In the Realms of Gold Read online

  In the Realms of Gold

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  IN THE REALMS OF GOLD: FIVE TALES OF YSTHAR

  First edition. April 10, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Victoria Goddard.

  ISBN: 978-1988908236

  Written by Victoria Goddard.

  Also by Victoria Goddard

  Greenwing & Dart

  Stargazy Pie

  Stone Speaks to Stone

  Bee Sting Cake

  Whiskeyjack

  Blackcurrant Fool

  Love-in-a-Mist

  Plum Duff

  Lays of the Hearth-Fire

  At the Feet of the Sun

  Those Who Hold the Fire

  Red Company

  The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul

  The Sisters Avramapul

  The Bride of the Blue Wind

  The Warrior of the Third Veil

  Standalone

  In the Company of Gentlemen

  The Hands of the Emperor

  Not Far From the Tree

  Till Human Voices Wake Us

  The Connoisseur

  In the Realms of Gold: Five Tales of Ysthar

  The Return of Fitzroy Angursell

  Petty Treasons

  The Tower at the Edge of the World

  Aurelius (to be called) Magnus

  Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander

  Terec and the Wild

  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Victoria Goddard

  Scheherezade

  Rook

  Not Far From the Tree

  Blue Moon over Pincher Creek

  Inkebarrow

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  Further Reading: The Bride of the Blue Wind

  Also By Victoria Goddard

  About the Author

  Scheherezade

  It was the thousand and first night.

  Scheherezade had worked it out a few hours earlier, after she realised how close it was to the third anniversary of her wedding. Four days short of three years since her marriage day. Four nights short of three years since she had first sighed lightly, smiled, shrugged charmingly, said, “Ah, but the tale of the fisherman and the djinn is far more marvellous than that, O august king.”

  Three days short of three years since her husband the king had kissed her fingers and said, “Then you may live another day to tell it me.”

  Three years to the day since she had conceived her desperate plan, convinced her father the vizier to take her to the king to be his three hundred and sixty-seventh bride, a year and a half since he had found his first wife in adultery on his brother’s notification, and then come back from a voyage with the plan that he needed revenge on the whole of womankind.

  One might have expected him to swear off marriage—he had a son and heir out of that first wife, who looked enough like him to be assumed legitimate—but the king Scheherezade’s husband had a mighty anger and a mighty thirst, and when he had once tasted the commingling of blood and passion and power he did not forget it.

  Scheherezade readied herself for the king’s arrival. She had bathed already in rose-scented water, dressed in silks of shimmering colours (tonight, as often, red), added jewels, twined jasmine through the intricate plaits of her hair, painted her face with kohl and rouge and subtle powders flecked with gold. She was not the most beautiful of her husband’s wives, but she was lovely enough that in the days before her marriage poets had written odes to her eyes and the shelly coils of her ears.

  Her attendants brought her clothes and paint-pots and unguents. Her sister had been her chief attendant until a month ago, when the king Scheherezade’s husband and decided Dinazad was woman enough to marry, and sent her off to his own brother as a gift. Scheherezade had wept, for her going she said, not saying it was his brother was a weak man, inclined to follow where he led, whether marriage or murder.

  Other attendants laid out the king’s room for his arrival: straightened the carpets, set the braziers scented with sandalwood alight, positioned the carved screens to hide the doors and windows. They laid out trays of food and wine and water and tea, lit the brass and silver lamps polished mirror-bright.

  Two years since she said begun the story of Aladdin and the djinni of the lamp, she thought, readying the layers of tonight’s stories in her mind. Her husband the king had liked that tale, chuckling over the clever lad from the souk, though not enough that he had not stroked her in the hours after midnight when she fell silent and said, “Hast forgotten all thy stories?” and when she looked at him she’d seen the eagerness in his eyes, and not known which hunger was the stronger.

  Her sister Dinazad had been there that night, ready to say, “Was he not in the days when he was prince visited by Sinbad whose voyages crossed the seven seas? O king of all treasures, will you not let my sister tell me of Sinbad before the dawn comes and her death with it?”

  Sinbad had taken her through two years of intricately layered stories. She was nearly finished the tale of his seventh voyage, closing the doors of each inset tale as the year spooled on. Now to take it out again to the next layer, back to the court of Aladdin—unless on Sinbad’s wandering return to the city Aladdin now ruled he should meet with an old companion, who naturally would regale Sinbad with his own voyages, burrow another layer deeper. She had not used the idea of the wife stolen away on her wedding-day by an ifrit who—

  Of course she had not used that idea; that was why she was married.

  Scheherezade heard the soft noises of her attendants leaving the king’s room. She would tell the story she had read in an old pagan book, of the sailor (who else would be friends with Sinbad?) who had angered a sea-god on his way back from a war, and been thrown on ten years of sea-wanderings. The ramifications of that story would be good for another year at least, or more, before the pagan sailor came home to find his wife still waiting for him.

  Scheherezade accepted the perfume passed by her present chief attendant, a woman chosen by the king her husband when he sent Dinazad off to be married to his brother. His brother followed him in all habits, whether virtuous or vicious, except that he did not like women who talked.

  She had no emotions to spare for her new attendant, who obeyed her mistress with a frightened flinching manner, and disappeared as soon as the guards opened the door to announce the king’s arrival; who was late this thousand and first night.

  He came eventually, as he always did, drawn by some fascination for her stories, for her body, for the pleasure he took in reminding her every evening that this would be her last unless she continued to weave her spell of words well enough. He was not always so crude as to mention it; if nothing else, he had learned subtlety through the nights of her stories; but he never failed to bring her winding sheet to lay upon their couch. As befit his queen it was made of white silk; it was nonetheless a shroud.

  He came eventually, and as she performed the courtesies her attendants vanished.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, handsome: dark beard and flashing eyes: he looked to her like one of the old, old sculptures from the dead civilizations that washed about the edges of the desert and the oldest parts of the cities. The sculptures were of bull-gods and manticores and winged monsters with human faces.

  She was careful to ensure every hero in her stories resembled him, one way or another.

  He liked her to begin while they ate, keep murmuring her stories through the night as the lamps burned down. This evening, the thousand and first evening, she began by feeding him apricots, grape leaves stuffed with rice and raisins, tender young birds her husband the king had probably hunted himself with his fine white falcon and his horse. Outside somewhere it was spring.

  She fed him delicately. He reclined against the winding sheet, his eyes more intense than usual. Perhaps he had been counting the days as well, she thought, or no, she saw, as she carefully drew the tale of the seventh voyage of Sinbad to its conclusion, he was more anxious than usual to move on from the food.

  She was practised, now, had the trays positioned where they could easily be set aside. Dipped her fingers in bowls scented with attar of roses (sometimes she was sick of flowers, whose scents and petals filled her life so that wherever she went there were the old petals, brown and withered, dropping away from her hair, the folds of her clothing, the hollows of her flesh). Dropped the first few layers of her clothes as moved across the white silk of her shroud to where the king her husband awaited her.

  “I have heard it said, O glorious king,” she murmured, stroking his face, down the hard line of his jaw, down the curls of his beard, to the hard warm muscles of his torso beneath his own loose robes. “While Sinbad had sworn off the sea at last, he did not forget his old comrades entirely, and as he went to the palace to beseech the prince Aladdin’s aid, he encountered a man in the marketplace who said—”

  “No more,” said the king her husband. “There will be no more stories.”

  He smiled at her, eyes dark; she could feel his excitement growing under her hands. “No more stories,” he said, and he kissed her. “I had almost forgotten how perfidious you women are, in all your stories of courage and clemency and love.”

  “My lord?” she said.

  “Three years have you kept me fr
om my purpose, from my vow, from my solemn oath. My court has come to laugh that I am so tied to a woman I will not leave her alone a night, that I cannot bear to pass a night without her voice in my ear.”

  “It is I who cannot live without thee,” she said, the terrible truth.

  He began slowly to undo her elaborate hairstyle, running his fingers through the tresses without any interest in whether she flinched or no. “My brother was the one to discover your perfidy, as he was the one to discover it in my first wife.”

  “I have betrayed you with no man,” she said, knowing full well that while that was the truth it was true also that she betrayed him with every thought, every word, every story where she measured him against tinker, tailor, soldier, fool, and found him wanting.

  “My brother lit upon the answer, so simple I had not seen it, for your stories bewitched me, sweet storyteller. But he saw it in his late wife your sister, when she tried a different trick than yours, tried honesty to see if that might win his heart. Three years I have sowed my seed in you, and to what end? A thousand night of tales, and nothing more.”

  She closed her eyes. Her sister, too old for her years, had conspired with their old nurse to provide a tea that made her barren. She had not known, had thought her womb closed (perhaps in some payment for her facility with stories, as if she could have all the intangible progeny of her infinite imagination but not also any children of her body), until her sister came to her before her own wedding and gave her the herbs for the tea she had made Scheherezade every morning for nine hundred and seventy-nine days.

  “Perfidious woman,” he said, “and I had almost thought you as wise and virtuous as you are beautiful and eloquent. I tell you, I know you now, and there will be no more stories.” He chuckled, moving his hand from the half-undone braids to discover her body. “Except the one that I write! My pen is as eloquent as your tongue, sweet traitor, and will never again write on palimpsest, but a fresh sheet each night.”

  He took her then, and several times again that night as the mood took him, until at last he fell asleep.

  But Scheherezade was not the inexperienced young maiden of his fantasies. In the hours between midnight and dawn she proved to her husband the final perfidiousness of women with the courage of all those baffled souls in her stories who would accept any breaking of their own hearts but rise up in vengeance against those who stoop to tyranny. After one thousand nights and one of patience Scheherezade pressed her winding sheet against his lips until at last he was still and that story was done.

  PERHAPS THERE WAS AN enchantment indeed to all her unfinished stories, for she found anonymity drop on her as easily as it had for Haroun al-Raschid when he sought to know the truth of his rule, in her tale that she had hoped might turn the king her husband from his ways.

  All her attendants were asleep; they would come at dawn to help her bathe and prepare for the next night of stories. The two guards who stood attendance were not permitted within the women’s quarters, and so late in the night, after a thousand nights of uneventfulness, they thought nothing when a woman enveloped in a white veil came out with a lamp and a pitcher. They barely looked at her, perhaps thinking it was easier to fetch water or wine from another room than disturb the king at his rest; certainly it was wiser.

  With empty pitcher and guttering lamp Scheherezade felt like some allegorical figure, creeping barefoot through the palace she did not know. That was her strongest thought; she felt crowded by the ghosts of her unfinished stories, and the so-definitely-finished frame narrative. Its reality lurched and flared and splintered back with her shadow. The roses and jasmine in her hair dropped down under her feet.

  She found a side door open for some early-morning delivery. The carter was bent over something beside the donkey, so she slipped along the other side of the cart and hurried into the city, her feet slapping very softly on the road. There was sand everywhere underfoot.

  She did not know this city, was three years from any excursion outside the palace walls, a thousand nights and one night from the young woman who had planned a way to save the lives of other maidens whom the king required as unwritten parchment for his pen. She was palimpsest, written over and scraped clean and written over again, and the city was full of the whispering ghosts of her stories, in the shut-up corners of shops and the occasional lamps behind shuttered windows.

  She had stopped up his appetite with stories, until he had silenced her, and she had reached the end of her patience. She was not one who would wait ten years or twenty for her husband to come home from the wars; or perhaps it was that her husband was not one she would wait for.

  She was not the bride stolen away on her wedding day by the djinni, bound in a chest with seven chains for his private enjoyment, kept at the bottom of the sea to keep her from all other eyes or hands. The djinni’s wife managed to cuckold her husband with five-and-twenty and two hundred kings, among whom were counted the king Scheherezade’s husband (who had found in her actions all necessary excuse for his own) and the king his brother who disliked honesty.

  Scheherezade followed the road from the side of the palace where it led. Her mind was as numb as her feet; the only concession she made to prudence was to accept the water another woman drew for her at a well on the outskirts of the city. The sun was rising into a sky like polished steel, the morning call for prayer echoing about her.

  The young woman at the well was one such as the king might have taken as a bride; perhaps her sister had been, if she had one, in the year before Scheherezade had wed. The woman knew the white veil for what it was, and perhaps she thought it was one of the dead who walked past her.

  In some access of pity or fear she proffered her own jug. Scheherezade paused to allow her to fill hers. Then she gave the woman the lamp she still held in return, leaving her standing there beside the well, turning the finely worked thing in her hands, long after Scheherezade had turned the corner between two white houses and entered the desert.

  No part of her wanted to ask the young woman for her story.

  As she walked, eyes straight ahead, pitcher balanced on the folds of her winding sheet above her head like a looming headache, ignoring all greetings and comments and whispered prayers and looks, Scheherezade finished her stories.

  She did not bring in the pagan sailor with the patient wife. Instead she had Sinbad finish his tale to Aladdin; and Aladdin, an old man, finished telling his life to the third fisherman, who finished telling his tale to the tailor he had met on the road two years past, and the tailor who had been telling the story of that encounter to the merchant’s son finished his tale, and the merchant’s son finished recounting his travels to his father, and on and on and on, rolling up the scroll of her memory until Ali Baba and Aladdin and Haroun al-Raschid who looked but was nothing like the king her husband all quietly met their ends, and with them the djinn and the magical fish and the rocs in their diamond-studded valleys, and with them the heroes and princes, virtuous maidens and loving wives, magicians, mathematicians, magi; alchemists, astronomers, aides; scholars, sailors, soldiers, servants; queens, enchantresses, lovers, fools; wise animals and uncanny ones; boats and bobbins and daggers and distaffs; until all of them had played out their roles, finished their stories, faded back into the ordinary dull fabric of the world, where a woman murders her husband because she has finally realised he will never change, not for a thousand nights and one of offered adoration, love, and all the stories of marvels, honour, humour, and heroism a storyteller might devise.

  By this time she was in the deep desert. Her pitcher had long since been emptied. A numb part of her tried to take amusement that it had taken her inner jug of words far longer to run dry, but when at last she came out of the final story, neatly finished off “and then she came to the desert,” she realised that there were indeed no more stories.

  It was night: the stars were brilliant in their multitudes above her. The desert was very quiet, with no voice to it. She had always imagined it full of winds, of murmurations, of secret movements, but it was as dry and as silent and as still as tongue.