Sabazel

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Danica threw herself away from him, rolled over, and lay with her limbs spread wide to the night air, to the moon’s rays that slanted in pale strands across the chamber. Her muscles sang, straining tighter and tighter toward a conclusion that would not come, not now—that much she could deny him. That much she could spite him, and herself as well for using him so.

  Mother, she sighed, I have won for you, and in that my will is yours I am pleased; Mother, have pity.

  The wind calmed itself, purling through the shadows like a rumor of distant, gentle chimes. Your will is mine, and I am pleased. Pity, then. Her body cooled, forgetting that she had cheated it.

  “Danica,” Bellasteros said. Her name plummeted into the darkness.

  She scooped the tangle of her hair away from her face and stretched, groaning. “Yes?”

  He sat up. His neck was bowed, his back curved, his head hung almost to his knees. “You would take my substance from me, my will, my strength; you would have me give you everything, but you give me nothing in return. Do I deserve so little? You name me Ashtar’s son, born into her hands as surely as you, but you show me nothing but scorn.”

  She raised her hand and with her forefinger lightly traced the line of his spine. When she reached the curve of his hips she rolled to her side and placed both her palms against his flank. His back and shoulders were scored with the red marks of her nails and teeth.

  “If you are Ashtar’s son,” she asked, “why do you punish me for my devotion to her?”

  Silence. Then, quietly, “I fear her. Her power touches me too closely.”

  Pity, Mother. “Have we served each other badly, Bellasteros?”

  “Perhaps.”

  She rose and looked into his face—chagrin, pain, and the dignity of acceptance. Her tension snapped and she found herself chuckling. “Bellasteros. Have you another name? Such a mouthful, that.”

  His surprise disarmed him; he turned to her. “My mother, they say, named me Marcos. It was not the name I would have chosen at maturity. My father”—he paused, continued smoothly—”Gerlac named me Bellasteros, intending to make of me a warrior.”

  “Marcos, then, if I may call you such in confidence.”

  His smile was faint but composed. “A polite request, my lady of Sabazel.”

  “A polite request, yes. but I am not the lady of Sabazel. Come.” She led him from the bed, across the room, through the shutters into the whispering darkness of a midsummer’s night. The breeze was cold against Danica’s moist skin. The chill was welcome, scouring her senses clean.

  The moon hung low beyond the Horn Gate, drawing its train of stars across the sky. Stars, too, were the spear points that glittered in the dimness of the pass.

  The water in the bronze basin shimmered in motes of silver, retaining the light of the moon. Danica passed her hand across the surface, swirling it. “This basin collects the mountain freshets, Ashtar’s tears,” she told Bellasteros. “The mountain binds the earth to the sky, and our lady lays her embrace over both.”

  He nodded. “In Sardis we must build our own mountains to bind us to the gods.”

  “And do their artificial heights please them?”

  He grimaced. “The gods favor Sardis, it seems, even if they use Sardis’s king for sport.” She glanced sharply up at him, but he did not speak in bitterness.

  She scooped up a double handful of the water and sprinkled it across his chest and shoulders. The bright droplets left shining trails across his skin. Another handful, and the silver rivulets cascaded down his back.

  The water in the basin stirred, dissolving into luminescent mist, which flowed upward from its boundaries. It wavered on the wind, shaping itself into a form that was perhaps human, perhaps not human at all. The light it emanated was so bright that the shadows of Danica and Bellasteros stretched behind them across the flagstones.

  The conqueror did not stir. His upturned face was set, calm stretched tightly over pain, his hands opened in supplication over the water. A tendril of the shining mist brushed his lips, strayed around his throat, coiled between his fingers.

  My son, you have been long in coming.

  He sighed deeply, the breath torn from the depths of his being, but pride kept his lips sealed.

  Your brow is stained with your mother’s blood. Your worship of me, so long delayed, will erase that stain.

  And pride kept his back straight, his chin high, acknowledging his nemesis at last.

  You will preserve Sabazel, and Sabazel will guard your back. You will make obeisance to me, and I shall lay the world before you.

  The mist again touched his face and he blinked, quickly, as if loath to lose the vision. But the light disintegrated, distant sparkles drifting away down the wind. Muted chimes rang in the shadows. The basin of water darkened.

  Danica slumped, exhausted, beside the still form of the conqueror, watching for his reaction. But for a long time he did not stir. His profile was the image of an archaic god chiseled in Sardian granite.

  Is the game truly over? Danica thought. Or do its rules change? And she thought. If I cannot have faith in Ashtar, I can have faith in nothing.

  She reached out and lightly pressed her fingertips against Bellasteros’s forearm. He started at her touch, then crumpled onto the stones. His hands closed into fists in his lap. “Here,” he said faintly, “here within her borders, I can listen. But beyond …” He turned to Danica, allowing her to glimpse the struggle in his eyes. “With all respect to the goddess, I am not solely her son. My mother’s death I shall repay—that much I owe. But I am caught in the nets of my life, and not even Ashtar can free me.”

  His mouth had softened; after only a moment’s hesitation Danica leaned forward to kiss it. “Here, at least, you will know peace. And after … We shall trust in the goddess. She moves in subtle ways, and her paths are many. She holds us both securely in her hands.”

  But still he frowned, troubled. Again he set his hand against Danica’s cheek, and, tentatively, he returned her kiss.

  They rose and walked arm in arm down the steps to the garden. But his eyes looked beyond the city of Sabazel to the invisible lines of its borders; beyond those borders to the Empire and to Sardis itself. “Here?” he asked.

  “Marcos,” she returned confidently, “here you will begin a new life.”

  His body was warm against hers, his voice an echo of the wind. “Show me, then,” he murmured, “how the bastard son of Harus can honor his sister in Ashtar.”

  So she led him back to her chambers, laid him on her bed, drew the curtains around them. And they made love with a tenderness that surprised them both. Not that she would trust him, Danica assured herself. He could yet betray her. But his strength was great, his surrender graceful, and his smile showed wry amusement at her, at his own confusion, at the gods themselves. Never before had she known a man of his complexity—and his beauty.

  But even as she lay in his arms, satiated with what might have been her own surrender, she knew that neither could she be freed from the nets of her life.

  *

  The wind stilled itself that dawn, and the day broke in a silent rush of pink and amber. The morning star glittered above Cylandra’s crown, drawing the shadow of the mountain from the high plains and the tiered buildings of the city. Ashtar inhaled the night.

  Atalia dozed in the guardroom beside the gate, her eyes glinting between half-closed lids, her hand clasped around a javelin. A cock crowed, and she started to attention, but the only living creatures she saw were the contentedly clucking chickens that paced the street and the bees that coasted on cool air toward the honeysuckle on the walls.

  Shandir lay wakeful between two Sardian soldiers—Aveyron, tall and fair, young, fresh from a provincial town in the shadow of Sardis; Hern, stocky and dark, older, grown weathered in Gerlac’s and now Bellasteros’s service. Her chestnut hair lay tangled over them all, and her cheeks were still flushed with the night’s efforts. But her expression was somber, and her lips moved in s
ilent prayer.

  Patros glanced between the shutters; only the leaves of the pomegranate trees moved in the garden. In the street, nothing stirred. He smiled. He closed the shutters, plunging the room back into night, and walked with quiet steps back to the bed. For a time he stood, watching Ilanit as she slept, flushed with an ethereal rosiness, her lips still parted from his kisses. Then he knelt over her and awakened her with a gentle murmur. “You have ravished my heart.” She opened her arms to him.

  Danica slept dreamlessly, and beside her Bellasteros lay as if struck down by an avenging deity; the rhythms of their breathing were the same.

  *

  The days passed in a honeyed slowness, and the nights were velvet soft beneath the stars. But the dwindling moon rose later and later each evening, and Atalia, at least, was pleased.

  Danica set a small incense burner in the ruins of the meal, crusts and seeds strewn across the taboret. “Here,” she said, “you might find this of interest. The smoldering leaves of lethenderum induce visions in some.”

  Bellasteros watched, one brow cocked in skepticism. “I have heard of the juice of the poppy, and of the drug taken by the mad hashishin of the northern wastes. But I have not heard of this. Is it a soporific?”

  She sat down beside him, chuckling. “No, Marcos, it will not dull your… faculties. I have already told you, you need not prove your prowess to me.”

  “Have I not already proved it?” he asked, mocking his own arrogance.

  She groaned. “Amply.”

  His grin was that of a small, innocent boy, drawing an echoing laugh from her. She tickled his side where the ribs curved just under the skin, and he leaped on her, bearing her down onto the bed with an upheaval of the coverlet. For a moment they wrestled, laughing, until their lips met.

  After a time Bellasteros raised his head. The spout of the incense burner emitted a tail of dark smoke, and a blue haze had gathered over the bed. He sniffed at it. “Coriander, perhaps; saffron and sandalwood.”

  “Lethenderum,” she informed him. She inhaled deeply of the fragrance; it sparked across her mind, tickling her senses and her nerves sang. Pleasure yourself, daughter. Pleasure, and no tomorrow. “Come,” Danica said to the man she held “we shall talk later.”

  Strange, she thought after a few moments, how quickly they had learned the peculiar melodies of each other’s bodies, how quickly they had learned to play those separate melodies and blend them into one that blotted out all memory, all dread.

  And, she thought after a few more moments, it was also strange how quickly they had learned to crave that duet, so that sleeping and eating and bathing became only chords in it so that their greatest need was the touching, the clinging and straining one against the other, the sweet contentment after.

  Then for a long time she thought nothing at all but listened bemusedly to the squeaks and sighs of her voice as she circled him, clasping him tight inside her. “Mother, in your honor …” And he, too, let the words of the litany be torn from him, in one long gasp of pleasure and submission.

  “Marcos Bellasteros,” Danica murmured, making of the name a caress. Strange, that she should so crave the body of a man …

  He lay sprawled among the bedclothes, blowing small whorls in the haze that covered them, holding her against his side. “Tell me of Sardis, the city of the two rivers. Tell me of the boy Marcos.” She propped her chin on her hand to watch the expressions, exaggerated by lethenderum, range across hi face.

  Thoughtfulness, and a brief frown of painful memory, and the tightness at the corners of his mouth that was resignation. “Marcos, the nurses called me, as a boy in the great halls of the palace. But soon I was given to Patros’s father, to be raised as his brother, and I was known as Gerlac’s and Harus’s son.

  “My mother Viridis was a name on an insignificant monument in the necropolis, to be remembered with a handful of beans on Hallow’s Eve; once I saw a faded scroll picturing the procession that carried her across the eastern river and laid her to what must have been an uneasy sleep in a rockcut tomb. Must have been uneasy, until now.”

  The black pupils of his eyes dilated and his voice slurred as the drug worked its changes on his mind. Danica’s head grew heavy and fell forward to rest on his shoulder. “Are these the visions you would choose?” she whispered.

  “No, they are not; I think you have given me the elixir of truth.” But his voice continued, and the images blossomed before her.

  “I thought the rumors of my birth were jealousy of the king’s son. But as I grew Gerlac declined; he himself began to make the sideways remarks, the quick sneers, that told me the rumors were true. And my old nurse confirmed it before she died—dying, she no longer feared Gerlac’s wrath.

  “The old king died violently, in an apoplectic fit, and I was pleased. He was a fool, never having learned to rule; in him, temper was a weakness. I was but twenty, but the troops cheered me in the citadel, and the generals offered me their fealty.

  “My first wife was Chryse, Mardoc’s daughter; we were wedded at fourteen, for Gerlac would not have me waste my substance—too proud to admit that that substance was not his. She was dull, she remains dull, and my other wives taken in diplomacy are likewise placid cows. Chryse bore me two daughters; Mardoc, shamed by the second, exposed it outside the city walls. The others? I did my duty by them. But always there was Patros, the company of men, and the military camp.”

  His voice faded and died, but the thoughts remained, molding the blue mist of the chamber into phantoms, ziggurats rising above the rivers of Sardis, the meek faces of women, Gerlac’s poisoned pride; and over all the outspread wings of the falcon god.

  He did not taste only his dutiful wives. After Gerlac’s watchful eye had closed, Bellasteros haunted the taverns and the gleaming brothels by the river wall. All he had to do was lower the hood of his cloak, revealing the dark, even features of the young king, and the women flocked to him. If he found a courtesan who could not only play games with him, or entertain him with song and dance, but who could converse about politics and geography and the doings of the gods, he chose her. And he descended upon her like a falcon upon its prey, leaving her whimpering; the next time she no longer met his eyes, and he pronounced her dull and forgot her.

  Under Gerlac, and then under his stepson, the power of Sardis grew—by conquest if necessary, by alliance, by the tribute of the lesser states about the Great Sea. The legions accepted provincials as soldiers and rewarded them with citizenship. Roads for couriers and merchants were driven through hills, across swamps, along the coastline; aqueducts spanned the valleys, and ships plied the sea in trade. Sardis was one tautly knit body, strongest of all the world—except the Empire.

  The Empire, facing Sardis across an uncertain border, a border marred by years of dispute. The Empire, waning as Sardis waxed strong …

  And the Empire was a goal held before Bellasteros by the old king whose respect he could never earn. The Empire was a chance to earn his own name and forget the whispers of bastardy that echoed in the citadel of Sardis. The Empire had spawned the woman Viridis, who had branded him at birth and left him motherless.

  So Bellasteros led an army of fifty thousand boldly across that uncertain border. It had taken him two years to defeat Kallidar and win Farsahn, two years to conclude the conquest of the known world and draw near the end. By the gods, there must be an ending …

  Danica heard his thought as if he spoke it, carried by the spiced smoke of lethenderum from his body to hers, circling and returning so that their minds were one—it was you I sought, only you; you have ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse.

  But he would never say the words or acknowledge she had heard them, and she would pretend ignorance of his thought. This man, of all in the world, had the power to draw love from her, and to draw fear.

  The mist shimmered. The vision of Sardis became only light motes in the mist, fading, winking out. And the king and the queen who lay so tightly together smiled in other, better d
reams; peace, and a world where peace was possible.

  *

  On the morning of the fourth day Danica and Bellasteros arose, and in silence they dressed again in their armor. Warily they regarded each other from the shadows of their helmets. “You will fight at my side in the campaign to come?” he asked.

  “No. I want only Sabazel. I shall guard your back, and Ashtar will ride by your side.”

  His nostrils flared. “I would have thought—”

  “Spare me,” she told him. “The rites are over.”

  So he turned and paced from the room, leaving the tumbled bed and the ashes of incense cold behind him. Danica bent to lift her shield onto her arm; the metal chilled her, reflecting nothing from a gray sky.

  A taut Patros glanced from the grim expression of his king to the gates of the city that closed behind them; he hid his face and did not speak.

  “So much for that,” Atalia said with satisfaction. “May they never trouble us again.”

  But Danica shook her head wearily and turned away from Shandir’s outstretched arms to walk alone up the mountainside. Ilanit hid in her chambers and wept, too young for the burden laid upon her.

  Bellasteros led his men over the borders of Sabazel. He sat tall on his horse, his mouth set, arrogant; his gaze was fixed on the standard carried before him, as if pleading release from some enchantment.

  From Cylandra’s flank Danica watched them, tiny horsemen creeping down the valley and across the plain. If I cannot have faith in Ashtar, she repeated, again and again, I can have faith in nothing. The wind whispered, Sorrow, daughter, for a game that cannot be won. But a new game begins, and you will play again. Weariness overcame her, the weight of her shield bore her to her knees, and she crumpled over its edge.

  A falcon floated on the mountain’s updraft, its talons curved beneath its belly, its eye sharp.

  Chapter Five