Marianus: Ledan: Ek-Anout
"They will expect cedarwood. I asked for cedarwood." The echo of Marianus's voice was oddly hushed in the low-ceilinged, makeshift audience hall. It was as though someone had cast a shroud over his very breath.
"There is no cedarwood, Sese."
"Heron." The chore of correcting these rats was grating, but necessary. They hoped, of course, that he'd stop, and so he must continue. Show them what a Pater of Lorar was made of.
"There is no cedarwood, Heron. The cedars grow in Kemassen, not ek-Anout." Saftan Andral ek-Ketenai bowed his head obsequiously. They were good at bowing here—too good. Would that they were as good at everything else.
Two dozen more hooded heads bowed before Marianus. The servants' featureless black robes merged into the shallow alcoves set into the walls. To a man, the servants stood ensconced like statues, their hands clasped in front of them, all alike. All silent.
Before Lorar had come, these men must have been priests of the strange god whose house Marianus now occupied. How easily the Anouti had traded their temple for a palace.
A brazier's light tickled along the ceiling, revealing stark ashlar stones stained black with soot.
This was no palace. It was a cave.
The only finery in this country seemed to be reserved for the temples, and the animalistic statues that loomed and lurked from beneath arches and along corridors. Yet here—here the only ornamentation was inked in ash. Whose home was this, and which god's eye now turned Marianus's way?
A sacrifice in the god's honour before he sailed home, and a safe course would be assured. He'd return with the water and with new stories for his great history. Assuming this Mikipsi—his Inda spy—ever turned up as he was supposed to. The possibility of the man's death gnawed at him—news out of the west suggested Hadrianus's son had spared no one from his father's court.
If Mikipsi failed, there was still Farnus. Farnus could be trusted to scour ek-Anout for the stuff all on his own, with no need for Marianus to abandon the senate to grasping hands.
Still, he must return with something. The naval defeat in Kemassen presented too much of an opportunity to his rivals for him to sail home with no bounty. The victory in Zimrida must be emphasized, the wealth ek-Anout had to offer impressed upon the factions—his own Redders most of all, roused to hunger by that upstart Baskius.
Andral coughed impatiently.
Good.
Marianus at last tapped the side of his throne. "This is a trading port―you should be drowning in cedars! I should be unable to breathe for cedarwood stacked ceiling high. In Lorar, our cedars always came from Ledan. Where are the cedars?"
"Pardon, Heron, but there's been no trade with Kemassen since Lorar waged war on her, and since, Heron, the war was lost, there appears to be no plunder either. Quite remarkable, I know."
So, the ugly little rat was insulting him, but what good was there in drawing attention to it? In the end, the man was right, and unfortunately, out of all the safeta, Andral was the best suited to rein in the others.
Marianus leaned back in his sandstone throne, ass aching like it hadn't since his army days. A horse's back was better padded than Anouti furniture. Even the beds were hard stone―nothing to sink into, nothing to soothe old bones. "We were led to believe the South was a land of excess, of luxury."
Andral straightened, standing short on the steps leading up to Marianus's seat. "A land of excessive pedants, I'm afraid, and luxurious book-keeping."
Andral was grey-haired and bony, with a swinging belly that suggested too much drink, and not enough bread to soak it up. He had a grotesquely pock-marked face, with a lump of a nose, and beady little eyes set in a brown, squarish face. The only thing at all dignified about him was his uniform, and even that veered on the effeminate―belted, long-shirted tunic of orange cotton, with gold trim along sleeves and edges. Andral's soft, flat, leather slippers poked out from beneath his dress, decorated with the sacred cow of one of his clumsy, foreign gods.
