Shadowed By Wings
Page 10
As my eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom, shapes resolved themselves, peculiar shapes perched upon braced racks jutting from the walls. Clawfuls of them, there were, all in orderly lines. Moth-eaten blankets were neatly stacked waist high beneath them.
“This is the Tack Hall, hey,” Egg said, his voice condensed by beam and wall. “This is where all the gear is kept, reins an’ saddles an’ parade stuff. Not the battle gear. That’s kept in the Cafar. Eidon wants us to clean and repair all this. Understand?”
Egg lumbered over to one wall and hoisted a bulky object down from one of the many racks. A saddle, that’s what it was. Great leather riding saddles straddled the racks protruding from the walls, saddles with hand-grips and foot stirrups jutting from them, fore and aft. As Egg lumbered back to us, huffing under the weight of the enormous saddle he carried cradled over his arms, he nodded at a chest-high wooden table, the top of which was peaked like a roof.
“Don’t just stand there! Pair up an’ carry a saddle to this bench.” A pause as he demonstrated with his own saddle, heaving it atop the long table so it sat astraddle the peak, stirrups dangling on either side. “Watch what I do an’ do it yourselves!”
In the ensuing noise and scramble, I slipped out the door and returned to the hovel courtyard.
Dono was waiting at the threshold of my stall, as though he were reluctant to enter without me present.
“Where is it?” I wheezed, looking for the venom gourd.
His eyes darted over me, then darted away, as keen and quick as the beak of a bird that impales its prey upon thorns.
“How do you know it won’t make things worse for you?” he asked.
“Venom?” I was stunned at the very idea. That caught a piercing glance from him and I could see him realizing that, yes, I had drunk it before, a great deal.
“It could close your throat over,” he rasped. “You don’t know that it won’t. I bet you’ve never been hit on the neck before, not like that.”
“I’ve drunk it enough to know how it affects me, Dono. It won’t hurt me. It was the force of the tongue lashing that hurt me, not the venom itself.”
“It was the combination of the two.”
“My tolerance of the stuff is higher than that of any apprentice here.”
Dono’s dark eyes studied me from beneath a veil of hair. “Temple’ll kill you for sure. You are a deviant.”
“No.”
“Egg says you called yourself a Dirwalan Babu. Those are Djimbi words, Zarq. Djimbi is the language of deviants.”
I frowned, nonplussed. Then I realized what he meant. No term existed for daughter in the Emperor’s tongue, and so to describe myself as the Skykeeper’s Daughter to Egg, I’d used the old Malacarite term babu. The dragonmaster had likewise called me such.
“It’s not Djimbi; it’s ancient Malacarite.”
“How would you know?”
“I learned the old language as an onai, while learning the hieroglyphic arts.”
“It sounds like Djimbi to me.”
“Just give me the draft, Dono.”
“The Djimbi are deviants. Temple executes all those who aid a deviant.”
“The Komikon is piebald,” I countered. “Djimbi blood flows in his veins. Is he a deviant?”
“He shouldn’t be giving the draft to you. It’s against Temple Statute to consume dragon flesh.”
“Venom isn’t flesh.”
“It’s wrong.”
“So you’re going to defy the Komikon’s wishes? Refuse me the draft?”
We stared at each other, both of us tense and unflinching. Finally, Dono shrugged. “You’ll give me half, understand? Half, and say nothing to the Komikon.”
“Half,” I agreed, though it angered me to do so. I’d planned on giving him only a few sips, not half of my potion.
With a nod, Dono limped out of the stall. He returned moments later, lips compressed with the pain of walking. Without speaking a word between us, we moved into the shadows at the very back of my stall.
He held the gourd cupped in his palms. We stood close, facing each other. Our breathing synchronized. His eyes blazed amber, like a dragon’s.
“It’ll lift you high,” I whispered. “It has a fiercer thrust when ingested, and a longer burn.”
He nodded. Outside, the buttery light of dawn was turning into the heat of morn. Beyond the stable domain came the muted sounds of rishi at work.
Dono lifted the gourd to his lips.
I couldn’t help it; I reached out and placed my hands over his. To control how much he drank, understand, so there would be enough left for me. He didn’t shake off my touch.
His lips parted and he tipped the gourd. His larynx bobbed up and down. I heard the liquid slide down his throat. After several swallows, and with the slightest hesitation, he lowered the gourd.
I watched him, waiting for the venom to flare into life within him. I saw the exact moment, too: His eyes widened briefly, then turned bright and brittle, as if sugar glaze had been poured over them and was instantly setting.
He shuddered and closed his eyes. I knew what furious fire raged through his sinus cavities, blazed in his belly, and devoured the pain of his whip welts. I knew what puissance and ecstasy swelled him beyond mere mortality. I knew what lust burned hard and undeniable in his blood.
His erection touched my thigh.
I swiftly downed the remnants of the draft and waited for the effects. They would be nowhere near as instant or intense as what Dono was experiencing during his virgin swallow of dragon’s poison. But I would take what I could get.
I stroked his penis while I waited, emboldened by his inability to control his body, empowered by his weakness, his need, his nearness. I craved some sort of affection from him, any sort.
You don’t know what your lust is for, I felt like whispering against his ear. You don’t realize such lust is intended for a woman, to encourage her to lie with a dragon, that she might hear the dragon’s thoughts.
The theory had only just occurred to me, upon the fiery wings of venom, surmised from what I’d witnessed and experienced at Convent Tieron. It at once made absolute sense.
I continued stroking him, his phallus as smooth and hard as burnished clay in my hand. Want started to pulse within me, too, muted by how paltry the dose of venom had been compared to my tolerance of the poison.
Dono climaxed with a cry, an arched back, a fierce look of elation on his face.
I leaned forward, then, and whispered in his ear, “You don’t want me to leave, Dono. You want me here with you, in the Komikon’s stables. Tell me you want me to stay.”
His eyes cracked open and his lips parted slowly.
“I want …” he croaked. And then he bit his lip and looked away, trembling.
There was a time, nearly a century ago, when a woman could not walk the dusty, narrow alleys of Clutch Re unaccompanied by a man.
She was required to wear a bitoo, an inviolable cloth garment manufactured by a Temple-sanctioned guild clan, at all times. Outside of clan walls she was forbidden to speak or to touch a man, be it her son or aging father or the man accompanying her outside of her ku compound. She was forbidden to gesture in the direction of a temple or a dragon, and forbidden to shed any dirty waters upon the ground as she walked. Quilted handkerchiefs called difees were used just for the purpose of sopping perspiration during an out-of-clan-compound journey; the more damp a woman’s difee upon return, the greater her sweat-sopping vigilance and therefore her piety. With much insincere groaning about laundering, women would compare their difees after journeying outside their clan walls.
Men were embarrassed, impatient, and uneasy when circumstance forced them to accompany a gaggle of women outside clan walls, but such journeys were routinely necessary. Women were needed to cart goods to one of the Clutch markets so that the men could trade the wares for Temple chits or other staples. Women were required to fetch water from the nearest Deep Well during the height of Fire Season. Who else
could do such chores? In my youth, my father’s mother, who lived to the extraordinary old age of fifty-two, would recount tales from those times to us girl children each eve, as reproach and reminder for how easy our childhood was compared to hers. Her tales were inevitably gruesome. The heavy pleats around her rheumy eyes would glisten with remembered grief, and her words would haunt our dreams. Although she died before I reached six, her stories remained with me always.
One story she’d been particularly fond of was that of her eldest navel auntie.
It was at the height of an unusually stubborn Fire Season, when muay plants lay limp in clan gardens, wilted leaves curling with brown. Under the sun’s relentless onslaught, the timbers of the women’s barracks creaked like the old bones of a dying beast, and the clan water towers grew thick with stagnant scum and the bloated corpses of thirst-maddened vermin that had fallen into the great vats and drowned.
Trips to the local Deep Well took place frequently, and on one blistering-hot day, my greatmother, then seven, was allocated the chore of fetching water along with her mother, her eldest navel auntie, and two other strong young girls. They waited in the torpid, interminable queue at the Deep Well from dawn until almost high noon. Roasting beneath their bitoos, their skin as feverish wet as the glazed skin of a fire-roasted boar, they lost the ability to think, to move, to breathe almost. They took turns between waiting in the line under that unforgiving sun and seeking refuge in the shade of the nearby temple, but the latter did little to relieve the smothering heat of bitoo and sun.
Finally, their turn at the well. Finally, the dank, metallic water splashing into their enormous urns.
On their return to their clan compound, unwieldy urns filled with precious water balanced upon their heads, my greatmother’s auntie stumbled on a bit of brick fallen from one of the ancient walls that divide clan from clan, guild from guild. Her ankle twisted. She cried out. One hand shot out to steady her balance as a natural reflex. She inadvertently grabbed the arm of her adolescent nephew, assigned the job of viagandri, girl herd, for the day.
A heat-embittered daronpu with a cheek swollen from a rotting tooth witnessed such.
My greatmother’s navel auntie was arrested on the spot for the dual crime of speaking in public and trying to seduce a man while upon Temple grounds.
Justice was meted out two days later, after enough stones had been gathered by daronpu acolytes and stacked neatly in strategic spots in the market square. Greatmother’s navel auntie, encased alive in a grudrun, the heavy, hempen shroud that encloses a dead woman’s body during transportation to the gharial basins, was herded out of the temple prison shortly after dawn. Beneath the grudrun, she’d been firmly gagged and tightly bound with rope from shoulder to knee. She walked rigidly, blindly.
She was placed upright in a hole in the ground, picked up as though she were a fence post and shoved into place. The hole was thigh deep. Two daronpu acolytes shoveled dirt back into the hole, burying her in place. Their spades moved carelessly in anticipatory haste.
My greatmother, then only seven, was required to watch because she’d witnessed her aunt’s transgression and therefore needed pimala-fuwa, the instructional cleansing of watching justice meted out.
She was required to throw the first stones.
As an old woman, she still remembered the sound those stones made as they struck her aunt’s body. Small, resonant sounds, like rotten plums dropping upon the ground from an untended tree. She remembered her aunt’s silence and the way her aunt’s body shivered with each stonefall. She remembered the seething crush of the crowd, the roar of hysteria emitted from obscenely open mouths. She remembered the spittle gathering like curdled milk in the corners of her cousin’s mouth as he screamed at his aunt in fury and shame, because of what she’d brought on him and herself with her careless footstep, her thoughtless cry, her forbidden touch.
Things had changed somewhat on Clutch Re since then.
Although a woman was still required to wear a bitoo when beyond the walls of her clan compound, she could journey forth unaccompanied by a man. Although forbidden to address or touch a daronpu, she might talk amongst other women while in public. Not that such conversation was encouraged, understand. It was merely overlooked, conveniently unheard by any man within earshot.
Another change that had seeped into acceptance on Clutch Re by the time I was a dragonmaster’s apprentice was that women not only transported clan goods to marketplace for trading; they also carried out the marketplace transactions through inoffensive gestures and brief, modest dialogue. Indeed, it was uncommon to see a man squatted before a mat of wares anymore, and was, in fact, deemed unseemly for a man to be engaged in such subordinate work.
Those changes that had slowly come about since my greatmother’s youth could be attributed to the ever-increasing discord and disorder plaguing the Emperor’s instrument of power in Malacar: Temple. The Temple of the Dragon. In the Emperor’s tongue, Ranon ki Cinai.
The Temple of the Dragon was but a theocratic dictatorship, first imposed upon our nation of Malacar nearly two centuries ago by the foreign autocrat Emperor Wai Fa-sren. Like all inhabitants of the Archipelago, the Emperor believed that dragons were divine. He was, however, a practical man unwilling to destroy the economy of the nation he’d vanquished. He therefore decreed that, although the eating of dragon flesh was forbidden, the consumption of unfertilized eggs laid in Temple-sanctioned Clutches within Malacar would be permitted. He also decreed that dragons could continue to be used as transportation and beasts of burden, but only by those people deemed worthy of such a sacred honor.
Only those people with Archipelagic ancestry, unquestionable loyalty to Temple, and considerable wealth and resource were ever deemed worthy enough.
One hundred and seventy years later, Emperor Wai Fa-sren’s fourth successor, Emperor Mak Fa-sren, still ruled Malacar from his Archipelagic throne, and he still did so through Temple.
Hivelike Temple vaults, each pitted with floor-to-ceiling hexagonal cells, each cell containing an ancient holy scroll, contained all there was to know about dragons and how Emperor Fa’s subjects had to live in regard to them.
But Temple was now rotting from the inside out.
While the Emperor’s Malacar-stationed militia leaders vied for power with his Temple Superiors, the landed gentry acting as overseers upon the Emperor’s Temple-controlled Clutches grumbled about self-governance. Wealthy Malacarite natives in the city muttered louder and more frequently about autonomy, while Clutch rishi and the city populace, aware of the in-house corruption and political squabbles plaguing Temple, chaffed under Temple’s yoke more and more openly.
The deepest thorn embedded in the Emperor’s flesh at the time of my apprenticeship was the sudden increase of Hamlets of Forsaken springing up throughout Malacar. Such nonpartisan agricultural communes, under the protection of no Temple-sanctioned warrior or dragon estate lord, were an unacceptable outrage, a bold, treacherous disregard of Temple Statute and allegiance to the Emperor.
But none of that was my concern as I returned to the Tack Hall where Egg and my fellow inductees polished silver and leather alike. Indeed, it wasn’t until nearly two years later that I even learned of the depth of Temple’s woes. What did concern me at the time, in that relentlessly obsessive way only venom can provoke, was the fact that I was still clothed, ridiculously, in Kratt’s cape, and that should a daronpu visit the stable domain, he could order me stoned on the spot for such indecency.
By the time I stepped onto the Tack Hall’s creaking wooden verandah, I’d determined to fashion myself a man’s short tunic from a couple of the blankets I’d seen stacked against the walls inside. I could have made a tunic from Kratt’s cape, I suppose, but I had no desire to wear that man’s cloth against my skin any longer if I could prevent it.
Egg and the inductees were hard at work, the smell of beeswax and polished leather thick in the air. Despite my ardent wish to slip in unnoticed, my arrival was instantly noted by all.
“Where’ve you been?” Egg squealed. “We have work to do!”
Venom hummed in my veins like hornets with raised stingers. I brushed by Egg, went straight to the nearest stack of blankets, and hefted it into my arms.
“These are riddled with holes,” I said in as accusing a tone as I could muster.
“What’re you doin’?” Egg cried.
“Mending these. They’re in a disgraceful state. What are they used for, hey-o?”
“Dryin’ the dragons, after exercisin’ in the Wet.”
“Right. Needles?”
Egg gave a strangled moan, then lurched down the length of the Tack Hall, elbows knocking saddles perched upon wall racks, disturbing the rows of neatly hung reins so that they rustled and hissed like snakes in his wake. At the end of the hall, he rattled through the drawers of a tall, broad cabinet.
He returned with an aggrieved expression, a spool of what looked to be more coarse string than thread, and a bodkin the size and thickness of a woman’s stout hairpin.
“It’s a needle for workin’ leather,” he said defensively. Then, petulantly, “Eidon said nothin’ to me about mendin’ those old blankets.”
I shrugged, took spool and enormous needle from him with muttered thanks, and turned for the door.
Egg’s squeal stopped me in my tracks. “Where’re you goin’ now?”
“Outside. I can’t see enough in here to sew.” Before he could grant or withhold permission, I walked out of the Tack Hall, my fellow inductees gaping at me.
My insolence toward Egg was unacceptable. No woman should display such behavior toward a man, especially one outside of her clan. But not only did I not quite view Egg as a man, I thought of the stable domain as my new clan, and therefore experienced only the slightest qualms about my audacity, quickly quashed by venom-induced insolence.
Perhaps I possessed more of my mother’s traits than I had hitherto thought; after Waivia had been sold as a sex slave, my mother had shown no compunction whatsoever in such similar displays toward men.