Birthgrave 01 - The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

6

There were many processions in which we rode hand in hand, for it was traditional. There were many entertainments at which we sat, and he would courteously ask me what I would have the dancers or the players or the jugglers or the magicians do. I had been afraid of these entertainments once, expecting the corruption to be strongest here, but I saw only beautiful things—a woman changed into a single jewel, two albino lions on whose backs two albino youths made strange knots of their bodies. There was music too, sinuous and softly thrilling, languid melodies coaxed from the round bellies of stringed instruments, and the bowls or silver horns.

Yet I was more aware of him than of the things I saw. In public we sat close enough, but in the palace we were separate. A word was not exchanged between us except those formal words when we must speak for his people. The vast library of the palace, filled with beautiful books, painted and bound in gold and jewels—I would often find him there, but when I came he would go away. I had thought at first he had never been with a woman, and perhaps feared me because of that, but I learned later, as one always can from the gossips of any establishment, that two or three of the small, beautiful, deerlike palace maidens had shared his pleasure at one time or another.

I had never really been lonely before, there had been no time or person to induce such a feeling of emptiness. In my dreams I would long for Vazkor, and the body and the power of Vazkor, long to hurt him, punish and destroy him, long to use him as a man would use a woman—to humiliate him, and finally become his slave. But awake, I would think of my husband the Javhovor, whose name I did not know. I would think of him beside me in the chariot, the slight abrupt shudders of cold that had run over his body, and yearn to warm him with my own, to stroke his hair and smooth cheeks, and walk with him in the palace, and talk to him, and have him sing to me as he did with his doe-eyed girls.

And I was afraid. Vazkor, like a black shadow of death, reached out to seize and replace his overlord.

Some days after the marriage, when I had ridden to the Temple so they could fall on their noses before me, I sought out Oparr.

"Give this letter to Vazkor," I said.

But there was never a written answer. Perhaps Vazkor mistrusted me even further now, for I had written: "Do you know the Javhovor understands your Power? Do you realize he guesses your ambition?

And he is not a fool."

Oparr came to me a few days afterward, and, when we were alone, he said softly to me, "The answer is, goddess, that some men, seeing death in front of them, walk toward it instead of running away. One who waits on death is easy to be rid of.

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