Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “You lie,” Andrion told her affectionately. “You want nothing more.”

  Ilanit smiled. “Go on. Our mother waits for you.” But he would not go until the others were cared for.

  “Welcome,” Ilanit said to Shurzad and Valeria. Valeria managed a faint nod, her eyes huge at finding herself in this legendary place. Shurzad stared blankly ahead, her face unpainted, unveiled, ravaged with twice her years. With despair, perhaps, at finding herself in the hands of the woman she had always perceived as her enemy. Or perhaps she simply did not know where she was.

  Dana told their tale, and the stories of Tembujin and Toth; Ilanit consigned all three invalids to the care of temple priestesses. Shurzad and Valeria plodded away, leaning together for support, the cat peering with drooping disconsolate whiskers through the bars of its cage. But Toth lay gazing about him, transfigured with joy. Odd, thought Dana, that this place should mean anything to him.

  Ilanit turned quizzically to Tembujin. He glanced from Dana to her mother and back, comparing their blond, green-eyed charms. A pensive smile shaped his mouth, a small boy surveying a tray of sweets, unsure if he will be permitted to have one.

  Ilanit chuckled. “Will you offer to the goddess Ashtar?”

  “She seems,” said Tembujin, smile tinted in gall, “to be stronger than my own deity.”

  “Then join the other men, and listen well when I give the rules.”

  Tembujin hesitated. His bright black eyes turned to Dana, too proud to ask, but needing too much to pretend indifference. Dana looked away, unprepared to see such a depth in him.

  Ilanit came at last to Patros. She needed no words to greet him; she simply set her hand on his cheek and secured him. The shield brightened for the length of a heartbeat, bathing them in its golden glow. The intensity of the look they shared struck Dana like a stinging slap. Like Danica and Bellasteros, they had chosen the complications of the heart, at times completing, at times draining them. Such compromise was never easy.

  Dana glanced at Andrion as he turned alone up the street toward Danica’s garden. Compromise, indeed. She started after him, stopped. Tembujin still watched her. His uncertainty gnawed at her; this fine, sleek animal could not live with such self-doubt. “Ashtar!” she said under her breath, “give me strength!” She sped after Andrion, hoping to outrun her importunate thoughts.

  The darkness was a velvet drape over Sabazel. Andrion’s footsteps rang on the pavement, counterpointing the distant strains of a lyre and song. As he bounded up the steps to the garden, a breeze caught his cloak and unfurled it like a glistening cloud behind him. For a moment he paused, looking toward the bright ripeness of the rising moon. His face was the image of a young warrior-god etched by substance upon shadow.

  He strode through the garden, opened the lamplit door of the house, stepped inside. His dark eyes shot one searching glance toward the bed. Yes, the quiet shape was still there, wasted hands folded, breast rising and falling with agonizing slowness. Andrion moaned softly, but his back remained lance straight.

  Danica laid her quill upon the scroll unrolled before her. Her face was a palimpsest, vellum written upon and scraped and written upon again, layer upon layer of thought, feeling, experience. Her eyes sparked, reflecting the armor before her, and then quailed, realizing that this stern black-clad warrior was her son. “Great mother,” she gasped, “what has he become?” But her question needed no answer. She glanced with a wry smile at Dana, the image of her younger self. Dana returned her look: Yes, I fear he has become a man.

  Andrion drew Solifrax and held it out to his mother. Lamplight cascaded down the curve of its blade and it hummed, a low note of latent power.

  She shook her head. “No, it is not mine. It was never mine.”

  Silently Andrion turned, knelt, and offered the sword to his father. But his father slept on.

  Bellasteros’s face was translucent, suffused with the sheen of sword and shield; a pure, clear light untainted by the sorcery that had brought him low. For one long, breathless moment, he seemed to Dana to be that image of his younger self that had consecrated Gerlac’s tomb. Her senses stirred, her nape pricked. Bellasteros had never chosen the easier path; now he clung stubbornly to life and duty until his duty was done. Later, he would earn the death he deserved. Danica, in choosing this fate for him, worked to some greater purpose . . .

  Andrion did not sense the reassuring vision. His face twisted with grief and anger and inexpressible weariness. With a muttered curse he stood and thrust the sword back into its serpent-skin sheath. The skin rippled in circles of light.

  Together Dana and Danica lifted the black-plumed helmet from Andrion’s head, unpinned the black cloak, unbuckled the polished armor, and left him clad only in a chiton. Dana took the sword from his unresisting fingers and gave it to Danica, who set it gingerly next to the dusty imperial diadem.

  “Go and make your offerings.” she said to Andrion and Dana both, “and take what blessing you can. Forget time and the rumor of war. Rest in the love of your mother.”

  Andrion kissed Danica and held her close, letting her stroke his hair, her own son once again. Then he and Dana turned hand in hand toward the temple square. Ah, Andrion, Dana mourned, compromise, always compromise. That he heard; his hand tightened on hers and his mouth firmed. Neither would he choose the easy path, only the best one. The wall between them thinned, became transparent, dissipated into moonlight as clear and hard as crystal.

  Ilanit was just concluding the rules of the rites, who might approach whom, which women were not to participate. Andrion placed a garland of asphodel around Dana’s neck, marking her as a participant; they kissed, but their lips did not need to touch. They let each other go, silently, without promises, but not without hope.

  The games began. Andrion ran and leaped and hurled the javelin, his face tight with effort, burning as brightly as the incandescent moon above. Dana’s heart ached for him, her body ached for him, her thought swirled and spilled into resolve; I, too, must play this game, for more than Sabazel. She turned to Tembujin, took his hand, and led him to her own little house.

  Kerith had strewn the bed with sweet-smelling herbs. The trembling light of a small oil lamp ignited the shadows with suggestion. It did not escape Tembujin, but he stood stiffly just inside the door, confused and wary.

  Dana poured a cup of mild pink wine from the pitcher on the table and tore a chunk of bread from the waiting loaf. “Here. Fortify yourself.”

  “He will no longer fight for you?”

  Poor innocent barbarian, knowing only how to take, not how to receive. “He does not own me. And you are no longer our enemy.”

  Tembujin sipped at the wine, nibbled at the bread. “Why, then?”

  “Odd as it may seem, you excite me.” And I would rekindle that fire your own people quenched, Dana thought. But if he knew that, he might deny his own lust out of spite. She drained her cup, letting the wine blunt thought, enhance sensation; a furtive pleasure, to permit herself to want him. She approached him, spread his tunic, and set her hands against his chest. Thin, but warm.

  He edged away. “You will tease me and then kick me again.”

  “You deserved that kick,” she told him, pursuing him until his back was against the door. She traced the sharp line of his collarbone and noted with suppressed glee that his pulse throbbed in his throat. “You had to be taught never to take a woman by force.”

  “I have never taken a woman by force,” he muttered indignantly.

  “No? And you would expect Sarasvati, say, to resist you when your army stands armed to the teeth beside your bed?”

  Tembujin frowned, too intelligent to misunderstand her, too stubborn to agree with her. Good, she thought, stubbornness can be fanned back into confidence. She kissed the hollow in his throat, tasting the salt sweetness of his smooth golden skin.

  “Sarasvati,” he said in a small, taut voice, as if the name discomfited him, “was mine by right of conquest.”

  “Then you,”
Dana replied, “by right of conquest are mine.” She took the cup away from him and set her lips against his. Yes, it was the kiss she remembered, only now she was the one that devoured his mouth and he—no, he did not resist. His arms closed around her, not in dominance, not in surrender, but in truce.

  This was not Andrion, who could freeze her with a frown, who could thrill her with a glance. This was exotic meat, to be savored. She laid him upon the bed and undressed him. He needed more flesh upon his bones, she decided with a calculating glance, but he was naturally lean.

  A moment later she found that Tembujin was still strong, so eager to prove his accomplishment in the pleasing arts that she had only to spread her limbs and listen bemusedly to the squeaks and sighs of her own voice. She smiled, and his face blossomed with elation.

  It was she who took him, riding him like one of his own ponies, laughing at the irony, at the justice, at the joy of their coupling. The name of Ashtar burst from his lips, stirred the shadows, and called the night wind to caress them both.

  * * * * *

  Andrion raced among his soldiers, among the local peasantry, among traveling merchants. Burning with rage, he left them all behind. What weakness, he told himself, to think for even a moment that his new toy sword would rouse Bellasteros—and to hope for even a moment that it would not. What weakness to think that he could lie quietly with Dana and forget who he was. He sold her to his enemy to buy allegiance. No, he told himself with a mighty heave of a javelin that earned admiring glances from the other men and from the watching women, and shattered the torchlight into streaming amber pennons—no, it was her choice, and a necessary one. Tembujin could no longer be an enemy. The mother was all-forgiving.

  Dana was leading the Khazyari away. Andrion stared at him, forcing the black eyes open with the intensity of his gaze: I give you my friendship freely; we shall see if you are worth it, barbarian.

  The muscle in Tembujin’s cheek jumped as he tightened his jaw, understanding. Andrion turned, pleased and yet distrustful of his pleasure. Was his lust for power greater than his lust for Dana? he asked himself savagely.

  He threw again, flaring with scorn and wounded pride. The spear whistled through the air and struck Sabazian earth with a thud.

  Ilanit and Patros walked close together, away from the square, into the night. First they would go to Bellasteros, and the knife would turn again in Patros’s heart. Then Ilanit would heal him; after these many years their love was less passion than comfort, soothing, not searing. Another hazard of maturity. Lyris, wearing a garland of asphodel as warily as though it might explode any moment, watched them go with shuttered eyes. Jealousy, Andrion asked himself, or envy? But she had the grace to let them go alone.

  The games were over and still he burned, a futile yearning scalding his muscles, his senses. He looked for Kerith and saw her accepting the attentions of one of his own soldiers. He spun, leaped up the steps into the temple and found a guest room with food and bath ready; steam did not, surprisingly, rise from his body as he settled into the water.

  Andrion tried to damp his fever by sipping desultorily at a cup of Sabazian wine, but he remained turgid with conflict and desire. At last he blew out the lamp and lay naked on the pallet, contemplating the temple atrium through the doorway. The moon was at its zenith, and while the strains of music had died away in the city, the moonlight itself was music, distant trills spilling down a silver shaft of luminescence into the atrium and the small pool. The pool reflected the light in a wavering glimmer, shaping warriors and gods against the night. And do even the gods know, Andrion wondered, what tomorrow will bring to me, to Dana, to anyone?

  A shape blocked his view, and he started. Lyris set her spear against the doorway and stepped into the room. Her angular form was somehow softened by the moonlight, but her words were abrupt. “Has anyone scraped you down?”

  “No. I am alone this night.”

  She knelt down beside him and reached for a nearby strigil. “Then allow me.” The scraper rasped his shoulder, raising gooseflesh.

  “Why, Lyris?” he asked, gazing back into the atrium. Now the moonpath was dancing, slow and sinuous, like a woman promising rather than teasing.

  “I would not have you think,” Lyris stated, “that because I am for Sabazel I am against you.”

  “Now why should I think that?” The light dazzled his eyes. The scent of asphodel filled his nostrils. The strigil scraped the muscles of his back and buttocks. Her hand rested upon his thigh, as neutral a touch as that of his cloak. But, to his amused chagrin, his body responded. Gods, have I no shame? And he reminded himself. This is Sabazel, and the rites of Ashtar, and Lyris wears the garland.

  He placed his hand behind her head, drew her down to him and kissed her. Her lips were stiff; not encouraging, but not cold. Had she intended to arouse him, knowing that she was bound to celebrate the rites, and choosing him as a harmless partner? Would this be her penance for her harshness that morning after the cavern? He was not sure if either alternative flattered him. He was not sure if he were making a fool of himself. He did not care.

  No amusement shaded her eyes, only incredulity and, perhaps, a furtive longing. “So,” she said, sitting beside him and laying down the strigil, “you can give me what no man ever has?”

  “I would not be that presumptuous,” Andrion replied. “I can only ask: May Gerlac’s bastard grandson repay his insult to you, proving that not all men are animals?”

  Her lips curved in a wry smile. “I know that some men are honorable. I see Patros’s tenderness to Ilanit and to me; I see their passion and realize that Gerlac’s demon ghost cauterized that part of me, so that I cannot feel it.”

  Andrion saw again the twisted body of the old king. His hatred had devoured many, but in the end it was his own soul to which he had laid waste. Tentatively, in apology, he stroked Lyris’s face.

  “Your audacity intrigues me, my prince.” Matter-of-factly she removed her clothes.

  Andrion realized what it was Tembujin must be feeling, swollen with need and yet wondering whether he would receive release or a swift kick. That was not far, probably, from what Lyris felt. She lay beside him, and he touched her as gently as he could.

  She tolerated his efforts with a forbearance partly grim and partly amused. Andrion had never felt so clumsy. At last, growing impatient, she lifted his shoulders and drew him up between her legs. He found himself enclosed by those strong thighs he had once admired from a less advantageous position. This was too much; sparks blotted his mind and he succumbed to the demands of his body. Every frustration of the last months, of the last hours, knotted within him, tighter and tighter, and he could think nothing, reason nothing, only strain to break that tangle. Then every fiber in his body snapped, the knot burst into tendrils of flame, his breath sobbed the litany and the words were caught by the moonlight and consumed.

  Andrion lay wheezing into Lyris’s hair. Yes, his muddled thought told him, it was Lyris and not some vivid dream. She had been beautiful once, before an evil priest fed a demon with her maidenhood. Now she was a bleached bone, her spirit an offering to the relentless caprice of the gods. Her eyes, focused beyond him upon the atrium and moving moonpath, sent her faith to the goddess. That, at least, no one could deny her.

  She looked around, saw Andrion, gently but firmly rolled him away from her. Her garland was crushed to pulp, smeared pink petals clinging to his damp chest. He stretched, groaning; his mouth was dry, and he swallowed. And suddenly he saw himself and laughed. “Ludicrous, all that gasping and heaving. Ashtar has a sense of humor, to take such as an offering.”

  “Indeed,” Lyris returned, allowing herself a chuckle. With a comradely pat she picked up her clothing and dressed. “It must have been easier,” she said, “when all men were enemies. When Sabazel stood alone. I came here too late.”

  “No, you came here to serve the days of change, the most important of all.” He sighed. “Thank you. Lyris.”

  She glanced down at him, not w
ithout sympathy. “Thank you.” Hoisting her spear, she was gone.

  His body was like lead, inert, and his mind floated free. He drifted up the moonpath, toward a gleaming image that opened its arms to him, blond hair like spun gold and eyes as green as jade . . . He fell into Ashtar’s, into Dana’s eyes, and smiling, he slept.

  * * * * *

  Dawn spilled through the shutters. A hummingbird whirred outside, its swiftly moving wings stitching light to darkness. Dana roused herself and glanced at the sleek body of the Khazyari prince beside her. The legendary lion of the Mohan, she thought with approval, bronze and black and strong.

  Andrion, she told herself, was bronze and black and strong. She sent her thought toward him but sensed only silence.

  Tembujin stirred, opened his eyes, found Dana’s face. His expression was slightly glazed.

  “Are you well?” she asked. She nibbled his ear, half concealed behind tangled ends of black hair.

  His face suffused with lechery and caution. “Yes, of course.”

  “No longer weak from your ordeal? Last night you told me you were not at peak form.”

  He cleared his throat. “Hm. You surprised me then. Now I am no longer surprised.”

  Dana laughed. Poor barbarian, she thought; does your courage hide between your legs? His hands closed firmly in the tangled ends of her blond hair. But no, she told herself as he guided her mouth to his, your courage is more complex than that. I give what I can, and you must find the rest within yourself.

  His eyes glinted, firelight on jet, a hunted lion turning at bay.

  * * * * *

  Andrion sat beside Toth’s bed, listening intently. When the faint, reedy voice faltered, he held a cup of herbed wine to the old man’s lips, lips that were pale iris blue. “You should rest,” Andrion told him. “We can talk later.”

  “Now,” the old man insisted. “You must know everything now.”