The Well of Prayers
Page 2
I fumbled to fasten my scarf even with Leba Mara’s help, my breathing coming more rapidly. My fingers couldn’t seem to make the knot, and I finally gave up and let Leba Mara fix it. It wasn’t perfect, but I had no mirror and however it looked would have to do. The guard gave a short nod at Leba Mara and turned his attention to the flow of wounded and sickly moving through our doors.
“You’re lucky,” she said, her voice a whisper. “They’ve been cutting off women’s hair right on the spot, whipping out daggers at the first stray lock. You can’t even let a pretty little curl or two show.”
“Yes, and now the pyres,” I said, shuddering. “What is going on? I’m sure my father doesn’t know.”
If he did, would he have said anything to me? I wondered.
“I’m just as sure he does,” she said. “Even if he knows no more than I do, it’s still plenty. And he has pull that even I don’t have.”
“He’s only a civilian though,” I said, which drew a sharp scowl from Leba Mara. For all her brashness, she didn’t tolerate a sharp tongue from subordinates. “With all due respect, Healer Mistress. He is secular. Anything he says to the Azwans wouldn’t be the same as coming from a priest or, surely, a healer?”
“Ah, but his eldest daughter is the Temple of Doubt’s new favorite, no? Surely, there’s something to be made of that, especially if that daughter should ask her father to intervene on our poor little city’s behalf? Maybe ask them to spare a few of us, or find out when they intend to return to our Great Numen’s side, where I’m sure our Kindly Master has more need of them?”
I hesitated. I understood the hint she was dropping; it couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d embroidered it on my smock. But Babba hadn’t mentioned my almost-sacrifice since my Keeping Day, like there was some sort of taboo against it. It also felt wrong to use my father’s new position to wheedle him into helping. He’d been made Lord Portreeve, head of the civil government, a position the Azwans had wanted him to have as a sort of repayment.
And, yes, the Temple owed us a lot. More than a lot. Reyhim, the Azwan of Ambiguity, had said as much the night he took me to the altar to be sacrificed, which hadn’t worked out the way anyone had expected. But if anyone could make anything happen in the secular world outside of the Temple’s sphere of influence, it would be Babba. The warehouses were all in the commercial district, so they would fall under Babba’s jurisdiction, right?
At least, that seemed to be where Leba Mara was headed with this. Maybe she was right. I might be only a junior apprentice, and still a little out of my depth in the working world, but Babba would know what to do. I had absolute faith in my father’s ability to make it happen. Even so, it didn’t pay to over-promise.
“I’ll try,” I said with as much unconcern as I could fake. “I can’t promise my father has any more pull than anyone here.”
“It’ll have to do, then.”
We went inside after that, under the careful eye of the guard, who gave me a disapproving once-over as we passed.
2
Seek out the healer who would cure you of aches and pains: go to her before you seek some spell for your every complaint. Though the healer is a witch who combines nature and theurgy for her craft, she spares me from squandering my power on toothaches and ulcers.
—From Oblations 13, The Book of Unease
The bustle of the busy ward usually kept me from dwelling on the events that had hit with cyclone force this summer past. My routine, until this morning, had been to keep busy enough so I might forget what had happened to me. The demon that had drawn the Azwans to our island was gone, but the Azwans remained, and my fate was inextricably tied up with theirs, at least until they chose to leave—as unlikely as that was beginning to seem.
What was the demon? The Azwans said it was the opposite of the numen who’d made himself our god. Such soul-stealing monsters occasionally dropped from the stars to war on him, and the last one had landed here on my island, New Meridian.
That demon had been destroyed, and I’d been at the altar when it happened. It wasn’t a role I’d asked for, and that idea had been running around my head even before today, when everything had soured so ominously. After all, this trouble had all begun with and was supposed to have ended with me. I had some role in everyone’s misery and my mop wasn’t helping me escape it. I pushed at it a little harder, making sweeping strokes across the tile floor, but every knot of dust looked like a plume of smoke.
I’d been called—more like dragged—to the altar as a sacrifice to our god, Nihil, to protect him from the demon, and instead of dying as planned, I’d wound up with some tiny shreds of the creature within me. Yes, floating around in my head were demon-bits, sort of like the spiritual equivalent of a few toenail clippings and a lock of hair, but invisible.
No one was supposed to know about the demon toenails—except the Azwan of Uncertainty, S’ami, that is—but he’d kept his distance in recent six-days, and I was all too happy to give him wide berth. Neither of us sought out the other, and I was fine with that. I was supposed to alert him if the nasty demon-bits grew into something more substantial, and I wasn’t exactly eager for that to happen.
The question I had to ask myself, over and over again, was this: am I me? The question wasn’t to find out if I was feeling out of sorts or maybe lacking a little confidence. No, the question had become am I still Hadara of Rimonil when I gaze out at the world or hear things? Lately, I’d heard many things that made me think I’m more than out of sorts, possibly addled, or even all-three-moons crazy.
For example, seeing magic.
Today was a perfect case, especially with the activity ratcheted up to a frenzy. As Leba Mara worked her way down the benches, she dangled a gold weight from a short length of chain. The weight itself was no bigger than her thumbprint in the shape of a broken shield. It was her personal totem, taken from one of the constellations, because, as she said, “In a proper sick ward, it’s always a fight to the death.” The broken shield vibrated over injuries and I’d brace for the sparks and the odor and acrid taste that flowed through her and out into her patients.
I tried to detect patterns, or ebbs and flows, or at least subtle changes in hues as spells were cast. The shopkeeper with the broken wrist—his spells looked mostly crimson, which ought to suggest blood, when I’d have expected shades of black and blue. He walked out of the sick ward, waggling his fingers cheerily, convinced he’d been magically cured and praising Nihil for it, but the spell lingered like a memory around the allegedly healed spot. It clung like bark on tree, sealed against the skin and bone it had mended.
If only I had someone I could talk to about what it meant, about how such spells really worked, about what went into magic and how I wasn’t convinced in the same way as the shopkeeper. Was it all just a giant placebo, a fake cure that only worked because people were thoroughly convinced of it?
Another commotion interrupted my thoughts. A prostitute, her hair chopped short around her ears, was sobbing onto Leba Mara’s shoulder. That’s what we did to women of loose virtue—forced them to wear their hair short and uncovered to let the world know their shame. Only this woman seemed a little younger than myself and couldn’t possibly be old enough to ply a trade like hers. She was holding a bloody rag to her nose, her eyes swollen shut after what must’ve been a nasty beating.
“Guards?” Leba Mara asked.
The girl nodded and sobbed. “Just one. He didn’t want to pay.”
I turned away. I didn’t want the girl to see my face, as I’m sure it registered pure disgust. Not all the guards were vermin. One had been good, or mostly so. Valeo would have something to say about this girl, I was sure of it.
I don’t take what isn’t freely given.
He’d said that. I hadn’t quite understood it then. But I did now, when it was too late.
The girl sobbed something about being hanged that I didn’t quite catch, but I didn’t need to. It was everyone’s thought today.
L
eba Mara patted her heart with her hand, the other arm still draped around the girl. “May no doubts remain in your soul, Nihil bless me, you won’t go to that pyre. At least not for this, alright?”
“So be it,” echoed others. They all patted their hearts, as if that alone might spare them the noose or a slit throat. Nihil likely wasn’t scrying from our sanctuary these days and was far away again. He hadn’t seen their heart-patting and I doubted he’d care.
And there it was, the big lie: I was a doubter. A skeptical, sarcastic doubter. And the hypocrisy of it all—I’d heard Nihil’s voice through the scrying mirror. How many people would give all they had for the chance to hear that beautiful tenor radiating around them? Only me, doubtful me, had heard it, not counting the Azwans and high priest, who probably hear him all the time.
I believed in Nihil. He was a real numen inside a borrowed human body. So what didn’t I believe?
His goodness, I suppose. Or maybe I doubted his wisdom making us dependent upon the magic that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, leaving everyone to guess if that was deliberate.
Maybe I didn’t believe in belief. Maybe lack of faith was the only thing I knew for sure.
But I doubted. I’d thought that would make me strong, but it just made me different.
My mood improved, though, as I resumed my chores. Babba could set things right. With his big promotion, my family wouldn’t have to fear the gallows, and maybe no one else would, either. Amaniel’s screams and accusations still rang in my ear over her lost stitching. She’d sewn a picture of one of Nihil’s incarnations. The soldiers—my soldier—had seized it, along with little Rishi’s white-haired doll. It looked too much like Nihil’s current body, I suppose. Who really knew anymore?
The only good to have come of that day was meeting Valeo. He was gone, but he’d given me purpose I’d never had. There’d be no more Valeos if I could help it. Just like Leba Mara, I was determined to make people live if I had to drag them back from the Soul’s Forge myself—if I even knew where such a place was. It was where the unredeemed went to have their souls remelted into someone new.
I’d been a terrible student in school because I seemed to have an allergic reaction at any mention of doctrine, and probably couldn’t find the Soul’s Forge if Amaniel took me there and shoved me into it. Ah, well, it only convinced me further that I belonged here, where I could make myself useful. I was learning to push a mop well enough, and I worked hard that day, blind to whether I was scrubbing my way through the floor altogether and halfway to the bottom of Kuldor. After this came the Sabbath and a full day home with my family. I had something to look forward to.
“Try not to take too much to heart,” Leba Mara’s voice jolted me back to reality. “That’s my Hadara, a real soft spot for the afflicted. No one should’ve told you about those pyres. I bet you’ve thought of nothing else.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” I said. “I will ask my father to help. Just let me finish this part of the floor.”
“An orderly can finish up. I’ve got something more important for my shiny, new apprentice.”
Leba Mara guided me by the elbow across the ward to her office, hardly more than a hidey-hole that probably once held brooms. She’d somehow managed to squeeze a table and stool in there along with the day’s duty rosters.
“I see your dedication, Hadara, but you know, not everything has to be drudge work,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to lend you this.”
She plunked a book into my hands. Books were rare commodities here, since all the engravers and typesetters were on the mainland. I ran my fingers along its worn spine and leather cover, looking for a title. The cover was blank; it had likely been rebound more than once, judging by its yellowed pages.
The first page announced, HUMAN AND FEROXI ANATOMY.
I glanced up, wondering if she really meant for me to have this and if it wasn’t somehow heretical. She was trusting me with something more valuable than all the goldweights in the Temple’s possession. I had a book, a book full of medicine and natural wonders.
“Thank you, Healer Mistress. I don’t know what to say.”
“Oral quiz is after Second Workday next week.” Leba Mara poked me in the ribs. “Study hard. I take only the best.”
I grinned and tucked the book under my arm.
Only the best! A book!
I couldn’t do much, but I could do this.
I don’t recall saying my parting goodmoons to everyone as I wandered out the door, my nose already planted in my new treasure. The pages gave off a musty odor that I inhaled like perfume, and my arms cradled the book as if it might start to wail or fuss if I treated it too roughly.
A few casual flips of the page and my surroundings dissolved. Cross sections of the human heart jumped out in crimson, followed by diagrams of muscles and joints and their assembly points. They gave way to a spread of cutaway views of a baby in the womb. Here were facts, not philosophies, and it was easily as miraculous as anything I’d witnessed in the sanctuary; the book cast its enchantment over me. How many nights had I sat up with Amaniel, trying to memorize Nihil’s incarnations when the most important story in the world was unfolding on these lovingly preserved pages?
What, in my short life, could I possibly have found more important than the curved sweep of this hunched form, with its tiny fists clutched to its chest, its sealed eyes waiting for its first glimpse of the world?
3
The woman who would serve me best is one who knows her place among her people. If I had meant for any woman to achieve more, I would have let her be born somewhere or sometime else, or as a man.
—from Oblations 18, The Book of Unease
I stumbled out the door, blindly following all the other bodies threading along Ward Sapphire’s footpaths. My steps fell in line as I plodded along, my nose deep in illustrations of Feroxi limbs, then the human digestive tract, and even a diagram of a hair follicle. How could anyone chart something so tiny?
I paused on the chapter headed, “Comparative Genitalia, Feroxi and Human Males.” Pious girls from proper homes didn’t even discuss such things, let alone look at pictures. I was sixteen and old enough to be married, but I was supposed to wait until my wedding night for Mami to give me The Talk About Sex that anyone who grew up by a dockside already knew in great detail. Sailors and longshoreman weren’t exactly shy about educating passersby on how it all worked.
This was different, I told myself. It was a textbook and for medical purposes. Only the best, Leba Mara had said. Study hard.
Besides, I ought to know where babies came from, right? Right.
I turned the page.
And immediately started giggling.
I slammed the book shut in case anyone saw me. How juvenile had I just been? Giggling over anatomy. Was I sixteen or six?
Still, I’d never seen a real one, unless I counted all the times I’d had to change a baby boy’s soil cloth. No, those didn’t count. At all. I crinkled my nose just remembering the rivers of toddler pee my many little cousins alone must have contributed to the world.
People jostled past me on their way toward the Ward’s wide, iron gates and the pavilion beyond. I opened the book to a different, safer, page on tendons and, once again, my feet strayed off course, my mind too busy turning over the diagrams as I turned the pages. I felt a tug at my sleeve and glanced up to see Amaniel in her gray school uniform.
“Wasn’t school over at high heat?” I said, irritated at the distraction.
“No, staying late again.”
“How much tutoring could you possibly need? You’re their best student.”
“That’s why.”
“Well, if you can stand the schoolmistress all that time …” I had a fading memory of my wrists getting slapped with her pointer.
“It’s not with her.”
“Then who?”
Amaniel smiled. “It’s a secret.”
“Please don’t tell me with an Azwan.”
I blinked a few times, expecting my crazy sister would be replaced with someone saner. Then again, she was the one the priests usually loved, and I was the one they’d pointed to as the bad example. “That’s … great. Yes, great. You’d be a very, um, special priestess. A nice one, too, I hope.”
“I’d be as nice as people deserved, yes?” Amaniel stuck her nose in the air. “And no more.”
Our pace slowed as we passed through the main courtyard beneath its swaying trees and giant planters brimming with tropical blossoms that were only just now fruiting over and dropping their petals. Autumn, such as it existed, came late to our island and meant only days of endless sun and sea breezes. It was a gorgeous day, but it had been a long time since I’d noticed whether days were good or bad. They’d all begun to run together.
I sighed and shook my head. “Forget being nice, then. At least try not to be so haughty. I need your help.”
“From Scriptures? A prayer you haven’t memorized yet? A tricky spell the healers can’t cast? I could probably help.” The smug look on Amaniel’s face would ordinarily set my brain spinning, but I let it pass. I had to ask her … but then what she’d just said hit me.
“Spells?” I nearly gagged. A scene of my sister waving a gold totem popped into mind, and I squeezed my eyes shut against it to no avail. I opened them to see her gloating. “No. Absolutely not. Never.”
That smug look again. “Yes. Spells,” she said. “I have Nihil’s blessings on me too, it seems, even if it’s not a special one like you, but maybe by my Keeping Day there’ll be a special blessing for me too. I aim to try.”
My jaw must’ve dropped because I felt a sudden dryness inside my mouth. She was still jealous about my Keeping Day celebration, when the Azwans recited a blessing Nihil had composed for me. Something about my willing, worthy soul and whatnot. Amaniel was jealous, and no matter what cruelty the Temple got up to, Amaniel would always see the world through the prism of her being the Not-Hadara, for better or worse.