The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  I bent slowly and picked up the gold pieces, all four of them, and I thought about my future. “I can’t, not just yet.”

  Disappointment flicked through their eyes and I wondered where they had been born. Where did their allegiances truly lay? Maybe they were men who had once known Lesser Khaim, who worked their way up in blood and steel to find themselves in the service of the Majister’s wills.

  I held up the four coins. “Can you read letters, Captain?”

  “I can,” he said, curiosity on his face.

  “What is your name?”

  “Lukat, of the Oskini.” A family, I realized, that had once specialized in poling ferries across the Sulong. “My father is Jaiska.”

  “If I run I’ll give a note to someone who can’t read. I’ll tell them that if I am not dragged back by the guard after a week, they will deliver you that note. It will tell you where one of these four gold coins is. Do you understand my meaning?”

  “Leave another note that tells me where you’re going and I’d be half tempted to join you just to be at your side on that adventure,” the so-far silent other guard said. He had a smile that was too friendly, and yet not threatening to me.

  “And I would be tempted to tell you,” I said, “but that you don’t understand why I can’t run is why I won’t. My kin lies down in that pit, the people who raised me from birth and sacrificed all for me. Who taught me all I know, and gave me all I have.” I wasn’t interested in yet another Djoka. A good man ultimately unwilling to fight for what was truly right.

  Captain Lukat stepped forward and leaned close so that only I could hear him. “If you run, I will do what I can to frustrate the duke, if the timing works. Particularly if I am the one asked to lead your hunt. But I make no guarantees.”

  “I understand.” I tried to keep the despair out of my voice. I was the one choosing not to run. “I am not sure if I can make this happen so fast. My father, mother, and me would make this suit in four days. But me alone? Surely the duke knows he’s setting an impossible task for me.”

  Luka glanced around again. He opened his mouth, then closed it, as if thinking better of telling me something. Then he shook his head and whispered.

  “Malabaz wants the stilthouses on the mudflats for himself. But the merchants who own them now refuse to sell, particularly now that there hasn’t been a Paikan raid in so long. The rents are too good when so many are desperate to seek the safety of a stable, growing city free of bramble. There will be a fight in the dark among the velvet ones soon, as the merchants have a meeting with their financiers. Malabaz will introduce his son to the family trade and make a man of him that night.”

  Savar was not a natural fighter. He would have needed to have spells to aide his slight frame and protection from his attackers. That was why we’d been commissioned to make special armor.

  “Malabaz wants the money from rents?”

  “He wants the land.”

  “It’s just mud,” I said.

  “He will burn the old, infested houses and build new ones. Villas for the newer merchants who can’t now afford the old river houses on the other side of the Sulong.”

  So they could pole across the river without the censori’s smoke drifting toward them. And throw whatever they had used up into the river under the cloak of night.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  Lukat grinned. “I have sold my sword to the duke for that night. And when the noblemen need discrete, expert polemen, my cousins will navigate the mudbanks and river runs. As it used to be before the bridge.”

  “The blood of family, the blood of strangers, and gold. That’s what this is all about.” I spat bitterness at the ground.

  “As it always has been.” Lukat swept onto his horse, and then leaned over and held out a hand. “Are you still going to try to do this thing, then?”

  I took a deep breath. “They are my family. I must try to save them.”

  “Then come, let’s get those ‘pretty gloves’ and take you back to your forge.”

  I looked out toward the road, and then back to his leather gloved hand, and grasped it.

  He swung me easily up onto the horse.

  He would be good with a blacksmith’s hammer, I thought for a second, gauging the grip and strength. Then he spurred the horse, and we were off into the night.

  4

  SAVAR SKULKED AROUND THE DOORS as Lukat returned me to the forge.

  “Father says I’m to keep an eye on the girl to make sure she doesn’t run,” he said as he glared at Lukat and his guards. “You may leave.”

  “Are you absolutely sure, my lord?” Lukat asked with full, but utterly false, sincerity.

  “I gave an order!”

  “Good luck, and be careful with that one,” the captain said softly as he helped me down.

  Lukat clattered off down the cobblestones into the night, and Savar moved close. He leered when he looked at me, which made me feel self-conscious in a way that made me hate him far more than I had already. All I could see were his father’s features in him. The same sneer, the slight wheedling tone of his voice. “The old man really did kick you around like a servant, didn’t he?” Savar said.

  I walked to the doors and opened them. Savar tried to follow me inside, but I shoved him back. He was skin and bones, birdlike, much as his father. He staggered and stumbled, his eyes narrowed as anger flashed like lightning.

  A piece of old parchment fluttered in his left hand in the dirty wind outside the forge. Savar had muttered words under his breath. But he bit his lip and stopped. He slowly gained control of his anger.

  “I’ll be watching you,” he said calmly, tucking whatever spell he’d been foolish enough to consider using out in the open of the city of blue. “I’ll check on your progress constantly, until you make me that armor, bitch. Or there will be consequences.”

  He kicked the door shut.

  I walked to the large sink and looked at myself in a polished metal mirror. I had protected myself against the worst of Malabaz’s blows. The blackening eye, the split lips, and the cut on my head seemed worse due to the blood. As far as I could tell, he had broken no bones nor hurt anything beneath my skin.

  It stung when I washed my face with shaking hands in the dark, but I ignored it. My mind roiled and spat anger and ideas. I crawled around to the edge of the forge to my old bed and lay down.

  The forge felt ghostly and empty. The suit of armor lurked in the dark, the coals of the forge barely touching the helmet’s serpent heads that roiled together in the demon Takaz’s fanged visage.

  I balled up my blankets and hugged them. I would have cried, but I had no energy for it. I felt guilty for needing to close my eyes, as all I could hear were Malabaz’s words. Four days. But I couldn’t even stop my hands from shaking. What was I going to do? What chance did I best have to save my parents: make the suit, or try to dig them up somehow?

  I needed guidance.

  I lay still, staring at the wall, until I couldn’t see it anymore.

  I woke with purpose. I added wood to the coals, but there was no breakfast to make, so I drank hot water to chase the chill from my aching bones. Then I left the forge. A dirty man in ragged robes I had never seen before watched me lock the doors. I walked over to him.

  “I am to prayers,” I told him firmly. “Tell your simpering lord I’m at the house of Che. I’ll be making an offering to the god for steady hands. You do not need to spy on me.”

  The wiry man tugged at his beards. “I don’t have to follow you to know where you go,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I am going to the priestly row. Walk with me, or not. It is your morning to waste.”

  He fell into step behind me, his bare feet padding dust. “You look at me with disgust,” he says. “But all I do is tell people truths. The truth is pure. Do the gods not tell us we should only tell truths?”

  I ignored him as we passed through the stench of morning workshops belching to life.

  “I worshi
p truth. And so it is good to me. It always reveals itself because I honor it by giving it light. Please remember that.”

  He slipped away from me as I turned the corner for the priestly row, where the temples of Lesser Khaim clustered near the butcher’s shops and jewelry stalls packed with glittering images of gods.

  I let out a deep breath and walked right past the house of Che.

  The priests of Assim blinked at me when I arrived at their doors. Their temple was one of the larger in Lesser Khaim: thick granite walls standing strong against the rundown wooden columns of the other orders. There were no courtyards in the temple of Assim, but small dark, stony rooms with statues of the Assim’s harem in the flickering shadows.

  Standing in the lobby, I blinked my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I could hear the soft murmur of tens of petitioners muttering as they traced thumbs against sigils burned into the walls by ancient magics. Walls that had been disassembled in the north and pulled by Merciful Monks in their bloodred robes through many miles of bramble-choked mud roads to bring them here.

  “Hello, child.” A shriveled older man with a bandage over one of his eyes, peeled away from a cluster of waiting priests as I ascended the steps to the first sanctum. His voice quavered with age. “Have you come for mercies?”

  I nodded, my mouth dry with fear.

  The old priest placed a hand on my shoulder. A calming gesture. “For three coppers off your string, you can speak to the wall and ask for relief from your wounds. . . .” he started to say, looking at my bruised face.

  “No.” I pressed a gold piece into his palm. “I would speak to a prophet.” I needed not just guidance, but all the help I could get. I would speak to the gods of my father and his people.

  The priest looked down at his hand, the coin, and then back up at me. His lips twitched. “Ah . . .”

  He pulled at my sleeve. “Come. Come here.”

  Two younger acolytes wordlessly joined us, walking down a small corridor lit by dishes of lamp oil away from the confessional walls. We moved deeper into the temple. The susurration of people’s whispered confessions died away, the air stilled, and it became hard to breathe.

  We were deep amongst the cells the followers of Assim actually lived in. We passed a small kitchen where robed priests sat at a communal meal of bread and soup; the strong smell of cumin tickled my nose. More still prayed against the walls of their cells, lips pressed against scribed granite, fingertips tracing out swooping symbols of the long-dead priestly language.

  At the end of this, the acolytes opened a thick wooden door into another small room. Scented aromatics heaped in large tin plates burned softly, the occasional twig making a faint cracking sound. A young man lay on a divan at the head of the room, naked except for a white linen loincloth. He had obviously become a prophet many years ago, as his skin had not seen the sun since and had paled almost to transparency. His bones pushed up against his skin, which hung loose against him.

  High-marked coins lay on the ground around his divan, as well as entire coils of cash strings. Gold, like the one I’d given the priest, and other denominations as well. Jewels and fine sculptures lay among the coins, scattered casually.

  “Valka felt called to prophecy four years ago,” the priest next to me said, adding my gold coin to the treasure around Valka’s emaciated body. “He was bitten by bramble after one full year of preparation. He walks the shadow worlds between gods and man, neither dead nor alive, now. Your words will pass through him to the other realm.”

  I looked at the corpselike Valka. “But what about signs?” I asked. “I need—”

  “If the gods will it,” the priest said, “Valka will give you a sign. If your heart is strong. If the gods hear you. Watch closely. It could be the slightest twitch. A motion. You must let your mind go out to the gods and be open to anything. Only then might your prayer be acknowledged. Only then might the Merciful One trick the demons from seeing you. Ask the prophet respectfully your question and seek the signs.”

  “How long? How will I know?”

  “Long?” the priest asked. “As long as you need. We will be outside the door, waiting. When you are ready, knock three times.”

  “But . . .”

  The two acolytes approached with a prayer mat held between them, cutting off further questions. The red threads on it were old and worn, but styled much the same as the symbols of mystery throughout the walls of the temple.

  They unrolled it in front of me with a quick snap, and then retreated out the door with the priest. I watched as the thick door slid inexorably shut with a thud. I was left with only the faint crackle of the aromatics and the sound of my heavy, scared breathing.

  Here was what we all feared: to be bitten by the bramble. To lie there neither fully dead nor alive. Our body dependent on others to feed it soups, cleanse it, burn aromatics to mask the smell of excrement. Yet this holy man had reached out and rubbed his hand among the fine bristles of bramble and collapsed of his own will. All to try to seek the gods themselves.

  According to many holy orders, some priests came back from bramble sleep. When they arose they spread through the countryside, claiming to have returned with the words of gods themselves. Though one had to be careful, as there were many who claimed to wake from sleep to deceive simple country folk.

  Here in the city, only a priest who took the kiss of the bramble in full view of twenty or more priests from three different temples could be certified a prophet. Here in the city, on priestly row, everyone knew these were genuine prophets lying in the bramble sleep.

  The Temple of the Merciful and Sly Assim had four prophets lying in the dark, waiting to reawaken. None of them had awoken in my life. But my father remembered a prophet by the name of Bylavi who had woken, taken all the offerings surrounding him, and left to spread what he was revealed.

  So I gently fell to my knees on the prayer mat and stared at the prophet Valka. It was not the priestly tradition to close a sleeping one’s eyelids, so his glazed, milky eyes stared directly at me. Seeing through to my soul.

  I lowered my gaze.

  “Prophet Valka, I seek a sign,” I said, my voice breaking with nervousness. “I’m just a blacksmith’s daughter. We are simple people, but hard working. We have done little to offend. But now . . .”

  I swallowed.

  “Now my mother and father are imprisoned, and I . . .” I stopped again. My hands shook like leaves about to fall from a tree. “What am I to do, Prophet? What should I do?”

  I waited in the dim light, staring at the cloud-white skin of his body and into the clouded eyes while waiting for my sign. I counted breaths to a number as high as I could stand, and then moved off my knees to sit more comfortably. I never took my eyes off the prophet as I shifted, though.

  Maybe, somewhere in my thoughts, I believed the prophet would blink and speak directly to me. Like I was a hero on a quest given secret instructions.

  But he did not.

  Time stretched on as I waited.

  And waited.

  “Some have said I should run,” I told the prophet.

  The prophet did not respond.

  “But there is another idea deep within me, one that may end with us all dead if I follow it,” I confessed. “It was in my dreams when I woke. A helm with a glassed visor to protect one from the bramble. Leathers under all the joints. I think I can dig for my parents if I am protected. But—”

  The Prophet Valka’s right hand seemed to stir slightly.

  Yes. I had certainly seen his thumb twitch.

  “Prophet,” I gasped. My heart leaped into my throat. I moved on my hands and knees and crept closer to the pale body. The skin under the prophet’s thumb trembled again, my mouth gaped wide with awe. And then the thumb split apart. Blood and pus trickled down the base of his hand as maggots writhed and tumbled out to the ground.

  I leaped to my feet.

  “Gods.”

  This was no sign. His body had lain fallow too long. He might be alive, but
the creeping and crawling things of the world did not see it that way. They saw only restful flesh.

  I stumbled back and knocked on the door three times.

  “So fast?” the priest asked, worry in his features as the acolytes opened the thick door.

  I grabbed at them. “The prophet has maggots.”

  One of the acolytes muttered under his breath and swept into the tiny room, but the priest held up a hand. “It is a sign!” he proclaimed loudly, startling all of us.

  The acolytes looked at him, then me, and bowed their heads in agreement. “It is a sign,” they repeated.

  The older priest took my arm and began to escort me back through the temple. “You have your message,” he said to me as we walked back past the sleeping cells. “It is a beautiful thing.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “To you or me, maggots are a thing of disgust,” the priest said. “A sign of putrefaction. Mess. Garbage. Ruin. But from the perspective of the maggot: It is all life. They live, they breathe, they grow. And you and I are like maggots to the gods, child. Do not forget that. There is the meaning of your sign. Do you understand now?”

  We walked on as I tried to grasp the meaning of his words, and what they meant for me.

  An instant passed before we stood at the lobby. The murmur of hundreds at prayer once again filled our ears, comforting me. “Life,” I repeated.

  “You were shown life,” the priest agreed, guiding me toward the steps and the bright light of morning on the priestly row, filled with incense and chants. “The prophet gave you the sign. An uncountable gift. Life.”

  “But what does that mean about what I’m supposed to do?” I asked. Was it seek my own life? Or save my father and mother’s? Or try?

  “Think on life,” the priest said firmly. “And there your answers will be. For we all die, child. It is only the choices of life that make matters.”

  The priest turned and left me quickly.

  Only the choices matter, I thought.

  Not the outcomes. The choice. What was the right choice?