by Tad Williams
“There’s still Merolanna. And the Loud Mouse.”
Briony grimaced. “That’s a strange thing, now you mention it. I have never seen Aunt Merolanna so distracted—perhaps over Kendrick, but it seems odd. She was strong as stone before the funeral, but has been grieving like a madwoman since, hardly leaving her chambers. I’ve been to see her twice and she’s barely spoken to me, as though she can’t wait for me to leave. In fact, it seems that all the family we have left is at loose ends. Oh, and here’s another surprise—since you mentioned her, I should tell you that our stepmother has asked us to dine with her tomorrow night.”
“What’s that about?”
“I don’t know. But let’s be openhearted and believe she wishes to be closer to her stepchildren now that Kendrick is gone.”
Barrick’s snort made his feelings clear.
“Another thing. Have you seen the letter Father wrote? The one Kendrick received from Hierosol the day before… before…”
Barrick shook his head. He looked annoyed—no, it was something more. He almost looked frightened. Why? “No. What does it say?”
“That’s just it—I don’t know where it’s gone. I can’t find it.”
“I don’t have it!” he said sharply, then waved his hand in weak apology. “I’m sorry—I suppose I really am tired. I don’t know anything about it.”
“But it’s important we find it!” She looked at him, saw that it was no good pressing; he was exhausted. “Whatever the case, never forget, you are needed, Barrick. I need you. Desperately. Now go to bed. Rest, and let me do what needs to be done tomorrow, then I’ll tell you about it when we go to dine with Anissa.”
He looked at her, then looked around the garden. The sun had sunk behind the residence’s western wing and the roofs were rapidly becoming dark silhouettes; an entire army of fever-children could have been hiding there now.
“Very well I will stay in my bed for tomorrow,” he said. “But no longer.”
“Good. Now, I’ll walk back with you.”
“You see, I don’t like sleeping,” he told her as they made their way down the path. Almost without her noticing it, he had taken her hand, as he had done when they were both children.”I don’t like sleeping at all. I have such very bad dreams—all of our family being cursed, haunted…”
“But that’s all they are, Barrick, dear Barrick. Just dreams. Fever dreams.” But his words had started a chill in her, even as the first evening breezes swirled through the garden and made the leaves of the hedges and ornamental trees scrape and rustle.
“I dream that darkness is coming down just like a storm,” he said, almost whispering. “Oh, Briony, in my dreams I see the end of the world.”
15. The Seclusion
THE BROTHER’S MAIDEN DAUGHTER:
She vanishes when we are all upright
Appears when we lay ourselves down
Look! Her crown is of gold and heather-blossom
—from The Bonefall Oracles
The Seclusion, Qinnitan quickly discovered, was not a building, or even a group of buildings, but something vastly larger, a walled city within the autarch’s immense palace, sandstone brick buildings set in carefully husbanded grounds, most with shrines and scented gardens at their centers, all connected by hundreds of covered walkways that provided much-needed shade, so that one of the Seclusions residents could travel from one side to the other, a journey that might take the best part of an hour, without ever feeling the direct touch of the harsh Xandian sun on her skin. It truly was a city all by itself, home not just to the autarch’s hundreds of wives, but to the army of people necessary to care for them, thousands of maids, cooks, gardeners, and petty bureaucrats, and not a single one of them a man.
None were men in the conventional sense, but there were certainly many hundreds of people within the Seclusion’s great high walls who had been born with at least the basic elements of masculinity, but who simply had not, for one reason or another, managed to hang onto all of them.
The Seclusion took up a sizable section of the autarch’s gigantic Orchard Palace, just as the palace itself took up a large portion of Great Xis, Mother of Cities In truth, the Seclusion’s share was proportionately larger than other sections of the ancient and monstrous sprawl of buildings formally known as Palace of the Flowering Spring Orchard, because those who lived and worked in other parts of the great palace could share gardens and dining halls and kitchens, but the Seclusion must be kept separate and protected, and so each function had to be carefully reproduced within its walls and staffed only with women or Favored.
If the Seclusion was a small city, the Favored were its priests and governors. Because of the famous sacrifice of Habbili, son of Nushash, Xis had always been a kingdom in which the castrated were held in some esteem— it was almost as established a route to the corridors of power as the priesthood In fact, the Favored ruled not just the Seclusion, but many of the bureaucracies of the Orchard Palace, so that the more daring soldiers of the autarch’s army sometimes sourly joked—in private, of course—that real men weren’t wanted in most of the palace, and would only be welcomed in the one place they were absolutely barred, the Seclusion. The actual truth was that many ordinary men who still wore their stones held positions of influence throughout the autarch’s court, like Pimmmon Vash, the paramount minister. The Favored as a group were some of the autarch’s mightiest subordinates, but they were by no means all-powerful. They had to struggle, as did everyone else in the Orchard Palace, for every fleck of attention from the God-King Sulepis, from whom all power and glory radiated like the sun’s light. But in the metaphorical darkness of the Seclusion, that country of women in which women held no nominal power—although the more important of the autarch’s wives were powers unto themselves— the Favored ruled virtually without rivals.
The Favored of the Seclusion, perhaps in deference to a tradition no one could now remember (or perhaps for other, less exalted reasons) considered themselves women, not tremendously different from those over whom they watched, and made the traditional attributes of womanhood their own, although exaggerated into parody they were almost all extremely excitable, romantic, vengeful, fickle. And of course the wives and their born-female servants had their own complicated webs of influence and intrigue as well. Altogether, walking into the Seclusion was like entering a magical cave out of a story, a place strung with invisible strands and snares, full of beautiful things guarded by deadly traps.
Qinnitan’s own role in the place was confusing from the first, and within days of entering she had begun to long for the certainty of her old life, for her uncomplicated role as one of the youngest and thus lowest of the low among the Hive Sisters. All the autarch’s wives and wives-to-be—and it was hard to tell sometimes what the difference in status meant, since he so seldom visited any of them—were of infinitely greater importance than any of the Seclusion’s servants, and yet the hundredth wife, let alone new-minted Qinnitan who was something closer to the thousandth, had to wait weeks for even the briefest appointment to see Cusy, the immensely fat chief of the Seclusion’s Favored—the Eunuch Queen, as she was sometimes laughingly called in the Orchard Palace. But nobody in the Seclusion would ever have laughed at old Cusy to her face Of all the denizens of that place, only Arimone, the autarch’s paramount wife—a flinty, beautiful young woman known as the Evening Star, who was the autarch’s cousin and had been the wife of the last older brother Sulepis had murdered to clear his path to the throne—would have stood up to Cusy without a great deal of consideration. Since Arimone lived almost as removed from the Seclusion as the autarch himself (she had her own little palace and grounds nesded at one end of the vast compound like the inmost chamber of a nautilus, and no one, not even the other high-ranking wives, came there without an invitation) there was nobody to challenge the Eunuch Queen’s authority.
Qinnitan had the fantastic luck—or so it seemed at the time—to be taken under the wing of Luian, one of Cusy’s deputies, a motherly Favo
red (at least in size and demeanor, since she was not particularly old) who took an unexpected interest in the new wife and within days of Qinnitan’s arrival invited her to come to her chambers and drink tea.
Qinnitan was treated to the promised tea, along with powdered Sania figs and several kinds of sweet breads, in a tented, cushion-strewn room in Luian’s chambers. The meal was accompanied by a gale of gossip and other useful information about the Seclusion, but it was only at the end of the meal that Luian explained why her eye had lit on Qinnitan.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?" she said as Qinnitan bent to kiss her hand in farewell. Qinnitan had been caught by the fact of Luian’s large hands, one of the few things now that betrayed her beginnings as a man, and so she did not for a moment understand the question.
“Recognize you?” Qinnitan said when the import finally sank in.
“Yes, darling girl You don’t think I lavish my time on every little queen that comes through the door of the Seclusion, do you?” Luian patted her chest as if the idea gave her breathing problems; her jewelry rattled. “My goodness, we have had two already this month from Krace, which is practically the moon. I was shocked to hear they even spoke a human language. No, my sweetness, I asked for you because we grew up in the same neighborhood.”
“Behind Cat’s Eye Street?”
“Yes, my darling! I remember you when you could barely walk, but I see you don’t remember me.” Qinnitan shook her head. “I… I must admit I don’t, Favored Luian.”
“Just Luian, dear, please. But of course I was different then. Big and clumsy, studying to be a priest. You see, that’s what I thought I would be until I was Favored, and then I lost my taste for it. I even went to your father once for advice. I used to walk up and down the alleys between Cat’s Eye and Feather Cape Row, reciting the four hundred Nushash prayers, or trying to…”
Qinnitan let go of Luian’s hand and stood up. “Oh! Dudon! You’re Dudon! I remember you!”
The Favored waved her fingers languidly. “Sssshh, that name! That was years ago. I hate that name these days—ungainly, unhappy creature. I am much more beautiful now, am I not?” She smiled as if to mock herself, but there was something other than self-mockery involved in the question. Qinnitan looked at the person before her—it was a little harder to think of Luian as female now, after the recollection of her former self—discreetly examined the broad features, the thick makeup, the large hands covered in rings, and said, “You are very beautiful now, of course.”
“Of course.” Luian laughed, pleased.”Yes, and you have learned your first lesson. Everyone in the Seclusion is beautiful, wives and Favored. Even if one of us should hold a knife to your throat and demand to be told she is looking poorly that day, just a little peaked around the eyes, perhaps, skin just a little less rosy than it should be, you will say only that you have never seen her more beautiful.” For a moment Luian’s kohl-rimmed eyes grew hard and shrewd. “Do you understand?”
“But I meant it sincerely.”
“And that is the second lesson—say everything sincerely. Goodness, you are a clever girl. It is too bad that I will have so little to do with your training.”
“Why is that, Luian?”
“Because for some reason the Golden One has ordered that you must be schooled by Panhyssir’s priests. But I will keep a close eye on you and you will come to take tea with me often, if you would like.”
“Oh, yes, Luian.” Qinnitan wasn’t quite certain what she’d done to rate such attention, but she wasn’t going to turn her back on it. Having a link to one of the Favored, especially an important one like Luian, could make a world of difference in one’s accommodations, in the skill and tact of one’s assigned servants, in any number of things up to and including the continuing favor of the autarch himself. “Yes, I would like that very much.” She paused in the doorway. “But how did you know who I was? I mean, I would have been not much more than a baby when you left our old neighborhood—how could you recognize me?”
Luian smiled, settling back in her cushions. “I didn’t. My cousin did.” “Cousin?”
“The chief of the Leopards. The very, very handsome Jeddin.” Favored Luian sighed in a way that suggested she had complicated feelings about this handsome cousin. “He recognized you.”
Suddenly Qinnitan, too, remembered the solemn-faced warrior. “He… recognized me?”
“And you did not recognize him either, I see. Not surprising, I suppose. He has changed almost as much as I have. Would you remember if I called him Jin instead of Jeddin? Little Jin?”
Qinnitan put her hand to her mouth. “Jin? I remember him—a bit older than me. He used to chase after my brother and his friends. But he was so small!”
Luian chuckled deep in her throat. “He grew. Oh, my, he certainly did.” “And he recognized me?”
“He thought he did, but he was not certain until he saw your parents. By the way, please write and tell your mother that she will be invited to visit you when the time is right, and to stop pestering us with pleading messages.”
Qinnitan was embarrassed. “I will, Favored Lu… I mean I will, Luian. I promise.” She was still stunned by the idea that the slab-muscled Leopard captain could possibly be Little Jin, a perpetually wet-nosed boy whom her brothers had more than once smacked in the face and sent home crying. Jin—Jeddin-^-looked now as though he could break any of Qinnitan’s brothers in half with one hand. “I’ve kept you too long, Luun,” she said out loud. “Thank you so much for your kindness.”
“You are quite welcome, my darling. We Cat’s Eye girls must stick together, after all.”
“The gardens are beautiful!” said Duny. “And the flowers smell so lovely. Oh, Qinnitan, you live in such a beautiful place!”
Qmnitan drew her friend away from the climbing roses and toward a bench at the middle of the courtyard. Queen Sodan’s Garden was the largest in the Seclusion and its hedges were low, which was why she’d chosen it.
“I live in a very dangerous place,” she told Duny quietly when they sat down on the bench. “I’ve been here two months and this is the first conversation I’ve had where I won’t have to worry whether the person I’m talking to might decide to have me poisoned if I say the wrong thing.”
Duny’s mouth fell open. “No!”
Qinnitan laughed in spite of herself. “Yes, oh, yes. My dearest Dunyaza, you just don’t know. The meanness of the older Sisters back at the Hive, the way they’d get after the younger ones or the pretty ones—that was nothing. Here if you’re too pretty, they don’t just push you down in the hallways or put dirt in your soup. If someone is jealous of you and you don’t have a powerful protector, you’ll end up dead. Five people have died since I’ve been here. They always say they fell ill, but everyone knows better.”
Duny looked at her sternly. “You’re teasing me, Qin-ya. I can’t believe all that. These women have been chosen by the autarch himself! He wouldn’t allow anything to happen to them, praise to his name.”
“He scarcely ever comes, and there are hundreds of us, anyway. I doubt he remembers more than a few. Most of the brides are chosen for political alliances—you know, important families in other countries—but some of them are like me. Nobody knows why we’ve been chosen.”
“We know why! Because he fell in love with you.”
Qinnitan snorted. “I thought I asked you not to make up stories about me, Duny. Fell in love with me? He scarcely noticed me, even when he was making the arrangements with my parents, such as they were.” She made a sour face. “Not that they could have said no, I suppose, but they sold me.”
“To the autarch! That is not being sold, that is a great honor!” Duny’s face suddenly froze. “Won’t you be in trouble for saying such things?” she whispered.
“Now you know why I brought you out here, where there are no walls or high hedges for spies to hide behind.” Qinnitan felt as though she had aged ten years since leaving the Hive, felt very much the older sister now. “Do you s
ee that gardener over there, over by that pavilion?”
“Him in the baggy clothes?”
“Yes, but not a him, and the gods save you if you ever said that in front of her. That’s Tanyssa, one of the Favored. Most of them go by women’s names here. Anyway, it’s her job to watch me, although I don’t know who’s given the job to her. Everywhere I go, there she is—for a gardener, she seems to travel from one part of the Seclusion to another very freely. She was in the baths yesterday morning, pretending to have some errand with the young Favored boy who heats the water.” Qinnitan looked at the well-muscled gardener with distaste as Tanyssa pretended to examine the leaves of a monkeyfruit tree. “They say she killed that young Akarisian princess who died last month. Threw her out of a window, but of course they say she fell.”
“But, Qin, that’s terrible!”
She shrugged. “It’s how things are here. I have some friends, too—not friends like you and I are friends, of course, although I may make some of those too someday. The kind of friends you have to have if you want to stay alive, if you don’t want to fall over dead after drinking your tea some evening.”
Duny looked at her without saying anything for a long time—a long time for Duny, anyway. “You seem different, Qinnitan. You seem hard, like one of those traveler girls that dance in Sun’s Progress Square.”
Qinnitan s laugh was a little harsh, but something about Duny’s innocence made her angry. It was the fact that Duny could still afford to be innocent, more than anything else. “Well, I probably am. Everyone talks nicely here—oh, they do talk nicely. And other than the occasional hissing catfight, everything is quite peaceful and comfortable. Do you like my dress?” She lifted her arm and let the pleated sleeve fall, graceful and translucent as a dragonfly s wing.
