“Of course, Your Honor.”
“That was nobly done,” said Liath as the girl was led away. Strange to hear words meant sardonically but spoken as if in praise.
“It isn’t right.” There was a lamp here, too, set on a tripod along the wall, a plump ceramic rooster with a flame burning from its crest. Its light gilded his hair and made his robes shimmer. “She was so young, and unwilling.”
Anger burned away the chains that fettered her tongue. “And wasn’t I, Hugh? Wasn’t I?”
He changed color. “To my shame,” he murmured hoarsely. That fast, he walked away—from her, from the hall where singing and merriment carried on, oblivious to the absence of the hated king. She hurried after him but somehow could not quite catch up, down carpeted corridors, up stairs whose banisters were carved with sinuous dragons, crossing a high bridge, out into the night air, still rosy from the sunset, that led them over into the holy precincts of the skopos’ palace. At last he paused, high on a parapet overlooking the river below and the distant lights of the harbor to the west. They were alone except for a lamp swaying in a soft breeze, flame twisting and flaring as the wind teased it.
He turned on her. “Why do you follow me? Can you forgive me for what I did to you?”
It was like lashing a stubborn mule to drive the words out. “How can you think I would?”
“Then why come here? Why torment me? Although truly if that’s how you wish to punish me for the harm I did to you, then you are amply justified.”
“How am I tormenting you?”
“To hear your voice and see your face after so long? To stand so close and not touch you? Isn’t that torment enough? Nay.” He turned away suddenly to open doors she hadn’t seen before. “Let me not speak of torment, who sinned so grievously and caused you so much pain.”
Her voice was her own again, but her limbs still worked as though to another’s will. She followed him into a simply furnished chamber, a single bed, a table covered with books, a bench, a chest, and a lamp hanging from the ceiling. The curtains softening the walls had no pattern, only a plain gold weave as richly brilliant as his hair, like an echo of the sun. He stood beside the table, not looking at her, profile limned by lamplight. Like the sun in shadow.
It was just too sudden. Words spilled out of her unbidden as her fingers brushed her own neck. “It was just that you had to have your hand on the throat of everything you wanted to possess. And I was one of those things.”
Fretfully, he fingered a parchment sheet that lay at the corner of the table, running a hand up the neat lines of its text and then down again, up and then down. “You were all that mattered. From the first day I met you it was as if I had been blinded, a veil cast over my sight. I could see nothing but you.” He fell silent, and at last went on. “I know your secret, I know what you are, but I will never betray you.”
“What am I?”
He looked up at last, meeting her gaze, and his stare was so intense and so scalding that she wished he hadn’t. Better not to see him, scarred and flawed as he was but still as beautiful as the dawn; standing this nakedly before her, his desire for her was plain to see.
“Fire,” he said hoarsely. “Ai, God, Liath, go. Go. I desire you too much. I can’t trust myself with you so close. I’ve tried to make a decent life here as a presbyter, doing what I can to serve God, and it will be enough.”
“I’ll go,” she said, stumbling over the words as the chains wrapped their silken cord around her again, wanting to say, “I’ll stay.” “But you said that you have Da’s book.”
“The book.” He lifted a hand to conceal his face. He stood so still for a moment, his emotions hidden from her, that she actually had an instant of disorientation, as though the world was spinning wildly beneath her feet and she was about to fall, or was already falling endlessly and forever down through the spheres until she would be lost in the pit and never free.
“The book.” He lowered his hand to rustle the parchment. The movement drew her gaze down to the figures neatly inscribed there.
“What is that?” she asked, enticed by the orderly lines and repetitive figures. Fetters drew tighter, binding her again as she moved to stand beside him so that she didn’t block the light. “That’s a date.”
“A date? I’ve been puzzling this out. I don’t know what it means, but there’s clearly a pattern. Do you know?”
“Yes, yes,” she said with mounting excitement. “Da and I saw a clay tablet with writing like this in the ruins of Kartiako. There was a very old man there, a sage who claimed to have knowledge of the most ancient days of his tribe. Of course I can’t read this writing, all sticks and angles, but he said it was a table charting the course of Somorhas. When it appears in the evening sky and when in the morning.”
“And the intervals of disappearance?”
“Yes, exactly! But this is a whole page! The other was only fragments. Is there more?”
“This is the only page I have seen. I believe it was copied from a more ancient source, perhaps from one of these clay tablets you mention. Do you see, here,” he pointed to a smudge, “how the scribe made a mistake and then corrected it. How does it work?”
“The ancient Babaharshans observed the stars for a thousand years. They recognized that Somorhas is both the evening star and the morning star, and that when she falls into the shadow of the sun that she vanishes for an interval, sometimes about eight days and sometimes about fifty days.”
He nodded, caught up in her excitement. “But Somorhas is part of God’s creation. Fate guides her movements. Isn’t it every eight years that she comes again to the place she was before, relative to the position of the sun?”
“Yes, of course. Look, here. That set of markings is a date, according to the sage at Kartiako. He called it—”
A moment only it took her to shift her attention into her city of memory. She skipped past the seven gates, the Rose of Healing, the Sword of Strength, the Cup of Boundless Waters, the Ring of Fire, the Throne of Virtue, the Scepter of Wisdom, passing beneath the Crown of Stars itself to the topmost part of the city where lay the astronomer’s hall, a circular building ringed with smaller, curving walls. Here in these galleries she had set her memory pictures of the cycles of the wandering stars and the precession of the equinoxes. Here, in an alcove marked with a drifting sand dune and lit by a bright sapphire no brighter than Hugh’s eyes to signify the sage’s complete love of wisdom, she found what she was looking for.
“He called it the month of ‘Ishan.’ These lines signify numbers, so that would be eleven. I don’t know how to read the rest, but this says that on the eleventh day of the month of Ishan, Somorhas would, well, that’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Her first appearance as morning star for that cycle, perhaps, or her disappearance into the sun’s glare.” She faltered, remembering how quickly others got bored when she got caught up in cycles and epicycles, conjunctions and precession, the endlessly intriguing wonder of the universe.