A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (4 page)

TWO

At the palace’s outer gate
a pair of sentries from Pedgor Garrison halted the three men and took their names, even though Clefrabbes Douin was far from a nonentity in Feln, even though Abel and Seth were recognizable as living if imperfect mirrors of the dead Latimer.

Seth stared past the guards.

Beyond the gateway: a pool outlined by tiles and pinched about its circumference with immersion nooks. In these nooks, pilgrims could give themselves to the waters of Shobbes. Today, however, the inner court was empty, and the tiled façade of the palace reflected the face of the pool as the pool reflected that of the palace.

“You must wait for Shobbes to admit you,” said one of the guards. He and his companion wore leather pants and vests. Carrying mech-rifles, they radiated a hostility that seemed to encompass even Douin.

“It was like this this morning, too,” Abel told Seth. “Before the aisautseb uprising, you could walk in whenever you wished, so long as you had an invitation. But now, as in the old days, you must wait for the blessing of Shobbes.”

The geyser in the pool, Seth knew, had a regular interval, but he had forgotten what it was. How long would they have to stand in the shadow of the stone-and-ceramic palace before certification came? The guards blocking their way and the Kieri in the teeming square below them made Seth equally nervous. He was caught, with his isohet, between Scylla and Charybdis.

At last Shobbes Geyser blew. The eruption was presaged by a churning in the pool and then an audible bubbling—whereupon the surface seemed to peel back and a pillar of reddish water shot upward, fanning out like a peacock’s tail as it climbed. Although the continuous plashing of the geyser made talk impossible, its eruption lasted scarcely a minute and soon a guard was able to say:

“Now you may pass.”

Seth was startled by the
warmth
of the drops that had misted down on him. The eruption had been too well foretokened to surprise him. But as Douin led them through the gate, Seth could still see—in his mind’s eye—the central plume dancing eighteen or twenty meters in the air.

It was a long way—over the wet mosaics surrounding the pool, then across an apron of enormous flagstones—to the palace entrance, and only when they were well beyond the hearing of the guards did Douin speak:

“Master Seth, did you see Aisaut in the geyser?”

“Aisaut?”

“A man of conscience should see the image of Aisaut projected against the palace through the geyser’s dancing. I was wondering if you saw such a thing. I know better than to ask your isohet.”

“I saw only water,” Seth said. He looked at Abel. The expression on Abel’s face was quick with apprehension and disgust. It seemed to say,
Haven’t you the sense to give your host the answer he wants to hear?

“Nothing else?”

“No, sir. Only water and sunlight and tiles.”

Douin’s eyes were cryptically merry. “That’s all I ever see,” he said. “In twenty-three years, that’s all I’ve ever seen.” He led the isohets up a final set of steps and into the Winter Palace.

Despite its ancient façade—the building supposedly dated to the early days of the legendary Inhodlef Era—the palace was luxuriously appointed within and almost shamefully comfortable. As in Master Douin’s geffide, the interior flagstone flooring was carpeted with a synthetic fabric both durable and eye-pleasing. Here, however, the carpet’s nap was iridescent, dyed cobalt and crimson in an immense cartographic pattern representing the world.

Seth, who had stood in this anteroom once before, waiting for Latimer to return from an audience with the Liege Mistress, distinctly remembered that on that occasion the pattern in the carpet had depicted stylized figures thieving and juggling—a portrait of people rather than a graph of the globe.

“Lady Turshebsel has changed the decor,” Seth whispered. For Douin’s benefit, he nodded meaningfully at the carpet.

Douin was briefly puzzled, then finally comprehending. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s the same carpet, Master Seth, but a different alignment of its nap. It has four separate designs, this carpet, depending on the direction in which its fibers are brushed. Master Günter was very interested in the process.”

Abel said, “I prefer walking across it to talking about it.”

“Very good,” Douin replied. He indicated a tilework archway farther on and led them toward it. There was a sound of gently lapping water from the higher chamber just ahead.

Seth had never set eyes on Lady Turshebsel, Liege Mistress of Kier. He knew that her people considered her the rightful inheritor of the geffide that was their nation, even though she had won her place not through descent from any previous ruler but instead from the happenstance of a lottery conducted by the aisautseb on the death of her predecessor. She was Liege Mistress, then, not through primogeniture but rather through the influence of patriotic prayer. Only young jauddeb females who obtained menarche on the death day of the last Liege Mistress, and who were residents of the city in which she had died, were eligible for selection. To ensure that no geffide sought to feign a daughter’s eligibility by misrepresenting the advent of her womanhood, the Kieri had long since evolved joyous first-blood festivities encouraging the geffide to proclaim a daughter’s time and to celebrate it before the world. Kieri girls, therefore, were quick to tell their parents of their arrival at menarche so that the news could be spread. A tardy report was almost unheard of, for girls were considerably more likely to err on the impulsive side. Further, to prevent the adults of a geffide from conspiring to place one of their daughters on the Kieri throne, tradition demanded that the family of the new Liege Mistress suffer the confiscation of all its goods and exile to a remote and overwarm area of the continent, usually to Feht Evashsted, a coastal area near the great southern ocean. For many, particularly the aged, this was a virtual death sentence. That, too, was why the passing of each Liege Mistress was customarily made public three full days
after
its occurrence, when an official of the court could verify, with little fear of either error or deception, all the first-blood registrations of the regal lady’s death day. After that, the aisautseb selected her successor from among the available candidates by a lottery that Seth did not wholly understand. Latimer had said that it involved the immersion of the bleeding girls in either the pool of the Shobbes Geyser (if the Liege Mistress had died in Feln) or in the sulfur baths of Shobbes in the forbidden moraine territories west of the Summer Capital (if the Liege Mistress had died in Sket). Purity and endurance were important criteria, and the famous pinkish cast of the waters of Kier was said to derive not from ferric oxides but from the pure, enduring tincture of the royal menses.

Although Seth had often heard Abel describe the Liege Mistress as an unprepossessing woman with a squat body and a full-moon face, he now began conjuring images of a dragoness or Gorgon—only to step into her laulset and find Abel vindicated.

Lady Turshebsel stood beside a small but exquisitely proportioned bathing pool shaped like the central cluster of a meadowland flower; each of its nine semicircular petals was an immersion nook. The tiles here were a dazzling burgundy, and to keep from slipping on them, the Liege Mistress wore a pair of thongs with adhesive soles and carried a rubber-tipped metal staff. In a row of tilework chairs growing out of the floor behind her sat Lady Turshebsel’s advisors, attendants, and sycophants: the members of her palace geffide. Not counting the Kieri over whom she ruled, Seth reflected, they were all the family the Liege Mistress would ever have. As an avatar of Shobbes, she was betrothed forever to the state, virgin to her death day.

Beyond that, old Latimer had said, she was an enlightened woman who quite early in her reign had renounced all but the most trivial ritual authority of the aisautseb. She had forced them out of the palace by command, securing their obedience because they themselves had chosen her and could disobey her only by openly conceding their own fallibility. Until two weeks ago, Lady Turshebsel had been able to survive—in fact, to prosper—without the aisautseb, largely because Gla Taus had remained for so long outside the range of Interstel’s benign meddlesomeness, and because the patriot-priests of Kier had found no cause to dispute the wisdom of her rule. Then, after sending an emissary to the court in Sket, Interstel had given the Ommundi Trade Company permission to seek mercantile rights on the planet, and the Latimers had come to Gla Taus to negotiate these rights with the Lady.

One of those sitting in a tilework chair, Seth noticed, was a priest. Engulfed in robes, his legs drawn up beneath him on the ceramic seat, his unblinking eyes like silver nail heads, he sat in a chair reserved for a prominent advisor. Two weeks ago, that chair had belonged to another, but to appease the aisautseb after their uprising, Lady Turshebsel had not only declared the
Dharmakaya
Kieri property but had reestablished a patriot-priest advisorship. This man was the first to hold that position in thirty-seven Gla Tausian years.

“Welcome, Master Seth,” Lady Turshebsel said from across the laulset. “Please join me in the waters.”

A woman advanced from another doorway, took the Liege Mistress’s staff, and removed her starched skirts and jacket. Then, wearing only her awkward-looking thongs, Lady Turshebsel descended into the pool. Her squat, naked body, like that of other Kieri, was lightly haired over its entire surface (excepting only the face), the hair deepening in color rather than in thickness at the pubic region: an unremarkable body, really, at least here on Gla Taus.

Once Lady Turshebsel had positioned herself in her immersion nook, her smile seemed that of a little girl who has tasted a forbidden confection. If she was indeed past middle age for a jauddeb, she bore her years well.

“Come,” she said. “All others may attend this conference from vantages of their own choosing, but Master Seth must join me in the waters.”

Kieri garments were made to don or doff without lifting the arms or raising the feet, and before Seth could protest or demur, an attendant had unstrung his jacket and split and peeled back the resealable leg seams of his pantaloons. Soon he stood before the mighty of the land in gooseflesh and breechclout, and that the Lady also wore no clothes was paltry consolation.

Half panicked, Seth looked to his isohet for aid.

“I suffered through the same thing this morning,” Abel said in Langlish. “Off with your breechclout, too. She wishes to take your measure.”

But Clefrabbes Douin took Seth’s wrist and led him toward the nook opposite Lady Turshebsel’s. “Perhaps he’d be more comfortable, Lady, if only those immediately concerned with this matter take part in our talks.”

Lady Turshebsel looked to right and to left, nodding each time, and, in a moment, there remained in the laulset only Seth, Abel, Douin, the silver-eyed patriot-priest, and a tall, ugly Kieri dressed in blue pants and a long, rope-hooked coat.

This man Seth knew as Porchaddos Pors, Point Marcher of Feln. It was his function to formulate and implement local policy. Although one of the highest-ranking courtiers in the Liege Mistress’s service, Pors was hierarchically subordinate to the Point Marcher of Sket, who, possessing his title through a more ancient lineage, exercised a greater authority nationwide. Pors was of the Kieri nobility, whereas Douin was a career civil servant who had won his position and his house through the sometimes uncertain preferment of scholarship and ability.

Seth did not like Porchaddos Pors because of his aggressive temperament and the animalish cast of his features. Although grateful to Douin and Lady Turshebsel for emptying the hall of extraneous onlookers, he still did not like to remove his breechclout before this man. The stare of the aisautseb, enveloped in his stiff, white robes, was also disconcerting. Why must he disrobe in front of strangers?

Abel and Douin flanked him, and Abel, nudging him in the side, muttered in faint Langlish, “Remove it and get in. The priests believe that a naked jauddeb speaks the truth; naked humans, too, apparently.”

Bathing with the Clefrabbes geffide had seemed a natural thing, a strengthening of the bond between host and guest—but this, despite the kindness in Lady Turshebsel’s eyes, seemed designed either to humble or to test; both, maybe. And because Abel had earlier said that getting back to Earth depended on how he conducted himself here, Seth tasted fear. What was he being tested on? What did they want of him?

He unknotted the breechclout and dropped it to the floor. His scrotum contracted, and his legs threatened to give way. But he kept his teeth clenched and entered the warm water, settling into the immersion nook and relaxing a little the moment his body was covered.

Water moved around him, and Porchaddos Pors came to the pool’s edge to stand behind the Liege Mistress. Half visible in the glare of light behind and to the left of Pors, the unblinking priest kept watch.

“Your isohet says you wish to return to Earth, Master Seth,” Lady Turshebsel began. “In the
Dharmakaya.
”

“Yes, Lady.”

“The ship you came in, formerly the property of the Ommundi Company, now belongs to us. The aisautseb, however, agree that you may regain it if you, your isohet, and the pilot who now lies aboard it in cold sleep agree to undertake a mission on behalf of the Kieri state. Master Abel has already agreed. The pilot, he tells us, will obey him, for Master Abel is now the Ommundi representative on Gla Taus with legal authority. But because you’re your isohet’s equal in all but age, Master Seth, we wish to acquire your consent, too.”

“I agree to whatever Abel has agreed,” Seth said, still not understanding what they wanted. He had the uneasy apprehension that he was being played like a fish with a hook in its gill, and yet . . . and yet Lady Turshebsel’s voice and manner were kindly. Her pale round face, framed with blue-black ringlets, bobbed lightly above the waters flowing between them, and he found no deception in her.

Accompanied by the sucking of his thongs, Pors neared Seth by stalking around the pool. “Have you no questions about what we require? No curiosity about the task? No doubt that you may be able to accomplish what we wish you to accomplish?” He halted halfway around and stared at Seth impatiently, meanwhile towering against the backdrop of a farther portal.