The priest retreated a pace. “You, too,” he cried, “a spawn of Sabazel. You, too, born of the goddess. Bastard, unfit to rule Sardis …”
“Go on,” said Bellasteros between his teeth. “Spew out your poison. Your powers wane, and you will enspell no one else.”
True enough; the faces around Adrastes reflected only shocked disbelief.
“Bastard?” the priest screamed. He pointed a claw-like finger at the emperor. “Heretic! You should burn, shrivel to nothingness for your deeds!”
Bellasteros laughed, and the power in that laugh froze the priest’s expression in gaping madness. Solifrax rose; its tip brushed Adrastes’s throat, passed down his chest, settled on the winged pectoral. Delicately, the emperor lifted the symbol of office and removed it. “Declan,” he called.
The young priest ran forward, knelt.
“You are hereby appointed the talon of Harus. The office of grand inquisitor is abolished, due to the treachery of he who last held it.”
Declan caught the pectoral as it slid from the blade. In his hands the metal swirled, beginning to glisten, reflecting the light of shield and sword. “My thanks, my lord,” he said, genuinely surprised.
“You shall restore honor to the name of Harus,” said the emperor. The images of the god seemed to flutter in satisfaction as he turned again to Adrastes.
Quicksilver spilled across the courtyard. Every eye turned to the east; the full moon rose above the horizon, a cauldron of light. Pale light, tinted with the faintest blush of red.
Adrastes screamed as if the light seared him. He shrank back, turning to run. With a beatific smile Lyris thrust out her foot and tripped him. He fell headlong at the foot of the altar, and Mardoc’s drying blood mottled his face and his robes with dark carnelian.
He crouched on the pavement, a cornered, wounded basilisk. And yet he bore some remnant of his power, and his pride was limitless—he raised his hands, beginning an incantation, and darkness gathered at his fingertips. The darkness swelled, streaming outward, seeking its prey …
As one, deliberately, Danica and Bellasteros stepped forward. The shield reflecting the moonlight, gathering it, pouring it like molten silver over the shadow and dissipating it—the sword, holding the golden gleam of the sun, making of the light itself a crystalline-bladed weapon that sliced the gathering darkness into tattered smoke.
Awed silence fell upon the courtyard; more than one spectator shrank back, covering his eyes. But not Patros or Lyris, Declan or Chryse. They watched, their faces as taut as the pale light they beheld.
And the shadow turned, enveloping Adrastes himself, sucking the color from his clothing and drawing the darkness of his eyes from their sockets. He screamed, crawling across the bricks, but could not escape. His tongue shriveled in his mouth, his eyes burst and melted down his face, his skin peeled away, revealing the black blood underneath.
The shadow winked out. But still Adrastes writhed, his robes burning in the clear white flame of shield and sword, fire and light consuming him until at last only a charred simulacrum of a human form lay before the altar. It whimpered, the cinders of its limbs twitching feebly. Bellasteros stepped into the luminescence of the shield, drawing it about him, and with Solifrax cut the life from the pitiful remains.
For a long moment the scent of burning flesh hung heavy on the air. Then a wind poured down the sky, bringing the cold cleanness of an ice-crowned mountain. The gathered people seemed to inhale in one great sigh.
Bellasteros stood silent in the moonlight and its reflection from the shield, letting it cleanse his sword, letting it purify him; his face was gray with the ashes of his anger. He turned to Danica, whispering, “Your forgiveness, Mother …”
Danica heard again the note of harmony, the strand of melody straining at her consciousness, that they had heard in the garden of the gods. He heard it, too—his dark eyes glistened with it; for one eternal moment they stood together, filled with the light of the sun and moon, filled with the music of the gods.
“We are forgiven.” Danica sighed. The absolution was sweet, sweet…. The melody was gone, burst like a pricked bubble. The shield muted itself and another wave of nausea drained the blood from her face.
Voices rose clamoring into the night. Bellasteros was suddenly surrounded by his officers, by Declan, Chryse, Aveyron, and Patros, declaring their fealty; the priests and priestesses crept forward in awe to touch the hem of his tunic and the rim of Danica’s shield. The falcon standards seemed to murmur contentedly, the god freed at last. No one went near Mardoc’s cold form or the cinders that had been Adrastes.
Danica looked at Ilanit and Lyris, and Shandir’s smooth face, as if she had never seen them before. She was falling, plummeting down from a great height; her remote, celestial viewpoint evaporated and drifted like silvered mist down the wind. Her power drained from her body, ebbing perceptibly from her mind, leaving her aching and hollow. Mortality and pain, the end of the game …
She leaned against Shandir, her knees suddenly too weak to hold her. “Take me away,” she said. “Alone.” Her ears buzzed, her head swam, all the blood in her body drained into her abdomen and twisted, tighter, tighter, into a cramp that took her breath away. “No.” she gasped. “No, not now, Mother …”
Shandir, horrified, took Danica’s shield and gave it to Ilanit, took her sword and helmet and passed them to Lyris, “Come,” she said.
Bellasteros looked over the heads of the people around him sensing something amiss. “Patros,” he ordered, “escort the queen of Sabazel to a place of rest befitting her rank.” Patros hurried to take Danica’s other arm, and Chryse, her brow furrowed with concern, followed.
She walked from the courtyard, placing one foot before the other; I shall not fall here, not before all these folk—Marcos! Bellasteros’s eyes rested on her back, offering his own strength, accompanying her…. Imperial officials and his own people mingled raised him up and bore him away.
The gate, steps, a street, and the gates of the palace; torchlit hallways flowed through her mind; a large shadowed bedchamber. Another cramp, wringing her entire body with its force—a rush of warmth down her legs as the waters holding the child burst from her body.
And no more thoughts, only sensation, only the consciousness of her own muscles straining rhythmically. Marcos! she wailed, even as she despised her own weakness, her own helplessness; but he was not there.
Chapter Seventeen
Bellasteros walked in a dream. The night undulated like a serpent around him, eyes flaring with lamps and torches and the great round glow of the moon. He slipped Solifrax hissing into its sheath and tried to focus on at least one face before him… . Sardian officers, requesting food, requesting medicines. Imperial officers swearing fealty. Palace officials and servants bearing gifts of wine, gold, spices. People touching him, wanting to share some shred of his power.
The throne room. Someone had brought the great tapestry, and the outspread wings of Sardian Harus stretched between lotus-capped columns. The embroidered battle it overlooked was won; the threads shifted, weaving themselves into a new scene—Farsahn, Iksandarun, and the Empire, prospering under the rule of Bellasteros. On the opposite wall, a fresco of Daimion with Mari at his side, their painted faces regarding him in cool challenge.
King of kings, god-king, emperor—the diadem was warm, sitting lightly on his hair, whispering of power. Bellasteros mounted the steps and seated himself gingerly on the imperial throne. Mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli, garnet and gold; the throne was an ornately carved peacock’s tail, and he felt as if his dirty, sweaty, bloody armor befouled it.
Thousands lay dead this night, sacrificed to his ambition— Mardoc, Atalia, Bogazkar—the legions, imperial and Sardian alike, decimated … The challenge, he thought, is to build.
His subjects, new and old, bowed before him. No longer would he have to worry who was faithful, who a spy. Aveyron, smiling, held the falcon standards at his side. Make the lad a centurion, he told himself. On a gal
lery above the room women watched him, exchanging pleased asides; the harem, one of the officials had whispered. Now his.
Danica, he thought. Where was she, what was happening, had she been wounded with some foul lingering poison of Adrastes? A pulse beat in the back of his mind, urgent, desperate. He peered through the glitter of the room, searching for Patros, but Patros was not there.
More petitioners, more decisions—and here an official came with a young girl, hardly older than his own daughter. Roushangka, said the man, Kallidar’s only surviving child.
She was his own cousin, come to think of it, a relative of his mother. But Roushangka was fair, unlike Sardian-dark Viridis. The child watched him with great gray eyes, her painted mouth tight with fear, the blond curls that streamed down her back trembling like poplar leaves in a breeze. In sixteen days, the astrologers said, a propitious time for marriage, the binding of a new ruler to the Empire.
“Yes, I would be honored,” said Bellasteros, abstracted. Blond, like Danica—Danica …
Roushangka was gone, carried away into the crowd. Someone produced wine, watered wine—he sipped, and his head cleared somewhat.
A group of Sabazians approached him, led by the thin one —Lyris—requesting a funeral pyre, games in honor of dead Atalia. “Yes, yes, of course,” he returned, and designated an officer to assist. “Lyris!” he called.
Pale, shuttered eyes, reserving emotion, reserving thought. “Yes, my lord?”
“Please, give me news of your queen. Is she well?”
A slight crumple of her mouth, then a polite inclination of her head, enough to conceal her face. “She will send messages when she is ready, my lord.”
“My thanks,” Bellasteros said dryly. But the pulse hammered on. Something was wrong, something had gone terribly awry. Gods! he thought. Have you not had your sacrifice for this day—forever? …
Patros appeared at his side, his helmet carried under his arm, his face set carefully so as to reveal little to the watching crowd. “Marcos,” he said under his breath, “your lady is caught in the travail of birth; she is tired and weak, and Shandir fears for her life—” His voice cracked and he hastily cleared his throat.
Bellasteros tried to speak and could not. Birth? Now? The room spun around him, torches elongating into fiery banners, voices quickening into one blended clamor, the heavy buzzing of insects on a hot summer’s afternoon…. Perspiration streamed down his back as he fell into reality.
“You must excuse me,” he said to whatever faces were closest. “I have urgent business elsewhere—I shall return as soon as possible.”
The people parted before him, bowing, reaching out to touch his sacred person. Then he was in a cool marble hallway, past a courtyard where the bare branches of orange and almond trees rattled in a jangling breeze, before a door guarded by a Sardian and a Sabazian, into a large bedchamber lit by braziers. Shadowed silk hangings, shutters open to the moon—the moon, held in a taut membrane of imperial purple, picked with diamonds…. The light streamed across the floor, cool, impersonal, blotting out the scarlet luminescence of the fires.
Chryse, wringing out a cloth in herb-scented water; Shandir, kneeling at the foot of the bed; Ilanit, wiping gleaming rivulets of sweat from her mother’s naked body—Danica! he thought, her name wrenched from his heart. She was propped up by thick pillows in the center of the bed, knees bent, hands trembling over the oddly flattened mound of her belly. Her face deathly pale and drawn, her hair tangled across the coverlet …
“Danica?” he said aloud, and hesitantly stepped to her side.
*
Tired, so tired—Danica was buffeted by the waves of pain, drowning in them, not coasting with a fierce glee down their slopes, as she should have been. Never like this before, one part of her mind insisted. Wrong, all wrong—too soon. Oh, my poor child, I have failed you …
Her eyes cleared, and for one lucid moment she saw the moonlight streaming across the floor, lapping at the foot of the bed. The shield gleamed in its corner, humming discordantly. I shall climb up the moonpath, climb up Cylandra to the peak, throw myself into the sky—cool, clean, quiet … Chryse poured a drop of wine between her lips and she swallowed. Her mouth was foul, her body streaked with dirt and blood—the moonpath, clean and cool …
Again the tightening, twisting, wringing, deeper and deeper until her eyes bulged from her face. The bandage on her arm reddened. She heard her own breath escape in a moan—Marcos … Weak, that tiny shred of coherence told her. Weak, to call upon a man now; none of a man’s business, this.
Danica’s eyes cleared. She was hallucinating. Bellasteros bent over her, his fingertips touching her face lightly, so lightly… . “Danica?” She was even hearing his voice. He was pale, frowning—the diadem muted and forgotten on his brow, Solifrax sheathed and forgotten by his side.
He was there, sitting uncertainly on the edge of the bed. She reached for his hand and grasped it convulsively in her own. “And my strength, my lady….” he whispered. Or perhaps he only thought it.
Danica’s muscles strained into one great expulsive thrust. She rose from the pillows, sitting almost upright. “Shandir,” she gasped, “now, the time has come.”
“What?” Bellasteros asked.
“Have you never witnessed a birth?” asked Shandir. She probed gently, announced, “It is lying correctly, Danica. But small, very small.”
“A birth?” Bellasteros replied. “No, of course not; women’s work …”
“But with materials you provided,” Shandir said tartly.
“Indeed,” he returned. His voice shivered and he steadied it.
“Bellasteros breaks all the rules,” said Danica. “He breaks them, and he builds new and better ones …” Her voice spun itself out and shattered in a sharp exhalation. Tired, so tired—she could hardly hold her head erect, her hands shook, her legs were only strands of flesh connected to her body—her body worked without conscious direction, wringing itself inside out.
“Prop her up,” said Shandir’s distant voice, and Bellasteros obeyed, placing his arm behind Danica’s shoulders and lifting her forward.
A moment later she fell back, spent. Chryse quickly forced another drop of wine between her lips. Chryse, the first wife of the emperor, Danica thought with detached amusement. Our child it is. hers more than mine … The Sardian woman’s face reflected a passionate hope, an agony almost equal to Danica’s own.
Bellasteros’s dark eyes glistened damply. Ilanit’s touch trembled. The shape in the comer—Patros, forgotten, unable to leave.
Again the thrust. Surely her body would rip itself apart, seared into two pieces, tattered flesh … “I can see its head,” Shandir said quietly. “Dark hair, a proper little Sardian.”
Perhaps she attempted a jest; Danica could not tell, did not care. She fell back, exhausted, no more strength, no more consciousness. Bellasteros’s arm was tight behind her, his hand still held hers. Draw from me, take whatever you need, my lady, my love …
Strength—with an effort she inhaled deeply, let his strength seep into her—and up, clenched with effort … Danica heard her own voice cry out, a wordless shriek of pain so intense it was ecstatic. And Shandir bent forward, pulled gently, held a tiny baby in her hands.
Danica collapsed, sliding down the far side of a great wave, faster and faster—the moonpath retreating across the floor, drawing her with it, out into the star-pricked sky and Ashtar’s arms….
Ah, my daughter, a game well played, indeed.
So the voice, the presence returned—returned to take her …
Bellasteros still held her. He was silent. Everyone was silent. She grasped the last strand of her consciousness and pulled herself from her dream. With an effort she cleared her head, opened her eyes.
Shandir held the baby gently. A boy. Heir to the Empire. Eyes closed, dark lashes crescents on his cheeks. Blue cheeks, flaccid limbs, little chest unmoving—tiny azure fingers limp on Shandir’s wrist.
The healer looked up
, met Danica’s eyes, shook her head in a slow, reluctant grief.
Chryse gulped and turned aside. Ilanit dropped the delicate cotton wrappings she held, covering her face.
Bellasteros said, very quietly, “No. Have we not had death enough, this day, this year—these past years? This innocent will not pay …”
In a paroxysm of denial Danica started up. She took the baby from Shandir’s hands. Small, too small—she felt as if she held a doll. The umbilical cord still coiled from his body into hers, not taut but slack. “No,” she said, low, fervent, “I shall not accept his death, too. Mother! Hear me—” Blood gushed from her body, splashing Shandir, and the healer bent hurriedly to her work.
Danica hardly noticed. Her gaze was fixed on some infinite horizon, beyond this room and the path of the moonlight. “Mother!” she cried. “Hear me!” The shield seethed with quicksilver.
The winter king, daughter. The winter king, sacrificed that the summer king might live, and living, secure Sabazel… . The game is over.
“Sacrificed to my ambition?” asked Bellasteros. “No! You no longer demand sacrifice, Mother …”
“And the game will not end like this!” Danica bled. Shandir grew pale, redoubling her efforts. Chryse and Ilanit stood helplessly, clutching at each other.
“Death,” Danica said. “Pain, and after pain healing, or what is the purpose. Mother!”
Sorrow, for a game that cannot be won.
“Compromise, only compromise—Harus himself upon your arm … What is this child but compromise!”
The baby lay cold and still against her breast. The goddess was silent. “We sustain you,” Danica cried, “as you sustain us; will you betray us, Ashtar? If we cannot believe in you, then we can believe in nothing, nothing …” Another gout of blood burst from her, pattering like rain onto the marble floor. A chill shook her, the room wavered, moonglowing mist shading her eyes. “I die, Ashtar,” moaned Danica, falling back against the pillows, clutching the baby. “Take me, too; kill me with your betrayal …”
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