Soleri

by Michael Johnston

  “No,” she said. “You are more right than you guess.”

  She drew up close, her lips nearly touching his. She would tell him now. She would tell him everything.

  “I killed him,” she whispered, her eyes dark and fiery. “I watched him die. When we were alone in his cottage after the feast, when it was just the two of us in his bedroom, he tried to hurt me. He threw me down on the table and ripped my clothes. He meant to take me by force, but I struck him with a kick before he could put himself inside me. I sent him rolling to the floor like a drunken fool. He hit his head. Unconscious, he choked on his own vomit while I did nothing. He drowned in his spit. I’ve told no one the truth. For three years I’ve told no one. I think about it every day and I am glad. His people believe I killed him and they are right. I was only ten and three and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what he would do when he woke, so I did nothing. I killed Roghan Frith.”

  Dagrun did not respond, and the silence between them grew. Kepi shivered, uncertain of how her new husband would reply. Would he send her to the gallows? She had confessed to killing a man.

  “Say something.”

  “There is nothing to say. You did not kill Roghan. It was his drunkenness that led to his end. You only did what you had to do. We are not so different, Kepi.” He folded her short locks, cupping her neck, her cheek. “At our wedding, during the offering, I was glad when you freed the slaves, happy to see the tradition ended. It’s a barbarous practice—a wedding sealed by a sacrifice.”

  He placed a woolen mantle on her shoulders to cover her. “I will not take what is not given freely and I will not hold you in Feren against your will. In the trunk there is a dress, sandals, and a cloak. Go, out the door, past the wall. Leave if you like.” He gestured to the door. “My guards will not stop you.”

  Then he was gone, and Kepi felt curiously bereft. A small part of her thought it might not have been so terrible if he had stayed.

  36

  Sarra’s caravan left Desouk on horseback, riding in a thin wisp of smoke just after dawn, riding hard and making camp outside the Dromus, on a strip of land that straddled the Harkan border. The escort she requested while still in Desouk arrived as her priests pitched tents. The Harkan soldiers dismounted and their captain announced himself: “I’m Sirin Dasche.” He told them that Barca, the Soleri traitor, was approaching at a terrific pace from the south, the San from the north and west. “You’ll have no more than a week in the Shambles before you’ll need to turn back. If you stay any longer, Barca or the San will block your retreat.”

  Sarra considered her situation. Wars were unpredictable things, but the Shambles was a desolate place. It held no strategic worth. She had to hope the outlanders would ride around the barren land and not block her path.

  Her eye caught something odd: Dasche wore a strip of black fabric wrapped around his arm. Black was the color of Horu. Sarra had worn it in Desouk to illustrate her grief. “What is it?” she asked. “Why do you wear the black?”

  “It’s…”

  “It’s what?” she asked. “Is it the king?” Her husband was aging, perhaps something had happened to him.

  Dasche nodded. “He was summoned to Solus, to meet the emperor.”

  “‘To meet the emperor.’” She repeated his words. Immediately, she wondered why her informants in Solus had not relayed this news prior to her departure. Perhaps the riots were to blame, or Barca’s army.

  “When?” she asked. “When was he summoned?” Sarra doubted much time had passed or she would have heard the news.

  “The call came just after the Devouring,” he said, spitting when he named the high feast of the Soleri. “An entire legion of the Alehkar arrived in Harwen. I heard the king slaughtered a dozen soldiers before they took him, just to show the men what he was made of. He left Harwen some time after the Devouring.”

  “Then it is done,” she said, her words a whisper. The march from Harwen to Solus was not long. Arko had met the emperor when she was still in Desouk. He had seen the face of the god and perished.

  She walked to the edge of the camp, motioning for Ott to attend to the men.

  Arko is dead.

  A meeting with Tolemy had no other outcome. No man entered the Empyreal Domain, save for the Ray, and survived.

  Sarra cursed.

  There was something she’d wanted to say to Arko before he died, a matter she had kept hidden for a decade—one that would now stay hidden. That realization hurt her more than the news of her husband’s death.

  She rubbed her sandals against the rocks. Damn you for leaving like this, Arko.

  She pictured the king of Harkana, the rough beard and hulking shoulders. The white stone he wore around his neck. She had begged him to discard the thing, but he refused. She wondered if he kept it still, if he wore it on his neck when he met Tolemy. Was the stone burned to ash just as Arko was surely turned to ash when he stood in the emperor’s presence? Were the stories even true? Perhaps Suten’s guards had simply cut off Arko’s head.

  “Are you okay, Mother?” Dasche asked, looking concerned.

  Sarra tried to smile, but her lips would not move. “Yes, of course.” She ground her teeth. “I’m fine—just feeling a little regret,” she said. “Tell your men to pitch tents and prepare the camp. We leave at first light,” she said sternly, not wanting to look weak as she had a moment prior. She turned from the others, leaving Dasche to direct the men while she took a soldier aside to help her raise a tent so she could sleep.

  She made camp, but found little rest.

  * * *

  The next morning, while the desert hills were still black with shadows, Sarra and her caravan set off with their Harkan guard, moving fast, resting little, up from a dry creek bed into a brown landscape of sandy cliffs pocked with small holes where sacred statues of ancient gods had once sat, then down into the dry, sandy valley.

  This part of Harkana was desolate in a way that had always depressed her, as a younger woman, as a queen—it was nothing but rocks and sand. When she was a child in the southern islands there was always the water, the movement of the sea, the endless blue horizon, the pale clouds, and gray, fog-hooded mountains, the chirping of birds. The island kingdom had not yet fallen to squalor and poverty then, but was a place of peace and relative plenty. Harkana had none of that. When she had first seen the north, the desert plains and the Shambles, when she had crossed the land as a young woman, it had made her heart sink. She saw neither homes, nor herds, nor any other sign of settlement. Even the buzzards had abandoned this place, moving on years ago to the more fertile hunting grounds of Feren. There was some life in the lowland plains and in the hunting reserve, in the high mountain pastures where trees and grasses grew and the eld hunted, but there was none here. Nothing moved and nothing lived, and the bareness of the landscape did little to improve her mood.

  “Noll,” Sarra called to the boy as she rode up alongside him. “Pass me your map.” Noll drew forth the parchment, pointing out a few monuments to help Sarra orient herself.

  The drawing described the country through landmarks: the mighty cliff with its pockmarked face, the absent statues, the long plain running parallel to the cliffs. The monuments that time could not wither, the mountains and plains, remained for them to see, but the Amaran Road was hidden, covered in sand and rocks. They knew where the road would have been, but they could not find it. They combed the rocky desert, shading their eyes against the sun, their progress slow and exhausting. Her caravan had to stop often to water the horses, water themselves, the Harkan soldiers snorting as they took long gulps of amber and laughing at some unheard joke.

  The sun ground its circle into the horizon; they made camp and rose early the next day. At midday they passed a line of standing stones, small totems that marked the edge of the Shambles. Not longer after, a sizeable Harkan patrol blocked their path, but when the soldiers recognized her Harkan escort and saw the woman who was still their king’s wife, they quickly let her
caravan pass. Sarra had known the Shambles was well guarded, but the size of the force surprised her. Aside from the Elden Hunt there was no reason for anyone to come here—no life, no resources. Nothing anyone wanted. They found only half-buried rocks, stones whose skin was mottled and black, coarse sand, and lifeless plants.

  “Perhaps the road is buried underground,” Sarra said.

  “Maybe it was covered, concealed by someone,” Ott said. “Perhaps the road’s surface lies just below the sand.” Ott rode astride a low hill pointing to an uneven cliff, its face oddly vertical, like a loaf of bread with one side removed. “The Soleri built their roads from local limestone,” he said. “The wide, flat stones made a cart’s passage smoother, but the large pieces were difficult to transport. So the paving stones were often quarried from cliffs that ran alongside the road.” If they could not see the road, if the trail were buried beneath centuries of sand and rock, they might at least spy the quarries from which the stones were taken. Ott pointed to a cliff. The sheer face seemed too flat to have been carved by nature’s hand. He stopped the caravan and slipped from his horse.

  “Dig here,” he said.

  The Harkans drove their spears into the hard-packed sand until their points clinked against a layer of stone.

  “Shovels,” said Sarra.

  The men brought out their digging tools. Clearing away the sand and rocks proved difficult, so much so that Ott suggested that perhaps the road was not covered by windblown sand but had been deliberately buried. Sarra glanced at Noll, who nodded. Perhaps that was why the Amaran Road was so difficult to uncover—it had been buried, concealed by someone beneath a layer of earth.

  Shadows drifted across the sand as the soldiers cleared away rocks and hard clay. When their work was done, Sarra walked upon what she guessed was the old road, the trail they had sought. Standing on the stones, she saw the road’s direction and shape. She noted where the hills had been cut and altered, where the road swung to avoid a cluster of stones or a cliff. “So this is it, the Amaran Road, a path once walked by the Soleri,” she said.

  They rode on through the rest of the afternoon, passing a circle of rocks where a tower had once stood, a groove left by ancient wheels, a trench where a wall had been. Wind and war had long ago destroyed the buildings and left nothing in their wake but ruin. The ground grew rockier, the road faded in and out, the sun dimmed. Sometimes they saw only gouges in the cliffs where the stones were once quarried; sometimes they saw nothing at all. More than once they lost track of the road completely and had to double back to where they had last caught sight of the trail or its quarry. Up ahead, the day’s last light lingered along a distant ridge. Sarra shaded her eyes and watched a line of dust on the horizon: San warriors moving northward. Sarra needed to hurry.

  Near dusk they came upon a shallow hole in the earth that once must have been the cellar of a mighty stone tower, now filled in with sand and rock. A half-collapsed stair led downward from the tower’s base, but rocky debris blocked the remainder of the passage.

  Noll pointed to a symbol on his drawing, one of the arrowheads that indicated a house of some kind, a storehouse perhaps, then glanced at the distant landscape. “Those cliffs are on the map, the dry lake bed too. This place, the tower, once sat astride the road.”

  “Then we will stop here.” Sarra nodded toward the stair. “Dig.”

  The soldiers dug until past dark, until their shovels met stone. They lifted the stones out, one by one, pulling them from the earth and passing them from soldier to soldier in a chain. By morning the soldiers had cleared the rocks from what now appeared to be a subterranean stairway. By afternoon they had found a passage beneath the tower, a door half-buried in sand revealing a set of stairs spiraling downward, and beneath that a well-preserved corridor, its floor only partly covered with sand. The tower they found astride the Amaran Road concealed a warren of underground tunnels. A stout Harkan led them through the passage, a torch held high, its flickering light dancing on the walls.

  The walls were black. “Mold?” a soldier asked.

  “No. There is no rot in the desert.” Sarra ran her finger across the rumpled black surface. “Ash.” The markings turned to dust at her touch, the air filling with a faint cloud. What happened here?

  A snapping sound echoed through the corridor. She saw Noll bending to unearth a broken arrow from the sand. A battle, thought Sarra as she brushed more ash from the wall. Deep grooves marred the stone relief.

  Ott ran his fingers through the dust.

  Sarra gave him a questioning glance, but he only shrugged. He had no idea what they were looking at either.

  The Harkans pushed onward toward the as-yet-unexplored end of the corridor, their black leather blending with the darkness, leading Sarra and her priests deeper into the passage. The corridor widened, and rows of statues flanked the passage. Long folds of drapery hung from the statues’ shoulders, a snake coiled into a circle graced their chests. It was the same symbol she had seen in the map chamber. More wards. Statues and murals built to scare off looters. She brushed her shoulder against a stony hand, its touch feeling like a piece of the past reaching out to contact her, to speak to her.

  They found chamber after chamber, destroyed, soot covering the walls, doors broken, tables shattered. “They were beating out a retreat,” one of the Harkans spoke out from the back of the line, a boy named Taig. He froze when the Mother Priestess and former queen caught his gaze.

  “It’s a retreat,” he continued. “They were fighting as they retreated, blocking passages, locking themselves in rooms. They were trying to escape.”

  “Who? Who fled and who chased?” she asked, but the boy had no reply.

  Ott seemed unconvinced. “Where are the victims, their bones at least? Our desert loves its corpses—the sand and salt will keep a body intact for centuries, sometimes longer.”

  Taig stammered until his superior clipped him on the head. The Harkan captain, Dasche, finished for the boy, “Isn’t it clear? They escaped.”

  The passage led to a wall of sand. The Harkans brought spades and shovels. They found stones beneath the sand, chunks too large to dislodge.

  They collapsed the passage. In desperation they sealed the stones behind them and continued onward. Who were they? Who chased and who fled?

  “Gods,” Sarra murmured, Ott at her side, “what happened here?”

  37

  The crack of iron cleaving wood shot through the open window of Merit’s chamber. Outside, sullen-eyed slaves chipped at the wedding platform, splitting the logs and carrying them away. The Night Wedding was over and the platform was nearly half disassembled. Two days had passed since the ceremony. Kepi had married Dagrun; their kingdoms were united. She had waited impatiently for Dagrun to come to her chamber, or to summon her to his, but there had been no sign of him so far. Perhaps he had heeded her words too deeply and was intent on making certain his new bride was with child before he laid his hands on Merit. Perhaps she had been too restrictive. No matter. She would remedy the situation soon enough and erase all memory of her sister in his mind. It was doubtful that Kepi had even made an impression on him. All Merit needed now was news from Shenn—word that the deed was done and Ren’s claim to the throne was ended.

  But that news had not arrived.

  More than a week had passed since Shenn had left for the Shambles, but she had not heard from her husband. There were Feren outposts along the northern edge of the Shambles and Harkan outposts along the southern. When her husband left the sacred hunting grounds, he could send word to her. But he hadn’t.

  She wondered if he had failed her.

  The door creaked open.

  Ahti entered without knocking. “Dagrun called for you—he requests your presence in the Chathair.”

  “The Chathair? Why?” she wondered aloud. And if Dagrun wanted to see her, why not just arrive at her chamber as he had in the past? Why did he need to speak to her in a formal setting?

  “I … I don’t know,” A
hti said, her face blank.

  “He gave no reason?” Merit asked, but the girl only shook her head.

  Sensing that she would learn no more from her waiting woman, Merit thanked Ahti and went out, shutting the door behind her. Why would Dagrun summon her to the seat of power?

  Unfamiliar with the corridors of Caer Rifka Merit lost her way, but only briefly. Stumbling down a corridor she caught sight of a tall and soaring chamber, a space so vast that it could only be the Chathair. Slipping between the open doors, smelling fresh pine and lotus, she entered the vast hall, a round space of indeterminate depth, cluttered with statues and carvings. Past a block of stone she gazed up at a sight that took her breath away: blackthorn columns whittled to an almost ethereal thinness filled the hall. They were not ordered in neat rows like the monuments in Harkana but staggered almost at random, giving the effect of a finely carved forest, gleaming in the torchlight. Merit pushed through the columns and caught sight of the Chathair itself. It was a simple stool carved from the same silvery-gray wood as the rest of the chamber, its four faces inscribed with strange characters. Behind the stool, in a place where the slender columns parted, stood a thing that appeared, at first glance, like a dead tree, but was in fact a monumental sculpture. It was the Kiteperch. She had heard of it, but never imagined it would be so enormous. A proper king of Feren held the kite as a symbol of his throne and his power. When he sat upon the throne, the kite roosted above him on the perch. In Feren legend, the kite was joined on the perch by all of the forest birds. They cried a great and solemn song, the Dawn Chorus, to announce the reign of a new king. Dagrun had no kite, he had not undergone the vigil and so the perch was empty. As far as Merit knew, no kite had sat upon the perch for fifty years. The previous king, Barrin, had earned his kite, but the creature had quickly abandoned the king, casting doubt upon Barrin and his rule.