Arrows of the Sun (45 page)

“I’ll have to do something about that,” he said to Korusan,
who rode at Umizan’s flank.

The Olenyas was mounted on Chirai. Umizan would not permit
his lord another mount, and it had seemed a waste of good senelflesh to leave
the dun behind. So Korusan had charge of him, and not unwillingly, either, as
far as Estarion could see.

Estarion hooked a knee over the pommel of his saddle, riding
at his ease. “I can’t live in horror of my own palace. What’s to be done, do
you think? Pull down the Golden Palace? Build a new capital?”

“First you need a solid empire for it to be capital of,”
said Korusan.

“Granted,” said Estarion, “and a solid self to rule it.
Sometimes I despair of that.”

“A rather cheerful despair,” Korusan observed.

Estarion unhooked his knee and swung down his leg and
touched Umizan into a gallop, all in one swift reckless movement. Umizan
reached the crest of the hill in three long strides, and plunged into a deep
bowl of a valley.

No scouts, no token of alarm. Safe, then.

Estarion let the stallion run as he would. The road was
steep but smooth. A town huddled at the valley’s end where it opened into sky,
but the land between was cropland, fallow with winter.

No one passed there. People kept to their walls and traveled
as little as they might, between winter and the rumor of war.

He was well ahead of his escort. A glance back showed them
on the crest, spreading out as if to scan the valley. Then they poured down
into it.

Umizan slowed to a hand gallop, tossing his horns. Estarion
laughed into the wind. It had a bite to it. Rain again by morning, his bones
judged, or even snow.

What at first he had taken for a cairn or a shrine set up by
the road stirred as he approached it. Umizan shied and skittered sidewise.

Estarion clutched mane, clamped knees to the stallion’s
sides. Umizan wheeled, snorting, horns lowered.

Estarion glared down the lance-length of them. Bright black
eyes glared back. “That took you long enough,” said a voice he had thought
never to hear again.

“Sidani?” Estarion slid from the saddle, keeping a grip on
Umizan’s reins. The stallion stamped, still in a temper: and well he should be,
fool that he had made of himself. “Sidani,” Estarion said. He felt the grin
break out. “Where in the hells have you been?”

“Ansavaar,” she said. She nudged the stone at her feet. It
shifted, yawned, opened eyes that gleamed green.

“Ulyai!” Her snarl and slash drove him back. He gasped,
shocked. It was Ulyai—he could not mistake her. “Ulyai. Have you forgotten me?”

“Hardly,” Sidani said. She pointed with her chin.

Ulyai’s back rippled. Three pairs of eyes appeared above it,
two green-blue, one blue-gold. Three pairs of ears pricked.

One by one the cubs tumbled over their mother’s flank and
rolled to the ground. Her foreleg caught and pinned two. The third, the one
whose eyes would be gold when they were done changing, eluded its mother’s
grasp and leaped upon Estarion’s foot, attacking it without mercy.

He swept the little beast up, wary of claws and infant
fangs, and met snarl with snarl. The cub’s jaws snapped shut. It stared
wide-eyed.

It was darker than the others, almost black. “Yes, I look
like you,” Estarion said to it.

Him. It was a he-cub. It let him ease it into the crook of
his arm. In return he let it gnaw gently on his thumb. It began to purr.

“I expect you can explain this,” Estarion said after a
while.

“I expect I can.” Sidani shouldered one of the two she-cubs
and lifted the other onto its mother’s back. She looked much the same as ever.
Thinner, maybe, but then so was Estarion. He saw no sign of the sickness that
had beset her in Induverran.

Estarion looked over his shoulder. His escort had come up at
last. He called out to them. “Look! See who’s been waiting for us.”

His Varyani were far from displeased, but his Asanians did
not know what to make of it. He laughed at them. “Here’s a friend I’ve been
missing. Guard her well, guardsmen. She’s as kin to me.”

o0o

Fine kin, Korusan thought, eyeing the wanderer woman as
she chose one of the remounts—a cross-grained, slab-sided gelding that seemed
to know her, for it lunged with teeth bared and then stopped, skidding, and all
but fell over on its rump. She grasped it by the horns and shook it; it let its
brow rest briefly against her breast. She swung abruptly into the saddle,
taking no notice of the reins, and wheeled the beast about.

She had Estarion’s reckless temper, that was certain, and
his fondness for monstrous cats. All through her juggler’s tricks, the ul-cub
kept its place about her shoulders.

Estarion had another as dark and gold as he was, and the dam
played mount to a third, pressing up against the black stallion’s shoulder. The
Varyani mounts snorted and sweated but endured; likewise the Lady Haliya’s mare
and Korusan’s dun.

The rest of the Olenyai were not so fortunate. Those who
were not forcibly dismounted were run away with, or fought a pitched battle of
man against maddened senel.

The woman surveyed the carnage with an ironic eye. It paused
on Korusan, went briefly strange; then passed on. She sent her gelding forward
with a touch of the heel, caught Estarion’s glance, drew him after her. They
divided in a long circle, seeming slow but in truth very swift, herding
together the scattered seneldi.

Korusan followed slowly. Chirai was uneasy but willing,
snorting and brandishing horns as he passed the ul-queen.

She sat to watch the spectacle, and ignored him with queenly
disdain. Korusan endeavored to return the courtesy. He had heard of the palace
cats of Keruvarion; who had not? But their living presence was unnerving.

All his brothers’ mounts were caught, and all of his
brothers who had been borne away. It was bitter to be so humiliated before
their rivals from Keruvarion. They bore it well, sitting straight and stiff on
their shuddering seneldi.

The emperor faced them. He seemed to be searching for words
to salve their pride.

The wanderer rode her borrowed gelding down the line of
them, with the cub draped purring over her shoulders. “There now,” she said,
her own voice like a purr, both rough and sweet. “It’s only ul-cats. They won’t
eat you. Not while you serve your emperor.”

Cleverly put. It gave the Olenyai time and grace to set
themselves in order, but it warned them also, and showed them on which side
they might find this stranger.

They took the road again with the wanderer riding beside
Estarion, talking a great deal of nothing, to the emperor’s evident pleasure.
The two of them had met, it seemed, over an escapade of his, and parted over
one of hers. Where she had been since, or how she had come upon Estarion’s own
ul-cat and delivered the beast of cubs, she was not telling.

She was very skilled at that. Almost, Korusan thought, as if
she were Asanian.

o0o

The town at the valley’s mouth would not let them in. It
was no indication of disrespect, its lordling said. There had been sickness; it
might be plague. He invited the emperor’s escort to pitch camp in his fields
and offered a penful of skinny woolbeasts for their dinner, but more than that
he would not do.

He was lying. Estarion could not be such a fool that he
failed to know it, but he refused to storm the walls. “They’re not in open
rebellion,” he said, “and I’d rather camp under the sky than sleep under
another roof.”

It could have been worse thought of, Korusan admitted. Their
camping place was broad, level, and easily defended. They had tents, there was
wood and dung for their fires, and the woolbeasts were not too stringy once the
cooks had done with them.

Estarion did not fulfill Korusan’s greatest apprehension,
that he would take his ul-cats to bed with him. The cub was too young to leave
its mother for long, and she was content to idle by the fire with the wanderer
for a companion. The emperor’s tent was blessedly empty of animals.

The emperor’s desire tonight was hot but brief; he fell
almost at once into sleep. Korusan propped himself on an elbow, warm in the
other’s warmth, and considered the sleeping face.

It had become a part of him. He knew no other way to think
of it.

He laid his palm against Estarion’s cheek. Estarion did not
stir. He curved his fingers into claws, raked them softly through the curling
silk of the beard, down the smooth line of neck and shoulder, round to the
breast. Over the heart they closed into a fist.

“If the world were empty of you,” Korusan said, “I should
not wish to be in it.” His mouth twisted. “I meant to snare you. I snared
myself.”

Oh, most certainly he had. He did not know when it had
struck him. Perhaps that first morning, when he woke alone, and knew himself
empty without Estarion’s presence. Perhaps even before that—perhaps from the
moment he saw this outland emperor, this upstart, this rival, this enemy he was
sworn to destroy.

Estarion did not love him as he loved Estarion. Estarion’s
heart burned like the sun. Worlds basked in it, and it had warmth to spare for
them all.

Korusan’s was a fiercer, frailer, narrower thing, a spark in
the night. It had room for one love, and one great hate. Both of them the same.
Both fixed here, in this heart under his hand, in this beloved enemy who slept
oblivious, like a child or a blessed saint.

Korusan rose slowly. Estarion did not move. His branded hand
lay half across him, glinting gold in the light of the lamp. Korusan turned his
face away from it.

o0o

Robed, veiled, hidden in shadow, Korusan slipped from the
tent. The fire had died down. The camp slept but for the sentries and, rising
from beside the embers, the woman Sidani.

Brightmoon was high amid swift-running clouds; Greatmoon
hung low in the east, the color of blood. The twofold light struck frost and
fire in her hair, now white as the bright moon, now red as copper.

Her eyes gleamed on him. Her voice came soft, blurred as if
with sleep. “Hirel?”

Korusan stopped. He had misheard. She had not given him that
name.

She drew closer. They were nearly of a height. “Hirel? Hirel
Uverias?”

“He is dead.”

The words came flat and hard. She laughed. Moon-touched, he
thought. “You promised me. If there was a way, you would come back. I never
knew you’d come in the same body.”

And how in the hells had she known whose face he bore? He
felt stripped naked, he in his robes and his swords and his veils.

“Madam,” he said with control that he had learned through
hard lessoning, “you are mistaken. I am Olenyas; no more, if no less. The last
of the Golden Emperors is dead.”

“No Olenyas ever born could claim those eyes.” She was close
enough now that he felt the heat of her body, breathed the startling sweetness
of her breath. She must have been beautiful in youth, a beauty to break the
heart.

It was in her still, here under the moons. She raised a
hand.

He shied, but she was too quick. The air was cold on his bared
cheeks.

His hands leaped to his swords, but he did not draw them.
Her eyes held him fast. Great eyes, dark eyes, eyes to drown in.

“I always forget,” she said, “how beautiful you are.”

“You must die,” he said, gasping it. “You see my face.”

She laughed. “I am dead, child. Years dead. Here,” she said.
“Look.” She held up her hand.

Gold, gold turned to ash and grey scars; but there was no
mistaking the shape of it. He had kissed its image just this evening, held its
burning brightness to his cheek till he could bear it no longer: and Estarion
smiling, not knowing that Korusan’s trembling was pain—willing, joyful,
fire-bright pain. They branded their emperors in Keruvarion, branded and ensorceled
them; or the god did it, if one believed in gods.

“I tried to cut it out,” said the madwoman, soft and
deceptively calm. “I took the sharpest knife I had. I heated it in fire and
began to cut. It was no worse than the burning I was born with. But the god was
having none of it. The gold goes all the way to the bone, did you know? and
wraps about it. And when I thought to cut off the hand, it was the knife that
went instead, flared up and went molten and poured away. Thus the scars. The
cuts healed clean, but molten steel is a match for any god. It took away the
fire, and that I was glad of; but now it burns like ice.”

“Gods,” said Korusan. “You—are—”

“Sarevadin.” She smiled. Yes: he saw it now. Estarion
favored her, and in more than face. “You always were slow to know me.”

“I am not Hirel!” Korusan snapped. “I am Koru-Asan of the
Olenyai, and you are stark mad.”

“Of course I am. All the dead are.”

He gripped her shoulders. They were bone-thin, fire-warm,
and very much alive. “You are no more dead than I.”

“Exactly.” She closed long fingers about his wrists, not to
resist, simply as if it were her whim to know the swift pulse of blood beneath
the skin. “Whose get are you? Jania’s?”

His teeth clicked together.

“I never did approve of that expedient,” she said. “Fifty
brothers were a great inconvenience, but it was hardly kind to keep them locked
in prison their lives long, and no sons to carry on after they were dead. Did
any outlive me, do you know?”

“The last took his life before the fourth Sunlord died,”
said Korusan. He was falling into her madness, hearing her as if it were
nothing to him but a tale.

“Ah,” she said. “He lived long, for an Asanian. But Jania—I
won the field there. We married her to a man in the far west of the empire. He
was a good man, I made sure of that; he cherished her.”

“She hated you,” said Korusan.

“She did not,” said Sarevadin. But then, slowly: “Maybe she
did. She had hopes of me before I changed; and after, when I was as you see me,
I let her brother send her away. She had the spirit that covets empires. Pity
she wasn’t born a man, and that she had so many brothers.”