by Jay Lake
This time I did hug him. Something was wrong, some strange distance, but I thought now I knew what it might be. He returned my hug, stroked my hair, and murmured some vague apology before slipping back into the meeting room.
There was much running about thereafter. A scrivener with a good copperplate hand was made to come write out the final agreement on a length of vellum. Nast made me countersign the bond, which he gave me a receipt for. He then took the bond back and filed it with the bursary clerk to hold against a future payment demand, and gave me a receipt for that. I told him the papers might not survive my trip to the uplands, so he took the demand receipt and filed it with the council’s privy clerk. I refused the last receipt, for I reckoned we had already made more paper than I’d ever have need for. Nast sniffed and slipped it into an inside pocket of his coat.
“Have a care, Mistress Green,” he said. “I should not like to see you fail to return and thus be unable to reclaim your wealth from the coffers of this city.”
That I did not even try to untangle. Instead I bowed. “I shall miss you as well, Mr. Nast.”
The front door was not so hard to find, and so after resetting my veil, I showed myself out. Septio stood across the street, dressed as an ordinary working man and eating fried fish from a folded paper cone. Despite my manifold irritations, I smiled to see him and went to ask after the Dancing Mistress.
We ate fish together and walked slowly toward an ostlery on Shandy Legs, as that street was known. He told me what I sought to hear, though it did not all please me.
“I brought that great pardine brute to the temple.” Septio took a large bite and gulped it down without much chewing. “We protect much there, as with any mysteries, but I was not so worried.”
“More fool you,” I told him quietly. “I was worried. Do you know what those bones were on his chest?”
“He said. Priests’ knuckles.” Septio grinned. I realized he was still as much an overgrown boy as he was a man. “I should like to see him try some tricks in our halls.”
“Did he?”
“No. He looked at the large scrying pond and called up a shadowed forest.” Despite his laughing demeanor, Septio grew very serious. “I have never seen an outsider do that. Even our priests have trouble with the pond.”
“The long puddle of quicksilver at the middle of your sanctuary?”
“Uh… yes.” He seemed surprised that I understood that secret.
“What of the Dancing Mistress?”
“When I took her from the god, I put her in the Hall of Masks. It is not so good a place for visitors, but also is sheltered from the
… eccentricities, I should say, of the divine. She was in no position to respond.”
“Why could I not go there?”
“I said, it is no place for visitors.”
My hands began to tremble. “You took the Rectifier within.”
“He is a spirit warrior of his people. And not human, besides. The eyeless faces would not trouble him. Even if they did, he would shed the disturbance as a teal sheds water.”
Eyeless faces. “So what is her state?”
“Her injuries are not life threatening, though she should spend a week or two abed, the Rectifier says. He fears far more for the state of her soulpath. He told me to imagine a human whose spirit has been shredded and scattered. Then the Tavernkeep arrived with a healer of his people, and a little mob besides. They seemed ready to fight. Her wounds were treated, and she was bathed in the manner of their people.”
I stopped walking, close enough to our destination that the smell of horses was rank in my nostrils. “I would see her before we set out on our journey.”
“The Pater Primus has forbidden it.”
The hair on my neck prickled. “He does not control me.”
“No, no,” Septio said. “He has sent word that the Dancing Mistress is to be kept under the protection of the Interim Council.”
I did not like that much, but I did not see an easy way around it without looking like a fool or, worse, a child. I had accepted a task from the Interim Council. Having the Dancing Mistress recovering under Federo’s watch might give them a chance to grow closer together, when their rift had been because of me. Following the path I already pursued was best for everyone.
Though it sounded good, I didn’t really believe that. Something was still wrong here. In that moment, I couldn’t say what with sufficient conviction to turn around and go back to the Textile Bourse with a demand to see her, and I was mistrustful of my suspicions.
Now I wish I had listened to myself, but at that time, I did not know my friends from my enemies. So I followed Septio into the ostlery and mounted a horse for distance for the first time in my life.
Whoever conceived of the horse as a form of transport must have been a man with no feet. Though I’d been educated in the details of harness and tack, presentation and points, and had sat atop a mincing mare trained within an inch of her life, that had all been at the Pomegranate Court, where the distance to be ridden was less than a stone’s throw, and everything was for the sake of appearance.
The substance of being perched high on the bony back of a cantankerous nag with poor digestion and a desire to put its head down every time it rushed toward the bottom of a slope was quite different. I sat far too tall for my sense of balance. The horse paid no mind to my efforts at control. Even with the leather trousers and boots the ostler had provided me, the pressures of the saddle raised aches in muscles of which I had never before been aware.
Septio laughed to see me stagger bowlegged as I dismounted at the end of our first afternoon’s ride. “My thighs shake a bit after riding over country,” he said with a grin, “but you have the Vitus dance.”
“If you hold still, I’ll be happy to kill you,” I growled.
Instead he unslung a blanket, then cleared some stones to lay it down. “Here. Lie flat a bit. I’ll care for the horses.”
I did as he said, and found myself most relieved not to be attempting the vertical for a while. My horse’s head swung over me as Septio turned it away. I swear the wretched beast was laughing. The aches would pass, I knew, for every part of my body had ached at some time. I was not so sure about the smell.
Give me a ship, any time, or the two feet with which I had been born.
Septio pulled loose the bags we’d found waiting for us at the ostlery, then unsaddled the horses. Once they were freed of their burdens, he watered them, brushed them, then staked them out to crop at the thick grass that grew along the edge of the stand of trees in which we camped. A stream just between the boles explained why the grove was here, in a rising valley with mostly low bushes and scrub grass.
I continued to lie still as Septio arranged our camp and made a fire. He drew a small packet from his satchel and shook some powder over the sticks and bracken. When he set a lucifer match to it, the fire flared like a war among the insects.
“What is that?”
“Much the same stuff that is used in pistols,” he told me. “Also festival crackers. It does not work so well when it is wet, but dry it is wonderful.”
“I did not realize that people carried that about.”
“Few do.” Septio grinned. “An amusement among the temples, though it has serious uses as well.”
He tended his fire a little while to make sure the flames were true. Once satisfied, he unpacked the saddlebags. I continued to watch him until he began wrestling with the problem of boiling some water.
Groaning, I sat up. “I will cook.”
“That is not only a woman’s duty.” He looked down at the small pan before him.
“Dolt, I’m good at it. You manage the horrid beasts, I’ll make dinner. We each have done our part that way, yes?”
He nodded.
Septio is not so bad, I thought a while later as I cut riverbank shallots into the developing stew. He was taking care of our situation.
“Tell me,” I said. “What did you mean about the sacrifice being ta
ken up?” This was not an issue I wanted to visit too closely, but I could not just let it go.
“When people are very sick or injured…” His voice was slow, thoughtful. “When they are in great pain, and there is only poppy to be given them by the healers at the Temple of Caddyce, sometimes a family will bring their father or son to the Algeficic Temple.”
“Because of the pain?”
“Because of the pain. Instead of a suffering, a wasting of body and soul, it can become a sacrament. Some good may be found.” He idly rearranged the firewood as he spoke, choosing his words with care. “As I told you, pain is part of life. A god such as Blackblood guards many doors for the people. Those who worship him, as well as those who pretend he does not exist. Even those who have never heard of him.”
“So this man or boy suffers on your altar?”
“He suffers before the god arrives. Blackblood takes this up, takes him up. Sometimes…” Now I got a long, slow look, almost pleading. “Sometimes the pain is taken up, but the man or boy remains.”
I felt a chill down my spine as the drawing dusk stole the light around us. “What becomes of him then?”
“He lives to serve the temple.”
Ahh. Like the Bone Door on the alleyside of the temple of the Lily Goddess, only much more difficult to pass through. “As you did once,” I said, my voice very soft. My heart flooded with pity for him.
“As I did once.”
“Do you remember your family?”
“A small bit. Some recall more than others.” Septio looked troubled. “If a fever is on the blood or brain, there may be little left of the former life. If it is the crab disease within the gut, the memories may remain complete as the seat of reason remains untouched.”
“Most are taken up.” I hated that idea. “How sad for them.”
“No, no, you mistake me. Blackblood’s priests? The Pater Primus, Tertio, all of us?” The sadness in his face deepened. “We are the sacrifices he rejected. We serve him in life because we were not wanted as part of his substance. Each of us seeks to find his way back to the god.”
What a miserable theology, I thought. The victim blames himself because his pain was not good enough. “What of women who hurt? Or girls?”
“I d-don’t know.” Septio’s voice was quite small. “They die in pain, I suppose.”
That was quite enough of this conversation. I let it lapse only a little too late.
We were headed toward the Eirigene Pass. Our route was not up the Barley Road, which mostly followed the Greenbriar River as it ran through farming country, but another, higher trackway with little traffic. The soil was more sparse up here, and I knew from my studies that the conditions would be much harsher in the winter. The few steadings we saw were long abandoned.
“I do not wish to push through refugees,” Septio said.
I stared at my horse, unwilling to mount, but just as unwilling to sit by this stream for the rest of my days. “What refugees? Copper Downs is not exactly overrun by the desperate.”
“If Choybalsan has truly broken the Temple of Air, there will be villages’ worth of farmers and servants on the move.”
“Unless he’s sworn them all, or given them tea and cakes.” So much rumor, so little truth. This was an invasion of dust and shadows.
“I still think we are better served to find the place and follow his trail, than to swim against the tide he pushes before him.”
“They do not teach rhetoric so much in your temple, do they?” I gave him a sly grin, then levered myself into my saddle. Or tried to, as the nag sidestepped just enough to drop me on my face in the dirt.
This time she definitely laughed.
“I will get you a block, and hold her bridle,” Septio told me. “You need to be very firm with her today.”
Though it was tempting to shout him down for condescending to me so, I could not afford such pride. Instead I stood mute and glowering at my miserable beast while Septio arranged things. I resolved that once I was asaddle, I would remain there all day. This in turn immediately made me regret the amount of tea I had just drunk.
We set out into a morning marked by mist on the stones above us, and a few furry goats on high. The place was pretty enough, and the air crisp, but so very northern a view that I felt a surge of homesickness for the sweltering fields of Selistan. This was a Stone Coast I had known only from Mistress Danae’s books, for I had never left the Pomegranate Court to walk the high crags or upland meadows. Little engravings and bad poetry had told their story, but as a child might recount solstice gifts, with eccentric details and much missing of the point.
I reveled in the hundred shades of gray that made up the tumbled rocks amid the scraggly grass, and their mother cliffs above. Late flowers peeked pale as babies’ eyes from thicker tufts. Sometimes a tree struggled away from the windbreak of its fellows, so a mighty giant could be little taller than I.
Small birds darted along the grass, juking and diving to catch the insects that fled before them. There were more goats. Occasionally the bones of a goat kill showed that something clawed and fanged kept a small kingdom here as well. When the trail ran close to the small river with its intermittent belt of trees, a different chorus of birds echoed from the shelter there.
The cliffs on both sides of us cut the sky into a ribbon of blue fabric from the loom of Mother Mooneyes. If a soul had a color, I imagined it might be that cerulean. Perhaps so many thought of paradise as lying somewhere above the air because we recognized the tint by instinct older than words.
That brought to mind a question that had slipped through my fingers more than a few times lately. “Septio.” I pitched my voice firmly to carry from one dangerous nag to the other, without startling the whole valley. “There is a priestly question I would ask you.”
“Perhaps I can answer,” he said cautiously.
I did not know if his easy confidence and edged humor had been left behind within Copper Downs, or if last night’s conversation about sacrifices weighed so heavily on him. Some good, solid theology of a more neutral sort might be the thing to bring him around.
“I have been thinking on theogenic dispersion,” I said. “About how gods and men draw power from one another.”
“Small questions. I doubt anyone has considered them before.”
His tone was so serious that for a moment I believed him. Then I realized that the city had not kept all of the best of this man behind.
“Fool,” I told him with affection. “I am serious.”
Septio laughed. The sound gladdened my heart.
We rode on, my miserable nag ensuring that I was jostled and bruised as much as possible. I gathered my thoughts.
“As I have read the tale, the gods and goddesses were once far greater and more powerful. World-urges, Lacodemus called them. They made the races of man, and perhaps the other thinking creatures. Then the theogenic dispersion came upon them. Small fragments of their divinity were scattered through the plate of the world. Some of those fragments became the sliver of grace we all carry within us. Others became the gods and goddesses we know in this life.”
He waited a moment to see if I was just pausing for breath. “A fair enough summation of what many believe.”
“I have also read that gods and goddesses arise from the thoughts and deeds of men. This Choybalsan, for example, is feared in part because he aspires to godhood.”
“Indeed.” Septio was noncommittal.
“So I am told that the gods created man, and that man created the gods.” I smiled. “The logic of this troubles me.”
He laughed again. No mockery was in him, just delight. His grin was genuine, and warmed my heart. “Why can they not both be true? Is it that you suppose time has a beginning and an end, and so one must have come first?”
“Well… yes…”
“The world has no beginning and no end. The plate goes on forever beneath the path of the sun. Why should time be bounded when the world is not? It could be that man creates the
gods, then in time, gods create man. Each returns the service to the other like a pair of players at the shuttle-net.”
“That seems strange to me.” I tried to tease out what it was that disturbed me about this logic. “A baby is born, a girl-child grows, a woman lives, a crone dies. Life comes from her loins and it begins again. This is a cycle, not a circle. Every plant and animal does the same. Everything in the world, except for gods.”
“You were taught well, Green.” His voice held real admiration. “Consider this: You say we all have a sliver of grace. What if it is the grace that flows through history, passing down the generations, and we and our gods are but seeds to carry it forward?”
That gave me much to chew on. Even though I had dwelt only in two lands, I had met sailors from a dozen more. Each had their own ideas about the soul’s progress-the Wheel of the Selistani religions was quite different from the transit of the Petraean afterlife. They were not in profound contradiction, either. No one denied the soul. No one denied grace. Not even a dreadful, sanguinary pain god like Blackblood.
The day went on in idle chatter and difficult riding. The problem was not so much challenging horsewomanship as my challenging horse. I persevered.
That afternoon, the horses tired, we stopped just below the highest pass amid the last of the meadows. Smoke was visible in the northern sky beyond. Our little river was no more than a trickle up here, but there were pools. I spotted fish darting above their sandy floors, before darkness claimed such details, and wondered how their ancestors had come so far from the sea. Did they have small cold-hearted gods who spoke in voices of the tide?
I still ached, but today’s ride had been better. I found myself aching in other ways, too, and eyeing Septio with a mix of appreciation and pity.
We built no fire as evening approached, for fear of showing a light. Septio explored a boulder field which had rolled down off the eastern cliffs until he found a crevice with no sign of recent occupation. There we set our blankets and ate a cold supper.
