He said, “My name is Salumehramahin, and I am yours until you no longer need me.” Then he looked me deliberately up and down one more time and added, “You will need me for a long time, I think.”
“Dzuria sent you, I take it?”
“Of course.”
His dress was shabby and painfully white; I liked that better than the slippery silks of last night. At least he looked like a servant, not a whore.
“Say your name again?”
“Salumehramahin,” he said, flashing a smile as white as his cottons.
“What do your friends call you?”
“Ramin.”
“Where do I find breakfast, Ramin?”
“I could bring it to you.”
“No, bring me to it: somewhere between this room and the palace, which is where I have to go now.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You should have been there earlier than this.”
Then he dressed me like himself, in a long loose shirt and baggy trousers, and offered me sandals that he said were the largest he could find in all the warehouses of Skander wharf. He said they would be too small. Which, yes, they were.
* * *
I have worn less, in my time. And been led by the hand in stranger, darker places, to worse meals and worse days too, though rarely so frustrating.
I broke my fast—and the boy’s, at my expense, naturally—on flatbreads filled with a hot spice paste, standing on a street corner. Afterwards I washed grease from my face and fingers at the public fountain, thought briefly and enchantingly of the notorious baths of Skander—and set my jaw resolutely against asking the way. I was for the palace, sea-scoured as I was. In and out, as swift as might be.
* * *
Ramin led me through winding alleys and shadowed arcades, with never a glimpse of our purpose until suddenly we came out into the light and there it was, four-square in front of us.
They call it a palace—the palace, as though this were the principality of the world—but in truth it is nothing so singular. There isn’t even a wall, to mark it off from the common city. The first building of authority is set openly on a public square; everything else has been added where it might be, behind and to the sides and running away out of sight.
That gateway building stands high and square, cut of local stone, as stern in its age as it must have been when it was new. Beyond lay a hundred unlikely structures, each one vying with its neighbors to be taller or broader or deeper, brighter or more imposing or more absurd. Some weary exiles built their pavilions to look like home, to teach their children where they came from; others seized the chance to shrug away tradition and build jubilant fantasies, faerie-castles that resembled nothing real in any city anywhere.
Some had built true castles, sullen fortresses that spoke of their fears: assassination, instability, uprising. I thought they should look around and find other things to fear. With five ships and a case of gold, I thought I could take this city entire. Except that I did not want it, and neither would my king. It’s always useful to have somewhere else in the world, a place that sits apart. Somewhere to send those enemies you’d sooner not quite kill.
And the children you dare not live with. Those too.
I looked down at the child who hung so persistently on my arm and tried to shake him off. And failed, of course; he was most earnest, tugging at me, “Come. There is a back way to the kitchens, I know a man there...”
I was sure he did. That was his Skander, and his experience: covert, insinuating, conditional. Not mine. “This is my way, my king’s way,” in through the front door to ask straightforwardly for what I wanted. Looking at me, they would see Rulf at my back, and all his ships behind him; they would not refuse me. In and out.
Little Ramin let go of me then, and put his hands firmly behind his back. “I cannot go in there.”
“Nor should you.”
“Nor should you,” emphatically. “Dzuria said—”
“Dzuria is your mistress, not mine.”
I straightened my shoulders and walked alone, under his diminutive skeptical gaze: up dry and gritty steps, between stout pillars, through an open door.
* * *
I was met with obsequious manners, with drinks and courteous conduct into one antechamber after another. Courteous to me, at least: they almost fought each other for the privilege of serving me, those big smooth rounded men. I was surprised that Skanderenes ran so large, until I remembered the native habit of the high-born in the matter of their officials. Cut young, a eunuch boy might grow and grow. This must be the consequence: this heavy, huge unmanning, this fatuous squabbling over the right to be subservient to strangers.
I sat and sweated in close confines, ate and drank what they brought me, demanded attention that did not come. I asked for the prince of the city, and was politely abandoned; I asked for the chancellor and was moved to another room and abandoned again. I wielded Dzuria’s name, and they might never have heard of her.
There were always other supplicants coming and going, seeking an audience, being disappointed. If all day I saw one person being led into the presence, I was not aware of it.
I did wait all day, in ever-fading hopes. And talked to my fellow-hopefuls, though none of them could offer hope. Some had waited weeks, one months. In and out looked like a fool’s dream suddenly. Tomorrow perhaps I’d come back with my blade and whoever I could find among my men, cause a rumpus, see what ruder manners might achieve.
Tonight, there was nothing to do but yield at last to brute implacability: court was closed, audiences were over, neither the prince nor the chancellor would see us now, we should all come back tomorrow...
* * *
I headed down towards the harbor and was unsurprised to find Ramin dancing attendance on me before I was halfway there, smugly certain. “You should have come with me, not wasted your time with silly pompous eunuchs.”
I wondered briefly how wise he was, to make such mock. For sure some of those same eunuchs had come to the palace by way of the slave markets; for a boy in need of a future, his mistress might deem that a reasonable road.
Over supper she said, “I’m sorry, I thought you understood. You should have gone with Ramin. The front door is hopeless. Even with the right bribe in the right hands, none of them will be seen to hurry. That might imply that money holds the power, not themselves.”
I growled, and wished again to show them other ways to hold power. A fist gripping a broadsword, a booted foot kicking in a door.
She said, “The palace is divided, half and half. The prince has time and no authority, while the chancellor has authority and no time. Both men train their staff to keep petitioners away, for entirely opposite reasons.”
I grunted. “How is anything brought to happen? Ever?”
“Oh, the city finds its way. All our business passes through the chancellor’s hands; just, not through the front door. Ramin will take you back tomorrow. Be warned, he will probably scold.”
“I don’t doubt it.” If he were mine—but nothing here was mine, except the Skopje. I wanted to step outside, simply to look at her. Wood and tar and canvas, pegs and ropes: I knew her absolutely and trusted her the same, and I could say that about nothing else in Skander. Not my crew, nor my new friends. Nor myself, even, or what I would do tomorrow.
Tonight—what would I do tonight? Drink, and listen to this woman.
Watch her, too. She had wit both ways, wisdom and humor; I would be happy just to listen. My eyes were still full of palace smoke, which made them sore and restless both at once, and I would be happy to close them and just listen. But then I would doze, I knew. The smoke had gone into my head and was numbing yet. So I kept my eyes open and my mind alert by dint of watching her. Her skin in the lamplight, how the lines were dressed in shadow like a web of softness laid over strength; her hair, that had been tempered and pinned close to her skull, was another heavy fall of shadow now. Her mouth was mobile, lightly mocking. Her eyes were steady, scrutinizing, always
honest and so not always kind.
If I’d been younger, I might have made a grand gesture of a grand offer, the courtesy of my body for her night’s delight. She would have laughed me out of the door, I think, even if she had been a younger woman.
But then, if I had been a younger man, I would not have seen the value in her. There are advantages to the slow creep of age; there is recompense. Not everything rots at once.
When there was space, when there was a quiet fallen between us, I said that, or something like it.
Even older men can make fools of themselves. She smiled and told me to go to bed, and did I want a child to light me the way?
* * *
Come morning, true to her word, Ramin took me up through the city again. On our way I saw a sprawled heap in a gutter, a groaning sorry mess of a man I thought might have been one of my crew. Another day, I might have stopped—but he was Rulf’s man, not my own. One of the young bloods; let him bleed. If he was bleeding. The dark wet stain he lay in might be wine, or vomit; it might be piss. Truth? I didn’t care.
On another narrow street I saw a shaggy blond head lean out of an upper window. Again, I thought that was one of mine; and wished him well, as a man’s dark arm reached to draw him back inside. I liked the lad; indeed, I’d seduced him myself from his father’s farm, before bad land and bad luck had had the chance to sour him. Left to make my own choices, I chose well, on the whole. Rulf? Not so. He had been a lucky king, but he’d needed that, to offset his disasters.
Sometimes I was astonished that he’d ever won the throne at all, let alone held it for so long. That none of his wars had killed him, and none of his mistakes, and—particularly!—none of his friends.
That Croft had apparently never even tried to kill him, even from exile. Where were the Skanderene assassins? The city was famous for its dealings with death.
Perhaps Croft had had his bones poisoned, his hair soaked with bane. Perhaps Rulf was dying even now as he gloated and lamented over his fallen foe, as I chased about on his stupid, deadly errand here in Skander, here at Ramin’s heel. Here in the chancellor’s back yard, in his house, in his kitchens, where there was heat and sweat and hurry, loud voices, no time.
Ramin snared a servant, greeted him by name, said, “Where is the steward Cephos?”
And would have been answered with a backhand blow, except that I was there. I caught that blow before it landed, a hand’s span from his head; held it the way a cliff might hold a hurled stone, unmoving, undisturbed.
I said, “The steward Cephos?”
“Please, you will, you will find him in the storeroom, down that corridor,” a frantic flicker of his eyes to show me where.
I nodded graciously and released his wrist. Ramin ducked ahead, to where indeed a man was checking sacks.
“Cephos! I have been looking for you!”
That earned him a slap too swift for me to intercept, even if I’d been inclined to.
“Master Cephos to you, little brat. And I have been waiting for you; I had word from your mistress. Yesterday, I think.”
The blow was taken for granted; the unfairness of the rest reduced Ramin to spluttering incoherence. With a shrug, the steward turned to me. “You would be Harlan the Sawartsman?”
“I would. I need to speak to your chancellor.”
“Yes. Come with me.”
He took us through a side-door and into another world: a half-world rather, a hollow between the domestic quarters and the public rooms. Rulf’s rede-hall was a single vast and open space, where you had to work out for yourself who was king and who was carl, who lord, who stable-lad. Here the very shape and structure of the house separated servants from their masters. It was like walking within the skeleton of a great beast; within the walls ran a network of stairs and passages, narrow and awkward and secret as spies. Secret for the light-footed, at least, for the slender and flexible. Ramin was cat-quiet and cat-swift, the steward much the same. I knocked my head on low beams, stumbled over sudden steps, scraped my shoulders against both walls at once.
We passed a dozen doors before at last the steward unlatched one and beckoned us through. I straightened my poor cramped spine with a grunt of relief—and struck my head one more time, on something that swung away from the contact and then back to hit me again.
This time I didn’t even try to hold the oath back to a mutter. At my side, the steward flinched; behind me, Ramin giggled; ahead, someone laughed aloud.
I reached up to snare the rope-hung obstacle, a bar of polished wood like a ladder’s rung or a child’s swing. Just one of many; for a moment I thought we’d been brought into a spider’s lair, the room was festooned with so many ropes and bars. A spider with a sailor’s ken, knowing knots and bindings and how to rig a space so that no two ropes should tangle.
Beneath that web, two men: one standing, one lying on a couch under a coverlet of cloth-of-gold. Both pale, shaven-headed. I took them for eunuchs, one more layer of officialdom to be circumvented.
It was the older of the two, the man lying down, who had laughed. He was grinning still. Glowering at him, wondering if he was sick or indisposed, I saw how the coverlet lay flat where his legs ought to have been; his body ended abruptly, just a little below the hips.
Now I understood the ropes and rungs. He was broad-chested, vigorous despite his age, despite his pallor; no doubt he could pull himself around this webwork as handily as any sailor aloft. Handier, without his legs’ weight or the need for footing.
And he was grinning at me yet, waiting for something; and
“Croft!”
* * *
I was the king’s windmaster; the breeze comes at my calling. A gale, when I shout. I had learned long since not to shout withindoors, even in a hall. Even in Rulf’s great rede-hall. In that close space, that day—well, I shouted.
I broke the room.
Those hollow walls splintered like bird-bones, shattered like windowglass. Ropes snapped and tangled, spars flew like straws. Ramin was blown clear across the room; I never saw what happened to Cephos.
Croft lay in the ruin of his couch, clinging to his companion, laughing and laughing.
* * *
Soon, in another room, that first passion spent:
“They call me Fenner nowadays,” he said, “hereabouts. Or simply Chancellor.”
We used to call him Fenner the Helpless, because he never needed any help. I had never been the right man for this mission. Rulf had subtler thinkers he might have sent, souls as suspicious as his own. Blunt and trusting are poor qualifications for an ambassador, especially to a city as insidious as Skander.
“You seem... shorter than you were,” I breathed, still barely trusting my own voice. Rulf and I were friends as two cats are friends, always sidelong in the corner of each other’s eye; Croft and I had been friends as two bulls are friends, always head to head. I couldn’t measure my danger here, or his own.
“Come, sit,” he wheezed, hoarse from laughing, hauling himself upright on this other couch. “Drink with me. The people here make little stronger than bread beer—but I have all the palace as my plaything, which means half the world, and the better half. Our guests learn to be open-handed. I’ve a honey brandy from the Brach that would be worth the journey to Brachia on its own account, rowing against tide and current all the way.”
Unexpected, abbreviated, very far from safe, he was still Croft. Of course I would drink with him. He wanted to talk, to tell me how clever he’d been, and how sly. We’d had the same conversation over and over, since we were boys together.
I sat the other end of the couch, where there would have been room even if he hadn’t shifted, that space where his legs were missing.
“We thought you were dead.”
“You were meant to.”
The second man had carried Croft in here, as casually as one carries a child. Now he fetched us bowls of glass filled with a clear dense liquor, fire on the tongue and fire to the heart. And took none for himself but se
ttled wordlessly on the floor against the couch’s arm, where Croft could reach out and stroke his smooth oiled scalp, tug lightly at his ear. Servant and lover, then—or I was meant to think so.
Croft had shaved his own head, and his beard too. That was my excuse for taking so long to know him. We look for what we expect to see, and make easy judgments: clothes, hair. Legs.
I said, “How does a crippled beggar, even a beggar king, rise to be chancellor in Skander?”
He snorted. That was not the question I wanted to ask. Even so, he graced it with an answer. “Painstakingly. A doctor fled here because his lord had died under his knife. I took the same chance, and lived. A man may shrug a burden off and get by the better after. You might learn that, if you chose. I traded legs for influence; the city’s prince was curious to watch the cutting and the healing after, and so I reached the palace. That prince is dead now, but I am here yet.”
“Your bones are in Sawartsland, in Rulf’s lap. Named and known.” Unmistakable, or so Rulf thought. “Did you have your doctor keep your legs in pickle, till you needed them?”
“And then attach them to some other body, and hope they looked to fit? I might have done.” He sounded pleased with me for suggesting anything so wily, so unlike myself. “But no: I bought a man at market and had my doctor break and bind his legs, just as Rulf had done with me. Then I kept him alive until I needed him.”
For years, that meant: years and years, in pain he knew too well. And then killed him, boiled his bones, wired them neatly together and sent them to us. I might have said anything, nothing; it would make no difference now. I said, “What for, old friend? Is there some way of vengeance here, that I can’t see?”
He laughed. “Oh, I have had my revenge on Rulf, although he doesn’t know it. He has no child, does he?”
“None—though not for want of trying.”
“Of course. He’d want a dynasty. He’ll never have one. I sent him a woman long ago, a hedge-witch to poison his seed. No sons for Rulf King, however hard he tries.”
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