by Judith Tarr
That was tempting. More than tempting.
To dine in the house of the king’s sister-son on the night when people dined only with friends and close kin—what magnitude of coup might that be?
Maybe it was a trick. Chakan would say so. But if Vanyi was with her, and Chakan himself, and Kimeri who was a weapon of remarkable potency, surely they could protect themselves against any danger Shurakan might offer.
She looked up into Bundur’s face. It was empty of guile. Which could of course be a sleight in itself, and probably was. But she saw no enmity there. What she did see . . .
Ah, she thought: the power of northern fashion in a country that reckoned women’s breasts a secret to be kept for the inner room. She was too wise to flaunt them any more than she already had. She tilted her head, beads on braid-ends sliding on bare shoulders, and feigned deep reflection.
Just as a shadow began to cross his face, she said, “Very well. One dines at sunset, yes?”
“At sunset, on festival night,” said Bundur.
“Does one do anything in particular? Bring a gift? Offer flowers? A prayer?”
“A gift isn’t necessary.” Which meant that it was. “Flowers are welcome, and prayers, always.”
“I see,” she said. “At sunset, then.”
“At sunset.” His voice was a little strange—thick. He was excited. Not, she hoped in the depths of her stomach, because she had fallen into a trap and would be dead by midnight.
oOo
Chakan was sure that it was a trap. Vanyi, most strangely, was not.
She had made her point indeed, let the queen see her and left the woman to make the next move in the long game. When she came home to a near-war in the dining room between Daruya and Chakan, she ascertained its cause at once and stopped it with a pair of words. “We’ll go.”
Chakan rounded on her in such fury that Daruya flinched. Vanyi did no such thing. “Down, young lion,” she said. “Draw in your claws. You don’t have the faintest understanding of what this means.”
“I know that it lures us all to the house of strangers, shuts us therein, and leaves us easy prey to the king’s assassins.”
“So it might,” said Vanyi, “if it were any other night and any other festival. This the festival of the summer moon. It’s for kin; for heart’s friends; for lovers. Enemies are never hunted on festival day. No wars are fought, no feuds pursued. If a man meets his brother’s murderer in the street on festival night, he smiles and wishes him joy and goes on. In the morning they go back to killing one another—but while the festival’s peace is in force, no man ever breaks it.”
“What better chance,” demanded Chakan, “to destroy the unsuspecting with the semblance of perfect peace?”
“Not during the festival,” said Vanyi.
“In the mountains,” he said, “no one steals from anyone else. But foreigners are fair prey. Theft from them is no dishonor. How can it fail to be the same here? We’re outlanders. We don’t keep festival. We can be killed, and no one will look askance.”
“This isn’t the mountains,” Vanyi said. “Honor is truly honor here. We’ve been bidden to keep festival in the highest house in Shurakan short of the royal house itself. If it’s the house most closely connected with the king, then so much the better. The queen is at least not disposed to murder us out of hand. The king would happily see us dead and burned. Let his sister see us, know us, learn that we’re not monsters, and maybe she’ll talk to him, and maybe, for a miracle, he’ll listen.”
“Minds like that never open,” said Chakan. “They’re locked shut.”
“Maybe,” Vanyi said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter, if we can get a foothold in the king’s faction. It’s not just a matter of finding out who broke the Gate here, Olenyas. When we do that, when we’ve got the Gate up and working again, then we’ll want to use it. We’ll need friends here, to keep us from being attacked all over again. Those friends may be in House Janabundur.”
“Or they may not,” said Chakan.
“We can’t know that till we go there, can we?” Vanyi dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Go. Get ready to guard us tonight. I need to talk to Daruya.”
He snarled, but he went.
Daruya rather wished he had not. Once he was gone, the door shut and an Olenyas on the other side of it, Vanyi fixed her with a profoundly disconcerting stare.
“Well?” Daruya snapped after it had gone on for quite long enough. “Are you thinking what everybody else seems to be thinking? No, I haven’t been tumbling the master of House Janabundur in a senel’s stall.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Vanyi imperturbably. “He’s a handsome buck, isn’t he?”
“I can’t say I ever noticed,” Daruya said. But she felt the heat in her cheeks. She had never been a good liar.
Vanyi saw it, raised a brow at it. “Maybe you didn’t know you were noticing. He’d be old to you, I suppose. He must be thirty winters old, give or take a few.”
“He has twenty-seven summers,” Daruya said stiffly, “and that is hardly old at all. He rides a senel very well for someone who was never on one before this past Brightmoon-cycle. But then he’s ridden oxen since he was Kimeri’s age. The skills do translate.”
“As do a few other things,” Vanyi observed. She inspected the daymeal that had been laid on the table some untold number of hours ago, picked out a fruit that was still fresh and a loaf that was not too dry, and ate each in alternating bites. In between she said, “Consider this. When our mages first came to Shurakan, a faction in the court welcomed them, admitted them to the kingdom, gave them a house for the Gate, and gave them leave to come and go as they pleased. Through the Guardian of the Gate they invited an embassy from the guild in Starios, and promised to receive that embassy with honor and respect.
“Then the Gate fell. The faction fell, too, it seems, either just before the Gate or just after. Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of it. We’ve been admitted, yes, and given a place to dwell in, and freedom of the city. But no one comes to us with any direct purpose except curiosity. I got at the queen today, but only because I’m a brash foreigner and I seized a chance. They won’t let me loose to do that again. To all appearances we came here on our own, uninvited by any person or persons in Shurakan, and we’re being treated as humble petitioners to their celestial majesties, not as invited ambassadors.” She finished the loaf, deposited the fruit-pit in a fine bronze bowl, poured a cup of the inevitable tea. “I haven’t said any of that to the Minister of Protocol, you know. It isn’t something I’ll say to someone whom I’m not sure I trust.
“And in any case,” she said, “if this faction is indeed discredited, its members, if they live, are lying low. They aren’t letting themselves be seen to speak with us or approach us. Unless one of them, their leader even, is the man who will be our host.”
“I don’t think he’s that subtle,” said Daruya.
“Does he need to be?” Vanyi asked. She paused, as if she needed to ponder what she said next. “I think you ought to know what it means when a man comes in his own person, without a messenger, and bids a woman and her kin to dine with his kin on festival night.”
Daruya could well guess. The catch in her throat was temper. Of course. “It’s a dreadfully public way to ask her to bed with him, isn’t it?”
“Not if it’s marriage he has in mind.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Daruya. “I’m a foreigner. I’m nobody that his benighted people will acknowledge: no family, no kin, no power in the kingdom. And if that isn’t enough, I’m hideously ugly.”
“None of that would matter,” said Vanyi, “if he thought he had something to gain. Or if he could persuade his enemies to think exactly that. Is there a better way to blind them to what he’s really doing, if he’s leading his faction back to power and using us as his weapons?”
“That’s supposing there’s a faction at all, and he’s part of it. He’s the king’s sister-son. Could he turn traitor to his own kin
?”
“He might not think of it that way. His faction—if it is his—believes that Shurakan can’t be forever shut within its walls, and has to learn to contend with foreigners on their own ground. Even foreigners who are mages.”
Daruya could not see it. She tried; she battered her brain with it. But she could only see Bundur riding the star-browed bay, trying to sit gracefully in a jouncing trot.
Vanyi broke in on the vision. “I’m thinking that we’ve been kept here in careful isolation, handled at arm’s length, and ignored as much as possible. Someone is keeping us from being cast out altogether. That someone may have sent us a message through your Bundur—or may be that gentleman, as innocuous as he seems. No nobleman of his age in Shurakan is a complete innocent. I’d say none could be completely honorable, either, but I haven’t seen all of them yet, to be sure. He’s up to something, if only a campaign to get you in his bed.”
“That’s all it probably is,” said Daruya. “I’ll tell him he doesn’t need to make a grand performance of that—I’ll bed him happily enough, and never mind the priests and the words.”
“What if he wants those? For honor’s sake?”
Daruya laughed a little shrilly. “Then he’s a fool. I didn’t marry the man who sired Kimeri. I haven’t married any man I’ve bedded since—and many’s the one who’s hoped for it. It’s not greatly likely I’ll marry this one, either. Who is he at all but a petty princeling of a kingdom on the other side of the world?”
“And you will be empress of all the realms of Sun and Lion,” said Vanyi. Her tone was perfectly flat. “Which, if your grandfather has his way, will include Shurakan and the lands between. With armies to hold them. And Gates to march the armies through.”
“Then maybe,” said Daruya with sudden bitterness, “it’s as well the Gates fell when they did, and they should never be raised again.”
“What, you don’t want to conquer the world?”
“I don’t want to make a fool of myself,” snapped Daruya. “My grandfather never troubled his head with such nonsense. I’m vainer than he is, and weaker, too.”
“Which,” said Vanyi, “may be your great strength.” And while Daruya stared at her, for once emptied of words: “Go get dressed. It’s getting late.”
She sounded exactly like a mother. Daruya bristled, but as Chakan had done long since, she obeyed.
There was, she told herself, no great profit in refusing; and yes, the sun was low, slanting through the windows and pouring gold upon the floor. She took a handful of it, part for defiance of Shurakani propriety, part for warmth in a world that could grow too quickly cold.
17
House Janabundur stood on a promontory of the city westward of the palace, sharing its eminence with an assortment of temples, one or two other lordly houses, and untold warrens of common folk. It was very like the kingdom it was built in, Daruya thought, waiting at the gate in the last rays of sunlight for her company to be recognized and let in.
They had done their best to look like the ambassadors of a mighty empire. Chakan had brought half his Olenyai and left the others to guard the house by the palace walls; they could show no weapons, but their robes were impeccable, their veils raised and fastened just so, their baldrics oiled and polished and crossed exactly. Vanyi had put on the robes of the Mageguild’s Master, as she almost never did.
They were cut in the Asanian fashion of robes within robes within robes, seven in all, grey and violet interleaved, and the outermost was of silk and woven in both violet and grey, a subtle play of color and no-color that shimmered in the long light. Her hair was plaited and knotted at her nape, bound with a circlet of silver; she wore no other jewel but the torque of the priestess that she had been from her youth, plain twisted gold about her throat.
Kimeri, clinging to her mother’s hand, wore a gold-embroidered coat and silken trousers, with a jeweled cap on her head and rings of gold and amber in her ears.
Daruya had caused the servants an hour’s panic, but the result, she rather thought, was worth the trouble. She had traveled light perforce, and brought nothing suitable for a state occasion. By dint of ransacking the embassy’s stores and taking the market by storm, the servants had made do handsomely.
The shirt and trousers were her own, of fine white linen woven in Starios; and the boots were made in Shurakan, white leather golden-heeled. The coat over them, like Kimeri’s, was new-made of silk from Vanyi’s stores, a shimmer of fallow gold brocaded with suns and lions, gold on gold on gold. Along its hem and sleeves ran a wandering line of firestones. Her hair was in its braids still, but its beads were amber and gold. There were rings in her ears and about her wrists, plates of amber set in gold. Her belt was gold, its clasp of amber. But lest the eye weary of so much white and amber and gold, she wore a necklace of amber beads interwoven with firestones, shimmering red and blue and green.
She smoothed the long coat with the hand that did not hold Kimeri’s, a nervous gesture, quickly suppressed. Chakan had struck the gong that hung in front of the gate; its reverberations sang through her bones.
Kimeri fidgeted. “Mama, can I take my boots off, please? My feet hurt.”
Daruya swallowed a sigh. The boots were new, of necessity, and made for the child, with room to grow in—and they were stiff, and she had walked half across the city in them. “When you get inside,” said Daruya, “we’ll ask if it’s not too unpardonably rude for you to go barefoot to a festival dinner.”
“Why would it be rude?” Kimeri wanted to know. “My feet hurt.”
Daruya was spared the effort of a reply by the scraping of bolts within and the opening of the gate. An aged but still burly porter scowled at them all impartially, but said nothing, merely stepped back and bowed, hands clasped to breast.
Vanyi interpreted the gesture as an invitation. She entered in a sweep of robes. The others followed a little raggedly, Olenyai last and darting wary glances at the walls that closed in beyond the gate.
That was only the entryway. The wonted court opened beyond, lamplit, with the inevitable fountain. A servant waited there, elderly and august, to lead them up a stair to a wide airy hall full of sunset light.
Daruya saw nothing of it at first but the light, which poured through a long bank of windows framed in a tracery of carved wood and molded iron. Slowly she accustomed her eyes to the splendor. The room was long and high but not particularly wide, stone-vaulted, with slender pillars holding up the roof. The floor was of the patterned tiles that were so common here, the walls hung with embroideries, too bright and many-figured to make sense of in a swift glance. At one end of the hall, near a broad stone hearth, a table was set.
No one sat there, though the plates and cups and bowls were all laid in their places. There was no one in the room but themselves and the servant who had brought them, and that one was retreating, bowing, saying nothing.
Chakan hissed and flashed a glance at Daruya. She refused to indulge him. None of them knew the custom here. In Starios the host would have been standing at the table, the family seated, awaiting the guests. Shurakan might well do otherwise; leave guests alone in an empty room while the family mustered outside and entered in a body.
They emerged from a door at the far end of the hall, as the guests had entered in the middle. Bundur led the procession. Daruya told her heart to stop beating so hard. It would never have been such an idiot if Vanyi had not vexed it with her tale of festival dinners and offers of marriage.
He was not at all ill to look at. As if to counter her white and gold, he wore shirt and trousers of the shimmering black near-silk that they wove here from the floss of a seed-pod, and a coat of scarlet embroidered with black and bronze. His head was crowned with scarlet flowers. They should have been incongruous; they were merely splendid.
A group of women walked behind him. The eldest, with her silvered hair, must be his mother. She looked like him, with the same proud cheekbones and robust figure; her garments too were black, her coat the color of bro
nze. Two younger women accompanied her, one with the free hair of a maiden, the other wearing the shortened coat and severe plaits of a new widow and leading a child by the hand. It was a boychild as far as Daruya could tell, not as tall as Kimeri but seeming older, with a thin, clever face.
Bundur spoke words of greeting, which Vanyi answered. She gave him the gift she carried, a length of gold-green silk; he received it with open admiration and an honest gleam of greed, and passed it to the eldest of the women.
She was his mother, yes, the Lady Nandi, and the younger women were his sisters: Kati who had not yet chosen a husband, and Maru whose husband had died in the spring of a fever. The child’s name was Hani; he was not Maru’s son but Bundur’s. Daruya stiffened at that.
“His mother chose not to keep him,” Bundur was saying to Vanyi, ostentatiously ignoring Daruya, “and left him to me.”
“The mother lives? You’re married to her?” Vanyi asked.
“The mother is a priest of the Blood Goddess, who forbids her devotees to marry. I wouldn’t have married her in any case,” said Bundur: “we weren’t mated except in the flesh. And since no priest may keep a child in the temple, I took this one to raise as was only proper. He’ll go to a temple himself, come winter solstice.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve asked him if he wants to go,” Daruya heard herself say.
It was the child who answered. “Of course I’ll go, lady. I want to learn everything a priest can learn.”
“Will you be a priest?” asked Daruya.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“My mother is a priestess,” Kimeri said in a clear voice, rather cold. “Ours can marry and keep their children if they want to. I’m going to be a priestess when I grow up, and have a daughter, and keep her, no matter what her father says.”
“Her father might say no,” said Hani.
It dawned on Daruya that these two knew each other, and not happily, either. They were as stiff as children could be who had had a quarrel, and Kimeri was itching for a fight. “You won’t be the father,” she said nastily, “so what would you know?”
