“Never fully. His wounds are healing, but as you see, he has grown very thin. He will never eat more than a few bites, and only when the boy feeds him.”
“It was clever of you to bring the lad here.” The words of praise sounded grudging at best. “But if the choice was mine, I would put a knife through him and be done with it. He should be lying at the bottom of the sea with the rest of his men.”
He was sinking through the water, down and down. Much sooner than expected he hit the bottom. All around him there was slime and ooze, a primal stench that seemed to go back to the world’s beginning.
They had not buried him at sea, as they had promised, but had flung him into the swamps outside the city.
If he had been alone it might have been bearable. But eels caressed him with loathsome wrigglings, fish nibbled at his lips and ears. He knew the abominable caresses of crocodiles, and the vampire kisses of leeches. Even the very slime was amorous, defiling him in orgasm after orgasm.
When Cuillioc woke the next time, it was to uncertainty and confusion. Where was he and how had he come there? Where had he been before that? He caught at a memory: a ship and a battle. But it was all noise and falling bodies—a blaze of sunlight on bright blue water—smoke and flames. And he was not on a galley now; he was lying on a narrow, uncomfortable bed in a cool, dim room.
“You have been wandering in your wits for many weeks. Now you are awake, we may hope for a speedier recovery.” Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the dusky chamber, and the first thing he saw was a man in the black five-cornered hat and dark green robe of a Mirazhite physician, bending over the bed as if to study him more closely, a sardonic expression on his lean, bronzed face.
“I don’t wish to recover,” said Cuillioc fretfully. “I thought I would die. I meant to die.”
“But that would not please my lord, the Son of the Sun.”
Slowly the rest of the room took shape: walls of raw, undressed stone; an iron grille covering a single window; a heavy door with a narrow slit cut into the wood, through which someone might easily peer in from outside. Besides the bed and a chair there were no other furnishings, and the blankets that covered him were stiff and coarse under his hands, as though they might be made of sacking.
“Is this the Citadel?”
“No, you are no longer in Xanthipei. This is the palace of Lord Vaz, the Prince of Persit. By his order you were brought here after the battle in the bay.” A shade of amusement crept into the doctor’s voice.
“You are the son of the moon goddess and he is ‘First-born of the Sun.’ But the moon dare not approach the sun too nearly, or she would be burned to cinders. You might have profited from her example.”
Cuillioc ignored the majority of this, for it did not much interest him. “What does your Lord Vaz want of me?”
“That,” said the physician, “is for the Prince to tell you himself.”
In another day, Cuillioc was able to sit propped up by pillows in the bed. On that day and the days that followed, his page would appear, from time to time, for the purpose of feeding him. But they never allowed the boy to remain with him long.
“What do you do in the times between?” Cuillioc asked him once, when the boy was spooning a thin broth flavored with the vile, life-giving herb into his mouth.
The urchin answered with characteristic brevity. “Same as I did for you, mostly.”
“You attend on Lord Vaz?” It was impossible not to smile at the idea of a guttersnipe from Apharos waiting on haughty Mirazhite royalty.
“I listen to people. I tell him what they say.” But then he added, in a startling burst of volubility, “They think I don’t know more than a word or two of their language. They think they can say what they like, and I’m too stupid to understand.”
In fact, Cuillioc remembered, the boy had picked up the language with amazing facility. If not the formal tongue, at least the argot of the servants. And it was not surprising if he was spying now for Lord Vaz.
His life had been such, that he had learned to find friends where he could—and discard them just as readily. “Do you spy on me?”
A shake of the untidy head. “No need to. He knows where you are. He knows you aren’t going nowhere.”
Each morning in Persit the trumpets shouted at dawn. Soon after, a noise like the gnashing of thousands of teeth came in through Cuillioc’s window. It was a sound (he eventually learned) originating in the hovels of the lowest class, where the women bent over their mortars and pestles grinding the grain that would feed their families that day. In Xanthipei, his apartments had been quiet, for they were not on the city side of the palace, but here he was exposed to the clamor and stench of the streets.
Despite the physician’s optimistic predictions, his recovery was slow. He continued to be subject to nocturnal sweats, alternately freezing and scalding his flesh, which drove the poisons out of his body even as he breathed more of them in. Nevertheless, the physician felt that a more drastic purging was necessary, and treated him with drenches and bleedings—for there were no natural healers in Mirizandi, and these were the methods the doctors were obliged to use. On learning that the leeches, at least, had been real, Cuillioc shuddered with horror and burned with humiliation, wondering how many of the other things he had dreamed were real as well.
Whether through the ministrations of his doctor or the healing hand of time, he finally grew stronger. Then they dressed him in somebody’s cast-off garments, marched him through miles of thick-walled corridors and pillared courtyards, and at last brought into the presence of Lord Vaz himself.
The Prince of Persit gazed down on him with delicate scorn from a raised chair under a gaudy silken canopy. A slender hand, every nail of which had grown to incredible lengths, gestured toward a low, cross-legged stool. “Be seated.”
“I prefer to stand,” said Cuillioc, with a haughty look of his own. But a pair of slaves—naked to the waist, with coppery skins oiled and glistening, the better to display the bulging muscles of their upper limbs and torsos—took hold of him on either side and lowered him forcibly to the stool. “I understood it was an invitation, not a command.”
“By which it may be seen,” said Lord Vaz, “that you do not understand our customs at all. When a superior speaks, there is no invitation. He expects obedience.”
“So it is among my people,” Cuillioc answered. “But I am the son of the Empress, you a petty prince.
You are not my superior, nor even my equal.” One of the slaves struck him hard, nearly knocking him off the stool.
With a bleeding lip and a smashed face, Cuillioc managed to maintain his fragile equanimity. The blow had neither surprised nor dismayed him. His desire for death had not diminished, and he hoped, given sufficient provocation, Lord Vaz would oblige him. “There can be no possible advantage to you in keeping me here. If you think you can hold me hostage or collect a ransom, you are greatly mistaken. I am disgraced; my mother would not lift a hand to recover me, or even to save my life.” To speak was painful; he thought his jaw was broken or at least dislocated, but pride forced him to continue. “She would never yield to threats under any circumstances.”
“You are not here as a hostage, but as my prisoner, to live or die at my whim. How I choose may depend on whether you prove yourself useful or not. I wish to know how Ouriána—mere mortal flesh, and a woman besides—ascended to such power she can pretend to be a goddess.”
Were it not for his aching jaw, Cuillioc would have laughed; the man was so ignorant, so obtuse. “My mother is a goddess. And there is nothing I can tell you about her apotheosis; it is a holy mystery.”
“That is nonsense. I myself am half a god, and so I know.” Lord Vaz sneered, and his fingers drummed the arm of his chair. “Do you think I cannot force you to speak? I am gentle with you now”—there could be nothing less gentle than his expression as he said this—“but my patience is not long. Spare yourself pain by answering my questions now.”