by Judith Tarr
Vanyi’s mages of the Gates had named both cities to her, and she to Daruya a few evenings since beside a fire in the mountains. That in the valley was the Winter City, that on the height its companion of the Summer.
The high ones, the lords and princes, court and king and queen and all their followers and dependents, traveled from one to the other in the long round of the year. Winter saw them below in the green warmth of the valley, drinking sweet water from the lake and hunting on the forested slopes to south and west. Summer brought sullen heat and pestilence and stinging flies, and sent the court fleeing up the mountain to cool airs and clean stone amid which they set their gardens.
Only the poor remained below, and the holy men and women in their temples, and the folk who tilled the rich land beside the lake, preparing for the harvest and the winter and the lords’ return. Then the Summer City was silent in its mantle of snow, and only the hardy remained, and the holy ones in the temples, and those commanded for their sins to hold the city until summer came round again.
It was summer now—the very day of High Summer, Daruya realized with a start: the greatest of festivals in the empire, and she had forgotten it. The Summer City was full of princes.
On this longest day of the year, with the sun sinking fast below the mountains but light lingering in the pellucid sky, the streets were thronged with people, in the music of bells and drums. They all wore the faces of plainsmen as she knew them in the Hundred Realms, familiar and yet subtly strange: features both stronger and finer, hair dark but often with a ruddy sheen, men as tall as she and broad with it, women walking proud in long coats and wide-legged trousers. Many wore the open-sided robes of temples, men and women shaven-headed alike, bare alike beneath the robes, and no more shame in them than she might have seen in kilted tribesmen of Keruvarion’s own mountains.
They had no fear. It was an odd thing to think as she rode among them walled in guards, but it was true. They stared at the strangers, commented openly on demon-eyes and shadow-gods and foreign horrors, seemed not to care if they were understood, or if the strangers might take revenge for what was said of them. They looked on what to them was superstition and terror, and they shrugged at it. They were the people of the Kingdom of Heaven. Their gods defended them. Nothing could touch them or do them harm.
And yet a Gate had fallen here. They knew fear of that, surely, and hate. She did not find it in the faces that she passed. Even the poor seemed decently fed and reasonably content.
They had entered the city through its eastern gate, the gate of the dawn that looked upon the pillars and the mountain wall. Once past the gate they turned northward and made their way up a road not much wider than a cart-track in Asanion.
Here it was a broad thoroughfare. Blank walls lined it, set with elaborate gates. Those that were open looked in on the jeweled extravagance of temples, or on gardens full of flowers, lit with lamps in the dusk.
Ahead of them rose a greater wall than any, strung with lights like a necklace of firestones. Its gate was of bronze, the pillars like those of the kingdom’s gate, mighty man-shapes in postures of guard. These were freshly painted, their armor gilded, their helmets ornamented with lamps.
As with all gates once the sun had set, this one did not open for them, but one lesser, to the side of the great gate, where new guards waited to relieve the old. The guardians of the pillars turned without speaking and went back to their duty, unmindful of the dark or the hour. The guardians of the palace—for it could be nothing else—took them in hand with as little ceremony.
First they wished to separate the strangers from their animals. Daruya would have protested that people who had never seen a senel could not know how to care for a herd of them, but Vanyi was before her. “Kadin, go with them. Show them what to do.”
Daruya could hardly quarrel with that. Kadin surveyed the persons waiting to take charge of the beasts, and was surveyed in turn. He was by head and shoulders the tallest there, and dark to invisibility outside the light of torches, but for the gleam of his eyes. After a long moment a man in a coat that swept the ground, which seemed to indicate rank here, held up his hand and said, “Show us.”
The others eased at that, as if at a master’s command. Kadin went away with them, with seneldi and oxen following. Vanyi and Daruya and Kimeri, the two remaining mages and the Olenyai, went onward on foot into the lamplit palace.
oOo
Daruya would remember little of that first sight of the Ushala, the palace of the brother-king and sister-queen in the Summer City of Shurakan. Lamps, she remembered those, burning perfumed fat and faintly rancid oil. Corridors that went on and on. Courtyards walled in darkness. Expectation that, tired and filthy and road-weary as she was, she must face the king and the queen and be as royal as they.
She was not asked to suffer that. She was taken through the heart of the palace and out into its gardens and thence to the walls, where stood a row of houses. Guesthouses, the guards said, with an intonation that made her think pesthouses, houses set apart for the victims of a plague.
All but one were dark. That one was waiting, ready for them, and it was surprisingly pleasant. Its rooms were not large but airy and clean, clustered round a courtyard in which was a fountain, and flowers sending sweet scents into the night. There were servants, soft-footed quiet people who offered baths, food, drink, rest.
Daruya took them all, one after the other. Vanyi stayed with her, and Kimeri. The others went away with most of the servants to baths and food and rest of their own.
Chakan would have stayed, but the servants were persuasive, and Daruya commanded him. “You’re dropping on your feet. Go and sleep, and come back to nursemaid me in the morning.”
Vanyi she could not compel so, nor did she overmuch wish to. There were great basins full of steaming water for both the women, and a smaller one for Kimeri, who for once was too tired to object. The servants were quiet and skilled. Daruya fell asleep under their hands; woke with a start to find herself lying on soft cloths, having the aches stroked out of her.
Vanyi lay almost within reach, much wider awake than she, and palpably on guard. Daruya knew a moment of shame—she should have been as wary, she who had her daughter to think of. But there was no danger here. All her senses assured her of it.
oOo
They were still assuring her of it when she woke to a dazzling-bright morning and Kimeri bouncing on her stomach, caroling, “Mama, see! See where we are!”
Daruya barely had time to scrub the sleep out of her eyes before Kimeri was dragging her to the window through which all the light was coming. It dazzled her; and yet it was not sunlight. That was away out of sight to the eastward. She was receiving the full force of it reflected from the Spear of Heaven, blinding white and seeming to hang directly before her, with a brief dip of valley between.
The house, she realized with the sluggishness of the barely awake, was built into the palace wall. There was nothing below her window but eventually—very eventually—the valley’s floor.
Kimeri scrambled up onto the window’s broad sill, laughing with delight. “Mama, isn’t it wonderful? We’re as high up as birds!”
“We were higher in the mountains,” Daruya said. “And on the bridge.”
“But we couldn’t fly there.” Kimeri leaned out as if she intended to do just that.
Daruya barred her with a stiffened arm. She had not been this animated since Starios, nor this openly inclined toward mischief. It was a relief in its way, but Daruya found herself wishing that the child could have clung to her unwonted docility for a day or two longer.
“You won’t be flying here,” Daruya said sternly. “You’ll scare people. They don’t have any magic, and they don’t know about people who do.”
“I can teach them,” said Kimeri.
“Not today,” Daruya said.
That quelled her, for a wonder. She let herself be swung back into the room and inspected. Rather to Daruya’s surprise, she was clean, combed, and dress
ed, and yes, fed. The servants were marvels indeed, if they could accomplish that much with this young imp.
Kimeri wriggled, impatient with motherly fussing. “May I go now, mama? Chakan says I can play in the garden with Hunin if you say yes.”
“I say yes,” said Daruya. “But only the garden, and only as long as Hunin says you may.”
“Yes, mama,” said Kimeri meekly.
Her tone warned of disobedience, but not for the moment. Daruya decided to let it suffice. Hunin was the eldest of Chakan’s Olenyai, sober and sensible. He would keep Kimeri in hand, nor hesitate to call on a mage if there was need.
With Kimeri there probably would be.
Daruya sighed and let her go. Time enough to worry when the child lost patience with her limits and went about testing them. For now Daruya would see what could be had in the way of bath and breakfast—another bath, yes indeed; after so long with nothing to bathe in but icy streams and water in waterskins, she meant to be clean from morning till morning, and every moment between.
oOo
Vanyi’s waking was easier and somewhat earlier, her bath simple and brief, her breakfast likewise. Once she had disposed of both, she said to the servant who attended her, “I would speak with the queen. Whom shall I send with the message, and when may I be granted audience?”
The servant did not change expression, or ask why Vanyi wished only to speak with the queen. He had been expecting the question, then, and he had an answer ready.
“Madam should speak with the Minister of Protocol, since it is he who determines who shall and shall not address the children of heaven. This unworthy person may send one yet more unworthy with a message, if madam wishes.”
“Madam does wish,” said Vanyi. “Madam is called Guildmaster, or lady, or if one is suitably familiar, Vanyi.”
“Lady,” said the servant, bowing in the manner of this country: hands folded on breast, head bent low. She doubted that it was proper to bow in return.
oOo
The message went out as promised, but the answer was slow to come back. While Vanyi waited, she discovered that none of them was being held prisoner. They could come and go as they wished, not only in the palace but in the city.
The guards who had brought them to this house had left them in the care of the servants, none of whom showed inclination to be a warrior or a jailer. They made no objection to Vanyi’s ordering the house as she pleased, with Olenyai on guard, mages established in an inner room to set up wards and begin their search for the destroyers of Gates, and seneldi stabled, after some negotiation, in the house next door. Pastures they could not have, but they were given ample grain and fodder, and the courtyard was large enough for them to run in, two and three at a time.
It would do, Kadin conceded; he kept his position as groom and guard. He was avoiding the other mages.
Naturally enough, Vanyi thought, though it grieved her. It would throb like a raw wound to see Miyaz and Aledi together, weaving their powers of dark and light. He made no effort to enter their sanctum, slept in a room in the house that he had made a stable, devoted himself to the care of the seneldi. He had even, since he came to the city, put off his violet robe and put on the kilt of his people. He wore it with an air that defied his Guildmaster to challenge it.
She did no such thing. When it was time for him to be a mage again, she would see that he did so. Now he would mourn as he must, without her to meddle. Jian had been lover and wife as well as lightmage. He was entitled to a certain extravagance of grief.
oOo
“A visitor, lady,” said the servant whom, by the time the sun reached zenith and sank slowly westward, Vanyi thought of as her own. She was sitting in the room she had been given, watching the play of light over the valley and testing the strength of the Great Ward. It had no weaknesses that she could find.
When the servant spoke, she started out of a half-dream. “A messenger?” she asked.
“A visitor, lady,” the servant repeated. “A guest who bids you welcome to Su-Shaklan. We have given him the cakes of welcome, and the tea. Will the lady receive him in the room that is proper for such things?”
The lady would, and with alacrity, no matter what the servant thought of that. Vanyi was not noble born, to care for such silliness—unless of course it suited her.
The visitor was waiting for her in a room that faced the garden, nibbling the last of a plateful of cakes and sipping a tiny cup filled with the hot herb-brew of Shurakan. He was not, as she had still dared to hope, an emissary of the queen, not openly or obviously. He was a priest in a saffron robe, with a pattern of flowers painted on his shaven skull.
It took a moment to see the face between the robe and the paint. It was not a young face, wizened and weathered, but its eyes were bright, its smile sweet, showing an expanse of toothless gums as he rose and bowed.
He did not bow as low as the servant did, Vanyi noted—there were degrees of reverence, then. This seemed to indicate respect but not servility, and a measure of equality.
His voice was sweet and rather high. It was not a eunuch’s voice. There were eunuchs here, her Guardians had said, and all of them were priests, unmanned in the service of one of their bloodier goddesses. But he was not of that sect. His voice had a trained purity, as if he were a singer.
“Lady,” he said, “it is well you are come, and well that I see you, come at last to Su-Shaklan. I greet you in the name of the gods and the gods’ children, and all who are in this kingdom they make blessed.”
It took Vanyi a moment to understand him. Magery could teach a language, but not its odder nuances. Some of these were very odd. She did not try to rival them, but said, “Greetings to you also, priest of the gods. My name is Vanyi, master of the Guild of Mages in the empire of Sun and Lion.”
The priest’s eyes narrowed a fraction. He was wincing, she realized, and in the most delicate manner possible. “Lady. Ah, lady. We do not use such words here, if we are most properly polite. I am named Esakai, priest of Ushala temple, where the children of heaven pay their devotions.”
He was telling her something, subtly. That she must not speak of mages here, yes, she had expected that. He had responded as a courtier might in requesting an outland barbarian not to relieve himself on the palace floor. The same delicate revulsion; the same careful consideration for the stranger’s ignorance.
But that was not all he was getting at. “Are you a messenger of the queen?” Vanyi asked him.
The tilt of his head and the lift of his brow reminded her that they were both standing, and he was old, and his feet were no longer as sturdy as they had once been. She chose not to ignore him. Rudeness was not what the occasion called for; and if he meant to divert her, then he had misjudged his target. She sat in the chair opposite the one he had occupied, thus allowing him to sink back into it with a barely audible sigh of relief.
Which too was subtlety. She countered it again with blunt directness. “The queen sent you, then?”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, no, lady. Of course not. The daughter of heaven needs no unworthy mortal to speak for her.”
“Then how does a mere mortal gain audience with her?”
“Why, lady,” said the priest in limpid innocence, “he does not. Mortals are unworthy to gain the attention of the gods’ own children.”
“In my country,” said Vanyi, “our ruler also is descended from a god, but he never shuns the company of his people. He walks among them as one of their own, and they love him for it.”
“So do our people love the children of heaven,” said the priest, unruffled, “but the children of heaven would never lessen themselves by walking on common earth.”
“That was so once,” Vanyi said, “in part of our empire. Its emperors, as they were then, became so rarefied that they had to take the earth to themselves or perish. The last of them mated with the sun-god’s child and begot a new world in which the gods walk with men, and men give the gods their power to rule.”
“How stra
nge,” said the priest. “How . . . unusual.”
“That may be,” Vanyi said. “But surely people do speak to the queen? She condescends, I’m told, when need demands.”
“Ah,” said the priest as if she had explained a matter that puzzled him sorely. “Ah, lady. The queen speaks, yes, for herself and in the times that she chooses. She never sends messengers or begs mortals to attend her. They come when the Minister of Protocol bids them come, and she comes as she wishes, or not.”
Slowly Vanyi worked her way through the tangle of alien logic. “The queen chooses when and to whom she speaks. The Minister of Protocol decides who will speak to her, if she chooses to speak, which is her right and her decision. Therefore the queen sends no messengers. The Minister of Protocol, howevern . . .”
“The Minister of Protocol abides by the will of heaven. The queen and the king her brother may speak or not speak. That too is the will of heaven.”
“I think,” said Vanyi dryly, “that the Minister of Protocol has a great deal of power. Has he sent you to instruct me?”
“I came by the will of heaven,” said the priest, “and of my own curiosity, to see what manner of people you are. The lowly mortals name you demons. I’m thinking that you are no such thing. But you are very strange—and your shadows most of all.”
“What, my blackrobes?” Vanyi allowed herself to smile. “They’re warriors of that empire which had to wed itself with the Sun or die. No demons; no creatures of terror. Merely men, bred and trained to defend their emperor.”
“Very strange men,” the priest said. “Were their mothers bred to demons, to make them strong?”
“We have no demons in Asanion,” Vanyi said, “which is the name of their country. Nor in Keruvarion, which is the name of mine.”
