The Iron Wars (21 page)

Aurungzeb stirred and glanced around. He looked now like a hirsute but mischievous boy.

“Ahara,” he called softly. “Light of my heart, they are gone. Come out now, my little sweetmeat. Your master calls.”

A slim shape filmy with gauze emerged from the curtained rear of the tent, and knelt before him with head lowered. He raised her by the chin and peeled away the veil which hid her features. A pale face, grey eyes, dark lips touched with rouge. He wiped it off them. “You do not need paint, my sweet. Not you. Perfection brooks no improvement.”

He clapped his large, hairy-knuckled hands. “Music, there! The slow dance from Kurasan!”

From an adjoining, closed-off portion of the tent came the sudden chimes and pluckings of musicians, somewhat ragged at first and then growing in speed and harmony.

“Dance for me. Dance for your weary master and make him forget the cares of the turning world.”

Aurungzeb threw himself down on a pile of silken cushions and commenced to suck on a tall water-pipe whilst his concubine paused for a second, and then began to move as slowly as a willow in a summer breeze.

Heria’s mind blanked out when she danced. She liked it. The exercise kept her supple and fit. It was the aftermath she did not care for, even now. Especially now. She had listened in on the report of Shahr Johor as she listened to everything that went on in the tent of the Sultan. Her command of the Merduk language was perfect, though she still pretended to have only a rudimentary grasp of it. She had hidden her grief at the news of the dyke’s fall, and her heart had soared at the account of the recent battle and the last-minute intervention of the mysterious and terrible red horsemen. Debased and soiled though she might be, she was still Torunnan. The man whose life she had shared until the fall of Aekir had been a Torunnan soldier, and it was no more possible that she should forget it than that the sun should one day forget to set.

The pace of the dance quickened. Aurungzeb, intent on the whirling movement of her white limbs, puffed out smoke in swift little clouds. At last it ended, and Heria froze in position, arms above her head, breathing fast. The Sultan threw aside the stem of his water-pipe and rose.

“Here. To me.”

She stood close to him. His beard tickled her nose. She was tall, and he had not far to bend to nuzzle the hollow of her collar bone. His hands twitched aside her gauzy coverings. “You are a queen among women,” he murmured. “Magnificent.” He stripped her naked whilst she stood unmoving. His fingers brushed her nipples, erect and painfully sensitive.

“My Sultan,” she began hurriedly as his hands wandered down her body. She had been depilated, after the fashion of the harem, and her skin was smooth as alabaster. His fingers became more urgent. She forced herself not to flinch as they explored her.

“My Sultan, I am with child.”

He went very still, straightened. His eyes glowed.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, lord. A woman knows these things. The Chamberlain of the Harem confirms it.”

“Name of the Prophet, a child. A son. And you danced before me!” He was outraged, furious. He raised a hand to strike and then thought better of it. Instead he brought it down to rest on her taut belly. “My child—my son. I have never had a son that lived. Miserable girls, yes, but this—this shall be a boy.”

“It may not be, my lord.”

“It must be! He was conceived in war, at a time of victory. All the omens are favourable. I shall have Batak examine you. He shall see. An heir, at long last! You must dance no more. You must keep to your bed. Ah, my flower of the west! I knew your coming would be luck to me! I shall make you first wife, if it is a boy—it will be a boy.” He started to laugh, and crushed her in a bearish embrace, releasing her an instant later. “No, no—no more of that. Like porcelain you shall be treated, like the rarest glass. Put on your clothes! I must have the eunuchs find something more fitting for the mother of my son, not these damn slave-girl silks. And maids—you shall have servants and a pavilion of your own—” He stopped. He felt her over as if she were some rare and delicate vase that might be shattered in a moment. “How long? How far grown is he?”

“Not far, lord. Two months, perhaps.”

“Two months! My son’s heart has been beating these two months! I shall burn a wagonload of incense. Prayers shall be said in every temple of the east. Ha, ha, ha! A son!”

A son, Heria thought. Yes, it would be a boy—she knew that, somehow. What would her Corfe have thought of that? She bearing a son to some eastern tyrant, a child of rape. Corfe had always wanted children.

The tears burned her eyes. “You weep, my dove, my precious beauty?” Aurungzeb asked with concern.

“I weep with joy, my lord, that I have the honour of bearing the Sultan’s child.”

Why was she still alive? Why had she not found some way to end herself? But she knew the answer. Human nature can bear many things, unimaginable things. The body eats, sleeps, excretes and lives, even while the mind prays for oblivion. And in time the mind adapts itself, and the insupportable becomes the everyday. Heria wanted to live, and she wanted her child to be born. It was his son, but it would be hers also, something of her own. She would love it as though it were Corfe’s, and her life might yet become worth something after all. She hoped that her husband’s ghost would understand.

SIXTEEN

U RBINO, Duke of Imerdon, was a tall, lean, cadaverous man with the look of an ascetic about him. He dressed habitually in black, and had done so since the death of his wife twenty-three years earlier. He was the most powerful nobleman in Hebrion, besides the King himself, but he was entirely unrelated—by blood at least—to the Royal House of Hibrusids. Imerdon had once been an outlying fief of the Fimbrian Electorate of Amarlaine, but the Fimbrians had relinquished their claims upon it decades ago, after the last battle of the Habrir River (which they had won). Few knew precisely why the Fimbrians had given up the duchy, the cities of Pontifidad and Himerio, all the land right up to the Merimer River, but it was rumoured that one of their then-endless civil wars had necessitated the removal of the garrison and its deployment elsewhere. The commander of the retreating garrison had not been able to resist giving the Hebrians a bloody nose one last time, hence the senseless battle of the Habrir.

The native nobility of the duchy had sworn fealty to the Hebrian monarch, whose kingdom was well-nigh doubled by Imerdon’s acquisition, and successive rulers of the province had intermarried with the Royal House. But though the Duke of Imerdon and his family were well respected, and indeed immensely powerful, they tended to be seen as outsiders, foreigners. Imerdon’s folk were of the same stock as those of Hebrion proper, but the long Fimbrian domination—almost five centuries—had rendered them slightly different from their western cousins. Many of them dressed in black for preference, like the men of the electorates, and they were generally a more disciplined and religious people who looked upon the excesses of gaudy old Abrusio with fascinated distaste. Their duke had remained aloof from the horrific war which had wrecked the kingdom’s capital city, though he had given free passage to the Himerian Knights Militant as they fled the country after their defeat. It was said that though he followed his king into heresy, considering it his duty, he did so reluctantly, and his sympathies lay yet with the Himerian Church.

The duke now sat in a covered carriage in upper Abrusio, not far from the Royal palace. If he pulled back the leather curtains of the vehicle he could count the cannonballs still embedded in the walls.

“My lord,” one of his retainers said outside the curtain. “The lady is here.”

“Help her in then,” the duke said.

The lady Jemilla climbed in beside him. He thumped the roof of the carriage with one bony beringed fist, and they trundled off.

“I hope I see you well, lady,” he said courteously.

“I am blooming, thank you, sir,” she replied. A few minutes of silence, as if each waited for the other to speak, until at last the duke said: “I take it your mission was successful.”

“Completely. I delivered the petition yesterday. The Astaran woman and the mage are no doubt pondering its implications even as we speak.”

Urbino nodded, his face expressionless. Jemilla was dressed in sober grey, the garb of a respectable noble matron, and no hint of paint or rouge had touched her face. She knew that different tactics were called for in dealing with the austere Duke of Imerdon. One hint of impropriety or wantonness, and he would drop her like a dead rat.

The duke appeared ill-at-ease, uncomfortable. He was obviously not fond of clandestine assignations and midnight conspiracies, and yet he was the key and cornerstone of all Jemilla’s schemes, and his signature at the head of the petition she had delivered to Isolla one of her greatest coups. If this man, this cold-livered, utterly respectable aristocrat, acknowledged the validity of her claims, then the rest would follow suit. Duke Urbino was famous for his fastidiousness, his dislike of intrigue. Only his sense of duty and honour had prompted him to meet Jemilla, and a rising unease with regard to the condition of the monarchy in Hebrion. And she had convinced him. Abeleyn was incapable of ruling, was barely alive. And the government of the country had been usurped by three commoners, one of whom was a wizard. And she bore the King’s heir. If the kingdom were not to become some outrageous oligarchy headed by men of low blood, then it was up to him, the most powerful nobleman remaining in Hebrion, to do something. His fellow lords agreed, and their letters had been arriving on his table for the past sennight. Jemilla had been very busy since her escape from semi-imprisonment in the palace. She had met the head of almost every noble house in Hebrion.

They were cowed, of course, terrified at the thought of sharing the fate of Sastro di Carrera and Astolvo di Sequero. Abeleyn’s kingship had been restored in a welter of fire and blood, the Carreras and the Sequeros rendered impotent by the slaughter of their retainers and the execution of their leaders. If anything further was to be done, it had to be done constitutionally. Where the sword had failed, the pen might yet succeed.

“This council of nobles we have envisioned, it makes me uneasy, I have to say,” Urbino said. “There is a certain lack of precedent… . The traditional platform of the nobles is the House Conclave, held yearly in this city, with the King as chairman and arbiter. I do not like something which smacks so of…
innovation
.”

“The King, my lord, is in no condition to chair anything,” Jemilla told him, “and the House Conclave is legally unable to debate any motion not tabled by the King himself.” A blue-blooded talking-shop was what that outmoded institution represented, Jemilla thought. She wanted something different, something with teeth.

“I see. And since the King cannot or will not appear, we are justified in setting up an entirely new institution to deal with this unique situation… . Still—”

“The other noble families have already indicated their support, lord,” Jemilla broke in swiftly. “But they await your word, as the foremost among them. They will not move without you.” Play on his pride, she thought. It’s his one vice—vanity. The cold-blooded old lizard.

Urbino did in fact seem visibly gratified by her words. “I cannot pretend you are mistaken,” he said with a trace of smugness. “Do you think it wise, however, to convene this, this council in Abrusio itself?”

“Why not? It shows we have no fear of the King’s forces, it brings the issues we are debating out into the open, and if the King should, by the grace of God, recover, then we will be at hand to bear witness and rejoice.”

Urbino looked thoughtful. “If what you tell me of his injuries is accurate, then I fear there will be no recovery, not even with that Dweomer-crow Golophin lurking around.” He sighed. “He was an able young man. Impulsive maybe, hot-headed at times, and sadly lacking in piety, but a worthy ruler for all that.”

“Indeed,” said Jemilla with the right mixture of regret and sorrow. “But the good of the kingdom cannot be neglected, despite our grief and our devotion to its nominal head. The house of the Hibrusids, lord, is virtually extinct. Abeleyn’s reluctance to marry was a clever instrument of policy, but it has redounded against him in the end.”

“The Astaran princess—” Urbino began.

“—is becoming a visiting dignitary, no more. She should, naturally, be accorded the respect due to her rank, but to suggest that her one-time betrothal to our dying sovereign renders her the right to govern this kingdom is absurd. Hebrion would become nothing more than a satellite of Astarac. Besides, she is a woman of low wit and mean understanding—I have met her, as you know—and she is hardly able to govern her own servants, let alone a powerful nation.”

“Of course, of course…” Urbino trailed off.

What a dithering, vacillating old fool he is, Jemilla thought, for all his blue blood. Great God, would that I had been a man!

“And the Hibrusid house is not truly extinct,” she went on smoothly. “I bear in my womb, my lord, the last scion of Abeleyn’s line. What the kingdom needs is a strong caretaker who will watch over this unhappy realm until my son enters his majority. I cannot think of a more honourable task, or a more prestigious role. And may I say, confidentially, that the heads of the noble families with whom I have already been in contact seem to be in unanimity. There is only one obvious candidate for the position.”

Urbino’s chin had sunk on to his breast, but there was a light in his eye. She knew he was weighing up the risks to his own person on the one hand, and the dazzling prospect of the regency on the other. And the risks could be minimized if they proceeded as she planned. A proper show of loyalty to the Crown. Public and decorous proceedings open to all. Once the true nature of the King’s condition became widely known, the commoners would clamour for someone to fill Abeleyn’s shoes. A kingdom without a king—unthinkable!

“It may be that I have a certain standing,” Urbino conceded, “but it is also possible that I am not the closest in… blood, to the monarch.”