The strait we were sailing curved to the north. It was narrow like my childhood river, and the two shores of Thalassopolis were so close at one point that I could reach each shore with an arrow.
“We have to row too,” I said to Baagh, who was still wearing the robe of the Buried with the black hood and embroidered crosses.
“We’ll miss the most beautiful view,” said Baagh, pointing to the shores, the surrounding palaces, and the city walls.
“Better that way. There’s evil magic here, and I don’t want anyone changing his mind.”
Baagh insisted. He wanted to feel the last kiss of Thalassopolis.
“Look around you, Da-Ren. You may never see this again.”
He was right. I stayed there, next to the bulwark, gathering the last images of Sapul.
“I don’t understand how we can still be alive, Baagh. Why didn’t they torture us?”
“Why would they do something like that? They have enough barbarians in the dungeons to torture for a hundred years. We were far more useful to them as envoys or spies. When the time comes for their Emperor to send his own envoys, he wouldn’t want Malan to put them on the stake.”
“But—don’t they want revenge?”
“Revenge is for the blind and fools. The Protospathos needs information, not revenge. He needs ears and eyes.”
“The palace guards. Those golden-haired giants. Why didn’t they ride out to fight us at the Empire’s edge?”
“And if they leave, who would stay here to protect the palace?”
“But what does their Story say? Their Truths? About this defeat? About the ruin that befell them?”
“The ruin that befell them,” Baagh repeated.
He was silent for a few breaths, and I didn’t push him.
“Did you see their wealth? Did you?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“That was nothing. You saw nothing of the majesty of the Empire. You didn’t get near the Emperor or his halls. Did you see the walls on the western side away from the sea? They are four times as strong as those of Varazam, and they were reinforcing them further as we walked in front of them. You saw hundreds of guards, but there are thousands still between where we stopped and the Emperor. They don’t fear barbarians in Thalassopolis. But you annihilate the tax-paying folk, and you cost them too much in aggravation.”
“The master of Varazam didn’t fear us either.”
“Varazam was but a dim star. Thalassopolis is the Almighty Sun.”
A sun that hides behind its walls.
The Buried Emperor surrounded by golden guards inside Thalassopolis. The Deadwalkers were not the skeletons I had dug up from the earth of Kapoukia. The Emperors of these palaces were the ones who deserved the name Buried, the bloodsuckers. They fed on the blood and sweat of their people. The suffering commoners of the Empire worked hard and died even harder to fill their tables.
“Will they give us more gifts each time we slaughter their tribe? I don’t understand this god of theirs; why he doesn’t curse them for this?”
“Our God says to turn the other cheek if you are slapped.”
“But this way they’ll be defeated.”
“No, in the end, they will prevail. Your own children will betray you, when they realize that all this spilled blood is senseless. You triumph in war, you win spoils, your children live and learn another life, and they have more to lose. Your children become the othertribers. Your triumphs return and rip your heart out. When you have gold, your tribe becomes like them. They will embrace you and pulp you into a spitting image of themselves, and your offspring will be happy they did in the new life. That’s how they devour all barbarians. What is their tribe that you speak of? The borders of the Empire have changed every day since the birth of the sun. The beating heart and the crown of the Empire is here in Thalassopolis. Her hair and nails are out there, in the lands that you sacked. Does anyone mourn when they cut their hair or nails? I do, because I have been there and have seen the suffering, but the Eunuchs don’t. Most of the soldiers of the guard are mercenaries. Didn’t you see them?”
“I even saw one of my own. A barbarian, as they would have called him.”
“One of your own who turned sides once he crossed south.”
“I wonder what kind of Story he fights with.”
My men had rowed hard and fast, and the naval ship had stopped following us. I asked the men to stop.
“Eat, drink! Pigs, goats. Wine.” I opened at their feet the sacks with the cooked meat I had brought from the palace.
They were men raised in the Sieve. Goat and woman were all they needed to be satisfied.
Baagh answered me by holding a gold coin. “With this story.”
What magic did this shiny metal have to turn every man into a crawling dog? If it was so important, why wasn’t it even in one Story of the Tribe when I was a child? And why did it rule over everything now that I was a man?
“Baagh, one day these walls will fall, even if they build them to the height of one hundred men. The Buried will be wiped out of their kingdoms.”
The oars started to slice through the calm waters again, drunk with wine. They led us north, fifteen on each side, their tips brown and white, identical in color and movement with the wings of an enormous vulture that was diving to devour meat in the black waters. I flipped a gold coin into the air. The saltwater lapped high to grab the gold before it landed in my palm again. I made a move to throw it into the sea to seal my words, but Baagh stopped my hand midmotion.
“We will need horses when we reach land,” he said.
It was late evening, the Sun’s final moment of triumph. The clouds had threatened all afternoon but didn’t bring rain, and now they sulked in bloody defeat as the Emperor of the Sky trampled over them with scarlet sandals.
The sky had been torn in two as my gaze traveled from one shore to the other. To my left, the sun set in bronze and purple above the palaces of Thalassopolis. I daydreamed of the copper-red light that flooded right now the dome of the Church. Despite all its beauty I had denied Sapul, and probably would never see it again.
To my right, the sky was painted raven feathers, with only the faint shape of a broken, pale Selene emerging at the edge of the eastern horizon. There, at the southeast, dwelled the warriors of my Tribe, delivering Malan’s ravenous revenge. There, the first night-breeze cooled the desert as the Ssons beheaded unruly slaves and drenched their thirst in pulpy red. There, Urak and the many Uraks of the Tribe raped half-dead mothers before slitting their throats.
To my left lay the Reigning City and the Dome of Wisdom. There, Carpus munched on his apple slowly as the sounds of a harp rippled along damask curtains. There, the white-bearded Cross Sorcerers were battling evil by studying their codices next to the hearth, their faces glowing from saintly apathy. The painted icon of the Archangel was mourning silently at the Holy Church, and the slain Drakon still hadn’t shut his eyes. Raios drank tankards of cheap wine in the harbor taverns, his fat fingers grabbing the trembling virgins, freshly shipped in from the tax-paying southern provinces.
I turned to the Sorcerer who had taught me so much about the world and the gods.
“Back at the church, you lit a candle, asking for the dead to be forgiven,” I said.
“I prayed. God’s grace is infinite.”
“But who forgives the living?”
Baagh remained silent, yet this voyage, whether he intended to or not, had taught me so much.
“Do you know something, Baagh? They call us the barbarians, but they are the real barbarians. Their craven Emperor, Raios, and the eunuch with the gifts and the two tongues. Not us.”
Baagh kept his eyes lowered toward the water and didn’t turn to meet my gaze. But at the sound of my words, the last kiss of Thalassopolis was wiped savagely from his face, its heat and softness gone. The headless ghosts of the Varazam maidens passed before our eyes, dancing for the last time on the parapets of the impenetrable walls. Screaming from the lungs, they
cursed the Buried Emperor before the torch smoke carried them to the night sky.
“Equally, Da-Ren. Equally barbarians.”
Interlude
LXVII.
The Stars Will Bring Him Back
Zeria’s fairy tale. As she whispered it to Aneria. As I heard it.
“You will never see the stars again, my love,” said the exiled prince.
Dalma remained still, like a pale statue of a long-forgotten goddess, not even looking at him. She was standing outside the damp cave that had become their refuge whenever she had no sleep. Moons had come and passed like this and such words made her neither sad nor worried anymore.
The fir trees around her were cloaking all sight of the horizon, sunrise or sunset. On bright days, the sun would glow at noon like a descending kindling fire and illuminate a small opening among the branches. On a cloudless summer night, the moon would shine a faint silver hope on her pallid skin. But not the stars. They were too tiny, too timid to penetrate the evergreen forest that had become their fortress.
“You will not feel pity for me, my love,” said Dalma. “You never will. I am here of my own will. All your princely bravery and valor would not have brought me here against my wishes.”
How did I fail her? Prince Draton wondered.
A few months ago, there was no warning of the dark fate that would befall them.
Dalma was the one of royal blood, not he. She was the daughter of the king of Lenos, a lord who ruled the vast, once-fertile fields west of the great forest and the thousands of starving slaves and farmers. He was a lord who had aged more than his years and a man of many possessions. His palace was a grim gray-stone castle that didn’t betray his wealth at first sight. But it had grown like an evil tree downward and sideways with the digging of tunnels, storage rooms and dungeons filled with treasures and gold. The king had no wife and no heart; whether he had lost them on the same night, whether the first caused the second or the opposite—nobody cared to remember. Men oftentimes tend to forget what brought the shadow of darkness; like moths, they are drawn to the source of the new light.
And the only light in the palace was Princess Dalma. For all the king’s sulkiness and callousness, he had in his daughter the gifts of her mother. Beauty, wisdom, and magic. For she could read the stars, sing the animals into obeying her and breathe a red blossom onto the flowers; though most of these were lies that men and women both loved and hated to repeat about the princess.
Draton had grown up at the edge of the forest and came to Lenos on his sixteenth year, at his father’s request. He was the youngest son of a hunter and had brought gifts for the king: a young fallow deer still dripping blood from the snout, its black-pebbled eyes shining still, two hares hanging from their hind legs, their snow bellies pierced red and their front legs in a suspended last hop, and a sack of quail that he emptied in front of the throne with a boyish smile of accomplishment. The quail fell atop one another onto the marble floor; a mesh of rich gray plumage, clawed talons, and chestnut-brown blood.
The king’s hierophant knelt on top of the dead life to read Draton’s fate and purpose. He then walked up to the king and whispered in his ear:
“This boy brings death, my king.”
But the king was genuinely pleased at the sight of so much purposeless death, and he ignored the deranged old man. He demanded that the boy stay forever in the palace. He made him the Master of Hunting and ordered the Masters of the Arts and the Letters to educate the young man as if he were a prince.
Draton fell in love with Dalma the first moment he saw her, as men do when they recognize in the same face the beauty of a flower growing alone at the banks of the lake, the reason to stop hunting life in the forest, the skipping heartbeat that makes even a rested man shiver, and the determination to do good even when it is not to their benefit. He entered the palace a boy that morning only to go to sleep that night a young man in love.
No, Dalma did not fall in love with him on the very first day. She had lived in a palace full of gold and darkness, jewels and hatred, hand-carved cutlery and senseless savagery, and all that, along with her education, made her cautious that opposites can coexist. She came a step closer to Draton the first day because his smile captured her attention. On the second day, he made her laugh as he gazed at her like a mesmerized statue, same as those of the hundred gods and demigods that filled the sacred temples. On the third day, she saw the boy studying with his new masters. She noticed the faintest autumn breeze moving his locks on the fourth day. He offered her—the princess of all people—an apple on the fifth day, as they came across each other in the narrow hallway. On the sixth day, he was wearing new clothes without a speck of dried blood from a forest hunt. She liked that. They spent every afternoon together after the seventh day.
By his twentieth year, Draton had become a man whom no one could distinguish from a born prince—a poet by choice, a huntsman occasionally when the king demanded it, a fierce swordfighter, and a brave rider of the wildest horses. Dalma was blossoming, and so was he, but Lenos was not anymore.
Autumn was now called the season of drowning rains, winter that of freezing death. Spring was now known as the season of swarming locusts, and summer had become the season of plague.
The king ordered the hierophant to lift the curse, but the pagan priest said that the gods had cursed Lenos and craved sacrificial blood. It was not the first time he had made the same claim, and the king had repeatedly and secretly agreed to this barbarity.
“A sacrifice then,” the impatient king replied and then ordered his guard. “Burn this madman alive. Now!”
There was no need for a pyre. The guards torched the hierophant’s coat of quail plumage and bird bones, and it instantly became a mantle of agony.
None of that had any effect. The locusts kept swarming. The few remaining palace guards were spending most of their efforts trying to keep the starving peasants from breaking the gates that had been shut and barricaded. There was brutal death outside the castle and a seething turmoil inside it.
Draton and Dalma repeatedly begged the king, “Open your gates; give them some of your gold, your bread.”
But the king did not want to hear a word about it. “There is not enough food even for us. How long since we had stuffed quail and venison on this table? And they do not cry for gold. The gods have abandoned them, and gold will not cure them. They cry for hope.” And revenge was the rest of his thought, but he kept that wisdom to himself. “Gold will not cure the plague or bribe the locusts to turn south. Even if I give them all my gold, they will waste it.”
For once, he was right. The peasants had no need for gold. Lenos was ripe for a new god.
The dark-robed priest of martyrdom rode one day on a dying donkey among the flooded huts. He heard of rain, ice, locusts, and plague and whispered to them about a New God. They had believed in the old gods for too long, and that was the reason for their demise and suffering, he said. His Lord was the Only True God, he shouted. This New God did not play a double-reed harp by a river, or dance and drink, and he didn’t need sacrifices of animals. He was like them, the suffering folk. His tears were burning and true. He was not raised in a palace, he had no noble education, he was not a warrior, and he couldn’t offer much in this life but would offer them everything in the afterlife. He was the One True God who knew right and wrong for all things, unlike all the false gods who were vile and envious because they were made by man and filled with man’s weaknesses.
The peasants embraced this New One God and Great Prophet. Outside the king’s castle, the priest became more powerful by the day and gathered more faithful every night. He soon marched to the palace gates. The thousands of starving peasants smashed down the rotting cedar planks that separated the two worlds, and no one dared to stop them. They stormed the inner bailey and smashed the statues and the temples of the old gods. They raided the storage rooms, only to find them empty of meat and wine and full of useless gold and silver gewgaws. That only fueled their anger
.
“Death to the old king, death to his kin and the old gods,” they cried as they stormed the most private temples and the hall of the throne.
They burned down the old god of the sun and the rains and thunders because he had abandoned them, and the god of war and weaponry and iron craftsmanship, and metallurgy. The three goddesses of music, hunting, and beauty were the ones the priest loathed more. A naked goddess smiling in front of men. What if she is actually powerful, he thought as they hammered her statue. They destroyed the halls of the gods of medicine and of the stars because they had brought no miraculous cures nor fulfilled wishes. They burned down the goddess who blesses the crops, but who could blame them for that? Locusts.
But before they came to burn their king himself, he raised his arms and shouted to the priest of the one god of absolute wrong and right. “Mercy, my priest. I believe. I believe. I denounce my kingdom and my gold, and I will now obey the New One Faith.”
Dalma’s face tensed with worry as she witnessed the destruction in the hall of the fallen throne. She turned to Draton. “My father is clever like a fox. He is old and sick now. He knows his end is coming and his gold will do him no good. He will side with the priest who offers eternal life. A suitable trade for both.”
The priest said, “God accepts your repentance, king who worshiped the false gods, but you have to make amends for the decades of misery you have caused to these poor peasants. Make a true offering.”
“I give you all my gold and my palace.”
“And it will become a church to worship the Lord. But, is that enough?” the priest asked looking around the hall.
The peasants shook their heads.
They want revenge. A sacrifice. After all, they have been pagans for so many centuries, the cunning king thought. Old habits die hard.
“The faithful have suffered, old king. You have to join them in suffering, else your repentance is untrue,” the priest said.
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