TWELVE

Axis fought his second battle with his father’s brother, the regent Telmenon, who was lord of a great swath of land in Lower Eben. Having ruled Eben for nine years while Axis grew up, Telmenon resented yielding his power to a boy. When Axis turned sixteen, three days before his wedding, he was crowned King of Great and Lower Eben, and Lord in the Name of the Serpent of all who dwelled within the river that divided the kingdom. Telmenon had seen that day coming for many years and planned for it. A month after the wedding, after the queen’s family had gone home, Telmenon rode at the head of the army from Lower Eben to attack the boy-king. Telmenon’s army would cross the Serpent by night and be massed around the royal palace by daybreak, giving Axis no time to gather his own forces. So Telmenon planned, and so it might have been but for the wedding gift from Ilicia.

As far as anybody knew, the tall, mute, faceless figure did nothing besides entertain the young queen and her courtiers on lazy afternoons with his tricks. Kane pulled doves out of empty goblets and pearls out of flowers. He made wine flow out of his staff and danced on the water lilies in the pool in the courtyard. Nobody wondered at the extent of his powers. Even when he walked on water he was only the deformed, gangling, gifted servant who did tricks. If at times his tricks were inexplicable except by magic of a complexity that should have been suspect, no one questioned it. He did always as commanded; if he had a thought of his own he never indicated it; when he was not wanted, he was not seen. Indeed, he might have been invisible, insofar as anyone but Axis remembered his existence then.

Which she actually was: invisible, many times. Kane had been watching the regent for years. Like Axis, she had known him since they were children. After he became regent and Kane learned to seem invisible, she tested her new powers everywhere in the palace, even under her mother’s nose. Thus she chanced upon a seedling meeting between Telmenon and one of his generals, and learned that he had no intention of relinquishing his power over Eben. That seedling, encouraged, spread secret roots of rebellion throughout Lower Eben. Kane did not tell Axis until she knew his heart, until she knew by his secret love for her that he could keep a secret. His face, at once beautiful and feral, revealed no more than the lion’s face, which says nothing at all as the lion crouches and waits. It speaks only when it springs.

So it was that when Telmenon’s army appeared by moon-light along the southern bank of the Serpent, Axis’s army rode out of the cornfields to meet it. The battle was reminiscent of that long-ago massacre of his mud-soldiers and his father by the Serpent. Axis waited silently in the night, while Kane watched. When most of Telmenon’s army was in the river, she signaled the Lion to attack.

The Serpent ran red in the moonlight,

The red moon floated on the water,

The Serpent‘s eye, open and bloody,

As it fed.

The army of Telmenon

Drank their own blood

As the Serpent dragged them under its waters.

The boy-king

Who would be Emperor of Night

Slew his father’s brother

And fed to the Serpent the dying warriors of Telmenon.

Kane helped the Serpent feed. It was late summer; Telmenon chose a time when the great river would be at its shallowest for his army to cross. As the poets described the scene later, the river would have had to be swollen with all the rains and melting snows in Eben to have drowned so many warriors. So Kane worked some illusions into the water, which drowned the wounded with their fears, and she coaxed a few streams and field channels that ran out of the river to flow back up their beds to swell the Serpent’s waters. The swirling floods confused the warriors in the dark. They saw the Serpent moving in waters they could have walked through; they panicked and ran into one another’s swords, or splashed blindly across into Axis’s army. The bloody eye the poets envisioned was a fair description of the full moon that night, as it was reflected in the reddened waters. Or as it appeared to the eyes of a warrior watching the burning arrows soar out of the sky across the river into the army still struggling on the south bank. At the battle’s end, many who fled still had no idea who had attacked them. Axis had dressed his warriors in black; their faces were hidden under hoods and veils not unlike Kane’s. They were the first faceless army of the night.

The boy-king

Brought his masked army

Out of the dark,

Out of stars and fire,

Out of the Gates of Nowhere

To conquer the enemies of Eben.

The poets were wrong about one thing: Telmenon did not die that night. Axis’s warriors, capturing what fleeing men they could find in the night, recognized the regent among their prisoners. He was wounded, stunned by events, and so exasperated he could barely speak when he was dragged from the dungeons at dawn and confronted by the boy-king he had tried to depose. Kane was there, of course, but only as a stray shadow without a visible source, if anyone had noticed.

The regent, pushed to his knees in front of Axis, dirty, sweating, and bleeding from a slash across one shoulder, looked so like Axis’s father that Kane expected the Lion’s heart to melt a little with pity. The king showed no anger; his voice remained even. As always, his broad, golden face revealed almost nothing of his thoughts.

“So, uncle,” he said, still in battle-black, with the cloth he had worn over his face hanging around his neck, “what shall I do with you? You taught me how to rule. What would you advise?

His uncle, tasting the unbearable bitterness of his defeat, spat at Axis’s feet. Prudently, he missed. The Lion only waited, his tawny eyes unblinking.

“How,” Telmenon asked finally, hoarsely, “did you know? Who betrayed me?”

“You betrayed yourself. And you betrayed me.”

“Who was it?” Telmenon demanded. “Tell me before you kill me.”

“You will never know,” Axis said softly, and that was so. No one of Telmenon’s warriors ever knew which of them had betrayed them all; everyone suspected everyone. Telmenon’s power had broken itself against a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had dismissed long before as something Axis would grow out of. Telmenon had told Axis what to do with him. Axis had his headless body returned to his family in Lower Eben by a small army, who also brought documents that declared Telmenon’s lands confiscated and sent his family into exile. Axis let them take what they could, along with their heads. Nobody argued.

Thus he bound Great Eben and Lower Eben, the twin kingdoms of the Serpent, securely under his fledgling rule. Inspired by the incident, he looked for something else to conquer. His mother protested; his wife pleaded. Peace, they craved, though it had been peaceful in Eben all through Telmenon’s regency. They wanted to sit in the courtyard among the peacocks, listening to the singing fountains and the cooing of doves while they played with Axis’s children, for the young queen was pregnant.

During Axis’s long reign she would have many children, not all of them her husband’s. But not all of his were hers. They had married one another for reasons of state; they expected certain things of one another, but love and fidelity were not among them. Compromises were reached: he would not bring his battles into Eben, and she would not bring her lovers to his attention. She had to relinquish certain illusions. Kane had seen the soft lights of hope and expectancy in her eyes when she looked up at her young husband. But nothing answered in his eyes. She was an affair of state, his wife and the mother of his heirs; he treated her kindly and with respect. But he would never love her. Having a practical soul, she consoled herself with her status and her right to his company. She grew to become an affectionate mother and a discreet wife. So the poets mentioned her rarely and without interest. Her life was not the stuff of passion or tragedy, at least as far as they could see.

Not even Kane saw much more, though she was very much aware of what could eat at the heart beyond anyone’s detection. For a while she could only watch, always masked, always silent, while Axis moved freely through his world. She longed for their childhood, when one was seldom seen without the other, when she could show him her naked face in public and smile, when they hid in the gardens and spoke their secret language. That Axis missed her as much, she could not have guessed. He married, became a father, ruled his kingdom, while Kane could only do her tricks to make the queen laugh, and trail as a shadow after her heart.

The Lion

Fearless, magnificent, unchanging through a thousand years,

Casts a glance of desire

And takes.

Walk in shadows, fear that glance.

The Lion sees through time,

Through cloud and stars,

Into a different day.

Beware if that day is yours.

Beware his watching eyes.

Axis’s golden glance had fallen on the Serpent. The river bordered another kingdom to Eben’s west, and passed through yet another to the east before it ended its journey in the Baltrean Sea. Marrying Cribex, the land to the west, he had secured the headwaters of the Serpent for his own interest. The kingdom between Eben and the sea, containing the rich delta lands the river watered as it fanned into the Baltrean, caught the Lion’s interest. He felt a certain kinship with the Serpent; it had consumed any number of his relatives during his uncle Telmenon’s ill-fated battle. So, he decided, the world that the Serpent ruled should be his.

He broached the matter in secret with his battle commanders; at his request, Kane listened in the shadow of a potted palm. He met with her at midnight, as was their habit when discussing such things. Invisible to his guards, she followed him into his private chamber, where no one else was permitted and where, it was assumed, he pondered the advice of his counselors, weighed it against history and experience. That he had a secret door to admit lovers and other whims, it was also assumed, though nobody ever found the door. There Kane allowed herself to be seen, only by Axis.

She unwound the thin black veiling around her face with relief, as well as some trepidation. He had not looked at her for a long time, and she had lost sight of herself as well. Nearly sixteen by then, she had been the lonely, misshapen Kane for so long that she felt she must be turning into him. The Lion’s expressionless face, gazing silently at her, did not help matters.

He spoke finally. “I am going to war with the sea-kingdom of Kaoldep. You must find a reason to come with me.”

She blinked, not understanding. “Why would you bring the child’s toy from Ilicia with you to battle?”

“I have no idea.” He still gazed at her, his wide-set cat’s eyes intent and unreadable. “I mean, I have no idea how to explain you. I want you there with me because I want you.”

She closed her eyes, the breath running soundlessly out of her. “Yes.”

“Before I married, I only had to turn my head to find you. I only had to say your name.”

“Yes.”

“And now, day after day, I must see you veiled, hidden, invisible even to me. I cannot see your face, you cannot speak. I can only watch the shadow of you, using your astonishing powers to amuse my wife.”

“My lord, I could not think of any other way—”

“Say my name.”

“Axis.”

“Again.”

“Axis.”

He gripped her hands, so close to her now that she could feel his heart beat against her fingers. She could not speak; tears spilled down her face. He put his mouth to her cheekbone, caught hot salt between his lips. He slid one hand behind her head, unbound her hair from its tight scarf. It swept down her back; strands caught in her tears. He shifted them away from her face, kissed her again, here, there, wherever he found tears.

“You have grown so beautiful,” she heard him say, his voice trembling against her ear. “I am King of Eben and a father, and I have fought for my crown and won my first battle, and always, always, with your voice in my thoughts, your face in my heart. Make yourself part of my life again. I don’t care how you explain yourself. I want you with me again. Kane. My first and only love. Make it so.”

“Yes,” she whispered, feeling herself for the first time all that he said: beautiful, wanted, loved. He spoke those words, and she became them; he had that power over her.

That was the night Axis and Kane became lovers, and of that all poetry is silent.

After that night, she began to make certain, subtle changes in the tricks she played to entertain the court. Kane seemed as astonished as anyone when he accidentally knocked a hole in a wall with power from his staff, or set a tablecloth on fire. He made instant reparations, sending stones flying back into the wall to mend it, directing a stream of water out of a fish pond to put out the fire. Then he curled himself into a ball, in terror of the courtiers’ wrath, and tried to beat himself with his own staff. The queen spoke of those mishaps to Axis, worrying that Kane might set her children on fire. The king, intrigued, sent for Kane and tested his powers in front of his counselors and commanders.

Kane, trembling with fear, destroyed three huge flower pots and shot fire out of the window over the courtyard. The peacocks fled, screaming. In the war room, the advisors consulted one another silently.

“My lord, that is no longer a toy,” one said finally. “That is a weapon.”

Kane’s knees hit the floor promptly; he flung the staff away and bowed until his forehead touched the floor.

“He does not know his own powers,” someone observed softly

“What shall I do with him?” Axis wondered. “It would be a pity to kill him. He is innocent of all malice, and his powers are hardly his fault. Yet he would be a danger to my children.”

“He would be a danger to more than children,” one of his commanders murmured, seeing the future as he stared at Kane.

“I cannot send him back to Ilicia.”

“No, my lord, you cannot. That would be foolish, and killing him, as you say, a pity. I suggest you take him with you to Kaoldep and see what he can do on a battlefield.”

Axis stood up, stepped to the veiled figure crouching on the carpet. “You have pledged your loyalty to me,” he said to Kane. “Will you make your staff into a weapon for the armies of Eben?”

Kane straightened just enough to seize the king’s hand and bestow fervent kisses on it. Then he held out one hand; the staff, lying in a corner, flew unerringly back to his hand. He rose, feeling the tension in the sudden silence. He put the staff into Axis’s hands, then held both hands over his heart and bowed his head.

And so, for the first time, Axis and Kane rode together into battle.