10. Chapter 10 #2
It was then, feeling my way across the language, that I asked him the thing I'd been circling for days.
I'd seen the women, the ones who moved through his great shelter with a particular status, who were spoken of with a word I'd learned meant something like the king's, who watched me with expressions I couldn't read.
It hadn't taken long to work out what they were, because I'd read enough about the shape of power to recognise a harem when I was standing in one.
How I felt about it, I hadn't yet decided.
But if I was aiming at the man, I wanted to see how he answered a hard question, so I asked it.
"The women," I said, and named the word for them. "Yours. The king's women. What are they to you?"
Something flickered across his face, not guilt exactly, but the discomfort of a man made to look at a thing he'd stopped seeing. He was quiet, and I watched him actually think about it, turn it over, examine himself as I'd asked him to, and plainly no one had made him do this before either.
"They are mine, by an old way," he said, feeling for the words, feeling for the truth under them.
"A tradition handed down from my father, and his father before him.
The king takes women, and in return they hold standing, honour, a place at the mound, because they are his.
" He frowned, and I could see him going somewhere he hadn't gone in a long time.
"I inherited them as I inherited the mound itself.
" He was quiet a moment. "With most of them I have never, that is, I do not...
" He stopped, tried again, and there was something almost bewildered in it now.
"I have never loved a single one of them, Ellie.
What I feel for them is a duty, and a kind of fondness, and never once the thing you mean when you say the word. "
"Then why keep them?"
"Because it is the way." He said it, and then heard himself say it, and I watched the answer stop satisfying him even as it left his mouth.
"Because to send them away would strip them of everything the tradition gave them.
Their standing comes from being the king's.
Take away the king, and they are nothing at all, status less, worse off than before.
" He looked genuinely troubled now, a man who'd walked further into a room than he'd meant to and found it wasn't the shape he remembered.
"It is a cage I keep them in for their own good, or so I have always told myself.
You are making me hear how that sounds."
Good, that's the man, right there, that's who he actually is, I thought.
Because a performer would have defended it, dressed it up, made it charming.
This one sat in the discomfort of an honest question and let it change his face, and that told me more about who Tau actually was than eight days of amber and combs had managed.
"Where I come from," I said carefully, "a woman's worth isn't something a man gives her by keeping her.
She carries it on her own, or she ought to.
Nobody where I come from ever quite managed to believe that about me, mind you.
" The dry aside slipped out before I could stop it, and he caught it, and something in his eyes sharpened with attention.
"But it's true anyway. Worth you can only get from a man is a leash with a soft collar, and I've worn one myself.
I'd not wish it on those women, however comfortable the tradition's made it. "
He looked at me across the fire without speaking, and behind his eyes some large slow reckoning turned over, and I had the sudden uneasy sense that I'd said a thing with more consequences than I'd meant it to have.
"Eleya," he said abruptly, half to himself, naming one of them, and there was a strange complicated weight on the name that I filed away without understanding.
I'd already had cause to notice Eleya. She was one of the king's women, and she was the one who watched me with the most open hostility of any of them, a beautiful, tightly-wound woman who went stiff whenever I came near Tau, whose dark eyes followed me across the settlement with a suspicion that had real fear underneath it.
I'd assumed it was jealousy, the ordinary kind, a consort resenting the newcomer the king trailed after.
It didn't quite fit the shape of her, though.
There was something more frightened in it than jealous, something that guarded rather than envied, and I hadn't worked it out yet.
I only knew that of all the pride, Eleya wanted me gone the most, and that whatever drove it, it wasn't the simple thing it looked like.
Tau got to his feet. The tiredness had gone out of him and been replaced by something I liked a great deal less, because it was the look of a king who had just decided something, and kings deciding things had never once worked out well for me.
"You've shown me a thing I can't unsee," he said, and there was a new energy in him, restless and certain. "I thank you for it. I think." The look he gave me then was close to a smile. "You will make my reign intolerably complicated, Ellie, and I find myself looking forward to it."
Then he turned and crossed the settlement toward his great shelter with the long purposeful stride of a man going to act on a decision, and I sat at my fire with the particular dread of a cook watching someone stride off to act on a recipe they'd only half heard, because I'd only meant to test whether there was a real man under the gold. I hadn't meant to hand him a lever.
I found out what I'd done the next morning.
He gathered the pride at the mound, the whole warm enormous sprawl of them, drawn by a king's summons, and he stood up before them in the grey spring light and spoke to them in the lion tongue, long and formal.
I caught perhaps one word in five. But I caught enough; I caught the word for the women, the king's women.
I caught the word I'd taught myself that meant free, or near it.
And I watched the faces in the crowd change, surprise, murmuring, a ripple of something that ran through the whole gathering like wind through grass, and I watched the women themselves, Eleya among them, go white.
He was dissolving the harem. Standing up in front of his entire kingdom and undoing the oldest tradition of the mound because a captive foreign woman had asked him a hard question at a cooking-fire and made him hear his own answer.
Oh, no, I thought, as the enormity of it landed. Oh, you beautiful, impulsive idiot, that's not, you can't just tear the ground out from under them like this,
Because I'd seen what he hadn't stopped to think through, in his sudden certain rush to do the honest thing.
He'd freed them, yes, and in freeing them, in a single grand gesture, he'd taken away the only standing those women had ever been permitted to hold, stripping them of the place the tradition gave them and handing them a freedom none of them had asked for, in a world that had no other slot for them to fill.
I knew that shape too well. It was my own life, if I was honest, a woman whose worth had only ever been whatever some man assigned her, cut suddenly loose from the man and left to discover she'd been given nothing of her own to stand on.
I'd railed at Tau about leashes with soft collars, and I'd been right, and I'd been so busy being right that I hadn't thought about what happens to a creature that's spent its whole life on a leash the moment you cut it free with nowhere to send it.
You don't give it freedom; you give it a cliff.
And somewhere under the horror of what I'd set in motion, quiet and unwelcome, a different thought was already turning over, because a problem is only a problem until you can see the shape of the answer.
I'd spent my whole life being handed worth by men and I knew, better than anyone in that whole warm settlement, exactly what it would take to build a woman a place to stand that no king could ever pull out from under her again.
The thought frightened me more than the hatred did, because it meant caring, and staying, and letting this impossible place become somewhere I was trying to fix rather than somewhere I was only waiting to be rescued from.
Across the crowd, Eleya's white frightened face turned, and found mine, and the look she gave me was pure blazing hatred, because she knew, as surely as I did, exactly whose hard question had just pulled the floor out from under her feet.