"Our da was taken in the levy."
"Yes, all right, so you do know something about it. Can I assume you also know the history of the rise of the Second Empire of Gil?"
Tig and I exchanged startled glances. Which Empire? The Second What? I cursed myself and my elders for sailing so blithely into the middle of a surprise like this; perhaps returning to the known world had made us careless. We should have asked more questions in Calloon. We should have bought new maps in Tata. We should have stopped in Glishor, Zelf, Plav, Sathelforn, for the latest news. In short, we should have examined the turbid waters of the known world very carefully before jumping into them headfirst after all those years away. I gritted my teeth. Tigrallef said, quite winningly, "We weren't taught much about it in Calloon. The Calmen have their own views, of course, but I'd really like to hear the Gillish account."
"Then listen carefully—it begins with the end of the Sherkin Empire. Now, many stories were told about the wrack of Sher, but the truth of it happened here, right here in the Gilgard, and it was a Scion of Oballef who accomplished it: a fool, and no hero, and no friend of mine, but the truth is that he alone destroyed the appalling Sherank using the great power of the Lady in Gil. I'll give him that much credit."
He paused, scowling over his thoughts, and quite suddenly turned a bright angry red; from calm to enraged in three seconds flat, by my estimate. "And then," he continued through clenched teeth, "the traitorous young clodwit destroyed the Lady."
"I'd heard that, actually," my father said.
"Don't interrupt! All the power in the world, enough to restore Gil, to make us the greatest nation—yes, the greatest empire—ever to arise in these oceans, and that tupping young fool smashed her to pieces and tossed her away! I could have killed him then, you know, and perhaps I should have . . ."
He collapsed backwards into the recesses of the chair, just wheezing at first, but the wheezing hardened into a threatening rattle within a few breaths; the First Flamen gasped and tumbled on to his knees beside him—"Mycri!"—but a dry yellow corpse-hand emerged from the depths of the chair to shove him away. A moment later, breathing more easily, the Primate sat up again.
"Kesi, you cretin. If my own anger could kill me, I'd be twenty-five years dead. Where was I? Oh yes—that double-dyed traitor and clodwit Tigrallef had just broken the blessed Lady. And so, there I was after the liberation of Gil, with a hungry, rebellious people to govern and a shattered nation to rebuild—"
"Wasn't there a Priest-King?" my father asked in a wide-eyed sort of voice.
The Primate regarded him thoughtfully; I was expecting another explosion of wrath and perhaps wheezing, but he simply folded his hands on his lap and nodded. "A good question—very good. Yes, there was the Priest-King Arkolef, but he was quite incapable of ruling, just as useless as his unusable brother. Tigrallef was a fool, but Arkolef was actually stupid. I have no regrets about taking the reins—somebody had to. And without the Lady's powers, it was not easy to lead the people in the direction that was best for them."
"What happened to the Scion?" I asked. This was partly to forestall any dangerous political commentary from my father—for example, about why the Primate was so damned sure he knew what was best for the people.
"You mean the Scion Tigrallef? May his bones bring forth flowers," said the Primate without a trace of grief, "he was killed far away from Gil. Before you ask, I had nothing to do with his death—it was a natural disaster at the eastern edge of the known world, some no-name island with a volcano. I'd arranged a marriage for him, an excellent alliance with Miishel, which was still a power in those days—the damned woman was quite fetching then, if I remember correctly—and all he had to do for the nation was eat and drink and tup himself silly in comfort for the rest of his natural life. He even managed to make a mess of that. He was useless. Useless."
"To be fair," the First Flamen said timidly, "it was the Last Dance that broke the alliance, not the loss of Tigrallef."
The Primate sighed. "If you irritate me once more today, Kesi, I'll appoint you to be resident governor of the Mosslines."
Poor old Kesi, whom I was beginning to like, sat back with a pale face.
"Kesi fancies he's a memorian," the Primate went on, "like the lost Scion himself. The Last Dance—yes, that came next. The great plague, the dancing death. You two are probably too young to remember it, but it was a bad time, perhaps the worst the known world ever saw—thousands died. Hundreds of thousands. Gil was hit less terribly than most, but even here it was a catastrophe."
"Were the Scions wiped out?" Tigrallef asked in a carefully neutral tone. Subtext: Is my brother dead?
"Most of them died, yes." Shifting his body to the edge of the deep chair, the Primate signalled for the First Flamen to pour out a beaker of wine for each of us. Tigrallef accepted the beaker with subtly unsteady hands—I realized the question was about more than his brother Arkolef. We had learned of the deaths of his father Cirallef and his uncle the High Prince of Sathelforn from survivors in Myr, but there had also been cousins, nephews, nieces, a mother; friends as well as family. Grief that was properly twenty years old was a spectre creeping up behind him at last, raising a cold hand to lay on his shoulder. Grief was also a powerful friend and ally to the Pain. I prepared myself to grieve with my father for these relations I had never met, but I also reviewed our emergency procedures for helping him keep hold.
"They all died but the Priest-King," the Primate continued when the wine arrangements were to his satisfaction, "and if poor Scion Arkolef was stupid before the plague, he was worse than stupid after it. Mad, you see, quite broken, nothing left of him. If his cousin Lady Callefiya had survived instead of him, or any one of the children, my task would have been much easier." His tone was aggrieved; destiny should have consulted with him before having the effrontery to spare my uncle Arkolef.
"How very sad," Tigrallef said softly. I glanced at him, amazed at how normal he appeared. Where was the grief? Where was the Pain? "Where is the Priest-King now?" my father added.
"Well cared for and still on the throne of Gil, my boy, and that's all the nation needs to know. No one will ever accuse me of killing him by neglect. Of course, it is not generally known that he has the sanity and intelligence of a spud-root."
"Why are you telling us, Most Revered One?"
"I'm coming to that. You'll understand your position better, I'm sure, when I've taught you a little history. You must have been a very small child at the time of the Last Dance; you may remember a little hunger, you may have heard a few stories from your parents, but you're not old enough to know in your heart how desperate the world was in the aftermath of the plague—not from the dancing deaths alone, but from the untended fields, the starvation, the civil strife, the fires burning unchecked, the fleets rotting in the harbours for want of crews to man them . . ."
"It always sounded to me," said Tigrallef with a straight face, "like a time of immense opportunity."
I nudged him desperately with my elbow; but the Primate raised a wattled chin to peer at him with surprise.
"How perceptive for such a young man," he said, recovering. "Yes, as you say, it was a time of opportunity, for a strong leader that is, and nobody saw it more clearly than I. Gil was not the only nation to have lost its royalty—the Last Dance had a taste for kings and powers. Four High Princes in turn succeeded to the throne of Sathelforn during the first fortnight of the plague, arid after the fourth one died it stayed empty—those of the rank to refill it were also dead. Miishel and Grisot, both kingless, went to battle with each other while their own civil wars were still raging, and thus they devastated the eastern edge of the known world; Storica set itself on fire and spilled a great deal of its own blood. Calloon and Tata you know about. The little mid-kingdoms, Plav, Luc, Glishor and the rest, sat around starving, weeping at the loss of their princes and the impotence of their gods." The Primate paused. "For the right kind of leader, it was indeed a world of opportunity."
His voice, so powerful until now, cracked on the last words, reduced to an old man's quaver. The First Flamen, reached out to him with what I could see was genuine solicitude, and again he was rebuffed. In fact, it looked increasingly like the First Flamen and I could take the captain of the guard off for a quick one in the nearest tavern without the Primate noticing, because he seemed hardly aware we were there. Only Tigrallef existed for him, sitting quietly and attentively beside me with his hands resting flat on his knees.
There was still no sign of the Pain.
The Primate sipped his wine and coughed to clear his throat. "So there I was, boy, empty-handed in Gil: the Lady gone, smashed by the Scion Tigrallef; the proud bloodline of the Scions shrunk to one weeping lunatic without living issue; both my claims to authority gone; the nation in ruins; the people in shock, without gods, without kings, without hope—what was I to do?"
"It's obvious," Tig said calmly. "You gave them a new myth."
"Myth" was probably a tactless word to choose—it looked to me like Tig had gone about half a step too far. I could see it in the First Flamen's eyes and hear it in the shuffle of the captain's feet behind our settee. The Primate, nursing his beaker, appraised Tig silently from under the louring eyebrows—Tig smiled back. Still no sign of the Pain.
That's right," the Primate said, so softly I had to strain to hear him. "I gave them a new myth. The myth gave them new hope. Their hope gave me the power I needed to weave them into a new nation and bring them out of the shadow of the plague—almost alone among the nations, Gil did not descend into general famine and civil war. And that was only the beginning."
He was enjoying telling this story. His voice hardly rose in volume, but every word was an arrow twanging from a tight bow.
"We were not very strong at first, but we did not need to be when the others were so weak. We organized Sathelforn first—it was a pitiful chaos when our army arrived, with the High Peerage dead and all the islands of the Archipelago armed against each other and warring for food; but I had the Scion Arkolef's claim to Sathelforn through the Lady Dazeene, and I had the Lady Dazeene herself—she wanted no power, but as long as I allowed her to tend to her surviving son—"
"She's alive?"
"Yes, boy, and you're interrupting again." Such quiet force; behind the yellow-domed corrugated old man, I saw the imposing shadow of what he must have been before age sucked him dry. I also saw why he and my father had loathed each other from the time my father was a child. "So we organized Sathelforn; and over the next few years we organized the mid-kingdoms, one by one; and then we took in Koroska, who begged to come under our dominion. Now we have treaties with the far western kingdoms, bits of paper which I have so far had no reason to tear up; and the eastern kingdoms pay us a very heavy tribute, so heavy that they may as well be counted as part of the empire, and they ceded us the Mosslines as well. The known world is at peace, and Gil is once again its heart. Any questions?"
"Two," said Tigrallef without pausing for thought. I tensed—there was a timbre in his voice which we who knew him dreaded. Not the Sherkin bastion, I prayed; but he asked with reasonably normal inflections, "What have you done with our family?"
"As the First Flamen told you," the Primate said with a black glance at the other old man, "your family is safe and well. I imagine they're even comfortable—is that right, Kesi?"
Kesi looked straight into Tig's eyes, then into mine. "I have seen to their comfort myself." I believed him.
"You see, Vero, young Tilgo, there's nothing to worry about. Your family will be treated like the Scions themselves, if you do as I tell you."
Personally, that did not reassure me. My father had told me how Flamens tended to treat Scions, from the time of the Sherkin invasion onwards; no wonder Arkolef was the only acknowledged survivor of the line. Even less reassuring was the way my father was beaming at the Primate. A little uncertainly, the Primate smiled back. I wiped my sweating palms on my nice new britches, because I could see my father was on the verge of what he'd call interesting behaviour.
"So our family is the surety for our good conduct," Tig said. "That's natural, Most Revered One, but I think it's only the half of it."
He casually picked up the wine flask and refilled the Primate's beaker. The First Flamen gasped at this, the captain began to jerk his dagger from the sheath on his arm—the Primate stopped him cold with a very small gesture. "Go on, young man," he said to my father.
"It's also secrecy, isn't it? Our poor family may have to be hidden away for ever. If you decide to use Vero and me to your advantage, we can't be known as the sons of a copper-monger from Calloon and a woman who whored for the Sherank. Isn't that right?"
The Primate, after the briefest of hesitations, picked up his beaker and raised it to Tigrallef in a kind of salute. "Keep talking."
"It's why the scribes had to die, and why yesterday's guardparty is going to the Mosslines with their tongues torn out."
"Obviously. Is there a question in this? You said you had two."
Softly: "Tell me a story, Most Revered One. Tell me the myth you told the people of Gil."
"No—you tell me." The Primate's tone was amiable, the undertone challenging.
"All right." Tig took a deep breath and raised his right hand in the manner of a Tatakil storymonger declaiming his wares. Sonorously, he began: "The power of the Lady is not lost to Gil. The Scion Tigrallef is not dead. The power became invested in Tigrallef when he broke the old vessel, and even now it is growing in him, perfecting and purifying him; and someday he will return to the Gilgard, glorious and powerful, to rule the righteous and destroy the wicked." He dropped his declamatory hand. "Have I got it right?"
"Of course you've got it right. Every toddling child in the empire knows the story. There are shrines dedicated to the Scion Tigrallef, the Ark and Sceptre of the Lady in Gil, in every hamlet from here to Zelf."
My father grinned cheekily. "Shrines dedicated to me?"
"Not necessarily." The Primate grinned back; no hesitation this time. "You must give me a chance to think, my boy, you only landed in my lap this morning."
"You had to get me off the streets, though. I can understand that."
"Quite so. I couldn't let someone with your face wander about freely. The results could be—"
"Awkward," suggested my father.
"Confusing," said the Primate. They grinned at each other again. The Primate reached out with a creaking of old shoulders and slopped more wine into my father's beaker. They raised the beakers and clinked them across the low table. Kesi and I, both excluded from this developing love-feast, caught each other's eyes uneasily.
"But what is there to plan?" my father asked. "It seems simple enough to me. You told the people Tigrallef would return—here I am."
"It's not at all simple. If I decide to use you instead of having your throat cut, timing will be everything. Yes, I told the people Tigrallef would return someday, but I had the indefinite future in mind. A few centuries. A few millennia. Effectively never."
"Well, when would suit you? I could come back later."
The Primate laughed out loud, a peculiar laugh that was something between the sound of strangling and the cry of an exceptionally obnoxious species of waterfowl that used to keep us awake in Gafrin-Gammanthan. "Don't worry," he said, "if and when Tigrallef returns in glory, we'll have no trouble making the prophecies fit the occasion. By the Lady, if only the real Tigrallef had been like you!"
"What if I were the real Tigrallef?" asked my father roguishly. "What would you do?"
This managed to wring an actual, if solitary, tear of laughter from the corner of the Primate's eye. "I suppose I'd have your throat cut straight away. It's what I really should do anyway. But you're very good, you know. You shouldn't waste it on Kesi and me, you should save it for the faithful."
"But are you sure I'm not the Scion? Maybe the story is true."
"Dear boy," the Primate said as he wiped the tear away, "you mustn't carry the joke too
far. Tigrallef died twenty years ago. As for the story, remember I'm the one who made the whole nonsense up."
They laughed together, at entirely different jokes.
At the far end of the room, the double doors swished open. The young Second Flamen entered and hurried across the sward of carpet with a scrolled paper in his hands, greeting the Primate with a quick full-arm gesture and a meaningful look. The Primate immediately sobered.
"Go now. You will continue to be our honoured guests for the time being. The First Flamen has arranged suitable quarters for you—I've often thought he'd be happier running an inn than an empire. Isn't that true, Kesi?"
The First Flamen blushed but made no comment, just beckoned to us and led us towards the doors accompanied by the same twenty troopers. Even before we were out of the room the Second Flamen was sitting in the place Tigrallef had just left, almost doubled over the table and talking to the Primate in a low, vehement voice. The First Flamen glanced back at them just before the door closed behind us. His face was anxious and even fearful, and he avoided catching my eye again. I wondered what his idea of suitable quarters would entail.
* * *
5
I PICKED HALF-HEARTEDLY at a plate of incomparable tripe pastries, wishing I'd gone a little easier on the merely memorable fig-mutton. In the other hand was a crystal wine beaker worth about the same as the wine inside it—the two together could probably have been traded for a small house. The carven and cushioned settee I was lounging on, with my boots off and my feet up, could probably have been traded for a farm. After some heated discussion we'd sent the Tatakil girls away, all four of them.
My father had taken nothing but a little water and a small bowl of lentil hotty, and he was wandering barefoot and thoughtful among the expensive marvels of our new quarters, hardly seeming to notice either them or me. From time to time he gave the ceiling an abstracted smile. Finally he bumped into the settee I was occupying, focused on me, and frowned. "Haven't you stopped eating yet, Vero?"
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 8