by Judith Tarr
They reached the wooden god and stared up. He was a terrifying thing to look at, with his four sets of arms and his scowling face, but Kimeri rather suspected the scowl was a mask. He felt stern to her, but not unwelcoming. The flowers he was festooned with were almost too sweet-scented. She stopped a sneeze before it burst out and betrayed them.
Hani, heart still thudding but perfectly in control of his courage, led her by the hand around the plinth on which the god stood. The shadows were black there, but when she sharpened her eyes and used a little magery, she saw how the god stood in a niche, and the niche was a hollow half-circle.
Hani set hand to wall and felt his way around behind the god. It was dusty in there, and it smelled of old wood and new paint and something sharply pungent that came from the god’s robe, and of course flowers everywhere. But there was plenty of space, plenty of air to breathe. Kimeri noticed the shape of a door in the very back, and just across from it, in the god’s leg, another door.
Hani, blind in the dark, groped for the catch that Kimeri could see perfectly clearly. He was thinking that he could be quiet and keep from letting her guess what he did. He did not know mages, she thought a little smugly. The catch made a distinct click, and then the door was open, with a ladder leading up into the god’s body.
He tugged her in. The scent of old wood here was overpowering. “Climb,” he whispered, hardly to be heard if she had not been a mage’s child. He thought he was helping her by setting her hands on the rungs of the ladder and nudging her feet toward the wall that was the inside of the god.
She climbed. Hani was behind her, panting so loud she wondered how anyone could keep from hearing him.
It was not a long climb. The god was not terribly tall, merely tall enough to be imposing. The top of him was almost big enough to be a room—his head, and there were windows, long and narrow like Shurakani eyes. Someone long ago had spread cushions underneath them to lie on, dusty but comfortable.
Kimeri looked out of one eye, Hani out of the other. The floor was surprisingly far below. The light of the lamp was hurtfully bright after the dark inside the god. Kimeri shut down her magesight and let herself see with ordinary eyes.
Hani nudged her with his elbow. “See this?” he whispered.
She looked at what he was holding. It looked like a trumpet, except that it was soft, made of cloth. Its bell was bronze.
“That’s a speaking trumpet,” Hani said. “A person sitting here can talk into it, and his voice comes out of the god’s mouth and sounds like the voice of heaven. That’s how they make prophecies here when the priests think it’s time.”
She was supposed to be shocked and amazed, but she did not see why she had to be. “We don’t need to pretend at home,” she said. “Our prophets are real. They make prophecies in their own voices, and priests write them down.”
“So do the priests do here,” said Hani, a little annoyed. “The prophecies are real. The god inspires them. But the people believe them better if they come from his mouth, instead of from somebody who might look like you or me and be somebody’s brother, or his cousin.”
“How silly,” said Kimeri. “Prophets are one’s brother or sister or cousin. What else would they be?”
Hani opened his mouth to reply, but froze. The curtain of the god’s shrine was sliding back with a great rasping of metal and grunting of men who heaved away at it. When it was drawn about half aside, it stopped, and people came through. What they were up to was clear enough to see: they were carrying enormous sheaves of flowers, baskets and baskets of them.
“Oh, dear,” breathed Hani.
Kimeri would have agreed with him, except that she remembered the door behind the god. She tried to tell him about it, but he clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t move,” he whispered. “Don’t breathe. If they find out we’re up here . . .”
His visions of dire fates were clear enough to shut her up. The least of them showed him being whipped while she got a royal spanking.
The people with the flowers were in no hurry at all. They brought lamps with them till the space beyond the curtain was blazing with light. They settled down to weave garlands and gossip and pass round skins of something that made them warm and giggly. The lamps gleamed on their heads, which were all shaved bare, and in their eyes, and on the flowers they were weaving and the flowers that others were taking down from the rafters and the plinth and everywhere between, including the god’s hands.
Once or twice Kimeri was sure that one of the garland-makers had looked straight up into her eyes, but the man turned away without saying anything. She crouched down a little lower and tried not to breathe.
All the dead and dying flowers being moved meant a great deal of dust and a scent so strong it made her sick. She did her best to keep her stomach where it belonged. She needed to go to the privy, too. But worst of all she needed to sneeze. She needed it so badly that her eyes itched and watered and her nose hurt, and her throat felt as if she had swallowed a bone sideways. She held her nose, but that meant breathing through her mouth, and that was noisy. And the sneeze kept on fighting to come out.
The inside of the god exploded.
She was still holding her nose, but the sneeze had shocked itself to death without ever coming out. Hani crouched with streaming eyes, yellow-grey with shock. The people outside were gaping and goggling. Some of them had fallen over. Hani’s sneeze had gone through the speaking trumpet and come out like the god’s own.
He grabbed her before she could say anything, and nearly threw her down the ladder, scrambling so fast to follow that he trod on her fingers. Outside she heard people yelling, arguing—
“The god spoke!”
“No, he didn’t. Someone got inside.”
“What? If it’s a demon—”
“We have demons in the palace. Haven’t you seen them?”
Sooner or later one of them would remember how to get inside the god, and come running to look. Kimeri shut her eyes and woke up her magery and dropped.
She landed light, with Hani almost on top of her, too scared to notice what she had done. He was still holding on to her hand. He half pulled her arm out of its socket, yanking her through the door—and then stopping cold as he remembered that he had nowhere to go.
The door in front of them had a perfectly visible catch, if one had magesight. Kimeri opened it and dragged him through and shut it tight.
They were in a passage like a dozen others, narrow and dim-lit and dusty. Hani was blind in it, but there was light farther on. Kimeri pulled him toward it.
oOo
“Do you know where we are?”
Kimeri looked around her. They had gone through a great many passages, because Hani was sure there were people running after them, and would not hear Kimeri when she tried to tell him that the priests had never even found the door behind the god.
People never listened to her. She looked at him sullenly and set her chin. “You’re the one who knows everything. Where do you think we are?”
“I don’t know.”
It cost a great deal of pride for him to say so. She was glad. “I thought you knew every crack and cranny of the palace.”
Since he had said so in the same exact words, he could hardly call her a liar. He glared at her instead. “I don’t know every one. Just the ones that are important.”
“This one is very important. We’re in it.”
“Then why don’t you get us out of it?”
Kimeri was ready to burst into tears, but she was not going to let any nit of a boy see her cry. “I can’t find my way, either. I haven’t learned to do that yet. I get all twisty when I try.”
He thought she was talking about being a girl and being too silly to tell where she was. He did not know anything about being a mage and being too young. If she told him, he would not believe her. Nobody believed in mages here.
That made her angry, and anger made her walk, she did not care where. Forward was good enough. He could follow or not. She
did not care.
He did follow, of course. Being lost made him scared. Being scared made him angry, but not as angry as Kimeri was at him for getting them into this in the first place. She stalked ahead and he stalked behind, and neither of them said a word.
oOo
They walked for a long time. Sometimes they took turns because Kimeri got tired of going straight. They were going in circles, she thought. Not the way they would in the woods, the way people got lost when they went hunting, back to the same place over and over, but the way walls could turn and twist and bend in on themselves and keep people from ever finding the way out.
Once she thought they had found it, but when they looked out at the blessed light it was coming in through a high window in the wall, and the room they were in was as empty as the rest, and there was no door but the one they had used to get in.
Hani stamped his foot and flung himself down on the floor. “We’ve got a curse on us! The god’s punishing us for climbing inside his statue.”
“He never punished you before, did he?” Kimeri asked reasonably.
The last thing he wanted was for her to be reasonable. “I never climbed inside him with anybody else before.”
“You mean I’m the curse,” said Kimeri. “Because I’m a foreigner and I look funny. I’m not! We’re lost because you don’t know as much about the palace as you thought you did.”
“We’re cursed,” he repeated. His face looked pinched and nasty. His eyes were slits. “Cursed, cursed, cursed.”
“We are not!”
“Are.”
“Are not.” Kimeri started to hit him. He spat at her. She whirled and ran away.
oOo
She did not care where she ran or how fast she did it. She careened around corners and through doorways. She heard him behind her—running and calling and trying to apologize, but she would not listen. He was only scared to be left alone.
There was furniture, suddenly, to dodge around, and instead of stone underfoot there were carpets. There were still no people. People were all somewhere else.
Except for the one she fetched up gasping against, who had come out of nowhere and stepped right in front of her. It was a tall narrow person with strong arms that caught her and held her even when she struggled. She was not thinking about that; once she did, she stopped.
The arms stayed strong, and kept holding her. She looked up.
A woman looked down. She was not old like Vanyi but she was not quite as young as Daruya either, and she had a way of looking older than she was. Her face was narrow and her lips were thin and she looked very severe, particularly when she frowned.
Kimeri burst into tears. It was not anything she thought about doing. It just happened.
The woman did not push her away, but held her and let her cry. When she was almost cried out, the woman said in a voice that was both rough and sweet, “There. That’s enough, I think.”
Kimeri sniffled hugely and swallowed the rest of her tears. The woman gave her a cloth to wipe her face. She used it. Her face had been very dirty: the white cloth was quite black when she tried to hand it back.
“No,” the woman said. “Keep it. Give it back to me later.”
And clean, she meant. Kimeri sniffled again, but that was the last of it. “Lady,” she said huskily, “can you tell me where I am?”
“Do you have a particular need to know?” the woman asked.
“I got lost,” said Kimeri. “I can’t find my way out.”
The woman’s face was no less stern, but her eyes were a little warmer. “I know how that feels. I’ve been lost here often myself. Have you been about it long?”
“Forever,” said Kimeri, fighting back the tears again.
This was not a person to cry much in front of. She was like Vanyi that way, and about as sharp in the tongue, too.
“It’s always forever,” the woman said. No: she was not quite as sharp as Vanyi. But almost. “Here, I’ll show you the way. Does your friend need help, too?”
But Hani was gone. Coward—he had recognized the room and known how to get out of it and run while Kimeri was getting the front of the woman’s coat wet. “I hate him,” she said. “I just hate him.”
“That’s often how we women feel about men,” the woman said. “We never can stop living with them, for all of that. He’ll come creeping back, you’ll see, and worm his way into your heart again.”
“He won’t,” said Kimeri. “He hates me.”
“I think he likes you and is afraid of me.” The woman looked bemused at that. “People often are. It’s a puzzlement.”
“I suppose it’s because you’re so tall,” Kimeri said, “and so narrow. And you look so severe. But you aren’t really, are you? If he’s so afraid of you and he’s still my friend, he should be trying to rescue me from you.”
“He’s a rarity in a male: he’s wise. Do forgive him for it. It’s a virtue we see too little of.”
“I hate him,” said Kimeri.
“Of course,” the woman said. She was laughing inside, which made Kimeri hate her, too. A little. Before she took Kimeri’s hand and led her out of the room and down a passage and across the corner of a garden and up a stair and to a door. “And past that,” she said, “is the court of the strangers where your house is.”
Kimeri knew that it was. She could feel her mother near, and Vanyi, and the others all together. None of them even knew that she was missing.
The woman started to draw her hand out of Kimeri’s, but Kimeri stopped her. “What’s your name?” she asked.
She could see it in the woman’s mind, as clear as everything else that she might ask, such as what the woman was and what she was doing here, but it was not polite to say so. Polite mages asked, and let people tell them.
The woman’s brows quirked. “My name is Borti. What is yours?”
“Merian,” Kimeri answered, “but they call me Kimeri— ki-Merian, because I’m little. But I’ll grow.”
“That,” said the woman, looking her up and down, “you will.”
“May I see you again?” Kimeri asked.
Borti smiled. She did not look severe at all then, or even very old. “Yes, you may. Come to this door and take the way I showed you, and if I’m free I’ll be in the room where you met me first. I’m often there at this time of day, and usually alone.”
Kimeri knew about alone-times. She needed them herself. She gave Borti her best smile and let her hand slip free. By the time she opened the door she was running. But she paused to look over her shoulder at Borti, who stood where Kimeri had left her, watching. She lifted a hand, the one that burned sun-hot, and ran through the door.
16
Not long after her foray into the teahouses of the Summer City, Daruya began to make a habit of going to the stable in the mornings and riding whichever of the seneldi seemed to need it most. It was dull enough work when she thought about it, riding in circles within the same four walls, but there was an art to it, like a dance of rider and mount. Her mare in particular had a talent for it.
It took the edge off boredom, certainly, and filled the mornings. She was close to happy, one bright cool morning, trying something new with the mare: a flying trot, legs flashing straight out, reined in by degrees until all the mare’s swiftness and fire contained itself into a powerfully cadenced trot in place.
The mare was amenable to a degree, but found it much more enjoyable, once contained, to lighten her forehand until she sat on her haunches. If Daruya urged her forward then, she reared up and sprang on her hindlegs. If Daruya sat through it, she came back lightly to a standstill, enormously pleased with herself.
At last, after considerable negotiation, Daruya coaxed the mare to permit half a dozen strides of trot-in-place. The mare bestowed them with the air of a lady granting an enormous favor. Daruya praised her lavishly, which she felt was no more than her due, and sprang from her back, and nearly jumped out of her skin.
A stranger, a Shurakani, stood watching, grin
ning at her. After the first shock she recognized him: the man from the teahouse, whose name right at the moment was emptied out of her skull. But not the eyes. Not the clear strong presence of him. He was larger than she remembered, broader in the shoulders, and he was quite as tall as she.
“That’s a splendid display,” he said without even taking the time to greet her. “You should offer it as an entertainment for princes. They’d give silk to see such a rarity.”
“I am not a hired entertainer,” Daruya said stiffly.
The mare snorted and rubbed an itching ear on Daruya’s shoulder. She turned her back on the intruder and tended the senel, taking her time about it.
He was not at all dismayed by her rudeness. He watched with perfect goodwill, and had the sense not to offer to help. She took off the mare’s saddle and bridle; he stood by, curious. She walked the mare to cool her; he followed. She sponged the mare with water from the fountain; he watched. She led the mare into the house that had been made into a stable; he strolled after, with a moment’s hesitation as he realized that all the walls had been taken down and partitions set up, and the house filled with strange horned beasts.
Daruya was used to it. She led the mare to her stall, fed her a bit of fruit, and stood smoothing the damp neck, ignoring the watcher with strenuous concentration.
She was still aware of him. It was impossible not to be. He regarded the seneldi warily but without fear, walking down the lines of stalls. The first nose that thrust inquisitively toward him, he shied at, but he came back bravely enough and stroked it. He was prepared for the next, and for the one after that.
The seneldi approved of him. He found the itchy places behind ears and at the bases of horns, and he was respectful of flattened ears and snapping teeth. He had brought nothing sweet for them to eat, which was a count against him, but they made allowances for ignorance.
He made a circuit of the stalls, coming to a halt at last outside of the one in which Daruya was standing. “These are marvelous animals,” he said. “And the way you ride them—astonishing! Would you teach me?”
