"Eminence?" Lal scurried toward him, bearing a thin-necked porcelain pitcher glazed white and etched with flowers. "May I pour you more tea?"
Jiroannes nodded. As Lal bent, Jiroannes saw a mottling on the boy's dark skin. "What is this?" he asked, reaching up to touch the bruise with one finger.
"It is nothing, eminence."
"It is a bruise. Where did you get it?"
Lal kept his eyes cast down. "It is nothing, eminence."
"I command you to tell me."
Lal finished pouring and backed away two steps. "The mistress struck me, eminence, when I entered her chambers after…" He faltered.
"After we argued." Wind stirred the awning. Beyond, smoke obscured much of the western curve of the sky, but above, stars began to show in the high bank of the heavens. It was frustrating enough never to know what was going on in camp, except that the jaran had at last assaulted Karkand. Jiroannes felt strongly that Mitya noticed and cared for him, but he doubted if Bakhtiian even remembered that a Vidiyan ambassador abided in his train. In order to complete his mission, he needed Bakhtiian's notice. And now-now Laissa had the audacity to strike his servants. It was all too much.
"Lal, you will cease waiting on my wife. It is insufferable that she treat you in such a fashion. Henceforth, you will serve me alone and cease going into the women's quarters. I'm sure that will be a relief to you, in any case."
Lal sank to his knees, balancing the pitcher in trembling hands. "I beg of you, eminence, it was nothing."
"You want to continue to serve her?" Jiroannes was astounded. "After she, a mere woman, treated you in such a way?"
"Eminence." Lal bent his head and shoulders, curving over the pitcher. From the guards" camp, Jiroannes heard a hacking cough and a baby's whimper. Darkness shielded the hills. The smoldering haze of the besieged city illuminated the western horizon. "I am not a man. My mother sold me into the palace service when I was still a boy, and after they cut me, I knew that only in the women's quarters could I rise to a position of importance. Eunuchs are not allowed to hold any office higher than that of attendant of the sash in a lord's household, and never any administrative office." In the lantern light,
Jiroannes studied the boy's beardless cheeks. "You have treated me well, eminence. You have been generous and kind, but you know it's true that while I can't become an offical in the Great King's court, I am welcome within the women's quarters."
Jiroannes tilted his head back. The underside of the awning lay dark above him, but he knew the scene well enough, having seen it created in the slave workshop abutting the women's quarters in his uncle's house: fine Vidiyan lords in their Companion's sashes riding to battle flanked by flags and standards and the Great King seated under a parasol, observing the march. A moment's reflection assured him that Lal was right: a eunuch was not considered a fit servant in a man's household, except as a body servant, and certainly not in the household of a Companion of the Great King. A eunuch might tie a lord's sash, but neither eunuch nor woman was allowed to hold the parasol over the Great King's head. Eunuchs belonged in the women's quarters, as go-betweens, as guards, as master of the gate and master of the treasury, as ministers seeing to the administration within the cloistered walls.
"Very well," he said at last. "But you remain under my protection."
"You are all that is magnanimous, eminence."
Jiroannes drained his tea, and Lal poured more into the cup. The warm liquid soothed him, and he felt the truth of Lal's words. He had been kind and generous to his slaves, and yet, one still eluded him. "Lal, send Samae to me."
Lal bowed his head and retreated. Soon enough, Samae appeared, dressed in striped trousers and a quilted damask robe, and knelt before Jiroannes, head bent in submission. Her hair had grown long enough to twine into a braid at the ends, fastened off with a silk ribbon. She folded her fine-boned hands in her lap and sat so still that the only movement he could see, on her, was the stirring of the ends of her hair on her collar. The carpet sank under her knees, forming a dark hollow.
"Samae, why did you refuse your freedom, when Bakhtiian himself granted it to you?"
At first she said nothing. Wind rustled through the tasseled fringe of the awning and shuddered the walls of his tent. He smelled smoke from the guards" camp; or was that a taint on the wind, blown in from Karkand?
"I am a slave, master," she said at last. Her voice was scarcely louder than the wind's rustle. Her voice. It was deeper than he had imagined it would be.
"But I command you to accept your freedom."
"Only the gods command me, master." She doubled over and touched her forehead to the carpet and lay there for the space of twelve heartbeats before lifting her head up again. "I am a slave by their law."
"By their law? What gods? What law is this?"
Under her lashes, she lifted her gaze to look at him. She had liquid brown eyes, dark and slanted against the pale ivory of her skin. "It is death to speak their name. Their laws are cruel, and they hate us for our ugliness."
"Samae, surely I do not understand you correctly," he said, exasperated. "The Everlasting God has given man laws in order that we may live as befits His Word. He shepherds us, in our ignorance, for we are His creation."
"We are clay," murmured Samae, as if she had not heard him, "clay and unclean water, and nothing else."
Jiroannes was too appalled to speak. Here he had thought that the great Tadesh Empire was a civilized country; certainly their concubines and dancers and metalwork and pottery were of the finest quality.
"When my grandfather's grandmother begged for their pity, because she was barren, they granted her wish but with this price: that one child from each generation be sold into slavery. I am the child the gods chose."
"But-" He took a sip of tea and choked on it. "Even a slave has certain rights, as we read in the words of the Everlasting God and his three prophets. Among those rights, the right to be freed."
"I am a slave," said Samae in her stubborn, soft, deep voice, "so that my family will remain free of the curse of barrenness. I will not bring this curse back on them. I cannot. Freedom is forbidden us, who are slaves by the gods" will."
"So if I command you to be free, you will not accept?"
She bent double again, brushing her forehead on the stiff carpet. "You are my master on this earth of clay, but the gods rule me."
Jiroannes realized that she was not bowing to him, but to her gods. A sudden compulsion seized him: to know her, to know of her, to make her speak her thoughts aloud, to fathom what lay behind her blank expression. "Then you serve the gods as your master?"
She remained bent over. Her voice emerged, muffled, out of the collar of her damask coat. "We cannot serve the gods, since they despise us."
"But if you're so much beneath their notice, then why bother to obey their laws at all?"
"They punish those who rebel against them."
Jiroannes let out a great sigh. He lifted his cup up, and Jat padded out of the shadows and took it away. Without knowing why, he extended a hand and brushed his fingers back along her hair and toyed with the ribbon holding her braid fast. "Why did you cry, when we saw the play-the dancers who speak with both words and hands?"
"Because the jaran believe their gods are kind."
"I don't understand."
The radiance along the western horizon swelled and brightened and then faded back down to a luminescent glow. "The woman came from the heavens, did she not? And the man loved her, and he got her with child. So she gave him a sword that she had stolen from her mother, die sun. But a sword brought from heaven bears two edges. For each blessing, it brings you also a curse."