by Shannon Page
Discreetly, Sian reached between the folds of her dress and slipped out her coin purse. Straightening her garment, she stood and climbed down from the cart, pulling out enough to pay the runner more than double the usual rate. None of this was his fault, and he, at least, was working still. For that alone, she wanted to reward him. He saw what she had handed him, and looked up to beam at her. “Pretty lady very generous! Thank you, thank you. You want me wait, I stay here all night long to take you back when you are finish, yes?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I have a daughter on the other shore. It’s long past time I visited her. Thank you for getting me this far.”
He bobbed his head, gave her a grateful wave, and turned his cart around to head back toward Alizar Main.
Well, there’s nothing gained by waiting, she thought, and started down the dusty road into the crowd. The press grew ever tighter as she neared the bridge. Once on the span itself, she was forced to barge her way quite physically through the endless throng of worshippers, knowing now that this was going to take far too long.
She pressed on, keeping to the bridge’s railing, where the crowd was thinnest. Perhaps a third of the way across, one of the marchers — a man in his twenties, broad of shoulder and dull of eye — bumped her nearly hard enough to knock her off her feet.
“Sorry,” Sian said, though surely it was he who should have been apologizing. The young man just continued on his way, lost in mutterings, as she tried to step even further back, though there was almost no room left between herself and a long drop into the bay.
Such fanatic faith puzzled Sian. She had been raised in the usual manner: temple on the feast days, a small dusty altar in the corner of the kitchen, remembrances to the ancestors when her mother took the family out to their memorial shrines. But there had been no particular passion behind the rites: no ecstasy, no terror. It was just something one did, like the weekly laundering, or repairing the roof — though with less obvious reason. Alizar’s gods were nowhere in evidence, nor had they been for as long as anyone could remember. Worship had no more relevance than did Popa Chinnai, who brought woven grass sandals and ylang-ylang incense for the youngest children at the turn of the year.
Any vestige of faith she might have retained had left Sian for good after increasingly complex and costly rites prescribed by Mishrah-Khote priests had failed to save her mother’s life from bloodpox. The order’s endless demands for “donations” had produced nothing; her mother had died in agony, coughing up more blood than a body should hold. After declaring her demise “the will of the gods,” the self-important priests had left young Sian to care for her bereft father all alone. Only one gentle-faced acolyte had shown any kindness to Sian at all, whispering furtive apologies for their failure, and offering to counsel and comfort her if she should wish to come see him at the temple, before he was whisked away by his superiors.
All these muttering, sweating folk around Sian now were clearly tapping into something she could not perceive. She could not fathom what drew them. What were they hoping to find?
Perhaps an hour later, as she neared the darkened bridge’s other end at last, the way became slightly less crowded. Sian seized this opportunity, weaving faster through the massive prayer line’s margins toward what appeared to be the front of it.
At last! she thought, putting on a final burst of speed. But as she broached the procession’s leading edge, she drew up short in new amazement. There, a very familiar figure danced and chanted, holding high a whale’s tooth, his face suffused with religious ecstasy. Young, strong but slight, light brown hair — she could not believe her eyes.
“Pino!” Sian shouted, moving towards him. He did not reply, but danced on, brandishing the whale’s tooth before him. As Sian continued to approach him, stepping through the tangled enthusiasts, she realized the others about him were gazing at the tooth reverently. As if it were some kind of a relic.
Was it the tooth of a whale? It had an oddly human look to it … Surely it was not … Oh, surely not.
“Pino!” she called again, stepping closer, pushing past a hefty woman in a gauzy blue wrap who carried a large cloth bag rattling with unknown objects. “What are you doing here?”
The boy finally turned his head and looked at Sian, a mixture of joy and fear on his face. But still he didn’t speak; he only kept dancing and brandishing the filthy tooth.
“Pino — talk to me!” Sian tugged on his arm, trying to yank him from the line.
Pino resisted, his eyes glittering with something — feral, almost. A look Sian had certainly never seen in him before. Suddenly he grinned, and stopped, seeming only then to see her through his ecstasy. “My lady! You have found us! Just as he predicted!”
“I …” Sian was at a loss for words. “As who predicted? What are you doing with these people? Why are you not back on Little Loom Eyot with Arouf?”
“The Butchered God’s priest — he said that you would find us!” Pino ignored her other questions, if he’d heard them at all. “He wants to speak with you, my lady!”
“With me? Whatever in the world for?”
“You had questions — on the boat — and he can give you answers! It is such a gift, my lady. I will take you to him!” Pino reached for Sian’s hand, then hesitated, recalling his place perhaps, reticent, even through his religious frenzy, to touch her without permission.
“Impossible,” Sian said. “I’m already late for a very important meeting. And you have no business here, Pino. I insist that you return home. Does Arouf know where you are?”
“But … No, my lady. Really. You must come! Now!” The line had continued to surge and flow around them for some time now, and grown thicker too. They found themselves squeezed against a building. Pino again moved to take her hand, clearly wanting to compel her along.
“No,” Sian said, pulling back, but keeping her voice gentle, trying to mollify him. Had someone given the boy powders? “Perhaps I will speak with him tomorrow.” Suddenly the prayer line seemed less obnoxious and more sinister. “Go home to the Eyot now; meet me at the townhouse in the morning, and you can take me to the priest then.”
Pino stared at her with pleading eyes. “No!” he shouted. His gaze seemed oddly unfocused, or was he looking at someone behind her?
Before she could turn to see, a strong blow at the back of her head sent her sprawling to the ground. She could find no voice to scream. No air. She struggled to rise, but the darkness took her.
Factora-Consort Arian des Chances watched her husband pace, until he stopped at last before the conference chamber’s great round window to stand gazing down at Home’s distant harbor, where his family’s fleet of cargo ships sat uncharacteristically idle, though the streets around it would doubtless be clogged with marchers now. Hivat, Viktor’s chief of security — which was to say, his top spy — had been by just before this meeting to inform them of the evening’s sudden but as yet indecipherable outburst of cultist presence in the city’s streets. He was back out there now somewhere, trying to find out why.
“They are surely here on your father’s behalf, my dear,” said Viktor. “You must know better than I what will appease them.”
“My father?” Arian said, astonished. “Whatever makes you —” Then she realized that he was, of course, not speaking of the cultists, but of the trade delegation, just arrived in time to see this massive display of unrest.
“They are sent by the Trade Authority in Copper Downs, are they not?” said Viktor. “Which means —”
“Of which my father is merely one member among many,” she interjected.
“ — that they are sent by your father,” he continued as if she had not interrupted. “First of many members. Who has better cause than we to know it?” He turned from the view to gaze at her. “They are here because your family is not enjoying the bride-price they had counted on.”
Arian made no further effort to hide her incredulity. “What an absurd assumption, Viktor! We’ve been married nearly tw
enty years. This union has been worth my family’s trouble many times over by now.” Her husband’s paranoia still surprised her sometimes. “Has Hivat provided you any scrap at all of evidence to support such a suspicion?”
Viktor shook his head.
“Then this delegation has come for the same reasons such officials have always visited important trading partners: to gather first-hand information and to strategize. That is all.”
He responded with an impatient humph, and came back to sit across from her at the room’s long, polished ebony table. “What can they expect me to tell them that they don’t already know? Does being Factor endow me with power over every vicissitude of life? Can I control the weather?”
“The weather is not our problem.” Arian sighed. Her husband lost himself so easily in such useless theater.
“Then what is our problem? If you know, please tell me. A nation filled with labor-hungry businesses, yet suddenly the poor choose not to work. How am I to deal with such a thing? How am I to understand it? How do they even feed themselves now?”
“The sea is full of food. As is the jungle,” said Arian, as baffled as her husband by this senseless protest movement — if that’s what it even was. The ‘Butchered God’ cult responsible for all of this had made no demands of any kind yet; given no clear indication of what all this marching was supposed to mean at all — that she’d been told about, at least. “But those supplies of food cannot last forever under such a strain. These marchers will return to the hiring houses soon. When the monsoon season returns, at the very least. They’ll have to.”
“This delegation requests clarification of my plans,” Viktor said, very nearly whining. “I have no plan. They want financial forecasts. Does that not sound like weather to you? It might as well be, for all the sense it makes to me. They want my head, Arian. They and half the leading families in Alizar. That is what they’ve come here to ‘strategize.’ On behalf of your unhappy father and his bankers. I am certain of it.”
Arian swallowed her impatience. At such times, her husband needed propping up, not dressing down. “Viktor, any Factor would feel as you do in times like these. But none of what’s happening out there is your fault. Everyone knows that. I married you because I trust and believe in you. My father let me do it because he trusts and respects you too — as do these trade representatives. Trust me in this. I grew up among them. They are greedy savages sometimes, but they are not fools. Seeing you deposed would only double Alizar’s unrest and further undermine the very productivity and commerce they want bolstered, not to mention end the considerable trade benefits my family has enjoyed here since we married. What possible gain could any of that bring them?”
“Perhaps they’ve made some better arrangement with another family.” He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “Orlon has had several cannons made this year. Hivat did tell me that much. And Gentia Suba-Tien seems to be burning through a rather astonishing amount of her husband’s money suddenly, for someone without greater prospects than any Hivat or I are aware of.”
“Viktor.” She gave him the look, perfected over many years: one-third pleading, one-third maternal fierceness, and one-third puppy love. Her masterpiece.
He glanced away, then looked down to fiddle with the embroidered lapels of his brocade robe before raising his hands in apology. “This is all that damned corpse’s fault. And the Mishrah-Khote’s. Don’t tell me I am wrong in this as well.”
“The Mishrah-Khote is even less fond of the Butchered God’s cult than we are, husband. You know that.”
“But it didn’t hurt them any to have a god wash up on our doorstep, did it? These priests never cease craving their old prominence, and whatever that great slab of meat really was, it plays far better in support of their claim to authority than it does to mine. There is nothing to prevent them from denouncing this new cult, while stirring the ignorant masses under their sway against the discredited secular authority I wield too. How am I to compete with a tangible god? Even a dead one.” He looked bleakly at the ceiling, as if petitioning some divinity himself. “You were right, though. I should never have insisted it was some kind of sea monster. That … was just desperate stupidity.”
Arian composed her elaborately painted face in sympathy and remained silent, having long ago learned that feeding his shame only damaged her tenuous power to steer him. Her husband was as good-hearted and honest a Factor as Alizar had known in many generations. But he was not a man well made to rule. Perhaps the two qualities were incompatible. She had often wondered since coming here from Copper Downs to be his bride.
Her husband looked away. “Do you think it was a god? Could the gods be coming back to Alizar too, now … from … wherever they have been all these ages?”
She gave him a smile designed to reassure. “If there are gods in Alizar, I know less of them than you do, love. But whatever that giant was, we are fortunate that it was dead.” She shrugged. “Its appearance has been followed by no further miracle of any kind, has it? Let it go, love. We’ve more pressing questions to address tonight.”
“But, what if —”
“Listen to me now,” she interjected. “These men tomorrow will want nothing from you but some marginally credible report for their superiors, who, in turn, want nothing but some vaguely plausible justification to leave everything just as it is. Any serious effort to fix things would be an egregious affront to my country’s chronically over-extended bureaucracy. Just tell the delegation that we are developing a new array of programs and incentives to appease the labor force here and persuade them back to work. That’s all they’ll want to hear.”
“Programs and incentives like what?” Viktor asked, frowning.
Arian rolled her eyes. “Renovation of slums, improved distribution of staple foods through work-assistance programs, state-subsidized access to a greater share of the Mishrah-Khote’s services.”
“Since when? With what funds? Our tax revenues are plummeting, Arian. Now is hardly the time to start —”
“Do you suppose for a minute,” she cut in, “that this delegation will go crawl around the raft warrens or down into Hell’s Arch or Alm’s Crib to ascertain the truth? I am trying to tell you that all they want is some passable way to claim they’re working on solutions to the world’s unmanageable problems without incurring any actual responsibility to do so in earnest. Give them that, and they will leave us in peace.” She paused, then added, “We might even consider some of the options I’ve just mentioned. Could it hurt to discuss them? Quietly? Why should this ‘Butchered God’s’ priest be allowed sole claim to concern for Alizar’s poor? Even in times like these, haven’t we resources to do at least as much as he can about any of this?”
“You’re telling me to lie to the delegation?” Viktor blinked, seeming to have heard nothing else she’d said. “That seems most unlike you.”
Arian drew a deep breath and shoved her frustration down once more. “It is not a lie if we are looking into it.” She could not solve all the problems of their nation’s poor tonight. She was just trying to help her husband find some breathing room. Was he too dull to see even that? “So let us just look into it, all right? I promise you, this delegation will not come back to check on our progress. And these current troubles will get better, Viktor, precisely because you are not to blame for them. Just buy us time to get there.”
He continued to gaze at her curiously, then shrugged. “It is as good as any other plan at my disposal. I thank you for the council, wife. It is a great help to have someone so much wiser in the ways of this game at my side.”
“There are many kinds of wisdom, husband. Yours are no fewer than mine, just of a different nature.”
“If you say so.” He gave her a rueful smile.
She rose and went to kiss him on the cheek. “I do. And on this occasion, I am right. Now, I must go to see our son. It is getting late. He will be sleeping soon.” I hope, she added silently. The more Konrad needed sleep, the further off his fever seemed to
keep it.
Only when she’d stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her did she allow herself a huff of exasperation. The very idea that her father would wish his own daughter’s husband toppled … Viktor was not a stupid man by any stretch. How he managed to arrive at such bizarre conclusions, she was unable to imagine.
As she continued through the Factorate House’s labyrinthine hallways, silent at this time of day but for the soft rustling of her silken robes and the ever-present calls of this fecund country’s strange wildlife, Arian considered the baroque columns, continental embellishments, diamond-tiled floors, and mosaic ceilings around her. Marble, malachite, alabaster and stained glass. Viktor and his family had brought all of this from the mainland, entirely remodeling the island nation’s modest palace at unimaginable expense, as a wedding gift for her. To make you feel at home, Viktor had told her grandly the first time he had shown it to her. She’d never had the heart to tell him that this great fantasy of ‘continental architecture’ was as oddly out of step with anything she’d known in Copper Downs as it was with her adopted country’s culture or native architecture. The grandest expression to date of her husband’s … impressive … imagination.
As she approached her son’s chambers, she met her younger brother, Aros, coming the other way.
“Factora-Consort,” he said, sweeping his pale hair back and giving her a courtly little bow, as mocking, somehow, as it was technically correct.
“What brings you here so late, Aros?”
“Just keeping my poor nephew company, of course, as any doting uncle should. Was your conference with the Factor fruitful?”
“I suppose,” she said, a bit annoyed that he had been allowed her son’s company while she, his own mother, had been denied the privilege. “How is he tonight?”
“The same.” Aros’s brow furrowed in concern. “I worry for him, Arian. He was recovering so nicely. Now … Is there nothing more the Mishrah-Khote priests can do?”