After three weary days’ march, as the land levelled and began to seem boggy and mosquito-ridden, Conan grew gruff and openly dubious of the move. He himself, inured to colder climes, saw no reason why they could not have wintered where they were. But the others, who had seen the lower camp, were enthusiastic to go there. Some of the young hunters—including Glubal, who hobbled along on a splinted leg and crutches—acted jubilant or positively frenzied as landmarks told them the place was near.
At last they arrived, crossing a broad field of waving grass-groats to halt on the sandy shore of a blue, tree-lined lake. There lay the circles of last year’s huts, the fire-pits, and, suspended from nearby trees, some canoes skilfully made of hide and boughs. But the hunters, heaving down their burdens, showed little interest in these things; instead, they flocked to a spot some distance from the lake shore.
Songa, holding Conan’s hand, led him in their wake. “Follow me, and be careful where you step,” she cautioned him.
Coming to an exposed, barren place where die young hunters clustered together, they stopped and waited uncertainly. Aklak knelt before them and pierced the hard clay soil with a digging-stick. Surprisingly, it gave easily. As Aklak lifted a chunk of clay carefully aside, a pungent but familiar smell wafted to Conan’s nostrils. The men and women about him sighed appreciatively; he noticed for the first time that they and Songa carried gourd-flasks and dippers.
“It is ready... it is, ah, very fine!” Aklak called out, zestfully wrinkling his nose. “No, do not crowd, do not fall in! There will be plenty this year!” Dipping his arm into the hole, he ladled out a foamy substance and raised it to his lips.
“Come, Conan,” Songa urged, prodding him forward with her gourd-spoon. “You will like it! Have you never had—” her lips formed a word he had thus far paid slight attention to, but that would now become a good deal more familiar to him “—no, you couldn’t have, for it is our invention! How could you ever have tasted beer?”
XI
Queen and Goddess
Queen Tamsin’s coronation was a discreet affair. Now that her popular uprising had achieved its victory, it was seen as unfitting to expose her royal personage—and the sacred fetish of the living goddess Ninga—to the prying eyes and coarse entreaties of the common mob. Rather, it was thought, an aura of distance and priestly mystery would help restore stability to the recently troubled empire; in this, Tamsin allowed her new court advisors to have their way.
Accordingly, the young queen’s ordination was held before several dozen privileged members of her court, in the refurbished throne hall now made over as a shrine to Ninga—its vanished throne replaced by an altar, its gem-faceted window supplanted by a single disk of translucent black glass. Most of those present at the ceremony were old, familiar faces: a score or so of high nobles, officers, eunuchs, and other worthies who, on fervently renouncing their allegiance to dead King Typhas, had been allowed to retain their lives and estates under Tamsin’s sway.
Outside in the temple square, the enthusiasm of the populace was satisfied with torments and executions—of the high chancellor and some few dozen knights, fugitive priests, and civil servants who were denounced as loyal to the old regime, or were at least deemed expendable to the new. These proceedings were carried out under the supervision of the new Marshall of War, Baron Isembard, and his crack troops.
Inside, the assembled court sat watching a program of newly devised Ningan Temple dances, which, though performed with stately dignity by gowned women and robed men, had much in them of rural Brythunian peasant reels and flings. This rustic innocence seemed to satisfy the girl-queen.
“Now you have seen, First Steward, the full penalty of misrule and kingly negligence.” Tamsin, gowned in Imperial finery, with the diminutive goddess on her arm clothed in even costlier splendour, deigned to share a few wise words with her advisor during the dance. “There are some slights and abuses an empire will not bear, even from a clever, watchful monarch.”
The eunuch Basifer, first steward of the Imperial household, was in appearance an unlikely tutor for the young queen; he was large and heavy-featured, displaying the hairlessness and excess flesh that so often accompanied his physical alteration. His hands, back, and head were welted and scarred by maltreatment during his boyhood in the palace service, and his coarse flesh had been stained a deeper tan by applications of fragrant nut-oil balm, as was the fashion among the castrated servants. Yet he, with his dispassionate wisdom and his leadership of his fellow civil officers and palace administrators, was the perfect one to carry over the smooth efficiency of the late king’s regime into the new theocracy.
“Indeed, my Queen,” Basifer responded in his measured tone, “Typhas was insensitive at times—headstrong too, and often wilfully inclined to disregard my best counsel.” He took care, as ever, to aggrandize his own role and yet disavow any fault during his former tenure. A little flattery too, he reminded himself, was never ill-spent. “How fortunate it is that one as far-seeing as Your Majesty—and of course, a goddess as all-powerful as our Ninga—arrived on the scene to set things right.”
“Great wrongs will always be set aright, Basifer.” The queen regarded him with her green-eyed, inscrutable... and now universally acknowledged as dangerous... gaze. “Do you even know, I wonder, why a supreme goddess ever saw fit to confront and vanquish Brythunia’s former king, and trouble herself with the petty affairs of mortal rulers? It had to do with an event long past, Steward, the death of some who were favoured of our goddess... and near to her. Very near indeed.” Gazing down fondly at her bejewelled, resplendent doll, she seemed to have abandoned the thread of the narrative. “Enough to say that revenge is a powerful, implacable force. Once set loose, it may topple an empire, or even a mighty god.”
“Aye, my Queen.” Inwardly the steward wondered what bizarre springs and balances could possibly drive a puzzle-box like this, so charmingly and deceptively cast in the face and form of an innocent girl. Also, what force might serve to restrain and channel such a dire, prodigal energy? He was less than straightforward himself in his mental workings, so he sensed a deep inner kinship with the girl; luckily, she tolerated his counsel, so far.
And yet there might in fact be an even better means of control, or at least of distraction. “Your Majesty, there is one whose absence today I have sorely regretted.” Basifer shook his bald head, as if in mild embarrassment. “He was summoned here for the ceremony. Yet his journey, I fear, is a long one, all the way from the southern border. And in view of the recent, umm, political changes here in Sargossa, diplomatic questions have arisen most urgently there of late. Some such matter may have delayed his departure.”
“You speak of this disinherited prince, whatever-is-his-name?”
“Indeed, Your Majesty,” Basifer affirmed. “Prince Clewyn. A most able statesman for his age—and quite a dashing figure, really. His judgements are swift and keen, yet entirely lacking in the headlong impetuousness of youth. A handsome fellow too, cultured and regarded as... romantic, in his way.”
“The late king’s envoy to Corinthia, since the truce.” Queen Tamsin’s voice revealed less than slight interest, as she watched the slow and rather stiff temple dance unreel. “Or was his duty more in the nature of a hostage? At any rate, Typhas trusted him as far away as Corinthia, if not here at court.”
“What you say is true, my Queen.” The first steward unctuously nodded. “He was never in good favour. here under the old regime—how perceptive of Your Majesty! But as an envoy, Prince Clewyn has learned much of foreign mannerliness, while forming invaluable diplomatic connections.” Basifer cleared his throat suggestively. “Your Majesty understands, of course, that the prince is no blood relation to Typhas, who gained power through military channels these twenty years agone.”
“And lost it through religious ones.” The young queen glanced upward toward the black glass window, through which faint cheers could be heard from the temple square outside. “I should think that by now, Typh
as has no living relatives.”
“Quite so,” Basifer affirmed. “While the king ruled, Prince Clewyn was denied any prospect of succession. And yet, by his ties to the former nobility, the hereditary kings and queens of Brythunia, the prince enjoys a place in the esteem of aristocrats and the populace that should not be discounted.” The eunuch paused with exquisite delicacy. “An understanding with such an eminent person as the prince could lend valuable underpinnings of tradition to a rulership that is already powerful in fact—”
“Enough, First Steward,” the girl-queen finally overruled him. “If you are implying that Ninga’s holy dominion, and my own rule as queen and High Priestess, need to be legitimized by a tie with some declining royal family—or that, having seized an empire, I should now hand it away in marriage to some royal upstart, some handsome, ambitious boy...” Her queenly indignation trailed off into a dangerous dearth of words.
“But nay, Queen Tamsin, I did not mean... forgive me.” Basifer, an adept survivor, was swift and earnest in his self-abasement. “I only wanted to commend to Your Majesty’s attention a personage whose acquaintance might prove congenial, one who could serve as a useful tool...”
“For you know, First Steward,” Tamsin spoke on, paying scant heed to Basifer’s protestations, “our eyes, Ninga's and mine, have never been set on the transient pleasures and temptations of life. Our gaze is on the spiritual world—” from die way the black-glazed daylight flashed in Tamsin’s green orbs, Basifer could easily believe her words “—and on those things in this world that promote strength and permanence in the higher one.” She shifted her slim body in her plain, straight-backed chair, causing the doll clutched beneath her arm to rattle its bead-strings and ornaments. “Our thoughts dwell on the constant, imperishable things, the tokens and repositories of power that continue to wax stronger, while mere mortal husks wither and die. If you wish to understand us better—” she rose from her seat “—come, Steward, and I will show you.”
The temple dance had ended and the acolytes were filing out at the back of the hall. The guards and courtiers waited uncertainly for the next event of the hallowed day; yet the new queen gave no thought to them, instead beckoning her steward with a stern look toward the broad-arched main doors. However talented a priestess Tamsin might be, she was not steeped in the ways and duties of queen-ship; Basifer thanked all the stars that the palace household and civil administration, which had been carried over almost intact from anaglyph’s highly efficient kingship, retained charge of day-to-day affairs. He himself had no choice but to follow as his queen, carrying the goddess of all the empire under her arm, walked out of the vast hall, abandoning her own coronation festival. The rest of the courtiers, similarly, had no choice but to sit and watch respectfully—at least until she was out of earshot.
Under the eye of guards and attendants, Tamsin led her steward out through the grand vestibule, up the spiral staircase, and back through the royal apartment into her private chambers. One of the more protected sleeping-rooms, formerly fitted out as King Typhas’s private armoury, had been done over, as Basifer knew, by a flock of acolytes and artisans recruited wholesale to the Ningan Temple. Now, when Queen Tamsin unlocked the door to him, instead of the reek of hasp oil and the glare of polished steel, he encountered the scented warmth and soft shimmer of hooded lamps against dark velvet hangings, the burnished gleam of golden fixtures, and the rustle of plush carpets beneath his sandalled feet.
“In a lifetime of miracle-working,” the young queen said, “I have found it useful to seek out the sources and conduits of spiritual potency.” She moved to a tall wardrobe of dark wood at the back of the room. “Even an all-powerful goddess finds it useful to embody her will in tangible charms, amulets, and tokens for the understanding of her subjects.” She opened the tall cabinet, revealing within it a sudden profusion of glitters and gleams. “Such objects as these can contain great power for good or ill through some enchantment that was conferred on them in the recent or more distant past. Once endowed, they retain such powers for eternity, but only for those who know how to draw them out.”
After waving a hand to indicate the brooches, necklaces and other baubles that hung within the case, Tamsin selected one and carefully lifted it out, looped across her slender hand. “Or they may have gained their power fortuitously through some grim or miraculous past event in which they played a part—and, so to speak, became haunted by it. It matters little, since both kinds of amulets have a place in my priestly art.”
The object she held out before Basifer was a bracelet, and a shabby one—a mere bangle of cheap Vilayet spiral-shells strung together on what looked like common thread.
“This,” she told him, “in spite of its looks, is an especially mighty token of my healing skill: the first object through which I ever channelled our goddess’s power. It cured my stepmother of her wasting nervous affliction— that same pious woman who is now Chief Virgin of our temple vestals. It alone brought about her miraculous rejuvenation, all through the will of gracious Ninga, of course, and through my own loving attention.” Bowing humbly, she rattled the holy doll with its blank, painted smile. “You can appreciate that, in its way, this bracelet is the most precious token I possess. Would you like to experience its power?”
“My Queen, I...” Helpless to resist the command implicit in his royal mistress’s manner and gestures, Basifer had no choice but to comply. Dumbly he extended the hand the queen had indicated, palm up. Having witnessed her magic, he was unable to conceal a tremor of dread, but he also felt an eerie twining of hope as Tamsin positioned the slack circlet of shells not in his open hand, but across the exposed skin of his wrist.
There came an immediate tingling sensation. Gazing down at the beaded loop in the room’s lamp-lit dimness, he imagined it beginning to shimmer with a bluish glow. Its outline was suddenly wavy and indistinct, as if glimpsed through the swilling, salt-laden waters of an inland sea. The feeling where the circlet touched him was one of intense, prickling warmth. He watched, both fascinated and repelled, as the tiny shells once again sprouted their original, dead occupants: antennaed, tentacled sea-snails, shading from pink to saffron and chartreuse in eerily luminous hues, setting forth across his skin with a waving and coldly tickling progress.
Unamazingly to his dazzled eyes, it looked as if the sea creatures were not limited to the tether of their bead-string. Though still yoked together, they made their way outward-down his wrist, around both sides, and up his goose-prickling forearm, encompassing an ever greater area of his skin. Where they crawled, he experienced certain feelings...
“If we were to let the circle pass about your arm and over your whole body,” Queen Tamsin said, “the result would be memorable indeed.” Abruptly she reached forth and plucked the magic circlet from her steward’s skin. “But now is not the time. Such deep transformations must be carried out gradually.”
Trembling, Basifer turned his hand over—and saw that the scars on the back of his wrist were gone. His skin was supple and smooth, free of the binding tug of the old, ridged welts. The sensation of tingling change had ceased; yet the wrist itself felt younger, the very tendons more vital and resilient than those of the opposite whip-scarred hand, with which he now stroked his rejuvenated limb.
“Your Majesty...” With heart stuttering weakly, he looked to his queen. In he slim hand, the shell beads clicked dryly, as light and brittle once again as any cheap trade ornament, with no hint of the ghostly life that had possessed them mere instants before.
“Remember,” Tamsin told him, “there is no part of you that cannot be healed, no wound so old or so deep that our mystic arts cannot in time soothe it and restore the sufferer to wholeness.”
Her words, penetrating to him as through a fog, released an indescribable anguish in his breast—and at the same time, a rush of devotion coupled with a heartfelt loyalty at the implied promise.
“To be healed, the one thing that you must possess is total faith in Ninga as goddess.” Re
turning the necklace to its hook, Tamsin gently primped the hair of her doll. “We are touched, Basifer, by your show of genuine fear, and by your new, stronger faith. If more of your elder generation felt it, fewer of them would have met the grisly fate of my own stepfather—inaptly called Amulf the Good— who stubbornly refused to renounce his belief in old Amalias's cult.
“But times have changed,” she continued airily. “That is largely behind us. We are now, Ninga and I, in a most fortuitous position as regards deepening and broadening our command of the invisible realm.” She gestured to her cabinet of charms. “As empress of all Brythunia, I control the former Temple of Amalias and its entire magical dispensary; the royal treasury, within these very palace walls, whose extensive wealth of gems and artefacts has yet to be inventoried for items of supernatural efficacy; and, of course, vast natural treasures, including the convict mines in the far eastern mountains that are fabled to produce both gold and jewels in steady supply.
“This reliquary—” she gestured again to the tall cabinet with its dangling, glittering contents “—contains the few charms and tokens of arcane potency that have been unearthed previously, and in my short tenure here. From this day on, we may anticipate that our Ninga’s magical arsenal—if you care to think of it so—will continue to grow, and with it, our powers of conjuration, and the worldly might of the Brythunian Empire. With more relics as ancient as this one, for instance...” Her hand settled on a pendant of dull silver metal. It was heavy and particularly foreign-seeming in design, with a coarsely polished gem of irregular shape set into its oval medallion. “This piece came out of the east, I am told, from unmapped territory near the border.”
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