In the darkness and silence, it seemed that his perceptions had expanded to take on horrifying new sensations. Thus, with organs that were not eyes he “saw” through the lid of his coffin the relentless march of the worms; with organs that were not ears he “heard” the hideous workings of thousands of tiny insect jaws. His skin, in particular, had become wonderfully sensitive, capable of receiving impressions similar to taste and smell, and through these he experienced his own dissolution—the loosening sinews and decaying brain, the swift reduction of flesh into liquid corruption. And not once, but again, and again, and again, as his bones were continually reclothed in flesh, then sloughed it off again.
At last he broke free from the torpor that held him. In a sudden burst of agitated writhing, he cracked open the lid of his stone coffin and struggled up through infinities of earth—only to be thrust down deeper than before as soon as he broke the surface.
Someone gripped Cuillioc’s shoulder and raised him up from his sweaty pillow. Where was he? His entire body was clothed in a chill perspiration; more was pouring off of him. When a damp tendril of hair fell across his face, a rough hand brushed it away. He felt these things but he could not see them, for darkness still pressed heavily on his eyelids.
The hard rim of a cup was pressed against his lips; a bitter liquid dribbled into his mouth. The odor was familiar but not the taste, which was unbelievably foul. He gagged and retched and brought it up again.
“If he will not take the medicine he will surely die,” said an angry voice.
“It will be your misfortune if he does die,” said another, cool, dispassionate; Cuillioc did not know to whom it belonged, but he disliked it instinctively. “Lord Vaz would not be pleased.”
“I can only do so much.” Blind as he was, the Prince sensed a seething resentment. “He will not take the medicine, and you know it is death to refuse it.”
He lay in a tomb-chamber inside one of their obelisks, his body wrapped in bands of silk, preserved in musty spices. So the Mirazhites honored the deities of their bizarre mystery cults: the two-headed calves, dog-faced women, and other abortions of nature.
The spices had mummified him, tightening the skin, causing his eyes to bulge out from their sockets and his lips to draw back, baring his teeth. Silent laughter racked him, for his leather tongue and constricted windpipe would not produce the tiniest whisper of sound. He had hoped to become a hero; they had made him instead one of their thousand blasphemous gods. Was that better or worse?
Somewhere a granite slab scraped against sand, letting a gust of humid air into his tomb. Men came in with flaring torches; he could smell the smoke even before he saw the fire. When they came to his couch of stone, one of the intruders stooped down to look at him. “This one is none of ours. How did he come here?”
Someone thrust his torch so near, Cuillioc could smell the musty perfume of the spices rising from the silken bindings. Then the wrappings ignited; he felt the flames licking at his dried skin. Finally his entire body went up in a white-hot conflagration.
And he burned and he burned. For centuries he burned, and all the while he could smell his own flesh scorching,
A foul taste filled his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but a hard hand kept his jaws clamped shut, and for all his struggles he could not pull away. Weak. He was far too weak, and they could do what they liked with him.
“I had the inspiration, you see, to put the leaves under his tongue,” said the voice he had come to associate with his worst moments. “In that way, even though he will not swallow them, he still absorbs some of the virtue.”
“He does not wake?” There was a sound like the scrape of a chair against a stone floor.
“Never fully. His wounds are healing, but as you see, he has grown very thin. He will never eat more than a few bites, and only when the boy feeds him.”
“It was clever of you to bring the lad here.” The words of praise sounded grudging at best. “But if the choice was mine, I would put a knife through him and be done with it. He should be lying at the bottom of the sea with the rest of his men.”
He was sinking through the water, down and down. Much sooner than expected he hit the bottom. All around him there was slime and ooze, a primal stench that seemed to go back to the world’s beginning. They had not buried him at sea, as they had promised, but had flung him into the swamps outside the city.
If he had been alone it might have been bearable. But eels caressed him with loathsome wrigglings, fish nibbled at his lips and ears. He knew the abominable caresses of crocodiles, and the vampire kisses of leeches. Even the very slime was amorous, defiling him in orgasm after orgasm.
When Cuillioc woke the next time, it was to uncertainty and confusion. Where was he and how had he come there? Where had he been before that? He caught at a memory: a ship and a battle. But it was all noise and falling bodies—a blaze of sunlight on bright blue water—smoke and flames. And he was not on a galley now; he was lying on a narrow, uncomfortable bed in a cool, dim room.
“You have been wandering in your wits for many weeks. Now you are awake, we may hope for a speedier recovery.” Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the dusky chamber, and the first thing he saw was a man in the black five-cornered hat and dark green robe of a Mirazhite physician, bending over the bed as if to study him more closely, a sardonic expression on his lean, bronzed face.
“I don’t wish to recover,” said Cuillioc fretfully. “I thought I would die. I meant to die.”
“But that would not please my lord, the Son of the Sun.”
Slowly the rest of the room took shape: walls of raw, undressed stone; an iron grille covering a single window; a heavy door with a narrow slit cut into the wood, through which someone might easily peer in from outside. Besides the bed and a chair there were no other furnishings, and the blankets that covered him were stiff and coarse under his hands, as though they might be made of sacking.
“Is this the Citadel?”
“No, you are no longer in Xanthipei. This is the palace of Lord Vaz, the Prince of Persit. By his order you were brought here after the battle in the bay.” A shade of amusement crept into the doctor’s voice. “You are the son of the moon goddess and he is ‘First-born of the Sun.’ But the moon dare not approach the sun too nearly, or she would be burned to cinders. You might have profited from her example.”
Cuillioc ignored the majority of this, for it did not much interest him. “What does your Lord Vaz want of me?”
“That,” said the physician, “is for the Prince to tell you himself.”
In another day, Cuillioc was able to sit propped up by pillows in the bed. On that day and the days that followed, his page would appear, from time to time, for the purpose of feeding him. But they never allowed the boy to remain with him long.
“What do you do in the times between?” Cuillioc asked him once, when the boy was spooning a thin broth flavored with the vile, life-giving herb into his mouth.
The urchin answered with characteristic brevity. “Same as I did for you, mostly.”
“You attend on Lord Vaz?” It was impossible not to smile at the idea of a guttersnipe from Apharos waiting on haughty Mirazhite royalty.
“I listen to people. I tell him what they say.” But then he added, in a startling burst of volubility, “They think I don’t know more than a word or two of their language. They think they can say what they like, and I’m too stupid to understand.”
In fact, Cuillioc remembered, the boy had picked up the language with amazing facility. If not the formal tongue, at least the argot of the servants. And it was not surprising if he was spying now for Lord Vaz. His life had been such, that he had learned to find friends where he could—and discard them just as readily. “Do you spy on me?”
A shake of the untidy head. “No need to. He knows where you are. He knows you aren’t going nowhere.”
Each morning in Persit the trumpets shouted at dawn. Soon after, a noise like the gnashing of thousands of teeth came in thro
ugh Cuillioc’s window. It was a sound (he eventually learned) originating in the hovels of the lowest class, where the women bent over their mortars and pestles grinding the grain that would feed their families that day. In Xanthipei, his apartments had been quiet, for they were not on the city side of the palace, but here he was exposed to the clamor and stench of the streets.
Despite the physician’s optimistic predictions, his recovery was slow. He continued to be subject to nocturnal sweats, alternately freezing and scalding his flesh, which drove the poisons out of his body even as he breathed more of them in. Nevertheless, the physician felt that a more drastic purging was necessary, and treated him with drenches and bleedings—for there were no natural healers in Mirizandi, and these were the methods the doctors were obliged to use. On learning that the leeches, at least, had been real, Cuillioc shuddered with horror and burned with humiliation, wondering how many of the other things he had dreamed were real as well.
Whether through the ministrations of his doctor or the healing hand of time, he finally grew stronger. Then they dressed him in somebody’s cast-off garments, marched him through miles of thick-walled corridors and pillared courtyards, and at last brought into the presence of Lord Vaz himself.
The Prince of Persit gazed down on him with delicate scorn from a raised chair under a gaudy silken canopy. A slender hand, every nail of which had grown to incredible lengths, gestured toward a low, cross-legged stool. “Be seated.”
“I prefer to stand,” said Cuillioc, with a haughty look of his own. But a pair of slaves—naked to the waist, with coppery skins oiled and glistening, the better to display the bulging muscles of their upper limbs and torsos—took hold of him on either side and lowered him forcibly to the stool. “I understood it was an invitation, not a command.”
“By which it may be seen,” said Lord Vaz, “that you do not understand our customs at all. When a superior speaks, there is no invitation. He expects obedience.”
“So it is among my people,” Cuillioc answered. “But I am the son of the Empress, you a petty prince. You are not my superior, nor even my equal.” One of the slaves struck him hard, nearly knocking him off the stool.
With a bleeding lip and a smashed face, Cuillioc managed to maintain his fragile equanimity. The blow had neither surprised nor dismayed him. His desire for death had not diminished, and he hoped, given sufficient provocation, Lord Vaz would oblige him. “There can be no possible advantage to you in keeping me here. If you think you can hold me hostage or collect a ransom, you are greatly mistaken. I am disgraced; my mother would not lift a hand to recover me, or even to save my life.” To speak was painful; he thought his jaw was broken or at least dislocated, but pride forced him to continue. “She would never yield to threats under any circumstances.”
“You are not here as a hostage, but as my prisoner, to live or die at my whim. How I choose may depend on whether you prove yourself useful or not. I wish to know how Ouriána—mere mortal flesh, and a woman besides—ascended to such power she can pretend to be a goddess.”
Were it not for his aching jaw, Cuillioc would have laughed; the man was so ignorant, so obtuse. “My mother is a goddess. And there is nothing I can tell you about her apotheosis; it is a holy mystery.”
“That is nonsense. I myself am half a god, and so I know.” Lord Vaz sneered, and his fingers drummed the arm of his chair. “Do you think I cannot force you to speak? I am gentle with you now”—there could be nothing less gentle than his expression as he said this—“but my patience is not long. Spare yourself pain by answering my questions now.”
“I cannot tell you what I do not know. What only Ouriána herself knows.” A meaty fist drove into his stomach; another knocked him from his stool. As Cuillioc curled up in agony on the floor, the slaves kicked him repeatedly.
Yet, the beating was a surprisingly brief one. After only a few minutes they hauled him to his feet and escorted him back to his room. Such was his infirmity, to subject him to too much violence would have killed him—and Lord Vaz was willing to be patient after all.
Every two or three days, when the bruises were fading, when the ache in Cuillioc’s belly began to subside, they took him before Lord Vaz again. The Prince of Persit always asked the same question, and Cuillioc always replied that he could not answer him. Then there was another beating. It would have been amusing if it were not so painful, for no amount of abuse could force him to give answers that he did not have.
“I could geld you,” the Mirazhite said one day.
With a sigh, Cuillioc studied the cool marble floor at his feet. He did not discount the threat, nor was he unmoved by it. But what did that matter? “Then I would be gelded,” he said wearily, “and you would learn no more of Ouriána than you knew before.”
The threats continued, at irregular intervals: I could put out your eyes. I could have you hamstrung. I could tell my slaves to break your back. Naturally, none of them achieved the desired result. Even had Cuillioc been inclined to speak, nothing he could have said would have brought Vaz any closer to the truth.
One day it pleased his tormentor to increase his discomfort by having a woman present during the interrogation. She was standing by the Prince’s chair as Cuillioc entered the room: one of the loveliest women he had ever seen, with smooth copper skin and hair like liquid shadow. A straight, sleeveless garment, very simple but of sumptuous materials, fell from her neck to her feet, and she wore a necklace of many pendant diamonds.
“I wish to know Ouriána’s secret,” said Vaz, coming directly to the point.
Until now, Cuillioc had felt no real hatred for Vaz or any of his people—viewed in a certain light, any revenges the Mirazhites took against him were just and right—but at this new humiliation he was enraged. So enraged that he did not even deign to give his usual answer, but stood silent and seething.
“Why are you so foolish as to defy me? Do you like being kicked and degraded by slaves? Or are you one who take pleasure in pain?”
Still Cuillioc did not reply.
This time his silence had an unexpected effect. “I have decided to be merciful,” said Vaz. “You are, after all, a prince of a noble line—though not the son of a goddess as you pretend. Give me your friendship, tell me what I want to know, and I will not only grant you your freedom, I will give you my sister in marriage.”
The glorious creature beside him on the dais turned toward Cuillioc with a dazzling smile. He had been so long without even the sight of a woman that he might have been enchanted, were it not for his aching wounds and his strong suspicion that it was all a trick. Was she even a princess? He did not forget the deceit they had practiced on him months ago in Xanthipei.
“Your sister is incomparable.” It was one thing to provoke Vaz, another to insult a woman, be she princess or pleasure slave. “But I am, as you have said, a prince of a noble line. I have been offered wives of great beauty and high lineage many times before—and not as a bribe to betray my mother.”
The slaves moved in, and he expected the usual hard blows to follow. But Lord Vaz was not finished with him yet. “Do you think I cannot make your life infinitely more unpleasant than it already is? Believe me, I can and will.”
So it had come to this, as Cuillioc had known it would eventually. His stomach cramped. He hoped it was only a weakness brought on by his sickness, his injuries, not ordinary cowardice. He hoped he would somehow retain some measure of courage and dignity under torture.
Something in his face must have betrayed him. “Ah, you think I am about to hand you over to my torturers,” Vaz said with a ghastly smile. “But a man may die under torture if he is stubborn—though the ordeal may be cruel, he knows it has its natural limits—and a dead man is useless. There is but one ordeal I know that will break even the strongest man: a daily taste of the lash, the unremitting degradation of slavery. I am sending you to the mines.”
This time, after a beating more lengthy and vicious than any before it, they stripped him of his borrowed
clothes, leaving only the loincloth to cover his nakedness, then attached heavy chains to his wrists and ankles.
As they led him off, he caught a last glimpse of the Princess up on the dais; she seemed mightily amused by his plight. Probably he thought he would not have liked being married to her anyway.
They paraded him through the streets, in his nakedness, in his chains. His bruised white skin instantly attracted attention, and everyone seemed to know who he was. People stopped what they were doing in the marketplace and turned to stare at him. There were catcalls and curses. Some of them mocked him with obscene gestures.
A stone flew through the air and hit him on his forehead; another hit him in his chest. One of his guards drew a scimitar and disappeared into the crowd. After that there were no more stones, but the rain of verbal abuse continued. He kept his head high and his eyes forward, scorning to recognize any of it. Let them see how the son of the Empress comported himself under the worst circumstances.
He was still so fragile that he believed he would not last many months as a mine slave, but he found he could contemplate that prospect with perfect equanimity. He would welcome death when it came. Dead, he could not disappoint Ouriána. The one thing he feared most was being returned to Phaôrax—and that was the one thing Lord Vaz would never do.
26
A second trip through the caverns, by the light of a pair of pale blue lanterns, was no less convoluted and bewildering than the first trip had been. If Sindérian had tried to count and remember all the turns, the ascending and descending tunnels, she could never have done it. But she made no such attempt. Once she and her companions left King Yri’s realm behind, she had no plans—indeed, no wish—to ever return again.
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