Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  If I am frustrated one more time, Gard thought, I shall surely explode like an overripe pomegranate, right here and now. But she made no move to fend him off. She smiled at him with the slightly inebriated expression of a child stepping off a whirligig. “Illusion?” he told her. “Show me something that is not illusion!”

  He lifted the end of her sari and began to unwind it, watching her warily all the while. No lick of power like the rasping tongue of a cat. No magical annoyances. Just the soft material flowing through his hands. He had always wondered how one of these garments was held together. Aha! The folds of cloth were tucked into the waistband of a petticoat. Just the kind of present he most liked to unwrap.

  “Yes,” she sighed in his ear. “Oh, yes.” Warm, smooth, cinnamon flesh chafed against him so inspiringly that his wariness evaporated like a snowflake upon Senmut’s smithy. Her breast, he saw without surprise, was tattooed with the looped cross of Saavedra. The one symbol that could complete the crescent scar on his arm.

  There was nothing at all symbolic in what he wanted now. He sank into the steaming patchouli-scented bath that was her body.

  Mangoes, her mouth tasted of mangoes, a hot liqueur cauterizing his exacerbated senses. Encouraging, the discovery that the postures and exercises and breathing patterns he had learned in meditation—shakhmi, shakhmi—could serve another purpose as well. Despite his long period of abstinence, despite the repeated frustrations of the evening, he did not have to fall upon her like a tiger upon its prey.

  She was inexperienced. No worry, he was skilled enough for them both. And yes! It was better than ever before. Surely he had never coupled like an animal, grunting and pawing; surely he had always known this fastidious touch.

  Deva’s eyes, slitted between aroused and alert lashes, emitted a glow like that of a clear sunset; gold and blue, rose and silver, rippled around them and impoverished the hangings of the bed. He dared to hope that he had brought her to a potential she had not known existed.

  But it was he who fell down a long, smooth slope, faster and faster, grinning delightedly. The release turned his body inside out, his bones popping, blood fountaining like a ruby spray, senses snapping. Incredibly painful and yet shudderingly perfect. Gard heard his voice wheezing something incoherent into Deva’s throat, even as with her own voice placed a gasping blessing over his head; “Saavedra, in your name, my lady!”

  No, he wanted to cry. No, in my name, woman; leave the gods out of this! But still he fell, limbs and thoughts flailing, down that slope, while the dragonet bounded behind him, tail flying, wings scrabbling in air that stirred with odd sparkling shadow-shapes.

  A potential that he himself had never known. The perceptual delirium went on and on, the elementary physiological response of his body but a variation on a much more sophisticated theme. The woman he held, the flesh he penetrated, was only a chrysalis, a gossamer veil behind which the wings of a butterfly, damply blue and turquoise, purple and malachite, shifted and stretched and grew stronger.

  The heat inside that chrysalis melted him. His flesh, his mind, his power, were wax running from the mold of his own being, leaving the interstices of his own personality to be filled by a heady liqueur of patchouli and mangoes and cinnamon, by glistening blue and purple . . .

  With a cry, he jerked suddenly away. He lay in the bed, in Deva’s arms, her body like armor around his. Armor could protect. Armor could be too heavy to be borne.

  The dragonet huddled with its wings snugged about its little body. Only its wide, almost transparent, gray eyes were visible beneath ears that perked lopsidedly, one curiously forward, one warily crumpled back.

  Gard dragged himself upward and looked into Deva’s face. Her efforts had engraved lines beside her mouth and between her brows. Her hair lay tangled across her forehead. She was staring at him as if it had been he who had changed shape in her arms. “Gard,” she croaked, stopped, swallowed, “Gard, if I take from your power, then I must give equally of my own.”

  No, no, he thought, floundering through the shallows of his own desire, we must forget all this nonsense about power, occult or otherwise. We must forget Senmut and Amathe and their portentous lectures on prophecies and omens, gods and millstones. We must remember nothing but the small illusions of the marketplace, and make our way from one end of the Mohan to the other as sleight of hand artists, sharing only the amusements of the flesh.

  Beneath him, around him, tangled with him, Deva whispered, “I knew in my bones you would come for me. But you took your own good time to get here.”

  The tide of his desire, for flesh, for more than flesh, went out and left him stranded upon the damp sand of his own folly. The dragonet sighed, shrugged away its wrapping wings, and examined philosophically one sharp, unsheathed claw. Complexity, always complexity.

  Deva’s eyes were scrying-pools, clear and transparent, seeing all, revealing doubts suspended in their depths, which dissolved even as he watched. God’s talons, Gard wailed silently, she will let herself be consumed so that she can devour me as she wills—women!

  “The will of the gods,” she said, on an attenuated sigh that stretched and broke into little breathy bubbles in his ear, “cannot be denied.”

  “Damn the gods,” he sobbed, even as he clutched her all the more tightly. “Damn the coincidences of prophecy. Damn you, Deva.”

  She said nothing more. She held him. And when, exhausted, he succumbed at last to sleep, she still held him, so that when the beat of wings echoed on the distant rim of his mind she shooed them away, and stood guard over him during the long hours of the night.

  Chapter Nine

  Perhaps it was jest, perhaps justice. The plain around Ferangipur reminded Gard so much of the plain around Sardis that he kept craning his neck looking for the scarlet-and-purple pennons of Andrion’s legions, straining his ears listening for the inescapable cadences of their marching feet. The dragonet lay, chin on paw, elbow planted in Gard’s liver, watching intently.

  The delta of the Mohan, Gard told it. The delta of the Sar. Each dominated by a great city. The gods’ game board repeated certain squares.

  He glanced at Deva, who she walked at his side instead of the customary one pace behind. One long brown hand held the small bundle of their belongings—clothing and Senmut’s herbs and her own fortune-telling bones. The other hand drew the end of her sari around her head and across the bottom half of her face. She was wearing not only her plain cotton sari, but her plain uninspiring features; her hair was parted severely in the middle and knotted, her feet and the hem of her garment were gray with the dust of the road.

  Gard dodged the tasseled bridle of the neighboring camel and settled his turban more firmly on his head. We are certainly, he thought sarcastically, going to make a grand entrance into Ferangipur. Where our fortunes shall be found.

  Although Deva made it obvious she would prefer to find her fortune elsewhere. Her eyes this afternoon were mud-brown, as flat as the landscape, as they scanned the roofs of Ferangipur.

  From this distance the city was muted by the moist haze of the afternoon, reminding Gard of the sand castles he and Tembujin’s sons used to build. Surely the sea, murmuring beyond a sweep of gravel, boats and arching palm trees, would at high tide rush in and dissolve those towers, domes, spires and massive walls into little piles of wet sand.

  Was this the same Great Sea that had encompassed Minras? It would be great indeed if it stretched from the Mohan to Minras, girdling all the world with its indifferent depths. But two Great Seas within the confines of one world seemed impossible. It would depend on how far the world reached; surely the valley of the Mohan was upon its very rim, and yet the steppes which gave birth to the Khazyari were farther still . . .

  A thunder of hoofbeats. Gard started. Two chariots raced up the road, scattering pedestrians and camels. Gard caught a glimpse of a saturnine face in the lead vehicle, mouth and eyes wide with the excitement of the race; Rajinder? No, it was a similar face, not the same one.

&n
bsp; Beyond the fields, Ferangipur grew with each step more and more solid. It was built high upon a mound which might once have been a natural eminence, but which Gard was willing to bet was the piled ruins of previous cities dating back to the youth of the gods. An ancient city, and a rich one.

  There, beyond several feathery acacias, a long centipede-like shape glistening in crimson and saffron silks wended its way along a path. A faint bray of trumpets echoed. The procession paused. Banners snapped in a sudden gust of wind. A huge storage jar was lowered into the ground. A funeral?

  The road passed a villa, whitewashed stone walls and the inquisitive faces of monkeys peeking out from a riot of pink and magenta rhododendron blossoms. A bird sang like the tap of a hammer upon a metal pot—tink tink, tink tink tink. Several richly bedizened elephants shoved the pack train aside; their mahouts exchanged good-natured shouts with the camel drivers, even as their masters set their faces toward the city, ignoring the peasants beneath them. A litter, surrounded by bearers waving ostrich fans, swept by in the elephants’ perfumed wake.

  The dragonet’s tongue curled out in a yawn quickly suppressed by the snap of its sharp teeth. Deva plodded on, unimpressed.

  Flags in every imaginable hue flapped atop the walls of Ferangipur. The surrounding clumps of thatched huts disgorged more and more people, women clad in orange and pink and saffron saris, men bedecked in marigolds and starched turbans. It was as if the city were a whirlpool, sucking the surrounding countryside into . . .

  “The Festival of the Fool,” said Deva, as usual a half-breath before Gard asked. “A spring planting festival.”

  “A festival! What fun!”

  “For some, perhaps,” she muttered, and he shot her an aggravated look which coasted smoothly past her submissive mask and evaporated unacknowledged.

  Here came the merchant in whose pack train they had traveled. Gard offered him an obeisance that the man was too good-natured to recognize as more ironic than polite. He threw Gard a couple of paise. “Thank you for your service. And the girl’s dancing was most entertaining. What a shame you did not want to make a few rupees by selling her body as well.”

  Gard concealed the coins in his empty purse, smiled, and through his smile thought: A good thing I am an honest man, or I would have turned her loose upon you. While she, ah, amused you, I could have taken every coin you are carrying behind your sash. “I am pleased we met in Chandrigore,” he replied, “and were going the same way.”

  “Those robbers might have made off with more than the one donkey without your sword,” the merchant continued. “You once served in the imperial legions, you said?”

  “I learned my little skill as a warrior under General Miklos of Farsahn,” returned Gard, with a self-effacing bow. And he thought, all caravan-masters should have someone with itchy bones to warn of lurking robbers. He had fought quite well, if he did say so himself; those exercises with Jofar had not been wasted. Stab, thrust, parry—and blood staining his hands. The dragonet’s ears wilted onto the crown of its head and it shuddered.

  “You were lucky to escape,” said Deva, her voice muffled behind her sari. “Such recklessness does not insure a long life.”

  As the merchant trotted away, Gard replied to Deva, “You were a great help, cowering behind the boxes and bales.”

  “Who was it,” she replied imperturbably, “who so confused the leader of the raiders with visions of armed warriors and scythed chariots that he called off the attack and ran screaming into the jungle?”

  Gard rolled his eyes and laughed. The pouch with the pentacle and the slaver’s seal bounced with a brief clang against his chest. He and Deva already knew each other too well. The recognition had been as swift, disorienting and inspiring as a dose of Senmut’s honey. Whether either honey or recognition warned of powers best avoided, or beckoned to powers impossible to deny, he did not care to analyze.

  Deva looked not at him but at the dragonet. Roused by her scrutiny the creature blinked its bright and beady gray eyes, simpering. Honestly! Gard snorted. The little beast had no integrity . . .

  Deva smiled, and her eyes in the shadow of the pale cloth flickered blue, green, amethyst, and returned to brown. It was his personal smile, made even more appealing by a conspiratorial wink: we have withstood the haunted hours of darkness, you and I. Gard relaxed into a grin—the daemon may have little integrity, but it had excellent taste—and nudged her with his elbow in a comradely gesture.

  The road rose onto a low promontory and curved. From it, Gard glimpsed the waters of the Mohan itself, lying like a silken drape beyond the city, its brown hem fanning far out into the blue of the sea. Fishing boats pleated the water among green islands that were like the heads of bathing giants; Gard imagined them rising suddenly from the water that surrounded them, spitting and laughing like schoolboys at play. But no. What he had taken for logs floating among the islands jerked, and were revealed as gharials of those schoolboys’ gruesome stories. The long scaly reptiles lurked just below the surface of the water, protuberant eyes and snouts filled with saw-like teeth making ripples in the sluggish current.

  “The monsoon will not come for three months yet,” said Deva. So that was why the river, while wide, was so turgid and dark, edged with mud flats upon which myriad white and gray and brown birds pranced and swirled like confetti at a wedding.

  The camel train veered toward a teeming encampment. Gard and Deva consigned themselves to the thickening throng of people hurrying into the city. With a sigh, less of resignation than of resolution, she said, “Here I am, back where I started three months ago, thinking I was leaving for good.”

  “I grew up on Sumitra’s stories of Ferangipur,” he told her. “I was meant to come here. Not to ask for help, though.”

  “You will not show Sumitra’s letter to Jamshid?”

  “I can succeed alone.”

  Her mouth twitched, the corners struggling with amusement.

  Oh, Gard thought. Well, virtually alone. “You are mine now,” he said soothingly. “You will never even see Bogatyl; we will stay far away from the court. And in time we shall make our way to Apsurakand. Your appointment with Saavedra is not for any particular month, is it? I mean, she does not exactly have a place set for you at dinner.”

  It was Deva’s turn to fire an aggravated look at him. “The lady in her infinite wisdom knows when I will come to her. Despite all impediments.”

  Gard hated to think of himself as being an impediment to Deva’s wishes, warped though they were. But he got a wicked thrill from being an impediment to a goddess.

  They were carried by the crowd across an open space—in Iksandarun it would be a parade ground—between the city gates and the sprawl of docks on the banks of the river. They were swept up the ramp leading to the great portals of the city. The huge iron-studded doors were open; armed guards stood beside them, leaning on their spears. Gard stopped and looked up, almost toppling over. Close by the gate was the tallest tower he had ever seen, sheer walls of brick and stone stretching upward almost to infinity.

  A surge in the crowd. Gard and Deva were squashed against the door. Trumpets sounded, their music no longer a harsh bray, but a high clear note of pride, almost bravado. A procession of chariots and elephants escorted by soldiers in polished helmets moved through the gates. “The royal family,” hissed Deva in Gard’s ear. “Coming from the burial of last year’s Festival.”

  Was that what that funeral in the fields had been? How could you put an event in a pot? Gard opened his mouth to ask and saw that saturnine face in the chariot again. Beside it—yes, it really was Rajinder this time, a remote and almost regretful expression upon his handsome features as he waved to the cheering people. Gard exhaled and nodded. So the other man, the charioteer with the self-satisfied grin, must be Vijay, the baby of the family, hardly older than Gard himself. And that woman in the howdah atop the elephant, her gold embroidered sari held modestly before her face, was the—what had Shikar said?—moonstruck?—Srivastava. She seeme
d perfectly lucid to Gard, her kohl-lined eyes shining like black pearls.

  Those eyes widened slightly and looked down. Out of all those in the crowd they met Gard’s, and for a long moment black held gray, unblinking. The pentacle tingled and the dragonet tilted its head to the side inquisitively, fluffing its wings. Then the vehicles and beasts vanished under the gateway, attendants furling the banners, soldiers presenting arms.

  Gard, shaking his head, was carried by the crowd through the throat of the gate and into the city. Deva, at his elbow, was chattering something, “—after the Rani Nuralini’s death Srivastava became head of the zenana. Which is one reason she refused to marry Shikar, I daresay, knowing that her power here was greater than it would be in woman-wary Muktardagh, and she could exercise that power without having to submit to a man’s attentions.”

  Once, Gard had never understood why women spoke of the bedchamber as though it were a battlefield. But that was before he had met Deva.

  They entered a broad avenue. On either side were market booths, mounds of figs, cherries, chestnuts, pistachios. Gard’s mouth watered at the tantalizing odor of larks and rose syrup cooked over a tiny charcoal grill, at mangoes and sticks of incense. Carved sandalwood chests, teak and ebony game boards, ivory figurines, cascades of silk and vast necklaces of jasper and lapis and gold lay heaped like the spoils from a conquered city.

  He and Deva bought handfuls of dates. Munching, they wandered through the celebrating crowds. Here, girls wearing horn and brass anklets danced to the music of shenai and cymbals. Nearby, a saffron-clad holy man repeated some obscure litany. There, a woman ran from a drunken soldier, uttering playful shrieks, her mongoose scurrying on a leash behind her. The bright sunlight was muted by dust and smoke into a blue haze. Otherworldly, Gard thought. Objects implied rather than real. Rather like the misty complacency of inebriation.

  He liked Ferangipur. The dragonet’s ears turned from side to side, its pink tongue flicked out and returned, its tail jounced up and down across his spine setting it aquiver with delight.