Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse
Page 30
“I should have guessed—I am strategos. At least for the moment. It is my responsibility to pre-empt an army’s movements.”
“Yes but it was the queen who negotiated this deal with Satah. It was she who sent the message to let him enter our harbour unchecked.”
Petra surfaces from her thoughts and fixes me with clear, cool eyes. “And it was I who failed to send a convoy to meet him. It was I who did not think to count his triremes but assumed—it’s like a woman letting her lover sneak into her room at night. Darkness does not make for innocence.”
“My mother invited Satah to Tibuta. The gerousia and ephors would never have let this happen.”
“The elder-women were sucking Tibuta dry. But that is no matter, as strategos I should know—”
“But you may not be strategos for much longer.” I pause to let this sink in. “You should be. You are the best we’ve got and the queen is tearing our nation apart. She turned her back on the gods when she expelled our government, when she executed the woman from Taveni Island and when she denied High Priestess Maud Lias her right to educate the people in the Holy Scripture, and when she shut the temple. And now she laughs in our faces, inviting our enemy to bed. You were right. We need to fight. We should dispose of the prince and declare war on Whyte. He has revealed his true nature. We can be certain he does not intend to help us.”
She pulls away but I reach out to stop her. “I thought, as a loyal woman of Tibuta, a woman learned in battle and one who will not lay down her sword and submit, one who, like Ayfra herself, would cross the sea for the sake of victory, refusing to accept defeat but instead fighting until the very last breath, I thought—I will admit, I thought you would be appalled by the queen’s decision.”
She says nothing.
Drayk, who has been listening intently, adopts a gentle, persuasive voice that massages Petra’s atrama. “Verne is destined to take the throne and when she does she can give you your daughter’s remains and solidify your position as strategos. Help her take what is rightfully hers.”
“I mean to bring Tibuta back to the righteous path, restore the old powers, re-establish Tibutan law and work with the temple to prevent further damnation. I will rid Tibuta of her enemies and unify her so she might face the Tempest.”
A Whyte horn sounds in the distance. “If the Shark’s Teeth had not poisoned Styla’s mind, she would be here now, learning from me,” Petra whispers.
“You mean if the queen had not killed her? Remember, the Shark’s Teeth are those who have the courage to articulate the truth.”
There are tears in her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Help me.” I reach out with my atrama, silently urging her to make the right decision.
She shrugs as, for the first time, she finds herself forced into a position of ineptitude, a scapegoat, a victim of the queen she has worked so hard to bolster. It is a reluctant, almost imperceptible gesture, but one which is far from refusal.
We fall silent when Adelpha approaches.
Chapter sixteen
I do not speak as I step into the swell, not even to Drayk. The ocean envelops me and I am grateful for its familiar embrace. Around me scared Tibutan soldiers enter like crabs and sink to the bottom. I am only vaguely aware of Adelpha swimming behind me and Drayk above me. Petra has gone ahead.
My ears and nose shut against the brine, my eyes adjust so I can see clearly: there is a shell, seaweed, an eel peering at us from behind a rock. I can hear the low clanking of a distant boat and the sound of one much closer, its anchor-stone grating along the sea floor.
As we swim out to sea the water temperature drops and, because I am a Tibutan, and a well-trained one at that, I instantly adapt, my body sending warm blood to my extremities and slowing my heartbeat to conserve energy. The sounds fade and I am thankful for the quiet. I want to stay down here where nothing can disturb me.
When I reach Port Tibuta Drayk is standing on the moss-covered step offering me his hand. He pulls me up and water streams down my hair and my face making my uniform heavy. He offers his hand to Adelpha. “Your mother and Petra have already gone over the Seawall. Most of the army is up.”
Behind us the Seawall casts its shadow like an accusatory finger over the gold and black sea. We are met by Chase and Odell. We enter one of the cages and move excruciatingly slowly to the pinnacle, run across the perfectly flat top, which still holds the residue of the day’s sun, and take another cage down.
From the cage we can see a crowd gathered on the barren earth like a writhing nest of termites. They butt up against rows of hoplites who have formed a protective wall to keep them back. Some have climbed the rubble of Kratos’s Arch. They shake their fists at the unresponsive sky.
Down, down the cages go and up, up rise the voices of our people.
This is no exultant chanting. It’s an angry mob of exhausted and disenfranchised people; they will not make way for their ineffectual queen and her daughters when it is the people who work and work and work while we do nothing, apparently, but sit on our thrones and eat whale meat. And nor should they make way. They ought to fight.
The gates open. At our backs is the Seawall. In front, the masses. They scurry forwards, so many of them, so few of us. A small group breaches the wall of soldiers, tumbling through, only to be cut down by sharp swords.
Drayk draws his xiphos. I pull out my double blades. We hesitate, unsure who to kill. Swords clang, and spears crash. The queen, my sister and my cousins run, holding their arms over their heads to shield themselves from debris thrown from the Arch. My mother makes it to the palanquin. Then Odell. Adelpha is next. Then Chase. A rebel launches at my sister. She focuses her energy on him, holding her hand out like a conductor. The rebel pauses, looks at my sister with a mad grin. Adelpha flicks her hand and the rebel runs and impales himself on a metal pole that juts out from the base of the Seawall. A beck of blood trickles down his chin.
I defend myself high, split the swords, and slice a man through the stomach with one while defending an attack from above with the other. It is my first kill. There is no time to think.
Chase sprawls in the dirt. A spear is embedded between his shoulder blades. Adelpha jumps over his body and reaches the litter. “Go!” I hear her yell as she clambers inside. “Go!”
“Highness!” I turn to see Ried pushing through the crowd. She points to a palanquin further on.
“Quick. Help me,” I say and, together, while the battle rages around us, we lift my cousin gracelessly into the litter. The unarmed fleets lift us off the ground and push their way through the colony of termites. Chase’s blood soaks through my military uniform. His eyes roll back in his head. His face is like poorly dyed cloth, white and grey in patches. The fleets stagger and sway through the crowd with us balanced on their shoulders. With every jolt Chase calls out. Soon, he merely groans. My tunic, the silk pillows, the curtains, everything is decorated with his red.
My eyes will not see. My mind will not acknowledge that Chase is dying. It will not acknowledge the sound of swords hacking through flesh. It will not acknowledge that Drayk is somewhere back there. I am rigid, alert, expecting the next blow to be the last, the one that sends me to my death. I expect to drop to the ground, our fleets slain, our guards overwhelmed. The mob will swarm over the litter, shake it, stomp on it, tip it and then smash it to pieces with us inside. They will devour every piece of wood, every piece of us.
But that last blow never comes. Ried and her co-conspirators plough through the dark cave and we burst out the other side into daylight. Hoplites hurry to escape, discarding their duty, their composure, and their sense of pride, self-preservation their only driving force, leaving their comrades to die. Those who stay back kill, and kill, and kill until they remember they are killing their own and they stop, disgusted with themselves. They are inundated by their countrymen.
I try to focus on the breath of fresh air wafting in through the curtains. I block Chase out.
On the outskirts of Ele
a Bay we turn north up the Holy Way. The street is crowded with anxious freemen and slaves, who know they will be unwelcome at the palace, and come instead to demand answers of Maud Lias.
I nurse Chase’s corpse until we are safely inside the temple walls. The fleets place us gently on the ground and I run from the palanquin, gasping for air, before doubling over and vomiting in the dirt. An ocean roars in my ears. The sky is swirling, the ground too. I can see only my feet and my hands held out in front of my face. I tremble uncontrollably.
The temple grounds have metamorphosed into a battle camp. Shark’s Teeth and defectors sit in the open cooking on small fires. They lie in the mouths of leather ridge tents or huddle together talking about the inevitability of war. Kylons fight at the end of their chains, revealing their fangs and spotted gums. Red priestesses and holy consorts call to one another for more supplies.
A sneering Shark’s Tooth with her face hidden behind her oak tannin and indigo scarf prods anyone who gets too close. “Keep going. You can’t stop there. Hurry up. There are people behind you. You. You look old enough to fight. Report for duty. You, you are far too old. Go home with your mother. Report to a Shark’s Tooth. All must be tested. We want only warriors here.”
“Highness, you too will have to be tested, I am sorry,” Ried says and points towards a tent. “It is the only way Demostrate will accept you.”
Walking in a trance, believing and not believing in my importance as an agent of change, I wash my bloody hands in a fountain below the pyramid; it is the same water as in the canal, but I am not interested in ablution. I feel, for the most part, beyond purification. I want only to be free of the blood.
I have exercised ultimate control over another person. I have killed a man—I remember his bearded face, the terror in his eyes as he held himself, blood oozing between his fingers—thus completing my transformation from civilian to soldier. Drayk prepared me for this. I must remain focused, involved and disconnected.
I join a long line of hopeful recruits outside Demostrate’s tent. I am only vaguely aware of Ried standing beside me. The line creeps forwards. Some who exit the tent carry a black headscarf. Those who exit empty-handed are escorted away by rebel soldiers.
It is my turn. I duck beneath the flap and enter the tent’s oven-like interior. Demostrate, the strategos of the Shark’s Teeth, sits behind a slab of timber propped up on unstable soapstone legs. She is a woman of incredible size, top heavy, a block of unrefined strength. Her face is the tip of a battering ram. She is all muscle and no substance, brawn and no brains. Her gaze, which is too intense, makes me uneasy.
One who has dedicated herself to physical perfection does so at the expense of mind and atrama, I reflect. Another thought plagues me: This is Tibuta.
There is a single chair opposite the strategos and I lower my tired body into it.
“Your weapons,” she says and without protest I throw back my cloak and unstrap the baldrics from each of my shoulders then relinquish Eunike and Paideuo.
Demostrate removes a stony white shark’s-tooth amulet from around her neck. Shaped like an arrowhead, it is as big as her hand and tipped in gold. “You see this? This is the Shark’s Tooth. Straight from Kratos’s thigh,” she says, swinging it in front of her face. “This was given to me by the high priestess. I don’t care who you are. The tooth will test you.” She holds it out to me and I take it. It is warm from lying against her chest. “Spin it. If it points to you, you are one of us. If it does not you are clearly a spy and I will have you killed, your body dumped in the lake.”
“So it is a game of chance?”
“No,” she says, peering at me over her nose. “The tooth holds the power of the First Mother.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you clearly support the queen and must die.” She smiles a sinister smile.
I have no choice. I must be tested. My chest constricts. Perspiration drips down my left temple.
“But you could be sending innocent people to death because of your faith in this amulet. It might just be a tooth, with no powers at all.”
Her frown is a proof of her unyielding certainty. “The tooth knows what is in your heart.”
I swallow. “Yes, but what if—”
“There is no ‘what if’! Hurry. There are others waiting to be tested.”
I weigh the shark’s tooth in my hand thinking of Harryet in this situation. I am all the more proud of my friend. “It is heavy,” I say, leaning forwards. I place the tooth on the table and hesitate.
“Now, or I will kill you myself.”
My thoughts are torture. I could refuse but something more than curiosity eats at me: an intense need to know. When I spin the tooth I believe I am doing it of my own free will. It does not occur to me that the outcome of this test was determined and written in scripture long before I was born.
The Shark’s Tooth pirouettes on the table. It slows and comes to a stop. Its golden tip is pointing directly at me.
“Lucky,” Demostrate says. She looks disappointed.
My relief is so profound I cannot help but grin. “I am clearly destined to fight by your side.”
“Not by my side, hoplite. I am strategos.” She rummages in a crate behind her and produces a piece of black cloth, throws it at me—it hits me in the chest—snatches up the tooth and exits.
Ried is waiting for me outside. “It is as the holy texts predicted,” she says, and nods in approval at the bandana, which I have wrapped around my head. The sun is a dazzling companion on the winding pathway between the tents to the pyramid. The sanctuary is cold and almost empty save for a few red priestesses and high-ranking Shark’s Teeth, who come and go like spectres in the dark. We burrow deeper and deeper into the temple, past the statue of the First Mother, through the winding sepulchral corridors until we reach Maud’s chamber.
“Thank you, comrade,” she says to the Shark’s Tooth guarding the door then, once the rebel is out of earshot says, “Your highness. She has been expecting you.” She opens the door.
Entering the room, I half expect to see Maud receiving blood but instead find her seated on the burgundy kline, her wiry legs protruding from a shroud-like grey peplos, one hand gripping her linden staff, the other limp in her lap. She is overcooked, all dry skin and shrunken muscle. Her swimming eyes struggle to focus and she sucks her teeth. “Ssss. Verne, my little bird,” she says and claps her gnarled hands. Her laughter quickly turns to a phlegmy cough and Ried, who has taken up her position behind the high priestess, pounds her back. “So you have passed the test,” Maud says, wiping the tears from her eyes. “There was never any doubt but it was necessary. To win your troops’ approval. The holy texts promised us a saviour and here you are. Come, sit by my side and I will teach you all I can in the short time we have. Most importantly, I will teach you to defend your mind against your sister.”
I obediently sit beside her, lifting my feet off the floor and tucking them beneath me. “Thank you for getting me out of the temple so quickly. And at such a cost to your soldiers. My mother threatened me with death and I knew it was only a matter of time.”
“It’s done now. Soon she will know you have defected.”
Though I know it is unavoidable this information sits heavy in my stomach like an undigested meal. I scratch at the patches of blood on my uniform. “Did you learn anything about the bird Callirhoe?” I say, looking up eagerly and hoping to move the conversation away from my guilt.
“I consulted the few Holy Texts that have survived here in Tibuta but with little success I am afraid. Your mother burned the scrolls we needed long ago. You will have to visit the oracle to get the information you need.”
“If I survive that long.” I mean it as a joke but it comes out more like a bitter complaint.
Maud overlooks my awkwardness and says to Ried, “Send for meat and bread. Send for Demostrate and her chiliarches. They must hear: the daughter of Tibuta has found her way home. This at least is cause for celebration.”
Of the women seated to my left and right I recognise Ried and the two Shark’s Teeth who stood guard outside Demostrate’s tent. One is called Lamb, the other Cub, nicknames, obviously. With their black turbans removed their faces are surprisingly gentle. Lamb’s is framed with tight white ringlets like wool but despite the epithet and her tender appearance her eyes hold the ruthlessness of a slave-turned-rebel. Cub is little older than twelve or thirteen and though her smile is broad I see darkness in her atrama, one cultivated in the mines.
Demostrate flings the door back and stomps across the room, scraping a chair out from the table and placing it in the corner furthest from everyone. She crosses her ropy arms over her chest and glares at each of us in turn, daring us to speak. None does. We clear our throats and try to pretend she is not there.
“Maud, I have a bone to pick with you,” says the strategos of the Shark’s Teeth.
“Speak Demostrate, but remember the gods are listening.”
“She might claim she wants to join the revolution but that doesn’t mean we can trust her. She has never seen the inside of a pit. I doubt she has even been outside the palace Wall.”
“That doesn’t mean her royal highness cares any less for the people of Tibuta,” Maud says and I nod in agreement.
“Yes but unlike us she doesn’t have rebellion in her blood. She has only joined us to infuriate her mother—”