The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  “I don’t wish to accuse the great sage of inconsistency,” I said. “But if folk religion is nothing but ignorant myth, how can any of it be salvaged?”

  Koro Ha’s eyes brightened, like coals stoked to flame.

  “An interesting question,” Koro Ha said. “Would you be satisfied if I answered that Yu Carries-Fire is concerned primarily with establishing social control of the uneducated masses, and less with establishing pure spiritual practice?”

  No, I would not be satisfied, as he had slipped around the hidden edge of my question. “Yet he titled his treatise--”

  “I know the title of the treatise, Alder,” Koro Ha said. “Even the classics can be of double purpose. Religion is politics is literature is philosophy and so on. The ability to perceive and elucidate the intertwining of the classics will be key to your success in the imperial examinations.” He tapped the next page of the book. “Go on, now. Unless you think yourself prepared to put the text aside and write an essay unpacking its complexities.”

  “I’m asking questions because I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Alright then,” Koro Ha said. “Was there something more you wished to ask?”

  I took a slow breath, as my grandmother taught me to before we began the Iron Dance. I studied Koro Ha, and reminded myself of a fact that I so often forgot. He was not truly Sienese, either. Despite his education and his mastery of imperial doctrine, his dark skin and tightly curled hair evidenced a childhood not unlike my own.

  “My grandmother has been telling me stories,” I said.

  “Ah,” Koro Ha said, and set down his teacup. He folded his hands and leaned back, as though bracing himself for a blow. “I wondered if--and when--we might have a conversation like this. What kinds of stories?”

  I shrugged, trying to seem relaxed and at worst ashamed, hoping he could not see the anxiety roiling inside me. Some of her stories would certainly merit eradication, if Yu Carries-Fire had his way.

  “Heroes and things,” I said. “Adventure stories, mostly. But there are gods in them. Wolves that talk. Things like that.”

  “And you enjoy these stories?”

  “They are…” I chose the next word carefully. Fascinating showed too much investment. Amusing too little to warrant wasting time with this question. “…strange, but intriguing.”

  “And you are wondering if they ought to be subsumed, or eradicated?”

  “They convey moral messages that are not always out of step with imperial doctrine,” I said, too quickly, too defensively. “I am wondering if there might be any truth in them.”

  Truth such as I had felt with my flesh and bones in the wake of my grandmother’s power.

  “You are wondering about magic,” Koro Ha said.

  Ice ran down my spine, and Koro Ha’s warm expression did little to thaw it.

  “I remember such stories, Alder,” he said. “We had their like in Toa Alon, even though the Empire ruled there with a harsher fist than here. There are others, too. Folk tales from the Girzan Steppe, even from the Sienese heartland. Stories, it seems, always survive. You might even find books of them in the larger cities of the Empire. Not particularly respectable reading, but not criminal either.”

  “They’re harmless, then?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say harmless. As we’ve established, literature is politics and so on. But most who read them are not looking for those deeper layers.”

  I took another deep breath, astonished that we were even having this conversation, and hoping he was not weaving an elaborate trap.

  “And magic?”

  “Most people are not looking for magic either,” Koro Ha said. “Some of the powers described in such legends may well exist--or may well have existed, once. But who can say what is fact and what is mere myth? At any rate, none in the Empire save the Hands and Voices are granted such gifts.” He smiled wide. “As I recall, you aspired to be the second greatest sorcerer in the Empire, once. I thought that a childish fancy.”

  I rankled at what I took for mockery. “Are you saying I’m not capable?”

  “Oh no, Alder, you are quite capable. But you have a long, long road ahead of you, if magic is your goal.” He leaned forward and tapped the next page. “A road you’ll never traverse if you cannot focus on your studies.”

  * * *

  That night, and many nights after, I lay awake recalling and contemplating the memory of my grandmother’s power. Magic could reshape the world. Its power was undeniable. It needed no argument to bolster it, nor any faith to make it true. Regardless of whether I accepted Sienese doctrine or Nayeni myth, my grandmother would still be able to conjure flame and change her shape.

  It was the only thing in the world that I yearned to understand for its own sake, not because an authority had decided that I must learn it. Once I had mastered it, it would be mine, to do with as I would. Neither bound to my father's dreams of a restored Wen family, nor my grandmother's for a Nayen free of the Empire.

  The two competing branches of my family--to which, I felt, I owed an equal duty--could not be reconciled. To serve one would be to betray the other. But magic offered a way for me to escape that stifling contradiction, to carve out my own path through the world. I had endured my hunger for it these four years. How much longer would it be before the Emperor chose me as a Hand or my grandmother deemed me ready to learn?

  Too long, I decided.

  The thinning strand of my patience lasted only until the next night without a summons from my grandmother. When the moon was high, and still I heard no tap at the window, I slipped out of the house and into the warm, summer night.

  Never had I come to the Temple of the Flame alone. The bare teeth of its guardian wolf gods menaced me. I avoided their gaze and stifled the thought that they might tell my grandmother that I had come without her.

  They were only stone, of course. But when a woman could become a hawk, was anything only itself?

  I knelt where she had knelt in the courtyard, beside the pavilion and the dry streambed. I shut my eyes, steadied my breathing, and opened myself to the world. Crickets chirruped, and bullfrogs croaked in the courtyard around me. A breeze rustled through the bamboo grove nearby. The earth beneath my knees and feet was cool and wet. I breathed deeply, and felt the faintest echo of the strange, oiled-iron sensation of my grandmother’s magic.

  It was in the world around me, a constant ebb and flow of energy. One thing changing into another. One moment giving rise to the next. Shifting possibilities, resolving from moment to moment according to the pattern of the world. My body shivered in rhythm to that flow.

  A thrill coursed through me, and suddenly I felt that I stood above and apart from the pattern of the world, and everything in it, even my own body. All was mine to shape to my will, as though the world was a sheet of rice paper and all its objects and events but a story being written. And I, hovering above, held the brush.

  Without knowing what I did I reached out--a grasping from somewhere deep at the core of me--and wrote my will into the world, mimicking the marks I had seen my grandmother make when she became an eagle-hawk.

  If my grandmother’s magic was fine calligraphy, mine had all the sophistication of a child splashing in the mud.

  Every muscle in my body seized. My mind collapsed into dread and panic, a marrow-deep certainty that I would die, as though I had flung myself over the edge of an abyss. I remember only a torrent of pain that dragged me, screaming, back into the twisted body crafted by my ill-formed spell. Limbs that did not know whether to be wing or hand, foot or talon. Hollow bones cracked and twisted by powerful muscles in need of a stronger skeleton. Glimpses of the overgrown path as I dragged myself toward home.

  How far I crawled on those broken limbs I cannot say.

  I came to my senses in my grandmother’s arms, in my own room and my own body. Her face loomed above me, wan and drawn. She hugged me to her breast and, rocking back and forth, whispered gratitude to the gods. It was the most affection I h
ad ever known from her.

  “You stupid, stupid boy!” she hissed at me. “I should never have shown you. But how did you--? It shouldn’t have been possible! Not yet, not without witch-marks.”

  I tried to apologize, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. She released me and pressed a lukewarm cup of red tea into my hands. It was medicinal and bitter, and I nearly coughed it up. She made me finish the tea, which settled my roiling stomach and soothed the stiff pains that suffused my muscle and bone.

  “You’ll be deathly ill for a few days,” she said, pouring another cup. “And deathly hungry, but your stomach won’t take anything but tea and bland broth, so you’ll have to suffer through it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I blubbered, finding my voice. “I just thought--”

  “You didn’t think,” grandmother snapped. “Your ambition and cleverness got the better of your thinking. Don’t let it happen again.”

  Despite her cold words, she sat with me while I wept and shuddered at the memories of the twisted creature I had been.

  “I should have been more careful,” she said. “I shouldn’t have shown you. Gods! Not even your uncle was so sensitive to magic.” She looked to the window, where the moonlight had vanished into the full dark before dawn. “I should go. Your mother and that tutor will be troubled enough by your sudden illness without wondering why I came to visit you in the dead of night.”

  I clutched at her arm. She stared down at me, her face hardening. Despite the agonies of that night, what most tortured me was the fear that my foolishness had cost me what I wanted most--her secret knowledge, and her forbidden power. I was more desperate than ever to learn.

  Prior to that moment, my life had been hemmed in and driven forward by my father and my grandmother and their divergent designs. But for an instant, I had felt the pattern of all things, and my will had hovered above it, unbounded, able to shape the world at a whim. This first attempt had led to horror. But with training, and with time, I was certain to master that power, and understand the profound, heart-stirring truth at the core of it. My young mind had yet to meet a challenge it could not overcome.

  “You’ll still teach me?” I said, unable to hide the desperation in my voice.

  She pried herself free of my hand. “I’ve hardly a choice now, have I?”

  Chapter Three

  Scars

  All that first day of my illness, while I drifted in and out of sleep, my mother lingered at my bedside, testing my fever with the back of her hand. It was more physical contact than we had shared since my early childhood, before I left her apartments for my own rooms in the eastern wing of the house.

  Mothers and sons, in the Sienese view, ought to be distant. Coddling left a young man ill prepared to manage his own household as a father--the Emperor of his little realm. Propriety would have had my mother send page girls to deliver trays of tea and ginger candy and return with reports on my recovery. But my mother--as became clear to me in those days--was not Sienese.

  She spent all that first day, and most of the next, sitting beside me, and conspired with my grandmother to displace the Sienese cook who managed our kitchen. Instead of the rich fare I had been raised on, my grandmother prepared the same foods she had served my mother and uncle when they took ill as children. A bland, slightly salty broth made with seaweed and dried fish. A light tea of wildflowers she gathered herself from the forest around our estate. A few bites of glutinous rice and dried dates wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed. Nayeni foods which I had never eaten before, but which my mother and grandmother trusted to make me well.

  Koro Ha’s display of concern was less for my health, and more for the damage a long illness might do to my education.

  Grandmother managed to fend him off for the first day of my convalescence. On the second, he argued his way past her defenses and established a beachhead at my writing desk in the corner of the room. From there he launched salvos from the books of Sienese odes and poems, the classics of religion, and the various treatises on government and philosophy, forcing my mother to retreat. Being in a room alone--but for a sickly child--with a man other than her husband was a step beyond my mother’s bravery. One could only stretch propriety so far.

  By the third day Koro Ha had conquered me. I spent the rest of my convalescence studying, though Koro Ha’s lessons were often interrupted by fainting spells that left me disoriented, as though my body had grown quite suddenly and no longer properly fit my soul.

  After six days the Nayeni diet had cooled the fire in my bones, but I was still unable to stand. I had a fainting spell on the seventh day, and that night I heard my mother and my grandmother arguing, as they had so often when I was very young.

  “What happened to him?” my mother said, her voice sharp with concern.

  “It takes time to drive a foul wind from the body,” my grandmother said. “He’s eating more, and the fever is broken--”

  “He’s dizzy and weak.” I imagined a glare between them, before my mother went on. “Whatever this is, it’s beyond us--”

  “It isn’t, just be patient--”

  “Will you tell me, then?” my mother snapped, loud enough for all the estate to hear. Then, quieter, but still full of anger. “I let you mark him. I agreed that he should learn our stories. I said nothing about teaching him your witchcraft.”

  “Your witchcraft, too, if you would have it.”

  “What. Happened. To. Him.”

  I had never heard such ferocity in my mother’s voice. Not even when my uncle had visited, unwanted and unannounced, eight years before. Neither had my grandmother, it seemed, for there was a long pause before she finally relented.

  “He dabbled in magic he shouldn’t have been able touch, let alone wield,” my grandmother said. “Not even Harrow Fox--”

  “Don’t speak of my brother.” I heard a sharp intake of breath, then a long, slow exhalation, like the beginning of the Iron Dance. When my mother spoke again, she was calm, poised, her voice a steady blade. “He needs a doctor. I will send for one. And--shut your mouth--if you don’t like it, you are free to leave my house.”

  * * *

  “Tell him nothing,” my grandmother instructed, the morning of the eighth day of my illness. “Not of what we do in the temple, and especially not what caused this sickness. If you must tell him something, speak vaguely of a chill wind and the sniffles. Something a grandmother would treat with soup and tea.”

  When I finished the tea she had brought, she collected the empty cups and bustled out of my room, muttering about wool-headed Sienese doctors and their random treatments, divined by nothing more than trial and error.

  I had been examined by Sienese doctors before. They passed often through the nearby town of Ashen Clearing in their endless wanderings throughout the Empire. At six years old I contracted a pox that had afflicted the children there. A doctor had come to town, but my father tripled the doctor’s usual fee to keep him on retainer in the guest room until I recovered, and Ashen Clearing lost half a dozen children in his absence.

  I do not remember that doctor clearly. Doctor Sho, with his knowing eyes and gnarled hands, made a much more profound impression--both when he came to treat my botched veering, and later, when my thirst for secret knowledge brought me back into his company.

  Doctor Sho’s bare feet were calloused and cracked. A wild crop of hair hung gathered at the nape of his neck, and wisps of beard floated around a thin-lipped mouth. His eyes were bright and expressive, lacking the demureness expected in Sienese men. The keen knowing in them terrified me.

  If Doctor Sho deduced the cause of my illness, my grandmother’s secrets would be revealed, my father and mother would be accused of harboring a witch, and the Sienese would put us all to death.

  He felt my pulse. I took deep breaths, hoping he would not notice, desperate to slow my racing heart. He pushed deeper, then paused, then pushed deeper, and paused again. He murmured, jotted something on a scrap of paper, then opened the chest of drawers he
had brought with him. The drawers were no bigger than the palm of my hand. Each had been etched with the logograms for various herbs and minerals, and carvings of vines and forest creatures decorated its sides. Doctor Sho’s fingers fluttered from drawer to drawer as he filled a series of paper sacks with pinches of various ingredients.

  He placed the two largest sacks on my writing desk. “These are herbal soups,” he said. “Mix them with broth. Eat one tomorrow and one three days after. During those three days drink this tea in the morning and this tea at night.” He held up two smaller sacks. “On the second day, if you cannot get out of bed you will need acupuncture and massage. Afterward, if your stool smells like rot send for me immediately. If you can get out of bed, go for a walk in the garden. On the fourth day, eat nothing in the morning, then meat and bread in the evening. After that you should recover.”

  All the while he had been scribbling these instructions on the sheet of paper, which he now handed to me. “I will explain this to your mother as well. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll return in six days for the other half of my payment.”

  All that from feeling my pulse? The speed and certainty of his deductions were as astonishing as magic. I tried to think of something to say while he shut and locked his chest of drawers. Fearing that he must have known how I had come to my illness--and that my silence might confirm some suspicion--I summoned the courage to thank him, but bit back the urge to ask what he had diagnosed.

  “Keep your thanks,” he said. “I’m being paid.”

  He hoisted his chest onto his back, fastened the web of straps that held it in place, and donned his wide conical hat. At the threshold he looked over his shoulder and fixed me with a blood-chilling stare.

  “You’ll have worse than me to face if you dabble with such dangerous things again,” he said.

  I followed his instructions dutifully, unwilling to risk the ire of a man who had seen through me with so little effort. Some of his medicines were cloying, others sour, and the herbal soups were salty as the sea. On the second day when I rose from my bed, my grandmother muttered a begrudging respect for the old doctor. Koro Ha led me on my slow walk around the garden. At the moon bridge my mother met us and, overcome with happiness to see me healthy again, she gathered me into an embrace which violated every rule of propriety between mother and son.