Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “If we do not show mercy, we shall pay for that.”

  Lyris picked up the javelin and tapped its butt end against the floor. “The law was made to shield us when our very existence was threatened. Now that we have won peace and the respect of our neighbors, we grow soft and shall be undone. One breach, and then another, and Sabazel shall be lost.”

  “Spoken with the zeal of the convert,” said Ilanit with a wry smile. “To think you were catechized with the litany of Harus when you were a girl in Sardis.”

  “I forswore the falcon god after what his high priest Adrastes did to me. Raped and possessed by Gerlac’s demon spirit . . .” Lyris shivered, glancing quickly from side to side, as if even the name chilled her. The shadows stirred. “I was only sixteen, as you were, and Danica showed me mercy even when the demon forced me to attempt her life.”

  “Mercy,” stated Ilanit, “to those who come here wounded.”

  “But I am a woman!”

  Ilanit’s brows shot up. “I am queen and you my weapons master!”

  The javelin cracked against the floor, and Lyris looked away, teeth tight between her curled lips.

  Ilanit slumped again. “Forgive me, my friend, my pair. This night drags my thoughts into some dark pit. I would not make light of your travail. To this day you will accept the touch of only one man. But your taste is impeccable, I must admit.” She cast a tentative look sideways at Lyris, offering peace.

  Lyris let the javelin fall, flinging her anger after it. “I am pleased to receive Patros’s offering, when he comes to me scented with your body.” She chuckled. “You turn me cleverly from my purpose, Ilanit, reminding me of happier times.”

  “I am not at all clever. If I were, I could remedy this trouble that has come upon us. Do you not think I fear our lawbreaking? This time I shall not gain a daughter. This time we shall draw the wrath of a new enemy upon our heads, and whether Ashtar will protect us, I know not. Her voice is silent, leaving me to choose.”

  “But you will not choose to cast out Bellasteros and his son?”

  “How can it be right to hate all men because some have hated us?” Ilanit glanced back at the brazier and the pitiful embers within. “No. Bellasteros might soon be leaving us for another realm; Andrion will find his own destiny. The Khazyari will not wait while we split hairs over our loyalties. We are bound to the Empire now.”

  “Indeed.” Lyris growled. “Safe, but no longer free.” She set her hand upon Ilanit’s shoulder, drawing her gaze. They eyed each other, Lyris’s tensile strength testing the strength of Ilanit’s conviction. At last the weapons master bowed slightly. “Of course I shall do your bidding, my queen; I shall even understand why you bid it. But I cannot like it.”

  “Neither can I, Lyris, neither can I.”

  The flames in the brazier subsided to ash. A cold, clean wind blew the smoke away. The doves fell silent. Ilanit and Lyris leaned together, talking quietly in the half phrases of long acquaintance, and the night spun itself out.

  * * * * *

  “Andrion!”

  He sensed the damp coolness of a summer’s morning. Birds sang riotously. No doubt Toth would have warm bread and cheese; his stomach felt as empty as an abandoned well.

  “Andrion!”

  No, it was a woman’s voice. This was Sabazel. What was her name, that warrior he had bedded last year? Or who had bedded him, rather, to his mingled chagrin and delight.

  “Andrion!” Fingertips stroked his cheek. “My son, awake to me.”

  His eyes opened. Danica’s face hovered over him. His mother’s face, drained of light and peace, cut by anguished sleeplessness into the furrows of age. But her eyes were calm and steady, doggedly guarding the depths of her soul. “Mother, what—”

  Searing memory flooded him. Gods, he chided himself, can I think of nothing more than food or sex? “Mother, forgive me, I slept.” He scrambled up and staggered, his muscles knotting themselves. His father’s diadem lay on his pillow, beside the hollow where his head had rested; the sword Solifrax lay mute at his right hand. No, I cannot, he thought. I am not strong enough!

  “You needed to sleep. Now your strength has returned.”

  Had it? Andrion felt as wobbly as a newborn colt. He shook himself, organizing his limbs, and tried to smile at his mother. He was, strangely, taller than she. Had he grown, or had she stooped?

  “Your father lives,” Danica said. “He is weak and tired, but he begins to break free of the oblivion of the poppy. We . . .” Abruptly she turned and braced herself on the edge of the table.

  No, Andrion thought, you are strength itself, Danica the warrior queen, the shield borne beside the sword. He gazed past her to the bed. The hangings swayed gently in the breeze. Through them Bellasteros’s face was as pale as some ancient fresco faded by storm and time.

  Andrion inhaled deeply, calming himself. He gave Danica his arm and together they walked to the bed as if the few steps were a long ceremonial passage. Something was wrong, he thought, something terribly awry. He reached out and jerked the hangings away.

  Where Bellasteros’s right arm had been there was now only a stump. Carefully bandaged, well cleaned, but a stump. The hand that had lifted Solifrax from the grasp of the gods and with it won an empire, that hand was gone.

  A rushing filled Andrion’s ears and brought the blood surging to his face. No, the emperor could not be a frail mortal. He must be strong and whole and sturdy to hold the hand of his son, guiding him, teaching him, laughing with him . . .

  Andrion steadied himself. And what then should Danica have done? Let the wound rot and the fever drain Bellasteros inexorably of life? A shameful death for the conqueror. Better to live, and grow strong again, and win back his realm.

  “Father,” Andrion said. His teeth were clenched so tightly his jaw ached.

  Bellasteros’s eyes opened. Taupe eyes, drained of madness, containing only a resigned sorrow. “Andrion?” a voice whispered. “Andrion, you are my heir, take the diadem.” His eyes rolled upward, clouded, closed again. His face was spent almost to the skull.

  No! Andrion realized he was trembling. “But this is Sabazel,” he protested.

  “Yes,” said Danica. “What did you expect, my son?”

  “Healing . . . healing and direction.” She did not answer. He turned, gazed full into her face. Her great green eyes, malachite mirrors, reflected the image of his own face. “Healing,” he persisted.

  “Andrion,” Danica sighed, “I once carried you and the power of the goddess as well, but now I carry neither. You are my strength, and his, and the gods’ . . .” Her voice shattered, and she struggled not to weep. Whether at Bellasteros’s agony or at the passing of her own strength, Andrion could not tell. He did not want to know; he had never seen her cry.

  He carefully set her upon the edge of the bed and kissed her brow. He tenderly drew the coverlet to Bellasteros’s gray-bearded chin and tucked it in. And he ran, bursting out of the small house, through the gleaming green and gold of the garden, up the steps to the hollow in the mountainside. “Gods! Gods!” he cried, but none answered.

  Dana sat by the bronze basin. “I waited for you,” she said. “I knew you would come.”

  He fell to his knees before her and bent his face onto her breast. Before his eyes the surface of the water stirred, sunlight glinting from its depths. Understanding rent his mind like the beak of a raven feeding upon the dead.

  What did you expect? he asked himself brutally. What did you expect? An ending like a story told to a princeling tucked away safe in his palace, his patrimony secure? Or a beginning? He was empty, his youth cut away, cauterized and bound; he was full to bursting with the unutterable agony of its amputation. Sobs of grief wracked his body, inescapable.

  Dana held him, her cheek against his hair. Her last tears, the dregs of her own grief, fell upon his head. The water in the basin swirled and splashed over the rim. He could not tell which drops were her tears and which the anointing touch of the goddess.


  Chapter Six

  The feathered standard of the odlok fluttered lazily in a slow evening breeze. Tembujin looked up at it, as if hearing something strange in the wind. But the constant and varied voices of men and beasts, punctuated by the cries of ravens, were louder than the murmur of the breeze here on the great central plain of the Empire.

  He shrugged and turned back to the bow laid on his crossed legs. It was made of horn and sinew on a wooden frame; now, unstrung, it was almost circular in shape. He dipped his brush into the pot of lacquer at his side and applied yet another shining layer.

  Sita, kneeling behind him, was dressed in the thick felt bodice and short skirts of a Khazyari woman. Her face glistened with sweat.

  “Well?” asked Tembujin peremptorily. She passed an ivory comb through his long tail of hair, grimacing as if the sable strands would dirty her fingers. But they did not. The shimmering cloth of the shirt he wore was spotless.

  “All Khazyari wear silk shirts,” he informed her. “An arrow will not cut through one; it will still enter the body, true, but if the shirt is pulled carefully, the arrow can be brought out without tearing the flesh any further.”

  “You think of war,” Sita said between her teeth, “nothing but war.”

  “We are strong. We are destined to take tribute from soft city dwellers, and to rule the Empire.”

  “It is not your Empire,” Sita retorted. The comb jerked. “Bellasteros might have welcomed you, for the Empire has long needed people.’’

  Tembujin glanced back, one black eyebrow arching upward in challenge, before dipping his brush once again. Quietly, almost to himself, he said, “These lands are indeed empty, unlike the country around Iksandarun. Unlike the valley of the Mohan, where I was born. Our progress north is slowed for lack of supplies . . .” The pall of haunted Iksandarun rustled over the plain, and his voice died.

  The sun sank toward the horizon. A band of warriors trotted by, their extra horses following like dogs behind them, and the air turned gold with suspended dust. The nuryan made obeisance to Tembujin; he nodded graciously in return.

  The shadow of the feathered standard stretched out, longer and longer, toward the east. There a faint glimmer paled the deep blue of evening, presaging the rising of the almost-full moon. Sita eyed it with something like hunger in her expression, hunger tempered with caution. Several Khazyari women, Tembujin’s cast-off concubines, passed by and made pointed remarks in her direction; the massive form of Baakhun left his yurt, Raksula jangling with Sardian jewelry in his wake. Sita quickly dropped her gaze back to her task.

  “You are accustomed to being served, not serving—” Tembujin began, but Baakhun appeared beside him. “Ah, my father, my khan,” he said in Khazyari. “Greeting.”

  Baakhun vented an enormous smile, every stained tooth glinting. “My son, my finest handiwork indeed.”

  Raksula growled, deep in her throat. Her hair was braided in a multitude of tiny plaits, each one supposedly a prayer to Khalingu; it had no doubt been the work of many hours for some hapless slave. The woman’s head seemed like a seething nest of serpents, her eyes hard chips of jet.

  Tembujin’s features set themselves in a caution not dissimilar to Sita’s. “Greeting, my father’s wife.” With a swift, smooth motion he strung the bow and snapped the string. It emitted a taut note of music.

  Raksula’s leather-covered toe stirred the carpet upon which Tembujin sat, a bright and intricate pattern of trees and birds. “A Mohendra rag. You are too good to sit upon the ground?”

  “My mother gave this to me. I keep it as a remembrance of my youth. I see many Khazyari now sitting upon imperial tapestries.”

  “Your mother,” said Raksula, not to be swayed, “was worthless, a princess with blood so weak she could not even withstand a winter journey to the steppes. She should have been sacrificed to Khalingu.”

  “And the worth of a prince?” asked Tembujin. He sealed the pot of lacquer and casually inspected his bow. Under the silk of his shirt his shoulders knotted. Sita released his hair and sat back, shrinking into herself, pretending no interest in this conversation in a strange language. The sun touched the rim of the world, washing the sky with a brilliant crimson glow.

  “A prince,” Raksula scowled, “is worth what his father the khan decrees he is worth.”

  Baakhun threw back his head with a howl of laughter, enjoying the game played by his wife and his son. “And this prince is worth everything to me. Such strength from such weak stock, is it not so?” His great hand closed on Raksula’s arm, pinching it.

  “Indeed,” she snarled. The word might have been acid, dripping upon Tembujin’s bowed head.

  His black eyes darted upward and thrust Raksula back a step. “A prince’s worth is measured in loyalty to his khan,” he stated. He rose to his feet and bowed to his father, insolently turning his back on Raksula.

  Baakhun howled again. “No one would be disloyal to me, least of all you, Tembujin.”

  Raksula’s lips tightened to a slit, the mouth of an irritable reptile drunk on its own venom. Her eyes sparked like tinder catching fire.

  An ovoid moon rose, tinting the rosy twilight with clear silver. Sita bowed slightly, as if to the moon itself; the wind lifted her hair and the light stroked the red gleam from it, leaving it a colorless fall of satin.

  Tembujin raised his face to the glowing near-ripe face of the moon, seemingly struck by some omen written upon it; even Baakhun and Raksula turned, and the camp for a moment fell silent. Then two squat figures waddled out of the shaman’s yurt; a cadaverous form strolled diffidently up to the gathered group, a servant in a brown cloak shambled by, carrying a pot of water.

  Everyone stirred as if released from a spell. Tembujin glared at Raksula, and she turned his glare with a gentle and affectionate smile. He recoiled, and his bronzed skin blanched.

  “Mighty khan,” Odo called. “The nuryan Obedei sends you this, found by his scouting party.”

  “And why,” muttered Tembujin, “should you be the one to take Obedei’s report?”

  Vlad thrust forward a silk-wrapped bundle; Baakhun took it, opened it, held up a black Khazyari arrowhead. “So?” he demanded.

  “This,” Odo answered, savoring every word, “was found in a rocky cleft a day’s ride from Iksandarun, lying amidst blood-stained dirt. In the direction of Sabazel.”

  “Sabazel,” repeated Raksula. “The scouts went on to its borders, then.”

  “Yes, indeed. The information that Hilkar gave us was actually helpful.” Odo made a mocking bow toward the thin figure of the traitor.

  Hilkar elbowed his way into the group, puffed like a pig’s bladder with self-importance. “As I told you of the pass at Azervinah and the road to Farsahn, and as I told you of Sardis itself. I have been there, you see, as an ambassador, and I have a kinswoman in the governor’s household—”

  Vlad’s shrill voice cut through Hilkar’s rambling. “Is it true that the Sabazians have women warriors? What sport, to kill one!”

  Raksula shot him an evil look, and he subsided.

  “The scouts made only a brief sally across the borders, and did not contact the inhabitants,” Odo murmured placatingly.

  Tembujin’s chin went up, alert, interested. “What of the arrowhead, Odo? Do you believe one of the emperor’s party was wounded?”

  “Yes. The emperor himself, Khalingu willing.”

  “Can you use the emperor’s cloak to discover that?” asked Baakhun.

  “The cloak that I brought to you,” Hilkar purred. He thrust himself eagerly forward.

  “Yes, yes, my khan,” said Odo.

  Baakhun waved Hilkar away as if the man were no more than an annoying flea. He laid one great arm across Tembujin’s shoulders. “Shall we organize a hunt, my son? Not for boar and lion and antelope in the midst of winter, but for an exiled king and his heir in the midst of summer.” He paused and wiped his brow. “By Khalingu’s teeth, is the summer always so hot here?”

  “The nurya
ns with their best warriors on the flanks.” nodded Tembujin, “and you commanding the center. We shall sweep the entire country of game, both animal and human, feeding ourselves and closing on Sabazel as we shall close on that legion now marching south on the Royal Road.” He cast a quick look at Sita’s bowed head. “Perhaps I should scout the area myself, Father.”

  “You know that I trust your judgment.” Baakhun’s eye followed Tembujin’s to Sita. “And your taste. If you ever tire of this one and her red hair . . .”

  Tembujin smiled thinly. “Not yet, Father. Not yet.”

  Sita’s clasped hands tightened convulsively, her knuckles glinting white. Raksula glanced at her in cool appraisal, and her eyes fogged.

  Baakhun chuckled and slapped the young prince on the back. Odo smiled, his eyes squashed into slits by his cheeks; Vlad pricked his fingers with the arrowhead and inspected the welling blood. Hilkar, oddly, was no longer grinning and bobbing obsequiously, but was peering at Sita’s shadowed features, as if something in her profile had struck his interest.

  “So,” said Baakhun. “Our prey Bellasteros turns at bay. We shall have him soon. And if I cannot sacrifice him to Khalingu, then I shall offer the prince Andrion instead. And the sword Solifrax shall be mine.”

  “Yes, great khan,” said Odo. “A pleasure to anticipate.”

  And Vlad chirped, “A pity that Bellasteros’s women chose their own deaths.”

  The words lay uneasy on the wind, stirred by an odor of roasting flesh. Baakhun lifted his head and sniffed the air like a hound. “Ah, the evening meal. Gazelle, perhaps. Raksula? Tembujin?” He started off. “Vlad?” he called over his shoulder.

  “Stop it, Vlad,” said Raksula, suddenly waking. She seized the arrowhead from the boy. “Odo needs that.”

  The boy shrugged, began to suck on his finger.

  Tembujin picked up his bow, flexed it, called, “I shall join you in a moment, Father.” And quietly, for Raksula’s ear, “What is Prince Vlad worth? As much as a pot of night soil?”