Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Eldrafel leaned against the doorway, a cup in his hand, his gray eyes creeping like slow frost over her body. They noted but did not linger upon her lean, taut flesh; fixing upon the gold necklace encircling her throat, they glinted like the cold blade of a butcher’s axe.

  Dana did not move. So, she thought, you brought me here. You corrupt even my uncertainties. A flush of fury colored her cheeks and moved so swiftly down the length of her body that she half expected the water to steam.

  Eldrafel’s heavy-lidded gaze followed the pinkness. “I wondered if the hair on your head had been bleached by the sun,” he commented. “But I see you are truly blond. As I am.”

  Dana might not be burdened with coy self-consciousness, but this was too much; she growled an epithet, heaved herself from the water and threw on her waiting garments. Which clung immodestly to her wet limbs. Eldrafel, relishing this effect, held out his cup. “Wine?”

  “No.”

  “It is not drugged,” he told her, smiling.

  She snorted and dodged around him into the sitting room. He followed, and after a brief dancing skirmish of steps and turns, cornered her. He drank, deceptively lazy. The wine stained his lips but not one drop smudged the gleam of his beard. He seized her arm and pulled her close to him. “I see,” he murmured, “why even proper Andrion lusts incestuously after you. I like strong women too.”

  “So you can weaken them?” Dana retorted, and wrenched away.

  He set down the cup and seized her again, his hands like shackles on her arms. Seething, she struggled, but even though he was no larger than she, his strength was uncanny. When she moved to kick him he crushed her against the wall. His body against hers was as cold as stone and as unyielding, because it was she who was meant to yield. Between a rock and a hard place, she thought dizzily.

  Eldrafel’s voice was silky with grace and power. “And you like strong men, do you not?”

  Her mind howled. No Sabazian was ever used by a man she did not want, why can I not break free, how dare he use sorcery upon me … He kissed her, his mouth fermented like the wine, and to her abject horror her body responded. Gods, surely I never wanted him, surely his beauty has never blinded me to his evil! Her knees were weak, her loins drenched with desire, her love for Andrion horrendously perverted.

  Then something in Dana’s thought snapped like an arrow finding its target. No! You shall not humiliate me!

  His hands crawled over her body, inspecting every crevice, plucking less at her garments than at her skin. She went limp. Her hands splayed against the breadth of his chest, sensing the slow susurration of his heart; her nostrils against his hair filled with a nauseating scent of musk. He laughed in triumph.

  The nape of his neck, and the back of his right leg … But she had no weapons save her fury and disgust. Suddenly she uncoiled and thrust him away with such force he fell sprawling. For one brief moment his face warped, affronted. Then it sheened with arrogance again. “I assume,” he said, “that the answer is no?”

  Dana cursed him, consigning him to the icy silence of the last circle of the underworld.

  Eldrafel was unperturbed. He rose to his feet, brushed himself off, adjusted his purple cloak and kilt. “Well, then, basilisk, it is your loss.” And with a sweeping, taunting bow he turned.

  But not before Dana had seen the glitter of gold in his hand. She grabbed at her throat. The pulse leaped raggedly through her naked skin. Ashtar, she had been so overwhelmed she had not even felt him undo the clasp of Andrion’s necklace. “No!” she screamed, “you cannot have it!”

  He was gone. Dana raged, at him, at herself, at Andrion and Sumitra for laying the necklace upon her. Fool, blithering fool, this is what happens when you lower your guard! Her body was slimed by the tracks of his hands; she shuddered, as if she would crawl out of her own skin. She kicked at the wall but could not shatter it. The door opened and a platoon of guards swept her away.

  The blue lotuses in the pool tumbled like acrobats. The somber sky wheeled overhead. A trireme creased the glassy swells of the harbor. Each passage, terrace, and doorway jumped out as if illuminated by a sudden flash of lightning. Thunder rumbled like the distant, inescapable roll of chariot wheels. I cannot bear any more of this! Dana wanted to scream, so loudly that the shriek would rend raw rock and worked stone alike and send them tumbling into the sea, so that the sea would roil and seethe and with its salt spume wash this infected sore of an island clean.

  The guards threw her into her own tiny cell and slammed the door. In one stride she was at the window, looking down on the dim shapes of palace, town, and sea. Her fingers drummed on the sill. “Tembujin!” she shouted.

  From the next window, an arm’s length away, came a sullen reply.

  “Tembujin! I want you to help me!”

  “How?” he asked, with a note of interest.

  Dana leaned out her window, eyeing his window and Sumitra’s balcony beyond. She was gasping for breath, she realized, as the air of Minras gasped with fevered sensuality. “Listen,” she began.

  *

  Eldrafel swaggered into the bedchamber. Gard sat there, with a damp clay tablet in his lap, a stylus in his hand, and his tongue caught firmly between his lips. Eldrafel snatched the tablet and glanced at it. “Too many mistakes,” he announced. He pulled the necklace of the moon and star from his belt and considered it. “Hmph!” he snorted sourly. “The king must come of his own free will, as enjoyable as it would be to enspell him.” He placed the necklace like a garrote around Gard’s neck.

  “That is Andrion’s!” the boy protested.

  “Indeed. Proof to Sardis that he named you his heir.”

  “But Andrion is still—” Gard shut his mouth with a pop and peered down at his feet as if his sandals held his next lesson.

  “Still alive?” sneered Eldrafel. “Not for long.”

  The boy winced. Chrysais came slowly down the stairs from the tower room. “What is it? Oh!” She stopped dead, her hand on her own throat, when she saw the necklace. “Where did you get it?”

  “From the Sabazian. They do indeed like men.” Eldrafel smoothed his kilt and smirked lasciviously at her. Her lips pursed as if she sucked on a lemon. “I would like to see,” he went on, “a more respectful attitude on the part of your son here.”

  At the word “your” Gard shot him with a resentful glance. Chrysais’s complexion flooded mauve.

  “Go away,” Eldrafel told Gard. “If you take off that necklace, I shall beat you until you are the color of my cloak.”

  Gard nodded petulantly and fled, his gray eyes polished with what might have been either tears or the flash of a sword. Two guards roused themselves and followed him. He had not once looked at his mother.

  “He is your son too,” said Chrysais, almost before the door had shut. “He is descended from two gods.”

  “Is he? How can a man ever be sure that a child is his own, when women are available to all?”

  “You know I have been faithful to you!” she protested.

  “Do I?” Eldrafel responded. “You tried to seduce even your own brother.” He danced a few steps. The dried chamomile rustled mysteriously beneath his feet.

  She coiled. “Do not insult me! I am a king’s daughter, a king’s wife, a king’s mother; I have brought you Minras and Empire alike.”

  “Minras was mine already,” said Eldrafel, scathingly reasonable. “Gard shall bring me the Empire. It is the kings themselves who matter, my dear, not their women.”

  Chrysais stared at him, her lip outthrust haughtily, her knotted fists half concealed by the flounces of her skirt. Slowly her mouth wilted, her right hand loosened and reached out, palm empty. “Ah, Eldrafel, do we grasp too much, and lose ourselves?”

  Her voice was as tremulous as a crone’s. Eldrafel did not look at her but at himself, in the mirror of her dressing table. His image wavered slightly, as if it were a pupa responding to the proddings of the butterfly beneath. “I weary of your sniveling,” he said. “It is too la
te now for your courage to fail. Go back to the tapestry and try again to draw Andrion and sword and shield here. I thought you had power.”

  “I do,” protested Chrysais, perilously close to a wail. “Eldrafel, my love, please …”

  He settled the fillet around his hair as if visualizing the diadem there instead. Thus reassured, he turned, glossy with pride and malice. “Try to do something right for a change,” he told his wife. “As for me—I must be about my father’s business.”

  “I have power,” said Chrysais, the words dull hammer blows upon an anvil. But the door had already shut; he had not once gazed directly at her. She looked toward the stairway, eyes as flat as faience beads. She looked toward the door, and her eyes flooded. Viciously she gulped.

  “I have power over you,” she stated. She went to her dressing table. Slowly, ritualistically, she daubed herself with carmine and kohl, considering the reflection of the shapes and colors, not her face. With a coquettish if somehow astringent smile she patted lotus oil onto her bosom and the sardonyx amulet alike, and followed Eldrafel out the door.

  *

  Dana sat on her windowsill and joined her chain of rags, woven from torn bedclothes, to Tembujin’s. She swayed precariously above the drop; he grimaced, but she remained calm, going so far as to hum under her breath. Sumitra hovered on her balcony, hands clasped, chin set.

  “All right,” Dana said. Tembujin tested the knot binding the rope to his bedstead and braced himself against the sill. Dana planted her feet against the stone and arranged the clumsy rope about her hips. “Go!” In great leaps she descended the vertical wall and landed only a bit too precipitously among brambles and ash at the bottom.

  Sumitra gasped. Then, as Dana waved, she waved back with a relieved smile. Tembujin almost, but not quite, grinned. Swiftly drawing the rope inside his room, he glared at the muted outlines of the palace, accentuated by the occasional glint of a spear, but no alarm was raised.

  “Do not worry,” Dana called quietly. “A sorcerous mirage still conceals this wing.” As she looked upward, the wall seemed to shimmer and shift before her, but the two peering faces remained firm. Really, Dana thought, with the first spark of exhilaration she had managed to kindle in ages, that was not difficult at all. She and Kerith had made many more complicated jaunts through the asphodel-scented fissures of Cylandra.

  Kerith. Astra. The spark ignited into flame. Slowly, slowly, she told herself: free Niarkos and his men now, arm yourself, and Sabazel and Sardis will follow. She waved again and crept away.

  A fitful sea breeze so filled the afternoon air with the stench of irex that even the lowering clouds were tinted purple. An odd molten light seeped through crevices in the overcast, every so often dispelling the gloom with wincing glare. Dana warily retraced her steps to the lotus pool, avoiding the numerous guards, and slipped inside the suite of rooms. She went out the far window.

  The malignant tower still stood, if possible even more askew than before, but the blue threads of light wafting by its windows seemed drained of brilliance, as pale as thin milk. The witch-fires extended too far? Dana asked herself as she scurried toward it.

  Guards clanked around a corner; she dived over a low wall and crouched as they marched by with as much spirit as if they moved through thickening honey. Andrion … No, he was in some other part of the palace. He might know what she was doing, but he could not grab her shirt and stop her. But then, even he would no longer counsel patience.

  She crept along the wall and peered through a lattice into an alcove filled with fluid green shadow and evil whisperings. The herb garden, stroked by an eddy in the reeking breeze.

  Someone stood on its far side, by the pillared corridor leading from Chrysais’s chambers. Dana squinted. Sunlight blasted the still figure and then just as quickly faded, but not before it and its velvet-dark shadow were etched on Dana’s mind; ornate chestnut curls, frills of silk and turquoise, richly curving breasts heaving raggedly with—terror?

  Then Dana saw what Chrysais had been watching.

  Two long white shapes lay beneath the sweeping fronds of the yew, more camouflaged than concealed by rippling shadow, like fish bellies flashing in a green-scummed pool. The tiny red jewel in Rue’s nose winked and then was eclipsed by the luster of Eldrafel’s hair and beard. She clawed at him, ecstatic, her limbs tangled awkwardly around his; his limbs were as gracefully arranged as ever. As when he danced, the muscles in his buttocks clenched and loosed, efficient, compelling, impersonal.

  Rue began squealing like a pig, shriller and shriller; Eldrafel, always mindful of appearances, put his hand over her mouth. Even in the gloom Dana could see his cool smirk, not one hair disarranged, as Rue wriggled blowsy and sweating against him.

  The nightshade rustled, the tainted rye hissed, and Chrysais was gone. Dana turned away, eyes and hands clenched, gulping the sudden acidic flood of her breakfast back into her stomach. Is that what it looked like? Were her piercingly bittersweet hours with Andrion, her cheerfully bawdy times with Tembujin, an image of this bestiality? Bad enough that afterward she reeked of their vital odors, not her own… .

  Her thought veered into part vision, part deduction, and she saw what had happened there in the garden as surely as if an echo hung upon the inebriated air: Perhaps it was her disillusionment that led Rue to concoct a salad of hellebore and nightshade, although Dana was not sure if the serving woman had meant to eat it or serve it to someone else, Chrysais or Sumitra or Dana herself. Eldrafel found Rue in the garden, and as her eyes lifted to his smooth and elegant body, her sorely-tested faith saw one last chance to be vindicated. Her eyes, huge and liquid, dark brews of resentment, and fear, and a rapacious cunning… . She murmured something about Chrysais being weak, not a fit mate for a god, her whining lack of control unraveling all his plans. She mentioned her brother Rowan who worked so selflessly for Eldrafel back in Sardis, where the plot was still tightly knit. She indicated her own possible defection.

  Dana heard Eldrafel chuckle through the muffled crescendo of Rue’s squeals. Oh, yes, he could perform as beautifully on a woman as everywhere else, but in the end, sex was to him only another weapon.

  She again choked down the bile in her throat. She leaped up, plunged over the wall and across a roof, and clambered like one of Sumitra’s monkeys up to the same window she and Tembujin had used to enter Chrysais’s bedchamber. Again it was unlatched. Protected by sorcery or overconfidence? she asked herself. I do not care.

  Quickly she searched the chamber, but the necklace was not there. She bounded up the stairs. And halted at the top, realizing someone was already in the tower room. Someone who gasped and panted like a personification of the frenzied air of Minras.

  She looked through the door, dreading to see some other scene of animal lust. But she saw instead Chrysais, a small dagger held awkwardly in both hands, slicing the great tapestry into shreds of canvas and yarn that quivered like wounded flesh.

  The queen was a wraith of the lush figure she had once been. Her lips were drawn in a rictus grin about clenched teeth. Her face was chalk white beneath the gaudy paint and powder, not human flesh but a staring mask of tragedy, drained by sorcery and thwarted ambition and hatred of reason and emotion alike.

  The images of city and sea, human and animal, disintegrated into drab confetti. With a shriek the blue witch-fire rimming the tapestry snapped and dissipated. The lamps before the tiny shrine went out, and the nephrite bull shattered into heavy black dust. The odor of lethenderum and sorcery seeped away. The chamber was only an old tower room, floorboards gaping unevenly, walls splotched with fungus. A cloud of ash drifted in the windows, carried on the fetid drunkard’s breath of Minras. The floor shuddered and subsided.

  Chrysais spun about, sensing Dana’s presence amid the shards of her sorcery. “It is all your fault!” she spat.

  “What did I ever do to you!” Dana retorted. But she understood why Chrysais hated her, a woman free of masculine taint, even as she rejected understanding; she wou
ld not let herself sympathize with this woman who had sold herself not only to a man, but to a demon.

  Among the wrack of yarn and cloth that shifted uneasily across the floor Dana saw several unused skeins, their colors still vivid, and a length of canvas completely bare of stitching. Perhaps these materials were particularly susceptible to enchantment… .

  Chrysais stepped closer, the dagger circling. “Hold the blade the other way,” Dana babbled soothingly to the blighted face and the eyes like discolored bruises. “Let the haft extend past your little finger, not your thumb. It is much more flexible that way.”

  Chrysais hissed epithets upon her, Sabazel, and every woman who had ever crossed its borders.

  Dana stood her ground, hands extended placatingly. “Let me show you how to hold it.”

  Chrysais did not so much lunge as stumble forward. Effortlessly Dana caught her arm, twisting it until, with a cry, Chrysais let the dagger fall. She swept the weapon into her own hand.

  But the queen of Minras stood immobile, her face hidden by hands that were mottled and blue-veined claws too frail even to sift the dregs of power. No longer aware of or no longer caring about Dana, she swayed back and forth, keening in a high-pitched wail of mourning.

  Dana quashed the impulse to go to her, embrace her, and lay her head upon her breast as one would soothe a devastated child. Chrysais had bought, and now paid, for choosing to be suborned by a man. She seized the canvas and the fresh yarn, thrust the dagger into her belt, and started down the staircase. As she clambered out the window, she heard Chrysais blunder down the stairs and out of the door.

  Dana landed lightly and straightened. Zind Taurmeni was an obscene protuberance over palace and city, purplish black and gray stone piled as high as the threatening purplish black and gray clouds. Which might as well be laden with ash as with rain; a gray patina bleared the giddy patterns of walls and terraces.

  To Dana’s horror, another patrol drove her crouching back to the lattice. Rue, thankfully, was dressing, her eyes glazed with smugness and zeal. But Eldrafel stood naked, a masterpiece of statuary draped by the odd flowing shadow, features distorted with furious consternation. He knew what Chrysais had done to the tapestry. Dana bolted.