The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  Gyalo watched her dark hand, clasped in his light one, his pale aura swallowed by her stormy colors. He had to hear it all; of course he did. But part of him resisted. Part of him said Stop. Part of him said I don’t want to know.

  “I waited for the chance. He was always careful, though, and for a long time it didn’t come. Then we stopped in a town, and he … he fell asleep without locking me up first. There was a basin made of some kind of heavy stone. I thought I could use it to … to … hit him. I took it … I knelt beside him … I lifted it up. But I couldn’t do it. I could … think it, I could imagine it, but I couldn’t do it. And while I was realizing that, he woke up and looked at me. I thought for certain he’d guess. But—” She paused. “He didn’t. He got up and left, and that was that.

  “We got to Baushpar. We were in a house, a big house with many rooms. He sealed the door and the windows. But the walls were made of plaster, and it came to me that if I could break through, get into the room on the other side, I could escape that way. He went that night to the Evening City, and I began to make a hole. I had to be careful, because his people were all over the house, and I didn’t dare keep at it for very long in case he came back. So I didn’t get very far. Then he did come back, and he came into the room … I’d forgotten about his patternsense. He saw what I’d done. I’d hidden it, but he saw. I thought he would be enraged.” She shook her head. “But he just stood there for a moment, and then he turned around and told me to take the baby and get out. Calmly. Just like that. So I did. I was so afraid he was playing with me—every minute I was looking over my shoulder. I didn’t dare travel on the road in case he sent someone after me. In the end I had to, though, because it was where you were.”

  “You dreamed me.”

  “Yes. Every night.” Her eyes held his. Her grip tightened. She leaned toward him. “Gyalo. He never touched me. Not that way.”

  “He never—” Gyalo could not complete the sentence.

  “No. He never did.”

  “I imagined—I feared—”

  “I know. I know.”

  He lifted her hand, put it to his cheek. There were no words.

  A loud crackling of leaves announced Diasarta’s return. He dumped an armful of brush on the ground, then swept a spot clear of twigs and leaf litter and began to build a fire. Chokyi squirmed in her mother’s arms, whimpering.

  “She’s hungry,” Axane said. “There’s not been much to give her these past few days, and my milk dried up a month ago.”

  “There’ll be food soon.” Diasarta rummaged in the supply bag and pulled out a string of dried apple slices. “Here’s something she can chew on in the meantime.”

  “Thanks.” Axane favored him with one of her rare smiles. “Come, little bird. This is very good.” She held the apple slice to her lips and mimed eating. “See?”

  She put the fruit into Chokyi’s hands. Chokyi examined it, suspicious, then put it experimentally into her mouth.

  “Tell me what happened to you,” Axane said to Gyalo. “I’ve dreamed some of it, and I heard the things you said into my sleep. But there are gaps.”

  So he did, beginning with his discovery of her absence and his realization of who had taken her. Diasarta kindled the fire, set a ring of stones around it, and began to prepare a meal.

  “I shouted at you that night to stay away,” she said, when he came to their arrival at the caverns. “Even though I knew you couldn’t hear me. I knew you could never get to me. I was so afraid he’d catch you and kill you. And he did catch you, Gyalo. It was a stupid thing you did, going in there after me.”

  “What else could I have done? Besides, he didn’t kill me. It pleased him more to think of me watching and suffering as he laid waste to Arsace. To make me think you were dead. For a little while, anyway.”

  He continued, describing his rescue of Sundit, their journey to Ninyâser, Santaxma’s fatal misjudgment.

  “I should never have left you,” he said. “I should never have gone with her.”

  “You couldn’t know what would happen.” She watched Chokyi, now gnawing enthusiastically on her apple slice, her mouth and chin sticky with juice. In the sky some light remained, but among the trees it was night; the two of them shone against the darkness, the ruddy illumination of Diasarta’s fire moving on their faces. “You couldn’t have done anything if you’d stayed.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell me how you found him, Dasa.” She looked at Diasarta, stirring the iron pot in which their meal was cooking. “After he was wounded. When I dreamed him that night you were already with him.”

  “It was an accident, really,” the ex-soldier said. “He told me he’d come back, and I was watching for him, but I never saw him. And then I was standing by my fire, not thinking of him at all, and he ran right by me. I called, but he didn’t hear.”

  “Actually, I think I did,” Gyalo said, “though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  “He went up the hill on the other side of the road. I went after him. Just before I got to the top there was a sound like … thunder, except I knew it wasn’t, and the ground shook—”

  “The hills.” Axane nodded. “I heard it, too.”

  “It threw me down. Stunned me a bit. I got up to go on, and nearly ran smack into a company of Exile cavalry, waiting at the top of the hill.”

  “Which I’d already encountered,” said Gyalo. “They took me for a pilgrim, and put an arrow in me when I turned to run.”

  “I ducked behind some bushes and waited for them to move on, or ride down on the pilgrims, or whatever they were going to do. After a while the captain said it had been too long, that the signal should have come by now, that something had gone wrong. They turned and rode north. I got up and began to search. He’d lost a good amount of blood by the time I found him. I patched him up as best I could and made a camp for us up in the hills.”

  “But the wound got infected,” Axane said.

  Diasarta nodded. “I didn’t have anything to treat him with. So I set out to find help.”

  “Carrying me over his shoulder. For more than a day.”

  “I found a crofter’s camp. They let us stay and sent for a healer. She did what she could, which wasn’t much by that time. I won’t pretend I wasn’t worried. But I said to myself that rata hadn’t put me in his path like that just to watch him die. Sure enough, the fever broke. We were at that camp near three weeks. Should’ve been longer, except as soon as he could walk more than ten steps without falling down he wouldn’t hear of staying.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Dasa.”

  “Not by much.” Diasarta took the lid off the cook pot. “Supper’s ready.”

  He dished out bowls of rice and meat. Axane fed Chokyi first, chewing the rice to soften it; only when Chokyi turned her face away from the spoon did she satisfy her own hunger, digging ravenously into the food. Diasarta finished his meal and began to rig a lean-to from the canvas of his and Gyalo’s tent. Under it, he laid out blankets.

  “Come, little bird,” Axane said softly to a dozing Chokyi.

  “Wait,” Gyalo said. “Let me.”

  She helped him settle Chokyi against his good shoulder. She whimpered, but then turned her face into his neck, too sleepy to protest for long. She was limp and warm, heavier than his arms remembered, but the rest of her was deeply familiar: the way her head fit the hollow of his shoulder, the softness of her hair under his cheek. He closed his eyes and breathed her in, fancying he could smell her own sweet scent beneath the dirt and soiled linen. He felt a fullness in his chest—a part of him that had been empty for much too long.

  He carried her into the shelter of the lean-to and laid her on the blankets, straining a little with his weakened arm. He slipped off his coat and spread it over her, then bent and pressed his lips against her little forehead. Axane knelt by him; her light swallowed his, her shoulder br
ushed his own. He felt the heat, the tension, which had been building in him since they stopped among the trees, and, suddenly, was unbearable. He reached across the child and caught her hand.

  “Come away with me,” he whispered.

  The heat was in her, too; he saw it in her flushed cheeks, felt it in the quiver of her pulse. “We can’t just leave her.”

  “Diasarta will stay.”

  The ex-soldier was gathering his bedding. “Thought I’d go off on my own,” he said, not looking up. “Give the two of you some privacy.”

  “No. We’ll go. Will you stay with Chokyi?”

  “You sure, Brother?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a blanket, and seized Axane’s hand again, and drew her away into the blackness among the trees. He heard the quickness of her breath; she had hesitated at first, but when he stopped and threw the blanket on the ground she flung herself at him, and they went down in a clash of knees and elbows, lips and teeth, wrenching at each other’s clothing. It was over quickly; they rested, tangled together, then began again, slowly, gripping one another as though drowning. It seemed to Gyalo that he had held her thus only a day ago, yet in the tears on her cheeks, the ache in his throat, the whole void and terror of their separation was contained. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out; he muffled his own cry in the heavy masses of her hair, which smelled of smoke and moss, and fell across his face like a fathom of black water.

  They lay entwined in the leaves. He had drawn her coat over them, and the blanket. The dark trunks of the trees rose all around, stars netted in their bare branches; between the clouds a half-moon peered down, cool and curious. The night was huge and winter-still. Sleep pulled at him, but he did not want to close his eyes, for he was submerged in her light, her beautiful light, and it was a joy almost as great as the feel of her to see the world through that shifting green-blue scrim. Time seemed to have stopped. Perhaps, when it moved on, it would leave the two of them behind, so they might he forever just like this.

  She stirred and pushed herself up against his chest. “I want to take a look at your shoulder.”

  “It’s too dark for you to see anything.”

  “I can feel it.”

  She unfastened the breast of his tunic. Her hair trailed across his face again as she leaned over him, reaching around to trace the puckered scar on his back. Gently, she palpated it.

  “That hurts.”

  “Still?”

  “Yes, when you probe at it like that.”

  “And other times?”

  “It aches. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The arm is weak. I still can’t raise it higher than my shoulder.”

  “You need to try, even if it hurts. If you don’t work the muscles, they’ll stiffen permanently, and you’ll never get back the full use of it. You should exercise it at least twice a day.”

  “Yes, mistress healer.”

  She lay down again. “I dreamed you the night it happened.”

  “You told me. It must have been terrible.”

  “I don’t ever want to go through that again, Gyalo. You can’t imagine what it was like. I didn’t want to sleep, because I feared what my Dreams would tell me. But how could I stay awake and not know? Every night I lay down in terror. So many times I woke up crying … I always told him I was dreaming of Refuge. He believed me, because he dreamed of it, too.” She was silent a moment. “He had terrible dreams. Worse than mine. I’d hear him, thrashing around and gasping. Sometimes he wept. Sometimes … he called out names. Dead names, names no one in the world but me would remember.”

  “You pitied him,” Gyalo said, with unwelcome recognition.

  “No!” She pushed at his chest, lifting herself away from him. “No, I never did! I hated him. Gyalo, you know I hated him!”

  “Yes, love,” he said, soothing. He reached to draw her back against him. She resisted.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what happened between him and me?”

  He let his hands fall. “You’ve already told me everything I need to know.”

  “No, Gyalo, I haven’t. I told you he never touched me. And it’s true. But he wanted to, I could see he wanted to, and I began to think perhaps … if I could go to him … it might make a chance for Chokyi and me. I did everything I could to make him think I was … willing. I worked to win his trust. I was obedient. I told him horrible stories about you—oh, Gyalo, I said the most awful things to make him believe I didn’t love you! I thought it would be hard. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t, because I’m a liar, all my life I’ve been a liar, you are the only person in the world I never lied to. And it worked. The moment came—it came, Gyalo, but when he reached out for me I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it—”

  “Axane!” With an effort Gyalo lowered his voice. “You don’t owe me any explanations. Whatever you did—whatever you had to do—you don’t need to tell me.”

  “But I have to know—” Her voice caught. “That you forgive me. How can you forgive me if you don’t know what I’ve done?”

  He reached up and took her face between his hands. He had thought it was for her sake that he had sworn never to make her speak of her experience. He understood suddenly that it had been for his. He had imagined what she had just told him, along with a thousand other ugly acts and possibilities. But he had not wanted any of them to be fixed into reality.

  “There is nothing to forgive, Axane. Do you hear me? Nothing.”

  She looked at him, her face drawn with a strange tension. At last, sighing, she lay down against him again. He pulled the blanket up to cover her, tightened his arms around her. He felt her muscles loosen. The stillness of the night reasserted itself. But the languorous serenity, the sense of having passed into some blissful otherplace, had dwindled. He sensed the cold imminence of the ordinary world, the world of jealousy and duty—as close as Diasarta’s campfire, which if he turned his head he could just see, glimmering faintly between the trees.

  “Well,” she said, muffled in his shoulder, “it’s over now. We can go home.”

  It was as if a song had suddenly stopped. The world reached out, closed its fist. Gyalo lay silent.

  She raised her head. “Gyalo?”

  Still he did not speak. She pushed herself up again. “No,” she said, and there was heartbreak in her voice, heartbreak and knowledge. “Oh no.”

  He sat up also. He was beyond the margin of her colors; he felt the change as harshly as the coldness of his body where she had been against him.

  “I have to, Axane. I have to go on.”

  “Why?” She gathered her dress up from around her waist, covering her breasts. “I’m free. Chokyi’s free. What else is there to go on for?”

  “You know the answer. I mean to kill him, if I can.”

  “What? Gyalo, you’ve never even fought another man! You’ve never used a weapon! And even if you had, you aren’t strong enough. No one is strong enough!”

  “I’ve gained knowledge of myself these past months, Axane. There’s more power in me than I knew.”

  “Not like his. When he came back from the Evening City he walked upon the air! On the air, do you hear me? I heard the noise of it, I looked out my window, and I saw it. If you go to Baushpar, you’ll die. You’ll die.” She sobbed wildly. “I told you, he was in despair that night. I think he’s stopping. I think he’s giving up.”

  “After all he has done? No.”

  “Is this what you think rata wants you to do?” she cried. “Do you think the god wants you to put your life at risk? rata doesn’t need you! He’s a god, he can do his own work!”

  “Axane—”

  “Or is it for me? For my sake, because he stole me, because of what he did to me before, in the Burning Land? But I don’t want you to avenge me! I don’t care about that! All I want is for you to come home with me and Chokyi!”

  “Axane—I
never dreamed he’d let you go—”

  “But he did! Why can’t you just come home with me and let the rest of it be?”

  “Because it isn’t over!” he shouted. “Because he’s still there! Because there’s only me!”

  She was silent, frozen. She understood. He could see it in her face—the old battle between what she knew about him and what she wanted of him. No more silence, he thought. No more elision.

  “Back in Ninyâser,” he said, “before all this began, I told you I hadn’t yet decided to go in search of him. It was true. When he kidnapped you and Chokyi, I was still trying to make up my mind. I thought that maybe rata was punishing me for my indecision by letting you be taken. Or maybe for the other choice I couldn’t make.” He drew a breath. “The choice of Messengerhood.”

  Across from him Axane sat like an image of herself, still clutching the bodice of her dress.

  “There was no question I had to go after you. It was a relief, in a way, to have the decision made for me. I told myself all that mattered was getting the two of you back. This was my will, and I would follow it, and if the god’s will were anywhere in it, I’d discover it, or not, when I came to it. But really that was just cowardice, an excuse to turn away from what I knew had to be done—and perhaps it was just as well, for when I got to the caverns I didn’t yet know myself, my power I mean, and if I’d gone in there and tried to challenge him, I certainly would have perished. Then I was drawn away from you, and when I came back I was struck by the Exiles’ arrow. When I woke up afterward, I couldn’t understand at first that I was actually alive. I’d been absolutely sure that I was dying …”