Gurjot said a lot, and Cheol much in reply, but Sang Ki already knew what the decision would be. Gurjot needed more men and, more importantly, he couldn’t risk a conflict with the Brotherband. Cheol’s men were only a fragment of a far larger force too dangerous to be alienated. And so they finished the day’s journey an increased party, if not a more unified one.
Sang Ki wasn’t entirely surprised when Cheol came to his fire that night. It was late, his mother had already retired to her tent, and the moon was bright and full over the camp. The air was filled with the smell of crushed grass. There should have been nothing but sand, and the unnaturalness of the scent made him uneasy.
Cheol stood for a moment, studying him. Sang Ki wondered if the other man expected him to rise. He was comfortable on his cushions, though, and merely watched the other man with a quirked eyebrow until Cheol settled cross-legged in the grass opposite.
Sang Ki nudged a half-empty wineskin with his foot. ‘Please, share my drink. We’re brothers now, aren’t we? Or is membership in the Brotherband not won so easily?’
‘Membership is open to all,’ Cheol said. ‘Why? Do you wish to join?’
‘I wish to know why you’ve joined us.’ Sang Ki smiled and picked up the skin to take a swig of his own wine, his eyes never leaving the tribesman’s.
Cheol was a hard-faced man, difficult to read. But the long scar on his left cheek twitched as he said, ‘That’s been discussed. And why has a half-breed Seonu joined the hunt? That hasn’t been discussed.’
‘I dare say my reasons are as good as your own.’
‘Perhaps. The other tribes have always taken the Seonu at their word. When we first came to these lands, the Seonu wandered in the Silent Sands and were lost. We thought them as dead as the Geun, but many years later another people came from the mountains and told us they were the Seonu. Some might have asked where they’d wandered for so long. Some might have asked why their hair was so pale now beneath their dark dye. We didn’t ask. We knew our questions wouldn’t be welcome.’
Sang Ki found himself, for the first time, bereft of a swift answer. These were the same doubts he’d secretly nursed, after he’d first read the history of his people, but he’d never heard anyone else express them. He’d always assumed he’d learn the answer when he reached his twenty-eighth year.
‘You know,’ Sang Ki said at last. ‘I’ve always hoped to meet a man of the Brotherband. Your history has yet to be written – perhaps I can be the one to pen it, if you’ll share it with me.’
‘What is there to know?’
‘You were Chun once.’
‘We were many things once. Aren’t men allowed to change?’
‘Of course, but in my experience they seldom do.’
Cheol’s regard made Sang Ki uneasy. But finally the other man said, ‘The messenger makes no matter if the message is true. We’d already defeated the Dae after they condemned us to starvation. We’d shown that men are wiser than women and we’d taught our women their place. We were ready to hear the truth, even from a child.’
The other man’s mouth clamped abruptly shut, and Sang Ki was instantly and absolutely certain that he was referring to Jinn, the dangerous young preacher. He had no reason for his certainty, except the expression on Cheol’s face. It was the tense look of a man who knew he’d said too much, who was perhaps a little more drunk than he’d intended.
‘Indeed?’ Sang Ki said pleasantly. He kept his own expression friendly as he clicked his fingers for two of his men to help lift him to his feet. ‘Well, perhaps we can continue this conversation tomorrow. I believe there’s a lot I might learn from you.’
He smiled and turned round and ignored the prickle of his shoulder blades, knowing that the other man’s eyes followed him all the way to his tent.
The next morning he sought out Gurjot, allowing his mammoth to drift towards the other man’s stallion as if it was pure coincidence.
‘I mislike our new allies,’ he said, as soon as he was sure none of the Brotherband could overhear him.
Gurjot didn’t quite roll his eyes, but his thoughts were easy to read.
‘Yes, I know,’ Sang Ki said, ‘and the fox accused the wolf of raiding the henhouse. But look at their clothing: it’s black and silver, the colours of the moon.’
Gurjot frowned, not understanding the point.
‘There are those who say our King’s missing son is the moon reborn. We had two such heretics in our dungeon, until they conspired in my father’s murder and escaped. The moon’s men aren’t to be trusted, and they’re most certainly not on our side.’
‘You want me to dismiss a fifth of our fighting strength – and let’s not fool ourselves, probably the best trained of it – because you dislike the colour of their clothing? Forgive me if I’m hesitant.’
‘It’s more than that. Cheol said something that led me to believe that he’s been taken in by the very boy who killed Lord Thilak. They’re serving their own interests here, can’t you see it?’
‘And you aren’t?’
‘Perhaps. But mine happen to align with yours. The Brotherband … I’m not so sure.’
Gurjot shook his head, a sharp gesture that Sang Ki understood meant an end to the discussion. ‘They’re useful and they’re controllable. When they cease to be either, we’ll part ways. Until then, you’ll follow my leadership, or we’ll part ways.’
‘Of course,’ Sang Ki said blandly, and he smiled and left the other man.
He sat beside his mother in silence for a while, watching their force’s progress through the waste that had become a garden. Insects filled the air with a comforting hum but the hot sun was a pressure on his neck. Sweat slicked between the folds of his flesh and his head pounded. He saw Cheol glance his way, the other man’s eyes unreadable, and resolved to set his own watch that night, and every night the Brotherband remained with them.
25
Eric had begun to imagine a life of leisure from the moment his duties were explained to him. But the second morning in Salvation, and every morning after that, he was woken well before he was ready. With no darkness it was hard to judge the length of his sleep, but he reckoned they never let him laze in bed for a full night’s worth.
It was always Bolli who came to rouse him. He’d been pleased at first, until he discovered that the other man was only interested in giving him his lessons: reading and writing and history and even mathematics, which couldn’t serve any purpose in the world that Eric could see. He was, at that very moment, staring at a triangle. Bolli had scratched it into the ice tray he used instead of paper, its surface cleaned by pouring water over it and letting it freeze.
‘I don’t know, do I?’ Eric said sulkily. ‘One side’s longer and two are short – what else matters? I don’t need to figure out the angle of a man’s cock to slide it in me.’
Bolli sighed. ‘You won’t be sliding a cock inside you at all if you know what’s good for you. The Servants don’t like that sort of thing – they say it isn’t in Mizhara’s Law. Which you’d know if you attended more to their lessons, but I hear you were snoring loud enough to wake the dead yesterday when they were trying to learn you the proper ways to behave.’
It was true. The lessons with the Servants were even worse than the lessons with Bolli. They took him to their library under a huge dome of ice. It was stacked with books of pure white vellum written in their goddess’s own hand, or so they said. They told him the books held all the rules and regulations that should govern any person’s life.
The Servants were very big on rules, as it turned out. Their time passed in cycles of thirteen days: what they called the ‘oroboros,’ beginning from the day they were born. The first day they were supposed to spend sitting around thinking about how they could improve themselves. The second they prayed, which Eric had never seen the point of when you could pay the Worshippers to do it for you. Days three to six they worked, and day seven was when they called upon Eric to do his manly duty.
Each husb
and had a different day out of thirteen. Since the Servants all began their oroboros the moment they were born, they were out of time with each other, some working on days others prayed, or shagged, or sat around. But that way there was always a husband available to see to their needs, no matter when their seventh day fell. Days eight to eleven they studied this Perfect Law of their goddess, which they seemed to know by heart already, and wrote down their thoughts about it to store away in their great library. The twelfth day they were at their praying again, and then on the thirteenth they thought about everything they’d done wrong and how much better they were going to be next time round. Eric couldn’t imagine what their idea of a wrongdoing was. It all seemed a sort of madness to him, but they never asked his opinion.
In time, they told him, he’d be expected to start his own oroboros. The longer he could put that off the better. In the meantime, they wanted to educate him, and if it was be educated or be stuck in that endless routine of theirs, he supposed his knowledge could stand a little increasing. So when they’d recite Mizhara’s words to him, boring sentence after boring sentence, he learned he was to recite them back and moon monsters take him if he got just one word out of place. Then the whole lesson would have to begin over.
Not that they ever got angry with him. He was never sure if it was the same Servant who taught him each day or different ones. He asked her name when they first met, and she told him she had none. Without names, the tall, gold-skinned women were hard to tell apart. But she – or they – never treated him with anything but an endless, wearying patience. They were big on rules but not too big on feelings, as far as he could tell. The most emotion he’d ever seen out of them was when they talked about their goddess, Mizhara. A bright light shone from their eyes then, but it wasn’t one he altogether liked.
It was a rum set-up all round. Housed in ice, made to learn to be a gentleman when he didn’t ever claim or want to be one, and taught a bunch of rules that served no good purpose he could see. And when he wasn’t learning, there was nothing to do but wander the ice corridors of the city or talk to the other husbands, who were pleasant enough but not the company he’d have chosen. They were much too concerned with what the Servants thought, too careful of everything they said. And most of all, they weren’t his type: too pale and blond and just like what he saw when he looked in the mirror, which had never put iron in his pecker. He thought of Lahiru, but the other man’s face seemed to get bleached out in his mind as if the endless whiteness of this place leeched the colour even out of memory.
Anyway, Lahiru was gone and less-than-perfect was better than nothing at all, wasn’t it? Bolli had always been a game lad, ready for a tumble with a fellow sellcock if there were no johns around to please.
Eric relaxed back on to one elbow and lifted the other hand to rest it against Bolli’s forearm. It wasn’t quite a caress, but definitely the promise of one. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’ve been here a while, ain’t you? What can a boy do to pass the time beside learn about triangles?’
Bolli brushed his hand off and leaned back. ‘Not that, that’s for certain.’
Eric pouted, an expression he knew made his lips look especially plump. He put his hand back on Bolli’s knee this time. ‘Don’t act the maiden with me, Bolli. You liked a bit of meat with your vegetables back in the day.’
But that hand was brushed off too, and Bolli stood. ‘That was then – I had no other way to buy my membership in the company. Why would I want it now when we have all the cunny a man could wish for? We’re not all of us mollies like you, Eric. And you’d better heed me: there’ll be none of that here, not if you know what’s good for you. I told you, the Servants don’t like it. And if they don’t like it, we don’t neither. We’ll keep you in line if they won’t, and we can hurt you in ways they won’t be able to see.’
Eric was so shocked by the coldness in Bolli’s eyes that he just lay without a sound and watched the other man walk from the room. But he’d seen a stirring in Bolli’s britches, despite all his words. Bolli had always been a hypocrite, Eric recalled now. But the threat in his eyes had been real. Eric shivered and turned back to the ice tablet, trying to figure out just how long the longest side of that triangle was.
The afternoons were his own, whatever that was worth. He’d been slowly exploring Salvation, though many a time when he’d approached something interesting one of the Servants had floated into view to forbid him to go on. It was against the rules, of course. He’d seen some beautiful things all the same. In one vast room he’d found hundreds and hundreds of statues, all of the same figure – their Mizhara, he was sure – but clearly carved by different hands. The icy, stern face was never quite perfect. He liked that. The Servants tried to pretend they were all identical, without even names to tell them apart, but they couldn’t stop their individual natures coming out.
Another day he’d found a room with a giant ice sculpture hanging from the ceiling: great globes and rings and jagged lumps all rotating round each other like a baby’s mobile. A Servant had told him it was a map of the universe, but hadn’t explained how that could be.
He’d even gone back to the hall where he’d been wed and looked at the cube of ice with the two footprints in it. He now knew it showed Mizhara’s last steps on this world before she’d departed it for ever, leaving only her endless books of instructions behind.
Today he decided to go down rather than up. From the outside, Salvation seemed only interested in reaching skyward with its huge octagonal towers and needle-sharp spires, but the city was built on snow and the snow went many levels down, with hundreds of rooms carved into it.
He half expected to be stopped at the top of the spiral stairs, but there was no one there and he paused a moment to admire the rainbows flung every which way by the clear ice. The footing looked treacherous. The Servants had their methods, though, and they’d scored the surface of the steps with diagonal grooves to provide grip for his soft-soled fur boots. His cape trailed behind him as he descended, picking up no moisture. The ice here never seemed to melt, no matter how bright the sun.
There was a landing after one rotation of the stairs, but he’d explored this level already. It seemed to be where the Servants had their quarters. Their rooms were even smaller than his and each was decorated with nothing but a golden sunburst on the far wall. He glanced around to see if he was being watched, then took the next flight down and then, on a whim, the next two after that as well.
The fourth level beneath the ground looked more interesting. It was darker here, the sunlight filtered through multiple layers of ice that turned it a pale blue so that the whole area had the feeling of being underwater. Bizarrely, it was also warmer. Some of the ice had even sweated a few droplets of water, which had carved runnels in the walls as they trickled down. The corridors seemed entirely empty, but there was a noise, a booming sort of roar that was also like the sea.
The sound was oddly directionless. Eric tried to find its source, following corridors curving right and left in the half-dark like the innards of some fabulous sea creature. The roaring never seemed to get louder, but after a while he realised he could feel it as well as hear it. It was a vibration that hummed deep in his chest and scattered the tiny droplets of water from the walls to splash his face. And then, with no warning, he turned one more corner and the source of all the noise was ahead of him.
It was vast, filling not just this level but what must have been at least ten more below. It was beautiful too. Cogs of crystalline ice turned within cogs, white pistons that might have been compacted snow rose and fell, and all of it hung without visible means of support within the enormous void it inhabited. His eyes kept getting caught by different bits of the mechanism, but the longer he looked, the more impossible it seemed. A cog that had been circling upwards suddenly seemed to be moving down. A sphere became a cube and a straight line twisted into a spiral, then back into a line again.
He stared at it open-mouthed until he heard the soft crunch of a footfall be
hind him and turned to find one of the Servants approaching. He expected to be sent away, but she just smiled. Her face radiated the nearest thing to joy he’d seen from one of them.
‘Beautiful, is it not?’ she said.
‘I suppose. What does it do?’
Her hand reached towards the nearest cog, her long, elegant fingers stopping just short of its furious rotation. ‘Mizhara, may her name be exalted, made it many seasons past, in the days when she still dwelt among us and the world was a better place. It keeps the light shining here in the days that would otherwise be night.’
‘It controls the sun?’
The Servant shook her head, her long blonde hair swishing around her white robe. ‘Better to say that it controls us. Salvation follows the sun between the poles of the earth. Such was the power of our mistress’s magics.’
Eric stared at the whirring cog. He saw that it was engraved with a long, curved stroke like a fragment of a huge letter. There were other strokes on other cogs and on levers and wheels too. As he watched the mechanism spin and turn, the strokes came into brief alignment. He caught the suggestion of some important word that he had no time to understand before they’d moved on and a new alignment was reached, a new word written by the goddess’s machine.
‘Is there more you wish to know?’ the Servant asked, sounding eager to impart it, but Eric shook his head. He didn’t like the thought of staying within reach of a power that immense.
It took him a long time to find his way back to the staircase, and then he fled up and away to the familiarity of his room and the other husbands.
The next day, though, he found himself exploring the bowels of Salvation once again.
Now that he was ready for it, he could feel the deep vibration of the machine as soon as he descended below ground. He passed the fourth level where he’d first seen it, then the fifth, then some impulse made him continue down twenty-three more levels until the spiral staircase ended. The sound of the machine was more profound here, rattling his teeth. He thought this might be the bottom of the city at last, but when he walked a little further along the icy floor he found another staircase, this one carved into stone.
Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods Page 30