Spear of Heaven (14 page)

It took a moment to see the face between the robe and the
paint. It was not a young face, wizened and weathered, but its eyes were
bright, its smile sweet, showing an expanse of toothless gums as he rose and
bowed.

He did not bow as low as the servant did, Vanyi noted—there
were degrees of reverence, then. This seemed to indicate respect but not
servility, and a measure of equality.

His voice was sweet and rather high. It was not a eunuch’s
voice. There were eunuchs here, her Guardians had said, and all of them were
priests, unmanned in the service of one of their bloodier goddesses. But he was
not of that sect. His voice had a trained purity, as if he were a singer.

“Lady,” he said, “it is well you are come, and well that I
see you, come at last to Su-Shaklan. I greet you in the name of the gods and
the gods’ children, and all who are in this kingdom they make blessed.”

It took Vanyi a moment to understand him. Magery could teach
a language, but not its odder nuances. Some of these were very odd. She did not
try to rival them, but said, “Greetings to you also, priest of the gods. My
name is Vanyi, master of the Guild of Mages in the empire of Sun and Lion.”

The priest’s eyes narrowed a fraction. He was wincing, she
realized, and in the most delicate manner possible. “Lady. Ah, lady. We do not
use such words here, if we are most properly polite. I am named Esakai, priest
of Ushala temple, where the children of heaven pay their devotions.”

He was telling her something, subtly. That she must not
speak of mages here, yes, she had expected that. He had responded as a courtier
might in requesting an outland barbarian not to relieve himself on the palace
floor. The same delicate revulsion; the same careful consideration for the
stranger’s ignorance.

But that was not all he was getting at. “Are you a messenger
of the queen?” Vanyi asked him.

The tilt of his head and the lift of his brow reminded her
that they were both standing, and he was old, and his feet were no longer as
sturdy as they had once been. She chose not to ignore him. Rudeness was not what
the occasion called for; and if he meant to divert her, then he had misjudged
his target. She sat in the chair opposite the one he had occupied, thus
allowing him to sink back into it with a barely audible sigh of relief.

Which too was subtlety. She countered it again with blunt
directness. “The queen sent you, then?”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, no, lady. Of course not. The daughter of
heaven needs no unworthy mortal to speak for her.”

“Then how does a mere mortal gain audience with her?”

“Why, lady,” said the priest in limpid innocence, “he does
not. Mortals are unworthy to gain the attention of the gods’ own children.”

“In my country,” said Vanyi, “our ruler also is descended
from a god, but he never shuns the company of his people. He walks among them
as one of their own, and they love him for it.”

“So do our people love the children of heaven,” said the
priest, unruffled, “but the children of heaven would never lessen themselves by
walking on common earth.”

“That was so once,” Vanyi said, “in part of our empire. Its
emperors, as they were then, became so rarefied that they had to take the earth
to themselves or perish. The last of them mated with the sun-god’s child and
begot a new world in which the gods walk with men, and men give the gods their
power to rule.”

“How strange,” said the priest. “How . . .
unusual.”

“That may be,” Vanyi said. “But surely people do speak to
the queen? She condescends, I’m told, when need demands.”

“Ah,” said the priest as if she had explained a matter that
puzzled him sorely. “Ah, lady. The queen speaks, yes, for herself and in the
times that she chooses. She never sends messengers or begs mortals to attend
her. They come when the Minister of Protocol bids them come, and she comes as
she wishes, or not.”

Slowly Vanyi worked her way through the tangle of alien
logic. “The queen chooses when and to whom she speaks. The Minister of Protocol
decides who will speak to her, if she chooses to speak, which is her right and
her decision. Therefore the queen sends no messengers. The Minister of
Protocol, howevern . . .”

“The Minister of Protocol abides by the will of heaven. The
queen and the king her brother may speak or not speak. That too is the will of
heaven.”

“I think,” said Vanyi dryly, “that the Minister of Protocol
has a great deal of power. Has he sent you to instruct me?”

“I came by the will of heaven,” said the priest, “and of my
own curiosity, to see what manner of people you are. The lowly mortals name you
demons. I’m thinking that you are no such thing. But you are very strange—and
your shadows most of all.”

“What, my blackrobes?” Vanyi allowed herself to smile. “They’re
warriors of that empire which had to wed itself with the Sun or die. No demons;
no creatures of terror. Merely men, bred and trained to defend their emperor.”

“Very strange men,” the priest said. “Were their mothers
bred to demons, to make them strong?”

“We have no demons in Asanion,” Vanyi said, “which is the
name of their country. Nor in Keruvarion, which is the name of mine.”

“There are demons everywhere,” said the priest, “except in
Su-Shaklan. Our prayers keep them out.”

Their Great Wards kept them out, Vanyi thought. She did not
say it. “Still, in Asanion, men look as these men do, as the lady does who rode
with us, though she’s taller than any of them. Their faces are like hers. They
veil them for honor and for custom.”

The priest shuddered delicately. “Ah, poor things, to be so
ugly. Maybe they do descend from demons, though they deny it. Demons are very
strong.”

“Daruya is reckoned beautiful in our country,” Vanyi said
with a hint of sharpness, catching herself a moment too late, suppressing
rueful laughter. She was as vain as that girlchild, and on her behalf, too.

“Ah,” said the priest, mildly nonplussed. “You are strange.”

“But human,” said Vanyi, “and desirous of addressing the
queen. Might the Minister of Protocol be persuaded to grant me a few moments of
his time?”

“This mere mortal could hardly say, lady,” said the priest.

“Venture a guess,” Vanyi said with a flash of teeth.

The priest blinked. “Oh, that is beyond me, lady. It has
been a great pleasure to speak with you. May I return, if your charity permits?
I should like very much to hear more of this empire of yours, where demons call
themselves men, and kings walk in the dust without fear of soiling their feet.”

Vanyi inclined her head. She could keep him there if she
tried, but she was not minded to do that. He would go back to his Minister of
Protocol, she was sure, and report every word that they had said. Then, with
any luck at all, the Minister himself would be curious enough to summon her—or
to send a messenger with a better head for the heights.

She could wait. For a while. Then, with or without the
mighty Minister, she would do as she had meant to do since she conceived this
expedition.

Daruya was bored.

Everyone else had things to do. Vanyi was pressing for an
audience with the queen. The mages had raised their wards and begun a working
to discover what had broken the Gates. The Olenyai took turns on guard. Even
Kimeri had occupation in plenty, what with the garden, the stable, and the
discovery that Kadin the mage had no objection to the presence of a small
girlchild as he went about his business with the animals.

Daruya was the odd one, the one who had no duty and no
occupation. Vanyi did not need her to assist in the campaign for an audience
with the queen—if anything she was a hindrance, what with the need to explain
who she was and what she was and why she had come, and the delicacy of
balancing her rank as princess-heir with the queen’s rank as ruler of Shurakan.
Kimeri needed her only to be there and to offer praise of the flowers she
brought in great untidy armfuls, or the spotted cat-kit she retrieved from the
straw of the dun mare’s stall, or the bit of harness she had mended all by
herself.

The mages certainly did not need her; she had proved
already, too often, that she overwhelmed their subtle workings with her great
blaze of power. And when she went into the city, to the house where the Gate
had been, to see what was there, she found Kadin in the empty echoing place
with no need or want of her, and a shrinking from the light of her power that
made her blind angry and inexplicably inclined to weep. She had nothing to do
and no purpose here but to wait, and to hope that when Vanyi won through at
last to the queen, Daruya would be permitted to speak in the emperor’s name.

There was only so much she could do to occupy herself in the
house they had been given. The servants needed no assistance, and looked
askance at any offer of it. Kadin was not displeased to let her help with the
seneldi, but she could not spend every moment of every day in their company.
The Olenyai neither needed nor wanted her to take a turn on guard.

For a full hand of days she kept her patience reined in. She
wandered about the palace, finding no obstacle to passage, merely polite stares
and respectful bows. People spoke when spoken to. Some even addressed her
before she addressed them, greeting her, inquiring as to her health and the
health of her companions.

They all seemed to know a great deal about the embassy, even
to understand that it was an embassy and not an invasion of demons from beyond
the Worldwall. It was not a matter of importance, they indicated with glance
and gesture and inclination of the head, but it was pleasant to see strangers
here where strangers came so seldom.

“You’ll take back the tale of us, I’m sure,” said one
exquisite courtier in a coat that trailed behind him, from beneath what had at
first seemed a towering helmet but revealed itself to be an edifice built of
his long lacquered hair. “Your empire would wish to know how we order the world
in Su-Shaklan.”

“It is curious, yes,” Daruya replied with careful courtesy. “It’s
always eager to learn the ways of strangers.”

“It will learn much from ours,” said the courtier. “Why, it
might even become civilized, and your emperor be judged worthy to address our
children of heaven.”

Daruya stared at him. It dawned on her with the slowness of
incredulity that he was calling her a barbarian and her emperor an inferior
monarch, unfit to stand in the presence of Shurakan’s divine rulers. Her first
impulse was to laugh; her second, to box this idiot’s ears. She suppressed
both. “My emperor is the son of a god,” she said stiffly.

“Ah,” said the courtier, polite. “How pleasant. Is it a god
we know?”

“We call him the sun,” she said more stiffly still.

“Ah,” the courtier said again with an expression of mounting
ennui. “A great god, yes. Very great. But not one of ours.”

They were not interested. That was the maddening thing, the
thing that Daruya would never have credited if she had not seen and heard it.
This little sipping-bowl of a kingdom fancied itself great; looked on the
mighty realm of Sun and Lion, and smiled as at the fancy of a child; called its
lords mere barbarians, and disparaged its god with a shrug of sheerest
indifference.

How tiny this realm was, how minute the concerns of its
people, how very narrow their minds. She would have been happy to open their
smug little skulls with an axe.

oOo

The palace was too small for her grand fit of temper. She
walked right out of it, with an Olenyas to keep her shadow safe: Yrias, who was
young and diffident and too shy to stop her. He would be her protection against
Chakan’s wrath when the captain of Olenyai discovered that she had ventured the
streets of the Summer City without him.

They were as steep as ever and as narrow, and as straitly
walled. It was like walking between cliffs in the mountains, except for the
gates that opened here and there, and the people who went back and forth in a
jostling crowd. No one rode here, even on an ox; they were all afoot, many
laden down with mountainous packs or trotting between the shafts of a wheeled
cart in which sat a toplofty noble or a painted-faced lady or a mound of roots
and greens for the market.

Common people, she had come to realize, dressed as she did,
in trousers and hip-long coat. People of rank wore coats of increasing length,
until the princes swept about in elaborate garments that trailed behind them,
worn over the same simple shirt and wide-legged trousers as that affected by
the lowest urchin—though of cut and color befitting their station. Her good
plain clothes, which in Starios would have marked her for what she was, here
made her seem a commoner, and not a wealthy one at that.

The distinction was not as sharp as it might have been. She
saw a princeling give place to a man in a coat that hung only to his knees,
because the latter was larger and older and walking with ponderous dignity. The
prince acted as if he were doing the man a favor; the man acted as if he had
expected that favor and would have been shocked not to receive it.

Age mattered, she had already observed. Size did, too, it
seemed. And dignity. But a prince was still a prince. The queen and the king
still were thought of as equal to the gods. Everyone bowed to divinity and
yielded place to it, but when priests walked past, unless they marched in procession,
they had no more precedence than anyone else. It all seemed very complicated
and very hard to make sense of.

There were temples everywhere. Asanion’s thousand gods
seemed to be mirrored here in Shurakan, if not doubled and trebled. Every god
had his priesthood, too, and every family gave at least one child to a temple.

She saw a gaggle of such children in the care of an erect,
stern woman, being herded toward a sweetseller’s stall. They were reciting as
they ran, in eerie unison: “The gods are all. The gods are one. We are all one
in the eyes of the gods.”