7

The Tomb of the Empress Chenelo

Csevet and Maia spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon going through the latest batch of correspondence. They agreed that many of the problems, questions, and concerns were better dealt with after the coronation, when there would no longer be the slightest ambiguity in the emperor’s position. There was another letter from Eshevis Tethimar, which Csevet frowned at and muttered, “Encroaching!” loud enough for Maia to hear. There was a letter from Setheris complaining of being denied admittance to the Alcethmeret; Maia thought wearily, Thou wilt be obliged to deal with him sometime. But Csevet assured him that he could without impoliteness defer that meeting until after the coronation, and Maia wrote a message to Setheris in his own hand to promise an audience after he was crowned and properly out of seclusion.

Then Csevet sat down to write another round of soothing and uninformative letters to the Corazhas, while Maia, Telimezh and Dazhis in tow, set out to deal with what matters he could.

The first was a full inspection of the Alcethmeret, top to bottom, and introductions to all the staff. Esaran looked incredulous and offended when Maia mentioned the latter, but he set his jaw and insisted.

“The emperor your father,” she began, but he cut her off.

“We want to know who serves us,” he said. Esaran acquiesced, but he knew she was not pleased. It was worth it, though, to learn that the shy little server in the dining room was named Isheian, to know the names of the laundresses and charwomen, the grooms and scullions and gardeners—for the Alcethmeret, Maia learned, had its own garden, separate from the gardens of the Untheileneise Court, where the gardeners grew roses that in the spring and summer would fill the tower with color and scent. Oshet might have been guilty of the impropriety of winking at his emperor. The kitchen master was not nearly so alarming as Maia had imagined; he was a grandfatherly gentleman with a tremendous white mustache. His name was Ebremis, and he questioned Maia closely and respectfully about his likes and dislikes. Maia tried not to explain about the household at Edonomee, which was ruled both by parsimony and by Setheris’s tastes, but he sensed uneasily that Ebremis guessed much of what he did not say.

Beneath the Alcethmeret, he met the girls who sat in the center of the spiderweb of pneumatic tubes that ran throughout the Untheileneise Court, and watched raptly for several minutes as they did their job. Back in the Tortoise Room, remembering Csoru’s flustered page boy, he asked Csevet what the use of a personal messenger meant.

Csevet’s eyebrows went up. “It might mean any of several things, Serenity. Such as the desire for secrecy.”

“Ah. No. The message was from Csoru Zhasanai.”

“Well,” said Csevet, “it indicates the desire to be certain that the message is delivered directly into the hands of the intended recipient. Also, of course, the insistence on an immediate reply. It may also indicate that one feels one’s message to be too important and too urgent to wait.”

“Of course,” said Maia, and Csevet almost grinned before he caught himself.

That night at dinner when Maia smiled at Isheian, she smiled back.

The plates had scarcely been cleared when the Lord Chancellor was announced. He came in like a storm; before Maia could so much as offer him a seat or a glass of liqueur, he had begun to explain, in a hectoring voice and excruciating detail, the rituals surrounding an emperor’s coronation. The fasting, the hours spent in meditation: “The emperor’s daylong meditation takes place in a vigil chapel beneath the palace itself. The Archprelate will take you, and it is traditional for the emperor to choose two close friends to accompany him on the journey to and from the chapel. Since you have no friends at court, you will of course choose your nearest male relatives who are of age. We make those out to be the Marquess Imel, your sister Nemriän’s husband, and Setheris Nelar.”

“We—,” Maia began, but Chavar continued over top of him: “At sundown begin the rituals of coronation itself,” and he was launched on a flood of archaic formulas and significant gestures, leaving Maia without a chance to say that he would under no circumstances allow Setheris Nelar to play a role of any ritual importance whatsoever in the process of his coronation. And Chavar’s smug and patronizing air, his condescension—of course you have no friends, you ugly hobgoblin—was enough to make Maia not merely resentful, but actually rebellious. Chavar is not my cousin, he thought, and this is not Edonomee. I can make my decision as it pleases me, and he cannot stop me. He heard Chavar out in patient silence, without giving any indication that his own plans were already diverging from the Lord Chancellor’s ideas.

When Chavar finally left, Maia turned his attention to the other matter with which he could deal before being crowned Edrehasivar VII; this matter was a personal one, and it took some arguing before Csevet and his nohecharei would let him attend to it. It was not—as Telimezh said earnestly, having found himself somehow saddled with the job of spokesman—that they did not approve of His Serenity’s sentiments, but that as an uncrowned emperor in full mourning, he ought not to be seen wandering the halls.

“We do not wish to wander the halls,” Maia said crossly. “We wish to visit our mother’s tomb, which we have not been able to do since her funeral ten years ago. We personally would find far more shocking an emperor who did not visit his mother’s tomb than one who did.”

To his exasperation, Csevet insisted on calling the edocharei in to consult on the matter, but they were an unexpected source of support. Nemer said, “Of course Your Serenity should visit the empress’s tomb,” and then retreated under a quelling stare from Avris. But Avris and Esha, in whose rectitude he also detected something of Nemer’s partisanship, said there was no impropriety in it, so long as the emperor agreed to go veiled. “You should not have gone to the Ulimeire unveiled, Serenity,” Esha said sternly. “We have spoken with Atterezh about it already.”

“We will agree to anything,” Maia said, “an it permits us this one thing which we so greatly desire.”

“Serenity,” Csevet murmured, giving way.

Maia had last worn a mourning veil also ten years ago. It had reeked of cedar and been scratchy against his face. The veil Esha produced was as light as a cobweb and smelled only of the sage and lavender that the edocharei used to perfume the emperor’s wardrobes and cupboards. There were bronze pins to hold it, with black enameled heads worked with the Drazhadeise device, and Maia felt strangely peaceful when Avris at last lowered the veil over his face.

With the entire Untheileneise Court in mourning, the halls were nearly deserted, though normally, Telimezh told Maia, the courtiers would be promenading in favored corridors until midnight at least. Those few whom they encountered bowed hastily and profoundly. They would not look Maia in the face, but he was aware of their eyes on his back until he had passed out of sight.

The Othasmeire of the Untheileneise Court, the Untheileneise’meire, was a vast white edifice, a dome supported on pillars like the trunks of ancient trees. The gaslights, in their antique faceted globes, cast strange shadows among the pillars. It was cold, colder even than the frigid open rooms of the Alcethmeret.

The tombs of the Drazhada circled the walls outside the ring of pillars, a wide double-row of sarcophagi, too many to count and yet not enough to complete the circle around the dome. The location where Varenechibel’s tomb would be built had already been marked off, although the marble was still in a quarry among the islands of the Chadevan Sea, and the space was heaped with flowers—mostly silk at this time of year, but there were a few bouquets of chrysanthemums gently shedding their petals among the artificial roses and lilies.

The tombs of Varenechibel’s second, third, and fourth wives were in the outer ring: the Empress Leshan, the Empress Pazhiro, the Empress Chenelo, each of them dead before her thirtieth birthday. The stylized bas-reliefs on the lids of the sarcophagi gave no real impression of what the empresses had looked like, much less what kind of people they had been. Maia ran his fingers over the white marble nose and cheek of the figure on his mother’s tomb, a gesture as symbolic and meaningless as the figure itself.

He knelt then, putting his veil back, aware of but ignoring Telimezh and Dazhis, who were standing stiffly by the nearest column. He had nothing to say, no offering to make, only the feeling, deeper than words, that he had to pay honor to his mother before the great public honor that would be paid to his father. He wondered if his mother would have been proud or sorrowful at his sudden elevation. Sorrowful, he thought; exalted rank had brought her nothing but grief and pain.

Finally, he whispered, “I am here.” It seemed the only thing worth saying. She was ten years dead, and all the things he had wished to say to her, all the things he had dreamed of saying during the cold years at Edonomee, seemed now like the pitiful whining of a child. Even an she heard, he thought, it would but grieve her. He clasped his hands and bowed to the tomb, determined even in this desolation of white marble to do her honor.

He stood, lowered his veil, realized there was one thing still to say. He touched the incised strokes of her name and said, low but clear, “I love thee still.”

He turned then and left his mother’s tomb, walking back toward where his nohecharei waited for him in the light.