The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  Doctor Sho returned on the sixth day, examined me impassively, nodded once, collected a string of silver coins as a gratuity from my mother, and left without a word.

  * * *

  As soon as I could walk again, Koro Ha resumed our lessons in earnest. Though the imperial examinations would not be held for four more years, he seemed to believe that any day not spent studying would be a millstone around my neck. We spent our mornings reviewing the classics and dialectics and our afternoons practicing calligraphy, composing essays, and writing poetry.

  I lay awake most nights listening for the tap at my window. It never came. Instead, I overheard many hushed arguments between my mother and my grandmother, their voices never as loud as they had been the night before Doctor Sho’s arrival, so that I caught only a few words muted by the wood and paper walls. In my imagination, they must have been continuing the fight over my grandmother’s lessons. She had promised to teach me magic, but my mother had been terrified by my illness and--I assumed--must have forbidden her.

  This imagined conflict made me despise my mother. I still loved her in that vague but potent way learned in infancy, but the sight of her had begun to annoy me. She congratulated me at my successes with Koro Ha. Praise that stung like nettles.

  My feelings of alienation built and built, until they overflowed my waking mind and submerged my subconscious in a horrible dream that returned me to that night in the forest, when I had dragged my contorted body on twisted limbs, gasping for air with each attempt to scream, harried from every shadow by the stone eyes of the wolf gods.

  I woke with a start, threw off my sweat-soaked blanket, and felt along the lines of my limbs to be sure they were human. When the hammering of my heart finally quieted, I heard a familiar tapping at my window.

  “Foolish Cur!” my grandmother whispered from the other side of the oiled paper screen. “Meet me in the garden. We have much to discuss, and only one night left to us.”

  * * *

  For the last time we followed the pathway through the forest to the Temple of the Flame. Grandmother paused beside the statue of Okara. I waited anxiously, desperate to know why this would be our last night together, and what she would teach me for my final lesson.

  A sense of the interconnectedness of all things lingered within me. I had not reached for magic since the night I made myself an abomination, but my longing for mastery had only deepened. I realized that a single night would never be enough for her to teach me all I needed to learn. A thought that darkened my mood like a black cloud.

  Finally, we reached the steps leading up to the temple. My grandmother sat and motioned for me to join her.

  “I must go away,” she said at last. Her eyes took on a faraway look, as though gazing upon her destination. The wrinkles on her face and hands were deeper than I remembered. The glassiness of age had begun creeping in at the corners of her eyes.

  “There is still much fighting in the north,” she went on. “Your uncle Harrow Fox is caught up in it and cornered. I will go to him tomorrow.”

  I knew my uncle only as a name, a reputation, and a bedraggled silhouette, yet once or twice--when my studies with Koro Ha had hit a snarl and the imperial examinations had seemed to loom over me like some unconquerable monster--I had entertained the fantasy of slipping away from my father’s estate, abandoning my duty to the Wen family, and making my way to join him in the mountains. Now my grandmother spoke of doing just that.

  “Do not follow me,” she said, perhaps sensing my desire. “You do not know enough to be of use. Read the books hidden here. Learn our histories. Teach your children. This will be your last lesson, and it is one I cannot leave you without.”

  She entered the Temple and returned with the obsidian knife that she had used to name me. She extended her palm. I gave her my hand. Gently she pressed the tip of the knife to my naming scar.

  I bit back pain as she carved my hand with three curving lines that followed the creases of my palm. As she did, I felt a thrum of power, like a single heartbeat through the pattern of the world. In its wake the sharpness of my senses dulled. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt for the ebb and flow of energy, the pattern of all things that I had apprehended in the moment before veering. All that remained was a sense of heat and power beneath the wounds my grandmother dealt. I felt the absence of the pattern like an amputated limb. I stared at my grandmother, hurt and betrayed, doing what I could to mask my panic while my mind grasped desperately for a shred of the power I had held.

  “These witch-marks are the sign of our pact with the gods,” she said. “Without them, you should never have been able to work magic. You tried to carve a figurine of jade and chose for your tool a woodcutter’s sledge. If you had tried to conjure flame, you likely would have burned the forest down.”

  Her words, though meant to calm me, had the opposite effect. I did not understand what she had done, but knew that the limitless freedom I had felt when first reaching for magic had been suddenly hemmed in, limited by this pact of which she spoke. Perhaps, as she claimed, those limitations would protect me. But she had chosen that protection for me, as everything else in my life had been chosen for me. I wanted to scream, to seize her knife and carve away the marks she had made in the hope that doing so would restore my freedom.

  Yet if I were to learn magic--any magic at all--I needed her to teach me. Who else in my life could? And so, as I would so often in the years to come, I swallowed my anger, my frustrations, and my feelings of betrayal. I would glean what useful truths I could from her and use them to find my way back to the deeper power I had tasted and which, with a few strokes of her knife, she had taken away.

  She poured clear alcohol over the wound and wrapped it in bandages till my hand was little more than a club of blood-stained cloth. This done, she entered the temple to replace the obsidian knife in its chest beside the altar with the books and scrolls that were the remnant of her culture. When she returned, I saw her hopes for me, and her fears, mingled and inseparable, written in the lines of her face.

  “When you were born,” she said, breaking the silence, “I fought the urge to hate you, as I still fight the urge to hate your mother. She was too young when the Sienese came. She forgets what they did to your grandfather. Or she never believed it. Harrow Fox, your uncle…he remembers. When they came, it was with the promise of wealth and culture. Silks, opera, and foreign delicacies. Wondrous weapons--rippled steel that could shatter our swords and grenades that could tear a palisade to tinder. Things they sold cheaply, for the payment they sought was not our silver but our souls.”

  I nursed my hand but soon forgot my pain, lost as I was in her words. Even the ache of her betrayal faded as I listened. Never had she spoken so much about herself, and certainly never about my grandfather.

  Her fingers--calloused like a farmer’s, or a soldier’s--toyed with the hems of her sleeves as she went on. “Your grandfather was the witch of our village temple, not me. I was the hostess of the common house. The people went to him to pray and came to me to drink and sing and hear the old-stories. I was that, too, a storyteller.”

  She shook her head and was silent for a moment, while her gaze returned to the present moment, and to me.

  “What matters is this; the Sienese came. A few at first, merchant adventurers--like your father--who traveled to the cities, then the towns, then the villages. They sought out things we took at first for harmless. Our stories. Our histories. Maps of our roads. Your grandfather spent many nights in the common house, answering their endless questions about our gods. He kept our magic secret, wise man that he was. Nayen was at war with itself, in those days. Three rival lords all claimed the throne of the Sun King. Save the threat of conscription and burdensome taxes, we common folk cared little which of them won in the end. Yet the Sienese took an interest.

  “Soon, more merchants came to our town, and soldiers with them, to defend their caravans. And we heard rumors that the Sienese no longer visited the north and west of our country,
the territories claimed by our lord’s rivals. They offered soldiers and their wondrous weapons and a swift end to the war, and our lord--may he burn forever--accepted. But of course, when his rivals had been put down, the Sienese legions were not finished with their conquest.”

  Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep, steadying breath. “Word spread of witches disappearing, of temples ransacked and burned. We made ready to leave but were too late. They came for your grandfather even as we shouldered our packs. We watched, Harrow Fox and I, while their sorcerers bound him in chains of light.” She swallowed, blinked, and took another breath. “Rather than let them capture him, and with him his magic, he did what all the witches of Nayen have done when cornered. He conjured a fire that filled the temple. It burned, with him in it, to the ground. Better to die than let the Empire steal our secrets.” There was a hitch in her voice. She swallowed. “I gave birth to your mother three months later, in the common house of a village, far from our home, where I cut my own witch-marks and tried to raise my children as their father would have wanted. Wise, stupid man that he was.”

  She rubbed her face with the heel of her hand and pressed on.

  “They are liars, Foolish Cur. So, to survive, we became liars as well. I made a living mending nets, and Harrow Fox was a fisherman for a time, until the rebellion. Never have I felt such pride and terror as the day he joined them.” She gestured with the knife toward my bandaged hand. “Until, perhaps, the day you worked magic without those marks. If you can, abstain from it. You have already tasted its power, and it is as alluring as strong drink. Worse, you are curious, and sensitive enough to learn on your own. Be careful. With those scars you will not make yourself an abomination again, but there are other powers just as dangerous and unwieldy. Do not seek them. And, at all costs, avoid discovery. If you become known as a witch, the Sienese will torture every secret they can from you before they let you die.”

  She looked to the sky, where the stars were dimming and the moon descending. Dawn would break soon and end the last night of our lessons.

  “I almost wish that I had not taught you,” she said, and stood. I rose to follow her. She touched my shoulder and looked at the bloody bandages. “Make up a story. Say you were whittling and the knife slipped.”

  We walked in somber silence and parted ways in the garden of my father’s estate. She embraced me. My bloodied hand was caught awkwardly between us. I bit my tongue to keep from yelping and did not pull away.

  A sudden fear of her leaving gripped me. She had been a pillar of my life, a window into half of my heritage, a teacher vital to my understanding of the world. My only means of learning magic, even if in a lessened form and limited by her fears for me.

  “You don't have to go,” I said, my voice tight.

  She smiled at me and, with rare tenderness, kissed the top of my head.

  “Keep our ways alive,” she whispered, and then released me. She walked swiftly to her wing of the women’s apartments. I lingered in the garden, until her silhouette disappeared behind the paper walls.

  * * *

  Instead of taking my grandmother’s suggestion--for I had never whittled in my life--I broke one of the porcelain plates on my breakfast tray and smeared blood from my thumb on the shards. My mother’s stewardess fussed about the broken plate. Koro Ha gave me a cursory scolding to sate her, but his real concern was with the damage to my writing hand.

  “You drop a plate, and now you may never write again!” One of his eyebrows twitched in frustration. “What has been the point of all my effort if you cannot sit for the imperial examinations?”

  More than wasted effort was at stake for Koro Ha. If I did well in the examinations, he could leverage that success into a position with a family of high station--perhaps even in the house of a Hand or a Voice. Many such families offered pensions and permanent quarters to tutors who guided their sons to success. If I could no longer write, any hope of such promotion and eventual retirement was lost to him.

  “We will have to see how it heals,” he said at last. “While we wait, we will dedicate ourselves to discourse and recitation.”

  I was halfway through reciting the Classic of Streams and Valleys when an eagle-hawk flew over the garden in a flash of auburn-feathers. I faltered, the poetic words fading from my mind as I watched the bird disappear behind the forest canopy, wondering if it was my grandmother, and if this would be the last time I would see her. Koro Ha made me start again, but my mind kept wandering, and he released me from my lessons long before supper.

  My grandmother was gone, and with her a path that my life might have taken. For all her encouragement to learn on my own, I knew that without her to counterbalance them Koro Ha and my father would lead me into their vision of my future. Any alternative I might have imagined would fade with time.

  That night I sat on my bed and examined my hand. True to my grandmother’s word, the wounds had already healed. The blood staining the bandages was dry and dark, but the scars beneath them were pale and thin. The scars itched and burned when I flexed my hand, but there were no scabs to crack. Koro Ha would never believe that I had damaged it that morning.

  I panicked. My mother and my tutor would be looking for a jagged scar cut by broken porcelain, not these ritualistic markings. I could not break another plate--that would invite too many questions. I kept no knife in my room. There were knives in the kitchens, but for the heir of the house to wander the servants’ wing in the middle of the night would prompt untoward gossip and rumor.

  There was only one knife that I could use without drawing attention. I crept out into the garden and from there followed the familiar trails. The last time I had walked them alone had ended in disaster. There was no one to save me from any similar folly now that my grandmother was gone.

  The wolf gods watched as I mounted the steps of the Temple. Stone eyes regarded me with neither warmth nor rebuke. If they remembered the last time I had come alone they did not show it.

  I brushed my hand along the top of the altar. The fire my grandmother had conjured in its hearth still burned. The knife was where she had left it, lying with the books and scrolls of bamboo slats in the small chest beside the altar. Twice I had seen that obsidian blade used in the working of magic, but in that moment, it was only a knife to me.

  The grip of the knife was old leather, worn down to match knuckles more widely spaced than mine. I held it clumsily in my left hand and examined my right, deciding where to cut myself. The upper half of my palm--below the thumb and above the naming scar--was unmarked and seemed a likely place for me to have cut myself in a futile attempt to catch a shattering plate.

  I gritted my teeth and slashed open my palm, deep enough to suit my lie, but not so deep to damage the hand beyond repair. The wound was long and uneven as it snaked from below my thumb to just below my middle finger. I thought it likely to prompt a sympathetic wince from the most hardened and battle-scarred warrior, and it drew even my knowing eye away from the finer scars my grandmother had dealt. I re-wrapped my hand in its old bandage and returned the knife to its place. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I left the temple. When I turned around, I saw only the stone eyes of the wolf gods, measuring me.

  The next morning, Koro Ha panicked at the sight of fresh blood. He removed the bandage and rebound it himself in a poultice of herbs and mineral oil. If he noticed the ritual scars my grandmother had dealt he said nothing. When he finished with the bandage he thrust a calligraphy brush into my left hand.

  “I hope you enjoy writing, boy,” he said. “You’ll be doing a great deal of it in the days to come.”

  Chapter Four

  Examination

  Only the silence at night when she ought to have been arguing with my mother told of my grandmother’s disappearance--my father, mother, and Koro Ha never mentioned it. Perhaps they believed that if we did not speak of her, the Sienese might never learn that we had harbored her for so many years.

  Over the next three years I taught
myself what I could of magic. The witch-marks had made it smaller. No longer did I hover above the world like a brush over blank paper, free to write whatever I willed. Whenever I reached for magic, I felt only the powers to conjure flame and change my shape. Without my grandmother’s guidance I dared go little further than kindling a candle flame.

  Is it any surprise that, as the examinations drew closer and closer, I put her lessons from my mind? The only remaining path toward mastery of magic lay in the unlikely possibility that I might become Hand of the Emperor.

  If she ever learned that my thoughts had so much as drifted in the direction of that possibility, let alone hoped for it--as I did now--her outrage would have burned hot enough to put me in fear for my life. Yet after years stagnated in my pursuit of magic, constrained by the witch marks she had made in my flesh before abandoning me to fight her war, I cared little for what she might think, nor her hopes and intentions for me. When the time came for me to travel to the provincial capital and take the imperial examinations, I had not been to the Temple of the Flame in more than a year.

  My father made a point of being home on the day before I was to leave. He did not put me to the question, as he had done so often in my youth. Instead, he led me to the small family shrine in the corner of our garden.

  We swept the altars to the sages, polished their golden faces with rose oil, set incense to burn at their feet, and filled their table with fruits and sweet rice. This done, we knelt before the lacquered panel carved with the ancient names of our family’s most notable members. My father invoked their aid and asked them to guide my tongue and my brush during the examination. I made my own venerations and asked Wen Broad-Oak to show me the path to becoming Hand of the Emperor. When we stood, my father squeezed my shoulder. A warm touch, the sort I had not known from him since my earliest memories.