Sabazel Read online

  The Sardian encampment resembled an anthill; workers streamed out purposefully from the central pavilion, carrying weapons and orders. The tents fell and were folded, the palisade was torn down and its planks transformed into carts; horses milled in temporary pens, whinnying indignantly. Camp followers gathered their children, and shrieking arguments broke out over cooking pots and bedrolls. Smoke and dust shrouded the sky, so that its clear blue arch faded to gray. The wind was still, and the scarlet and purple pennons hung lank until they, too, were furled and packed away.

  The Sardians left behind a new town, a community of veterans wounded or grown old, of tradesmen and artisans who had gathered at the gates of the great encampment, of weary imperial soldiers. And, always, of women and children seeking the protection of men.

  The soldiers Aveyron and Hern guarded the opening of the pavilion, watching with interest as pages carried tables and couches and rolled tapestries to waiting carts. “Good,” Hern said. “Action again. No more of this consorting with barbarian gods.”

  “It looked to me,” commented Aveyron, his blue eyes wide and wary, “as if you quite enjoyed consorting with barbarian gods.”

  “Now, lad, a soldier takes his pleasure where he finds it. But those Sabazians—they would as soon slit your throat as spread their legs.”

  “So would most of the women in this camp, if they thought they could escape punishment.”

  Hern spat and ground the spittle into mud with the butt of his spear. “The Sabazian women know not their place, and we are well rid of them. Our young king is at times too courteous, I think, to the strange gods in these outlands of the world.”

  “He is a man of honor,” Aveyron said. “And we are far from Sardis.”

  “Too far—” began Hern, but a horse came plunging up the avenue of the camp, scattering people before it, and the two soldiers snapped smartly to attention.

  The messenger reined in, leaped off his mount, hurried inside the pavilion. “Dispatches from the garrison at Azervinah!” he shouted.

  Hern glanced from the corners of his eyes at his companion. “May Harus lead us to a speedy victory in the south, and a return to Sardis before the snow flies.”

  Aveyron did not reply, but his hand tightened around the shaft of his spear.

  *

  Bellasteros slumped in his chair. From his hand dangled the dispatch tablet, switching back and forth as if to time the tumbling of his thoughts. His opaque eyes were focused on the middle distance. For the last two days, since his return from Sabazel, he had brooded over maps and messages, and not even Mardoc had dared to disturb him. But now Mardoc waited, his body poised in expectant impatience, polite but never subservient. “A dispatch,” he said, prompting the conqueror into speech. “A dispatch from the garrison—”

  “At Azervinah,” Bellasteros interrupted, waking.

  Mardoc nodded, waited, exhaled in frustration. “What does the dispatch say?” he asked.

  His tone was much too acid. The king’s chin thrust upward, and his eyes held Mardoc’s unblinking. The older man gritted his teeth, nodded again, added, “My lord.”

  Bellasteros stood and with a gracious gesture presented the tablet to his general.

  Patros, seated at the writing table nearby, shook his head with a smile that was partly aggravated, partly amused. He looked at what he had written:

  To Danica, Queen of Sabazel. Greetings.

  Bellasteros of Sardis, King of Kings, presents his compliments and his thanks for hospitality rendered.

  Somehow his hand, of its own accord, had begun to write, Ilan … Quickly, with a guilty glance over his shoulder, he blotted the letters out.

  “By the tailfeathers of the god!” Mardoc exclaimed. “I thought the satrap Bogazkar had died in the battle before Farsahn.”

  Bellasteros smiled humorlessly. “So did we all. But as military governor of the south, he may not even have been there.”

  “And now he has declared himself Kallidar’s successor, forcing the southern provinces under his standard!”

  “I wonder how many of the refugees declaring fealty to Sardis are really in his pay?” Patros inquired from the side.

  “We shall never know,” growled Bellasteros. He set his hands against his hips. “I would have thought the Empire weary of this never-ending war. I would have thought it drained of men and weapons … It is the nobles with their private armies, surely, who seek to expand their power by fighting on. As if they were not powerful enough. The emperor and his lords owned everything, the people were so many serfs, bodies to be sacrificed at need.”

  Mardoc blinked. “Thanks be to Harus that the pass at Azervinah is ours,” he stated heartily, establishing one fact in the morass of imperial politics.

  “Thanks be to Ashtar,” said Bellasteros. Go on, some ironic part of his mind muttered. Goad him. Goad him into spitting it out and ridding himself of it.

  And Mardoc snapped around like a cobra prodded from its den. “You say that name here? Have you so easily forgotten your father Harus?”

  I know well my child’s mother, Danica said somewhere in the conqueror’s memory. He turned abruptly and threw himself back into the chair, set his elbows on the arms, clasped his hands before his chest stubbornly.

  “Bellasteros.” Mardoc said, his voice rising, “has that slut bewitched you, stolen your soul from you so that you no longer have the stomach to be king?”

  “Enough, Mardoc,” Bellasteros growled. “I have bought and paid for an alliance, no different from wedding a chieftain’s daughter.”

  “Your wives, from Chryse to the last, wait upon your word, and you do not bow to them.”

  Bellasteros bit his own tongue, viciously, to stop the words that would have flown from it.

  Patros frowned, laying down his pen. He jumped up and advanced to the side of the conqueror’s chair. “An alliance,” he asserted.

  Mardoc turned on him. “And you, Patros, acting like a sick calf, not a warrior. The whores in this camp offer better sport than that scrawny Sabazian girl.”

  Patros scowled, coiled, tensed for the leap. The king’s right hand shot out and seized his friend’s forearm in a grasp of steel. “Mardoc,” he said, in a voice so soft that the general had to step forward to hear, “it does not become our courtesy to mock the rites of another land. It is said that even the ancient hero Daimion had the help of such a warrior-woman. My vow is fulfilled, my bargain complete, and the episode is over. If you wish to test my stomach for the kingship, General, you will get this army ready to move into battle—through the pass of Azervinah which my efforts won for us!”

  Mardoc’s features resembled nothing so much as the mottled face of a rocky escarpment. Slowly he drew himself up, and slowly the flush drained from his cheeks. “My apologies, lord. My concern was only for you, and for the future of Sardis which rests in your hands.”

  Bellasteros ducked his head in polite acknowledgment. “You have long been my most trusted mentor, and I respect your concern, for it is always mine as well. But my soul is safe, thank you, and Sabazel lies behind us.”

  Mardoc bowed. “You comfort me greatly. Now, with your permission, I will see to the breaking of the camp.” He offered the dispatch tablet and Bellasteros released Patros to take it.

  “Continue, General, with my compliments.”

  The two men waited stiffly as Mardoc marched across the now empty pavilion, bowed once again in the doorway, disappeared into sunlight. They exhaled as one. The conqueror’s right eyebrow arched upward questioningly.

  “Forgive me,” Patros said. “I have been on edge of late.”

  “Like a sick calf,” returned Bellasteros.

  Patros tried to smile but did not succeed. “No longer a cream-filled cat?”

  “No longer.”

  They shared a long, reflective look, each daring the other to speak. At last Patros stepped close to the chair and said, in a husky conspiratorial whisper, “Do you suppose they did indeed steal our souls?”

&nb
sp; “Perhaps our souls were freely given.” Bellasteros sighed. “Perhaps they never belonged to us at all.” He paused. The shouts of a centurion bullying a work squad echoed in the sudden silence. Hoofbeats trotted past. The wind was still.

  Bellasteros closed his eyes. The sunlight failed, and the moon-silvered form of a woman stood before him. She was not beautiful, not by the standards of a Sardian brothel; her beauty was in her strength, in her reluctant smile, in the boundaries she held so carefully about her own soul. He looked quickly up and shook himself, but Danica’s clear green eyes were still fixed on him; spare me, the rites are over.

  Patros touched his hand. “I count myself very fortunate that my parents are mere mortals, that I know them both. I have brought troubles enough upon my own head without the help of gods.”

  Bellasteros flushed. “What?”

  “I have brought enough troubles—”

  “No, no. About your parents.”

  “Mortals. Not gods.” Patros’s gaze was open, honest, his hand quite steady.

  “My father Harus,” ventured Bellasteros.

  “And your mother Ashtar.”

  The centurion shouted again, loudly enough to make the pavilion tremble. Bellasteros had a sudden impulse to leap up, stalk outside, and offer the man evisceration at the very least. No; unworthy of a king, to turn the issue and make a subordinate suffer for it. Or a friend.

  The blood drained from his face, leaving it tingling, icy. “How long have you known?” he croaked. “Did Ilanit tell you?”

  “With all due respect, my lord, Ilanit and I did not speak of you. It was earlier, when the old king watched you with hatred in his eyes, that I knew. How could I know you, and not sense your secret?”

  “But you never told me you knew …”

  “My lord … Marcos.” Patros’s voice dropped even further. “You are my brother, and I would protect my brother from pain, whether it be in the field or in his mind. You rule in your own right, and not because your birth was the battleground of deities.”

  Bellasteros swallowed his panic. “How do you always know what to say, my brother, and when to say it, and how? I do not deserve such loyalty.”

  Patros shook his head. A rueful half grin touched his face. “You can understand what I left behind in Sabazel. The next time Mardoc insults Ilanit—”

  Mardoc. Bellasteros held up his hand warningly, stopping Patros in midbreath. “So my secret is not a secret after all. Does he know the truth as well? He was, I am told, among the first to hail my divine paternity; was it only a political move to preserve the one strong prince born to Sardis before he could fall like his mother to Gerlac’s wrath?”

  “No, Mardoc is neither so subtle nor so crass. His faith is a simple one. He dreads the power of a barbarian goddess over the king he loves. If you forswear the falcon, he thinks Sardis will lose the Empire.”

  “And if I forswear the goddess?”

  Patros had no answer for that. “I can only counsel caution,” he said. “It was Mardoc who razed the temple of Ashtar in Sardis, not knowing that he avenged Gerlac’s pride; he thought to prove his obedience to Harus. He must be convinced of your obedience, also.”

  “As always, I tread a narrow path.” Decisively, Bellasteros rose to his feet. He stretched so that his sinews cracked. “Enough of this. I must busy myself with the campaign. It cost us two years to take half the Empire, for we had to struggle with Kallidar’s armies every step of the way; Iksandarun is as distant from Farsahn as Farsahn is from Sardis, but I daresay we shall travel much more quickly now. Bogazkar commands only the dregs of an army, and we still have fifty thousand.”

  “Not the same fifty thousand with which we started,” Patros reminded him. “New legionaries from the provinces replace those veterans killed—how many have we lost, one in ten? And the number of camp followers grows daily as the impoverished of the Empire claim your protection.”

  “One in ten.” Bellasteros sighed. “An ending soon, I pray …” He raised his chin. “Onward. No calves, or cats, or any creature but the falcon of victory. Sabazel is behind us, Patros. Do you not agree?”

  His mouth settled again into the tight line of command; reluctantly, Patros agreed. But the constraint between them was gone, and the conqueror’s hand fell in an affectionate gesture on his friend’s shoulder. “I thank you …”

  Spears glinted in the doorway. A page hurried across the carpets. “My lord, a messenger from General Mardoc.”

  The rounded figure of a woman stood dark against the glare of the sun. At Bellasteros’s gesture Hern and Aveyron stepped back, raising their weapons. “Not quite a messenger, my lord,” called a rich, fruity voice.

  “Ah,” Patros said faintly. “Theara.” He turned aside and busied himself again at the writing table.

  Bellasteros flashed a quick, wry smile at Patros’s back and then allowed his features to shade into annoyance. “If not a messenger, then what?”

  Theara glided into the shade of the pavilion; ebony ringlets bounced above the soft curve of an exposed shoulder, silk rustled, bracelets jangled. She raised a small square of linen and dabbed at the sweat streaking her powdered forehead. “My lord, your pages tell me that I may not place my poor belongings with your goods, that I must walk with the—the trulls populating this camp.” Her full red lips pouted.

  “Poor belongings?” Patros mumbled into his quill. “The gold and the brocade we draped over you at Farsahn?”

  Bellasteros cleared his throat harshly. “And the general sends you to ask if you may move as part of my household?”

  “Yes, my lord,” the courtesan returned. Her trembling kohl-rimmed lashes seemed about to take wing from her eyes. “My lord could not so soon forget—”

  “Pack your belongings with mine,” Bellasteros interrupted, exasperated. “And tell the general that I have better things to do than dispose of the baubles paid to painted …” He stopped. And my price is the Empire, he thought. He dismissed Theara with a brisk nod.

  She curtsied, murmured her thanks, turned. Patros glanced over his shoulder at her swaying progress to the doorway; her last meaningful glance backward was directed at him as well.

  “Mardoc sends our follies to haunt us,” he said.

  “Harus!” Bellasteros sighed. “He is as subtle as a rampaging bull. I believe you are right; he knows nothing. Would that I enjoyed his ignorance.” And the conqueror stood, silent, his hands on his hips and head cocked back, listening for some distant sound beyond the cacophony of the camp.

  Theara stepped delicately across the gutter that edged the avenue; a soldier shouted a question after her and she cut him dead with a stare. “Ashtar,” she whispered under her breath, “your will, not mine, be done.”

  A wind stirred the haze that shrouded the camp, tearing it into rivulets of cloud. A murmur of chimes echoed in the vault of the sky.

  Patros looked up, startled. Bellasteros set his teeth deep into his lower lip, as if the distant bells were a torture almost too painful to be borne.

  *

  Four figures emerged from the dim tunnel of the avenue. The two soldiers, dressed in the black-and-bronze livery of the palace, stopped with a clash of weapons beside the gateway pylon. The cloaked women hurried on, across wide dark tiles that only faintly reflected the starlight. A thin curl of smoke rose from the altar in the center of the courtyard, reaching upward until it smudged the face of the full moon. The scent of burning flesh hung heavy on the air.

  The women started up the steps of the great ziggurat of Harus. They looked neither to the right nor the left, ignoring the mounds of lesser gods that were ranged in obeisance at the falcon god’s feet. In the shadows at the far corner of the courtyard was a patch of scarred tile, overgrown with nettles and fireweed; once it had been the shrine of Ashtar, the twin of that in Iksandarun, but the soldiers of Gerlac had long ago looted it, burning and smashing, and had pried up its blocks of stone to add to Harus’s mountain. The blood of the priestesses, it was said, stained scarle
t the anemones that blossomed there in the full of the moon.

  Halfway up the steep staircase of the great ziggurat was a doorway. The women stopped there, huddling together, frightened by a sudden rush of invisible wings in the darkness. Below them lay the city of Sardis, a black velvet drape displaying the lamps of the night like so many jewels; the braziers in the temple courtyard flared a sullen red, the street lamps glittered yellow, the torches set about the palace citadel burned with a steady white light.

  The lamps stopped at the banks of the two rivers, the red and muddy Sar Cinnabran, the clear Sar Azurac, that embraced the city with their confluence. Beyond them, on the west, was the flat farmland that fed half the known world; on the east was the necropolis, a vast city of the dead where no lamps burned.

  The door opened noiselessly on its hinges. One woman emitted a short squeak; the other raised a hand as if to soothe her. Adrastes Falco, the Grand Inquisitor of Sardis, the Talon of Harus, waited in the opening.

  “Welcome,” he said with a courteous nod. His black eyes were hooded by their lashes. “Please, come into my chambers.”

  The women stepped through the doorway into a low columned hall. An acolyte filled an oil lamp that danced above a table strewn with tablets and scrolls. The suggestion of a great statue stood lost in guttering shadow and a distant ripple of wings.

  Adrastes indicated a cushioned chair. “Please, my lady, be seated. May I offer you refreshment?” He turned to a stand holding an amphora. Over his shoulder to the acolyte, he said, “Declan, you may go.” The young man hurried out.

  “No thank you, Your Eminence,” said the woman who sat in the chair. Her voice was breathless, with the climb perhaps, or perhaps with some emotion. When she drew back her veil her face was as pretty as a child’s, her eyes large and guileless, her chin soft. A gold chain sparked at her throat.

  “It is a pleasure,” Adrastes said, “to receive the first wife of the king in the precinct of Harus.” He arranged himself and his feather-patterned robes in a chair opposite and set his long, tapering fingertips against the winged pectoral on his breast. His face was ageless, frozen in sharp, sly maturity; his hair and beard were a glossy black. It was the thinness of his lips and the shielded glitter of his eyes that betrayed his fanaticism.