Mistress of the Empire (38 page)

Light shone through the dome. It caught like fire on the golden throne, and cast triangular dapples across the pyramidal dais. Twenty levels down, it warmed the marble floors and flashed on the rail where the supplicants came and knelt for audience with the Light of Heaven. Despite the small slave boys swishing plumed fans, the Emperor’s throne room was airless. Officials sweltered under their finery, and the younger of the two present, Lord Hoppara, sat still. It was too hot even to fidget. The elderly Lord Frasai reclined upon his cushion, now and
again nodding under his ceremonial helm, as if he fought off sleep.

The five priests in attendance murmured, and tended their censers, adding the reek of incense to the already stifling atmosphere.

On the golden throne, weighed down beneath layers of fine mantles, and the massive plumed crown of the Empire, Ichindar looked too worn and thin for a man in his late thirties. The day had been fraught with tense decisions, and the session was not over. Once weekly, the Emperor held a Day of Appeals, when, from dawn to sunset, he was available to his people. He must sit in his chair of state, and give judgments for as long as supplicants should appear, until the hour of sundown, when the priests sang their evening invocations. Once, when a Warlord had held office over the Council, the Day of Appeals had been ceremonial. Beggars, low priests, commoners with petty grievances – these had gathered to hear the wisdom of a ruler who shared mystery with their gods. Ichindar often had napped in his chair while the priests acted as his voice, dispensing alms or advice as their gods allowed in righteousness.

Since then the nature of the Day of Appeals had changed. The supplicants who came to beg audience were often nobles, and many times enemies, seeking to weaken, extort, or break the imperial rule over the Nations. Now, Ichindar sat rigid on the golden throne and played the deadly Game of the Council, in words, in judgments, in the knowledge that the stakes were often his own supremacy. Sundown always found him exhausted, and many days he could not be trusted to recall the name of the consort selected that week to share his bed.

Today he dared not bend his head more than a fraction, lest the weight of his crown of state bow his neck. He flicked fingernails dusted with gilt toward the woman who sat on the white-and-gold cushion at his feet.

‘Lady, you should not be here, but resting in the cool gardens by the singing fountains.’

Heavily pregnant, and tired enough that her skin looked transparent, Mara dredged up a smile. ‘If you try to command me, I’ll spoil your image of authority by refusing to leave.’

Ichindar muffled a chuckle behind one wing of his pearl-crusted collar. ‘You would, too, you insufferably willful woman. When I named you Servant of the Empire, I created a monster.’

Mara’s smile vanished as she inclined her head toward the floor below, where the next supplicant approached and made his bow. Her eyes turned hard as precious metal, and the hand on her lap fan clenched white.

Ichindar followed her glance, and muttered what might have been a profanity under his breath. One of the priests twitched around in annoyance, then quickly faced front as the voice of the Emperor rang out through the domed chamber of audience.

‘Lord Jiro of the Anasati, know that you have the ear of the gods through our ear. Heaven will hear your plea, and we will answer. Rise. You have leave to speak.’

The slight snap to the consonants warned of Ichindar’s irritation. His hazel eyes were chilly as he watched the Anasati Lord straighten up from his obeisance and stand at the rail, his avid, scholar’s gaze trained intently upon the golden throne, and also the woman who sat before it, at the Emperor’s feet. Jiro bowed. Although he observed the forms of courtesy, his graceful delivery somehow managed to mock.

‘The imperial dais holds company today,’ he opened, shifting to Mara. ‘Good day, Lady of the Acoma, Servant of the Empire.’ His lips thinned in what a friend might have construed for a smile. An enemy knew better.

Mara felt a chill chase across her skin. Never before
had a pregnancy made her feel helpless; now, under Jiro’s predatory regard, she felt her clumsy heaviness, and that unnerved her. Still, she did not lose control and allow herself to be baited.

Ichindar’s voice cracked across the interval that followed, as Acoma Lady and Anasati Lord matched stares. Slender and worn as the Emperor was, his authority was real, a palpable air of force even in that enormous chamber. ‘If you have come to us as supplicant, Lord Jiro, you will not waste our time in idle social chat.’

Ever the smooth courtier, Jiro waved aside the reprimand with a flash of gold; he wore metal rings, his one affectation to flaunt his wealth. The rest of his attire was plain. ‘But my Sovereign,’ he protested in gentle familiarity, ‘I do come as supplicant. And my reason, I must admit, is a social one.’

Mara resisted an urge to shift uneasily on her cushion. What could Jiro have on his mind? His informal tone was itself an insult to the Light of Heaven, but not one that could be noted without setting shame upon Ichindar’s dignity. To react to Jiro’s presumption was to give weight to him as a man. No one who sat on a god’s throne could acknowledge so petty a slight.

The Light of Heaven maintained a frosty silence through the minute that Jiro stood with his brows suggestively raised. The subject under discussion would have to be pursued by the Anasati, were it to continue.

Jiro tilted his head, as if he only then recalled his true purpose. His face very subtly leered, and one eyelid drooped suggestively toward a wink. ‘I came because I have heard many rumors concerning your daughter Jehilia’s famed beauty. I ask a boon, my Sovereign: that you share your joy in her with your people. I ask to be presented to her.’

Mara reined back a burst of fury. Jehilia was but a girl, barely ten, and not yet come into her womanhood. She was not a woman of the Reed Life, to be gawked at by
men who were not relatives! She was certainly too young for courtship, or even for the suggestion that she should be entertaining suitors. Jiro’s subtleties were twisted and deep, that he should come here and dare such a thought in public. The ramifications were endless, not least the implied slight to the Light of Heaven’s manhood. Without sons, he must secure the imperial line through his daughter’s marriage, but how presumptuous the Anasati Lord was to imply credence to the gossip of the streets, that the Emperor would have no son, and that the ninety-second crowned head of the Nations would be the man who won Jehilia’s hand.

But angry words could not be spoken; Mara clamped her teeth, aware of Ichindar’s advisers standing red-faced with fury to the sides. Made sensitive to her own vulnerability, she was mindful that the three priests on the pyramid dais were affronted, but powerless to intervene. Lord Hoppara had taken a stranglehold on the place at his sash where a sword should hang, were weapons not forbidden in the presence of his Emperor. As father of the girl, Ichindar sat stone-still. The jewels on his mantle were frozen sparks, as if he had restrained himself from breathing.

For a long, tense interval, nothing stirred in the grand audience hall.

With unprecedented audacity, Jiro ventured a lazy-voiced addendum to his petition. ‘I have done some interesting reading recently. You do know, my Sovereign, that before your reign, seven imperial daughters were presented on or before their tenth birthday. I can tell you names, if you like.’

Mara knew this was a second slap against a man whose office had once revolved around memorisation of his family pedigree and other issues of religious context that had nothing to do with rulership. Ichindar would know of those seven girls, if not the mitigating circumstances of history that had forced their public presentation before
puberty. And his office was much more, now, than religious ceremony alone.

The sun shone hot on the topaz and marble floors, and the Imperial Guards stood like statues. Then, with icy deliberation, Ichindar set his clenched fists on the arms of the golden throne. Anger stiffened his face like a cameo against the mantling weight of his collars. Yet his voice was controlled to its usual regal pitch when he deigned to give answer.

‘My Lord of the Anasati,’ he said, precise consonants echoing off the high dome overhead, ‘it would please us better to present to you our son, when the gods choose to bless us with an heir. As to our daughter Jehilia, if the Lord of the Anasati enjoys paying heed to the gossip of her nurses, who boast that every infant they dote upon is blessed with extraordinary beauty, then we grant permission for a portrait to be made by one of the artists we patronise, and to be sent to the Anasati estates. This is our will.’

The traditional phrase rang into silence. Ichindar was not the figurehead his forebears had been but an Emperor fighting to retain his authority. Mara sat back, limp with relief; his handling of Jiro’s aggression had been exemplary. A portrait of a child! Ichindar had neatly taken the blade out of the dilemma. But, sadly, the greater issue remained. Jiro had dared to be first to voice the thought that Jehilia would become a husband’s path to the golden throne. She would not remain a pretty royal child for much longer, but would become a hotly contested prize in the Great Game. Once a girl torn wholesale from the Goddess Lashima’s order into the throes of the Empire’s bloody politics, Mara felt her heart go out to the child.

Ichindar’s hold upon the reins of rulership would slip on the day his eldest daughter married. Unless he could conceive a male heir, the traditionalists would use Jehilia
as a powerful means to undermine him, especially if her husband was a well-placed, powerful noble.

On the floor below, at the supplicants’ rail, Jiro crossed both arms over his breast in the time-honored imperial salute. He bowed before the Emperor’s honor guard, and arose, smiling. ‘I thank my Sovereign Lord. A portrait of Jehilia to hang upon my chamber wall would be very pleasing indeed.’

The dig was petty; Jiro had not quite dared to say ‘bedchamber wall,’ Mara noted with vindictiveness. But that he had stooped to so mean a comment in public hearing demonstrated his contempt for the man who sat upon the golden throne. And Mara realised, with a stab of intuition, that Jiro would not have been quite so vicious had she not been present. The taunt to Ichindar had been intended to goad her as well.

‘I fear this day I have not been a benefit to you,’ she murmured as the great doors boomed closed behind the Lord of the Anasati.

Ichindar started to reach out to her in sympathy, recalled his formal audience, and restrained himself before an adviser needed to step forth and intervene. ‘My Lady, you are wrong,’ he murmured back. His hair clung to his forehead, too damp with perspiration to be stirred by the fan boys’ efforts, and his fists had not loosened on his throne arms. ‘Had you not been present, strong as rock at my feet, I surely would have lost my poise!’ He ended with a viciousness he had kept back from the enemy who had angered him. ‘It is a very unscrupulous man who will stoop to attack through a father’s love for his child.’

Mara said nothing. She had known many such unscrupulous men. Her memory turned poignantly to two murdered children, a boy and a girl both under five years of age – the children of the late Minwanabi Lord – who died as a direct result of her actions. Her hand rested upon the mound of
her belly, over the swell of her unborn child. She clenched her teeth in resolve. She had lost a son, and another child by Hokanu she had never had the chance to know. Again she swore that the deaths of all of the young ones must not be for nothing. She would die and the Acoma name be as dust before the wrath of the Assembly of Magicians before she let Jiro reinstate the Warlord’s office, and bring back the unconscionable bloody conflicts that had comprised the Game of the Council in the name of honor.

Now that the first steps toward change had been taken, she was determined not to give back old ground.

Her eyes and Ichindar’s met, as if the thought had been spoken aloud between them. Then the doors opened, and the imperial herald announced the next supplicant.

It seemed a long time until sundown.

Hokanu stripped off his sweaty leather riding gloves. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded of the white-clad personage that stood blocking the doorway.

But the immensely fat servant did not budge. His gleaming, moon-round face went stiff with displeasure at the Shinzawai Lord’s poor etiquette, in showing such unseemly haste. The imperial hadonra was a man attentive to nuance, and he ran the vast complex of the Emperor’s private apartments in the palace with unflinching, cold-hearted proficiency. Moths did not infest the imperial closets, the servants went about their duties like oiled clockwork, and anxious husbands did not disrupt the hadonra’s morning round of inspection with commands better suited to the battlefield.

Fixed squarely in the vestibule’s entryway, the huge man folded meaty forearms. ‘You may not pass at this time, my Lord.’

Hokanu restrained himself from a pointed comment. ‘My wife, I was told, went into labor two days ago. I have
been riding on horseback at speed from my estates beyond Silmani since then, and have not slept. I will know if my wife is safe and well, and whether my heir was born whole, if you will kindly let me pass through to her apartment.’

The imperial hadonra curled his lip. The redolence of the barbaric creatures that permeated Hokanu’s presence was an offense. No matter how powerful the Lord, no matter that he was a staunch supporter of the Light of Heaven, he stank of his horseflesh, and he should have bathed before making an appearance in these hallways. ‘You may not pass,’ said the servant, unperturbed. ‘The Emperor has commanded a performance of sobatu for this morning.’ He referred to a form of classic opera, in the grand high style, of which only ten had been composed. Then, as if Hokanu were not educated, and the son of a preeminent house, the servant added, ‘The Imperial Shalotobaku Troupe are using the chambers beyond for their dressing, and as I need not remind you, none may lay eyes upon them but the Emperor’s immediate family.’