Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Ventalidar reared and neighed. Yes, Andrion thought as he clung to the reins. Fight, yes. The horse’s luminous eyes blinked, stilled, peered inquisitively at Andrion. Nikander’s eyes widened perceptibly. Dana started to smile.

  Andrion petted the horse and he did not shy. Andrion murmured sweet nothings in his ear and it pricked forward, intrigued. Andrion leaned heavily against his side. And now, some part of Andrion’s mind told him, you will probably be thrown onto your face before them all. But that thought burned to ash in the heat of his desire and dissipated down the wind.

  He pulled himself as slowly and carefully onto Ventalidar’s back as he would enter a woman. And yet he had never had to woo a woman with this delicacy. He chuckled at his importunate thought. The horse’s broad back was warm and pleasant against his skin. Assurance flowed like sweet liqueur through his veins.

  The watchers gasped. The stallion started, rearing. Andrion clutched at his mane and tightened his knees. “Ventalidar,” he whispered, “who goes upon the wings of the wind.” For a moment the horse stood, braced and shivering. And then he shrugged, his coat reflecting that quick red gleam. Divine intervention, perhaps; Andrion did not care. “So then,” he said to the horse, “we each have our roles to play, have we not? Pawn or hero, in the end it is the same.”

  He flicked the reins and Ventalidar moved off, tossing his head and stepping as proudly as if he had tamed Andrion. Only then did Andrion realize they were surrounded by an immense crowd, so silent that the distant cry of the falcon echoed eerily, seabirds chuckled overhead, and the wind itself laughed. Dana, grinning, stood in her stirrups and saluted. Andrion, bareback, waved jauntily to her. Nikander’s features broke into a smile. “A beast worthy of your mettle, my lord. Lead us to victory.”

  My mettle, not my father’s, Andrion thought. “Victory indeed,” he called over his shoulder.

  A ripple ran through the proconsul’s staff and spread in ever-widening circles outward. A thrumming in Andrion’s ears, wind and Ventalidar’s hooves, became the chant of a thousand voices, “Andrion, Bellasteros, Andrion!” Hands reached out to god-touched horse and god-touched rider. Andrion found himself surrounded by a cordon of centurions, called by one of Nikander’s invisible gestures. He commanded his troops with the subtle motions of a rider practicing dressage. Of a rider riding Ventalidar.

  Gods, Andrion said silently, thank you for this favor; the joy is all the sweeter for being unexpected. He laughed out loud. Ventalidar carved a stately swath through the people and led them, singing and cheering, up the ramp toward the city gate. Nikander and Dana fell in just behind, each bowing and gesturing for the other to go first.

  Andrion cared for the horse before realizing how dirty and hungry he was himself. Bathed and shaved, he hurried to dine, glowing with an achievement so intense it almost shamed him to feel it. Dana, reclining beside him, allowed his glow to illuminate her wit and began exchanging comradely jests with Nikander’s officers.

  Andrion regarded the candied rose petals, saffron rice, and larks in honey set before him; he would have preferred a hearty meal of beans and fish, legion fare. But Nikander obviously felt that a prince, beloved of the gods, ate such delicacies. The proconsul reclined stiffly opposite, his hooded eyes gazing avuncular approval. Andrion glowed even brighter; he ate his rose petals and was grateful for them.

  Later he and Dana, left diplomatically alone, sat sipping cool sherbet in the twilit atrium of the proconsul’s residence. Nikander’s wives and children peered from the surrounding colonnade like so many exotic birds, chirping about the Sabazian woman’s familiarity with the prince, cooing about the prince’s dark, even features, so like his father’s. “Andrion, master of man and beast,” someone said.

  “Nikander has so many wives,” whispered Dana.

  “He was ennobled many years ago,” Andrion replied.

  She giggled. “He must have many hidden qualities.” And then, sobering, “Why, by Ashtar’s tresses, did you take such a chance with that horse?”

  “You should not have to ask that.”

  “I am surprised that you did not name him Tembujin.”

  She does not goad me, Andrion chided himself as irritation fluttered in him. She challenges my complacency, as well she should. “You noticed the resemblance, then. Did you also notice that the horse submitted to me?”

  “He was frightened; you soothed him.” She paused, as she would when the elusive Sight stirred within her; but no, she lost it, and she shrugged it away. “Your stallion will make a fine mate for my mare.”

  “Does your mare go into heat only at the solstices and the equinoxes?”

  But Dana would not accept his challenge. She tried to smile, but her lips faltered and tightened instead. “Andrion, I am not pregnant.”

  “Ah,” he said, the syllable a stone falling suddenly into deep water. That interlude in the cavern had been some other time. some other world. No wonder she burnished her own glow this night, rejoicing at her release from such a burden. Or did she rejoice? Did he? His eye went reluctantly to her face, not really wanting to see her expression; she stared up into the sky with a faint, closed smile. Let it go, he ordered himself. Soon you will have your own atrium and caged wives chattering like peahens over their big bellies.

  The twilight was muted as if, with no moon to guide them, the stars hid their brilliance. The horse was, after all, only a horse. “The moon will be new tomorrow.” Andrion sighed. “We shall not see it again until we are well on the way to Sardis.” Sardis, and a faint resonance in the back of his mind, the dark tomb of the demon king.

  Dana smiled at him, and he at her. Conscious of the watching eyes they dared no more.

  * * * * *

  The days were woven like a tapestry, the warp the unfurling Road consumed by Ventalidar’s tireless stride, the weft Andrion’s desperate eagerness to touch the future, to make the future, with its fearsome uncertainties, into a secure past. The escort hurried behind, led rather than leading.

  Causeways, forests, fields, and marshes fell behind. They outdistanced the rocky hills that were the last thrust of the great southern mountains; they passed the ancient border between the Empire and Sardis.

  At last the Road wound in lazy curves, past stands of cypress and oak, down into the floodplain of the Sar. The setting sun glinted off the twin rivers, and the city that lay in their confluence seemed like an intricate child’s toy. Smaller towns and villages lay about the walls of Sardis, dividing the land into tidy blocks of wheat and barley and olive trees. An indigo smudge on the horizon was Pirestia and the sea.

  An irrigation canal, a mirror reflecting a gilded sky, was suddenly creased by an ibis. A boy guided a herd of harp-horned cattle across the Road; harvesters sang in the fields. Row upon row of tents lay ahead, the last rays of the sun pricking light from the spears of the guards.

  The great ziggurat continued gleaming faintly even when the sunlight drained from camp and wall, as if illuminated from within, the heavy stones parchment thin. Can I see into your heart, Harus, as you see into mine? Andrion asked silently. Sardis lay at last at his fingertips, and the scents of dust and cattle and freshly scythed grain were like a heady ale. Ventalidar pranced as if the journey had just begun, nostrils flaring.

  The necropolis was beyond the city, beyond the two rivers. I come to the reckoning, Gerlac, Andrion called; I have none of your Sardian blood, but for Sardis and the bastard Bellasteros I offer my life.

  Dana’s face was gray with dust and weariness. She would not have chosen to come here. Gods, he thought, I offer many lives. He saluted her, and she summoned a smile as taut as the bow which arched above her head.

  The sentries of the long bridge crossing the clear Sar Azurac saw the livery of Farsahn and the falcon brooch and snapped to attention. The traffic on the bridge pulled aside. The stones rang like bells under Ventalidar’s hooves. The moon rose, an elliptical lamp glowing orange just above the ziggurat, a flame lit at its peak. Tomorrow it would be full. And you,
too, Ashtar, Andrion thought. You can see into my heart and set strength against weakness.

  Doves spun upward from the temple precinct, their wings dark brush strokes against the face of the moon. The moon shed its orange gleam, shook off the embrace of Harus, mounted higher into an indigo sky. The evening star hung beside it, a clear, pure white. Andrion reached for the hundredth time to his throat, but even the mark of the necklace had faded.

  Soldiers flocked from the encampment, shattering the evening’s lull with their shouts. The gates of the city stood open; but then, they had not been closed for years. Andrion and Dana passed under the carved archway into flickering torchlit streets, into a flood of ruddy faces and reaching hands. “Andrion!” the cry went up. “Bellasteros, Andrion!” He had come, the axis upon which their mingled hopes and fears now must turn.

  Dana quailed back, set her teeth, plunged after the escort into the throng. Ventalidar started and Andrion soothed him. The world stuttered, the faces and fires up close and definite one moment, wavering distant and misted the next. The streets were haunted, filled with people looking like Chryse his stepmother, Declan the priest of Harus, Aveyron . . . The faces lingered only in his mind. There is something of me that is Sardian, he thought, that they gave me. He raised his hand to wave to his people.

  They swept Andrion along like a piece of jetsam. Soldiers fended off the surging crowd, their helmets tilted rakishly as they, too, tried to see the prince. Ventalidar danced down the cobblestones. Were his hooves striking fire, or did the torches gutter in a sudden breeze? The colonnades of the agora and the staircases of the forum flowed by. Monuments to those men thought to be his ancestors shifted on their pedestals, but they did not mock him.

  They passed another gateway, guards in black and gold standing to attention, a glitter of short Sardian swords. Great flaring lamps reflected crimson in marble walls. The escorting horsemen fell back, so that Andrion and Dana beside him emerged alone in the center of the palace courtyard. Still the cry went up, ringing against the clear night sky, “Bellasteros, Andrion.” The wind took the names and bore them away.

  Andrion floated from his horse’s back to the ground. Dana’s blond hair gleamed briefly copper in the lamplight. His elation chilled as he thought, Sarasvati, I shall avenge you.

  Ventalidar suffered himself to be led away by a solicitous groom. Great brass-bound doors swung wide. Light, pouring down a long stairway, drove back the night.

  “My father.” said Dana, in a suddenly small voice. Patros rushed down the stairs, choosing in his delight to forfeit dignity. Gods, Andrion thought, how the waiting has told upon this old friend, crevasses cut at the corners of his mouth and eyes, the silver at his temples consuming his sable hair. He, too, grows old . . . But then the crevasses were erased by a great boyish grin. Not knowing which to embrace first, Patros took them both into a massive hug.

  “Patros,” Andrion said, sternly quelling a quaver like a weary child’s,” Bellasteros has lost his right arm.”

  Patros looked Andrion in the face, seeing, apparently, that same veneer of Bellasteros’s courage that Nikander had seen. And perhaps he saw something of Danica’s integrity, as well. His features furrowed again, but his shoulders squared themselves. “Andrion, you are his right arm.”

  Andrion straightened. Yes, he thought, solace is only a moment’s embrace; the game will be played to the end, and I am the king upon the board. I am strong. Steadily, he said to Patros and to Dana both, “We are all his right arm.”

  Patros nodded and grinned again. He clasped Andrion on one side and Dana on the other and carried them to the top of the stairway. Servants flicked by like hummingbirds. In their midst appeared a statue of Gerlac. Andrion returned the glare of the empty marble sockets. My father’s strength was forged in hatred, he told it, but mine is forged in love.

  Clothing swirled before him and twin veiled faces confronted him. Dana stiffened, settling her bow on her shoulder.

  Valeria’s eyes were warm and wide and shy, if oddly troubled; Andrion bowed punctiliously over her damp, trembling hand, and wondered why she trembled. He bowed over Shurzad’s cold hand and suppressed a start. Some power hummed in her, some acid coursed through her veins and shocked him. A half-healed cut marred her wrist.

  He looked up into her eyes. They were hard, like beads of jet. Odd, her eyes had not been that dark before. He seemed to teeter on the edge of a precipice, his mind plucked by the darkness of an abyss. But within the abyss something squirmed pitifully to be free.

  He closed his eyes, shook himself, opened them again. Shurzad stared into the distance over his shoulder. Her face had something in it of Ilanit’s when the goddess moved in her mind, of Dana’s when the Sight came upon her. And yet Shurzad was as drawn and pale as if rent by her vision, not filled by it.

  I see too damn much, Andrion told himself. She is only jealous.

  Patros’s eyes rested upon Andrion, too noble to suck another’s strength, and yet strengthened by his presence; relieved, as if Andrion were the star-shield gleaming against encircling darkness. “Come,” he said, and his eyes turned fondly to Dana. “Tell me of your journey.”

  But Shurzad looked stonily beyond her husband’s daughter. Dana’s wary green eyes followed, widened, and fixed upon a shadow in an angle of the hallway. Andrion turned. No, not a shadow but a gray cat, crouching, tail twitching, topaz eyes scanning Andrion’s body with a glare so intent he could feel it. He shuddered. Surely there had been a cat in his vision.

  Dana spun abruptly and paced off. Andrion followed at Patros’s side, ordering the scattered mosaic of his thoughts. Valeria attempted to match her half-sister’s stride and failed. Shurzad stood alone in the hallway, a pillar of silence repelling the shouting from the street, the echo of footsteps from the palace. “Your will be done, Qem,” she murmured. The cat slipped away, shadow blending into shadow.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Khazyari camp lay strewn beside the Road. Behind it stretched the vast plain of the southern provinces, shimmering in wind-stirred waves of grass and tree and rock gilded by the late summer heat.

  Toth stood at the edge of the camp, shading his eyes against the rising sun. squinting to the north. An uneven blotch, the faintest suggestion of a cloud bank on the horizon, faded and was absorbed into the clear blue sky even as he looked at it. It was only a mirage of the dawn light, a transparent reflection in the colored glass of the sky above the mountain range that divided the northern Empire from the south.

  Figures moved on the Road, coming from the pass at Azervinah and the cleft of the Jorniyeh. The sentinels set up a cry. Toth slipped away. The iridescent smoke wavering over the camp swirled in a sudden gust of wind, stirred by an unseen hand.

  Baakhun lumbered from his yurt like some great beast from its lair, blinking around him in a vague, disturbed somnolence. Raksula and Odo popped out of the shaman’s shelter. Vlad, torturing a small bird in the shadow of Khalingu’s cart, looked up, shrugged, returned to his play. Sita glanced from the doorway of Tembujin’s yurt, her eyes indigo dark, guarded.

  Tembujin rode stiffly, his red-rimmed eyes haunted by some dread knowledge. His hand went again and again to a necklace at his throat, a gold crescent moon and a star at its tip, reassuring himself of his strength, perhaps. Or perhaps the necklace drained his strength and he sought in bewilderment a way to seize it again.

  Obedei ran through the gathering crowd, took the reins of Tembujin’s pony, helped him down. For a moment the prince swayed, scourged by weariness. Then he straightened and in sudden afterthought grinned, but his grin was no longer sublimely confident; his face was as tightly drawn as his bowstring.

  “Welcome,” said Baakhun, distracted, reciting lines by rote. He patted at Tembujin’s shoulder and missed. Raksula and Odo bobbed up and down in unison, smiling in bland malevolence. Hilkar materialized at Tembujin’s elbow and stood mesmerized by the necklace.

  “My lord,” Tembujin said to his father, the words pouring from him as if hi
s troubles poured, too. “We traveled to the end of the Jorniyeh, where it meets the great water of the sea. We skirmished with a few guards, and collected tribute; we touched the borders of Sabazel and found them guarded only by girl children. The north is ripe for the plucking, the people abandoned by their leaders . . .” His voice ran down, stopped.

  Baakhun peered at his son, his heir, as though he were a stranger. Suspicion furrowed his high shaved forehead. “Empire unguarded, eh? Well, well, we shall see.”

  Tembujin licked his lips and said even faster, trying to repulse those troubles as they came tumbling back toward him, “The pass at Azervinah is difficult, a flanking movement, perhaps, to the west.”

  Baakhun turned his back on his son and thrust through the crowd as if no one were there.

  Tembujin looked after him, his lips parted in dismay and hurt. Raksula and Odo still watched him, still smiling expressionlessly. Hilkar leaned forward and blurted, “Where did you get that necklace?”

  Tembujin focused on Hilkar’s bulging eyes, and his face froze in anger. Anger, a more tolerable emotion than dread. Coldly he strode away. Toth drifted in a slow spiral behind him. Hilkar scurried like a rat.

  Odo and Raksula chuckled, congratulating each other on their subversion of Baakhun, and returned to the shaman’s yurt and some evil-smelling potion they brewed inside.

  Sita composed herself, bowed her head, folded her hands before her in feigned docility. But her shoulders coiled with a tenseness equal to Tembujin’s.

  He burst into the yurt, ripping away the doorway with a vicious sweep of his arm; he threw off his tunic, seized a dipper of water and drank thirstily, washing away a bad taste in his mouth. Over the rim of the dipper his eyes fell upon Sita, and for just a moment, softened. “So,” he said, “you are still here.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “You do not prefer my father’s embraces?” He threw the dipper down.