“No. When we came into the hall you had a look on your face like you were in a nightmare you couldn’t wake from.” He looked at me searchingly, oddly earnest.
He seemed to want some answer. “I thought he would just refuse you, and then you would take what you wanted by force.”
“Dire enough.” He set his cup down with enough force to splash beer onto the table. “What was he thinking? Surely he didn’t imagine the tribes would still support him after that?”
“I suppose he thought his control over them was complete enough.” The next part was out of my mouth before I could think of what I was saying. “Vosei had said that if he refused the marriage, one of his sons would sit on the throne of Therete.”
“That one deceives,” Atehatsqe said. It was a moment before I realized that he referred to Vosei. “When the Lord of the Sky speaks, the meaning is plain.”
“He said the curse would be ended when you married my sister.”
“When I married your father’s daughter.” He slid another piece of meat onto his plate. “What the king of Therete says, is: you are my wife. When I am king, may the day be long in the future, you will be queen.”
“You won’t,” I said when I had managed to draw breath again. “You can’t.” I shook my head. “It’s ridiculous.” It couldn’t be real, but everything around me was sharp-edged and solid: the chair I was sitting on, the prince sitting across the table from me, his armor on a stand behind him, the golden cuirass and helmet I had seen so often from the walls of my home. His sword and leaf-bladed spear.
That earnest, even vulnerable look returned to Atehatsqe’s face. “Eat, Yrej. Please. I want things to be pleasant between us.”
“Pleasant.” I couldn’t believe I had heard him correctly. “How is this supposed to end the curse? I can hardly have your child.”
He frowned. “As I told you before, one’s duty is sure, even if nothing else in the world is.” His frown cleared. “Either this is part of Artej Ehat’s plan, or he will find a way to make it so. He made promises to my ancestors, and to me, and he will keep those promises.”
I was not an innocent. I knew that some men preferred the embraces of other men. It had never appealed to me, and I had never been even remotely curious about how they went about things. Now even had my tastes run that way I couldn’t have enjoyed it. Atehatsqe, though, was direct and confident, and when he had spent himself between my thighs he bade me sleep beside him. When morning came I was escorted back to the litter and rode the whole day close and hot inside.
Four generations before I was born, the then-king of Therete had gone hunting in the northern part of his kingdom and strayed over the boundary into Vos Inei territory. This would have gone unremarked except for the fact that he and his party stopped outside a holy cave.
There was a spring, as there often is, and the king was thirsty. He dismounted and strode to where the water trickled down the rock to a pool and reached out, but was stopped by one of his companions, who had seen a snake nearby.
The king was still young, and perhaps hadn’t been king long enough to learn to check his impulses. He ruled the richest, most powerful nation he knew of, and the Lord of the Sky had promised that as long as he upheld the contracts between the god and the people of Therete, no snake would ever bite him. “I am not afraid of snakes,” he said.
“No one need fear snakes who treats them with respect,” said the snake, slithering into the open.
“Artej Ehat drove you out of Therete,” the king said. “The savages here may be fool enough to worship you, but I owe you nothing.”
“Nor I you,” said the snake. “I do not give you permission to drink from my spring. And if you do in spite of me, you will regret it.”
The king drank, of course. And then he lowered his trousers and urinated into the water — an act that shocked his retainers as much as it angered the god Vosei. “Despoil your own temples!” commanded the snake. “Be the bane of your own people, and your own god!” The king only laughed, and rode back over the border. It wasn’t until much later that he realized the snake’s words had been a curse.
In every place the king spent the night on the way back to Therete, strange things happened. Herdsmen out before sunrise saw a monster lurking in the tall grass, a serpent thirty feet long and broad as a man. Dogs and birds and even small children disappeared. The king thought very little about it, if he even heard the reports — after all, people did imagine things, especially in the dark. Accidents happened, and what was one dog or baby here or there? He was more inconvenienced by the odd behavior of his servants, who had realized the truth long before it ever crossed his mind that there was a problem.
The god Artej Ehat had declared that no snakes would be permitted in the city of Therete. And when the king approached the gates, he found that no matter what he did he couldn’t enter. He was obliged to camp outside and send a messenger in to ask the god for help. Whether the servants at this point confessed what they knew, the story doesn’t say.
By way of an intermediary Artej Ehat told the king that he was unable to lift the curse. Worse, it was heritable. But he could breed it out of the line. The mother of the next king would be carefully chosen, the growing princeling shaped in her womb by the god, and the next generation as carefully planned, until the corruption was gone entirely. Artej Ehat would take care that each king of Therete would have only one child, a son, and that one only one son and so on, until the house was free of the curse.
Although his son was human enough to return to the city and live in the palace, that first snake king never set foot in Therete again.
At supper the next night I swallowed the few remaining fragments of my pride and asked if I could ride, rather than be confined in the litter. Atehatsqe was dubious — royal ladies didn’t ride out in full view of soldiers, and there was the question of my recent injury. But the doctor had no objections, and the slaves found trousers and tunic for me, and a huge length of gauzy embroidered silk that would protect me from the profane gaze of the soldiers.
By now the hills I had first seen in the distance were only a memory. I saw the landscape unobscured in the morning and again in the evening, but during the day the horses raised a cloud of dust that surrounded us as we rode. Everyone wore cloths across their mouths and noses to keep from choking on it. “It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many of us,” Atehatsqe told me. Between the cloth and the helmet only his dark eyes were visible. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the litter?”
I preferred to ride. The dust was thick, and the sun hot, but at least there was a breeze, and riding I didn’t feel so much like a helpless prisoner. “It’s not quite like Vos Inei,” Atehatsqe said.
“No.” Already trees and rain seemed like a dream. “It’s very different.”
Atehatsqe cocked an eyebrow, and I thought he might speak, but just then another armored rider came up beside us and the prince turned to him. “Varoshtej!”
“My prince,” said Varoshtej, his eyes brushing across me as though I didn’t exist, and then he lowered his head.
“Are you well?” asked Atehatsqe. “I’m sorry I haven’t had much time for the past few days.”
“Quite well,” said Varoshtej. “I have no complaints. I only wished to ask…”
“The king won’t hear of it,” said Atehatsqe. “He believes your father betrayed him.”
“There will be difficulty finding new priests,” said Varoshtej, his voice even. “Candidates will find themselves suddenly disqualified. Or leave the city before they can be invited.” Varoshtej, then, was the son of one of the priests who had died in the ruins of my father’s house.