Authors: Elizabeth Bear
What a ridiculous superstition,
she told herself, and dropped her dressing gown.
You might as well suppose that your own honored father could have offered poor advice.
The clothing and coifing she had to endure was elaborate, but it commenced, at least, with a hot and scented bath. On another day, Yangchen would have managed to relax as she leaned her head on the steep side of the neck-deep cedarwood tub. She would have felt the pain in her muscles subside as one of her women worked to ease the cramping brought on by elaborate hairstyles and elegant posture—not to mention the workings of a guilty conscience. Today, though, any sensual pleasure she might have felt was lost to the weight of her distraction. She scarcely noticed that the water had begun to cool around her until her women helped her to stand.
Yangchen waited on a cedarwood grating beside a brazier stocked with aromatic coals while the women scraped lingering droplets from her with sandalwood paddles, then softened her body with sandalwood-scented oil. The tub was emptied halfway and carried out. Yangchen—swathed now in a soft robe to give her skin time to absorb the oil—took a seat before the brazier. She perched on an elevated stool so her hair could be combed out without brushing the carpeted stone of the floor. Her women, as drilled as any military unit, moved on and off stepping stools so they could comb the whole length of each strand.
In the next room, Namri was still wailing. Ridiculous superstition or not, Yangchen shifted uncomfortably. If it were her milk souring, the babe would not fuss so when presented with the nurse’s breast.
At last her hair was dressed, her face painted. She stood to let her ladies fold and drape layers of silk and cloth of gold around her body. At first, the over-robe they provided was one in white and crimson, the colors of bone and blood for mourning. But Yangchen sent it away. The ladies might have raised their eyebrows, but they brought her another, this one in deep violets and indigos.
As they twisted the sash around her middle, she thought that soon she would be ready to wean Namri—or at least give him over to his nurse completely. Which meant that soon, she would be bearing again. She still had a supply of the herbs the foreign sorcerer had given her to ensure conceiving a son.
Now that Yangchen’s youngest sister-wife, Payma, had fled court to protect the baby
she
carried, a baby that was most likely the child of Songtsan’s condemned brother Tsansong, it would be Yangchen who gave Songtsan his second heir as well as the first.
She found herself to be dressed. While she took her place on her chair—her privilege as senior wife was not to crouch on cushions now that the Dowager Empress was dead—and her calligraphy, the ladies uncovered the windows to let in the light and air. The brazier that had been necessary to warm the damp from the air when the chamber was closed up and Yangchen was nude was carried out by the same brawny servants that had handled the bathtub and water. Songtsan’s other wife, Tsechen, and the ladies of the court began to arrive, each with a subsidiary lady bearing her calligraphy, or reading, or embroidery. If they came in neat order of precedence and began filtering in as soon as the doors opened for the removal of the brazier, that was only because each of them kept a servant stationed in the hall from sunrise onward.
Tsechen wore crimson and snow white, egret feathers dazzling against the glossy blackness of her hair. She, like Yangchen, was also the wife of condemned Tsansong. She, like Yangchen’s body servants, took in Yangchen’s choice of garb with an impassivity that could only hide condemnation. Yangchen met her silent outrage with a smile, hiding how she might otherwise have quailed before it.
Yangchen had done what she had done, and she was pleased with the outcomes. Whatever hard and ruthless choices she had made to ensure her victory … they were the price of protecting the empire and her emperor—and her children, not only Namri but also those she had yet to bear.
One who did not deal by heartlessness in the arena of politics did not live long enough to see one’s lofty ideals lead inevitably to the ruin of nations.
Tsechen had no child, and Yangchen would see to it that she stayed barren. As long as that was so—as long as Tsechen’s blood remained unmingled with that of the emperor—Yangchen did not fear Tsechen, and so Tsechen did not need to fear Yangchen. Of course, it might be safer to remove her entirely—but Yangchen preferred to be merciful where she could. And there would inevitably be other wives, as time passed. Such was the course of empire.
Even if Yangchen could find the stomach to remove them all, the pattern would inevitably become noticeable.
The ladies breakfasted within the hour. For some time after that, they sewed and practiced their painting and read aloud by turns. Namri was brought to Yangchen again so she might nurse him—this time, comfortingly, he cooperated—and before the midday meal she excused herself for her appointment with the wizard.
Another day, she might have waited for the doorkeeper to bring her word that Hong-la had arrived. But she had seen a large strange bird, gray and long-necked like a heron but with a raptor’s beak, beat heavily past the window. So she required that rarest of commodities for a royal person: a few moments completely alone.
A series of painted screens concealed the corner in which Yangchen slept from the rest of her chamber, where the ladies gathered. She rounded the flimsy barrier on some pretext—a fan or scent, she wasn’t even quite sure herself what she said. But she had to wave two of her ladies back to their cushions when she stood in order to fetch it herself. Unable even for the moment to dispense with her awareness of politics, she wondered if her independence would increase her legend or serve to remove some of the awe of her under which her subjects should rightfully toil.
Whatever the effect, she would have to adapt it to her needs. This was not a task she could safely abandon to any hands but her own, nor one she could perform under watchful eyes.
The brassy-gray bird perched on the window ledge beside Yangchen’s bed, peering suspiciously this way and that. Papery eyelids blinked and opened with each turn of its crested head.
A bit of indigo ribbon bound a copper-bright capsule to its ankle. Her swift, short strides constrained by the whisking hem of her robe, Yangchen crossed to the window. Her fingers fumbled the capsule at first, but she managed to twist it open. The note within—on western-style paper—was ciphered, but by now Yangchen could read those symbols as easily as the syllabary sigils of Song.
It was brief.
I will visit you. Await another letter.
She read it three times, all a courtier’s trained memory required, before sliding it between her painted lips and chewing quickly, grimly, until the paper and bitter ink collapsed into a paste that she could swallow.
* * *
Upon his arrival at the Black Palace, Hong-la had expected to be shown into the empress’s reception chamber and offered a cushion on the floor among her ladies. It was the accepted means of doing such things, and avoided any hint of scandal. Instead, she met him alone, in an opulently paneled and carpeted chamber divided down the middle by an openwork ivory screen and otherwise completely devoid of furnishings.
Hong-la wondered how many spyholes and niches were concealed in the elaborate, elephant-carved, coffered paneling, and if any of them were occupied.
She was waiting for him when he entered, the pierced screen rendering her indigo-clad form into something more akin to a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.
“Empress,” he said, performing the ritual obeisance. The hem and the draped sleeve of her robes twitched as she beckoned him forward. In the situation of a formal audience, even a Wizard of Tsarepheth advanced upon the emperor’s wife with his head bowed and his eyes averted. He scuttled up with humility largely unpracticed since his time in Song, amused despite himself by how far he had to hunch to get his head below the level of hers. Hong-la was taller than most men, and broad-shouldered, and even after the birth of a prince the empress remained a porcelain doll of a woman.
He dropped to his knees before the screen, relieved to ease the strain in his thighs. The carpets absorbed the impact; he landed with only a faint thud, despite the lack of grace engendered by middle years and a chronic lack of exercise.
“Empress,” he said again. “I accept my duty to serve you with great pleasure.”
He wondered if she would bring up the flight of Samarkar-la and the escaped princess, Payma. Surely, that had been adequately hashed over through official channels—Hong-la had not been privy to the discussions between Yongten-la and the emperor, but he had heard enough about them from Yongten-la to have an idea of how hard the bargaining had been and what concessions had been made by the wizards to avoid reprisals. And it was not as if either the empress or Hong-la had the authority to gainsay their respective masters. So it must be something else.
He had time to muse on what, because she kept him waiting. Formulating her response or stretching out his hoped-for discomfort, he was not sure … but then, nor was he particularly uncomfortable. Hong-la was unusual in that he had been a eunuch before he became a Wizard of Tsarepheth. He had come into his adulthood as a civil servant in Song, and it was there he had acquired his skills as an archivist and administrator.
The Rasan dynasty was replete with canny politicians and ruthless manipulators. But the Rasan emperors had been eliminating rival branches of the bloodline for centuries, and compared with the intrigues of the so-called Ten-Thousand-Princes of Song … there just weren’t enough nobles in Rasa to make things
really
interesting.
So her silence gave him no great pause. What she said when she finally spoke, though, brought his eyes up quickly in a reaction too startled to hide.
“Rise, Hong-la,” she said. “I cannot speak to the top of your head at this time.”
He realized he was staring and averted his gaze, but not before he had glimpsed the strain creasing the maquillage that should have rendered her face an expressionless oval. He stood, his attention fixed on the bottom edge of the screen between them. It had been carved in panels of cherry trees in blossom, homey and familiar to Hong-la, and he wondered if the empress had brought it with her, or if it had been part of the once-princess Samarkar’s bride-price when she in her turn had been sold to one of Song’s Ten-Thousand.
He thrust his tongue out in respect, and though he stood, he continued to bow low. Her inviting him to stand in her imperial presence did answer one of his questions, however: if there were any watchers in the walls, Empress Yangchen did not know of them.
She said, “I have drawn you from your duty to the victims of the pestilence, and for that I apologize.”
“I am not sure,” Hong-la said carefully, “that we may call it—precisely—a pestilence any longer. Not with precision, anyway. An affliction, certainly. An infestation…”
He was, he understood with detached rationality, taking refuge in scholarly babble. With an effort, he silenced his tongue. He drew a breath, pained on his own behalf, and continued. “That is to say, if by my duty to the empress I may serve the empire, I am at her disposal.”
Through the screen, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smile. That too disturbed her paint. “We both have a duty to the empire, Hong-la. And to Tsarepheth. How is it, do you think, that these demons have managed to enter within the sweep of the city’s blessings and the prayers that guard it? And how is it that the Citadel and the palace remain unsullied by their presence?”
“Something has corrupted the city’s blessings,” Hong-la said. “And those on the temples are beginning to fail, I fear. Priests now are sickening as well. We—the Citadel—we have begun the process of checking and renewing the prayers all around Tsarepheth, but as you must be able to imagine, great empress, this is not a simple process, nor a swift one, and we are so very busy with the sick.”
“And anyway,” she said, “the demons have already come within.”
“It is so.”
“But previously—someone, somehow, must have given them permission to enter.”
“It is so,” he said again. “Or, at least, somehow abrogated the protections against their entering.”
Cold danced along his spine as he said it.
Who can give such permission?
The master of a house. Or the master of an empire.
Hong-la, veteran of two courts and a college of wizards, was glad for the moment that the woman he stood before was an empress, and that he could not be expected to meet her gaze.
But why would an emperor invite demon spawn into his own realm? Unless he were somehow tricked into it?
“Empress,” he said, when the silence had stretched long, and he was too aware of her painted gaze on him through the lattice of the screen, “is there more? My patients—”
Silk slicked against silk as she shifted. “We are burning my younger husband at sunset,” she said. “You must stay to witness the execution.”
6
A line of gold like the edge of a paper set alight crawled the eastern horizon when Temur led his liver-bay mare from her stall, and even the desert was mild. Not cool, precisely—but not dangerous.
He watered Bansh well, stroked her fetlocks and pasterns, felt her flesh firm and cool and sound wherever his hand touched. She had been brushed and was gleaming, her tack cleaned meticulously, restitched where it was worn and hung beside her door. Someone had replaced her threadbare saddle blanket. Temur felt a pang of discontent with himself; it was he who should have seen to those repairs, and while he had visited Bansh daily, it was he who should have seen to her care. No matter how competent Ato Tesefahun’s grooms were.
She seemed happy to see him now, though, and—her owner-notched, black-tipped mahogany ears pricked, her tail switching—she also seemed pleased at the prospect of exercise. She nibbled his shoulder while he saddled her and grabbed for the bit so eagerly Temur had to defend his fingers. He liked the spring in her step, the sparkle of well-rested spiritedness that attended her. He liked the way she pranced a step as he swung up into the saddle—and he liked his own response too: the strength of adequate food and sleep seemed to throb from his fingertips, and all the tension of worry and conspiracy crackled through him, lending nervous energy.