The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  Her feet barely left the branch before it fell. She looked back mid-leap to see the Glib Ape falling with it—he had cut himself away from the tree exactly as he had planned to cut her.

  Datang harbored no illusions about that stroke of fortune—the Ape could only be delayed, and perhaps not much at that. She bounded every inch that was in her, once, then again, each time feeling shorter of breath, more leaden in the legs. She heard the crash of branches behind her and summoned up the will to aim for a particularly dense pine, thinking to confound the Ape by shinnying down it, veiled from his eyes by a curtain of needles.

  Her legs made the leap, her hands kept the grip—but the branch greeted her with the same groan and fiber-by-fiber snap that she had only imagined before. Dead bark flaked away beneath her palms. She fell and grasped, and her hand landed in a grouse’s nest; in the whirlwind of pine needles and rushing air and gravity, her heart went out for a moment to the now-never-to-be-hatched grouse chicks whose eggs had shattered beneath her fingers. As if in vengeance, those very yolks and albumens slicked her hand too much to keep a grip on the next branch down. On the next, she hit her head.

  If Datang did not lose consciousness in the fall, it would perhaps be too much to say she retained it. Her mind was a welter of disconnected perceptions: The velvet sky, the branches like frazzled brushes painting over the stars, the wide eyes and skittering claws of terrified birds and squirrels fleeing from her path. Pine limbs assailed her like the broken chair legs beloved of tavern brawlers. A monk smiled at her and bowed, or so she remembered later; he carried a staff adorned with six softly chiming rings, and the great ring threaded through them was tipped with a spear’s wicked point.

  She did not hit the ground. What she did hit, spoke, and what it said was, “The Colors, I’ve shat myself.”

  Datang could make no comment on this matter, in large part because she had rolled off whatever she had landed on and was trying, with some distress, to breathe while half-submerged with snowmelt-thickened mud and sphagnum moss. She ordered her body to leap to its feet and was greeted by a pathetic heave that only served to drive her face into fresh mud. “Women falling from the sky,” said the voice of whatever had thought it had shat itself. “‘Tis a shame my pants are soiled, or I might have made a better impression.”

  Datang lifted the fingers of her left hand, which was closer to the voice, in acknowledgment of the great justice of this point. She was well pleased with her success in this strenuous endeavor.

  “Well, if you will not be civil, I will not help you up. Wake me when you wish to have intercourse, conversational or otherwise—I am disgusted with your ruination of my trousers, but specific favors may induce me to negotiate terms.”

  “Hark, a lout!” rang the voice of the Glib Ape.

  “No,” said the person on whom Datang had landed, “she merely dresses thus. In fact, she is a woman of pleasant construction—save her tongue, which takes frustrating economies.”

  “I think my only regret in killing you,” said the Glib Ape, “is that I would love to have seen the Ape’s Left Hand do the job. But I am desperately behind in my work as it is.”

  Datang tried frantically to move and was rewarded with a substantial, though ultimately ineffective, convulsion of her right arm. “The Ape’s Left Hand?” said the other voice. “I do not know that style.”

  Datang pushed herself over enough to lie on her side, facing the Ape and his interlocutor, a bear-sized man with a bald head, a proud gut, and his elbow leaning on a bayoneted rifle as tall as his shoulder. Both the Ape’s hands were glowing with amber light, now. “I disavow it,” she averred as loudly as she could, which was not loudly. “Call me Whirlwind of Tigers or else by my name, Datang.”

  “Disavowal of one’s style is no virile thing,” said the giant. “For myself, I am proud to be Envied of Snakes Lin Gyat.”

  “Envied of Snakes?” said the Glib Ape. “I do not know the style, for it has been many years since I have played, but it seems respectable enough.”

  “And more. But, pray, a thought yet nags—”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, unless memory fails, it would seem that you have recently proposed to kill me. Do you still?”

  “Given the nature of your remarks to the Left Hand, I think I do—unless you are the Iron Eunuch’s man.”

  Lin Gyat made a noise that evoked certain digestive processes. “When a man is not his own man, how can he expect others to be men for him?”

  “Really, now,” said the Glib Ape, “that is cruel, and rude besides.”

  “If you think that rude, you have not seen much of life,” said Lin Gyat, and with such smoothness that Datang only later realized the motion’s speed, he brought his rifle to and shot the Glib Ape square in the chest, sending him flying a man’s height backward through a cloud of his own blood.

  Datang had managed to struggle up by this point and looked with some regret at the corpse of the Glib Ape. “Envied of Snakes,” she said, “I now understand your name, for I believe you would have outshot an archer with arrow nocked and drawn. But it will not do you much good against a squad of the Pretender’s soldiers.”

  The shot’s report had brought those soldiers running. Lin Gyat looked in their direction and nodded. “On a clear field, I might fight you for that observation, but the visibility makes for a harsh cincture on my rate of fire. Do you propose we go together?”

  Datang conquered her queasiness long enough to transfix Lin Gyat with a gimlet stare. “As comrades-in-arms, Envied of Snakes, no more.”

  “Perhaps I understand. And yet, many women have enjoyed great camaraderie in my arms—”

  “The Crescent, Envied of Snakes, make it brothers-in-arms then.”

  “Come now,” said Lin Gyat, “that is imprecise.”

  But Datang had already begun to limp away from the oncoming soldiers. Envied of Snakes gathered his effects and trotted to catch up. “I did save your life,” he said, slightly hurt.

  “And I repaid in kind,” said Datang, “unless you think those soldiers would have heard your slanders of the Iron Eunuch and let you walk away.”

  Lin Gyat opened his mouth in protest, then closed it in cogitation, then let his lips part to sigh in concession. They heard the cries of soldiers as they came upon the body of the Glib Ape, but there was no pursuit—or if there was, it swiftly went astray. Still, they marched swiftly until Datang was glassy-eyed and shambling, at which point Lin Gyat graciously professed fatigue. They bedded down on opposite sides of one of the forest’s cloud-daubing firs, huge graceful trees whose color faded toward the top until they seemed to be painting the very heavens onto the canvas of the sky.

  Petitioners

  he court’s mood that morning was one of predictable uproar. King Tenshing had no illusions that his order to Gyaltsen could have been kept secret, and the petitioners at the Orchid Palace did not disappoint in that regard; a full third set their original grievances aside to plead, bribe, and threaten the King into restoring the army to the field. Of the remaining petitioners, many had causes or complaints relating to the insurgency. A baron and a duke had summer homes in Therku whose fates were uncertain (their house-diviners were pessimistic—and with good reason, as it would emerge). Many more petitioners had relatives, and no access to divination (these fared better, on the whole, than the summer homes, although we cannot say that all survived). When the gates were closed on the petitioners, the Council of Dukes came to air their concerns, which were of much the same character. Dukes Rinzen (of Gyachun) and Samdhup (of Dhakamma) outright accused the Green Morning of abetting Kandro at Goat Ridge; Duke Norbu of Tanggang had it on good authority that the rebel army was engaged in nothing but sack and rapine, and viewed it as imperative that it be stopped before reaching the Dragon’s Hump, where (by towering coincidence, as he assured the Council) he happened to own a very profitable farm. Tenshing knew better than to inquire after the dukes’ personal armies, which were as a rule his to command in al
l situations except those in which they would be of use. The time had not been an utter waste, however. By the time all present were starved just shy of incoherency, it had been made clear that the dukes could not pillage the surrounding farms without fear of the general’s reprisal, and that offers of refuge to displaced sharecroppers and peasants, while not required, would be met with the King’s great favor in the future. The dukes, meanwhile, would loan the King the least operable of their ordnance, which his artificer-monks might be able to repair where theirs had failed, after which they would retreat to their estates before the Khodon Pass became impenetrable.

  In an atypical diversion, King Tenshing spent much of the lunch hour with his youngest wife, Kamala, who was perhaps not as enthusiastic about dallying with her husband as he could have hoped (the Thousand Arm Testament’s several stanzas of pyrotechnic euphemism notwithstanding). He then ate a spare meal of butter tea porridge and settled down with the documents whose demands customarily ruled the early afternoon. In the mid-afternoon, the King took a lesson from the Masters of the Diamond Word and the Crane’s Migration Step. They were sour at the necessity for abbreviated training, as Tenshing had occupied his normal morning practice hours with meetings, but the King’s step was as long as a winter’s night, and his word as inexorable as sunrise. Neither master could fault his execution.

  As evening loomed, Tenshing returned to the Orchid Throne to see the day’s select-petitioners. The King’s father, the faultless Tenshing Saptama, had wished to respect his forebears’ tradition of seeing those possessed of will enough to arrive early, but with a scholar’s discernment he recognized that the most impassioned claims were not always the most deserving. After the gates closed in the mid-morning, the remaining petitioners submitted to interviews with three senior students of the University of Rassha—one in law, one in history, and one in theology. These students selected three petitioners for a late afternoon audience with the King. It would be excessive to say that this audience was the highlight of King Tenshing’s day, for if that designation were to be reserved for one thing, it would be the training that constituted his life’s purpose; and if it were to be extended to a second, it would be the unpredictable joys of congress with such refined minds as General Gyaltsen, the King’s Lama, and Lin Tong. The smaller joys of Tenshing’s wives and children would of course contend for representation as well—but, in any case, it would at least be fair to say that Tenshing appreciated the taste of his selectors, who had the decency to include petitions both meritorious and stimulating; and that he sometimes wished the morning’s petitioners could be so ably chosen.

  “If you will permit me to explain—” said the first petitioner, but King Tenshing interrupted him with the uncommon grace that no amount of practice can convey, if it is lacking from one’s native character.

  “Please,” the King said. “Tell us your name and provenance.”

  “Thogmey,” the man said, “plowman of Baron Huchul’s estates in Dhakamma.” He stooped and exposed the back of his neck, which bore Huchul’s arms in tattoo, the vulture volant of Dhakamma over a field of poppies.

  “I would have believed you, Thogmey vassal,” said Tenshing with a kind smile, “but I like a man who fortifies his words with evidence. What is your petition?”

  “As I have begun to say, Your Grace, I fear it requires an explanation perhaps lengthier than you might prefer.”

  Tenshing eyed his selectors, who stood in trinity on the far wall of the throne room. Their solemnity suggested mischief at work. “I welcome it,” he said to Thogmey.

  “Only—”

  “Yes?”

  “It is imperative that you hear me out, Your Grace, no matter how hard the listening becomes.”

  “I assure you,” said Tenshing, “the desire to do so consumes me.”

  “I must also impress upon you the tiniest token of theology.”

  Plowman, said Tenshing, and his word was as hard and brilliant as the gem from which it took its name—but kind, miraculously, always kind. Speak with no further qualification.

  At this admonition, Thogmey stood, his posture relaxed but much improved; when he spoke, his voice, which had been raspy and rather weak, swelled easily to fill the great stone chamber. “The Deity Who Waits, Your Grace, is the steward of the reviled and helpless—criminals, beggars, demons of hell, the unborn—for he has forsworn his rightful enlightenment until the same is attained by every last soul in hell, earth, and heaven. This is known.”

  Tenshing nodded.

  “Are animals not helpless, Your Grace, and reviled?”

  The theology on this matter is, of course, extensive, and its most salient points stood readily at King Tenshing’s command—but he chose not to deploy them, taking the commendable view that hermeneutic tradition is best reserved, like any elite fighting force, for the direst and most momentous contests, and a man ought otherwise apply his own energies and talents. “There are writings in support of your position, plowman,” he said neutrally.

  “And is it not, therefore, conceivable that He should use animals for His messengers, as He has been known to do with the other creatures He loves?”

  “It is nearly inevitable,” said Tenshing, beginning to sense the shape of things to come.

  “Then it should shock you not at all that my dzo Mingma has a message for you, Your Grace. From Him who Waits.”

  The small postural adjustments that the Demon Guards made inside their armor grew thunderous in the ensuing silence.

  “It is an improbability that you describe,” said Tenshing, “and yet I find myself entirely innocent of shock. It is an astonishing feeling. But where is Mingma?”

  “The barony could not spare her,” said Thogmey. “But I have brought this to you.” And he began to dig in his pocket.

  Tenshing watched the digging for a moment, which seemed to occupy more of Thogmey’s effort than seemed strictly necessary. “Plowman,” he said, “it cannot have escaped you that there are many animals nearby the Orchid Palace, and many more of the Deity’s wards—beggars, the unborn, and so on. I myself have an unborn son and daughter. I have no doubt your Mingma is most percipient, but does it not strike you as odd—”

  “Here it is!” said Thogmey, and he began to unfold what emerged as a large sheet of pulpy foolscap, smeared with ink and charcoal in a labyrinthine pattern. He spread it out on the dais, and Tenshing almost unwillingly knelt to examine it. “Mingma treads thus when she is set out to graze. There is sweet clover to either side, but rather than touch it, she will shave off the tips of grass she has already eaten.”

  Tenshing examined the pattern for a while, then took the sheet and folded it. “It is a strange picture your dzo has drawn, Thogmey vassal. I thank you for it, and I hope I may keep it.”

  “You may, Your Grace, for I could draw it again tomorrow; she has nearly left the earth bare,” said Thogmey. Tenshing settled back into his throne, drawing breath to dismiss the plowman, and Thogmey’s face fell as he realized his interview had drawn to a close. “Only, Your Grace… have you nothing for her?”

  “For her?” said Tenshing. “I thought she had a thing for me, which I have accepted, and with no small appreciation for your dzo’s talents. But I must say, plowman, it is a cheap thing to bring commerce before the Orchid Throne—”

  “Your Grace,” interrupted Thogmey, to the coordinated winces of the selectors, one of whom went so far as to screw up his face as if in pain. Having secured the King’s silence, the plowman groped for words, seeming for a moment like one trying to explain the sky to a blind mole. “There is nothing on her path but bare roots and dirt, Your Grace. She cannot pull a plow; she is like leather over wicker. The Deity’s work will starve her if she does much more of it.”

  At this it was as though a storm cloud descended over King Tenshing’s soul, a dank shroud that enervated as it jolted. It was not anger with Thogmey that afflicted him. Recall, please, that the King’s moral education was unparalleled in his day and any day since. To
have implied a certain subtle derision in his replies to Thogmey had been atypical enough, a token of the day’s challenges; but to have missed a pain so basic as a farmer’s love and need for his animal—that was a wrong-footing as grave as tripping on a root in a mortal duel. “Your dzo,” the King said lamely. “Of course.” He looked circumspectly at his selectors and the polychrome-armored Demon Guards who flanked the throne as ceremonial bodyguards, but if any could supplement his knowledge of remedies for disordered eating in livestock, they did not come forward. He took a deep, cleansing breath, then met Thogmey’s pleading eyes with resolution. “I will send a geologist, plowman, to examine the field’s soil, and an omen-reader to do likewise with its portents. Perhaps an expert eye will paint a clearer picture. In the meantime, perhaps Mingma will consent to graze a different field.”

  “A different field,” said Thogmey, and Tenshing could not tell whether the plowman’s echo meant revelation or derision. “I will attempt it, Your Grace.” He stared off for a moment, lost in contemplation of the possibilities. “I must warn you, though, Mingma is a dzo of more than common stubbornness.”

  At this some spirit could not help but return to Tenshing, and the gravity on his face again became a mask, albeit a convincing one, over a certain muted gaiety. “I never imagined otherwise.” He thought a moment, then reached forward to clasp Thogmey on his shoulder. The plowman froze, as though he had been given a diamond or a rare book and was unsure whether it was entirely proper to accept. “I understand, Thogmey vassal, and what I can tell you is that I believe the gods are fair. He who Waits is possessed of unlimited kindness. I do not think he will indenture your creature past her usefulness. But if she does not budge, well, you shall have an omen-reader, and a geologist.” He thought another moment. “And a veterinarian. That goes without saying. We have many fine veterinarians caring for the kingdom’s herd, and you shall have the finest.”