Dangerous Offspring (40 page)

You are cordially invited to Micawater Palace for the Challenge of Cyan Peregrine to Lord Governor Lightning Micawater, which will be held in the palace grounds, on August 12th this Year of Our War two thousand and twenty-five.

 

The Challenge will be preceded by two days of events and feasting.

 

All other Challengers for the position of Lightning this quarter-year may submit their Challenges in advance so they may shoot in competition with Lightning preceding the Challenge of Cyan Peregrine.

 

RSVP to Lightning at Micawater Palace

Two months later, I was standing on the roof of Lightning’s palace, feasting my eyes on its fabulous vista. I slid down from its ridge to the balustrade, knocking off a couple of tiles. The groundsman, far below me on the terrace, waved his fist; so I gave him a cheerful salute. The view was so amazing, and the summer sun so hot, that I wanted to see Lightning’s majestic tournament from above.

I leant against the slope of the pediment, in the shadow of the gold ball on its point. The tiles beneath my feet were hand-made to look like feathers; the chimneys behind me were collected in refined plain pillars.

Everybody who was anybody was here, and some people who were nobody at all. Coaches were arriving continually, through the Lucerne Gate and down the Grand Walk to the front of the palace. The Walk was wide enough for three coaches abreast to drive between the double rows of pollarded elms. In the middle each coach reached a marble statue on a plinth of Lightning’s mother with a winged stag. They trotted around it on either side and parked next to each other on the vast gravel semicircle in front of the portico.

I walked along the balustrade, onto the end of the portico and peered over. I could just see Harrier on the front steps, welcoming in the latest batch of visitors. His age was showing; he had grey hair above his ears. He gave each guest a key on a ribbon and ushered them into the cool shadow of the exedra porch. They entered under the pediment, between its four fluted columns with drooping plume capitals, into the house.

The Austringer and Eyas Wings stretched out on both sides of me, perfectly symmetrical. I returned, along the top of the balustrade, to the back of the palace. Pavilions covered the whole lawn down to the lake.

The celebrations started yesterday, with archery competitions in the main ring adjoining the blue and white striped awning of the long stand. Notable archers shot at novelty targets like a dove tied to the top of a pole, or a hazel wand upright in the ground. There had been promenades and pleasure boats on the lake. Lightning had laid on no contemporary entertainments like jousting; instead he had had chariots made and a track built on the other side of the lake. He had stepped into one of these brass-clad contraptions, taken the reins of a pair of coursers and showed us how to race them. His youngest brother had been a champion charioteer. Tern and I had watched the races, very tentative at first but people quickly got the hang of how to drive them.

Then last night Lightning had held a ball. We had found costumes laid out in our rooms. The women looked beautiful in their draped gowns, and laughter echoed along the corridors as the men tried to figure out their togas. We were surprised but we took it as good entertainment. Everything, from the ancient harp music to the sickly mead, orgeat and boar roasts served in archaic style, was a reconstruction of his memory of the original Games. Lightning was beside himself with joy. He was home at last!

Down on the lawns everyone was scattered around the enormous stand along one side of the archery ground, roped off from the rest of the grass and outlined by hay bales. The other side was open, towards the lake and bridge. Beside it stood a cloth-of-gold pavilion for the Challengers and, on the other side, servants carrying trays of chilled Stenasrai wine came and went from a refreshment tent.

The pavilions were an ancient round design, not triangular, and the lines of bunting surrounding the archery ring were the same as those topping the walls of an amphitheatre. The whole scene belonged in the pages of a picture book: Lightning was indeed reliving the founding of the Circle.

A series of tall flagpoles flew long, dark blue banners with the Micawater mascle. My Wheel flag and Rayne’s red oriflamme pennant were there too. We were acting as witnesses for the Challenge. At least two Eszai witness every Challenge; mortals are never used as witnesses because Eszai are less likely to be corrupted. We have a vested interest in keeping the Challenges fair and we would fiercely resist any less than the best being admitted as to do so would tarnish our own status.

I looked out into the distance. The avenue ran straight on the other side of the lake, between beech plantations to the crest of a low hill. A folly stood there, a scaled-down replica of the entire palace, placed exactly opposite it at the end of the vista. It was so ingeniously decreased in size that it skewed the perspective–making the avenue look longer than it was. Everyone who saw the folly for the first time believed it was a palace exactly the same size at a great distance. I knew it housed only a single ballroom, but its trick of the eye was so exact I imagined that I could see a tiny Jant leaning on the pediment looking back at me. I shuddered.

Lemon trees and spear-like cypress grew on the brow of the hill clear against the sky around the folly and, beyond it, livestock grazed on smooth-turfed grass like a carpet. I could just see the beginnings of the hills rising up to Donaise in the distance. Tiny, spidery vine frames climbed them, and their lower slopes were lines of immaculately planted grey-green olive groves and coffee plantations.

I suppose the landscaped garden isn’t really designed to be seen from the roof. The guests on the terrace will have the best of it, or those strolling along the avenue, from which smaller pathways led and opened up new vistas. The perspective presented statues that seemed far off, suddenly near at hand. Gaps in the woodland revealed winter gardens, espaliers, great pillars, all meticulously landscaped for kilometres around.

Beyond the beech wood two smaller avenues crossed the main one in an asterisk, and of course Lightning had had time to watch over the trees as they grew and matured, so now centuries later, they were looking their best.

I stood on tiptoe and looked down the length of the Austringer Wing; over the roof of the Austringer building at the end. I could just see a dark green pattern of tall hedgerows–the labyrinth. It was enormous; lemon hedge on one side of the path and box on the other, so if you got lost you could smell your way around it to the great trellis and pergola in the centre. They are covered in vines drooping fat clusters of purple grapes. The tendrils hang down like a screen of falling water, and it is wonderful to push through them to the hideaway inside, where you can sit among statues in its shade.

Past the maze grew the long, unkempt grass of the ‘wilderness’–nothing of the sort but a well-designed meadow where Lightning held garden parties. I’d rather have kept it natural than have it look so through artifice and expenditure. Beyond that rose the belvedere, once copied by the Rachiswaters in their circular style. I wondered why it was that the richer people became, the more sequacious?

At the end of the Eyas Wing, in the other direction, a slope went down to ‘the farm’ by the river, a few kilometres distant but the clutch of aslant roofs looked more like a small town. Most of the estate workers lived there, tending beehives, kitchen and herb gardens, a phasianery for peacocks and pheasants, a rabbit warren, brick kilns and a dovecot. Lightning calls the estate office ‘The New House’, although it is four hundred years old. The Alula Road passes through to Micawater town itself, which was disguised behind another well-placed copse. Lots of townsfolk were here, watching the festivities and loving it. They were the sort of Awian citizens who hold street parties on their lord’s birthday.

People were converging on the archery stands. From up here, parasols over women’s shoulders looked like little circles. I noticed a knot of people heading from the refreshment tent and in their midst I recognised Eleonora’s confident stride. Beside her was my little, dark-haired, vivacious Tern. The Challenge is about to start. I had better go join them.

I stepped off the balustrade and tilted out in a long, slow glide. I swept over the terrace onto which the palace’s doors opened; then the water gardens below them, a round central spring framed symmetrically by four limpid pools.

The ground dropped away and steps led down to a parterre, with the sky-blue roses of Awia in flower beds bordered by low hedges. More box hedges looked like embroidery, clipped into lacy flowing designs, scrolls and plumes against the rich, loamy earth. From that level stone hounds guarded a balustraded double staircase descending to the avenue. People walking on the paths between the flower beds looked up as my shadow sped over them.

I focused on Tern and Eleonora and the courtiers surrounding them, who were settling on the lowest seat of the stands nearest the archery ground, reserved for the Queen’s use and covered with samite silk. I came in above the rounded end of the awning and veered wide to the arena’s grass, flared wings and touched down. My landing drew a little tentative applause from the crowd.

I hopped over the ropes and Tern came forward to meet me. ‘My love,’ I said over her shoulder as we hugged. ‘My dear, dear love.’

‘Isn’t this exciting?’ Tern exclaimed. ‘What a magnificent day!’

Eleonora nodded contentedly. ‘It’s a Lakeland summer all right. Three fine days and a thunderstorm. It’s like clockwork.’

‘Well, the sooner we get this over with and on to the party the better.’ She passed me a glass of sparkling wine. ‘I pestered Lightning to give us some real Stenasrai. “You must have had Stenasrai in six twenty,” I told him. “It’s better than that ridiculous mead.” It’s a wonder anyone in the seventh century had any teeth.’

I was enjoying the party but I still had a lot to do. Since the slaughter of the battle there had been more people hiding from the draft. There was a groundswell of sentiment against the war and criticism of the Emperor, which the Emperor was ignoring until it gradually subsided.

Eleonora had covered herself with glory and was full of pride. We hadn’t regained so much land since the Miroir battles of the last Tanager dynasty. No wonder the Rachiswaters had been so keen to match them by making advances in Lowespass, but Eleonora had taken more than any of them. Our shared knowledge of how awful the battle had been brought us together in this warm sunlight, whereas Tern, who could never understand, just kept talking. ‘I worried about you when the Circle broke,’ she said. ‘Although worry is quite an inadequate word for what I felt.’

‘I was fine, my love. I saw the flood. I never want to go back to Slake Cross though. Every time we go there we get massacred.’

Tern said, ‘Some people are talking about an odd phenomenon. My warden says god appeared to the Emperor on the battlefield.’

‘Really?’ I said casually. ‘In what shape?’

‘A very strange one. A tall column of smoke, and trees made of worms.’

‘Mass hysteria.’ I shrugged. ‘People report all kinds of visions under battle stress. It’s terror that causes it. Lowespass generates more folklore than it can use.’

‘Well, I don’t see why it should have to export it.’

I said, ‘Some fyrdsmen say that you can still hear the winch tower bell, tolling underwater in the river. Fyrdsmen will tell you any old crap.’

I was interrupted by three flights of whistling arrows being loosed on the other side of the lake in honour of the victor of the chariot races. Eleonora shook herself. ‘Lightning slept through the dam breaking,’ she said. Tern and I laughed. It’s a joke that Lightning is such a sound sleeper Insects could be eating him and he wouldn’t wake up.

‘You dare wake him, Jant,’ said Tern. ‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Um…I was busy.’

‘And the Emperor asked Lightning to have dinner with him. At least, I heard so…Is it true?’

‘Yes. That
is
true.’

‘But it’s unheard of! For Lightning, for anybody! Well, come on. Tell me. What did they talk about?’

‘I asked Lightning, but he wouldn’t say.’

‘I would never have thought anything like a one-to-one conversation could ever happen.’

‘It was in the hall at Slake,’ I said. ‘No one else was there.’

‘Couldn’t you have spied? No, stupid question.’

Eleonora spun the key to her suite around her finger on its ribbon. ‘This place is quaint. I like the marble bathrooms. But it’s not as big as Rachiswater. Or as grand as I’ve planned Tanager to be. It’s odd to think it was the capital once.’

‘It’s not bad for five four nine!’ Tern said.

‘Lightning’s town was even bigger than Hacilith back then,’ I added. ‘Hacilith took a hundred years to overtake it. He never wanted to extend it; he wanted to preserve it and the palace too.’

Eleonora spun and spun her key. ‘What a shame. Lightning rattling around in the house alone for fourteen hundred years. One hundred and forty bedrooms and no woman to share any of them with. It’s enough to turn a man’s mind. Why hasn’t he ever married? Does he bat for the other team, or what?’

Tern laughed. ‘No-oo. He’s just looking for the perfect match.’

‘Well, we’ll have to do something about that.’ The two women looked at each other. ‘He just needs to relax. Perhaps his Queen could…command him to.’

‘I think he wants some kind of red-haired huntress,’ Tern said as we settled ourselves in the stands.

‘Nonsense. He just needs the attentions of a woman
au fait
with her desires.’

From here was a much better view uphill to the palace. It was all warm, shortbread-coloured Donaise limestone, from the rusticated stonework on the lower storey to the rich carving in the great pediment; many strips of decorative mouldings surrounded a smooth bas-relief of the winged hounds bearing the lozenge coat of arms. Each column led up to a statue on the roof as if supporting it. Between the columns two levels of windows proclaimed how many rooms could house Lightning’s guests. The Eyas and Austringer buildings at the ends of the two wings had enormous windows with round arches giving on to the ballroom and stateroom respectively. It was built in the most regular manner rare in the country today; Awia has gone straight from Micawater’s classical to neoclassical, and now Rachiswater’s art nouveau, without ever having been through a rustic phase like the Plainslands.

‘It’s all right for some,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Tern.

‘Well, Lightning walked straight in to the Circle. He never had to wander around the world the way I did, before I even found out the Castle existed. He didn’t have to plot and scheme like an Awian prince, either, because he had the Castle and his immortality instead. No wonder he can pretend this noble liege fantasy.’