Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Ashtar, Dana wailed silently, kill me if you must, but do not taunt me with helplessness!

  The mast snapped like a stick. The rail vanished from Dana’s hands. The men beside her disappeared. The deck fell away, leaving her suspended for a moment in air and water mingled into some new element. Then she fell, sliding on droplets glinting with every color of the rainbow, into some infinite depth.

  Water warm as blood engulfed her, crushing her into a hollow silence. Her bow was wrenched from her arm. She fought, clawing with powerful strokes toward the surface—but where was the surface? Her eyes were filled with a dark green blur, all shadow, no reality. Her lungs labored, burning. Ashtar! her mind screamed, not now, not here, so far from home and naked …

  Whorls of light spun before her. Her chest was bursting. She broke the surface, spat, gasped, and was sucked back under. Then kill me, Ashtar, even as I go about your bidding, kill me! As if by a huge hand, she was plucked up and cast onto a hot, abrasive surface.

  Her eyes were filled with water and a glare of light. Her mouth puckered with salt. Her ears rang with a hammering drumbeat; it was the pounding of her own heart. Waves sucked at her body and she heaved herself away from them. Black rocks tore through her shirt and trousers into her flesh.

  Andrion, Tembujin, Niarkos. She was alone. She couldn’t tell whether it was saltwater or blood in her mouth. Must get up. She tried to rise. The land heaved as the water had, and she fell back onto the rocks, clutching at them, dizzy. Must get up.

  She inhaled, exhaled, inhaled. A miasma of rotten flesh filled her nose and she choked. A blurry shape moved in front of her. She squinted.

  Andrion knelt just where the water met the land, braced on his arms, chest heaving. His cloak was gone and his wet chiton clung to his body, outlining every straining muscle. Thank the gods, then, Dana thought, for one favor. She pulled her sodden hair away from her face.

  Niarkos wallowed in the surf, staggering, falling, crawling. He still held the line. No, what he was pulling behind him was Tembujin’s long tail of hair. The Khazyari’s body rolled with the waves, limp.

  No, oh no! Dana gained her feet and stood swaying, defying the world to throw her down. Niarkos collapsed. Tembujin lay sprawled in the shallows, disappearing under a foamy wave, surfacing again.

  The sea lion roused himself. He dragged Tembujin farther out of the water, dumped him among the rocks, and unceremoniously kneaded his chest and back. Tembujin sputtered, choked, retched, and croaked, “A horse, give me a horse, Khalingu take ships and sails and sea.” He coughed rackingly.

  Several other bedraggled figures crawled from the surf. Dark shapes, planks and men, rolled in the waves farther out. The gentle sea swell gave not the slightest hint of the whirlpool waiting to snare the unwary. Cursing would not help, Dana told herself. The gods disposed of men like pawns on a game board, damning or redeeming with cruel impartiality. She turned, walked one wary step at a time toward Andrion, and fell down beside him.

  He was not dazed; his eyes were distressingly lucid. “Thank the gods you are alive, Dana,” he wheezed, between lips drawn as tight as bowstrings.

  She saw then that the clasp on his belt that had held the sheath of Solifrax was torn open. His sword, his father’s sword, had been swallowed by the sea. His hands clenched and opened and clenched again, and at last his fingers grasped the necklace jouncing in the pulse at his throat.

  She spoke without thinking. “So. Now you know how I feel.”

  “I have always known how you feel,” he snapped.

  “How could you?”

  Tembujin threw himself down, yelped as a rock ground into some tender spot, and said, “God’s talons! Do not start quarreling now.”

  “We are not quarreling,” Dana and Andrion chimed in unison.

  Niarkos lumbered up and down the beach. He collected the living men, counted casualties, hurled an occasional epithet at the waves that tossed smashed bits of ship and crew onto the beach as carelessly as a kitchen maid throwing away garbage.

  Tembujin roused himself and tallied the survivors, reporting acidly that Andrion’s company had been reduced to an ignominious force of two soldiers and five sailors, armed only with the daggers still belted to Tembujin’s waist and Dana’s thigh. “Without a ship,” Andrion concluded, “we cannot send to Rhodope if the Minrans prove hostile. And Miklos’s orders were to wait a month before coming after us. The game begins in earnest now.”

  “The game has never ended,” Dana returned.

  With an abrupt scramble, Andrion stood and braced himself, hands on hips. He offered Dana a nod and a smile, strained at the edges, incongruous between the angry jut of his chin and the embers glowing in his eyes, but a smile nonetheless.

  Dana recognized his attitude; it had been hers outside the Horn Gate of Sabazel. He wanted no commiseration over the loss of the sword, as she had wanted none over the loss of the shield. If he could smile, so could she, and she did. If only the wind would carry away the terrible stench that clogged her nose and throat, but here, in the lee of the mountain, no wind blew.

  Niarkos stood to attention, sparing himself nothing, to accept his reprimand. Shameful, not only to lose one’s ship but to strand one’s emperor in the losing. “I am responsible, my lord.”

  “You could have changed nothing,” Andrion reassured him. “You did what you could.” The admiral nodded, stoic in the face of devastation, ready to shoulder the next task.

  Andrion strode from man to man, making sure that those injured upon the rocks were properly bandaged. With a few terse, tight gestures and phrases he organized them into some semblance of order. Just as they turned toward the city, a solitary man appeared around a pier of rocks ahead. At the sight of the bedraggled company he turned and ran. “All right then,” said Andrion. “The dice are cast.” Moments later several guards wearing pleated kilts and leather caps burst from the stones waving long, leaf-bladed spears.

  Dana quelled her body’s jerk backward and the itch on her feet that urged her to run. Run where? she asked herself. This place is far from home. Too far.

  “Ah, a welcoming party at last,” Tembujin said brightly, and deflected Dana’s glare with a toss of his lank hair.

  The soldiers were not as large as average Sardian legionaries, but their spears were quite businesslike. Their leader was a dark, hawk-nosed individual identified by the emblem of a winged bull upon his cap. He jostled with Niarkos, asserting his control in a thick but not incomprehensible version of the common tongue, and was surprised when the burly admiral deferred to a much younger man. This youth was a head taller than he; he scowled with annoyance.

  Andrion’s scowl was barely contained by his own stubborn dignity. With a sarcastically gracious wave of his hand he allowed the guard to lead. As the glowering man marched them off, Andrion set a pace slow enough to irritate him, fast enough that he had no grounds for complaint.

  The company trudged past the pier and was engulfed in a miasma of death. Choking, Dana asked herself, do these people leave their dead to rot upon the beach? But it was no charnel house. Low buildings were spaced around a series of vats, and huge hills of dried, empty shells lined the path. Workmen looked curiously up, intrigued by the tall, trousered woman and the high-planed features of the Khazyari. To a man their arms and hands were dyed Rexian purple. Purple, she thought; was she remembering some vague image or foreseeing it?

  “So,” exclaimed Niarkos. “Here is the home of the famous dye. I never knew it was made from rotten shellfish.”

  “Beauty from death,” Andrion added. “Somehow I am not surprised.”

  “And has the wind carried this reek all the way to Iksandarun?” demanded Tembujin.

  “That would not surprise me either.”

  The soldiers led them around a buttress of tortured rock, and blessedly, a light, fitful breeze greeted them, sweeping away the stench. With good reason, Dana told herself, were the dye works downwind of the city.

  They scrambled up a road edged w
ith aromatic cypresses which whispered secretively among themselves, passing from odd translucent shadow to odd hazy light and back. Then, around another corner, the path became a flagstoned street and the city opened before them.

  The avenue was lined with tall gray houses, each sprouting myriad tiny pillars along its facade. Windows and doors and alleys gazed expressionlessly at the passing company. Her sandals crunched on the pavement, and Dana saw that the houses were gray because every surface was dusted with ash. From the smoking mountain, perhaps? And stranger still, more than one building had been thrust askew, as though the island were a great beast that had shaken itself. Tidy piles of brick and pillars awaited repair. But the street was empty, market stalls abandoned, carts left riderless.

  Then voices, rising and falling in some liturgical response, echoed down a puff of wind. The bellowing of bulls was suddenly loud among the walls, as if the animals themselves were about to come bursting around the corner, tossing passersby on the sharp tips of their horns.

  Bulls bellowing. Dana blanched and her steps faltered. Andrion set his hand firmly in the hollow of her back and bore her along.

  The bellows ceased. Music, played on a reed flute, danced along the breeze. And it was Andrion whose head went up, whose cheeks blanched. “Tembujin,” he said tightly, “does that melody not sound familiar?”

  The Khazyari’s eyes narrowed into black slits. “Indeed. In Iksandarun, just as Ethan and Ursbei and I entered the city gate, moments before we were attacked. To signal, I daresay, that the sacrificial animals approached.”

  “Even Sardis no long sacrifices human beings,” replied Andrion. “Not on the altar, at least.” The guard made some signal as if to tell them to stop talking, but his gesture withered, scorched by the flicker in Andrion’s eyes.

  They emerged onto a viaduct. To one side, toward the smooth, glinting water of the harbor, an arena was carved into the hillside. Here was the population of Orocastria, tier upon tier of olive faces looking eagerly toward something on the floor of the arena, something concealed behind a huge garlanded slab of rock. No wonder the streets were empty.

  Dana faltered again, her visions becoming too real, too fast. “Of course you saw this place,” Andrion whispered in her ear. “Have we ever doubted that? Just remember that not all your visions are true ones.”

  I should not need him to tell me that, she reminded herself scornfully. She strode on, shoulders square and stiff.

  At the end of the viaduct was an edifice that could only be a palace. It commanded the crest of the hill into which the arena was carved; several balconies and terraces overlooked the arena itself. A jumble of windows, pillared corridors, and floor levels layered like some exotic sweetmeat clung around massive pillars of stone. The red, yellow, and blue paint of ornate frescoes shone bravely through their patina of dust and ash.

  The company passed under a gateway crowned by great, curving horns. Another Horn Gate, Dana reflected; the horns of a bull, not of a crescent moon. She wondered if here in Minras lingered some memory of the old beliefs that predated even Sabazel, the beliefs predicated on the savage animal powers. Some of those beliefs had expressed themselves in repellent rites; how could one of those ancient queens commit herself to her king and then sacrifice him, turning her vows inside out? But then, she would have thought her commitment was to a greater purpose… .

  Dana caught one last glimpse of the sea—an alien element, but her only route home. The interior of the palace was damp and chill. The hallway turned, turned again, passed several shadowed frescoes of sea creatures and ships. It burst into a garden, plunged into dimness, ran through a large room or two and then, against a rough stone wall, stuttered off into three separate passages. The guard took the center way. Dana felt smothered, closed in a sarcophagus that no matter how elaborate still reeked of death.

  Suddenly they were in a large, airy room that at first appeared to have no ceiling. Squinting upward, Dana saw balconies piled one upon another, their railings thickets of pillars that scrambled as high as the painted roof beams. Each story must have had windows, for the room was quite light, and yet it, too, was hazy, an oddly familiar scent lying heavy on the still air. A throne room, then, or a temple, or both.

  How galling, thought Dana, for the emperor, the khan, the heir to Sabazel, to arrive bruised and disheveled, herded like pitiful supplicants before the ruler of Minras. Whoever that was. Instinctively she drew herself up, as did Andrion and Tembujin as they strode across the dizzyingly complex patterns of the tiled floor. The leading guard made impatient shooing motions at them, but they swept by him and approached the center of the room where they stood in a frieze of defiant caution.

  Here was a stone basin, set about with four pillars. Another set of carved horns stood on one rim, reflected in the water within. Dana was reminded again of Sabazel, of Ashtar’s basin and pool. She craned forward, wondering if this water, too, bore a message.

  A reflection of the horns, and of her own face peering in, and of a chair encompassed with carved wings. Then the water swirled, and her head swirled with it, her thought caught and yanked away by a snaky tendril of alarm.

  Dana saw Andrion’s eye glinting almost as brightly as Tembujin’s. Then she saw the woman whose sudden appearance from behind the throne had so ensnared their attention. She came forward, leaned over the water, and stirred it with the tip of a beringed finger round and round into a whirlpool. She looked up, firing a calculating glance from beneath dark, even brows. Her eyes were shifting depths of blue and violet. Drowned eyes, Dana thought. The mysterious fullness of the sea, the command of wind and wave … No! her mind howled indignantly. No one has that power save Ashtar!

  The woman laughed. A gesture dismissed the guards, who hustled Niarkos and the others away. The stentorian voice of the admiral, keeping his men orderly, was swallowed by the maze of corridors.

  The woman rose, glided back to the throne and sat upon it, arranged flounced skirts around her, and leaned back with her arms comfortably splayed upon the wings. “Greeting,” she said. “I am Chrysais, Queen of Minras.” Her voice was honey seeping from a replete hive, lightly accented.

  As though drawn by a thread, Andrion, Tembujin, and Dana stepped closer. Not one pair of eyes blinked. Incense billowed from hidden censers.

  Chrysais’s gleaming chestnut hair was coiled in intricate waves and tendrils, clasped by golden clips. Her eyes were outlined in kohl, her cheeks rouged, her lips painted the color of crushed berries; her face was an unblemished mask, worn thin at the corners of the mouth and eyes by an underlying intensity. The open bodice of her gold and purple dress displayed full, round breasts. They, too, were rouged. She laughed again, low and throaty, glorying in her power.

  Dana wrenched herself away, feeling the same gut-searing lust as the men, permitting none of it. The woman is no better than a whore, she thought, outraged, to flaunt her charms so brazenly.

  And she thought that if Chrysais did sell herself, it would be for more than a few coins. Much more. The way she had stirred the water in the basin, gloating … Suddenly Dana recognized the heady aroma of lethenderum, a drug that could weaken the reserve and induce visions.

  Andrion cleared his throat. “Greetings,” he said. His voice approached its usual timbre and seized upon it. “Does the Queen of Minras usually receive castaways?”

  “No,” Chrysais purred. “But then, you only appear to be castaways.”

  “Khalingu,” muttered Tembujin, recovering himself with a deep exhalation, “I could have sworn we were shipwrecked.”

  Dangling amethyst earrings swayed as she smiled. Amethyst and faience necklaces sparkled upon her breast. “Tembujin, Khan of Khazyaristan. Dana of Sabazel. And you,” she said to Andrion, “who claim to be the son of Marcos Bellasteros, King of Sardis, Emperor.”

  “Claim?” repeated Andrion, squeezing the word between his teeth.

  “Some secrets are not kept as well as you so fondly believe. It is well known, for example, that Sabazians t
ake many lovers and marry none.”

  Dana bridled; Danica could have saved herself and Sabazel much pain if she had pretended Andrion was another man’s son. At least Chrysais made a direct lunge, not the feint Dana would have expected of one so … feminine.

  Chrysais acknowledged with only a pleased twitch of her mouth the Sabazian who squirmed like a stranded fish before her.

  Andrion’s hand closed on empty air at his side, groping for the hilt that was not there, but his words were so firm they seemed to clear the cloying smoke. “Can you look at me and deny that I am Bellasteros’s son?”

  Chrysais leaned forward. Her arms pressed her breasts together, forcing a muffled growl from Tembujin’s throat, and her tongue passed slowly between her lips. Her blue gaze peeled away Andrion’s even features, the lambent darkness of his eyes, the lean lines of his body, and evaluated the tension between pride and doubt that strengthened the very core of his being. “No,” she said, perhaps gratified, perhaps disappointed. “No, I cannot deny that you are his son.”

  She had only been testing him. Dana seethed. Her mind simmered. In its steam she wondered if Chrysais had also been testing herself, trying the strength of a blood tie. Blood rites, she thought suddenly. Damned lethenderum.

  Tembujin found something very interesting in a corner of an upper balcony, always appreciative of Andrion discomfited, not about to comment on such discomfiture before a stranger.

  Andrion smiled, thin as a blade, ordering Chrysais to speak.

  “And to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” the woman asked.

  Briefly Andrion told the story of Rue, Sumitra, and the shield, but stopped short of mentioning that Solifrax, too, was gone. He did not ask for help.

  “Someone hides behind the god of Minras, it seems,” replied Chrysais, her lashes veiling her eyes in an expression that was probably intended to be complacent, but was not. “Such impertinence. I shall help you find what was lost, if I can.”