The chanting voices of the monks grew deeper, richer, tone and harmony layering into dizzying heights. The liturgy of a goddess. Of the goddess, her multiple names threaded into an intricate choral work. Woman-hating monks? Gard asked himself. No. They deny what they most want, out of mingled fear and pride.
“You expect too much of me,” he said to Senmut. Unsurprisingly, his tongue was thick in his mouth, his lips tinglingly numb.
“Do I?”
“I dislike being tested.”
“Do you?”
“You are going to tell me it is an honor, being tested.”
“Am I?”
The soul-nets spun. Faint glistening shapes clung to them. Attenuated shapes, impressions of—not humanity, some kind of deity, perhaps. Shapes swam in the air above the plateau, playing seek and find with the swooping falcon. Coiling together in ethereal couplings, he realized, as he had directed them in that moment of outrage at the smithy. He had often wondered whether the gods indulged in carnal acts. Or, rather, in acts of love. Not the same thing.
He gulped and blinked. His body was as flaccid as the goatskin bellows. His mind writhed. The stalactites of honey plummeted, one by one—no, a bell clamored, each peal a blow against his head—no again, it was a hammer, beating an imperative upon the anvil of his thought.
Senmut sat in amiable silence at his side. Jofar stretched out, dozing, at his feet. “Eldrafel,” Gard said, astonished at the plump ripe shapes of his own words.
“Eldrafel,” repeated Senmut.
“My father.”
“Your father.”
“He had power, and he was evil.”
“Manifestly,” Senmut agreed. “Lord of the Dance, Leader of Souls. Lord of Darkness.”
Gard tried to swallow. The moisture in his mouth was thick and bittersweet. “He had more than one attribute, yes. But power does not necessarily mean evil—darkness does not automatically stem from, from . . .” His voice wobbled.
“Does it not?”
“Andrion has power. No, he is used by the gods’ power.” The falcon fell, shrieking, seized something small and wriggling from the shade of a thorn bush, rose again and disappeared into the night. The slender drifting shapes, like quicksilver banners against the indigo hush of evening, danced to the chanting. But no, the chanting had stopped, and the wind was quiet, and the shapes danced to the slow pulse of blood in Gard’s own veins. The end of the world was really quite compelling, a stark beauty of contour and shadow, a subtle beauty of cause and intent . . .
I might, Gard thought, become a philosopher yet, specializing in symbol and image and obfuscation.
“Power does not necessarily mean evil,” Senmut goaded.
Gard had no body. He was drained of lust and pride and fear. He felt nothing of himself, no pain, no pleasure. He was lost.
He was found. A little voice in his belly said, “I could show Andrion power. I could show them all power. I could show them—honor.”
A thin strand of lucidity jerked him up. I am drunk. Not on wine, but, by Harus, on honey. What nectars have those bees been sucking?
Senmut was holding his hand. He was rolling back the sleeve of the burnoose. The little sickle glinted in a light that was neither of the sun nor the moon. “Not that kind of virgin blood, boy,” the monk cackled. Gard saw the point touch his arm, saw the welling line of his own blood, felt nothing. The thread of sobriety frayed and snapped. His blood was ice, it was steam, it was a clangor in his mind—wake up, wake up . . .
“Show them all,” he murmured.
“So be it then.” Senmut gestured. He made a slow, sinuous, spread-fingered, arcane gesture, a curtain coming down over Gard’s perceptions. Or a curtain going up.
He was outside his own body, looking in. He was watching, intrigued and appalled as something cracked like an egg inside him. Revealing something that uncoiled and fluttered and peered up at him. A little creature, part reptile, part bird, with wings and a pointed nose and eyes as bright as Senmut’s. With those limpid gray eyes that could see beyond the mundane into a quite extraordinary reality. This was the being that had winged so swiftly by his head in the encampment. This was the being that had summoned him.
Gard clung to the very rim of consciousness, eyeball to eyeball with the hatchling in his own belly. Intelligent creature, appealingly ugly, not without humor, considering the gravity of the moment. But then, how else to deal with terror, except with humor?
The creature turned and sank sharp teeth into his vitals. Sensation returned in a tidal wave of agony.
Gard cried out. Fire and ice. Sweetness and acid. Ecstasy and pain, all at once. Union with his own spirit, more intense than the spending of his seed inside any woman.
Slowly he toppled over the edge of that abyss, the little imp clutching him, he clutching it. His fingers, its claws, left tracks in the precipice of his own being as he slid, wailing, from a great height.
But Senmut’s gnarled hands caught him just before he was dashed to shards upon some lurking shoal of reality. Caught him, and held him up like a baby just released from the body of its mother. The old man’s voice echoed from a great distance, “I thought that honey would do the trick. Nourishment for your own personal daemon, eh, Gard?”
Gard spun slowly into oblivion, cradling the dragonet against his breast.
Chapter Four
For one rational moment Gard wondered how on earth he could get his body into such a posture, legs knotted, ankles laced, shoulders almost dislocated. His Minran governess had used the customary warning when she had caught him making faces at his mother; now her words came back to him, and he wondered if he would freeze in this posture, spending the rest of his life scuttling about like a crab. But the qualm passed; he had assumed that position often enough over the last five months.
He directed the little dragon daemon that nestled under his ribs to stir the embers in his belly until they burst into flame. A useful skill when the winds of heaven drove rain and sleet and snow before them, feasting on mortality and warmth so that the occasional tooth-rattlingly crisp and clear day seemed like a blessing from the hand of Hurmazi himself.
But the basin had not been capped by a fragile scum of ice for several days; he could no longer indulge himself as he so often had during the winter, sketching a sign with his hand and watching steam like an exhaled breath rise from the water as its sheen of ice vanished. Earth and water, air and fire, power and blood—those equations he now understood.
Whether the other skills he had learned over the winter were useful, he had yet to see. Just as he had yet to decide whether the dragonet was really a vestigial organ that he had inherited from the supernatural beings in his ancestry, generating his own occult power, or whether it was simply symbolic, a focus for his hallucinatory existence in Dhan Bagrat.
He straightened his back as Senmut had taught him—the spine, boy, the channel for blood and power—and began the breath-patterns. Inhalation, slow and deep. Exhalation, until his lungs flapped empty. Counted repetitions of the khu-word; shakhmi, shakhmi, rolling from his tongue, down into his throat and then forward to his lips, where it burst into the surrounding darkness. His private daemon stirred and stretched and purred like a cat.
Together, Gard and daemon spiraled down into his own awareness. He saw, heard, touched, smelled, felt dimensions he had once dreaded, because he had only sensed them in nightmares. He no longer felt the cold air upon his skin, the gritty surface of the platform through his robe, the pulse of his own blood. He chased a quick, bright shimmer singing in his veins, now in his grasp, now barely perceptible. Maddeningly elusive, disturbingly compelling, it danced with him, step, step, turn, turn, turn step again and again.
The dragonet smirked, folded its tiny paws on its haunches, and began muttering its own khu-word—imkhash, imkhash. The beast was a vendor in some supernal marketplace, extolling the virtues of its wares, mounds of self-confidence, bales of knowledge, piles of occult powers teetering precariously one upon the
other and garnished with honey.
The world outside, the world inside, it promised in sultry tones, were one and the same, shaped by perception and imagination made will, shaped by that shimmer that was not blood, was not ether, but was some of each . . .
The daemon fluttered its wings petulantly. Gard struggled from the quicksand of his own mind. He peered down from the walls of Dhan Bagrat to the plateau beneath.
Dawn. The shapes of an encamped caravan floated in a sea of smoke and shadow, insignificant against the mountains etched on a sky like the thinnest, finest silver leaf. A zephyr rotated the soul-nets as painfully as old men hobbling up a staircase. A faint salubrious odor hung upon the chill air, perfume trailing from the skirts of spring.
Through the dark curtain of his lashes Gard watched the sky swept by waves of fiery pink and rivulets of gold alloy like those he had gingerly poured into molds in Senmut’s forge when he had made his own pentacle. On the near edge of the camp several robed figures stood beside a gray horse.
Gard leaned forward. The dragonet pricked its ears. Hooves rang against the ground. A shod war horse, then, like Andrion’s late lamented Ventalidar. The robed men swirled around the animal like the opening blossom of a camellia, their garments muted by the tentative light into pastel blues, yellows and roses.
Gard stared so intently he felt each individual mote of dust land on his eyeballs. He blinked and took a deep breath. To his ears came a distant trill, the jingle of ankle bracelets. Yes, there, drifting in soft butterfly-shapes through the encampment, was some merchant’s retinue of dancing-girls.
The dragonet giggled. Gard grimaced and stilled the importunate response of his body. But it was reassuring to know that the physical appreciation of femininity was one faculty that had not been distorted, abandoned, or converted to obscure metaphysical purposes during his winter in Dhan Bagrat.
For a moment he and his daemon pondered just what it would be like now, to make love to a woman with senses that had been so refined. Perhaps the difference between swilling tavern beer with the husks of barley floating like sewage upon its top, and sipping clear blush-rose Dulcamara wine.
Which was made in the Mohan. Where this caravan, judging by the turbans on the men and the howdahs on the elephants, had no doubt begun. It would carry no news of the Empire, then. The two or three caravans that had struggled by during the winter had left only quick eddies of information; the imperial family had journeyed to Farsahn, Tembujin’s eldest son had married, Andrion’s ancient war horse had died.
They have some nerve, Gard thought with a wry smile, to go on living without me!
A man mounted the Mohendra horse. In the uncertainty of dawn the beast was as ghostly pale as Death’s steed. The group began picking its way through tumbled rocks and thorns toward Dhan Bagrat.
Bee eaters swirled upward in glints of blue, caroling into the sky from the burgeoning branches of the plane tree before the gate. Several bees swooped by. The omnipresent Senmut ambled across the entrance court. For the hundredth time Gard played with the idea that there was more than one Senmut.
Senmut opened the gate. Grinning—visitors!—Gard leaped to his feet, fished one of the last of the dried apples from a fold in his robe and held it before him, contemplating it with the keen eye of a jeweler appraising a gem. Odd, the things he could not remember; the taste of ordinary honey drizzled over pastry, the scent of roast boar in the banqueting hall, the touch of Raisa’s hands upon his skin. The image of Raisa had faded into that of generic Woman, dark hair and deep-curved lips parted, ready to kiss, and eyes like—like what? The woman-icon of his momentary but urgent fantasies had eyes like the sea on a cloudless day, depth upon depth of blue, green, violet . . .
His grin became a scowl. Hellfrost, this occult swamp had him seeking significance in a piece of fruit! He sank his teeth into the apple and worried away a chunk so large he could barely move his jaw to chew. Although the peel was tough, the flesh inside was sweet and firm, and runnels of juice leaked from the corners of his mouth. The dragonet smacked its lips. Gard climbed down the ladder and walked toward the courtyard, munching.
By the time he arrived, Senmut was standing in the gateway, hands folded inside his sleeves, eyeing the approaching visitors. Several other monks materialized out of the walls and Jofar stood in the passage to the main courtyard, bucket swinging from one hand. A brief fluttering echoed from the tower—the falcon, or one of the monks still engrossed in his exercises—Gard could not tell.
Jofar caught Gard’s eye and gestured. Gard winked at him—we can spar later, after we enjoy the show. Gard had long since despaired of teaching the young Apsuri; now he simply survived their encounters without too much embarrassment. Or resentment that despite the prophecies surrounding his birth, good, simple Jofar had no demons to wrestle with and was not nagged to breathe or meditate or study Senmut’s arcane arts.
Senmut waved Jofar back into the inner court. Jofar’s face fell. He shuffled off, looking over his shoulder. The procession came to a halt before the gate just as the sun, the eye of Vaiswanara, cleared the mountaintops and spilled light across the world.
The war horse’s harness was edged with bells that rang gaily as it cavorted; its rider was resplendent in loose silk breeches and coat and turban, all of the lushest reds and yellows. Gard almost drooled at the colors. He levitated his apple core above his palm and then caught himself—and it—quickly. The leader’s turban, he noted, was more intricately folded than those of the men who were on foot. Perhaps the draping of a man’s turban signaled his rank; that knowledge would be of value when he arrived in the Mohan.
The delegation moved in a cloud of spices and aromatic oils, an intoxicating draught compared to the everlasting odors of dust and beans that hung over the monastery. Gard inhaled open-mouthed, recognizing musk and cinnamon, and something as pungent as hazelnut liqueur.
“That,” said Senmut’s voice in Gard’s ear, even though the old man stood several paces away. “is Tarek ed Urgal of Giremon. Menelik’s chief lieutenant. Now why is he coming here?”
Tarek leaped from his horse and stood for a moment, graciously accepting the homage of a dozen pairs of eyes. His beard was black, carefully pointed, oiled to a soft luster. His sash held a wicked, jewel-inlaid scimitar. When he stepped forward it was with the cool assurance that the dirt and pebbles beneath his feet would be transformed to marble by his touch.
Gard could not tell what it was that stirred him with greater lust, the magnificent horse, or the fine clothes—his own nondescript robes would not have made a saddle blanket for that horse—or Tarek’s confidence.
And yet that confidence had something in it of Eldrafel’s, a tremor of questionable motive and a self-absorption that was not quite self-awareness . . . Gard shook himself. No need to see scorpions beneath every brick, even if he did have a daemon in his stomach. He tossed the apple core away; it was a poor thing, after all.
Tarek nodded. His flunkies produced bundles and bales. After a moment’s close scrutiny—yes, even the horse was male—and with a bow that was less polite than sarcastic, Senmut allowed them inside the gate.
Senmut’s acerbity was not lost on Tarek. He grinned, a sudden flash of white teeth in a mahogany face. “We are only simple merchants trying to earn a living,” he said, in a voice oiled as sleekly as his beard.
“Since when has the Satrap of Giremon been a simple merchant?”
“When it pleases the Padishah to name him one.”
“When it pleases Menelik to name himself Padishah of all the Mohan, when he is not?”
“We all have ambitions.” Tarek gestured, and the dusty stone pavement was littered with bright cloths and open boxes. Ivory and ebony, spices and oils, teak and garnet. A black onyx bowl gleaming like Khazyari eyes. Pottery and bolts of linen. Some of the monks moved forward, murmuring to each other, fingering the merchandise and haggling with the vendors. Others disappeared into the depths of the monastery and produced small metal votaries and pots of
honey. Ordinary honey, Gard knew; the honey that had blown off the top of his head was a closely guarded secret.
“Your brother sends his greetings,” said Tarek with a half-smile that was almost, but not quite derisive.
Brother? Gard repeated to himself. The dragonet pricked its wings.
Senmut spat a graphic oath. “I disowned him many years ago. Do not dirty my ears with his so-called greetings.”
Now, that was interesting. A brother—the black kid of the family, perhaps? Why? Gard drifted closer to the men, his ears unfurling.
But Senmut retired glowering into his facial hair and said nothing more. Tarek’s expressionless expression must have taken years to cultivate. Both heads angled away from each other, inspecting the sky, considering each other’s cohorts, evaluating the wares laid out for sale.
Tarek folded his arms. His coat fell open and Gard saw that he was wearing a mail shirt. Trusting soul, to wear mail into a monastery. Perhaps he always wore mail.
Tarek’s eyes were nodes of polished flint. If Gard approached close enough, he might see himself reflected, an insignificant shape wavering upon a paradox of shiny opacity . . . The dragonet stirred fitfully. Gard narrowed his eyes, summoned an invisible tendril of his sixth sense and snapped it across the courtyard. Like the coat gaping to reveal armor, Tarek’s arrogant reserve parted and Gard glimpsed an aura of lightning-streaked indigo.
Tarek’s head went up like that of a wolf scenting its prey. His aura burst like a bubble and vanished. Gard’s tendril of intent recoiled, stinging him. The pentacle in the pouch around his neck rang his senses like a gong. His daemon shrank. Hastily he stepped into the shadow cast by the outer wall and pulled his hood over his head. Tarek’s stony eyes passed him by and rested on Senmut, faintly puzzled. Senmut smiled, a mere wrinkling of his lips over his teeth, the genial host wanting nothing more than for his guests to leave.
Wings of Power Page 5