The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  That got his attention. He blinked up at her with brown eyes as lush and fringed as those of any sacred cow. “What are we doing, Mama?”

  It was the blurred, lisping voice of a small child. And yet, as always, she could not help thinking how clever he was, how smart, how special. How advanced. Surely, all parents felt this. Their own children must always be the cleverest, the smartest, the most special. The most advanced for whatever tender age they had attained. She felt the tiger’s desire to kill anything that threatened him, and did not so much conceal that desire behind a camellia-petal smile as … incorporate it. “Do you remember last year, when we went down to see the water-divers and their ceremony?”

  He didn’t. She didn’t really expect him to. But she watched him bite his lip in concentration and then nod, as if he was certain that he was supposed to remember, even if he didn’t, exactly. She looked at him with pretend sternness. “Do you really remember, Drupada?”

  He shook his head. She laughed, and turned to his wet nurse and the door attendants. “I shall carry him out to the litter,” she said.

  It wouldn’t hurt anyone to see her in a maternal guise. The fact that she did, in fact, dearly love her only child and heir didn’t change the fact that Sayeh was also keenly aware of politics and appearances.

  “Now sit still, princelet,” she told him. “We’re going out where our people can see.”

  * * *

  And so they did. Sayeh carried her son down the carpeted stone path between waist-high stone planter walls filled with the pregnant-bellied stems of a heavy-blossomed flower called desert rose. The thick, knobby stalks were rich now with blossoms of velvet red, silken white, and a black shot through with threads of burgundy. They had lost their narrow leaves in the aridity of the dry season. Bees buzzed heavily around them, powdered with the golden pollen that hung fat in hairy caches on their hind legs, but soon the rains would shred the delicate flowers, and coax the waxy leaves to bud again. Seeds would scatter, and the seedlings would be well-drenched and well-warmed for their eventual debut.

  Sayeh reached out and let her free hand trail over the still-dry, still-perfect petals as she passed.

  Beyond the planter wall stood a rank of liveried servants, their tunics and trousers clean and new with the beginning of the year, as was fitting. They held up slender white poles, and between those poles was stretched a translucent canopy of silk, to shade the rajni and the prince as they stepped out of the palace doors into the brilliant starlight.

  Beyond them were some of the Orchid Court’s gardens and orchards, tier upon tier of the mandara tree, the aromatic myrtle, and the fig and pomegranate huddled up dormant and waiting for the rain. There were citrus, too, their waxy leaves and bright green thorns dusty and dulled for a few hours more. There was no water to irrigate them, until the rains came. And there were wisteria, their bare gnarled canes woven over arbors that would—one day soon—drip with white and periwinkle flower clusters.

  Under those trees and arbors, silent and watchful, her people stood.

  Sayeh settled Drupada on her hip again, regretting her decision to carry him. He wasn’t getting any lighter, and his little fists knotted hard and dragged at her white robes as he steadied himself. But she was committed now. She stopped at the bottom of the path and turned back to her palace, hanging on to Drupada as she shifted her weight and bowed to the place that gave her shelter, the place that symbolized her kingdom of Ansh-Sahal.

  The Green Palace of the Orchid Court was white as weathered bone. At least at this time of year. A sort of tiered pyramid or ziggurat, it rose up in a succession of levels, each one bordered by a row of bare, thirsty, sunburnt trees. At their bases, a faint frizz of green could be glimpsed even now: the barbed garland of a plant called thorny spurge, which kept its leaves even in the driest times. She was too far away to see its tiny, two-petaled red or yellow flowers. After the rains came, the whole palace would drip with greenery and blossoms as if they fountained from it, the white bones cloaked in a verdant flesh.

  “Mama,” Drupada asked, “what you do?”

  “Shh,” she told him. Obviously, she wasn’t getting him out of the palace often enough if this came as a novelty. Her lips moved in a prayer, and when she straightened and turned back, she told him, “I am thanking our house for keeping us safe.”

  He giggled and hid his face against her robes, obviously taken with the idea.

  She carried him down the steps and out from under the translucent silken shade to where their palanquin waited. It was gilded and enameled, sparkling with sapphires, hung with pale drapes. She made a point of showing no strain from his weight or his lack of skill as she helped him into the sedan chair. He insisted on climbing up “himself,” and succeeded with only a little assistance, though it took slightly longer than he had apparently expected. Sayeh was relieved to have somebody else hauling her rapidly growing child for a while, and settled onto the bench beside him with a relieved, if silent, sigh.

  The heavy ivory charmeuse curtains fell closed around them, filtering the light of the Heavenly River into a pleasant glow.

  Her bearers were well-trained. They lifted her so smoothly that she felt only the slightest shift, and their steps were perfectly timed.

  As they began to carry the tiny royal family of Ansh-Sahal down to the Bitter Sea, a cheer went up from the people gathered around the palace.

  Sayeh knew it was as much for the imminent rains as it was for her son and herself. She allowed herself to enjoy it anyway.

  * * *

  “Why are they cheering?” Drupada asked.

  They were well on their way, not that the sea was far. Sayeh glanced over at him, taken with his small studious face. Had he been thinking about that all this time?

  Maybe. “Because we are the rajni and the prince,” she said. “And because we are going down to the sea to call the rains to Ansh-Sahal, and bring an end to the dry season.”

  “NO!” His face screwed up. She was answering the wrong question.

  She both looked forward to and dreaded his increasing command of language. She wondered if maybe he could not remember what were the rains, yet, and what their difference was from the season of dust. Sayeh missed the moments of her own childhood, when the Kingdoms had been united under her grandfather’s reign, and she and her mother had gone west to the wetter, more moderate climates closer to the ocean for the dry season.

  Though the capital city of Ansh-Sahal was built on the shore of what was by courtesy the inland Bitter Sea of Sahal, and it was certainly salty enough to be a sea—saltier than the ocean, at least at the surface—that sea was not large enough to soothe the air-spirits as the ocean did. Ansh-Sahal was also at a higher elevation.

  The dry season here was drier, and hotter; the rainy season colder and more wet.

  That was probably not what Drupada wanted to know, so Sayeh said mildly, “That is not how we ask politely, my princelet.”

  He sighed in exasperation. She was old to have such a young son; the Mother had not seen fit to bless her until her fortieth year, and she had been forty-one before Drupada was born. She doubted she would ever have another. But distant as her own childhood was, she remembered dimly from it that, in general, adults were exceedingly obtuse.

  “Politely?” she reminded.

  He sighed, much put-upon. “Why am I prince?”

  Why am I a prince? Oh. Well. That was a much easier question than she had been afraid of. “You are a prince,” she said, organizing her thoughts, “because I am a rajni and you are my son. It is my duty to oversee my people, and make sure they are fed and safe from strangers, and that the gods are attended as the gods desire. Someday, that will be your duty, too. When I am gone.”

  He clutched at her, eyes suddenly wide.

  She stroked his hair. “That won’t be for a very long time,” she reassured. “You’ll be as old as Old Parrah before I go away.”

  “But who take care me?” he squeaked.

  “You’ll st
ill have people to advise you, little otter. But everybody’s turn comes to be the one who takes care of other people someday. And you’ll have had plenty of practice by then. You’ll be a daddy yourself, like I’m your mommy now.”

  That stopped him, and got him thinking. And it was just as well, because the smell of the sea was growing stronger, and Sayeh could hear the ceaseless private whisper of the waves. The filtered light outside grew dimmer: the veil rising with the Cauled Sun, hiding the river of stars.

  She could also hear the voices of her people gathered already, and the footsteps of the hundreds following her little palanquin with its bearers and squads of buffering soldiers down the road. Her father had been prone to traveling with a small army, and keeping the populace at a distance. Sayeh thought it a better practice in the long run to keep fewer guards about her, and make of her people friends.

  The bearers placed her sedan chair in a set of mounts. She could tell the difference, because they did not lower her as far as the ground, and because she felt the click as the carrying poles went into the brackets. That was better; less sand in the rugs and cushions, and easier to climb out gracefully.

  There was a clatter as the steps were brought. Sayeh gathered her son into her lap—he only squirmed a little—and waited for the chief of her personal guard to draw the curtains back. Her guard captain Vidhya smiled through his gray-streaked beard. He reached down and lifted Drupada from her grasp. Vidhya balanced the boy on his shoulder—much manlier than the hip trick, Sayeh thought, concealing a grin—and extended a hand for her to use to lever herself upright with as much dignity as could be managed.

  She stood, and surveyed her domain.

  Her palanquin had been set down at the base of a long bight overlooking the glittering curve of the sea where the rocky and occasionally precipitous coast swept up toward the north. The water lay dark beneath the silvery glints reflecting from the Heavenly Sahal that brightened the veiled daytime sky behind the Cauled Sun. Snowcapped mountains, the southernmost reaches of the Steles of the Sky, lofted themselves above the haze of horizon to the west, to shimmer in the light of so many cascading stars.

  Sayeh looked down and glimpsed the sea so many lengths below. A rocky pier stretched out to sea before her. It was built out from the cliff edge, seemingly unsupported except by its own span, a feat of Wizardly engineering. It was of black stone flecked with plates of mica that glittered as bright as the facets of the waves below. It was no more than Sayeh’s height in width, but over two hundred fathoms long. There were no rails.

  Sayeh did not step too close to the edge. It would not do for the rajni to collapse mid-blessing from unchecked vertigo.

  Along the clifftop behind her, her people stood ranked many dozens deep. They too wore white and silver, or as close as they could come with their limited resources. Keeping white clothing white required a certain expenditure of money and time, and in practicality many were garbed in the soft duns of undyed homespun. They murmured among themselves, their voices soft but lifted and carried to her by the wind blowing out to sea.

  Sayeh wished she could not hear a lack of confidence in those murmurs, even now. The auguries that had attended the beginning of her regency—and the beginning of the dry season—had not been favorable. She needed good omens now.

  Along each side of the pier stood the water-divers. They too wore white—a scanty brief twisted around their loins, and nothing else besides their water-belt—a wide band of waxed canvas folded and wrapped tight about each waist, secured with a steel toggle pushed through a loop of hemp. They were women all, and all were slender, almost bony. Their hair was shaved or cropped short. They wore no jewelry.

  Upon them, in the dry season, the life of Ansh-Sahal, and her rajni, and all her people, depended.

  Sayeh fought the urge to glance back over her shoulder, at her people arrayed in judgment along the edge of the cliff. Their judgment was for her, she knew: a rajni alone, a widow, and shandha to boot. They wanted a raja, as they had wanted a raja when, in her fifteenth year, she had married Ashar, the beautiful third son of the raja of Sarathai-lae, to give them one.

  They might celebrate her beauty—even now, with four decades behind her, Sayeh knew they did. Modesty had never been expected of a princess, thank the Good Mother, because she didn’t know how she would have managed it when day in, day out, everyone she met had been praising her graceful feet and the shining part of her hair since she was old enough to paint her eyelids and blush. But they were not ready, yet, to accept that she might be a fitting regent for their raja-yet-to-be.

  Drupada squirmed in the grip of the guard captain. Vidhya held on to the boy, murmuring to him to settle down, that what he was doing was dangerous. He set the prince up higher on his shoulder, and Sayeh tried not to watch. This only heir, this only child of her body—squirming and tickling a hundred fathoms above the sea.

  She could not ward him from everything, especially not from his own curiosity. Not and expect him to grow into a capable king in his own time.

  “Mama!” he called.

  Sayeh squared her shoulders and stepped away from him, out into the center of the long stone pier. She extended her hands, her arms held wide like wings at shoulder level. The fanned, pleated sleeves of her robe flared like pinions. The front of the robe, unfastened except for a silver clasp between her breasts, whipped out and back in the sea breeze, fanning like a tail because bands of silver embroidery weighted the hem. Her gauzy trousers smoothed themselves to her legs, and only the heaviness of more bullion held the bottoms at her ankles.

  The water-divers turned to watch her come.

  As she passed each pair, Sayeh reached out right and left in a benediction. She touched their naked shoulders and murmured a blessing meant for their ears alone. She had learned it at her father’s knee, and it was meant that no one ever heard it pronounced except the water-divers, and the ruler. Certainly the sea wind roaring up the cliff ripped the holy words from her lips and threw them skyward. She could not even be sure the water-divers heard what she said.

  It didn’t matter. They knew the words by heart.

  Some of the women were old, with slack bellies and breasts like stray flaps of flesh and bony scapulae like dull blades stretching skin as soft and thin as gauze. Some of them were very young, their eyebrows black and their limbs rounded and firm. Almost all of them smiled to see their rajni. On one or two, the smile seemed forced. Sayeh tried not to hold it against them.

  She remembered who these women were, and what they did.

  Behind her, she felt the movement, heard the whoosh of lifting wind as, pair by pair, the women dove off the sides of the pier. She did not turn to watch them: she just blessed the next pair, time after time, as she came to each.

  The sea below was too far down for her to hear the splashes about the waves and the wind. But when she turned back, they were all gone. All but one, one of the youngest, who Sayeh could not remember ever having blessed before. She must be new, elevated from an apprentice since the last year’s blessing to take the place of a water-diver who had retired. Or who had been crippled. Or killed.

  The girl gave Sayeh a seething glance, one of heady resentment. It shivered along Sayeh’s nerves until she could practically taste it: bitter, electrical. Sayeh could not hear the people on the shore above the sound of the wind, but she could see them shifting, pointing. Captain Vidhya almost started forward, but then remembered that he had the prince on his shoulder. And before he could hand Drupada away—

  —the girl turned her back on Rajni Sayeh, composed herself, lifted her arms, pointed her toes, and stepped calmly off the pier.

  * * *

  Forgetting herself, Sayeh rushed to the edge, then clutched herself back at the last instant, her head reeling. She still saw. It was a long enough dive that there was plenty of time to watch the last instants of it.

  The girl parted water like a knife, vanishing beneath the sea with almost no splash at all. A perfect entry, for all her insole
nce. And then there was nothing, the long silence, the wait. At least the Sea of Sahal was small enough that the waves knocking the base of the cliffs were not towering, and not powerful enough to throw a woman against them and dash her to death on the rocks.

  Not unless there should be a storm.

  The first bobbing head broke the black sea close to the cliffs, where the earliest divers had gone in. Sayeh saw her rise, struggling in the water as if dragged down by a tremendous weight. She was a strong swimmer, but what dragged at her unseen was both enormous and heavy.

  The tender boats had begun their rush in from the perimeter as soon as the final diver committed herself, and now Sayeh saw them turning to meet the surfacing swimmer. Someone in the boat extended a pole to her, one with a blunt hook at the end and a long rope drooping from the boat-edge to a ring just beside the hook. Sayeh saw the diver thrust something through the loop—a big metal toggle, which caught and held. Then the hook was around her body, under her arms, towing her back to the boat.

  The other tenders were circling, and now and then one rowed frantically toward an exhausted, reappearing head.

  Once the first water-diver was on board and wrapped in a blanket—the deep water was spring-fed down from the roots of the mountains and it was icy cold, compared to the temperatures at the surface—the men in the tender threw the line over a winch and began hauling the bulk at its end in. Each heave rocked the boat, as if something heavy indeed dragged at it.

  Before too much longer, they had surfaced a great waxed canvas bag that—swollen and sausagelike—was larger and obviously much heavier than the body of the woman who had worn it into the deeps wrapped as a belt, then opened and filled it. The boatmen hauled it up into the tender, and one of the men gingerly opened the tight-knotted top, just a little. He dipped a cup inside and handed the result to the resting diver with a little, formal bow.

  It was a pretty gesture, and she returned it. She sipped at the cup, and Sayeh saw with relief that she then tossed her head back and drained the rest of what was contained there.