by Judith Tarr
People were staring in Asanian fashion, under lowered lids or out of the corners of their eyes. Poor creatures, wrapped in all those robes, compelled by custom to wear their hair unbound or knotted at their napes. The crop-headed, tunicked servants were happier by far than they.
His own people had had a little sense. Those who dared kilts, or who were entitled to them by blood and breeding, wore them with relief.
His mother might have worn one herself, but she had greater care for Asanian sensibilities than he had. Her gown covered her from throat to ankle but left her arms bare. Its heavy raw silk revealed little of the body beneath, which was a pity. She had beautiful breasts, firm still and round though she had borne and suckled a son.
She bowed her head to the compliment, with a slight, wry brush of vision: himself as she saw him, a slender dark beauty with a noble breadth of shoulder.
Dark, yes, beyond a doubt. Slender—lean, for a fact, and not much hope of gaining flesh as he aged, if his mother’s kin were any guide. They were all as ribby as spring wolves. Beauty . . .
He laughed. Lord Dushai thought him amused by something someone had said. He let it pass.
His mother was pleased with him. And why not? As far as she knew, he had given up his corpse-faced commoner and accepted his lot, though not, yet, so far as to take to bed an Asanian woman.
He did not even know where Vanyi was. Among the priests, most likely, or in the temple. She did not speak to him now; she did not touch his mind, nor respond when he sought hers.
No use to try. It only caused him pain. He drained his cup of snow-cold wine and held it out for the servant to fill.
Lord Dushai addressed him, soft and clear under the muted murmur that was Asanian conviviality. “I have prepared an entertainment for you, majesty,” he said, “which perhaps you have not seen before. We call it, if you will, a concourse of attractive lies.”
Estarion’s brows went up. This was new, and possibly interesting. He watched as black-clad servants brought lamps into the empty circle till it blazed as bright as noon. While they did that, others dimmed the lamps without, casting the hall into twilight.
He was aware of heightened alertness: his guards marking the deepening of shadows. The beginning of an ache marked those who were mages, and the wall they raised about him. He made himself ease, endure, await what would come.
Once the servants had arranged the lamps to their satisfaction, they departed. There was a silence. It was a peculiarly Asanian thing: no stirring of restless bodies, no sighs of impatience, no muttered commentary. Even his Varyani were quenched into stillness.
Thunder rolled. Estarion jumped like a deer. Dushai’s amusement brushed him, startling not for that it existed, but for that there was no scorn in it. He settled slowly, willed himself to smile as if at a jest.
Drums and flutes and horns, and instruments he had no names for. A consort of musicians marched into the light, arrayed themselves round the edges, settled to the floor, and never a pause or a soured note. The music they played was Asanian, rather like the yowl of mating cats, but, like their wine and their sauces, it grew on one.
He was ready, more or less, when the players came in. Their like haunted the roads of Keruvarion, wandering bands full of, as Lord Dushai had said, attractive lies. But these were no mountebanks. And they did not speak their parts. They sang.
Their tale was in his honor, of course, and apt in view of the morning. They played out the tale of Sarevadin and of Hirel Uverias, the dark prince and the golden. The one who was Hirel was Asanian, a beautiful boy with the fierce unhuman eyes of a lion. The one who was Sarevadin was a wonder: while he was a prince, one was certain beyond a doubt that he was male, but when she rose up out of the mages’ circle she was a woman, and no hint about her of the man that she had been. No magery, either, that Estarion could sense. It was all art.
He looked for a twist, for a stab of hostility in word or gesture. He found none. They were honest players, and their play an honest play. They did not touch on the tragedy of the Sunborn: the world he had sought to make, with the goddess bound in chains and the god triumphant over her, laid low by his heir’s betrayal.
He would have ruled alone, and set Asanion beneath his heel. His heir had set Asanion’s emperor on the throne beside her, sacrificing all that she had been, because she saw no other hope.
This was all sweetness. Two princes loved one another across an abyss of enmity; two empires could never be reconciled but through the love of those who ruled them.
An easy conclusion, for all the enormity of Sarevadin’s sacrifice. A simple resolution. The old emperors were disposed of—Ziad-Ilarios of Asanion dead defending the of Mirain’s empress, that empress dead in spite of him, Mirain himself ensorceled in his Tower—and the Mageguild thwarted in its desire to rule the rulers they had made, and the lovers wedded on the field of battle. Soldier of the Sun embraced soldier of the Lion. Emperor clove to empress life upon a golden throne. Joy ruled where had been only sorrow.
Estarion suppressed a snort. It was very pretty. Very convenient, too, for the talespinners. They never mentioned aftermaths. Emperor and empress growing old, emperor dying early as royal Asanians did, empress declining headlong to her own death, perhaps by her own hand, and Asanion chafing endlessly in the bonds of amity that they had forced upon it. Rebellions out of count, even a war or two, and their son dead in one such, and that one’s grandson poisoned in the Golden Palace, and the last of their line presented with the consequences.
He would have liked it better if someone had come raging and foaming out of the shadows after the last aria and prophesied death, doom, destruction. Like Vanyi’s prophet. That would have been nearer the truth.
The players finished their playing. The musicians concluded with a flourish. Asanians did not applaud; they rose and bowed. Estarion was pleased to follow their example. The players bowed in their turn, and it went back and forth, like a dance of odd birds.
Somewhat after he had had enough of it, he put an end to it by stepping into the light. The players were startled, but they masked it well.
The Sarevadin, seen close, was less ambiguous as to gender than before. The northern skin at least was genuine; the red Gileni mane was not. Estarion bit his tongue before he asked what could compel a northerner to make himself a eunuch. The player had pride in himself. He met Estarion’s eyes willingly, if warily.
The Hirel was older than he had seemed. His lion-eyes were clever shapes of glass with plain brown behind them, and a dun-drab lock escaping from the yellow wig. He was no more reluctant than his fellow to look an emperor in the face: a remnant maybe of the part he had played.
“You did well,” Estarion said to them.
He never understood why a word from him could mean so much. It was the fact of his rank, he supposed, and the fiery thing in his hand. These players wanted to kiss it, as people did in Keruvarion but never in Asanion. Or maybe the commoners did; but he was not allowed to approach them, or to be approached by them. Emperors did not do such things here. They did not even speak to lords of the Lower Courts.
He had caused a scandal by addressing these players. He did not care. They were Asanian, mostly, but some of them had come from Keruvarion. This manner of singing the parts was a thing of the far west, where they had gone a season or two before, having an enterprising leader: the young eunuch, whose name was Toruan.
Relieved of his wig and his woman’s dress, seated on the couch beside Estarion and partaking hungrily of meat and bread and fierce sauces, he was a pleasant, witty companion. He could deepen his voice almost to match Estarion’s or lighten it to a woman’s sweetness, but in itself it was soft and rather husky, not like a child’s, but not like a man’s or a woman’s, either. It was, Estarion thought, remarkable. He said so.
“Training,” said Toruan. “That’s why they do it: for the voice, to keep it from spoiling. Catch it soon enough, train it well enough, and it grows into this.” He indicated himself with a hand as elo
ngated as the rest of him; but his chest was vast, now that Estarion had his attention called to it. The gown had shaped it into a convincing semblance of a woman’s breasts.
“You chose this?” Estarion asked.
The eunuch paused. For a moment his face went still. Then he smiled. The pain in it was almost imperceptible. “Of course not, sire. My clan was poor. A sickness ravaged it, took all the hunters and laid low our herds and left us starving. I was the best of what was left. They sold me for a wagonload of corn. The one who took me was kin to a master of singers in Induverran. He heard me singing at my work. He had his kinsman come to listen; his kinsman bought me, and made me a singer.”
“The selling of slaves is banned in Keruvarion,” said Estarion, soft and cold.
“They went over the border to do it,” Toruan said. “They were hungry, sire. Their children were dying. My father and mother were dead, and I wanted to see more than our hunting runs, and be more than a wild clansman. It profited all of us.”
“It fed them for a season at the most. It robbed you of all your sons.”
“I didn’t know it would come to that,” said Toruan. “When they asked me if I wanted to be a singer, I was so glad, I sang. Then they gave me wine. When I woke from the drug that was in it, I found my price all paid, and no way to unpay it. I should have killed myself, I suppose. But I never quite worked myself up to it.”
Estarion’s tongue had a will of its own, and that could be cruel. “I . . . know about prices,” he said.
Toruan stared at Estarion’s hands—at the one that gleamed with gold and burned with unmerciful fire. “Maybe,” he said, “you do.”
And maybe, thought Estarion, he did not. Not such prices as these.
o0o
Toruan consented to bring his players and his repertory of sung plays to Kundri’j Asan, if not at once and not in the emperor’s train. “That wouldn’t be proper,” he said. He was northerner enough to break bread and share speech with the imperial majesty, but when it came to traveling with it, he went all Asanian.
Lord Dushai was regretting, maybe, his novel entertainment. Estarion could read none of it in his face. There were still the women to endure, kept long past their time by the emperor’s whim, and while they waited they had eaten and drunk perhaps to excess. Some of them were openly importunate. When clever soft hands slid beneath his kilt, he fled.
The chambers he had been given were quiet. No one stared or whispered. No one called him to account. He had offended a high lord, scandalized that lord’s court, and insulted its women. And he was, it seemed, to be left to rest in peace. Maybe that was his punishment.
Ulyai was asleep on the bed, although she opened an eye at Estarion’s approach. Sidani was awake.
She had been lying so, it seemed, for a while. She looked much as she always had, neither young nor truly old, and the glance she turned on him was brightly ironic. “So, youngling. I take a fit and wake in your bed. Do I make the natural assumption?”
“It was the safest place I could think of,” he said, “and the most comfortable.”
She wriggled in it. “So it is. They’ve learned something since last I came here. This is a proper bed. They were always trying to drown me in billows of cushions.”
“I had the servants get rid of those. Asanian beds aren’t bad, once you get down to them.”
“I never thought of that.”
She lay silent for a while. He hovered, wavered. The golden collar irked him suddenly; he extricated himself from it.
Once it was gone, he found that he could breathe. He sat on the bed’s edge. “Are you well?” he asked her.
“Was I ill?”
He shrugged a little.
“I was,” she said. She sounded surprised. “I was cold, I remember that. I’d been thinking too much. Remembering.”
“It put you in a fever,” he said. “Iburan looked at you. He said it was nothing he could cure.”
“No one can mend old age. Not even gods.”
“You’re not old.”
“Infant,” she said, “stop that. Of course I’m old. I’m ancient.”
“You’re not going to die quite yet.”
“Alas for that.” It was only half mockery. “Watching one’s husband die is not pleasant. When one’s son dies . . . that’s harder. And when one’s grandson is laid in his tomb, then, youngling, one begins to wonder if one isn’t cursed. And such a curse! ‘May you outlive all your descendants.’”
Estarion flung up his burning hand, casting the curse aside. The light of it made her blink. “Don’t say such things,” he said.
“What? Someone might be listening? Gods don’t care. Men can’t harm me.”
“You are appalling,” he said.
She grinned: a shadow of her wonted insouciance, but it was white and wicked enough. “Are you going to sleep, youngling, or do you have other sins in mind?”
His cheeks were burning. Still, he met her grin with one of his own. “You’ll live,” he said.
Godri had spread him a bed in one of the lesser rooms, with eloquent if wordless disapproval. Estarion went to it in something like gladness, once he had seen Sidani asleep again.
Maybe he witched her into it. Maybe he did not need to.
16
The new morning was if anything more heat-sodden than the one before. Estarion woke in a sweat, to sounds like muted battle.
One of the voices was Godri’s. The others he did not know, but he knew the cadence of Asanian speech. They had looked for the emperor in his bed, it seemed, and failed to find him.
He rolled to his feet, yawning hugely, stretching till his bones creaked. The battle was no longer quite so muted. He went out to face it.
Asanians were ridiculous about naked bodies. Bed-play to them was the high art, and they performed it, as far as he had ever been able to tell, in as many clothes as possible. They never bared more than faces and hands and feet, except in the bath; and then they pretended that they were robed to the eyes. They even wore clothes to sleep.
Absurd; lunatic in such heat as this. He entered the battlefield as he was born, with no covering but his skin. The silence was thunderous. Godri faced an army of Asanians, every one of them in a servant’s tunic, and every one determined, it seemed, to pass or die.
On sight of Estarion, they dropped flat on their faces.
“Godri,” he said. “Who are these people?”
Godri’s eyes were battle-bright; his breath came hard. He steadied it enough to reply, “They say they belong to the Regent of Asanion. Who is, they say, on the road to Induverran this very moment. And who expects to see the emperor properly—as they say—bathed, clothed, and arrayed to receive him.”
“And you object?” Estarion asked.
“They have,” he said, “razors. And robes. And bottles of scent.”
Estarion raised his brows.
“They informed me, my lord, that my services would no longer be needed. You are in Asanion now. Asanion will look after you.”
When Godri was as precise as that, Godri was most dangerous. Estarion smiled slowly. “Will it, then? And I suppose I’m to wear the ten robes and the wig, and the mask too? And sit on a throne in the hall? And speak only through a Voice?”
“Yes,” said Godri.
“Pity,” said Estarion, “that I won’t be doing any of that.” He shifted from Gileni to Asanian. “Up, sirs. Listen to your emperor. The bath I’ll take. But no razors, and no scent. My squire will see to my robing. If his grace the Regent is displeased, then I take it upon my head.”
There was one use for Asanian servility. It kept them from arguing with royalty. The Regent’s servants were not pleased in the least, but they could not protest. The emperor had spoken. They must do as he commanded.
They bathed him in blessedly cool water. They did not threaten him with razors or drench him with scent. They did object to the kilt which Godri proffered. “That will not do,” the chief of them said—safe, maybe, because it
was the squire he spoke to.
“It will do,” Estarion said.
It was a royal kilt, scarlet edged with gold. The belt that went with it was rich, gold leaved over thickly carved leather, and he suffered the full weight of northern ornament: rings, armlets, necklaces, earrings of pure and heavy gold lightened with a gem or two; strings of gold and ruby woven in his hair, and threads of gold in the curls of his beard. He was blinding; dazzling; glorious. “Since,” he said, “after all, I am receiving the Regent of Asanion.”
“He’s not going to approve,” Godri observed.
“Alas for his grace,” said Estarion.
o0o
The hall was as cool as anything could be in this climate. Its lofty dome held off the worst of the heat, and its many-colored stone kept to itself the coolness of the night. A pair of servants wielded gilded fans, cooling Estarion with their breezes.
The chair on which he sat was not too uncomfortable as thrones went. Asanians knew the virtue of cushions, too much so when it came to their beds, but thoroughly satisfactory under his rump. He rested his foot on the living stool that presented itself: Ulyai, who judged herself more truly needed where he was than with Sidani.
She was not forthcoming as to the woman’s whereabouts. Safe, she informed him in the image of an ul-queen laired with her cubs. He decided to trust her. In the circumstances he had little choice.
His own escort was present only in part. Most of the courtiers were still asleep or amusing themselves as courtiers could in a foreign city. His Guard was halved to those on day-duty. His mother was there, of course, and Iburan, and one or two priest-mages. Not Vanyi. Everyone else in that hall was Asanian.
A small shiver ran down Estarion’s spine. So many yellow faces. So many minds turned on him, and not one level pair of eyes.
This too was his empire. These too were his people. They did not ask that he love them, only that he rule them.
