Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  So Tarek had power. Gard squirmed, old wounds aching. Whether it was good magic or evil sorcery, he did not know. He did not want to know.

  He sidled away, out of the chill of the shadow into the thin warmth of the sunlight, his face burning as bright as when he had peered inquisitively into the fire pit, watching the wax mold of his pentacle melt away. He saw Jofar walk by the passageway to the main courtyard, bucket in hand, making a circuitous route to the basin. He eyed the polished woods and bags of spices enviously; the monks, as he would have expected, were buying only pots of oil and bolts of rough-woven linen. Odd, that a man as intelligent as Tarek would bring so many things impractical for a monastery, unless . . .

  He glanced back. The dragonet teetered on its clawed toes, its nostrils flared. Tarek was watching each bearded monkish face as though his eyes were razors revealing the features beneath the hair. Unless, Gard’s small daemon muttered, he brought so many goods in order to conceal something among them, like the pretense that his purpose was trade at all.

  The crowd of monks parted. Gard stood at the edge of a glorious tiger skin, the paws outstretched to the four winds, to the four elements. He shook his head; dizzy again. By Raman, he had thought himself over that. The fur was a gold as rich as the inlays on Sumitra’s paintings, the black stripes were words in some enigmatic language. The teeth were frozen in a low growl that almost reverberated in his ears. In the center of the skin was a shield.

  He pressed forward, heedless of who, monk or trader, he shoved aside. The shield, too, was gold—gold-leafed, surely, his rational mind told him. The rest of his mind knew only that it was beautiful. Not a perfect disc like the magical shield of Sabazel; larger, a figure eight to cover the body of a warrior. He squinted. Yes, it did have writing on it, or perhaps pictures—he was too far away to see. He was not too far away to hear its distant hum, almost like a song, beckoning seductively.

  The haggling voices receded into a faint buzz in the back of his mind. The dragonet was chattering something, but he ignored it. He heard only the song of the shield, and Tarek’s voice proclaiming, “Whoever can lift the shield without stepping on the skin may have it.”

  The monks stood cogitating, scratching their heads, picking their noses. The traders exchanged muttered asides. Senmut stared inscrutably into nothingness.

  Gard thought, I have no use for a shield. The monks have no use for a shield; it is not important. He thought, Tarek would not give away anything, let alone such an artifact. He will expect payment.

  Something beneath thought wanted to touch the shield’s cool surface, wanted to look into the images that danced slowly, sensuously, across it. A shield of power. Power gathered by those who just might, in their heart of hearts, want to be powerful.

  The glow of the shield filled the courtyard, washing out the shape of every man there. No one stirred. Fools, to let such a thing go, monastery or not . . . Of course! He would get it and give it to Jofar. Those muscled arms could lift it easily. A good boy, Jofar, bodily power rewarded indeed.

  It was easy; he did not need fine clothes to do it. He raised his hands. The dragonet gulped and raised its paws. The tiger skin shivered. One edge turned over, tucked itself, rolled into a snug tight coil like the knot his intestines were making.

  There! Gard grinned. The dragonet threw up its paws and scowled petulantly. Gard could not tell whether it was his heart hammering in his chest, or the amulet of the pentacle beating like a second heart upon his skin. The shield lay before him. In its shining surface he saw his own features, and Tarek’s image wavering like a specter just beyond. Impressed? he asked it silently.

  Again that rich, cloying hazelnut odor filled his nostrils. Tarek’s image vanished. Gard’s feet were suddenly damp; water ran in tiny rivulets through the courtyard. From the corner of his eye he saw Jofar, intent upon the scene, splash yet another bucket of water into the overflowing basin. The flood rushed past his feet, over the paving, and into the outer yard, leaving dark tracks like the stripes of the tiger skin across the ground.

  The shield! He lifted it and looked in it. Shapes writhed—armies clashed, cities burned, elephants and chariots and arrows glanced through air choked with a glistening bronze mist. Gard leaned forward. The world reeled and only the shield was steady, its surface smoking.

  The smoke condensed upon his glee and chilled it. Sorcery. The rich scent was the prettified but still all too familiar reek of sorcery.

  Memory congealed. Gard saw himself as a child swimming in the ocean. Full of his own ability, he swam out too far and was caught in an undertow. He struggled, frightened and indignant both, but was drawn inexorably down into the watery depths just as he was drawn now into a gold sea, strangled by metallic waves.

  As a child he had been saved by the captain of his mother’s guard, and returned to her frantic, lotus-scented embrace. Now, nothing could save him. His daemon choked, the shield consumed him and his power . . .

  “All right,” said Senmut’s tart voice. “You can stop showing off now.”

  Me? Gard started so violently his brain sloshed against his skull. The pentacle sighed like subsiding embers. The dragonet floundered and flounced, and then broke into a disdainful little jig upon his stomach. Gard stood, focusing carefully on what passed for reality.

  In one swift motion Tarek seized Gard’s hood and pulled it from his head. Gray eyes met stone, steel struck flint, and sparks flew. “Your manners need mending, my—” Gard began, then broke off, wincing, as his senses were winnowed like a bag of wheat. For a moment, they floated like so much chaff in the air around him—interleaved motes of memory, knowledge and intent suspended on a breath.

  “No, this is not the one,” said Tarek to himself, and Gard heard the words as though spoken aloud.

  The weight of Tarek’s mind was a stone; it would grind the kernels of Gard’s being, bake it into bread, taste it to see whether it was rancid or sweet . . .

  Gard’s thought convulsed. His daemon ducked, raising the pentacle like a parasol upon its tail, its attitude defensive and insolent at once. The amulet vibrated with tension. Senmut lifted a hand—perhaps in protest, perhaps to shoo away a gnat. Who the hell are you to question me? Gard shouted silently. He thrust the shield into Tarek’s face, reflecting that harrowing gaze back upon itself. The shield hissed like a cobra. The man emitted a strangled cry and spun away; for a moment Gard thought his turban was going to wilt like an overripe rose. But in a blink of his suddenly flat, guarded eyes Tarek recovered himself. He surveyed Gard less in anger than in respect, and, oddly, he laughed.

  So you use charm, Gard thought truculently, when force fails! But no—I want nothing to do with your sorceries! He turned his back on Tarek and, through the mingled man-shapes thronging the courtyard, saw Jofar standing in the doorway. Wordlessly, Gard held out the shield; come on, take it, it is too heavy for me.

  Jofar laid the bucket down and stepped through the mud, each footstep a moist plop. “For me?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Gard darted one brief look at the surface of the shield; nymphs danced beside a peaceful stream, twining garlands around the muscular limbs of a warrior. Well, muttered the dragonet, emerging from the shelter of its tail, what do you expect from such a wizard’s toy?

  Jofar took it. His damp hands left steamy prints upon the metal. Gard’s hands prickled as though the outer layer of his skin had adhered to an icy blade. His mind swirled, mud and bronze mist coating his temper with sludge.

  Jofar hefted the shield and set it on his arm. He looked around him at each Mohendra face, and came at last to Tarek’s. Under that not entirely humorless gaze Jofar’s rawboned jaw parted in a grin of triumph, the dull eyes flared into intelligence.

  “Would you like to carry that shield in battle?” the sorcerer asked.

  “Yes!” exclaimed Jofar.

  “A test then, if you will.” Tarek, with a brief snort that was close to a snicker, pulled his scimitar from its sheath. In one sweeping flash he threw it to Jofar; J
ofar caught it one-handed. A gesture from Tarek, and two of his guards drew their own weapons. They lunged toward Jofar.

  You did not ask before you tested me, Gard thought. He scowled. The dragonet set its elbows on its haunches and sulked.

  One of the sparring soldiers trod on Gard’s foot and he stepped grudgingly aside. Lunge, feint, parry; Jofar turned every blow expertly, and landed more than a few of his own. Gard had waked that talent in the ungainly youth. There was no danger in this rough sport. But any satisfaction he might have felt was sucked from him by Tarek’s predatory appraisal of his pupil. The daemon burbled complaints into his esophagus and Gard spat vinegar.

  The circle of men watched enrapt as the swordplay continued. Jofar’s grin blinded his opponents. His huge body moved as gracefully as a gazelle’s. At last the two guards drooped, yielding, and Jofar looked around for more armies to conquer.

  With a vulpine smile, licking his lips in satisfaction, Tarek held out his hand for his scimitar. Reluctantly, Jofar gave it back, then glanced for approval at Gard. Gard managed a sickly nod. His thought left sticky footprints on his senses—a Mohendra sorcerer, searching for a Mohendra youth, a warrior . . . This was a game, he realized with a chill. Somebody else’s game. And he had blundered onto the board without bothering to learn the rules. If there were any rules.

  The dragonet sat petulantly inspecting its own snout, no help at all. Senmut stood wrapped in his robe, as brown and withered as a mummy, his eyes holes in his skull revealing gray skies within. The Apsuri men wrapped up their wares; Tarek, with mocking deference, draped a fine linen cloak over Jofar’s shoulders as if he were packing him away as well.

  Gard lurched out of mud into enlightenment. Tarek had come to get Jofar—that much was obvious. The sorcerer must have learned how to tell the two babies of the prophecy apart, and believed Jofar to be the one who would bring glory to Apsurakand. If he simply wanted only to finish the ancient massacre, he would not have bothered with such elaborate tests. Interesting, that Menelik was taking up the threads of that old story.

  Tarek raked the courtyard with one last glance, meeting Gard’s eyes in—disappointment? or mere curiosity? The man had expected power and bodily strength in the same person, that also was obvious, but he managed to be wrong without undue loss of dignity.

  Tarek made an extravagant bow, hands fluttering like wings, neither challenging nor yielding. Gard quelled an expensive and defiant gesture, then told himself with a snort that it was rather late to be prudent now. But then, the affairs of the Mohan, while intriguing, had nothing to do with him.

  Tarek and his pale horse led the procession down from the gates. Jofar was escorted in the midst of the lackeys, his face peering out above all the turbaned heads, exalted into handsomeness. Gard waved. Jofar’s arm, thick as an oak branch, brandished the shield in salute. The sun glanced off its surface, striking Gard’s eyes like a slap across the face.

  The gates slammed. The monastery was suddenly silent and colorless. The sun rode up the sky, drawing the shadows after it. The sky was a profound blue, as blue as a goddess’s healing yet mocking eyes.

  The pentacle hung like iron slag against Gard’s chest. Trembling he thought: So that is the practice of magic. Intoxicating. And very tiring.

  As Senmut turned and hobbled away, a sudden gust of wind blasted Dhan Bagrat. Jofar’s abandoned bucket tipped over, and the water that splashed onto the already sodden ground left an ocher-tinted stain like spilled blood. The soul-nets began to move, faster and faster, their creakings elongated into shrieks of agony as if somewhere a battle raged, and the souls of countless warriors spun the great wheels as they passed by on the way to Paradise.

  Chapter Five

  Gard followed Senmut into a building and down a dark, narrow stairway. The old monk moved more wearily than Gard had ever seen, his body growing insubstantial in the shadow, and then, as if seizing resolution, collecting itself into corporeal form. Gard caught up with his mentor in the cellar beneath the basin. His eyes were still dazzled by the sunlight, and the underground darkness seemed doubly thick. Something in his heart ached like a cauterized wound.

  He blinked and asked, “Are you angry with me for revealing Jofar to Tarek?”

  Senmut angled a polished metal disc to reflect a brassy spill of light into the room. With his lens he lit a lamp. Slowly, unwillingly, the shadows retreated, revealing the clever machines that whirled and nodded, pounded and clasped, each powered by the force of running water.

  Perhaps the old man had not heard; the incessant rush of water was loud in the confined space. “Are you angry?” Gard persisted.

  “That you have been slopping through your lessons? That you still see almost nothing beyond your own pride?”

  “Gods, if I had any pride, I would not be working here like a Rhodopean gutter cleaner. No, no! Are you worried about Jofar going with Tarek?”

  Senmut lifted a mallet and tapped inquisitively on a terra cotta pipe. The water within gurgled in response. “As I believe I once told you, prophecies have a way of working themselves out.”

  “But you did not want Jofar to come out of the inner courtyard. You were trying to manipulate his destiny.”

  Senmut chuckled under his breath. “Gard, I do not believe in tempting fate. I require that it tempt me.”

  Gard groaned.

  Senmut inspected a millstone, pulled out the peg that held it immobile, poured grain into its maw. The beam of radiance touched it; the stone sparkled, revealing itself as Sardian granite. Wheat dust billowed outward in a golden cloud.

  And you can just go on with your daily tasks, Gard protested mutely, after—well, after something happened here which had to have some significance to someone, somewhere . . .

  The cellar was filled with the pungent smells of dirt and spoiled grain and mildew, dim and dank enough to be an anteroom to Tenebrio’s ghastly temple. Gard shivered and drew his threadbare robe more closely about himself. He turned to his tasks, adjusting a wooden screw here, tightening a leather band there. The multiplicity of toothed wheels needed to be checked for decay. The pipes carrying the water had to be inspected for leaks. The water clock that gave the hours of contemplation and worship, the mallets that pounded rags into paper pulp, the rakes carding wool, the various spitting and heaving little engines that seemed to exist only for Senmut’s enjoyment . . . Very cunning, Gard thought with his usual grudging admiration. In Dhan Bagrat peasantry and wizardry mingled. I am neither peasant nor wizard. What am I doing here?

  Jofar’s zeal in overfilling the basin meant that there would be enough water flowing over the wheels and into the collection gutter to run the machines for a time. Gard would now inherit the job of keeping the basin filled, all by himself. “One is debased,” Senmut was fond of saying, “so that one can then be refined.” And after the refinement? The dragonet was asleep, snoring gently, paws folded and ears limp.

  Senmut was pacing up the damp stone stairway, leaving him alone in the murk and damp. Gard sprinted after him, across the courtyard, into the base of the tower, up another stair that was equally uncertain but which was at least dry wood, and arrived with a clatter in the tower room.

  He much preferred working here. The soul-nets rattled sleepily outside the windows. Daylight, whether blue or gold or gray, illuminated the machinery, and occasionally the calculating eye of Great-grandfather Harus swept by. Here there were metal engines, thin pieces of beaten or molded iron, copper, silver, gold, shaped into discs and orbs and diadems wider than Gard’s extended arms. Models of the heavens, Senmut had told him.

  Today the soul-nets whined on a piercing note, moving so quickly that loose ends of rope flapped like the strokes of a whip on Gard’s shrinking flesh. The shafts that rotated the myriad armillary spheres spun madly, and the evening star chased the moon chased the warrior star chased the sun, round and round and round like the thoughts tumbling through Gard’s mind. The constellations rotated before his eyes, the convergence of stars that had shone upon
his birth shifting and changing so that the unavoidable fate decreed for him shifted and changed as well. Becoming, he asserted to himself, avoidable. Oh yes, he had learned to read the stars. Not paying attention to his lessons indeed!

  He picked up his polishing cloth. Senmut attached a tiny chariot to one of the shafts and contemplated the turning of its wheels. The scythes affixed to its axles swished as they turned, as if thirsting for real battle and real blood. The air swirled with the odors of terebinth and beeswax, of crushed herbs and dung.

  Gard wiped the dust from the track along which the red-bronze warrior star coasted. His forearm tingled; it had been one of those miniature scythes that he had helped Senmut make on his first day here. The one that had left the curving scar on his skin. He pulled up his sleeve. The cut had healed well under Senmut’s herb poultices. Milfoil and comfrey to stop the bleeding, myrtle to draw out the poison, marigold to heal the wound. Or so Senmut had named them. Gard had resisted herb-lore, even though these were healing herbs, not the maddening ones his mother, Chrysais, had grown in her garden on Minras. In Dhan Bagrat the madness was refined into honey.

  The scar was now only a white line against the pale gold of his flesh. A line delineating the crescent moon of Ashtar, or the harp-shaped horns of the bulls of Minras, or an eye of Vaiswanara. What it was not was the looped cross of Saavedra, symbolizing the mating of male and female.

  “Are you not worried about Jofar?” he asked abruptly.

  “It is not mine to question,” Senmut replied.

  “Donkey feathers! You question everything!”

  Senmut’s keen glance was brighter than Tarek’s, less brooding. It promised a squall but not a monsoon. “Perhaps it is the nature of man to bang his head against the wall of ignorance, and in breaking it . . .”