Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Kidnapped,” said Tembujin. “Taken away on a ship whose sail was painted with a winged bull.”

  “Pirates? Have they demanded ransom? I shall ransom her!” Andrion’s hand closed upon the hilt of Solifrax and it murmured vengeance.

  “They were no pirates,” said Patros. “They did not take Valeria’s jewelry. And there has been no message.”

  Valeria told the tale by rote. “Our serving women were ill,” she concluded, “having eaten tainted food, it seemed, so we had only the one, a new girl named Rue. It was she, I fear, who told the brigands where we would be, and when; she went willingly to them. The commander looked at me with the strangest eyes …” She shivered. “I lay upon the beach until Miklos returned with the children, and brought us safely back to Sardis.”

  Miklos, thought Andrion, grasping at something, anything. “Good man. Always been a good man.” He released the sword, flexed his hand, looked curiously at his palms stained with sweat and leather. That hand had touched Sumitra and Dana as well.

  “Not all the children,” scowled Tembujin.

  Valeria sighed, a breath drawn from the same icy depth as the wind. “I lost the baby I carried. Born too early to live.”

  “Lost?” Tembujin hissed. “The child was murdered.”

  I was born too early, Andrion thought. My parents demanded my life from the gods, for I was to be winter king to my father’s summer king. The skein of his mind tangled, spinning threads of irrelevancy, even while something snagged him, something Valeria had said, something Tembujin had said. He frowned.

  “My lord, “said Valeria. “Andrion, Sumitra believed herself to be pregnant.”

  The skein knotted, strangling him. He saw his own face contort, saw his own body leap from the chair and stand quivering, reeling from the force of the blow. Who, then, shall be my heir, when summer comes again? Why, gods, why? Patros took his arm and he shook it away. Strike quickly, at anyone, at anything. “Tembujin, did you know she was pregnant?”

  The black eyes crusted with caution. “No. If I had, I would have wished you and her and the child well.”

  “Seeing no more chance for your son to rule? No more chance for you to rule through your sons? No more chance for you to crow over me?”

  “What do you imply?” Tembujin crouched like a lion.

  “Andrion,” said Patros soothingly.

  He did not want to be soothed. His jaw was so tight it writhed in pain. In another moment his heart would writhe and he would be unmanned, here before them all. “Someone plots against me, against Sabazel, someone, perhaps, who seeks vengeance against those who defeated his people. Who defeated him.”

  “Go on, say it,” spat Tembujin.

  “Sabazel?” Patros asked quietly, but the intensity of his voice sliced through the others.

  Andrion turned, mouth open, and whatever scathing words he had meant for Tembujin subsided into ash. Gods! he shouted to himself, have you woven each individual agony into some intricate, indecipherable pattern greater than its parts? “The woman Rue, bearing the sign of the winged bull, stole the star shield. Ilanit is ill, Sabazel is ill, Sumitra is gone!”

  He could not look at Patros’s stricken face, at Tembujin’s and Valeria’s shocked eyes; the walls billowed around him, surged forward like the waves of the sea, threatened to smother him. Gasping for breath, he spun about and plunged from the room.

  The corridor was cool and dim, dawn still struggling with the smoky shadows of the night. Bonifacio, attended by a tidy line of acolytes, stood exchanging courtesies with Patros’s wife Kleothera. At the sudden entrance of the emperor, Bonifacio halted in mid-phrase, turned his back upon her, bowed deeply. The other priests bowed even more deeply. I wager, Andrion thought with renewed irrelevance, that he has chosen no one stronger than himself. Except perhaps that acolyte Rowan who was with him in Iksandarun—yes, there he is, such large eyes—what the hell difference do the man’s name or face or strength make?

  Patros and Tembujin rushed into the corridor. Their eyes targeted Andrion. Everyone’s eyes targeted Andrion. He was pierced through and through as if by black Khazyari arrows.

  Bonifacio’s vacuous face bobbed before him. “My lord, my condolences upon the loss of your wife. The eyes of Harus will surely guard her in the afterlife. We, his lowly servants, can only continue in this life.”

  Blithering idiot, Andrion told himself with one last thread of sanity.

  Bonifacio continued with properly solemn mien, “The lady Sumitra would doubtless have wanted her lord to take another wife. I have a list of several noblewomen who would be suitable.” He produced a piece of paper from his capacious sleeve and thrust it into Andrion’s face.

  Sanity snapped, and the frayed ends lashed into frenzy. Andrion plucked the list from Bonifacio’s fingers, tore it to shreds, dashed the bits to the floor. His hands closed on the priest’s feather-trimmed robe. Bonifacio’s toes scrabbled for the floor and his jowls flapped in fear as his face approached the rich brown eyes of the emperor and was singed in their fiery depths, leaving him naked of pretense and pride.

  “Why are you so sure Sumitra is dead?” Andrion snarled. “Convenient, is it not, that she was carried away in my absence?”

  Bonifacio gabbled. Kleothera’s veil creased her rosy cheeks as she grinned at the priest’s discomfiture. The acolytes huddled around Rowan like sheep around a shepherd.

  Andrion threw Bonifacio into their midst. Solifrax blazed, and the morning shadows fled before its radiance. “By the pinfeathers of the god, priest, you shall not come to me again until you come crawling at the hem of my wife’s cloak! It is my choice whom I wed, and when and where!”

  Tembujin and Patros exchanged a wry glance; Sumitra had not been Andrion’s choice, not at first, but it would take a braver man than Bonifacio to remind him of that now.

  Bonifacio sprawled, sobbing his fealty. And Andrion realized, as though dashing cold water into his own face, that he was terrorizing the man before his subordinates, that he had lost his temper—Harus, was his temper that of a king or was it not?

  Andrion stood as stony as one of his own statues while Bonifacio and his minions scuttled away, colliding in the doorway in their haste to be gone. Their footsteps faded. The wind purred about the palace. Solifrax was dull and heavy in his hand. Tears seared tracks through the dirt on his face, as hot as droplets of lifeblood, revealing the mortal flesh beneath.

  “Do you really think Bonifacio is responsible?” Patros asked.

  “No more than I think Tembujin is,” groaned Andrion. Courtesy, as vital in ruling as doubt; he sheathed his sword and opened his palm to the khan, accepting a slight bow in return. But Tembujin’s eyes were still guarded. Yes, of course, in my uncertainty I wound my own right arm… .

  The tiny rounded form of Kleothera appeared at Andrion’s elbow. “Now,” she said briskly, “you must rest. I shall let no one else annoy you.” She conducted Andrion into a nearby chamber, efficiently divested him of his armor and put him to bed, standing on no ceremony with an emperor a generation younger than she.

  She had been the widow of a Sardian officer, not an aristocrat, but the nobility of her spirit matched Patros’s own. As Patros gravely accepted sword and diadem, his eyes were drawn to his wife; a happy marriage was still a novelty to him. Marriage, Andrion’s mind wailed. Wife.

  Kleothera offered him a cup. His hands shook, sloshing the white liquid, and she steadied it for him. “Valerian, almond milk, and anemone,” she said, “to help you sleep.”

  Anemone, yes, he thought. And asphodel, the flower of love and death, the flower of Sabazel. The light of the sword and shield gnawed by darkness… . His thought unraveled. Kleothera stroked his brow, and he fell headlong into dream-haunted sleep.

  Chapter Four

  The ship hovered for a moment on the crest of the wave, and then with an odd sideways slither, wallowed into the trough.

  In the tiny cabin Sumitra could not tell whether it was night or day. It could have been o
nly a few hours since she had been taken, or it could have been months. Ropes whined amid an occasional rush of feet overhead; boards creaked in agony, as if at any moment the ship would disintegrate and cast her into the pulsing roar of the sea.

  Her head, too, pulsed. The stink of tainted bilge water and the reek of the guttering oil lamp hung about her, and her stomach wriggled like some slimy creature found under an overturned rock. In spite of herself she groaned.

  Rue hurriedly wiped Sumitra’s gelid forehead. The cloth was moistened with saltwater, and it, too, stank. “The first months of pregnancy are indeed difficult,” she essayed.

  Sumitra fixed the serving woman with a baleful glare. “So you know of that, too. Inspecting my body linen, I suppose.”

  Rue turned and wrung the rag in a basin, concealing her face.

  “I am ill because I have never been on such a small ship before,” Sumitra insisted. The tiny flame of the lamp leaped and danced. The cabin was as small as a tomb, the narrow bed the frame of a coffin. Andrion would have to bend double even to enter the door. Andrion… . Certainly they had taken her to strike at him. Unless—unless he had chosen this method of putting her aside. But he would not have his own soldiers killed, he would not have her so terrified. If he no longer wanted her, he would simply tell her, as was his right… . His face flickered before her, pared of its wry humor, sharp with rage; no, Andrion would never stoop to such a scheme.

  The ship wallowed again. Her eyes crossed. The vision faded. “Why betray me, Rue?” she croaked. “Why betray your emperor?”

  “He is not my emperor. I serve another, greater ruler.”

  Sumitra frowned. Before she could speak, the door opened and a man ducked inside. Even in the dimness, with such uncertain senses, Sumitra could see the opulent Rexian purple cloak he wore. A merchant prince, then, or perhaps a prince of the blood. No mere pirate.

  And his face was no brigand’s. Its planes were sculpted in creamy marble rather than human flesh, its angles smoothed and polished. His golden hair was bound with a fillet and his golden beard was neatly trimmed; his eyes were as pale and clear as a silver mirror. Something moved there, concealed by the tints of gold and purple, like a shadow in the depths of a crystal ball.

  He nodded brusquely. Rue scuttled away, permitted only one yearning glance at his beauty.

  So he was the ruler she served. Sumitra tried to straighten her hair and her garments, and succeeded only in sitting up. The ship heaved. She grabbed for the bed rail. The man did not stir. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Eldrafel,” he replied, admitting to no particular rank. His long, delicate fingers touched the ruby in her nose. She stiffened, but his hand fell back to his side. “You are Sumitra, first wife of the emperor Andrion Bellasteros.” It was a statement, not a question.

  She was not quite sure she liked the way those names sounded in his odd, singsong accent. When he spoke again, the words flowed past her before she could quite hear them; his voice was not deep but vibrant, with the low eddies and undertones of a reed flute. “… jaw is shattered. He might live, maimed; probably he will die. You defended yourself well.”

  Oh. The man she had struck with the stool. Nausea swept her again. But Eldrafel’s probing gray eyes were not angry; they were self-possessed, with callousness, perhaps, or with a sardonic pleasure at her spirit.

  She felt naked before his cool scrutiny, her every thought offered like delicacies on a banquet platter; her head spun and her stomach congealed into a lump of lead. She turned away, and he was gone.

  Sumitra gasped for air as if he had taken her breath away with him. Decisively, she stood. The ship wallowed, and she staggered against the far wall, one step away. There was her zamtak, tossed against a row of amphorae, a couple of the strings loosened and curling disconsolately.

  Sumitra took the wet rag and cleaned it of sand. She perched on the edge of the bunk, tightening and then tuning the strings. The plinks and trills were familiar and therefore soothing; slowly the harshness of her expression softened and her nausea ebbed. A tear glistened in her eye and she brushed it away. “What good would it do to weep?” she asked herself aloud.

  As if in reply she heard, below the cacophony of the laboring ship, a faint sound of chimes. It was so much like the chime of Solifrax that she started up. Then, with a grimace and a shake of her head, she turned again to the zamtak. The strings hummed under her touch. Music filled the room, a plaintive ballad making whorls in semidarkness.

  Again the chimes. Sumitra laid her hand across the strings, but the music hung in the air, summoning light out of darkness. There was a shapeless canvas-wrapped bundle thrown carelessly behind the amphorae. A clear pale light seemed to be shining tentatively through the cloth.

  Sumitra stared at it a moment, doubting her senses. But the light was unmistakable; not the crystalline light of Solifrax, but something similar, an otherworldly purity and beauty.

  She lay down the zamtak. Slowly, her hands beginning to tremble, she pulled the bundle out and tugged at its bindings. A large disk, metal, but not as heavy as bronze. The rough canvas parted. Beneath was the smooth and glowing surface of a shield.

  “No,” Sumitra said under her breath. “It cannot be, not here.”

  In the center of the shield was emblazoned a many-pointed star. It pulsed gently, singing a song almost beyond conscious perception. And yet Sumitra heard. “Yes. It is the shield of Sabazel. By the third eye of Vaiswanara …” She smiled at herself. “No. By the blue eyes, by the golden tresses of Ashtar, how did you come here?”

  The shield quieted. Sumitra sat a long time, stroking the warm metal surface, brushing it clean of dust, oblivious to the smells and sounds around her. The star tingled under her hands as if kissing them, and when the oil lamp flickered wildly and went out she did not notice.

  “So,” she said at last. “You, too, have been kidnapped. I must keep you safe, for those who search for you will surely join those who search for me. Although you are essential to Sabazel, and I am not at all essential to the Empire, heir or no heir …” Her lips tightened. She whispered, “Ashtar, if Andrion is your child, then so, surely, is this child I carry; keep it safe, I pray, for its father’s arms, for will those arms not open to me again?”

  The shield flickered with a faint, faraway luminescence and then faded. Sumitra nodded, her prayer answered. Smiling, humming her ballad, she carefully wrapped the shield again and set it beside the bunk, next to her zamtak. She lay down and composed herself for sleep, her hands folded upon her belly. Her great dark eyes stared up into the murk and through it, finding serenity upon the other side.

  *

  Andrion stood on a palace balcony overlooking the Sar, rubbing his chin reflectively. The serving girl who had shaved him had been so excited at touching the handsome young monarch, her hands had shaken. But she had not done too much damage. Her fluttering bosom had really been quite lovely; he realized only now that he had noticed it.

  The evening sky was scrubbed clean, shining cobalt shading to gold in the west, where the evening star hung suspended. Andrion’s thought twisted like wool thread around its spindle, raveling in the spinner’s hands, knotting and breaking and twisting again.

  He leaned over the parapet to watch Bonifacio and his acolytes—a row of goslings behind a goose—march through a crowd of waiting people to the end of a long pier. No wonder Bonifacio had been up and about so early this morning; it was the Day of Divine Retribution. The priest had no doubt spent the intervening hours catechizing the populace with their year’s misdeeds. He made an expansive gesture toward the emperor, a thousand faces turned hopefully up, and Andrion waved; let the ceremony begin!

  Children, Tembujin’s and others, frolicked down the balcony, their sweet voices innocent of desire or death. A tentative wind wafted Bonifacio’s drone upward. With a snort Andrion turned away, doubting if such a passive ceremony could heal the malaise haunting him, haunting his world. Solifrax chimed gently and he touched it, asking it, your
will or mine?

  He was caught by the domestic tableau in the governor-general’s study, figures as vivid as if cast from the shimmering evening light. Valeria and Kleothera sat cooing over Dana’s baby. Dana made some pleasantry for her father Patros, who returned it with discreet affection. Tembujin offered noncommittal commonplaces that ran like water from Sarasvati’s cool, polite, not entirely humorless, rejoinders. If her eye strayed every now and then to Ethan, if Dana could not keep herself from glancing at Zefric, Tembujin diplomatically did not notice.

  Then the tableau cracked, the voices faded. Sumitra was not there. The world was colorless without the bright yarns of her tapestry; it was out of tune without the music of her voice and her zamtak.

  The faces in the study, too, turned to Andrion. They chose hope beyond despair; who could blame them? They would flay him alive with their hope. He hid his expression by leaning over to tickle the baby. No consolation; the child gazed up at him with the even green eyes of his mother. Sumitra’s child would no doubt have brown eyes… .

  “We shall name the baby Declan,” said Patros. “Kleothera’s own niece shall be his nurse.”

  “I am pleased,” Andrion said, clearing his throat.

  “We shall send in exchange a baby girl rescued from a garbage pile.” Kleothera clucked scornfully. “How could anyone cast out a babe simply because it is female? I had thought such customs forgotten.”

  “It was Bellasteros who banned such practice,” said Andrion, crossing the room to join Patros at his desk. “He always cringed to remember how Chryse’s father exposed the younger of her two daughters, embarrassed that Chryse could not bear the Prince of Sardis an heir. That stiff old general lies uneasy in his grave, I wager, because Bellasteros’s heir was born at last …” Kleothera nodded encouragingly; she was too intelligent not to have discerned the truth. “… to the Queen of Sabazel,” he finished.