His eyes met Gyna's and he stopped, shaken. "Dear ladies, you have filled the streets of the great capitol of Camlorn with your beauty," cried the King, forcing a silence on the giggling, murmuring assembly.
Not a one of lust as she had experienced before, but one of small fondness, a dutiful kiss. Yes, that was it: she could see him as she had dreamt of him, high above her as he was now, bending now to kiss her.
As for the King himself, he was a handsome man of middle age, rather unremarkable, but Gyna was awed at the sight of him. At his side was his chief bodyguard, a battlemage by the look of him. The prostitutes crushed into the courtyard, as the King himself came to the balcony to greet them. Before the March had danced it way into the palace gates, she had all but forgotten the encounter.
Yet the experience had not frightened her: it seemed only one more strangely familiar aspect of the alien city. The old witches who sometimes came in to Daggerfall had sometimes spoke of doppelgangers, spirits that assumed the guise of their victims and portended certain death. The woman looked back at her, and it seemed as if she was thinking the same thing.Īnd so Gyna was. The same age, and height, and hair, and eyes, and figure, almost exactly. Looking at that whore had been like looking in a mirror. "It's all right, madam," said a blonde in silk. "My apologies, ladies," she said with a mock military salute. She looked abashed at the spectacle she had caused. The women in the parade gasped and surged back at the sight, but Lady Jyllia quickly calmed her stallion down. She did not see the snake-charmer at the mouth of the alley, and when his pet hissed and spread its hood, her charge reared up in fear. Hoping that it was the tale end, and desirous not to be lost again, Lady Jyllia guided her horse toward the festival. Peering down an alley, she saw the main avenue crowded with the March of Beauty. In no time at all, she was lost in the city where she had lived all but five years of her life. Jyllia thought for a moment, picturing in her mind the arrangement of streets in the city, and devised a shortcut to avoid the main street and the March.įor a few minutes she felt very clever as she wound her way through tight, curving side streets, but presently she came upon temporary structures, tents and theaters set up for the celebration, and had to improvise a new path. It would take hours to wait for the March to pass, and she had promised her old nurse Ramke a visit in her house south of the city. The streets were snarled, at a standstill. She had completely forgotten about the March of Beauty. The King's daughter Lady Jyllia rode out of the palace gates, and immediately cursed her misfortune. And yet, what was even stranger was how, at the same time, familiar it all looked, though she had never been there before. Compared to the squalid quarter of Daggerfall where she made her home, Camlorn at the height of celebration seemed so unreal. It was clear by her demeanor that she was used to the lascivious glances, though she was far from jaded at the sight of the city in splendor. In her late twenties, she wasn't the youngest of the prostitutes, but she was certainly one of the most desirable. Gyna attracted much of the attention with her tall, curvaceous figure barely covered by strips of silk and her curls of flaxen hair specked with flower petals. It was no secret that they were all prostitutes, and after the March and the Flower Festival that evening, they would be available for more intimate business.
The menfolk jostled one another and craned their necks, picking their favorites. A thousand comely young women, brightly and provocatively dressed, danced their way down the long, wide main street of the city, from the Temple of Sethiete to the Royal Palace. The sight that drew most of the male citizens of Camlorn was the March of Beauty. Musicians played in the plazas great and small, and on every street corner was a new exotic entertainer: Redguard snake charmers, Khajiiti acrobats, magicians of genuine power and those whose flamboyant skill was equally impressive if largely illusion. Every grand boulevard and narrow alley was strung with gold and purple banners, some plain, some marked with the heraldic symbols of the Royal Family or the various principalities and dukedoms which were vassals of the King. The occasion was the millennial celebration of the founding of the Breton Kingdom of Camlorn.
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