Hall of the Mountain King Read online

  “And if I bid you stay?”

  The dark eyes kindled. Sanelin’s eyes, set with the sun’s fire. “If you bid me stay, I will stay, for that is the path which the god has marked for me.”

  “Not the god alone,” said the king. He raised a hand as if to touch the boy’s shoulder, but the gesture ended before it was well begun. “Go now. Bathe; you need it sorely. Eat. Rest. My squire will see that you have all you desire. I shall speak with you again.” And as they moved to obey: “How are you called, grandchild?”

  “Mirain, my lord.”

  “Mirain.” The king tested it upon his tongue. “Mirain. She named you well.” He drew himself erect. “What keeps you? Go!”

  TWO

  They called her the queen who was not. In law she was the king’s concubine, captive daughter of a rebel from the Western Marches, mother of his sole acknowledged son. In her own country that would have sufficed to make her his wife, and her child heir to throne and castle; here where they had cast aside the old gods and the great goddess to become slaves of the Sun, a concubine was only that, her son always and inescapably a bastard.

  She did not stoop to bitterness. She held the highest title these apostates allowed, that of First Lady of the Palace; she had a realm of her own, the women’s quarters of the castle with their halls and courts, barred and protected in proper fashion, with her own eunuchs to stand guard. Though those were aging, alas, and his majesty would permit her to buy no more; when she had been so unwise as to suggest that he send her young slaves of his own choosing and a surgeon to render them fit for her service, his rage had come close to frightening her.

  They were turning barbarian here. They had few slaves, and no eunuchs. In a little while, no doubt, they would put on trousers and shave their beards and affect the dainty accents of the south.

  She contemplated her reflection in the great oval mirror. It had been her father’s shield; she had had it silvered and polished at extravagant expense, that she might never forget whence she had come. The lovely maiden it had once reflected was long gone, she of the wild lynx-eyes and the headlong temper. The eyes were quiet now, as the lynx is quiet before it springs. The face was beautiful still, a goddess-mask, flawless and implacable.

  She waved away the servant with the paints and brushes, snatched the veil from the other’s hands and draped it herself. Doliya tarried overlong in the market; damn the old gabbler, could she never perform a simple errand without dallying in every wineshop along the way? Not but that the woman’s delays had often proven profitable; secrets had a way of escaping when wine loosened men’s tongues, and Doliya’s ears were wickedly keen.

  “Great lady.” The voice of her chief eunuch, thin with age. As was he, a gangling spider-limbed grotesque of a creature, who had never learned to creep and cringe and act the proper servant. His father had been her father’s enemy; it had amused the old monster to slaughter all that line save the youngest son, and to have the child cut and trained and given to his daughter as a slave. It was a crooked comfort to see how old he was and how much younger she seemed, and to know that she was a full year the elder.

  He was accustomed to her brooding stares, and unafraid of them. “Great lady,” he repeated, “there is that which you should know.”

  His level tone, his expressionless face, told her much. Whatever tidings he bore, he rejoiced to bear them; which meant that she would not be pleased to hear them.

  Such games he played, he her bitter enemy, he the perfect faithful servant. Impeccable service, he had told her once when he was still young enough to blurt out secrets, could be a potent revenge. She would never dare to trust him completely; she would never dare not to. She had laughed and taken up his gauntlet and made him the chief of her servants.

  “Tell me,” she bade him at last, coolly, sipping iced wine from a goblet of tourmaline and silver.

  He smiled. This was bitter news indeed, then, and he was in no haste to reveal it. He sat in a chair the twin of her own, commanded wine and received it, drank more slowly even than she. At last he set down the cup; laced his long withered fingers; allowed himself a second smile. “A stranger has come into the king’s presence, great lady. A stranger from the south, a priest of the burning god.”

  For all her control, she tensed; his amusement deepened. “He brings word of the king’s heir, of her who departed so long ago; some would say by your connivance, although that surely is a falsehood. You may rejoice, great lady. Sanelin Amalin is dead.”

  The lady raised a brow. “I am to be surprised? Vain hope, my old friend. I have known it for long and long.”

  He continued to smile. “Of course you have, great lady. Have you also known that she delivered herself of a son? A son of her god, bearing the Sun in his hand, wrapped in divinity as in a cloak. With my own eyes I saw him. He has spoken with the king; the king’s folk serve him; he lodges, great lady, in the chambers of the king’s heir.”

  She sat very, very still. Her heart had stopped, and burst into life again, hammering on the walls of her flesh.

  Ginan smiled. She thought of flesh flayed living from bone, shaped the thought with great care, and thrust it behind those glittering eyes.

  They dimmed; he greyed, his smile died. But his satisfaction could not so easily be vanquished.

  All her care and all her plotting—all the women who came to the king, who could conceive no children to supplant her son; the one whose spells sufficed to conceive a son but not to bear him alive, who died herself in the bearing—all for naught. Because she had not gone so far as to dispose of the heir herself, trusting to the Journey and, if that failed, to the priestess’ vows. Sanelin would never know man, never bear a child. If she returned, if she took the throne, how easy then to cast a spell, to distill a poison, to assure that Moranden son of Odiya of Umijan became king by right of all Ianon.

  Almost, almost, the lady could admire her. Insufferable little saint that she had been, still she had found a way both to thwart her enemy and to keep her name for sanctity. It seemed that the barbarians had believed the lie; the whelp had been suffered to live. Unless . . .

  Ginan knew her well enough to read the flicker of her eyes. His smile returned undaunted. “No, great lady, he is no impostor. He is the very image and likeness of his mother.”

  “Dwarfish and unlovely? Ah, the poor child.”

  “As tall as he needs to be, and well above any need of beauty. He is a striking young man, great lady; he carries himself like a king.”

  “Yet,” she mused, “a priest.”

  “A priest who is a king, great lady, may marry and beget sons. As indeed some had speculated that the princess might do if she were ruling queen, for the kingdom’s sake. As it seems that she did.”

  “He is not king yet.” Odiya said it with great care. She refilled her cup and raised it. “Nor shall he be while I have power in this kingdom. May the goddess be my witness.”

  oOo

  Vadin did precisely as he was bidden. It kept him from having to think. He did not understand half of what he had heard on the battlements; he was not certain that he believed the rest. That this foreigner should be the son of the king’s daughter, of a woman so long mourned that she seemed as dim as a legend, yes, perhaps he could credit that. But that the boy should have been sired by a god . . .

  Mirain bathed, which truly he had needed, and he let the king’s servants carry away his ragged trousers and bring him a proper kilt. But he raised an uproar by calling for a razor.

  First they had to find one; then he insisted on shaving his face as smooth as a woman’s. Vadin’s own twitched as he watched. The servants were appalled, and the eldest of them ventured to remonstrate, but Mirain would hear none of it.

  “It’s hot,” he said in his mincing accent. “It’s unlovely. It itches.” He grinned at their shocked faces, shocking them even further, and sat to the repast which they had spread for him.

  Perched on a chair that had been carved to Ianyn measure, devouring honey
cakes and laughing still at the servants’ outraged propriety, he looked even younger than he was. He did not look like the son of the Sun.

  He finished the last drippingly sweet cake, licked his fingers, and sighed. “I haven’t eaten so well since I left Han-Gilen.”

  The eldest servant bowed a degree. Mirain bowed half a degree in return, but lightly, smiling. “I commend your service, sirs.”

  It was a dismissal. They obeyed it, all but Vadin. He kept his post by the door and said nothing, and won his reward: Mirain let him be.

  As soon as the men had gone, Mirain’s face stilled. He no longer had the likeness of a child. Slowly he turned about, his right hand clenching and unclenching, his brows drawing together until he was the very likeness of the king his grandsire.

  His nose wrinkled very slightly. Vadin could guess why. Although the rooms to which the king’s men had brought him were rich, clean and well swept, they breathed an air of long disuse. No feet but servants’ feet had trod that splendid carpet out of Asanion in time out of mind; no one had leaned upon the window frame as now he leaned, looking down into a sheltered garden or up over the luminous battlements to the mountains of Ianon.

  He turned his hand palm up upon the casement. Flecks of blinding gold played over his face, over the walls and ceiling, into Vadin’s eyes.

  They vanished as his fingers closed; he turned his eyes to the sun that had begotten them. “So, my lord,” he said to it, “you led me here. Drove me, rather. What now? The king grieves, but he begins to rejoice, seeing in me the rebirth of his daughter. Shall I heed my fates and prophecies and his own command, and stay and be his death? Or shall I take flight while yet there is time? For you see, my lord, I think that I could love him.”

  Perhaps he gained an answer. If so it did not comfort him. He drew a long breath that caught sharply upon a wordless sound. A cry, a gasp of bitter laughter.

  “Oh aye, I could have refused. Han-Gilen would have kept me. I was no foreigner there for all my foreign face, eagle’s shadow that it was amid all the red and brown and gold; I was the prince’s fosterling, the priestess’ child, the holy one, venerated and protected. Protected!” That was certainly laughter, and certainly bitter. “They were protecting me to death. At least if I die here, I die of my own folly and naught else.”

  He turned from the sun. His eyes were full of it, but it had no power to blind them.

  As they caught Vadin he started, as if he had forgotten the squire’s presence. Probably, Vadin thought, he had hardly been aware of it at all, no more than he was aware of the floor under his feet.

  Unless, of course, it rose and tripped him. His scrutiny was both leisurely and thorough, taking in the squire as if he had been a bullock at market. Noting with due interest the narrow beaky face with its uncertain young beard; the long awkward body in the king’s livery; the spear grounded beside one foot, gripped with force enough to grey the prominent knuckles.

  Mirain’s eyes glinted. In scorn, Vadin knew. His body was hardly awkward at all, and he acted as if he knew it. He had a way of tilting his head that was both arrogant and seeming friendly, and a lift of the brows that a courtesan should have studied, it was so perfectly disarming. “My name is Mirain,” he said, “as you’ve heard. What may I call you?”

  Dismissed, Vadin wanted to snap. But training held. “Vadin, my lord. Vadin alVadin of Asan-Geitan.”

  Mirain leaned against the casement. “Geitan? That’s in Imehen, is it not? Your father must be alVadin too; my mother told me that Geitan’s lord is always Vadin, just as Ianon’s king is always Raban like my grandfather, or Mirain.”

  Like this interloper. Vadin drew himself up the last possible fraction. “It is so, my lord.”

  “My mother also taught me to speak Ianyn. Not remarkably well, I fear; I’ve been too long in the south. Will you be my teacher, Vadin? I’m a disgrace as I am, with a face like mine and a Gileni princeling lisping out of it.”

  “You’re not staying!” Vadin bit his tongue, too late. Adjan would see him flogged for this, even if the foreigner did not.

  The foreigner did not even flinch. He took off the band of his Journey and turned it in his hands, and sighed faintly. “Maybe I should not. I’m an outlander here; my Journey is hardly a year old. But,” he said, and his eyes flashed up, catching Vadin unawares, “there is still the geas that my mother laid upon me. To tell her father of her glory and her death; to comfort him as best I could. Those I have done. But then she commanded me to take her place, the place her vows and her fate had compelled her to abandon, for which she bore and trained me.”

  “She placed great trust in blood and in fate,” a new voice said.

  Its owner came forward in the silence. A woman, tall and very slender, robed all in grey with silver at her throat, the garb of a sacred singer. Her face was as beautiful as her voice, and as cool, and as unreadable.

  “So she did,” said Mirain as coolly as she. “Was she not a seer?”

  “Some would say that she was mad.”

  “As mad as her father, no doubt. As mad as I.”

  The woman stood before him. She was tall for a woman, even a woman of Ianon; his head came just to her chin. “My lord gave you her rooms. His own son has never had so much.”

  “You know who I am.” It was not a question.

  “By now most of the castle knows it. The servants have ears and tongues, and you have her face.”

  “But she was beautiful. Not even charity could call me that.”

  “All her beauty was in her eyes and in the way she moved. No carved or painted likeness could ever capture it.”

  “Nor any in flesh.” He shook off the complaint with its air of long use, and regarded her, loosing a rare and splendid smile. “You would be Ymin.”

  Strong though she was, she was still a woman, and that smile held a mighty magic. Her eyes warmed; her face softened a very little. “She told you of me?”

  “Often and often. How could she forget her foster sister? She hoped you would win your torque. The loveliest woman and the sweetest singer in Ianon, she said you would be. She was a true prophet.”

  Almost Ymin smiled. “Your own torque, my young lord, could as easily be silver as gold. Was it our blunt-spoken Sanelin who taught you such courtesy?”

  “She taught me to speak the truth.”

  “Then the sweetness must be the legacy of Han-Gilen, which we singers call the Land of Honey.”

  “Sweet speech is certainly an art much valued there, although they value honor more. The worst of all sins, say they, is the Lie, and they raise their children to abhor it.”

  “Wise people. Strength is greatest here, of the body most often, of the will but little less. There is no place in the north for the gentle man or for the weakling.”

  “Hard as the stones of the north, they say in Han-Gilen.”

  Mirain turned back to the window. Ymin set herself beside him. He did not glance at her. “Why did you depart?” she asked him.

  “It was time and past time, though my lord prince would have had me wait longer, till I had my growth and an army to ride with me. But the god has no care for manhood, or for the lack of it. I left in secret; I walked in secret until I had passed the borders of Han-Gilen. It was a very long way to go afoot, with winter coming and a long cruel war but lately ended.” His voice changed, took on a hint of pride. “I fought in it; well, my lord said. I was his squire, with his son, the Prince-Heir Halenan. He made us both knights and armed us alike. I was sorry to leave them. And the princess, Halenan’s sister . . . she helped me to slip away.”

  “Was she very beautiful?”

  He stared at her, briefly speechless. “Elian? She was all of eight years old.”

  Ymin’s laughter was sudden and heart-deep, a ripple of pure notes.

  He frowned; unwillingly his lips twitched. “Maybe,” he admitted, “someday she will be lovely. When I saw her last, she was dressed like a boy in ancient tattered breeches and a shirt of mine—much too lar
ge for her—and her hair never would stay in its braids. Still, that was splendid, like her father’s and her brother’s and no one else’s in the world: red as fire. She was trying to look like a bold bad conspirator, but her eyes were all bleared with crying, and her nose was red, and she could hardly say a word.”

  He sighed. “She was a living terror. When we rode off to war, we found her among our baggage. ‘If Mirain can go,’ she said, ‘why can’t I?’ She was six years old. Her father gave her a royal tongue-lashing and sent her home in disgrace. But he gave his steward orders to have her taught weaponry. She had won, in her way, and she knew it.”

  “You loved, it seems,” she said, “and were well loved.”

  “I have been fortunate.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Her face had changed, grown cool again. “My lord, what will you do here?”

  His hands rested on the casement, the fingers tightening until the knuckles greyed. “I will remain. When the time comes I will be king. The king who drives back the shadows, the son of the Sun.”

  “Your will is firm for one so young.”

  “My will has nothing to do with what must be.” His tone was faintly bitter, faintly weary.

  “The gods’ love,” she said slowly, “is a torment of fire.”

  “And a curse on all one cares for. Hold to your coldness against me, singer, if you would be wise.”

  She laid her hand on his arm. Her eyes were clear again and steady upon him, as steady as her voice. “My lord, do you know truly what you are doing? Can you? Your mother raised you and trained you and commanded you to be what her fate had forbidden her to be, high ruler in Ianon. But the place for which she shaped you is twenty years gone.”

  “It is known even in far Han-Gilen that the King of Ianon has no chosen successor. That he awaits the return of his daughter.”

  “Is it also known that he keeps his vigil all but alone?” She spoke more rapidly, less calmly. “Kingdoms can rise and fall in a score of years. Babes then unborn have since borne children of their own. None of whom has any memory of a priestess who set forth on her Journey and never came back.