Selene led me into this den of lionesses, smiling all the while. “Mother, see! Sir Hadrian has come to visit us.”
Maria Agrippina turned at our approach from a conversation with a Jaddian eali woman of astonishing perfection and smiled. “Selene, yes! I see.” I knelt before the Empress’s seat. She was lovely as the Jaddian goddess at her right hand, and lovelier than I remembered: an image of genetic perfection distilled across sixteen thousand years. She did not offer a hand and left me kneeling, not ordering me to rise. “I am pleased you could join us for this dreary affair, Lord Marlowe.”
Raising my eyes enough to see her gold-sandaled feet, I said, “I was honored to be invited, Majesty.”
“I should hope so,” she said, voice distant. “I suppose I should thank you for my son’s safe return, though Alexander gives mixed reports of his adventure. He says you treated him like a peasant.”
“This is the one?” the Jaddian woman asked.
I glanced up at the woman—a princess or satrap of Jadd, I was not sure. With her olive skin so bronze it was almost green and hair black as mine, she seemed permanently veiled in shadow, though she dressed bright in pantaloons striped white and blue and a sleeveless robe that showed off the impressive array of golden armlets and bangles she wore.
The Empress put a hand on hers. “Yes, Sibylla, it is.”
Sibylla’s eyes widened, accentuated by the indigo dye that stained her eyelids. “We have stories of you in Jadd, Lord Marlowe.”
“Good stories, I hope, my lady.” Still I did not rise. I was beginning to grow uncomfortable there on the patterned carpet with Selene hovering at my shoulder.
Sibylla said, “The Satrap di Sayyiph says you are a man of quality. Il uomos aretes!”
Aretes, arete. Excellence. It was one of those words that survived to contemporary Jaddian from the ancient languages that formed it. I bowed my head deeper. “My lady is too kind.”
I opened my mouth to inquire after the Maeskolos, but the Empress cut me off. “She is, isn’t she? As I understand it, Lord Marlowe’s primary quality is ambition. I understand you are to be named to the Council shortly, lord. One wonders where your ambitions end.”
How was I to respond? Shame and innocence warred with me, and a sticky embarrassment coated my neck and shoulders. Any protest would appear defensive. Better to say nothing.
“What?” the Empress said. “Nothing to say?”
“Mother!” Selene took my arm, but I sensed that to rise was a mistake.
“Selene, this man is beneath you. Take yourself away.”
The princess fell back at once.
Sibylla and the other ladies and lords gathered round the Empress had gone silent. I did not rise, but kept my gaze fixed on the carpet. Behind me, I sensed a throng of onlookers gathering. The liquid embarrassment began to run down my back. My fists clenched at my sides.
“I see . . .” the Empress said. “My daughter is the target of your ambition.” I could not deny her. Who listening would believe I preferred my Tavrosi sorceress to a red-haired princess of the Sollan Empire? They were princes themselves.
“Understand your place, sir,” the Empress said. “You are a servant. You serve us. At our pleasure. Forget this at your peril.” She extended one sandaled foot, placed it on the dais before her. “You will offer us a sign of your obedience.”
I looked up and met the Empress’s gaze, dimly aware of the half dozen Martian guardsmen who stood behind her and Lady Sibylla. She meant for me to kiss that foot. It was an insult and a grave rebuke. Such a thing was reserved for slaves, for the palace homunculi and the lowest of lowborn servants, a reward and a punishment at once.
“Mother, stop! There’s no need . . .” Selene interjected.
“Quiet, girl!” Maria Agrippina said, and tapped her toe thrice on the tile. “Here, boy.” I made to rise, prepared to cross to the dais and obey. What else could I do? With the Empress and her court before me, the royal children and various high lords behind, with the Martians near at hand? “On your knees!” the Empress snapped. “Crawl.”
I clenched my teeth, ducking my head further to hide the fire in my eyes, and placed my hands against the carpet. Focusing on the floral pattern in the rug, glad Valka slept in fugue, I started to crawl. The royal seat must have been ten miles away, so long it seemed. I felt half-ready to spring from my prone position and fly at the evil woman, goddess or no, and damn the Martians.
My hands shook, and I became aware—as though my perceptions were hidden from me by some heavy blanket—that I’d forgotten to breathe.
I could have killed her, then. How dare she humiliate me? Me. For an instant, I was every ounce the conspirator Breathnach and the Lions believed I was. In that instant, I would have gladly cut her down and cut a path to the throne. The Marlowe rage was on me, bright and cold as distant stars.
“Leave it, Mother!”
Alexander appeared from the crowd at my back.
“Alexander, you’re just in time!”
“I said leave it,” the prince interjected, stepping between me and the Empress’s chair. “Sir Hadrian did nothing wrong. Stop this at once.” And there in the sight of all he laid a hand on my shoulder.
Maria Agrippina’s eyes narrowed. “You defend him?”
My squire thrust out his chin. “He doesn’t need defending. His actions speak for themselves.” I did not know what to say. Mere days before this same prince had demanded that I kneel before him.
The sandaled foot withdrew beneath the white skirts. “Get him out of my sight.”
Away from Her Majesty’s compartment, I said, “Thank you, Alexander.” Selene stood near at hand, folded in on herself, head down.
The young prince looked up at me. “She shouldn’t have done that.” Beneath my white cape, my hands were shaking, but with sustained rage or fear for my safety or my dignity I could not guess. “I’m glad you came. I wanted to apologize.”
“You wanted to apologize?” I said, surprised.
Looking round, I discovered that Alexander had bowed his head, held his right fist to his chest in salute. “I asked my father to let me travel with you. I understand you had no say in the matter. Anyone would be frustrated.” I blinked, astonished at the moment of clarity in the young nobile, but impressed. “I wanted to ask if you would allow me to accompany you when you leave Forum next.”
My mouth opened, but for an instant no words came out. I might never again leave Forum, if I really was to take Lord Powers’s seat on the Council. I might be married to Selene, and so be trapped in the Peronine Palace the rest of my days, like a fairy-tale princess trapped in her dragon-watched tower. I might throw myself off the nearest platform. A hundred answers played at once, but in the end I repeated the first one. “I’m not so sure I’m leaving Forum soon, Highness.”
Alexander paused himself before answering. “I understand. But . . . when you go.”
I glanced over his shoulder at Selene. “You did this?”
The princess looked up, and though her face was still white, she smiled.
* * *
A pair of tumblers wearing nothing but painted motley rolled past me to the amusement of a close knot of onlookers, bells in their hair. Alexander’s eyes followed on, admiring the girls. Selene clapped along with her siblings and the other lords, and drank—though I did not.
Behind us, the trumpets played, and the master of ceremonies set the stage as wooden vessels crashed into one another and men fought and were hurled from the decks of their ships and plunged into the false sea.
“Do you think they’ll drown?” asked Princess Vivienne, come back round again—without shy Titania—to watch the fighting with her elder sister.
“These are proper gladiators,” I said, shaking my head. “See the masks they’re wearing? They’ll have osmosis gear underneath. Still might lose one or two with the ships c
rashing about, but I’m sure most of them will be fine.” The gladiators wore combat skins beneath their imitation antique armor, suits not so different from the underlayment of a legionnaire’s combat armor, complete with impact-absorbent gel layer. The only difference was that the gladiators’ suits were designed to lock up as they sustained damage to steadily emulate real injury. “It has its problems,” I was saying to both princesses, and to Bayara and a small knot of listeners who had gathered about the Devil of Meidua. “The suits work on a point system, so you can actually cheat them with a series of small hits—the kind that wouldn’t stop a man in a real fight. I beat a gladiator once that way, when I was a . . .” I had been about to say fodder pool myrmidon when I realized that to do so would be to confirm the worst sort of thing about my outcaste past. “When I was in Colosso.”
“You were in Colosso?” asked Selene’s handmaid, Bayara. But for her hair—which was red as that of the royal children—the girl reminded me of Anaïs Mataro, being of some lower stripe of the palatine class.
Selene laid a hand on her friend’s knee. “I thought I told you, Yara.”
“For three or four years on Emesh.”
“Where’s that?” Bayara made a face.
“The inner rim,” I answered, “right on the edge of the Veil, near the border with the freeholds.” But I could see on her face that all this meant nothing to the handmaid, and I smiled. “It’s as far from here as you can get, right at the very edge of the Empire at the heart of the galaxy, near the core. Farther than you can really imagine.” This seemed to work better, and the girl smiled.
Alexander stirred in his seat by the rail, and turned from his contemplation of the false sea and the fighting to ask, “Did you really run away from home?”
I did not answer at once. Below, the wreckage of ships and gladiators was being swept away by servitors with mighty nets. Watching them in a nostalgic haze, I answered, “I did. I meant to go to Teukros and become an Expeditionary Corps scholiast, but I never arrived.” I had been about to recount my time in the coliseum, but the memory of the Empress and how she had debased me came back to me, and I fell silent.
“How did you end up on Emesh?” Alexander asked. “That’s almost as far away from Teukros as it is from here.”
The vision Brethren showed me in the bowels of Vorgossos flashed like lightning across my mind. The smugglers who had delivered me from Delos and my father vanished into nothing, the stars beyond the portholes changed. The same power that had resurrected me had moved me across space, had set me on this path, the very path that led me to Vorgossos. To Arae and Aptucca. To Iubalu and my triumph. I was a piece in a game I did not understand, and felt again that longing to leave Forum, to fly to Colchis and the Imperial Library and look for answers.
“I don’t know,” I told the prince simply. It was not quite a lie. “I was in fugue. When I awoke . . . I wasn’t where I expected to be.”
A shadow passed before the sun, and looking up with a million other faces, I saw the barge sailing in, suspended by repulsor pods like balloons that carried it in over the rim of the Colosseum where the statues clutched their pennons, over the crowds and the sailcloth screens that showed feeds from flying cameras. The master of ceremonies shouted over it all, over cheers and the pounding of hands and feet, over trumpets and the distant salute of cannon fire. The opening act done, the next event would pit two teams of gladiators against one another, but they would fight not upon the floor of the Grand Colosseum as on other occasions, but upon that floating platform.
“I was hoping they’d drop it!” said Princess Vivienne, pouting.
“And splash the commons?” Selene put it. “That would have been amusing.”
I did not point out to the princesses that this was Forum, that the only commons here were servants. Even the gladiators were the sons of lesser lords, the very best far-flung worlds could offer to please their Holy Emperor. Slaves and myrmidons such as I had been seldom fought on Forum. Only the best toy warriors could perform for the Emperor, though His Radiance was but rarely in attendance.
“Philip says the team in yellow there is from Car-Tannae on the outer rim,” Vivienne was saying. “He says their knights don’t use swords. They use highmatter nets. Like fishermen. They throw them over an enemy and use a remote to activate it once they’ve got them.”
“Highmatter’s not allowed in the games,” Alexander cut in, shutting down his younger sister.
Vivienne made a face. “I know that, Alex. But Philip says they’ll still use nets. Isn’t that strange? Nets?”
“The ancients used to use nets,” I said, interposing myself between the two royals. “In the Golden Age. Both in show combats like this one and in battle.”
“I give you this, Selene,” came a drawling voice from over my shoulder, “your boy knows his stuff.” Turning, I found the long-haired Prince Ricard standing just behind my chair, so close that had the sun been lower in the sky his shadow would have fallen across me. The other prince laid a hand on the back of my seat. Leaning in, he said, “Fancy a wager, Marlowe? I’ve got four-and-a-half million marks riding on the Car-Tannites to take the day. You game?”
I looked up at him. “I am afraid, Your Highness, that what funds I have belong to your radiant father.” Repeating the Empress’s words from minutes before, I said, “I am but a servant.”
“Afraid?” the prince echoed, not seeming to have heard the rest, “Don’t be afraid! It’s only the Colosseum! Philip!” He looked back over his shoulder. “You were right! Marlowe wouldn’t take my bet!” The stockier, short-haired prince laughed from a few tables over and clambered to his feet, seeming only a little drunker than he had the night of the triumph.
Just what I needed, I thought.
“He’s not afraid, Ricard!” Selene said. “He doesn’t want to play your stupid game.”
“Sir Hadrian was a gladiator!” Bayara protested.
Ricard’s eyes widened. “He was! I’d forgotten! Ooh, but this is too good!” Prince Philip had joined his brother by then, and Ricard wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Philip, did you know Sir Hadrian was a gladiator back in the day?”
“I think I did,” Philip answered, cradling his wine in both hands to keep Ricard’s jostling from spilling the vintage. “Where did you fight?”
“Emesh!” Princess Vivienne offered.
“The fuck’s an Emesh?” Philip squinted at his little sister.
“Inner rim, somewhere,” Bayara said, apparently now an expert.
Philip raised his glass. “Cheers. Those rim fights can be bloody brutal, man.” He drank deeply, and when he was done asked, “I don’t see your woman around. Did she not come?”
Princess Selene answered for me. “The Tavrosi is in fugue. Something about that trouble with Director Breathnach.”
The besotted prince nodded somberly. “Nasty business, that was. I’m sorry to miss her.” He leaned toward Ricard and tried to whisper, “Sorry to miss her ass, that is. You remember that thing, Ricard? I’d turn to witchcraft, too, if it meant burying myself in that.”
“Enough!” I rose, wheeled so quickly Prince Philip did, in fact, drop his wine. The crystal goblet bounced on the thick carpet and rolled away, spilling wine that cost as much as a peasant farmer might make in two years’ hard labor. Both Philip and Ricard took a step back. I pushed my cape back over my shoulders. Too late, I remembered I was not armed, and settled for hooking my thumbs in my belt, facing the brothers square. “Apologize to the lady.”
“She isn’t even here!” Philip said, still recoiling.
I took a step nearer the two princes, but did not speak.
Ever the cooler head, Ricard half-stepped between me and his uncouth brother. “Stand down, knight! My brother is a prince of the Sollan Empire. It is death to lay hands on him!”
“Have I laid hands on him, Highness?” I asked coldly,
not taking my eyes from Philip’s face. I kept my hands at my side. History would not repeat itself. This was not Gilliam. I had no hidden ring, no hidden rank.
Neither of the princes moved. Neither spoke. Alexander, Selene, and the others did not stir. Eyes narrowed, I took a careful step toward the princes, and took pleasure watching the blood drain from Philip’s face as Ricard thrust out a hand to stop me.
“We’re done here,” I said, voice calm and cool.
Two Martians appeared almost from nowhere and pushed me back. “Step away from the prince, lordship,” one said, voice flattened and modulated by the helmet speakers.
Philip grinned.
“What is going on here?”
I shut my eyes. I should never have come, never have accepted Alexander’s invitation or Selene’s or whose ever it was. I should have frozen myself with Valka until all was decided and the Emperor’s orders were handed down.
Empress Maria Agrippina wafted in from the back room, Lady Sibylla and several other courtiers following in her wake like dolphins dogging a sailing ship.
“The barbarian attacked Philip,” Ricard said.
“Only because Philip was being terribly uncouth!” Selene cut in, standing to put herself between the Empress and myself as she had before.
Vivienne did not stand, but called out, “Sir Hadrian didn’t attack him! He only told Philip to leave.”
“Philip had it coming, Mother,” Alexander said, coming to my defense as well. “If it had been me, I’d have hit him by now.”
The Empress surveyed her five children, emerald eyes flitting over the several dozen others in the onlooking crowd that had formed around us. Crown Prince Aurelian stood off to one side, sad eyes watching the proceedings, a befuddled expression on his face—so like his father’s. Maria Agrippina said, “I should have thrown you out of the box earlier, sir.” She sniffed, glancing briefly to Sibylla. “Quality indeed. We have a word for your quality here, Lord Marlowe, as I said: ill-breeding. A cousin you may be, however distant. The least of our cousins, but outcaste once is outcaste forever, they say. No washing out that stain.”
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