King of Shards

by Matthew Kressel

  She blushed. “Emod!”

  “Well . . .” He gave her an apologetic look. “Just look at his hands. No calluses. He’s not a laborer. My guess is he’s a man with servants. A king’s son.”

  Rana grabbed Daniel’s hand. She examined them, and he stared at her. It was true. Daniel’s hands were as soft as a baby’s cheek. She dropped his hand and Daniel cocked his head at her, perplexed.

  “He’s a puzzle, indeed. But a puzzle for tomorrow.” Emod sucked his pipe. He scratched his beard and exhaled a gray cloud of smoke. “Rana, did I tell you? A Massap trader bought one of your rings. The tall woman called it—how did she say?—‘A fine knickknack.’ I thought that was a good compliment, don’t you think? Do you have any more like it?”

  “A knickknack, eh?” Emod had a particular way of telling stories so the financial outcome always fell in his favor. “How much did she pay for my knickknack?”

  “Oh, she haggled, that woman! Here’s your share.” He offered her three Jallifexes. Not half enough to buy the metal to craft it.

  She glanced at his rolled up blanket, his rheumy eyes. “You keep it, Emod.”

  He didn’t object. He never did. “That’s very generous of you, Rana! Very generous. So where did you say you were headed?”

  “Up the DanBaer.”

  “Up?” He frowned. “What for?” He sized up Daniel again.

  “To see an old friend, I hope”

  “This friend lives up the mountain?”

  “Not quite ‘lives.’”

  “Then quite what?” He stared at her.

  “How about I tell you about it when I get back?”

  He took a deep quaff from his pipe and exhaled slowly, temporarily obscuring his face with smoke. “Then make sure you do get back. You mind your bones, Rana. I don’t know what I’d do without my sunshade.”

  Starve, she thought. Or beg on the street corners like a skinpeeler. “I’ll be back in two days. Three at most.”

  “Three? I’ll pray to the Goddess for you.” He relit his pipe as Daniel fiddled with a copper ring that had a six-pointed star signet.

  “That’s from the Sons of Ebraim,” Emod said, “an ancient Bedu tribe. Original. Worth fifty Jallifexes. It’s yours for thirty.”

  “I told you he doesn’t speak Wul,” she said.

  “Every man speaks the language of trade.”

  “Let’s go, Daniel,” she said, grabbing his arm. “That’s camel shit.”

  “Camel shit?” Emod exclaimed. “But, my flower, you crafted it!”

  “That’s how I know what it’s worth!”

  “Rana,” Emod said, his voice slow and serious, “nothing you make is ever shit.”

  She pulled Daniel away from the table. “Let’s go, Daniel. We’ve got a long trip.”

  “That’s odd,” Emod said.

  “What’s odd?”

  “The table.” He pressed against it with his palms. “It’s rattled for years, and I could never quite get it to stop.”

  “I know. So what?”

  “It’s stopped rattling.”

  And indeed it had.

  “It seems the stars are in your favor,” she said.

  “And yours, I pray,” Emod said, bowing his head. “You mind those crags. And Goddess willing, come back to me, my sunshade.”

  “I will. Goodbye, Emod.” And with these words they left Emod to the hot morning, and traveled on. Adar licked his chops as he trotted beside them.

  “Is this how you rest?” she said. “By theft? You might have gotten us all killed! One more act like that and I’m putting a leash on you.”

  Adar huffed and lifted his snout, as if proud.

  They walked up the sloping street as the rising sun struck the top of the Ukne Tower. Right now she would have been climbing the tower’s thousand steps to begin another long day at work. Would Chief Architect Jo send a boy to fetch her? What would the masons do without her worksongs to take their minds off their hard labors?

  She imagined Jo’s disgruntled face, Davo’s disappointment, and it felt as if a stone had been lifted from her heart. She was free. Free of work, free of responsibility, and it felt glorious! She skipped along the street.

  A shriveled, aged woman sat against the husk of a dead cedar, which had long ago risen through cracked stone. The woman held her palms out and pleaded, and before Rana could stop him, Daniel had given her two dried pomm fruits from his satchel.

  Rana grabbed his arm. “What the hell are you doing? Those are for us, not scavengers!” She spat on the ground before the woman.

  Daniel said something, but it didn’t matter. Rana had no patience for useless people.

  “Lazy fucking waste,” she said to the woman. “You have two arms, two legs. But you choose to beg instead of build. Disgusting.”

  The woman smiled to reveal rows of rotten teeth. She flicked Rana the demon’s curse with her fingers.

  Rana shivered. This was the third time someone had cursed her this month. To nullify the curse, she’d have to make yet another animal sacrifice to Mollai.

  “Let’s go, Daniel,” she said, pulling him away from the hag. The woman smiled again as they turned the corner.

  The sun was bright as workers tossed heavy sacks over shoulders. Muscled boys shoved seed-filled wheelbarrows up slopes. Teenaged girls led sleepy camels down the crooked avenues. The streets twisted to avoid the ruins of the city’s previous incarnations. Where roads were impossible, footbridges led over the remnants of ancient and long-abandoned buildings.

  From one bridge, Rana gazed into the crevices below. There were at least three subterranean levels, and dark corners hinted at even deeper ones. Long ago, she had tried to descend into those ancient tunnels and nearly died when the ceiling had collapsed. Since then, she preferred to observe from above. As the desert encroached, the city always grew up.

  The air in the Qarrio district, a group of crooked thoroughfares in the southern quarter, smelled of sweat and shit, both human and animal. Bound in cages, pens, chains, and rope were camel, oxen, goat, eagle, hawk, and sundry other animals shipped from distant lands. A juvenile she-camel caught Rana’s eye. About three-quarters the size of a mature adult, the animal was tied to a fence post and eyed passersby solemnly. Partly, it was the animal’s calmness that attracted her. If they were to ascend the steep DanBaer, they’d need a steady beast. But mostly it was its juvenile size that she hoped would be reflected in its price. After making Daniel and Adar wait in the shade, she sidled up to the camel’s owner, a short, thin man in boiled leather, sandworn from journeys across the Tattered Sea, and tried her best to charm him.

  Rana had many skills, but haggling was apparently not one of them. The man would go no lower than ninety-five Jallifexes, even after she threatened to take her business elsewhere. She reached into her satchel and pulled out her bag of coins. She had spent most of her earnings on supplies for her studio, so the bulk of the coins in the satchel were Papa’s.

  As she handed over the coin, she thought, I swear to Mollai, I will pay you back, Papa.

  This was borrowing, nothing more. She felt a pang of guilt, of course, but if Marul were sick or hurt, she would need to be carried. Plus the satchels were already heavy on her shoulders and they hadn’t even begun their ascent up the mountain.

  The camel seemed all too happy to be free of her owner. From the looks of her filthy fur and rope-burned ankles, he hadn’t treated her well.

  Rana was leading the animal back to Daniel and Adar, who waited under an awning, when a long-haired man in torn clothing stepped in front of her, so close she could smell his breath, and he said, “Give me the bag of coin.”

  He held a rusty knife to her stomach, panting his sour breath into her face. She glanced over at Daniel and Adar, who were distracted by a woman trying to sell Daniel a caged bird.

  “Hey!” the man said. “Give it quick and I don’t cut you!”

  Using Papa’s money to save Marul was one thing, but giving Papa’s money away to
this filthy thief was another. She pretended to reach into her satchel, and as she came up she elbowed the man in the jaw. He yelped, then slashed at her, slicing her forearm with the knife’s rusty edge. Rana screamed.

  “You little bitch!” he said. He lunged for her chest with the knife and would have killed her, but Adar suddenly appeared, a huge black silhouette. He leaped onto the man and knocked him over. The man screamed as Adar tore a chunk of flesh from his arm.

  “Sentinels! Sentinels!” the vendors shouted. “Call the sentinels!”

  “Adar!” Rana shouted. The dog had sawed deeply into the man’s arm. “Let’s go!”

  Adar turned to her, fangs bloody, his white eyes huge and wild. The thief beneath him cried and grabbed his shredded arm, the bone visible under flesh and blood.

  Rana leaped onto the back of the camel, smearing its sides with her own blood. She kicked it into motion, and it was all too happy to flee this scene. With her good arm she reached down to grab Daniel, hoisting him across the beast’s neck. He lay there, looking terrified as they sped away. Adar, his jaw dripping red, ran beside them.

  Her heart pounded as the blasts of the sentinels’ horns came from behind them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Daniel lay across the camel’s neck, the wind nearly knocked from him at every bump, and they turned through two dozen streets, maybe twice that number, until the smelly street with its odd menagerie of animals seemed a distant memory. Rana looked around, then stopped the camel. Daniel slid off it gratefully.

  It had happened so quickly. One moment Rana seemed to be buying a camel from a short man in leather, and the next she was screaming on the ground while Adar was chewing on another man’s arm. And Rana was still bleeding from the deep gash in her forearm. Not life threatening, but serious. Hands shaking, he searched in his satchel and found a tunic.

  Against her protestations he tore the tunic into several strips, and used them to bandage her arm. He felt queasy. The grotesque image of Adar chewing that man’s arm down to the bone had been seared into his mind.

  “You need a doctor,” he said as he knotted the bandage. Blood spread quickly through the fibers. He rubbed his temples. The cut on his chest from the day before itched and stung, and his legs felt weak. “I might need one too.”

  Rana looked up at the mountain beside the city, pointed at it, said something in her silken tongue. She made the camel kneel, then climbed back onto it. She offered to help Daniel up, but he paused. Adar gestured for Daniel to get back on the camel.

  Daniel shaded his eyes. A few passersby gazed suspiciously at Rana’s bloodied clothing before moving on. Perhaps, Daniel thought, I should get some new friends. He considered running away. But to where? He wasn’t sure he was ready to face this city without a guide. And Adar said he could get him home. It wasn’t much to go on, but he had little else. So he took Rana’s hand and climbed back onto the camel.

  She kicked it into motion, and they trotted up the street. Adar kept pace at the camel’s heel. The camel had no saddle, and Daniel’s groin bounced painfully against its spine. He shifted as best he could, when his hand found the boutonniere in his pocket.

  Rebekah, he thought, wake me from this nightmare. You’re no more a demon than I’m in Gehenna. He shifted, holding Rana’s waist as if grabbing at answers.

  Could this really be Gehenna—Gehinnom—the realm where sins were purged? Gram swore Gehenna was a real place, as real as Earth, that hidden doors all over Earth, especially in cemeteries, led down to its world of suffering, that all the wicked passed through Gehenna, brought by the angel Dumah. That five evil men burned there for all eternity. But Daniel had argued with her. “The name comes from the Valley of Hinnom,” he had said. “A place outside of Jerusalem. They sacrificed children to Moloch there. It was a scary place, and through the centuries the name morphed into Gehenna. It’s not real, Gram.”

  “Gehinnom,” Gram had said, using the Hebrew name, “is as real as your nose! At night, when I dream, my soul departs my body, and I travel to realms you cannot imagine. I’ve seen the suffering of Gehinnom. Be grateful you never glimpse their sorrowful faces.”

  “Dreams, Gram,” he’d said. “Just vivid dreams.”

  But now, as he bounced on the back of the camel, his fingers around the wine-colored flower, he wondered if he should have listened more closely to her. Was he one of the dead, fated to suffer in this place of burning? Did he die at the wedding? Before? In the storm?

  He shook his head. Madness! he thought. This is all madness.

  As they approached the mountain, the streets became steeper, narrower, while the city behind them grew hazy with dust. Huge towers glittered prismatically in the sun, their sides bedecked with jewels, and the visage changed colors as the sun rose. It was all so breathtakingly beautiful. If this was Gehinnom, it wasn’t all suffering and torment.

  They turned the corner, and the mountain wall loomed before them, sudden and steep. A million strata of burnt orange stone reached high into the clear sky. On a promontory above, six rotundas had been carved out of the rock face. Fat vines drooped from balconies. Palms and leafy plants grew in lush gardens. The steep walls had been engraved with depictions of demonic beasts in battle with a large sword-bearing army. Above them a hundred arched windows looked out from high walls, their stone frames baroque wonders of masonry. They were traveling beneath the palace, the one that had been carved out of the mountain. He had glimpsed the palace when he first saw this city, but up close its walls seemed different, intimate. If only he had a camera, to prove that such a marvel existed.

  Under the shade of one rotunda, five young women in flowing white robes smoked ridiculously long pipes. They laughed and their voices bounced among the folds of stone.

  A woman leaned over the balcony and said, “Me-nee, wah, dom-tu?” Her companions burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Pes-hu per-apt ba!” Rana snapped back. She glared up at the women and spat.

  “Mu-mu!” the woman replied, waving her hand dismissively. “Mu-mu, feg!” Her companions guffawed, their echoes like cawing birds.

  The laughter faded as they turned around a bend. They came upon a black pond a hundred feet wide, its calm waters vanishing inside a natural cave mouth. A spring? An elderly woman sat cross-legged on the ground, hands clasped in her lap, eyes half-closed with the far-away look of a meditating monk. A man in leather armor and a sheathed sword at his waist dozed against a tree. The tree’s pink flowers were in riotous bloom and its petals littered the ground like confetti. It was the first tree Daniel had seen here, and its sudden pink beauty made him gasp. The man’s hand squeezed the hilt of his sword as his chest rose and fell.

  Rana grumbled, reached into a pouch, and tossed a coin into a bucket at the woman’s heel. The woman formed a triangle with her fingers, sang a brief tune—her heart didn’t seem to be in it—and pressed her forehead to the ground. Rana bowed and elbowed Daniel a few times before he realized she wanted him to bow too. Throughout this brief exchange, the guard didn’t move, but Daniel knew the man only pretended to doze.

  Toll paid, they trekked on, and the city vanished behind tons of rock. To their right, the cliffs rose steeply for hundreds of feet. To their left, beneath a precipitous drop, an orange expanse of sand spread to the horizon, the rolling desert he and Adar had crossed yesterday.

  Parallel dunes marched across the desert like slow moving ocean waves. They were miles away, but their distant hum, like a giant bow drawn across a cello the size of a city, shook his belly. Every few minutes a dune crashed into the cliffs below, sending up sprays of sand. With a loud hiss, the sands drained back into the desert, as if they were standing on the rim of an hourglass a thousand miles wide.

  The immensity of it all was too much, and he took slow breaths to calm himself. Their camel teetered on scree, and he held more tightly onto Rana’s waist. The young woman was taut, muscular, stronger than him. As they climbed further up the mountain road, under the pestering sun, he began to wi
sh he had stayed in the city. At least there he had shade and solid ground.

  Rana hummed, softly at first. Her tune was baroque, a fugue of sorts, but with a tonal complexity unmatched by any classical piece he had heard before. There was perfection in it, a bird-like artistry he didn’t think was possible from the human mouth. He closed his eyes and listened. The porcelain, freckled face of Rebekah smiled at him from behind his closed lids. They sat in her small apartment, candles flickering on the dinner table beside the second-floor window, the box with the engagement ring sitting open before her, her smile in the candlelight.

  No malice, he thought. There was never malice from her. She’s no demon!

  Rana stopped humming, and Daniel blinked and awoke from the dream. It was disconcerting how easily he had drifted into reverie, almost as if her music had some kind of hypnotic influence. He shivered.

  Rana was pointing deep into the desert. “Bedu she-way-lan,” she said.

  Many miles away a cloud of dust floated just above the sands. Within the cloud were hundreds of ash-colored specks. People, he realized, and camels and cargo, a desert caravan. A dune rose and obscured them from view, and when the sands descended again the caravan had jumped miles across the desert.

  “Holy shit!” he said. “How the hell did they do that?”

  Rana laughed. “Es per-shemp Bedu!”

  Daniel shook his head. “What?”

  Adar stared at Daniel, his moon-white eyes bright and steady, before he bounded on ahead. The caravan, when Daniel looked again, had leaped another mile.

  ——

  The sun beat upon the demon’s black fur as he trotted ahead of the camel. Though you walk on two legs like a man, the demon thought, you might as well walk on all fours, like me. You are as ignorant as a mule, Daniel.

  “Es per-shemp Bedu,” Rana had said. No translation in Daniel’s patchwork English could have matched the native poetry. In Daniel’s language, one might have crudely said, “Thus go the Bedu.” The phrase implied the uncertainty of life, the nature of the universe to surprise, as the Bedu ever astonished with their ancient magic and knowledge of forgotten things.