Restoration (7 page)

“Your Highness, the procession is engaged.” The gold-clad chamberlain dropped to his knees behind the Prince, whispering just loud enough to hear. “The bearers await your command ...”

Aleksander, eyes fixed on his father's body, gave a slight nod. But the chamberlain did not go.

“... and, Your Highness, please forgive me for carrying any other message than those required by this most mortal ... most dreadfully grievous ... and I would not speak it if not commanded by my lord High Chamberlain, who was himself commanded by His Highness, who waits outside ... demanding ... insisting ... most kind lord that he is—”

I winced. The servant's craven, crawling stuttering was just the quality to put an edgy man violently out of humor. And Aleksander was a very edgy man. The Prince did not raise his voice, but might have bitten the words out of the stone floor. “Speak or I'll rip out your useless tongue.”

“I am bade to tell you that His Highness, Prince Edik, has arrived in Zhagad and says he must see his beloved Emperor and cousin laid out before the rites begin.”

Before Aleksander could answer, a clattering of boots and un-muted voices violated the reverent stillness of the temple. No servants this time. I could hear the clink of gold chains around their necks and feel the steel menace of their weapons. The very air carried the assurance of royal privilege. The newcomers stood on the far side of the bier, just out of my line of sight.

“Shades of Druya, Aleksander. You look like some barbarian priest calling up gods to protect his village. No one's done this kind of silly blood-marking in three hundred years.” The visitor had a lilting voice that curled around its edges, as if he were forever on the verge of sneering laughter. “One might think you were actually mourning the old devil's passing.”

“Have you come to lick at the trough now he's dead, Edik? Do you think I've forgotten that he forbade you to stand or speak in his presence?”

“Ah, my young cousin, this is the time to draw up the ties of blood, not—”

“On your knees, Edik, and hold your coward's tongue! You are in the presence of your Emperor, and until he is ash, you will obey him.” Aleksander strode to the end of the bier. “Bring in the bearers!”

No one in the palace could have failed to hear Aleksander's scornful rebuke of his visitor. But only I, with a Warden's hearing, could have heard the visitor's whispered response, buried as it was beneath the shuffling clamor of those who came to carry Ivan to his pyre. “And afterward, dear cousin Zander ... once my cousin is burned and only you are left ... then what?”

I crept along the floor far enough to glimpse the three on the far side of the empty bier, and the odor of danger was so strong, it almost gagged me. Two Hamrasch lords stood smiling at Aleksander's back, and before them, kneeling on the floor, was a middle-aged man. His sleek blond braid fell to the side of his placid face. No anger twisted his full lips; no offense or indignation marred his wide brow or glinted in his narrow-spaced eyes. But he had ridden into Zhagad with a troop of Hamrasch warriors, and he propped his hands and his chin on a stick of polished wood, still stained with the blood of a clumsy slave.

Derzhi inheritance was strictly through the male line. Horses, land, titles—and in the case of the Denischkar heged, the Lion Throne—passed from eldest son to eldest son. Fortunately or unfortunately, the most recent generations of the royal branch of the widespread, powerful Denischkar family had produced few children of either sex. Aleksander was Ivan's only child. Ivan's only brother Dmitri, Aleksander's harsh and well-loved likai, had been childless when he was murdered by the Khelid. Aleksander's closest cousin Kiril was of the female line, the son of Ivan's widowed sister Rahil and therefore unable to inherit, dependent upon the Emperor for his position and fortune. And so to find the man who stood next in line to Aleksander, one had to look back another generation, to Varat, a younger brother of Aleksander's grandfather. Varat himself was long dead in some Derzhi war, as was his youngest brother Stefan, but Varat had left an only son, Prince Edik. It appeared that the Hamraschi had no intention of wresting the throne from Aleksander's family ... only from Aleksander.

Though I had served in the Emperor's summer palace in Capharna for some five months, I knew little of Edik. One of my previous masters, an elderly Derzhi baron, claimed that Edik had once abandoned fifty warriors to be slaughtered by the Basranni, and was therefore a proven coward whose braid should be shorn. Perhaps true, perhaps not—the baron was not always the most accurate in his history. But I knew that Edik did not change expression when he beat a helpless man.

I did not leave Aleksander that night. There were few enough honorable people in the imperial court. I knew of none save his wife, the Princess Lydia, his personal guard captain, Sovari, and his cousin Kiril who understood Aleksander well enough to truly love him. No others could he trust to guard his back.

Derzhi custom required the disposition of a corpse no more and no less than one day after death. Desert life demanded quick resolution, but the gods had to be served, too, and by allowing the sun to rise on the lifeless body, one allowed the gods to see clearly what had come to pass. Perhaps it gave them a chance to intervene if they desired.

Such speedy disposition precluded most of the powerful from attending Ivan's rites, as it would take weeks for the principal heged lords to travel from their widespread holdings. But every heged was required to maintain a household in Zhagad and to have at least one male relative in direct line of its first lord living there at all times. These were not hostages, of course; the idea of hostages from their own houses was repugnant to the Derzhi. They were informants, conveyors of the Emperor's pleasure to their honored families. And each household had its own garrison, sized in proportion to the importance of the house and available to serve at the Emperor's command. But whatever the reasons and explanations, as a result, all Derzhi families were represented in the funeral procession. As soon as I had shifted into falcon's form and made accommodation yet again with altered senses, I flew through the deserted palace toward the sound of the singing, hunting for those I needed to know.

A torchlit procession wound slowly through the streets of Zhagad toward the desert. Following a row of singers and priests rode troops of Derzhi warriors, from grizzled lords to youths with new braids, all of them wearing the patterned scarves or colored tef-coats of their hegeds. Small groups of red-robed women walked or rode alongside the men, as was their heged custom. At the front of the procession came representatives of the Ten—the most venerable of the two hundred or more Derzhi families—the kayeet-crested Fontezhi, the highly traditional, blue-coated Gorusch, the despicable Nyabozzi, who controlled the slave trade, the Marag in their long green-striped scarves, and the rest of them. The Marag were the family of Aleksander's wife, and it was the Princess's downy-cheeked, sixteen-year-old brother, Damok, who led the Marag warriors. Behind the Ten rode the remainder of the Council of Twenty, hegeds not so ancient as the Ten, but some of them even wealthier and more powerful, like the Hamraschi. The Council had little true power; the Emperor's word was absolute in every instance. But every heged had its legions of warriors, and strength was everything to the Derzhi.

After the Twenty, some fifty or sixty people marched chained together—one for each of the lands and peoples subject to the Empire. The sullen prisoners—some young, some old, all gaping stupidly at the crowds—were people of no significance. The kings and nobles, wisewomen and chieftains of the conquered lands had all been slaughtered, their noble lineage vanished into history. Many of the long-defeated peoples like the Suzaini, the Manganar, and the Thrid were no longer enslaved, and now formed the working heart of the Empire. But the Emperor kept one prisoner of each race, picked at random and held until death in his dungeons as a symbol of his domination, and they were paraded through the streets on occasions such as this.

The Emperor's heged, the Denischkari, followed the prisoners. Beside Edik rode the short, square-shouldered Kiril, his face like stone, and a handsome older woman dressed in flowing red—Kiril's mother, no doubt, the Princess Rahil. Rahil had married for love, so Aleksander had told me, to the younger son of a minor house. The marriage was an intolerable disgrace to her family. On the day Kiril was born, Rahil's brother, the Emperor, had sent her husband into a battle where the young noble was certain to die. Rahil had never spoken to Ivan again, though the Emperor had lavished on Kiril the father's fondness he had withheld from Aleksander. Kiril was permitted to ride with the Denischkari, as a concession to his royal blood, rather than being consigned to the roadside, as were other nobles of minor houses.

Behind the Denischkari came Ivan, laid out on a gold-draped wagon pulled by ten fine horses. Ivan's own mount, a magnificent bay, followed riderless, nervous, as if he knew he was to be slain and burned beside his fallen master. And after them all strode Aleksander, tall and proud, his red cloak billowing behind him in the chill night breeze risen off the desert. His feet were bare, his blood-marked face cold and haughty, his gaze wavering not one mezzit to either side of him. He might have walked right off the etched and painted stone tablets that decorated Derzhi halls. No bodyguard rode beside him or behind him, yet I doubted anyone would dare strike at him directly. For that moment the Prince wore the mantle of empire, given him by the fierce old warrior still very much in view. As long as Ivan existed in Derzhi eyes, any hand that touched Aleksander must surely risk the gods' wrath.

I flew from one perch to another, seeking a place from which to observe the Hamrasch lords. At last I settled on a monument to some long-dead emperor and sat among the stone vultures who were pecking out the eyes of the emperor's vanquished foe. From there I could stare into the grizzled face of Zedeon, the First Lord of the Hamrasch, a short, craggy, gray-braided veteran of the Basran war. He wore a golden tef-coat with no shirt underneath, the sleeveless garment exposing a broad chest and upper arms as thick as Kuvai oaks. A narrow red scarf was tied about his bare left arm with something held in the knot. It was a sprig of nyamot, the tiny white flower that bloomed after a desert rain.

Flanking Zedeon were his middle-aged sons, Dovat and Leonid, the two who had accompanied Edik to the palace. Their stern faces were no comfort for one who cared for Aleksander. I'd had occasion to observe Leonid when I was a slave. Intelligent, I had always thought him, well-spoken, always a surprise among a warrior race that prided itself on illiteracy. Ruthless, as were most powerful Derzhi, but not exceptionally cruel. Dovat, the younger of the two brothers, squat and rough like his father, I didn't know at all. Leonid and Dovat also wore red scarves and the incongruous nyamot about their arms, as did every other warrior of their heged. Odd. Their family symbol was the gold tef-coat sewn with a howling wolf.

The procession passed beyond the gates of the inner ring of Zhagad. Inside the wall the onlookers, members of the lower houses, had been solemn as their betters passed them by, not mourning Ivan so much, I guessed, as weighing the chances for the future. A disputed succession was a fearful prospect, only slightly less disturbing than being ruled by a Derzhi son who would murder his father. Once the Emperor's body passed into the outer ring, the crowds to either side of the roadway surged forward, women wailing, men hoisting sons and daughters upon their shoulders to see. The din grew deafening, and I fought the urge to streak for a nearby rooftop. As I passed back and forth above the procession, I was distracted by a glimpse of brilliant green among the crowd—a woman standing between two of the torchbearers that lit the way, the same woman I'd seen watching as I helped the fallen slave on my arrival in Zhagad. Were her eyes following my flight through the murky light? I circled closer, but she had already vanished into the crowd.

I maintained my watch upon the Hamraschi until the procession passed through the outer gates, traveling along the Emperor's road between the paired stone lions that guarded the approaches to the city. On the desolate plain stood a massive pyre, built with trees dragged by chastou from the sparse forests of the eastern uplands. They placed Ivan's body on a platform atop the pyre, and a giant Lidunni warrior wielded the sword to kill the Emperor's horse bound near the foot of it. With torches carried from the temple of Athos, the acolytes set the base of the pyre to burning.

Derzhi funeral rites were magnificent—wild music and singing to wrench the soul, pageantry and customs that drew on centuries of heged traditions. Unlike their Basranni kin, the Derzhi did not engage in long-winded storytelling, but rather reenacted the glorious deeds of the deceased with dancing.

To the murmured astonishment of the assembly, Aleksander himself stripped off his mourning garments and, clad only in a loincloth and blood, danced the story of his father's journey into the afterlife. With ferocious grace his long, lean body evoked the ritual battle with the sun god—a demonstration of the dead warrior's strength and worth—and then a final acceptance of a seat at the god's right hand. The dancing did not stop when the Prince returned to his place. Rather it became wilder as the night grew late and the flames grew high, the dezrhila dancers whirling in the rapture of ancient deities nearly forgotten in the glory of the young sun god Athos.

I fluttered through the smoke, watching Aleksander, watching the crowd, watching the Hamraschi. The hegeds sat in a circle about the burning mound. Old Zedeon sat cross-legged in front of a hundred Hamrasch warriors, his sword laid across the sand in front of him, as was the custom in times of war. Leonid and Dovat were no longer beside him, but rather sat with the representatives of other houses. As the night wore on, the two Hamraschi moved about the circle, always respectful, but eventually sitting with every one of the Twenty hegeds, whispering quietly with the lords. Aleksander, seated at the front of the Denischkar family, kept his eyes fixed on the pyre, but I suspected he had noted the Hamrasch brothers, too. Prince Edik sat behind Aleksander, his soft face expressionless. When the pyre caved in upon itself, exploding in whorls of sparks so that the heavens were adorned with a whole new array of stars, Edik smiled. And when the crowd began to wind its sleepy way back toward Zhagad, Edik, Leonid, and Dovat rode together.