“Yes, lord. At once.” The vizier banged his staff on the floor of the tent. Back in the palace it would have rung impressively against marble, but here it produced only a dull thump. Such were the indignities of following his Sultan into the field. The officers and ministers took the hint, rose, bowed and backed out of the tent into the baying blizzard outside, the vizier following with a resigned look on his face.
Aurungzeb stirred and glanced around. He looked now like a hirsute but mischievous boy.
“Ahara,” he called softly. “Light of my heart, they are gone. Come out now, my little sweetmeat. Your master calls.”
A slim shape filmy with gauze emerged from the curtained rear of the tent, and knelt before him with head lowered. He raised her by the chin and peeled away the veil which hid her features. A pale face, grey eyes, dark lips touched with rouge. He wiped it off them. “You do not need paint, my sweet. Not you. Perfection brooks no improvement.”
He clapped his large, hairy-knuckled hands. “Music, there! The slow dance from Kurasan!”
From an adjoining, closed-off portion of the tent came the sudden chimes and pluckings of musicians, somewhat ragged at first and then growing in speed and harmony.
“Dance for me. Dance for your weary master and make him forget the cares of the turning world.”
Aurungzeb threw himself down on a pile of silken cushions and commenced to suck on a tall water-pipe whilst his concubine paused for a second, and then began to move as slowly as a willow in a summer breeze.
Heria’s mind blanked out when she danced. She liked it. The exercise kept her supple and fit. It was the aftermath she did not care for, even now. Especially now. She had listened in on the report of Shahr Johor as she listened to everything that went on in the tent of the Sultan. Her command of the Merduk language was perfect, though she still pretended to have only a rudimentary grasp of it. She had hidden her grief at the news of the dyke’s fall, and her heart had soared at the account of the recent battle and the last-minute intervention of the mysterious and terrible red horsemen. Debased and soiled though she might be, she was still Torunnan. The man whose life she had shared until the fall of Aekir had been a Torunnan soldier, and it was no more possible that she should forget it than that the sun should one day forget to set.
The pace of the dance quickened. Aurungzeb, intent on the whirling movement of her white limbs, puffed out smoke in swift little clouds. At last it ended, and Heria froze in position, arms above her head, breathing fast. The Sultan threw aside the stem of his water-pipe and rose.
“Here. To me.”
She stood close to him. His beard tickled her nose. She was tall, and he had not far to bend to nuzzle the hollow of her collar bone. His hands twitched aside her gauzy coverings. “You are a queen among women,” he murmured. “Magnificent.” He stripped her naked whilst she stood unmoving. His fingers brushed her nipples, erect and painfully sensitive.
“My Sultan,” she began hurriedly as his hands wandered down her body. She had been depilated, after the fashion of the harem, and her skin was smooth as alabaster. His fingers became more urgent. She forced herself not to flinch as they explored her.
“My Sultan, I am with child.”
He went very still, straightened. His eyes glowed.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, lord. A woman knows these things. The Chamberlain of the Harem confirms it.”
“Name of the Prophet, a child. A son. And you danced before me!” He was outraged, furious. He raised a hand to strike and then thought better of it. Instead he brought it down to rest on her taut belly. “My child—my son. I have never had a son that lived. Miserable girls, yes, but this—this shall be a boy.”
“It may not be, my lord.”
“It must be! He was conceived in war, at a time of victory. All the omens are favourable. I shall have Batak examine you. He shall see. An heir, at long last! You must dance no more. You must keep to your bed. Ah, my flower of the west! I knew your coming would be luck to me! I shall make you first wife, if it is a boy—it will be a boy.” He started to laugh, and crushed her in a bearish embrace, releasing her an instant later. “No, no—no more of that. Like porcelain you shall be treated, like the rarest glass. Put on your clothes! I must have the eunuchs find something more fitting for the mother of my son, not these damn slave-girl silks. And maids—you shall have servants and a pavilion of your own—” He stopped. He felt her over as if she were some rare and delicate vase that might be shattered in a moment. “How long? How far grown is he?”
“Not far, lord. Two months, perhaps.”
“Two months! My son’s heart has been beating these two months! I shall burn a wagonload of incense. Prayers shall be said in every temple of the east. Ha, ha, ha! A son!”
A son, Heria thought. Yes, it would be a boy—she knew that, somehow. What would her Corfe have thought of that? She bearing a son to some eastern tyrant, a child of rape. Corfe had always wanted children.
The tears burned her eyes. “You weep, my dove, my precious beauty?” Aurungzeb asked with concern.
“I weep with joy, my lord, that I have the honour of bearing the Sultan’s child.”
Why was she still alive? Why had she not found some way to end herself? But she knew the answer. Human nature can bear many things, unimaginable things. The body eats, sleeps, excretes and lives, even while the mind prays for oblivion. And in time the mind adapts itself, and the insupportable becomes the everyday. Heria wanted to live, and she wanted her child to be born. It was his son, but it would be hers also, something of her own. She would love it as though it were Corfe’s, and her life might yet become worth something after all. She hoped that her husband’s ghost would understand.
U RBINO, Duke of Imerdon, was a tall, lean, cadaverous man with the look of an ascetic about him. He dressed habitually in black, and had done so since the death of his wife twenty-three years earlier. He was the most powerful nobleman in Hebrion, besides the King himself, but he was entirely unrelated—by blood at least—to the Royal House of Hibrusids. Imerdon had once been an outlying fief of the Fimbrian Electorate of Amarlaine, but the Fimbrians had relinquished their claims upon it decades ago, after the last battle of the Habrir River (which they had won). Few knew precisely why the Fimbrians had given up the duchy, the cities of Pontifidad and Himerio, all the land right up to the Merimer River, but it was rumoured that one of their then-endless civil wars had necessitated the removal of the garrison and its deployment elsewhere. The commander of the retreating garrison had not been able to resist giving the Hebrians a bloody nose one last time, hence the senseless battle of the Habrir.
The native nobility of the duchy had sworn fealty to the Hebrian monarch, whose kingdom was well-nigh doubled by Imerdon’s acquisition, and successive rulers of the province had intermarried with the Royal House. But though the Duke of Imerdon and his family were well respected, and indeed immensely powerful, they tended to be seen as outsiders, foreigners. Imerdon’s folk were of the same stock as those of Hebrion proper, but the long Fimbrian domination—almost five centuries—had rendered them slightly different from their western cousins. Many of them dressed in black for preference, like the men of the electorates, and they were generally a more disciplined and religious people who looked upon the excesses of gaudy old Abrusio with fascinated distaste. Their duke had remained aloof from the horrific war which had wrecked the kingdom’s capital city, though he had given free passage to the Himerian Knights Militant as they fled the country after their defeat. It was said that though he followed his king into heresy, considering it his duty, he did so reluctantly, and his sympathies lay yet with the Himerian Church.
The duke now sat in a covered carriage in upper Abrusio, not far from the Royal palace. If he pulled back the leather curtains of the vehicle he could count the cannonballs still embedded in the walls.
“My lord,” one of his retainers said outside the curtain. “The lady is here.”
“Help her in then,” the duke said.
The lady Jemilla climbed in beside him. He thumped the roof of the carriage with one bony beringed fist, and they trundled off.
“I hope I see you well, lady,” he said courteously.
“I am blooming, thank you, sir,” she replied. A few minutes of silence, as if each waited for the other to speak, until at last the duke said: “I take it your mission was successful.”
“Completely. I delivered the petition yesterday. The Astaran woman and the mage are no doubt pondering its
