by Pearl North
13
Thela’s Challenge
Po awoke to the sound of distant shouting. Beside him Thela stirred. They both sat up as the voices got louder.
“Thela Tadamos! Come out and face your country.”
A challenge.
Thela arose and wrapped her robe about her. She strode to the door, as upright and proud as if she were leading the procession on Mother Day. She made no effort to smooth her hair. It fanned out around her in a wild and regal tangle.
She threw open the door. Beyond it Po saw a woman with salt-and-pepper hair, about a head shorter than Thela. Behind her was a crowd of women.
“Plata. So you’ve finally got your courage up. Is this supposed to be dramatic timing, or are you afraid if you wait until morning you’ll lose your nerve?”
“Day or night is irrelevant to me when our country languishes. And I knew I would find you here, dallying with your half-breed consort. You care more for him than you do for running Ilysies these days. It seems fitting to challenge you in his bower.”
Thela’s voice was low. “Will you fight me here, too, then?”
“In the ring. These are my witnesses. He can be yours.”
“You’re joking.”
“You seem to have more regard for him than you do for your advisors, or even your heir.”
“If you mean to challenge me, Plata, then do so. If you’re just trying to make a point, these theatrics do not serve your purpose.”
“Summon your heir, then.”
Thela’s nostrils flared. “Very well.”
In twenty minutes’ time, a group had assembled in the exercise yard. Plata and Thela had stripped and now faced each other, both holding the traditional curved knife.
On Plata’s side of the ring stood the delegation of women who had accompanied her to Po’s chamber. On Thela’s side stood Jolaz, Mab, Uphine, Po, and Myr, who had also awakened, and begged to come along.
“She seeks advantage in doing this in the middle of the night,” said Jolaz. “Thela would have more supporters if she’d issued her challenge in broad daylight.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Uphine, and Po was shocked to see Mab nod in agreement.
Thela and Plata circled each other. Unlike practice fights, where the opponents wore armor covering the vital areas, this was a serious duel. They faced each other naked. It could well be a fight to the death.
Thela had the reach on Plata, but Plata was more muscular. “Your lust for your male has clouded your thinking,” said Plata.
“Are you trying to talk me to death?” said Thela.
Plata dug one heel into the sand and launched herself at Thela. She drove one shoulder into Thela’s solar plexis. Thela fell on her back. Plata dropped on top of her, straddling Thela’s hips and raising the knife.
Thela jabbed her fingers into Plata’s eye. The woman screamed and covered her face with her hands. Thela took advantage of the moment and threw her off.
But she’d done no permanent injury to Plata’s eye. Before Thela could follow up with a slice or a kick, Plata had leaped to her feet. The two circled each other once more. “You think you can do a better job leading Ilysies than I have?”
“I think your steppe-born husband can do a better job,” said Plata. “Under your reign we’ve lost our army, our flying machine, and our dominance in the Plain of Ayor. What are we now?”
“A rich country with no enemies. You forget that the Singers were on the verge of invading us and they are a threat no longer. Thesia has its own business to attend to, and the Libyrinth is harmless.”
“The fact that you’re comfortable making that assumption should tell all here just how far you’ve fallen. The Thela I knew would never be so blind.”
Thela rushed her. She brought her knife in low and might have disemboweled Plata if the woman had not turned and taken the slash across the hip instead. Blood streamed down her thigh, but she seemed unimpaired by it. She caught Thela’s knife arm and forced it upward.
Thela twisted and broke free but Plata shoved her. Thela fell face-first in the sand. Before she could get up or roll over, Plata wrested the knife from Thela’s hand and cast it out of the ring. Thela whipped around and kicked out at Plata, but she dodged out of the way.
“You’re disarmed. You’re defeated.”
“I’m not dead yet,” said Thela.
Plata charged her.
Thela leaped up, dodged Plata, and then sprang out of the ring. Po gasped. What was she doing? It was illegal to retrieve a weapon once it was cast out of the ring.
Thela didn’t go after her knife. She ran from the exercise yard.
“What are you doing?” shouted Plata. “You can’t! You coward!”
The spectators were in an uproar. Po turned to Myr. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
“This is disgrace for all of us,” said Myr.
Then Po saw Mab smiling. His stomach turned into a stone. He ran after Thela, his heart battering against his ribs.
Ahead, he could hear Thela’s footsteps slapping against the stone floors. She was headed to his bower, where the pen was. Could he overtake her? Could he prevent her from what she was about to do? He ran faster.
He rounded the corner and saw the door to his apartments closing up ahead. He reached it just before it latched and he threw it open and plunged inside.
“Good, don’t let them in,” said Thela. She stood near the bed, the pen in her hands.
Po slammed the door shut behind him and bolted it shut. No.
“Now why didn’t I make use of this sooner?” Thela’s gaze lingered on him a moment before she began to write. Po wanted nothing more than to run across the room and wrest the pen from her grasp, but he couldn’t move. He was barring the door. Because that was what Thela wanted.
The end of the pen opened like a flower and little motes of light drifted from it like pollen. As she wrote, words, golden and glowing, hung in midair. “Plata, daughter of Hecat, from Quatra north of Videsis, is my most ardent political supporter.”
Po could do nothing but watch as the words shimmered and faded, and reality shifted. Out in the hallway, voices lifted in confusion. “Why have you stopped?” someone demanded.
“Thela surely knows what she’s about,” said Plata. “There’s no need for us to interfere.”
“What are you talking about? You challenged her. She fled! She’s a coward. Go in there and execute her and restore honor to the throne!”
“Execute her? Our most brilliant leader? Never!”
Thela’s tongue poked out from the corner of her mouth as she thought. She nodded and lifted the pen again. “Plata, whom I just wrote about, never challenged me. She and the others with her in the hallway will return to their beds and go to sleep. When they awake, they will believe that the events that took place in the Ilysian palace on this night were a dream, and they will not speak of it for as long as they live.”
In the hallway, the voices fell silent. Po heard footsteps retreating.
Po tried to force himself to cross the room and wrest the pen from Thela. Now that her former challenger had retreated, he could leave the door and come to her side. He could touch her. He could lean his head on her shoulder and caress her arm. But when he tried to reach for the pen, he found himself doing something else entirely.
“Not right now, dear,” said Thela. “I’m thinking.”
Po went and sat down on the couch.
“How could I have allowed myself to come so close to losing the throne when I had this at my disposal?” She hefted the pen in one hand. She glanced at him and then away.
She wrote, “Adept Ymin Ykobos is outside the door to this room, ready to examine me.”
“Po, open the door,” she said, once the words had faded.
He did, and there stood Ymin Ykobos, looking vaguely confused. “I’m here to examine her majesty,” she told him.
“Ymin, accompany me to my quarters.” Thela turned to face him. “We will leave you now, Po. Aw
ait me here. You will make me unhappy if you do anything else.”
Po had memorized what she’d written about him with the pen, back in the Corvariate Citadel: “In all but one respect, Po is as he was before I last wielded the pen. The only difference is that now, he will only do what makes me happy.”
Somehow, she knew he was the reason she hadn’t been using the pen. And she wasn’t taking any chances now. That was why she had summoned Ymin Ykobos. Soon his teacher would confirm what he had done.
14
The Book of the Night
Haly and Gyneth caused quite a stir when they returned home to the Libyrinth.
“I told you we should have surfaced farther away and walked in,” said Haly, looking around at the ring of spectators their arrival had attracted. Many of them held pitchforks and other implements, and were just lowering them in a manner that suggested they’d been raised in preparation for attack moments ago. In the distance she could see other people running toward the Libyrinth.
“But that would have meant missing the look on Peliac’s face,” Gyneth murmured under his breath. Louder, he said, “Someone should go after them and let them know everything’s all right.”
Rossiter took off at a run.
“What is the meaning of this?” demanded Peliac.
“And welcome home,” said Clauda, stepping out from the throng, Selene a pace behind her.
“Clauda! You’re alive!” Haly threw herself in her friend’s arms and hugged her tight. “Selene found you?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew she would.” Haly looked up, to see Selene smiling in a way she had never seen her smile before. Haly glanced again at Clauda. Her friend gave a little nod and raised an eyebrow. Ah, good. “Finally.”
Selene blushed and Clauda laughed out loud.
“So … why have you come home in a Devouring Silence?” asked Clauda.
“There’s a lot to explain, and I want to hear about your journey, too. But we’re starving. Let’s go in and get something to eat.”
Over fried onions and pulse, fresh bread and preserved plums, Haly, Gyneth, Selene, and Clauda caught up on one another’s adventures. Many others stopped by to say hello or update one of them on some other development.
“So we just got back yesterday,” said Selene.
“And there’s been no word about Jan, Hilloa, and Baris? Or Po?” asked Haly.
“Nothing,” said Peliac, who had seated herself nearby and occasionally interjected a comment.
Haly looked around at all of them. It was time. She couldn’t put it off any longer. “There’s something else. Something I found when I was with Endymion.” She turned to Gyneth. “I just couldn’t talk about it before. You’ll see.”
They all waited in silence as Haly took the paperback novel The Book of the Night from her satchel. “This is … well, I just don’t know what to make of this.”
“What is it?” said Selene. She peered over Haly’s shoulder. “Oh! Goddess!”
Soon others had gathered around. Gyneth’s eyes went wide. Peliac gasped. “What? What does this mean?” she said.
Haly shook her head. She opened the book and read the first page. “Belrea and Yammon lived in a small village in the middle of a vast plain known as the Plain of Ayor. It was a dry, sparse land, offering little to sustain the people, apart from an abundance of silverleaf bushes that provided forage for the goats. With great effort, the villagers coaxed crops of barley and pulse and onions to grow in the meager dusty soil, but the goats were more reliable. It was Belrea’s job to take them out of their paddock each morning and watch over them while they grazed. This is because she was the daughter of the village’s head woman and man. Belrea was the village goat girl, an honor she took very seriously.”
Haly struggled for words, and failed. She simply handed the book to Gyneth to read. She watched his eyes grow wider and wider as he read, and at last he looked up from the page. “The goat girl?”
“What?” said Peliac. “Let me see.”
Wordlessly, still holding Haly’s gaze with his own, Gyneth handed the book to Peliac. Selene and Clauda read over her shoulder.
“What does this mean?” asked Selene when they’d all read the first couple of pages and handed it on to others.
“I don’t know,” said Haly. “I do know that this—” She took the book back from Burke and examined it more closely. On the spine was a little image of a starburst with a rocket ship sailing across it. “Parker Millennium, Science Fiction” read the imprint. “—was published as fiction. It’s a novel, not history. Not biography.”
“Are you sure?” said Peliac. “How can you tell?”
“Maybe it was rebound at some point by someone who wished to confuse matters.”
Selene shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Listen to this: ‘Yammon and his best friend Iscarion also lived in the village, but they were from much poorer families. Every morning they went out to the fields and tilled the soil and watered the crops and weeded the rows.’”
“But Belrea was born in Ilysies! She was the first Ilysian queen. She’s not an Ayorite. And Yammon and Iscarion grew up as slaves to the Ancients! None of this is true!” Spittle formed in white flecks at the corners of Peliac’s mouth.
“This is fiction,” said Haly, a funny feeling building in the pit of her stomach. “It doesn’t have to be true.”
“Then this story is a fabrication based on our historical figures?” opined Gyneth.
Haly flipped to the copyright page, as if the fact that it was an offset print book were not proof enough. “It predates our Yammon, Iscarion, and Belrea,” she said, pointing at the copyright date: 2098 by Roger Theselaides.
* * *
On her way to breakfast the next morning, Haly encountered Selene, Clauda, and Arche at the console. “Have you read the rest of it?” Arche asked Selene.
“Yes.”
“What happens?”
“Yammon, Belrea, and Iscarion become friends. There’s a romance between Belrea and Yammon, and some hints at a love triangle, with Iscarion being in love with Yammon, though the author never really commits himself in that regard.”
“Why not?”
“Probably afraid to. The people of Old Earth were weird about same-sex romantic and sexual relationships. It’s impossible to say whether the author himself shied away from the topic, or if he gave in to pressure from his publisher.”
“They couldn’t just write what they wanted?”
“Oh, heavens no. Publishing was a business driven by profit. And while the majority of publishing was done with ink on paper, books and the shelf space for them in the places where they were purchased were very tightly controlled. Anyway, in this book they all became friends and then their village was destroyed by the night wind, a sort of dark tornado that is controlled by a group of powerful people known as the Ancients. All that the night wind sucks up is instantly transported to a stone citadel where the Ancients live, protected by slaves they’ve mind-controlled from the villages they’ve captured. And guess what the slaves are armed with?”
“What?”
“Mind lancets.”
“Mind lancets?”
“Yep.”
“Huh.”
“I know. Anyway, the three of them have to defeat the Ancients and liberate all the villagers that have been captured. Which of course they do, in the end.”
“How do they accomplish it?”
Haly moved on and their conversation fell out of earshot.
Within hours, word of the paperback novel The Book of the Night had spread throughout the community at the Libyrinth, and speculation was running wild. Overnight, the book copying activities of the Community of the Libyrinth switched from The Book of the Night by Iscarion to the paperback novel The Book of the Night by Roger Theselaides. Everyone wanted a copy.
“Belrea, Yammon, and Iscarion were named after the characters in the book, it’s obvious. No other conclusion makes any sense,” said Nieth
in the line for breakfast.
“And the Plain of Ayor, as well?” challenged Arche.
“Yes! Clearly the Ancients adored this book, as is evidenced by it being beside the last Ancient.”
Haly sighed, got her bowl of porridge, and sat in the far corner of the dining hall, but it was little help. Everywhere Haly went, people were reading it out loud to one another, and speculating on what it meant that a book written and printed millennia ago so closely resembled events from their own world’s history.
“They called it the Corvariate Citadel because it lay enshrouded in darkness as black as a raven’s wing,” Ock read, surrounded by a little group in the Alcove of the Dog. “Clouds perpetually blotted out the sun and it was said that the darkness emanated from deep within the citadel, where the Ancients kept an orb that held all the powers of night and darkness, and it was these they used to enslave the Ayorites.”
Of course, there were some differences between their world and the one presented in the novel, but those seemed to be just as captivating to people as the similarities were.
As she passed the kitchen she heard Hepsebah reading to Burke, Vinnais, and Rossiter. “‘It’s bad luck to break a mirror,’ said Yammon.
‘Worse luck than remaining slaves of the Ancients all our lives?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Iscarion. ‘I always have bad luck anyway. What difference does it make?’
‘And I’ll get into the temple.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Yammon and Iscarion both said at the same time.
‘No. I’ll be fine. I’ll present myself at the gate as a maid of the night. They’ll be happy to have me. Once I’m inside, I’ll use this.’ She showed them the short mind lancet Iscarion had made. ‘They won’t be expecting it.’
“The three of them looked at one another. Yammon gave a heavy sigh at last, and nodded.”
“So Belrea was there when the Ancients were overthrown,” said Rossiter.
Haly stopped. She couldn’t help herself. She wished she’d never told anybody about this book. Now everyone was acting as if it was the real Book of the Night. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. “We don’t know what it means,” she said. “This book was written long before our world even existed. It’s not a history of the overthrow of the Ancients. For all we know, it’s just a coincidence.”