by Judith Tarr
She looked up from that ancient face to the living one of the Lord Seramon. He was crowned with stars—the first that she had seen since, young and rebellious, she had gone up on the roof of her mother’s house and looked full into the eyes of the night.
Darkness was terrible. Darkness was death. And yet in that face which was so dark, she found only comfort. He smiled at her. She wanted to melt into his arms, but she was not made for such softness. She turned from him, but without rejection, and led him into the royal house.
No human creature died that night, and no animal, either, nor was any villager stolen from his house. One field was stripped, but those near it were untouched. The wards had held.
There was festival in the villages. The people did not understand precisely what had saved them; only that priests and nobles had wielded magic, and that a god had shown them the way.
That their queen should take the god as a consort, they found perfectly right and fitting. The court reckoned it a scandal: three days he had been there, a shockingly brief time to come so far or to presume so much. But Tanit had expected that. She could see it, too: how sudden it was. Yet in her heart there was nothing sudden about it at all.
Seti-re brought them together in the temple before the gods and the people. He was a good and proper ally; he put on a face, if not of joy, then at least of acceptance. He set her hand in the Lord Seramon’s and blessed them in the names of the gods, and performed the sacrifice of a white heifer and a black bull-calf, pouring out their blood over the altar-stone.
Tanit was in a world outside the world. She saw herself in royal state, robed and crowned, with her face painted into the mask of a goddess, and her hair hidden beneath an elaborate structure of plaits and beads and gold. She saw him beside her, more simply dressed, but wearing royalty as easily, as naturally as his skin. How strange that he the god should keep no more state than any noble bridegroom, but she who was inescapably mortal should wear the semblance of divinity.
His fingers laced in hers, his eyes warm upon her, brought her back into her body. “From before time I have known you,” she said.
She had spoken in silence, in a pause in the rite. Seti-re looked affronted. But he mattered not at all. The Lord Seramon bent his head. “From beyond the horizon I came to you,” he said, “and when the worlds have passed away, still I will belong to you.”
Those were the vows that bound them, far more than blessings spoken by any priest. They were truth so simple, so pure and absolute, that there could be no breaking them.
She did not, even then, feel constrained. For this she had been born. Whatever came of it, she would never regret the choice that she had made.
The wedding feast had been prepared in haste, but the cooks had outdone themselves. There was a roast ox and a flock of wild geese roasted and stuffed with dates and barley, heaping platters of cakes made with nuts and honey and sweet spices, plates and bowls of greens and roots and fruit both fresh and dried, and an endless procession of lesser delights. At evening the guests did not flee as they had so often before. The bold would go home under protection of the wards, and the rest would stay in the palace until the sun rose.
Estarion would not have been startled to discover that he was expected to play host to all of them through what should have been the wedding night. He had known stranger customs. He was seated apart from the queen, among the great men of the kingdom; she sat with a flock of ladies, as blankly unreadable as a painted image.
He set himself to be charming to these men who eyed him in wariness or hostility or, here and there, open speculation. He was somewhat out of practice in the art of seducing courtiers, but it was not a skill one could altogether forget. These courtiers were far less jaded than those of Asanion, if not quite as easy in their manners as those of his northern kingdoms. They were not warriors, but neither were they purely creatures of courts. They made him think of small landowners and gentlemen farmers of the Hundred Realms: bound to the earth, the river, the hunt; shaped in small compass, but not petty of either mind or spirit.
He liked them. They were as flawed as men of any other world, but there was honesty in them, and care for their people, even under the long weight of the shadow. He had learned the names of each, and would learn their lands, their cares, their kin—later. Tonight he learned their minds, how they thought, what they hoped for; what, apart from the darkness, they feared.
Not long after sunset, a servant bent toward his ear and murmured, “Lord. It’s time.”
He had been listening to a tale told by a lord from a holding upriver, of hunting terrible long-toothed beasts in the cataracts of the south. “They can bite a man in a half,” the lord said, “and fling a calf out of his skin with a toss of the head. They have a taste for manflesh; they’ll raid boats and steal the boatmen’s children. Once I heard tell—”
The servant touched Estarion’s shoulder, polite but urgent. “Lord!”
He excused himself as courteously as he could. No one took offense, even the teller of tales: a grin ran round the circle, and they vied in wishing him well. The warmth of their regard followed him out of the hall.
The servant led him not toward the queen’s chambers as he had expected, nor to his own, but to a part of the palace which he had yet to explore. It was older than the rest, lower, darker, less airy and elegant. Its walls were plastered and painted, but the paint was fading. The air smelled of dust and age, overlaid with the scent of flowers.
They entered a chamber that might once have been a royal hall. Squat pillars held up the roof. The center was an island of light, banks of lamps arrayed in a broad circle, rising up toward the pillars and suspended from the ceiling. The extravagance of it, the soft clarity of the light, made all the richer the carpet of flowers that spread across the worn stone of the floor.
A bed was set there, strewn with fragrant petals, and beside it a table and a chest, the accoutrements of a royal bedchamber. She was not there. But for the servant, and the cat who coiled purring at the bed’s foot, he was alone. In a moment, the servant effaced himself and was gone.
Estarion smiled. He had a fondness for the unexpected, if it was not too deadly. He took off his kilt and jewels and laid them in the chest, which was empty, and unbound the ropes of gold and strings of beads from his hair; then plaited it again in a single thick braid, bound off with a bit of cord. He sat cross-legged on the bed, and waited in the patience that priests and mages learned in youth.
Soft airs played across his skin. The scent of flowers was almost overpowering. Within himself he felt the wards upon city and kingdom. The darkness was late in coming; the night was quiet, the stars untainted. He knew a prickle of unease, of old and intractable suspicion: a deep mistrust of stillness in the heart of war.
Such quiet could be a gift, if a general had both wisdom and courage. Old habits were waking, fitting themselves to him like familiar garments. Yet he was calmer than he had been then, less impatient, less inclined to indulge his temper. He had learned to wait.
Almost he laughed. Patience indeed! Three days in this world, and he had bound himself to it with no honest thought for the consequences. And yet he could not find it in himself to regret it. What he had said to her in the temple was true. This had been ordained; this was where he was meant to be, and she, in this age of both their worlds.
He looked up in his island of light, into her face. She was standing on the edge of the darkness. Her mask of paint was gone, all but the jeweled elaboration of the eyes. Her hair was free, blue-black and shining, pouring down her back to the sweet curve of her buttocks. She was wrapped in a gown of sheer white linen, such as he had seen before. As before, it concealed nothing. The dark aureoles of her nipples, the triangle of her private hair, were but thinly veiled.
Her eyes were wide and dark, and blank, almost blind. Yet he knew that she saw every line of him. He frightened her a little with his size and darkness, the breadth of his shoulders and the strength of his arms and thighs. She was avoiding
, with care, the thing that both frightened and fascinated her most.
He rose. He heard the faint catch of her breath, but she did not retreat. When he knelt, she eased a little. He was not so towering tall then, or so inclined to loom. He smiled at her. He might have thought that all those sharp white teeth would alarm her, but she warmed to his warmth, and smiled somewhat shakily in return.
She advanced into the light. Her feet bruised the blossoms strewn on the floor, sending up a gust of sweetness. She knelt in front of him, and lightly, almost trembling, brushed his lips with hers.
The leap of his body toward her took him aback with its strength. He mastered it before it flung him upon her. It seemed she sensed nothing. While he knelt rigidly still, she traced the lines of his face with her fingers. Her touch was like the brush of fire over his skin. She followed the track of a scar, the curve of his lip; she hesitated ever so slightly between smoothness of cheekbone and prick of close-shaved stubble. She coaxed his mouth open and stroked a salt-sweet fingertip across his tongue, and counted his teeth as if he had been a senel at a fair, catching her finger on the sharp curve of a canine. Her own were not so many; they were blunter, and her tongue, running over them, was pink.
Her scent was musk and spices. He breathed it in while she explored his body, downward from his face across neck and shoulders and breast, down his arms, along his sides. She turned his hands palm up, the dark and the gold, and assured herself that indeed it was gold, born in the flesh, rooted deep in bone and sinew. The fire in it, so much a part of him that it had long ago ceased to be pain, flared suddenly, then just as suddenly eased. He met her eyes and fell down and down, headlong into joy.
The love of man and woman was an awkward and often ridiculous thing. Tanit, in teaching herself the ways of his body, the things that were subtly or not so subtly different, knew that she was putting off the inevitable. With Kare the king, it had been a thing she did out of duty. She lay as still as she could, and, did as he bade, and waited for it to be over. Then in a few months, either the blood and the pain came, or the child was born and drew a breath and died.
With this man who was not exactly a man, with his blue-black tongue and his predator’s teeth, she caught herself thinking thoughts that she had never imagined she could think. Her maids did, and ladies of the court, too—their gossip was full of it, how this man’s face or that man’s eyes or another man’s private parts made their bellies melt. She had never melted for anyone—until, so brief a time ago, this stranger from beyond the horizon lay unconscious at her feet.
He was fully conscious now, kneeling subject to her will, with a look about him that made it clear how great an effort it was to remain so still. He had mastered even that part of him. How she knew that it was force of will and not lack of desire, she could not tell; she only knew that it was so.
Her heart was beating hard. Her skin was now hot, now cold. Her belly—yes, her belly was melting as she looked at him, his beauty and strangeness. His eyes were as deep as the river. His lips tasted of honey, drowning her in sweetness.
His breast, his legs and arms, were lightly pelted with curling hair. She ran fingers through that on his breast. He quivered; then stilled. He was waking below. His will was weakening, or he had loosed its bonds.
She should cast off her gown and lie on the bed and let him get it over. But the fear in her would not let her do that—fear, and something else. Something that was inextricably a part of the melting in her middle. She wanted—she needed—
He rose in one long fluid movement, sweeping her up with such effortless strength that she laughed, borne as on a wave of the river. Her arms linked about his neck. She had gone from fear to a dizzy delight, a singing brightness in which nothing mattered, no darkness, no terror, only those eyes meeting hers and that body warm against her. For long moments she was not even certain which body was his, and which hers. They were all one, all woven together, flesh and manifold souls.
It was not as awkward as she had feared. Her body knew, after all, how to dance the dance. When it was ridiculous, he laughed as hard as she, rolling together in the banks of flowers.
He ended on his back, she sprawled along the length of him. He shifted; she stirred. She gasped. He was inside her, filling her, just on the edge of pain; until with a sigh she let the pain go. He had sobered. His eyes were softer than she had ever thought they could be. She kissed the lid of each, and found the long slow rhythm, the ebb and surge of the world.
When the release came, she cried out in astonishment. She had never—she could never—
It broke like the crest of the river in flood. She sank down and forever down, cradled in his arms, in a sweetness of crushed flowers. He was breathing lightly, as if he had been running. Skin slid on skin, slicked with sweat. She lifted a head that felt impossibly heavy. His eyes were shut, his head tilted back, but she could feel his awareness like a brush of fingers down her spine. Was this what it was to have magic?
“This is what it is to love a mage,” he said. He kissed the crown of her head. “Beautiful lady.”
“Splendid man.”
He laughed softly. Her heart was singing—and so, her bones knew, was his. They would raise the light, and break the darkness. She knew that, just then, in that night in which the shadows never came.
FIFTEEN
TELL ME OF YOUR WORLD,” SHE SAID.
They lay together in the long stretch of night before dawn. She had slept; he had rested in the quiet. Deep quiet, empty of enemies.
She had awakened in his arms, rumpled and beautiful. Her thoughts murmured inside of his. The words grew out of them. “What is it like? Is it like this?”
“A little,” he said. “The sky, the sun—they’re very like. We have deserts and rivers and green country. Mountains; too, and seas, which are rivers that fill the world, and taste powerfully of salt.”
“We know of seas,” she said. “The river flows into one. They say it’s green. Someday I mean to see it and know for myself.” And after a pause: “Tell me more.”
“There are two moons,” he said. “One is red, like blood, and so vast that in some seasons it seems to fill half the sky. The other is white and small and very bright. Long ago people believed that the red moon was the darkness’ child, and the white moon was born of the light. Now we believe that darkness and light are twinned; that one cannot exist without the other.”
She sighed on his breast. “And you? You believe that?”
“I know that in my world it is true.”
“That is rather wonderful,” she said. “Fitting for a world full of gods.”
“There are men, too. And women.”
“But not you.”
“I was born,” he said, “of a line of divine madmen. The first of them was a renegade without a father, a priestess’ son when priestesses were put to death for violating their vows of fidelity to the god. But she had lain with the god, or with a man who had been possessed by the god—no one ever truly doubted that, not once they knew him. He was … not as other men were. He won himself an empire, but saw his own heir turn against him, make alliance with the son of his great enemy and so cast him down. The two of them imprisoned him in a tower of magic and enchanted him into sleep, and so took him out of the world but not out of life. With that act they made a greater empire, and ruled it together. Their son inherited, and his son after him, and after him my father. Then I was born, and I was to be all that was most splendid in our world: mage, king, priest of Sun and Shadow.
“When I was twelve years old, a rebel killed my father. I destroyed the murderer, but nearly destroyed myself. It was long years before I was whole again. I was emperor for a mortal lifetime. I saw my son born, and I saw him die. I raised his daughter to be my heir, and she raised hers. When their time had come, I left the empire to them, and walked away.”
“Such tales,” she said. “Such brevity. I’ll make you tell me the whole of every story.”
“Only if you promise to tell me y
ours.”
“Mine is nothing,” she said. “I come from a lordly family near the border of Ta-senet. My mother is the old priest’s daughter and the high priest’s sister. I was married in youth to the king. The king died; there was no one else to rule the city. Now I am queen, and the rest you know.”
“Such brevity,” he said. “This is why there are singers and poets: because we who live the tales have no gift for telling them.”
She laughed her rich bubbling laugh. “My singers will make a legend for you and spare you the trouble. May you be the son of a god and a goddess? Were they gloriously beautiful?”
“My mother was,” he said. “She was a chieftain’s daughter of a wild tribe, a priestess of the dark goddess. My father saw her dancing by the fire one night as he tarried with the tribe during a hunt. He loved her then and ever after. It was a scandal in its day: he had resisted every marriage that anyone tried to make for him, and when at long last he did marry, he married for love.”
“Ah,” she sighed. “You can tell a tale after all. Will I be a scandal among the gods? Will they be horrified to discover that you gave yourself in marriage to a mortal woman?”
Estarion’s lips twitched. One corner of his mouth turned irresistibly upward. “My heir will be absolutely appalled. She was as rebellious a child as a king should ever hope not to have. She chose her daughter’s father for his beauty and lineage, used him like a fine bull, and sent him home to his wives when she had what she wanted of him. It was years before even I learned who had fathered her child. But then she found a noble consort, a man of perfect probity, and married him and adopted his son and became everything that she had formerly professed to despise. She’s a better ruler than I ever was, and more truly suited to it, but a more humorless creature I’ve seldom known.”
“Humor is not a virtue in a ruler,” Tanit said.