The Seer King: Book One of the Seer King Trilogy (42 page)

“I thought it was mostly hell.”

She stared at the painting. “Yes,” she repeated. “Mostly hell.”

• • •

An hour later, we were finishing the remains of our picnic in the park that stretched behind the museum. I’d made another discovery — no one ever thinks of illicit liaisons in the palaces of culture. So we’d sometimes meet in museums, galleries, or concerts. After we were assured we hadn’t been followed, we could go elsewhere to be alone. Even though I was hardly interested in my surroundings, little by little I was picking up a bit of polish.

We’d made passionate love in her carriage on the way to the museum, and I wanted her again, but sensed this was not the time to suggest it. She’d always been reluctant to talk about her family, and after her words in the huge building behind us, I understood why. But I wanted to know more.

She looked at me quizzically after I repacked the basket.

“You have been quiet Are you mad at me?”

“Now why would I be that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because of what I said?”

“About your home?”

She nodded.

“Not mad, my love,” I said. “You can do anything, feel anything you want about your family, including having murderous intent. But if you want to tell me more, I’ll gladly listen.”

She hesitated, then began, without preamble.

“Everyone seems to think living in a castle is some kind of dream. But it’s not. It’s cold, and the stone walls echo, and all the rooms have to have fireplaces.

“That’s what I remember most. Being cold.” Her voice lowered. “Inside and out.” She looked away from me, perhaps hoping I’d stop her from going on. But I remained silent.

“I’m the last-born, and my three brothers are all quite a few years older than I am. I guess my parents thought they were through with children, although they never said anything.

“My father … well, he’s
the
Agramónte. Very severe, very righteous, always aware of what he’s saying to make sure he doesn’t present an untoward image to outsiders. He was always kindly to me, but remote, and became nervous if he spent very long with me, and quickly called for one of my nursemaids on the pretext that he was boring me.

“My brothers were, well, brothers. I always wanted to tag along with them, and for a while, when I was a baby, they’d tolerate me. But pretty soon I got older, and they had their own interests, and so they’d go to a lot of trouble to avoid me.

“In some ways, that didn’t matter, because all they like are hunting, and auctions and talking about crops and how the government is incompetent and taxes are too high and all slaves are lazy spoilers.” She shrugged. “Typical country lords, in other words. When I turned thirteen, all their friends realized I existed and came flocking around, trying to get into my knickers.”

“What about your mother?”

“She died,” Marán said shortly. “About three months after I married. I think it was out of pure happiness for the marriage she’d help make for me.”

I kept silent, and reluctantly Marán went on.

“She was the daughter of another noble family, of course. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor. The reason my grandfather wanted her to marry my father was because her family owned a strip of land between two of our estates.

“So that was the dowry she brought to her wedding bed.

“But she was quite happy, having married into the Agramóntes. Indeed, she became the social arbiter for the family — who were our equals, our inferiors, our superiors. Fortunately for her, there weren’t many of the latter. Like my father, she always worried about our role in society.

“When suitors started calling on me, she would barely greet them before looking them up in one of the peerage books, to make sure they were noble enough to be able to put their hand up my dress.” She made a wry face.

“In the country, at first they try to fuck you, then, if they can’t do that, they decide you should become their bride. Then they fuck your lights out until you’re flabby with a dozen children and they get bored and start spending nights in the servants’ quarters or in the city with a mistress.” She gloomed in silence for a bit.

“That was your introduction to love?”

“Not quite. I’d read romances, and frankly dreamed of the day I’d have swains dancing around me. I just didn’t realize what the acceptable ones would be like.

“Maybe I should have run off with the first boy I fell in love with.”

“Thank Irisu you didn’t,” I said.

“Poor fellow,” she said, paying no attention to me. “He was the son of my father’s coachman, and I still remember his grin, and his curly hair. He had green eyes, and smelled most marvelously of horses.

“I was half in love with horses, then,” she explained, “sometimes wishing I was one, and if I couldn’t find a centaur, I would settle for him.”

“What happened?”

“My mother found out about it, and within the day the family was sent away. Later, after I was married, I tried to find out what happened to him … them. All I could learn was they came to Nicias, and that was all.”

Marán peered at me. “You don’t mind me telling you this? Nobody but Amiel’s ever heard my silly little tale.”

“Why should I mind?” I wondered. “Should I be jealous of a schoolgirl infatuation?”

“Why not,” she said, her good humor returning for an instant. “I’m jealous of every girl
you’ve
been with.”

“Ah, but there weren’t any,” I said, looking pious. “I was a complete virgin until I met you.”

“Right” Marán thought for a moment. “I guess, growing up, I was like some kind of doll. Everybody got to dress me up like they wanted, and show me off here and there, but what I wanted … well, that didn’t matter. My father wanted me to look like this, my mother wanted me to act like that, and nobody ever asked what did Marán want. Not then, not ever.

“I was cold … and I was lonely. I never really had anyone to play with. When I was very tittle, I could romp with the children of our retainers or slaves, but I found out quickly they always made me queen or commander or whatever in every game we played, and made sure it was a game I wanted to play. Then, when I got older, there was no one, although once a month or so we’d visit some other noble family, and I’d get a chance to play with their children, if they had any.”

She looked at me wistfully.

“I wish I was more like you.”

I’d told her a bit of growing up in Cimabue, and of my love for solitary wanderings in the jungle.

“So I read all I could,” she went on, “especially about cities, and dreamed of the day I could come to Nicias. I remember reading a poem once, about a man who came from the black forests, and even though the city had become his home, the coldness of those dark woods would be with him until his dying day. I wondered if that was me.”

“I will loudly testify there is nothing cold about you, Countess.” At least that elicited a bit of a smile.

“You know,” she continued, “I never thought I’d be married when I did.”

“What did you want to do?”

“Don’t laugh. But at one time I wanted to be a courtesan. I’d be young, and beautiful, and all my noble lovers would pay for a night with me with a carriage full of gold, and they’d want to leave their nasty wives, but I’d just laugh and dance away.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t actually do that,” I said. “Else you would have found most whores’ customers are fat, old, unbathed, and have, shall we say, unusual tastes.”

She stared at me, and her face was hard. Now it was my turn to apologize.

“Never mind,” she said. “I just thought of something that … that wasn’t very nice. Anyway, if I wasn’t going to be a courtesan, I’d be some kind of very intelligent woman, and help philosophers and kings reach mighty decisions.

“That’s the real reason for my salons. I guess I’m trying to give something to that poor lonely little girl that doesn’t exist anymore.” She turned away, but I saw her eyes fill. I reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away from me.

“But then, as I said, I got older, and then the wooing began. There was one boy I liked, who always made me laugh, and I looked forward to his visits. He was noble enough, but his family didn’t have any gold, and so one day he, too, vanished.

“One of my brothers told me later his father had been given a goodly sum to keep him from calling again.

“You see what it was like?”

This time she let me take her hand.

“When I was sixteen the whole thing became a frenzy. There were balls, riding events, social evenings, and I had never a moment to be alone.

“I might have liked it, if I hadn’t known all of this had but one purpose: to see me married to the most suitable man my family could find. Suitable to them.

“That went on for a year, and then my father brought Hernad home. Lord Lavedan. I thought my mother would expire in joy, finally having someone ‘of the proper station’ calling on her only daughter. As I said, not much later, she did just that.

“Somehow everyone, all of these sparkling young men, knew the issue was settled, and instantly found other flames to flit around.

“When my father introduced me to him, it was over, and my life was determined for all time.”

I waited for her to go on, but she remained silent Then she looked at me.

“I guess you think this is all shit Poor little rich girl, and she should maybe have been born in a hovel and learn what real misery’s about.”

“No,” I said truthfully. “I’ve known people who were poorer than poor, and were happy. Please, Marán, stop belittling yourself.”

She kept staring into my eyes, as if unsure of whether to believe me or not. Suddenly she jumped to her feet.

“Come on, Damastes. I want to go home. I’ve ruined this day for the both of us.”

I protested nothing was ruined, that it was important she tell me these things, but she would have none of it, and so we returned to the carriage and she took me back to the stables where I’d left Lucan. She just pecked my lips when we kissed good-bye, and I desperately wished there was something I could say or do to make her feel better. But there wasn’t, and so her carriage rolled away.

As I rode back to the Helms’ cantonment, I thought again and again of what she’d told me. It was odd, with the exception of her wealth, how similar our childhoods were. But one produced a woman who was, I was learning, desperately unhappy, and the other a man who was quite the opposite.

That night, waiting for tardy sleep, I thought again on the matter. I suddenly recognized one difference: I did what I did out of choice, whereas she was never consulted about anything. Then I thought this happened — happens — to almost all women I’ve known. Everything they were permitted to do was decided by a man. By a man or, like Marán’s mother, someone who delighted in doing men’s every bidding.

I wondered how Numantian thinkers could rail on about the injustices done to slaves, or the poor or the benighted hill tribes, and never look across the pillow and see an even greater, omnipresent evil.

I set that out of my mind; if a soldier could barely hope to influence the course of a single skirmish, how could he hope to change what appeared to be immutable custom? Perhaps the only way things could change was if Tenedos’s goddess, Saionji, was given her head and allowed to tumble society until it was entirely different. But that made me shudder — who was to say the goddess preferred things different?

Then another insight came. The biggest real difference between Marán and myself was that I grew up in a house of love, even though it wasn’t spoken aloud that much. I was forever being given a hug by my mother, a loving pinch from one of my sisters, at least when they weren’t angry with me, and a smile from my father when he passed.

But poor Marán? At no time in her story had I ever heard her use that word, and wondered if she knew what it was.

As I drifted off, a single clear thought came, and I don’t think I realized exactly what it actually meant: Perhaps she didn’t. But by the gods, I was going to do all I could to teach her.

• • •

We were lying naked in the sun, our horses tied a few yards away. I was slowly rubbing a soothing antiburn balm on the backs of Marán’s thighs. She purred contentment, and slid her legs apart.

I dipped my finger into the oil, ran it up the center of her buttocks, and slid it into her. It met no resistance, but her body jolted, stiffened as if I’d hurt her.

“Don’t do that,” she said, her voice hard, cold.

I stopped, and said I was very sorry.

“Never mind. Just … just don’t do that. I really don’t like it.”

I apologized again, and began stroking her shoulders.

She lay with her head turned away from me. After a while, she said something very strange.

“The morning after I was married,” she said, in a completely toneless voice, “I walked into my dressing room, and saw the face of a stranger.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“I looked like a little girl,” she said, almost in a whisper. “A little girl who’s gotten lost, and can’t figure out why, or what she could do to find herself.”

• • •

Now began a bad time for Nicias, and other cities in Dara. It was as if Chardin Sher were some sort of wizard, and had cast a curse on us.

The Rule of Ten seemed almost invisible, and the few decrees they handed down had little to do with our problems.

Prices for staples, supposedly regulated, rose and fell like the tide. People began hoarding, especially the middle class who could afford it. There were shortages in oil, rice, butter in the poor sections of the city.

There were many more street speakers, each with a different solution to the woes of the times.

They had to fight for sidewalk room with a new plague: Nicias was inundated with magicians, and it felt as if we were back in Sayana, seeing everything from fortune-tellers to palmists to conjurers to those who would sell you anything from a love-philter to a poison.

Tenedos said this was truly a sign of evil. “Without insulting my own profession, not even these charlatans, when a populace feels change ahead, feels that the very ground under its feet may be quicksand, it seeks out those who claim to have answers.” He smiled wryly. “Although perhaps I shouldn’t complain, since now the auditoriums I speak in are always packed. I just wish I knew if anybody is actually listening, or if they’re jumping from seer to seer like bees crazed on pollen.”