by R. Lee Smith
‘I thank You, Father, for Your temperance and restraining hand,’ Meoraq thought sourly. ‘Without which, I would surely have slaughtered a man with much disgrace and deep satisfaction.’
Sheul did not receive his prayer.
“I do thank You,” Meoraq said again, aloud this time, and with the proper gravity. The usher did not look around; a Sheulek speaking to God could hardly be a singular occurrence. “O my Father, I am ashamed that I require Your hand upon my heart to hold me from brawling, even with so low a man as the steward of Saluuk. Gann’s touch stains more than the daughter, I think,” he added with a scowl. “It would not shock to me to learn he put the scar on her himself.”
It would shock him, actually, but it was also disturbingly easy to visualize. Lord Saluuk learning of his daughter’s pregnancy and, knowing Gann’s taint would soon be visible to all, making certain she carried an honorable scar. He had been a Sheulek once, and doubtless knew how the women of a Sheulek’s many conquests melted together over time. Perhaps another Sheulek would have accepted his responsibilities without contest, and who knew? If the girl had not been so memorable in her tears, Meoraq might have been fooled. She was so very skilled an actress (I have known no other man but you) that a part of him was tempted (those pleading, tear-filled eyes) to believe her even now.
There were men in the world who actually envied a Sheulek the liberty to take whatever woman Sheul moved him to take, not realizing that so many of those women were sired by men like Arug or Saluuk, that the women themselves were largely forgettable, and that years of exposure to all of Gann’s carnality and deceit made a man see it everywhere. In everyone.
Meoraq walked, lost in brooding thoughts of conniving fathers and flat-headed babies, as the usher escorted him to the outer courtyard of the shrine. The priest waiting to admit him offered prayers, which Meoraq, in his black mood, felt strongly compelled to accept. His meditations were lengthy and fruitless, scored through by disruptive visions of Saluuk’s Gann-lost girl and her baby, and he did not end them so much as abandon them for another night. He did not notice that they were not taking the right way to the garrison until he followed the usher through a door and found himself in the holy forge at the shrine’s heart.
A white-cowled priest stood before the eternal fires, his hood pulled low over his eyes. His robes were richly trimmed, the hem weighted with gold plates and cut to glide just above the floor rather than pick up even a trace of dirt. Each finger was armored to the tip with delicate bands of fine metal. His color was so heavily crusted with jewels, it was a wonder he could breathe. He did not bother to acknowledge Meoraq, although he had surely heard him enter.
“You wished to speak with me?” said Meoraq after a few calming breaths. He would have liked to demand that he be shown a Sheulek’s proper respect and damn well be left alone, but he’d indulged in enough shameful behavior for one night. He would show his divine Father repentance with patience and respect, even if it was a damned inconvenience.
The priest turned, pushing back his hood to get a better look at him. “Sheulek,” he said, eyeing his sabks. “You are Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor?”
Obviously. How many other Sheuleks do you have in your damned city tonight?
‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience,’ Meoraq thought. He said, politely, “I am.”
“I am Exarch Ylsathoc Hirut.”
Meoraq waited.
The exarch frowned, clearly annoyed that he did not fall back cowering at the name. “Surely you were told that I wished to speak with you as soon as you arrived, as I was told the moment that you passed the gates of this city. But that was more than an hour ago. And here I have been. Waiting.”
I am a Sheulek and I go where I fucking well will.
‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “It is my duty to attend Sheul’s judgments before attending to my own personal audiences,” Meoraq said.
“I see. So be it. At least you are here now. I had begun to think you had forgotten this stop upon your circuit, although I can easily see why you would. Sheul the All-Father surely knows that it is only my love for Him that holds me in this pisspot, but then, I was born in Gedai and know better how a city ought to be. You, now…” The exarch cast a disapproving look back at him over his shoulder. “Where have you been?”
Engaged in the duties I am sworn to and the privileges I am owed, one of which may include putting a knife in that eye if you roll it at me again.
‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “I was detained at Xheoth.”
Ylsathoc grunted, then turned all the way around. He held out a long, pale object which Meoraq actually needed in his hands before he recognized it as a thigh bone.
Its meaning stabbed into him like a knife’s blade. And twisted.
“Your father is dead,” said the exarch without further preamble. “Sheul has named you steward of House Uyane. Xeqor awaits her champion.”
4
The exarch wanted to read him the oaths immediately, but Meoraq refused to hear them. He was given the use of the temple’s finest room for his bedchamber that night, but he didn’t use it save as a place to store his pack. He went instead to the innermost cloister and there knelt at a firelit shrine with the knife of his fathers heavy over his heart.
The holy smiths of Xi’Tothax executed their craft well; his father’s thigh bone had been expertly cut and carved to make the hilt which the reforged blade so perfectly fit. It was not quite the knife he remembered hanging from his father’s neck, but he was proud to carry it, as proud as he was reticent to claim it.
His feelings had no bearing on the matter. In accordance with the law, it was his own, and unless it passed to the hand of one of his brothers before the turning of the year, it would be his forever. Or at least until his death, when it would be broken, the hilted half burnt with him upon his pyre and the edge sent onward to his future son. This was House Uyane, ever-changing and eternal as this knife, and he should be honored to take his place in that endless line.
He should be.
And yet…
Meoraq knelt, sleepless, for all the hours of the night as priests and other residents of the temple district came and went. He made all the appropriate prayers, but he didn’t feel the bereavement he felt he’d ought to and the psalms tasted of lies in his mouth. Eventually, he gave them up and fell silent, although he remained bent before the fires, brooding.
He wondered if it marked him for a bad son for thinking more of the House he was doomed to inherit rather than the man he had inherited it from, but he couldn’t help that. He’d loved his father, in the same way and at much the same distance as he loved Sheul, but he didn’t know him well. Why shouldn’t the legal problems of the House weigh on him in his first hours of mourning? He knew the law better than he’d known Uyane Rasozul.
He had left home at the age of three to begin his training, like all sons born under the sign of the Blade, and although he had wintered each year at home in Xeqor, he had seen little of its lord. Since taking his oaths, it seemed Meoraq had even less time at Uyane, although he stopped in whenever his circuit brought him near enough to make such a diversion possible. Rasozul always made time to receive him if he was in, but he was much withdrawn since the death of Meoraq’s mother and there weren’t many pleasant times to recall now.
Here in Xi’Tothax, many days distant from Xeqor and the House he must assume, Meoraq brooded. He was proud of his father, proud to wear this knife and touch the smooth, solid bone of its hilt, but all his pride seemed to spring from other people’s memories. Meoraq didn’t know the hero of Kuaq, who had climbed the walls when raiders held that city’s gates and cut through a hundred and eleven men alone, one of them the Raider-Lord Szadt, the most evil man ever gone to Gann. He didn’t know the Sheulek who had, in the course of his service, emerged the honest victor of more than one thousand battles, better than twice the account most Sheulek could expect. He had never seen the man his training masters r
emembered, never knew the reasons men invariably paused when they heard Meoraq’s name and came back to say, “Uyane of Xeqor? A son of Rasozul?”
No. Meoraq knew no hero, but only the man who sat in his rooftop garden in the evenings, preferring to sit on the tiles with his back propped against his chair as he read. He knew no warrior, but only the father who sometimes tapped at Meoraq’s door if he saw a light beneath it, bringing hot tea on cold nights and trading tales of roads they had both traveled, each in his own time. He knew no Rasozul, but the husband who showed altogether too much attention to the woman who wived him and who had mourned her with embarrassing steadfastness for seven years now. And that was still a good man, surely, but no man to inspire a full night’s worth of prayer. He prayed anyway…yet his mind wandered, and eventually he cried surrender and let it.
He still thought of his father some—vague impressions at the very fringes of far more trivial memories—but when his mind finally seemed to settle, it did not bring him to House Uyane at all, but to Tilev, where he had stood his training. He could see its halls in his mind as clearly as the cloister of Xi’Tothax would be now if he only opened his eyes, and this unexpected clarity so surprised him that he did open them.
The fires burned low in the holy forge before him. It would need its keeper to fuel it soon. Sheul’s forges must never be allowed to grow dark.
Glancing aside, Meoraq counted three priests among the few men come at this early hour to make their prayers. None of them seemed in the least otherworldly. As he watched, one of them stole a hand into the side-pocket of his robe and scratched at his groin. Hardly the act of some divine vision. No, he was awake and his mind, though far from quiet, did not ring with the voice of Sheul as He lent a needful son His guidance.
Well, he was done here, wasn’t he? He’d run out of prayers long ago, even after repeating several of them. He hadn’t paid an ear to the ringing of the hours, but judging by the people around him, he would put it at three. Nearly dawn. If he left now, he could catch almost a full hour’s sleep before the meal was called at four and be on the road again right after.
The road home. To Xeqor. To renounce his oaths as Sheulek and take up the stewardship of his bloodline.
Meoraq shuddered, then hissed annoyance because he had shuddered, and finally bent and pressed his brow to the cold tiles because he had startled several people around him with the hiss. A Sheulek must be his own master at all times, over his flesh and over his emotions. He breathed deeply. He found calm. He closed his eyes.
And was again in the halls of Tilev. Vaguely at first, but soon with the same surprising clarity as before, until he felt almost as though he could reach out his hand and touch the door that stood ajar before him in his imaginings.
It was a door he knew, a memory he had often revisited, and he was comfortable watching it all play out again in the quiet of his meditations. Gradually, the sounds of praying worshippers and groin-scratching priests faded out until this memory became a kind of reality. Between one slow breath and another, Meoraq slipped away from his true self and became the boy he had been at fifteen, his considerably smaller body drawn tense with apprehension as he stood outside Master Tsazr’s door.
* * *
He’d been Master Tsazr’s brunt that year. A boy of fifteen and a brunt. Not the youngest ever to hold that rank, but two full years younger than most. Then again, Meoraq was the son of a Sheulek, and more, a son of House Uyane, the championing House of all Xeqor. So it did not wholly surprise him to receive a brunt’s tabard on his return to school, and it would not surprise him three years later to hear that Nduman had received his, or six years after that, when even Salkith had one (although he recalled that it did surprise Salkith). They were the sons of House Uyane and, for good or ill, there were expectations.
Perhaps because of this, Meoraq had been assigned to serve Tsazr Dyuun, the weapons master, who was notorious for his physical approach to discipline when it came to dealing with high-born students…and their fathers, when necessary. It was true that Meoraq had received many slaps as Tsazr’s brunt, but not undeservedly and never for trying to hide behind the shield of his father’s reputation. And Tsazr had never sought to provoke him on the subject, or even indicated that he knew Meoraq’s father, although Meoraq knew he and Rasozul had shared the same circuit in their years of judgment. He was a hard man, Tsazr, and he had a hard hand, but Meoraq had served him half a year and could say honestly that he was much improved for it and hoped to be brunt to him again the following year (if he was called, he supposed he should say, although there was no real doubt. His were not the highest marks, but there were few boys of his age who knew the Word better and none at all who could best him in the ring).
The brunts enjoyed a fair amount of celebrity among the other students for the very few privileges afforded them along with innumerable additional responsibilities. The position was, of course, in reference to Prophet Lashraq’s own brunt, who had set the highest possible standard for devotion and piety while in service to another, but who had not (as was often bitterly remarked at the brunts’ table) been asked to make top marks in school at the same time. Meoraq’s duties were possibly even more strenuous than the others, with Master Tsazr to judge them, but they had been greatly diminished in the sixty-some days prior to the moment when he stood before this open door. Master Tsazr had been away, and not just away, but away on a pilgrimage. As his brunt, Meoraq had harbored secret hopes that he might journey along with his master, and he yet remembered the acid disappointment with which he had watched Tsazr walk away through the gate, leaving him behind with little to do but run errands for the watchmen and bully his younger brothers around in front of their age-mates. Still, to have a master away on a pilgrimage was a point of pride to any brunt, and this pilgrimage even more than any other because Master Tsazr had gone to Xi’Matezh.
Xi’Matezh. Spoken one way, it meant Forge of the Soul; with raised inflection, it became All-Beginnings; solemnly and with proper pitch, it was The One Heart. All names were truth.
Xi’Matezh had stood since the Fall of the Ancients, and although it had done so well beyond the reach of any city and without a steward of any kind to care for it, it had not fallen into ruins. Nor would it ever, it was said, for Sheul dwelled there as tangibly as any mortal man. It was well known that the doors of Xi’Matezh’s inner sanctum stayed fast against the vast majority of those who sought entry there, but the doors did open for some. And while rumor made many claims after that, upon one point all tales agreed: those judged worthy to enter heard the voice of Sheul. Not in prayer, not in dreams, not in the quiet reaches of their conscience, but the true voice of the living God.
So it was to Xi’Matezh that Master Tsazr traveled in the first year of Meoraq’s service to him and it was from Xi’Matezh that he had returned. That was the word awaiting him when Meoraq emerged from lessons and so he had raced across the whole of Tilev and up three flights of stairs to find that indeed his master’s door stood open.
All of this ran once more through Meoraq’s meditations, bringing fresh color to old memory until it was nearly with the same sense of excitement that Meoraq the Sheulek watched the brunt that he had been raise his hand and push his master’s open door further open. And it was new all over again—to see the man who had been so long absent sitting on the ledge of his window as though he had never left. Just sitting there, motionless, watching the wind blow clouds across the sky.
Meoraq’s first thought was that he didn’t look as if he’d been gone sixty days, even sixty days walking across the wildlands. He looked older. Not just tired or travel-worn, but older. By years.
Master Tsazr had not seemed to notice him yet. That didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t, but Meoraq knew he ought to leave. Being Tsazr’s brunt did not give him the right to come so far into his master’s private chambers and he knew it. Still he lingered, not quite daring to intrude but hesitant to retreat.
There was mud on Tsazr’s boots. Wet, black m
ud on the soles, fresh from the world just without the walls of Xeqor. Black mud, yes, but under that, caked high on the leg and staining the laces, was older mud, as red as rusted iron and proof of a far larger world…a world that only the Sheulek could wholly claim.
When Meoraq raised his eyes from this enticing sight, he found Tsazr gazing back at him. He managed not to flinch, but it was a clumsy salute he finally gave and an even clumsier excuse for his presence: “I’ve come to clean your boots, sir.”
Tsazr’s spines flared. He shifted his legs slightly apart and leaned forward to look down at his feet. He seemed to stare for quite some time. When he looked up again, he was frowning. “I know you. You’re one of Razi’s sprats. Nduman, is it?”
That cut at him. Yes, it had been sixty days and some, but he had been in service to Tsazr half the year before that. “Meoraq,” he said, as neutrally as possible. “Your brunt.”
“Ah yes. So I recall. Well, I knew it wasn’t Salkith, so I think I can count that half a stroke in my favor.” Tsazr rubbed at the side of his snout, studying Meoraq’s face intently. “You look very much like your father. Have you ever been told?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll only hear it more as you get older. Striking man, your father.” Tsazr leaned back again into the curve of the window and looked out. “The stuff of bad poetry. Handsome as hell, but a hard-cut face and a stare like the edge of a knife.” He glanced idly back at Meoraq and grunted, then returned his gaze to the sky. “Pity there’s not a mark of your mother on you, boy. At least Salkith got her eyes.”
He didn’t know how to answer that, so he said nothing. Whatever first spark of pleasure there had been in receiving so direct a conversation from his normally-taciturn master was now entirely turned to ash. Even the compliment of this comparison to his father (even if it was only to his looks) added to Meoraq’s growing unease.