Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Barún sighed, and a smile of relief gleamed whitely through his golden beard. “At last a man who speaks the truth!” he cried, obviously thinking he could see where his lordship was headed.

  Summerchild—and Oryn, too, to judge by the stiffening of his massive shoulders—had heard far too many of Lord Akarian’s half-baked schemes to do more than wait uneasily for what would follow that hopeful preamble. House Akarian had lost far too many teyn and cattle to the aqueduct project for there to be any hope that the “single course” he spoke of was going to lead anywhere useful.

  “My lords,” continued Lord Akarian, “is it not clear to us all that the gods have deserted our land? In the days of our ancestors, in the days when the kings of House Durshen ruled the Realm of the Seven Lakes, there were none of these troubles. When the lords of House Akarian were kings over the Seven Lakes in the time of our grandfathers, the rains fell and magic lay healthy and strong in the hands of the wise men of the realm. Is there no man in this room—no man in this city—who has the wit to ask himself, What changed?”

  He was looking straight at Oryn as he spoke. Taras Greatsword, Summerchild knew, would have crossed the pavilion in two strides and smote the old lord to the floor with the back of his hand—if he didn’t simply run him through on the spot—before calling his guards to haul the traitor and his sons away.

  “A good question, my lord.” Mohrvine, after one moment when startled shock widened his turquoise eyes, recovered his composure a split second before Oryn did and spoke into the dumbfounded hush in the room. “Now that you speak of it, a great many things have gone amiss since the death of Taras Greatsword.”

  All eyes went to Oryn—nobody really wanted the Akarians back on the throne—and it was too late, Summerchild perceived, to unsay the suggestion or to simply silence one half-mad landchief, powerful though he might be. By speaking the name of Taras Greatsword, Mohrvine had deftly shifted the ground of the accusation away from the House Jothek and onto Oryn alone.

  “We know the gods are with you, my lord,” declared Lord Sarn, leaping to his feet in order to fall to one knee. In his dark-red robe and pantaloons he resembled a brick kiln on whose top a thin crop of grass had grown, yellowed, and died. “How else, when you put yourself into their hands at your consecration? But if indeed a curse is withering our land . . .”

  Later, Summerchild reflected that Oryn should have reacted like a despot and simply yelled, “Guards!” Though at this point that might not have saved him. Not without killing every man in the room.

  Instead he said what was clearly the first thought that came to his mind: “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “My lords of the Realm of the Seven Lakes!” Lord Akarian flung up his scrawny arms to heaven. “I call for the Ceremony of the King’s Jubilee that he may reconsecrate himself to the gods! For the gods alone can save this land!”

  Mohrvine was on his feet as if his cushion had bitten him. “A Ceremony of Jubilee!” He, too, stretched his powerful arms to the heavens; and his voice, the trained boom of a battlefield commander, re-echoed in the carved cedar rafters. “A jubilee!” His landchiefs and the deep-desert sheikhs who had pledged him allegiance sprang up as well and took up the shout. They were unprepared for this, thought Summerchild, aghast, noting automatically that it was the Akarian landchiefs who ran from the pavilion to carry the news abroad and that Mohrvine had to gesture to his tall son Sormaddin to get him to follow them out with a half dozen of their own men in the general rush.

  He followed this up by striding immediately to Oryn’s dais—Oryn was on his feet by this time, speechless—and falling to the floor before him to press his lips to his nephew’s embroidered slippers. “We know the gods are with you, my lord,” he cried, and Lord Sarn—secure in the knowledge that his niece was married to Oryn’s heir, Barún—fell at his other side and grasped Oryn’s other foot. Lord Jamornid—who’d been gaping stupidly at the whole business—scrambled to his feet, dashed forward, and joined them, careful to keep a cushion in hand lest some infinitesimal speck of dirt from the marble floor be ground into his purple pantaloons.

  “We know the gods are with you, and when the gods show to all the world that you are their own choice, all the evils that beset us will melt as shadows melt with the coming of day!”

  The pavilion’s polished pillars shivered with the cheering of the lords. Even Lord Akarian seemed swept up in the general delight, though his sons had drawn apart to confer in a corner. Cries and cheers began to be heard from the direction of the Golden Court that lay immediately outside the palace’s main gate. With only the slightest extension of her hypertrained senses, Summerchild could hear the news being called out from the Marvelous Tower’s red-and-golden heights.

  Men shouted thanks for the King’s Jubilee, making it impossible for Oryn to accuse Akarian or the respectful Mohrvine of any ill will.

  Or, in fact, to do anything but thank his murderers for their loudly expressed loyalty and wonder what the hell he was going to do.

  FOUR

  They can’t really proclaim a jubilee this early in your reign!” protested Summerchild, the moment the king—having received the final bowed oblations from the last departing landchiefs—stumbled through his private doorway back into the latticed and curtained nook. “Can they?”

  “They evidently have.” Oryn sank down onto the divan as Barún’s massive shadow appeared in the archway that led in from the terrace. “Enter!”

  Not only his younger brother took up this invitation but the three Sun Mages crowded in behind. The partitioned end of the Cedar Pavilion began to be extremely full.

  Barún’s hand was on his sword hilt—its perpetual position when not occupied with one of his concubines or his brother’s guardsmen. “Shall I take a squadron and arrest them?”

  Summerchild wondered if her lord’s brother really thought he could lock up all the great landchiefs of the realm without the whole countryside rising in revolt, and concluded that Barún probably did think it. He was handsome as a god and could crush walnuts in his fists, but he couldn’t outthink the kitchen cat.

  “Word has gone out by this time,” Oryn explained to him. “We’d succeed only in making fools of ourselves, if nothing worse. When one is dealing with doubt that we have the gods’ mandate to rule, that’s a dangerous thing.”

  The younger man nodded, brows knit together as he digested this. At last he said, “Then the matter should be simple. The gods led you through the ordeals of consecration once; they will do so again. Perhaps Lord Akarian has the right of it, for once. If you undertake the ordeals again, perhaps they will even relent and bring back true magic. . . .”

  He glanced at Summerchild and cleared his throat hastily. “Of course, they will leave the magic of women in place as well, we hope.”

  “One never knows, with gods.” Oryn held out his hand to assist old Hathmar down to the divan; the aged Sun Mage’s eyesight had been maintained for years by the finely graded spells of healing worked almost subconsciously on his own eyes. These spells, like all others wrought by male wizards over the centuries, had failed; and even the thick-lensed spectacles he and others of his order had devised over the past few years did not help him now.

  “I have always had the teensiest, tiniest suspicion, however,” Oryn went on, looking back at the other two mages, whom Summerchild had risen to lead to seats, “that it wasn’t entirely by the efforts of the gods that I got through the ordeals of consecration when I was crowned twelve years ago. And that leaves me feeling a little . . . concerned. Have I call to be?”

  Barún looked completely uncomprehending. Yanrid the crystalmaster glanced at his colleagues from beneath his shaggy brows.

  “The King’s Jubilee,” stated Rachnis shadowmaster in his high, scratchy voice. “Thank you, child, that’s very kind of you but I’m perfectly capable of getting up and down myself. In ancient times the Ceremony of the King’s Jubilee was proclaimed whenever a king reached the forty-n
inth year of his reign, for it was judged that at that age he became a new man, and therefore, a new king. As a new king, he must pass through all the ordeals of his consecration again, to grant the gods their chance to say whether they wished this new king to reign or not. The Jubilee was held in the first new moon of the forty-ninth year. No Akarian king ever achieved forty-nine years of rule, and precious few of the Durshens, and to further complicate the records, kings of old sometimes changed their names after a Jubilee, so we can only guess at how many of the Durshen or Hosh Dynasty kings were in fact continuing to rule under a second name. But the number cannot be large.”

  The old man tented his skinny fingers, and like a good Pearl Woman Summerchild knelt to him holding the exquisite platter of fresh fruits, candied rose petals, moonjellies, and those exquisite wafer cones of beaten cream called gazelle horns. Aside from its being better manners to serve one’s own guests, there were some matters it was better that servants did not hear.

  “Upon his deathbed”—Oryn pulled up a low stool usually reserved for the slave who wielded a fan—“my father assured me several times that ‘Everything will be all right,’ a statement Soth repeated on a number of occasions in the week between my father’s death and my own consecration as king—my father having died in the moon’s last quarter. By the way, my darling, you had probably better get in touch with Soth and summon him back here. I have the dreadful feeling we’re going to need his advice rather badly. And in fact everything was all right, though I still have nightmares about the crocodiles, not to mention the pit of cobras and being chased by that damned lion. Did someone drug the lion?”

  Barún looked shocked to his soul at even the suggestion that anyone would tamper with the ordeals of consecration, but Hathmar’s thin mouth tugged in a smile. “The lion was drugged, my lord.”

  Oryn heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m glad to hear it. I shouldn’t have liked to think of a beast that slow trying to make a living on its own in the wild, poor thing. And I suppose one can simply selectively wet down the kindling on the route one walks through the fire: straw damp with water looks pretty much like straw damp with oil. But the crocodiles . . .”

  “That was magic.” The pale-blue eyes with their film of white lifted to his face, as if the Archmage could still see.

  Oryn drew a deep breath. “Bugger,” he said quietly. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “We know of no drug that will affect crocodiles, my lord,” said Rachnis. “Not without killing them. Moreover, they come in and go out from the lake into the lagoon within the temple enclosure. To drug them would involve drugging every beast in the lake.”

  Oryn raised his brows. “So it’s been considered at some point in the past, has it?”

  “That I cannot say, Lord King. It is the same with the cobras in the pit of the Serpent King. And the poison that you drank at the heart of the maze in the Temple of Time . . . no one but the single Servant of Time knows whether the cup contains poison or not, but believe me, the spells we cast forth upon you assumed that it was the deadliest venom known.”

  The old man leaned forward and selected a single grape from the tray before him; his black, sharp lizardlike gaze cocked up at the king. “Myself, I have always suspected that the rites of consecration were originated by the Veiled Priests to screen candidates for the kingship. We know almost nothing of the Zali Dynasty—it was fifteen hundred years ago, and even the land was different then. Myself, I believe the Veiled Priests were in fact mages: mages whose power was not as strong as the Sun Mages who backed the Hosh monarchs who truly united the realm. As far back as our Citadel has stood—long before the rains ceased to fall and had to be summoned by the magic of our order—the Sun Mages have guided the kings through their consecrations.”

  “Did my father know?”

  “Your father guessed.” Archmage Hathmar folded his clawlike little hands. “It has always been forbidden to speak of these matters to anyone. The priests of the gods hold great power among the common people, especially in the countryside. But your father came to me the night before his father’s consecration with some very . . . specific . . . promises of support and alliance in return for services which neither of us clearly defined.”

  “Sounds like Father.”

  Summerchild, seated now beside Oryn’s stool, glanced up at him worriedly. She’d been only a child when Taras Greatsword had defeated the last of the Akarian kings and had ridden in triumph through the Yellow City to crown his own father, the fat, scheming old moneybags Lord Jothek, King of the Realm of the Seven Lakes. She’d just been sold to the most prestigious Blossom House in the city, whose Mother had seen promise of beauty in her skinny seven-year-old self; from its doorway she remembered watching them ride past.

  Taras Greatsword, a golden-haired kingmaker and the greatest war lord of the land. His father—officially generalissimo of the Akarian armies but in actuality merely a superb organizer—slouched in the saddle of a white warhorse and looked as if he were worrying about the cost of every rose petal strewn in their path. The current Lord Akarian, then the head of the formerly royal house’s cadet branch. And among them a chubby, curly-haired, overdressed little boy clinging wretchedly to the mane of a mount too big for him, looking around in worried apprehension at the crowds who cheered the end of Akarian incompetence and graft.

  That memory had been in her mind when, eleven years later, she’d been informed that Greatsword, now king, had purchased her, the youngest and most choice of the perfect Pearl Women of the realm.

  The memory of that curly-haired child.

  She asked now, “Is it permitted to teach those protective spells to women, lord shadowmaster? Now that the magic that gave them strength has waned?”

  “Sweet of you not to say ‘failed,’ child.” Hathmar extended his hand to touch her wrist with a gentle smile. “We are all of us growing accustomed. The problem is—”

  “The problem is,” concluded Rachnis grimly, “that for most of the year we have been endeavoring to do exactly that: to teach those spells to the girl Raeshaldis without, of course, telling her how they are used. And she has so far been unable to make a single one of them work.”

  Oryn closed his eyes for a moment, as if hearing words he had feared all along. Then he opened them again and said, “By the way—where is Raeshaldis?”

  The house of Chirak Shaldeth lay on Sleeping Worms Street, within a hundred feet of the rose-pink walls of the Grand Bazaar where Chirak was one of the five proctors who governed mercantile law. Like most of the great houses of the city, the lower floor of the main block was given over to warehouse space and its outer courtyard to the stabling of the asses and camels on whom the family business depended. Then came the kitchen and the harem, and last of all the inner garden court, like a jewel of rest from the city’s clamor and stink.

  A wall circled the whole of the little compound, and around the corner from the big camel gate a small door, heavily barred, opened onto a narrow stair. Shaldis couldn’t recall having come in that way more than three times in her life. The teyn porter—Two Shoes, they’d always called him, not that he or any teyn ever wore such things—opened at her father’s knock and regarded her for a moment with pale-blue eyes whose slit pupils widened and retracted like a cat’s.

  For a moment she thought he might speak. But he only made a shuffling bow and stepped back to let them in.

  Another teyn—a jenny, profoundly pregnant—was washing the tiled stairs as Shaldis followed her father up: its silvery hair had been clipped all over and shaved off its arms and lower legs, to keep it clean for household tasks. Despite the blue-gray skin that showed through the cheap dust-colored tunic that many household teyn wore, in the dark of the stair it looked surprisingly human. Five Cakes, Shaldis recalled her name was.

  “Father—” Habnit slowed his steps as they neared the arched space of the landing, with its wide windows onto the outer court. He hesitated, and Shaldis knew exactly what he was going to say. She’d b
een sick to her stomach all the way here from the Citadel, wondering how she was going to deal with the situation.

  When he couldn’t finish the sentence she did so for him. “Is he going to have a seizure if I don’t wear a veil?”

  They both stopped, a half-dozen steps below the landing, regarding each other in the shadows, united by the past they shared.

  “He isn’t used to the new ways.” He meant—Shaldis could almost hear him think it—If he goes into one of his rages, you can leave the house and have somewhere to go. He’ll take it out on me.

  And on your mother.

  The recollection of all her submissions, all the humiliations she’d borne in silence, all the fury swallowed so that her grandfather wouldn’t turn his rage on his son’s wife rose chokingly to Shaldis’s throat, and she trembled as if it were yesterday that she’d been required to wash her grandfather’s feet and dry them with her hair. It seemed to her that she’d spent the whole of her life, since she was old enough to stand and think and speak, defending her father or her mother or her younger brothers and sisters from that harsh-voiced furious autocrat.

  And it had never been enough.

  “If I wanted to please him,” said Shaldis quietly, “I’d have married that imbecile Forpen Gamert, wouldn’t I?”

  “For me,” coaxed Habnit, masking his dread with a charming smile.

  She sighed. Her stomach hurt. “Let’s get this over with, Papa.”

  FIVE

  I thought wizards were supposed to know about things like this,” Pomegranate whispered as she strained her senses to pierce the white mists that drifted above the waters of the Lake of Reeds. Her dark eyes were sharp for her sixty-three years, but even with the acute senses of magic she could see little beyond the straw hut where they crouched—she and the former Earth Wizard Soth, and Tosu, the adolescent son of the headman of Shonghu village, about a day’s walk up the lakeshore. The fogs that cloaked the Yellow City on winter mornings were a daily phenomenon here in the northern portion of the realm, even in midsummer. Pomegranate could barely discern the shining line where the shrunken waters met the long wastelands of reeds and pools that had once been deep under water, and the waters covered any possibility of using her nose to detect their quarry. Listen as she would, the soft, steady lapping of the wavelets rendered other sounds beneath them indistinct.