A woman in black rags climbed heavily to the stage. One of the actors clapped her hand to her mouth; she seemed to be suppressing a scream. Another woman in black appeared on the stage, and another.
Someone finally did scream; Rakera felt almost grateful for it. Here at last was something he could understand. “What are these women?” Rakera asked the traitor. “Surely they’re not Virtues?”
Talenor had gone very pale. “Maegrim,” he said.
“What?”
“The Maegrim. Someone’s fortune is about to change.”
The women began to dance, turning slowly so that Rakera saw their hoods of badger skin. These are the fortunetellers, then, Rakera thought. The ones who can change a life with a glance. He had almost thought they were no more than stories.
The women danced faster. There were six of them, and then seven. One took out a flat bundle of conjuring sticks and sank to the stage; a stick fell from her hand to the floor. “Summer!” the woman said.
“What does that mean?” Rakera asked.
“A summer cast in a summer month,” Talenor said. He seemed pleased about something. “Good fortune.”
“Summer!” the woman called again.
“Good fortune?” Rakera said. He laughed. “It’s still winter—can’t you tell? Callabrion hasn’t ascended this year.”
“Summer!” the woman called out one final time, and then gathered up the conjuring sticks and left the stage.
“Stop them!” Rakera said. He put his hand to his sword and half-stood. Men ran up to the stage. Rakera blinked in confusion. The women had disappeared.
He turned back to Talenor. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know, my lord. They—”
Rakera motioned to his men, who caught the traitor in a ring of swords.
“They come and go as they please,” Talenor said. “They are—they are witches, sacred to Sbona—”
“Quiet,” Rakera said. He had grown weary of the games of Etrara; he needed time to think. Finally he said, “Someone’s fortune is about to change, is that what you told me?”
Talenor nodded.
“In Shai there are only two people whose fortunes change, the king of summer and the king of winter,” Rakera said. “We kill the kings at the end of their reigns, to make the crops fertile and to show what happens to people who aspire to more than their place on the ladder permits. Everyone else does exactly what his father did and what his grandfather did before that.”
Talenor said nothing.
“The god-king still rules in Shai,” Rakera said. “It must be someone from Etrara whose fortune is about to change. And the only man of Etrara I see in this room is you, traitor.” He scowled. “Tell me why I should not have you killed.”
“I—I can be useful to you, my lord,” Talenor said.
“You weary me, traitor. I don’t want your help. Haven’t you heard the proverb? ‘A man who is false to one king will prove false to another.’
“It’s an honor to be killed by one of our guards,” Rakera went on. “In Shai we put out the eyes of traitors before we kill them, so that they will not see the honor being done to them. As for barbarians—”
Talenor moaned. Rakera reached out and gently removed the duke’s spectacles. Talenor shut his eyes. “You’ve already proven you have no honor,” Rakera said. He motioned to one of his men. “Kill him. And find me the Duchess Mariel.”
The man moved forward and stabbed Talenor to the heart.
For a week the Shai left Duchess Mariel alone. They hammered their lamps of twisted iron into the ceilings of the palace, splintering the paintings in the royal suite of the goddess Sbona creating the world. They laid their barbaric rugs of gold and blue or black and red over the patterned marble tiles. They burned herbs in the fireplaces that made Mariel’s eyes sting and her head ache, and whenever two or more of them met in the hallways they beat their swords together, making the corridors ring hollowly.
A guard was posted at the door of the royal apartments, but Mariel seemed to be free to walk through her rooms and those of her brothers and sister. But the rooms were deserted; she met no one on her wanderings, not even Talenor.
She wondered what had happened to Talenor; he had told her of his plans to gain favor with the Shai. Even he had proved to have designs on the throne, she thought. He had fooled everyone for so long, pretending to be a scholar, interested only in his books. She had been the only one who hadn’t been taken in.
One day she came upon a man sitting in a pool of shadow. At first she took him for another ghost, but then she recognized Sbarra’s poet. “Sorth,” she said.
“My lady,” Sorth said, standing quickly. “Please—I beg you—take me with you when you go.”
So Duchess Sbarra had gone with Callia when she fled, Mariel thought. She could imagine the arguments between Sbarra and her husband, the accusations each had made; Sbarra, unlike Talenor, would not find it so easy to turn traitor.
“I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere,” Mariel said dryly. “I seem to be a prisoner here too. Why didn’t you leave with the duchess?”
“There was no room for me. She took her personal servants and no one else. And now I—I’m trapped here.” He looked into the shadows as if he saw enemies lurking there. Perhaps, Mariel thought, he had ghosts of his own.
“Why do you say that? The Shai have left us alone so far. There’s no danger here.”
“There’s a danger to me. Don’t you understand? A masterless poet is a target of scorn for every other poet—their satiric verses could kill me.”
She could see that he believed it; he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed, as if he had not slept since Duchess Sbarra had gone. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“I beg you—”
“I’ll take you into my service. Would that do?”
“Yes,” he said immediately, gratefully. “Yes—I thank you, my lady. I’ll write a poem praising your generosity—future generations will remember your goodness. But why didn’t you leave with the royal family?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He looked doubtful, as if he thought her about to do some heroic deed he could set down in verse. But she had told him the truth; although Callia had pleaded with her to go with them she had made up her mind to stay. Leaving the palace would do her no good at all; she could not escape her guilt.
She had thought it would be easy to kill Gobro. It had been she who had raised the idea of poison, who had asked Narrion to visit the apothecary, she and Callia who had given him the poisoned cup. She had not reckoned with his ghost.
A few days later she finished her sleeping potion, but she was not allowed to send a servant to the apothecary’s for more. She stopped her wanderings and lay in her rooms with her eyes closed, trying to dispel her headache. In the long hours alone she began to think of her brothers and sister, Tariel’s children.
Tariel had been a scrupulously honest tyrant, treating each of his children and their mothers with equal fairness. She remembered walking in some procession or other; she and Talenor, as the oldest, had each held a corner of his train, and Callia and Arion and Gobro, tiny children then, had walked behind them.
Once, though, Callia’s mother had displeased Tariel for a reason Mariel could not remember, and Tariel had banished his former mistress to the kitchen and ordered her to do scullery work. The children of the palace servants had understood immediately that Callia could now be taunted without reprisal; they had called her “God’s child”—the peasant term for someone who was illegitimate or whose father was not known—and worse names than that. Mariel did not think that Callia had ever forgotten it; from that day forward she would never set foot in a kitchen, not even to give orders to a servant. Perhaps that explained her sister’s obsessive need for pageants and finery. Perhaps Callia still thought of herself as somehow less noble than the rest of them.
Poor Gobro was dead now, and Arion too: she had heard about his death when the remnants of the defe
ated army had come home. Some of the soldiers had whispered that Arion had betrayed them, and Mariel had wondered if that could be true. With Arion dead there were only the three of them left.
And Val, of course, though Val didn’t seem to know that he might be the legitimate heir. Even after coming back from Tobol An he had gone on being Val, courteous and pleasant and a little distant. When Callia had asked her what she thought, Mariel had advised her sister to do nothing.
But Callia had apparently not taken Mariel’s advice; Mariel had heard that Val had been sent to where the fighting was the thickest. And Val was another who hadn’t come back; perhaps he was dead too, another death on their hands, though she had heard rumors that he had been captured. But who remained to ransom him?
The next day a delegation of the Shai came to her room. She was still lying on her bed, her head having gotten no better after a night’s sleep. “Where is Queen Callia?” Rakera said.
“Callia?” Mariel said. She knew quite well where her sister was; the queen and some of her courtiers had fled to relatives in the country. “I have no idea. Surely you asked Talenor.”
“Of course. He said his sister refused to talk to him when she found out he intended to turn traitor. He didn’t put it that way, of course—no man thinks of himself as a traitor.” Rakera paused. “Talenor’s dead,” he said.
“Dead?” Mariel asked. Fear filled her; the pounding of her head grew worse. It was impossible to think. But she would not ask this man how her brother died; she would not give him the satisfaction.
“Where is Queen Callia?” Rakera asked again.
“My sister comes and goes as she pleases. She’s the queen—at least she was. She has no need to ask my leave for her actions.”
“Shall we use the ladder then?”
“The—the ladder?”
“Aye. Or did you think your position here would protect you?”
She felt stretched on the ladder already; her head had given her no peace all night. She did not think she could survive torture. “I have no position here,” she said.
“That’s true, quite true. The ladder, then. And if you still resist we’ll have you put to death.”
They would take her out of her cool dark room and force her into the dreadful light of the iron lamps. Then they would bind her arms and legs to the rungs of the ladder. And if she didn’t die of the pain they would kill her; they had already proven their cruelty in killing Talenor.
“I don’t—” she said feebly.
“Come, come, Duchess Mariel. We’ve already got your poet tied to the ladder—he’ll be a little taller when you see him next. It’s only a matter of days, of hours, really, before he tells us what we want to know. Why don’t you save his life, and your own, and tell us where she is?”
“She’s with her mother’s relatives,” Mariel said weakly, lying back against her pillows.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“And where is that?”
She told him. As the Shai left she heard one guard say to another, “A decadent people, as we thought. There’s no honor left in any of them.”
First Gobro and now Callia, she thought, closing her eyes: she marveled that betrayal seemed to grow easier with time. Would they truly kill the queen? They seemed to know all about killing royalty.
Something moved in her room and she opened her eyes cautiously. Gobro stood in front of her, the weak light from the window shining through him. A jewel at his fingers glittered. “Do you know where Riel is?” he asked.
“Go away,” she whispered. “Go away—you’re dead, go away.”
Val heard the key in the lock and his guard came in, bringing him breakfast. Since their conversation about ambition the guard had spent a few minutes of every day talking to him, and Val had begun to look forward to his visits. The man had none of the courtly graces of Duchess Sbarra and her friends, but Val had quickly learned to overlook his shortcomings in exchange for his company, however brief.
“The news from Etrara is good,” the guard said now, putting down Val’s tray. “The city has fallen without resisting.”
“No,” Val said, profoundly shocked. “No one fought at all?”
“No one.” The guard sat at the table opposite Val. He grinned. “Some of them even turned traitor, making our task that much easier.”
“What of Queen Callia? And Talenor, and Mariel?”
“I don’t know. My commanders don’t tell me such things. Why should they, after all?”
“Do you know—what will happen to me?”
“Ah, that I do know. There’s no one left to ransom you—you’ll be sent as a slave to Shai. They’ll put you to work in the silver mines, perhaps, or the vineyards.”
A slave. From king of Etrara to slave. Despair overcame him; he put his head in his hands, saying nothing.
No—he would not sit quietly, waiting to be shackled and bound. He looked up. “It seems that you were right about ambition after all,” he said carefully. He stood and went to the window, looked out at the other cells.
“That’s true,” the guard said. “The gods dislike a man who tries to rise on the ladder.”
“Aye. And now the gods have struck me down, as easily as I might cut the thread of that spider there.”
The guard turned to see where he pointed. One step brought Val to his side. He drew the other man’s sword and moved away quickly.
“Open the door,” Val said. The sword was unfamiliar, heavy, but it did not waver as he pointed it toward the guard.
The guard went to the door. “The city you knew is gone,” he said. “Where will you go?”
“That’s my business. Open the door.”
The guard put his hand on the ring of keys at his belt. Suddenly, so quickly Val did not see him move, the other man drew his dagger. He moved toward Val, the dagger poised.
Val picked up a chair, threw it at the other man. The guard went down, hitting his head against the wall as he fell. Val wrenched the dagger from his hand and took his keys. The guard stirred a little, moaning, but he did not wake.
Val unlocked the cell, fumbling with the keys and the dagger in the same hand, and hurried outside. “Andosto!” he called. “Andosto, it’s Val! Where are you?”
Someone answered from another of the cells. Val ran toward the sound and turned one of the keys in the lock. Nothing happened. He tried again, and the door opened.
Andosto came to the door. Val threw him the sword. “Hurry!” he said. “Etrara’s fallen. We have to get away, get free.”
Two more of the Shai came toward them, moving quickly. Andosto could deal with them, Val thought; he ran to open the other doors.
Men left their rooms, blinking in the unfamiliar light. “Go help Andosto!” Val said, not staying to see if they understood. One cell opened to Anthiel, the untutored poet-mage who had saved them in the mountains. Val unlocked the last cell and looked around him.
More of the Shai had come up; Andosto was holding off two of them, and a third lay dead at his feet. One of the Shai saw Val and broke off to run toward him. Andosto bent, took the dead man’s sword, and threw it to Val. Val caught it by the hilt, a trick his fencing teacher had taught him.
As the Shai came closer Val saw that it was his guard, the man who had spoken so eloquently about ambition. He had roused himself, then, and had found another sword.
Once again the lessons of his fencing master came back to him, and he parried the other man’s strokes until he found an opening. His opponent, caught off guard by his sudden movement, took two steps backward and stumbled against a rise on the ground. Val thrust his blade forward and the man fell.
Val looked around him. One of the men Andosto fought with was down, and the other seemed to be tiring. Val hurried toward them.
“How—” Andosto asked.
“Not now,” Val said. “We have to get away before they realize we’ve gone.”
The second Shai guard turned and ran as Val came up to Andosto.
The other men of Etrara joined them. “Hurry!” Val said, leading the men away from the cells.
As they went Val heard Anthiel speak a brief spell of illusion, cloaking them from the Shai, and a spell of protection against whatever evil magic remained. After a short time they topped a rise and Val could see the plain stretch out before them, and the Teeth of Tura in the distance.
They came down to the plain. The grasses, sharp as swords, bent in the cold wind. For the first time since his escape Val felt his wounds, the dull aches in his rib and thigh.
He looked over his shoulder, but no one seemed to be following them. “How did you escape?” Andosto asked.
“I took my guard’s sword,” Val said.
“And—Etrara’s fallen, you say?”
“So my guard said, and I see no reason to doubt him. He said they would not ransom us, that we would be put to work as slaves.”
They walked for a time without speaking, passing trampled, muddy earth. He felt very weary. No one in Etrara had thought they would lose; all their talk had been of conquest, of the riches they would find in Shai.
“What will you do now?” he asked Andosto.
“I’ll go back to Etrara. Maybe I can help—help somehow—”
For the first time Andosto sounded uncertain. Val saw the other man’s future very clearly: he would fight on, waging a hopeless battle against the Shai until he was overcome and killed. He could not exist quietly in a conquered country; it was the nature of heroes to be heroic.
“What about you?” Andosto asked. “Where will you go?”
Val was silent a moment. Until now, he saw, he had been content to follow where others led. He had gone into exile because Narrion had told him to, and had fought in Callia’s war because it had been expected of him. But what did he want for himself? Did he want to be king? And could he claim the throne if the Shai ruled Etrara?
No—there were traitors in Etrara, his guard had said, and one or another of them might have given his secret to the Shai. It would be dangerous to return.
Suddenly he thought of Tobol An. He felt a profound desire to see it again, to sit by the hearth drinking tea, to talk with Taja and Pebr about the great world outside. The war had probably left the tiny village untouched; its harbor was certainly too small to interest the Shai. He could stay there until he decided what to do.
Summer King, Winter Fool Page 14
