“Well,” she said, “I have heard a curious fancy. You are to fight another duel.”
I had lost my puzzlement at the quick roads of Masrian gossip. Besides, I had meant to tell her.
“Yes. Something I can’t avoid.”
She loosened her sash and let the cub have it; then she came to me and set her hands on my shoulders.
“I acknowledge that you have brought my son to the Emperor’s Chair, that without you and your wicked genius he would be corpse-cold, and I sport for some wretchedness or other. I recognize everything and I obeise myself. So don’t do this thing, now of all times, two days or less before Sorem is anointed. He trusts you, values you. If you die, some part of him dies also. I am silent in the matter of my own distress.”
Even she knew nothing of my past, beyond what was common talk. We had come to love too simply, and with too few
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lies; she had demanded no detail of my life the way most women will, as if every incident recounted is a link that binds, as if you should have had no life indeed, but what you live of it with them. Malmiranet had nagged no history from me, yet she knew me, as I was.
Seeing my face, she said quietly, “Yet you will do it, will you not? No pleading of mine can dissuade you.”
“No. It is beyond your words, or mine. Beyond all of us.”
“Will you say what it is that drives you to this?”
“If it would help us, I’d say. It would not.”
She drew me to her, and held me, and said, “Well, then. I’ll ask nothing else.”
If I had ever wept in all my years since I had been a man, I would have wept then. I foresaw my death, and hers, as clear as I saw the sunlight on the red wall.
It was not a moment for harsh sounds, yet the door flew open, and the bronze girl Isep ran through it.
“Empress,” she rasped, “my lord, your son-”
She had no need to say the rest. Sorem appeared behind her.
He was wearing black, some modest custom before the Coronation, and it made the rage in his face twice as evident. He grabbed the bronze girl by her hair. She winced but made no noise.
“Yes,” he said to us. He looked at Malmiranetj at the thin robe and her nakedness beneath and his color rose. At me he did not look.
Malmiranet stood away from me.
“Isep,” she said, “please take my leopard cub and have him fed, that is if he requires anything after eating my girdle.” She spoke lightly, as if nothing were happening out of the ordinary. Almost involuntarily Sorem let go of the girl, who darted forward, scooped up the cub and the girdle together, and ran out. Sorem, with great deliberation, shut the doors.
With his back to us he said, “I find everyone in the palace informed, except for me, that this has been between you. I’d heard you were lusty, my Vazkor, the darling of the beds of the Palm Quarter. But I am surprised you donated some of this lust upon the body of my mother.”
“Let us get it right,” I said. “Is it your notion of honor to creep up on her bedchamber to make certain she remains celibate?”
He sprang around, snarling out some oath.
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Malmiranet said to him gently, “My beloved, I haven’t taken the vows of a priestess, as well you recall.”
“Yes, you have chosen men,” he said. “It was your affair. But this one, this northern dog who has sprinkled his lecheries like spilled wine-”
I had been at a low ebb and passed from that to dull anger. Now I could have smiled sourly. Here was the irrational brat broke loose again. What possessed him?
“You had better names for me a month ago,” I said.
“I trusted you then, though I should have been undeceived. Five hundred men and women dead on your instructions, Vazkor, when the city burned and you persuaded me that it must.”
“We are remembering that once more,” I said.
“I have never forgotten it.”
‘There is only one thing you forget,” I said to him. “Yourself.”
“By Masrimas,” he barked, and took a step toward me. His eyes were blazing, half mad. “You would have made yourself king in my stead if you could,” he shouted. “Treachery is your ablest weapon, that, and the tool between your legs which you used on her to such effect. That’s the way you mean to climb, is it? Onto my throne by way of a woman’s passion?”
“Who has been talking to you?” I said.
He controlled himself with an effort, and replied, “One of Denades’ captains reported to me that you had been seen conversing with Seemase magicians in the market. I am aware of your ties with Seema-that man Lyo who was your slave. I don’t know what plot you hatched, but be warned, Vazkor, I have guarded against it.”
“A pity you were not more guarded against foolish chat, sir,” I said. I wondered if the captain had also told him of my dealings with Malmiranet. Several must be conscious of the facts, and it had been doubly unwise to keep it from Sorem, since this was the result. Still, I could not fathom the roots of his fury. He railed at me like a child, or like a drunken girl.
He had grown pale as ash after the fire has died. He said again hoarsely, “I trusted you. I would have made you my brother, my friend.” He strode across the room and struck me in the face. I had never yet let any man do that unanswered if my wits and my hands were free, and be sure I answered him.
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He sprawled on the mosaic, just where the leopard cub had sprawled in its game, with the fringe of the red sash spilling from its jaws. The red that spilled from the corner of Sorem’s mouth was blood.
He got up slowly, leaned on the wall and looked at me, and his eyes were full of water. Then he called, and Yashlom and six jerdiers walked into the chamber.
Malmiranet had moved away from us, twisting the gold serpent bracelet on her wrist, staring from the window at the giant palm tree as if not to add her witness to his shame. Now she murmured, “No, Sorem, for my sake.” Her voice was uneven as on that night when she asked his safety from me. I could hear that she was not asking for her sake, as she said, neither for mine, but for his.
“Madam,” he said, “I put down your own deeds as due to weakness. Don’t make me involve you in his treason.”
At that she turned to face him. I had had that look directed at me once, and I recollected it well. Sorem flinched and averted his face. Not glancing at any of us, he instructed the six jerdiers to conduct me to my allotted apartment. It was the most elegant phrase I ever heard employed in sending a man to a jail.
I had not gone armed to her room and had neither knife nor sword about me. I was slow, too. That spell from the marsh had made me sluggish for a whole month of idleness, and I could not thrust it off quickly enough to snatch up some handy weapon-the stool, one of the hunting spears from the wall. It seemed, in the settling of my inner despair, hardly worth it. As for Power, I dared not. Of a selection of devices the readiest and most effective, it was denied me. For a moment I thought, Perhaps this, too, Sorem’s idiocy and anger, are of the witch’s making, to fetter me. If I use the Power in me, she will feed on it and utilize it to destroy me. If it remains unused, she will come more leisurely to my death. But still, she will come.
It was an elegant dungeon, a set of chambers in one of the Western towers, decorated in enamels and marble, with a whole wall of books, a cabinet of wines and liquors; the bed was borne on the backs of four crouching lion-women. Nothing is straightforward in Bar-Ibithni; no lion statue without a Woman’s head and breasts, no horse without wings, and no man without dual natures in his soul.
I did not keep my head. I was young and a dolt. I sat on
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the pretty couch and got drunk on koois and red wine. I had never been able to get drunk, for more than a little either of food or drink made me ill, which this presently did. After that was over, I closed my mind to the world and slept.