Lord of Emperors
Guy Gavriel Kay
Praise for Lord of Emperors
‘Kay is a storyteller on the grandest scale . . . Kay has complete control of all he creates . . . Kay’s prose is sure footed and poetic.’
—Time (Canada)
‘Detailed, richly textured, and endlessly fascinating . . .[Kay] is a magnificently talented writer . . .A truly splendid novel.’
—Chronicle-Herald
‘Powerfully written and compulsively readable.’
—Maclean’s
‘Lord of Emperors is vintage Kay—richly written, exploring themes of art and power, interweaving alternate history and high fantasy to create a strange yet familiar world.’
— Winnipeg Free Press
‘His Sarantium (and the road to it) is an intricate and highly detailed creation populated by a legion of memorable and sharply delineated characters.’
—Toronto Star
‘Complex and compelling . . . Every aspect of Lord of Emperors reveals a master at work ... As with Sailing to Sarantium, Kay has constructed Lord of Emperors as a literary mosaic of great intricacy and delicacy, for all its adventures, its courtly intrigues, its confrontations with death and various powers . . . Now complete, The Sarantine Mosaic takes its place as a major historical fantasy, one which redefines the possibilities of and sets new standards for the genre . . . Simply not to be missed.’
—Edmonton Journal
‘This is some of the finest writing to arise in the last decade in any genre, high culture be damned.’
—The Vancouver Sun
‘A fantastic story, touched with magic . . . Lord of Emperors is a feast of riches . . . Kay has created in The Sarantine Mosaic a world that stands on its own past and present. [Characters] are alive and vibrant and fascinating.’
—The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
‘Essential reading for all Kay fans.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘Of breathtaking scale and accomplishment . . . Kay has wondrously stripped away the illusions of perception without judging, and beneath is deeper understanding.’
—FFWD
‘Kay’s books ring with authenticity. They are literate and imaginative and work on many levels. History aficionados will delight in the small and telling insights Mr. Kay brings . . . while other readers will simply delight in the grand sweep of the story, the rich characterization, and Mr. Kay’s sheer gift with language . . . [Lord of Emperors] is very satisfying and no exception to the success of the rest of Mr. Kay’s work.’
—Charles de Lint, Ottawa Citizen
PENGUIN CANADA
LORD OF EMPERORS
GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry. He won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Ysabel, has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world.
Visit his Canadian website at www.guygavrielkay.ca and his international website at www.brightweavings.com.
ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY
The Fionavar Tapestry:
The Summer Tree
The Wandering Fire
The Darkest Road
Tigana
A Song for Arbonne
The Lions of Al-Rassan
The Sarantine Mosaic:
Sailing to Sarantium
The Last Light of the Sun
Beyond This Dark House
(poetry)
Ysabel
Under Heaven
LORD OF
EMPERORS
BOOK 2 OF THE SARANTINE MOSAIC
GUY
GAVRIEL
KAY
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000, 2003, 2005
Published in this edition, 2010
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)
Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2000
Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
* * *
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Kay, Guy Gavriel
Lord of emperors / Guy Gavriel Kay.
(The Sarantine mosaic; bk. 2)
ISBN 978-0-14-317459-2
I. Title. II. Series: Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sarantine mosaic ; bk. 2.
PS8571.A935L6 2010 C813'.54 C2010-900611-9
* * *
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For Sam and Matthew,
‘the singing-masters of my soul.’
This belongs to them, beginning and end.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Sarantine Mosaic is animated by and in part built around a tension in the late classical world between walls and wilderness. For my own introduction to this dialectic (and how it shifts), I am indebted to Simon Schama’s magisterial Landscape and Memory. This is also the work that introduced me to the Lithuanian bison and the symbolism surrounding it, giving rise to my own zubir.
The general and particular works cited in Sailing to Sarantium have anchored this second volume as well, and Yeats remains a presiding spirit, in the epigraph and elsewhere.
I should now add Guido Majno’s quite wonderful The Helping Hand: Man and Wound in t
he Ancient World. On Persia and its culture, books by Richard N. Frye and Prudence Oliver Harper were immensely useful. For table matters and manners I was aided by the Wilkins and Hill text and commentary on Archistratus, along with works by Andrew Dalby and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. Attitudes to the supernatural are explored in books by Gager, Kieckhefer, and Flint, and in a collection of essays edited by Henry Maguire for the Dumbarton Oaks research facility in Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks also provided translations of Byzantine military treatises, papers presented at various symposia, and some evocative artifacts in their permanent collection.
On a more personal level, I have been greatly the beneficiary of the skills, friendship, and commitment of John Jarrold, John Douglas, and Scott Sellers, and I am indebted to the careful and sympathetic eye of my copy editor for both volumes of this work, Catherine Marjoribanks. Jennifer Barclay at Westwood Creative Artists has brought intelligence and a necessary sense of irony to increasingly complex foreign language negotiations. Rex Kay, as always, offered early and lucid commentary, especially (but not only) on medical issues.
I also want to record here my appreciation for the encouragement and sustained interest offered by Leonard and Alice Cohen for fifteen years now. Andy Patton has been a source of ideas and support for even longer, and in this case I am particularly indebted to him for discussions about Ravenna and light, and the various doorways (and traps) that must be negotiated when a novelist deals with the visual arts.
There are two others who continue to be at the centre of my world, and so of my work. The usual suspects, one might say, but that flippancy would mask the depth of what I hope to convey. Accordingly, I’ll simply conclude here by naming Sybil and Laura, my mother and my wife.
Turning and turning in a widening gyre . . .
LORD OF
EMPERORS
PART ONE
KINGDOMS OF
LIGHT AND DARK
CHAPTER I
Amid the first hard winds of winter, the King of Kings of Bassania, Shirvan the Great, Brother to the Sun and Moons, Sword of Perun, Scourge of Black Azal, left his walled city of Kabadh and journeyed south and west with much of his court to examine the state of his fortifications in that part of the lands he ruled, to sacrifice at the ancient Holy Fire of the priestly caste, and to hunt lions in the desert. On the first morning of the first hunt he was shot just below the collarbone.
The arrow lodged deep and no man there among the sands dared try to pull it out. The King of Kings was taken by litter to the nearby fortress of Kerakek. It was feared that he would die.
Hunting accidents were common. The Bassanid court had its share of those enthusiastic and erratic with their bows. This truth made the possibility of undetected assassination high. Shirvan would not be the first king to have been murdered in the tumult of a royal hunt.
As a precaution, Mazendar, who was vizier to Shirvan, ordered the king’s three eldest sons, who had journeyed south with him, to be placed under observation. A useful phrase masking the truth: they were detained under guard in Kerakek. At the same time the vizier sent riders back to Kabadh to order the similar detention of their mothers in the palace. Great Shirvan had ruled Bassania for twenty-seven years that winter. His eagle’s gaze was clear, his plaited beard still black, no hint of grey age descending upon him. Impatience among grown sons was to be expected, as were lethal intrigues among the royal wives.
Ordinary men might look to find joy among their children, sustenance and comfort in their households. The existence of the King of Kings was not as that of other mortals. His were the burdens of godhood and lordship—and Azal the Enemy was never far away and always at work.
In Kerakek, the three royal physicians who had made the journey south with the court were summoned to the room where men had laid the Great King down upon his bed. One by one each of them examined the wound and the arrow. They touched the skin around the wound, tried to wiggle the embedded shaft. They paled at what they found. The arrows used to hunt lions were the heaviest known. If the feathers were now to be broken off and the shaft pushed down through the chest and out, the internal damage would be prodigious, deadly. And the arrow could not be pulled back, so deeply had it penetrated, so broad was the iron flange of the arrowhead. Whoever tried to pull it would rip through the king’s flesh, tearing the mortal life from him with his blood.
Had any other patient been shown to them in this state, the physicians would all have spoken the words of formal withdrawal: With this affliction I will not contend. No blame for ensuing death could attach to them when they did so.
It was not, of course, permitted to say this when the afflicted person was the king.
With the Brother to the Sun and Moons the physicians were compelled to accept the duty of treatment, to do battle with whatever they found and set about healing the injury or illness. If an accepted patient died, blame fell to the doctor’s name, as was proper. In the case of an ordinary man or woman, fines were administered as compensation to the family.
Burning of the physicians alive on the Great King’s funeral pyre could be anticipated in this case.
Those who were offered a medical position at the court, with the wealth and renown that came with it, knew this very well. Had the king died in the desert, his physicians—the three in this room and those who had remained in Kabadh—would have been numbered among the honoured mourners of the priestly caste at his rites before the Holy Fire. Now it was otherwise.
There ensued a whispered colloquy among the doctors by the window. They had all been taught by their own masters—long ago, in each case—the importance of an unruffled mien in the presence of the patient. This calm demeanour was, in the current circumstances, imperfectly observed. When one’s own life lies embedded—like a bloodied arrow shaft—in the flux of the moment, gravity and poise become difficult to attain.
One by one, in order of seniority, the three of them approached the man on the bed a second time. One by one they abased themselves, rose, touched the black arrow again, the king’s wrist, his forehead, looked into his eyes, which were open and enraged. One by one, tremulously, they said, as they had to say, ‘With this affliction I will contend.’
When the third physician had spoken these words, and then stepped back, uncertainly, there was a silence in the room, though ten men were gathered amid the lamps and the guttering flame of the fire. Outside, the wind had begun to blow.
In that stillness the deep voice of Shirvan himself was heard, low but distinct, godlike. The King of Kings said, ‘They can do nothing. It is in their faces. Their mouths are dry as sand with fear, their thoughts are as blown sand.They have no idea what to do. Take the three of them away from us and kill them. They are unworthy. Do this. Find our son Damnazes and have him staked out in the desert to be devoured by beasts. His mother is to be given to the palace slaves in Kabadh for their pleasure. Do this. Then go to our son Murash and have him brought here to us.’ Shirvan paused to draw breath, to push away the humiliating weakness of pain. ‘Bring also to us a priest with an ember of the Holy Flame. It seems we are to die in Kerakek. All that happens is by the divine will of Perun. Anahita waits for all of us. It has been written and it is being written. Do these things, Mazendar.’
‘No physician at all, my great lord?’ said the small, plump vizier, dry-voiced, dry-eyed.
‘In Kerakek?’ said the King of Kings, his voice bitter, enraged. ‘In this desert? Think where we are.’ There was blood welling as he spoke, from where the arrow lay in him, the shaft smeared black, fletched with black feathers. The king’s beard was stained with his own dark blood.
The vizier bowed his head. Men moved to usher the three condemned physicians from the room. They offered no protest, no resistance. The sun was past its highest point by then, beginning to set, on a winter’s day in Bassania in a remote fortress near the sands. Time was moving; what was to be had long ago been written.
Men find courage sometimes, unexpectedly, surprising themselves, changing the
course of their own lives and times. The man who sank to his knees by the bed, pressing his head to the carpeted floor, was the military commander of the fortress of Kerakek. Wisdom, discretion, self-preservation all demanded he keep silent among the sleek, dangerous men of the court that day. Afterwards he could not have said why he did speak. He would tremble as with a fever, remembering, and drink an excess of wine, even on a day of abstinence.
‘My king,’ he said in the firelit chamber, ‘we have a much-travelled physician here, in the village below the fortress. We might summon him?’
The Great King’s gaze seemed already to be in another place, with Perun and the Lady, beyond the confines and small concerns of mortal life. He said, ‘Why kill another man?’
It was told of Shirvan, written on parchment and engraved on tablets of stone, that no man more merciful and compassionate, more imbued with the spirit of the goddess Anahita, had ever sat the throne in Kabadh holding the sceptre and the flower. But Anahita the Lady was also called the Gatherer, who summoned men to their ending.
Softly, the vizier murmured, ‘Why not do so? How can it matter, lord? May I send?’
The King of Kings lay still another moment, then he motioned assent, the gesture brief, indifferent. His rage seemed spent. His gaze, heavy-lidded, went to the fire and lingered there. Someone went out, at a sign from the vizier.
Time passed. In the desert beyond the fortress and the village below it a north wind rose. It swept across the sands, blowing and shifting them, erasing dunes, shaping others, and the lions, unhunted, took refuge in their caves among the rocks, waiting for night.
The blue moon, Anahita’s, rose in the late afternoon, balancing the low sun. Within the fortress of Kerakek, men went forth into that dry wind to kill three physicians, to kill a son of the king, to summon a son of the king, to bear messages to Kabadh, to summon a priest with Holy Fire to the King of Kings in his room.
