Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  He should have felt secure, Solifrax on one side, the zamtak on the other, the shield before him. But he did not.

  *

  As Sumitra tried to catch her breath, she indulged herself in an examination of Andrion’s aquiline profile, Sardian granite chiseled by the clean wind of Sabazel.

  He stood with his hand comfortably on the hilt of Solifrax, surveying the brooding landscape. It was raw and unfinished, jagged rocks piercing the soil, and yet was at the same time immeasurably old, stark chasms cleaving layer after layer of weathered dirt and stone. Sumi wondered what it would look like in spring, when the now dormant groves and vines put on green leaves, when the oranges and almonds blossomed. Now the land was gold and gray, the sky a lacquered eggshell blue. Sea birds floated impassively across its dome, and yellow songbirds trilled from a stand of wizened pine.

  Minras, she thought, was a tapestry woven of sensuality, sorcery, and a certain weird beauty. The air itself panted, straining toward some mysterious conclusion. The reek of sulfur and rot was inescapable. Three days’ walk behind them Zind Taurmeni was lost in its vaporous shroud; an equal distance before them Tenebrio solidified into a black hulk. Beneath Tenebrio was Akrotiri, both Jemail and Gard averred in their mouth-filling accents. Akrotiri, where Eldrafel had been born. Perhaps he, too, was inescapable. Sumitra shuddered, and remained short of breath.

  In a fold of land suitably far from the main road, Tembujin, Gard, and Jemail searched for food while Dana started a fire beside three great rocks tilted together like a tomb. The Sabazian was so efficient; she hunted, built fires, and slept easily out of doors. Sumi had never slept on the ground, and even in Andrion’s arms she lay awake wondering how many spiders and snakes and other silent night creepers were scouting the pleats of her gown.

  More than once she had glanced at Dana to see Dana glancing at her, not angry or resentful, but somehow puzzled. At how, Sumi told herself, Andrion could care for two women so different. But Dana’s gaze had not once been belligerent or even hurt; her eyes would slip into their guard towers and abandon the problem as irrelevant. She would have to believe it irrelevant, rather than insoluble, in order to serve her own certainties … Or so Sumitra thought, being rather vague on Sabazian protocol.

  She looked back at Andrion to see him frowning. He no doubt found the lack of hue and cry worrying, almost annoying—they had Gard, after all—but she could do nothing about it. A few moment’s respite from worry; she could manage that for him. It was really quite stimulating out here, no walls, no clustering attendants, no need to sit quietly, hands folded … An adventure.

  Down the slope behind her was a valley, a surprising rift of lush green in the blasted heath of the island’s crest. It was curtained by clouds of steam from several hot springs. Ferns and flowers thrived in the moist warmth, and bees gamboled drunkenly above them. A brilliant orange-and-black butterfly lit on Sumitra’s shoulder. Laughing, she tried to get it to perch on her finger.

  Andrion, startled by her laughter, looked around just as the butterfly tired of the game and wafted away. His frown evaporated as he, too, glanced into the valley. “No harm in a bath,” he said, “even though Gard would call the warm pools ‘the blood of the god’ or something similarly unappetizing.”

  “The child,” she replied, “is really quite engaging, Chrysais’s charm without the flavor of corruption.” And she allowed herself to wonder if their son would resemble his impish cousin.

  Andrion handed her down the slope as though she were as fragile as the butterfly. A pool lying amidst blowsy frills of celandine and myrtle was the perfect temperature; for a time they soaked, letting the heat mend the sores and strains of the journey.

  “Bright shone the sun as we lay …” Sumitra sang softly. Andrion stared into the sky as though it were a parchment listing commandments of chastity, his features stern but wistful. Gods, the man’s nobility could be downright aggravating! Grinning, Sumi splashed him. He splashed back. She pushed him under the water. He surfaced with a grin of his own.

  After a brisk wrestling match, moist skin against moist skin, the soft grass beside the pool was undeniably inviting. Steam drifted in scintillant veils around them, the sword lay exchanging resonances with the zamtak, and the bees caroled overhead. Sumi giggled as the coppery stubble on Andrion’s cheeks tickled her throat, her breast, her flanks. He was much too busy to giggle. His body was an intoxicating paradox, strength tempered by tenderness; to Sumi nothing else mattered, and she succumbed to blessed drunkenness.

  They clung to each other and to oblivious contentment, limbs woven tightly, belly crushed to belly. Then suddenly Sumitra felt a brief, delicate movement deep in her body. Her skin chimed, and Andrion started. The child had stretched its tiny body, awakening much earlier than expected to make this moment utter perfection. “He acknowledges his father!” she exclaimed ecstatically.

  Andrion’s face was transfigured by delight. But then his innate honesty had to raise its annoying head. “Actually, it is my place to acknowledge him. If it is a him. What if it is a her?”

  Sumi’s ecstasy tarnished.

  Andrion grimaced and went quickly on, cajoling, teasing. “If it is a girl, we shall start a new fashion. An empress, taught by Sabazian tutors, riding with the Khazyari. We shall find a prince of the Mohan for her to wed. The only worthwhile thing my councilors have ever done was to choose a Mohendra princess for me.”

  She had to smile at his recklessness and at the affection that inspired it, even as she knew the moment was indelibly marred. Indeed, something was hovering like smoke in the interstices of her mind, something that must have seeped into her awareness during those unguarded minutes of physical and emotional surrender. Already the cutting edge of her thought grew dull. I am only tired, she told herself. Very tired.

  “I mean that last,” Andrion told her, trying to keep her smile from fading. “About my councilors, and you—I missed you terribly, Sumi.”

  She clung to him fiercely then, frightened that so much as a hair might come between them. But her smile was gone, and contentment was stalked by unease.

  *

  Dana was sharpening a stake to impale the scrawny hare Tembujin and Gard had produced when she saw Andrion and Sumitra returning. They walked close together, understandably reluctant to lose whatever peace they had found this afternoon. All lovers deserved moments of peace, did they not?

  Her dagger slipped and sliced an ugly gash in her left forefinger. Clumsy! she shouted at herself. Fool, to let too many different strands of concern trip you up!

  With a small sympathetic noise Sumitra ripped her already tattered gown and set about binding the wound. Her eyes avoided Dana’s. Embarrassed to be caught loving him? Dana asked herself. Or greedy, wanting to keep her image of him to herself? But such a thought was unworthy of them all.

  Dana tried to speak and her words curdled in her throat. Sumitra tried to speak and emitted only an awkward mumble. The constraint was hideous, unwanted but impossible to deny. Andrion watched them, his face a wound scabbed into numb expressionlessness.

  Jemail appeared with a crust of bread and a moldy cheese rind begged from a farm. Andrion, as usual, insisted that most of the food be given to Sumitra and Gard. When she protested, when the child wrinkled his nose in distaste, one strict if fond look from the shuttered eyes of the emperor and they ate.

  As night fell the stars and moon were swallowed in fog. The huge rocks that sheltered them seemed to grow taller and lean menacingly over them. Sumitra plunked idly at her zamtak while Gard, the only animated figure in the group, frolicked about the fire. He tried to draw Solifrax, to hear its warning hiss, and an impatient gesture from Andrion brought him to heel with the self-satisfaction of a child wanting his elders to notice his amiability.

  The boy threw himself down beside Jemail, and Jemail flinched away from the chestnut hair and the gray eyes. Muttering something about standing guard, he hoisted his spear and disappeared into the darkness.

  Dana sifted
her thought for some reminiscence she could share jokingly with Andrion and Tembujin, but all the lighter moments of their campaign seven years before had been exhausted on the previous nights; the dregs of memory left her feeling old and used. And it was unfair to keep firing bolts of reminiscence past Sumitra’s serenity, reminding her that her husband had lived a lifetime before he ever knew her.

  Serenity? Dana repeated. The jangling zamtak, the tongues of sickly sweet fog lapping at the borders of the firelight, the dejected quiet of the group, set her teeth on edge. So did Gard’s eyes, like and yet unlike his cousin Eldrafel’s. “How did Gath die?” she asked, thinking aloud.

  Andrion and Tembujin stiffened. Gard said, “He was drunk and went to bathe, and the water was too hot and cooked him like a lobster.”

  The silence was so thick that when a string on the zamtak suddenly broke, its ping reverberated like a bow shot. Sumitra swore under her breath, at the string or at the boy’s callous words, or at both. But to him Gath had been a stranger, the object of a cautionary tale, not real.

  Andrion cleared his throat and said, with heavy-handed jocularity, “You seem to enjoy being a hostage, Gard.”

  “I was to have been one before,” returned the child. “Traded for the son of Melkart of far Dibourti. But when Melkart came to arrange the details, he was taken suddenly ill and died, and the little boy became king—with our help, of course.”

  With Minran help, indeed, Dana said to herself. Near that dusky garden of herbs sudden illness and death must be commonplace. Nothing is safe here.

  Conversation languished. Each form lay wrapped in its own prickly mantle. Dana, her head resting upon the comforting quicksilver chime of the shield, did not think she could sleep. And yet she did.

  She knew the vision that took her was unequivocally true. She stood on the hard, cold marble floor of a corridor, just inside the shadow surrounding the guttering lamp. But the guard outside Patros and Kleothera’s bedroom door looked right through her, not seeing her. The silence of the early morning hours was broken only by a distant hollow ringing like the sea. By the rumble of chariots in the streets. And by footsteps.

  The guard peered into the darkness. Apparently he saw nothing. But Dana could see the young priest, his eyes rolled back in his head, holding a knife half concealed in his robes.

  The guard yawned. The priest lunged. The soldier’s open mouth was frozen, gaping, as his eyes gaped in death. The priest lowered his body soundlessly to the floor.

  Dana tried to move. She could not. She strained forward, struggling to make her oddly numb limbs respond. Then she realized that she had no body, only eyes to see, a mind to understand.

  The priest slipped through the door. His eyes in the lamplight glittered crazily, the pupils as tiny as poppy seeds.

  Dana’s thought leaped. The walls dissolved before her. She saw the bedchamber, the wide bed with embroidered hangings moving gently. The wind was fresh and cool off the Sar, and a frail moonpath shimmered on the floor, kissing the cradle beside the bed.

  The bloody knife lifted the hangings. Patros lay, smiling slightly, his arms wrapped around Kleothera’s body, holding her against him. She was a perfect fit.

  Black flame flickered about the knife. Dana writhed, her thought twisting about the spindle of her desperation, tighter and tighter. Abruptly, with an expulsive wrench like a birth pang, her mind broke free. The cradle beside the bed shuddered as Declan emitted a shriek.

  Kleothera started awake, saw the priest, the knife, the black fire, and shrieked in turn. Patros, instantly alert, rolled out the far side of the bed and pulled her with him. The priest staggered, struck blindly at the bedclothes, then turned toward the cradle.

  In perfect synchrony Patros and Kleothera threw a blanket over the priest’s head and bore him down. Patros twisted his wrist until the knife fell clattering onto the floor. Kleothera hurried to the cradle and swept up the baby.

  Declan’s wails subsided into little breathless hiccups as he burrowed onto her shoulder. I am sorry, Dana cried silently, that I had to wake you—with a pang she realized that she had indeed touched him across the leagues between them. Her son had her Sight. If she had kept him—no, not even Danica could keep a son. And without Declan’s warning, Patros would be dead—although by the laws of Sabazel Dana should not have even known Patros, let alone cared for him… .

  Astra was her heir. It was she who counted for everything in the closed world of Ashtar.

  Guards were clanking down the hallway. Torches flared, driving away the darkness and the moonpath as well. For a moment it seemed to Dana as if Patros saw her, or sensed whatever part of her was with him. Gravely, if somewhat puzzled, he nodded his thanks. But his image was already dwindling, then was gone.

  Dana stared upward into the enigmatic Minran sky. She had been in Sardis; she had no doubt of that. She wanted only to go home to Sabazel. All the seas and all the skies between her and Sabazel were an aching void in her heart.

  Andrion’s dim form loomed over her. “You were moaning; was it a vision?”

  She sighed. “A priest, no resemblance to Rue, tried to kill Patros tonight. Thank the goddess I was able to warn him through little Declan.”

  He scowled. “Does Rowan have enough power to direct the priests of Harus to his own foul ends? Patros would indeed stand in their way; his loyalty cannot be bought. I only hope it cannot be spelled.” And Andrion, too, sighed. “I do not suppose you could message Nikander to return to the north?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry.”

  Andrion settled down beside her. For a time they spoke of the Sight, and of Sardis and Sabazel; she could see only Sardis, he suggested, because the tangled threads of Chrysais’s, of Eldrafel’s plot, had not yet tightened further about Sabazel.

  That was not any less unsettling. Perhaps she simply could not sense happenings in Sabazel, or … “What I fear the most,” she concluded, too weary to dissemble, “is that I am not interpreting my Sight correctly, and instead of leading us to freedom, I lead us deeper into a trap.”

  “We would be entrapped in any event,” Andrion returned, struggling against bitterness. “It is my choice, too, to search out the snare.”

  “As Gath did? As that other king—Melkart?”

  He did not reply. He knew the limits of her Sight as well as he knew his own limits; he might condemn himself, but not her. For too long had they woven a fabric of experience that was theirs alone. Now, in this dark hour, they did not even touch, because they did not have to.

  Sumitra, Dana realized, was not asleep. Her eyes were jet slits, hooded by her lashes. Not jealous of her husband’s intimate colloquy with the Sabazian; that was a word Sumi did not know. But still a shadow drifted over her expression as she watched them, as if the effort to be tolerant cost her more emotional currency than she had to spare.

  Something, Dana fretted suddenly, followed them across the interior of the island, some invisible hound of hell sniffed at their heels, until, tired as they were, they could not rest but waited, poised and wary, ready to leap aside from a bite that would not come.

  The fog drifted like a rent curtain across the moon, but its clammy gibbous face held no counsel and no comfort.

  *

  Andrion squinted upward. A falcon, the first he had seen since arriving on Minras, lay against the arch of the evening sky as if painted upon it. “So you come at last, Harus,” he said to it. “You would be better advised to protect your chosen city and leave me to find my own fate.” The bird remained impassive. The air was torpid, as foul as a drunkard’s breath, reeking of brimstone and corruption.

  Andrion scratched his chin beneath its coat of coppery stubble. Dana’s lips were a tight fissure, he noted, and Tembujin’s cheekbones were axe blades. He did not have to turn around to see that Sumitra’s eyes were sunk deep, their brightness dulled. But she seemed uncharacteristically tense rather than tired. Had she been that way ever since those moments of delirium in the hidden valley? But hunger and weari
ness and worry made his own mind spin tauntingly with a frenzied dread, and subtlety was beyond him.

  He peered down the boulder-strewn scree before him toward the small whitewashed boxes edging a harbor that was Akrotiri. The water was so clear that the fishing boats upon it seemed to be suspended in blue-green crystal. As the sun sank farther into the west, the shade of the cliff poured over town and harbor, blotting up the colors. The road downward, a gold ribbon strung from thorn bush to thorn bush, disappeared.

  A dangerous trek in the dark, Andrion mused. And even if they arrived safely in Akrotiri, their clothing, stained and torn by their journey, could not have distinguished them from beggars. Except for Andrion’s now dirt-mottled purple cloak, and the clear unsullied light of the sword he bore, and the purity of the light of the shield Dana bore beside him. None of which would buy them a boat.

  They could steal one, he thought, and send payment later. Although none of them knew how to handle a boat, perhaps they could at least sail a small one back to Orocastria to free Niarkos and the others, evading pursuit by doubling back on their tracks.

  Pursuit? What pursuit? That was reason enough for nervousness. They could not wait for Miklos to come and find them. They had to get off this haunted island!

  With a sharp gesture Andrion turned around, Dana and Tembujin with him. Sumitra was gone. His heart, already racing, palpitated painfully. Unlike her, to wander away by herself. Gard pointed, Jemail gestured with his spear, and they turned up a path leading away from the cliff toward the beetling mass of Tenebrio. It had once been a paved road, but now the flagstones were settled crazily, overgrown by tiny creeping plants.

  There she was, just entering a grove of trees; cypress and yew, shivering despite the still air, sifted the sunlight into cobwebs of light and dark. When Andrion stepped beneath the heavy branches, the hilt of Solifrax writhed in his hand. The shield swirled, its light sickly. The zamtak on Gard’s shoulder jangled. Tembujin cursed. Jemail stopped dead, his eyes huge and frightened. “Wait here,” Andrion said, not without sympathy, and they left Jemail behind.