Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

Tembujin shoved Vlad aside and marched out onto the field. The watchers shouted; the other archers gave way. He gestured, and attendants moved the wicker target farther back. With a twist of his body he strung his bow, tightening its horn and sinew into a crescent. Smoothly he plucked an arrow, nocked it, aimed. His thumb snapped and the string hummed. The arrow flew swift and true to the center of the target. The crowd roared its approval. Tembujin smiled faintly, chose another arrow, fired again.

  Raksula sidled closer to Baakhun and curled up at his feet, swinging the amulet. “You will need stamina,” she purred, “when the odlok Tembujin departs and leaves his red-haired girl with you.”

  “He has not offered her to me,” responded Baakhun. “She will stay with his own household, I suppose, served by that eunuch.” And he chuckled, a rumble emanating from deep in his chest, amused by his own cleverness. “But a eunuch could never serve her the way I could.”

  Raksula laughed heartily. “True indeed, my lord. Tembujin keeps her so close, there are those who name him selfish.” She reached behind her, dragged Vlad onto the dais, and seated him at his father’s right hand.

  Baakhun peered inquisitively into the skin of kviss, as if Sita were kept within. “A waste of a pretty girl.”

  “Unlike the odlok, to so insult his father.” Raksula barely murmured the words, but the wind lifted them to Baakhun’s ears. His lower lip protruded, injured, and he gulped the kviss.

  Hilkar abandoned the effort to understand this exchange in Khazyari. He turned and feigned great interest in the archery contest. Tembujin shot a third time, again perfectly, and the other contestants bowed to him. Another cheer rose from the crowd. He glanced around at Baakhun, but Baakhun, petulant, would not meet his eye. The prince’s face clouded.

  Raksula smiled, but her eyes were still flat. The wind stirred the afternoon light like water in a bronze basin.

  * * * * *

  Darkness lay heavy over the world, a mist dimming the face of a gibbous moon. Mist lay over the plain south of Azervinah. where the humps of the Khazyari yurts stretched horizon to horizon.

  The image of Khalingu stretched and yawned, lipless mouth with brittle, sharp teeth opening, long tongue licking out. The hangings stirred as if by a fetid breath.

  Raksula and Odo bent together over a solitary flame. Between their clasped hands dangled the amulet of the Eye. At their side lay the trussed shape of a prisoner, a Sardian captured in the disastrous battle along the Road. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, his breathing was shallow; he had been drugged into docility.

  The Eye twitched like a cat’s tail, back and forth, back and forth, over the fire. Shapes oozed through the shadows and streamed out through the smoke hole of the yurt, flowing upward into a shrouded sky.

  In Sardis, at night under a waning moon, Shurzad knelt naked before her secret shrine of Qem. All was ready: knife, lamp, incense, an empty chased gold offering bowl beside another containing a curl of dark auburn hair. “So,” she said to the cat, Qemnetesh, “we begin. Such little magicks I have done before, such insignificant ones, love philters and elixirs of strength.”

  The gray cat lay along the altar, delicately cleaning its paws. It did not look up at her.

  Shurzad’s voice quickened and rose, leaving the rhythm of her own breath and taking up Raksula’s. Darkness oozed around her, sucking at her; her body swayed, its soft shining curves seemed to waver, slip into another shape, waver back again.

  Raksula lifted a long curved dagger, touched the amulet with it, traced an arcane pattern on the face of the prisoner. His eyes disappeared, leaving only vacant white crescents beneath his lids. Raksula cut his throat.

  Shurzad looked up into the eyes of Qem. They were deep topaz mirrors, spinning, pulling her down into some depth. Her voice stopped with a gasp in her throat. She picked up the knife, and it twisted, alive, in her grasp. Blood welled from her wrist, flowed into the empty offering bowl, became a shifting vermilion pool that lapped out, farther and farther.

  Raksula’s teeth glinted. Great beads of sweat stood out on her brow. Each tiny braid on her head stood on end and waved, as if trying to swarm from her head and follow her words across the darkened expanse of the world.

  She spoke a word of command. Shurzad screamed in pain. Her eyes started from their kohl-rimmed sockets. And yet, except for the cut on her wrist, her body was unscathed.

  Valeria slept, secure in her bed in the palace of Sardis, guarded, doted upon. She tossed, moaning in nightmare, and the shadows of her bedchamber coiled like strangling ropes around her.

  The blood in Shurzad’s bowl leapt upward in a garish red fountain and sprayed the other bowl. The coil of dark auburn hair was inundated. It sparked, writhing, and burned. The incense emitted an evil stench, as of a charnel house, a battlefield where only jackals and vultures moved.

  Shurzad crumpled before her altar, motionless, hardly breathing, her eyes staring unseeing before her. The flame of her lamp stood straight and unwavering, touched by no breeze here in the secret, ensorcelled room. Shadows hemmed her in, harrowing her soft flesh with darkness and then fading. Laughter echoed around her, faint and distorted, like a feverish hallucination.

  A guard passed the outer door, his footsteps steady, ordinary. Shurzad slowly lifted her face. It was sunken like a grape that has been crushed and sucked dry. Her eyes contained only a tiny image of the solitary flame. “My husband readies an army,” she whispered, as if she had no voice, no will, left. “Andrion comes to claim the army. To claim Valeria, as you promise.”

  The offering bowl held a curl of charcoal, and ancient rust stains. The statue of Qem was silent, only carved stone. Qemnetesh emitted one sharp gleam between slitted eyelids and then lowered its head, asleep.

  Raksula held the amulet of the Eye before her and gloated. “Shurzad. Valeria her daughter. What pleasure, Odo, to turn Bellasteros’s flank. To strike at Andrion in a place he feels secure. Shurzad, you simpering fool, I own you.”

  The body lay silently, head twisted back, blood running sluggishly from the gaping wound in its throat. Blood soaked into the dark carpet and lapped at the hem of Raksula’s skirt. Odo squatted over the butter lamp, nursing its tiny flame; it flared, sending his shadow shooting up the walls of his tent, a hulking and twisted gargoyle bending over Raksula.

  She laughed, Odo sat down, the flame steadied, and the gargoyle disappeared. “Qem,” she said, “an aspect of Khalingu as snow leopard, brought here to Iksandarun by the caravans, and carried by Shurzad herself to Sardis. How pleasant, indeed.” She stirred the body of the prisoner with her foot, sneering, “Sardian weakling.”

  Odo’s face was furrowed with a different thought. “My lady, to put henbane into Baakhun’s kviss so that he may heed those suspicions we plant in him is inspired, certainly inspired. But Tembujin is strong. You saw how the warriors cheered him at the games four days ago, before we left. We must enspell him to what appears to be treachery.”

  “Fool,” said Raksula. “Of course we must enspell him, even as we enspell the other prince, Andrion. Khalingu has planned it all.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Odo replied.

  Raksula swung the amulet in slow circles, round and round, and Odo’s eyes, black currants in rolls of dough, followed it. Outside the yurt the statue of Khalingu sat, still and content, under a shadowed moon.

  Chapter Eleven

  They left the city in darkness. Ilanit’s shield, raised in farewell, glowed like a beacon behind them. At dawn they guided their horses across the borders of Sabazel, and the sun rose before them like another shield, flourished in greeting. The wraith of a waning quarter moon hovered uncertainly above the still-shadowed horizon at their backs.

  Andrion and Dana had hardly seen each other in the eight days since they returned from the cavern, kept apart not by some conspiracy of their elders but by some elusive reluctance to test the depths of their new bond.

  Lyris had insisted on scouting the entire country of Sabazel and beyond while Andrion chafed to
move on and Dana went gravely and patiently about her business. Not, he thought, that he was in any hurry to test his fate in Gerlac’s tomb. He shivered and put that thought out of his mind.

  He realized Dana was looking at him, and smiled at her. She smiled back and began to laugh, somehow bewildered that there was still a constraint between them. It was as if the old wall had burned away, revealing another just behind.

  Andrion repeated her laugh and her bewilderment. “I shall be clumsy at this,” he said. “I always thought of my father as the hero.”

  “But you were born a hero,” Dana returned. “Ashtar’s will, set long before our births or even our mothers’ births.”

  Andrion grimaced, both pleased and resentful to be a pawn of the gods. Cylandra shrunk behind them, faded, became only one peak among those that anchored the southwestern horizon. The grasses of the high plains bent and sighed like the waves of a golden-green sea stroked by a morning breeze. The sky deepened to blue. Billowing clouds, still tinted pink with dawn, thronged low in the eastern sky.

  Dana shifted irritably in her long skirt and high-laced boots. “I would have preferred to ride bravely out in armor,” she grumbled.

  “Of course,” Andrion replied. “But if we are to be a merchant couple, we must look the part. Subtlety now, and then when I find Solifrax . . .”

  “And my father’s army,” shot back Dana, but she was teasing him.

  He bowed graciously over his saddle and arranged his cloak around him, much more comfortable in an embroidered chiton than in Sabazian trousers. He carried no weapons save for a short dagger behind his wide leather belt; Dana wore a dagger concealed under her skirt. Her bow was wrapped in a bolt of cloth, her arrows hidden among pots of honey and grain laid on a packhorse, ostensibly goods for trade. Also hidden was the sheath of Solifrax, now only a dry cast-off serpent’s skin, the bronze image of Harus, and the winged brooch. But the crescent and star necklace still gleamed against Andrion’s throat; it seemed an innocent enough affectation for a young merchant, and he could not bear to put it away.

  A young merchant, he thought, and his sister? His wife? Sacrilege indeed. “How fares Kerith?” he asked. “Will she speak to you again?”

  “She was not angry with me. She understands the demands of friendship.”

  “And of love?” he asked quietly.

  Dana looked at him with a slight frown, trying to fathom his question. “We are lovers, if that is what you ask.”

  “Ah,” he replied. He sternly reminded himself that Patros shared Ilanit with Lyris, Bellasteros shared Danica with Shandir—no, it was each woman’s pair who was the constant in her life, the steady daily cycle of sun and moon compared with the brief if insistent thunderstorm of a man’s presence. He cleared his throat. “Do you think you will pair with her someday?” he asked, knowing even as he spoke that he picked at a scabbed but still tender wound.

  Dana’s mouth twitched, too considerate to show amusement. “Perhaps. But not yet. We do not pair ourselves until our first pregnancy, so that the babe may have two parents. You know that.”

  “Ah,” Andrion said again. “But I never thought of you pregnant.” There, he had said it.

  Dana chuckled, leaned over and lightly slapped his thigh. “I will let you know when I know. And that, Andrion, is more favor than other men receive.”

  “Thank you,” he said, rather stiffly. But she was right, he deserved no preference. And if Dana did bear his child, be it boy or girl . . . He abandoned that thought as well. The complications of the heart were an indulgence he could not allow himself, not now.

  “Soon,” said Dana quietly, probing her own wound, “they will find a wife for you.”

  Andrion cringed. “Some general’s daughter, who will lie whimpering while I steal her nurtured innocence?” He guided his horses carefully across a gully, through a warm cloud of crushed thyme and the song of locusts, and waited for Dana to follow. “My father did not meet Danica until he was twenty-seven, and he had no heir before then. But I have known Sabazel since birth—”

  “And are beguiled by the daughters of Ashtar?” Dana asked, not without sympathy. “Some men would use us and then reject us, true, but not Bellasteros, not Patros, not you.” She, too, cleared her throat. “Shurzad will not be pleased to see me with you. She intends a general’s daughter for you, her lovely, cosseted Valeria.”

  “A fragile blossom; I would bruise her with a kiss. When I gave her a lock of my hair last year, she blushed and stammered.”

  “Shurzad would not even let us play together,” said Dana, “fearing, I suppose, that I would contaminate her.”

  Andrion was only too ready to abandon such difficult topics as his potential marriage and his possible children. “When were you in Sardis?” he asked.

  “I was a child, without breasts.”

  “Many years ago, then.”

  Dana laughed, refusing to rise to the bait. “Indeed.”

  “Poor Shurzad,” said Andrion, swallowing a grin. “She never forgave Patros for leaving her on their wedding night and going simply to sit with Ilanit and the unborn child that was you. As Bellasteros, I hear, left Roushangka to sit with Danica and me.” Roushangka, the ill-fated imperial princess, Sarasvati’s mother . . . The sunlight faded. “Gods,” he muttered. “Even if in the end we drive the Khazyari away, we have lost so much, Dana, so much.”

  “I always sensed in Sarasvati the free spirit of a Sabazian, well hidden though it was. Even to herself, I think. Such a waste.”

  They moved on across the plain. It seemed to Andrion that they stayed in the same place while the ground slipped away beneath them and the clouds rose across the sky like a creeping curtain. I am clumsy, Andrion said to himself. I must learn to be strong.

  “We shall make better time when we reach the Royal Road at Bellastria,” said Dana after a time.

  Bellastria, thought Andrion. Where my father and my mother first met. “Sardis was once a world away from Farsahn, and Sabazel was only legend. Now, with the roads and bridges Bellasteros built, with the maps he had drawn, the world shrinks.”

  “But grows no less deep,” Dana returned dryly.

  A falcon coasted high above the plain, its bright eye fixed on the riders beneath. Andrion saluted it. “I come to your city, Harus, I come.”

  Egrets flew upward, blinding white against clouds like blue-black iron. Thunderheads blotted out the sun. The world softened into an artificial twilight, but the two riders rode on and on, until the storm broke at last. They sought shelter in a village, and played their roles to perfection for their hosts.

  Andrion tried to imagine himself as a villager, complacently ignorant, untouched by the gods. But he could not. And neither, he decided, could Dana.

  * * * * *

  A cool, brisk wind rolled up the clouds and thrust them away; the morning sun glinted off each stalk of grass, each branch of the willows lining a swollen stream. Andrion and Dana bade the villagers farewell and set their faces to the east.

  By afternoon they came to an escarpment. The land fell away into a thick forest that edged a glistening rim of the sea, azure water blending in hazy sunlight with azure sky. There was the settlement of Bellastria, founded behind the palisade of an old Sardian encampment. Not too old, Andrion corrected himself. Less than twenty years ago his father had summoned his mother here, and here he tried to kill her. How often Bellasteros had told that story, shame-faced and yet amused at his distant impetuous self.

  The ditch that had protected the camp was almost filled in, and houses lay beyond the remaining logs of the palisade; the forest was pocked with farm plots, and boats were drawn up on the beach. Beyond the town, a wide river wound like pieces of glinting mirror through the lowlands.

  Dana and Andrion guided their horses down into the damp, verdant stillness. Unusual stillness, Andrion noted; the drooping oak leaves murmured among themselves, stirred by a whisper of a breeze, but above the town plumes of smoke reached unwavering upward. No birds sang, no sm
all animals moved, even the hum of insects was muted; no human figures were about.

  “Something is wrong here,” said Dana, her nostrils flaring.

  They followed a muddy track through the wood, the plop-plop of their horses’ hooves sounding like reverberating drumbeats. The outskirts of the town, whitewashed walls and red tile roofs, appeared through the thick oak boles, beyond a stubbled field.

  And then a puff of wind brought a distant murmur of voices, not shouting voices, but taut, cautious ones, gabbling faster and faster and then cut, suddenly, by a word of command.

  As one, Andrion and Dana dismounted. They tied their horses to a nearby tree trunk, concealed behind a tangle of blackthorn and oleander. They crept forward across the field and into a narrow alley between high limestone walls. A few pigeons hopped through the dirt, searching for scraps to eat, cooing softly.

  “We shall take tribute,” stated a smooth, lightly accented male voice, “and leave you to ponder the lesson of our coming. Lessons, perhaps, for Nikander in Farsahn, for Patros in Sardis.” He spoke easily, accustomed, it seemed, to being obeyed.

  Dana and Andrion pressed against the side wall of a house and peered around its corner into the marketplace of the town, cobblestones surrounded by low columned buildings, a well, piles of melons, grapes, flyspecked fish.

  The center of the square was thronged with people, probably the entire population of the town. All were hunched over, as if waiting to be beaten, their hands upraised in supplication toward—

  Andrion choked down a gasp. The gasp exploded into rage. He closed his eyes, opened them again, but the scene before him did not alter. A Khazyari warrior stood on the public speaker’s stand, his hands on his hips, his long black tail of hair tossing behind him. His gleaming black gaze raked the faces before him, and his lips parted in a lazy smile. “Boo!” he cried suddenly, and the entire crowd jumped back.