Arrows of the Sun (37 page)

“You’re not safe after this,” Estarion said.

“I am if you say I am,” said Toruan. He drank off the wine
that Estarion’s servant had poured for him, and held out the cup to be filled
again. His hand was shaking.

“Why?” Estarion asked him.

Toruan closed both hands about the newly filled cup. His
eyes searched Estarion’s face. “You didn’t understand, did you?”

“I understood,” Estarion said, amiably enough, he thought,
but Toruan’s fingers tightened till the knuckles greyed. “Granted that they
keep me like a prisoner of state, can you honestly say that matters are as bad
as you showed them to be? Or that I am that perfect a fool?”

“I never thought you a fool, my lord,” Toruan said. “But you
are cut off here from anything that hints of reality.”

“Who put you up to this? My mother? The temple? My court in
Keruvarion?”

The proud eyes lowered; the eunuch hid his face behind his
cup. “I did receive a messenger from the empress mother. But that was after we
decided to do it, my lord. We’ve been in the towns; we’ve traveled the roads.
We know what people are saying to one another, and what they’re threatening to
do.”

“Rebellion against the barbarian on the throne?”

“That, my lord, and more.”

“Surely not,” said Estarion. “I’m here; I came as I was
ordered to come; I’ve taken what’s mine, and done what’s expected. Those are
old grievances and empty threats.”

“They are not,” said Toruan, “my lord.”

“So,” said Estarion. “You were put up to it. Who was it who
wrote the songs for you? Iburan? He’s a fine fast hand with a verse, and he
doesn’t get on well with the high priestess here. He’d want to wake me up to
that, I’m sure. As if there were anything I could do. I’ve no authority inside the
temple.”

“My lord,” said Toruan, “I spoke to the priest, I confess
it. He was your mother’s messenger. He said that you’d protect us even if you
were angry; you’re too honorable, he said, and too honest to do otherwise. But
we had our play all written. We were going to take it to Keruvarion.”

“What, and foment rebellion there?” Estarion was not angry,
not yet, but his temper was slipping its chains. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve
incited the High Court almost to riot? Not that they’d ever show it, but they were
running over lists of poisons, and hiring assassins.”

“You needed to know,” said Toruan, as stubborn as ever a
northerner could be, and as perfect an idiot. “The priest thought so, and the
empress mother. You won’t listen to them. They thought you might at least give
me a hearing.”

“So I did,” Estarion said. “So did the court; and I’ll be
hard pressed to get you out of here unpoisoned. What do you want me to do? Go
back to Keruvarion?”

“Open your eyes to what’s outside of this palace.” Toruan
flinched a little at Estarion’s expression, but went on stubbornly. “It’s bad,
my lord, and getting worse. They use your presence here as a weapon. They call
you conqueror. They swell your Guard into an army, and have it raping and
pillaging Kundri’j.”

“When I was in Keruvarion,” said Estarion, “they called me
conqueror. They had me scorning to set foot in their country, and despising all
that they were. At least now they have me here to carp at.”

“They killed a tax collector in Ansavaar.”

“They have a deplorable propensity for killing tax
collectors. That was seen to, surely?”

“They overran the troops sent to punish them, and fortified
the town, and there they sit. They’ve declared themselves free of your sway.”

“Have they?” Estarion half-rose, then sat again and sighed.
“It will be settled. I’ll attend to it.”

“Then you’ll attend to the rest, too? It’s a plague, my
lord. You know what sickness is, how it comes to a man, and he passes it to his
wife, and she to her baby, and the baby to the cat, and round it goes. And
maybe they all live, and maybe one or more of them dies. And that is the way of
the world. But if it goes beyond the one house, if it runs through the
town—then it’s not so little any longer. It’s pestilence. It wipes out whole
cities, strips the land of its people, lays low the demesne. That’s what this
is, my lord. It’s not a little thing, a rebellion that refuses to die of age
and exhaustion. It’s young in strength but old in rancor. It won’t give way at
a word, even if it’s you who speak it.”

“How odd,” mused Estarion. “They spend all their strength to
see me here, and now that they have me where they wanted me, they do their best
to lure me out again. Aren’t they ever satisfied?”

Toruan did not understand, or did not care to. He said, “My
lord, I won’t say you’re badly advised, but you aren’t hearing what goes on
outside of the palace. It’s worse than it was when you came here. Much worse.
In some towns I’m afraid for my skin. They see it, you see, and start to
growl.”

“My guards have had no trouble in Kundri’j,” Estarion said.
“Nor did I, when I went out. I was barely noticed.”

“This is Kundri’j,” said Toruan. He looked about at the
chamber in which they sat. “How do you stand it, my lord? You must be
suffocating.”

“One learns to endure it,” Estarion said honestly enough,
and somewhat to his own surprise. “Tell my mother that it was a valiant effort.
She and her priest will see that you are protected. You may choose to take
yourself and your people to Keruvarion, where your art is a new and wonderful
thing. But,” he said, “you may not be wise to give them your tragedy of folly.
They don’t hire assassins. They see to it themselves, and promptly.”

“Our play was for you,” said Toruan. He set his cup aside
untouched, and dropped to his knees in front of Estarion. “My lord, we are
yours, all of us, but we’re a vanishing few in the mobs of Asanion. They’ve
been stirred up. Their old hates are new again, and their fears are stronger
than ever. Maybe you can’t go out among them as you could in Keruvarion, but if
you knew, if you kept yourself aware of them, all of them—”

“I am as aware as emperor can be,” Estarion said. He was
weary again, aching with it. He had hoped for an evening’s pleasure, for an
hour’s brief escape from his troubles, and this well-meaning idiot had only
made them worse.

He was not to blame. The empress had got at him, and Iburan,
who thought himself subtle. They would know how little Estarion was deceived by
their cleverness.

He dismissed the eunuch as politely as he could, sending him
under guard to the empress’ palace and charging the guards to defend him with
their lives. It would, he hoped, suffice.

He almost smiled, thinking of the court, how appalled the
lords had been, how hard they had fought to conceal it, because the emperor
professed himself pleased. No doubt they thought him a simpleton.

He wandered his rooms, more restless than he had been since
he could remember. Servants kept creeping out of shadows, begging to serve him.
He herded them out. The guards were more tenacious, but they could at least be
banished to windows and corridors.

He tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. He read a few
lines in his book. He drank more wine than he should, enough to make him
light-headed, and walked for a while on the roof of his summer-room, under a
sky as restless as he was, until the rain drove him in.

As he came down from the roof, a shadow met him. He smiled
with the first honest pleasure he had known since morning. “Yelloweyes,” he
said. “I’ve missed you.”

Korusan did not say anything. That was like him. Estarion
passed him, drawing him in his wake, chattering of he knew not what. It was a
restlessness of the tongue, close kin to that of his feet.

Somewhere in the maze of rooms, between the room of silks
and the armory with its golden panoplies, Korusan stopped. Estarion’s shadow
was cold without the Olenyas in it. He turned.

Korusan stood as straight and stiff as the pillar beside
him, with eyes that burned. Fever, thought Estarion.

The boy was perfect Asanian: he hated to be touched. But
Estarion was not to be thrust aside for this. “You’re burning up,” he said.

“It is nothing,” said Korusan. But he shivered.

He was ill, there could be no doubt of it. Estarion
considered the wisdom of knocking the child down and sitting on him and shouting
for the physician.

It would be a fair battle. Korusan was arming for it
already, tensing under his hand. He lowered it from the brow to the shoulder,
which was rigid. “You should have this seen to,” he said.

Korusan’s hand flew up. Estarion braced to be struck aside;
froze as the boy’s fingers closed about his wrist. “I am often ill,” Korusan
said. His voice was coolly bitter. “It is nothing to fret your majesty. It will
pass as always, and leave me no worse than before.”

“And while it’s passing? How well will you guard me, when
you can barely stand up?”

“I can stand!” he snapped, wavering as he said it, but not
loosing his grip on Estarion’s wrist.

Estarion tripped him, caught him as he fell, braced for a
fight. Korusan offered none beyond a sulfurous glare. Estarion laughed at it
and carried him inward.

o0o

The bathing-room was warm and quiet, its pool of ever-flowing
water murmuring gently to itself. Estarion set Korusan on the rim and held him
there. “Bathe,” he said. “It will cool you down.”

Korusan stared at the water as if he had never seen its like
before.

“You do bathe, I suppose,” Estarion said with tight-strained
patience. “Or do you lick yourselves over like cats?”

Korusan hissed at him, so like a cat that he laughed. “We
bathe. But not,” the boy said, “in public.”

“I’ll turn my back,” Estarion said.

Korusan lifted his shrouded head, as haughty as any emperor,
and as short in his temper. Estarion met his glare, gold to gold.

Something shifted. In Estarion, in Korusan; he did not know.
Maybe the earth had shrugged in its sleep.

Gold, he thought. They were not the color of coins; that was
Haliya, as close as made no matter. They were clearer, a color between amber
and citrine, now as flat and hard as stones, now as soft as sleep. Thick long
lashes, dark gold, and fine arched brows a shade lighter, and skin as clear and
fair as ivory.

Korusan lowered the lids over those remarkable eyes, and
raised them again, almost as if he were succumbing to sleep. Estarion caught
him before he could tumble into the water. But he was steady on his feet.

He was taut still, but not as rigid as before, easing
slowly. He reached up past Estarion’s arm, and with sudden force, sharp enough
to make Estarion start, stripped off headcloth and veil.

Estarion’s breath caught. Even after those eyes, he had not
expected beauty such as this: an image carved in ivory. No line drawn awry, no
mole or blemish, no flaw save two thin crimson scars that ran straight and
deliberate from cheekbone to jaw. They only made him the more beautiful.

“If you had been a woman,” Estarion said, “singers would be
making songs of you.”

“Not in Asanion,” said Korusan. He ran fingers through
cropped yellow curls, pulling out tangles with ruthlessness that made Estarion
wince. “It is wanton to sing of a lady or an Olenyas.”

“Or a prince of the court?”

“That,” said the boy, “I am not.” He said it strangely, but
that was his fever: he was shaking again, cursing himself. With the same
ferocity that had startled Estarion when he bared his face, he wrenched free and
shed his robes and his weapons, all of them.

Beautiful, yes, and clad in scars and a single ornament, a
topaz on a chain about his neck; and so young, caught between boy and man,
slender but with breadth coming in his shoulders, taut-muscled as a swordsman
must be, light on his feet as a dancer, even dizzy with fever. This time as he
swayed, he caught at Estarion. His hands fisted in robe and tore.

Estarion had stopped trying to guess what the boy would do
next. He was not afraid. Probably he should have been. A bred-warrior’s body
was as much a weapon as one of his swords, and if anything more deadly. But
there was no death here, unless it were in Korusan’s sickness.

The air was cool on his bared skin. He shivered lightly.
Korusan touched him. A spark leaped, jolting them both. He laughed. Korusan
recoiled; then sprang, lion-swift, lion-strong, bearing him down in a tangle of
limbs and robes.

Estarion struck tiles hard enough to jar the breath from
him, guarding his throat by instinct, seizing what presented itself: a
shoulder, a wrist. Korusan twisted with boneless suppleness. His body was
burning hot, fever-dry. Estarion let him hurl himself sidewise, guiding him,
toppling them both into the water.

It closed over them. Korusan’s legs locked about Estarion’s
middle. Estarion thrashed. Drown—he would drown—

He burst into blessed air, gulped, scrambled feet beneath
him. Korusan clung with blind ferocity. Gasping. Weeping? Face buried in
Estarion’s shoulder, arms inextricable about his neck, chest heaving with sobs
or with battling for breath. His weight was as light as it was strong.

Estarion’s hand found itself stroking the boy’s back. Its
sleekness was all muscle, its bones just perceptible—thin as Asanians went, and
smooth as they all were, like ivory. And cooler, maybe, than it had been.

He sank down carefully, braced against the pool’s side,
alert for mischief. But Korusan offered none. His breathing quieted. His clasp
loosened, though it did not let go.

It was trust, Estarion knew with sudden clarity. Estarion
could thrust him under and hold him, and he would not fight.

His head moved on Estarion’s shoulder, from side to side as
an infant’s will, seeking the breast. But no infant this. One hand crooked
still about Estarion’s neck. The other explored the long curve of neck and
shoulder and arm, and up again, over belly and breast and throat. Pausing
there, as if tempted; but tangling itself at last in beard. Estarion looked
down past clenching fist into eyes gone wide, all pupil, in a face as white as
bone, and the blood-red slash of scars.