by Glenda Larke
Their ancestors never dreamed any man would want to disturb such a sacred place, she said, her narration faltering under the weight of her grief. Those ancestors were wrong. While lost in the forest, a hunter–she referred to him simply as Vile Man–observed a funeral procession flight of a recently deceased Chenderawasi Avian, as the bier was carried into the cliff caves by a flock of mourners.
Avarice drove him to find a way to enter the cave. Knowing the power of the plumes, he intended to steal some of them. Once inside, he was exposed to so much unbound sakti that he couldn’t help breathing it in, absorbing it through his skin, swallowing it along with the water he drank from the pools in the cave. Probably that was unwitting; he would not, after all, have been able to see the sakti.
He stole some plumes and made his way back to his village, where he began to plan. Gathering similar like-minded villains around him, he had gained so much power he could coerce others and seize power in the islands. The outcome was devastating. There was war. War between villages. War between clans. Chenderawasi Avians were hunted and killed. Whole villages disappeared. People were subjugated and enslaved, used and abused.
The tide was finally turned when an empu, a blademaster, allied himself and his apprentices with a flock of the remaining Chenderawasi. Together they developed a way to fold the barbs of a Chenderawasi regalia plume into a kris. Whoever owned such a weapon was not so vulnerable to coercion, and the daggers themselves used the inherited wisdom of Chenderawasi sakti to guide their owners.
Even so, the Rani said, it took many years to bring peace back to the islands and to return all the lost plumes to their rightful place. Now, of course, we have other ways of hiding and protecting the regalia of the dead.
She fell silent while Saker sorted through all she had said. Eventually he remarked quietly, “That’s not the whole story, is it?”
She sighed. It was more complex than that. Which brings me to your problem. The child you call Piper.
His heart turned over in his chest. He and Sorrel would have to make life and death decisions about a child they both loved. How was he ever going to tell her that? He had no idea. He murmured, more to himself, “A devil-kin.”
No. I think your devil-kin have a different origin. From what Ardhi said, that sounds like a working of sorcery, and an imperfect one at that. A sorcerer, though, is someone else. Something worse. Something evil. I know you don’t want to believe that anyone can be born evil, but they can and are–if they are birthed by another such.
Sweet Va. This had just gone from desperate to impossible.
The Rani continued, elaborating on the story she’d just told. The Vile Man had not been born that way. In fact, once he found the unbound sakti, he could have used it for good. Another man or woman might have, but not him. He was a man who always chose the corrupt way, the way he could satisfy his lusts with no regard for others. His motivations were revenge for perceived slights, the absorption of power to command others, the accumulation of wealth, the need to indulge his compulsion to hurt and mock. Once he’d absorbed the sakti that was unbound within the caves, it was his choice how to use it, and that was the way he chose.
He became a sorcerer, not so much by choice, but because he was the kind of man who was corrupted after imbibing too much raw power. It changed him physically, allowing that corruption to pass down to his children. He marked his friends with a black smutch, and marked his enemies with a different black mark.
My ancestors fought them, she said. Ardhi’s ancestors fought him. Eventually he was destroyed. They thought they had solved the problem.
“But?”
He’d given birth to other sorcerers. They grew up. They killed with impunity, and now there were five of them, not one. It took us a hundred years to root them and their children out and rid ourselves of the blight they had caused. You must kill this child, Piper, and her brother. They are not human. They won’t have choices, not when they are grown. They will be what they were born to be.
Saker’s horror burgeoned with her every word. He wanted to deny the truth of all she said, to attack her logic, to prove her wrong–but he couldn’t find the facts to refute her, and she was relentless.
If you want to know the source of your sorcerer’s power, then look to his past, or his ancestry. Somewhere, sometime, someone who had the seeds of wickedness within him imbibed too much of your witchery, perhaps by accident, perhaps deliberately. That person, or those people, are the cause of the plague Ardhi told me about, the source of your devil-kin. And every sorcerer must be killed before you will be safe again.
He whispered, “I cannot kill a baby. Any baby. Especially one I love.” Especially when I once cared for her mother. “Nor can I ask Sorrel to stand by while this child is murdered.” By the oak–not when she had her own daughter foully murdered! “This is against all I ever believed in. I would jump off this cliff, right now, rather than do such a heinous thing.”
She stared at him, unspeaking, and his silence lengthened into a mute appeal he did not know how to voice.
With unexpected suddenness, she flung herself off the cliff, dropping into the valley before spreading her wings to catch a wind and coast across the canopy. He stood and watched and envied her the gift of flight. When she curved back towards him, he shouted at her, his rage ripping the words from him. “Damn you! There has to be a better way!”
She ignored him and flew on. He watched and then, when she turned back and coasted past him once more, he cried out to her again. “Don’t you believe in your own sakti? The kris and your plume–they sent us here! Why? Why?”
Our sakti doesn’t want to be used for ill! It happened with the Vile Man, and it will do anything to prevent it happening again.
“Then why didn’t it kill Piper back there in Lowmeer? The kris–I saw it fly through the air and stab a man in the back. It did that to save us! If it had done nothing, then we could all have perished. But it saved us with a deliberate act against another.”
She circled the valley again, flying so far away she was only a speck against the canopy. It was fully a quarter of an hour before she returned and came in to land. She smoothed down her feathers, raised and lowered her ruff, then fixed him with a single red-rimmed eye.
I don’t know why. But you are right. There must be a reason. I will call together the heads of all the Families. Take the child and go back to your ship. We will speak again when we have decided what is the best solution. If there is one.
“And Ardhi?” he asked.
His death was not something we required. That was the decision of the empu, the blademaster. It takes time to make a blade of power and Ardhi didn’t have time to wait. So the empu used the power of sacrifice. He built a Chenderawasi kris using the promise of a life to awaken the sakti in the plume barbs. That life was Ardhi’s. The choice was Ardhi’s and he made it freely. He must take the kris back to the blademaster and fulfil that vow.
“And if he doesn’t?”
She shrugged her shoulders in a very human gesture. I don’t know. I doubt even the blademaster knows. But it doesn’t matter anyway; Ardhi will do it whatever we think! Do you not know him? Why do you think I did not insist on his punishment? Because he punishes himself in far worse ways than his Raja or I could ever impose. Every day that he lives…
Despair soaked his thoughts. Beggar me speechless. She is as hard as rock. “He has to kill himself? Or does the blademaster have to kill him?”
Ask him. Now take the child and the woman and Ardhi, and go back to your ship. We will have an answer for you the day after tomorrow. Whether it will be the answer you want, I don’t yet know. We will meet you after sunrise. Not here; at Batuguli. Ardhi knows the place.
“Sit down,” Sorrel ordered Ardhi, pointing to the wooden signal-flag locker. She was perched on the other end of it, while Saker was seated a pace away on the hatch cover near the mizzen mast. “We want to talk to you about not dying.”
“I’m a crew member, remember? I have work
to do—”
“I haven’t seen you swabbing a deck since we left Spice Winds,” Saker remarked drily. “And I distinctly heard Juster give you the rank of third mate after you sailed us safely out of Javenka.”
“And don’t officers have things to do, too?” Ardhi waved a hand at the lagoon. Boats of varying shapes and sizes bustled between ship and shore, laden with bricks in one direction, bringing back supplies and spices in the other. The woody musk aroma of fresh nutmeg and mace in the air overwhelmed the smell of the sea and the forest. Sorrel suspected it was seeping into the seams of the ship and would remain with them all the way to the Va-cherished Hemisphere.
Ardhi glared at Saker. “I’m the only person on board who speaks the Chenderawasi language fluently. I’m the interpreter.”
“They can manage without you for a bit,” Saker said.
“We really need to talk to you about not dying,” she added. The two men had been speaking in Pashali, but she decided to stick with her own language. She needed all her powers of persuasion.
“You can’t change what has been agreed,” Ardhi said, but he did sit down nonetheless.
She wanted to put her arms around him, to tell him they both cared too much to see him killed. Far too much, if she was honest. Instead she leaned over and placed Piper in his lap, where the child hauled herself up to stand in order to pull at his head band.
“Addi!” she said happily. “Addi!”
Tears gathered at the back of Sorrel’s eyes, but she blinked them away.
It was the day after they’d been to meet the Raja, and even though all of them were safely back on board ship, Sorrel was still shaken. The day before had been one of the most exhausting she’d ever spent. Piper had cried so much, affected by forces none of them fully understood. On the way back to Golden Petrel her distress had been intensified by a downpour that had lasted an hour and left them utterly drenched. Back on board, Surgeon Barklee had ended up giving her a sleeping draught to calm her down and, thanks be, she had slept through the night and woken her usual happy self.
I wish I could say the same, Sorrel thought, but all they had learned ashore haunted her like a recurring dream. Every time she pushed the horror away, it returned: Piper was probably Prime Fox’s child, a potential sorcerer, as was her brother, the Prince-regal, heir to the Basalt Throne. And Ardhi thought he had to die.
She glared at him. “You can’t agree to be killed, just like that. It’s–it’s–unthinkable!”
“I knew the price of the kris then, and that I’d have to pay it one day.”
“No,” she said, pushing back that wretched impulse to weep, “Ardhi, please. Listen to me. On board Spice Winds, I learned what it was to have friends. You and Saker and Banstel, you made my life bearable! And now on Golden Petrel, I’ve learned what real friendship is. People who care about me, who care what happens to me and who have done their best to help me. Saker, Lord Juster, Surgeon Barklee, Banstel, Mate Finch, Mate Cranald… And you. How can you expect Saker and me to allow you to go meekly to your death? We won’t do it!”
“My promise to the empu was made long before I met you.” His troubled eyes were as dark and as deep as a forest pool. “I’m sorry.”
She took a deep breath, steadied herself. You have to find the right words, Sorrel. A man’s life depends on what you say. “Yesterday I learned that the child I love just as much as I loved my own is a sorcerer. Something so horrible, I–I find it hard to accept its truth. I am still battling to cope with even the idea of its possibility. A baby, born with no choice of the kind of person they will grow up to be? An evil man seduced a princess, in order to place his child on a throne. To place a sorcerer on a throne. That is true evil, as vile a scheme as can exist.”
She paused, but when he opened his mouth to reply, she held up her hand to prevent his words. “No. You will listen to what I have to say. This Chenderawasi sakti: the Rani told Saker yesterday that the purpose of it is to protect your lands and thus yourselves. In both our worlds, if a person with a witchery acts in bad faith, their power is taken from them. Even without that, the power is always limited.”
He nodded.
“You were eighteen years old when you made a mistake which had horrible consequences. You did your best to make amends. You couldn’t bring the Raja back to life, but you did bring his regalia back, with the help of the kris.”
He nodded again.
“The Rani told Saker sakti comes from the land, the sea, the sunlight. And that this sakti often accumulates in the blood and feathers and bones of special people, like Raja Wiramulia. Is your blood special in that way?”
This time he shook his head.
She was relentless. “The Raja’s blood and bone and feathers were all used in the making of the kris. Because of the kris the plumes are here, in Chenderawasi. The kris did its job. It did its job without your blood. And yet you think your blood, your life, is still required? The Rani didn’t tell you that. Nor did the kris.”
“The empu said it was.”
“You asked the blademaster to do something in a hurry, without the usual time for proper craftsmanship. What if he was afraid of failure and thought a sacrifice must be necessary to overcome the problems of crafting such a dagger in a limited time? So he sacrificed you, because he hated you for causing the death of his Raja. But what if it wasn’t necessary? What if it was just something that gave him confidence when he needed it?”
“He would never have lied!”
“He didn’t lie! He believed it. He was just wrong.”
Ardhi was silent. He looked away from her, his gaze fixed on the decking.
He’s uncertain. Good. She reached out a hand and closed it over his. “We don’t want you to die. We especially don’t want you to die for nothing.” Underneath her hand she felt his fingers tense.
He has beautiful fingers. Climbing was his witchery; perhaps that had something to do with it. Most sailors had hands as rough as the hempen rope they hauled and as hard as the decks they scrubbed, and although he might not have been an ordinary seaman any more, he was still up aloft every day. Even so, his hands were elegant as well as strong.
“There’s one way,” she said, “that might tell you whether your death serves a purpose or not. Saker says the kris makes its own decisions.”
“That’s true,” Saker agreed. “It jabbed me in the leg the day we first met. You say you didn’t throw it at me: it left you and flew through the air to me. And what about when you broke into my room in Throssel Palace? You say it refused to return to you!”
“We think you should not allow the blademaster to make decisions about your life or death,” Sorrel said. “You should ask the kris.”
He raised his head to look from her to Saker and back again. “Princess? What princess? What evil man do you mean? And what throne?”
She shot a look at Saker. “Ah. That’s something we have to tell you. It wasn’t our secret to share,” she said, “but the situation has changed and you should know everything now. You see, Saker and I are wondering if maybe your task is not finished yet. The Chenderawasi Islands are still in danger from Lowmeer.”
“No, oh no.” He was shaking his head, an appalled expression on his face. “I don’t want to leave my home again. Don’t ask that of me.”
This time it was Saker who was relentless. “Will you ever be able to live here again?” he asked. “Isn’t that why you are willing to die–because you have no life here any more?”
Sorrel had to turn away from Ardhi then. She couldn’t bear to see his pain.
“We are going to tell you about who Piper is,” Saker said. “Although that is perhaps not quite as important as who her brother is. Then you might understand why you cannot die, not yet.” He leaned forward and tickled Piper’s tummy; she giggled and squirmed. “You see, Ardhi, you have not done nearly enough yet to absolve yourself. You’ve barely started.”
Sorrel winced. That was cruel. But then, if it saved his life…
39
The Outcast
Ardhi dropped his shirt on to the deck, and dived into the clear water of the lagoon. He swam underwater, clearly visible, with an economy of effort uncanny to those used to the cold oceans of the Va-cherished lands.
“He makes it look so easy,” Juster said in Sorrel’s ear.
She nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing. Ardhi was at home in the sea. He belonged here, in these islands with their beaches of dazzling white and waters so warm and translucent–and she and Saker were asking him to leave again.
“I haven’t paid him yet for his services to the ship,” Juster remarked. “Can I take it that he’ll be returning? Because right at this moment, he looks as if he’s trying to escape.”
“He is,” said Saker. “I don’t think he can, though.”
Ardhi surfaced and trod water for a moment. The twist of batik cloth he wore as a head band was still in place, as was the sarong he’d twisted up between his thighs. His kris he had thrust through the waist at his back.
He looks as if he is trying to go back to what he was, she thought. As if he can shed his sailor’s clothes and turn back the clock. But Saker is right; he can’t return. They won’t have him.
They’d told him about Princess Mathilda, and the Prince-regal, about Prime Valerian Fox. He’d absorbed it all, but said nothing. Saker had attempted unsuccessfully to extract a promise that he wouldn’t do anything until they’d talked to the Rani again, but all he agreed to was to think about it. A little later he’d divested himself of his sailor’s clothes and dived over the side.
“I want to talk to you, Saker,” Juster said. “I don’t want to be caught napping by the arrival of a Lowmian ship. I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“Tell me when they appear on the horizon, of course. Or better still, before they appear on the horizon. So we can get clean away. I don’t want to engage any ship until I’m sure it’s laden to the gunwales with cargo.”
