The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (103 page)

Peter looked at him blankly a moment before he retraced their conversation. "Flowers, you mean?"
"And leaves. Leaves and twigs and moss and vines and nuts and bark and berries and earth. We place them in a basket and make a little landscape out of them, using twigs as trees and moss as shrubs. We're creating a tiny Koretia, because the gods created Koretia on the day they gave us their law. Then we place the creation baskets on a table and sing songs. We throw nuts into the fire and make wishes, and then we have our feast."
"You feast on blackroot nuts?" said Peter, scraping his memory for long-ago lessons about the food that commoner Koretians ate.
"Oh, more than that on New Year. We eat meat on that day. My father used to go hunting—" Andrew stopped abruptly, his hand freezing upon the clay blade he was stroking. After a moment, he took his hand away.
"Yes?" prompted Peter. He was practically hanging off the bed now in his eagerness to hear the tale. Andrew was rarely so loquacious.
Andrew darted him a brief look that Peter could not read, then dropped his gaze. "That was before I was born. We never could afford meat when I was growing up. I went hunting one New Year on Capital Mountain with Joh— With another boy. But it started raining heavily, so I came home empty-handed."
Peter thought about this as the wind blew against the shutters, causing the candles to flicker. He knew that a vast feast awaited him tomorrow. His father would take him to the quarters of the Great Council; the council, appropriately enough, was in charge of the festivities on the day celebrating the giving of the law. He would eat suckling pig, roast crane with chicken's claws, hare boiled in raisin wine, baked pheasant, stuffed dormice, hazelnut custard, and (at Peter's request, which the High Lord had indulged for his own, devious reasons) honey cakes.
He wondered suddenly what Andrew would eat. "Do you have New Year celebrations in the slave-quarters?" he asked.
Andrew flicked another of his brief looks at Peter. "I think so."
"You think so? Don't you know?"
"I've never been invited to them."
Peter rested his chin onto the backs of his hands, watching as Andrew painstakingly rolled the remaining clay into a ball. Peter had gathered, from something Lord Carle's free-servant had said, that Andrew was not popular with the other slaves, but Peter had not realized that Andrew's isolation extended as far as ostracism. It seemed intolerable that Andrew should be exiled from his native land, only to find himself exiled from his fellow slaves as well.
"Well, then," said Peter, "we'll have our feast here."
Andrew's gaze flew up and stayed up, fastened upon Peter's face. Peter felt that strange mixture of joy and thrill he always felt when Andrew looked straight at him. It was forbidden for slaves to look directly at free-men. That Andrew was willing to break his training – was willing to trust Peter not to punish him – after he had been so badly punished by his last master . . .
Now fully immersed in the excitement of the moment, Peter said, "We'll do everything. We'll bring the outdoors indoors. We'll make baskets full of Koretia, and we'll toss nuts into the fire, and we'll sing, and we'll have a feast. We'll have a better celebration than they're having in the slave-quarters
or
the Great Council."
Andrew was breathing deeply now, his gaze still fastened on Peter. After a while he said, "I don't want to sing."
"All right," said Peter, puzzled but agreeable, "we don't have to sing. But the rest . . ."
He looked at the shuttered windows, and his spirits faded. He could not leave this room without his father's permission. And he could not imagine going to his father and saying, "Please let me go gather moss so that my slave can have a proper New Year for once."
But Andrew, it seemed, had already jumped ahead in his thoughts. He pulled himself up into a crouch, saying, "I'll get the materials. I can take them from the inner garden. With your permission," he added belatedly.
"And I'll get the basket and the meat." Peter had no idea how one obtained a basket in the palace, but no doubt his father's free-servant would know. And the meat could be easily obtained; Peter ate meat daily.
Andrew was already on his feet, wiping off the seat of his winter breeches with his hand, and reaching down to tuck his breeches into his winter boots. He had left the floor all a-mess with clay and tiny blades, which Peter supposed he ought to reprimand the slave for. But not for all the law books in the empire would he have destroyed Andrew's apparent eagerness to prepare their private festivities.
Andrew turned toward the door. He ought to have bowed before leaving. He ought to have bowed and asked permission to depart and awaited Peter's word of permission. "Andrew!" cried Peter.
Andrew stopped dead, as though a blade had plunged into his back. He turned. Peter caught a brief glimpse of the fierce, dark expression in his eyes before the slave lowered them. "Lord Peter?" he said formally; his voice was toneless.
"Here." Rising, Peter snatched what he needed off the hook next to his bed. He offered it to Andrew, who looked up. His eyes were now startled. "It's cold outside," Peter said softly.
Andrew reached out slowly, as though in a dream, and took Peter's cloak in his hand. For a moment, it seemed as though he would speak. Then he lowered his eyes, bowed, and left the chamber silently.
Meat, it turned out, was not so easy to obtain that day as Peter had anticipated.
His father's free-servant, upon being consulted, had coldly informed Peter that the cooking servants were busy preparing meals for the following day. But they would, of course, stop their work at once if the Chara's son asked them to. . . . Drogo's voice grew still colder.
"No, of course not," Peter said hastily as the free-servant refilled his water pitcher. "I will wait for supper. What is the dish today?" He could, he supposed, divide his meal with Andrew; he had done that more than once when Andrew was still bedridden from his beating.
"Date salad," said Drogo, snuffing out Peter's hopes. "Unless, of course, the Chara's son would prefer another dish? In between my duties to the Chara, I would be glad to make a special effort to—"
"No, not at all." Peter turned away before Drogo should give another of his self-sacrificial speeches. If it were Andrew, Peter could have asked the favor of him, but Andrew only had access to the slaves' kitchen, and slaves were not permitted meat except on feast-days. By tomorrow, it would be too late; Peter would be busy with his own duties as Chara To Be.
For a while after Drogo left, Peter sat on his bed, contemplating the situation. The only other person he could think to consult was his father, but his father had been busy talking all afternoon to Lord Carle, and now the two men had left together to visit the Map Room. Peter had hoped that Lord Carle would stop by to give his greetings, but the council lord had evidently been too busy for that. The council lord would not even be attending the New Year festivities of the Great Council tomorrow, the Chara had told Peter; Lord Carle was going to his country home for several days of rest before he resumed his onerous duties.
Peter frowned as he stared at his law books, which he had abandoned on the writing table when Andrew had brought in the scraps of metal and clay and asked, in his abrupt manner, whether Peter wanted to make New Year ornaments. Peter was used to free-servants giving him New Year gifts they bought with their small savings: winter flowers and dried tree-fruit and once, from Lord Carle's free-servant, an expensive bag of Daxion nuts, which Peter suspected had been paid for by Lord Carle himself. Peter was not used to a servant bringing him materials with which he was expected to make ornaments of his own, in the manner of the most lowly slave in the palace.
It was the best gift he had ever received in his life. It had taken all his effort to remember that Andrew's back was still healing from his beating; otherwise, Peter would have embraced him on the spot.
No doubt Peter would receive a reprimand from his father tomorrow or the day after, for neglecting his studies today. What worried Peter more was that he had no gift to give Andrew.
What could you give a slave who, by law, could own nothing? Traditionally, the Chara's gift to the palace servants at New Year was a day off from work, for the festivity celebrations were handled by specially hired free-servants. The palace servants also received permission to organize their own celebrations, using previously authorized food from the kitchens.
That was the Chara's gift, but the Chara's son had nothing to give his slave. Food, yes, time off from work, yes – but Peter was already giving as much of that to Andrew as he could possibly hope to hide from his father. And whatever he gave would be trifling compared to what Andrew had given him: a chance to act like a normal boy for an entire day.
He fingered the misshapen Balance in his lap. Something he had created with his own hands, without a servant at his elbow, offering to do the work for him. Andrew had not even passed him the sap until he asked for it. Peter was as proud of the handcrafted Balance as if it were his first proclamation as Chara.
He stood up, walked over to the hearth, and spent the next few minutes arranging the Balance and the clay blades on the mantelpiece. He had forgotten to ask Andrew how to make the Heart of Mercy, as well as miniature versions of the books in which the Chara's law was scribed. It was of no matter. The Balance and the Sword would do for now. And he had more to anticipate.
Grasping the tapestry on the wall in order to pull himself up, he stood upon a chair, opened one of the shutters, and gasped as the cold wind slapped against his face, accompanied by flakes of snow that stung and numbed his cheeks. The windows were near the ceiling, and were narrow in height, in order to prevent intruders from entering, but Peter could see into the inner garden through the murky afternoon light of the snow-laden sky.
The inner garden was a bare lawn, with shrubs and flowerbeds now heavy with snow. It was easy to sight Andrew in his black cloak; he was the only person in the chilly garden, other than the guards at the doorways leading from the garden to the rest of the palace. Andrew was on his knees, scraping away at the snow with his bare hand. Peter realized, with a stab of guilt, that he had sent his servant out to gather moss and twigs in a snowstorm.
There was nothing he could do, though; Andrew was too far away to hear if Peter shouted. Peter closed the shutter, climbed down from the chair, and returned his mind to his half of the tasks.
Meat . . . Perhaps Andrew could find a solution to that. The basket was another problem. Drogo had greeted Peter's enquiry by raising his eyebrow and saying that there were no doubt baskets somewhere in the palace "if the Chara's son should wish me to search for them." Peter had resisted an impulse to throw the water pitcher at Drogo. Instead, he now began searching his room, trying to find something that could be used as a basket. There was the water basin, of course, but it was made of silver, and silver came from deep in the mines. He needed something that was made of a material that could be found outdoors. Wood, perhaps? The chairs were made of solid wood, too thick to tear apart, and in any case, he could just imagine what the Chara would say if he found Peter dismembering a valuable chair.
His eye fell on the pieces of paper sitting next to the books on the table, where he had been scribing notes to himself.
It took him until the final trumpet of daylight to finish making the creation basket, partly because it had occurred to him that the basket would be more beautiful if it were decorated. So he had taken up his pen, dipped it in ink, and drawn a decoration that he hoped resembled the swirly vine patterns he had seen on the tunics of visiting lords from Koretia. At the last moment, on impulse, he had added masks on the borders of the paper. He and Andrew had held a conversation about masks just a few days before, at midwinter's eve, when he had happened across Andrew staring out a window that faced south. Peter seemed to recall that masks were connected in some way with the Koretian religion. He had no idea what Koretian masks looked like, so he inked them all in as solid black. Then he set about trying to paste the papers together with sap in such a way that they formed a basket.
He was not very successful. Part of the problem was that he had no blade with which to cut strips of paper. His father had promised that the Chara's heir would begin his lessons in bladeplay as soon as the weather grew warm, which would be not long after Peter's fifteenth birthday. But not until his coming of age at his sixteenth birthday, he knew, would he be permitted to actually own a free-man's blade. Every man in the palace wore a blade on ceremonial occasions, except for the slave-men and, of course, the eunuchs. But the eunuchs were not men at all – rather, they were half man, half woman. Peter avoided them as much as possible, not knowing what to say to such oddly mixed creatures.
His craftwork looked more like a very fat ship than a basket. It had a pointy bow and a long, flat stern. It looked utterly unseaworthy. Peter put his chin on his fist and contemplated the results. He supposed that, if he had more practice at this sort of thing, he would be better at it, but that did not change the fact that the basket looked ugly.
Not at all a decent present to give to Andrew. Peter sighed.
His head jerked up as he heard a sound in the corridor, but it was only his father, returning from the Map Room. His father paused to speak briefly to the guards outside the Chara's living quarters, and Peter waited, half hopeful and half dreading, to see whether the Chara would stop next door to check on his son. But a moment later came a familiar thud as the door to the Chara's living quarters closed.
Peter sighed again. There were times – many times – when he wished he had not been born as heir to an empire. If he had been any other boy, he could be spending this festal eve playing with children his age, rather than sitting alone in his chamber, feeling guilty because he had not read a law book in three hours. He looked again at the basket and wondered whether he should tear it up before Andrew arrived back.
The decision was taken from him as Andrew slid silently into the chamber. Peter was never quite sure how Andrew managed to get past the guards, who were supposed to challenge anyone entering Peter's quarters, even if only for form's sake. The guards were just a couple of spear-lengths away, guarding his father's quarters next door, so they