Spear of Heaven (30 page)

“But not any longer?” asked Borti.

“The Golden Empire is gone,” Daruya said. “I’m all that’s
left of it, I and my daughter. Now we have assassins, though not of late, and
the occasional rebellion. Our rulers walk out where anyone can see, and
everyone knows their faces.”

“That was true here, once,” said Borti. She looked suddenly
exhausted, hollow-eyed and pale under the bronze sheen of her skin. “I shall
sleep, I think. Then think again, and consider what to do.”

“So should we all,” Lady Nandi said, rising. Her glance at
Bundur was bright, suddenly, and full of mirth that echoed his own. “With
possible exceptions.”

No
, thought
Daruya. But her mouth was full of spiced meat and festival wine, and Bundur was
pulling her to her feet, and the Shurakani were singing, out of nowhere and
none too tunefully, what must be a wedding song. The sun was coming up—it was
morning. How could there be a wedding night?

Bundur swung her up in his arms, swept her clean off her
feet. He was laughing. They all were. Except Daruya, who was rigid with shock
and resistance; too rigid to fight. Even when he carried her away, and no one
followed, not one. Not even an Olenyas.

Bundur set Daruya on her feet. She was still stiff, still
furious, but all too wide awake to the absurdity of resistance. Awake too to
where she was. A room with tapestried walls, a broad hearth swept clean, a low
table, cushions, and a curtained alcove. Behind the alcove was the bed.

He did not drag her to it. Once she was steady on her feet,
he went to the hanging that bled light, and slid it aside from a window. Sun,
topping the Worldwall, washed him in brightness.

He stretched, yawned, pulled the cords out of his hair and
shook it down. He turned, smiling.

God and goddess, Daruya thought. She was terrified—panicked.
Her eyes darted without her willing it, looking for escape. The door was
barred. Another door—a bath? Another portion of the suite?

She could not move at all. He wandered to the table where
things were set for tea, including a little brazier and a copper pot full of
water, singing as it came to the boil. He folded his legs under him and made tea,
his big hands deft with the delicate pots, the bronze spoon, the dried leaves
of the herbs and the pinch of flowers.

“The trouble,” she said, out of nowhere in particular, “is
that I can’t—let—myself love a man. Not without fighting with him endlessly,
trying to make him hate me and leave me, or at least let me be. It’s so much
easier to choose lovers as one chooses one’s dress for the day, for its color
or its style or its suitability to the weather. Then come nightfall, one can
take it off and forget it, and put on another.”

He was listening, but not discomfiting her with his stare.

He lidded the teapot and set hands on knees and waited while
the herbs and flowers steeped. Their fragrance wafted toward Daruya in a breeze
from the window: sweet and pungent, with a faint green undertone.

“I’ve never felt this way before.” She could not stop
talking, filling the awful silence with a babble of words. “I’ve never wanted
to be near anyone all the time—thought of him when he’s not there—remembered
his hands when I should be thinking about something else altogether. I’m losing
myself. I don’t want that. I hate it.”

“Time makes it easier,” he said.

“You know that?”

He raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were too
bright to bear. “Not . . . from personal experience. I’m still
rather lost myself. But I’ve been assured on excellent authority, one does grow
accustomed; one learns to keep the self and the other, both, without losing
either.”

“You can’t feel that for me. I’m all edges. I make a great
deal of noise. I wound your pride with every word I speak.”

“But not with every word you think,” he said, “or every
glance you turn on me. Fear makes you say all those words that wound.”

“I wish,” she said tightly, “that you would lose your
temper. Just once. And stop being so bloody understanding. It makes me sick.”

“Am I too much like your grandfather?”

She leaped. He caught her. He was stronger than she, and he
had skills she had not expected. She could not fling him down and pummel him.

“Who told you?” she gasped. “Who told you that?”

“The Lady Vanyi,” he answered. “She says I well ought to
drive you wild: I’m too damnably like him. But steadier, she says. I don’t
think she means it as a compliment.”

“She’s been desperately and hopelessly and unrequitedly in
love with him for forty years,” said Daruya.

“Not unrequited,” he said. “Not the way she tells it. Though
I suppose I’d have to ask him for his side of it. They do best as they are,
that’s all.”

“Then can’t we?”

He laughed. “Oh, you are clever! No, we can’t. Do you want
to? Really? In your heart?”

“In my heart,” she said, “I want to be a child again, and
never to have heard of what’s between men and women at all. I’m afraid of you.
Every time I look at you I feel as if I want to drown.”

“Oh, that’s only love,” he said. It came out light, but she
could sense the weight of fear beneath. He, too. He was afraid. Of her; of what
she did to him, so close, with those hot-gold eyes of hers, and all that
outrageous hair.

It was happening again. She was blurring into him. She
wrenched away, body and soul, and backed against the wall. “I can’t do it,” she
said. “There’s no maiden-blood to show here, with my daughter for proof that it’s
long since shed. Can’t we just . . . not, and pretend we did?
Aren’t the words and the blessing enough, and the name of wife that the queen
gave me?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“I want,” she said. “I want—I don’t—”

Oh, damn her traitor feet. They were taking her straight
back to him, and her hands were seizing him, pulling him to her.

They were exactly of a height. But he was much broader. She
measured the span of his shoulders. He smelled of spices, of the herb they
liked to sprinkle in the bath, of wine and tea-herbs and flowers. And under it,
subtle but distinct, musk and maleness.

It was different, a little, from other men she knew.
Foreign. Sweeter, less sharply pungent. Or was that because he fit so well?

Horribly well. The skin of his face looked faintly weathered
but felt smooth, molded tight to the proud bones. His eyes were shut—narrow
eyes, but long, the lids folded as a plainsman’s often were, so that they
seemed to tilt upward. Open, they would be dark, almost black.

He was breathing shallowly. Breath that caught as she ran a
finger down the line of his mustache, tugging it gently. His hands were fists
at his sides. Every muscle in his body was bent on not seizing her as she had
seized him; on not sending her back into panic flight.

“Too late for that,” she said. “I did it already.”

His eyes snapped open. “You can read my mind.”

“I thought you knew.” Fear, elation: she was a mage, he was
sure of it now; he would thrust her away, shun her in horror of what she could
do.

He did none of that. He shivered, yes, but he raised his
hands, took her face between them, met her eyes. His thought-speech was clumsy
but astonishingly clear in a man without training in magery.
I love you
.

It echoed down to the bottom of him, truth within truth
within truth.

“You know nothing of me,” she said. “How can you love what
you don’t know?”

“I know what the soul knows.” Aloud, that, because she spoke
aloud. “We believe that souls are eternal, but bodies come and go; souls are born
and reborn, over and over, on the wheel of the gods.”

“That is horrible.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “We were lovers before, but perhaps I
treated you badly; perhaps you loved me too much, and cost us both that turn of
the wheel. Now you flee and I pursue. It’s all one, do you see? We were bound
before the wheel began, and will be again, until the wheel is gone.”

“When I die,” she said in a voice that tried not to shake, “I
want to lie on the breast of Mother Night, in the god’s peace, and never wake.”

“Of course you want that—but only for a while. After night
is dawn again. You’ll be up and doing, loving and being loved, casting your
bright soul on the wheel where it serves best. You’re never one to be content
with simply being.”

“That’s too easy,” she said. “Too simple a wisdom. You
prattle it like a child its lessons. I’d rather a round of honest bedplay, and
a goodbye after, without the facile philosophy.”

“It is not facile.” Ah, at last: she had goaded his temper.

Too briefly. He calmed himself again, and that was not easy
with his banner flying as high as it was, urging him to seize her and rape her
where she stood. “You don’t understand. I can’t expect you to. You’re an
outland woman who follows outland gods.”

“Now you’re talking down to me. Stop it.”

He stiffened. “You are. Is the truth such an insult?”

“When you put it that way, it is.”

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” he said. “All I know how
to do is love you.”

“I’d rather you talked more and loved less.”

He saw the lie in her eyes. It brought his smile back, his
wicked, innocent, brilliant smile. “You do love me,” he said as if he had just
discovered it. “You do. You did from the first. Didn’t you?”

“Of course not!”

But he was exploring her face as she had explored his, with
delicate fingers, tracing the arch of her brows, the shape of her eyes, so
round and so shallow-set beside his, the curve of her cheekbone, the fullness
of her lip. There was nothing in the world but that touch, so light it barely
brushed her skin, so hot it burned.

“Honey,” he murmured, “and gold. Why, you are beautiful.”

He was surprised. She hated him for it, or tried. She was
blurring into him again, feeling his wonder, his delight in her strangeness, in
discovering beauty where he had never thought to find it.

“The Spear of Heaven in the morning, fierce and burning
gold,” he said. “The she-tiger in the wood, snarling defiance at the hunter.
But a tall lily, too, in a queen’s garden, soft as silk, soft as sleep.”

“Poets have made love to me before,” she said—gasping it,
with none of the edge of viciousness that she had intended.

“I’m no poet,” he said. “I’m telling you what I see. I didn’t
marry beauty. I married my soul’s self. But to find it—oh, that’s wonderful.”
He paused. “I suppose I’m quite ugly to you.”

“Why, you’re as vain as I am,” she said. “Of course you’re
not ugly. You’re not pretty, but then I never cared much for pretty men, even
when I chose one to father my daughter. I like a solid man with substance to
him, good bone, a bright eye—”

“Like one of your seneldi?”

She had flattened his poetry into plain practicality, but he
had turned it to laughter. “—a thick mane,” she carried it on, “long and
glossy, and a fine slope of shoulder, a strong back, good haunches, a straight
leg and a sturdy foot . . .”

“But I have no horns,” he said as if he lamented it, “and my
tail is not even a nubbin. I’ll never make a stallion.”

God and goddess help her, he had her giggling. And finding
fastenings, and discovering that there was not much to his clothes, but enough
if one were in a hurry to get him out of them. The coat fell easily. The shirt
had buttons, which needed wrestling with. The trousers were held up by a belt,
and a cord under that. He did not wear trews.

He was a goodly stallion. But—

“They scarred you! Who cut—who—”

He gaped. Stared, as if she had found some mutilation that
he had never known he had.

Understanding dawned. He went scarlet under the bronze of his
skin, from the peak of black hair on his forehead all the way down to his
breastbone. “It’s . . . something we have done to us when we’re
newborn. They consecrate us to the gods. It’s only the foreskin. The rest of me
is quite as it was made, and quite able to—to—”

Quite willing, too. And not so odd, maybe. Barbaric, but not
ugly, not really. To cut a man there, even if he were too young to know what
was being done to him . . .

“I am ugly to you,” he said, wilting as he spoke, all over.

“No,” she said. “Damn it, no.” She got out of her clothes,
not being too careful of fastenings, to set them level and give him something
else to think about.

It succeeded; that much she could say for it. He had modesty
like an Asanian, a body-shyness that she had never had; her grandfather had
seen to that, brought her up with and around northerners who went naked as
often as they went clothed. It had not kept Bundur from letting her undress
him, but it did strange things to his composure to be seeing her as naked as he
was, and so different.

The women had seen how tall and narrow and boyish she was.
He saw as he had seen in the garden not so very long ago, that she was a woman;
slender certainly but full-breasted enough, breasts that were still round and
high and firm though she had suckled a child. Her skin was finer than he was
used to, its texture softer, but the golden down on it was strange to him—he
had little even between his thighs, was all smooth bronze. What he would have
made of a true northerner, and a male at that, she could not imagine. Some of
them were pelted like bears, with beards to their breasts.

“Am I ugly to you now?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “Oh, no.”

“Nor are you to me.” She took his shaft in her hand, warm
heavy solid thing, coming alive to her touch. Beautiful, even so altered. As
all of him was. As it had always been—yes, since first she saw him, sitting at
a table in the teahouse, daring her to flay him with her tongue.

She could cut him to the bone now if she said but a word. Or
two. Or three. She knew exactly which words they would be. And she said none of
them.