by Micah Yongo
Yasmin stood and went across to comfort her. After a while, Bilyana’s sobs quietened, small choked snivels coming between her coughs and sniffs.
Hassan spoke gently. “You must tell me, Bilyana. How did Zaqeem come to learn these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“Perhaps he mentioned names, people he’d spoken with, anything.”
Bilyana’s teary eyes stared into nothing, lost in grief. Her voice, when it came, was high and childish, as if about to cry again. “I don’t know.”
Hassan sat back in his chair with his knuckle against his lips.
“Sometimes he spoke of friends. A group of friends, he said. The Fellowship of Truths – that’s what he called them, this group. But he only spoke of it sometimes, when he’d taken wine.”
“The Fellowship of Truths?”
“He said he and Tobiath were part of it. Sons of the Fellowship, he said. He said he was going to tell you, Hassan. He said only you would understand… would hear him… know what to do.”
It was then the candle went out, the short limping flame shivering to a stop on top of the diminishing pool of wax on the shelf. The abrupt dark made Bilyana gasp.
“It’s alright, the wax was low, I told the chamberlain to replace it yesterday but he must’ve forgotten.” Hassan stood to his feet in the blackness. “The hour is late anyway, we ought to take you home before your brother, Zíyaf, begins to worry.”
“Home. Yes.”
“Come.”
Bilyana flinched as Hassan rose and touched her arm in the darkness.
“Come, Bilyana.”
Outside in the street the night was relatively bright, the half-moon shining through a clear sky. Bilyana hunched her shoulders against the chill, grasping the collar of her woollen cloak as Hassan and Yasmin guided her.
“What will you do?” Bilyana said.
“I’m not certain,” Hassan said.
“But you believe me, what I’ve told you?”
“I do.”
Bilyana smiled a little despite her tears, sniffing again. “I thought you would but I wasn’t sure… I know it sounds fanciful.”
“Not so much. Not to me… The week before he died, I received word Zaqeem was to visit. He wanted to be sure I would be in the city. He said only that he had urgent things to tell me, too urgent to be written… He was dead a week later, the night before he was to travel… Perhaps now I know why.”
He guided her by the elbow along the street. The hollow coo of an owl prodded shyly at the dark. The street, a narrow passage flanked by blocky terraces, was empty except for a mule tethered by a mooring post on one end, sleeping whilst it stood, its tired huffed breaths pushing small funnelled clouds into the darkness. There was no wind, no sounds other than the shuffle of their footsteps in the dust and the quiet snorts of the mule as they went along the road.
“I was afraid,” Bilyana said. “If his life was taken for what he knew, then what should become of my own, since he’d told me? For weeks I feared, and then after a while that fear passed. But tonight, now, after speaking of it, after telling you, I’m afraid once more.”
Yasmin could have said there was no need to be, perhaps she would have in other circumstances, but instead she remained silent as they walked her all the way back to the street of her house and waited at its corner as Bilyana reached the door and went in.
“In the one who has become both sage and fool, both elder and child, in this one lies the way of the sha, and the road to mastery.”
The Sayings of Qoh’leth,
The Ninth Discipline of the Shedaím
Twenty-Eight
S H A
To get the arrow out had been difficult and painful, and despite the meditations a niggly hot ache pinched in Neythan’s shoulder whenever he moved it. He expected it would be that way for a while. Gaana and Zahia had done it mostly themselves, sawing the quarrel shaft down before dousing the wound with sourwine and then, with Gaana’s timid voice at his ear, gentle as a hummingbird, warning, “This will hurt some,” cutting with a slim blade of flint around the injury to open the wound and slide the arrowhead slowly out. That had been the easy part. Worse had been the cleaning, Gaana dousing the bleeding sore with more sourwine and water and slipping her cloth-capped finger in and around to push out the dust and silty dried mud left over from the quag and river. And then, worse, much worse, sealing it, pressing the iron rod handle of her cookpan – left to rest in the fire until glowing – into and against the bleeding, its searing touch hissing as it cauterized the flesh.
It took Neythan a while to sleep that night, and a while longer to realize why Gaana was later nervous of him. There was a simpering wary quiet that hadn’t been there before – there when she put food before him, or came to check on the wound, dabbing softly with honey and wine. In truth only this morning, several days on, had he understood why. He’d been too quiet, silent in fact, when she took out the arrowhead and tended the wound. An oversight on his part. Force of habit. The disciplines ran deep.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
Caleb, walking beside him, glanced up. “Oh? Well. Good. Thinking. Never a bad thing.”
Neythan watched him. He’d been that way all morning, his thoughts elsewhere. “Hanesda,” Neythan said. “There are a few things that did not make sense.”
They were walking back for the fourth time that morning from the watersprings near the city gate. Neythan was waddling in small quick steps with a pail of fresh water held on either side, their sloshing weights swinging at his knees. Gaana needed a water carrier for the day but her daughter, Yoani, had taken ill with fever.
“The Brother knew I would be there,” Neythan said. “I’m certain of it now. In the palace. He was expecting me… He called me a heretic. He knew who I was, knew me by name. And then he asked where she was, meaning Arianna, as though he was expecting us to be there together, thinking us one party, like the men by the well did.”
Caleb didn’t answer.
“And then there is something the ranger said, of what he’d heard, that Arianna had turned against her own kind, against the Brotherhood… Are you listening to me?”
Caleb’s gaze swung back around from the street. “What? Yes… she’d turned against the Brotherhood…” He looked up at Neythan, and then away. Then glanced back again. “No bad thing, by the way.”
Neythan sighed. “It’s certain she’s been killing others of the Brotherhood, Caleb. Yannick is not the only one. That’s what the ranger meant. I’d suspected it was so back when we found that body after the ash plains but now I am sure. I could see it in the Brother’s eyes in the palace, the way he looked at me, thinking me party to her.”
Caleb kept walking, saying nothing.
“The thing that bothers me is, how did he know I would be there, in the palace?”
“The ranger,” Caleb said, still looking away. “He must have betrayed us. Warned the Brotherhood.”
“I thought that too. But if it was the ranger, why would the Brother in the palace think me of one party with Arianna, seeing the ranger knew, by our very bargain, that I am not?”
“I’d not think it the first lie he’s told, Neythan.”
“But why lie about that?”
Caleb finally turned back and glanced at him.
“If his aim was only to smooth his escape, by letting them know I would be there, what profit was there in saying I was to be there with her?”
Caleb thought about it. His gaze drew back from the street to Neythan. “You think someone else told them? Not the ranger?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“Who else but the ranger would have known? Or had means even to tell?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or would think you with Arianna?”
“Or know me to be without her but want it told otherwise?”
Caleb’s brow spiked, paying full attention now. “Now there is a thought… Perhaps you’ve been spending too much time wit
h me.”
Neythan laughed drily. “If by that you mean having questions without answers, I agree.”
The street, mud-black and cracked, was narrow, the paving a half-foot above the slender roadway the carts trundled over and hedged by a slim shallow ridge as if to keep those walking from spilling into it. It made the walkway difficult to pass along. Neythan, holding the rope-handled buckets on either side, had to keep turning his hips to sidle around and past the others on the street, tiptoeing sometimes along the ridge like some bored playful child whilst balancing the yaw and swing of the pails. He swooped, stepping up onto the thin ledge around an old man clumsily wheeling a small cart of chickpeas and sumac cuttings, and then nipped down again in time to avoid a wider cart of pomegranates being drawn along the road – where the old man should’ve been – in the opposite direction. Caleb followed, dancing nimbly up and down again.
“How many more of these have you to get?”
“Two more,” Neythan grumbled. “I’d never known clay could be so thirsty.”
“Not all of it will be for the potter’s work. Gaana plans to bathe Petur later. And you will save her the trip for the cooking too. How’s the shoulder?”
Neythan vaguely danced his head, part nod, part shrug.
“I suppose work like this won’t help it much,” Caleb said.
“You could always lend a hand.”
“And ruin my back? Then we’d both be partway crippled. No sense in that.”
They turned the corner and walked along the road past the sheepgate, dodging the stumpy bollards that lined the paving where mules and donkeys were often tied. Not far from here Neythan had had his first witnessing by the market square where they set the giant baudekin on the last day of each week. He could still, even now, remember it like it was yesterday – the dry tang of spices chafing the air, the bickering din of trade, lowing of livestock, a busy place but not as bad as Hanesda, not too busy. Hanesda – something still bothered him about it, niggling his sha, though he couldn’t place what. He needed to meditate. To try to retrieve it. He glanced down to tell Caleb but the older man’s gaze had already drawn away again.
Caleb started, seeing Neythan watching him. “What? Did you say something?”
Neythan shook his head slowly, still watching.
Caleb started to say something, then stopped. He gestured apologetically. His gaze drifted away again. “You ever have things… people… bring things back to you?” he said quietly.
Neythan, fighting the swing of the rope-tethered pails, almost had to lean in to hear.
“Remind you of things, I mean. Things from before…” Caleb’s hand lifted as though to finish the sentence, shaping into a claw in mid-air before dropping impotently to his side. Then he shook his head and looked away.
Neythan, puzzled, spoke to interrupt the silence as much as anything, to try to catch whatever thought Caleb’s flopping hand had dropped. “Smells,” he said. “Smells often do that. For me, I mean… like every spring, in Ilysia, when the blueberries begin to fruit, there would be the smell of mandrake in the clay gardens by the tutor’s fields. The smell would always make me think of Tutor Maresh. Even after he was gone.”
He looked at Caleb, whose gaze had now reeled in and fixed to him, listening.
“I told Master Johann of it once,” Neythan said. “How they made me think of Maresh. He said such things are like the smoke that lingers when a flame dies. Like incense, he said. Lingering shadows, he called them. Every soul known truly by another will have one. And a man’s sha shall feel it, just as it does all things, though we forget its voice.”
Caleb’s face twisted a little.
Neythan saw it. “Though… Master Johann often spoke strange things.”
“No,” Caleb said. “No. He speaks truth this time.”
Neythan watched him carefully. “It is a truth familiar to you?”
But Caleb looked away.
Neythan let the question lie there awhile. Then, not knowing what else to say, he was about to change the subject back to Hanesda, that elusive something still bothering him, something half-remembered. But then Caleb answered.
“The daughter,” he said. “Gaana’s daughter, Yoani,” he smiled sadly. “This morning – she must’ve been dizzy with the fever – she asked me if I am her lost grandfather… She says he was lost before she was born and so has never met him. She thought I might be him.”
“She is fond of you,” Neythan said.
“Yes.” Caleb’s smile faded. “A daughter is a wonderful thing.”
“Is it?”
Caleb didn’t answer. He looked away across the street again, watching the gaggle of fruit pickers carrying their produce-laden baskets on the other side. Neither spoke. They continued along the street, turning at the corner to head to the house.
“I had a family once,” Caleb said. “Your Brotherhood took that from me. After Hikramesh… I returned to my home, to my wife and children… they were all… they’d… they were dead… but they took my daughter, my firstborn.” He looked at Neythan. “Yes, as though I were a heretic. Though I’d committed no betrayal they took her, hid her, denied her burial… Little Yoani reminds me of her. Of my Yva. Like the lingering shadow you speak of.”
“I’m sorry,” Neythan said. He knew little else to say. They carried on in silence along the street.
“Johann speaks truth this time,” Caleb finally said, quietly, almost to himself as they rounded the corner. “The sha remembers, even what we would sooner forget.”
Neythan dropped the pails of water and stopped. The buckets clattered to the ground, one to a flat dead stop, water sloshing over the rim, the other tipping over and spilling into the street.
Caleb, startled, turned and looked at him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“That’s it.”
“You’ve spilt the pail, lucky to have not done so the other too.” Caleb came forward to collect the toppled bucket. “Surprised you’ve not broken the thing.”
“Hanesda,” Neythan said.
Caleb righted the bucket on the pavement and set it down. Most of the water had already run out onto the paving. “That’ll be no answer to satisfy Gaana when you return one bucket light. You’ll have to go back again.”
“Yes… we must go back.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to… Wait, what?”
“We must go back… to Hanesda.”
“Back to Hanesda? Best I remember, it was no easy thing to leave. Why would we go back?”
Neythan was looking elsewhere. “The sha always remembers,” he said, mostly to himself. “Yes,” he smiled, laughed a little.
Caleb looked at him blankly. “Finally. You are finally going mad.”
“Back there. In the tavern. I was with Yevhen and Nouredín. I was drunk… and there was a girl.”
“You’re talking of Hanesda?”
“A harlot.”
Caleb sighed, palm raised, head shaking. “I’ve no interest in hearing about–”
“No. I mean. She was just talking to me, telling me stories, of those who visited there, those she’d entertained. Vassals, princes sometimes, all kinds, and then she says…” Neythan’s head wagged with disbelief as he remembered. “She speaks of a strange visitor, less than a moon ago, she says. An old woman. Very old. And blind, cataracts thick as fingernails.”
“Well. Strange place for one like that. That I’ll grant. But, well, there are all kinds of people in the world…”
“No, Caleb. Listen to me. The harlot told me. She told me. She said the woman was blind, but was like one who could see – the way she moved, the way she turned, the girl couldn’t understand it. But I could, Caleb, even then, even with all the wine. Though I didn’t remember it afterward, then, when she was telling me, I understood.”
Caleb was eyeing Neythan seriously now. “What did you understand?”
“I’ve seen a woman like this but once before. Old, blind, yet as one who is not, one frail, yet able…
I saw her the night I was sworn, Caleb. The night we received our decrees… I’ve known none like her before or since. That woman was an elder of the Shedaím.”
Twenty-Nine
C R O W N
“So, you want for the slavegirl to be your whore. Well, it shall not be so. Not now. All must go well with this wedding. Do you understand? Nothing shall upset it.”
Sidon’s mother hissed the words to him in the darkness. She was leaning over him as he lay in his bed, the blue hue of the moon illuminating her face from the shadows, her fingers pressed against his chest. A strange thing to wake to, but then she’d been behaving strangely ever since she learned about the graverobbing, and stranger still since he’d insisted the slavegirl, Iani, join him in going to Qadesh to meet his betrothed. The girl was an able seamstress, she had an eye for the right cut of a robe, she’d be a good aide in readying his wedding garment, but no, to Mother, the motive could only be ulterior. Sidon barely slept the rest of the night.
At least the road into Qadesh was a pretty one. The windless lake sat like a giant dish of glass to one side, still as ice, staring a blank white eye up to the pale sky it reflected. The city walls were topped at their corners by stone-carved bears, their open, angry mouths pierced by the gaze of watchmen so that at night, or even in the dim cast of a cloudy evening, the hollowed throats glimmered in the gloom with the yellow flicker of a watchman’s fire. They glimmered now as Sidon sat in the carriage opposite his mother, thinking of the night before and waiting for the wheels to roll them through the city to the governor’s Judge House to finally meet his betrothed.
