by R. Lee Smith
Behind him, the sentries conferred in uneasy mutters. The one who had called him by name now called out again, saying, “Have you a message for me to carry, honored one?”
“I do not ask my brothers under the Blade to carry my messages,” Meoraq replied, still walking.
It was a rare thing for a sentry to hear himself addressed as brother by a Sheulek and it gave these three pause enough that Meoraq had nearly reached the outer gate before they tried again.
“When shall I tell Exarch Ylsathoc you will see him?”
“Name any hour that pleases you,” said Meoraq, drawing his kzung to strike against the gate. “But any lie is a lie before God and you must answer for it. If I choose to see this man you speak of at all, it will be in my own time.”
“I mark you, sir. “The sentry sighed, rubbing at the bony ridges over his brows in a dejected manner. “I only give the message I am given.”
The sentries retreated and Meoraq was given a few moments in the relatively dry pass-way to kick the worst of the mud from his boots while the gatekeeper finished locking them in and turned around. He made an offensively cursory salute, which Meoraq immediately forgave since he also offered both a flask of twice-brewed nai and to carry Meoraq’s pack. The drink was hot and strong and good—Sheul’s love in a swallow, as his father often said—and it was difficult to bear in mind that he would have as much nai as he wished once he was settled, but this flask would be all the gatekeeper could claim until the end of his shift. A Sheulek had the right to seize whatever goods he desired of any man he wished, but Meoraq did try not to be an ass.
“Suppose I should ask your name,” grunted the gatekeeper, striking a lamp. “See your bands and the seal of your blades and all the rest of that ribbony shit, but I’ve had that over-groomed slaveson bleating in my face six times today alone and if you aren’t the Uyane he wants, by God and Gann, you’re still the man he’ll get.”
Meoraq grunted, flexing his spines forward to show some degree of acknowledgement, but he had no intention of seeing anyone until he’d had a bath and a hot meal.
The rest of the walk through the pass-way was comfortably quiet. The gatekeeper made a mutter when the urge came on him, but like Meoraq’s own mutterings were so often apt to be, they were not made in expectation of answers. The flask passed back and forth between them freely, and Meoraq never refused it, although he did limit himself to sparing sips. By the time they had reached the inner gate, it was down to the dregs and bitter with coarse, smoky grounds.
“Keep it,” grunted the gatekeeper when Meoraq tried to return it. “I see you’ve not got one and that’s a hard lack when the weather turns.”
“I do not ask the gate to make provision when the temple summons me,” said Meoraq, and firmly held out the flask.
The gatekeeper snorted humor as he brought out his keys. “Ask for a flask from that crowd and they’ll bring you the finest jeweled cup your eyes will ever clap to. Priests. They think worth is in riches, not use. Hear me and mark well,” he went on, just as if he were a training master and Meoraq a boy on his field. “A thing is not what it looks like, but what it does. Finest priestliest cup in the world won’t keep nai hot in its belly on a long walk in the rain.”
“I mark,” said Meoraq, amused.
The gatekeeper grunted again, swinging the door wide open. He bellowed for an usher then turned in the same breath to give the proper formal farewell, since little ears were around to hear them: “Tothax is yours, honored one. Show mercy to us.”
Meoraq raised the flask as he would raise his sabk in the arena, then slung its strap around his neck and walked on, smiling.
* * *
One city was very much like another, each one being made after Oracle Mykrm’s design at the Prophet’s direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the busy streets of the inner ring with his usher hurrying to keep ahead of him.
This was the living body of any city: the inner ring, where farmers and cattlemen met abbots and oracles, where merchants ruled over lords and the taxman ruled over all. Voices struck out on every side—hailing friends, hawking wares, protesting price—until they all came together in a great cursing, laughing, chanting wave of chaos. After so many days alone with nothing to see but the rain and the empty road, the thousand sights and sounds and smells of the city were both welcome and abrasive. They were close enough to the terrace that the grey shine of true light could be seen if Meoraq looked to his left down the long rows of shopfronts, but if he looked to his right, orderly rows of hanging lamps burned a far brighter path deeper into the protected city and that was how he turned as soon as he reached the wide archway that led to Xi’Tothax—heart of Tothax—the Temple district.
Gradually, the crowds loosened and the clamor faded. The many noisy bodies became a few strolling priests and even fewer scampering boys. Meoraq slowed his long strides to let his particular boy take a proper place before him.
The Temple gates were closing as he neared them, but the watchmen posted there gave the sabks riding at Meoraq’s arms a glance and opened them right up again.
“Exarch Ylsathoc—” one of them began, bowing, but shut his mouth at Meoraq’s upraised hand. He basked in the warmth of their uncomfortable silence as his usher exchanged himself for one of the temple’s own boys and then he walked on.
“I will meet with the abbot,” he said to his new boy, making certain the watchmen at the gates could hear. “And him alone.”
The usher, oblivious to everything but the naked blades adorning Meoraq’s harness, gave breathless obedience and set off.
Meoraq followed, thinking pleasantly vindictive thoughts of the faceless Exarch Ylsathoc pacing himself into a frothing fury in some priestly corner of the temple, and it was some time before he realized he was not being led to the cloister, but to the stronghold. He started to say something about it being the custom to show a Sheulek to his chambers before all else, but turned the half-formed sound to a wordless grunt instead. He had said he would meet with the abbot, so the boy was by-Gann taking him to the abbot and if he went there tired and wet and muddy as a cattleman, he had only his own peevishness to blame for it.
‘Life is filled with small lessons,’ thought Meoraq, casting a dour eye up at the soot-black ceiling and through it, to Sheul’s ever-watchful gaze. ‘I hear You, O my Father, and I am humble at Your instruction, but just once I would like to indulge a mortal failing without having to learn from it.’
Sheul did not reply.
The boy brought him into the hold as far as the doors to the Halls of Judgment and there delivered him with great importance to an amused council guard. They waited, showing each other the proper motions of dominance and submission with one eye on the boy until he was entirely gone. Immediately after the closing of the door, the guard dropped his arm mid-genuflection and gave Meoraq a slap to the chest.
“Ssh, you’re wet!” he said, shaking out his hand.
“It’s raining. Or has been. Ten days and nights. Here.” Meoraq thrust his damp, muddy pack maliciously into the other man’s arms. “You can carry that.”
“You are a low man, Raq.”
“The man who walks in the sight of Sheul walks the high path at every hour,” Meoraq replied piously and walked around the low wall separating them to help himself to the guard’s cup. Also nai, but quite cold. Meoraq drank it anyway, fingering thoughtfully at his new flask. “How are you, Nkosa?”
“Walking, working and getting dipped. Guess that means I can’t complain.” Nkosa folded his arms and watched as Meoraq forced the last bitter swallow down and turned the empty cup over on the wall.
They were somewhat related, Nkosa’s mother having been a servant in a house where Meoraq’s father had once stayed on a circuit. She claimed him for the sire, and even though she carried no scars to prove it, when the baby opene
d up male, Rasozul had paid for the boy’s placement at a training hall (or whatever passed for one in a city like Tothax). Of course, the woman had been swiftly married to one of her own caste, the man whose name Nkosa carried. Meoraq had known nothing of this until their first meeting, when Nkosa rather shyly asked if he was by chance related to Rasozul and the whole story had come out. Meoraq had seen no reason to query his father for confirmation. The Uyanes were Sheulek all the way back to the founding of the House; it was inevitable that he should find blood-kin. Really, it was a wonder he didn’t find more of them.
“You’re late,” Nkosa said now, cocking his head to a censuring angle.
“Impossible.”
“You come through twice a year, early sowing and second reaping, regular as a cattleman bathes or an abbot shits. Last harvest was a quarter-brace ago. You’re late.”
“A Sheulek moves at God’s hour.”
“Mm. Was it a woman?” Nkosa asked, with just a hint of wistfulness. During their infrequent and much-enjoyed chats together, he had confided that he had stood twelve years of the seventeen required of a Sheulek’s training before he had been culled, but he was still a bastard, even if he was one of Rasozul’s, and there never was much hope of him being called higher than he stood now. “It was my mother’s doing,” he liked to sigh at the end of this confession. “If only she’d been presented to him as a daughter of the House instead of some linen-girl who helped him rumple up the sheets before she changed them, I’d be wearing a set of my own blades.” Such things were not supposed to factor in a Sheulek’s selection, but of course they did. Politics had no place in Sheul’s sight, but this was Gann’s world.
“There was no woman,” said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul’s granting and never entered his mind.
“Was it two women?”
“No.”
“Ten?”
“No,” said Meoraq, grinning. “Although I appreciate your high opinion of me.”
“I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night,” sighed Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.
“And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right,” said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, “but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best.”
“I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten.” Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. “I suppose you heard I married.”
“No. It was only rumor when I was here last.”
“Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something,” he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. “It’s been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead.”
Meoraq frowned.
Nkosa noticed and snorted. “It’s not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it’s just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we’re kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?”
Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he said merely, “How does she suit you?”
“Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father’s wife and the servants. I hardly know her.”
“Your women share rooms with the servants?”
“We don’t all have Houses, Raq,” said Nkosa with a snort. “Some of us just have homes. But she’s all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her.”
“Your father really should have explained that to you years ago,” Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave Nkosa a comradely tap and said, “Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—”
“You are such an idiot,” snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.
The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles. Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn’t hot enough to steam. “What did you say?”
Nkosa opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.
“How could you—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!” Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, “This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!”
Meoraq kept his hand on Nkosa’s shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, “You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself.”
He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it. Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man’s name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature…but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn’t.
Meoraq released him. Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. “I should tell someone you’re here,” he said, not looking up. “Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days.”
“Exarch Ylsathoc.” Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. “So I hear. Do you know why?”
“You have to be better than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job,” he added at a mutter. “But if you want to hide from him, there’s a petition in the hall right now.”
“A Sheulek doesn’t have to hide from anyone,” said Meoraq. And frowned. “A dispute at this hour?”
“They’ve been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn’t hear the charges.”
Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment’s thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the warrior’s caste.
“I suppose I should put my name in,” said Meoraq, heading for the door. “It was good to see you, ‘Kosa.”
“Think of me tonight when you’re making free with all your conquered virgins,” Nkosa said morosely.
“I sincerely hope not. But think of me while you get dipped with your wife.”
“I always do.”
They both laughed, but it wasn’t quite the same laughter as it might have been.
The clerk, or whoever he was, was in the hall just outside, gesticulating wildly as he hissed to a whole crowd of solemn-faced men, some of them robed as judges. Civil judges, perhaps, but a very bad thing to see. They all looked at Meoraq.
Nothing he did now could possibly be the right thing to do. If he said nothing, Nkosa was sure to be punished, which could mean anything from the loss of his post to a public whipping. If they waited to bring their charge against him until Meoraq was gone and another Sheulek heard that he had put his naked hand on Meoraq, Nkosa could easily be exiled to the wildlands or even executed. But if Meoraq did speak in Nkosa’s defense, he would make a public issue out of what still might be a private one, humiliating not only his friend, but the man whose name he carried. The taint could reach as far as his household’s master, the steward-lord of House Kanko, who might take the view that House Uyane had dishonored him personally. For that matter, the governor of this piss-miserable little city might raise formal charges against the governor of Xeqor, since House Uyane was that city’s championing House.
The only reas
onable response was silence.
Meoraq twitched his spines…then flattened them and strode purposefully over to the watchful crowd. “Twice a year,” he said over their bowing heads, “I have the pleasure to see my cousin.” It wasn’t entirely untrue. They were blood-kin, anyway. “We have precious few moments together and you—” He leaned close, staring furiously into the top of the clerk’s bent head. “—have robbed me of three of them. One for the interruption I might have forgiven. Two for the threat you had no right to make. And three that I find you so soon smearing the tale out into the hall. How say you, man?”
The man could not seem to say anything. Meoraq was not entirely certain he was breathing, although he did appear to be trembling very slightly.
Meoraq gave him a quick count of six to feel the weight of all these staring eyes and then he straightened up and drew his samr.
Everyone took a long step away, save the clerk, who dropped with a wheeze of terror to his knees. He stared up at him, his eyes in the lamp-light like daubs of jelly, like something already dead that only glistened.
“Uyane Meoraq stands before you,” spat Meoraq. He was calm, quite calm despite the venom in his tone and the shine of his naked blade. “And with the right to carry this weapon comes the right to use it however I will. You offend me.”
From the kneeling man’s motionless, open mouth came a series of soft, dry clicking sounds. After a moment, Meoraq decided he was trying to say, ‘I cry,’ but managing only the first glottal before his strength failed. His bladder, Meoraq noticed, already had. A twinge of disgust flexed through his spines, seeing that. He did not expect every man to face death as a warrior, but he should at least face it as a man.
“I have not decided to forgive you,” he said, sheathing his samr and stepping away before he got piss on his muddy boots. “But I will think about it and let my judgment be known when I return in the sowing season.”
He left unspoken but very clear the understanding that if he returned to news that Nkosa had been punished, his judgment would be severe.