by Judith Tarr
“Children,” said Lady Nandi, “this is festival, when all enmities are laid aside.”
Neither looked particularly contrite, but they subsided, shooting occasional, baleful glances at one another. Kimeri was thinking openly at Hani. Coward, coward, coward. Daruya had a vision of some outrageous prank in the palace, and Kimeri left alone to face the consequences while Hani bolted for safety.
Hani saw it differently. He had run for help but found none, and when he came back Kimeri was gone. He was too stiffly proud to say so. Kimeri was too angry to read him properly.
Daruya bit her tongue and kept out of it. She had not even known that Kimeri was playing in the palace. Of course the child had to have been; she was never home, and Daruya had yet to see her in the stable in the mornings.
That would stop, Daruya resolved to herself. An Olenyas would accompany the imp hereafter, and keep her out of trouble if he could. An Olenyas should have been doing so from the beginning.
Another weapon in her war against Chakan. She stored it away and focused on the festival, which after all was a feast of amity.
Bundur held out his hand. She found herself taking it and being led to the table and seated in the center, with Vanyi on her right hand and Chakan—too startled to resist—beyond her, and Bundur on her left, and his mother and his sisters beyond. The children had their own place at the table’s foot, with a feast suited to their taste, and bright boxes set in front of them that proved to be full of games and toys and manifold amusements. They seemed to arrive at a truce, however temporary: when Daruya looked toward them they were playing together, arguing softly but without perceptible rancor over the untangling of a puzzle.
“Children are good fortune,” Lady Nandi said in her strong sweet voice. “Don’t you think?”
She was addressing Daruya, showing no particular revulsion at either her ugliness or her foreignness. Daruya blessed her long and often bitter training for vouchsafing her a harmless answer. “A child is the hope of its house.”
Lady Nandi greeted that ancient banality as if it were priceless wisdom. “Truly! And yet my son tells me that you intend to have but the one?”
She wasted no time in getting to the point. Daruya rather liked her for it. “It’s not a matter of intention,” she said. “The god so far has given one child to each of his descendants, one heir and one only. I don’t expect that I’ll be any different.”
“Our gods are kinder,” said Lady Nandi.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Daruya.
There was a pause while servants brought the first course: platter after platter, bowl after bowl of fragrant and often cloying delicacies. Daruya watched in dismay as her bowl was heaped with the pick of them. Bundur selected with his own hands the roasted wing of a bird, and a slender pinkish object that was, he said with relish, a bird’s tongue, and something shapeless that he promised would give her a taste of heaven. It gave her a taste of salt and mud and peculiar spices. It was, Bundur told her while she struggled to keep a courteous face, the nest of a bird that dwelt in cliffs above the city.
There were words to speak as they began, a chant from one of their sacred books, which Bundur led and the women responded to in chorus. It had something to do with war in heaven, and an army of birds, and a goddess’ two children fleeing the field of battle.
For all the quantity of food that filled her bowl, she discovered, watching the Shurakani, that no one ate more than a bite of each offering. The bowls were taken away almost full. “For the poor,” Bundur said, as if she had asked.
Odd custom, but not unappealing. The second course was the same, and the third. The first had been devoted to creatures of the air. The second was comprised of creatures of water: fish broiled and spiced, fishes’ eggs, the legs of a fen-leaper. The blessing-chant took up the tale of the goddess’ children, who fled from the realm of air through river and fen to the protection of the waterfolk, and there were kept alive while all their people perished. In the third round of the feast, over the fruits of the hunt, mountain deer and boar and the strong flesh of the cave-bear, Bundur sang of the deer that led the children of heaven to the secret place in the mountains, and the sow who gave her piglets to feed them, and the bear that sheltered them in its cave until they gathered a new people and founded the kingdom of Su-Shaklan.
Last of all came a mountain of sweet cakes and a palace of spices, and the delicate flowery tea of ceremony, neither given nor shared lightly. Over it the Lady Nandi spoke the blessing, the words that formed the center of the festival: “‘Rule in joy,’ the goddess said to her children, ‘and rule in memory of sorrow. Do not fight, nor give yourselves up to hatred, nor take the life of any living thing but to feed your bodies or to defend your souls. Remember; and keep this festival in the name of peace.’”
“In peace,” the others echoed, Bundur’s deep voice, the women’s lighter, the children’s lightest of all. Vanyi’s, too, Daruya noticed, and Kimeri’s. But not Chakan’s. And not her own. By the time she thought of the courtesy, it was too late. The prayer was ended. The cakes were going round, and the tea, and Bundur was smiling at her.
“So,” he said, “what do you think of our festival?”
“We have nothing quite like it,” she answered. “There’s High Summer, when we celebrate the birth of the Sunborn, and Autumn Firstday, when children come of age and heirs come into their inheritance, and Dark of the Year, when we all do penance for our wrongdoings. But no festival like this, when every year people try to remember to love one another.”
“You’re a warlike nation, then?”
“No,” she said. She was aware that the others were listening; that she was being judged by what she said. But then she always had, who had been born the emperor’s heir. “We’ve had wars, and many—there’s no help for it in a realm as vast as ours. But we’ve had peace, too; long years of it. I remember the Feast of the Peace, when my grandfather ended the last of the wars, and all enemies were brought together in one place and made into one people. They weren’t all happy about it, but they came, and they swore not to fight again. Nor have they.”
“How long has that been?” Bundur asked.
“Five years,” said Daruya. “It looks like lasting, too, though there’ve been small skirmishes here and there. Some people never do understand when a war is over.”
“We haven’t had a war in a dozen generations,” Bundur said.
Daruya smiled thinly. “Yes, and whom would you fight with? Your mountains protect you. We don’t have such mountains where I come from. It’s mostly open plain. Armies have fought across it for a thousand years.”
“You must feel naked,” said Bundur, “and defenseless.”
“Not any longer,” she said. “We’re all one empire. You could begin walking by the western sea, and by the time you came to the shores of the east, you’d have been traveling for half a year. And safely, too. Bandits don’t hunt the emperor’s roads.”
“Do they infest the lesser ones?”
“Not if he can help it.”
“He must be a very busy man, to look after so vast a realm.”
Bundur did not believe any empire could be that large—he was indulging her, and transparently, too. “The emperor has lords and servants in plenty. Someday,” she said, “I’ll take you there and show you how wide it is, you who can’t imagine anything larger than your tiny goblet of a kingdom.”
His face lit from within. “You would do that? You would show me the world beyond the Wall?”
She was a little surprised. She had been threatening him, she thought; but he acted as if she offered him a great gift. “You actually want to see the world?”
“You thought I didn’t?”
She lowered her eyes. Her cheeks were warm. Damn him, he did that to her much too often. “You all seem so smug. Self-satisfied. Content to think that Su-Shaklan is all the world you need to know.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Su-Shaklan is the heart and soul of the world, yes, but some of
us do want to know what else there is.”
“You might not like it,” she said. “It’s very wide. And in places very flat. And no one there has ever heard of Su-Shaklan.”
“No one here has heard of your empire, and you do rather well despite it,” he pointed out.
“You think so?” she asked.
“I think,” he said, “that you are like the sun in a dark place. You gleam, do you know that? All gold, even in the shadows.”
“That’s the god in me,” she said. “No god of yours, as everyone is so careful to remind me.”
“Maybe we can be taught,” he said.
She laughed, short and cold. “Do you want to be? You might be corrupted.”
She was aware of his mother, listening, and his sisters. They offered no objection, betrayed no disapproval. She might have been a player on a stage, performing for their pleasure.
He spoke as if they had been alone. “If I can be corrupted by a single foreign woman, however fascinating, then I deserve whatever fate I suffer for it.”
“What do they do to heretics here? Burn them? Flay them? Spike them to the walls?”
“That depends on the heresy.”
“They flay mages, don’t they? And bathe them in salt, and keep them alive and in agony, till the gods have mercy and take them.”
“Not in this age of the world,” he said. “We have none of that kind.” Ah, she thought: even he could not say the word. “But some of us lack the ancient animus against them. Not all of them are evil, we believe, and not all of what they do is foul.”
“I’m glad to find you so enlightened,” she said levelly, “considering that I am a mage of a line of mages, and all my blood is afire with magery.”
“We call that the gods’ fire here,” he said.
“It’s the same,” said Daruya, “no matter what name you set on it.”
He lifted a shoulder, flicked a hand: shrug, dismissal of the uncomfortable truth. “You’re a priest, yes? You’re consecrated to your god.”
“All the Sun-blood are,” she said.
“So,” said Bundur. “Your god lives in you. That’s a heresy in some sects here, but not in all. Not in ours.”
“Are you saying,” she said slowly, “that you can sweeten what we are to your people by calling us priests and our power the gods’ power?”
“Isn’t it the truth?”
“Well,” she said, “yes. But—”
Vanyi intervened, and none too soon, either. “We used that expedient in Su-Akar. We were told it wasn’t necessary here.”
Bundur turned his attention to the Guildmaster, apparently unruffled by her meddling. “Once, it wasn’t. Things have changed.”
“So I see,” she said.
He smiled. His teeth were white, and just uneven enough to be interesting. “We’ll speak of that. But this is festival night, when we should forget our troubles. Will you come into the city with us?”
Vanyi looked as if she might have pressed him for more, now that he had begun. But she was no less wise than Daruya. She let be, for a while. “We were intending to see the dancing.”
“With us,” he said laughing, “you can do better. You can join in it.”
“Well now,” she said, “I don’t think—”
“Come,” he said, sweeping her up, and Daruya, too, and whirling them out of the hall. “Masks, cloaks, festival purses—come! We’ll revel the night away.”
oOo
It was a mad, glad night, a night of masks and laughter, sudden lights, sudden shadows, dancing and singing and long laughing skeins of people winding through the city. Daruya was swept right out of herself, whether she would or no. With her alien face hidden behind a mask, her alien mane concealed by the black hood of a reveller, she was no stranger at all. No one stared at her; no one whispered, or called others to come and see the demon walking free in the streets of the Summer City.
For all the wildness of the festival, her companions clung close together. Bundur’s hand was strong in hers, fingers wound together, inextricable. When she danced, she danced with him. When she ran, he ran with her, and the others behind.
She had no wish to be free of him. He seemed like a part of her, the moon to her sun, whirling ever opposite, ever joined, but never touching save at arms’ length. More than once some stranger tried to pull her loose; Bundur laughed and spun her away and shouted something that she could not make sense of, something about festival right. It always sent the other spinning off to a new quarry.
The music was all bells and drums, with once in a while the moaning of a great horn. It sounded odd, but after a time it seemed fitting—particularly after she had drunk a beaker or two of another wine than she had had in Shurakan before. This was strong, heady, and not sweet at all. If anything it was sour, like the yellow wine of Asanion.
What color it was, she could not clearly see. Pale, she thought, not red, not blood-colored. Gold like sunlight. It burned going down, and warmed her to her fingers’ ends, and made her feet light in the dance.
Bundur drank off a whole jar of it, dancing round a fire that leaped and capered in a square. There were masks all around it, laughing, clapping their hands, beating on drums.
It came to Daruya with a shock of cold that she was standing alone and he was far away, across the fire. He whirled on the other side, arms wide, singing in his deep voice.
She ran, lifted, sprang through the fire. It reached for her as she flew. She laughed at it. “Cousin,” she said to it. “Soul’s kin.”
It warmed her but could not burn. It was never as hot as the fire in her blood.
She landed lightly, reaching for Bundur. Their hands clasped. The fire leaped out of her and wrapped him about.
He gasped. He was burning—but he was not. The fire filled him and did not consume him.
“Mageborn,” she said, but in her own tongue, the language of princes in Starios. “Fireborn, Sun’s blood. You—too—”
He understood, but in his bones, where he refused to listen. In himself he knew only that there had been fire coming out of her, and it was gone. They stood on cold paving, with the dance going on around them, and the fire—simple mortal flames again—casting ruddy light upon them all.
No fear, she thought. Even in the refusal of knowledge, no fear.
He pulled her away from the flames, but not back into the dance. She tried to twist away. The others were gone. She could not find them. The fire—
But he was too strong, and he was running, dragging her whether she would or no. This was the trap, her mind gibbered. Now he had her alone. He would take her away, hold her hostage, demand an empire’s worth of ransom. Chakan would be gratified.
Stupidity. He was running away from the fire and the knowledge it held. He dragged her because he lacked the sense to let her go. He was lordly drunk, pure mazed with wine, and still too much the gentleman to throw her down and rape her as many a self-respecting princeling might have done.
Although, at that, he might not be so drunk that he thought she would allow such a thing. She would have gelded him if he had tried.
He ran, and she ran with him, weaving through the crowds. There was a giddy pleasure in it, once she gave herself up to it. Running, darting, dancing when they fell into a skein of dancers, running loose again, from end to end of the city and back, from fire to fire, dance to dance, sunset- side to sunrise-side, till movement was all there was and all there need be.
So was the sun in its dance with the moons. So were the stars, wheeling in their courses. Such was the festival, this feast of the peace in the Summer City of Shurakan.
18
It had not been a pleasant morning. Festival wine was stronger than it looked, and hit harder; and Vanyi, having fallen into bed just as dawn paled the eastward sky, was roused much too soon after sunup to greet a guest.
Esakai of Ushala temple, fresh and bright-eyed as if he had slept the night through, wanted to wish her a bright morning and was disposed to linger. He was cu
rious as always, questioning yet again the preposterous belief the mages shared with Asanion, that there was no war in heaven between the light and dark, between good and evil; that the worlds hung in a balance, and that both light and dark were faces of the same power.
She was never completely averse to debating theology, but in the morning after a night of revelry it was more difficult than usual. She trapped herself, one way and another, into inviting her guest to breakfast. He might have stayed till noon if Daruya had not come to her rescue.
Daruya, trained in a harder school than Vanyi had been, got rid of the man in the most amiable way possible, but with admirable dispatch. He seemed hardly aware of the speed of his dismissal; he was still smiling when Daruya thrust him out the door, and still trying to persuade Vanyi that perhaps balance was not the way of the worlds.
Once he was gone, Vanyi found herself wishing for a less taxing escape. Daruya shut the door and barred it with an air of ominous purpose, dropped into the chair that Esakai had vacated and filled an empty bowl, tasting as she went, with a young thing’s ravenous hunger.
She had come to bed later than Vanyi, if in fact she had slept at all. Her hair was out of its many plaits, new-washed and curling more exuberantly than ever; she was back to the plain trousers and the worn coat that she wore among the seneldi, her only ornament the torque of Avaryan’s priesthood. She looked stunningly beautiful, and completely unaware of it.
She filled a cup with tea, grimaced but drank it. “This has to be the most vile excuse for a tipple that man ever thought of,” she said. “I even find myself missing Nine Cities ale.”
“You aren’t, either,” Vanyi said. “That stuff is undrinkable by human creature. This is rather pleasant once you get used to it. It’s subtle.”
“I’m not.” Daruya spread a round of bread with herbed cheese, folded it over, devoured it in three bites. “You were wrong after all.”
“What?” Vanyi asked. “About tea?”