Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Across the maidan,” said Deva, gesturing beyond the body-clogged avenue, “is the temple of Harus. Should you go pay your respects?”

  “Why not?” Gard replied, his mood expansive enough to include even the gods. They threaded their way through the crowd.

  The temple was only a red brick cell inside a dirt courtyard, a far and desperate cry from the great ziggurat in Sardis. But a Ferangi sentry stood respectfully outside the door, and the little image of the falcon was bronze, not gilded wood. Gard bowed before the hard jet eyes of the god and his turban fell off. The eyes looked past him, slightly bored.

  With a tight smile Gard reached behind him, pulled Deva to his side, and said, “Great-grandfather, this is Deva.”

  She nodded a polite greeting. The little falcon image remained impassive. Gard shrugged, turned and saw an alcove no larger than a crack in the wall, holding not an idol but a spray of pale asphodel. “When the Empire acknowledged Ashtar as Harus’s consort,” Deva whispered, “Jamshid asked the imperial envoys to make a place for her here.”

  Gard visualized the heights of Cylandra, the mountain that watched over Sabazel, and grimaced. Ashtar in her fickleness probably regarded this pitiful shrine as an insult. But Ashtar hardly needed him to defend her.

  Neither did Saavedra, he thought when Deva led him to the temple next door. Even though it was a shabby little mud brick edifice containing a rude wooden representation of a naked and ridiculously fat woman, the row of candles before her—white, blue, red, as had been the tapers in Dhan Bagrat—were newly lit, and the camellias and roses laid about her feet were so fresh that their odor seemed to have replaced the air in the temple. Deva bowed deeply and genuflected, muttering some kind of apology, while Gard fidgeted.

  Back out into the sunlight. Voices and music, odors and shapes, rippled through Gard’s head. Wonderfully stimulating. Perhaps they should find themselves a room at an inn—unless the inns were all full. A bed of straw in a stable would not be too bad, if it were clean . . . The breeze tickled his hair. Oh yes, the turban. It had come unwound. He had yet to master the technique of folding it, at least without an open space to lay it out in; he wrapped the length of cloth around his waist and forgot about it.

  Other temples lined the maidan, growing larger and more elaborate the closer they got to the domed building at the very end. “Vaiswanara?” Gard asked Deva.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  Some of the doorways they passed opened into sunlit atria, others into smoky black holes like passages into the netherworld. Hurmazi’s temple was a respectable stone building, its forecourt decorated with three little woman-images. “The god’s wives,” Deva explained. “Pallias, Ranithra, and Kyphasia. Just aspects of Saavedra.”

  He nodded sagely—whatever you say, dear—and peered at a stone idol that looked suspiciously phallic. Only a few people stood, furtively, about the shrine of Hurmazi, patron deity of the Alliance. Apsuri merchants, perhaps. And a noblewoman clad in a brilliant turquoise sari, serving-women in attendance, who delicately laid a garland of marigolds over the stone and bowed before it.

  They moved on. The crowd grew thicker and the shouting louder. Several children began to follow Gard, pointing and gesturing. Every time he turned and offered them his remaining dates, they fled in a storm of giggles. The red hair, of course. At least they thought it was funny.

  The temple of Raman, Hurmazi’s evil brother, was a waste disposal pit. So much for Raman, Gard thought. The Ferangi had an appealing sense of humor. Beyond it lay another temple, and another; gods of the hearth and the hedgerow, of the monsoon and of the jungle, of every minute aspect of human life. Offerings lay before them all, brooms, flowers, bunches of grapes, brass pots of wine, a tiger skin.

  In all this swarm of shrines was not one to Tenebrio. If these people had ever heard of the ancient and evil god of Minras, he had now been forgotten. Good—such a feeble shadow had no power over the pleasures of today.

  The deities, Gard thought with a grin, swarmed in Ferangipur like gnats. The people were not so much god-ridden as god-bitten. He whispered to Deva, “Where is the temple of the god of hangnails? Is there a snail-god, humping his shrine on his back? What about priests to bless the chamber pot, surely an integral part of human existence? Or is that Raman’s duty?”

  “Sssh,” Deva hissed, and swallowed an echoing grin.

  At last she led him through a torrent of people up the vast marble steps of Vaiswanara’s shrine and into the cool interior. Intricately carved lattices half concealed the idol; silver, Gard saw, with a face of what looked like rough burned stone. “It fell from the heavens many generations ago,” said Deva in his ear. “A sign from Vaiswanara himself.”

  Priests in elaborate maroon and saffron robes, with funny conical hats like haystacks, marched around the building waving censers and chanting. The words echoed from the height of the dome above, setting a multitude of hanging lamps to swaying. Just illusion, surely, that it was the ground swaying beneath Gard’s feet. The dragonet wrapped its tail around his spine and held on as his head spun again. The slight drunkenness was far from unpleasant, but he would have preferred it to be induced, not by the fever heat of crowded divinities, but by wine. “Come,” he said. “I have had enough gods for one day. I am hungry for physical, not moral sustenance.”

  Deva nodded; evidently only Saavedra had the power to stir her.

  Atop the flight of steps the sunlight seared his eyes. Something fell on him like a light rain. Deva’s gasp was oddly loud. He peered out between slitted eyes to see a sea of faces all upturned to him and his clothing stained with colored dust. The children had thrown red and yellow chalk all over him. “Hail,” voices called. “Hail the Festival of the Fool!”

  “Welcome, fool, to Ferangipur!”

  How did they know his birth sign was the jester? The dragonet leaped up and bumped Gard’s heart into his throat. Huge soldiers, surely the largest in the garrison, were advancing up the steps. The priests were closing in behind him. Deva, with a short wail, was elbowed aside.

  The soldiers lifted their hands and threatened him with—garlands of marigold? He was going mad. Too many gods for the rational mind to take. Soldiers and priests piled the flowers so high on his shoulders he had to lift his chin to see over them.

  Stranger and stranger. Everyone was nodding and bowing and smiling at him. Two priests took his arms and escorted him to a waiting elephant, its vast flanks painted with gold leaf and carmine. Gard seized one glimpse of Deva’s oddly pale face before it was eclipsed by the laughing faces of others.

  “What is your name?” asked one of the priests.

  Gard told them.

  “Hail, Rajah Gard!” shouted the man. The shout was taken up and repeated by the crowd so that Gard heard his own name rolling like thunder across the maidan.

  “Rajah!” he exclaimed. Very perceptive indeed, to know not only his birth sign but his regal ancestry. The dragonet reared, rampant, and unfurled its wings.

  Several people started talking at once, leaving Gard to grope through their words as if hacking his way through underbrush. “Festival of the Fool.” “Every year pick a stranger to be rajah.” “All powers of rajah.” “Based on ancient festival in which the rajah was killed to make land fertile, but that was wasteful, so now every year the rajah simply steps aside and a stranger is chosen to play the part for a day. Just to bring luck.”

  Oh yes, they once killed the king of Minras too. But that was a dark and solemn occasion, not one of light and laughter. “All the powers of the Rajah?” Gard inquired, commending himself for his caution.

  “Assuredly, my lord. Will you play the part for us today?”

  They must be divinely inspired. Ferangipur was a good place, a good place indeed. “Sure. Why not?”

  The man turned and declaimed, “This stranger, Gard . . .” He paused and looked at Gard questioningly. Oh, he needed a patronymic. “Gard ed Bellasteros” sounded good, but would only be accurate in the mate
rnal line; he could hardly say, “ed Andrion,” and he would not utter his real father’s name. “Gard ed Minras,” he announced.

  “Gard ed Minras,” the man continued, “has agreed to play the fool for us today!” Again he heard his own name repeated by a thousand voices. Except for one sudden obscenity that cut through the clamor—was that Deva? He had not realized she knew such a word. Why was she upset?

  But this was too good to pass by. “Bring me my woman, there,” Gard commanded. Heads turned. Hands grasped Deva, still clutching their bundle, and thrust her and Gard together up the short ladder into the howdah on the elephant’s back. The mahout goaded the beast’s ears. The elephant lurched to its feet and lumbered away, Gard and Deva clutching at the railings.

  The temples bobbed up and down before Gard’s eyes like ships in a storm. Surely the children gamboling under the elephant’s huge feet would be crushed. No, they leaped away, laughing and pointing. “Red hair! The Fool has red hair!”

  So that was why they had chosen him. He laughed at his pretensions—divinely inspired, regal ancestry—hah!

  “Gods,” said Deva faintly. Her complexion was pale green. “By Saavedra’s brows, Gard . . .”

  Was she seasick? The elephant curled its trunk and trumpeted. A path opened through the crowd, and elephant, priests, and guards moved in stately procession down the maidan. Before them was a whitewashed building decorated with so many carved lattices and spires that it looked like a confectioner’s castle. “The palace?” Gard asked Deva. “What fun! We will have a place to spend the night, after all.” He waved to the people of Ferangipur, and they cheered again.

  Her mouth worked. Her eyes flashed. “Oh, you are a fool.”

  “I have spent a great deal of my life playing the fool,” he told her, nettled. “We might as well profit by it. I know we wanted to make a slightly quieter entrance. But this is a stroke of luck. Surely they will give us rich gifts, and we can make our journeys in style, not as servants. Be glad I cannot claim the rule of Minras; on Minras they sacrifice kings.”

  “And what do you think they do here?” she retorted hoarsely. “Why do you think they always choose a stranger? What do you think was in that pot they were burying as we approached the city?”

  Gard’s elation froze and sprayed in icy droplets over the dragonet. It flailed indignantly, entangling itself in Gard’s intestines, raking his bones with its tail and producing a note in his mind like that made by a hand sweeping across harp strings. His spine responded in a sympathetic vibration and he shuddered violently. Cold sober again.

  The happy shouts were oddly muted. All he could hear was the blood rushing in his head and the insistent, almost maddening, cry of a bird—fever, fever, fever. “But,” he said, “all the powers of the Rajah?”

  “Until sunset! Then a quick poison—at least they are merciful in that—and burial in a pot in the cellars until the next year. Fine compost a fool makes, I suppose. Perhaps your red hair will bring even more fertility to the fields!”

  Gard sat back on the cushions. They heaved beneath him like a queasy stomach. “I cannot refuse now?”

  “No.”

  “I should have known better than to consort with so many gods,” he muttered. It was when he bowed to Harus that his turban fell off, revealing his hair—he was a flame attracting not moths but the stinging gnats of godly mordant jokes—tempting fate . . . The pinions of the dragonet’s wings swept through his mind, kissing him with stubborn tenacity. The pentacle chimed against his heart. Oh no, I shall not be the butt of yet another divine jest. “So,” he exclaimed, “make fate tempt me!”

  “What?” demanded Deva.

  “There must be some way we can not only free ourselves from this turn of the game but make it into our advantage.”

  “How?” The smooth planes of Deva’s face were twisted with anger and fear. But at least she did not deny the “we”. And unlike any other woman, she did not remind him that this would not have happened had they gone to Apsurakand as she had wished.

  “I thought you were the one with faith,” he told her, smiling sweetly.

  Her eyes snapped. She drew breath, opened her mouth, tilted her head to the side and then, surprisingly, shrugged extravagantly, hands fluttering into the air and falling again.

  Admirable woman. She knew when to be quiet.

  In the late afternoon sun the palace glistened before them like mother-of-pearl. The smoke of cooking fires and incense cleared from Gard’s eyes and he saw every bit of stone filigree atop the palace, every block in the city tower behind it, every fleck of colored chalk upon his own breast as clearly defined as a tile in a mosaic. The sky was a pure azure blue. As were Deva’s sparkling eyes.

  Well, he thought, as the elephant came to a ponderous halt, I have never fulfilled anyone’s expectations. I shall not start now.

  He handed Deva down the ladder and with her on his arm passed into the cool scented air of the palace, trailing majesty and obstinacy and little whorls of colored dust.

  Chapter Ten

  The Ferangi certainly knew how to hold a feast. Gard surveyed the huge semicircular table laden with every food he had ever imagined and a few he had not. A shame that he knew the after-dinner savory was to be fatal; it took the edge off his appetite. He could produce Sumitra’s letter, of course, but that would mean he was still dependent on charity . . . A challenge, yes.

  Deva sat on a stool beside the great cushioned throne, the legendary khaddi of Ferangipur, eyeing the silk canopy above Gard’s head as if waiting for it to smother them both. The dragonet tapped a claw on Gard’s breastbone, eyes narrowed, the gesture not idle but maddeningly alert. The marigolds at his throat stirred as if to a breeze, even though the room was still. If all his orders had to be followed . . . No, he could not order himself to be freed.

  His eyes narrowed, his perceptions flared. Every object before him, every scent, every sound, was distilled to its essence and transformed into an intense ray of light swirling with all the colors of the rainbow, from darkest indigo to brightest yellow. The colors were reflected in the bulbous eyes of the dragonet. Its claw tapped more quickly.

  The scents of the food, the perfumes of the surrounding crowd, and the rose water tinkling into a fountain outside the door were as heady as incense. Musicians played something light and undemanding on zamtak, shenai, and tiny cymbals. A stuffed peacock, its feathers fanned elegantly above its brown, crisp skin, looked glassily into nothingness. Bowls of jellies and chutneys surrounded it like quivering dancing girls. Seed cakes spilled artistically from a tray, invading a platter of candied almonds and fried nasturtium blossoms. Mangoes and pomegranates marched in spiraling ranks among tureens of spiced meats and saffron rice. A lavish silver and shell saltcellar dominated the table like the citadel of Ferangipur dominated the mouth of the Mohan.

  Rows of human faces lined the curve of the table. Bearded faces topped with turbans like overblown roses stretched away to Gard’s right, smooth faces adorned with elaborate nose jewels and earrings to his left, and gaggles of priests like brightly plumaged parrots anchored the ends. Every now and then a pair of dark eyes looked up, met Gard’s, and recoiled as hurriedly as though he were a bit of camel dung brought into the palace on the sole of a boot.

  Except for the five faces opposite, seated at a small table between the embracing arms of the large one. Not one pair of those eyes avoided him. Interesting, how Sumitra’s velvet on steel demeanor could be repeated so subtly in her family, by the angle of a chin or the tilt of a head. Except for the woman who sat beside Rajinder, wearing a turquoise sari. Her bearing was the same, but her face, while familiar, did not resemble the others.

  “Ladhani,” whispered Deva. “Rajinder’s first wife and the mother of his son. Daughter of an Apsuri noble.”

  Ah, yes—she was the woman they had seen bowing to Hurmazi’s shrine, caught between her husband’s and her father’s people.

  Rajah Jamshid ate only those morsels placed between his lips by a s
olicitous Srivastava. The resemblance between old man and young woman was startling: similarly thin faces, cheekbones as prominent as scythes; the same black pearl eyes, shrewd and yet remote.

  Srivastava had the ethereal appearance of a fairy, living beyond the influence of sun and moon in some celestial twilight. The dragonet peered at her, ears flattened. The gold pentacle against Gard’s chest chimed very faintly. For just a moment he sensed the quick shimmer of an aura draped about Srivastava’s fragile form like a cloak made of silk gauze, expensive but ill-fitting.

  She stirred uneasily and glanced up at him, faintly puzzled, before bending once again to her father. No help there, Gard told himself. She might not even be aware she had that tentative power.

  Jamshid’s silver beard contrasted oddly with his dark bronze face, a face that had not been tarnished by time, but had been burnished very thin so that the mortality showed through like the base metal backing of a mirror. His neck above the high collar of his jacket was so scrawny it seemed as though the resplendent scarlet turban with its gold and feather brooch would crush his head like an egg onto his jewel-encrusted chest.

  The Rajah nodded to his surrogate with that arrogant courtesy peculiar to rulers. Deep in his eye Gard caught a quick flash like heat lightning upon the horizon, illuminating the warrior who had once run circles about Allaudin, the father of Menelik and Shikar. Then the flash was gone. The old man was as incorporeal as his daughter.

  Deva murmured, “When Srivastava refused Shikar’s suit last year, Menelik gave his brother the daughter of an Apsuri merchant, a girl named Yasmine; I have heard that her beauty is astonishing. But despite such a consolation prize, Shikar still resents the insult, as we saw in Chandrigore.”

  Score one for Jamshid, Gard thought. And for his heir. He caught Rajinder’s eye. The prince’s magnificent mustache swooped like an eagle’s wings across his chiseled features, repeating the sweep of his brows. His mouth twitched; he saw an unjustly condemned victim, not an object to be swept away like chalk dust at the end of the festival. His wife Ladhani nibbled at her food, sipped at her wine, and essayed a brief empathic nod at Gard.