A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  Sarevan laughed with him, freely, but hit him without gentleness after. “Whelp! This isn’t a raiding party.”

  Zha’dan hit back. Sarevan lunged at him. They rolled on the grass in laughing combat.

  Ulan made himself a part of it, growling in high delight. At the end of it they lay all together, hiccoughing, scoured clean of aught but mirth.

  o0o

  Sunset brought battle again, but battle of words, without laughter. Sarevan was minded to cross Asanion as he had crossed Keruvarion, in secret, taking sustenance from land and sky. Hirel would not hear of it. “This is not your wild east. The hunting belongs to the lords and satraps, each in his own demesne. Those who hunt without leave are reckoned thieves and punished accordingly.”

  “Not with Ulan and Zha’dan to cover our tracks,” said Sarevan.

  Hirel tossed his head, impatient. “And if they do, how swiftly can we ride? How far must we wander, to be secret, to fill our bellies? How careful must we be to spare our seneldi, now that we may find no others?”

  “What do you want to do? Take the open road? Invite our assassins to finish what our foolish flight interrupted?”

  “Take the road, yes; outrun our enemies. If enemies we have. I saw no daggered shadows. I tasted no poison in our wine. The posthouse might have been abandoned, so easily we left it.”

  “It was not—” Sarevan’s tongue met his mind and froze. He had been too busy running to think. He had forgotten indeed that this was not Keruvarion.

  “Speculate,” said Hirel, “if you can. Sorcery nearly felled you. You gave way to instinct: you fled it. What if you were meant to do just that? To run into a trap. Or more subtle yet, to abandon the swift way; to take to the shadows. And thereby most certainly to delay my coming to Kundri’j.”

  “And if you are delayed, Aranos becomes high prince.” Sarevan liked the taste of it not at all. It was alien; it burned, like Asanian spices. He spat it out. “But if we ride openly, the enemy will know. He’ll lay new traps. I don’t think he’ll wait long to make them deadly.”

  “Are you afraid?” Hirel asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid!” Sarevan shot back. “But a coward, I’m not. I don’t want to arrive late, but neither do I want to arrive dead.”

  “That would not be comfortable,” said Hirel. “We have Zha’dan and Ulan. We have you, whom sorcery cannot fail to rouse. We even have myself. I have no power and no great skill in hunting or in fighting, but I do know Asanion. If we vanish for a day or two, press on through the shadows, I think then we may return to the daylight.”

  “With stolen seneldi?”

  “Ah,” said Zha’dan, entering the fray at last, “that’s easy. We find a town with a fair. We trade. We do it twice or thrice, over a day or two. Then when our path is comfortably confused, we go back to the inns and the highroad.”

  “It won’t work,” Sarevan said. “We may lose a pair of seneldi, but we can’t lose our faces.”

  “You may,” Hirel said slowly. “Sometimes, Olenyai go all masked. It is a rite of theirs. We cannot sustain such a deception: the masked do not mingle with folk in inns, nor speak any tongue but their own secret battle-language. But for a day, two, three—it is possible.”

  “Where will we find the robes?” demanded Sarevan. He was being difficult, he knew it. But someone had to be.

  “I can wield a needle,” said Hirel, astonishingly. “For the cloth, we find a fair. I can be a slave for an hour if I must: a slave whose mistress has a fancy for black.”

  Sarevan opened his mouth, closed it. Zha’dan was regarding Hirel in something remarkably like admiration.

  With a sharp hiss, Sarevan conceded the battle. “Very well. Tonight we ride in the shadows. Tomorrow we find a fair.”

  Hirel did not gloat over his victory. It was Zha’dan who whooped and kissed him, disconcerting him most gratifyingly, and went to saddle the seneldi.

  o0o

  They found their fair: a town with a market, and a wooded hill outside it, thick enough with undergrowth to shelter the beasts and the two men who could not show their faces. Hirel went down on foot in his underrobe, cut to the brevity of a slave’s tunic, with Zha’dan’s iron collar about his neck and a purse of Asanian coins hung from his belt.

  The Lord Uzmeidjian had not missed them or their golden kin, Zha’dan had assured the two princes; and certainly Zha’dan had earned them. Hirel had looked at him and sighed, but said nothing.

  The boy was gone for a long while. Sarevan tried to sleep through some of it. The rest he spent on his belly in a knot of canes, keeping watch over the road and the town. Ulan kept him company.

  He had shed his damnable tunic; flies buzzed about him in the day’s heat but did not sting, and the earth was cool. He would have been comfortable, if he had known how Hirel was faring. The boy had done well enough in his venture into a Varyani town, but this was Asanion. Who knew what niggling law he might have managed to break in his princely ignorance? Did he even know how to bargain in the market? Or if the mages after all had not lost him, and had seized him—

  Sarevan set his jaw and willed himself to stop fretting. His face itched more maddeningly than ever. He had used the last of the dye this morning. It had stung like fire; he had almost cried out, as much with knowledge as with pain. It was the dye that so tormented his skin: eating at it, burning it, leaving it raw and angry. Even if he could find another bottle, he did not think his face would survive it.

  He worked his fingers into Ulan’s fur, lest they claw new weals in his cheeks. People passed on the road. Was that a boy with hot-gold hair cropped into a wild mane, coming up from the town?

  Not yet.

  He set himself to his vigil. The sun crawled to its zenith.

  o0o

  Ulan growled, the barest murmur. Sarevan shook himself awake and peered. A slave with a pack on his back trudged slowly toward the thicket. A slave with dust-drab hair.

  Dust in truth, and a handsome bruise purpling his cheekbone. He started as Sarevan rose out of the thicket; his eyes widened at the bare body.

  He did not speak. He looked both furious and pleased with himself. He strode into the thicket’s heart, tossed down his pack, greeted Zha’dan with a vanishingly brief smile.

  “You’ve been fighting,” Sarevan accused him.

  He knelt to uncover his booty. Coolly, without looking up, he said, “I have been defending my honor.”

  Sarevan seized him by the nape and hauled him up. “What did you do, you little fool? Were you trying to get us all killed?”

  Hirel twisted free, angry now; a white heat, rigidly restrained. “I was trying to be what I seemed to be. I did not heed the taunting of the market curs. But when they seized me and sought to strip me, because they had a wager, and they wished to see what sort of eunuch I was—was I to let them see that I am no eunuch at all?” He tossed his hair out of his eyes. They were fiery gold. “I had already let it be known that I served a lady; and the law is strict. One of my adversaries had a knife, if perchance it should be needed. Should I have let him use it?”

  Sarevan said nothing, quenched for once, beginning to regret his hastiness. Hirel was white and shaking. He was worse than angry. He was on the thin edge between murder and tears.

  He calmed himself visibly, drawing in deep shuddering breaths. “I defended myself well enough. Better certainly than they looked for. They chose to seek meeker prey elsewhere; and I won a modicum of respect from the merchants. They did not drive as hard a bargain as they might have.”

  “You liked that,” Sarevan said. “Maybe you should have been born a merchant.”

  “Better a tradesman than a worthless vagabond. Or,” said Hirel, bending again to his unpacking, “a eunuch. Of any sort.”

  Zha’dan looked ready to ask how there could be more than one. Mercifully for all of them, he held his tongue.

  o0o

  Hirel had needles and thread and cutting blades. He had bolts of black linen and bolts of fine black wool. He ha
d belts of black leather, and black gauntlets, and boots that proved not to fit too badly; and marvel of marvels, four black-hilted swords in black sheaths. They were Olenyai blades; but he would not tell how he had found them. He looked both proud and guilty.

  “He stole them,” Zha’dan translated, with approval.

  Hirel flushed. “I appropriated them. As high prince I am overlord of all warriors. I claimed my royal right.”

  Zha’dan applauded him. He flushed more deeply still and attacked the somber linen.

  The others found themselves pressed into service. With Hirel directing them, they transformed themselves into shiu’oth Olenyai: warriors under solemn vow.

  When they were done, the sun was westering, and Sarevan was sucking a much-stabbed finger. Hirel slapped down his hand. “Mask yourself,” the boy commanded. Sarevan obeyed rather sourly.

  Hirel stood back, hands on hips, head cocked. “You will do,” he judged, “for a while. If no one examines you too closely.”

  “You comfort me,” said Sarevan.

  Hirel ignored the barb. For himself he had stitched a headdress to match the rest: the filleted headcloth and the mask that concealed all beneath it, even to the eyes. A panel of thinnest linen set over them was easy enough to see out of, but from the outside seemed featureless darkness.

  “We look alarming,” Zha’dan said. He sounded highly amused.

  Sarevan was stifling already. At least, he reflected wryly, he would not find it so easy to claw at his itching cheeks.

  o0o

  People had stared at a dozen Olenyai and a young lord and his two barbarian slaves. They did not stare at three shiu’oth Olenyai. Their eyes slid around the shadowed shapes; their voices muted; their bodies drew back smoothly, as water parts from a stone.

  It was almost ridiculously simple to exchange the stolen seneldi for a pair of black mares. The seller did not haggle at all. He almost thrust the beasts at them, his eyes rolling white, his plump face sheening with sweat. He asked no questions. When they left him, he looked ready to weep for relief.

  So with the next seller, and the next. Most often it was plain fear. Sometimes it was fear poisoned with hate. Then Sarevan’s back would twitch, dreading a stone or a hurled blade.

  o0o

  Zha’dan was swift to lose his pleasure in the game. In the night, when they camped, he was unwontedly silent. He would speak of it only once. “I’ve never been hated before. It hurts.”

  Hirel comforted him as only Hirel could. Sarevan lay apart and tried not to hear them.

  The trying only made it the more distinct. Whispers. A flicker of laughter. A breath caught as if in sudden pleasure. The rhythm of bodies moving together: the oldest dance in the world.

  For the first time in a long while, he was aware of the weight of his torque. He took it off, straining a little, for the iron sheathing stiffened it.

  The night air was cold on his bared neck. He rubbed it, feeling of the scars, the circle of calluses that had grown from old galls.

  A bitter smile touched the comer of his mouth. An Asanian would not have known that he was not a slave, that he had not been one for long years.

  The first had been the worst. He had lived with numbroot salve and no little blood, and wounds that festered, and no bandages. Bandages only prolonged the agony.

  He turned the blessed, brutal thing in his hands. Disguised, it looked liked what it was: a badge of servitude.

  He held it to his breast. It was a cold lover. It granted no mortal peace.

  Yet there was peace in it, bounded within its circle. Peace that came neither easily nor quickly, and yet it came. He was still Avaryan’s priest. Neither murder nor treason could rob him of that.

  o0o

  The hunt had lost them. Sarevan marked it in the passing of pain.

  “For a long while I could feel them looking for us,” said Zha’dan. “They followed the seneldi we stole, I think, and when that trail proved false, cast wide for scent of us. Now there’s nothing.”

  “They will wait ahead,” Hirel said. “In Kundri’j.”

  He did not sound unduly cast down. The Golden City was far away yet, and they were advancing at a good pace under a clear sky. The brilliance of autumn had begun to touch it; the land beneath was like and yet wholly unlike anything Sarevan had known in the east.

  Hirel had been wise, he conceded now, to demand that they take the open road. In the heart of Asanion, there were no shadows to hide in: no wilderness. The broad rolling plain was a pattern of walled towns joined together by roads, each town set like a jewel in a webwork of fields.

  The streams here ran straight and steady, wrought by men and not by gods; the trees were planted in rows that guided and guarded the wind, or in the artful disarray of the high ones’ hunting grounds. And always there were the gods, the small ones and the great ones, worshipped in shrines at every milestone, and often between.

  This was a tamed land. A company could not ride free over the fields, or wander from the highroad on a path that though narrower might prove a shorter way to Kundri’j. Even the road had its laws and divisions, its hierarchy of passers, from the slave on bare feet to the prince in his chariot.

  For shiu’oth Olenyai on swift seneldi, there was the broad smooth verge and an open way, but they might not stray into a field or onto the road itself. And even they had to stop for the passage of a personage, or slow to a crawl in traversing a town.

  Now and then as they crossed Asanion, and more often as they drew near to the imperial city, they had seen caravans of slaves shuffling in chains from market to market. Hirel had seen, but he had not seen, as was the way in the Golden Empire. Zha’dan learned that custom quickly enough: his people had captives and the odd bought servant, though never whole market-droves of them.

  Sarevan, raised to abhor the thought of men kept like cattle, took refuge in the schooling of a prince. What one could not alter, one endured. And though it shamed him, he was glad for once of his mind’s crippling, that he could not sense the misery that throbbed about the chained and plodding lines. He could look away and make himself forget.

  But he had not had to ride within sight and sound of a slave market.

  o0o

  Sarevan did not ask the name of the town. He did not wish to know. It was large; it trumpeted prosperity. The road ran straight through it, dividing its market, so that travelers might pause to trade a wayworn senel for a fresh one, to satisfy hunger or thirst, to buy a weapon or a garment or a jewel.

  Or a slave. There were, it seemed, a number of purveyors of such goods. Some did so in the privacy of walls, marked only by a sign above the door: a gilded manacle or an image carven in the likeness of a particular breed. Others set up tents, open or half open or enclosed. And here and there stood a simple platform, perhaps canopied, perhaps not, with a man crying the day’s wares to a throng of buyers.

  The three of them rode close together with Hirel in the middle. Even behind his mask, the boy seemed much as always. A little stiff, a little haughty, disdaining to take notice of the world about him. His mare was moving very slowly.

  She stopped. Sarevan’s glance strayed. When he looked back, the saddle was empty.

  Bregalan spun on his haunches, breasting a current turned suddenly against him. Sarevan raged, but the stallion could advance no swifter than a walk, and for that he was jostled and cursed, even threatened by a charger with bronze-sheathed horns. He snorted and slashed; the destrier veered away. He plunged through the gap that the other had left.

  Hirel’s rough-coated mare stood abandoned and beginning to wander. Beyond her the road gave way to a broad shallow space filled with people, focused on a platform and a huddle of slaves.

  They were all boys, the youngest perhaps nine summers old, the eldest a little older than Hirel. They were naked, collared, their hands bound behind them that they might not seek to cover their shame.

  Most were Asanians, slight and tawny; two were pale-skinned green-eyed Islanders; one was a
tribesman of the north, haughty and sullen, and several standing close together had the faces of desert wanderers. They were all eunuchs, every one.

  Sarevan found Hirel easily enough. He was taller than many, and he was the only one in Olenyai black. He stood on the edge of the crowd, straight as a carven knight. His mask was crumpled in his hand. Beneath the dusty headcloth his face was bloodless.

  Sarevan followed his eyes. One of the Asanians stood a little apart. The others were chained together, neck and ankle. This one had his own chain and his own guard; his collar was gilded, and from it hung a written tablet.

  “A thoroughbred,” said Hirel. “He will be offered last, and the seller will accept no price unless he judges it sufficient. See, how fair his skin, how pure a gold his hair, how flawless his face; how perfect his age, the very flower of boyhood. I wonder that he is sold in the open market; that is not common for slaves of his quality. Perhaps his lord has a debt to pay.”

  It was too calm, that voice. His eyes were too wide and too pale.

  Sarevan gripped his shoulder; it was rigid, impervious. “It’s not you, Hirel.”

  “A season ago,” said Hirel, “it was. It would have—I would have—”

  Sarevan pulled him close. He did not resist. He was shaking; his brow was damp. But he would not turn away from the boy who was so much like himself as he had been when Sarevan found him, a child poised on the very brink of manhood.

  He had passed it in the season since. This one never would.

  “He is not you,” Sarevan said again. “He is brass and painted bone. He is soft; he is pretty; his eyes are not the eyes of the lion. He is nothing beside you.”