Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Tembujin bent double over his bow, as though the arrow lodged in his own heart. Dana stopped herself in the midst of a victorious gesture. Her mind spun; love, death, loyalty, and sacrifice. She touched his arm but he did not respond.

  The muddy course of the Galel suddenly filled with swirling brown water. Many of the Khazyari ponies were swept from their feet, and the warriors they bore smacked into the water and could not rise before imperial troops were upon them. The river flowed on, streaked with scarlet.

  Nikander leaped onto his horse, ordering soldiers to follow him. They poured down the valley, pursuing the fleeing Khazyari, leaving a flotsam of mangled bodies behind.

  A shaft of sunlight sliced beneath the clouds. The distant rim of the valley leaped into clarity, a sharp brass edge against a sky sketched in harsh chiaroscuro. Then the light failed, and the rain fell again.

  * * * * *

  Andrion’s throat was raw. His arms and shoulders trembled. His armor seemed to be scummed with ice. His thoughts tumbled like brush in the torrent of the Galel. Harus, the battle lasted all afternoon, it seemed but a few minute’s work. My nightmares had more substance . . .

  Baakhun had fallen. Whose bow had fired the arrow, Dana’s or Tembujin’s? Or did it even matter? The deed was done.

  Ventalidar stood behind him, watching him. Solifrax fell from his nerveless fingers. He laid his face against the horse’s warm, richly scented shoulder, and concealing himself with a crooked arm, sobbed.

  Ventalidar nuzzled him. The spate of tears ended as quickly as it had begun; his mind steadied. Andrion wiped his face with a corner of his cloak and rescued Solifrax. He looked sheepishly around. Lyris leaned against a nearby rock, tight-lipped, as Patros wrapped a bloody cut on her thigh.

  “Did we win?” Andrion croaked.

  Patros was pale but composed. “Since they withdrew, and since their leader was killed, I suppose we won this battle at the least.”

  “This battle,” nodded Andrion. “At the least.”

  “Why in Ashtar’s name,” said Lyris, “did you rush into the thick of the fray like that? We thought we should surely lose you.”

  “Ah,” Andrion said. “Did you think you were protecting me?”

  Lyris shrugged, and thanked Patros with a strained smile.

  Andrion looked down at himself; his hands were caked with blood, but little of it seemed to be his own. He had suffered only a scratch or two on his arms. The curved blade of Solifrax was as clean and bright as ever. In that moment he hated its hypocrisy. He thrust it into its sheath, but it hung heavy with reproof at his side.

  The brief flood drained away, leaving blood- and mud-mottled bodies heaped behind it. The slaughter of the Khazyari ponies was appalling; they lay everywhere, limbs askew, great dark eyes staring into a spectral sky. And was the slaughter of men any less appalling? Andrion demanded of himself. Soldiers, too, lay everywhere, some crying in feeble voices, too many silent.

  Kerith was a bloodied shape nearby, her face twisted in agony, teeth sunk into her lower lip. Dana held her friend’s head in her lap as Ilanit carefully bound the wound. And when had Dana come back, her quiver empty?

  She looked up, her eyes meeting Andrion’s. They swam in grief and horror. Is this the battle you wished for in the tomb? he asked her mutely. A clean battle in the open air? Her eyes fell, her face concealed by the hard shell of her helmet. He cursed himself for mocking her.

  Tembujin leaned as if sorely wounded over the neck of his horse. Was he? But no, he sat up, forcing his back erect with an almost audible crack.

  Andrion tried to summon vindictive glee—your father for mine, barbarian—but there was no glee left in him. The same game devoured them all. He mounted Ventalidar and went to help the gathering of the wounded.

  * * * * *

  Shadowed day clotted into lightless night. The torches of burial squads and the pyres of dead horses flickered crazily along the valley of the Galel, driven by a moaning wind. Andrion stood at the edge of the encampment as the Sabazians prepared to take their dead and wounded home. “We have lost five,” Ilanit told him wearily, her shield muted on her arm. “I shall bring twenty more to ride beside you to Iksandarun, now that the enemy has been turned from Sabazel.”

  Andrion could think of nothing to say, so he said, “Thank you.”

  Dana set her hand on his stubbled cheek, searching his eyes as if to touch the ragged edge of his soul. Their breaths were mingled clouds of frost in the cold night. Not even a waning moon lit their faces.

  Then the women were gone, leaving only the sound of hoofbeats to echo with uncanny clarity down the wind. Patros sighed and turned his harrowed face to Andrion. “Are you well?”

  “Yes.” They parted, each to his own duty.

  Andrion’s eyes seemed to be filled with half the rocks in the Galel. But he walked doggedly through the encampment, letting wounded soldiers touch the hilt of Solifrax, making weak jests with exhausted ones, soothing the grief of the camp followers whose men had not returned. The night fluttered, torchlight streaming about him, worshiping faces smearing into garish, tragic masks.

  The bronze falcon followed him, borne by a haggard Miklos. He saw as in a delirium that Shurzad worked with the surgeons, her nine fingers splashed with blood and bile. Her kohl-rimmed eyes above her veil were dazed by the knowledge of the suffering of the soldiers who quieted at her touch.

  Andrion dismissed Miklos. He turned, disoriented by his own camp. He saw Tembujin sitting cross-legged, shoulders bowed, alone and aloof outside his own tent. A torch guttered above him, and its uncertain brazen light made glistening tracks of the tears on his cheeks.

  And I expected him to be battle-hardened, Andrion thought. Soon, I may see my own father die.

  A gray shape flowed through the shadows. Shurzad’s cat wrapped itself around Tembujin’s legs. The Khazyari did not react. Then another shape appeared, a slender woman, large liquid eyes peering guilelessly above a carefully tied veil. “Ah,” said Valeria’s soft voice, “there you are, you naughty beast. I am sorry, my lord Tembujin, if he annoys you.”

  Tembujin hastily rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. “No, my lady Valeria,” he said, clearing his throat. “He does not annoy me.”

  Valeria swept the cat into her arms, where it lay as relaxed as a fur drape, its far from guileless amber eyes smirking at Tembujin. “Ah,” the girl murmured, “good night, then.” She retreated with a rustle of linen and a faint odor of violets. Tembujin stared after her.

  So she, too, tends the wounded, Andrion thought. Why not me? Because I am strong, strong. He plodded to his own quarters, the pale faces of the dead following him. I am not wounded, he told them. More battles lie before me, Iksandarun must be taken, this is but the beginning . . .

  He sat for a long time contemplating the purity of Solifrax, not bothering to wrap his cloak around him or light the brazier; nothing could turn the chill of this night. He ended the day the way he had begun it, cold and numb, caught in the coils of nightmare.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A falcon circled a sky of deep, clear, brittle sapphire. Ashtar’s eye, Andrion told himself. The depth of her thought suspended a spectral waning moon, a wisp of light that was like her mercy . . . If I cannot believe in the gods, he decided, I shall have to believe in myself. I cannot believe in nothing.

  Even here, at the borders of Sabazel, ashes swirled in a gentle wind and the acrid scent of the funeral pyre lingered, the last traces of the Sabazians dead in the battle of the Galel. The Sabazians dead for me, Andrion thought. And for him. Several women bore a litter toward a waiting ox cart, the body of Bellasteros carried at last from its sanctuary.

  No, Andrion wanted to scream at the solemn faces, no, this is not a funeral, he will yet wake!

  The wind rippled the banners of a waiting honor guard. The cart received the litter. Ilanit raised the shield in salute, and the morning sun hissed across its surface like wind stirring water in the bronze basin. Danica pressed something into
Andrion’s hand. It was the diadem of the Empire, a gold circlet newly polished and so cold it burned his fingers.

  What did she mean? He fought in his father’s name, not his own. And yet . . . “Would it be easier,” he asked his mother, “if he had died a hero’s death in Iksandarun, as he intended before I forced him to run away, before I brought him to this?”

  “No,” replied Danica. “The goddess has her purposes.”

  The crisp green eyes were calm, resigned, but to Andrion they were shadowed by the image of the black warrior, Bellasteros’s mortality. He spun about, went to the cart, lifted the protective hangings and placed the diadem on Bellasteros’s silver hair. The crown no longer fit him; it was too big, and tilted rakishly over his brow. His closed eyes did not open, and the crescent shadows of his lashes on his hollow cheeks did not waver.

  “The diadem is yours, Father,” Andrion whispered so that only Bellasteros could hear. “But the sword is mine now; the horse has always been mine and never yours . . .” He inhaled with a shudder, wondering if he uttered blasphemy. “Father, I carry your burden, I fight your battles, have I not earned the sword?” The still face did not change. The falcon screeched overhead, and the hangings snapped in the breeze. What did you expect? Andrion asked himself.

  Tembujin peered over his shoulder. “The emperor, your father?”

  “Yes,” Andrion replied, too dull to resent his curiosity.

  Tembujin’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Toth did not keep me alive with food alone, but with tales of gods and ancient heroes and the exploits of your parents before you were born.” He glanced at Danica cautiously, suspecting, perhaps, what it meant to spring from such stock.

  “I am sorry, Andrion, I had a part in bringing him to this.” Tembujin stooped to inspect one of his horse’s hooves, pretending to find some pebble imbedded within.

  Ah, thought Andrion. So you try to be my friend. He was not sure he liked that thought. But it was little enough to forgive another man, when the gods themselves were ultimately unforgiving.

  Ventalidar snuffled the cool, clear air and shook his mane as though to say, enough of this maudlin introspection, let us dance across the world. Andrion had to grin as he leaped onto his back. Danica, with the plump turtledove of Shandir beside her, sat ready behind the oxen. Lyris frowned down at her sword, debating whether it was sharp enough for the task ahead. Ilanit contemplated the sky, listening to resonances in the wind.

  Dana reined up beside Andrion. “Is Kerith well?” he had enough wit to ask her.

  “Well enough,” Dana replied, “so long as she stays here.”

  “I shall return you to her side before the snow flies,” he said, and was warmed by Dana’s smile.

  The ox cart creaked, bearing the weight of his past. The Companions of Sabazel turned away from their own borders and followed him over the rim of the world.

  * * * * *

  Andrion had realized, even as he gave it, that his promise to Dana was a rash one. The snow would probably fly well before they could even approach Iksandarun, let alone before the Sabazians could return to their home. But such rash promises were, it seemed, part of the language of love.

  The imperial army moved laboriously south. Scouts brought word that the Khazyari had indeed been turned away from the pass; suffering from the loss of so many of their ponies, the barbarians seemed to turn tail and run. But as Nikander took the trouble to point out, they could well have learned the virtues of playing dead. Patros kept scouts, the questing senses of the legions, moving briskly into the great southern plain.

  Was Tembujin, Andrion wondered, galled by his people’s seeming meekness? He looked up from burnishing the bright blade of Solifrax, across the gold pavilion to where Tembujin made some minor adjustment to his bow. “We should move faster,” Andrion said to Patros, seated at a writing table nearby. “We must harass them, give them no time to regroup.”

  Patros laid down his quill, but it was Tembujin who answered. “Having you behind them should be harassment enough.”

  Andrion exchanged a glance with Patros; Tembujin spoke of his tribe in the third person. “Governor,” he said, “what shall we do with the Khazyari? Reinstate Tembujin to his proper role as khan?” He gestured expansively. “We could settle them on the moor north of Iksandarun, calling it Khazyaristan, perhaps. The Empire has room for a nomadic tribe.”

  The odlok glanced up, fully aware he was being tested. “You would not kill them—us—all?”

  “I would rather free the Khazyari of Raksula’s evil influence,” Andrion replied. Tembujin’s face darkened and his fingers snapped the bowstring in a short, sharp gesture.

  “We have to defeat them first,” said Patros. “Then we can be magnanimous.”

  “To a khan I can trust,” added Andrion.

  Tembujin’s eyes were glittering slate, opaque, unreadable. “Have you not yet learned to trust me?” he said to Andrion and Patros both. “I know what ambitions I can now afford, and what my loyalties must be. Building is much harder than destroying, but in the end more profitable.” For just a moment his eyes widened, letting Andrion see within. Then Tembujin tucked one corner of his mouth into an ironic smile and bent again to his bow.

  Andrion leaned back in his chair, almost breathless. Solifrax hummed across his lap, glistening with a brief aura of light. Beautiful, Andrion thought. As beautiful and as compelling as death.

  * * * * *

  The moon died, was swept away by the sun, appeared again as a glaucous sliver riding the morning sky to the army’s left. The days were punctuated by violent but inconclusive skirmishes as the Khazyari faded before them. The world was sustained in a russet haze of autumn, the plains like rippling fluid bronze, the sky a blue so crisp it made Andrion ache.

  Tembujin resumed tying his hair into a short, stubborn tail. Thank Sarasvati, thought Andrion, for trimming his manhood so nicely. The new moon after the fall equinox was Sarasvati’s birthday, noted by a prayer to the crimson-plumed helmet: Bellasteros, protect your younger daughter, give her strength. He gives us both his strength, Andrion told himself. And we pray to him as if his apotheosis were already accomplished.

  The quarter waxing moon marked Valeria’s birthday; a new Valeria, who initiated conversations with Andrion and Tembujin both, and contemplated the world with firm chin and clear eye. She is no longer a fragile flower, Andrion thought, but fruit ripened as I have been, by ordeal and the love of her parents. Tembujin paid her polite and correct attentions, more formal than the jests he shared with Dana or with Andrion himself; Patros watched, partly skeptical, partly amused.

  Shurzad stayed close beside her daughter. Her mutilated hand reached as often for her naked throat as Andrion reached for his. Her eyes still held some trace of that creature struggling to be free. Or perhaps she found it, and did not like what she saw. Her hair was carefully ringleted, her eyes shadowed with lavender and kohl, but still she seemed to Andrion to be an edged weapon blunted.

  Patros watched his wife through sad, wary eyes, and as often as he shared a smile with Valeria, he smiled at her as well. But it was Ilanit with whom he often talked, in the elliptical sentences of conversations already long concluded. And one evening Shurzad came to Ilanit in the camp of the Sabazians.

  Lyris tensed, her hackles rising. Andrion, seated with Dana, looked up. Ilanit offered Shurzad a rock to sit upon as graciously as if she opened the Horn Gate to her.

  Shurzad remained standing, ill at ease but driven from within. “My thanks, Queen Ilanit, and to your mother, Danica, for helping me. Despite my often . . . unkind words about you and yours.”

  Ilanit bowed. At her knee the shield sparked gently.

  “It was your goddess, was it not, who told you to succor me?”

  Ah, thought Andrion. She seeks assurance that the gods do indeed look over us.

  “No,” answered Ilanit. “I chose freely to aid a wounded soul.”

  “But you are not directed by the voice of your goddess, certain in all tha
t you do?”

  “No.” Ilanit cocked her head to the side, as if finding either the question or the questioner to be slightly pitiful. “My mother once bore the power of the goddess, but I never have. Ashtar reserves her strength to herself now, and leaves us mortals to find our own certainty.”

  “Ah. I see.” Shurzad’s face fell and she turned away.

  Andrion stood, intercepted Shurzad, took her poor hand and bowed over it. “Forgive me, lady, for wounding you.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending. “With the lock of hair you gave Valeria I enspelled you to come to Sardis, so that I could use you.”

  “No, no, lady,” he returned, hastening to reassure her. “I dreamed I should come, in Ashtar’s cavern at the full moon after midsummer’s moon.”

  “And my spell was laid as the moon waned.” Her face contracted in pain, her voice faltered. “So, even that effort was for naught.” She turned and blundered away.

  Andrion realized not what he had said, but what she had heard. “Harus! I did not mean to rub her nose in her helplessness!”

  “She waits for redemption,” Ilanit said, shaking her head.

  Yes, Andrion said to himself. So do I. And I shall find it only in duty. He touched Dana’s cheek lightly with his forefinger, bowed to Ilanit and the shield, managed a wink for Lyris. And he, too, went into the night, not blundering but striding as stiff as any soldier.

  * * * * *

  The full moon drifted, a gleaming disk, above the Khazyari camp. The sounds of revelry were muted, as if Baakhun’s prodigious appetite had eaten the spirits of his warriors and taken them with him into death.