Elizabeth Moon: Liar's Oath

“Nonsense.” Arranha smiled at Luap. “This lady knew me in my wild youth, Luap, and like her friends gave me good warnings I was too foolish to hear.”

She softened a trifle. “I blame my sister as much as anyone, she and your father both. If he had not tried to force a match, or she had accepted it—”

“I would be a very dead magelord, having fallen honorably on the turf at Greenfields with my king,” said Arranha. “If, that is, your sister had not knifed me long before, for driving her frenzied with my questions. She threatened it often enough, even in courtship.”

“Well . . . that’s over.” With a visible effort, the old lady dragged herself from memory to the present. “And my business with you, Arranha, is about the Sunlord, not about the past.”

At once, he put on dignity. “Yes, lady?”

She sat on the stone ledge beside him, and recited the whole tale again. Arranha, Luap noted, actually seemed to listen with attention to each detail—but of course it was his god whose rituals mattered here. But when she started to pull the cloth from her bag and unfold it, Arranha put out his hand.

“Not here, lady.”

“But I wanted to show you—”

“Lady, I trust your piety and your grandmother’s instruction, but you have now told me—Esea’s priest—about them. From here, the ritual is his, not yours or mine. Give me the bag.”

She handed it over, eyes wide, and Arranha held it on outstretched hands. A pale glow, hardly visible in the sunlight, began to gather around it. Luap realized that the sun seemed brighter, the shadows of vineleaves on the wall darker . . . stiller. No air moved. The glow around the bag intensified, became too bright for eyes to watch. Luap felt a weight pressing down on him, yet it was no weight he knew, nothing like a stone. Light. But very heavy light.

Abruptly it was gone, not faded but simply gone; he blinked at the confusing afterimages of light and shadow. A cool breeze whirled in and out of the courtyard. And the bag on Arranha’s outstretched hands lay white as fresh-washed wool, only less white than the light itself. The old lady sat silent, mouth open, eyes wide; her companion’s face had paled, and even Arranha had a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“Lady, your gifts are acceptable, and we can now, with your help, restore Esea’s altar to its proper array.”

“What was that?” Luap asked. Arranha merely smiled at him and shook his head; a fair answer. He offered his arm to the old lady, who roused suddenly from her daze and stood, more steadily than Luap would have expected.

“You should come too,” Arranha said, as he guided the women toward the High Lord’s Hall. Luap knew better than to ask why; he suspected the answer had to do with his ancestry, and only hoped Arranha wouldn’t think it necessary to tell the old lady about that . He tried to think of a duty he must perform, right now, somewhere else, and couldn’t—and in Arranha’s presence, he could not make one up.

Fortunately for his composure, the walk through the maze of passages and little walled yards that had grown around the old king’s palace kept the old lady breathless enough that she had no questions to ask. When they finally came to the great court before the High Lord’s Hall, Arranha led the way straight across it to the main entrance. Whatever the doorwards may have thought, they offered no challenge to Arranha and Luap.

Inside, the coolness of stone and tile and shadowed air. Most of the windows shattered when the city fell had been boarded up. Luap supposed that someday artists would design new windows to fill the interior with manycolored light, but for now Gird had no intention of spending the land’s wealth on such things. The great round hole in the end wall, above the altar, had been left open, for light, and through it the sun’s white glare fell full on the pale stone of the floor, a bright oval, glittering from minute specks in the slabs of rock. Luap noticed how it was all the brighter for the shadows around it, focusing the eye on what lay within the light.

Arranha walked up the Hall, followed by the other three, their footsteps sounding hollowly in that high place. They walked through the sun, and back into shadow, halting when Arranha did, then moving at his gesture to stand at either side, where they could see. At the altar, he bowed before laying the bag atop it. His prayer seemed, to Luap, unreasonably elaborate for something so simple as the consecration of a handwoven cloth for its covering, but he omitted none of the details the old lady had mentioned, from the selection of the animal, to the washing and spinning and weaving. From time to time, he asked the old lady for the name of the person who had performed each rite. At last, he came to some sort of conclusion. By then Luap was bored, noticing idly how the sun’s oval slipped up the floor, handspan by handspan, as the morning wore on. Arranha’s shadow appeared, a dark motionless form; when he looked, the sun blazed from Arranha’s robe. It shifted minutely to catch the edge of the altar, which would be in full sun any moment.

Abruptly, in silence, Arranha came alight. As if he had turned in that instant to the translucent stone of a lamp, his body glowed: Luap could see the very veins in his arms, the shadows of his bones. Once more he prayed, this time in a resonant chant. Without haste, yet swiftly as the sun moved, he opened the bag and drew out the cloths, unfolding them with cadenced gestures. In the full light of the sun, that rich embroidery glittered, shimmered, gold and silver on blue. Arranha’s hands spread, and passed above the cloth. Its folds flattened as if he’d soothed a living thing. Blue as smooth and deep as the sky . . . light rose from the altar, as light fell from the empty window, to meet in a dance of ecstasy.

Luap did not know if Arranha kept on chanting, or if he fell silent. Until the sun moved from the altar, as it passed midday, he stood rapt in some mystery beyond any magicks he’d thought of. Then the spell passed, and he looked across to find the old lady’s face streaked with tears; she trembled as she leaned on Eris’s arm. Arranha folded the cloths, just as ceremoniously, and returned them to the snowy bag for storage. Then, stepping away from the altar, he turned to her.

“Lady, Esea accepts your service, and I, his priest, thank you for your years of diligence.”

She ducked her head. “It is my honor.” From the way she said it, Luap wondered if she had anything else in her life to look forward to. He smiled at her when she looked up, but none of them said anything as they left the Hall. Back outside, she seemed to have recovered her composure, and turned to Luap with a sweet smile.

“You will thank the Marshal-General for me? I will come again, but now—I am a little fatigued. Eris will see me home; please don’t trouble yourselves.”

“Of course, lady,” he said. He might have offered to escort her anyway, but she’d already turned away, and something in Arranha’s expression suggested that Arranha wanted to talk to him out of the old lady’s hearing. For a few moments, Arranha was silent, then he shook his head abruptly and smiled at Luap, a smile twin to the old lady’s, before leading the way back to his own chosen courtyard. There he waved Luap to a seat on the stone bench and sat beside him, hot as it was now in midday. Luap was about to suggest that they find a cool inside room in the palace when Arranha shook his head slowly. “I had forgotten her, you know. Until you brought her, I had not thought of Dorhaniya for years.”

“You knew her,” Luap said. “A . . . duke’s daughter?”

Arranha sighed, and nodded. “Yes—longer ago than I care to think.” He gave Luap a searching look, then went on. “You need to know some of this, and you probably don’t remember it.”