Fantasyland 02 The Golden Dynasty (39 page)

Zahnin moved forward to spot me while I
mounted then instantly walked to his steed, swung up and off we
went, two warriors in front followed by Feetak and Narinda next to
Bohtan and Nahka. Me with Diandra’s roan falling in on my side.
Seerim behind us next to Bain and Oahsee, Zahnin then the last two
warriors.

“The pyre is far away, my dear,” Diandra
said to me then she lifted her chin to the air, “the wind,” she
finished as an explanation.

She was right, it
was
windy. Luckily, the rain had wet the dust and sand
so it wasn’t swept up to bite us. Not that the wind was fierce but
it was no cool breeze either. It was good the pyre was set far; we
didn’t need a spark to fly and the Daxshee to burn to the ground.
We’d had enough heartbreak for awhile.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

She turned her head and gave me a small
smile. “This is what I was going to ask you.” I returned her small
smile, reached out a hand, she grabbed it and gave it a squeeze.
Then we dropped hands and she answered, “I am sad,” she turned
forward and said with feeling, “
it
was sad.”

She could say that again.

“You?” she prompted.

“Lahn took care of me last night,” I replied
and felt her eyes on me so knew her head turned my way. I sighed,
thinking of my crazy romantic Korwahkian friend and how she would
take this news. Then I admitted honestly, “It’s true. He was
lovely.”

I felt her eyes leave me as she muttered,
again with feeling, “I am pleased.”

I was too.

Damn.

We rode through the chams at a sedate walk
for awhile in silence.

Then Diandra spoke and I was surprised to
hear her voice held a vein of hurt. “Why did you not tell me you
held magic?”

I blinked and looked at her. “What?”

She didn’t answer my question. Instead she
said, “I do understand, my friend, why you would hide it. I must
admit, I have long since given up many of the beliefs I held
growing up in the Vale, but the ones I have given up do not include
my disdain for magic. So, you growing up in that part of the world,
I can see you wishing to withhold this information perhaps thinking
it is the same here. But you should know,” she looked at me, “that
the Korwahk do not hold such disdain for those who have magic. They
are few and they are revered.”

I kept staring at her. Then I repeated,
“What?”

Again she ignored my question and stated,
“But I do wish you would have trusted me enough to tell me. It was
a grave surprise to see you command the heavens.”

There it was again.

“Diandra, I didn’t command the heavens,” I
told her and she looked at me.

“As I explained, you do not have to hide
this. In fact, I wish I had known earlier.” She faced forward
again. “You are my friend and even if you shared your secret with
me, it would not change how I feel about you. It is obvious,
considering your personality, that you hold noble magic.”

“
Diandra, sweetheart, I
don’t
hold magic, noble or any other kind,” I asserted
and her eyes came my way again.

“
Circe, I was
there
,” she replied. “I saw you shout your lament to
the heavens and the instant you did, they wailed.”

“
I
didn’t do that. That storm was brewing all day,” I
pointed out.

“This is true, but you called it down,” she
returned.

I shook my head and whispered gently,
“That’s insane.”

“It is? I do not see why you think this,
considering I and thousands of Korwahks witnessed the same.”

I shook my head again and started, “I –” but
she cut me off.

“This, too, has been whispered through the
night. Many a cham stayed lit as husbands and wives put heads
together, neighbors met with neighbors.” She looked forward. “Your
storm coupled with the unprecedented acts of the warriors on behalf
of Dortak’s bride…” she nodded her head once and finished, “if
there were any nonbelievers, there are none now.”

I blinked then again asked, “What?”

She turned to me. “The golden queen of
legend, her fierce king, the Golden Dynasty, there are many stories
and as the years pass, these stories, as they have a tendency to
do, grow and build until they become mythical, fantastical.”

“And what is the fantastical story of the
Golden Dynasty?” I enquired although I was uncertain I wanted to
know.

Of course, Diandra told me. “The one I
always thought was a flight of fancy was the one that stated the
mighty king and his golden queen were god and goddess. He had
strength that was unparalleled, cunning beyond compare and his
queen had magic. He was impossible to kill and she commanded the
moon and stars, the sun, the rivers and seas, the heavens and the
earth.”

I stared at her.

She kept talking. “The story tells that they
never grow old, they live in youth until their first son succeeds
the Dax. Then they fly on winged horse into the heavens.”

“That’s absurd,” I said softly.

She peered at me closely. “Circe, last
night, I could
feel
your
despair. I could
feel
your
frustration at your powerlessness. It shone off you like an aura.
And when you stood and shouted your lament, your one word felt like
it pierced my skin. And it was your word that did that, my dear,
not the thunder and lightning, which, I will remind you, does not
come at once while the heavens open at the same time they pour down
their tears. They start distant and one follows the other, they
offer warning. They do not come one on top of the other
with
the wet. I have lived many
years on this earth and I have not once seen that until you called
it upon us last night.”

Okay, I had to admit, I lived many years
on the earth,
my
earth, but
still, I’d never known that to happen and I lived in Seattle where
it rained a lot.

Oh man.

Still, it couldn’t be true. It had to be a
fluke.

“Diandra, my sweet friend, I’m telling you,
I don’t hold magic,” I whispered and she studied me closely.

Then she said quietly in return, “Perhaps
you do and you did not know you did until last night and it flooded
out from you when your emotions were careening out-of-control. But
it matters not, now your people believe you do, they believe you
hold great power, they believe your king cannot die, they believe
you will never age and they believe, deep into the depths of their
spirits, that the Golden Dynasty is upon us.”

I faced forward thinking,
holy shit, now what
do I do with
this?

“
There is more to this than last night, my
dear,” she continued. “You fit the description of the Golden
Goddess exactly. Golden hair, golden eyes and now, with your time
in the sun, golden skin. You sing like the seraphs and your heart
is as golden as your eyes. But you are the queen of the warrior
nation because you
are
a warrior,
fierce of spirit, a match to your formidable king from the very
beginning, the night of your claiming. The warriors themselves
respect you like no other woman, you have earned great loyalty in a
short period of time as evidenced last night when so many came
forward to intervene, an occurrence so extraordinary, I still have
trouble believing it. The same holds true for the mighty Dax.
Seerim has told me for years he has never seen a warrior like your
King Lahn, even when he was younger, he had no compare. He has
never been unhorsed, he has never been disarmed, he rode out for
his first kill at the age of fourteen for his trainers had nothing
left to teach him, he so excelled in his studies. ”

Oh man…
really?
Fourteen? Holy crap.

She kept talking. “I have seen him face
challenges and his strength and speed is astonishing. It is
superhuman and now, it would seem, this is because he is not a
human but, like you, a god.”

“Diandra, I’m not –” I started but she held
up a hand and I stopped.

“We will talk more later, not now, my love,
for we approach the pyre.”

Considering our bizarre and scary
conversation, I hadn’t noticed it but now I did. We had left the
chams and climbed a small rise which we were now descending. Others
on foot and on mount moved in the direction of the tall, wooden
pyre on which a body wrapped in white gauze rested. There were many
still approaching, like us, but it seemed there were thousands
already gathered and waiting, silent and respectful.

As our procession approached, the thick
crowd parted at the orders of the front of the guard and, since I
was queen, we road straight to the pyre.

See? Sometimes it was
not
good being queen.

We stopped close to the pyre and I saw that
the wood leading up to the top was mingled heavily with flowers,
hundreds of them of all colors, shapes and sizes, even the body had
flowers resting on it from those who had been able to toss their
blooms that high.

Zahnin’s horse trotted forward and he
dismounted to spot me as I swung off my horse.

Then my women and I approached the pyre,
each of us lost ourselves in a moment of reflection before, in our
time, we laid our flowers in the wood.

Then we stepped away and stood, waiting, as
silent as the rest of the crowd as the trail of horses and people
joined us and gave their blossoms in offering if they had them.

As I stood close to the pyre, I felt eyes,
many of them. This was not unusual but after Diandra and my talk,
my senses were heightened to the point these eyes felt
physical.

I shook this off and noted our numbers were
no longer swelling however I didn’t look around very much. I did
this not because I didn’t want to encounter people who thought I
was a goddess (crazy!) but because I didn’t want to see Dortak
amongst them. I made a promise to Lahn and I needed to keep it. And
to do that, I needed to adopt the ignorance is bliss strategy.

I also noted that no time was wasted for the
gray-haired, female healer who had attended me when I had sunstroke
was standing to the side bearing an unlit torch which another woman
was lighting.

Interesting, women lit the pyre.

Then I sucked in breath when her torch was
lit and her eyes came to me before her body started my way.

Oh shit. No. Was this a queenly duty?

She kept coming.

Oh God, it looked like this was a queenly
duty.

Great, fucking great.

She stopped in front of me and spoke. “My
golden queen, I watched as you held her gaze when her spirit moved
to the next realm. It is my honor to offer you the torch which will
send her ashes to the heavens so her body can join her spirit.”

Then she offered me the torch.

Crap.

Well, there was nothing for it so I took the
torch and looked at the pyre. Then I looked at the healer and
asked, “Do you know her name?”

She examined my face a second before her
eyes warmed and her lips tipped up in a small smile.

“Her name was Mahyah, my true, golden
queen.”

I nodded. Then I took in a deep breath and
walked to the pyre.

Then I looked up at the body so high up I
couldn’t see much except they’d changed the gauze, there was no
blood to be seen and her face had also been shrouded.

Then I thought about a young Korwahk woman
who possibly walked through the parade and looked over the warriors
in their avenue while wondering which one would be hers, maybe
excited about her life as a warrior’s wife and in three short weeks
she’d been debased, defiled, beaten and abused.

Then I turned around and called to
Diandra.

Quickly, she moved to me.

When she arrived, I whispered, “Can you
translate?”

She nodded.

“You can say no if you’re uncom –” I started
but she shook her head and touched my arm.

“I will speak your words, my queen.”

I smiled at her.

Then I wasted no time so I wouldn’t lose my
nerve, turned to the crowd and spoke loudly in Korwahk, doing the
best I could do and hoping I didn’t fuck it up.

“I am only recently Korwahk and I am new to
your tongue. I have not yet learned it enough to honor young Mahyah
on her pyre before we send her ashes to the heavens. So my friend
Diandra will be translating for you the words to a song I sang to
Mahyah some days ago in hopes of reaching her spirit and giving her
a few moments of peace. Before her death, she told me the land that
I sang of was the land where she wanted to go. Now, I will sing the
song to you so you can know where Mahyah is and she is somewhere
happy.”

Then I looked to Diandra who nodded to
me.

Then I sang without accompaniment. I didn’t
do great, I didn’t suck. I certainly didn’t sound like seraphs,
though I didn’t know what they sounded like. The good news was,
once I closed my eyes and gave my mind over to the song, I
remembered all the words. And I was so into it, I didn’t even hear
Diandra translating the words while I sang.

When I was done, I opened my eyes and saw a
sea of faces, there were some women crying, their eyes wet, their
hands to their mouths but every eye was on me.

“I don’t know what lemon drops are, Circe,
and they don’t have chimney tops but I did my best,” Diandra
whispered to me and I turned my head to her and smiled.

Then I grabbed her hand, squeezed and
whispered, “I’m sure it was perfect.”

She smiled and squeezed my hand back.

Then I turned to the pyre and looked up at
the gauze shrouded body.