Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  Tayy gave him a curious frown, but continued his explanation of Harnish ways. “If we’ve caught a firstborn by some chance, his family will probably ransom him, which would be good, because we need the horses. The rest will be stuck with the dung-work in their masters’ tents for a year or two, but then they’ll be adopted or marry in. War makes widows, after all, and widows need husbands. Down the long path, their families in the South will consider it a favorable alliance and our khan will work those connections for the benefit of the ulus as well.”

  Llesho wondered what Kaydu would say about the need for husbands, but for the Harnish it wasn’t the part of the story that he doubted.

  “That is not slavery as I have known it among the Harn.”

  Tayy bristled at the challenge, but caught something in the bleakness of Llesho’s disbelief that stopped him in his tracks, thinking. “Bolghai told me a story once, when I was little,” he said, and began walking again, “that he had dream-walked in the life of an outlander slave. Like cattle led to slaughter, he said, only Chimbai-Khan, who had asked for the tale, would never treat his cattle so badly. Bolghai wept at the telling, and wouldn’t speak of it again.”

  The Long March, Llesho thought, and shivered in weary dread of his own memories.

  “These men are prisoners taken in fair battle. The Qubal clans aren’t raiders,” Prince Tayyichiut insisted, “When we kidnap someone, it’s to ransom him back where he came from, or for marriage, not to sell to strangers for the highest price.”

  Llesho wasn’t sure the Qubal’s neighbors, paying ransoms and weeping for their lost daughters, would appreciate the difference, though it apparently mattered to the khan who traded only in “honorable” slavery. The Ulugar clans had committed horrors on his people, however, had tortured Hmishi and served the master who had driven the emperor of Shan mad. For his own sake, he was glad that the northern clans he counted as allies had no part in death marches or the sale of their foes into perpetual servitude. But he would have no mercy for the southern clansmen who had fallen into Mergen’s hands.

  “And Tsu-tan’s lieutenants?” he asked. “What has your uncle the khan learned from them?” Unlike the warriors sent to work off their parole, battle commanders were held accountable both for the orders they received and for the ones they gave. There had been two, he had heard, taken alive.

  “Nothing, yet. They had the usual choice. One talked. He had no information of value to offer, but it saved him from a worse fate. Mergen had the man’s head cut off this morning. The other will not, or cannot, answer the khan’s questions, not even to say he doesn’t know. So we are come to the place where the river ends.”

  Llesho frowned. “What river is that?” he asked, though he could guess what the riddle meant.

  Prince Tayyichiut gave a little shrug as if the answer should be obvious, but explained in plain terms that Llesho couldn’t ignore. “Mergen-Khan has run out of options. Prisoners of military rank may choose to give up their master’s secrets in exchange for a swift death. If they prefer to take their knowledge with them to the underworld, they do so with their bowels in their hands and their enemies walking on their living graves.”

  Burial, Llesho had learned from Bolghai, was an eternal prison for the Harn. In Harnish belief, fire sent the dead of the grasslands to join their ancestors in the spirit life and to be reborn into the world. A man put into the ground would remain there, trapped body and spirit to molder and rot forever. But Prince Tayy meant more than that. As they climbed the steep path that led onto the grassy plain above the dell, he explained his uncle’s quandary.

  “It will hurt the khan soul-deep to hand this man his liver and bury him alive. Mergen’s a rational man and knows the value of fear when trying to extract information from an enemy. Once you’ve torn out his entrails and thrown the dirt in over him, though, your enemy can’t tell you anything. So you reward the traitor with an easy death and punish the honorable man with unspeakable horrors, all for the hope that next time a fool tries to hold onto his honor, he will believe that you’re serious and give in before you have to do the same to him.”

  “Does it work?”

  Tayy gave him a defensive glare. “It’s not like it happens every day.”

  Llesho had never dealt with this part of the aftermath of battle—interrogating prisoners—before. The Way of the Goddess allowed him defense both of self and subjects, and his training had turned killing into a reflex to save his own life or the lives of his companions. The Goddess forbid causing pain for its own sake, however; he had never used torture as a means to even his most worthy ends.

  Thinking about it now, he realized that he hadn’t wanted to know what Shou had done to the captives after the attack on the Imperial City of Shan, or how Habiba extracted information from the enemy. With a countenance as flinty as the stone that littered the plain, Kaydu climbed the side of the dell at his side and he wondered what acts of terror she had committed in her father’s name, for his cause. By his silence he had lost the right to ask about that now, but he was done leaving the decisions to others.

  They had reached the high plain where horses waited for Tayy and Llesho as promised. None for his cadre, however, nor had Tayy’s young guardsmen-companions awaited them on the edge of the Up Above, which gave Llesho cause to wonder who really had sent the prince.

  “Your uncle doesn’t know that you’ve asked for my help, does he?” If he hadn’t been distracted by his brother’s more gentle interrogation, he might have guessed sooner that the prince had taken on himself this mission to save his uncle the khan from his prisoner’s agony. He expected Tayy to look guilty when he confessed, but the prince raised his head proudly. “He doesn’t know you the way I do, or he would have thought of it himself. But he’ll listen if you go to him. I promise.”

  “What do you think I can do?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll think of something.”

  That wasn’t the answer he was looking for. In more than one sense, Llesho decided, it was time he took the reins for the Great Goddess in whose service he fought. He didn’t think Tayy was going to like it, though.

  “I can’t let him do it,” he said.

  “That’s the point, isn’t it? To get the information out of the prisoner somehow, so Mergen doesn’t have to gut him and bury him alive.” Tayy left off checking the cinch that held the sheepskin saddle to his horse’s back, waiting for Llesho to explain himself further.

  “The Way of the Goddess is peace,” Llesho answered, “I am that great lady’s husband. Whether he speaks or not, I can’t stand by while a helpless prisoner is gutted like a fish and thrown into a dishonored grave.”

  Prince Tayyichiut leaped into his saddle and looked down at Llesho where he stood at his stirrup. “If you fail, you won’t have to stand for it; you’ll be sitting on a horse.”

  Not a confusion of language friend to friend, but an uneasy warning from a Harnish prince to an outlander that reminded Llesho of an earlier conversation. Friendship, Tayy had said, survives among princes only as long as it served the ulus. As a deposed king, even a wizard-king of the Cloud Country, Llesho did not rank with an acknowledged khan in his own lands. He might attend the interrogation at Tayy’s insistence, but he wouldn’t get a say in the proceedings unless he came up with something more than a crown he didn’t own yet to support his position. Tayy, and probably his uncle the khan, wanted magic from him.

  Llesho looked more deeply inside himself. It had to be there, the core of what made him the god-king of the Thebin people and true champion of the Goddess. His brothers believed in it and grew impatient for him to show it. The mortal gods who trailed after him likewise insisted that he accept his nature and pick up his duty. And once, it seemed an eternity ago, he had felt it touch him in the camp of the mortal goddess of war.

  Sometimes, he forgot that. But he remembered it now: that moment at the foot of the Lady SeinMa, and his words to her. He repeated them, more to himself than to the Harnish prince: “Iam go
d.”

  Tayy blinked, then he grew more princely in his awe. “You’ve never done that before,” he pointed out.

  Llesho tilted his head, a question and permission to continue, while a secret smile tugged at his lips.

  “You’re glowing. Heaven seems to be shining through you. I’ve never seen—” He broke off, at a loss for what to say.

  “Tell me about the prisoner.” Llesho set a hand to the prince’s stirrup, gentle insistence.

  With a sigh of relief that they had not, as yet, committed some irredeemable act in the eyes of this creature out of the Cloud Country he suddenly didn’t recognize, the prince spilled answers like a sacrificial offering. “He seems to know something, but hasn’t opened up yet.”

  Tayy winced at the unfortunate choice of words for reasons Llesho well understood. Tsu-tan’s lieutenant would be opened up soon enough, if he didn’t talk. He let the error pass, though his own gut was cramping. It seemed to have a mind of its own as it tried to crawl more deeply into hiding than a soft belly provided.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he finally agreed. “Perhaps I can persuade him by less painful means.”

  Prince Tayy gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Mergen-Khan is no magician, but he says he sees in you divine powers.” He mentioned this as if the notion had struck him as foolish before and he was still wary of accepting it as truth in spite of his own eyes.

  “You may use any powers you have to persuade the prisoner to betray his master. Honor demands, however, that the prisoner retain the right to refuse.”

  Which meant, Llesho figured, that he could use any means he possessed to torment or terrify the man into submission, but Harnish custom prohibited reaching into his mind to draw out painlessly what he wanted. They might take the prisoner’s life in any way they chose, so long as they left him his honor. If he had the skill, of course, Llesho would seize the man’s knowledge in a heartbeat and leave him standing in his own skin. To a Thebin, honor did not include gutting his enemy alive or burying him to suffocate slowly while above him men walked across his open, dirt-packed wounds. Unfortunately, the Goddess hadn’t gifted him with the ability either to read minds or to unseal men’s tongues against their will.

  “I don’t have any such powers,” he answered truthfully.

  Tayy’s frown told him his friend no longer believed that about him. “If you don’t, that man will spend the next three days dying a horrible death. You will dishonor your goddess and Mergen will spend the rest of his life with this man’s screams in his head.”

  “Wanting doesn’t make it so. I have some skills, some gifts of my lady wife, but none that apply here. None that Bolghai can’t do better.” Growing into his gifts took time—that was the hard part about them. And they weren’t always what you wanted or thought you needed, though they often turned out to be both in the end. Meanwhile, the khan had ten thousand Harnish warriors to bring against Llesho’s handful. If he tried to stop the khan by force, he’d be throwing their lives away and Mergen would do what he felt necessary anyway. “I don’t know what he expects me to do!”

  “Convince the prisoner to give his honor into your hands while he speaks, so that Mergen-Khan can give him a painless death. At the least, your anguish should convince the fool that Mergen-Khan doesn’t make idle threats.”

  Just when Llesho was beginning to hope that theywere idle threats, Tayy added, “They always give in once the gutting begins, but by then it’s too late. They’re off their heads and can’t get a clear thought past their own screaming.”

  He’d thought Tayy didn’t know. Not every day, then, but he’d seen it, or heard enough.

  “He’ll have to kill me first.” Well, that was one way, Llesho decided. Not the one he’d have chosen with time to think, but the first one out of his mouth and no way to take it back now.

  Tayy didn’t blink. “Uncle said as much. I think it would destroy him to do it. That’s why he didn’t ask you to attend from the start.” He stopped, as if giving some thought his full attention, then added, “Perhaps, if you screamed enough, the prisoner would break. But you’d still be thrown with all your gaping wounds into a living grave.”

  It took one quick glance to realize Prince Tayyichiut was telling the truth. Like his uncle, he’d never show his feelings to the lieutenant of their enemy, but for his friend horror bled from his eyes.

  “We’d better go, then.” Llesho rose into his saddle with a command for his cadre, “Stay here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Kaydu had heard it all. She stood nearby with Little Brother cradled in her arms as if the animal had understood and sought the comfort Llesho would never have.

  “I’m going to be a king,” he said because she wouldn’t understand. “Be a god.”

  “Then you’ll need an honor guard appropriate to your station. I can muster the troops in moments.” She unwrapped her arms and set her familiar on her shoulder. Little Brother knew this as preparation to ride and crawled back into his pack until only the top of his head peeked out.

  Llesho shook his head, a sad smile meant at his own expense on his lips. “Fifty or a thousand guards can’t make me more than I am in my own skin. If that’s not enough, nobody else should die for my lack.”

  A protest marked her troubled frown. Then she took a closer look at him, and answered his crooked little smile with one of her own. “Holy Excellence,” she said, the title of the Thebin king, with an emphasis on “holy” and a deep bow to go with it. “A king requires pomp and circumstance,” she answered her own question, “a god carries ceremony within himself.”

  So. She understood more than he’d thought. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but the notion didn’t sit comfortably in his mind yet. It came as a shock that others saw and accepted more easily than he did himself, though Kaydu was the daughter of a powerful witch and a witch herself in the court of the mortal goddess of war. Consorting with gods presented no novelty to his captain or his cadre.

  “Then just us, as witness,” she decided with a gesture to include his cadre and he couldn’t forbid that. They would have marched on foot behind him, but horsemen of the khan approached with Yesugei at their head. A perfect solution, though the Qubal chieftain might not think so.

  “Little king!” Yesugei addressed him with a seated bow from the waist. “Mergen-Khan sent me to find you.”

  “I am at my host’s command,” he answered politely. “But will need your horses for my guardsmen—”

  “Of course.” The chieftain motioned his followers to give up their mounts. He carefully blanked his face, though his glance kept stealing to Prince Tayyichiut. Wondering, no doubt, if Tayy had anticipated his uncle.

  When one cadre of riders had changed places with the other, Yesugei wheeled and took off, not for the ger-tent of the khan but skirting the tent city. When they had gathered sufficient distance from the palace, he cut through a cluster of modest white felt tents, bringing them out on the wide avenue that formed the axis of every encampment. A processional to the front door, then, as an honored guest or a questionable ally.

  Yesugei didn’t lead them to the ger-tent of the khan, however, but stopped instead at the playing field that opened out in front of the palace of white felt and silver embroidery. This, too, conformed to the plan the tent city followed at each stopping place. On a field almost the same as this, but a hundred li behind them, Llesho had played a Harnish game grown deadly when the ancient spear he carried at his back awoke with blood-lust in its flight. He’d conquered something in himself that day, and tamed some of the hunger for death in the weapon. Again, a crowd waited to see how the outlander would fight a different battle, for the honorable death of an enemy.

  Yesugei worked their party through the waiting throng, past a raised platform set up beside a shallow grave dug into the temporary playing field. The prisoner lay spread across the platform in his shackles. Llesho spared no closer look in that direction, however. Harnish raiders from the South had shown no mercy when th
ey attacked Kungol. They now made common cause with Master Markko, who tortured and killed his friends and had poisoned Llesho in the long days of his captivity.

  The prisoner couldn’t hurt him now, though. He’d followed Tayy’s summons to save a Harnish life from torture and end it in dignity as the Way of the Goddess dictated. But in a secret part of himself, he was afraid to look at the man who had followed Tsu-tan on Master Markko’s business. His rage was so vast that it waited only a glance, a word, to sweep away his duty to his Goddess and her Way. So he didn’t look, lest vengeance take the place of mercy in his heart, but let Yesugei lead him forward until he faced the khan.

  Surrounded by his guardsmen at the center of the playing field, Mergen-Khan awaited Llesho on horseback. He wore the richly embroidered silk coats and tunic of his office and, on his head, the quilted-silk and silver headdress of the khan, covered over with the silver helmet that served in battle as a crown. At his right hand, in her massive headdress of silver horns draped everywhere with strings of precious gems, sat the old woman, Bortu, the mother of this khan and his brother who had preceded him. Prince Tayyichiut urged his horse forward and took his place at his uncle’s left, the heart-side for the heir. Yesugei called a halt then, and announced, “I have brought the wizard-king of the Cloud Country, may he serve the khan well.”

  With a low bow in his saddle, Llesho added his own polite greeting to his host: “I come at your call, Mergen-Khan.”

  Mergen returned the bow with a courteous nod.

  Those nearest him knew Mergen in all his moods, thoughtful and whimsical, determined or grieving. None would have doubted that cold judgment ruled him now. Llesho saw himself in that shuttered emptiness, however. Like Mergen, he’d learned to close away his distress behind the mask of a king; he knew how upset the khan was by how completely he hid the emotion.