The insurrectionist turns still. “Empress,” she says and her voice is as uninflected as the sky’s hum. “I do not love on command, and neither will I hate on the same.”
“Are you a child, to be contrarian for the sake of it?” But Narasorn laughs, the sound of a wave striking shore. “What you do requires passion, and hate is easier to instigate than love. I want you to destroy Kaiyakesi.”
Sanhi touches the folded cranes gently, careful not to crush the beaks or the wings. “I can anticipate why you might wish for this. But I am not one of your beasts and you will not tame me. I am not clay and you will not shape me.”
“If I cannot motivate you with spite then I will offer you a reward. Do what I ask and I’ll return you to the day my soldiers took you. You’ll have been absent not for a year or fifty, but for at most an hour.”
The insurrectionist steps forward. The Rosette’s roof is steep and high, built to invite a death of plummet and impact. “What makes you think that is reward for me, recompense enough for what you did? There is a chain called tyranny, and most governments form its links. My life is devoted to destroying that and there’s no shortage of them remaining. I need not return to that time. I can go on, doing as I did before; if I am bereft of my past allies, new ones can be found. I will rebuild. I will become, and I will not be deterred or removed.”
“Your ideals are noble. But it was all just practice, wasn’t it?” Narasorn pursues the insurrectionist, though her gauntleted hands do not yet reach out to pull Sanhi away from the edge. “Onsakit was the real thing, the city of your birth, the one you wanted to free from its despots above all else. First, though, you had to make a name for yourself, become familiar with the rules of engagement. You got better each time—the first minor domains were disastrous, Honghu was a shambles for a long time, but Bussaba-Morrakot was nearly perfect. You uprooted the theocrats, replaced them with thinkers and those with a mind for truth. Onsakit was going to be your triumph, not only prosperous but just. Zheng Husin at your left, Lenenha at your right, and together you’d have created a system that sustained itself; that would be proof to corruption and avarice. That was your dream, your life’s desire.”
“What,” Sanhi says quietly, “did they believe happened to me? I see Yenseret magistrates riding high here, Yenseret traders in our prestige markets. Husin’s and Lenenha’s jars are left to beetles and ants in the Rosette, unhonored. Unguarded, for I could remove them as I liked.”
Narasorn gestures down at the red courtyard, the red streets, the walls of horn and claw. “Yenseret propagated the lie that you sold your own city—found a believable double to act as you, actually. The truth, of course, was that they anticipated the rebellion and thought it the perfect moment to annex Onsakit. Zheng Husin, I hear, cursed your name as they quartered her.”
Sanhi’s hands shake, clench; this too Narasorn takes note. “And Lenenha?”
“Who knows? I give you two choices: to return to that day and reroute history, or to avenge Onsakit. Kaiyakesi remains ascendant. Yenseret is most careful to give us excellent trade privileges, but it’s nothing to me to crush them.”
“What proof do I have that you did not engineer Yenseret’s invasion?”
“You could ask their governor.” Narasorn’s head sways side to side, the rhythm of a fascinated snake. “She is not obliged to truth. You could find accounts of what happened, if you care to take the time. Everything I have said you may verify, including—doubtless—Zheng Husin’s rage for you as she died.”
The roof is built to invite that certain urge. That death of plummet and impact. Blood on red pavement, Sanhi thinks. It’ll be all be the same. “Or I could take the third option.” She thinks of nothing at all and takes the final step. Fear vanishes. Falling is easy—
* * *
This time the empress pins the insurrectionist to the beast, gauntlets on arms delicate from a year of deprivation. The royal face is gray and damp with sweat, the royal breath labored. “I will not allow you the third choice.”
Sanhi looks into Narasorn’s eyes. “I wasn’t going to jump, Empress. I meant only to suggest that I’ve a way out that you may not control.”
“In another moment you would have taken the leap. In another trajectory of events, you took that step and you shattered on the courtyard. Don’t.” Narasorn’s voice seems to crack, but it is perhaps more exertion than emotion. “It is pointless. You cannot prove to your satisfaction that I didn’t manipulate Yenseret into invading Onsakit, but be assured that I’ve no love for that nation of hedonistic fools.”
The insurrectionist does not struggle. She is calm, almost limp, in the empress’ grip. “How old were you when Kaiyakesi’s highest magistrates betrayed their own empress, your giving-mother, and destroyed her?”
“Old enough to make them repay many times over and purge their families.” Narasorn inhales deeply, lets go of Sanhi by degrees. “They broke many of her bones and burned her face. They took her dignity, her voice, the strength of her limbs. But even then I thought that the fault did not lie with them alone, as individuals. It’s Kaiyakesi that is the rot, Kaiyakesi itself in need of the purge.”
“Why didn’t you prevent her ruin?”
“I came to the gift later, and it’s impossible to move backward beyond that point. Forward is painful. The future isn’t always mine.” The empress withdraws but remains between the insurrectionist and the roof’s edge. “Moving outside of time isn’t the panacea you might believe it is.”
Sanhi slowly gathers up the strings of cranes and blades. Her fingers tighten on Lenenha’s ash jar. “Good enough to found an empire on and keep it mighty. Were this known, even your most loyal subject would slip you the knife while you sleep.”
“You overestimate the courage of my subjects. They skip and cry at their own shadows, let alone mine.” Narasorn strokes the beast’s flank, metal-clad fingers on metallic muscles thrumming the notes of distant thunder. “What will it be?”
* * *
Sanhi never learns the name of the palace on the lake, and Narasorn does not reveal it. The insurrectionist is granted the honor of sharing the empress’ wing and is made to spend significant hours in Narasorn’s bedchamber: an impression Narasorn cultivates. “Better that they believe you my concubine than my co-conspirator,” she says as Sanhi studies the census and history of Kaiyakesi. “Those that captured you have long perished in the line of duty; none know who you are. They think I’ve taken a fancy to a foreigner, having long tired of the scented, delicate palace girls.”
“And have you?” The insurrectionist does not pause in her reading; she makes notes of the bureaucrats of agriculture and infrastructure, the ministers who command supply chains and taxation. She looks for noted orators and inventors, controversial academics. Dissidents put away by aristocrats, soldiers wronged by their commanders. There are as many kinds as there are breeds of cacti and just as many ways to use them to prick open Kaiyakesi’s skin.
“I’ve done my duty of passing on the gift. One of my daughters will manifest it. But she will not suckle on treachery and come to womanhood on a throne—she’ll use this power elsewhere, in some better, more generous capacity. As for delicate palace girls, I’ve never much enjoyed them. They are more obligation than pleasure.”
Sanhi looks up, but her interest appears merely polite. She has painted her eyelids gray-green and her lips pale gold, careful to avoid the imperial purple and the Onsakit red. “In your position you may have anyone, or anything. Save perhaps a lover you can trust.”
“I had one of those once.” Narasorn sits by the window, sampling declawed cacti roasted with banana, puffy sugar-bread, scarabs fried and dipped in syrup. Desert fare. Onsakit dishes. The insurrectionist watches her consume each bite, frowning. “In your position, with your power to sway hearts and direct passion, you could’ve had anyone. Share tales of your conquests, and I’ll share mine.”
“It’s not how I think of my past affairs. The cartography of my existence isn’
t defined by invasion or conquest.” Her fingers alight on the chain of blades she has fastened around her throat. She plays with their edges, which she has kept sharp and brilliant, taking a whetstone to them every couple weeks. They never cut her.
“Indeed not? Is it true that Lenenha, First of Blades, was more than your master of arms and more than your confidante?”
“She is dead; she is dust. What matters?”
Narasorn leaves the delicacies. She might have loomed over Sanhi, but after a pause she kneels so they are face to face. “Which dishes did Lenenha enjoy?”
The insurrectionist’s glance darts to the plates and bowls by the windowsill. “Are you not satisfied with the hold you already have on me?”
“The revelation of secrets long clenched in a fist is an art.” Narasorn unstraps the buckles that hold her jacket shut, peels away the cotton underneath and gestures at the tattoo beneath her breasts, inked in white against the deep teak of her skin. Then in quite a different voice, a lower note with the scrape of rusty metal she says, “This is the royal alphabet, the letters that are tattooed on no one save the reigning monarch. It allows me to assume another shape, another voice...”
An unwilling intake of breath. “No,” Sanhi whispers.
In place of Narasorn kneels First of Blades Lenenha. She smiles with a mouth much thinner than Narasorn’s, a mouth split by a long scar. “My commander Sanhi, to whom I pledged my life, my voice, my arms.” A hand takes Sanhi’s, brings it to her sternum. “My heart.”
“I refuse this.” The insurrectionist did not weep when they captured her or bound her mouth; she did not weep when she returned to Onsakit; she did not weep when she found the ash jars. Now the tears fall. “I refuse you.”
Narasorn—Lenenha—brushes saltwater from Sanhi’s cheek. “You’d seen my body often enough then, run your fingers over my tattoo more times than I can count. You used to ask what it meant and I said, A secret. And so it is. I know you’ve a birthmark on your inner thigh and that you’ll have no one’s tongue in your mouth, citing its resemblance to a snail; I know you prefer goat-hair brushes for your eyes, sable brushes for your cheeks when you’ve the time and means for luxuries. I know what you like to eat, the tea you best prefer for your breakfast, the tisane you favor before going to bed.”
Sanhi does not resist, does not struggle. She is almost limp in her seat, but she is not calm. “So breaking me was your desire from the start. What is the point? I’m here, I’m doing what you demanded of me.” She makes a small, pained cry.
“I did not plot your destruction. I meant only to see you work from the inside; getting as close to you as I did wasn’t part of my plan. I was... fond of you.”
Yin Sanhi thinks of death. Falling is easy. The empress’ chamber is the highest point of the palace and the lake is home to sharks. Blood in black waters. It is all the same. “You can say this, after what you did to me?”
“You would not have come to Kaiyakesi on request or command, on promise of reward or under threat. That’s your nature.” The empress, who remains in the form and face of Lenenha, lowers her hand. A minute tremble, which does not escape Sanhi’s notice. “I’ve bound myself to your time, your path of events and possibility. So firm is this hold that now I may not travel backward past the day I had you captured in Onsakit. I’ve told you—it is no panacea to have this gift; I’m fettered by the universe’s laws, and the universe is more rigid than justice, more uncompromising than vengeance.”
“Am I to offer you my sympathies? My admiration? My forgiveness?” Sanhi has mastered herself; her voice is steady. “Will you threaten to go back on your word, Empress, and leave me stranded here?”
“I wanted,” the empress starts, stops. “I wanted your acknowledgment, perhaps. No. I won’t go back on my word. Once you’ve set in motion the process that breaks down Kaiyakesi, I’ll return you to your moment of triumph. We’ll part, and I’ll come back here to free myself from this burden called empire.”
The tears continue but they are on their own: Sanhi does not shake or gasp and they do not move her. “Leave me to my work then. You must want your liberty as much as I do.”
Narasorn returns to the window, doing up her jacket. She is herself, again. “What will you do once you’re in your proper time?”
“Is it not obvious?”
* * *
That night Narasorn wakes to a change in light and shadow. She does not sleep heavily and never has—she has long adopted a soldier’s habit, passed to her by both mothers. But she pretends unawareness as Sanhi’s shadow falls upon her. The empress does not reach for any of her weapons; her bare hands alone suffice, should it come to that.
When Sanhi straddles her hips, Narasorn reaches to touch the insurrectionist’s jaw, her thumb light across the insurrectionist’s lips. The texture of those sewing scars, the texture of a year beneath the lake. “Shall I be Lenenha for you? Her words, her voice. Her flesh.”
“Secrets once revealed can’t be taken back, Empress.” Sanhi is a blot in the moonlight. She bends close and her teeth scrape, not gently, across Narasorn’s mouth. “Your tools and subjects may be malleable as doubt. I am not.”
The insurrectionist comes back the next night, and the night after that.
* * *
An empire is built like a wall: it protects itself from outside intrusion. A strong empire is built like a prison: it keeps those inside within, and those outside without.
This stronghold of stone corridors and black glass is marked by nothing save Narasorn’s color and a terrible quiet. Sanhi has helped dismantle prisons full of filth and defeat. This is silent and clean, the dignity and finality of mausoleums.
Beside her the empress becomes Lenenha—a distortion of sight, a passage of shadow; Sanhi does not look.
They free an astronomer whose eyes have been sutured shut, the lids punctured in fine pinpricks so she’d always see stars unmoving and unreal; a lieutenant who has been hamstrung at ankles and elbows so she may never wield weapons again; a musician whose fingers have been ground down, left to knit crooked and useless. Each recognizes Sanhi and the First of Blades. The art of revealing secrets has presaged her, a sowing of rumors like seeds. A murmur here that Yin Sanhi lives; a whisper there that she will come and do what she does best.
The words are acid in her mouth, but Sanhi’s voice is her instrument and her weapon. She wields it, telling the prisoners, “Give me the name of the one who wronged you.” She holds their gaze. “Give me the name of their weakness and their terror.” She carries them in her arms, though she is not strong. “Give me the names of those they trust, and I’ll bring you their ruin: a gift I shall put in your lap, and it will be as rich and sweet as stars.”
The musician asks, “Where is Zheng Husin?”
Yin Sanhi says only, “She is not here, though she could have been.”
The astronomer demands, “Where have you been all these decades, why did you not come for us before?”
Yin Sanhi answers only, “All things have their own time.”
The lieutenant exhales, “Will you bring us to victory?”
Yin Sanhi breathes simply, “Yes.”
The empress kills her own soldiers as easily as she might kill any other; their cries are drunk by the stone, their blood by the glass. Lenenha’s wheel-blades remain pure and clean as they leave the prison behind, the way they always do, never stained by viscera. It is not a Kaiyakesi weapon, and they do not ride Narasorn’s beast to escape. The illusion must be maintained.
It is easy to destroy an empire when one is given all the keys.
* * *
Yin Sanhi makes her web, raises her army, fosters her factions. It is faster than any other revolt she has raised. The northern administration wages civil war within itself; the southern and western provinces battle each other over farming and fishing rights. In the eighth month she says to Narasorn, “You won’t be able to salvage your empire, even if you try to, unless you turn back time.”
“I
will do so,” the empress says, “as many times as it takes if the provinces ally and turn back into Kaiyakesi. Too much centralized power, and despotism is inevitable. Too great a state, and inertia becomes inherent. That must not happen again.”
Twelve months and twelve days pass.
They watch from the empress’ chamber over the lake, listening to the sound of fire and heavy feet, of blades meeting one another. Narasorn takes Sanhi’s hand. “Your task is done and I’ll be true to my word. I’ll return you to that day, though your scars will remain.”
“Once I’m gone, wouldn’t my deeds here undo themselves?”
“Our paths will diverge. I’m the constant—my presence will enforce your events.”
Sanhi gazes down at the lake. “This is not how I would’ve chosen to do it.”
“It is done, and was done quickly. I’m satisfied, and you can hardly wish to prolong it.”
The insurrectionist strokes the chain of miniature blades that she gave back to Narasorn. It stretches across Narasorn’s breast now, and Sanhi winds the length of it around her fist. “After Onsakit I could have moved on to Kaiyakesi.”
The empress could have stepped away, torn the chain out of Sanhi’s hand and blood out of Sanhi’s palms. “What are you saying?”
“I’ll take Kaiyakesi apart my own way, not at your instruction or through the methods you’ve dictated. Don’t you want to see that, Empress? Come back with me. Join my path, and be Lenenha again.”
“I am not a beast,” the empress murmurs.
“Yet I will tame you.”
“I am not clay,” the empress insists.
“Yet I will shape you.”
Narasorn laughs, the sound of wave striking shore. “Perhaps.”
Their hands tighten around one another’s, and they take a final step.
Copyright © 2015 Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #178 Page 4