Kings of Ash

by Richard Nell

  Ruka knew if his people wasted like the citizens of Sri Kon, half would starve in one season.

  Despite their great learning and access to the world they still had superstition and nonsense like his homeland. They believed in spirits and baubles and religious habits meant to ward off trouble or focus luck. Cripples and madmen were abandoned as ‘cursed’, left to linger in alleys and beg or steal for food like strays.

  The islanders themselves were small, weak, and more sickly than Ascomi. Illness seemed to plague them constantly, but still they lingered. The least amongst them were not culled by the elements, but protected by their kin and their laws. And their women—their women birthed single-sons, not twins or triplets, with very rare exception.

  With enough food and shelter, in a few generations, the men of ash would out breed them.

  What the Pyu truly had was rain, and heat. They had beaches low and sloped as if made for shipping, and dominance of an important sea. All of this was natural, ‘from the gods’—who they said hated them. Near everything they had stemmed from fair weather and fertile land, and they were ungrateful.

  It was these thoughts in his mind on the night of his last rest day—perhaps a week before he and Hemi meant to release the Kubi over ‘stone steps’, and change river-life forever.

  He’d been storming back to his room with balled fists from the city to sleep, mind lost in thought, when a red-faced messenger shouted from the street.

  “Master Ruka! Here!”

  The young man was armed with a long knife and wore the king’s colors. He was sweat-soaked, his voice hoarse from use. “The king,” he gasped, pupils flared, “the king asks for you, right now.”

  Ruka glanced at his ever-present bodyguards, then the anxiety in the young man’s eyes, and felt a moment of fear. He wondered for a moment if he should flee, expecting the king had lost his patience, and would now demand Ruka’s permanent loyalty, or offer him death.

  It may also be Kikay making her move. She had never liked him, and he’d known she would not forget their boat-ride and the dead captain who could have been her. Ruka had lost control of his brother in his rage, and felt shame. But there was nothing he could do.

  He took a deep breath and made his decision. If it was Kikay, then that was Ruka’s ‘fate’, and he deserved to face it. But he would not go quietly. He would fight for his life, such as it was. If he failed then he failed, for one day he knew he would pay for all his deeds. Perhaps it was now.

  He followed the guard at a jog, unsure in any case how he’d make it home without the king’s blessing. In his Grove, he stood in his armory, and the dead layered him in steel.

  Chapter 29

  The servants led Ruka through palace gates with tense guards in tow. Butlers and cleaners hid in shadows, and the air buzzed with silence. It was ‘Hotu’, the Pyu calendar name for a half moon, but few lanterns were lit. Ruka felt a concreteness, a stillness in things as just before blood was spilled and futures ruined—a heightened sense of now.

  “This way.” The same runner that found him took the first floor stairs in twos and threes.

  Ruka followed recalling exits, as well as which guards were likely on duty and which hand they held their weapons with. He pictured a map of Farahi’s fake rooms and tunnels to use if needed, though he hadn’t seen them all. He knew the three possible shifts guarding tonight, and the faces of every man.

  They jogged down empty halls in the Royal Wing, not far from where Ruka once killed assassins. The knowledge that he had nearly died in these islands several times did not escape him, and he wondered only if this would be the last.

  He was finally stopped outside an unmarked door flanked by bodyguards. Ruka waited because this did not mean Farahi was inside—often the king left his elite to watch over empty rooms, and to meet him involved subterfuge and false locations. But Ruka heard voices inside.

  The messenger knocked then backed away as if afraid, and Ruka gripped a sword and shield in his Grove.

  Be ready brother. The walls are close so I will give you short, stabbing blades. Kill quickly and do not linger, we will need to move as we fight.

  The door opened, and Ruka nearly drew something from nothing, prepared for assassins and treachery and mortal combat.

  “Let him in.”

  Farahi’s voice. It sounded tired, the words said as if in after-thought.

  Ruka saw old robed physicians huddled inside over a table, picking over glass jars and bickering in quiet voices. Kikay sat rigid in a corner with neatly stacked papers on her lap untouched, eyes drifting, accusing.

  Farahi knelt at the side of a bed surrounded by pails and vials. He held his concubine’s hand as she lay still, her eyes closed and breathing fast, her skin pale and moist.

  “She’s been poisoned,” he said, keeping his face turned to hers as he brushed his fingers through damp hair. “My physicians say there is nothing more to be done.” His voice was calm and far away, the only sound now in a hushed room.

  Ruka was no longer afraid, and ducked inside to kneel beside them. In Hali’s pale skin he saw images of his mother lying in a mound of furs. He spoke softly. “Do you know how?”

  The king shook his head, smiling as if it were funny.

  “She was unconscious when I found her.” He waved at an empty corner. “There were broken plates. She must have dropped them as she fell.” He brought his eyes—with some effort—to Ruka’s face. “I should prefer it if she lived.”

  Ruka expected something approaching threat, but was instead struck by the raw, tender, even humble look. He saw a kind of madness too in the king’s eyes, a terror and rage buried beneath the surface, magma waiting for this man of stone to crack and loose his fire. Ruka knew why the palace felt like a graveyard, and why sweat shone on every face.

  “My mother was an herbalist,” Ruka said, knowing the danger just as well as the king’s trembling physicians. “But I must try to learn the poison’s ways, Farahi, and I can promise nothing.”

  Kikay almost snarled.

  “Now your creature’s a physician? If so, for all we know he poisoned her, brother. Send him away.”

  The king pinched his wide nose. “Out. Everyone out, except Ruka.”

  The physicians almost ran.

  Kikay scattered papers as she stood, pretty face twisted, green-dyed nails digging into her palms.

  “Everyone must suffer for this. All must fear us more than they hate, more than anything. Hali’s dying because we’ve been too soft. How many times must I say it, brother? How many times? Let me punish them. The Orang-Kaya. Our lords. The islands. All of them.”

  Farahi’s moist eyes blinked. “Not now, Kikay.”

  “Not now? Not now? If not now then when, brother? When?”

  “Not now!” The king surged to his feet and Ruka heard servants scatter beyond the door. “Do you hate our people so much, sister? How many corpses is enough? I thought this would end. Must you take each chance to spread cruelty?”

  Her eyes blazed. She came forward and faced the king square, eyes up and locked on his. Her voice hushed like Ruka’s had with a knife at Priestess Kunla’s groin.

  “Perhaps you’ll hate them, too, when your precious Hali dies.”

  The king’s pupils flared. He balled a fist, but relaxed. Then, as if in cold decision, he struck the matron of Pyu, open-handed and hard. She hardly flinched.

  “I’d die for you, brother. I’ll take a few slaps.”

  She turned and walked tall, sandals tapping stone across the room, and closed the door behind her.

  Ruka leaned over Hali’s bed in silence. He felt the blood pulsing through her throat, then lifted her lids, smelled her breath, and looked in her mouth. He couldn’t truly be sure what she’d been given, nor of anything.

  She seemed much like old warriors on jimson weed—as if she hallucinated beyond control, trapped in a dream while her body withered. He looked at the jars labeled with Pyu names—foreign plants and mixtures he didn’t know or underst
and.

  “She’s pregnant,” said the king, who sat still and distant again, “if that matters.”

  Ruka took a deep breath. He was digging through his mother’s garden in his Grove while the dead brought grinders, water and glassware made since his time in the isles. For all he knew, it would burn up when he tried to draw it. So far he’d only tried steel and leather—sturdy tools made of sterner stuff than plants and potions.

  “I’m going to attempt to wake her, Farahi.”

  He said it because he knew he had no choice but to try. Waking her was all he believed could be done with any likelihood. The king’s face rippled with hope as he sat forward.

  “Will she live?”

  “I do not know. But I will open her eyes.”

  The dead went to work. All around him they crushed seeds and roots meant to slow and ease death, calm fevers and madmen, then mixed them with charcoal.

  If Ruka was right, Hali could perhaps be soothed from her dreams. Her heart would beat slower, her breathing relax, and perhaps once woken she could drink and vomit and flush out the toxin from her gut or blood. Or perhaps her heart would simply stop.

  “If you save her, Ruka, I’ll give you anything you want. Anything. I swear it.”

  Ruka heard the tremble in the man’s voice, and held back his brother’s sneer. He wished he could put it away, to forget the word weakness and all urge to exploit it. Not with this good man, not his friend.

  “I would try regardless,” he said quietly, then stood and went to the physician’s table. He made a show of mixing potions and smelling plants, but in his Grove he held the mixture in his hand and closed his eyes. He imagined how it would look in the land of the living, how it would feel grasped in warm flesh.

  Heat and moisture tingled in his hand at once. Unlike weapons and armor, the vial dripped into being as if in the rain. It started as dew, then droplets, beading to pool in his palm without spilling as the glass appeared and filled with a murky blackness, corked with cloth, just as he’d imagined.

  He did not pause to dwell on another impossible thing, instead moving to Hali’s bed and lifting her chin. He oozed the dark liquid into her mouth and rubbed her throat as it clenched and swallowed.

  Ruka and the king knelt there together, as if in prayer, as the young woman fought for her life.

  “Tell me about your children,” Ruka said, hoping the man would remember what he had.

  Farahi’s smile reached his glazed eyes.

  “Good boys.” He looked at Hali’s stomach. “Tane is six now. He chases his tutors with a stick. He charms the maids for more toys, and teaches his brothers bad habits.”

  Ruka tried his best to smile. He imagined fatherhood and brotherhood—a life where ‘extra’ anything was possible, and where resisting it was a virtue.

  “Rani and Manu are serious, and too much like their father. They sit and watch Tane for hours.” Farahi leaned forward and held Hali’s hand. “Kale...” He laughed, and his eyes welled. “Like his damn mother. Won’t eat, won’t sleep. He fusses and fusses till he has his way, which is always.”

  “Uhhhm.”

  Hali’s head twitched, eyes fluttering then darting about the room.

  Ruka blinked and saw his mother lying in her furs, calling for him with a half-frozen mouth.

  “Fara-che?”

  The king squeezed her hand and his face transformed, as if he had never been afraid.

  “I’m here. You’ve been poisoned, my love. We need to know how.”

  She turned her head and moaned. “I don’t…I had some tea, maybe, I don’t know, Fara-che. My stomach.”

  Her anguish hardened the king’s face. “Who brought it, Hali? Where were you?”

  “Bring me my son.” Her eyes went wide and she clutched at his arm.

  For a moment Farahi froze, then the hardness dissolved, and he was up and screaming at the door for Kale and physicians.

  They brought the boy wrapped and sleeping, hair longer than when Ruka saw him last. His fat had slimmed enough to show his mother’s features.

  The physicians flooded and purged the king’s concubine as she tried to hold her son, who woke up and cried as he looked at his parents. She called his name and took him as she rest, sometimes humming a low, sweet song.

  The king paced and raged and bargained with spirits and gods. He threatened his men with death if they failed. He swapped from lord to man, back and forth, holding his lover’s hand or hair or the buckets as she expelled. When the chief physician said it wasn’t working—that ‘maybe what the barbarian did made it worse’, Farahi screamed.

  He threw the man to the tiles and beat him with his fists despite Hali’s weak protests. It went on and on, and when he turned back, red mixed and smeared across his cut fists. He left the man unconscious on the floor. His eyes promised worse, far worse, as if this violence were but a drop in an endless sea.

  “Who was it?” he demanded. Again Hali said she didn’t know.

  Who is to blame? Ruka sat silent and alone in his miserable empathy. Who is to blame?

  Hali’s vomit soon turned to blood, and the king begged her not to die. He took the child away, banished the physicians again, and brushed her hair.

  Since the beginning, Ruka had counted water-drops in his mind because knowledge was useful, and perhaps next time he could do better.

  In less than a hundred more—despite the king’s pleas and threats and Hali’s promises she felt better—she fell asleep again, and ceased to breathe.

  The king’s lover died white and fetid, slick with blood, sweat, and tears. She had been alive, young and beautiful but a few hours before her death. It was a fact without comfort, or pity, or perhaps meaning. But it was the truest thing Ruka knew.

  Farahi stumbled from the bed then the room as if drunk and without a word.

  Ruka sat alone and looked at the corpse. He thought: I could have killed her, and built her a grave. She could have lived with me in the land of the dead, and perhaps that is better than nothing.

  But it had not been his decision to make, and impossible to explain. He locked the image of Hali’s face in his mind, thinking perhaps later he would carve a statue of her beauty to stand forever in the land of the dead. He expected this would bring the king no peace.

  Chapter 30

  Servants shuffled against doors and walls, staring at the ground as Kikay stomped past.

  She had no plan except death for the first man, woman or child to look at the red welt spreading across her cheek. Her legs took her down empty halls and stairwells, away from light, people, and especially Farahi.

  She walked down into darkness and terror where three innocent girls hung naked and sweating.

  “Stretch them up.”

  Her new master of torture tugged at ropes as Hali’s maids wept.

  Kikay lifted a spiked iron rod. She beat the youngest across the legs, and meant to strike once, maybe twice, but kept hitting. Then there were screams and begging and all the girls crying out so weak and pitifully.

  “Stop,” she grabbed the girl’s thick, beautiful hair and yanked down hard. “Stop!” she screamed and pulled back to keep hitting, moving up from long legs to slim sides and arms, then the flat stomach that had never birthed a child, till the girl’s toes painted with blood and the spikes shone in torchlight.

  “Who did it?” Kikay shouted, panting. Only two girls were left to answer.

  “Please, please my lady we don’t know. We don’t know! We loved Mistress Hali! Please!”

  “And what were you doing while someone killed your beloved mistress?” Kikay hissed.

  They cried and she almost knocked out their teeth. The oldest kept talking.

  “She…was to see the king. We were warming a bath.”

  “And who told you that?”

  “She did! She told us herself!”

  Kikay snarled and threw the rod clattering across stone tile. She wiped her hands on the torturer’s apron, and picked up a jagged knife meant for saw
ing.

  “You’d best think of something useful, and quickly.” She put the flat of the cool metal against her cheek and closed her eyes. When she opened them the oldest had her face scrunched in some mixture of fear and concentration.

  “There was a teapot,” she breathed out hard, as if she’d just realized. “We didn’t make it, she never asked.”

  “Then how did she get it?” Kikay came forward with the blade, setting it down gently on the girl’s wrist.

  “I don’t know. Please, please I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know much of anything, do you?”

  “No, lady, please. I don’t.”

  Kikay took the knife away and shoved it back on the spotless table. She sighed.

  “Keep them here. I may free them, or I may butcher them and put their heads on stakes. We’ll see.” She ascended from the gloom, followed by pleas for mercy and more pathetic weeping.

  Obviously, the teapot was the answer. She could go back and tell the physicians, but no doubt it didn’t matter now. As usual Kikay tried to see the positive from tragedy, and at once knew Hali’s death was a mixed blessing.

  Yes, the woman had her uses—she could whisper words in moments a sister could not. But she clouded Farahi’s judgment, and made him weak in ways he should be strong.

  Kikay glanced at herself and saw blood drying in patches on her dress and her shoes. For once she didn’t care. Shadowy walls and portraits of Alaku kings flew by her in dim light as her legs took over, the feel of night air against her skin all the purpose to move she needed.

  Should she start the killing tonight? She couldn’t decide. Should she gather up servants and guards, sending long knives in the city for Alaku enemies in their beds?