He loved that book. It was one of the few gifts he remembered his father ever giving him.
Ah, your father. Another dead man. Another who rots in the ground, headless. Remember how nobody found his head? How they spent three days trying to fish it out of the pond where it fell? How they gave up and put a turnip, wrapped in gauze, so his body wouldn’t look so deformed as it burned on the pyre?
He bites his lip.
Tap-tap-tap.
The crow is staring at him again. He thinks about catching it. Perhaps if he can fashion a form of trap, he can lure it close enough to grab it. Once in his hands, he will strangle it, squeezing the last life out of it so that it could never…
Go on...
No. He takes another deep breath. Jasmine petals.
I bet if you poked around the garden with a stick, you would stumble on your father’s head. Hail the Dragonlord Reshiro, last true Dragonlord of the realm. Hail to the King, sitting by a tree stump, housing mice and growing mushrooms as the years go by.
White petals. Soft white petals clustered around broad, green leaves, while he sits underneath and turns the pages...
If your family is truly blessed by the gods…
The crisp, yellow pages, smelling of leather and ash from the ink…
Why didn’t he at least die a noble death? Why was he crying and begging his assassins to spare him, to think of his children, a coward’s grimace on that head that would never be found again?
Nostrils flaring, he gets up and changes his position. He knows it doesn’t help, but it doesn’t stop him from trying. He tears his gaze away from the crow to look at his feet. They are bare, caked with mud and blisters. When did he lose his shoes? Yesterday? Last year? He must have asked R— to get new ones for him, although the rocks do not hurt his feet as much as they used to.
In truth, his body does not hurt as much as it used to. One gets accustomed to the cold, to the hunger, to the discomfort of sharp rocks and wet mud. In time, even boredom becomes bearable. It is the constant tap-tap-tap that hurts.
You are aware, aren’t you, that not caring is a prelude to death?
“With you, everything is a prelude to death,” he says out loud. His voice echoes around the walls of the cave, roaring into the darkness. He readjusts his seat before staring at the remnants of last night’s fire. A part of him knows that if he touches it, it will be damp and cold, which will possibly explain why he shivered all throughout last night, but he doesn’t remember...he remembers very little now…
He hears a different sound. He turns his head with the efficiency of a blind man and realizes it is water dripping from a crack in the ceiling. He listens to it for a long time before remembering that he is thirsty.
He crawls towards the sound until he reaches a stone wall. As he turns, he stumbles on the stream almost entirely by accident. He looks up into the blackness, allowing the water to seep past his cracked lips and over his dry skin. The refreshing, earthy taste of the water momentarily numbs the pain.
You don’t even remember your name, do you?
He jerks his head back in annoyance. Of course he does. It’s V…
He hears the sinister laughter, the sort that comes from deep within the belly.
“Why does it matter?” he calls out. His voice sounds hoarse, alien.
Dragonlord, it says. Dragonlord. Dragonlord! The taunting continues, the way it always does at this time of the day, which tells him that the crow will be gone by now. He tries to drown out the voice in his head and hobbles towards the light. The figure is on time, too—he can see the silhouette in the distance. He no longer remembers her name, either, but her arrival is the only thing he has left to look forward to.
He realizes, a little later, that she is not alone. The figures draw closer. When he sees the person behind her, without understanding why, he begins to cry.
Chapter Eleven
“Do you see why I couldn’t have told you?” Ryia murmured, breaking a silence that started when Sume first laid eyes on Rysaran and seemed to have lasted forever.
Sume regained her senses and leaned against the side of a tree. Rysaran was still crouching at the edge of the cave, staring at her from the shadows with tears running down his face. He had not said a word since she arrived. “Won’t he come out?” she asked. “Surely a bit of sunlight, and some fresh air…”
Ryia shook her head. “I’ve tried. He doesn’t like that. Scratched me the first few times I did. Weak as he is, he’s still much stronger than me.” She took a deep breath. “He doesn’t want to leave the dragon. It’s there in the caverns somewhere.”
“Did you try to get anyone else here?”
Ryia looked at her. “At the state he’s in? I didn’t want to risk word coming out that the Dragonlord is…” She swallowed. “He would’ve been assassinated within the week.”
“Your sisters do not know either?”
“It has only been a little more than a year since I found him. We used to go here when we were young. I had decided to take a morning walk—I don’t know why—and found him here. He didn’t recognize me, although a part of him must’ve remembered this part of the woods that we used to explore.
“I tried to tell my sisters that same day, but by then they were too preoccupied with this campaign to depose of the Hoens. They were...incensed at the idea that Rysaran could be reduced to something less than a man.” Her lower jaw quivered. “I asked them...what if he is alive? What if the reason he cannot come home is because he’s broken, driven mad by this dragon-obsession of his? Roa laughed and said it would be better if he never came home at all...”
“He’s their brother, too,” Sume said. “You’re probably wrong. They’ll understand.”
“You don’t know them like I do,” Ryia murmured. “Not them or this family. Preserving the throne is all there is. Is it not obvious that the Ikessar clan is just as proud, if not more so, than the Oren-yaro? It is the only reason we’ve held on to the throne as long as we did. And now it is slipping from our grasp...” She turned her head to the side to look at Rysaran’s figure, now crouched in a corner, arms around his knees.
Sume touched Ryia’s shoulder before stepping forward. She saw Rysaran’s eyes dart towards her, but there was no glimmer of recognition. “Hello,” she said. He looked past her.
“There’s a crow,” he said, a few moments of silence later. “If you could catch it, I would be much obliged.”
She came close enough to smell him. “Do you remember me?”
“That crow is pestering me and he knows it.” Rysaran rubbed his nose with his fingers. “You,” he added, staring at her now for the first time. “Why is there two of you, now? Why…” And he stopped, as if his words confused him. When Sume moved to touch him, he flinched, drawing deeper into the shadows.
“He does that,” Ryia said, coming up from behind her. “Touch frightens him. I think the idea of interacting with anyone frightens him. He talks sometimes—to someone else who isn’t there. He yells at it, curses it.”
“Naijwa’s beast,” Sume murmured. She realized that Ryia was listening to her. “It’s the dragon, or at least what you all think is a dragon,” she said. “Have you seen it?”
“No. But I’ve heard it breathing, moving. I think it’s trapped in the caverns. I’ve been too frightened to check. Rysaran tells me he won’t go anywhere without it.”
Sume walked to the basket Ryia had brought from the kitchens and removed a package, wrapped in white cloth. She returned to Rysaran, holding the package out with one hand. Rysaran looked at her. “You’re skin and bone,” she said. “You need to eat.”
“Eating hurts,” Rysaran mumbled, but after a moment, he took the package. He placed it on his lap.
“I asked the cook to make something you like,” Ryia broke in. “You remember? You love these cakes. There’s cheese and egg in them. I also brought dried fish and rice. The cook boiled it in coconut milk.” She glanced at Sume. “He used to eat more, but lately, he won’t t
ouch what I bring. I’ve tried…” She stopped, holding back tears. “You have to eat, brother,” she whispered. “You have to try.”
“Eating hurts,” Rysaran repeated. “Hurts my mouth. Hurts my belly.” But his fingers traced the cloth gingerly, a look of longing on his face.
“Do you remember me, Prince Rysaran?” Sume asked again, now that he seemed a lot calmer. “We last saw each other in Oren-yaro, where you saw the dragon. You released it from the ruins of Warlord Yeshin’s palace.”
“The dragon,” Rysaran breathed. A flicker came to his eyes. “Yes. He does not listen to me. He thinks...all of this is foolish, but I will show him. I will be the master of him yet.”
“Dragons don’t talk, brother,” Ryia whispered.
“This one does,” Sume said. “Listen to me, Prince Rysaran. It’s not a dragon. It’s a creature of agan, created long ago, that consumed a dragon and so now appears in the guise of it. It’s playing with your mind, my lord. This is what it does. If you are not strong enough to fight it—if you cannot draw strength from the agan streams, it will destroy you. Not just kill you—it can destroy your very soul.”
As soon as she stopped to catch her breath, she heard Ryia stifle another sob. But Rysaran looked past her, at something unseen in the distance. “He says,” he murmured, “that you have other things to worry about. Your daughter…”
Sume grabbed his shoulders. “Wake up, Rysaran!”
He continued staring in the distance.
“It’s inside him,” Sume told Ryia a while later, after they were able to wrap Rysaran in a blanket and force him to eat a bit of cake, soaked in water. “Attached to his mind, like a leech. I was told that it could do that—that the more time you spend with it, the easier it can sink in and play with you. Someone with a connection to the agan can draw from the stream for protection, but people like us are little more than sheep in the face of a wolf. In Gaspar, we met a man called Gaven who had been around it too long. Worse, I think—he was raving mad, dangerous. That Rysaran is almost peaceful compared to him is surprising.”
“I don’t understand, Sang Kaggawa,” Ryia said. “How do you know about this creature?”
“It’s—it’s hard to explain. But it’s what brought me back to Jin-Sayeng, after spending time in Gaspar. The merchant I’ve been working with, Enosh Tar’elian, used to be involved with the company that brought the creature back to the mainland. We’ve spent the last few years trying to track it down to make sure it’s destroyed. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous it is—you’ve seen what it did to Oren-yaro and Shirrokaru.”
“Actually,” Ryia murmured. “I haven’t. I haven’t left this temple in over seventeen years. But I think I know what you mean. I’ve heard the stories, and I found it hard to believe—back when I first heard them—that a mere dragon could’ve caused such destruction.” She glanced at Sume. “You could destroy this thing?”
“Not me, exactly.”
“But you’re with people who want to do this?” She gestured at Rysaran. “Once this creature is no longer there, he would return to normal. Won’t he?”
“I hope so. I—I don’t know as much as I should. I’ve been trying to learn, but there is so much about the creature that we don’t know about. A Gasparian witch made it, and…”
Ryia turned away. “I don’t care what it is,” she whispered. “I don’t want to know. We kept these things away from Jin-Sayeng for a good reason.”
“It is not a thing we can pretend doesn’t exist. The agan is part of the way things are, Ryia, whether we want to believe it or not...”
Ryia gave her a fixed stare. “You remember your honorifics when you speak with my sisters,” she said. “Yet you refer to me only by name. What is it about me that elicits little respect?”
“I apologize.”
Ryia gave her a thin smile. “And there, again.” She sighed. “It is the same thing with my brother, you know. As hard as he tried, he just never came off as someone with an air of command. He called it his greatest failing, as Reshiro’s only son.” She shook her head. “No matter. This thing you are talking about...agan, the Kags call it...it does not belong in Jin-Sayeng. Once my brother returns to the throne, I will remind him of his duties to seek out these witches and eliminate them from our land.”
“It is not a living witch that did this,” Sume said, realizing, as soon as the words came out, that Ryia did not care about anything she had to say. She dropped her head in resignation. “These people—Enosh Tar’elian and Sapphire Orsalian—left the kingdom a few months ago to follow a lead on this creature’s location. If you will allow me the resources to locate them and bring them here, they will know what to do.”
“These names,” Ryia murmured, the disgust plain on her face. “Sapphire Orsalian sounds Dageian.”
“She is half-Dageian, Your Highness, though I think she is at least part Jinsein. She looks like it.”
“A rok. You would not drink muddied water, even if another tried to convince you it is water all the same.”
“With all due respect, I am an alon gar and yet…”
“Still pure Jinsein. You forget that you are speaking with an Ikessar.” She snorted. “What about the other one? The merchant?”
“He is from Gorent, though he grew up in the Kag.”
“I have read of such people. I did not think I would ever meet one. My brother had travelled to Gorent in the past. Did you know that?”
That came as a surprise. “No, Your Highness.”
“When he was still a boy, he went out and saw the world. To learn more, he said, though really, it was to find himself a dragon. One of the conveniences of having been born as the son. Fool boy. I would have loved to travel with him.” She looked at Rysaran, who was now staring at the ceiling. “Even if my sisters were to win their war, it is too late for that now, I think.”
“I wouldn’t give up so easily.”
“Empty words, Kaggawa. Look at him.” She got up. “I will make the arrangements for you to contact these people. You—” She stopped herself, pulling back from the obvious command. “I’m going to get food and blankets. Could you stay here and watch him? As a friend?”
“I won’t leave his side,” Sume said.
“Thank you.” She glanced back at her brother. “Sing to him. Tell him stories. He used to like that. He still does, I think.”
Sitting alone with Rysaran reminded Sume of her father.
Hearing stories about Goran alon gar Kaggawa over the past few years had given Sume the impression that he was a charming, likable man, always full of humour and energy. Perhaps she even recalled it, in a memory that overlapped her brother Oji’s, because they had been similar in many ways.
But mostly, she only remembered Goro the town drunk, the washed-up merchant, the man who couldn’t even be trusted to buy a sack of rice without wasting it on wine along the way. She remembered waking up in the middle of a night to the neighbour’s dog barking, which always meant that—for that night, at least—her father had managed to find his way back home. She would open the front door to find him vomiting in the garden or passed out by the steps. Because Hana would scold the old man if she woke her up to help, she always brought him in herself, heating up water to wash his face with.
Goro, if he woke up during these ministrations, would begin crying. He never told her the reason—he never spoke much in the years after her mother’s death—but even as a child, she could guess why. People find strength, or they break. There is enough room in a lifetime for both.
“Rysaran,” she said. Even his name failed to ignite recognition; the prince continued to stare into space. Sume longed to see the familiar flicker in his eyes and the smiles that accompanied his strange ideas. She could still remember the way he would get so engrossed in their conversations that his whole face would light up, and how wonderful it felt to know that afterwards, she would come home to her baby and a man who cared about them both even if it meant he would have to yell at her to show i
t.
“Those were wonderful times, weren’t they?” she found herself asking the shell of a man that sat not more than a few paces away from her. “You had worries, but they weren’t much. Rice was cheap. Nobody was trying to kill you. I had Rosha, and Kefier…” She paused, the name forming into a question as soon as it left her lips. She stared at her fingers.
Maybe I should’ve been kinder to him in those days. I think a part of me blamed him for not being the man I wanted him to be. For not being Enosh.
“You’d tell me I was being foolish,” she said, glancing at Rysaran. “Is love really so complicated? You’d be surprised. I know it isn’t a thing you’ve given much thought to—you and your dragon-dreams, Rysaran, it’s all you’ve ever had! But…”
She tucked a lock of hair over her ear. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I know that I’m supposed to stand here and bear it all, that there are more important things to worry about. We hear stories about heroes of old and tell ourselves that we can be like that, too, brave and daring and impervious, only that’s not how it works, you see? Not all of us can be so selfless or so strong. Look at you, Rysaran. Would you be here if you had allowed yourself to be happy? The Jin-Sayeng you loved and served have forgotten about you.
“We can pretend that we’re doing bigger things, that there is more at stake than our own petty feelings, but it doesn’t work like that. I made the sacrifice not to see my daughter so that I can save her life—save the world, I thought! I regret it every day. All of this would be easier if I can come home at night and see her face, watch her sleep, watch her grow. She must be so tall by now. I know that she must hate me.”
She saw Rysaran begin scratching at the wall, an effort that seemed to exert him so much that his thin chest heaved almost immediately. It was painful to see how his collarbone stuck out from his skin. “But you don’t care about that at all, do you? Prince Dragonlord. The crown was yours by default, yet you still felt like you had to earn it. If only Jin-Sayeng knew what they had in you…”
An Elegy of Heroes Page 94
