Collected Short Fiction, page 1507
“And what might that be, my dearest one?” he asked, gently stroking her sleek pale back.
“Well,” said Etaag Thuuyal, “this comes from Subsidiary Concubine Hypoepoi, who heard it from the High Eunuch Sambin, who got it from Lady-in-Waiting Sipyar Giyango, whose husband heard it from somebody whose friend is a Justiciar at the starport. It seems that a starship arrived this morning from someplace out in the Territories, and when the passengers disembarked it was discovered that one of them was—can you imagine it?—no, you would never guess, not in a million years—well, the passengers came down the ramp, and most of them were the usual assortment of tourists and pilgrims and such, but then what do you think marched out of the ship, as blithe and bold as anything could be—?”
“Tell me,” said the Emperor Ryah VII.
Etaag Thuuyal smiled with deep self-satisfaction. Great benefits, she had learned long ago, accrued to those who were capable of keeping the Emperor amused.
“Well,” she said, “what I heard was—”
And at last she unrolled the story as it had traveled up the chain of communication to her ears.
The Emperor was startled. And fascinated as well.
A maula on Haraar? Well, of course, the creature would have to die. An offense of that magnitude couldn’t go unpunished. Propriety demanded it.
But—all proprieties aside—the Emperor Ryah VII was instantly taken by the inherent mystery of the maula’s apparently suicidal decision to travel to the Capital World by commercial spaceliner in full knowledge of the risk involved. Suicide, he knew, was not a typical behavior pattern of barbarians and other simple life-forms. They might be uneducated and coarse and dull-witted and crude, but never were they blind to their own survival imperatives. Like all primitive animals, they burned within with the furious species-need to live and reproduce and maintain their species’ niche in the great chain of being. An animal might gnaw off its own leg in order to escape from a trap into which it had stumbled, the Emperor thought, but it was hardly likely to stick its leg in the trap in the first place, purely to find out if the trap really would close on it.
So why—why—
“There must be an explanation for what this maula has done. To march with open eyes into certain death—no, no, it must have had a reason that made sense to it,” said the Emperor. “It must have. What possibly could have possessed the creature? I have to find out!” His face was aglow with excitement. He sprang lithely out of the hammock and called for the eunuch on duty.
“A maula has turned up at the starport aboard a liner from Seppuldidorior and it seems they haven’t executed it yet. Find out if that’s so. And if the execution really hasn’t take place, tell them that I’ve ordered a day’s delay in the carrying out of the sentence. I want to talk to this maula first. Have it brought here first thing in the morning.”
“I hear and obey, O Lord of the Universe.”
“Run along, then.”
The Emperor returned to his hammock. Etaag Thuuyal stretched out her arms to him, amiably, invitingly.
4.
LAYLAH WALIS was beginning to worry—just a little. Or perhaps more than a little; but she tried to keep her uneasiness under control. Everything so far had gone pretty much according to plan, after all. She had actually managed to get to Haraar, which was no easy trick for someone from the Territories. And she had survived the critical first few hours of her presence here without suffering the fate of summary execution to which, at least in theory, she could have been subjected.
But now—
Now she was in jail, more or less, and the hours were ticking along—it must be almost dawn by now—and she wasn’t at all sure what was going to happen next. The fact that a whole series of Imperial bureaucrats had come to interrogate her during the course of the day, each obviously holding a higher rank in the official hierarchy than the one before, was a good sign. The more of them who came, the better. Especially since the more highly placed ones had appeared distinctly intrigued and perplexed by the inexplicable fact of her arrival here.
The biggest risk had been that some clod of a low-caste port functionary, aware of the stringent desecration law and devoid of all curiosity about why Laylah might have chosen to violate it, would simply haul out his blaster and impose the appropriate sentence on her the moment she stepped off the starship. But that hadn’t happened; and now she had put her hooks in some bigger fish. If her calculations were correct, the mystifying tale of the maula at the starport was continuing to climb up and up in the hierarchical levels, until eventually it would come to the ear of the Emperor himself. And then—
Then—
But that was if her calculations were correct. It was all a wild gamble, a thousand-to-one shot, and she had known it from the start. A much more likely outcome would be that the port officials, after dithering around for a day or so, would finally come to the conclusion that the decree concerning desecration of the Capital World by maulas meant exactly what it seemed to mean, and that they had no choice but to invoke a sentence of summary execution. And then, as soon as they had shuffled through the proper bureaucratic procedures, the door of her holding chamber would open and some grim masked functionary would step inside and—
She could hear sounds in the hall. People approaching, right on cue.
Then through the glass window of her cell Laylah saw three figures. One was the stocky little security chief, Dulik, who had spoken with her earlier that day. He had seemed intelligent and sensitive, even sympathetic. The other two, who flanked him at what Laylah knew was the proper distance of respect in this culture of elaborate social distinctions, were brutish-looking low-caste Ansaar in somber dull-green uniforms, even shorter and more chunky than Dulik—some sort of security guards, she supposed.
Executioners?
Certainly they looked grim, all three of them. Laylah had made a careful study over the course of many years of Ansaar body language, and the posture of these three, as she surveyed them through the window, seemed ominous indeed. They held themselves very stiffly, shoulders pushed up practically to their ears and long arms close to their sides, and their eyes were retracted in their sockets, always a mark of tension among the Ansaar, with the vertical slits of their pupils nearly invisible.
The cell door swung open.
“You are summoned, Laylah Walis,” the security chief said, in a taut and portentous tone.
He seemed almost to be trembling.
Were they going to execute her on the spot, then? Laylah’s studies in modern Ansaar culture had told her that the death penalty, though it was prescribed for all manner of breaches of taboo, was very rarely inflicted nowadays, at least on the inner worlds of the Imperium, and it was generally regarded by most citizens as a harsh and unsavory relic of an earlier and more violent era. Now that the Ansaar had conquered as much of the galaxy as they seemed to require, they were mellowing, evidently, into a more easy-going race. Which might explain why these three looked so tense and miserable, if indeed they found themselves with no choice but to put their prisoner to death right here and now for her defiance of the tiihad rules.
“Summoned to what?” she said, as calmly as she could.
“Not to what, maula, but to whom. The Emperor has requested that you be brought to him. For some reason he is interested in speaking with you before you die.”
The Emperor?
Then it had all worked out the right way, after all! Laylah allowed a quick smile to flit across her face. A surge of relief flooded through her. Success! Success! Not an execution, but an audience with the High Ansaar himself!
But then one of the two low-caste Ansaar produced a coil of rope from a sack that he was carrying and the other grabbed her arms and yanked them roughly behind her back as though she were a beast being trussed for slaughter.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“It would be worth our heads if you were somehow to escape,” said the security chief, as the guards proceeded to tie her wrists tightly together, and then her ankles. “We intend to take no chances whatever with you.” He signalled to the guards, who seized her by the elbows and propelled her across the room and out the door of the cell.
It was awkward and humiliating. She was a head and a half taller than the two Ansaar and it was all they could do to hold her upright. Her legs dragged behind her as they pulled her clumsily along, and their sharp-clawed seven-fingered hands dug miserably into her flesh as they sought to maintain their grip on her. All she could do was to relax her body as much as possible and try to make things easy for them. But even so she felt stretched and bruised and cramped by the time they had hauled her in a series of bumps and jolts down an interminable tunnel and out into the bright golden-green light of the Haraar dawn.
A sleek teardrop-shaped car was waiting. They dumped her inside, and jumped in alongside her.
“The Imperial Palace,” she heard Dulik say to the driver. And then, in a muttered undertone: “He delays the maula’s death. He must speak with her first, we are told. Well, who are we to question the Emperor’s wishes? Who are we, indeed?”
There was a humming sound as the magnetic rotors cut in.
Then the car lifted and floated down the track that would take it out of the starport and toward Haraar City, the fabled capital of the Ansaar Empire.
Tales of the beauty and splendor of the great Ansaar metropolis were told everywhere in the known galaxy. “The rose-red city half as old as time,” a poet had called it—a city of a thousand palaces and five thousand temples, of green parks and leafy promenades, of shining stone obelisks and long eye-dazzling colonnades. From here, the invincible imperialist might of the Ansaar had radiated relentlessly and irresistibly outward over the past ninety thousand years, spreading and spreading from planet to planet and from system to system in ever-widening circles until the Ansaar host controlled a dominion that arched across better than a thousand parsecs of space. And for eons the wealth of all that vast empire had poured down in torrents upon this city of Haraar, making it the most majestic seat of government that had ever existed anywhere.
But little of the capital’s wondrous beauty was visible to Laylah Walis as the maglev car in which she rode floated silently toward the center of the city. She sat hunched down between the two Ansaar guards, her long legs sprawling far forward and her head uncomfortably buried in a plush cushion; and all she could see at the angle she was forced to assume was a glimpse of a golden dome here, a pink minaret there, a great gleaming black obelisk jutting into the sky over yonder.
The car floated to a halt. Ungently the guards pulled her from it.
She had one astounding glimpse of her surroundings: the courtyard of an incredible palace: high gleaming walls of porphyry inlaid with medallions of onyx rising before her—delicate many-windowed towers of dizzying height climbing far above them—long boulevards lined by strips of immaculately tended shrubbery stretching off to left and right, with crystalline reflecting pools, narrow as daggers, running down their middles—a colossal shining globe of translucent quartz right in front of her through the intricate channels of which flowed rivers of shimmering quicksilver moving in brilliant pulsations—
Then a thick smelly hood of some dense furry fabric was pulled down over Laylah’s head and she saw nothing further.
“This is the maula that the Emperor asked us to bring to him,” Laylah heard Dulik saying—speaking to palace officials, no doubt. There was an interchange of low muffled words; her hood was lifted for a moment and yellow Ansaar eyes, cat-like and unfriendly, peered briefly into her own, and then the hood descended again; and suddenly she was swept off her feet and carried away, arms and legs dangling unceremoniously in mid-air, with no more care for her comfort than a sack of produce being hauled into a market would have received.
She clamped her lips tight and muttered some angry words within the privacy of her mind. This was hardly the kind of reception she had imagined, when she had first heard that she was to be taken before the Emperor.
But worse was to come.
There was an endless time of footsteps clattering down some marble hall; then the sound of a great door being swung back; and then the bruising impact of being dropped like so much merchandise onto a stone floor.
Laylah lay there, listening to the echoing drumbeat of retreating footsteps, and then to a silence so intense that it roared in her ears.
She was alone, so far as she could tell—bound and hooded, lying on a cold slab of stone in the middle of what must have been an immense empty room. The ropes that encircled her wrists and ankles were beginning to chafe and cut cruelly into her skin, and she felt stifled and nauseated by the increasingly stale, moist air within the hood that covered her face.
She remained that way for hours, struggling for breath, unable to see, and virtually unable to move. She itched in a dozen places and could do nothing about it. Her legs and back grew stiff and sore. She wriggled and twisted, trying to loosen her muscles, but it was all but useless. The stone beneath her body grew colder and colder. Lying on a block of ice could hardly have been more unpleasant. At least ice would melt, after a while. But this stone floor—no doubt it was beautifully polished and magnificent in hue and texture; it might have been the finest marble, or perhaps travertine or alabaster—was devoid of all warmth and miserably unsatisfactory as something to lie on.
Footsteps, finally. Many people approaching.
Voices, growing closer.
The hood being lifted at long last. Laylah blinked, gasped eagerly for breath, scratched her chin against her shoulder to gratify the itch that had begun to plague her half a million years before.
She was indeed in a bleak, enormous stone-walled chamber, high-ceilinged and windowless and altogether bare except for a few small statues set in niches in the distant corners of the room. It might have been a drilling-hall for soldiers. All around her stood a ring of armed guards in comic-opera uniforms: flowing crimson pantaloons, great green sashes, loose purple tunics with great flaring shoulder-pads. Like all the other Ansaar she had seen thus far in her life, they were unprepossessing to behold, short and stocky of build, with thick chests and long ape-like arms and stubby bowed legs.
But standing in front of her, apart from all the others and studying her as though she were some rare and curious zoological specimen, was an Ansaar of such noble mien and grandeur that Laylah knew at once that she must be in the presence of the Emperor Ryah VII.
He seemed to be almost of a different species from the other Ansaar. He was immensely tall, not only for an Ansaar but very likely taller than any human man Laylah had known: well over two meters, she guessed, perhaps two and a half. His proportions were more like those of a human than an Ansaar, too: his legs were long and tapered, and his arms, though of a goodly length, were nothing like the dangling gorilla-arms of the guards, but reached only as far as his thighs, as a human’s arms would. The sagittal crest that ornamented his hairless head was the most impressive Ansaar crest she had ever seen, reaching well past his earlobes and extending almost to the small of his neck, and its contours were awesomely steep, rising to needle-sharp prominence—a mark, Laylah knew, of the highest caste.
His skin color, too, was unfamiliar. The Ansaar she had previously seen ranged in hue from the palest tan to a deep olive. From throat to ankles this Ansaar was swathed in a thickly brocaded robe of heavy crimson fabric shot through with threads of silver; but his face and hands were visible, and they were the color of richest mahogany, with a fiery scarlet undertone. Out of that deep-toned mask of a face came the gleam of penetrating green eyes—not yellow, like other Ansaar eyes, but green, the lustrous heavy green of pure emerald.
Surely this was someone who had been bred for a thousand generations for the purpose of occupying the Sapphire Throne of the Ansaar Empire.
He was truly kingly in a way that Laylah had not imagined possible. There was the clear aura of royalty about him from head to toe. Despite herself, despite the profound and fierce loathing for all things Ansaaran that burned within the bosom of every member of the human species, Laylah felt a powerful throb of awe—and an unmistakable, astonishing, incredible shiver of immediate physical attraction.
“Lift it up,” the Emperor said, in a voice that rumbled with authority and sonorous force. “Let me see what this maula looks like.”
The guards raised her to a standing position. Her legs were cramped and stiff, and she nearly toppled; but she held herself upright with a fierce effort, struggling to ignore the pricklings that shot through her feet and calves like shafts of fire. Lifting her head, she stared directly at him, her eyes meeting his directly, the upper-caste style of Ansaar social usage, her head inclined at precisely the correct angle to indicate deference to his majestic person while retaining her own personal dignity.
“A she-maula, I’d guess. But look at her! Look at her!” the Emperor cried. “Is that a maula expression on her face? Is that the way a maula would stand? She holds herself like a countess! She looks right into my eyes the way a high-caste woman would!” Then he smiled a jagged Ansaar smile and said, “You are a woman, aren’t you, maula? I don’t know much about humans, actually. But you seem female to me.”
“You are completely correct in that assumption, Majesty,” said Laylah coolly.
He chuckled. “And she speaks perfect Universal! Just like a lady of the court! Better than some, in fact.” The Emperor took a couple of sauntering steps toward her, his vertical pupils narrowing to slits, his brilliant green eyes gleaming brightly with the insatiable curiosity for which he was famed. “What a strange one you are. Where did you learn such good Universal, maula?”
“It’s a very long story, O Supreme Omniscience,” Laylah replied.
“Ah. Ah. A long story, indeed.” He nodded and smiled. He seemed tremendously amused by her. This is working very well so far, Laylah thought delightedly. “You must tell it to me, then. In a somewhat shortened version, if you would. Three ambassadors are waiting to see me today, and the Goishlaar of Gozishtandar is here besides. The Goishlaar wants favors from me, as usual, and that always makes him very impatient.”
