bin-Sutus did not agree. “I think you are being alarmist. Agors has never betrayed to me any intention of making war upon the West.”
Nihim pushed back his chair and stood. “Of course. But neither did our father give you any indication of what he intended to do in his final testament.”
“I think you are worried where there is no need to be concerned, Ghen-mu. I have spent many hours with your brother, and I don’t find him eager to create war. He will challenge the West, he will play with them as— What is the game the Athadians enjoy so much?”
“Usto. It is a board game. It is an intellectual diversion of the aristocracy. But don’t forget, bin-Sutus, that the Athadians enjoy other diversions, as well. They have arenas, you know, and their bloody sports in which men pummel one another, joust, kick, and gouge.” He shook his head. “We men of the plains race our horses and play to relax and enjoy the life the gods have deigned to share with us.”
“Kicking goats’ heads along the streets of this city,” bin-Sutus smiled, ‘is not precisely what your grandfather and his friends did on the plains.”
“True. But still…it is only an exercise done without pretense. The sports and games the people of the West amuse themselves with—their board games and contests of violence—these are their…rehearsals for life’s events.”
* * * *
Lord Thomo was seated on his verandah behind the Authority, enjoying the fragrant evening, when General Thytagoras loudly made his way past the hired servants and announced himself directly. Thomo winced as he looked across the patio; Thytagoras had just shoved aside the young man stationed at the verandah entrance and was now stalking across the bricks toward his honor. Thomo wiped his face, uncrossed his legs, and tapped his fingers on the table beside him, preparing himself for the officer’s display of temper.
“It’s all right!” he called to the young man hovering behind Thytagoras.
The boy nodded and returned inside.
And like a whirlwind suddenly come still, Thytagoras threw himself into a chair and faced Thomo. He was perspiring heavily, panting, and he bounced one leg nervously as he sat.
“What is it?” Thomo asked him.
Thytagoras’s stare was complete with rage. “I feel as though I should, I should strangle you right now, where you sit!”
“What under the gods are you talking about?” Thomo evinced no apprehension.
“I have just been speaking with Sirom. He told me about the letter you sent to King Elad.”
“This I did.”
“Are you incredibly stupid, or are you just naive?” Thytagoras asked hotly. “I won’t charge you with being a traitor—”
“You speak before you think, General,” Thomo interrupted, warning him. “Watch your tongue, or I’ll bring charges against you.”
Thytagoras growled from low in his throat. “Why have you done this? Why, sir?”
“What have I done, General?”
“You write to Elad—you tell him to send someone from the capital to witness the funeral of a, a barbarian king? Our enemy? Does the moon possess you? What could you possibly—”
“It’s known as diplomacy, General,” Thomo reminded him as levelly as he could. “And I don’t look upon the Salukadian Empire as our enemy.”
“Our…antagonist.”
“That sort of thinking leads to things that men regret. Why do you have such hatred in you? Tell me. I want to know. I wish to understand.”
The breeze was fragrant, wine was at hand, the two were alone in the evening. Thomo watched the officer as though attempting to intuit what was happening in his mind, to imagine what could have shaped him.
But Thytagoras would not answer him. He stood and took an erect, proud posture. “I’m afraid I must resign my commission,” he announced gravely.
Thomo winced. “You’ve been drinking. Don’t be foolish, General. You’re overreacting. Sit down. Please, sit. Tell me why this offends you so much.”
Thytagoras stared at him, then threw his hands behind his back. “I simply cannot be a part of this.”
“You are not an unintelligent man, General Thytagoras. Why do you insist upon hating these people? Is it the color of their skin? Is it the shape of their eyes? Some religious custom? Why do you insist on making trouble where there is none?”
“Is none?” Thytagoras objected, showing a shocked expression. “They moved their troops into our side of the city! They have destroyed our Temple and built some pagan monument in its place! The gods only know what they intend to do now that their old chief is dead! And you say there is no trouble? I ask you, Lord Thomo—why do you pretend that there is no trouble and continue to appease these people? I see is a storm on the horizon! And it is coming at us very quickly! Very quickly!”
The man was sincere. Thomo gave the matter a moment’s consideration before replying. “I appreciate your concern, and I am not dismissing your concern when I say that. I respect you, General, and those are not simply words. I remind you that we have both faced other men’s swords on the field. But our king did not send me here to instigate a war. He sent me here to act as a diplomat. We can find a thousand reasons not to act amicably with the East, but that achieves nothing. Do you think these people want war with us? We know what war is. Do you think that’s why they’ve done these things?”
Thytagoras coughed his disgust. “You’re a soldier!” he countered. “Gods, man! You are a soldier! Where are your instincts? You wore the armor of the imperial forces, and you don’t even think like a soldier!”
Thomo would not accept such a slander; he rose quickly and confronted Thytagoras angrily. “My instincts as a soldier are on the battlefield—and I prefer to use those instincts on the battlefield, General, and not in our streets! A soldier serves his government! Damned be our nation when the government begins answering to the military! Elad has done too much of that already, as far as I’m concerned! As long as my king asks me—as a soldier and as a diplomat and a man of honor—to do everything in my power to prevent war, then, by the gods, Thytagoras, preventing war is what I will do!”
General Thytagoras clenched his jaw. “I cannot be part of it.”
“Then resign! Or transfer to another city! I’ll send you and your temper to the outbacks of the Fasu River! Tell me now! I’ll draw up the papers, I’ll sign all the necessary—”
Thytagoras, wholly disgusted, lifted a fist, then swung it in the air. Holding his chin high, he gravely proclaimed, “I cannot serve my nation with honor, Lord Thomo, when my duties make me a part of dishonorableness.” He reached inside his vest, withdrew a small packet tied with a leather string, and dropped it onto the table. “There are my commission papers, my record of service, my badges, and my formal declaration of resignation. Do whatever is necessary with them. I’ll leave my uniforms in my room, and you may do with those whatever you like.”
“Don’t be a fool, Thytagoras.” Now Thomo regretted his undiplomatic loss of temper. “When you calm down—”
“I’ll strike you, Lord Thomo. Under all the gods, I’ll draw a knife on you! If that will madden you enough to kick me out of this empire’s army, then I’ll do it.”
Thomo stared at him. Something turned cold very deep inside him. “You can’t be serious,” he protested quietly.
“As serious as my mother was in giving birth to me.”
Thomo had seldom agreed with General Thytagoras; they were two entirely different kinds of men. And yet Thomo knew this officer to have served his nation honestly and tirelessly his entire professional life. “Thytagoras…I will refuse.”
“Then refuse! But I’m leaving tonight! I won’t stay here and be a part of this…absurdity!” He looked across the verandah and stared out at the city. “They open their jaws, smiling, Lord Thomo—and we are stepping into those jaws. Do you consider that diplomacy?”
“You are wrong, Thytagoras.”
“And I believe you are wrong. I cannot serve the throne any longer, Lord Thomo. And—trust me�
��I regret that more than I can say.” Failing to salute, he pivoted on a heel and crossed the patio. When he came to the arched entranceway, he turned a last time to face Thomo. “I do not love war, your lordship. But for as long as men have lived, there has never not been war. Sometimes it is the needed thing. And if you understand that, then you must understand why it’s important to foresee where war may happen; and if that war can’t be prevented, then—by the gods!—it’s important to fight that war as earnestly as you fight for your damned diplomacy!”
Thomo stared at him.
“And if you do not understand now what these easterners are doing, Lord Thomo, then you have no right at all to be conducting our diplomacy with them.”
“Good evening, General!”
Thytagoras saluted him fiercely, turned, and went into the Authority Building.
Thomo watched him go. Then, to calm himself—
—if you do not understand what these easterners are doing—
—he reached for his wine on the table, and then cursed when his hand accidentally knocked aside a few strategically placed usto pieces.
He had been rehearsing some deceptively simple moves when Thytagoras interrupted him.
* * * *
As their coach made its way down Losun Boulevard and passed beneath the great Ibar Bridge, Agors and Nihim glanced out the curtains to observe the people of their city—the crowds of them, starkly illuminated by lamps and fragrant torches set in the city walls and burning like a hundred thousand eyes to create a false daytime. Sailors caroused with loosely dressed women; old men walked in the company of youngsters; men and women of all ages strolled hand-in-hand; barterers and merchandisers offered fresh fish, ceramics, rice, dyed cloth, and weapons from their stalls.
When the coach reached the quay, it rumbled to a jarring halt, and the loud voices of trained guards called for the crowds and sightseers to hold back. Then the door was opened and Nihim stepped out, followed by Agors. The shadow of the great city wall behind them cast its dusk on the quay and over the crowds and the tall-masted ships secured along the docks. Nihim noticed the ship that held his father’s sarcophagus; its sails were dressed with animal silhouettes—the gods of the wide plains—and hundreds of lamps glowed upon it. The rising mists of the Usub were caught in the flickering flames of the lamps and created a kind of aura, a glowing halo, about the ship.
Agors did not linger but with his military stride crossed the stone quay toward the boarding ramp. Approaching the soldiers guarding the ramp, Agors decided to loiter, while all around him moved the many throngs of people. The Salukadians among them bowed their heads and held out their hands in postures of deference when they saw Agors. Already word had reached the streets that the late ghen’s elder son had been chosen by the gods to take his father’s place upon the seat of the world.
“O Ghen-mu, grace me with your touch!” “O Ghen-mu, please welcome my baby into your presence!” “O Chosen of the Gods, touch me with your heart!” Such had always occurred whenever the late ghen himself made his rare public appearances—awed crowds bowing subserviently, collecting for a glimpse of the face or a touch of the hand.
But not all there on the quay were so devoted to the son of the gods. As Agors, beneath Nihim’s critical eye, passed his hands upon numerous heads and faces, there came to him three individuals shaved bald, their heads and faces decorated with tattoos and incisions, their clothes no more than animal-skin robes painted with decorations: circles, stylized flames, letters of ancient alphabets. Agors’s eyes went wide when he saw them; his hands tightened into fists, into claws.
“The grace of the Prophet on you, O Ghen-mu of the East,” spoke the foremost of the three.
Agors sneered.
The smiling speaker did not flinch; rather, he proffered a flower, holding it out for Agors to touch or take. Behind him, shadowed by the crowds of others waiting to see the new ghen, stood the other two, a man and a woman—both bald, both stained and decorated, both smiling.
Doom-Soulers.…
“—O Ghen-mu.…”
“Get away from me!” Agors whispered to him.
The three frowned and stepped back.
Nihim leaned close to his brother. “They mean no offense, Agors. You do not—”
“No offense?” He wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “For all I know, they had knives hidden in their sleeves! ‘No offense’!”
“I quite doubt that,” Nihim spoke.
Agors growled and started up the ramp, marching onto his barge. Nihim followed him.
On deck, they stood at the rail and observed the quay below, where crowds stared up in awe and soldiers directed the lines of workers who moved up and down the loading ramps with their crates and boxes.
“I am their enemy,” Agors said to his brother. “Don’t you think I know that? These…Doom-Soulers! They hold us responsible for their holy temple!”
“We are responsible, Agors. We have despoiled it.”
“They think we are…barbarians!”
Nihim stared downward and saw where the soldiers were directing the three Soulers to get back into the city.
“Haven’t you heard,” he asked Agors, “that they think our desecrating their temple is a sign of the last days?”
Agors stared at him.
But Nihim’s expression was tolerant and knowing—passive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Deep into his return to her—here, now—where he knew there was no need for rooms redone to resemble caverns, no need to pay her gold for parodying herself—where he should have been honest with her and more than honest with himself—
Still— He could not, at first, be honest with her.
“Thameron, what has happened to you? What have you— What did you do to your hands, Thameron?”
He had looked at her, shown her his eyes, and she, aware of what she herself had suffered, aware of choices she had had to make, did not comprehend everything but had sympathized with him.
“I couldn’t wait,” she had confessed to him. “I was too ill. I had to—leave.…”
And she had asked him, in those moments of their new togetherness, to lie to her.
“I wondered about you for so long that finally I forgot about you. People can only wonder for so long. So much happens. I never forgot, really, but I always…I knew I’d remember you, and I wanted to keep that.”
Eyes. Hands. New touching. Kissing, like children, new to themselves.
“I want to help you, Assia. I want to change everything for you, now.”
“Tell me that again,” she had asked him. “Tell me that again, tell me some more, and keep telling me, I want to hear you say it, I want to believe it, I want to believe it from you.”
Lying there beside her, hidden away in warm shadows in some corner of the city, the humility of his congress with other human beings now past, looking into her ivory and dark eyes, knowing that whatever had been eradicated or strangled or mutilated in her—still—some part of her remembered, and wanted him, or wanted again that one brief night, the one rainy afternoon—
With the Master of the Hell of Men.
“What did you do to your hands?”
In love with her? Looking into her eyes, in love with the aroma of her, frenzied as by any sorcery with the grunts and moans of her, the abandonment. Did it matter that it was him? Did it matter to her? Her nails in his back, drawing blood, as if it were a ceremony.
Her hair, fluttering beneath his lips. Her breasts, and sinking into the flesh of them as he might sink into the warmth of the good earth. Her nipples, like living things, as large and wrinkled and dark as the skin of puckered berries. Flesh, human flesh, and all of her emotions.
He had sobbed, overcome, and drawn his face close, laid his head on her stomach and seen there the wide open pores of her dark tanned skin, pores from which small hairs grew: dark wheat upon a shadowed glossy field. He had moved his tongue upon her as though he were pressing soft footpads upon some clean area, the first ev
er to move upon such a place.
And, later, she had tried to quiet his sobbing. It was only after they had finished that she remembered him as a priest, the way he had been. Now he was a man, a man who had journeyed far and who knew such passions and how to create them—intricate mazes of pleasure, flowing and rolling, dipping and rising. Where had her friend learned such things?
With petals of flowers that he had turned into gold, he had brought her to this apartment, a vast room decorated with draperies, mosaics, statues, a fountain, and windows of colored glass. She had never before been in such a place. But, being Assia, these things had been interesting only for the moment; she had been more interested in Thameron himself and what had happened to him.
Circumventing her question, he had asked Assia about herself. And she told him everything but told it briefly. Few details. Yet Thameron appreciated her gradual decline into degradation, for what other than that had happened to himself? And he had wondered again how it was that the truly good souls are always those who are made to suffer.
* * * *
Late at night, at the bottom of the night, with the light of the moon coming through the barred windows and the flames in their lamps dancing softly, Thameron told her. Assia had bathed in the fountain, and now she sipped tea and reclined upon pillows while Thameron sat cross-legged in the umhis position and—
Told her everything.
“You loved me for myself,” he said to her. “You were the single person who understood what I was trying to accomplish.” Although they had been young then, young in experience and not yet emptied by life—still, she had been Assia then, and she was the same Assia now.
“Tell me,” she whispered, her dark eyes urging him, one hand fluttering near his feet to encourage him or simply to touch him.
He stared at her, marveling at her, remembering all the hired women who were now so far away, for although their bodies had been similar, and the fall of their hair—
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