From the porch across the courtyard Gabriel watched them until their figures blurred in the brightness, then went back into the office. The room was pitch black after the sunlight. He staggered and almost fell, and someone put a chair behind him so he could sit down. There was shouting outside; Officer Razzak was calling the Shinali and soldiers to an assembly. There was silence, and the people waited. Then came the announcement, the words loud and echoing about the old stones. “The Empress Petra has given her final command. You are free to go.”
There was stunned silence, for a moment, then a mighty cheer, and sounds of celebration.
Before the cheers had faded, the palace envoy said to Gabriel, “Gabriel Eshban Vala, I pronounce you prisoner of His Majesty, Lord Jaganath, eleventh ruler of the Navoran Empire. Do you understand the charge against you, and the sentence?”
“Yes.”
Razzak pulled Gabriel to his feet and forced his hands roughly behind him, crossing them at the wrists. The envoy started to bind him.
“Is this necessary?” asked Gabriel. “I want to go back to Navora of my own free will. I won’t try to escape, I give my word. Besides, I haven’t the strength to run.”
The envoy thought for a while. “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll ride; you walk unshackled. But if you do try to escape, I’ll do the executioner’s job for him.”
There was the sound of the colossal gates being pushed open, clanging back against the stone walls. The envoy left the office. Gabriel followed him, though the light blinded him and he stumbled on the step. People were dark shapes moving across the shining dust. He could just make out someone being conveyed on a blanket toward the open gates. His eyesight cleared a little, and he saw that it was Tarkwan being carried. As the people took their chieftain into freedom, they sang a Shinali love song. They were still singing as they placed him by the river, overlooking the land he had loved. Soon afterward the song turned to a lament, and Gabriel, listening, knew Tarkwan had died.
The envoy touched his prisoner’s shoulder, and Gabriel went ahead of him across the courtyard to where the horse waited. It seemed strange to have the gates open wide, and people going back and forth. The soldiers were already leaving. Shinali men were raiding the soldiers’ barracks, looking for their slings and knives and hunting weapons.
In the courtyard the people were preparing to leave. Not realizing Gabriel had been arrested, they called cheerfully to him as he walked past. He wanted to speak their names, but could not see their faces clearly in the violent light. Everything was hazy. The sounds of happy voices intermingled with the brightness, and the clang of cooking pots sounded loud and harsh, like Navoran temple bells.
People were gathering just outside the gates, raising their hands and praying. Others were running down into the river, plunging into the cleansing coolness, rejoicing. Beyond them was the ancient fort bridge, and the road to the coastal hills and Navora. The road was well worn now, with wagon ruts deep in the dust.
The envoy mounted his horse. “Say your farewells,” he said to Gabriel.
Gabriel looked for Ashila but could not see her. People came over to him, asking questions, their faces anxious. They remembered his trouble with Navora, and that he was accused of doing a great wrong. He did his best to encourage them, praying that his voice was steady. “I’m not being a prisoner of this man,” he said. “I’m going where I choose. Where’s Ashila?”
Reassured, they made jokes about a half-Shinali in the city and touched his chest with their palms, honoring him, loving him. He avoided embraces, though it was hard, and his friends looked hurt. “You want us to wait for you?” they asked. “Our journey, there’s no hurry for it. We’ll be staying here and getting fat on fish and mountain goats, until you come back.”
“Don’t wait,” he said.
Behind them, Yeshi and Zalidas and some of the elders were already preparing a pyre. Tarkwan’s body lay wrapped in a sleeping mat, ready for cremation. People had found their stone axes and were chopping down the fort gates for wood for his funeral fire.
Yeshi came over, wearing the bone amulet, sign that he was chieftain now. Gabriel touched the bone, stroking with his fingertip the carved images of the man and the eagle merged. In the fort, musicians played, mingling funeral chants with songs of celebration. The flutes echoed in Gabriel’s memory, and for a few moments he was a child again in Navora, lying hurt in bed with the Shinali bone clenched in his hand.
“Leave this place quickly,” Gabriel said to Yeshi. “The Empress gave you freedom, but it was her last command as ruler. An evil man is emperor now.”
“We’ll be gone by high moon tonight,” said Yeshi. “I’ll keep you in my knowing, brother. When we come back, in the Time of the Eagle, when the battles are past, people of your blood will tend the lands beside people of my blood.”
Gabriel thought of his mother and family, even now tending the land, loving it. And he thought of his child, Shinali and Navoran blood mixed, the unity already begun.
Yeshi touched his own chest, then placed his palm on Gabriel’s and spoke the Shinali farewell.
Ashila stood nearby, and, seeing her, the new chieftain and his people went back into the fort to prepare for their great journey. Gabriel and Ashila were alone, but for the envoy waiting on the bridge.
Lifting his hand, Gabriel lightly touched her cheek. She moved closer, her face uplifted, her mouth near to his; but he shook his head and stepped back.
“Not even one farewell kiss?” she asked.
“I can’t, love.”
She was certain then, and gazed along the bridge, down the long road he would walk; but she saw only white light and a great unknowing. She bit her lip, trying to control the grief. For a while they stood like that, longing to embrace, to say a thousand things that were in their hearts.
“No one is taking my life from me,” he said. “I lay it down myself.”
“I know,” she whispered. She looked into his eyes and saw that he was smiling, radiant; and there was so much love in him, so much triumph and joy, that she looked away again, unable to bear it.
The envoy called to Gabriel, his voice impatient.
Ashila placed her right hand on her left breast, then on Gabriel’s. “Our hearts will always be together,” she said.
“Keep me in your knowing,” he said in Shinali.
“I will, and in our child’s knowing. Sharleema.”
They linked hands one last time, their eyes full of tears. Then he walked away.
When he was far down the road, he looked back.
Ashila saw him turn around, and she lifted her hand in a final farewell. He waved back, then walked on. She watched until he vanished in the light, until all that was left were his footsteps in the dust, and his child beneath her heart, and the happiness in her knowing.
She returned to the fort and climbed the tower and looked along the road, but saw only the sun. She sat on the bare wooden floor where they had loved, and she wept; and it was sunset when she went down again to the river, to the fish cooking on hot stones, and the funeral fire, and the nation he had saved.
The envoy walked his horse slowly, so his prisoner could keep up. But Gabriel fell often, and finally the envoy lost patience. He stopped his horse under the trees beside the road, where the evening breeze blew in from the coast. He looked back, and watched as the young man staggered in the dirt, and fell again. This time the prisoner was a long while getting up. Then he stumbled on, at last drawing alongside the horse.
“At this rate,” said the envoy, “we’ll never get to Navora.”
Gabriel tried to speak, but his voice was cracked and rasping, and no words came. Slowly the envoy dismounted. Trained in safely diagnosing bulai fever, he covered his mouth and nose with a thick cloth, then commanded Gabriel to turn his face to the light and open his mouth. Keeping at a safe distance, Gabriel obeyed, and the envoy peered at the back of his throat.
“You’ve got plague,” the envoy announced. “You have a day le
ft, I’d say; not much longer.”
Gabriel said nothing, but his eyes shone with an unearthly fire, and the envoy looked away, afraid and swearing. “There’s no point in delivering you now,” he said. “Lord Jaganath wouldn’t thank me for taking plague into his palace. Have you anything I can give him, some token, by which he’ll know you were indeed my prisoner?”
Gabriel removed the small leather bag from about his neck. Jaganath had seen the bag that fateful night at the Empress’s feast, when he had publicly accused Gabriel of wearing the Shinali amulet; now he would see what else it contained—the small symbol in the shape of a figure eight, made of grass from Shinali lands, intricate and endless and strong: the sign of Shinali dreams.
Taking it, the envoy mounted his horse again and rode away, galloping fast, dust rising about him like powdered gold.
Darkness melted into light, and light to dark. Somewhere Gabriel lost the road and found himself on cliffs overlooking the sea. There was grass here, sweet and warm under his bare feet. He lay on it and watched the gulls wheeling overhead, crying. There was an eagle, gliding close, its eyes like fire. And flames in a Shinali hearth, and Ashila watching over him, smiling while she wept.
Then the sun again, and heat, and thirst.
And an evening. Or was it dawn? The skies soft, the color of pearl. Oysters, rotting on a beach, and a knife flicking out the precious part, the eternal part, the beauty formed out of pain. The rest discarded like old clothes.
Heat. Stumbling in it, weary, thirsting, tearing off the garments that hampered and held back; the last relinquishment, terrible, sublime.
The earth, the sky, the sun and moon gone. Dimness, and silence. The great valley, shadowy and full of peace; and the wind, the holy wind, powerful and awesome and joyous. He raised his eyes and faced the vastness before him, not alone.
Elated, he lifted his arms to the glowing wind, and began to run.
The beginning
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About the Author
Photo credit Tulloch Photography, Tauranga, New Zealand
SHERRYL JORDAN is the author of several critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including THE HUNTING OF THE LAST DRAGON, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; THE RAGING QUIET, a School Library Journal Best Book and an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults; WOLF-WOMAN, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; WINTER OF FIRE, an ALA/YALSA Recommended Book for the Reluctant Reader and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; and THE JUNIPER GAME, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. She is also the author of SECRET SACRAMENT, the prequel to TIME OF THE EAGLE and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. She lives in Tauranga, New Zealand.
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Books by Sherryl Jordan
Secret Sacrament
Time of the Eagle
The Hunting of the Last Dragon
Credits
Cover art © 2001 by Lee and Diane Dillon
Cover design by Hilary Zarycky
Cover © 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
SECRET SACRAMENT. Copyright © 1996 by Sherryl Jordan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan, Sherryl.
Secret sacrament / Sherryl Jordan.
p. cm.
Summary: A disturbing incident when he is only seven years old foreshadows the role Gabriel will play in the relations between his Navoran people and the Shinali, a role that is solidified when he becomes an Elected One and trains to be a Healer.
ISBN 0-06-028904-X—ISBN 0-06-028905-8 (lib. bdg.)
ISBN 0-06-447230-2 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © July 2016 ISBN 9780062459787
[1. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.J7684 Se 2001 00-38838
[Fic]—dc21 CIP
AC
* * *
First Harper edition, 2003
Originally published in New Zealand in 1996 by Puffin Books.
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Secret Sacrament Page 33
