Prince Tayy gurgled and choked while the physician soothed his throat with his thumbs. “There, there, it will be better soon,” he said, and Tayy quickly settled down again, beyond the reach of pain or dreams that had caused the restless motion on his bed.
“I’m sorry,” Ibn Al-Razi said. “But he must be kept quiet until the wound begins to heal.”
“I remember,” Llesho agreed with a bitter twist of a smile. He’d had no syrup of poppy in Shan and the herbs his brother had to offer were only of slight help in calming the fire that had torn his belly. “Whatever you can do for him, I’m grateful.”
The physician returned his smile with a gentle one of his own. “And now your own examination, young king?”
“All right.” But he said it around a yawn, as his mind wandered off on vague and meaningless questions, like, “Why does everybody I meet call me ‘young king’ instead of using my title? And why am I still sitting up?”
The answer to this latter came with the doctor’s careful hands on his shoulders pressing him back into a feather bed that seemed to reach out to enfold him.
“Stay with him, if you wish,” he heard Ibn Al-Razi whisper as he tiptoed away.
“Thank you.” That was Menar’s voice, accepting his posting at the bedside of his brother. And then the poet began to recite.
“A king with morning in his eyes Walked out of the sun . . .”
Part of Llesho’s mind made the connection to the sun and recognized that the poem spoke about the king of a new day. But another part, lost in the confused jumble of his undirected thoughts, saw a king in mourning with his losses etched into his weeping face. Neither understanding would be wrong.
Chapter Twenty-five
“Father of thunder! Daughter of heaven! You, from whom all gifts are given! Spare this son of war and strife, Give him back his youth and life!”
IT HAD grown so dark that Llesho wondered for a moment if he had lost his sight while he slept or, by some power of dream-walking, had taken the place of his brother’s spirit in the body of the blind poet. Which would, he thought, explain why the poem he heard seemed hardly the stuff to build a legend on.
“It’s a mother’s prayer for a child at war,” a voice spoke to him out of the darkness. Menar didn’t need the light to see that he’d awakened but used the senses of the blind. The change in the sound of Llesho’s breathing, or the shift from the paralysis of sleep to the stillness of the wary, would have told his brother everything. “I’ve run out of poetry, and fallen back on the simplest pleas of the common folk.”
They’d been little more than children when his cadre set out on his quest, so the prayer seemed apt. He wondered how his companions were faring. Banned from the sickroom, they’d be fidgety and quick to the knife or the sword as boredom and worry made war on their training. They’d manage, of course—they always did. Since he’d left the ship, however, he’d neither seen the trickster god nor heard him mentioned by either of his names. And that made him seriously nervous.
“Master Den?”
The question must have seemed unrelated to Llesho’s earlier conversation, but Menar replied with the patience one shows to the ill. “He’s in the town. Master Ibn Al-Razi could not bar his doorway while your companion carried you in his arms, but he won’t abide the presence of false gods as guests under his roof.”
Llesho trembled to hear a prince of Thebin speak so about the trickster god. “How can one deny the existence of a being who walks through the door and gives a proper bow?” Admittedly, ChiChu had never picked Menar up by the scruff of his neck and set him on his path by the might of his tree-trunk arms. But the seven mortal gods made up the greater part of the Way of the Goddess and Menar was a prince of her holy house. He was afraid to ask the next question, so he posed it as a reproof. “But you know the truth. You could have told the physician otherwise.”
Menar heaved a small sigh. As Llesho’s eyes adjusted to the dim starlight, he saw a shift in the shadows. The bulk of the poet’s shoulder moved in a shrug against the darkness. “I no longer follow the Way of the Goddess,” Menar said. “We don’t deny that Master Den exists, or that he may be a powerful magician in his own way. If we met the Lady SienMa, who holds our own Habiba’s service, we would respect her skills as a worthy magician as well. But we do not honor any mortal being as a god. Master Ibn Al-Razi could not in conscience offer the hospitality of his roof to one who makes such claims about his person.”
Llesho didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you mean you don’t believe in the Great Goddess, or in heaven either?”
That seemed impossible. Somewhere in the course of his journeys, Llesho had stopped thinking of the Goddess as an unreachable goal. The heavenly wife who fed him water when he was thirsty, who comforted him when he was in pain, who had mourned him through many lifetimes, was as real to him as his own cadre but more precious even than those companions.
“Once I did.” Menar raised a shoulder in apology. “But no longer.”
She kissed me.He thought to offer his own experience against his brother’s loss of faith—I have been to the gardens of heaven, and they are in need of our help.
Another possibility came to mind, and though it pained Llesho even to think it, he couldn’t leave it unspoken. “Or is it that, knowing the gates of heaven are imperiled, youchoose not to heed her plight?”
A candle or a lamp would have helped him read his brother’s feelings in the nervous twitter of his fingers or the play of emotion across his face. But a blind man has no need of light, so Menar hadn’t lit one. Afraid that asking would break the tenuous mood, Llesho closed his eyes, determined to rely on the senses that Menar used to read the world every day. The poet’s voice would tell him much. And the rhythm of his brother’s breathing, now that he was paying attention, sounded strained with distress.
“The Bithynians are very strict about their religion,” Menar explained. “A slave must accept the Father and his Daughter as his gods or die. A blind slave, even a poet, has few choices in such a place. A blind infidel has only the mines or public stoning. Or beheading, if he has a merciful master.”
That isn’t Mercy,Llesho wanted to tell him.Mercy is a dwarf who plays the flute in the court of the emperor of Shan. Menar had fallen deeply into his story, however. He kept his objections to himself while the poet-prince who had become a slave to gods as well as men continued with his confession.
“For a long time I resisted.” The rustle of cloth brought Llesho’s eyes open. Menar had raised a hand—perhaps reaching out, perhaps a gesture of helplessness—and let it fall again, no more than a shift in the patterns of darkness. “Faith had a part in my resistance, of course, and tradition. But I was freshly wounded as well, and preferred death to my new blindness.
“Ibn Al-Razi, however, refused to let me die. He brought me home to this place. Even in the perpetual darkness of my new condition, it reminded me of Adar’s clinic in the mountains. And he offered me a new life in the arms of the Father and his Daughter.”
“But the Goddess—”
Menar stopped him with a sigh. “It’s different for you, for Adar and the other chosen husbands. For those of us to whom she did not come, faith is a harder thing.”
“Shokar says he had the greater gift, to be set free to live a normal life.”
“The Father and his holy Daughter have been good to me, Llesho, when all the world seemed turned to ash in my hand. I honor your quest, I’ll even follow you, but in the name of my new gods.”
Llesho had always thought that faith couldn’t be forced upon a believer but flowed from the hidden experience of the heart. It seemed that he’d been wrong. He wouldn’t use the tactics of the slavers against his brother, however. As a true servant of the Great Goddess, he could only offer his own experience in exchange for his brother’s story.
“She’s real, you know, not some ideal turned into a philosophical parable. She fed me water with her own hand and held my head when I thought that Master Mark
ko’s poisons would kill me.”
“I understand,” Menar said. “Your companions have talked about this Master Markko. I am only a poet, but I would pierce this villain to the heart with my pen before I would let him touch you again. I have learned in my master’s workrooms, however, that when we suffer great terror and pain, our imagination sometimes supplies what our heart needs.”
“Is that how you explain your own prophecies?”
“Sometimes,” Menar admitted, humor and something more coloring his voice. “Mostly, I just open my mouth and let others decide where the message comes from. But no god has ever given me a cup of water.”
Llesho remembered his own days of doubt. Not that the Goddess existed, but that she could find worthy an exiled prince, an ex-slave and a former gladiator, all things that must fall below the expectations of the queen of heaven. He’d been wrong. So was Menar. He just needed time to find his way back.
Llesho was silent for so long that someone else might have guessed he’d gone to sleep. Menar, with the senses of the blind, knew better.
“Although it’s heresy among the Bithynians to believe so, I can find it in my heart to accept that the Great Goddess exists in her own heaven, while the god of Pontus rules his separate domains of sky and earth. But don’t ask me to abandon the god of Pontus and his Daughter. Try to think of it this way. What the Goddess discarded, the Father and his Daughter picked up for their own use. I would not desert them.”
“All right.” Llesho lay back on his bed. They would have this conversation again but, then as now, he had to respect his brother’s choices. The matter of the prophecy, however, couldn’t wait that long.
“What about the Apadisha?”
“He will not lift a finger to help a goddess whose very existence is heresy and an abomination in his eyes.” Menar stated what Llesho suspected, so it came as no great shock. “Since the Marmer Sea separates the Harn from Pontus, and since the Harnish are notoriously afraid of water, he loses no sleep over the fate of Kungol becoming his own fate either.”
Again, the news disappointed but didn’t surprise him. Thebin was a long way from Pontus. They shared no gods and competed in trade, each at the pinnacle of a different road by which goods traveled west and east. Kungol’s misfortune just made Pontus richer. Menar wasn’t finished, however; he had held the turning point to the end, like the storyteller he was.
“But to fulfill a prophecy handed down by his own god, which his astrologers and the magicians in his service assure him most certainly will sweep all Bithynia before it, for that the Apadisha would do much.”
Ah. The prophecy. Llesho still didn’t know what it said. He took a breath to ask, but Menar quieted him with a hand crossing his forehead. In a gesture so like Adar’s that his heart yearned to bring the brothers together, Menar drifted fingers over Llesho’s eyelids, bringing them down with no force but the suggestion of sleep. “Later,” he said, “when the sun has come up . . .”
“. . . another death of snakebite in the town,” Lling whispered. “Bamboo snakes are rare anywhere in Bithynia and unheard of in the city. It has to be Lady Chaiujin, but how did she follow us so closely? It’s not like there are forests or mountains to hide behind on the ocean. We would have seen a ship out there.”
“It seemed pretty mountainous to me,” Prince Tayyichiut answered in equally hushed tones. “I lay you odds that wretched cup of hers has something to do with it, though.”
They hadn’t noticed he was awake yet. Llesho let the quiet voices wash over him as he came back from the silent place in his dreams. He felt like he’d slept for just a brief moment this time, but the last time he woke up his whole cadre had been gathered in the sickroom. Kaydu was gone now, and so were Bixei and Stipes. Lling was reporting to Tayy the most recent disturbing news from Pontus, leaving Hmishi to watch over their king’s sleep. He was doing so with a peculiar intensity that worried Llesho.
“You’re back,” Hmishi said. “The physician Ibn Al-Razi says I’m to ask you what you recall since you’ve been here.”
“Kaydu was here. She said Marmer Sea Dragon is with Master Den, who is not allowed in to see me.” He remembered that intelligence from the other side of sleep. “Menar said that is because he doesn’t believe in the eight mortal gods and won’t have as a guest any mortal who claims to be one, though he accepts Master Den as a great magician.” Kaydu hadn’t been there when he’d talked to Menar. It must have been two different conversations.
At the sound of their low voices, Lling and Tayy glanced over. Some question passed between his Thebin guards, and some decision. “Master Ibn Al-Razi has put the cup in the care of the college of magicians for safekeeping.” Lling picked up her story again. Reluctantly, Prince Tayyichiut let his attention be drawn away.
“That’s good.” Hmishi tried to look pleased with him but ended up looking uncomfortable instead.
“What has put that expression on your face?” Llesho asked, keeping his voice down. Lling would hear later from her partner. And maybe, when he knew what was going on, he’d tell Prince Tayy himself. But for now, he’d humor his guardsman’s quest for as much privacy as he could manage in the sickroom.
“I asked Ibn Al-Razi why you didn’t wake up.” Hmishi watched him as he spoke, gauging Llesho’s reactions. “He said he couldn’t help you. That you were moving far away from us, beyond even the realm of dreams, and that the dark of sleep offered peace you wouldn’t willingly abandon. You needed to find the will to go on when strength had finally failed you.”
That sounded too close to how he was feeling for comfort, but Llesho didn’t say anything. Hopefully, he kept the truth off his face, but he didn’t have as much control as he would have liked. Tears threatened and he didn’t even know why, except that he was awake now and maybe didn’t want to be.
Hmishi didn’t wait for an answer, though. “I didn’t right away, but the longer I’m alive, the better I remember dying,” he said.
It wasn’t about him, so Llesho felt safe in giving an answering nod. He remembered that time. Too vividly. It still visited his nightmares.
“I felt bad for Lling, but Tsu-tan had destroyed not only my body but my soul as well. I knew that even if flesh and bone mended, the wounds to my self—to who and what I was—ran so deep that they would never heal. So death came as a relief. I didn’t have to hurt anymore. I didn’t have to remember what his soldiers did to me, what he did to me. I could let it all go. Then you brought me back.”
Llesho refused to apologize. “I still needed you,” he said, though it sounded petty in his own ears. “Lling still needed you.”
Lling had suffered as well. Losing Hmishi was one burden more that they had spared her, he and Dognut. That mattered almost as much as his own need to have his companions around him in his struggle.
“I know. I have a sworn duty here, in this life, to your service and to Lling’s heart. I wouldn’t have wished to carry the betrayal of those obligations into the next.” A little smile cracked his otherwise somber expression. “Lling is fully capable of making me sorry the next time we meet on the wheel.”
Which was true enough. Hmishi had put him off his guard with this talk of his own death and his connection with Lling, so the guardsman’s next words struck him like an unexpected blow.
“You moved the realms of heaven and earth and the underworld to bring me back from the dead. Imagine how it is for those of us who have followed you across half the world, who have risked fire and storm for you. Who have entered the camps of our enemies as prisoners and diplomats in your service. Imagine how we feel to watch you drift away into the dark, abandoning the quest that brought us here where we are strangers and powerless.
“And what of the armies that gather at your back?” As he talked, Hmishi’s voice gained volume. Lling and Tayy interrupted their own conversation, watching with mounting concern as Hmishi called his king to account:
“Do you understand what you have set in motion with your actions? And what now waits,
losing patience, while you decide whether your quest is worth living for? From what I’ve heard, the Way of the Goddess has carried you down a similar path before; you’ve died in her service before. But that was in battle, or betrayed by your own weapon. How will you answer to the lady in your next life, knowing you left her to the mercy of the monsters raised by your greatest enemy while youslept away your life in Pontus!”
Hmishi ended with a roar that brought the rest of his guards running, Bixei still brushing the sleep from his eyes but with a sword in his hand. Ibn Al-Razi entered on the heels of the cadre. With a gentle but insistent hand on Bixei’s wrist, he urged the sword point down, where it could do no harm in the sickroom that was suddenly boiling with people.
“What’s happened?” Kaydu’s sharp gaze covered the room, but found nothing amiss. She hadn’t drawn her sword, but her hand never left its hilt.
Llesho dropped his face in his hands, too embarrassed to face the anxious crowd that had suddenly transformed Ibn Al-Razi’s hospital into an armed camp.
“Hmishi was giving a pep talk. He got a little excited, but everything seems to be all right now.”
Lling answered the question in a tone that made Llesho certain not only that she’d been listening the whole time, but that the whole thing had been a setup. If he’d had any doubts, a quick look at Tayy’s guilty expression settled them. Ibn Al-Razi just raised an eyebrow in a way Llesho was more accustomed to seeing on Habiba’s face. A universal response, it seemed, but towhat he hadn’t quite figured out yet.
Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven Page 34
