A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  Even as I loved the House of Bayyur, I chafed at my restrictions. I could no longer go out, could not enjoy the marketplace. And I was the only child, my companions the hagaad—bodyguards—who protected me.

  The head of the kazervaaj understood that my world of palm fronds and still ponds was not enough. She would not give me free run of the city—she would not risk its pollution poisoning me. But we began to take leave of the temple, to travel out of the city environs, and it was in this way I came to know a little more of the empire.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  When I was thirteen we went to the imperial palace, which was called the Temple of Kings. It was nestled against a great cliffside, and framed by six waterfalls, three on each side. Spanning north, west, and east was a great jungle with a single, paved road all the way through. By then I had been to the grasslands, the sea, and the great northern mountains. And at last, it seemed, the king had heard of me and requested my presence.

  I heard whispers of the saagkazaar, dancers and singers of the kazerach. I wanted so desperately to be one, to be so connected to the kazerach, to pour all my heart into song for him. And I believed the king’s summons—the king, who was the vessel of the kazerach in the mortal world—was a sign of what I was. But as our caravan made its way along the road, my mind turned with unease. I sat in a litter as we made our way from the palace, each side hung with linen, dark enough that no one could see within, but light enough to allow in a breeze.

  There is a concept in dance called ukun: discord. It is the missed heartbeat, the skipped step, the hitched breath. Sometimes, it is good. A kazerach’s appearance often produced ukun. Their touch, their gaze, would disrupt the saagkazaar, no matter how well trained. Sometimes, however, ukun was deadly. It was the world misstepping. A saagkazaar’s song was the song of the world; the enchantment of the kazerach relied on our ability to work in concert with it. But if the world was out of step, if something was wrong, ukun was unavoidable in song.

  I was neither priest nor scholar, and I was young besides—only thirteen. But I knew the cadence of Bayyur’s song intimately, the notes as it issued from all lives, both human and not, and I could recognize where it faltered, where there was good ukun and bad. In the most holy among us, his song wreathed us the way fire wreathed logs in a hearth. It was not so with King Kegaad—the song and his spirit seemed to be constantly at war, as if he might beat it into submission, as if it might feed him with no price or offering in return. And as it flowed from the king I detected discord, unease, fear. It was discord I was familiar with—the cacophony of Baal, the unrest of the sick and poor shoved into alleyways, starving. When I knelt before the king I had to remind myself that he was as I was—his flesh was sacrosanct and therefore he had the right to look upon my face as few others outside the monasteries did. But it sat ill with me, and took away from the joy of my journey, that I’d found such song inside the king. And the bitterness of our meeting only amplified when our eyes met.

  I said little as we left the palace that morning, and less when we stopped to make camp that night. No longer was I the rambunctious girl who ran from her baths and struggled when younger priestesses undressed her. I sat through the rituals silently, my eye turned inward, playing over and over the meeting with the king. Even the Temple of Kings, ancient and beautiful and laden with history, had sounded sorrowful. Despite my difficult younger years, I knew little of sorrow now. I could not stomach it, could not sit with it as most people might.

  The priestess who’d found me when I lived in alleys entered the tent. She was called Keda, and her face was thin and severe. Though Bayyur venerated all things beautiful and abundant, Keda seemed to live an ascetic life. Her gown was black, her hair bound into many thin braids and lashed at the back of her head. She abjured gold and gems, and wore neither perfume nor cosmetics. When she’d found me, I thought she despised me. I had such a hunger in me for everything, and she found it distasteful, but I’d grown on her as a barnacle grows on a ship’s hull.

  Keda stared at me kindly and dismissed the priestesses.

  “I told you we should not go.”

  I nodded, glum and on the verge of tears. “Why was it so bad?”

  “None of us knows,” she said.

  I blinked up at her, her old and grave face cast in shadow by the lanterns. I did not burn incense in the tents when we traveled, for it troubled her lungs, and it was an easy thing to give up.

  “I wish to dance,” I said at last, and she nodded.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The kazerach were not gods.

  Many foreign to Baal believed this—or at least, believed that we believed this. In the tongue of outsiders the kazerach would be called world-serpents. For it was their spirit that coiled around worlds and stars, that drove life in galaxies, that connected us all through song. They had loved mortalkind once, long ago. Their spirit drove us into creation. And they so loved our dance and song and our reverence. But kazerach were not mortal, and our lives were fleeting, and the grief of loss, and the grievousness of the mistakes we made, drove them away.

  They were—are—divine in their way. But true gods do not care or rely on us. And the kazerach were bound to us as we were to them. Our health was theirs, our disease was theirs, and our disregard and corruption meant their ruin. Remember this, for I did not.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The women of the hagaad escorted me to a clearing in the jungle then stood a little way back. I was not yet old enough that any of the priestesses had chosen to teach me the dance of the saagkazaar. But I knew the lesser dances that priestesses performed regularly and many songs besides.

  I spun as the song unspooled inside me, as I thought to fix all the discord that reverberated in my mind and chest. It felt like a physical thing, mold that grew on my arms, cobwebs that filled my lungs. The sadness and defeat sloshed around in my mind until the song began to take root in me and crowd everything out. I sang for the glory of Baal, the beauty of the city I’d left behind, the majesty of Bayyur’s sun as it rose over ancient spires and heated yellow stone. I sang, thinking of the palm fronds that wafted in the breeze of his house, and the heavy brass lanterns that swayed and danced, twined with incense smoke. I danced, my mind filled with the glimpses of him I’d gotten, the purity innate in dance, untainted by the sorrow and grief of men.

  I wished, in my most secret of hearts, that Bayyur would come down. No one who danced for him danced thinking they were separate. But all knew that Bayyur had not descended from the heavens, had not crossed the dimensional divide, in eons.

  So when the sky split in two and cosmic thunder broke open the vault of heaven, I did not understand. I stopped, my face turned upward, my eyes wide as the black night sky turned white and then gold. It settled back into its velvet surface, and a column of silver poured down from above.

  I understood, distantly, that the Bayyur I saw was but a sliver of his true self. That his spirit fed a world and replenished it, that he could not be anything like a man. But a man was what I saw, tall and broad-shouldered, his hips narrow, his skin dark as night. His shoulders were dusted with gold and silver, and his hair fell to his shoulders in many braids. From his left ear hung a gold chain from which in turn hung a gleaming emerald. He was beautiful and resplendent, and when he saw me his mouth ticked up into a smile.

  “How wondrous,” he said, and held out a hand.

  I walked toward him as if through a dream. Every glimpse of glory suddenly made sense to me, every note I had ever gleaned from the world around me suddenly shone brighter. Discord and harmony lived together in him, for he encompassed all, and I thought little of how closely that discord echoed the king’s. I thought even less of the quiver of fear in the grass, and the way animals seemed to shy away from the clearing. And I ignored the women of the hagaad who came closer, their spears in hand. I could think only of how he sank
to one knee before me to be eye level with me, and how later, when I asked, he took the chain from his ear and gifted it to me.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The year I called down Bayyur, the mother priestess relocated me to a monastery well outside Baal. I did not mind it—Baal was loud, its air clouded, its song cacophonous. And in Baal I could not leave the monastery. In the grasslands I could see the stars, I could hear the song of the world, I could walk beyond the monastery’s walls and sing without worry of violation. It was no hardship to leave, though many of the sisters who accompanied me resented the relocation. In the grasslands Bayyur came often when I danced. I was young still, and could not mark things that should have worried me. In love with love, with the joy of the dance, with the knowledge that he had come for me when he had not descended from the firmament for anyone in a millennia, it was easy to put my meeting with the king behind me. It was even easier to ignore the song of discord in the world, which each year seemed to grow louder and encompass more. Betimes it seemed that Bayyur’s hair curled as mine did—and when I said this to him lines appeared at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. That too was dusted with gold.

  In the monastery was a prayer bower, its floors swept clean, its ceiling open to the night sky. There, often, between sunset and true dark did I dance, and wait for him. And there, more often than not, did he come and recline and listen to me sing. And there, too, I was finally allowed to learn the dance of the saagkazaar.

  Perhaps, if I had not been so secure in my own power, if I had thought beyond my own abilities and my own desires, I would have seen it. How often he reclined, the tired way he looked, how often he came when truly, he should not have come at all. I would have thought how strange it was that he appeared to me and never the king, his vessel in the realm of men. I would have listened—to the discord inside him, to the discord in the world. Perhaps if my teachers had trusted me, if I had been less in love with love, I could have been made to understand. What the king did, how Bayyur struggled to hold him back. How he came to me tired and left rejuvenated.

  Whatever was happening in the empire, I knew little of it. But I understood my teachers’ reluctance to name anyone saagkazaar, for in the hands of a saagkazaar lay the fate of nations. None but her might call the kazerach from the king’s side, might unseat his power. And I was young—thirteen at first—and did not know what I had done.

  But I cared nothing for the world outside—there was the song, and dekaad, and Bayyur himself. Nothing else mattered.

  And perhaps it was because nothing else mattered that I made the choice that I did.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  There were three parts to the dance of the saagkazaar: gatha, suku, and dekaad. Twilight, dusk, and dawn.

  Gatha was not the dance—it was the ritual by which incense was lit, by which the place of offering was swept, and the steps a saagkazaar took to kneel before the heavens. It was the ritual of choosing what one wore, which jewelry to hang from and adorn your wrists. It was the oils pressed against your skin, and the ochre on your eyelids.

  Suku were the opening notes. Some of the saagkazaar played instruments, or so I had been told. Those of us who did not still understood the importance of the link between twilight and dawn—the enchantment of the half-light. The will necessary to bring down a kazerach, to turn his ear and his mind—ancient and beyond our comprehension—for a few moments to our world.

  And finally, dekaad. Dekaad was the dance itself, the revelry of love and desire, the moment the flesh met the divine. It is said that in the golden age when the kazerach came regularly that dekaad was a deadly dance—that the kazerach enjoyed it too much and that we mortals had not the strength to bear their love or attention. That many saagkazaar died before ever attempting to become kazerkai.

  It was dekaad that I loved—I had little patience for gatha, and the inherent talent at song that I paid too little attention to suku. But in dekaad I reveled, and it was in dekaad that my instructors found the most fault. For I loved too much and too clearly, and showed none of the humility necessary before the kazerach. And I was so eager to finally learn, filled as I was with the thrumming energy of desire in adolescence, that I did not pause to think why I learned at all. The power of the dance and my love of Bayyur were so heady a thing that I forgot fear and sense both and threw myself into the lessons.

  If I had remembered . . . if I had paused to think . . .

  But such is the way of things.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I rose every morning before dawn to join the sisters in their prayers. I did not know if Bayyur watched me and so knew this, or if the cosmos conspired so that I might be where I was needed at the proper time. I dressed for prayers every morning as if I were in gatha, perfumed and oiled, my many braids coiled at the back of my head and wound in gold, ochre on my bottom lip, and the corners of my eyelids. I had lit the first of nine incense bowers in my room when a sound, as if thunder had struck in my room, split the air in two.

  The lit reed in my hand dropped from my fingers and for long moments I could not move at all. As if the world had shifted and forgotten me, or death had come and my mind had not yet found it. When at last I could move, I spun around.

  I was sixteen by then and as I was, as I have told you, had never had reason to fear anything in my life. For a single moment he appeared as I knew him, bare-chested, dusted in gold, his eyes shining in the darkness of my bedchamber.

  “Khefa—” My name tore itself from his mouth, warped with pain and sorrow. I had never heard him thus. Had never heard him as anything but detached, amused. He was a kazerach, the spirit of all life on this planet.

  But before my eyes the form I knew, the form I loved, tore itself apart. He came back together as skeins of darkness weaving themselves into something whole, and he turned into something I did not know. A man, still, with his night-dark skin and glowing eyes. A man, with his curled, coarse hair and his chest dusted in gold. A man, and yet he glistened and his hands were tipped with claws, and there was something—

  Something. Ukun.

  Here it was in the heart, in the soul, of our world.

  I felt it—discord, misstep—in my heart as Bayyur pulled away from my bed and stumbled toward me. Felt my heart miss a beat as he fell at my feet and did not rise. Remembered how easily I had ignored it and let it continue to take root.

  “Khefa,” he said again.

  I could not breathe. Bayyur was kazerach—ancient and undying, and though loved by me, beyond my ken. I had thought him—

  He remained on his knees even as he looked up at me, his eyes black where they had always been gold. Had he hid this aspect of himself from me? Could he no longer do it? I could not move, could not think—what had happened to him?

  He shuddered and I heard something spill from his mouth and strike the ground. Heard several breaths dragged in and out of his chest.

  Ukun happened not only in dekaad, but in life itself. It was death too early, summer too long, a rainy season that drowned crops. It was the slow decay of the world. The slaying of the spirit that gave it life.

  I had never touched Bayyur. As my flesh was sacrosanct, his was divine beyond imagining. His was not for me to touch, ever, and yet I reached for him and held his shoulder. It was a single touch, and yet it seemed to undo us both. I understood, at last, what my teachers meant when they said I lived too much in the flesh. Divine desire unspooled through me, and I felt there were no words to express it. What does a single blade of grass say when the heavens unload a storm on her back? What does cosmic dust say when it is swept away by solar winds? How was I, a mortal girl, meant to contend with divine flesh, even as broken as it seemed?

  I could not. And yet my grip held and I knelt beside him, and when he bowed his head over my shoulder, I raised a hand to cradle his head. He felt mortal then, though he shouldn’t hav
e. And I felt—not mortal, not divine. I felt as if I were dekaad and ukun incarnate in one moment, two cosmic forces churning in me as I held Bayyur. It felt as though my skin were too tight and not tight at all, as if a flower had taken seed inside my rib cage and at any moment would begin to blossom, winding its way around my bones, and burst through my skin.

  “Do you remember,” he began, his voice hoarse, “when I first came to you?”

  “Yes,” I replied softly.

  “Besieged on all sides by corruption and rot,” he continued. “And then a single light. A gleaming mote in the darkness.”

  He shuddered again.

  “Help me,” he whispered. “I beg of you.”

  I had never held lightning or thunder in my hands, but it felt as if thunder clapped and lightning struck to take him from me. My skin burned and sparked where he’d sat. And the ichor that spilled from his mouth had burned a hole in the stone floor.

  I did not go to prayer. For long hours I sat where I’d held him, immobile, unable to think. Or rather, able to think only one thing. For I knew what I must do, what it was, truly, that he was asking of me. And I knew too that it was forbidden—that the priestesses would never allow it, that the king, as many kings before him, had decreed it a crime. For the power of rulership of our world was to be held by the king alone, and a saagkazaar could not be seen to hold the influence of the kazerach. It would tip the power of nations.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Bayyur was dying, and he would take our world with him.