Anackire

by Tanith Lee

  “Indeed—indeed, yes, lord Prince. Quite likely. The heaviness and cold of the snow making brittle, overbalancing a structure already out of kilter. Very hazardous. Some of the ceiling might have fallen into the temple itself.”

  “When?” said Kesarh.

  “When, my lord?”

  “If unrepaired, when would this happen?”

  “Already the repairs—”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Rest assured, Prince Kesarh. Even unrepaired, not for several more years.”

  The mason did not want to meet Kesarh’s dark Visian eyes, but found he had to. Caught and held, he heard Kesarh say, “You will see to it, sir, that not only the ceiling, but the Eastern Cupola too, fall into the temple before the first month of the siege snow is ended.”

  The mason almost fainted. He had realized something was coming. Not this.

  “But, my lord—”

  “The occasion,” Kesarh went on smoothly, “will be some religious observance, when the whole court is present. And the King, and the King’s brothers, naturally.”

  The mason sank to his knees. His legs had given way, his bowels and bladder almost. To be informed of all this would mean he would be watched hereafter, under sentence of swift death by Kesarh’s men if he revealed or attempted to reveal any of it. Nothing could have been more explicit. The eastern end of the temple was the King’s place, directly before the figure of the goddess. If the Cupola fell, it would crush anything and everything beneath to powder—and pulp.

  “I see you’re pondering my ingenuous transparency, and what it must entail.”

  “But you’ll kill me anyway,” gasped the mason. “Even if I could do it, how could I expect to live?”

  “The baker who poisons his dough soon has no customers. Let me amaze you: I deal honestly where I’m able. Those who serve me are recompensed. Only those who displease or inconvenience me get their wage in pain. Your choice is simple. Agree and benefit. Refuse, and have your sins revealed to all and sundry. Thereby you’ll lose your position, and perhaps end up in the harbor, if I feel particularly insecure.”

  The mason kneeled on the floor. He began to sob. Kesarh watched him.

  “How could it be done—timed to fall so exactly—”

  “You’ll have some help with that. Tomorrow someone will come to your house to discuss the details. There can be no mistakes. Now get out. Your tears and urine about to spill on the floor won’t enhance it.”

  When the man was gone—there were several useful by-ways out of the new rooms—Kesarh walked through into the bedchamber.

  The girl he had brought from Xai was staring at one of the gilded books left lying open. Of course, she could not read.

  She looked up at his step, adoring him. She was not unattractive, wholesome, and had improved on the nourishing diet he had seen to it she now received. She was also a half-wit. The combination suited him. At this time he needed no one about him, even a slut in his bed, that he could not rely on.

  He thought of Val Nardia. She would have the sense to do as he had written, feign some illness, not allow herself to be pried from the sanctuary.

  Whenever he thought of her now, he felt a curious nothingness, as if some wounded nerve were deadened. He had drunk fire with her at Ankabek. It had exemplified all Zastis, that one night. And yet now, whenever she came to mind, only this lack of feeling came with her. Why? Was he sated there, as with all the others? No, it was not that.

  He abandoned the reverie, and moved toward his safe little wine girl. There would be time, before the etiquette of dinner—

  There was not time.

  The spears clashed on the marble outside and there came rapping against the doors.

  Suthamun had summoned him.

  Kesarh had no more apprehension than at any other hour. He lived in a constant state of attentive self-guard, a sensitivity to peril, as an animal did. He found this neither pleasant nor unpleasant. He was used to it. It was, to him, synonymous with the nature of living. Other men who did not grasp this truth were sluggards, or imbeciles.

  The kernel of Suthamun’s blond court was gathered in one of the frescoed side chambers off the banquet hall.

  It was the general scene, servitors padding about, hangers-on conniving or preening or sulking. By the fountain two of the council were discussing something as frivolous as Iolian chariot races. Kesarh nodded to them, and they bowed. The King stood with his brother Uhl and the scarred half-brother who was also a favorite. There was something unique. Kesarh took heed of it instantly. The usual loud music the Shansarian court so much enjoyed was absent.

  Abruptly, Suthamun shouted clear across the room. “Kesarh! Here to me.” The tone was well-meaning, as it had been since the recall from Xai. Those words of going, Visian dog, might never have been uttered. Yet there was another element now. A modulated depth, not unlike the timbre a priest assumed in some holy declaration.

  Kesarh began to walk forward. He looked unaltered, but his wariness had now increased.

  He was thirty paces away when Suthamun called out again in the peculiar tone.

  “Kesarh, I received ill news today. Ill news.”

  It flashed through Kesarh’s brain that his own messenger and the secret rider of the King had passed each other on the road; that Val Nardia had already denied the invitation back to court and here the denial was, about to be thrust at him, an accusation dressed as a regret, maybe a request that he persuade her otherwise.

  Suthamun now came toward him in turn. His face was puckering, swollen with consternation. The crowd about the room was noiseless, all eyes and ears. “Ill news,” Suthamun repeated, yet again.

  Kesarh stopped and waited.

  “I’m grieved to learn it, Sire.”

  “Alas. Your grief, your grief for sure. Word came to us not two hours ago, from Ankabek. Your sister—” the voice rang, hesitated.

  Kesarh went on waiting.

  “Your sister, the Princess Val Nardia, is dead.”

  Those closest to Kesarh saw his color go, like light blown out in a lamp. That was all. He said nothing, and then the King reached him, took his hand, in commiseration.

  The murmur went round, and round again, and ended.

  The King said loudly, “It offends me to add to your burden, but there it is. Val Nardia hanged herself. She was with child— She slew both herself and it. The goddess alone knows what possessed her.”

  They had been speaking in Shansarian, of course.

  It seemed to Kesarh as if he had never learned that tongue, and now sentences were delivered to him without meaning. Yet the room had faded to smoke, the floor disintegrated, gone. This then was why, the nothingness, the death of the nerve, the nightmare at Xai—

  As if he had no control of his mind, a chain of creatures stole across it. A little child, laughing, a young girl singing, blushing, combing her hair, a young woman with her mouth yearning toward his, her arms locked about him.

  It should be possible to leave this place. But it was not possible. The deceptive smoke was treacherously full of people. An enemy gripped his hand, exalting. Now one must show decorous, suitable anguish. Nothing more.

  She had hanged herself. Val Nardia. And a child, their—his child—

  Probably his hands were cold, cold as the hands of certain men before they must kill another. Suthamun would feel the coldness in the hand he had taken. But the hand was also still. It did not tremble.

  Kesarh returned the pressure of the King’s palm.

  “My lord,” he said. His voice was eloquent, subdued, as ever excellently pitched. He had not, after all, forgotten the Shansarian language. “You show me too much care of me, taking it on yourself to bring me these tidings. I don’t deserve your kindness. For my sister, I knew nothing of a child, nor do I know why she should do this to herself. The goddess has her now. Val Nardia
is with Her, in Her all-cognizant forgiving arms. My sorrow will last my lifetime. I can scarcely express, my lord, how your solace, extended toward me at such a moment, moves me.”

  They whispered all about him in the smoke. He could have smiled. Suthamun let him go. Kesarh knew his eyes had not left the eyes of the King. Kesarh knew that his eyes shouted louder than the King’s histrionics. Let Suthamun read what he liked there. Soon it could no longer matter.

  She passed like music through the air, her pale gown reflecting in a polished floor, her blood-red hair.

  She passed with flowers, ten years old, her little breasts already blooming through her dress, a doll trailing from her hand. “Kesarh, where are you? I couldn’t find you.”

  Val Nardia.

  He drank wine with them, and went to eat with them. He ate. He discussed other topics, rationally. They gave him margins for his seemly grave distress. They condoled, they praised her beauty, and he thanked them with great courtesy.

  He wanted to tear them apart, scraps of skin, bits of bone.

  It would be seemly also to beg the King’s leave to retire early, but not too early. She was a woman, not even his wife or mother, less than a comrade, father, brother, son—Though perhaps he had lost a son, too, did they but know it.

  At exactly the correct time, he begged leave, got it, and left.

  • • •

  In the second black hour of morning, Rem came to the doors of the new apartments. He showed the soldiers, two of the Sevens, Kesarh’s authorization, and got himself let in. Rem had gone too long in a saddle and too long without sleep. He had become sure he was also too late, yet the impetus of the attempt not to be, failed to let up until he knew.

  Arriving in the first chamber, he found out. Lamps still burned on their stand, describing the shards of a smashed wine jar. Against the wall a girl huddled, the Xaian girl, Berinda, her cow-calf eyes all unquestioning misery. She said nothing. Rem moved to the inner door and knocked. There was no sound. Rem opened the door and walked through, and presently into the bedchamber.

  There were no lights here, only the moon coming in through the window. Against that, the straight male outline of Kesarh was immediately to be seen.

  “It’s Rem, my lord.”

  “I know it’s Rem. You wouldn’t have got in past the guard if you were anyone else. They don’t fall asleep. None of you do, after ten lashes.”

  The voice was the same, constant. “My lord, I tried to reach you before the King—”

  “I’m sure you did.” There was a pause. Kesarh said, “Where did they bury her?”

  Rem could be sure of nothing. He was too tired to be able to assess. It had to be told.

  “My lord, did anyone mention there was a pregnancy?”

  “Yes. They mentioned that.”

  “The priests there, they think they can bring it to term.”

  Kesarh was silent, immobile.

  “Somehow,” said Rem, “they’ve preserved the body. They claim they can preserve her till the baby’s grown, then birth it. It’s some kind of drug-witchery. Probably lies. It looked real enough, as if it might happen as the woman said.”

  “All right,” Kesarh replied, as if everything that had just been related were feasible. But then, “I’ll go there. He’ll expect me to, be pleased, think I’m no holiday in grief, idle—I’ll see to it. You did what you could. Get out now.”

  “My lord. Did you understand—”

  “No. It’s gibberish like everything else. Get out.”

  “My lord—”

  “By the nonexistent stinking pits of Aarl get out. Go straddle your whore-boy or eviscerate your shrew of a mother. Anything. Away from me.” Kesarh had hardly lifted his voice, but he had turned. There was a piece of the smashed jar in his hand and he was working his fingers around and around it, fluid showing dark, wine or blood. The moon gave just enough illumination. He was crying. Not couthly, detached as his stance and his diction had been, but messily and completely as a child.

  Rem backed a step, recollected, and turned round to walk out of the door.

  As he shut it, he heard Kesarh briefly laugh, despising him.

  • • •

  In the end, no one investigated Ankabek. The King, it seemed, wished to keep Kesarh near him, to comfort and sustain the Prince. Suthamun gave no sign if Kesarh’s resilience annoyed him. The King had learned the game, or thought he had, and played it now with all the interest of an intriguing hobby.

  Kesarh did not speak of Val Nardia in public, in private did not ask again for her burial place, or query the tale of Lowland witchcraft, the hypothesis of a child growing in the stasis of a live-dead womb. The King’s own messenger had been given some notion of a modest stone marking her ashes, near the temple precinct. To the worshippers of the goddess suicide was neither a sinful nor an honorable recourse. No stigma had added itself. For a minor female aristocrat sufficient had been done.

  Kesarh appeared to accept both the King’s patronage and the blank wall of death. He was thought, by many not directly initiate, to be the current royal favorite. His displayed but disciplined bereavement was admired.

  Several days after the headlong ride back from Ankabek, walking through the lower city, Rem met Doriyos, guarded by the elderly tortoise from the House of Three Cries. Doriyos came up to him and stood slim and well-mannered before him, and said, “I never see you anymore.”

  Rem smiled, mostly at Doriyos’ beauty, which shone like a lamp in the sallow day.

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Sorry for me, or for yourself?”

  Rem smiled.

  Doriyos said simply, “You’re in love with him, then.”

  Rem stopped smiling.

  Doriyos said, “I mean, with your lord. Your Prince.”

  “Wake up,” said Rem. “Stop talking like some coy girl. That was what I had you to avoid.”

  Doriyos cast down his eyes. “And you learn, too, the speech of the beloved.”

  Rem walked on and left him standing there, his light slowly dimming, like the last summer sky.

  • • •

  The skies turned to slate and bore great winds. Then to grayness and to stillness. The skies became low ceilings of gentle ivory from which there parasoled the pitiless fore-taste of the snow.

  • • •

  Raldnor Am Ioli propped with practiced ease a column of the covered walk, inwardly admiring himself, in his furs, the bright pallor of his hair, against the backdrop of a snowy garden.

  When the first flecks drifted into Istris, he had found himself once more at the outer fringes of high society. With the first thaw, on the fringes of the court itself. Now the second snow, the three-month-siege snow, was down, the city Lowland-white, and ice creaking in the harbor. And Raldnor had strolled through the royal gardens in chat with a significant official. Pausing here among the columns, he had already seen the Warden of the council slowly patrolling on his own constitutional. When the man came level, they would exchange a few polite words.

  Raldnor was pleased with himself. He had aided Kesarh, taken indeed a mighty risk for him, but it had turned out well advised. Kesarh had that mark on him, that devastating escutcheon of natural advantage. His ruthlessness, his magnetic personal power, exercised at will, effortlessly, were sure symptoms of greatness.

  King-Maker. That was a title for Raldnor to toy with.

  He had added his own revenues to help buy the council. They were all amenable now, predisposed. Kesarh’s own gold, so marvelous to those who had reckoned him in poverty, had sprung it seemed from a careful use of reliable bankers, and trade ventures that had brought in consistent though concealed profits. The business had been initiated by Kesarh at the age of thirteen. That was impressive enough. Impressive too he had, even as a boy, not squandered anything, lived as if poor in truth, letting the monies grow, n
ever showing he had wealth until it would be opportune.

  The Warden was nearly level now. A half-blood Vardish Vis, as Raldnor himself, but dark in looks: Suthamun’s sop to the people.

  “Good day, lord Warden.”

  “Good morning. A cold one.”

  “All we’ll get now, my lord, until the spring.”

  The Warden had paused, his clerk at his back, his guard farther off. Others patrolling the walk would note whom the Warden of Istris stopped beside.

  “I must thank you for the wine, Raldnor. A very welcome vintage in this weather.” Raldnor bowed. The two unmentioned jars in which the wine had gone were banded with precious metals and gems. “And tomorrow we give thanks for a new heir,” said the Warden. “The blessing of Ashkar, to replace lamentation for the loss of a son so quickly with hymns of joy at the birth of another.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  They stood solemnly, considering the blessing of Ashkar.

  The boy-child had been born on the first day of the siege snow, to one of Suthamun’s lofty Shansarian wives. In antique Dortharian belief, that would be the soul of Jornil returning. Tomorrow, the whole court must roll their chariots through the whiteness to the Ashara Temple, where the repairs upon the roof had been just now suspended until spring. Skeletons of scaffolding reared from the heights, like an extraordinary forest. Levers and cantilevers held all supported and secure.

  “I shall drink a cup of your good wine before setting out,” said the Warden. “The temple, I think, won’t be warm.”

  He passed on, leaving Raldnor Am Ioli satisfied. Raldnor himself would not be at the temple ceremony. There was no particular reason for this absence. For the King-Maker had, in this respect, been told nothing at all.

  • • •

  The wind was blowing in across the bay, and smoking snow flared along the streets. The royal household struggled through it. Shansarian horses trapped in gold slid on carpets of ice.

  Inside, the temple was unwarm, as predicted, its lamps tilting to the wind. But Ashara, balanced on her burnished fish-tail at the temple’s eastern end, and clothed only in carven hair, did not feel the cold.