Red Country

by Kelso, Sylvia

  You expect to be affected by a legend. You do not look to see it affected by you. It was he who broke the silence, in the merest whisper.

  “Sellithar.”

  All at sea, I went on the defensive by instinct, trying to sound pacific rather than belligerent.

  “I hope you’ll excuse me. I didn’t choose the name. It’s tradition. . . .”

  And then it struck me like a thunderbolt. To him the first Sellithar had not been tradition. She had been his living, lived-with, abandoned queen.

  My eyes fled to Moriana. Hers were laughing, almost wickedly. She must have spoken too, in mindspeech, but much as I was thinking, for Beryx started and said, “No. Yes. I mean, of course. No, only at first—oh, dear. . . .”

  His confusion was endearing. An intuition that it was his basic quality off-balanced me further. Endearing is not the term you expect to use in summing up an aedric emperor.

  “I mean,” he went on, with a disarming smile, “that you have the name, and some resemblance, but you’re quite different.” And from mirth and confusion came one of those rapier darts that were also characteristic. “As Zam’s probably learnt by now.”

  Then he instantly cancelled my embarrassment with soldier-swift directions that produced wine and sat us down with the cups at our elbows, delicate buff pottery painted with the dagger-petalled flowers. Following my eye, Moriana said, “Lythians. Thangrian work.” Beryx was saying briskly, “I doubt we need waste time on talk-talk. We all know why we’re here.” He raised his brows, handing the initiative to me.

  I took the challenge and plunged. “You know what’s happening in Everran?”

  The last thing I expected was to disconcert him twice. He nodded, looked down, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. Then he said, “Yes. I . . . am sorry, but I may know better than you.”

  A premonitory thrill made my voice sharp. “What do you mean?”

  “After Zam told me, I used Pharaone.” Now the look was apologetic. “Since you left . . . I’m sorry I must say this. It’s a hard thing to have someone disappoint you, and no easier to give the news.”

  The chill became ice. “What has Kastir done?”

  As he hesitated, Moriana said in that lovely voice’s nearest approach to asperity, “Oh, stop quaking about her feelings and get on with it! She’d sooner know. I would.”

  He did not snap at her. I had the impression they were so closely linked, so fundamentally happy, that they could revile each other with the blithest impunity. He said equably, “Enough, vixen,” and turned back to me.

  “I’m afraid he twisted your orders. He did wait till it was fairly clear there’d be no word from you.” Moriana snorted. “Then he opened channels with Estar.” The pity in his eyes described my face. “And then he told Everran they could not fight Quarred and Estar and Hazghend too. Since you had forbidden him to do it by war, Everran’s only choice was to admit Estar’s migrants, accept them peaceably, and so keep out the rest. In gratitude, Estar appointed him governor.”

  I can still see the signet on his left hand as it lay on the table, a long-knuckled hand with burn scars and ancient shield calluses and the huge finghend, his sole imperial token, square-cut, graven with a vine whose leaves were fire. Yet all my will was bent to the one grim determination, that they should not see me cry.

  “There was really,” he went on gently, “little else he could do.”

  I had to break out, though I tried to subdue the tone. “No doubt you think I should have stayed? Should never have given him the order? Or you think, like all the rest, that there’s no good in an unmarried queen?”

  He laughed outright. “Don’t ravage me, spitfire! I’m already fireproof.”

  Mollified by the tone, I said, “I beg your pardon. But what else could I have done?”

  He nodded. After a moment he went on.

  “The migrants have been crossing north over Breve Tirien for the last month. A drop in the bucket to Estar, to Everran a flood. There is one thing, it will deter the others. Half the Estarian army has squatted on the border, and they could enlist migrants to form suicide squads before they let Quarred or Hazghend or anyone else take what they’ve ‘won’. Everran—” Despite my extremity, his eyes reminded me that it had also been his kingdom, that Zam said it was still very dear to him “—is for all purposes a piece of Estar.” He paused. “We both know there was room. And there’s been little trouble. Far less than I expected. Everran simply seems to have . . . accepted things.”

  I saw Everran lost in a gray swarming flood, our customs and dialects swept away, my lords and soldiers’ dazed submission, their spirit broken before battle. Because of me. Because I had betrayed their trust, because I had run away. . . . I do not know what I would have done then had the door not opened and Zam walked in.

  Dimly I registered that both Beryx and Moriana had jumped up, with a flurry of embrace and exclamation, a note of joy, more than joy, in Beryx’s, “Zam! How was it?” and something recorded that this was more than relief at a diversion or a tactful pretext to let me recover myself. That Zam was not just an acquaintance, he was more like a son.

  When the fuss subsided we all sat round the table. It could have been a family breakfast rather than a council between an emperor, an empress, a queen and a virtual king. Beryx opened it with an enquiring look at me.

  By then I had had time to think. “How big is Assharral?” I asked.

  His brows shot up, but he answered readily. “There are ten provinces, all but one bigger than Everran. Eight would be more thickly populated.”

  It gave me pause, when he did not answer my next thought as Zam would have, so I had to go on aloud. “Could you get an army across Hethria?”

  Moriana’s black eyes flashed fierce approval. But Zam and Beryx looked so guarded it was like no response at all.

  After a moment Beryx said, “Is that what you want?”

  I was past manners, let alone diplomacy. “Everran is my kingdom. I want it back!”

  Beryx scrubbed at his hair. He sounded unhappy. “Have you thought what it will cost?”

  When I did not answer, he spelt it out for us both.

  “It will split the Confederacy. They’ll unite against Assharral, or take sides and turn on each other. Whoever wins, Everran will become an Assharran dependent. The balance of power will be destroyed. Assharral will be permanently involved. There will never be a Confederacy again. And whatever the rest do, Estar will certainly fight.”

  Now his eyes held open pain. “You know what that means. Dead Assharran and Everran soldiers, yes, but for Everran itself? Ravaging, pillaging, wanton destruction. A people divided. Guerrilla warfare. Reprisals. Decimated population, the land ruined. You know that, whoever wins a war, the battlefields lose. If we did win, you wouldn’t get back Everran. It would be a—a ruin.”

  I think my mouth fell open. I know I gawked like an imbecile as the cumulative sense sank in. He met my eyes, unhappy but unflinching, while I progressed from realization to belief to reaction to words.

  “You don’t want to help me.”

  He scrubbed again at his hair. “Sellithar, I want to help, I would help you, please believe me, for your own sake and for Everran’s, if only—if only I could.”

  The rage came then, burning my ears, reddening my sight. “If you could! Do you have an empire, or don’t you? Do you care for Everran, or not?”

  “Of course I care,” he said wretchedly. “But it’s a question of how—”

  “Oh, I see! So long as you have Assharral, it doesn’t matter who else is dispossessed. And all because I believed a stupid dream and ran away, trusting to get help from you!”

  Still he did not fire up, just looked miserable. The approval had left Moriana’s eyes, there was a cold glint in Zam’s. I rounded on them. “And don’t say I can’t speak to an emperor like that! It’s his fault this happened! I’d never have left Everran if it weren’t for him!”

  “Sellithar!” When Beryx did rouse he was commanding
enough for any emperor. He also seemed much younger, a glimpse of an earlier, more hot-blooded king. “Do you really think I’d tinker so viciously with reality? Whatever caused your dream, it wasn’t sent by me.”

  “Ohhh!”

  I had leapt up, the chair went over with a crash, with a second crash my winecup fragmented on the floor. Through a teary haze of wrath I saw their faces: Moriana grave, Beryx stern, Zam impassive as ever; six eyes with the same aedric quality. “If you’re aedryx, then give me Kastir any day. At least with him it was straight deceit!”

  Beryx’s eyes dilated. Very softly, he said, “Sellithar, will you—just for a moment—look here?”

  And when I looked his eyes flowed, darkening to laurel or bayleaf green shot with the white slashes of sun on leaves, absorbing my attention, swallowing me.

  With neither rage, wonder nor resistance I felt myself grow calm. As the backwash of emotion faded his face reappeared, and he said quickly, “Forgive me, but I had to do that. Now listen. You’ve sat in judgment. You know there are two sides to every case. Will you at least hear ours?”

  I took breath. Then I said stonily. “Well?”

  Incredibly, he grinned. “No,” he said. “Not in the least like Sellithar.”

  Then he sobered. “I know this is the most damning of all defenses, but we tried to act for the best. You were at Eskan Helken before we had any inkling of this, and if you had gone back then it would have done no good. We didn’t want to make your decision. We wanted to see you, face to face, to tell you what had happened and hear your side and let you make your choice. We hoped that . . . you would see our side too.”

  “And if I had?”

  “Then we . . . we would have been most happy to . . . I mean we still are—or at least we would be—”

  “Men!” said Moriana. “What he means, apart from trying to save your pride, is that you needn’t be dispossessed. You could come to Assharral. Not as a court ornament. We need a new governor in Tasmar, for a start.” She smiled at me. “And it’s not charity.”

  My momentary softening steeled. “Thank you,” I said. “But I am the ruler of Everran. It belongs to me.”

  Beryx was frowning as at a physical pain. “Try to understand,” he said earnestly. “What happened in Everran is beyond reversal. The cost of trying would be bloodshed and misery far beyond its worth.”

  “You mean I should simply give up? Go quietly away, let Everran become an Estarian anthill and Kastir play at governors and everybody think”—rage made my head swim—“that I didn’t look for help? I just deserted them?”

  “No, I never meant—”

  “You not only won’t help me fight, you don’t want me to fight at all!”

  His doubt and unhappiness vanished. He spoke with a more-than-imperial authority.

  “There are ways and ways of fighting, Sellithar, and if the hardest is against yourself, the most foolish is against Math. Which means, so far as it can be defined, reality. That-which-is. And when you fight reality you can’t help but lose. Reality now is that Estar has taken Everran. I’m not a velandyr by any means, I feel as you do. It was my kingdom once. But I do have enough Velandryxe—enough wisdom—to recognize reality when I see it, and accept what I must.”

  Moriana cast her eyes up. “You may as well go quietly,” she put in, “once he starts to talk about Math.”

  I hardly heeded her. Though the rage threatened to drown me, my voice, amazingly, was almost cool.

  “It’s very easy to say that, when you’re sitting safely in Assharral, with Hethria to fend off any risk to you. It’s not so easy for me. I’ve lost my kingdom. I’m afraid pious resignation’s not quite within my reach.”

  Moriana choked a giggle, but I noted with a start that Zam was frowning, frowning thunderously. The wrath you feel at an insult to someone very dear.

  “Oh, dear.” Beryx’s dismay was almost comical. “I know it’s hard to accept. I know I sound a hypocrite. I know I might as well spit in the wind as say, ‘I’d give in.’ I know you don’t believe that either.” Tiredly, he smiled at me. “You feel we’ve betrayed you, and from your view, we have.”

  The smile faded. “But . . . try to see, Sellithar. When you choose a course of action, you try to base it on the facts. So do I. Only facts aren’t enough. How you see them is governed by—beliefs, principles. I believe in Math. And Math says, Respect That-which-is. Which means, never try to tamper with it unless you must. What happened in Everran is now reality. There’s no sign that Estar will play the tyrant. If I meddle, I’ll cause ruin and destruction in Everran, I’ll waste untold lives in the Confederacy. And I’ll betray Assharral, by involving them in a pointless, irrelevant war, at whose end we’ll all be worse off. I cannot do it. That is my judgment; in Math and as an emperor. Do you see?”

  “You won’t help me,” I said flatly.

  “I’ll help you if you let me.” He held out his hand as if to make it a physical fact. “I can help you come to terms with it, to make a new life, in any way I can, in any way you like.”

  “Except to get Everran back.”

  “Oh, Sellithar.” It sounded almost tragic. “I can’t.”

  The breath caught in my throat. “I’d have done better to go straight back from Eskan Helken and take on the Confederacy myself!”

  Zam looked across me and said quietly, “I did think it would have been better to tell her then.”

  My throat dried so completely it was some time before I could speak.

  “You knew?”

  His eye was hard as a fist. “I used Pharaone too.”

  “And you never told me, you brought me all this way for nothing, you let me go on thinking they’d help, and all the time you—oh, you—you—”

  Beryx cut in like a flash. “Zam wanted to tell you, I said, No. To go back would have been pointless, and we hoped you’d—”

  “And you discussed me! Talking over my head as if I was a filly you might buy, making my choices for me, giving my kingdom away! By the Four, if you weren’t aedryx I’d murder the lot of you, even if I’m a woman I’d, I’d—” and then, to my eternal chagrin, I dissolved willy-nilly into tears.

  * * * * * *

  When I finally resurfaced, Moriana and I were alone. She did not bother with soothing coos and embraces. She gave me a cup and ordered, “Drink this.”

  I choked on the wine. My own Everran wine. She sat down with an elbow on the table, studying my face.

  “Yes,” she said. “He is infuriating. The most infuriating man alive. Or that may be Zam, in your case.” I was too far gone to erupt. “But you’ll never move him, not if you cut both your throats, once he decides something is against Math. And I have reason to be grateful for that, because if he wasn’t such a soft-hearted imbecile I’d have destroyed Assharral and killed myself into the bargain. Or been killed by the people I wronged.”

  She gave me a flashing smile. “The last thing that you want to hear is ancient history. And it is unjust that you’ve lost Everran, and we sit here preaching surrender with our every border intact. Unhappily, it’s also reality. I loathe having to echo Beryx, but there’s no refuting that.”

  Her hard common sense revived me. I put by the cup, unearthed a grubby post-Hethrian handkerchief and blew my nose. “Now,” she said crisply, “we’ll think what to do next.”

  It was there with the vividness, the clarity and instantaneity of a lightning flash. I said, “I know what to do next.”

  She looked enquiring. I heard Zam say other aedryx only used Scarthe when they chose, wondered if he was eavesdropping now, challenged him to do his worst, and stood up.

  “Thank you for your patience,” I said. “I wish I could stay longer. I should have liked to see more of Assharral—and of you.” For a moment I envied her bitterly, not for her dominions, but for what she had made with Beryx: the integral gaiety born of happiness, of two people safe behind humanity’s strongest shield. “Please tell Beryx I beg his pardon for troubling him. And tell Zam he’s th
e vilest, most priggish, most hateful, hypocritical, tyrannical, selfish monster ever born, and I never want to see his face again as long as I live.”

  “Oh, oh!” she cried, and giggled most disconcertingly. “What are you going to do?”

  “I am going back to Everran” I said. “With the Sathellin. I shall marry Kastir, since there’s no other help for it, and I shall get Everran back, whether I’m queen or not.”

  Chapter V

  As with the days between my father’s death and funeral, that next time seems separate, distinct, divorced from everything else. Hard to reassemble now. I recall that the most nerve-wracking part was to actually get clear of Assharral, and that I was obsessed, not with the fear that Zam or even Beryx would try to stop me, but with the thought that a caravan might not leave that day, so I should be forced to ruin my grand exit by creeping pusillanimously back into Etalveth for the night. I had seen enough of Hethria to know I could not cross it alone.

  But a caravan had gone that very morning, and the caravanserai keeper, unaware what ravages lay under my gratefully concealing turban, told me quite calmly that, “If you canter along you’ll catch ’em this high noon.” I paid my score, savagely disentangled my belongings, and sent Vestar at more than a canter along the wide swathe of hoof-tracks toward the west.

  No one tried to stop me. No one pursued me. It made me half-thankful, half miserable. I must have made good use of that new skill in closing the mind on that return journey, for even at the caravan’s pace most of Hethria remains a blur. It was easier, of course, because we kept to the Sathel roads this time. The memories were all rooted elsewhere.

  The most harrowing part of all, I am still quite sure, began when I rode under the arch at Gebasterne and saw with shock that the gate guards were dressed in Estarian gray. From there to Saphar it grew steadily worse. I never realized how much I had esteemed, taken for granted, needed the past I had been so set on discarding, until it was lost. It was not just the mass of new cultivation, the swollen towns, the babble of strange dialects, the gray Estarian clothes everywhere. It was the pang, over and over, of unconsciously expecting some well-known landmark, a portico, a crested door, an ancient well or long-cursed awkward gate, to find with shock that something new, often better, always rawly assimilated, was in its place.