Last King of Osten Ard 02 - Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  For a moment Tzoja paused, overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the task. How could she, a mere mortal, hope to help this ageless creature? But if she did not, she was only another useless slave, and Viyeki had told her many times about the Fields of the Nameless.

  She traced down the length of the queen’s hip. It was unutterably strange to realize that the Mother of All was no larger than Tzoja herself—a little taller, perhaps, but more slender, with fine bones that might have belonged to some soaring bird of the air.

  At last she put her hands under the covering, struggling hard to keep from shaking as she touched the queen’s skin. She did not know what to expect and half-feared to discover something terrible, scales like a serpent or the damp stickiness of an earthworm, but instead she felt nothing stranger than a woman’s body, thin but not fleshless, the skin dry and cool. She put her fingers against the stomach and pressed gently, searching for inflamed organs, but found nothing she could call unusual, and the queen did not seem to feel pain at any of her probing.

  “I . . . I do not find anything clearly wrong,” she said at last. “And in any case, I must gather herbs before I can help you, Great Queen. I had no physic garden in Nakkiga—it has been long since I practiced any healing—and it is late in the year, but there are still things I might find that could help ease your pain.”

  You have permission. The second thought was sharper. You will be accompanied by a guard at all times.

  “And there are . . . other things I need too.” Tzoja’s heart was still rabbiting. She could not have imagined this day, this moment, even in her maddest dreams. “I need fluids of the body, to examine.” She swallowed. “Fluids of your body, Majesty.”

  My Anchoresses will provide them to you. Help me and you will be rewarded. Fail me and you will be a long time in sorrow.

  Tzoja jerked her hand away as though it had been burned, then forced herself to reach back toward the queen’s body again, willing her hands to stop trembling, wondering if the queen could glimpse her every thought. Like God she thought. As they say about God, that He sees everything, knows everything . . .

  “I have it!” said a voice just behind her, speaking out loud, frightening Tzoja so badly she almost fell forward against the queen. “It has ripened! Oh, see it! Great-Great-Grandmother will be so pleased, she will surely give me more—”

  Jijibo! Silence! The queen’s angry thought crashed through Tzoja’s head like a clap of thunder, dropping her onto her knees, her skull throbbing.

  “But you cannot be wrathful with your dutiful grandchild!” the newcomer burbled. “Look, the last one has ripened! It is as beautiful as blood!”

  Out, mortal. There was no question this was meant for her. Tzoja scrambled to her feet, desperately trying to remember where the door of the wagon was. She felt someone brush past her and smelled the strangest combination of scents she could remember, peach blossoms and spoiled meat and the sour tang of blood, all suffused with a cloying perfume that would not have been out of place on a slave-whore chosen from the lowest pens. Jijibo, she finally realized, her thoughts chaotic and slow. The new arrival must be the queen’s descendant, the one that the Hidden had told her was their savior, or at least their master, the Dreaming Lord.

  Fumbling, she found her way to the door only to be met there by another body, an Anchoress who must have come at the queen’s silent call. For a moment they tangled in the doorway and Tzoja’s mask was knocked askew. The Anchoress roughly pushed her through the door; as she stumbled over the high threshold the mask fell off, tugging the blindfold down far enough that one of Tzoja’s eye was uncovered. She fell to her knees again, scrabbling on the floor of the wagon for the mask, her thoughts full of terror. She found it and lifted it to her face, but as she did a sound made her turn.

  The door had been left open, and a lurch of the wagon had made it swing wider. For an instant Tzoja saw the inner room whole, frozen in a single moment, like one of the religious paintings she had seen in northern churches.

  A blind, masked Anchoress was helping the queen to sit up on her cot, Utuk’ku wound in her sheet like a corpse, all of her hidden but the masked head. A strange, tatterdemalion figure was on its knees beside her, holding out something that gleamed pink-orange like a sunset sky. It was a fruit, round and scarcely larger than a fat plum, and it seemed to glow with a light of its own.

  Tzoja pulled the mask back over her face, then turned and crawled as swiftly as she could away from the queen’s retiring room and down the passage that ran the length of the wagon, feeling the great wheels bumping below her, grinding everything beneath them as they turned. Another Anchoress lifted her to her feet and led her away, and it was all gone again as swiftly as a dream.

  * * *

  Cuff the Scaler spent his days dragging heavy broken stones across the ruins of Naglimund and his nights in a muddy pit with the rest of the slaves. It was hard to sleep while the dying moaned and the living wept, but every night his exhaustion quickly dragged him down into slumber.

  And every night he dreamed.

  Ever since his foundling childhood, the only thing Cuff could do better than anyone else had been to climb. His legs were short but strong and his arms were as long and powerful as those of Brother Aart, the abbey’s blacksmith. As a child, when Cuff made mistakes and people grew angry with him, he would run away and climb to the rooftops. Later, as he grew bigger, he would climb the guard towers, or even onto the high walls of the keep. Sometimes he would linger in the high places for hours while the priests or others he had offended followed him from building to building, shouting up at him to come down and be punished. At last kind Father Siward had recognized that Cuff’s exceptional skill was God’s gift—“a gift to someone who has not many others” the priest said—and urged people to give the young man tasks that suited his abilities. Soon Cuff was fixing roof tiles on the fortress or thatches in the town below, ringing the bells in St. Cuthbert’s steeple, and chasing pigeons and rooks from the statues of the saints that decorated the outside of the church. “Scaler,” the people began to call him, and every time he heard that name it made him proud, just as Brother Aart the smith was proud, or Brother Girth the wheelwright: it meant he had work of his own, that he was doing what God meant him to do.

  Cuff was strong, too, with hands toughened by his climbing and fingers that could grasp a branch or the edge of a roof like an owl’s claws and not let go. Sometimes the soldiers in the fortress towers would give him a walnut so he could crack it between his thumb and one finger. They even made wagers with other soldiers who had never seen the trick. Cuff worried a little that making wagers might be against God, so he didn’t tell Father Siward about it, but he was always pleased to show what he could do. It was good to have friends, even if they teased him sometimes and called him names when he did something wrong. He did not blame them for getting angry. He knew his thoughts were slow and his tongue did not always work the way it should. He had been named after the abbey when he was a foundling; Father Siward always said the name was inspired because Cuthbert was the patron of the lame and the halt. But even when he grew, Cuff could never say the saint’s name properly, though it was his own name, too. He pronounced it as “Cuffer” because his mouth wouldn’t make all the sounds, and “Cuff” was even easier.

  Cuff had not always been happy, but his life had seemed useful. He had believed he understood what God wanted of him, and that he could do it, and even be welcomed into Heaven someday. He had believed all these things . . . until the demons with white faces had attacked his home, killed his friends, and made him a slave.

  And every night as he slept shivering on the damp ground, he dreamed—but not of happier times, which would at least have been a kind of escape. Instead he dreamed that someone was calling him—summoning him. The dreams had begun before Naglimund fell, but now, like a river that had overflowed its banks, the dreams had become a roaring flood from the moment his eyes clo
sed until they opened again. And they were always much the same—a voice out of darkness, a woman’s voice, calling him to come, begging him to come to her. “You are needed,” she told him, night after night. “We are waiting for you.” But day after day he woke in a muddy pit, still a prisoner of the white-faced demons, unable to go anywhere except back and forth between the ruined church and the growing mountain of rubble he and the others had hauled away. But the dreams never left him now, even when he was awake, and though Cuff thought slowly, when he began to think of something, it was hard for him to stop.

  Could it be holy Mother Elysia he heard, calling him to Heaven? Cuff told the other slaves about his dreams, begged them to explain what the voice meant, but no one could tell him. Some only stared at him, and some were angry. They were all slowly dying, beaten, overworked, and starving, enslaved by the heartless creatures who had destroyed their homes and murdered their kin. Many of them would have given much to dream Cuff’s dreams—to have any hope at all.

  * * *

  It seemed there was no escaping Shun’y’asu, Viyeki admitted to himself. The poet of Blue Spirit Peak had written:

  Be wary of charity

  If you give a starving child a crust of bread

  Soon you may feel pity for the servants who fail

  To remember the scented oils for your bath.

  You may stop beating your slaves

  When they look on you without love.

  All that is good will totter and fall

  Because of a crust

  He had always assumed the short poem to be merely ironic: Shun’y’asu’s sympathy for Nakkiga’s lower castes was one of the foremost reasons that his work had been forbidden by the Hamakha Clan. But now Viyeki thought perhaps there was more truth to the poet’s words than he had ever guessed. Because once an exception is allowed, he thought, how can the others be kept out? How can you ever stop?

  Viyeki suppressed an unmagisterial sigh and raised his hand. “Nonao,” he told his secretary, “tell the foreman to stop beating that mortal slave.”

  Nonao shouted the command and the Builder foreman turned with a look of anger on his face, but as soon as he saw the High Magister watching from the stairs the foreman dropped the rod and fell to his knees, pressing his forehead against the damp ground.

  Viyeki made his way down, moving at a pace commensurate with his station. The first part of the work had gone swiftly, the engineers needing less than two days with their hammers and grapples to bring down the shell of the mortal temple, which now lay in mounds of scattered rubble. But Viyeki knew that clearing it away would not go as swiftly, and all the stone would have to be removed before his Builders could begin digging down to the old structure beneath the ground. Even the addition of a few hundred mortal slaves could only speed things so much—most of them were women, children, or old men— and Viyeki could feel the queen’s impending arrival with the same trepidation as a farmer before harvest watching an approaching storm.

  But it must be done. The Mother of All does not share Shun’y’asu’s sympathies. She will not hesitate to execute us all if she is displeased.

  He reached the place where the foreman still kneeled. The slave he had been beating was a male, apparently healthy and strong, though he cowered now with his hands over his head. Few mortal males of any age were still alive, and Viyeki thought it would be a shame to lose another. “What happened here?” he asked.

  The foreman rose to a crouch but would not meet the High Magister’s eye. “A thousand apologies, my lord, but this one, this slave, he talks to the others. He distracts them, and for all I know he incites them against us.”

  “Do not let them kill him, great lord!” begged one of the other slaves, a woman. “He does not understand, that is all. He is simple-minded.”

  Viyeki’s command of the mortal tongue was not good enough to understand all her pleading, but he recognized the words “understand” and “simple” and reasoned out the rest. He looked down on the slave who had been beaten, who was now peering up at him between his fingers.

  “What is his name?” he asked the woman.

  “Cuff, my lord. That is what everyone calls him. He is simple-minded. He means no harm.”

  Viyeki waved away the explanation and examined the huddled figure. The slave had long, strong arms, but as he slowly lowered his hands, Viyeki could see the shape of his face and his confused look, and knew he had understood the woman rightly.

  “Cuff,” said Viyeki. “That is your name?”

  The slave nodded his head rapidly, his overstretched smile revealing several missing teeth. “Cuff,” he repeated. His tongue was too large for his mouth, his speech slurred and awkward. “Cuff the Scaler. That’s true! Cuff is a good boy.” And then suddenly, before Viyeki, his secretary, or the foreman could do anything to stop him, the slave scrambled over and threw his arms around Viyeki’s legs, prostrating himself at the magister’s feet. “Don’t hurt Cuff. I work hard! Hard!”

  The foreman hurried over to drag the slave off him, but it was too late—Viyeki’s magisterial robes were smeared with mud. The foreman dragged the offender away and threw him to the ground. The slave lay on his back, weeping now, arms and legs curled protectively above him like a dying insect. The foreman pulled a sharp-bladed adze from his belt and looked to the high magister for permission to dispatch him.

  “Work hard!” the slave cried in a long, agonized whine.

  For thousands of years the Hikeda’ya had routinely disposed of such misfits whenever they were born, defending the queen’s sacred blood and the purity of their race as it had come out of the Garden. But now they lived in a different age—Hikeda’ya nobles were encouraged to mate with mortals, and halfbloods like Viyeki’s own daughter were to be the salvation of the people. The great certainties with which he had been raised were tottering, just as Shun’y’asu had said, and Viyeki knew that he was one of those who had helped weaken the foundations. Perhaps the poet, for all the talk of his treasonous sympathies with outcasts, had seen truths that had eluded the Hamakha nobles themselves—even the queen. Once the gate of pity had been opened, no matter how narrowly, it could not easily be closed again.

  Where will it end? Viyeki could not imagine. But he also knew he had only a short time until the queen herself would come, and he needed every slave he had been able to save from the vengeance of Kikiti’s Sacrifices.

  “We must keep healthy, strong slaves like this one when we can,” he told the foreman. “Let him work by himself, where his babble will not distract the others.” The foreman looked at him in surprise for a single unguarded moment, but quickly composed his face to reflect only obedience.

  “As you say, High Magister.” The foreman tucked the long-handled adze back into his belt, then grabbed the slave roughly by the arm and led him away to a pile of rubble far from where the other mortals were working. He indicated by gestures and slaps to the slave’s head and shoulders what he was to do.

  “The mortals are animals,” said Nonao as the other slaves turned back to their work. “Worse than animals. Look, the creature has covered your gown with dirt, my lord.”

  “We must all make sacrifices for the greater good,” said Viyeki. “For the race. For the Garden that birthed us.”

  “I hear the queen in your voice,” his secretary replied, but he did not sound entirely convinced.

  Because of a crust, Viyeki thought, and cursed poetry.

  * * *

  After the terrible day when her blindfold slipped, Tzoja’s sleep was fitful and filled with nightmares, but time passed and the queen did not summon her again. Either the Hikeda’ya did not know what she had seen or they did not care.

  The only advantage of being a slave, she thought. Not important enough to notice. She prayed it would continue that way.

  She had not even told Vordis what had occurred, but her friend had sensed her fea
r when she returned and had comforted her. “We all are frightened when we first wait upon the Mother of All,” the blind woman said. “Do not let it haunt you. It will pass. Soon it will be second nature.”

  Tzoja could not imagine such a thing ever being second nature, but she was content to have fallen away from the queen’s notice. She would have been happy to be forgotten entirely. That did not happen, however.

  On perhaps the fourth or fifth day after she had attended the queen, one of the Queen’s Teeth appeared at the wagon and made it known by signs that he had come only for Tzoja. Frightened, not certain whether she was being taken back to the queen or for summary execution, she moved as helplessly as in one of her evil dreams, letting herself be lifted onto the hard saddle of the guard’s horse like a bundle of rags. The sky was high and bright, with a stiff breeze blowing, and as the guard shook the reins and the horse started away Tzoja looked all around, wondering if this would be the last time she would see the sky. The snow had stopped falling, though the mountains looming in the northeast were capped in white, and she wondered without really caring where they were now. They must have crossed over into the lands of mortal men by now—that seemed obvious—but where? How far away was the place where Valada Roskva and the Astalines had taken her in, half a lifetime ago? Had any of those women survived? Perhaps they had rebuilt the settlement after the Skalijar left. She hoped so, fervently. It would make it a little easier to die if she could think that somewhere Roskva’s followers still lived, still worked and laughed and shared what they had.

  She was terrified at the prospect of seeing the queen again, but when the guard steered his horse away from the great train of wagons, a colder feeling stole over her. So it was to be death, then. She was to be taken out and killed. Back in Nakkiga they would have thrown her into the Fields of the Nameless. Out here her bones would be gnawed by animals, lashed by rain, and scattered over the cold ground until nothing was left but white shards.