Red Country (4 page)

He gave me his cold, dry smile. “Will you tell me, princess, or shall I tell you?”

“If I accept,” I said, “Everran becomes a satellite. Hazghend will milk our men and money for their wars, they'll export their own hellions and the blood-feuds will tear our country to shreds as well. What's more, Lyve will probably think himself strong enough for a try at the Confederacy. And he'll want to do it by another war.”

“Not to mention,” he added dryly, “that you yourself will have to put up with Lyve.”

I shuddered. “I purposely ignored that. He drinks like a Hazyk. He'll take concubines later if he doesn't now. And they think wives are only fit to beat and bed.”

His gaze dwelt thoughtfully on me.

“If you refuse,” he took up the summation, “it will be an insult no Hazyk tyrant could stomach, least of all Lyve. He will certainly retaliate. He will not have far to look for help. Quarred, for instance, would be delighted to give his—bandits—safe conduct overland from the Isthmus to you.”

We looked at each other. “It's a stick-fork,” I said.

He rattled his fingers on the table. “There are certain options. Play for time. ‘Maidenly protestations.' Dispute the marriage terms. Even Lyve cannot hope to win Everran for nothing, and if you set the price high enough, it will be impossible to raise at home.”

“That means he'll raid the Confederacy.”

“And possibly start a war that will distract him from you.”

I said, “Including with Estar?”

He said, “My loyalty is here.”

I said, “Everran is Confederate too.”

He raised his brows. I said, “What can we buy with time?”

He frowned at the table. “Possibilities. That a blood-feud wake, or be wakened, in Hazghend. That an assassin appear. Or be made. Or chance intervenes. A storm, perhaps, at sea. Or we can play Hazghend against the Confederates. Tell Quarred Hazghend mean to raid them. Tell Holym Quarred is considering an alliance with Hazghend against them. Tell Estar the same. Tell Hazghend Estar plans to ally with Quarred and stamp them out. Someone will certainly elect to make a pre-emptive strike, and again, they will forget about you.”

“That would destroy the Confederacy.”

“But save Everran.”

I thought about it. I should have thought rationally, but the past, infuriatingly, persisted in interrupting, my own past and the past of which I had learnt.

I said slowly, “Everran founded the Confederacy. It was begun by one of our kings. I would feel I was . . . betraying him.”

Kastir was silent. No retort could have been so crushing.

In something like despair I asked, “Is there no other option you can see?”

He got slowly to his feet. Even before he spoke, something about his manner gave me pause.

“There is one other option, princess. A simple solution to your problems, at home and abroad. One Lyve has already offered you.”

“Marriage! Oh, splendid! In the Four's name, Kastir,” for once I forgot to be polite with him, “just who do you propose for groom? Lyve? The Holym Scribe? Some Quarred patriarch with a beard to his broken knees? One of your Estarian shophets who holds power for a year and then sinks without trace? Or have you really, really gone so moon-mad as to imagine I could marry in Everran without causing a civil war?”

His eyes were fixed on my face. They held a painful constraint, a more painful intensity. His voice was husky, quite unlike usual.

“You could,” he said, “marry me.”

I was so flabbergasted, I let him finish his declaration without once breaking in.

“It is quite true,” he began, “that you could hardly marry in Everran, and the other choices hold little appeal. That is one reason for my offer.” With Kastir even a marriage proposal was ordered, reasoned, methodical. “There are more important factors. It would rid you of Lyve. It would check the other Confederates. It would silence all those who object to a queen's sole government, and, once I was fully accepted, as I have good reason to think I should be, it would remove any threat from your brothers; wherever they are, whatever they may do. Also, I think I could help you to rule efficiently. We would make, as the ploughmen say, a matching team. Everran would be the better for it. And there would be security, peace of mind, for you.”

He paused, searching for words.

“There is a great disparity in our rank. Many people will accuse me of making this offer with an eye to the main chance. Others will say I did it to advance Estar, and consequently myself. But I assure you, princess, that my loyalty has long been to Everran. And for longer, to its queen.”

Another pause. “This may seem a mere marriage of convenience.” He looked down, and up again. “Feelings cannot be proved. But I promise you, princess, that if we marry it will be no matter of convenience to me.”

My eyes must have asked what my tongue could not frame.

“I always held you in affection,” he said. “When you dealt with Oxys it became admiration. Now I know I am in love with you.”

This is Kastir, I told myself. Cold, clearheaded, unemotional Kastir, proposing the incredible. However unlikely the event, it is natural that love itself cannot turn his head. But some stupid cell of memory threw up an almost forgotten passage from the songs of Harran to the first Sellithar, and something un-akin to reason whispered, This is not how I would wish a man to be in love with me.

In the meantime, he was waiting. If I was dumbstruck, he had left himself without defense. Mere good manners demanded that I should not keep him so.

“Kastir.” I found my hand was at my temple. “This is so—sudden—so—unexpected. I—I'm honored. I'm—deeply touched. But I—I'm sorry—I need time to think about this. It's so—so—”

He nodded at once, looking quite as disordered as I felt. Then he bowed deeply, and by mutual consent we both scurried from the room.

* * * * * *

Not surprisingly, I lay awake a long time that night. I had thought of calling Zathar, consulting with him, but respect for a confidence precluded it. I longed for my mother. I could hear her go to the core of it with some irreverent irrelevant essential like, “Do your toes curl when you think of kissing him?” I thought of Everran. I thought of Kastir himself. I tossed and turned and had given up all hope of a decision long before I managed to fall asleep.

I woke at the end of a morning dream, always the vividest, but this time of a more than remarkable intensity. I have no time for dream-readers, any more than for ghost-watchers or soothsayers or tradition worshippers. Only this dream would not go out of my head.

As usual, only the final sequence survived, yet it was clearer than if I had been there in the flesh. I knew the place. It was on the main southern road, Wyven Tirs, just before it drops from the highlands to Asleax' gates. I could see all Everran laid out beneath, azure and pigeon's neck purple and iridescent emerald, silvered from the first of the winter rain. I knew the season. Air's day, when all Everran goes out to fly the huge gaudy kites that honor the Fourth Lord. They were aloft above the walls of Asleax, specks of leaping, diving color on a boisterous wind. Ahead of me the Tirien foothills rose to the Helkents' rampart, meat-red from the passage of the recent rain, but they were only a background for the dream's core. The core was a man on a tall brown blood-horse, with my dream-self standing at its head.

They too had been through the rain, for the rider's scruffy sheepskin jacket was watermarked and his straight black hair clung damply to his skull. He had the bones of kingship, springing nose, an almost arrogant jaw, and he would have been handsome, but for the huge purple scar that blemished his right cheek.

His eyes more than made up for it. They were the strangest, most dream-like and enchanting part of all. Long, almond-shaped eyes with thick black lashes. And the irises were green.

It is not unknown in Everran. If I had never seen it for myself, Zathar had drummed into me the mark of our predecessors' dynasty. “The true Berheage's eyes were green.” It was almost the only fact I retained from history, and that mark was what my dream-person had beyond all mistaking. Dark green, inwardly lit eyes, lucent as wells of emerald.

Yet there was something more about those eyes than color; an attraction, a fascination, the kind of spell you discover in the depths of a great finghend, where no matter how steady your hands seem, the light makes stars and ribbons in the heart of the gem. Motion. That was what remained when I awoke, the way those irises had seemed to flow with their own inner motion, even though his regard was steady on my dream-self's face.

In waking I also retained a fierce pang of loss and grief. As the dreamer, because I wanted to keep the strangeness and clarity of the images, but also because I woke in the knowledge that my dream-self had been saying farewell to him; that his going would deprive me of magic, of living's savor, as well as a deep human affection. So I woke with tears, actual tears on my cheeks.

I remember I sat up to wipe them, vexed with myself for such stupidity, and I had rung for Finda and begun to undo my night-braids when I recollected the rest.

The green-eyed man had spoken to my dream-self. I had the oddest conviction, the most vexing of all, that this scene was not just mind-play, but a fragment of reality. Past reality. That annoyed me further, for the present should not have to acknowledge the influence of the past. It is gone, over, done with, it made its own mistakes and should leave us to make ours. Only the words it had left with me would not fade.

The green-eyed man had said, “Eskan Helken first, I think. There were so many things I didn't learn. Then. . . . They say there's another ocean, east of Hethria. I haven't used Pharaone. Some things should be seen with eyes.”

From the moment of recall the words pestered me, circling in my mind, their absurdity the most vexing of all.
Some things should be seen with eyes.
How else does anyone see? And why should gibberish like “Pharaone” and “Eskan Helken” be mixed with reality? Hethria is certainly real, it is a country east of Everran, and learning is quite sensible, so long as its subject is not history. Why, why, why, nagged my wayward mind as I dressed and breakfasted and instructed the household and tried not to think of Kastir. Eskan Helken, Hethria, Asleax, Pharaone, Wyven Tirs, Air's day; and a man with green, indubitably, idiotically green eyes?

In the end it was too much. Exasperated, I told Nerthor, “Put off the morning audience. And ask the Phathos to visit me.”

Though Nerthor's face stayed carefully blank I felt a fool, and a bigger fool when I reflected how the palace would buzz with it, every giggle-headed ninny inventing omens and fabricating disaster. The princess Sellithar, who so scorned fancy and superstition, actually summoning the Phathos, the chief of soothsayers, the cynosure of the vapid and gullible.

I felt a far bigger fool when I had to tell the thing to him. He was an old man, of course. They always are. Half-blind, with peering, white-glazed eyes that never left my face.

I dealt with the concrete details first, the place, the time, the words, the man's clothes and coloring. Keeping the emotions in reserve, I would then have wrestled with the magical quality of those eyes; but I had got no further than, “They were green,” when the Phathos lifted a hand and with unexpected authority cut me short.

“Beryx,” he said. “Who made himself an aedr to fight the dragon Hawge. That is what you saw in his eyes, princess. The spell of the aedryx, which made their eyes perilous as the dragon's own.”

I nearly stamped my foot at him. Hawge, forsooth! Of course I knew of Beryx, the last Berheage, whose heir was Harran, our dynasty founder, just as I knew of the dragon who wasted Everran and whose bones supposedly lie in the desert of Gebria, with a fence about them and enterprising yokels to charge you a gold rhodel a look, and in my opinion some light-minded sculptor gave his life to the perpetration of a monumental hoax. Nothing could be so big and contain life.

As for aedryx, the ancient wizards and supposed rulers of our entire Confederacy, whose powers had gone beyond spell and witchcraft, and who had reputedly killed each other out long before Everran was founded, there were ghost and nursery tales of them to glut even harpers. And none more substantial than the desert city that stands before you with arch and tower and palm, all of them upside down.

I had no time to air my views. The Phathos was going on.

“It is all in the songs of Harran. You never listen to them, princess?” The shade of pity in his eyes exasperated me. “Harran parted from his king on Air's day, along the road to Asleax. He rode south to Maer Selloth to claim his love, who was the first Sellithar. And also Beryx's queen. Beryx rode east out of Everran, beyond the lore-keepers' ken. Those are his words at parting. And it is Harran to whom he speaks.”

My anger crumbled in what I must confess was pleased surprise. I had always been sure there was some scandal about Harran and his beloved Sellithar who brought him a kingdom, only Zathar would never let it out.

“Beryx's queen?” I burst out. “Then how could she be Harran's—”

“Beryx was childless,” said the Phathos. He considered me, and patently omitted something. “He left the kingdom to Harran. And the queen.” There was an old sadness in his milky eyes. Sadness by proxy. It irritated me all over again, but he took no notice. There was new vigor in his tone.

“That was no ordinary dream, princess. It was a sign, an omen, sent by the founders of your house. Beryx rode eastward out of Everran. Your salvation too will come from the east.”

“Hethria?” I did explode then. “A fine place to find salvation! Can I stop the Confederacy with a pack of peddlers? Or do I just bury it in cartloads of sand?”

He stared past me. “You will journey to your salvation,” he said, “as Beryx did. And as it was for Beryx, the road will be long.”