think she was lying. He thought of childbearing as the essence of a woman's estate; to his own mind, the inability to bear children must necessarily be a tragedy for a woman.
'If you can't have children,' said Lord Alagrace, 'the Ondrask will just have to endure the disappointment.’
'But he'll beat me!’
'A slave's estate is a hard one,' said Lord Alagrace, unmoved.
'If we go now we can get away.' said Yen Olass. 'I can come with you. I can help you. I can be very, very good. You'll die without me.’
'You'd be a help when I met Khmar,' said Lord Alagrace, 'but I can't take you south. A hundred yahooing Yarglat would ride us down. You don't seem to realize that my authority in Gendormargensis is finished. Everyone knows or thinks that Khmar is displeased with me. If I give them a chance, the Yarglat will be more than happy to kill the last surviving member of the High Houses of Sharla. By the same token, it doesn't matter if you tell all the world what we've done together in the past. I'm not likely to come back here as Lawmaker – or as anything else.' 'You mean you want to die?’
'I mean I accept my fate, whatever that may be. Yen Olass, we can only struggle so much against what life has in store for us. Now remove yourself. I have business to conduct.’
Yen Olass left Karling Drask, crying, and not caring who saw it. But on her way back to Valslada, she dried her eyes, and began to think. She realised now why the Silent One had directed her to take the news to Lord Alagrace. The Silent One had guessed, more or less, what would take place. It had been done deliberately, to show Yen Olass that there really was nobody in all the world who would help her or defend her.
Now she had no friends in all the world.
She wished she could run away somewhere. She wished she could run away to the cave near the hunting lodge at Brantzyn. She had really enjoyed herself there, with her fire as her friend and her horse as her friend.
Well? Why not run away?
She had a horse, and her saddle bags were all packed. She could not run north: the bandits in the Sarapine Ranges would get her if the pursuit failed. But south… south was Khmar. The lord emperor, terrible and entirely unpredictable. Could a slave petition the lord emperor? She would find out, by asking him.
At Valslada, Yen Olass saddled Snut and loaded him up for her journey. She put on her league rider's weather jacket and her new lightweight fur coat. She armed herself with her weapons. She was ready to go. She would camp out that night, sleeping in her snow-coat, safe under a horse blanket with Snut.
Yen Olass mounted up.
'Ya!' said Yen Olass.
And Snut made for the stable door.
'Hey, you!' said a voice.
It was one of the stable hands. Yen Olass could have explained herself with any of a thousand lies, but instead she panicked.
'Ya!' said Yen Olass. 'Ya!’
As Snut raced past the stable hand, he grabbed one of her boots and pulled her out of the saddle. She fell heavily. Getting to her feet, she slugged the stable hand as he grabbed her, and he staggered backwards. As Snut came back to see what was wrong, Yen Olass snatched her sabre from its saddleside sheath.
'You want to play rough, huh?' said the stable hand, and picked up a pitchfork.
Yen Olass hesitated. He frightened her.
'What's this?' said a familiar voice. 'What's going on here?’
It was a league rider, the one who had once spent an afternoon teaching her how to kill people.
'The slave was trying to steal a horse,' said the stable hand.
'I was riding on business for Lord Alagrace,' said Yen Olass.
'A slave does not ride with weapons,' said the stable hand.
'I'll settle this,' said the league rider. 'Girl, come with me. And you – get back to your work.’
Out in the grounds, away from the stable, the league rider talked with Yen Olass. Not knowing what else to do, and with no percentage left in telling lies, she told him the truth. He was young, and bored after months of idle peacetime duty; he had already been paid off by Lord Alagrace, and his service would end when Alagrace departed from the city. A good gallop wouldn't do him any harm at all.
'I'll get your horse,' he said, 'and mine. I'll tell them you persuaded me you had a legitimate mission to Brantzyn, that I accompanied you half the distance for your protection, and last saw you heading north.’
Yen Olass was sure he was going to rape her, kill her, steal her horse or sell her to a slaver down the river, but what could she do? To go might be disastrous, but to stay was impossible.
'Thank you,' she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lord Alagrace was annoyed when Yen Olass disappeared, particularly after a casual enquiry established that there was ultimately nothing to stop an oracle from having children just like any other woman. As he saw it, Yen Olass had turned down a chance for her life to end happily ever after. Now she was a runaway slave, and likely to go under the spikes when she was caught. He was disappointed in her.
A three-day womanhunt failed to locate Yen Olass. After an ugly interview with the Silent One, and an acrimonious argument with the Ondrask, Lord Alagrace left Gendormargensis with Chonjara, the Princess Quenerain, some servants, a contingent of thirty soldiers and some mules.
They voyaged in a ferry boat down the Yolantarath River, which first winds south as it flows from Gendormargensis toward the western coast of Tameran; at the southernmost point of the river, they picked up the Yangrit Highway and travelled thereafter by land.
Travelling at the personal command of the emperor, they could demand horses from the way stations along the highway. These served the imperial couriers, and consequently stocked only the best animals. However, as they could seldom provide more than half a dozen mounts, the convoy travelled at the marching pace of the infantry.
They journeyed south at a leisurely pace, for Lord Alagrace was in no hurry to face the emperor. Sometimes they halted by night in a town or a village, and sometimes a way station accommodated them; on occasion, failing to reach a way station before dark, they halted in woods or by
fields, put up tents, and cooked over open fires, sleeping with guards on watch for gypsies and thieves.
Every evening, Lord Alagrace practised with the sword, preparing himself for the confrontation at Favanosin. He did not contemplate challenging his emperor; rather, he was perfecting himself for his death.
Sometimes they halted at a place large enough to support its own tea pavilion. Always there was water, for this was a land of streams and small rivers, and no community built its houses far from running w7ater. At every tea pavilion, Lord Alagrace indulged himself with the silk girls. He rather enjoyed these melancholy autumn evenings: the wine mellow, the sunlight fading, a faint smell of cooking smoke on the air, and a girl with a klon playing in the plankenyi style, one note allowed to die away before the next started.
He indulged himself shamelessly in regret. He had served the Yarglat faithfully, believing that the ends justify the means. Then, in the Blood Purge, the ends had disappeared – so how was he to justify the means he had used? There were still his hopes of succeeding through Celadric, of course, but those hopes were a pale shadow of the glory of his original ambitions. The high civilization of the High Houses of Sharla was now lost forever, the people who could have rebuilt it buried in mass graves…
And now, since Khmar was probably going to kill him, even his hopes for Celadric were at an end…
Lord Alagrace knew he had failed, and therefore he was released from the demands of ambition. For those of us ruthless enough to discipline ourselves according to the dictates of our unlimited ambitions, to fail becomes the ultimate luxury. And so it was with Lord Alagrace: like a man bleeding to death in a warm bath, he felt slow, comfortable, languid, unable any longer to summon sufficient passion to lament his own fate.
Where had he gone wrong? To find the answer, he reviewed his past. He had studied the evolution of empires, consulting old texts and modern histories derived from the same. He had placed his faith in a future of rational administration where the stable bureaucrat would be more important than any warlord with his sword imbrued with
