Court of Fives

by Kate Elliott

My nod is my answer. “There’s water at the base of that shaft, not more than a body’s-length drop. If the pattern holds, then we’ve reached Rivers.”

  The lamp gutters, flame wavering. When I tip the lantern sideways the flame brightens again.

  “That one is almost out of oil,” says Kalliarkos. “It’s going to take time to get to the entrance we came through. We’ve got to move.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “She is awake. We will not leave her, Jes. I promise you.” He vanishes back up the tunnel.

  Amaya is rubbing her lips with the back of her hand just as a cat does. “The handsome prince is sweet on you, Jes,” she purrs. Her meanest smirk peeps out. “How did that happen?”

  “Shut up!” I crouch by the shaft, trying to decide how far the drop really is.

  “I’ll go down first,” she says unexpectedly. “You need to stay here to lower down the others because you’re stronger than I am.”

  “Are you sure?” This isn’t the fussy Amaya I know.

  As if my thoughts are words she shows her teeth, and a faint hiss escapes her. Then she smiles. “I’m not afraid, Jes.”

  And she isn’t afraid. Without a complaint or a whine or a demand for attention she swings her legs over the opening. When I’ve hooked my elbows under her armpits I lower her as far as I can, then let go. Her splash resounds in an echoing space. She laughs.

  When I lower the lamp toward her I can dimly see her staring up at me from where she sits with water eddying around her waist. Twice she slaps the water just to make it jump.

  “It’s shallow. Wait!” She flounders out of view.

  “Amaya!”

  Her voice drifts out of the darkness. “The water is just a narrow channel. I’m already up on a stone floor. It’s easy, Jes! We just need more light!”

  Voices murmur down the passage behind me, and Ro-emnu backs into the space. He cradles Mother’s head, while Coriander moves her legs. Mother’s eyes are open, tracking vaguely, and her mouth forms my name when she sees me. I kiss her.

  “You go down first,” I say to Ro-emnu, “and we’ll lower her.”

  Amaya is right: it is easy. Coriander and I lower Mother into his arms. One by one we transfer the others: the listless, mute oracle; Maraya with our baby sister; Cook; Coriander with the boy and the other lanterns. Last, Kalliarkos rests a hand on my shoulder. Flame sputters as the lamp that has brought us this far flickers, catches a last flare of oil, and drives back the shadows.

  Exhaling, I lean against him and shut my eyes. Just one breath to gather my strength and my courage for the last push. His lips brush mine. They’re cool and a little dry and their touch makes me so warm that I can’t help but remember Father ordering me never to speak to him again.

  “Jes!” Maraya shouts as if she disapproves of our embrace, not that she can see us. “Hurry! Bring the light!”

  Just as I open my mouth to reply, the lamp at our feet spits one last spurt of flame and dies. A soldier’s curse snaps out of me. A faint flame wavers below.

  “Go, and I’ll follow,” he says.

  I feel my way over the edge, hang, and let go. Water sprays up around me as I absorb a landing in knee-deep water and then jump back blind. He hits right after me, water flung into my face. Flailing to orient myself I slap first a wall and then his arm.

  I shout too loud and my voice cracks back from a cavernous space. “Merry? Where are you?”

  “Over here!”

  When we wade in the direction of her voice we push out of the channel up onto a stone floor covered with rubble and layered with dust. There huddle Maraya, Amaya, Mother, Cook, the babies, and a lamp that flickers and goes out, emptied of oil.

  Ro-emnu and Coriander and the oracle are gone, and they have taken the last lantern with them.

  31

  Kalliarkos and I stand side by side. I am too bewildered to speak.

  He elbows me. “There! Do you see the light?”

  A golden glow sways in the distance, rising and falling like a boat drifting in the well of eternity. Then it vanishes.

  Cook sobs once and then stifles her fear. At least the babies aren’t crying.

  “I can’t believe Ro just did that to us,” cries Kalliarkos. “I used my rank and my name to get him released from prison into my custody! He said he would do anything to help his sister, that an Efean man is not an honorable man if he abandons his family.”

  “We aren’t his family.” The words roll tartly off my tongue. The Rings spin in my head as I recollect his words in the tomb. “He came to help his sister. But now he wants the oracle. After the way she seemed to recognize you, he must believe she has something to do with the royal family. He must hope that she knows secrets he can use to write his scandalous plays. So much for being a noble poet! Oh gods. We’ve come so far and yet we are still trapped!”

  Despair crashes into me so fast I can’t stop my souls from sinking into wretched misery. Collapsing to my knees, I begin to weep.

  He kneels beside me, crushes me against his chest. “Jes! It’s all right. We’re almost there.”

  “It’s too late,” I cry. “We’ll never get out of here now.”

  His voice has all the passion and determination that I have lost. “It isn’t too late. We’ll walk upstream in the direction we saw the light. Ro and I entered the complex at a pool that had four streams flowing out of it. This has to be one of those streams. We’ll tie ourselves together with the rope and I’ll lead. You and Cook carry your mother. Your sisters will each take a baby.”

  His plan makes sense, and his firm tone steadies me. I sniffle, sucking up my tears as a pinch of hope lightens my heavy heart.

  He whispers in my ear as intimately as if we were alone. “Instead of telling ourselves what we can’t do, we have to believe in what we can do. Let’s go.”

  He unwinds the rope and loops us together into a shuffling centipede with ten legs, everything done by feel. To my amazement Amaya volunteers to go last.

  “I’ll scratch and bite anything that tries to eat us from behind,” she hisses, poking me in the side with a finger. We all laugh nervously.

  Kalliarkos takes the lead, followed by Maraya holding our baby sister. Cook and I make a basket with our arms to carry Mother. We stick close to the water and creep forward with slow sweeps. Small stones and uneven bits of material crunch and slide under our feet. Mother weighs like an unwieldy sack of lead. Amaya sticks so close behind that she notices when Cook or I shift at all and is there to steady us.

  Kalliarkos and Maraya give warnings over their shoulders: “There’s a dip in the ground.” “Careful, to your right, something hard and round that rolls.”

  Suddenly Kalliarkos grunts in pain.

  “Hold on, I just kicked a big rock.” The scrape of a heavy object on stone shudders through the darkness, then he mutters a curse. “There’s rubble we have to climb over.”

  We untie Maraya and give her both babies. She waits alone in the dark so we can shift Mother by feel up a rugged ridge of what feels like collapsed stone columns and down the other side. It’s exhausting, and if we didn’t have all four of us working together we couldn’t manage it. But we do, and when we get down on the other side Cook and I sit with Mother’s limp body braced between us as Kalliarkos goes back over the rubble to fetch Maraya.

  “Do you want me to take a turn carrying Mother?” Amaya asks, squeezing my hand. “I know I’m not as strong but I can manage for a little distance.”

  “No, it’s all right, Amiable, I’d rather you take rear guard since you’re not afraid of the monsters and I am.” The truth is I don’t want to hold our brother, but I can’t tell her that.

  “That’s because I’m too sweet, and they’ll just spit me out. I’m not really afraid of the dark, you know. The only times I ever said I was, it was just to get my way.”

  Maraya’s voice floats down from above. “We already knew that, Amiable. Father was the only one you ever fooled.”

  “I don
’t want to talk about him!” she snaps.

  “We should go on, if you can,” says Kalliarkos.

  I feel him press in beside me. His hand taps my arm in a secret signal, and I tug on his sleeve in answer. I swear to the gods that I can hear him smile. His cheek brushes mine. I press a kiss randomly that touches the corner of his mouth. Then we set back to work tying us all into a line again so we can go on.

  Each slow step along a cracked and uneven floor we never see is a victory as long as Mother still breathes. Her weight on my arms, the way my shoulders feel like they are pulling out of their sockets, all is a triumph as long as she still breathes.

  By degrees a pallid glow begins to rise like mist off the ground. A hazy silver light clouds the air ahead of us, and we climb stiffly over a second mountain of rubble to see an oval pool gleaming below. The water shimmers like silk. Down we stagger. When we reach the rim of the pool Cook and I have to rest, so we set Mother down as Kalliarkos explores farther along the shoreline.

  Her eyes are open, and with what seems her last strength she reaches until her hand meets the liquid. Lustrous mist twines up her arm until it paints her face with an eerie luminosity.

  I hold my breath, not sure what will happen next.

  With unlooked-for strength she sits up, seeking her children.

  “Maraya. Jessamy. Amaya.” She beckons us closer and we each touch a hand to our heart in the Efean way as we kneel so she can touch our foreheads one after the next. “Where is Bettany?”

  “We’ll find her and bring her back, Mother,” I say.

  She nods regally, accepting my promise, and lays her left hand on the boy’s head and her right on the girl’s. “This fine boy will be Wenru. This fine girl will be Safarenwe. Let it be as I say, for it is my responsibility to name them. I birthed their flesh into this world to be a vessel for the five souls the land who is Mother of All gives to them.”

  “But Mother,” says Amaya, “those are Efean names.”

  “So must they be Efean, now that their father has turned his back on them.” She holds her head with the pride and dignity that has been hers all along. “He made his choice. It is time to go on without him.”

  In the water’s sheen I see my face so clearly that I wonder who I truly am and who we all are, we who walk above ground not knowing what lies beneath that we have been taught to forget.

  The game called Fives has five obstacles. A person has five souls.

  This cannot be a coincidence.

  The City of the Dead is the mask that conceals what was here before the Saroese came. The invaders buried the magic of Efea beneath their tombs.

  “This way!” calls Kalliarkos triumphantly from halfway around the pool.

  We gather ourselves and trudge after him. Mother walks, leaning on Cook. I examine the cavern and its mysteries one last time, but hurriedly follow as the others vanish into an opening in the wall. Chalk marks a narrow passageway where a lit lantern hangs as a beacon. I wonder if Ro-emnu left it. When I enter, I find what appears to be a tomb robber’s tunnel punched through the main wall. A crude set of steps boxed in by timbers leads me on a long and crooked path past more buried rooms and dark passages. The steps are lit at intervals with lanterns so I walk from one dim aura to the next.

  I emerge into the back of a storage room carved out of rock and filled with barrels. The wall stinks so foully of urine that I cover my nose as I squeeze past. A low archway leads into another storage room stacked with crates. A curtained opening admits me to an underground warehouse filled with ceramic vessels used to transport olive oil. Tripods hold lamps burning so brightly that I shade my eyes.

  Six Efean men stand guard, each wearing the trowel of the masons’ guild inked into his left shoulder. Five wear the knee-length wrapped linen skirts typically worn by Commoner men, and like most laborers they go bare-chested. The sixth is an elderly man dressed in a long formal keldi and linen tunic. He is talking quietly to Kalliarkos and Mother. Maraya and Cook hold the babies. Amaya has curled up on the floor and has actually fallen asleep.

  “We did not see him pass through this warehouse, my lord,” the elderly man is saying. “Once you reach the steps, there are other routes by which a person may make his way to the city streets.”

  “So be it,” says Kalliarkos with a gracious nod. “I will not ask you to speak against one of your own. Perhaps he feels he has discharged his obligation. What do I owe you, Honored Sir?”

  The old man bows respectfully. “Nothing but your trust, my lord. As we agreed beforehand, we must bind your eyes to lead you out so as not to reveal the location of our gathering place.”

  “I gave my word and I will honor it.”

  Two of the men make a chair of their linked arms to carry Mother. They treat her like a great lady, although she is too weary to realize it. I like them for the respect they show her. When they pull an eyeless cloth mask over my face, I do not protest.

  By the time our guides remove our masks I have lost all sense of location and time. They propel us along a walled corridor into an oval dining hall with round tables and benches in the Commoner style. It has canvas for walls, a roof raised on brick pillars, and lamplight in plenty because it is nighttime. Thynos and Inarsis stand comfortably together looking over a shadow-washed garden. In the distance the fifth night-trumpet blows, the last one before dawn’s fanfare. The two men turn and see us.

  “There you are, Kal.” Thynos’s tone is light but the way he pounds Kalliarkos on the back reveals a much deeper affection. “Nar and I were beginning to despair of you.”

  Inarsis examines the silent masons and our ragged party. “I admit I underestimated you, my lord.”

  Kalliarkos’s grin dazzles. “You are pardoned, General Inarsis. This time. But don’t do it again.” He looks at me, and I wink at him, and he laughs.

  Having deposited Mother on a bench, the masons retreat. Kalliarkos follows them into the corridor. I hear his low voice, their laughter and genial replies. His knack for making allies has served him well.

  “Food!” Amaya descends locustlike upon a platter of olives, flatbread, and baked fish.

  “Are those twins?” says Thynos with a side-eyed grimace, but we girls ignore him in favor of digging into the food while Cook offers a sampling to Mother.

  “Maraya?” she says, pushing away the food. “Jessamy? Amaya?”

  We hasten to her. She touches us on the lips, and then each baby in turn. She is our mother, who guards our breath.

  Her hands feel so dry and hot when I grasp them. “Mother, we are taking you to a refuge. Polodos and Maraya intend to marry. They will take care of you and the babies. We’ll find Bettany. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Her half-unfocused gaze rests on me for a drawn-out while. “I dreamed we had been buried for so long,” she answers in a tone so weightless I fear it will float away and take her life with it.

  “You need to rest and heal, Mother,” I say sternly.

  When Kalliarkos reappears, Inarsis studies him with the sort of frown Father would use when he examined ranks of soldiers who hadn’t prepared their kit correctly. “What of the poet?”

  Kal sweeps an arm heavenward with the same gesture an actor would use to flamboyantly indicate the Path of Honor. “He has fulfilled his part. Let us be on our way.”

  Inarsis transfers his gaze to Mother. Her face has none of the luster that normally makes people stare at her, nor does her kind smile light the room like an offering of peace to soothe the world’s ills. Does he see beneath the grief and exhaustion to the beauty he expects from a woman whose Patron lover kept faith with her for twenty years? Or is he looking for something else? After a moment he approaches her with a dip of the knee, cupping his left hand so his little finger touches his breastbone.

  “Honored Lady, with your permission I will convey you to the inn. I have arranged for a healer to examine you and the newborns.”

  “We need a doctor,” says Cook, who has not the slightest compunction
about contradicting an Efean man she cannot imagine might be a general.

  Inarsis glances at the floor with a pinch of his lips, then up again. “I have already sent for a dame much experienced in midwifing.”

  He does not rebuke her as a Patron man would a woman speaking out of turn, but he does not back down as Efean men normally must in the presence of Patrons. Cook looks to me, and I nod to show it is all right.

  Mother relaxes into the sure embrace of his command. “Thank you, Honored Sir. I accept.”

  I step back to allow the general to carry out his arrangements. With a frown Cook follows him into the garden. Amaya is still eating but Maraya is looking from Kal to me and back.

  Lord Thynos slaps Kalliarkos’s shoulder. “Well done, my nephew. There should be another attendant, though. And what of the oracle?”

  “The poet took his sister, as we agreed beforehand.” Kal’s glance warns me to keep my mouth shut. “The oracle is dead.”

  “I have never approved of this barbaric practice of burying living people in tombs,” Thynos mutters.

  “Is it more merciful to kill oracles as they used to do in old Saro?” I retort.

  When Thynos is agitated, his old-country accent gets stronger. “Only emperors ever had oracles. The custom was given up when the empire fell. Here it has become a disease, nothing more than a fashion. Every clan must bury their head of household with an oracle so as to be seen as important and honored as the next clan. It is a foul pollution.”

  The outburst silences me. But Kalliarkos nods as if he has heard this tirade a hundred times and takes it no more seriously than an offer of a trip to the legendary oasis of the winged snakes and gossiping trees. “It’s done now, Uncle. One tomb is empty.”

  “Yet you will tell me nothing of how you got them out?”

  “I gave my word of honor that I would respect Efean secrets.”

  Most Patrons would scorn the idea of their honor being subject to any oath given to a Commoner, but Thynos makes a gesture of acceptance.

  Out in the courtyard Inarsis courteously assists Mother into a curtained carriage.