by K V Johansen
CHAPTER IV
The sound of the wheeling gulls was loud overhead, and the crows clamoured . . .
The man whined like a miserable dog. They were tearing his dirty loincloth from him, leaving not a rag for his modesty, shaving his head.
That a human being should come to this. His bruised and bloody face, his raw back, turned her stomach. It was wrong. Whatever the treason, the heresy, he had committed, it was wrong. He could have been a monster, a cannibal, a tormentor of children, and yet such a death as this would have been wrong. Of course the empire would execute those who worked against it, the spies, the rebels, which this man had been; one expected that; one knew it one’s doom when one took on such a task, but a headsman’s axe made a sufficient end. He had been taken by prophecy in his agonies, they said. When the gods of the land moved a man to speak and their words were met with this . . .
The man’s entire body was blackened and swollen in broken lumps; blood seeped down his legs; his hands were crusted black with it. Why the magistrates bothered with torture, when they had every right to send at once for an imperially-licensed diviner . . . but that was not how things were done in the Nabban Bloody Yao had made.
Kill him and have done with. It had been this Emperor Otono’s father who instituted the death of disembowelling. His brother had rebelled against him, and Yao had made certain his death taught his lords and generals a lesson of loyalty, and perhaps his own children too, though it did not seem they had learnt it well. There was one prince dead by suicide while still a youth and a daughter who had fled, pursued by assassins for the defiance of fleeing. Rumour was, whispered most warily, that she, wizard-talented and permitted only the most minor of studies, in accordance with Min-Jan’s law forbidding imperial daughters and sisters to wield any power, had secretly achieved the rank of Bamboo Badge, the highest tier under the Pine Lord. Or perhaps rumour exaggerated and lost Princess An-Chaq had been only Plum or Palm. No matter. No second Yeh-Lin, Min-Jan her son had declared. Imperial women were also forbidden holding any minor office, or undertaking any scholarship even of a non-wizardly bent, or having lovers, male or female. Might as well smother them at birth, in Rat’s opinion.
Most recently Dan, the youngest prince, had risen in rebellion, fleeing the palace for his maternal Dwei-Clan cousins in Shihpan Province in the northwest the night after his father’s death. Yao had died of an apoplexy this past spring, falling dead from the Peony Throne in the act of condemning to death his Minister of Festivals in a rage. A punishment of the gods, striking him down? The Minister had been executed by Emperor Otono as his first act in his father’s memory, followed by the proscribing of Prince Dan as traitor and heretic. Dan was inspired by such very prophecies as this man had spoken, the fool’s dream of the golden age the Traditionalists celebrated, a time when lords were answerable for how they used their folk, the emperor a mere priest of a land of petty princes and shrines, and slaves were debtors with a term to serve, no more. Or unknown.
Interestingly, Dan had not been condemned for the murder of his father. Too evidently an act of the gods.
Rat was not so certain. She had not been in the palace, then, but what she had seen since . . .
They were condemning the victim as a false prophet now, too, as if they could kill him two and three times, pile crime upon crime. Had he cursed them in the name of his gods, of Father and Mother, whose poor wandering dreams he had tasted, as they tortured him? She hoped so. She remembered the actor, the voice that seemed as though it spoke to you and you alone, giving living breath to the old, old poetry of the plays.
The land wanted to change, yet Mother and Father vouchsafed no clear visions at all to their servants in these times, unless the vague words of prophets—drunk, mad, imbecile, as though such fragmented and open minds caught the edges of another’s uneasy dreams—were truly holy. Some few might truly be moved to speak by a god’s hand falling upon them, Rat supposed.
She could hardly deny that the gods might reach out and touch their folk, after all.
Emperor Otono stirred unhappily on his little folding chair, the only one who might sit here. She might hope conscience made him uncomfortable, that he might suddenly declare an end to this, order someone to behead the man and have done with, but Otono, from what she observed, was a man who would cling to what had been done, because it had been done. Weak. Uncertain. Cursed by the gods, it was whispered in the palace. Three wives, as permitted an emperor under Min-Jan’s law, but childless. An epidemic of croup had swept through the palace around the time of Yao’s death, and many children had died, slave, free, and imperial. All six of the emperor’s sons and daughters.
Poison or wizardry rather than disease, Rat would have said, but the imperial physicians and the wizards of the corps said otherwise. Rat considered that they were blind fools, but it was not her place to say so, being a slave in the household of the elder princess, Buri-Nai, Otono’s full sister.
A slave, and yet she wore court robes of silk and had jewelled combs—the jewels were only glass, but nonetheless—fixed in her cropped hair. The nobles were like a garden of scented flowers, bright, sweet, whispering—whispering robes of silk, so thin, so fine, almost iridescent, so heavy in their multilayered wonder. Whispering voices hidden behind painted fans, as if they viewed an entertainment and must discuss it as it happened. Compare it to previous such entertainments. The emperor’s robes were the grandest, the most translucent, held the most colours: a garden of a dozen red flowers in shades ranging from palest rose to deepest carmine, each just short enough to expose the embroidered hem of the one below, with an over-robe of cloth of gold. His broad sash was a red so dark it was nearly black. His cylindrical cap was cloth of gold as well, and an array of golden, ruby-headed pins fastened the bun at the nape of his neck. She saw the glint of them as he turned his head to murmur some word to the captain of the Wind in the Reeds, the imperial assassins and spies, who stood at his side. He wore gloves, not to sully imperial hands with any touch of the mundane world, and his slippers were embroidered in golden thread on crimson.
This was how you dressed to watch a man be torn apart to die?
The princess was an echo of the emperor in the same imperial colours; Rat, who was called Lau in the palace, was the woman who held her parasol.
Captain Anri of the Wind in the Reeds did not watch the prisoner, but the courtiers. There were others, who looked like slaves of the court and carried no obvious weapons, but whose eyes watched all about. One of the princess’s ladies was such. Diman.
The wizards of the imperial corps wore many-layered court gowns too, but their outer one was a deep, clear blue. They worked by rote and book and dared nothing that had not been well-tested and attested and set down.
No priests. The priests of the Father and Mother were not in favour at court these days. The last attendants at the shrine of the Father in the palace gardens had quietly withdrawn to some hermitage after Yao’s death. Otono’s anger had at least been confined to destroying the shrine and ending all imperial gifts to the thousand others throughout the land.
Rat touched the amulet she wore about her neck, against her skin. A hidden trinket, a river-stone with a hole worn through it, strung on a leather thong. Comfort. Promise. Not of a god, as the barbarians of other lands might wear amulets of their gods when they went travelling far from the land of their birth and their folk. Promise of the memory of a god.
The prisoner whimpered, wailed, wordless. The sound trailed away into sobbing, then dissolved into screams as the executioner’s assistants laid hands on his raw flesh again. They bound him to the brass rings set into the stone table that was the only man-made structure other than the wharves on this islet, which lay just beyond the sandbanks and breakwater walls of the lagoon.
To be disembowelled alive, gutted like a fish and unpacked, spread out for the gulls and ravens . . . that was what was meant by a traitor’s death. He screamed and screamed in his animal terror, not yet touched with the knife.
The emperor’s bodyguard, the full troop of eight giants, none under seven feet tall, stood ranged behind Otono, a half-circle about him. For a moment, as if in the corner of her eye, half-seen, and yet not seen at all, there was light, gathering nowhere and everywhere, as if it might pour through from somewhere, make—someone, the prisoner, the executioner, the emperor, someone or anyone—a blazing beacon of flesh, a fire shaped in human form.
There was no time to gather any defence against it, to know what it might be, breaking into the world, where it might unloose itself. All in a heartbeat.
There was a great shout that bypassed the ears.
A sound like thunder, and the rock beneath her feet lurched. Branched lightning struck, searing the eye. Not from the blue sky; it arced over the table, snapped between rocks. The earth heaved. Waves leapt, flinging spray into the air from the far side of the isle. The executioner lay dead, a charred sprawl, smoking. The table was shattered and fallen. She could see the bare and bloody foot, that only, of the condemned man, a lightning-broken shackle beside his ankle. The rest of him was hidden behind the shattered table from which he had been spilt. The emperor lay flat on the ground among his guards and his wizards and his ladies. All that, Rat saw in a single flash as she fell sideways, deafened, blinded, but sound returned in voices screaming. To lie stunned, to gather her wits, to try to comprehend . . . no time. Move. Act. She crawled to where she could look again.
They were stirring all about her, the fallen flowers of the court, the bright silks, the guards in gilded scale and silk-swathed helmets. They clambered like clumsy, uncertain kittens on all fours, mewling. The emperor’s parasol-bearer sat up on her knees and wailed, pawing at the emperor, who flopped all limp and slack as she hauled him into her arms. Foolish woman. She should be giving thanks to the Old Great Gods she was spared.
The emperor was certainly dead. That fine silk was scorched black over his heart. One of the giants dragged the parasol-woman away, shouting. So much shouting.
“The gods!” A wizard stumbled to her feet, hands clapped to her ears, her coiled braids shedding their pins and tumbling down. “The gods, the gods have struck down the Exalted!”
Well, someone certainly had.
“The emperor is dead!”
“Wizards of Prince Dan!” someone else cried.
Old Great Gods, were they fools? This was no wizardry. But the old Pine Lord did not deny the possibility. He was among those who failed to stir.
“The wrath of the Old Great Gods!” Princess Buri-Nai staggered to her feet. “It is the wrath of the Old Great Gods!” She jerked her arm away from the giant who presumed to seize her. “Diman, come. We must save him.”
“Who, princess?” The assassin had shed the outer layers of her court robes. Beneath she wore leather armour, snug leggings. No sword, but a long knife in each hand, putting herself between her princess and the glowering giant who would have been a hero and carried her to safety.
“The prophet! The prophet of the gods.”
“Princess, he’s fried,” Diman said bluntly. Rat had an unholy urge to snicker at that coarseness. Shock.
“Exalted,” Buri-Nai said.
Rat felt as though her heart stopped, as if the world held its breath, though none but she and Diman had heard.
Diman gaped. Her face was painted for court, powdered pale, eyes outlined in blue, mouth made small and red. It hid the pock-marks that scarred her. Now her gaping made her a theatre mask, an expression of shock or horror.
Not a plot between the two of them, then. The Wind in the Reeds were better actors than that.
The Pine Lord, maybe? But he had died in the attack. Some other wizardry—but Rat knew the taste of wizardry in the air and this lightning had not been—
—had not been any work of the gods, either. No.
“The gods have struck down the emperor for the death of their prophet!” someone cried. “We are all damned, we are all damned!”
Very likely.
Diman’s mouth snapped shut. “Exalted Buri-Nai,” she said, and pushed past Rat, who was fumbling with stupidly shaking hands to retrieve her parasol, as a good attendant should. But she followed close, courting a blow from a princess always too quick with the sharp edge of her bamboo-bladed fan, to see for herself what horror lay beyond the broken table.
The prisoner was not dead. His eyes stared at the sky, dark, dilated, and his body shook with little panting breaths.
“Prophet of the gods,” Buri-Nai said, stooping to him. She pulled off a glove, laid a hand on him, his skin against her forbidden imperial skin. Rat was not certain what she was seeing. Concern? Prurient curiosity? Theatre? He was cold and sweating and gritty with ash blowing from somewhere. “Prophet of the gods, do you hear me?”
Theatre. Others had followed—two wizards of Bamboo rank, Captain Oryo of the giants, the First Minister, the Master of the Treasury, the Lady Governess of the Wives.
“Prophet of the gods, do you hear? Do you see me, know me? I am Buri-Nai, daughter of Yao and heir to this land now. I am the chosen, the fulfilment of your prophecy. The line of the sons of Min-Jan is ended, as you foretold. I am the Daughter of the Old Great Gods, and you have been deceived by the lies of the devils, to think Nabban’s salvation lies elsewhere. Do you know me?”
The man blinked. His lips moved, swollen and bleeding. Shaped a word, maybe. His eyes drifted closed.
“Bring him,” Buri-Nai ordered, looking over her shoulder. Captain Oryo frowned.
“You heard the Exalted,” Diman said. “You’ve witnessed the judgement of the gods, captain. Bring the prophet, as the empress commands.”
Empress.
The space of a breath, two.
Buri-Nai straightened up. “Captain Diman—”
It was the captain decided Oryo. A glance back at the dead, at Anri the captain of assassins sprawled unmoving by his master.
“Exalted Buri-Nai.” Oryo bowed, stooped to gather up the limp and senseless prophet. Shouted names, orders, and they were engulfed in the giants. They formed around the princess—empress, if she survived the day to come. Rat was only an adjunct, like the parasol itself.
Some of the court had already fled, their boats seeking the gap in the breakwater, oarsmen driving them into the lagoon, frantic with terror, frantic to be the first to carry the news.
Dan, far in the north and his rebellion going badly, was emperor now, by Min-Jan’s law, but by the time news of his brother’s death and an empty throne reached him, Buri-Nai would have the reins of empire firmly in her hands, if she were not dead. Her sudden seizure of power was not so mad as it might seem—if it was sudden at all, which Rat might doubt. Dan’s Traditionalists called for an end to slavery, a diminishment of the powers of the great lords and of the very emperor. The lords, save those inclined to the gods, and certainly the court, would rather not see him take the Peony Throne. But a woman, a defiance of Min-Jan’s law—and “Daughter of the Old Great Gods?” An unheralded revolution in religion . . .
There would be chaos. Anarchy. There would be . . .
The nebulous opportunity that had been foreseen, that had brought her here.
No time to delay, for any of them. Rat followed meekly as Diman helped the empress into her own boat—they were taking the emperor’s body in his.
Buri-Nai’s boat left the choppy waters of the open sea to follow the emperor’s back across the green waters of the lagoon. Her boatmen bent their backs to their oars in silence, broken only by the creak of rowlocks and the tap of Chichi, the drumming girl who kept their time. The Old Great Gods had never entered into the affairs of the living world, save only the once, when the seven devils warred over the world. Was even the rot of Nabban enough to call them back? Rat doubted. And did not the oldest stories of the wars say that the devils, in their final act of rage and hatred, had sealed the road of the heavens against the passage, not of human souls, but of the Gods?
Prophets, minor and—so even the priests of the shrines s
aid—mostly deluded, wandered the land, imprisoned, flogged, even executed by magistrates in almost every town. There was a commonality in some of their claims, the priests would admit, in secret, to those they thought—sometimes mistakenly—could be trusted. The destruction and salvation of the empire, the rebirth of the gods . . . More rare was mention, often from the most mad, of a messenger of the Old Great Gods in the west, but those who raved of that never spoke of Nabban and Nabban’s fate. Even the priests of the shrines did not speak of any return of the Old Great Gods into the world.
Daughter of the Gods.
Was the self-proclaimed empress mad? Could even the ruin of Nabban be enough, to bring back the Old Great Gods? Or—what other powers might stir, in this time of chaos?
They skirted around the city—the city of a hundred islands, the floating city, the Golden City of Yeh-Lin—rather than cutting through where their wide-spread oars would be a hazard in the maze of canals, then crossed more open water, fought the current at the lower mouth of the Gentle Sister, the tide running against them, and headed upriver for the stone wharf and water-stairs of the red-pillared gatehouse reserved for the imperial family alone. Buri-Nai’s boat hung back to allow the dead emperor and those who guarded him—two of the giants, his slaves, a few courtiers who had found themselves with no other transport—to make his landing undisturbed. The rest of the flotilla would be putting in at the lower wharves by the river mouth, jostling, quarrelling over slights, in haste to spread their news.
Reserved for the imperial family, but the boat of First Minister Zhung Hana pushed past them to follow the emperor.
Buri-Nai’s own boatmen, grim-mouthed but silent, shot in to the wharf hard on Lord Hana’s stern. There would be angry words in the boatmen’s stilt-village, undoubtedly. Buri-Nai permitted herself be handed out, climbing the stone steps, scrubbed twice a day to keep them from being slimed with algae and weed, on Diman’s arm, her hand again protected by its silken glove. Rat followed, unaided, ignored, and silently cursed the delicate slippers that made her footing so insecure. The boat arrowed away, making for the dyke-enclosed pound upriver, where the vessels of the imperial court were kept.
