Saric looked grim. ‘Which cause, mistress? After Ichindar’s boldness in seizing absolute rule, what Lord’s ambition would be sated with the restoration of the Warlord’s title?’
‘You do see.’ Mara’s words were crisp. ‘A ratification will not happen. Even with all of our backing, can you imagine a girl of twelve ruling? With Ichindar’s pampered First Wife as regent? If Lord Kamatsu were still alive as Imperial Chancellor, perhaps, with our resolve, we might see a woman where now there is a girl. But if I read your comments aright, Hokanu, Kanazawai Clan support has fragmented under pressure from your rivals and discontented cousins. You hold the office, but not yet the unified clan that your father had forged. Possibly Hoppara of the Xacatecas would stand forth as our ally, but Frasai of the Tonmargu is still Imperial Overlord. Feeble old man that he is, he still commands Hoppara’s office, and as clan brother to Jiro, if chaos breaks loose I doubt he can hold out for a stalwart and independent course. No, a new council could not stem the bloodshed now. Instead, the first Lord who can take control of the palace will force the priests to place Jehilia upon the throne, then take her to wife and see himself anointed Emperor.’
Saric concluded, as always, with another question. ‘You believe that Jiro was behind the Omechan assassination of the Emperor?’
But his words went unheard. Hokanu was staring into the deep eyes of his wife in something close to outright horror. He said very quietly, his voice edged with menace, or a note of great pain, ‘You are not thinking of defenses, Lady. You will not be calling out our troops to join with the Imperial Whites against the storm that must soon beset Kentosani?’
‘No,’ Mara admitted into an icy quiet. ‘I will not. If I get to the Holy City first, I mean to attack.’
‘Justin?’ Saric’s voice held a high note of awe. ‘You would set your son on the throne as Jehilia’s husband?’
Mara spun around fast as a cornered beast. ‘And why not?’ Her whole body quivered with stressed nerves. ‘He is a lawful contender for the divine office of Emperor.’ Then, into the shocked stillness that followed, she cried out in heart-wrung appeal, ‘Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see at all? He’s just a little boy, and it’s the only possible way to save his life!’
Saric’s mind had always been nimble. He was the first to sort the ramifications, and see past Mara’s wounding fear. To a stiff-faced Hokanu, he added with no trace of his customary tact, ‘She’s right. Justin alive would pose a threat to any outside faction who took the girl and forced wedlock. No matter how strong the self-styled Emperor’s army, he would draw his enemies to the throne with him. No point of law would be overlooked, and Mara’s popularity as Servant must force recognition of Justin’s adoptive blood tie. Dissidents would seize upon Justin’s cause as a rallying cry, whether we willed it or no. Others might be willing to kill us all to win the opportunity to put the boy on the throne as their puppet.’
‘Civil war.’ Mara sighed, sounding wrung to her very core. ‘If Jiro or any other Lord gains the crown, we would have no Emperor, no revered Light of Heaven, but only a more glorified Warlord. It would be a merging of the worst of both offices, when we would hope to wed the best.’
Hokanu moved suddenly. He caught her shoulders, turned her face into his chest in time to conceal her dissolution into tears, then stroked her in sad gentleness. ‘Lady, never fear to lose my support. Never fear that.’
Muffled into his warmth, Mara said, ‘Then you don’t disapprove?’
Hokanu smoothed back the hair torn loose from her headdress in the fever of their earlier embrace. His face looked suddenly lined with care and no small foreboding. ‘I cannot pretend to love the idea, Lady of my heart. But you are right. Justin will make a wise ruler, once he reaches maturity. And until then, as his guardians, we can continue to reject the atrocities of the Game of the Council and enforce a new stability in the Nations. The people must all bow before his and Jehilia’s combined claim, and the gods know, the unfortunate girl deserves a mate close to her own age and inclinations. She would indeed be miserable as a puppet, wed to a man viciously driven by ambition, as Jiro is.’
Then, as if sensing that Ayaki’s loss lay very near to the surface of his wife’s thoughts, and that with this chilling threat to Justin her need for solace at this moment must outweigh all other matters, Hokanu lifted his Lady bodily in his arms. He cradled her tenderly against the breastplate of armor and bore her out of the scriptorium. As he turned down the corridor in the direction of their bedchamber, he called to Saric over his shoulder, ‘If you have brought back from Thuril some means to stay the hand of the Assembly of Magicians, pray to the gods it will work. For unless I am totally mistaken, it must soon be Jiro of the Anasati we face across the field of war.’
Once in the privacy of the master suite, Mara pushed impatiently against Hokanu’s cradling embrace. ‘So much to do, and so little time!’
Ignoring her struggles, Hokanu bent and laid her down on the sumptuous cushions of their sleeping mat, and only his fighter’s reflexes permitted him the necessary speed to catch her wrists as she immediately tried to shove herself erect. ‘Lady, we are not caught unprepared. Arakasi has kept us well informed, Keyoke is a craftier strategist than you or I, and Saric will waste no time in giving them word that Justin’s claim must of necessity be pressed.’ As Mara’s eyes bored furiously up into his, he gave her an ungentle shake. ‘Take an hour! Your people will all be the better for being left free of distraction. Let your Force Commander consult with Irrilandi and Keyoke and do his job! Then when he has had time to assemble his ideas, we can hold council, and forge the wisest course between us.’
Mara looked again as if she might crumble. ‘You’re not worried for your Shinzawai holdings in the north, or your cousin Devacai’s meddling?’
‘No.’ Hokanu was bedrock-firm. ‘I inherited Dogondi for Shinzawai First Adviser, remember? My father relied on him for years, particularly when he was absent from home as Imperial Chancellor. Dogondi’s as crafty as any man alive, and with our new messenger relay in place, he will hear of your need for aid in Justin’s cause before sundown tomorrow. Incomo and he have worked together like old cronies. Trust the efficiency of your good officers, Lady. My own servants you have won over shamelessly. Not one who wears Shinzawai blue would do less than give their lives for you, but not if you throw your uninformed opinion into their works just now.’
Another more violent tremor coursed through Mara’s body. ‘How have I done without you all these months?’ she marveled in a voice shaved thin by jangled nerves. ‘Of course you are right.’
Hokanu felt her relax. When he judged it safe, he released her from restraint and waved for a maid to remove her travel clothing. As the woman set about her ministrations, he soon found he could not resist joining in the unwrapping. As the Lady’s overrobe came off, and the ties to the underrobe were loosened, he played his hands along the smooth warmth of her flesh. ‘A bitter homecoming,’ he mused.
‘Not the one I would have chosen, husband. I have missed you.’
The maid attendant might as well have been invisible.
Hokanu smiled. ‘And I you.’ He reached to unbuckle the fastenings of his breastplate, then lost his concentration at even so simple a task as the maid let Mara’s inner robe fall away. The sight of his Lady, even tired and dusty from the road, with her hair tumbling loose from its pins, took Hokanu’s breath away. She noticed his bemusement and at last managed a smile. Putting her hands over his, she began to work the leather straps through the buckles until he laid his lips upon hers and kissed her. After that, neither noticed as the maid took over the task of his undressing, then bowed to master and mistress and softly stole from the room.
Later, when the couple lay replete with their lovemaking, Hokanu ran his finger gently along the line of Mara’s cheek. The light through the screen silvered the streaks of age starting to grow in her black hair, and her skin showed weathering from the harsher sun of the southern lands. Even as he caressed her
, she stirred and murmured again, ‘There is so much to do, and little time.’
Mara pushed herself up onto her elbow, a restlessness to her manner that now could not be denied.
Hokanu loosened his embrace, knowing he could not hold her. A war waited to be fought, in open repudiation of the Assembly’s disapproval; young Justin’s life depended upon the outcome.
Yet as Mara did arise, and clapped for her maid to return to attire her in battle dress, her husband stared after her with a terrible, gnawing poignancy. Hereafter, nothing between them would be the same. Either Jiro would sit on the golden throne, and Mara and all he loved would be destroyed; or they would perish in their attempt to make Justin Emperor; or perhaps most painful of all, Lady Mara would become ruler of Tsuranuanni. Still, he simply had no choice; for his own daughter’s sake, he must add his knowledge of war and trust that the legendary luck of the Good Servant would keep both them and their children alive. He pushed away from the mat, reached Mara in one stride, and while she had one arm helplessly caught in the process of her robing, took her face in his hands and gently, lovingly kissed her. Then he said, ‘Take time for a bath. I will go ahead of you and take counsel with Lujan and Irrilandi.’
Mara returned the kiss, and flashed him a brilliant smile. ‘No bath would ease me so much as one we could share.’
Hokanu let that cheer him, but as he slipped into his discarded clothes and hurried to the council of war, he could not help but recognise that whether they would survive or fall in this full-scale conflict, inevitably their lives would embrace change. He could not shake the foreboding that the events must force distance between him and the Lady he held most dear.
• Chapter Twenty-Five •
Assembly
Chumaka smiled.
He briskly rubbed his hands together as a man might do to warm them, but the day outside his window was hot. What the Anasati First Adviser reacted to was a chill of deep excitement. ‘At last, at last,’ he muttered. He swooped amid his clutter of papers and correspondence to grab what looked to be a nondescript notation of tally marks on a creased scrap of paper. But the markings hid a complex code, and the imbedded message was precisely the one that Chumaka had prodded and plotted and cajoled to bring about.
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and questioning manner of his clerk, Chumaka hurried out to seek his master.
Jiro preferred to pass midday in indolence. He never took a siesta, nor, like so many Ruling Lords, did he amuse himself through the heat in lascivious play with concubines. Jiro’s tastes were ascetic. He considered the chatter of women distracting, so much so that on a whim he had once ordered all of his female cousins consigned to chaste service in the temples. Chumaka chuckled at the memory. The girls would have no sons to become rivals, which made the master’s short-tempered arbitration a wiser move than he knew. Jiro instinctively preferred privacy. At this hour he would be found at his bath, or else reading in the cool, breezy portico that connected the library with the scribes’ copy chamber.
Chumaka paused at the junction of two inner corridors, dimly lit since no lamps burned in the heat, and faintly scented with the wax and oil used to treat the wood floors. His thin nostrils twitched.
‘Not the baths, today,’ he muttered, for he could smell no trace of scent borne on the air by the passage of Jiro’s bath slaves. The master was fastidious to the point of fussiness. He liked his food spiced to briskness to keep his breath sweet, and favored perfumes in his wash water.
The old, drooping ulo trees that edged the portico outside the library cooled the air even in the most sultry summer weather. Jiro sat on a stone bench, a scroll in his hand, and more heaped haphazardly around his feet. A deaf-mute slave attended him, ready at the twitch of his master’s finger to attend to the slightest need. But Jiro’s needs were notably few. Beyond the occasional request for a cold drink, he often sat at his reading until midafternoon, when he would meet with his hadonra to discuss estate finances, or arrange for a recital of poetry, or walk in the pretty gardens designed by his great-grandmother, which it had been his pleasure to see replanted and restored.
Immersed in his reading, Jiro did not immediately respond to the rapid tap of Chumaka’s sandals against the terra-cotta tile of the portico. When he did notice the sound, he looked up as if at an intrusion, his brows pulled down in vexation, and his manner stiff with restraint.
His expression changed at once to resignation. Chumaka was the most difficult of his servants to dismiss without the fuss of enforcing his rank as Ruling Lord. Somehow Jiro felt it demeaning to deliver bald-faced demands; they were crude, and he prided himself on subtlety, a vanity that Chumaka was well versed in the art of exploiting.
‘What is it?’ Jiro sighed, then checked his bored exhalation, realising that his First Adviser was showing the unabashed toothy smile he reserved for felicitous news. The Lord of the Anasati brightened also. ‘It is Mara,’ he second-guessed. ‘She has arrived home to find herself disadvantaged, I hope?’
Chumaka waved his coded note. ‘Indeed, master, and more. I have just received word directly from our spy implanted in Hokanu’s messenger service. We have precise descriptions of how she plans to deploy her troops.’ Here the Anasati First Adviser’s manner dampened, as he recalled how difficult it had been to break the private cipher of Hokanu’s correspondence.
As if sensing that a lecture on such subtleties might be forthcoming, Jiro pressed the discussion ahead. ‘And?’
‘And?’ Chumaka for a moment looked vague as his train of thought recentered. But his eyes never once lost their sharpness, and his mind worked impressively fast. ‘And our ruse worked.’
Jiro reined back a frown. Always, Chumaka seemed to expect him to follow the vaguest of references without any accompanying explanation. ‘Which ruse do you speak of?’
‘Why, the one concerning the engineers of the siege engines and the toy maker’s plans. Lady Mara believes we were duped into hiring her false workers. She has arranged for no attack on our forces that are positioned to storm Kentosani.’ Here Chumaka gave a wave of dismissal, ‘Oh, she’s cozened her husband to call out the Shinzawai troops from the north. They will attack our northern flank, she believes, while we are in disarray and still struggling to recoup from the deaths she expects will happen in the mishap that results from the first firing of our battle rams and ballistas.’
‘They won’t fail,’ Jiro mused, his narrow face softening at last. ‘They will shatter those ancient fortifications and our men will already be inside.’ He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘The Shinzawai troops will arrive only to do homage to a new Emperor!’
‘And to bury their boy heir,’ Chumaka added in a low voice. Again he rubbed his hands together. ‘Justin, now. Should we say he was killed by fallen masonry, or that he was mistaken for a servant boy and given over to the slave master as spoils? There are many unpleasant ways for a boy to perish in the slave pens.’
Jiro’s lips thinned in disapproval, and his eyes narrowed. He was not comfortable with practices he considered brutal or purposely crude – after a childhood spent being bullied by his younger brother Buntokapi, he had no patience in that respect.
‘I want it done quickly and cleanly, without unnecessary pain; a “miscast” spear should do well enough,’ he snapped. Then his tone turned thoughtful. ‘Mara, though. If the living body of the Servant of the Empire were to fall into the hands of our troops, she would be another matter.’
Now it was Chumaka’s turn to shy from the discussion. Tsurani enough to arrange for men to be tortured or killed when matters made such measures necessary, still he did not relish the idea of causing pain for the Servant of the Empire. The look in Jiro’s eyes whenever he contemplated the Lady Mara inevitably gave him an inward urge to shiver.
‘I shall arrange to send your Force Commander, Omelo, this latest news of Acoma and Shinzawai deployment, with your leave, my master.’
Jiro gave a languid gesture of acquiescence, his thoughts still focused upon
revenge.
Barely waiting for this signal of approval, Chumaka backed off, bowing, his spirits reviving almost at once. Before Jiro had retrieved his scroll and returned to reading, the Anasati First Adviser was hurrying off, muttering ideas and plans half under his breath.
‘Those Minwanabi warriors who did not swear service at the time of Mara’s ascension to the title of Good Servant, now …’ he mused. A wicked gleam flashed in his eyes. ‘Yes. Yes. I think the time is appropriate to call them in from that frontier garrison and add their ranks to the confusion of our enemies.’
Chumaka hastened his step, loudly whistling now that he was out of his master’s earshot. ‘Gods,’ he broke off his tune to whisper, ‘what would life be without politics?’
The Empire mourned. On the announcement of Ichindar’s death, the gates to the Imperial Precinct had boomed shut, and the traditional red banners of mourning had unfurled from the walls. The land roads and the waterways of the Gagajin had come alive with messengers. The rare metal gongs and chimes in each of the temples of the Twenty Higher Gods then rang in homage at the passing of Ichindar, ninety-one strokes, one for each generation of his line. The city would stay closed to trade for the traditional twenty days of mourning, and all merchant shops and stalls not essential for the maintenance of life had their doors sealed with red bunting.
Inside Kentosani, the streets were subdued, the hawking cries of food sellers and water brokers stilled; and the chanting of the priests in prayer for the holy departed rang out in the mourning quiet. By tradition, conversation was forbidden in the streets, and even the city’s licensed beggars had to seek alms in pantomime. The Red God Turakamu had silenced the Voice of Heaven on Earth, and while Ichindar’s embalmed body lay in state amid a circle of lit candles and chanting priests, the Holy City also observed its silence of respect and sorrow.
On the twenty-first day, the Light of Heaven would be placed atop his funeral pyre, and the chosen successor anointed by the priests of the Higher and Lesser Gods would ascend the golden throne as the ashes cooled.
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