by Judith Tarr
24
Bundur set Daruya on her feet. She was still stiff, still furious, but all too wide awake to the absurdity of resistance. Awake too to where she was. A room with tapestried walls, a broad hearth swept clean, a low table, cushions, and a curtained alcove. Behind the alcove was the bed.
He did not drag her to it. Once she was steady on her feet, he went to the hanging that bled light, and slid it aside from a window. Sun, topping the Worldwall, washed him in brightness.
He stretched, yawned, pulled the cords out of his hair and shook it down. He turned, smiling.
God and goddess, Daruya thought. She was terrified—panicked. Her eyes darted without her willing it, looking for escape. The door was barred. Another door—a bath? Another portion of the suite?
She could not move at all. He wandered to the table where things were set for tea, including a little brazier and a copper pot full of water, singing as it came to the boil. He folded his legs under him and made tea, his big hands deft with the delicate pots, the bronze spoon, the dried leaves of the herbs and the pinch of flowers.
“The trouble,” she said, out of nowhere in particular, “is that I can’t—let—myself love a man. Not without fighting with him endlessly, trying to make him hate me and leave me, or at least let me be. It’s so much easier to choose lovers as one chooses one’s dress for the day, for its color or its style or its suitability to the weather. Then come nightfall, one can take it off and forget it, and put on another.”
He was listening, but not discomfiting her with his stare.
He lidded the teapot and set hands on knees and waited while the herbs and flowers steeped. Their fragrance wafted toward Daruya in a breeze from the window: sweet and pungent, with a faint green undertone.
“I’ve never felt this way before.” She could not stop talking, filling the awful silence with a babble of words. “I’ve never wanted to be near anyone all the time—thought of him when he’s not there—remembered his hands when I should be thinking about something else altogether. I’m losing myself. I don’t want that. I hate it.”
“Time makes it easier,” he said.
“You know that?”
He raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were too bright to bear. “Not . . . from personal experience. I’m still rather lost myself. But I’ve been assured on excellent authority, one does grow accustomed; one learns to keep the self and the other, both, without losing either.”
“You can’t feel that for me. I’m all edges. I make a great deal of noise. I wound your pride with every word I speak.”
“But not with every word you think,” he said, “or every glance you turn on me. Fear makes you say all those words that wound.”
“I wish,” she said tightly, “that you would lose your temper. Just once. And stop being so bloody understanding. It makes me sick.”
“Am I too much like your grandfather?”
She leaped. He caught her. He was stronger than she, and he had skills she had not expected. She could not fling him down and pummel him.
“Who told you?” she gasped. “Who told you that?”
“The Lady Vanyi,” he answered. “She says I well ought to drive you wild: I’m too damnably like him. But steadier, she says. I don’t think she means it as a compliment.”
“She’s been desperately and hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with him for forty years,” said Daruya.
“Not unrequited,” he said. “Not the way she tells it. Though I suppose I’d have to ask him for his side of it. They do best as they are, that’s all.”
“Then can’t we?”
He laughed. “Oh, you are clever! No, we can’t. Do you want to? Really? In your heart?”
“In my heart,” she said, “I want to be a child again, and never to have heard of what’s between men and women at all. I’m afraid of you. Every time I look at you I feel as if I want to drown.”
“Oh, that’s only love,” he said. It came out light, but she could sense the weight of fear beneath. He, too. He was afraid. Of her; of what she did to him, so close, with those hot-gold eyes of hers, and all that outrageous hair.
It was happening again. She was blurring into him. She wrenched away, body and soul, and backed against the wall. “I can’t do it,” she said. “There’s no maiden-blood to show here, with my daughter for proof that it’s long since shed. Can’t we just . . . not, and pretend we did? Aren’t the words and the blessing enough, and the name of wife that the queen gave me?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“I want,” she said. “I want—I don’t—”
Oh, damn her traitor feet. They were taking her straight back to him, and her hands were seizing him, pulling him to her.
They were exactly of a height. But he was much broader. She measured the span of his shoulders. He smelled of spices, of the herb they liked to sprinkle in the bath, of wine and tea-herbs and flowers. And under it, subtle but distinct, musk and maleness.
It was different, a little, from other men she knew. Foreign. Sweeter, less sharply pungent. Or was that because he fit so well?
Horribly well. The skin of his face looked faintly weathered but felt smooth, molded tight to the proud bones. His eyes were shut—narrow eyes, but long, the lids folded as a plainsman’s often were, so that they seemed to tilt upward. Open, they would be dark, almost black.
He was breathing shallowly. Breath that caught as she ran a finger down the line of his mustache, tugging it gently. His hands were fists at his sides. Every muscle in his body was bent on not seizing her as she had seized him; on not sending her back into panic flight.
“Too late for that,” she said. “I did it already.”
His eyes snapped open. “You can read my mind.”
“I thought you knew.” Fear, elation: she was a mage, he was sure of it now; he would thrust her away, shun her in horror of what she could do.
He did none of that. He shivered, yes, but he raised his hands, took her face between them, met her eyes. His thought-speech was clumsy but astonishingly clear in a man without training in magery. I love you.
It echoed down to the bottom of him, truth within truth within truth.
“You know nothing of me,” she said. “How can you love what you don’t know?”
“I know what the soul knows.” Aloud, that, because she spoke aloud. “We believe that souls are eternal, but bodies come and go; souls are born and reborn, over and over, on the wheel of the gods.”
“That is horrible.”
“Beautiful,” he said. “We were lovers before, but perhaps I treated you badly; perhaps you loved me too much, and cost us both that turn of the wheel. Now you flee and I pursue. It’s all one, do you see? We were bound before the wheel began, and will be again, until the wheel is gone.”
“When I die,” she said in a voice that tried not to shake, “I want to lie on the breast of Mother Night, in the god’s peace, and never wake.”
“Of course you want that—but only for a while. After night is dawn again. You’ll be up and doing, loving and being loved, casting your bright soul on the wheel where it serves best. You’re never one to be content with simply being.”
“That’s too easy,” she said. “Too simple a wisdom. You prattle it like a child its lessons. I’d rather a round of honest bedplay, and a goodbye after, without the facile philosophy.”
“It is not facile.” Ah, at last: she had goaded his temper.
Too briefly. He calmed himself again, and that was not easy with his banner flying as high as it was, urging him to seize her and rape her where she stood. “You don’t understand. I can’t expect you to. You’re an outland woman who follows outland gods.”
“Now you’re talking down to me. Stop it.”
He stiffened. “You are. Is the truth such an insult?”
“When you put it that way, it is.”
“I don’t know how to talk to you,” he said. “All I know how to do is love you.”
“I’d rather you t
alked more and loved less.”
He saw the lie in her eyes. It brought his smile back, his wicked, innocent, brilliant smile. “You do love me,” he said as if he had just discovered it. “You do. You did from the first. Didn’t you?”
“Of course not!”
But he was exploring her face as she had explored his, with delicate fingers, tracing the arch of her brows, the shape of her eyes, so round and so shallow-set beside his, the curve of her cheekbone, the fullness of her lip. There was nothing in the world but that touch, so light it barely brushed her skin, so hot it burned.
“Honey,” he murmured, “and gold. Why, you are beautiful.”
He was surprised. She hated him for it, or tried. She was blurring into him again, feeling his wonder, his delight in her strangeness, in discovering beauty where he had never thought to find it.
“The Spear of Heaven in the morning, fierce and burning gold,” he said. “The she-tiger in the wood, snarling defiance at the hunter. But a tall lily, too, in a queen’s garden, soft as silk, soft as sleep.”
“Poets have made love to me before,” she said—gasping it, with none of the edge of viciousness that she had intended.
“I’m no poet,” he said. “I’m telling you what I see. I didn’t marry beauty. I married my soul’s self. But to find it—oh, that’s wonderful.” He paused. “I suppose I’m quite ugly to you.”
“Why, you’re as vain as I am,” she said. “Of course you’re not ugly. You’re not pretty, but then I never cared much for pretty men, even when I chose one to father my daughter. I like a solid man with substance to him, good bone, a bright eye—”
“Like one of your seneldi?”
She had flattened his poetry into plain practicality, but he had turned it to laughter. “—a thick mane,” she carried it on, “long and glossy, and a fine slope of shoulder, a strong back, good haunches, a straight leg and a sturdy foot . . .”
“But I have no horns,” he said as if he lamented it, “and my tail is not even a nubbin. I’ll never make a stallion.”
God and goddess help her, he had her giggling. And finding fastenings, and discovering that there was not much to his clothes, but enough if one were in a hurry to get him out of them. The coat fell easily. The shirt had buttons, which needed wrestling with. The trousers were held up by a belt, and a cord under that. He did not wear trews.
He was a goodly stallion. But—
“They scarred you! Who cut—who—”
He gaped. Stared, as if she had found some mutilation that he had never known he had.
Understanding dawned. He went scarlet under the bronze of his skin, from the peak of black hair on his forehead all the way down to his breastbone. “It’s . . . something we have done to us when we’re newborn. They consecrate us to the gods. It’s only the foreskin. The rest of me is quite as it was made, and quite able to—to—”
Quite willing, too. And not so odd, maybe. Barbaric, but not ugly, not really. To cut a man there, even if he were too young to know what was being done to him . . .
“I am ugly to you,” he said, wilting as he spoke, all over.
“No,” she said. “Damn it, no.” She got out of her clothes, not being too careful of fastenings, to set them level and give him something else to think about.
It succeeded; that much she could say for it. He had modesty like an Asanian, a body-shyness that she had never had; her grandfather had seen to that, brought her up with and around northerners who went naked as often as they went clothed. It had not kept Bundur from letting her undress him, but it did strange things to his composure to be seeing her as naked as he was, and so different.
The women had seen how tall and narrow and boyish she was. He saw as he had seen in the garden not so very long ago, that she was a woman; slender certainly but full-breasted enough, breasts that were still round and high and firm though she had suckled a child. Her skin was finer than he was used to, its texture softer, but the golden down on it was strange to him—he had little even between his thighs, was all smooth bronze. What he would have made of a true northerner, and a male at that, she could not imagine. Some of them were pelted like bears, with beards to their breasts.
“Am I ugly to you now?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “Oh, no.”
“Nor are you to me.” She took his shaft in her hand, warm heavy solid thing, coming alive to her touch. Beautiful, even so altered. As all of him was. As it had always been—yes, since first she saw him, sitting at a table in the teahouse, daring her to flay him with her tongue.
She could cut him to the bone now if she said but a word. Or two. Or three. She knew exactly which words they would be. And she said none of them.
He had skill. She had not expected otherwise. When she moved toward him he was there. There was a moment of hesitation; awkwardness, not-fitting. Then, as each found the rhythm of the dance, each fit to each, matched—
“Like riding a senel,” he said. His voice was deep, full of laughter even in the midst of loving.
She locked legs about his haunches and drove him to a gallop: then back, slow and slow, grinning to match his grin.
Beautiful, his mind said. So beautiful when you smile.
“So ugly when I scowl?”
He laughed, outside and in. Always beautiful. Always. And well you know it, too.
“Then we are matched,” she said. “Perfectly.”
Haven’t I always said so?
“Insufferable,” she said. “Intolerable. Beloved.”
25
Uruan the Guardian slept straight through the night and the day and the next night. When he woke with a raging thirst and a desperate lunge toward the privy, Kimeri was there. She helped him as she could, with him too caught up in his body’s needs to be amazed that the golden power of his dream was a child, and a very young one at that, even if she was the Sunlady’s heir.
Vanyi he knew better, and greeted with a recollection of his princely manners, though he nearly fell on his face trying to bow to her. She got him back into bed and saw him fed rich broth and strong tea, and answered the questions that babbled out of him.
She was afraid that his mind had got scrambled in his long imprisonment, but Kimeri had no such fear. He was only weak, and having trouble understanding that he had been inside the Gate for more than a full cycle of Greatmoon—forty-nine days altogether, since he insisted on counting.
“It was no time at all,” he kept insisting, “but it was an eon and then another. She was there,” he said, tilting his chin at Kimeri. “She was the only light in that dark place.”
Kimeri wanted to duck her head, embarrassed, but what he said was true, mostly. “That was the god who’s in my blood. He kept making me dream about you.”
“And so kept me alive and bound to the Gate.” He could have been blaming her for it, but there was the beginning of a smile on his face, and in his eyes that had seen too much nothingness. He focused them on Vanyi, frowning. “What are you doing here? I was trying to get through before the Gate broke, to tell you not to come; it was getting too dangerous. The palace—”
“The palace was perfectly quiet when we arrived,” she said, “but last night they killed the king and set up another.”
He sat up, though his face went green and he reeled, trying to get to his feet. “Then where are we? We’re not in the house of the Gate. I can feel it—it’s somewhere else. Are we in prison? Has the faction that favors us won after all? They were all to be killed or silenced.”
“We’re in House Janabundur,” said Vanyi, “and safe, for now. Stop trying to get up and gallop off.”
“Janabundur? But that’s—” Uruan went perfectly green but not unconscious, and folded up. The Olenyas on guard scooped him back into bed and laid a sheathed sword, very gently, across his chest.
He understood the message. His lips quirked wryly. “All right. I’ll stay put. But, Vanyi, Janabundur is the king’s—the old king’s—clan-house. Not that its lord isn’t dispos
ed to be friendly; he is, and he’s honest in it, but there would be better places to hide in plain sight.”
“I don’t think so,” Vanyi said. “His lordship offered for the princess-heir and won her, with the emperor’s consent. They married after we brought you here. Marriage in this place, it seems, can make a native out of a foreigner, and a power out of a nobody, and a proper noble lady out of a mage.”
“The princess-heir? Daruya? Married to—” Uruan started to shake. It looked like convulsions. It was laughter.
Vanyi waited it out with more patience than she had ever shown Kimeri. Kimeri herself sat on the bed and tucked up her feet and watched him till he stopped giggling and wiped the tears away. “Really? Lord Shakabundur married her? She didn’t throttle him for his presumption?”
“Really,” said Kimeri. “She only tried to strangle somebody once. He was pushing her when she didn’t want him to, and trying to get him to kiss her. Great-Grandfather said she should have gutted him instead.” Since he could hardly argue with that, and did not seem inclined to, she went on, “She likes Bundur. She makes a great deal of noise pretending she doesn’t, but that’s because she’s afraid. She’s not used to liking men who want to marry her.”
“Let alone marrying them.” Uruan cradled his head in his hands, after assuring the Olenyas that that was all he wanted to do. The sword retreated but stayed within reach, poised to stop him if he tried to get up again. “God. Goddess. I gather the Gate’s not passable?”
“It, and the whole chain of Gates from here to Starios,” Vanyi said. “We had to walk in from Kianat, with a broken Gate behind us. Something here began it, but we’ve found nothing, except you.”
“One redheaded fool trapped in a Gate.” He closed his eyes, but he was not asleep. His mind was wide awake and very keen.
Kimeri helped with that. The Gate inside her made it easy to run a thread of feeling-better through him, and keep it running till he had all he needed.
He did not know what was happening, though if he had asked she would have answered. He thought it was something Vanyi was doing.