Banner of the Damned (15 page)

My window looked west, but even so there was enough light to reveal pink eyelids and a faint puffiness below her eyes.

She turned my way. “I believe myself observant, yet my attraction for Rontande clouded my perceptions. I thought his heart was involved, as mine was beginning to be.”

“It was not his heart, but his ambition?” I ventured.

“Did you see it, then?”

I said, “The way he kept bringing the subject back to himself. Or to flattery of you.”

She sighed, flinging her hands out wide in the mode called Bird on the Wing. “That is the fourth one. And I was so careful, this time! Is it always this way? No wonder my sister refuses to marry, though I always thought Davaud the kindest of men. My sister has always been formal and distant. I thought it her nature, until I began to understand some whispers about the past. Or is it always this way for everyone? Ambition first, no true interest in the other person, as a person? Is that arrogance, that I want to be desired as Lasva and not as a princess?”

When I saw that she wanted an answer, I said, “Yet he painted for you.”

She breathed a soft laugh. “You did not know that painting is the new fashion? Come.”

We moved through her suite to her private chamber, the one with access to her sleeping room. This room was enormous, but that was the end of my met expectations: in the place of fantastic art and textiles there was a complicated climbing structure covered in old carpet-work, much shredded, and around the room hosts of pillows, and even miniature houses in and out of which cats paced; the faint flash of magic from inside the houses indicated that the Waste Spell had been laid on them, instead of on wands, as is usual wherever people have pets. Extremely expensive to lay those spells time after time on the houses, but it meant that there would never be any smell, and the sand within the houses would always stay clean. And no servant had to come in to wave the wand over the boxes, as is common elsewhere.

On the wall above the bed someone had affixed the painting of the cats, framed within two dyed-silk mats in contrasting shades of dull gold and rust.

“They’re all busy with their brushes now,” she said as she took the painting from the wall and carried it to the outer chamber where she held her parties. “Those who can. It’s more popular than extemporaneous music. Did you hear what happened in the east?”

“My parents mentioned a new treaty on the border. That is all I know.”

“It was made by Kaidas Lassiter, whose father Hatahra loathes. Maybe the son isn’t so… so frivolous. I do not know. I only met him to exchange bows. There was some sort of skirmish with brigands on the border with Khanerenth, when Kaidas was visiting his cousins. Some countess or duchess on the other side of the border was involved. Kaidas and this countess or duchess vanished into her castle, and for a time no one knew if he was a hostage, a prisoner, or what. After a week—this was New Year’s Week—they emerged, he with a new treaty and she bearing a lover’s cup, painted in her own colors and decorated with her favorite
motifs. Though it was a pillow gift, she put it on her mantel. Peace, and so romantic! Now the style is painting.”

“Ah-ye,” I exclaimed. “And so Lord Rontande made the cat painting for you.”

“But do you not see? I didn’t, at first, but I think you did, didn’t you? That was not for me, he wants me to display it for others to see on my wall.”

Pillow gifts are always private, intimate. Kept in one’s inner chamber and never shared. I hadn’t seen his intent, but I had seen his motivation.

Though I wasn’t sure what to say, she was studying me carefully.

She clasped her hands. “I love dogs as well as cats. However dogs can hurt you with their eyes, they are so devoted, and all they ask is love. And sometimes you are too busy to give it. What is the—the responsibility of love, and how many can one love? With cats, it doesn’t matter so much. Rontande reminds me of a cat. He is so… so smooth. But he’s not as interesting as a cat, who never bores one with its ambition.”

She turned away to wipe her tears. I reorganized my pens, reversing their order, that I might keep my hands and eyes busy.

“Remember when you first came, Emras? I asked you to see for me. Just like my sister’s scribes do for her. At my next party—nothing large—an informal reading, an evening of music, either our own or a concert—you must be my eyes, and if there is something I don’t see, you must tell me. Will you do that?”

I bowed.

She fluttered her fingers in the Butterfly-in-the-Wind mode, the delicate lace at her wrists floating. “As for Rontande. When he comes to my party, he will find his painting in my outermost chamber where the servants most frequently walk. Ostensibly a place of honor, in the public eye. But I think he will take my meaning about his ambition.”

I bowed again, thinking to myself that if the queen asks me what we talked about, I will say it was only cats, as I walked to my room.

There I found an invitation from Tiflis: another summons to mine for gossip.
She’s heard about Rontande.

TEN
O
F
S
ARTOR AND
G
ARGOYLES

I

loved going to Sartor with Lasva. On each of the twelve days, I willingly followed her to the different stations around Ilderven, listening intently to the remains of Old Sartoran ritual and to scraps of poetry celebrating what our ancestors thought were important events in the history of human life. And when given free time, I enjoyed going off with my fellow scribes to the Scribe Guild to debate long lost meanings, as we have for centuries.

When we returned the following year, I used my own money to take one of the horse drawn cabs, feeling very grand and grown up.

By then I had met my chief accuser, and as Greveas will no doubt have told you, we became friends. She and her peers said that they found charm in my Colendi-accented Sartoran, and I found their quickly spoken, idiomatic Sartoran good practice.

The year after, Greveas and her friends took me to a concert where I sat high in the gallery with others in service, listening to the beautiful Falisse Ranalassi who, after the brawl in the Alarcansa dining chamber, endured two weeks of refined cruelty from her cousin Carola Definian—cruelty so deliberate and so well hidden from the adults that Falisse ran away and worked her passage down the river to Sartor by singing ballads with a group.

She auditioned at the music guild and commenced several years of intense training. Nicknamed Larksong, she would win the Silver Feather, and go on to world fame. And ever after she would say that it was her cousin who inspired her.

Later that visit, I was taken to the Guild archive, where Greveas and her friends traded off giving me a history of the New Year’s festivals throughout the world—certain guilds responsible for certain plays, costumes always a certain way, centuries of symbolism. “This is how we have always taught each new generation morals, ethics, and history,” Greveas said, her slanted eyes wide on the last word. “Our ancestors knew that we learn the most through play.”

“Colendi plays are a social dialogue,” I said with what I now recognize as rather pompous earnestness. To their smiles, I responded: “A duel of wit, Scribe Aulumbe used to say, between the rituals and conventions of government and the wishes of people who need, desire, or flirt with change.”

My Sartoran friends laughed at me. “For all you Colendi claim to be so civilized, only in Colend have playwrights, actors, and sometimes audiences been imprisoned. And twice in your history riots broke out after a performance,” Greveas said.

“Our
early
history,” I said, and they only laughed the harder.

One of her friends leaned forward. “Early? Early? You are still early. It is only, what? four generations? Five? since your emperor decided that Independence Day sounded too much like a rebellious child and changed the name of the festival to Martande Day.”

They laughed the more heartily, Greveas saying, “Wait until your second millennium before you begin to talk about ‘early.’”

Oh, that comfortable superiority! Yet this was the beginning of my discovery of the Sartoran paradigm, how very differently you Sartorans see the world!

At the time, I could scarcely conceive of the fact that the Scribe Guild building is four thousand years old. One of the scribes insisted it was older, though admitting that it’s been torn down and rebuilt twice with the same stone. The last modernization was just after Queen Alian Dei married King Connar Landis in 3355, well over a thousand years ago.

You see, I remember these things. They are important to me. Historical paradigm and how it shapes perspective! My mind fills with the vivid image of that shared fifth-story salon that looked south over Ilderven, Greveas and the other young Sartoran scribes sitting about on the low curule couches, talking over centuries-old gossip as if it were current. All
the figures of history were living and breathing people to them. One of their favorite pursuits was finding contradictory accounts, to figure out who was lying and why.

The fourth year, I had my usual review after my return home—which was always in time for the Martande Day that you Sartorans so tolerantly scorned, when all Colend dresses in white and blue, our royal colors, to celebrate the accession of our first king. I brought up what Greveas and her friends had said about the Colendi view of history, and Halimas flashed me that unexpected grin. “We were going to wait another couple of years before getting into royal truth, archival truth, and personal truth.”

“Don’t forget social truth,” Noliske said. She was always serious, though sometimes she displayed an irony that matched the queen’s.

“There isn’t any social truth,” Halimas retorted. “Which,” he turned to me, “is why I am not scribe to the queen but stayed, instead, with education. Sartor’s view of history is so long that we call it archival truth—they will talk about patterns that take centuries to change.”

“The problem with that, as we see it, is that such a very long view can lose sight of personal motivations,” Noliske put in.

“So. Continue to tell the truth as you see it, but question every account, now that you have enough experience to perceive what might be the motivation behind its slant—whether royal, historical, or purely personal.”

Now you are thinking that I am going to begin excusing my actions on the basis of scorn for Sartor, its guilds and its archival truth

Rather than offer protestations that will seem self-serving, let me share a memory.

In that salon at the Sartoran Guild in Ilderven, symbolic home to the scribes of the world, a fire stick burned in a cheery low fire on the grate, for those stone buildings can be chilly. Greveas’s bright red hair was outlined against an age-darkened tapestry depicting scribes a thousand years before. She and her friends sat about in their dark blue robes, toasting corn cobs in wire mesh so that the kernels popped into crunchy florets.

Despite the scrupulously scrubbed floorboards (new floors get laid down every century or two) and the cleanliness of the plain furnishings, those buildings whiffed of mildew, a scent that forever after reminded me of Sartor. At each visit I sat in the window embrasure, my favorite place, as I rubbed my thumb over a smiling gargoyle—a toad with a cat face and artichoke leaves for a ruff, paws out as if it would spring onto the street below.

Magic protected it from the wear of wind, rain, and time, so my fingers buzzed slightly as they gritted over the stone. The cat-toad creature had been carved directly below the window in a long line of rioting fish and frogs and other animals of water, land, and air, fanciful and not. From below, one could not see any of those details.

The first time I saw the stonework I wondered who it was for—who was intended to see all that detail—until I glanced across the street into the tall windows of Twelve Towers Guild. The elongated carvings of ancient figures, each holding a scroll or book, gazed with monumental patience back at me. They, too, would be difficult to make out from five stories beneath. But from the high windows the scribes and the archivists could see one another’s buildings, and enjoy the sight.

There might even have been silent messages in those stone shapes, now forgotten, so that only the art remains. It is a memory that has offered me consolation.

ELEVEN
O
F
L
OVE AND
P
OWER

“W

hat did you see, Emras?”

After our return, and the Martande Day cakes had been consumed, and the blue clothes put away for another year, the round of late summer activities commenced.

“I saw your guests enjoying themselves. I saw everyone join the
Roundelay of the Summer Lark
. They played a second round, through all the minor keys, after Lord Jantian added the counterpoint with his finger-cymbals.”

“That is what they wanted us to see. What did you see when my back was turned?”

“That Lady Ananda—”

“Lay aside the honorifics, Emras. We are alone.”

“I saw Ananda’s smile fade as soon as you turned away. She put her twelve-stringed tiranthe down and picked up her fan, then turned it over in contrary mode when she met the eyes of Isari. I saw Suzha make the spywell sign twice to gain their attention.”

Lasva’s voice dropped a note. “We make music, which we are taught adds harmony to the world, but are we ever truly harmonious? We gather friends around us, but I see the little evidences that each thinks
only of herself. Or himself. Or what is secretly entertaining, rather than the entertainment by the artists. Did anyone listen to our music?”

“Farava. Her eyes were closed the entire time you played.”

“Farava of Sentis lives in a world of music. Some say of spirits, and unseen things.” Lasva sighed. “I did think I’d find a friend. Lissais was a friend, but she was sent from court. Farava does not seem to trust words. I get nothing but politeness from her.”