Arrows of the Sun

by Judith Tarr

  “It has its own distinction.” Dry, that, from one who stood in the circle.

  “And its own destruction.” Cold and soft. Korusan stiffened at it. Infinitesimally; but here of all places, now of all times, there could be no concealment. “He will be dead before he is a man; and if he lives to get a son, what will that son be, as weakened as the blood has grown? Dead in infancy, or witless, or mad—if any are born at all of seed so sore enfeebled. Such is the Brood of the Lion.”

  “He will live long enough,” said the dry voice. “He will do what he is born to do.”

  “Will he live so long?” the cold one inquired.

  Run, said the law. And Korusan had run. Keep silent, it said. And he had kept silent. Running had won him nothing but pain. He said, “I will live as long as I must.”

  “You will be dead at twenty,” said the cold one, the cruel one. “You fancy yourself strong enough now; and with magic and physic and training, so you are. But those have their limits. I see the darkness in you. Already it sinks claws in your bones.”

  “All men die,” said Korusan steadily. “It is a gift, maybe, that I know what I shall die of, and when.”

  “Is it a gift, too, to hate those who willed this doom on you?”

  He laughed. They started, those grim men in their circle, and that lightened his mood immeasurably. No one ever laughed in this rite, under this questioning. “They are dead who condemned my house to its death—man without woman and woman without man, lifelong, and never a child of any union but one; and that was their weakness, that they permitted her to live. Or maybe their cruelty. They would know that the sickness was in her, the blood-beast, the thing that goes down from father to son, from mother to daughter, and weakens and twists and kills. But—hate them? No,” he said. “No. It was never their choice that she wed daughter to son and son to daughter, and they likewise, to preserve the line pure. If I hate anyone, it is that one. She was a fool, my ancestor. Far better had she done as her brother did, and wedded with barbarians.”

  “Then the Blood of the Lion would truly be lost,” the dry voice said. Not so dry now; there was a whisper of passion in it.

  “It is lost in any event,” said Korusan. “My sisters are dead or idiots. I may die before I can sire sons. But before I die, I will have our blood-price. The blood of the Sun is more robust than mine, but it too resides in one man, and one man alone. And he has no son.”

  “That we know of,” said the cold one.

  “There is none.” A new voice, that. It spoke with surety, from an unveiled face. Korusan regarded the man in grey who emerged from the circle. He was not afraid, though he saw the man’s shadow, a woman in black, as barefaced as he, and as deadly keen of eye. Lightmage, darkmage.

  He raised a brow. The lightmage met his stare blandly and said, “He has no son. No daughter, either.”

  “I hope,” said Korusan, “that he refrains from women, then, until I hold his life in my hands.” He smiled at the mages. “You will see to that.”

  They were affronted. He watched them remember who he was.

  The knife shifted on his nape. He spun. The world ran slow, slow. Still, almost it failed to slow enough. He lost a lock of his hair, a drop of blood. He won the knife.

  The one who had held it now held a length of uncut gold. Korusan grinned at him and finished what he had begun: set blade to the uncut mane of his youth and cut it away, lock by heavy lock, and stood up a man. The air was cold on his unprotected neck. His head was light. He ran fingers through cropped curls, tugging lightly at them, but never letting down his guard or his weapon.

  “No,” he said, “I am not of your blood. No bred warrior, I. I was bred to be your master. Bow then, Olenyas. Bow to your lord.”

  He did not think that he had appalled them. They knew what they had raised. But knowing in the head and knowing in the belly—there, he thought, was a distinction they had not made. There were no eyes to read, to uncover resentment or regret, or even fear, until the one whose knife he had won lowered the outer veil. And then—and this he had not looked for—the inner.

  It was a younger face than he had suspected, and more like his own than he could have imagined, even knowing the women and the barefaced children. The Master of the Olenyai regarded him with eyes well-nigh as pure a gold as his, but white-bordered in simple human fashion, and no fear in them, nor overmuch regret. Then they lowered, and he went down, down to the floor, in the full prostration. “You are my lord,” he said, “and my emperor.”

  “I am not the emperor,” said Korusan.

  “Then there is none,” the Master said. He rose. His eyes came up. That was permitted of Olenyai, to look in the face of royalty.

  “I do not wish to be emperor,” said Korusan. “I would be Olenyas.”

  “May you not be both?” the Master said.

  Korusan was silent. He had spoken enough foolishness, and far beyond the limits of the rite. He reversed the knife in his hand and bowed as initiate to Master, and returned the knife to its owner.

  The Master accepted it. Korusan drew a slow breath. If it had been refused, then so likewise would he; and he would be emperor without a throne and Olenyas without the veil, rejected and found unworthy.

  The fine steel flashed toward him. He stood his ground even as it neared his eyes. Even as it licked down, once, twice, and the pain came stinging. He kept his eyes steady on the Master’s face. Ninefold, the scars on that cheek: from cheekbone to jaw, thinly parallel like the marks of claws. One for each rank of his ascent.

  Korusan said, “I will not take second rank for my blood alone.”

  “Nor do you,” said the Master. He wiped the knife clean of Korusan’s blood and sheathed it. “You could be swifter in defense.”

  “I was swifter than you.”

  The Master’s hand was a blur, but Korusan caught it. The Master smiled. “Better,” he said, then snapped free and slapped Korusan lightly on the unwounded cheek. “That for your insolence. And this,” he said, “for your wit.” He set hands on Korusan’s shoulders and leaned forward, and set a kiss where his hand had stung. “Now you are Olenyas. Be proud, but never too proud. Be strong, but never so strong that you betray yourself. Be swift, but never as swift as your death. And take the oath as your kinsmen have taught you.”

  Korusan knelt and laid his hands in the Master’s, looking up into that face which now he was entitled to see. He was aware of other faces, strange and yet familiar, and eyes that he had known when all the rest was wrapped in darkness. But for the moment he saw only the one, and the two that came up behind it, lightmage, darkmage, filling the Master’s shadow.

  He shuddered a little inside himself. Magic he knew, because he must know it. Magic he had, because it was bred in him, like his eyes, like the death that would take him while lesser men were still no more than boys. But he had no love for it.

  “It is our custom,” the Master said, “to give the oath and the protection, and to seal them in bronze, and bind them about your neck.”

  “But for you,” said the lightmage, “bronze is too little a thing, and a binding of chain too feeble. You, we seal and bind with the Word, and with the Power that is behind the Word.”

  Korusan felt it in his bones like the fire that had filled him in the wood. He fought instinct that would have risen and swelled and thrust the magic away. He let it crawl through him, though he shuddered at its touch. He hoped devoutly that his stomach would keep its proper place. It was never his most obedient servant; and he had not fed it since this rite began.

  Preoccupied with keeping his belly quiet, he barely noticed the wrench and twist as the magic pulled free. He did see the lightmage sway, and the darkmage steady him. He heard the woman mutter, “Goddess! He is strong.” And the man: “Hush! He hears us.”

  Then he knew that they had not spoken aloud, but as mages spoke, in the silence behind the words.

  The lightmage met his gaze directly. “You are strong,” he said, “but unschooled. Beware of arro
gance. It will destroy you.”

  Korusan’s lips stretched. It was not a smile. He spoke the words then as the Master bade him, words that meant everything and nothing after the touch of magic. The magic had sealed him to this rite; the magic, and the blood that ran down his scored cheek. The words were for his brothers, his Olenyai. To serve where he must serve, to command where he must command; to do battle for lord and land and kin; to show his face never but to his brothers, and to protect the secrets of his caste— His caste, he thought, half wry and half in pain. Only while it served him, and until his vengeance was won.

  To protect, then, while he lived, and to defend to the death.

  He was warrior born, warrior bred if not to the blood. Their enemies were his enemies. He was all of their kin, as they were all of his. He took the robes and the veil, the knife and the swords. He sealed them with his blood.

  Robed, veiled, armed, he danced. The circle opened itself for him and to him. He danced to the drums, and their beat now was swift, but that swiftness was joy. He drew his swords. They were steel, and they gleamed in lamplight and firelight. He spun. He leaped. He sang. “Ohé! Ohé Olenyai!”

  Others sprang into the dance. Steel rang on steel. It was like a battle, it was like a willing woman. He whirled in its center. He was all of them, and all of himself. Korusan. Olenyas. Lion’s cub. Warrior born, warrior raised, born to die young. Lord and weapon of his people. Arrow shot from the bow: an arrow in the Sun.

  3

  Kingship. Majesty.

  It was stronger than wine. Stronger than dreamsmoke. More dizzying even than the scent of Vanyi’s hair, wonderful sea-sweet masses of it, and she wound in it, gleaming in moonlight and starlight and the nightlamp’s flicker.

  Estarion reined himself in. That was the throne, making him its own. The fire he carried in his right hand was shrunk to a sunlit warmth: painlessness after pain so long and so relentless that it shaped the world about it.

  He turned his hand palm up in his lap. Without the price of pain the Kasar was a beautiful thing, beautiful and improbable and all perfectly the god’s creation.

  He closed his fingers carefully over the bright burning brand and looked up. His people waited for him. Eyes fixed on him, faces a blur of black, brown, bronze, gold, and one beloved white-bone glimmer. She was afraid for him. He gave her warmth and a promise.

  His mother shifted all but invisibly, reminding; admonishing. He smiled at her. Grinned, she might have said, though he did try to damp it down. One grew accustomed to it, she had told him. But it was splendid, this first heady draught of empire.

  He raised his branded hand. The silence, that had been absolute, shattered in one glorious wave of sound.

  They paid him homage one by one, from the highest to the lowest. They wore the bright edge from his joy, but nothing could rob him of it.

  Vanyi was not in the endless train of his people. When she came to the throne, it would be to sit beside him in it, empress to his emperor, mother of his heir. She was gone now about her duties: mage, priestess, guardian of the Gates between the worlds. Those would not wait for any man, even a man who was lord of the world.

  They came without pause or diminution, to bow at his feet, to kiss his hands, to murmur the words that made them his people, and to hear him seal them with a word and a smile. His throat was raw. His face ached with smiling, his neck with bending to acknowledge bows or tribute. His backside, he decided, would do much better with a thicker cushion; and that almost betrayed him into laughter. The stout merchant in front of him received a smile that made him blink, dazzled, and the freewoman behind looked mildly smitten.

  The one behind them, well out of proper order and walled in retinue, neither smiled nor appeared enraptured with Majesty incarnate. Estarion went cold.

  There had been others of that ilk among the lords and princes. One could hardly avoid them. They were half of his empire, as his advisors never tired of reminding him. But he could not abide them. Oily yellow people with flat snake-eyes, bowing and groveling and thinking scorn at eastern barbarians. When he could read their thoughts at all. They thought slantwise, round corners; they made his head ache.

  The Asanian lord bowed low. He wore the five robes of a prince, one atop the other, slender ivory feet bare as befit one who need walk only in palaces, straw-gold hair uncut and bound behind him with plaited gold. He bowed to the floor, prostrating himself, and his entourage went down with him, concerted as a dance.

  Their minds were a babble of nonsense. They were warded, with magery in it. Not that the mage could be a priest of Avaryan, or Estarion would know it; nor could it be a mage of the old and broken Guild. No: it was but one half-hidden servant, grey man in a grey gown, with eyes as flat as coins.

  Estarion set his teeth against the pain of that protection. Some small remnant of his power had come back since he lost it in the time he could not remember, when he had wielded it like a weapon, and killed the mage who killed his father; but it had come back flawed. Nothing could test his shields without his knowing it; and that knowledge was a stabbing pain.

  He meant to say the words that set the prince free to rise. Pain locked his jaw upon them. Pain, and anger. How dare any mage, or any man, try his defenses here, where he was emperor? It smacked of contempt, if not of treason.

  The moment stretched. The prince and his entourage lay on their faces, unmoving. The court began to shift uneasily.

  “Estarion!” his mother hissed in his ear.

  He recoiled from the sound of it, and from the rebuke that came as much from within as from without. “Get up,” he said. Snapped. In High Court Asanian; but the inflections were all awry. He had addressed the prince of five robes as a minor eunuch of the Middle Court.

  His lordship rose with grace they all learned in childhood. The others were less polished, or less composed. Their anger grated raw against his aching brain.

  A prince could not declare death-insult against an emperor, but Estarion had made no friend in this one. The Asanian spoke the words of homage in precise, icy syllables, each inflection meticulously and lethally correct. His entourage did not echo him. That was insult less than mortal but more than minor.

  The prince bowed again to the floor. This time he rose without Estarion’s bidding, and bent his head a careful degree. Giving the emperor pardon. Forgiving a barbarian his ignorance.

  As he began to back away down the long silent aisle, Estarion stopped him with a word. He stood stiff and still, and he did a terrible thing, a thing that no Asanian did to the emperor enthroned. He looked up into Estarion’s face.

  Estarion met the yellow eyes. They fit that face: old ivory, old gold, carved smooth and sleeked with scented oil. Their stare was bold beyond belief, as Asanians thought of it, and profoundly, wonderfully shocked.

  Estarion smiled. “Am I what you expected?” he asked sweetly, in High Asanian that had remembered itself and given the man his proper rank.

  The Asanian’s gaze dropped, as did he, full on his face, all grace and dignity forgotten, and in him only fear. He had meant defiance, that was in every line of him, and contempt for the emperor who would not walk in the west and yet called himself lord of Asanion. He had forgotten, or chosen to forget, that there was Asanian blood in the barbarian, blood of the Lion, blood imperial.

  He fled, there was no other word for it. Estarion sat back in his throne and set himself to be markedly gracious to the Islander who came forward shakily, almost creeping in the Asanian’s wake.

  o0o

  Estarion stood in the middle of the robing-room and stretchcd. No servants beset him. He had locked them out, and bought a few moments’ quiet.

  There was wine on the table. He filled a cup, drank a heady draught.

  He ached, inside and out. Some of that was hunger. But he could not go to the feast until the servants, tyrants that they were, gave him leave. He must make an entrance, and so must enter last.

  He circled the room, skirting the chests and the clothing-pr
esses. His mood was odd, unsettled. The Asanian had taken the splendor out of it. The man had been testing him; and he had not done well. He had let himself be caught off guard. He had betrayed his weakness.

  “I may be young,” he said to the air, “but I am not stupid. Nor completely ignorant of my failings.”

  “Goddess forbid that you should be.”

  He whipped about. A locked door was small barrier to a mage, and his mother was one of rare power.

  Likewise the one who bulked behind her. Great tall northern barbarian in beard and braids and baubles—strangers never suspected the cultured delicacy of that mind, nor knew him for the great mage and scholar and priest that he was.

  They were together more often than not, priestess of the dark and priest of the light. It was a jest in some quarters that they were like the old Guildmages, matched in their magic, darkmage and light. They had shared Estarion’s regency, and shared his raising once his father was dead; they were not always of a mind, but they never failed to come to an accommodation, one way and another.

  The Lady Merian settled herself in the room’s one chair. She never looked less than queenly, but her eyes were tired.

  Estarion set a cup in her hand. She wrapped long fingers about it, gratefully maybe, but she did not drink the wine that was in it.

  Avaryan’s high priest in Endros betrayed no such hesitation. He drained his cup and set it down, and sighed.

  Estarion looked at them both. Anger pricked. He was emperor, and these two not only invaded his solitude, they reduced him to a child.

  “I cry your pardon,” his mother said, reading him with maddening ease. “There is too much to say, and too little time to say it.”

  “Is it nothing that can wait until the morning?” Estarion demanded.

  “I think not,” said Lord Iburan. He was unwontedly quiet, almost grim, though his eyes on Estarion were gentle enough.

  Not angry, then. When Iburan was angry, mountains trembled.