slaughter. Though Khmar had seemed a disaster to civilization, Lord Alagrace had taken the opportunity to become mentor to Celadric, Khmar's eldest son; as the boy grew, Lord Alagrace had taught him a new ethic in which planning, negotiation and consultation were more important than battle, glory and conquest.
His fault, really, was that he had indulged himself in the present by postponing his struggles to an indefinite future. Celadric might die, or might come to power when Alagrace was dead. Lord Alagrace should have tried to wrest the empire from Khmar. There were ways. A mercenary army, a conspiracy, an alliance with the Witchlord… he could have tried. Attempting to overthrow the horse lord would probably have meant his death, but he was doomed to die anyway…
And now that it was all over, for the moment… life was sweet. The wine, the notes of the klon, the voice of a silk girl lifted in a plaintive song… a leaf falling toward running water… evening, and a fish taking an insect, clearing the water in a smooth curve… a meal, with the savour of sauces recalling other places, other times… then the darkness, and perfume against his skin, hands nourishing his flesh, eyelashes whispering against his cheek… smooth hair, warm lips, a sigh…
A girl who says she loves you…
Sometimes, his flesh striving toward spasm, he would almost allow himself to be convinced that there was some revelation to be discovered in this crisis of desire. Sometimes, afterwards, he almost allowed himself to be persuaded that he was a great lover, and that the girl did, indeed, love him… at least a little. Yet he never quite managed either of these feats, for failure did nothing to strengthen his powers of self-delusion.
The silk girls were a cadre of desirable whores reserved for the higher castes in an effort to save them from the diseases the common soldiers shared in the stews – diseases which often meant, eventually, not just buboes and genital warts, not just sterility, stinking discharges and the inconvenience of pissing through an ulcerated urethra, but, with time, blindness, paralysis, insanity and death.
Despite medical inspections, this method of quarantine was not foolproof, but it afforded the high-born with a degree of protection. The silk girls for their part were glad enough to escape from the routines of army brothels; while they were safer from the classic venereal diseases, the advantages of being a silk girl did not end there.
As silk girls, they enjoyed better food, clothes and accommodation; they were protected from violence, and saw only one client in an evening, instead of twenty. Their smaller clientele made them less likely to develop the cervical cancers encouraged by the rampole efforts of hundreds of dirty penises; the link between the dirty penis and cervical cancer had been demonstrated just ten years previously by the great medical statistician, the First Honour Inspector of Human Biology, Tarlor Poutan na Venski (another victim of the Blood Purge), who had begun his elegant and exhaustive study after discovering that oracles, being virgins by law and necessity, never suffered from this kind of cancer.
Together with these advantages, the silk girls benefited from better contraceptive methods – sponges soaked in olive oil were the most reliable, and both these products were imported at great expense by way of Ashmolea. When these methods failed, they enjoyed the services of a better class of abortionist.
Furthermore, clients were free to buy the silk girls from the state, thus releasing them from the nightly routine of enticement, excitement and surrender. No matter how enchanting the entertainer, Lord Alagrace knew that calculation ruled every gesture, every murmur, every touch which treasured his flesh. For these girls, as their charms declined with age, would be returned to the army brothels; if nobody intervened, they would end their lives as old,
diseased slave women, sorting coal from rock in the screening sheds of a mine, or working dawn to dusk spinning hemp to rope.
Whenever a girl mimed passion, or said – as if confessing a secret none other had been privileged to hear – that he had gratified her desire, Lord Alagrace always reminded himself that for any of these slaves of the state he would be a desirable owner. He was old, and at least a little softhearted; it was even odds that he would leave a girl her freedom in his will, and a little money to sweeten that freedom. And he knew himself to be old-fashioned and straightforward, an easy customer, his usual satisfactions being suggested mostly by biology; unlike some, he had no wish to have a woman sewn up tighter, to push his fist into her privacy, to see her satisfy a dog, to mark her neck and watch her mouth gape.
Possessed of such knowledge, he succumbed to no infatuations; the blandishments designed to satisfy that most subtle sexual organ, the ego, never persuaded him to believe that he was in love. Yet, even so, he allowed himself to enjoy those blandishments. It gave him pleasure to listen to some melodious, faintly fevered voice massaging his sense of mastery:
'… You're the first man I've met who's been able to touch me like that… I don't know what it is, but I can't resist – this… do you like this? Does it make you happy? I want to make you happy, you're the most beautiful person I've ever met in my life
Often he would fall asleep with some woman gentling his body; at the end of the day he was sometimes very tired. But sometimes, if the girl was drowsy and fell asleep before he did, Lord Alagrace would lie awake and allow himself to think about his lifelong service to the empire.
In his youth, fighting in the armies of the Collosnon Empire, he had allowed himself to believe that he pursued power only in order to rise to a position where he could serve the higher purposes of civilization. But in fact, he had existed as a function of his own ambition, which had been gratified time after time; on first leading his own troops to victory, he had felt like a young god, strong, powerful and immortal.
Now, in his declining years, he sometimes doubted even the existence of the 'higher purposes' which had been the excuse for his drive to power. It was generally agreed that an empire was the highest expression of civilization. Yet, supporting the glory of the greatest empire was the grubby, commonplace suffering: a woman in the sweating darkness of an army brothel closing her eyes as a soldier shoved his penis into her vagina, a sewn-up oracle falling asleep in a cold bed in a solitary room, a legless soldier begging bone-sustenance in the streets of Gendormargensis…
Yet surely it would all be worth it if Celadric became emperor and brought about a new form of government, more reasonable, more humane… yet what if reasonable, humane government only created reasonable, humane nightmares?… down from the hills come tribes of fratricidal barbarians, battering each other's skulls with jagged rocks, then eating the corpses so produced. Settling in the cities, they become reasonable, humane and civilized, learning to prefer cats instead of dogs. Their wars are fought in accordance with rules designed to make them reasonable, humane…
Half-remembering half-translated pieces of the Book of the Remnant, that ancient and fragmentary account of the Days of Wrath, Lord Alagrace would sometimes fall asleep to dream of reasonable, humane wars fought with weapons which never killed, but, instead, softened the skull, ate out the eyes, turned the finger joints to jelly…
Discovering such doubts in his old age, he did not struggle for answers, but instead indulged himself, to a degree, in selt-pity, in a sense of futility. Perhaps all his life had been for nothing… no matter. Defeated, he had nothing more to live for, therefore… these final days were sweet.
His contemplative calm allowed him to enjoy sunlight and cloud, landscape and skyline, a cup of wine and the heat of a woman's body, and, every day, the rituals of the blades. Working with his sword, perfecting techniques of balance and timing, attack and evasion, feint and follow-through, he sometimes recaptured, just for a moment, the sense of godlike strength which had possessed him at times in his youth.
And often, at the end of a perfect autumn day, he thought to himself: this day has been enough. It has been enough to have lived just for this day, this one perfect day
And so, travelling south toward Favanosin, Lord Alagrace reconciled himself to his death, and made himself ready for it.
CHAPTER NINE
The slave Yerzerdayla was sold down the river by the dralkosh Bao Gahai, who was jealous of her beauty and who needed the money. Since the collapse of the Safrak Bank, the economy of the Safrak Islands was marginal; even as chief confidant of the Witchlord Onosh Gulkan, Bao Gahai could not live in the style to which she had once been very much accustomed.
Gendormargensis was known to be glutted with women, so the slaver who bought Yerzerdayla, and a string of
