Arrows of the Sun (49 page)

“What, and made martyrs, but taught no lasting lesson?”

“Lessons are best taught quickly.”

“Maybe.” He pulled the coat from its wrappings and shook it
out, and sighed. No. Not for this. He must be as Asanian as he could manage,
however it galled him.

“Where’s your shadow?” Sidani asked.

“Resting.” Estarion dropped the robe he had been wrapped in
and reached for the first of the ten.

“Are you sure of that?”

He whipped about, plait lashing his flanks. “What are you
saying?”

She shrugged. “I wonder if you ever noticed whose face he
wears.”

“What, the Lion’s mask? Yes, he has it. I’d be astonished if
he weren’t a cub of that litter.”

“And it doesn’t concern you that he might have ambitions?”

“Korusan?” Estarion laughed. “Korusan’s ambition is to reach
his twentieth year. If he manages that, he’ll go for Master of Olenyai.”

“Not emperor?”

Estarion went still. “He loves me.”

“Do you love him?”

“Is that any affair of yours?”

“Do you?”

He thought of driving her out. But Sidani was not a tamed
creature, nor one to yield to mere proprieties. He set his teeth and answered
her. “If anyone holds my heart, it is one who does not want it. My Goldeneyes . . .
have you ever been the half of a thing, and known that there was another, and
it was nothing that you ever expected?”

Sidani’s eyes closed. Her face was stark. “Yes,” she
whispered. “Yes.”

Estarion stopped, drew a breath. He had not looked for that
of all answers. “You don’t call that anything as simple as love. It has no
name. It is.”

Her eyes snapped open. “You have no right to understand so
much.”

“Why? Because I’m young and a fool?”

“Because he isn’t dead yet. You haven’t had to live without
him.”

“I hope I never may.”

“Then you’ll be dead within the year.”

Estarion shivered. He was naked and the room, though heated
with braziers, was chill. “Are you prophesying?”

“I hope not.” She moved toward one of the braziers and stood
over it, warming her hands. “Go carefully, young emperor. Watch every shadow.
There’s death here, surer than ever it was in Kundri’j.”

“Yes,” he said. He put on the first of the robes. It was
silk, and cold, till it warmed to his body. When he reached for the second, he
found her hands on it, and her eyes behind that, daring him to refuse.

She helped him to dress, unplaited his hair and combed it
and netted it in gold. Somewhere she had been a bodyservant, maybe, to have
learned such lightness of hand. When the tenth robe was laid atop the rest, she
turned him to face her.

Her grim mood was gone. She smiled her old, wild smile. “Oh,
you’re a beauty, you are. If I weren’t five times your age, I’d have you on the
cushions in a heartbeat.”

He was as reckless as she, when it came to it. He swept her
backward and kissed her thoroughly, and set her on her feet again.

She looked wonderfully startled. He left her so, walking
lightly to the ordeal of the banquet, trailing robes and gold.

o0o

There were robes for Estarion again in the morning, and
gold, but of Sidani there was no sign. Estarion wondered if he had frightened
her into flight. That would hardly be like her; but who ever knew what she
would do?

The night had been quiet. Korusan came in as Estarion
readied for sleep, looking bruised about the eyes but protesting that he had
slept.

Estarion forbore to press him. It was not true, what Sidani
had suggested. This was Olenyas only, whatever his face, and he lived to serve
his lord.

And if that was love, to see him so, and love was blind,
then so be it. Estarion could not be other than he was; he could not learn to
start at every shadow.

Korusan was in one of his muted moods, when he wanted rather
to fold himself in Estarion’s warmth than to dance the battle-dance that always
ended in another dance altogether. Estarion was content to hold and to be held.
He fell asleep so, though he thought that Korusan lay awake. The golden eyes
were open, the last he remembered; and when he woke they had not changed, nor
did the boy seem to have moved nightlong.

o0o

They went out together, man and shadow, in a swelling
crowd of attendants. The cold was less this morning but still keen enough to
cut, the square of the palaces as crowded as it had been before, but its
center, by the fountain, stood open. Lord Shurichan’s men had raised a platform
there and set the whipping-posts upon it, and ringed it with guards.

For Estarion there was a throne on the steps of the palace.
The high ones waited there, muffled against the cold. He knew his mother’s
slender height in a cloak of ice-white fur, Iburan’s massive solidity, the
thickset golden-armored bulk of Lord Shurichan, the liveries of guards:
Ansavaar’s black and bronze, Keruvarion’s scarlet and gold, plain Olenyai
black.

When he came into the sun with Ulyai and her cubs at heel,
all that throng bowed down like grain before a gale. All but his Varyani. He
grinned at them. None of them smiled. The strain of dwelling in Asanion was
taking its toll.

He sat in the tall chair. Ulyai stretched at his feet; her
she-cubs, unwontedly subdued, crouched in the hollow of her side. The he-cub
snarled at the press of people and sprang into Estarion’s lap, where he settled,
tensed as if on guard. Estarion rubbed his ears until he eased a little, but he
would not relax his vigilance.

Merian came to stand beside and a little behind him. He
slanted a glance at her. “Trouble?” he said.

“Possibly.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. It would be
a pretty picture: mother and son, empress and emperor, her white cloak and his
scarlet against the gold of the throne. “Are you speaking to me again?” she
inquired.

“Did I ever stop?”

“Often.” She sounded more amused than not. “You could have
forbidden me my pleasures.”

“And made them sweeter? Pity I didn’t think of that.”

She laughed softly. She looked young this morning and beautiful
in white and green, with gold in her hair. It was impossible to hold a grudge
against her, however great her transgression. And what had she done but love a
man worth loving?

She should have told
me
, whined the small mean thing that laired in Estarion’s heart. But her
laughter was too sweet, and she too much beloved, for all the sparks they
struck from one another. He reached impulsively, caught her hand, set a kiss in
the palm.

She smiled. “I think that you quarrel simply for the
pleasure of forgiving me after.”

His heart was too full, almost, for speech. But he found his
famous insouciance and put it on. “What’s life without a good fight?”

She leaned lightly against him, arm about his shoulders. He
knew better than to think that any of it was uncalculated. She guarded him so,
and claimed him for her own. But there was love in it, and pleasure in his
nearness; a pleasure that warmed him even in the bitter wind.

A stirring on the crowd’s edges marked the coming of the
prisoners. The banners over them were Estarion’s, and Shurichan’s flying lower,
as was fitting.

Guards with spears opened the way before and behind. Of the
captives there was little to see: a bobbing of bared heads, a pause and a
flurry as one of them stumbled.

The people were deathly silent. In Keruvarion they would
have been roaring, surging like the sea. Here they were still. Watching.
Almost, Estarion thought, like an ul-cat poised to spring.

Shurichan’s troops were scattered through them, and his own
who were not needed to guard his person, and on the roofs waited a line of
archers with bows strung. If any in that throng either rose in revolt or sought
to free the prisoners, he would meet with the point of a spear, or fall to an
arrow from above.

The executioner mounted the block and readied his whips. One
by one the prisoners ascended to face him.

He was big for an Asanian, almost as tall as Estarion, and
broad, and startlingly young, with the long gentle face of a woolbeast. He went
about his work with peaceful deliberation, taking no notice of the struggling,
cursing captives, or the cries of the cowards among them. They would believe,
maybe, that Estarion mocked them with clemency, and meant to see them flogged
until they died.

The last of them stumbled to his place with the aid of a
guard’s spearbutt. The executioner shook out the thongs of a many-headed whip,
smoothed them, laid the whip carefully on the table beside the rest. He turned
toward Estarion, bowing low.

“He is ready,” Lord Shurichan said, “majesty.”

Estarion hardly needed to be told. He raised his branded
hand. The sun caught it, shot sparks from it.

People flinched. His lips stretched back from his teeth, but
not in pleasure. None of this was pleasure. But he would do it. He could do no
less, and still be emperor.

Justice, he thought as the whip rose and fell. Some of the prisoners
screamed. Some cried and pleaded to be let go.

His stomach was a hard cold knot. His jaw ached with
clenching. The ul-cub in his lap had dug claws into his thigh. He welcomed the
pain.

They said that when the Sunborn wrought summary justice, he
opened his mind to the one who suffered it. Lest, he said, he grow too fond of
exacting punishment, and too free of his power to do so. No one had ever
pretended that he grew the softer for it, or the less implacable.

Estarion had no such greatness in him, and no such steel.
But he would not put a stop to this. These were fools; and fools they must be
seen to be.

The last was the dreamer, blue with cold and bleak with want
of dreamsmoke. He kept his air of insolence for all that, shook off the guards
who would have dragged him to his punishment, walked there on his own feet and
in his own time, and held up his hands to be bound to the post.

He managed as he walked to catch Estarion’s eye and hold it.
Estarion met the hard yellow stare with one as hard and, he hoped, as flat.

The dreamer shrugged, turned his back, barely flinched as
they stripped the robe from it. His shoulders were narrow and yellow-pale and
thin, sharp-boned like a bird’s. He did not seem to mind as the others had,
that he was naked. He grinned over his shoulder and wriggled his bony backside.

He did not scream until the tenth stroke, and then in a
strangled squawk, as if it had been startled out of him. It took the edge off
his mockery. Still he walked away when it was over, though his back was laid
open with weals that would turn to scars, branding his shame until he died.

Estarion rose with the ul-cub on his shoulders. The crowd
was quiet. The guards were watchful but at ease. They did not like what he did;
they had argued loud and long against it. But his mind was fixed. He would go
to the scaffold and speak to the prisoners, and let it be known in Pri’nai that
the emperor’s justice was more than a cold word out of Kundri’j. It was here,
present before them, and with his face behind it.

He began to descend the stair. His guards were ready for
him, likewise his Olenyai, and his mother and his mages.

They did not have his consent, but they defied him. If he
would indulge this folly, their eyes said, he would go full guarded, or he
would not go at all.

He could not quarrel with them now. And too well they knew
it, as surely they knew what comfort they were, warding his back with power as
with weapons.

Half of the way down, he paused. The prisoners stood on
their scaffold, held upright if need be. Some were waking to awareness that
this was all they would suffer; that they were alive, and would indeed walk
free.

There was a stir behind Estarion. Ulyai growled. Estarion
glanced back. One of the guards had stumbled. His fellows caught him. He
steadied, muttering curses at his own clumsiness.

Estarion smiled thinly. He was all nerves and twitches. His
captives stood waiting for him, their rebellion broken. He had not won in the
south, nor yet in all Asanion, but he was lord in Pri’nai; that, he had proved.

The way was open as it always was, the people on their faces
in homage. He would teach them to stand like men. But first he must show them a
Sunlord’s clemency.

He sprang lightly onto the scaffold, disdaining the steps
that led up to it. He had caught his guards for once off guard. That made him
laugh.

Ulyai lofted herself up beside him and crouched, tail
twitching, muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. Poor queen of cats; she hated Asanian
cities with a deathless passion. Her son, riding on Estarion’s shoulders,
howled with ul-cat glee.

No, Estarion realized too late. Rage. The cub dug in claws,
reversed himself, and sprang.

Estarion spun. The dreamer went down in a flurry of claws
and teeth and steel.

Steel?

The air was full of wings, wind, knives. Ulyai roared.

“Starion!” Iburan’s voice, great bull-bellow. “
Starion
! ’Ware mages!
’Ware mages
!”

Not mages, Estarion thought as the world slowed its turning
and the wind died to a shriek. Not only mages. A Gate. And in the Gate, death.

They boiled out of the air, men in white, armed with knives.
They sang as they came. They sang death, they sang oblivion, they sang numbing
terror. All their eyes fixed on Estarion’s face.

Claws hooked in Estarion’s knee. He snatched up the he-cub,
who was still snarling, bloody-mouthed but richly content.

He did not spare a glance for the dreamer. Ul-cats, even as
young as this, did not leave living prey.

With the cub again on his shoulders, he leaped down into the
roil that had been his escort. His throat was raw. He was shouting. Howling.
“Here! I am here! Take me, fools. Take me if you can!”

He stumbled. Body. White. Assassin—but—