Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  When it finished, the Meerchild studied the drawings with more care than the Master had ever perused them, memorizing every line. And then it carefully obliterated them with solid fields of black, tore them into tiny pieces, and tucked them beneath its pallet.

  Twelve: Venery

  Head bowed over a cup of kerum, Jak listened to the sounds of early morning in the high desert, the trill and chirp of birds and insects that were completely unfamiliar. At night, the valleys echoed with the melancholy baying of wild desert dogs. They saw them occasionally as they traveled, flanking them at a distance in the fragrant desert brush or watching from the darkness with eyes reflecting the light of their campfire at night, but never coming close enough to bother them. Ahr said the dogs were harmless so long as they kept their food tied tight in their rucksacks. They were scavengers and creatures of opportunity, and were probably only appearing to trail them because, like the humans, they were keeping close to the narrow stream of the Filial.

  In ten days, the small party from Haethfalt had come to the edge of the “wasteland” and descended rapidly toward the startling green stretch of the Delta in the distance. It was a different world once they’d left the high altitudes and rocky slopes of mound country. The snow, only in patches among the desert scrub, would soon be gone as they approached the coast. In a day or two, Ahr said, they might be in Rhyman.

  Across the anemic fire, Ahr and Geffn were equally absorbed in the depths of their cups as if they were the most interesting things in the world. Ahr had grudgingly conceded that it made sense for them to travel together, but had steadfastly avoided any conversation with Jak, while Geffn maintained a sullen resentment toward both of them.

  After the fight in the snow, they’d gone back to Mound RemPeta to pack supplies for the journey instead of heading off half-cocked as Geffn had been. Keiren had already given a brief account of finding Jak safe at Mound Ahr and of Ra’s disappearance in the storm. For once, he’d been spare in his detail, leaving out, in particular, any mention of the evidence of Ra’s Meerity. When Jak thanked him privately, he glowered and said he had no interest in looking a fool.

  Armed with goggles and snowshoes, with their gear loaded on a sled they took turns hauling, they’d set out once more for the Delta in a fragile truce. The sled and snow gear had to be abandoned when the snow cover dwindled, and they’d continued on with what they could carry on their backs.

  As they set out this morning, Jak had the uneasy feeling they were being watched. It was a feeling that had persisted for the past few days, and Jak had put it down to the constant unseen presence of the dog packs, but today it was hard to shake.

  Apparently, Jak wasn’t the only one. When they stopped for a short rest at midday among one of the many rock formations that littered the semi-arid plain around the trickling Filial, Ahr glanced over his shoulder as if scanning the vista behind them as he passed the water skin to Jak. When Jak drank and handed it to Geffn, Ahr was still, with one hand on his knife at his side.

  Jak watched him. “You feel it, too.”

  Geffn lowered the skin and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, looking from one to the other. “Feel what?”

  “Company,” said Ahr. “Someone’s been on our tail for hours.”

  “On our tail?” Geffn glanced in the direction Ahr was looking. “You mean following from Haethfalt?”

  “Or somewhere west of us. We might have picked them up when we reached the desert floor.”

  “Who in sooth would be tailing us?”

  Ahr shrugged. “Bandits.” He rose and hoisted his pack.

  Geffn scrambled to his feet. “Well, what are we going to do about it?”

  “Not much we can do about it. Be alert. Wait and see if they show themselves.” Ahr started walking, and Jak rose to follow.

  “Wait and see?” Geffn grabbed his pack and slung it over his shoulder with the water skin. “And see what? If they slit our throats?”

  Ahr stopped and turned back to him with a look of contempt. “Did you just now realize this trip would be dangerous? Bandits are the least of our worries, you precious, coddled falender. If you manage to catch up with Ra, you’ll have far more to worry about than you ever dreamed.” He turned his back on Geffn and forged onward, while Geffn glared after him.

  After a moment, Geffn fell into step beside Jak, who’d hung back to stay out of their squabbling. “How do we even know he’s going after Ra? He could be leading us on a wild-goose chase. Why in the name of the gods are we following him?”

  Jak sighed and looked over at him. “So now you want to talk to me, suddenly? You haven’t said two words to me since we left Haethfalt.”

  “Well, I may have been a little goddamned angry with you, Jak. What did you expect?”

  Jak shrugged. “I don’t know. In all honesty, I don’t even know what to expect from myself half the time.” Ahr was moving farther ahead of them, obviously unconcerned with whether they kept up, and Jak slowed even more. “I never meant to hurt you, Geff. I know that sounds pathetic and full of shit.”

  Geffn avoided looking in Jak’s direction, staring at his feet as they walked. “It’s kind of a weird time for you to be saying this.”

  “I know. But it’s always a weird time. And I know I’m a total pain in the ass. I just want you to know that I still care about you a great deal.” Jak played with the red braided wristlet Geffn had tied in place during their ceremony. Both of them still wore the symbol on their right wrists. They’d never officially unbound their handfasting. “Whatever happens when we reach Rhyman—” Jak’s words were cut short by the zing of something flying past them. An arrow struck the rocky path ahead of them.

  “Get down!” Ahr said sharply and dropped to his haunches.

  Jak pulled Geffn down, and both of them hit the dirt flat. Another arrow whizzed over their heads and skittered across the rocks. Ahr dashed for cover behind a cluster of boulders. “Over here, dammit,” he growled at them. “Get off the path!”

  Jak and Geffn scrambled on knees and elbows toward the spot, lying flat against the low rim of stone just as another arrow struck the side of it.

  “They’re just beyond that ridge.” Ahr jerked his head toward the rocky bend in the path of the stream that had once been a much larger river. The scattered rocks, Jak realized, were the remains of the riverbed. In another time, they’d have been under water, or at least hip-deep in it. Where Ahr had indicated, dust was stirring in the air, kicked up by their pursuers as they came into view. Four men on horseback rounded the bend, moving slowly, obviously well aware of their advantage.

  “Meerhunters,” said Ahr.

  “What the fuck do we do now?” Geffn hissed.

  “Surrender,” said Ahr.

  “What?” Geffn gaped as Ahr got to his feet and made himself a glaring target.

  “What are you doing?” Jak tried to pull Ahr back down, but he jerked his leg from Jak’s grasp and stepped out onto the path.

  “Halt!” The Deltan-accented voice bounced against the rocks as the men on horseback came closer.

  “I’m about as halted as I can get,” Ahr replied calmly.

  “The Deltan falender.” The leader’s voice dripped with scorn as he pulled up before him.

  Ahr’s lip lifted in a sneer. “Small.”

  Jak was puzzled by Ahr’s retort until the Meerhunter answered sharply, “The name is Smalls.” And then it sank in that Ahr knew these Meerhunters. “You may as well show yourselves,” Smalls added in the direction of the rocks where Jak and Geffn were hiding. “We know you’re unarmed.”

  Jak stood reluctantly. “Then why in sooth were you shooting at us?”

  “Sport,” said one of the hunters with a laugh.

  Smalls smirked. “To get your attention.” He studied them as Geffn stepped out with Jak from behind the rocks. “The Deltan we know about, and we saw you, falender,
with the whore in Mole Downs. But this one we don’t know. He’s certainly not our fugitive, unless the Meer can change appearance.”

  “He’s just my kid brother,” said Jak, while Geffn stared with disbelief. “Leave him out of it.”

  Smalls seemed to accept this. “Where is the Meer?”

  “What Meer?” Hands in pockets, Jak tried to look casually bemused.

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. The Deltan whore and your bartender friend confirmed your involvement. We searched your little mole hovels in Haethfalt just after you left, and the Meer was no longer there. But he’s not with you. So where is he?”

  “He?” Geffn made a small yelp of protest as Jak stepped on his foot.

  “How would we know?” Ahr snapped. “We’re just taking a winter holiday. We don’t know anything about any Meer.”

  Smalls let out a tired sigh. “Is that how it’s going to be? Very well, then. Carry on with your holiday. I’m sure you won’t mind if we travel with you.”

  “The more the merrier,” said Ahr. “Safety in numbers. You never know when you’re going to run afoul of bandits out here.”

  Sharing the campfire with the Meerhunters that night, Ahr lay on the ground with his pack for a pillow, Jak lying between him and Geffn in an uneasy truce, though none of them were sleeping. On the horizon, a distant haze gave away the dense river population to the southeast. With the advent of gaslight and other fantastic inventions in the years following the Expurgation, the Delta cities now sparkled like the garments of a Meer even after dark. Rhyman was a spoiled fruit, drifting its scent of overripe sweetness across the Delta. The thought of returning sickened him.

  Haethfalt had been his hope of forgetting.

  He’d worked as a laborer during the years after his transformation and had seen with bitterness that nothing had changed. The temples, now ruled by prelates, still stood in the Deltan provinces. They were called courthouses, and from them the prelates dispensed law, but their circle of influence still thrived on the bribes and collusion of the rich, gained off the sweat of the common. The only difference was that now their boons couldn’t be wrought with magic. They’d lost their golden geese.

  He’d grown to hate the sight and stench of Rhyman, but beyond the reaches of the Delta, there was nothing. Rhyman was civilization, or so he’d always believed; all else was wasteland. Working on the barges that carried goods throughout the Delta, he’d learned of the slow Deltan Exodus that had begun after the Expurgation. The rumored existence of free settlements beyond the western desert was one of the vague ideas that had helped fuel the Expurgist movement, though Ahr had never put much stock in it. But in dribs and drabs, Deltans were leaving the cities for the promise of egalitarian societies and a new life, after realizing it would never be found in the Delta.

  Most ended up heading north toward the icy seas, but Ahr had wanted to go as far as he could possibly get, and Munt Zelfaal, the peak of the distant mountains that seemed like a vague mirage from the Delta valleys, had been it. Its windy crags, looming tall and foreboding above the sloping hills at the end of the wasteland, seemed to draw him onward with purpose as he traveled. At its foot, he’d found Haethfalt, and in Haethfalt, he’d found what he was looking for.

  They’d been wary of his foreignness, but generous to a fault, and Jak, leveling those steel eyes on him that seemed to lay him bare, had decided he was worthy of belonging to their collective, and had versed him in the language and culture they affectionately called “Mole”. There in Haethfalt, he’d found a friend, perhaps the first he’d ever known. And there he’d at last found peace, free from the Delta and the sweltering reminder of Ra.

  But from death, Ra haunted him still.

  “So what is this about a whore and a bartender?” Geffn whispered once the Meerhunters had begun to breathe with the steady rhythm of sleep. It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke.

  “Friends of mine we ran into at the Downs,” Ahr grunted.

  “You didn’t tell me they were friends of yours,” Jak whispered back. “Or that you knew Meerhunters.”

  “I didn’t tell you a lot of things. And I don’t know Meerhunters, they just happened to find me after the trip to the Downs, checking to see if I had a Meer hiding in my ‘mole hovel’.” Ahr had to stifle a giggle of hysteria at how inadvertently filthy the phrase sounded. “They’d gotten a tip there was a newcomer in Haethfalt, and I said I didn’t know of any and sent them on their way. But I did wonder how they got wind of my presence there. I didn’t realize Cree would turn me in.” He punched at his makeshift pillow in a vain effort to make it more comfortable. Most likely, Cree had divulged that information under duress, which was distressing to contemplate.

  After three days in the company of the Meerhunters, they came to Rhyman an hour past dawn, their unofficial escorts temporarily separated from them when they’d exchanged a night’s labor on a produce barge for enough Deltan coin to replenish their supplies. “I’m sure we’ll see you again in Rhyman,” Smalls had promised with a tip of his hat and a dark gleam in his eye.

  Ahr’s stomach clenched at the sight of the temple on the banks of the great river. The smaller tributary was joining with the larger, and Ludtaht Ra—Ra’s Temple—glistened white under the early morning sun. “Anamnesis.”

  Beside him on the deck, Jak yawned. “Ana-what?”

  “Anamnesis. The river.” He gripped the rail, elbows taut as though he could halt the inevitable sluggish motion of the barge toward Temple Ra. “The river that remembers.” They drew still nearer, and he looked up at its golden tiles and ivory arches: the naked god in his sacred paint. The polished steps that met the water here, reflected clean and white from dawn on the Anamnesis, weren’t the ones that led into the courtyard, the steps on which corpses had lain, steps stained by blood.

  There is the temple where his head rested between my legs. He shivered at the unbidden thought. But they were past it now. The barge bore them disinterestedly toward the colorful banners of commerce.

  Scent wafted toward them from the bank: the perfume of tea. He’d forgotten it—how impossible—in three years of Haethfalt kerum. Ahr had once smelled the fragrance of those leaves from dawn to dusk, sifting them from the flats where they dried and sewing them into the small cloth packets. The teahouse where Ahr had worked as a girl was just beyond the square, and they were nearly upon it. And in front of it—he trembled at the force of memory—in front of it was the place in the street where Ahr had seen the face of a Meer.

  She’d gone out among the crowd to hustle baksheesh from the fanatics. Ahr had no interest in magic or gods. Where were they when she fled her marriage bed?

  Six months before, her father had announced it to her over supper: she was to wed the templar who owned her father’s debt. Besides the debt’s forgiveness, the family would receive a generous gift of land, and it was a step up in class for her. She was lucky to have been noticed by him. He’d grinned at her eagerly across the table, an old man with sallow skin and sallower teeth.

  He’d brought gifts to win her, gifts peculiar for a courtship: sweets in bright paper packets, satin ribbons, and a doll. As she’d revealed the doll within the wrapping, Ahr had eyed him, nauseated. He wasn’t buying a wife, but a girl-child, in his estimation. She was thirteen and fertile, with breasts the size of pomegranates, but this old man saw her as a child…and wished to lie with her.

  The thought of his greedy hands removing her veil, his clammy lips breaching the symbolic barrier of virginity and violating her mouth, filled her with horror. It was only the first part of her body he would possess, but the most unbearable to think of, for it was the most intimate. She might be able to stand the grimness of her conjugal duty by shutting her eyes and turning her head; he probably wasn’t one to linger if his prick was viable at all, but those horrible lips would want to embrace her own, like garbage thrust into her mouth. She’d recoiled from the doll in
disgust, as though it were the doll that sickened her.

  “I will not,” she’d said, startling them from behind the silence of the veil. This was a transaction in which she was not expected to speak, and certainly not to object. He’d reached across the table with his soft, damp palms and tried to pet her hand as though soothing a tantrum. It was a nasty herald of what lay ahead, and she’d torn her hand away. “I will not.”

  Her father had been dumbstruck. He’d worked too long for this debt to have its pardon crumble between his fingers. Her mother had begun to cry, whether from the prospect of her daughter’s marriage or the refusal, Ahr wasn’t sure. Her promised husband had grown red in the face and looked from daughter to father in consternation. What maid would refuse such a prestigious marriage? And she had no dowry! He was making a great concession for his fancy, which ought to have flattered her.

  She was steadfast despite her father’s threats to turn her out into the streets to make her own way.

  “She’ll become a harlot!” her mother had sobbed, but still Ahr wasn’t certain whether she sobbed for the degradation Ahr might suffer, or the loss of the gift of land.

  In the morning, she found her clothes packed into a satchel by the door, her mother weeping at the table and her father absent. Ahr had stood for a moment waiting for her mother’s acknowledgement, but there was none. She picked up the bag and left her home, suffering a moment of terror on the threshold. Where would she go?

  In the end, she’d found the teahouse with its girls and old women, gladly taking the work, and the tent yard behind the mill in lieu of a bed. It would do; she slept with other homeless mill girls for companions, unmolested by pedophilic old men.