Arrows of the Sun (25 page)

His squire looked a little strange himself, drawn and
silent. “I don’t think they understand themselves, my lord.”

Estarion wanted to pull off the damnable robes and kick them
as far as they would go. But he had done that already, too often. He had done
everything that a rebel could do, or a captive, or a spoiled child.

“And for what?” he said aloud. “They still surround me. They
still torment me. They still overcome me, no matter what I do.”

Godri had nothing to say. Poor Godri. Estarion defeated him
as Asanion defeated Estarion. But Godri loved his master, and Estarion hated
his.

Hating it accomplished nothing. Estarion stopped, struck
with the thought. It had occurred to him before; it had been beaten into his
head. And yet. Suppose . . .

He began to smile. Godri’s eye rolled like a startled
senel’s, which made Estarion smile wider. “Suppose,” he said, “I gave them what
they wanted. What then, do you think? Would they let me be, and take the chains
from me?”

“I don’t know, my lord,” Godri said in a tone that indicated
that he knew, and that Estarion would not like to hear the truth.

“You don’t think they will,” Estarion said. “But I have to
try it, do you see? I’m trapped whatever I do. If there’s one small chance that
I can be free, will you fault me if I take it?”

“You’ll do what you’ll do, my lord, whatever I say to you.”

Estarion drew him into a quick, hard embrace. “Oh, my poor
friend! Such a trial I am, and you never say more than a word. I do love you
for it.”

“Maybe you should hate me,” Godri muttered. But he smiled as
if he could not help it, and when Estarion told him what he meant to do, the
smile burst into laughter. Most of it was incredulity, but some at least was
mirth. “It may only be another skirmish, my lord. But such a skirmish!”

o0o

Fortified by Godri’s approval, Estarion prepared his
battlefield with care. The servants surprised him by clothing him in the robes
he asked for, and astonished him by bearing his message to the one for whom it
was meant.

Lord Firaz came in good time, unruffled as always. Estarion
wasted no time in nonsense. Having seen the Regent served with wine and
cakes—both approved by the dun mouse of a taster—he said, “I’ve sent out a
summons to the High Court. I’m to marry in Asanion, they say. Well and good.
Let each lord and prince present his marriageable daughters. I shall choose as
I best may, and get it over.”

The Regent did not so much as widen his eyes. “Shall we say,
then, that the ladies of the Court are to gather in, perhaps, a hand of days?”

“No,” said Estarion. “Today. At the next turning of the
glass.”

“Sire,” said his lordship with extreme delicacy. “These are
ladies of the High Court, not—”

“Surely,” Estarion said, “they’ve been prepared for this
since I crossed the border into Asanion. They’ll come to me in the sixth hour.
Or will you tell me that every marriageable woman in the High Court is not now
in the city, waiting on just this summons?”

“Your majesty is perceptive,” said Lord Firaz. His tone was
dry. It did not quite imply that his majesty was also precipitous. “Perhaps
rather the seventh hour, when the day’s warmth is diminished somewhat, and the
hour of rest is past?”

“I have rested,” said Estarion. He smiled. “Will you stand
with me, so that I may choose wisely?”

The Regent bowed to the floor, not without irony. “As my
lord wills,” he said.

o0o

The hall of queens lay in the inner palace, behind gates
guarded by women of the Queen’s Guard and eunuchs of the Golden Palace, in
walls as much of silence as of stone. Here the pillars were carved in intricate
fashion with twinings of vines and flowers, and the walls behind them were
thick with figured tapestries. The sun that came in, came in through narrow
lattices; light here was lamplight, great banks and clusters of them, burning
oil scented with flowers.

Estarion paused in the passage behind the throne. He had not
been permitted to come so far before. A company of guards had gone ahead,
eunuchs of the Golden Palace, and more of them surrounded him, and still more
warded his back.

What they feared, he could not understand. His father had
been murdered in the emperor’s chambers, in that room which Estarion had
commanded to be locked and barred, and to which he did not go. If an assassin
came, it would be a bold one indeed who ventured the protections of the women’s
palace. One who penetrated the outer palace had to fear only death. One who
came as far as this would die long and slow, and he would die a eunuch.

From where Estarion stood, the hall was clear to see behind
a shimmer of curtain, and filling with veiled women. They came with little
evidence of haste and no more flutter than one might expect. Their fathers and
their brothers were not permitted here, but must wait in mounting anxiety in
the outer palace. Eunuchs guarded them, and mothers and aunts and cousins, some
old enough, or bold enough, to drop their veils.

A tall figure moved among them, robed as an Asanian lady,
but those slender dark hands were not Asanian, nor that unveiled face. Estarion
had not known till he saw her how sorely he had missed his mother’s presence.

He could not tell if she disapproved of his haste. It was
too like him, she had been known to observe. He was like a cat, asleep or
idling daylong, then leaping to the hunt, and never a pause between.

Estarion admitted it. But he was not about to change his
mind, even for his mother’s sake.

The hall was almost full. Estarion’s nursemaids, having
ascertained that there were no rats behind the arras, consented to allow him
past the door. He could see clearly through the veil, but no one would be able
to see him. It was remarkably like being a child and spying on one’s elders
through the curtains.

He was to mount the throne, there to sit while each lady was
brought to him and presented with due ceremony. But his mood was purely
contrary. He dropped all but the innermost and outermost of his robes, which
should be enough to satisfy even Asanian modesty, and left the bulk of his
guards staring at the heap of them, and walked calmly round the veil.

They were, most of them, watching the throne and not the
curtain behind it. He was well past the dais before anyone moved. A ripple ran
through the hall, a whisper that in Asanion was appalling rudeness.

And better than that, to his mind, mutters of doubt,
objections, even resistance. How could that be the emperor? It was a lanky
barbarian in a mere two robes, like a commoner with pretensions.

His mother turned at his approach. The light in her eyes
made him want to weep. He had meant to kiss her hand with cool courtesy, but he
found himself embracing her instead, clinging hard if not long. “Mother,” he
said in the language of her tribe. “Oh, Mother. They wouldn’t let me go.”

“You’ve grown thin,” she said in the same tongue. “You’re
naught but a rack of bones. What have they done to you?”

“I’ve done it to myself.” He mustered a smile. “It’s not as
bad as it looks. I’ve been out of the sun too long, that’s all.”

“I should never have forced you to this,” she said.

A small prick of malice moved him to agree with her, but he
mastered it. “Hush now,” he said. He bent to set a kiss in each of her palms.
“We’re being rude, you know. Shall we bring out our best Asanian, and set about
finding me a wife?”

“Maybe,” she said, still in the speech of her youth, “maybe,
after all—”

He could not let hope grow, that she would relent, that he
could go home, win Vanyi back, be as he was before: innocent, and happy. “Come
now,” he said. “Here is Lord Firaz, and he promised he’d tell me who is rich
and who is beautifully bred. Will you show me who is sensible, too, and maybe
not excessively horrified to contemplate a barbarian in her bed?”

“Most of them are fascinated,” Merian said, this time in
Asanian. She took his hand: the left, that was like any man’s. “Lord Firaz,
what pleasure to see you here. Your ladies: are they well?”

They circled the hall slowly. Lord Firaz, having exchanged
courtesies with the empress, proceeded to present each lady, her lineage and
her connections and her prospects as a mother of sons, as if she were a mare in
his stable and Estarion a stallion at stud.

Merian was charming, setting the nervous at ease, coaxing
smiles out of the shy or the sullen. Estarion did not say anything. He was
noticing who darted glances at his face, and who managed to evade him in his
course. He had never felt quite so much like a necessary evil before.

He met a pair of coin-gold eyes in a blue veil. They did not
drop at once, or shrink from the sight of him. They belonged to someone whose
path never quite crossed his. There was someone else next to her, one of the
shy ones, no more than a bowed pink-veiled head and a strayed yellow curl. A
very small, bent person in black had them in charge, herding them with skill,
determination, and a talent for keeping them out of his majesty’s way.

His majesty said something to the woman whom Firaz
presented, words he never afterward remembered. The blue veil was losing itself
in the crowd, and the pink beside it.

There was one great use and pleasure in the office of
emperor. People did not get in his way. Estarion left his mother being pleasant
to a woman whose name he had already forgotten, and went in pursuit of the lady
who would look him in the face.

Her duenna was almost too clever for him. The fierce old
thing led him a merry chase, making good use of a gaggle of plump startled
maidens and a knot of guards and a convenient pillar. Estarion stretched his
stride round that, and almost laughed.

Trapped, and thoroughly: cornered for a fact. He knew how to
fill an exit simply by standing straight and gangling less, and letting his
shoulders be a wall.

He tried not to grin. Asanians, like cats, did not show
their teeth except to display their armament.

He bowed as an emperor might, for courtesy: an inclination
of the head, a slight tilt of the body. “Ladies,” he said. “Am I so fearful a
monster, that you should run from me?”

The shy one hid her veiled face in her sister’s shoulder.
The bold one looked straight at him, and she was laughing, surely, the more her
duenna glowered. “You are not handsome,” she said, “as the canons would have
it. But you are very interesting.”

She had a clear light voice, a little sharp maybe, but
pleasantly so. Estarion raised a brow, which made her eyes dance the more, and
said, “I would rather be ugly and interesting than handsome and insipid.”

“You are not ugly,” she said. “At all. Just . . .
different. Does it come off?”

He looked down at his bare sufficiency of robes. “I should
hope so,” he said.

She did laugh then, clear and free. “Not those, my lord!
That.” She managed somehow, without moving or touching him, to make it clear
that she was pointing at his hands, and not at their shape, or even at the
Sun’s gold.

He turned them. They were perfectly ordinary hands, burning
brand aside: long and narrow like the rest of him, callused from rein and
shieldstrap and sword.

She set her small round hand beside them, all ivory as it
was, with long gilded nails. “You aren’t born that way, my nurse told me. They
rub you with soot when you are born, and every day after, till the color takes,
and you’re all black, which is what they call beautiful. What color are you
really? Nurse said white, like a bone. I think brown. If you were white, the
soot would only turn you grey.”

Estarion had never heard such nonsense in his life. “I’m all
as nature made me,” he managed to say. “Here. Touch.”

He thought that she would not. But she stretched out a hand
that shook only a little, and brushed the arm he bared for her. Timidly at
first, as if she feared the stain; then more boldly, stroking light but firm,
as one should stroke a cat.

“You have fur,” she said, “like an animal.”

“Like a man,” he said. He should have been offended. He was
merely amused. There was an innocence in her, coupled with a brazen boldness,
that one seldom saw even in children, and never in maidens of breeding in the
High Court of Asanion.

And yet slaves and servants did not dress in sky-blue silk
sewn with silver, or betray glints of gold at ears and throat and wrists and
ankles. The one who must have been her sister was all that she was not, modest
and shy and ladylike in every particular, and her duenna was a smolder of
resentment.

“Do you have fur,” she asked, “all over?”

He had a rush of heat all over, in places he would rather
not have thought of. “Not quite,” he said. “Don’t Asanians have any?”

“Not that they’ll admit to.” She looked him up and down. “I
suppose I’ll have my eyes put out, or my tongue, for being so impudent. If I
have a choice, may I keep my eyes? I talk too much, everyone says so; my tongue
would be no loss. But I do like to look at you. The others are so dull. All the
same color, and soft, like bread before it bakes.”

He laughed. The shy maid surprised him: she did not cringe,
but lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were softer than her sister’s,
more amber than gold, and full of astonishing mirth. “What are your names?” he
asked them both.

“I am Haliya,” said the bold one. “And this is Ziana, and
our dragon is Gazi, who thinks that I should marry someone proper, and not an
outland conqueror. Ziana and I were born on the same day, to the same father,
and our mothers were sisters, which makes us sisters too, twice over. We’re not
rich, or not very, though we’re noble enough. Our house is Vinicharyas. It used
to be very great in Markad, but now it settles for being middling ordinary in
Kundri’j.”

“You are not ordinary at all,” said Estarion. He liked to
talk; too much, some people thought. But she was like a river in flood.