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

by Curt Benjamin

  “My husband,” she answered him. As his eyes slid closed again, he felt her lips touch his. Husband. More than a word or a promise, for the first time it felt like the truth.

  When he woke again, the sun had come out in Pontus. Golden light poured in through the open windows with a breeze that blew the curtains like streamers into the room. Beyond the windows, Llesho saw the city washed clean in the sunlight and dressed in all her bright colors. And, on a balcony he hadn’t noticed when he was brought in, a man in a wide white skirt and boxy jacket danced in circles, his arms raised over his head, which was itself tilted in a dancer’s pose. The dance looked nothing like the prayer forms Llesho practiced, but still it reminded him of the Way of the Goddess. He’d learned from the Gansau Wastrels that many cultures trained their bodies to seek perfection and the goodwill of their gods and spirits. Watching the hypnotic motion of the dancer, he felt himself drawn up, as if he could float to heaven on the dance.

  Presently, however, the dancer noticed his attention. He stopped his turning and entered through the long windows. Now that he’d drawn closer, Llesho recognized him as the physician, Ibn Al-Razi.

  “You’re awake. Hungry, too, I would guess.”

  “Starving,” Llesho admitted. “It must be past din nertime.”

  The doctor smiled down at Llesho with satisfaction sparkling in his eyes. “Breakfast, actually. Your companions have been worried. I told them you’d wake up when you were ready and sent them away to their duties.”

  “Worried?” A memory niggled at the back of his mind, of lying in the moss at the feet of his Goddess, but it seemed very distant now, clouded with the sticky darkness of sleep.

  “You’ve been asleep for three days.”

  “Three days!” Llesho bounded up out of his bed, only to find that his legs refused to work and his head objected to the sudden change in orientation. Dizzy, he fell back down upon the feather bed. Someone had cleaned him while he slept, had taken away his rough clothes and covered him in a soft bed shirt that came to his ankles. Fine for sleeping in, but he couldn’t very well stroll around Pontus dressed like that. Once he was able to stand on his own, which he was determined to do any minute.

  “Prince Tayyichiut—?”

  “Struggles still with his terrible wound.” The physician shook his head, overcome by sadness at the horror that had been done to the young prince. “Syrup of poppy helps him to rest, and some of the medicines I compound in my workroom help when the wound suppurates.”

  Infection. Llesho’d seen enough of that in battle to know the danger. Working with the oysters in Pearl Bay as well, for that matter.

  “Kwan-ti, the healer who tended us on Pearl Island, made a paste of molds and seaweed that calmed the redness of a wound,” he suggested. She was far away, however, and he didn’t mention she was a dragon-queen when not tending to the wounds of the children who had harvested the bay for pearls.

  “I, too, know of such potions,” Al-Razi assured him, “And my poets are able to recite the compounds for many of them.”

  Medicine in the empire of Shan made little use of poetry, and that of the Harn seemed mostly composed of riddles. But much of Adar’s Thebin medical knowledge had been imparted in prayers. The notion of medicines and compounds reduced to poetry did not surprise him as it might, therefore. It did cause him to wonder why Habiba had sought out this particular physician.

  “I would like to meet your poets, if I may.” He didn’t mention his suspicion, that Ibn Al-Razi harbored a Thebin prince among his poet-slaves.

  “And so you shall after breakfast, when you are examined and your case is rhymed for the record books.”

  That wasn’t quite how it was done in Kungol, but Llesho let that pass. He would soon have the answer to his question—did his brother Menar reside in the house of the physician Ibn Al-Razi? In the meantime, he was still worried about Prince Tayy.

  “Have your poets given the prince any of these potions?” he asked. He knew that some people responded poorly to them. Had heard of injured divers who died of the potions though their wounds were slight. Al-Razi assured him this was not the case for the Harnish prince in his care.

  “Prince Tayyichiut responds well to our unguents and potions,” he said, “but a wound of such horror injures the soul as well as the body. How well he recovers will depend on his spirit and his will.”

  Llesho nodded his understanding. He didn’t like the answer, but he remembered the time, several cycles of the seasons past now, when he lay wounded after the Battle of Shan Market. He would have died but for the presence of his brothers. Adar and Shokar, his cadre, and even the emperor himself, had pulled Llesho through the hard times in a way that potions alone could never do. He would have to do the same for Tayy. Flinging aside the clean white sheet that covered him, therefore, he tried once again to rise from his bed.

  This time the physician let him stand. “The privy is in that direction.” He pointed down the length of the room. “Can you make it on your own, or do you want a chamber pot?”

  The privy hadn’t been his goal when he stood up, but Llesho quickly changed his mind. Privy first, then Tayy’s sickroom.

  “I can make it,” Llesho insisted. He wasn’t ill, after all. Just worn to the bone. “Then I want to see Prince Tayyichiut.”

  “Privy first,” the physician agreed only so far. “Breakfast second,” he substituted his own schedule. On consideration, breakfast seemed like a good idea, too.

  “And an examination of your own condition. Then we will see about visiting.” Al-Razi sounded pretty final about the order of his day, and Llesho found he didn’t have the energy to object. His legs did work, however. More or less. He could find Tayy on his own, later, if the doctor didn’t want to cooperate.

  Al-Razi motioned forward a servant who took his elbow and his weight, guiding and supporting him. They made it to the privy without incident, though Llesho wondered at how much longer than it looked the room became when he walked it. The way back was longer still, and the servant was nearly carrying him by the time he reached his bed, which was now mounded with soft cushions. When he was settled propped up on the mountain of cushions, the servant rested a tray with short legs on the bed over his knees.

  Llesho wished for a plate of eggs and ham, a slab of bread or a bowl of porridge, but none of those appeared on his plate. Instead he found a variety of delicacies for an invalid. Sherbets and boiled fruits were spread out before him, along with thin squares of flat bread toasted until they were crisp and a yogurt sauce to dip them in.

  In spite of his desire for heartier fare he took up a crisp of bread and dipped it, admitting that it was better than he’d expected. The fruit was tasty as well, and he discovered, to his dismay, that the doctor had been more accurate in his breakfast choices than Llesho himself. Half of the food remained on the tray when he stopped, unable to finish even the small amount put in front of him. He was glad he hadn’t protested the tray out loud since he now had to apologize only in his own mind. Al-Razi seemed to read this in his eyes and smiled knowingly as he gestured for a servant to take the scraps away.

  “It will take just a moment for my poets to join us. Then, if you have the strength, I will examine you.”

  “All right.” Another servant took away all but two of the cushions and Llesho gratefully lay back again, exhausted by even the small effort of tending to his physical needs. In spite of his weariness, Llesho’s heart beat faster, and nerves raised the hairs on his neck and his arms. In just a moment—

  “Master Al-Razi.” A man curiously tall and thin as a reed entered first, carrying a book of linen paper in his arm. With his free hand he touched his forehead and his heart in a respectful greeting. He was very pale, with chiseled features and strange blue eyes that saw keenly. Nothing at all like Menar, who was both Thebin and blind.

  Llesho tried to shake off the disappointment. There were so many places Menar could be in Pontus. They had heard of the blind poet as far away as the grasslands, s
o he must be something of a public figure. He couldn’t stay hidden for long, not with such a reputation. Once he recovered from this strange weariness, Llesho would go out into the city and find him.

  A dark hand rested on the elbow of the first poet, however, where it was crooked to cradle the medical book. In a matter of two paces, the second poet followed his fellow into the infirmary.

  “Master,” the poet said. He looked a lot like Balar, but slimmer, more fragile. His eyes were scarred and filmed with cataracts, no natural failure of vision but the remains of a terrible injury.

  Pain squeezed at Llesho’s heart at the sight of his brother. Who would inflict such a horrible wound on a poet, even one who was a slave? Surely not Ibn Al-Razi, who tended him with such gentle care. The answer to a different question came easily, however. Who would torture a Thebin prince? The Uulgar clansmen. Remembering what the raiders had done to Hmishi, he trembled to imagine the wounds he couldn’t see on his brother.

  “Menar,” he whispered, afraid to believe that he had found the prince. “What have they done to you?”

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” The poet cocked his head uncertainly in the direction of the voice. Llesho had seen only seven summers when the Harnish raiders came. He’d had the high, piping lilt of a child then, nothing at all like his voice now, deepened with maturity.

  “It’s me. Llesho.” Struggling with his covers and with the failure of his strength, he dragged himself to the edge of his bed, but the physician kept him seated with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Llesho? What Llesho is that?” Grief and anger crossed the poet-slave’s face. “You ask what they have done to me? Only this: my brother Llesho is dead, murdered when just a child with the rest of my family by the same men who burned the eyes in my head.”

  A low moan escaped Llesho’s throat. “Menar, it’s me! I didn’t die. The raiders carried me into Shan and sold me as a slave in the pearl beds. I’ve been fighting to get back home ever since.” Which was the truth of his heart if not the start of his quest.

  Ibn Al-Razi patted Llesho’s shoulder encouragingly. “If your brother is the young king of Thebin, then this Llesho is he,” the physician assured his poet-slave. “And if you are his brother, then I have sheltered a prince in hiding in my infirmary all these years.”

  “It can’t be—” Menar shook his head, refusing the hope held out to him lest it tear his heart out when it was taken away again. Llesho knew the feeling, saw it in the working of Menar’s jaw.

  In spite of his doubt, the poet let himself be guided to the bed. Delicately, with fingertips grown sensitive to seeing with touch, he traced Llesho’s brow, the curve of bone around his eye. When he had drawn the chin, the nose, the curve of an ear, he hesitantly withdrew his hand.

  “The face of our father,” he whispered, his own face a mask of awe and confusion. “Can it be? Llesho?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” Llesho reached for his brother, and Al-Razi moved aside, guiding his blind slave to take his place at the bedside.

  When their hands met, Menar sat down heavily on the bed and wrapped his arms around his brother. Pressing Llesho’s head to his heart, he choked out a great gasping sob. “Oh, Goddess,” he cried, “They have burned out my eyes so that I cannot even weep for you.”

  “That’s all right,” Llesho answered, his tears falling on his brother’s jacket like a morning rain. “I’m crying enough for both of us.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Kaydu pretended to wander by coincidence into the infirmary at just that moment, but battle-ready tension underlay the casual words. Little Brother remained tucked away in the pack on her back, ready for battle even in this sheltered place. Llesho raised his head from his brother’s shoulder and wiped at the tears with his gauzy sleeves.

  “This is Menar,” he explained, “my brother.”

  “The blind poet?” Kaydu sauntered closer, took a better look. “He does look a lot like Balar.”

  Little Brother, sensing the change in her mood, crept out of hiding and clambered to his preferred perch on her shoulder. He wore in miniature the uniform of Thousand Lakes Province and on his head a cap with the button of office on it. With a warning screech, the monkey leaped from her shoulder to the bed. There he stretched on tiptoes to touch an inquisitive finger at the corner of Menar’s damaged eye.

  Menar froze, afraid to move in the presence of some assault he could not see or rightly interpret. “What is it?”

  In answer, the monkey whimpered his own distress and wrapped his arms around the prince’s neck.

  “It’s Little Brother. My familiar,” Kaydu explained. “Your injury has upset him and he wants to comfort you.”

  Llesho held his breath. He had grown used to traveling with wonders and for a moment let hope overcome reason. But the monkey’s touch didn’t heal the scarred wound. Menar remained blind.

  Kaydu made no move to collect her familiar, but watched both princes with calculation in her glance. “I thought my father brought us here because of Ibn Al-Razi’s other patient, but things seem to be moving toward a crisis in all directions on this quest.”

  “What other patient?”

  The physician answered this question. “Your captain, who has not received visiting privileges yet, probably is speaking about my royal patient in the palace.”

  “He’s the personal physician to the Apadisha,” Kaydu confirmed. “My father has gone to pay his respects at the magician’s college, but when he returns, he has promised to explain the next part of the plan.”

  Llesho waved away her explanation. He wasn’t interested in Habiba’s plans. Or rather, there remained little choice in what they had to do. “Of course I’ll consider Habiba’s advice in securing the aid of the Apadisha. But the quest remains on my shoulders, whether I want it or not. I won’t see anyone else hurt by it.”

  He was thinking of all his friends wounded in battle, and those that he had lost. But Menar stroked his face with a sad and knowing smile. He was, after all, the source of the prophetic verse they sought in Pontus.

  “I never thought, when the god of Pontus spoke through me, that he meant the brother I had thought lost all these years ago. But if you are the one foretold, you bring us war.

  “People are hurt in war and the Apadisha knows it. He won’t expect to escape unscathed. Rather, he will ask, ‘Is the goal in this battle worth the cost in lives and homes and hearts?’ And, ‘Is this the star who will lead us to that goal, or a false light in a murky sky?’ ”

  Llesho took that for a poet’s way of asking if he was likely to lead them to victory, or to take the Apadisha with him into defeat. Mergen, Prince Tayy’s uncle, had asked the same questions Menar predicted for the Apadisha. So far, he’d brought the Qubal people only the death of their khan and possibly the death of their prince as well. He didn’t know if he had a better answer for Pontus. He did know the nightmare of Lluka’s visions, however. The alternative to war was the end of all the worlds of heaven and earth, though the underworld might survive only to welcome the damned.

  “War knocks on the Apadisha’s door,” he therefore said. “His choices are to fight, to risk death in battle so that the world he knows will go on, or not to fight, and watch his world burn. I will fight. So will Mergen of the Qubal people who roam the grasslands. The Tashek people of the Gansau Wastes have fought and died in this quest, and will do so again. The emperor of Shan is also with us, and Shokar has trained Thebin soldiers who will fight to return Kungol to Thebin rule. The Apadisha may join us, or he may stand aside and watch. But I have seen Lluka’s visions. If we lose, he will die as quickly as the rest.”

  “Important questions, and weighty answers all,” Ibn Al-Razi interrupted, “but the sickroom is no place to decide the Apadisha’s business. Particularly since the Apadisha isn’t here. Matters of state can wait until our young king has rested and can present his case at the Divan.”

  “Master.” Menar bowed his head to accept the gentle rebuke.

&nbs
p; Outrage stirred in Llesho’s heart, to see his brother bend his neck to the yoke of his slavery. How could he trust the attentions of a doctor who held his brother in servitude?

  But Ibn Al-Razi bowed his head to his slave with a smile that Menar couldn’t see but must hear in the words the physician spoke. “I have always known you were a prince among poets. Now I find you are a prince among mortal men as well. When your brother, the young king, has rested, we will discuss the price of your release into his hands. For now, let me enjoy one last afternoon of your talents. Will you recite for us, something soothing to ease your brother’s way into sleep?”

  “Not yet,” Llesho reminded them. “Prince Tayyichiut first. Then rest. If you put us together in the same chamber, we’ll both be easier to keep track of. And I will rest more easily knowing how the prince fares.”

  “It may distress you, to see your friend so brought down by his injuries,” Al-Razi objected. Then his eyes swept the scars at Llesho’s breast.

  “But I am reminded that you are no stranger to the terrible wounds of war. Perhaps.” The physician dropped his gaze, contemplating some image behind his lashes. “Your friend sleeps deeply. He will not know you are there—the poppy robs the patient of his will to rise out of his slumber. But if you will rest more easily in his presence, it can be arranged. At least for a little while.”

  He gestured with a flick of his wrist and servants came forward, making a chair of their locked hands for him to ride in. Llesho would have protested that he could walk, but his journey to the privy had robbed him of his adven turing spirit. He let himself be guided to the human chair and carried into a nearby room identical to his own, where Prince Tayyichiut lay in restless dreams.

  “His mind struggles to make its way back to the land of the waking,” Al-Razi explained as Tayy’s head tossed on his pillows. “For the sake of his stitches, however, he must remain quiet.”

  With that, the physician left him to take up a thin silver rod pierced through its center from end to end like a blade of river grass. He put one end into a vial of dark glass and put the other end to his mouth, sucking, Llesho supposed, until a dose of the poppy had traveled up the rod. Releasing the straw from his mouth, he capped it with his finger. Then he took the open end and inserted it between Tayy’s lips, nudging it past his teeth, until so much of the straw had disappeared Llesho thought the prince must have swallowed it. When he was satisfied at the positioning of the silver straw, Al-Razi took his finger from the end.