Spear of Heaven (22 page)

No one sat there, though the plates and cups and bowls were
all laid in their places. There was no one in the room but themselves and the
servant who had brought them, and that one was retreating, bowing, saying nothing.

Chakan hissed and flashed a glance at Daruya. She refused to
indulge him. None of them knew the custom here. In Starios the host would have
been standing at the table, the family seated, awaiting the guests. Shurakan
might well do otherwise; leave guests alone in an empty room while the family
mustered outside and entered in a body.

They emerged from a door at the far end of the hall, as the
guests had entered in the middle. Bundur led the procession. Daruya told her
heart to stop beating so hard. It would never have been such an idiot if Vanyi
had not vexed it with her tale of festival dinners and offers of marriage.

He was not at all ill to look at. As if to counter her white
and gold, he wore shirt and trousers of the shimmering black near-silk that they
wove here from the floss of a seed-pod, and a coat of scarlet embroidered with
black and bronze. His head was crowned with scarlet flowers. They should have
been incongruous; they were merely splendid.

A group of women walked behind him. The eldest, with her
silvered hair, must be his mother. She looked like him, with the same proud
cheekbones and robust figure; her garments too were black, her coat the color
of bronze. Two younger women accompanied her, one with the free hair of a
maiden, the other wearing the shortened coat and severe plaits of a new widow
and leading a child by the hand. It was a boychild as far as Daruya could tell,
not as tall as Kimeri but seeming older, with a thin, clever face.

Bundur spoke words of greeting, which Vanyi answered. She
gave him the gift she carried, a length of gold-green silk; he received it with
open admiration and an honest gleam of greed, and passed it to the eldest of
the women.

She was his mother, yes, the Lady Nandi, and the younger
women were his sisters: Kati who had not yet chosen a husband, and Maru whose
husband had died in the spring of a fever. The child’s name was Hani; he was
not Maru’s son but Bundur’s. Daruya stiffened at that.

“His mother chose not to keep him,” Bundur was saying to
Vanyi, ostentatiously ignoring Daruya, “and left him to me.”

“The mother lives? You’re married to her?” Vanyi asked.

“The mother is a priest of the Blood Goddess, who forbids
her devotees to marry. I wouldn’t have married her in any case,” said Bundur: “we
weren’t mated except in the flesh. And since no priest may keep a child in the
temple, I took this one to raise as was only proper. He’ll go to a temple
himself, come winter solstice.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve asked him if he wants to go,” Daruya
heard herself say.

It was the child who answered. “Of course I’ll go, lady. I
want to learn everything a priest can learn.”

“Will you be a priest?” asked Daruya.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“My mother is a priestess,” Kimeri said in a clear voice,
rather cold. “Ours can marry and keep their children if they want to. I’m going
to be a priestess when I grow up, and have a daughter, and keep her, no matter
what her father says.”

“Her father might say no,” said Hani.

It dawned on Daruya that these two knew each other, and not
happily, either. They were as stiff as children could be who had had a quarrel,
and Kimeri was itching for a fight. “
You
won’t be the father,” she said nastily, “so what would you know?”

“Children,” said Lady Nandi, “this is festival, when all enmities
are laid aside.”

Neither looked particularly contrite, but they subsided,
shooting occasional, baleful glances at one another. Kimeri was thinking openly
at Hani.
Coward, coward, coward
.
Daruya had a vision of some outrageous prank in the palace, and Kimeri left
alone to face the consequences while Hani bolted for safety.

Hani saw it differently. He had run for help but found none,
and when he came back Kimeri was gone. He was too stiffly proud to say so.
Kimeri was too angry to read him properly.

Daruya bit her tongue and kept out of it. She had not even
known that Kimeri was playing in the palace. Of course the child had to have
been; she was never home, and Daruya had yet to see her in the stable in the
mornings.

That would stop, Daruya resolved to herself. An Olenyas
would accompany the imp hereafter, and keep her out of trouble if he could. An
Olenyas should have been doing so from the beginning.

Another weapon in her war against Chakan. She stored it away
and focused on the festival, which after all was a feast of amity.

Bundur held out his hand. She found herself taking it and
being led to the table and seated in the center, with Vanyi on her right hand
and Chakan—too startled to resist—beyond her, and Bundur on her left, and his
mother and his sisters beyond. The children had their own place at the table’s
foot, with a feast suited to their taste, and bright boxes set in front of them
that proved to be full of games and toys and manifold amusements. They seemed
to arrive at a truce, however temporary: when Daruya looked toward them they
were playing together, arguing softly but without perceptible rancor over the
untangling of a puzzle.

“Children are good fortune,” Lady Nandi said in her strong
sweet voice. “Don’t you think?”

She was addressing Daruya, showing no particular revulsion
at either her ugliness or her foreignness. Daruya blessed her long and often
bitter training for vouchsafing her a harmless answer. “A child is the hope of
its house.”

Lady Nandi greeted that ancient banality as if it were
priceless wisdom. “Truly! And yet my son tells me that you intend to have but
the one?”

She wasted no time in getting to the point. Daruya rather
liked her for it. “It’s not a matter of intention,” she said. “The god so far
has given one child to each of his descendants, one heir and one only. I don’t
expect that I’ll be any different.”

“Our gods are kinder,” said Lady Nandi.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Daruya.

There was a pause while servants brought the first course:
platter after platter, bowl after bowl of fragrant and often cloying
delicacies. Daruya watched in dismay as her bowl was heaped with the pick of
them. Bundur selected with his own hands the roasted wing of a bird, and a
slender pinkish object that was, he said with relish, a bird’s tongue, and
something shapeless that he promised would give her a taste of heaven. It gave
her a taste of salt and mud and peculiar spices. It was, Bundur told her while
she struggled to keep a courteous face, the nest of a bird that dwelt in cliffs
above the city.

There were words to speak as they began, a chant from one of
their sacred books, which Bundur led and the women responded to in chorus. It
had something to do with war in heaven, and an army of birds, and a goddess’
two children fleeing the field of battle.

For all the quantity of food that filled her bowl, she
discovered, watching the Shurakani, that no one ate more than a bite of each
offering. The bowls were taken away almost full. “For the poor,” Bundur said,
as if she had asked.

Odd custom, but not unappealing. The second course was the
same, and the third. The first had been devoted to creatures of the air. The
second was comprised of creatures of water: fish broiled and spiced, fishes’
eggs, the legs of a fen-leaper. The blessing-chant took up the tale of the
goddess’ children, who fled from the realm of air through river and fen to the
protection of the waterfolk, and there were kept alive while all their people
perished. In the third round of the feast, over the fruits of the hunt,
mountain deer and boar and the strong flesh of the cave-bear, Bundur sang of
the deer that led the children of heaven to the secret place in the mountains,
and the sow who gave her piglets to feed them, and the bear that sheltered them
in its cave until they gathered a new people and founded the kingdom of Su-Shaklan.

Last of all came a mountain of sweet cakes and a palace of
spices, and the delicate flowery tea of ceremony, neither given nor shared
lightly. Over it the Lady Nandi spoke the blessing, the words that formed the
center of the festival: “‘Rule in joy,’ the goddess said to her children, ‘and
rule in memory of sorrow. Do not fight, nor give yourselves up to hatred, nor
take the life of any living thing but to feed your bodies or to defend your
souls. Remember; and keep this festival in the name of peace.’”

“In peace,” the others echoed, Bundur’s deep voice, the
women’s lighter, the children’s lightest of all. Vanyi’s, too, Daruya noticed,
and Kimeri’s. But not Chakan’s. And not her own. By the time she thought of the
courtesy, it was too late. The prayer was ended. The cakes were going round,
and the tea, and Bundur was smiling at her.

“So,” he said, “what do you think of our festival?”

“We have nothing quite like it,” she answered. “There’s High
Summer, when we celebrate the birth of the Sunborn, and Autumn Firstday, when
children come of age and heirs come into their inheritance, and Dark of the
Year, when we all do penance for our wrongdoings. But no festival like this,
when every year people try to remember to love one another.”

“You’re a warlike nation, then?”

“No,” she said. She was aware that the others were
listening; that she was being judged by what she said. But then she always had,
who had been born the emperor’s heir. “We’ve had wars, and many—there’s no help
for it in a realm as vast as ours. But we’ve had peace, too; long years of it.
I remember the Feast of the Peace, when my grandfather ended the last of the
wars, and all enemies were brought together in one place and made into one
people. They weren’t all happy about it, but they came, and they swore not to
fight again. Nor have they.”

“How long has that been?” Bundur asked.

“Five years,” said Daruya. “It looks like lasting, too,
though there’ve been small skirmishes here and there. Some people never do
understand when a war is over.”

“We haven’t had a war in a dozen generations,” Bundur said.

Daruya smiled thinly. “Yes, and whom would you fight with?
Your mountains protect you. We don’t have such mountains where I come from. It’s
mostly open plain. Armies have fought across it for a thousand years.”

“You must feel naked,” said Bundur, “and defenseless.”

“Not any longer,” she said. “We’re all one empire. You could
begin walking by the western sea, and by the time you came to the shores of the
east, you’d have been traveling for half a year. And safely, too. Bandits don’t
hunt the emperor’s roads.”

“Do they infest the lesser ones?”

“Not if he can help it.”

“He must be a very busy man, to look after so vast a realm.”

Bundur did not believe any empire could be that large—he was
indulging her, and transparently, too. “The emperor has lords and servants in
plenty. Someday,” she said, “I’ll take you there and show you how wide it is,
you who can’t imagine anything larger than your tiny goblet of a kingdom.”

His face lit from within. “You would do that? You would show
me the world beyond the Wall?”

She was a little surprised. She had been threatening him,
she thought; but he acted as if she offered him a great gift. “You actually
want to see the world?”

“You thought I didn’t?”

She lowered her eyes. Her cheeks were warm. Damn him, he did
that to her much too often. “You all seem so smug. Self-satisfied. Content to
think that Su-Shaklan is all the world you need to know.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Su-Shaklan is the heart and soul of the
world, yes, but some of us do want to know what else there is.”

“You might not like it,” she said. “It’s very wide. And in
places very flat. And no one there has ever heard of Su-Shaklan.”

“No one here has heard of your empire, and you do rather
well despite it,” he pointed out.

“You think so?” she asked.

“I think,” he said, “that you are like the sun in a dark
place. You gleam, do you know that? All gold, even in the shadows.”

“That’s the god in me,” she said. “No god of yours, as
everyone is so careful to remind me.”

“Maybe we can be taught,” he said.

She laughed, short and cold. “Do you want to be? You might
be corrupted.”

She was aware of his mother, listening, and his sisters.
They offered no objection, betrayed no disapproval. She might have been a
player on a stage, performing for their pleasure.

He spoke as if they had been alone. “If I can be corrupted
by a single foreign woman, however fascinating, then I deserve whatever fate I
suffer for it.”

“What do they do to heretics here? Burn them? Flay them?
Spike them to the walls?”

“That depends on the heresy.”

“They flay mages, don’t they? And bathe them in salt, and
keep them alive and in agony, till the gods have mercy and take them.”

“Not in this age of the world,” he said. “We have none of
that kind.” Ah, she thought: even he could not say the word. “But some of us
lack the ancient animus against them. Not all of them are evil, we believe, and
not all of what they do is foul.”

“I’m glad to find you so enlightened,” she said levelly, “considering
that I am a mage of a line of mages, and all my blood is afire with magery.”

“We call that the gods’ fire here,” he said.

“It’s the same,” said Daruya, “no matter what name you set
on it.”

He lifted a shoulder, flicked a hand: shrug, dismissal of
the uncomfortable truth. “You’re a priest, yes? You’re consecrated to your god.”

“All the Sun-blood are,” she said.

“So,” said Bundur. “Your god lives in you. That’s a heresy
in some sects here, but not in all. Not in ours.”

“Are you saying,” she said slowly, “that you can sweeten
what we are to your people by calling us priests and our power the gods’ power?”