Andrion had expected the smoke of the pyre to be thick, black, and foul. But it was only a colorless strand, coiling up into the twilight like supplicating hands, emitting no odor at all.
“He was not truly human flesh,” said Tembujin.
Andrion’s consciousness was bloated by too many disparate images, too many emotions. His mind flapped painfully from thought to thought; his body was askew, borne sideways by the sheathed weight of Solifrax. He replied, “No, something of him was human flesh. See?”
Gard sat stiffly on the edge of the dais, suffering his newfound aunt, Sarasvati, to stroke his hair, which was almost the color of her own. All Bellasteros’s children had red hair, Andrion told himself, a legacy of that stranger in Sabazel. Of the god, his will made flesh indeed.
Gard had watched impassively as the shell that had been his father was consumed by fire. As he had watched his entire world consumed by fire and wind and wave. It might take years before it would hurt. Until then, Andrion would hurt for him.
Tembujin said quietly, “I shall take Gard to live with me. Horses and camels to ride, and children to play with—he will heal.”
“Gods,” Andrion said, part epithet, part prayer. The diadem branded his brow, the necklace was a band of flame about his throat. The sun bled across the horizon, draining the sky to a clear turquoise luminescence against which every rock, every tree, stood in sharp outline. “Come,” he said, and led Tembujin toward the pavilion.
The scene inside was not a divine tableau; the torches flickered and smoked and the arms were tarnished bronze. The people who looked up at his entrance, summoning smiles to their exhausted faces, were human beings. He loved their every imperfection.
Valeria ran into Tembujin’s arms; he hid his face in her hair, so that Andrion could not see the expression on it. They stood like an island amid their children, who tugged at Tembujin’s breeches demanding, “What did you bring us? What did you bring us?”
Andrion smiled; their ordeal had been despite, not because of, their parents. Perhaps their impishness could in time scour those grim lines from Gard’s face.
Nikander greeted Andrion with a bow. “My centurions and I thought we were mad, to be so drawn toward Sabazel. But my scouts revealed the truth soon enough. My apologies, lord, for not realizing you called.” Andrion shrugged away the apology and thanked the gods for laconic Nikander. He collapsed into his own armchair, not caring if Eldrafel had sat there. It had never been his.
“Please, sit,” Andrion told Patros, who dropped gratefully back into his own chair. Kleothera stood on one side, Declan’s little face gurgling above her shoulder; Ilanit seated herself on the other. Patros and Ilanit were similarly gaunt and white-haired; Kleothera seemed a turtledove beside two ibis. So this was the Queen of Sabazel, her attitude seemed to say. So what if she has been my husband’s lover these twenty-five years or more. Is she not a mother, and a grandmother to boot? Declan slobbered into a toothless grin as Ilanit, her grave humor undefiled, winked at him.
Sumitra seated herself at Andrion’s side, regarding the ruined zamtak on her lap with an expression so mingled of wistfulness and relief that Andrion said quickly, “We shall find you another.”
“Not like this,” she returned. “But its purpose has been served.” She set it aside, laid her sleek head against Andrion’s arm, laid her hand on her stomach. “And I shall have other matters to occupy my time.”
A centurion bellowed outside, and another farther away. The measured tread of a work crew approached and faded. Surely, Andrion thought, his distended head was illuminated like a lamp, his thoughts revealed for inspection by everyone before him. But then, he had nothing to conceal. Bring on the petitioners, the secretaries, the accounts. Such concerns would be as intoxicating as new wine.
Miklos stood holding the falcon standard, well content. “Have you ever had a yen for the priesthood?” Andrion asked him.
“My lord?”
“Well, I suppose there is some acolyte, from Farsahn, perhaps, who will be found to be loyal. Perhaps you would prefer a generalship.”
“My lord!” Miklos grinned. “I am hardly of mature enough years.”
“But surely of mature enough initiative,” said Nikander.
Something odd tickled Andrion’s chest. He realized it was laughter. He let it bubble from his lips.
The doorway opened. A sentry snapped smartly to attention. Dana and Kerith entered and strolled to the dais. Equal tenacity of spirit, Andrion thought, but thankfully somewhat mellowed at the moment. “Sabazel was once at the rim of the world,” said Dana without preamble or honorific. “I am perturbed to find it now a Sardian parade ground.”
“We shall move tomorrow, I promise.”
“While sparing a few men for the winter rites?”
Andrion, to his intense discomfiture, flushed as red as the sunset. “I shall ask for volunteers,” he said. And silently to Dana’s bleak but somehow amused green eyes, not now, love. Forgive me.
She allowed him a wan smile. That was not what I asked, love. After Minras, I am not quite ready to recognize the demands of the body.
“May I offer you birthday greetings, my lord?” said Patros, filling an awkward silence. “And may I ask a favor?”
“Thank you,” Andrion replied. “Yes, of course.”
“May I have your permission to retire? You and your father have led me a merry life; have I not earned some rest?”
“Certainly,” grinned Andrion. “With my compliments.”
Some time later he left the voices in the pavilion—which were compelling by familiarity, not magic—to escort the Sabazians to the edge of the camp. The bonfires lit for the benefit of the work crews cast a faint blush across the indigo sky. Several soldiers watched his colloquy with the women, curious but not critical. Had he ever really feared their knowing his birth? That game was over.
The full moon, a serene white circle nestled in a silver corona, hung unstained a handsbreadth above the horizon. The eastern face of Cylandra was spangled with its light. The shadows were so innocent as to be banal. “Would we bless the light if we had no darkness?” Dana asked.
“We hide in shadows when the sun glares too brightly,” Andrion replied. “Thank Ashtar on my behalf. I shall come again soon to celebrate the rites, I promise.”
He kissed Kerith’s cool cheek. He embraced his sister Ilanit and his cousin Dana. He laid his hand on the simmering surface of the shield, evoking a chime. He stood, armored by diadem and necklace and sword, as the women crossed the empty ground toward the Horn gate and the torches, like distant stars, beside it.
A small shape, a child, rushed to meet them. The moonsheen picked red from her hair. Astra. Andrion lingered to see Dana sweep up their daughter, the heir to Sabazel, before he turned to his own borders and went inside.
* * * * *
Sumitra laid the skeins of yarn on the handiest flat surface, the top of her distended stomach, and considered them. Lustrous purple, and crimson for the sun—yes, just right. She threaded her needle with the chosen strand. The rejected skeins bounced to a thrust from underneath. She soothed the restive baby with a pat; not much longer, little one, not much longer.
From the opposite side of the tapestry Valeria laughed. “You look like an overripe melon,” she said. “Surely I was never that big.” Her needle flashed, pulling taut a silver strand that defined the rim of the star-shield.
“Oh yes you were.” Laboriously, Sumi shifted in her chair, leaning sideways to reach the tapestry. One stitch, two; the smooth yarn between her fingers, the swoop and tug of the needle, the slow revelation of the image—a purple cloak draping the shoulders of an auburn-haired man—was deliciously mesmerizing.
The living man sat at his desk nearby. “I think Sumi has been waiting until you arrived,” he told Sarasvati with a teasing smile. “All is well in Sabazel?”
“The first buds were just breaking when I left,” she replied. “For such a cold, dark winter, I do believe spring has come early.”
“Yes,” said Andrion. His eye sought and found Sumitra’s rotund form, and rested there as if admiring a work of art.
Another stitch, and another. She glanced up at him, and around the room. Each familiar face, each ordinary object had an aura that fell upon her eye like a benison. She contemplated the play of lamplight upon texture—creamy stone, dark wood, and pale linen drapery—rich in substance, not in decoration. Rich in nuance, as different voices blended in ever-changing, ever-similar harmonies, and a cool jasmine-tinted breeze caressed her skin.
The children there, one red head bent beside the black ones over a game, small faces intelligently intent—a pattern to savor, indeed . . . She realized the thread dangled slack from her fingers, and she smiled at herself. Her mind moved with the somnolence of her body, constantly pausing to appreciate the smallest things.
“Well,” said Sarasvati, so quietly that Tembujin looked up from the dagger he honed, ears pricked, “I do have one bit of grim news. Rue miscarried of a—a monster; she cried that Queen Chrysais had cursed her, that the woman’s ghost haunted her. At last we found her beneath a precipice on Cylandra, dead. I did not know if Sumi wanted the ruby stud, so I brought it.”
For a moment the room was so silent Sumitra could hear the tread of the sentries outside. And yet those measured steps were more vivid than the memory of Rue’s face, with or without the ruby. The tiny hole in Sumi’s nostril had closed; it had been only affectation, after all. “Sell it,” she said quietly, “and hold a feast for the people when the child is born.”
Perhaps Valeria had no more memory of Rowan’s face; she nodded, cut her thread, tied it. The shield sparked in Dana’s hand, and her green yarn eyes gazed with their own truculent honesty upon the world outside Sabazel.
“So Rue killed herself,” Andrion said. “I hope she took with her the last of Eldrafel’s poison.”
“Hey!” protested Ethan. “You moved my piece!”
“I did not,” Gard retorted. “I was ahead!”
“You were not,” chimed in both Zefric and Kem. The little girl watched, thumb plugging her mouth, eyes wide.
With one sharp gesture Gard upset the board. “Then I shall not play!” he shouted as the playing pieces skittered across the floor.
“Gard,” said Andrion sternly. Tembujin’s black eyes flashed. “Gard!” The miscreant wilted, and with lip outthrust began to rearrange the game.
Gard, King of Minras, no land, no patrimony. Sumitra’s gaze intersected Andrion’s. She shook her head slightly; some poison might never be cleansed. The boy had been dragged so abruptly into maturity that he had stretch marks on his soul.
He stood at her elbow, the startlingly perceptive gray eyes inspecting her sketch of Zind Taurmeni. “It was much larger than that,” he stated. And, generously, “But I suppose you can only suggest it.” His thick Minran accent had already taken on a Khazyari burr. He began to sort Sumitra’s yarn.
“Gard?” Ethan called. “Are you playing?”
“Not now. Later.”
With a sigh Andrion turned back to his desk. “I just had this letter from Patros. They have retired to a small holding outside the walls. If he can keep Declan out of his ink pot, he plans to write his memoirs.”
“I cannot wait to read them,” said Sarasvati.
The broad double doors opened and a secretary looked in. “My lord,” he called. “Captain Jemail to see you.”
“That was a speedy journey,” said Andrion. “Send him in.”
The hawk-nosed Minran’s plumage was exceptionally fine, Sumitra thought, cloak and breeches and turban of the finest silk, and a dagger at his side encrusted with semi-precious jewels. “The caravan proved profitable, I take it,” Andrion greeted him.
Jemail pulled a purse from behind his sash and laid it with a flourish upon the desk. “Your investment, my lord. I hurried back to return it with interest.”
“That was a gift, Captain.”
Jemail drew himself up. “I wish no debts, my lord.”
“Indeed.” Andrion’s eyes crinkled, but he kept a straight face.
“And,” said Jemail, snapping his fingers, “a gift for your lady.”
Sumitra laid down her needle. Yes, Jemail had taken his caravan to the Mohan, but what— A plump, dark-eyed woman glided in the door, knelt, handed Jemail a wrapped package.
“My wife,” said the Minran offhandedly as he opened the cloth. “Bought her in Ferangipur.” He held up a new zamtak, the wood polished to a mirror-like sheen and embossed with silver stars. “For you, lady.”
By levering herself on the tapestry frame Sumitra managed to flounder to her feet. She took the instrument and ran her fingers over the strings. Out of tune, of course, and—well, pleasant but mundane. Thank the gods for that. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Captain” she said.
Jemail bowed punctiliously. His wife glanced up, her eyes not at all shy, but as firmly quiet as Sumi’s. Andrion leaned back in his chair and laughed.
* * * * *
The bedchamber was thronged with shadows. Odd, Sumitra mused, I would have thought I would be frightened of the dark. But here, her body snugged in the curve of Andrion’s, nothing was frightening.
“The new zamtak has no power in it?” he asked, his lips on her ear.
“No.”
“And that pleases you?”
“Yes.”
He laughed quietly, “The power is in the wielder, not the instrument. It is choice, not chance, to wield.” He surrendered his doubts, she realized, as he had surrendered his irascible heroism, to domesticity.
Solifrax lay on its table at the side of the room, crowned with the diadem, quiescent. Perhaps it was the necklace that sighed to Sumi’s touch, perhaps Andrion. Haunted by the echo of unredeemed lust, they made love only in long resonant silences, in embraces as still as a spring evening. Someday, Sumi thought, we shall again touch flesh to flesh, and risk again the complications of the body. Someday. And she, too, laughed. Adults as squeamish as children, experience a curse to overcome.
Andrion kissed her. “What?”
“I waited for you to rescue me, and I waited to escape, and I waited to be rescued again. This waiting now, love, is a blessing.” She twitched her robe aside and laid his hand on the taut flesh of her belly. The child stretched, testing the world from the safety of the womb.
The night lamp flickered, and the shadows twirled slowly across the ceiling. Dancing, Sumi said to herself. Stitching light irrevocably to darkness, a simple pattern beyond the complex game of the gods. Just as the sword was a simple crescent, and the diadem a simple circle, and the zamtak’s simple melodies could mend the raveled edges of the soul . . . She smiled. The heart would make its own choices, seek its own level, without fear.
She dozed. Her abdomen tightened and then loosened, as it had so often recently. It tightened again. And it twisted, harder and harder, wringing the sleep from her body.
“Oh!” she said, in a breath of anguish and delight.
Andrion was instantly alert. “Yes?”
The lamplight blurred before her eyes. After a time her belly twisted once more, so consuming her consciousness that she was only vaguely aware that Andrion was at the door calling for Sarasvati and Valeria.
* * * * *
Dana rested her elbows upon the cold, hard rim of the bronze basin. Bemusedly she contemplated the images shifting within the depths of the water, faces caught in the purest illuminated crystal. Her mind stirred, embroidering the images with voices, with scents, with the fresh dawn breeze that dissolved the mist. Jasmine, yes; she smelled jasmine.
Sumitra lay in the great bed, eyes dark not with pain but with determined effort. Valeria dripped wine between her lips. Sarasvati probed gently and announced, “The baby is lying correctly, Sumitra. Big, strong child—twice as large as Andrion was at birth, I daresay.”
Sumi, a gravid goddess, smiled serenely. Surely she, too, was touched by the gods, to heal, like Andrion, not to destroy, like . . . Dana would not let the names form even in her thought.
She saw Andrion pacing up and down the passageway, his hand knotted on the hilt of Solifrax. Helpless, his thought echoed, I am helpless, I did this to her and I cannot help her. The diadem tilted rakishly over his brow, just as he had slapped it on in the middle of the night. As he had worn it when dawn blossomed up the sky and playfully chased a new moon before it, when morning brightened toward noon.
Dana laid her chin upon her arms. The shapes were more lucid than any she had seen since—since midwinter’s moon. During the spring she had had only an occasional twinge of empathy or intuition, not the blasting Sight that had both harrowed and served her during the long struggle on Minras and had at last, apparently, burned itself out. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her breath rippled the surface of the water and the images danced. “I want to see this, Mother; but Mother, if you take the Sight from me forever, I will not complain.”
Heresy? Perhaps. But Ilanit was slowly passing the rule of Sabazel on to her daughter, and Astra asked to lift the star-shield onto her own arm; as the seasons pass, so pass the generations of women.
Andrion released Solifrax, glancing down at the sword as if shocked to see it by his side. And what good will you do now? he asked it. He swept aside clustering attendants and burst into the bedchamber. “Women’s work, my lord,” a man protested. Andrion growled and slammed the door in his face.
Dana shook her head with a rueful smile. Was it so wrong, then, to love him? She had lain more than once in Kerith’s arms, reassured by the tenderness of her touch and the long silences resonant with words unsaid, and had horrified herself by imagining Andrion’s arms and his male body urgent against hers. Was Sabazel not enough, the presence of men only brief thunderstorms disturbing the equanimity of this blessedly mundane life?
Andrion sat beside Sumitra. As if it had been waiting for his arrival, an expulsive thrust jerked her upright. He held her, a strong arm behind her shoulders, his face wrenched with equal effort. She lay back, gasping, and their eyes exchanged a message that made Dana’s heart ache, not with jealousy but with—a certain regret. She closed her eyes for a moment, and pressed her hands to her flat, echoing belly. Astra, Zefric, Declan—I need not wish for more, ever.
Sumitra rose, wrung again and again, while Valeria and Sarasvati murmured encouragement; her sweat-sheened face was both serious and rather surprised. Andrion was so pale as to be slightly green. But he set his mouth and held her upright, gently supported her, raised her again.
Noon in Sabazel, noon in Iksandarun, and the radiant sun painted brief rims of shadow around the bronze basin, around the walls of the palace and city. Sumitra cried out, not in agony but in triumph. Sarasvati exclaimed in delight and lifted the plump, wet, mottled-pale baby upward.
It was, of course, a boy. His sturdy limbs thrashed, disoriented, and his little mouth opened in a perfect O of indignation. He screamed so loudly the room rang with the cry; I am! I am! Cheers resounded from outside the room. Sumi scooped the clinging tendrils of her hair from her face and laughed a laugh tempered with tears.
Valeria laid the baby on a soft blanket. Sarasvati waited until the pulsing cord went slack, tied it off and cut it.
Andrion watched, his cheek against Sumi’s hair, the rich dark depths of his eyes swirling damply.
The baby snuffled and quieted. Valeria handed him to his mother. Sumitra carefully touched the round cheeks and smoothed the sparse hair with its hint of auburn. The baby’s eyes opened. They were a lush indigo, promising the brown depths of his father’s gaze; they focused with cross-eyed intensity upon the gleaming diadem.
“Marcos,” said Andrion, voice thick. “Marcos. Not because I would make of you a warrior, my son, but because I would wish for you the name of the man my father. And if you come in time to the surname Bellasteros, then I would have it only an honorific.”
Little Marcos boggled at his father, mouth working, fist waving purposefully. He hiccupped. Valeria turned his face toward Sumitra’s breast; he rooted a moment, and then attached himself so firmly that Sumi gasped with pleasure.
Dana gasped, and her own breasts tingled. For a moment Andrion looked directly at her, sensing her presence like a quicksilver shape upon the sunlight. They shared one soft smile of perfect understanding.
His image thinned and dissipated. Dana watched sun motes spiral up, up through the water, coming from some infinite depth, conveying light but no message.
She lay her forehead against the now warm metal. Tears welled within her throat; what purpose, to deny them? They glided silently across her cheekbones to drop in tiny prisms into the basin.
A touch on her shoulder. Astra said, “Are you sad, Mother?”
Dana folded the child in her arms. “No, I am not sad.” The patterns of life and death were as poignantly round as the shield; never quite finding contentment, they circled back on themselves, and so reconciled the contradictions of the mind and of the flesh.
Astra’s dark eyes glinted. She nodded toward the basin. “You were watching the emperor. He would not be my father, would he?”
Dana stared at the child, brows quirked. So she, too, had the Sight. Not surprising. Not surprising at all. “You are not supposed to know your father,” she teased.
Astra shrugged, shook her head, and reached out to stir the water in the basin, setting the sun particles to dancing.
The heart, Dana thought, makes its own choices, fearlessly.
* * * * *
Andrion settled the diadem on his head, his breastplate on his chest, Solifrax at his side. Every metal surface gleamed as mirror bright as the sun-burnished sky. Spring flowers tumbled in drunken profusion from the gardens atop the palace, and chimes rang in the fretwork surrounding them. Perhaps it was the wind that chimed in his ears; it did not matter. A lark caroled above the walls of Iksandarun. The army and the people waited. The gods kept their own counsel, mute, consigned to their places in the deep echoes of the mind, and no longer, thankfully, stirring the brilliant pool that was the world.
Sumitra opened the bundle she held to display Marcos’s puckered face to Gard. Gard said, “Such a mite, to be the heir of the Empire.”
“Yes,” said Andrion. “Nevertheless, he is.”
“And he may have it,” said Gard, with an emphasis that could only come from one who had seen monarchs devoured by power.
Andrion shared a glance with Sumitra. The boy’s eyes were filled with light in which no shadow stirred. But in his veins flowed the blood of a god and the blood of a demon, just how uneasily mingled time would tell.
“May I go now?” Gard asked, blissfully unaware of adult analysis. His booted feet were already carrying him backward across the flagstones. “Ethan has a new pony, and he said we could play pulkashi.”
“Go on,” Andrion said with a smile, and the boy turned, almost colliding with Tembujin.
The Khan laughed and sent him on his way with a playful swat. “Are you ready?” he asked Andrion. He settled his bow on one shoulder, his long hair on the other.
“Yes.” Andrion lifted Marcos from Sumitra’s arms. A centurion called an honor guard to attention. The palace gates opened. A multitude of voices roared as Andrion stepped out, Tembujin and his lion plaque on one hand, the falcon standard on the other.
With becoming gravity a priest signaled the massed army and people to silence. “The blessing of almighty Harus upon this child,” he called. “May his spread wings protect this heir to the Empire.”
And vouchsafe him the power to preserve, Andrion thought. You may even, my lord grandfather, bequeath him your nose.
“In the name of the god!” called the priest, his magnanimous gesture including all gods.
Ah, Dana, Andrion thought. Very carefully he held the tiny form of Marcos up to the populace. The baby clenched his eyes, screwed up his face, shrieked. The glittering falcon standard seemed to shriek in reply, and the people cheered approval.
Andrion lowered the child and tucked him into the crook of his arm. Here, feeling more secure, Marcos quieted. His eyes, bright little gems, gazed out wonderingly at the width of the world.
The legions shouted again, saluting with a clash of swords against armor. Andrion drew and lifted Solifrax in reply.
Marcos’s eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the gleam of the sword. “Not yet,” Andrion murmured to him. “Not yet.”
Tembujin bowed in fealty. The purple and scarlet pennons rippled in the wind, circling. Circles within circles, Andrion thought; the generations are born, know sorrow and joy, and pass away. He sheathed the sword and turned back to the gateway, to where Sumitra waited, to where his life and hers and the child’s lay in an infinite pattern before them. The wind sang. And I shall be with you wherever you go.
Yes, Dana, he smiled. Like twin sigils over Iksandarun shone the sun in splendor, and the waxing moon’s sardonic smile.