Steles of the Sky (11 page)

Anil-la reined his black-brown cow up beside her as she and Lord Shuffle paused atop an outcrop overlooking the canyon below. The rest of her entourage waited at the foot, stepped off the road to let the wagons pass.

Yangchen was aware of her cheeks nipped red, the hair flying loose from her braid as the wind rising up the canyon wall whipped it about her unpainted face. “I look a hoyden,” she said into the wizard’s silence.

She angled her face slightly to catch a glimpse of his expression. He seemed stern and serene as he said, “You look an empress.”

“Doctor Anil,” she said—she’d begun using the Song form of his title as a sort of pet name, a joke between them, and it usually curled the corner of his mouth just a little. “Are we going to make it out of the mountains before the snow?”

“I am a wizard,” he answered. “Not the Mother Dragon. It depends on the mountains and the grace of the Six Thousand, now.”

“Or the grace of the Scholar-God.” She jerked her eyes up at the sky. “If you are certain that is whose this is.”

She
was certain. But the wizard’s word made that certainty easier—less damning—to admit to.

“I do not think her grace resides with us.”

“No.” Yangchen ran her hand across the wooly crest on Lord Shuffle’s broad, tall shoulders. He shivered in pleasure, hide twitching as if shaking off a fly. “We will have to make our own.”

Anil-la followed her down the outcrop, rejoining her attendants as she moved along the train. Namri woke—the sway of the steer’s gait seemed to soothe him, and he slept harder and better in the saddle, to Yangchen’s surprise—and she put him to her breast. One of her guards passed up flat bread baked the night before, cold roasted beef, and butter. Yangchen dusted crumbs from the prince as she ate and rode, the knotted reins hanging loose across her thighs. Lord Shuffle would take care of them without her constant management.

After some time on the road, her people had clumped themselves by groups and social affiliations. As Anil had recommended, soldiers kept discipline and moved among the civilians, rendering aid because Yangchen had spoken personally with their commanders and made it so. Out among the commoners as never before, Yangchen was stunned to see so many with slit noses, cut lips, hands removed by a headsman’s axe. It seemed that a third of the peasantry had suffered some mutilation, and while she knew that was an exaggerated estimate brought on by her own shocked tendency to notice the maimings, still it troubled her.

Her father’s voice in her ear:
He must be ruthless who would rule
. But was this her husband’s justice? Her mother-in-law’s?

She herself had done what she had done, and others had suffered for it. Where was
her
justice for that? She had—

She had stolen a whole kingdom.

If you get away with it, it’s not a crime.

She watched; there were no secrets in a camp on the move. And she saw that the maimed did not seem to treat their companions all that differently from the whole. Here a man with his cheeks scarred by the thrust of a hot iron leaned at the wheel of a neighbor’s wagon; here a woman with a cut nose bent under a burden bigger than herself. She watched a herdsman branded for tax evasion risk his life to catch a panicked mule on the edge of a precipice, and she turned to Gyaltsen with a furrow between her eyes that she could feel would leave worry lines.

“While we are traveling,” she said, “I wish to judge all accusations of crimes. And when we reach Rasa, I wish to review the criminal codes.”

He inclined his head. “Dowager.”

She turned to find Anil-la staring, his mouth heavy with a frown. He dropped his eyes immediately, hand to his cheek to cover a flush. “Dowager. Forgive my rudeness.”

“Doctor Anil. You disapprove?”

He shook his head. “You are not what I expected, when—” He shrugged, and if possible seemed to shrink lower in the saddle. “You are not what I expected.”

The pinch of her own face smoothed, though this smile would leave lines as well. She realized with a stomach-twisting shock that it was no longer her untouched beauty for which men would desire to serve her, but the power of her word, now law.

“Good,” she said, and looked away again until she could make her face as serene and shuttered as a bride’s.

*   *   *

As befitted her rank, Saadet Khatun greeted her unborn child’s subjects beneath a roof of sky. A hoofprint arc of walls of bleached felt sheltered her on three sides, and she was warmly robed in wool and furs—but as sunset lacquered the eastern sky, the wind freshened. Summer was past an end. Desert-bred, Saadet drew her hands up into her sleeves, trying not to hunch inside her coat as her breath plumed before her.

Lanterns were lit at the periphery, a brazier brought close to where she sat on a heap of rugs that made a little dais, her back against the Padparadscha Seat—the weather-beaten old saddle that was the Qersnyk excuse for a throne. The columns of Qersnyk men and women advanced slowly down an avenue flanked by white-houses and the lines to which horses had been picketed. Some of them stepped out of their queues briefly to punch the skins of fermenting airag that hung beside each door—a neighborly act, for the mare’s milk needed constant stirring to assure its quality … though what quality that might be, Saadet was personally uncertain.

As each man or woman took a moment to stand before her and place fist to palm in fealty—not to her, but to the babe within her—Saadet made every effort not to stare over his or her shoulder to the next, and the next, and the next beyond. Their faces disconcerted her, especially the ones with a hostile cast.

Were those swearing fealty because they hated Re Temur even more?
You cannot hate him more than I do.

The line stretched around the bend in the meandering avenue. It might as well have stretched into infinity, as far as a pregnant woman’s bladder was concerned. Over her head, raised on a pole that stretched above the felt windbreak, Qori Buqa’s bull-embroidered banner snapped.

She wondered where al-Sepehr was. She wondered if he would ever trust her enough to share his plans with her as deeply as he had shared them with Shahruz. She knew it was wise for her to be seen not to rely on him overmuch; there would be those who did not like it that he advised her. Bad enough a foreign Khatun—she was not the first such the Qersnyk had promised fealty to. Far worse, for her to seem to take the word of her foreign father over that of Qersnyk advisors.

Endure,
Shahruz told her—but she had been enduring since the sun was high. It was enough.

Would he leave her
all
the unpleasant jobs?

She had enough discipline left to wait until a man lagged in coming forward before she rose. As soon as she planted her feet, though, a woman was beside her, hand on her elbow bearing her up—and the shaman-rememberer Paian moved forward from his place beside the wall. He spread his arms and said, “The Khatun is tired. Return tomorrow,” and at his words two warriors slid a series of panels of felt across the open side of the shelter.

Saadet’s bladder cramped. She pressed a hand to her belly. Paian, turning, touched her arm—a liberty she still found shocking, though among the Qersnyk, it was but a courtesy. “Khatun?”

Her face burned with embarrassment. “I have to piss.”

“Of course you do,” the shaman-rememberer said, exasperation on his face. Saadet steeled herself not to wince, but the irritation wasn’t at her. “That young warrior is riding your bladder as if it were a prize red mare, isn’t he? Esen, pull that panel open. The Khatun needs relief.”

They let her out onto the steppe between the royal enclosure and a corral, backs turned in politeness as they made a circle around her—except for the woman who helped her manage her robes as she squatted. For a sharp moment, Saadet did not recognize herself—a barbarian queen pissing under the cold light of the rising moon. The hot perfume of her urine on the frosty ground struck her as she stood again, stepping wide around the steaming puddle before she shook her robes into place.

The woman stepped back as Paian returned to her side. “Your supper awaits, Khatun.”

She had not thought of food in hours, but her mouth flooded at the reminder. As she walked with the shaman-rememberer and her entourage, though, she remembered herself enough to ask after news and business.

Re Esen started to speak, but stammered and glanced at Paian as if waiting permission. “It is your news.”

Paian shrugged matter-of-factly. “Your rival raises his banner at Dragon Lake, Khatun. Summer will bring war, if an army comes to him.”

Saadet nibbled her lower lip for a moment before she remembered that that was a bad idea in the wind and cold. The skin could chap right off it. “Can we stop him?”

“We could try to intercept him,” Esen said. “But that would not prove your claim to the Padparadscha Seat.”

“Another usurper would be right behind him, you mean.”

“Or a dozen.” If Esen quibbled with the word
usurper,
he did not say.

Saadet felt Shahruz rejoin her, suddenly interested. “What proves my claim?” the twins asked.

Esen said, “Your war-band. Your babe’s war-band, I should say. The number and quality of those that turn out to support him.”

“The ability to impress enough warriors to win a fight, you mean.”

There was a pause. The brothers glanced at each other, a communicating look that the twins recognized viscerally passing between these other siblings.

Esen stuffed his gloved hands into the patch pockets on his sheepskin coat. “Actually winning the fight counts too.”

“I need to seem a fit Khatun. A fit mother of a Khagan, then.”

Esen nodded. Paian stared into the middle distance, the sky bright with the twins’ familiar stars and moon that must seem unutterably alien to him.

“I need to make a display of myself.”

“Without,” Esen said, “seeming to.”

The twins nodded. Saadet could shoot—and Shahruz could shoot better. He could fight. Together, they could manipulate, sneak, and kill—

Esen added, and then choked: “Especially when…”

“Speak.”

But it seemed stuck in him. It was Paian who finished the thought. “Especially when rumors fly, Khatun, of the Sorcerer-Prince arising from his tomb. And of the curse of Danupati breeding war and plague across the breadth of the world.”

The twins felt a little thrill of triumph—Shahruz’s triumph—at this evidence of the results of their work and sacrifice. Saadet’s heart offered up only a kind of numb acquiescence.

“A woman can fly the eagles,” the twins said, remembering that not all the austringers on her first, fateful wolf-hunt had been men. “Would a royal hunt prove my mettle?”

That sibling glance again.

“It wouldn’t hurt,” said Esen.

*   *   *

The long low mews was warm with carefully vented covered braziers and with feathered bodies, and it was rich with the ammonia scent of guano. Ranks of hooded eagles and other raptors sat on leather-padded stumps along each side wall, divided from one another by half walls. The austringers slept with their charges, and their bunks hung from chains against the shorter rear wall.

When Saadet had seen them before, both falcons and falconers had been caparisoned to be seen, the men and women in black livery twined with gold, the birds in mirrored furnishings. Now the austringers wore old clothes, stained with blood and haggled at the edges, and the raptors were hooded in soft worn leather.

A bell jangled as Saadet entered the mews, the pell-mell ringing of an eagle scratching itself. These birds were as flea-specks to al-Sepehr’s rukhs, but they had their own majesty, and she paused a moment to appreciate it. Two falconers rose—not quite jumping, long-habituated to be cautious of jerky movements around their charges—but a third was coaxing an unhooded bird to take scraps of furred meat from her fingers, and did not even raise her eyes.

Saadet realized that it would have been kind to send ahead. This being a queen was a complicated business.

Saadet gestured her retinue back and waited just within the doorway, letting the felt-lined hide curtain drape, rattling its rings, to seal the warmth inside. The two standing falconers exchanged glances; one bowed, and the other stepped forward slowly. “Khatun.”

“I have come to see my son’s eagle,” Saadet said, words she had been rehearsing in her head since she began the walk over. Qori Buqa had told her that the eagles had their own names, which they kept secret from men. She was not sure how else to refer to the bird. “That is to say, the eagle that flew for my husband.”

The falconer indicated the bird that his female compatriot was coaxing. “She misses your husband, Khatun. She pines for him. We are doing what we can.…”

Trying to move sedately, like the professionals, Saadet tiptoed across the straw-strewn floor. The steppe eagles were broad-winged, copper-black in color, their napes picked out in feathers that caught gold off the sun. The females were larger and fiercer than the males, as is common in birds of prey, and the bird that had flown with Qori Buqa was the strongest of them all.

“Would it help her to fly?”

“We have tried, Khatun.” No tone or trace indicated that he took offense. But that, too, was what it meant to be queen. “But her wing is still weak.”

The eagle had been injured on that first hunt that Saadet had shared with Qori Buqa, and it was the twins’ facility with a pistol that had saved her.

The falconer continued, “They bond, you understand. We must hope we can keep her alive until her mourning passes.”

Saadet nodded. The unhooded bird peered over the shoulder of the falconer who tended her, tracking Saadet with illuminated irises striated gold and darker gold.

“Can you teach me to tend her?”

Saadet was not a large woman. One of the austringers glanced doubtfully at the girth of her arm.

“The royal eagles are heavy, Khatun—”

“We mourn the same man, she and I,” Saadet said. “Perhaps our wings can become strong together.”

*   *   *

Somewhere in the Grave Roads, the djinn left them, but Edene had learned better than to hope. He would return at whatever moment was least convenient and insert himself once more into her retinue—what Ka-asha Ghul insisted on calling her “court.”