The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  Sayeh herself felt an answering twinge at the idea. She knew a little something about terrifying surgeries, and Tsering-la’s delicacy with a knife. And she had had the comfort of knowing that the Good Mother had blessed and ordained her own quest for motherhood, or her propitiations would never have been answered. And that she would surely have died, and her child with her, if she did not submit to having that babe cut from her when there was no natural path for him to be born.

  She’d healed fast and clean, under the ministrations of the Good Mother’s nuns. And now she had her beautiful heir, her son.

  The rajni wondered if Nazia would someday make a similar frightening decision, and if the girl would be blessed to regret it as little.

  “That is not a decision you would need to make for many years,” Tsering-la said, releasing her hand. “First we must see if you have any aptitude. Not everyone takes to the training. But you have the wit for it: that, I’ll warrant. Will you come with me, Nazia?”

  The girl murmured something.

  “Speak up,” Sayeh said.

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  Sayeh bit her lip and twisted her head away. She caught the harbormaster watching her from across the desk in the corner, and smiled so the woman would not look down. She needed the comfort, for the moment, of another grown woman’s gaze.

  On the choices we make in thoughtless childhood, are the rest of our long lives hung.

  Those who got any choice at all.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s settled. May I trouble your husband for more tea, Harbormaster?”

  * * *

  “Well, that’s one problem dealt with,” Sayeh muttered, in the shelter of the palanquin. The drumming rain wanted to comfort her. She rocked in misery.

  There was only Tsering-la to see her. She could allow herself the luxury of distress.

  “But not the major one.”

  “No.” Sayeh gathered herself before she continued. “The omen at the beginning of the dry season was bad. The woman died on the first dive. And now the rains have come on so swiftly that the divers and tenders were endangered, and the dead diver’s daughter has closed the season by bringing bitter water back. None of it is promising.”

  Tsering-la sighed. “My training did not prepare me for the interpretation of omens. You need a priest for that.”

  “The wisest abbess of the Good Mother couldn’t pull a positive interpretation out of this.”

  “Perhaps,” Tsering-la said, carefully. As if feeling his way on uncertain footing. “Perhaps what you need now is not a positive interpretation. But an accurate one.”

  * * *

  Forewarned is forearmed, Sayeh told herself for the third time, and girded her loins to approach the abbess. She did not travel to the cloister in state, but moved in a simple palanquin with a minimum number of guards, and those not in livery. They took her out the palace’s postern gate, and spirited her down one of Ansh-Sahal’s side streets so quickly that not even the beggars managed to swarm her conveyance.

  This was in part to keep her consultation of the abbess a secret, and in part to thwart the Sahali folk who clustered by the palace gates, demanding an audience, demanding that Sayeh take a new husband immediately. Her people could make their own interpretations of the omens, and they had obviously decided that the Good Mother disapproved of a rajni ruling alone—even one ruling as regent for a minor son. They’d stop her if they could, and they would not hesitate at all to tell her so.

  But all the same, no one would expect a rajni to make her escape by the ignominious tradesman’s gate. And Sayeh took a certain joy in being unpredictable.

  Out the back she went.

  * * *

  In Sarathai, the nuns would have been easier to reach. The custom there was to build the palace so that the women’s quarters interlocked with the women’s quarters of the temple, being separated by grates of sandalwood, ivory, soapstone, or gilt. Nuns and ladies could thus converse, and both were said to benefit by it.

  But here in Ansh-Sahal, the palace was at the hill’s peak and the temple stood atop the cliffs, overlooking the ocean. So it was that Sayeh must be whisked there, veiled and hidden, for her meeting.

  Ironically, stepping out of the plain palanquin into the luxury of the temple’s courtyard was like emerging from a nun’s cell into paradise. Sayeh, having accepted the assistance of a eunuch doorman to rise from her seat, paused for a moment amid trees that had bloomed heavily, instantly, once the rain reached their roots. A dragoncrystal roof on pillars between the trees kept the monsoon from her head, and diverted more water to their thirsty roots. Its panes, faintly luminescent with their own light, were scattered with heavy gold and purple petals, bruised and folded by the falling droplets. The scent was fermented, cloying, not unpleasant.

  Sayeh had a rajni’s knowledge of poisons and their uses. And so, despite its source, Sayeh knew the dragoncrystal was supposed to be safe for such purposes. It was poisoned, yes, with the dragon-poison that could cause sores, brittle bones, falling hair—but it was nearly unbreakable, and unlike most things that had absorbed the dragon-poison, the crystal was only dangerous if ingested. Ground to powder and inhaled, or used to store food—then it could kill. Otherwise, the panes were no more dangerous than the lead foil that held them in place.

  Sayeh had heard that her cousin Mrithuri, who dwelt in the Alchemical Emperor’s palace, had a throne room entirely skylighted with dragoncrystal mosaic. Sayeh had never seen it, and could barely imagine such beauty—and such expense.

  Rain pattered through the leaves and rang on the crystal, chiming an improvisational glissando. Sayeh moved forward, leaving her guards behind. This was the house of the Good Mother, and she was safe as any Good Daughter here. And if she did not feel safe, it would be impolitic to show it. Even if she wanted to shriek and storm, she could not have done so.

  So much of the courage of rajnis rested in keeping a straight face and a level tone.

  As she stepped clear of her entourage, accompanied by the temple eunuch, she saw a group of six women draped in silk, contorted in poses recollecting the wind-bent, sky-reaching trees all around the covered area. Jewels and ropes of gold dripped from them like weeping blossoms and bunches of sweet fruit.

  Silently, in golden sandals, they began to dance.

  There was no music but the music of the storm. They moved in time to the timeless rain, and yet they were perfectly in step with one another. Their feet provided an arrhythmic beat that was the only percussion, and they whirled with slow precision so strong and sure that it seemed the afterimage of a faster gesture. They crossed and wove together as she advanced, guided by the eunuch, and only when she was nearly close enough to touch them did they sweep apart, bent gracefully, their arms waving toward her as if the wind’s benediction.

  Their heads were bowed. Their bodies made the columns of a corridor she walked down. There were rituals and secret signs in patterns they held by their hands.

  Sayeh went between them, and entered the temple’s open door.

  Within, all was calm and dim. The abbess waited for Sayeh herself, and Sayeh was surprised to see that the old woman wore no jewels or silks or robes of estate. She had on silver slippers, yes, but they were down at the heels and the strap across the toes was worn at the edges. Her clothes were plain pale wool, a tunic and trousers, and she wore a bright indigo and turquoise knotted shawl wrapped carelessly about her shoulders in defense against the chill.

  Her face was creased like a wizened fruit from smiling; wiry strands escaped her pinned-up bun. Her hair was steel-colored, and vermilion laced her part. Two golden rings gleaming in the left side of her nose were her only jewelry.

  “Your Abundance,” the abbess said to Sayeh, bowing surprisingly low for one with such old bones, on such a wet day.

  “Your Wisdom,” Sayeh replied, amused as always by the exchange of titles.

  “I hope we have some of both for each other today,” the abbess said. “Come into my s
tudy.”

  The eunuch was left behind. The two women—one old, one merely matronly—walked down the tiled temple corridor. Oil lamps flickered dimly on plinths, to mark dark intersections. The walls were pierced and filigreed to show internal spaces, but Sayeh did not see any immured nuns in the corridors and cells so revealed. Perhaps they were gathered at prayer, on this first full day of the rains. Perhaps they were sleeping.

  They came to a carved rosewood door, inlaid with jet and ivory, that had no door handle. The abbess pulled a ring of keys from her pocket. Bronze and iron, they clattered unmusically. She selected a smallish one and fit it into the lock, then pulled against the key itself.

  The door eased open noiselessly. They passed within.

  The abbess’s study was a small room with uncharacteristically solid walls. Sayeh wondered if there were another room in the entire temple where a woman could have privacy. It was bright within, after the shadowy corridors: bull’s-eye windows in the vertical segments of a peaked and folded roof let light stream down despite the continuing rain. The walls were lined with shelves and racks and cubicles for books of all descriptions—scrolls and tablets and panel books and stitched books and fans—except on one where a small hearth smoldered softly, rendering the space both warm and dry. There was a desk with some papers and pens and a vase of catkins in what Sayeh guessed was sacred river water. There was a Song-style oxbow chair with a slung leather seat—old and cracked, but soft-looking—and there was a long couch strewn with cushions that were threadbare, but plump. Several thick knotted rugs were heaped on a tile floor glazed the whited blue of skim milk.

  There was someone in the room besides the abbess and Sayeh.

  An old woman, and a foreign one. Not large—still slender, even in her age, and dressed in the style of the lands far north and west, beyond the Steles of the Sky and the Great Salt Desert. An Asitaneh, perhaps—except she wore Qersnyk boots, even here indoors, and a shawl with the edges worked in sky-blue knots and Qersnyk bangles. And she was not veiled. She was wearing a cloth wrapped over her hair, but there wasn’t even a loose end that could have been drawn over her face if she chose. And yet, as far as Sayeh knew, all the Asitaneh women—and quite a few of the men—covered their faces among strangers.

  The abbess locked the door behind them—it also only pulled shut with the key—and turned to face the two women. “Your Abundance Sayeh Rajni,” she said, “this is the poetess Ümmühan.”

  Sayeh put a hand to her mouth like a girl.

  She had heard of this old woman. She had been a slave-poetess in the Caliphate, when there was a Caliphate still, and she had been the historian of the court of the Qersnyk Khagan. She was said by some to be the greatest living smith of words in the religion of her strange sky-dwelling Scholar-God, and their God held words as sacredly, as mystically, as Sayeh’s Good Mother River held dance.

  Sayeh made her hand fall to her side and worked the fingers in their rings until she felt she had herself under control again. She was rajni; she could be charmed, but she could not allow herself to be starstruck or overwhelmed. She extended the hand to the old woman and said, “What a delightful surprise, Poetess. Your reputation precedes you.”

  She did not ask what brought the poetess to Ansh-Sahal. But perhaps her raised brow and her glance at the abbess gave her away, because before the abbess could speak Ümmühan smiled toothlessly and said, “I have come to witness with my own eyes the famous beauty, the famously kind, Sayeh Rajni.”

  Sayeh knew flattery when she heard it. You did not get to be a rajni and over forty without a certain well-honed sense of when you were being buttered up. But the poetess Ümmühan managed to deliver her compliment without sounding either oily or self-conscious.

  She was a court entertainer. And one who was famously good at her job.

  “It is my honor,” Sayeh responded. “Word of your own beauty and wisdom, and the beauty of your poetry, has reached even this far land.”

  Ümmühan grimaced, clowning, and pinched the creased skin of her cheek between a knotted finger and thumb. “Such beauty,” she said dryly. Then she grinned her wicked, toothless grin. “But the words are still good, I hope.”

  Sayeh lowered herself to the couch edge, aware that she was keeping two older women on their feet, because not even the abbess could sit before the rajni did. She waved them into places, and they both sank down as if this were her solar, and not the abbess’s own study.

  Utterly disarmed, Sayeh thought nevertheless that Ümmühan was wrong. She was beautiful—lovely, with her piercing eyes and her elegantly soft skin. Perhaps nothing that would make a young man’s head turn … but Sayeh was no young man. She hoped she looked as well in forty years more. And had as sharp a wit.

  “You shall have to come to my court and demonstrate them, then,” she said. “We are fond of foreign arts, and your reputation precedes you. It is said there are no better poetesses.”

  “That cannot be true,” Ümmühan replied. “There is one poetess of whom there is no equal. She Whom I serve. She is the poet from Whom all words spring, and Ysmat of the Beads is Her pen.”

  “What does she write upon?” Sayeh asked, genuinely curious.

  “Souls,” Ümmühan replied, still twinkling wickedly. “And the ink is chance, and fate, and the deeds of men.”

  Sayeh thought about that—about chance, and fate, and the deeds of men. It seemed to her that these contradicted one another. “Can all three of these things exist at the same time? If there is chance, can there be fate? If we have free will, then how do chance and fate hold sway? What good then are oracles and prophecies?”

  Ümmühan looked at the abbess. The abbess had taken a seat in her oxbow chair. She nodded, as if to encourage the poetess—or as if she too might be interested in the answer. Sayeh wondered which it was: were the two old women conversing, or colluding?

  “I do not know how it is in your philosophy,” the poetess said. “But in mine—in ours—we believe that fate and chance and the will of men are all three strands of the cloth that history and the world are made of. Fate is just another word for the will of the Scholar-God. Chance is that which happens outside of Her will. And the will of men … is the will of men.”

  “And the will of women?” Sayeh said it archly, with a knowing rise.

  “That too,” Ümmühan answered. “Although I suspect we all know men who would prefer we had no wills with which to thwart them.”

  “Strands in the cloth, you say.” Sayeh leaned forward, elbows on her knees. This had a direct bearing on what she had come here to discover after all. “Like embroidery?”

  Ümmühan shook her head. “More like warp and weft and … some third thing, as if the cloth existed in three dimensions. Perhaps it is like felt, yes? That you weave with a little hooked needle?” Her fingers beaked and her hand made a picking motion, like the head of a bird. “The threads mesh together and go in all directions, and are woven together so close you could never tug a single one free without severing it, and a dozen others. Some of those threads are fate and some are chance and some are will.”

  “You’ve thought about this.”

  “I am a scholar servant of the Scholar-God,” Ümmühan replied. “Thinking about things is my calling.”

  Sayeh barked laughter. “At that, I guess it is. Your Sahali, by the way, is excellent. Where did you learn?”

  “I have always had a gift for languages,” the poetess said with the modest air of one drawn to an admission. “Yours I learned in Qeshqer, in the house of the imperial Wizard of the Khaganate. She herself did not speak Sahal or Saratahi—but many people came and went from that place, and most of them of them were scholars.”

  The porthole windows above were dimming slightly. Heavier rain, or the rising behind the clouds of the veil that would end the bright night. Sayeh recollected why she had come—not for company, even the company of wise and delightful women, and not so she could be feted by sacred dancers in courtyard. She glanced apologetically awa
y from the poetess.

  “I need to speak to you of omens,” she said to the abbess, with a sideways glance at Ümmühan. “Perhaps in private?”

  It was a suggestion, only. Even a rajni did not order the first daughter of the Good Mother around. Except when it came to such small matters as when to sit and when to stand.

  The abbess said, “The sour water. The burned water-diver.”

  Sayeh swallowed, nodded. Reminded herself that she was the rajni. “My people do not wish to be ruled by a rajni, Mother Abbess. They see these mishaps as signs that the Good Mother does not favor my rule.”

  The abbess steepled her gnarled fingers. “You could take a new husband, Your Abundance.”

  Sayeh shook her head. “I cared for my husband, Your Grace. I do not wish to remarry. Certainly not so urgently as this.”

  Ümmühan turned to look at them both, the pale cloth of her headscarf stretching gracefully with the gesture. She spoke carefully, as if to be sure she understood. “And if you remarried, you would be subject to the word of a man. How long were you married before you were widowed, Sayeh Rajni?”

  Sayeh counted in her head. “Thirty-three years, Poetess.”

  Ümmühan’s head tilted as she did the math. Sayeh had married at age eleven, because the council had willed it. Her husband had been much older, and he had been her regent until she herself was of age to take the crown. They had ruled together as raja and rajni, and she had, indeed, cared for him very deeply.

  And now she very deeply enjoyed being her own woman, and making her own decisions. She just had to cling to, build, and consolidate power enough to survive until she was in a position of strength and stability.

  She said, “A new husband would only wish his own children to inherit. This would not protect my son.”

  She had fought hard for that baby, suffered greatly for him. Far more than most women endured. That the Good Mother had blessed her with a child at all, Sayeh reminded herself, was a mark of divine favor. No one would harm her son. The boy was not merely the raja-in-waiting: his existence was a sign that the Good Mother protected him with Her own abundant hand.