of horn to keep out dust and wind, making them resemble houses on wheels, which in fact they were. The wheel rims and spokes were crimson, as were the axles and fittings. Gold scrollwork was everywhere, and on their sides were the most wonderful paintings—soldiers in silver armor who fought under clouds of arrows; great ships flying before the wind on storm-black seas; glittering processions that climbed toward mountaintop cities; and, most fascinating of all, a tall robed woman who gazed imperiously at me from her jeweled throne.

  “You like them, do you, young mistress?” asked a voice below me.

  I looked down to see a man by my stirrup. He looked old to me then, but I suppose he was barely forty; he wore plain traveling clothes and was very tall. His nose was big and hooked and his eyes were set close together on each side of it, and unlike most Durdana men he had a short beard, russet shot with gray. I thought him extremely homely.

  “Yes, sir, I do like them,” I said, minding my manners.

  “Which one the most?” He sounded not at all patronizing but as if he really wanted to know my opinion, and with that I found him not quite so homely after all.

  “I like the woman on the throne,” I told him. “Who is she?”

  “Ah, that’s the Empress Maylane. You’d know of her, from your studies.”

  I was never loath to display my learning, so I said, “She held Seyhan against the usurper Deijad, while her husband, the Emperor, was imprisoned in the Yellow Smoke Islands. But she freed her husband at last and brought him home through many dangers. Then there was a great battle against the usurper, and she and the Emperor died in it, side by side. But before Maylane fell she killed Deijad, and Derjad’s army fled. It was very tragic. But their son took the throne, and afterward he brought peace and happiness to Durdane.”

  He grinned. “I see you pay attention to your teachers. That’s the story in an oyster shell.” He lost the grin and regarded me thoughtfully. “Would you like to be such a woman?”

  I blinked. It seemed a bizarre idea, but on the other hand it would be beautifully sorrowful, and people would read about me in the histories.

  “Maybe,” I said cautiously.

  “Always a wise answer. Anyway, it’s a good story, so a lot of people have written about it. We play Ristapor’s Maylane Unyielding, which to my mind is the classic of all the forms.”

  “Indeed,” I answered. “I look forward to seeing it.”

  He gestured at the wagons. “And so you will. Now, if you’ll excuse me ... Ah, my apologies. I’m Master Luasin. And you?”

  “I’m Lale Navari,” I stanmiered. Here I’d taken him for some minion, and instead I’d been talking to the greatest living master of the High Theater. In my confusion I added unnecessarily, “I’m one of the Despotana’s students.”

  “I gathered as much,” he said, “from your erudition. Now I must...”

  He waved vaguely to me and made off. He walked oddly, as if his ankles were stiff.

  Dilara said, “That was himl He doesn’t look like I thought he would.”

  “No,” I agreed, “he doesn’t.” I gazed at the painted empress. She gazed back at me. I tried to see my face in hers, but of course I couldn’t.

  Master Luasin’s company presented not only Maylane Unyielding but the cycle of three history plays called Loyalty, Maylane Unyielding came first, to my delight, because I wanted to see an empress at war.

  None of us knew exactly how a High Theater drama looked and sounded. Our Literature Tutoress had taught us that it used poetry, song, and mime and that it included paintings and tableaux, but that wasn’t the same as seeing it. And our attempt at The House of the Magistrate, though we were terribly earnest about doing a selection from the classics, didn’t really fill the eye with its magnificence.

  Our theater studies were exclusively of the classics, but Mother had allowed us to see a few works of the common drama down in the city, to round out our education. In that type of theater there was a lot of action, usually punctuated by street songs, not all of them polite. The dialogues were slangy and fast and often very witty, and the plots were fre-quentiy blood drenched, with people being executed and murdered all over the place. Our Literature Tutoress considered it extremely low, not, I think, because it could be bawdy and violent, but rather because ordinary people liked it so much. Hers was a common opinion among the well educated, who held that the popular plays were vulgar, the acting execrable, and the performers defective in both morals and character. Some of them were defective in these ways, which naturally made them all the more interesting.

  The High Theater enjoyed a far more elevated reputation, and Master Luasin was an artist of its very first rank. This was because the classical drama was very old and stately, and told stories of honorable people who were beset by villains of dreadful power and malice. Because the plays always taught a clear moral lesson. High Theater performers were considered quite reputable, and Master Luasin’s were deemed the most reputable and accomplished of all. His company was under the patronage of Yazar, the Despot of Brind, and normally resided in Istana, Brind’s capital, but it was so excellent that it customarily traveled to Kuijain every summer, to perform for the Sun Lord and for the powerful and rich of Bethiya’s capital. This was the first time the company had come to Tamurin, and paying Master Luasin to do so must have cost Mother a pretty sum.

  There were ten people in the company: six were actors, while the other four and Master Luasin managed the staging, the music, and everything else. They all kept pretty much to the quarters Mother provided for them, but I did manage to catch one of the stagers in Seaward Yard; she was a stocky woman with big hands and heavily muscled forearms. I made the mistake of asking her how they got their wagons through the steeps of Crossbone Pass.

  She laughed. “By the Lady of Mercy, that would be a long thump and bump from Kuijain, wouldn’t it, by the overland road? If you can call it a road any more. No, my dear, we came mostly by water. By boat down the Short Canal from Kuijain to the Pearl, then by lorcha to Dirun at Pearl Mouth. Then we loaded ourselves on a pelican and sailed across the Gulf to your Despotana’s port at Kalshel. And a bit longer after that, and here we were.”

  “Oh ” I said, embarrassed at sounding ignorant. Kalshel was on the other coast of Tamurin, and was connected to Chiran by a well-maintained road that ran across the peninsula. If I’d thought clearly. I’d have realized that Master Luasin would come that way, because Kalshel port was how the merchants of Tamurin traded with the mainland to the east. Commerce from the southwest coasts, and from the offshore archipelagoes, went through Chiran—though not without first enduring the attentions of Mother’s customs agents, as did all the goods shipped through Kalshel.

  Mother’s palace had a private theater that dated from the imperial days when Repose was the residence of Tamurin’
s prefect. Master Luasin’s stagers needed several days to bring it to the condition he demanded, but at last it was done, and the aftemoon of Maylane Unyielding arrived.

  We students, our tutoresses, and Mother with several of her senior officials, made up the audience. We sat on the four tiers of cushioned benches that rose above the theater floor; before us, positioned to catch the best light from the tall windows, was the stage. Its sides were closed off, to conceal the performers’ entrances and exits, and a filmy hanging stretched across its rear; the fabric was translucent and behind it I could make out the first landscape of the play, painted on a curtain of gossamin. To the stage’s right was the musicians’ gallery, already occupied by a woman with a double flute and a man with a sivara.

  We students settled ourselves quietly on the benches, with the icy gaze of our Tradition Tutoress ensuring decorum. Mother went down to the small altar by the stage, where she lit a cone of incense to the Sun Goddess, the patron of artists. We all prayed to the goddess, and Mother retumed to her seat.

  There was a silence of a dozen heartbeats. And then, with five perfect notes of the double flute, the gauze curtain folded itself upward and there before us, real as life, was the Stone Flower Garden in Seyhan Palace.

  And the play began.

  Everyone knows Maylane’s story, but few have seen the drama performed in the old manner, and fewer still have seen it in such perfection. Master Luasin declaimed the poetry of the narrative parts in a voice so deep and resonant I didn’t believe at first it was him. The gossamin paintings that illustrated the story glowed like cascades of jewels, every one more gorgeous than the last: the burning mountains of the Yellow Smoke Islands, the imperial necropolis of old Seyhan, the pearl-inlaid bedroom of the Empress, the sunlit and terrible battlefield of Maghara.

  And the singing! It sent chills through me, especially when the women’s voices rose above the men’s, like many-hued birds soaring in the winds that blow far above the earth. And as Maylane and her husband approached their fates, I could hardly hold back my tears, for I knew that although they never lost hope, there was no hope for them.