Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Gods, Andrion sighed to himself, Toth has given his life for me, for Sarasvati and Tembujin. How subtly the gods work. How cruelly.

  The words went on, forming images of Baakhun, of Raksula, of Odo and Vlad. Images that tore at each other, jackals fighting over the same piece of carrion. No, not carrion, Andrion reproved himself. They fought for power, as he did. They fought for the Empire.

  When the weak voice finally stopped, Andrion felt dirty, caught in a spider’s web. The strands, gummed with the remains of the dead, clung to his face and hands. The strands bound his necklace with an unbreakable knot. Tembujin made him angry, but never dirty.

  “Thank you,” Andrion said to the ancient face on the pillow. “I shall bring a priestess to give you some strengthening brew.”

  Every breath Toth took was shallower than the last. “Bring me Danica, if you please,” he whispered. “Your mother, Danica.”

  “Certainly.” He stepped from the small room into the atrium of the temple. Sunlight glanced across the surface of the pool, and doves preened themselves, cooing, in the rafters. Andrion asked himself abruptly, How does Toth know that my mother is Danica, not Chryse? But he remembered the images of the Khazyari; Toth was a shadow, moving silently just at the fringes of others’ lives, never living any passion of his own.

  Andrion grimaced; the gods only knew what else Toth had discovered about his family in Iksandarun. Miklos’s and Sarasvati’s innocent passion, for example. He really should say something encouraging to Miklos. For his bravery, offer him Sarasvati’s hand, after victory—if they survived the spider’s web.

  He found Danica setting an incense burner close beside Shurzad’s sleeping form. The woman’s features were drawn fine and clear, a portrait sketched but not colored, surface but no depth. Andrion said a silent prayer for her, and for Patros, who leaned over her and touched her face with sad solicitousness, forced to play out his agony before the world.

  Danica settled a coverlet around Valeria’s fragile body. The girl smiled at her with the adoration of a child for a kindly grandmother. But her face was no longer innocent; something in the set of her mouth and chin told of her own anguish, played out mutely but no less painfully. And I had a part in that, Andrion chided himself. Patros knelt beside his daughter, kissing her with a tenderness that struck Andrion’s heart like a sharp dart. Hatred was easier than love; like strong drink, it first exhilarated and then deadened the drinker.

  The burner emitted a silver tendril of smoke. The room filled with the scents of lavender and valerian. Danica led both Patros and Andrion into the atrium. A breeze ruffled the surface of the pool; the mosaic on its bottom seemed to dance, at one moment jumbled squares of color, at others clear, precise pictures of a burning city, of dark horsemen, of a sword flaring in its bearer’s hands.

  “The possession was broken,” Danica told Patros, “when Andrion destroyed the amulet; Valeria was, of course, caught in her mother’s spell. Shurzad paid with her own flesh, and is now cleansed.”

  Andrion thought, I did something right? He remembered the tingling in his hand, the bitter taste of burning flesh in his throat. But he could not be frightened of this power.

  As though hearing his thought, Danica took his hand between hers. “I had power once. It was pleasant, and it was terrifying as well. And yet it was still my own decision, how to use that power.” She glanced at Patros. “Care for yourself, my friend; I could no longer heal you of a mortal wound, as I did once.”

  “But you have, today,” said Patros, “by healing my family.”

  “I can heal their bodies. Whether Shurzad wakes filled with remorse or despair or anything at all, I cannot tell. She lived for her spite. Now she knows its futility, but what else does she have?”

  “She has my love,” Patros protested, “but I could never convince her of that. It is my fault, Danica, that she fell to evil.”

  “No, no.” Danica released her right hand and took his. Slowly Patros’s anguished features smoothed and his dark eyes filled with the atrium’s light.

  Andrion held Danica’s left hand, strong and delicate as the wing of a bird, which had once borne the star-shield. She had carried it and her worries and his own infant body all the leagues to Iksandarun. And suddenly he knew that she should come again to Iksandarun, carrying Bellasteros. The wind murmured the name like an anthem, like a dirge.

  The sunlight shimmered on the water and the mosaic shifted; a young man, sitting beneath a tapestry stitched with the outspread wings of Sardian Harus, his rich brown eyes considering with a wary pride the tall queen before him.

  Andrion reclaimed his hand. But this is my battle! he thought with his own pride. The image shattered and he was immediately contrite. No, this is a battle for all of us—for the Empire, Ashtar, and Harus. Patros bowed his thanks and went in search of Ilanit. Andrion told his mother about Toth.

  The old man was dying. His wasted face was touched by shadow, but his eyes were calm. “At last I have returned,” he whispered as Danica knelt beside him. “I was born here; here shall I die and offer my soul to Ashtar.”

  Born here? Andrion repeated to himself.

  Danica glanced up at him in bewilderment; he shrugged. She looked back at Toth. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you not recognize me, my lady?”

  The old man’s face seemed to shift somehow, filling and smoothing. Danica gasped. “Tethysinia!”

  Toth cackled in pleasure. “One and the same. I rode beside you on the embassy to Iksandarun, when you were little older than your granddaughter Dana. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Danica almost stammered in confusion. Andrion shook himself. Toth? The old palace eunuch he had known all of his life? Tethysinia, a Sabazian?

  Toth still looked Danica in the face, sparing himself—herself—nothing. “I lusted for an imperial soldier; I would not grace that feeling by saying I loved him. I left our camp to go to him, and I watched from the walls as you were attacked so treacherously by imperial troops. I saw you take the star-shield from your mother’s dead hands, and I knew then I had lost Sabazel.”

  “But you could have returned,” Danica frowned, “made atonement, taken up your life where you left it.”

  “No. I betrayed you, and I earned exile. The soldier died in a fight over a tavern wench and so paid the price, however unwittingly. I cut my hair and took a eunuch’s robes and served the palace.” Toth’s voice was only a wisp of sound, her face drained into transparency.

  “Why did you not reveal yourself to me when Bellasteros took the Empire,” Danica choked, “when I entered the city at his side? Or later, when I visited his court so many times?”

  “I was not worthy, my lady, of you or the conqueror. But I thought I could redeem myself by serving your son, named beloved of the gods.” The pale, gentle eyes turned to Andrion.

  Andrion felt like a fish pulled suddenly from water to gasp upon the riverbank. He knelt beside his mother and Toth, groping for soothing words. “You have served me, all my life. You served my sister in her hour of need, and you have served us all by bringing Tembujin to us.” Gods, to hear his voice say such words. “Toth, Tethysinia, your loyalty is greatest of all.”

  The old woman smiled, face glowing, wide eyes shimmering with light like the pool in the atrium. And her eyes stayed wide and clear, reflecting the depth of the sky, utterly at peace. Danica sighed and touched the now lifeless hand. “Mother take her soul. She played her role, and now it is over.”

  Andrion swallowed hard. And I thought he had never felt passion, he mused. “Is nothing real?” he asked. “Is everything I believe only illusion?”

  “Perhaps,” Danica replied. A breeze keened, crisp and cold, through the temple. A corner of Toth’s coverlet fluttered and then flipped neatly over the smooth alabaster face, concealing it. “We must believe in Ashtar, in Harus, in the beneficence of the gods, or we can believe in nothing.”

  “Beneficence and peace . . .” Andrion swallowed again, and managed to
smile.

  Arm in arm, Danica and Andrion walked slowly back into the atrium. The day was still glittering bright, etched in crystal and gold and blue, the last gleam of summer. “We shall lay her on a pyre,” said Danica to the pool, “and give her the honors due a Sabazian.”

  The pool splashed, the mosaic rippled. Shurzad’s cat crept up to the water, peered in, and patted its reflection with a velvet paw. The reflection was simply that of a domestic cat, innocent and carefree. Danica held out her hand for it to sniff; it rubbed its cheek on her wrist and folded itself around her legs. Danica tickled its belly, and it purred playfully. Andrion could not believe it had stalked the halls of Sardis with such a sinister air. “Qem, small trickster,” Danica said to it, accepting no pretense, “welcome to Ashtar’s sanctuary.”

  * * * * *

  The third day was cooler, but still clear. Andrion, Dana, and Tembujin stood on a boulder-strewn slope of Cylandra, looking over the breadth of the world. The horizon smoked, blotted with gathering cloud, land blending imperceptibly into azure sky, as if the world contracted around Sabazel.

  Tembujin exhaled in a sigh of determination. He sat down on a handy rock and laid out his supplies; horn, sinew, wood, and a pot of lacquer. “So the old creature was really a woman?”

  “Yes,” said Andrion. He tapped a short Sardian sword against his thigh and eyed Dana, questing for her emotions. Dana eyed him similarly.

  “He saved my life,” said Tembujin, “by giving me his own food; for that I actually find myself grateful.” He, too, glanced at Dana, a brief sideways gleam, and set a strip of horn against the wood. “He served Sarasvati.” His hand tightened on the frame of the bow. “Are you aware, Andrion, that Raksula now knows who Sarasvati is?”

  “That had occurred to me,” Andrion replied with a grimace. “All the more reason to secure a swift victory.” And he proffered the sword to Tembujin.

  Tembujin took it, cocking his head to the side. “You would trust me with these weapons, bow and sword?”

  “Yes.”

  Tembujin cleared his throat. “I shall make a bow for you, Dana, as well. That long bow is not good enough.” He snapped wood and horn and they sang, piercingly sharp.

  “Ah?” asked Dana, with some amusement.

  Good, Andrion told himself dispassionately, he finds himself; he is too fine a beast to waste. Tembujin glanced up at him, and their eyes met and held. The black eyes gleamed with a wry humor of their own. That bow is not good enough for Dana, those eyes said, but you, Andrion, are.

  Andrion bowed. Turning, he laughed quietly at himself, at the game he played. He took Dana’s hand and together they walked down the mountain slope, leaving Tembujin alone. The persistent creak of horn and wood followed them. A falcon circled far above, watching, and they saluted it.

  Dana’s little house was cold and silent. She lit a fire in a brazier; the coals hissed and snapped like Solifrax leaving its sheath. No, Andrion thought, today I am the sword and Dana my sheath . . . You are incorrigible, he informed himself with a smile. Still smiling, he took Dana in his arms. “I shall never love another as I love you,” he said. There, choose complication, and accept it.

  “No one and no thing can break that which binds us,” she returned. Her eyes opened to his, clear gemstones reflecting everything, hiding nothing.

  They fed each other small bites of summer fruit until it was gone. They hid under the coverlet and made love with an intense, bittersweet joy. They lay knotted together, warm and content, and for a time they were one.

  Outside the room the day faded, overtaken by cloud. The overripe harvest moon, beginning to decay, tried futilely to flee the racing clouds of winter and a wind tainted with the tang of cold iron.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ilanit’s sentries had saluted her as she and her Companions left the high plain sacred to Ashtar and entered the world of men; now they remained hidden in the folds of land leading toward Cylandra. Cylandra itself was a silver and lavender suggestion to the west, a memory at the rim of a smoked-glass sky.

  The imperial encampment resembled an efficient termite hill. Shurzad and Valeria were consigned to their servants; Nikander ushered Andrion and Patros, Ilanit and Lyris into the great cloth-of-gold pavilion. Miklos, his face hard and sober, took his place by the doorway. Even in the early afternoon the braziers flared with glowing coals, forming a pocket of warmth against the chill.

  Andrion sat gingerly back in his father’s chair; to that, he thought, he was also becoming accustomed. And yet the still, sleeping face of the emperor seemed always just in the corner of his eye. His hand twitched Solifrax up and down, smacking it gently across his thigh, the serpent-skin sheath glimmering in brief rings of light. He caught himself, stilled his hand, and a moment later found himself twitching it again. Lyris smiled thinly at him, making some silent if not exactly complimentary remark on his manhood. He ignored her, focusing on Nikander’s words.

  “The Khazyari cannot take us by surprise, but neither can we surprise them. Two scouts have disappeared; we must assume they were taken.”

  Andrion winced. Patros nodded gravely, his dark eyes never leaving Nikander’s face, letting no personal pain come between him and his duty.

  “Our new cavalry units are training well,” Nikander went on, “and we should find ourselves much more flexible than in the days of the phalanx.”

  The phalanx, Andrion thought. The square of legionaries bristling with spears against which the Empire had dashed itself to bits. Around which the Khazyari ponies could run circles. “Your plan has worked,” he said approvingly to Patros. “The barbarians, complacent, believe us to be ripe for the plucking.”

  Patros bowed, grateful for the compliment, but troubling to point out, “Tembujin says that the Khazyari do not like the heat of summer here, and that, taken with their uncertainty as to our moves, also slowed them.”

  The whistle of a bowstring came faintly through the sides of the pavilion. Then another, followed by a solid double smack. Tembujin’s voice cried out in approbation. Dana studies her new weapon, Andrion told himself. It begins. Solifrax flicked across his leg and his blood drummed in his ears.

  “If I may,” said Ilanit courteously to Nikander, and he deferred to her. “I would not like to meet the Khazyari horsemen on the open plains, new cavalry units or no. Can we not draw them into the rougher country on our southern borders, into the valley of the Galel?”

  “If they cannot use horses to advantage there, neither can we,” said Patros. “Even our chariots would be useless.”

  So much for my fond image of myself astride Ventalidar, leading a cavalry charge, Andrion thought.

  “We are not as accomplished with horses as they are,” Nikander said. No one disputed him.

  “We have an advantage,” said Andrion, and every face turned to him. He wanted for one irrational moment to glance behind him; surely Bellasteros stood there, drawing those respectful looks. But he did not. “We know this land. We have another in that the best Khazyari officer is now loyal to us. He should, by the way, have a white horse to ride, befitting his rank.”

  “Ah,” said Nikander sagely. And to Miklos, “See to it.”

  Miklos stood a moment, disbelieving. Then he executed a tight about-face and disappeared. Andrion’s wrist flexed in irritation; I have swallowed my anger until I choked on it, why can you not? Solifrax slapped his thigh and stung his flesh.

  Another flight of arrows outside. Ordered marching steps and a complementary patter of hooves. Shouted commands. A breeze jangled, faintly but perceptibly, through the pennons above the pavilion. Andrion laid his sword beside him and leaned forward, intent.

  “I have sent half a legion up the Jorniyeh, past Azervinah,” said Nikander, “to intercept the Khazyari as they retreat from Sabazel.”

  Lyris’s face darkened. Yes, of course, Andrion thought, to her and to himself as well, they will retreat.

  * * * * *

  Dana bent her new bow. It was smaller than her oth
er one, but more powerful; the hum of the string was like the hum of her body when touched by a man—no, she scolded herself, the rites are over. She narrowed her eyes, gauging the tide of her blood. Too fast, pulsing in dread and anticipation mingled. Between heartbeats she flicked her thumb. The bowstring snapped and the arrow hissed, cleaving the chill air, into the wooden target.

  “Good,” said Tembujin beside her. He raised his own bow and sighted, glancing upward; the scarlet and purple pennons above the pavilion lifted and began to stream outward in a breeze. “The wind,” he protested, “is the bowman’s worst enemy.” He loosed his arrow and it went wide of the mark.

  “No.” Dana chuckled. “For us the wind is a friend. Work with it.” She nocked an arrow, sighted. The rushing tide of her blood, and the wind murmuring through her hair, guiding her . . . There. Perfect shot. She turned with a grin of triumph to Tembujin.

  With an exasperated roll of his eyes, he bent his bow again.

  Andrion and the others were leaving the pavilion. Patros gathered his officers and lectured them, his right hand marking cadence in his left palm, every head nodding rhythm. That is the Patros my mother loves, Dana thought with a smile. That is my father.

  The Companions stood attentively as Lyris explained the tactics; their mothers had trekked with Ilanit and Danica, with Patros and Bellasteros, once before to Iksandarun. Dana’s smile faded into a sigh.

  Andrion stood alone, isolated by a shell of rank and manner, less severe than sardonic. Several passing legionaries, some Sardian dark, some imperial fair, whose fathers had like as not been enemies, nudged each other and exchanged wide-eyed, awed asides. One young man almost tripped over a tent brace, so intent was he on the solitary figure of the prince.

  Nikander turned to pursue some question tendered by a centurion. Patros dismissed his officers. Ilanit leaned close to him and said from the corner of her mouth, “So Sabazel rides again to the aid of Sardis. We have played this game once before, have we not?”