Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  I bore the sword for a few moments, Andrion told himself. It burned my hands, knowing it was not mine. But his hands were firm and clear, not singed at all.

  “Harus,” murmured Bellasteros. “I brought you from Sardis to the Empire, and now I exile you; Ashtar’s hand once lay over all the world, but even she is trammeled by the present.”

  At the end the gods drove Daimion, too, mad with despair, Andrion thought. Perhaps he had deserved it. Bellasteros did not. Andrion knelt beside his father and spoke quickly, with a forced cheerfulness, “Fourteen days at least to Sabazel; we must not tire the horses. Toth provided us with dried meat and fruit and twice-baked bread, and the streams have yet to dry up in the summer’s heat.” You are babbling, he told himself. He swallowed the dirt, the acid in his mouth, and tried again. “We shall go across country, and they will not know where we have gone, they will not follow.”

  “The traitor,” said Bellasteros, “will know Sabazel.” His glazed eyes never left the tiny face of the falcon. The falcon was silent, its bright bronze muted with dust.

  Andrion’s lips tightened. Horrible, to see the mighty Bellasteros stunned by defeat, eaten by an evil spell; a demi-god desecrated. Andrion wanted to shake him, scream at him to wake. But only Danica, who once bore the power of the goddess, might be able to ward such sorcery. “No,” Andrion said, a trifle too loudly, “Sabazel is our refuge.”

  He focused on his father’s arm, bound with a bloody scrap of his own chiton. The shaft of the arrow had snapped in his hands sometime during the cold paralyzing dawn, snapped like living bone. “We must withdraw that arrowhead, Father. It will not wait for Shandir and Danica.”

  A frown flickered over Bellasteros’s face. He glanced down at his arm and seemed to notice the wound for the first time.

  “I will do it,” Andrion stated firmly, but his stomach was anything but firm.

  “Danica,” stated Bellasteros. He stirred, sat up straighter. His eyes cleared, darkening, and turned to Andrion. His hand touched the necklace at Andrion’s throat and his seamed and weary features softened in a smile.

  Ah, my father . . . A movement; Andrion started. But it was only the fourth guard, the one little older than he, offering a helmet full of water. Andrion dredged his name from the well of memory and tried to smile. “Miklos, thank you.” The young man was hollow-eyed, pale beneath his sun-darkened skin, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

  “My lord,” said Miklos, “I campaigned against the bandits along the Royal Road when I came out from Sardis two years ago. I have seen something of surgery.”

  “Good, you may help me.” Andrion’s hands trembled; he choked back a scornful oath and clenched his teeth. Delicately he touched the bandage. Bellasteros winced and looked away, beyond the shadow and the stones, to the distant insubstantial horizon. The bloody scrap unwound, revealing the barbed head of the black Khazyari arrow imbedded in raw, scored flesh halfway between elbow and shoulder.

  “We must push the arrowhead through,” Miklos said. “A barbed head will only tear the wound further if we draw it out the way it entered.”

  “Mm,” said Andrion. His jaw ached, but he ground his teeth even tighter. Spoiled princeling, grow up. “Here, hold the arm steady.” Miklos inhaled deeply and grasped his emperor’s arm in two strong hands. Andrion took the arrow-shaft between thumb and forefinger.

  Bellasteros began to speak, quickly, his voice thin and strained. His eyes never left the horizon, but it was not the horizon that flickered in their depths. “Chryse, my first wife, I tore you from your home in Sardis and brought you to Iksandarun on the day of my victory. My victory, and therefore yours. But you were torn from our daughter Chrysais, never to see her again, for she married the king of Minras in the Great Sea.”

  Andrion pushed, slowly. The barbs sliced even more deeply into the wound. Blood gushed, burning, over his hand. A sparkling mist swam before his eyes; impatiently he shrugged it away.

  Miklos averted his face and gazed intently at the image of the falcon. His lips moved. But his hands were steady.

  Bellasteros’s breath caught in his throat. “Chryse, you raised my children as your own: Andrion, son of Danica the queen of Sabazel; Sarasvati, daughter of the imperial princess Roushangka. Dead in childbirth, Roushangka, and now Sarasvati’s blue eyes are closed forever . . .”

  “The lady Sarasvati,” Miklos blurted. “Is it true, did she leap from the battlement?”

  Do not remind me, Andrion pleaded silently. Do not speak of it, and maybe it will not be true. But the other man’s dark gaze was fixed unwaveringly on his face, pleading in its turn. “Can you imagine,” replied Andrion, forcing the words between his teeth, “what the Khazyari would have done to her?”

  “Yes,” Miklos hissed. And added lamely, a moment later, “My lord.” His gaze fell. His hands remained strong on Bellasteros’s arm.

  Andrion worked the arrowhead as gently as he could, pushing it deeper; the blood welled up around it, spilled over, ran down onto the dirt.

  Bellasteros’s left hand clutched awkwardly at Solifrax. “Aveyron, my old friend, what a fool I was to let the enemy take me from behind.” He gasped, closing his eyes. His words tumbled from his lips, spinning into delirium. “Gods, gods, take me as your sacrifice, the blood of the summer king healing his land—”

  “No!” Andrion exclaimed. “Your strategy was sound; we were betrayed.” His gentleness was only giving Bellasteros more pain. He thrust, and the barb burst from the back of the arm, blossoming from torn scarlet muscle. Scarlet droplets pocked the dust where Andrion knelt. His stomach heaved and he forced it back down. His father’s voice abruptly ceased, leaving a sudden silent void in his mind.

  Imperial blood, he thought, as warm and red as the least peasant’s. “Forgive me,” he murmured, not sure just why he asked forgiveness.

  Andrion grasped the barbed point of the arrowhead and pulled it from the poor shattered flesh. It pricked his fingers, and his own blood mingled with his father’s. He considered the evil weapon. Was it tainted? But the emperor’s madness came from a more subtle poison. And there was no remedy, not here, not now. With a curse he threw the arrowhead away.

  Bellasteros’s face was so pale as to be faintly green. A cold sweat glistened on his forehead. Andrion cleaned the arm with water from Miklos’s helmet. His own sweat ran stinging into his eyes but he ignored it.

  “Patros,” sighed the king, his voice drawn into a feeble thread. But it was his voice. Andrion inhaled, trying to absorb that voice into his own body. “I grew up with you, your brother in your father’s house. You helped me gain the Empire I have now lost. Declan, I brought you to your fate in Iksandarun. Chryse . . .” And he roused, opening his eyes, seeing nothing. “If I had given Sarasvati to Sabazel, she would be safe now. I owed her to Sabazel, in return for Andrion. But I owed Roushangka, dead in childbirth; I owed Chryse for my neglect. I owe the gods themselves . . .” His words dissipated and died; his hand went slack and fell away from the sheath of Solifrax. His eyes faded again, taken by pain and madness.

  Andrion bound the wound with the ragged edge of Bellasteros’s cloak. A brown peasant’s cloak, not his crimson one. He realized his teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip. Salt-sour sweat stung his eyes, salt-sour blood clotted his mouth, his stomach fluttered and his head swam, thoughts spinning like dried willow leaves in a fall wind, like the ashes of Iksandarun scattered to the sky. Something in Miklos’s voice caught him then, some carefully hidden agony. Yes, he had been assigned to the women’s wing of the palace . . .

  Andrion’s thought steadied. He glanced up. The young soldier held one end of the bandage, his eyes opaque, his face set. I can hardly ask, Andrion thought, just how closely the guard guarded his princess, or if she encouraged such devotion; but then, such a grave and delicate game would have been worthy of her temper.

  His lips crimped in a bittersweet smile as he tied the rude bandage around his father’s arm. Miklos slipped away, disdaining thanks.

/>   Andrion hovered as Bellasteros dozed uneasily, muttering strange phrases under his breath, waking only to take food at Andrion’s insistence. The sun passed its zenith and began to glide toward the west. The wind stirred slow whorls of dust down the cliff face, and the shimmering mirages were sucked up into a flat blue sky burnished like a blade.

  We have to go, Andrion thought; we shall surely be pursued. He rose, stretching. His body ached as if it had been beaten.

  His father leaned on his arm, silent, and struggled silently onto his horse. Andrion settled Solifrax at Bellasteros’s side, but the emperor stared into the distance as if listening for some music in the wind that he could no longer hear.

  Indeed, there was no message in this searing breeze. Andrion picked up the bronze falcon; with a quick prayer, Mercy, Harus, for this your servant, he stowed it in a saddlebag. He sent a prayer upward into the sky, to the flaring disk of the sun, and the moon that hid its face from the sun’s harshness: Ashtar, we are your sons, have mercy. And he thought, everything will be well when we reach Sabazel; my mother Danica, my sister Ilanit, my cousin Dana with her challenging smile will heal us. We shall find direction in Sabazel. His necklace burned his throat and blood clotted on his hands as he led the company into the hot breath of the afternoon.

  The shadow of the great rocks moved away from the black arrowhead and the blood-spattered dust. The edge of the sunlight spilled over them. A serpent glided from beneath the boulder, considering the world through eyes like cut sapphires; its shining scales clicked by the barb and smoothed a crescent across the stained ground.

  Chapter Four

  Tembujin dozed in the heat of midday, luxuriating among the quilts of his raised bed, wearing only his plaque of rank. A breeze plucked fitfully at the hangings of the yurt, and sunlight flickered around the door; motes of golden dust swirled in the warm air.

  There was a movement beside him. Tembujin’s muscles tightened, his black eyes glittered briefly between slitted lids. Sita thrust the quilts away and sat up, groaning, looking about her with a moment’s confusion. Then her mouth tensed with memory. She sat unmoving for a time, only her breasts rising and falling with her breath. The fall of red hair down her back lifted in the breeze as if stroked by invisible hands. Tembujin smiled, let his smile fade, did not stir.

  Then Sita sighed and raised her chin. She glanced down at the sleek body of the Khazyari prince, her nostrils flaring with distaste. His long knife lay among his clothes on the carpeted floor; stealthily she crept from the bed, picked it up, drew it from its sheath. She turned it in her hand and a brief ray of sun glanced down the blade.

  Slowly she stepped to the side of the bed and sat beside Tembujin’s still form. Slowly she raised the knife so that the shining blade just touched the arch of his throat.

  Her teeth indented her lower lip. The blue of her eyes, the blue of evening before the first star, glistened with shifting depths of fear, anger, conscience. Tembujin’s face remained as impassive as a statue cast in bronze, but his hand snaked silently through the covers behind Sita’s back, tense, ready.

  “Harus! If I kill I am no better than he!” She turned and hurled the knife across the yurt. It struck deep into the carpeted ground and stood there shivering. Tembujin’s hand leaped upward, closed on Sita’s hair, and yanked her down.

  She yelped in terror, and yelped again as Tembujin fell on her, pinning her to the bed. Her hands set themselves flat against his chest as if to shove him away. But she moved only her eyes, averting them when his face pressed close to hers.

  “Why did you throw the knife away?” he asked.

  She looked right and left, seeking an escape. But the Khazyari’s hand was tight in her hair, his weight crushing her. His black eyes searched hers. She swallowed. “Whoever strikes you down would die. And I have compromised so much already to live.”

  Tembujin laughed shortly. “If it were a slave who struck me down, retribution would indeed be swift and unpleasant. There are those, though, who could perhaps strike with impunity.” He released her hair and raised himself on his elbows, continuing to contemplate her face. But her eyes revealed nothing. The long tail of black hair tied at the back of his head fell forward and rested on her shoulder like a coil of binding rope. “You are no courtesan,” Tembujin said. “A virgin, certainly. Did you think I would not know?”

  Sita’s lips thinned as she closed them even more tightly.

  “You have fair skin, smooth hands. You have never worked.”

  Her cheeks slowly drained of color.

  “A rich merchant’s daughter, perhaps, a precious jewel among his wares?”

  She exhaled suddenly, as if relieved; her eyes flicked across his, searching in turn. “Yes, quite.”

  “So,” Tembujin said. “Live, then. You are mine now, and if you behave yourself, no one will hurt you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” she replied, her words tinted with bitter gall. “I shall live, and suffer the indignities of living, such as contempt so great you would not even bind me after using me.”

  “Shh,” he said soothingly. “Be glad you were not taken by my father Baakhun, who would squash you like a flea, or by Odo the shaman, who would work evil magic on you, or my pig-brother Vlad, who would torture you, knowing no other way to pleasure himself with a woman.” Tembujin abandoned her eyes and bent his cheek to hers, inhaling the lavender and anemone of her scent. “But I, Sita, know how to pleasure you.”

  Her lip curled in denial. She stared up at the center pole of the tent, removing herself from her body, and sighed, lightly, shakily. “Ashtar . . .”

  The wind stirred the cloth doorway of the yurt and played with the prince’s feathered standard that stood outside. The guard next to it leaned on his spear dozing. Toth, carrying a clay pot of water, approached quietly.

  Warriors did not deign to notice slaves. Toth bent, set the pot on the ground, and glanced through the opening. The dim interior danced with dust motes that formed shifting shapes and figures in the corner of the eye, not quite seen, not quite unseen. A knife stood upright in the floor.

  The sturdy bronze body of the Khazyari prince arched above Sita’s rounded whiteness; black hair and copper mingled on the quilt like the design on some exotic vase. The son of the lion played, not ungently, with his prey. As Toth watched, her hands reached upward above Tembujin’s shoulders, clenched into fists and then loosened, opening, perhaps, in supplication. Perhaps in offering to a goddess who could sanctify her sacrifice.

  Toth’s plump face withered like a sun-dried apricot. He straightened, turned, shuffled away. His dark-circled eyes glanced toward the bleakly silent walls of the city. The pile of severed heads before the gate was almost obscured by a great swarm of buzzing flies, and the sickly sweet odor of death lay heavy on the wind. Under the eye of Khazyari warriors, a squad of slaves, boys who had yesterday been freeborn citizens of the Empire, stacked brush around the grisly pyramid. Another squad dragged cartloads of mutilated corpses to the mound that had risen eighteen years ago, the tomb of the Sardians who had died for Bellasteros and the Empire.

  The traitor Hilkar straddled a horse atop the mound, smirking like a grotesque puppet, head held high and thin chest out-thrust in a counterfeit majesty that both imitated and mocked Bellasteros’s regal manner. “The emperor,” muttered Toth, “tempers his pride with grace. We welcomed his conquest, for he freed us from a pitiless rule. And Danica of Sabazel placed the diadem upon his brow.”

  Vlad wandered through the carnage, poking here, probing there, as flies crawled across his greasy face. Women and children quarreled over looted riches.

  The old servant turned away from the scene, shuddering. Outside a nearby yurt he found another water pot. Only dead eyes watched him; he hoisted it to his shoulder. He skirted the guards by the khan’s great yurt. A low sound of heart-rent sobbing echoed within, punctuated by thunderous snores.

  No guard stood outside the residence of the shaman; the rumor of Odo’s protective spells
was enough to frighten away even the boldest Khazyari. Toth, grimacing, made the sign against the evil eye. Again he bent and set a pot before the door, again he glanced inside.

  Another dim interior. But these dust motes were black, not golden, and swirled in wraiths of acrid smoke. Here were grasping claws, there sharp, leather-covered wings. Bright spots of eyes, amber and chalcedony, glinted in the mist. Toth strangled a cough. The yurt reeked of nightshade and hemp, those herbs that excite the mind and create visions.

  The mist rose from the burned upturned palms of a woman whose body lay in the center of the tent surrounded by butter lamps. A carved stone axe lay across her face, the focus for her blank, staring eyes; the focus for her contorted features, frozen dead in an extremity of terror. No wound marred her pale skin.

  Carefully spread beneath her was Bellasteros’s crimson cloak. As the lamps guttered in the breeze, the cloak rippled like a lapping pool of blood.

  From the shadows at the rear of the yurt came an odd noise, a grunting like a wild boar in rut, a rhythmic striking of flesh against flesh. As Toth’s eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw Raksula leaning over the squat body of Odo. Her scrawny legs wrapped the folds of fat that were his waist, pressing them into intricate hills and furrows; her hips thrust at him, slapping wetly. He grunted, his glazed eyes staring into some other dimension, his mouth hanging open. But Raksula’s eyes, points of brightness amidst the damp tangle of her hair, were those of a feral animal. Under the glare of those eyes the amulets on Odo’s chest leaped and danced; Raksula seized them in claw-like fingers and made of them reins to guide the heaving body of the shaman. She laughed, and the black mist swirled through the yurt.

  Toth gagged. He spun about. The cart of Khalingu blocked his path. The form of the god seemed to shift and move behind its hangings, multiple arms reaching greedily outward, shaking weapons above a face split into the rictus grin of a skull.