FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
THE SCENT of lamp oil stung the air, stabbing sharply as it rose up from the dampened beams of the walls and sodden planks of the pyre. Junari waved a hand before her nose. The attendants had been thorough in dousing the wood with the oil, the fumes wafting out to infuse the clothes and burn the eyes of the priests, family members, and congregants gathered around the funeral temple-pyre.
The funeral pyre-temple, constructed over the past two days from aged timber, rose to the height of three men in the center, spreading seven paces at the base. The long beams tilted inward in a circle, coming to a peak at the top in a crisscross of angles, nailed together with wooden pegs for support. The assembly resembled a wooden version of the tents of the nomad people of the Kytain Dominion, the Sky Plains. Junari had seen a painting of the plains people and their dwellings once as a child, dreaming of a life among the tall grass and rolling hills. Her life had instead taken her to inner planes, the meditations of the temple priesthood supplanting the wide-open skies of the eastern lands.
Those many years training and rising through the priestly hierarchy placed her that day before the pyre-temple of her prayer and ritual guide, Lamno Horda. She had supervised the building of the structure herself, choosing the words to add to those of the traditional memorial, memorizing what she intended to say in farewell to a dear friend as he made his passage to his next incarnation. She had studied under Lamno Horda’s careful tutelage since her first arrival as a temple novice, becoming like a daughter to the childless couple. Lamno Horda’s wife, Miraa, had insisted that Junari perform the ceremony that would see Ongaa, god of fire and death, consume the wooden shrine and her husband’s body, preparing it for further embodiment in the world.
Nervous, the fumes of oil and incense making her dizzy, Junari rubbed tears from her eyes and turned to look behind her at the family and fellow priests gathered in the grassy clearing. The sun sat just above the horizon, blinding her with its fire-orange light, the tint deepening the hue of her amber robes until they seemed as aflame as the bonfire burning beside the funeral pyre-temple. She did not see Miraa, but had noted her among the congregants earlier. Funeral pyres were lit with the final rays of the day’s light, symbolizing the last days of life, the dark night to come, and the dawn of a new incarnation to follow. Junari turned, as customary, to face the pyre-temple and address the god Ongaa in prayer, reciting the most famous devotion to the bringer of flame and the guardian of death.
“Great god Ongaa,
Bless us with your presence,
You who brought us out of savagery and darkness,
You who light the fire of our hearth,
And bring the glow to our lamps.
Great father of death and flame,
You who consume our souls in the blaze of your love,
You who transform the ash of our lives,
And kindle the clay of our rebirthing,
Grant us the bounty of your flames and the wisdom of your spirit,
Embrace our beloved in your loving arms,
Carry our cherished one through the endless night
And to the dawn of the eternal morning.
So may it be now, so may it be forever.
Anaha, Ahana.”
Junari concluded the prayer with the traditional benediction, placing her clasped hands to her forehead. The ocher light of the setting sun washed across the land, trees and hills and temple spires gleaming in its wake as it splashed over the beams of the pyre-temple, making it appear to alight from within. She gestured to the attendants, and three men pulled flame-drenched torches from the bonfire to walk around the structure, touching the fire-tipped points to the oil-soaked wood. Blue-orange flames ate their way up the wooden beams to meet at the top, sparks spiraling into the air, glittering brightly against the plum-black sky of twilight.
As the blaze grew, Junari turned to the assembly and continued the memorial, quoting from The Book of Ending and Beginning. She read a passage in the ancient Mumtiba language, the first tongue of the sacred scriptures, reciting a prayer of peaceful transformation and auspicious birthing, blessing the consciousness of the departed with the good tidings of the congregation as they spoke back the words she said aloud.
A sound, unexpected and immediately disconcerting, rose above the crackling of the sanctified wood and mixed with her intonations of the prayer. She stopped, turning her head, uncertain if she imagined the noise from behind her. It came again, clear and unmistakable. The cries of a woman fought the roar of the funeral flames. The cries of Miraa, her mentor’s wife.
Junari rushed to the entrance to the pyre-temple, the wide gap between the supporting beams filled with smoke and flame. She heard the cry again, the wail of fear and pain and despair. How could Miraa have come to be in the pyre-temple? She had not seen her friend when she began the ceremony. Had she already been inside? What could she have been doing there? Saying final words to her beloved? Hoping to join him on his journey through the unknowable dark night? This did not sound like the woman she knew.
The answer to her questions struck Junari as a man came into her view, the brother of her mentor, a merchant in the city, a seller of rugs in the market place. A man with fire reflected in his eyes, his head nodding in prayers unheard over the flames.
Junari did not wait to think, leaping forward into the burning inferno, following Miraa’s screams. The smoke and heat slammed into her, knocking her back — fiery fists that both pummeled her and sought to grasp her tight. She held her arms above her face, peering around her elbows, wiping her stinging eyes, holding her breath as she searched out the source of the cries for help.
She stumbled beneath the oppressive heat, discovering the origin of the screams even as they faded. Junari found Miraa tied to the bed of wooden slats where her husband’s body rested in final repose, fire lashing out at her. Her head hung in unconsciousness as flames fed upon her clothes and arms. The smoke had overwhelmed her. Junari knelt down and tugged at the ropes binding her friend to the funeral bed. Pain seared her mind as the fire-tinged ropes bit into the flesh of her fingers. She screamed, releasing the life-sustaining air she held in her lungs as she continued to paw at the knots binding Miraa to certain death.
In that moment, staring at Miraa restrained and aflame, another fire came to mind, in another place and time, a blaze she had buried beneath years of shame and guilt and recrimination. A morning sun in a clear sky. A village between rolling hills. Townspeople gathered, herded into the streets. Five people tied to stakes beneath a pile of wood, flames climbing up their legs, smoke hovering around their faces. A man and a woman. Arms free of the ropes wrapping their chests. Hands held. Eyes wide open in silence, gazing at the forest beyond the town as the firestorm ate away at their bodies. Staring at an unseen girl of twelve who had left her bed with the dawn to walk in the fields and pick flowers long before the armed fanatics from the town assembled. A girl who hid in the woods and watched, frozen in terror, as she saw her mother and father dragged from her uncle’s home and into the open lane between the houses. The girl who cried as the angry invaders bound her parents and tied them to a makeshift pyre built from the ruins of a wagon and the firewood of nearby homes. A girl who observed in anguished stillness as a holocaust of intolerance and hatred devoured the two people she loved most.
Junari cried out in pain and sorrow, sobbing for the loss of her mother and father and the loss of the man and woman, Lamno and Miraa, who had taken their places in her life, all consumed by fire. She struggled again with the ropes securing Miraa to the funeral bed. The charred corded fibers would not unwind, nor had they yet been eaten thoroughly enough by flames to snap. Junari coughed and tugged at Miraa’s lifeless body, fire creeping down to set the woman’s hair alight. Junari felt dizzy, the poisoned air burning her lungs even as flames ran up along the sleeves of her robe. She beat at the flames and turned from the fire and death to crawl toward air and hope and life.
A support beam fell beside her, sending
embers cascading over her body, burning her face and neck. She lurched to her feet and staggered through the blazing entrance and into the cool night, gulping down the sweet air, coughing up the blackness within as she collapsed to the ground.
THE PRESENT
JUNARI STARED at the cicatrix marks along her arms, remembering the flames of the makeshift temple that had served as a double funeral pyre. She looked to the conflagration engulfing the city below the wall, the same long-cooled embers of responsibility and shame of that night so long ago rekindled to scorch and scar her heart. She had failed again to see what stood before her and had acted to appease her own desires.
The night of her mentor’s funeral, she had been so possessed of the desire to impress the priests assembled, to make good upon his long endorsement of her studies, that she had not noticed his wife Miraa’s absence until too late. Had she carried more concern for her friend’s sorrow than her own selfish need to shine, she might have noted the erratic expressions of her mentor’s brothers and cousins. She might have considered the source of the fevered looks in their eyes. She might have guessed that they had knocked their brother’s wife unconscious and dragged her into the pyre-temple before the mourners gathered, tying her to her dead husband’s funeral bed so that she might join him in death and further birth.
A vile, ancient, and outlawed custom — burnt marriage offerings, as they were known — still happened in the outer reaches of the dominion, far from civilized society, although rarely in the towns and temples near the capital. It had not occurred to Junari that her mentor’s family would exact this loathsome tribute from Miraa. While women were accepted as equals in the search for the Divine within the temples, many men outside the priesthood could not see them as more than property to be discharged with the house and land and other items of estate upon their husband’s death. And, in many cases, the women were seen as obstacles to inheritance, a funeral pyre providing an opportune means of ensuring the desired transfer of title and deed and familial wealth.
Junari had called for the pyre-temple to be lit. She had sentenced her friend to a death in flame. And now, years later, consumed with fear and anger and self-importance, she had called down the wrath of a newborn goddess upon a people she needed to view her as a blessing rather than a threat. She had failed her pilgrims and her goddess and the people she would never know dying in the flames of her ignorance and malice. Just as she had failed her parents, hiding in cowardice rather than trying to save them from the death pyre of their captors. How were her actions this day different from those of the fear-blinded Kam-Djen priests who burned her parents alive?
She wiped tears from her eyes. Moaratana’s wrath could not be called upon in blind anger or fear, for it would consume all in its path, like the firestorm devouring the city. She had asked not merely for protection, but retribution, and the Goddess did not act in half measures. Nor, it seemed, would she rescind her fury without some greater plea than meager words of prayer.
The famous Juparti legend of a kinsett named Willona came to Junari’s mind, and she knew with sudden clarity what the Goddess Moaratana required to cease her inflamed reproach of the city. In the ancient days, the gods had demanded sacrifices to bestow their bounty upon believers. The taking of an animal’s life-energy fed the gods and gave them cause to receive human petitions for intercession in their lives. The greater the deed petitioned of the god, the more significant the required offering. Powerful priests and rulers in those far-gone days had been known to surrender even their children to appease the hunger of the gods and turn the events of the world to their favor under divine guidance. Sacrifice of any kind had fallen from use under the reformations of the prophet Godonteka, the Golden One, as his followers called him. The preciousness of living beings, their divine energy, made their sacramental deaths abhorrent to the sacred essence of the divine cosmos, the Nahan Tagana.
But Moaratana was not a Pashist god — not a god to sit silent in response to her people’s prayers. Moaratana acted in the world, and she required action to encourage her continued involvement.
“Moaratana, hear my plea.” Junari raised her head and her voice to the skies. “Save these people who hate us. Spare this city that would turn us back from your will. Protect those who suffer through ignorance of your benevolence. Accept this sacrifice as supplication to your divine will and in return for your grace.”
Junari lowered her head, reaching her hand out to snatch the dagger from Kantula’s belt, turning the blade inward, thrusting the tip into the flesh beneath her ribcage, crying out as she pulled the hard steel up into her heart.
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THE THRONE
DJU-TESHA
SMOKE FROM herb-scented lamp oil cloaked centuries-old decay, clouds of rancid dust, and the tang of deep earthen mold. Dju-Tesha raised a kerchief to her nose, trying to ignore the battle of smells assaulting her nostrils as well as the darting shadows and tiny nails scraping along the stone floor. Rats. Dju-Tesha hated rats. The flea-infested creatures overwhelmed the palace every few years, appearing in private rooms, their naked tails trailing as they scurried from stomping feet and screaming voices. She had awoken once as a child to find one on her bed, attempting to gnaw at her hair. She retched silently at the memory.
“Still hate the rats?”
Dju-Tesha grimaced at her brother holding the lamp beside her.
“They have made no attempt to endear themselves to me over the years.” Dju-Tesha coughed at the earthen clouds kicked up by their footsteps.
The catacombs were cleaned for her brother’s burial a few months past, but the dust seemed decades deep. Maybe they had taken a wrong turn. The maze-like warren of sepulchers and sarcophagi looked identical from nearly every angle. She had searched the library shelves for a map to the resting place of her ancestors, but none had ever been made. Were it not for the ill blood between her and the long-tailed subterranean inhabitants of the tunnels, she might have been inclined to create one herself. A useful addition to the palace library. She had frequently dreamed of writing a book that would be as valuable and as inspirational as the tomes she read and reshelved in the archives. Something to rival Gan-Wot’s History of the Three Great Dominions or Lan-Win’s Articles of Discourse and Belief.
“Fan and I played here often as children.” Tin-Tsu swung the lantern to look down a corridor of cobwebs.
She remembered her brothers’ accounts of terror in the burial chambers beneath the palace. They would return grimy and reeking of stale death to recount tales of ghosts and demons they had battled in their journeys underneath the earth. They taunted her to join them, but she had always preferred stories of adventure to actual escapades. She simply did not possess the temperament nor the constitution of an adventuress. She only now ventured into the burrow of entombed bodies because of Tin-Tsu’s request to accompany him to see their father and brother. He had missed both funerals and wished to make his prayers for their fruitful passage into the Pure Lands in front of the crypts of their final material resting place.
“This way?” Tin-Tsu pointed into darkness.
“Possibly?” Dju-Tesha shielded her eyes from the lamplight as she peered into the blackness.
“I thought you came down with the burial parties.” Tin-Tsu plunged ahead, apparently on instinct more than visual confirmation of their destination.
“I followed the priests and mother. And, if I may point out, I was rather too distraught at the time to calibrate my surroundings.”
Dju-Tesha sighed at the memory. She had not been close to her eldest brother — he had carried too many burdens in life to allow for intimate relationships — but she missed him greatly nonetheless. She hoped she might find herself closer to Tin-Tsu in the coming days, although he, too, seemed preoccupied with matters of state.
“Of course. My apologies.” Tin-Tsu nodded in solemn sincerity as they walked
.
“There.” Dju-Tesha pointed to a row of stone coffins ahead. “That is the place.”
They approached slowly, the glow of the lamp revealing five slate black caskets, two with ornately carved lids detailing in images and words the deeds of the men lying within them. Each generation had a set of graves for their ultimate repose. Her father and brother already filled their last stone beds. She hoped it would be a very long time before she needed to lie down beside them for the final sleep. She had no desire to see the pleasures of the Pure Lands until she had witnessed the best of those in the gross realm of Onaia.
“Would you join me in a prayer?” Tin-Tsu hung the lantern on a metal hook protruding from the arched brick wall of the chamber.
“Certainly.” Dju-Tesha clasped her right palm around her left fist and bowed her head.
Tin-Tsu lowered his head and raised his hands as well, pausing before he spoke. Dju-Tesha did not recognize the prayer her brother uttered and suspected it to be one of his own fashioning, created in the moment rather than memorized and recited. She envied him this skill. She possessed a keen mind with an inexhaustible memory, but she did not have the form of imagination necessary for making poems or prayers from nothing but the air in her lungs and the intentions of her heart.
“Great God, master of all things in all times, hear our humble pleas for the care and good keeping of our loved ones in the Pure Lands. May you guide and nurture them in all their needs. May you reward them for their many deeds here in this shadow world. May they bask in the brilliance of your eternal love. May you make for us a place beside them to reunite when we, too, have exhausted the filament of our inner flame and passed from this shaded realm of sorrow. Onna Djen.”
The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1) Page 39
