The Emperor's New Pony (19 page)

“No…” she said slowly.

“Back in Hada,” Me’kor said, “where I was a princess like you, that was how the men did it to us, once we turned eighteen.”

“What?” Alira said. “You’re telling tales, Me’kor!”

“I swear to you, Alira-love! You Amidians are like babies, talking of you’s courtliness and things. When a girl turns eighteen in Hada, her father picks a man to give her a betrothal kiss, and then she will be he’s wife when she turns nineteen.”

Edera felt herself start to flow between her thighs at the thought of this strange tale. Truly the world had wonders of so many kinds that she would never have known if she had not come to Maq. “A betrothal kiss?” Alira asked. Edera could tell that her Amidian sister had been affected by the little story as much as she herself had.

“Mm-hmm. That’s what I mean. Jer Be’to—he was like a duke, in Hada—he was going to be I’s husband, before the empire came. I had to bend down in front of him, and he lifted up my gesh—you know, like a tunic—so that he could look at me down there, and see if he liked it and if he thought I hadn’t been naughty—you know, with another boy. And of course I hadn’t been, and I guess he liked my little cunt.” She laughed. “I didn’t even know him, really, but he gave me a long, long kiss down there, until I came, and then we were betrothed. But he died in the war.”

“You’re making that up, Me’kor!” Adilan said accusingly.

“Not a word! When I heard that folk marry in the empire and in your country without the man seeing the girl’s cunt, I thought they were making
that
up.”

Edera laughed. She looked at Me’kor and at her sister Hadians. They were a few years older than the Amidians, and Master Morqan had said that after the race he would find knights for them who would take them back to Hada, if they wanted to return. The thought of never seeing these new friends again made Edera feel serious.

“Are you going to go back, Me’kor?” she asked.

Me’kor’s face, usually occupied by a perpetual sunny smile, grew thoughtful. “I don’t know, Edera-love. Master Morqan says I can have a knight who doesn’t take me back, too.” The smile returned. “And I want to see you’s Amidia before too long! Maybe I’ll see you there when Master Ranin takes you back!”

“Oh, but that would be years and years!”

Then a strange look came over Me’kor’s face. She bent her head close to Edera’s and whispered, “Or maybe not.”

Now all the fillies huddled their heads together, sensing that something important was passing.

“Just you all be careful,” Me’kor whispered. “I don’t know anything except a thing I heard Master Ropiq say to Master Morqan.”

“What was that?” Edera asked, in the same whisper.

“Master Morqan was saying that the preparations for the race had been so complicated that he hoped there wouldn’t be another for a long time, and the Master Ropiq said that with luck tonight’s race would be the last one the emperor ever saw. They didn’t think anyone was in the schoolroom, but I was still on the stairs just below where they were whispering.”

Edera’s heart pounded in her chest. Did Ranin know? Was he part of it? Should she try to tell him somehow?

* * *

The Moon Festival began at sunset of the winter solstice. Before the horns blew to announce the festival, at the moment when the sun touched the sea, the two teams stood harnessed in their special chariot tack, attached to the two-wheeled cars that were little more than an axle with a board atop it. In the cars, holding the traces in their left hands and their quirts in their right, stood Master Ranin and Lord Haq. Lord Haq had spent perhaps a quarter of the time with the Hadians that Ranin had spent with the Amidians. Edera thought it hardly seemed fair to the Hadians to have such an inexperienced driver, but Ranin had told her time and time again that the race was not truly a race, but rather a show, and that they would try to beat the Lord Haq and his Hadians, but only in such a way as to provide the entertainment the emperor required.

“You must not fight me, Edera, when I pull you up, if I need to let Lord Haq catch up to us or even pass us. If you obey me, the other fillies will follow your obedience. Do you understand me, or do I need to spank it into you?”

“You need to spank it into me?”

Ranin had kissed her, and given her a little spanking to help her remember.

Standing waiting for the horns to blow and signal that the time had come to enter the stadium—the yard at the back of the palace transformed by the construction of enormous wooden stands for the people to watch the race—Edera felt two desires rise in her breast, and dance with one another in a pattern so complicated she could not begin to trace it: to warn Ranin, and to please him. Could she please him by warning him? Was there anything to warn him about? From moment to moment she had to push back the urge to turn and try to whisper around her bit to him that he must be careful because something was going to happen during the race, or after it.

The horns blew. First the far-off blast that meant that the sun had touched the sea came from Cape Maq-li to the north. On an ordinary evening, it would have been met by hundreds of other horns blowing haphazardly through the city, but on the night of the Moon Festival, Master Ropiq had told his pupils, only the imperial horns answered the ‘Call of the Cape.’

The sound of the imperial horns, three hundred gleaming tubes of bronze twisted into shapes so fantastical Edera could not understand how any sound could come out at all, was like the roaring of the ocean in the gods’ earthly heaven. She had never heard anything so beautiful, or so loud. The horn players, in the center of the race course, stood in a vast circle, facing inward to where Lord Qartin, his staff of office raised high, beat time, leading them in the ancient imperial hymn of Maq, calling the gods’ blessing down upon the emperor and his subjects.

In the stands, the subjects sang the hymn, and that, too was beautiful. Edera could not imagine that if they knew Emperor Comnar they would love him as they seemed to, but she found that there were tears in her eyes as she thought of those who had been her own subjects, and the way they had looked at her as she rode through the streets of her capital.

And she had thrown that all away because she thought she might marry the son of the strange, loathsome man standing on his little wooden island in the race course, who soon would drop his kerchief to start a shameful race of captured girls fitted with his bit and bridle, with his terrible tails in their innocent backsides.

And Edera felt gratitude, because without it, she would never have known any of this, and she would never have had Ranin’s cock inside her, making her feel a pleasure beyond her wildest dreams. Then she knew what to do, because Ranin shook the traces to tell her. She took the bit between her teeth and led her sisters forward at a trot, stepping high the way their master had taught them.

The feeling of pulling the chariot had been difficult to become used to, when they had started training a month before. A filly pulled the weight with her chest and her hips in equal proportions: it was not painful when done correctly, but it certainly seemed unnatural at first. She supposed that it only felt natural now because she had done it so many times, but unnatural or no, she did it tonight without even thinking about it, and she knew Adilan, to her left, and Alira and Melisan, the outside pair, did the same.

She knew not to turn her head, ever, because that would almost immediately throw the team out of step by shifting them slightly in the direction she turned her head, so delicately were their bridles attached to one another and all to the traces Ranin held. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Lord Haq and the Hadians kept pace perfectly with them, the Hadians also stepping high, and Me’kor smiling around her bit.

They had reached the starting line before Edera even knew it. The distance had always seemed a long one when they practiced it, but now, in the beauty of the Maqian sunset, at the most splendid of the imperial festivals, filly Edera who once was princess of Amidia was about to run a humiliating race that somehow felt at the same time like a triumph. And who knew what would happen before it was over?

She heard the emperor’s voice, though she could not see him. He stood, she knew, on the little island in the middle of the race course that marked the start and, after three laps of the long course, the finish.

“My lords and ladies, my knights and gentlewomen, my masters and mistresses, my goodmen and goodwives, my boys and girls, and above all, my fillies!” he called, naming all the degrees of imperial citizenry and making the crowd laugh uproariously at his inclusion of the fillies. “This Moon Festival I share with you my pride and joy, the new imperial stables of Maq. The fillies you see before you, ready to run, are girls from Hada and Amidia, two kingdoms that your army, O my people, has ground under your heel! Brought here and trained to serve the pleasure of my court, a potent symbol of imperial greatness, now I present them to you for this festival’s entertainment. I pray you: enjoy their shame as they race for your pleasure!”

The applause was loud, but perhaps not quite as loud as Edera might have expected. Nor were there any jeers at the shame of Hada and Amidia. She had heard that the citizens of Maq liked to see those who resisted the imperial legions torn apart by wild animals in the great arena by the sea. Surely watching pretty young women in harness would tickle their fancy at least as much?

“Lord Chief Marshal Haq!” shouted the emperor. “Are you ready?”

Silence—Lord Haq must have nodded.

“Master Versal, you who were lord chief marshal of Amidia, are you ready?”

Silence again, and Edera pictured the nod of the man she loved, to please whom she could think of nothing better in this world.

A hush fell, and then she saw a flutter high up out of the corner of her eye—the kerchief of the emperor, like the cloth they had practiced with. When the emperor dropped it, the race would begin. Edera looked forward and willed herself not to see the cloth, but only to wait for Ranin’s word and his hands on the traces.

Then, finally: “Ha!” her master cried, and Edera started to run as the crowd around them roared.

They had reached the first turn when Haq called to him. The noise of the crowd was so loud that there was no chance he would be heard by anyone but Ranin and the fillies, and at first Ranin didn’t even understand what he was saying, since although they were certainly not moving quickly by equine standards, it took all his concentration to keep the little chariot balanced securely on its wheels.

“I know you are going to try to kill me, Versal,” he called.

For a moment Ranin thought he saw Edera move oddly in the traces, as if she were going to turn her head, but then the motion was gone. Without thinking, and with instinctive affection, Versal flicked the quirt out to touch her backside, and she tossed her head to show she had got the message: the way to help Ranin was to obey him and do what he had trained her to do.

Ranin supposed that it could sound to the fillies who didn’t know that something larger was happening like idle banter between racers. He gave a little slack to the traces, and Edera sped the team out of the turn, until they were five or six lengths ahead of Haq. The Hadians weren’t bad, especially when Morqan drove them, but the Amidian girls simply ran better as a group: their feet fell in unison time after time, and their pull was clean and even. Haq, with a quarter of Ranin’s experience, did not disgrace himself, but he certainly kept nowhere clear a line as Ranin did. The Amidians easily kept the five-length lead past the emperor’s island and halfway through the second lap.

What had Haq meant? Why had he said it? Ranin had planned to try his desperate attempt on the final lap, and to try to make it look like an accident. Now he had no idea what to do, for Haq clearly knew what was coming.

The crowd, who loved Lord Haq even more, perhaps, than they loved the emperor, was screaming for him to catch up, and Ranin knew he must let it happen, if the desperate conspiracy were to have any hope. In the home stretch of the second lap, he pulled Edera and the rest of the team to three-quarters pace, calling to them “Easy now!” and hoping it looked like they were tiring.

Behind them, the Hadians lost no time in swinging wide to the left and coming alongside. Haq clearly had much better control than he had had at first, and Ranin could see that the Hadian girls wanted to show what they could do. Ranin would let them pass right at the emperor’s island, to give the maximum effect and please the crowd most greatly. He shouted “Ha!” and let Edera bring the Amidians up to speed. Both teams were flying now, the girls’ feet on the hard dirt of the track stirring the dust and both teams striding as one. Ranin could see the face of the emperor, with a cruel smile on his lips. Lord Qartin stood impassively beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, Ranin saw Haq pull something out of a fold in his tunic—something that glinted faintly in the fading twilight.

Then, very clearly, he saw Haq give a jerk to his traces that had to be a terrible mistake, except that Ranin could tell that it was deliberate. With a sound of splintering axles, and startled cries that quickly became screams, the Hadian team crashed into the Amidians.

The momentum was still on them, despite the crash and the wheels of the chariot cars no longer even being on the dirt: in an instant, both teams and both chariots crashed into the wooden emperor’s island, whose light construction immediately gave way, collapsing into a heap under the ten bodies of the teams and their drivers. Haq himself went flying off his little chariot right onto the emperor.

For several long, long moments, there was utter confusion. Eight fillies, two drivers, one emperor and one lord high steward were all tangled in the complicated harnesses that bound the girls to their chariots. One of the chariots and at least two of the girls seemed to be lying atop Ranin.

“Edera!” he tried to call out, but the weight of wood and bodies stole his breath away. Her name emerged from Ranin’s lips only as a croak.