by J. S. Bangs
A low table was set with trays of fruit and a jaha board with the pieces in their starting positions. He moved towards the table cautiously, lifted a mango, then put it down in a hurry. Not time to eat yet. He took a drink of water from the ewer on the table then moved to one of the basins to wash his face. He heard footsteps behind him and turned.
Kirshta and a young woman were waiting for him. The woman shared the prominent nose and kinky hair of the Western people with Kirshta, but she was very pretty, with large eyes and a mouth that seemed to be hiding a smile.
“This is my sister Vapathi,” Kirshta said. “She is to dress you and will be your maid while you remain in the Ushpanditya. When you’re ready, I’ll bring you down to the Dhigvaditya.”
“The Dhigvaditya?”
Kirshta smirked. “You’ve spent plenty of time there. The fortress of the Red Men.”
“Ah.”
Kirshta extended a hand towards Navran. “Vapathi?”
The woman came forward and began to strip Navran. Navran reddened for a moment as her fingers brushed against his shoulders and chest. She glanced at him, saw the redness of his face, and laughed.
“Are you nervous to have a female servant dress you?” she said with the slightest hint of mockery in her voice.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Kirshta and I always work together. But Kirshta must see to the Emperor’s Hand directly, so you’ve fallen into my care.”
“You do this often?”
“I do what I’m told,” she stated matter-of-factly. “But don’t worry. If you were to lay a hand on me, you’d be in much worse danger from Ruyam than I would be from you.” She gave him a flirtatious smile. “Now kneel.”
Navran knelt. Vapathi oiled Navran’s hair and beard and touched them with a hint of myrrh, then redressed him in a fine white cotton dhoti and a green kurta embroidered with yellow serpents. She prodded him to stand, and she slipped smooth leather sandals on his feet. Then she stepped back and examined him from head to toe.
“Good enough, Kirshta?” she asked, glancing back at her brother standing near the entrance to the room.
“A proper member of the Emperor’s household,” Kirshta replied.
The attention was suspicious. To what end? Navran wondered.
Vapathi brushed a speck of dust from his shoulder and looked him over again. “It’ll do,” she said.
“Have you eaten?” Kirshta asked.
“Not really,” Navran said.
“Eat, then. Ruyam can wait for us.”
Navran wouldn’t have wagered much on Ruyam’s patience, but he did as Kirshta indicated. Vapathi gathered up Navran’s old clothes and left the room, making a hand-sign to her brother which Navran couldn’t understand. Navran tried a slice of the mango and successfully swallowed a bite. The sweetness was nearly unbearable on his tongue. He took another swallow of water and fiddled with the pieces on the jaha board.
“Do you play?” Kirshta asked. He stood directly behind Navran and stared over his shoulder with interest.
“Some,” Navran said.
“Let’s see.” Kirshta sat down across the table from Navran and tidied his own pieces. “You may go first.”
“No time for a full game.”
Kirshta smirked. “We’ll start one. You make the first move.”
Navran took another bite of mango and shrugged. It would pass the time, at least. He moved one of his peasant pieces down the left corridor, a standard opening move. Kirshta made a similar move on his side of the board. The dhorsha and another peasant followed, which Kirshta mirrored, both players angling towards the nearest tower that they could safely take. Kirshta took the tower opposite Navran’s, as expected. Navran hesitated then moved one of his peasants towards the middle of the board.
Kirshta raised an eyebrow. “Not going down the right corridor?”
“Not how I play.” Moving to the center was an aggressive move, suggesting an offensive towards Kirshta’s tower even before securing the second tower on his side of the board. The strategy was very successful when Navran played for chits at the wharves. But a doubt tickled him. Kirshta might have learned a different play style in the halls of the Ushpanditya.
Kirshta folded his hands and leaned back. He studied the board for a while then looked at Navran with eyes narrowed. “I think it’s time for you to go to Ruyam.”
“You giving up?” Navran asked.
“Not at all. But we’ve made Ruyam wait long enough. I’ll make my next move later.” He rose to his feet and put his hand on Navran’s shoulder. “Follow me.”
This was not the end to the game that Navran had envisioned. He gave Kirshta an annoyed glance. But he was in no place to complain, so he rose and followed Kirshta out of the room.
By now the route from the tower to the Red Men’s fortress was becoming familiar. Once they passed through the door into the Dhigvaditya, Kirshta took a different hall, up a steep staircase and out onto a wide porch atop the barracks.
There stood Ruyam, a tower of red silk and gold rings, the morning sun directly above his head. The red silk of his robe seemed to glitter with fire, and the oil on his head gleamed.
As soon as they stepped through the door he said, “Come here, Navran.” He did not turn to look at them.
Navran came. Ruyam stood at the edge of the porch, a thin wooden paling all that separated them from a drop of four stories into the courtyard below. Navran’s heart pounded. He had never been atop a building this tall. Ruyam was a head taller than him, and Navran felt overshadowed and diminished. Ruyam’s hand touched his shoulder with a disturbing, familiar touch. “What do you see?”
The wall on which they stood dropped to an enormous enclosed yard of packed dirt. A company of Red Men drilled in the yard, snapping their spears left and right with precisely timed grunts. The yard was enclosed by a wall of white stone, at least twenty paces thick, hung with red banners and painted with Am’s spear and rice stalk. A tower rose at the far end of the yard, and a low, squat building lay crouched under the south wall.
“Soldiers training,” he said. “Why?”
“This is the Dhigvaditya, the fortress of the Red Men whom you see drilling below. We stand atop their barracks. This is the main garrison, fourteen thousand strong. Their sole purpose is to serve the Emperor and carry out his commands.” He folded his hands behind his back and began to walk. “Follow me.”
Navran followed. They went to the south and turned onto the top of the wall enclosing the yard. Red Men were posted every forty paces along the top of the wall, and they bowed to Ruyam as they passed. Ruyam walked to the outside edge of the wall and looked down a gap between the spade-shaped crenellations. “Look here,” he said.
Navran looked, then gasped and pulled himself back. The outer wall was twice as tall as the inner, plunging one hundred feet onto a foundation of dun-colored stone. A band of gnarled scrub guarded the foot of the fortress wall, and on its far side the buildings of Majasravi began, a chaotic patchwork of brown, yellow, white, and green stretching across the plain.
“The Dhigvaditya is built atop an outcrop of stone. The walls were built at the edge of the precipice, and at the foot a moat was deepened, widened, and filled with thorn scrub. It’s over a hundred feet straight up from the bottom of the moat to the crown of the walls. No army has ever taken it, not even in the days before Aidasa when it was just the garrison for the king of Sravi, and the walls were half as high as they are now.”
Ruyam strolled slowly, putting one hand on his stomach and raising the other in the walking variant of the Moon posture. “There is an old legend about the Dhigvaditya. The king of Sravi, when he had laid the foundation of the walls, bade the thikratta who served him to prophesy and bless the fortress. The thikratta took a stone and said, ‘No army will breach these walls unless they first possess this stone.’ Then he threw the stone into one of the foundation piles, and the king ordered it buried. The tower at the far end of the courtyard is now built on top of it. A
nd as promised, no army has ever breached the walls.”
They walked around the perimeter of the training yard atop the wall with the sounds of grunting and clacking spears trickling up from the yard. To every side the multi-colored sprawl of Majasravi stretched, obscured by a thin humid haze. When they passed through the east tower and reached the north side, Ruyam pointed into the city.
“Do you see the temple?”
Navran grunted in assent. Perhaps a mile from the fortress was a large walled temple complex, by far the largest thing on the horizon. Within the complex were multiple tanks of green water, banks of flowers, mango groves, and a ring of five small shrines topped with painted pyramids. In the center of the shrines was a massive structure of brown stone, its every surface covered with reliefs and friezes, painted in myriad colors, topped with a six-layered pyramid and a disk of brilliant gold.
“Majavaru Lurchatiya,” Ruyam said. “The great temple to Am the Right-Handed. The Emperor gives offerings there, and in return the Right-Handed One fortifies his armies and assures his dominion.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“There used to be six minor temples surrounding the Great Temple. The second Emperor Cupta built the Emperor’s Bridge over the Amsadhu, and as the culmination of that project he moved the sixth one stone by stone to Jaitha. Now it sits on the temple island, and everyone who crosses the bridge must pass over its porch. You see, Navran, the minor temples represent the boundaries of Am’s sacred dominion: one for each of the four directions, one for the earth, and one for the sea. The temple which represented the south was moved to the Amsadhu, the river which divides north Amur from south, the river which once was the boundary of Manjur’s kingdom. The Amsadhu is Am’s. All of Amur is Am’s.”
He kept walking along the north wall, turning towards the roof of the barracks where they had begun. Beyond the barracks, the taller, more delicate domes and towers of the imperial residence gleamed.
“Where is the temple of Ulaur, Navran?”
“In Virnas.”
“Ruins and dust are in Virnas. But here in Majasravi….” He gestured to the pink and white-marbled palace beyond the barracks. “That is the Ushpanditya, begun by Aidasa as an expansion to the fortress, and farther expanded and improved by every emperor since. Where are the palaces of the Heir?”
Navran kept his lips pressed together. He said nothing.
“You seem like a reasonable man, Navran. I expect you to make a reasonable choice.”
They reached the porch atop the barracks and found a quartet of Red Men waiting for them. The leader knelt to Ruyam and said, “The guard is ready.”
“Have the guests arrived?”
“All of them. They await you in the Green Hall.”
“Wonderful. We go directly. Navran, stay with me.”
They descended a staircase into the barrack where, to Navran’s surprise, a cohort of twenty Red Men stood waiting for them. They bowed to Ruyam when he approached and fell into step behind them. Navran walked nervously at Ruyam’s side through the Horned Gate between the barracks and the palace.
The Green Hall was a broad hall paved in green marble, with an open colonnade on one side that looked over a garden of orange trees. They entered through the rear, Ruyam and Navran at the lead, and came into a crowd of silk and perfume. Nobles crowded the hall in scarlet, gold, indigo, and emerald dress, rings encrusting their fingers and rubies in their noses. There were murmurs of surprise and outrage as the Red Men forged an aisle for Ruyam and Navran through the crowd. Navran stayed a step behind Ruyam, feeling his face grow hot at the stares of the nobles. By the stars, he hoped that Ruyam wasn’t planning on showing him off.
There was a raised dais at the far end of the hall. Seven steps rose from the green marble floor to a gold-inlaid throne that was draped in red cloth. When they reached the bottom step of the throne, Ruyam whispered, “Over there,” and pointed to the side of the dais. In relief, Navran moved to the side, and the Red Men came forward and formed a line that blocked him from the view of the rest of the room. Why had Ruyam even brought him, then?
Ruyam raised his hand. The room grew quiet.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
There was no answer from the gathered nobles. Ruyam began to pace on the dais. “Why so shy? Many of you have seen me before. Speak up, whichever one of you is brave.”
A mustached man near the front of the crowd bowed and said, “You are the Emperor’s Hand.”
“And what is my name?”
“The Emperor’s Hand has no name.”
“False!” Ruyam shouted. The man jerked backwards. “I am not the Emperor’s Hand, and I have a name. And my name is Ruyam the thikratta.”
An explosion of shouting and shock roared through the hall. An instant later it was silenced by Ruyam’s raised fist.
“I do not give you permission to shout yet. I said that I am not the Emperor’s Hand. That is because Kupshira Jandurma-daridarya is dead. As of last night, there is no Emperor.”
This time the shock was registered with indrawn breaths and quiet grimaces spreading throughout the crowd. No one wanted to shout. Last night? Navran wondered. Had the senile wretch died and been carried out while he slept? Or perhaps he had been dead for some time.
“There is no Emperor,” Ruyam went on, “because I am not allowing one. The Red Men are mine. In accordance with orders I gave weeks ago, the Red Men in Gumadha have captured the Prince-Imperial and placed him under arrest. If there is any other claimant to the Ushpanditya who would like to step foot upon a stone in Majasravi, I will burn him alive and feed him to the dogs. Let that be fair warning. All of the kings and khadir and majakhadir of Amur will bow to me as they did to the Emperor. But you will not call me Ruyam-daridarya. I am Ruyam the thikratta. I need no other title than that.”
The room was silent. Navran wondered why a thikratta needed an empire if he did not need a title. But maybe even the empire itself was a means to some obscure end for Ruyam.
“You may make obeisance now,” Ruyam said.
No one stirred at first. Then the man who had ventured to answer Ruyam’s question stepped forward, bowed at the waist, and said, “Hail Ruyam the thikratta, Lord of all Amur. May you live forever.” He dropped to his knees, touched his forehead to the floor, and backed away.
One by one, the other nobles in the room approached and did the same.
* * *
The majakhadir and khadir lingered into the evening, gossiping and shaking heads in little clusters like swarms of gnats. The colonnade of the Green Hall looked over the silhouettes of orange trees swaying against the indigo horizon in the breeze. The interior of the hall was bright with lamps, casting a warm glow over the long tables laden with a feast fit for—well, fit for the Emperor: oranges over ice, mangoes and limes, roast lamb and fried fish, heaps of steaming rice and roti.
Ruyam reclined on a bed of purple silk cushions at the foot of the dais and made Navran rest next to him. It was profoundly uncomfortable. Glances shot like arrows towards Ruyam from throughout the room, though those glances at least showed fear and respect. But him? The nobles looked at him with confusion and pity. He would prefer that no one looked at him at all.
“Did you appreciate my performance?” Ruyam said, leaning towards Navran across a tray of roasted lamb and figs. He smiled and reached for a modest sliver of lamb, placing it onto his own tray and licking his fingers.
“They seemed impressed,” Navran said. He still didn’t understand why Ruyam had brought him, nor why Ruyam sought his opinion.
“Impressed?” Ruyam scoffed. “They’ll be plotting against me within a day. They probably are already. As the Emperor’s Hand I was aware of a dozen petty intrigues among the ministers and courtiers, and there must have been just as many whose existence escaped my notice. I was more than once approached with offers from other nobles. I have only made my work harder, now. They’ll stay away from me as long as they think of me as the Emperor.”
“You said you weren’t the Emperor.”
“A matter of terminology. A thikratta cannot be the Emperor. But I hold the Ushpanditya and the Dhigvaditya, and the Red Men obey me. I don’t care what they call me. Vapathi, bring another drink for Navran.”
Vapathi rose from the place where she and Kirshta knelt behind Ruyam. She filled a cup with the flagons of hot spiced rice beer and put it in Navran’s hand with a short bow. Navran took it with a wobble in his hand. It was his third cup.
It would be so, so easy to drink this cup, and the next one, and the one after that. Bliss and oblivion. But he feared that if he did, he would wake up in the dungeon again. Or let loose with Cauratha’s name.
“Does the drink suit you?”
“It’s fine.” It was a heck of a lot better than the stuff he had drunk for most of his life.
“You may get it whenever you need from the kitchens. Or you may ask Vapathi to bring it for you. I am giving you a chamber of your own on the floor beneath mine. Vapathi will be your attendant.”
Navran nodded. He almost said thank you, but stopped for the absurdity of it.
“Now pay attention. The dance is starting.”
A chain of bells jingled at the north end of the hall. A line of eight women entered, and Navran’s pulse quickened. The musicians followed them, playing a fast, exhilarating tune, with rapid rises and falls and the insistent beat of the drum underneath it.
The women began to dance. They wore thin, silky cholis, which barely sufficed to cover their breasts, and held veils of various colors in their hands, which rose and fell around them like sheets of cloud as they danced. Their skirts reached the floor but were slit up the sides nearly to the waist, and the legs beneath them moved. Like ripples of water, fast, graceful, teasing, elegant. Black hair cascaded down their backs, tied with chains of gold. Brown skin glistened with oil beneath green and yellow silk.
