Children of the Dragon

by Frank Robinson

  She was informed that Eshom Mutsukh had gone to the Vraddagoon to conduct the affairs of his high office. As for Eshomdai and Mara, they were locked away with their tutors and governess respectively. Thus, except for servants, Golana found herself alone in the big house.

  She made her way down into the kitchen, and tried to engage the serving-maids in conversation on various household topics. But she was the mistress of the house, and so they only spoke respectfully and circumspectly to her, agreeing with everything she said. Despite the women’s outward obeisance, the attempt at conversation made Golana feel herself a fool.

  Out into the courtyard she went next, to walk dreamily among the trees, admiring their sinuous beauty. It was cool and pleasant here. She stooped to inhale the fragrance of the flowers and to chase the shimmering peacocks. But not even these gaudy birds would let her touch them, and she soon grew bored, and returned to the house, idly exploring its rooms. She encountered servants here and there, at work, but they let her wander wherever she wished without scolding her. She felt invisible. Finally, in the afternoon, she wound up in the library, nestled in a chair and slowly turning the pages of a book she couldn’t read.

  Thus did Madame Golana Resseh Mutsukh pass the day, which she was not anxious to end, because she feared the torments of the night. But finally it was time to dress in her evening clothes. Soon the Magistrate returned home, and she was escorted to meet him in the dining hall for dinner.

  Eshom Mutsukh smiled broadly at her, and gently squeezed her hand as they were seated. The children had come to dinner too, but Mutsukh placed his bride close beside him, and insisted on making her the sole subject of conversation. Through dinner, the Magistrate and his children spoke with animation of all the details of the previous day’s wedding, and of all the eminent guests who had attended. But Golana said almost nothing, and only nibbled her dinner.

  At last he drew up close to her and whispered in her ear. “I can see that you’re unhappy. It is quite understandable right now. Your life has met with a great and sudden change. You miss your father and your sister and your little house; you don’t feel at home here yet; everything must seem so strange.”

  “Yes,” the girl admitted, “that’s part of it.”

  “I understand completely. Last night, I frightened and upset you. And it hurt. I’m sorry.”

  Hesitantly, Golana nodded.

  Mutsukh smiled warmly and patted her hand. “Please don’t fret over it. Only the first time hurts so much. I wouldn’t willfully hurt you.”

  Golana closed her eyes, not knowing how to look at him. Speaking softly like this, in the glow of the dinner candles, he seemed such a gentle soul. She did not dislike him now, he was not a bad man. How could she speak to his face of the terrible loathing that had come over her when he had pressed his body on her—and which would recur when he repeated the act?

  “I want you to be happy,” Mutsukh affirmed forcefully. “I want you to respect me, and more, to love me.”

  Golana nodded dully. She did not see how it could ever be that way at all. She would never regain happiness. She felt very small and helpless, a child with prison walls closing upon her.

  2

  IN TIME, GOLANA’S pain at being trapped in the house of Eshom Mutsukh ceased to burn; it settled down into a nagging, irritating sort of pain. She spent her days in languid boredom, her only goal being to somehow consume the hours, wandering aimlessly through the house or sitting in the cool garden, staring after the movements of the peacocks. For hours on end she watched them. With these peacocks she felt a closer kinship than with anyone else in the house. Prized only for their beauty, they too were imprisoned here.

  Most of the hours, though, she spent in what became her private sanctuary, where rarely did a servant intrude. This was the library, with its shelves and shelves of books and scrolls she didn’t fathom. In a deep chair she would curl up with a heavy tome in her lap and slowly turn its pages, drifting, mesmerized by line on line of script, all unreadable to her. Golana would admire the fluid beauty of the writing, copied out by the hands of faceless scribes. She would trace the lines with her fingers, wondering at their significance. Sometimes Mutsukh would leave a few scraps of parchment on the desk, on which he had been working; and taking his pen and ink, the girl would try to copy from the books onto the blank scraps. Drawing with care, she could faithfully reproduce the writing, but this brought her no closer to its meaning. Sometimes too she would find pictures in the books, painted by hand in glittering colors, even gold and silver; and she would long gaze at these illustrations, looking back and forth between them and the writing, struggling in vain to penetrate the riddle of their relationship.

  Often at night, Mutsukh himself would spend hours alone in the library, and having a sense of its sacredness, she never dared disturb him there. Instead, she would wait for him in their bedchamber.

  He had been truthful in promising that their intercourse would stop hurting and making her bleed. It seemed to give her husband so much pleasure that she tolerated it without complaint. She would shut her eyes and try to think of pretty things—the peacocks, or more often the pictures of tall, dark-haired princes she had seen in the books. If she could keep her mind off the ugly hunchbacked Mutsukh, suffusing it instead with pleasant visions and especially with those strange jolts of sweetness rising within her from her loins, the act was not so terrible. Indeed, the anxiety preceding it was much worse now than the thing itself.

  “You still don’t like it,” Mutsukh whispered one night afterward.

  “I don’t mind,” Golana replied almost automatically. But she realized this was gradually coming to be the truth.

  “I know that I’m an ugly beast.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Don’t say no, it’s true. I am not a man who shuns the truth. It doesn’t bother me very much. I can’t do anything about the looks I was born with, and I’m not resentful, since I was given other blessings to offset them. If I were an evil man instead of ugly, that would be different; I would be responsible for my evil. It is by being a good man that I try to compensate for my ugliness. But I’m sorry if my ugliness makes you unhappy, because I so dearly want to see you happy.”

  Golana was at a loss to respond.

  “So you don’t deny it: you are still unhappy. I had hoped you would grow to like it here and feel at home, but I’ve failed, and you’re still miserable. You must tell me what it is that I can do to make you happy. I stand ready to do anything you ask . . . even . . . letting you alone at night.”

  The girl could hear the lump in Mutsukh’s throat as he said this, and her heart went out to him. For the first time she felt a surge of affection, and a deep bond with this man. Before he had seemed so distant, but now she realized they were both unhappy in their awkward situation. And it was equally her fault as his.

  In the dark, Golana leaned over and kissed her husband’s face, and she pressed her arms around him. She could feel his cheeks damp.

  “No,” she said, “that wouldn’t make me happy. In truth, not at all!”

  “Golana, you are such an angel,” he whispered hoarsely. “I knew it the first moment I met you, in your father’s house. I knew somehow that you are very, very special. For a time, I feared this marriage was nevertheless a terrible error, but now I see that my first impression was right after all. You are a wonderful wife. I would do anything for you. Please help me to make you happy.”

  After a long silence, Golana spoke. “There is one thing that I wish.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it possible—or am I presumptuous for a girl?—is it possible that I could learn the magic of your books?”

  Mutsukh chuckled softly. “Why, it isn’t magic at all. Just ordinary books. Why do you wish this learning? It’s nothing for a woman.”

  “Woman or not, I want to learn. The books are a mystery that torments me. If I learn, perhaps I�
��ll find that I’m not interested in them after all. But I must find out for myself.”

  “Very well. If that’s your wish, you’ll have it. The children’s tutor shall teach you to read.”

  “Teach me yourself! Please!”

  The darkness covered Mutsukh’s flushing. “All right; yes, I will teach you myself,” he said. “I would love to.”

  Now each evening Golana eagerly counted the hours to her husband’s coming home. Her ears were peeled for the sound of his arrival, and she would rush down to greet him. They would polish off dinner in some haste, and afterward Mutsukh would take his young wife by the hand, up into his library, to teach her the secret of language.

  It was not easy at first. The Magistrate took his own reading skill quite for granted, and his attempt to convey the knowledge was a stumbling one. But Golana was an apt and avid pupil, and soon, by teaching her the sounds of all the letters, he had her reading fluently. She was learning the rudiments of grammar too, and writing; her first letter was to her father, and it naturally took him quite by surprise. Few were the women who could read, let alone write a cogent letter.

  Once she had gained these basics, Golana spent every possible hour in the library, poring over the books and scrolls, puzzling out difficult words and expressions. Many of them were in an old, archaic style, but she soon mastered these as well. She was immeasurably excited not just at her ability to decipher the long-mysterious scripts, but at the feast of wonders that the books contained. At the beginning she’d had no idea whether their contents would be worth the trouble of digging out, but she quickly found herself reading in complete absorption. Golana was thirstily soaking up an ocean of knowledge that she’d never known existed. All at once, the world was infinitely greater than the narrow confines that had theretofore bounded her vision.

  Her reading was indiscriminate but diligent, so as not to miss the tiniest morsel, even in abstruse texts she could hardly understand. She read history, poetry, science, geography, mathematics, and the sacred books of theology, all precious realms completely new to her. Forgotten was her boredom; her life now, in Mutsukh’s library, was an ecstatic romp.

  “What does the tutor teach Eshomdai?” she asked one day, referring to her stepson.

  Mutsukh replied that he was taught everything a boy should know: literature, religion, history, every conceivable subject.

  “Oh, just like in your books!”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I would so much enjoy listening to his lessons.”

  “But such lessons are for boys, not girls.”

  “You said the same of your books—but I love to read! Oh, please let me listen to Eshomdai’s lessons!”

  The Magistrate waggled his head in consternation at the remarkable wife he had acquired. But in fact, he was pleased by her hunger for knowledge; it set her quite apart from the ordinary run of pampered women whom he might have married. “Very well,” he said, “you may certainly attend the lessons.”

  At first Golana exercised this privilege sheepishly, hiding herself in a corner while the tutor lectured Eshomdai and engaged him in dialogues. She sat quiet as a cat, as an interloper who knew she didn’t belong there. Sometimes, though, the master and the boy touched upon topics that she had encountered herself in the library, and her breath was taken away when she knew the answers to questions propounded by the tutor. But she kept her silence.

  One day Eshomdai was studying geography, and he was asked to identify the capital of Diorromeh Province.

  The boy casually answered, “It’s Ganda Saingam.”

  And Golana knew that was wrong! She had just been reading about Diorromeh, and while Ganda Saingam was, true enough, its largest city, the capital was actually at Anda Lusis. This time, she could not restrain herself. “No, Eshomdai,” she called out from her corner, “the capital is Anda Lusis!”

  Both master and pupil looked up, startled. “That’s right,” the tutor said, “you should be ashamed of yourself, Eshomdai. Even this girl knows that Anda Lusis is the capital of Diorromeh. Even this ignorant girl!”

  “I am not ignorant!”

  “Oh, a hundred pardons, I did not mean to offend you, dear Madame Mutsukh,” the red-faced tutor hastily apologized. “I only meant that, obviously, women have no knowledge of these things.”

  This only aggravated Golana’s indignation. “No knowledge? Indeed! Do you suppose it was ‘intuition’ that told me about Anda Lusis? I know some geography, and I know a great deal more!”

  “Then tell me, what is the capital of Kholandra?”

  “Vertetis!” Golana answered proudly.

  “And of Muraven?”

  “Sajnithaddhani!”

  “Who was the author of the Principles of Mathematic Inquiry?”

  “Avdoulzakhar Benna!”

  The tutor gasped.

  And nevermore would Golana sit in a comer through her stepson’s lessons.

  As Golana’s studies progressed, she began to discuss the things she read with the tutor and Eshom Mutsukh. In the sessions with the tutor, Eshomdai began taking a back seat to his quick-witted but younger stepmother. And the Magistrate took a growing pleasure in his exchanges with Golana. Who ever imagined that a wife could be a stimulating intellectual companion? More and more, Eshom Mutsukh reserved time to spend alone with her.

  She read many books about the history of the Bergharran Empire, from the legend of Sexrexatra down through all the dynasties and rulers. She delved too into the related sacred texts, so steeped in their veneration of the emperor-deity. It had previously been her habit to ignore religious matters; that was exclusively the province of men. As a woman, Golana was not expected to make appearances at temple. No ode had ever tried to inculcate her with reverence or even belief. Now, her sharpening analytical mind began to ponder.

  Her wonderings were propelled by events at Ksiritsa. There, at the Dragon City, in the Palace of the Heavens, the old Tnem Al-Khoum Satanichadh had died. He had sat three decades upon the Tnemenghouri Throne. A new emperor was taking up the Scepter, the twenty-year-old Prince Sarbat, crowned in a fabulous ceremony. Thus too passed the godship; and accordingly, at the temple of Arbadakhar, there was performed a glorious pageant to inaugurate worship of this new god.

  But was not this Sarbat a man, had he not been born of woman? What then distinguished between a god and a mere mortal? That one was called a god and worshipped by credulous people?

  Sarbat received that worship now because he was the son of a god; and so too, Tnem Al-Khoum had inherited the godship from his father. But the line was not unbroken. Golana had read in books of how Sharoun the Sword had risen from the army to overthrow Riyadja Tsitpabana. How could a peasant unseat a god, and deify himself instead, through very earthly cleverness and bloodshed? How could this make gods of the usurper’s descendants? And what if some general came along now and knocked Sarbat off the throne?

  But the sacred books solemnly and simply held that the throne was the seat of godhood. They also decreed that every human event was according to the god’s whim, and his whim followed no logic any mortal could understand. “The Emperor works mysteriously,” the parchments said; “do not attempt to comprehend his justice, for to mortals, there is none.” Golana wondered if this nihilistic mumbojumbo was just a mask to conceal the truth: that the Emperor was powerless, neither hearing nor responding to prayers. In fact, no god at all.

  The world, she observed, was indeed devoid of justice. There was no rightness in her being rich and pampered while millions starved. There was no reason for the good to suffer while evil men thrived. The world was fraught with inequity, Golana concluded, not because the Emperor’s whim was beyond comprehension, but because the Emperor was no a god only to impose a façade of order upon a world which, in their hearts, they knew was orderless if not insane.

  Such a faith was fundamentally repellent to Golana. Sh
e could not believe the scriptures were true, but more than that, she would reject them even if true! The perverse god they depicted was hateful to Golana. It was bad enough for the world to be unjust and insane—but it would be far worse to believe there was a conscious agency making it so. If such a tyrant god existed, she would not worship him, but fight him.

  Skillful a reader as Golana became, Mutsukh’s library contained many books that baffled her. Their scripts resembled the one she knew, but with different letters and words she couldn’t understand. She could never puzzle out any of these texts, could not even scratch their surfaces. And there were even books with writing that was wholly alien.

  When she inquired about this problem, Eshom Mutsukh patiently explained that he had taught her to read only Tnemghadi. Some of his books, however, were Urhemmedhin, and he also owned some rare volumes from foreign lands like Kuloun, Mohonghi, Laham Jat, and Valpassu.

  “Can you read those languages?” she asked.

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “Would you teach me Urhemmedhin?”

  Eshom Mutsukh was nonplussed by this request. It was extraordinary enough that his wife could read Tnemghadi. While he was pleased by her zest for learning, to read Urhemmedhin was another matter. It was true that Mutsukh and other high officials learned the language, in order to govern the province. But for anyone else, a knowledge of Urhemmedhin would be regarded as subversive and heretical.

  Mutsukh pondered long before speaking. Then he said, “You can’t possibly have read all the Tnemghadi books I have.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then why do you want to read the Urhemmedhin ones?”

  “Because there are Urhemmedhin books.”

  The man pursed his lips and thought some more. “Very well,” he whispered slowly, “I will teach you, but on one condition. You must never reveal to anyone that you can read Urhemmedhin.”