by Kate Elliott
“Take that cloth down!” shouted a loud male voice. The singing ceased abruptly.
Gil rolled her off the cot and they had both just tugged their garments into place when the priest ripped down the cloth and with lamp in hand glared at them with all the offended hauteur of a man who believes his god is the only true master.
To her surprise he burst out laughing. “Get out! But the hells if I wouldn’t have tried it, too, at your age.”
She stood with as much dignity as she could drape around herself. To serenade her departure Gil began singing a cheerfully lewd song called “The Fisherman’s Hook.” Actually she thought there was something a little wrong with Gil that made him find pleasure only when there was risk involved. But it didn’t matter. Great-Aunt Tsania often said each person carried both a gift and a burden within themselves and sometimes they were the same thing.
The priest hustled Tyras back into the cell, shoved the door shut, and barred it. She didn’t see General Shevad. He had vanished. The prisoners huddled at the back of their cells like whipped dogs, no longer bold enough to sing. A prickling of fear washed her skin as she looked toward the open gates.
The eunuch who was her guard at the palace, Tayum, strode toward her down the length of the stable like an executioner in haste to get the job done. Guards flanked him. He said nothing; he did not need to say anything.
If she had fled to the river first maybe she would have gotten away, or maybe they would have caught her anyway at the wharf. The prayer her people sang every morning must now be her guide: Let us not cease working, let us not lose heart, for as we walk backward into a future we can never see, our eyes remain on the responsibility that has been given into our hands.
Facing Tayum, she sorted through Elit’s favorite roles and put on The Slightly Impatient Innkeeper with Too Much to Do.
“Ah, Tayum, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you. I am ready to return to the palace. We will need to pass by my apartments in the lower palace to pick up my things.”
He gazed at her as if he could not understand her words and then, with a shrug, gestured for her to precede him. Outside, Prince Kasad and the Silver carriage were gone. Had both Kasad and Shevad abandoned her? But as she climbed into a new carriage she knew it wasn’t true: Neither man could afford to let Tayum see her with him lest the eunuch tell Queen Chorannah.
They did not stop at the lower palace, and she was transferred from the carriage to a curtained chair for the ascent up the stairs. After much jostling and weaving the chair was set down and the curtains parted. Instead of the spacious chamber and balcony where she had been confined before, she was ushered by Tayum into a tiny closet of a room crammed in a row of others along a guarded corridor. It reminded her of the stalls in which the prisoners were kept, only her tiny room was furnished with shelves for her mattress and bedding, basin and pitcher on a table for washing, and her chest, which had been brought up already. The hasp of the lock had been broken. With a spurt of dread, fearing they had stolen her Book of Accounts, she knelt and opened the lid. The book lay atop folded cloth, her box of writing tools tucked beside it. She gripped the chest and breathed until her heart ceased its erratic gallop. By then they had slid shut the door, leaving her alone in darkness.
She slept a little, but was woken by a series of thuds and quiet chatter as people began moving about. The gray light of dawn leaked through the rice paper covering the door.
The door slid open and the two silent attendants who had served her before entered with a tray of chicken rice soup for breakfast and a pitcher of scented water to wash in. As soon as she had finished her dawn ablutions, Tayum beckoned peremptorily. She grabbed her book, determined not to leave it or her mirror behind as long as there was the faintest hope she might have a chance to escape. In silence he led her to a screened balcony overlooking a shrine in which veiled priests intoned prayers to Beltak the Shining One. He held aside a drapery and indicated she should enter to sit with the queen and her women. But here she balked.
“I am Ri Amarah. I do not bow my head to any god, and I cannot pray to this one.”
He gestured more insistently. She held her ground, refusing to enter as the prayers droned on. She was exhausted, but as long as they waited for her to yield she would not show weakness. For a wild instant she thrilled to the idea the queen would cast her out.
Instead, after the prayers crescendoed and the women murmured a final response, she was swept up in their exit like a stick jostled into the wake of the queen. Tayum shepherded her along. In a chamber painted with vines and flowers the queen took a seat on an ebony stool. The ladies observed in chattering good humor as servants divested Chorannah of her prayer robes, perfumed and combed her, and draped her in fresh garments dyed in jewel-bright shades.
After this they processed to a spacious porch overlooking a lovely garden, not the king’s. From this vantage Sarai saw the white Assizes Tower with its shuttered windows. Certain women were picked out to sit close to the queen and others relegated to corners in a scheme clearly meant to indicate favor. Tayum brought Sarai forward last of all, every gaze watching, and seated her on a cushion at the queen’s left hand.
The queen declaimed a long speech as every woman listened with rapt attention. Sarai hadn’t the faintest idea of what she was talking about because she spoke, of course, in Sirni. When she at length finished, the women brought out embroidery, crewelwork, miniature painting, and sewing. Sarai’s legs were beginning to go numb from sitting still for so long, but she did not know what else to do except open her Book of Accounts and read over her old entries since her ink and brush were packed away in her writing box.
The translator sank down beside her with a harried look, her dark-blue skirts puddling around her legs. “Lady Sarai, it is not the custom for women to possess books. Contracts and religious tracts are men’s work. Women are the keepers of poetry and song, all that is spoken. If you will give me the item, I can see it properly destroyed.”
Sarai slapped the book shut and clasped it against her chest. “Among my people every married woman keeps a Book of Accounts. I can no more give this up than I can pray to your god.”
The queen spoke in a low voice to one of her eunuchs, the translator was called away, and then nothing happened except that as the women worked they glanced now and again with curiosity at Sarai. She sensed no particular hostility, only calculation.
Later tea and cakes were brought by servingwomen all garbed in drab blue, easy to distinguish next to the bright colors of the court women. Over these delicacies the ladies stood up in turn, declaiming poems to applause and commentary. Last of all went the queen, who had quite the most prodigious memory. She spoke verses at such sonorous length that Sarai had to keep pinching herself to keep from falling asleep in the heavy heat of late afternoon.
How gratefully she rose when the queen finished. Her feet tingled, all pins and needles, making it painful to walk. Tayum showed her back to her narrow room where her boxes of gifts and fabrics had arrived and been unpacked onto the shelves. The curtain clasp given her by Queen Dia was the only thing not sorted away; it had been left on top of the covered chamber pot.
In this tiny cell she was now to live. She unrolled her mattress and lay with eyes shut, afraid to let go of the book lest they steal it from her while she slept. Weariness conquered her and she drifted off, only to wake with a jolt at the clanging of a bell.
Dusk had overtaken the world while she slept. All along the corridor doors scraped open, women talked in lively voices, and the glow of lamps oozed along the rice paper walls as people moved past. A light came to rest before her door. It slid open to reveal Tayum.
Supper was taken in a chamber decorated with tapestries. The meat-ridden barley stew came so strongly spiced she could only pick at it. Afterward they took their places in the Queen’s Audience Hall where Sarai had last seen Gil. The ladies competed to show how many verses of poetry they could declaim. A singer from Bell Quarter was brought in to sing tragic d
eath songs—the only thing Sarai understood—after which the women talked until very late while sipping wine, all in Sirni, like so much babble. At last the ordeal ended and they retired, each to her own cubicle.
The two women who had served her were kneeling outside her tiny room, but as she tried to wave them away, wanting to be alone, a commotion stirred at the end of the corridor. The queen sailed down the passage and came to rest by Sarai’s door. Chorannah pulled a whip from her belt and handed it to Tayum. The two servants knelt, heads bowed, and the translator crept forward on her knees.
“What is this?” Sarai demanded, so alarmed at the sight of the whip and the groveling women that she forgot the queen’s title.
Hands raised to her face, the translator spoke into her palms. “Her sublime highness, Queen Chorannah, desires an orderly existence. You have troubled her four times today, Lady Sarai. First you rudely departed the guest chamber most generously given to you, and compounded the offense by entering the men’s courtyard when women and men are enjoined to serve the Shining One in separation.”
Sarai said nothing because she had certainly done that.
“You refused to enter the shrine. You refused to surrender the book. And you follow the offensive custom of your people, in which women hide their faces when only the most exalted of priests are allowed that privilege. As it is said, Those closest to the Shining One cradle some of His light in their faces, and thus betoken their holiness through what they are enjoined to conceal.”
Sarai grabbed her book off the table. “I am Ri Amarah. I follow the customs of my own people. I did not ask to be brought here. Send me away, if I displease you.” She thought of Gil and how the queen might still find a way to harm him, and so forced out the words, “Your Highness.”
“Her exalted and honorable highness, Queen Chorannah, comprehends that the proper ways of the palace are new to you, Lady Sarai,” said the translator, peeking through splayed fingers. Her dark eyes had something of the look of Gil’s eyes, a slight fold that spoke of Qin ancestry, but the queen’s court had so many people of a foreign look that Sarai could not sort out who might have come from where. Up here in the queen’s wing no one looked Hundred-born like Elit or Yava. “Queen Chorannah is merciful. You may keep the book and not attend at the shrine, according to the ways of your people. But for the offense against hospitality your servingwomen must be punished for not stopping you from disgracing the queen’s court by your disgraceful actions.”
“My servingwomen? I brought no servants with me…”
The other two women were unbuttoning their jackets to bare their shoulders. Tayum weighed the whip in his hand. He had the muscled shoulders to really hurt them, and as the cloth slipped down their backs she saw how smooth and unblemished their brown skin was. Because of her they would feel the whip’s bite.
“The queen will retract the punishment if you surrender the book and attend at the shrine,” said the translator.
Sarai shuddered as her hands tightened on her precious book in a death grip. Her mouth burned with rage-fed words.
“No! If you must whip someone, whip me, because I am the one who acted, not them. Whipping them in my place falls on your head, not on mine! Do not think you can coerce me by making me believe I am obliged to protect them by denying who I am.”
Her ragged breathing and frenzied pulse throbbed in her ears. All down the corridor the women of the court stared raptly at the tableau playing out in their midst like one of Elit’s stories, all high emotion and furious threats.
Queen Chorannah raised an eyebrow and, with a shrug, signaled to Tayum. The two servingwomen bent over, bracing themselves on their hands, their expressions devoid of any spark of protest, not even a plea for mercy.
She forced herself to watch. Tayum applied the whip with precise rhythm: four lashes to one girl, four to the other, the sound so crisp and potent it filled Sarai’s ears until she could hear nothing else. He might have been digging a ditch, work that needed to be done and must be gotten through. The girl who had worked impatiently whimpered as her skin reddened. The other girl gave only a faint grunt as each lash raised a welt on her shoulders.
Four passes he made, sixteen strokes to each young woman. Then he stepped away and held out the whip. Queen Chorannah took it, gathered up her particular attendants, and processed away down the corridor as the women who lived in the other cubicles bent double like stalks of grain bowed down by a passing wind. The translator rose to follow, and as she scurried away she murmured words in the language of the Hundred so Sarai would be sure to understand, “Thus is the selfishness of Silvers exposed.”
Sarai’s face burned with the heat of fury but she refused to answer.
The other court women retreated to their cubicles with their own blue-garbed servingwomen in attendance. One by one, lamps were extinguished for the night.
The two girls pulled their jackets back on. Moving slowly, postures made awkward by their efforts to keep cloth from rubbing against welted skin, they made clear through gestures that they were now to help Sarai make ready for bed.
She could not even force out a word. Instead, she fumbled in her pouch and pressed a gold cheyt into each girl’s hand. With downcast eyes they accepted the coin wordlessly. She waved them away, then slid the door shut, desperate to be alone.
The queen had caged her and afterward in the most deliberate way possible marked her out as an outsider who could not be trusted. In its way it was a brilliant piece of maneuvering.
For a long time she sat with head sunk in her hands, too upset to sleep. When all was quiet, she eased open the door. At the end of the corridor a single lamp burned and a eunuch stood guard. Almost she lost her courage: She was a ship adrift without sail or oars, ballasted only by a dead mother, a frail aunt, a departed lover, and a wrongfully arrested husband. Almost the old whispers from her childhood strangled her: She bears the mark of her mother’s shame, and that is why her mother named her Sorrow.
But sorrow is what you feel. It may be interwoven with your spirit because of the griefs you have suffered but it is not sewn into your flesh; it is not who you are. Her mother had left wealth, status, and a son behind, and although everyone said Nadai had selfishly chosen an outlaw lover over her responsibilities to her husband’s respectable clan, Sarai was sure there was more to the story.
People hide what they don’t wish you to know.
Why was the queen so desperate for her money? Where were Gil and the other arrested men being sent? Even confined by their walls she could play a part in this tale just as if she, like Gil, had been recruited as a spy, and just as if she, like Elit, had joined Hasibal’s pilgrims.
35
Although the guards rousted them out at dawn, the prisoners waited under guard in the courtyard for half the morning.
“I’m hells thirsty,” muttered Tyras. “This bag is so cursed heavy. How long do we have to wait? I wish they would just get on with it.”
“Shut up,” whispered Gil as a guard turned to look at them.
Perhaps spurred by Ty’s complaint, a nearby prisoner called out, “How long do we have to wait here? If you’re not going to march us out, why not let us go home to our clans?”
A guard pushed through the prisoners and whipped the man across the face, the tip drawing blood. With a scream the man dropped to his knees, hand pressed to his face. “My eye! My eye!”
“Shut up,” said the guard, looking around at the nervous, sweating men. “No talking.”
As the man whimpered, trying to gulp down his pain so he wouldn’t get whipped again, Gil counted the prisoners: fifty-eight men, not one of them old enough to have more than a touch of gray in his hair. The mature men had the builds and muscle of laborers while the younger men came in all sorts. There was one big, broken-nosed, thuggish-looking fellow and several men with mean eyes and sour mouths who looked as if they might actually have been properly arrested criminals. The rest, like he and Ty, had the aggrieved stance of unfortunates caught in a s
treet sweep and now too terrified to protest. Many carried a sack, the hopeful dregs of their lost life.
Two wagons piled with full grain sacks trundled in, accompanied by a swaggering chief, twenty-four guards armed with spears, long knives, crossbows, and a whole lot of rope. With the prison guards atop the wall-walk aiming crossbows down, no prisoner dared resist as they were roped together into two columns. Gil got caught several people ahead of Tyras, and so as they were marched—or better to say shuffled—out, he had no one to lean on, no one to feel stalwart beside. The men were tied so tightly together he smelled the stink of his neighbors, although he doubted he smelled any better wearing an unwashed short kilt and the miasma of the prison as his perfume.
Out South Gate they trudged. Loitering kinsfolk of the prisoners tried to call out farewells or offer a final embrace but the hells if they weren’t shoved back by the guards. After that people gave them a wide berth except for a few stubborn mothers and aunts and sisters and wives and female sweethearts pacing them in silent grief; no men dared hang around, fearing they might get arrested, too. He held on to his memory of Sarai’s visit, but mostly his thoughts circled around Shevad’s astounding command that he play spy, as if he were joining the fabled Black Wolves of old.
What a joke! Yet he kept thinking of what Captain Kellas had said up in the palace.
Down to the Lesser Istri they made their slow way. There a barge took them across to the southern shore. Out on the water a few men tried to pee into the river to the curses of those they hit with their stream instead. Gil felt nauseated by the pitch and sway of the barge as the winch hauled it across the river, so though he hated being driven off the barge truly knowing he was leaving behind the city he had grown up in, he was at the same time relieved.