Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Another movement. Three monks filed into the courtyard. Gods, they were wearing only loin cloths! Even in his sheltered corner, Gard’s burnoose felt as light as diaphanous silk, fluttering to the groping fingers of the wind.

  The monks ranged themselves against a wall. One of them stood on one leg, arms upraised; one knotted his legs together and laid his hands gracefully on his ankles; one lay down and folded his legs so that his knees clamped his nose. Gard waited. They did nothing, but remained as still as a frieze. Meditating, perhaps. That was a monkish activity. Their shadows, cast and then whisked away as the sun reeled among the clouds, pirouetted on the wall behind them.

  Several bees dived into the courtyard, spun about the walls, exited. The falcon dozed upon its perch, shifting and muttering. The soul-nets spun. Jofar poured another bucket of water into the basin.

  Gard stood tapping his foot, arms crossed, waiting.

  Another monk joined the first three, stretching and twining his arms and legs until he looked like a spider. Such posturing seemed hardly human. But then, the monks were hardly human, no personality, no individuality, distinguished only by the thickness and distribution of gray in their facial hair. Only Senmut had that disconcertingly keen gaze. Or else only Senmut looked directly at Gard.

  His shoulders prickled. Sure enough, there he was.

  Senmut walked into the courtyard, up to the cinder and rock-strewn hut that was the smithy, cast aside his robe and beckoned to Gard. Without his robe the old man managed somehow to be both wizened and muscular.

  Had he always limped like that? The limp was not pronounced, but was more of a lopsided shuffle . . . Senmut had a clubfoot. “Let me help you!” Gard exclaimed, rushing forward.

  Something Senmut was holding in his hand glinted in a ray of sun. “Look,” he said, holding the object above the fire pit.

  It was a little glass disc, like the bottom of a perfume-vial. A broken one, as such vials usually were after some irate feminine hand had cast them at Gard’s fleeing figure. He had wondered from time to time whether it would be feasible to fill a window with such discs, allowing light but not wind into a room. But then, the Goddess would probably not approve of her spy the wind being shut out of men’s affairs.

  Senmut moved the disc in a slow, sweeping motion. The sun glanced out, hard, strong, almost hot. A tiny point of incandescence danced among the twigs and leaves piled on a heap of charcoal. Gard peered closer. Was that smoke?

  Yes, a tendril of smoke issued from the fire pit. Then a spurt of orange flame, and the kindling was burning with all the pops and crackles of happy laughter.

  With a smug smile, Senmut put the glass disc into a pouch hanging from his neck. Gard caught a glimpse of a gold pentacle inside. At least he had not imagined that. “The lens focuses the power of the sun,” the monk said. He fanned the flame and arranged a couple of metallic lumps at its edge. “So, too, can you learn to focus your power.”

  “I have no power,” Gard said.

  Senmut gestured toward what looked like a dead animal lying beside the stone-rimmed pit. Ah, a goatskin bellows. With a sigh, Gard shed his burnoose, and, clad only in his chiton, picked up the long sticks extending from the skin. He began to pump. The fire flared. Warmth. How pleasant!

  Out in the courtyard, one of the meditating monks stirred and stretched and glided into a passageway. Another trick of the light; for a moment Gard could have sworn the man had grown wings.

  The sunlight dimmed. Smoke billowed up, filling the hut. Gard coughed and cleared his throat. A trickle on his head heralded rain. Senmut organized his tools: hammer, tongs, a bucket of water.

  He began speaking, calm, ordered words arranged as neatly as the tools. “According to the Apsuri philosophers, the world is torn between two forces, good and evil, personified by the gods Hurmazi and Raman. The sophists in Ferangipur take a slightly different view; they see the world as a dialogue between love and discord, in which both Vaiswanara and Saavedra play parts.”

  Gard nodded. Saavedra, whom Senmut had named last night, was the Mohendra version of the mother-goddess.

  “In the Mohan, as in the Empire, there are those who discount the mother-goddess’s role. In Apsurakand She has been divided, each of her triple aspects becoming a consort of Hurmazi. And Ferangipur’s ruling family worships only Vaiswanara, ignoring the synthesis of extremes. Male and female, if you like.”

  Oh, yes, I do like, Gard said to himself. But what is all this talk of gods to me? Just another litany to learn in exchange for food and shelter.

  Senmut manipulated the glowing hot knob of ore from the fire pit, placed it on a flat rock and began to strike it. Beneath his hammer it flattened like bread dough in the hands of a baker. Gard’s blood pounded in his ears in the exact same rhythm. His shoulders flexed and loosed, working the bellows.

  Rain rustled upon the thatched roof of the hut, accompanied by the periodic swish-plop of Jofar’s water bucket. “The soul-nets are only partly symbolic,” Senmut continued. “They harness the energies of living beings, and the energies released by the dying. For life serves the world as blood vessels serve a man, and blood is power.”

  Gard was swept with a sudden manic vision; the god-king, Marcos Bellasteros, swinging on one of the nets, playing seek and find with his wives, teeth flashing in a grin. According to certain old campaigners, that infectious grin had been passed on to the god-king’s son, Andrion, and to his grandson Gard. But his daughter Chrysais, Gard’s mother, would not be amused. And Eldrafel—he was not quite human. He would not deign to linger in some mad monk’s fanciful web.

  “Pay attention, boy,” growled Senmut. “Save the imagery for later.”

  Damn! Gard was growing dizzy again, as if he himself were spinning round and round in midair. His breath raced, his pulse scampered up and down his throat.

  The pace of Senmut’s voice did not hurry and did not falter. “But you will learn more of this, as you learn to focus your power.”

  “I have no power,” said Gard.

  “Soon you will make your own amulet,” Senmut continued, unperturbed. “The metal would be, like that of a bell or a weapon, stronger for being mixed with virgin blood.”

  “I did not come equipped with virgin blood, mine or anyone else’s,” Gard muttered.

  The hammer clanged upon the metal. “The five points of the pentacle, or the wizard’s foot, symbolize the five senses. The senses that you must deny for a time, while learning to control them.”

  “Why should I control them? They are most rewarding as they are.”

  Senmut snorted impatiently. “To develop and focus your power, boy. Are you not listening?” He plunged the lump of metal into the bucket and replaced it in the fire.

  Gard pumped on. I am listening, he thought, but this is not what I want to hear.

  Senmut straightened and tapped his hammer lightly on Gard’s forehead. “You wonder, no doubt, how I know who you are?”

  “Did my uncle, the Emperor, send you a letter, asking you to waylay me?”

  “It would have had to come on the same caravan, would it not? No, I saw your coming in my bones.”

  Gard shook his head, puzzled. “Like when Raisa’s old nurse says she can predict a change in the weather by the way her bones ache?”

  “Not quite, boy. But . . .” Senmut, judging by his chuckle, found the idea appealing. “In my fortune-telling bones. And in the stars as well. A boy of noble, if mixed blood, born in the sign of the jester, with the bull rising behind, caught between the falcon and the shadow under a waxing moon. A powerful omen, one that I could not ignore.”

  “Would you have preferred to ignore it?” Gard swayed and caught himself. He was growing very tired of this dizziness. Must be the unhealthy air here. Too much smoke. No perfume.

  Senmut jerked his head toward the door, indicating Jofar’s bulky form. He bent and retrieved the flat piece of metal. The hammer shifted in tone a bit, the blows becoming sharper and brisker; the metal began to take on a cres
cent shape. “Jofar, too, is of noble blood. He is the nephew of Menelik ed Allaudin, the Shah of Apsurakand. Not that he knows, you understand, and you must not tell him.”

  “Who what?” The sudden change of subject left a crick in Gard’s neck.

  “Menelik was warned by a seer that of two children born in Apsurakand on the day of the Sun’s Awakening—the winter solstice—one would bring glory to the Apsuri, while one would bring about the Shah’s death. Menelik felt quite capable of making his own glory, so he ordered every child born that day to be killed. Even the son born to his own sister.”

  Gard nodded again. This, at least, was amusing.

  “But Menelik’s sister did not, understandably, want her baby killed. So she sent him secretly here. Not only to protect him, but in atonement for Menelik’s crime. Which crime the gods have no doubt noted against his name.”

  “But what of the other baby?”

  “If one baby was hidden away, I daresay the other could have been, too. Which one is to bring glory, and which death—and whether Jofar is really one of them . . . Well, these prophecies have a way of working themselves out.”

  Oh yes, I am afraid they do. Gard squinted through the mist of smoke and rain. Jofar, having filled the basin, was now lumbering about, waving a stick.

  Oh, he was pretending the stick was a sword. Even here he must have heard tales of warriors and their battles. But gods, how clumsy! Aloud, he said, “I cannot see that he has any power, for glory or for death.”

  Senmut smiled broadly, every tooth glinting in the firelight, and again thrust the implement into the water. Steam boiled up and concealed his expression—sorrow or glee?

  The old monk was making a small scythe, Gard realized. Too small to be useful shearing grain; probably more wizardry. He watched Senmut place the implement back in the fire, watched it begin to glow, watched the old man pick it up yet again. “Jofar has only power of the body, boy, not of the deepest interstices of the soul. A different thing altogether, as you well know.”

  “No, I do not know!” The bellows moved even faster, and the fire leaped upward. Gard’s face and chest burned as red-hot as the scythe, and his back broke out in goose flesh. “What if your bones and your stars lied about me?” he demanded.

  “They did not,” said Senmut, calmly reasonable. He was not even breathing hard. “You have an aura that confirms it all.”

  “Do not taunt me,” said Gard between breaths. Any aura he had was likely to be a sickly phosphorescence.

  The hammer pounded on. “Your aura is silver-white, tinted purple at the edges. Rexian purple, which was once produced on Minras. I hear the market for purple dye has collapsed, since Minras is no more.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “No. It is not. But neither is it a reason for you to waste your energies. Woman, for example. A sink of . . .”

  “Perdition?” Gard asked caustically.

  Senmut glanced up. His eyes raked Gard fore and aft. “Of course not. Pay attention. Saavedra is the consort of Vaiswanara, as Ashtar is the consort of Harus. A synthesis of powers. But for you, now, woman and food and adornment are distractions, leaving your senses unfocused and your power unrealized.”

  Gard’s shoulders ached. His stomach churned, and his mind, too, was nauseated. “I do not have power!” he growled.

  “Say, rather, you do not want it, because you fear what it can do.”

  The smoke clotted with the rain into a thick mist. For a moment Gard could see nothing, only the orange maw of the fire before him, light struggling to thrust back the shadow. And then he saw the black cloud of ash and soot, the writhing limbs of lightning, that had consumed Minras. Because Eldrafel had gloried in his power, and sought more, and more, and more. Gard had helped Andrion escape, and had prayed that the gods would strike his father, his own flesh, down. The gods had answered his prayer, as they answered most prayers, with their own sardonic humor. His father had died at Andrion’s hand. But not before all his people had been obliterated.

  Senmut’s eyes were gray, like his own, like his father’s. But in Senmut’s eyes there was no hint of malice, only intersecting layers of concern and intelligence and wit. “No,” he said mildly. “It is not your fault.”

  Abruptly Gard dropped the branches. The goatskin closed with a wheeze not unlike the wheeze of his own breath. The fire popped protestingly.

  He looked out the doorway of the hut. With the help of the rain, the basin was brimming. The monks still sat immobile, water running off their noses. Jofar plodded about the rain-darkened pavement, his makeshift sword waving ineffectually.

  Senmut’s measured words persisted behind Gard’s back, the repetitive cuts of the torturer, each one just enough to draw blood, not enough to kill. “Did you not hear the tiny voice of your own soul calling you last night? Boy, did you not hear me?”

  Yes, yes, I heard! Gard’s frustration hissed like the scythe plunged into the bucket of water. “Stop calling me a boy,” he snapped.

  “When you accept the responsibilities of a man, you will be addressed as one.”

  “Who are you to talk to me like this?”

  “Who are you, to deny the power the gods have given you?”

  Gard’s thought cramped. “Screw the gods!” he shouted. He shot from the hut like an arrow from a Khazyari bow. Steam boiled from the doorway behind him. The sound of Senmut’s indulgent laughter singed his heels. “Hey!” he called to Jofar. “Not like that, you idiot, your opponent will come in under your guard!” Jofar gaped at him.

  Gard drew his sword, swung blindly, and slipped. A real adversary, he scolded himself, would have run him through then and there. God’s beak! he shouted mutely. Take of hold of yourself, man! Deep breath, steady stance . . .

  Jofar’s heavy features lit with realization. Eagerly, he took up a similar stance. “Lunge,” said Gard, managing not to gasp. “Feint. Parry.”

  Of course the youth was strong; Gard had expected that. What he had not expected was that the loutish gait would drop from Jofar like a sea creature’s abandoned shell. Amazing how light he was on his feet, for one so big. How did he get so big on such food? Steady, steady . . . Jofar’s stick met Gard’s sword with a blow that almost wrenched Gard’s arm from its socket.

  He spun, leaped, and glimpsed Senmut standing in the door of the hut, smoothing the blade of the miniature scythe with a piece of agate until the metal gleamed as brightly as his eyes. Was that faint chuckle the wind ruffling the water in the basin, or the rain sifting down upon the ground, or the smithy fire settling into embers—or was Senmut still laughing at him? He slipped on a wet paving-stone, recovered himself, then turned a blow with elegant precision, if he did say so himself.

  That blow for the dizziness, that for the uncertainty, that for Senmut’s confounded sorceries! He was no longer cold. He was no longer dizzy. And he had no power save that of the flesh.

  * * * * *

  Dinner had been a grim repeat of breakfast, with some vile orange squash for dessert. No wine. No honey. Gard’s stomach flapped under his ribs like a purse emptied during a night of gambling.

  After eating, the monks had vanished into what had to be a chapel, judging by the deep-throated chanting that soon issued from the doorway. Stubbornly he had stayed behind.

  A peek into a chapel window, through an iron grille, had showed him the monks gathered in a circle about nothing but a row of bowls and candles. No idol. No celebrant. Nothing even remotely mysterious. He could not help but remember the ornate altar of Harus, atop the falcon god’s tall ziggurat in Sardis. From there you could see for leagues, past Pirestia into that blue haze that was the sea. Beyond the sea was the charred ruin of Minras.

  I was only eight years old, he thought. I had no power. If I had, could I have made a difference? Or would I have clumsily ensured the destruction of the Empire as well?

  He settled down on a rooftop, his back against a wall, hoping to glean the last rays of the sun. But the sun was only a feeble glow, a stai
n upon the clouds massed like an attacking army upon the horizon.

  At least he was alone here, suffering no watching eyes. Even the falcon had left its perch on the tower. In great sweeping circles it scythed the air above the plateau, sublimely indifferent to its great-grandson huddled against a mud-brick wall, earthbound and still.

  A dust devil spun across the plain. The wind spun the soul-nets, and they creaked like the voices of old men. The voices of the monks rose and fell. Jofar loped across the roof and settled down at Gard’s feet like a huge, blessedly silent hound.

  Thank those perfidious energies that passed for gods that the day was nearly at an end. Gard’s senses ached as if flayed, his mind exposed like raw, quivering flesh to the elements. Even the pervading hum of the bees was as gratingly intense as a herald’s trumpet blown in his ear.

  The day was nearly at an end. The nightmare would catch him tonight. He would grope through the maze of the monastery, drown in the basin, burn in the fire, be hanged, choking and gasping, from the soul-nets, even as the scorching breath of the demon followed him . . .

  Senmut was seated comfortably at his right hand. He was too tired to be startled, let alone wonder where the monk had come from. The old man proffered a small earthenware pot. “Honey?” he asked, with his peculiar toothy grin, for all the world like Andrion urging an ambassador to a cup of wine.

  Gard hesitated. Now what?

  “Very good honey,” Jofar coaxed. His pupils dilated, polishing his dark eyes with smooth sincerity.

  Why not? Gard lifted the small wooden spool and twirled a string of thick golden sweetness into his mouth. Cloying sweetness, yes, and then a sudden pungency, like vinegar and smoke. The honey melted on his tongue, became steam, wafted upward and froze into stalactites hanging from the top of his skull. A rush of perception swept his already exacerbated senses; Ashtar! he thought, this stuff is as good as a woman!