The ship hovered for a moment on the crest of the wave, and then with an odd sideways slither, wallowed into the trough.
In the tiny cabin Sumitra could not tell whether it was night or day. It could have been only a few hours since she had been taken, or it could have been months. Ropes whined amid an occasional rush of feet overhead; boards creaked in agony, as if at any moment the ship would disintegrate and cast her into the pulsing roar of the sea.
Her head, too, pulsed. The stink of tainted bilge water and the reek of the guttering oil lamp hung about her, and her stomach wriggled like some slimy creature found under an overturned rock. In spite of herself she groaned.
Rue hurriedly wiped Sumitra’s gelid forehead. The cloth was moistened with saltwater, and it, too, stank. “The first months of pregnancy are indeed difficult,” she essayed.
Sumitra fixed the serving woman with a baleful glare. “So you know of that, too. Inspecting my body linen, I suppose.”
Rue turned and wrung the rag in a basin, concealing her face.
“I am ill because I have never been on such a small ship before,” Sumitra insisted. The tiny flame of the lamp leaped and danced. The cabin was as small as a tomb, the narrow bed the frame of a coffin. Andrion would have to bend double even to enter the door. Andrion. . . . Certainly they had taken her to strike at him. Unless—unless he had chosen this method of putting her aside. But he would not have his own soldiers killed, he would not have her so terrified. If he no longer wanted her, he would simply tell her, as was his right. . . . His face flickered before her, pared of its wry humor, sharp with rage; no, Andrion would never stoop to such a scheme.
The ship wallowed again. Her eyes crossed. The vision faded. “Why betray me, Rue?” she croaked. “Why betray your emperor?”
“He is not my emperor. I serve another, greater ruler.”
Sumitra frowned. Before she could speak, the door opened and a man ducked inside. Even in the dimness, with such uncertain senses, Sumitra could see the opulent Rexian purple cloak he wore. A merchant prince, then, or perhaps a prince of the blood. No mere pirate.
And his face was no brigand’s. Its planes were sculpted in creamy marble rather than human flesh, its angles smoothed and polished. His golden hair was bound with a fillet and his golden beard was neatly trimmed; his eyes were as pale and clear as a silver mirror. Something moved there, concealed by the tints of gold and purple, like a shadow in the depths of a crystal ball.
He nodded brusquely. Rue scuttled away, permitted only one yearning glance at his beauty.
So he was the ruler she served. Sumitra tried to straighten her hair and her garments, and succeeded only in sitting up. The ship heaved. She grabbed for the bed rail. The man did not stir. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Eldrafel,” he replied, admitting to no particular rank. His long, delicate fingers touched the ruby in her nose. She stiffened, but his hand fell back to his side. “You are Sumitra, first wife of the emperor Andrion Bellasteros.” It was a statement, not a question.
She was not quite sure she liked the way those names sounded in his odd, singsong accent. When he spoke again, the words flowed past her before she could quite hear them; his voice was not deep but vibrant, with the low eddies and undertones of a reed flute. “. . . jaw is shattered. He might live, maimed; probably he will die. You defended yourself well.”
Oh. The man she had struck with the stool. Nausea swept her again. But Eldrafel’s probing gray eyes were not angry; they were self-possessed, with callousness, perhaps, or with a sardonic pleasure at her spirit.
She felt naked before his cool scrutiny, her every thought offered like delicacies on a banquet platter; her head spun and her stomach congealed into a lump of lead. She turned away, and he was gone.
Sumitra gasped for air as if he had taken her breath away with him. Decisively, she stood. The ship wallowed, and she staggered against the far wall, one step away. There was her zamtak, tossed against a row of amphorae, a couple of the strings loosened and curling disconsolately.
Sumitra took the wet rag and cleaned it of sand. She perched on the edge of the bunk, tightening and then tuning the strings. The plinks and trills were familiar and therefore soothing; slowly the harshness of her expression softened and her nausea ebbed. A tear glistened in her eye and she brushed it away. “What good would it do to weep?” she asked herself aloud.
As if in reply she heard, below the cacophony of the laboring ship, a faint sound of chimes. It was so much like the chime of Solifrax that she started up. Then, with a grimace and a shake of her head, she turned again to the zamtak. The strings hummed under her touch. Music filled the room, a plaintive ballad making whorls in semidarkness.
Again the chimes. Sumitra laid her hand across the strings, but the music hung in the air, summoning light out of darkness. There was a shapeless canvas-wrapped bundle thrown carelessly behind the amphorae. A clear pale light seemed to be shining tentatively through the cloth.
Sumitra stared at it a moment, doubting her senses. But the light was unmistakable; not the crystalline light of Solifrax, but something similar, an otherworldly purity and beauty.
She lay down the zamtak. Slowly, her hands beginning to tremble, she pulled the bundle out and tugged at its bindings. A large disk, metal, but not as heavy as bronze. The rough canvas parted. Beneath was the smooth and glowing surface of a shield.
“No,” Sumitra said under her breath. “It cannot be, not here.”
In the center of the shield was emblazoned a many-pointed star. It pulsed gently, singing a song almost beyond conscious perception. And yet Sumitra heard. “Yes. It is the shield of Sabazel. By the third eye of Vaiswanara . . .” She smiled at herself. “No. By the blue eyes, by the golden tresses of Ashtar, how did you come here?”
The shield quieted. Sumitra sat a long time, stroking the warm metal surface, brushing it clean of dust, oblivious to the smells and sounds around her. The star tingled under her hands as if kissing them, and when the oil lamp flickered wildly and went out she did not notice.
“So,” she said at last. “You, too, have been kidnapped. I must keep you safe, for those who search for you will surely join those who search for me. Although you are essential to Sabazel, and I am not at all essential to the Empire, heir or no heir . . .” Her lips tightened. She whispered, “Ashtar, if Andrion is your child, then so, surely, is this child I carry; keep it safe, I pray, for its father’s arms, for will those arms not open to me again?”
The shield flickered with a faint, faraway luminescence and then faded. Sumitra nodded, her prayer answered. Smiling, humming her ballad, she carefully wrapped the shield again and set it beside the bunk, next to her zamtak. She lay down and composed herself for sleep, her hands folded upon her belly. Her great dark eyes stared up into the murk and through it, finding serenity upon the other side.
* * * * *
Andrion stood on a palace balcony overlooking the Sar, rubbing his chin reflectively. The serving girl who had shaved him had been so excited at touching the handsome young monarch, her hands had shaken. But she had not done too much damage. Her fluttering bosom had really been quite lovely; he realized only now that he had noticed it.
The evening sky was scrubbed clean, shining cobalt shading to gold in the west, where the evening star hung suspended. Andrion’s thought twisted like wool thread around its spindle, raveling in the spinner’s hands, knotting and breaking and twisting again.
He leaned over the parapet to watch Bonifacio and his acolytes—a row of goslings behind a goose—march through a crowd of waiting people to the end of a long pier. No wonder Bonifacio had been up and about so early this morning; it was the Day of Divine Retribution. The priest had no doubt spent the intervening hours catechizing the populace with their year’s misdeeds. He made an expansive gesture toward the emperor, a thousand faces turned hopefully up, and Andrion waved; let the ceremony begin!
Children, Tembujin’s and others, frolicked down the balcony, their sweet voices innocent of desire or death. A tentative wind wafted Bonifacio’s drone upward. With a snort Andrion turned away, doubting if such a passive ceremony could heal the malaise haunting him, haunting his world. Solifrax chimed gently and he touched it, asking it, your will or mine?
He was caught by the domestic tableau in the governor-general’s study, figures as vivid as if cast from the shimmering evening light. Valeria and Kleothera sat cooing over Dana’s baby. Dana made some pleasantry for her father Patros, who returned it with discreet affection. Tembujin offered noncommittal commonplaces that ran like water from Sarasvati’s cool, polite, not entirely humorless, rejoinders. If her eye strayed every now and then to Ethan, if Dana could not keep herself from glancing at Zefric, Tembujin diplomatically did not notice.
Then the tableau cracked, the voices faded. Sumitra was not there. The world was colorless without the bright yarns of her tapestry; it was out of tune without the music of her voice and her zamtak.
The faces in the study, too, turned to Andrion. They chose hope beyond despair; who could blame them? They would flay him alive with their hope. He hid his expression by leaning over to tickle the baby. No consolation; the child gazed up at him with the even green eyes of his mother. Sumitra’s child would no doubt have brown eyes. . . .
“We shall name the baby Declan,” said Patros. “Kleothera’s own niece shall be his nurse.”
“I am pleased,” Andrion said, clearing his throat.
“We shall send in exchange a baby girl rescued from a garbage pile.” Kleothera clucked scornfully. “How could anyone cast out a babe simply because it is female? I had thought such customs forgotten.”
“It was Bellasteros who banned such practice,” said Andrion, crossing the room to join Patros at his desk. “He always cringed to remember how Chryse’s father exposed the younger of her two daughters, embarrassed that Chryse could not bear the Prince of Sardis an heir. That stiff old general lies uneasy in his grave, I wager, because Bellasteros’s heir was born at last . . .” Kleothera nodded encouragingly; she was too intelligent not to have discerned the truth. “. . . to the Queen of Sabazel,” he finished.
Dana, leaning on the back of Patros’s chair, glanced sharply up. She ascertained that Andrion was attempting a black joke, and offered him a slightly off-center smile before looking back down at the parchment her father held. On it was a drawing of a winged bull.
“Ah,” Andrion said. Old problem or new, it was still a question of succession.
“Sarasvati,” said Patros, “did this from her memory of Rue’s armband and from Valeria’s description of the ship’s sail. I sent a copy to the harbor with Nikander; you may remember, my lord, that his brother Niarkos is an admiral. And. . . .”
Patros paused, making sure of his facts. Andrion nudged gently, “And?”
“Sailor’s rumors say that the harbor of Minras is guarded by statues of winged bulls. It is their god, Taurmenios.”
“Ah,” said Andrion. Of course, the dark legends of Taurmenios gathered like smoke on the borders of old tales. Minras, and his half-sister Chrysais, a stranger to him. He turned to Sarasvati. “When Rue said that Ilanit’s queenly aspect reminded her of Chryse . . .”
She nodded, following his thought. “She did not say ‘Chryse,’ did she? She said ‘Chrysais’.”
“Chrysais was the sister of that exposed child.” Andrion shook himself. These irrelevancies were becoming annoying. If indeed they were irrelevancies. One stitch at a time.
He paced up and down, thinking aloud. Patros’s crisp voice, Dana’s and Tembujin’s quick wits, pulled each strand of thought to its end. The attacks on Tembujin, the theft of the shield, the kidnapping of Sumitra—was it paranoia or insight to see it all as a plot to bring him north and send him rushing heedlessly beyond the borders of the Empire, to turn his eye away from plots here or to draw him to Minras or both . . . If someone wanted to seize the Empire, he had picked a damnably subtle way of going about it. “Does the power of Gath of Minras reach even to Iksandarun?” Andrion exclaimed.
“King Gath is dead, my lord,” Patros reminded him. “He and Chrysais had a son, I think, but he would not be old enough to rule.”
“Why torment Sabazel?” Dana asked. “Very few know just how firmly you are bound to it.” Patros’s face tightened; she did not have to say her mother’s name to remind him of her or of dead Lyris.
“We must not leap to conclusions,” Andrion stated in his best council-chamber voice, even as he asked himself if he did not already leap. “Someone with a very long arm plays games with me. With us all. It may be someone merely hiding behind Minras—someone here, perhaps, who wants me gone. It may be that the gods themselves use us once again for sport.”
The faces watched him, Patros trusting, Dana resigned, Tembujin almost challenging. “I shall send someone to Minras,” announced Andrion. “Miklos and a small company, I think, to scout the lay of the land. A legion to Rhodope, to wait. Nikander will go south to Iksandarun, to govern while I wait here.”
Tembujin leaned on the other side of the desk. “I shall go to Minras. My lord.”
“My lord?” Andrion repeated skeptically.
“I would prove my loyalty to you. I would avenge my child—and my guard Ursbei.”
“Damn it, man, you need prove nothing to me.”
The tip-tilted black eyes said otherwise. Andrion spun away from them; to prove that he does not plot against me, he shoulders my burden and goes away. Suitable payment for my doubting him, leaving me relieved and dirtied by my relief.
Patros stirred in the currents that swept past him, his eye fixed warily on his elder daughter. And if I ever doubt Patros, thought Andrion, I would be dirty indeed; if his loyalty ever wavered, the night would be too dark to survive. . . .
“I shall go to Minras,” said Dana, addressing not Andrion’s face but the wall beyond his shoulder. “Without the shield, my daughter has no land to inherit.”
My daughter. But not my heir. Succession, and rule, and I . . . Andrion took a deep breath, but it could not penetrate the knot in his chest. The draperies fluttered in the wind.
Night had crept silently across Sardis. The room was dim, lit only by the soft light of the lamp on Patros’s desk. Declan began to wail. Dana took him from Kleothera’s arms and opened her shirt. Here he would be cared for, here she could leave him; here she could leave Andrion to follow the letter of her everlasting law . . . A tear ran from beneath her lashes and fell upon the baby’s tiny form like a kiss of farewell. It might have been a drop of molten lead on Andrion’s heart.
Tembujin bent solicitously over Valeria. His eye touched Dana and passed on, but not before Andrion read their expression; he knew well that reluctant thirst. His mouth tasted the savor of milk and oranges even as his nostrils filled with the scent of jasmine.
The children were shouting. Abruptly, he turned and followed them outside. The stars were bright hard points of steel against the velvet drape of the sky. The moon was cut as cleanly in half as if by the blade of Solifrax. The wind was bracingly cold, ringing toward the sea, and the sword rang in response against his thigh.
Myriad pinpricks of light flared along the riverbank. One by one they seemed to leap down into the dark and quiet stream. Candles in tiny glass cups, red, green, gold, blue, rode on wooden rafts and cleverly folded paper boats down the river to the sea, bearing away with them the year’s regrets. A contented sigh rose from the gathered Sardians, and Andrion allowed himself a rueful smile.
Once it had been customary to slaughter a bull or a ram and cast it into the river; as the current swept it away, it carried with it the transgressions of the year before. It was Chryse who had begun today’s gentler custom. Perhaps there was a place, Andrion thought, in the midst of the sea, where all those cast-off guilts lay gathered in soggy piles, no longer able to wound.
The lights flowed toward the sea. His thought strained toward the sea. His smile tightened into a grimace. How can I leave my fate and the fate of those I love, how can I leave the fate of the land itself in the hands of others? Even if those other hands belong to the gods themselves. But is it my pride that speaks, or something more practical, a small internal bookkeeper calculating his columns of credits and debts?
The candles dwindled down the glossy sheet of the Sar. Andrion leaned over the balcony after them. And suddenly the necklace of the moon and star lifted from his throat and tugged at him, as insistent as if it would drag him over the railing into the water and draw him, lit bright with his own uncertainty and decision, over the horizon to his fate.
Surprised, he laughed. When had he ever been favored with a sign when he needed one? But then, when had he ever waited for a sign before making a decision? No, he would not grow old and stale, forfeiting that daring that had won him an Empire. If he could not untangle this intricate plot that knotted around him, then he would cut it open.
And surely, surely, murmured the bookkeeper in his mind, the tug of the necklace meant that the Empire would be safe.
“I, too, shall go to Minras,” he stated, to the lights, to the necklace, to that part of him squatted in sulky caution over its ledger scroll. “The water in the sea is salt, but it is there that my thirst will be slaked.”
The necklace fell noiselessly back against his throat. The candles vanished. Their dancing colors were reflected in the stars above and in the star that trembled against his pulse, and never quite disappeared.