Mazarkis Williams: The Emperor's knife

“Look again,” Banreh said.

Mesema looked. She always found it hard to deny Banreh. His eyes held a promise and a trust.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I… I don’t know.” The wind blew harder, and Mesema felt suddenly cold. “A-A strange patterning. Now waves, huge waves with a man riding across them. A cliff. A prison. I don’t know! Nothing.”

“You see more than you know,” Banreh said. He brought his horse around to stand before Tumble. Though he’d never be a Rider, her father gave his voice-and-hands a fine steed; it helped Banreh keep alongside him during hunts and ride-outs. But the Chief spared Banreh now to bring back the Cerani’s prize.

Mesema was meant to leave with Arigu at autumn’s turning. She remembered how Arigu had stood at the edge of the horse-pen, watching her ride away. His expressions were unfamiliar to her, his language incomprehensible. She might as well step off the edge of the world as go to Nooria.

“Why didn’t the prince take Dirini?” The question burst from Mesema without permission. “She’s proven. She has her children to speak for her.”

“The Cerani have strange ways,” Banreh said. “Dirini’s children would always be considered a danger.”

“Are they mad?”

“Different.” Banreh rubbed at the golden stubble on his chin and looked out over the grass. “The prince has no younger brothers-they were all killed when the eldest took the throne. Why he was spared, I don’t know. The Cerani general has reasons, but he doesn’t tell me the truth.”

“I should ride away from here,” Mesema said. “I should ride and join the clanless. Chasing deer on the brown-land would be better than going to Cerana.” Banreh started to reply, but she spoke over him. “Don’t talk to me of duty. The Felt won’t suffer if one daughter rides away.”

Banreh shrugged. “When the horse fell on me I thought my life was over. I heard my leg break and I knew all my dreams broke with it.”

Mesema watched him. He had a faraway look. His eyes held the green of the spring.

“I would have made a middling Rider,” Banreh said. “I was never a natural, not like your father or your brother. I would have got by, but I’d always have been third-best in any group of four. Maybe I’d be dead by now, killed last summer when we fought the Red Hooves.

“Instead I found a new world, a world of strange tongues and the stories they conceal. I found writing, and in it a trail to a dozen lands beyond our own-whole new worlds, Mesema, places no Felt has ever been. Places your father could never conquer though he had ten times the Riders.”

“What are you saying?” Mesema asked. “That this Cerani prince is my broken leg?”

Banreh turned to face her. “Your horse has fallen. How you get up again is a matter for you.”

“Don’t think to instruct me, Banreh.” Mesema found her anger again. “I am not a child and you are no Elder.” She met his gaze and challenged it. “Is there nothing you regret, not being a real man?”

Banreh met the challenge. “Had I been a Rider, I would have ridden to your longhouse and set my spear. But I am not, and even if I had been, the Cerani prince would still have beaten me to your bower. We are the Felt, Mesema. We carry on.”

Banreh turned his horse and rode slowly towards the camp. Mesema looked once more towards the setting of the sun and the distant marches of the clanless, then she too began the ride back.

We are the Felt. We carry on.

Tuvaini passed through the royal corridors. On his right, a recess held a mosaic, bright in purple and white. He had hidden there as a young boy, hoping his uncle wouldn’t find him and force him back into his lessons. He recalled the feel of the cool agate against his bare legs, the way he had held his breath, sure that the slightest sound would betray him. He is lazy, he prayed they would say. A poor student. Not promising. Then they would send him home to the seaside. That desire faded once he came to know Emperor Tahal.

Tuvaini passed under the carving of the god Keleb. Here, just outside the imperial suite, he used to place the Robes of Office around the shoulders of the late emperor. They had walked to the throne room together, Tahal and Tuvaini, thousands of times. Tahal had spent more time with him than with his own sons. He had known all save one would die.

All save two, as it turned out.

Tuvaini turned a corner and left the royal chambers behind. Here lay the doors to the treasuries and scriptoria. In between them all, handsome tapestries concealed plain tiled walls. The officers of the quill and coin were mere men of tribute, chosen from the villages and farms of vassal lands and trained for a lifetime of shifting papers. It was better to fill such rooms with men of limited ambitions, men like Donato who took joy in building monuments to failures.

Tuvaini walked on. As he neared the servants’ chambers, he yawned. Sometimes Lapella made him sleepy. It wasn’t her fault; she relaxed him. He found her door and turned the key in the lock. Whenever he entered her quarters, he had the sensation of stepping into his home province. He hadn’t been there in more than ten years, but Lapella held for him all the voices and scents that he missed. He even, somehow, smelled the sea about her.

Tuvaini used to wake to the calls of the fishmongers and seabirds, the ringing of the ships’ bells and the sound of waves cresting upon the rocky shore. The gardens under his window bloomed jasmine and rose, and his mother used to trim them as she sang.

She had been the granddaughter of Satreth II, known as the Drunk, the laughing stock of the empire in his day. Still, cut off from Nooria by mountains and a desert, huddled against the shore of the gulf, they were almost as deities through his blood. The shipbuilders and merchants knew little of palace gossip; to them, blood was everything. Little did they know how thin it ran. Tuvaini’s people were unlikely ever to rise to the Petal Throne. A female connection was near to meaningless when it came to the succession.

Tuvaini put the sting of that aside. “Lapella,” he called softly, dangling the key from one finger. He found her prostrate before her altar, offering incense to Mirra. Her fingers showed white against the soapstone base; she held hard to her prayers. Lapella never tired of Mirra. Perhaps she dreamed that one day Mirra would remove the scars from her pox-sickness, even fix her ruined womb. Tuvaini’s belief was that no god should improve the lot of humans. Only the Mogyrk god had ever promised that, leaving his Yrkmen followers to practise vengeance and cruelty in his stead. The invaders burned through the empire, even raping and plundering their way through the palace itself. When Satreth the Reclaimer fell upon them at last, they learned the weakness of their god.

Tuvaini didn’t interrupt Lapella; he liked indulging her sometimes. He took a seat by the window and studied the moon. He’d paid off three Red Hall guards and set them running. He had to show them how their actions were a form of loyalty, show them the wider tapestry. He was good at explaining such things. With any luck, they could make it to his home province in five days. They could work for his family there, in obscurity. Nobody would ever learn they’d allowed the Carriers to pass through the secret ways to the fountain, and by his order.

The others, who knew nothing, would be questioned and killed. Backwards as it was to reward the treacherous guards and kill the honest ones, Beyon had left him no choice. The emperor had, quite unexpectedly, advanced from cutting throats to asking questions-and then cutting throats.

Tuvaini felt some regret for the deaths. The guards had served him well, on the whole.

Lapella stood now and straightened her robes. She looked at him in her shy way, chin tucked in. “Are you thinking about the emperor?” Her meekness stirred him. Once, she had been bold, the tigress of the province by the sea.