Glenda Larke: The Heart of the mirage

A moment or two later, Dorus was back with a clay tablet. A pronounced tremor in his hands prompted me to take it from him before he dropped it. 'The names of everyone involved,' he whispered. He made an effort to control the shaking. 'They'll kill me if ever they find out.'

'They won't hear it from me.' I glanced at the list. 'You've done a good job.' I extracted a coin from the purse hidden in the folds of my wrap.

T don't want your tainted money,' he said in revulsion. 'Some of them are my friends!'

'They are traitors, plotting the overthrow of their monarch. They will get the justice they deserve.'

'My – my son?'

'He is well, as I am sure you know. I doubt this sojourn in the Cages will do him any harm; I hope it will do him some good. If this list is as comprehensive as it looks, he will be released by nightfall tomorrow. I keep my promises, Dorus.' I started towards the door, but a quixotic impulse made me turn back to say, 'Markis is a young fool who let his silly ideals get him into trouble once, and may do so again. But he does love you. If you are wise, you will tell him what you had to do to gain his freedom. He will keep your secret, and his fear of putting you in a similar position again will keep him out of trouble.' I had intended to keep in reserve the propensity of Dorus's son to do foolish things, a lever I would be able to use against the jeweller in the future, but what was the point when I wouldn't be here to exert pressure on the handle? I flipped the gold coin in Dorus's direction. 'Use it to buy him a new set of clothes. He'll need them after three weeks in the Cages.'

I emerged into the deserted street, indifferent to the hatred that followed me.

I was used to it.

The moment I entered the front hall of my villa on the fashionable side of town, I was greeted, as usual, by a slave. This time it was Aemid, once my nurse and now my personal handmaiden. Glad to be out of the desiccating heat of the desert-season, I sat on the entry stool in the cool while she undid my sandals and knelt to wash the dust from my feet with water smelling of lemon blossom.

I tried to relax and let the tensions of the day slip away along with the grime. It wasn't easy. When I gazed around it was to look on something I was about to lose. I loved this house; I had been brought up here. I had played my first games on the terrace, read my first books in the library, ridden my first horse in the garden, taken my first lover in one of the bedrooms. After the death of my adoptive parents, I rid the rooms of much of the ostentation that had irked me as a child, so now it was all I desired. I liked to think I had chosen the best of Tyranian style and rejected the more florid embellishment that Salacia, my adoptive mother, had so admired.

The cool marbled hall, the elegant statuary decorating the wall niches, the great fireplaces that burned whole logs in the snow-season, the way rooms opened out on to fountained courtyards – 1 loved it all. If I listened, I could hear the splash of water mingling with the soft murmur of pink and grey mellowbirds. If I glanced through the archways to my right, I would see the vines, now rich with fruit, that covered the atrium. If I drew breath, it was to smell the trumpet flowers and lemon blossom, and just a wisp of freshly baked bread from my own kitchen ovens. If I reached out my hand, I would touch the soft velvet of the cold-weather drapes we drew closed to keep the room warm when the fires were lit and the wall fountains were heated.

This was the only home I could ever remember having.

And I had to leave it.

I looked back at Aemid and waved a hand at the foot basin. 'Since when has this been your job?' I asked, using the Kardi language, as I always did when talking to her. 'Where is Foressa – or Dini?'

She gave a grunt. 'They're busy.' It was a lie and both of us knew it. Before I could chide her, she blurted, 'What did the Exaltarch want with you?'

I smiled softly, touched that she had been worried. 'Something I never expected: he wants me to go to Kardiastan. With the rank of Legata, what's more.'

I was totally unprepared for the effect of this news on her. She jumped to her feet, dropping the sponge she had been using, and stood swaying, her fists clenched, her breath loud and rough. The normal olive-brown tint of her skin blotched unevenly, the lines on her face burrowed deeper.

'Aemid! Are you all right? What in Vortex has come

over you?' I was awash in her emotions: joy and fear and panic in equal parts. -

She didn't answer. Her eyes dropped to the sponge, but she didn't pick it up. Water ran in rivulets over the marble tiles. 'When?' she asked at last, the word a strangled sound in the back of her throat.

Seeing she was not going to fall, I released the supporting hold I had taken on her arm. 'I don't know; as soon as I can wind up my affairs here and obtain a sea passage. A week perhaps. I will have priority on any coastal vessel.'

'Wind up your affairs -?'

'It's very doubtful I shall be coming back for a while. What's upset you so, Aemid? Are you worried I'll leave you behind, or that I'll take you with me?' I looked at her uncertainly.

'Could I – is it possible? That I can go with you?'

'Well, of course, if that's what you want.' I was puzzled. 'I had no idea you felt so strongly about Kardiastan. All I've ever heard about the place seems to indicate it's damned inhospitable; a hellhole with a climate worthy of the Vortex of Deadi. Melete's heart, why would you want to return there? You belong here by now, surely.'

Aemid did not reply. She knelt and began to towel my feet dry with trembling hands, her grey head bent.

I went on, 'I shall take Brand as well, and I shall keep a skeleton staff here to maintain the house and gardens, but the other slaves will have to be sold. I can always buy another household in Kardiastan. You may tell the others. Tell them I shall see that they go to good homes.'

Aemid's head swung up in shock. 'There's no slavery in Kardiastan!'

I stared at her. 'What in the world are you thinking of? Weren't you yourself enslaved there? And what of

all the newly arrived Kardi thralls you see here in Tyr from time to time? Of course there is slavery in Kardiastan!'

'Oh – yes. Yes, of course,' she muttered, flushing. 'I was just – For a moment, I was remembering how it once was.'

'Aemid, you haven't been there for, what? More than twenty-five years? You were taken while the Kardiastan Uprising was still in progress, I know, but that was a long time ago. Those wars are long over; Kardiastan has long been a province of the Exaltarchy, and where the Exaltarch rules, there is always slavery. It is the natural order of things that the conquered should serve their masters. Now go and tell Brand I want to see him after I bathe. I have the stink of the Cages on my skin and I won't feel clean until I've washed. You can send Dini in to do my hair.' She nodded, apparently in control of herself again, but as she left the room, I noticed her hands trembled.

When I emerged from my bedroom a while later, clean at last and dressed more comfortably in loose trousers and a long loose top, it was to find Brand waiting for me.

Like Aemid, Brand was a house slave. The red flecks in the brown of his irises and the red flash over his forehead in his otherwise brown hair proclaimed his blood to be Altani. Altan Province was one of the conquered nations to the south of the Sea of Iss – but Brand never spoke of his home any more than Aemid did. He had been a gift from General Gayed to me on my tenth anniversary day. Twelve years old then, a defiant boy, skinny and undersized. Now he was a large man, taller by a head than I was, with a width to match his height and a strength to match his width.