His conquering sword

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jiroannes sat under the shelter of his awning, a blanket over his legs, his torso and arms encased in a fine brocade coat, and watched the glow in the west where the sun sank down over the hills and blended its light with smoke and fire from distant Karkand. He sipped at hot tea. Steam rose from the porcelain cup; this cup alone, of all that Syrannus had so carefully packed back at his uncle's villa, still remained fit for him to drink from. All the others had been chipped or broken or stained. Vines and peacocks circled the rim, a delicate round of painting. The aroma of the tea soothed him. Around him, the camp was quiet. At last.

He shuddered. He had not known that a woman could shriek that loudly, or that a woman who so clearly feared his attentions in the bed would show such anger when he informed her that he intended to visit elsewhere that night. As if it was any right of hers to dictate where he found his pleasure. But perhaps Syrannus had been right all along. The old man had, in his mild way, cautioned against the marriage. And yet, Laissa's audience with Mother Sakhalin had proved successful, or at least, so Laissa had reported. With the Habakar king in the hands of Bakhtiian, Habakar merchants streamed to Jiroannes's camp to beg for an audience with the princess Jiroannes had married. No, Syrannus had been wrong: The alliance would serve him well.

"Eminence?" Lal scurried toward him, bearing a thin-necked porcelain pitcher glazed white and etched with flowers. "May I pour you more tea?"

Jiroannes nodded. As Lal bent, Jiroannes saw a mottling on the boy's dark skin. "What is this?" he asked, reaching up to touch the bruise with one finger.

"It is nothing, eminence."

"It is a bruise. Where did you get it?"

Lal kept his eyes cast down. "It is nothing, eminence."

"I command you to tell me."

Lal finished pouring and backed away two steps. "The mistress struck me, eminence, when I entered her chambers after…" He faltered.

"After we argued." Wind stirred the awning. Beyond, smoke obscured much of the western curve of the sky, but above, stars began to show in the high bank of the heavens. It was frustrating enough never to know what was going on in camp, except that the jaran had at last assaulted Karkand. Jiroannes felt strongly that Mitya noticed and cared for him, but he doubted if Bakhtiian even remembered that a Vidiyan ambassador abided in his train. In order to complete his mission, he needed Bakhtiian's notice. And now-now Laissa had the audacity to strike his servants. It was all too much.

"Lal, you will cease waiting on my wife. It is insufferable that she treat you in such a fashion. Henceforth, you will serve me alone and cease going into the women's quarters. I'm sure that will be a relief to you, in any case."

Lal sank to his knees, balancing the pitcher in trembling hands. "I beg of you, eminence, it was nothing."

"You want to continue to serve her?" Jiroannes was astounded. "After she, a mere woman, treated you in such a way?"

"Eminence." Lal bent his head and shoulders, curving over the pitcher. From the guards" camp, Jiroannes heard a hacking cough and a baby's whimper. Darkness shielded the hills. The smoldering haze of the besieged city illuminated the western horizon. "I am not a man. My mother sold me into the palace service when I was still a boy, and after they cut me, I knew that only in the women's quarters could I rise to a position of importance. Eunuchs are not allowed to hold any office higher than that of attendant of the sash in a lord's household, and never any administrative office." In the lantern light,

Jiroannes studied the boy's beardless cheeks. "You have treated me well, eminence. You have been generous and kind, but you know it's true that while I can't become an offical in the Great King's court, I am welcome within the women's quarters."

Jiroannes tilted his head back. The underside of the awning lay dark above him, but he knew the scene well enough, having seen it created in the slave workshop abutting the women's quarters in his uncle's house: fine Vidiyan lords in their Companion's sashes riding to battle flanked by flags and standards and the Great King seated under a parasol, observing the march. A moment's reflection assured him that Lal was right: a eunuch was not considered a fit servant in a man's household, except as a body servant, and certainly not in the household of a Companion of the Great King. A eunuch might tie a lord's sash, but neither eunuch nor woman was allowed to hold the parasol over the Great King's head. Eunuchs belonged in the women's quarters, as go-betweens, as guards, as master of the gate and master of the treasury, as ministers seeing to the administration within the cloistered walls.

"Very well," he said at last. "But you remain under my protection."

"You are all that is magnanimous, eminence."

Jiroannes drained his tea, and Lal poured more into the cup. The warm liquid soothed him, and he felt the truth of Lal's words. He had been kind and generous to his slaves, and yet, one still eluded him. "Lal, send Samae to me."

Lal bowed his head and retreated. Soon enough, Samae appeared, dressed in striped trousers and a quilted damask robe, and knelt before Jiroannes, head bent in submission. Her hair had grown long enough to twine into a braid at the ends, fastened off with a silk ribbon. She folded her fine-boned hands in her lap and sat so still that the only movement he could see, on her, was the stirring of the ends of her hair on her collar. The carpet sank under her knees, forming a dark hollow.

"Samae, why did you refuse your freedom, when Bakhtiian himself granted it to you?"

At first she said nothing. Wind rustled through the tasseled fringe of the awning and shuddered the walls of his tent. He smelled smoke from the guards" camp; or was that a taint on the wind, blown in from Karkand?

"I am a slave, master," she said at last. Her voice was scarcely louder than the wind's rustle. Her voice. It was deeper than he had imagined it would be.

"But I command you to accept your freedom."

"Only the gods command me, master." She doubled over and touched her forehead to the carpet and lay there for the space of twelve heartbeats before lifting her head up again. "I am a slave by their law."

"By their law? What gods? What law is this?"

Under her lashes, she lifted her gaze to look at him. She had liquid brown eyes, dark and slanted against the pale ivory of her skin. "It is death to speak their name. Their laws are cruel, and they hate us for our ugliness."

"Samae, surely I do not understand you correctly," he said, exasperated. "The Everlasting God has given man laws in order that we may live as befits His Word. He shepherds us, in our ignorance, for we are His creation."

"We are clay," murmured Samae, as if she had not heard him, "clay and unclean water, and nothing else."

Jiroannes was too appalled to speak. Here he had thought that the great Tadesh Empire was a civilized country; certainly their concubines and dancers and metalwork and pottery were of the finest quality.

"When my grandfather's grandmother begged for their pity, because she was barren, they granted her wish but with this price: that one child from each generation be sold into slavery. I am the child the gods chose."

"But-" He took a sip of tea and choked on it. "Even a slave has certain rights, as we read in the words of the Everlasting God and his three prophets. Among those rights, the right to be freed."

"I am a slave," said Samae in her stubborn, soft, deep voice, "so that my family will remain free of the curse of barrenness. I will not bring this curse back on them. I cannot. Freedom is forbidden us, who are slaves by the gods" will."

"So if I command you to be free, you will not accept?"

She bent double again, brushing her forehead on the stiff carpet. "You are my master on this earth of clay, but the gods rule me."

Jiroannes realized that she was not bowing to him, but to her gods. A sudden compulsion seized him: to know her, to know of her, to make her speak her thoughts aloud, to fathom what lay behind her blank expression. "Then you serve the gods as your master?"

She remained bent over. Her voice emerged, muffled, out of the collar of her damask coat. "We cannot serve the gods, since they despise us."

"But if you're so much beneath their notice, then why bother to obey their laws at all?"

"They punish those who rebel against them."

Jiroannes let out a great sigh. He lifted his cup up, and Jat padded out of the shadows and took it away. Without knowing why, he extended a hand and brushed his fingers back along her hair and toyed with the ribbon holding her braid fast. "Why did you cry, when we saw the play-the dancers who speak with both words and hands?"

"Because the jaran believe their gods are kind."

"I don't understand."

The radiance along the western horizon swelled and brightened and then faded back down to a luminescent glow. "The woman came from the heavens, did she not? And the man loved her, and he got her with child. So she gave him a sword that she had stolen from her mother, die sun. But a sword brought from heaven bears two edges. For each blessing, it brings you also a curse."

Her voice had a hollow unearthliness that made him nervous. He jerked his hand away from her hair. The wind picked up. Golden tassels danced and fluttered, spinning, along the awning. His sleeve quivered, like an animal shifting in sleep and then settling. "Why should you care, in any case," he asked, "that the jaran believe their gods are kind?"

She did not speak for a long while. At last, she lifted her head enough that he could see her pale cheeks and the dark slash of her mouth. The lantern light caught the glistening of tears on her cheeks, and tears welling in her eyes gave those eyes the brilliance of jewels. "Because they will learn otherwise," she whispered.

"But why-?" But he knew, to see her face, why she cared. She had lived long enough in Tadesh, perhaps even with her family, to learn their dances, the secret of which passed down only within their own race. Then, sold into slavery, she had sailed alone over the wide seas and come into a foreign country and been sold again, into the hands of a foreign master. Alone, at the mercy of her gods, it was no wonder he had never seen her smile. The only wonder was that he had never seen her cry before now. But she had never cared about him. He was only her master on this earth of clay. Probably she had never cared about anyone or anything in Vidiya; had not cared until she came to the jaran. Until she saw their women walking free. Until she was sent to the tent of a boy newly come to manhood,

"I will undertake to treat you more kindly," he said, wanting suddenly for her to think well of him. "It's too bad the jaran don't allow slaves in their camps, or I'd give you to Prince Mitya as a gift."

She gasped, harsh, as if he had hit her. Her hands moved frantically in a sign, warding him off. Or not him, perhaps, but the notice of her gods. She struck her forehead to the carpet once, twice, a third time, keening in a thin, muted voice, and then fell silent, and stilled.

Jiroannes stared at her, taken aback. "Go in to my tent," he said brusquely. "You'll attend me when I'm ready for bed."

With no expression on her face, she rose, bowed, and retreated into his tent. Jiroannes swore under his breath, flung the blanket off his legs, and stood up. Jat padded forward and eased it off the carpet, and briskly folded it up, and vanished back into the shadows. Jiroannes strode to the edge of the carpet. The tassels spun over his head, gold thread glinting and sparking in the lantern light. Beyond, the camp of the jaran army stretched on endlessly into the night. A few campfires burned, in his guards" encampment, along ambassador's row, and farther on, into the main camp. Stars glistened above, as unobtainable as Samae. He saw now that he would never be anything to her but her temporary master, to be suffered while she served out her penance, which could only end, for her, when she died. Perhaps he would give her to Mitya, or into Mitya's household. Perhaps he could explain the situation to Mother Sakhalin and ask her to advise him. Mitya would marry the Habakar princess, of course, but surely a man was allowed a secondary wife or a concubine. Surely some provision could be made for her. Yes, that was the right choice.

Determined, he spun and walked back across the carpet. The plush gave beneath his boots, and he had to step up, a little, inside his tent, where the carpets were piled five deep. A gauzy silk curtain screened off his bedchamber from the front portion of his tent, and as he crossed past his writing table, he saw a lantern shining through the fine silk, and movements silhouetted like the dancing of actors against the translucent fabric.

Like a play, he watched it unfold before him, at first in surprise and then in horror.

Samae knelt at the foot of his bed. Laissa, standing, extended her arm and offered the slave girl a cup. She said: "Drink this." Samae took the cup and drank it down without hesitation.

Jiroannes lunged forward and pushed past the beaded entrance into his bedchamber in time to see Samae drop the cup and clutch her throat, clawing at her neck. She gagged and gasped and choked, and her pale complexion faded to an obscene gray color. One hand groped out. She grasped at the drapery ringing the bed, but the fine silk fabric slipped through her fingers and she fell, retching, but all that emerged from her mouth was a hoarse, rattling sound.

She gasped and choked out three words. "He is safe." As she doubled over, the embroidered quilt caught on her bronze slave's bracelet and slid down off the bed, half over, half under her. She lay still. Her head lay cushioned on crumpled quilt. Against the fine white silk embroidered with red leopards and blue peacocks outlined in gold, her black hair made a stark line, like coarse, unraveled thread.

"She was stupid as well as ugly," said Laissa impassively. "You're better off without her."

Jiroannes could not make himself move. "What have you done?"

"Just so we understand each other, husband, I have poisoned her. I will supply you with concubines from now on, girls who are more suitable to our household. You will have to marry again, of course, but I expect mat you will include me in the negotiation for your secondary wives."

Samae's damask coat was the same peacock blue as the draperies that shrouded the bed. A lantern hung from each carved bed post, each one a cunningly wrought bronze bowl girdled with an elaborate screen through which the light shone.

"I could have you kilted for this!"

"This is commoner's behavior, these histrionics." Her voice was dispassionate. "I sought to provide you with a lesson. You will treat me with the respect I deserve. I ma this household now, and with my influence, you and I can attain eminence at court. I warned the jaran queen that you might prove difficult. Be assured that without my goodwill you won't leave this camp with the alliance your Great King so sorely desires. Why else would he send you so far?"

The truth was, Jiroannes was beginning to have doubts about Vidiya's army and its ability to hold off the jaran army, if things came to war. He suspected mat his future lay with the jaran, not with the Great King's court. But he wasn't going to let Laissa know that. "You're a fool, Laissa. I meant to give her-" He jerked his chin toward Samae's body. "-to the young prince."

"Find him another slave-girl, then. There's little enough to choose between mem."

The shadows stirred, down in the tunnel that linked his tent to hers. Jiroannes caught a glimpse, sliding away, of an observer: It was Lal. Maybe Lal had been trying to warn him all along. Maybe Lal had already thrown his lot in with her camp. She had stuffed the household full of retainers loyal to her; she controlled the kitchens; the guards" camp was by now probably riddled with her informants. She was a princess.

"I'll await you in my chambers," she said. "If you cared for the girl, and she for you, then I'm sorry for it. Had you gotten her with child, I'd have had to kill her anyway."

She eased her robes away from the corpse and turned and marched away down her tunnel, into her domain. She had sewn tiny bells around the hem of her veil and hood, perhaps in imitation of the jaran women, and they tinkled merrily as she vanished into the dark billowing hall. Lal hesitated, there in the shadows, and then followed her.

Jiroannes stared at the body. Samae had fallen on the cup-his last porcelain cup, shattered into bits under her shoulder. A hand lay limp on silk, stretched out as if tracing the golden line of a peacock's feathered glory.

Laissa was wrong, of course. Samae hadn't cared for him at all.

"He is safe." Samae had known it was poison. She had taken it willingly. The blessing for her, to go to Mitya, whom she cared for, would then become a curse to the prince; she had taken the poison to spare him.

It had been a long time since Jiroannes felt called upon to pray. He sank to his knees now and bent his chin to his chest and spread his hands on his thighs, palms open to God, and prayed a long reverent prayer of thanks to the Everlasting God, who judged His servants with more mercy than Samae's gods had judged her.