At the Feet of the Sun Read online

  At the Feet of the Sun

  Lays of the Hearth-Fire

  Book Two

  Victoria Goddard

  Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This one is for all the fine folks on the HOTE Support Group Discord server (especially the moderators and everyone who kept me company through all those sprints writing and editing this book), for those who wrote to tell me how much The Hands of the Emperor meant to them, and for my ever-supportive family.

  Contents

  i. The Man From the Proverb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Interlude

  ii. Chasing a Viau

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Interlude

  iii. The Star Paths

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Interlude

  iv. Faravia

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Interlude

  v. The Rising Horizon

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  i. The Man From the Proverb

  Chapter One

  The Comet He’eanka

  The bells of the Palace of Stars were barely audible outside its walls. Cliopher Mdang, Viceroy of Zunidh, listened to the faint, falling tones of the midnight bell until the echoes faded, then turned away from the looming bulk of stone behind him to walk through the dark, empty gardens.

  His sandals crunched lightly on the gravel, echoed a moment later by the feet of his two guards and the soft thump of the butts of their spears. Ato and Pikabe both thought he should be in bed, but they had said nothing when he’d left his rooms and descended the back stairs to the outside door.

  They passed by several patches of glimmering pale blossoms, sweetly fragrant in the still, warm air. It was deep into the dry season, this part of the world: someone must be watering them, for there to be so many flowers in bloom. A handful of pale green lunar moths the size of his hand dipped from blossom to blossom.

  He ducked under the arch made by the lower branches and aerial roots of a cascading bearded fig. Roosting birds, disturbed by his passing, shifted and muttered to each other before settling down again. He scuffed at the dead leaves in the hollow below the branches, the earthy scent masking the earlier flowers. He breathed deeply in, out, releasing the tensions of the day. It had been a productive day, but a long one.

  It was, he knew even without hearing the bells, rather too late for him to still be out here and not in his bed. He had the Council of Princes the next day, and that was always fatiguing. But he had not been able to resist the lure of the comet he’d been told was visible.

  On the other side of the great fig was a little outpost of the Imperial Botanical Gardens, which mostly curved around to the south of the Palace. The gardens stepped down the ancient volcanic plug upon which the Palace was built to the River Dwahaii at its feet. In a bight of the river were well-managed floodplains and a system of dykes and pools where the collection of moisture-loving plants was kept. Cliopher kept meaning to go down and see the waterlilies again—they did not wait upon the wet season or the dry in equatorial Solaara—but somehow never found the time.

  There were too many days like today, where it was only now, in the quiet midnight, that he managed to get out-of-doors at all.

  He walked through the curving beds, a few lights set low down guiding his steps. He did not like to think he was so inattentive to his surroundings that he would wander unwittingly off the gravel paths, but it had to be said he had, once, stepped on a very rare orchid just about to bloom.

  (The curator in chief of the Botanical Gardens had not been very impressed by his defence that there had been a spectacular meteor shower that particular occasion: the little magic lights had been placed well before his next night-time excursion, a week or so later.)

  At the very edge of the cliff was planted a tui tree. It was, he believed, the only one to grow east of Nijan and west of the Isolates: their presence was a marker that Wide Sea Islanders lived or had lived in a place. The flowers were used in certain ceremonies, and cuttings had been taken from island to island all across the Wide Seas in the great voyages of settlement.

  Cliopher did not pretend, even to himself, that there was any great universal symbolism in the fact that this particular tree had only started blooming in the past few years, when he had finally found his way to claiming himself and his culture even here in the Palace and bureaucracy of which he was so much a part.

  The flowering was due to the fact that he had finally thought to ask an Islander botanist what she thought might be the problem. On her recommendation he had brought soil from under a thriving, blossoming grove of the trees at home, in case there was some crucial microbial lifeforms that his tree was missing. The tree had perked up noticeably within a week.

  Nevertheless—it had been such a wonderful surprise, last year, to come out one evening when he was particularly missing home, and discover the first few shy blossoms. Microbiota or not, he rejoiced.

  He was missing home tonight.

  A tui tree starting its bloom was the signal to look out for the kula canoes coming across the Bay for the great festival of the Singing of the Waters. The story was that the trees blossomed each year when the trade winds across the Wide Seas shifted direction, to show they were waiting patiently for the He’eanka, the ship of Elonoa’a, to return home.

  So many of his ancestors must have done the same, waiting for a wandering relative or lover or friend to return from an expedition of trade or discovery.

  Cliopher had no reason to expect anyone to come. His family back home were waiting, not exactly patiently, for his boat to come home.

  He leaned forward to breathe in the fragrance of one half-unfurled flower. The glimmering white petals seemed to chide him. He bit his lip as the rich chocolate scent made homesickness nearly overwhelm him.

  He did not expect anyone, it was true. But like the tui trees, blooming every year regardless of who came or did not come, Cliopher was waiting for someone.

  His lord and friend, the Last Emperor and Lord of Zunidh whose Viceroy he was, was away. Travelling.

  Looking for an heir according to an ancient custom that had let him escape the confines of his Palace, his role and his rank and all that went with them.

  Questing.

  Cliopher had stayed behind, of course. (Of course.) His Radiancy had entrusted the government of the world to him. Someone had to ensure that the preparations for the transition of government to his Radiancy’s successor went smoothly, and that someone was Cliopher, who had dedicated the majority of his life to the reconstruction and reformation of the government.

  Like the tui tree, therefore, he waited.

  He was finding it hard to be patient.

  Many years ago, someone had placed a bench under the tree. Cliopher sat down on it, glancing once to see that Ato and Pikabe had settled themselves at parade rest behind him—even after several years of being guarded, he could not quite ignore them—and regarded the prospect before him with a certain degree of satisfaction.

  The land fell steeply away below his feet, grey shadows with a few sparkling fireflies garlanding the rocks. At the bottom of the cliff was the run of water gardens, barely illuminated this time of night, and beyond them the thronging, busy neighbourhood of the Levels, lit with magic and torc
hes of many colours. A few great red eyes suggested bonfires.

  Bonfires always, to his eyes, meant a feast, a festival, a party.

  He felt a stab of envy.

  Sometimes he badly missed casual fun. He hated this life as a great lord, guarded and cosseted and kept well away from whatever drunken shenanigans were happening down there in the Levels.

  Beyond the city were the inky meanders of the River Dwahaii, and beyond that the cultivated plains, and beyond that the great glimmering line of the sea.

  He put his elbows on the backrest of the bench and tilted his head up to look at the sky. The young moon was already hidden behind the Palace to his rear.

  The stars were not what they had been when he crossed the Wide Seas in the years after the Fall, when it was just him and his little boat in the entire compass of the horizon; nor as he had seen them on quiet nights camping out on the Outer Ring islands on holidays back home; but they were as brilliant as any others he had seen since.

  Solaara was farther north than the Vangavaye-ve, a little above the equator. The northern pole star, Le’aia, was visible, a handbreadth above the horizon. A handbreadth was a ziva’a, he thought, putting out his hand for a moment to measure its altitude as he had been taught.

  He glanced at Ato and Pikabe, smiling sheepishly. Ato was looking away, into the gardens behind them, but Pikabe caught his eye and smiled in return. “Do you see the comet, sir?”

  It was hard to miss: four ziva’a above the horizon, a little south of east, in the heart of the square forming the body of the Fisherman. The tail pointed east and down, and the nose was into the great band of bright stars called Lulai’aviyë, the Wake.

  “There, in the Fisherman,” he said, pointing.

  “We call that the Hunter,” Pikabe said. “Different cultures, I suppose.”

  Cliopher chuckled. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “What other constellations do you have, sir?”

  He looked up. There, just barely visible over the southern horizon, was Nua-Nui. “That one is the Great Bird—his beak points the way to the southern pole. Between him and the Fisherman—your Hunter—is one called the Shell.”

  “What kind of shell?” Ato asked.

  “It’s the general word for shell,” Cliopher replied, his eyes catching the familiar doubled arc, though the lower half was very faint. “A common, ordinary white shell—the kind you find on the beach by the thousands. Clam-shells, usually, though it doesn’t matter. Could be a cowrie.”

  “We call that one the Water-Witch—there’s her staff,” Pikabe said, pointing to another star that Cliopher’s reckoning did not include in the constellation.

  “We have a water-witch in our stories, too—Urumë, the Sea-Witch, we call her—but she doesn’t have a constellation named after her.” Cliopher found the tight ring of stars over the Emperor’s Tower in the middle of the Palace. “There, that’s Tisaluikaye—‘the Island that Swallowed the Sea’. It’s the full name for a tisalë, an atoll, you see, which is a ring of coral around a lagoon. The story goes that the first atoll was created by the Sea-Witch when she had a fight with the sea.”

  “The Island that Swallowed the Sea. I like it,” Pikabe said, laughing.

  “There’s also the Island the Sea Spat Back—Moakiliye—moakili is the word for an uplifted coral island, one where an old reef, turned to stone, emerges back out of the sea from tectonic upheaval.”

  “It’s not really called the Island the Sea Spat Back,” Pikabe objected. “Not really.”

  “Moa’a is a word for the sea,” Cliopher explained. “Kilito is the word for spitting back or rejecting something, and ye is a suffix that means island. So: Moa’akilito-ye is the original one. It’s one of the Agirilis.”

  “We call that ring of stars the Ring,” Ato said, and winked so quickly Cliopher was not sure he’d seen the gesture. Perhaps the stolid guard had just twitched…?

  “We call it the Turtle,” Pikabe said. “In the beginning, the old men say, Turtle dove down into the muck at the bottom of the sea and brought up mud to be made into land, and as a reward the Creator put him up in the sky as a constellation. It’s always a good idea to be polite to turtles, the old men say.”

  “I shall bear that in mind,” Cliopher promised gravely. “What do you call the River of Stars?”

  The name for the wide band of stars was one of the few Shaian astronomical terms he knew. There had never been any reason, and little apparent point, in studying star lore after he left home. In Astandalas the stars were of another world, and anyhow masked by the lights and smoke of that great city, and in Solaara he had never felt the need.

  As he looked at the sky the old Islander names stirred in his mind, teasing at the tip of his tongue. There was the long, undulating constellation of Au’aua, the Great Whale, her eye the brightest star in the northern sky. There was Jiano, one of the Sixteen Bright Guides, riding high above the shoulder of the Fisherman, the star for whom the current Paramount Chief of the Vangavaye-ve was named. And there, rising in the south of east (remāraraka, his great-uncle’s voice said in his ear, the direction from which the long-tailed cuckoos come), Furai’fa, the ke’e of Loaloa, Cliopher’s own ancestral island in the Western Ring.

  “We call it the Path of Straw,” Pikabe said. “The story goes that Turig, the god of beer, was cold one night so he went to the house of his brother Ardol, the god of farming, and borrowed a bundle of straw to take back to his home. But he was so drunk he spilled half the straw along the way home, and that’s what we see. Ardol lives in the east and Turig in the west, because Ardol has to wake up early with his animals and that way Turig always knows to follow the Sun home. The path curves because he was so drunk.”

  Cliopher laughed, as did, surprisingly enough, the usually-taciturn Ato. “We call it the Path of the Cranes,” Ato volunteered. “That’s the way they migrate, where I’m from, way up north.”

  “What about your people, sir?” Pikabe asked. “Do you say the River of Stars, too?”

  The Sea of Stars or Sky Ocean was the name for the sky, and though he had heard that Isolate Islanders called the Wake ‘the Great Current’, Cliopher’s great-uncle, his teacher of the ways, had taught him Western Ring names and knowledge.

  Cliopher’s heart warmed at the inevitable thought of his Buru Tovo, who had gotten on the sea train at age ninety and come halfway around the world to see what people were saying about his wayward great-nephew. He smiled up at the stars.

  “Our name for it is Lulai’aviyë. Lulai is the word for ‘the light in the wake of a canoe’—there’s a kind of phosphorescence that you see in the ocean at night, which glows when you disturb it—and Aviyë are the Ancestors, the first of the wayfinders. So it means ‘the Light in the Wake of the Ancestors’ Canoes.’”

  He traced out the line of the Wake until it disappeared behind the dome of the Palace. It had been so long since he thought about these names, these stories. Cliopher’s voice went a little quieter as he went on.

  “The old name for the Wide Sea Islanders is Ke’e Lulai’aviyë, or just Ke’e Lulai. The people who live Under the Wake. Most of our islands lie under its path.”