“How?”
“By talking about it, cousin. By Ohrmazd, we are riding a giant sea turtle.”
Ashtadukht pointedly did not look at him. “I don’t think there’s anything to discuss. What would you have me do? Ask it to drop us off at the next continent?”
“If that is plausible,” he replied. “Or separate continents if you would prefer.”
“Don’t you—” She put her hand on her knee and lifted herself up as if she were her own crane. “Don’t you make me out to be the—”
She happened to be a pretty shoddy crane. Her knees locked for a second before bending under her own weight such that she fell into him.
He supported her, taking her weight like he used to, before she pushed him away. Ashtadukht wanted to cry into his chest. Not like some sobbing little girl, but like a woman who, with every moon, woke to feel less and less herself. As if someone else were moving in, and her powerless to do anything but carry on in its destructive wake—and only because it wanted her around to see the nadirs she’d reach.
She wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She backed away, giving her legs an ultimatum: that they’d listen or she’d chop them off. That seemed to do the trick.
Tirdad regarded her gently, something he hadn’t done in weeks; not where she could see it, anyway. “Would it hurt to ask? Not necessarily different continents, but somewhere with civilization. Somewhere we can . . . recover. We were not made for this.”
Ashtadukht caught his meaning. He might have worded it carefully, but he was referring to her alone. She fought the snarl that wanted dearly to find her expression and turned to face the ocean. “I’ve already tried talking to it. The beast ignored me. I don’t think it could give—”
She squinted. Her eyes had begun to fool her during her time on the island, and they were worse in daylight. Whatever obstructed the vague zone where the water met the sky was blurry beyond identification. But it was most definitely there, obstructing.
“What’s that ahead of us?” she asked, pointing.
“Vessels.”
“Like vases or rhytons?” Ashtadukht said it without thinking, and the pause that followed gave the grimace that eventually found her face ample time to screw it up.
“No, like ships,” Tirdad eventually clarified. “Either one normal-sized ship and a fleet of miniatures, or one very large ship leading a fleet of common vessels.”
“Is it coming our way?” she asked, making a concentrated effort to force her eyes to focus.
“Directly. It is, well, cousin . . . I think it is the Dourboat.”
“That’s just some imaginary whim of hers,” Ashtadukht retorted, skeptical but not entirely convinced. “I’ve never heard of it before she brought it up.”
“Well,” said Tirdad, “it has lips, maybe barnacled. It is opening and closing them like a salmon. And between, you would not think I could see it so far away, but there is this eerie-looking emptiness. Reminds me of a sinkhole. Sure feels dour.”
When the fleet drew near enough for her to pick out details, she realized his description was wanting; he’d never really had much of an imagination. The salmon analogy only went as far as the repeated opening and closing. She likened it to the flapping jowls of an ornate barnacle king. Feather-like cirri bedecked its maw and undulated in anticipation of a meal. She found herself wondering whether a barnacle could be fleshy; she’d seen barnacles, and they were anything but.
That train of thought fell to the terrible opening, or sinkhole as Tirdad had put it. She figured his description fit. It did give the impression of having once been solid then, after the pressure of existing between those foul lips, having collapsed in on itself. All that remained was this mysterious gullet that persuaded you to avoid wondering where it exited.
“I guess that could be the Dourboat,” Ashtadukht reluctantly surrendered. “And the smaller boats?”
“They look like mites.”
“It sure seems large,” she said at length, noting how it got more imposing as it neared. This wasn’t an issue of perspective but of her having a more reliable means of comparison than the accompanying fleet. The tangle of its unbalanced and too-many masts skimmed the bottom of the clouds, giving the general impression that it was about half as large as the island turtle.
It slowed to a crawl, and its jaw slackened so drastically that it trailed to one side behind the rest of the mouth. And even though it should have cleanly caught a wealth of sunlight, none made it past those terrible lips. Ashtadukht took a step back.
Shkarag’s ominous muttering came to her, and she recalled it in a whisper. “All the things will flood, the šo-wretched Dourboat will appear with its too-many masts, it’ll part its barnacled lips, and you’ll all wish you had—”
The half-div had been interrupted by a dry heave then, which made the delirious portent all the more frightening. To think it’d amused her at the time. Ashtadukht had a feeling those missing words had something to do with wishing you’d never been born. It was more than the appearance of the thing. It emanated horror, took her apart and inserted it between the seams as it pieced her back together.
“We’re done for,” she said, trembling and grabbing at her head. “It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming.”
She sucked in great gulps of air, afraid each would escape if she wasn’t firm with it. The turtle accelerated in reverse—or she suspected it did anyway, because the world rushed past in a blur. Her palms bleated like mad goats at her head, tried to steal her brain from her skull.
A dreadful baying erupted, which to her surprise, didn’t belong to her. Or it did, and those bleating hands—her traitorous hands!—had succeeded in their robbery. Trees careened past. Her hair buffeted her face. The single plait she’d bothered with made her wish she hadn’t.
“Give it back!” she demanded. “Give me back!”
A piece of debris did her that favour by colliding with her head. It bowled her over, and the damage would probably need to be sewn shut, but she felt herself again. As far as she was concerned, that was all that mattered.
It turned out the baying, which went on like the ceaseless complaint of a tiny injured mutt, belonged not to her but the Dourboat. It had intimidated an ongoing gale into its madness-dark hull, and in doing so ripped trees and boulders from the shell of the turtle.
Tirdad lay on top of her, doing what he could to keep them both from flying off.
“What is it doing?” he shouted above the din, one arm around her, the other secured to what he hoped was a sturdy root.
“Eating?” she ventured bitterly, not bothering to raise her voice where he could hear it. “How should I know?”
The gale came to a close, leaving in its wake the rustling, creaking, and crying of an ecosystem disturbed to its core. Ashtadukht looked on listlessly as the Dourboat shuttered its pitch black maw. She didn’t want to get up. Neither her body nor her mind approved, so she lay there and prayed the worst was over, not really expecting that to be the case.
“It seems to be chewing,” Tirdad observed.
“Seems so,” she verified, watching its barnacle-laden hull move as if volatile gases fought to escape.
“I do not like this.”
“And here I thought you pined for it.”
Her remark took a moment to register before Tirdad climbed off of her, grunting and mumbling to himself. “I saved you,” he said. “You would have been blown away.”
“Thanks,” she limply replied.
“You could at least sound grateful.”
“Thanks,” she said with a sarcastic croon.
Her eyelids fell as fatigue rushed in to fill the lull. The instant they closed a thunderous boom sounded, a boom of the sort that would have people sticking their heads out windows and pondering its origin the world over. It was the boom a dog might make if its bark were a supervolcano.
She observed, in an equilibrium of startled half-sleep, as a plume of detritus was vented from the Dourboat’s mouth. The gritty-
looking smoke unfurled, and from those heavy billows soared objects it had sucked from the island. Trees impaled the shell. Boulders left craters. All slathered in muck, they exploded where they hit, leaving swathes of sizzling, stinking acid.
Ashtadukht knew its more subtle characteristics because the bole of some corrupted tree had lodged itself in the hill a few feet away. She didn’t even think to take cover until it popped.
She recoiled and threw herself into a roll down the hill. She’d reacted too slowly to avoid much of the blast, but the tumble got rid of most of the muck. When she came to a stop, she hurriedly pulled off her tunic and trousers. What little was left of them sizzled loudly, threw a putrid smell, and was quickly reduced to a gooey mass.
Her stomach burned.
“Damn Nasu-kissing—fuck!” she cursed, untying her sacred girdle and peeling off her sacred shirt, taking a layer of skin with it. “Fuck,” she moaned. “Fuck, fuck. Inhuming, menstrual-bathing—fuck!”
She instinctively hugged her abdomen, which sloughed away a layer of flesh, and cried out once more.
Doubled-over in a sustained wince, she examined it miserably, her hands hovering over the site. She whined, doing her utmost to hold in her tears. The acid had also wreaked havoc on her upper back, where the agony flared with even greater intensity.
Tirdad rushed over, and she was so seized up in pain that she didn’t even bother covering her breasts. “By Ohrmazd,” he said, kneeling to examine her.
“Don’t touch it!” she hissed.
“I will not, cousin. I promise.” He took her forearms and gingerly pulled them to her sides. “You managed to avoid the brunt of it. Should see what it did to the hill. I cannot do anything about the pain, though; all of our supplies are gone.”
“Kill me,” she said through gritted teeth. “Kill me now.”
“I know it hurts, cousin. It looks dreadful. Maybe we can find some—”
She took him by the throat, locked a desperate stare on his, and reached down to extract his sword. “Take this and end it. Please.”
He placed his hand over hers, halting the blade in its scabbard. “You will be fine. Just bear with it. I know you have been through much worse.”
The turtle lurched, throwing them both to the ground. Ashtadukht arched her back and recoiled away from the pain of the impact where it hit her exposed flesh. She rolled onto her side just in time to watch the sea turtle lift its head triumphantly, the Dourboat trapped between its mighty jaws. Wood, which must’ve held the ship together somewhere under its armour of barnacles, creaked and complained. It was the dreadful sort of creaking reserved for a lone sentry atop a wooden tower with orders to stay the night. A sinister creaking.
The Dourboat flared its feathery cirri; it parted its tenebrous, barnacled maw. Its too-many masts broke off like brittle icicles. The turtle’s bite broke its armour, and it was as if ten-thousand clay jars had been shattered at once.
The sound carried with pristine clarity, accompanied by the Dourboat’s pathetic baying. Its hull buckled, and the sea turtle tossed it aside like some dismantled toy. It bore down upon the remainder of the fleet as if it were nothing, swimming through and demolishing the mite-like vessels in the process.
“Well,” said Tirdad.
Ashtadukht eased herself up, and only because it put less pressure on her burning torso. “Well,” she muttered, before passing out.
• • • • •
Ashtadukht awoke feeling more comfortable than she should have, sloughed flesh or not. Carefully, she patted her abdomen. It felt tender but not unpleasant.
She blinked. She was cosseted by the beneficent shade thrown by thousands of shoots, each larger than the most mighty cypress, and each different from the next. She recognized the arrangement immediately. There was no mistaking it.
“The Tree of All Seeds,” she said softly, and even her deadened love of all things marvellous stirred where the carrion birds had once torn it apart.
All plant life originated there: shrubs, myrtles, dates, poplars, tulips, cotton, saffron—everything. The great Senmurw would take flight, encouraging the shoots to grow, and when it alighted the shoots would be detached. From there, the Chamrosh bird would collect the seeds and deliver them to Tishtar, who is the mighty general of the eastern stars and rival of the drought-bringing div, Aposh. Tishtar would then nourish those seeds with life-giving water and rain them upon the world.
Ashtadukht recalled this from her archives of such mystifying legends in the way she would have decades ago. A remnant of the person she had once been marvelled. Only a remnant.
The rest of her, the jaded star-reckoner wondered when they would fall.
Then, as if walking a hierarchal path of legend, her mind registered where exactly the Tree of All Seeds grew.
“Mount Alborz,” she whispered, drawing her gaze beyond the tree to the mountain of mountains, the estate of the clouds, and the axis around which the heavens revolved, the World Mountain central to all of the Earth.
“It is really something,” Tirdad said from her side. “I still cannot believe it. I mean, I have always believed in it. But to be here at its base. Incredible.”
Ashtadukht had faint memories of oscillating consciousness: of soaring over the open sea, of a tightness in and around her chest, and of debilitating pain. Boundless nothing followed, then a feeling of being outside herself. She knitted her brow. She distinctly remembered ambling along while Nasu assailed her. And feebly trying to swat them off. As far as divs were concerned, Ashtadukht had always ranked Nasu among the worst to deal with. They’d buzz about the corpses of the recently departed like reptilian flies with all the wrong proportions, seeking to contaminate souls on the way to the afterlife. The whole affair had always given her the impression of being worse than it seemed to an outsider. Having experienced it firsthand, she would rather have been wrong.
“What happened?” she asked, peering through the branches of the Tree of All Seeds to the summit of Mount Alborz, where it pierced the heavens. She figured they must have been well out of range of civilization, because something so massive would have been visible from Hrom to Iran.
“I think . . . I think you died,” Tirdad replied with some difficulty. “I am sorry. Your injuries were more severe than I thought. The acid had eaten through your back and—” He shook his head. “It must have been agonizing. I should have believed you.”
“I died?” She recalled the Nasu, how they buzzed so vexingly in her ear. How they sought to defile her spirit.
“I think so.”
“I died?” she asked again, and found herself resenting the past tense she employed. When a person dies, it’s common decency for them to stay dead. “If I died, why am I here?”
“The Chamrosh rescued us on its way back to the Tree.”
“That doesn’t explain why—”
A voice like the noble, spirited face of the sun cast its warmth on the conversation. “Your friend, he vouched for you.”
“Huh?” Ashtadukht turned to face what was without a doubt the Senmurw of legend: dog-headed, with the magnificent prismatic plumage of a peacock curled around the body of a raptor. And here, where tradition placed it.
The Senmurw inclined its head. “Ohrmazd shine upon you.”
“And you,” Ashtadukht responded mechanically.
She swallowed, but the lump in her throat was intransigent. Next to the Senmurw, the Chamrosh sat on its canine haunches, quietly sizing her up with the intelligent scrutiny of a bird. This bothered her principally because it was praised for plucking the enemies of Iran during their march to attack and dropping them into the sea. Considering she’d fled the uprising, she wasn’t entirely sure where she stood as far as enemies of Iran were concerned.
It was the sort of anxiety one feels when approached by an agent of a Supreme Judge: dredging up anything you’ve ever done that might be construed as incriminating, wondering which you’d be arrested for, and searching for an escape route or slippery explanation.
The Senmurw indicated Tirdad with talons like swords. “He argued with passion, this man. Loves you intensely.”
Tirdad coughed and diverted his gaze.
“Claimed you were special. ‘Well,’ I responded, ‘I cannot go around bestowing a feather upon every person who is dead or near death. Special or not.’ But he would not have it. Do you know how he convinced me?”
“Uh.” Ashtadukht glanced at her cousin. He was doing his utmost to avoid eye contact, giving the sand at his feet an uncomfortable glare. But he clearly dared not push his luck with the Senmurw any further, who pressed on.
“Claimed I had to. The nerve. I said to myself, I said, ‘Senmurw, this man, he had better be right persuasive to be so bold as to tell you something must be done.’ Cham here wanted him in the ocean.”
“Drown the ne’er-do-wells!” squawked the Chamrosh. It took a step forward, pawing at the sand. “Drown ‘em in the endless sea!”
Ashtadukht shrunk away, positioning herself behind Tirdad. She hugged her chest and wished she weren’t cuffless.
“But this man,” the Senmurw continued after giving the Chamrosh a conciliating pat. “This man argued that your dead body would contaminate a place of such purity. Defile it. So I said, ‘Hmm.’ And Truth be revered, your corpse would be like a single grain in the Lut: insignificant.
“A grain nonetheless, he told me. A smear. I reckoned he had a point, and I thought, ‘This man, he retorts with passion yet refuses to stray from the Truth in his cause. No attempt at lying.’ And I supposed it would be wrong to allow the Lie a triumph in this place, so I bestowed a feather upon him, to use as he wished.”
Ashtadukht caught a breath in her throat. The feather of a Senmurw had real power, and was traditionally only given to heroes who’d been of some great help to the creature.
She fixed her stare on Tirdad. “You brushed me with it. You healed me.”
He grunted. “What else would I have done with it?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, frustrated by his squandering something so rare. “Whatever you please? You wasted it! You—” She looked away. “You could’ve put it to much better use.”
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 23