Idol of Bone

by Jane Kindred

  It was from one of these countless mornings, waking stiff and cold on the dirt, that she’d come out to scoff at the Meer’s procession and see what she could make of the simpletons who flocked to it. She passed through the crowd amid the murmurings of prayers, holding out her palm with an appropriately beholden look whenever a petitioner looked her way.

  Ahr was counting the money with one hand in her pocket with some satisfaction when the crowd erupted in earnest. Cymbals tinkled, flutes played, and the temple entourage appeared in their elaborate robes. She pulled her veil tight, hoping her would-be husband wasn’t among them.

  The templar priests preceded a palanquin draped in velvets and silks of peacock and gold. The great Meer was supposedly inside, but she suspected it was another empty gesture on the part of the templars, for why else keep the curtains drawn? Men built like mountain cats bore the litter on their shoulders, and she was interested in these. They were bare from the waist to the shoulder and glistened with sweat in the warming midday. They were proud, beautiful men, with fair hair bound in leather behind their heads. Ahr smiled at one of them with her eyes and then looked down, her face flushed at her audacity.

  People were bowing and nearly hanging on to the side of the litter, making the bearers’ chore more difficult. Despite the hangers-on, the sculpted litter bearers didn’t seem to be tired, and she became convinced they carried an empty box. She laughed into the cloth over her mouth. Such spectacle! These fools thought their god would come down among them and answer their petty desires. They—Ahr was arrested by the hint of movement at a breach in the curtain. The litter was moving slowly through the pressing bodies; perhaps it was only—no, there it was again. Someone was watching, someone within after all. His eyes were on her.

  Ahr felt a rush of fear and blood to her head, for a moment caught in the allure of mysticism. The god had looked at her. With her heartbeat fluttering rapidly, she stared transfixed, following the steady gaze as the litter passed by. Then it was gone, and she couldn’t be certain she’d seen it, but couldn’t convince herself it had been a trick of the light.

  She made sure to be there on the following day. She would discover the truth. But perhaps today the Meer would not be spying on the crowd. Could he be spying? Was that what it was? Ahr waited, and the litter arrived at the same time as the day before. He was looking for her, his gaze deliberate. She answered his challenge, refusing to look away. Let him have her hanged for her insolence, she thought. She would not be intimidated, even if he was a god. How dare he spy upon her from his fancy cage? How—?

  His eyes had changed expression, and he retreated suddenly into the shadow of his box. She clutched her chest in astonishment, feeling the rise and fall of her breasts with her quickened breath. He’d blushed. She was sure of it. He was a man after all.

  Ahr returned on the third day, determined to get closer, and pushed her way through the masses of the faithful. She was in the inner circle where the fanatics were, jostled and pushed by them. He came, and she saw him more closely. He seemed to want to speak to her; he stared at her so.

  She returned to the teahouse to spill tea leaves absently on the floor and rip seams she’d just sewn on the little packets. The foreman struck her hands with a cane when he caught her staring at nothing. She tried to concentrate, sorting the leaves with her bruised fingers. What could the Meer want of her? Why had he chosen this strange communion with her? At night she dreamed of a great god with the head of a beast, caged behind bars. She opened the cage, and he laid his head in her lap, growling low in his throat when she stroked the fur. Ahr woke with the flush of arousal.

  For three more days, she appeared at his silent beckoning, feeling that he must—she must—someone must do something—something must happen. She felt as though she were caged herself, pacing and following the edge of the bars until the procession had passed her. He would return to his temple, and she would not know, not know.

  He looked at her so completely, as though he needed something of her, and she burst into tears over the flats of tea, trying to think of something she might give him, an offering of some kind, a memento. It was the last day of the procession.

  She went out to the street. They all had; no one would be missed. The bronze-chested men bore him toward her, and Ahr fought to reach the inner sanctum. It was difficult on this finale. The petitioners were frenzied. She saw him then for a brief moment before he passed, anticlimactic, a glance. She flowed with the crowd that followed him, like one of his desperate supplicants, pressed close against the litter.

  There was movement, a breeze at the litter’s edge. His hand. She touched the fingers, trembling, waiting for the shout of alarm. His fingers penetrated the gaps in hers. There was a commotion, a stumbling, and he’d grabbed her, and she poised, terrified, between the street and the sacred space.

  And then she was in. He wanted—oh god, he wanted. He was her Meer. She couldn’t refuse him. He descended on her, and she made a small sound of terror, exposed by him, taken, her breast in his devouring sacred mouth; but he circled it reverently, as if he were the subject and she the Meer. She was laid out like a sacrifice. His body was upon her, but he held back, trembling above her. Trembling? A god trembled? His eyes begged her like a desperate petitioner. The boon was hers to grant. She couldn’t bear the longing in his eyes; he seemed to drink her with them. She offered herself, and he sprang upon her. Pierced by him, she tried to stop herself from crying out.

  Tears spilled out of her, but he persisted, succumbing to her like an ecstatic in the throes of a religious fervor. She submitted to his urgent supplication, looking into his eyes as he sundered her. He had exposed everything but her face. He meant her to remain somehow chaste. She wept again when he climaxed, holding on to her. She wanted his acknowledgment of what she’d given, and he wouldn’t remove her veil, not even to kiss her mouth, which longed to be comforted by his embrace.

  A sound from outside the curtains alarmed the Meer. She’d forgotten they were carried on the shoulders of men. He tried to dress her, ridiculously clumsy, and she helped him, wondering at his whitened face. She might have imagined he was afraid, if that were possible. It was she who was about to face the consequences. He withdrew himself from her, oddly tender now in his touch, and through some magic of the Meer, she was charmed from the litter without discovery.

  Ahr stood below the temple steps and watched MeerRa ascend in great ceremony, the curtains now drawn to display him like an idol to the higher castes allowed here.

  She touched the veil to her lips. She was undone, but there was nothing external to corroborate her undoing.

  “And here you are, the Meerist and his falenden midten.” The voice, carrying from the bank as the barge docked, shook Ahr from his reverie. Smalls and his companions were waiting for them.

  Thirteen: Expurgation

  Ra pushed herself up from the cold floorboards, stiff and empty, her elbows shuddering with weakness. She lay on the floor of a rented room with no idea of the passage of time. Not too long, she supposed, or the tavern keeper would have come wanting his money and found this corpse of a woman on his floor. Deep furrows were gouged into the boards, and there were splinters beneath her nails. Perhaps she’d been trying to dig her way back into the grave.

  She climbed to her feet and peeled off the dirty gown. As she lowered her arms with the cloth in a ball inside her fist, she saw her reflection. In the mirror over the washbasin, warped and fissured, stood a naked woman, disheveled lengths of black hair clinging to her breasts. The empty woman stared at her. Ra couldn’t place her with herself. She dropped the gown and threaded her fingers through the patch of hair between her legs, and with the other hand she covered one breast and squeezed it cruelly. Why had she bothered with this flesh? She might have been what Jak wished to be: truly unsexed.

  What had driven her from peaceful oblivion to create this pointless shell? It took tremendous will to form the body fr
om thought, an ardent desire for life. She couldn’t have had either of these, after…after. Had she come for revenge? Had she meant to punish Ahr for her sins? Ra pitched forward in the grip of nausea and swallowed bitter acid in her throat. She ought to eat, but that would only prolong things. She straightened again and looked into the marred reflection. The woman was starving. Let her. She spat at herself, and watched the spittle slip down the glass.

  Ra conjured a simple garment in the style she’d seen on commoners upon her arrival. She chose black, a dress that covered her from head to toe, with long, straight sleeves that covered the backs of her hands, and a skirt with a high waist. She wore her boots; those would do. The sable cloak would not. It was an absurdity. Instead, she manufactured a light, hooded cloak of flax, again in black, and hid her Meerish hair beneath it. Between her head and the hood, she draped a thin scarf of translucent white to form the veil that would protect her face from curiosity and disguise her as a virgin—which, technically, she supposed, she was.

  As she wound the cloth about her throat and drew the hood over her head, she looked once more in the mirror. The image stung her with the force of raw memory peeled back like skin torn from her flesh. The last face MeerRa had seen had worn such a veil, a veil that had fallen only as one more assault against him.

  The Meerchild’s drawings were subdued. Nesre cursed himself for the foolishness of his outburst. It had damaged the child’s confidence at the worst possible moment. The child continued to draw as if compelled, though it watched him in fear when he came to collect them, but there were no specifics to the images it was now creating.

  In the latest, MeerRa gazed at his own reflection, as if watching Nesre somehow through the dark glass of the scrying chamber. Nesre studied the image with its dark, piercing eyes. Like all Meer, he had a face that transcended the beauty of masculine or feminine. They would have made lovely concubines if not for the potent venom of their speech.

  The details of the room in which the mirror hung were sparse but clearly Deltan. If nothing else, the prelate knew MeerRa was somewhere among them. It would only be a matter of time before he came to exact his revenge upon the templars who’d betrayed him. The trail from the wasteland had grown cold, without another word from the Meerhunter, Pike. It was time for Nesre to inform the Prelate of Rhyman.

  On the street, she walked swiftly, following the scent that had driven her to In’La instead of Rhyman. One of them was here. One of her accursed breed survived here in hiding, and she would draw him out. The scent propelled her into the marketplace. She passed the red and yellow rows of fruit, brown hills of bread, blue waves of fish laid end to end on top of one another. None of this mattered. This was not what she hungered for. Among the awnings that advertised burnished pottery, clockwork gadgets, and ironworks, she found what she sought. An old woman sat on an overturned bin, a dirty pail in front of her. She raised her cataract-dulled eyes to Ra’s and lifted the bucket.

  “Five bits for a lump,” she rasped. Her fingers were stained with the soot of her trade.

  The smell of Meeric blood was on this woman, but she was withered and weak. Was this what had become of her arrogant race? She could hardly be a threat to anyone, but no matter. Ra would do what she’d come to do. She drew her hood tighter about her face and took a preparatory breath, but the old woman spoke first.

  “Vetma ai MeerRa.”

  Ra stopped short. It was the refrain of a petitioner: Bless me, oh MeerRa. In the post-Expurgation Delta, it was a threat. The Meer recognized her and had let her know it.

  “How do you know me?”

  But the old Meer simply rose with her pail and shuffled past her. Ra followed her through the rows of crabs and shellfish and out of the market. The Meer led her along the bustling street through a landscape of wire rims and peculiar fumes from the two-wheeled contraptions that were the rage here. Ra kept her eyes on the old one, afraid she would disappear into the clouds of smoke.

  They came to an alley, where the woman paused at the basement grate of a darkened building and fished a key out of her pocket. She turned the lock with arthritic fingers, lifting the grate and climbing down into the well below. Ra pursued her with the same steady purpose, descending into the old woman’s cell.

  The Meer set down her coal bucket and tottered to the stove, picking up a greasy kettle that had been warming over the embers of a cooling fire. “A warm drink is what’s called for.”

  Ra made a swift move behind the crone and struck her. The woman stumbled into the stove with a cry of surprise, and Ra brought an arm across the Meer’s throat and crooked her elbow around it, intent on breaking the ancient neck. Unexpectedly, she met with resistance.

  The old woman dislodged her and turned, and a previously unsteady hand struck Ra across the face with the force of a red-hot iron. Ra sprawled on the floor, limbs folding like broken sticks beneath her. Before she could recover, the Meer leapt on her with ferocity and slashed her face with nails like splintered glass. Ra cried out, unable to shove her off.

  Blood sprayed across her vision, and Ra threw her arms over her head with a howl of terror. The sight of blood in her eyes—not the slow, dark seep of tears, but the bright red gush of injury—was the last vision of MeerRa’s battered mind on the steps of Temple Ra.

  The old Meer dug her fingers into Ra’s lacerated cheeks and jerked, forcing Ra’s attention on her face. When Ra looked, however, it was no old woman, but a strong-shouldered, majestic creature no older than Ra with waves of bright mahogany hair that showered over them both. Ra felt she ought to know the face, but if she did, it was a memory so distant it had been lost in the fog of time, long before her flawed and ill-conceived renaissance. Something about the face instilled her with an instinctive terror that made her afraid her bladder might fail her.

  “MeerRa!” The Meer pierced Ra’s bloodied vision with eyes as green as dragons and dark as her trade. “A thousand dead Meer cannot bring Nana back.” Ra’s breath caught on a sob. The Meer shook her, sending a bolt of pain through Ra’s skull. “You must abandon this. You cannot complete the Expurgation.”

  Ra closed her eyes, trying to turn her head in the impossible grip. “There should be no more of us.”

  “If you believed it,” said the Meer, “you would not have come. You left the solace of oblivion to retrieve your pain.”

  “No. I returned as a coward.”

  The Meer softened her grip. “You gathered your pain to you without mercy.” She stroked Ra’s hair beneath the fallen veil. “Poor monster in the mirror,” she said, and then kissed Ra savagely, searing her tongue between Ra’s teeth and drawing Ra’s tongue into her mouth as though she would drink the blood from Ra through it. The Meer released her after this curious violation and stood.

  “Who are you?” Ra gasped, afraid of the answer.

  The flawless face rippled with an unreadable expression. “I am Shiva.”

  “MeerShiva. Meershivá.” The name became an oath upon her tongue. Ra averted her eyes as if Shiva’s might turn her to stone. She touched her fingers to the blood on her cheeks, stunned. Shiva’s power was legendary. Ra couldn’t understand why the Meer hadn’t simply broken her spine and dispensed with her, or spoken a word to sunder her without bothering to dirty her hands.

  Ra shook her head. “Why do you live like this?”

  Shiva gave her a dark smile. “You are not the only Meer who dines on guilt.”

  Ra drew in her legs, one aching sharply, possibly broken, and rocked forward on her knees with a moan. “I am gorged on memory.”

  “Rest here, MeerRa.” Shiva’s voice was soft and soothing. Before Ra could answer or protest, the room grew gray and distant, and she slept.

  The Meerchild trembled at the images that came to it now, hissing in fear and alarm as it watched the events unfold in the darkness of the glass. There were two now, and the child felt the blood of the other as a wild, electric
strain within its own that it hadn’t been aware of before. Instinctively, it shied from putting down the image of the other in the light and shadow of the marks from its charcoal stub.

  It backed away from the parchment and retreated to the safety of its worn straw pallet. The Meeric flow was loud and crackling with energy, as if the dark glass into which the child peered would shatter and the minute slivers fly forth and blind it. The child had been content before, unaware of anything beyond itself except the simple drawings that came to it, which had satisfied the Master. Now images came to it that it dared not express. But the Master would still want his drawings.

  The Meerchild rocked, humming to itself, the rushing, spring-rain sound of its habitual gesture with its fingers no longer comforting. Its skin prickled with danger. It whispered Ra’s name in awe, too afraid to say the other.

  They’d come farther north this time than they’d ever been. The only thing farther was the icy sea. At least the weather was no more miserable here than in the western highlands; it was as good a place as any.

  As always when they traveled, however, Ume had to assume the identity she’d been born with, for safety’s sake. Highwaymen were less likely to prey upon two men traveling together, and no one was looking for Cillian Rede. Cree tried to cheer her up by making a game of it—Ume wasn’t taking off an identity, she was putting one on, cross-dressing as male. Cillian Rede, said Cree, was Ume’s “drag” persona.

  With the wardrobe Ume had been forced to leave behind at Mole Downs, the only dress she had now anyway was the sapphire silk, and after the dunking she’d taken, it was good for nothing but scrap. The first thing she intended to do when they settled was buy a bolt of cloth and get to work on a new gown. The bits of velvet that were salvageable could be ties and accents. If she could find a nice silvery gray moiré, the sapphire would be quite striking against it. The dress was already coming together in her head.

  Cree climbed into their makeshift tent in the back of the cart after setting the traps for breakfast. “What are you scheming about?”