Sword of the Deceiver (9 page)

Natharie swallowed her bile. There would never be water enough to wash this mark from her. She closed her eyes and imagined her beads. In her mind, she remembered how they felt slipping through her fingers.

What are the strongest fetters?

Pride, hatred, ignorance, reliance on rite and ceremony, desire for a future life in the worlds of form
.

The deeply familiar admonition ran through her, stilling her within herself, grounding her although the world still swayed around her. He would not defeat her, not even with this blood mark.

Natharie rose to her feet, smoothly, gracefully. The high priest took a step back. Natharie ignored him. She bowed over folded hands to the goddess. This was Jalaja’s house, and one did not fail to honor one’s hostess. She bowed to the emperor, her mortal host. She saw, very briefly, that Prince Samudra was on his feet and halfway down the dais steps. She wondered distantly what had stopped him. She turned and walked back to her palanquin, her head held high and her deportment so perfect her tutors would have been amazed. She knelt. She folded her hands and looked back up at Divakesh. The sword dangled loose in his huge hand, and for a moment she saw the stunned disbelief in him.

In Natharie’s dignified repose, she knew her triumph. Her bearers lifted her up and carried her to a doorway in the shadow of the palace’s white and pink wall. A horde of slaves surrounded it, stripping off the heaps of treasure as men with heavily kohled eyes and long silk coats snapped orders and made notes on tablets.

“Up, up!”

It was the grey woman — what had Prince Samudra called her? Mistress Usha? — again, snapping her fingers to rouse Natharie from the distant place her mind had gone.

Natharie was able to stand, but the strength and grace that had been hers a moment before were gone. She shook and she shuffled. The grey woman gestured impatiently toward the darkened doorway and Natharie staggered forward, following the other young women as they entered the dim corridor. Weakness made her mind swim with confusion. The change from the shining and sinister magnificence to the cramped, low-ceilinged darkness was too abrupt. The badly lit hall smelled of warm dust. They were taken to a poky, unadorned room where Mistress Usha walked around with a key and undid the shackles from the other women’s wrists, passing them off to waiting slaves. Natharie sat on the floor with the others as she was told. Bowls of rice were brought, and she ate, in the light of the single, flickering lamp, never minding the strange flavors. Slaves scurried about laying out pillows on the floor. Mistress Usha pointed to a corner and glowered at Natharie. Meekly, still trembling, Natharie crept over to her allotted space, and lay down. She closed her eyes once more. This time, sleep came to her, and Natharie received it with a profound gratitude.

The sun was well behind the hills by the time the horns blew their final warning to whatever demons lingered outside the palace walls and the priests made their final obeisances to the Mothers. The bearing poles were slotted into place on Chandra’s throne, and the emperor was carried back inside the palace. Samudra shifted his weight as much as he dared.

What had Divakesh been trying to do? Samudra’s head still swam with the shock of it. The priest had threatened the life of a member of a royal house. He had shed her blood in the middle of the purification ritual. Anger burned in Samudra like the flames at the feet of the Queen of Heaven. Anger polluted each thought, and the presence of all seven Mothers could not wash it away.

Chandra will give the orders
, he told himself during the endless ceremony and sacrifice.
This is a perversion of the ceremony. Divakesh will lose his head
.

Now that the emperor had departed, the purified tribute procession marched itself into the depths of the palace where the various components would be distributed to the appropriate ministers and stewards. Samudra glanced down at Hamsa. Her face was bland but he saw anguish in her eyes. She too had thought Divakesh might kill Natharie.

Now Chandra must understand what Divakesh truly is
.

Samudra’s turn to depart had arrived. He got to his feet and walked to the golden door of emperors. The guards knelt and raised their spears in salute, and he and Hamsa crossed into the palace.

Beyond the door waited the robing chamber, a place of carved ivory, polished stone, and open chests. The servants moved around him at a stately pace, handing each other the various pieces of the formal regalia — the crown, the robe, the rings — to be bowed and prayed over, polished, wrapped in linen, and stowed away. As he knelt in obeisance, Samudra had an odd image of an outer shell being put into storage and his brother being left behind. There was no emperor here. The emperor was in boxes.

Chandra himself lounged perfectly at ease, a robe of purple silk wrapped loosely about him. Chandra had always enjoyed the princely life and partook deeply of its luxuries. He had not yet begun to turn fat. He was too fond of wrestling and riding for that. But a sly and lazy look could creep into his eyes, a covetous look that assessed all before him, whatever their place or birth, as if they were gems to be set into rings for his arms. Beside Chandra, of course, was Yamuna. Yamuna was always beside Chandra, as Hamsa was always beside Samudra. Always waiting, always working for the life and health of the one to whom he had been bound. Yamuna was to Chandra tutor, confidant, protector, just as Hamsa was to Samudra.

The next thing Samudra saw was that Divakesh stood there by the wall, as solid and unperturbed as any of the statues around him.

Samudra’s mind slammed shut. He knelt in obeisance, trying to collect his wits. Why had Chandra not already pronounced judgment on Divakesh’s outrageous action?

“No more of that, Brother,” announced Chandra, laughing at the formality of Samudra’s obeisance. “The ceremony is over. Give me your embrace and let me look on you!”

Samudra stood on knees suddenly weak as water. Over his brother’s head, he saw the satisfied glitter in Divakesh’s arrogant gaze. Samudra walked over to Chandra, and embraced him. At the hard warmth of his brother’s touch, Samudra found himself looking at Chandra closely to see what the past year had brought. He wanted to find some understanding of what made the emperor completely disregard the enormity of what the priest had done before the altar.

“You look good!” cried Chandra, pushing him back to arm’s length and gripping his wrist. “Strong. Your time among the barbarians and their women has agreed with you.”

Samudra had to call on all his discipline not to throw his shorter, slighter brother to the ground as he had done so many times when they were still boys. As he had thrown Pravan. “Thank you, Ch … Majesty.”
You address your emperor
, Samudra reminded himself fiercely. His emperor, and to one side Divakesh, the sword and the voice of the Mothers, with his great arms that could dispatch a bull with a single blow if the ceremony called for it, but with hands of such skill and delicacy he could draw a lotus of a dozen colored sands. Divakesh who had the power to keep Samudra out of the palace with a word and to shed royal blood so that everyone saw, and no one saw.

“So.” Chandra stretched himself out on his pile of gold and silken pillows and held out one hand. A servant put a goblet into it. At a gesture, another was brought to Samudra. His throat was dry as dust, but he could not drink. Chandra, however, sipped from his cup and gave a loud sigh of enjoyment. “What news do you bring me from the outside world?”

This could not be what it seemed. His brother could not simply be ignoring Pravan’s disaster and Divakesh’s … he had no name for what Divakesh had done. Samudra swallowed and tried to find some words that would not destroy decorum. “It is rather the news brought to me that I would speak of.”

Chandra sighed and rolled his eyes toward Yamuna and Divakesh as if to say, “I told you.” “You heard about the Huni? It is no matter.” He took another swallow from his goblet. “Pravan will get them in the spring.”

At that, the fragile dam holding back Samudra’s fury burst. “Pravan is a coward and a fool who squanders the lives of his men in pointless displays!” he roared. “He could not find his ass with both hands if he had a slave to guide him!” He took a step forward, hands flexing at his sides, inches from his sword, forgetting everything, thinking only of the Huni, of dead men and the treaty that had been destroyed. “You sent me chasing across the country after gold and you let Pravan destroy our treaty with Lohit and then fall down before the Huni. All so Divakesh” — he stabbed his finger toward the priest — “could make some blasphemous example of King Pairoj’s rule!”

“Brother, guard yourself more closely here,” said Chandra with sudden sternness.

Samudra felt his blood surging in his head and in his hands. Wasted. Wasted for nothing, lives and time, and chances … and this priest stood smugly beside his brother, telling him the Mothers knew what idiocies … “Ch … My emperor, why? Pravan could have brought the tribute. The Sindhu princess did not have to be threatened. Why …”

“Is it for a soldier to question his officers?” replied Chandra, the sly, lazy smile creeping from his mouth to his long eyes again. “Or is it to obey?”

Control yourself
. Samudra was beyond that sort of control now. He spread his hands to his brother. “My emperor, who has told you I need to be put in my place? And at the cost of such dishonor?”

Something flickered behind his brother’s eyes and to Samudra’s shock, he found he could not tell what it was. A year, he thought again. It should not have meant that much. He had been gone for long periods before. He was a soldier. But this time it was because someone had been pouring honeyed suspicion into his brother’s, his emperor’s ears.

Who? Who could come between them like this? Divakesh had been with him, Samudra. Who else was there to speak such subtle lies to Chandra that he would come to believe them as truths?

Memory overtook him: of sitting on the stone steps on Liyoni’s banks. Beside them their father’s funeral pyre was a bed of coals and the wind wafted the heat over his skin.

“It will come, you know,” Chandra had said as they sat side by side. “There are those who will try to use you to bring me down. They will say, Samudra, he is the soldier, he is the better man. Let us break the dance and set him on the throne.”

“They will fail,” Samudra had answered. “You are my lord and my brother. Nothing under Heaven can change that.”

He had thought Chandra would embrace him then, but Chandra held his place. Only his mouth moved, shaping words Samudra could not hear.

At the time, he had thought his brother was saying “Thank you,” but now with the strange light shining behind Chandra’s eyes, Samudra was no longer certain.

“Why should anyone speak against you, Brother?” asked Chandra, his voice suddenly as sharp as his eyes were indolent. “Is there something I should know?”

There was a special awareness that could descend on a man during battle, the extra sense that allowed his skin to feel the blow that had not yet fallen, and move the body so that it breezed harmlessly past. Samudra felt that same awareness come over him now. He felt the coming blow in Divakesh’s gaze, felt weapons hidden in the room, but he could not tell where. It could not be that Chandra held these weapons. Chandra was being used as a weapon.

Samudra understood then, with absolute finality, that Chandra had known what would happen when he sent Pravan north. He had let it happen. It might be that he even knew what would be done to Natharie at the altar.

If the emperor saw any of this new understanding in his brother’s stricken face, he gave no sign. He only leaned back and turned to Divakesh.

“I had a dream last night,” he said, sipping once more from his goblet.

Divakesh folded his great hands in an attitude of reverent prayer. “Speak your dream, Sovereign. I will tell you what it means.”

“I stood on my balcony. In my hands were the signs of kingship. At my feet burned the sacred fire. Below me, I saw a woman. She was dressed in rags and tatters and her face was grey with ashes, but her body was ripe and full. She called to me, saying ‘Chandra, Son of the Pearl Throne, Father of Hastinapura, come out! Chandra, look on me with your own two eyes!’”

The priest watched his emperor keenly. “And what did you do, Sovereign?”

Chandra shrugged. “I did nothing. I awoke.”

Divakesh shook his head heavily, and Samudra thought he looked relieved. “Oh, my sovereign, that was an evil dream. The woman was a devil, the temptation of sin calling you to forswear your purity and pollute yourself by mixing with the outcasts and the blooded. The ashes were to disguise the marks of her face, and the skirts hid her feet, which you would have otherwise seen were backward, as a witch’s are.”

For the first time since Samudra entered, Chandra turned to his bound sorcerer. “Is that also what you say, Yamuna?”

Yamuna appeared to consider this for a long moment. “Tell me, Sovereign.” Yamuna’s words always sounded carefully measured, as if he thought he might be charged for their weight. “What did this woman carry with her? Besides the ashes, what decoration did she wear?”

“Nothing, save a white flower at her throat.”

The corner of the sorcerer’s mouth twitched. Behind him, Samudra heard the rustle of cloth as Hamsa shifted her weight. Yamuna lifted his black eyes to regard Divakesh. “Priest, do you still say this was a devil?”

“Of course.” Samudra would have sworn Divakesh’s shock was genuine. “She called our sovereign to leave the heart of the dance, to forsake purity.”

“Of course.” Yamuna nodded. “Sovereign, what can I add to what the voice of the Mothers has told us? It cannot be other than the high priest says.”

Hamsa sucked in a sharp breath, and Yamuna’s gaze turned to her at once.

“Have you something to say, Hamsa?”

All attention fell against Hamsa. Her hands gripped her walking stick, and Samudra watched her wither before those other, stronger eyes. He knew Hamsa’s strength, he knew her sound counsel, but he also knew she had never truly become used to court life. She was most herself, as he was, when they traveled beyond the palace walls, and even then only when she could walk rather than be forced to ride horseback. She was a creature of the out-of-doors and the wilderness. Intricacies and intrigues tired her, and, if Samudra was honest, they frightened her.