As there was no point in trying to regain my feet, I careered on, like a child in snow, and feeling the presence of at least three swords coming down at me. I slid past them all, by luck alone, and my ancient weapon opened two bellies and spread a red stain over a third.
I was on my feet again, but I had blood in my eyes: blood and guts, and the stink of it in my nose. My body chose this time to tell me that it had a monstrous headache.
The wounded man crumpled and his eyes asked for me to ignore him, which I did. The two who were opened on the floor merely lay across my way, staring at the ceiling, waiting to die. There were two more but I was choking on bile, and my museum-piece sword was sliding in my grip.
I heard the voice of the sanaur call the men in his uniform to drop their weapons. I heard Reingish curse him and then I heard Arlin bellow out at the bottom of her voice, not my name nor even that of Velonya, but the words “Norwess, Norwess!”
A dukedom destroyed long before I learned I might have inherited it: gutted like these poor men. A realm I visited as a wary trespasser, and which I had never desired.
But my lady has a streak of romanticism about her, where I am concerned. And she sounded in a great good mood.
I saw her turn Reingish’s blade from the emperor one more time, and there was a spark at contact. I drew my attention back upon my old sword, which was, somehow the belly of the wolf made material.
The belly of the wolf was always hungry in the nursery rhyme, and so I let it attack the two remaining soldiers. I took the hand off one, and he stood screaming, and the other ran away down the back corridor.
Behind me was a clatter and I saw Reingish’s dowhee skidding around my feet. Without thought I bent to retrieve it and then I had a blade in both hands and a shield up my elbow.
Reingish had lost his weapon and his men and all his chance, or so it seemed. Arlin backed off a small step to allow the emperor to decide his fate. Delicate of her, I thought. But Reingish was not weaponless; he had his little red knife, symbol of all his hate. I saw it in his hand and then he was attempting my trick one better. He leaped—he seemed to leap—upon Arlin, but as she ducked it was apparent that his feint was only to get her out from between him and his grandfather. He hung in the air like a bird, like a plains eagle with his one sharp red talon descending toward the old man’s throat.
It was the sort of moment that freezes in the mind. I remember being astonished at the tininess of the blade, and noting that there was something different in the ring on the hand that held it. The stone was gone from the setting. But though I was frozen, Arlin was not, and my lady split Minsanaur Reingish open with her saber, from midbelly to behind the legs. His innards and he fell separately to the floor. Upon Arlin.
I pulled her out. She was coughing. I had bile in my mouth. Already there were flies. For a short while there was no one else in the room except Arlin, the old sanaur, and myself.
She spat her mouth clear. “It reminds me of the monstrous pig, which you had to slaughter in Rudofsdorf. Remember?”
I looked up. “Indeed, it is monstrous.” One of the soldiers, as I glanced at him, trembled and died. “It is a slaughterhouse.” I met the eyes of the emperor, which were wet, and they glanced from one dead Rezhmian to another—not his heir, but at the soldiers—blinked and shed tears.
“Why did it have to be you?” he whispered. “Twice in two days, and now he who was almost your twin. Is this what my boy foretold to me? Is this the promised ruin, rather than the earthquake? Why you?”
I stood up, helping Arlin. Now a few guards scrambled into the council room, and a man in the salmon color of the aristocracy. They found us all talking amid the blood and bodies, and no weapons raised, so they stood in horror without decision.
“Why me? Because he was almost my twin, Sanaur of Rezhmia. And he took my identity in order to commit murder. And anyway—I couldn’t let him assassinate you.”
The little old man gave me a glance of birdlike intelligence. “Why not? Did you think I would be less inclined to answer your government’s belligerence than he? That’s not the case. Or that he would make a more fearsome commander in chief? That’s definitely not the case.”
“No, Sanaur!” Arlin spoke with minimal courtesy. “Nazhuret behaved as Nazhuret will behave. It is his nature. In… certain ways he is a simple man.”
The sanaur began to pick his way out from among the steaming, broken limbs and bodies. He had largely escaped being soiled. “All the more reason,” he said, rubbing his hand over his thin eyelids, “that I will not make you my heir, though you are eligible.”
I choked in pure surprise. “Sanaur! Of course you won’t do that. My loyalty is…” and here I had to stop and think, for all the events in the past two days had made me lose sight of the fact that I had no declared loyalty to Rudof, and had insisted as much many times. To the face of the king. Here we had been acting almost as the sworn representatives of the North; it had seemed appropriate.
“… my sympathy is for Velonya. It raised me. I have almost a Velonyan mind.”
“Almost?” Now that I had denied any interest in the power it was his to give, the old man showed me a warmer eye. “You certainly have not a Rezhmian mind.”
“I have not a mind for statecraft, that is sure, Grandfather. Had I now just been attacked by my own heir and traitorous soldiers and rescued by two strangers out of my nightmares, the day after an earthquake that crumbled half my city, I would not be thinking of the political necessity.” He glanced at me again, as though suspecting he had been insulted.
“No, Nazhuret, you’re right,” said Arlin, and she put her hand on my shoulder. “You’d be thinking of the eternal meaning of things. Or else you’d be digging buildings out. Or playing marbles with orphaned children.” She turned her face to the emperor and said as though to an equal, “Nazhuret spent his youth in poverty and all subsequent years in the search for truth. The dukedom of his betrayed father was offered to him and he turned it down. Why do you believe he would then lust after authority in a nation of strangers?”
The sanaur peered fiercely at her, one hand on the door out of the bloody chamber. Many people in the hallway bowed to him, wide-eyed. “You are not a eunuch at all, are you? I only thought so because you are so much taller than he. Northman tall. And because of the sword. Women in Rezhmia do not carry swords. But by your—I will say the word authority—over him, I believe you are his wife.”
I bowed. “This is My Lady Charlan, daughter of Baron Howdl of Sordaling Province, great ’Naur of Rezhmia.”
“Not his wife.” Arlin corrected us.
After the long, measuring look she received, Arlin added, “I never said I was a eunuch to anyone. I never said what I was.”
The old man smiled and passed through the door. “No, and we were too polite to ask. No mind.
“You both have saved my old life, for its few more years. I thank you. Now my time is not my own, but these people will see to your needs.”
He walked alone down the hall.
While they were bathing me I got sick, and then I fell asleep. I woke up in a panic that I had let the moment go: the moment when the ’naur would at last talk to me. After all we had been through, after the privation, the confusion, the violence, and the irritating air of predestination, still we had not been allowed to speak our little message of peace to the Emperor of Rezhmia.
I woke up in a well-padded bed, under silk covers. I woke up with a dizzy headache and I woke up angry. I was blinking at the face of Dowln, and he was lifting my head to a goblet.
My mood was terrible, and so I said, “You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t lay hands on me when I’m not aware. I’ve been a fighter all my life and you can’t tell what I might do.”
He put the glass to my lips, and what it contained was surprisingly bad-tasting. “I thought of that,” the jeweler said calmly. “But Arlin said you never exploded that way. She said you tend to wake amiably.”
Thus convicted, I fini
shed whatever was the terrible draught. I did not feel amiable. Despite his protest, I got out of bed.
I was dressed in silk—to my embarrassment in the salmon—pink silks of Rezhmian royalty. The color looked odd against my always sunburned skin, and my sunburned yellow hair.
“You were given a potent drug which is very effective at controlling people’s actions. Or at killing them. I’m glad you survived, but you must not push now. It is damaging.”
I needed his help to stand. “Are you glad I survived? Though I have been the ogre of your dreams?”
“Not only that,” said Dowln, and then he added, “Your weapons, Nazhuret. I found them and cleaned them.”
“The dowhee?”
“No, the ancient set. Look.” He attached my hand to a bedpost and left me for a minute. When he returned he had in his hands the old sword and shield, but they glowed of gold and of steel and of bronze. Set into the boss of the shield was a blood-red garnet and at the pommel of the sword was a clear ball of beryl.
I stared at these dumbly for a moment, but the medicine was working quickly and I began to laugh. “These are what I invented? I made these out of poison and my own mind? Who would have credited a half-sized snowman with such skill?”
Dowln glanced from me to the weapons and back again, determined to be respectful, however I behaved. “The workmanship is good, and very old,” he offered. “I cannot tell whether they are Rezhmian or from the North.”
“Science,” I stated, holding out the shield. “The workmanship is very good indeed. It took many people to build this shield, though I invented it yesterday. And contemplation…” I waved the sword in the empty air. “That, I suspect, is more ancient than the other.” I put both down on the messy bed.
“They were an experiment of mine,” I said, and then staggered off to void my bladder. Not in a planter pot, this time.
Dowln took Arlin and me to see the emperor again, and I was aware that this was the meeting for which we had come so far, through privation, earthquake, and treachery. All this for a little conversation, where I might plead Rudof’s cause and my own. I was tired, but my head improved by the moment. Arlin’s eyes were sunken and shadowed, but she preserved that air of dark inscrutability that was her own.
At the entrance to the ’naur’s chamber I almost turned on my heel and walked out, for the place was draped and decorated with the weaponry and armor of Velonya as it might have been with the heads and skins of animals. Against the inlaid wall were dozens of sabers and pikes, which leaned like tentpoles, all scuffed, battered, or broken. An ugly pile of harquebuses rose from the tiles, dirty and in disrepair, and all about hung the uniforms of men, rusty with dried blood. The old emperor looked more fragile than ever as he sat upon the barrel of a three-pound cannon, in his hands a lieutenant’s field jacket, ripped, burned, and discolored.
My temper died back when I realized that he did not consider these sad things to be in the nature of trophies. He was turning the filthy cloth in his hands again and again, as though it would drop a secret if properly handled.
“Which division is this?” he asked me, perfectly calm. “I used to know all these things, but your king has modernized so much…”
Neither Arlin nor I answered. Her lean face was white, which is the sole way she displays her anger. The old man peered up at us without embarrassment. “I am not asking you to betray your red king, grandchild. I would only like to know.
“All these things, these dozens and dozens of sidearms and swords and artillery, were gathered after the battle of Kowleseck. Kowleseck is perhaps a hundred and fifty miles north of here.”
“I know where Kowleseck is, Sanaur of Rezhmia,” I replied as evenly as I could. “But I know of no modern battle fought there.”
My “grandfather” sighed at me. “So wise and so ignorant. That makes a difficult combination, you know? Velonya attacked Kowleseck in the early summer: first of the big raids against our cities. Our civilians.”
I felt my feet had been swept from under me. Arlin braced herself and looked distrustfully at the man whose life she had saved. “I surely am ignorant, Sanaur of Rezhmia, if there have been raids against your cities. But I know they were not accomplished by King Rudof. Look elsewhere.”
He cocked his birdlike head and let the uniform drop. “Reingish, you mean? That was my original thought, Nazhuret—it is so odd, calling you by your uncle’s name. I suspected that young adder myself. But not even Reingish could commandeer an entire regiment of soldiers of Velonyan body and Velonyan face, mount the officers on square Velonyan horses and supply them with modern Velonyan army weapons, and set them against towns that were destined to be his own.
“And also it made no proper sense, for Reingish could have had me killed a hundred times with less effort than this, and set about inflaming the public without interference. That would not be so difficult, at least in the City, for the folk within the walls are always more belligerent than the peasants—perhaps because they do not do their own butchering and have no experience with the reality of blood.”
His rheumy eyes glanced from one death-garment to another as he spoke, and I believed that this old man had a strong sense of the reality of blood.
“Possibly it was not Reingish, then,” I said, “but I am convinced it was not Rudof of Velonya either. I know the man and he does not send troops against civilians. Under no circumstances.”
He got up slowly. The last two days had been no easier on the emperor’s body than upon mine. Arlin offered her arm and he took it. “Well, lad, that may be true. In fact, I will say it is likely true from what I hear of the King of Velonya. But it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the raiders are from the northland and it is the northland, not young Rudof, against which we have declared war.”
“You have?” Tears stung my eyes to hear this, finally, although I don’t know whether they were of grief, despair, or simple frustration.
“Yes. And we move out the day after tomorrow. It must be quick.” He looked at me and then away again. “You see, Nazhuret, if Rudof cannot control his barbarian rowdies, then Rezhmia must do so for him. And I… I cannot wait for the men Reingish has suborned to unite in a new pattern against me. Also, there is always a period of danger after the death of an heir declared. Two of my grandchildren were assassinated last night: one in this very building—don’t sympathize, I scarcely knew the one and despised the other—but I have a need to direct Rezhmian energies elsewhere, and to be elsewhere myself.”
“The emperor is going to ride with his army?” asked Arlin, losing her inscrutability for a moment and staring at the old man who looked—as old people will—breakable as a newborn bird.
He smiled grimly. “Not ride, exactly. Bounce around in a dark and stuffy carriage surrounded by nursemaids,” he answered her. Then his smile died.
“The interview is over,” he said. “Go home now.”
I don’t know if I blinked or merely dropped my jaw. “But Sanaur of Rezhmia, I have not… I think there can be another solution. We can save so many lives…”
“Can we, lad? I think not, and I have lived with the responsibility for over twice your years. I think what we are going to do is to lose a generation of young men to the flies. And so will Velonya. That is how history and the nature of man have arranged it. War is not always avoidable or best avoided.”
The emperor grew more forceful and more bitter as he spoke. His hollow cheeks darkened. As I opened my mouth I realized I had no answer for him, and that what he had said to me was almost what I had said to you, Powl, that beautiful summer day.
“Though it is always evil,” added the emperor. He waved his gnarled hand at us as though shooing children out of doors.
“Go now, Nazhuret. Prince Nazhuret, although no heir to me. And Lady Arlin—enemy though you are I create you also Princess of Rezhmia (in your own right, as foolishly you are not married to the boy). Take good horses and not the asses that bore you here. Ride out of the City as quickly as you migh
t, for you are in danger as enemy aliens, and in more danger as Rezhmians standing so close to the throne. Get along. You are dismissed!”
So strong was this fragile man’s power that we almost ran from the chamber. He called us back at the door.
“I have released my slave,” he said, and his voice shook. “The last slave in Rezhmia. If you would do me one last favor of many, please… please take him home with you.”
A servant woman closed the door in our faces.
I did not know whether we were being honored or simply made prisoner, for a good dozen Rezhmian cavalry flanked us and followed behind as we were led from the fortress and the outer city. Our saddlebags were filled with fine linen and wool and that preserved food that Rezhmian cooks have made an art for the eyes as well as the stomach. The horses upon which they had mounted us were not our horses but the southland’s best: tall creatures built as lightly and strung as tightly as fiddles.
Repeatedly I told the officer in charge that these were not our horses, but he might as well have been deaf.
Repeatedly Arlin cried to them, “Where is Dowln? The jeweler. The sanaur said we are to take the jeweler… ,” but for her the company was equally deaf. Her ferocity in this matter surprised me; after an hour of frustration she stopped her prancing horse sideways on the sunken road and blocked the passage entirely.
“Dowln the prophet, the jeweler,” she shouted at the milling cavalrymen, and she dared to draw her saber. “By the emperor’s command you will deliver him to us!”
No City man could claim not to understand my lady’s accent, nor her intent either. The troopers rolled their eyes and whispered. The lieutenant who led them grew darker and angrier by the moment, and I remembered that Arlin had pulled such a stunt only a few days ago on the streets of Rezhmia’s outer city, to allow me room to stare at a sign. I wondered if any of these men might be the same as the soldiers she had so insulted the last time, and I doubted she could get away with such effrontery twice. The officer gestured curtly and one rider pressed forward. I loosened the ancient blade from where it was strapped to the saddle pommel. I could put my hand to this less obviously than I could reach behind me for the dowhee. My nervous horse I backed beside hers, so that she would not be side-on to attack.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 48
