Arrows of the Sun

by Judith Tarr

  “They do that,” said Vanyi. “They give, and they take away. Else they’d not be gods.”

  “Maybe we need no gods.”

  Vanyi was not unduly shocked. One learned on Journey: not everyone yielded easily to the gods’ will.

  Sidani moved forward into the light of the vigil-lamp, almost as if she had forgotten that she entered a temple. Her face was still a shadow, but her eyes were bright, fixed on Vanyi’s face. “For once I don’t appall you. Do you agree with me, then?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  Sidani looked down at her feet on the fine colored pavement, and up past Vanyi to the altar with its undying light. Her hand rose to her throat. Something, some trick of the lamplight, caught the thickening of scars. Old galls.

  Slave’s collar? There were no slaves under the sway of the Sun.

  Vanyi touched her torque. No slaves. But priests enough, and the torque a cruel weight, rubbing raw the necks of those who bore it.

  “Yes,” said the wanderer. “I was a priestess of the Sun. No one else has seen, do you know that? Least of all your great one, your holy one, your mage and priest and master. He’s blind to aught but light.”

  “You ran away,” Vanyi said.

  Sidani laughed, harsh as a gorecrow’s cry. “Ran, and was not driven? Can you be so sure of that?”

  “You’re not one to do anything but what you choose for yourself.”

  “That’s a flaw in me,” Sidani said. “Yes, I ran. I flung my torque on the altar, cursed the day I took it, and declared myself dead and damned. They wouldn’t help me, you see. They wouldn’t lend me their power when my beloved was dying.”

  Vanyi shivered. “They can be cold, the Sun’s priests. They’ll do nothing for one the god has touched.”

  “So they said of him. But they always hated him. He wouldn’t believe in them, you see, or bow to the god. Not even in the end, when the Light was in his face.” Her own was stark, racked with memory. “Oh, he was a cold, cruel, godless, heartless monster of a man, and I loved him with all that I was. He was the half of me. But for him, I would never have been.”

  “Chubadai?”

  Sidani’s lips stretched back from her teeth. “That fat pirate? He never laid a hand on me. He knew I’d take it off if he tried.”

  “He died, your lover. And so you turned apostate.” The words were cold on Vanyi’s tongue, with a tang of bitterness. “I . . . don’t know that I could do as much.”

  “Why should you? He’ll live long, your lissome lad, if an assassin doesn’t get him first. My beauty was born to die young. He didn’t age too terribly before he went—that much grace the god gave him. He just. . . went. One moment all there for me, and a good hot quarrel we had going, too. The next, empty: drowned in light.”

  “You fought on his deathbed?”

  Sidani smiled. “It was splendid. He insisting to his last breath that there were no gods, and all the proof in front of him, and I ready to strangle him if I didn’t kiss him to death first. It took him just then, like lightning from the core of him: seized him and consumed him. No long slow withering into dotage for my lord. He went up like a torch.” Her smile died. “That was glorious. But the priests who refused to give him life when he took sick—them, I never forgave. Nor ever shall.”

  “I should rebuke you,” Vanyi said, “if I were a proper priestess.”

  “You’re proper enough.” Sidani strode to the altar with the air of one who dares her greatest fear, and turned her face upward to the lamp that hung above it. “There,” she said. “There, god and father. See what I think of you. Will you strike me now? You dragged out my life for years past counting, half a mind that I was, half a spirit, half a soul. Take me, damn you. Put an end to this endlessness.”

  Her grief was like a wind in that holy place, bleak and cold. It was older than Vanyi, and stronger, with power in it beyond magery. It left her empty of thought or will.

  Perilous. Some small part of her knew it, fought it. The rest fell before it.

  o0o

  Pain. Her cheek stung. She looked into a face she knew and did not know, black eagle-face, eyes—

  “Your eyes are wrong,” she said.

  They blinked. Sidani drew back. Both of them were on the floor, Vanyi lying, she kneeling, sitting on her heels.

  Her eyes were perfectly ordinary northern eyes, if sharper than most. Why Vanyi had wanted them to be yellow, she could not think. Fuddlement, no more. They all looked alike, these northerners, with their faces like birds of prey.

  For the first time in a long while, she yearned for a face that was like her own. Brown, maybe, with wind and weather, but white under it, and eyes sea-colored, and hair neither straight nor curling but something of both. Sharp-chinned, long-nosed, Island-bred, and no great waveless shield of land between herself and it.

  Her fingers clutched at unyielding floor. Her stomach heaved. Laughter choked her. All these days, months, years, and now of all times she succumbed to the land-sickness.

  No wonder people said they wanted to die. It racked her: knotted her stomach, cramped her belly, doubled her up gasping.

  A thin strong hand stroked her hair back from her sweating face. Arms lifted her. A voice spoke, cursing softly and with great inventiveness.

  “Not,” said Vanyi. “Not your fault.”

  “Only about half of it.” Sidani held her as she struggled, with ease that froze her into stillness. “Stop that. This place is too strong for you, with what I woke in it. I’m taking you where you’ll be safer.”

  “Don’t need—don’t want—”

  Little good that did. Vanyi was going to be properly and catastrophically sick, and soon. She hoped she would not do it all over Sidani’s coat.

  These new eyes above her were as they should be, bright gold with astonishment in the dark face, and the temper that flared in it was oddly comforting. Arms somewhat stronger and much more welcome closed about her. Anger trembled in them. “What’s wrong with her? What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” Vanyi said before Sidani could begin. “The sea. It’s too far. My blood—my tides—”

  They were flowing out of her. Relentless, as if the moons had set hooks in her belly and torn it apart. As if—

  “No!”

  Her courses were strong. They always had been. But this was stronger than anything she had known. There was more in it than the tide of the moons, more in her womb than vows and emptiness.

  The bindings had failed. They had made a child together, she and Estarion—neither of them suspecting, neither of them dreaming that it could be possible. And it died, this son, this daughter, it did not matter. The bindings, waking too late, closed in upon it. They killed it. Nothing that she did could stop it.

  o0o

  “What did you do to her?”

  Estarion was much quieter this time. The anger was beaten out of him.

  Neither of them had moved to fetch help. Sidani knew what to do: her hands were deft, catching the flood when it came, stanching it with cloths that she drew it seemed from air. One of them did not move as well as the other, he noticed with remote and bitter clarity. It was twisted somewhat, and its palm was scarred as if she had held it in a fire.

  Odd that he had not noticed before. Odd that he noticed now, or cared, when nothing should matter but Vanyi’s life.

  “I think,” the woman said when Vanyi was quiet, more asleep than unconscious, “that you had somewhat more to do with this than I. Has she miscarried before?”

  The word rang in his brain. “Mis—” He tossed his head. It would not come clear. “She can’t! She’s womb-bound. Spelled. She can’t—”

  “You forget what you are,” Sidani said. “Did no one teach you to hold your seed until you were ready to beget your heir?”

  He recoiled. “That’s barbaric!”

  Her laughter was weary beyond telling. Something in it struck him nearly to tears. “So. That much of Asanion is yours. Did your mother know what she was pe
rmitting? Or did she care?”

  He could not think of that. Of what it would mean. That his mother knew, and had not prevented it.

  “The goddess is a milder thing than she was when I was young,” Sidani said, still in that tired voice, but without the terrible mirth. “But she’s a cold one still, and heedless of life or light. I can’t fault your mother, I suppose. She’s but serving the power she’s sworn to.”

  “My mother is not evil!”

  “Of course not,” said Sidani. “She’s a good priestess and a strong empress. Your father chose her well.” As if, thought Estarion, she had a right to judge. “But she did ill not to warn you that the Sun’s seed is stronger than mages’ bindings. That it could come to this.”

  He looked down at Vanyi. She seemed very small in the wide bed, very white and still. His heart twisted. “Oh, god and goddess. I could have killed her.”

  “Nonsense!” He jumped at the sharpness in Sidani’s tone. “She’s a good, strong wench—or she would be if your priests hadn’t meddled with her cycles. Better for you both if she’d seen to it herself, and not trusted in someone else’s bindings. Although,” she added, musing, “even that might not have come to anything, you being what you are. That fire will burn in the void between the stars.”

  “What are you? How do you know so much?”

  The bright black eyes slanted toward him and then away. There was nothing old in them at all, and nothing young. They were beyond age. “I tell stories. I live a few, maybe. Your grandfather got your father on a woman proven barren, proclaimed so by mages. He sowed his seed in the dry land, and it brought forth a bright fruit. She’s no fallow field, this one, nor will be, now the gates are open.”

  Estarion’s hands lowered of themselves to Vanyi’s body, tracing the paths of life and magic. They ran clean and they ran straight, no knot of coiled spells beneath the heart. Blood had washed it away.

  He began to shake. “Gods. Oh, gods. She’ll be forsworn.”

  “Don’t moan.” Sidani gathered together bloodied sheets and cloths and made a bundle of them. “Someone will have to wash these.”

  “And explain them.”

  “Never explain,” she said. “You are the emperor. That and no more is your explanation. But,” she added, “if you insist, then your lady has had a particularly calamitous onset of her courses. They’re never easy for her, are they?”

  “No,” said Estarion unwillingly. But, “Mages will know as soon as they see her.”

  “Let them. More fools they, for fancying that they could bridle Sun’s blood.”

  He was not afraid of her, not exactly. But as he saw her standing there like a serving-woman with her armful of bloodied cloths, he knew suddenly and piercingly that she was more than he had imagined. Vanyi had seen it: blessed, damnable perception. She had not seen what was in her own body, not looking for it, not expecting it, and it had betrayed her.

  “Go to sleep,” said Sidani, dryly practical as any grandmother with a stubborn child. “She’ll be sleeping for a while, and when she wakes she’ll need you there, as strong as you can be. She wanted that baby too badly to be easy about losing it.”

  “But she didn’t even know—”

  The glance that raked him was burning cold. “Manchild,” she said, “go to sleep.”

  And, like the infant that she reckoned him, he went. He sensed no sorcery in it. It simply was.

  9

  “A son! A son for the Olenyai!”

  The cry rang from the tower of their stronghold, riding the notes of a horn. So it always was when a son was born alive, unblemished, and spoken for by the mages. Daughters were neither sung nor celebrated, although they suffered the same testing, the same speaking of mages, and the same hard fate if they failed: death, and casting out for the birds to feed on.

  “That’s another one for Shajiz,” Marid said, down below in the court of swords, where he was alone but for his swordbrother. “What does that make now? Six? Seven?”

  “Five,” said Korusan. He was honing his right-hand sword; he had barely paused for the birthing-call.

  Marid shrugged. “Then he’s got two more coming. Remarkable. Do you remember when he was so behindhand in his duty that they were talking of forbidding him the women altogether?”

  Korusan ran the stone down the bright blade and up again. “So they were,” he said. His voice had no inflection.

  Marid shot him a glance. Here where none could see them but Olenyai, he went unveiled. The single scar on his cheek was as redly new and no doubt as itchy in its mending as Korusan’s: he rubbed it, fidgeting as he always did, for Marid was a restless man. “Some come late to it, that’s all.”

  Korusan’s hand stopped. He thought of clasping the sharpened steel, for the pleasure of the pain. “You have two sons,” he said.

  “So will you, when you get to it.”

  “I go to the women every night,” said Korusan. “Every cycle of Brightmoon they name themselves and the men who have gone to them, and the seed that has sprouted in them. They often name me among the sowers. But never among the harvest.”

  “You’re very young,” said Marid, who to be sure was a whole year the elder.

  “I was doing a man’s duty while you were still a flute-voiced child.”

  “And who was it that I heard last cycle, singing descant with the girls?”

  Korusan’s sword sang into its sheath. There had been a moment while he raised it, when Marid’s eyes had flickered, his hand twitched toward his own sheathed blade. But he would not begin battle, if battle must be. Not against his swordbrother.

  Korusan would have liked to be as certain of himself. Olenyai were loyal to their lords and to one another. It was bred into them. But Korusan was not Olenyas—not in the blood, and not in the soul.

  “I think,” said Korusan. “I fear . . .”

  He could not say it, even to Marid, who was as close to him as any living thing could be.

  Nor would Marid set it in words for him. He was blind, was Marid, and deaf to what he did not wish to hear. “Shajiz was one-and-twenty when his first son was conceived; and he had been going to the women since he was twelve years old. Early manhood isn’t early fatherhood, brother.”

  “Early is all I have,” said Korusan. But not loudly. Not for Marid to hear. He thrust himself to his feet. “Maybe it will be tonight.”

  Marid grinned, transparent in his relief. “Maybe it will. Luck to your sowing, Olenyas.”

  “Luck to your reaping,” said Korusan, “Olenyas.”

  o0o

  The woman was willing. She was beautiful, also, as they often were, and she was skilled in the high arts. She could receive as well as give pleasure. Her murmur of thanks seemed honest, her smile unfeigned when he paid her the compliment of asking, “May I come to you again?”

  She lowered her eyes as was proper, and said, “My lord, you may.” And then she said: “Tomorrow, if it pleases my lord.”

  His heart should have been light. The women of the Olenyai were given to choose whom they would see a second time, as it was given the men to choose whom they would visit once. He had pleased her, then, and well.

  But he was in a bleak mood as he left the place of the women and entered the place of the men. Harems in the world without, he was told, were scented, close-walled places. This was walled, to be sure, but its scents were simple ones: clean flesh, clean garments, the pungency of herbs or the sweetness of a flower in a woman’s hair. Olenyai knew well the arts of simplicity. It made them strong; it taught them to focus on what mattered.

  Men leaving the women’s quarters walked a path well trodden through the years, up a stair worn deep in the middle, along a passage hung with tapestries so old as to have lost all color and figure and faded to the muted brown-grey of the stone behind them. Then they turned, either up to their own place—whether chamber or barracks—or down to the training grounds and the gates.

  Although it was late, well past the midnight bell, Korusan turned tow
ard one of the gates. It was unguarded. No one in Asanion would enter the fortress of the Olenyai, even if he had won his way so far. To pass those walls was forbidden any not of the Order, or of the House of the Lion. The lands that lay about it were not wide as princely domains went, but they sufficed to feed and furbish the castle; and they were guarded as the gates were not, by men in black robes with hidden faces.

  He slid the bolt easily, for it was kept well oiled, and stepped into the cool of the dark before dawn. It had rained in the early night, but now all the clouds were blown away. The moons were glorious: blood-red Greatmoon at the full, silver Brightmoon some days short of it, filling the sky with fire, overwhelming all but the brightest of the stars.

  There was someone sitting near the gate on a heap of stone left over from the building and grown now into the earth it lay on. In the bright moonlight the robe was silver, but it would be grey in the sun; the hair was frosted white, but would be youthful gold where eyes saw daylight-clear.

  Korusan knew this lightmage by sight. It was a woman, and often about the castle. He had not seen her alone before, without her darkmage shadow. Here she had shadows in plenty, but none lived and breathed. They were all born of the moons.

  Her eyes glittered as she turned them toward him. He knew better than to think that she had not been aware of him from the moment he opened the gate, and likely before that.

  “It is odd,” he said, “to see a lightmage here, under the moons.”

  “But they are as bright almost as day,” she said.

  “Almost,” said Korusan. Perhaps he should feel his presumption. Olenyai did not speak thus easily with mages, as if mages were folk like any other. But he was not born an Olenyas.

  “We all must understand our opposites,” the lightmage said, “or they may consume us.”

  “Have you consumed your opposite?” Korusan inquired.

  She laughed, a silver sound, so alien to her rank and to this place that he started. “Oh, my darkmage! He is a daytime creature; the sun sets, and he falls asleep, and sleeps the night through. But I can never sleep when the moons are high. Do you hear them singing?”