by Tanith Lee
But she said, “I would like it a little. But not to displease Malmiranet. I love her more than I will ever love any oaf of a man, however handsome he is, or clever in a bed. Besides”—and her eyes altered—“she would kill us both.” Her loyalty and her amused spite—mixed as it was with an almost unnatural pride, as if, with Malmiranet’s knife in her heart, she would have said, “See here an Empress’ anger”—brought me to my senses. I think I should have been embarrassed if other things had not weighed on me like lead. I asked myself, as I followed Nasmet, if she would recount my cloddish courtship to Malmiranet. I imagine some part of me wished to tear desire and liking out of me, flesh and brain and heart. It would be easier to die without it.
Then the doors were opened, and I saw her, and everything was altered, as I might have reasoned it would be.
I think I had never come to her and found her quite the same. Always there was a subtle variance in her mood, the setting of the chamber, her garments. It was her cleverness, mannered or instinctive, to be changeable yet unchanged, like seasons in a garden.
I remember how her thin white robe of Tinsen gauze, catching the red reflection of the sun on the painted wall, seemed to smolder on her skin, pleated smoke caught in by a girdle of ruby silk. Her hair was knotted up loosely. She would tie it this way sometimes that I might unfasten it. She had been playing with a leopard cub, a little tawny mewling devil that rolled on the mosaic, gnawing at the ends of her silk girdle. Turning to me, the light behind her, all the dark slenderness of her body rimmed with fire, I thought suddenly of Demizdor, a contrary thought, for they were not alike in any fashion.
“Well,” she said, “I have heard a curious fancy. You are to fight another duel.”
I had lost my puzzlement at the quick roads of Masrian gossip. Besides, I had meant to tell her.
“Yes. Something I can’t avoid.”
She loosened her sash and let the cub have it; then she came to me and set her hands on my shoulders.
“I acknowledge that you have brought my son to the Emperor’s Chair, that without you and your wicked genius he would be corpse-cold, and I sport for some wretchedness or other. I recognize everything and I obeise myself. So don’t do this thing, now of all times, two days or less before Sorem is anointed. He trusts you, values you. If you die, some part of him dies also. I am silent in the matter of my own distress.”
Even she knew nothing of my past, beyond what was common talk. We had come to love too simply, and with too few lies; she had demanded no detail of my life the way most women will, as if every incident recounted is a link that binds, as if you should have had no life indeed, but what you live of it with them. Malmiranet had nagged no history from me, yet she knew me, as I was.
Seeing my face, she said quietly, “Yet you will do it, will you not? No pleading of mine can dissuade you.”
“No. It is beyond your words, or mine. Beyond all of us.”
“Will you say what it is that drives you to this?”
“If it would help us, I’d say. It would not.”
She drew me to her, and held me, and said, “Well, then. I’ll ask nothing else.”
If I had ever wept in all my years since I had been a man, I would have wept then. I foresaw my death, and hers, as clear as I saw the sunlight on the red wall.
It was not a moment for harsh sounds, yet the door flew open, and the bronze girl Isep ran through it.
“Empress,” she rasped, “my lord, your son—”
She had no need to say the rest. Sorem appeared behind her.
He was wearing black, some modest custom before the Coronation, and it made the rage in his face twice as evident. He grabbed the bronze girl by her hair. She winced but made no noise.
“Yes,” he said to us. He looked at Malmiranet, at the thin robe and her nakedness beneath, and his color rose. At me he did not look.
Malmiranet stood away from me.
“Isep,” she said, “please take my leopard cub and have him fed, that is if he requires anything after eating my girdle.” She spoke lightly, as if nothing were happening out of the ordinary. Almost involuntarily Sorem let go of the girl, who darted forward, scooped up the cub and the girdle together, and ran out. Sorem, with great deliberation, shut the doors.
With his back to us he said, “I find everyone in the palace informed, except for me, that this has been between you. I’d heard you were lusty, my Vazkor, the darling of the beds of the Palm Quarter. But I am surprised you donated some of this lust upon the body of my mother.”
“Let us get it right,” I said. “Is it your notion of honor to creep up on her bedchamber to make certain she remains celibate?”
He sprang around, snarling out some oath.
Malmiranet said to him gently, “My beloved, I haven’t taken the vows of a priestess, as well you recall.”
“Yes, you have chosen men,” he said. “It was your affair. But this one, this northern dog who has sprinkled his lecheries like spilled wine—”
I had been at a low ebb and passed from that to dull anger. Now I could have smiled sourly. Here was the irrational brat broke loose again. What possessed him?
“You had better names for me a month ago,” I said.
“I trusted you then, though I should have been undeceived. Five hundred men and women dead on your instructions, Vazkor, when the city burned and you persuaded me that it must.”
“We are remembering that once more,” I said.
“I have never forgotten it.”
“There is only one thing you forget,” I said to him. “Yourself.”
“By Masrimas,” he barked, and took a step toward me. His eyes were blazing, half mad. “You would have made yourself king in my stead if you could,” he shouted. “Treachery is your ablest weapon, that, and the tool between your legs which you used on her to such effect. That’s the way you mean to climb, is it? Onto my throne by way of a woman’s passion?”
“Who has been talking to you?” I said.
He controlled himself with an effort, and replied, “One of Denades’ captains reported to me that you had been seen conversing with Seemase magicians in the market. I am aware of your ties with Seema—that man Lyo who was your slave. I don’t know what plot you hatched, but be warned, Vazkor, I have guarded against it.”
“A pity you were not more guarded against foolish chat, sir,” I said. I wondered if the captain had also told him of my dealings with Malmiranet. Several must be conscious of the facts, and it had been doubly unwise to keep it from Sorem, since this was the result. Still, I could not fathom the roots of his fury. He railed at me like a child, or like a drunken girl.
He had grown pale as ash after the fire has died. He said again hoarsely, “I trusted you. I would have made you my brother, my friend.” He strode across the room and struck me in the face. I had never yet let any man do that unanswered if my wits and my hands were free, and be sure I answered him.
He sprawled on the mosaic, just where the leopard cub had sprawled in its game, with the fringe of the red sash spilling from its jaws. The red that spilled from the corner of Sorem’s mouth was blood.
He got up slowly, leaned on the wall and looked at me, and his eyes were full of water. Then he called, and Yashlom and six jerdiers walked into the chamber.
Malmiranet had moved away from us, twisting the gold serpent bracelet on her wrist, staring from the window at the giant palm tree as if not to add her witness to his shame. Now she murmured, “No, Sorem, for my sake.” Her voice was uneven as on that night when she asked his safety from me. I could hear that she was not asking for her sake, as she said, neither for mine, but for his.
“Madam,” he said, “I put down your own deeds as due to weakness. Don’t make me involve you in his treason.”
At that she turned to face him. I had had that look directed at me once, and I recollected it well. Sorem flinche
d and averted his face. Not glancing at any of us, he instructed the six jerdiers to conduct me to my allotted apartment. It was the most elegant phrase I ever heard employed in sending a man to a jail.
* * *
I had not gone armed to her room and had neither knife nor sword about me. I was slow, too. That spell from the marsh had made me sluggish for a whole month of idleness, and I could not thrust it off quickly enough to snatch up some handy weapon—the stool, one of the hunting spears from the wall. It seemed, in the settling of my inner despair, hardly worth it. As for Power, I dared not. Of a selection of devices the readiest and most effective, it was denied me. For a moment I thought, Perhaps this, too, Sorem’s idiocy and anger, are of the witch’s making, to fetter me. If I use the Power in me, she will feed on it and utilize it to destroy me. If it remains unused, she will come more leisurely to my death. But still, she will come.
It was an elegant dungeon, a set of chambers in one of the Western towers, decorated in enamels and marble, with a whole wall of books, a cabinet of wines and liquors; the bed was borne on the backs of four crouching lion-women. Nothing is straightforward in Bar-Ibithni; no lion statue without a woman’s head and breasts, no horse without wings, and no man without dual natures in his soul.
I did not keep my head. I was young and a dolt. I sat on the pretty couch and got drunk on koois and red wine. I had never been able to get drunk, for more than a little either of food or drink made me ill, which this presently did. After that was over, I closed my mind to the world and slept.
I woke in the morning. The birds were singing in their cages under the tree boughs. I was in a daze, so far gone in not knowing what to do I no longer bothered with it, and lay abed, watching the sky beyond the windows. Each window was latticed with iron, a memento of Eshkorek and my stately prison there. And, as once in Eshkorek, I faced my death with morbid languor, almost laziness.
All remedies were valueless. Even that duel of sorcery I had planned could end only one way. I would not go to the marsh to get my demise when I could wait more comfortably for it here.
I dozed.
A man, one of the Crimson Guard, brought me food at noon. He was afraid of me, and at some pains to show me there were five of his fellows outside the door. I swung off the couch, and he lumbered backward and unsheathed his sword.
“Be at peace, my friend,” I said. “The teeth of the sorcerer are drawn.”
But he rushed out, and they thrust home bars to lock me up again. If I had felt free to set my Power on those bars, they would have been in a delicate mess.
The food was excellent, and I ate some of it and drank some water, the memory of wine making my belly gripe.
I did not believe that Sorem would have meted out to Malmiranet any of the bitter judgment he had vented on me. All the while I had been reckoning that it was his anger, suspicion of me poured in his ears by others, his jealousy of her, fear of my strength and how I had been before him on that night of fire.
This was the day he was to fast and pray in the Masrimas Temple. No doubt his honorable heart was full of much besides tomorrow’s anointing. All at once it made me sorrowful, the drunkard’s sadness, to recall that brief comradeship of ours. Sorem the one man at last to whom I could trust my back.
* * *
I had found a three-stringed eastern viol, along with the other commodities of the room, and had set about the work of retiming it, having nothing better that I might put my hand to in that prince’s tower.
Just before midnight, the bars scraped up from their sockets and Sorem came into the chamber.
He was dressed in the yellow robe of an acolyte, the hood of which he now pushed back. He motioned them to shut the door, and when it was done, stood in the lamplight alone with me, staring at my occupation with the viol. I thought, By my soul, has he come to beg my pardon yet again?
“I am not actually here, Vazkor. I am in the Temple, before the Altar of the Kings. You understand?”
I looked up at him and said, “I understand I’m past joking with you.”
He spread his hand, that gesture of his, magnanimous, at a loss.
“I don’t know what I should do with you, and that’s a fact. I don’t mean to kill you,” he added. I must have smiled at the absurdity of his rescinded threat under that sword hanging in the sky. He caught his breath, and said, “Don’t laugh at me, Vazkor. You deceived me and you’ve made me nothing in my own eyes. You’ve done enough.”
“Prince,” I said, “I am weary.”
“Listen, then. Tomorrow at dusk, provision will be made for you to leave the city. Your wealth and your portable property shall go with you. I’ll retract no measure of your just earnings.”
“At dusk, then. And so farewell.”
His lip curled. Probably he had seen some actor do it.
“Since you entreat me for news of her, my mother is unharmed, and keeps her apartments with every recompense I can give her.”
“Why should I entreat for news, Prince, when you say I took her only as a means to the Emperor’s Chair? As for recompense, Prince, I should guess she’ll scarcely notice it.”
He crashed his fist down upon the table, so the wine cup spilled its draft of water.
“Tomorrow,” he grated out, “you ride with my cortege to the Temple. The people expect to see you there. You will be guarded, and there will also be priests in case you should try sorcery. After the ceremony, you’ll wait till sunfall, when you will be escorted from Bar-Ibithni.”
“Very well,” I said. “What’s one day more or less?”
“You speak as if the world will end tomorrow,” he said acidly. “I assure you it won’t, despite any machinations of yours.”
The lamp was burning low, the room nearly in darkness. He suddenly shivered, then came over to me and set his hand on my shoulder.
“Vazkor,” he said very softly, “this enmity is ridiculous. If you will swear to me, by your own gods, that you have never plotted against me—”
I met his eye, and I said, “I am finished with your kingdom, Sorem. And I have no gods. Do as you wish.”
His eyes blurred and his hand gripped my shoulder as if he could not stand without it, and then he walked away. But I had seen what I had been too blind to see before—I think perhaps because I had not wanted to.
“I will grieve for this for many years,” he said, “that you would not swear and cleanse yourself of suspicion.”
Then he rapped on the door and they let him out.
I tightened the last peg of the viol. Somewhere nightingales sang, but it is possible to tire even of nightingales.
Part IV: The Cloud
1
THE FLIES CAME with the morning. I woke, and the air of my chamber buzzed with them. They flickered across the panes of the windows inside the lattice and crawled along the table—ten flies, or twelve, or more; it was hard to be certain, for they were forever in motion. Their noise and agitation disturbed me, so I turned slayer of flies till the rooms were quiet again.
A girl brought me a Masrian breakfast, fruit stewed in honey, sugarbread, and similar stuff. She did not seem afraid of me as my male guard had been; perhaps she did not know who I was. Then, as she set down the silver platters, she saw the corpses of the flies and cried out.
“What is it?” I said. I felt sorry for her; I seemed to see only decaying bones where she stood, emblem of approaching death. The whole city had such a look for me that day.
“The flies—” she said, “everywhere. In the Horse Market the herds are mad with flies. One woke me at sunrise, crawling in my ear.”
“The summer heat, no doubt,” I said, but she put her hand to her lips and said, “The blind priest who begs by Winged Horse Gate—he said it is the god of the Hessek slaves, the dark one they call Shepherd of Swarms. His vengeance—a plague of flies.”
“Well, there could be worse thing
s,” I said. “See, I’ve killed them.”
I could eat nothing when she had gone.
The bells were ringing in the Palm Quarter. The sun shone bright as a dagger on this day of coronation.
An hour later they brought my ceremonial robes, cream-colored linen embroidered with gold and silver, the kilt diagonally fringed with indigo, the boots of white bull hide studded with red bronze. There was a heavy collar of gold and alcum set with blue gems, and the border of the looped cloak of scarlet silk depicted a whole boar hunt, done in silver, green, and blue thread. Nothing had been omitted, even the theatrical sword with its soft golden blade and hilt warted with pearls. I was to be shown favor before the people, Sorem’s brother, the sorcerer. He did not lack cunning in his own way. What tale did he mean to give them to account for my abrupt departure tonight? Not that he would need to give it. Not now.
The invisible sword above the city would fall today.
I felt as sickly numb and as deadly indifferent as only a man can who is going to his execution.
* * *
Bales of crimson silk had been set down all along the tracks and the roads that led to the great southern Masrimas Temple. They bloomed like a river of poppies before us; after we had passed they were in rags from the booted feet, the wheels, and the trampling of horses, but still the people ran to them, and ripped the rags into smaller rags, and bore them away as trophies of this imperial moment. Even before we got outside the gate, I could hear the cheering and cries of the crowd. They had filled the groves, hanging in the trees to watch. Men had even climbed the ancient cedar that leaned above the secretive well. As the tracks bore around and descended into the terrace streets, the throng stood in a crush so thick they could barely move their arms. They gaped and shouted as if we were their sustenance, a vicarious show that made them all kings for a day.
As tradition dictated, Sorem had remained in the holy precinct. He would come out to us, dressed in plain black, meeting us in the open square before the Temple. Here, the spokesman of the council would greet him, a man of eighty-odd years, strong, tough, stubborn old fool who reveled in such customs and the part they gave him. Sorem would ask why we had come to him, and be told we had come to make him our Emperor. Sorem would immediately refuse, pleading his unsuitability. The council would then severally state his virtues and fitness for the job, and we should troop in the Temple to effect the matter. This theatrical imbecility, a ceremony that had evolved two hundred years ago, or more, was Hessek custom rather than Masrian, incorporated by Hragon-Dat into his own coronation, apparently to please the mixes of the city, but more likely to titillate himself.