by Jay Lake
One opened his mouth to protest-or threaten-so I opened the muscles of his forearm. At the sight of blood, they scattered.
Turning to the old man I’d rescued, I tried to frame an apology in Hanchu. I paused a moment to take stock of what I saw. He wore a long buttoned cassock in a saffron-dyed cotton weave with turned-in seams, carefully wrought handwork from the look of it. Distinctive enough, but not the richly embroidered silk and cloth frog closures typical of the better class of Hanchu attire.
“Bid welcome,” I said in my limited, stumbling command of his language. “Take your ease.” Except for discussions of food and cooking, and certain expletives, that greeting nearly depleted my store of words.
“And well met,” he replied in Hanchu. Switching to accented Petraean, the old man continued, “We are lost in this marvelous city, and subject to the attentions of tasteless persons. You are foreign as well. Can you perhaps help direct us with more kindness than the last I asked?”
We turned out to be the man I’d rescued and another small, elderly man who could have been his twin. No, I realized, the other man was his twin. They were matched, even to the point of holding their heads the same way-slightly cocked like a pair of wading birds stalking loaches in the reedy shallows. Looking back, I realize now the gods could not have sent me a sign more clear than that.
I ignored it with the self-assured folly of youth.
“My profound gratitude for the rescue,” the second brother said. “As well as the courtesy. Few here know our country or our language. Your people look inward, not outward.”
I turned the deep brown skin on the back of my hand toward them, and brushed it with the fingers of my other hand to draw attention to the color. “You have already seen that these are not my people, though I abide here. This is a land of pale folk with ideas that are sometimes pale as well.” I’d thought Federo a maggot-man when I met him, the very first of these northerners I’d ever laid eyes upon. “I would be pleased to aid you if I am able.”
“We have lost our way to Theobalde Avenue,” said the first brother.
“Your docks and market caught our eye too well,” added the second. “As did the louts who can be found here.”
Louts, indeed. I’d run into thugs a time or two. “I believe I know the way. Are you in haste?”
The first brother shook his head. A sly wit sparkled in his gaze. “Not now that we have your delightful company.”
The other caught the moment again. “You speak fairly. We shall play the old traveler’s game and offer you a trade. My name is Iso, and this is my brother Osi.”
Osi smiled, as clever and secretive as his brother. “We are traveling mendicants.”
The words slipped back into his brother’s mouth. “Our pilgrimage is longer than our lives will last, but we carry onward.”
The traveler’s game was something I had only read of in old stories, though I understood that prisoners played it much the same way even now.
“I am Green,” I told them. “A girl-no, a woman-of Selistan, lately resident here in Copper Downs. In time I should think to return across the Storm Sea.”
Osi dipped his head. “I will give you this next thing. We confess that we knew who you were, though it was only chance that brought us to you in the market.”
He had given me a new piece of information, and now it was my turn to give him more if I would come to understand why they knew me. I did not feel under threat, but it was still a bit odd to realize that these two had been looking for me. “I was born in Selistan,” I said, “in the region of Bhopura.” How do I get them to answer the question I want to ask?
Iso answered this time. They always spoke this way, I was to learn, like a volley between two shuttlecock players. He had to raise his voice above the whoop of several children nearby, but this did not seem to distress him. “We are on a journey to visit all the temples of the world, but we have not yet crossed the Storm Sea.”
That was an easy response. Perhaps I could drive this conversation back to my purposes. “I have crossed the sea three times, and so I am here today.”
Osi, quite promptly: “We have crossed many seas since we left the country of birth as well, along the Sunward Sea.”
That was far to the east, beyond the usual reach of Stone Coast shipping. Also nowhere near the Hanchu lands, which lay westward of here. The steam-kettle vessels that plied the ocean between the Stone Coast and Selistan were built along the Sunward Sea, though, where the arts of metallurgy and naval architecture and the mysteries of bottled lightning were much better understood. “I am no one to be known in this city,” I said. “For though I was largely raised here, I have never lived among its people.”
Iso replied, “You are known even to us, you who are a priestess of both a foreign god and a new one raised here in this place.”
Osi: “New gods are rare enough that the word spreads quickly to those who study such things.”
Maybe these men can help me find some wisdom to deal with Blackblood’s ever more pressing claims. “I have been within a few temples,” I said cautiously. “And spoken to more than one god directly. For all the good it’s done me. But I am no priestess.”
“And we are no priests,” Iso said. “Still we have knelt before a hundred altars, and recited prayers in more languages than a man should be able to count.”
The market noise rose and fell around us like waves at the shore, but I was completely drawn in to these men and their traveler’s game. “You have gone much farther than I. Home is all but lost to me, even here.” Especially after Kohlmann and Jeschonek had turned me away.
“Home is wherever we lay down our bowls and take our rest.” That was Osi, who laid a loving hand on his brother’s arm.
“Home is wherever I can put aside my knives and sleep in peace,” I told them.
“That is a rare home indeed for one of your formidable talents,” said Iso.
I broke the game then, in a sense, for a rush of frustrated generosity overwhelmed me. “Would that I could offer you a place to stay and set your bowls, but my own position in this city is tenuous. I am sorry.”
“We know this,” Osi said, “for what you say is true of everyone to some degree. Even the wealthy man in his house with a firm count of all his coins considers his position tenuous.”
Iso picked up the thought without a gap in their speech. “You are just more honest with yourself and with us.”
Back to Osi: “We would beg your indulgence, though, Mistress Green.”
Iso: “Priestess or no, you are said to be a consort of gods and a friend to goddesses. You may be able to tell us much to support our pilgrimage.”
“The work of our lives,” Osi added.
As they asked this of me, the spell of the conversation was broken. I did not feel an urge to reject these men. Whatever problems they had were not my own. I possessed too many troubles already.
On the other hand, these two must have great experience with gods and their affairs. And as foreigners, they had no stake in the events unfolding about this city. Everything coming to boil around me concerned pardines, Selistani, or the Stone Coast natives and their petty gods. These men were from a distant place, and had no stakes in the nascent battles.
Could I trust them?
Of course not. Strangers were never to be trusted. But perhaps I could be confident in not counting them as enemies.
“I will make a bargain with you,” I said. “A version of the traveler’s game, in its way.”
“What bargain?” asked Iso.
Did they ever mistake their rhythm and speak over one another, or leave a quiet gap in error? I would guess not, and indeed, never did catch them out so.
“I will tell you what I can of temples and gods here, and the history of this place that I do know well, if from a narrow angle of view. In return, you will tell me what you can of how the gods treat with one another, what deeds they do among themselves. I fear the politics and jealousies that pass among them have alread
y touched my life. I would know more of that with which I am afflicted.”
“Divine favor is ever an affliction,” Osi replied with a small smile. “Though all the priests deny it, who could truly prosper under the fire of such attention?”
In that moment, my sense of affinity with these two blossomed. They understood me in a way that no one here had or would likely be able to. All three of us were strange in a stranger land. I could see how communities such as the Temple of the Silver Lily came into being-people of like mind and allied intent who shared interests. To the grave and beyond, if all went well. Much as what a family was said to be, though I had never known such.
Best of all, these twins were the first people I had met since leaving Ilona’s side who did not place demands on me. All they wanted to do was talk.
“I have seen enough of divine favor to last me a lifetime.” I was surprised at the bitterness that crept into my voice with those words. “A bit more secular favor would not be at all misplaced.”
Iso and Osi exchanged a long glance. It was as if they were conferring, which perhaps they were. What did I know of the bond between twins? Or siblings, even. I had been the only child of my parents. On my one visit back to my father’s farm, I had seen no evidence of Shar, his second wife, bearing him more children.
“We would retire from this market,” Iso told me. “Will you help us find our way back?”
Perhaps this was not a ruse. “Yes.” I needed somewhere to rest that did not involve sleeping with my face pressed against a tavern table. Or bringing on more of Blackblood’s attacks. “I may be a danger to you. There are those who hunt me.”
Another glance exchanged, this one much quicker than before. Then, Osi: “We have learned not to fear. If we are quiet and careful, no one should know.”
I walked with them out of the market. They were a marvel to watch, each moving as smoothly as any senior Blade mother, but always coordinated with the other. A dance in two parts, played out against the rolling tide of a crowd, somehow never touching or brushing against anyone else. They slowed only once, passing a cart from which brass scrap was being sold so that the eyes of one brother-Iso, I thought-could linger on the cart’s cargo before he was shoved onward by one of the scrapman’s boys. Osi took his own look as they moved away.
I slowed my pace as well for a step or three to see what had been of such interest. The cart was large as a beer wagon, the man atop it a veritable draft horse himself. He was selling broken brass statues, bawling out the quality of their work. I let his words wash over my ears, picking them from the hubble and bubble of the crowd.
“… finest crafting! Apes, fresh from losing the races! You knows them sorcerer-engineers don’t use second-rate stuff, not never! Melts down good and smooth, you can hammer it out, all blessed. They died in harness…”
My footsteps had led me out of hearing of his pitch. Brass apes. They had races here, that I’d never seen, clockwork driving the creatures to knuckle through the streets. The last bout had been while I was lurking up in the High Hills. The losers tended to be broken up. I suppose someone had salvaged the clockwork and the cam-based punchleather logic mechanisms that guided their behavior.
I led the twins away from the Dockmarket along Orchid Street, south of the Temple Quarter. The street they sought was a narrow, brick-walled alley almost devoid of doors and windows where it ran through the warehouse district. In fairness not so easy to find if you did not know your way among the stolid buildings. High, blank walls loomed on each side. Iso and Osi stopped in front of one of the few entrances, a watchman’s door, one of them fumbling with the lock. I turned to scan the street while the brothers let us in.
Larceny? Or just a cautious entrance to their own unlikely castle?
When I followed them inside, I beheld an odd place indeed.
***
The twins had made their temporary home in a warehouse filled with maritime equipment. Anchors rusting in iron rows, their upper cross members close to breaking off. Braces and mounts for masts and their crosstrees. Great coils of rope or chain each thicker than my arm. There was even a suite of offices built into what would have been the fourth storey of the warehouse, facing out toward the street and reached by rickety stairs ascending along the high interior wall.
Everything including the building itself looked worn, used, aged. Which made me wonder who would bother to pay to store such gear.
Iso and Osi had made a nest of boat furniture and tarps near the back of the warehouse. Judging from the tracks in the dust, no one but them had been here in a while.
We sat down and one of them-Iso, I think-lit a small stove powered by alcohol. Without any comment, his brother readied a copper pot to boil water, three plain porcelain cups, and a small bowl of loose tea.
“This is our custom,” Osi told me. “On receiving a friend in one’s home.”
“Home is where your bowl is,” I supplied.
Iso nodded. “And where you may lay down your knives.”
For a while I let them care for me, and marked a quiet time for myself. It was pleasant to belong, even in a fleeting way. Short of some serious scouting, or possibly divine intervention, no one would find me here.
That made me very happy indeed. This was my chance to carefully sort through the matters of the Selistani embassy, the pardines and their desires, and Blackblood. Though at first I kept my thoughts to myself, their quiet murmurs and occasional mutual touch tempted me over and over to speak.
They fed me a musky tea that tasted of flowers. I liked it well enough, but would not seek out the blend again. A small bowl of lentils, cooked soft and spiced with a dash of pepper. Both sat well on my stomach. My hunger was eased.
Watching them move, I realized these two touched each other constantly. For reassurance, or as a method of communication. It was like seeing old lovers, or some of the senior Blade mothers, where the bodies were shared much as the thoughts of these twins surely were.
Finally I spoke above the roil of my own thinking, still considering my troubles. “You are very close.”
Osi-I believe-smiled. “We live by a strict code.”
Iso nodded. “If we touch or are touched by one not of our rite, we must be cleansed with ritual, prayer, and fasting.”
No wonder they’d moved so carefully through the crowded market. These two were not fighters, they were ascetics. As I’d seen when I first met them. “So if I were to brush my fingers across yours, this would be unlucky?”
“Unclean,” Osi replied. He held up his hands, as if to ward me off. “Not to say that we doubt your hygiene or your personal practices. Just that you have not followed the spiritual journey we share.”
I was not offended. Rather, I was fascinated. “So you touch one another, but no one else.”
“Exactly.” Iso, this time. I thought I could tell them apart now. He continued: “No matter if you are a beggar or a king. We would still pull a drowning child from the waves, but we would be forced to cleanse ourselves afterward.”
“Both of you?” This amazed me.
Osi ran a hand down Iso’s forearm, barely tracing the seam of his brother’s yellow sleeve. “For one of us to touch is for both of us to touch.”
One mind, one body. I could not truly imagine such closeness. Not even with my baby, who swam inside my womb even now. No lover had ever been so merged. We are born alone, we die alone, we live alone along the way. Had these two found a method to surpass that ultimate confinement of the human spirit to a single body?
I knew it was different for the pardines, and could say nothing of other races, or humans in other places. But these two… “I find your dedication admirable.”
Osi shrugged, the motion passing to Iso in perfect coordination. Iso answered, “It is who we are. We garner no praise and curry no favor, but only follow our rites.”
Iso added, “We must tell you a thing. In our practice, any touch is unclean, but a woman’s touch or breath is a poison to the spirit of a man.”
I laughed, though that rang false against my heart. “You had best avoid the Temple of the Silver Lily, then. My goddess’ halls are full of women.”
“You are the first woman we have taken a meal with in more years than we could easily number.” Osi’s tone was very serious.
Even knowing his words for flattery, he still soothed the hard edge they had just now raised in my mood. “Because I am Green?”
Iso smiled again. “Because the gods here are strange, and more disturbed than we have found before. You stand at the heart of the matter.”
Osi made with his right hand a small sign I did not know. “We have much to learn. Our temple visits are not simple offertory and prayer. You are the one who birthed a god, Endurance.”
His brother: “We have never before encountered a theogenetrix.”
I was tempted to say they had not encountered one now, but I didn’t suppose that to be entirely true, regardless of my misgivings. “You should have known Federo. He carried the god Choybalsan as a woman carries a child beneath her beating heart.” I looked at their serious faces, blinking owlishly at me in the shadows of the warehouse. “Would this have been easier for you if I had been a man who called Endurance into being?”
Osi’s honesty was disarming. “Yes. Much easier. But we are challenged in our work, just as anyone who pursues a quest must be.”
Iso: “So we shall lay aside some rituals, and make additional time for others.”
“No god will strike you down, I think.”
“We are not struck,” Osi said. Something in his tone plucked at my thoughts, but I could not place it, and so dropped the subject as I already seemed to be pushing beyond the edges of their comfort.
***
Afternoon passed in shafts of dusty light that walked slowly across the warehouse’s cavernous interior from narrow windows set high in the walls. First these battens gleamed, then those grates, and for a while a pile of brass binnacles flashed like gold. I spoke more to the brothers, and spent time in my own silences as they attended to their meditations. Though they were mendicant, and seemed to possess little, what they did own unpacked and opened and refined and subdivided into smaller and more manifold belongings. For example, a small satchel revealed a collection of tools. The handles of each opened to smaller tools and firestarters and tiny blades.
