She could hear Nerian’s sneering voice in the back of her head. “What are you doing with that? You’ll hurt yourself.”
Maybe I want to stab you with it, she thought. Could you even stab with a sabre?
She made her way back to where she had left the soldier. As soon as she got near the alley, she heard voices, and realized that the men had caught up with the soldier.
Portia slowed down, her heart thumping so loud she felt like it would burst from her chest. Their backs were turned, and they hadn’t seen her yet.
“You’ve run out of luck, Tribune,” one of the men were saying. “I don’t see your little friends anywhere.”
“Who needs friends?” the soldier coughed. “If word gets out that you slaughtered an imperial soldier in broad daylight…”
“Broad?” The man spread his arms out. “This entire neighbourhood is under our control. Do you see guards or watchmen anywhere? And I hardly think reinforcements are coming. This route isn’t part of your patrol, is it?”
“Piss off,” the soldier muttered. “If the plan is to bore me to death, you’re winning.”
The man laughed. “No, but I’m not sure I want to kill you at all. What do you think, Balas? Who would pay to have Tribune Mahe Amiren back in one piece?”
“I’m not so sure about that,” the man called Balas replied. “Seems like she’s getting involved in things she’s not supposed to.”
“A Tribune, running with the syndicate. Oh, the Imperial Military is not going to like this.”
They suddenly froze, and Portia realized that she had taken one step too many. Both men turned towards her.
“It’s that rat from earlier,” Balas said. It was the last words he would ever speak. As he stood there, distracted, the woman called Mahe reached for his leg and dragged him to the ground before pulling out a dagger and stabbing him in the throat.
“The sword!” she yelled.
Portia, panicking, threw it haphazardly to the ground. Mahe dove for it, just as the man fumbled with his own blade. Portia closed her eyes to the sound of clashing blades, and then a small shriek that could’ve been made by anyone. She smelled more blood and struggled to keep her head from spinning.
She felt someone grab her arm. “Run,” Mahe said. She opened her eyes and saw the second man sprawled over a pool of his blood.
Portia stopped thinking. She ran.
Somehow, they found themselves in an empty barge running south. Mahe had positioned herself closed to the window, where she could hide her wound from curious eyes. They sat together silently for a while, watching the barge drift past the streets. Eventually, Mahe cleared her throat.
“Thank you a second time,” she said.
Portia looked at her. “There’s going to be a third, is there?”
Mahe’s face twitched. “I would like a place to rest.”
Portia swallowed. “You can’t just go back to the barracks? Don’t you need to file a report?” When Mahe didn’t answer, Portia smiled nervously. “They were right, then. You’re involved in things. But they called you a Tribune.”
Mahe nodded. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“I don’t know what it looks like. I’m just a…a jobless architect. This isn’t going to get me in trouble, is it? This isn’t the kind of thing I normally do.”
Mahe’s eyes flickered towards her with a cool detachment that did a lot to calm her nerves. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can promise it will remain that way. But I am Tribune, and can protect you if…” Her face tightened from the pain.
“If I continue to assist you,” Portia finished for her. “Great. Just my luck.” She sighed, glancing up for a moment. “I’ve heard of you, I think. Aren’t you a war hero? From the Hafed attack?”
Mahe shrugged. It was clearly something she didn’t want to talk about, and Portia decided to leave it alone. “My apartment’s down from this stop,” she said, pointing. “We can go there for now. It’s not like I’ve got anything else planned for the day.”
“There is no one with you? The fewer people who know, the better.”
“There is no one,” Portia said. “Not anymore.”
She helped Mahe off the barge, and they walked in silence all the way back to her apartment. It occurred to Portia that it was the first time she was coming home without Nerian in her life. Opening the door, she almost expected to hear the cat demanding his food, or see Nerian’s figure bent over the kitchen table as he tinkered with one of his projects. Sometimes he would even look up from them, flash her a bright smile, take her by the hand, and draw him close to his heart.
So much changed, yesterday and today. Now the kitchen table was empty, and so were half of the shelves. Portia helped the soldier to a seat, and watched as she pulled her sleeve back to reveal the wound and begin wrapping it with a piece of leather.
“Are you sure you don’t want a physician?” Portia asked.
Mahe gave her a look, and she closed her mouth. She left her alone and busied herself with picking up the broken plates and cups from the floor and throwing them in a barrel. She swept the remaining pieces away, straightened the curtains, and threw a blanket over a smashed chair.
She realized that Mahe was still watching her. Her cheeks coloured. “It’s nothing,” she said. “An argument. But it doesn’t matter. He’s gone, now.”
“Are you any good as an architect?” Mahe asked.
“What? Oh.” Portia glanced at her messy desk. “Not particularly.”
“Good,” Mahe said. “You can work for me, then.”
“What?” Portia repeated.
“At this point in time, I need someone discreet and nondescript. And you don’t seem unintelligent. You’ll do.” She closed her eyes.
Portia scrambled to pick her jaw up from the floor. You’ll do?
She realized Mahe was asleep. She returned to her bed to straighten the sheets, and then to her desk to stare at the black and red ink spilled all over the parchment, the half-drawn designs and sketches from over the last couple of years. She felt like digging through it, like throwing it all upside to find a scrap of dignity for herself—something that said she went beyond you’ll do. The anger came and went.
She cracked open the window and watched the sun bleeding over the horizon as it set. Later, drenched in darkness, Mahe woke her up, and she drifted into her new life like a ship meeting the next wave. A fork in the road…
Sometimes a woman had no choice but to go on.
Jagged Slate on Blue
(A Prequel Story for Jaeth’s Eye)
He is afraid that if he closes his eyes, he will forget the crashing of waves against an empty shore. The fiery gaze of a million stars stretching over deep, black darkness. The rustle of the wind through the branches.
It is not that those things do not exist in Baidh. Even from the hard, narrow bed he occupies, he can hear the swelling sea from the docks, watch the sky twinkle over the flat grey rooftops, and smell the smoke-tinged breeze brush through the dusty muslin curtains. But it is not the same. The town has consumed every aspect of the world he knew and twisted it into something different. Not unpleasant, but different.
Jarche does not understand. Jarche thinks he is being overdramatic and that he should be thankful he is here instead of rotting in the ocean depths. She dares him to leave, to swim all the way back, if there is even anything there left waiting for him. She tells him that fire has consumed his village and that everything and everyone is either rubble or ash. She says it is the truth. She does not realize that because he did not see it happen it is not the truth for him. A part of him still thinks he can come home if he wants to.
The other, more sensible part simply drives him to stay awake at nights and hold on to those last few strands of memory like a famished man grasping for food, or a drowning man reaching for air.
“Is it so bad not to remember?” Jarche asks him one morning as she pulls bread out of the oven and lays them on the table one b
un after another. Her eyes gleam like blue marbles. He has never seen such eyes before, so big and bright that you can see the amber flecking around the iris. He finds them fascinating.
He shrugs in response to her question, cradling a hot bun in his hands. He breaks a piece off, pops it in his mouth, waits for it to melt under his tongue. He sighs. If not for the bread, he would have left a long time ago.
His father warned him about immobility, once.
“A good leader is not immobile,” he said. “He is always planning ahead, always jumping, even if he cannot see what is on the other side. His people depend on him to be able to pretend he knows what to do.”
“But what if he really doesn’t?” he remembers asking. He remembers that the weather was cool in those days. Not Baidhan-freeze-your fingertips cold, but better than warm, like lying under a tree before noon, patches of sunlight on your toes.
“He figures it out, Enosh,” his father replied. “Even if it’s at the last moment, he figures it out.” His father smiled, then, and Enosh remembers noticing for the first time that some of the stubble under his young father’s bronzed jaw were white as frangipani petals.
The ships flock to the docks as harvest season draws near. He sees them unload rich blankets and spices from the east and swallow bales of hay and stacks of wool to take back with them. The markets are full to bursting. It is difficult to walk down the streets without getting stepped on or mugged.
Jarche takes him shopping and buys him strange food from the stalls. “Try this,” she says, shoving skewers of pungent mutton, powdered with cumin and garlic, in his face. “Or this!” she gurgles, her hands full of crumbly turnip and chicken pie. He misses fish that isn’t dry or so terribly salted, raw fish and shells, and ferns and shrimp boiled in seaweed. They do not think seaweed is food in Baidh. They make their stews with whisky and fat.
When he feels a little braver, he turns down the street and abandons her. The feeling of freedom overwhelms him. Even though people stare at his foreign face and height and the darkness of his skin, he laughs. He uses his own money and buys bread—streaky brown bread with poppyseed and stuffed with cheese and garlic. Baidh smells like wet wool and muddy excrement, but the bread makes that easy to forget.
“You’re one of them whats-its, yeah?” the baker’s-boy asks him from across the counter. “From the islands.”
“Yes,” he replies. The Kag tongue comes easy to him. The baker’s-boy looks surprised, his yellow eyebrows arching and staying there.
“Is that so?” He looks at him in bafflement, his head nodding. “You’re short,” he finally says, as if it is an observation that cannot be made without comment. He sticks his tongue through the gap in his teeth.
Enosh smiles. His father taught him to be polite. But he ducks out of the shop before the boy notices how brown his eyes are, as if they do not have brown eyes here in Baidh. Or short people. He finishes the bread as he walks and pats out the crumbs against his trousers.
“Tourist?” a girl his age asks him.
“I guess,” he replies.
She grins. She is wearing a green dress with ruffled laces around her small waist. It looks pretty on her. Her hair is the yellow of corn ears and frames her face with curls. “You picked the wrong place,” she tells him. “Jin-Sayeng might have been more interesting, or even Cael—anywhere on the mainland, far east. Here, there’s nothing to see unless you fancy flat, swampy fields. Our favourite game is try to walk to the next farmhouse without falling on sheep crap.”
He laughs at that because he sees the truth in it, though he has never left the port since he came.
“You have a beautiful voice,” she tells him, unabashed. “Tell me about where you come from.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he replies. But he tries. He tells her about lazy afternoons and sandy shores and hunting. She finds the hunting particularly exciting. In Baidh they chase rabbits with terriers and arrows. She has never heard of hunting with fire-hardened wood spears and packs of baying hounds, of tracking boar barefoot and for days until it is cornered, of jumping on its back and watching the blood of its life trickle slowly down your shaking arms.
“What happens after?” she asks.
“We take the carcass home and cook it. Roasted over a fire, seasoned with sea-salt. The entire village comes down to share the meat and bring platters of food from their homes. There’ll be singing and dancing. Stories. Laughter.”
“Are the hunters ever in danger?”
“Of course.” He stops for a moment, a shadow crossing his face. “My father died while hunting.”
“Oh,” she gasps, her hand jumping to cover her mouth. “I’m sorry. Truly…”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “It is a great honour to die like that. It was not even a boar he fought. It was a serpent—a naga, a huge serpent. It was the size of three men. I was there. He killed it before its death-spasm made it sink a fang into his leg. There was poison. He died that night.”
“Your father must have been very brave.”
He nods. “The elders say he was one of the best chiefs the islands had. If he had lived longer, he would have done great things, even restored Gorent’s name. He—“ but he cannot not go on. The words catch at his throat and he is afraid of the torrent of tears waiting behind them.
She does not notice, or at least he hopes she does not. She tugs at the hem on her skirt and she smiles at him, her face dotted with freckles. “Your father sounds like a hero,” she says.
He is unsure what she means. His question catches her off guard. “Why—!” she barks, twirling, leading him down another narrow cobbled street. A dirty dog barks at them from behind a cottage. “A hero. You don’t have heroes in your land? Like that word you used—great men. Notable men, yeah? You know the word tourist, but not hero. Mother o’ mine, but you’re funny.”
“No one has told me before,” he confesses.
“A hero is someone we all aspire to be, someone we look up to. Like, when you’re stuck in the crag with a lamb in your arms, you ask, what would Agartes do. Yeah? The boys all try to be brave like Agartes or Faran or Lageon the Swift.”
“You mean like a God,” he says. Even then, he is perplexed. “But Ab is the only God there is.”
“That’s—“ She pauses, screws up her face. He is young, but he has been around girls before and he senses an argument. Although he is unsure where it is coming from, he tries to quell it by reaching for her hand. She flushes.
“Tell me about your heroes, then,” he says.
She drops his hand, but not in a bad way. She smiles shyly. “Which one shall I talk about?”
“I don’t know,” he mutters. Kag names are still strange to his ear and she had spoken so terribly fast. But he gropes for that first one, testing it under his tongue first. “Agar-tas,” he says. “Who is he?”
“Agartes,” she corrects pleasantly. Her laughter is like the ringing of bells. “Well. He’s a hero throughout all the Kag, all across the western coast on the mainland. But of course he is especially loved here in Baidh, because he hails from Baidh. He was a great warrior who never bent his knee to one king but rather served the Kag people. He commanded armies, slew all manner of beasts, and founded what later would be the great Kag cities. Cael in Cael, for example.”
“But we here in Baidh love to tell about his beginning, yeah? He was born on this island, raised a farmboy like any self-respecting lad. It is said that an enormous turtle came to him from the shores because he was prophesied to be the one who would bring the Kag together. He left Baidh on the turtle’s back and disappeared for many, many years. He returned a man wielding an enormous sword. The first thing he did was fight a band off Dageian raiders from the Hafed coast.”
“He sounds like a respectable man,” Enosh muses.
She nods. “He was!”
“Do you know anyone who’s met him?”
She whirls towards him, staring deeply into his face. Her green eyes dance. “You’re serio
us? Oh! That’s funny. But he’s been long dead. For several hundred years.”
“How do you know what he did?”
“Well—how can we not know, silly? There’s books and poems and scrolls, yeah? There’s like, five kingdoms standing because of him. Although I don’t know if I should count Kagtar, but—you see my point?”
He doesn’t, but he smiles because she is trying and that is the most he has ever received from anyone in this place. They speak of other things while they buy a bag of roasted chestnuts from a toothless old woman in a tavern, and then they eat it from the docks while watching the seagulls fly. The sky is red by the time they stroll back into town.
“What’s a monkey doing here?” a voice calls out, breaking his thoughts. Enosh turns around to meet the insult with the kind of courteous nod monkeys are incapable of, but he does not get that opportunity. A meaty fist slams into his jaw and he sees the sky before his head connects with the pavement. The girl’s high-pitched screaming drowns the air.
“Father!” she cries. “Leave him be!”
There is talking while his head swims. Someone grabs his shoulder and he thinks he is being helped up, but it is the same man reaching out to hit him again. He cringes and waits for a blow that never comes. Instead it is the man rolling across the cobblestone, his face bruised and bloody, and he finds it amusing because it is the first good look he gets of his attacker.
“Ylir,” another man says.
“Sir,” he replies, mechanically. He looks up. The only way to look at Yn Garr is to look up. The man is tall, even by Baidhan standards. Apart from the slight ruffle of his bushy white beard, he looks unperturbed.
Enosh glances at the girl for a moment and bows. He does not have time to apologize. Soon Yn Garr is turning a corner and he has no choice but to follow.
They are silent for a good, long while. This is not strange. Yn Garr rarely speaks to him. But Enosh cannot help but feel remorseful, though he is not sure exactly what he did wrong. He tries to match his pace with Yn Garr’s long strides. Only when Yn Garr’s cottage appears in the horizon does the man open his mouth. “Someday you must learn how to deal with those kinds of people,” he says. “Sheep bullied, not men.”
The Dragonlord's Call Short Story Collection Page 5
