“Then let the serpent bite.” Nezeru heard his footsteps getting closer. Suddenly overcome with an animal terror she had never felt before, she struggled, but Kemme was too strong. The tree trunk must be scratching her nipples until they bled, she knew, but in her fear she hardly felt it. “Hold steady, Sacrifice,” Makho hissed. “Show courage.”
She gained a little control of herself and managed to stop squirming.
“You owe the queen your body,” Makho intoned, and then the first blow of the hebi-kei fell.
She only dimly heard the loud crack it made, because a bolt of fiery pain leaped through her entire back. Nezeru writhed in agony and almost cried out, but she was afraid to open her mouth, afraid she would vomit with her face pressed against the tree. The pain, which had seemed at first so fierce it would stop her heart, only grew worse as the moments passed.
“You owe the queen your heart,” said Makho, and struck again.
Stars seemed to burst and die inside her head, and her bones felt as if they would snap, so hard did she try to push forward, away from the lash, but Makho only waited a few moments, then calmly continued.
“You owe the queen your spirit.”
The serpent bit her again, another poison wound, deep and foul. She had never felt pain like this, not even in the worst days of her training, the Fire Ordeal or the Ice Ordeal or the Hall of Spears. She tried to suck air into her body but it would not come. She could not see. Everything was red mist.
“You owe the queen your life.”
Again and again Makho struck, and each time Nezeru thought she could take no more, that the next blow would separate her shrieking spirit from her agonized flesh forever. Somewhere near the end a great darkness bloomed in her head like one of the holy black flowers of Nakkiga’s high meadows, filling everything, bringing silence, bringing blackness.
? ? ?
In dreams her mother Tzoja followed her through a lonely forest of dead trees and damp, dark earth, calling for her, but Nezeru did not want to be found.
Leave me alone! she wanted to shout. You’ve cursed me with your mortal ways! With your weakness!—but her mouth was full, and her limbs would not obey her. Earth. Her mouth was filled with earth. She was buried in the dirt and only the mortal woman who had brought her into the world still searched for her. But the weight of the heavy soil was too much, and even though Nezeru had changed her mind, even though she wanted now to be found, she could not move, could not speak, and her mother’s voice grew ever more faint . . .
She woke in horrible, blazing pain to discover a weight on top of her. She tried to cry out, but a hand was over her mouth. A moment later, a stinging slap rocked back her head.
“Be quiet, halfblood! Would you disturb everyone’s rest? We set out in the morning!”
It was Makho. For a moment, confused and in terrible pain, Nezeru continued to struggle. The chieftain dropped his hand from her mouth to her neck and squeezed until she stopped fighting, but kept his weight on top of her. She felt him untying the laces on her trews.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Having you.” He yanked her clothing roughly down around her knees. “Do you think punishment means you escape your duty to your people?”
The pain was everywhere, each muscle and sinew shrieking as if they had been burned black. She could barely think, but she felt that if he took her now, it would kill her heart stone dead in her breast.
“No!” she gasped out. “You can’t!”
“You tell me no?”
He slapped her again, but it was so much less than the pain of her wounds that she barely noticed.
“I could kill you for that—”
“No, Makho, it is . . . I am . . .” She could think of no other excuse, no other way to stop him. “I am with child. We dare not chance harming it.”
His hand had been raised a third time, but now it halted in mid-air. His face was still contorted in a snarl. “With child? Do you tell the truth?”
It was too late to take back the lie now. “Yes.”
“Why did you not say anything before?”
“I only knew it with certainty yesterday on the ship. I began to suspect when we were on the Island of Bones.”
“You took twenty strokes of the serpent without telling me this? You risked the life of a new subject for the Mother of All?” He seemed to want to beat her again. “Selfish she-crow!”
“I did not think—it all happened so quickly . . .”
He grabbed her arms and yanked her up into a sitting position. He was not particularly rough, but sudden movement still brought agony from her wounds. “Is the child mine?”
Panic rolled over her like an avalanche. The deception had popped out of her mouth as quickly as the decision not to kill the fleeing boy on the mountainside, but the results would be just as long-lasting. O Mother of the People, what am I becoming? Still, she had no time to consider consequences: if she took too long answering, Makho would begin to doubt her story. “I . . . I think it must be, Hand Chieftain. I have coupled with no one else since we left Nakkiga during the last moon.” Nor with anyone else for some time before that, she knew, but there was no reason to complicate things with too many details. Even when you are forced to tell a lie, her father had once said in a moment of unusual candor, tell one that contains as much simple truth as possible, so you will have fewer invented details to recall later on.
Nezeru realized that, almost by chance, she had chosen the one falsehood that could genuinely change her situation. Nakkiga’s ancient laws had changed after the terrible losses they had suffered during the failed War of Return, and the Hikeda’ya now encouraged nobles to couple with mortals or halfbloods. The blood of mortals was more fertile than that of the immortals, somehow, and their offspring, even with a pureblood Hikeda’ya parent, reached maturity at a startlingly early age. Nezeru herself had solved Yedade’s Box and begun her path through the Order of Sacrifice at an age when many true Hikeda’ya children were still infants, and she had reached a high level of achievement in her order when pureblood Norn children born the same year remained babes in arms. The one thing that all Hikeda’ya knew was that new births were a sacred necessity. Makho’s ability to use her or even punish her had now been sharply curtailed, all to protect the children the Hikeda’ya so badly needed.
But there was no child.
“Dress yourself, Sacrifice,” Makho told her. “Despite your punishment you may ride, not walk, but you still will do everything else your position demands and that I order.”
“Of course, Hand Chieftain Makho.”
He was clearly disappointed, but Nezeru didn’t think it was only because he could not couple with her. “We set out when dawn touches the treetops, Sacrifice. Be ready—you will receive no special favors. The Hikeda’ya do not pamper those who breed our new Sacrifices, lest we create a generation of the weak.” Then he walked back across the campsite, leaving her alone. She pulled her trews back up, then wrapped herself in her cloak and turned her back on the places where the others lay.
Now I am twice a liar, she thought, floundering in the enormity of her crimes. If the truth of either of them is discovered, it will seal my execution.
Despite having avoided the humiliation and agony of being taken against her will, Nezeru felt as though she had lost something unspeakably important. Tears filled her eyes for the first time since the habit had been driven from her in early childhood. She felt like a husk, like something left behind. She lay wretched and unsleeping for a long time afterward, unable to understand how her life had gone so badly astray.
? ? ?
Later, Nezeru could scarcely remember the first two days of riding after her session with the hebi-kei. The hours blurred into one long fever dream—in fact as well as in feeling, because a malady had gripped her in the night and would not let go. The trees swayed before her as if in a high wind, although she could scarcely feel a breeze. Her skin, especially on her back, felt as though red-hot ants swarmed across her. None of the others would speak to her, and though Makho might avoid harming her outright, he lived up to his promise of doing her no favors. Among the Hikeda’ya, pain and even death were small sacrifices compared to the greatest sacrifices of all, the queen’s decision to leave first her home in the Garden, and then later to separate from the rest of her family, all for the good of her people. All Hikeda’ya knew that, for more than a hundred Great Years—many thousands of seasons as the fleeting mortals counted them—Queen Utuk’ku had survived the loss of both her husband and son, living on without them all these long years because the People needed their monarch, and that was the only measure by which suffering could be considered.