by David Drake
“Aye, the prince and all his chiefs and nobles,” Chalcus said with an unreadable smile.
He turned to play with the door latch, a heavy arrangement that could be locked from outside but not from within; probably something to do with a the building’s former use as brothel. Ilna’d known many sorts of hardship and discomfort; but not all sorts, and if she’d believed in the Great Gods she’d have thanked them for that mercy.
“Not an assembly I’d ever expected to be part of,” Chalcus continued, now looking out the bank of casements facing east over the courtyard. He glanced sidelong at Ilna. “Of course if you’re determined to greet all your friends and the new lot from Valles...?”
Ilna’s smile was grim. Did he think she was a child who knew nothing of his tastes? Chalcus loved gatherings of the great and powerful, as surely as he loved clothes that focused all eyes on his swaggering form. But he was trying to be kind, and that was no cause for anger.
“I’ll go to the dinner, Master Chalcus,” she said, “and I’ll go to Prince Garric’s wedding when that’s held in a few weeks time. There’s nothing forcing me to be elsewhere, and I’m not afraid to recognize the truth. Any truth.”
“No, nobody’d be fool enough to think you were afraid, dear one,” Chalcus said very softly to the open windows.
He turned to meet her eyes and said, “Do you have regrets, Mistress Ilna?” His voice was flat, stripped suddenly of the lilt that was as much a part of him as the smile generally crinkling his eyes.
“Chalcus,” she said, “things are as they should be—for the kingdom, for Garric. For me as well! I wouldn’t change a bit of it if I could.”
She smiled like a demon carved from ice. The skills she’d learned in Hell gave her powers beyond the imagining of anyone but Tenoctris of those who knew her. She could force Garric, and in time she could force the whole world, to her desire; but she would not.
“I’m glad for the way things are, Master Chalcus,” she said. “Though because I’m often a fool, it tears my heart out to see them.”
Ilna opened her arms. Chalcus came to her and swept her up, kissing her; gentle as a cat with her kitten, for all the strength in his scarred body.
Merota continued to sing as she came down the stairs. She’d reached refrain again, and her voice trilled like springwater, “I’ll always be single, the rest of my life....”
***
“Well, said Cashel, looking around the overgrown garden, “the palace seems a nice place, doesn’t it, Tenoctris?”
“It’s quiet,” the old wizard agreed. She was being agreeable, at any rate. “I’d hoped the building might have a library that would give me some guidance about the creature that was loosed on us, though.”
The palace of the Counts of Haft was brick and three stories high on the front where pillars rose from the ground to the roof. Back here in the private areas there were only two stories and all the rooms looked out on little gardens like this one. Sparrows and finches hopped about on the ground, picking at seeds; a pair of gray squirrels were chasing each other up and down the ancient dogwood tree by the back wall, changing places for no reason Cashel could make out; and in a basin filled by the shower earlier in the day, frogs chirped furiously.
The garden wasn’t home, exactly, but for Cashel it seemed more homelike than any place he’d been in Valles, let alone shipboard. He didn’t mind ships, but he was glad to be on solid ground again.
“Maybe the library’s in the part where the count’s still living?” he said, nodding toward the back wall. Garric had taken over the front and east wing of the palace, but the count and his personal servants still occupied his private apartments in the west wing. The other side of the back wall here was also a garden—Cashel could see the tops of what he thought were redbuds and a huge weeping willow—but it was part of the west wing, with no entry from where Cashel stood.
“No, I asked some of the older servants,” Tenoctris said. “The library burned in the riots when Count Lascarg came to power. There were volumes in it dating back to the Old Kingdom, the chamberlain thought.”
She smiled wryly. “Volumes as old as I am,” she added.
The Old Kingdom fell when a wizard drowned King Carus—and drowned himself as well in the backlash of the forces that he couldn’t control. An event so enormous had distant effects, the way a stone flung into a pond makes waves slap the far edges. One result had been to throw Tenoctris a thousand years into her future, to fetch up on the shore of Barca’s Hamlet where Garric had found her.
Cashel cleared his throat, letting the thought form fully before he spoke. Then he said, “I guess you were sent here for a purpose, Tenoctris. And I guess that means you’re going to stay while you’re needed. Which I guess is going to be a good long while yet.”
Tenoctris had lived a long life before the cataclysm scooped her up, but she’d already brought more to the present than she’d been allowed to give her own day. Without her wisdom and skill, Cashel knew that the present kingdom, reborn with Garric leading, would have vanished like chaff in a bonfire.
The old woman sniffed as she knelt to look more closely at a stone bench. “I don’t accept your notion of purpose, Cashel,” she said. “I believe in chance, and I believe in the forces that I can see and sense; but I’ve never seen the gods you pray to.”
Cashel grinned. “Chance?” he said. “You mean luck? Then I guess Garric and me and everybody else in the Isles who wants to live a normal life without wizards smashing things is awfully lucky, seeings as you just happened to appear right where we needed you to keep everything from flying apart again.”
Tenoctris laughed as she ran her fingers over the moss-covered carvings on the top of the bench. “Cashel, just as you have faith in the Great Gods,” she said, “I have faith in the blind machinery of the cosmos. Sometimes, I’ll admit—”
She turned to meet his eyes, laughing with a serious undertone.
“—I have to stretch farther to justify my beliefs than I would yours.”
Cashel smiled, holding his quarterstaff out at arm’s length just for exercise. He wasn’t bragging, though he knew there weren’t many men who could grip the end of the thick staff in one hand and keep it straight. Cashel didn’t have to brag about his strength; it was there for all to see, as surely as Sharina’s beauty.
Tenoctris was giving her full attention to the bench, now. “Cashel,” she said, “this is very old. It was part of an altarstone, originally.”
“Brought here from an old temple, you mean?” he said. He looked more closely at the bench, but that was just politeness. The marks on the stone wouldn’t have meant anything to him if they’d been clear. Now, worn by time and under a fur of moss, he’d have had as much luck trying to read words in the wave-tops.
“I’m not sure,” said Tenoctris, eyeing the rest of the garden from where she knelt. “Those seats there—”
She nodded toward chairs made by cutting down sections of a fluted pillar; her fingertips continued to touch indentations in the top of the bench.
“—are made out of column barrels, and there on the wall—”
Nodding again, this time toward the partition between this garden and its twin in the east wing. Blocks of sandstone formed the foundation, though the rest was old brick.
“—are parts of a frieze. See the triglyphs?”
Cashel wouldn’t have known a triglyph if it bit him, but he supposed some part of what he was looking at was a triglyph. Maybe even a family of them.
“I think there was a temple here before the palace was built,” Tenoctris continued. She rose, frowning. “I think the inscription’s to the Lady, though I’m more guessing than reading.”
Cashel cleared his throat. He had the staff in both hands, now. He could hear the concern in Tenoctris’ voice. He didn’t understand what was causing it, but he was ready for anything that appeared.
“Sharina’ll be back soon, I think,” he said as his companion continued to ponder the bench. “Can she h
elp you read, do you think, Tenoctris?”
Sharina’d gone off to the temple of the Lady to pray as soon as the formalities of greeting the locals were over. She hadn’t asked Cashel to let her go without his company, but they knew each other pretty well by now. Her friend Nonnus had worshipped the Lady, and Cashel figured this visit had something to do with him. That was Sharina’s private business.
Tenoctris laughed and put her hand over Cashel’s where it gripped his quarterstaff. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said with a hint of embarrassment. “There’s nothing wrong, nothing evil, about there being a temple here. It’s just that places where people worship tend to focus the forces that turn the cosmos. Reusing the sites for other purposes is, well, dangerous.”
She pursed her lips in sour expression though her eyes continued to smile. “As are quite a lot of other things, I know,” she went on, “including worrying myself into a tizzy because everybody else doesn’t feel the same way I do about what I think is important. And—”
She turned again to survey their surroundings, her hands on her hips.
“—when I let myself think about it instead of just reacting on instinct, there’re few more innocent uses for the site than as a quiet garden. Forgive me for being silly, Cashel.”
“I don’t think you’re silly, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. His voice was a trifle huskier than it’d have been if he was completely settled, and though he held the staff at his side again, he hadn’t forgotten about it.
A shepherd learns that instinct can warn him about a lot of things that his conscious mind could never explain to other people. And Cashel knew Tenoctris well enough by now to trust her instincts just as far as he did his own.
***
There were probably other temples to the Lady in Carcosa, but the nomenclator Sharina had asked sent her to that of the Lady of the Sunset. It stood on a knoll near the northern wall of the city. She hadn’t been able to see the temple itself from the harbor, but the gilded bronze statuary on its roof blazed above all the surrounding buildings.
“Huh!” snorted one of the Blood Eagles escorting her. “This is what the hicks call a temple, is it?”
“Shut up, Lires, or you’ll be sweeping out stables with your moustache!” snarled the lieutenant commanding the squad. “She’s here to worship and you’re here to guard her while she’s doing it!”
Sharina pretended not to have been listening, but the soldier’s comment angered her on many levels. The temple wasn’t large, certainly not by the standards of Valles or ancient Carcosa, but it was perfectly proportioned and had been built by expert craftsmen. The life-sized statues on the roof were winged dancers, probably meant for the four phases of the West Wind; they were modeled as ably as anything Sharina had seen in the capital.
The temple had six slim columns across the front, two more than normal on a width of 35 feet or so. The design gave the building a look of airiness, and the ceiling-high glass panels—diamond panes set in silvered bronze instead of lead—lighted the interior as well as displaying the cult statue to those sacrificing outside.
Nothing but Ornifal chauvinism could object to the temple, and Sharina was from Haft. More important, though—she had come here to worship, just as the officer said.
Sharina’d been raised to be conventionally religious, since a peasant community doesn’t have much scope for complete surrender to the Gods. A farmer who spent all his days praying would starve when winter came, and his neighbors would have as little sympathy for him as they did for his drunken neighbor.
Her mother Lora mouthed platitudes with the same empty formality as she taught Sharina court etiquette: it was the done thing. Reise said nothing about how he felt regarding the Gods; people in general found it politic to conceal their opinions around Lora unless they wanted to listen to her diatribes on where their beliefs were mistaken. Sharina suspected that her father was as much an unbeliever as Ilna declared herself to be, but he’d paid his share when the priests from Carcosa made their annual Tithe Procession and he’d raised his children to offer a pinch of bread dipped in ale at meals to the shrine on the wall of the inn’s common room.
Nonnus the hermit was the only person Sharina knew to whom the Lady was a real part of life. Perhaps even to Nonnus She was only a hope, the possibility that Someone could forgive the things he had done as a soldier. For Nonnus’ sake, Sharina had come here to pray and to sacrifice. No one had a right to sneer at that impulse.
But she held her tongue—as Nonnus would have done.
In the plaza fronting the temple were seven altars. The one in the center was ornately carved and surrounded by a waist-high marble screen to separate those sacrificing from the common people. An attendant, one of the priestly thugs, lounged in the enclosure to keep out anybody who might try to use a site meant for his betters.
An old woman waited by the simple altar on the right end, where a priest was lighting a small fireset. Two other priests sat in a kiosk to the side, talking and keeping a desultory eye on the plaza. The courtyard behind the temple got a good deal of traffic both of priests and laymen, but only the woman was sacrificing at the moment.
Sharina turned to the officer of her guard. “You’ll wait here,” she said. “When I’ve finished, we’ll return to the palace.”
“Milady,” the man said, “we’ll come—”
“You will not,” Sharina said. The anger—at what had happened to Nonnus, at the chaos that was so much a part of life, at herself for the risk she’d taken with the lives of those she loved best when the whale attacked—boiled out in her tone. It shocked her and slapped the soldiers like a gush of fire. “I’m here to worship.”
She turned and strode stiff-backed toward the kiosk. One of the priests waited, standing with his hands tented before him. The other walked briskly into the porticoed compound.
The Blood Eagles remained where they were. She heard a man—not the officer—snarl, “Lires, you’ve disgraced the Regiment!”
“I wish to make an offering,” Sharina said to the priest in a clear voice. “I’ll need to purchase the incense from you as well. What’s the fee for this? Just a basic sacrifice.”
An elaborate sacrifice with animal victims and all the pomp of majesty would’ve offended Nonnus. To the hermit, the offering and even the prayer were merely symbols of the heart; but symbols are important.
“Of course, Princess Sharina,” the priest said, bowing low. “If you’ll wait here just a moment, Lord Anda will be right out. Please accept my apologies on his behalf for our not being properly prepared to greet you.”
“I don’t want Lord Anda,” Sharina said, her eyes narrowing and her anger rising again. “I’m here to make a sacrifice for the soul of a friend. You can—”
The high priest came out of the courtyard, his expression supernally placid but his legs moving very quickly indeed under his long robe. With him—actually straggling a pace or two behind—were half a dozen junior priests, men and women both. One had lost her sandal in her hurry, and another appeared to have tugged his robe on back to front.
An alarm clanged within the compound. The burly thugs at the entryway straightened up in the passage, holding their censers like the clubs they really were. Twenty more of the same sort came boiling out of the courtyard and ran toward Anda and his aides.
Anda glanced over his shoulder at them with a look of cold fury and gestured them to a halt. Returning his attention to Sharina, he said blandly, “It’s better that we not discuss our business here in public, I think you’ll agree, Princess. If you’ll come—”
“We have no business!” Sharina said. “I came to burn a pinch of frankincense in memory of a dead friend!”
Lord Anda put his hand on her arm. In a blast of fiery rage, Sharina’s mind turned to the Pewle knife. She’d left it at the palace because she was going to worship.
Steel rasped. “Hey!” grunted one of the thugs. The aides clustering with their chief started like deer surprised at a spring; Anda looked
up with a blank expression.
Lires stepped between Anda and Sharina. He’d dropped his shield on the way, so he had a hand free to grip the priest’s arm and twist it up at an angle.
A pair of thugs started toward them. “I wouldn’t!” said the Blood Eagles’ officer, his sword bare in his hand.
Lord Anda was struggling; the soldier lifted him a little higher so that his toes just touched the ground. Because of the way the priest’s arm bent, if it took all his weight either his shoulder or his elbow would be dislocated.
“Now, let me tell you how it is, master,” Lires said. “This is a temple, a place of worship, so I won’t shed blood here. But it you’d actually touched the princess instead of just looking like you meant to—”
“But—” another soldier protested.
“Shut up!” the lieutenant snarled.
“—then I’d break your arm, and break the other arm; and then I’d break your legs,” Lires continued in the tone of a mother chiding her newborn. “After that, well, I’d decide depending on how I was feeling at the time. Do you see?”
“Princess Sharina...,” the priest whispered. Sweat covered his brow. “I sincerely apologize if anything I said was—”
The soldier jerked him a little higher. “The right answer is yes, priestling. Can you say yes?”
“Yes, may the Sister take you!” Anda shouted.
Lires flung him back. Anda stumbled and instinctively tried to put his hand down to catch himself. He screamed and collapsed on the ground.
“Aye, She may,” Lires said, clashing his spearbutt against the cobblestones. “And if She does, then I guess you and I get to meet again.”
“I have no more business here,” Sharina said, wondering at how little she felt. She spun on her heel and added, “Lieutenant, we’ll return to the palace now.”
“Sorry, your highness,” Lires muttered from behind her as the other Blood Eagles fell in on both sides.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, Trooper Lires,” Sharina said. “I was the one who mistook this for a place of worship.”