Captivity (23 page)

Niall, like the rest of the household,
courteously ignored the fact that I have not a single relative on
all of Eclipsis, no one to engage in family vengeance on my behalf.
As ‘Gravina Aranyi I could never entertain a man in my room. Even
in the great hall of Aranyi Fortress, or here in the rooms of our
spacious apartment in ‘Graven Fortress in the heart of the old
Eclipsia City, I was allowed to receive male visitors only if
Dominic could not, and then only properly chaperoned.
Theoretically, Dominic would be well within his rights—expected,
more likely—to kill Niall and me both should he find us in so
compromising a position. In our family, however, the rule was
understood not to apply to Dominic’s lover, but Niall liked
mischief.

At my repeated invitation Niall made an
elaborate show of peering furtively in all directions before
sidling sinuously through the door. The idea of wife and lover
betraying their lord with each other struck him as hilarious.
Sometimes I think he was tempted, aware, as he could not help but
be, of my feelings for him. The thrill of committing so flagrant an
outrage would almost compensate for the tedium of sex with a woman,
but Niall would not hurt Dominic or me for the sake of a joke. His
roguishness was always tempered by compassion.

Niall whistled at the danger—better even than
double infidelity—as I explained about the translated work. “Do you
have a death wish,” he asked. “Or do you think I have?” He was only
too happy to take a look. He sang the opening phrases softly under
his breath; he was always a quick study. He flipped ahead, scanning
the story, and asked to borrow it. I never had to spell things out.
Niall knew Dominic by then almost as well as I did.

When Dominic came home the evening of the
last day of the Assembly session, Niall greeted him with a kiss,
saying he had a gift he would like to present after supper. “Keep
your breeches buttoned through the soup course at least,” Dominic
said. Politics always put Dominic in a foul mood.

There were no lewd jokes once Niall stood up
and began to sing. His voice rang out clear and true, steadied by
peril, where many would have faltered. He was unaccompanied that
first night; I had not wanted to involve others in what might turn
out to be a fiasco. But all went smoothly. The opening line,
invoking the muse to tell of the hero’s great anger, could not help
but pique Dominic’s sympathetic interest. By the time Dominic
registered the fact of the story’s alien origin he was captivated.
Dominic had a stunned look on his face when Niall finished the
first chapter. I suspect they both had their breeches unbuttoned
before they reached the bedroom.

The next night Dominic expressed his
appreciation to me, the giver of so great a gift. He stopped my
attempt at self-justification with a mental caress.
Such themes
are universal—honor, love, fate,
he said as our minds
converged, our bodies soon to follow.
Without interesting
variations on the familiar, we would all be bored to death
.
During the night Dominic called me Briseis, the name of Achilles’
captive woman, whose seizure by Agamemnon sets the plot in motion.
“If anyone tried to rob me of such a prize,” Dominic said, his face
buried in my neck, “he would rather face Achilles’ wrath than
mine.”

Dominic wept unashamedly after supper many
nights as we went through the whole poem, a chapter at a time. Once
I overheard Dominic singing a phrase or two that pleased him. His
deep voice, musical even when speaking, is extraordinary in song. I
nearly swooned with rapture, entering the room silently and using
my
crypta
to request a private recital some night. But
Dominic was evasive, coldly furious—not with me exactly, but at
being found out. Since his voice broke, he said, he never sang.

There was nothing I could do but acquiesce,
and the storm passed. The
Iliad
remained a bond of pleasure
among the three of us. We had gone through the whole work twice in
the past six months, although it had been some time since we had
heard of Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow.

We worship Apollo on Eclipsis, one of many
manifestations of the sun god, but I had not thought of these
exalted gods and goddesses very often since leaving the seminary.
Women have our minor household deities; men no doubt have theirs.
Apart from viewing the eclipse there is little that one would call
formal worship in our daily lives.

But in the style of the poem, each character
is identified with an epithet: Achilles the swift runner;
Patroclus, rider of horses. Apollo is the supreme, deadly archer, a
role he does not play in his Eclipsian form, and there are a great
many bows and arrows in the
Iliad
. I could only hope that
Dominic would make the association. Like all Eclipsians schooled in
their oral tradition, Dominic has an excellent memory for such
things. I had staked my life, and all my family’s, on the belief
that Dominic would understand, and that Reynaldo would not.

When morning was but a promise barely readable in the
night sky, Reynaldo rose from his sleepless vigil and woke the
other bandits. The leader was calm at the beginning of this new
day, purposeful and optimistic. If there had been unanticipated
developments, unnecessary revelations and complications last night,
in the end everything seemed to point toward the spectacular
success he had worked so hard for.

As I also “woke” from my memories to my
death-like trance, I found it easy to read and even share some of
Reynaldo’s mind. What had horrified and disgusted me when I was
fully alive became merely another mental pattern to the minuscule
spark of
crypta
that animated me now. Like a mite living on
the surface of an eyelid, I inhabited the vast foreign territory of
my host as if it were the entire universe, and individual bumps of
what I had once seen as disfiguring warts or growths were now
magnified to the point of becoming only so many landmarks to help
in navigation.

Through Reynaldo I became aware of a distant
sound, hard to identify, from a location that was impossible to
pinpoint. It was irregular and faint, sometimes a frenetic multiple
tap tap tap
, other times more of a slow individual
thud…thud
. Reynaldo wasn’t sure it really was a sound.
Perhaps it was the feeling a person’s heartbeat creates inside his
head when he is excited, on the verge of the triumph of a lifetime.
He wanted to ask the others if they heard anything, but decided
better of it. What if they didn’t, or said they didn’t? What would
he do if his
crypta
told him they really didn’t hear it?

The sound seemed almost to be coming from
underground, from inside the mountain the castle was built against.
Maybe the mountain was trembling in preparation for an avalanche,
or a volcanic eruption, or a rockslide. Just as well they would all
be moving south soon, once the Aranyi men were killed and the way
was open. Reynaldo put the strange
tap tap tap, thud thud
out of his thoughts and studied his “daughter.”

Jana had also awakened early. She was quiet
and thoughtful this morning, no longer the defiant spitfire of last
night, but observant and cautious. She ate her rancid breakfast
quickly, squatting beside her adoptive “father,” while Reynaldo
smiled at her and praised her obedience.

The girl was an unexpected bonus to this
whole operation. Reynaldo had known there were Aranyi children, but
not that there was anything like this, this young female Dominic
Aranyi that he could possess eventually, not just as property, but
as a man can possess a woman, can produce children, amalgams of
father and mother. In a few years—how old was she? She must be
about eight, he guessed, judging from her height and her strength
and the way she had spoken last night. She would mature early.
Four, five years at the most until she was a woman. That was not
long to wait for such a bride. He dared to let genuine hope flower
in him at last.

While the light still retained the grayness
of predawn, Reynaldo ordered his men to their battle positions.
Despite all the rumblings of mutiny last night, there was no
hesitation, no reluctance, as the bandits hurried to retrieve their
bows and quivers from the castle’s armaments room and took up their
posts. Reynaldo’s rule was enforced by
crypta
; and whatever
their feelings, the men knew they could not expect mercy from
Dominic and his forces. They had no choice but to follow the plan,
strike first and hope the Aranyi men had brought some treasure, if
only for show, recompense for the trouble they would bring on
themselves by killing ‘Graven.

“Now, lass,” Reynaldo said to Jana, “now
you’ll see your new papa win a great victory.” He reached a hand to
stroke her hair, but Jana drew back, like a dog from an abusive
master, and Reynaldo dropped his arm. Time enough, with Aranyi
safely his and the battles won, to school his intended consort to
accept his touch. In the meantime he would treat her as he would a
frolicsome untrained pup fresh from its mother’s teat. He found a
length of sturdy rope, fashioned a harness around Jana’s shoulders
and tied the loose end around his own waist. Once the battle was
under way he’d have no leisure to think about her wild tricks. Jana
accepted the rope in sullen silence, without struggling. She had
her own thoughts, and would await the outcome of events, like
me.

It was a slow, tedious wait. Dawn broke with
a stunning display of summer lavenders and roses, the red sun burst
through low clouds, rays of pale flame pierced the dense treetops;
but from the woods beyond the ruined castle’s clearing, where
Dominic and Niall and their forces must be camped, there was no
sign of impending attack. Only Reynaldo’s
crypta
gave proof
that they were out there at all.

“Come on, you motherfuckers,” Reynaldo
muttered as the hours passed, as he stalked from ruined battlement
to jagged wall, as his men grew weary, their arms trembling from
holding their bows constantly at the ready, their eyes straining to
see the smallest movement at the fringes of the trees, their ears
pricked for any rustling. “Get your dicks out of each other’s
assholes,” Reynaldo said, enjoying a pun, “and we’ll give you a
real shafting.”

There was some sound: a flurry of ax blows,
the occasional crash of a tree falling. It had been going on for as
long as the bandits had stood in position, since there had been
enough light to see where the blade bit the wood, but there was no
hint of the purpose, or whether the Aranyi men would show
themselves and the results of their labor anytime soon.

Reynaldo shook his head in pity. They must be
building their siege ladders at the last minute. He had expected
better preparation from the renowned Aranyi troops. “Come on, you
bastards,” he said, louder now with greater confidence, “forget
your ladders. You’re fucked. Come and get it.”

Not until midmorning, with the sun halfway to
noon, did the Aranyi troops make an appearance. From the edge of
the trees a small force, maybe twenty men, Niall clearly visible in
the front, stepped a pace or two out of cover. The distance
accentuated the vulnerability of the neat little figures, the sun
picking out the occasional steel helmet or wristband clearly, fresh
faces gleaming against gray uniforms edged with black. Like an
atheist’s offering to the gods, their delicate beauty would go to
the sacrifice unappreciated by all but the priest with the
knife.

Reynaldo took a deep breath. “Let them come,”
he said, although it was almost unnecessary. The men knew the plan
as well as he did. “Wait until they’re within close range, then cut
them down like kindling.” It would be stupid to reveal their secret
weapons too soon, when the enemy was far enough away that not all
the arrows would hit their target with killing force or in a vital
area.

Jana saw her chance. She ran to the wall,
clambered onto a ledge. “Niall!” she yelled. “Niall, go back! They
have ar—”

Reynaldo only laughed. He yanked hard on the
leash, catching Jana adroitly as she tumbled off the wall. He put a
gloved hand over her mouth. “You don’t know when you’re beat, do
you lass?” he said, undisguised admiration in his voice. What a
daughter! What a wife she would make, worthy of a great man like
Reynaldo.

Jana’s shouts, brave as they were, had done
no damage. Although her voice could carry in the stillness of the
morning, it was too great a distance for any words to be heard
clearly. And since Reynaldo’s
crypta
didn’t travel far
enough to read Niall’s thoughts, he doubted that Niall could have
picked up Jana’s. At any rate, the Aranyi troops had not reacted to
her cries, but continued to stand exposed, making tantalizing
targets, just out of reach.

Of Margrave Aranyi there was still no sign.
All the better. Let him show himself after his meager little force
had been destroyed. They could hunt him down like an antlered buck
through the forest. The chase would be exhilarating.

Reynaldo kept Jana’s mouth covered while he
made sure of her. “If you don’t behave,” he said, “I’ll take you
down to your dead mother and baby brother, and lock you in. Do you
understand?” Jana nodded and Reynaldo removed his hand from her
face. “I want you to watch this. You must see it for yourself when
your old papa is killed. Then you will learn to love your new
papa.”

While Reynaldo had spoken to Jana the Aranyi
forces had advanced rapidly. As soon as he let go of her, he gave
the order to fire. But as he did, and as the archers rose as one
and let forth their deadly volley, the Aranyi forces, not spread
out in a line or semi-circle as expected, but huddled together in a
kind of long narrow column, raised large rectangular pieces of wood
and formed a protective covering over themselves.