Her lips parted and behind the dark eyes a spark of determination glinted. She raised her chin and met him eye to eye. “What must I do, Your Grace?”
He nodded. “Good. You have passed a spiritual test this day, Fiorella, but a new one is being prepared for you even now.” He seated himself again on the chair opposite her, drawing it up so that their knees were nearly touching. “Now, let’s begin. Give me your hand. I want you to close your eyes and free your mind from all worry and distraction. There is nothing here but the sound of my voice. Listen to the sound of my voice, Fiorella . . .”
When he left her chambers two hours later, the Bishop Benedict mused that Fiorella Orsini might prove to be an even more perfect vessel for his power than Pater Julian had been. He had thought unquestioning willingness the key to the success of a channel, but he now suspected that the Lombard’s rock-like will and stoic sense of duty would serve him even better. That he had discovered in her a secret passion for religious importance could prove a great bonus. The evening would tell. If she did her job well, Michal Zelimir would be blind-sided, for he never would expect an attack from that unimposing quarter. By the time his shai guard dog realized who the real attacker was, hiding behind the diminutive Lombard, he hoped to have the king wedged firmly between a raging flood and a fire.
He took himself off to his own quarters then where he would prepare a second assault on a completely different front.
oOo
Lukasha did not need Master Antal’s bleating to tell him of the Gherai Khan’s sudden renewal of aggression against the farms and villages of Zelimir’s southern-most darugha. He heard the piteous mental screams of a handful of Mateu who had ventured there with their Apprentices from the northeastern province of Sandomierz in an attempt to aid the victims of the first Mongol inroad.
There were shai there, too, he realized. Young women like Kassia and, like Kassia, just coming into their powers. The Khan did not kill them. They were White Mothers. A rare and wonderful commodity. They would live, but among the Tartars it was unlikely their powers would ever come to fruition. He raged at the loss and waste, lying awake in his darkened room.
In a while, he called up a spirit light—not a flame such as Kassia used, but something more akin to bottled sunlight. The flame she conjured so easily still resisted him. As he prepared to rise, it came to him with a cold, bitter thrill that though Itugen awoke, though Her daughters began to revive and Her lands with them, the Bishop Benedict had the means to put it all at naught. If the Tartars persisted, if the Franks overcame, if Polia fell to become a land once more divided, crushed, oppressed, all would be as it was before. Fires, followed by icy storms that brought no rain. Drought. Famine. Disease. Bloodshed. Itugen would turn Her face away a second time.
Lukasha groaned aloud. It struck him like a leaden weight—Polia’s future could well be as grim as her past.
No. He could not allow it. This time he would not stand idly by and watch his homeland be trampled under foreign feet. This time he had a weapon. He had only to learn its use. That would take a little time yet, he knew, but he would do it. Until then . . .
The Mateu threw himself out of bed with a will, drew on a lightweight robe and left his private quarters. Across his public office he went, to his more private one, from there, up to his studio. He didn’t have all the catalysts yet for a purely Twilight spell, but he had two that were in opposition to each other. That was enough to form a powerful Twilight Battle, a pairing much stronger than the aeromantic Duets he had used for so many years.
At his work table, he lifted a velvet cover from a pair of spell balls and picked them up, one in each hand. Fire was in his right hand—a gleaming copper ball which contained a fine powder of ash. Water was in his left—a translucent glass of sea blue which held the relic of Kassia’s drowned husband.
On his dais, he stood and faced the south. In that direction and slightly eastward were arrayed the forces of the Gherai Horde. Further south still, lay a natural enemy of the pillaging Mongols. It was upon this enemy that Lukasha focused his entire attention. With a single spell, he reached across the miles and spoke to the soul of the slumbering Sultan of Turkey.
The spirit of Fire, Harmattan, fought him to exhaustion, but the water was a Mateu’s natural element; Maelstrom obeyed his every thought and kept Harmattan, the Dragon, under control. The Sultan was his, and in that possession, Lukasha breathed into him the burning desire to beat the Tartars back from the gateway to Europe.
He was intent on the battle that would soon be joined. So intent, he did not realize that a battle had also been joined closer at hand.
oOo
Fiorella moved in an aura of power. It made her skin tingle, heightened her awareness of every sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. She was in constant amazement of this magic—most especially of its effects. She had not quite gotten used to the way the pagan king looked at her now. That made her skin tingle too. She reminded herself every time he would brush the back of her fingers with his lips that she did this for the glory of the Church.
Loathing. She felt for this man such loathing, it was all she could do not to tremble herself to her knees the first time he held her gaze just a moment too long. And when, during that first, unforgettable supper, with the lovely Turk and the fiery Polian looking on, he had helped her rise to her feet, she thought her womb had folded in on itself. She could still feel the imprint of his hand upon her upper arm—the pressure of his fingers about her own.
She remembered the look on the Polian girl’s face when the man she no doubt thought was hers, repeatedly turned from her to Fiorella. That look of bemused hurt was the sweetest thing in the entire encounter. It was what had made Fiorella realize that the power Bishop Benedict had invested in her was real. For a moment, it hadn’t mattered that Michal Zelimir’s touch was as sharp as the kiss of a dagger.
The agony had only gotten worse. The bishop assured her it would pass, but it had not. Five days, and it had not. She burned when the Polian king spoke to her, longing to wriggle out from under his voice as a rabbit escapes a half-closed snare. They were alone now for brief periods of time—this at the bishop’s approval—and during those periods, she must work at drawing the king toward her, when her every instinct told her to thrust him away.
At night, she would lie abed in the dark of these alien rooms and pray for her own failure. For the goal of Benedict’s plan was her marriage to Zelimir, a marriage that she fully expected would bring about torture of body and soul. She knew her prayers were destined to go unanswered. She could feel the power gliding over and around her. Even now, even as she tried to sleep, little tongues of flame danced through her and tickled her skin.
A sob caught in her throat. She would marry Michal Zelimir and he would possess her. She tried to imagine it—because she must be prepared, she told herself—but her imagination failed her. In the end she would sleep, extrapolating on the brush of warm lips across her cool palm. Her dreams offered her no sanctuary.
oOo
The Bishop of Tabor stood in the throne room of the king where, not long before, had stood an envoy from Khitan and the darughachi of Teschen, giving grim reports of the confrontation in central Khitan between Mongol and Polian forces.
“You are losing Khitan, Your Majesty,” Benedict told him. “And you will lose Teschen too, if you do not act quickly. The Gherai Khan will not stop until he has struck at the heart of your kingdom and devoured it.”
He paused to study the pale face of the man seated in the throne. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, gentler. “Think, my son. The forces of the Khan will eventually meet the Imperial Frankish armies. It is inevitable. When they have been met, they will be pushed all the way back to the Crimea. The difference lies in this: that thousands of Polians will have died, your capital will lie in ruins and you will very likely be dead, as well. I offer you a chance to beat back the Gherai at the border of Teschen. A chance to save countless lives, yours included.”
Michal Zelimir made no answer, but merely gripped the arms of his throne until his knuckles were white.
“Come, Your Majesty, you won’t pretend with me that you haven’t begun to find Fiorella the least bit comely and companionable? Why else have you kept such close company with her these past weeks?”
Why indeed? At the moment, Michal Zelimir was at a loss to explain that. Well, yes, the girl did seem more . . . alluring. He had even found himself comparing her to a deep garnet jewel that graced a ring on his left hand. Yet, what was that compared to the price he was asked to pay for her? At this moment, he had no answer to that, only the clear understanding that what Benedict said was true. The Mongol forces could be pushed back now, or they could be pushed back when Tabor was in ruins and Polia had been trampled under the feet of their wild ponies.
He raised his head and looked Benedict in the eye. “I will have an answer for you at dawn on Celek. I must pray and meditate. I must make peace with my God. I must speak again to my advisers.”
“They will advise you, Majesty, as the envoys from Khitan and Teschen and Sandomierz have advised you—do what must be done to protect your provinces.”
“I will have an answer for you on Celek,” Zelimir repeated, and left his throne room. He meant to retire to the cesia to pray, but his heart drew him to seek out Zofia. She could not advise him, but she could comfort him and offer him distraction and solace.
He was at the mouth of the corridor that led to her rooms when he thought of Fiorella and of the Shrine she had showed him in her rooms. It was a Shrine to the female deity Mariam, she’d said, but to Zelimir the carved wooden figure with the gentle, mother’s face represented Itugen. It mattered not at all that the Franks insisted on calling her something else.
There were no such shrines in Amadiyeh’s rooms; her Prophet had forbidden them, and he knew that it would dismay her to know that he had prayed once at Fiorella’s Shrine of Mariam-Itugen. It had brought him no sense of contact with the Goddess, but when he had raised his head and turned his gaze to the Lombard, he had found her eyes upon him. Something in the dark, colorless gaze had awakened desire in his soul. It was not the white-hot, rage of emotion he felt for Kassia when he thought of her too long, or sensed her too near, but it pulled him nonetheless. It pulled him now, and so he changed his direction, turning west instead of east and moving along a different corridor. He thought briefly of Zofia; he knew more certainly with every passing moment that he must soon send her away.
Even as the king sought comfort, and Benedict reveled in his obvious advantage over the pagan monarch, the vanguard of the Turkish troops, flying from outposts some leagues beyond the southern reaches of Khitan’s western sister, Teschen, caught up the rear flank of the Mongol forces. They caused no more than mild distress at first, but when the balance of the Sultan’s northern armies reached them several days later, they became much more than an annoyance. Turks and Mongols faced each other across the Khitani countryside while two men, far removed from the physical combat, sweated out the battle and, more than either warring leader, determined its outcome.
It was not a matter of strategy but of style that placed Mengli Khan where the Turkish forces were able to ambush him and take him prisoner. The Bishop of Tabor exerted strong and direct control over his puppet, whereas Lukasha, knowing himself to be no military strategist, sent to the Sultan only motive power—a desire to defend the country where his great-niece now resided and might rule as queen. The Sultan directed his generals, and the campaign—with a direct goal and a defined target—was prosecuted by men of greater military experience and knowledge than Lukasha of Dalibor.
During the telling battle, Lukasha, sitting in the locus of his dais, legs crossed, spell balls set about, brow glistening sweat in the light of spirit lamps, could feel the frantic efforts of Benedict to control his puppet forces. In the end, he could even sense the utter confusion of the trapped Khan when his motivator at last abandoned him. With the light, unimportant pop of a bubble bursting, the Frankish bishop gave up his foothold in the Tartar mind, his rage leaving behind only a sour, smoky smell.
A smile crossed Lukasha’s lips. He sent to the Turkish Sultan a presentiment of victory and rose from his dais to tend to other tasks.
Celek came, and Zelimir prepared to welcome a Turkish envoy to his court. His promise to give Benedict an answer had been put aside, for he believed the Turks had solved his military and political problems. It made all sense now to marry the lovely, if demur Amadiyeh, to take Zofia as a second wife—allowed him by Turkish reckoning—and send the Lombard, with her strange appeal, back to her homeland. The Turkish would serve to keep the Frankish forces out of Polia indefinitely. It made all sense. It would save Polia with little compromise. It would please the God and Goddess and relieve the Mateu, especially his old friend, Lukasha.
Zelimir told himself he was victorious. That somehow the Bishop Benedict had erred in thinking he could be manipulated, bullied. He would bring the Turkish envoy into his presence and there announce that he would wed the Sultan’s great-niece. He would, moreover, announce it before the bishop and his Lombard Duchess, though neither would expect it after his recent attentiveness.
In the throne room, before an assemblage of Polians, Franks and Turks, Zelimir was less sure of himself. He felt Benedict’s regard like an oppressive weight, and sought Zofia’s eyes as a ward against it. But the lady’s eyes were cold and aloof, and Amadiyeh’s were veiled, and so he ended his search for support with Fiorella, who stood, as always, behind her bishop. Her eyes welcomed him with smoldering embrace. Dear God, could he have ever thought her dull or plain? She was a jewel.
The Turkish ambassador, one Haji Husayn-i-Shirazi, seemed agitated, and immediately after the ceremonial and diplomatic overtures had been made, he requested leave to speak. Zelimir was quick to grant the request, it put off his own announcement that much longer.
“Your Majesty, King Zelimir,” Shirazi said, inclining his head only slightly. “I come to you, as you know, with the news that your enemy, Mengli, Khan of the Gherai is captured and his forces dispersed to the four winds. My lord, the victorious and successful sultan, the ruler aided by God, the shadow of the Provider, up-lifter of the banners of Religion, ruler of the two easts and the two wests, namesake of the apostle, Sultan Mehmet Osman Khan, sends greetings and asks after the welfare of his nephew’s daughter.”
“You may inform the Sultan that his great-niece is well,” Zelimir answered and prayed the ambassador would say more. He did, but it was not what the king expected.
“Is she? The Sultan—king of kings who are numbered as the stars—is under the apprehension that the lady Amadiyeh is to be betrothed to Your Majesty. Yet I arrive here to find that there are yet two other bride candidates within you royal household, and that one of them is a daughter of the Frankish Empire—a great enemy of the Sultanate.”
Zelimir opened his mouth, willing himself to say the words that would defuse Shirazi’s growing anger, but the words would not come.
“I had come to Tabor,” the Turk continued, “hoping to take the glorious Sultan news of his great-niece’s marriage into this royal house. I am dismayed that this does not seem to be the case. The Sultan of the two continents and of the two seas will also be dismayed. In the belief that we supported an ally, we extended our troops into your territories and aided in the thwarting of your enemies. Are you the ally of the Osmanli Empire, King Zelimir, or are you the ally of her enemy?” He glanced obliquely at the Bishop of Tabor, who merely pursed his lips.
Zelimir’s eyes slid from the Turk to the bishop to Fiorella, now at His Grace’s shoulder. Her eyes were huge, bottomless. They pulled at him and, in a moment of great clarity, he realized that he desired her as he had desired no other, would pay whatever price to possess her. Kassia was forgotten, or might have been if Master Antal had not chosen that moment to clear his throat, calling his King’s eyes to himself for but a moment. The sight of the Mateu’s white garment recalled Master Luka
sha, and Kassia’s white hair, and her marriage to Zakarij all at once.
The king gasped and steadied himself, both hands gripping the arms of his throne. Beside him Bogorja stirred. “Sire, are you ill?”
Am I ill? My kingdom is trapped between two forces bound by dogma and habit to be at each other’s throats. I am trapped between these same forces personified. Am I ill? I am dead.
Zelimir raised his head and gazed out over the small crowd assembled before him. The Frankish Empire or the Osmanli. One would be his ally, the other his enemy. Did it matter, really, which was which? If he married Amadiyeh, he would have the Osman Turks at his back to defend his borders against both Mongol and Frank. If he married Fiorella (a shiver coursed through him) he would have the Frankish forces to stand against Turks and Tartars alike. Zofia . . . Zofia might be offered concubinage, and Kassia . . .
He had had a pleasant daydream once of riding to Dalibor and sweeping white-haired Kassia away to some Carpathian stronghold where neither of them could be found. That was only a daydream; this would define his life and the life of his people forever. He knew Benedict’s plans for Polia—absorption into his Empire and his religion. Of the Sultan he was not so sure. It was written in the Holy Book of the Arabian that his followers were to teach by example only, but he had heard rumors that this teaching was not always observed.
He focused his eyes on the Turkish ambassador, but they would not stay there. He tried to bring them to Amadiyeh’s face, but he could not. He could feel the sweat beading upon his brow.
“I have had a difficult decision to make,” he said, his voice a husky croak. He felt every ear take in the words. “Of all the women brought to me, these three are the only ones who remain. (Kiska!) They are, all three, fair of form and face, all intelligent and companionable. (Kiska!) All are dear to me. (No. Kiska!) Yet, I have had to choose but one of them.”
“You have made this choice, my lord?” asked Shirazi.
The Spirit Gate Page 37
