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Rustem had feared this question. He was a good dissembler—most physicians were—but this was his king, mortal kin to the sun and moons.
‘I have encountered it before,’ he said. ‘I was trained in Ispahani, my lord, where the plant grows.’
‘I know where it grows,’ said the King of Kings. ‘What else do you have to tell me, physician?’
Nowhere to hide, it seemed. Rustem took a deep breath.
‘I also smelled it elsewhere in this room, great lord. Before I put the herbal scent to the fire.’
There was a silence.
‘I thought that might be so.’ Shirvan the Great looked coldly up at him. ‘Where?’ One word only, hard as a smith’s hammer.
Rustem swallowed again. Tasted something bitter: the awareness of his own mortality. But what choice did he now have? He said, ‘On the hands of the prince, great king. When he bade me save your life, at risk of my own.’
Shirvan of Bassania closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, Rustem saw a black rage in their depths again, despite the drug he had been given. ‘This . . . distresses me,’ said the King of Kings very softly. What Rustem heard was not distress, however. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if the king had also detected kaaba on the arrowhead and shaft. He had been ingesting it for twenty-five years. If he had known the poison, he had allowed three physicians to handle it today without warning them, and had been about to let Rustem do the same. A test of competence? When he was on the brink of dying? What sort of man . . . ? Rustem shivered, could not help himself.
‘It seems,’ said Great Shirvan, ‘that someone besides myself has been protecting himself against poisons by building up a resistance. Clever. I have to say it was clever.’ He was silent a long time, then: ‘Murash. He would have made a good king, in fact.’
He turned away and looked out the window; there was nothing to see in the darkness. They could hear the sound of the wind, blowing from the desert. ‘I appear,’ the king said, ‘to have ordered the death of the wrong son and his mother.’ There was another, briefer silence. ‘This distresses me,’ he said for a second time.
‘May these orders not be rescinded, great lord?’ Rustem asked hesitantly.
‘Of course not,’ said the King of Kings.
The finality in the quiet voice was, Rustem would later decide, as frightening as anything else that day.
‘Summon the vizier,’ said Shirvan of Bassania, looking out upon night. ‘And my son.’
Rustem the physician, son of Zorah, wished ardently in that moment to be home in his small house, shuttered against the wind and dark, with Katyun and Jarita, two small children peacefully asleep, a late cup of herbed wine at his elbow and a fire on the hearth, with the knocking of the world at his door something that had never taken place.
Instead, he bowed to the man lying on the bed and walked to the doorway of the room.
‘Physician,’ said the King of Kings.
Rustem turned back. He felt afraid, terribly out of his depth.
‘I am still your patient. You continue to be accountable for my well-being. Act accordingly.’ The tone was flat, the cold rage still there.
It did not take immense subtlety to understand what this might mean.
Only this afternoon, in the hour when a wind had arisen in the desert, he had been in his own modest treatment room, preparing to instruct four pupils on couching simple cataracts according to the learned devisings of Merovius of Trakesia.
He opened the door. In the torchlight of the corridor he saw a dozen tired-looking courtiers. Servants or soldiers had brought benches; some of the waiting men were sitting, slumped against the stone walls. Some were asleep. Others saw him and stood up. Rustem nodded at Mazendar, the vizier, and then at the young prince, standing a little apart from the others, his face to a dark, narrow window-slit, praying.
Vinaszh the garrison commander—the only man there that Rustem knew—raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry and took a step forward. Rustem shook his head and then changed his mind. You continue to be accountable, the King of Kings had said. Act accordingly.
Rustem stepped aside to allow the vizier and the prince to walk into the room. Then he motioned for the commander to enter as well. He said nothing at all, but locked eyes with Vinaszh for a moment as the other man went in. Rustem followed and closed the door.
‘Father!’ cried the prince.
‘What is to be has long ago been written,’ murmured Shirvan of Bassania calmly. He was propped up on pillows, his bare chest wrapped in the linen bandages. ‘By the grace of Perun and the Lady, the designs of Black Azal have been blighted for a time. The physician has removed the arrow.’
The vizier, noticeably moved, passed a hand before his face and knelt, touching the floor with his forehead. Prince Murash, eyes wide as he looked at his father, turned quickly to Rustem. ‘Perun be exalted!’ he cried, and, striding across the floor, he reached forward and seized both of Rustem’s hands in his own. ‘You shall be requited, physician!’ exclaimed the prince.
It was with a supreme act of self-control and a desperate faith in his own learning that Rustem did not violently recoil. His heart was pounding furiously. ‘Perun be exalted!’ Prince Murash repeated, turning back to the bed and kneeling as the vizier had done.
‘Always,’ agreed the king quietly. ‘My son, the assassin’s arrow rests there on the chest beneath the window. There was poison on it. Kaaba. Throw it in the fire for me.’
Rustem caught his breath. He looked swiftly at Vinaszh, meeting the soldier’s eyes again, then back to the prince.
Murash rose to his feet. ‘Joyfully will I do so, my father and king. But poison?’ he said. ‘How can this be?’ He crossed to the window and reached carefully for a swath of linen that lay beside Rustem’s implements.
‘Take it in your hands, my son,’ said Shirvan of Bassania, King of Kings, Sword of Perun. ‘Take it in your bare hands again.’
Very slowly the prince turned to the bed. The vizier had risen now and was watching him closely.
‘I do not understand. You believe I handled this arrow?’ Prince Murash said.
‘The smell remains on your hands, my son,’ said Shirvan gravely. Rustem cautiously took a step towards the king. The prince turned—outwardly perplexed, no more than that—and looked at his hands and then at Rustem. ‘But then I will have poisoned the doctor, too,’ he said.
Shirvan moved his head to look at Rustem. Dark beard above pale linen bandages, the eyes black and cold. Act accordingly, he had said. Rustem cleared his throat. ‘You will have tried,’ he said. His heart was pounding. ‘If you handled the arrow when you shot the king then the kaaba has passed through your skin and is within you by now. There is no menace to your touch, Prince Murash. Not any more.’
He believed this was true. He had been taught that this was so. He had never seen it put to the test. He felt oddly light-headed, as though the room were rocking slightly, like a child’s cradle.
He saw the prince’s eyes go black then—much like his father’s, in fact. Murash reached to his belt, whipped out a knife, turned towards the bed.
The vizier cried out. Rustem stumbled forward, unarmed.
Vinaszh, commander of the garrison at Kerakek, killed Prince Murash, third of the nine sons of Shirvan the Great, with his own dagger, flung from near the doorway.
The prince, a blade in his throat, dropped his weapon from lifeless fingers and slowly toppled across the bed, his face to his father’s knees, his blood staining the pale sheets red.
Shirvan did not move. Neither did anyone else.
After a long, frozen moment the king turned from gazing down at his dead son to look over at Vinaszh and then at Rustem. He nodded his head slowly, to each of them.
‘Physician, your father’s name was . . . ?’ A tone of detached, mildly curious interrogation.
Rustem blinked. ‘Zorah, great lord.’
‘A warrior-caste name.’
‘Yes, lord. He was a soldier.’
‘You chose a different life?’
The conversation was so implausible it was eerie. Rustem felt dizzied by it. There was a dead man—a son— sprawled across the body of the man with whom he was speaking thus. ‘I war against disease and wounds, my lord.’ What he always said.
The king nodded again, thoughtfully, as if satisfied by something. ‘You know one must be of the priestly caste to become a royal physician, of course.’
Of course. The world knocking at his door, after all. Rustem lowered his head. Said nothing.
‘It will be arranged at the next Accession Ritual before the Sacred Flame in midsummer.’
Rustem swallowed hard. He seemed to have been doing so all night. He cleared his throat. ‘One of my wives is of the commoners’ caste, Great King.’
‘She will be generously dealt with. Is there a child?’
‘A girl, yes, my lord.’
The king shrugged. ‘A kindly husband will be found. Mazendar, see it is done.’
Jarita. Whose name meant desert pool. Black eyes, black hair, light step en tering a room, leaving it, as if loath to trouble the air within. Lightest touch in the world. And Inissa, the baby they called Issa. Rustem closed his eyes.
‘Your other wife is of the warrior caste?’
Rustem nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. And my son.’
‘They may be elevated with you in the ceremony. And come to Kabadh. If you desire a second wife there it shall be arranged.’
Again Rustem closed his eyes.
The world, hammering and hammering at his door, after all, entering like the wind.
‘This cannot take place until midsummer, of course. I wish to make use of you before that. You appear a competent man. There are never enough of them. You will treat me here, physician. Then you will undertake a winter journey for me. You are observant, it seems. Can serve your king even before you rise in caste. You will leave as soon as I am well enough to go back to Kabadh, in your own judgement.’
Rustem opened his eyes then. Looked up slowly. ‘Where am I to go, great lord?’
‘Sarantium,’ said Shirvan of Bassania.
He went home briefly when the King of Kings fell asleep, to change his bloodied clothes, replenish his herbs and medicines. It was cold in the windy darkness. The vizier gave him an escort of soldiers. It seemed he had become an important man. Not surprising, really, except that everything was surprising now.
Both women were awake, though it was very late. They had oil lamps burning in the front room: a waste. He’d have chastised Katyun for it on a normal night. He walked in. They both rose quickly to see him. Jarita’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Perun be praised,’ said Katyun. Rustem looked from one to the other.
‘Papa,’ someone said sleepily.
Rustem looked over and saw a little, rumpled figure stand up from the carpet before the fire. Shaski rubbed at his eyes. He’d been asleep but waiting here with his mothers.
‘Papa,’ he said again, hesitantly. Katyun moved over and laid a hand across his thin shoulders, as if afraid Rustem would reprimand the boy for being here and awake so late.
Rustem felt an odd constriction in his throat. Not the kaaba. Something else. He said, carefully, ‘It is all right, Shaski. I am home now.’
‘The arrow?’ said his son. ‘The arrow they said?’
It was curiously difficult to speak. Jarita was crying.
‘The arrow is safely removed. I used the Spoon of Enyati. The one you brought out for me. You did very well, Shaski.’
The boy smiled then, shyly, sleepily, his head against his mother’s waist. Katyun’s hand brushed his hair, tender as moonlight. Her eyes sought Rustem’s, too many questions in them.
The answers too large.
‘Go to sleep now, Shaski. I will speak with your mothers and then go back to my patient. I will see you tomorrow. Everything is well.’
It was, and it wasn’t. Being elevated to the priestly caste was a stunning, miraculous thing. The castes of Bassania were immovable as mountains—except when the King of Kings wished them to move. A physician’s position at court meant wealth, security, access to libraries and scholars, no more anxieties about buying a larger house for a family or burning oil lamps at night. Shaski’s own future had suddenly expanded beyond all possible hope.
But what could one say to a wife who was to be cast off by order of the King of Kings and given to another man? And the little one? Issa, asleep in her cradle now. The little one would be gone from him.
‘Everything is well,’ Rustem said again, trying to make himself believe it.
The door had opened to reveal the world on his threshold. Good and evil walked hand in hand, not to be separated. Perun was opposed, always, by Azal. The two gods had entered into Time together; one could not exist without the other. So the priests taught before the Holy Flame in every temple in Bassania.
The two women took the child to his room together. Shaski reached up and held each of their hands, walking through the door, claiming them both. They indulged him too much, Rustem thought. But this was not a night to dwell upon that.
He stood alone in the front room of his own small house amid the burning of lamps and the firelight and he thought about fate and the chance moments that shaped a man’s life, and about Sarantium.
Chapter II
Pardos had never liked his hands. The fingers were too short, stubby, broad. They didn’t look like a mosaicist’s hands, though they showed the same network of cuts and scratches all the others’ did.
He’d had a great deal of time to think about this and other things on the long road in wind and rain as autumn steadily turned to winter. Martinian’s fingers, or Crispin’s, or Pardos’s best friend Couvry’s—those were the right shape. They were large and long, appearing deft and capable. Pardos thought his own hands were like a farmhand’s, a labourer’s, someone in a trade where dexterity hardly mattered. It bothered him, sometimes.
But he was a mosaicist, wasn’t he? Had finished his apprenticeship with two celebrated masters of the craft and had been formally admitted to the guild in Varena. He had his papers in his purse now, his name was entered on the rolls back home. So appearance wasn’t really important, after all. His short, thick fingers were nimble enough to do what needed to be done. The eye and the mind mattered, Crispin used to say before he went away; the hands could learn to do what they were told.
It seemed to be true. They were doing what needed to be done here, though Pardos would never have dreamt that his first labours as a fully-fledged mosaicist would be expended in the remote, bitterly cold wilderness of Sauradia.
He would never have even dreamt, in fact, of being this far away from home, and on his own. He had not been the sort of young man who imagined adventures in distant places. He was pious, careful, prone to worry, not at all impulsive.
But he had left Varena—his home, all he knew of Jad’s created world—almost immediately after the murders in the sanctuary, and that was about as impulsive an action as could be imagined.
It hadn’t felt as though he was being reckless, it seemed rather as if there was no real choice in the matter, and Pardos had wondered why the others couldn’t understand that. When pressed by his friends, and by Martinian and his concerned, kind-hearted wife, Pardos had only said, over and over, that he could not stay in a place where such things were done. When they told him, in tones of cynicism or sadness, that such things happened everywhere, Pardos replied—very simply—that he hadn’t seen them everywhere, only in the sanctuary expanded to house the bones of King Hildric outside Varena.
The consecration of that sanctuary had been the most wonderful day of his life, at first. He and the other former apprentices, newly elevated to the guild, had been sitting with Martinian and his wife and with Crispin’s white-haired mother in places of honour for the ceremony. All the mighty of the Antae kingdom were there, and many of the most illustrious Rhodians, including representatives of the High Patriarch himself, had come to Varena along the muddy roads from Rhodias. Queen Gisel, veiled and clad in the pure white of mourning, had been sitting so near that Pardos could almost have spoken to her.
Except that it hadn’t been the queen. It had been a woman pretending to be her, a lady-in-waiting. That woman had died in the sanctuary, and so had the queen’s giant, silent guard, chopped down by a sword that should never have been in a holy place. Then the swordsman— Agila, Master of Horse—had himself been slain where he stood by the altar, arrows whipping down from overhead. Other men had died the same way, while people screamed and trampled each other in a rush for the doors and blood spattered the sun disk beneath the mosaics Crispin and Martinian and Pardos and Radulph and Couvry and the others had laboured to craft in honour of the god.
Violence, ugly and profane, in a chapel of worship, a desecration of the place and of Jad. Pardos had felt unclean and ashamed—bitterly aware that he was Antae and shared the blood, and even the tribe, as it happened, of the foul-tongued man who had stood up with his forbidden sword, smeared the young queen with ugly, vicious words, and then died there with those he’d killed.
Pardos had walked out the double doors into the sanctuary yard even as the services—under the orders of the sleek chancellor, Eudric Golden hair—had resumed. He had gone past the outdoor ovens where he’d spent a summer and fall attending to the setting lime, out through the gate and then along the road back to the city. Before he’d even reached the walls he had decided he was leaving Varena. And almost immediately after that he’d realized how far he intended to go, though he’d never been away from home in his life and winter was coming.
They’d tried to dissuade him later, but Pardos was a stubborn young man and not easily swayed when his mind and heart were set. He needed to put a distance between himself and what had happened in that sanctuary—what had been done by his own tribe and blood. None of his colleagues and friends were Antae, they were all Rhodian-born. Perhaps that was why they didn’t feel the shame as fiercely as he did.
Winter roads to the east might have their dangers, but as far as Pardos was concerned, they could not be worse than what was about to happen here among his people with the queen gone and swords drawn in holy places.
He wanted to see Crispin again, and to work with him, far away from the tribal wars that were coming. Coming again. They had been down this dark path before, the Antae. Pardos would go a different direction this time.
