The Empress Examines

“That’s enough,” she said mildly as Bee fussed over the finishing touches of her tightly tiered braids, smoothing out invisible stray hairs.  “I will finish from here.”

            “Yes my lady” Bee murmured as she pressed the back of her fist to her forehead in respect.  She padded across the soft red carpet and left through the carved mahogany door.  The Empress Ynelgo admired how the large door, with wood imported from the south and crafted by city artisans specifically for her chambers, opened and closed with barely a whisper, although she was certain Bee was irritated at her early dismissal.  It was a quirk the Empress sometimes indulged herself in.  She reached across the vanity table and tugged on a tassel, revealing a glass polished so finely she could see her own face.  Her face was wide and brown and looked pensive in the warm orange lantern light.  A thoughtful face, a sincere face, a face you’d want to believe in.  With her glass, the Empress was one of those few people in the empire who could regularly examine themselves, though she only used the glass when there was something that needed looking into.  The glass also allowed her to apply paints to her own face – a rare occurrence that was a bee in Bee’s bonnet.  Applying the paints and beauty creams was a sort of therapeutic exercise when she was troubled, or just wanted some time alone.  Tonight she was both.

            There was trouble again in the Garth peninsula – it seemed never-ending.  Efforts to build there, maintain settlements and commerce, was increasingly difficult as rogue witches and wizards attacked loggers and settlements around the Vygernangx Monastery, cursing them in the name of the elder gods.  The Empress Ynelgo delicately rubbed some cream into her skin.

The barbarians were also getting restless, emerging from the jungle in organized attacks on merchant caravans bringing goods and supplies to and from the settlements.  The merchants were getting spooked.  Some outright refused to go there.   Others demanded guards and exorbitantly high rates to travel to the peninsula.  Lord Aldamir, who held sway in the monastery and had his own contingent in the area, was the only one able to get any goods through, and although she’d initially appreciated his stability in the region, she suspected he was behind the increased and coordinated barbarian attacks on crown caravans in the region.  The whole area was brewing, stewing.  The future she’d imagined there since her imprisonment seemed less and less real.  The story she’d told herself so many times (it was more vivid than many of her memories of imprisonment or revolution or the glossy whirl of court life): Garth, that wild garden at the edge of the world where she might have been trapped forever, would be the new center of civilization. 

There would be a city

She hungered for it.

The city was her dream, and it was dying.

The whisper of a promise made in a dark cell when everything was uncertain -- she did not need to hold onto it, it held onto her.  She left that place, but it never left her.  The promise, the dream haunted her.  In little ways she found herself trying to fulfill it, to build the city the nameless gods revealed to her on the site of her slavery and her freedom.  She had the resources: stone was accrued from the slave mines, wood from the Garth peninsula.  The largest obstacle was the area itself, which refused to be settled.  And the city would need settlers.  People to come from all over, to build and bring civilization to those woods.

The Empress painted a thin line of black Kolhari kohl on her eyelid.  She allowed the motion to comfort her, to pull her from her aching thoughts.  Watching herself, delicately and ritually purging herself of imperfection, she could feel how one might become addicted to beauty.  There was so much beauty in the courts, but it never seemed so laden with power as when the Empress attended to herself.  It was obsessive but it was also calming, a personal exchange, something habitual and private like thoughts or the secret stirrings of desire.

She watched the body in the mirror: Weighty lower lip.  Shadow across the cheekbone.  Point at the center above the nose where all the features converged.  The silver band across the forehead with glinting stones.  She knew the eyes were moving as she traced these things, but she could never quite catch them as they moved.  Disturbed by this, the Empress tugged on the tassel and the mirror was covered by its curtain.

She made her way to the party.  People began arriving some time ago, but of course she wasn’t late because the party didn’t begin until she arrived.  There was a subtle change as she entered the ballroom, a new gravity and social orientation she’d come to recognize as one who was always a source of attention.  She glided around the hall, taking note of who was there and who was not, speaking to those she needed to speak with and listening to others.  It was a party but it was also politics, as everyone there knew.

Almost everyone.  On her circuit around the room, the Empress noticed a man who seemed to be outside the party.  He was a large man with a gash across his face, poorly dressed, who made no attempt at socializing.  She paused to speak about nothing with a noble, but kept her eye on the man, who was making his own stealthy circles around the banquet table.  Who was he?  Not a noble she knew – certainly none of them would appear at her party like that.  She looked at him again.  Not a noble at all.  Someone unfamiliar with court life.  An ambassador?  A new concubine?  Vizerine’s man.  The slave.

 Her eyes sharpened.  The Empress had seen slaves on her tours of Neveryon, but she had never spoken with one.  She knew the games Vizerine and other nobles played with people from the pits.  She’d considered it before, taking a concubine of low status who wouldn’t be a threat to her position.  It was safer in many ways than the flirtations in the court – sex, like everything else at court, was politics.  But she had dismissed the idea of slaves as lovers with the same caution and distaste she had dismissed them as servants (the origins of her distaste is a tale for another time). 

But this man intrigued her.  

He did not look like a slave.  And not only because his clothes, though too poor for the party, were far to fine for a slave, though that was part of it.  Perhaps it was the glamour of the party reflected onto him.  Though there was certainly something of the man himself.  He was big, commanding (the Empress knew of course that size is not the only kind of power -- that small people can wear power much greater than their stature -- but the man’s build did make an impression on her).  But there was also something of a thinker about him – a twinkle of potential the Empress couldn’t define, though she felt it quite distinctly.  It was an impression that could dissolve or solidify with a moment’s conversation.  Intrigued, despite the rustle of rumors that flowed in her wake, the Empress approached the slave who was not a slave.