“And then the Mantis’ men at last saw the high walls of Southmarch Castle across the bay, and knew it would take them a year or more to overthrow such a powerful stronghold—a year of starvation, because the land had been made uninhabitable around them and their stores were empty. Even Davos’ most loyal lieutenants, the men who had enriched themselves at his side and gone from bandits to magnates in his employ, now refused his orders. They had lost the will to fight. Many of the soldiers threw down their weapons on the spot and skulked away from the overwhelming sight of unconquered Southmarch.
“But Lily had kept only a token army inside the castle. The greater part of her forces had been taken by ship to the coast of Landsend to begin their ride south. So it was that as the Mantis’ army was in its greatest disarray, with a quarter or more of its number deserting and the rest fighting among themselves, the army of Southmarch fell upon them.
“The Southmarch folk were much fewer but they were fed, and angry, and fighting for their own land. The mercenaries trapped on the beach put up only a short resistance before the Southmarch force split them in half. Those on one side were forced back against the waves of the freezing bay and either surrendered or were killed. Those on the other side did their best to follow their comrades who had fled earlier, but most were caught as they tried to climb the cliffs. The queen’s archers picked them off like birds on a low branch, their bodies tumbling down the hillside in such quantity that in Southmarch we have for centuries called a disordered heap a ‘mantis-pile,’ although few these days remember where the term came from.
“The Mantis himself, Davos of Elgi, died in Brenn’s Bay, trying to wade toward the castle with a dozen arrows in him.
“You see, the March Kingdoms have been invaded by Syan, by Hierosol, by the Kracians and all the mercenaries of the Gray Companies. We have been invaded three times by the Qar themselves. Twice we have driven them out with them suffering great losses, and we will drive them out again. And you, Sulepis, for all your power and certainty, will soon be only another name in the histories of my country—another failed invader, another man whose pride was greater than his sense.”
Even though only Vash, the autarch himself, and Panhyssir spoke enough of Olin’s tongue to understand all he had said, the northern king’s tone as he finished his tale was enough to make many of those surrounding the autarch’s litter look up at their monarch with foreboding, if not terror. This foreigner was insulting the Golden One!
At first Sulepis said nothing, but at last a smile stretched slowly across his angular face.
“Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed, Olin. A story with a lesson in it! Although I think you could have trusted your audience to puzzle out the meaning without the last bit—perhaps a bit too much honey on the cake, if you take my meaning. Still, very good.” He nodded as if taken with a new idea. “And your advice is excellent. It would certainly not be a good idea to sail all my ships and all my men into the bay at once, leaving myself open to whatever mischief these Qar have planned for me.” He leaned down as if about to impart a secret. “So in a few moments we will disembark a good number of our soldiers and let them come upon Southmarch from the land while the fleet approaches on the water. What do you say, King Olin? Since it is your idea, will you accompany me? It may be your only chance to feel the earth of your homeland beneath your feet—or at least, to do so with the open sky above your head.” He laughed, then called out to the captain of the flagship, “Prepare to make land!”
The autarch swept down from the forecastle and his servants scurried before him like ants. Pinimmon Vash had to follow the Golden One, of course—this early landing was news to him and he had much to do. When he looked back, Olin Eddon still stood in the same place, surrounded by guards, his pale, weary face empty of any expression Vash could recognize.
If he had wished to be completely honest, Pinimmon Vash would have had to admit that Olin Eddon made him uneasy. He had only ever met two types of monarchs, and certainly all the autarchs he had served had been either one or the other—those who were oblivious to their own shortcomings or those who were overwhelmed by them. Some of the most savage, like the current autarch’s grandfather, Parak, had been of the latter sort. Parak Bishakh am-Xis VI had heard conspiracies in every whisper, seen them in every downcast gaze. Vash himself had barely survived his years in Parak’s court, and had kept his head only by recommending—in the subtlest possible way, of course—other targets to the autarch’s attention. Still, Pinimmon Vash had twice been arrested in those last, nightmarish years, and once had written his testament (not that if he had been executed Parak would have honored it: one of the incitements for an autarch to declare treason was that the traitor’s goods were always forfeited to the throne).
The current autarch was of course the other sort, the sort that believed himself infallible. In fact, the young autarch’s luck was so extravagant that even Vash had begun to believe that the success of Sulepis might have been ordained by Heaven itself.
But this northerner, Olin Eddon, was like no other ruler the paramount minister had ever met: in truth, his measured way of speaking and his quiet observation of what went on around him reminded Pinimmon Vash of his own father. Tibunis Vash had been chief steward of the Orchard Palace, a position from which he was the first ever to retire—all others before him had died in harness or been executed by dissatisfied autarchs. Even after Pinimmon had reached adulthood, and indeed even after he had been raised to the position of paramount minister, the highest position a nonroyal could reach, he had still felt intimidated in his father’s presence, as though the old man could see right through what impressed so many others, could see through the robes of office to the trembling boy beneath.
“He has been dead ten years,” Vash’s younger brother had once said, “and yet we still look over our shoulder in case he is watching.”
But Tibunis Vash had not been cruel or even particularly cold, just a reserved and careful man who always thought before he spoke and spoke before he acted. In that way this Olin Eddon was much like him. Neither of them ever rushed to speak and both of them seemed to hear and see things others missed. If there was a difference it was in the impression that each gave to an observer: Pinimmon Vash’s father had seemed to sit above the turmoil of the busy and treacherous Xixian court, serene as the statue of a god in a temple garden. King Olin seemed bowed down beneath a great but secret sorrow, so that nothing else in life, no matter how wonderful or dreadful, could ever seem more than trivial. Still, though, despite his aura of defeat, there was something about the northern king that made Pinimmon very, very uncomfortable. So it was that as Olin stood beside him now on the rocky beach of the small cove where the boats had set them down, Vash felt that it was he, not the prisoner, who was subtly in the wrong.
“It will not be long,” Vash said. “We will be moving before the sun has finished tipping noon.”
Olin did not seem to care much one way or the other: the northerner did not even look at him, but went on watching the troops preparing for the march, some carrying jars and chests off the ships, others assembling wagons that had been in pieces in the hold, or harnessing teams of horses and oxen to pull those wagons. “Did you wish to have that conversation now?”he asked at last, still looking anywhere other than at Vash himself.
“What conversation?” Was the man truly so desperate, or just a fool? “Look, here comes the Golden One. Have your conversation with him, King Olin.”
A hundred paces down the beach the autarch stepped from his gilded boat onto the backs of a dozen crouching body-slaves, and from there to the throne atop his litter, which the slaves then lifted and carried up the beach. The gold leaf that covered it glittered so brightly in the spring sun that it did in truth look like the sun’s own chariot.
The commanders of the brigades now brought the soldiers, who had been waiting in the sun, back to attention. By the time they had marched out the supply train would be ready to move in behind them.
Vash was still on his knees when the litter stopped beside him. “Ah, there you are,” the autarch called down to him. “I did not see you groveling in the sand. Stand up.”
Vash quickly did what he was told, although he had to struggle not to groan out loud at the pain in his joints. It was mad that he should be here in the wilds of this uncivilized land, exposed to the gods alone knew what kind of chills and harmful vapors. He should be back in Xis overseeing the kingdom, dispensing wise justice from the Falcon Throne in the autarch’s absence, as befitted his age and years of service . . . “I live only to serve you, Golden One,” he said when he was on his feet at last.
“Of course you do.” Sulepis, dressed in his full battle armor, looked up and down the beach at the waiting soldiers—several thousand fighting men and nearly an equal number of their supporters, with at least that many more remaining on the ships until they reached Olin’s Southmarch. Vash knew that the northerners could not even comprehend the autarch’s power, the size of his empire, let alone withstand it: the Golden One could easily summon an army ten times bigger than this if he needed it, while still leaving Hierosol under strong siege and his home in Xis impregnably guarded.
The autarch himself knew all this, of course: he had the expansive, grinning face of a man who watched something dear to his heart finally taking shape. “And where is Olin?” he called. “Ah, there. We agreed you would travel with me, so come sit at my feet. This is your country—I am sure there are many local features and quaint customs you can describe for me.”
Olin looked sourly up at Sulepis atop the litter. “Yes, we have many quaint customs here. Speaking of such, may I walk? I find the long weeks on the ship have left me in want of exercise.”
“By all means, but you will have to speak loudly so I can hear you from up here—a metaphor of sorts, eh? A caution against becoming too removed from one’s subjects!” Sulepis laughed, a high-pitched giggle that made some of his bearers tremble, so that the litter actually rocked a little. Vash’s heart climbed into his mouth. The autarch seemed to grow wilder and less predictable by the hour.
The drums thundered and the horns blew. The great army began to move out, armor gleaming in the afternoon sun so that the flashing wave caps seemed to have rolled across the beach and over the land for as far as the eye could see. Vash waited with Olin and his guards, Panhyssir and the other priests, and dozens of other courtiers and functionaries, all doing their best to crowd into the shadow of the autarch’s raised litter.
“I don’t believe I finished talking with you about the fairies,” said the autarch as they reached the coast road and the ranks of men and animals turned and began to travel southwest toward Southmarch. “We were speaking of your unusual family heritage, Olin, weren’t we?”
The northerner was breathing heavily after only a short climb up from the beach, and his face had gone from deathly pale to an angry red flush. He did not answer.
“So, then,” Sulepis said. “The fairies—or the
Pariki,
as we call them in Xand—were driven out of most of our lands long ago, even the high mountaintops and deep jungles in the south. But when they had roamed our lands in the earliest days the fairy-people had sometimes coupled with the gods themselves. Sometimes fairies coupled with mortals as well, and sometimes those couplings made children. So even long after the gods were gone and the fairies driven out, the heavenly blood survived in certain mortal families, unseen and unsensed sometimes for many generations. But the blood of the gods is a strong, strong thing, and it will always make itself known again.
“In my studies I learned that your northern Pariki, the Qar, had never been completely driven out, and in fact still held much of the northern-most part of the continent. More important, though, I learned that they had shared blood with one of the royal families of Eion, and that what was even more interesting was that the Qar who had done so also claimed direct descent from the god Habbili . . . the one you call Kupilas, I believe? Yes, Kupilas the Artificer. You can imagine my interest at learning there were mortals living in the north with the blood of Habbili himself flowing in their veins. You know the family I mean, Olin—don’tyou?”
The northerner bunched his hands into fists. “Does it amuse you to mock the curse of the Eddons? The grim trick the gods played on us?”
“Ah, but my dear Olin, that is where you are wrong!” chortled the autarch. Vash had never seen the god-king in such a strange mood, like a perverse child. “It is no curse at all, but the greatest gift imaginable!”
“Still you mock me!” Just the tone of Olin’s voice made the autarch’s Leopards loosen their daggers in their sheaths. Vash was very glad to see they weren’t planning to use muskets in such close quarters. The loudness of guns made him nervous, and he had once seen an undervizier’s head blown off in an accident when the Leopards were trooping. “You have me prisoner, Sulepis—is that not enough? Must you taunt me, too? Just kill me and have done with it.”
Vash had grown used to the way the autarch treated Olin as an amusement, how he took abuse and resistance from the northern king which would have had one of his own subjects tortured to death ages ago, but he was still surprised at the mildness of Sulepis’ reaction.
“It
is
a gift, Olin, even if you do not know it.”
“This gift, as you call it, likely killed my wife in childbirth. It made me throw my own infant son down a stairway, crippling him for life, and forced me many nights each year to hide myself away from my own family for fear I would hurt them again. In its grip I have even howled at the moon like your Xixian hyena-men! And that same curse that crawls through my veins, and in the veins of my children as well—and if the gods continue to hate us, will someday crawl like a poison through my grandchildren too—now grows stronger in me again with every hour as you drag me back to my home. Gods, it is like a fire inside me! I might have been Ludis Drakava’s captive as well, but at least in Hierosol I was free of it, may heaven curse you! Free of it! Now I can feel it again, burning in my heart and my limbs and my mind!”