“Not proved, foreigner. Coming coiffed as a snowman has its own subtlety. But if you did not come to parade your illegitimate features, why did you make the trip at all?”
This conversation took place in the middle of the floor of Dowln’s quarters. It surprised me that the jeweler had not offered the next emperor a chair, at least, even if the refreshment he had provided for us was all the food he had ready. The min’naur would reject the offer, in the mood he was in, but I had at least expected Dowln to try. While I puzzled over this, I answered, “We came as messengers, Prince. From Rudof of Velonya.”
Reingish’s eyes sparked and angry blood rushed to his face. It was obvious that he did not appreciate the king’s many qualities. “Rudof’s tame Rezhmian, is it? And they say the Velonyans don’t keep slaves.”
Myself, as a slave? As I heard this my mind filled with the history of every time I have been rude to, abrupt with, or simply contradicted my king. I put my hand to my mouth to stifle the giggles, and heard Arlin, whose thoughts ran like mine, clear her throat behind me. Before I could answer sensibly, the min’naur continued. “So then. What is it: this message you bring alone from the north woods to our city? Has Vestinglon decided to sue for peace before the war has even begun?”
Until this moment I had tried not to believe in the reality of the coming war, though it had spread itself under my nose from South Territory to here. Now it took me a moment to catch my breath, like a man splashed with freezing water. “The message,” I said, trying not to be thought insolent, “… is for the Sanaur of Rezhmia.”
For a moment I thought the man would leap at me, but instead he spoke very quietly. “And what am I, then?”
Arlin changed the tensions in her body. I knew she smelled violence. So did I. “You are the Crown Prince of Rezhmia, great lord,” I said.
“But my grandfather is old, and leaves military matters to me.” Reingish spoke more politely, more collectedly than I had expected. I nodded with artificial complacency.
“That is, of course, the wisest thing he could do,” I said. I do not lie well. I don’t mean my moral objections prevent me from telling falsehoods, like this one. I mean only that I am not competent at it. In this case, it didn’t matter. I didn’t expect to be believed. “And I am certain he will relay to you everything we have to say. He will probably even ask that I repeat my message in front of you. We will know as soon as the emperor has gotten the earthquake relief well begun.”
I looked into a face of rage: white rage, hot rage, and the crown prince said nothing. His hand was around a pendant that had been hidden beneath his shirt and collar. I could not see it, but I knew it was his little dagger.
“I see by your glance at my decoration that you know me by my nickname. All the world does: Reingish of the red blade.” He said this almost casually, and I did not reply. After some moments of staring daggers at me, his eyes began to wander over my shabby person. This examination got as far as my hand, and then the prince’s face paled once more.
“Give me the ring. Let me see it.”
I heard Dowln stir behind me, and Arlin shifted silently. I felt a great reluctance to part with the gift, even to the Minsanaur of Rezhmia, and even for a minute. But I do not value any item of adornment more than I do my life, and besides, I did not want to give way to attachments to objects. I tried to take the thing off, without success.
It might as well have been welded to my finger. I apologized to Reingish. “I don’t understand, Min’naur. It went on easily enough.” I couldn’t even get the ring to twist around.
The prince grabbed my hand and held it to the light, saying, “It would come off with the finger easily enough, impostor.”
Dowln was at my side, looking white and proud as the prince himself. “This man is the guest of your grandfather, Minsanaur,” he said, and the three armed escorts of the prince made angry faces, and a noticeable clattering of steel.
Reingish gave no sign of having heard. He held my hand in a grip that ground the long bones together, but I don’t think he did this out of malice. “This!” He raised for inspection the ring and my hand together as though they were one thing. “It’s an inauspicious stone and an ominous message. ‘i find my light in darkness.’ Are you so proud of your wickedness?”
I looked at the stone, with its star of silver, bodiless, immaterial, and pure as mathematics. I felt a stab of pain, that it could be so misunderstood. “Darkness is not wicked, Min’naur. It is not even dark, really.”
He dropped my hand and held his own in front of my face, with its blaze of brightness amid gold. “Look at this, foreigner, and know your own signet is only a parody, as you are a parody of me.”
The ring was of the same pattern, though it was of gold and hence beyond tarnish. In the center of it was set the largest and most colorful diamond I have ever seen. It was like the egg of a small bird in size, and in shape. Around this splendor were carved the words, again in Allec: i am the source of light.
I murmured my appreciation of the ring, heartfelt, but added, “I think the min’naur does the other ring a disservice. The meanings of the inscriptions are not very different.”
Reingish was not listening. He, too, was lost in the play of light in the diamond. “The setting was made by my grandfather’s dreaming dog, here. That was my mistake, I see. The stone is anciently in my family. It is one of our treasures, and this coarse snowman desired to destroy it: to cut it in two.”
Dowln’s face did remain guarded, but I could see the muscles in his neck tighten at being called “snowman.” I remembered that this man chose to talk Velonyie with us, even though he did it badly. He said, “It has a bad flaw in the center, Minsanaur. When it was part of the orb, that didn’t matter, but worn as a ring, it may strike something at the proper angle and fracture.”
Reingish snorted and he stroked the ring affectionately with his left hand. “Diamonds are the hardest material upon the earth. I know that much. Here…” He held out the gem before me again. “Do you see a flaw? Any flaw?”
I looked into the stone and then peered across the table of its cutting, paying attention to the planes of refraction. I wished I had the loupe I carry in my backpack. “I do, Min’naur. It runs diagonally across the width of the gem. I would guess that this diamond formed originally as two adjacent crystals, which grew into one another.”
He snatched the hand back. “So what do you know about precious stones, you beggar?”
After a glance at Reingish’s face, I apologized again. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Min’naur. Although I am no jeweler, I am an optician, and I know how light is bent in different materials.”
“This ring will outlive you,” he answered me. Raising his glance he added, “And outlive the last slave, too.”
So Dowln was the last of Rezhmia’s bondservants. The last.
The last of everything becomes precious.
“It will if you don’t strike it against anything,” I told the min’naur, and he chose to take my advice as more hostile wordplay.
“Against your yellow head, you mean, snowman?” (He could insult my appearance no other way.) “Tell me when was the last time the might of the Rayzhia was broken against Vestinglon? It has been hundreds of years.”
It had been only one hundred and ten years, as I learned in school, since Velonya reclaimed (or stole) most of South Territory from the min’naur’s family. At that time the South was led by Parliz the Astronomer, who led his defense according to the triangulations of the stars. I was also an astronomer, but I had not been taught to put moral or precognitive meanings to the positions of the heavenly bodies. I did not know upon what military strategies the Rezhmians were leaning, for this war they were building, but I doubted they were those of Parliz.
Despite all of my stoic education and the training of my own picaresque life, this situation made me afraid.
Reingish made me afraid. I stole a moment in the belly of the wolf before I answered him.
“In Rezhmia
,” I said at last, “I see sweet pale grapes and fine green wines. And wheat. And peasants with round faces who sing while they work. War against the North will end this for at least a generation. Even if you win territories, and I do not think you can.”
My calmness did not prove contagious. “So, northman who calls himself my cousin! You come here to counsel appeasement! So that our peasants’ bellies might stay round and our wines good!”
I had not said “bellies,” of course, but “faces.” Nonetheless I did not correct the crown prince upon this. “It would be appeasement, great lord, if you were under assault. But Velonya has made no move against you, so peace is only common sense.”
There was a great stir among the min’naur’s five attendants, who glanced at each other and murmured half-sentences. I could see that my words impressed them as shocking lies, or shocking idiocy. It seemed that these men knew of such provocation.
In that moment the bottom was taken out from under me. Amid hardship and blood and wreckage, my firm ground had been the fact that Velonya had not provoked Rezhmia in any fashion, overt or covert. I expected talk of national birthrights, of hungry populations, or of the long, long dispossessed. What I did not expect was the natural courage of men who believe themselves attacked, as these five courtiers seemed to believe. That courage cannot be bent or outargued.
What I did not expect was for Min’naur Reingish to say: “I have seen the bodies of my people, gathering flies on the road. I have seen the villages burning!”
I have no magic way to tell if a man is lying. One might think I was at an advantage, face to face with my own face as I was. But I looked carefully at Reingish, and in my mind I tested his words, and I saw no reason to believe he lied. I was mystified, and so I told the crown prince. Then I asked: “How many villages have you seen destroyed, Min’naur? Were they north, at the edge of the plains, or along the road here? And did you have any evidence that it was Velonyan troops that did it?”
I hoped he would tell me. I wanted desperately some simple information, after coming so far on rumor. But my inquiry (perhaps not very respectfully put to the heir of an empire who already thought me a threat) produced only anger.
Oddly enough it was directed not at me but at Dowln. He pointed his finger at the blond slave’s face, and I remember that even at the time I marked his gesture as one I should avoid making, for it only emphasized the difference in height between prince and slave. “You can disappear, you conniving lapdog!” shouted the prince.
Dowln kept marvelously calm as he answered, “You have already told me, Minsanaur, that on the day my patron dies, there will be no more slaves in the City. I never misunderstood you. But as for now, the sanaur is well and remains my protection.”
The finger retreated, but there was a change in the focus of the prince’s eye, from hot rage to cold. “Only if my grandfather knows, fool. If you all disappear, he can only presume, and quite rightly, that your treacheries swept you away together.”
There were only four blades in the min’naur’s party, one of the attendants being some sort of priest, but that was four more blades than we had. Unless I could reach the one upon which Dowln had been working, that with the wound-wire hilt. It had not yet been edged, but it would serve to turn a blow.
Possibly Arlin and I could take on four blades without weapons of our own, presuming Dowln didn’t get too much in the way. But we were in the middle of a hive of enemies, and in a capital city of enemies; however could we find our way free?
While I thought these things, a speckle of small clouds passed over the sun, and the large workroom gave the netted impression of light under water, or of the light that took me and let me go again on the day I met you. I had a strange moment; a dislocation of mind; I cannot say more. Perhaps it was what people call a presentiment. It may be I was only feeling fear.
Dowln tried to step between Arlin and myself, to face the crown prince more closely, but we did not permit, so he was forced to call over my head, “Look into the hallway, some one of you. You will see the guard is missing.”
Reingish snorted. “That mercenary. Of course he ran. He fears me.”
“He fears you but he serves me,” said Dowln, as though he were discussing the properties of gold as versus silver. “He is in the sanaur’s apartments now, where his wife is chambermaid. He left with my prepared orders and with my token.”
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw the face of the slave behind me. He was collected, yes, but he was white, and there was a film of sweat over his forehead. “We may be murdered, Minsanaur, but we cannot disappear,” he said.
Min’naur Reingish thought. I could see his eyes flicker as though he were reading words in the air. The three other armed men shifted in place, but their hands did not leave their courtly rapiers. At last he said, “To kill you is not murder under law, slave, any more than killing a yapping dog. To kill these…”—and that finger pointed again, this time more effectively at me—“… would be…”
Much more difficult, I said to myself, but only to myself.
“… would be only a public duty. But I will spare my poor grandfather any further disturbance on this terrible day.” He rubbed his sleeve over his face, and by the dark smears on the silk I knew that Reingish, too, had been sweating. The three hands on three rapiers relaxed, and Reingish turned to go, but then turned back.
“But I warn you, treacherous tool, I will make no peace with darkness!”
This time I did answer, as inoffensively as I could, “Why not, Minsanaur of Rezhmia? Every day does.”
Reingish looked startled, but he was stalking out and did not ruin the dignity of it. When he was gone, and his attendants with him, Arlin turned to me and spoke her first word since the incident began. “That was a good line, Zhurrie! Was it spontaneous?”
I must have glared at her. “Of course it was.” My attention was caught by something she pulled from beneath her jacket: a throwing dagger, small and sparkling.
“You didn’t think I’d permit them to take everything, do you? This would have evened the odds considerably.”
Dowln came closer to examine the dagger with his professional eye. “You would have killed him, then? The minsanaur himself? Well, why not? You, at least, are entirely Velonyan.”
Before he could say more I interjected, “I think you misunderstand me, sir, if you think Arlin’s loyalties are different from my own.”
I stopped because out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure standing by the wall not far from the doorway. It was garbed—or “tented” might be the more appropriate word—in crimson robing with a dull gold undergarment. Its head was surmounted by a hat that resembled the roof of the oratory in Norwess. Its face was smiling shyly and the hem of its garments were dusty. I recognized this figure as one of the attendants of the crown prince: the one without a sword. The priest.
I was mystified. “How did you get back in here?” I asked the man. “I didn’t hear nor see you return.”
“I didn’t leave,” he answered, and his voice was deep and lush. A player’s voice. I was startled by the voice and then reflected that a priest’s place is ritual, and ritual and theater are much alike. “I’m sorry if I was not welcome.”
“You were not there a moment ago,” stated Arlin, and the priest only widened his eyes, which in Rezhmia means the same as a shoulder shrug but is considered more polite.
Dowln gave a great sigh, as though the events of the last hour had finally caught up to him. He scraped a chair over the flags and sat reversed upon it, resting his chin on the high back. “Ngaul Eyluzh; since when have you been made a member of Reingish’s inner circle?”
The man in red did not follow his host’s example. He remained standing against the wall. “Since never, Lord Dowln. They merely overstrode me in the hall and I was swept up among them. I am, you know, not a sprightly walker.”
Dowln rubbed the back of one hand over his jaw, and as I watched him, I felt there was something strange about the gesture.
It was the lack of that small but unmistakable sound of abrasion that results from contact with most men’s shaven faces. “I see. A common coincidence.”
Eyluzh the priest shook his head chidingly. “Nothing is coincidence today, artifactor, and nothing is common. Almost one person in ten in the City is dead or badly injured. The floor of H’Appid Niaus is become a hospital.”
Niaus’s shrine is, I think, one of the architectural wonders of Rezhmia. Amid this city of pink stone it is the largest wooden building, if a structure woven of willow wands may be considered wooden. It stands four stories high, and each of the stripped withies that make it up has been dyed, either white with lime, madder-red, golden, or of a blue made from ground lapis. Supposedly the City was built around H’Appid Niaus, which is immensely old, as is the priesthood that serves it. When one willow wand fails, another of equal dimension is stripped and dyed and fitted in its place, so that while the entirety is ancient, none of the substance is.
Much like the human body, I reflected, that adds and subtracts, adds and subtracts, while keeping to the general pattern.
H’Appid Niaus breathed constantly, groaning, from wind and heat and cold, and the changing of the angle of the sun. Or so I had heard. And it seemed that its strength of many weak pieces had survived the devastation that flattened huge stones.
So did most of the weak human bodies in the City—survive, that is. The use of the shrine to care for them seemed fitting.
The priest in the gaudy robe withdrew his hands from the ends of his sleeves and he billowed a bit. I gather the pockets of the garment were reached from within. “Here we go,” he said, and then blew his lips out in contradiction. “No. Those are my beads. Here.”
His white hand, dwarfed by the mass of the fabric, held two objects: a slip of paper and a rod of turquoise, delicate as a graphite pencil. I was aware that Arlin’s attention sharpened at the sight of the Sanaur Mynauzet’s personal token. He delivered these things not into Dowln’s hand, but into mine.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 44