A shadow came between her and the sun. She looked up. Bellasteros extracted his sword from the body, drove it into the ground beside the carcass, and levered the animal away from her. “Foolish,” he commented, “to turn your horse on the mud. Even the most surefooted beast would slip.” He was breathing hard but his expression was of casual interest
“My thanks for your assistance,” Danica said politely. She ignored his proffered hand and clambered to her feet. The sun-dappled surface of the stream beckoned and she made no effort to resist. She laid the quiescent shield down, stripped off her armor, boots, and the softer garments beneath, and cleaned them as best she could. Naked, she threw herself into a pool to wash away the blood and sweat of the hunt.
Bellasteros watched with great interest, not even pretending to avert his eyes. At last he, too, laid aside his bronze armor to bathe in the stream. “What did you think?” she asked him, catching one of his glances. “Did you believe the tales that we Sabazians mutilate ourselves, cutting away our womanhood to better draw our weapons?” He dropped his eyes then, and she laughed. “How could we nourish our infants?”
Bellasteros splashed out of the water, laid himself on the bank of the stream, and regained his composure. “Indeed,” he said, with a sly sideways gleam, “a people that did not bear offspring would soon perish.”
“Truly,” she replied. She seated herself some paces away, drying the golden waves of her hair in the sun and in the breeze that rang through the forest. The water murmured to itself, singing a half-remembered song of ancient heroes and their deeds.
After a time Danica said, “We are not the barbarians you name us.”
“You take many lovers and marry none,” he told her by way of evidence. “How do you know your child’s father?”
“We accept those men who wish to make offering to Ashtar,” she returned. “I know well my child’s mother. Your marriages have not prevented your taking lovers.”
Bellasteros opened his mouth, shut it, frowned slightly, and tried again. “We bury our dead according to the rites of the true gods.”
Danica smoothed her hair over her shoulders and picked up her trousers. “Ashtar, the true goddess, requires that we bum our dead.”
“And you give away your sons.”
“To be cherished by our neighbors. You expose your daughters, to die at the mercy of the cold and the wolves that prowl the garbage middens of your cities.”
“Harus,” muttered Bellasteros. He grabbed his tunic. Danica settled her breastplate over her chest and slipped her sword into its scabbard, making no further comment but watching him through her lashes.
He buckled his cuirass and strolled across the grass to stroke his horse’s nose. “Bellasteros,” he mumbled, “the master of man and beast.” The horse nickered against his shoulder.
Danica surprised herself with a smile. When the conqueror turned back to her their eyes met and held, exchanging not challenge but wary respect.
Game and set, sighed Ashtar. Bring him to me, daughter, in Sabazel.
Chapter Two
The fortress of Azervinah, a titanic block cast off from the neighboring mountains, did, indeed, appear to be impregnable. Danica craned her neck to see the distant points of light along the shadowed walls at the top of the rock. It was difficult to tell which lights were torches and which were stars spread lavishly by Ashtar’s hand across an indigo sky.
“How did Kallidar build a fortress up there?” asked Ilanit. Her helmet threatened to slide off her head as she looked up and she steadied it with her hand.
Atalia shrugged. “They say he ferried up the stones on the wings of giant eagles.”
“A block and tackle would have served as well,” Danica said. “And the slaves of the Empire.”
Bellasteros materialized out of the darkness, the small watch fires gleaming in his burnished armor. “I am told there are secret passages in the rock,” he said, “but in the two moons since the siege began no one has entered or left.”
“And you’ve set no more fires than usual?” she asked. “The watchers on the rock have no cause to think this night different from those before?”
“Mardoc gave the order,” he responded with some acerbity. “As I ordered him.”
As I ordered you, Danica added to herself. But she said nothing. He had lost five trusted men trying the same move she and her Companions were now attempting. The game still hung in the balance, and Azervinah was only a piece on the board.
She tested the weight of her sword and shield, strapped securely across her back. Her body felt oddly light without its armor, and the soft slippers on her feet made only a disconcerting patter across the stone.
“I await your signal.” said Bellasteros. “Show Kallidar that we have grown wings.” His hand fell on Danica’s shoulder in an expression of polite encouragement.
A few moments later she and six chosen Companions were wedging the first of the tent pegs into head-high crevices in the darkest shadows at the base of the rock. From peg to peg they crawled like patient spiders, straight up the face of the precipice, clinging, reaching, grasping. Their breaths mingled with the night wind and their bodies became blots of shadow against the rock.
Danica drove a peg into a crack, tested it, pulled herself up onto it, and reached over to steady a nearby Companion. She paused a moment to let the pain in her chest and shoulders subside, gazing out over the tumbled hills at the base of the fortress and at the three tiny campfires like fireflies. The wind chilled the sweat on her body even as it whispered strength. She felt she’d been clinging to the cold stone all night, through dark day and on into eternity; the man-made walls above her had grown so close she could pick out the pattern of cyclopean blocks.
Danica inhaled, squatted, and yanked loose a peg beside her. Then, slowly, she rose and began to pound the peg into another crack just opposite her face.
“We are almost there,” she hissed to the weary woman beside her, but her words were caught up and blown away by the wind that purled through the night. The other woman reached, grimacing, and grasped the peg just above her head. She put her weight on it. With a patter of gravel the stake pulled loose from the rock.
The wind stopped still. Danica held her breath. For one long second the woman hung suspended between earth and sky, cradled in the hands of the goddess. A small cry escaped her throat. Then, gently, Ashtar released her. The Companion’s eyes were glazed with a merciful death before her body fell, a dark crumpled shape, into the night. Danica heard no impact; it was as if the woman had been snatched away from the plane of existence on a breath of wind that was Ashtar’s sigh.
Danica leaned her face against the cold roughness of the stone and whispered a prayer. On her other side someone made a short comment, part curse, part supplication. A dissonance of jangling chimes sounded faintly around the rock.
Above the serrated mountaintops appeared an aureole of pale gold, presaging the rising of the moon. Was there not peace in death? Danica asked herself. The jangle smoothed into distant melody. “Come,” she called quietly.
Soon the crescent horns of a waning moon gleamed in a pool of light several handsbreadths above the horizon. Dark shapes clambered over the parapet at the crest of the rock and dropped to the paving stones with a faint ring of weapons.
Danica set her star-shield on her arm; it caught the luminescence of the sky, a cloud of light motes centered on the now pulsing star. Her form glimmered in and out of soft-silvered darkness, slipping ahead of the Companions like a will-o’-the-wisp.
A guard dozing in a puddle of torchlight had no time to wake but fell with a clash of armor, taken from behind by Danica’s sword. The arched doorway he had guarded was closed by a metal grille; beyond it steps disappeared downward into the heart of the rock. Danica wrenched open the grille and a woman started cat-footed down the steps to open the outer gates to the warriors of both Sardis and Sabazel.
Danica ordered her Companions to pull the body of the guard into a place of concea
lment, but no one came to investigate the quick noise of his collapse. Her lip wrinkled in scorn.
The Sabazians crept through the shadows of the fortress, avoiding other sentries, until they found themselves before the carved doors of the most choice apartments of the fortress, guarded by two sleepy soldiers.
A rumor of violence, Sardian war cries and the answering yells of soldiers awakened roughly from sleep, echoed in the corridors. Sparks shimmered across Danica’s shield. “Now!” she cried. “Sabazel!” She and her Companions leaped forward. The guards before the door pulled themselves to attention, but Sabazian swords struck them down. Danica kicked open the doors. They flew back against the stone walls with a crash.
The large room was richly furnished; tapestries and chests of ornaments lay along the walls, glittering in the torchlight. The emperor had brought his treasures with him in his flight only to find them useless in Azervinah. But Danica had no interest in the assembled wealth. On a canopied bed at the far corner of the room a brawny dark-bearded man sat upright, rubbing sleep from his eyes, his florid face twisted with incomprehension. Beside him a tousled woman clutched the bedclothes to her breast and screamed.
“Emperor Kallidar,” Danica purred, advancing with sword and shield ready. “King of kings, god-king. Long have I waited to avenge your insults to me and mine.”
The man’s face grew even redder as uncertainty was swept away by rage. He leaped from the bed and plucked a huge scimitar from the wall. “Sabazian bitch!” he stated. “You would always demand the right to bear your weapons in my audience hall, believing yourself better than my subjects, who would gladly lay down their arms for the Empire.”
An altercation began in the doorway as Kallidar’s soldiers tried to force their way into the room. But the Companions stood shoulder to shoulder just inside the aperture, their shields ringing as they parried the swords of the imperial troops. They bent and swayed in unison, lunging again and again. The thrill of Ilanit’s paean reverberated through the fortress as the doorway filled with dead and wounded. Then the fighting was over. A bronze helmet rippling with scarlet horsehair appeared in the door.
Danica’s eye flicked for an instant to that figure in the doorway and to the forms gathered behind it. Kallidar saw his chance. Spitting a curse, he leaped, surprisingly quick for his bulk. The scimitar whistled through the air just where Danica’s head had been. But she had thrown herself to the side, spinning on her feet; her narrow blade flashed and her shield glimmered with an aureole of pale fire.
“The Empire is no longer yours,” she told her opponent. “Bellasteros rides with me.”
Kallidar’s face contorted and he looked curiously down at the oozing red furrow across his upper arm. Danica smiled at him, her green eyes cold. “Strike, emperor,” she murmured. “Strike again.” She lowered her sword mockingly.
The man’s eyes bulged. He lunged and Danica danced aside, her weapon glancing up under his extended arm and gashing the muscles there. Even as he bellowed in pain he laid his other hand on the hilt of his giant sword, slashing the air so close to Danica’s body that she sensed the wind of the blade’s passage like gooseflesh on her throat.
Again she leaped, faster than he could turn to follow, evading the scimitar. She thrust her shield into the emperor’s face as if it were a flaming brand. He winced as the light of the star-shield glanced off his features, draining his skin of color so that he seemed to already be a grinning death’s-head.
Danica lunged, following the gleaming path of her shield with the blade of her sword. It struck deep into Kallidar’s chest. For an instant the two stood frozen, face-to-face, as Danica’s blade held the man impaled. The scimitar fell from his grasp and clattered across the flagstones. Then, in one smooth movement, she pulled her scarlet sword away. Kallidar crashed to the floor like a sacrificial ox. She regarded his corpse with narrow-eyed disdain and pushed at it with her foot.
A motion in the corner of her eye became Bellasteros. He lifted the emperor’s great sword and weighed it in his hand. His voice vibrated with barely controlled anger. “I had thought to kill him myself,” he informed Danica. “I am the son of Harus, I am to be emperor, and I had thought to kill him myself.”
Danica rested the tip of her sword on the floor, catching her breath. The light in her shield was undimmed. “Long live the emperor,” she said with a shrug. His eyes, their flame hooded, didn’t leave hers. Behind him Patros frowned at Ilanit and IIanit met his frown with studied indifference.
Weapons clashed in the corridor and Atalia burst into the room. She was pursued by several imperial soldiers, who leaped through the doorway and then realized their mistake. The Companions closed around them, aided by the Sardians who had stayed at the conqueror’s side, and Bellasteros and Danica turned together to the attackers.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, their swords pealing. Danica beat back the attack of a soldier hardly more than a youth and was just turning to aid Ilanit when the shield spat a warning, jarring her arm. “My thanks,” she gasped as she spun to face the upraised dagger of the woman who had shared Kallidar’s bed. She batted the knife away with the flat of her sword but the woman struck again.
The woman’s dagger hit the star engraved on the shield and shattered in a burst of light. She cried out in terror and shrank back, her hands before her eyes. With a sweep of his sword Bellasteros disposed of one of the soldiers he faced; the other threw down his weapon and fled. The conqueror turned, saw the cowering woman, and raised his sword.
Danica’s blade flashed up underneath his, and they met with a clang. “The woman belongs to Ashtar,” she said.
Bellasteros stared at the queen who stayed his hand. His body quivered; his mouth was only a tight line across his face. And yet the flame ebbed from his dark eyes even as he stared at her.
Kallidar’s partner scrabbled away across the floor. Her eyes were widely dilated, transfixed by the pulsing star on Danica’s shield. Like a puppet dangled by the flare of light, she rose, opened a narrow casement on the far wall, eased herself onto the sill, and fell backward into the night. The gust of wind that shrieked around the fortress and carried her body away jangled with muted chimes.
The silence was absolute. Danica heard her own heartbeat within her breast and the ragged, awestruck breaths of the warriors behind her. With part of her mind she noted that one of the tapestries illustrated the legend of the deified hero-king Daimion, the tree and the sword—the beginnings of the Empire.
Then Bellasteros lowered his sword and released a pent-up breath. He bowed, stiffly, to Danica and summoned up a wry smile. “You have kept the bargain. Should I come to your capital at the turn of the year and make my offering to Ashtar in gratitude for victory?”
“Would such rites please the gods at the edge of the world?” she asked. Her shield ceased humming and she sheathed the sword.
He gestured expansively, gracious in defeat and victory mingled. “I am told that all gods must be placated in turn. And your goddess seems to be no exception.”
“Then you will be welcome in Sabazel,” she said. She laid her fingertips on his face just long enough to kindle his eyes with a different kind of fire.
When she turned away her fingers retained the warmth of his skin. She met Atalia’s quizzical expression with a thoughtful smile.
Ashtar murmured. Not yet, daughter. You have not yet won the game.
*
The interior of the pavilion was illuminated bright as noontide by countless torches, the flames doubled and redoubled by cloth of gold, gleaming utensils, and burnished bronze armor. The falcons of Sardis preened themselves in the vortex of light, watching unblinking as a Sabazian woman feasted beside Bellasteros.
Danica eyed the dishes of larks’ tongues and sugared roses before her, next to bowls of chickpeas, salt fish, and olives, standard army fare. She permitted herself one more sip of wine. The Sardians drank their wine unwatered, and she had no wish to lose control of her faculties. But the liquid was blood-red,
blood-warm, and delicious, stroking her body into an insidious lassitude while drawing her mind tighter and tighter.
Bellasteros reclined beside her, a respectful handsbreadth away. The scent of his body was strong in her nostrils and it was almost a pleasant sensation. If he did come to the summer rites of Ashtar, crossing the borders of Sabazel, then she might think that sensation very pleasant indeed.
His officers passed before the platform, weaponless, bowing to him. Some of the older ones, such as Mardoc, made of their bows perfunctory inclinations, but the imperial officials in the conqueror’s employ made the deep obeisances due an emperor, and more than one of them murmured the name of Daimion. Bellasteros’s deification had begun.
Bellasteros called for more wine as he watched his officers take their places on their own couches. A boy filled his rhyton, dodging around the bored guard just behind him, and the conqueror drank deeply.
He realized then that Danica was watching him and favored her with a salute of his drinking horn. The wine slopped over the ram’s head carved on its base. “Bellasteros rides with me,” he mimicked. “I might have argued with such words, but now …” He drank again. The smile he turned on her was complacent.
She was somehow disappointed that he thought the game over. The voice of the goddess sang in the flame of the torches and the conqueror waited for a placatory answer.
“What would you have me say?” she asked him.
“I would have you and your warriors as allies, to secure the southern provinces of the Empire.” His smile now was less complacent than proprietary.
She shook her head. “I want only Sabazel.”
“And if I come to you, Danica, in the rites of Ashtar?” He reached out to touch her arm.
The caress sparked her body. The hair on the back of her neck shivered and she stiffened, drawing away. “Then you will make your offering,” she replied, more harshly than she had intended. “I bargained for freedom, my own as well as Sabazel’s.”
Sabazel Page 2