The Killing Moon

by N. K. Jemisin

  The old woman considered this for a moment. “You may have horses and provisions to facilitate your journey home. But take care; by coming here, you may have made yourselves an enemy of your lord.”

  He bowed over one hand to her. “We serve Hananja, Elder. Our Prince is merely Her Avatar, and as such he rules only on Her sufferance.”

  As he straightened, he remembered Eninket’s face at their last meeting: smiling, reassuring. Lying through his teeth. The rage returned—not the red, brutal rage he’d been fighting since the desert, but something cleaner and more welcome: the cold and righteous anger of a Servant of Hananja.

  Perhaps I am not wholly corrupt yet, he decided. Perhaps I can remain myself long enough to administer justice one last time. And for you, my birth-brother, that justice is long overdue.

  Seeing something of Ehiru’s thoughts in his face, the old woman’s eyes widened. But then her fear faded and she returned a slow, grim nod.

  “Then I bid you good luck, Gatherer,” she said, “and for all our sakes… good hunting.”

  31

  The Hetawa shall offer healing to all, Gujaareen and foreigner alike, believer and unbeliever. The Goddess welcomes all who dream.

  (Law)

  Nijiri heard the crowd before they walked out of the Meeting House. At first he thought it was the river, though he had already seen as they passed through the city that the river curved away to the west, disappearing into the green, mist-covered mountains in the distance. Then his ears sifted out words and phrases and shouts, and he realized the noise was voices—so many of them raised and speaking at once that the result was a monotonous roar. He could not imagine why so many people would assemble in such undisciplined chaos. No public gathering in Gujaareh was ever so loud. Was it perhaps a riot? He had heard of such things in foreign lands. Then he stepped outside, and saw.

  People: hundreds of them, possibly thousands, thronging the steps of the Meeting House and the streets and the alleys beyond it, men and women and children and elders, so many that he could not see the end of them. But when he and Ehiru emerged onto the steps of the House with Sunandi, the gabble softened, then went silent altogether. Sunandi and Ehiru stopped, and Nijiri did as well, all three finding themselves the focus of countless pairs of eyes.

  Breaths passed. Nijiri looked into the faces of the nearer crowd members and saw many things, from fear and curiosity to anger and adoration. More than anything else, he saw something that shocked and confused him, for though he had seen it many times in Gujaareh, he’d never expected to see it in a city that named Gatherers anathema. Hope. But what they wanted from Ehiru—only Ehiru, no one seemed even to notice Nijiri—he could not guess.

  Then Ehiru stepped forward, turning his hands palms open at his sides. Startled, Nijiri hastened to follow, hearing Sunandi mutter something under her breath then follow as well. When he glanced at Ehiru’s face he was stunned again, for the strain and misery of the past month had vanished from his brother’s face. He was smiling, in fact, as he continued forward into the crowd, and his expression was the one Nijiri remembered from their first meeting, years and years ago—tenderness, sternness, warmth, detachment. Peace. The crowd, seeing this, murmured and parted for him, whispering to one another.

  Then behind them Nijiri heard boots and the jangle of armor, jarring the aura of peace. He glanced around and saw that several Protectorate guardsmen had come out onto the steps, whispering anxiously to one another at the sight of the crowd. Nijiri dismissed them from his attention and focused on Ehiru instead, for he felt certain that what he was witnessing was no less than an intervention of the Goddess. Kisua had abandoned narcomancy centuries before—but respect for it, and faith in Hananja’s power, clearly still lingered in at least some small part of her ancient soul. As Ehiru’s apprentice, it was his duty to bear witness to such a momentous event.

  I do so with a glad heart. Hananja, thank You for making my brother himself again, if only for this moment.

  Then someone pushed forward from the crowd, half-dragging another figure. Ehiru stopped. Nijiri tensed, but it was only a man pulling a child along with him—a child, he realized in belated horror, who had been afflicted with some terrible crippling wrong at some point in his short life. The boy’s head lolled back on his shoulders as if he lacked the strength or control to raise it, and though his legs seemed to function, they did so poorly, lurching and wavering to such an unsteady degree that without the man’s aid he might have fallen. Worst of all, Nijiri saw that both his arms had withered, becoming tiny and useless beneath the elbow.

  “G-Gatherer, your pardon,” said the man. He wore the garb of a blacksmith and spoke such a thick dialect of Sua that Nijiri barely understood him. “My son, this is my son, will you heal him? Take my life if it will help, Gatherer, I am a loyal follower of Hananja, the healers here can do nothing for him, please—”

  As if those words had been a signal, other voices suddenly rose around them. “My mother, Gatherer, she’s dying,” called a woman—and another woman’s husband, and a soldier pointed to his missing eye, and a stooped elder begged to be sent to his wife in Ina-Karekh so that he would no longer be alone… so many. All of them, so hungry, pressing forward and extending hands in supplication. They even began to look at Nijiri: fingers plucked at his shoulders, at his robe. Someone caressed the back of his head and he started away, catching a glimpse of desperate yearning in a woman’s eyes before the crowd surged forward again and she was lost in it.

  Abruptly there were too many hands, too many pleading voices all around them, wanting, needing, desperate for more than any two Gatherers, any ten Gatherers could ever provide. Nijiri gasped as someone yanked at his robe, tearing it; on pure instinct he struck back, knocking the hand away and shifting into a guard-stance. Someone grabbed at Sunandi too, and Nijiri caught a glimpse of Sunandi’s eyes widening in alarm as she pulled away—

  “Let me see your son,” Ehiru said to the first man who had spoken.

  His voice cut across the rising din, though he had not raised it. The crowd still hushed and drew back. In the new silence, Ehiru stepped forward and took the child’s chin in his fingers, pulling the lolling head upright to examine unfocused eyes.

  “He is still himself,” the man said. His voice was thick with unshed tears. “The withering sickness came upon him years ago and destroyed his body, but he still has a mind. He is my only child.”

  “I understand,” Ehiru said, and sighed. “He can be healed, but not by me. Such a healing would require dreamseed to regenerate the muscles and nerves, and dreambile to stop any growth that has gone wrong. Surgery could be used to remove the parts of his body damaged beyond reclaim, and that would require dreamblood to banish his pain and dreamichor to replenish his strength. It would take many eightdays and there is a possibility it would not succeed completely. I have not the skill to do any of it.”

  “But you’re a Gatherer—”

  Ehiru looked up and the man’s protests died on his lips. “A Gatherer, not a Sharer. I can help him in only one way.” In the silence the words carried.

  The man caught his breath—but instead of drawing back as Nijiri expected, he reached out and caught Ehiru’s arm in a hard grip. “Then help him that way,” the man said. “My son weeps every night knowing that he can never inherit our smithy, he can never marry or care for us, his parents; he will be like this the rest of his life. He reaches the age of manhood in two years but his mother still diapers him like a babe! He feels pain with every movement! He has begged me to kill him many times, but I, I could never… the courage…” He shuddered, bowing his head and shaking it fiercely. “But if he cannot be healed—”

  Ehiru watched him for a moment, then looked at the boy. A horrible palsied movement passed through the child’s flesh, tears welling in his eyes and spilling down the sides of his face, his mouth gaping open and closed and open again. It took long painful breaths for Nijiri to realize that the twitching, frenzied movement was the child’s effort t
o nod agreement.

  Oh Goddess, how could You allow such suffering to continue? How could anyone?

  But though he had expected no answer to that prayer, he got one anyhow as Sunandi stepped forward and put a hand on Ehiru’s other wrist. “I cannot permit this,” she said. She spoke softly, her face subdued, but she did not take her hand away.

  Ehiru merely looked at her. Nijiri heard gasps from the crowd, however, and when he turned to see what had startled them he saw two of the guards coming down the steps, spears at the ready.

  “Do it, and they will kill both you and the boy’s father, Gatherer,” she said, raising her voice loud enough for the crowd to hear. Then she looked at the man, sighing. “I understand that your son suffers, but what you ask goes against every law we honor.”

  The man stared—then lunged at her, dragging the afflicted child, trying to hit her with his free hand, his face contorted with rage. The crowd cried out in collective alarm. Ehiru caught the man immediately and pulled him and the child back; Nijiri stepped in front of Sunandi to protect her. “Honor?” the man cried. “What should I honor? Do you see my son? What does the law do for him, highcaste bitch?”

  Ehiru laid a hand on the man’s chest and pushed him firmly back. “Peace,” he said—and even if Nijiri had not sensed the quicksilver flow of dreamblood between them, he would have known it by what happened next. The man caught his breath and stumbled backward, clutching his son to himself in reflex. He blinked at them with no hint of his former rage, focusing on Ehiru in stunned wonder.

  “Take your son to the Hetawa in Gujaareh,” Ehiru told him. Then he turned to Sunandi and the guards, his eyes cold with suppressed anger. “That much is permitted, is it not? Or is even a Gatherer’s advice illegal here?”

  She watched him for a long moment, and with a chill Nijiri saw that she knew what Ehiru had done to the angry man. How she knew he could not guess; perhaps it was only that she was skilled at observing others. Regardless, on her word the guards could kill Ehiru for using narcomancy—and in the process free her from the threat of the abeyance, at least until matters could be settled in Gujaareh and another Gatherer dispatched to collect her tithe. Bile rose in Nijiri’s mouth; he clenched his fists. Wicked, filthy-souled woman! he thought at her, willing her to sense his rage. If he dies, another Gatherer is right here to take your worthless life!

  But Sunandi raised a hand, gesturing for the guards to be at ease. “Advice is permissible,” she said, “though I must add that anyone who goes to Gujaareh to be healed with magic will never be permitted to return to Kisua. This has always been our law.”

  “I care nothing for your laws,” Ehiru snapped. Then he turned and started forward into the crowd again. They parted down the middle, making a path.

  Sunandi sighed, no doubt reading Ehiru’s anger in the stiff set of his broad shoulders. Nijiri threw her a glare of his own and then started after Ehiru; after a moment and one last signal to the guards, she joined him.

  “Whatever you might think,” she said in a low voice, “I stopped him to save his life.”

  Nijiri snorted. “He allowed you to stop him, to save yours.”

  “What?”

  He gestured around at the crowd, which had begun to murmur and shift, anguish and anger on many faces. “Look at these people, Speaker. They are Hananja’s faithful and they came to see Her highest Servant. If those guards had attacked him, do you think any force short of the gods themselves could have stopped their wrath?”

  She stumbled to a halt. He kept walking, too angry to care whether the crowd closed in and tore her apart in that moment. But he heard her sandals clap on the stones behind him as she jogged to catch up, and reluctantly he forced himself to think of his mother, as Ehiru had taught him. That cooled his anger, and he slowed down for her.

  “It would seem I’ve spent too many years studying foreigners and not enough with my own people,” she said, sounding chagrined. He took it for her version of an apology. “You see them more clearly than I.”

  “People everywhere are the same.”

  “All people except him.” From the corner of his eye he saw her nod toward Ehiru’s back.

  Nijiri smiled, lifting his head proudly. “True. All people except him.”

  Following along in Ehiru’s wake, they passed through the last of the crowd and returned to Sunandi’s house.

  32

  It is the sound of screaming that wakes the child Ehiru.

  For a moment he lies on his bed, listening to the chorus of his brothers’ breath and wondering if the sound is the remnant of some dream. But he dismisses that thought, for he never forgets his dreams, and just a moment before he was skimming above the greenlands near Kite-iyan. There were no screams then, just the hollow rush of the wind and the pennant-flap of his loindrapes. He remembers the tickling caress of barley hairs against his skin, the fermenting smell of hot mud in the irrigation canals, the sun on his back, the sere blue sky. In the past he has dived into the mud to see what it feels like. Once it tried to drown him, but he is a proper child of Gujaareh. He proclaimed his soulname—I AM NSHA—and took hold of the dream so that the mud became like the womb he remembers only when he is asleep, harmless and enveloping and profoundly comforting.

  But now the dream is gone and he lies in the real world, where he is just a little boy and his heart is full of sudden fear.

  He sits up; several of his brothers do the same. This is the chamber where the youngest of the Prince’s sons sleep. Tehemau has seen seven floods of the river and is oldest, but it is Ehiru to whom the other boys look. He is only five, and does not understand that they see a peculiar wisdom in him; he merely accepts it. “Goddess-touched,” their tutors call it. “Blessed with the gift,” said the priest who came to Kite-iyan a few days before to examine him. He gave Ehiru a necklace with an intriguing pendant: an ovoid of polished obsidian etched with a stylized moontear. “Before forty days have passed you shall join us,” the priest told him then. “You are a child of the Hetawa now.” Ehiru knows this is foolish. He is the child of his mother, and the father he rarely sees but loves anyhow, and perhaps this Hananja of whom he has heard so much. But he fingers the pendant now and shivers as a flicker of foreboding moves through him.

  Getting out of bed, he whispers to his brothers that they should find someplace to hide. He will go to see what is happening. Tehemau insists on accompanying him, mostly to save face. Ehiru nods even though Tehemau wets the bed and sometimes, after a nightmare, weeps like an infant. Ehiru wishes one of their older brothers were here—Eninket, who is kind and knows the best stories, or perhaps the warrior Tiyesset. But Tehemau’s presence will be a comfort, at least.

  He and Tehemau slip into the corridor and run from one drape and flowering vase to another. Ahead is the solarium where usually they can find several of their mothers lounging on couches and cushions, chatting or playing dicing games, drawing letters or checking over figuring scrolls. A place of busy peace. Instead they find the aftermath of chaos—tables and couches overturned, cushions thrown to the floor, dice scattered. Tehemau starts to call out for his mother and Ehiru shushes him instinctively. They hear another scream nearby, followed by something stranger—sharp men’s voices, deeper and rougher than those of the eunuchs who normally serve in the Prince’s springtime palace. The palace guards are never allowed inside unless their father has come to visit. Is that what has happened? But if so then why do the men sound angry?

  They peer around the corner and see:

  Two of their mothers lie on the floor, unmoving, their fine clothing dark with spreading blood. Another cringes on a couch nearby, nearly gibbering as she asks why why why? The soldiers ignore her. They are arguing among themselves. One of them wants to spare her—“long enough to enjoy”—but the others are insisting that they follow orders. The argument ends abruptly when one of the men spits on the floor and thrusts his sword through the mother’s throat. She stops gibbering and stares at him in surprise, blood bubbling over her
lips. Then she sags backward.

  Tehemau screams. The soldiers see them.

  Tehemau gets farther than Ehiru because his legs are longer. One soldier grabs Ehiru by his sidelock and yanks him backward so hard that his vision blurs; he cries out and falls. Fear slows all that follows. Through a haze of pain-tears he sees another soldier tackle Tehemau to the ground, cursing as the boy struggles wildly. When the soldier draws his knife it catches light from the colored lanterns. So does Tehemau’s blood, arcing forth and spreading over the marble after the soldier draws the knife across his throat.

  Ehiru does not cry out—not even when the soldier dragging him stops and draws his own knife. It curves gracefully upward, casting blurred rainbows like the Dreaming Moon.

  “Wait,” says one of the other men, catching the hand that holds the knife.

  “I thought you wanted a woman?” laughs the one that holds Ehiru.

  “No, look.” The soldier points and another makes an exclamation of surprise and Ehiru knows that they have seen the Hetawa’s pendant dangling around his neck.

  “Take him to the captain,” says the first. The one holding him sheathes his knife and hauls Ehiru up by his hair.

  “Try to escape and I’ll kill you anyway,” he says. Ehiru hears but does not respond. His eyes are locked on Tehemau, who has stopped moving now. Tehemau has wet himself again, Ehiru notices. Through the fear he feels sorrow, for wherever his soul has gone now, Tehemau is probably ashamed.

  The soldiers drag Ehiru through the corridors where his mothers’ talk and music once echoed, intermingled with his siblings’ chatter and play. Now the corridors are filled with the sounds and smells of death. The scenes drift past slowly, like so many minstrel plays. In the corridor he sees several of his oldest brothers dead. Tiyesset lies facedown among them with a broken lantern pole in his hands, a warrior to the end. As they pass the atrium garden Ehiru can hear strange grunting sounds; through the leaves he sees one of his mothers struggling beneath a soldier who is hurting, but not killing, her. Ehiru’s soldiers see this and resume their bickering as they drag him along. They pass one of the girls’ sleeping chambers and there Ehiru sees many bodies. It was their screaming that woke Ehiru and his brothers.