Epilogue: Twisted Leather

The funeral cortege stretched all along the Avenue of Prayers, the entire city standing in the sun to see His Radiance Diryish Pollus make his last journey, to his white mound in the centre of the cemetary spiral.  The gap, that had been like a missing tooth, was now filled.

Kyrus and Kyrus both stood at the edge of the balcony, looking down on the horse-drawn chariot, where Diryish sat in his absolute stillness.  The sun-topped crystal staff in his fixed hand moved slightly as the animals stamped and tried to back, rainbow points shifting over the faces of the people nearest him. 

The terraces all up and down the cliff walls were fringed with people as well, the wind shifting clothing and veils and though people were quiet, that many folk made a noise.  Like the mythical sea, he imagined.  Children would cry like birds floating over the sand, and be soothed.  Most people showed some flash of gold if they could afford it, to honour His Radiance, going to his rest. Everyone else had yellow cotton scarves or sarbands or veils.

Kyrus looked sideways at da, standing so still that he looked like a gold column. He wore tunic and breeches, the soft boots for riding birds, but instead of warrior black they were all in gold and white silks.  His veil was almost transparent gold lace, weighted with gold medallions, his eyelids painted gold. His head was bare, with his warrior feathers in black and white and gold and white cascading down over one shoulder.  In his hand he held the sun staff, like the one that would be buried with Diryish, but rather more substantial than the paper and gilt that would go into the white mound.

The sun bit brutally on them all and the city’s pumps creaked and groaned in the unnatural silence.  Beside da, Nasera Mariush stood, with her baby in her arms, wearing the blinding white veil of a Radiance of Lainz.  Ma stood behind in the the crowd of zardukar and hive lords, all wearing black, edged with gold lace. 

Things are really weird now, he thought. Really talking to ma instead of talking at her and hoping she caught the line of what you were saying out of the raging torrent of information flood.  She and da haven’t done more than talk a bit, a little awkwardly, since the Hive acknowledged da and I to be... me and da are... oh endarkened... da’s the Emperor.  Thank the light and the dark.  If da had really been dead it would have been just me, by myself, and I’d surely muck it up.

He looked down over the sea of heads to the felon’s cage right where the city and the bridge kissed.  Nadian--he’d Tried to blame her somehow for his plans to assassinate all of great-granda’s kids and grandkids.  The monks... ma’s friend Yasna... they said he was code crazy but Nadian had rounded on him, on them, and started screaming at the monks trying to save him and then at the judge.

“I’m the important one here! How dare you judge me? How dare you try and diminish me by saying I’m mad?  How dare you take these women’s words seriously?  They’re just whores only fit to spend my semen into and to occasionally bear boys!  I’m the one who should have been judging YOU.  I am the Emperor not that man-loving, unnatural sword bird who lied to the whole country!  What does it matter if I killed a few deficient children?  The old man didn’t see that they weren’t good enough to follow him on the throne!”   

He’d gotten less coherent after that, ranting about how they were all less than he was.  The whole city had been appalled when the Rasheem had gone into his private study and found out that he’d been grave-robbing to teach himself mandery.

Da, once he’d recovered from the bees taking him up, and begun to sort out all the threads of code they’d given him access to, had insisted on sitting in on the whole trial.  It had taken longer because Nadian had kept breaking down in outraged, threatening rants, and the linners... ma too... had let the whole Empire see everything.  Headlines had screamed “You Are All NOTHING: Accused Says!” and “I Deserve the Empire!” and such things. Kyrus closed his eyes for a moment, just trying to make the past week seem more real.

Nadian had been convicted of grave desecration, treason and murder and attempted murder and they’d stripped him, shaved him and cranked him out over the canyon for him to foam and rage and howl at the city, at the people who had gathered on the bridge to hurl rotten fruit, rocks, pierce-skins at him and expose rude body parts... at least until his mother and sister and their guards, came out to stand by the cage.

Neither Anahita Basserus, or her daughter Kurazon, had looked at Nadian, nor spoken to him, standing silently with their backs to his cage.  In the face of their mute witness of his end, the crowd had quietly disappeared.  The two women had stood fast, veiled and shaded unlike Nadian but with him, until his voice failed a day later.

That was when Basserus had wound his legs and arms into the side bars so that he would not fall when he lost consciousness. The women had stayed the rest of that day, but left sometime that night, when there was no spirit left to witness.

His corpse was still there, dried in place around the bars.  Da had said to leave him, that his granda was beyond caring about niceties of cages being full or empty along his funeral route.   

Ky wasn’t sure what he felt when his eyes fell on the leathery remains twisted through the metal, still swinging in the wind.

Kyrus wanted Tizzy, he wanted to cuddle the silly ferret and have her stick her nose in his ear, but this was a public occasion and he couldn’t have her squirming and shedding hair all over his clothes. She chattered and squeaked, dancing on Hara’s shoulder where she stood by her da... who stood under the Milar banner, just behind. Kyrus wanted to look back toward her but didn’t want to be seen to be twitching around like a restless five year old.  He felt her hand touch his back, fleetingly, comforting.

The old man’s funeral preparations had taken days, but Kyrus still didn’t feel real.  This was all so strange.  Ma said he’d feel like she had, wandering in dreams, time and code.

“I never got to know him,” da said. “I’m not even sure how, exactly, to grieve him.”

“Yeah, da.  Just a bit of connection in the code.”  He hesitated.  “All them... ah, those recordings, though.  Like he knew he wouldn’t make it but still wanted to help, still wanted to meet us, know us.”

Da snorted, but softly.  “More like he wanted to lecture us. They’ll help.  But I already want to shake the old man till his teeth rattle, for some of the messes he left behind for us to clean up.”

“Does anybody’s death not leave a mess, da?”

“You’re right, son.”  He opened his eyes.  “Time to start fixing it.”  He put his free arm around Ky’s shoulders and lifted the sun staff to signal the cortege.  “Time to let him go.”

** End Book One **