“Liar!” she screamed suddenly, and painful blood flooded into her white face. The green eyes blazed. She beat her fist on the arm of her crystal throne. “Liar!”
“You’re a fool,” I said, and leaned back on the guards to rest my legs.
“We have smashed the armies of Pandahem — aye, and your raggle-taggle bobtail of an army from Vallia! Now we go forward into Jholaix and all Pandahem will be mine! Mine!” She was panting. “As for Vallia! We’ll attack Vallia and smash that Lem-forsaken blot from the face of the world!”
“If you trust in Lem,” I said, “you’re more of a fool than I thought.”
She almost lost control. But she was a Queen. She had suborned good men to put her on the throne. Rees had fought for her. She forced herself to lean back, to let her hands uncurl from fists to claws. She smiled. “I know what I shall do with you, Dray Prescot, Prince of Cramphs! But first you shall taste the cup of bitter humiliation while I drink from the cup of victory!”
I did not know what she meant then, but two days later — days spent in a hole in the wall below the palace — I found out.
It is in the nature of a man to be himself, despite himself, and it was in the nature of this woman Queen Thyllis to be a bitch. Also, and this seems unarguable, it is in the nature of a victor to be seen to be victorious.
I was dragged out. They did not remove the chains. They cleaned me up and fed me so I felt better. The stone walls of the dungeons dripped with moisture, niter-gleaming. The guards contained many more diffs than there had been before in the Hammabi el Lamma. A little Och came forward with a strip of red cloth. My blue breechclout was taken away and the red cloth was wrapped around me. It was not the old brave scarlet, but it was red. In the circumstances I took no great heart from that. I suspected the reasons for the red, and I did not like them at all.
They gave me a huge breakfast of slursh and red honey, then a Brokelsh, cracking off jokes typical of the witticisms of his race, sawed off a quantity of my hair and beard. They handed me a skin bag of wine
— a foul red rubbish from the lees of all the barracks, I suppose — but I drank it off. They gave me a handful of palines. They wanted me sober and able to appreciate what was going on. Then they led me aloft with the iron chains, up the narrow stairs, slimed and gloomy. By this time I had fathomed out what was going on.
It was, given the circumstances, both obvious and simple.
I will not go into all the doings of that day. It was a day of Hamal’s greatness. Queen Thyllis celebrated a huge triumph. She gave public thanks to Havil the Green for the victory of her armies before she finally took the crown and the scepter. At last she sat on the throne, the Empress of Hamal. Her husband the King went through all the procedures as a pale shadow hovering near, deferred to by those of lesser ranks, but a cipher, a puppet, a pawn, there only for the legality of the whole proceedings. Thyllis had adapted with great cunning all the high thrones, daises, and platforms on which they rode as well as the boloth palanquins, so that she always sat higher than her husband the King. The procession was vast, glittering, magnificent, superb. It wound slowly through all the chief thoroughfares and boulevards of Ruathytu. I knew many of them well as we went along. All the vantage points were loaded with sightseers. Every foot of the way was crowded with people shouting and cheering.
“Hamal! Hamal! Thyllis! Thyllis!” And how triumphantly she must have heard their new yell: “Empress!
Empress! Havil keep the Empress Thyllis!”
Dust puffed despite the slaves and their swinging watering cans. The suns shone down. The flags flew. The trumpets shrilled. Bands played all the famous marches of Hamal, swinging down boulevard after boulevard, circling the kyros and the Jikhorkdun and the merezos. On and on went the procession, animals caught for the display, chained slaves, the trophies of battle, loot taken from the despoiled palaces of Pandahem. Regiment after regiment marched, and even in my state I could observe that many of the regiments were brand-new, composed of young men from the guls. Probably there were clums there, also, for Hamal had formidable population resources if she admitted the despised clums to the ranks of her army.
Cavalry trotted. I wondered if Rees was there, so I asked my guards, to be told no one had heard of him. They were all new men. .
Above us in the sky flew the vollers and the flyers, creating patterns against the opaz glare, a proud symbol of Hamal’s might. The noise of cheering buffeted every step of the way. As for Thyllis, true to form, she had bedecked herself in gorgeous simplicity. A long green gown, loaded with gems, fitted the needs of the occasion with a singular appropriateness. She looked regal — no, rather, she looked imperial!
How superbly she aped those notorious Queens of Pain of Ancient Loh, aped them and surpassed them!
Her howdah aboard a massive boloth which swayed along on its sixteen legs had been so lavishly decorated I wondered how many families of guls might live for how many years on the value of the jewels and gold alone. She sat high. She sat with only a feathered fan behind her head so she might be seen by everyone. The sight of that barbaric magnificence must have thrilled everyone who watched. For the cruel empress of a cruel empire, the Empress Thyllis was supreme and superb. After all that long procession of booty, slaves, and soldiers had wended for bur after bur through the streets of Ruathytu, Empress Thyllis in her fantastically decorated howdah aboard the equally fantastically decorated boloth followed. Apart from an honor guard of zorca cavalrymen who brought up the rear, she let everything precede her and so lead on in a mounting frenzy of expectation to her own glittering arrival. A space had been left between the last marching body of men before the boloth. These last were her personal bodyguards in their link mesh, and others marched on either side of the boloth, with zorca-mounted officials. In that space a single calsany trotted along. People guffawed when they saw that beast of burden, the lowliest of the low, trotting along with down-bent head, always ready to accept the beatings with sticks which were the lot of the calsany.
Chained to the tail of the beast, dragged along, went the man who was known to the crowds as the Prince Majister of their hated enemy Vallia.
How they booed as I was dragged past, trying to keep on my feet, being dragged by the chains and the tail of the calsany. Every time the calsany became frightened by the noise and the close-pressing throngs he did what all calsanys do when they are startled.
The cramphs of Hamal had not forgotten a thing.
Lashed to the harness of the animal in an upright position a flagstaff nodded along. Someone had told them, Furtway, probably, and they had stitched up a red flag with a yellow cross. This fluttered from the staff atop the calsany’s back as I stumbled along at the rear.
So, I, Dray Prescot, Prince Majister of Vallia, took a proud part in the coronation procession of the Empress of Hamal, and I stumbled along with Old Superb flying over me. I do not believe I wish to dwell more on that day.
It was absolutely certain that if Rees, Chido, Nath Tolfeyr, Casmas the Deldy, or anyone of that circle of friends and acquaintances I had made in Ruathytu, saw me as I staggered along, the chains clanging and hampering me so that often I fell and was dragged before I could claw up to my feet again, then they would never recognize this man at all. It makes sense. If you see a man you know to be the Prince Majister of Vallia, all filthy and grimed, chained and humiliated, dragged through the streets at the tail end of a calsany, how could you possibly for a moment imagine he was Hamun ham Farthytu, the Amak of Paline Valley? No, there was no risk that I would be mistaken for the Amak. The day ended at last. Thyllis had spent four burs in the Great Temple of Havil the Green being crowned, and I had spent the time getting my wind back and slopping up a bowl of slursh, without red honey this time, and no palines either. The guards looked curiously at me. But they must have seen walking dead men many times before, working as they did for the Empress Thyllis. At the end of the day when the twin suns of Antares at last sank I was carted off, still in my chains, and thrust back into my hole.
The gloom of the dungeon matched my thoughts. I had felt no humiliation, no shame, during that parody out there in the streets of Ruathytu. Anger I had felt, of course. Determination to bash a few skulls and escape, yes.
But the Opaz-forsaken chains would not yield. I could not bend or break them. What Thyllis had in store for me next would be physically unpleasant. The psychological unpleasantness she had already handed out would have pleased her, no doubt assuming me to be crushed in spirit. But that kind of naked display of power offends me. Taking no material store in it for myself, it could not inversely harm me. Had Thyllis been in my position on that day she would have been asphyxiated with shame and humiliation.
Dark figures moved into view under the single torch and I bawled down at them.
“Jump to it, you rasts! It’s time for supper and I’m famished!”
But it was not my guards who stepped forward into the torch light.
“Dray Prescot?”
