They were replaced, of course. The empire is canny enough to understand that it is easier to keep an office and replace the person holding it than it is to change the political structure altogether. Names have power; it can take people a long time to realize they’ve stopped meaning what they used to mean. In the case of the Greenshirts, the city’s invincible defenders became a second-rate constabulary charged with putting down brawls by the harbor and hauling the most obvious dissidents before imperial courts. The former lords of Dombang became lackeys, but even lackeys can be dangerous if they carry spears and flatbows and have the weight of an empire behind them.
The men who entered the square were a standard patrol—four soldiers, customary green tabards over their shirts of mail. The soldiers had obviously gone to some effort to keep their armor polished, but Dombang’s relentless wet salt heat had left a thin patina of rust over the rings, rust that streaked the faded green cloth of the uniforms until it looked as though each man had been bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds for weeks. Still, they were more composed, more professional than the Greenshirts from my childhood—Ruc’s influence, I assumed—and professional or not, it was tough to miss the figure of the pantsless man urinating on the statue of one of the city’s founders.
“Citizen!” shouted the patrol leader. He was large, middle-aged, slabs of muscle deteriorating slowly into fat.
The drunk pisser didn’t notice. He was still staring at his own red hand.
“Citizen!” the Greenshirt shouted again. His men fell in behind him as he quickened his pace.
The other revelers saw the coming disaster, tried to pull their friend away from the statue, but trapped by his tangled pants and baffled by drunkenness all he did was to raise his slick palm to show them.
“The red hand,” he muttered. Then, disastrously, he quoted from Chong Mi: “‘I saw hands of blood, ten thousand bloody hands, reach up from the waters to tear the city down.’”
The leader of the Greenshirts stiffened—the words might have been an arrow lodged in his chest. After a heartbeat’s shock, he leveled his spear, barked an order. The two men with flatbows dropped to a knee, taking aim on the hapless fool.
I watched the scene from the shadows, amazed that my night’s painting could turn so quickly to violence. The red hands were only the first step in my plan. I’d half expected them to go unnoticed. What were a few smears of paint, after all, dabbed up in the riot of color that was Dombang? If I had scripted the evening’s events, I couldn’t have written a more perfect coincidence. It was almost as though the old gods of the delta were watching after all, standing grim-eyed and silent in the darkness behind me, dragging the city that had betrayed them toward chaos.
One of the pisser’s friends, more sober than the rest despite having lost his vest earlier in the night, stepped forward, his hands raised. “No,” he said. “It’s not … We’re not…”
“On the ground,” the captain barked, gesturing with his spear. “All of you. Get on the ground.”
The bare-chested man took another step forward, evidently propelled by the conviction that if he could just get close enough, just get the words out, the whole misunderstanding could be avoided. He walked like a man in a dream, slowly but implacably, his hands raised, while behind him the pisser, finally understanding the danger, struggled to drag his pants up around his waist. The rest of the group stood still as Goc My himself, eyes wide, red with the reflected light of the square’s lanterns.
“Listen,” the bare-chested man said. “Just listen…”
When he had almost reached the captain, he stretched out one tentative hand toward the man’s spear, as though to defend himself. A mistake, as it turned out. When the soldier yanked his weapon back, one of the soldiers beside him twitched. Such a small motion: a jerk of the head, stiffening of the shoulders, sudden spasm of the hands as they tried to close momentarily into fists and found the flatbow’s trigger. The bolt took the closest man in the gut—an inexplicably bad shot at such close range. He gaped in horror, stared at his own ruined stomach, touched the end of the rudely protruding bolt. Ananshael held him in his hands already—I could see it in the angle of the wound and the bleak sheen of the man’s eyes—but the body is stubborn. It can take a long time to die. In the space that remained to him, the dying man lurched forward, arms outstretched, and then my god descended, invisible and unerring, come among us once again to unstring his trembling mortal instruments.
I’ve watched my share of brawls. Most don’t go much further than a few busted fists and broken noses. Most people don’t want to die, and they seem to know, instinctively, that the best way to keep from getting dead is to keep a leash on the fight. Most brawls are governed by an unspoken, universal set of rules: leave the fallen where they drop, avoid the eyes, fight with chairs and bottles, not bricks or stones. In the event that someone draws a knife, there’s almost always a pause, a choreographed moment in which everyone takes stock.
Those rules don’t apply after someone takes a flatbow bolt to the stomach.
It all happened fast, as though the violence had been there all along, penned and waiting to be released. The dying man seized the spear with his final, awful strength. The other soldier fired his flatbow. Some revelers fled, some charged forward, screaming their rage. Spears met flesh. Fingers closed on throats. Lips drew back. Teeth, bleeding. More screaming. Bodies pressed lover-tight. Steel twisted in viscera. Blood splashed on the stones. Vicious kicking and stabbing over and over and then, like the end of a great musical crescendo, it was over.
“The god’s mercy upon you,” I murmured quietly.
He was already gone, of course. Ananshael is never one to linger after claiming his due. Only the bodies remained: eleven dead, sprawled on the cobbles beneath Goc My’s inscrutable gaze—seven of the men who had spent the evening drinking and singing, and all four Greenshirts. I’ve always thought there’s something beautiful in that final stillness, the way the dead find rest in even the most awful postures.
The remaining revelers—there were four of them, including, improbably, the man who had pissed on the statue in the first place—didn’t share that peace. They stared at the scene, chests heaving, mouths agape, as though in just a few moments the world had become an illegible text, all language dissolved into blood and wrecked flesh.
Finally, one of them seized another by the shoulder. Wordlessly, they stumbled away, the soles of their sandals slapping against the stones, echoing through the night. I knew the world was fragile, but I hadn’t figured on just how fragile. When I finally turned away, Goc My remained, gazing over the plaza with blank, stone eyes.
*