The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  The pony nickered, tossing its head up and down. He put a hand to its head, and it shied away, dragging on the lead rein, pulling him off balance. He stumbled backward. The pony tugged again, nostrils flaring. Steadying himself, Jehan rubbed its nose, felt the tremor that ran through it. He frowned. He could hear nothing beyond the rumble of wind, see nothing new save the distant hill, could smell nothing save stale flesh and wool. The pony had sharper senses than he did. The irrigation ditches could provide cover for another of those desiccated things, maybe more than one. The wind shoved at him, once, twice, again, each time with increased force until he stumbled sideways into the pony. He caught at it for balance. It was still trembling. He reached across the packsaddle for the carbine. A gust of wind threw dirt into his face, and he coughed. His gloved fingers fumbled on the rifle, refusing to grip. The pony pulled again on the rein. With his spare hand, he rubbed once again along its nose. Still nothing new to be seen out there, not by him, anyway. Nothing new to hear. He gave the pony one last pat and began to unwind the lead rein. Time to turn back.

  The pony balked, digging its hoofs down into the shingle. The wind caught at him, shoved him sideways, snaring his feet in loose pebbles and the veins of old grass. He stumbled, dropped to one knee.

  The world went silent. The air cleared, dust sifting downward. The pony stamped a hoof. Moment followed moment. Jehan became aware of his breath, lifting and falling, the tang of wool in his nostrils, the patina of chill on his skin below his layers, the sourness of dirt on his tongue. He could see, now, the slash of the streambed cutting its way down the hill’s flank and, to the north, a square stern house of dark stone squatting on the height of the rise, roof steep and intact. Windows punctuated it, one, four, six. No smoke rose from its two chimneys. Aude had spoken repeatedly of a house made of stone. Perhaps this would satisfy her. They could ride out toward it tomorrow and then turn back. He inhaled, once more heard how loud his breath had become. Man and pony stood, struck to stillness by the silence. And then…

  A thrumming, a drumming through the earth, almost too low to hear, stealing up from the ground through bone and tendon. The sky dimmed, dropped, and exhaled in one hard gust, tumbling Jehan onto hands and knees. Soil and grit spiraled upward, outward, razoring into garments. The pony whickered in fear. A second gust snatched at the lead rein. Blinded, gasping, he clung to it, scrambling backward until he collided with the pony. He groped for it, knotted fingers into its mane. The watercourse channeled the wind straight at them. If they stayed here, that harsh blast would lay them open to the bone. Clinging to the pony, he climbed to his feet, wrapped his arms about its neck. They had to get out of this wind. They would never make it to the house of stone on its exposed hill, not facing into this. The pony could barely stand, let alone walk into the wind. If they turned…The Woven House was too far. The plain afforded no shelter.

  Not quite no shelter. The irrigation channels might give them two or three feet of cover. They had passed one only a few yards earlier. Head bowed, arms locked tight, Jehan leaned into the pony, urging it to turn. It resisted him, shocked into stillness. He let go of its neck, dug his fingers into its ear, twisted. It flung its head up and turned. He released the ear and tugged on the lead rein. Now, if only it did not bolt…It twitched, stamped a hoof, and leaned into him. Pushed by the hard palms of the storm, they stumbled back along the waterbed, weaving, half blind, to the lip of the last irrigation ditch. The wind hit them broadside as they turned, knocking him into the pony. He clung, let it drag him around, around and down, as the wind sent both to their knees just into the lee of the bank. Jehan buried his face in the pony’s coat, arms locked to it, and shut his eyes.

  He did not know how long they huddled there. He knew only the bite of cold, the drag of wind, the slow scrubbing ache of grit ground through fabric and coat into flesh below. Each breath scoured his lungs. Gusts punched and rocked him. Overhead, the air growled and thrashed. Breath by breath, he waited. At last, breath by slow breath, the wind braked and lessened.

  When he lifted his head and opened sore eyes, broken soil tumbled down his neck, bounced and flowed from shoulders and back. His mouth tasted foul. Beside him, the brown pony was powdered gray. He patted it. Opening its eyes, it pushed its nose into his hand, and he rubbed it, murmuring nonsense into its ear. For long moments they rested, each leaning into the other. The pony had no name. Jehan had acquired all three a month before in trade for Aude’s chestnut saddle mare and his own square bay trooper. Now he stroked the long nose and said, “Clairet: that’s you.” Whatever happened, this animal was his kin now.

  He fished in the saddlebags and poured water for the pony before taking two sips himself. Then he rose. On all sides, the steppe stretched out, no less gray and bleak than before. The same heavy pewter clouds cramped the sky. Perhaps an inch or two more dirt had settled into the irrigation channel. He turned, slowly, and his breath tripped.

  The top layer of the streambed was gone. It snaked away, rock laid raw to the sky. Here and there the low light struck sticky gleams from its surface. Stones the size of Clairet’s head had been tilted or dumped, exposing splintered hearts. He swallowed. Beside him, Clairet clambered upright, nudged the small of his back. He reached back absently to pat her.

  The wind had galloped along the watercourse and flayed it. Somewhere, back along its track, lay the Woven House on its low rise, unprotected and frail. Somewhere back there sat Aude, wrapped in her scrolls and sheltered only by old bamboo. Intent on her research, she might not even have noticed the change in the wind until it was upon her. Jehan threw the lead rein over the pony’s neck and scrambled into the saddle. They headed back along the stream at a canter.

  They were two thirds of the way back when it began to rain. Not water, but drifting flakes of yellow, lifting, tilting, swirling. One by one at first, letters and words scattered down into the watercourse, nested in clothes and hair. Prepositions littered the pony’s mane; Jehan shrugged, and a small avalanche of nouns skittered from his shoulders. As they reached the foot of the rise to the Woven House, the cloud of verbiage thickened. They inhaled verbs, coughed numbers, crushed participles underfoot. Parchment and splinters of bamboo had displaced dust from the wind. Jehan dismounted, ducking his head, brushed fragments from his face with one hand. Sixteen bushels read one scrap lodged in his glove; loaned two hoes. Two silver five copper nested between the pony’s ears. Lefmay dry from Ost… scudded past to settle on a knot of dead grass. Looking up the slope, a thick swirl of text ghosted his sight, cut him off from the Woven House.

  He chewed on his underlip. Think, Jehan. There could be a simple explanation. Most likely Aude had been a little slow in fastening the shutters, so deeply had she been absorbed in her reading. He ought to be able to believe that, it was like her. He was not sure he did. Broken words and broken bamboo…He shook himself, closed down on panic. The scouring wind had spared him and the pony, both smaller and lighter targets than a house. Aude was no fool.

  The irrigation channel had sheltered him. The Woven House, by contrast, stood exposed. He swallowed, tasting old ink, and forced the thought further away. He could not afford fear, not here, not now. He was almost back: from the top of the slope, he would see the house and its compound. Bad witch bargain whirled past, making him blink. Stone House. Aude had forgotten to close a window, that was all. Probably the one in that fetid bedchamber. Almost there…She was likely as worried about him as he about her. He quickened his pace. Cold struck up through his soles. He wiped at his eyes with one end of his outer scarf and peered up.

  Dry grass and drier earth, a litter of broken vegetation and parchment and that endless cold, low sky. He must somehow have turned himself around. He rotated slowly, scanning. Plain and sky on all sides, icy wind tugging, but nowhere stood the Woven House. Where it should have been there was only breakage and jetsam: here the split bone of a stilt, there ragged patches of a woven wall. Long splinters and nooses of cane coiled underfoot. The old loom lay broken, thr
ead flapping, adrift in a sea of potsherds and chair legs, mattress stuffing, brass pans, and worn leather straps. The jumble of parchment pieces dusted everything. Jehan swallowed. Nowhere could he see any trace of Aude or the two other ponies. Perhaps, after all, she had heard the wind rising and taken shelter elsewhere.

  The most likely place was the old watercourse. It did him no good to think that. If the ponies had panicked, she could be a mile or more away. In which case, she would make her way back here. He should give her credit enough to believe that. He freed his pony of saddle and headstall so she could browse whatever she found. Then, methodically, he set himself to pick through the debris for such of their possessions that Aude might not have had time to take. A tattered horse blanket. One saddlebag, foul with dirt but still buckled shut. From under a broken house panel, a water canteen, undamaged and still full. A hand count of spare undergarments, torn by bamboo shreds and soiled. Aude’s silver-backed hairbrush, its surface scoured to opacity. Her locket, the chain tangled and the clasp broken.

  Bone. First one small fragment, caught in a hank of mattress stuffing. Then another. And then, under the shattered staves of what had been the floor, a hail of them, long and short, all sharp, all broken, some still with shreds of muscle attached. He pulled back, gagging. Here at the heart of the debris lay a charnel heap, bone and flesh rendered down into pieces, none longer than his hand. The ponies… He had no proof that Aude made part of this litter.

  He had no proof that she did not. Scraps of fabric snagged and flapped throughout the ruins, the wool and cotton of her clothes. Jehan sank back onto his heels and buried his face in his hands.

  8

  Cadre

  IN THE COURTYARD OF THE CADRE, the bronze fountains stood silent. Leaves littered their basins, cracked and dry; the tiled pathways were dusty. All around, the lattices studding the arcade were closed. In the alcoves of the main archways, stone guardsmen watched, blank eyed. There was no peace to the stillness: it fizzed and snapped with waiting.

  Bare feet silent on the path, a figure paced, hands buried in his long sleeves. Here, in their private place, he walked bareheaded and unarmed, long plait swinging loose down his back, clad in light green tunic and trousers. Only the twisting line of braid at collar and cuffs marked his status. Corn ears and rice fronds denoted that he was a bannerman, sworn to the service of the Grass King. A pale blue coil bordered them, marking that he belonged to the Banner of Air. A single line of gold woven into that showed him to be one of the five Cadre, intimate of the king and leader of all the Banner of Air.

  His name was Sujien, and he was not precisely human.

  He reached one side of the court and turned. The plait bounced forward, and he pushed it back with one hand. Ten paces. Twenty. He reached the center and halted, tilting his head up and back into the eternal twilight of the Grass King’s realm of WorldBelow. He said, “The air knows. It still tells me.”

  “And yet we found nothing.” Shirai sat on the lip of the central fountain, watching Sujien. His face was square, his body set solid and strong. The border to his braid redoubled the patterns of the Grass King, earth upon earth. The leader of the Earth Banner, he was oldest and first among them. His voice was deep as stone. “Cold air, dry soil, water locked away, death everywhere.”

  “We must look again.”

  “I didn’t say we would not.”

  “Yet you brought us back.”

  Shirai drew his own plait forward and began, methodically, to undo it. The golden half-light picked him out, traced his shadow across the empty bowl of the fountain. His hair was flecked with bronze, his skin two shades darker.

  Sujien resumed pacing. He said, “We’ve delayed and delayed. It’s gained us nothing. The humans brought this on us. I felt that. You know it. The captive. His allies. I can smell them on the wind. They’re getting closer. I can feel it.”

  “The air is a fickle messenger,” Shirai said, mildly. “It changes.”

  “Not always.” There was a bite to that. Wisps of wind began to gather in the corners of the courtyard, troubling the leaves. A scent of sour orange traced the margins of the air. A single bee browsed among the drooping brown blossoms that still clung, here and there, to the branches. Sujien said, “You were there. We all were. We smelled it. Earth magic and water magic where it should not be. A human who reeks of it. We called to it. I have called to it, to that human thing, over and over. We can make it come to us. We can make it put things right. But we have to act.”

  Shirai made no answer.

  “We’re failing.” Turning to face Shirai, Sujien pointed to a stone guard. “We’re returning to earth. That is not how it should be. If we act, if we find that human thing…”

  “Impatience threshes no grain, Jien-kai.”

  “Neither does inaction.” Sujien stood for a moment, then shook his head and stalked into the arcade. It was chill under the vaulted roof, where all should be pleasant and warm. The floor was laid in bronze and green; iridescent color washed over clay by loving hands. The walls were plastered and molded; a frieze of trees extended long boughs, inlaid with fruits of turquoise and tiger’s eye, carnelian and jade. Here and there a human figure labored among them, gathering fruit. Sujien walked past them to the bead-hung arch into the bathing room, and stopped. Over a shoulder, he said, “It’s the doing of the human. The captive. I have told you so, over and over.”

  “How so?” Shirai asked. “He no longer has ink and parchment, nor wax, nor wood, nor writing instruments of any kind. He has no more contact with Liyan. He has no form that might use any of those, anyway.”

  “He has his mind and his blood.” The bee rose from the dead flowers and began to drift toward the arcade.

  “He has no means of transmitting his ideas. No denizen of WorldBelow will heed him. Liyan’s machine is broken, and the twins have been exiled.” Shirai rose.

  “It wasn’t always so.” Sujien waited for Shirai to join him. “We didn’t check the gate inside the Stone House, Shirai-kai. That’s how the captive entered. We could call the human we need to it.” The bee bumbled into a wall, seeking nectar from the painted fruits. The movement caught Sujien’s eye, and he hissed, raised a hand.

  Shirai said, “Do not.”

  “It’s a pest. All of them are.”

  “The Grass King chose to make them. We do not have the right to interfere with that, any more than we have right of entry to the Stone House. The Grass King gave that guardianship to the twins.”

  “To those who helped and cozened the prisoner.”

  “The Grass King chose them, Jien-kai. He had reasons.” Shirai made to pass.

  “And you know them?” Sujien was cynical.

  “He had reasons,” Shirai said, “but they don’t answer the questions you have now.” He placed his hand over Sujien’s. “Come. Let’s bathe.”

  “The twins watch the gate. The twins betrayed us once. This speaks of their hand. I smell them in all this, too. We should have done something about them long ago. They’re nothing but trouble, they’re not fit guardians for anything.”

  “The Grass King chose them. We have no right to question that. He has not changed his view. And the earth speaks to me of human things, blood and possessiveness, as the air does to you.”

  “Then we must follow that voice.” Sujien looked again at a stone guard, then along the arcade to an arch traced in cobalt and turquoise. “First WorldBelow then WorldAbove have grown dry. We grow dry with them. And Tsai is all but gone.”

  “We will act,” Shirai said, “when the earth tells me. It will call, Jien-kai. It always does.”

  9

  A Net of Dust and Air

  WITHIN THE WIND-WRACKED WALLS of the Woven House, Aude slept pillowed on a pile of ancient scrolls. Their words, in black and brown, left smudges on her cheeks and slipped into her dreams. She stood on the steps up to the house, and it was spring. Beyond the enclosure on all sides rice plants marched away, shocking green against the rich dark mud. She walked am
ong them, barefoot. The mud kissed her soles, slid lover’s fingers between her toes. Water shimmered thick and brown around the plants, murmured down the irrigation channels. She brushed a hand over the rice plants and felt their freshness rising. She lifted her face to the sky and watched clouds glide by. Here and there, amid the paddies, houses rose in ones and twos, neat on their stilts, doors and windows open to the air. People dressed in loose pale robes worked the paddies. She came to the edge of one paddy, climbed the low dyke to the irrigation channel beyond. Kneeling, she dipped her hands into it, scooped up a palmful. It tasted crisp on her tongue, promising growth and new leaves. She inhaled, clean green air filling her throat and lungs. Reflected in the water, her face was a pure oval, dark as old honey. Beads of moisture ran from her fingertips, dropping back into the channel. She swung her legs around and slid down into the water. It welcomed her, caressing skin, lifting limbs, fanning hair around her, drifted, eddied, breathed her in. She closed her eyes. Small currents tugged her, carrying with them memories of soil, of warm pale roots growing stout and strong. She could hear it all, out there beneath the rice paddies, the hot hum of growth. It washed through her, worked through her, fed her out into the young rice, drew her back in, earth and water and air all balanced and anchored through her. She lay limp, letting her heart slow. Overhead, the sun lulled her. There was no barrier between her and the water, no difference between her floating limbs and the blades of rice. She drifted while the rice ripened to harvest, shrunk back down to fallow, and the water nourished and cherished, rose and fell.

  And fell. She was stretched thin, the riverbed shrinking beneath her. Cracks opened; her limbs flaked and dried. The air turned cold, pinned her to the hard dry earth with cold strong hands. Her lungs choked on dust and death. She was bound down into the soil as it froze, eyes blinded, ears stopped, gasping for one taste, one sip of water, body flaking, breaking, scouring away on the wind.