Tathea

by Anne Perry

  Isadorus rose to his feet and walked towards the window, speaking with his back to them. “I know Tathea is our ally, Ulciber. I know your advice has my good at heart, but the law of the Book is the sanctity of choice. You cannot teach truth in the wake of force. If I send Camassian armies into Shinabar to restore Tathea to the throne, she will be listened to for the wrong reasons. What may begin as justice will end as revenge because passions will run too hard and too high to stop. Where is the end of retribution?”

  Ulciber’s face tightened and something in his eyes flashed for a moment, as if it were he who had sustained a defeat and not Tathea. But he said no more. He was a counselor, even a friend, but he knew his boundaries and was wise enough not to overstep them.

  Tathea also recognized defeat, and although all her passion cried out against it, her anger was too hot for her to trust her tongue. She had asked for help and been denied it. She withdrew before she betrayed her emotions. If sense did not move her, at least pride did.

  She dreaded telling Ra-Nufis of her failure. But after initial surprise, he contained his frustration with dignity, and entirely without blame towards her.

  “There will be a way,” he said with absolute confidence, standing in the sharp winter sunlight in her room. “If not now, then later. The Word will prevail. The Power that gave it to you will open up another path. Events may occur which will cause Isadorus to change his mind.” He bit his lip and shrugged his shoulders very slightly. “One thing you may be sure of, conditions will grow worse in Shinabar. That alone may be sufficient.” He looked down, then up again quickly. “This I do know—the Word will not fail.”

  It was enough to return her to her study of the Book, and gradually a peace grew within her, a deeper knowledge of her own fallibility, and a resolve not to fail Ra-Nufis again, or all those people who did not know the burden with which she was entrusted but who depended upon her.

  It was well into spring when Alexius returned to Camassia from the border wars in Irria-Kand. It had been a hard season of campaigning, and the barbarians beyond the eastern plains seemed greater in number than previously, and better armed. Camassian legions were holding, but their losses had been considerable, and it was mixed news he brought back to Isadorus.

  Alexius was used to life on the march and on the battlefield. He did not enjoy physical hardship, but it did not trouble him as it did many. He had long ago learned to master not only the exhaustion, the cold, and the hunger, but also the fear of the enemy in daylight, and that worse fear born in the imagination when at night he lay under the stars, hearing the cries of injured men and knowing what the morrow could bring. He knew how to discipline his dreams. He had seen enough of death and of mystery to imagine the divine.

  Nevertheless, he was startled on his first audience with Isadorus to find him so changed by what he had read in the Book. He had seen Eleni’s gift of healing for himself, and it had disturbed him deeply because of its overturning of the natural order he had come to expect; it spoke of deeper powers than he had believed in before. It also disturbed him because it was his own wife who possessed the gift, a woman he had known all his adult life. He had shared all manner of experiences with her. He thought he knew her as well as he knew himself. Now, without warning, she was the channel for something greater and beyond them both.

  He left Isadorus and went home. Eleni greeted him with the old, familiar warmth; quick to laughter, gentle to touch, as easy in response to him as she had always been. It was as if nothing had changed. And yet within hours he knew it had. There was a secret joy in her from which he was excluded. All night he lay beside her in the darkness, feeling his separateness.

  It drove him to seek the Shinabari woman and find out for himself what the Book said, and why it mattered so profoundly to those he loved.

  She was alone in a room overlooking a walled courtyard of the palace with cypress trees and a pool for lilies. He had thought he remembered her face, but when he saw her again it was with surprise. She was darker than he had recalled. Her features were stronger. Only her mouth was soft, and the long curve of her throat. He noticed with surprise that she had beautiful ears.

  She stood in the middle of the floor. She was dressed in hot earth colors bordered with bronze. All the joy and pain of her belief were naked in her extraordinary face.

  “I came because I wish to see the Book,” he began. “I want to learn of it from you, not from one of those who know little, except that they believe its power.”

  She did not point out to him that Eleni had been studying the Book for close to a year, or that Isadorus was more than familiar with it now. That was not what he meant, and perhaps she knew that what he needed was to come to the source.

  “If you wish,” she agreed, watching him steadily. She made the slightest gesture with her shoulders. “I will fetch it.”

  “Thank you,” he accepted, coming further into the room. For the first time he glanced around. It was filled with her presence, her different, subtler nature. There was no Camassian ornament; only the architecture was native. On a small table stood an alabaster horse. It had not the complex lines of a live animal, but was simple, fluid, with the imaginative grace of the artist’s dream. In its power it was truer to the spirit than to reality. He knew without question that it was Shinabari.

  Tathea was coming back with the Book in her arms and its beauty caught him by surprise. The gold of it was warm, the pearls gleamed soft as milk but with a radiance as if they held the light rather than merely reflected it. The great star ruby in the hasp burned like fire.

  He had come intending to inquire, not to argue. He knew enough of mystery to be prepared to believe, but he had not expected to feel awe, and yet now at the moment of reaching to touch the Book, suddenly he was hesitant.

  “Take it,” she urged him with the barest flicker of amusement in her eyes.

  The gold was smooth beneath his fingers. He sat down on the chair she indicated, then opened the Book and read the first page, then read it again. It was what he had already heard from Eleni, but seeing it written awoke in him a new feeling. He lost all awareness of the room around him, even of Tathea standing a yard away. He was alone in a pool of light with the words, and he was unable to draw his eyes from them.

  He turned the page and read on.

  When he looked up she was still standing. She had not the warmth of Eleni, and the gentleness that he loved, but there was a grace in her unlike any other. It came of hunger and pride and loneliness and, he realized with surprise, an intense ability to be hurt. He looked at her with sharper curiosity.

  “He says He gives no commandment without making a way possible to obey,” he said. “And yet He seems deliberately to have written confusion. When you face the extremity of life and death, hunger, pain, terror, bereavement, you are truly alone with yourself. Dreams fall away. Mysteries crumble and leave nothing. All that stands then is truth, and the law.”

  Her eyes did not waver. “I know that,” she answered him. “You speak as if you are the only one who has faced death or despair. Do you imagine the Book fell out of the sky and landed in my hands?”

  It was a just rebuke.

  “I apologize,” he said sincerely. “But that is not an argument. The Book is still complex and unclear.”

  “And if it were easy, would you value it?” she demanded.

  He was about to answer that he would, then he recognized the challenge in her voice and thought again. “Do you see some virtue in obfuscation?” he asked.

  She took it up as if it had been a gauntlet thrown down. There was certainty in her as if she were inspired by something beyond herself. He had never seen anyone with such a passion of the mind. It sparked a ripple of excitement inside him.

  “Do you value what is given you, or what you have labored for?” she challenged.

  “I should labor to understand this?” He touched his finger to the Book, but he did not take his eyes from her face.

  “You are a child of God, but not a
baby to be fed with a spoon!” she returned.

  He laughed abruptly. “You don’t honey your words, do you?” He leaned back, looking up at her.

  “Wasn’t the bare truth what you wanted ... General?” He saw in her eyes a world of memory lying behind her use of his title. She was reminding him of the battlefield, of his implied condescension to her as a woman because he knew hardship and courage and thought she did not. With a ripple of surprise, and something curiously like pleasure, he recognized in her a spirit of remarkable strength.

  Forgetting time, he sat opposite her, turning page after page of the Book, picking out passages and questioning her, arguing, wresting one meaning from the words, testing it and finding another, seeking to understand.

  Always she kept up with him. Her mind was logical, incisive and agile. She gave no ground in pursuit of truth, and seemed to feel no resentment on the rare occasions when he found flaws in her reasoning. It amazed him that she grasped new thoughts with such eagerness. The clarity of her ideas and the sheer power of her mind excited him. It was like the physical exhilaration of a wild gallop along the shoreline with a perfect horse beneath you.

  He was astonished when he caught sight of the hourglass and saw it was after midnight. He opened his mouth to apologize, then knew he would be a hypocrite to express sorrow, even superficially, for what had been superb, a time filled with tumultuous, burning ideas he would never discard or forget. Words of any sort were unnecessary. She did not care that it was nearing the first hour of morning. They had explored eternity. He found himself resenting the duties which must keep him away for several days.

  “May I return after the festival?” he asked as he stood at the door. She was in the center of the room, distanced from him, from the simple furniture. The light was gold on her lips and the hollow of her neck.

  “Of course.” She looked at him with an expression he could not read, as if she both wished him to return and at the same time felt pain at the prospect. He thought how little he knew her. Her mind was as clear as sunlight to him and her heart a territory unmapped and unknown.

  He had intended to tell Eleni in detail about his time with Tathea, but somehow the right opportunity did not come. He referred to it only obliquely, and then only in terms of his interest in the Book, not his discussions with Tathea.

  He found thoughts of the Book and his visit to Tathea occupying his mind more and more. The ideas in the Book consumed him. He returned to see her after the festival, and again after that. There was a beauty of justice in the teaching from which he could not turn away. He struggled through the complexities of the language towards a kind of sublime reason in all things. It was always there, just beyond his grasp, beckoning to him, revealing new fragments of the whole each time.

  And she was the perfect companion. The breadth of her imagination astonished him. The courage of her spirit never failed. Nothing was too difficult, too powerful or too subtle for her to attempt. Her hunger to read the mind of God matched his own.

  It was late summer, and a sudden squall of rain was lashing the cypresses in the palace gardens when they came to the end of a long discussion on the nature and purpose of power. They had argued furiously, but with the pure pleasure of duellists, rejoicing in each other’s skills and never doubting for an instant that they sought the same truth.

  “I still think there could be a better way,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a smile. “The power to heal,” he thought briefly of Eleni, “to turn stone into bread and feed the hungry, anything that relieves pain or loss, would do only good.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she responded instantly. She was sitting opposite him in a matching chair, the dark blue of her gown spilling gold at the hem. She no longer bothered to pretend patience with him. He regarded it as a measure of their honesty with each other. It was at the core of his ease with her, and the refreshment of heart and mind he knew in her company.

  “A miracle is a product, not a cause,” she went on, looking at him earnestly. “None of those gifts to heal, to feed or clothe, to command the elements, even to raise the dead bring any souls nearer to the knowledge of God.” She leaned forward a little, bringing her face further into the light, deepening the soft shadow of her hair over the nape of her neck. “If it could teach you love, or courage, or integrity of heart, do you not think God would do it himself? Then there would be no need for life or learning!”

  He regarded her closely. There was an intensity in her which made her face the most beautiful he had ever seen. Without thinking, he reached out and touched her, only an instant, and withdrew again. The warmth of her ran through him. No one else had the same fire in the soul, the same blazing courage of heart.

  He did not bother to say he understood her. She had seen it already in his eyes.

  It was some time after that that the subject arose of Isadorus’s rejection of her plea for troops to return to Shinabar. Summer had turned to autumn. The leaves were turning; the cypresses were dusty. They stood together on the bare earth of the lemon grove, the fruit hanging golden ripe.

  “Do you know anything about war?” he asked mockingly. “Do you even know which end of a sword to hold?”

  “I can ride well!” she answered.

  “Riding well is for running away,” he retorted with a smile. “If you plan a military campaign you should learn something about warfare, even how to hold a sword.”

  “Teach me,” she asked immediately, her gaze unflinching.

  He was uncertain for a moment if she was serious. He should not have been. He knew it the instant after. The doubt in her eyes was whether he would do it, not if she needed the knowledge.

  It was rash. He looked at her. She was no warrior queen. In her plain, dark green robes he could see how slender she was. There was nothing of the athlete about her. One good blow would have broken her in half.

  She sensed his refusal and disappointment filled her eyes.

  “Of course,” he said quickly. “It is a small thing in return for all you have taught me. We’ll start tomorrow.” He laughed suddenly. “Sabers at sunrise!”

  They met in the gymnasium where the Household Guard practiced, but shortly after dawn, before the Guard arrived. Tathea was dressed in a borrowed tunic and a padded cotton tabard to protect her body.

  Martial skill did not come to her naturally. She tired easily, and Alexius had to work hard not to hurt her merely by his far greater strength. To begin with, she was hesitant to strike out. Over and over again he told her to lunge, and she failed to. In the end he had to make her sufficiently angry. He caught her with the flat of his blade until she lost her temper and finally struck back, awkwardly, losing her balance.

  He guffawed with laughter as she scrambled up, cheeks burning. This time she slashed at him with more skill, remembering what he had told her.

  “Bravo!” he said, still laughing and sidestepping with ease. He caught her again, a clean score, but gently.

  Her lips tightened and she began to concentrate, moving her feet with more agility, her body with more grace. He saw the determination in her. He needed to defend himself with a trifle more care.

  When they were finished, she was breathless and exhausted, leaning over her sword, her hair falling out of its ties, but she could not keep the smile from her face and her eyes shone with victory, not over him, but over herself.

  Military strategy was a far different thing. They studied in the palace map room where all the Camassian Empire, its provinces, dependencies, and neighbors, were built in clay, down to the last valley, river, and hill. She grasped the elements in an instant, indeed sometimes she was ahead of him in perceiving his purpose. He never had to explain any tactic more than once. She understood, before he elaborated, the need to know the terrain of a battle, to be familiar with an enemy commander’s history, the experience of his men, their morale, and also the weather. It was barely necessary to touch on the importance of supply lines for food and weapons, of care for the wounded and evacuation if po
ssible, of the maintenance of discipline, and at all times of respect for the command and the belief in victory.

  It was extraordinary to be speaking of such things to a woman, and yet in a way her gender was irrelevant. She was at times the most comfortable of people to be with.

  When they spoke of the Book, she still startled him with the daring of her imagination. It soared to heights he could barely think of. She stood with her face to the light, her passion so intense she seemed almost unaware of him. Then as suddenly she would turn and look at him, forcing him to climb the untrodden paths with her, to reach for thoughts no man had grasped before, ideas in the mind of God Himself.

  Eleni’s study of the teachings in the Book was quite different. For her its reality was in the acts of mercy in daily life. She, like Isadorus, had been born while their father was a soldier, and she knew the reality of ordinary men who risk their lives. She had seen wounds, hunger and exhaustion as closely as she now saw the splendor of court. She also knew the frailty of power.

  For her the truth of the Book lay in the relief of individual pain. The gift within her was of God. She had never doubted it from the moment she had first felt it flood through her into the injured horse in the arena. The act of healing was the purest joy she had ever known, like the flight of a bird soaring upwards on effortless wings, the grace of doing what she was born to do.

  But afterwards she was drained. Frequently she had to sleep. She awoke refreshed and with a sense of peace she thought nothing would disturb.

  She learned her mistake in a place she had never imagined. She went to visit Tathea. It was now almost winter, and she had not seen her since early autumn. The servant told her that Tathea was not in her apartments but in the Guards’ gymnasium. Eleni was surprised, but intent upon speaking with her, she made her way back down the steps, across one of the dozens of courtyards, to the gymnasium. She opened the door and saw Alexius, stripped to breeches and chest armor, shoulders and arms bare, holding a sword in his hand and laughing. Opposite him was Tathea wearing a tunic and light armor, her legs also clothed in breeches, leather boots on her feet. Her black hair was tied back hard from her face, and she too held a sword.