by Glenda Larke
Marvellous what you can do when you have a cabochon and a Magor sword, he thought, his cynicism curling his lip. Especially when she’d had help. Temellin had finally sent a delegation of the Magoroth under Garis, not to Tyrans but into the fledgling states, to aid them with the establishment of a new order around the Sea of Iss. And there had been the moneymasters, of course, prodding and tweaking the traders and the merchants and the highborn to act in ways not inimical to their own interests.
‘My biggest fear,’ the Reviarch said, reflecting Arrant’s thoughts again, ‘was that the old Exaltarchy would disintegrate into anarchy.’ He glanced at Ligea. ‘Yes, a clever woman, your mother.’
Arrant didn’t reply, suddenly feeling out of his depth. In comparison to these two men, he knew nothing about the complex world of finance, commerce and trade. He changed the subject. ‘Who is the woman opposite, the one with the big piece of jewellery around her neck?’
The Reviarch glanced across. ‘Ah. That’s Antonia, priestess of the Cult of Melete. She serves at the temple on the Via Galetea. No friend to your mother.’
‘The pendant is the insignia of the Meletian High Priestess,’ Arcadim added.
‘Why doesn’t she like Ligea?’
The Reviarch and Arcadim exchanged a glance.‘Ah,’ the Reviarch said again, running a hand down his beard. ‘You should ask your mother that. But it has a lot to do with the Domina Ligea taking the temple on the Forum Publicum away from the Cult of Melete, and giving it to the Unknown God. Antonia was the High Priestess there before. The temple on Via Galetea is half the size and not nearly as beautiful.’
‘She’s lucky she lived,’ Arcadim added.‘She deceived the followers of Melete for years with a false Oracle.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that,’ Arrant said, anxious not to appear too uninformed. ‘When my mother became Exaltarch, she persuaded Esme, the Selected of the Oracle, to tell everyone what she knew.’
‘That’s right. When people heard what Esme had to say, there were some who pressed for Antonia’s death, but Domina Ligea was merciful. Not always a good thing. The cult lost at least half their following over the affair,’ Arcadim added.
There was an uncomfortable silence. The Reviarch cleared his throat noisily; Arcadim excused himself and disappeared in the direction of the lavatories; Arrant fidgeted and stared at his plate.
I shouldn’t have come, he thought. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here.
And this was such a silly way to eat, lounging about on divans, picking things off the low table instead of sitting at a proper bench. And there were all the rules about how to eat. Fingers of the right hand only, never the left. Don’t get the palm of your hand dirty, either. Wash the fingers in the fingerbowl between each dish. Stupid. Back in the Stronghold or on First Farm, they’d sat at a board table on upright chairs, and they’d used spoons. And your own dagger to cut the meat and bread.
He looked around the room once more, wishing that Gevenan could have been there. Although Gevenan would never have attended something like this, at least not voluntarily. Anyway, he was no longer in Tyr. He was now General Gevenan, the Military Governor of the Western Region of Tyrans, a post he had taken up two years after Ligea became Exaltarch.
He missed Gev. You always knew where you were with the General.
He was thinking about getting up and leaving when a youth came and sat next to him, taking Arcadim’s place on the divan. He looked bored too and pulled a sympathetic face at Arrant. ‘They drag awfully, these banquets, don’t they? Father insisted I come. If it wasn’t for the food…’
‘Try the stuffing in the goose,’ Arrant advised. ‘Water chestnuts, I think. It’s really good.’
‘Yes, I have. Are you really the Exaltarch’s son, Arrant? Someone over there was saying you were.’
Arrant nodded. Not someone else who wants something…
‘My name’s Martecian,’ the youth said chattily, oblivious to Arrant’s wariness. ‘Magistrate Pereus is my father—that’s him next to the Legate Valorian over there. He said I should come and talk to you because you looked as bored as I did!’ He laughed, and Arrant found himself grinning back. ‘Are you training for the army yet?’ Martecian asked, snatching a wine glass from a passing servant.
Arrant froze. ‘Not—not officially.’ A blinding flash of light. Screaming…Don’t think about it. Don’t remember. ‘They won’t take you before sixteen. Not into the officer training anyway.’
‘How old are you, then?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Oh. I didn’t know. I thought you were older. I heard talk of you fighting during the fall of Tyr, and that was already four years ago. I’m sixteen. I’m going off to join the army this year. Are you going to do the same when you’re old enough?’
Arrant shook his head.
‘Why not? If you want to be the Exaltarch after your mother, you ought to be a military man first. Or are you going to the Academy to study politics instead?’
‘I’m not going to be the next Exaltarch.’ He thought he couldn’t have imagined anything worse. And then did just that. Being the Mirager of Kardiastan when I have no control over my power, that could be worse. A lot worse. His hand shook as he reached blindly for some grapes.
‘I suppose there’s nothing to say the next Exaltarch should be the child of the last one,’ Martecian agreed. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s happened like that in the past, has it? We are not a kingdom, after all. But people say you and the Exalted One are different from others. Because you have that.’ He pointed at Arrant’s left hand, indicating the uncovered cabochon.
The flash that came into Arrant’s head was detailed, every piece of the scene stitched into the tapestry of his mind, embroidered with the vividness of perfect memory, as though he were there now, seeing it anew.
The chunks of flesh. The shower of red rain, blood falling, drenching. The stickiness of it on his face, trickling like honey down his cheek. The head of a man turning in the air, without its body. The splat of it when it hit the ground. The smell of meat…only the meat was human. The stink of human innards. All around him, the death of others. Men he had killed. None with the time to scream before they died. Foran obliterated. A bloody stream, oozing thickly into the drain of the paveway. The wounded men Foran had been treating nowhere to be found…
How many had he slaughtered? He had no idea.
Afterwards, there were some who said he’d killed Foran. That he’d killed some soldiers of Ligea’s legion as well. And all the wounded. But he hadn’t. Well, not all of them. Foran had died with a spear in his chest, and the legionnaire gorclaks had trampled some of the wounded. The others…
He dug his nails into his palm, hard, seeking pain to haul him back into the present. It took so little to bring on those horrible flashbacks, and so much to push them away.
Martecian gave him an odd look, and Arrant knew his abstraction would be construed as a further indication of his strangeness. He was, after all, the son of a woman many regarded as being a living goddess. Didn’t she shoot lightning bolts from her hand and sword? Wasn’t the very touch of her fingers said to be curative to the ill?
He’s wondering if all they say about my instability is true. Wondering if the Exaltarch’s son really could blow people to pieces with a look, just because he lost his temper. He’s wondering if the Exaltarch’s son should be feared, not befriended.
Everyone wondered that, sooner or later. Everyone had heard the rumours. Which was one reason why he had no friends of his own age. No parents would risk their offspring spending time with him alone; he might disintegrate them. Even now, Martecian was looking uncomfortable.
‘Excuse me,’ Arrant mumbled, and left the divan, left the banquet hall. Outside, he slipped away in the direction of his own quarters. Goddess, how he hated everything about the palace in Tyr! About this sterile life he led. Where nothing was true, where nothing showed its heart on the surface.
He dodged the servants bringing more tr
ays piled high with steaming dishes. The smell was suddenly nauseating. He ran on up to the first floor, hoping to reach his room unobserved, but bumped into Narjemah coming from his mother’s apartments. She was more Ligea’s servant—no, more a companion than a servant—now that he was too old for a nurse.
She clicked her tongue when she saw him. ‘You should be downstairs at the banquet,’ she scolded. ‘You wanted to be there! Nagging your mother like that…’
‘No one will miss me.’
‘Your mother will.’
‘She didn’t want me to go in the first place.’
‘She likes you to be unknown. It’s safer.’
He shrugged. ‘I thought it might be interesting, but I was just bored. I don’t have anything in common with those people. I can’t even be myself. I dare not say anything—anything normal, for fear others will use it against my mother.’ He took a deep breath, knowing he was beginning to sound like a spoiled child. ‘You know what’s really funny, Narjemah? When we first came to Tyr to fight the war, I thought that after it was over, we’d all go home. All of us: Ligea, you, me. Even Gev, to Inge. Oh, I knew Mater talked of being Exaltarch, but I thought that was just for a few months at most. After all, if we won the war, there’d be no need for her here, would there?’ He looked at her, half rueful, half miserable. ‘I was such a child then.’
She sighed. ‘I know. I even thought the same thing myself, although I might have extended the time frame a little. And I was no child.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Come, let’s go to your rooms and we’ll have a mulled wine and a chat. It’s been too long since we sat and had a talk.’
He nodded, pleased. And then felt scornful of a thirteen-year-old who was so lonely that talking to his nurse sounded like a good idea.
The wine, when it came, was watered—his mother insisted on that still—but deliciously tainted with anise and honey, cardamom and sultanas. ‘Remember when we used to drink this up in the Stronghold on those cold snow-season nights?’ he asked. ‘Only back then you used to put a few drops of wine in the water rather than the other way around.’
She smiled. ‘You were much younger.’ Then she added, more seriously, ‘Arrant, you do realise why your mother can’t go back to Kardiastan, don’t you?’
‘I might have known nothing then, but I am not such an idiot now,’ he said. Misery dragged at his voice, so he made an effort to sound more cheerful. ‘I don’t have a chance to be. I have six different tutors, remember? History, philosophy, rhetoric and politics, geometry, natural science and geography. And that’s not including the chief scribe of the Asenius Counting House who comes once every ten days to teach me accounting and trade.’
He fiddled with his goblet, eyeing the sultanas at the bottom, swollen with wine and spice. He had so loved them when he was younger. ‘I know if my mother leaves before her changes are properly fixed in place, the whole’—he searched for the right word—‘edifice will crumble. Cominus litters his rhetoric lessons with statements about how, without her, Tyrans would either degenerate into chaos and civil war, or it would have another despot like Bator Korbus.’ He swirled his wine without drinking it. ‘I know he’s right. There are so many things that can go wrong. Gev has never managed to find Favonius or half the Jackals and Brotherhood compeers. They are still out there somewhere, causing trouble. Rathrox Ligatan too.’
Narjemah nodded. ‘The changes she wants are so, um, fundamental, only she can achieve them. Because she is the only person with Magor power. Which means she’s the only person who can choose the right men to implement the changes. She’s very clever, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘No, I don’t think you do. Not really. For all your tutors and your fancy education, I don’t think you really see her as she is. The Exaltarch part of her, I mean. Look at the way she manages the Advisory Council and the Senate. She had to get the highborn on her side when she became Exaltarch. But why would they support her, when she spoke of freeing slaves and vassal states and conquered nations, which would destroy their income? So she enticed the most powerful families by setting up another Advisory Council, and seating their representatives there. Then she used them unmercifully as scapegoats when people complained of conditions. When the Council complained about what she was doing, she gave them more power, more work—which made them even more responsible if schemes failed. “If they want power, they have to earn it,” she told me once.
‘What she did split the highborn families right down the middle, between those who had power and those who didn’t, and that division halved their strength. Then, when she’d milked as much as she could from that, she reassembled the Senate. And brought more families into power, and balanced that by including the military and the commercial traders.’ She smiled at the look on his face. ‘Never expected to hear me speak like this, did you? I’m just your old nurse, who knows how to kiss a skinned elbow better, but wouldn’t know a philosophical treatise from a trade treaty, right?
‘Ah, Arrant, before I was your nurse, before I was a slave, I was one of the ruling class of Kardiastan. The Magor were well educated, you know. Even Theuras. We were taught to read and write and figure. Taught to think. Taught to think of ourselves as—as rulers, in fact.
‘Well, my world fell apart when Kardiastan was. When you came along, the best thing I could be was your nurse, the woman who was there for you when your mother couldn’t be. That didn’t mean I stopped thinking.’
He found himself blushing. It was true, she had never been more to him than the nurse he loved. He had never thought about her in any other context—only as she related to him.
She swirled her drink and took a sip, then put the goblet down. ‘I resented your mother terribly when we first met. Did you know that?’
He shook his head.
‘Because she had her cabochon, and I didn’t have my powers any more.’ She fixed her gaze on him. ‘You don’t know what it is like to be a real Magor, because you have never had a cabochon you could rely on. But when you’ve grown up knowing how the people around you feel, as I did, when you’ve been surrounded all your life by people who could speak together on two levels, using emotions as well as speech, when you know from young how to hear and see things with special clarity—it’s like being a god. I suppose that’s what made the Magor so arrogant, so ready for a fall. But for all that, it still made living—well, magical. Being without that power is like being blind and staggering along in the dark with your hands tied behind your back.
‘It was wrong of you, Arrant, to refuse to allow your father to send you another Magor tutor when Foran died. You just wanted to punish Mirager-temellin for not sending for you once the war was over, and that was childish. And stupid.’
Arrant bit his lip, but didn’t reply. It wasn’t true, anyway. Not really.
Yes, Ligea had written to Temellin shortly after she became Exaltarch, telling him she had no time for her son. She was too busy and Foran was dead. With Kardiastan free, and at peace, it was better he went to his father. When Temellin wrote back insisting she keep him until he was of an age to receive his Magor sword, Arrant had been shattered all over again. His father still didn’t want him. Nor, for that matter, did his mother.
But that wasn’t why he had refused another tutor. No, he had done that because he was never again going to seek out the power of his cabochon. How could he, when he could kill people, people he didn’t even want to kill, so easily? When he could turn people into mush and liquid as thoroughly as a mill grinder turned wheat to flour, even though he didn’t want to? He wanted nothing to do with such power. He didn’t want to feel the whisper of it in his cabochon. When he did, he tried to suppress it. And if that meant he could never be Mirager, then so be it. He didn’t care. Ocrastes’ balls, even sitting here thinking about it, he was sweating…
‘It’s a joy,’ Narjemah said, ‘to feel that power. It’s a wondrous thing. And you are cutting yourself off from it.’
He kept silent.
; ‘A Mirager needs to be able to use his cabochon.’
‘We both know I’ll never be the Mirager,’ he blurted. ‘And I think Ligea and Temellin know that too.’
‘None of us knows any such thing.’ She sighed. ‘Arrant, you need to forgive your parents. You need to forgive yourself. None of this is anyone’s fault, you know. It just happened.’
He reverted to his silence, knowing she was talking about a lot of things. His situation in Tyr. His separation from Kardiastan and his father. What had happened outside the North Gate…
She gave an exasperated grunt. ‘You and Ligea, you are so alike sometimes. Mirage take the two of you! Do you know how much she blames herself for your lack of Magor skill?’
He was startled, although he thought maybe he had heard that before, from someone, somewhere. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because of what she did when she was carrying you. She drained herself of power on more than one occasion. Because she fell into the Ravage and it might have poisoned you. Because she made you become an essensa. Any one of those things might explain your problems; she’s very good at blaming herself, is the Magoria. Whatever the explanation, it was not your fault.’
‘Oh!’ He thought about that. And came to the conclusion that it really didn’t matter. How it had happened didn’t change his situation.
‘She did her best for you,’ she said. ‘She knew, right from the beginning, that she wouldn’t be the best of mothers. How could she be? She had no memory of a loving family. As she was growing up she was encouraged to be self-contained, without sentiment, to be cold and calculating, to keep people at a distance. They were the virtues that Gayed valued and tried to inculcate in her.’
‘You weren’t there,’ he said. ‘Did she tell you all that?’
She shook her head. ‘No, Brand did. Do you remember him?’
He nodded, and felt a cold twist of dislike. Memory came flooding in, unwanted, yet vivid in a way only a child could have remembered it.