by Jay Lake
That was quite enough of this conversation. I let it lapse only a little too late.
We were headed toward the Eirigene Pass. Our route was not up the Barley Road, which mostly followed the Greenbriar River as it ran through farming country, but another, higher trackway with little traffic. The soil was more sparse up here, and I knew from my studies that the conditions would be much harsher in the winter. The few steadings we saw were long abandoned.
“I do not wish to push through refugees,” Septio said.
I stared at my horse, unwilling to mount, but just as unwilling to sit by this stream for the rest of my days. “What refugees? Copper Downs is not exactly overrun by the desperate.”
“If Choybalsan has truly broken the Temple of Air, there will be villages’ worth of farmers and servants on the move.”
“Unless he’s sworn them all, or given them tea and cakes.” So much rumor, so little truth. This was an invasion of dust and shadows.
“I still think we are better served to find the place and follow his trail, than to swim against the tide he pushes before him.”
“They do not teach rhetoric so much in your temple, do they?” I gave him a sly grin, then levered myself into my saddle. Or tried to, as the nag sidestepped just enough to drop me on my face in the dirt.
This time she definitely laughed.
“I will get you a block, and hold her bridle,” Septio told me. “You need to be very firm with her today.”
Though it was tempting to shout him down for condescending to me so, I could not afford such pride. Instead I stood mute and glowering at my miserable beast while Septio arranged things. I resolved that once I was asaddle, I would remain there all day. This in turn immediately made me regret the amount of tea I had just drunk.
We set out into a morning marked by mist on the stones above us, and a few furry goats on high. The place was pretty enough, and the air crisp, but so very northern a view that I felt a surge of homesickness for the sweltering fields of Selistan. This was a Stone Coast I had known only from Mistress Danae’s books, for I had never left the Pomegranate Court to walk the high crags or upland meadows. Little engravings and bad poetry had told their story, but as a child might recount solstice gifts, with eccentric details and much missing of the point.
I reveled in the hundred shades of gray that made up the tumbled rocks amid the scraggly grass, and their mother cliffs above. Late flowers peeked pale as babies’ eyes from thicker tufts. Sometimes a tree struggled away from the windbreak of its fellows, so a mighty giant could be little taller than I.
Small birds darted along the grass, juking and diving to catch the insects that fled before them. There were more goats. Occasionally the bones of a goat kill showed that something clawed and fanged kept a small kingdom here as well. When the trail ran close to the small river with its intermittent belt of trees, a different chorus of birds echoed from the shelter there.
The cliffs on both sides of us cut the sky into a ribbon of blue fabric from the loom of Mother Mooneyes. If a soul had a color, I imagined it might be that cerulean. Perhaps so many thought of paradise as lying somewhere above the air because we recognized the tint by instinct older than words.
That brought to mind a question that had slipped through my fingers more than a few times lately. “Septio.” I pitched my voice firmly to carry from one dangerous nag to the other, without startling the whole valley. “There is a priestly question I would ask you.”
“Perhaps I can answer,” he said cautiously.
I did not know if his easy confidence and edged humor had been left behind within Copper Downs, or if last night’s conversation about sacrifices weighed so heavily on him. Some good, solid theology of a more neutral sort might be the thing to bring him around.
“I have been thinking on theogenic dispersion,” I said. “About how gods and men draw power from one another.”
“Small questions. I doubt anyone has considered them before.”
His tone was so serious that for a moment I believed him. Then I realized that the city had not kept all of the best of this man behind.
“Fool,” I told him with affection. “I am serious.”
Septio laughed. The sound gladdened my heart.
We rode on, my miserable nag ensuring that I was jostled and bruised as much as possible. I gathered my thoughts.
“As I have read the tale, the gods and goddesses were once far greater and more powerful. World-urges, Lacodemus called them. They made the races of man, and perhaps the other thinking creatures. Then the theogenic dispersion came upon them. Small fragments of their divinity were scattered through the plate of the world. Some of those fragments became the sliver of grace we all carry within us. Others became the gods and goddesses we know in this life.”
He waited a moment to see if I was just pausing for breath. “A fair enough summation of what many believe.”
“I have also read that gods and goddesses arise from the thoughts and deeds of men. This Choybalsan, for example, is feared in part because he aspires to godhood.”
“Indeed.” Septio was noncommittal.
“So I am told that the gods created man, and that man created the gods.” I smiled. “The logic of this troubles me.”
He laughed again. No mockery was in him, just delight. His grin was genuine, and warmed my heart. “Why can they not both be true? Is it that you suppose time has a beginning and an end, and so one must have come first?”
“Well . . . yes . . .”
“The world has no beginning and no end. The plate goes on forever beneath the path of the sun. Why should time be bounded when the world is not? It could be that man creates the gods, then in time, gods create man. Each returns the service to the other like a pair of players at the shuttle-net.”
“That seems strange to me.” I tried to tease out what it was that disturbed me about this logic. “A baby is born, a girl-child grows, a woman lives, a crone dies. Life comes from her loins and it begins again. This is a cycle, not a circle. Every plant and animal does the same. Everything in the world, except for gods.”
“You were taught well, Green.” His voice held real admiration. “Consider this: You say we all have a sliver of grace. What if it is the grace that flows through history, passing down the generations, and we and our gods are but seeds to carry it forward?”
That gave me much to chew on. Even though I had dwelt only in two lands, I had met sailors from a dozen more. Each had their own ideas about the soul’s progress—the Wheel of the Selistani religions was quite different from the transit of the Petraean afterlife. They were not in profound contradiction, either. No one denied the soul. No one denied grace. Not even a dreadful, sanguinary pain god like Blackblood.
The day went on in idle chatter and difficult riding. The problem was not so much challenging horsewomanship as my challenging horse. I persevered.
That afternoon, the horses tired, we stopped just below the highest pass amid the last of the meadows. Smoke was visible in the northern sky beyond. Our little river was no more than a trickle up here, but there were pools. I spotted fish darting above their sandy floors, before darkness claimed such details, and wondered how their ancestors had come so far from the sea. Did they have small cold-hearted gods who spoke in voices of the tide?
I still ached, but today’s ride had been better. I found myself aching in other ways, too, and eyeing Septio with a mix of appreciation and pity.
We built no fire as evening approached, for fear of showing a light. Septio explored a boulder field which had rolled down off the eastern cliffs until he found a crevice with no sign of recent occupation. There we set our blankets and ate a cold supper.
“The Temple of Air will be visible from beyond the crest of this pass,” I told him. I’d read many maps in the Pomegranate Court. “This is the Giant’s Wallow. It lets into a high valley that runs toward the east to join the Eirigene Pass.”
“How far?”
“That I am not so sure.” I l
ooked at him, a pale blur in the starlight with the old moon yet unrisen. “I have never walked this land. Only seen it on a map as a bird soaring above a paper world.”
“Well,” said Septio, “either we will meet some of Choybalsan’s men there, or we will find his trail.” I could hear the pretense of confidence in his voice. “We shall approach from behind his line, a pair of unarmed religious wanderers, and ask for parley.”
“Let us hope he gives it to us,” I muttered.
Septio looked at me strangely. “We each have the protection of a god. You are marked by some southern power strange to me. I am Blackblood’s man from the beginning to the end. We will don those brown robes tomorrow and style ourselves Brothers of the Empty Hilt.”
“Who are they?” I liked something of the name.
“A jest, in truth.” His voice was turned in embarrassment. “The acolytes of the Temple Quarter used to claim to be Brothers of the Empty Hilt, in the days before the Duke fell. That became a sort of password among us.”
What would befall if this Choybalsan knew of the jest, I wondered, but that seemed to rank small among the sum of my fears.
After we had drawn off our boots, Septio preceded me into the rock cleft. We were to sleep close, both for warmth at this higher altitude, and because of the small space. He seemed so hot, and flinched when I moved to hug him.
“What is the matter?” I asked.
He would not answer, but I realized he was trembling. I ran my hands down his chest, and his trembling became nearly a fit. I do not know what possessed me—impishness, slyness, or a stirring of the love of the heart—but I touched his trousers and found him straining fit to burst his buttons.
“We should not—,” he began, but I shushed him with a kiss.
I began to stroke him. “I am not accustomed to lying with men, but you delighted my heart and challenged my thoughts today.”
“You for me as well,” he whispered hoarsely, though by then his mind was elsewhere. We soon both reached that place.
Lying with a man did not hurt so much as I might have thought. The feeling of being filled with flesh was so different from the glass and leather and metal toys. So I rode him hard until we both were well spent.
Finally I lay wedged beside Septio. “You are my first b—man,” I whispered.
“You are my first woman.” Something in his voice grew very shy. “My first entry, in truth. I have only been the vessel, not the seed, within the temple rites.”
We curled close then, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and slept through the hours of the night.
I awoke aching and sticky. Pretending not to see the way he strained for me anew, I slipped out of our little cave, threw a blanket over my shoulders, and wandered to the stream. The water was cold enough for pain, but it served to scrub me clean.
What was the point of that? I wondered, but I caught myself. Back at the Lily Temple after Samma and I had parted ways, I did not pretend so much at love of the heart with the older women. Instead I had treated the whole business as being of no consequence. Sex with Septio had been clumsy, to say the least, but also possessed of a sweetness I had not felt since Samma and I first began to slide our hands across one another in the dormitory.
“I do not need to push him aside,” I told the fish in their pool. “There is also no need to cleave to him.” The matter would play itself out.
Standing with the blanket open wide to fold around me, I turned to meet half a dozen grinning men. Three held crossbows.
It is very difficult to attack a man with a crossbow. Even an archer can be rushed, if you have the nerve. Men with blades may be met a dozen different ways. A crossbowman will have only one shot in a fight, but at arm’s distance, that can well be fatal.
When one of the men began to open the laces of his trousers, I took my risk in hand. With a shriek, I leapt straight for the would-be rapist. I hurled my blanket at the two crossbowmen standing close to one another. Their shots were caught in the cloth as I had hoped. I took my first target down with a shoulder to the gut and a punch into his testicles.
The third bolt, however, tore a line of fire through the muscles of my bare ass.
I rolled forward to find myself unable to spring back to my feet. Another roll lent me the momentum to be up and moving toward our horses and my knife even as blades slipped free of their scabbards behind me.
Forty paces, uphill. I could easily outrun all those men, but the crossbowmen would have time to reset their cranks. I sprinted barefooted over gravel and raw, stubbled grass as Septio stumbled out of the cleft where we had been sleeping. His eyes widened, and he dived back into the shadows.
You’d better have a weapon in there, boy, I thought savagely.
I reached the horses and snatched free their hobbles. I would not fight from the back of one of those horrid beasts, even if my butt were not bleeding, but having the nasty animals stumbling about in ill-tempered panic served me better than it served the bandits.
Our saddles and gear were tucked in a cleft just beyond. I recovered my knife and turned to meet my attackers.
They were smarter than I’d hoped. The group had hung back to let the crossbowmen reset their weapons, and to laugh at their fallen comrade. When they saw that I had not taken up a bow of my own, the six spread out. Five trudged up the slope toward me. The last staggered groaning behind.
That was fine with me. I could catch my breath and climb a boulder or two. The height would slow them down. Well, if they bothered to climb. They could always shoot me off like a heron on a post.
I was forced to work with what was to hand.
Unfortunately, the muscles of my ass were giving up. I couldn’t tell how large the wound was, but the backs of my thighs were sticky with blood. Climbing was far more difficult than it should have been.
Septio’s head popped up from a gap in the rock. “Green.”
“Get up here and fight.” I turned so their clearest shot wouldn’t be a second bolt in my butt.
That was a mistake, as I’d sat down unthinking. Very bad idea. I managed not to howl in pain, but was forced up into a very unstable crouch.
“I think these men are with Choybalsan,” he said. “We should ask for him.”
I could not believe my ears. “After the six of them have split me like a melon with their pustulent cocks, they might take you to him.”
“Not if we make them respect us.”
“A naked, bloody girl and a naked, sticky boy?”
He passed me a small paper packet. “Hold this, I’ll light it. Then throw it at them.”
I clutched his packet as a lucifer match flared. He touched it to the corner of the paper, which began to hiss and spark.
“Throw it,” Septio said urgently. “Now!”
In midair, the packet burst in coiling red smoke, shot through with black veins.
Ah, I thought. Fire powder.
The sparking missile landed amid a stand of dried-out thistles, which resisted only moments before curling into fire themselves. The oncoming bandits yelped and scattered. A bolt whistled high to spang off the cliff face before rattling to a stop a few feet away on my boulder. The attackers regrouped about ten paces below me, just in front of the little flare-fire. Their grins were back.
“That didn’t work,” I said.
“I have more.” Septio frowned and passed me a larger packet.
“We’re going to amuse them to death?”
“Just throw it.”
That packet sparked as the last one had. I tossed it right at the bandits. One of the bowmen grinned and caught it with his free hand, cocking his arm to throw it back at me.
This one went off like a granary explosion. A blinding flash erupted, followed by a solid thump, which I felt inside my chest more than heard. I closed my eyes, blinking away the glare just as a crossbow, hand and arm still attached, smacked into the stone above me. It slithered to rest nearby.
I grabbed up the bow, tugged the former owner’s hand free, and se
t myself madly to cocking it. I happened to know where there was a bolt handy.
When I looked up again, four of them were down hard. One was on his knees throwing up. My would-be rapist staggered toward my boulder with murder in his eye. I sent him a crossbow bolt for his trouble. Not being practiced with the weapon, I missed his neck, but the shot to his cheek seemed to discourage him.
“They can have the damned fires out there for their funerary offering,” I said, sliding down on my belly to where Septio had been hiding. I was in no way prepared to set my ass against the stone again. When I found my feet, I snapped at him, “We must go, now. That was enough noise and smoke to summon everyone within miles.”
“You are welcome for saving your life.”
I grabbed his face and kissed him. “Not now, foolish boy.”
Septio had to wrap me around the hips in a sling of torn muslin before I could manage to tug on my blacks and riding trousers. My breasts ached a bit, but I bound them with more of the muslin. Over them I slipped into the robes we’d brought to wear as Brothers of the Empty Hilt. The horses had fled from the fire and the fighting, so we carried only water, our satchels, and my blade.
Two remained alive—the vomiting man and one who’d taken the brunt of the explosion. His eyelids were burnt off and his lips black. I gave him mercy as kindly as I could. The vomiting man had finished his business, but he had the shivers and would not talk. I gave him the mercy as well, but I let it hurt a bit. I wiped my blade on his cloak, then walked to the stream and cleaned it again there among the little fish.
When I stood again, I found Septio watching me. His face was drawn and pale.
“What?” I snapped.
“You killed them.”
“Well, yes. They tried to kill me first.” He was such an idiot. “Besides, you were the one carrying bombards in your satchel. What did you intend them for? Festival crackers?”
“No—I . . .” Septio’s voice trailed off. “You made it so personal.”
I began walking uphill, toward the crest of the pass. The muscles in my ass burned terribly, pulling me off my stride, but I kept moving. Out here I could scarcely retire to a couch and call for mulled wine until my body had healed itself.
