Glenda Larke - The Heart of the mirage

'You are scratching your left palm,' he accused.

I looked down at my hand guiltily. It was a joke between us that whenever I was worried I itched the lump – the size and shape of half a pigeon's egg cut lengthways – in the middle of my palm. He stood up and came to take me in his arms. T don't like this, Ligea. You are right to be worried. Kardiastan is a strange place. I've heard strange tales. They are an odd people."

I looked at him, deliberately arch. 'I am Kardi,'

He lifted my hand and kissed the deformity on the palm. It was hard and solid beneath his lips. 'And look how different you are!'

'I am not odd!' I was careful not to be whenever I moved in highborn circles. I kept my work for the Brotherhood as quiet as I could, and tried to appear as Tyranian as possible. I kept out of the sun and powdered my face to lighten my skin, I had my hair highlighted to make it more blonde than brown. I was accepted as Tyranian. It was, after all, what I felt myself to be.

He asked, 'Do you remember Kardiastan?'

'No, not really. Except -'

'Except what?'

'Oh, sometimes I have the faintest recollections. About a woman; my mother, I suppose. My real mother. Sometimes, something will remind me of her. A whiff of perfume, a particular laugh, a certain colour. And then there's this.' I indicated the swelling on my hand. 'I seem to remember her telling me not to show it to anyone. Goddess only knows why. I remember it as being… different then… somehow. Oh, I don't really recall, but my mother – my adoptive mother, Salacia – told me before she died that when the General first brought me home I was so sensitive about the lump I would not unfold my fingers, not even when I was asleep. They couldn't understand why. They were going to force my fingers up to see what it was I hid there, but Aemid persuaded them it was better not to upset me. She made me a glove to wear. And in a couple of months I opened my hand of my own accord, I suppose when I'd decided no one was going to worry about the lump there.' I gave a wry smile. T must have been a funny little thing then. I couldn't have been three years old, but I was obviously as stubborn as a closed mussel.'

'You still are,' he said with a laugh. 'Ligea, I am dirty with the dust of my journey. I've spent most of the day with my backside plonked in the saddle of a gorclak. I smell of sex and sweat and animal hide – how about a soak in that sunken bath of yours?'

I tilted my head. 'With me?'

His eyes twinkled. 'I thought you'd never ask.'

I stood on the deck of the Flying Windhover and reflected that, for all the flying this ship did, it would have been better named the Wallowing Pig. I had taken the first convenient sailing, and I was beginning to regret it. It wasn't that I was so eager to reach Kardiastan; it was just that being cooped up for so long in such a small space gave me an intimate understanding of why a lion paces up and down in his cage. Four weeks, and we still weren't in Sandmurram. The seamaster blamed the weather and the cargo; the first because the winds were contrary, the second because the weight of the Tyranian marble we carried made the ship unwieldy. So he said. I was inclined to think the Flying Windhover probably always moved like a pregnant sow.

'Why on earth are we taking marble to Kardiastan anyway?' I asked Aemid idly. She was standing beside me, leaning over the rail watching the bow wave curl back like fruit-peel before a knife.

She snorted. 'Let me guess: so that your soldiers and administrators can build houses and public buildings to match their status. You people don't like to live in

homes made of our Kardi adobe – not good enough for you. And we Kardis are taxed to pay for the marble and the construction of course, because you say the Exaltarchy's soldiers and civil servants are serving the Kardi people.'

'And so they are,' I said, nettled both by Aemid's criticism and her deliberate use of the words 'you' and 'we'. I gave her a sharp look. I didn't like the change I'd noted in her ever since the first mention of going to Kardiastan. I liked neither the overt realignment of loyalties nor the suppressed anger I had detected once or twice. But it puzzled me too. Aemid was not in the habit of being provoking and I'd never had to question her loyalties before. What in all Acheron's mists was wrong with the woman?

I tried to explain. 'Tyrans provides the soldiers for security and the administrators for efficiency, all paid out of Tyranian public coffers; so why shouldn't Kardiastan pay for their housing and for the public buildings, buildings that will belong to Kardi Province when diey are completed? There is always a price for peace, Aemid.' I reached out – as I had often done lately – to touch her emotions, and felt her confusion. Just then the predominant feeling was one of bitterness.

'Aemid,' I asked softly, 'what is the matter? You are not happy. Do you regret coming with me?'

'Never.' The word was uncompromisingly definite and I needed no special intuition to know it was the truth.

'Then what is it?'

'Memories. Just memories. The closer we come -' She looked away from the sea to my face. T have a son there somewhere, if he survived. All these years… I have tried not to remember. Now I think of nothing else.'

' I felt as though one of the waves had just slapped cold water across my face. 'A son7. You left a child behind in Kardiastan? But you were – what, twenty? – when you came to Tyr, so he could have hardly been more than a baby! Why did you leave him?'

'Leave him? I didn't leave, I was stolen! I was made a slave, sold, because I kicked a legionnaire who put his hand between my legs. Sentenced to the slave block for kicking a man's knobs.'

I was immeasurably shocked, not so much by the severity of the sentence as by its unlawful consequence. I protested, 'But it is not permitted for slaves to be separated from their young children!'

'Perhaps that's what the law says, but who cares about the words of the law in the chaos following a conquest? A woman sells better without encumbrances.'

'Oh, Aemid – I did not know…'

'You never asked.'

The words were stark, summing up a lifetime of attitudes, and they stung. 'I'm sorry,' I said at last, not sure just why I was apologising. For my ignorance? For Tyr? Even to my own ears the words sounded weak. Inadequate. 'As you say, in times of conquest… Aemid, do you have any way of finding out what happened to him?'

'None. I do not know who took him – or, in fact, if anyone did. He may have died of neglect within days. He is lost to me.'

I felt an irrational guilt and did not know what to say. Finally I asked, sounding more abrupt than I intended, if she would tell me more about Kardiastan. I added, 'After all, it is my land too. Why did you never tell me about it?'

'The General forbade me. The only thing he allowed was that I taught you the tongue. That, he

wanted. Don t you remember how he used to question you about all I said to you? He checked up on me whenever he could.'

'He was interested in all I learned.'

'Oh yes. Indeed.' The bitterness was there again. 'He made sure you were brought up Tyranian, every thought in your head.'

'He adopted me legally so that I could be a citizen of Tyrans. It is natural he wanted me to be loyal to his country, the country he made mine.' Tyrans was the hub of the world, filled with people of every hue and varied customs, a place where my skin tone and the place of my birth could be rendered irrelevant by my citizenship – but only if I was seen to be Tyranian in every other way. And I was. I was proud that every thought in my head was Tyranian.

I hid my exasperation with Aemid and said, 'But tell me about Kardiastan.'