Hall of the Mountain King Page 8

  “He was mad, the keepers decided. He looked like a poor wayfarer, but they thought they glimpsed gold on him under the rags. Maybe, after all, he was a prince in disguise. ‘Put your question,’ they commanded him at length when he showed no sign of beginning.

  “He paid them no heed at all. By then the sibyl had come to the bars of her cage, reaching through it. Her hands were as thin and sharp-taloned as a white eagle’s. She was filthy; she stank. Yet our young hero took her hand and smiled and said, ‘I shall set you free.’

  “Her kinsmen reached for their daggers. But they found that they could not move. They were caged as securely as their prisoner, bound with chains no eye could see.

  “‘Only name my name,’ the stranger said, ‘and you shall be free.’

  “They had proclaimed themselves the mouthpieces of prophecy; yet not one could utter a word. But the madwoman, the idiot, the wordless seeress, bowed as low as the stranger would let her, and said clearly, ‘Avaryan. Your name is Avaryan.’”

  The talespinner paused. The silence had spread from the wineseller’s stall to the street without. His hearers waited, hardly breathing. He struck his hands together with a sound like a thunderclap. “And behold! Fire fell from heaven and shattered the cage, and smote to the ground all that false and venal priesthood; and their victim stood forth free and sane. But she wept. For the stranger who was the god—the stranger had vanished away.”

  The stall erupted into applause; a shower of coins fell into the girl’s cupped hands. Mirain added his own, a silver solidus of Han-Gilen.

  For every patron the girl had a kiss or a curtsey, but he won the talespinner’s own low bow. “My tale was pleasing to my prince?”

  “It was well told,” said Mirain, “though I pity the poor sibyl. Does she live yet?”

  “Ah, my lord, that is another story.”

  Mirain smiled. “And you, of course, will tell it if we beg you.”

  “If my prince commands,” said the talespinner.

  “Well?” Mirain asked of the others. “Shall I?”

  “Aye!” they called back.

  Mirain turned to the talespinner. “Tell on then, with this bit of copper to sweeten your labor.”

  “Well now, that’s bliss, to have time to spare for market tales.”

  Vadin had seen him come. Mirain must have sensed it; he turned slowly, with perfect calm. Moranden stood directly behind him. He smiled with a very slight edge. “What, uncle! Back already from the hunt?”

  If that struck the mark, Moranden showed no sign of it. “No hunting for me today. But then, you wouldn’t know, would you? Our troubles haven’t yet come into the talespinners’ repertoires.”

  People were watching and listening, distracted from the tale by the prospect of a royal quarrel. But Moranden blocked the only clear path of escape.

  “There’s more to be had in the market than old legends,” Mirain said. “Is it true, uncle, that the mountain folk have been raiding on the Western Marches?”

  “A tribe or three,” replied Moranden.

  “And others have taken advantage of the opportunity, have they not? Have settled the tribes to be sure, but finding themselves armed and armored, have declared themselves free of their lord. A dire thing, that, and worse yet when the lord is royal and my uncle. Surely people lie when they accuse you of over-harshness.”

  Moranden’s eyes narrowed and began to glitter. The scar was livid beneath them; his face twisted a little as if he knew pain. But wrath was stronger, tempered with hate. “Not all of us can rule under the sun of loving kindness, or take our ease among the rabble. Some must fight to keep that rabble in hand.”

  “As you will be doing, my lord?”

  “As I must do. I leave at dawn to settle your borders, Throne Prince of Ianon. Do I merit your highness’ blessing?”

  Mirain was silent, tight-lipped. Moranden smiled. “Remember, my prince, as you sleep safe within these walls. No enemy has ever walked here, or so they say; nor shall he while I live to defend you.”

  Mirain’s head came up. “You need not trouble yourself to protect me.”

  “Indeed?” Moranden looked down at him, measuring him with unveiled scorn. “Then who will?”

  “I guard myself,” gritted Mirain. “I am no ill warrior.”

  “You are not,” his uncle conceded. “Certainly you hold your own among the younger lads.”

  Vadin should have moved then. He should have moved long since. But even breath was frozen out of him, or enspelled into stillness. He could only stand and watch, and know what this mad master of his would say. Said with great care, with the precision of icy rage. “I am a knight of Han-Gilen and a man in any reckoning; and I fight my own battles. Look for me at dawn, mine uncle. I ride at your right hand.”

  oOo

  “You are insane.”

  They had all said it, Vadin loudest and longest and to no effect at all. Ymin said it now, facing Mirain without fear although he rode still on a red tide of wrath. “You are quite mad. Moranden is a danger to you even in the castle under the king’s protection. If you ride to war with him, he will have what he longs for.”

  “I can protect myself.”

  “Can you?” She thrust back her sleeves, gripping her forearms until the long nails, hardened from years of plucking the strings of her harp, seemed to pierce through flesh and muscle into bone. But her voice betrayed only impatience with his folly. “You are behaving like a spoiled child. And well he knows it. He sought you for just this purpose, to set you precisely where he wants you: in his hands, and too wild with rage and rivalry to care what befalls you.”

  He rounded upon her. “He has challenged me openly. If I refuse him, I have no right or power to claim kingship.”

  “If you refuse him, you prove that you are man enough, and king enough, to ignore an insult.”

  His face was closed, his will implacable. “I ride at dawn.”

  She reached for him. “Mirain,” she said, not quite pleading. “If not for your own sake, for your grandsire’s. Forsake this folly.”

  “No.” He eluded her hands, and left them there in his chamber, the singer alone and hopeless, Vadin forgotten by the wall. The door thudded shut behind him.

  EIGHT

  Vadin shivered, struggling to stay awake. It was an unholy hour to be out of bed: the black watch of the night when men most often died, and demons walked, and Uveryen defied her bright brother to overcome her power.

  He was ghastly cold, sitting in the king’s antechamber, waiting on the royal pleasure. With the sublime illogic of the half-asleep, he did not fear for life or limb. He fretted over his baggage. Should he have packed one more warm cloak? Or one less? Had he forgotten something vital? Mirain’s armor—was it—

  “My lord will see you now.”

  The quiet words brought him lurching to his feet. They tangled. He sorted them with vicious patience, under the servant’s cool eye. In some semblance of good order, he entered the lion’s den.

  The king was as the king always was, broad awake, fully clad, and somehow not quite human. Like a man in armor, warded against the world; but this one’s armor was his own flesh and bone.

  Vadin, bowing at his feet, wondered if he had always been like that. An iron king, ruling with an iron will, loving nothing that lived.

  Except Mirain. Vadin rose at the king’s command, roused at last, beginning to be afraid. Princes did not often pay for their insanities. Their servants often did, bitterly.

  The king stood close enough to touch. Vadin swallowed. Part of him was surprised. He did not have to look up by much. Two fingers’ breadth. Three.

  He had never been so close before. He could see a scar on the king’s cheek, a knife scar it must have been, thin and all but invisible, running into the braided beard.

  There were few lines on the king’s face. It was all pared clean, skin stretched taut over haughty bones. Mirain’s bones.

  But not Mirain’s eyes. These were hooded, deep but not b
ottomless, studying Vadin as he studied the king.

  No god flamed in them. No madness, either. But of magecraft, something. A flicker, low yet steady, strong enough to see a man’s soul, too weak to walk in his mind.

  “Sit,” the king said.

  Vadin obeyed without thinking. The chair was the king’s own, high and ornate. The king would not let him find another. His tired body made the best of its cushions; his mind waited, alert for escape.

  The king revived the dying fire, squatting on his haunches, tending the fragile new flames with great care. Vadin counted scars on the bare and corded back. Every man had scars; they were his pride, the badge of his manhood. The king had a royal throng of them.

  The old man’s voice seemed to come out of the fire, his words born in Vadin’s own thoughts. “I fought many battles. To gain the eye of the king my father. To earn the name of prince. To become prince-heir, and to become king, and to hold my kingship. By the god’s mercy, I had no need to wrest it from my father. A seneldi stallion killed him for me: a stallion and his own arrogance, that would suffer no creature to be greater than he. Of that beast’s line I bred the Mad One. It was revenge, of a sort. The sons of the regicide would serve the sons of the king. The stallion himself I took and tamed and rode into every battle, until he died under me. Shot, I think. I do not remember. There have been so many. It has been so long.”

  He sounded ineffably old, ineffably weary. Vadin said nothing. It seemed to be his curse that kings confided in him. Or else and more likely, he was not going to live long enough for his knowledge to matter.

  The king sat on his heels with ease that belied both voice and words. “It perturbs you, does it not? To know that I was young once. That I was born and not cast up armed and crowned from the earth; that I was a child and a youth and a young man. And yet I was all of them. I even had a mother. She died while I was still among the women. She had enemies; they said she had lovers. ‘And why not?’ she cried when they came for her. ‘One night a year my lord and master grants me of his charity. All the rest belong to his wives and his concubines. He casts his seed where he pleases. Am I not a queen? May I not do the same?’ She paid the price of her presumption. My father made me watch as they flayed her alive and bathed her in salt and hanged her from the battlements. I was royal. I must know how kings disposed of their betrayers. I was not seven summers old.

  “I learned my father’s lesson. A king must endure no threat to his rule. Not even where he loves, if that love turns against him. The throne is a dead thing, but its power is all-encompassing. It knows no human tenderness. It suffers no compassion.

  “And on that day of my mother’s death, with the screams of her dying ringing in my brain, I swore that I would be king; because for me to take the throne, my father must die. I know now that he was a hard man, cold and often cruel, but he was not evil. He was merely king. Then and for a long time after, I knew only that he had murdered my mother.”

  Vadin choked back a yawn. He kept waiting for the blow to fall. It was all very sad, and it explained a little of the king’s madness, but Vadin could not see what it had to do with Mirain. Or with dragging Mirain’s squire out of his warm blankets in the deeps of the night.

  “Alas for me,” said the king, “I learned to hate my father; I learned to cast aside mercy, to be most royally implacable. But I never learned not to love. For the kingdom’s sake I took an Asanian queen. She would hold back the Golden Empire; she would enrich us with her splendid dowry. Herself I did not consider, save as a price to be paid: a pallid dwarfish creature, bred like a beast to ornament a western palace. And when she came, indeed she was small, as small as a maid of ten summers, but her heart was mighty; and in the arts of the bedchamber she had no equal.

  “They say this land was too harsh for her. Yet she was learning to endure it, even perhaps to love it. She was growing strong; she was beginning to accept our ways. And I killed her. I set my child in her, knowing what I did, knowing what I must do, although she was too small by far to bear an heir of Ianyn kings. She conceived, and for a little while I dared to hope. The child was not large; she was bearing well, without pain. Yet when her time came, all went awry. The child was twisted in the womb, fighting its birth. Fighting with the strength of the mageborn, which taxed the full power of priests and birthing-women and, in desperation, of the shamans whom even then I had in mind to banish from my kingdom. They prevailed. My queen did not. She lingered a little. She saw her daughter. She heard me give the little one the name of heir. Then, content, she died.

  “I mourned her. I still mourn her. But she had left my Sanelin, who had all her mother’s valor and all her sweetness, but who was strong with the strength of our people.

  “Yes,” the king said, meeting Vadin’s eyes with a shock like two blades clashing, “I loved my daughter too much. I loved her for herself, and I loved her for her mother who was lost. But I did not love her blindly. Nor was it merely the grieving lover who made his lady’s child his heir. I knew what we had made together, my queen and I. In the body of a maidchild, slender and Asanian-small, dwelt the soul of an emperor.”

  “It was unfortunate,” Vadin ventured, “that she was a woman.”

  The king rose. For all his age and his height and the weight of his bones, he moved like Mirain: like a panther springing. Vadin steeled himself for the killing stroke.

  It never came. “Aye and aye,” the king said heavily, “it was unfortunate. More unfortunate still that I had no sons. She was my only child, and she was pure gold; and the Sun took her. It was no choice of mine. From her infancy she knew who must be her lord and her lover. He had made her for himself. At last he took her from me. Rightly, after all; a daughter passes from her lord father to her lord husband, and she was Avaryan’s bride. But she was also Ianon’s heir.”

  Sometimes one gambled. Vadin made a reckless cast. “The Prince Moranden—”

  The panther roused, snarling. It was laughter, harsh with disuse, ragged with pain. “You love him, do you not? Many love him. He is lordly; he is proud; he has his mother’s beauty. But she is goddess-wise. He is not even clever.”

  “Why do you hate him?” Vadin asked. “What has he done to you?”

  “He was born.” The king said it quietly, without rancor. “Of all the errors of my life, the greatest was my taking captive the daughter of Umijan. She was suckled on hate; she came to me in hate. But her beauty struck me to the heart. I thought that I could tame her; I dreamed that she would come, if not to love me, at least to esteem me as her consort. I was a fool. The lynx does not lie down on the hunter’s hearth.”

  “You should have killed her before she got her claws into your son.”

  “He was hers from the moment of his conception.”

  “Did you try to change it? You never let him forget who was your favorite. You made it obvious who would have the throne. Sanelin, or no one. It’s a wonder he didn’t slit your throat as soon as he knew how.”

  “He tried. Several times. I forgave him. I love him. I will not give my throne to him.”

  “What if Mirain had never come?”

  “I knew that he would. Not only was it foretold. Not only had the god promised me in dreams that the great one would come. I knew that my daughter would be no more willing than I to let her heritage fall into the hands of Odiya of Umijan.”

  Vadin marveled that he was here, sitting while the king stood, talking to him as if he were—why, as if he were Mirain. “I don’t understand. I’ve known men who were never properly weaned. Prince Moranden is nothing like them. He’s strong. He’s Ianon’s champion. He has no equal on the field, and few enough off it.”

  “There is more to the world than the wielding of a sword.” The king turned his hands, much calloused with it, and half smiled. “Moranden is his mother’s creature. When she commands, he obeys. Where she hates, he detests. She is the shape and he the shadow. Were he king on the throne of Ianon, she would rule. She rules already wherever he is lord.”

>   “But—” Vadin began. He stopped. What use? The king knew what he knew. No Imeheni yokel could teach him otherwise.

  If there was anything to teach him. Vadin shifted uncomfortably. Moranden was no monster. He had been kind to a lad from the outlands who was no threat to his power. He could be charming if it suited his purposes. But he was honorable even when it did not serve him. He was a mortal man; of course he was flawed. Even Mirain was far from perfect.

  The servants fought to wait on Mirain. Moranden’s name met with a shrug, a sigh, an acceptance of one’s duty. Sometimes, they conceded, it was pleasant to serve him. Sometimes it was perilous. He was a lord. What could one expect?

  He was not cruel. He was no more capricious than any other prince. Mirain was infinitely less predictable.

  Mirain was Mirain. Even Vadin could not envision him as anything but what he was; nor was it conceivable that he would let anyone command him, let alone do his ruling for him.

  Moranden—yes, Moranden was a bit of a weathercock. Everyone knew it. A man could win his favor, not with copper, nothing so venal, but his friends were often the ones who flattered him most cleverly. He had no patience with the drudgeries of kingship: councils, audiences, endless and innumerable ceremonies. He had sunk low in the market, when he accused Mirain of shirking those duties and let people think that he himself had been laboring long hours over them. Probably he had been dicing with his lordlings until the king called him to defend the Marches.

  Vadin snorted softly to himself. Next he would be exonerating Mirain for idling in the market while the kingdom went to war. Mirain had not been idling, after all. Not exactly. He had been acquainting himself with his people.

  “If Moranden is Odiya’s puppet,” Vadin said at last, “why did you give him a princedom?”

  “I gave his mother a princedom, for a price. She would not set her son on me; I would leave them free to govern as they chose. Within the limits of the law.”

  “Which you had made.”

  “Just so,” said the king.