The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  That brought the Gage up. He didn’t stop walking, though, so neither did the Dead Man, stretching his legs to keep up. “Well,” he said. “After a fashion, we’re both dead.”

  “We have so much in common,” the Dead Man agreed placidly, belying his internal urgency. “My death is merely symbolic. So far.”

  The Gage shrugged. “My heart has stopped. And before it stopped, it was drawn beating from my chest and replaced with a thing of pistons and gears.”

  “I suppose that counts for something on the death front,” the Dead Man agreed. “Though I feel we’re getting distracted by technicalities. But only inspect the situation from my perspective.”

  The Gage crouched down a little lower, gazed around ostentatiously, eyelessly, and unnecessarily before straightening up again with a shake of his head. Despite himself, the Dead Man laughed. The Gage’s shoulders straightened in that posture that the Dead Man thought of as a smirk.

  “Your perspective,” the Gage urged.

  The Dead Man plucked up a pinch of his threadbare wool sleeve. “You have metal. I have this. You are a Gage, and I am what I am. What you were before doesn’t matter, as you have been at pains to demonstrate to me.” He didn’t actually believe that—the Dead Man knew perfectly well that what had driven the Gage to become a Gage was still driving him. Was a wound unhealed. But he was certainly willing to use the other’s self-delusion to win an argument. What otherwise was the intimate knowledge of friends for? “And I have never been anything but a Dead Man. So I don’t even have a past self to fall back on. You want me to move forward from the thing that creates me. And I’m not sure I want to. Or that it would be good for me, frankly.”

  The Gage thought about it quietly for so long that thunder crackled eerily, and it began to rain. “There are things in the past you don’t care to give up.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Another is that the thing I was created for still gives me purpose, after a fashion.”

  “To defend a dead, deposed caliph?”

  The Dead Man’s tone held a sorrowful simplicity. “To serve the Scholar-God. Whatever land She takes me to.”

  * * *

  The rain, once it started, continued hard and long and unabated. The oxen went from clopping along packed dirt to splashing through liquid, sucking mud in a matter of an hour. The ice-boats and the wagons bogged down by turns and had to be levered out of each other’s ruts, and—fairly soon—also out of the ruts left by earlier travelers.

  Breathing through the wet veil plastered against his face, hair escaping his queue as he leaned on a lever, the Dead Man bit back on a curse that would have scandalized his one-time spiritual mentors and wondered if maybe the Gage didn’t have a point. They had greased up the Gage’s joints with handfuls of rendered fat, and now the Gage, laboring beside him, gave off the aroma of a slightly rancid barbecue.

  The stink of sun-heated brass had been, the Dead Man admitted—though only to himself—preferable.

  They struggled on.

  The planned route took them through a range of what were technically mountains, but after the heart of the Steles of the Sky seemed no more than foothills. Though the pass was low, by the Dead Man’s new standards, he felt the buzz of relief when Druja came to him and said that the rains had come earlier than anticipated, and they would be diverting through the lowlands. It was a longer route, but the roads there were paved. They would lose less time—and entail less risk—than they would struggling up the sliding, saturated roads on the flanks of the hills.

  Druja did not look relieved at his decision, however. He looked concerned, and not with the usual concern for timetables and schedules that always creased his brow.

  “What is it?” asked the Gage, his booming voice lowered to something like a murmur.

  Druja shook his head. “The low road takes us through the Boneless’s capital. Which is where the bey is headed anyway, so it means we can deliver him precisely to his destination—”

  “He’s leaving the caravan in Chandranath?” the Dead Man asked.

  “Business interests,” said the caravan master.

  “Pity it’s not that damned Mi Ren instead.”

  Druja didn’t speak, just turned his head and spat. It vanished in the rain as if it had never been.

  “More tariffs on the low road?” the Dead Man asked.

  “If we’re lucky. Maybe we can claim we’re pilgrims.” Druja gestured ahead, to where the Godmade walked along the edge of the road some fifty paces ahead, the long staff a pendulum whisking in time with every second stride.

  The Dead Man asked, “What is it your people mean when they say Godmade, Druja? A priest, obviously. I have never encountered one such before—”

  “Not just a priest. There are priests and priestesses, cloistered nuns and sacred royalty, some of whom can beg the direct favor of the Mother or the Good Daughter and be heard, on occasion, in accordance with their duties. A Godmade is different…” Druja searched for the words. “A saint, of sorts, I suppose. A prophet. Like your Ysmat.”

  Not like Ysmat, the Dead Man thought, but he had dwelt among heathens long enough to bite his tongue. “Godmade are not common?”

  Druja seemed uncomfortable. “I saw one preaching once, when I was young. Not since.”

  “Does each of them win favor with your Mother through self-denial?”

  The caravan master thought it over. Thin, cloying mud splashed at every step. “I do not think so. But Nizhvashiti’s sacrifice may be for some private purpose. Or perhaps in payment to the gods, who are said to respect such devotions.”

  The Dead Man thought of something. It almost made him trip as he considered the implications. “If a Good Daughter serves your Mother River, Druja, does that mean there is also a Bad Daughter?”

  Druja was silent for a long time: five steps, ten. Then he kissed his teeth and said, “We do not speak of her.”

  That chill was surely only the rain running down the Dead Man’s back under coat and shirt. He would never be warm again. His eyes tracked the black-cowled shadow of the Godmade walking before them, far down the caravan line. There was a flash, a glimpse of gold, almost-imagined as Nizhvashiti turned toward them and winked, just as if they were clearly audible despite the distance and the falling rain.

  The Dead Man was not new to the ways of preachers. Still, he was impressed.

  * * *

  After two nights in the rain, the Dead Man would have been willing to wrestle Himadra the Boneless personally, just for the privilege of a dry place to sleep. (Although, if he really were literally boneless, that raised the interesting question of how good a wrestler he could possibly be, and what wrestling him might be like.)

  The liquid mud flowed like slimy water. It got into everything—boots, eyes, ears, hair, the interior spaces of the ice-boats—and it dried (when you could get it to dry) into a heavy, stiff, cumbersome suit of coagulated dirt that weighed one down and flaked off into dust at the slightest provocation. The mud came in many interesting colors—pale gray and dull red, in particular, and occasional patches of a dusky blue-purple—and it was as slick as that rancid axle grease. More slick, in fact: the axle grease was a lot thicker.

  “I have come to believe,” the Dead Man deadpanned, digging his heels in while a rope abraded his palms and his boots slid in a patch of slick purple, “that the local soil must be unusually rich in clay.”

  “Yes,” the Gage said from a few knots up the rope. They were skidding one of the ice-boats down a steep patch. “I believe the region is known for its pottery.”

  One of the major drawbacks of spending time with the Gage was the impossibility of determining if or when he was making a joke based on facial expression or modulation of his tone. The area probably was known for pottery. On the other hand, the Gage also probably thought it was extremely funny to point that out when they were both glazed with slip to the armpits.

  The Dead Man decided to laugh. Chuckle, at least, while blinking stinging
rain from his lashes. Around him, the shadowy shapes of the caravan’s passengers straggled, spread out dangerously in the rain. If he were a brigand, the Dead Man would wait for days like this, and attack caravans struggling through the monsoon by preference. There was absolutely no way they could run, if they were beset now. They were strung out all over the landscape, and it was all but impossible to keep a lookout with the weather drumming on their heads.

  Brigands were not in general known for their devotion to hard and uncomfortable work. It was just as likely under these conditions that they would choose to stay home. Still, he kept an eye peeled, as well as he could under the circumstances.

  At least the rain was warm. That probably meant all these mud puddles were full of cholera. The Dead Man passed himself a mental note to try not to swallow any of it.

  He glanced down at his mud-encrusted hands. He’d just avoid eating or drinking or wiping his face for the next month and a half.

  “Only another hour or so to the paved road,” the Gage said cheerfully.

  “And no hope of a hot supper,” the Dead Man replied.

  Then the rope slipped again, and he cursed, and got on with the problem of controlling it and with it, the ice-boat. If they made it to a paved road, he swore, he was going to get down on his knees and kiss the flagstones in the name of the Scholar-God, who had invented civil engineering, and also architecture.

  Oh, right. Except for the cholera.

  * * *

  They did get stones under their wheels, and the Dead Man, true to his prayers, got down and kissed them, though dryly, and he wiped his mouth after—much to the amusement of caravaneers and passengers. At least the draft animals seemed to have no opinions. The rain didn’t let up, but by God’s mercy they were out of the mud, and the body-warm water washed the clay from their skins and clothes after a day or two. Those passengers who cared to even got to go back below and get dry—dryish, as dry as anything could be in the soggy cloying humidity—though the quarters inside the ice-boats were so cramped the Dead Man hated to imagine being stuck in there for days due to weather.

  The marriageable noblewoman was still walking. And so were the acrobats, who actually seemed to enjoy the water falling from the sky. They were stripped down more or less to their underclothes, which probably helped with their comfort. The Dead Man could hear the spoiled Song princeling excoriating his people even through the heavy curve of the scaled hull every time he wandered too close to the second ice-boat.

  On the evening of their third day in Himadra’s lands, the roads grew less deserted; more miserable travelers began to edge around them in both directions, gawking. On the morning of the fourth day, city walls hove into sight. It was their first glimpse of Chandranath, the throne city of Himadra the Boneless, Warrior-Lord of the North. Or the South, if you happened to be coming from the direction of the Steles, the Dead Man supposed. The rain and mist broke briefly as they crested the pass, giving a fine view of the valley below.

  By the Dead Man’s Caliphate-honed standards, it wasn’t much of a city. The citadel was impressive—it hulked amid the granite roots of mountains a thousand feet above, accessible only by a road so steeply switchbacked that from here the stacked lanes looked like steps carved for a giant’s foot. Chandranath itself huddled at the foot of the peaks, and seemed to be built chiefly of mud brick, straw, wood, and daubed wattle walls. The buildings were one story—two at the most, and those few—with heavy roofs of thatch overhanging the earthen walls to keep them dry in the rainy season and cool in the rainless one. A wooden stockade atop an earthwork dike surrounded it, but the Dead Man could see over those quite plainly into the town itself as they descended the pass.

  The city could not have held more than five thousand, the Dead Man thought. If they slept stacked up like cordwood, perhaps double that.

  Cleared fields surrounded the city on all sides. Terraced rice paddies even crept up the base of the mountains behind it, though they did not reach to the citadel—and were currently deserted to the driving rain. Only here and there could the Dead Man pick out the silhouette of a draft animal—some sort of black ox that waded through the muddy water stolidly, heavy horns draping the skull from a center part like pigtails.

  Beyond the city, the road continued through more fields. But at the edge of the fields, a dark forest loomed, and the road dipped into it, vanishing into the tree shadows.

  “Pity we didn’t push on a little farther last night,” said one of the acrobats—Ritu, by name. She was a woman in middle age, mother to most of the aerialists. She was barefoot in the slimy mud, and wore only a pair of pantaloons that were plastered to her muscled thighs, and a halter that revealed a strong midriff under skin puckered from childbearing. The circus seemed to be made up of one or two large, extended, intermarried families. Ritu was one of the ones who had chosen to get out and walk alongside the caravan guards, rain or no rain, and she wasn’t bad company. “We could have slept warm in beds.”

  The Dead Man sighed. “Were I not a religious man, I would place a wager that Druja will not care to stop now, either, with so much light ahead of us. Rain or no rain.”

  He realized later that he had been speaking out of his own desires rather than observed facts. It was a bet he would have lost. And so did the Scholar-God protect her faithful.

  Druja, like most successful caravan masters, was not known for his spendthrift ways. But even that parsimonious bastard realized that if he marched his sodden, filthy, miserable staff and passengers past a perfectly functional coaching inn and caravanserai, he was likely to have an armed revolution on his hands. They would rest there a day, he decreed, and move on in the morning.

  The Dead Man would rather have been on duty. If he could not have progress, his restlessness required distraction. But he drew the red stone for the first shift of liberty.

  He drew also such partial wages as the caravan master was willing to allow him—Druja wouldn’t pay them off for the trip still short of their destination, even if he could afford to without collecting the value of his cargo—and went to find a bathhouse and a laundry and some food that didn’t taste of months in barrels on the road. He’d never seen a Sarathai city before; this seemed too fine an opportunity to miss. It wasn’t home—what could ever be home again, without Zillah, without a sacred charge?—but at least it might be interesting.

  Sadly, he had to leave the Gage behind, as the Gage had drawn a green stone. But the Dead Man thought he was likely to be able to keep himself mostly out of trouble. The boring kind of trouble, anyway. He would have welcomed a little of the other kind, at this juncture.

  Whistling, he asked directions to the nearest bathhouse in his fragmented but improving dialect. The woman he asked looked at him quizzically from under the shelter of a banana leaf held over her head—the rain had recommenced after all too brief a pause—and pointed. “There is only one,” she said.

  I hope there’s more civilization where we’re going, the Dead Man thought, regretting that the Gage was not there to share the thought with. The Gage wasn’t much for bathhouses anyway, being made entirely of metal, but he did enjoy a cosmopolitan environment.

  Chandranath wasn’t big enough to get lost in, and the bathhouse was no more than ten minutes’ walk from the caravanserai. It was identifiable by a red clay tile roof and the clouds of steam rising up from it in the damp, warm air—a striking sight, even though it was physically incapable of adding to the humidity. A wall surrounded it, mortared stone broken by a wrought gate. It was the most permanent-looking structure he’d seen here, other than the wooden coaching inn.

  The rain made every area without stones laid on top into a sucking morass. At least the streets were paved in the city as well as along the routes leading to and from it. Glancing up at the gray stone citadel looming above, the Dead Man suspected that had as much to do with defense and putting down peasant rebellions as it might with encouraging trade and keeping the pubs open.

  He shrugged, and went through the g
arden gate into the courtyard. If he could not get closer to Sarathai-tia, at least he would distract and soothe himself.

  His appearance in the dooryard of the bathhouse occasioned some comedy at first, as the attendants were utterly at a loss with what to do with him. The language barrier didn’t help. At last, he determined that the problem was one of social rank, which apparently the good citizens of Chandranath took exceedingly seriously. As a foreigner, he was considered outside the system—but as somebody who wanted to wash himself in a public bath, he needed to be slotted into it somewhere.

  He imagined it had to do with how dirty the water would be when it reached him, and shuddered.

  Finally, inspecting the color of his money and the hilt of his saber, the attendants appeared to arrive at the conclusion that he was warrior-caste. They accepted his purse and his blade for safekeeping, gave him a glazed tile on a string to hang about his neck as a token for reclaiming them, agreed to launder his clothing while he bathed, and showed him in through the second of six doors on what he assumed was the men’s side of the baths. There, he found a changing room, longer than it was wide, with a series of cubbies along each wall. The empty cubby he selected was constructed of woven mats hung on wooden stakes, and did not quite reach either ceiling or the clay tile floor. But it was replete with hooks and shelves, and he skinned out of his mud-stiff clothing with relief, leaving only his veil in place.

  He followed the sound of splashing and the clouds of steam to the edge of the bathing pool. It was probably not done to jump into the baths themselves while still filthy, he suspected, so—ah, there. A big iron cauldron with a wooden dipper beside it rested over a bed of coals, and cold water dripped from a wooden pipe over it. A tray of clean, damp white sand rested beside. That seemed self-explanatory. He dipped up hot water, diluted it with the cold until the temperature was bearable, and proceeded to sluice and to scrub, sighing in pleasure as road-filth and rain-filth peeled off him like rinds.

  The other men were watching him, he knew. Here was a stranger, and one with a blue scarf twisted bizarrely across his face in a baths, of all the places. They were too polite to murmur much, at least, and all but the young boys and the old men dropped their eyes when he turned back. The young boys were too curious and inexperienced for him to take offense, and the old men were old men: their survival had earned them the right to not give a damn if they stared. He washed out his veil, too, taking care to keep a wrap across his face for modesty.