The Red Country

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter II

Kastir was as furious as I tried to appear. I rebuked the guard captain and had the sentries whipped, then thanked the Four for a diversion in the shape of a Hazghend embassy. At least, until I heard what their message was.

The mere idea of a Hazyk embassy is laughable, and the fact was more laughable still. They had not bothered with a “Note.” They were not really “envoys.” Just half a dozen blond bears of warriors in the full barbarity of waist-length plaits and horned helmets and double-headed axes, escorting the hearth-bard, of all people, who did not recite his master’s message, but made a song of it. And that was the most laughable of all. Hazghend’s tyrant had discarded politics. He was smitten by my charms, which the bard exaggerated beyond all recognition, and he proposed to marry me.

“Not funny,” said Kastir with his elbows on the presence chamber table. “No, princess. Not funny at all.”

“No,” I said. I knew about Lyve, by repute and from Kastir himself. A young tyrant, newly established in the usual bloody way, a fine seaman, a better warrior, short of occupation at home, where he had already given the corsairs a lesson good for generations, ruling a people who were bursting their arid country at the seams; prouder than a jumped-up Estarian money-lord and touchier than one of his own warriors, with a nasty streak of rancor to keep his grudges alive. Tales of his revenge upon various offending Hazyx were already rife in the Confederacy. “Why,” I said, “do you think I kept my face straight in there?”

He gave me his cold, dry smile. “Will you tell me, princess, or shall I tell you?”

“If I accept,” I said, “Everran becomes a satellite. Hazghend will milk our men and money for their wars, they’ll export their own hellions and the blood-feuds will tear our country to shreds as well. What’s more, Lyve will probably think himself strong enough for a try at the Confederacy. And he’ll want to do it by another war.”

“Not to mention,” he added dryly, “that you yourself will have to put up with Lyve.”

I shuddered. “I purposely ignored that. He drinks like a Hazyk. He’ll take concubines later if he doesn’t now. And they think wives are only fit to beat and bed.”

His gaze dwelt thoughtfully on me.

“If you refuse,” he took up the summation, “it will be an insult no Hazyk tyrant could stomach, least of all Lyve. He will certainly retaliate. He will not have far to look for help. Quarred, for instance, would be delighted to give his—bandits—safe conduct overland from the Isthmus to you.”

We looked at each other. “It’s a stick-fork,” I said.

He rattled his fingers on the table. “There are certain options. Play for time. ‘Maidenly protestations.’ Dispute the marriage terms. Even Lyve cannot hope to win Everran for nothing, and if you set the price high enough, it will be impossible to raise at home.”

“That means he’ll raid the Confederacy.”

“And possibly start a war that will distract him from you.”

I said, “Including with Estar?”

He said, “My loyalty is here.”

I said, “Everran is Confederate too.”

He raised his brows. I said, “What can we buy with time?”

He frowned at the table. “Possibilities. That a blood-feud wake, or be wakened, in Hazghend. That an assassin appear. Or be made. Or chance intervenes. A storm, perhaps, at sea. Or we can play Hazghend against the Confederates. Tell Quarred Hazghend mean to raid them. Tell Holym Quarred is considering an alliance with Hazghend against them. Tell Estar the same. Tell Hazghend Estar plans to ally with Quarred and stamp them out. Someone will certainly elect to make a pre-emptive strike, and again, they will forget about you.”

“That would destroy the Confederacy.”

“But save Everran.”

I thought about it. I should have thought rationally, but the past, infuriatingly, persisted in interrupting, my own past and the past of which I had learnt.

I said slowly, “Everran founded the Confederacy. It was begun by one of our kings. I would feel I was . . . betraying him.”

Kastir was silent. No retort could have been so crushing.

In something like despair I asked, “Is there no other option you can see?”

He got slowly to his feet. Even before he spoke, something about his manner gave me pause.

“There is one other option, princess. A simple solution to your problems, at home and abroad. One Lyve has already offered you.”

“Marriage! Oh, splendid! In the Four’s name, Kastir,” for once I forgot to be polite with him, “just who do you propose for groom? Lyve? The Holym Scribe? Some Quarred patriarch with a beard to his broken knees? One of your Estarian shophets who holds power for a year and then sinks without trace? Or have you really, really gone so moon-mad as to imagine I could marry in Everran without causing a civil war?”

His eyes were fixed on my face. They held a painful constraint, a more painful intensity. His voice was husky, quite unlike usual.

“You could,” he said, “marry me.”

I was so flabbergasted, I let him finish his declaration without once breaking in.

“It is quite true,” he began, “that you could hardly marry in Everran, and the other choices hold little appeal. That is one reason for my offer.” With Kastir even a marriage proposal was ordered, reasoned, methodical. “There are more important factors. It would rid you of Lyve. It would check the other Confederates. It would silence all those who object to a queen’s sole government, and, once I was fully accepted, as I have good reason to think I should be, it would remove any threat from your brothers; wherever they are, whatever they may do. Also, I think I could help you to rule efficiently. We would make, as the ploughmen say, a matching team. Everran would be the better for it. And there would be security, peace of mind, for you.”

He paused, searching for words.

“There is a great disparity in our rank. Many people will accuse me of making this offer with an eye to the main chance. Others will say I did it to advance Estar, and consequently myself. But I assure you, princess, that my loyalty has long been to Everran. And for longer, to its queen.”

Another pause. “This may seem a mere marriage of convenience.” He looked down, and up again. “Feelings cannot be proved. But I promise you, princess, that if we marry it will be no matter of convenience to me.”

My eyes must have asked what my tongue could not frame.

“I always held you in affection,” he said. “When you dealt with Oxys it became admiration. Now I know I am in love with you.”

This is Kastir, I told myself. Cold, clearheaded, unemotional Kastir, proposing the incredible. However unlikely the event, it is natural that love itself cannot turn his head. But some stupid cell of memory threw up an almost forgotten passage from the songs of Harran to the first Sellithar, and something un-akin to reason whispered, This is not how I would wish a man to be in love with me.

In the meantime, he was waiting. If I was dumbstruck, he had left himself without defense. Mere good manners demanded that I should not keep him so.

“Kastir.” I found my hand was at my temple. “This is so—sudden—so—unexpected. I—I’m honored. I’m—deeply touched. But I—I’m sorry—I need time to think about this. It’s so—so—”

He nodded at once, looking quite as disordered as I felt. Then he bowed deeply, and by mutual consent we both scurried from the room.

* * * * *

Not surprisingly, I lay awake a long time that night. I had thought of calling Zathar, consulting with him, but respect for a confidence precluded it. I longed for my mother. I could hear her go to the core of it with some irreverent irrelevant essential like, “Do your toes curl when you think of kissing him?” I thought of Everran. I thought of Kastir himself. I tossed and turned and had given up all hope of a decision long before I managed to fall asleep.

I woke at the end of a morning dream, always the vividest, but this time of a more than remarkable intensity. I have no time for dream-readers, any more than for ghost-watchers or soothsayers or tradition worshippers. Only this dream would not go out of my head.

As usual, only the final sequence survived, yet it was clearer than if I had been there in the flesh. I knew the place. It was on the main southern road, Wyven Tirs, just before it drops from the highlands to Asleax’ gates. I could see all Everran laid out beneath, azure and pigeon’s neck purple and iridescent emerald, silvered from the first of the winter rain. I knew the season. Air’s day, when all Everran goes out to fly the huge gaudy kites that honor the Fourth Lord. They were aloft above the walls of Asleax, specks of leaping, diving color on a boisterous wind. Ahead of me the Tirien foothills rose to the Helkents’ rampart, meat-red from the passage of the recent rain, but they were only a background for the dream’s core. The core was a man on a tall brown blood-horse, with my dream-self standing at its head.

They too had been through the rain, for the rider’s scruffy sheepskin jacket was watermarked and his straight black hair clung damply to his skull. He had the bones of kingship, springing nose, an almost arrogant jaw, and he would have been handsome, but for the huge purple scar that blemished his right cheek.

His eyes more than made up for it. They were the strangest, most dream-like and enchanting part of all. Long, almond-shaped eyes with thick black lashes. And the irises were green.

It is not unknown in Everran. If I had never seen it for myself, Zathar had drummed into me the mark of our predecessors’ dynasty. “The true Berheage’s eyes were green.” It was almost the only fact I retained from history, and that mark was what my dream-person had beyond all mistaking. Dark green, inwardly lit eyes, lucent as wells of emerald.

Yet there was something more about those eyes than color; an attraction, a fascination, the kind of spell you discover in the depths of a great finghend, where no matter how steady your hands seem, the light makes stars and ribbons in the heart of the gem. Motion. That was what remained when I awoke, the way those irises had seemed to flow with their own inner motion, even though his regard was steady on my dream-self’s face.

In waking I also retained a fierce pang of loss and grief. As the dreamer, because I wanted to keep the strangeness and clarity of the images, but also because I woke in the knowledge that my dream-self had been saying farewell to him; that his going would deprive me of magic, of living’s savor, as well as a deep human affection. So I woke with tears, actual tears on my cheeks.

I remember I sat up to wipe them, vexed with myself for such stupidity, and I had rung for Finda and begun to undo my night-braids when I recollected the rest.

The green-eyed man had spoken to my dream-self. I had the oddest conviction, the most vexing of all, that this scene was not just mind-play, but a fragment of reality. Past reality. That annoyed me further, for the present should not have to acknowledge the influence of the past. It is gone, over, done with, it made its own mistakes and should leave us to make ours. Only the words it had left with me would not fade.

The green-eyed man had said, “Eskan Helken first, I think. There were so many things I didn’t learn. Then. . . . They say there’s another ocean, east of Hethria. I haven’t used Pharaone. Some things should be seen with eyes.”

From the moment of recall the words pestered me, circling in my mind, their absurdity the most vexing of all. Some things should be seen with eyes. How else does anyone see? And why should gibberish like “Pharaone” and “Eskan Helken” be mixed with reality? Hethria is certainly real, it is a country east of Everran, and learning is quite sensible, so long as its subject is not history. Why, why, why, nagged my wayward mind as I dressed and breakfasted and instructed the household and tried not to think of Kastir. Eskan Helken, Hethria, Asleax, Pharaone, Wyven Tirs, Air’s day; and a man with green, indubitably, idiotically green eyes?

In the end it was too much. Exasperated, I told Nerthor, “Put off the morning audience. And ask the Phathos to visit me.”

Though Nerthor’s face stayed carefully blank I felt a fool, and a bigger fool when I reflected how the palace would buzz with it, every giggle-headed ninny inventing omens and fabricating disaster. The princess Sellithar, who so scorned fancy and superstition, actually summoning the Phathos, the chief of soothsayers, the cynosure of the vapid and gullible.

I felt a far bigger fool when I had to tell the thing to him. He was an old man, of course. They always are. Half-blind, with peering, white-glazed eyes that never left my face.

I dealt with the concrete details first, the place, the time, the words, the man’s clothes and coloring. Keeping the emotions in reserve, I would then have wrestled with the magical quality of those eyes; but I had got no further than, “They were green,” when the Phathos lifted a hand and with unexpected authority cut me short.

“Beryx,” he said. “Who made himself an aedr to fight the dragon Hawge. That is what you saw in his eyes, princess. The spell of the aedryx, which made their eyes perilous as the dragon’s own.”

I nearly stamped my foot at him. Hawge, forsooth! Of course I knew of Beryx, the last Berheage, whose heir was Harran, our dynasty founder, just as I knew of the dragon who wasted Everran and whose bones supposedly lie in the desert of Gebria, with a fence about them and enterprising yokels to charge you a gold rhodel a look, and in my opinion some light-minded sculptor gave his life to the perpetration of a monumental hoax. Nothing could be so big and contain life.

As for aedryx, the ancient wizards and supposed rulers of our entire Confederacy, whose powers had gone beyond spell and witchcraft, and who had reputedly killed each other out long before Everran was founded, there were ghost and nursery tales of them to glut even harpers. And none more substantial than the desert city that stands before you with arch and tower and palm, all of them upside down.

I had no time to air my views. The Phathos was going on.

“It is all in the songs of Harran. You never listen to them, princess?” The shade of pity in his eyes exasperated me. “Harran parted from his king on Air’s day, along the road to Asleax. He rode south to Maer Selloth to claim his love, who was the first Sellithar. And also Beryx’s queen. Beryx rode east out of Everran, beyond the lore-keepers’ ken. Those are his words at parting. And it is Harran to whom he speaks.”

My anger crumbled in what I must confess was pleased surprise. I had always been sure there was some scandal about Harran and his beloved Sellithar who brought him a kingdom, only Zathar would never let it out.

“Beryx’s queen?” I burst out. “Then how could she be Harran’s—”

“Beryx was childless,” said the Phathos. He considered me, and patently omitted something. “He left the kingdom to Harran. And the queen.” There was an old sadness in his milky eyes. Sadness by proxy. It irritated me all over again, but he took no notice. There was new vigor in his tone.

“That was no ordinary dream, princess. It was a sign, an omen, sent by the founders of your house. Beryx rode eastward out of Everran. Your salvation too will come from the east.”

“Hethria?” I did explode then. “A fine place to find salvation! Can I stop the Confederacy with a pack of peddlers? Or do I just bury it in cartloads of sand?”

He stared past me. “You will journey to your salvation,” he said, “as Beryx did. And as it was for Beryx, the road will be long.”

“To Eskan Helken, no doubt?” I snapped.

He shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “Whatever Eskan Helken may be.” And drawing his robe about him, he walked out with the presumption of the licensed charlatan, presuming so far as to give me his back as he went.

* * * * *

Even had there been perfect ease between us, I doubt I would have told Kastir about that interview, let alone the dream. In the light of his outlook they became embarrassing lapses into the irrational. I was doubly glad of the need to concoct a reply that would offer Lyve neither hope nor offence, and let us gloss over everything else.

I had half expected Kastir to press me for his own answer, but to my relief he never did, and the following days slipped by as usual, more raids in Stiriand, knotty law cases appealed to the crown, consultations with wine-lords over a price for the new vintage which was drawing near.

When Fire’s day arrived, I had little heart to go out and light a bonfire with the rest on Hazar plain. I retained too clear a picture of Sazan and Haskar dancing with childish glee around the flames; but there was a position to uphold. It was on the way down that evening that I saw the Sathellin.

They seldom enter Everran, though they are partly of Gebrian stock and we are their principal western trading-stop. Usually they unload their caravans in the bustling border depots of Penhazad or Gebasterne, consign their exotic seeds and beasts and the inimitable eastern silk into their agents’ hands for the exchange to filter where it will, take on a fresh load of wine and expensive portable curiosities, and disappear back into the red wastes of Hethria, across which, in perpetual motion, they live their lives. As a child, I once asked a Sathel where they went. “Over there,” was his unblinking reply.

Their blue desert robes and black turbans made such a striking sight in the market square of Saphar that I would have looked at any time. But it was the influence of the dream that made me halt my escort and beckon one up to me.

He came without hesitation, a slight wiry man, so far as I could tell for the robe, instinctively pulling up his turban as they do with strangers, to show only a pair of bright hazel eyes webbed in line upon line of crows-feet that the desert sun had bitten deep into an originally swarthy skin. But he looked me in the face with neither timidity nor fawning. In the best sense, a masterless man.

“Tell me,” I said, “what is to the east of Hethria?”

His eyes did not change, yet I sensed barriers lowered, bringing blank impassivity. He said, “Assharral.”

I had heard the name, swathed in legends too improbable for truth. “And what is Assharral?”

“The empire.”

However slowly, I was getting somewhere. “Who rules it?”

“The emperor.”

No, I was not getting anywhere. On impulse I said, “Do you know what Eskan Helken is?”

The barriers dropped with a thud. He said nothing at all.

“I asked you a question,” I said.

“Ah.”

“Do you mean to answer?” I was less piqued than amused. Clearly he did not understand a monarch’s power. Yet I would have been sorry to break that proud, free insolence to my will.

He looked me full in the face and replied, too calmly to be called impudent, “Them that asks no questions doesn’t hear no lies.”

“Let it be,” I told the bristling lords behind me. “After all, he’s no subject of mine.” But as I descended to the plain, already sown thick with red buds of fire, I had a sense of freedom, of enlargement, as invigorating as I had once found Kastir. There was something more in the east than sand. Perhaps, if need arose, the Phathos’ ravings might prove tenable.

* * * * *

The next crisis, I had expected, would be Lyve’s reply. I was wrong. It was a double menace, a Lyngthiran raiding party who instead of hit-and-running had thrown up defenses in the Coesterne hills and showed every sign of founding a colony in Stiriand; and on the same day as that report, another Quarred embassy.

The embroidery was pretty as ever, but the cloth was no longer silk. Quarred wished to inform me that they had given asylum to my wrongly and unlawfully banished brothers, that they recognized Sazan’s claim to the throne under Quarred law, where succession passes through the eldest male, that they would back him in winning his rightful place, and that, if necessary, the support would not stop at words.

“It’s a pity,” said Kastir, “that the flocks have left.”

It was rare for him to state the obvious, rarer not to seek the remedy rather than diagnose the wound, rarest of all that he should waste time on futile “if’s.” The flocks were gone. An effective counter was no longer possible.

When I did not reply, he said, “Princess, there is other news.”

I had no need to ask, is it bad?

“There has been a census in Estar recently. Ever since, the news-talkers have been full of figures on Estar’s high population in comparison to Everran’s. A new agitation group has formed. They call themselves the Open Spacers, and they preach that Estar must remedy the situation before the country runs out of food. They claim it is unjust for one Confederate to suffer from over-crowding, while another has too much land to use. And they have begun to apply pressure on the Assembly delegates.”

Aghast, I stared at him. I knew the machinery of Estarian government, he had taught it me. The hidden leaders feed the news-talkers, the news-talkers seed public opinion, public opinion sprouts noisy pressure groups who push the Assembly delegates to present a motion demanding such-and-such; the shophets who ostensibly rule the country refer to the guild-leaders or money-lords who fed the news-talkers, and it becomes the people’s will. Far, far more lethal than an imposed government policy.

“Four!” I cried. “They won’t send troops like Quarred or brigands like Hazghend. It’ll be a migration—a folk invasion—a—oh, Kastir, what are we going to do?”

“We can pay anti–Open Spacers,” he said at length. I could hear how hopeful he considered that. “Try to enlist the money-lords. Bribe delegates. Or . . . as I suggested before, maneuver Estar into a war. With Hazghend. Quarred. Anyone.”

“I won’t do that! And as for bribes. . . .”

I could feel my nose wrinkle. He sighed.

“I know how you dislike political chicanery. But once the migration begins, we have no hope at all.”

“No. No.” Slaughter on the borders, Estarian, Everran soldiers massacring each other. Futilely, pointlessly. Slaughter in Everran, when Estar’s myriad troops broke through.

The walls of the queen’s hall contracted, closing in on me. Hazghend, Quarred, Estar, Lyngthira, converging on Everran like kites on a foundered horse. We had to fight them, and we simply did not have the resources to fight them all.

I stood up, hurriedly, jerkily, feeling my limbs mirror the agitation so ignominiously clouding my wits. Kastir watched in silence. His hopes must have been sinking too. Not even our marriage would stop an Estarian folk invasion. Politics simply would not come into it.

“I have to think,” I said. The royal coronet constricted my head like a band of iron. “Kastir, pardon me. I’ll think better alone.”

* * * * *

The palace was claustrophobic, the very gardens were not open enough, though they were rich with the spice of rivannon bloom and the smoky lavender clouds of terrian trees in flower. In the end I climbed to the summit of Asterne, into the leveled stone circle within its low parapet, where, after the dragon razed Saphar, Harran rebuilt a little rotunda to shelter the bells that make music from the play of Air. It is usually occupied by a watch of mirror signalers, but it was near dusk when I arrived, and the watch had gone. The signal-unit stood alone. I paced to and fro, to and fro, while the bells tinkled faintly, fitfully, as the wind breathed over Asterne’s head.

At last I stopped and leant on the parapet. Below me Saphar’s streets were blurred with dusk, their structure picked out clearer and clearer as each house kindled its lamps. Away to the west the light clung upon the bellies of a fleet of clouds, lurid scarlet streaks above the Helkents’ silhouetted crests. To the south they had already melted into oblivion. Saphar Resh was dissolving too, a shadow dwindling into the dark, but far in the east a last amber ribbon touched the topmost ridge of Saeverran Slief, the high country that goes down to the untrammeled horizons of Gebria, and the wider deserts of Hethria beyond.

And beyond that?

A deep breath filled my lungs, an enlargement like the very air of liberty. Salvation, the Phathos had said. What if it were soothsayer’s babble, unproven, unproveable? Assuredly, there was no salvation here. I was not Everran’s shield, I had become a focus for its enemies. But if I were gone, Lyve could not try to marry me, Quarred could not use me and Sazan to incite a civil war, and with Estar it would make no difference. Whatever Holym did would hardly matter. If I found nothing in the east, Everran would be no worse off than before. And the vaguer the possibilities the better. By so much might probability undershoot the fact.

I took one last look at the night dimming Saeverran Slief, then walked rapidly to the steps.

* * * * *

In my own rooms I wrote a letter informing the council I planned to go away and appointing Kastir Regent, then another to Kastir which authorized him to use his judgment in the fix I had left to him, prohibiting only one thing: that he should engineer war in the Confederacy for Everran’s sake. I did not have to spell out to the council that he was not merely my long-term right hand, and the best source of advice in any dealings with the Confederacy, but an Estarian born. Whatever his loyalties, that gave him the best chance of staving Estar off till I got back. I knew that Nerthor, my guard officers, and most of the lords would back him, whatever the long-term antipathy of the steward and treasurer. Let them suffer this supreme elevation along with the rest, I thought almost gleefully. It would give them one last innovation to fume about.

I sealed both letters with the royal signet. Then I unearthed my old gray habit and leather forage cap, made a bundle of other necessities, and rang for Finda.

“Bring me some scissors,” I said. “Send to the stables and tell them to saddle Vestar, the bay mare.” Rawhide, the name means, and it was apt. “Then tell Nerthor I want the privy purse.”

Her eyes bulged, but she asked no questions. I do not encourage such liberties.

When Nerthor arrived he took one look at my cap and habit, another at the golden hanks on the tiring table, the crimson cloak tumbled on the floor, and dropped the privy purse. “Your majesty . . . princess . . . what are you—why are you—where are you—” The years fell away from him. “What in the Four’s name are you up to, Sellithar?”

I stretched my arms back till the muscles cracked, feeling sovereignty drop away like the cloak, knowing for the first time what it was to have no responsibilities, no kingdom round your neck; no one to rely on you.

“I’m going away,” I said. “I’ll tell you where, Nerthor, but it’s a state secret and you’ll keep it to yourself.”

“Four save us!” he yelled as I counted gold rhodellin from the privy purse. “In those clothes, hair cut off, all alone, not a donkey-boy for escort—and now, you can’t go now, not with—!”

“Oh, yes I can. There’s never been a better time. And I shan’t be gone long, I hope. Just long enough.”

“Just long enough!” He very nearly grabbed me before he remembered himself. “Sellithar, for the Four’s sake—long enough for what?”

I slid the royal signet off and held it out and he received it automatically. “For help,” I said.

“Help? What help? All alone and—what help!” It got near a howl but he knew better than to move after me. “Where?”

“Hethria,” I said.

© 2008 Sylvia Kelso

First published by FiveStar Books

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