The Awakened City

by Victoria Strauss

  I will not let my grief consume me. I will fix my mind on what I can control. I’ll go to Faal. I’ll speak against Taxmârata. I will try to hold my spirit-siblings united—yes, even Kudrâcari and her faction. Ages ago, on the steppe, Gyalo spoke of tests. It may be that he is right in that at least: Perhaps all of us are being tested.

  I must not fail. Whether rata wakes or sleeps, the true Next Messenger is yet to come. When he does, we Brethren must be waiting.

  29

  Gyalo

  THEY ENTERED NINYSER from the northwest, along the Baushpar road, and walked together through the city. At the beginning of the Great South Way, just beyond the King’s Gate, they reached the agreed-upon point of parting. Diasarta and Apui and Lopalo would head south, then west into Haruko. Gyalo would go home.

  The day was bright but chill, with a sharp gusty wind. They stood together at the Way’s edge, out of the stream of traffic—four travel-weary men in ragged clothing, their drawn and hollow faces attesting to some recent suffering or trial. The two Tapati no longer wore ratist garb, and their growing hair and beards obscured the swoops and swirls of their tattoos, but it was still immediately apparent what they were, or had been. In Baushpar, Gyalo’s band of followers had accepted the presence of the Brethren’s legendary guardians with little curiosity. Here people stared, fascinated or fearful or simply trying to work out why these men were apart from their masters, trudging the roads and sleeping rough like common people.

  The companions had not spoken as they walked. In these last moments also they stood silent. Farewells had been made the night before, and Gyalo had forbidden any public displays of reverence. Still, in the imminence of separation, Gyalo felt there was something he should say or do. The way the other three watched him told him that they felt so, too. But he could not think of anything.

  At last he simply said: “I’ll be on my way.”

  Diasarta nodded. “Go well, Brother.”

  “And you. All of you.”

  “We’ll be back.” Diasarta looked Gyalo in the eye. “Three years from now, on the day of Baushpar’s fall. Don’t forget.”

  It was halfway between a promise and a threat.

  Diasarta had laid his plans in secret and sworn the others to secrecy also. Not until the night after the four of them left Baushpar did he reveal what he intended. Gyalo, whose single-minded toil among the ruins had blinded him to nearly everything else, listened in amazement as Diasarta told him of the thirty men and women he had recruited from among Gyalo’s followers, of the oath they, and he, and Lopalo and Apui, had sworn: to carry word of the Messenger’s coming and rata’s rising to the kingdoms of Galea, and teach the faith that must be followed in the time before the god’s return—a Way of rata ungoverned by leaders like the Brethren and uncoupled from the institution of the church, in which the god, awake and aware, overlooked the world and the Five Foundations were joined by a Sixth: Prayer.

  “A Sixth Foundation,” Gyalo repeated, wonderingly. Such a thing had not occurred to him—might never have occurred to him. Yet the instant Diasarta said it, he felt the same rightness he had experienced in the hours immediately following his choice.

  “It’s no more than what you’ve said yourself, Brother. rata hears us now. People should know that, in the time between.”

  “The time of Interim,” Gyalo said.

  “That’s his name for it.”

  “Yes, but it’s a good name. So much of what he taught was true, in a backward sort of way.”

  “Interim it is, then, Brother. If you say so.”

  “This is really what you want, Dasa? This task? This … labor?”

  “Me and the others. Yes. Though I always thought it’d be you who’d lead us.”

  It was as close to condemnation as the ex-soldier had come since their conflicts on the steppe.

  Gyalo regarded him now: a homely man whose hard-lived life made him look at least a decade older than his thirty-two years, whose sallow skin and close-set eyes suggested dissoluteness. Yet his straight stance spoke of a new-gained authority, and his gaze, clear and calm, conveyed a certainty beyond mere knowledge. Lopalo and Apui had it, too, that certainty. It breathed from the three of them like a collective lifelight. One could see they had some special understanding. Looking at them, one wanted to have it, too.

  “I won’t forget,” Gyalo said.

  Diasarta stepped forward. They embraced. The Tapati stood like stones; such liberty was not for them, for they were only the Messenger’s disciples. Yet they were the first, as Diasarta was the first—the first companion, the first protector—and that would count for much in the time to come. So, Gyalo knew, they believed.

  He lifted his hand—half farewell, half blessing—and turned away. He could feel their eyes on him all the way to the King’s Gate. But when he paused there to look back, they were gone.

  In the northern half of the city, above the Year-Canal, the companions had passed through areas that clearly spoke of Râvar’s violent sojourn. The battered districts around the ratist religious complex were still deserted. But the southern city, with its mean squares and alleyways and the cancer of the Nines clinging to its southwest quarter, had largely escaped the pilgrims’ depredations, and though the streets were emptier than they should have been, things seemed to be going on much as usual. Gyalo was ragged and unkempt and dirty, but so were many who lived there, and no one gave him a second glance as he made his way through the familiar streets. It was sweet, the anonymity—the first he had had since he and Diasarta climbed out over the ruins of Baushpar. He would miss Diasarta—missed him already, with a sharpness that did not quite seem real, as if he had only to turn his head to find the ex-soldier walking next to him. But he would not miss being known, being recognized, being followed. He would not miss being the Messenger.

  His steps slowed as he neared his own street. Across from the roofed passage that gave access to the little square, he paused. The passage thrust a finger of space between two of the dwellings, revealing at its end a sunlit snippet of the court: an expanse of paving stones and the fountain, and beyond it, the green door of his own home. Like Diasarta’s absence, it seemed unreal. He could not, for a moment, bring himself to step into it. As always when he stopped moving, he was aware of his fatigue—not the weariness of bone and muscle, which had come to seem a normal state of being, but a stretched, overburdened weakness that he felt sometimes in his bowels, sometimes in his chest, sometimes at the base of his skull, but really in none of those places, for the exhaustion was of his shaping, which lay at the foundation of his being but not in any physical part of him.

  And beneath it, deeper even than the roots of power, the pebble of quiet he had brought back from another realm. He felt that, too, and not only when he was still.

  At last, his heart beating in his throat, he crossed the street and inserted himself into the darkness of the passage. The court was empty—it was too cold for wives to sit in their open doorways shelling beans, or for the old grandfather in the house next to Gyalo’s to occupy his stool in the sun. The green shutters of the house, like the door that matched them, were shut tight. It did not mean anything, he told himself—on such a chilly day, anyone might choose to keep their shutters closed.

  The bundle he carried on his arm did not contain a key. The key had been lost in the caverns, along with his pack. Of the possessions with which he had begun the journey, only Axane’s bracelet remained, safe on its cord beneath his clothes. Yet even if he had had the key, he would not have brought it out—for he wanted the door to be open, and to approach it with the key in his hand would have denied the possibility of openness.

  It required an effort of will to reach for the latch.

  It lifted easily. The door swung open.

  There was no one in the room. He stood on the threshold, searching for signs of occupancy. The pressure in his chest would not allow him to cal
l out. He crossed to the kitchen: It was empty also. But there was a fire in the stove. He could see its heat, distorting the substance of the air.

  Behind him, something changed.

  He turned, clumsily, as if he were underwater. Axane stood at the foot of the stairs, cloaked in the glorious turmoil of her colors. Her hands hung at her sides; her face was still.

  He could not stir. He could not even say her name.

  She walked toward him without haste. She came right up against him, and slid her arms around his waist and laid her cheek on his chest. The world turned green, turned blue, turned green again. He sighed, a long exhalation that felt like the release of more than breath. He let the bundle drop and wrapped his own arms around her, feeling her warmth, smelling the sandalwood scent of her hair.

  They stood that way for a long time, breathing in rhythm, their hearts matching beat for beat. At last he pulled back and took her face between his hands.

  “You waited.” He hardly recognized his voice.

  She looked up at him. “I love you,” she said. “Every time I thought of leaving, I came back to that.”

  He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her mouth. He closed her in his arms again, folded himself around her.

  “Where’s Chokyi?”

  “Upstairs.”

  She led him to the second floor, where all was as he remembered: his desk, the chests for supplies and clothing, the big bed where Chokyi lay, her thumb in her mouth, flushed and damp with sleep. Gyalo knelt and smoothed the hair from her forehead. The dark crescents of her eyelashes fluttered, but she did not wake. Looking down at her—lost and regained, too young to retain any memory of the terrible events that had swept her up for a time—he felt something in him unravel. Tears filled his eyes, ran down his cheeks.

  Axane’s arms went around him. He let her hold him for a moment, then wiped his eyes and got to his feet.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Her face went quiet. He turned from her and led the way downstairs, where the door to the outside still stood open. He closed it, then took off his coat and hung it on the hook and went to sit beside her on a cushion. She looked at him, a look that told him that she did not have to know, that he could keep silent if he chose. She had waited for him; he had come back; they could go on from there. But though he knew it might drive the final wedge between them, he had to speak. Once at least, everything must be told.

  He started with the moment she and Chokyi had left him. He told her of his and Diasarta’s entry into Baushpar, his encounter with Ardashir, then with Râvar. The fire; Râvar’s death. His choice to become the Messenger. His journey to the Courtyard of the Sun; the small destruction he had meant to make, the enormous one that had been made instead, by him and through him. His and Diasarta’s survival—not by any forethought on his part, but simply because the spaces of the Court were huge and they had been standing where nothing happened to fall. Their journey out across the wreckage, realizing, horrified, the true scope of the damage. The desperate search for survivors. He had barely noted the passage of night and day during that time, could not remember sleeping or eating or any pause at all apart from the evening he had spoken with Sundit.

  “I dreamed that,” Axane said. “I saw you talking with her, with Diasarta and all those others behind you.” She looked at him. “She repudiated you.”

  “Yes.” The admission was still painful. Of all the Brethren, Sundit’s had been the only acknowledgment he really wanted.

  He spoke of his followers—near a hundred of them at the end, mostly vowed ratists and other residents of Baushpar, with a few ex-citizens of the Awakened City. He still did not understand what had held them to him, beyond his shaping and the Bearer’s necklace; he had not spoken to them or blessed them or let them praise him, and left it entirely to Diasarta to deal with them. Still they followed, going where he led, digging in the ruins because it was what he did.

  He had gone on digging past the point where anyone might reasonably be expected to be found alive, far past the limits of his strength. At last Diasarta and the Tapati had physically overpowered him—he being by that time too weak to resist, either with his hands or with his shaping—and carried him to an empty dwelling outside the walls. He slept for two days, his followers camped nearby. When he woke, he told Diasarta what he meant to do, enduring the ex-soldier’s surprise and dismay. A week later, he and Diasarta and Lopalo and Apui slipped out of Baushpar in the middle of the night. At the time he had not cared what his followers would make of his disappearance, but he was grateful, afterward, that Diasarta had prepared them.

  He had rehearsed this account often in his mind, and was able to give it without stumbling or pausing or breaking down, though he was not always able to look Axane in the face. Except for that single interruption, she did not speak; no doubt she had seen much of what he told her in her Dreams, but there must also be much she had not seen, and since they parted he had not spoken at all into her sleep. She wore her mask, the quiet face behind which she hid the intensity of her nature, the vulnerability of her heart. He understood, though he wished it were not so. Out of a face like that, rejection might come as easily as acceptance.

  At last he was finished. Still without speaking, she got up and went into the kitchen, returning with a cup of water. He drank it down, then sat looking at the cup, reading the structure of the clay and of the glaze, his patternsense drawn with unerring certainty to the flaw at its base where a sharp tap would crack it. It was always what he saw first now: flaw, fault, the possibility of unmaking.

  “I was dreaming him,” Axane said. “The night of the fire.”

  “You saw what happened?”

  “Yes.” She was staring at her hands, clasped on her knees. “They had a confrontation, he and Ardashir. Ardashir accused him of being false. Râvar admitted it—he admitted everything. Ardashir fell into a rage and attacked him. He didn’t … Râvar didn’t even try to defend himself. And then somehow there was fire. I can’t be sure, but I think he made it. I think … he burned himself.”

  Gyalo was silent. He had not known this, not exactly. But what she said seemed right.

  “I woke up then.” A small shudder rippled through her. “I couldn’t bear to go back to sleep, so I didn’t see … you, and what you did. The next night, when I dreamed all the destruction … I’d been sure he was dead, but I thought I must have been wrong, that he’d escaped somehow and destroyed Baushpar. But then I saw you and Diasarta. I heard you talking. And I saw the necklace, the Bearer’s necklace.” She drew in her breath. “I knew then that I’d lost you. That you’d never come back.”

  “But I did come back. I’m here.”

  “For how long, Gyalo?” She raised her face, her great dark eyes seeking his. “Is it over? Or is there more?”

  “Axane. You know everything now. What I’ve done. What I am.”

  “What you believe you are. I’ve always known that.”

  “What I am, Axane. Whether you accept it or not. And also what it has made me. I am like him now. A murderer.”

  “You are nothing like him!”

  Gyalo set the cup gently on the floor, resisting the rush of feeling that urged him to strike it at its shatterpoint. “I … killed … thousands … of people. Maybe more than he did.”

  “But you didn’t intend for anyone to die. I know you, Gyalo. Even if I hadn’t seen you weeping in Diasarta’s arms that night, I’d know that. There was a … flaw. A fault under the city. You didn’t know it was there.”

  Gyalo remembered the eager hand of his power, delving down into the earth, greedy for dissolution. “My will was used, Axane, but it was still my will. My hand was seized, but it was still my hand. I understand that it was required of me. I know the ash-tainted life we lead in this time before the end of time is just a poor shadow of the perfect life to come. I know our shadow-lives mean little to the god, who loves on
ly the brightness in us … But I’m a mortal man, and this is the only life I know, and it was the only life they knew, the people I killed. I can’t forget that. I cannot simply say, It was rata’s will, and forget that all those lives came to an end because of me.”

  “No, you cannot,” she said. “And if you could, I’d hate you.”

  Gyalo sat breathing hard, his face hot and his chest tight. He could not look at her.

  “What you’ve done. I can never understand it, not as you do.” She paused, choosing her words. “But I don’t mourn Baushpar. And if what’s happened really puts an end to the Brethren and the church, I won’t mourn them either. And I know—Gyalo, I know those deaths were not what you wanted. I know you would give anything to take them back—even your own life. Maybe even mine and Chokyi’s. Râvar wanted the death he made. He craved it. It was his triumph. It was his heart. You are nothing like him.” She reached out, took hold of his wrist. “Nothing, nothing like him.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not as I was, Axane. You need to know that.”

  She said softly, “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “But can you live with me? I will never renounce the choice I made. I am the Messenger.”

  “Can you live with me?” Her fingers tightened on his wrist, so that he had to lift his eyes. “Knowing I will never, never name you so?”

  There was no mask. Naked in her face was her fierce unbelief, her absolute repudiation of the truth that lay at the core of his own being. For the first time he understood, really understood, that her lack of faith was not disillusion, or laziness, or a lapse of intelligence or a deficiency of education or any of the causes that lay behind the other atheisms he had encountered, but a willed and deliberate choice not unlike his own. For the first time, he understood that he would never change her. For the first time he realized how much he had hoped, one day, he might.