The Judging eye

INTERLUDE: MOMEN

The sound of discord carried on the breeze. A riot in faraway streets.

Kelmomas stood with his chin on the balcony rail, staring out over the Enclosure at the stately passage of clouds crossing the light of a moon too low on the horizon to be seen. Woollen blue wisped across the starred firmament, condensing into bellies of black.

The Nail of Heaven flared white from a sailing summit. A distant chorus of shrieks and bellows signalled another brutal torch-lit incursion.

He had no name for his rapture. Calm and slow breathing. Stationary. Stationary amid the clash of all things. The repose of a soul peering out from the world's shrouded centre. The unmoved mover.

The ruler unseen.

Across the sky he heard a many-throated song of defiance crumbling into cries of outrage, shouts of fear and dismay. The heave of hundreds breaking. The clash of arms.

You, the voice murmured. You made this.

"What are you doing out there?" his mother called out from the dark entrance to his room. She pulled aside the sheers to see him better.

"I'm scared, Mommy."

Her smile was too fraught to be reassuring.

"Shush. You're safe. They're not that many."

She held out an arm and he fell into it, hugging her about the waist. It was one of the innumerable habits linking little boys to their mothers. They walked to his bed together, into the light cast by a solitary hanging lamp. His new nurse, Emansi, had snuffed all the others.

The lantern's flame was a point that blistered to look at, that could not be touched, that threw all the shadows outward, away from the burnished ring of illuminated things. The crimson embroidery-ducks with interlocking wings-gleamed along the folds of his half-drawn covers. The mosaic of dancing bears stretched in a floriated arc into the darkness of the ceiling.

She pulled aside the covers and guided him into the folds with a gentle hand-yet one more thing he cherished with the ferocity of tears. Then she crawled in after him, cupped his small body in the warm palm of hers. She told herself, he knew, that she came here for his sake, that the loss of a brother was trauma enough, let alone the loss of a twin. Think of how intense their bond had been in infancy!

This was what she told herself, he knew.

He closed his eyes, followed the inner drift to the hazy outskirts of sleep. Her love seemed to encase him, to hold him hot and dry and safe. There was a nothingness in her arms, an oblivion indistinguishable from bliss. All cares fell away and with them, the cold-pocketed world that was their foundation. There was only here. There was only now. Another point of lantern-light, though no longer blistering, because he was the illumination.

Let others burn their fingers. Let them turn aside their eyes.

He rolled and snuggle-wriggled so that he could face her on the pillow. They stared into each other's eyes, mother and son, for several long moments. The immediacy of her was so vivid, so close, that nothing else could ever be as real. She was the only thing.

He ran a fingertip along the embroidered lip of the top blanket, a small proof of texture. He bent his face into the semblance of petulant concentration.

"I miss Sammi…" he lied.

She swallowed and blinked. "Me too, sweetling. Me too."

A part of him, the snake-sneaky part, laughed. Poor Samarmas. Poor-poor Samarmas.

"I didn't get to see Father."

Her eyes hardened beneath a film of tears.

"I'm sorry, Kel. We're at war. Your father, he… he has to make sacrifices. We all have to make sacrifices. Even darling little boys like you…"

She fell silent and remote, but he could see her thoughts clear enough. He does not mourn him. My husband does not mourn our son.

"Uncle Maithanet," the little Prince began, "he…"

A kind of wariness crept into her expression. Her eyes blinked away the fog of self-pity and suddenly became alert. "What about your uncle?"

"Nothing."

"Kel. What about your uncle?"

"He… watches you funny."

"What do you mean watches? How?"

"Is he angry at you, Mommy?"

"No. He's your uncle."

An inward look of cycling thoughts and worries.

"Which means he's my brother," she added, but more for her own benefit, he knew, than for his. She reached out to cup his cheek in her left hand, the one bruised by what she called her "ancient tattoo."

The Prince-Imperial fluttered his lids as though overpowered by warmth and weariness. "But he has more power…" he whispered, pretending to fall asleep. He would open his eyes later, when her breathing slipped into the long trough of dreams.

Unseen rulers never slumbered, not truly.