32
It is the sound of screaming that wakes the child Ehiru.
For a moment he lies on his bed, listening to the chorus of his brothers’ breath and wondering if the sound is the remnant of some dream. But he dismisses that thought, for he never forgets his dreams, and just a moment before he was skimming above the greenlands near Kite-iyan. There were no screams then, just the hollow rush of the wind and the pennant-flap of his loindrapes. He remembers the tickling caress of barley hairs against his skin, the fermenting smell of hot mud in the irrigation canals, the sun on his back, the sere blue sky. In the past he has dived into the mud to see what it feels like. Once it tried to drown him, but he is a proper child of Gujaareh. He proclaimed his soulname—I AM NSHA—and took hold of the dream so that the mud became like the womb he remembers only when he is asleep, harmless and enveloping and profoundly comforting.
But now the dream is gone and he lies in the real world, where he is just a little boy and his heart is full of sudden fear.
He sits up; several of his brothers do the same. This is the chamber where the youngest of the Prince’s sons sleep. Tehemau has seen seven floods of the river and is oldest, but it is Ehiru to whom the other boys look. He is only five, and does not understand that they see a peculiar wisdom in him; he merely accepts it. “Goddess-touched,” their tutors call it. “Blessed with the gift,” said the priest who came to Kite-iyan a few days before to examine him. He gave Ehiru a necklace with an intriguing pendant: an ovoid of polished obsidian etched with a stylized moontear. “Before forty days have passed you shall join us,” the priest told him then. “You are a child of the Hetawa now.” Ehiru knows this is foolish. He is the child of his mother, and the father he rarely sees but loves anyhow, and perhaps this Hananja of whom he has heard so much. But he fingers the pendant now and shivers as a flicker of foreboding moves through him.
Getting out of bed, he whispers to his brothers that they should find someplace to hide. He will go to see what is happening. Tehemau insists on accompanying him, mostly to save face. Ehiru nods even though Tehemau wets the bed and sometimes, after a nightmare, weeps like an infant. Ehiru wishes one of their older brothers were here—Eninket, who is kind and knows the best stories, or perhaps the warrior Tiyesset. But Tehemau’s presence will be a comfort, at least.
He and Tehemau slip into the corridor and run from one drape and flowering vase to another. Ahead is the solarium where usually they can find several of their mothers lounging on couches and cushions, chatting or playing dicing games, drawing letters or checking over figuring scrolls. A place of busy peace. Instead they find the aftermath of chaos—tables and couches overturned, cushions thrown to the floor, dice scattered. Tehemau starts to call out for his mother and Ehiru shushes him instinctively. They hear another scream nearby, followed by something stranger—sharp men’s voices, deeper and rougher than those of the eunuchs who normally serve in the Prince’s springtime palace. The palace guards are never allowed inside unless their father has come to visit. Is that what has happened? But if so then why do the men sound angry?
They peer around the corner and see:
Two of their mothers lie on the floor, unmoving, their fine clothing dark with spreading blood. Another cringes on a couch nearby, nearly gibbering as she asks why why why? The soldiers ignore her. They are arguing among themselves. One of them wants to spare her—“long enough to enjoy”—but the others are insisting that they follow orders. The argument ends abruptly when one of the men spits on the floor and thrusts his sword through the mother’s throat. She stops gibbering and stares at him in surprise, blood bubbling over her lips. Then she sags backward.
Tehemau screams. The soldiers see them.
Tehemau gets farther than Ehiru because his legs are longer. One soldier grabs Ehiru by his sidelock and yanks him backward so hard that his vision blurs; he cries out and falls. Fear slows all that follows. Through a haze of pain-tears he sees another soldier tackle Tehemau to the ground, cursing as the boy struggles wildly. When the soldier draws his knife it catches light from the colored lanterns. So does Tehemau’s blood, arcing forth and spreading over the marble after the soldier draws the knife across his throat.
Ehiru does not cry out—not even when the soldier dragging him stops and draws his own knife. It curves gracefully upward, casting blurred rainbows like the Dreaming Moon.
“Wait,” says one of the other men, catching the hand that holds the knife.
“I thought you wanted a woman?” laughs the one that holds Ehiru.
“No, look.” The soldier points and another makes an exclamation of surprise and Ehiru knows that they have seen the Hetawa’s pendant dangling around his neck.
“Take him to the captain,” says the first. The one holding him sheathes his knife and hauls Ehiru up by his hair.
“Try to escape and I’ll kill you anyway,” he says. Ehiru hears but does not respond. His eyes are locked on Tehemau, who has stopped moving now. Tehemau has wet himself again, Ehiru notices. Through the fear he feels sorrow, for wherever his soul has gone now, Tehemau is probably ashamed.
The soldiers drag Ehiru through the corridors where his mothers’ talk and music once echoed, intermingled with his siblings’ chatter and play. Now the corridors are filled with the sounds and smells of death. The scenes drift past slowly, like so many minstrel plays. In the corridor he sees several of his oldest brothers dead. Tiyesset lies facedown among them with a broken lantern pole in his hands, a warrior to the end. As they pass the atrium garden Ehiru can hear strange grunting sounds; through the leaves he sees one of his mothers struggling beneath a soldier who is hurting, but not killing, her. Ehiru’s soldiers see this and resume their bickering as they drag him along. They pass one of the girls’ sleeping chambers and there Ehiru sees many bodies. It was their screaming that woke Ehiru and his brothers.
At last they reach the grand hall. Here the soldiers stop before a man who wears more red and gold than they do. The man stoops to examine Ehiru’s pendant.
“He is not yours!” cries a voice, and this one wakes Ehiru from his stupor. His own mother. He turns, ignoring the pain this causes his scalp, to see her emerge from a side-corridor. She wears a brightly colored brocade wrap and the gold-amber necklace that Ehiru’s father gave her; she is regal and unafraid. Soldiers immediately take her by the arms, dragging her forward. She barely seems to notice their presence. “I have given my son to the Hetawa,” she declares to the captain. “Harm him and risk the Goddess’s own wrath.”
The captain scowls at this and orders the men to kill her.
The world slows again. Two knives go into her at breast and belly, then again at neck and side. The men step back. Ehiru lunges forward, not caring if he loses his scalp, but fortunately the soldier’s grip has loosened and he slips free only a few hairs the less. He reaches her as she falls, stumbling in his effort to catch her, and failing. She lands hard enough to bounce but then lies still, her hands drifting to the floor at her sides, her eyes fixing on his. She is smiling. He skids to his knees beside her, the floor is slippery with her blood, her wrap clings to his hands when he takes hold of it in an effort to pull her upright.
“Do not weep,” she whispers. Blood is on her lips. He screams something; he does not know what. “Do not weep,” she commands again. She lifts her hand to touch his face, drawing a wet line down one cheek. “This is how it must be. You will be safe now; Hananja Herself will protect you. You are Her son now.”
And then she stops talking. Her hand drops. Her eyes are still fixed on his, but different somehow. He is still screaming when the soldiers drag him back; they ignore him. They are upset, frightened for some reason.
“No way to know she was the firstwife,” the captain says. He sounds shaken. “So many women here, no way to know. That’s what we’ll tell him.”
“And the brat?”
“The Hetawa, where else? Do you want to be the one who explains to the Gatherers how he died?”
No one answers.
“We’ll deliver him on the way back to Yanya-iyan. As far as tonight is concerned, he wasn’t here.”
So they carry Ehiru outside and truss him up and strap him across a saddle like baggage, and once the killing is done they ride away with him into the desert night. And as they dump him on the Hetawa steps and leave him there for the Sentinels to collect, he recalls the old priest’s words and realizes that they were not an error, but a prophecy. Now, though he would never have chosen it, he is a child of the Hetawa. Now and forevermore.
*
Ehiru opened his eyes and lifted his head from his knee. Sunandi’s garden surrounded him, wilder and thicker than Gujaareen gardens tended to be, although no less beautiful. Straightening from the awkward posture, he stretched out his leg and sighed, looking up at the Dreamer through the graceful branches of a shimanantu tree. He’d come to meditate, but the humid warmth of Kisua’s nights had lulled him into sleep—and memories—instead. Not the wisest thing to sleep outdoors and without screening cloth; he scratched one leg and grimaced as he felt a four of insect bites beneath his fingers. Then he tensed, hearing a footstep behind him.
“Is your bed not to your satisfaction, Gatherer?”
He relaxed and turned to see Sunandi. She stood a few feet away on the porch that was the garden’s entrance. She wore only a light shift, momentarily throwing him back to the fateful night of their meeting in Yanya-iyan that now seemed so long ago.
“The bed is fine,” he replied. “Gatherers don’t sleep at night.”
“And yet you have the look of a man who’s just woken from a fine nap.”
I’m not quite a Gatherer any longer, he thought, but did not say. She probably knew it, anyhow.
“Where’s your little killer?”
Ehiru shook his head. “In Ina-Karekh, though his body is in your guestroom with my jungissa holding him in sleep. He would be awake too, if not for that, worrying over all our troubles.”
“Hmm, yes.” She sighed. “I’m glad to know that Gatherers, too, have sleepless nights. Makes you seem more human.”
“I could say the same of ambassadors,” he said, turning to look up at the Dreamer again. Waking Moon peeked around the curve of her larger sister, a signal of the coming dawn. “Someone in your profession must see so much evil, day in and day out. It surprises me to see that you can still be troubled by anything enough that it disturbs your sleep.”
“A matter of degree, Gatherer.” She walked down the steps, coming to stand on the grass beside him. “Everyday evils are nothing to me, true, but this war is so much more than that.” She hesitated, then added in a tone of resignation, “Perhaps I should be glad that I won’t live to become so jaded.”
He sighed up at the Moons. “You sought to prevent war. There’s no corruption in that.”
He sensed her surprise and sudden attention in the moment of silence that followed. “Even if my methods…?”
“Corruption is a disease of the soul, not the actions, Jeh Kalawe. And though the latter are often symptomatic of the former, it is a Gatherer’s duty to see beyond superficialities. When I return to Gujaareh, I’ll inform the Council of my judgment.” He glanced back at her. “See to it that you never grow corrupt enough to accept evil without losing sleep, however, or it will be dangerous for you to enter Gujaareh again.”
She exhaled, fourdays of tension released in that one sound, and closed her eyes for a moment—perhaps sending a prayer of thanks to whatever gods she respected, or perhaps just savoring life anew. But when she opened her eyes the old irreverence was there. “Be sure you tell your apprentice too, priest. He doesn’t like me.”
In spite of his mood, Ehiru smiled. “Nijiri has little experience with foreigners or women. You confuse him.”
“And that which confuses must be destroyed?”
“Or understood. But you, Sunandi Jeh Kalawe, are a difficult woman to understand under the best of circumstances. You can’t blame Nijiri for throwing up his hands and deciding to kill you as the simplest solution to the matter.”
She laughed, low and rich. He watched her, obliquely fascinated by the sound and the long graceful lines of her neck. “He wouldn’t be the first man to come to that conclusion,” she said, looking up at the Moons. “The Prince seems to have felt the same way. And Kinja often joked about it.” She fell silent then, abruptly, and he remembered that she was still in mourning.
“This Kinja,” he said. He gazed at the Dreamer as he said it, but he caught her look from the corner of his eye, sensed her sudden tension. He kept his tone soft, trying to convey that he meant only to comfort her. “Will you tell me of him? Since, it seems, he died trying to save both our lands.”
She was silent for a length of time. It was very Gujaareen of her, though Ehiru suspected she would not appreciate the description.
“He was…” she began, slowly, “Well. My father, officially, by adoption. But in truth he was more like you are to Nijiri—an older brother, a mentor, a friend. I loved him the same way that boy loves you.” She paused then, glancing at him. “Perhaps not in quite the same way, though. I never wanted Kinja as a lover.”
“Even if you had, he would have loved you too much to indulge your desire,” Ehiru replied, evenly. “A father has power over a woman that no lover should have, after all, and vice versa.” He shrugged. “This Kinja seems an honorable man, and honorable men are not so selfish.”
“Perhaps you should say this to your apprentice, priest.”
Ehiru shook his head, slowly, and brushed away a persistent biting insect. “I’ve known Nijiri since he was a child. Nothing stops him, or dissuades him, once he sets his mind on a thing. That will make him a good Gatherer.” And then, because the moment seemed to demand a degree of candor, he added, “And I’m selfish enough to want his love, for whatever time I have left. I won’t abuse it, but… I’m not strong enough to turn it away, either. Perhaps you’ll think less of me, for that.”
She sighed and hunkered down to crouch beside him, arms wrapped around her knees. “No. I don’t think less of you. Embrace love while you have it, priest—from whichever direction it comes, proper or improper, for however long it lasts. Because it always, always comes to an end.”
Her pain, her aching loneliness, was almost more than Ehiru could bear. He wanted so badly to touch her, stroke away her sorrow and administer peace in its wake, but he dared not. His desire for her was dangerously strong already. Then too, he realized sadly, he could not spare the dreamblood. His mind was consuming what he’d taken from the soldier far too quickly.
Well, there were other ways to share peace.
“I’m no woman,” Ehiru said. “I won’t have the strength to travel on my own, once I dwell permanently in Ina-Karekh. But before that, if I have the opportunity, I’ll seek out this Kinja, and tell him what a lucky man he is.”
A small tremor passed through her, and her face twitched. “Thank—” But she could not complete the phrase. Tears welled in her eyes, abruptly. Ehiru looked away and fell silent, to allow her that much privacy.
After a moment, she took a deep breath and said, in a calmer tone, “The boy says you mean to, er, take up permanent residence in Ina-Karekh soon.”
“Yes. I must.” He lowered his eyes. “I’m no longer fully in control of my mind, Jeh Kalawe. Even this moment is just an island of lucidity in the flood of madness that surrounds me. In truth, you shouldn’t be alone with me. It isn’t safe.”
“The boy doesn’t fear you.”
“But you should. Even he should.” He sighed, watching the garden’s shadows shift in a breeze.
“No.” To Ehiru’s surprise, he felt Sunandi’s hand cover his. “In the desert, you endured days of madness when you could easily have taken me. That’s not the way of a murdering beast, no matter what you did to that soldier. And as you say, Gatherer—sometimes, no matter how horrid the outcome, we must judge a person by his intentions rather than his actions.”
And then, to his greater shock, she leaned in and kissed him.
It lasted only a breath, just long enough for him to taste the merest hint of her berry-dark, rose petal–soft lips. He had never kissed a woman before. Later, he would recall the scent of whatever oil she’d put on after her bath, the sound of her breathing, an impression of cinnamon on the tip of his tongue. The feel of her hand on his, and the softness of her breast against his arm. Later he would imagine pulling her closer, regret that he would never know the fulfillment of such thoughts, and be glad, at least, that he’d had the chance to experience this in his last days of waking.
Then she pulled back with a small sad smile, and he stared at her, still stunned.
“May Hananja’s inward sight be ever upon you,” she said softly, the blessing’s syllables rolling beautifully in her native tongue. Then she stroked his cheek with one hand. “I can’t wish you peace, for when you return to your homeland you must fight. But good luck.”
And then she got to her feet and left the garden. Ehiru stared after her for a long while, unsure of what to think, or whether to think at all. Eventually, though, it came to him that he felt better. More certain of the choices he’d made, and the path he faced. In her own way, she had given him peace.
“Peace and luck to you as well, Sunandi of Kisua,” he said softly. “And farewell.”