Prologue
A short story by Lady Sovay Terrasso
Spring had come to Kiro City, the capital of Centauri Prime, and the minnio were blooming everywhere. The white, star-shaped flowers on their thin vines adorned the mansions of Noble Houses and the pitted walls of the tradesmen's homes alike; the plant was as ubiquitous as it was beautiful. In the beautifully-tended parks of the capital, minnio vines grew up around the cinnamon trunks of the sibaree trees. When the sibaree bloomed a few weeks later, as they always did, the rioting scarlet blossoms would provide a startling counterpoint to the glowing white of the minnio. It was considered one of the natural highlights of the year.
A boy wandering in the gardens behind the Royal Palace stopped to pick some of the blooms, detaching a length of minnio creeper from a tree and winding it through his hair so that the pale flowers glimmered like stars in his dark hair. He climbed up on the stone rim of a pool to admire himself in the still water, then dangled the vine in the water like a lure so that the irridescently-scaled treel--a piscine delicacy favoured by members of the upper tier of Centauri society--would swim up and nip at it. Eventually he lost interest and gave the treel the minnio; they might even benefit from the slightly euphoric nectar of the flowers. A rare liquour could be brewed from minnio nectar, even though it took great amounts of the flowers and painstaking care; for its potency, the resultant drink was called brenna'kolee, or the favourite drink of Li--or Kolee, the Goddess of Passion In hopes that some of the nectar might have crushed onto his hands as he played with the flowers, he licked his fingers to taste the telltale tang, but there was nothing there. It didn't matter. It was such a beautiful day--the sky a rich cloudless blue, the air sweet and gentle--that he didn't need anything to make it better. Satisfied, the boy slid off the pool rim and walked off through the Royal Gardens.
He was a slight, quick child with sparkling dark eyes and black hair that was just beginning to curl up into a crest. Young as he was, he moved with a careless grace that, his proud parents predicted, would ripen into the kind of easy elegance that would have noble ladies of all ranks swooning at his feet. As yet, the boy didn't think much of this. His knowledge of the female of the species was limited to a few select encounters: his mother, his two sisters and the governess who shepherded them everywhere, several older cousins and the despised aunt who was his namesake. Of this group, the only ones he could stand were his sisters. They were the only people who understood him.
He wandered through the Royal Gardens, enjoying the freshness of the spring day. No doubt his parents would have raised a great cry over his abscence--the family as a whole was supposed to have met with the Emperor today in the Royal Court, but he had managed to evade his governess and slip out into the gardens--but he was having much more fun on his own. He wandered past stone statues of gods and ancestors, through mazelike constructions of hedges, through wide-open spaces where he stood with his face to the light and stretched his arms up towards the sun just to feel the warmth rain down on his skin. After a moment of deliberation at an intersection, he yielded to curiosity and began to walk towards the Royal Menagerie.
The Royal Menagerie had been built several generations ago by an Emperor with a great fondness for animals. So great a fondness, in fact, that he loved nothing more than to pit one beast against another; determining whether the ferocity of a blood-crazed liati could overcome the armoured endurance of a north-continent kazha. The present Emperor, a peculiarly progressive man, had stopped this practice; he had maintained the Royal Menagerie but banned the public fights and took great care of the aminals already in the Menagerie.
The boy wandered through the carefully-tended enclosures, each reproducing the natural habitat of the animal. He admired a flight of kirli as they fluttered back and forth, bright wings flashing in the sunlight; he watched two young teris tussling in the sunlight, shadows dappling their thick brown fur, and he came to a halt in front of the liati enclosure.
Wild relatives of the domesticated gerani, the liati were among the most dangerous predators on the Centauri homeworld. Lean and sinewy, the single liati of the Royal Menagerie stalked back and forth in its enclosure, its movements fluid with a predator's grace. Six powerful legs propelled the flexible body across the ground, unsheated claws digging deeply into the ground. Save for its greater size and strength, the camouflage spots dappling its hairless hide where its farmer cousins had short, sleek fur, the liati looked like much like a tame gerani; to the boy's eyes, it seemed like a larger version of his beloved pet.
There was a fence blocking the liati's enclosure from the rest of the Menageri--glided cages having seemed a little ridiculous to later Emperors--and a coded lock on the door, accessible only to the Menagerie-keepers...but fences can be climbed and locks circumvented from the inside by nimble-fingered boys. He was not quite sure why he was doing this, but something inside him seemed to push him across the ground to the liati's door, making his fingers grasp the heavy metal weave and his toes catch footholds in the fence, his body climb over until he dropped to land lightly on the rocks of the liati's environment and he could inspect the lock from the inner side.
It was the work of but a moment or two to figure out how to release the lock, and after that all he had to do was swing the door open and invite the liati out. At first it was wary, darting him slanted glances from feral gold eyes, but as he backed away and showed it its freedom, it slowly paced out into the open.
They stood eye to eye in a small annex of the Royal Gardens, the liati and the young boy. With smooth grace, the liati took one pace forward. The boy refused to move or lower his gaze. Eyes narrowed, he took a step of his own forward. "I see you." he said to the liati. Muscles slid and flexed beneath the hairless hide as it tensed for the spring, claws kneading the soft grassy ground underfoot. Never lowering his eyes, the boy smiled. "I see you. You can't hurt me."
As if from a distance, he heard footsteps behind him; footsteps and the singsong undercurrent of someone talking to himself. It faded from his senses as he concentrated solely on the liati. It was like a game that the old Emperor would have enjoyed; the Centauri child against the fierce liati, prey defying predator. Of course, he already knew the outcome, so it was really no contest at all.
The voice rounded the corner into the grassy space where the boy and the liati stood. The talking-to-itself singsong abruptly stopped, and an anxious voice said with horror, "Cailo?" and then a shout, "Oh, gods! Cailo!" He ignored it.
The liati wrinkled its lips back in a snarl, exposing long, curving fangs, and took another deliberate pace forward. The boy stared it boldly in the eyes and refused to yield his ground, even when the liati crouched to spring. Its tail lashed back and forth like a gerani's, eyes never leaving its prey.
The boy stared back into the predatory gaze. "You can't hurt me." he whispered confidently. "Nothing can."
The liati gave its hunting cry, a hoarse, snarling roar, and leapt. Hands clasped on the boy's shoulders and yanked him backwards, out of the way. The lean bulk of the liati passed him in a swift, fluid motion, its claws dug into the turf where he had been standing scarcely a moment ago.
Someone behind him--the owner of the hands, most likely--gasped and he felt himself pulled, stumbling, back around the corner. "What are you doing?" a shaking male voice gasped in his ear. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
"Oh, leave me alone! I'm fine!" he protested, shaking himself free of the trembling hands to peer around the hedge. Alone in front of its enclosure, the liaiti scratched at the ground once or twice before deciding that the pursuit of its prey was too complicated to be undertaken now. With a resentful backward look, it slunk back into its enclosure, where it curled bonelessly atop a rock and closed its eyes. The boy smiled. He had bested it.
No longer concerned with the liati, the boy turned around to take a look at his unnecessary rescuer. He was a small man in his early thirties, shaking slightly with the aftershock of what he had just done. The cut of his heavily-embroidered frock-coat and the height of his crest marked him as a member of the Centaurum, though in all likelihoood a newly-appointed one, judging from his age and his nervous air. Even as the boy watched, he pulled a lavendar handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead, then bent to look straight into the boy's eyes. He didn't have far to bend.
"Cailo," he said, his voice trembling only a little, "are you all right?"
Sulkily, the boy turned his head. "No. It couldn't have. Not even if it wanted to." Suddenly he smiled, giving the Senator all the brilliance of his child's charm. "Nothing can hurt me," he said, so assuredly that the little man blinked at him in half-convinced confusion. "Nothing ever will."
"The idealism of youth," the Senator sighed, straightening up and adjusting the lapels of his coat with a finicky, habitual gesture. Nonetheless, he darted a quick look at the smiling boy at his side. "Well, Cailo," he said at last, extending his hand to the boy, "you'd better come back to the Palace. Your mother is worried sick about you. She was angry enough to demand that your governess be discharged and sold! Surely you don't want that."
The boy ignored him. If he wasn't going to use his proper name, he wasn't going to respond. He wouldn't miss the governess anyway; she was always telling him not to do things, as if she didn't know who he was. Serve her right if she ended up drudging out her days as a menial in a lesser House. He wouldn't care.
Standing there in the sunlight, a perfect picture of innocent unconcern, he heard the Senator's high-pitched, uncertain voice speaking to him. "Cailo? Cailo, are you listening to me?"
"I like my name." he replied. "Please call me by it."
The chestnut-haired man sighed. "All right. And if I do, you'll come back to the Palace?"
"Of course." Trustingly, the boy placed his hand in the Senator's and looked expectantly into the man's blue eyes. For a child, he had a singularly charming smile.
There was silence, and then capitulation.
"Come along, little Cartagia," the Senator said, yielding at last to the desired nickname. "Let's get you home."
Together they left the Royal Menagerie.
©1999 by Sovay Terasso, except of course for the characters, planet, etc. All rights reserved except for when they aren't.
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