Except she couldn’t.
‘What,’ rasped the muscular, sweating man in front of the queen, ignoring the cleric, ‘does Batiara say about treason? What do the Antae do to rulers who betray them?’ The words rang harshly in the holy space, ascended to the dome.
‘What are you saying? How dare you come armed into a sanctuary?’ The same cleric as before. A brave man, Pardos thought. It was said Sybard had challenged the Emperor of Sarantium on a question of faith, in writing. He would not be afraid here, Pardos thought. His own hands were trembling.
The bearded Antae reached into his cloak and pulled out a bunched-together sheaf of parchments. ‘I have papers!’ he cried. ‘Papers that prove this false queen, false daughter, false whore, has been preparing to surrender us all to the Inicii!’
‘That,’ said Sybard the cleric with astonishing composure, as a shocked swell of sound ran through the sanctuary, ‘is undoubtedly a lie. And even if it were not so, this is not the place or time to deal with it.’
‘Be silent, you gelded lapdog of a whore! It is Antae warriors who decide when and where a lying bitch dog meets her fate!’
Pardos swallowed hard. He felt stunned. The words were savage, unthinkable. This was the queen he was describing in that way.
Two things happened very quickly then, almost in the same moment. The bearded man drew his sword, and an even bigger, shaven-headed man behind the queen stood up and moved forward, placing himself directly in front of her. His face was expressionless.
‘Stand aside, mute, or you will be slain,’ said the man with the sword. Throughout the sanctuary people had risen and now began pushing towards the doors. There was a scraping of benches, a babble of sound.
The other man made no movement, shielding the queen with only his body. He was weaponless.
‘Put down your sword!’ cried the cleric again from the altar. ‘This is madness in a holy place!’
‘Kill her, already!’ Pardos heard then, a flat, low tone, but quite distinct, from among the Antae seats near Gisel.
Someone screamed then. The movement of retreating bodies made the candles flicker. The mosaics overhead seemed to shift and alter in the eddies of light.
The queen of the Antae stood up.
Her back straight as a spearshaft, she lifted her two hands and drew back her veil, and then removed the soft hat with the emblem of royalty around it and laid it gently down on the raised chair so that every man and woman there could see her face.
It was not the queen.
The queen was youthful, golden-haired. Everyone knew. This woman was no longer young, and her hair was a dark brown with grey in it. There was a cold, regal fury in her eyes, though, as she said to the man before her, beyond the intervening mute, ‘You are unmasked, Agila, in treachery. Submit yourself to judgement.’
Pardos was watching the perspiring man named Agila as he lost what remained of his self-control. He could see it happen—the dropping jaw, the gaping, astonished eyes, then the foul, obscene cry of rage.
The unarmed mute was the first to die, being nearest. Agila’s sword swept in a vicious backhand that took the man at an angle across the upper chest, biting deeply into his neck. Agila tore the blade back and free as the man fell, soundlessly, and Pardos saw blood fly through holy space to spatter the clerics, the altar, the holy disk. Agila stepped right over the toppled body and plunged his sword straight into the heart of the woman who had impersonated the queen, balking him.
She screamed as she died, taken by agony, twisting and falling backwards onto the bench beside her chair. One hand clutched at the blade in her breast as if pulling it to herself. Pardos saw Agila rip it back, savagely, slicing her palm open.
There was screaming everywhere by then. The movement to the doors became a frenzied press, near to madness. Pardos saw an apprentice he knew stumble and fall and disappear. He saw Martinian gripping his own wife and Crispin’s mother tightly by the elbows as they entered the frantic press, steering towards the exits with everyone else. Couvry and Radulph were right behind them. Then Couvry moved up, even as Pardos watched, and took Avita Crispina’s other arm, shielding her.
Pardos stayed where he was, on his feet but motionless.
He could never afterwards say exactly why, only that he was watching, that someone had to watch.
And observing in this way—quite close, in fact, a still point amid swirling chaos—Pardos saw the Chancellor, Eudric Goldenhair, step forward from his place near the fallen woman and say in a voice that resonated, ‘Put up your sword, Agila, or it will be taken from you. What you have done is unholy and it is treachery and you will not be allowed to flee, or to live.’
His manner was amazingly calm, Pardos thought. He watched as Agila wheeled swiftly towards the other man. A space had cleared, people were fleeing the sanctuary.
‘Fuck yourself with your dagger, Eudric! You horse-buggered offal! We did this together and you will not disclaim it now. Only a dice roll chose which of us would stand up here. Surrender my sword? Fool! Shall I call in my soldiers to deal with you now?’
‘Call them, liar,’ said the other man. His tone was level, almost grave. The two of them stood less than five paces apart. ‘There will be no reply when you do. My own men have dealt with yours already—in the woods where you thought to post them secretly.’
‘What? You treacherous bastard!’
‘What an amusing thing for you to say, in the circumstances,’ said Eudric. Then he took a quick step backwards and added: ‘Vincelas!’ extremely urgently, as Agila, eyes maddened, clove through the space between them.
There was a walkway overhead, not especially high: a place for musicians to play unseen, or for clerics’ meditation and quiet pacing on days when winter or autumn rains made the outdoors bitter. The arrow that killed Agila, Master of the Antae Horse, came from there. He toppled like a tree, sword clattering on the floor, at the feet of Eudric.
Pardos looked up. There were half a dozen archers on the walkway. As he watched, the four men with drawn swords—Agila’s men—slowly lowered and then dropped their weapons.
They died that way, surrendering, as six more arrows sang.
Pardos realized he was standing quite alone now, in the section reserved for the artisans. He felt utterly exposed. He didn’t leave, but he did sit down. His palms were wet, his legs felt weak.
‘I do apologize,’ said Eudric smoothly, looking up from the dead men to the three clerics still standing before the altar. Their faces were the colour of buttermilk, Pardos thought. Eudric paused to adjust the collar of his tunic and then the heavy golden necklace he wore. ‘We should be able to restore order quickly enough now, calm the people, bring them back in. This is a political matter, a most unfortunate one. Not your concern at all. You will carry on with the ceremony, of course.’
‘What? We will not!’ said the court cleric, Sybard, his jaw set. ‘The very suggestion is an impious disgrace. Where is the queen? What has been done to her?’
‘I can assure you I am far more anxious to know the answer to that than you are,’ said Eudric Goldenhair. Pardos, watching intently, had Agila’s words still ringing in his head: We did this together.
‘One ventures to guess,’ added Eudric smoothly, to no one and to all of them left in the sanctuary, ‘that she must have had some word of Agila’s vile plot and elected to save herself rather than be present at the holy rites for her father. Hard to blame a woman for that. It does raise some . . . questions, naturally.’ He smiled.
Pardos would remember that smile. Eudric went on, after a pause, ‘I propose to restore order here and then establish it in the palace—in the queen’s name, of course—while we ascertain exactly where she is. Then,’ said the yellow-haired Chancellor, ‘we shall have to determine how next to proceed here in Varena, and indeed in all of Batiara. In the meantime,’ he said, in a voice suddenly cold that did not admit of contradiction, ‘you are under a misapprehension of your own, good cleric. Hear me: I did not ask you to do some
thing, I told you to do it. The three of you will proceed with the ceremony of consecration and of mourning, or your own deaths will follow upon those you have seen. Believe it, Sybard. I have no quarrel with you, but you can die here, or live to achieve what goals you have set for yourself and our people. Holy places have been sanctified with blood before today.’
Sybard of Varena, long-shanked and long-necked, looked at him a moment. ‘There are no goals I could properly pursue,’ he said, ‘were I to do as you say. I have offices to perform for those slain here and comfort to offer their families. Kill me if you will.’ And he walked from the raised place before the altar and out the side door. Eudric’s eyes narrowed to slits, Pardos saw, but he said nothing. A smaller Antae nobleman, smooth-chinned but with a long brown moustache, stood beside him now, and Pardos saw this man lay a steadying hand on the Chancellor’s arm as Sybard passed right by them.
Eudric stared straight ahead, breathing deeply. It was the smaller man who now gave crisp commands. Guards began mopping with their own cloaks at the blood where the woman and the mute had died. There was a great deal. They carried their bodies out through the side exit, and then those of Agila and his slain men.
Other soldiers went out into the yard, where frightened people could still be heard milling about. They were instructed to order the crowd back in. To report that the ceremony was to proceed.
It amazed Pardos, thinking of it after, but most of those who had rushed out, trampling each other in terror, did come back. He didn’t know what that said about people, what it meant about the world in which they lived. Couvry came back, Radulph did. Martinian and the two women did not. Pardos realized that he was glad of that.
He stayed where he was. His gaze went back and forth from Eudric and the man beside him to the two remaining clerics before the altar. One of the clerics turned to look back at the sun disk, and then he walked over to it and, using the corner of his own robe, wiped at the blood there and then at the blood on the altar. When he turned around and came back, Pardos saw the smeared blood dark on his yellow robe and saw that the man was weeping.
Eudric and the one beside him took their seats, exactly as before. The two clerics glanced nervously over at them and then raised their hands once more, four palms outwards, and then they spoke, in perfect ritual unison.
‘Holy Jad,’ they said, ‘let there be Light for all your children gathered here, now and in days to come.’ And the people in the sanctuary spoke the response, raggedly at first and then more clearly. Then the clerics spoke again, and the response came again.
Pardos rose quietly then as the rites began, and he moved past Couvry and Radulph and those sitting beyond them towards the eastern aisle and then he walked past all the people gathered there beneath the mosaic of Jad and Heladikos with his gift of fire, and he went out the doors into the cold of the yard and down the path and through the gate and away from there.
At the moment a man and a woman she had loved since childhood were dying in her father’s sanctuary, the queen of the Antae was standing fur-cloaked and hooded at the stern railing of a ship sailing east from Mylasia through choppy seas. She was gazing back west and north to land, to where Varena would be, far beyond the intervening fields and forests. There were no tears in her eyes. There had been earlier, but she was not alone here and visible grief, for a queen, required privacy.
Overhead, on the mainmast of the sleek, burnished ship, whipped by the stiff breeze, flew a crimson lion and a sun disk on a blue field: the banner of the Sarantine Empire.
The handful of Imperial passengers—couriers, military officers, taxation officials, engineers—would disembark at Megarium, giving thanks for a safe journey through wind and white waves. It was late to be sailing, even for the short run across the bay.
Gisel would not be among those leaving the ship. She was going farther. She was sailing to Sarantium.
Almost everyone else on board had been present as a screen, a mask, to deceive the Antae port officials in Mylasia. If this ship had not been in the harbour, the other passengers would have ridden the Imperial road north and east to Sauradia and then back down south to Megarium. Or they might have taken another, less trim craft than this royal one, had the seas been judged safe for a fast trip across the bay.
This ship, expertly manned, had been riding at anchor in Mylasia waiting for one passenger only, should she decide to come.
Valerius II, Jad’s Holy Emperor of Sarantium, had extended an extremely private invitation to the queen of the Antae in Batiara, suggesting she visit his great City, seat of Empire, glory of the world, to be feted and honoured there, and perhaps hold converse upon matters of moment for both Batiara and Sarantium in Jad’s world as it was in that year. The queen had had conveyed to the ship’s captain in Mylasia harbour—discreetly—her acceptance six days ago.
She had been about to be killed, otherwise.
She was likely to die in any case, Gisel thought, looking back over the white-capped sea at the receding coastline of her home, wiping at tears that were caused by the wind at the stern, but only by the wind. Her heart ached as with a wound, and a grim, hard-eyed image of her father was in her mind, for she knew what he would have thought and said of this flight. It was a grief. It was a grief, among all the others of her life.
Her hood blew back in a swirling of the salt wind, exposing her face to the elements and men’s eyes, sending her hair streaming. It didn’t matter. Those on board knew who she was. The need for uttermost care had ended when the ship slipped anchor on the dawn tide carrying her from her throne, her people, her life.
Was there a way to return? A course to sail between the rocks of violent rebellion at home and those of the east, where an army was almost certainly being readied to reclaim Rhodias? And if there was such a course, if it existed in the god’s world, was she wise enough to find it? And would they let her live so long?
She heard a footfall on the deck behind her. Her women were below, both of them violently unwell at sea. She had six of her own guards here. Only six to go so far, and not Pharos, the silent one she’d so dearly wanted by her side—but he was always by her side, and the deception would have failed had he not remained in the palace.
It wasn’t one of the guards who approached now, nor the ship’s captain, who was being courteous and deferential in exactly proper measure. It was the other man, the one she had summoned to the palace to help her achieve this flight, the one who had said why Pharos would have to remain in Varena. She remembered weeping then.
She turned her head and looked at him. Middling height, long grey-white hair and beard, the rugged features and deep-set blue eyes, the ashwood staff he carried. He was a pagan. He would have to be, she thought, to be what else he was.
‘The breeze is a good one, they tell me,’ said Zoticus the alchemist. He had a deep, slow voice. ‘It will carry us swiftly to Megarium, my lady.’
‘And you will leave me there?’
Blunt, but she had little choice. She had needs, desperate ones; could not make traveller’s talk just now. Everything, everyone who might be a tool needed to be made, a tool, if she could manage it.
The craggy-faced alchemist came to the rail, standing a diffident distance apart from her. He shivered and wrapped himself in his cloak before nodding his head. ‘I am sorry, my lady. As I said at the outset, I have matters that must be attended to in Sauradia. I am grateful for this passage. Unless the wind gets wilder, in which case my gratitude will be tempered by my stomach.’ He smiled at her.
She did not return it. She could have her soldiers bind him, deny him departure at Megarium; she doubted the Emperor’s seamen would interfere. But what was the point of doing that? She could bind the man with ropes, but not his heart and mind to her, and that was what she needed from him. From someone.
‘Not so grateful as to stay by your queen who needs you?’ She did not veil her reproach. He had been a man inclined to women in his youth, she remembered learning once. She wondered if she might think
of something yet, to keep him. Would her maidenhead be a lure? He might have bedded virgins but would never have slept with a queen before, she thought bitterly. There was a pain in her, watching the grey coastline recede and merge into the grey sea. They would be in the sanctuary by now, back home, beginning her father’s rites under the candles and the lanterns.
The alchemist did not avert his eyes, though her own gaze was icy cold. Was this the first of the prices she was paying, and would continue to pay, Gisel thought . . . that a queen adrift on another ruler’s boat, with only a handful of soldiers by her and her throne left behind for others to claim, could not compel proper homage or duty any more?
Or was it just the man? There was no disrespect in him, to be fair, only a frank directness. He said gravely, ‘I have served you, Majesty, in all ways I can here. I am an old man, Sarantium is very far. I have no powers that would aid you there.’
‘You have wisdom, secret arts, and loyalty . . . I still believe.’
‘And are right to believe that last. I have as little desire as you, my lady, to see Batiara plunged into war again.’
She pushed at a whipping strand of hair. The wind was raw on her face. She ignored it. ‘You understand that is why I am here? Not my own escape? This is no . . . escape.’
‘I understand,’ said Zoticus.
‘It isn’t simply a question of who rules in Varena among us, it is Sarantium that matters. None of them in the palace has the least understanding of that.’
‘I know it,’ said Zoticus. ‘They will destroy each other and lie open to the east.’ He hesitated. ‘May I ask what you hope to achieve in Sarantium? You spoke of returning home . . . how would you, without an army?’
A hard question. She didn’t know the answer. She said, ‘There are armies and . . . armies. There are different levels of subjugation. You know what Rhodias is now. You know what . . . we did to it when we conquered. It is possible I can act so that Varena and the rest of the peninsula is not ruined the same way.’ She hesitated. ‘I might even stop them from coming. Somehow.’