Arrows of the Sun (17 page)

He was aware of heightened alertness: his guards marking the
deepening of shadows. The beginning of an ache marked those who were mages, and
the wall they raised about him. He made himself ease, endure, await what would
come.

Once the servants had arranged the lamps to their
satisfaction, they departed. There was a silence. It was a peculiarly Asanian
thing: no stirring of restless bodies, no sighs of impatience, no muttered
commentary. Even his Varyani were quenched into stillness.

Thunder rolled. Estarion jumped like a deer. Dushai’s
amusement brushed him, startling not for that it existed, but for that there
was no scorn in it. He settled slowly, willed himself to smile as if at a jest.

Drums and flutes and horns, and instruments he had no names
for. A consort of musicians marched into the light, arrayed themselves round
the edges, settled to the floor, and never a pause or a soured note. The music
they played was Asanian, rather like the yowl of mating cats, but, like their
wine and their sauces, it grew on one.

He was ready, more or less, when the players came in. Their
like haunted the roads of Keruvarion, wandering bands full of, as Lord Dushai
had said, attractive lies. But these were no mountebanks. And they did not
speak their parts. They sang.

Their tale was in his honor, of course, and apt in view of
the morning. They played out the tale of Sarevadin and of Hirel Uverias, the
dark prince and the golden. The one who was Hirel was Asanian, a beautiful boy
with the fierce unhuman eyes of a lion. The one who was Sarevadin was a wonder:
while he was a prince, one was certain beyond a doubt that he was male, but
when she rose up out of the mages’ circle she was a woman, and no hint about
her of the man that she had been. No magery, either, that Estarion could sense.
It was all art.

He looked for a twist, for a stab of hostility in word or
gesture. He found none. They were honest players, and their play an honest
play. They did not touch on the tragedy of the Sunborn: the world he had sought
to make, with the goddess bound in chains and the god triumphant over her, laid
low by his heir’s betrayal.

He would have ruled alone, and set Asanion beneath his heel.
His heir had set Asanion’s emperor on the throne beside her, sacrificing all
that she had been, because she saw no other hope.

This was all sweetness. Two princes loved one another across
an abyss of enmity; two empires could never be reconciled but through the love
of those who ruled them.

An easy conclusion, for all the enormity of Sarevadin’s
sacrifice. A simple resolution. The old emperors were disposed of—Ziad-Ilarios
of Asanion dead defending the of Mirain’s empress, that empress dead in spite
of him, Mirain himself ensorceled in his Tower—and the Mageguild thwarted in
its desire to rule the rulers they had made, and the lovers wedded on the field
of battle. Soldier of the Sun embraced soldier of the Lion. Emperor clove to
empress life upon a golden throne. Joy ruled where had been only sorrow.

Estarion suppressed a snort. It was very pretty. Very convenient,
too, for the talespinners. They never mentioned aftermaths. Emperor and empress
growing old, emperor dying early as royal Asanians did, empress declining
headlong to her own death, perhaps by her own hand, and Asanion chafing
endlessly in the bonds of amity that they had forced upon it. Rebellions out of
count, even a war or two, and their son dead in one such, and that one’s
grandson poisoned in the Golden Palace, and the last of their line presented
with the consequences.

He would have liked it better if someone had come raging and
foaming out of the shadows after the last aria and prophesied death, doom,
destruction. Like Vanyi’s prophet. That would have been nearer the truth.

The players finished their playing. The musicians concluded
with a flourish. Asanians did not applaud; they rose and bowed. Estarion was
pleased to follow their example. The players bowed in their turn, and it went
back and forth, like a dance of odd birds.

Somewhat after he had had enough of it, he put an end to it
by stepping into the light. The players were startled, but they masked it well.

The Sarevadin, seen close, was less ambiguous as to gender
than before. The northern skin at least was genuine; the red Gileni mane was
not. Estarion bit his tongue before he asked what could compel a northerner to
make himself a eunuch. The player had pride in himself. He met Estarion’s eyes
willingly, if warily.

The Hirel was older than he had seemed. His lion-eyes were
clever shapes of glass with plain brown behind them, and a dun-drab lock
escaping from the yellow wig. He was no more reluctant than his fellow to look
an emperor in the face: a remnant maybe of the part he had played.

“You did well,” Estarion said to them.

He never understood why a word from him could mean so much.
It was the fact of his rank, he supposed, and the fiery thing in his hand.
These players wanted to kiss it, as people did in Keruvarion but never in
Asanion. Or maybe the commoners did; but he was not allowed to approach them,
or to be approached by them. Emperors did not do such things here. They did not
even speak to lords of the Lower Courts.

He had caused a scandal by addressing these players. He did
not care. They were Asanian, mostly, but some of them had come from Keruvarion.
This manner of singing the parts was a thing of the far west, where they had
gone a season or two before, having an enterprising leader: the young eunuch,
whose name was Toruan.

Relieved of his wig and his woman’s dress, seated on the
couch beside Estarion and partaking hungrily of meat and bread and fierce
sauces, he was a pleasant, witty companion. He could deepen his voice almost to
match Estarion’s or lighten it to a woman’s sweetness, but in itself it was
soft and rather husky, not like a child’s, but not like a man’s or a woman’s,
either. It was, Estarion thought, remarkable. He said so.

“Training,” said Toruan. “That’s why they do it: for the
voice, to keep it from spoiling. Catch it soon enough, train it well enough,
and it grows into this.” He indicated himself with a hand as elongated as the
rest of him; but his chest was vast, now that Estarion had his attention called
to it. The gown had shaped it into a convincing semblance of a woman’s breasts.

“You chose this?” Estarion asked.

The eunuch paused. For a moment his face went still. Then he
smiled. The pain in it was almost imperceptible. “Of course not, sire. My clan
was poor. A sickness ravaged it, took all the hunters and laid low our herds
and left us starving. I was the best of what was left. They sold me for a
wagonload of corn. The one who took me was kin to a master of singers in
Induverran. He heard me singing at my work. He had his kinsman come to listen;
his kinsman bought me, and made me a singer.”

“The selling of slaves is banned in Keruvarion,” said
Estarion, soft and cold.

“They went over the border to do it,” Toruan said. “They
were hungry, sire. Their children were dying. My father and mother were dead,
and I wanted to see more than our hunting runs, and be more than a wild
clansman. It profited all of us.”

“It fed them for a season at the most. It robbed you of all
your sons.”

“I didn’t know it would come to that,” said Toruan. “When
they asked me if I wanted to be a singer, I was so glad, I sang. Then they gave
me wine. When I woke from the drug that was in it, I found my price all paid,
and no way to unpay it. I should have killed myself, I suppose. But I never
quite worked myself up to it.”

Estarion’s tongue had a will of its own, and that could be
cruel. “I . . . know about prices,” he said.

Toruan stared at Estarion’s hands—at the one that gleamed
with gold and burned with unmerciful fire. “Maybe,” he said, “you do.”

And maybe, thought Estarion, he did not. Not such prices as
these.

o0o

Toruan consented to bring his players and his repertory of
sung plays to Kundri’j Asan, if not at once and not in the emperor’s train.
“That wouldn’t be proper,” he said. He was northerner enough to break bread and
share speech with the imperial majesty, but when it came to traveling with it,
he went all Asanian.

Lord Dushai was regretting, maybe, his novel entertainment.
Estarion could read none of it in his face. There were still the women to
endure, kept long past their time by the emperor’s whim, and while they waited
they had eaten and drunk perhaps to excess. Some of them were openly
importunate. When clever soft hands slid beneath his kilt, he fled.

The chambers he had been given were quiet. No one stared or
whispered. No one called him to account. He had offended a high lord,
scandalized that lord’s court, and insulted its women. And he was, it seemed,
to be left to rest in peace. Maybe that was his punishment.

Ulyai was asleep on the bed, although she opened an eye at
Estarion’s approach. Sidani was awake.

She had been lying so, it seemed, for a while. She looked
much as she always had, neither young nor truly old, and the glance she turned
on him was brightly ironic. “So, youngling. I take a fit and wake in your bed.
Do I make the natural assumption?”

“It was the safest place I could think of,” he said, “and
the most comfortable.”

She wriggled in it. “So it is. They’ve learned something
since last I came here. This is a proper bed. They were always trying to drown
me in billows of cushions.”

“I had the servants get rid of those. Asanian beds aren’t
bad, once you get down to them.”

“I never thought of that.”

She lay silent for a while. He hovered, wavered. The golden
collar irked him suddenly; he extricated himself from it.

Once it was gone, he found that he could breathe. He sat on
the bed’s edge. “Are you well?” he asked her.

“Was I ill?”

He shrugged a little.

“I was,” she said. She sounded surprised. “I was cold, I
remember that. I’d been thinking too much. Remembering.”

“It put you in a fever,” he said. “Iburan looked at you. He
said it was nothing he could cure.”

“No one can mend old age. Not even gods.”

“You’re not old.”

“Infant,” she said, “stop that. Of course I’m old. I’m
ancient.”

“You’re not going to die quite yet.”

“Alas for that.” It was only half mockery. “Watching one’s
husband die is not pleasant. When one’s son dies . . . that’s
harder. And when one’s grandson is laid in his tomb, then, youngling, one
begins to wonder if one isn’t cursed. And such a curse! ‘May you outlive all
your descendants.’”

Estarion flung up his burning hand, casting the curse aside.
The light of it made her blink. “Don’t say such things,” he said.

“What? Someone might be listening? Gods don’t care. Men
can’t harm me.”

“You are appalling,” he said.

She grinned: a shadow of her wonted insouciance, but it was
white and wicked enough. “Are you going to sleep, youngling, or do you have
other sins in mind?”

His cheeks were burning. Still, he met her grin with one of
his own. “You’ll live,” he said.

Godri had spread him a bed in one of the lesser rooms, with
eloquent if wordless disapproval. Estarion went to it in something like
gladness, once he had seen Sidani asleep again.

Maybe he witched her into it. Maybe he did not need to.

The new morning was if anything more heat-sodden than the
one before. Estarion woke in a sweat, to sounds like muted battle.

One of the voices was Godri’s. The others he did not know,
but he knew the cadence of Asanian speech. They had looked for the emperor in
his bed, it seemed, and failed to find him.

He rolled to his feet, yawning hugely, stretching till his
bones creaked. The battle was no longer quite so muted. He went out to face it.

Asanians were ridiculous about naked bodies. Bed-play to
them was the high art, and they performed it, as far as he had ever been able
to tell, in as many clothes as possible. They never bared more than faces and
hands and feet, except in the bath; and then they pretended that they were
robed to the eyes. They even wore clothes to sleep.

Absurd; lunatic in such heat as this. He entered the
battlefield as he was born, with no covering but his skin. The silence was
thunderous. Godri faced an army of Asanians, every one of them in a servant’s
tunic, and every one determined, it seemed, to pass or die.

On sight of Estarion, they dropped flat on their faces.

“Godri,” he said. “Who are these people?”

Godri’s eyes were battle-bright; his breath came hard. He
steadied it enough to reply, “They say they belong to the Regent of Asanion.
Who is, they say, on the road to Induverran this very moment. And who expects
to see the emperor properly—as they say—bathed, clothed, and arrayed to receive
him.”

“And you object?” Estarion asked.

“They have,” he said, “razors. And robes. And bottles of
scent.”

Estarion raised his brows.

“They informed me, my lord, that my services would no longer
be needed. You are in Asanion now. Asanion will look after you.”

When Godri was as precise as that, Godri was most dangerous.
Estarion smiled slowly. “Will it, then? And I suppose I’m to wear the ten robes
and the wig, and the mask too? And sit on a throne in the hall? And speak only
through a Voice?”

“Yes,” said Godri.

“Pity,” said Estarion, “that I won’t be doing any of that.”
He shifted from Gileni to Asanian. “Up, sirs. Listen to your emperor. The bath
I’ll take. But no razors, and no scent. My squire will see to my robing. If his
grace the Regent is displeased, then I take it upon my head.”

There was one use for Asanian servility. It kept them from
arguing with royalty. The Regent’s servants were not pleased in the least, but
they could not protest. The emperor had spoken. They must do as he commanded.