The Awakened Kingdom

by N. K. Jemisin

  “I…I do not know, medre.”

  She did something to his arm that I couldn’t see because of all his robes. He made a sound that was tight and terrible. She was hurting him! I almost gasped, but that would have given away Eino’s group—and already Eino was dripping sweat, his face tight with concentration and his arms trembling with effort. I did not know why. It was not a hard thing he was doing.

  “I don’t know!” The boy did not show his pain much, but even the little that tightened his jaw and thinned his lips was terrible. “I didn’t see!”

  “Stop that,” said the woman by the fire, glowering. “You want to explain away bruises to his mother or sisters?”

  The first woman rolled her eyes, but stopped doing whatever she was doing; I relaxed as the boy did. Then she grinned. “Well, there’s other ways to find out what you’ve been up to. Right, pretty?” She stepped closer and put a hand down between them, feeling for something amid his robes; he gasped and jerked away, but she pulled him back. “No telling what you boys do when you’re alone, trying to play woman for each other. Maybe I should check to see if you’re still intact? Maybe I should make you less intact, take you to my house instead of yours.” She fumbled with his robes, trying to pull them up. He went rigid, his eyes full of tears. I did not like it at all and I wanted to do bad things to her! But if I did, it would give away Eino’s group.

  “Brightness and shadows, Veiba.” The woman by the fire, who felt like a leader, came over and dragged the boy away from her; Veiba laughed, as the boy turned his face away and trembled. “We don’t have time for that sort of foolishness.”

  With that, the leader turned and whistled in two tones. From steps and terraces and the nearby woods around Yukur—Yukur was really mad! All those womenfeet on its stones!—other whistles answered her in different tones, different tunes. The woman sighed. “No trails out of the site but those of the few we’ve caught. We lost them.”

  “These few are enough,” said Veiba. “It’s proof they’ve been sneaking out, coming here.”

  The other women murmured agreement; finally the leader sighed. Raising her voice, she called, “Hear the decree of the Warriors’ Council! By their word is this place of traitors forbidden now and henceforth. Come again and we will catch you, and name you traitors, too. Come forth now for amnesty; we will see you escorted home.” She glanced at Veiba in plain warning. “Safely.”

  She paused for a moment, listening. That’s when I heard Eino panting really hard! He was going to give us away! I didn’t understand why, but he was almost out of magic. That was weird, so I touched his back and gave him some more. He jumped and looked at me in a surprised way, but it was enough. He stopped panting, and when the moment of silence passed, the leader shook her head and held up her fist in a signal. All the women turned and started heading back down the steps, bringing the boys they’d caught with them. But those were only a few of the boys who’d been in the dance-circle! We were the best at hide-and-seek.

  When the strange women were finally gone, Eino let the magic go and sagged to the ground on his hands and knees. The other boys hugged each other and some of them cried a little and the rest went down next to Eino, praying or rubbing his back or whispering quiet, Thank the gods. (I poked my lip out at this. They should be thanking the godling! Stupid mortals.)

  “Hey,” I said, hunkering down next to Eino to peer at him once some of the other boys had withdrawn. “You want some more magic? I have lots.”

  He looked up at me with the strangest look on his face. “Wh-why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why? Why are you here? Why did you help us?”

  I blinked, but I didn’t know how to answer the questions, so I just kind of shrugged. “I’m really sorry,” I said, partly also to Yukur. Yukur just sent a wave of snittiness back; it would be mad for a century about this. I sighed. “I didn’t mean to interrupt the thing you and the others were doing.”

  Eino’s jaw tightened. He sat back on his knees abruptly. “You at least joined in and didn’t break the spirit of it. That lot, though”—he nodded after the strange women—“were probably retaliation for that little trick I pulled on the Council this afternoon. We’ve danced out here before, many times, and no one ever troubled us.” He shook his head, sobering. “Gods. An actual raid. I must have really pissed them off.”

  “What do you mean?” I hunkered forward; he was speaking softly, like he didn’t want the other boys to know, so I did it, too. “What was in that paper thing you made me take into the Raringa?”

  “An idea they clearly didn’t want to consider. I’ll tell you later.” He looked around at the other boys, who had withdrawn into knots and were talking quietly to each other now. “Can you send them home? The hunters will be watching the trails, after that.”

  “Huh? Oh! Yeah!”

  “A moment, then.” Eino got to his feet, taking a deep breath and turning to the other boys. “You weren’t here, friends. If the ones they caught say that you were, you’ll be home safe in your beds in a moment to belie them. There’s no proof; remember that.”

  Some of the boys let out relieved sighs. But another one who was tall and older like Eino frowned. “Eino, I can’t do this anymore. If I’d been caught…my mother’s carting business depends on me marrying into Selu-medre’s clan. The scandal—”

  “Scandal!” A younger boy made an angry gesture. “You weren’t out here cavorting with foreign women or siring daughters for free, for gods’ sake—”

  “Enough.” Eino looked weary and angry and some other stuff besides. “There’ll be time for recriminations later. If you don’t want to come next time, then don’t come. It’ll be some time before I do this again, anyway, to let things cool down.” His expression turned bitter. “I never dreamt they would find something so simple so threatening.”

  The older boy frowned, but before he could ask, Eino glanced at me. I looked at the other boys and felt the places in the world where they were supposed to be, the place each called home, and I made little folds to put each of them in those places. (Some of them were surprised! I giggled at them.) After a moment, only me and Eino remained at the top of the terrace. He stared out over Yukur, the edges of his thoughts tasting thick and bitter. “There,” I said. “You want to go now, too? I have to go back to Fahno-enulai’s anyway; I’m staying with her ’til she finds me an enulai.”

  He drew back a little at this, then sighed. “Of course you are. But I don’t want to go back yet.” His jaw tightened. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  He made an odd gesture with his hand, and I felt it: a tiny wave of the FORCE he had thrown during the dance. “I’ve never been able to do that before.”

  I shrugged. “I dunno why you didn’t, but you could. Isn’t that what the dance was for?”

  He turned his head a little, so I saw how he frowned. “It was just a dance. I found descriptions of it in a book, images of it in an old sphere. Nothing I learned of it said it was supposed to be magical.”

  “Well, it was.” I shrugged. “The moves were not magic by themselves, but you made them magic because you told them to be, and the universe listened. Together you and the dance said stuff like sha ejuviat, and wahek akekkipu.”

  Eino twitched. “You’re speaking godwords.”

  “Um, yeah! ’Cause I’m a god?” I tried not to roll my eyes. Papa Tempa told me that mortals don’t believe things even when they see them, sometimes, so you had to say stuff that was obvious. Silly mortals. “Oh. Do you need me to tell you what I said in mortal?” I tried to think of how to translate, but mortal words are all wrong for stuff like that.

  “No,” he said, slowly, frowning to himself. “I…understood what you said.”

  Oh, well then. “So, you were speaking godwords yourself in the dance—just, you know, without godwords. Probably because you’re a demon, too, if you’re related to Fahno-enulai? I dunno. But that’s why the dance was full of magic. You were dancing with a god,
and everything we do is magic, and you’re more magic than most mortals, so you danced it, too.” It had been so much fun! I did a little hop, remembering the dance, and stomped the ground once—but only a little, because Yukur didn’t need anybody else messing it up.

  He turned to face me, looking troubled. “I know some magic,” he said, slowly. “My grandmother taught me enough to control myself, and to protect myself. But that takes concentration, practice. I’ve never done magic by accident.”

  I stopped play-dancing, puzzled. “You didn’t do it by accident. You wanted to hit me, even though we were only play-hitting. You wanted the ground to shatter beneath your feet.”

  “That’s it? I want something enough, and it happens?”

  “Well, that’s how it works when I do it. But I don’t need the dancing. And I never saw anybody run out of magic before! Maybe because you’re mortal?”

  He stared at me without answering for so long that I got bored and started spinning around, humming the boys’ chant.

  “I need to know if you’re going to tell my family about this,” he said finally. “Since you’re staying with us.”

  I stopped humming, although I kept spinning, because it was fun. “Tell them about what?”

  Having become more sophisticated, now I could tell better when mortals were wary or surprised or disbelieving, and he was all three. “About this. Some of the boys they caught will talk.” His jaw flexed. “They’ll have to. Some of them will say that this was my gathering. But like I told the others, without corroboration, it will just be rumor. Rumors can’t—” He paused, then laughed in an angry sort of way. “Well, they can hurt me. But not as much as proof, and they won’t have that.”

  “Oh.” I shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t want me to. But why aren’t you supposed to be here, if that’s the problem? And why were those women so mean?” I stopped spinning and scowled after them, and wished that bad things would happen to Veiba. My first curse! I didn’t know if it would work, but I sure hoped it would.

  Eino shook his head. “They were cruel because that’s what people are, sometimes. And we weren’t supposed to be here because good clan-sons don’t do such things. We stay home where it’s safe. We obey without question. We don’t go out late at night unchaperoned to cavort like barbarians. And we don’t demand, via unsigned proposals slipped unseen into the Council’s ‘new business’ docket, that men be granted again the rights that we justifiably lost centuries ago!”

  I was really confused. “Huh?”

  Eino sighed and looked around, finding his discarded robes and shaking them out. Some of the other boys had trampled them; he grimaced and brushed ineffectually at the footprints until I willed them all away. He let out a little wry chuckle, then nodded thanks and began to put on the robes in layers: first a long narrow sleeveless sheath of the same stuff as his loose pants, then a simple black robe, then the voluminous, brightly-dyed outer robe, which had strange seams and extra lengths of cloth and weird unnecessary leather belts. It was very complicated. I grimaced over at my own discarded robes, disliking them just because of watching him.

  “We come to Yukur,” he said, as he got dressed, “because once, a long time ago, a rebellion started here.”

  I knew what a rebellion was! A long long time ago, like a whole three hundred years, a godling called Kahl Avenger had tried to do bad things. Everybody was still upset about it. “And everybody is still upset about it.” I was trying to sound wise.

  “No, it was ages ago; everyone who lived through that time is long dead. And the rebels were fools.” Eino scowled, stepping into his slippers. “They hoped that a few weapons and help from Tokken and Menchey—nations that were our enemies back then—would allow them to overthrow the government and establish a different rule. Male rule, in the foreign fashion of things. But the Darre were warriors then, much more than now, and the rebellion was put down. Harshly.”

  Well, that wasn’t a very good story! “What happened to them?”

  “Tried as traitors and executed or exiled. And then, even though men had helped to fight back against the rebels, even though a man was ennu, the nation’s leader, at the time…the women took away any rights the men possessed.” Eino shook his head, flicking at wrinkles and making minute adjustments to his robes. “To vote, to hold property, to occupy any positions of worth, even to be counted adults in their own right. It was a reaction against everything seen as a contribution to the rebellion: the weak ennu, a war that had decimated the country a few decades before, foreign influences. But that’s why now, a bunch of boys gathering to have fun brings down fifty hells’ worth of wrath.” He sighed and shook his head. “Or maybe that was me. That scroll I had you deliver—it was a proposal to grant men inheritance rights. It probably had no chance of passing, but I just wanted them to consider it, for gods’ sake. Instead, it just seems to have made them angry. Hells.” He began to take the combs out of his hair, letting it fall back into its usual black river.

  I felt really sad and flat then, all the fun of the dance gone. “Why do you do things like this, then? Dance when you’re not supposed to, ask for things that make people mad? Wouldn’t it be easier to just…” I shrugged. I didn’t really know how to say it.

  He let out a sharp sort of laugh that didn’t sound like he actually thought anything was funny. “You really are new to this realm, aren’t you? You don’t know mortals very well.”

  I nodded, glad to finally have the conversation return to something I understood. “I’m new to everything. You are the first mortal I ever met.”

  “The first—” Eino frowned. “You do seem…inexperienced. And, well, young. But one can never tell with godlings; forgive me if you’re actually a billion years old.”

  I had to count on my fingers, and multiply by the spins of this galaxy’s wheel, and then by the expansion of the universe, and some other things. Time is annoying. “I’m almost a thousand hours old!”

  “A thousand—” He got an odd look on his face. “Hours?”

  Oh, wait, he had used years. But I needed the next thing smaller than a year. “Um, a month?”

  He stared at me. “You’re one month old?”

  “And, like, ten days.” It wasn’t like I was still a baby.

  After a long, silent stretch he burst out laughing, and it was almost a mean laugh but not quite. “Gods, this is my luck! But I suppose I should thank you—er.”

  “Shill! My name is Shill!”

  He inclined his head in a formal sort of way. “Eino mau Tehno tai wer Tellomi, Shill-medre.” Son of Tehno, of the same clan as Fahno, and he’d given my name a suffix that just meant he wanted to be polite to a strange woman. I beamed, delighted, especially since I was still wearing a boy body. “Lady Shill, rather. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep the others hidden, without you.”

  “You’re welcome! I would have done it for you, though, if you’d asked, so then you wouldn’t be so tired. That would be my thank-you for the dancing. Or fighting.” I frowned, confused.

  Eino smiled. “Both. In the days before the traitors, that was how men fought to hide their strength from—and display their beauty to—women. It was called anatun, the battle-dance.”

  “I like anatun! I became more of myself while dancing with you.” Eagerly I grabbed one of the dangly parts of his sleeve; this, finally, was what I needed to talk to him about. “Will you help me?”

  His expression grew wary. “Help you do what?”

  “I don’t know what I am.” I bit my lip. Mortals had different ways of saying it. How had Ia explained it to Fahno? “I don’t know my…nature. But lots of godlings, they come to this realm and meet mortals who help them figure themselves out. I think you can be that person for me!”

  Eino flinched and glared at my hands until I let go of his robes. “No,” he said, in a cold scary way that made me think of Mama Yeine. “You destroyed the city by accident, Lady Shill. You think I don’t remember, just because Lord Ia cleaned up your
mess? I’m grateful for your help, but go find your nature with someone else as your prop. I have my own troubles.”

  “But it only happened with you! And I only found a little bit of me!” He set his jaw and turned away, starting toward and down the terrace steps; anxiously I trotted after him, trying desperately to think of how I could convince him. “Maybe—um—maybe I can help you?”

  Eino stopped. Fully robed, with his hair perfect, he was so different from the wild master of the dance that he seemed like a whole other person. I didn’t know which was the real him, and which wasn’t. Maybe he was both. In this shape, however, his expression didn’t change; his whole face was like a mask. “What do you mean?”

  “I…I don’t know.” I twisted some grass beneath my toe; it didn’t mind. “I could do more god-stuff for you, I guess?” He had so little magic. “Anything you want, if I know how to do it.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You’d do my bidding? In exchange for…what, exactly?”

  Oh, this! I inhaled. “Let me follow you around and do stuff like you do and talk to you and watch how you do things and maybe be your friend!”

  Eino’s expression turned sardonic. “Just that.”

  “Well…yes. I need to understand you.” This, I felt sure, was the key to learning my nature. And then I gasped. “Oh! Maybe you could be my enulai, too!”

  Something changed minutely in his expression. “No.”

  “Why not? You’re a d-demon, aren’t you?” I still shivered when I said it.

  “Yes, I am.” He smiled, but it was another not-happy smile. “I am the only child or grandchild of Fahno, greatest enulai of the age, who’s inherited her gift. But I’m told I don’t have the temperament to be an enulai.”

  I remembered Eino yelling at me in the market when I’d stood there blubbering. “Uh, I don’t think whoever told you that was right.”