by NS Dolkart
Grandpa Kilion, as always, spent the time trying to engage Goodweather in side conversation while casting the occasional dismayed look at his wife and daughter. The argument never got so heated or uncivil that he actually intervened, but he seemed to be eternally considering it.
Yet these arguments were nothing next to the day Pa and his wives joined them at the temple for the afternoon meal, their eight children in tow. The temple had a dining hall where the priests usually ate together, but Grandpa had sent most of them north across the plains to reassure the populace that God Most High was with them. Their absences left enough room for Pa’s big family, but no matter how much space there was, it felt too crowded. It felt like they didn’t belong.
Even with the din of so many people talking and eating, the tension in the air was so strong you could have strung a bow with it. There was tension between Pa’s wives and tension between Myma and Grandma, but the worst of it was between Myma and Pa. They usually avoided each other, but today it was worse: Myma glared at Pa every time he spoke, almost as if the quake that was the main topic of discussion was somehow his fault. For the first time, Goodweather realized how much Myma hated Pa. They had never gotten along – there was too much jealousy on both sides over Ma – but this was more than jealousy. Myma hated him.
Was it because Ma had brought him back from the dead? Goodweather had long wondered if this was the source of Myma’s jealousy, but whenever she had asked her about it – mostly at a younger, less polite age – Myma had spoken glowingly of how Ma had brought Pa back in order to bring peace to the nations. In Myma’s words, she had “saved us all.” But if that wasn’t her complaint with Pa, why did she also seem to blame him for everything that went wrong? She blamed him whenever Ma felt achy, whenever another of her hairs turned white – it was frankly ridiculous. He and Ma had spent less than two years together, and that was more than a decade ago! How much damage could he possibly have done?
Goodweather just wished her three parents could sort out their differences and leave the rest of the family out of it. As far as she could tell, Pa didn’t have anywhere near the kind of loathing for Myma that she had for him. He seemed, if anything, bewildered by the way she was glaring. Couldn’t they just make up somehow? What if Pa apologized for whatever it was that he had done? Or if it wasn’t the kind of thing you apologized for, couldn’t Myma just forgive him already?
Pa cleared his throat. “I hear from Goodweather that Bandu is training dogs now? How many do you have?”
“None.”
Myma’s curtness brought him up short, but Goodweather jumped in to ease the awful tension. “We don’t train them for ourselves, people pay us to train them. Ma and I do it.”
Pa frowned. “She’s so stubborn. She’ll never find a true replacement for Four-foot, so she won’t even keep a dog? She’d be happier if she’d only–”
“She had a chance to bring Four-foot back,” Myma snapped. “She wanted to. But she chose you instead.”
Goodweather winced almost as much as her father did. The words were hurtful enough on their own, but the savage conviction with which Myma had wielded them was enough to tear someone apart. Goodweather hoped her mother would never turn on her like that. Even watching her do it to someone else was enough to shake her to the bone.
Goodweather had heard of Four-foot, Ma’s legendary wolf friend. Pa had told her of how the wolf had come to his rescue and how it had died, how Ma had loved it, and how it was Four-foot’s death that had cleared the way for her to love a human being. Ma always spoke of Four-foot with such longing that Goodweather had no trouble believing Pa’s assessment. And Myma wasn’t a person who just made things up: if she said that Ma had had the chance to bring Four-foot back instead of Pa, then it was probably something Ma had told her.
But Myma had always spoken with pride of the way Ma had brought Goodweather’s father back, since it was Pa who had really made the peace between the Dragon Touched and their southern neighbors in Ardis. How could she now suggest that Ma should have chosen Four-foot instead?
Something had filled her with rage, something that Goodweather did not quite understand. It frightened her.
Pa was dumbstruck. “What are you saying?” seemed to be the best he could muster, in a voice whose anger couldn’t mask its shock. Everyone was staring at Myma now: Criton, his four wives, Grandma and Grandpa, and all the children old enough to understand even a portion of what was going on.
But Myma didn’t wilt. “Bandu made a sacrifice, a heavy sacrifice to bring you back, and not because she wanted to. She sold part of her life away so that you could save all the people who depended on you, so what do you do? You make people depend on you more. More wives, more children. You’re disgusting and ungrateful. That’s what I think.”
“She never told me about a sacrifice,” Pa said quietly. “She just hid herself away with you and disappeared.”
“As she had every right to do. She doesn’t owe you anything, Criton, you owe her. You’ve been leeching off her for eleven years now – that isn’t enough for you?”
Pa sat silent, his expression roiling with anger and guilt and confusion. Not a word was spoken – even the children went quiet, looking from their father to Myma and back again. At last Grandpa rose, coughing awkwardly. “It’s getting late. I think maybe we should…”
He trailed off as two people entered the room. The first, bowing his head respectfully, was that night’s watchman at the gate, a curly haired plainsman with a cleft chin. “We tried Criton’s house first,” he murmured, “but I see you’re all here.”
The second person was Ma.
8
Bandu
Her first priority after the quake was to make sure Vella and Goodweather were safe. She sent the dogs running back to their owners, packed what food she could, and began walking toward Salemica, not even planning for what to do once she arrived. The important thing was to see how her wife and daughter were faring, to protect them if they needed it.
She didn’t know what had caused the quake, but she knew whom she could ask. The Yarek, whose great body stretched from the heavens to the underworld, would know what was happening.
Whether it chose to answer was another question entirely. It had fulfilled its obligation to her the day it had led her down to the underworld on a staircase of roots. Now that it owed her no favors, she would have to rely on its kindness, insofar as it had any. Castle Goodweather had been kind to her as a child, but the Yarek was more than just the product of Goodweather’s seed. It was its own massive entity, raised on the rich soil of this world in the shadow of the Gods it had once threatened. Close as it was to Them, maybe it couldn’t afford to be too kind.
Even if that was true, Bandu had no doubt that she had been right to insist on bringing only Goodweather’s seed to this world. Even if this new Yarek wasn’t exactly kind, it was certainly a good deal kinder than Illweather had been. Just the thought of bringing home a seed from the plant beast’s cruel half was enough to make Bandu glad of her decision.
So she would ask the Yarek, once she knew that Goodweather and Vella were safe. She had seen trees crack and birds get torn apart when the sky shook – what if her family had been inside a building when it happened? Would the roof fall on them? Salemica’s buildings were tall, especially the temple where Vella’s parents lived. If the shaking sky could break tall trees, that temple was worth worrying about.
She hadn’t been to Salemica in years. Once Goodweather had grown old enough to tramp alongside her Myma, Bandu had been glad to let the two of them travel here alone. Salemica was Criton’s city; she had never liked being there. Anyway, it was far enough away, and there was always enough to be done at home in her wife and daughter’s absence. The weeks alone cleared Bandu’s head, and made her appreciate them better when they returned.
She certainly liked solitude better than she liked the idea of seeing Criton again. She didn’t hate him, didn’t get angry about him anymore the way Vella did, but
she had nothing she needed to say to him and nothing she wanted to hear him say either. Vella gave her reports each time she came home, and that was more than enough. It had been easy to let the years slide past without visiting again.
Let Goodweather love her father – she deserved as much, and so did he – but Bandu could admit her mistakes, and loving him had been one of them. It had been an easy mistake to make, back when they were both too young to know better and had so recently lost the ones they loved, but she and Criton had never been well-suited to each other. She doubted he was well-suited to anyone, really. There were things he was good at, and love was not one of them.
The two greatest joys Criton had given her, he had given by accident. The first was Goodweather. Criton had wanted to mate with Bandu, he could not pretend otherwise, but her pregnancy had come as a shock to him. A shock, as if he somehow hadn’t understood the way young were made. Then again, perhaps he hadn’t. She hadn’t considered back then how little he understood, how he had never seen a pregnancy or even watched animals mate. She may have come to him with too many assumptions, just as he had with her.
Either way, he had given her Goodweather by mistake. Fatherhood had been something that happened to him, and from what she heard it was still happening to him fairly regularly. Bandu was grateful for Goodweather’s existence, but she didn’t give her former husband more credit for her than he deserved.
The second joy Criton had given her was even more accidental than the first. Bandu had followed him to his people and lived among them for several long and miserable months while they waged war on their northern neighbors on the way to waging war on their southern ones. She had made few friends among his people while guiding them toward their victories, but one of those few had been Vella.
Vella had come to her as a friend of Dessa, who was the daughter of Criton’s cousin, and confessed her attraction to Bandu one day while helping her with Goodweather. Bandu had taken her along when she left Criton, a choice that was selfish and cruel and for which she had been unfairly rewarded with over a decade of love and support. Bandu was profoundly grateful for Vella. Their marriage had horrified Criton when she told him about it, but it still could not have happened without him.
Now Bandu would be seeing him again, whether she liked it or not. There were uncomfortable conversations ahead of her. Bandu had given half her life to bring Criton back from the dead, but she had never told him so. Well, it would be obvious enough now.
She could still remember the pain in his face when she had said she would not be returning. Vella would have called his pain selfish and ungrateful, and she was right, but it was also true that he had known nothing of Bandu’s sacrifice. All he had known was that she would not be staying, and at the time it must have seemed to him that she had brought him back to a world without love. If that had been true, he would have had no reason to be grateful.
But it wasn’t true. There was plenty of love in the world, of all different kinds. For one thing, Bandu had left him with their adopted daughter Delika. He had always been better with her than with Goodweather anyway. And whether he had found any love with a mate since then, he had clearly found new wives without difficulty.
She arrived in Salemica shortly before dusk. The lands were so fertile she could feel it in her toes: the great river she had followed flooded in the rainy season. Salemica stood on an incline too gentle to be called a hill, but high enough to spare it from the waters, at least most years. She thought that a major downpour must reach and breach its walls, but maybe that was the point. Criton’s city could only stand so long as his God protected it.
Not for the first time, she shook her head at this foolishness. God-worshippers had a perverse inclination to put themselves in these positions, as if the Gods would reward them for their trust. Bandu would never understand it, especially not with God Most High. It didn’t matter if He was more powerful than the rest, because He was also the most inattentive.
She marched to the gate and told the men there that she wanted to see her wife and daughter. The guards at the gate were young, but not so young that they failed to recognize Bandu. She saw the flicker of confusion and reevaluation on their faces as they tried to reconcile the way she looked now with their memories of her. Hadn’t she been of an age with Criton and Vella, more or less? But if she had been a teenager eleven years ago, and in her twenties a few years later, how could she now be verging on middle age?
“I am here for Vella and Goodweather,” she said again. “Where are they?”
They mostly stared. “I can show you Criton’s house,” a guard offered.
Bandu nodded at him. “Good.”
Inside the gate, Bandu marveled at the city’s growth. Salemica was an unusual city, in that the walls had been built well before there was town enough to fill them. Now there were houses everywhere, with little alleys running between them. The further she walked into the city, the larger the streets and houses grew, as if each wave of people who settled here had thought there couldn’t be too many more behind them. As each group had been proven wrong, the newcomers built smaller houses to make sure there would be space.
The streets, which began as those narrow alleyways near the gate, ran together like rivers as she neared the city’s center. Already from several streets away she could see the Great Temple, rising mountainlike above even these larger houses. Within minutes she and the guard had passed into the widest road, bustling with merchants and other vendors, which led to the great road-lake into which all rivers flowed.
In other cities Bandu had seen, temple squares all contained more than one temple. Here, though, the house of God Most High stood alone. It had been the first house built, the one Criton’s people had erected before any people had made their own homes in the city. God Most High had moved here first.
The temple was massive, giant blocks of red brick piled on top of one another so that the priests of God Most High could live and do their work closer to the sky. Bandu thought that if mountains had been designed by people, they would look very much like this: all bricks and stairs and right angles. There were no more doors on the ground level than there would have been in the side of a mountain, only stairs to the huge platform on top. There, a great altar stood before the house where Vella’s family lived, and where they spoke to their God.
“This way,” the guard said, leading Bandu along the edge of the square to a sprawling building that stood across from the temple steps. Criton’s house.
His house disgusted her, even from the outside. It was the same size as that abbey she and her friends had visited long ago, a building that had easily housed not only its five guests but a half dozen grown men besides. The house was made of stone, just like that abbey, with wooden shutters and two chimneys. Even with Criton’s three wives and many children, there would be more than enough room, and that meant that whoever had designed it had assumed there would be more wives and children on the way. That might have been the most obscene part of it all.
The chimneys weren’t smoking, so Bandu told the guard to check whether Goodweather and Vella were there. She didn’t want to set foot in that house if she didn’t need to.
The guard returned promptly; there was nobody at home. “They might be at the temple,” he suggested.
They pushed their way through the crowd and began their climb. Bandu was glad to be going to the temple, despite all the steps. The building had a better feeling to it than Criton’s house. For one thing, its size made more sense. Gods were big and vain and would probably start killing people if They didn’t get big grand houses that showed off how much people feared Them. What was Criton’s excuse?
The funny thing about building your God a big house was that it didn’t matter if the God actually lived there, because the important part was the respect. It was Vella’s family that lived in the temple, but everyone knew it wasn’t the Highservants’ house, because they weren’t the ones who had to be appeased with big red buildings that towered above a city.
Bandu’s legs grew tired as she neared the top. There were so many steps to be climbed before she could pass the altar and enter the dwelling. The base of the building had taken a great deal more labor to build than the actual house, and its only purpose was to make the temple taller: closer to the heavens and easy to see from any of the streets below. The house on top, tall and square and grand, was still smaller than Criton’s house.
The guard led her inside to the place where the priests ate. As Bandu walked, Vella’s voice came from up ahead, raised and angry. She was yelling at someone. The guard looked at Bandu with awkward curiosity, but she ignored him and passed through the archway to the dining room. Sure enough, there they all were: Vella and Goodweather, Kilion Highservant and his wife Chara, Criton and his whole family. Though Vella had clearly been yelling at Criton, it was Kilion who was standing, trying to make peace. He would likely succeed, Bandu thought: there was nobody Vella respected more than her father.
Once Bandu had stepped into the room, though, Kilion’s peacemaking efforts became moot as all focus shifted to her. Everyone went quiet and stared, which Bandu found uncomfortable. Except for Vella and Goodweather, who were only surprised to see her, all the other adults were going through the same reevaluation as the men at the gate. How could she have aged so much in so few years? Bandu wished people would stop doing that.
Criton spoke first. “Bandu,” he said. “You’re here.” He looked like he wanted to leap across the table towards her. Was he really so eager for this meeting?