by R. Lee Smith
Meoraq roared, kicking and slapping at the wind as it gusted, battering its way inside him. “No!” he spat, twisting his head violently back and forth until the wind went away. “Not! Leaving!”
“Meoraq.”
It was a woman’s voice, a woman’s hands that brushed along the sides of his face, cupping him and making him quiet as the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. He opened his eyes and saw his mother, fresh as on her wedding day, bending over him with loving exasperation shining down out of her eyes. Her eyes were golden brown and warm as tea; he’d forgotten.
The wind slackened. A few stars flickered and grew. In the east, the mountains he thought he saw flickered as well; Rasozul glanced that way and then at Yecidi.
“I know,” she said, as if he had spoken. Perhaps he had, in that way of silent understanding which Meoraq had so briefly shared and which the pain had utterly taken from him. “But he’s not ready. And he doesn’t have to be. Meoraq,” she said again, bending even lower to touch her brow to his. “Trust me. Do you trust me? I know you are very tired, but you must trust me.”
He groped for her hand and found it, weakly squeezing, trying to fill that touch with all the years’ worth of love he’d denied her for all his arrogant, stupid reasons, but he could feel her withdrawing from him. He could still see her and she was still smiling, but she was holding herself separate from him and she was doing it deliberately. It hurt and as he withdrew himself in confusion, that hammer suddenly smashed into him again.
“Breathe,” his mother said, stroking his face. “Don’t fight. Trust me, Meoraq, and relax.”
He tried, but at the slightest loosening of his will, the pain took his whole body, burrowing into his throat like a living thing and swelling through his chest.
“Breathe it in,” his mother said, and although she was still holding him, he could scarcely see her. The stars were going out in sheets now, all the world filling up with black, and ah, he hurt, he hurt, there was nothing left to feel but hurt.
“We’ll wait for you,” his father said. “Remember that and let go.”
Let go. He’d said that to Amber once, in the ruins the night of the storm, and although he couldn’t bring that night fully into focus through this terrible pain, he thought she’d done it. Because she’d trusted him to hold her. Meoraq battled his eyes open, but there was nothing of his mother left but her hands like shadows to either side of his face, nothing of his father but a voice beneath the killing wind telling him to breathe. The hammer struck; Meoraq opened his mouth to scream and the pain clawed at once down his throat.
He breathed it in.
* * *
Meoraq was awake long before he was able to do anything about it. Awareness was a live coal in his chest, a thick pool of pain much wider than the dimensions of his body. His arms and legs, of no significance, floated elsewhere. He drowsed in the thoughtless black, listening to low speech and shuffling bodies without the ability to make words of what he heard. And that was fine.
Gradually, the pain grew sharper and as it sharpened, it shrank. With the shrinking came a better sense of the rest of his clay until, all at once, he had an arm with a hand attached at the end of it, and within that hand, another hand. A soft hand. With many slender fingers.
He knew it was Amber before he knew he was Meoraq. Smiling, he squeezed the hand that held him. She squeezed back.
“Where is the knife of my fathers?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, a ghost in his throat.
She lifted his hand and laid it over the smooth bone hilt.
He smiled in the darkness. “Draw it with me, wife.”
Someone coughed. Not Amber. Someone else.
Meoraq opened his eyes. He lay in a sickbed—a raised mat, open all around to allow ease of tending—and a rather large blurry man stood at the foot of it with a scattering of other blurs around him. People. Damn it. “Leave us,” said Meoraq.
“That’s not His fire in your belly, son,” said a familiar voice, not moving. “That’s wetlung.”
Meoraq saw no reason it couldn’t be both, but the act of opening his eyes had forced daylight into the whole of his body. Now he could see that the sickbed in which he lay was in a room, which was in a House, which was in the city of Chalh. He started to sit up, but his brain threatened to leave if he insisted, so he settled back into the bedding under Amber’s guiding hands. “It is Uyane before me,” he said, fitting a name to the man just now coming into focus at the heel of his sickbed. “Lord of his House under my descent and steward of his bloodline in Chalh.”
“Keeper of the armory keys, warden over the Holy Fire of Gedai, guardian of the Oracle’s Fourth Order, and too damned old to care,” Uyane agreed. “But it’s just Jazuun when I stand with kin. Or are you holding my House in your shadow?”
“Not from your sickroom, I’m not.” He looked around again. “How did I get here? Wait…”
Meoraq thought.
He remembered.
He looked up at his wife. “You saved my life.”
One corner of her mouth ticced up in her crooked, human smile. “Feels awful, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” He thought some more—it was disturbingly difficult, a physical strain—and looked at Lord Uyane…Jazuun. “You found us? How?”
“Tripped over you on my way to Xi’Matezh.”
“What were you doing there?”
Jazuun snorted and shrugged his spines. “Said I went there for Fifth Light, didn’t I? All those fucking bells…I think a better question is, what were you doing there? It’s been a brace and more! I thought you’d gone home.”
“We were delayed.” Meoraq tried again to sit up and again abandoned the effort. He put a hand on his chest, feeling at the pains within as if it could tell him something. “I don’t remember this,” he muttered and looked up. “How do the surgeons say?”
“They say rest for half a brace or so and if Sheul shows you favor, you’ll be whole as you ever were. You’ve lost some juice and cracked some bones, but none of that was too serious apart from the strain it put on you. It was the wetlung that nearly killed you, boy, so you’re to be resting on your feet as much as possible.”
“And you?” Meoraq tried to raise the hand that did not grip Amber’s to touch her heart, but his clay was heavy. He could manage only to rest his palm on her belly, which he supposed was just as appropriate. “Were you injured?”
“No, for a change. I’m fine. Or…we’re fine, I guess.” She laughed a little. Her laughter, even self-conscious as it was, was beautiful. “I’m still getting used to that.”
“Then all is well.” Meoraq closed his eyes to think some more. The darkness helped. “Are they feeding you?” he mumbled. It seemed very important in that moment.
“Oh boy, are they feeding me. The lady of the house here has been stuffing cake into me with both hands practically since I got here.”
“At least it isn’t marrow, eh?”
“Marrow would actually be a nice change. I could really go for a steaming heap of marrow right now.”
He smiled. “You don’t mean that.”
“Not yet, but I’m getting there.”
With effort, Meoraq turned his attention back to Lord Uyane, who had been watching this one-sided exchange with undisguised curiosity. “How long have I been here?”
“Six days, in and out. You’ve muttered some before this, but this is the first I’ve seen you give sensible speech. If you want to move to a decent bed, I’ll let you, but your woman stays with mine. No arguments,” he added, cocking his head at Amber, who did indeed have an argument gleaming in her eye. “You can see him in my company, but then you let him rest. How in the hell do you get this she-Sword to obey you, boy? It’s like putting a tether on the wind.”
“It is,” Meoraq agreed, petting Amber’s hand. “A fine, fierce wind.” He dozed, fitting himself back in his flesh as if his body were an old pair of refurbished boots—familiar, but stiff and a bit too tight.
Boots…
“Where are my boots?” he asked, rousing.
“Up Gann’s ass and around the kidney,” Lord Uyane replied with a snort.
“I didn’t have time to look for anything,” Amber added. “We only have what was already on the sled when I put you on it, and we left a lot of that behind so we could get here faster. We still have a few things, I guess. Mostly stupid little stuff…your tea box…my mug. But…” She took a deep, bracing breath, dropping her eyes. “But you lost your knives. Or I lost them. Iziz took them and I didn’t think…anyway, they’re gone.”
Meoraq glanced at the knife of his fathers resting on his chest, then at his arm, naked but for the cord of her hair. His sabks…? His sabks! Handed down from the firstborn son of Uyane Xaima himself, perhaps the oldest set of honor-knives in all the world, blades that had never known defeat, and now they were gone.
He pulled in breath and hissed it out, pulled in another and just let it go. He reached out and stroked once at his wife’s brow, doing what he could to wipe away the guilt and shame she carried there. “So they are gone,” he told her. “Uyane Xaima was only a man. His sabks were only metal. And what does it matter now, eh? The Age of the Warrior is ended. It is only right that they end with it, there…where it all began.”
He had managed somehow to forget they were not alone in this room until Lord Uyane said, “Ended.”
They both looked at him and then beyond him to all those other watching, listening, invisible servants. Alarm flared in Meoraq’s chest as hot as fever, but Jazuun didn’t seem all that upset. Or even surprised.
“I knew it just by looking at you. Even at your worst, I could see it on you…on both of you.” Jazuun looked them over—first Meoraq, then Amber—and raised his chin like a true Sword in judgment. “You opened the doors at Xi’Matezh, didn’t you? You entered before it fell.”
Alarm flared again, which was twice too often for his ill-used clay. Meoraq put a hand over his heart to steady it and kept his spines still. “You don’t blame me for that, surely.”
“Blame you?” Jazuun tipped his head back in mock puzzlement. “It was God who held the shrine up all these ages. How is it that you dropped it? Although if any man could…If you can walk,” he said suddenly, “there’s something I want to show you.”
A strange sort of knowing entered Amber’s face. She looked at Jazuun and then at Meoraq, biting at her soft lip, and finally shook her head. “Come and see,” she said, holding out her hand.
Meoraq consulted his clay, which had used the little time since his awakening to decide it was not dying after all, but which had not yet decided whether or not it was glad to hear that. He sat up, clasped Amber’s little wrist in one hand and Lord Uyane’s considerably more helpful one in the other, and heaved himself over the side of the sickbed and onto his feet. Standing was bad enough; walking, where every step jostled the broken shards of hell occupying his lungs, was worse; the worst, what Amber would call the frosting on the shit-cake, came when Lord Uyane opened the door and Meoraq found the hall simply choked with people, startling him into an unplanned, “Fuck Gann!” for all of them to witness.
His voice rolled out in a fine, firm thunder, silencing all the mutters, coughs and shuffling that large crowds produce, and as one body, all turned to stare at him.
And there he stood in nothing but a loin-plate—an adolescent nightmare come to horrifying life.
“Motherless pack of ghets,” Jazuun said, but he said it under his breath and when he stepped forward to clear a path, he did it without slapping or swearing. The crowd, a faceless mass of rich robes and garish jewelry, gave ground with great reluctance and no small amount of posturing. These were not servants, scribes, messengers or any other breed of man Meoraq was accustomed to see collected in another man’s halls. These were priests, landholders, judges, lords—the wealthiest and best-bred that Chalh had to offer. He saw, by God, the standard and flashes of the governor, jostling and being jostled by those of the Great Houses, the Temple, the Tribune and—
Meoraq cocked his head, then raised his arm off Amber’s shoulders and aimed it like a spear into the crowd, trapping one man in frozen horror at the end of his pointing hand. “Ylsathoc Hirut!”
Like the cursed virgin in that old knee-time tale, hearing his name freed Exarch Ylsathoc from his paralysis. “I knew I knew that name,” he whispered, backing clumsily away. “I knew I knew that name!”
Lord Uyane was waiting beside the open door to a stairwell, so Meoraq moved on, but he was loathe to let his prey escape unscathed. “Keep him close,” he told Jazuun at the door. “I’m going to need provisions.”
Jazuun eyed him curiously, then shrugged his spines and signaled a guard. The unfortunate exarch was escorted from the hall, gesticulating wildly and making vague, incoherent allusions to all the places and people who were at this moment expecting him, including his infirm father.
“You really are a scaly son of a bitch sometimes,” Amber said, leading him onto the stairs.
Meoraq grunted agreement, still smiling. His body ached in every bone, but he felt so much better just knowing that pompous little fool would be waiting in mortal terror of him the rest of the day. “It has its uses,” he told Amber. “Perhaps now the rest of them will leave.”
“You couldn’t disperse that lot with flaming oil, son,” Jazuun snorted. “There will be twice this number and twice again once word slips out that you’re awake.”
“Me?”
Jazuun gave him a dry sidelong glance. “Who else would they be here to see?”
Meoraq looked at Amber.
“Well, yeah,” she admitted. “I’ve had some of that, but believe me, it’s always as your little monster.”
“Why?” asked Meoraq, genuinely baffled. “What did I do?”
Lord Uyane laughed, clapped him once on the shoulder and bounded on ahead to open the rooftop door.
Light flooded the stair at once, blindingly bright. Meoraq’s vision swam. He raised a hand to shield his eyes and left it there, his neck bent, seeing nothing but the stairs under his bootless feet until he reached the top. And so he was looking down when he stepped out under the open sky and saw the shadow of the stairwell hatch sprout long beneath him, as stark and black as if it had been painted there. Then he stepped around the stairwell hatch and suddenly the sun was in his eyes—not the light of the sun, but the sun itself—dazzling white, burning ghosts of pink and yellow in his eyes. The clouds that had been endless all his life had swept themselves into no more than a handful of high, wispy smudges. The sky beneath was green, as it had always been green, whether anyone knew it or not.
He had no idea how long he stared. He did not notice whether he found the stairwell wall and let it guide him to the ground or whether he simply collapsed. He did not see the others who shared the rooftop with him, not even Amber, whose hand remained clasped with his the whole time. It was not Sheul’s lamp or the glow of His forgiveness, but it was the sun and the sun was still a miracle.
When at last Meoraq came back to himself, there was Amber, sitting beside him on the rooftop, her hair turned to white gold around her face. Her mouthparts were smiling, but her eyes were watchful and unsure.
“When?” he asked her.
“Same day we got here.” One corner of her mouth crooked up a little higher. “I saw it happen, actually. I was right here on the roof. Praying.”
Jazuun waited for her to stop talking and then gave Meoraq a light tap to catch his attention. “The Oracles have been in sequester for days, but the only thing they’ve decided is that you’ll be able to explain it.”
Meoraq could feel his throat working, but could not hear any words. Amber squeezed his hand. He looked at it, at her, at the sun, at Lord Uyane.
“I don’t envy you, son.” Jazuun braced a hand on Meoraq’s shoulder and eased himself down with a grimace and a curse. Then he leaned back, rubbing at his knee and watching the few clouds drift in the wind. “But it isn’t really you they care about. O
h, you’ll go home with the kind of fame fools dream of and twenty years from now, your sprat with be taking six breaths and counting them slow every time some piss-licking gatekeeper holds him out in the rain to say, ‘Uyane? A son of Meoraq?’”
Meoraq coughed out a laugh and clapped a hand to the end of his snout, rubbing hard.
“But that’s his problem,” Jazuun finished. “All you have to do tonight is tell them what happened in Xi’Matezh. Let them decide what it means.”
Gentle words. They pierced him like a sword, pierced and twisted.
Meoraq shut his eyes against the sun and let his head drop. Lord Uyane let him be. Perhaps he thought he was praying. He wasn’t. He was trying to think, just think, and the thought that kept coming back to him was that of Lashraq, no Prophet but only a man, who had nevertheless raised Sheul’s lamp for the whole world to see, and of Master Tsazr, who had once told his awe-struck brunt how he had passed the doors at the holiest shrine the world ever knew and heard the voice of God and how Meoraq had judged him honest.
He gave himself a slow-count of six, this time with faces to put to the names he had chanted since boyhood, and when he was done, when he was decided, for good or evil and for all time, he raised his head and said, “I stood before the doors in Xi’Matezh and Sheul our Father brought me in. He spoke to me.”
Amber reached up and stroked the back of her hand across his brow. He closed his eyes and felt her warmth, together with the warmth of the true sun.
“His words were not a comfort,” Meoraq said. He caught her hand, pressed it over his eyes and kept it there until he knew he would not show tears, then released her and stared boldly into the face of Lord Uyane Jazuun. “How do you judge me?”
Jazuun held his gaze a long, long time before it finally wavered. He looked at Amber, then at the sky and the other braziers lighting along the rooftop and finally back at Meoraq. He frowned. “Truth.”
“Truth,” Meoraq echoed. He nodded—a human gesture—and rubbed at his snout some more. “The Word which was given to Lashraq was for an age which has ended. Some things…must change. We must learn to judge with wisdom and not with blades. We have become too eager to see Gann’s taint where there is none. We must learn to show mercy. We must try to forgive.”