by Hugh Cook
That last answer left Yen Olass entirely defenceless. She knew that if she was prepared to die she would have killed herself at the age of twelve. She knew that she wanted to live, even if she had to eat shit for breakfast for the rest of her life. But the Ondrask? He stank. He was a barbarian. He was illiterate. He would treat her like a dog. And he had other women already, she had seen them at his yashram, they would hate her and steal her boots. And when he grew tired of her, what then?
'Does he know . . . ?’
'The Sisterhood does not ask what the Ondrask does know or does not know.' said the Silent One. 'We are satisfied that to serve his wants in this instance will be to serve our own best purposes. We no longer regard you as an asset to our organization.’
Yen Olass bowed her head, fighting down tears. She did not want to be smothered by a stinking barbarian, to chew furs and sew clothes, to live in a yashram with dogs and lice and squalling children and alien women who hated her.
'Return to Lord Alagrace and advise him of our decision,' said the Silent One. 'Another oracle can be supplied to him for the journey south if he so desires.’
Yen Olass, not wanting to make her situation any worse, made reverence to the Silent One, then fled.
Lord Alagrace was not at Valslada. She sought him in Karling Drask, and found him in the office of the Lord Commander of the Imperial City; he was trying to instruct the new incumbent on how to conduct the census planned for the coming winter, and was not pleased to be interrupted.
When Yen Olass made it clear her need was urgent, Lord Alagrace took her into a side room, where she poured out the troubles of her heart.
'Well,' said Lord Alagrace, when she had finished, 'there it is. It's not what we wanted, but we'll just have to live with it.’
'It's me who has to live with it!' said Yen Olass.’
'I don't see what you're making such a fuss about,' said Lord Alagrace. 'Coming south with me, you were likely to get yourself killed. This way, you get a man, a house, some children.’
'I can't have children!' wailed Yen Olass.
That was not true. Despite what the Sisterhood had done to her at the age of twelve, she was still entirely capable of breeding. However, Lord Alagrace, who had no precise knowledge of the messy details, had no reason to think she was lying. He thought of childbearing as the essence of a woman's estate; to his own mind, the inability to bear children must necessarily be a tragedy for a woman.
'If you can't have children,' said Lord Alagrace, 'the Ondrask will just have to endure the disappointment.’
'But he'll beat me!’
'A slave's estate is a hard one,' said Lord Alagrace, unmoved.
'If we go now we can get away.' said Yen Olass. 'I can come with you. I can help you. I can be very, very good. You'll die without me.’
'You'd be a help when I met Khmar,' said Lord Alagrace, 'but I can't take you south. A hundred yahooing Yarglat would ride us down. You don't seem to realize that my authority in Gendormargensis is finished. Everyone knows or thinks that Khmar is displeased with me. If I give them a chance, the Yarglat will be more than happy to kill the last surviving member of the High Houses of Sharla. By the same token, it doesn't matter if you tell all the world what we've done together in the past. I'm not likely to come back here as Lawmaker -- or as anything else.' 'You mean you want to die?’
'I mean I accept my fate, whatever that may be. Yen Olass, we can only struggle so much against what life has in store for us. Now remove yourself. I have business to conduct.’
Yen Olass left Karling Drask, crying, and not caring who saw it. But on her way back to Valslada, she dried her eyes, and began to think. She realised now why the Silent One had directed her to take the news to Lord Alagrace. The Silent One had guessed, more or less, what would take place. It had been done deliberately, to show Yen Olass that there really was nobody in all the world who would help her or defend her.
Now she had no friends in all the world.
She wished she could run away somewhere. She wished she could run away to the cave near the hunting lodge at Brantzyn. She had really enjoyed herself there, with her fire as her friend and her horse as her friend.
Well? Why not run away?
She had a horse, and her saddle bags were all packed. She could not run north: the bandits in the Sarapine Ranges would get her if the pursuit failed. But south .. . south was Khmar. The lord emperor, terrible and entirely unpredictable. Could a slave petition the lord emperor? She would find out, by asking him.
At Valslada, Yen Olass saddled Snut and loaded him up for her journey. She put on her league rider's weather jacket and her new lightweight fur coat. She armed herself with her weapons. She was ready to go. She would camp out that night, sleeping in her snow-coat, safe under a horse blanket with Snut.
Yen Olass mounted up.
'Ya!' said Yen Olass.
And Snut made for the stable door.
'Hey, you!' said a voice.
It was one of the stable hands. Yen Olass could have explained herself with any of a thousand lies, but instead she panicked.
'Ya!' said Yen Olass. 'Ya!’
As Snut raced past the stable hand, he grabbed one of her boots and pulled her out of the saddle. She fell heavily. Getting to her feet, she slugged the stable hand as he grabbed her, and he staggered backwards. As Snut came back to see what was wrong, Yen Olass snatched her sabre from its saddleside sheath.
'You want to play rough, huh?' said the stable hand, and picked up a pitchfork.
Yen Olass hesitated. He frightened her.
'What's this?' said a familiar voice. 'What's going on here?’
It was a league rider, the one who had once spent an afternoon teaching her how to kill people.
'The slave was trying to steal a horse,' said the stable hand.
'I was riding on business for Lord Alagrace,' said Yen Olass.
'A slave does not ride with weapons,' said the stable hand.
'I'll settle this,' said the league rider. 'Girl, come with me. And you -- get back to your work.’
Out in the grounds, away from the stable, the league rider talked with Yen Olass. Not knowing what else to do, and with no percentage left in telling lies, she told him the truth. He was young, and bored after months of idle peacetime duty; he had already been paid off by Lord Alagrace, and his service would end when Alagrace departed from the city. A good gallop wouldn't do him any harm at all.
'I'll get your horse,' he said, 'and mine. I'll tell them you persuaded me you had a legitimate mission to Brantzyn, that I accompanied you half the distance for your protection, and last saw you heading north.’
Yen Olass was sure he was going to rape her, kill her, steal her horse or sell her to a slaver down the river, but what could she do? To go might be disastrous, but to stay was impossible.
'Thank you,' she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lord Alagrace was annoyed when Yen Olass disappeared, particularly after a casual enquiry established that there was ultimately nothing to stop an oracle from having children just like any other woman. As he saw it, Yen Olass had turned down a chance for her life to end happily ever after. Now she was a runaway slave, and likely to go under the spikes when she was caught. He was disappointed in her.
A three-day womanhunt failed to locate Yen Olass. After an ugly interview with the Silent One, and an acrimonious argument with the Ondrask, Lord Alagrace left Gendormargensis with Chonjara, the Princess Quenerain, some servants, a contingent of thirty soldiers and some mules.
They voyaged in a ferry boat down the Yolantarath River, which first winds south as it flows from Gendormargensis toward the western coast of Tameran; at the southernmost point of the river, they picked up the Yangrit Highway and travelled thereafter by land.
Travelling at the personal command of the emperor, they could demand horses from the way stations along the highway. These served the imperial couriers, and consequently stocked only the best animals. However, as they could seldo
m provide more than half a dozen mounts, the convoy travelled at the marching pace of the infantry.
They journeyed south at a leisurely pace, for Lord Alagrace was in no hurry to face the emperor. Sometimes they halted by night in a town or a village, and sometimes a way station accommodated them; on occasion, failing to reach a way station before dark, they halted in woods or by
fields, put up tents, and cooked over open fires, sleeping with guards on watch for gypsies and thieves.
Every evening, Lord Alagrace practised with the sword, preparing himself for the confrontation at Favanosin. He did not contemplate challenging his emperor; rather, he was perfecting himself for his death.
Sometimes they halted at a place large enough to support its own tea pavilion. Always there was water, for this was a land of streams and small rivers, and no community built its houses far from running w7ater. At every tea pavilion, Lord Alagrace indulged himself with the silk girls. He rather enjoyed these melancholy autumn evenings: the wine mellow, the sunlight fading, a faint smell of cooking smoke on the air, and a girl with a klon playing in the plankenyi style, one note allowed to die away before the next started.
He indulged himself shamelessly in regret. He had served the Yarglat faithfully, believing that the ends justify the means. Then, in the Blood Purge, the ends had disappeared -- so how was he to justify the means he had used? There were still his hopes of succeeding through Celadric, of course, but those hopes were a pale shadow of the glory of his original ambitions. The high civilization of the High Houses of Sharla was now lost forever, the people who could have rebuilt it buried in mass graves . . .
And now, since Khmar was probably going to kill him, even his hopes for Celadric were at an end .. .
Lord Alagrace knew he had failed, and therefore he was released from the demands of ambition. For those of us ruthless enough to discipline ourselves according to the dictates of our unlimited ambitions, to fail becomes the ultimate luxury. And so it was with Lord Alagrace: like a man bleeding to death in a warm bath, he felt slow, comfortable, languid, unable any longer to summon sufficient passion to lament his own fate.
Where had he gone wrong? To find the answer, he reviewed his past. He had studied the evolution of empires, consulting old texts and modern histories derived from the same. He had placed his faith in a future of rational administration where the stable bureaucrat would be more important than any warlord with his sword imbrued with slaughter. Though Khmar had seemed a disaster to civilization, Lord Alagrace had taken the opportunity to become mentor to Celadric, Khmar's eldest son; as the boy grew, Lord Alagrace had taught him a new ethic in which planning, negotiation and consultation were more important than battle, glory and conquest.
His fault, really, was that he had indulged himself in the present by postponing his struggles to an indefinite future. Celadric might die, or might come to power when Alagrace was dead. Lord Alagrace should have tried to wrest the empire from Khmar. There were ways. A mercenary army, a conspiracy, an alliance with the Witchlord ... he could have tried. Attempting to overthrow the horse lord would probably have meant his death, but he was doomed to die anyway . ..
And now that it was all over, for the moment . . . life was sweet. The wine, the notes of the klon, the voice of a silk girl lifted in a plaintive song ... a leaf falling toward running water . . . evening, and a fish taking an insect, clearing the water in a smooth curve ... a meal, with the savour of sauces recalling other places, other times . . . then the darkness, and perfume against his skin, hands nourishing his flesh, eyelashes whispering against his cheek . . . smooth hair, warm lips, a sigh . . .
A girl who says she loves you . . .
Sometimes, his flesh striving toward spasm, he would almost allow himself to be convinced that there was some revelation to be discovered in this crisis of desire. Sometimes, afterwards, he almost allowed himself to be persuaded that he was a great lover, and that the girl did, indeed, love him ... at least a little. Yet he never quite managed either of these feats, for failure did nothing to strengthen his powers of self-delusion.
The silk girls were a cadre of desirable whores reserved for the higher castes in an effort to save them from the diseases the common soldiers shared in the stews -- diseases which often meant, eventually, not just buboes and genital warts, not just sterility, stinking discharges and the inconvenience of pissing through an ulcerated urethra, but, with time, blindness, paralysis, insanity and death.
Despite medical inspections, this method of quarantine was not foolproof, but it afforded the high-born with a degree of protection. The silk girls for their part were glad enough to escape from the routines of army brothels; while they were safer from the classic venereal diseases, the advantages of being a silk girl did not end there.
As silk girls, they enjoyed better food, clothes and accommodation; they were protected from violence, and saw only one client in an evening, instead of twenty. Their smaller clientele made them less likely to develop the cervical cancers encouraged by the rampole efforts of hundreds of dirty penises; the link between the dirty penis and cervical cancer had been demonstrated just ten years previously by the great medical statistician, the First Honour Inspector of Human Biology, Tarlor Poutan na Venski (another victim of the Blood Purge), who had begun his elegant and exhaustive study after discovering that oracles, being virgins by law and necessity, never suffered from this kind of cancer.
Together with these advantages, the silk girls benefited from better contraceptive methods -- sponges soaked in olive oil were the most reliable, and both these products were imported at great expense by way of Ashmolea. When these methods failed, they enjoyed the services of a better class of abortionist.
Furthermore, clients were free to buy the silk girls from the state, thus releasing them from the nightly routine of enticement, excitement and surrender. No matter how enchanting the entertainer, Lord Alagrace knew that calculation ruled every gesture, every murmur, every touch which treasured his flesh. For these girls, as their charms declined with age, would be returned to the army brothels; if nobody intervened, they would end their lives as old,
diseased slave women, sorting coal from rock in the screening sheds of a mine, or working dawn to dusk spinning hemp to rope.
Whenever a girl mimed passion, or said -- as if confessing a secret none other had been privileged to hear -- that he had gratified her desire, Lord Alagrace always reminded himself that for any of these slaves of the state he would be a desirable owner. He was old, and at least a little softhearted; it was even odds that he would leave a girl her freedom in his will, and a little money to sweeten that freedom. And he knew himself to be old-fashioned and straightforward, an easy customer, his usual satisfactions being suggested mostly by biology; unlike some, he had no wish to have a woman sewn up tighter, to push his fist into her privacy, to see her satisfy a dog, to mark her neck and watch her mouth gape.
Possessed of such knowledge, he succumbed to no infatuations; the blandishments designed to satisfy that most subtle sexual organ, the ego, never persuaded him to believe that he was in love. Yet, even so, he allowed himself to enjoy those blandishments. It gave him pleasure to listen to some melodious, faintly fevered voice massaging his sense of mastery:
'. . . You're the first man I've met who's been able to touch me like that ... I don't know what it is, but I can't resist -- this ... do you like this? Does it make you happy? I want to make you happy, you're the most beautiful person I've ever met in my life
Often he would fall asleep with some woman gentling his body; at the end of the day he was sometimes very tired. But sometimes, if the girl was drowsy and fell asleep before he did, Lord Alagrace would lie awake and allow himself to think about his lifelong service to the empire.
In his youth, fighting in the armies of the Collosnon Empire, he had allowed himself to believe that he pursued power only in order to rise to a position where he could serve the higher purposes of civilization. But in fact, he had existed as a function o
f his own ambition, which had been gratified time after time; on first leading his own troops to victory, he had felt like a young god, strong, powerful and immortal.
Now, in his declining years, he sometimes doubted even the existence of the 'higher purposes' which had been the excuse for his drive to power. It was generally agreed that an empire was the highest expression of civilization. Yet, supporting the glory of the greatest empire was the grubby, commonplace suffering: a woman in the sweating darkness of an army brothel closing her eyes as a soldier shoved his penis into her vagina, a sewn-up oracle falling asleep in a cold bed in a solitary room, a legless soldier begging bone-sustenance in the streets of Gendormargensis .. .
Yet surely it would all be worth it if Celadric became emperor and brought about a new form of government, more reasonable, more humane . . . yet what if reasonable, humane government only created reasonable, humane nightmares? . . . down from the hills come tribes of fratricidal barbarians, battering each other's skulls with jagged rocks, then eating the corpses so produced. Settling in the cities, they become reasonable, humane and civilized, learning to prefer cats instead of dogs. Their wars are fought in accordance with rules designed to make them reasonable, humane . . .
