The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  * * *

  By the end of the next day, those lingering words had become a constant echo against the walls of my skull, taunting me while I plodded through the day's paperwork and wandered the gardens, seeking something to occupy my mind and chase away the lingering disquiet the windcallers' visit had stirred.

  While wandering, I spied a group of porters arriving by a servant's gate in the wall of the garden, bearing crates of various supplies, and was struck by a bolt of inspiration.

  Here was a way out into the city which did not require Voice Rill's permission. Dozens of people must pass through each day, I reasoned, not only to bring supplies into the garden but to deliver the correspondence that traveled in a constant stream between us ministers and our subordinates.

  Getting back into the garden might prove more difficult, but as I returned to my rooms a plan had already begun to form. First, I summoned Jhin.

  “I would like some clothing in the An-Zabati style,” I said when he answered my summons, doing my best to hide my excitement beneath a cool, mildly annoyed detachment.

  “Might I ask why, your excellence?” Jhin said.

  “They seem better suited to this climate than these robes,” I said, flicking out my sleeves. “My rooms become stifling in the heat of the day.”

  “I see.” Jhin dipped his head slightly. “I can assure you, Your Excellence, that while An-Zabati clothes are indeed well suited to the desert, the wardrobe I have selected for you is made of the finest silk, and tailored not only to this climate but to the dignity of your office.”

  “The embroidery itches me, as well,” I said. “I'm not used to all of this gold and silver thread, you know. Must I always dress as though I might receive the Emperor himself at any moment? No, a plain kaftan will do.”

  Jhin blinked, his composure beginning to crack. “You would dress like a servant, Your Excellence?”

  I sighed, seasoning my voice with just a hint of exasperation. “Put a few lines of red or silver or what have you on the cuffs, if you must.”

  “Your Excellence, I--”

  “As my steward, your task is to bring me what I require, is it not?” I said. “My discomfort distracts me from my work, which slows the business of the Empire. Now, if you will be so kind? The sooner I am able to dress in something that breathes a little better the sooner I can review these new import taxes.”

  After another moment of hesitation, he bowed and departed, and that night returned with a bundle in his arms and a mildly defeated expression.

  That night I hardly slept, and nonetheless woke with the dawn of the desert sun to dress myself in the kaftan he had brought me and venture, at last, out into the city. So giddy was I that I nearly forgot to take one of the unopened reports from my desk--still bound in its scroll-case and with the wax seal of whoever had sent it to me intact. It was vital to my return: a sealed message for Hand Alder would be my ticket back through the servant's gate at the end of the day.

  I had the presence of mind to snatch a pair of workman's gloves on my way, pilfered from an unlocked storeroom full of gardener's tools. The common people of An-Zabat were unlikely to know my face, but they would certainly recognize the tetragram from the banners that fluttered upon their obelisks. I completed the disguise by pulling my hair into a tight bun at the back of my head, a peasant's hairstyle that would deflect the recognition of any gate guard or servant who had seen my face before, but who would never believe that I might so debase myself.

  Sure enough, the two guards at the servant's gate let me pass without so much as a second glance, though my heart thundered against my ribs while I pulled the door open and stepped through the wall. The gate opened into an alleyway, already rich with the echoing sounds of the city.

  After the quiet seclusion of the garden, An-Zabat nearly overwhelmed me. Heat radiated from the packed earth of the crowded streets. Raised voices haggled over prices. Crowds cheered for performers. As I neared the oasis, the cascade of water from Naphena’s urn rose above the cacophony, and the air filled with the smells of dry-spiced meats, the tang of oil and salt and sugar, of herds and sweat and excrement.

  I began my immersion into An-Zabati culture with a survey of the food stalls scattered throughout the oasis bazaar. First, lamb dry-rubbed with black pepper and fire-roasted till juices dripped down the skewer. Then a cup of brined olives that stung my nose. As I moved from stall to stall, I soaked in the sights of the bazaar--men haggling over bolts of cloth, a fruit-seller glaring at a nearby pack of bedraggled children, a tumbler juggling knives in flashing arcs while a thin-limbed monkey scampered between the onlookers, holding out a basket that was slowly filling with coins.

  For a time, I stood in Naphena’s shadow, studying the statue. It was nearly as tall as the glittering obelisks that towered over the city, rising, it seemed, from every crossroads. If the waters of the Blessed Oasis were indeed the product of some ancient and wonderous magic, Naphena’s fountain should have left a wake to rival the Emperor’s own. Yet the statue and the pool left no wake at all.

  I nursed my disappointment with a bag of honey-candied dates and resumed my wander through the bazaar, hoping that some insight into the puzzle of the oasis would strike while my mind was distracted, until I felt a sudden, brisk chill on the back of my neck. I turned toward it and saw a ripple in the air like light on glass and the flash of silken scarves glimmering in the sun.

  Atar, the dancer.

  Power flowed from spiral tattoos on the backs of her fingers. As her hands twirled, she wove the wind like the threads of a tapestry, or the strokes of a brush, making the scarves swim through the air as though of their own accord. While I watched her two preposterous, thrilling thoughts occurred to me. First, that she was a person I could learn from. Genuinely learn, outside the rigid structures of the canon. The second arrived in a jolt through my chest as she spun, throwing her hair across the slope of her neck, and met my gaze.

  Her emerald eyes widened in astonishment, and her next few movements held a stiffness born of confusion and surprise, but she found again the rhythm of her dance. She followed it to the last step, then bowed to wild applause and a rain of coin that filled the basket at her feet.

  All the while, her gaze never left me.

  If I had been able to pull myself away, what might have happened differently? How might the world have failed to change?

  She gathered up her basket, and her audience dispersed to rejoin the market crowd. A river of bodies she crossed, as gracefully as she danced, to stand beside me, her head cocked and eyes narrowed.

  “Minister of Finance,” she said in Sienese, and jangled the basket of coins. “Did you linger to collect your tax from this poor street performer?”

  “I hoped for some hint of why a street performer might stand beside the windcallers and treat with the Empire,” I said, in An-Zabati.

  She laughed, a sound that left a wake through me like magic.

  “As I said, there is much you do not know,” she said, following me into her own tongue. “I must confess, I did not expect you to accept my invitation.”

  “We are both more than we appear,” I said. “And, as you have so rightly pointed out, I have much to learn of An-Zabat. Would you care to teach me?”

  “You think I have nothing better to do than give you a tour?” she said, glaring as though I had offered some grave insult.

  I stammered, trying to think of a retort, put off balance by her sudden shift in tone and by the strange, anxious wonder she evoked in me. Seeing my discomfort, she laughed again, then turned on her heel and set off into the city.

  “Come, then,” she said. “Few of the deeper truths of An-Zabat can be found in this bazaar.”

  * * *

  Atar led me through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets, deeper into the city. Soon, the houses we passed bore the old scars of conquest--the jagged burns of battle-sorcery, mud bricks torn by an errant sword, a building shattered by chemical grenades. Human waste ran in the gutters. There
were still crowds, but all the life seemed to have gone out of the people we saw. They walked with hunched backs or huddled in doorways with bottles and pipes that trailed a sweet, blue smoke. Atar pressed a few coins into the hands of beggars and urchin children. She did nothing to hide the wealth she had carried from the bazaar and showed no fear of robbery.

  For my part, I constantly fought the urge to glance about me, wary of hidden knives. With a backward glance I spotted a pair of bulky figures draped in white kaftans, with swords hanging from their hips. My first glimpse of them sent a spike of fear through my heart, dressed and armed as they were in the An-Zabati style. Accomplices of Atar's, perhaps, here to seize the chance to kidnap a Hand of the Emperor and hold him for political ransom. Or mere brigands, spotting me as an outsider in their city, ready to pounce the moment I stepped into some secluded alleyway.

  But a second glance revealed tell-tale signs that at once assuaged my fear and filled me with a new, different paranoia. Beneath their hoods, their faces were Sienese, and they walked with the familiar gait and bearing of Sienese infantrymen. Guards from the citadel, who had tailed me since my departure. They followed closer, now, likely feeling the same nervousness that I did.

  Clearly, I had not been so successful in my subterfuge as I had thought. Had Voice Rill sent them, or Jhin? A steward had some command of the household guard, after all. Regardless, an awkward conversation with one or the other would be waiting for me when I returned, and there was little I could do about my unwanted escort now.

  “There was poverty here, before,” Atar said, pulling my attention back to the city around me. “But An-Zabat was not broken like this. These people had steady work, even if only as laborers. Only the windcallers can live as they did before.”

  I paused in the mouth of an alleyway and watched a child who knelt on hands and knees, staring hawk-like at a refuse pile. A tawny rodent darted from the pile. The child snatched at it, but the rodent slipped his grasp and darted away.

  “I’ve seen the ledgers,” I said, forcing my eyes away from the pitiful child. “An-Zabat is a thriving port. More money flows through this city than any other province of the Empire.”

  “An apt description,” she said. “It flows through, as water flows through the canals from the Blessed Oasis, but very little leaks out and trickles down. After the conquest trading rights were stripped from the An-Zabati merchants and given to their Sienese rivals. An-Zabati windcallers ferry goods to and from the city, An-Zabati middlemen buy and sell them in the bazaar, and the fortunate make a living, but it is the Sienese who profit, who amass the wealth born of all that labor. And all around them, the city is dying.”

  We went on and witnessed scene after scene of desperation and suffering. Youths clawing at each other over a scrap of dried meat. Fathers tearing bread into thin pieces and handing them to their children, keeping nothing for themselves. Gaunt mothers clutching babes who watched us with hollow eyes.

  I had seen such things in Iron Town. But that had been a place besieged, its suffering an artifact of chaos and war. Which of my subordinates should have written that, despite the fortunes that changed hands in the Barge Bazaar, children starved not an hour’s walk away?

  I should have known. I had seen the ledgers, the names of the importers and exporters who owned the goods that moved through An-Zabat. Sienese names.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She cocked her head. “For what?”

  “For whatever part I have played in this suffering.”

  “You are Minister of Trade,” she said. “You stand at the center of it.”

  Her words stung and made me flush.

  “The Empire gives you your task, and you perform it, for that is what they have made you,” she went on. You are Hand of the Emperor, are you not? This is what you agreed to when you accepted your position here. Did you not know the nature--and the consequences--of your work?”

  Guilt gnawed at me, and I recalled the Classic of Wealth and Labor, in which Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way wrote that a merchant is no better than a bandit if his wealth does not elevate the farmers and craftsmen who are the backbone of the Empire. What was I doing as Minister of Trade, collecting tariffs and taxes to pay for the garden I lived in and the luxuries of the Eternal Citadel, if not hoarding wealth that could have fed these children?

  I had spent the bulk of my life cloistered in relative wealth; first in my father’s gardens, then Voice Golden-Finch’s, and now in the imperial citadel of An-Zabat. I had known of poverty, of course, but in a world where anyone could improve their lot through success in the imperial examinations, it was easy to ignore. But what hope would these desperate children have to compete against those like Pinion and I, whose entire lives were devoted to study, whose fathers hired skilled tutors, who never had to spend an afternoon sifting through rubble and refuse to find their next meal?

  I remembered Clear-River, now with sympathy I had never felt before. It must have seemed a cruel joke that he, a peasant’s son, should struggle to the heights of Sienese society, only to be kept from the highest position by the son of a wealthy merchant.

  “Is it any surprise that many in this city hate the Empire?” Atar said suddenly, drawing me back to the present. We stood in an empty square that might once have housed a market. Now it was only a field of dust and ruin, barren and dark in the deepening twilight.

  “You speak as though we alone are to blame for their suffering,” I said. Something within me refused to accept such a one-sided history. “As you said, there has always been poverty. Before the Empire, was An-Zabat ruled by benevolent kings willing to empty their storehouses to feed the poor? And what of the windcallers? They continue to grow fat from trade, and their struggle against the Empire closed the ports for a year. How does that help a starving child?”

  “Many have died in the struggle,” she said, her voice hardening. “But their deaths were naphnet, and they knew this. They were willing to die for a greater cause. If the Empire supplants the windcallers, that will be the end of us all.”

  “A story that serves the windcallers,” I said, furrowing my brow at this word, naphnet, which I had not encountered before. Its meaning was clear enough--a reference to the goddess and the sacrifice she had made to create the oasis.

  “A story based in truth,” she said. “The windcallers travel far, Nayeni. They have seen what happens when your Empire shuts its fist.”

  Her gaze drifted, fixed on something behind me, and hardened. “You have helped the people by giving up your silos. That was well done, and that kindness is the only reason I offer you these truths, for I think there is some chance you might listen,” she said. “There is more I would show you, if you wish to see. Meet me in the bazaar, two nights from now, at dusk. And come alone.”

  She crossed the empty square, then headed down another narrow street. The sun had set by now, and the city seemed painted in black and purple ink. When she had vanished from sight, I turned, and saw the white, shapeless forms of my unwanted escort, lurking at the edges of the square, the only figures in sight.

  I sighed and waved for them to join me. “I hope you paid attention to the turnings,” I said. “I’ve got no idea where we are.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Firecaller

  The next two days felt slow and heavy as an overburdened barge. My morning paperwork had never been more simplistic or routine--though I now read it with a more knowing eye and saw the signs of Sienese prosperity and An-Zebati destitution that I should have noted all along. Two thoughts occupied my mind, circling round each other; excitement for my reunion with Atar, and a fretful question--how would Voice Rill would react to my venture out into the city?

  Just after noon on the second day, I had my answer.

  He came to me, this time, which was enough cause for concern on its own. I was finishing my day’s work--and beginning to plot my evening escape from the citadel. I heard Jhin’s excited, pleading voice, and then the door swung open and Voice Ri
ll stepped through.

  “Hand Alder,” Voice Rill said, a beatific smile on his face and his hands folded into the sleeves of his robe. “I heard from gossiping soldiers that you spent a day meandering through the city in the company of a dancing girl. How is it that I am hearing this second-hand, and not from you, when it is such an…uncommon activity?”

  So, Jhin had sent the guards who followed me after all. That, or Rill wanted to obfuscate the degree to which he kept an eye on me. If the latter, what did it mean that he had waited two days for this confrontation?

  “I thought it beneath your notice,” I said, summoning the justifications I had rehearsed to mind. “Surely I am not the first Minister of Trade to take an interest in the daily lives and marketplaces of the people he governs? The dancer offered to give me a tour of the city, and I accepted.”

  “A tour that included less than savory locales,” Rill said.

  “It did,” I said. “But, as Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way wrote, ‘the most objectionable of truths carries beauty to the honest man.’ I want to craft policies that will make this city thrive as it never has before, Voice Rill. I cannot repair flaws and bolster weaknesses that I do not see.”

  “That may be,” Rill said. “But we had previously discussed your venturing into the city, and I made myself very clear.”

  “I did not venture out officially as Minister of Trade or Hand of the Emperor,” I said. “There was no damage done to the prestige of my office. No violation of propriety. I only went out and saw the city for myself, to better understand it.”

  “The reports of your subordinates are insufficient?” Rill said. “Fire them. Find better ones.”

  “There are things I might notice that any subordinate might not,” I said. “I was given this post, Voice Rill. I must be allowed to fulfill its duties to the best of my ability, and that means seeking out the information I require. I cannot do my work while hamstrung, and if you mean to so restrict me I fear there may be no path forward but for me to tender my resignation and seek a position elsewhere in the Empire, if only to preserve my own reputation.”