Several great slabs of stone cast from the edge of a cliff in some ancient cataclysm shaded a rocky gully where the small company of horsemen huddled concealed.
Andrion stood at the mouth of the ravine, looking down a rough scree to the rolling grassland across which they had struggled in those dark hours between midnight and dawn. Now, at noon, sunshine glanced off the stones to assault him with waves of heat. The air moved in slow eddies, scented with the sweat of horses and men, with the dry odors of dirt and crushed thyme. The empty lands before him, abandoned long ago by the dregs of the hero-king Daimion’s dynasty, shimmered and danced with mirages.
He closed his eyes. Perhaps the memories of the night were also mirages, nightmares induced by some fevered dream, terror and grief and pain circling in red-tinted darkness. If he could see beyond the heat-distorted horizon, he would see Iksandarun shining like a great peacock, unsullied, unbloodied . . . No, he was an exile in his own land, dirty and unshaven. Following the custom of Sardis, as became the son of a conqueror who had adopted the fashion of his new Empire, he had never gone unshaven.
Sardis. It was still there, governed by his father’s oldest friend, Patros; forty days’ journey along the Royal Road in peacetime, more, much more, along the wilderness tracks of a conquered Empire.
Abruptly Andrion turned back into the shade. A small trickle of water pattered down the gully; three of the guards tended the horses, rubbing them with tufts of grass, offering tender shoots of the tamarisk trees that clung precariously to the rock.
Bellasteros was propped against a boulder, holding a cup of water untouched in his hand, his head resting on his rolled cloak. The bronze figure of Harus sat on a small altar of pebbles. The emperors eyes, washed pale with pain and sorcery, waited for a sign. The imperial diadem rested dust-stained on his brow; the sword Solifrax lay sheathed and quiet, forgotten at his side.
I bore the sword for a few moments, Andrion told himself. It burned my hands, knowing it was not mine. But his hands were firm and clear, not singed at all.
“Harus,” murmured Bellasteros. “I brought you from Sardis to the Empire, and now I exile you; Ashtar’s hand once lay over all the world, but even she is trammeled by the present.”
At the end the gods drove Daimion, too, mad with despair, Andrion thought. Perhaps he had deserved it. Bellasteros did not. Andrion knelt beside his father and spoke quickly, with a forced cheerfulness, “Fourteen days at least to Sabazel; we must not tire the horses. Toth provided us with dried meat and fruit and twice-baked bread, and the streams have yet to dry up in the summer’s heat.” You are babbling, he told himself. He swallowed the dirt, the acid in his mouth, and tried again. “We shall go across country, and they will not know where we have gone, they will not follow.”
“The traitor,” said Bellasteros, “will know Sabazel.” His glazed eyes never left the tiny face of the falcon. The falcon was silent, its bright bronze muted with dust.
Andrion’s lips tightened. Horrible, to see the mighty Bellasteros stunned by defeat, eaten by an evil spell; a demi-god desecrated. Andrion wanted to shake him, scream at him to wake. But only Danica, who once bore the power of the goddess, might be able to ward such sorcery. “No,” Andrion said, a trifle too loudly, “Sabazel is our refuge.”
He focused on his father’s arm, bound with a bloody scrap of his own chiton. The shaft of the arrow had snapped in his hands sometime during the cold paralyzing dawn, snapped like living bone. “We must withdraw that arrowhead, Father. It will not wait for Shandir and Danica.”
A frown flickered over Bellasteros’s face. He glanced down at his arm and seemed to notice the wound for the first time.
“I will do it,” Andrion stated firmly, but his stomach was anything but firm.
“Danica,” stated Bellasteros. He stirred, sat up straighter. His eyes cleared, darkening, and turned to Andrion. His hand touched the necklace at Andrion’s throat and his seamed and weary features softened in a smile.
Ah, my father . . . A movement; Andrion started. But it was only the fourth guard, the one little older than he, offering a helmet full of water. Andrion dredged his name from the well of memory and tried to smile. “Miklos, thank you.” The young man was hollow-eyed, pale beneath his sun-darkened skin, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
“My lord,” said Miklos, “I campaigned against the bandits along the Royal Road when I came out from Sardis two years ago. I have seen something of surgery.”
“Good, you may help me.” Andrion’s hands trembled; he choked back a scornful oath and clenched his teeth. Delicately he touched the bandage. Bellasteros winced and looked away, beyond the shadow and the stones, to the distant insubstantial horizon. The bloody scrap unwound, revealing the barbed head of the black Khazyari arrow imbedded in raw, scored flesh halfway between elbow and shoulder.
“We must push the arrowhead through,” Miklos said. “A barbed head will only tear the wound further if we draw it out the way it entered.”
“Mm,” said Andrion. His jaw ached, but he ground his teeth even tighter. Spoiled princeling, grow up. “Here, hold the arm steady.” Miklos inhaled deeply and grasped his emperor’s arm in two strong hands. Andrion took the arrow-shaft between thumb and forefinger.
Bellasteros began to speak, quickly, his voice thin and strained. His eyes never left the horizon, but it was not the horizon that flickered in their depths. “Chryse, my first wife, I tore you from your home in Sardis and brought you to Iksandarun on the day of my victory. My victory, and therefore yours. But you were torn from our daughter Chrysais, never to see her again, for she married the king of Minras in the Great Sea.”
Andrion pushed, slowly. The barbs sliced even more deeply into the wound. Blood gushed, burning, over his hand. A sparkling mist swam before his eyes; impatiently he shrugged it away.
Miklos averted his face and gazed intently at the image of the falcon. His lips moved. But his hands were steady.
Bellasteros’s breath caught in his throat. “Chryse, you raised my children as your own: Andrion, son of Danica the queen of Sabazel; Sarasvati, daughter of the imperial princess Roushangka. Dead in childbirth, Roushangka, and now Sarasvati’s blue eyes are closed forever . . .”
“The lady Sarasvati,” Miklos blurted. “Is it true, did she leap from the battlement?”
Do not remind me, Andrion pleaded silently. Do not speak of it, and maybe it will not be true. But the other man’s dark gaze was fixed unwaveringly on his face, pleading in its turn. “Can you imagine,” replied Andrion, forcing the words between his teeth, “what the Khazyari would have done to her?”
“Yes,” Miklos hissed. And added lamely, a moment later, “My lord.” His gaze fell. His hands remained strong on Bellasteros’s arm.
Andrion worked the arrowhead as gently as he could, pushing it deeper; the blood welled up around it, spilled over, ran down onto the dirt.
Bellasteros’s left hand clutched awkwardly at Solifrax. “Aveyron, my old friend, what a fool I was to let the enemy take me from behind.” He gasped, closing his eyes. His words tumbled from his lips, spinning into delirium. “Gods, gods, take me as your sacrifice, the blood of the summer king healing his land—”
“No!” Andrion exclaimed. “Your strategy was sound; we were betrayed.” His gentleness was only giving Bellasteros more pain. He thrust, and the barb burst from the back of the arm, blossoming from torn scarlet muscle. Scarlet droplets pocked the dust where Andrion knelt. His stomach heaved and he forced it back down. His father’s voice abruptly ceased, leaving a sudden silent void in his mind.
Imperial blood, he thought, as warm and red as the least peasant’s. “Forgive me,” he murmured, not sure just why he asked forgiveness.
Andrion grasped the barbed point of the arrowhead and pulled it from the poor shattered flesh. It pricked his fingers, and his own blood mingled with his father’s. He considered the evil weapon. Was it tainted? But the emperor’s madness came from a more subtle poison. And there was no remedy, not here, not now. With a curse he threw the arrowhead away.
Bellasteros’s face was so pale as to be faintly green. A cold sweat glistened on his forehead. Andrion cleaned the arm with water from Miklos’s helmet. His own sweat ran stinging into his eyes but he ignored it.
“Patros,” sighed the king, his voice drawn into a feeble thread. But it was his voice. Andrion inhaled, trying to absorb that voice into his own body. “I grew up with you, your brother in your father’s house. You helped me gain the Empire I have now lost. Declan, I brought you to your fate in Iksandarun. Chryse . . .” And he roused, opening his eyes, seeing nothing. “If I had given Sarasvati to Sabazel, she would be safe now. I owed her to Sabazel, in return for Andrion. But I owed Roushangka, dead in childbirth; I owed Chryse for my neglect. I owe the gods themselves . . .” His words dissipated and died; his hand went slack and fell away from the sheath of Solifrax. His eyes faded again, taken by pain and madness.
Andrion bound the wound with the ragged edge of Bellasteros’s cloak. A brown peasant’s cloak, not his crimson one. He realized his teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip. Salt-sour sweat stung his eyes, salt-sour blood clotted his mouth, his stomach fluttered and his head swam, thoughts spinning like dried willow leaves in a fall wind, like the ashes of Iksandarun scattered to the sky. Something in Miklos’s voice caught him then, some carefully hidden agony. Yes, he had been assigned to the women’s wing of the palace . . .
Andrion’s thought steadied. He glanced up. The young soldier held one end of the bandage, his eyes opaque, his face set. I can hardly ask, Andrion thought, just how closely the guard guarded his princess, or if she encouraged such devotion; but then, such a grave and delicate game would have been worthy of her temper.
His lips crimped in a bittersweet smile as he tied the rude bandage around his father’s arm. Miklos slipped away, disdaining thanks.
Andrion hovered as Bellasteros dozed uneasily, muttering strange phrases under his breath, waking only to take food at Andrion’s insistence. The sun passed its zenith and began to glide toward the west. The wind stirred slow whorls of dust down the cliff face, and the shimmering mirages were sucked up into a flat blue sky burnished like a blade.
We have to go, Andrion thought; we shall surely be pursued. He rose, stretching. His body ached as if it had been beaten.
His father leaned on his arm, silent, and struggled silently onto his horse. Andrion settled Solifrax at Bellasteros’s side, but the emperor stared into the distance as if listening for some music in the wind that he could no longer hear.
Indeed, there was no message in this searing breeze. Andrion picked up the bronze falcon; with a quick prayer, Mercy, Harus, for this your servant, he stowed it in a saddlebag. He sent a prayer upward into the sky, to the flaring disk of the sun, and the moon that hid its face from the sun’s harshness: Ashtar, we are your sons, have mercy. And he thought, everything will be well when we reach Sabazel; my mother Danica, my sister Ilanit, my cousin Dana with her challenging smile will heal us. We shall find direction in Sabazel. His necklace burned his throat and blood clotted on his hands as he led the company into the hot breath of the afternoon.
The shadow of the great rocks moved away from the black arrowhead and the blood-spattered dust. The edge of the sunlight spilled over them. A serpent glided from beneath the boulder, considering the world through eyes like cut sapphires; its shining scales clicked by the barb and smoothed a crescent across the stained ground.