by Tanith Lee
“He imagines I may dispose of him, since Raldnor swore I attempted it, last time.”
“Quite, my lord.”
“Reassure Emel,” said Kesarh. “He’s my King. He’ll leave me charge of the armies, I think. I’m a soldier. Let us all stick to the thing we’re best at.”
Biyh shifted. He had, after all, been one of the Nines. He had seen how Kesarh’s mind could work. He knew some ten-year-old secrets, and knew that Kesarh knew that he did.
“My lord, there’s something—” Biyh hesitated. He gnawed his lips. When Kesarh did not prompt, he said, “there’s something Raldnor did, to safeguard Emel. Or rather, himself.”
“Dressed the boy as a woman and taught him harlot’s manners. So I gather.”
“Well, my lord, actually rather more than that.”
The black and merciless eyes, glazed with a strange opaque brightness—fever, they said an assassin had tried to stab him at Istris—pinned Biyh to the air so he writhed. Better come out with it, make a love-gift of it. Left to himself, Kesarh would learn sooner or later, one could not use it for bargaining, and look what he had done with the troops, spun them round like a wheel. He was as much the showman and the mage as ever—
“Raldnor brought in Ommos surgeons. They did what the Ommos have a talent for.” Kesarh gratified him by blinking. “Yes, my lord. The Prince is no longer any sort of a man. Gelded. Not fit to be a king, not by Vis standards, let alone Shansarian. You wouldn’t want to make a fuss here. They’re that touchy. But the council in Istris—”
Kesarh started to drink wine. There was a silence. Kesarh eventually said, “And how do you know?”
Biyh shrugged. Honesty was the wisest course.
“I don’t mind ’em like that. I’ve seen him stripped. I’ve had him.” After another silence, Biyh, feeling more secure than he had for days, added, “You might let him live. Or you might not. But he can’t harm anyone, poor little beggar.”
Emel himself did not hear this culminating plea. He had heard the rest.
Having been penned in Amlan’s palace so many months, he was privy to several of its more interesting crannies. He had sometimes, fascinated and repelled, played voyeur to Raldnor’s sadistic bed-sports, utilizing an unfrequented overhead gallery with a loose tile or two. Kesarh, as the intermediary captains had done, installed his suite in Raldnor’s apartments. It had not been difficult to employ the previous method.
From the moment Karmian ships had been sighted, Emel had felt the gray draught of death drizzling on his neck. Then Kesarh was in the city, and the soldiers cheered just as loudly as on the night Raldnor had produced his insurance among the torches. Emel considered bolting, but the palace was rushing with men. Kesarh entered the palace. Not only one apartment, he was in every shadowed place.
The act of going to eavesdrop on fate needed all Emel’s courage. While he did it, even listening to Kesarh’s earlier words, Emel had not deemed himself reprieved. To be told he would live and be a king always had intimations of a death-sentence. They had all, had they not, promised him that? But he had been praying, too, not to Ashara or any deity of name, but to some unformed god of the self, that Biyh would somehow gain a means to protect him. For Biyh, surely, was faithful. Then Biyh surrendered him uncaringly.
Emel returned to his bedchamber. He had picked up a flair for cruelty from Raldnor, and coming on a beetle on the door, pulled off its legs as he wept with fear. Hearing the steps approach along the corridor, preface to the executioner, he crushed out its life also under his heel, a counterpoint.
• • •
Another gaudy orange sunset lit the ceremony on the stairway, hitting the painted walls and tiers of the palace, the stout painted wooden pillars with their lotuses of indigo and henna, and capitals of flying bis. Kesarh had requested that the King and Queen be present, and they sat in their bone chairs with bone bracelets, behind him up the steps. She was lovely, and her brother-husband was sick, still. Kesarh had asked after his health, and the Queen had said, “It’s nothing, lord King of Karmiss.”
“Since I put men into Lan,” said Kesarh, “he’s been failing.”
“Just so,” she said. “He and I, we are Lan. Distress this earth, and we are stricken.”
“Are you?” he said. “You yourself seem to bloom, madam.”
“A painted complexion,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you, lord King, even Lans know something of deception.”
He thought of Val Nardia again. Sister and wife.
Then he went out into the sunset, and the bone chairs came, and the other participants of the play. The soldiers crammed the Square and hung from the rooftops and trees to see. There would be Amlans, too, watching. Perhaps the reinstatement of blond rule, this sham, would seem bitterly humorous to Lan, also.
At each breath, the light throbbed. In an hour or so, there was the second cauterization to look forward to.
Emel was being escorted down the stair.
And the soldiers, catching sight of him, trained to it now, shouted and banged their shields.
The racket swarmed in Kesarh’s skull, but he moved about to welcome the boy—who was not even that—the one mistake that had been made and which could not be rectified till Karmiss.
Emel gazed up, too frightened to avoid the hypnotic eyes of Kesarh. The hand that touched Emel’s shoulder had lost none of its physical power. It had lifted him to horseback and into chariots, it had guided and led him. Once, in winter, when his own child’s hands were frozen, Kesarh had returned them to life, chafing them in his own. Emel had worshipped Kesarh. Kesarh who wanted to murder him.
Kesarh seemed to peruse him now, stern, compassionate. Then he turned to the soldiers. He said to them, the words ringing across the square: “This is indeed Emel. My King’s son, and my King.”
And then, as they bellowed all over again, Kesarh knelt to him.
It was not like Raldnor, but solely like that other time, at Istris in the map chamber. The kneeling man. But the sunset had grown thicker, more like blood now on the shining black of the hair, the bloody garments.
Emel twisted to face the soldiers, and reckoning he was about to speak to them himself, a unique event, they hushed each other and abruptly all the cacophony was gone, leaving just a hollow of ominous red light.
Emel stared at them. They had cheered him, too, had always cheered him. They liked him—it must be so. And there were many of them. And Kesarh, his enemy, was only one.
The desperate solution came to Emel suddenly. He knew he had mere seconds to implement it. He flung up his arms, and screamed at them in his high girlish voice. “It’s lies! He’ll kill me! Kesarh will kill me! Don’t let him—please save me—help me—”
Over and over, the same phrases spurted forth. The shrill wailing penetrated, its anguish apparent even where language was obscured. The front rows of Karmian soldiery reacted, a murmur, sulky and unsure, questions and denials, passed backward. It might have burnt itself out. While Emel’s throat was not strong, he could not have managed very much more.
But Kesarh had risen to his feet. Looking down at this screeching eunuch, his cold blood seemed to boil. “Be quiet,” Kesarh said. But Emel did not heed. He cowered away and began to bawl, sobbing and flailing.
There was malice in it too. It was malice which had lent Emel the bravado. To damage the ones who betrayed him, even as he tried to escape them. And because of this, when Kesarh reached out again to grasp him, hold him still, Emel rounded, snarling through his hysteria. And Emel too reached out, beating and clawing at Kesarh to keep him off.
Emel did not know about the tiny festering agony of the wound. If he had known, instinctively, he might have tried to avoid it.
But the attack—which from blow appeared vitiated, nothing—came down repeatedly there, and exactly there. The pain exploded through sinews, into the pit of an arm, the breast and throat, the
vitals. And seeing Kesarh recoil, Emel lashed out again and again.
The soldiers were in fact chuckling, some of them, not realizing quite what went on, finding the spectacle funny; the feeble smitings of their boy King. Then Kesarh struck him.
Probably, they expected a slap. It was not a slap.
They were all fighters, and however sloppy they had become, most of them that saw it saw too the blow was enough to break Emel’s neck. And that it did break it.
Like something falling to pieces, the boy collapsed and toppled all the way down the stair, and into the front rank of soldiers at the bottom. Who leaned over him and tried him, and then let go, muttering. It had a different timbre now, this noise, and it spread rapidly.
The light was almost gone. Last dapplings of red still lit up the murderer on his self-chosen stage of steps.
He did not move or speak. It was not the pain or the fever or the rage which had changed him into stone. Perhaps irony had some part in it. He had used death so often and so adroitly in private. Yet he must have known, in the most public fashion possible he had just now written out his epitaph.
23.
DHAKER, THE OPAL-EYE, directed his eternal wink through the night toward the shore, and said, “Something burns.”
He was correct in this.
The three Zakorian galleys, letting out sail to a shoreward wind, circled nearer. Before too long, the distant flashing of flames became self-explanatory. Most of the port of Amlan was on fire.
Outriders of the navy of Free Zakoris, Dhaker’s triad had kept the reavers’ agility. They had a diplomatic reason for going in, which was that Kesr Am Karmiss, ally of King Yl, had patently joined battle with the rebel Karmians in Lan. But the long hot winter prowling Thaddra, and Dorthar’s barren, guarded north, had put them in key for a fight. And doubtless there would be spoil, a city of it, with such drink and women as Karmiss had not consumed.
The boats swam to land, avoiding the Karmian anchorage, which seemed, however, deserted. When they got ashore, most of the battle in the port was over; only bodies, the odd looter, the fires, remained. The Amlans were gone, too. Off into the hills, likely. Hills and mountains were the soul of Lan.
Dhaker organized his men. A company stayed to scour the port, and keep faith with their own ships. The rest took off along the Amlan road.
Nearer and later, the glow over the city wall gave sign of some incendiary action also here. Their mission gradually altered focus.
Free Zakoris hated Kesarh, despite any treaty. He had the yellow man’s blood, and besides had spent his youth and young manhood humiliating her. Now he might fall into Free Zakorian hands. Yl would be interested no doubt, to get such a prisoner, while Karmiss and the east would loosen on the tree.
• • •
It was the Shansarian troops who began the riot in Amlan. Their motive was unvarnished: Emel was theirs. When Kesarh was taken, albeit like a felon, into the palace, they had called council. The time of soldierly governance had gone to their heads, and they demanded the slayer of their rightful king be given back to them. Feeling scaled high. They cursed Kesarh. He was Vis, scum, a black jackal. This led to a personalization of insults all round. The Vis soldiery, who had also enjoyed the autonomy, not only of Lan, but in Kesarh’s Visian Karmiss, took exception. Others came in on every side. There really was no discipline left in Amlan. Raldnor and his successors had eroded it, and Kesarh, who could have got it back, was disqualified. They sprang for each other’s throats, howling. Vis against Shansar, mix against both, company against company. And while it went on, messengers and berserkers alike carried the story and the bloodbath to the port. The remainder of Kesarh’s escort, hurrying off the convoy of Lily ships, were intercepted on the road.
One frantic contingent, beating a way through insane Shansars and roaring Istrians, through the fire-hung city and the streams of evacuating Lans, reached the palace doors—now the ultimate and single defended area—and thus the surviving Karmian command. This happened to be a bemused Biyh.
“Commander, three shiploads of Free Zakorians are coming.”
“Hell and the pit,” said Biyh.
He was not far out.
There were not even six hundred of them, the Zakorians, but they were eager, barbaric and in good order.
The port had had no defense. The gates of the city stood wide. Nor could any unity be brought to the maelstrom. Kesarh, of course, could have done it. But Kesarh, of course, had been conducted to the cellar. “My—lord,” Biyh had said there, solemnly, between dismayed nerves and dumbfounded curiosity and a certain oblique pleasure. “For your own protection, I must leave you here. Bound, and guarded.” Kesarh had grinned, or showed his teeth like a dog when afraid, one was not sure. One hastened away and landed in this mess.
Biyh hustled together the seventy men who were holding the entries of Amlan’s palace. He had already made an effort to stir out the Lannic Army from the Salamander barracks. But most of these had made a run for it, or gone to aid their families in the pandemonium.
In the end, Dhaker Opal-Eye’s force cut neat swaths to the door. Not seeking to engage battle, save where it was most tempting, many of the groups of fighters had overlooked them. The palace defenses retaliated bravely, but not for very long. They were dispatched against walls, on galleries, under columns. At length, Free Zakorians had the palace. They did not attempt to retain it. They looted but did not unleash fire, searching diligently. The King and Queen were gone, persuaded by the remnant of their own guard, who successfully gathered them away into Lan’s night-smurred soul, under cover of chaos.
Dhaker’s men did, nevertheless, get into a cellar over five gutted Karmians. They found Kesarh, manacled as they would have wished.
“Here is the one,” said Opal-Eye, “who is not a king. Well,” said Opal-Eye, “you’re not a king now, Kesr Am Karmiss.”
Not only shackled, but burning with fever, he was no difficulty to deal with. They hacked a way back to the road, to the port and to their ships, killing here, looting there.
Leaving embers on the skyline, their slaves rowed them north.
Dhaker himself cauterized the infected wound in his captive’s arm. He heated the iron white-hot and kept it on the roasting flesh for as long as was needful, perhaps some seconds more. Dhaker did not want his trophy to die before they rejoined Yl’s fleets, but also, Dhaker’s father had been at Tjis.
• • •
The house, so agreeable and fruitlessly tranquil, was abruptly full of screaming.
Ulis Anet stood to face the doorway as one of the winged pairs of feet flew in.
“Madam—”
“What is it?”
She was told.
The King of Xarabiss’ daughter turned and walked away into the garden. She ignored the turmoil. White pigeons, offended by the sudden din, dashed to the sky between chasms of rose-red wall.
The Lily ships were coming back from Lan. From Istris other ships were setting forth to bring the Karmian remnants out. The length of Lan, they said, men galloped, calling in the troops, summoning them from hills and crags, from the valleys and the villages. Every man of Karmiss must return. Lan would be abandoned, rent and used and left lying, for Free Zakoris to have if Free Zakoris willed it.
The Black Leopard would move toward Karmiss herself, very shortly. No longer an ally—the devourer. The treaties were all torn up.
Kesarh, regicide and madman—Free Zakoris had Kesarh.
She had dreamed of something, she could not even properly remember. A serpent was in it, and its teeth glittered like knives. She had wept in her sleep, and woken weeping. And now she knew. And wept once more.
She did not love him. She loved him. And he would die, and Karmiss would die, and she was to blame, so her dream had shown her, save she could not remember it, or why.
• • •
“Lady, you’ll be
cold. Here’s your nice cloak, with the kalinx fur, he gave you.”
“No,” Ulis Anet murmured. But they lifted her from the grass, began to bear her away.
“Hush, lady. Istris isn’t safe. Full of crazy soldiers and ships coming in. The Warden’s to enforce curfew. And the baker said, black galleys, the Leopard, seen at sunset—”
A male voice. “We’re going inland. Come on, lady. You’re delaying us.”
She was bewildered. She thought they would sell her as a slave.
“Kesarh,” she said.
“Forget him, lady. He’s sliced in segments, feeding fish.”
“Shush! Let her alone.”
The night closed her eyes. She slept in the arms of her maids.
• • •
Stars patterned the darkness.
They were in the hills of Karmiss.
She stared at the stars, and some philosophy or aberration filled her so she lifted her hands. In Elyr, star-gazers understood such fancies.
There was a small inn, and when the sun came up she was alone. Even the ankars and the ornaments they had brought for her had disappeared. The cloak of black and white furs had disbanded into live animals and slunk under the door.
The inn-keeper stood over her.
“Fine lady—fine whore. What’ll you pay me with?”
He raped her. At any other time, such a terrible thing would have sickened her, driven her mad. But she was beyond it. All the while he abused her, her conscious mind was far away.
“You’ll have to try harder than that,” he said.
He told her she could sweep out hearths and carry water, and he would whip her for negligence. Had she been sold and never known it?
She got up from the bed and faced him.
“I am the King’s mistress,” she said.
“The King—we’ll be ripped in shreds because of this king. Out! I’m sorry I soiled myself with you, you red-haired slut.”
• • •
There was a road. It went to Ioli, where she had never been. People in flight from every city and town seemed to travel the road in either direction, moving on to it and off it at various subsidiary tracks. There were carts, wagons, lowing beasts, the clatter of pans tied together, and the elderly, too weak to go on, resignedly sitting to die on the verge.