26
A Gatherer shall submit himself to Her test once per year. He shall purge himself of all tithes, and travel between dreaming and waking with only Her favor to guide him. He shall endure in this state for three nights, or until death draws nigh. At the height of this test, he shall be attended by one who does not begrudge Hananja’s tithe. If even once the Gatherer claims Her tithe for his own selfish desires, he shall fail.
(Law)
In the borderlands between Ina-Karekh and Hona-Karekh, a voice whispers.
For a time Ehiru could ignore the voice, as he had long ago learned to do. Deny a vision and it has no power. This one is easy to deny. It is soft, sometimes inaudible, rambling and gibbering when he can hear it. But it never stops, and every so often it says something so provocative that he cannot help responding.
His words were full of lies. “Remember that I freed you” love me forgive me serve me.
Eninket? thinks Ehiru. Perhaps.
One lie, another lie. The Superior. The Kisuati woman. The Law and Wisdom of your faith. Your brothers, all your brothers.
No. I do not believe that.
All your brothers. Even the boy. Brother protector lover son.
Nijiri would never lie to me. I will listen to no more of this.
*
A vision:
He walks along the banks of the Blood at sunset, Kite-iyan gleaming atop its hill in the near distance. He is small. His mother holds his hand. He looks up at the woman he can no longer remember clearly, though parts of her linger in his mind: skin smooth as polished nightstone, a laugh rich like cattail wine, eyes that are pools on a Dreamer-less night. Is she beautiful? She must be, for she is a foreigner and yet has become the firstwife of a king. He wishes he could remember more of her.
“Soon,” he says to her, a man’s voice coming from his childish throat. “I will see you again very soon.”
She looks at him, dark lips and graceful brows and blurred perfection, and he knows that she is sad. This troubles him for reasons he cannot remember. But when he opens his mouth to speak to her again, the words flee and the thoughts jumble and the vision is
*
“It is not real, Brother.”
Ehiru blinks and sees darkness. Cold air goosebumps his skin. The Dreamer’s shifting light makes the dunes seem to roll like water in the distance. A warm body presses against his on the pallet. Nijiri.
“I know,” Ehiru says, though he is beginning to doubt that what he sees is not real. His mind has begun to wander toward Ina-Karekh, and he knows better than anyone that the land of dreams is a real place with real power.
“I want to be with my mother,” he says, and the boy flinches. Ehiru regrets inflicting pain in this manner, but Nijiri is a man by the laws of their people, a sworn Servant of the Goddess. It is time for him to face the responsibility of his role. “At Kite-iyan. You have never seen that palace, so I will describe it to you.” And he does so, drawing on a hundred memories from his childhood, embellishing its beauty unnecessarily. “I can shape the rest, but it must be that place. She will be there, and I want to see her again.”
The boy’s tears wet his skin. “Do not ask this of me, Brother. Please.”
But there is no one else and they both know it. And even if their other brothers were available he would choose Nijiri, for the boy loves him. That is the key, Ehiru understands now. Gathering is an act of love; without that, it becomes something perverse. When Nijiri Gathers him there will be beauty more sublime than he has ever known, because the boy has loved him for years, loved him through pain and beyond, loved him with a strength that pales the Sun’s love for the Dreamer.
He feels no shame at the thought of using that love for his own ends. It has always been a gift freely given between them.
*
The voice returns at mid-morning, when they resume their ride and monotony weakens the wall he has built to contain the madness. He ignores most of its ravings until it says,
The Kisuati woman is beautiful, is she not?
He is prepared for this. Lust is one of the first emotions to break free once a Gatherer’s dreamblood reserves are drained. He ignores the voice and the image it plants in his mind: Sunandi lying on a red cloth, her long neck bent back for his lips, her full breasts ready for his hands, desire in her long-lashed eyes. There is a powerful stir in his loins, but this too he ignores out of long habit.
Never once with a woman in your whole life. Why? Kisuati women know ways of preventing children.
Children are the least of the prohibition, he thinks back, irritably. There is also the danger of corruption—even greater with her. She lies for a living.
The voice sounds triumphant, as if getting him to respond has been its private battle.
No need for lies in bed, it whispers slyly. No need for speech. Just lay her down and spread her thighs and bury your troubles in her flesh.
No.
The voice bursts into laughter, harsh and mocking, because it knows that his refusal is not for lack of interest. It will try again later when his will has weakened further and he has become more susceptible to its suggestions. That is only a matter of time.
*
Another vision. Fire dances along the horizon. The earth itself is burning. Inhumanly tall figures stride toward him amid the flames. Gods? But their faces are familiar. He gasps as he recognizes his brothers, Sonta-i and Rabbaneh and Una-une.
But Una-une is dead—
As he recalls this, he sees that his old mentor is smiling at him. But there is no affection in the smile, though they were all but father and son during the months of his apprenticeship. Instead the smile is cold, cruel. Una-une turns his eyes downward and when Ehiru looks he sees that the god-Gatherers walk upon not sand or rock, but bodies. The corpses lie sprawled and ugly, utterly without dignity, though to Ehiru’s horror he sees sigils pressed into their flesh. Rabbaneh’s poppy. Sonta-i’s nightshade. Una-une’s green orchid. His own oasis rose, stark and black. As he stares at the last, which rests upon the breast of a beautiful lowcaste woman, Nijiri’s mother oh Hananja, Una-une’s foot comes down and crushes her chest. He hears bones breaking, sees clotted blood welling around his mentor’s sandal, smells and tastes its stench. It is desecration of the most obscene kind and he screams for them to stop.
“They cannot,” says a voice at his side, and he looks down into Nijiri’s solemn eyes. “This is the Gatherer way.”
*
Ehiru jerks free of the vision quietly, some part of him recalling in time that he is surrounded by unbelieving strangers who will look askance at a man who starts screaming for no apparent reason. An overabundance of dreambile, he diagnoses as his pounding heart slows. A Gatherer no longer produces dreamblood on his own. When his reserves are empty, the mind increases the production of other humors in a hopeless attempt to compensate. The scholarly recitation helps him focus on reality even as the sound of snapping bones still echoes in his ears.
“Rest break, Brother,” Nijiri says. Ever the devoted attendant. Ehiru nods, too hollow and numb to speak. He remembers to rein in the camel so that he can dismount; he goes through the motions of setting up his lean-to by rote. When he sits down in the shade the shivers set in. He pulls his robes more closely about himself and concentrates on opening his canteen, praying that no one notices his shaking hands.
I cannot bear this much longer, he thinks, and looks up at Nijiri as the boy comes to assist him with the canteen. He will not plead; the boy must accept the duty on his own. But soon, Nijiri. Please, soon.
Nijiri looks into his face, and his own twists in anguish. Ehiru reaches up to touch his cheek, perversely wishing he had dreamblood to soothe the boy’s pain. But Nijiri pulls away, and though his heart aches, Ehiru knows that this is necessary. Perhaps by putting distance between them Nijiri will find the strength to do his duty. It is an exceptionally cruel apprenticeship trial, but Hananja’s will cannot be denied. Nijiri is strong enough for it, Ehiru thinks with pride. The boy has always had a Gatherer’s soul.
The boy goes over to crouch in the shadow of his camel, rocking back and forth a little as he wrestles with his conscience. Then the Kisuati woman goes over to Nijiri with a canteen and Ehiru wants to watch them, see if the boy manages to keep his temper this time, but he cannot because another vision comes upon him and it is so fierce that he cannot resist and he sees
*
Blood and death blood on the sand blood and fire blood upon blood upon blood. Kill the Kisuati woman kill the witnesses kill them all except Ehiru, bring him back in chains in chains in chains.
Slyly the voice says, Eninket knows you have betrayed him.
I betrayed no one. When the abeyance ends—
Delay, disobedience. HeShe is the Avatar; his word is Her word, which is Law. But there’s still time. Kill the woman now and Shehe will be merciful. You can go back to the Hetawa. You can have peace again. The woman is young but her life has been rich. Her dreamblood will be sweet as you swallow it into your soul.
No! I cannot Gather for selfish gain! That is an atrocity—
The atrocity is what will happen now. Because of you. Do not forget this, fool, beloved of Hananja. Real blood will flow because of you.
He looks up and sees death coming. A true-seeing—
*
Reality returned, hard as a blow.
“Something is out there,” he said. He felt no particular urgency as the words came. “Someone is coming.”
Nijiri was at his side immediately. “What do you see?”
The figures strode toward him from the horizon, immense, smiling, cold-eyed. They were evil, and he told Nijiri so. Flight was the only option—though he sensed already that flight would be hopeless.
“Break camp!” Gehanu cried. She ran through the milling minstrelfolk, swift despite her bulk. “Quickly, we must go! Soldiers of Gujaareh!”
The minstrels’ confusion beat against Ehiru’s mind, their questions against his ears. Why would soldiers of Gujaareh threaten them? Where had those soldiers come from? Ehiru did not know either, but someone did. There was no confusion in the Kisuati woman as she turned toward her mount—but as she did, her eyes met his and revealed her fear.
“They mean to kill you this time,” Ehiru told her.
She flinched, then her lips quirked in a bitter smile. “I seem to hear nothing else from you Gujaareen these days.” Then she was gone, heading for her camel, and Nijiri was tugging him toward his.
Ehiru gripped the boy’s arm. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and saw the boy’s eyes widen at his sudden lucidity. He smiled tightly in response; a Gatherer’s will was a formidable thing. Nijiri smiled back before nodding and sprinting toward his own beast.
They mounted and whipped their camels to the loping canter that was their fastest run. The camels smelled their fear and obliged without protest. The Kisuati border was only a half-day’s ride away. There was no way to tell how far back the Gujaareen were through the heat-haze, or even whether they had spotted the caravan. There was hope.
No there isn’t, laughed the voice in Ehiru’s mind.
When he glanced back again, the wavering specks on the horizon had resolved into clear shapes: men on horseback, four fours or more, riding hard to catch up to them. The minstrels called out to one another in polyglot urgency and all around Ehiru daggers and camelwhips and the occasional short sword appeared. Then Gehanu called out something else and the leaders of the caravan turned, dragging the rest to a halt. Instantly they began circling, backs to one another, weapons at the ready. Talithele’s palanquin they set down at the center, along with the heavier of the trade goods so as to make their mounts more maneuverable.
To Sunandi, Ehiru heard Gehanu shout, “Go!”
To which Sunandi replied, “I’ll never make it.”
“Try, damn you! We will hold them here.”
But already Ehiru could see that the double-line of horses had split, some veering to the east and the others west to flank them. The minstrels would never be able to hold all of the soldiers, and it would take only one to break off from the two-pronged attack and run Sunandi down.
“Merik’s Fires, they’re not slowing at all—” Ehiru heard one of the minstrels gasp, and then the soldiers were upon them.
Somewhere in the chaos that followed, Ehiru flung himself off the camel and rolled to his feet in the sand. He could fight better on the ground. A soldier rode at him with sword drawn; he braced himself. It took all his strength and skill to capture the flat of the blade between his hands when the soldier swung at his head. He threw his weight to one side and twisted the sword sharply; surprise and momentum made the soldier lose his grip on the hilt as the horse rode past. Ehiru threw the blade aside—and then gasped as his sight blurred, another landscape superimposing itself on the present. A forest out of nightmare: ferns whose tendrils reached for him, palm fronds dripping poison…
No! Not now! Not—
“—That one, damn you!” Ehiru pulled himself out of the vision to see a soldier on the other side of the chaos, reining in his horse to shout at the man who’d just tried to decapitate Ehiru. This one wore no livery—none of them did—but the stamp of the Gujaareen military caste was plain in his sharp features and heavy jaw. Something in his manner hinted at command. “Orders are to bring him back alive!”
Then Ehiru had no more time for thought. Dust and cacophony filled the air, human cries mingling with animal panic and the clang of metal. Around him life and death flickered in vignettes: Gehanu’s son Kanek struggling to control his frightened mount while a soldier bore down on him from behind. The singer Annon desperately using her precious harp as a shield while a soldier hacked at it with his sword. A dancer whose name Ehiru did not know screaming on the ground with his belly open and intestines laid out before him.
His sight locked on the last. A Gathering would be more merciful than the death the dancer faced now. Pivoting on his toes Ehiru stalked toward the man, the battle around him fading into so much background noise. “There are no Sharers here,” he whispered to himself. The words rang hollow despite their truth. He pushed aside guilt and tried to focus on his duty. “It must be done.”
But before he could reach the man there was a flurry of something at the edge of his vision. A distraction; he ignored it. But then it moved into view and he saw a soldier, horse wheeling away from a minstrel with a whip—
NO!
—And the dancer made no sound as the horse’s hoof came down on his head. Brain and bone sprayed the ground, the essence of a man’s whole self scattered to the dust.
Ehiru was not prepared for the rage, a flood of hatred so savage that his head pounded with it. But the soldier who had stolen his tithebearer had ridden off into the fray already.
Kill him, said the voice.
And Ehiru replied, “Yes, I shall.”
He ran after the soldier, silent, intent. Something moved across his vision and blocked his path, a different soldier brandishing a sword, words about surrender. He batted the sword aside and took hold of the arm that held it, ramming the heel of his free hand into the elbow. The wet pop of the breaking joint sounded like the head of the dancer, who might have been sentenced to an eternity in the shadowlands by a soldier’s carelessness. “I shall avenge you,” he whispered to the dancer’s soul, yanking the screaming, broken-armed soldier off the horse. The soldier kept screaming, writhing on the ground and holding the flopping ruin of his arm. Ehiru contemplated him for a moment, then remembered that this was not the soldier he wanted. He stepped around the riderless horse and continued after his prey.
Another soldier fell to the ground at his feet, choking and spitting blood. Nijiri ran into view, poised to strike again, though he held the blow when he saw that the soldier was disabled. Ehiru smiled at the sight.
“Brother!” The boy was wild-eyed. “There are more soldiers approaching from the south, a Kisuati patrol. If we can hold out a bit longer—” He caught his breath and whirled away as another soldier rode at him.
“Good,” Ehiru said, gliding onward. The boy was a Gatherer; he could take care of himself.
He spotted the soldier he’d marked near the center of the madness—perilously near Talithele’s palanquin. “You shall not,” he whispered, and charged past a riderless camel to grab the man’s leather half-torso under the arm. He hauled with all his weight and the startled soldier tumbled to the ground, confused but still trying to raise his sword. Ehiru stepped on the sword and put one knee on the man’s chest to pin him down. Then he took hold of the man’s hair and chin to break his neck—
Take him.
He frowned, pausing.
For the Goddess. A tithe was lost; here is another.
Around Ehiru the world was chaos. The soldiers had spotted the Kisuati patrol and were beginning to withdraw, harried by the surviving minstrels. Gehanu was on the ground, holding Kanek’s body and screaming her grief.
So much death and waste. The woman’s corruption and the Superior’s lies and Eninket he is Eninket.
“You should have trusted me,” Ehiru snarled at the face below him. The soldier’s eyes widened. Then Ehiru put his hand on the man’s face—
mother
—and forced his eyelids shut—
Hananja I beg you for peace
—and then he was inside the soldier and the taste of dreamblood was a sweet shock, like the first splatter of rain after a long drought. And after the taste, a torrent. He threw back his head and shouted in ecstasy as the self of the soldier poured into the aching hollowness within him, sending life surging from his core out to the very tips of his fingers and toes. So delicious it was, so powerful that his head reeled and his groin throbbed and his scalp tingled and OH GODDESS YES he needed more, so much more that he shoved aside the soul to look for it. There was nothing left save what little the soul needed to remain intact but what did that matter? He snapped the tether and sucked what spilled and crushed the soul and swallowed that too, and when nothing remained but tatters of mortal anguish, only then was he satisfied.
And then horror smashed up from the depths of Ehiru’s consciousness and shattered the bliss with a single word. The name for his sin:
Reaper.