Give it to her, you great goof, Mrithuri thought fiercely. Hathi relented, and placed it in Ata Akhimah’s hands.
“The red lotus!” she said, buying time. “My rajni, a potent portent indeed! For its color presages blood.”
A murmur swept through the crowd. Mrithuri lowered her own arms and kept her attention on Ata Akhimah. The Wizard bent her head to study the lotus, picking through the petals with care, examining the stamens and pistils. Mrithuri clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from rattling as gooseflesh prickled across her wet skin. The light of the Heavenly River was brilliant, but the evening was still chill.
Their eyes met, queen-priestess and Wizard-doctor. Neither dared frown.
Work your magic, Akhimah, Mrithuri thought. The last thing we need right now is a terrible augury for the year to come. On top of Mahadijia interrupting the ceremony, that’s not consolidating to my reign.
But despite her foreign name—so masculine in its sound!—and despite her foreign schooling, Ata Akhimah had been long in Mrithuri’s land. She knew a thing or two, and Mrithuri trusted her.
Akhimah winked and turned so that her back was to Hathi, and she faced the assembled crowd. “The lotus that grows by the palace of Sarathai-tia is the reason that palace is here,” she said. “This lotus bloomed here before the Alchemical Emperor united the kingdoms of the Sarathai and the kingdoms of the Sahalai into one Empire. This very lotus, this plant from which we pluck our auguries. Upon whose sacred roots and stems and nuts we sup. From whose sacred stamens we brew our tea. For the lotus is eternal, undying.
“This blossom bloomed white, they say, in those days. It bloomed when all lotuses bloom. But the Alchemical Emperor came here, and sat upon his bank, and saw it—blooming white in its purity, having lifted itself from the mud. We are told that this courage touched the Alchemical Emperor, and so he touched in turn the lotus. And it was the stroke of the hand of the Alchemical Emperor himself that caused it to bloom each year and offer a prophecy.”
She brandished it again, red as hearts-blood, dripping silt water across her ebony fingers.
“This sacred blossom budded in the mud. It rose out of the mud. It grew tall and beautiful from the mud, until it floated on the water and emerged on the bosom of the earthly river, in the light of the Heavenly River, for all to see. This sacred blossom on the bosom of the Mother River reflects the sacred stars that bloom on the bosom of the Heavenly River, and light our nights below.
“And it offers us a glimpse of a happy future now!
“Blood can come from birth as well as death,” Ata Akhimah intoned, with admirable projection. “Here, in the depths of the blossom, there are traces of gold. That presages richness rather than conflict. The Mother has spoken! In the coming year, the auguries predict for our beloved rajni a marriage, and an heir!”
Oh, Mrithuri thought. Well, thanks for that, old pal.
Ata Akhimah lifted the blossom, cupped on both palms, as if she were offering it to the starry river above. Hathi rumbled, as if to say don’t mind if I do. She reached out, plucked the portent from the priestess’ upraised hands, and popped it into her giant mouth, where it disappeared in a couple of casual chews.
Mrithuri kept her face impassive as the elephant began to walk idly up the path. Faster, she urged silently.
The contents of the pierced sandalwood box awaited her attentions. And vice versa, she thought, and hid a smile.
* * *
After Hathi was led away for her bath and breakfast, the nuns within the piercework walls sang Mrithuri back into her chambers. She was shaking with the cold by the time her handmaids pulled her sodden petticoats and blouse off her, dripping sacred, silty river water all over the tiled portion of the floor. The water in the rajni’s private bathhouse was hot—Ata Akhimah had long ago overseen the installation of modern plumbing, with a hypocaust and boilers kept stoked and bubbling. It was a great luxury, and the rajni’s women would have bathed her immediately to get her warm.
Normally, she would have permitted it, too. But the clouds had slid across the heavens as she climbed the steps, and by the time she was back in her own rooms and her women were pulling the stalls from her fingers, a gentle patter of rain had begun to fall. The echoes of thunder rolled distantly, growing louder. The river’s fast, and the rajni’s, were both ended.
Yavashuri was before her at once with a pierced ivory plate loaded with tiny morsels. And Mrithuri’s stomach rumbled in answer to the distant thunder at the smells of cardamom, turmeric, saffron, and cumin. But Mrithuri was impatient, agitated with the augury of the red lotus, shivering with gooseflesh and nevertheless still standing naked except for a rug wrapped across her breasts and then draped around her shoulders. Her fast was doing nothing for her temper, either, as she waved Yavashuri away with ardent hands.
“Bring me my damned box,” she said, and Chaeri scampered off to get it, forgetting in the excitement to limp.
Yavashuri set the food aside and lifted a bowl of lotus-scented tea to her with both hands, ceremoniously. Steam coiled up, but Mrithuri waved it away as well. “I don’t want that,” she said. “You know what I need now.”
Irritably, she rubbed at the likeness of the sacred snake tattooed on her arm.
“It will be a moment, Your Abundance,” Yavashuri said tiredly. “And you are cold and have eaten nothing. The tea will warm you, Your Abundance.”
Mrithuri glanced away, ashamed of herself a little. The craving in her was stronger than cold, stronger than hunger. But Yavashuri, her old nurse, never used her title except as a reproach. And it was traditional to break the sacred fast with this tea, flavored with the stamens harvested from those selfsame sacred lotuses.
She sighed and accepted the cup, glancing anxiously after Chaeri. Relief for her headache and aching joints would come faster on an empty stomach. But the tea was plain, unsweetened and without milk, and should not lessen the effect.
“My pardon, Yavashuri,” the rajni said. “It has been a trying evening.”
While they quarreled, the tea had cooled enough for drinking, and she sipped it. It would do for now.
She drained the cup, but irritably waved away the platter of dainties Yavashuri lifted to her again. She did not want sweets soaked in rosewater syrup, or delicate folded pastries, or dumplings so tiny and crisp they would melt like butter on her tongue. She did not want tidbits of snail sauteed in butter and allium, then skewered and returned to their shells. She did not wish tiny balls of saffron rice and meltingly tender slivers of meat.
She would eat the lotus stems and the sliced and fried rhizomes, as tradition demanded. But first … yes, first.
Here was Chaeri now, the big sandalwood box in her hands. The woman handled it carefully, remembering—Mrithuri hoped—that Mrithuri had rebuked her for carelessness not too long ago. Mrithuri would not care to rebuke her again unless she must; that one incident had led to a week of enduring suffering sighs and sidelong, sulky glances.
She reminded herself that Chaeri had a difficult history, and that tolerance was a benediction of the Mother. Chaeri set the box down on a low table and backed away. Mrithuri sank gratefully into the inlaid, square-armed chair beside it. Lacquer and gilt everywhere, the brightness doing nothing for the increasing throb of her headache.
She reached out and stroked the carved fretwork of the surface of the case as her women backed away. Chaeri smiled. Yavashuri frowned. The others were carefully neutral, and the nuns sang on.
The rajni had no secret from the nuns. But the nuns were nothing but secrets. They never left their cloister, and they never spoke to anyone outside the residence of the rajni.
Mrithuri slid the lid aside, very gently. That which dwelt within was not overfond of sudden movements, sudden lights, or vibration.
A faint hiss answered her motion nonetheless.
She waited, then gently reached inside. Now her motions were steady, her gaze calm. If a chill still prickled the flesh of her arms and made her grit her teeth to kee
p them from clicking, she did not let it affect the dexterity of her hands.
She felt a curve of firm muscle, a cool leathery body. A flicker of questing tongue. Gently, she eased her fingers around the denizen until it was encircled. She slid her fingertips up scales the wrong way, feeling their raspy, feathery edges and careful to touch lightly. There were the heavy muscles of the skull, the softness of the cheeks.
She glided the lid aside the rest of the way and firmed her grip on the serpent within. As she lifted it from its comfortable burrow, her ladies turned away. Except for Chaeri.
The snake was perhaps as long as her arm, though thicker through the body. It was a moss green in color, rich and soft, and upon its long back were delicate, definitive patterns that resembled the figures of brush calligraphy in some complex, unreadable tongue. Its lidless eyes gleamed like jade, and its black tongue flickered, tasting.
“Hello, precious,” Mrithuri cooed to it, holding it behind its heavy jowls quite firmly. It tested her grip, but she managed it. The bulky body was unbelievably strong, and very heavy. The skin felt like the finest leather.
The door to her private chamber slid aside in its runners.
She didn’t drop the snake. She pulled its face away from her own, and raised her chin to look at Ata Akhimah.
The Aezin Wizard slid the door shut behind her without turning back to look at it. She had traded her earlier clothes for a halter of white linen and white linen trousers, worn under an open black robe that swept the floor behind her red knotted hemp sandals. She sighed, and crossed her arms over her chest in the wide sleeves. Her bangles clattered, some glittering, some the yellow-white of bone.
The Wizard said, “It would not do to become too reliant on that Eremite venom, Your Abundance.”
The serpent seemed to be growing heavier. Mrithuri allowed the mass of its body to rest upon her lap, keeping control of the head only.
“She is as dependent on me as I am on her,” Mrithuri replied.
She pushed aside the bath rug, and applied the serpent’s fangs to the left side of her chest, just above the small swell of her bosom, next to a ragged row of a dozen pinprick scabs surmounting layers of tiny white scars. The snake, discomfited by the noise and argument or perhaps by the chill of her hands, was all too content to oblige her. It bit hard and bit deep, a sharp pricking pain followed by the deep, spreading feeling of burning. Mrithuri felt the jaw muscles work against her fingers. When it stopped, she pulled the snake away.
A bubble of blood formed on the snake’s mouth as its jaw closed. Warmth moved through its cool flesh. It had fed, and would be sluggish now. She cradled it close against her, still controlling the heavy, triangular head.
She leaned back in the square, uncomfortable chair and released herself to the burning. It crawled through her from the site of the wound, a slow painful warmth that pulled the chill from her flesh far more effectively than the tea had done. A trickle of blood wound down her breast as she relaxed. The aches in her joints extinguished themselves. The pounding in her head began to recede. She closed her eyes and enjoyed clarity, energy, the feeling of well-being that followed.
When it had settled in, Mrithuri opened her eyes again. Gently, she replaced the satiated serpent in her den, beside her sisters. She closed the lid, making sure the air flow would be unimpeded, and waved Chaeri to her with a negligent but much more relaxed gesture than previously. When the girl had taken the serpent away, her long brown-black curls swaying with her walk, Mrithuri looked around with a sigh. What had Yavashuri done with the damned breakfast?
Oh, there she was with it. She had set it on a slightly larger table across the drawing room, with the remains of the tea, and was pulling up a second chair.
Mrithuri stood, her limbs light and full of energy. Yes, she thought she could face breakfast now. “Did you find out what that damned Mahadijia wanted?”
“No. But it’s nothing good, I’m sure of it,” Ata Akhimah replied, studiously turning her eyes to the barren gardens beyond the windows. “Your cousin Anuraja is a weasel.”
Mrithuri looked down, and tugged her bath rug back into something resembling modesty. “Weasels are useful. They keep the rats and cobras in check.”
Akhimah snorted. It was as close as she came to a laugh. Mrithuri had not known enough Aezin to guess if that was a cultural trait or a particular one. It was true, though—tensions between cousin Anuraja, to the south in his kingdom of Sarathai-lae, and cousin Himadra, to the north in his kingdom of Chandranath, helped to keep Mrithuri and her own little speck of land safe. And as long as she could keep juggling both of them and marrying neither, she stood a good chance of maintaining the independence of her corner of this crumbling empire.
“Sit and eat with me.” The Wizard’s bangles chimed as she gestured. “Every discussion is better over breakfast.”
Mrithuri sat. All the thought about balancing terrors reminded her of something. “No word from your old master yet?”
The Wizard, ladling mango puree over a dish of rice, looked up and frowned. “‘Mentor,’ I would say, not ‘master.’ She and I were of different schools, and I got my training at the University.”
“Someday you’ll explain to me what the difference between Aezin and Messaline Wizardry is.”
“It would be faster to explain the commonalities.” Ata Akhimah smiled. “We—my school—are healers, architects, geomancers. We build and repair. The Wizards of Messaline also build things, some of them, but what they build are automatons. Or they raise the dead, or see the future … it’s really not the same thing at all.” She waved a wrist dismissively, chiming. “Were you hoping she would come herself?”
“I was hoping she would at least send help,” Mrithuri admitted. “Or some kind of a message. Something to aid us. Her reputation, after all, wraps the world. She might know something that would give us an advantage over the neighbors. I don’t expect her to come herself. I know the Wizards of Messaline do not like to leave Messaline.”
Mrithuri looked down and pushed a morsel of baked fish across her plate. Nothing appeared appetizing.
“Be patient,” Ata Akhimah advised. “I foresee that you will still have a kingdom and still be a rajni when her messenger arrives. Red lotus or no red lotus. Your Abundance.”
Mrithuri rested her forehead on the palm of her hand. “From your lips to the Mother’s ears, Akhimah.”
3
There was a word for a mark that remained after that which made it had moved on—a path worn in earth, ink on a page, a bruise on skin, a dry riverbed, a scar. Or, well, not precisely a word for the thing. But a word for the act of so marking. A word that by extension meant the thing that acted to cause the mark, and the thing that was acted upon and so became a thing that was marked, and also the mark itself, and precisely and significantly the action of marking that forever linked those things and joined them into a continuum, even long after they had moved apart again.
It was not a word in any human language, and it could not be pronounced well by any human tongue. It didn’t fit—quite—into the human categories of nouns and verbs as discrete and different things … but the Gage knew it. Having been constructed by a Wizard was good for one’s vocabulary.
The word was rlmyrranndl, or close to it. He’d shared it with the Dead Man once: the Dead Man had made an observation that even ancient races had a primitive concept of the Scholar-God’s pen.
The Gage had withheld comment, as good friends sometimes learned.
The thing the Gage was observing now was just such a mark. Which in itself was not unusual: the whole world was constructed of the remainders and reminders of processes past. But this mark was special. It demanded consideration.
The caravan were coming down out of the mountains, having crossed the watershed’s divide and found the smoothest of the tributaries of the Sarathai. The winter had given way to spring and then to weather almost summery as they descended. The overloaded ice-boats now wallowed down the swift current with the
cradles that held the runners unbolted from the hulls and balanced on the decks in disassembled pieces. The surviving yaks had been left at a Rasani way station by the river’s headwaters; Druja would retrieve them on his return trip. From here, the ice-boats floated. And floated quickly, too.
This frustrated the Gage, who would have liked to have studied the mark more closely. He would have leaped from the deck of the ice-boat to the shore and trusted in his ability to catch up later, but he was confident that would capsize the ice-boat, or at least swamp it. And since he was on the lead boat, that would be a disastrous misadventure for all of them, as the others would inevitably be swept into the first.
So the Gage walked swiftly the starboard length of the ice-boat. His weight shifted the boat’s trim, and he heard the rudderman curse, but all he could do was try to step lightly. Which he would have done anyway, because as compelling as it was to keep the mark in sight as long as possible in order to study it, it was more compelling not to put a foot through the deck planks.
He met the Dead Man coming the other way, though they were old enough comrades that the Dead Man stepped out of his way without asking any questions. Without asking any questions first, anyway. He certainly asked enough, through his indigo veil, after he fell into step with the Gage.
“What are you looking at?”
“Spoor,” the Gage replied. He pointed with a finger that glittered where it caught the sun. Trees carpeted the surrounding slopes now, and the snow protected by evergreen branches had not yet melted. But nor was it unruffled and unperturbed. A packed trail ran alongside the nameless river. “What do you suppose made that?”
The Dead Man frowned, leaning out—though not so far out that a reaching branch might snag him. The Gage kept an eye out anyway, just in case. “Hard to tell. We’re moving fast. Looks like pugmarks rather than hooves, though.”
“Tiger?”
“Big for a wolf. Don’t they have those bear-dog hybrids south of the mountains?”
The Stone in the Skull Page 5