by Kate Elliott
“I hope not among your people, for I think I will go mad with these restrictions!”
“Yes. Your husband is out on his own business.”
Growing up in the Mei clan, where her father ruled with a whip hand and his wives by turns quarreled and cooperated, had not prepared Mai for her own married life. Nothing could have prepared her for Anji. He was indeed the very prince both dangerous and lovely who walked through the sentimental stories she had loved as a girl. The songs hinted of stolen pleasure, the sensuous delights of the bed, but in the Mei clan she had observed discontented or quietly abused women who had to accept every whim or cruelty laid on them by their husbands and masters. She had supposed her own husband would offer a similar service, the Gandi-li boy of whom she had never heard a bad word except that he was an obedient son of a wealthy family determined to increase its stature in town.
Anji was nothing like the colorless, uninteresting men of Kartu Town.
“You’re blushing,” said Miravia with a smile. “Is he very good to you?”
Grandmother Mei, disappointed throughout her life, had had sharp words for any person who admitted to happiness. She would crush a flower before she would see a child rejoice in its fresh beauty. Yet why allow Grandmother Mei’s bullying ways to dictate her own path? If boasting was bad, surely it was because it demeaned the hopes of others, and embittered your own modest spirit.
“He is good to me. So is it wrong of me to be a little angry that he gets to go out, and I must be confined?”
“He’s out on militia business.” She gestured toward her brother. “It’s not only women who aren’t allowed to go where they wish.”
Priya, wearing a humble cotton robe, and Eliar, with his butter-yellow turban wrapped tightly to conceal his hair, were bent over a scroll. Eliar was holding the ends open while Priya used a hair pin to point out the words as she followed them from top to bottom.
“ ‘To arrive on the far shore. Six virtues carry you, as ships ferry passengers across a turbulent sea. Generosity, which is communication. Discipline, which is openness. Patience, which is space. Energy, which is joy. Contemplation with the inner eye, which is awareness. The highest of these is knowledge, a sword with two edges to cut through the knot of confusion and trouble, the obstacles that confine us and stand as barriers to our liberation.’ ”
Miravia continued as Priya paused in her reading. “Eliar wanted to join the militia, but he was consigned to escort me, since he is my only brother of age, so you can see there are strictures laid upon men as well. Eliar is wild to go on some adventure. But no one will let him. It would be easier for me to go.” She made a face to show she didn’t mean it.
“You can conceal yourself under the veil and go anywhere you wish,” said Mai, “and no one would recognize you. We could go out together, veiled in that way.”
“Everyone who saw us knowing we were Silvers!” She spoke the common word for her people with a biting lilt. “Afterward we would have to face my grandmother, and your husband, dear friend. I do not have the courage to attempt that.”
The glamour of twilight passed; night settled, and with it the daytime sounds of rumbling cart wheels and casual traffic. Water burbled through the complicated system of pipes that fed the fountains of the compound. Now and again they heard the fire watch clapping through the streets, or a swell of singing from one of the temples, and once they heard a man’s startled shout.
Eliar said, “The waters represent death? And the far shore is the existence we hope for after death?”
“No,” said Priya. “To arrive on the far shore is to follow the path of awakening.”
“There was still a light burning in your office when I came in,” said Miravia.
“That was Keshad. He never stops working. I don’t think he sleeps.”
“Your factor?”
“One of them. He’s young, but knowledgeable. I don’t know if any of the Ri Amarah ever had dealings with him. He was a slave to Master Feden.”
“Any merchant in Olossi knows better than to send slave factors to deal with my people. It would be terribly insulting.”
Mai glanced again at Priya. Would Miravia hate Mai if she knew Mai had slaves of her own? Surely Miravia already knew, and looked the other way. And yet, Mai could not see the harm in it. Everyone kept slaves, who could afford to do so. Slavery was what happened to people when they had lost everything. Yet that did not mean slaves were not human. When folk mistreated their slaves or forced themselves upon slaves who had no recourse but to accept unwanted attentions, that was cruel.
“Cruelty is always wrong,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” said Miravia with a surprised look. “Slavery is cruel because it deprives a person of their own life and of their honor. It is always wrong to permit slavery.”
This was treacherous ground.
Mai said, “Anji means to take a boat across the sea to look at the work being done in the Barrens, on our new estate, which I might remind you I have not seen—”
“Not that it isn’t a hundred mey away from any kind of lively markets!”
“Don’t remind me!” Mai laughed. “I will visit there twice a year to check on the herds. It sounds very much like Kartu Town, all dust, only with no market to liven the day. Many women who hope to marry the soldiers will be sent to live there the year around. Can you imagine!” She took a segment of sunfruit and considered its moist flesh, then popped it in her mouth and sighed as the sweet juices cooled her throat. “After the attack on Tam and Seren, Anji decided to increase the recruitment for the militia on the Olo’o Plain. He rode upriver with a company. He is sure another attack will come.”
“From the empire? Or the northern army? Surely the leaders of the northern army know who was responsible for their defeat.”
“Anji has many enemies.” So the hero always did, in the tales and songs. Sometimes he won and lived, and sometimes he lost and died. And often he won, and died anyway.
“Captain Anji is a very clever man, I am sure from everything you and Eliar and my father and uncles say, not that I will ever be allowed to speak to him conversationally. I am sure he knows what he is doing.”
“I am also sure of it, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t in danger. And it’s doubly worse because Seren did not see who stabbed him, and was then overtaken by the poison so he never saw what happened to Tam.”
She shuddered. Anji had arrived in time to see Tam’s ghost, but of course he could not hear the speech of ghosts, and the spirit had departed with the setting of the sun. If only Shai had been here!
A dog barked, answered by another. In a nearby district, drums beat a rhythm uncannily like the thunder of hooves on a hard road, but the pounding faded away into silence. A light flared in the sky.
“What was that?” Eliar released the scroll, stood, and stepped into the open. Miravia looked over her shoulder, her brow furrowing with puzzlement as she stood and bent back her head, the better to stare. Twisting, Mai could see nothing above the curved roof.
Nearby, many voices joined in shouting, the noise expanding outward like the clash of bells. From the courtyards, at their stations, guards cried the alarm.
A door slid open, and Sheyshi came onto the porch carrying a tray of fresh tea. Oblivious of the others, she got to the steps before she responded to the outcry. She raised her eyes to stare along the peaked roof and, with a shriek, dropped the tray. The pot shattered. Miravia reached down to pull up Mai, but by now there was nothing to see in the sky. Yet shouts and curses from the gardens grew louder, more intense. Priya hurried down off the porch without putting on outdoor sandals.
“Mistress, come quickly. Back inside.”
“What did you see?”
“A demon,” said Priya. “Come quickly, Mistress.”
“A ghost!” Sheyshi collapsed beside the shards of the teapot, weeping noisily. “It will eat us!”
“That horse had wings!” cried Eliar as he clattered up to his sister and gripped her sho
ulder.
“It is a Guardian,” said Miravia breathlessly, her face alight with wonder. “A Guardian has entered your house, Mai.”
The household alarm bell began to ring.
O’EKI SET ASIDE his counting frame and accounts book and rose from his desk. “Master Keshad, you’ve done plenty. I think you can quit for the night.”
“No, thanks.”
With a shrug, the big man padded off, remarkably quiet-footed given his size, slid open the doors that led in to the public receiving rooms, and left Keshad alone in the office.
When Keshad worked, he did not have to think. Tallying accounts focused his mind. Scraping ink from stone and mixing it with water into a fluid state calmed his trembling. The firm tap tap tap of beads, flung one into another on his counting frame, soothed him with its impersonal pattern. The hiss of lamp flame eased the raging of his heart.
Would he ever see Bai again? Even if she did return, what was she now? Did he mean anything to her at all? Or would she natter on at him, trying to force him into an apprenticeship to one of the seven gods, when in truth the gods meant nothing.
He scratched tallies onto paper: rates for timber bought by the log, hire for carpenters who would bring their own tools, and hire for tools to be used by the gang of debt slaves recently sent to the Barrens.
Why had that bitch Mistress Bettia paraded in with Nasia in tow? Only to stab at him? But maybe she didn’t even know that he and Nasia, when slaves of Master Feden, had been lovers. She likely didn’t know how he had rejected Nasia out of hand the day he had bought himself free from Master Feden’s service. Why should Nasia have thought he would clear her debt, too? There was no way to prove that the pregnancy Feden had rid her of had grown from his seed. Surely Nasia understood that everything he had ever done, he had done to free Bai from the temple’s clutches? Not because he loved Nasia.
He dipped brush to ink. While he could not write, having not been trained among the hierophants of Sapanasu, he had learned the tally marks and basic ideograms necessary to do business, to account, to recall. Anyway, it impressed the mistress when he announced he had done the tallying himself. Yet her two older slaves could write, and so could Captain Anji. There was nothing special about him, nothing anyone would notice or care about.
Why think about the captain’s wife at all? Really, a man could bear her smooth expressions and pleasant smiles and doting looks for only so long. Her even-temperedness would become cursed tiresome.
Chisels and awls and files, on hire; straw bought for matting, and matmakers to do the work; extensive negotiations with the blacksmithing guild, since the captain hoped to entice a smithy to set up shop in the cursed forsaken Barrens. All dust, no markets. Keshad could think of few worse places of exile. Why would anyone want to live there?
He smiled, feeling the curl of irony in his gut. Anyone, that is, except a person who wanted to control the trade in oil of naya, now that it had been proven as useful in war as in healing and lighting.
More acquisitions for the house, coin drawn against the household treasury: a bronze alarm bell; breeding ewes and a pair of rams; homespun for the eventual bridal portions of twenty women who had agreed to travel to the Barrens and set up household shops there.
To marry Qin soldiers, and raise children of their own. All that time, when he was Feden’s slave, he had slammed closed his thoughts any time folk discussed marriages of people they knew. Better not to hear about the things you could never have. A debt slave could never marry.
A bead of ink dropped from the brush to splatter on the finely grained rice paper. Aui! He was clumsy, distracted despite his best efforts, an Air-touched Goat whose mind could never rest but must skip from one thing to the next. He could not find peace, not even in prayers said over the prayer bowl he had received in the Sirniakan Empire when he had taken the oath of Beltak: Accept my obedience, you who are Lord of Lords, King of Kings, the Shining One Who Rules Alone.
Peace! Peace! Peace!
What did any of it mean? What did any of it matter?
Shouting broke the silence of his empty chamber. Doors, slid sharply open and shut, gave a series of reports like stick-fighting. He rinsed the brush and set it on its stand, untied his sleeves as he rose.
The alarm bell clanged. The very one purchased in the wake of Tam’s death! The vibration shook through his feet. Who would protect Mai?
He unlatched and opened the secret door behind the scroll cabinet, and ducked into a narrow, lightless corridor that buffered the office from the main house behind. He felt along the brackets on the low ceiling above: one, two, three, four. A latch unhooked another secret door, and he slid into the crane room. By the light of a single flame, the white cranes gleamed like ghosts.
The shouting turned into a roar of confusion as doors drummed open and shut. A woman screamed. Mai!
Mai was in the inner chambers, entertaining the Silver girl she called friend. Of course he had never been in the innermost chambers, but he knew where they were. He ran through the rat room and into a featureless chamber with bedding rolled up against one wall and a door gaping. Two Silver guards with hair concealed beneath turbans had their backs to him as they stared out the other side. He shoved past them.
“Hey, there!” One grabbed for his shoulder. “You can’t go in there.”
With a splintering crash, a wall shattered. Both guards shouted in surprise. Keshad leaped across the corridor, slammed open a door, and dashed through a small room fitted with an altar at one end, draped with cloth and adorned with wilted flowers and the stubs of candles. Men shouted after him. He shoved the next door aside, and stepped onto a porch surrounding a squared courtyard open to the air. His foot touched ground just as bodies smashed through the doubled doors to his left: Qin soldiers in desperate fighting retreat. Wood cracked, spun in the air; scraps of rice paper floated.
In lamplight, Mai stood with mouth agape. Priya stepped in front of the young mistress. One of the soldiers—Jagi—loosed an arrow from his taut bow, but he was shaking so hard its flight went wild and stuck quivering in a beam. The Qin spread out in a half circle to shield Mai, Chief Tuvi at the apex. The chief’s normally imperturbable face was creased with shock and—yes—fear.
A woman rode out of the house, ducking under the lower eaves of the porch. Her wings flared silver, only they were not wings but rather the flowing cloth of a gleaming cloak doubled over the paler silver-gray wings of the horse. She was a ghost, with pallid ghost skin in a round ghost’s face, and ghost hair pulled into three braids like cords of straw. Her eyes burned with the blue fire of demons. If there was any doubt that she was a ghost, she had an arrow still quivering in her left shoulder and one that had caught in the fleshy skin of her neck, and although blood pulsed from the wound, she did not falter. Her gaze swept the courtyard, and when it flickered over him, he staggered, barely caught himself on a wooden pillar.
The hells!
She was the ghost girl he had found at the edge of the desert. When he had found her, she had been naked but for that silk cloak, mute and unresponsive. Whatever stirrings of sexual desire her white skin and pale-gold hair and demon eyes might have aroused in him when he had stumbled upon her, curled up behind a rock at the side of a dirt path, were nothing compared with the greed she had enflamed when he had realized an instant later that she was a treasure of incomparable worth. He had brought her, in hiding and at great expense, all the long journey north through the empire and over the high mountain pass, just so he could exchange her for Zubaidit’s freedom.
Her gaze passed on as she dismissed him. The Silvers cried out with garbled words, like men waking into nightmare, and ran into the house, crashing into furniture in another room. Nearby, a female sobbed as in agony.
The big man stumbled into the courtyard through another door. “Priya! Where are you?”
The bold Qin soldiers were struck as into stone by the power of her demon gaze. She raised a hand, holding a mirror with brass fittings, chased in the old
style. She turned the mirror to catch a reflection.
“Umar is now dead, like Eitai,” she said in her dead, flat voice. She pointed to Chaji, who cowered among the soldiers. “You are the last one, Chaji. The wolf must cut out those who are diseased, to keep the herd strong.”
Lamplight flashed in the mirror, a doubling and tripling of flame.
Chaji collapsed to the paving stones as though the strings to a dancing doll were sliced through and the wooden body clattered to the floor. None moved to attack. They were utterly terrified.
The demon gaze shifted, and halted on the big man, who cowered for all his hulking size. “You took the coin, and pushed me into the house, to let the others at me.”
Mai stepped forward, around Priya, and pressed the older woman behind her.
“What do you want, Cornflower?” she asked, her voice alive in the air like the scent of flowers. “You are dead. Why do you haunt us? How can we help you rest?”
The two girls were of an age, Kesh thought idly and at random, both barely past girlhood and venturing cautiously into the bloom of young womanhood. But where Mai was sleek and cared-for, a well-tended garden showered with the constant rains of affection and admiration, the demon girl was all edges, no different really from the splintered doors hanging in tatters behind her.
She said, in her emotionless voice, “You did not harm me, Mistress.”
“Neither did O’eki. He is a slave, as you were. He must do what his master commands. You cannot hold blame to him for that. Please do not harm him.”
The mirror, still raised, shifted as the girl twisted it. Priya groaned, but the demon lowered her hand, hid the mirror’s face, and stared at Mai. “What the master commands. Where is Master Shai? Tell me where he is. Then I will go.”
And kill him were the words she left unspoken.
“Shai never touched you.”
“He was my master. He took coin into his hand in exchange for three to rape me. How is it different to murder a man with your own hand, or step back and allow another to do the deed for you?”
