He did not smile, or dismiss that. He said only, ‘Somehow. But then you would not return either, would you?’
She had thought of that, too. ‘Perhaps. I would pay that price, I suppose. Alchemist, if I knew all paths to what will be, I’d not have asked for counsel. Stay by me. You know what I am trying to save.’
He bowed then, but ignored the renewed request. ‘I do know, my lady. I was honoured, and remain so, that you summoned me.’
Ten days ago, that had been. She’d had him brought to her on the easy pretext that he was once more to offer his spells of the half-world to help ease the souls of the dead in the plague mound—and her father’s spirit, too, with the memorial day approaching. He had first come to the palace more than a year before, when the mound was raised.
She remembered him from that time: a man not young but measured and observant, a manner that reassured. No boasting, no promised miracles. His paganism meant little to her. The Antae had been pagans themselves, not so long ago, in the dark forests of Sauradia and the blood-sown fields beside.
It was said that Zoticus spoke with the spirits of the dead. That was why she had summoned him two summers ago. It had been a time of universal fear and pain: plague, a savage Inici incursion in the wake of it, a brief, bloody civil war when her father died. Healing had been desperately needed, and comfort wherever it could be found.
Gisel had invoked every form of aid she could those first days on the throne, to quiet the living and the dead. She had ordered this man to add his voice to those that were to calm the spirits in the burial mound behind the sanctuary. He had joined the cheiromancers, with their tall, inscribed hats and chicken entrails, in the yard one sundown after the clerics had spoken their prayers and had gone piously within. She didn’t know what he had done or said there, but it had been reported that he was the last to leave the yard under the risen moons.
She had thought of him again ten days ago, after Pharos had brought her tidings that were terrifying but not, in truth, entirely unexpected. The alchemist came, was admitted, bowed formally, stood leaning on his staff. They had been alone, save for Pharos.
She had worn her crown, which she rarely did in private. It had seemed important somehow. She was the queen. She was still the queen. She could remember her own first words; imagined, on the deck of the ship, that he could as well.
‘They are to kill me in the sanctuary,’ she had said, ‘on the day after Dykania, when we honour my father there. It is decided, by Eudric and Agila and Kerdas, the snake. All of them together, after all. I never thought they would join. They are to rule as a triumvirate, I am told, once I am gone. They will say I have been treating with the Inicii.’
‘A poor lie,’ Zoticus had said. He had been very calm, the blue eyes mild and alert above the grey beard. It could surprise no one in Varena, she knew, that there were threats on her life.
‘It is meant to be weak. A pretext, no more. You understand what will follow?’
‘You want me to hazard a guess? I’d say Eudric will have the others out of the way within a year.’
She shrugged. ‘Possibly. Don’t underestimate Kerdas, but it hardly matters.’
‘Ah,’ he had said then, softly. A shrewd man. ‘Valerius?’
‘Of course, Valerius. Valerius and Sarantium. With our people divided and brutalizing each other in civil war, what will stop him, think you?’
‘A few things might,’ he’d said gravely, ‘eventually. But not at first, no. The Strategos, whatever his name is, would be here by summer.’
‘Leontes. Yes. By summer. I must live, must stop this. I do not want Batiara to fall, I do not want it drenched in blood again.’
‘No man or woman could want that last, Majesty.’
‘Then you will help me,’ she’d said. She was being dangerously frank, had already decided she had next to no choice. ‘There is no one in this court I trust. I cannot arrest all three of them, they each walk with a small army wherever they go. If I name any one of them my betrothed, the others will be in open revolt the next day.’
‘And you would be negated, rendered nothing at all, the moment you declared it. They would kill each other in the streets of every city and in the fields outside all walls.’
She had looked at him, heartsick and afraid, trying not to hope too much. ‘You understand this, then?’
‘Of course I do,’ he had said, and smiled at her. ‘You should have been a man, my lady, the king we need . . . though making us all the poorer in another way, of course.’
It was flattery. A man with a woman. She had no time for it. ‘How do I get away?’ she’d said bluntly. ‘I must get away and survive the leaving so I can return. Help me.’
He had bowed, again. ‘I am honoured,’ he’d said, had to say. And then: ‘Where, my lady?’
‘Sarantium,’ she had said baldly. ‘There is a ship.’
And she’d seen that she’d surprised him after all. Had felt some small pleasure then, amid the bone-deep anxiety that walked with her and within her as a shadow or half-world spirit through all the nights and days.
She’d asked if he could kill people for her. Had asked it once before, when they had raised the plague mound. It had been a casual question then, for information. It wasn’t this time, but his answer had been much the same.
‘With a blade, of course, though I have little skill. With poisons, but no more readily than many people you might summon. Alchemy transmutes things, my lady, it does not pretend to the powers the charlatans and false cheiromancers claim.’
‘Death,’ she had said, ‘is a transmutation of life, is it not?’
She remembered his smile, the blue eyes resting on her face, unexpectedly tender. He would have been a handsome man once, she thought; indeed, he still was. It came to her that the alchemist was troubled in his own right, bearing some burden. She could see it but had no room to acknowledge the fact in any way. Who lived in Jad’s world without griefs?
He’d said, ‘It may be seen that way, or otherwise, my lady. It may be seen as the same journey in a different cloak. You need,’ he had murmured, changing tone, ‘at least a day and a night away from these walls before they discover you are gone, if you are to reach Mylasia safely. My lady, that requires that someone you trust pretend to be the queen on the day of the ceremony.’
He was clever. She needed him to be. He went on. She listened.
She would be able to leave the city in a disguise on the second night of Dykania when the gates were open for the festival. The queen could wear the heavily veiled white of full Rhodian mourning in the sanctuary, which would allow someone to take her place. She could declare an intention to withdraw from public view into her private chambers the day before the consecration, to pray for her father’s soul. Her guards—a select, small number of them—could wait outside the walls and meet her on the road. One or two of her women could wait with them, he said. Indeed, she would need ladies-in-waiting with her, would she not? Two other guards could, in festival guise themselves, pass out through the walls with her amid the night chaos of Dykania and join the others in the countryside. They could even meet, he said, at his own farmhouse, if that was acceptable to her. Then they would have to ride like fury for Mylasia. It could be done in a night and a day and an evening. Half a dozen guards would keep her safe on the road. Could she ride like that, he asked?
She could. She was Antae. Had been in the saddle since girlhood.
Not so long ago.
She made him repeat the plan, adding details, going step by step. She changed some things, interpolated others. Had to, he couldn’t know the palace routines well enough. She added a female complaint as a further excuse for her withdrawal before the consecration. There were ancient fears about a woman’s blood among the Antae. No one would intrude.
She had Pharos pour wine for the alchemist and let him sit while she considered, finally, who might pose as herself. A terrible question. Who could do it? Who would? Neither she nor the grey-bearded man sipping
at his wine said so, but each of them knew it was almost certain that woman would die.
There was only one name, really, in the end. Gisel had thought she might weep, then, thinking of Anissa who had nursed her, but she did not. Then Zoticus, looking at Pharos, had murmured, ‘He, too, will have to stay behind, to guard the woman disguised as you. Even I know he never leaves you.’
It was Pharos who had reported the triple-headed plot to her. He looked at the other man now from by the doorway, shook his head once, decisively, and moved to stand next to Gisel. The shelter at her side. Shield. All her life. She looked up at him, turned back to the alchemist, opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it, as around a pain, without speaking.
It was true, what the old man said. It was agonizingly true. Pharos never left her, or the doorway to her chambers if she was within. He had to be seen in the palace and then the sanctuary while she fled, in order that she could flee. She lifted one hand then and laid it upon the muscled forearm of the mute, shaven-haired giant who had killed for her and would die for her, would let his soul be lost for her, if need be. Tears did come then, but she turned her head aside, wiped them away. A luxury, not allowed.
She had not been, it seemed, born into the world for peace or joy or any sure power—or even to keep those very few who loved her by her side.
AND SO IT WAS THAT the queen of the Antae was nearly alone when she walked forth in disguise on the second night of Dykania, out from the palace and through her city, past bonfires in the squares and moving torchlight and out the open gates amid a riotous, drunken crowd and then, two mornings later, under grey skies with a threat of rain, leaving behind the only land she had ever known for the seas of late autumn and the world, sailing east.
The alchemist who had come to her summons and had devised her escape had been waiting in Mylasia. Before leaving her chambers ten days ago he had requested passage to Sauradia on the Imperial ship. Transactions of his own, he had explained. Business left unfinished long ago.
He doubted she would ever know how deeply she had touched him.
Child-queen, alone and preternaturally serious, mistrustful of shadows, of words, of the very wind. And what man could blame her for it? Besieged and threatened on all sides, wagers taken openly in her city as to the season of her death. And yet wise enough—alone of all in that palace, it seemed—to understand how the Antae’s tribal feuds had to be altered now in a greater world or they would revert to being only a tribe again, driven from the peninsula they’d claimed, hacking each other to pieces, scrabbling for forage space among the other barbarian federations. He stood now on a slip in the harbour of Megarium, cloaked against the slant, cold rain, and watched the Sarantine ship move back out through the water, bearing the queen of the Antae to a world that would—some truths were hard—almost certainly prove too dangerous and duplicitous even for her own fierce intelligence.
She would get there, he thought; he had taken the measure of that ship and its captain. He had travelled in his day, knew roads and the sea. A commercial ship, wide, clumsy, deep-bellied, would have been at gravest risk this late in the year. A commercial ship would not have sailed. But this was a craft sent especially for a queen.
She would reach Sarantium, he judged—see the City, as he himself never had—but he could see no joy in her doing so. There had been only death waiting at home, though, the certainty of it, and she was young enough—she was terribly young enough—to cling to life, and whatever hope it might offer in the face of the waiting dark, or the light of her god that might follow.
His gods were different. He was so much older. The long darkness was not always to be feared, he thought. Living on was not an absolute good. There were balances, harmonies to be sought. Things had their season. The same journey in a different cloak, he thought. It was autumn now, in more ways than the one.
There had been a moment on board, watching Batiara disappear in greyness off the stern, when he had seen her weighing whether or not to try seducing him. It had wrung his heart. For Gisel in that moment, for this young queen of a people not his own, he might even have surmounted all the inward matters of his own, truths apprehended in his soul, and sailed on to Sarantium.
But there were powers greater than royalty in the world, and he was travelling to meet one now in a place he knew. His affairs were in order. Martinian and a notary had the necessary papers. His heart had quailed at times once the decision had come to him—only a fool, vainglorious, would have denied that—but there was no least shadow of doubt in him as to what he had to do.
He had heard an inward cry earlier this autumn, a known voice from the distant east, unimaginably far. And then, some time after, a letter had arrived from Martinian’s friend, the artisan to whom he had given a bird. Linon. And reading the careful words, discerning the meaning beneath their ambiguous, veiled phrasing, he had understood the cry. Linon. First one, little one. It had been a farewell, and more than that.
No sleep had come to him the night that letter came. He had moved from bed to high-backed chair to farmhouse doorway, where he stood wrapped in a blanket looking out upon the mingled autumn moonlight and the stars in a clear night. All things in the shaped world—his rooms, his garden, the orchard beyond, the stone wall, the fields and forests across the ribbon of road, the two moons rising higher and then setting as he stood in his open doorway, the pale sunrise when it came at last—all things had seemed to him to be almost unbearably precious then, numinous and transcendent, awash in the glory of the gods and goddesses that were, that still were.
By dawn he had made his decision, or, more properly, realized it had been made for him. He would have to go, would fill his old travelling pack again—the worn, stained canvas, Esperanan leather strap, bought thirty years since—with gear for the road and with the other things he would have to carry, and begin the long walk to Sauradia for the first time in almost twenty years.
But that very same morning—in the way the unseen powers of the half-world sometimes had of showing a man when he had arrived at the correct place, the proper understanding—a messenger had come from Varena, from the palace, from the young queen, and he had gone to her.
He had listened to what she told him, unsurprised, then briefly surprised. Had taken thought as carefully as he could for Gisel—younger than his never-seen daughters and sons, but also older than any of them might ever have to be, he mused—and pitying her, mastering his own grave meditations and fear, his growing awareness of what it was he had done long ago and was now to do, he gave her, as a kind of gift, the plan for her escape.
Then he asked if he might sail with her, as far as Megarium.
AND HERE, NOW, HE was, the watched ship heeling already away to the south across the line of the wind and the white waves, the driven rain cold in his face. He kept the pack between his feet on the stone jetty, wise to the ways of harbours. He wasn’t a young man; waterfronts were hard places everywhere. He didn’t feel afraid, though; not of the world.
The world was all around him even in autumn rain: seamen, seabirds, food vendors, uniformed customs officers, beggars, morning whores sheltering on the porticos, men dropping lines by the jetty for octopus, wharf children tying ship ropes for a tossed coin. In summer they would dive. It was too cold now. He had been here before, many times. Had been a different man then. Young, proud, chasing immortality in mysteries and secrets that might be opened like an oyster for its pearl.
It occurred to him that he almost certainly had children living here. It did not occur to him to look for them. No point, not now. That would be a failure of integrity, he thought. Rank sentimentality. Aged father on last long journey, come to embrace his dear children.
Not him. Never that sort of man. It was the half-world he had embraced, instead.
‘Is it gone?’Tiresa said, from inside the pack. All seven of them were in there, unseeing but not silenced. He never silenced them.
‘The ship? Yes, it is gone. Away south.’
‘And we?’ T
iresa usually spoke for the others when they were being orderly: falcon’s privilege.
‘We are away as well, my dears. We are, even now.’
‘In the rain?’
‘We have walked in rain before.’
He bent and shouldered the pack, the smooth, supple leather strap sitting easily across his shoulder. It didn’t feel heavy, even with his years. It shouldn’t, he thought. He had one change of clothing in it, some food and drink, a knife, one book, and the birds. All the birds, all the claimed and crafted birdsouls of his life’s bright courage and dark achievement.
There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a post, watching him watch the ship. Zoticus smiled and, reaching into the purse at his belt, tossed him a silver piece. The boy caught it deftly, then noted the silver, eyes wide.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘For luck. Light a candle for me, child.’
He strode off, swinging his staff as he walked through the rain, head high, back straight, north-east through the city to pick up the spur of the Imperial road at the landward gate as he had so many times long and long ago, but here now to do something very different: to end the thirty years’ tale, a life’s untellable story, to carry the birds home that their called and gathered souls might be released.
That cry in the distance had been a message sent. He had thought, when he was young, reading in the Ancients, shaping a prodigious, terrifying exercise of alchemy, that the sacrifice in the Sauradian wood was what mattered there, the act of homage to the power they worshipped in the forest. That the souls of those given to the wood god might be dross, unimportant, free to be claimed, if dark craft and art were equal to that.
Not so. It was otherwise. He had indeed discovered he possessed that knowledge, the appalling and then exhilarating capacity to achieve a transference of souls, but earlier this autumn, standing in his own farmyard of a morning, he had heard a voice in his mind cry out from the Aldwood. Linon, in her own woman’s voice—that he had heard only once, from hiding, when they killed her in the wood—and he had understood, an old man now, wherein he had been wrong, long ago.