Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Baakhun raised his gray and ghastly face. “Do not shed his blood,” he choked. “He was once an odlok, he must die bloodlessly, by starvation.” And the khan turned away. Raksula licked her lips and chuckled.

  The footsteps of the warriors, Tembujin’s shambling tread, reverberated through the yurt and then were gone. A sudden breeze tautened the felt fabric, and it flapped explosively. Obedei, his hands balled at his sides, kept his gaze fixed on his boots. Sita’s fiery eyes fastened upon Raksula.

  Raksula started at that stare. With an evil smile she leaned against the broad, damp expanse of Baakhun’s chest. “Kill her,” she said. “She is Bellasteros’s daughter, conspiring with the traitor Tembujin, kill her.”

  Baakhun’s huge hand reached out, seized Sita, pawed perfunctorily at her breast. He inhaled to give the order. She seized the knotted muscle in his arms and looked up into his eyes, forcing his gaze to her face. “Great khan,” she said, in heavily accented but clear Khazyari, “I carry Tembujin’s child. All you have left of Tembujin is his child, of your blood and his mingled.”

  Baakhun’s empty eyes stirred, woke, focused on her. Raksula hissed, her hands darting out to rend Sita’s body. But Baakhun’s massive arms closed around her, protected her for a moment, then shoved her toward an astonished Obedei. “You, you will be governor of Iksandarun. Take her with you. And take that maggot Hilkar as well. Imperial maggots, take them away!” The khan crumpled to the platform like a huge cypress tree falling, slow and ponderous, shaking the ground. He reached for a skin of kviss and drank deeply. He turned his face, twisted like a hurt child’s, away from his people. Tears spilled down his cheeks. Raksula snorted in disgust.

  Sita collapsed against Obedei, trembling violently as her desperate strength drained from her. It was as if she had not even spoken, as if the words had come from outside herself and now hung in crystalline drops above the sudden vortex of sound that buffeted her. The yurt billowed, torches spinning out into pennons of flame, faces swirling into a demon’s dance.

  Toth was there, looking at her, nodding some kind of encouragement, perhaps; Andrion and Dana are still alive, there is a plan, a reason . . . He, too, was gone. And the golden necklace no longer seared her waist.

  The necklace had fallen through her dress. Sita gasped, pulled herself up, scrabbled about her clothing. But Obedei was dragging her through the crowd, away from the platform, silent and tight-lipped.

  Odo wiped Vlad’s face and thrust him forward. Raksula seized him and called, “The new odlok will have gifts for his loyal followers!” The yurt erupted with cries and shouts. She picked up Tembujin’s plaque and set it upon Vlad’s flabby body. With Odo she stepped behind him, smiling threats and promises at the entire assemblage. The screams of the people were deafening, edged with resentment and puzzlement, but were screams of acclamation nonetheless. Baakhun, huddled over his drinking skin, nodded weary acknowledgment. Vlad emitted a high-pitched giggle, strutted across the platform and smeared his boot through a tray of food.

  Raksula’s arm shot out, seized a fawning Hilkar, dragged him to her side. “Give me the necklace,” she commanded.

  He snickered and searched his sash, at first with self-congratulatory confidence then with hurried fear. His face froze in the snicker, loose-lipped and grotesque. “I . . . it is not there!”

  “Fool,” hissed Raksula. “Idiot, worm! See if you can redeem yourself by killing that bitch and her whelp before they reach Iksandarun!”

  Hilkar, bowing and scraping, stepped backward and fell off the edge of the platform. Odo, bloated with pride and venom, plucked at Raksula’s sleeve. “All is well, my lady. Tembujin is gone. And you have the amulet of the Eye.”

  Raksula sighed and reached into her bodice, pulling out the amulet Shurzad had given Hilkar. “Yes, yes, we are stronger than ever; and in time Khalingu will deliver that necklace into our hands.” Her thin lips split into a complacent smile.

  Baakhun drank, dazed, oblivious, forgotten.

  Obedei propelled Sita from the yurt and fought through the throng swirling outside. For a moment she was blinded by the darkness. Obedei thrust her toward the yurt that had been Tembujin’s. “Save what you can,” he told her.

  Her eyes cleared, the cool night wind fanned her face, the moonlight poured its innocent radiance upon her. “What have I done?” she whispered. “I have killed him, so I am less than he is; and yet he lied to me . . .”

  From the far edge of the camp horsemen moved toward the north; a figure staggered behind them, wrists tied to a leash-like rope. A plump form on a spavined nag was only a blot of darkness following. “Toth!” Sita gasped. “No, do not leave me!”

  She turned in breathless circles toward the great yurt of the khan, where Andrion’s necklace had disappeared; toward Obedei’s still, taut figure, which gazed toward the silvered mounds of the northern plain; toward Tembujin’s yurt, which was being gutted by a shoving, grasping group of women who cast guilty looks over their shoulders even as they seized what they could.

  “God’s beak!” Sita cried. She ran toward the women, kicking, shoving, striking out. They jeered her, pulling her hair. She seized the Mohendra carpet, staggered with it to a shadowed place several yurts away, and sank down upon it. She clasped her arms about herself, shivering, retching in desperate spasms of denial. “Gods, help me!” The wind lifted her hair, stirring it in slow circles about her face. Her anguish poured itself out and was gone.

  She laid her hands upon her belly. “So, little one, you saved me even as you bought your father’s death. I live, still I live, for what purpose I know not.” She raised her tear-streaked face toward the moon. “I shall try to be strong, I shall try.” The wind was as cool as if fresh from an ice field, cleansing her nostrils of the miasma of the great yurt.

  Sita folded the rug, hid it in the shadow, staggered up. The camp heaved like a disturbed termite hill, horses stamping, camels bellowing, human voices caught in revelry as feverish as if the revelers tried to forget to what they had acquiesced; shouts and cries shattered against the expressionless face of the moon.

  Sita crept unnoticed through the camp. She skirted the shadowed image in the cart and approached the shaman’s tent. It was dark, untouched by moonlight. A foul odor hung about it. Her skin prickled, as if touched by tiny claws, but nothing was there. She plunged into the tent.

  A solitary butter lamp burned before a stake holding what at first appeared to be some thick effluvia of darkness. But no, it was a manikin formed of Tembujin’s hair, still as dark and glossy as it had been on his head. Sita’s lip curled in disgust. She forced her hand to touch the manikin. It was cold, so cold it burned; gasping, she started back. Something moved in the corner of her eye. But it was only her own distorted shadow, cast by the tiny flame in the lamp. She smiled tightly and tilted the melted butter so that it ran onto the dark, fetid rug. The flame followed its path. Hissing yellow fire leaped from the carpet and Sita’s shadow leaped taller and taller against the fabric. She turned and fled.

  There were eyes upon her, glittering eyes shining in the depths of Khalingu’s cart. But the moonlight poured down upon it, making of the hangings an upraised gleaming shield. Sita skirted the image, hurried away. The yurt behind her looked like a black beehive oven filled with incandescent flame.

  She returned to the pile of rags that had been Tembujin’s yurt and sat down in their midst upon the Mohendra rug. The moonlight sparked on the woven pattern, as if there were some meaning in it; Tembujin’s life, Sita’s life, the Crimson Horde and Iksandarun. She slumped over it, her hair a shining hood around her. “Forgive me, Andrion, I lost your necklace,” she murmured. “For whatever I have done, forgive me.” She did not stir when the thick felt of Odo’s yurt at last caught fire, sending a shower of sparks upward to mingle with the stars. Dim shapes rushed by her, their drunken shouts the unintelligible gibbering of ghosts.

  The night lasted into eternity, and still the moon hung silent in the silent sky. When Obedei appeared at
her side, Sita did not start. She rose meekly, rolled the rug, followed him to his own yurt. She lay on his bed, waiting numbly for him to touch her, but he did not. When at last she slept, she whimpered through fire-streaked nightmares, and the night at last ended.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Andrion wondered if the doves spiraling from the temple precinct would pierce the hazy sky and plunge through it into black, star-pricked night, or if they, too, were trapped by the uncompromising light of day.

  The birds spun across the flat white disk of the rising sun and disappeared. Andrion, blinded by the glare, looked away. The mist would soon burn away and the day would be hot. Not that it should matter to him, where he was going. He felt slightly drunk, observing himself and his surroundings from a great height.

  The ferry creaked beneath his feet and a tentative puff of wind fluttered the great lateen sail. The muddy waters of the Sar Cinnabran murmured just beyond comprehension, Ventalidar’s ears pricked. Absently, Andrion stroked him. “No,” he said, “you cannot come with me into the tomb. You will wait, guarding my back.”

  Dana stood at the gunwale beside a silent Patros, staring at the low, jumbled buildings of Sardis cleft by the lightning stroke of Harus’s ziggurat. The city was muted by dusty haze, as if by legend; her eyes seemed to envision it as nothing more than a pile of rubble, an occasional broken column or the mutilated head of a statue. My own head, Andrion thought, my own eyes staring vacantly at the passing years, and Sabazel enduring still . . . He shook himself.

  Something sparked at the peak of the ziggurat. The bronze falcon, perhaps, that Bellasteros had saved from the sacking of Iksandarun. It had been before dawn, under a spectral moon, when Patros had conducted Andrion up the long flight of steps, past the great statue of Harus in the wing-stirred darkness of the sanctuary, to the altar at the peak of the artificial mountain. There Andrion, trying not to condescend, had given the falcon to Bonifacio. But poor fawning Bonifacio made it so tempting to condescend.

  Andrion had bowed before the images of Harus, large and small, but they looked through him and would not speak. He had bowed before his father’s crimson-plumed helmet, but it, too, was as silent as a cast-off carapace, the creature who had worn it gone. Bonifacio muttered prayers and blessings, made small protests at the coming violation of the tomb of Gerlac, Harus’s servant, urged Andrion to visit the ancient oracle instead. Andrion had longed to tell him that Harus, Ashtar’s consort, needed no servants like Gerlac, that he had already heard from an oracle in Sabazel. But he had said something polite and reassuring and walked numbly beside Patros toward the east, away from the setting moon.

  Andrion looked away from the living city and toward the city of the dead. Not much farther now, and the penalty for a moment’s disloyalty to Bellasteros would be paid. The sunlight, diffused by the hazy sky, poured like a pale, vinegary wine over the dun-colored hummocks of tombs and monuments, blending all into an indistinguishable shimmer. The brightness of the sun, and the brightness of Solifrax waiting in shadow; Andrion touched his throat, seeking the emblems of sun and moon united, but they were gone.

  The ferry ground against the riverbank. The soldiers of the guard scrambled out. Patros reached to aid Dana and thought better of it, leaving her to leap from the boat alone. Andrion grasped Ventalidar’s reins and jumped. Ventalidar landed beside him with a reassuringly solid thunk of hooves against ground.

  Dana’s hair streamed down her back, a gleaming veil; her eyes were as flat as jade beads, whether concealing fear or resentment, whether racked by the Sight or bereft of it, Andrion could not tell. Her forehead shone with gelid sweat. She smiled tightly at Patros but the muscle in her jaw writhed, her teeth clamped shut. And is this, Andrion thought, her penalty for a moment’s disloyalty to Sabazel?

  The party mounted and rode toward the great pylon gate of the city of the dead. Patros looked eagerly ahead, the line of his cheek and jaw set less in dread than anticipation, a desire exalted by its depth. He wants that sword as much as I do, Andrion told himself. He wants to worship me as he worshipped my father. He will not, he cannot fear Gerlac as I do, for he knew the living man and I know only the demon.

  Dana shrugged her bow from her shoulder and offered it to her father. He laid it across his arm like a ceremonial sword, a companion to the flaccid snakeskin sheath of Solifrax which he wore at his waist. The pylon rose before them, a tall pile of brick and stone carved with the names of ancient kings now almost weathered away. Ventalidar danced sideways, restively, as if a cold breeze blew through the gate. But the day was hot and still. Patros returned the salute of several guards and led the company under the cracked lintel, into the necropolis.

  Lemon and orange trees clung to crevices in the paving stones, above windrows of rotting fruit clouded by wasps. A lizard sunned itself atop a stele, and colonnaded tomb was half-displaced by a gnarled weeping cypress. The monuments were broken and dusty, long ago despoiled and forgotten. The buzzing of insects was the distant murmur of lost souls.

  The avenue turned and curved down into a great basin. “Here,” Patros said, “is the quarry from which came the stone for the great ziggurat. And for many of those old tombs by the gate. The later kings and nobles wanted their tombs carved in the rock, to better protect them from grave robbers.”

  The rock was honeycombed with elaborately carved niches, memorial inscriptions, closed tombs. Asphodel, paler than any that grew on Cylandra’s slopes, clung beside straggling lemon trees. The pale gold stone gathered the sunlight, filling the basin with a pool of liquid heat rimmed high above by a bleached blue sky.

  There was the doorway. The huge slab had subsided, leaving a dark fissure at its top, but the seals were intact, faded but still readable: Adrastes Falco, Talon of Harus, protects this tomb of the godling Gerlac. The evil Adrastes, Andrion told himself, contaminated with sorcery, who met well-deserved death in Iksandarun only a few hours before my birth. The muscles in his neck and shoulders knotted, as if burning eyes glared at his back. He knew he was frightened, but he saw his fear from far above, dispassionately, someone else haunted by this old terror. The taste of rotten fruit coated his throat.

  Dana knew well the names of Gerlac and Adrastes. Her face was pale and set, and beads of sweat left tracks down her cheeks.

  “It was another lifetime when the procession came here with Gerlac’s coffin,” Patros mused, leaning on his saddlebow. “Chanting and incense and the weeping of the servants who were to die . . . we no longer commit such sacrifice, of course, thanks to Bellasteros’s compassion.”

  Are you sure? Andrion thought as he crawled slowly, heavily, from Ventalidar’s back. He handed the reins to a soldier. The horse snorted and pawed at the ground.

  Andrion was standing on a grave stone, a slab placed flat in the floor of the basin. He bent, narrowing his eyes. Viridis, wife of Gerlac, read the almost obliterated inscription. So, he thought, my grandmother deserves only this hole in the ground, beneath the feet of the man who murdered her. The gods burden me with this old evil. He turned to the escort and gestured.

  Reluctantly they clambered from their horses and approached the tomb of Gerlac. Dana shivered, gathered herself together, followed. With his dagger, his only weapon, Andrion’s numb fingers cut the seals on the tomb. The dagger tingled, sending ripples of pain up his arm.

  Grunting, heaving, the soldiers rolled the stone away. Bats exploded from the opening, pulling with them a cloud of almost palpable darkness. Dana started; if not for the watching men, she might well have screamed. Andrion seemed to fall down a long, smooth curve, faster and faster, shattering his numbness upon sharp pinnacles of mortality and fear. Sweat slipped in cold beads like stroking fingers down his back. He set his teeth into his lip, and the pain of it was sharp and immediate, steadying his resolve.

  Patros ordered a torch lit. The flame was swallowed by the glancing sunlight. Andrion saw his own hand take the torch, raise it high. He heard Dana make some faint sound in her throat, not quite a sigh, not qu
ite a protest. She stepped to his side; their trembling shoulders touched, jarred, touched again, warm living flesh to flesh.

  “I shall wait here for your return,” Patros called; he tightened his mouth, refusing anxiety. The bow and sheath lay reverently across his arm. The accompanying soldiers shifted uneasily, pretending interest in other things. Ventalidar’s dark eyes reflected a pinpoint of light, a torch tiny in the circle of darkness that was Gerlac’s tomb.

  Dana and Andrion saluted Patros and turned to the shadow. “You have no power over me,” Andrion said. “Gerlac, I have none of your blood, and you have no power over me.”

  Dana’s teeth glinted between her lips. She took her dagger from its sheath and clutched it before her. They stepped through the doorway into a narrow passage.

  The sunlight failed, and the torch leaped high in gouts of yellow flame. The faint breath of a breeze moaned through the corridor, as cold but not as clean as the breeze from Cylandra’s icy crown. The dank chill of twenty-five winters was gathered in the tomb; Andrion felt his sweaty skin break into gooseflesh, each tiny hair questing nervously upward.

  The walls of the passage were carved and painted gaudily with bas-reliefs, warriors and gods dancing in the flicker of torchlight. Andrion tried to focus on one particular scene of his father Bellasteros, young but never untried; the light leaped, the images shifted and whirled away and made taunting gestures in the corners of his eyes.

  He turned, trying to look everywhere at once, following the faint afterimages clotting the boundary between light and shadow. His foot crushed something; he lowered the torch. Human bones, desiccated into crumbling husks, lay along the corridor.