by Greg Keyes
“I’ve had no notice to that effect,” he said at last.
“No matter,” Hezhi snapped impatiently. “I’m here.”
“So you are. But I am busy.” He took the brush back up and began writing again.
“Who are you?” Hezhi demanded, in as imperious a tone as she could muster.
The old man sighed, paused in midstroke. He finished the character and laid the brush back down. “You may call me Ghan.”
“That’s not a name. That’s the old word for ‘teacher.’”
Ghan set the writing board aside. “At least you know that much. What else do you know, little Princess?” She did not miss the thick sarcasm in the scribe’s voice.
“I can read, if that’s what you mean.”
“You can read the syllabary, I’m sure. Every child can read that. But can you read the old characters?”
“Some of them.”
“And who, pray tell, taught you that?”
There was something accusing in the man’s voice, something that made Hezhi feel suddenly insecure, cautious.
“All Royal Children are taught that,” she muttered.
“Oh, no, Princess. You will not lie to me. That is the first and only thing I will teach you. With a willow rod, if necessary.”
Tsem growled. “You will not,” he said.
“Hold your tongue, servant. You have introduced your mistress. I will not hear from you again unless I ask you a question. Indeed, you will wait outside.”
“He will not,” Hezhi insisted, taking a step nearer her guardian. “Tsem stays with me, always.”
“Not in here, he doesn’t. Not unless he can read, that is.” Ghan looked up speculatively at the huge man.
Tsem could read, but Hezhi knew better than to admit that. Servants who could read were considered dangerous and were usually punished.
“Of course he can’t read,” Hezhi said, hearing her own voice falter. Her manufactured confidence was rapidly failing her in the face of this terrible old man.
“Then he can wait outside.”
“No.”
“Princess,” Ghan said testily, “he can wait outside, or I can send a message to the court, requesting to see your petition to study here. That is what I should do in any case.”
Hezhi hesitated a long moment before relenting.
“Wait outside, Tsem,” she said at last. Tsem said nothing, but his expression showed that he did not approve of her decision. He padded silently to the door and took up a place just beyond it, so that he could still see in.
Ghan watched him go, betraying no satisfaction at having his order obeyed. He then rose and moved to the nearest section of shelves. After a moment’s study, he selected a single volume, took it down, and brought it over to Hezhi.
“Open this to the first page and read me what you see there,” he demanded.
Hezhi took the book gingerly. It looked quite old, bound with copper rivets green with age. The cover was of some animal skin, which marked it as being at least a century old. The cotton paper was still white, however, if very soft from age and use. Hezhi opened the book, gazed down at the faded black characters for several long moments.
“It’s something about the Swamp Kingdoms,” she said at last. “This part is talking about the annual flooding of the delta.”
“Read it out loud.”
Hezhi brushed her hair out of her face. She glanced toward Tsem, hoping for a little courage.
“Ah, let’s see. ‘Herein begins our—something—we undertake to—ah—something—the many divisions of the delta lands—ah—inundated—the many dams and levees—’”
“Stop.” Ghan reached over and took the book from her hands, gently closed it.
“I’m sorry,” Hezhi whispered. “I just didn’t know all of those characters.”
Ghan sat back down on his stool. “I want to know how you know any of them.”
“I have a few books.”
“Do you? In the old script?”
“I have a copy of the Hymn to Bitter Lands.”
“Who taught you to read it?”
“I also have a book about the old script.”
Ghan crooked his mouth to one side. “You mean you taught yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That would explain your awful pronunciation, wouldn’t it?”
Hezhi felt herself near tears. “I didn’t know my pronunciation was bad.”
Ghan shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Why do you want to study here, Princess?”
“What else is there for me to do?”
“Go to parties. Court young men. You must nearly be a woman now.”
“I don’t like parties,” she replied.
Ghan nodded. “Princess, let me tell you the truth. I’m a little impressed that you taught yourself this much of the ancient script. It shows that you have sense somewhere in that little head. It’s not too rare for you royal brats to come in here and waste my time, to try to learn just enough to make sparkling conversation and impress the court. What is rare is a young woman who already knows how to read. If you were a man, Princess, I would not turn you away. I might teach you something. But you are not a man. In a year or two, you will be a woman, and you will marry some fair-faced fool, and he will not want you to be smarter than he is. Teaching you would be a waste of my time, and I have little enough time to waste.”
Anger was lurking behind Hezhi’s fear and intimidation, hidden like a cat. Now it sprang like a cat, suddenly and without warning. “I would not want to waste your time!” she snapped. “I don’t care if you teach me anything. Just sit here with your stupid pen and your stupid ink, and I’ll find whatever I need. I’ll teach myself, like I always have. Just leave me alone and stay out of my way!”
Ghan shook his head. “One must be taught how to use a library, whether one can read or not. You want to know about architecture. Do you think the books that treat that subject are somehow going to leap out at you? You think we keep them all together?”
“I don’t care! I’ll find what I want!”
Ghan stared at her, and beneath his skeptical gaze, Hezhi felt her anger begin to retreat once more. Without its heat, it was difficult to withstand Ghan’s scrutiny, but she forced herself to, even when her anger was stone cold and she became frightened at her own outburst. She wondered if she should add a “please?” to her last statement, but now her jaw seemed frozen in place.
Ghan nodded suddenly. “Very well. You will be very quiet. You will never speak to me. You will be very careful with my books, and the first time you tear one sheet of paper, I will send notice to your father and have you barred from this place. Do you understand these conditions, Princess?”
Hezhi nodded dumbly, at last letting her gaze stray to the richly embroidered carpet beneath her feet. “Yes, Ghan.”
“Good.” Ghan took his writing board back up into his lap, retrieved his parchment, brush, and ink. He did not look back up at her.
Her knees shaking a bit, Hezhi turned to confront the hundreds upon hundreds of shelves that seemed to lead back into infinite depths.
Like the darkness, she thought to herself. Two years ago, I stepped into real darkness for the first time, searching for D’en. Into the unknown.
Here I go again.
“Confusing,” Hezhi told Tsem, as the wind fluttered the cottonwood leaves above their heads. “You could know exactly what you want and never find it. But I made progress, I think.”
“What are you trying to find?” Tsem muttered, scratching at an ant bite on his hairy lower leg. Nearby, water gurgled in an alabaster fountain beneath a sky of lapis lazuli and gold. The roof garden of her mother’s apartments was one of Hezhi’s favorite places.
Hezhi snorted. “You know. Maps. Old maps, drawn before this city was built upon the flooded one. Maps I can use to figure out how to get to D’en other than by the Darkness Stair.”
“If D’en is even …” Tsem cut that off; how many times in the past two years had they had t
his argument? The given was that Hezhi would assume D’en was alive until she had evidence that he was not.
But this time Hezhi’s face clouded, not with anger, but with sorrow. “I … Tsem, I’m not sure I remember what he looked like any more. He had black hair like mine, and a little round face … Sometimes I wonder if it’s even him I’m trying to find, now. But I loved him so much, Tsem. It seems like a long time ago, when I was very young …”
“You are still young, Princess,” Tsem reminded her. “Master Ghan is right. You have other things you could be doing.”
“Oh, yes,” Hezhi responded sarcastically. “Important things. Like going to parties. Like meeting men.”
“Qey thinks …”
“I know what Qey thinks, and so what? Anyway, I’m not old enough for men yet. I haven’t started my bleeding.”
Tsem suddenly grew a shade darker and turned his attention intently upon the fountain. Realizing she had embarrassed him, Hezhi stood and walked to the waist-high wall that encircled the rooftop garden. The city of Nhol stretched out before and around her, a bone metropolis shimmering in the westering light. Her mother’s garden occupied the southern wing of the palace, and though the towers and ziggurats of the central halls soared high above her to the north, nothing obstructed her view to the west, south, or east; this rooftop was the highest on the wing.
Now Hezhi gazed off east. Behind the palace, gardens and vineyards rolled out green for a thousand paces before they were bounded by the wall. Beyond that, vast fields of millet and wheat checkered the floodplain in black fallow and viridian cultivation. Not far beyond them, Hezhi knew, the desert began, the vast waste her people called Hweghe, “The Killer.”
Tracing her finger along the stuccoed wall, Hezhi walked south, gazed out at where the walls of the palace faded seamlessly into the city, a jumbled, chaotic tangle of streets, shops, and dwellings. Near the palace, these were of comfortable size, but they seemed to diminish with distance. Though Hezhi had never been into the city, it seemed difficult to believe that her eyes told the truth about the most distant—and most numerous—houses visible to her. It seemed that they were no larger than Qey’s kitchen—perhaps smaller.
East and south lay the River. Before him loomed the Great Water Temple, a seven-tiered ziggurat that blazed white, gold, and bronze, from whose sides four streams of water constantly cascaded, drawn up from the River by his own will. The two waterfalls Hezhi could see glistened like silver and diamonds. The River himself, beyond, was nearly too wide to see across. He lay heavy and cobalt, massive, unmerciful, unstoppable. A thousand colored toys bobbed upon his back: her father’s great trading barges, fishing boats, houseboats, the tiny craft that could hold only one or two people. Foreign ships, beautifully clean and graceful of line, swept along beneath billowing sails, coming and going from the Swamp Kingdoms and the seacoast beyond like so many swans. All on the River, trusting—no, praying—that he would not capriciously choose to swallow them. People loved the River, worshipped the River, but they did not really trust him. The River had taken people in from the Killer, saved them, made them his own. The people of Nhol had no other god but the River—and his manifestations, the nobility. Like her father, who was part god.
Like herself. Like D’en, wherever he was.
An amazingly loud belch erupted suddenly behind her, and Hezhi smiled. Tsem was no god. He was mortal, pure-bred, despite his parents’ different races. Mortal and happy to be so.
“Pardon me,” Tsem said sheepishly.
Hezhi bit back a rude retort, but she did move upwind.
“It’s not just the flood that buried the lower city, you know.”
“No?” Tsem asked.
“I always imagined, la, and the flood covering the city, and then the Third Dynasty building this one upon that. But really, most of the lower city was filled in on purpose. To raise up the new one.”
“So the next flood wouldn’t be as bad.”
“Right. The River isn’t supposed to flood us, his children, but …” Hezhi shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve heard the River sleeps a lot. That sometimes we just have to fend for ourselves.”
“Why not wake him up?” Tsem asked.
“I think that might be worse,” Hezhi replied. But she made a mental note to look for books on that, too. Priests wrote most books, so there should be more than a few about the River. In fact, that might be another angle to consider. The new palace had aqueducts and canals crisscrossing it, so that the sacred water would always surround them, enclose its children. The old city must have had such ducts, too.
“There must have been at least a few pipes,” Hezhi mused to herself.
“You’ve changed the subject, haven’t you?” Tsem said, his brow wrinkled.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. The one useful book I found was on the reconstruction. There were no maps, and that was a disappointment. But it talked about what they did. They filled in the courtyards with sand and rubble. Houses back then were mostly courtyard, and the walls were even thicker than the ones in the palace are now, so with the courtyards filled in, they could build on top of the old buildings, even if the rooms were still empty. That’s why the floor cracks in the old sections, sometimes, and there are spaces underneath. That’s why we haven’t gotten anywhere; even when we find a suite of rooms that isn’t full of sand or water, we eventually hit one of those filled-in courtyards. But you remember that one pipe? The one we found about a year ago?”
Tsem grunted. “The one I couldn’t fit into?”
“Yes. I bet that was one of the sacred water tubes, built to carry water to the interior canals and fountains.”
“And? It was blocked off, too.”
“It had collapsed. Recently, I bet. If we could just find those … If I knew where the old temple sanctuaries were …”
“Princess!” Tsem’s eyes were wide. “Temples? We can’t go into temples!”
“Why not? After all, one day there will probably be a temple dedicated to me, like there is one for my father.”
“But not to Tsem, Princess. Tsem is not safe from sacrilege, and he guesses that you aren’t, either, whatever you may think.”
“Hmmf. Well, I’ll find that out, as well.”
“Princess, you spent all day in there and found only one book.”
“You have to admit, it’s better than bumping around in the dark the way we have been. In one day, I understand more about the problem than I did this whole past two years.”
“Well, I’m all in favor of keeping you from bumping around in the dark.”
“And yourself,” Hezhi added.
“That, too,” Tsem admitted.
IV
A Drink with the King
Perkar’s palms stung with the shock of his blow; the axe twisted off the grain of the wood and whistled down, out of his control. Angata swore and danced aside, the heavy blade barely missing his calf.
“Pay attention to what you’re doing, you fool,” Angata snapped, glaring at Perkar from his new vantage two strides away.
“Sorry,” Perkar grunted, barely meaning it.
“Sorry wouldn’t help if you’d gashed my leg down to bone,” Perkar’s cousin retorted. He shook back his brown hair, his green-eyed gaze still hard.
Perkar shrugged. “Sorry is the best I can do.”
“It’s not helping us get the fence built, either,” Angata complained, waving his hand vaguely at the split-rail snake winding back into the woods, then at the half league of pasture that remained to be crossed.
“I know,” Perkar sullenly acknowledged. His gaze followed the line of Angata’s finger off into the woods.
Angata stared at him a moment and then shrugged. He sank down to the soft, new grass of the pasture, folding his legs up beneath him. “I say we rest, then.” He sighed. “You’ve been like this all morning, and I have no desire to hop back to your father’s damakuta on one leg.”
“Father wanted this fence done by the new moon.”
“He didn’t
say which new moon, did he?”
Perkar shook his head ruefully and flashed his cousin a brief smile. “You’ve got me there. Maybe I should sit down for a bit.”
“Yes. Until you can get your mind back on building your fence.”
“My father’s fence,” Perkar corrected him, his voice a bit sharp.
“Oh. Oh. So that’s it, eh?”
Perkar chewed his lower lip a moment before reluctantly replying. “I was seventeen yesterday, Angata. Seventeen. And I’m still working on my father’s holding.”
“Your father is a great man.”
“Yes, yes. My father is a great man. Rich in Piraku. Yet what do I have?”
“His good looks.” Angata grinned.
Perkar glared at him. “I should know better than to talk about this.” He turned his face back toward the forest. An awkward silence grew up between them. Perkar, brows knotted, clenched around his frustration; Angata’s broad flat face was set in an exasperated scowl.
“You know the answer,” Angata muttered, breaking the silence first. “Get yourself a woman. A woman with a good dowry, a father-in-law with a lot of land.”
“Why don’t you just say ‘marry Bakume’s daughter’?” Perkar snapped.
“All right, you stupid fool. Marry Bakume’s daughter. The Agasapanyi Valley has some of the best pasture in the world. Bakume offered you two pastures, twenty cows, and a good bull to go along with her. Not that anyone would need all of that to marry Kehuse. You’ll find no lovelier bride.”
“I don’t like her.”
“Perkar, I heard your father say he would offer you ten cows into the bargain himself, if you would marry her.”
“Oh, he did? So now I have a dowry?”
Angata reached for him, but Perkar pulled away. “You should forget her, Perkar,” he hissed, and Perkar knew they were no longer speaking of Bakume’s daughter.
“Easy for you to say. You’ve never known her.”
“No,” Angata said, a little heat of his own rising into his tongue. “No, I’ve never lain with a goddess. But I’ve lain with women enough, and they’re all pretty much the same, Perkar. I can’t imagine that even a goddess would be that different.”
