The Company of Glass

by Tricia Sullivan

  The woman who cared for the horses recognized Tarquin at once and scolded him because the animal he had ridden a few days ago was now lame and could not work. He apologized and offered to help her feed and water the king’s beasts, which had many days of hard going ahead of them. In truth he wanted to avoid socializing, but the woman took his hanging back to mean something different, and while they were watering the horses he found himself on the receiving end of an offer that was difficult to refuse. He had his hands inside her clothes and matters were looking promising when her five-year-old child appeared outside the stall, dragging a doll by one leg and crying over a nightmare. So much for that.

  When at last he wandered into the central hall where the king’s reception was being held, he was ravenous and the others were drunk. The hall was of a size to comfortably hold two hundred. Its inside walls had been painted in dark colours to keep them from shining all night, and the imposing space was partitioned to create a feeling of security and intimacy at the expense of grand design. Several smaller rooms had been created by wood and stone blocks, between which were stretched ‘walls’ of deeply coloured hide cut into geometrical patterns and stitched together. One section had been devoted entirely to the display of food, arrayed on trestles and platters that rested on vats of wine and Deer Clan spirits. Small heatstones had been placed in burners scattered liberally on beams and shelves cut in the walls: they glowed with rich colours as they alleviated the chill that came to the mountains even on a summer night.

  The women of A-vi-Sirinn were dressed in the dyed linen cultivated by their lowland Clan sisters who had mastered the Everien style of spinning and weaving. Their manner of dress was simple, and they favoured dim colours and long, flowing lines: few in the Deer Clan dressed to get attention. Even so, the king’s arrival had prompted the donning of the silver and copper jewellery mined in these hills, and Tarquin saw more than one woman in full face paint that must have taken hours to effect, for Deer Clan paint was intricate and subtle. Yet the majority of the faces were brown from sunlight and possessed of a weariness and perhaps even an uneasiness that one night of good cheer could not completely banish.

  Of the men, he saw only Elders in their white robes and a cripple. Even the boys were absent: none seemed older than ten or eleven, and Tarquin remembered how Ajiko had spoken of using women and boys behind the lines. There was a group of Scholars set apart by their red robes and hushed voices. They carried weapons but by the look of them, if the Scholars were responsible for the guardianship of the town, A-vi-Sirinn had better rely on its walls.

  Lerien had given his men strict orders not to overindulge, but the townspeople were keen to make merry. The place was full of inebriated women and adolescents who couldn’t hold their liquor. Tarquin worked his way towards the food, trying to be unobtrusive. A gang of oldsters had gathered around the visitors and were toasting the old days, each other, and Ysse; Lerien was barely visible in a corner with Kivi, apparently conferring over the Eye.

  Tarquin took as much food as he could carry and leaned against a pillar, listening to the talk and watching the local girls circulate among the visitors, one of them going so far as to pretend to have forgotten that the top four fastenings of her dress were undone. He made idle bets with himself as to which one of Lerien’s men would get her, and then, as he watched her more, revised this to a question of how many of them she would allow.

  The town’s elderly governor, Wodhi, was drinking freely and in between toasts addressing the group with a series of rambling anecdotes about horses; everyone was looking bored. ‘In Ysse’s heyday, the Deer Clan bred such horses as you children have never seen. Now we have warhorses, which we derive from the draught stock, but in those times my Clan had pastures and to spare. They’d have made your Pharician beasts look like donkeys. Our horses were more fleet than the arrows from young Taro’s bow.’

  The Wasp smiled, but the other young ones exchanged ‘not another one of those before-the-Sekk-came stories’ glances.

  Tarquin heard himself say, ‘I remember a horse called Ice.’

  ‘Ice! Don’t say his name to me!’ cried the old man, his grizzled jowls flapping. Tarquin smiled and ignored him.

  ‘My brother took me to see the races,’ Tarquin said. ‘I remember how we spent ten days walking on the way to the meet, and ten days coming back, and by the time we got home our mother was like a ghost with fear for us, for she’d heard the news of what the Sekk were doing to people they found in the hills. Anyway, Ice was the name on everyone’s lips. Nothing on four feet could outrun him.’

  ‘He was a fell beast with a black heart. His ancestors came from the cruel deserts south of Pharice. They are cannibal horses, did you know that?’

  Tarquin laughed.

  ‘It’s true, you young fool! That horse never grew old and it never took the bridle. Unnatural demon-thing, born in a Fire-House probably …’ Someone refilled Wodhi’s mug and he swayed, forgetting what he was saying.

  They all laughed; Taro and Jakse were drinking too much and received a second warning from their leader, which was met with good-natured protests. A girl was called on to sing and everyone gathered around; Tarquin found himself standing just outside the circle, beside the drunken old man who called himself Wodhi.

  ‘You’ve lost nearly all your men,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Where have they been sent?’

  Wodhi shrugged and glanced towards the king. ‘If only we knew. I put together a battalion and sent them down the valley to join the army. That was eight months ago, and no news yet. I must content myself with the fact that the Sekk have not reached us here.’

  This was a pitiful excuse for contentment, Tarquin thought.

  ‘Jai Pendu is on the way,’ the old man added. ‘Are you not riding in the wrong direction, Tarquin the Free?’

  Long seconds passed. Tarquin could think of no answer. He coughed.

  ‘Give me some of that,’ he said, and a mug of strong malt was placed in his hand. He tilted his head back and drank. A Deer girl had taken a stool and a polished red lute. She was paper white with auburn hair and grey eyes, and her throat trembled when she sang. She was exquisite, Tarquin thought, but for the savage × that scarred her cheek. How had her father felt, he wondered, when he took the burning knife to his daughter’s perfect face, to brand her as human lest she be mistaken for Sekk? And how would men treat her, who would be both drawn to her fragile looks and repelled by the beauty that made her look like a Sekk?

  Through summer long I’ll wait for you

  Our vows still on my lips

  No night shall break your courage true

  No moon my love eclipse

  Her eyes were shining with emotion. He finished the whisky and found himself filled with the wild hope that he had been wrong about the Pharician army. Maybe he had been seeing things; maybe there was no enemy marching on Everien. Perhaps it had all been simply another vision, another episode in eighteen years of sporadic insanity.

  A curvy young blonde was standing beside him, her lips swollen and blurry and her hair in disarray. She took the cup away and handed it back to him full.

  Better, he thought, drinking, that he should be insane and his people persist. For he had dedicated his life to Everien – this was the only thing that gave his existence what little meaning it had. In this matter he had taken his cue from Ysse. She had accepted her role as head of state not because she wanted to be queen, but because it was what had to be done, and Ysse never shrank from doing the things others feared. She had abhorred statecraft: he had never seen a crown on her head, and even in private she dressed as a warrior. In her last years, despite the debilitating illness that wasted her body, she had ridden every day, kept falcons, and was a frequent visitor to the garrison where she was in the habit of overseeing the training of the young. He had himself conducted weapons training sessions in which Ysse hobbled in with the aid of a stick, spoke to him for a quarter of an hour of inconsequential things without seeming to inspect the men, and
left. Later she would summon him to her office and offer a detailed analysis of each warrior’s individual strengths and failings. Sometimes her suggestions were radical.

  ‘That one,’ she might say, pointing to a particularly clumsy student, ‘he would do better to fight without the shield.’

  ‘He’s too slow to survive without a shield,’ Quintar would protest, incredulous. ‘He’d be cut to pieces.’

  They would argue back and forth for a while, and Quintar would go away annoyed that she passed judgement too rapidly, without bothering to spend more time with his pupils. Then, a week or two later, her words would work on him and eventually, no matter how he fought the idea, he would tell the student to work without the shield. While Quintar waited to be proven right, his slowest, most ponderous student would suddenly metamorphose and become more agile, more powerful, and more alert. Quintar would curse Ysse in private, and her eyes would laugh at him whenever the man in question was mentioned. This kind of thing happened many times. It drove him crazy; but Ysse never rubbed his nose in it, and she seldom interfered with his work unless he asked for her advice. If she had been a man, he thought, there would have been nothing she couldn’t do.

  As it was, she had died with her work unfinished, for the Sekk still plagued Everien. The last time he’d seen her, she had received him in her private chambers. She was dressed in a dark red robe that hid some of the effects of the disease. When she rose to greet him, she moved with the old surety, and only her grey-streaked hair in its braids hinted at her age. The black eyes were as bright and clear as ever, and her smoky skin had few lines, for emaciation had pulled it taut across her cheekbones. Yet there was now a softness in her demeanour that was uncharacteristic of the Ysse he had served all his adult life, and it gave him pause.

  It was not long after the slaughter at Jai Pendu. He had already made up his mind to leave Everien. Everything had to change, because he wasn’t the same and couldn’t pretend he was. The only way he could get through the days was to shut down every feeling he owned, and he had walked around like a zombie as he made preparations to depart. He had delivered his renunciation to his Clan, who didn’t take it seriously at first, even the day before he planned to ride. He’d made all the preparations, but everyone expected him to snap out of it; those who dared invade his privacy and speak to him told him earnestly that he was a hero. He heeded no one. He became like iron, and almost forgot that life had ever been any other way. When Ysse summoned him, he approached the audience as a mere formality, forgetting her uncanny ability to see into people.

  She took his hands. The way she said his name brought his heart into his throat. He turned her hands over in his and looked at them: here could her true history be seen, in the thick veins, the scars, and the crooked fingers broken and mended and broken again. Her skin was warm and dry. She looked up at him and said simply, ‘Don’t go.’

  He was nonplussed. ‘Do you order me to stay?’

  ‘I forfeited the right to give you orders the day I sent you to Jai Pendu.’ Her eyes were steady against his, their pressure as certain as if she put her hands on some deep place in him and swung it open.

  He swallowed and looked away. He let go of her hands; her disappointment rippled in the air between them.

  ‘It is hard, Quintar.’ Her voice was so soft that he had to look at her. It was the second time she had used his Clan-given name.

  ‘I’m not called that any more.’

  ‘Why do you look this way at me?’ she said. ‘Why the shame? Why?’

  It should be obvious, he thought. The only ‘why’ was why she taunted him. But he said nothing.

  ‘You think I deserve this?’ she said, and he glanced at her sharply as she gestured to the walls and battlements around them. ‘You think I am special because I was the one who blundered into Jai Pendu and captured the Fire of Glass? Are you really like the rest of them, even now?’

  He hadn’t bargained for this, and fleetingly wished himself anywhere but in the line of her scrutiny. ‘You are the queen,’ he answered stiffly. ‘That is how I think of you.’

  She released his gaze then. Sighed, looked out across her land. ‘That is all you will allow yourself, so that is all you will get.’

  He didn’t know what this meant. Ysse was silent for a long moment.

  ‘When death comes it should be sudden, so that our lives need not change to accommodate it. So that we need not back down from what we are. So that there will be no time for fear.’ She paused for breath, and he saw the quaver in the loose skin of her throat before she continued. ‘I will not have a sudden death. I watch my life unravel. Everything I have ever done I have charged at full speed. They thought me courageous, but I was only fearless, and that is not the same thing. I was never afraid to die in battle. I am afraid to die in bed. It is the one battle I can’t fight. All I can do is stand still and watch it happen.’

  His hands were gripping his own knees. He was thinking of his men, and how he had been able to do nothing to save them. ‘I know,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Tarquin,’ she said. ‘I sent you to Jai Pendu. Their deaths are on my head. Not yours. I want you—’ She caught the sceptical look on his face and sighed. ‘I want you to go free.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Is it? Now, maybe, it seems that way. It is all too fresh, too raw, and you are like me. You must act. You can’t bear to stand still. So you will go off and think that by running you can change what’s happened—’

  ‘I know I can’t change it,’ he contradicted her, unable to attenuate the bitterness in his voice. ‘I know it will never change. I know there’s nothing I can do. I’m not running because of guilt. I’m running to save myself. Ah … I can’t explain.’ He looked around the room as if the walls themselves would pounce on him. Everything in Jai Khalar reminded him of Jai Pendu. It made him feel sick.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ she said. ‘I have no right to behave as if I understand.’

  He looked at her again, knowing she did somehow understand, wanting to plead for help. But she was not offering him authority, guidance, mentorship. The equality, the sense of being in her confidence that she held out to him now did not flatter him as it would once have done; it unsettled him.

  ‘Come and see my flowers,’ she said, and led him out on to a terrace he had never even known was there. It had rained and the sky was still overcast; all of Jai Khalar was white and gleaming, but the plants Ysse was growing in stone containers on the terrace bore brilliant flowers among dark green foliage. The intensity of the wet colours was almost painful. Their petals fluttered in the wind, reminding Tarquin of the world below, of dirt and ordinary things that were so remote from this height. Ysse poured wine from a flagon and offered it to him.

  ‘These are jaya plants from Pharice. They can live to be a hundred years old. I started growing them when I got back from Jai Pendu. They require much attention and care, and I found the pastime soothing. For years after my trip to Jai Pendu, I had difficulties. In my mind, I mean.’

  ‘You?’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I was afraid I would lose face, that my authority would suffer, if I admitted anything was wrong. But also … also I felt somehow that the things I had seen were secret, and that it would be wrong to speak of them to anyone else.’

  She didn’t look at him as she spoke, but rather at the plants, moving her fingers in the soil and idly caressing their leaves. He had never seen Ysse like this, didn’t know how to read her manner, and felt like he was caught in quicksand. Instinctively he went very still as she continued.

  ‘If I could have,’ she said, ‘I would have left Jai Khalar as you are doing. I would have gone far away, started over, lived as a woman. But I could not. My duty was here, and I had started something that I needed to see through. I let them make me queen – someone had to do something!’ She laughed, and for a flash there was the old Ysse, tough as nails, practical. ‘So to cope with the visions, I began cultivating
these flowers. You probably think it sounds pitiful, but they are the closest thing I will ever have to children.’

  ‘It is not pitiful,’ he protested feebly. The idea of Ysse as a mother of children had set his mind reeling, but he didn’t want to show it. ‘I mean, I understand.’

  ‘You need something like these plants. If you must go, then go. But do as I would have done. Make something of yourself. Don’t give yourself over to the past, or to the labyrinth.’

  His breath caught. She knew. ‘Labyrinth?’

  ‘Jai Pendu, and the maze it can make of you. It will trap you inside yourself if you let it.’

  He started to shiver as if about to enter combat. She put her hand on his.

  ‘I can’t talk about it,’ he said, hating himself for his weakness. He had idolized Ysse for years, just as everyone did. To find himself now on such intimate terms with her, and to behave like a sick or wounded animal instead of a man – this should have burned deep. Yet she showed no acknowledgement of his shame.

  Her hand went to his cheek. He didn’t look at her face. She poured more wine and he downed the cup in two long swallows. Ysse moved away, looking out over her land, and the moment faded.

  Suddenly a mischievous look came over her and she said, ‘Do you remember that time in the border skirmishes of the Bear Clan?’

  He reached for the flask and helped himself to yet more wine. It splashed when he poured it. ‘If you’re going to talk about that,’ he replied with a nervous laugh, ‘I’m going to have to get really drunk.’

  She smiled. ‘Why? You were delightful.’

  Abashed, he looked at his boots. ‘I’m surprised you remember it.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He let loose another embarrassed laugh and avoided her gaze. Her eyes were black and bright all at once.

  ‘Well, obviously. I mean, how could I forget? It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut about it.’ He moved to stand beside her while the shadows on the white cliff deepened to blue and purple with dusk. She had been his commander, but that night in a ditch waiting for a Bear Clan messenger who never showed up, she had not been in control. What the twenty-year-old Tarquin would have given to be able to say to his cronies, ‘I had the queen last night’ – or rather, ‘I had the queen last night, in a ditch.’