“I get the bench.”
The oarsman’s voice brought him out of his silent contemplation. Briefly, among his own followers, Llesho had been a king. With a notable breakdown of good sense where Prince Tayy was concerned, he had been learning measured judgment with a mind to his subjects and those who looked to him for leadership. But Llesho didn’t even consider disputing Singer’s claim to the most comfortable bed. Some things learned at an early age come back quickly when they mean life or death.
In the hierarchy of the slave pens he was lowest of the low. Newest to the bench, he needed sound advice and the goodwill of his fellow slaves if he wanted to stay alive. And in the politics of their bench, Tayy was even lower than that, written off in the accounting books of a slave’s head as drowned already. He wondered how long it would take chained to an oar before he was eyeing Prince Tayyichiut’s biscuits for himself.
Tayy was taller than Llesho, but neither of them were tall by Singer’s standard. There was plenty of space in the well between the benches for both of them to sleep if they curled up a bit. Worn out by the labor and his terror of the sea, Tayy had already wrapped himself in a tight ball and was sleeping fitfully with his back pressed against the side of the boat. Llesho shifted around a bit, trying to get comfortable, but decided that wasn’t going to happen. He had worried that his mind, abuzz with plans for their rescue and anxious about Markko following somewhere behind them would keep him awake. But the impossible weight of his lids dragged them down over his eyes almost before he had settled his arms and legs about him.
Singer’s voice followed him into sleep: “You did well, boy.”
Exhausted from his labors at the oar, Llesho longed for deep, dreamless sleep. In his days as a pearl diver, the rise and fall of the swell had often soothed him, but it wasn’t working now. He was pretty sure he’d only dozed off for a few minutes when his eyes popped open. He tried to close them again, but they stubbornly refused to obey. Logically, his restlessness shouldn’t have surprised him. Tayy was in bad shape, and Llesho hadn’t caught sight of a rescue boat since they’d left Edris.
To make matters worse, the mist over the harbor city was growing darker and more ominous. Even at a distance the storm, in its birthing, stirred up a choppy sea that cut across the current in which they ran. With the tug and hesitation of the oars, it seemed like they were being pulled in three different directions at once. More frightening to Llesho was the restless mind reaching out from within it. Master Markko was in there somewhere, and the magician was looking for him.
Llesho gave up on sleep. He sat up and looked out over the water, wondering where Kaydu was with their rescue and fretting at the absence of the pearls he had carried at his throat for so long. He was just wondering if his crowded mind could handle even one more crisis when a strange sound at the side of the boat shocked him to attention. Something was out there, climbing out of the depths and scrabbling determinedly to board the low pirate galley.
Terrible monsters inhabited the sea, fearsome creatures with rows of teeth in lines one behind the next like a phalanx of skeletal soldiers. The overseers on Pearl Island had encouraged tales about them as a warning against escape: they would snap a man in two and grind him up like pie filling between those terrible teeth. Or vast, shapeless horrors with snakes dangling from their heads would crushed a man to paste, feeding gobs of entrails into their great huge mouths like the most devoted servants. His own attempt to flee would have ended in his death if Pearl Bay Dragon hadn’t rescued him, but not all dragons were as friendly. Certainly a dread of such beasts had stopped many an escapee from ever setting out.
He was on the very point of waking Singer to alert the ship to their new danger when Pig popped his head over the side.
“There you are.” The Jinn climbed into the boat and shook the water off the silver chains that wrapped his bristly black hide. “I’ve been looking for you. I see you’ve found Prince Tayyichiut.”
“What are you doing here? I’m not asleep and I’m not dream-walking!”
“Of course you’re asleep. You need it, too, but we don’t have any time to waste. There’s a storm coming.”
Chapter Fifteen
“WHAT ARE you doing in my domain, Jinn?”
Llesho whirled at the sound of a voice behind him. No one had seemed to notice that he was standing in the well of his bench talking to a soggy black pig wrapped in fine silver chain. Undetected, however, the slave whom Master Den had chosen to accompany Llesho from theGuiding Star had stepped up behind him. He looked much the same as he had in the waking world, both competent and dangerous. As proof of both, he had escaped his shackles.
“You know each other?” the slave asked Pig, who ducked his head as if he didn’t want to answer.
“Not if it displeases you, Master Dragon.” The Jinn bowed, but not before Llesho caught the shifty slide of his eyes.
“Dragon?” Llesho saw no changes in the captive’s features that would prove the conclusion, but he didn’t doubt Pig’s word. He’d met enough dragons in his travels to be cautious in their presence, however. Particularly over water.
In his human form, the dragon inclined his head in the affirmative. “Permit me to introduce myself,” he said, but his deep, silvery gaze never left the Jinn. “I am Marmer Sea Dragon, king of this sea and the shores that mark its boundaries.”
Llesho accepted the introduction, inclining his head with diplomatic precision in the same degree as the dragon-king had done. “Llesho, King of Thebin in exile and husband of my lady the Great Goddess.”
“You are welcome, young king. Your companion, however, is not.”
Pig shuffled his two back feet uneasily and rubbed at his nose with a forefoot in a display of nerves that Llesho had never seen in him before.
“You were thrown out of the Beekeeper’s gardens for your actions, beast.” The dragon-king growled his displeasure with a rumble in his throat that made Llesho glad the magical creature couldn’t spit fire in his human form. “What makes you think you are welcome in the domain of the very one you have injured beyond measure?”
There could be only one beekeeper a dragon would mention in that company. The Great Goddess. Pig had told him a very different story about his departure from the heavenly gardens.
“Thrown out?” He wanted the Jinn to deny the accusation. The thick silence that followed was more damning than any words. First Master Den, and now Pig. The harrowing disappointment of one more betrayal fed Llesho’s anger. Did he have any friends in this wide world, or was he a fool, trusting in his enemies as they used him like a dupe for their purposes?
“You said you escaped to bring help for the Goddess. What other lies have you told me?” He kept his voice low, but even Pig must hear the iron in it.
“No lies.” The Jinn gave a phlegmy snort, his version of an indignant sniff. “You didn’t need all the details and my lord dragon’s version isn’t exactly true in all its particu lars either.”
The sea itself had grown still as lamp oil beneath them: waiting, it seemed, for the tale to erupt in storm and fury.
“Did my lady, the Great Goddess, expel you from the heavenly gardens or not?”
“She was displeased with me, yes. I departed her company by mutual agreement, to seek redress for the wrong I had done by my actions. I’ve returned twice in your company since then—did I seem unwelcome?”
He hadn’t, but that could owe more to the need of the moment than the status of the Jinn. Llesho turned his head, looking from Pig to the thunderous dragon-king and back again. When he thought he was braced for the worst the truth might bring, he asked, “What did you do?”
Pig didn’t answer, so the dragon-king did it for him. “The magician who follows you,” he said, “who would take all of heaven for himself.”
“Master Markko,” Llesho agreed. “What about him?”
“He was but a mountebank doing tricks for coins in the market square when he met our friend the Jinn.”
“You re
leased the demon from the underworld!” The air went out of Llesho’s lungs with a whoosh. He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. “It’s your fault that heaven is under siege!”
“No!” Pig drew back, rattling the fine links that wrapped him. Llesho had wondered about them before, but now they made sense. The Jinn had escaped heaven but not the chains that had bound him there.
“Not exactly. And that’s not the whole story. If I’d known what Markko intended, I’d have done it all differently.”
Lluka’s dream swept over Llesho with heart stopping intensity. He saw the fireball rise again in the sky, felt the flames sweep over him, consuming all the worlds in destruction and chaos. He remembered the seductive question—“Is that a wish?” Pig had asked it so many times that Llesho had come to look on it as a game, which it had never been. His country in ruins, friends facing death yet again, his brother Lluka driven mad by the future Master Markko intended for them, a future that would see the end of all creation: had it all happened for the twisted pleasure the Jinn took in playing games with human hearts? With their greed? And not only humans. Marmer Sea Dragon had his own grievance.
Pig had denied that he released the demon that held the gates of heaven under seige, but he still hadn’t answered the question: “What did you do?”
“Markko was born the child of a slave girl in the court of a minor dignitary on the outskirts of Pontus.” The Jinn gave a little shrug, mimicking, perhaps, the way he had dismissed their most feared enemy in the past. Kaydu had guessed he might have had his training there.
“This official never acknowledged his parentage but kept his son in the household as an educated slave. Growing up as the property of his father, he trained himself in the dark arts—for revenge, I thought. I’d have been happy to help him out there; his father was a petty tyrant and deserved any retribution his son might concoct. But Markko wished to be a great magician. He had some romantic notion of wooing the Great Goddess with the hope that she would grant him eternal life. For a price, I could have granted even that wish, but his mind was twisty even then.”
Llesho’d had more than a taste of slavery. He wondered if that long-ago Markko the mountebank had made his wish out of pride and vanity, or because he could see no other escape in the life he’d been given? Too late now to know if a different turning then might have saved them from the end of all their worlds; Markko the magician had done too many loathsome things since to feel sorry for him. Questions still begged for answers, however.
“And how did a lowly slave with romantic dreams of winning the attentions of my lady wife become a magician with the fate of all the kingdoms of heaven and earth and the underworld in his hands?”
“You need dragon’s blood in your veins to be a real magician,” Pig explained with a little shrug. Llesho knew that.
“Markko had none.”
“That can’t be so,” Llesho objected. He’d seen for himself the scales that mottled the magician’s skin.
“There was this young dragon—” The sea rocked the pirate galley as if the water had a mind of its own and, like a horse with a blanket of nettles, wished to throw them off. Llesho grabbed hold of the oar secured by its stanchion to steady his balance.
“My son,” the dragon-king said.
Pig had the courtesy to look dismayed, but this had come as no surprise. He maneuvered his great bulk so that Llesho stood between the dragon-king and himself, keeping a hold on the oar against the pitching of the boat. On the bench, Singer had started to snore. Tayy frowned in his sleep and curled a little tighter in on himself. Neither woke. The fate of worlds might hang in the moment, but on the bench in front of them the rowers stepped up and fell back, stepped again in the quarter-pace stroke.
“This young dragon,” the Jinn persisted in his tale, “fell in love with a girl and wished to be human. It seemed a perfect solution for them all.”
Llesho had known Pearl Bay Dragon as the healer Kwan-ti for most of his young life among the pearl beds. He had only seen her in her dragon form twice: once when she had saved him from drowning, and again, when she had come out of the sky like a silver arrow in the battle against Master Markko in the capital city of Shan. The dragon-king himself appeared before them in the shape of a man. “I don’t understand,” he therefore said. “Dragons can appear in any form they want, even human.”
“And so would my son, if he had waited. Shapes are a gift of a dragon’s maturity.”
“Which comes slowly as humans measure such things,” Pig explained. “The young dragon did not feel this lady had such patience in her.”
Llesho figured that meant she’d have died of old age before her dragon-lover had the power to approach her as a handsome young man. A tragedy for the embroideries of storytellers, but something you were supposed to accept and get over in real life.
“What did the dragon-boy do?” He didn’t really want to hear the answer but knew it must figure in his own saga somehow. Otherwise, why this particular dream?
Pig avoided his eyes when he answered, “He wished to be a man.”
“And so to kill two birds with one throw, your friend the Jinn fused the dragon who is my son with the man who wished for dragon blood, and made them into one being,” the dragon-king answered, and tears stood in his human eyes. “My son is trapped inside that madman, who used his stolen powers to call forth a demon-king of the underworld. No more can a young dragon control such a thing than he could become a man for the love of a girl!”
“Merciful Goddess!” Once, when Llesho had just begun his training in dream traveling, Master Markko had snatched him off his path and held him captive in his command tent. The magician had awakened the old poisons in his blood and Llesho’d had the satisfaction of being sick all over the the magician’s robes. Markko had held his head until he settled, then changed his soiled robe for a fresh one.
In those moments with his skin exposed, Llesho had seen Master Markko’s great secret—thick patches of dragon scales mottled his sickly flesh. At the time, he’d thought the magician an unfortunate child of a mating gone awry between a dragon and a human, driven mad by the strangeness of his own body. Now, the truth made him ill. No wonder Master Markko was insane!
“I have given up hope of rescuing my son.” The dragon-king choked out the words through a throat clogged with tears. “I wish only to end his misery.”
“Would you care to repeat that?” Pig hunched his shoulders as the dragon-king’s shape flickered and changed. Llesho kept his eyes on the blurred form through the dizziness of mind and eye rejecting what they saw. If the creature settled in the shape of a dragon, his great size would sink them on the instant, unless he burned them to a cinder with his breath first.
Pig made no excuse for his untimely offer, but told the truth that Llesho hadn’t wanted to hear: “It is in my nature to ask.”
“It would be worth the price to wish you dead for what you have done,” the dragon-king replied, settling firmly into his human form again, “but no, I do not wish it so.”
They were saved, if one could consider it that, by the sudden appearance at Marmer Sea Dragon’s elbow of Master Den in his full pirate garb. “Ah, I see you three have met at last. Good, good.”
“I see no good in this at all!” Llesho exclaimed. “Pig, whom I trusted as the loyal servant of the Goddess sent to guide me, now proves to be the enemy of my lady wife, banished for his crimes.”
Visions of chaos and fire filled his mind, and he turned on the Jinn, shouting into his woebegone piggy face, “Do you know what you have done? Can you imagine the destruction your actions have brought down on all our heads?”
“I’ve been remiss in my hospitality,” Marmer Sea Dragon said with an ironic bow to Llesho. “Are you fond of ham for dinner, or perhaps ribs in barbecue sauce?” Pig he snubbed, a dangerous thing to do to a Jinn. Unless you are a dragon-king.
Pig glared at Master Den. “This is your doing, old fool. What in all the kingdoms of heaven and humans and the s
pirits below did you think you were doing by bringing the boy here, to meethim! ”
“I wasn’t fast enough to stop a foolish tongue,” Master Den admitted, “though for a change it was not my own.”
Llesho flinched at the reminder. His hasty words to Prince Tayyichiut had put them on this path.
“We had to cross the sea anyway.” The trickster gestured to his own billowing scarlet-and-yellow pantaloons with a flourish. “And no quest is complete without pirates. As for our friend Marmer Sea Dragon, he was on the trail of a prophetic rhyme that would put in his hands the power to stop Master Markko and release his son from his torment. It seemed only logical to bring him along.”
Something about Master Den’s sly innocence made Llesho wary of hidden truths in that introduction. Dragons, after all, could take the shapes of many things.
“Have we met before on this quest, my lord dragon? Do I know you by another name?” he asked with a polite bow as befitted a supplicant in the halls of a great king. The Marmer Sea was the dragon’s domain.
With an exasperated sigh, the dragon-king let his glance slide sideways, where Master Den waited with mischief curled in the corners of his grin. “I had to think of something quickly,” the trickster god apologized. “I looked down and there they were right to hand. Or foot, actually. Bluebells. The word just popped out of my mouth, and then we were stuck with it, so to speak.”
“One of us was, at least,” Marmer Sea Dragon shook his head. In the shape of a great horse, he had carried Master Den on his back for a time. And had suffered the indignity of a flowery alias. “Avoid the company of Jinns and trickster gods,” he warned Llesho, “They are nothing but trouble.”
“I had noticed that.” Bluebell. Llesho had traveled in the company of kings and gods for a long time now, and knew to keep his smile to himself.
The dragon-king studied Llesho thoughtfully. “Plots within plots, I see, Master Trickster,” he murmured. “Is he truly the one?”
Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven Page 20