by S. D. Tower
The first thing I learned was that horses were not boats. I'd imagined that guiding the animal would be much like steering a boat, and I'd overlooked the fact that the creatures had minds of their own. I was given the least skittish of the spare riding mounts, but the chestnut mare did not take to me, nor I to her. Despite the coaching I got from Dilara, the wretched creature insisted on barging off the road to nibble leaves, and I nearly fell off a dozen times in my efforts to dissuade her. So, about mid-morning, I was consigned to the back of a placid and unadventurous packhorse. My humiliation and chagrin left me almost speechless for a while, but Dilara and Sulen didn’t snicker as I'd feared they would; instead, they rode alongside me and told me I just needed more practice.
Rain came and went as we trotted along, but my duster and hat kept me marvelously dry and warm. Dilara, Sulen, and I formed our own little group, while the Despotana and Tossi rode some yards ahead; around us the soldiers formed an armored, moving wall. About midday we reached Gladewater, and as I gazed around the place, I realized that it was nearly as poor as Riversong. If I’d had to make my living there, I would have starved.
But now I was on my way to High Lake, and Dilara said we would reach the town by nightfall. I could hardly wait to see it, although Sulen sniffed and said that High Lake was a run-down place and not nearly as big as the city of Chiran, where the Despotana’s school was. That turned our talk to the school, and soon I was getting very uneasy—how could anyone be expected to learn so much? But Dilara and Sulen seemed to manage tolerably well, as far as I could tell, and I decided I’d probably do no worse.
The forest thinned as we traveled, and the road became a little broader, with occasional remains of pavement jutting through the turf. After a while I asked hopefully, “What happens after you learn all you’re supposed to learn? Does the Despotana find you a rich man so you can get married?”
“I’m not sure,” Dilara said. ‘Tossi is the oldest of us, and she’s not getting married. I don’t think so, anyway. She told me that Mother Midnight says we shouldn’t bother about— Oh!” Sulen had twisted around in her saddle and was making shush-shush gestures, but she was grinning. Dilara giggled, and I said, “What’s the matter? Who’s Mother Mid—”
I shut up as I realized she meant the Despotana. Then, lowering my voice, I asked, “Why did you call her that?” “We all do,” Dilara told me. “But we don’t say it if she can hear. Usually we call her Mother, or if we’re speaking with her, we call her ma’am. Her Midnight name—it’s kind of a joke. It’s because of the story.”
“What story?”
“It’s in The Book of the Pearl Garden Mistress, Don’t you know it?”
“No.” I'd never even seen a book, but I was determined not to admit it. “I can’t read, remember?”
“Then I’ll tell it to you tonight before we go to sleep. All right?”
“All right.”
“You’ll learn to read just fine, too. I’ll help you.”
I felt better for her promise. I was already coming to like Dilara a great deal, with her pert grin and her nimbleness and her quick, nervous gestures. And I sensed that she liked me as well. For the first time in my life, I seemed to be making a real friend.
We rode on through the rain-washed day, with only a brief rest in the late aftemoon. Well before then I was saddle sore and too tired to talk much. Dilara’s and Sulen’s chatter also diminished, and eventually they both looked as weary as I felt. But neither grumbled about being tired, so I didn’t complain either—though back in Riversong I’d never kept quiet when I was uncomfortable, even if piping up eamed me a cuff on the ear.
The ground rose slowly as we approached High Lake, the lowland forest giving way to scrub meadow with scattered stands of bead trees, gums, loquats, and wait-a-bit thorn. The loquats were in fruit, and when the sun looked out from behind the rain clouds, the clusters of small bronze globes shone like metal. More people lived in this region than around Riversong, and during the aftemoon we passed through two farming villages. One was as miserable as Gladewater; the other was abandoned, its roofs falling in and its gardens choked by weeds. But every so often we saw big fortified manors, with tilled fields all around them, and scores of men, women, and children stooping among the furrows with their hoes. I asked what the manors were. Sulen said they were the homes of wealthy landowners, and that the people in the fields were the tenant laborers who worked the fields for them.
Not all these workers were of my race; some were Erallu, the people that had inhabited these lands before we Durdana came. I could tell, because they were small of stature, with bronze skin and long blue-black hair adorned with copper rings. The priestess of the Bee Goddess in Riversong had been an Erallu, but she was the only one I'd known. Clearly they were more common here.
We reached High Lake as the first fireflies began to sparkle in the dusk. The town didn’t have a wall, which disappointed me because I'd wanted to see one. Sertaj told me this was because the place was only half a day’s march from the fortress garrison at Shiragan, the capital of Indar’s Despot, and so was reasonably well protected. To discourage malefactors, a gibbet stood on the edge of the town, a pair of corpses dangling from the crosspiece.
The town’s civic boundary was marked by a ceremonial gate that consisted of two tall posts and a curved lintel. The vermilion paint on the lintel had almost all worn away, and its exposed wood was silvery with age. By one upright was a place god shrine, with a lichen-stained tile roof and a gnarled wooden image in the central niche. I thought of the shrine by the flame magnolia, and of Master Lim, and I was ashamed at how quickly I'd stopped thinking about him. So I whispered a prayer to Our Lady of Mercy, to ask that Master Lim might be happy in the Quiet World and that he might be allowed a new sivara, or whatever instrument a fabulator’s spirit used.
Then I saw how the town got its name. We rode past some acacia trees and suddenly there was Myriad Mirror Lake, a great plain of water that glittered indigo and copper in the setting sun. Fishing boats scudded across it, sails white against the wooded green hills rising from the far shore. The breeze blowing off the waves smelled of cool water and citrus.
Sulen, who had a tutorial streak in her nature, now decided that she must pass on to me what she’d learned about High Lake. She told me that before the invasion of the Exiles, which brought about the Partition and the end of the old Durdanian Empire, the place was a famous resort town. Wealthy families of the empire’s southwestern prefectures used to come to these forested hills to escape the hot season, and the richest of them built villas of spectacular magnificence along the wooded shore. But after the Partition, the southern part of the empire broke up into the Despotates, and many rich families became poor or died out. Eventually their mansions fell into ruin, just as the Stock House in Riversong had done. But a few of the town’s palatial inns remained, among them the one where we were to stay tonight.
An inn! I’d never imagined I’d sleep in one. I desperately wanted to ask Dilara what it was like, but I’d already displayed enough ignorance for one day.
As we continued along the esplanade, Sulen went on with her lecture, pointing out the remains of the famous parks and floral displays of the town, now forlorn with neglect. We passed shrines to Father Heaven and his consort, the Bee Goddess, and one to the Lord of Starlight. Although they had graceful domes and spacious sanctuaries with columned porches, they looked worn and old, and the two priests I saw wore shabby robes.
Beyond the gardens were the buildings of the town itself. Its streets were busy even at sunset, mostly with Durdana but with a few Erallu among them. Petty merchants called their wares from beneath the awnings of their stalls; people haggled for fresh fish, loquats, plums, and rounds of bread sold cheap at the end of the day. A barber shaved a man in a porch; a public scribe, pen in hand, huddled with a worried-looking young woman over a sheet of paper. Lanterns like yellow moons glimmered at the street comers and over the stalls, their light wan in the early dusk.
At length we reached High Lake’s main square. The buildings around it were two stories high and sided with overlapping boards, their windows covered by pattemed latticework. All had verandas and balconies with elaborately carved and painted balustrades. Above the buildings’ omate eaves the roofs varied in design. Some were low pitched and drably shingled, while others rose with a curving sweep like a hawk’s wing and were covered with red and blue tiles.
At first I thought the square magnificent, but very quickly I realized that its wonders were less than they appeared. Most of the square’s paving remained, but in the side streets many flagstones were missing. The alleys between the buildings were thick with refuse and smelled worse than the middens of Riversong. Many of the carvings on those elaborate balconies were broken, and their paint had mostly worn away. Shingles and roof tiles showed gaps, and I realized that many of the buildings, even those in the center of the town, were falling into ruin.
But I was used to tumbledown places, so the shabbiness didn’t take me aback. What did surprise me was the effect our cavalcade had on the townsfolk. The Kayanese soldiers had terrified me during the raid on Riversong, but this was my first experience of the fear that commoners everywhere in the Despotates had of armed men, even those who were behaving themselves. Many people vanished as soon as they saw us, scuttling away down fetid alleys or sidling through the nearest doorway. A few bolder ones stayed on the verandas and watched us sidelong as we passed, our horses’ hoofs clattering and the lance pennons waving above the troopers’ helmets. Most merchants hurried to close their stall shutters at our approach, although some of more courage called out, “Noble lord, noble lady, fine cloth, fine silver, fine wares” as we went by. But nobody got too close to the horses, and our soldiers were clearly ready to use their lance butts on anyone who did.
We left the square and rode farther along the esplanade. Eventually we came to a big wooden building of two stories, secluded within a stone-walled compound on the lakeshore, and unlike the town it still possessed a faded magnificence. A tall sign by the compound gate had writing on it, which Dilara said announced the inn’s name: the House of Lofty Grasses.
The gate stood open. Ekrem led our party into a large courtyard with stables left and right. A man was lighting a cluster of lanterns that hung on a pole in its center. Attendants appeared, and a huge-ruffed watchdog with an iron collar barked angrily from its cage. Then an elderly woman came out of the inn and bowed repeatedly to the Despotana, and before I could blink I was inside the inn, up a flight of stairs, and in a dim corridor paneled in dark wood. A door opened and closed and I found myself with Dilara and Sulen in a high-ceilinged room of—to me—stunning opulence. Lamps in wall sconces burned with clear yellow flames. The walls were smooth plaster painted in alternating panels of cream and red, and on the polished floor were thick mats and a pair of sleeping couches, each a size for two people, with coverlets of a fine green fabric. Next to each couch stood a low table with washbowls, ewers, towels, and a basket of ripe citrines. A tall, latticed window looked toward the lake, fading now into darkness.
I must have gaped at my surroundings, for Sulen said, “Oh, Lale, this place isn’t all that wonderful. Wait till you see the Despot’s piace in Shiragan. We stayed there on our way south.” She giggled. “He liked looking at Tossi, so I bet he’ll want us to stay there again. I think he wanted to keep her.”
“Why didn’t he?” I asked. “A Despot can do anything he wants, can’t he?”
They both laughed, though not nastily. “Don’t be silly,” Dilara said. “Of course he can’t. We’ve got safe passage from him and the other two Despots between here and Tamurin. Molesting any of us would ruin his honor.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. Until now I hadn’t wondered how the Despotana could be traveling so freely through another ruler’s domains. If Kayan’s Despot put his nose into Indar, for example, our Despot would slice it off at the neck.
“Look,” Sulen said, and I recognized the tutor’s tone, “it’s like this. Tamurin isn’t at war with anybody. Mother doesn’t bother other Despots and they don’t bother her, even though Tamurin is a rich place.”
“Why don’t they?” I asked, lowering myself gingerly to one of the couches. I was very saddlesore and extremely hungry.`
“Because Tamurin’s got a lot of mountains and our pike-men are very fierce and they all love the Despotana. A general from Brind tried to conquer Tamurin back in the old days, just after the Partition, and he lost his whole army. Also, the other Despots hope that if they’re nice to Mother she’ll help them if they’re attacked by another ruler, for example, or if there’s a rebellion.”
“Does she do that?” I asked. Dilara had lost interest in the conversation and was washing her face.
“Not so far. But she might. Also, each of them hopes she might marry him, so he’d get Tamurin along with her.”
“Is she going to marry anybody?” I asked in dismay. I didn’t like the idea of some man telling the Despotana what to do, and maybe having a say in my education.
“Not very likely,” Sulen answered, with a snort of disdain. “I don’t think she likes men very much. Don’t you know what happened to her?”
“No. What was it?”
“Don’t get started on that,” Dilara said as she dried her face on a towel. “You sound like our history tutoress. Can’t it wait till after supper?”
Sulen ignored her. “Mother’s bloodline name is Seval, but she was married into the Danjian family and had a baby son. Her husband’s father was Sun Lord of Bethiya, so she was of very high rank indeed.”
“Bethiya?” I said, trying to imagine how she’d ended up being the Despotana of Tamurin, and failing.
“Yes,” Sulen went on. “Her husband was to be Sun Lord, you see, after his father died, but his enemies assassinated him. So the old Sun Lord named Mother’s little boy as his successor.”
This was my first introduction to the complicated dynastic affairs of Bethiya’s rulers. I listened patiently.
“They lived in Kuijain,” Sulen went on, “where the Danjian bloodline had been feuding for years with the Tanyeli, the other great bloodline of Bethiya. That was because the Tanyeli thought they had the better claim to rule, and there were a lot of assassinations on both sides. Then, soon after Mother’s husband was murdered, the two clans started fighting in earnest. They ended up almost exterminating each other and the old Sun Lord was killed. Mother’s little boy was murdered, too, during the fighting, but she survived because she wasn’t in Kuijain when it happened.”
“Oh,” I said. “What happened to her then?”
“She went to Tamurin, for her safety, and married its Despot. Then he died of a fever and she became Despotana. Then she started her school. That was seven years ago. Tossi was her first student. There are thirty-nine of us now.”
“So who became the Sun Lord? There is one, isn’t there?” I had visions of a vast empty palace with no one at home.
“Yes, of course there’s one.” Abruptly Sulen seemed angry. “He’s sixteen years old now. But he’s a usurper, and anyway, he doesn’t really rule Bethiya. The Chancellor does. The Chancellor’s a very wicked man, you know. He pretends to justice. Mother says, but he’s really a cauldron of vipers. He could have kept her baby from being killed but he didn’t. In fact, he made sure the Danjian and the Tanyeli would wipe each other out, so he could put the usurper onto the dais and then have his own way in everything. Mother hates him. We all hate him, don’t we, Dilara?”
“Yes,” Dilara said. “Now, can we please find out when we’re going to eat?”
We women didn’t dine in the inn’s conmion room with the soldiers and other guests but instead were taken to a private chamber with paintings of herons and wild geese on the walls. It was a quiet meal, not because the Despotana forbade conversation but because we were all weary. I watched Tossi so I’d know how to eat in an approved manner, and remembered not to spit bones and pits onto the floor. One thing I found strange was
the food spear, an instrument I'd never seen. It looked like a tiny fish trident. You used it to convey morsels to your mouth, which I decided was a very good idea, as it kept one’s fingers from becoming greasy.
When we’d finished eating, the Despotana sent the others from the room but told me to stay. I sat quietly, gazing down at my dish. It had a blue rim and a white center with yellow grasses painted on it.
“Lale,” she said, and I looked up at her. I saw again that the Despotana was a very ordinary-looking woman, no longer young, not yet old. There were lines at the comers of her small mouth, she had tiny wrinkles at the comers of her eyes, and there was a tracery of gray in her hair. She could have been any of the stall vendors in the streets of High Lake. But, oh, her wonderful voice. It was rich and smooth as the honey of the Bee Goddess. When she spoke, I could do nothing but listen.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said as she studied me. “Did you know that?”
I did. I’d been aware of it all day. But my years with Detrim’s family had taught me never to be open about what was in my mind, so I hesitated, unwilling to admit that I knew how close her scrutiny had been.
“Lale,” she said, seeing my hesitation, “now that you have been accepted into my school, you are my daughter. I will forgive my daughters all transgressions except two. One of these is lying to me.”
I’d been about to do exactly that, and I shuddered inwardly at my narrow escape. I said, “I knew you were watching me, Despotana.”