Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Dana, leaning on the back of Patros’s chair, glanced sharply up. She ascertained that Andrion was attempting a black joke, and offered him a slightly off-center smile before looking back down at the parchment her father held. On it was a drawing of a winged bull.

  “Ah,” Andrion said. Old problem or new, it was still a question of succession.

  “Sarasvati,” said Patros, “did this from her memory of Rue’s armband and from Valeria’s description of the ship’s sail. I sent a copy to the harbor with Nikander; you may remember, my lord, that his brother Niarkos is an admiral. And… .”

  Patros paused, making sure of his facts. Andrion nudged gently, “And?”

  “Sailor’s rumors say that the harbor of Minras is guarded by statues of winged bulls. It is their god, Taurmenios.”

  “Ah,” said Andrion. Of course, the dark legends of Taurmenios gathered like smoke on the borders of old tales. Minras, and his half-sister Chrysais, a stranger to him. He turned to Sarasvati. “When Rue said that Ilanit’s queenly aspect reminded her of Chryse …”

  She nodded, following his thought. “She did not say ‘Chryse,’ did she? She said ‘Chrysais’.”

  “Chrysais was the sister of that exposed child.” Andrion shook himself. These irrelevancies were becoming annoying. If indeed they were irrelevancies. One stitch at a time.

  He paced up and down, thinking aloud. Patros’s crisp voice, Dana’s and Tembujin’s quick wits, pulled each strand of thought to its end. The attacks on Tembujin, the theft of the shield, the kidnapping of Sumitra—was it paranoia or insight to see it all as a plot to bring him north and send him rushing heedlessly beyond the borders of the Empire, to turn his eye away from plots here or to draw him to Minras or both … If someone wanted to seize the Empire, he had picked a damnably subtle way of going about it. “Does the power of Gath of Minras reach even to Iksandarun?” Andrion exclaimed.

  “King Gath is dead, my lord,” Patros reminded him. “He and Chrysais had a son, I think, but he would not be old enough to rule.”

  “Why torment Sabazel?” Dana asked. “Very few know just how firmly you are bound to it.” Patros’s face tightened; she did not have to say her mother’s name to remind him of her or of dead Lyris.

  “We must not leap to conclusions,” Andrion stated in his best council-chamber voice, even as he asked himself if he did not already leap. “Someone with a very long arm plays games with me. With us all. It may be someone merely hiding behind Minras—someone here, perhaps, who wants me gone. It may be that the gods themselves use us once again for sport.”

  The faces watched him, Patros trusting, Dana resigned, Tembujin almost challenging. “I shall send someone to Minras,” announced Andrion. “Miklos and a small company, I think, to scout the lay of the land. A legion to Rhodope, to wait. Nikander will go south to Iksandarun, to govern while I wait here.”

  Tembujin leaned on the other side of the desk. “I shall go to Minras. My lord.”

  “My lord?” Andrion repeated skeptically.

  “I would prove my loyalty to you. I would avenge my child—and my guard Ursbei.”

  “Damn it, man, you need prove nothing to me.”

  The tip-tilted black eyes said otherwise. Andrion spun away from them; to prove that he does not plot against me, he shoulders my burden and goes away. Suitable payment for my doubting him, leaving me relieved and dirtied by my relief.

  Patros stirred in the currents that swept past him, his eye fixed warily on his elder daughter. And if I ever doubt Patros, thought Andrion, I would be dirty indeed; if his loyalty ever wavered, the night would be too dark to survive… .

  “I shall go to Minras,” said Dana, addressing not Andrion’s face but the wall beyond his shoulder. “Without the shield, my daughter has no land to inherit.”

  My daughter. But not my heir. Succession, and rule, and I … Andrion took a deep breath, but it could not penetrate the knot in his chest. The draperies fluttered in the wind.

  Night had crept silently across Sardis. The room was dim, lit only by the soft light of the lamp on Patros’s desk. Declan began to wail. Dana took him from Kleothera’s arms and opened her shirt. Here he would be cared for, here she could leave him; here she could leave Andrion to follow the letter of her everlasting law … A tear ran from beneath her lashes and fell upon the baby’s tiny form like a kiss of farewell. It might have been a drop of molten lead on Andrion’s heart.

  Tembujin bent solicitously over Valeria. His eye touched Dana and passed on, but not before Andrion read their expression; he knew well that reluctant thirst. His mouth tasted the savor of milk and oranges even as his nostrils filled with the scent of jasmine.

  The children were shouting. Abruptly, he turned and followed them outside. The stars were bright hard points of steel against the velvet drape of the sky. The moon was cut as cleanly in half as if by the blade of Solifrax. The wind was bracingly cold, ringing toward the sea, and the sword rang in response against his thigh.

  Myriad pinpricks of light flared along the riverbank. One by one they seemed to leap down into the dark and quiet stream. Candles in tiny glass cups, red, green, gold, blue, rode on wooden rafts and cleverly folded paper boats down the river to the sea, bearing away with them the year’s regrets. A contented sigh rose from the gathered Sardians, and Andrion allowed himself a rueful smile.

  Once it had been customary to slaughter a bull or a ram and cast it into the river; as the current swept it away, it carried with it the transgressions of the year before. It was Chryse who had begun today’s gentler custom. Perhaps there was a place, Andrion thought, in the midst of the sea, where all those cast-off guilts lay gathered in soggy piles, no longer able to wound.

  The lights flowed toward the sea. His thought strained toward the sea. His smile tightened into a grimace. How can I leave my fate and the fate of those I love, how can I leave the fate of the land itself in the hands of others? Even if those other hands belong to the gods themselves. But is it my pride that speaks, or something more practical, a small internal bookkeeper calculating his columns of credits and debts?

  The candles dwindled down the glossy sheet of the Sar. Andrion leaned over the balcony after them. And suddenly the necklace of the moon and star lifted from his throat and tugged at him, as insistent as if it would drag him over the railing into the water and draw him, lit bright with his own uncertainty and decision, over the horizon to his fate.

  Surprised, he laughed. When had he ever been favored with a sign when he needed one? But then, when had he ever waited for a sign before making a decision? No, he would not grow old and stale, forfeiting that daring that had won him an Empire. If he could not untangle this intricate plot that knotted around him, then he would cut it open.

  And surely, surely, murmured the bookkeeper in his mind, the tug of the necklace meant that the Empire would be safe.

  “I, too, shall go to Minras,” he stated, to the lights, to the necklace, to that part of him squatted in sulky caution over its ledger scroll. “The water in the sea is salt, but it is there that my thirst will be slaked.”

  The necklace fell noiselessly back against his throat. The candles vanished. Their dancing colors were reflected in the stars above and in the star that trembled against his pulse, and never quite disappeared.

  Chapter Five

  Dana grasped the railing as the deck seemed to fall away from her feet. She thanked Ashtar that the journey was almost over; Minras was a glistening cloud on the horizon. I have probably become so accustomed to this awkward sea scuttle, she thought glumly, I will now be unable to walk on land.

  Tembujin and Andrion gazed ahead, black hair and black cloak rippling. The string of the bow on Dana’s shoulder sang in the wind; Tembujin’s bow, unstrung, lay at his feet. And yet the wind was growing gusty, about to fail. The flesh pricked on the back of Dana’s neck, and impatiently she shrugged the qualm away. Not yet, I cannot do anything yet. I must get there first.

  Beside her Niarkos averred, “This ha
s been a remarkably fast passage. Not that I ever came here before, my lord, but I believe that twenty days to Minras from Sardis is most unusual. A strong, fair wind made all the difference. She has flown like a crane.”

  Ah, yes, Dana thought. A ship was “she,” for no discernible reason.

  “Thanks be to, er—Harus,” said Andrion, with a sage nod. The corner of his mouth crimped. Guiltily, Dana hoped, at denying Ashtar, guardian of the wind, her due. She glanced up at the taut sail, at the noon sky like polished silver, and back down at the water foaming past the great blue eyes painted upon the bow of the ship. Blue eyes; sailors were no fools.

  “Odd,” Tembujin said from her other side. “The—what did you call them, Admiral, dolphins?—are no longer riding the bow wave.”

  “Perhaps they do not want to come so close to land,” Niarkos returned, with such heavy-handed nonchalance that both Dana and Andrion glanced sharply at him.

  If Nikander was a great turtle, deliberate and laconic, his brother Niarkos was a sturdy sea lion, given to odd bellowings and pawings. He was upset that the dolphins had left; that much was clear.

  Niarkos withdrew, leaving Andrion and Dana confronted with each other. Andrion, Dana thought—something about Andrion, some image gnawing the edge of her thought like a hungry rat. The breeze faltered, the air grew sultrier. Andrion wiped a brow shining with more than heat sweat. He had been reticent during the voyage, lighting with only an occasional flash of humor, fearing, apparently, that if he revealed anything of his worries he would reveal too much of his weakness. To me, Dana shouted in silent indignation at him, you are afraid of revealing yourself to me?

  But she had to admit that neither had she been in an expansive mood. She had been feverish and snappish as her milk dried up, as she groped for images of the lost shield. Wherever the shield was, there, too, was Sumitra; she was sure of that. But her Sight was uncontrollable, and the vision that snapped sharp little teeth at her now came unbidden and unexpected.

  Andrion’s clear brow shone in the sunlight. She demanded, “Where did you leave the imperial diadem?”

  His eyes widened in surprise. “I gave it to Patros to put on Harus’s high altar, as Tembujin left his lion plaque with one of his nuryans. You were there, you saw.”

  “Yes, but …” She scowled; now that she wanted the image it pirouetted mockingly away. “I do not think it is there,” she muttered lamely.

  Tembujin made a quick dismissive gesture, impatient as always with manifestations of an otherworld he did not touch and therefore did not understand. No wonder he had spent most of the voyage playing interminable games of draughts with Niarkos and his officers as Andrion and Dana stalked about daring each other, daring anyone, to try and penetrate the carapaces they wore.

  But now Andrion stared at Dana, believing her words without question, analyzing what could be done. And, of course, nothing could be done. His clenched fist hit the wooden railing; his other fist held the hilt of Solifrax so tightly his knuckles glinted white.

  I should not have spoken, Dana berated herself. That warning was a javelin in his back. I should not have spoken.

  Suddenly the sail flapped, spilling the wind, and with a heave that sent the three of them lurching together, the ship wallowed dead in the water. Niarkos shouted incomprehensible orders. The hovering gaggle of soldiers was overrun by stampeding sailors. If Miklos had been there instead of on Rhodope with the waiting legion, he would have told the soldiers in no uncertain terms to stay clear; Andrion, suddenly recalling how few retainers he had here, growled a reprimand.

  The sail was quickly furled. Oars were produced, and under the walkway upon which Andrion, Dana, and Tembujin stood, the rowers took their places. A drum began to beat cadence, reverberating from the smooth dome of the sky. The wind whimpered.

  Dana searched the eastern horizon; there, just breaking the surface of the sea, was a frail quarter moon. They had sailed away from Sardis under a full moon, across waves that had danced, light-spangled, in the wind. She had feared that perhaps they left the moon behind, but no, it had waned, disappeared, come again just as it did in Sabazel.

  The name of Sabazel tightened her stomach and drew her shoulders up. If she had left Sabazel behind, so had she left Sardis and its chariots. Chariots had never seemed threatening before, but during the journey her vision had returned again and again; a fiery chariot, sketched in white heat, rushing down upon her.

  Minras solidified from cloud into land, seeming more line than substance through its veil of bright haze. Its coast was tattered by boulders like cast-off teeth; its spine was a high serrated ridge, anchored on the far end by the faintest suggestion of stubby peak, on the near by a conical mountain from which a thread of gray smoke curled upward to stain the colorless sky.

  “That,” said Andrion.

  “Yes,” Dana sighed. “Yes, I have seen that mountain. I had thought it only a fancy. How can a mountain burn?”

  Tembujin grimaced and shook his head.

  The mouth of the harbor was a cleft between a promontory and a small island; yes, it was bracketed by two points of light that could well be gilded statues. Beyond it was a city—Orocastria, Niarkos had named it. Dana squinted into the sun’s glare. Blocks of gray stone clambered up the steep slope from the harbor; green trees and vines, silvery now in winter, did little to soften the harsh contours of the island and its mountains. In places stony outcrops like razors sliced through city and field, as if reminding human interlopers that the rock had been there first, and suffered occupation with ill grace. And yet from this distance Orocastria seemed a prosperous and peaceful city, the harbor filled with boats and many insect-like figures toiling upon the docks.

  Andrion’s cloak shuddered in one last wheezing zephyr and lay still. His brown eyes, their flame carefully banked, seemed to Dana to scan the island as though his will alone could summon Sumitra from wherever she was hidden. Touching, Dana thought, how he went after her, how deeply he must care for her. Perhaps it was her submissiveness that appealed to him, or that she was not only a symbol of his reign but of his future realm… . Dana spat her musings into the sea as unworthy of them all.

  “Gods!” exclaimed Niarkos at Dana’s elbow. The statues beside the harbor were quite close now; huge striding golden bulls, wings unfurled, nostrils flaring at the scent of prey, sleekly sinewed shoulders and haunches the embodiment of haughty power. The tip of each curving horn was as sharp as a spear.

  But they did not prod Niarkos into exclamation. Across the harbor mouth moved a galley, a behemoth with three banks of oars instead of one. The prow was a long, cruel battering ram. “I have heard rumors of such ships,” Niarkos breathed. “I have heard that Minras rules the farther sea; perhaps it does. Look, the city has no walls. With ships like that it needs no walls.”

  “Would Minras perhaps like to rule the nearer sea?” Andrion asked under his breath.

  The trireme vanished behind a statue. Nothing else moved except the slow, glassy waves and the smoke spiraling from the crest of the mountain. The city was silent behind the hazy glare. The drum beat cadence for the oars, and the oars splashed in unison, and the sea beat against the shore, rolling louder and louder.

  “If we had been invited,” exclaimed Niarkos, “they would have sent a pilot out to lead us in. The tide is changing, but …”

  But? Dana asked herself, caught by more than Niarkos’s apprehension. The mountain puffed out a graceful cloud of dust, accompanied by a low, distant rumble. Maybe it was the gods’ smithy. A land wind shrieked past, carrying the stench of decomposing bodies and brimstone. Even as Dana gagged, another, more elusive, odor settled heavily on the back of her tongue. Sorcery.

  Andrion tensed, if possible, even tighter. Tembujin’s eyes narrowed, needing no supernal sensitivity to know that something was amiss.

  The sea was oddly slick, humping into a great swell as if some giant sea creature swam just beneath the surface. The galley slipped up one side of the monster wave and then fell down
the other, seeming barely to touch the water, oars flailing.

  “Shore current,” spat Niarkos, leaping into action.

  The drum beat faster. Officers shouted. The rowers steadied and redoubled their efforts, but to no avail. Under the condescending eyes of the alien god, the ship was swept like one of Sardis’s candles past the harbor mouth and down the coast toward the roots of the mountain. Buttress upon buttress of dark, scoriated rock loomed forbiddingly close, teasing, withdrawing, approaching again. The sea hurled itself against the jagged shore and burst into spray.

  Dana clenched her teeth in a paroxysm of frustration; this is journey’s end! This is our goal! We must come safely to shore!

  Andrion’s broad shoulder was against hers. His face wrestled with opposing expressions, now set indignantly, now wavering with fear. On her other side Tembujin muttered some profane litany in his own guttural tongue.

  The water beneath the ship was glassy. For a moment Dana thought she would see right through the blue-green depths to the sea floor, littered with shards of rock and wood and bone that rolled ceaselessly to and fro. Blue-green depths like Astra’s eyes. Astra, with her sweet red hair, her legacy stolen—if I do not win back the shield, I shall never embrace my daughter again!

  Suddenly the sea seemed to tilt sideways. The ship lurched ponderously, lurched again, and like a scrap of flotsam began to spin. The deck heeled so steeply that Dana, Andrion, and Tembujin clutched desperately at the rail. With cries of fear soldiers and seaman slipped and scrabbled down the slope of the deck. Spray filled the air like thousands of tiny sharp arrows.

  “Whirlpool!” shouted Niarkos, clinging to a line at the base of the mast. The drumbeats stopped abruptly. The reverberation of the sea continued the cadence, wave after wave striking and shivering the planks of the ship. The sea piled into a wall, mounting to giddy heights before Dana’s unblinking, salt-scummed, eyes. Spires of stone leaped from the swirling water, clotted with foam like the teeth of a rabid dog. The tall carved sternpost spun slowly, slowly about and shattered into splinters against the rocks. A howl of despair rose from the crew, but their voices were snatched away and devoured by the roar of the sea.