Nancy Berberick: The Lioness

The music soared, the notes of pipes like a flight of birds. It came back to earth again, caught and held by the subtle drum beat that guided the steps of the dancers. Kerian sailed among them, lovely in her festival garb. She had abandoned the colors of Rashas’s service in favor of harvest colors. She’d unbraided her hair and caught it loosely back in a shimmering scarf the color of corn silk. Her wide skirt swirled, golden as the oaks of autumn. Upon her wrists and the slim ankles of her brown naked feet, silvery bells rang. Sunlight warmed the day; she wore a thin silk blouse dyed the exact shade of the blue asters in the fields, the scalloped sleeves so short as to merely cover her lavishly tattooed shoulders.

Winding, Kerian’s tattoos were like shadows upon her sun-burnished skin. Gil knew where each began and where each ended. He knew how they intersected and exactly where. Some of the Kagonesti covered their tattoos, either because a master decreed them uncouth or because they themselves had learned to feel ashamed of this unmistakable signing of the Wilder Elf heritage. Others covered the markings because they felt the tattoos were not for the casual observance of others. Kerian never covered her twining vines. She didn’t care who noted the tattoos or how they felt about them.

“Ah, well,” Lady Elantha murmured, watching Kerian dance. “I suppose not all the servants have learned grace.”

“Indeed,” said the king, smiling, because he must be seen to agree. He made a purposeful hesitation. “Yet she moves like shadows on the ground. Look, her feet barely touch the earth. That is a kind of grace, don’t you think, my lady?”

Lady Elantha sniffed. “She is vulgar and half-clad, at that.”

Not quite, Gilthas thought who knew this dancer clad and unclad, yet it was true that the silk of her blouse was so thin that she wore a camisole for modesty, and that was not of significantly more substance than the aster-blue blouse. The king saw the shadow of his lover’s breasts as she danced, and Lady Elantha saw his hand move, a small restlessness he couldn’t help. Gilthas then folded his hands as though casually, but he did not take his eyes from the dancers.

Shining, swinging from hand to hand in steps so complicated they looked like madness, Kerian flung back her head, honey hair tumbling in rippling waves from her kerchief. The silk scarf caught a breeze and drifted toward a young man who stood watching the dance. He reached and caught the kerchief, holding it out to Kerian and teasing it back. Gilthas couldn’t hear what was said, but he understood the man’s gestures. He’d return the scarf for the fee of a kiss. Kerian’s laughter rang like bells. Never missing a step, she took back her kerchief and lightly paid the fee as she passed round in the circle dance.

“Move on,” the king commanded, his voice curt. He did not part the hangings again to look out until he discerned, by the receding sound of music and voices, that they’d come to a more utilitarian part of the city. They were in the Knights’ quarter now. Not far from here, Gilthas knew, Lord Eamutt Thagol sat in his ugly barracks building, the Skull Knight issuing orders to his minions. This day, at the request of Rashas who was the Senate’s liaison between the kingdom and the Knights, Thagol had agreed to keep his dark-armored patrols discreetly in the background of the festivities.

Gilthas folded his lips grimly as they neared the eastern bridge the way out of the city. The king parted the litter’s hangings again, gazing eastward, feeling an aching and an emptiness. The bridge’s silvery span lifted high above king and lords, high above the city itself. Connected to the other three bridges by a series of towers, no more than guard houses for the watch, there had been a time when this bridge was no different from the other three.

Recently, that had changed.

Gil’s stomach turned, bitter bile rose into his throat. The eastern bridge bristled with spears like pikes. Upon the bloody points of those spears sat the fresh heads of elves. Above, high in the bright blue harvest sky, a darkness of ravens sailed. In the king’s ears, the sounds of festivity seemed as the sound of a distant sea, barely heard, hardly recognized.

Out from the watch tower a stocky figure came, a Knight in black mail, high-booted, his hair cropped short as was the custom of all Knights. He carried with him a sack, and from the forest a murder of crows gathered over his head. The Knight pulled a head out of the sack by its long hair. Red hair it had been, and now it was matted with dark blood. The dead one had been a woman; Gil saw it by the delicacy of her features as the Knight took the head by the ears and thrust it hard down onto the steel tip of a spear. The dead woman’s jaw dropped, as though to scream.

Beside the king, Lady Elantha seemed not to have noticed. Some of the senators murmured among themselves. One, behind the king’s litter, made a choking sound of sickness. Horses that had never seen battle or smelled blood other than that of game, snorted and danced as the breeze from the forest brought them the stench of elf blood.

Only Rashas sat his mount calmly, in silence looking at the Knight on the wall as he walked back to the guardhouse.

“My Lord King,” he said, never turning to look at Gilthas, “you see there the expected issue of Lord Thagol’s new orders. He fears the folk in the forest are becoming too … obstreperous.” The senator turned, his long eyes glittering cold, his face a waxen mask. “He doesn’t want to see the robbers on the highway become a thing for a dragon to notice. Of course, you needn’t distress yourself, Your Majesty. It’s certain the robberies will stop now, the dragon’s tribute will go by unmolested, for word will go from here, even today, of this display. Thagol only wants peace, My Lord King. He only wants order and compliance.

“As do we all, Your Majesty. The dragon, her overlord, your own most loyal Thalas-Enthia. Peace and order and—” Rashas moved his mouth in an imitation of smile. “—compliance.”

In silence the senator said to the king: I will treat with this Knight, with our enemies. Not you, boy, and so let there be no more talk of Lord Firemane’s governorship in further meetings of the Thalas-Enthia. From now on, let there be only your compliance with my wishes.

Sharp and cold, Rashas’s command moved the procession along. Horses snorted, the clip of hooves quickened.

Gilthas let the silk hangings fall. After a certain amount of time had passed, he asked Lady Elantha to send word to Rashas that the king felt fatigued and wished the procession to come discreetly to an end near the royal residence. Once returned, he went to his chambers. He wanted quiet and a place to calm an anger he hadn’t given Rashas the satisfaction of seeing, anger he wouldn’t give him the pleasure of hearing about in gossip.

A newly laid fired crackled in the hearth, testimony to a servant’s efficiency and acknowledgment that though the first day of autumn shone warmly outside, the night would come cool. Upon the marble-topped sideboard in the small dining chamber adjacent to both his library and his bed chamber, a silver tray sat, with two golden cups and a tall crystal carafe filled with ruby wine.

Gilthas had worn many rings that day, and now he removed all but one, a gleaming topaz whose fiery heart reminded him of a man long dead, his father the half-elf, Tanis, against whom he so often measured himself. What would his father have done, seeing the heads of elves decorating the silver bridge? Gil didn’t know, couldn’t ask. The man was long dead. He dropped the rings carelessly into the tray and saw propped against one of the cups a half-sheet of creamy parchment. Gilthas recognized the firm hand, the letters that looked as though they’d been formed by a general in the field. Even after all these years, his mother wrote dispatches, not letters.