M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  They waited.

  The following two days were anxious and tedious; there was no word from Aluja. The Lady’s shoulder wound grew better, healed, and became less inflamed. The bruise on her forehead did the opposite: it pained her less, but the bluish-black, veined shadow spread over her cheek, squeezed around her long-lashed eye, and sent tentative fingers down her jaw toward her throat. The captain shook his head and uttered encouragements, but Ridek was not deceived. She grew visibly weaker, and he suspected that she could no longer see from the eye thus embraced by the discolored, puffy flesh.

  Hodal arrived on the third day, a sinewy oldster with a face as sour as cheap wine. He announced that Aluja, now a lowly Milumanayani warrior in the pay of Firaz the Younger, was in contact with a physician who was a friend of Yan Kor. As soon as the doctor could find an excuse to leave the camp, he would come. They had to be satisfied with that.

  On the fourth morning Ridek awoke to laughter, shrill voices chattering in sibilant Milumanayani, and the burned-fish redolence of cooking sand-clams. Ten paces, away, the Lady Deq Dimani sat crosslegged upon her desert-cloak combing out her locks as best she could with her good hand. “Nomads,” she warned him. “Be cautious.”

  The captain’s scruffy soldiers were crowded about something down in the hollow behind their lookout post. Ridek used sand to make his ablutions, adjusted the remains of the Gaichun s tattered green tunic, and scrambled down the slope to see. He paused to offer the Lady Deq Dimani his hand, but she refused with a grimace that swiftly became a smile.

  The Milumanayani officer met them halfway down. “As you requested, Madam,” he said formally. “My sand-worms intercepted the Tsolyani a Tsan or two outside Kankara. Lost three—and one good soldier as well—but we rescued your comrade for you. There was no girl—another party had taken her into Kankara separately, a gaggle of soldiers and a priestess of the Goddess Dlamelish, the scouts say.”

  Ridek would have questioned him further, but the Lady hobbled on past into the throng below. The soldiers parted before her, and he saw whom the nomads had brought.

  It was one of the Pygmy Folk. He peered. The stance, the splotchy gray and black fur, the mottling on its beak: it was Thu’n, he who had accompanied them out of Ninue!

  Surprisingly, the little nonhuman did not appear at all pleased to be rescued. If anything, he was outraged. Two gaunt, sun-blackened tribesmen laughed and lurched and swung to and fro from his furry arms, dodging his snapping beak and wildly kicking, sharp-clawed feet. Bloodstains and torn desert-cloaks attested to the effort it had taken to subdue him. “My Lady!” Thu’n squalled. “My Lady! Oh, help me!” She rounded upon the captain and his soldiers. “What has been done to him?”

  “Nothing—uh—Lady. Nothing,” one replied. “The sand-worms only follow their custom.”

  “What custom?”

  Thu’n shouted, “They took my golden discs, my Lady! My discs—the ones the Prince gave me in Mihallu—!” He broke off.

  “The Pygmy Folk love gold!” She snapped her fingers imperiously. “Give him back his wealth!”

  The captain issued stem commands. Some of the nomads grinned, others sniggered, and only the eldest, a blackened skeleton of a man, had the grace to look apologetic.

  The officer translated. “He says he cannot. In the Desert of Sighs all property belongs to everyone alike—whoever asks must receive.”

  “I have already had too much experience of their laws in Na Ngore. Tell him we want Thu’n’s property back. He has need of it. At once.”

  A babble arose, which the captain quelled by laying about him with the flat of his sword.

  “He says that this is no longer possible. Lady,” he panted. “The little beast had a handful of golden discs—coins, perhaps—and the maidens of the tribe fancied them for bangles and necklaces.”

  “Where are these ‘maidens’?”

  “In the desert, I suppose. The nomads did not bring their womenfolk here.”

  She swiveled back to Thu’n. “Let them keep your coins. I shall give you gold aplenty when we reach my brother—or Yan Kor.”

  “Never! You do not understand—” Again, Thu’n seemed at a loss to explain the importance of his missing discs.

  Some of the tribesmen scowled. A few fingered bone-tipped spears, and the Milumanayani officer retreated a pace or two.

  “The old man says he can have ’em back if he can find ’em.” The captain hawked up phlegm, visibly unwilling to do more.

  Thu’n was released, still hopping and fuming. He went to each of the nomads in turn, made demands, and held out his hand. No discs appeared.

  “Give these sand-worms breakfast,” the captain ordered. He addressed the Lady Deq Dimani. “The girls’ll hang the little beast’s precious discs from their ears and noses. If ever he sees one, he can have it back for the asking.” He chortled. “And more besides. Their hussies earn their keep by serving the needs of the Tsolyani army—and ours as well.”

  Later, when the captain’s troops had eaten, and the nomads, too, had been fed outside the camp, Ridek went to relieve himself in the rocky gully behind the campfires. One of the tribesmen awaited him there, a skinny, starveling youth attired in the voluminous leather cloak that was the sole and universal costume of the Desert of Sighs.

  “What do you want?”

  The other shook long braids that stank of Hmelu-fat and showed struggling teeth in what could be interpreted as a

  smile.

  “Off! Away! 5 have nothing for you!” He was not afraid; help was but thirty paces away.

  The nomad made an unmistakable gesture, one that repelled Ridek more than it shocked him.

  “Go away before I—!”

  The Milumanayani reached down, caught the hem of the poncho-like cloak, and raised it high. The naked, scrawny body thus revealed was indubitably female.

  “tupazhesl” the giri said. “Tupanges tluT’ She repeated her gesture.

  Between her flat, big-nippled breasts swung a golden disc the size of Ridek’s palm.

  He pointed wordlessly. She simpered and slipped the disc and its thong off over her head. “Lufajes mtu,” the girl said, and handed it to him. She grinned expectantly.

  He had nothing to give her in return—most certainly not what she asked! He grinned back. “Thank you—uh—thank you.” He indicated the captain’s campfire back on top of the rise and grabbed himself by the ear, as a mother does a naughty child. “They’re calling me,” he improvised. And fled.

  Ridek found Thu’n seated by the fire moping over a mound of empty sand-clam shells. He sat down beside him. “Would you tell me something?”

  The creature fixed him with one sharp black eye but made no response.

  There was no other way; Ridek plunged into the heart of the matter. “Why,” he asked, “did you so willingly go over to the Tsolyani in Ninue? And later at Pu’er?”

  Thu’n flicked a glance over toward the Lady Deq Dimani who dozed upon her desert-cloak in the shade of the outcrop.

  Ridek continued doggedly, “The captain said that you were chatting merrily with the Tsolyani soldiers when his folk rescued you. That you did not aid in your escape. That you actually resisted until you saw the Tsolyani must lose. That only then did you attempt to slay one of the foe with his own dagger and cry out allegiance to Yan Kor.”

  “All false—the errors of desperate men!” Thu’n said grumpily. “And how does this concern you?”

  “The Lady considers you a loyal adviser, yet you seemed very eager to exchange her green for Tsolyani blue.”

  “Go away, child. The Lady is aware of everything. She makes no accusation; why should you?”

  “I have heard my father say that the greatest loyalty dwells in the breasts of children and old women. If people are not faithful, then I do not help them.”

  “Help? How can you help me? By not tattling to the Lady Deq Dimani? Cha! You profit nothing thereby! She employs me as a scholar, an historian, one who reads ancient tongues and por
es over scrolls. I work for her, boy! I am neither liegeman nor slave, and my loyalties are my own.”

  “My concern is not with the Lady.” He withdrew the golden disc from within his tunic. “I weave my own Skein: my friends I help, my foes I disdain, as my father says. Are you friend or foe?”

  Thu’n leaped up to thrust one grasping paw at him across the fire. “That is mine! Give it here, child!”

  “It was given—freely—to me.” The circumstances did not merit repeating. “I may give it away again. But only to a friend.”

  Thu’n cursed and clacked his beak. The Lady Deq Dimani raised her head to look over at them, and he subsided. “To the Deep Hole with your silly human ‘nobility’! Even for a human you are naive—childish—unlettered in the world!”

  “Lettered enough to read the word ‘friend’ and tell it from ‘foe.’ ”

  Thu’n flexed his clawlike fingers, ran them through his grizzled gray-black fur, and sputtered.

  Ridek took pity upon him. After all, how much of a hero had he himself been? Had he fought to the death when the Tsolyani took him in Ninue? Had he tried to slay the Kasi or his other tormentors at Pu’er? Had he even refused to work when they turned him into a slave? Hrugga of the epics indeed! There were always necessities, exigencies, reasons, and qualifications to everything. He was fast learning what it was to live in a world where no color was pure, where Lord Hnalla’s white shaded imperceptibly into Lord Hrii’ii’s purple, and where loyalties and ties and bonds were forever tangling in shifting webs that defied unsnarling.

  He dropped the disc into Thu’n’s leathery palm.

  For a moment the creature blinked at him, his gray-white beak agape in what might have been either astonishment or joy. Then his eyes narrowed as he held the disc up to the light.

  The Milumanayani girl had pierced it for a neck-thong. She—or a comrade—had also punched many other little holes in it: a phallus, the primordial symbol of fertility, crosses and crescents and circles, the glyphs of some unknown desert deity. The whorls and symbols its ancient makers had inscribed upon it were obscured and lost.

  Much to the startlement of the rest of the camp Thu’n threw back his head and uttered a long, ululating howl. It was thus that Ridek learned that the Pygmy Folk cannot cry.

  During the afternoon of the fifth day a boy, a Chlen-hide tanner’s apprentice not much older than Ridek himself, brought the news they had dreaded to hear. The youth displayed the captain’s little ring and said, “Hodal asks you to come. Your friend—the nomad—has been arrested by the Tsolyani. He got a message to Hodal first: bring the woman and the boy to Kankara. The physician waits to treat her, and there is another agent whom you are to meet. Can you return with me now?” They could. It was a grim and solemn trip down through the dry, bracken-covered scarps and gullies to the bustling encampment below.

  22

  The tent flap opened from darkness into a medley of yellow lamplight. Blinded, Trinesh stumbled upon the figured Khirgari carpets that made pools of cyan and amber and carmine and orpiment and viridian upon the sandy floor. He squinted and managed to avoid the heaped dais-pyramids of smaller rugs and druggets, each surrounded by its own foothill-range of cushions and hassocks and bolsters and backrests of carven, ivory-limbed Ssar-wood. Amid the carpets, like pagodas rising out of a rainbow-hued garden, stood enameled chests, filigreed taborets, and trivets upon which burnished, fat-bellied censers gleamed with the brightness of golden moons. There was too much to see, more than the senses could take in at once: draperies, banners, tabards, a jungle of colours and fragrances and intricate shapes. In one comer, against a tapestry overflowing with the stately figures of the Gods advancing into battle upon Dormoron Plain, Lord Vimuhla’s Holy Flame quavered upon a portable altar of red-veined camelian. Trinesh stopped to blink and rub his eyes.

  In front of him, General Kutume hiTankolel gave the appropriate fist-to-breast salute to the man seated at the camp-table in the center of the tent. General Kutume and General Kadarsha hiTlekolmii, Commander of the Legion of the Searing Flame and now Kerdudali—Senior General—of the eastern armies under Prince Mirusiya himself, were old friends.

  General Kadarsha looked up. “At this time of night? What is this you bring—an armed insurrection?”

  Trinesh’s superior sought a carpet-dais of suitable height. He found it, pulled a fat cushion around to lean upon, and sat down. “Just a few of my lost troopers—veterans of that fiasco at Fortress Ninu’ur last year—with a tale that deserves a rendering by an epic-singer. ” A wave indicated the three men and one woman with him; these he gestured to sit where they were, by the door. The other two—the spindling, lean-fleshed old hermit and the ugly slave—he had left outside. Their apparent status did not merit an audience.

  Trinesh had not revealed Tse’e’s identity, nor had he mentioned Okkuru’s unexplainable wealth. To do so was to assure the impalement of both men, as well as the speedy confiscation of the slave’s gold. The aid those two had rendered him and his comrades at Pu’er deserved whatever reward he could contrive. If they desired his silence, they would have it, even if the Flame Lord Himself were to decree otherwise! He could only pray that Tse’e had put aside his suicidal plan to surrender himself in exchange for Okkuru’s freedom—and that the latter, in turn, would keep his riches safely out of sight until Trinesh found some means of getting him away from the encampment.

  Kadarsha stood up, scratched the small of his back against a tent-post, and pushed away the parchments his staff-Dritlan had spread in front of him. “Enough for tonight, Kambe,” he grumbled. “Even a bad epic is better than your funereal dirge of debits and requisitions and roster-lists.”

  The Senior General was taller by ten finger-breadths than most Tsolyani: a powerful man, once slender, but now softer and thicker in the wrong places from good food and easy travel in a general’s litter, rather than army rations and “the pauper’s palanquin”: a pair of serviceable feet. Kadarsha’s face was unusual, a trifle foreign-looking, with a broad forehead and wide-set eyes, the white lines of healed battle scars, and faint creases at the corners of his mouth that spoke of the encroachments of time, laughter, and not a few sorrows along the way. General Kutume was smaller and more debonairly handsome, as Tsolyani tastes went, but he was clearly of a different breed, one far commoner in every army: a soldier devoted as much to purses and haggling and documents as to swords. Both were about thirty years of age, and both were numbered among Prince Mirusiya’s “new men,” his comrades in the Legions before his Vriddi patrons and the Omnipotent Azure Legion, that corps of special servitors closest to the Emperor, had pulled him out of obscurity and announced him to be a Tlakotani, a Prince, and one of the heirs to the Petal Throne.

  “Sing your epic, soldier!” the Senior General grunted. He sat down again, drew his legs under himself upon the carpet-dais, and adjusted the folds of the dark orange night-robe he wore. From the inner chambers of the pavilion behind him a child crowed and giggled; it was said that this Kadarsha was devoted to his priestess-wife, the Lady Oyaka hiTlekoImu, and she, in turn, was an abject slave to her two sturdy twin sons.

  Trinesh did as he was told. It took a long time, and before it was ended the Senior General poured goblets of amber-hued Mash-brandy for them with his own hands. Both Generals were said to be familiar with matters of sorcery; both were moderates in the service of the Flame Lord; and both were reputed to be reasonably noble, as “high folk” went.

  Most importantly for Trinesh, neither would dismiss his adventures as a fable or a deserter’s glib alibi.

  If only Trinesh could relax and yet stay awake! The trip north from Pu’er had been arduous—awful! There had been questions and retellings and reports to be tediously copied by the Legion’s pokenose, busybody scribes. In turn, he had been informed of the recapture of Fortress Ninu’ur by the Yan Koryani and the deaths of Vinue and many of the troops of his Kareng. Fressa and Charkha had escaped, as had his own body-slave, Bu’uresh; General Kutume promised th
at he would be reunited with these three presently, as well as with other survivors of his unit. The Tsolyani had subsequently taken Fortress Ninu’ur back and razed it to the ground in a frenzy of vengeance, but Trinesh could no longer rejoice even in that. He was drowsy, fatigued beyond imagining, and yet stretched so taut that the blood thrummed in his temples like the drone-strings of a Sra'ur. Dineva leaned on Chosun’s thick shoulder behind him, while Aijasu sat apart, eyes glazed, and fingers still unconsciously caressing the crossbow that General Kadarsha’s guards had made him leave outside with them.

  “The Lady Deq Dimani,” the Senior General mused. “I met her once-—twice—a Song time ago.”

  General Kutume said, “Your Mihalli, Hereksa: you did not see him or the Lady again after they passed through the Nexus portal ahead of you?”

  “No, my Lord.”

  “I wonder if he could be the same Mihalli spy General Kaikama’s watch seized a night or two back? The one involved with the Mu’ugalavyani physician?”

  The Senior General rubbed at the pale scar-lines upon his cheek. “We left the good doctor free to run, but on a very short tether: a juicy Hmelu-beast to entice more of the Baron’s spies. I can have that tether shortened—or call for the butchers if need be.” His robe rustled as he turned to his Dritlan. The barracksroom tongue-waggers said that it was upon this solemn, eager-eyed youth that General Kadarsha piled most of his paperwork as a farmer loads a cart with Chlen-dung. “Kambe, see if our bait has tempted any other prey.”

  “I think the Lady Deq Dimani will seek out the doctor, Sire.” Arjasu ventured. “She’ll be wounded: my bolt took her in the shoulder. And she may have the Yan Koryani princeling with her.”