Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  The Austringer and Eyas Wings stretched out on both sides of me, perfectly symmetrical. I returned, along the top of the balustrade, to the back of the palace. Pavilions covered the whole lawn down to the lake.

  The celebrations started yesterday, with archery competitions in the main ring adjoining the blue and white striped awning of the long stand. Notable archers shot at novelty targets like a dove tied to the top of a pole, or a hazel wand upright in the ground. There had been promenades and pleasure boats on the lake. Lightning had laid on no contemporary entertainments like jousting; instead he had had chariots made and a track built on the other side of the lake. He had stepped into one of these brass-clad contraptions, taken the reins of a pair of coursers and showed us how to race them. His youngest brother had been a champion charioteer. Tern and I had watched the races, very tentative at first but people quickly got the hang of how to drive them.

  Then last night Lightning had held a ball. We had found costumes laid out in our rooms. The women looked beautiful in their draped gowns, and laughter echoed along the corridors as the men tried to figure out their togas. We were surprised but we took it as good entertainment. Everything, from the ancient harp music to the sickly mead, orgeat and boar roasts served in archaic style, was a reconstruction of his memory of the original Games. Lightning was beside himself with joy. He was home at last!

  Down on the lawns everyone was scattered around the enormous stand along one side of the archery ground, roped off from the rest of the grass and outlined by hay bales. The other side was open, towards the lake and bridge. Beside it stood a cloth-of-gold pavilion for the Challengers and, on the other side, servants carrying trays of chilled Stenasrai wine came and went from a refreshment tent.

  The pavilions were an ancient round design, not triangular, and the lines of bunting surrounding the archery ring were the same as those topping the walls of an amphitheatre. The whole scene belonged in the pages of a picture book: Lightning was indeed reliving the founding of the Circle.

  A series of tall flagpoles flew long, dark blue banners with the Micawater mascle. My Wheel flag and Rayne’s red oriflamme pennant were there too. We were acting as witnesses for the Challenge. At least two Eszai witness every Challenge; mortals are never used as witnesses because Eszai are less likely to be corrupted. We have a vested interest in keeping the Challenges fair and we would fiercely resist any less than the best being admitted as to do so would tarnish our own status.

  I looked out into the distance. The avenue ran straight on the other side of the lake, between beech plantations to the crest of a low hill. A folly stood there, a scaled-down replica of the entire palace, placed exactly opposite it at the end of the vista. It was so ingeniously decreased in size that it skewed the perspective–making the avenue look longer than it was. Everyone who saw the folly for the first time believed it was a palace exactly the same size at a great distance. I knew it housed only a single ballroom, but its trick of the eye was so exact I imagined that I could see a tiny Jant leaning on the pediment looking back at me. I shuddered.

  Lemon trees and spear-like cypress grew on the brow of the hill clear against the sky around the folly and, beyond it, livestock grazed on smooth-turfed grass like a carpet. I could just see the beginnings of the hills rising up to Donaise in the distance. Tiny, spidery vine frames climbed them, and their lower slopes were lines of immaculately planted grey-green olive groves and coffee plantations.

  I suppose the landscaped garden isn’t really designed to be seen from the roof. The guests on the terrace will have the best of it, or those strolling along the avenue, from which smaller pathways led and opened up new vistas. The perspective presented statues that seemed far off, suddenly near at hand. Gaps in the woodland revealed winter gardens, espaliers, great pillars, all meticulously landscaped for kilometres around.

  Beyond the beech wood two smaller avenues crossed the main one in an asterisk, and of course Lightning had had time to watch over the trees as they grew and matured, so now centuries later, they were looking their best.

  I stood on tiptoe and looked down the length of the Austringer Wing; over the roof of the Austringer building at the end. I could just see a dark green pattern of tall hedgerows–the labyrinth. It was enormous; lemon hedge on one side of the path and box on the other, so if you got lost you could smell your way around it to the great trellis and pergola in the centre. They are covered in vines drooping fat clusters of purple grapes. The tendrils hang down like a screen of falling water, and it is wonderful to push through them to the hideaway inside, where you can sit among statues in its shade.

  Past the maze grew the long, unkempt grass of the ‘wilderness’–nothing of the sort but a well-designed meadow where Lightning held garden parties. I’d rather have kept it natural than have it look so through artifice and expenditure. Beyond that rose the belvedere, once copied by the Rachiswaters in their circular style. I wondered why it was that the richer people became, the more sequacious?

  At the end of the Eyas Wing, in the other direction, a slope went down to ‘the farm’ by the river, a few kilometres distant but the clutch of aslant roofs looked more like a small town. Most of the estate workers lived there, tending beehives, kitchen and herb gardens, a phasianery for peacocks and pheasants, a rabbit warren, brick kilns and a dovecot. Lightning calls the estate office ‘The New House’, although it is four hundred years old. The Alula Road passes through to Micawater town itself, which was disguised behind another well-placed copse. Lots of townsfolk were here, watching the festivities and loving it. They were the sort of Awian citizens who hold street parties on their lord’s birthday.

  People were converging on the archery stands. From up here, parasols over women’s shoulders looked like little circles. I noticed a knot of people heading from the refreshment tent and in their midst I recognised Eleonora’s confident stride. Beside her was my little, dark-haired, vivacious Tern. The Challenge is about to start. I had better go join them.

  I stepped off the balustrade and tilted out in a long, slow glide. I swept over the terrace onto which the palace’s doors opened; then the water gardens below them, a round central spring framed symmetrically by four limpid pools.

  The ground dropped away and steps led down to a parterre, with the sky-blue roses of Awia in flower beds bordered by low hedges. More box hedges looked like embroidery, clipped into lacy flowing designs, scrolls and plumes against the rich, loamy earth. From that level stone hounds guarded a balustraded double staircase descending to the avenue. People walking on the paths between the flower beds looked up as my shadow sped over them.

  I focused on Tern and Eleonora and the courtiers surrounding them, who were settling on the lowest seat of the stands nearest the archery ground, reserved for the Queen’s use and covered with samite silk. I came in above the rounded end of the awning and veered wide to the arena’s grass, flared wings and touched down. My landing drew a little tentative applause from the crowd.

  I hopped over the ropes and Tern came forward to meet me. ‘My love,’ I said over her shoulder as we hugged. ‘My dear, dear love.’

  ‘Isn’t this exciting?’ Tern exclaimed. ‘What a magnificent day!’

  Eleonora nodded contentedly. ‘It’s a Lakeland summer all right. Three fine days and a thunderstorm. It’s like clockwork.’

  ‘Well, the sooner we get this over with and on to the party the better.’ She passed me a glass of sparkling wine. ‘I pestered Lightning to give us some real Stenasrai. “You must have had Stenasrai in six twenty,” I told him. “It’s better than that ridiculous mead.” It’s a wonder anyone in the seventh century had any teeth.’

  I was enjoying the party but I still had a lot to do. Since the slaughter of the battle there had been more people hiding from the draft. There was a groundswell of sentiment against the war and criticism of the Emperor, which the Emperor was ignoring until it gradually subsided.

  Eleonora had covered herself with glory and was full of pride. We hadn’t r
egained so much land since the Miroir battles of the last Tanager dynasty. No wonder the Rachiswaters had been so keen to match them by making advances in Lowespass, but Eleonora had taken more than any of them. Our shared knowledge of how awful the battle had been brought us together in this warm sunlight, whereas Tern, who could never understand, just kept talking. ‘I worried about you when the Circle broke,’ she said. ‘Although worry is quite an inadequate word for what I felt.’

  ‘I was fine, my love. I saw the flood. I never want to go back to Slake Cross though. Every time we go there we get massacred.’

  Tern said, ‘Some people are talking about an odd phenomenon. My warden says god appeared to the Emperor on the battlefield.’

  ‘Really?’ I said casually. ‘In what shape?’

  ‘A very strange one. A tall column of smoke, and trees made of worms.’

  ‘Mass hysteria.’ I shrugged. ‘People report all kinds of visions under battle stress. It’s terror that causes it. Lowespass generates more folklore than it can use.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see why it should have to export it.’

  I said, ‘Some fyrdsmen say that you can still hear the winch tower bell, tolling underwater in the river. Fyrdsmen will tell you any old crap.’

  I was interrupted by three flights of whistling arrows being loosed on the other side of the lake in honour of the victor of the chariot races. Eleonora shook herself. ‘Lightning slept through the dam breaking,’ she said. Tern and I laughed. It’s a joke that Lightning is such a sound sleeper Insects could be eating him and he wouldn’t wake up.

  ‘You dare wake him, Jant,’ said Tern. ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Um…I was busy.’

  ‘And the Emperor asked Lightning to have dinner with him. At least, I heard so…Is it true?’

  ‘Yes. That is true.’

  ‘But it’s unheard of! For Lightning, for anybody! Well, come on. Tell me. What did they talk about?’

  ‘I asked Lightning, but he wouldn’t say.’

  ‘I would never have thought anything like a one-to-one conversation could ever happen.’

  ‘It was in the hall at Slake,’ I said. ‘No one else was there.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have spied? No, stupid question.’

  Eleonora spun the key to her suite around her finger on its ribbon. ‘This place is quaint. I like the marble bathrooms. But it’s not as big as Rachiswater. Or as grand as I’ve planned Tanager to be. It’s odd to think it was the capital once.’

  ‘It’s not bad for five four nine!’ Tern said.

  ‘Lightning’s town was even bigger than Hacilith back then,’ I added. ‘Hacilith took a hundred years to overtake it. He never wanted to extend it; he wanted to preserve it and the palace too.’

  Eleonora spun and spun her key. ‘What a shame. Lightning rattling around in the house alone for fourteen hundred years. One hundred and forty bedrooms and no woman to share any of them with. It’s enough to turn a man’s mind. Why hasn’t he ever married? Does he bat for the other team, or what?’

  Tern laughed. ‘No-oo. He’s just looking for the perfect match.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to do something about that.’ The two women looked at each other. ‘He just needs to relax. Perhaps his Queen could…command him to.’

  ‘I think he wants some kind of red-haired huntress,’ Tern said as we settled ourselves in the stands.

  ‘Nonsense. He just needs the attentions of a woman au fait with her desires.’

  From here was a much better view uphill to the palace. It was all warm, shortbread-coloured Donaise limestone, from the rusticated stonework on the lower storey to the rich carving in the great pediment; many strips of decorative mouldings surrounded a smooth bas-relief of the winged hounds bearing the lozenge coat of arms. Each column led up to a statue on the roof as if supporting it. Between the columns two levels of windows proclaimed how many rooms could house Lightning’s guests. The Eyas and Austringer buildings at the ends of the two wings had enormous windows with round arches giving on to the ballroom and stateroom respectively. It was built in the most regular manner rare in the country today; Awia has gone straight from Micawater’s classical to neoclassical, and now Rachiswater’s art nouveau, without ever having been through a rustic phase like the Plainslands.

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Tern.

  ‘Well, Lightning walked straight in to the Circle. He never had to wander around the world the way I did, before I even found out the Castle existed. He didn’t have to plot and scheme like an Awian prince, either, because he had the Castle and his immortality instead. No wonder he can pretend this noble liege fantasy.’

  ‘It’s how he had time to bring us together.’ Tern laid her hand on my knee.

  ‘I call that plotting and scheming,’ said Eleonora.

  Tern said, ‘I paid him a routine visit and he mentioned I might be interested in Jant. I remember taking my coach to see Lightning one morning and I told him how Jant’s courtship was progressing. “He came to see me last night–I love his appalling timing. And do you know–his boots were covered in manure!” How we laughed!’

  I snorted unhappily. Travelling from the Castle to Wrought to court her had been the start of my drug-taking. I stayed awake for two, three nights at a time, driven to extreme exhaustion by a fear of inadequacy. And apparently Tern had already decided to marry me before I started and there was no reason for me to have used scolopendium at all.

  She had flicked open a pamphlet. ‘Ha!’ she said. ‘Lightning has a grotto. He never told me.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A grotto. How exciting. I’ve been coming here for nearly a hundred and twenty years and he never showed me. Listen.’ She read from the book: ‘ “Who would have thought that a cavern of such delightful artifice would lie at the end of the path? A passageway leads to a charming rocaille grotto with a small waterfall. Niches in the walls form shell-adorned seats, and above them is the inscription: All time not spent in loving is lost.” Ah, isn’t he sweet?’

  I said, ‘The grotto’s on the other side of the secret garden. We can visit it later. What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a programme for the party and a tour of the grounds. All the sculptures and so forth.’

  I let her chatter on, dwelling on how beautiful she was–the gentle contours of her face, her manicured hands. I thought how lucky I was that she found me equally wonderful.

  Tern loved the summer sun, though her manor had a much more dismal climate. Wrought is in the rain shadow of Bitterdale; all the clouds that come in from the sea rise over the hills, drop their rain on her manor and leave the inland manors clear.

  I looked down to the glistening lake. Far on our right towards its centre an artificial island was covered with trees. The pink marble pediment of the dynasty’s mausoleum, its engraved frieze, and the pinnacles of other memorials showed between the tree tops.

  The still water reflected them, but further off by the sluice gate bridge, the stirred-up water scintillated as its silica flecks reflected the sunlight. Many people were promenading along the bridge, and I don’t blame them because Micawater Bridge is one of Frost’s finest legacies.

  It spanned a little man-made river flowing out of the tail-end of the almond-shaped lake, once natural but artificially enhanced since Esmerillion’s time. The bridge carried the avenue through its roofed and arched arcade, and below it had square windows along its length above the span. Their shutters were closed; all were honey-coloured varnished wood to match the stone. From flagpoles along the length of the parapets, blue pennants draped down almost to the water.

  There were rooms inside the bridge: all well-furnished and painted, and there was even a tiny theatre for music recitals. Lightning’s friends sometimes use it as a summer house. From the windows they can look out over the lake to watch fleets of swans, dragonflies whizzing over the water’s surface beneath them, and sometimes horse hooves clattered overhead along the
avenue. So, over the centuries, Lightning has shaped the landscape much as Frost did, but for beauty and convenience. Whenever he had enlisted her help for a feat of engineering it was also a feat of elegance.

  ‘Look!’ said Eleonora. ‘Here he is.’

  Lightning emerged from the gold pavilion, carrying a compound bow so big it looked like a longbow. Cyan was behind him in a black T-shirt, waistcoat, quiver and a bracer on her arm. Lightning strolled up to us and bowed to the Queen. ‘I hope you enjoy the tournament.’

  ‘I will,’ said Eleonora.

  The Challenged Eszai always acts as his own master of ceremonies, conducting the Challenge himself according to his own style. It was a necessary part of the façade of unshakable confidence which is our most effective guard against Challengers. Lightning had asked his five reeves, from his musters of Micawater Town, Bitterdale, Altergate, Tambrine and Foin, to act as functionaries.

  Lightning walked to the centre of the area and held out his hands to the crowd. ‘This is my standard Challenge, which I set to show I can defeat a Challenger at all kinds of shooting. There will be three rounds. The first is for distance. There will be just one arrow each, unless the bow fails. I wish the Challenger, Cyan Peregrine, to shoot first in each round.’

  Cyan stood behind a dark blue pennon on a cane. She looked small next to her father and seemed very aware of the inconsequential figure she cut, with the slivers of her legs and narrow squared shoulders. Her red compound bow looked like a toy in comparison with Lightning’s. She took an arrow and nocked it to string and then, with the bow in her hands, she lost her uncertainty and became businesslike. She knew what to do, and I knew how good she was: I had witnessed her skill in the Jacamar Club.