by Tad Williams
“Heard it?” Makewell put his hand on Feival Ulosian’s knee, but the boy removed it. “We have rehearsed it for most of a year, and even performed it a few times in Silverside. What is new about that?”
“If nothing else, it would be new to the Tessians,” Teodoros said with an air of great patience. “But I have changed it— rewritten much of the play. Also, I have made a larger part for you, Pedder, as great Perin, and for you, Hewney, as the fearsome dark god Zmeos, despoiler of a thousand maidenheads.” He smiled. “I know it will test you to play so against your own character, but I feel certain you will give it your best.”
“Sounds like rubbish,” said Hewney. “But if it’s good rubbish, it won’t chap me to mount it in Tessis.”
“And I suppose you feel certain that I will let you clap a hundredweight of new speeches on me as the beleaguered virgin?” said young Feival. “I won’t have it, Finn. Already I have twice the lines of anyone.”
“Ah, but now we come to my idea,” said Teodoros. “I sympathize with your plight, Feival, and so I have written you a new part instead—shorter, but with a great deal of verve and bite, so that the eyes of the audience will be rapt upon you whenever you enter.”
“What does that mean? What part?”
“I have made the goddess Zuriyal an important part of this new play—the wife of Zmeos and Khors’ sister-in-law. Although darkly beautiful, my Zuriyal is jealous and fierce and murderous, and it is she whose cruelties most threaten pure Zoria.”
“Darkly beautiful is not beyond my skills,” Feival said lazily, “but surely in a play called after Zoria the virgin goddess, somebody must play the virgin herself? I would be happy to carry a lesser load, but is not Waterman here a jot too thickset and whiskery to play the divine mistress of all the pure virtues?”
“Doubtless—so why not let Tim play the part?” Teodoros spread his hands and gestured toward Briony like an envoy delivering a gift to a jaded monarch. “He is younger than you, even, and fair enough in his way to pass for a girl, if not viewed from too closely?” He turned and gave Briony a pleased smile that made her want to take a stick to him.
“Are you mad?” sputtered Makewell. “The child has no training, no skill. Does he know the Seven Postures of Femininity? Just because he held a spear for us when we played Xarpedon in some cow-byre does not mean he can stand up before the Tessians and pass as a woman—let alone a goddess! Are you really so desperate to claim another share, Teodoros, that you would put this boy up as a cheap front for your ambition?”
“In other times I would have you for that, Makewell,” said the playwright coldly. “But I realize I have brought this to you as a surprise.”
“I think he could do it,” said Birch. “He is clever, young Tim.”
“Thank you, Dowan,” Briony said. “But I do not want to be a player at all, still less to go on the stage and mime my dear, holy Zoria, who would never forgive me.”
“What, is our craft too low for you, then?” said Hewney. “Were we mistaken? Do we have a duchess in our midst after all, traveling in secret?”
Briony could only stare at him. He must be making fun of her, but he was uncomfortably close to the mark. “Do not look so frightened,” Feival said, laughing.
“Everyone here knows you are a girl by now.” “What?” Dowan Birch shook his head. “Who is a girl?”
Feival Ulian whispered in his ear. The giant’s eyes grew round.
“I knew he could not be a boy when he chose to stay with you, Teodoros,” said Pedder Makewell haughtily. “No handsome young man would subject himself to your pawings.”
“And I haven’t seen anything but halfwit farm boys succumb to your charms, dear Pedder,” said Teodoros. “But this is beside the point.”
“You all know?” Briony could not shake off her astonishment. And she had thought herself so clever!
“You have traveled with us two tennights or more, after all,” Teodoros said kindly.
“I didn’t know,” said Birch, wide-eyed. “Are you sure?”
“Enough of this yammering,” said Feival. “If anyone should be unhappy at the thought of our Tim—shall we still call you that?—playing at the goddess Zoria, it should be me, since it is my contracted due to play the leading woman’s role. But if I like this Zuriyal-bitch that Finn has jotted out for me, I will raise no objection.” He smiled. “I am with Dowan on this. I think you have many hidden depths.”
“Think on it, Tim,” said Teodoros. “And yes, we shall still call her...him that, because you may remember it is not lawful to have a woman on stage. If you will consent, we would have a new play for the Tessians, one that I can humbly say is my best. Much of my inspiration came from the talks you and I have had.”
“Talks, is it?” Makewell shook his head and made a razzing noise with his lips. “Does that mean there are many scenes in this new work of a fat old playwright futtering a disguised child? I thought your winds only blew one direction, Finn.”
“Don’t be jealous, Pedder,” said Teodoros serenely. “I promise you my relationship with young Tim has been as chaste as it would have been with Zoria herself. But Tim, the crudeness of Master Makewell left to one side, what do you say? You could be a great help to us and earn yourself a player’s share, which can be rich indeed in Tessis, since the Syannese love plays the way the Hierosolines love religious processions.”
“I am flattered, I suppose,” Briony said carefully—she would be traveling with these people for days more, perhaps months, and didn’t want to offend them. “But the answer is no. Under no circumstances. It will not happen in this world or any other. You must think of something else.”
She only had a tennight to learn the lines. There were dozens upon dozens of them, in teetering rhyme-that-wasnot-rhyme. Rehearsals came at night after whatever performance they made for their supper, so most of the work was done by candlelight in tavern courtyards and barns, while chill winds blew outside and snow and rain fell, but they could also speak lines and discuss blocking—a word she had learned meant where the actors went in and out or stood—as they made their way down the Great Kertish Road toward Syan.
I have fallen so far, she thought. From a princess in a castle to a false goddess with no home, with straws in my hair and fleas in my woolen hose.
Still, there was an unfamiliar freedom in such a collapse from grace. Briony was not happy, but she was not sad, either, and she had to admit that however lonely and uncomfortable it might be, and however much she missed her home and family, she was having something that could only be described as an adventure.
33. The Crocodile’s Roar
Argal and his brothers launched their attack upon the fortress Moontusk, and many gods were slain, o my children, a thousand times a thousand.
In the end, betrayed by one of his own family, Nushash was prevented from destroying his half brothers, so he withdrew to the sun with his sister-wife, Surigali, Mistress of Justice. His true brother remained in the moon, taking as a spoil of war Nenizu, the wife of Xergal, to be his own wife.
—from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One
Already smoke lay over the Kulloan Straits like thick fog, great curtains of gray and black torn ragged by the wind. The Xixian ships churned up and down before the walls of Hierosol, their long banks of oars stabbing at the water like the legs of insects, fire spouting from their cannons. The defenders fired back: white spouts leaped up to show where the Hierosoline cannons were finding their range, and many of the Xixian sails were tattered, the flaming eye insignia in flames, but none of the besiegers had been sunk yet. Still, it was a little solace to Pelaya to see that the cannonfire that reached Hierosol’s walls did almost no damage.
“Look, Babba,” she said, tugging on her father’s arm. “They bounce off like pebbles!”
He smiled, barely. “Our walls are strong and thick. But that does not mean I want you here watching. You have given me your mother’s message, and my midday meal.” He turned to the armed servant, a tall m
an with the longsuffering look of someone in minor but almost constant pain. “See her back, now, Eril. And tell my wife that she and the children are no longer to come to the palace, not unless I say they may.”
The servant bowed. “Yes, Kurs Perivos. And I will inform the kura, as you say.”
Pelaya rose onto the tips of her toes to throw her arms around her father’s neck, not caring one little bit about either Eril’s frown of disapproval or her father’s distracted, half-attentive squeeze in return.
“You should not act so, Kuraion,” the servant reproached her as they made their way out of the antechamber and onto the landing. He had called her “Little Mistress” since she was small enough to enjoy it—a time long past. “Not before strangers.”
“What strangers, Eril?” She was particularly nettled because she always did her best to uphold the honor of her house—and it was high honor, too: the Akuanai were of the blood of the Devonai, the dynasty that had ruled all Hierosol only a few short centuries before, and whose funeral masks lined the entrance hall of the family estate in Siris like an assembly of patient, placid ghosts. She might not be as timid as Teloni of speaking out in public, but neither did she run or giggle like a child: those who saw her, she had always felt sure, saw a young woman as grave and seriousminded as befitted her upbringing and her noble house.
“There were soldiers there,” he said. “Your father’s men.” “Theo and Damian? And Spiridon? They have all been in our house,” she told him. “They are not strangers, they are like uncles.” She thought of Damian, who was really quite handsome. “Young uncles, perhaps. But they are not strange to me, and it is no shame to embrace my father in front...”
She did not finish her statement because something outside the antechamber boomed like thunder, making the statue of Perin sway in the wall shrine above the landing. Pelaya squeaked with fear despite herself, then ran to the window.
“What are you doing, child?” The servant almost grabbed her arm to pull her away, but then thought better of taking such a liberty. “Come away. A cannonball will kill you!”
“Don’t be foolish, Eril.” Whatever else she might be, Pelaya was her father’s daughter. “They cannot shoot their cannon this far, all the way to the citadel, not unless they are inside our walls already. But, oh, sweet mother Siveda, look!”
A thick plume of gray black smoke was rising beside the ancient walls—one of the buildings along the quay of the Harbor of Nektarios.
“It must be the powder magazine, hit by some stray shot. Oh, look at it burn!” Had her forward-thinking father not moved much of the powder stored for convenience in the immense harbor magazine, parceling it out to at least a dozen different storage places all over the city, half of the city’s black powder would be gone now, not to mention the harbor itself, which would have almost certainly been destroyed. Instead, it looked as though only one building, the magazine itself, had been ruined, and if the fire could be put out quickly the loss would be bearable.
“I must tell my father,” she said, leaving Eril to catch up as best he could as she scuttled back up the stairs.
“What are you doing?” her father shouted as she came in. He looked angry, truly angry, and for the first time she realized that the city might fall—that they all might die. She was so overwhelmed by this sudden, terrifying understanding that for a moment she could not speak.
“The magazine...” she said at last. “The one in the Harbor of Nektarios. It was hit by...it’s exploded.”
His expression softened a little. “I know. There is a window in the next room, do not forget. Go, and hurry to your mother as I told you. She will be frightened—I’m sure she could hear that crash in Landsman’s Market.”
He is defending the whole city, she thought, staring at him. Her father had already turned back to the table and was examining his charts again, his big hands splayed across the curling parchments like the roots of tall trees. For a moment she found it hard to breathe.
Pinimmon Vash, Paramount Minister to the Golden One Sulepis, Autarch of Xis, did not like traveling on ships. The sea air that had so delighted his ancestors when they came out of the deserts of Xand and settled on the northern shore of the continent smelled to him of putrefaction. The rolling motion of the waves made him feel again as he had in his childhood, when he had caught the bilious fever and lain for days near death, unable to keep anything in his stomach, shivering and sweating. In fact, his survival of that fever had been so unexpected that his father had dedicated the sacrifice of an entire ram to the goddess Sawamat (something that Vash would never have mentioned to the autarch, who barely acknowledged that any other gods beside Nushash existed).
Now, as he teetered down the ramp, he was so grateful to be on dry land again that he offered a silent prayer of thanks to her and to Efiyal, lord of the sea.
The long bight of land known as the Finger, which jutted out into the Kulloan Strait parallel to the western shore of Hierosol, was almost invisible from where he stood at its southernmost tip. Billows of gray and stinking yellow smoke hung close to the ground, so that in the few places where the walled fortifications could be seen at all they seemed to float atop clouds like the palaces of the gods. The fighting, which had begun at midnight with an invasion of the autarch’s marines from both the landward edge of the Finger and the place where Vash’s ship had just landed, was almost over. The Hierosoline garrisons, undermanned because Drakava had (against the recommendations of his leading advisers) withdrawn so many soldiers in preparation for the siege, had put up a brave resistance, but the small fortresses had proved vulnerable to the missiles of burning sulfur and straw the autarch’s catapults had flung over the walls by the hundreds before the morning sun had climbed above the horizon. The defenders, choking, blinded, many of them dying from the poisonous smoke, had been unable to repel the autarch’s marines, who, protected by masks of wet Sanian cotton, were able to hoist their siege ladders and clamber over the walls almost unopposed once the worst of the smoke had blown away. The defenders had offered resistance, but weakened, breathless, and blinded, they had fallen before the marines like brave children fighting grown men.
If we could use that tactic on Hierosol itself, Vash thought, the war would be over in a few days. But there was not enough sulfur for that in all of Xand, nor enough catapults to throw it, even in the autarch’s huge army. Still, he could not help admiring how well Ikelis Johar and the other polemarchs had planned for the siege. The cannons jutting from the walls of the fortresses along the Finger might not be able to reach the walls of Hierosol, but they were an invaluable aid to its defense, able to rake the near side of any ships in the strait, or drive them in under the bigger guns of the city walls.
The autarch’s pavilion had already been mounted on the slope beside the gangplank of his flagship, the Flame of Nushash, a towering four-masted warship painted (in defiance of any secrecy about its semi-divine passenger) in blindingly bright shades of red and gold and purple, with the great, flaming god’s eye on either side of the bow and the autarch’s royal falcon spread-winged in gold across the red sails. The recently erected pavilion was no more restrained, a striped cone almost fifty paces across flying two dozen falcon banners. Vash limped toward it, angrily waving away the offers of help from his guards. Sulepis, the Golden One, had already made it clear he suspected his paramount minister’s loyalty: the last thing Vash needed was for the youthful autarch to see him staggering in on the arms of soldiers. He might as well announce himself old and useless and be done with it.
The autarch, dressed in his fanciful battle-array of golden armor and the flame-scalloped Battle Crown, was sitting on his war throne atop a raised platform at the center of the tent, talking to the Overseer of the Armies. Dozens of slaves and priests surrounded him, of course, along with a full troop of his Leopard guards in armor, muskets in hand, their eyes as brightly remorseless as those of their namesakes.
“Vash, welcome!” The autarch spread his fingers like claws, then scratc
hed himself under the chin with the figured tip of his golden gauntlet. “You should have stayed on the ship a little longer, resting yourself, since we are going back to the landing spot soon anyway.” “I’m sorry, Golden One, I don’t understand.”
The autarch smiled and looked to Ikelis Johar, who nodded but maintained his customary stony expression. “The Royal Crocodiles are coming ashore.”
For a moment Vash was completely confused, wondering what bizarre new plan his impulsive master had conceived. Was he going to put some of the massive reptiles from Xis’ canals into the strait, or even introduce them somehow to the waterways behind the Hierosoline walls? The great beasts were certainly fearsome enough, even the younger adults longer than a fishing boat and armored like a siege engine, but who could make them do anything useful?
It was a mark of how strange and impulsive the autarch was, and how unpredictable life was in his service, that Vash was still trying to understand how crocodiles could be used in warfare even as he and Ikelis Johar and a crowd of servants and soldiers followed the autarch’s litter back toward the ships. Only as he saw the monstrous thing being swung up from the hold of one of the six biggest cargo ships did Pinimmon Vash remember.
“Ah, Golden One, of course! The guns!”
“The largest, most beautiful in the history of mankind,” said the autarch happily. “Each crafted like exquisite jewelry. What a roar they will make, my crocodiles! What a fiendish, terrifying roar!”
The immense bronze tube was six or seven times the length of a man, and even without its undercarriage, its weight was clearly staggering—several pentecounts of seamen were pulling on the ropes, trying to steady it as they swung the cannon barrel out over the side of the boat, the massive winding-wheels and pulleys creaking with the strain. The weapon had indeed been cast to resemble some monstrous river reptile, with inset topaz eyes and fanged jaws stretched wide to make the cannon’s mouth, and the creature’s rounded back ridged with scaly plates. This one and its brothers would fire huge stone balls, each missile ten times the weight of a man, and if the autarch’s engineers were correct (they had been informed they would die painfully if they were wrong) they would easily be able to reach the far side of the strait from the forts along the Finger.
