Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  She fluttered her fingers in the Butterfly-in-the-Wind mode, the delicate lace at her wrists floating. “As for Rontande. When he comes to my party, he will find his painting in my outermost chamber where the servants most frequently walk. Ostensibly a place of honor, in the public eye. But I think he will take my meaning about his ambition.”

  I bowed again, thinking to myself that if the queen asks me what we talked about, I will say it was only cats, as I walked to my room.

  There I found an invitation from Tiflis: another summons to mine for gossip. She’s heard about Rontande.

  TEN

  OF SARTOR AND GARGOYLES

  I

  loved going to Sartor with Lasva. On each of the twelve days, I willingly followed her to the different stations around Ilderven, listening intently to the remains of Old Sartoran ritual and to scraps of poetry celebrating what our ancestors thought were important events in the history of human life. And when given free time, I enjoyed going off with my fellow scribes to the Scribe Guild to debate long lost meanings, as we have for centuries. When we returned the following year, I used my own money to take one of the horse drawn cabs, feeling very grand and grown up.

  By then I had met my chief accuser, and as Greveas will no doubt have told you, we became friends. She and her peers said that they found charm in my Colendi-accented Sartoran, and I found their quickly spoken, idiomatic Sartoran good practice.

  The year after, Greveas and her friends took me to a concert where I sat high in the gallery with others in service, listening to the beautiful Falisse Ranalassi who, after the brawl in the Alarcansa dining chamber, endured two weeks of refined cruelty from her cousin Carola Definian—cruelty so deliberate and so well hidden from the adults that Falisse ran away and worked her passage down the river to Sartor by singing ballads with a group.

  She auditioned at the music guild and commenced several years of intense training. Nicknamed Larksong, she would win the Silver Feather, and go on to world fame. And ever after she would say that it was her cousin who inspired her.

  Later that visit, I was taken to the Guild archive, where Greveas and her friends traded off giving me a history of the New Year’s festivals throughout the world—certain guilds responsible for certain plays, costumes always a certain way, centuries of symbolism. “This is how we have always taught each new generation morals, ethics, and history,” Greveas said, her slanted eyes wide on the last word. “Our ancestors knew that we learn the most through play.”

  “Colendi plays are a social dialogue,” I said with what I now recognize as rather pompous earnestness. To their smiles, I responded: “A duel of wit, Scribe Aulumbe used to say, between the rituals and conventions of government and the wishes of people who need, desire, or flirt with change.”

  My Sartoran friends laughed at me. “For all you Colendi claim to be so civilized, only in Colend have playwrights, actors, and sometimes audiences been imprisoned. And twice in your history riots broke out after a performance,” Greveas said.

  “Our early history,” I said, and they only laughed the harder.

  One of her friends leaned forward. “Early? Early? You are still early. It is only, what? four generations? Five? since your emperor decided that Independence Day sounded too much like a rebellious child and changed the name of the festival to Martande Day.”

  They laughed the more heartily, Greveas saying, “Wait until your second millennium before you begin to talk about ‘early.’”

  Oh, that comfortable superiority! Yet this was the beginning of my discovery of the Sartoran paradigm, how very differently you Sartorans see the world!

  At the time, I could scarcely conceive of the fact that the Scribe Guild building is four thousand years old. One of the scribes insisted it was older, though admitting that it’s been torn down and rebuilt twice with the same stone. The last modernization was just after Queen Alian Dei married King Connar Landis in 3355, well over a thousand years ago.

  You see, I remember these things. They are important to me. Historical paradigm and how it shapes perspective! My mind fills with the vivid image of that shared fifth-story salon that looked south over Ilderven, Greveas and the other young Sartoran scribes sitting about on the low curule couches, talking over centuries-old gossip as if it were current. All the figures of history were living and breathing people to them. One of their favorite pursuits was finding contradictory accounts, to figure out who was lying and why.

  The fourth year, I had my usual review after my return home—which was always in time for the Martande Day that you Sartorans so tolerantly scorned, when all Colend dresses in white and blue, our royal colors, to celebrate the accession of our first king. I brought up what Greveas and her friends had said about the Colendi view of history, and Halimas flashed me that unexpected grin. “We were going to wait another couple of years before getting into royal truth, archival truth, and personal truth.”

  “Don’t forget social truth,” Noliske said. She was always serious, though sometimes she displayed an irony that matched the queen’s.

  “There isn’t any social truth,” Halimas retorted. “Which,” he turned to me, “is why I am not scribe to the queen but stayed, instead, with education. Sartor’s view of history is so long that we call it archival truth—they will talk about patterns that take centuries to change.”

  “The problem with that, as we see it, is that such a very long view can lose sight of personal motivations,” Noliske put in.

  “So. Continue to tell the truth as you see it, but question every account, now that you have enough experience to perceive what might be the motivation behind its slant—whether royal, historical, or purely personal.”

  Now you are thinking that I am going to begin excusing my actions on the basis of scorn for Sartor, its guilds and its archival truth

  Rather than offer protestations that will seem self-serving, let me share a memory.

  In that salon at the Sartoran Guild in Ilderven, symbolic home to the scribes of the world, a fire stick burned in a cheery low fire on the grate, for those stone buildings can be chilly. Greveas’s bright red hair was outlined against an age-darkened tapestry depicting scribes a thousand years before. She and her friends sat about in their dark blue robes, toasting corn cobs in wire mesh so that the kernels popped into crunchy florets.

  Despite the scrupulously scrubbed floorboards (new floors get laid down every century or two) and the cleanliness of the plain furnishings, those buildings whiffed of mildew, a scent that forever after reminded me of Sartor. At each visit I sat in the window embrasure, my favorite place, as I rubbed my thumb over a smiling gargoyle—a toad with a cat face and artichoke leaves for a ruff, paws out as if it would spring onto the street below.

  Magic protected it from the wear of wind, rain, and time, so my fingers buzzed slightly as they gritted over the stone. The cat-toad creature had been carved directly below the window in a long line of rioting fish and frogs and other animals of water, land, and air, fanciful and not. From below, one could not see any of those details.

  The first time I saw the stonework I wondered who it was for—who was intended to see all that detail—until I glanced across the street into the tall windows of Twelve Towers Guild. The elongated carvings of ancient figures, each holding a scroll or book, gazed with monumental patience back at me. They, too, would be difficult to make out from five stories beneath. But from the high windows the scribes and the archivists could see one another’s buildings, and enjoy the sight.

  There might even have been silent messages in those stone shapes, now forgotten, so that only the art remains. It is a memory that has offered me consolation.

  ELEVEN

  OF LOVE AND POWER

  “W

  hat did you see, Emras?” After our return, and the Martande Day cakes had been consumed, and the blue clothes put away for another year, the round of late summer activities commenced.

  “I saw your guests enjoying themselves. I saw everyone join the Roundelay
of the Summer Lark. They played a second round, through all the minor keys, after Lord Jantian added the counterpoint with his finger-cymbals.”

  “That is what they wanted us to see. What did you see when my back was turned?”

  “That Lady Ananda—”

  “Lay aside the honorifics, Emras. We are alone.”

  “I saw Ananda’s smile fade as soon as you turned away. She put her twelve-stringed tiranthe down and picked up her fan, then turned it over in contrary mode when she met the eyes of Isari. I saw Suzha make the spywell sign twice to gain their attention.”

  Lasva’s voice dropped a note. “We make music, which we are taught adds harmony to the world, but are we ever truly harmonious? We gather friends around us, but I see the little evidences that each thinks only of herself. Or himself. Or what is secretly entertaining, rather than the entertainment by the artists. Did anyone listen to our music?”

  “Farava. Her eyes were closed the entire time you played.”

  “Farava of Sentis lives in a world of music. Some say of spirits, and unseen things.” Lasva sighed. “I did think I’d find a friend. Lissais was a friend, but she was sent from court. Farava does not seem to trust words. I get nothing but politeness from her.”

  Heedful of my parents’ cautions, I reminded myself that I was a scribe, asked to observe. I was not a spy, who tries to winnow out secrets to carry to those who will pay to possess those secrets. I would observe if asked, but secrets must stay secret, whoever they belonged to.

  Therefore I did not tell Lasva that Tiflis, who interrogated me on all the court chirps she overheard from the hopping birds in Alsais, had said that Lissais was sent away because she had fallen in love with the princess. Her family did not want the trouble of an unrequited grand passion: she was the fourth so sent, three lords having departed summarily for Sartor, or Sarendan, one family having sent their heir all the way north to Lascandiar, on the north continent.

  Lasva faced the window, hands stroking the butter-colored cat, who purred and stretched. “In my dream last night, I floated down a canal. The voices in the reeds whispering poetry were those of Lissais, and Calres, and Demiran.” She named three of those sent away. “I float out of reach of their voices, though I try to linger, to catch their tone and their words.”

  She turned from the window, and reached down to stroke the butter cat and the smaller black who twined about her feet, tail high. “But I cannot seem to catch a friend. I think I am done with Readings in the Reeds. They only give me bad dreams.”

  The glance of interest, the speculative smile: it happened again. Warily, I returned the smile and moved on to the storage rooms of the Wardrobe, where former Lirendis had stored their favorite clothes. Lasva was attending a century party, and all must be as it was one hundred years before.

  “Will you hold this length against yourself, scribe? As you seem to have nothing else to do.”

  That was Torsu, the newest clothes dresser. I’d already noticed her sense of style—not that Lasva’s gowns were ever less than perfect. But Torsu had a way of standing back, sturdy arms folded, her eyes narrowed. Then with a twitch the fabric would drape perfectly. The newer styles had opened the overrobe all the way up the sides, and the underrobe was more of a gown now. It did not wrap but followed the line of the body. The two long lines of the overrobe complemented the shape beneath. Some wore lengths of gauzy silks in loops and swoops over all.

  I took the length of heavy silk, loving the luxurious hiss, the cool sheen. The rules were that I was not to be ordered to do others’ work, but I was mindful of my arrogance to Kaleri so long ago, and so I stood there as Torsu walked around me and the green silk. The staff bound their hair up simply, usually wrapped with thin ribbon, but Torsu’s straight dark hair was artfully bound in blossom knots at each side of her head, to make her face into the heart shape. So complicated a style meant that she either had friends or influence with the hair dressers in the staff.

  “Who comes and goes from her rooms now?” Torsu asked.

  “What?” I replied witlessly. “The cleaners, or—”

  “Who is she sleeping with now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come, you are not sightless. I only want to find out what his tastes are—or hers. Does she like the women?”

  “I don’t know.” The question—Torsu’s tone of intimacy, of knowing—made my nerves tingle.

  “A lover’s tastes can be charmingly added to a gown. Just a hint.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  A rustle from behind was all the warning we had.

  Torsu looked up, quick as a bird, and Marnda was there, her lined cheeks mottled. “Thank you, Scribe Emras, for your forbearance.” She cast me a glance of rebuke before turning on the dresser: I should not have taken the silk.

  “If you wish to stay in the princess’s service, you will spend the next year as a mender, Torsu,” Marnda whispered, her voice tremulous with anger.

  Marnda held out her arms, and I surrendered the shimmering lengths of spring-colored silk to her. Beyond her shoulder Torsu glared at me in reproach—my profession of ignorance had protracted the conversation long enough to catch Marnda’s ear. I may as well record here that she never spoke to me again, and the intimations that I conspired with her are not only false but absurd.

  The interested eye was so dark it was black, the better to reflect light. Framed by curling lashes. The smile curved lips already enticingly curved. Black tight curls, the faintest scent of cinnamon. Silver blue nail lacquer enhanced her beautiful hands as she noted the return of the ivy gown.

  “Thank you, Scribe Emras.” She knew my name.

  Lady Carola Definian stood at the sidelines at a horse race. “Look at him ride.” Carola sighed.

  Her cousin Tatia sent a quick look her way. “And so?”

  Carola breathed in, exerting all her control to hide that burst of laughter that burned behind her ribs every time she thought of her father found sprawled on the floor between his bed and the door. Sprawled like a drunken peddler, only dead instead of drunk. She’d had to go inside her clothing storage and bury her face in her old gowns so she could let out the shrieks of laughter at his utter lack of melende in death.

  Alarcansa was hers. And oh, the joy of giving orders instead of getting them!

  Tatia mistrusted that smile. “So Handsome Lassiter rides well. What of it? You can hire better riders. You can bed them afterward. Then dismiss them.”

  Carola snapped her gaze at her cousin. “You do not want to see me married?”

  Tatia raised her hands to ward shadow trespass. “Ah-ye, darling cousin, I live only to see you happy. I just thought….”

  Carola scorned to ask what she thought. Hirelings—even well-trained hirelings—were nothing to the sight of these high-born courtiers, rich and wanton, matched with horses equally high-bred and striking. And at their head, his long body tight, hands loose, smile free, his hair wind-streamed like the mane and tail of his horse, rode Kaidas Lassiter.

  It was whispered that he was as good a lover as he was a rider. It was whispered that when he found a lover who could match him ride for ride, before he galloped on he painted them a lover’s cup—a fragile round cup with no handle, that it might be shared between two.

  Carola remembered her father’s excoriating diatribe about the vulgarity of her infatuation with an indigent baron’s son who could bring nothing of worth to Alarcansa.

  She turned her angry gaze on her cousin and whispered in her father’s deadly tone, “I want him.”

  It was easy enough to find her name: she was Shuras, First Scribe to the Wardrobe, under the Grand Seneschal.

  I made an excuse to return—I had “forgotten” the jeweled shoes that went with the ivy gown. Shuras gave me a spray of starliss and one of those smiles.

  I had come to understand that Tiflis’s craving for “chirps” was bound to her work—her livelihood depended upon knowing the very latest chirpings of the little birds
busy pecking and fluttering around the edges of court, for the booksellers were always trying to figure out what might become popular.

  Chirps were gossip, what courtiers called whispers, a term descended from the days of the spywells. The bird metaphor used in Alsais came from the Heralds’ tradition of crying the news in the city squares at the Hour of the Bird just after Daybreak in the morning. The most entertaining chirps usually found their way to the plays.

  Tiflis’s journey scribe’s project, a book depicting famous loving cups with each illustration’s story told in poetry from the time the cup was made, had earned her a position as clerk. I’d hired Delis to make her a splendid set of lily-frosted queen-cakes to celebrate her promotion, knowing that Tif would glory in the display before her new peers.

  “They say that not two weeks after the death of the Duke of Alarcansa, Lady Carola Definian, the new duchess, rode all the way to Estan for the point-to-point.” Tiflis’s eyes widened with enjoyment. “Ah-yedi! She laid out fantastic amounts in entertainment, and wagers on Handsome Lassiter’s garlanding the bucks, and on his animals when he did not race. All to catch his eye—before she even came before the queen to swear fealty!” She waved in the direction of the palace, where the Duchesses of Gaszin, Altan, and Sentis had united to give a flower-filled, expensive party in welcome of the new duchess.

  “Did she get a lover’s cup?” I asked.

  “Not that I heard. Handsome Lassiter hasn’t deigned to paint one for anyone in this kingdom since Lady Talian of Deshlen got one, and he found out that she straightaway put on her outer salon mantle, where all can see it—like a trophy garland after winning a race.”

  By now I had refined my comportment in these meetings with Tif. I reacted enough that I could see my cousin react to my reactions—like mirrors distort the infinitude of reflections between them.