Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  “I should be doing this for you,” argued Summerchild as the king held out a sugared berry to her lips. “You’re never going to get a reputation as a disgrace to the dynasty if you give concubines sugared berries instead of having them beg for the privilege of placing them in your mouth.”

  “I need the exercise.”

  And Summerchild laughed.

  “Councils used to appall me because they were so dull, you know.” Oryn leaned to the latticework, peered through the gauze that backed the exquisite carving, to see into the larger portion of the pavilion, something that anyone could do unobserved from this closed-up and deeply shadowed end. In the main chamber the detachable openwork walls had been removed from between the pillars that held up the ceiling, admitting morning sunlight and the fresh coolness of the gardens. “Lord Sarn always scheming for money and position, Lord Akarian sounding off for hours about whatever fad he thinks will save the world this month . . . Is he still eating insects?”

  “I had the cooks prepare some just in case.”

  “I hope they clearly marked which dishes are which. Lord Jamornid trying to buy everyone’s loyalty and respect by having the best and spending the most. . . . Do you think this outfit is more impressive than his? I really should keep spies in his household to let me know what he’ll be wearing.”

  He returned his eye to the lattice. Lord Jamornid, gorgeously turned out in varying shades of violet silk, had just entered the main chamber and was trying to convince the broad-shouldered Lord Sarn that each lord should—and in fact, must—have his individual slaves present with fans, having never apparently encountered the idea that such slaves would not only discuss with their colleagues in the kitchen whatever they heard but also could be bribed to pass the information along to merchants, corn brokers, and landlords.

  “Now they frighten me,” Oryn said softly. “They frighten me because each man seems to think that all the old rules still apply. They still think that it’s a game about individual power, about raising their House to the kingship. It isn’t like that anymore.”

  He looked down again, in genuine distress, at the woman on the cushions, the woman who had been called the Summer Concubine: the most perfect, and perfectly trained, Pearl Woman of his father’s harem. The woman he had loved at sight, fifteen years before.

  The woman who had been among the first to develop the powers of magic, when rumors were flying that the Sun Mages—and the Blood Mages and Earth Wizards and the rest—were losing the ability to heal and ward and summon rain.

  “We must forget our differences,” Oryn went on with an earnestness he would have deplored back in the days when he’d been the fearsome Taras Greatsword’s disgraceful dilettante heir. “We must put aside our individual concerns. We must unite, and remain united. Or we will die.”

  Summerchild lifted one small jeweled hand and wrapped it around Oryn’s massive fingers. Though of medium height, she was so slender as to give the impression of childlike smallness, especially against the king’s six-foot three-inch bulk. Her fair hair was dressed with elegant simplicity; her linen gown, finer than most silks, was the pale clear hue that exactly matched her enormous eyes. “You wrong them, Oryn,” she said gravely. “I think every single one of them would be willing to put aside his own petty concerns and take command of the united realm. They are noble men at heart.”

  “Yes—just ask them.” Oryn turned briefly to the mirror on the wall, to check his eye paint and unsnag one of his topaz-and-ruby earrings from his hair. “Here come the lesser fry,” he added, turning back. “Sarn’s cousin Lord Nahul-Sarn, the Great Stone Face . . . the man looks like he was hewed rather than birthed. There’s Brother Barún—I’m astonished the Emerald Concubine let him out of her pavilion this early. Here’s a gaggle of Sarn and Jothek landchiefs and a couple of the rangeland sheikhs. . . .”

  “No sign yet of Lord Mohrvine?”

  “No. Drat this custom that the king must arrive last and keep everyone waiting. My uncle will make sure he’s the last of them, and I have to appear after him, and it’ll be noon before the council is over and hot as a bake oven. You and Mistress Raeshaldis couldn’t manage to conjure a steady, cooling breeze, could you? Or a permanent patch of autumn weather for, say, a hundred feet around the pavilion? It would help things out enormously.”

  “I shall devote my fullest attention to it, my lord.” Both knew that the conjuration of weather lay outside any single woman’s power. They both prayed it would respond to combined spells, but had no proof. The Sun Mages had been able to call the rains only at certain times of the year.

  “I knew I could count on you, my dearest. Good heavens, that’s Benno Sarn with Lord Sarn. His older brother, you recall, who gave up his inheritance to become a Sun Mage. Still robed as a wizard, I see—very tasteful arrangement of astrological signs embroidered on his cloak—he looks like he’s the one who’s going to need to conjure a cooling breeze, in that getup. We should see some excellent glares when the Sun Mages show up. Yes, here they are.”

  “Oh, let me see!” Summerchild leaned forward and pressed her eye to the lattice just as a tall and grave-faced young guardsman named Jethan escorted Hathmar, Rachnis, and Yanrid up the pavilion’s shallow steps. Hathmar, white-haired, bent, and nearly blind, walked past the former rector of the Citadel without a glance; but withered little Rachnis gave Benno Sarn a single cold stare before turning his face aside; and Yanrid, the youngest of the three, traded sneers with his erstwhile colleague that would have done credit to a pair of rival Blossom girls encountering each other in the Flowermarket.

  “Where is Shaldis?” asked Summerchild, sitting back onto her cushion. “She should be with them.”

  “Unless my chamberlain has had an attack of propriety and is leading her here by a separate way. Which sounds like something Geb would do, when you come to think of it. Absurd, when you consider she’s the only one of the Sun Mages with any power these days.”

  “Lord Sarn’s certainly treating them with respect.” The stocky, powerful landchief had risen from his place on the striped linen cushions of the divan to arrange extra cushions for the Archmage.

  “Lord Sarn needs to have people continue to believe in the Sun Mages’ power, since his brother seems to be his court mage these days,” Oryn murmured. “Maybe Benno’s even convinced Sarn he still has power—since trying to resume his rightful position as the head of House Sarn would only get him assassinated. Ah,” he added, as a slender figure came into sight, strolling along the edge of the marble reflecting pool with a string of deep-desert sheikhs trailing respectfully in his wake. “Here’s Uncle Mohrvine at last. Just late enough so that if I make them wait long enough to put him in his place—”

  “Great heavens, my nephew is not here yet?” Lord Mohrvine’s voice cut through the muted chatter in the pavilion. During the riots of the past spring, when it looked like the nomads of the desert were going to attack the rangeland settlements, Taras Greatsword’s younger half brother had begun affecting the bearing and plain dress of a military captain. He’d kept it up, as a pointed contrast to his royal nephew’s curled and bejeweled elegance, probably because he’d guessed that eventually the nomads would attack again and people would seek to put their trust in a strongman. He had made a brief alliance with his nephew during the riots, but Oryn did not deceive himself about Mohrvine’s intentions.

  “It will be noon before we’re done here. We might as well hold this meeting in the midst of the desert.”

  “One of these days I really am going to have to have him murdered, as Sarn keeps telling me I should.” Oryn straightened the billowing silk of his over-robe, checked Summerchild’s mirror again, and adjusted the set of a necklace. “Only, of course, Sarn knows that as long as Mohrvine is around, he’ll never stand a chance of sitting on the throne himself. Wish me luck, my blossoming rose of springtime. I shall need it.”

  THREE

  Naturally, no one on the council wanted to hear that new levies of money, grain, teyn l
aborers, and beasts of burden were required for work on the aqueduct. From behind the lattice, Summerchild watched the respectful routine of greeting the king as he made his entrance—and Oryn was a genius at making an entrance—erode within minutes into bitter squabbling.

  “I admit that more camels are needed now that the workers are farther into the desert, but surely you must see that the division of liability among the High Houses is grossly inequitable!”

  “Are you quite certain of your figures, Lord King? Why cannot supplies for the work crews be purchased for far less than four thousand gold pieces? What on earth are you planning to feed them?”

  “Five hundred teyn is a tremendous number, now that so many are needed to bring water up from the lakes to the fields.”

  She observed their faces, men who for the most part would never have dared utter a peep in protest to the demands of Taras Greatsword, Oryn’s redoubtable father. Chinless Lord Jamornid was on his feet, forgetting his carefully cultivated dignity and shouting like a fishwife at Oryn’s brother, Barún. Heavy-shouldered Lord Sarn was shaking a sheaf of papers at Oryn as if it were a weapon. Only Lord Mohrvine sat silent, his eyes—pale turquoise green, lazy behind heavy lids—moving almost mockingly from lord to lord, not only the great landchiefs but the merchant clan representatives and the lesser sheikhs of the rangelands and near desert, the ones who would have to bear the burden of the new levies. Summerchild had been trained in the finest Blossom House in the city and had retained her connections with the ladies of the Flowermarket District: she knew that Mohrvine systematically entertained these lesser lords nightly, at great expense, in the Blossom Houses. According to her informants he’d purchased concubines for many of them, girls exquisitely trained in the pleasing of men . . .

  . . . as he had purchased the Emerald Concubine, who was Barún’s dearest treasure, to the fury of Lord Sarn’s niece, Barún’s wife.

  “Yes, my lord, the rains were a bit late this year—”

  “A bit late? Nearly a month?”

  “—but they did come, and in perfectly normal quantity. Why you persist in believing that we even need an aqueduct . . .”

  Summerchild knew Barún was absolutely enslaved by that honey-haired, green-eyed girl, but in her fifteen years’ residence in the House of the Marvelous Tower she’d seen the king’s handsome younger brother absolutely enslaved by numerous other concubines while still retaining sufficient energy to carry on liaisons with circus acrobats, good-looking stevedores, and the handsomer members of the palace guard.

  Yet the knowledge that both Mohrvine’s mother, Red Silk, and his daughter, the beautiful Foxfire, bore in them the power of the Raven, made her prickle with suspicion every time that handsome, gracious lord made a gift to anyone or asked them to dine. Greatsword, she knew, had mistrusted his younger half brother profoundly, more than once coming close to having him executed.

  But even then, it had been too late to do so with impunity.

  “For a year now you have been pouring money into this absurd project of yours, my lord, and what have you to show for it? If you had spent the same amount of money and labor deepening the existing wells . . .”

  She followed Mohrvine’s gaze now to the two sons of Lord Akarian as they raised a protest on the grounds of the failure of magic to protect their crops and investments. “It used to be one could put a spell around the walls of the teyn villages and be sure of them all turning out for work in the mornings,” stated Proath Akarian, his whining tenor almost indistinguishable from his father’s. “It takes three times the guards to keep an eye on them now, and they slip out of their compounds like weasels, no matter how many of them you string up or how many spikes you put around the walls. When those mages of yours come up with some really reliable means of controlling the teyn again, Your Majesty, then we’ll be able to provide you whatever you wish.”

  And this from a man, thought Summerchild with a resigned shake of her head, who six months ago had been the sworn member of a cult that claimed all workers of magic—both male and female—were in fact demons.

  She glanced at Proath’s father, wizened, dirty, with his white hair just now growing out of that cult’s rather silly obligatory tonsure; he was nodding his agreement. Lord Akarian generally changed answers to the ills of the world every two years or so—his membership in the cult of the magic-hating god Nebekht had lasted nearly three, a record with him.

  Whorb, the younger of the two Akarian heirs, added, “And Your Majesty can’t pretend to think we have grain to spare! Rats have invaded our granaries as never before, and last fall locusts came out of the desert to devour our farms by the White Lake and the Lake of Gazelles. Locusts! And who knows but that they will return this year in greater numbers!”

  “This is not even to speak of the epidemics that have broken out in the villages,” added Lord Nahul-Sarn. “I lose workmen daily to marsh fever and pneumonia. Injuries in the mines that once a mage could heal now mortify or turn to fever, lockjaw, and convulsions. Among the cattle and the teyn it’s worse.”

  “Really, my lord,” chimed in one of the lesser Jamornid landchiefs, “until Your Majesty is willing to share the benefits of the magic these women of yours make, you can scarcely expect us to keep up with your taxes and demands! It is not only not possible, it is not fair.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Oryn sat up very straight on his cushions—as well he might, thought Summerchild with the cold tension of foreboding tightening behind her sternum. She saw the young landchief flinch guiltily; saw the glance that passed between him and Lord Mohrvine.

  In spite of his pomaded curls and eye paint, when Oryn was stirred up he could be terrifyingly impressive. His deep voice, like velvet and bronze, cut effortlessly through the angry clamor of his lords: “Do I understand that there is a belief in some quarters that I am withholding the—the services of the Raven sisterhood from those who need them, simply to increase my own revenues?”

  Sarn, Jamornid, and half the lesser landchiefs began a gabble of protest, cut off by the king’s lifted hand.

  “Is that what is being said about me?”

  Glances flashed around the room like birds caught in a windstorm. A lot of them, Summerchild noted, touched Mohrvine.

  It was Lord Jamornid who spoke. “Your Majesty has never sent these women who claim power—these women who bow to the commands of one in Your Majesty’s household”—it was the closest a well-bred man could come to discussing another man’s concubine in public—“out to our compounds, to use their magic to control the teyn.”

  Silence in the pavilion, broken only by the musical twitter of the green-and-yellow finches in the trees. Summer-child saw the glances flick toward the lattice where they all knew she sat.

  Wariness. Resentment.

  And in some—whose eligible daughters they fancied had been passed over in matrimony, despite the fact that no king in five hundred years had dared to formally wed a daughter of one of his landchiefs—hate.

  “My dear Lord Jamornid . . .” Oryn’s beautiful voice was now deadly soft. “If I do not dispatch members of my household to the compounds that house your teyn it is out of regard for the penury you pled moments ago, lest you should be obliged to entertain these ladies to no purpose. The magic of women has proven so far to be unlike the magic of men. Believe me, if the Sisters of the Raven were capable of controlling the teyn with spells of awe, as my lord Hathmar and the Sun Mages for so long did”—he inclined his head toward the three Sun Mages, sitting on their cushions in their robes of white, gold, and blue—“we would have far fewer problems with teyn workers disappearing from the aqueduct than we do. It is one of the problems upon which they are working.”

  Reluctantly, Summerchild added in her mind—knowing as she did that those “spells of awe” were in truth spells of terror and pain. The labor of the teyn was essential to the aqueduct, to the fields, to bringing water to the city. But every time she passed through the gates of a teyn compound and felt the ancient stink of the
accumulated fear spells whispering in the walls, her heart cringed.

  “Teyn workers disappearing from the aqueduct,” said Lord Sarn drily, “is precisely the reason we are unwilling to send yet more of our teyn out there, under inadequate guard—”

  “Not to speak of the curious fact,” added Verth, the landchief of the lesser Marsent branch of House Jothek, “that far fewer teyn do escape from the royal enclosures than from those of lesser men.”

  “That is absolutely untrue,” said Oryn, startled, and Summerchild saw a dozen pairs of eyes slew again to Lord Mohrvine, who assumed the pained expression of a parent hearing a child claim to have slaughtered dragons and settled a little further back on the divan. “And if that is so—”

  “My lords.” Lord Akarian rose from his place on the divan and spread his skinny arms wide like the priests of Darutha the Rain God did when blessing the soaked crowds in the temple square in the first downpour of spring. Summerchild guessed that it was the old man’s wealth and wide acres, more than awe, that quieted the room.

  “Have we not all seen how a man lost in the desert will chase mirages of safety and water, running now one way, now another? Are we not all aware that in doing so he loses even the little life he has left in these foolish quests?” His reedy voice had a gentle, rather dreamy note, like a grandfather speaking to unruly and frightened children. “Do we not all know that if he would but follow a single course, he would come to safety at last, no matter what dreams the sands cast up to lure him to death?”