“His head or the wall?”
“Both. In breaking it, he discovers another wall beyond.”
“And we can do nothing but wait and see?”
“I have waited for twenty years, since Jofar was brought here as an infant.”
Twenty years. Only phlegmatic Jofar would have survived such a childhood. Unless it was the childhood that had made him phlegmatic. “And now he is gone. To what?”
“I do not know, Gard.”
“You mean you do not know everything?”
Again the keen look, and a grin to boot. “The gods know everything. All I know is the danger of ignoring the omens and prophecies they offer us.”
“So you teach me because the omens tell you to?”
“I teach you because you have great power that can ultimately make a difference in this world.”
“What,” Gard asked between his clenched teeth, “if I want to make a difference only to myself?”
“Then you are a fool.” Senmut turned away. Gard threw down the cloth and leaned on the windowsill. He was so close to a twirling soul-net that the ropes and staffs blurred before his eyes, casting a rippling shadow less upon the scene below than upon the mind which considered it.
The monastery complex was engagingly off-plumb, from the pregnant tower, down to the walls that nudged at but did not retain the rocky soil of the ridge upon which it was built. The squat boulders, the buildings, the hill itself were smooth humps, comfortingly organic, not at all like the sharp and tortured rock of Minras. Not at all threatening.
Jofar had never been threatening. Not, perhaps, a true friend, like Tembujin’s sons; he was simply not quick enough. Losing him was like losing a pet. Gard made a gorgon’s face at the taste of his own bad humor. Could it be, he asked himself brutally, that he resented Jofar’s suddenly being returned to his home, while he, Gard, had no home?
In the courtyard below, a monk hobbling on all fours gave up his attempt to become another species and sat down to meditate in the sun, his shadow a little puddle around his knees like a garment that could be cast off. Senmut kept promising that in time Gard, too, would learn the secrets of fleshly transformation. There was no point, though, in becoming a donkey just to carry a load of honey to a passing caravan.
The caravan. He looked beyond the encompassing mud-brick walls, past the feeble green haze that were gardens fed by the water runoff, past the occasional gray blob of a sheep. No, the caravan was gone. The plateau stretched in shimmering blankness to the smudge of mountains on the horizon. That way lay the Mohan, and cities finer than this pile of mud could ever imagine. Wealthy Ferangipur. Apsurakand and its satellite cities such as Giremon ruled by the ineffable Tarek, and Muktardagh, ruled by Menelik’s brother Shikar ed Allaudin.
Under his hands the wood of the window sill wriggled. It was oak, he sensed, and had been trimmed by an iron axe two generations before, about the time the Khazyari sacked what was now the Apsuri Alliance.
He still had his bag of gold and his letter, wrapped in his Sardian chiton and belt and hidden in his bed. He had just honed his sword, having found one of the monks cutting firewood with it.
This place has no hold over me. I learned from it, but I served it, too. I have no obligation to Senmut; it was he who led me astray from my journey . . . Gard turned, casting a guilty look toward the old monk, but Senmut—twiddling with an interlocking mesh of toothed gears that seemed to have no purpose other than to raise and lower a small purple banner—was for once not eavesdropping on his acolyte’s thought.
I am wasting myself here. I have places to go, and things to do. I have my own omens to follow.
The diminutive daemon opened one eye, regarded the man of which he was a part, turned over and went back to sleep.
* * * * *
Gard sat in the back of the chapel, his dinner resting very uneasily in his stomach. He would rather starve in the wilderness, he thought, than face another day of dried fish and beans and orange squash. His fingertips traced the line of his ribs under his robe; each one was a sharp ridge beneath flesh stretched as taut as a Khazyari drumhead. He envisioned the dragonet peering out from between his bones like a prisoner in a cell. But still it dozed, twitching like a dog dreaming of the hunt.
Bones, yes; he had learned to read those, too. Tonight his own bones ached, each note of the monks’ chant grating upon them like fingernails over slate. After evensong he would tell Senmut he was leaving.
Gard wriggled on the hard stone bench. If he had had a birthright, he would have sold it then and there for a goose-down cushion.
The candlelight cast mysterious shadows upon the dun-colored walls. The pentacle was heavy in its pouch against his chest. He had made it to Senmut’s directions, repeating the nonsensical words, shakhmi, shakhmi. He had opened the then-fresh cut on his arm to provide—virgin blood, hah! And yes, it had protected him today from Tarek’s probing power. The five points were the four elements plus spirit. Or the five senses that had now shriveled away to nothingness. Riddles. Symbols. He yawned.
Magic was not at all as mysterious as he had once thought when he was a little boy boggling at the conjurors in the marketplace in Iksandarun. It was not so much a matter of herbs and blood, strange ingredients and muttered spells, as it was simply movement blended with intent, a synthesis of imagination and will. And if Gard had anything, he had imagination and will.
Senmut sang happily, his face smoothed by harmony. Surely that glimpse of weariness and irresolution had been a figment of Gard’s own internal dissonance. He yawned again. Nice harmonies, he reflected, but they need a feminine soprano to carry the melody.
His thoughts settled with the little pops and sighs of ashes cooling in the fire pit. Magic as a synthesis, as a tension—like the tension of sun and moon, man and woman—madness, for these monks to do without that. Man and woman belong together, as a union of opposites, complete.
Even the gods knew that. Harus had come to Bellasteros’s mother, in Sabazel under Ashtar’s bright and piercing eye. Tenebrio had come to Eldrafel’s mother, and Eldrafel to Chrysais, on Minras in demon-haunted darkness . . . The miniature dragon moaned in its sleep. Gard felt again that tickling in his veins, the trace of power, bright and strong like lightning playing upon the horizon and presaging a storm.
Like the lightning dancing in Tarek’s indigo aura. Gard twitched. Tiring, that brief clash of magicks with the Satrap of Giremon. Numbing.
The scent of the bowls of honey, the smoke of the candles, clotted in his throat. Colored candles, ranging from white to gray-black, each with its own significance: white to dispel evil influences—did not do much to get rid of me, did it?—blue for healing, green for prosperity, red for good luck, down to the black candle, which symbolized communication with the dead. His spine crawled, something vaguely serpentine shaping his drowsiness.
He yawned, his features almost splitting and peeling from his skull, and wriggled again on his bench. Between lids like wool blankets he saw the candles waver. Pale vegetable dyes colored the wax, so that each was barely different from the other, like day after day in Dhan Bagrat.
Of course, he thought suddenly and clearly, there is no more Rexian purple. And his head fell forward on his chest.
Periwinkle. He tasted Senmut’s periwinkle tea. To prevent nightmares, the old man had assured him. It had worked admirably. No nightmares all winter, the wings of night eerily silent. Only the impassive contemplations of the day, fire and air alone without the harmonies of feminine earth and water, lessons not complete because they were incompletely presented . . .
The walls of the chapel crumbled and fell. The candle flames whipped madly and winked out. Something large, horned and winged, stamped just outside. With an incoherent cry Gard leaped to his feet. Hot fetid breath shriveled his back. He ran, thrusting aside the monks as they sang imperturbably on.
He gasped and stumbled across the mud in the courtyard, his breath exploding in his lungs like the heat of Senmut’s forge. The penta
cle melted. The dragonet started up, screamed, and was cremated. Its pathetic little pile of ashes was swirled away by a howling wind. The winged bull of Minras, draped in Tenebrio’s shadow, thundered behind him.
The soul-nets atop the tower spun madly against the indifferent silver of the sky. Senmut hung there, bleeding from a thousand cuts, blank eyes staring upward, murdered by his own toys.
Demons of darkness pounded at the mud-brick walls of Dhan Bagrat, throwing them down. “No!” Gard cried. He stopped and wheeled. “No, you cannot do this, they welcomed me—I shall not let you . . .”
The commotion was stilled by a soft, clear, female voice. With a bellow of frustration the bull retreated. Gard jerked around.
The face looking up at him was like Raisa’s and yet was not hers. It was his idealized female, perfection in womanly flesh. Her eyes were translucent blue, green, and amethyst, her silken skin glowed with patchouli, bracelets tinkled upon her wrists. One of her hands stroked his face, the other offered a fresh, moist apple. She smiled. “I have waited for you a long time.”
“I was trying to come to you,” he muttered, his tongue like a block of wood. “These crazed monks kidnapped me and made me carry water.”
She laughed. Golden light danced in her eyes. Her teeth flashed in her smooth cinnamon skin. Gard reached for her, seized a handful of silk or of hair or of yielding skin . . .
“Ah, Gard,” sighed Senmut.
Gard opened his eyes and looked up. The chapel was empty. Only the white and blue candles still burned, their tiny flames motionless in the darkness. A faint gleam shone in the windows, and the iron grilles cast intricate shadows that gamboled across the floor, up Gard’s legs, into his lap. The dragonet watched, chin resting alertly on its paws, darkness spinning like fine black wool upon its tail.
“You must go now,” Senmut said.
Gard pulled himself to his feet and clutched at the old man’s shoulder, dizzy. “Can I decide nothing for myself?”
Senmut smiled tightly, his face in the glaucous candlelight amused and weary at once. “You can only become an adept if you want to. As yet, you do not. You still fear yourself.”
Gard shrugged noncommittally—maybe so, maybe not. The nightmare ebbed and he released the old monk.
Still Senmut smiled. “You have learned more than a little here. Enough to bang your head even harder against that wall. For rarely have I met anyone so hardheaded.”
“I shall take that as a compliment, Senmut,” Gard said.
“Yes, you do that.” Senmut’s smile dried into—sorrow, perhaps, or dread; he turned and hobbled out of the chapel.
Gard was alone except for the daemon in his belly, who sat picking its teeth with a claw, offering no comfort and no advice. Something flew past the window, lightly brushing the grille with its wing tips. Lightly brushing the back of Gard’s neck so that his body suddenly chilled with goose flesh.
Stumbling over the benches, caroming off the door frame, he blundered away. The candles blinked and went out.
Chapter Six
With a dashing swirl of his burnoose, which would have been more effective had the cloth not been quite so stained and worn, Gard bounded up the steps and under the arched entrance to the caravanserai. His nose registered the scents of coriander, garlic and lye, not those of spoiled meat and sewage. Good. This inn must be the best in Chandrigore.
A small man with the pursed mouth and twitching nose of a hare appeared in the entrance court. “My good man,” Gard began.
The hare made shooing motions. “Go away. No scraps for beggars.”
Not a surprising reaction. Gard’s ragged clothing, his scraggly beard and straggling hair, were not much of a reference. But he knew what was. He snapped his fingers, and between them appeared an imperial solidus.
The glare of the noon sun was nothing to that of the coin. The proprietor’s lips loosened, opened, and spread into a smile of courtesy annealed with avarice. His sternly pointing forefinger went limp; his hand flopped over like a dying spider and remained extended with palm up and open. “I beg your pardon, Nazib,” he said. “The light—the shadows—ah, I can see by your bearing that you are a man of substance.”
Gard strangled a laugh and whisked the solidus up his sleeve. Nothing like the gleam of gold to ennoble a face. “First I want a room. Your best. I want a bath, a barber, new clothes. I want dinner; lamb and saffron rice and mangoes. For two,” he added daringly. Perhaps some young and comely wife of an old merchant would be traveling alone, and would be pleased to accept the dinner invitation of a personable if somewhat mysterious stranger . . .
The dragonet in his breast stirred in its sleep and muttered something faintly disapproving. If I wanted Senmut’s opinion, Gard told it, I would have stayed at Dhan Bagrat.
The innkeeper turned and began shouting orders. The ensuing scene might have been from one of Gard’s favorite comedies—he had always been partial to Aristofanis—played in the great theater in Iksandarun.
Servants both male and female materialized from doorways and corridors. Dizzyingly, the set was changed from the cobblestoned courtyard to a carpeted and draped upper room, its balcony overlooking the marketplace. Gard found himself in a bath, sluiced by bucket after bucket of jasmine-scented water hurled enthusiastically by a burly manservant. So much for the odor of beans and dirt and sanctity. This was the new life he had sought. That he would have found long since, were it not for that quick glint of power in his blood. But the winter had been an illusion, the monastery only a fever dream. And the sweetness on his lips was not honey, but the expected kisses of women.
Odd, how the curtains fluttered even on this windless day. Surely the inn’s roaches were emitting those short, suppressed giggles. There was a time when he would have strutted before such admiration, but now he hurried to step from the bath, drape a towel more or less modestly around his loins and settle the leather pouch around his neck before the maidservants were upon him like a flock of songbirds, offering trays of sweetmeats and sherbet and—yes, by the three wives of Hurmazi, Dulcamara wine.
The women’s features were masks, he realized with a qualm; pleasing but ultimately meaningless. Gods, surely he had not exchanged the only power he had once had, his attraction to and for women, for the nebulous and frightening powers hammered into him by Senmut! Poetic justice and a dirty joke, both . . . The little daemon yawned and stretched and sat up, blinking its bright little eyes at the play. The scene changed again.
It had taken only moments for the marketplace to hear of the wealthy Imparluzi Nazib; his coloring, his accent, and his coins marked his imperial origins as surely as a brand on a cow. Gard stood, goblet in one hand, almond-stuffed date in the other, watching gluttonously as vendors swarmed into the room. They unfurled eye-searingly gaudy garments, offered weapons gleaming with garnets and agates, suggested vials of aromatic oils and glittery baubles, murmured enticingly of horses and elephants.
He confined himself to purchasing changes of trousers, shirts, and jackets, in practical but colorful cottons and linens. He made the turban-seller drape his scarlet and yellow confection around a vase, ready to wear. He bought sharp-toed leather boots and a crimson silk sash.
He managed to resist the blandishments of the sellers of daggers and scimitars. A keen glance showed him that the blades were cheap bronze, not beaten iron, and the jewels only paste. His legionary’s sword would serve to discourage robbers; he had no other use for weaponry. Of course, if someone had offered a ruby-handled scimitar like Tarek’s, or a gilt-edged saber like Andrion’s . . . He closed his eyes a moment, letting the dragonet’s scolding mutter penetrate his overstuffed senses. Do not be more of a fool than you can help. Magic swords are not sold in the marketplace at Chandrigore. Save a few coins for some later time.
I did nothing to earn these solidi, Gard told the small but insistent creature. Let me use them to reward myself for my winter’s labor. I do not need the charity of relatives; I shall be a traveling conjuror and my public w
ill shower me with all the riches of the Mohan.
Commending himself for his thrift, he sold his old burnoose and chiton, belt and sandals, to a rags dealer for a few brass paise. Only the pouch containing the pentacle and the letter, his purse, his sword, and a small packet of healing herbs prepared by Senmut himself remained as souvenirs of his earlier lives.
The barber appeared, a middle-aged woman who chattered away in the brisk singsong Mohendra accent without ever seeming to take breath. “Ah, Nazib, here I am to attend to your hair. Sit here, like this. A cloth, to catch the cuttings? Like so?” She paused, razor poised. “What, by the nine teats of Saavedra? Cut it short? Leaving none to coil under your turban? Ah, a pity, the color is so unusual.”
Gard laughed helplessly, envisioning the mighty mother-goddess giving suck like a pig. He allowed the barber to tilt his head back and inspect his even features. “And the beard trimmed so, Nazib? The mustache—a little wax on the ends . . .” She demonstrated with water and Gard saw himself in her small bronze mirror sporting cavalry lances beneath his nostrils. His gray eyes were stale and yellow in the bronze, slightly crazed. He declined the adornment.
“Ah, Nazib, you should let your beard grow long, long, and, pull the ends under your turban, so.” She tweaked his whiskers. “You should let your hair grow long, long, so that it falls like a curtain around your ladies. Do the Imparluzi nobles have large zenanas? By the balls of Vaiswanara, I have heard the Emperor himself has a zenana of a hundred wives! Of course, Rajah Jamshid’s older daughter, Sumitra, rules them all with an iron hand.” The cuttings of his hair blew around him like crimson snowflakes in the gusts of her words. He visualized Sumitra staggering under the weight of an iron hand or Andrion lolling in the midst of a hundred women. He laughed again.
Then, suddenly, the actors were gone, the frenzy of the play dissipated, and Gard stood alone on the opulent set. The hare stood at the door bowing. “Can I bring you anything, Nazib? More sweetmeats? More wine?”
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