The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  How in the coldest corner of the Scholar-God’s most benighted hell was Himadra going to support not just a visiting dignitary, but two standing armies? And why was he so eagerly recruiting to increase the size of that army, when he would only have to feed and house those men?

  “Because he has no intention of quartering them for any longer than necessary,” the Dead Man said out loud, to clarify the situation to himself more than to impart any information to the Gage.

  “Pardon?” the Gage said, absently.

  The Dead Man thought of the message sewn up in oilcloth, dangling ribbons and lead seals, hidden within the Gage’s secret compartments. A message from a Wizard, to a queen. His heart beat faster. His belly seemed to drop right out of him.

  Would Himadra march them in the rainy season? Did these foreigners campaign in winter? It seemed to the Dead Man so very unwise, but he had to admit there was a great deal he did not know about the Lotus Kingdoms. Perhaps the summers were worse.

  Perhaps.

  He said, “We’re riding into a war.”

  * * *

  That night, the storms broke over them in brand-new earnest. If the Dead Man had thought he’d seen rain before—well, now he saw rain, and thunder, and lightning. He sat beside the Gage in the darkness of the wheelhouse, aware that he should sleep but unwilling to give up the serenity of a stormy night so easily. He even drew out his rarely used pipe and his hoarded tobacco, and managed to strike a light into the aromatic shag despite the damp.

  He was still there, seated leaning against the helm and smoking slowly, when Nizhvashiti climbed up the railing.

  Some light from the kingdom’s spectacular night filtered through the roiling clouds, making them seem like smoke lit with an inner fire. The Godmade hesitated atop the railing, robes flapping black against a darkly glowing sky like some inquisitive raven.

  “Gage? Would you mind company?”

  The Dead Man felt an irrational surge of jealousy. He has company. But he bit his tongue: Nizhvashiti had been brilliantly useful, though the Dead Man’s earlier suspicions about the convenience of it all had not waned. And the caravan had problems that perhaps the Godmade could help find the solutions for.

  “We’re up here,” the Dead Man said.

  Nizhvashiti hopped the railing, robes swinging soddenly, and joined them in the dark. Just as the wheelhouse was becoming all the more crowded, lightning flashed violently overhead. It gleamed off the Godmade’s golden false eye, and the thunder crackled almost immediately with the flash. The Dead Man jumped, on his feet before he knew it.

  The Gage put out a hand to steady him. “Keep your powder dry, Serhan.”

  Nizhvashiti … laughed. Not a cruel laugh, but a chiming, merry one. The Dead Man blinked: he wouldn’t have imagined it. But then, he was a Dead Man, and he supposed most people would be startled to hear him laugh, also.

  “Hello,” the Godmade said.

  “Hello, Nizhvashiti,” the Gage answered.

  The Dead Man nodded—it was not so dark that the gesture was useless—and asked, “Can’t you end this damned storm?”

  The Godmade laughed again, gentler this time. Almost a womanly chuckle. “It is not my place to control what the Good Mother makes. Or the Good Daughter, either. They know the world and its needs better than I. So I merely ask, and they answer.”

  The Dead Man bit back the acid reply he would have leveled at the Gage—you do not know this strange priest well—and reminded himself that he had a similar relationship with his own god. Except She never answered. Not in so many words. The Scholar-God was above other deities, which were minor demons and angels and demigods, all. They might intervene. She chose to act only through intermediaries, saints and prophets, so as not to upset the terrible, trembling balance of the fragile world She had written into being so very long ago.

  He grasped after a philosophical mood and eventually found enough shreds of one to cloak himself in even if the cold wind still bit through. “Well,” he said, “I suppose watching it gives us something to do.”

  He scooched over before he sat back down. The Godmade sat with him, shoulder to shoulder, companionable. The Gage stood beside them, so stolid and silent it was easy to pretend he didn’t exist. Together, they watched the storm.

  Spray dashed up from the deck with each heavy raindrop, wetting the edges of the Dead Man closest to the lip of the overhang. His and Nizhvashiti’s rears were out of the wet, at least—the helmsman’s shelter had an elevated deck. The Dead Man wondered if ascetics minded sitting in puddles, or considered it simply a just element of their self-mortification.

  It seemed rude to ask.

  The Dead Man leaned back and folded his hands behind his head, trying to imagine himself on a grassy hillside in spring. He heard the Godmade breathing beside him, but stared instead up at the storm-dimmed sky.

  The Godmade said, “Tell me about your god, then, Dead Man. As I have told you something about mine.”

  Was he being called upon to witness? To witness to a foreign cleric, and one of such manifest power?

  It seemed a strange reason for his god to have brought him here, the Dead Man mused. But then, the Scholar-God moved in mysterious ways.

  He realized, shocked and ashamed, that it had been days since he had remembered his meditations. One was meant to read the words and study them daily, to consider them and contemplate them until the meaning began to open to one’s knowledge like the unfurling petals of a rose. That was the beginning of wisdom, and the root of holiness. Without a proper sun to remind him of the stations of prayer, he was becoming an apostate.

  The Dead Man closed his eyes—the storm still lit the lids red with every flash—and opened his mind to a verse from the sacred texts, allowing whatever the Scholar-God would will to come. He was nevertheless surprised by the lines that rose to the forefront of his mind. They were not lines for catechizing an unbeliever, but rather words of questioning, of love of the world, of doubt.

  He tried to feel the meaning of the words, speak them with passion nonetheless. If this was what he was inspired to, then he would not believe he had been inspired wrong. And it was wrong to simply intone the Scholar-God’s arguments. They must be … internalized. Considered. Spoken as if they lived and breathed and were each day argued anew, not as if they lay dead and dusty in some tomb.

  The Dead Man quoted, “‘There is day and there is night, brothers. Those are both sweet things. There is food in the belly; there are the stars afire above; there is water in the river. There is the sun hot on your back and the pulse of blood hot in your heart. These are all sweet things. Likewise there is the smell of your children’s hair, the feel of a pen in your fingers, the song of the poetess. Life is always sweet, sisters. So who then would choose to die?’”

  After what seemed a reverent pause, the Godmade said, “Are those the words of your god, Dead Man?”

  “They are the words of Her Prophet, Ysmat of the Beads. They are Her words, as Her Prophet recorded them.”

  “Your god seems to argue there in favor of the secular world. Does not She offer a promise of an afterlife? Is not yours an ascetic religion?”

  “Not so ascetic as yours.” The Dead Man glanced down at the priest’s skeletal fingers, which rested splayed upon the robe above the folded, sticklike knee.

  The Godmade’s head shook thoughtfully. “I practice a meditation of the Banner Isles, better to serve my Mother, as a good daughter must.”

  “‘Who then would choose to die?’” The Gage quoted, in his bass rumble. “And yet, there are those who do choose it.”

  The Godmade exhaled long and thoughtfully. “Perhaps we are meant to realize then that if the life that God has given us is sweet, then God being kind, death must be sweet as well. Perhaps the verse is meant to comfort us with that realization, when we come to it.”

  “Perhaps.” The Dead Man glanced over. The priest’s face was relaxed, the gold eye gleaming faintly in the shadowy daylight. “So few have returned wi
th a report.”

  “Those words could be words in my own tradition,” Nizhvashiti continued, as if the Dead Man had not spoken. “‘There is food in the belly; there are the stars afire above; there is water in the river.’”

  The Dead Man could not think of an answer. They rested in silence and watched the storm until, near the end of the bright night that served these strangers as day, the rain thinned and the clouds tore. A great rift opened above the eastern peaks, revealing the starry void beyond in all its brilliance.

  Light spilled through. It washed over the bare brown mountains rising around them, illuminating folds and valleys from a low angle that made them stand out glowing against their own shadows. The sky behind was a tower of twisted cloud, gray and black like silk, tangled like warring banners. The light danced up that tower as it danced up the mountainsides, picking out tiny details, undulations and rills. These were not the flat, dull clouds of a stone-lid overcast. They were fantasias, pinnacles.

  The Dead Man was weary, sleepless, cold. He caught his breath to look at this vision: the tiny wood-walled city huddled in the belly of all this vast implacable terrain.

  “What a God-forsaken place.”

  He almost slipped out of his skin in startlement when chill, bony fingers crept into his own.

  Nizhvashiti leaned on his shoulder for a better view and whispered, “God-forsaken is also beautiful.”

  6

  The snakebite made everything more bearable. Mrithuri’s mind was clearer. Her body felt strong. She even felt up to dealing with her grandfather’s sister’s river-rejected son. Or his emissary, which amounted to the same thing.

  In too short a time, Mrithuri was going to have to sit in the throne room next to the Alchemical Emperor’s empty chair and listen to old men argue, ostensibly to improve or protect the lot of Sarathai-tia and Mrithuri’s people but in all reality to show off their rank and importance to themselves and one another. For now, at least, she could enjoy the peace and quiet with the snakebite fresh in her veins, making her thoughts as chilly, swift, and crystalline as the water from the mountain springs that fed her own Sarathai.

  After she and Ata Akhimah had spoken, they consumed a sparing breakfast of lotus root and shoot, served with lentils and last season’s preserved fruit wrapped with rice in fluffy, delicate pancakes. Mrithuri ate with one hand while reading reports with the other. She didn’t have an appetite for it after the snakebite, but she’d long since learned that her own appetites had very little bearing indeed on her duties as rajni.

  Ata Akhimah broke the silence sooner than Mrithuri would have liked. Unsurprisingly, the Wizard wanted to talk about her duties as a rajni as well.

  “About the lotus—” the Wizard said.

  Mrithuri pinned her on a stare. Her body thrummed with energy; her mind burned clear. “You may be about to lose your reputation as a soothsayer, old friend.”

  “It was that or a war,” Ata Akhimah replied. “And the lotus really was white at its heart.”

  “Conveniently, no one can check your work, as the lotus in question now resides inside an elephant.”

  “A marriage might serve your aims, my rajni.”

  Mrithuri sighed. She wanted to snap, but she knew that was only the nervous tension engendered by the snakebite talking. “We’ve been over this. I’m not marrying someone who will want to rule me. This is my kingdom, and I will hold it in my own right.”

  The Wizard smiled wickedly. “Well, you haven’t spoken with Mahadijia yet. He might surprise you. There’s a stepson from the third wife’s previous marriage, isn’t there?”

  Mrithuri flicked rice at her. “Anuraja’s not going to hand me over to a stepson. You know what he most likely wants. And how fast word of that lotus is going back to Sarathai-lae. There’s not enough political advantage in the world to get me to lie down for Anuraja. Even if he wasn’t in the habit of executing his wives to excuse his own impotence.”

  “I thought he was after your cousin Sayeh. He never was pleased that she married his half brother rather than him.”

  “She’s already got an heir of her own. And is freshly widowed. Do you think she’s going to want that gouty old monster when she didn’t before?”

  “You think Anuraja would make his ambassador interrupt the ritual of the returning rains to press suit for another marriage proposal? It was a theatrical ploy, and meant to force your hand.”

  Mrithuri set her pancake down, still without appetite. Grains of rice, golden with saffron, spilled onto the gilded plate. She concentrated for a moment on the music of the lyre drifting from within the cloister walls. The question didn’t really rate an answer: “My cousin has buried five wives. Would you have me be the sixth, at least until he finds an excuse to execute me?”

  “None of them was a rajni in her own right.”

  “So I have more lands for him to claim. The old bastard’s stick is rotten with the black drip and his feet are festering from the pissing evil. Not all his wives and mistresses can give him a brat that lives longer than a few days, and he still insists it must be their fault. I’ll pass, I thank you.”

  Ata Akhimah could not keep her lips from curving. “Pity your cousin Sayeh’s son isn’t a little older.”

  “If by a little, you mean twenty years.” The boy was still in his swaddling wraps. Mrithuri picked up the pancake again and bit into it vindictively. The nuns were singing softly along with their lutes, an ethereal and almost wordless tune. She chose to let it soothe her. “I’m more worried about the Boneless than my entirely hypothetical marriage.”

  Himadra—to use his given name—was the raja of Chandranath, which lay in the mountains north and very slightly west of Mrithuri’s kingdom of Sarathai-tia. Mrithuri considered him little better than a bandit lord.

  “Your entirely hypothetical marriage might put you in a stronger position where Himadra is concerned.”

  “You mean troops.”

  Ata Akhimah nodded.

  Mrithuri sighed. “Who could bring me troops? Or riches to buy mercenaries? I don’t want some Song prince, or a second son from Rasa. Besides, all the older sons of Namri are married off already, so even if I was willing to take the—what, twelve-year-old?”

  “Fifteen,” Akhimah said tolerantly. “Samrukan, if I recall correctly.”

  Mrithuri waved the disregarded reports in her left hand as if fanning smoke aside. “Anyway, they have that bizarre custom where if you marry one brother you marry them all. As a reigning rajni, that sort of thing becomes very awkward very fast. And don’t get me started on the Song princes. They’ll want far more for their families than they’ll bring to me.”

  “How about a nice barbarian?” Akhimah’s voice was glossily cheerful. “Those Qersnyk tribes make babies like they’re farming them.”

  “You help like puppies,” Mrithuri answered, with a fond glance at Syama. The bear-dog’s massive paws quivered faintly in her sleep, and she issued a low, snoring whine.

  Mrithuri held up her hand for a napkin. One of the maids deposited the thick cotton cloth, well-drenched in warm water and lemon juice, in her palm. She wiped carefully and then dried her hands on the cloth that followed. She worked the elegant, encumbering fingerstalls back over her nails and sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s time to go face the Dharasaaba.”

  The Dharasaaba was a parliament—a tiered assembly of nobles, clerics, and guildsmen with advisory and some fiscal authority over the ruler. Presiding at their councils was Mrithuri’s daily chore—as if playing at priestess weren’t a sufficient consumer of her hours. Well, that was the price she paid for being rajni and raja both. And a husband would not help with that. As much of a bore as she found it, she wasn’t about to turn over the task of governing her beloved nation to some stranger—and a husband couldn’t serve her role as the soul of the Mother River made flesh.

  Mrithuri’s maids offered again to bathe her—they would have used the sacred water of the river, but filtered to clear it of silt—and she again refused
. Ata Akhimah averted her eyes again while Mrithuri’s maids re-robed her. You wouldn’t think a doctor would be so fastidious of sensibility. You would be wrong.

  In clean petticoats, her skin freshly oiled to seal the sacred river’s moisture into her pores, Mrithuri stepped again into the tray of gold dust and closed her eyes while her women painted her cosmetics into place. The thrum of the venom in her veins soothed her still.

  Once the paint was done, they escorted her to the throne room for her early audiences with the Dharasaaba. It was hard to believe that the Heavenly River had made no more than a fifth of its progress across the sky. The night had been a lifetime long already.

  “What do I expect today?” she asked Hnarisha. He was her secretary and castellan, the heart of her councils, and her chief annoyance on the topic of marriage. A man of delicate frame, he had a tendency to put on flesh that he was constantly at pains against. He also bore an incongruous Cho-tse name. How, exactly, a man from the south, not far from the Banner Isles, had wound up bearing a name that should have belonged to a five-hundred-pound bipedal tiger was a little beyond Mrithuri’s comprehension. But he was a very good secretary, no matter what his mother might or might not have gotten up to.

  He consulted his notes. “Mahadijia has requested a hearing in his role as emissary from your royal cousin Anuraja, my rajni. I’m afraid.”

  His lifted eyebrow told her that he’d heard about the interruption this morning.

  Mrithuri sighed. She wondered what he’d wanted that could be so important as to break the sacred silence. Or perhaps the interruption itself had been the point. Discomfiting others was one way to show your power, and disrespecting ritual was another. It could not simply have been ignorance; the man was an ambassador, after all, and the customs of Sarathai-lae were not so very different from those of Sarathai-tia.

  Perhaps it was as simple as Anuraja, and by extension Mahadijia, having no respect for a woman, whether in her role as priestess or as rajni. How could such a one honor the Good Mother when he had no honor for her Daughters?