Outside the Tower, rumor has some nasty words for it. And sometimes, they are true, whether from lust or loneliness—too often you sleep solitary, even with five wives—or from honest love.
Perhaps such shadow territory stretches beyond the Tower. Certainly, no boy inside it ever made such a fuss.
* * *
The Diaspora. Week 1.
Meditations. Alkhes-Assandar
He was so damned big. I’d dropped off when they left me alone. Three nights huddled in ditches with the bridle over my arm . . . I was still on hunt alert. So I jumped up the minute the shadow moved and there he was, right on top of me. Ten feet tall.
And so damned handsome. Built big, but perfect shape. Long legs, broad shoulders, narrow hips. Face like a temple sculpture. Not pretty. A man’s model. And those cursed lion’s eyes.
I remember him from Amberlight, got up like an artist’s whore, all gold-dust and jewels and paint. The sod’s better-looking without. Even with his nails broken and his hair uncurled and axle grease all over his shirt.
I expected him to hit me. Or to snipe. He’s got a tongue like a Heartland poison dart. I don’t know why he shut up. Or why he touched me, but it scared me dumb. If I’d been less cold, and less damaged, and less—daunted—I would have hit out myself. There are plenty of those around the court. In Dhasdein. Even in Cataract, sometimes. And they seem to like my looks.
And then Tellurith had to put me in bed with him. Like a damned woman, plastered all over his chest.
I have been in bed with men before. Not at court. In the field, on picket, or a retreat, you can get caught without blankets. Or even a cloak. When a raid hits the caravan, and you wind up on a sandhill with your gear on a camel thirty miles away, in one of those freezing Verrain desert nights. Or you can have wounded, and sometimes, to keep warm’s their only chance.
But I do not, not, not expect to wind up beside a man who looks like the River-lord’s statue, with the woman I’m supposed to have married on my other side.
May I be hung if he doesn’t look better in bed than Tellurith as well. All that hair—longer than hers, and thicker—spread out over the saddlebags like black-bronze silk. Profile like a cursed—statue. Plenty of muscle to fill out the blankets. And of course he’d never dribble or break wind. I doubt the bastard so much as snores.
Not that I had a chance to find out. If the rest hadn’t done for me, Tellurith did. Dropped sleep-syrup in the last tea we had, waiting for—Sarth—to wash. I knew by my next morning mouth. But after that, I hardly got past, “I can’t sleep in there, wait, listen, Tellurith . . .”
And part of it, gods know, was the relief. Oh, gods, to have that pain stop. To rest a broken bone on something not too hard, not too soft, just the right height. And not have to move again. To know yourself back in friendly lines. Safe.
* * *
The Diaspora. Week 2.
Tellurith’s Diary
The old poet was right, when she said that leaving your City is only to take it with you somewhere else. But even with it half a moon dead behind you, on what else do you pattern your life?
Which may be why, along with grief, and loss’s aftermath, and remembered ruin, not to mention wrestling these Mother-forsaken bullocks and more forsaken wagons along this most forsaken mule-track, I have had to break up a war tonight.
Two women. Two cutters. Cousins of Charras, my senior power-Crafter, married amiably ten years to the same man. Coming to blows, to woken cutter blades, over who should bed him first.
It must be memory that terrifies me so, to see a cutter woken like that. Memory of the great light-guns, that I designed, that Diaman and Keranshah built along with us, shearing through wood and metal and flesh and bone on the glacis of Amberlight. Of that sick jerk as the blade in my own hand met naked flesh. But to see those white beams clash in the twilight, and know they threatened my own kind . . .
I broke it up, of course. House-head skills, ingrained House discipline. A couple of bellows, and Azo and Zuri were there to back me. If they had not stopped.
If they had not stopped . . . Azo or Zuri with an arm gone, a thigh slagged, a foot cut off. If they had not stopped . . .
It will be better once we arrive. When we can shed the nightmare of pursuit, of fresh massacre along this pestilent bog-rut. When we can settle into the new life.
A relief to know we are expected; that it is all right—or as all right as three hundred strange mouths at the heel of autumn may be. The light signal came back today. I sent Iatha, House steward, with Hayras and Quetho, the closest I have to Craft-heads, and Desis: troublecrew, sometime raider, scout. All well, the signal said. Report follows. Desis will be riding back with it, firsthand information, right now.
* * *
A tidy enough village, it sounds. Forty to fifty permanent houses, perhaps four hundred souls. Mother bless, room to spare; quarters for the summer quarrymen. And a negotiable ascent. Better than this pig-wallow where we have had to shore every bridge; Desis is developing an engineer’s eye.
I could have sent a genuine one, but Alkhes is still not fit to sit a horse. And to judge from Desis’ words, I was wise.
“The Ruand, ah.” Hunkered on her heels, sipping the last tea by my fire. “Reckon she’s a bit of a character.” A pause. A shake of her alert, cropped, troublecrew head. “They stick to the old ways, up there.”
Troublecrew, so she will not warn me outright: Ruand, we are headed for the backwoods, where they make myths of Dhasdein and an ogre of Cataract. Where men’s rule has not merely never been threatened, but is still undreamt. Where newfangled revolutions might be more danger than they are worth.
I was considering that . . .
No. I was still refusing to consider that when, behind me, someone spoke.
“That water’s getting cold.”
The last hot water of the night. Saved with love’s care, with steely determination. Offered in Sarth’s dark velvet voice.
With Sarth himself hunched at my back, one hand thistledown-soft on my shoulder point.
From Alkhes it would have been nothing, but from Sarth? Bred and trained in the tower, in Amberlight, where men are taught from birth not to ask?
Six nights I had been sleeping with them both, too tired and too tense to think of anything more. After this news it would be worse. As he, with the remnants of that men’s gossip-net, would know.
The bath would warm me, the other would help me sleep. That too, he had long known.
The rest had to begin some time.
I got up, and offered him a hand. When he took it, I said, “You can come and scrub my back.”
* * *
The Diaspora. Week 2.
Meditations. Alkhes-Assandar
The bastard! The scurvy, sneaking, double-crossing whore!
I should have thought. Should have expected it. She said, Both of us. She took him back. He fought for her. She was with him while I—was blowing up, tearing down her life. She even loves the bastard. I can tell that. She has a right. She has every right!
But oh, gods, it hurts.
I thought I could manage it. Whatever happened, I have to wait. You can’t please yourself, let alone a woman, when every stray move folds you up like a busted tent. And I’m so tired. Not just the damage. Trying to stay on my horse, trying to make these stubborn, lamebrain, deaf-and-blind women do some things right—gods, with two pentarchs and some discipline, I could cut five days off this march. If I even had a sapper who’d