by Anne Perry
She looked up to see him smiling at her, anticipation of her pleasure in his eyes.
“It’s ... wonderful,” she answered, gratitude, longing for home, and the ache of exile and loneliness drowning her voice for a moment. “It’s good to see you again,” she said impulsively. “Thank you for coming here so soon. You must be tired.”
“What else could be so important?” he asked with a little shrug, one shoulder higher than the other. It was a gesture she had seen a thousand times in Thoth-Moara, never here. She did not want to be too precipitate in asking him the news. All the time he had been gone she had waited, and now he was back she was half afraid to hear. She kept the exquisite little tortoise in her hand, turning it over and over, her fingers caressing its surface. She offered him food and wine, and only when he had refreshed himself did he speak of Shinabar.
He looked grave. “The news is not good, Majesty. If you wanted revenge and the power to have it, then I would say the time is ripening fast, but I know you love your people, as I do, and hunger to teach them the words of the Book.” He took a breath. “But now they dilute and moderate even the old religion. They keep the rituals because people like them, but they’ve forgotten what they mean, and they’ve lost the courage to speak the truth about anything. The differences between right and wrong are so blurred they are breeding a generation that is not even going to know what the words mean. They are already angry, disillusioned, and hungry without knowing what for. They want everything immediately, and when they have it, it satisfies nothing.”
She was loath to believe it. Surely he was exaggerating. “It is only a reaction to violent change. It won’t last.”
His dark eyes were touched with pity as he looked at her, but there was no hesitation in his answer. “No, Majesty, that is not true. It is a creeping sickness which has been rising for a long time, a decade or more. The ugliness is there. We are a weary people. The hardships of the war to the east fifteen years ago, and then the drought, tested us to—”
“We rose to it!” she interrupted him, remembering those bitter days clearly, the tension, the daily news of hunger and death. First they had feared for the lives of friends and family as the armies struggled. Then in the aftermath of victory had come the deeper terror that with drought in the mountains the underground rivers that fed the vast cisterns would dry up and whole cities would starve. For three years it had grown worse. Crops had failed. Animals had had to be slaughtered. Disease spread. People whispered in the streets of plague.
At last the rains had come again. Slowly the cisterns started to fill. Hope surged back.
“I know we did,” Ra-Nufis acknowledged, but his voice dipped as if he spoke of a tragedy, and his eyes looked at some greater defeat.
“What do you mean?” she demanded, standing up swiftly, unable to sit still as fear gripped her. “What do you know that you are not saying? Tell me the truth—or what you know of it.”
There was silence in the room. The sands of the hourglass slipped through the funnel without a whisper, and no rain beat against the window. The little black and white cat stretched and curled up again, purring gently.
“That after the misery and the fear of that time,” Ra-Nufis replied gently, “your generation was determined your children should not suffer as you did. You protected us from reality. Life did not give us the discipline of war or of hunger, and you did not offer laws or standards that would and should have replaced them.” There was pity and anger in his eyes. “You were tired, and you allowed your own weariness and your desire to protect us to give us license beyond liberty. You praised what was good in us; you also praised what was commonplace, even tawdry. Because circumstances placed too many demands on the youth of your age, you placed too few on the youth of mine. Soon we will have forgotten how to tell each other the truth, or even what it is!”
What he said was terrible, but as she heard the words she knew it was true. She did not interrupt him.
“Our armies have grown slack.” He watched her as he went on, knowing he was hurting her, and that he must. “At heart they no longer believe in themselves, and they are right not to. We have no more heroes.” He lifted his shoulders again in the slight, rueful shrug. “Perhaps some of the heroes we used to have were more flawed than we cared to admit, but even if we half knew that anyway, we admired what was good.” He smiled an ironic, Shinabari smile. “We may have painted on ordinary faces the masks of greatness, but at least we hungered for what it represented.”
He let out his breath in a sigh. “Now we are afraid of it. We have lost ... an innocence. Ta-Thea, you must find a way to come back and teach them the great truths of the Book. There is beauty in it which will win thousands, then tens of thousands, eventually millions. Everyone should have the right to hear. It is already beginning in Camassia, God knows, and Shinabar is perishing for lack of it. Laws cannot change a nation. It must come from within. Only the truth can bring about change.”
She stood without answering, and he was content to wait. She thought back over a dozen incidents, a score, and with each one she became more certain that he was right.
“Help me,” she said at last. “Find me the arguments that will move Isadorus. He won’t use his power to overthrow the usurpers and enable me to teach the Book. He believes that is the wrong way to spread the Word, but he would do it for the safety or the peace of Camassia. He would have to believe it would succeed, and he is a soldier, so he will not be fooled.”
Ra-Nufis rose to his feet slowly, smiling. “I know my craft, Majesty. I have learned a great deal since I first understood that I must serve my people and the Book by returning you to Shinabar. I know military strengths and positions. I know the generals and their weaknesses. I know numbers, weapons, and morale. I also know the governors of the provinces and which are most likely to side with the present regime. I know who owes whom debts of honor, or fear, or money.” He moved a fraction closer to her. He still carried a faint smell of salt and tar on his clothes. “I know who can be persuaded to change allegiance, and who is only waiting for a chance with a true hope of success to turn against the weakness and corruption, and those who are behind it.”
“That won’t change Isadorus’s mind,” she said sadly.
“I know.” His voice was keen, full of hope. “But the threat from the barbarians will be far worse if Shinabar falls and there is nothing left between them and Camassia. He will see then that we have no other path.”
Tathea threw herself into the work on the Book with even greater dedication. She wrote a translation into Shinabari simultaneously with the Camassian on which she worked with the scribes. As she finished each section, they made a hundred copies.
She still needed Alexius’s help. Once every seven or eight days he would come and read what she had written and argue over ambiguities and meaning.
She had not intended to tell him of her news of Shinabar. It would be unwise. But in the long hours of talking over passions and dreams, she found herself speaking also of the soul sickness of her own people.
It was by now high summer. The wind blew from the sea to the south, massing storm clouds heavy on the horizon. He had commented on it as he came in. The harbor masters would be working hard, rescuing all they could. No one could come or go.
“I’m glad I’m not at sea,” he said, pursing his lips and staring out as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. “I’d rather race the worst storm imaginable on land than any at all on the water.”
Another storm tugged at the corner of her memory, greater than this one, filled with a terror which was more than the elements, something personal, and primeval. A shiver of fear ran through her. Without reason, she thought of the barbarians on the borders of Shinabar, and to the east and west of Camassia, and perhaps even to the north also. They too were an unknown force, ungoverned and malign. She was glad Alexius was here. If she had to face an enemy, any enemy, she would rather do it beside him than anyone else alive. He would never find reasons to evade the s
truggle. He would never run away. Sometimes he was less subtle than Ra-Nufis, certainly less imaginative and amusing, less generous than Eleni, less wise than Isadorus. Sometimes he seemed to love the law with too little room for mercy, but there was nothing of the coward in his soul and nothing of the liar. He could die facing the enemy, and there was a sweetness in that like sunlight.
“We must have courage,” she said as much to herself as to him. “Without courage we can lose everything. It is the virtue on which all else may depend. If we won’t face the Enemy and fight for what is good, everything will be lost, even honor.” She hesitated. “Even love.”
The rain was beating harder on the windows and high over the city lightning flared. Several seconds later came the crack of thunder, as if the fabric of the sky was being torn apart.
“Do you think the Great Enemy will cover the face of the earth with war and ruin?” he asked, reaching to put his hand on her shoulder. She could feel his fingers through the cloth of her gown. It was as if his strength seeped into her.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “One day.” She gazed at the sky as again lightning lit it in a wild glare, and the darkness that followed was deeper. The crash of thunder drowned her next words and she had to repeat them. “I don’t know if it will be in our time. Perhaps not, but it will come. It will be the greatest test. There will be no more peace, no more middle ground. We must choose one side or the other.”
He was standing so close beside her she could feel the warmth of his body as they watched the storm. His breath moved the fine hair at her cheek.
“Is there middle ground now?” he asked doubtfully. “Is there not merely the illusion of it?”
“Yes. ‘Out of that desolation I will create a new earth, and those who have chosen life I will welcome home at last, and they shall be before My face forever, and they shall know Me as a man knows his father, and his friend.’”
He tightened his grip on her shoulder. “‘But before that there will be war and the abomination of destruction,’” he quoted in a whisper. “‘Ruin will cover the face of the earth.’ It seems there is no way to be there at the victory without fighting the war ... and perhaps being crippled, exhausted, bereaved ...”
Lightning and thunder came simultaneously, a blue-white flash that touched every corner of the room, and a noise so violent it drowned out everything else. In the silence afterwards, the roar of the rain seemed as nothing.
“How can we endure that, if we don’t do it together?” he asked.
She turned to look at him in the yellow lamplight. His eyes were suddenly frighteningly honest, the tenderness in them unconcealed, as if in that instant he newly understood love and felt a bond of courage and vision which would outlast all others. She gazed at him for a wild moment that was sweeter than the touch of lips.
His hand moved from her shoulder to her cheek, so soft she barely felt it.
The rain stopped. The air was cold, as if the Enemy was just beyond the grass, waiting. “I shall not forget your name.” The words came back to her like the echo of death.
She stepped back, ice knotting inside her. Ice beat against the window. She looked at Alexius’s face and saw the same fear, and the same knowledge in his eyes. They had been so close to betraying Eleni—and themselves. The blood was hot in his cheeks. There was no need for words for either of them; words would be clumsy and make irretrievable what was better merely known, never said.
“We must have courage,” she repeated, lips stiff. It was difficult to breathe. “And never allow ourselves to forget which army we fight for. It is easy, too easy to become separated from the—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “Lost. I ...” He stopped, uncertain how to go on.
She made herself smile, but there were tears thick in her throat, and the ache inside her was almost intolerable. “I think I can manage the work on my own for a while. You have given it much ...” The words were stiff, ridiculously formal for the searing intimacy of the emotion which filled her. “... Form and logic,” she continued stiltedly, “and clarity of law. That is what is needed.”
“Of course,” he agreed too quickly. “Tathea ...”
She shook her head and turned away. She could not bear him to go. It must be quick.
Perhaps he did it for her, perhaps for himself. She heard the door close, and she stood alone and allowed herself to weep as she had not done since she had mourned Habi.
Isadorus saw Tissarel again by chance. He had not intended to, even though he had thought of her often, her form softened by memory. Absence had lent her a gentleness and a truth she had not possessed. He knew it, and he had no desire to see her, in case she was far happier than he was. She was intelligent, and certainly she was beautiful. She knew how to please. He smiled self-mockingly at that memory. She would find another lover quickly enough, probably a younger one. She might even marry. He had at least provided her with enough money to do as her heart dictated, not her needs.
He met her in the evening after an excruciating new play. Every virtue had been hammered home like a nail. The wicked were irredeemable and unexplained. The good were flawless and without humor or humanity. He ached for a little laughter amid all the well-meaning gravity, a little scarlet or even gray to soften the blacks and whites.
They were still at the theater, attending the celebration after the final act. Barsymet was praising the playwright. But then she had never had much sense of the color or complexity of life. But she did know her duty, and she was doing it admirably.
Isadorus wandered away, unable to look the playwright in the eye, and found himself almost alone at the top of the long flight of steps that led down to the courtyard. He caught the pale glimpse of a woman’s gown.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, thinking he had interrupted a private moment. He did not intend to leave. They could, if they wished to.
But she did not move, and he looked at her more closely. It was only then that he recognized her with a lurch of familiarity.
“Tissarel?” He wanted to say more, something casual and gracious, but his mind was blank. The great hall full of dignitaries and art lovers disappeared, and the memory of her all but drowned him, her nearness, their shared laughter, the hours when even the Empire had not mattered. His mouth was dry. His physical hunger to hold her became a starvation, an aching emptiness which filled his body.
“My lord,” she replied, but she did not bow her head as anyone else would have done. She was just as beautiful as he remembered, the curve of her breast, the long line of her neck, the delicacy of her mouth, the way her hair grew. The man in him could not help seeing it, but it amazed him how trivial that was now. Hundreds of women were beautiful—thousands. One could buy beauty.
“Did you watch the play?” He asked the first thing that came to his tongue, simply for something to break the silence.
“Yes.”
“Did you enjoy it?” Would she tell him the truth? Could she afford to? Who was she here with? Now that he had thought of it, he had to know. Imagination would be worse than reality. And yet he had no right to inquire, and he wished her happiness, even love. But he would have given anything short of love of the Book for it to have been with him. Yet if he gave up honor, there would be nothing for either of them. The knowledge of that was all that kept him from her.
A smile touched her mouth and her eyes. She was watching him carefully, as intently as he was watching her.
“No,” she answered him. “It was terrible.” Laughter and tears were in her voice. He could hear them as he could feel them in his own throat. “One of the actresses is my friend, or I would not have come,” she went on. “I don’t know what on earth I can say to her!”
A wave of relief swept over him. He found himself smiling idiotically. “Say that she acted well,” he replied. “Anyone who can make those lines remotely human has a touch of genius!”
She laughed, the same rippling, delightful sound it had always been. Time vanished. The past was with them again.
Except that now she had no need to pretend. What he saw in her face would be the truth.
“Thank you. I’ll tell her you said so,” she answered.
“Don’t tell her I said the play was stiff,” he warned, “that it was dishonest to life, that the characters spoke their thoughts and were never brushed by any of the cravings that move the heart or the body.” He spoke from his own passion, his voice thick. “Real virtue springs from conflict and from choices that are so terrible they cost more than you believe you have.” Would she understand? “Goodness without the temptation to evil is an illusion, as is evil without a knowledge of good.”
“I know.” Her voice was gentle with a new tenderness, one that was not paid for in jewels, but in loneliness. And in that moment, without her finding words to frame it, he knew that their parting had also cost her, not in the cheap physical loss of money or pleasure, but in the tearing of love. All the years he had known her he had taken her for granted, she was someone he had bought, a woman trading in her beauty. Now when it was in so many ways too late, he realized he had purchased nothing. Everything of worth that he had had from her had been a gift. He was ashamed of himself for the meanness of his judgment, and humbled by the grace that had extended to him something he had so little treasured or deserved.
How could he let her know without misleading her? And he must not do that. He must betray neither of them.
“I wish I had known I loved you when I could still have told you so,” he said quietly. “Now I cannot.”
She smiled, tears bright in her eyes. “I know that,” she said softly. “You don’t need to explain.”
Close to them someone laughed, and a man called out a woman’s name.
Tissarel turned and walked away. She looked back once and smiled at him, then disappeared into the crowd.
