The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  I spoke with an authority I did not feel. “Go apart to do it.”

  To my surprise he heeded me, stalking off into the grass. He returned with an array of fruit and nuts, which he consumed with (I thought) unnecessary ostentation. The Tapati cast glances and muttered among themselves. Drolma vanished behind my tent. It occurred to me that by refusing his offer I had put myself in the position of having to beg his help if no water source appeared.

  On the fourth evening, the water nearly gone and no stream or well reported by Reanu’s scouts, I swallowed my pride. I thought he might toy with me, or gloat, or even refuse. But he only nodded, and told me tersely what he meant to do. We stood by, like spectators at a play, as he created quantities of the same foods he had made for himself, causing them to appear in piles on a cloth Reanu had laid out. It has been centuries since I’ve seen the practice of unfettered shaping, but it seemed to me that the noise and light of what he did was not really very different from what one sees at a Communion ceremony. What came next, though, was entirely unfamiliar. He paused, his eyes moving on the ground, as if searching for something. Then there was a burst of brilliance, as if lightning had leaped out of the grass; a deep roll of thunder pulsed below our feet. Ha-tsun, beside me, gasped. For a moment nothing happened. I stood, blinking at the spots before my eyes. Then a spray of water rose up, sparkling in the light of sunset.

  There was a murmur from the men. The apostate stepped back. The expression on his face was odd; he seemed to look on us with contempt, we mortals who feared his ability so, but I’m sure I also saw defiance, as though against his will our judgment touched him.

  “That’s all,” he said. “I’m finished.”

  My people stood like stones. With all the authority I could muster I stepped forward and filled my cup with water. Turning to my staring staff, I drank a long draught. I know what I know; I spoke the truth when I told him I feared no corruption. Still, something primitive in me was relieved to find that the water tasted like … water. Cold, faintly metallic, delicious.

  “Gyalo Amdo Samchen has shaped these things for our necessity,” I said, pitching my voice much louder than was needed, as if I stood not in the middle of a wilderness but within the shadowy precincts of the First Temple. “On my authority as a Daughter of the Brethren, I declare them free of taint. You may eat and drink without fear for your souls.”

  They came forward then—some matter-of-factly, piling their bowls as if these were any rations, some hesitant, making the sign of rata before picking among the apricots and apples and cherries, the almonds and cashews and walnuts, the green onions and radishes. Drolma, who had turned pale when I told her what was to occur, had once again retreated behind my tent. When I took a bowl and cup to her, she refused them.

  “I have what I need, Old One.” She indicated a jar with perhaps a finger length of water in it and a bowl in which she was soaking grain and dried meat to soften it enough to chew.

  “Drolma, there may be enough natural food to last you across the steppe, but even if I gather all the remaining water from the caverns, it won’t last long. What he has shaped can’t harm you, I swear it.”

  “Old One,” she said with perfect calm, “if you order me to eat and drink, I will obey. Yet of my own will I cannot put these things into my mouth. I’m a Shaper, bound by Shaper vows. By refusing, I affirm those vows, which you and your Brothers and Sisters in your wisdom created to protect us all. I repudiate the choice he has made.”

  I looked at her. Like all of us, she is dirty, her face and scalp peeling painfully with sunburn. I’ve always thought her dry and pedantic—excellent qualities in an aide, dull qualities in a companion, and one of the principal reasons I selected her for this journey, in hopes she would be less likely to succumb in the manner of our first spy. In that moment, I found a new respect for her.

  “I will honor your choice, Drolma. I will also excuse you from your ceremonial duties for as long as he is with us.”

  “Thank you, Old One.” I saw the relief in her face, that she would not have to conduct Communion or Banishing in the presence of an apostate.

  I went to my tent. Elderly as she is, Ha-tsun fares poorly on this journey; to spare her strength I have forbidden her to tend me, but as usual she had disobeyed, lighting my lamp and preparing my bedding. I eyed this journal and thought of writing. Instead another impulse gripped me. I got up and ducked outside again.

  “Reanu, I am going to speak with the apostate.”

  I saw him struggle with his desire to challenge me. “I will be watching, Old One.”

  The moon seems to shine more brightly in this vast and empty place than elsewhere in the world. I could see every detail of the flattened grasses at my feet as I made my way toward the camp’s edge, where the apostate had laid out the blanket Reanu had given him (for he came to us with nothing but the ragged clothes he wore). He sat facing south. As I drew near I heard him whispering, like someone telling Communion beads.

  He heard me and turned. One hand rested on his chest, closed around some object under his shirt, for all the world as if he still wore an ratist simulacrum. For a moment we regarded one another. He looks very different than he did in Baushpar, with his hair grown out; if I had passed him in the street, I might not have given him a second glance. Yet the long, tilted eyes are the same, the level brows, the broad cheekbones and full mouth; and there is the way he holds one’s gaze, a stillness, an intensity, the whole of him present in a single look. That really is how I knew him when we stood face-to-face again: by the way he looked at me.

  “Your captain doesn’t seem happy.”

  I glanced back. Reanu had risen to his feet. His arms were folded under his stole; no doubt his knives were half-unsheathed. “It is his duty to be mistrustful,” I said.

  “So he has given me to understand, in no uncertain terms.”

  “Has he threatened you?”

  “Only if I don’t behave.” He smiled a small tight smile. “I appreciate his position. After all, I’m a mad apostate.”

  “Whatever else you are, Gyalo Amdo Samchen, it’s clear you are not mad. Even though you sit whispering to nothing in the night.”

  He removed his hand from his chest and placed it on his knee. “Perhaps I was telling my beads.”

  “I thought you had rejected the church.”

  “I have left the church.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I was talking to my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “She’s a Dreamer. At night I speak into her Dreams, so she’ll know what has happened to me during the day.”

  “I don’t recall that about her. That she was a Dreamer.”

  “She didn’t confess it. I’m the only one who has ever known.”

  It did not surprise me to learn she had held something back. I remember her from Baushpar, a small dark woman, unexceptionable but for her lustrous wealth of hair, quiet and yielding in her manner—yet in the core of herself as hard as iron, as basalt. I never thought, as some of my Brothers and Sisters did, that the apostate had broken his celibate vow with her. Yet there must have been something between them, for now she is his wife.

  I pulled my stole closer. Hot as it is in the day, at night the steppe is cold. “It must comfort you to know she sees you.”

  “In a way.” He sighed again. “She’s the reason I came to the Awakened City. Râvar has her. Her and our child. He kidnapped them.”

  I remembered he had spoken of something being stolen. “Why?”

  “In the Burning Land, while they were traveling, he … forced himself on her. Got a child on her. He let her go at Thuxra, and she found her way to me by dreaming. But he had … time, I suppose, to realize he wanted her back. He sent his people to Ninyâser, where he knew she meant to go, and took her and the child. I came after them. He caught me. He recognized me, ju
st as you did.”

  “He remembered you from Refuge?”

  “Yes. I thought he’d kill me, but he let me go. It pleased him to think I would be watching, helpless, as he made his way across Arsace. He told me Axane and Chokyi were dead. He lied about Axane—I saw her when they marched away. But Chokyi—” He stopped. “I still don’t know.”

  My mind flashed back to the caverns. “I heard a child crying in his chambers.”

  “What? When?”

  “Before he imprisoned me. I went to see him unannounced.”

  “She’s alive, then.” The apostate put his hand to his eyes.

  “You care for her,” I said. “Even though she’s not yours.”

  “I love her.” He drew a long breath. “It’s not her fault who her natural father is.”

  “Not every man would see it that way.”

  “I haven’t abandoned them,” he said, as if I had accused him of doing so. “It’s just that I could never get to them on my own. I have some power, but it’s a spark compared to his. A mote. And even if that weren’t so, he knows my lifelight. I can disguise my face, but my lifelight I can’t hide. The only way to free them is to stop him. Only the King has any chance of that.”

  “So you don’t accompany me for Arsace’s sake after all.”

  “You should be glad. Self-interest is a more reliable motive.”

  All this time I had been standing. Now I knelt on the springy, broken grass. He watched me with that steady gaze of his. No doubt he found it strange that I should approach him. Yet even now, after the terrible things he said to me, I cannot deny the mystery of him, and how it eats at me: Gyalo Amdo Samchen, risen from the dead.

  “Tell me how you escaped from Faal.”

  “Diasarta tracked me there. He hired on as a laborer and found out where I was being kept. One night he picked the lock of my room and took me away.”

  “Did you expect him to try to rescue you?”

  He plucked a grass stem and turned it between his fingers, watching the heavy seed head bob. “No. I didn’t even know till I saw him whether he was alive or dead.”

  “There was a body on the rocks below your window.”

  “He arranged it. He wouldn’t tell me how.”

  “And then the manita sickness. As I recall, you were sentenced to fourteen measures. That’s a massive dose. I’m surprised you survived.”

  “Diasarta stole manita from Faal’s stores. I was able to wean myself off it gradually. It was bad.” He swallowed, as if revisited by a memory of that terrible nausea. We did not know, when we promulgated the Doctrine of Baushpar, how manita binds those who use it; but we have had much reason since to be glad, human nature being what it is. “But not as bad as stopping all at once. Diasarta took care of me.”

  “He has been a good friend to you.”

  He nodded once, forcefully. “Better than I deserve.”

  “Yet he is not with you now.”

  “He’s following the Awakened City. Waiting for me to come back. And I do mean to go back. Whatever the King chooses to do, I don’t expect he’ll take special measures for my wife and child.”

  It angered me, his matter-of-fact assumption of his continued freedom, though I have given my oath that he shall have it.

  “Diasarta’s loyalty to you was clear in Baushpar,” I said. “He made no attempt to hide it, even though he must have realized it would damn him. It was the same with the Exile captain, Teispas. I’ve always wondered—did they believe you the Next Messenger, as some of my Brothers and Sisters thought?”

  “Does that really matter now?”

  “I am curious.”

  He tossed the grass stem aside. His mouth was tight. “I don’t have to answer such questions. I no longer acknowledge your authority.”

  “Yet I do have that authority, whether you acknowledge it or not. I am the guardian of rata’s Way. I am the shepherd of all souls upon this earth.”

  “So you teach the faithful to believe. Yet the Darxasa says nothing of the Brethren or their Covenant.”

  “How could it? The Darxasa predates the Brethren.”

  “Yes, and is that not convenient for you all?”

  For a moment I was speechless. “Do you deny the Covenant?”

  “You say that rata granted you immortality on the First Messenger’s death, thus sanctifying your Covenant and legitimizing your rule. But the second point rests upon assumption of the first. Deny that, and the logic fails. What is there, really, to prove that your souls are reborn? Do you regain your memories, or merely learn them through study of your journals?”

  I could hardly believe I had heard aright. It was not just the shocking heresy of what he said; it was the absolutely fearless way he said it, as if it were not an assault upon twelve hundred years of doctrine, but merely a question of interpretation. I should have condemned him. I should have cursed him. I should have gotten to my feet and left him. I did none of those things, though I cannot now say why.

  “In Baushpar,” he said, “when Kudrâcari and her supporters invoked the similarities between the manner of my emergence from the Burning Land and the events foretold in rata’s Promise, they intended only that the Brethren consider the possibility that I had heretically come to believe myself the Next Messenger. But what resulted from their efforts was not what they expected, for in forcing you to examine the question of my falsity, they also forced you to confront the possibility that I might not be false at all. It terrified you so much that you packed me off to Faal without allowing me to speak, even in denial. Time, you must have thought, would prove it one way or the other. I’m sure you all rejoiced when you learned I was dead. Final confirmation that I was just an apostate after all, and not the Messenger, herald of the end of the Age of Exile. Which is also your end.”

  “You do not dare say such things,” I whispered, stupidly, as if I could deny the evidence of my own ears.

  “You asked the question.” He leaned toward me. His long clear eyes held mine. “Now you will hear my answer. Yes, Diasarta and Teispas believed me the Next Messenger, though I tried to persuade them to abandon their belief. I saw the same signs they did, I could not help but question—but long before I stood before you in Baushpar, question led me to denial. I would have said so to you all, had you permitted it. But then Diasarta came to me in Faal, offering a freedom I had not dared imagine, and I saw rata’s hand in that, giving me a second chance. I chose to take it—chose to take it, and though you might think it was an easy choice, it was not, for I still believed what you had taught me, I still feared my Shaper self, and to choose apostasy, not to have it thrust on me but to choose it of my own considered will—No. It was not easy. I’m no closer now than I was that night to understanding what I am meant to do with my freedom. rata is silent, and though I see his hand in all that has occurred, I can’t tell what it is he wants of me. What is it to fulfill his Promise? What is it to open the way? What if I name myself the Messenger, and am false without knowing it? What if I refuse, and the falsity lies there? What if, fearing to choose, I stand upon the razor’s edge all my life?”

  He caught his breath, as if taken unawares by his own words. The look on his face was almost of exaltation, but there was dread there too, as of a man who gives wild tongue to the deepest and most hidden of his secrets.

  “But there’s one thing I do know. When you condemned me to Faal I thought I had failed the task rata gave me in the Burning Land, for I had not made you, the Brethren, believe in his rising. But I know now—I am certain now—that this was not what he intended me to do. I was sent to try you. To test you. To prove your faith. It was not I who failed. It was you.”

  Such a cold came over me then. The night seemed to dim, as if clouds had suddenly surged across the moon. But above us the moon shone clear.

  “You are worse even than apostate.” My voice seemed hardly louder t
han the wind. “You are anathema.”

  Having released such a torrent of evil words, he apparently had no more to say. He only looked at me, his eyes like glass.

  I gathered myself to do what I should have done before, and got to my feet. I was aware of him at every step, watching as I walked away. Reanu watched, too, tense and still. As I drew level with him he asked, softly, “Do you need me, Old One?”

  I shook my head. I did not trust myself to speak.

  I thought that to write this record might ease me. It has not. I can still hear the last words the apostate said to me, with their uncanny echo of the words Taxmârata spoke the night I left Baushpar … To hear them from his mouth, the mouth of this man whose apparent death seemed to prove something that now is unproven … ah, merciful rata! I am filled with the awful hollow understanding that rises on realization of a mistake one should not have made. With all my heart I long to turn back time, to undo my foolish impulse to go out to him.

  Yet what would that change, but knowledge?

  I have considered banishing him. But what if he did not obey me? What of my mission to Santaxma? More to the point, what would we do for food and water? We are dependent on him now. Perhaps that was his intent when he offered his assistance.

  I will endure his presence, because I must. Once we are finished in Ninyâser I will let him free—not because I wish it but because I have no choice. And I will hope, with all the power of hope I have left in me, never to hear of him again.

  Today the apostate found water.

  We have been walking for six days. Each day Reanu has dispatched scouts, but they have found no trace of any natural water source. This is no longer important for us, for we drink what the apostate provides quite naturally now. Drohna, however, has suffered. As I promised, I ordered the remaining water from the caverns gathered for her exclusive use; but though she has been thrifty, by this morning it was nearly gone.

  In the middle of the afternoon we stopped to rest. Reanu set four of his men to hold a blanket by its corners so Drolma and Ha-tsun and I might have shade. I and Ha-tsun drank the water the apostate had made the night before. Drolma sipped from her own small cache, then lay back and closed her eyes. Her face ran with sweat. I eyed her, knowing she would allow herself to perish rather than drink the apostate’s water, dreading the moment when I would have to order her to partake.