Her head was still bent. Her voice was not docile but as uncompromising as flint. “No.”
Tembujin pulled her to him and inspected her closely. Perhaps he thought to find some surcease from his worry, a minute’s solace. But her gaze went through him. “Here,” he said with a studied lightness. “Here, I brought you a present. My regard for you, after all.” He pulled the necklace from his throat and held it out to her, clasped in his hand so tightly that at first it appeared to be only a gold chain.
“Something you stole?” she asked, still looking beyond him.
“Believe me,” he said, one corner of his mouth tucking itself into a bitter smile, “I paid for it.” He opened his hand, let the chain unfurl, and the crescent moon and the star gleamed before her.
Her eyes snapped and dilated so widely that the soft shine of gold was reflected like a kindling fire in their depths. “Where did you get that?’’ she demanded hoarsely.
His look went hard and cautious. He muttered, “This must be a remarkable bauble to interest so many people.”
“Where did you get it!” The intensity of her look stabbed him, thrust him back a step.
His breath caught in his throat. His black eyes stirred with a sick comprehension. He snarled through his teeth, a cornered leopard striking out, “I took it from the body of a man I killed. A young man, dark auburn hair, brown eyes like those of a fine, well-bred horse.”
Sita’s face went gray and hollow.
Deliberately, unrelentingly, Tembujin’s voice went on. “He rode with a blond woman, young, supple and yet strong, with gleaming green eyes. Good sport she was, before she, too, died.”
Sita’s hands rose to her face, pressing a cry back into her mouth. Her eyes raked him, not wanting to believe, but believing all.
Tembujin seized her shoulders, dragged her to the bed, and threw her down on it. Her body heaved beneath his but he pinned her. She spat at him. He did not deign to notice, and the moisture glistened on his cheek like a tear. He dangled the necklace before her eyes. Sparing neither himself nor her, he asked, “Who was he? Who was the woman? Tell me, Sita, who you really are.”
She was not weeping. Her eyes were dry, burning with hatred and despair. “My brother Andrion, son of the falcon,” she said, clearly enunciating each word. “His cousin Dana of Sabazel. And you know my name.”
“Sarasvati,” he hissed. His face was so close to hers that the sibilants of her name sprayed over her. She did not flinch. “Not just a noblewoman, but Sarasvati, the daughter of Bellasteros.”
“Make the most of it,” she snarled. “Barbarian carrion-eater.” He drew back his hand as if to strike her, but she did not take her eyes from his face. “Go ahead and beat me. Force me, for I shall no longer yield to you. Or is your lust at last satisfied, blood-drinker?”
His hand fell. His features collapsed. He rolled away from her with a sound almost like a sob, his anger caught and consumed by a weary terror. The necklace fell from his suddenly slack hand.
In one swift movement Sita swept it up and cradled it against her breast. She glanced at Tembujin, tensed to fight or flee. But he lay face down among the quilts, his body racked by the shocked quivering of a wounded animal finding its strength useless to free itself, trying to understand why its strength no longer sustains it.
Sita jerked herself away. She sat on the edge of the bed, rocking herself back and forth, the necklace clasped in her hands. A shaft of morning sunlight withdrew across the floor and was absorbed into the daylight outside. Still Tembujin did not rouse. After a time his quivering ceased and he lay as if dead, finding some measure of freedom in an exhausted sleep.
Sita allowed a tear to spill down her cheek. “Ashtar,” she muttered, “Harus, help me. Help me to hurt him . . .” She stopped, gulping. Her head went up, as if listening to distant words. And slowly her mouth hardened with decision.
She reached for Tembujin’s knife and held its shining blade before her, letting quick refractions of the sunlight play across her face. But the light did not illuminate her expression. “No,” she murmured, “death would be too merciful for you.” She leaned over his prone body and in a few delicate strokes severed his long tail of hair. It coiled around her hand as heavy and smooth as a serpent. He groaned in his sleep, caught in a nightmare, but did not wake. “Dream,” said Sita. “Dream the despair you have cost me.”
She threw away the dagger and rose. She stared at the necklace, lifted it to her lips and kissed it. Then she dropped it down the bodice of her dress. “Andrion,” she said, “I shall avenge you.”
Sita slipped out of the yurt into the brilliance of the noonday sun. She ran furtively from shadow to shadow until she reached Odo’s shelter. A huge warrior ambled away, his face set in innocent puzzlement. Hilkar stood in the doorway, bowing and nodding and squealing fealty to Raksula’s dim shape. Sita dodged behind Khalingu’s cart. The image seemed to shift and mutter, disturbed from sleep, but Sita’s upward glance was more impatient than fearful.
Hilkar scuttled away. Sita whisked across the open space and paused in the doorway. Darkness stirred before her. dim, malevolent shapes swooping toward her and then swirling away. The faint light of a butter lamp tended by the squat figure of the shaman. Odo looked up, smiled in pleased surprise, and gestured. From the deepest shadow Raksula stepped forward and bowed, gloating, to Sita.
Sita stepped back, confused by this sudden mocking courtesy, but her face was still hard with anger and pain. “Here,” she said, thrusting out the coil of hair. “Here. Drive Tembujin’s spawn from me. Hurt him.”
Raksula, realizing what it was she was offered, lit with pleasure. She took the hair into her hands with a slow, sensuous motion, her sharp fingers not tearing it but caressing it. She glanced covertly at Odo, and he grinned and jiggled up and down, his flesh rippling with delight.
Raksula looked again at Sita, her teeth gleaming, her eyes bottomless pits sparkling in an ecstasy of evil. “Thank you, child, thank you.”
Sita paled at that look. She spun about.
“And would Tembujin have shown you a gold necklace, my child?” Raksula asked, her voice exulting with secret knowledge.
Sita jerked as if stabbed between the shoulder blades. “No,” she said hoarsely. “I know nothing of any necklace.” She leaped forward and confronted Khalingu’s cart. The image leered at her. She gasped, veered, ran. Her hair streamed behind her, flaming in the sunlight. Howls of laughter followed her.
She rounded a yurt and ran headlong into a body. She squeaked in terror. It was Toth. “What have you done?” he demanded, discarding courtesy.
With a mighty effort Sita caught her breath. But she could not still her trembling. Wordlessly she reached into her dress and displayed the necklace. “Yes,” sighed Toth. “I saw it at his throat.”
“He killed Andrion,” Sita said. The long-delayed tears swelled in her, clogging her throat, swimming in her eyes. “He killed Andrion and Dana and he mocked me with their deaths.”
Toth frowned. “No. I cannot believe that. They are in Ashtar’s hand as surely as we are. There is a plan, my lady, a reason.”
Sita crumpled to the ground, drained of anger and of resolve, drained of thought and left only with grief. She held the necklace to her face and sobbed. Toth took her into his arms and held her against his chest. His translucent eyes mirrored the sun and the sky, a preternatural patience at last reaching fulfillment.
Hilkar stood just at the side of Odo’s yurt, his face contorted, his body shaking in a rapture of malice. “So,” he muttered, “princes fall, and princesses, as well. I am powerful indeed.”
* * * * *
Raksula’s grasping hands moved quickly. They fashioned a manikin from Tembujin’s hair, a little creature with arms and legs and head and a tail of hair of its own. She impaled the doll on a sharp stake and set the stake in a circle of butter lamps. As she worked she sang spells, and Odo danced around her, transported by evil glee.
Raksula sat back and consid
ered her handiwork. Odo hunkered down beside her. “Surely,” he said, “Khalingu decrees that Tembujin’s hour has come. He shall not even be able to speak, let alone defend himself.”
“How fine it is,” crowed Raksula. “His necklace belonged to Bellasteros’s son, his woman is Bellasteros’s daughter. And the imperial bitch herself delivers him into our hands!”
Odo giggled happily.
“And I thought Hilkar would be no more use after our victory at Iksandarun,” Raksula chuckled. “Well, Odo, forgive me for that mistake.”
“A minor misperception, my lady,” returned Odo. “Hardly a mistake. It is Tembujin who makes mistakes.”
“And Baakhun who will act on them, and we who will profit by them.” She turned to Odo. her eyes glinting with joy and lust. “Come, pleasure me for a time. Until the feast for Tembujin’s return. For his downfall.”
Odo’s tongue darted between his lips. His pudgy hands reached out to Raksula’s skirts and lifted them. She was moaning in delight before he even mounted her.
* * * * *
The sun passed across the sky and plunged behind the western horizon. A full moon rose, shedding an uncanny silver light over the camp. Sita looked up, pleading for a blessing, but the moon was silent. The fires of the Khazyari muddied the clear light.
With a sigh Sita ducked into Baakhun’s great yurt. She folded her hands meekly and took her place behind the other women. The air was close and warm, redolent of singed meat, stale milk, spices, and sweat; slowly the color drained from her cheeks and she gulped, nauseated. But her eyes were flickering lamps of hatred and dread.
Toth hovered nearby, his features expressionless, serving huge trays of imperial delicacies to the assembled warriors. More than one of the faces that had been lean and feral before Iksandarun was now swollen with dissipation.
Tembujin sat cross-legged by Baakhun. They glanced at each other once, as stiffly suspicious as strangers set on the chieftain’s platform by chance, and they did not look at each other again.
Tembujin lifted the drinking skin again and again to his lips, until his face flushed and his eyes dulled. But then, his eyes had been strangely dull even before he began drinking, his body as flaccid as that of a corpse impaled upon a stake. Warriors shouted jests and compliments alike to him, but he did not hear. He seemed not even to be aware that the short ends of his hair stirred uneasily about his shoulders.
Baakhun did not drink at all, as though he grew tired of the herbs in his kviss, as though he no longer wanted strength, fearing what he might do with it.
Raksula and Odo sat chuckling. Vlad’s greasy face shone with joy at the food laid before him, unaware of any other reason for pleasure. He threw the leg bone of a pheasant into the crowd of feasting Khazyari and reached for the stuffed haunch of a boar. Grains of cracked wheat cascaded down his tunic and Raksula indulgently wiped them away. Hilkar fawned behind them, shooting glance after glance between his sparse lashes at the solitary copper-colored head in the group of women. One corner of his lip shivered into a sneer.
Obedei sat close to the chieftain’s platform, picking at his food, not sharing in the shouts and cries that gusted about the yurt. He looked from Tembujin to Baakhun and back again, cautiously. But even he did not dare look at Raksula.
A minstrel played his harp in a minor scale and began wailing about some past victory of the odlok’s. Tembujin did not respond. Baakhun shifted in massive irritation, his lower lip beginning slowly to jut out.
The song ended and was applauded with louder shouts. Emptied skins of kviss sailed through the air to land with moist splats at the minstrel’s feet. Raksula stood and signaled for silence. Obedei tensed.
Feeling some change in the thick, odorous air, Tembujin at last stirred. His dark eyes flickered with a grim awareness, trying his bonds; then they blurred into vague futility. They crossed Sita’s unblinking stare and passed on without reaction. Sita lowered her hands to her stomach as though it had suddenly knotted.
The shouts and cries subsided to a dull murmur. Raksula began a speech punctuated by expansive gestures. Sita caught a phrase here and there, words darting about the huge domed tent like demons. It seemed as if the gathered warriors were only shapes of light and shadow, not living people but simulacra, summoned and controlled by the shrill voice of the Khazyari witch. Only Raksula was real.
Beads of sweat started on Sita’s brow, joined, ran down her temples and throat. Her face was icy cold, dead flesh. Toth stood alone on the opposite side of the yurt, eyes closed, hands clasped, waiting for the blow to fall.
Raksula’s words had sharp teeth, striking again and again, leaving jagged wounds. Tembujin dares to challenge the rule of the khan, his father. He had the odlok Andrion in his hands, but he returns with only a golden necklace, a token of friendship, perhaps. Perhaps a bribe. What conspiracy now waits to catch the Khazyari in the northern provinces?”
Sita swayed. The words were not quite what she had anticipated. Maybe she simply did not understand them.
Tembujin also swayed. He seemed not to hear the charges against him; he raised the skin and drank thirstily, fueling his slide toward oblivion, a man so sorely wounded he no longer felt pain and could not resist the final blow of the executioner.
Raksula produced the men who had been with Tembujin in Bellastria. The hulking, somewhat simple warrior testified that he had captured a young man and woman there. Another warrior described the man’s golden necklace, how Tembujin had taken it and then left the man abandoned in the street.
Abandoned. Not slaughtered, abandoned. Sita slumped against the fabric of the yurt. Her lips began to tremble. Dark red hair matted her brow.
Raksula was grinning now, her teeth glinting like a death’s head. With a flourish she summoned Hilkar and translated his words: Yes, Prince Andrion had a necklace like that. Yes, he was tall and auburn-haired and dark-eyed. And the tall blond woman with gleaming green eyes was no doubt Sabazian, one of the spawn of Danica.
Raksula turned with a triumphant gesture to Baakhun. Baakhun stood, shaking off his torpor, eyes burning. Tembujin laid down the drinking skin, crumpled, hid his face in his hands.
The silence in the yurt, the silence of the mob gathered outside, was absolute, no voice, no breath, no protest. “And,” crowed Raksula, “Tembujin’s pride, his audacity, is so great . . .”
Again the flourish. Hilkar turned and dove through the throng, his robes flapping, his outthrust bald head and wattled neck like a vulture swooping onto its prey. He dragged Sita from her shelter behind the others. She gathered all her strength and struggled, but his scrawny hands bit like claws into her flesh. “No!” she cried, not so much to him as to the night.
Toth turned away, hiding his face.
Hilkar thrust Sita sprawling onto the carpet before Baakhun, seized a handful of her hair and dragged her face up. “The daughter of Bellasteros,” he said in well-coached Khazyari. “Tembujin kept her, knowing who she was. See, he gave her a gift, binding himself to your enemy, mighty khan . . .”
Hilkar’s hand ripped Sita’s bodice, dragged the necklace from it, waved it high into the air. He said nothing; he did not have to. The necklace shone hard and bright in the torchlight. A shout went up, drunken epithets, hurt protests.
Baakhun paled, stabbed deep. Tembujin looked slowly upward, and for a moment his eyes touched Sita’s, as openly as if they together played some intricate game and he begged some knowledge, any knowledge, of the rules. Then his eyelids shivered, his eyes thinned to black slits between his lashes, and he looked down again. Sita cowered, her face reflecting the same horror and confusion as Baakhun’s.
The warriors leaped up and surged in drunken chaos forward. Vlad, grinning open-mouthed, beat cadence with a bone upon his tray. Raksula glowed, exalted by joy and malevolence. Hilkar released Sita and preened himself. “For your father,” he muttered to her below the clamor. “The conqueror who took my bride Roushangka and killed her.” He tucked the necklace inside his sash.
/> Sita wrenched herself away from Baakhun’s sickened features, from Tembujin’s bowed head. Her eyes lit with a bright blue flame. She set her teeth into her lower lip, rose to her feet and confronted Hilkar. “Roushangka was my mother,” she snarled. “Your filthy tongue desecrates her name. Better that she enjoyed one night with Bellasteros than suffered a lifetime with you!” She struck him across the face. He staggered, yowling; she seized the necklace from his sash and thrust it into her dress. Hilkar fell back into the swirling mob and was swept away.
Sita turned, colliding with Obedei. The warrior was frowning, incredulous, hurt; he took her shoulders in a firm but not ungentle grasp and leaned toward the huddle that was Tembujin. “My lord, defend yourself!”
Tembujin raised his head. But his face was blank, his eyes veiled with the film that floats on a stagnant pool. He looked at Obedei and through him as if he had never seen him before.
Obedei’s hands kneaded Sita’s shoulders in a paroxysm of frustration and defeat. She pulled herself away but was hemmed in by the storm raging about the great yurt. The necklace seared her breast, fell through the torn fabric and hung at her waist.
Vlad pounded on the tray. Someone trod upon the minstrel’s harp and it twanged as it shattered. Voices screamed from outside. Raksula slithered to Baakhun and whispered in his ear. The khan’s great chest heaved. He turned to Tembujin and bellowed, “You are no son of mine. You are no Khazyari. I renounce you.”
Tembujin jerked, closed his eyes, opened them again as if hoping to see himself in a new place. But nothing was changed. Baakhun plucked him to his feet; his body flopped like a child’s puppet as his father ripped the plaque from his chest, tore the tunic and shirt from his back, took the bow that lay beside him and broke it over his knee. “You will not even deny it!” sobbed Baakhun through his teeth. “Half-breed!”
Raksula spewed orders. “Take him north, to where his crimes were committed, and let him die slowly, slowly.” Two warriors grasped Tembujin’s arms; an aisle opened suddenly in the throng and they dragged him through. He stumbled, deathly pale, unresisting, his vague gaze touching no one. The screaming voices poured upward, broke, dissipated. Silence fell. Raksula’s glittering eyes touched every face in the gathering; Odo made arcane gestures with his amulets. Every warrior looked at his fellow, wondering who shared in the guilt, denying any knowledge of it.
Winter King Page 16