‘I rode in at four a.m. The tears in my eyes turned the lamps to stars. Thankfully Balzan …’
I waited, but he didn’t finish his sentence. I walked to the end of the terrace, where the panes of the hall’s lightly-ornamented windows looked black against the shortbread-coloured stone. That hall used to be the stateroom of Awia.
Saker had one thing in common with Cyan. They were born at the right time. She was born at the perfect instant to make the most of the gunpowder revolution, and immortalised at a good age to innovate. He grew up in the Insect swarm of the seventh century.
Watching the clouds flock shadows across the lawn, I thought, it’s hard to believe he knew this as the Insect Front. In 619 the Front ran behind that hill, the lake must have been a trodden swamp, and the Mosaic Gallery a field hospital. In his mother’s reign, San and his army almost lost Awia. In the bitter fighting, day and night, Saker dedicated himself to stopping the Insects slaughtering his people. Insects had killed his father, his grandfather, and three of his younger brothers. He fought constantly, and the army called with hindsight the ‘First Circle’ collapsed around him. The archers who survived must have been tough as bugs and practised to perfection by the time the Games threw them against each other.
I sat on the balustrade and stretched my wings. His mother, Teale, was beside herself in despair that Awians were streaming to Hacilith as refugees once more. She was striding around that stateroom and yelling at his older brothers, inciting them to fight in the grounds teeming with Insects. ‘If you want it so much!’ she shouted, ‘Go and get it!’ and she hurled the jade sceptre through the window. That pane, there, the one at the end.
Saker was coming back from the battlefront and he saw it smash the glass and fall with the shards two storeys into the flowerbed. He picked it up and returned it to her, though the claw had broken off the eagle and it’s missing to this day. He said, ‘Mother, our family will never lose Awia, because I’ll stand there with the archers. There’ – where the statue is now – ‘and I won’t move. We’ll shoot until we either push the vermin back, or the world runs out of arrows.’
It was the most desperate time, but he did it, and they forced the Insects into Bitterdale and held the Games on that very spot. And Saker had made Cyan’s life just as desperate, but the desperation was the making of both of them.
Now, under the warmth of the sun and refreshing breeze, Saker gazed at nothing, down at the pool with the basking bronze mermaids. The surface of the water had restored the reflection of the rear of his house.
‘Don’t start that fidgeting with your scar again.’
‘What …? Oh. That. Forget that! It’s not important … At least I’ll soon be with Leon.’ He shuffled his wings and sighed. ‘I know Cyan didn’t like me to begin with. I’m glad we were reconciled at … the end. I’m glad I got to know her … how she really was. The rifle brought us together.’
He rubbed the raised tramlines of his Savory scar. ‘She was only seventeen. Why do we destroy the youth of every generation? Cut her dead when she could have achieved so much more?’
‘It’s an achievement to have been Eszai.’
‘She should be in Peregrine, alive … and she would be, too, if I hadn’t landed her with being Lightning.’
He turned from the vista, leant his backside on the balustrade, and looked up at the great rectangular windows of the second floor. ‘I feel like it’s my house for the first time …’
Abruptly he slammed back into the Mosaic Gallery and darted down it. I followed, through the Green Drawing Room, Trisian Library, Reception Hall, to the Dining Room where a cold meal had been laid out for me.
‘Food!’ he said. ‘They think of everything, these people!’
‘Thanks, Saker.’
He went to the window and looked out. You could see the rotunda boathouse with its spiral rack. A few groundsmen were dismantling the impromptu bridge and loading the punts into it. One hand rustling the fletchings of the arrows in his quiver, the other with fingertips dug into his scar, he said, ‘Insects didn’t kill Cyan. Humans did.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm. Is that enough food to get you to the Castle? Is that all right?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Telegraph me at Tanager. I’ll be waiting. I need the Emperor’s advice … You’ll have to go soon, I’m afraid. It’s one o’clock already.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can see the sundial by the lilacs.’
‘A sundial?’
‘Yes.’ He forced a smile. ‘You never have to wind them.’
CHAPTER 18
Flight to the Castle
I flew over Micawater town, which Saker had kept much as it was in the year 687, the same as the palace, and any modernisation was invisible from the air. In all my life I’d never seen it so deserted.
No one sitting on the fountain’s basin. No one on the green, or in the adjoining marketplace. No one loafing by the plinth of the Quadriga Statue of Gyr, Saker’s brother the charioteer, galloping four copper horses in hand, the most famous sportsman of his day. Everyone must be terrified. They were all indoors and the streets were empty.
I’ve always thought Saker mustn’t appreciate being constantly reminded of his deadly brother but, because the citizens raised the statue in 625, he couldn’t get rid of it. His manor must be cloyed with memories he won’t allow himself to remove – maybe his cellar’s packed with Gyr’s statues – like living with other people’s skeletons in your cupboard.
I flew over the idyllic rows of shops, Town Hall and muster office with its Insect siren, over the Alula Road. The town meandered, streets of the same biscuit-coloured stone with roofs of pale grey tile. Here, people’s houses are spread out between almond trees and carefully-tended kitchen gardens. Awians like a great deal of personal space, it comes from having wings. Their sense of aesthetics, personal expression, dignity and display; they’d never allow themselves to be crammed together in the noise and filth, exploited to death like the humans in the back-to-backs of Hacilith.
The houses dwindled into immaculate olive groves and vineyards through which the Austringer Road wound up over Donaise Magna. All the gates of the estate were painted the same sky blue.
If Saker hadn’t preserved it in its chocolate box perfection, it could have been as big as Rachis or Tanager, with their beautiful skylines. To think, it was the largest town in the world once, before Hacilith overtook it thirteen centuries ago. Nervous people clipping the vines waved thankfully as my bird-of-prey shadow flicked over them. I recognise a nationwide clampdown when I see it. It’s ugly and hate-filled and takes a hell of a long time to reverse. If Micawater had grown to a big town, these guys might have wider horizons, broader minds, and not be so damn scared.
I crested the belvedere on the summit, with the kourai statue on its tower: an idealised young man with his wings spread. Awians stick these statues here, there and everywhere to commemorate the brave sacrifice of the youth.
When Insects first appeared in 411, in the distant north at Lazulai, they made a small enclave of their Wall, and ate everything inside it. The Awians watched them, fascinated, and even dropped in food. When the news reached the Pentadrica, Queen Alyss came to see what was happening. At that point the Insects, which had stripped their enclave bare, burst out and slaughtered Alyss, her retinue and hundreds of Awians. The Insects ranged around, eating cattle and crops, expanding towards Lazulai. The young men and women of the city, the kourai, took up arms for the first time – bill hooks and boar spears – and ventured to round up the Insects and kill them all. The Insects massacred every last youth. But they made the original offensive, which Awians hold dear to this day.
Eventually Lazulai fell, and the families of those brave people fled south to Murrelet. A hundred and forty years later, their descendants fled south again, from Murrelet to Micawater. It’s been a steep learning curve.
So, the Pentadrican elite having been devoured, their country collap
sed in chaos. The Plainslands and Morenzia began to seize borderlands, while desperate Awian refugees surged in. All three nations fought over Pentadrican land for four years, the only civil war we’ve ever had, until, in 415, San brought them to a settlement. Humans and Awians signed the peace treaty at Dace, and San led them against the Insects instead. His campaign successfully slowed the Insects’ advance, and the kings of Awia and Morenzia proclaimed him Emperor that same year. They gave him Alyss’ palace, and he made it his Throne Room. He built a curtain wall around it, and it became the Castle.
You see kourai statues so often you hardly notice them, but Saker had infected me with his melancholy mood. It was hard to believe I’d never see Cyan again.
As he says, she was only seventeen, but there’s been one younger Eszai. The youngest was sixteen, she was one of my precursors as Messenger, who got cemented into the Wall somewhere east of Col Oriole, and starved there beyond rescue, until the Emperor couldn’t hold her any more.
I could have been the youngest Eszai ever. I was fifteen when the landslide forced me to leave Darkling. I’d taught myself to fly by then. In fact, if I hadn’t been spiralling over the sheer arêtes, a wolf pack wouldn’t have eaten the goats I was supposed to be tending, Eilean wouldn’t have thrown me out of the shieling, and the avalanche would have crushed me, too.
I’d taken to the air and left Scree Plateau. If I’d known about the Castle then, I’d have flown straight to the Emperor. I wouldn’t have had to live in the city. What a waste of time my seven years in Hacilith had been, like a loop snagged from a tapestry. But I came from nowhere and I knew no better, so it’s pointless mourning those years of strife. I had to suffer them, to learn about the world and the Castle. But still, I glided, wistfully, contemplating how I could have snipped off the loop of Hacilith and been immortalised at fifteen. How bizarre. What would it feel like to live in my fifteen year old’s body forever?
Exciting! Sexy! Confusing for all the Zascai who often don’t take me seriously enough at twenty-three.
I reached the Castle early evening, and landed in the Starglass Quad. The Throne Room’s South Façade loomed, pierced with the great Rose Window high above, and step-topped with pinnacles. Riant sunlight lit the elaborate wall, deepening the shadows of the stonework and almost vivifying the fifty statues in niches, from the great Tympanum Portal to the height of the rose.
I ran towards the entrance. The statues represent the immortals, they carry weapons or tools to signify their positions, and they’d been carved from life, from the original fifty who’d won through the heats of the Games. I passed Rayne’s statue, which stands as a cornerpiece to the portal, and others line up, leading into the doorway itself.
I passed into the shadow of the carved lintel. The two guards uncrossed their halberds; I entered the dim, green marble narthex, with frankincense lamps burning on ledges. The fan-vaulted ceiling was lower here, so when you pass through the carved amber doorway, you’re hit by the full effect.
I stepped through the threshold. The dazzling Throne Room soared around me. There was San, on the Sunburst Throne at the end of the aisle, its long, gold flames radiating at his back. Harlequin light from the rose window fell upon the ebony benches and the scarlet carpet.
I walked down the aisle, past the carved bench ends. Beams from the high, pointed windows shone across the immense vaulted space, slanting lancet-arched panels of light on the glittering mosaic of the opposite wall, ascending to the gallery where guards with longbows watched, and highlighting the huge onyx columns of the arches striding the hundred metre length of the hall, their tops drooping with acanthus leaves and dripping with carving. Above me, the ceiling bosses of ships, trophies of arms, beasts and Insects seemed alive.
The walls above the arches coruscated with an Insect battle in polychrome mosaic on a gold background, soldiers and cavalry filling the walls, in ancient lamellar armour and each man an individual lovingly rendered, perhaps from life, from the men of the first army.
The Emperor watched me all the way. I felt the strength of his scrutiny. His face was shadowed by the top two straight spines of the sunburst and the wavy rays either side of them. The glorious light behind him shone from four pointed windows in the apse behind the throne. All I could see of the Emperor’s face were his pinched cheeks and shoulder-length white hair, but I felt pierced to the core by the strength of his insight: the pale grey eyes you can never meet.
I reached the space before the four dais steps, stopped in one of the shadows of the rays, and bowed, feeling my katana hilt press my back.
‘Comet,’ said the Emperor. ‘Tell me.’
I related the bombing of Wrought, Cyan’s death and Saker’s reaction, standing quite still. A step to either side would flare the sunlight in my eyes. ‘The King of Awia requests your advice,’ I said.
‘Tell him this. He must not persecute the Litanee. All the peoples of my Empire have always been free to travel throughout the world.’
‘He said the newspapers are stirring up hatred.’
‘Will you write to counteract them?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Extend a hand to the Litanee. Encourage the Awians to overcome their fear. Litanee people should remain in Awia if they wish. Tell Queen Eleonora and King Saker the Castle will help them find Connell Rose, and she must be brought to me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not to Eleonora. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘We must stop the hatred festering. I will protect the royal family. Where might Connell be?’
‘She could be anywhere. She could have reached Litanee by now.’
‘Then ask Governor Aver-Falconet if he will tactfully search Litanee.’
‘Yes, my lord. Tornado’s on his way here.’
‘Then I will have him scour the Plainslands, as Eleonora is combing Awia, and Hurricane searches Lowespass. We will design a net to catch Connell. She will not remain at large for long. As she is not forthcoming about her reasons for murdering Lightning, I am interested in speaking with her face to face.’
I shivered. ‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Co-ordinate them and keep me informed. I also want you to publicise a contest for the position of Lightning to be held here as soon as possible. We are not daunted by the threat of black powder charges. Speak to the musketmen and archers, so they may devise a competition and set a date.’
I bowed, met his fathomless eyes, and glanced for relief at the stained glass windows behind him. Each had a design of the people and bounty of each of the four lands. To my left, on the mosaic around the windows, the tumultuous vanguard of the cavalry crashed into a serrate swarm of Insects, filling the space above the gallery with bronze carapaces and silver blades. They’re a comfort. The standard bearer with the moustache, I like him best.
San said, ‘Be sure Queen Eleonora has no doubt that Litanee must not be expelled from Awia, nor imprisoned, nor harmed in any way.’
‘I will, my lord. Thank you.’ I bowed, and left.
I ran past Breckan; Kay’s and Sirocco’s rooms, under the Breckan Bridge and along the front of Carillon, the Treasurer’s apartment, then Gayle’s on the ground floor. Mare’s Run on my left was a cliff of elegant pilasters and sash windows, curved to fit in the gap between Carillon and the curtain wall. I passed the Master of Horse’s rooms, then the Sailor’s, then the raised pond reflecting water lilies like porcelain bowls.
On my right, behind the two rococo red and white storeys of Carillon, behind its louvred bell tower, the Throne Room’s walls stretched to the sky. The great spire of the Throne Room dwarfs the northwest bridge and the theatre’s cupola; it draws your gaze to its sunburst apex, shining in the sky.
I threw open the door of my tower in the curtain wall and ran up the three hundred and thirty steps to my apartment. I booted the pile of newspapers away from the entrance and went in. There was the usual stack of letters on my desk. I grabbed them, sat on the split-level steps between my stud
y and bedroom, and glanced through them.
One letter was remarkable in the quality of its cream-wove paper, my address inscribed in a sophisticated hand – the Sailor’s:
The Flagship Gerygone
Cobalt Bay
21 June ’40
What ho, Jant!
Having received your – perplexing, I might add – semaphore asking for the gen on missing gunpowder, I thought you might fancy a head’s-up of the latest from our beloved Grass Isle.
I uncovered a cache in a smugglers’ cave. It’s a dry, manmade affair in the cliff, which I’ve known about since the blessed days of Ata, and in it yesterday, lo and behold, ten kegs of blasting powder appeared. Though there’s space for a hundred more. While the Grass Isle customs were recovering them, some Litanee attacked. They seized a policeman, Cargeen, and carried him off. Bally cheek. If I’d been present it’d never have happened. They escaped scot-free and resumed their activities, blithe as larks.
So I sail my old tub to Cobalt and lie in wait, and last night I pop out the telescope and what do I spot? A nippy little schooner rounding Cobalt Point. The dapper thing scoots by out of view to everyone but yours truly, and anchors off Cullion Cove where she disgorges a rowing boat that lands them ashore.
They aren’t real smugglers, because it’s full moon. Smugglers only sail under a blank moon. The stolen powder is their cargo, right enough. Now, Jant, as this schooner is new to me and dashed efficient, I thought I’d let you know before blowing her clear of the water. Give you a chance to come and look, what?
And while we’re on the subject of explosions, what the blazes do you mean by trying to keep the five inland at Wrought secret? You cannot keep the damn things under cover, Jant, because they are explosions, and id est I can hear them. Give a chap some credit. So maybe you should flutter over and tell me what the bally hell is going on.
Fair Rebel Page 18
