by David Drake
The queen’s suite had a floor of boards laid edgewise and planed smooth, solid and warm to the feet even without a layer of carpets over it. The king’s side of the building had probably started out the same, but at some point a layer of slates had raised it an inch. Words and figures had been drawn on the floor in a variety of media: chalks, paints, and colored powders. The fine-grained stone retained them as ghostly images.
“Really!” said Martous. “It wouldn’t be proper to place Prince Garric anywhere else. These are the royal apartments!”
“Protas said his father didn’t use spells to hurt other people, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. “Was the boy wrong, then?”
Tenoctris held the yarrow stalks in the circuit of her right thumb and forefinger. She cocked her head quizzically toward Cashel with a expression.
“No,” she said, “I think Cervoran was interested in knowledge for its own sake rather than for any wealth or power it could bring him. I’m of a similar mind myself, so I can sympathize. Only… only I’ve gained most of my knowledge by reading the accounts written by greater wizards than I. Cervoran searched very deeply into the fabric of things himself. He gathered artifacts as well as knowledge—”
She nodded toward a rank of drawer-fronted cabinets against the west wall. Above them hung a tapestry worked mostly in green. It showed a garden in which mythical animals strutted among the hedgerows.
“—and stored them here. To me these rooms are a clutching tangle, like being thrown into briars. Even to laymen, at least to a sensitive layman like Sharina, I expect this would be evident and uncomfortable.”
“It’s like shelling peas in bed,” Sharina said, speaking precisely to emphasize her point, “and then lying down on the husks. Milord, I’ve become quite sure that my brother will require other accommodations.”
“This is very unfortunate,” the chamberlain said, hugging himself in obvious discomfort. Sharina couldn’t tell whether he was complaining about her decision or if he felt the whirling sharpness of ancient spells also. Martous might not know himself. “Very. Well. I’ll give orders. There are rooms in the west wing, though that’ll mean…”
He caught himself and straightened. “Be that as it may,” he resumed in a businesslike tone. “Are you ready to go over the arrangements for the apotheosis and coronation, in lieu of the prince?”
“Tenoctris?” Sharina asked. The old wizard was looking into a drawer she’d just opened, holding her hands crossed behind her back as if to prove that she had no intention of touching the contents. The yarrow stalks lay on the floor where she’d been sitting. So far as Sharina could see, they’d fallen in a meaningless jumble.
Tenoctris pushed the drawer shut. She looked up and said, “I’m done for the moment. There’s nothing acute to be dealt with, though—”
She turned her head toward the chamberlain with her usual birdlike quickness.
“—Lord Martous, I suggest you have these rooms closed until I’ve had time to go over the collection. There’s nothing that I’d consider dangerous in itself, but there are a number of items which could be harmful if misused. Also there’s a chance they could draw actively dangerous things to them.”
The servants had stopped working and moved to the south wall when Cashel and Sharina entered. Sharina made a quick decision and said to the steward in charge, “Master Tinue, please move Prince Garric’s impedimenta back out of here and carry it to the west wing. Lord Martous will give you specific directions. I’m ordering this on my authority.”
“I’ll take them!” one of the locals said eagerly. She looked at Martous and said, “You want them in the rooms over the old banquet hall, that’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” said the chamberlain unhappily. The locals were already grabbing chests with far more enthusiasm than they’d showed previously. “If the princess insists, we have no choice.”
He shook his head as the servants bustled out. “It won’t be hard to keep them away from this suite if that’s what you want,” he said in a low, bitter tone, the first hint that Sharina’d heard that he had normal human emotions. “The problem was getting them to go in and clean the suite decently. And King Cervoran was no help, no help at all! He didn’t seem to care if cobwebs and dust covered everything!”
“I can imagine that would be frustrating,” Sharina said with honest sympathy. “Regardless, the real uncleanness was a result of your master’s art rather than mere dirt, so the lack of ordinary cleaning didn’t make much difference. There’ll be time to correct the problem after Lord Protas becomes marquess.”
Sharina’d been chambermaid in her father’s inn while she was growing up. It was a job you could only do well if you convinced yourself that it mattered, that you were really making the world better instead of performing a meaningless ritual which the events of the coming night would completely undo. Martous didn’t have her personal experience with the work of cleaning, but they could agree that it was a worthy end in itself.
“Yes, of course,” the chamberlain said. He opened both hands in a gesture that was just short of shooing the visitors to the connecting door. “We’ll do that now.”
Tenoctris bent to retrieve her yarrow stalks; age asserted itself and the motion caught halfway through. Cashel touched her shoulder to indicate he was taking over, then swept up the spill with his left hand. He handed the stalks to Tenoctris, then lifted the satchel while she wrapped them again.
Martous opened and closed his mouth. He was obviously fuming, but he had enough control not to say something which, when ignored, would underscore his complete lack of importance.
“I thought a divination might direct me to the source of the power that surrounds us here,” Tenoctris said, shaking her head wryly as she put the stalks away. “It completely overwhelms me. I can’t determine a direction.”
“You mean which object in Cervoran’s collection is causing it?” Sharina said as they returned to the queen’s suite. Her servants were opening the sole chest of clothing that accompanied her.
“Cervoran didn’t have any talisman of such weight as this,” Tenoctris said. Her voice was carefully emotionless, which probably meant that she was worried. “This is… a very serious business. I don’t call it a threat, but the thing around us is so enormously powerful that we’re in danger even if it isn’t hostile.”
She smiled cheerfully, breaking her own mood. “A hailstorm isn’t hostile to the flowers in a garden,” she added. “But it will flatten them anyway.”
“You’ll find a way out, Tenoctris,” Cashel said calmly. It wasn’t bravado when he spoke: it was the belief of a mind so pure and simple that no one listening could doubt the truth of the words. “And we’ll help you, like we have other times.”
Sharina gripped Cashel’s left biceps and hugged herself to him. It wasn’t the conduct expected of a princess in public, but it was what she needed just now.
“Not that way please,” said Martous as Sharina and her companions moved toward the door to the stairs. He gestured toward the north facing room with the bed. “I can explain better from the balcony.”
Sharina led. The chamberlain seemed to expect it, and Cashel as a matter of course brought up the rear—unless he thought there might be trouble ahead. It was the position from which he’d badgered flocks along the road. Sharina suspected Cashel felt much the same way about her and Tenoctris as he had for the sheep for which he’d been responsible back in the borough.
The balcony ran the full breadth of the room, but it was narrow front to back. It was plaster-covered, but the way it creaked under even Sharina’s slight weight suggested that it was built from wattle and daub; the hollow clack she got from a rap of her knuckles confirmed the suspicion. An outside staircase led down to a plaza.
“Cashel?” she said doubtfully, looking over her shoulder as Tenoctris and the chamberlain joined her on the balcony.
Still standing in the solid-floored bedroom, he grinned. “I guess it’d hold me,” he said. “But I don’t s
ee that it needs to now.”
“I had a stand built for the gentlemen and ladies of the kingdom,” Martous explained, gesturing toward the plaza. “Now that you’re here, I suppose some of you Ornifal nobles will share it. And of course the two princes will be in the center of the lowest tier. I’m having another throne built for Prince Garric.”
By ‘gentlemen and ladies of the kingdom’, he means the gentry of First Atara, Sharina translated mentally. She kept her lips neutrally together. It wouldn’t be proper to snarl at the chamberlain’s pretensions, but that might be less offensive than laughing at him as she’d come close to doing.
The plaza spread broadly, covering perhaps ten acres without permanent buildings. On three sides of it were tents and kiosks, and to the south were bleachers—the stand Martous referred to.
In the center of the plaza was a pile of brushwood nearly as big as the palace. On top of it, just lower than the eyes of those on the balcony, lay a corpse on a bier of gold cloth.
Despite the distance, Sharina could see that the dead man had been middle aged; he was balding though not bald, and plump without being really fat. His cheeks were rouged, but the flesh was already beginning to slump from them. Silver coins covered both eyes.
“When Lady Liane has a moment, she’ll give you direction as to the seating arrangements,” Sharina said firmly. “She has an excellent grasp of protocol, and I do not. She’ll consult with Lord Attaper, the commander of the royal guard, and I advise you not to argue with the decisions they make.”
She cleared her throat. “There will be provision for guards,” she added. “Probably more guards than you think—” Or anybody not himself a bodyguard thinks, Sharina added in her heart “—is necessary or even conceivable.”
“If you say so,” the chamberlain said. He added fretfully, “Time is very short, you realize.”
Sharina realized that perfectly well, so she didn’t comment. It was proper that the chamberlain should have his own priorities, but those weren’t the priorities of the Kingdom of the Isles as personified in Prince Garric and his closest advisors.
Tenoctris glanced at the corpse, then turned her attention to the shacks and tents around the edges of the plaza. Country folk had raised them for shelter, in some cases forming little hamlets of half a dozen families around a single cook fire. Peddlers and wine sellers moved through the crowd, either carrying their stores on their backs or accompanied by a porter or a donkey. The gathering had more the atmosphere of a fair than a funeral.
A fence of palings and rope picked out with tufts of scarlet wool marked off an area the width of a bowshot around the pyre. There were no guards to enforce the boundary. Either the peasants of First Atara were unusually obedient folk, or they understood just how big the blaze would be and had better sense than to come too close.
Tenoctris fixed the chamberlain with her quick eyes. “Do the ceremonies you’ve mentioned involve wizardry?” she asked.
“Oh, good heavens, no!” Martous said. “We’re not that sort of people here on First Atara.”
He paused, connecting what he’d just said with what he and the visitors knew of the late king. “Ah,” he said. “Well, King Cervoran was, of course, but that was him. His father raised show rabbits, you know. My first job in the palace was as Page of the Rabbits. Ah. Really, there was no harm in the king, just, well, interest. And there’s nothing of the sort in the apotheosis ceremony, not at all.”
Patting his hands together to close the discussion in his mind, Martous continued, “The ceremony actually started before you arrived in Mona. A delegation of nobles carried the late king from the palace while choruses of boys and girls lined the path to the pyre, singing hymns to the Lady.”
He frowned. “The boys’ chorus might’ve been better rehearsed,” he admitted, “and there was some difficulty with the staircase up the front of the pyre, but I think things went well enough given how short my time was. Quite well!”
Sharina smiled. The staircase Martous mentioned was a steep contrivance with notched logs for stringers and treads also fashioned from logs with an adze rather than a saw. Cloth runners—muslin dyed shades of red ranging from russet to pale pink—made the stairs presentable from a distance but also made them harder to climb.
Sharina supposed it hadn’t seemed reasonable to waste effort on the details of something meant to burn in a day or two. The person making the decision—probably the chamberlain himself—might’ve considered the problem a group of out-of-condition country squires would have climbing the structure while carrying a laden bier, however.
“Tomorrow morning at the ceremony,” Martous continued, “Prince Protas will light the pyre. I do hope it goes well. The brush had to be bundled while it was still green, I’m afraid. If only we’d had more notice about the king’s health so that we could’ve started preparations sooner!”
“King Cervoran appears to have been very remiss,” Sharina said. She was making a pointed joke to remind the chamberlain to think about what he was saying. He merely nodded agreement, too lost in his own concerns to have any awareness of the wider world.
“After the fire’s been lighted,” Martous said, “Protas will throw on a lock of his hair. I’ve already had one prepared by the palace hairdresser so that there’ll be no problem there. The chief nobles will file across the front of the pyre and sprinkle incense.”
He looked sharply at Sharina as though she’d sudden become interesting. “How many of you Ornifal nobles will be joining the procession? A rough number, if you please?”
“None,” said Sharina. “And I must remind you that we’re the delegation of the kingdom, not of the Island of Ornifal alone. I, for example, am Princess Sharina of Haft.”
“Ah,” said Martous. “Ah, yes.”
He turned his face toward the plaza, pressing his lips out and in several times. At last he continued, “The choruses will perform during the ceremony. I do hope we won’t have a repetition of the regrettable business with the boys singing that they’re ‘impure with vices’ as they did during the presentation. Anyway, when nobles have finished casting incense and the pyre is burning properly, a dove symbolizing the late king’s soul will be released from beside Prince Protas’ throne—”
“From the throne rather than from the pyre itself?” Tenoctris asked. “When I’ve seen this sort of ceremony in the past…?”
“Well, there was a problem with the cage opening during the rites of the late king’s father,” the chamberlain admitted. “In fact, some of the… the more superstitious members of the populace ascribed King Cervoran’s devotion to wizardry to, well, that problem. This is foolishness, of course, but I decided not to take a chance on having it happen again.”
Tenoctris nodded. “My parents would’ve been glad of an excuse on which to blame my interests,” she said. “In their hearts, I’m sure they were afraid it was their fault. Though so far as I’ve ever been able to tell, there’s nothing more mystical about skill at wizardry than there is in preferring fish over mutton.”
“As soon as the dove has flown…,” Martous said. He was looking at Tenoctris as he spoke, his eyes wide, but he suddenly flushed and jerked them back to the pyre. “As soon as that’s happened, I say, Prince Garric will stand and crown Prince Protas with the ancient topaz diadem—he’ll be holding that through the rites. There’ll be a general acclamation. I hope—”
He looked coldly at Sharina.
“—that we may expect the royal party to join in the acclamation?”
“You may,” Sharina said in a neutral voice.
Lord Martous took a deep breath. “Then,” he said, clasping his hands, “I believe we’re ready for the ceremony. Except for the seating arrangements. If you don’t mind, I’ll take my leave now. I need to talk with the master of the boys’ choir.”
“I hope your discussions go well, milord,” Sharina said, but the chamberlain was already halfway to the door.
She knew she should feel more charitable toward him. Only a f
ussy little fellow concerned with trivia could’ve made a good chamberlain. Given that, Martous was more than competent.
Tenoctris faced the pyre, but Sharina couldn’t tell where the old wizard’s mind was. “How do the arrangements strike you, Tenoctris?” she asked.
“What?” the wizard said, falling back into the present. “Oh. The arrangements seem perfectly regular. A little ornate for so—”
She smiled.
“—rural a place, but one finds that sort of thing in backwaters… if you’ll forgive my prejudices. I’ve always been more comfortable in communities that value books over turnips.”
“I’m glad to hear it’s all right,” Sharina said. “I was worried that something might happen.”
“So am I, my dear,” Tenoctris said. “The human arrangements are regular, as I said; but I’m by no means sure that we humans will have the final say in what happens tomorrow.”
The combined signallers of the royal army, some fifty men with either straight trumpets or horns coiled about their bodies, stopped playing at a signal from Liane. It seemed to Garric that the plaza still trembled. Even so there was only an instant’s pause before the combined signallers of the fleet, fifty more men determined to outdo their army counterparts, took up the challenge.
Garric groaned, looking down at the topaz crown resting on a pillow in his lap. The images in the heart of the yellow stone danced in the play of the sun. He hid a grimace and leaned to his left, bringing his lips close to Sharina’s ear. He had to be careful because he was wearing his dress helmet, a silvered casque from which flared gilt wings.
“I should never have allowed them to do this,” Garric said. “It was Lord Tadai’s idea, a way that we could contribute something unique to the funeral ceremonies, but it’s awful.”
“The locals seem to like it,” said Sharina. He more read the words on her smiling lips than heard them. “I’m sure they’ve never heard anything like it before.”