The Goblin Emperor (6 page)

Maia smiled at him. “Thank you. We also would be honored.” He ignored Beshelar’s appalled expression and followed the prelate up the stairs into the temple.

He considered and discarded the idea of telling the prelate that his Ulimeire was preferable by far to the dank and grimy Othasmeire at Edonomee. It was wiser for him to say as little as possible, and he feared besides that the prelate would take it as some sort of joke. But it was true. The Ulimeire was shabby and run-down, but clean, and the whitewash that had not been applied to the pillars had clearly been put to better use on the walls. The shy people, elves and goblins, in their much-mended and ill-fitting blacks—very like the clothes that Maia himself had been wearing when he had left Edonomee centuries ago that morning—were the family and friends and lovers of the crew of the
Wisdom of Choharo,
of the servants whose lives had been lost with their imperial masters. Many of the mourners wore livery; one or two of them were people he thought he had seen in the Alcethmeret earlier in the day. He saw grief and pain on their faces and wished he felt anything of the sort in his heart. He wished he had had a father worthy of mourning.

It took some time to find a place to put an emperor and his nohecharei in the Ulimeire that did not cause great discomfort and embarrassment for all concerned, but between the goodwill of the congregation, the prelate, the emperor, and his maza—and the remarkable and pointed forbearance of his guard—the matter was managed, and the prelate, taking his place before the altar of Ulis, as clean and shabby as the rest of the temple, began the service for the dead.

He spoke the words very simply and honestly, unlike the affected intonations and dramatic pauses of the Archprelate of Cetho who had officiated at the funeral service for the Empress Chenelo. Maia was disturbed to discover how clear and sharp his memories of his mother’s funeral were. Ten years might as well have been as many days.

The Empress Chenelo Drazharan had died in the spring of her son’s eighth year. She had been ill for as long as he could remember, his gray, stick-thin, beloved mother. Even to a child, it had become clear that winter that she was dying, as her eyes seemed to take up more and more of her face and she became so thin that even a badly judged touch could bruise her. She spent much of that winter and early spring in tears, dying and homesick and desperately afraid for her son.

She had been married very young—barely sixteen—and the marriage her father’s idea. The Great Avar of Barizhan wanted to see his daughter an empress. The Elflands, hostile to all foreigners though they were, desperately needed cordial relations with Barizhan, their only access to the rich trade of the Chadevan Sea, and so Varenechibel’s Witness for Foreigners had convinced him to agree to the marriage. It had been a bad decision all around, Chenelo told Maia in the days before her death. Her father, bitter in his disappointment that his wife had given him no sons—only two daughters, and one of those ill-favored and half-mad—had cared nothing for Chenelo and everything for the idea of treaties to secure his northern borders against his much larger and more powerful neighbor. The Witness for Foreigners had been an ambitious, greedy man. When Maia had been two years old, the Witness had been caught taking bribes from Porcharneise merchants. Varenechibel had sent Chenelo a gruesomely explicit engraving of the execution.

Varenechibel himself, still mourning for his third wife, the Empress Pazhiro, who had died five years previously, should not have considered marriage at that time, especially not to a girl young enough to be his daughter, a foreigner, a barbarian, a goblin; she had gained her the cruel soubriquet “Hobgoblin” among the court before she was even married. Varenechibel found her ugly, boring, unappealing, but his lack of interest in her would not have deepened to hatred had it not been that their wedding night, the necessary legal consummation of their marriage and the only time Varenechibel claimed his marital rights of her, resulted in her pregnancy. Considering the unambiguity of the evidence that she had come a virgin to his bed, he could not even claim the child was not his.

Pazhiro had died in childbirth, and perhaps if Chenelo had done the same, he would have forgiven her. But she survived, and produced a healthy son as dark and ugly as herself; Varenechibel said viciously that if she thought she could replace Pazhiro and Pazhiro’s last, dead child, she was very much mistaken. As soon as Chenelo was able to travel, she and her child were sent to Isvaroë, where she would spend the last eight years of her life.

She had died on a gray, windy day in mid-spring, and since a dead empress was marginally more acceptable to Varenechibel than a living one, preparations were immediately put in train for a high ceremonial state funeral. It was also true that the Great Avar, who made no protest about his daughter’s treatment while she was alive—and saw nothing to criticize in the idea that a man would want no more congress with his wife than was necessary to beget a son—would have been grossly offended if less than full respect were paid to her corpse. The quiet house at Isvaroë was invaded by secretaries, functionaries, clerics. Most of them, when they noticed Maia at all, looked at him and sighed and shook their heads. He hid in his mother’s bedroom as much as he could.

If he could simply have lain down and died of grief, he would have. His mother had been the world to him, and although she had done her best to prepare him, he had been too young fully to understand what death meant—until she was gone, and the great, raw, gaping hole in his heart could not be filled or patched or mended. He looked for her everywhere, even after he had been shown her body—looked and looked and she could not be found.

He wept only in private, not trusting the strange adults who bustled around him, breaking the peace of Isvaroë with their loud voices and continual racket of packing and planning. And then came the day when they told him he had to leave Isvaroë, and took him in an airship to the Untheileneise Court, in which he had never fully believed, being always half-convinced that it was merely part of his mother’s stories.

He sat now, in this clean shabby temple to the moon-god, who was also the god of dreams and death and rebirth, and remembered the cold echoing marble of the Othasmeire of the Untheileneise Court, with its separate satellite shrines for each god. But there was not room in the shrine of Ulis for a full state funeral, and so Chenelo’s bier was placed beneath the dome’s oculus, as the biers of the Empress Pazhiro and the Empress Leshan had been. Instead of this single prelate, there had been a flock of clerics and canons surrounding the red-robed Archprelate, a miasma of incense, and crowds of white-haired, white-faced elves in elaborate black who stood and listened to the service silently and without emotion. Here, they were
almost
silent, but there were the sounds of sobs choked back; the rustle of cloth against cloth as one mourner comforted another; even, halfway through, the wail of a child realizing loss, and the quick wordless shuffle as people cleared a path for her father to take her out. No one, Maia thought, would have done as much for him.

He remembered standing silent and stony-eyed beside the noblewoman given the thankless task of shepherding him through the funeral. Although the account Chenelo had given him of her marriage had been carefully impartial, carefully judged to what a child could understand, nevertheless his fierce worship of his mother had led him closer to the truth than she had ever wished him to go. It was his father’s fault, he understood, and this his father’s court, and he imagined that it would please them to see him weep. So he had not wept, not then, although he had wept every night for a week in the cold, musty bedroom he was given at Edonomee. Probably, he thought ruefully, he had frightened that noblewoman very much, and he made a mental note to ask Csevet if she could be found.

The prelate of the Ulimeire used the short form, unlike the interminable ceremony that had been used for Chenelo and would be used for Varenechibel and three of his four sons. The longest single part was the list of the names of the dead and the list of those who survived them. Hesitantly, with a shy glance at Maia, the prelate added at the end, “The Emperor Varenechibel IV, Nemolis Drazhar, Nazhira Drazhar, Ciris Drazhar, survived by the Emperor Edrehasivar the Seventh.” Blinking back a sudden prickle of tears, Maia bowed to the prelate over his clasped hands as each of the other mourners had done in turn, and cared nothing for the stiff, shocked disapproval of Beshelar at his elbow.

With the service concluded, it was clear to Maia that the prelate and congregation would only be shamed and embarrassed at the spectacle of their emperor picking his way through the tall yellowing grass to the twelve new graves. And there was no difficulty in extricating himself; he simply quit fighting Beshelar for the reins of the situation, and Beshelar with grand pomposity did the rest. Maia smiled at the prelate and the prelate smiled back. Beshelar all but physically strong-armed the emperor into the carriage, crowding Cala and himself in behind. The coachman clucked to the horses and they rattled off.

For ten minutes, no one said anything. Beshelar looked like he was reinventing most of Setheris’s favorite epithets—with “moon-witted hobgoblin” at the top of the list—although of course his sense of propriety was too great to allow him to utter them. Cala stared dreamily out the window, as he had on the way to the Ulimeire, and Maia himself clasped his hands in his lap and contemplated their darkness and ugly, lumpish knuckles.

Then Cala turned and said, “Serenity, why did you wish to attend the service?”

He sounded genuinely curious. Maia said, “I don’t know.” He did know—he knew all too well—but he did not want to discuss his father with his nohecharei, with anyone.
Let that truth be buried with him,
he thought.
It profits no one for Edrehasivar VII to speak of his hatred for Varenechibel IV.
And the worst of it was that he did not even hate his father; he could not hate anyone of whom he knew so little. The thought of Beshelar’s shock and disgust was exhausting, like the thought of carrying a massive boulder on his shoulders for the rest of his life.

Then he realized he had forgotten to use the formal first, and Beshelar would be shocked and disgusted anyway. He looked at Cala to avoid looking at Beshelar, and found the vague blue eyes unexpectedly sympathetic. “Nothing can make death easier,” Cala said, “but silence can make it harder.”

“Speaking helps not,” Maia said.

Cala drew back a little, like a cat tapped on the nose, and silence—whether hard or easy—filled the carriage, unbroken until they reached the Untheileneise Court.

5

The Emperor’s Household

By the end of dinner that night, Maia was so exhausted he could no longer keep his eyes focused. He had asked Beshelar to see that the grilles of the Alcethmeret were closed as soon as they returned from the Ulimeire and had steadfastly refused to grant an audience to anyone for the rest of the afternoon.

Which did not mean—although he wished it could—that he was either alone or idle. Esaran was lying in wait for him. She refused to allow him to return to the Tortoise Room, insisting that it was not suitable to his dignity and dragging him up the next circumference of the stairs to the Rose Room, which was large enough to get lost in and decorated in an oppressive scheme of black and cherry. The wallpaper was an elaborate Porcharneise floral pattern, roses of all shades from deep purple to orange-red, the edges of the petals picked out in gilt.

Esaran had a seemingly endless list of questions he had to answer and decisions he had to make, and just when he thought she might be done, she rounded on him with the reminder that among the victims in the crash of the
Wisdom of Choharo
had been the emperor’s edocharei, his gentlemen of the chamber. Her tone indicated without any need of his asking that he would not be allowed to continue to take care of himself as he always had at Edonomee. She added that since Clemis Atterezh was waiting eagerly to fit the emperor for his new wardrobe, it would be as well to take care of the matter promptly.

She did not like him, but it was clear she was not going to let her personal feelings interfere with her efficiency. Possibly she was more keenly aware than Chavar of the emperor’s power to remove her from her position if she gave him reason. But her efficiency felt like ruthlessness, and he was so weary already, a headache ticking in his temples, that he said simply, “We are confident that any persons you recommend will be entirely adequate to our needs.”

She nodded, despising him for weakness, and whisked herself away. Atterezh came in on a wave of cheerful burbling about cloth and color and pattern of which Maia understood maybe two words in seven. Beshelar and Cala, as befitted the emperor’s nohecharei, sat one to either side of the door watching alertly. Maia suspected that this would not be the last time in his life he wished to be able to tell them simply to go away.

And before Atterezh was done, Csevet had appeared, with a list even worse than Esaran’s. Word of the new emperor’s arrival had spread, and courtiers, the Witnesses of the Corazhas especially, were beginning to gather. Csevet had a towering stack of letters—some delivered through the pneumatic system, others left by various persons with the guards at the grilles when they were not permitted entrance—and he insisted inexorably that every one of them had to be at least
noticed
that evening. He and Maia sat, one on either side of the enormous desk that lurked like a winter-fuddled bear in the back corner of the Rose Room, and went through the letters one by one.

Maia had known that he had been plunged into deep water by his accession to his father’s throne, but it was that stack of letters that showed him just how deep and cold the water was. He recognized some of the names, from gossip Setheris has shared, and knew generally what the Corazhas, the Judiciate, the Parliament were, but the inadequacy of his knowledge became more and more cruelly apparent with each letter, as Csevet read it aloud and paused with his eyebrows raised, and Maia had to ask who the writer was, or what exactly it was that he was writing about. Beshelar and even Cala got dragged into the process of educating the emperor, and Maia sat and listened and hated it.