Red Country

by Kelso, Sylvia

  Tears clouded my vision. But emotion cannot be permitted to cloud the mind.

  Kastir had waited silently. Now he said, “Princess, the present is bitter, but it is the future that matters most.”

  I looked up. He numbered on his fingers.

  “Banishment to Lyngthira would be barbarity. Hethria is an unknown quantity, too little known to risk as a source of danger in your rear. Exile to any nation in the Confederacy would play into the conspirators’ hands. They would become a focus for disaffection, a seed-ground for rebellion and invasion. And not a chance that any Confederate would miss.”

  It was like a bucket of cold water over the head. I said, “I could have it out with them.”

  He shrugged. “How much is repentance worth? Next time they may be more careful. Too careful, perhaps.”

  Silence filled the little blood-colored room. At last he spoke again. “Princess, there is only one remedy for high treason. It is a mistake not even you can afford to forgive.”

  I moved my foot on the crimson carpet. Then I said, “Send the guard captain to me.”

  * * * * * *

  It was as terrible as you would expect. Of course they denied it, swore the letters were forgeries, accused Kastir of plotting to eliminate them and then use me to rule Everran, wept, begged me to believe them, invoked the bonds of blood and family. I cannot bear to write the rest. The Four know, I would have given Everran to be convinced they were innocent. But the letters were there. Facts are facts.

  The other conspirators had to be arrested too, and there was no hope of keeping it secret after that, all Saphar was in uproar, all Everran for what I know. I had no heart to think beyond my own folk’s part in it. But when they were all under guard, the night before the executions, Zathar came to visit me.

  He did not request formal permission; just slipped into the presence chamber on Nerthor’s heels when Kastir had gone and the chamberlain comes to see his sovereign to bed. It had Nerthor’s connivance, I suspect, but before I could speak he had vanished and Zathar had me round the knees in the ancient mercy ritual.

  It was more dignified to stand still. At last he raised his lined, fallen old man’s face, all blubbered with tears that had soaked even his beard, and I could not help it, seeing him in such a state. I helped him up, said, “Please, Zathar, don’t upset yourself so,” sat him down, poured him wine, and braced myself for the inevitable.

  First he maundered on about my “faith to the blood,” my “generosity and magnanimity.” But then he lifted his bloodshot eyes and said with an intensity I could not discount, “Princess, I well know you scorn our trade and all its lore and you’ll not heed more than the words’ length. But believe me, believe me, if you do this t’will be the greatest sorrow of your life.”

  Patiently, I said, “Go on.”

  “They’re your blood kin,” he said, “guilty or innocent. Let be this—this will stain your hands beyond all washing, let be the folk’ll never trust you again, they’ll be ever asking, ‘If she could do that to kinfolk, what may she do to us?’ Let be all that, there’s Everran to think on. You’re the queen. Oh, princess, I know you’ve no time for the lore-songs, but t’is in them, over and over. Them that do evil in the high seats, it returns on their kingdoms, not on them. T’is Everran, princess, that you think to ward, and that you’ll bring to ruin. I can tell you, you remember—”

  “Not now.”

  I knew he would cite examples for hours, examples I knew as well as he. I wanted time to think. For at his words something had leapt within me, crying: He’s right, that’s the truth! Some response deeper than the mind, deeper than the very will, against which facts, reason, political expediency were mere words, arguments that one touch of concrete reality can overset.

  I could feel his eyes. When I sighed and began to marshal the prosecution points, he interrupted, tumbling over his words. “Not a pardon princess not even exile not any judgment at all!”

  “What then?” I stared.

  He leant forward, and actually took hold of my wrist. He was barely whispering.

  “Let them escape, princess. Tonight. I can do it. Just say the word, you’ll never know so much as how. . . .”

  “But. . . .”

  His eyes burnt into me. “Princess, whatever the proof, I know t’is wrong. I know! Let them go. No matter where, they’ll not trouble you, they’ll lie quiet as mice and just wait until—”

  “Until what?”

  His eyes fell. From a hardened back-biter, I might have expected some euphemism for, Until you get rid of Kastir. But Zathar had never sunk to nursing a grudge. He did mumble something, changed it to, “Till this comes clear.” Then he fixed his gaze, dog-like, back on mine.

  There was no rational cause for it. It could not be justified by any argument in reason. It was sheer stupidity, emotion, clouding the wits, overbearing the mind, irresistible.

  I took his fingers from my wrist and blinked and said to the table, “Get them out, Zathar. I don’t care how, I don’t care where. Don’t dare try thanking me. And if you ever breathe a word of this, I’ll have you burnt alive.”

  Chapter II

  Kastir was as furious as I tried to appear. I rebuked the guard captain and had the sentries whipped, then thanked the Four for a diversion in the shape of a Hazghend embassy. At least, until I heard what their message was.

  The mere idea of a Hazyk embassy is laughable, and the fact was more laughable still. They had not bothered with a “Note.” They were not really “envoys.” Just half a dozen blond bears of warriors in the full barbarity of waist-length plaits and horned helmets and double-headed axes, escorting the hearth-bard, of all people, who did not recite his master’s message, but made a song of it. And that was the most laughable of all. Hazghend’s tyrant had discarded politics. He was smitten by my charms, which the bard exaggerated beyond all recognition, and he proposed to marry me.

  “Not funny,” said Kastir with his elbows on the presence chamber table. “No, princess. Not funny at all.”

  “No,” I said. I knew about Lyve, by repute and from Kastir himself. A young tyrant, newly established in the usual bloody way, a fine seaman, a better warrior, short of occupation at home, where he had already given the corsairs a lesson good for generations, ruling a people who were bursting their arid country at the seams; prouder than a jumped-up Estarian money-lord and touchier than one of his own warriors, with a nasty streak of rancor to keep his grudges alive. Tales of his revenge upon various offending Hazyx were already rife in the Confederacy. “Why,” I said, “do you think I kept my face straight in there?”

  He gave me his cold, dry smile. “Will you tell me, princess, or shall I tell you?”

  “If I accept,” I said, “Everran becomes a satellite. Hazghend will milk our men and money for their wars, they’ll export their own hellions and the blood-feuds will tear our country to shreds as well. What’s more, Lyve will probably think himself strong enough for a try at the Confederacy. And he’ll want to do it by another war.”

  “Not to mention,” he added dryly, “that you yourself will have to put up with Lyve.”

  I shuddered. “I purposely ignored that. He drinks like a Hazyk. He’ll take concubines later if he doesn’t now. And they think wives are only fit to beat and bed.”

  His gaze dwelt thoughtfully on me.

  “If you refuse,” he took up the summation, “it will be an insult no Hazyk tyrant could stomach, least of all Lyve. He will certainly retaliate. He will not have far to look for help. Quarred, for instance, would be delighted to give his—bandits—safe conduct overland from the Isthmus to you.”

  We looked at each other. “It’s a stick-fork,” I said.

  He rattled his fingers on the table. “There are certain options. Play for time. ‘Maidenly protestations.’ Dispute the marriage terms. Even Lyve cannot hope to win Everran for nothing, and if you set the price high enough, it will be impossible to raise at home.”

  “That means he’ll raid the C
onfederacy.”

  “And possibly start a war that will distract him from you.”

  I said, “Including with Estar?”

  He said, “My loyalty is here.”

  I said, “Everran is Confederate too.”

  He raised his brows. I said, “What can we buy with time?”

  He frowned at the table. “Possibilities. That a blood-feud wake, or be wakened, in Hazghend. That an assassin appear. Or be made. Or chance intervenes. A storm, perhaps, at sea. Or we can play Hazghend against the Confederates. Tell Quarred Hazghend mean to raid them. Tell Holym Quarred is considering an alliance with Hazghend against them. Tell Estar the same. Tell Hazghend Estar plans to ally with Quarred and stamp them out. Someone will certainly elect to make a pre-emptive strike, and again, they will forget about you.”

  “That would destroy the Confederacy.”

  “But save Everran.”

  I thought about it. I should have thought rationally, but the past, infuriatingly, persisted in interrupting, my own past and the past of which I had learnt.

  I said slowly, “Everran founded the Confederacy. It was begun by one of our kings. I would feel I was . . . betraying him.”

  Kastir was silent. No retort could have been so crushing.

  In something like despair I asked, “Is there no other option you can see?”

  He got slowly to his feet. Even before he spoke, something about his manner gave me pause.

  “There is one other option, princess. A simple solution to your problems, at home and abroad. One Lyve has already offered you.”

  “Marriage! Oh, splendid! In the Four’s name, Kastir,” for once I forgot to be polite with him, “just who do you propose for groom? Lyve? The Holym Scribe? Some Quarred patriarch with a beard to his broken knees? One of your Estarian shophets who holds power for a year and then sinks without trace? Or have you really, really gone so moon-mad as to imagine I could marry in Everran without causing a civil war?”

  His eyes were fixed on my face. They held a painful constraint, a more painful intensity. His voice was husky, quite unlike usual.

  “You could,” he said, “marry me.”

  I was so flabbergasted, I let him finish his declaration without once breaking in.

  “It is quite true,” he began, “that you could hardly marry in Everran, and the other choices hold little appeal. That is one reason for my offer.” With Kastir even a marriage proposal was ordered, reasoned, methodical. “There are more important factors. It would rid you of Lyve. It would check the other Confederates. It would silence all those who object to a queen’s sole government, and, once I was fully accepted, as I have good reason to think I should be, it would remove any threat from your brothers; wherever they are, whatever they may do. Also, I think I could help you to rule efficiently. We would make, as the ploughmen say, a matching team. Everran would be the better for it. And there would be security, peace of mind, for you.”

  He paused, searching for words.

  “There is a great disparity in our rank. Many people will accuse me of making this offer with an eye to the main chance. Others will say I did it to advance Estar, and consequently myself. But I assure you, princess, that my loyalty has long been to Everran. And for longer, to its queen.”

  Another pause. “This may seem a mere marriage of convenience.” He looked down, and up again. “Feelings cannot be proved. But I promise you, princess, that if we marry it will be no matter of convenience to me.”

  My eyes must have asked what my tongue could not frame.

  “I always held you in affection,” he said. “When you dealt with Oxys it became admiration. Now I know I am in love with you.”

  This is Kastir, I told myself. Cold, clearheaded, unemotional Kastir, proposing the incredible. However unlikely the event, it is natural that love itself cannot turn his head. But some stupid cell of memory threw up an almost forgotten passage from the songs of Harran to the first Sellithar, and something un-akin to reason whispered, This is not how I would wish a man to be in love with me.

  In the meantime, he was waiting. If I was dumbstruck, he had left himself without defense. Mere good manners demanded that I should not keep him so.

  “Kastir.” I found my hand was at my temple. “This is so—sudden—so—unexpected. I—I’m honored. I’m—deeply touched. But I—I’m sorry—I need time to think about this. It’s so—so—”

  He nodded at once, looking quite as disordered as I felt. Then he bowed deeply, and by mutual consent we both scurried from the room.

  * * * * * *

  Not surprisingly, I lay awake a long time that night. I had thought of calling Zathar, consulting with him, but respect for a confidence precluded it. I longed for my mother. I could hear her go to the core of it with some irreverent irrelevant essential like, “Do your toes curl when you think of kissing him?” I thought of Everran. I thought of Kastir himself. I tossed and turned and had given up all hope of a decision long before I managed to fall asleep.

  I woke at the end of a morning dream, always the vividest, but this time of a more than remarkable intensity. I have no time for dream-readers, any more than for ghost-watchers or soothsayers or tradition worshippers. Only this dream would not go out of my head.

  As usual, only the final sequence survived, yet it was clearer than if I had been there in the flesh. I knew the place. It was on the main southern road, Wyven Tirs, just before it drops from the highlands to Asleax’ gates. I could see all Everran laid out beneath, azure and pigeon’s neck purple and iridescent emerald, silvered from the first of the winter rain. I knew the season. Air’s day, when all Everran goes out to fly the huge gaudy kites that honor the Fourth Lord. They were aloft above the walls of Asleax, specks of leaping, diving color on a boisterous wind. Ahead of me the Tirien foothills rose to the Helkents’ rampart, meat-red from the passage of the recent rain, but they were only a background for the dream’s core. The core was a man on a tall brown blood-horse, with my dream-self standing at its head.

  They too had been through the rain, for the rider’s scruffy sheepskin jacket was watermarked and his straight black hair clung damply to his skull. He had the bones of kingship, springing nose, an almost arrogant jaw, and he would have been handsome, but for the huge purple scar that blemished his right cheek.

  His eyes more than made up for it. They were the strangest, most dream-like and enchanting part of all. Long, almond-shaped eyes with thick black lashes. And the irises were green.

  It is not unknown in Everran. If I had never seen it for myself, Zathar had drummed into me the mark of our predecessors’ dynasty. “The true Berheage’s eyes were green.” It was almost the only fact I retained from history, and that mark was what my dream-person had beyond all mistaking. Dark green, inwardly lit eyes, lucent as wells of emerald.

  Yet there was something more about those eyes than color; an attraction, a fascination, the kind of spell you discover in the depths of a great finghend, where no matter how steady your hands seem, the light makes stars and ribbons in the heart of the gem. Motion. That was what remained when I awoke, the way those irises had seemed to flow with their own inner motion, even though his regard was steady on my dream-self’s face.

  In waking I also retained a fierce pang of loss and grief. As the dreamer, because I wanted to keep the strangeness and clarity of the images, but also because I woke in the knowledge that my dream-self had been saying farewell to him; that his going would deprive me of magic, of living’s savor, as well as a deep human affection. So I woke with tears, actual tears on my cheeks.

  I remember I sat up to wipe them, vexed with myself for such stupidity, and I had rung for Finda and begun to undo my night-braids when I recollected the rest.

  The green-eyed man had spoken to my dream-self. I had the oddest conviction, the most vexing of all, that this scene was not just mind-play, but a fragment of reality. Past reality. That annoyed me further, for the present should not have to acknowledge the influence of the past. It is gone, ov
er, done with, it made its own mistakes and should leave us to make ours. Only the words it had left with me would not fade.

  The green-eyed man had said, “Eskan Helken first, I think. There were so many things I didn’t learn. Then. . . . They say there’s another ocean, east of Hethria. I haven’t used Pharaone. Some things should be seen with eyes.”

  From the moment of recall the words pestered me, circling in my mind, their absurdity the most vexing of all.Some things should be seen with eyes. How else does anyone see? And why should gibberish like “Pharaone” and “Eskan Helken” be mixed with reality? Hethria is certainly real, it is a country east of Everran, and learning is quite sensible, so long as its subject is not history. Why, why, why, nagged my wayward mind as I dressed and breakfasted and instructed the household and tried not to think of Kastir. Eskan Helken, Hethria, Asleax, Pharaone, Wyven Tirs, Air’s day; and a man with green, indubitably, idiotically green eyes?

  In the end it was too much. Exasperated, I told Nerthor, “Put off the morning audience. And ask the Phathos to visit me.”

  Though Nerthor’s face stayed carefully blank I felt a fool, and a bigger fool when I reflected how the palace would buzz with it, every giggle-headed ninny inventing omens and fabricating disaster. The princess Sellithar, who so scorned fancy and superstition, actually summoning the Phathos, the chief of soothsayers, the cynosure of the vapid and gullible.

  I felt a far bigger fool when I had to tell the thing to him. He was an old man, of course. They always are. Half-blind, with peering, white-glazed eyes that never left my face.