Mistress of the Empire (63 page)

Mara raised her eyebrows, too sober to be amused, but wildly seizing upon the implications of this development. Right of death by combat was a Tsurani custom! Why should these Chakaha cho-ja honor such a tradition? ‘Did the tribunal that judged you grant your bequest?’

Lujan’s crooked grin of irony told her as much, before he answered, ‘At least I shall have the opportunity to chop at some chitin before they have my head.’

Mara stifled an inopportune rise of hysterical giggles at his vehemence. ‘Who have the Chakaha cho-ja selected as their champion?’

Lujan shrugged. ‘Does it matter? Their warriors all look the same, and the hive mind most likely ensures that they are of equal ability. The only satisfaction I may have is that I will be chopped to pieces in combat before their headsman gets his chance to cut my neck.’ He loosed a bitter laugh. ‘Once I would have considered such a death in your service
to be a warrior’s honor, and the paeans that would have greeted me upon my entrance to Turakamu’s halls would have been the only reward I desired.’ He fell silent, as if in deep thought.

Mara ventured conclusion of his statement for him. ‘But your concept of honor has changed. Now a warrior’s death seems meaningless beside the opportunities offered by life.’

Lujan turned a tortured glance to his Lady. ‘I could not have summed up so neatly, but yes. Kevin of Zun opened my eyes to both principles and yearnings that the Tsurani way can never answer. I have seen you dare to challenge the course of our entire culture, as no male ruler might have done, for fear of ridicule by his peers. We are changed, Lady, and the Empire is poised on the brink of change with us.’ He glanced around, as if to savor what life was left to him. ‘I care not for my own life; who have I to mourn after me who will not soon follow me into death when we fail?’ He shook his head. ‘It is the frustration of losing any opportunity to somehow … pass along what we have learned, that these insights will not perish with us.’

Mara spoke insistently to cover her own pang of fear. ‘Hokanu will be left, and our children, to carry on after us. They will somehow rediscover what we have, and find a way to act without blundering into this cho-ja trap.’ She let out a long sigh. Looking at her old companion, she said, ‘My largest regret, most strangely, is that of a wife and a woman. I’m everlastingly sorry that I cannot return to make peace with Hokanu. He was always the soul of sensitivity and reason before: something of importance must have prompted his behavior toward Kasuma. I maligned him unfairly, I think, by accusing him of a prejudice his nature would not allow. Now it’s too late to matter. I must die with the question unasked that could restore our understanding. Why, when I could easily bear another child that is male, did
Hokanu act so aggrieved when he learned that his firstborn was a daughter?’

Her eyes sought Lujan’s in appeal. ‘Force Commander, you are a man who understands the game between sexes well, or so I have been informed through kitchen gossip. The scullions never tire of describing the serving girls and ladies of the Reed Life who languish for your company.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Indeed, if they are to be believed, there are droves of such women. How is it that a husband as wise as Hokanu should not be gladdened by the birth of a healthy, unblemished daughter?’

Lujan’s demeanor softened, very near to pity. ‘Lady, did Hokanu never tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’ Mara demanded sharply. ‘I was harsh with my husband, and bitterly outspoken. So deeply did I believe his behavior was in the wrong, I drove him from me. But now I regret my hard-heartedness. Maybe Kamlio taught me to listen more carefully. For like these cho-ja of the Thuril territories, I condemned my husband without ever asking his testimony.’

Lujan stood a moment looking at her. Then, as if reaching some decision, he folded to his knees before her. ‘Gods forgive me,’ he murmured softly, ‘it is not my right to break confidence between a Lord and his wife. But tomorrow we will die, and I have always been your loyal officer. Lady Mara, I would not have you pass this life without the understanding you desire. Hokanu was stricken with a grief, but he would never have spoken of its cause, even had you returned and begged to hear. But I know what sorrow afflicted him. I was in the chamber when the healer of Hantukama informed your husband of what he, in his kindness, swore he would never reveal to you: that after the poisoning by the tong that cost you your unborn babe, you should bear but one more child. Kasuma was your last issue. Hokanu kept the secret because he wished you to
hold the hope of another pregnancy. His daughter is a joy to him, never doubt, and his consecrated heir for the Shinzawai mantle. But he knows, and is saddened, that you will never give him the son he longs for in his heart.’

Mara sat stunned. Her voice came out small. ‘I am barren? And he knew?’ The full import of Hokanu’s courageous resolve struck her, sharp as the most stinging thorn. He had been raised motherless and his blood father had been taken beyond reach by the Assembly of Magicians; Hokanu’s whole world had been one of male camaraderie, with his uncle, who became his foster father, and his cousin, who became a brother. This was the root of his longing for a son.

But he was also a man of rare sensitivity and appreciation for the company of intellectual minds; where another Lord with less heart would have taken on courtesans as his gods-given male right, Hokanu had loved her for her mind. His craving for equality in companionship had become realised in marriage to a woman with whom he could share the most inspirational of his ideas. He spurned the usage of concubines, the company of women of the Reed Life, the pleasures to be found with bought creatures like Kamlio.

Now Mara understood how he had been faced with a choice abhorrent to him: to take another woman to his bed, one that meant nothing beyond her capacity to conceive and breed, or to go without a son – to forgo the fraternity he had shared with his adoptive father, his brother, and Justin, whom he had given back to Mara for the sake of Acoma continuance.

‘Gods,’ Mara all but wept. ‘How stone-hearted I have been!’

Instantly Lujan was beside her, his strong arm supporting her shoulder. Mara sagged against him. ‘Lady,’ he murmured in her ear, ‘you of all women are not
insensitive. Hokanu understands why you reacted as you did.’

Lujan held her as a brother might, in undemanding companionship, as she ran through all the details to the half-painful, half-hopeful conclusion that if she died here, her beloved Hokanu would have Kasuma for his heir, and freedom to take another wife to bear him the son he longed for. Mara clung to that thought. At last, to escape her own woes, she said, ‘What of you, Lujan? Surely you do not contemplate the leaving of this life without regrets?’

Lujan’s fingers stroked her shoulder with a rough tenderness. ‘I do have one.’

Mara turned her head and saw that he seemed to be studying the woven patterns of the cushions. She did not press for his confidence, and after a moment he gave a wry shrug.

‘Lady, it is strange how life shows us our follies. Always I have enjoyed the favors of many women, but never held the desire to marry and be content with one.’ Lujan stared fixedly, self-conscious, but oddly freed from embarrassment by the fact that with the dawn, he must face an ending of life, an ending of dreams. The nearness of his accounting with Turakamu lent them both the solace of honesty. ‘Always, I told myself, my roving ways were the result of my admiration for you.’ Here his eyes flashed toward her in a glance of truthful adoration. ‘Lady, there was much about you for a man to appreciate, and a toughness that made other women seem … if not lacking, then at least smaller of stature.’ He made a tight gesture of frustration at the inadequacy of words. ‘Lady, our journey into Thuril has taught me to know myself too well, I think, for ease of mind.’

Mara raised her eyebrows. ‘Lujan, you have never been less than the exemplary warrior. Keyoke overcame his distrust of grey warriors to choose you above others to fill
his former post as Force Commander. In these late years I believe that you have come to hold as much of a place in his heart as Papewaio did.’

‘Now, there is a tribute.’ Lujan’s lips quirked toward a smile, and then hardened. ‘But I have been less than honest with myself, now that my spirit lies near to its reckoning. I am sorry, this night, that I never found any woman to share my hearth and home.’

Mara regarded the bent head of her Force Commander. Recognising that in some manner Lujan wished to unburden himself, very gently she said, ‘What kept you from starting a family and raising children?’

‘I outlived my master of the Tuscai,’ he admitted with a tightness in his throat. ‘The misery of a grey warrior cannot be described, for his life is outside society. I was a young man, strong, and skilled in arms. And yet there were moments when I very nearly did not survive. How would a child or a woman fare, were they to be left houseless? I saw the wives and children of my fellow warriors driven away as slaves, forever to wear grey and answer to the needs of a master who cared little for their comfort.’ Lujan’s voice sank almost to a whisper. ‘I see now that I was afraid that someday those children would be mine, and my woman become some other man’s to use as he chose.’

Now Lujan looked his mistress squarely in the face. There was an unnerving depth to his eyes, and a ring to his voice as he added, ‘How much simpler it was to admire you from afar, Lady, and guard your life with my own, than to live the possibility of the nightmare that even yet wakens me sweating from my sleep.’

Mara reached out and touched his hands, then kneaded them until they relaxed their furious grip. ‘Neither you nor any unborn child of yours will ever in this turn of the Wheel go masterless,’ she said softly. ‘For I very much doubt that either of us will escape this prison with our lives.’

Now Lujan did smile, a strange serenity to his bearing that Mara had never seen. ‘It has been my pride to serve you, Lady Mara. But if we do live past tomorrow’s dawn, I ask a boon of you, that you command me to find a wife and marry! For I think that with the magicians as your enemy, such straits as these might easily be repeated, and if I am to die in your service, I should prefer not to face the Death God with the same regret in my spirit a second time!’

Mara regarded him with a smile of deep affection. ‘Lujan, knowing you as I do, I doubt I shall have to command you to do what is clearly in your heart to do. But, we must win past tomorrow’s dawn.’ Crossing her arms as if to ward off cold, she said, ‘We must sleep, brave Lujan. For tomorrow will come.’

Sleep was impossible.

Since her strangely intimate exchange of confidences with Lujan, Mara felt no urge to converse. The Acoma Force Commander had shown no indication to sleep and settled cross-legged on his mat. The cho-ja had confiscated his armor along with his sword. Left the padded underrobe designed to protect his skin from chafing, he looked both undressed and vulnerable. Battle scars normally concealed by his raiment were exposed, and although he was as fastidious as any Tsurani officer, his last opportunity for a bath had been in an icy river current while enduring Thuril jibes. His clothing was greyed with dirt, and his hair spiked up into whorls from long hours under his helm. Muscled as he was, he seemed somehow diminished without his trappings and officer’s plumes.

Looking at him, Mara was forced to recognise his human side, his maleness that would never know fatherhood, and the incongruously tender comfort he had given with hands better accustomed to the grip of a killing sword. As if his coming fate held no consequence, he meditated peacefully, his soldier’s discipline forcing worries aside to husband strength against demands of battle.

Mara, despite every training of the mind garnered in the Temple of Lashima, was left without such solace. This time her mind found ease in ritual; if she was not feeling regret for loved ones who had been lost, she felt rage against an intolerant fate that condemned her to failure in protecting those still alive. Try as she might, her thoughts could not be forced to subside toward anything approaching tranquillity.

The ignominy of imprisonment without any way to contact her captors left her galled. The magical chamber effectively sealed the condemned away from all other living beings. Sourly, Mara wondered whether even gods could hear prayer in such a place. And with no windows, nor even the sounds of outside activity, the minutes dragged. Darkness itself would have carried a blessing of change, but the cho-ja globe drifted always, its light stark and constant.

The dawn would come, inevitably.

And yet for all the creeping agony of waiting, daybreak caught Mara unprepared. Her racing, trapped thoughts still circled, repeatedly reviewing events and questioning whether this action, or that word, or that decision differently handled might have won them alliance and freedom. Her futile pondering left her with a crushing headache. With the flashing magical whirl of light that signaled the dissolution of their prison, Mara felt tired, and depressed.

A double-file guard of cho-ja marched forward to take custody of the condemned. Mara retained enough presence of mind to rise and cross to where Lujan waited, awake and already on his feet.

She took his dry hands into her own clammy ones. Then she regarded his expressionless face and intoned the ritual words, ‘Warrior, you have served in highest honor. You have leave from your mistress to claim what death you choose. Fight well. Fight bravely. Go singing to the halls of Turakamu.’

Lujan sank into a bow. His return courtesy seemed to exhaust the patience of their captors, for cho-ja guards advanced and hauled him to his feet. Mara also was grasped and tugged away as a herder might drive a needra calf to slaughter. She lost sight of Lujan as the bodies of cho-ja warriors closed around her. They allowed her no chance for protest, but set her on the march
through the maze of hallways that riddled the city of Chakaha.

She raised her chin high, though pride seemed meaningless. The cho-ja of these lands were not impressed by honor, or courage, nor did they have any care for human dignity. She presumed that very soon she would be greeting the spirits of her ancestors; but not as she had always expected. Here, now, the most glowing of her Tsurani attainments and even her illustrious title of Servant of the Empire seemed empty. Now she would have traded all for a last glimpse of her children, or one tender embrace from her husband.

Kevin had been more right than ever she knew. Honor was only a glorified word for emptiness, and no sane replacement for the promise of continued life. Why had it taken until now for her to fully understand what prompted the opposition of the Assembly? And if help to break their stagnating hold upon Tsuranuanni could not be found here, and these Thuril cho-ja would make no alliance, where would Hokanu seek for resources to end the tyranny the magicians so jealously guarded? If there were answers, they must remain a mystery.

The cho-ja guard were indifferent as beings of stone. They moved briskly through the corridors, and across two catwalks that sparkled like glass. Mara regarded the clear sky, never so green and fresh before now. She smelled the fragrance of rich earth and jungle greenery, threaded through with the perfumes of tropical flowers; and on the breeze she drew in the scent of ice carried on the winds from the mountain peaks. She drank in these pleasures of life, and also the beauty of Chakaha’s tracery of towers. She walked, bathed in colored arrows of light caused by sunbeams that shone through the towers, and her spirit shrank from the senseless end to come, the giving up of all hope, and the end of all dreams.

Too soon, the cho-ja guard escorted her into the translucent purple dome where the tribunal had judged her the day before. Now there were no officials present, not even scribes. The chamber was occupied by the spindly presence of a single cho-ja mage. It stood in a domed alcove. Upon the marble floor at its feet was a scarlet line that described a perfect circle.

Mara recognised the figure’s significance. Set to a diameter of twelve paces, with a simple symbol scribed at east and west, where two warriors would stand confronting each other, she beheld the Circle of Death, traditionally drawn within the Empire for time out of mind. Here would two warriors battle until one lost his life in the ancient rite of challenge that Lujan had chosen in place of honorless execution.

Mara bit her lip to hide an unseemly apprehension. She had once stood to witness a husband’s ritual suicide with less trepidation in her heart. For then she had regretted the waste of a young man whose own family’s neglect had left him open for her exploitation. That indeed had been the first moment when the Game of the Council had shown itself to be less than a rigid code of honor and more a license to indulge any excuse to exploit another human’s faults. Now honor itself seemed empty.

Mara beheld Lujan, standing between the cho-ja guards on the opposite side of the room. She knew him well enough to read his stance, and she saw, with a terrible pang, that the human warrior who would take up his weapons to die no longer subscribed to the beliefs he had been raised in. He valued the esteem he might gain in the Red God’s halls far less than the lost chance to marry and rear children.

To Mara, Lujan’s challenge to combat was a tragic and meaningless gesture. The honor he might win for his shade was like the fool’s gold that Midkemian swindlers foisted upon the unsuspecting merchant. And yet
the charade would be played through to its senseless conclusion.

Lujan was both more and less than the grey warrior she had rescued from masterless oblivion in the mountains. Guilt for her own responsibility in that change closed her throat. She had difficulty breathing, far less holding herself expressionless and erect as a noble Tsurani Lady must in public.

The cho-ja mage waved a forelimb, and an attendant scurried into view, bearing Lujan’s confiscated weapons and the plain, unmarked armor he had worn into Thuril. Not without disrespect, it crouched and deposited the gear at the warrior’s feet.

‘Our hive has no knowledge of the manner of usage of these protections,’ intoned the cho-ja mage, which Mara interpreted as an apology that the worker could not offer Lujan the courtesy of helping him arm.

On impulse, she stepped forward. ‘I will assist my Force Commander.’

Her words echoed across the dome. But unlike in a gathering of humans, no cho-ja present turned its head. Only the mage twitched a forelimb to permit Mara to cross to Lujan’s side. She bent and selected one of his greaves from the floor, then flashed a glance at his face. By the slight arch to his brows, she saw he was surprised at her gesture, but also secretly pleased. She gave him a surreptitious half-smile, then bent to lace on the first of his accoutrements. She did not speak. He would understand by her unprecedented behavior how highly he was regarded by her.

And in truth, the handling of armor was not unknown to her. She had girded on Hokanu’s sword many times, and before him, her first Lord Buntokapi’s; and as a child, she had played at adult behavior with her brother, Lanokota, when he had carried his wooden practice sword to workouts with Keyoke.

Lujan gave her a nod to indicate that she had the lacings right – tight enough to bind, but not so much that they would restrict his movement. She finished with the heavy, laminate sword that had more than once stopped enemies at her door. When the last buckle of the sword belt was clasped, she arose and touched Lujan’s hand in farewell. ‘May the gods ride your blade,’ she murmured, which was the ritual phrase one warrior might say to another who sallied forth, expecting to die.

Lujan touched her hair, and tucked a drifting strand back behind her ear. The familiarity might have been an impertinence, had Lujan not come to hold the place of her dead brother in her heart. ‘Lady, feel no sorrow. Had I the choices of my youth to make over, I would live them all again.’ His mouth quirked with a ghost of his old insolence. ‘Well, maybe not quite all. There were the instances of an unwise wager or two, and then the fat madam of that brothel whom I once insulted …’

The cho-ja mage rapped a hind limb upon the paving with a sound like the crack of a mallet. ‘The time appointed for the combat is at hand!’ it intoned, and at no other discernible signal, one of the cho-ja guard advanced to the edge of the circle.

It waited there, its bladed forelimbs shining in the soft light under the dome.

Lujan flashed Mara his most insouciant grin, then sobered, his mien as taut as any time he had waited poised for battle. Without a look back, or any sign of regret, he walked to the circle and took his place on the side opposite his cho-ja opponent.

Mara felt alone and vulnerable. Uneasily she noticed that her cho-ja guard had closed the space she had crossed; they now stood arrayed at her back, as if prepared to block her retreat, or any other desperate move she might attempt.
Her knees shook. It embarrassed her that even that small weakness showed.

She was Acoma! She would not flee her fate, nor would she demean Lujan by shirking her place at the circle’s edge. Still, when the cho-ja mage intoned the procedure, that at its signal both Lujan and the cho-ja warrior appointed to face him should cross within the line and commence the contest, the Lady fought back an overpowering wish to close her eyes, to shut from view the petty striving that was all Lujan might claim for his epitaph.

Lujan gripped his sword. His hand was firm, and his sinews did not quiver from apprehension. Nervousness seemed to have fled him, and indeed, to Mara’s eyes he seemed more assured than before other forays in the past. This battle was to be his last, and that knowledge eased him. Here, on the edge of the circle of challenge, there were no unknowns to worry over: the outcome of this fight would be the same whether he fought well or not, whether he won or he lost. He would not leave the circle alive. To wish events had been otherwise was a waste of his strength, and a lessening of the courage he had been born and raised to exhibit. According to the creed of the Tsurani warrior, he had let no one down. He had served his mistress well and fully; he had never turned his back on any foe. By all that he had been taught to believe, his death by the blade here was a fitting thing, the culmination of honor that was more sacred to the gods than life itself.

Quiet in his readiness, Lujan inspected his sword edge one last time for flaws. There were none. He had drawn it for nothing but sharpening since departure from Tsuranuanni.

Then all considerations were ended as the cho-ja mage spoke out. Hear me, combatants. Once the line of the circle is crossed, the ward of its making will activate. To step over the line again, either from within, or if another
should try to intervene from without, will bring death. The terms of battle shall be according to Tsurani tradition: either the condemned shall die in combat inside the circle, or if he proves the victor, he shall be permitted to choose the hand of his executioner. I, mage of the city-state of Chakaha, stand as the witness that these proceedings require.’

Lujan gave the cho-ja mage a crisp salute. The cho-ja warrior he was to fight gave no acquiescence at all beyond a change in stance, from a position of rest to the angled crouch that signaled its readiness to charge. Beads of reflected light glanced off the knife-sharp edges of its forelimbs, and its eyes sparkled inhumanly. If pity and regret were part of the hive mind, such emotion was not reserved for the fighting arm of its society. The cho-ja warrior held but one directive: to do battle and to kill. In Tsurani conflicts, Lujan had seen companies of the creatures turn a battlefield into a butchery, for unless the weather was cold, the speed and reflexes of a human warrior were inferior. At best, he judged by the humid air that wafted through this chamber, he might get in a few parries before his body was diced up. His passage to Turakamu would be quick and almost painless.

His mouth tipped into a ghost of a crooked grin. If he was lucky, he would be drinking hwaet beer with his old friend Papewaio in Turakamu’s halls before sundown.

‘Cross the line and commence on my signal,’ intoned the cho-ja mage; and it stamped its hind limb against the floor with a sound like the chime of a gong.