Sorrowing Vengeance

by David C. Smith

  He was shocked, but she was adamant. He suspected that her seriousness was a ploy and that it would pass, that it would be forgotten in a day.

  And even while her ministers and diplomats and bankers and lawyers prepared to take their leave from the Salukadian Holy City, Salia remained alone and refused to think of the past, did not dwell on the present, tried not to anticipate the future. But memories intruded, memories like hunger coming at the starving man who must not dare to think of food.

  Sugat, her childhood, her father, a household with five hundred servants, poets lauding her terrible beauty, aristocrats vying for her attention—yet no one to speak to, no one to talk with, no one with whom to share what she wondered about.

  Her own father, who did not know her, prostituting her to the Athadian throne for his own prestige. And telling her to laugh, this man so pompous and selfish that he was incapable of smiling even at himself and his own excesses. “All of this is here for your enjoyment. The gods offer no greater wisdom than to allow us to laugh at the world they have given us. If you laugh at a thing, you control it.”

  Corpses smile, skulls smile, even as they corrode in the grave: all bones, all teeth and grinning, grinning, mirthful with some private glee known alone to the dead and buried.

  The dead and buried, alone with their freedom.

  Freedom.…

  Freedom to do with herself as she might wish. Even to hurt herself as she might wish, the way distempered animals tend to hurt themselves, as though with great purpose, in answer to some great scheme.

  When Agors visited her yet again that evening, he found Salia sitting naked in the middle of the floor of her chamber, very seriously and intently scratching herself, pressing her sharp long nails into her wrists and forearms. She was studying the discolorations, the bruises that resulted. The ghen was shocked.

  “Why?” he asked her, kneeling before her. “Why are you doing this?”

  She looked him boldly in the eyes, laughed, and hurriedly helped him out of his clothes. Then, when they made love, Agors discovered that Salia moaned loudly, pleasurably, when he in his excitement happened to hurt her.

  Later, she reprimanded him for this, rubbing her breasts and her hips and sides, pointing out to him, “Here…look…see what you did? You’re like an animal.…”

  A prisoner of emotions, he had told her, that she could not express.…

  * * * *

  The afternoon before the Athadians were prepared to depart from Erusabad, Queen Salia made her way by carriage to the royal carrack docked beyond the Holy City’s walls. Lord Thomo, who was aboard the ship, standing alongside the captain and monitoring the loading of cargo, was surprised to see her arrive. Salia seemed troubled, preoccupied; she did not speak with anyone and immediately went below, into the hold, where her smaller and more precious pets were lodged. Thomo thought it best not to intrude and so allowed her to be by herself; but when the queen came up to return to her carriage, Thomo reminded her that all would be in ready for leaving in the morning.

  Salia replied that that was fine, and requested that Thomo visit her that evening in her apartment in the palace before he retired.

  That invitation was not in itself peculiar or inappropriate, yet it caused Thomo some concern for the remainder of the day, although he could not explain to himself why that was. He was, therefore, in an irritable frame of mind when, following a late supper taken alone, he was admitted into his queen’s apartment. She greeted him in the front chamber, which was dimly lit and suffused with incense, and was confronted by a solitary Salia, who told him, “I shall not return to Athad just yet, Lord Thomo.”

  Thomo said, “I don’t understand, your crown.”

  “I’ll repeat myself. I am not returning to Athad tomorrow.”

  “Queen Salia—” Thomo’s astonishment was complete. “What has happened? My queen, have you been threatened? I promise that—”

  “No.” She did not even smile at the absurdity of that.

  “Then you must please explain, your highness. What am I to say?”

  Salia gave his question much thought and was silent for a long while. Thomo remained standing where he was. Finally, his queen told him, “If I try to explain, you would only misunderstand. As I’m sure everyone will misunderstand.”

  “But what am I to tell King Elad?”

  She seemed to ponder that. Decisively, then, she informed him, “I will—yes, I will—I will tell you the facts, although the facts are not the apparent causes.”

  “Please…just—try to explain.”

  She nodded stiffly, in control of herself and cool in her demeanor. She had, Salia told Thomo—how would priests explain it?—she had committed a series of indiscretions with King Agors. Yes, Thomo could be shocked if he wished, but he was familiar enough with court life, and human habits and desires, not to be honestly surprised. And yet this willful romance had little in itself to do with her decision. She had come to feel—

  “What of your duty?” Thomo interrupted her, becoming impatient, even beginning to anger now that he understood something about her reasons for staying. And he had liked this young woman.…

  “Don’t speak to me of duty, Lord Thomo.”

  “You are the queen of the West! You have duties to your people—to your husband, to—”

  “They are not my people. It seems to me, Thomo, that my duties have primarily been to appear beautiful and to act simple minded.”

  “That is not true! You are mightily respected!”

  “Am I? By whom? Elad? The people? The court? My father?”

  “Don’t use that as an excuse! You are a woman! You are queen!”

  “Call me a queen, and I’ll tell you that I am a woman; call me a woman, and I’ll tell you that women have always been given their names by men—so what does the name matter, or the duty attached to it, or the person?”

  Thomo was stunned. Was this some sort of protest? Was she trying to martyr herself?

  “Whatever I have lost, or will lose,” Salia told him, “Elad has gained. It’s not that I don’t love him; I do, in my own way, as much as I am able to love. But why should I trap myself further?”

  “You exchange one trap for another,”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps the larger cage gives the illusion of freedom, where the small cage does not. If that is so, then the world itself is a cage. But perhaps, Lord Thomo—and consider this—perhaps I am now truly free. As free as any man or woman can be in this world. Free to make a decision, because of my beauty and my station and my privileges, and all my other traps and cages. And free to live by that decision.”

  “This is absurd!” Thomo was shaking; to calm himself he moved to a table and poured himself wine, and as he poured he asked Salia, “Do you do this because the East flatters you? Do you think that somehow there is truth here that you can’t find in Athadia? Truth? Freedom? What?—does Agors flatter you? Every man flatters you! Are you not yet above that? Queen Salia, this is a different world, this East! A week from now…a month from now, a year…everything will have changed, and you’ll have only regrets if you make this decision! You can have memories, now. And you can make your decisions later. Return to Athad—yes!—and cast back, ponder all this more than you have done so far, in your home climate, and then make your choice! But do your husband and your people the dignity of facing them with this!”

  “It is not a choice, Lord Thomo. I am not choosing between one thing and another. And I don’t care to return to Athad. Why should I prolong this?”

  “You’re destroying everything you have!” he nearly yelled at her.

  “That doesn’t frighten me, Thomo, if I am destroying myself. But you’re once more confusing who I am with what I am. Now, I ask you: if I have found something that gives me more than I have ever had before—and I don’t mean Agors—even if that thing is destructive, should I not pursue it? Or should I reject it to live dull, long years and wait for my destruction to come from elsewhere? Shouldn’t I grasp this wonderful thin
g and live brightly, even if for only a short time?”

  “What is this ‘thing’ you wish to destroy yourself with?” Thomo asked her

  “It’s…whatever it is that I feel now,” Salia replied. “And it may not truly be destructive, Lord Thomo. It may be only…the intensity I have come to realize in myself. Have you never felt such things within you? No…of course not. It seems to me that I am less confused than our people of the West are; there, they believe that it is worthy to live long in confusion rather than to live briefly in understanding. And where is the harm if I do this? The empire has managed to survive foreign wars and civil wars, rebellions and starvations, assaults from without and tempests from within. It can survive the loss of one more beautiful woman, I think. I am first of all myself, Lord Thomo, and I cannot disown myself; but I can disown all the pretense that others have heaped on me. I suppose that if I could point to a ‘thing’ and tell you that that is why I am staying here, that would satisfy you. Or if I told you that I am staying because of greed, or hate, or something else that’s as tangible as a ‘thing.’ But if I tell you that I am staying only because of myself? Do you really think, Lord Thomo, that if I stay here, the Athadian Empire will be weakened? Or do you think that the empire will take it upon itself to come after me? I know what you’re thinking; you need not say it—that this will lead to conflict, that this will lead to war. Well, it will not.”

  Thomo set down his wine cup. “You are wrong. You sit in a position where you cannot be the person you think you want to be. You cannot act, as queen, freely enough to renounce your queenship. If you desired this, you should not have married Elad.”

  “If I could change the past with a whisper, I would do it; if I could change what already has happened, though it cause me great pain, believe me, I would willingly allow myself to suffer. But I cannot. Therefore, I cannot make any excuses but only offer my reasons. And I remind you again, though you are threatened by the idea of returning to Athad without me, that I am only a woman, and one not much loved.”

  “There you are wrong.”

  “No, Thomo, no…I am not wrong. I remind you, too, of this: that I have never had a home, not even in my own country, because there my father did not allow me to have a home, but only that prison we mentioned, where I was not myself. And I do not have a home in Athadia, but only another prison. Here—I am my own home, Lord Thomo. Don’t you think that I can be a queen, and great, alone and by myself without the robes and jewels? Or do you think that I can only be a queen, and nothing else, because of what has been put upon me? I have no home, Thomo, other than myself; I have no heart, other than my own. If you try to threaten me by saying that what I do will cause harm to Athadia, then again I tell you that Athadia will only harm itself and use me as its excuse.”

  Thomo had nothing to say to this.

  “I have never been loved, Lord Thomo: I do not even love myself. What will you say love is? Does Elad love his empire? Does Agors love his people? I am not loved, but I can choose with my heart, and now I am doing that. I think that love is only another of those things men have devised, like politics and the gods, to coerce the mind and the body and the soul, to create ideals that fall short of reality. But reality is ideal enough. I accept that. I have my own mind and soul and body, and I am free; do not speak to me of love or duty for Elad or Athadia.” She smiled sadly, then, and looked at him.

  His lordship had tears in his eyes.

  “What?” she asked him. “You are weeping, Thomo. Tears for me?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not for you. Gods help me, Queen Salia, but I cannot cry for you!”

  She nodded faintly and looked away. “How strange,” she murmured. “Do you know? Surely I wept when I was a child, but I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember ever having shed a tear in my life.…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Is this what the world had come to? Anxieties and animosities, agreements and compromises, all in a balance carefully preserved—and now all of it reduced, dangerously, to the imbalance of two proud, distrustful neighbors, because of a woman’s whim? All this, done away with, over something as foolish as a pouting woman’s selfish declaration to abandon her responsibilities?

  Thomo looked at Lord Sirom on the other side of the table. The old aristocrat was nearly asleep; his chin rested on his chest, and the early light of dawn at the windows grayed his face strangely, making him appear ill.

  Certainly Thomo, himself, felt ill.

  Perhaps it had all been an illusion anyway. Perhaps the two empires were meant to charge each other headlong. Perhaps intransigent Salukadia and intractable Athadia were destined to clash; and if Queen Salia’s damnable arrogance were going to bring that crisis about, then it might as well be that as anything else.

  Anything else.…

  Thomo brooded. He was still, to this day, surprised that Elad had let the occupation of northern Erusabad, and the desecration of the Temple, go unpunished. Peace at any cost? For the mightiest nation on the earth, with more weapons than it had citizens to use them—more weapons than it had food to eat—to continually barter for peace, when the world seemed so begging for slaughter? Peace, under those conditions?

  Then again, perhaps Queen Salia was right. Why should her abdication and self-imposed ostracism lead to war anymore than anything else should? Surely the empire would not forfeit its safety and security over one madwoman.

  But there are advantages to a war, thought Thomo.

  That old lie. Still, the balance was ever precarious. War had not been banished but only delayed. Swords were kept sharp and not neglected. And always the swords were used, so that when the blood dried, the swords were ready to be used again, now or later, to reinvigorate the old lie, the eternal lie. Blood. Screams. Piles of dead. Mutilations. Thomo thought of bodies made into pieces, of voices eternally buried and kept silent there, under the cold earth, of the anonymous faces of loved ones smeared by blood and fire into nothing like faces at all. Whole generations sent into red ditches. Humanity’s plunder, taken from broken backs, gouged eye sockets, from severed limbs, the future stolen from every family, because of war, war, war.…

  Everyone claims to prefer peace to violence, Thomo reflected, until the machinery of war presents itself in a profitable light. There are advantages to a war. Fortunes are made. Pride is roused. Life is given a purpose, and emotions are provided a target, so that the routine of the ordinary is superseded by the promise of the sensational—as though life itself has no meaning or greatness to it when each day is the same as the one preceding it.

  Still, this choice of the queen’s did not necessarily mean a conflict. It could quickly become just another foolish diplomatic difficulty to be managed.

  But Thomo feared that a trivial incident such as this could be just the lever to dislodge the fulcrum. Tempers would flare, demands would be issued, questions would be pushed aside, and men would lift their swords while invoking justice and love and all the good things, using passions to drown hearts and minds.

  War.

  Well, he himself would argue against it as best he could, when he was back in Athad.

  But even now, Thomo could hear the confident voices of outrage. He could envision the faces of the indignant and the proudly belligerent. He knew that those who had never worn a sword or been on the field would be the first to—

  Lord Sirom was staring at him.

  Thomo shook his head. He reached for his cup of tea but found that he had emptied it already. He whispered, “I am…afraid…to return to Athad without the queen.”

  Sirom sighed. In a voice that sounded loud in the room’s full silence, he answered his friend. “But there is nothing else to be done. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “She was my charge, in a way. She was—”

  “She was seduced by the—escape of this place. That is all. Look at her. She’s a young woman, headstrong, attractive, perhaps a little—” He motioned toward his head with one hand, twirled a finger.

&
nbsp; Thomo slapped the table. “Damned be Agors!”

  “You can’t blame him, either.”

  “Council will.”

  “You must present the facts to them.”

  Thomo abruptly pushed back his chair, stood, and began walking toward the door. But then he stopped and faced Sirom. “I should try once more to speak with Agors.”

  “Why should the lord of the entire eastern empire lose his sleep to speak with you, a general of the West, over the troubled delusions of a young woman?”

  “Is that how you interpret all of this?”

  “It is. Sit down, Thomo. Sit.” Lord Sirom waved a hand.

  Gradually, Thomo found his chair again.

  Sirom rubbed his face, stifled a yawn, and glanced at the windows behind his friend. “Dawn. Gods, aren’t you tired?”

  “I am tired,” Thomo replied heavily, staring at the empty tea cup, “of passions and pride and people flinging challenges at the world, as if the world were there to answer them on their terms. I am tired of petulant, pretty young women raised to sit in thrones. I am tired of politicians fighting like spoiled children over things that are harmful and dangerous and stupid. And I am tired—”

  “Restrain yourself, Thomo.”

  “Restrain myself?” he nearly yelled, slapping the table again. “This will bring us to war. I know war, sir. I can smell war coming the way farmers smell a storm! Do you want war, Sirom?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “It will come to that!”

  “I truly don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t?”

  Sirom shook his head. “We’ve had wars provoked by more situations than I can name, but something this immense, just by its very size, frightens everyone. If our two empires were to clash—well, it would have happened by now. I mean before the occupation and this business with the Temple. You would have sensed it coming; you would have felt it. But we’re not involved in politics of war; we’re involved in politics of trade and banking. The politicians will become excited, and some of the businessmen with a stake in the outcome, but why, under all the gods, would they jeopardize everything they now have? Salia has been suspect all along and is no reason to beat the drums. Her father and King Elad and the High Council will trade many insults, but things will calm down. Abgarthis or someone will come up with some method of saving face for Elad. Things will settle themselves. The West will remain West and the East, East.”