The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  Like Winter, Dawn was stopped by the wreckage of its walls, and also by the roof of an adjacent monastery, which had slid nearly intact off the building and landed in the street. A gang of vowed ratists was digging for survivors, dragging aside great beams, passing tiles and bricks from hand to hand. They were so covered with dirt and dust that they resembled men made out of clay. Their dead were laid out along the Avenue—scores of them, it seemed, though I could not bear to count. The stench of decay was ugly under the pall of dust.

  Reanu pulled one of the diggers aside. In a voice so hoarse it hardly sounded human, he told us that he and his fellows had chosen to remain in Baushpar not because they believed the true Messenger approached, but to guard their monastery. He described Râvar’s triumphal procession into the city, how his faithful had run wild in the ensuing week. He told us how, four days ago at sunset, the earth had quaked and the center of Baushpar had come roaring down. Reanu asked the questions; I kept my hood low and said nothing. The man must surely have wondered at us, but he showed no sign of suspecting that he spoke to a Daughter of the Brethren.

  “We’ve been digging ever since,” he said. “We’ve pulled some out alive. We can still hear cries.”

  “What of the false Messenger?” Reanu asked. “Is he still in the city?”

  The monk shook his head, impatient to return to his labor. “He took a residence outside the walls. That’s all I know.”

  We released him and moved on. For the rest of the day we circled the perimeter of the ruins, speaking with such citizens of Baushpar as we encountered, who had remained in stubbornness or in belief and were now, like the monks, fighting a doomed battle to rescue any who might still survive beneath the rubble. What did I hope to learn by this painful journey? Even now, I’m not completely sure. Yet it seemed to me that I owed it to Baushpar, my beloved city, to gather as much knowledge as I could. And to myself, I suppose. I’ve never been content unless I understand.

  Our journey, however, produced no understanding. Everyone we met spoke of Râvar’s entry into Baushpar and the violence of the pilgrims, but beyond that there was little agreement. Some thought the Brethren had refused Râvar when he went to them, and he (or rata) had in anger made an earthquake to destroy a faithless city. Some thought the disaster had come of natural causes, and bore no connection to the Messenger’s (or the false Messenger’s, depending on who was speaking) advent. Some thought Râvar had left Baushpar to preach his doctrines to the other kingdoms of Galea. Some swore he had been crushed in the collapse. Some were certain he was still present, preparing to raise a new Temple on the foundations of the old. There were even some who claimed that they had seen him, with the Blood around his neck, walking the ruins in the fearful light of his power. I remembered the blue-white flashes I had seen the night before, and drew my hood even farther across my face.

  Outside the Summer Gate, we encountered a dusty, draggled group that greeted our questions with a chorus of lamentation. They led us down into the southern suburbs, to a place where a crowd kept vigil by the charred remnants of a house. There, from Râvar’s own palm-scarred followers, we heard an entirely different story. The way had been opened; rata’s return was imminent. The Messenger, his work upon the earth complete, had been reclaimed by his father in a cataclysm of fire. They had been told this by a stranger, a Witness (clearly they considered this some sort of title), who had suddenly appeared before them, then vanished again. I thought of Ardashir, that tireless servant. Yet if Ardashir had been the Witness, surely the people would have recognized him.

  Twilight was beginning to fall. I was weary past expression, grieved past telling, sick with what I had seen that day and overwhelmed with question: Was Râvar alive or dead? Was he present in Baushpar, or gone? What of Gyalo Amdo Samchen? We rode beyond the suburbs to make camp, for I could not bear the thought of passing a night in the carcass of Baushpar. None of us could eat much of the meal Lopalo prepared, nor did any of us wish to sleep. We huddled round our fire in the frost-crisp air, listening to the faint singing of the pilgrims at Râvar’s burned house. Overhead, the slimmest crescent moon floated amid a glorious array of stars—the world going on as always, beyond the affairs of men and gods.

  It looked like a spark at first, dancing on the dark in the direction of the city. I squinted at it, wondering. It enlarged, turning from a spark into an ember, like a cat’s eye when torchlight catches it. I thought I could hear something—a shuffling, a rustling.

  In the same instant that I recognized the sound of an approaching crowd, Reanu and the others were on their feet, their knives flashing in their hands. I found myself standing also, breathless with dread. For I knew what it was, that glowing cat’s eye. I knew who approached me through the deep dark, knew I had been a fool to imagine I could enter Baushpar and remain hidden from his hatred.

  But it was not Râvar who stepped into the firelight. It was Gyalo Amdo Samchen.

  My men and I stood in silent shock. He looked like someone who had escaped from underground—his clothing filthy and torn, his hair a tangle around his shoulders, his beard-stubbled face raw with scrapes and cuts. A bandage wrapped his thigh. Around his neck hung my father’s necklace, strangely pristine, the pulsing golden ember that had alerted me to his approach. I could just see the mass of people behind him, a suggestion of form at the farthest margin of the firelight. One, a little ahead of the rest, seemed familiar.

  “Sundit,” Gyalo said. Then, to Reanu: “I don’t mean you harm.”

  “What about them?” Reanu gestured with one of his knives toward the silent crowd.

  “They follow me.” Gyalo coughed, cleared his throat, coughed again. “I can’t stop them. But they are peaceful.”

  Now I recognized the man waiting like a pillar at his back, the firelight partially illuminating his face: Gyalo’s companion when we first met, the ex-soldier Diasarta.

  Gyalo sat down, abruptly, as if his knees had given way. I followed suit, and more slowly, my guards.

  “How did you find me?” I asked, still trying to comprehend that it was he and not Râvar. I don’t know why this should have surprised me so—why, when I saw the Blood shining on the dark, I never thought of him. Perhaps over the course of the day I had grown more afraid than I realized.

  “I heard of four Tapati asking questions in the city, with a fifth companion whose face was covered. I thought it must be one of you. I didn’t know which one till I saw your lifelight.”

  There was a strange flatness to the way he spoke, as if he were so exhausted that he could not summon even the energy for emotion.

  “Were you caught in the collapse?” I said.

  “Yes. Dasa and I. We’ve been digging. With our hands.” He held them up, as battered as the rest of him, several fingers bloody where the nails had torn. “Also with my shaping.”

  I thought of those blue-white flashes, of the people who had said they saw the Messenger walking in the ruins. A chill went through me. I heard Taxmârata’s voice: I looked at him and understood the truth. There he sat, just across the fire from me, no farther than in our nighttime conversations on the steppe. I looked at him, and I did not know what I saw.

  “What has happened here?” I asked. “Did Râvar do this?”

  He shook his head. “Râvar is dead.”

  “It’s certain, then?”

  “I saw the fire that consumed him.” Again Gyalo coughed, this time as though it pained him. Behind him, Diasarta stood immobile; the crowd was a wall of shadows. “It was I.”

  “You killed him?”

  “The act of shaping that destroyed Baushpar was mine.”

  “rata!” It was Reanu. I could not have spoken.

  “I’m not strong enough. Not naturally.” He paused, holding himself absolutely still. “The strength was given me.”

  “But …” I struggled to find words. “Why?”

  “This is what i
t means to open the way.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No.”

  “Baushpar was built for the Age of Exile. It was built to honor rata sleeping. But rata is awake, and so Baushpar honors a falsehood. It had to fall.”

  “But … this is rata’s holy city.” My voice was faint. I felt as if I had passed into a nightmare. “Every stone of it speaks his glory.”

  “The church must also fall.” He still spoke in that flat way, terrible phrases uttered without any visible expression. “For it, too, enshrines rata sleeping. And it clings to that falsehood, clings tight, like a living creature whose survival is its first concern. It cannot of its own will pass away. It has become not merely a vessel of ignorance but an impediment to the truth. Not until it is gone can rata return. To that end, the Brethren must disperse. To that end, Baushpar must lose its holiness. To that end, the Way of rata, the sleeping Way, must cease to exist.”

  Words cannot convey my horror. I’d told myself that Mâra must have misunderstood. But he had not misunderstood. It was exactly as he said. My heart quailed. Was this what I must accept? Was this the man I must call Messenger, this pitiless creature with his glittering eyes and his toneless voice? I looked at him, his face lit by the flames almost to the color of the Blood on his chest. I looked at Diasarta, as still and watchful as my own guards. I looked at the tenebrous crowd behind him, the people who had walked so quietly at his back and now waited so patiently for him to be finished. Followers. Pilgrims.

  “This is what Râvar wanted,” I said. It was hard to find my breath to speak. “To destroy Baushpar, to murder the Brethren. This is what he meant to do.”

  “No,” Gyalo said, for the first time showing some emotion. “He only wanted vengeance.”

  “If the church falls, what will hold faith in the hearts of the people? What will keep Shapers to their manita, without the Brethren to oversee the Doctrine of Baushpar?”

  “The church is not the author of faith. Faith built the church, not the other way around. As for the Shapers, perhaps they will find a middle way.” He drew a breath. “As I did not.”

  “The church is the house in which faith lives. It is what prevents faith from becoming what Râvar made it! Without the church, the world will become as it was before my father brought the Way to Galea! rata! What have you done?”

  “What was required.”

  “It was required to bring the city down on living people? On three of my spirit-siblings? No. rata would never condone such an act! Do you think he loves us human creatures so little, that our lives count so little to him?”

  “rata loves us,” he said. “It’s just that he doesn’t love us the way we love each other.”

  “What—what is that meant to mean?”

  “We grieve at death, for our lives are all we have. But what does death mean to rata, who will raise us all perfected into the new primal age? What does pain mean to him, who will burn us to make us clean?”

  Everything in me recoiled from these words. “What do they mean to you, Gyalo Amdo Samchen?” I cried at him, my voice breaking. “For you are the one who has made them here!”

  In a convulsive motion he raised his battered hands and pressed them against his eyes. “I know it,” he said. “I know it.”

  He sat like that a moment. Then he let his hands fall. He was not expressionless now. Emotion was naked in his face.

  “I had thought … of all of them … that you would understand, Sundit. That night in Ninyâser, the night I left—you knew me then. You knew me, before I knew myself.”

  I shook my head, weak with the memory of that moment. “The man I thought you were that night would never have done what you have done.”

  He looked at me. The firelight moved on him, bright and dark. “I haven’t changed. The truth is what it was that night. I am the Messenger. I always have been.”

  For the first time there was sound from his followers, a murmur of reverence, rising quickly, dwindling back to silence. I glanced toward my men. Reanu and Omarau stood like the warriors they are, bodies tense, faces hard and alert. Lopalo’s and Apui’s stances were the same—but in the faces of those two I saw something different, an awe that even their tattoos and the shadows could not disguise. They, too, had known this man who sat beyond the fire. They, too, had witnessed his deeds and perhaps, like me, begun to draw conclusions about his nature. Now those conclusions pulled them away from me. I could almost see them going, slipping across the border of belief.

  Somehow, the sight of their surrender brought me to my senses. My mind cleared, an absolute transition, as if a great wind had swept through me. All my doubt fell away.

  “No.” My tongue embraced the word. Its rightness was tangible to me, like the heat of the flames. “I was wrong that night. I see it now. I repudiate you, Gyalo Amdo Samchen. Whoever the Messenger is, you are not he.”

  Silence. We sat eye to eye, each fully revealed to the other—enemies at first, then briefly friends, now enemies again. I wonder why, knowing what he is, it never occurred to me to fear him.

  At last he drew in his breath, and nodded. “So be it.”

  He pushed to his feet. It required a perceptible effort; he staggered a little as he came upright, and Diasarta stepped swiftly forward to catch his arm. A ripple went through the crowd, more felt than seen in the darkness.

  “You’ve made your choice,” he said to me, “as I’ve made mine. But I would have you know. It was not my intent to kill your spirit-siblings. It was not my intent … to crush living people under the rubble of Baushpar. If I could have made a different choice—” He stopped. He stood a moment, his face and body rigid, and I realized that his expressionlessness was not any lack of feeling, or even the blankness of exhaustion, but the exercise of a terrible control. “I would have spared them all.” He raised a bloody hand, pointed a finger at my throat. “I charge you, Sundit. By the life you owe me. When you speak against me to your spirit-siblings, also tell them that.”

  I felt as if I spoke around a stone. “rata will read the truth of it in your soul, if it is true. I cannot.”

  He looked down at me a moment longer, ragged and—yes, I will admit it—majestic, my father’s necklace shining on his chest. Then he turned and walked off into the night, Diasarta still supporting him. The shuffling crowd of believers followed. I could hear the noise they made long after they passed out of sight.

  I knew I should remain with my men—comfort them, offer counsel. But I was worn and soiled and hollowed out with anger and with grief, and I needed desperately to be alone. I retired into my tent, where for a third night I lay unsleeping. I heard them talking, their voices rising now and then as if they were arguing; they did not speak Arsacian but their own language. Occasionally, a creak or thud or groan came from inside the city. I thought of Gyalo Amdo Samchen, walking the ruins, employing the power that had wrought so much death in search of those who might survive. As if that could absolve him.

  The Tapati fell silent before dawn. As soon as it was light enough to see, I left my tent, and found them all still sitting by the coals of the fire. They conveyed a sense of unity, as if something had been mutually decided.

  “Well?” I said.

  They exchanged a glance. “Old One,” Lopalo said. “Apui and I would beg a favor of you.”

  I already knew what the favor was. “Speak.”

  “We wish to remain in Baushpar. To help in the search for survivors.”

  “And perhaps,” I said, “to join this so-called Messenger?”

  Their eyes fell. “Whatever you command, Old One,” Lopalo said, “we will obey.”

  “What of you, Omarau?”

  “My place is with you, Old One. And my belief,” he added, glancing sidelong at his fellows.

  I turned to Reanu. He answered without being asked, his face stern behind his tattoos. “I told you once that I would never leave
you, Old One. Where you go, I go. Always.”

  I was almost ashamed of the intensity of my relief.

  “You may remain,” I told Lopalo and Apui. “But know that your choice is irrevocable. If you change your minds, if you ever realize you are mistaken, you cannot return to me.”

  “We understand, Old One,” Lopalo said. “We’re grateful.”

  Both of them bowed to the ground.

  Lopalo built up the fire again, and he and Apui prepared breakfast. They seemed eager to offer me this last service, and I forced myself to eat. We could still hear Râvar’s pilgrims, who had not stopped singing all night long. Then the four men together readied the horses and packed up the camp. Lopalo and Apui begged my blessing before they went, and I gave it; perhaps I should not have, but they have been so staunch, and though their defection grieves me, I cannot find it in my heart to be angry at them. They will face enough chastisement in the time to come, when rata returns.

  Reanu and Omarau and I rode north, circling wide around the city, picking up the road into the hills well beyond the northern suburbs. At the crest of the hill where I first looked down on Baushpar’s ruins, I reined in and sat for some time. Reanu and Omarau waited in patient silence. At last I wiped the tears from my cheeks, and we moved on.

  I write this entry in my tent. My battered writing desk rests on my knees, a candle flickering in its holder. I am weary down to my bones. Yet I think I will not sleep this night either.

  Two false Messengers. Two separate sets of misguided followers. Two heretical doctrines. Gyalo, I think, is worse than Râvar, whose blasphemy was no less, but who at least knew himself as false. Râvar gloried in his deeds, and Gyalo’s pain was clear—yet it may be that very pain that feeds his falsehood, the terror of the consequences of understanding he was wrong. It stops my breath to imagine such self-deception. It stops my heart to think that I allowed myself, even for a moment, to believe in him.