by Kate Elliott
“The book.” He lowered his hand to rustle the parchment. The movement drew her gaze down to the figures neatly inscribed there.
“What is that?” she asked, enticed by the orderly lines and repetitive figures. Fetters drew tighter, binding her again as she moved to stand beside him so that she didn’t block the light. “That’s a date.”
“A date? I’ve been puzzling this out. I don’t know what it means, but there’s clearly a pattern. Do you know?”
“Yes, yes,” she said with mounting excitement. “Da and I saw a clay tablet with writing like this in the ruins of Kartiako. There was a very old man there, a sage who claimed to have knowledge of the most ancient days of his tribe. Of course I can’t read this writing, all sticks and angles, but he said it was a table charting the course of Somorhas. When it appears in the evening sky and when in the morning.”
“And the intervals of disappearance?”
“Yes, exactly! But this is a whole page! The other was only fragments. Is there more?”
“This is the only page I have seen. I believe it was copied from a more ancient source, perhaps from one of these clay tablets you mention. Do you see, here,” he pointed to a smudge, “how the scribe made a mistake and then corrected it. How does it work?”
“The ancient Babaharshans observed the stars for a thousand years. They recognized that Somorhas is both the evening star and the morning star, and that when she falls into the shadow of the sun that she vanishes for an interval, sometimes about eight days and sometimes about fifty days.”
He nodded, caught up in her excitement. “But Somorhas is part of God’s creation. Fate guides her movements. Isn’t it every eight years that she comes again to the place she was before, relative to the position of the sun?”
“Yes, of course. Look, here. That set of markings is a date, according to the sage at Kartiako. He called it—”
A moment only it took her to shift her attention into her city of memory. She skipped past the seven gates, the Rose of Healing, the Sword of Strength, the Cup of Boundless Waters, the Ring of Fire, the Throne of Virtue, the Scepter of Wisdom, passing beneath the Crown of Stars itself to the topmost part of the city where lay the astronomer’s hall, a circular building ringed with smaller, curving walls. Here in these galleries she had set her memory pictures of the cycles of the wandering stars and the precession of the equinoxes. Here, in an alcove marked with a drifting sand dune and lit by a bright sapphire no brighter than Hugh’s eyes to signify the sage’s complete love of wisdom, she found what she was looking for.
“He called it the month of ‘Ishan.’ These lines signify numbers, so that would be eleven. I don’t know how to read the rest, but this says that on the eleventh day of the month of Ishan, Somorhas would, well, that’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Her first appearance as morning star for that cycle, perhaps, or her disappearance into the sun’s glare.” She faltered, remembering how quickly others got bored when she got caught up in cycles and epicycles, conjunctions and precession, the endlessly intriguing wonder of the universe.
“Do you know,” he said slowly, absently tracing the pattern of the markings, “there has been debate here among the college of astronomers about Ptolomaia’s use of the equant point. Of course many claim that if planets move with varying speeds, then the heavens do not move in a uniform motion, as we know they must. But without the equant point, then truly we cannot account for all the movements of the planets in the heavens.”
“Unless Ptolomaia is wrong, and the Earth isn’t stationary.”
Stunned, he stared at her while the lamp flame hissed and a breeze off the parapet rustled through the papers scattered over the table.
She went on, made rash by the dreamlike quality of their meeting, by his surprise, by a fierce recklessness overtaking her, here where she could speak freely the forbidden words known to the mathematici. “What if the heavens are at rest and it is Earth which revolves from west to east?”
He leaned down, both hands on the table, shutting his eyes as he considered. “West to east,” he murmured. “That would create the same effect. Or if both the heavens and the Earth moved, one from east to west and the other from west to east.” He trailed off, too caught up in the puzzle to finish, gripped by the same passion for knowledge that had always held her in thrall.
Had she misjudged him? Had his humiliation at Anne’s hands caused him to look into his heart, deep waters indeed, and transform what he found there? How could she have felt that silken touch winding through her body as a chain and fetter, when it was what had brought her here in time to see, and to aid, the change that would make Hugh over into a new person, her heart’s desire?
A door thumped gently against the wall as the breeze caught it. The lamp flame flared up boldly, illuminating him. Wind kissed her face. He was so inadvertently close to her, eyes closed, expression almost innocent, if the desire for knowledge can ever be innocent. He smelled faintly of the scent of vineflower and cypress. This close, she felt the heat of his body, no less potent than the yearning in her heart. Was that her heart pounding? Was this what she had been looking for all along? Someone with the same passion, the same questioning, unquiet mind?
Was it her hand lifting to touch his chest, where his heart beat most strongly? Was it she who leaned closer, into him, and brushed his cheek with her lips?
He opened his lips in a soundless sigh. Turning to her, seeking, he kissed her even as she kissed him. In a moment they stood together, so close that like the aetherical daimones who mingle sometimes in ecstasy they seemed to melt one into the other, as if their bodies could actually interpenetrate and become one in truth, a union so complete that no earthly intimacy could rival the depth of their sharing.
“Ai, Liath.” He murmured her name as a caress as the lamp blazed behind him, making him shine.
A small voice shunted away into the deepest, dustiest corner of her mind, almost too faint to hear, spoke in her heart.
I’m going to wake up and find myself in Hugh’s bed.
At that instant, choking, she felt the writhing worm, an actual presence inside her. The silk ribbon, but a living one, that had insinuated itself into her body and now sank its aetherical touch deep into her flesh, mingling and melting until her arm raised of its own accord, not hers, to caress Hugh, until her body pressed itself against him, seeking his touch, until she would give herself to him of her own free will—
But it was not her.
Lies and deceit. In the sphere of Somorhas dwelt dreams and delusion.
“No, Liath,” he said, as if he’d heard her thoughts, as if she’d cried out loud. “This is the truth of your heart’s desire. I am with you. I am not a dream. Hate me if you must, but see that we are alike, you and I.”
Wasn’t it true, after all? No matter what he was now or what had gone before? Didn’t she recognize in him a soul like her own, passionate and eager? Ai, Lady, had she always hated him and loved him in equal measure?
Nay, that was the worm speaking.
The daimone was now so thoroughly intermixed with her own being that it was becoming impossible to separate out her own thoughts from those it spoke within her mind, from those it uttered with her voice.
“I am not like you, Hugh,” she said, each word a struggle as the daimone tried to form other words on her lips: “I’ll stay with you, I’ll love you and only you.”
“If you turn away from me now, Liath, then what choice will I have but to go back to being what I was before? You are fire. You can cleanse me. Your love can purify me. Stay with me, Liath.”
Fire.
She reached for that single lamp flame, flickering as the wind rose. His arms tightened around her.
She called fire.
The room exploded in flames.
Hugh was gone, torn away. She stood on a featureless plain, rose-colored mist twining around her body, the fog of lies and deceit that had ensnared her. In that mist, even into and interpenetrating her own flesh, she saw the pale glamour
of a daimone actually inside her, part of her body.
Fire raged at the horizon, a wall of flames that marked the gate of the Sun.
It faded as the tower chamber swam back into view, as the daimone infesting her pulled her back into the dream, into the lie.
One step she took, toward the Sun, then a second agonizing step as Hugh winced in pain and she wanted to reach to him, to smooth anguish from his brow, to show him that he truly was her heart’s desire. No one else. No one else fit for her.
A third step, like walking on broken glass, and she had crossed the plain. The inferno that was the sphere of the Sun began actually to burn the clothes off her body.
Scour herself clean. She wasn’t afraid of fire. She never had been. The fire cut deeper, melting away her flesh, but that was not really her flesh but rather the daimone, writhing as the sun’s fire forced it to twist out of her body. It fled down along a gleaming thread, back to Earth.
“Damn.” Hugh’s voice was almost lost in the crack of flame as the wall of fire rose in a sheet of brilliance in front of her.
Had it all been a lie? Or had she seen truths within herself, far down in those depths, that she could not bear to acknowledge? Wasn’t it true, after all, that beneath the surface they shared a similar passion? That she had more in common with Hugh than she had ever had with Sanglant?
The truth was too horrible to contemplate. Naked, she flung herself into the blazing furnace of the Sun.
4
NO doubt the old Dariyan Empire had fallen in large part because of the corruption that had ripened within the imperial house and burst at last in a final flowering of putrescence. Ancient images and obscene pagan carvings still fouled old corners and forgotten rooms in the skopos’ palace. Not all had been chipped away and replaced by saintly figures more appropriate to a land presided over by the Daisanite church.
Corruption still insinuated its tentacles into the heart of earthly empire, whether spiritual or secular. That much was achingly apparent to Antonia as she sat at the Feast of St. Johanna the Messenger and watched King John, known as Ironhead, publicly molest the daughter of the Lady of Novomo, she who had harbored the fugitive Queen Adelheid last spring. The girl was barely into pubescence, in the first flush of development. Ironhead drank heavily and acted every bit the coarse bastard he in truth was, even fondling the girl’s small breasts through her gown. That she wept silently, tears coursing down her face at this humiliation, open for all to see, did not stop him.
But Hugh did.
He called over a steward and whispered instructions into the man’s ear. Soon enough, a trio of the king’s whores—Ironhead had installed a dozen or more in his chambers—emerged to the sound of lute and drum. They were pretty young things, skilled in the art of lascivious dancing, something not meant to be viewed in such a public arena. Their antics would have made Antonia blush if she were not made of sterner stuff. She understood the attractions of the flesh though she had long ago strangled any such carnal desire in herself. It only got in the way.
Presbyter Hugh was no fool. He understood the weak stuff that Ironhead was made of. Once the king’s attention had been caught by the obscene undulations of the dancing girls, Hugh sent the king’s hostage away and substituted another of the king’s whores in her place. Ensnared in the grasp of wine and lust, Ironhead either did not notice or in any case soon ceased to care.
The feast dragged on in this manner. Where were the pious readings of the book of St. Johanna, to remind the faithful of her apostolic journey and her noble martyrdom? None stood to sing psalms or to declaim from the Holy Verses. Feast days had always been celebrated with the solemnity they deserved in Mainni, when she had been biscop in that city. But the skopos lay dying and could not control Ironhead’s excesses.
In the midst of the merrymaking, Hugh rose quietly and left. Antonia made haste to follow him. He had gone outside to the shelter of the colonnade. Scattered clouds made a patchwork of the night sky. A misting rain fell.
He was not alone. By the heavy scent of lilac, she knew that the womanly form leaning against him, embracing him, was one of the king’s whores.
“He’ll never notice I’m gone this one night,” the young woman said in a breathless voice. “I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you.”
He set hands firmly on her shoulders and pushed her away. “I beg your pardon, Daughter. My heart is already given to another.”
She hissed, like a cat ready to claw. “What’s her name? Where is she?”
“Not walking on this Earth.”
The whore began to snivel. “I hate God for stealing you. You ought to be warming women’s beds, not praying on cold stone.”
“Don’t hate God,” he said gently. “Pray for healing.”
“What do I need healing for? You could heal me, if you’d come to me. Aren’t I pretty? Everyone says so. All the other men desire me.”
“Beauty doesn’t last forever. When men no longer desire you, you’ll be cast onto the street. Which will serve you better, Daughter? Men’s lust, or God’s love?”
“It’s all very well for you to babble piously about God’s love! What other profession is open to me? My mother was a whore. There are at least five presbyters smirking like saints in the skopos’ palace who might be my father, any one of them! What am I to do, a girl like me, bastard daughter of a whore, except be a whore in my turn? That’s the only life I know. What respectable man would want someone like me?”
He didn’t flinch under the assault of her scathing fury. “I happen to know,” he said quietly, “that there is a certain respectable sergeant of the guards at the skopos’ palace who has a brother who is a tailor down in the city. That brother has had cause to visit the sergeant a time or two, and he saw you in the garden more than once. I expect he even makes excuses to come visit his brother in the hopes of catching a glimpse of you. But of course to his way of thinking, what chance has a common tailor like him with little enough to offer compared to the silks and wine given you in the king’s suite?”
“His kin would all know I was a whore, and hate me for it,” she muttered, but the edge of anger in her voice had muted. She sounded unsure of herself, afraid to hope. “He’s probably some ugly, leprous, wizened dwarf anyway, who can’t get a decent wife.”
“Ah, well. I happen to know he visits his brother every Ladysday and that they attend Mass together in the servants’ chapel.”
“You lead that Mass,” she said, surprised. “Everyone knows you do. All the servants talk about it. But I know that the presbyters don’t let whores into the church, the old hypocrites, poking their lemans in the nighttime and calling them nasty sinners during the day.”
“When I lead Mass in the servants’ chapel, no one is turned away, no matter what they have been in their past. No matter what they have done.”
She knelt at his feet abruptly, bowing her head. “I pray you, Father, forgive me. You know I’d do anything for you in return for your kindness and mercy.”
“So be it, Daughter.” He touched her on the head, his blessing, and she caught in a sob, jumped up, and hurried away.
It was too dark to see his face. He stood there for so long that Antonia wondered if he was on the verge of turning around and going back into the feasting hall. The bell tolled the end of Compline, and she recalled belatedly that she had other obligations. But she dared not move until he at last shook himself and walked away down the colonnade, returning to the skopos’ palace. When she could no longer hear his footfalls, she followed that same path past the great hall and through the monumental court where king and skopos might meet to survey their troops in times of trouble. Her feet thudded quietly on the cobbled stone walkway. Light rain moistened her skin. A servant hurried past toward the hall, carrying a lamp and a basket, and a brace of presbyters hastened from their prayers to the promised joviality of the feast already in progress.
The whore’s words stayed with her. Would these pious presbyters spend their nights in
carnal pleasure, only to turn around the next day and condemn sinful humankind? Truly, God’s creation had slipped to the very edge of the Abyss. It needed a firm hand to guide it back to holy ground.
The skopos’ palace was a warren of chambers suitable for intrigue, or so it seemed to Antonia. Heribert might have corrected her; once, after he had spent a year in Darre studying at the palace schola, he had returned with many a boring explanation of how the palace had been built out of the remains of an old Dariyan emperor’s residence, then expanded upon, partially destroyed in a fire, and rebuilt, only to be expanded again during the time of Taillefer.
But while Anne might keep secrets, she had not come to the skopos’ palace to skulk about like a thief. She had already a suite of chambers suitable to a cleric of the highest rank and a bevy of servants and lesser clerics to serve her. By the time Antonia reached the innermost chamber of Anne’s suite, where the Seven Sleepers met each week to discuss their progress, the others had already all arrived and taken their places. Polished silver cups gleamed under lamplight, and after servants poured wine, they retreated soundlessly and closed the doors, leaving Anne and her four companions alone.
“You are late, Sister Venia,” said the Caput Draconis, she who sat first among them. That damnable hound always lying at her feet growled.
“I beg your pardon. I lost my way again.”
“So do we all at times, alas. If you will sit, Sister Venia, then we may prepare ourselves.”
The hound lifted its head to watch as Antonia sat on the bench next to Brother Marcus. He acknowledged her with a quirk of his lips, nothing more. He wore the presbyter’s robe and cloak easily. Except for Anne, he had made the smoothest adjustment when they had fled south from the smoking ruins of Verna. Antonia still found the city of Darre confusing, a labyrinth of ancient ruins and modern timber buildings, courtyards and alleys, pastures and paved squares, and the palace compound a maze of corridors, chambers, and servants’ passages in which she often got lost even after all these months. Marcus had grown up here. To him, navigating in the skopos’ palace was as natural as breathing.