Arrows of the Sun (7 page)

“Were you born a fool,” Estarion asked, “or did you study to
become one?”

“Clearly you were born rude.” The stranger cast the line
long and low and level, as a darter flew. It barely brushed the surface of the
water.

Silver flashed. Line snapped taut. “There,” said the
stranger, but softly, almost tenderly. “There now.”

Estarion stared at the fish flopping and gasping at his
feet. Blank bliss had transmuted into blank rage, and thence into plain
blankness.

The stranger was a woman, he realized with a small but
penetrating shock. It was not obvious. She was whipcord-thin, dressed in
ancient hunting leathers, hair plaited as simply as a priest’s, although she
wore no torque. Her nose was as fierce an arch as his own, her skin as
velvet-dark, but her eyes were northern eyes, black in white, under brows as
white as the flash of her teeth when she grinned at him.

She was old: and that too was not immediately obvious, for
all the whiteness of her hair. Her skin was stretched taut over the haughty
bones. She still had her teeth, and she carried herself like a young thing,
with a light, arrogant grace that raised his hackles and set his pride to
spitting.

She brought in another fish as quickly as the first, with
ease that was like contempt. “You are a witch,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said the stranger. “But here I’m a fisherman.”

“Woman,” Estarion said. His tone was nasty.

“You’re jealous,” she said. “Touchy, too. Here’s enough for
your dinner and mine. Where’s your gratitude?”

“I’d have had my own dinner if you hadn’t helped me out of
it.”

“And whose fault was that? This isn’t milady’s fishpond,
where any idiot can drop a line in peace. There’s a fair to middling army over
yonder, and rakehells enough in it, and here are you, as if there was never a
danger in the world.”

“There isn’t,” he said.

“I walked right up to you. What if I’d been minded to stick
a knife in you?”

“I’d have known if you were,” he said. “Look here, whoever
you are—if this is his lordship’s personal pool, then tell him it’s his dinner
I’m fishing for, and would he mind not sending his servants to startle me out
of nine years’ growth?”

“You don’t need that much,” she said, measuring his length
against her own. She was middling small for a woman in the north: he stood a
head-height above her. She was anything but cowed. “And who says I’m anyone’s
servant?”

“You’re from the castle, aren’t you? You’re not Lord Peridan,
and you’re not his mother either, from anything I’ve heard.”

“Oh,” she said, rich with irony, “I certainly am not that
delicate flower of womanhood. I came here from Suvilien, but I was never a
bondsman there, nor anywhere on this wide earth. I’m no one’s servant but my
own.”

“And the emperor’s,” Estarion said. It was a devil in him, a
stab of wickedness. She did not know who he was, that was clear to see. He was
not about to enlighten her.

“Not even the emperor’s,” she said. “He doesn’t own the
whole world, or even the most of it.”

“What is there beyond the twofold empire? Wastes of sand or
wastes of ice—fine prizes for a lord who has everything.”

“The Realms of the Sun are great enough, but they’re no more
than a single continent on a single face of this wide and turning world.
There’s land beyond the desert, youngling, on the world’s bottom, and land
beyond the seas, both west and east.”

“And you’ve seen it?”

She paused to hook another fish. He was interested in spite
of himself; he hardly cared that she took her time in answering. “Some of it,”
she said at last, having freed the hook of its bright burden and cast again.
“The seas are wide, and some few of the ships upon them are brave enough to
sail out of sight of land. Or storm carries them, and they fetch up on isles no
man of our race has ever seen.”

“Are there people there? Or dragons?”

“People enough, who speak strange tongues, and reckon us
gods for that we sail on ships out of the sea. Dragons? Nothing so dull or so
common. Dragonels as big as hawks, yes. And fish with wings. And insects like
jewels, and furred beasts that sing like birds.”

“Stories,” said Estarion.

“Certainly,” she said. “But true enough for that.”

“But if they were true,” he said, “then wouldn’t the Sunborn
have conquered them?”

A shadow crossed her face, too brief almost to see. “If he
had known of them, he would have tried.”

“Someone will, you know. Eventually.”

“Or one of them will conquer us.”

“Not while I live,” said Estarion, forgetting his pretense.
But she did not seem to hear him. She was drawing in another fish, the largest
yet and by far the most determined to escape.

He lent a hand with the line. Together, hand over hand, they
brought the catch to shore.

“We’ll feed an army with this,” the stranger said.

“Not the one yonder,” said Estarion. “That would take a
whole boatload. But milord of Suvilien will have a dainty for his dinner.”

“He is a glutton,” she said.

It was hardly polite to say so, even if she had not been a
commoner. Estarion forbore to rebuke her. She would not have listened in any
case, and he had other matters to settle. “Do you have a name?” he asked her.

“Do you?”

“Estarion,” he said before he thought; and scowled. “You?”

She half shrugged, half smiled. “Many. Call me Sidani if you
like.”

Wanderer
, that
meant. And maybe, a little,
Exile
. It
fit her well enough. “Sidani,” he said, marking her with it.

“Estarion,” she said, still half-smiling. “I knew someone by
that name once. His hair was as red as fire, and he had a temper to match. He
married a priestess in Asanion. Fine scandal that was, too.”

“That was the last Prince of Han-Gilen but three,” Estarion
said, “and he died young, and if you knew him, you must have known him in your
cradle.”

“Oh, I am terribly old,” she said. “Are you named for him,
maybe?”

“It’s a common enough name in the south,” he said. “You
can’t be as ancient as that.”

“Why, youngling? Because you can’t conceive of anything
older than yourself?”

She wanted him to draw himself up haughtily and declare
himself a man grown, he could well see, and then she could go on laughing at
him. He said, “You’d have to be ninety at least, then, and you’d never be
roving the roads. You’d have yourself a house somewhere, and a chair with
cushions, and servants to run at your call.”

“I had that,” she said. “I wearied of it.”

“But—”

She had stopped listening. She gutted the fish with a knife
as lean and wickedly curved as a cat’s claw, and strung them on a coil of the
line, and presented them to him with a bow and a flourish. “Your dinner, my
lord.”

“And yours,” he said. He did not know what demon possessed
him, but he was not one to alter his word. “Come to camp with me. I can offer
you a place by the fire, and all the dainties you can eat, and good company,
too. Stories, even. Though maybe none as good as yours.”

She frowned. She would refuse, he could taste it. He cast
another lure. “You don’t want Lord Peridan to eat all your hard-caught fish, do
you?”

“That belly on legs.” She spat just to leeward of Estarion’s
foot. “Very well then. I’ll come. I hope you don’t regret it.”

So did Estarion. But if there had been evil in her, or any
sorcery, he would have known; and his head was not aching even a little. Rather
the opposite. He could not remember when he had felt as well as he did now. No
pain, no ache of knotted muscles, no constant press and fret of rank and duty.

She cleaned her knife with a knot of grass and sheathed it
at her belt. There was nothing feminine in the gesture, and everything female.
He wondered how he could ever have failed to see that she was a woman.

“Well,” she said in her deep sweet voice—nothing male in it,
and nothing old either. “Are you going to dawdle the day away?”

“Yes,” he said, to take her aback; then he laughed. “Come
then, lady and stranger. Try your wits on the emperor’s men.”

Estarion’s return was somewhat less calamitous than he had
feared. The camp was quiet; alarmingly so. Lord Peridan sat in the middle of it
in a massive sulk.

“The least,” he was saying—growling—“the very least his
majesty could do is to be present when his loyal vassal comes to attend him.
Comes, it should be needless to say, at no little cost of time and
inconvenience, not to mention the danger to his digestion, to dine at his
rustic table, when the table in that lord’s castle is renowned for its
excellence, not to mention its comfort, and furthermore—”

Estarion swept a bow before him. It brought his peroration
to a halt and began a new one. “And what, pray, are you? Who gave you leave—”

The man was a walking gullet, but he was a clever one. He
heard the gasps. His eyes darted round the circle that had opened to admit
Estarion. They settled on Estarion’s face.

The eyes, of course. Everyone always stopped at the eyes.
“Sire,” he said, as smooth as if the rest of it had been a litany of homage.

Estarion should not have spared a glance to see how the
stranger was taking this revelation. She betrayed no flicker of surprise, and
no repentance, either. The tilt of her brow almost pricked him to laughter.

He bit down hard on his tongue and schooled his face to
blandness. “Lord Peridan,” he said. “I trust your wait was pleasant. I bring a
gift, as you see: a dainty for your dinner. Will you share it with me?”

Lord Peridan looked as if he had swallowed one of Estarion’s
fish, sidewise.

“Uncleaned,” said Sidani’s voice in Estarion’s ear. He did
not jump—in that much, training held. And how in the hells she knew what he was
thinking—

No time now. He smiled at Suvilien’s lord. “There, sir. Sit
at your ease; Godri here will fetch you wine and whatever else you desire. And
how is your lady? And your lady mother? Your sons are well, I trust? Your
eldest son’s son—a fine tall lad he must be, and ready soon to come out from
among the women.”

“In the autumn, sire,” Lord Peridan said, warming perceptibly.

Either he had forgotten his grievances, or he was choosing
to play the game as Estarion led it. Estarion cared little which. This mountain
of lard was his best defense against the storm that threatened in his mother’s
eyes, and perhaps worse, in Iburan’s. He would keep it by him for as long as he
could, and he would charm it into complacency, or he was no son of the Sun.

As he set himself to play the courtier, Sidani made herself
a part of the camp. She did it with sublime simplicity: chose a fire, sat by
it, began to tell one of her stories. He was aware of her, distant and yet
close, as if she were a part of him; another thing to wonder at, but later,
when there was time to spare for things that mattered. For now it was enough
that she stayed.

o0o

“He has the gift,” the stranger said. “No doubt of that.”

Vanyi eyed her sidelong. The woman had come in with
Estarion, walking in his shadow as if she had a right to be there. He never had
got round to explaining her, nor had she seen fit to explain herself. She was
simply there. People acted as if she belonged with them.

Idiots. Courtiers. If it walked with the emperor, it was
his, and no one thought to question it.

Vanyi must have said it aloud. The stranger said, “What,
like the royal cats? I like that, rather.”

“What do you know of anything royal?”

“His thoughts exactly,” the woman said.

The fish had all gone to the great glutton of a lord, except
one that came by Godri’s hands, with his emperor’s compliments couched in the
elaborate phrases of the desert. She accepted it graciously, Vanyi granted her
that, and she showed a mastery of phrase that left Godri blinking in awe.

She did not, Vanyi noticed, include any of the many formulas
of unworthiness. Nor did she try to decline the gift.

“And why should I?” she asked of Vanyi. “I caught it.” She
divided it neatly and laid half of it on Vanyi’s plate. “Here, eat. It’s as
good as anything you’d catch at home.”

“Fish of the sea is surpassingly fine,” Vanyi said.

“But fish of the river is sweeter.” The stranger disposed of
hers with a cat’s neatness and economy, and followed it with a noble quantity
of lesser meats. In the middle of them she tilted her chin in the gesture that,
where Vanyi was born, meant greeting, and said, “Sidani, they call me.”

“Vanyi,” said Vanyi. A mage guarded her name; but courtesy
was older than magery, and deeper rooted.

This was not a mage. Vanyi was almost certain of that. Not a
priestess, either. And yet she had an air of both.

Maybe it was simply age, and arrogance that put Estarion’s
to shame. They were all like that in the north. They called southerners
servile, and sneered at the grovelings of the west. Imperial majesty meant
nothing to them except as they partook of it. They never forgot that the
Sunborn was king of Ianon first, and Ianon was the heart of the north.

“I’m not Ianyn,” Sidani said, “though my father was. I’m
everything and nothing.”

“You look Ianyn,” Vanyi said. And stopped. “How do you do
that?”

The dark eyes were as blankly innocent as a child’s. “Do
what, priestess?”

Read my mind,
Vanyi said without words.

Nothing. No flicker of response. The mind before her was a
clear pool, transparent to the bottom, and thoughts in it as
quicksilver-elusive as fish. One, caught, was pleasure in the honeycake she
ate. Another held nothing more or less terrible than Vanyi’s own face, too
white and sharp for beauty, but the stranger reckoned it splendid.

Vanyi did not like enigmas. Her body tensed to rise, to get
away. Her mind held fast. This was danger. Not for herself, she never feared
that, but for Estarion.