Shadows of Sanctuary Part 19

Lalo bent stiffly to pick up his palette knife. 'She's right...' He took a step towards the mutilated picture. 'd.a.m.n him ...' he whispered. 'He tricked me - he knew that this would happen. May all the G.o.ds d.a.m.n Enas Yorl!'

Gilla looked at the picture and began to laugh. 'No ... really,' she gasped, 'it's an excellent likeness. You only saw her pretty face. I know what she's been up to. Her fiance killed himself when she threw him over for that gorilla from the Prince's guard. The vixen is out for all she can get, which the picture makes abundantly clear. No wonder she hated it!'

Lalo slumped. 'But I've been betrayed ...'

'No. You got what you asked for, poor love. You have painted that wretched girl's soul!'

Lalo leaned on the splintery railing of the abandoned wharf, staring with unfocused eyes into the golden dazzle cast upon the waters by the setting sun as if by wishing hard enough he could become one with that beauty and forget his despair. I have only to climb over this flimsy barrier and let myself/all... He imagined the feel of the bitter waters closing over him, and the blessed release from pain.

Then he looked down, and shuddered, not entirely because of the cooling wind.

The murky waters were littered with obscene gobbets that had once been part of living things - offal flushed down the gutters from the shambles of Sanctuary to the sea. Lalo's gorge rose at the thought of that water touching him. He turned away, sank down with his back against the wall of a shanty the fishermen sometimes used.

Like everything else I see, he thought, whatever seems fairest is sure to be most foul within!

A ship moved majestically across the harbour, pa.s.sed the lighthouse and disappeared around the point. Lalo had thought of shipping out on such a vessel, but he was too unskilled for a sailor, too frail for a common hand. Even the solace of the taverns was denied to him. In the Green Grape they would congratulate him on the success that was impossible now, while the clients at the Vulgar Unicorn would try to rob him, and beat him senseless when they discovered his poverty. How could he ever explain, even to Cappen Varra, what had happened to him?

The planks on which he was sitting shook beneath a heavy tread. Gilla ... Lalo tensed, waiting for her accusations, but she only sighed, as if releasing pent hope, or fear.

'I hoped I'd find you here...' Grunting, she eased down beside him, unslung and handed him an earthenware pot with a narrow spout. 'Better drink this before it gets cold.'

He nodded, took a long swallow of fragrant herb tea laced with wine, then another, and set the pot down.

Gilla pulled her shawl around her, stretched out her legs and settled back against the wall. Two gulls swooped overhead, squabbling over a piece of flesh.

A heavy swell set wavelets lapping against the pilings below them, then there was silence again.

In the shared stillness, warmed by the tea and by Gilla's body, something that had been wound tight within Lalo began to ease.

'Gilla ...' he said at last, 'what am I going to do?'

'The other two models failed?'

'They were worse than Zorra. Then I started the portrait of the Portmaster's wife... Fortunately I got the sketch away before she could see it. She looked like her lapdog!' He drank again.

'Poor Lalo.' Gilla shook her head. 'It's not your fault that all your unicorns turned out to be rhinoceroses!'

He remembered the old fable about the rhinoceros who looked into a magic mirror and saw there a unicorn, but it did not comfort him. 'Is everything beautiful only a mask for rottenness, or is it only that way in Sanctuary?' He burst out then, 'Oh Gilla, I've failed you and the children. We're ruined, don't you understand? I cannot even hope anymore!'

She turned a little, but did not touch him, as if she understood that any attempt at comfort would be more than he could bear.

'Lalo ...' she cleared her throat and started again. 'It's all right - we'll get by some way. And you haven't failed ... you haven't failed our dream! You made the right choice - don't I know that it was me and the children in the first place that kept you from what you were meant to do?

'Anyhow -' she tried to turn her emotion to laughter, 'if worst comes to worst I can model for you -just for you to get the basic lines of the figures, of course,' she added apologetically. 'After all these years I doubt I have any flaws that you don't already know...'

Lalo set down the teapot, turned and looked at her. In the light of the setting sun Gilla's face, into which the years had carved so many lines, was like a weathered image which some worshipper had gilded in an attempt to disguise its age. This bitter line for poverty endured, that, for the death of a child ...

Could all the sorrows of a world have marked a G.o.ddess more?

He laid his hand on her arm, seeing the size of her body, but feeling the strength in it, and the flow of energy between them which had bound him to her, even more than her beauty, so many years ago. She sat still, accepting his touch, although he thought she would have been well-justified in turning away.

Do I know you?

Gilla's eyes were closed, her head tipped back to rest against the wall in a rare moment of peace. The deepening light upon her face seemed now to come from within. Lalo's eyes blurred. / have been blind, he thought, blind, and a fool...

'Yes ...' he fought to steady his voice, knowing how he would paint her, where he would look for others to be his models now. His breath caught, and he reached out to her. She looked at him then, smiling questioningly, and received him into her embrace.

A hundred candles blazed in Molin Torchholder's Hall, set in silver candelabra wrought in the shape of torches upraised in clenched fists. Light shimmered in the gauzy silks of the ladies of Sanctuary, gleamed from the heavy brocades worn by their lords, flashed from each golden link of chain or faceted jewel as they moved across the floor, nearly eclipsing the splendour of the room.

Lalo observed the scene from a vantage point of relative quiet beside a pillar, tolerated for his role in creating the murals whose completion the party was intended to celebrate. Everyone of wealth or status who craved the favour of the Empire was there, which these days amounted to most of the upper crust of Sanctuary, everyone wearing the same mask of complacent gaiety. But Lalo could not help wondering how, if he had painted this scene, those faces would have appeared..

Several merchants for whom Lalo had worked in the past had w.a.n.gled invitations, although most of his former clients would have felt as out of place in this gathering as he did. He recognized a few friends, among them Cappen Varra, who having just finished a song, was now warily watching Lady Danlis, who was far too busy being charming to a banker from Ranke to notice him.

Several other acquaintances from the Vulgar Unicorn had somehow managed to get hired as extra waiters and footmen. Lalo suspected that not all of the jewels that winked so brightly .tonight would leave the house in the hands of those who had brought them, but he did not feel compelled to point this out to anyone. He braced himself as he recognized Jordis the stonemason shouldering his way towards him through the glittering crowd.

'Well, Master Limner, now that you've finished serving the G.o.ds, you'll have a bit more time for men, eh?' Jordis smiled broadly. 'The s.p.a.ce on my wall that's waiting for my picture is still bare...'

Lalo coughed deprecatingly. 'I'm afraid that in my concentration on heavenly things I've lost my touch for earthly excellence ...' The stonemason's expression told him how pompous that sounded, but it would be far better for everyone to think his head had been turned by his new prosperity than for them to guess the truth. The solution to his dilemma that had enabled him to complete the job for Lord Molin had forever barred him from Society portraiture.

'Heavenly things ... ah, yes...' Jordis's eyes had moved to one of the nymphs painted on the wall, whose limbs were supple and rounded, whose eyes shone with youth and merriment. 'If I could make a living gazing at such lovelies, I suppose I'd refuse to paint old men too!' He laughed suggestively. 'Where do you find them in this town, eh?'

Selling their bodies on the docks ...or their souls in the Bazaar ... slaving in your kitchen or scrubbing your floors... thought Lalo bitterly. This was not the first time this evening that he had been asked who his models were. The nymph at whom Jordis was now leering so eagerly was a crippled beggar girl whom he had probably pa.s.sed in the street a dozen times. On another wall the wh.o.r.e Valira proudly presented a sheaf of grain to the G.o.ddess, while her child tumbled like a cherub about her feet. And the G.o.ddess they worshipped, who dominated all of the facile splendour in this room, was his Gilla, the rhinoceros who had been revealed as something greater than any unicorn.

You have hearts but you do not feel... Lalo's eyes moved over the dazzle of apparel and ornament in which Lord Molin's guests had disguised themselves. You have eyes, but you do not see. He murmured something about an artist's perspective.

'If you want a room decorated, I'll be happy to serve you, but I do not think that I will be doing portraits any more.' Ever since he had learned to see Gilla, his sight had been changing. Now, when he was not painting, he could often see the truth behind the faces men showed the world. He added politely, 'I trust that your work is going well?'

'Eh? My work - oh yes, but there's not much left for a stonemason now! What remains will require a different sort of craft...' His chuckle held a hint of complicity.

Lalo felt himself flushing, realizing that Jordis a.s.sumed he had been fishing for information about the new temple - the greatest decoration job that Sanctuary had ever known. Wasn't I? he wondered. Is it unworthy to want my G.o.ddess to adorn something more worthy than this jumped-up engineer's/easting hall?

His mouth dried as he saw Molin Torchholder himself approaching him. Jordis bowed, smirked, and melted back into the crowd. Lalo forced himself to stand up and meet his patron's eye. for Lord Molin's excess flesh covered a powerful frame, and there was something uncomfortably piercing about his gaze.

'I have to thank you,' said Lord Molin. 'Your work appears to be a success.' His eyes roved ceaselessly from the crowd to Lalo's face and back again. 'Perhaps too successful!' he went on. 'Next to your G.o.ddess, my guests appear to be the decorations here!'

Lalo found himself trying to apologize and froze, terrified that he would blurt out the truth.

Molin Torchholder laughed. 'I am trying to compliment you, my good man -1 would like to commission you to do the paintings on my new temple's walls...'

'Master Limner, you appear to be in good spirits today!'

Lalo, who had just turned from the Path of Money into the Avenue of Temples, on his way to make an initial survey of the s.p.a.ces he was to decorate in the new temple to the Rankan G.o.ds, missed a step as the soft voice spoke in his ear. He heard a dry chuckle, felt the hairs rise on his neck and bent to peer more closely at the other man. All he could see beneath the hooded caravaneer's cloak was the gleam of crimson eyes.

'Enas Yorl!'

'More or less...' his companion agreed. 'And you? Are you the same? You have been in my thoughts a great deal. Would you like me to change the gift I gave to you?'

Lalo shivered, remembering those moments when he would have given his soul to lose the power the sorcerer had bestowed upon him. But instead, his soul had been given back to him.

'No. I don't think so,' he answered quietly, and sensed the sorcerer's surprise.

'The debt is mine. Shall I paint you another picture to repay it?' He added, 'Shall I paint a portrait of you, Enas Yorl?'

The sorcerer halted then, and for a moment the painter met fully the red gaze of those unearthly eyes, and he trembled at the immortal weariness he saw there.

Yet it was not Lalo, but Enas Yorl, who was the first to close his eyes and look away.

THEN AZYUNA DANCED.

by Lynn Abbey

1.

He was a handsome man, somewhat less than middle-aged, with a physique that bespoke a soldier, not a pnest. He entered the bazaar-stall of Kul the Silkseller with an authority that sent the other patrons back into the dusty afternoon and brought bright-eyed Kul out from behind his bolts of cloth.

'Your grace?' he fawned.

'I shall require a double length of your finest silk. The colour is not important - the texture is. The silk must flow like water and a candleflame must be bright through four thicknesses.'

Kul thought for a moment, then rummaged up an armload of samples. He would have displayed each, slowly, in its turn, but his customer's eyes fell on a sea-green bolt and Kul realized it would be folly to test the priest's patience.

'Your grace has a fine eye,' he said instead, unrolling a half-length and letting the priest examine the hand and transparency of the cloth.

'How much?'

'Two gold coronations for both lengths.'

'One.'

'But, your grace has only recently arrived from the capital. Surely you recall the fetching-price of such workmanship. See here, the right border is shot with silver threads. It's certainly worth one-and-seven.'

'And this is certainly not the capital. Nine Rankan soldats,' the priest growled, reducing his offer further.

Kul whisked the cloth out of the priest's hand, spinning it expertly around the bolt. 'Nine soldats ... the silver in the cloth is worth more than that! Very well. I've no choice, really. How is a bazaar-merchant to argue with Molin Torchholder, High Priest of Vashanka? Very well, very well - nine soldats it is.'

The priest snapped his fingers and an adolescent temple-mute scurried forward with the priest's purse. The youth selected nine coins, showed them to his master, then handed them to Kul who checked both sides to be certain they weren't shaved - as so much of Sanctuary's currency was. (It was not fitting that a priest handle his own money.) When Kul slipped the small handful of coins into his waist-pouch, Torchholder snapped his fingers a second time and a ma.s.sively built plainsman ducked under the stall's lintel, holding the door cloth until the priest departed, then taking the bolt from the silent youth.

Molin Torchholder strode purposefully through the crowded Bazaar, confident the slaves would keep pace with him somehow. The silk was almost as good as the merchant claimed, and in the capital, where better money flowed more freely, would have brought twice what the merchant had asked. The priest had not risen so high in the Rankan bureaucracy that he failed to savour a well-finessed haggling.

His sedan-chair awaited him at the bazaar-gate. A second plainsman was there to hold his heavy robes while he stepped over the carved-wood sides. The first had already placed the silk on the seat and stood beside the rearmost poles. The mute pulled a leather-wrapped forked stick from his belt, slapped it once against his thigh and the entourage headed back to the palace.

The plainsmen went to wherever it was that they abided when Molin didn't need their services; the youth carried the cloth to the family's quarters with the strictest instructions that the esteemable Lady Rosanda, Molin's wife, was not to see it. Molin himself wandered through the palace until he came to those rooms now allotted to Vashanka's servants and slaves.

It was the latter who interested him, specifically the lithe Northern slave they called Seylalha who practised the arduous Dance of the Consort at this time each day. The dance was a mortal recreation of the divine dance Azyuna had performed before her brother, Vashanka, persuading him to make her his concubine rather than relegate her to the traitorous ranks of their ten brothers. Seylalha would perform that dance in less than a week at the annual commemoration of the Ten -Slaying.

She had reached the climax of the music when he arrived, beginning the dervish swirls that brought her calf-length honey-coloured hair out into a complete, dazzling circle. The tattered practice rags had long-since been discarded, but she was not yet twirling so fast that the priest could not appreciate the firmness other thighs, the small, upturned b.r.e.a.s.t.s. (Azyuna's dance must be danced by a Northern slave or the movements became grotesque.) The slave's face, Molin knew, was as beautiful as her body though it was now hidden by the swinging hair.

He watched until the music exploded in a final crescendo, then slid the spy-hole shut with an audible click. Seylalha would see no virile man until the feast night when she danced for the G.o.d himself.

2.

The slave had been escorted to her quarters - more properly: returned to her cell. The beefy eunuch turned the key that slid a heavy bolt into place; he needn't have bothered. After ten years of captivity and especially now that she was in Sanctuary, Seylalha was not likely to risk her life in escape-attempts.

He had been there watching again; she knew that and more. They thought her mind was as blank as the surface of a pond on a windless day - but they were wrong.

They thought she could remember nothing of her life before they had found her in a squalid slave-pen; she'd merely been too smart to reveal her memories. Neither had she ever revealed that she could understand their Rankan language - had always understood it. True, the women who taught her the dance were all mutes and could reveal nothing, but there were others who had tongues. That was how she came to learn of Sanctuary, of Azyuna and the Feast of the Ten-Slaying.

Here in Sanctuary she was the only one who knew the whole dance but had not yet performed it for the G.o.d. Seylalha guessed that this year would be her year the one fateful night in her constricted life. They thought she didn't know what the dance was. They thought she performed it out of fear for the bitter-faced women with their leather-bound clatter-sticks. But in her tribe nine-year-olds were considered of marriageable age, and a seduction was a seduction regardless of the language.

Seylalha had reasoned, as well, that if she did not want to become one of those mutilated women who had trained and taught her she'd best get a child from her bedding with the G.o.d. Legend said Vashanka's unfulfilled desire was to have a child by his sister; Seylalha would oblige the G.o.d in exchange for her freedom.

The Ten-Slaying was a new-moon feast; she bled at the full-moon. If the G.o.d were man-like after the fashion of her clan-brothers, she would conceive.

She knelt on the soft bed-cushions they provided her, rocking back and forth until tears flowed down her face; silent tears lest her guardians hear and force a drugged potion down her throat. Calling on the sunG.o.d, the moonG.o.d, the G.o.d who tended the herds in the night and every other shadowy demon she could remember from the days before the slave-pens, Seylalha repeated her prayers: 'Let me conceive. Let me bear the G.o.d's child. Let me live! K-eep me from becoming one of themF In the distance, beyond walls and locked door, she could hear her less fortunate sisters speaking to each other on their tambours, lyres, pipes and clatter sticks. They'd danced their dance and lost their tongues; their wombs were filled with bile. Their music was a mournful, bitter dirge - it told her fate if she did not bear a child.

As the tears dried she arched her back until her forehead rested on the soft ma.s.s of her hair beneath her. Then, in rhythm to the distant conversation, she began her dance again.

3.

Molin paced around the marble-topped table he had brought with him from the capital. The mute who always attended him hid in the far corners of the room.

Molin's wrath had touched him three times and it was not yet high-noon.

The injustice, the indignity of being the supreme priest of Vashanka in a sink hole like Sanctuary. Construction lagged on the temple: inept crews, unforeseen accidents, horrendous omens. The old Ilsig hierarchy gloated and collected the citizenry's irregular t.i.thes. The Imperial entourage was cramped into inadequate quarters that shoved his household together. He was actually sharing rooms with his wife - a situation neither of them had ever desired and could no longer tolerate. The Prince was an idealist, an unmarried idealist, whose belief in the bliss of that inconvenient state was exceeded only by his nai'vety with regard to statecraft. It was difficult not to enjoy the Prince's company, however, despite his manifold shortcomings. He had the proper breeding for a useless younger son, and only the worst of fates had brought him so perilously close to the throne that he must be sent so depressingly far from it.

In Ranke, Molin had a fine house - as well as rooms within the temple. Rare flowers bloomed in his heated gardens; a waterfall coursed down one interior wall of the temple drowning out the street-noises and casting rainbows across this very table when it had resided in his audience chambers. Where had he gone wrong? Now he had a tiny room with one window looking out to an air shaft that must have sunk in the cesspools of h.e.l.l itself and another one, the larger of the two, overlooking the gallows. Moreover, the Hounds were elsewhere this morning and yesterday's corpses still creaked in the breeze.

Injustice! Indignity! And so, of course, he must clothe himself in the majesty of his position as Vashanka's loyal and duly initiated priest. Kadakithis must find his way to these forsaken quarters and endure them as the priests did if Molin was to acquire better lodgings. The Prince was late - no doubt he'd got lost.

'My Lord Molin?' a cheerful voice called from the antechamber. 'My Lord Molin?

Are you here?'

'I am, my Prince.'

Molin gestured to the mute who poured two goblets of fruit tea as the Prince entered the room.

'My Lord Molin, your messenger said you wished to see me urgently on matters concerning Vashanka? This must be true, isn't it, or you wouldn't have called me all the way out here. Where are we? No matter. Are there problems with the temple again? I've told Zaibar to see to it that the conscripts perform their duties...'

'No, my Prince, there are no new problems with the temple, and I have turned all those matters over to the Hounds, as you suggested. We are, by the way, in the outer wall of your palace -just upwind of the gallows. You can see them through the window - if you'd like.'

The Prince preferred to sip his tea.