Spear of Heaven

by Judith Tarr

  He took no notice of her abstraction. “Where is the child now?”

  She had to stop and remember Kimeri and the Gate, and the nurses’ snoring as the child crept through the door into her own chambers. “I brought her back,” said Vanyi, “and put her to bed, none the worse for her night’s wandering. There’s a binding on her now, and I called one of the palace ul-cats to enforce it. She won’t go anywhere again until morning.”

  “God and goddess,” said the emperor. “She’s as bad as her mother.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Vanyi said. “She was sleepwalking, it seems. She doesn’t remember coming to the Guildhall. The Gate’s fall brought her, I think—she’s got Gate-sense.”

  “All the Sun’s brood do,” he said. He sounded faintly angry, though not at Vanyi.

  “Poor Estarion,” she said with rough sympathy. “It always ends in your lap, no matter where it begins. It’s your doom, I think: to be the one who holds it all together.”

  He shrugged. Self-pity, Vanyi knew, was an indulgence he had given up long ago. He had been emperor since he was twelve years old, when he saw his father dead of poison in the palace of what had been the western empire, when western Asanion and eastern Keruvarion were united only by force and by ancient enmity. He had spent his youth and all his manhood uniting those two hostile realms into one empire, building his city on the border between them, bringing their courts together, making their disparate peoples one people. Now he had his reward. For five whole years he had had no call to war; for three seasons, no assassin had tried to take his life.

  Strange how little he showed of all that. He had scars in plenty, but his coat and trousers hid them. His face was still more young than old. He kept from his youth a kind of innocence, a resilience that never seemed to fail or to harden, no matter how sorely he was tested.

  If he was aware of her thoughts, he gave no sign of it. He sighed and said, “She’s punishing me, you know. For letting her father die and her mother go away as soon as she was born. So she had an heir without a father, and meant to leave the heir as she was left, but I was cruel: I wouldn’t let her.”

  “That was brutal, yes,” said Vanyi, dry as winter grass. “You left Varuyan to find his own way as all sons must, even princes. If that was into marriage with a pretty fool, and into an aurochs’ horns while that fool was pregnant with his daughter, that was his fault. Not yours.”

  “I know that,” he said a little sharply. “Not that Salida was—or is—as much a fool as you insist. She’s Asanian; she’s practical. She didn’t have the will or the strength to raise a Sunborn daughter. She knew it. She also knew that if she stayed in the palace, she’d be immured there, condemned to be nothing more than a dowager princess. If she gave up the child, surrendered her rank and her dowry, went back to her kin, she could marry again; she could have children that honestly were her own, and not the get of a god.”

  “Granted,” said Vanyi. “But she could have spared something of herself for her firstborn: a word, a letter, some intimation that she remembers the girl’s existence.”

  “We decided, she and I,” said Estarion, “that it were best if she did no such thing. Less pain for her. Less difficulty for the child whom she so wisely gave up.”

  “That wasn’t wise,” Vanyi said.

  He said nothing. She could not tell if he agreed, or if he was being stubborn, or if he had simply tired of the subject. He wandered back to the window. There was something of the caged beast in the way he stood, but a beast resigned to its captivity, its yearning shrunk to a dull ache.

  “You were all the father she ever needed,” Vanyi said, not to comfort him, but because it was the truth. “Haliya has always been a mother to her. But that’s never enough for the young. They’re the strictest traditionalists of all.”

  She could not see his face, only the broad line of his shoulders, and the heavy braid that fell between them. His mood to the touch of her magery was surprisingly calm. He said, “If Haliya loses the child of her heart, I don’t know that she’ll recover.”

  It was calm, then, over grief. No use to say that he had known it when he married. His line lived long, if sudden death did not take them, and he had taken an Asanian wife, of a people who blossomed early and died young. It had been necessary, one of the many necessities that bound two empires into one.

  Vanyi gentled her voice as much as she might. “Is she so frail?”

  “You should know as well as I. You saw her yesterday.”

  She ignored the snap in his voice. “She’s grown old, to be sure, and I’m sorry for it. But I think she’s stronger than you imagine.”

  “Strong enough to withstand the cruelty of a child?”

  “That’s what mothers are for. Grandmothers, too.”

  He carefully did not observe that Vanyi had never been either. She would have borne his son, if she had not miscarried. There had been no children after, of any of her lovers.

  Her choice. Her grief, when she had leisure for it. Which mostly she did not. The Gates were her children, the mages her kin.

  “And I should go back to them,” she said. He was a mage, if not of the Guild. She did not need to speak aloud the thoughts that were clear for him to read.

  He turned in the window. “You will go?”

  She almost smiled. “O persistent. Of course I’ll go. I’ve watched my mages girdle the world with Gates, walking or riding or sailing from each to the one that must be built after. Now I want to see for myself what’s on the other side of the world.”

  “And what broke the Gate there.” He spread his hands, the dark and the golden. “I have no power to stop you.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. “But you won’t use it.”

  “Because I promised,” he said, a little wearily, a little wryly. “I’m cursed with honesty: I keep my word.”

  “There are worse things to be cursed with,” she said. She rose from the chair, creaking a little.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She blinked.

  “For bringing ki-Merian home,” he explained—not even a hint of rebuke that she, the mages’ Master, should fail to read a simple thought. “She’ll have better nurses after this. More wakeful.”

  “Less susceptible to her sleep-spelling.” Vanyi caught the flash of his glance; she smiled. “Yes, I know they’re all mageborn, and those that aren’t, are ul-cats, with magic in their blood. Maybe she needs a simpler guardian: one too mindblind to notice when she’s working her magics.”

  “I’ll think on that,” he said.

  He would, too. That was the great virtue of the Emperor Estarion. He listened to advice. He might not take it—but he did listen.

  3

  Once Daruya’s temper had carried her out of her grandfather’s sight, she calmed as she always did, into a kind of sullen embarrassment. She went to lair in her safe place, the stable that housed her own seneldi, the herd that she had bred. There in the dark and the hay-scented quiet, she slipped into the dun mare’s stall and sat on the manger, elbows propped on knees, chin on fists. The mare, accustomed to Daruya’s presence at odd hours, chewed peacefully on the remains of her supper.

  Daruya let the mare’s peace seep into her mind, blunting the sharp edges of anger. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. The mare flicked an ear, listening. “Whenever I stand in front of my grandfather, I shrink till I’m no bigger than Kimeri, and no wiser, either. And then we fight. Or I fight. He just smiles in that way he has, and lets me howl, till he decides it’s time to shut me up.”

  The mare nosed in the corner of her manger. Daruya stroked the black-barred neck, ruffling the mane with its stripes of black and gold. This was a queen mare: unlike the bulk of her kind she had horns, though not the ell-long spears of a stallion; hers were a delicate handspan, straight and sharply pointed.

  Daruya brushed one with a finger, pricking herself lightly on the tip. “I wish,” she said, “that he could see anything of me but my worst. He thinks I’m an
utter child, spoiled and irresponsible.”

  “And aren’t you?”

  Daruya flicked a glance at the stall door. A shadow leaned on it, regarding her with golden eyes. He was faceless else—veiled, hooded, black-robed from head to foot. He inspired no fear in her at all, and no surprise. “Chakan,” she said. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “Much the same as you are, I suspect,” he said. His voice behind the veils was light, even laughing. “Let me guess. He won’t let you go to the other side of the world.”

  “Worse than that,” said Daruya. “The Gate we were to pass through is broken, and the mages don’t know how, or why. Vanyi and the others are still going, but to the Gate before the one that broke. I’m to stay home. Just as I always do.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Chakan, folding his arms on the half-door and resting his shrouded chin on them. “You’re not kept a prisoner. Not even close.”

  She glowered at him. Chakan the Olenyas was a cheerful soul, for all his black veils and his face that none but another Olenyas or a heart’s friend might see, his robes and his twin swords and his long bitter training. She knew that he grinned at her behind those veils—his eyes were dancing.

  “But there,” he said. “I cry your pardon. I’m supposed to indulge your temper, and here I persist in being reasonable.”

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “Of course you do.” He straightened, stretched, yawned audibly. “Are you contemplating a suitable punishment for his majesty? An aurochs hunt, maybe? I’d rather a boar, myself, it being spring and all, and the aurochs not in rut until the fall. They’re dreadfully peaceable at this time of year. A boar, now—a boar will rip you to pieces no matter what the season.”

  She never could help it with Chakan—he always made her laugh, even when she wanted to kill him.

  He knew it, too. “There now,” he said. “It’s almost dawn. If you won’t hunt boar, and I think you shouldn’t, seeing as to how we’d have to rouse out the whole hunt, and they’re all sleeping off their night’s carouse—shall we ride instead? I’ve a fancy to see the sun come up from the Golden Wall.”

  “If you wanted that,” said Daruya, “you should have left at a gallop an hour ago.”

  “Bet on it?” he asked.

  Hells take him. He knew exactly how to twist her to his will. “Six suns, gold, that we don’t reach the top before the sun is up.”

  “Done,” said Chakan.

  oOo

  Daruya took the striped mare. Chakan had his own gelding saddled already, waiting in the stableyard and sneering at the stallion in his run. The stallion, who knew the cranky little beast, ignored him as a king should.

  It was very dark, but the stars were brilliant, and Brightmoon rode the zenith. They rode down from the palace hill through a city already awake, the markets rousing and setting up, the bakers baking the day’s bread, the smiths working the bellows in their forges. Asan-Gilen, city of the two empires, which everyone called Starios—Estarion’s city—was properly said never to sleep. Rather, it changed guards. Even as the merchants set about opening their stalls, the nightfolk drifted yawning to bed.

  Some of them knew Daruya and greeted her, either with silence in the western fashion or with a word and a dip of the head in the way of the east. By the courtesy of Starios, none detained her, nor was she ever beset with crowds. Unless of course she wanted them.

  Spoiled, Chakan would say to that, and arrogant, too. Odd, she thought, that he could say such things and barely ruffle her temper, but if her grandfather even hinted at them, she flew into a rage.

  She shut down the thought. The processional way, wide and all but empty in the not-quite-dawn, ended in the Sunrise Gate, the gate that looked on Keruvarion. That was shut still, but the lesser gate beside the great one opened to let them through, with a grin and a salute from the guard.

  She found herself grinning back. The wind blew straight out of the east, full in her face. It smelled of morning, and of green things, and of open places.

  Chakan’s gelding was already out, already stretching into a gallop on the grass that verged the emperor’s road. Daruya’s mare tossed her unbitted head and snorted, and launched herself in pursuit.

  East out of Starios they ran, across the fields new sown with spring, through the arm of forest that stretched out toward the city, and then up, veering off the great way to a narrower path. It wound upward through the trees, till the trees gave up the pursuit. The land here was stony, the way steep, tussocked with grass. Once, and then again, the seneldi leaped streams that crossed the track.

  The sky, that had been all dark and stars and bright arc of moon, greyed as they rode, till it was silver, and the stars were gone, and the moon a pallid glimmer. Chakan’s gelding stumbled in landing, after the second stream; but he steadied it, and it went on undismayed, racing the sun.

  Daruya let the other take the lead, narrow as the way was, and difficult. Her mare was reasonably content to settle to the smaller senel’s pace, flattening her ears and threatening his rump with her teeth only when he seemed to slacken. Daruya, after all, was not trying to win the race.

  This steep rock that they climbed was the Golden Wall, not for its color, which was green in spring and brown in summer and white with snow in the winter, but for that it marked the border between Keruvarion in the east and the old Golden Empire in the west. Estarion had set his city just beyond the shadow of it, where it sank into a rolling land of field and forest, athwart the traders’ road from east to west. There was a little river running through it, tributary in time to Suvien the mighty that was the lifeblood of Keruvarion, opening westward of the city to a lake on which the people fished and the high ones kept their summer villas.

  All that, Daruya could see as she reached the summit of the ridge. Her mare snorted and danced. Chakan laughed aloud. The sun, just rising, shot a shaft of light straight into his eyes.

  Daruya slid from the saddle and let the mare go in search of grass. She was breathing hard, and her black mood was gone. She spread her arms to the sun. The morning hymn poured out of her, pure white song.

  When the last note had rung sweet and high up to heaven, she stood still with her arms out, head flung back, drinking light. It had a taste like wine.

  Awareness came back slowly. Chakan was sitting cross-legged on a stone, watching her in Asanian fashion, sidelong. His eyes were the same color as the sunlight. “Sometimes,” he said as if to himself, “one . . . forgets . . . exactly what you are.”

  The exultation of light gave way to a more familiar irritation. “Oh, not you, too. I get enough of that from my grandfather.”

  “You do not,” he said, and he sounded like Chakan again, immune to the awe of her rank. “He is utterly matter-of-fact about anything to do with being a mage or being a Sunchild. It drives some people wild. He should be a figure of awe and terror—not a quiet-spoken man in a plain coat, who can drink light like water, and make the stars sing.”

  “That’s just magery,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Mages can work great wonders, I’ll never deny it. Sunlords are different. The god speaks to them directly.”

  “Not in words,” said Daruya.

  “Does he need them?”

  That silenced her. She paced the rough level of the summit, turning slowly as she went. Away eastward stretched forest and plain, the wide reaches of the Hundred Realms. West was a broader level, forest that gave way quickly to tilled fields and clustered towns. Below on its own hill and on the level about was Starios beside its lake.

  The sun had reached all she could see, turned it to gold, melted mist that clung to hollows. She could if she wished gather the light in her hands.

  She knotted them behind her. The right hand with its golden brand was burning fiercely; she shut her mind to it. Chakan, if he knew, would say that the god was talking.

  And did she not want to be what she was?

  With a sudden movement she pulled off the fil
let that bound her brows, worked fingers into tangled curls. Priests and royalty did not cut their hair. She had cropped hers short not long after Kimeri was weaned—chiefly, Chakan had opined, out of petulance that the child’s birth had not been more of a scandal. People expected Daruya to do outrageous things. Often they forgave her, because she was their princess, and beautiful: the Beauty of Starios.

  It was quite maddening. “Sometimes I think,” she said to the wind, “that all royal heirs should be brought up far from court, in ignorance of their rank, until they’re old enough to bear the weight of it.”

  “It’s too late to try that with Kimeri,” said Chakan.

  “Yes, and I was going to leave her with the burdens while I ran away. Is that what you were thinking?”

  “No,” he said.

  He did not point out that she could read his thoughts if she tried. In fact she could not. Olenyai were protected against magery; and Chakan, like some few of his kind, was born shielded, unreadable even if he had wished to be read. It could be disconcerting, if one heard his steps, saw him approaching, but sensed nothing in the mind at all, not even the shadow of presence that marked the rest of the Olenyai.

  Daruya found it restful. He asked nothing of her as mage or woman—he had never wished to bed her, that she knew of, nor been anything but friend and, as much as anyone could be, brother. She had brothers in blood, or so she was told, sons of her mother and her mother’s husband, but none of them had ever come forward to claim the kinship. Chakan was more truly kin, Olenyas though he was, bred and shaped to serve his emperor.

  She, bred and shaped to be empress in her turn, said less bitterly than wearily, “All priests, even royal priests, are given a little freedom, a bit of Journey to teach them the ways of the world. I’ve not been allowed it. Yes, I know it wasn’t safe before—there were still wars, rebellions, assassins coming right into the palace and dying on Olenyai swords. But that’s over. After forty years of war, we have peace. We’ve had festivals from end to end of the empire, to celebrate the wars’ ending. It’s time now, if it will ever be—time for me to have the rest of my training.”