The Emperor, who can remember-though only with an effort now-walking in only a short tunic and torn, sodden boots through a winter the first time he came south from Trakesia, at his uncle’s behest, is grateful for the warmth. It is a short enough walk back to the Traver-site Palace, but his personal immunity is to fatigue, not cold.
I am growing old, he thinks, not for the first time. He has no heir. Not for want of effort, or medical advice, or invocations of aid from the god and the half-world, both. It would be good to have a son, he thinks, but has been reconciled for some time now to not having one. His uncle passed the throne to him: there is some precedent in the family, at any rate. Unfortunately, his sisters’ sons are feckless nonentities and all four of them remain in Trakesia, at his very firm instruction.
Not that they would stir any sort of insurrection. To do such a thing requires courage and initiative and none of them has either. They might serve as figureheads, though, for someone else’s ambition-and the god knows there is enough hunger for power in Sarantium. He could have them killed, but he has judged that unnecessary.
The Emperor shivers, crossing the gardens in the night wind. It is only the chill and damp. He is not fearful, at all. He has only been afraid once in his adult life that he can remember: during the rioting two years ago, in the moment he learned that the Blues and Greens had joined together, side by side in the Hippodrome and in the burning streets. That had been too unexpected a development, too far outside the predictable, the rational. He was-and is-a man who relies on orderly conduct to ground his existence and his thinking. Something so unlikely as the factions joining with each other had rendered him vulnerable, unmoored, like a ship with an anchor ripped free in a storm.
He had been prepared to follow the advice of his most senior counsellors that day. To take a small craft from the little cove below the Precinct and flee the sack of his city. The foolish, illogical rioting over a small increase in taxes and some depravities alleged on the part of the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue had been on the very cusp of bringing down a lifetime’s worth of planning and achievement. He had been frightened and enraged. This memory is much more vivid than the one from long ago, the winter trek down to the City.
He reaches the smaller of the two main palaces, ascends the wide steps. Doors are opened for him by the soldiers on duty there. He pauses on the threshold, looking up at the grey-black clouds west over the sea, then he walks into the palace to see if the woman whose words saved them all that day two years ago is still awake, or has-as threatened-gone to sleep.
Gisel-Hildric’s daughter, queen of the Antae-is said to be young and even beautiful, though that last hardly matters in the scheme of things. It is distinctly probable she could offer him an heir, though less likely that she would really afford an alternative to the invasion of Batiara. Were she to come east to wed the Emperor of Sarantium it would be seen as an act of treachery by the Antae. A successor would be named, or emerge.
Successors among the Antae tend to follow each other rapidly in any case, he thinks, as swords and poison do their winnowing. It is true that Gisel would serve as excuse for Sarantine intervention, lending validity to his armies. Not a trivial thing. The endorsement of the High Patriarch might reasonably be expected in the name of the queen, and that would carry weight among the Rhodians-and many of the Antae- which could turn the balance in a war. The young queen, in other words, is not really wrong in her reading of what she might represent for him. No man who prided himself on his command of logic and capacity to analyse and anticipate could deny that this is so.
Marrying her-if she could be winkled out of Varena alive-would represent a truly dazzling opening up of avenues. And she is indeed young enough to bear, many times. Nor is he so old himself, though he might feel it at times.