“You might be the one who survives him,” the Dead Man said, in a voice mossy with memories.
“Poxed and rotting, if he has his way with me.” She drew a shaky breath. “But one can live a long time with the rot. And so I am planning on outliving him.” She stopped and pressed her nails to her mouth. “Or, planning in case I do outlive him, anyway. I can’t plan on such a fragile possibility.”
The Dead Man nodded into her hair.
She said, “What if there are more of those things you fought by the cisterns?”
“That would be a problem,” he admitted. “Though the Wizards have a better idea what to do about them now. And Nizhvashiti might be able to call up the wrath of God or a cleansing fire or who knows what, if we ask it nicely.”
It hurt to laugh.
He pressed his face into her hair. In the utter darkness of the shuttered chamber where they lay, he’d unwound his veil and kissed her mouth. She’d traced the outlines of his features with her fingertips.
“So,” she said, “will you marry me?”
He sat up in the dark and drew her around to face him. He was nothing but a faintly paler blur against the blackness, but she felt the warmth of his close breath when he said, “You did not answer when I asked if you loved me.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” he said. “As rain matters, and the birds matter, and the taste of wine in autumn matters.”
It was trapped in her throat like a bone. What she loved, she lost; it was not safe to love. “I do not know,” she admitted. “I do not know what love is. I do not know what it is to love.”
“Thank you,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “You are a truthful rajni. You may need to learn to put that behind you.”
She laughed. “Does that change your answer?”
“Kindle a light,” he replied.
She handed him his veil and waited through a moment of rustling. The lamp by the couch was ensorcelled with one of Ata Akhimah’s many useful household magics, and when Mrithuri turned the tiny gear to move the wick, it lit of itself and burned with a light as clear as a topaz gem.
She turned and gasped. He held the creased blue length of his veil in his hand. His face was bare in the lamplight. He flinched from her expression.
“That bad, is it?”
It was a very ordinary face.
More weathered about the eyes, where there were engaging lines that showed the work of sun and wind. She had, she realized, become used to reading the entire cast of his expression from just the lines around those eyes. But the face surrounding the eyes seemed years younger, the skin unwrinkled and without the pigmented spots that sun exposure brought. His nose was pronounced, his lips much thinner and more mobile than she would have expected. His beard was flattened from being under the veil.
She considered. He seemed nervous. “I like it,” she said.
“My answer is yes. For an hour, for a day. I will marry you, my rajni.”
“Yours,” she agreed.
She reached for his hand, but he caught her by the wrist with his free hand and laced his fingers through her own. With his other hand, he slid the end of his veil between their palms, so they held it together. With the other end and quick, skilled gestures, he bound their hands together into an unwieldy package.
“In the sight of God and Her prophet, I, a Dead Man, do wed thee, Mrithuri Rajni, and with my sword I thee endow.”
Something twinged in his face as he said the words. For the second time in his life, she remembered. But he said them softly, and fervently, with a holy weight behind them.
Mrithuri thought for a moment. She was rajni, and she did have the right to perform marriages. Why not her own?
She echoed his form, but did not know the scripted response, and so made it her own. “In the sight of the Mother and her Good Daughter, I, Mrithuri Rajni, do wed thee, a Dead Man called Serhan, and with my heart I thee endow.”
He leaned forward over their joined hands, and she kissed him.
The door to the chamber was flung open, admitting a shaft of witchlight split by two familiar figures. Mrithuri jumped, hilariously restrained by her bound hand. The Dead Man cursed and dragged a corner of sheet across his face as Hnarisha and Ata Akhimah burst into the room.
Syama lunged to her feet with a snarl. When she saw who it was, her stub of a tail whipped like the handle on a pedal-grinder.
“Rajni,” Hnarisha said, exactly as if the Dead Man were not naked on the couch beside her. “Anuraja’s army is on the move. Also,” he added, with a glance at their hands, “I think you need witnesses to make that official.”
He glanced at Ata Akhimah, who was staring straight ahead, over the heads of everybody in the room, her brown arms folded over her white blouse. She nodded with one quick jerk of her chin.
Hnarisha slid the door shut behind him. “I guess you’d better do what you just did all over again.”
The Dead Man sighed and jerked his sheet-wrapped head in the direction of a hook on the wall. “Hand me that scarf,” he said.
* * *
Mrithuri dressed herself in armor, not in finery. It was her grandfather’s armor, antique in decoration and design. She was surprised to find it fit her as if it had been made for her, with the exception of the skirts and sleeves being long.
The Dead Man went with her, and she was grateful. The lacquered chain mail of her armor tunic was heavy, and swung against her thighs. He helped her braid her hair and fit her helm, his touch as impersonal as if she were any raw recruit. Then he stepped back and regarded her critically.
“A very martial queen,” he decided. “It needs a weapon.”
“Daggers,” she said. She touched the serpent torc at her neck, which rested now over the collar of the armor. “I know how to use those. There are some with jeweled hilts. Flashy enough, I suppose.”
He nodded, and at his gesture the armorer fetched them for her. Mrithuri watched, impressed by how smoothly he had integrated himself into the life of the castle and made himself the de facto captain of her guard. The colored leather of the harness, with its gilt buckles, hung over the crimson-and-sapphire lacquer of the chain. Mrithuri thought, I will be dazzling in the Riverlight.
The Dead Man eyed her up and down. “We need to keep you out of bowshot, dressed like that. Every archer in Anuraja’s army will want to take you down.”
“Unless he’s given orders to take me alive,” she said grimly.
The Dead Man sighed. He looked over his shoulder, as if making sure they were more or less alone. Lowering his voice, he said, “The world breaks us. That is just the way of the world. The lucky ones, or perhaps the ones who are brave enough to stand the pain, might heal stronger and better in their new shapes. But they will never be the people who were not broken again. So if you wake up a different person one day because of what we now encounter, well. Remember that if you face the pain bravely, it will not make you terrible. Just different.”
She rubbed her arms through the sleeves of the chain mail, making it rattle. “Let’s go watch the war.”
* * *
The night was breaking as Mrithuri and her entourage rode down through the city on the back of an elephant, then dismounted in the shadow of the main gates to Sarathai-tia. The storm clouds that had been piled uselessly on the eastern horizon seemed, if anything, to have risen higher. They seemed oddly flattened, like murky water in a tank, and there was not a hint of wind or rain. The air held all the breathlessness Mrithuri expected of the dry season.
Syama had paced alongside Hathi. Now, as Hathi offered her trunk to assist her passengers down, the bhaluukutta went and leaned against the elephant’s leg. Mrithuri was not entirely sure who was comforting whom.
Hathi waited among guardsmen and soldiers as the Dead Man dismounted, followed by Hnarisha, Yavashuri, and Ata Akhimah, Tsering-la, and Lady Golbahar. Ritu was organizing her people for castle defense, and had drafted Vidhya to her cause. General Pranaj was already commanding the sold
iers manning—and now reinforcing—the walls. Chaeri did not care to come so close to the war.
The chain mail was heavy on Mrithuri, making her calves strain and ache as she climbed the stair to the battlements, Syama at her heels and her people behind and before. They came to the top, which was swarming with men and war-dogs and barrels of oil to be set afire and boys running with bundles of shafts for the ballistae and even a sure-footed donkey hauling a cart of stone cannonballs down the walk as calmly as if it were on a narrow road.
“Well,” said Hnarisha, huffing slightly as he came up beside her, “I guess we’ll find out what they were waiting for now. How in the shine of the River do they keep that donkey cart from pushing people right over the edge?”
“Long years of practice, I assume,” Mrithuri said. She looked around, about to ask where the Godmade was, until she realized that what she had taken for a pole swathed in wind-ruffled black banners was, in actuality, Nizhvashiti standing straight and narrow atop a battlement, robes fluttering around it as if it stood in a freshening breeze that no one else could feel. As the rajni came up, it turned mismatched, unseeing eyes—one gilt, one glass—upon her. Would that ever become less unsettling?
She’d be lucky to live long enough to find out.
“What do you see, Nizhvashiti?”
“More boats,” Nizhvashiti answered. “And a black cloud rising. A sorcerer upon a throne of corpses, crystallized with gemstones. Lightning.”
“A storm,” Mrithuri said.
“The Good Daughter does not leave her Mother in chains.” The Godmade stretched out its arms, letting the long sleeves stream from a bony frame in the wind rising up the city walls. For a moment, Mrithuri thought Nizhvashiti was going to try to fall into flight like a bird of prey. But the Godmade stood there, only, the wind threatening to lift it from its feet, but otherwise unmoving.
Mrithuri watched for a few long instants before deciding that nothing interesting was going to happen right then. The strange little ritual made her think, and she looked along the wall in either direction to see her royal austringers spaced out the length of the battlements, each with a red-winged bearded vulture on a glove. Her scouts were ready. Her men were ready.
She honestly was not sure what she was doing here. She felt the need to see, with her own eyes, the war. She felt that her men, who were here willing to fight and die for her, needed to see her beside them.
“Why do you suppose they are moving now?” she asked the Dead Man.
He shrugged. “Why do you suppose they waited so long?”
While she was considering her answer, a runner—a skinny lad still devoid of body hair, clad in a dirty loincloth—came from the river side of the city. He prostrated himself before General Pranaj and, after a brief interval, was waved to his feet and allowed to report that Anuraja’s people were crossing the river in more boats, coming straight for the water gate.
The Dead Man, standing beside her, muttered, “I don’t know why they’re bothering with more boats. If the river falls much farther, there won’t be much to keep them from just walking right up to the river gate.”
“Mud,” Yavashuri said.
“For a few days more.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, if the river keeps dropping as she has … well, there will be no water to row across. Only a mudflat.”
“Oh,” said the Dead Man. “Of course. A killing field.”
Mrithuri imagined it: Anuraja’s men in the mire, projectiles raining down on them.
Pranaj’s signalers were drumming out a complicated, nigh-incomprehensible series of changes. Mrithuri had not learned the patterns, but she watched her men respond. They knew what the beats meant.
“Let’s go around to the river wall,” Mrithuri said, on a tickle of premonition, as the austringers, on one drumbeat, stepped to the battlement and lifted their bird-heavy gauntlets high. She watched them turn their birds—her birds—to the wind, so their heavy, red-stained wings could lift them with the most ease. Large raptors prefer to fall into flight, or to fly into the wind.
She should be within, on her chair, to protect the birds. To connect with their senses; to interpret what they saw and felt. To make sure they stayed out of the path of enemy arrows, enemy bullets, enemy spells. To protect them.
She was overwhelmed by the number of things requiring her protection. She could not be there for all of them. She could not put her fragile body between death, and everything.
The sacred vultures fell into the wind one by one by one, a ripple of collapse like balanced pupai plaques arranged to fall against each other. Mrithuri walked along behind the austringers, trailing her entourage, briefly reaching out to caress the wild mind of each vulture as she passed. They had been fed on her blood already; they were there in her awareness now, as she was there in theirs.
She felt another mind, more distant than the others. It was the presence of the bearded vulture she had sent to accompany the Gage on his long journey.
The Gage was still not with him. The vulture waited on the thermals spiraling out of blasted desert, within sight of an enormous storm, a terrible upwelling of pale green dust that roiled with fungal bulges and crackled with sickly lightning. The colored light and tinted shadows of strange suns limned the dust cloud. Mrithuri realized she was seeing past a boundary, into a land under a sky ruled by different gods. She knew other gods made other suns: she had heard of the twin suns of Song, the Lion Sun of Messaline. She had never imagined what it would be like to see past the veil from one land into another. She did not know what sky could host so many suns, so many conflicting sources of light.
Now vulture and woman contemplated the height of the storm through the same eyes, turning wingtip on the same pinions that felt the pressure of wind and gripped it like strong fingers. They were borne effortlessly aloft on the upflow. Mrithuri could have fallen forever into the vulture’s experience, lost herself in the unworried animal mind. If she snapped the tether to her own body, she would be free, and that … complicated meat … would be left behind. Let somebody else sort out succession and precedence and who would be emperor of what. She could just … go flying.
What was one more woman’s body, in a war?
It was just a fancy, she chided herself. A temptation. She was too well-trained in her duty to walk away. Or fly, for that matter. Wasn’t she?
Some little part of her was still aware of the gentle pressure of Ata Akhimah’s hand on her arm as the Wizard guided her, walking along the walls. Just barely.
But her will, stretched out, trembled like a stick held out by one tip. The weight of being overextended pulled at her. All the other birds were there as well, her whole clan of sacred, red-stained minor carrion gods. The threads connecting her to them were strong. The thread connecting her to her body was weak, attenuated. Nothing kept that frail flame burning except the venom that lit its veins, and it had been some time since she had taken the venom.
She was teetering. Sliding out of herself, into the wings of the strong young bird.
“Rajni!” Ata Akhimah’s voice, sharp and sudden. Mrithuri snapped back into herself, blinking. Scrambling, backpedaling, as if she had felt the dirt crumble from beneath her toes at the edge of a cliff.
The entire battlefield projected itself into her awareness at once. A flash of vision, as if a map were held up before her: the combined gestalt of all the eyes, all the vultures. The second flotilla of boats, moving across the low and silt-opaque river. A heavy ripple under the surface, alongside. The besieging army, still blocking the causeway. Still holding back out of ballista range. A cloud of carrion birds swirled behind them. Not Mrithuri’s familiars, those. Not the sacred bearded vultures.
Something ominous. Something she did not quite recognize.
Stay clear, she warned her birds. Stay close to the city. Beware bowshot, and beware what follows the enemy. It wasn’t words, exactly. But she knew they understood.
“There’s so many of them,” she said, and came back
to herself.
Ata Akhimah was looking at her. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Mrithuri said. “But would you expect me to be?”
They had come along the top of the wall to the river gate by then. The massive, figured, copper-shod doors were of ancient mahogany, dense and resilient. They were sealed, barred on the inside, closed against the seamless golden stone of the gate-arch on the outside. Mrithuri leaned out to look down on them from above, feeling no fear despite Hnarisha’s shocked intake of breath. The reliefs glittered, the shadows that outlined them stark in the rising light of the Heavenly River.
The new wave of boats were still beyond cannonshot. They came across the lotus-clogged water like plows cutting green sod. The milk-pale river behind them seemed milk-thick, as well, as though the white clay silt that filled it were thicker than usual. As if the Mother were a river of potter’s slip.
“The dolphins,” Ata Akhimah said.
“It is not safe for them,” Mrithuri said, her voice rising as it squeezed through the tight throat of fear. “The river is so low—”
“It is not safe for any of us,” Ata Akhimah answered. “The dolphins can break the bridge. They can overturn the boats and put those men in the water.”
“I am charged with their protection. They are sacred to the Mother. Will I win Her grace by letting them come to harm?”
Nizhvashiti’s papery words echoed in her memory. The Good Daughter does not leave her Mother in chains.
“Aw, shit,” Mrithuri said. She looked around her: The Dead Man, Hnarisha, Yavashuri. Lady Golbahar. The two Wizards, Ata Akhimah and Tsering-la. Coming up behind them now, walking as silently as a husk on the wind, Nizhvashiti. “I should have my hands in the water for this.”
“Wait,” Tsering-la said. “Let me see what I can do.” He stepped forward, holding out a flask that sloshed. He gestured to Mrithuri, and, understanding, she cupped her hands. He filled them with cool wetness.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 31