Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Gard turned away, his gorge rising. Every night it was like this, the women vended like plucked chickens in the marketplace. He had only to look at one, and their owner would be at his elbow, hands clutching, tongue lolling in a canine grin. Gard had insisted again and again, “Just browsing!”

  Pitiful slaves—they probably smelled like camel, too, not like lemon grass or asphodel or jasmine, as women should smell—gods knew he would never stoop to such crass behavior as to buy one!

  Senmut gesticulated in the direction of the girl; a warding sign, Gard realized. Not a bad idea. His eyes watered, the scene before him blurring and then clearing again. The burning acacia branches must be green, they made so much smoke. It clotted in his throat. Still he could not speak.

  A second merchant scented a customer, and began offering dried fish and rice. A third extolled the virtues of his sticks of frankincense. Senmut plucked a jar from his donkey; the merchants tasted the honey inside. They haggled. A deal was struck.

  Gard stood swaying from side to side as the dust undulated beneath his feet, as the voices rose and fell in his head like the meaningless keening of insects. The men, the beasts, the wares both human and inanimate, seemed less real than the shape of the building on the escarpment, less genuine than the luminous eyes of the donkey, less valid than the silver orb of the moon etched upon the sky.

  “Gath!” said the merchant. “Unload the honey. Load the donkey with these.”

  Numbly, Gard moved to obey. His legs refused to saunter, his knees bending the wrong way. The earthenware jars were as smooth as fine porcelain, and the scent of the honey filled his nostrils with sunlight and green and warmth. The honey flowed slow and sticky into his mind, miring his thoughts. The merchants and the huddled shapes of the beasts ebbed from his awareness like flotsam carried away on the tide. He reached out as if to recall them, and let his hand fall empty at his side.

  Old Senmut was startlingly clear. He held an apple. No, the apple floated a handsbreadth above his palm, caught in the grasp of the air itself. Illusion, Gard insisted to himself with one last tendril of sanity, it was all illusion.

  “Winter,” said Senmut softly, “is necessary to spring.” The apple began to spin, faster and faster. Its wrinkled peel filled out and blushed red in the elusive light of the monk’s hand. The light glinted, and what Senmut held in—no, above—his palm was a gold pentacle. “A wizard’s foot,” he said. “To protect your power.”

  Gard sputtered, and spoke with such vehemence that the sinews stood out like cords in his jaw, “I have no power!” There. He had managed to say that all right. He had shouted it, and surely every head in the encampment turned toward him.

  No. They were oblivious. He and the monk might as well have been standing alone on a mountain peak, leagues from any other human being.

  Senmut grinned again. The pentacle vanished in a tiny flare of light. The apple lay secure in his weathered palm. The donkey’s velvet nose butted Gard in the back. Far, far away the dancing-girl plodded through her paces, her bells a remote jangle. The man lying in the shadow of the elephant snuffled into his toy like a pig into mire; the other men bartered obscene jokes. All of them, flies upon a dunghill.

  “Stop it!” Gard shouted. But the words left his lips in an almost incomprehensible mutter.

  Senmut understood. “Stop what?”

  Gard gaped at him, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. “I do not know,” he muttered disconsolately. “I have never known.”

  “Then you had best come with me, and find out.”

  Silence. No bells, no snuffling, no raucous laughter. Only the wind, pealing down from some remote depth of heaven. It is a nightmare, Gard promised himself. Different from the usual one, but a nightmare nonetheless.

  Or was it? Somehow, he was not at all frightened. His cheeks flushed despite the wind, as if he had just drunk an entire carafe of unwatered wine. And he heard himself laugh. And honorable man would stay with his employer, but he was not an honorable man. “I quit!” he cried to the merchant-phantom. “Load your own camels!”

  That penetrated the mist. The man’s tenuous shape turned laboriously and he glanced back. His mouth moved. In slow waves Gard heard him say, “You are going with him? You must be crazed by the sun, boy!”

  “Or by the moon,” Gard returned. “Farewell.”

  If the merchant cursed him, the oaths dissipated before reaching his ears. The man himself dissipated into that strange, pale, inside-out shadow that shrouded the encampment.

  Gard stumbled behind the monk and his donkey, his burnoose fluttering and flapping in the wind, climbing the rough slope to the monastery. The building rose before him, the lamp at the gateway shining as bright as all the brass sconces in Andrion’s banqueting hall.

  Senmut gestured. The gates opened, not onto darkness but onto light. Tiered surfaces emitted a soft glow, as though the interior were a temple embellished with gold leaf.

  If against the moon the buildings had appeared orderly, here on the doorstep he could see they were not. Walls met at weird angles; stairways coiled upward, burped tiny landings, veered off into midair; pavements billowed like stone seas. The tower flexed and stretched like an elephant’s trunk, lifting what seemed to be tangled spider webs toward the sky. It was around them that the light gathered, pulsing gently.

  They were long staves entangled with ropes, spinning in the airy blast like the sails of windmills. “Soul-nets,” explained Senmut. Gard nodded, dazed. Sure, he thought. But it was not dementia that polished the old man’s eyes. Senmut’s eyes were the same uncanny gray as his own.

  Gard spun around and looked back over his shoulder. The plateau was deserted. No fires, no caravan, just drifts and sparklings of moonlight. The world from which he had come was no more substantial than the shifting images in the depths of a crystal.

  He looked up. The moon floated complacently in a sea of stars, stars drained of luminescence by her light. “Saavedra,” said Senmut. “The goddess of love and death.”

  “Who has too many aspects to be escaped,” Gard added, exhaling a long, truculent sigh. Senmut cackled agreement.

  So be it, then. Gard squared his shoulders and stiffened his back—a Sardian legionary, inspected by his emperor—stepped out and tripped across the threshold. Damned dizziness. Damned caravan, damned monk!

  The lamp was an ancient iron lantern holding a candle stub. The gates were weathered wood. The buildings were dim mud-brick slabs disposed about a courtyard illuminated only by moonlight. A small lugubrious man shuffled away with the bags and bales of Senmut’s purchases; the donkey was gone. This is simply another divine jest at my expense, Gard thought.

  “Gard,” asked Senmut, “would you prefer the gods to take delight in tormenting you, or not to care for you at all?”

  “Ah,” Gard said. Of course the man would know his real name. He summoned a smile, determined to play along politely with his hallucination. “I would like very much to find out.”

  With a crash the gates swung shut behind him. Disturbed, something flapped its wings and squawked. The soul-nets spun. Gard listed to the side, spinning with them, turning, toppling.

  The pavement floated gently up and embraced him in sun-warmed stone. The firm bosom of the goddess, he thought, smiling. She sneaked in through the gates when Senmut was not looking.

  He surrendered to the blessed nothingness of sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Gard opened his eyes and peered quizzically upward. He saw an expanse of dun-colored plaster, cracked and peeling. The fissures were probably in some arcane pattern, showering the sleeper beneath with disorienting spells, incantations of confusion, giddy thaumaturgies . . .

  He sat up, groaning. A hammer pounded upon the anvil of his skull. I must, he told himself, stop waking up in strange beds.

  But the room’s very banality was reassuring. If he had waked on a goose-down mattress draped with silk, he would have given himself up for mad. But the string cot on which he lay was e
xactly the kind of bed he would expect to find in a monastery like Dhan Bagrat, so uncomfortable as to mortify the flesh and drive the mind, in self-defense, into contemplation of the ethereal.

  Gard thrust aside the threadbare blanket and swung his feet onto the floor. Last night had been the first since he had left Iksandarun that he had not staggered through the labyrinth of his nightmare. In fact, he had not dreamed at all. Unless the visions of caravan and monastery had been dreams. If so, he was still dreaming.

  Abruptly the hammering in his head stopped. This was the strangest hangover he had ever had.

  His boots lay tidily toe-to-toe upon the cold plaster floor. He slipped them on. He felt beneath his robes, behind the belt snugging the folds of his linen chiton to his waist, and assured himself that the purse of gold coins was safe. As was Sumitra’s letter. And a short Sardian sword, a souvenir of his brief career as a centurion, was still sheathed at his hip. Ordinary government issue, nothing like Andrion’s magic blade. Power gathered only about the powerful.

  Standing, he discovered he could span the room’s breadth with his arms. For once he was glad to be shorter than Andrion; anyone taller than average height would have had to stoop. Cautiously he approached a rickety shutter, tenuous gray light glowing between its slats, and opened it.

  Outside the window the land fell abruptly away to the plateau. If a caravan had camped there last night, it had left no sign. Scraggly thorn bushes tumbled down the scree like acrobats in the wind. Or perhaps the wind was throwing about the boulders themselves as it tossed and stirred the banks of cloud above. Black, gray, white, with an occasional glimpse of blue like a rock emerging from an airy surf, the clouds danced to the piping of the wind, and drew complex textures of light and shadow upon the distant mountain peaks that marked the borders of the world . . .

  Gard’s reverie shattered at the crash of the door. “Did you not hear the morning bell?” demanded Senmut, his beard bristling indignantly.

  Morning bell? That insistent clamor had been a bell?

  “Move, boy, move! Fill the basin with water!”

  This was irritating; usually Gard had only to open his mouth and repartee fell glibly out. But before Senmut’s jaundiced gaze he nodded as dumbly as an ox and trudged out of the room. His feet carried him down a narrow passageway that smelled of damp clay, and around two or three hooded figures. A bee whined past his face. Water? A well?

  He emerged into a large courtyard surrounded by drab brown walls. There was a well. Cursing under his breath he stomped across the pavement—it was uneven, but not actively moving—grasped the bucket, sent it clattering downward. What basin? Where?

  A ray of sunlight glanced through the clouds, some divine trickster flashing a mirror in his eyes. He winced, and the light was gone, extinguished by a sudden shadow that moved as though cast by giant wings.

  Gard spun about. Clouds reeled across the sky, but nothing watched him except a dozen blank doors and windows. And a falcon, who sat on a perch high up on the side of the tower, its feathers so fluffed against the morning chill it had no more dignity than a broom. A—soul-net?—spun silently just behind it, making it appear to be rotating. Its black beady stare met Gard’s gray and resentful look with disconcerting steadiness.

  Gard shrugged and began to pull in the heavy bucket. His sinews cracked. Blood sped tingling through his veins. When he saw his own sulky face mirrored in the well water, he had to laugh at it.

  He might have been confused last night, but now his head was quite clear. He had let the caravan go on without him. By coming with Senmut he had tacitly agreed to take whatever lessons the old man had to teach, even in drawing water. It was winter, after all, no time to be staggering around in the wilderness. A little poverty before sampling the riches of the Mohan would be penance indeed. And no women. He was cutting off his nose to spite his face, with a vengeance.

  A shame Andrion and Tembujin and Raisa could not see him now, working as a menial for a lunatic asylum, virtuous and conscientious. And you, Harus? He glanced over his shoulder. The falcon preened itself, offering no praise.

  Gard fumbled the bucket. Icy water cascaded down his torso. He gasped. His eyes bulged and his skin shriveled as wind and water sought the most intimate crevices of his body.

  Senmut stood in a doorway, watching with such serene patience he made sober Andrion look like a fussy child. And those eyes! Fathomless blue-gray, depth after depth of shifting brightness. A magic blade indeed; Gard was decapitated, his head upended and his thoughts poured out to lie in small, pitiful piles upon the ground. Voices in the night, apples and pentacles, invisible wings and the eye of a tiger glinting upon the mud-brick walls . . .

  He wrestled the bucket from its clasp, his teeth chattering with cold. And then again, he thought, this winter might prove to be an ordeal.

  * * * * *

  Gard’s nonchalant stroll away from the refectory changed into a contemplative plod as soon as he was out of sight of the monks. He could not decide whether he was relieved or disappointed that upon Senmut’s introduction—as his “new acolyte”, no less—no one in the monastery had recognized his name or his ambiguous rank.

  There was that grove of dilapidated date palms again. Over there was the bath house, over here the ranks of beehives, surrounded by a never-ending spiral of bees intent upon their task. He walked on, kicking a pebble.

  No theater, no taverns, no paintings or tapestries to cover the bare walls. His stomach growled, whether with hunger or virtue he could not tell. Breakfast had been a dismal rice and lentil soup, prepared without even salt, let alone peppers or mint or something else flavorful. And, surprisingly, no honey. Perhaps the bees’ output was kept for trade. At least the food was hot, if not distributed generously enough to satisfy a young appetite.

  The pebble caromed off yet another blank wall. He made a face at it. The buildings were scattered across the crest of the hill like the tesserae of a bewildering mosaic. Roofs became walkways, irregularly spaced windows served as doorways, gardens popped out as unpredictably as bubbles in fermented fish sauce. Everything was as bland as the food; even the olives and acacias were the uniform gray-brown of the brick. The date palms beside an outer wall—female, Gard assumed with a smirk—and a few bean plants in a garden no larger than his bedroom in Iksandarun were the only patches of green, and they were as tentative as the fuzz on a boy’s face.

  And the silence! No groaning camels, no cries of vendors, no marching guardian feet. No music, just the eternal piping of the wind, now high-pitched and shrill, now crooning as low as a lullaby.

  After his visions of the night before, he had expected Dhan Bagrat to be a storehouse of wonders; talking idols, the wailing flutes of snake charmers, shape-changers on flying carpets like the conjurors who performed in the marketplace in Sardis. A trained monkey or two, at least. But he had not even found the little gray donkey who had carried the pots of honey to the caravan. He had let himself be seduced by the monastery’s otherworldliness, only to find it depressingly of this world.

  Gard booted the pebble and it bounced into the courtyard. He frowned. No matter which way he went, he kept returning to the courtyard . . . Ah, he understood. Dusty pavement and a few herb-beds adorned with dried sticks and leaves. The wind channeled by the high walls into spinning the staff-and-rope contraptions. The well, and nearby, the long stone basin shaped like a sarcophagus which, according to Senmut, had to be kept filled at all times. The smithy in the corner—had that smithy been in the corner earlier? His impromptu bath had been rather distracting.

  Earth, air, water, fire; all the elements gathered in one place. Clever symbolism. Maybe something interesting would happen after all, like suckling pig and quince jelly and wine for dinner.

  Something moved in the corner of his eye. He glanced around. Surely that had been the little lump of his pebble. Now it was a scarab beetle, toiling across the pavement. The skin on the back of his neck contracted.

  He inhaled, closed his eyes, opened
his eyes, exhaled. As if summoned for his amusement, here came the one other youth in this den of old men; Gard had spotted him this morning, slurping his soup on the opposite side of the refectory. He dumped the bucket into the well and drew it up, looking not at it but at Gard.

  Gard eyed him levelly in return. He had long since learned how to deflect the curious looks provoked by his chestnut hair. Me? Something unusual about me? You must be mistaken.

  At least no children ran shrieking from him in this place, as had several in a village passed by the caravan. Their parents had greeted him with the crossed fingers that averted the evil eye. “Fire-demon,” he had heard them say; did they think that red hair and deafness went hand in hand? Just his luck to come to a land where everyone was dark.

  The youth turned toward the basin. He tripped over his own feet, as if he had so recently reached his full growth he had yet to learn how to use it.

  “Greetings,” Gard offered. He was rather surprised his voice worked.

  The boy paused, balancing the bucket precariously on the stone rim. “You are the new acolyte.”

  “I suppose I am, yes. My name is Gard. From the Empire.”

  Not the briefest flicker of recognition crossed the heavy-jowled face. “I am Jofar. From Apsurakand.”

  Ah. He was not only from the Mohan, but from the hereditary enemy of Sumitra’s Ferangipur. He would be worth cultivating. “How long have you been here? What do you do here? What have you learned?”

  Jofar shrugged. “Forever. Very little. Nothing.”

  Taciturn? Or simply stupid? That protruding jaw, half-concealed by a dark beard, might be either strong or stubborn. Gard opened his mouth to ask more, but Jofar, shifting the bucket from one massive hand to the other, dashed the water into the basin and trudged back to the well. His shoulders filled the brown robe, stretching it, fraying it until . . . Gard blinked. No, the youth was not wearing armor beneath his outer garments. Just a trick of the light. What a waste; someone that big would make quite a warrior.