Kings of Ash

by Richard Nell

  Chapter 22

  Ruka banished his brother and stared at the walls. In his mind he watched Bukayag struggle against the monks again and again. Both the fight and the room were fascinating, world-changing.

  It seemed he had things to learn here even of violence, though such close hand-to-hand meant little in war, or against men with swords and armor.

  Still—two little Northerners had trapped and knocked the mighty Bukayag senseless, and if it weren’t for the pain shooting through his torso, shoulder, and several places on his head, Ruka may have laughed.

  But this scuffle was a minor distraction. What mattered, what truly seized the slowly firming earth beneath Ruka’s feet and spun it like an angry god, was the room itself.

  The walls before him were like a huge carving, as if a single piece of enormous stone had been hollowed out from within and placed here. The shapes and symbols were physical things, not carved in like a rune, but emerging as if cut away from stone like statues. They weren’t just sculptures, however, nor meaningless artwork made for beauty alone—they were symbols, and perhaps words.

  The Batonians had runes.

  Thousands covered the room from floor to ceiling, perfectly spaced and consistent. It covered the whole Ascomi tongue, and more. Ruka almost pointed as he recognized symbols, an excitement rising in his breast.

  Edda’s mark! And Seef, and Bray, and Noss!

  He could make no sense of it. It was impossible, and yet here they were, just as a single book in Farahi’s library had described.

  “You must leave at once, for this…blasphemy.”

  The old, miserable looking priest seemed ready to burst, but Ruka stood and ignored him. The young priests or warriors stirred but stayed down, eyes widened with surprise perhaps because he’d stood so quickly.

  Ruka almost scoffed at them—as if this small tussle could bring him true pain and suffering—as if a few strikes of a palm would be enough to keep a man like Ruka from his purpose.

  Though, he had to admit, it did hurt.

  He rolled his shoulders and winced because Bukayag was pouting like a child, and he’d left Ruka to feel the wounds and bruises he’d earned in the hall. But pain didn’t matter, minor wounds didn’t matter. He had come here for this.

  The Batonian ‘test’ room lay before him. It was mentioned in a single book on ‘Ancient Religions’ from Farahi’s collection. At first it seemed just one of many books Ruka pored through as he memorized and created in his Grove’s growing library. Then he’d recognized the runes, and nearly revealed his amazement to Aleki.

  They’d been learning of religion, old and new, from the continent and the isles—mostly the words of the ‘Enlightened’, or an ancient Pyu prophet of sorts. Among other strange things, the islanders believed a man could defeat death with enough thought, or at least the right kind of thought.

  From the continent they had embraced a view that the world and heavens were in perfect harmony—that action brought reaction, good brought evil. But like the Ascomi, they had ancient, terrible gods. They had ocean-boilers and child-eaters, imperfect beings that hated and loved and feared like men, different only in scale and power, cruelty and greatness.

  All the old stories were written in some version of the island tongue, and without any to truly stand out—that is, all except one.

  The hero Rupi, who tricked the gods for fire, fought off sun-beasts, and did a hundred impossible things—his story had been first written in what the islanders called ‘Old Batonian’.

  What mattered were the symbols. The islanders now all shared the same symbols, but ‘Old Batonian’ had a language with a thousand symbols for different words. And when he’d first seen them, Ruka choked on his spit.

  Most of the symbols had extra loops and slashes, curves or angles, but still—they were unmistakable. They were runes. He’d asked his tutor all kinds of questions: How old is the language? Where does it come from? Who are the people there? Where did they come from?

  But the man was little help. He seemed not only disinterested but perhaps annoyed at questions about an old, meaningless dead language. Ruka had at once formed his plan to see it for himself.

  “Please, Ruka, do as he says.”

  Arun rose now to his feet, legs bent and ready in a fighting crouch.

  Strangely, Ruka couldn’t seem to read anything meaningful on the walls. He knew the symbols, but they weren’t arranged in any sort of pattern that formed words he understood. Perhaps the patterns had changed, he realized, or perhaps it was a code, or perhaps whoever drew them had not meant to say anything at all. He couldn’t help but feel disappointment.

  There are answers here, Ruka thought, or perhaps pathways to better questions.

  But he needed time.

  “If I was your student,” Ruka said without looking away from the walls, “you could punish me. You could educate me properly.” He met Lo’s eyes and waited, then at last knelt down and bowed, head on the floor, as time slipped quietly through the room.

  He hoped his earlier arrogance and rudeness had been enough to entice the man to accept this to punish him.

  Give men what they want when it benefits you.

  Ruka grinned into the floor, thinking very well, Farahi, I will try to learn.

  “You wish to seek Enlightenment?” the old man said, his tone pinched and raised at the end.

  “I do.”

  Ruka kept his head lowered and tried to control his anxiety. He did not know what he would do if the old man refused. He counted drips of his water-counter and tried to be patient, tried to ignore the almost palpable incredulity of the islanders.

  “You will swear to obey me in all things?” said Lo after a long pause.

  Kikay stepped forward and almost stomped. “Teacher, please, this…”

  “Is not a woman’s business.” Lo snapped. “You will swear?”

  “I swear it.”

  “Then I accept you. Take off your clothes and lie down on your back.”

  Ruka almost snorted. He had expected pain, or possibly a task so self-destructive he would be forced to refuse. But humiliation made sense. It was a weapon of the weak.

  He obeyed, careful with his damaged ear as he stripped off the cloth shirt, bunching it with his shorts in the corner. He was glad his brother still slept.

  The islanders all stared at him, and he remembered the feeling when he’d first become ‘Bukayag’—the unwanted eyes of townsfolk after hiding in the hills for years alone.

  “You will lie there until I tell you otherwise, and from now on you will call me Master.”

  “Yes, Master,” Ruka said at once, etching every new rune in stone in his Grove as his gaze swept the ceiling.

  Then Lo was telling Kikay the ‘savage’ would stay till the monks said otherwise, and that the king could have him when he’d failed or quit and not before. She’d fumed, and jabbed a finger though Ruka assumed she must be thrilled.

  Then he was left alone. He lay mostly naked on the cool, dusty floor, staring at foreign symbols, ancient and across the sea, yet used for words by his own people.

  Why, he thought, why why why and how, and when and do we come from paradise, or do they come from ash? Were we enemies? Friends? Once the same? Did your world chase us away, or did we chase you here?

  He saw his mother dead and frozen, thawed and rotten come spring, picked down to bones by maggots and wolves. He saw a broken, starving people turned hard and cruel by the cold.

  And then at last, the question that truly mattered, the question he had asked a hundred ways a hundred times and never answered, the question on his tongue before he knew how to speak, and perhaps on the tongue of every man of ash.

  Who is to blame?

  * * *

  The priests sewed up his ear and scalp then starved him in a little room with one barred window. For two days he lay on the floor beside the tiny bed too small to hold him. When Lo tried to sneak in, Bukayag rose up and stared.

  The old man met his eyes
. He tried to hide it, and perhaps it was the realization they now stood alone together in a very small room, but Ruka saw his fear.

  “Why are you here?” he said without coming all the way inside.

  Ruka held back his brother’s venom, thinking I could ask you people the same.

  “I am here to learn.”

  Lo seemed to consider this for a time, then frowned. “What can you do?”

  “Anything that a man can do, Master.”

  The old man showed his toothless maw, which was perhaps a smile. “You are arrogant and rude, and certainly wrong.”

  Ruka shrugged because he supposed that could be true. The old man turned and hobbled off without another word, and Ruka sighed and lay his body back to rest while he worked in his Grove.

  Since he’d first seen the war-fort Pyu men called a ‘palace’ he’d begun a great project of his own. The dead already began to stack the walls from blocks cut in their quarry. They pulled these with ropes and rolled them along tree trunks—just as the Pyu.

  Other teams of the dead cleared forest, or dug into the earth to make room for underground floors. Ruka at first thought the moat a decorative waste of effort, but he had read most sieges ended with the invaders digging tunnels beneath, and thought a deep moat would make this difficult. Starvation and disease were the next weapon of choice, so he’d use the river, and make wells, and fill a hundred cellars with supplies. The dead didn’t eat or sicken, of course—but it was good practice for the real thing.

  He’d also begun sculptures in the Pyu style—starting with images of his mother, of Egil, and Aiden. One day he intended to make a sculpture of all his men, particularly those who died because of him but he hadn’t killed directly. It seemed at least a small way to honor them.

  He would also build the weir, expand his armory, construct the new forges and stables and glassworks and brickworks. The immensity of the task made him smile, undaunted, though he never had enough time nor enough workers, and his plans always outstripped his means.

  Bukayag resisted their urge to sleep. They didn’t talk about the monks in the hall, though Ruka felt his brother’s urge to kill them, even if it meant sneaking into their rooms with cold steel.

  He’d never allow this, and felt only contempt for the thought. He respected the monk’s bravery, their victory and prowess. Arun had saved them from Trung and his pits, and though his reasons were perhaps selfish, the deed mattered more.

  “We should be bringing more from our Grove to the world,” Bukayag grumbled. “We should be testing the limits and growing our power, not wasting time in this shithole.”

  Ruka smiled, thinking now that his brother was active again, he was awfully chatty.

  All things in their time and place, brother. We have much to learn.

  “I’m tired of learning. We have everything we need. Let us return, and conquer the Ascom.”

  Ruka blinked at this, perhaps surprised to hear it spoken out loud. In truth he had already considered it.

  Yes, he had knowledge and power now to perhaps arm a great horde of outcasts and lesser men with the forges of the dead. He could bring word of this new world, converting greater men to his cause in a new campaign. He had more than Imler ever dreamed possible, and the Order had grown weak.

  I have everything, he thought, closing his eyes, everything except a reason.

  “Don’t just lie there, come.” Lo arrived again as the sun rose, and gestured to follow.

  Ruka blinked away a neglected exhaustion, rising with a groan to duck through doorways and down the stair-wells till they walked on fresh-cut grass in a ring facing the lake.

  The view here rivaled the path down from the rocks, which was already a sight to behold. The Batonian lake seemed almost a perfect circle, surrounded by small, fire-spewing mountains like Turgen Sar—the mountain of all things.

  Was it another tie between these people and the children of ash, Ruka wondered? Or just coincidence?

  A boy sat before them in the grass holding a pear-shaped instrument, much like Egil’s lyre. He bowed to Lo and plucked at the four strings with his right hand, placing down fingers higher up with his left. The sound was strange but pleasant, and they sat and listened looking out as steam rose from the water, and the sun dipped down behind its mountain ramparts.

  When the playing stopped, Lo smiled and met Ruka’s eyes.

  “Since you can do anything, foreigner, here—play the peepa.”

  The boy bowed and extended the instrument.

  Ruka looked at it and at his ‘master’, then glanced at the boy. He’d watched his hands as he played and knew many of the movements, able to summon them exactly if required. But it would be like speaking in a foreign tongue. His movement would be clunky and unpracticed and useless.

  Perhaps it was the view, or the warmth, or the pleasant music, but Ruka gestured at the instrument and laughed. It wasn’t truly a matter of practice.

  His digits were too thick, and too rigid, and he was missing a finger. Even with effort he could never play like the boy.

  “I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Your lesson is learned.”

  The priest glared at him as if he felt otherwise. “And what lesson is that?” he snapped.

  “Humility,” Ruka said, feeling more amusement than shame.

  The old man smiled at him, his toothless mouth a gaping hole of darkness. “Oh no, my poor, ignorant apprentice. That lesson has just begun.”

  Lo took Ruka on a tour of the island, where he was out-done at every turn by little brown priests with pleasant smiles.

  Some could balance perfectly on wooden beams. Others leapt through the air holding their weight with toes or fingers; others swam like fish or held their breath long after Ruka surfaced sputtering.

  There were priests who could sing like birds, or catch sturgeon with their bare grip, and yet others who could bend bronze with their flesh or climb trees like squirrels.

  The old man sneered after Ruka’s every failure, but in truth he began to enjoy his own defeats, and the skill of the other men’s displays. His pleasure seemed to annoy his master.

  “You grin like a fool, which you are. So strong and mighty but out-done by a boy who still wets himself at night.”

  Ruka laughed because it was true, and quite amusing, and Lo’s face twisted as he huffed. He took Ruka to a cluster of rough-barked trees, pointing up into the canopy.

  “Catch that monkey with your hands,” he said, then settled on a rock and picked at his gums, as if angry to provide the test.

  Ruka had already seen the creatures on Sri Kon and thought them fascinating. They seemed very playful and clever, and harassed the merchants of Farahi’s island as they stole and made mischief from merchant squares to soldier’s barracks. He admired their intelligence, and their agility, their curiosity and their courage. In many ways, they reminded him of men.

  He watched them as he practiced throwing again and again in his Grove. When he was ready, he withdrew the hidden blade from his ill-fitted ‘apprentice robe’, and took aim.

  The blade spun fast and true, and pinned one animal to its thick branch, straight through the chest. It sagged without even a howl of surprise.

  Lo goggled, mouth working soundlessly as he pointed at the blade.

  “Use your hands, I said! Catch him, I said!”

  Ruka walked to the creature and snapped its neck to be sure it wasn’t suffering, holding it up in display.

  “I threw the knife with my hands, Master. And it seems well caught.”

  Lo blinked with his mouth still agape. He leaned forward as if he might spit or retch, putting his old wrinkled hands on his knees. He leaned against the closest rock, and howled.

  “That’s true,” he managed, wiping away a tear. “That’s true, yes you did.”

  Ruka smiled at him, liking the old priest far more than he expected. “Meat is meat,” he said. “Sacrifice should not be wasted. Tonight I will cook you monkey, Master.”

  The old
man looked up and shook his head, his fit coming to an end as he stared and stared. With a grin, at last, he nodded.

  * * *

  For two more days Ruka was assigned tasks next to apprentices half his age. Together they cleaned chamber pots, cut and peeled vegetables, and scrubbed the temple until their knees were raw. Ruka enjoyed it all immensely, and hadn’t realized it was meant as will-testing tedium until the boys started to complain.

  He only shrugged, and continued, even cleaning at night while he worked in his Grove. When an elder monk finally approached at dawn and told him to ‘leave all that noisy brushing and go to sleep, you idiot’, it seemed the test was over.

  On the third day, Lo came again.

  “Today you dance the Ching, Ruka.”

  Men of ash had no word for ‘dance’, but it just meant rhythmic movement.

  “Yes, master.”

  “Brother Tamo will be teaching you. Do what he says.”

  Bukayag tightened their jaw but Ruka ignored it, and bowed. This time they brought him peacefully to the room of runes.

  Tamo knelt by the windows watching the sunrise. He turned and bowed as they entered, his face serene and friendly, no trace of anger at Ruka, no avoidance of his eyes.

  “Once you have performed to Tamo’s satisfaction, you will see me again. You will not eat until you do.”

  “Yes, master.”

  Ruka studied the room again and found it the same. He wondered with excitement if the test might help him understand, or when they would end so he could explore the island and learn more himself. Then Tamo rose and started moving.

  He was slow, and purposeful, his stance strong and balanced like a warrior. After several thrusts, twists and steps he stopped and waited, and Ruka did his best to imitate it. Then Tamo began again, adding another movement.

  This repeated over and over. Tamo made a total of forty-nine movements or sets of movements that took thousands of water-drops of time, the finer steps somewhat difficult with Ruka’s nine toes. He did what he could.

  As the sun reached its peak outside the window, flickering the men’s shadows as they moved over the creaking floorboards, the routine finished. Tamo bowed again, gesturing for Ruka to step back. Then he snapped forward violently, hacking his way through the movements at full speed.