Court of Fives

by Kate Elliott

Despite having died in disgrace and in debt, Lord Ottonor must be allowed a final procession to the City of the Dead because that is the prerogative of a lord who was head of a clan and thus must be honored by burial in an oracle’s tomb.

  We assemble for the funeral at dawn. The royal carriage, the seven noble palaces, and all the lordly clans with their retinues are required to accompany the procession. Tana pushes me into line with Gira, Shorty, Mis, and the cook’s girl, filling in a row of five.

  I lean toward Gira. “Why did Talon stay behind in the stable?”

  She steps on my foot. “Stop talking.”

  We march in time to the mournful pulse of funeral drums. I have never before worn formal household livery because my sisters and I never officially belonged to Lord Ottonor’s household. The adversaries of Garon Stable wear a version of the parade uniform worn by Garon soldiers. As we walk I adjust my knee-length sleeveless vest. Its back is stitched with the horned and winged fire dog that represents Garon Palace. Three buttons close the bright yellow silk across my chest, allowing it to flow open to either side. Beneath the sleeveless vest I wear a knee-length tunic cinched at my waist with a lacework of three belts. Loose trousers are tucked into boots. The color of the processional scarf marks the occasion: we all wear long, narrow white funeral scarves.

  Anise’s harsh words haunt me. Whatever it is Garon Palace wants, it will not hesitate to trample anyone who stands in its way.

  By the time we get to the bottom of the King’s Hill I am sweating all over. Father told us stories of his childhood and how it got cold in a season he called “winter,” but I don’t understand why Patrons wear all these layers of clothing in warm Efea. Even my eyelids are sweating.

  As all the households reach the Avenue of Triumphs, they line up according to status. Clans whose animal talismans bear no wings naturally give way to palaces, whose talismans do. Among the palaces there is a further hierarchy, depending on who stands highest and who lowest in the royal favor. Although every lord’s clan we meet halts to let us pass, we are required to give way to all six of the other palace clans. How Lord Gargaron must hate having to let another palace go ahead of him! Finally we take our place.

  A staggered formation of Garon soldiers stands in the first rank to protect the household. Behind them, with the best view, the lords and ladies of the palace assemble. In the third rank gather the lesser relatives, officials, and officers. The highest-ranking servants and Challenger-level adversaries stand in the fourth rank, and we Novice and fledgling adversaries and the lower servants are crammed at the back with the worst view.

  Kalliarkos stands between Lord Gargaron and an elderly woman carried in a chair. He is wearing an elaborately tasseled hat. I catch glimpses of his bare neck as the beaded strings sway each time he shifts.

  “Stop staring at him.” Gira nudges me with her heel.

  Flushing, I try to think of how Amaya would salvage the situation. “Why do Patrons wear those ridiculous hats?”

  Gira snorts.

  A servant in the fourth rank hisses displeasure, so we shut up.

  Pipes, bells, and a chorus of singers announce the arrival of the king and queen at the head of the funeral procession. The royal banners glide into view, carried by officials wearing robes embroidered with blood-thorn roses, white death-flower, and skeletal falls of bone-vine. A hooded sea-phoenix perches quiescent in a cage, its folded wings glittering. When the royal carriage rolls past without king or queen in it, I hear a murmur of spiteful satisfaction. Not even Prince Nikonos has come to honor the dead man. People will discuss this dreadful insult for months.

  The funeral wagon passes, devoid of the embroidered banners and garlands of painted masks that would usually drape the flatbed with its open coffin. A lord’s burial casket should be gilded with gold flakes and studded with jewels. Ottonor’s coffin is humble wood painted with cursory daubs of lozenges, straight lines, and handprints to depict the three gods and their attributes of fecundity, martial prowess, and justice.

  Lord Ottonor does not lie in the coffin yet, of course. Dressed in formal parade wear embroidered with the three-horned bull of Clan Tonor, his corpse lurches forward one awkward step at a time. The priests have bound his self, his shadow, and his name into his body, where his heart still resides. With the mystical power held by the priests, they have motived his flesh with a fresh spark of life taken out of another creature and fixed into him.

  Kings and princes and lords walk to their tombs this way.

  His expression is a peaceful mask, face waxy with the paraffin that has been rubbed over his skin to preserve it. Only the jerking motion of his limbs betrays disquiet within the four remaining parts of his soul, as if he fears to approach the judge who rules the afterlife.

  Four priests attend him, one at each of the cardinal directions. Each holds a ribbon attached to the silver chain at his waist.

  His male relatives follow. Heads bowed, they pace in shame. Steadily rising whispers spread like fire among the onlookers.

  Father’s decision to join Lord Gargaron’s household no longer seems quite so heartless and ambitious. Now it seems more like prudence and desperation. What would have happened to us had Father’s fortunes tumbled into the pit with Ottonor’s clan?

  The crowd’s whispering conversations quiet.

  The oracle comes.

  In the empire of old Saro, a dead emperor was accompanied into his tomb by servants. They would be smothered to death and arranged in the chamber so as to serve him in the afterlife. Last of all, an oracle would be brought into the tomb and given poison. In her death throes the priests could read a prognostication of the next emperor’s reign. But when King Kliatemnos the First died, his devoted wife, known as the Silent Orchid, refused to condemn another woman to that cruel tradition. She and her four daughters walked with the king into the tomb, the only time Patrons have ever had anything good to say about a man having four daughters. Out of respect for her dignity the priests allowed her and her daughters and the oracle who accompanied them to live. If you can call that living: walled up in a tomb until you die.

  Girls chosen to be oracles grow up in separate cells in the temple, never seeing another person and speaking only to the priestesses who pass them food and water and the priests who instruct them in the lore of the gods. This procession is the only occasion an oracle will ever have to glimpse the sky and the sea and the city and the faces of people.

  The curtained wagon passes in silence. No one wants theirs to be the last voice heard by an oracle on her way to her tomb. She might carry some fragment of your five souls—a taste of your heart or a thread of your shadow or a sliver of your self or, worst yet, the memory of your name—to dwell among the tombs forever.

  The silence makes my skin prickle like ants crawling all over me. I shift my feet nervously but even that faint scuffing reverberates like a clap of thunder. The curtains sway. I hold my breath for fear the oracle will catch the spark of my breathing and steal it.

  Only when the wagon passes out of my sight do I exhale.

  The oracle’s vehicle is followed by twenty tomb attendants walking in ranks of five. These women from Lord Ottonor’s clan have been granted the honor of sitting vigil overnight as the borrowed spark drains from the body of the deceased. Mourning shrouds cover their bodies from neck to ankle and they have all done up their hair in a tower of braids wrapped around a conical funeral hat. I see Amaya’s friend Denya among them, looking pale and sad.

  Behind them walk the five servants who will be walled into the tomb at dawn to serve the living oracle. They are faceless and nameless. Shrouds cover their heads and drag on the ground so even their feet cannot be glimpsed.

  The shrouded attendant who walks at the center staggers like a wounded creature with a swollen belly. I blink.

  Suddenly I am absolutely sure it is my mother.

  My heart pounds so hard I think it is going to leap out of my throat. A headache spikes between my eyes, my vision growing blurred. Another o
f the attendants is tall like Bettany, and one has a slight lurch to her walk as Maraya would. One is short and delicate like Amaya, and the fourth could be me if I wasn’t standing here, torn away from them.

  “Mother,” I gasp.

  Gira grasps my wrist. “Shhh.”

  The bricklayers’ wagon trundles past, followed by a file of royal cavalry and a squadron of six spider scouts. The clanking of their metal feet on stone shakes me back to earth.

  It cannot be them. Tomb attendants are raised in the temple just as oracles are. My thoughts are just a wandering madness because I don’t know where my mother and sisters are.

  The princely and lordly retinues follow the funeral procession through the city and past the harbors to the temple and Eternity Gate. I walk as if dazed by shadow-smoke, my hands clammy and my face hot.

  Just past the temple wall rise the mudbrick tombs where ordinary Patrons inter their dead, one hundred to a small chamber, packed in like bricks. Richer Patrons can afford family tombs where, for generation after generation, their dead are wrapped in shrouds and stacked onto granite shelves. The tombs of the lords and the palaces stand on the hill, with the royal tombs at the crown. Only highborn Patrons are served by oracles, as it is said, “Let the king and his sons heed the word of the gods even in the shadow of the afterlife.”

  All the households wait in the heat as the dead man is led into his tomb. The sun hurts my eyes but every time I close them I see a nightmare vision of my mother wrapped in a shroud.

  The palace households ahead of us start filing in to pay their last respects. We creep up the hill. At length a porch and low door appear before us. Bricklayers wait under an awning, bricks and mortar and tools ready for tomorrow’s dawn.

  My hands clench as I climb the five steps onto the porch. A simplified version of a three-horned bull is carved into the lintel, a few lines incised to identify this as the tomb of Clan Tonor. The opening into the tomb is so narrow we have to turn sideways to go in. I shuffle behind Gira through an outer chamber with an offering trough to the right and a latrine trough to the left. People have already urinated into it, and the smell makes me wince. The tomb also stinks of the sweat of so many hot, anxious people trudging through. How horrible to be trapped inside here for the rest of your life.

  We pass under an arch into the central chamber with its stone bier. Offering cups and bowls filled with flowers, beads, coins, and magical amulets surround it.

  Dead but breathing, Lord Ottonor lies on top of the coffin. The spark that gives him breath will fade over the course of the day and night. Just before dawn the priests will place him inside his coffin and seal the lid. His corpse and coffin will rest on the bier until his oracle dies.

  How do the priests fix that spark into him? Did it come from an animal or a person? All I know is that it must come from a similar place as the magic the king’s magicians use to animate the spider scouts, whose metal bodies are given life by sparks taken, so Father once told us, from desert spiders.

  The twenty vigil-sitters face the walls, their backs to the mourners who file past. The five shrouded attendants kneel in the archway that opens into the third chamber, where the oracle resides. From behind they look like sacks.

  The quiet in the tomb presses like weight. The world outside, the sough of the ocean, the cry of gulls, the speech of people: these have vanished. All I hear is the scuff of feet and the occasional sucked-in breath as people enter the tomb behind us and get a lungful of the fetid air.

  We pace up the length of the middle chamber. The moment I reach the head of the bier, the line halts. I look down on Lord Ottonor’s waxy forehead. His eyes are horribly open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, which is painted black with white specks for stars. His chest rises and falls. I am caught between the bier and the veiled attendants who block the doorway into the third room.

  This end of the tomb smells fresher because in the oracle’s chamber there is both an air shaft and a hole for speaking to people outside. Five lamps burn, illuminating a table set with a basin and pitcher, a stack of books atop a wooden chest, and a curtained bed where the oracle must be seated, hidden from the mourners.

  One of the bed curtains stirs. I stiffen, holding my breath so I don’t shriek out loud.

  Pale fingers brush through a slit in the curtains, probing from the inside.

  She sees me. I know it. A wave of dizzy fear makes me sway.

  The oracle speaks in a whisper like the scratch of a poisoned thorn.

  “The tale begins with a death. Where will it end? There could be a victory, a birth, a kiss, or another death. There might fall fire upon the City of the Dead, upon the tombs of the oracles. A smile might slay an unsuspecting adversary. Poison might kill the flower that bloomed brightest. A living heart might be buried. Death might be a mercy.”

  Shorty nudges me from behind. The file is moving. I stumble in Gira’s wake, accidentally brushing the clammy skin of Lord Ottonor’s dead hand with my own. Sweat breaks down my back. A pulse pounds in my ears and I am not sure if it is my own or that of the spark that animates the corpse’s chest. Maybe the oracle’s heart beats in time with mine.

  I do not know where I am going.

  I cannot think.

  At the archway that leads out from the chamber I glance desperately back toward the five attendants, realizing I have lost my only chance to try to communicate with them, just to make sure they are no one I know. With a hiss through teeth like a snake giving warning before it strikes, Gira drags me after her. I stagger through the outer chamber and onto the porch where with a gulp of fresh air I see the blue sky unfolding above. A sob knots in my throat, but I keep it down in my heart where it must stay.

  I feel like a walking corpse as we return through the city to Garon Palace.

  The training stable gate with its horned and winged fire dog greets us like a refuge.

  It is already late afternoon as we wash up with the ritual prayers. Many servants remained behind to spend the day preparing a huge repast to celebrate the dead man’s safe passage to his next house of existence. The leavings we receive in the stable are the most magnificent feast I have ever laid eyes on. None of Father’s victory feasts nor any of the social engagements we girls were allowed to attend boasted platters of gingered-orange quail, date-stuffed chicken, wine-soaked beef, white fish garnished with almonds and saffron, salted eel, barley cooked with herbs and onions, honey cakes, and enough beer to drown a city.

  I force myself to place a moist honey cake on my tray.

  “Did you hear anything in the tomb?” My voice quavers. I am afraid they will say yes, but I am even more afraid they will say no.

  “No, but it sure smelled,” says Gira, wrinkling up her nose. “Why do you ask?”

  “No, thank the gods.” Shorty cuts her off. “And I’ll thank you not to repeat the question.”

  “It would be ill fortune,” adds Mis. “The oracle never speaks until the tomb is sealed.”

  The honey cake sits uneaten.

  I imagined the words. That’s all.

  The party looks likely to spill late into the night, so I make excuses and creep off to my bed. Wide awake although exhausted, I listen to the adversaries singing lewd songs as they get drunk. From over the palace wall, a melody of tuned bells mingles with the breath of flutes. At intervals a male voice rises to sing sonorous stories of the splintering of the old empire and of how the first Kliatemnos and Serenissima bravely defeated the corrupt magic of the old Efeans and erected a new and pure kingdom on Efean soil.

  As I drift, a horrible certainty swims to the surface of my mind. Through her oracle’s magic she was speaking to me alone. For Gargaron’s poisonous scheme to work, he must remove Mother from Father’s reach forever in case Father is tempted to seek out the beautiful woman he has loved for half his life. How better than to bury her where no one can look for her and where religious law prevents her rescue?

  I wake with a jolt, like I have been stabbed.

  I will h
ave my stewards make provision for the women, Lord Gargaron told Father.

  And so he has.

  22

  My guts twist in knots as I struggle not to throw up. I lie shaking so hard I cannot stand.

  When the fit passes I dress, finding everything by feel. It is the middle of the night but I have to go there now. I have to save them. I pin my Garon badge inside my tunic in case I need it, but for now I must not advertise where I come from.

  Outside, a single lamp burns by the drinking basin. The tables are clean, benches set atop them for the night. It is so quiet and still that as I pad past the Fives court I don’t at first notice a person standing on one of the beams. She is balancing on her left leg while holding her right leg straight out in front of her with her hands grasping the flexed right foot. Not a wobble disturbs her. She might as well have been turned to stone. By the shadow of her clubbed hair I know it must be Talon. I freeze, waiting for her to shout, to betray me. But I am met with silence.

  By easing back a step I fade into the shadows along the wall. I have to keep going.

  The stable gate is closed and barred. Pressing my ear against it, I listen for the guards but hear nothing.

  I crack open the pedestrian door set into the large gates. The guards lean against the porch pillars, dozing, a crock of spicy plum wine open at their feet. They too have partaken of the funeral toasts to a dead lord no one liked or respected.

  I creep past them, scarcely breathing until I am out of sight of Garon Palace.

  Father told us a hundred times that girls like us must never go out alone at night. When he was gone to the wars I often sneaked home at dusk from Anise’s stable, but I have never in my life been out alone at night. The dregs of funeral feasts spill here and there into the streets. Men reel along in clots of singing and laughter. Three Commoners, wearing the white ribbons of people willing to take coin in exchange for sex, chat about a poetry contest that they plan to attend on the next full moon. A woman pushes past with a cart for selling toasted shrimp. Her bucket is empty, a good night for her, and she is singing an old Commoner song about the young woman who slept with the incarnated moon. She looks unthreatening so I pace along behind her.