It faded as the tower chamber swam back into view, as the daimone infesting her pulled her back into the dream, into the lie.
One step she took, toward the Sun, then a second agonizing step as Hugh winced in pain and she wanted to reach to him, to smooth anguish from his brow, to show him that he truly was her heart’s desire. No one else. No one else fit for her.
A third step, like walking on broken glass, and she had crossed the plain. The inferno that was the sphere of the Sun began actually to burn the clothes off her body.
Scour herself clean. She wasn’t afraid of fire. She never had been. The fire cut deeper, melting away her flesh, but that was not really her flesh but rather the daimone, writhing as the sun’s fire forced it to twist out of her body. It fled down along a gleaming thread, back to Earth.
“Damn.” Hugh’s voice was almost lost in the crack of flame as the wall of fire rose in a sheet of brilliance in front of her.
Had it all been a lie? Or had she seen truths within herself, far down in those depths, that she could not bear to acknowledge? Wasn’t it true, after all, that beneath the surface they shared a similar passion? That she had more in common with Hugh than she had ever had with Sanglant?
The truth was too horrible to contemplate. Naked, she flung herself into the blazing furnace of the Sun.
4
NO doubt the old Dariyan Empire had fallen in large part because of the corruption that had ripened within the imperial house and burst at last in a final flowering of putrescence. Ancient images and obscene pagan carvings still fouled old corners and forgotten rooms in the skopos’ palace. Not all had been chipped away and replaced by saintly figures more appropriate to a land presided over by the Daisanite church.
Corruption still insinuated its tentacles into the heart of earthly empire, whether spiritual or secular. That much was achingly apparent to Antonia as she sat at the Feast of St. Johanna the Messenger and watched King John, known as Ironhead, publicly molest the daughter of the Lady of Novomo, she who had harbored the fugitive Queen Adelheid last spring. The girl was barely into pubescence, in the first flush of development. Ironhead drank heavily and acted every bit the coarse bastard he in truth was, even fondling the girl’s small breasts through her gown. That she wept silently, tears coursing down her face at this humiliation, open for all to see, did not stop him.
But Hugh did.
He called over a steward and whispered instructions into the man’s ear. Soon enough, a trio of the king’s whores—Ironhead had installed a dozen or more in his chambers—emerged to the sound of lute and drum. They were pretty young things, skilled in the art of lascivious dancing, something not meant to be viewed in such a public arena. Their antics would have made Antonia blush if she were not made of sterner stuff. She understood the attractions of the flesh though she had long ago strangled any such carnal desire in herself. It only got in the way.
Presbyter Hugh was no fool. He understood the weak stuff that Ironhead was made of. Once the king’s attention had been caught by the obscene undulations of the dancing girls, Hugh sent the king’s hostage away and substituted another of the king’s whores in her place. Ensnared in the grasp of wine and lust, Ironhead either did not notice or in any case soon ceased to care.
The feast dragged on in this manner. Where were the pious readings of the book of St. Johanna, to remind the faithful of her apostolic journey and her noble martyrdom? None stood to sing psalms or to declaim from the Holy Verses. Feast days had always been celebrated with the solemnity they deserved in Mainni, when she had been biscop in that city. But the skopos lay dying and could not control Ironhead’s excesses.
In the midst of the merrymaking, Hugh rose quietly and left. Antonia made haste to follow him. He had gone outside to the shelter of the colonnade. Scattered clouds made a patchwork of the night sky. A misting rain fell.
He was not alone. By the heavy scent of lilac, she knew that the womanly form leaning against him, embracing him, was one of the king’s whores.
“He’ll never notice I’m gone this one night,” the young woman said in a breathless voice. “I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you.”
He set hands firmly on her shoulders and pushed her away. “I beg your pardon, Daughter. My heart is already given to another.”
She hissed, like a cat ready to claw. “What’s her name? Where is she?”
“Not walking on this Earth.”
The whore began to snivel. “I hate God for stealing you. You ought to be warming women’s beds, not praying on cold stone.”
“Don’t hate God,” he said gently. “Pray for healing.”
“What do I need healing for? You could heal me, if you’d come to me. Aren’t I pretty? Everyone says so. All the other men desire me.”
“Beauty doesn’t last forever. When men no longer desire you, you’ll be cast onto the street. Which will serve you better, Daughter? Men’s lust, or God’s love?”
“It’s all very well for you to babble piously about God’s love! What other profession is open to me? My mother was a whore. There are at least five presbyters smirking like saints in the skopos’ palace who might be my father, any one of them! What am I to do, a girl like me, bastard daughter of a whore, except be a whore in my turn? That’s the only life I know. What respectable man would want someone like me?”
He didn’t flinch under the assault of her scathing fury. “I happen to know,” he said quietly, “that there is a certain respectable sergeant of the guards at the skopos’ palace who has a brother who is a tailor down in the city. That brother has had cause to visit the sergeant a time or two, and he saw you in the garden more than once. I expect he even makes excuses to come visit his brother in the hopes of catching a glimpse of you. But of course to his way of thinking, what chance has a common tailor like him with little enough to offer compared to the silks and wine given you in the king’s suite?”
“His kin would all know I was a whore, and hate me for it,” she muttered, but the edge of anger in her voice had muted. She sounded unsure of herself, afraid to hope. “He’s probably some ugly, leprous, wizened dwarf anyway, who can’t get a decent wife.”
“Ah, well. I happen to know he visits his brother every Ladysday and that they attend Mass together in the servants’ chapel.”
“You lead that Mass,” she said, surprised. “Everyone knows you do. All the servants talk about it. But I know that the presbyters don’t let whores into the church, the old hypocrites, poking their lemans in the nighttime and calling them nasty sinners during the day.”
“When I lead Mass in the servants’ chapel, no one is turned away, no matter what they have been in their past. No matter what they have done.”