The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Yes,” the Dead Man answered. “On the river is where I will sleep.”

  * * *

  They must stop to rest the oxen, if not themselves. The Dead Man thought that was the only reason they didn’t roll all day as they did all night. Druja did catch catnaps, as did the Dead Man. Nizhvashiti and the Gage, however, were ever-present and ever-watchful. Even if the Godmade’s watchfulness seemed sometimes to consist of standing like a carven figurehead on the crow’s-nest of the lead ship, black robes whipping, seemingly impervious to wind or rain.

  By benefit of this post, Nizhvashiti was the first to spot their objective. Though the smell hit them all not long after the Godmade called down and raised a pointing finger to mark the column of black smoke spiraling into the sky.

  “Shit,” Druja said, clambering up to join the Godmade and the Dead Man, who had been the first to answer the priest’s urgent shout. The three of them crowded the narrow crossbar of the unrigged mast, and Druja shook his head bitterly. He leaned out, holding a spar, and bellowed down, “Set the brakes! Set the brakes!”

  The rumble and sway of the ice-boat’s motion stopped so abruptly the Dead Man clutched the mast for balance. He kept his place, at least, which was good news. He was getting too old for broken bones to heal as quickly as they used to.

  “Raise the plague flags again?” the Dead Man asked.

  Druja’s mouth twisted. “Do you think they’ll fool anybody? Anybody it would benefit us to have fooled, anyway?”

  Moving through silent consensus, Druja, the Gage, the Dead Man, and the Godmade climbed down from the lead boat. They walked forward, up the rocky and scree-strewn slope, the stones turning underfoot crumbly and yellow and very like in texture to the clay of the road surrounding them.

  They did not speak as they crested a rise and the ruins of the burnt stockade on the banks of the broad, blind-white river came into view. That the ruins still smoldered despite the rain spoke of a tremendous fire, especially since—by the smell—what was dead in the stockade had been dead for at least a couple of days.

  Druja said, “Any sign of an ambush still here?”

  The Dead Man craned his neck and strained his eyes. There was a churn of mud leading south, along the riverbank. Many hooves and many boots. “I think they’re gone.”

  “Bandits?” Druja asked.

  It was the Godmade’s head that shook in disagreement then. “Not enough bodies among the ruins, and not enough of those that are there are the bodies of fighting-age men. They took conscripts. And probably hostages.”

  No one wondered that the Godmade could see so clearly, so far—not with that featureless golden eye.

  “Army,” Druja said.

  The Dead Man’s pulse rose in his throat and accelerated. “They’re on land,” he said. “The river will be faster.”

  “And we want to get ahead of them for some reason?” Druja asked.

  “Sarathai-tia. It’s fortified. It’s a royal seat, isn’t it?”

  Druja nodded. “You want to sign up to sit out a siege?”

  By the pen of God, no. Even the thought made the Dead Man’s stomach churn. Once had been enough in one lifetime. He remembered the reek of the trapped city, the eyes of the starving populace seeming to enlarge day by day in the sockets of their skulls.

  “I’d rather stop the siege before it happens. But that’s not the track of a large enough force to lay a big city under siege.” He waved at the churned mud as the caravan paused at the top of the switchbacked hill. “It’s a raiding party. The Boneless is still putting his army together. This was for supplies and men. They’ll make an arc, I warrant, foraging as they go, and bring back whatever they can get to Chandranath. We’re getting into farming country here; it’s not like the rocks and scruff we’re leaving. There’s resources here worth stealing.”

  “So you think they’ll bend east and north, away from the Mother River?”

  Nizhvashiti said, “It’s the logical choice. Why come back along the same route you left by, if your aim is pillage?”

  Druja stared at the river below. “You don’t think we’ll pass them if we continue southwest.”

  “Downriver,” the Dead Man said, trying to put more trust in his own tactics into his voice than he felt, necessarily. “It’s our best choice.”

  “Downriver,” Druja muttered. He raised his hand and waved.

  * * *

  Hammering heart and searching eye: vigilance availed the Dead Man not as they rolled down the hill onto the riverbank. He had been right in the first place: the reavers had moved on. He and the Gage and Nizhvashiti fanned out around the ice-boats as they were fitted for sailing—the rolling frames unbolted, the boats backed into the river by the oxen and floated free, the oxen unharnessed and the frames disassembled and stored. Some of the pieces converted into bits of the ice-boats’ rigging; others were lashed to the gunnels, where they took up surprisingly little room.

  The dock had been burned, but blessedly the reavers had not done a workmanlike job, and between the rain and the river some planks and all the pilings remained. Crewmen hopped out along those to secure the ice-boats with their hawsers. The Dead Man would have liked to bury the bodies of those who lay among the rubble of the shattered caravanserai, but he thought the passengers—especially Prince Mi Ren, who was pacing and swearing alongside the shore—might stage an actual revolt if he tried to delay them long enough to see to the dignity of the dead. So the Dead Man contented himself with a muttered prayer, read from the tiny book he kept wrapped in oiled silk and pocketed against his bosom, and looked over to see Nizhvashiti also murmuring words and making passes in the air.

  Perhaps some saint or God would intercede for them in death, since no such mercy had been forthcoming in this lifetime.

  Druja watched the process of converting the wagons to boats like a cat with one kitten, though he tried to constrain his own pacing and swearing to areas where Prince Mi Ren’s pacing and swearing was not taking place simultaneously. He scratched the oxen behind the ears as he and the teamsters unharnessed them, and petted one shaggy brown beast on the nose before turning away.

  The Dead Man gave him an arch look as Druja came up beside.

  “Some farmer will be glad to have them,” Druja said, glancing back at the confused, huddled beasts. One lowed forlornly. “Still, I’m sorry to take the loss. But we can’t bring them.”

  He paused and scratched under his scruffy beard. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

  “Better than we will, most likely,” the Dead Man said kindly. “Better row Mi Ren out to the boat before he explodes, though.”

  “Bless his little pointed head,” Druja replied. “Load up, then. It’s a long, slow old river.”

  * * *

  That it was, and full of people. After the emptiness of the mountain roads, the bucolic patchwork of fertile fields, farmhouses, and fishing villages along the riverbanks seemed like crowding. And after the caravan had been so long alone on the water, it seemed now that the river itself seethed with boats—coracles, dinghies, barges, scows. The narrow houseboats, long and low in the water, with their low roofs. The ferries that wore ceaselessly back and forth and back again, roped against the current, tugging their pulleyed tethers as they made their rounds. The ropes were marked with flags of brilliant cloth, and as the ice-boats came upon each, it had to be met with forked poles and lifted smoothly over the dragon prows. They had not rigged the masts and sails—the current alone would suffice to carry them.

  The richness of the land in Sarathai-tia was a striking contrast to the barren brown hillsides of Chandranath. The Dead Man found himself thinking that if he were Himadra, he’d want to annex it too. And this was the heart of the old Lotus Empire, wasn’t it? There were propaganda reasons behind such a conquest.

  And then there was the richness of the river, so white with soil it seemed it ought to taste like milk. Yearly floods would replenish this land, and keep it forever fertile.

  The Dead Man turne
d from the rolling farmland, seeking the glint of starlight off his partner’s carapace. He leaped from the prow of the second ice-boat as it crowded the first, landing lightly at the stern of the leader. Not too bad for an old man nearing fifty, even if the landing hurt more than it once would have.

  Trotting up alongside the railing, he found the Gage planted stolidly before the helmsman’s little house, balanced so that his weight was directly over the keel. Still the ice-boat wallowed: it was overloaded even before the Gage, with a third of the cargo and passengers from the destroyed boat. But Druja’s cargo masters knew their business, and the boat maintained its trim.

  The Dead Man folded his arms and settled into the same stance as the Gage—braced with legs shoulder height apart. He imagined he looked a little less like an implacable mountain.

  “I feel a little better about the oxen,” the Gage said.

  “Abandoning them?”

  Light shimmered on the brass pate as the massive head nodded.

  “They’ll likely find work,” the Dead Man allowed. “Farmers such as these aren’t going to inspect a windfall like a dozen trained draft animals too closely.”

  “Especially in the wake of reavers slaughtering all their cattle, or driving them off for soldiers’ steaks.” The Gage shrugged. “The mountain oxen won’t love this weather, but farmers are probably smart enough to shear them for wool. It is what it is, I suppose.”

  The age-old lament and acquiescence of the soldier. It is what it is.

  “You are not capable of softheartedness,” the Dead Man said. If they’d been alone, he would have rapped on the Gage’s carapace. “There’s nothing housed within you but cogs and gearshafts.”

  The Gage said, “I hate to abrogate a responsibility.”

  They were silent for a while, watching the river slip by. The Gage at last muttered, “If I were Himadra, I’d want to conquer this too.”

  “I thought the same thing,” the Dead Man answered with a snort. “Are you brooding?”

  The Gage mimicked a sigh like a rusted gear breaking loose and reluctantly turning. “What would I have to brood over?”

  A murdered love, the Dead Man thought. Unsatisfactory vengeance.

  But he didn’t speak—just paused again, to see if the Gage would fill in the space that followed. When his invitation was met with silence, he at last made a face and spoke himself. “I wish you’d be a little less … invested in nurturing your pain. You water it daily. You’ve had your revenge: it’s time to think of new things.”

  “You think of new things for both of us. Besides, it’s not as if you don’t brood.”

  “I don’t brood as a lifestyle.” The Dead Man rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you growing tired of this peripatetic way of being? Aren’t you weary?”

  “The Gage that stops being restless is the Gage that lies down and rusts.” The Gage shrugged. “I only outlived my lover because I had a goal in mind. I only outlived my maker because I still cared about things outside of her. Most of us don’t go on like that, you know.”

  Most of us, in this case, meaning most Wizardly creations. Some had a life beyond their makers. But those were not generally things that were created to be Wizard’s servants.

  “I need my pain.” The light of the Heavenly River glittered off the Gage again as he cocked his head. “It gives me focus. Redeems my ceaseless existence. Reminds me of compassion.”

  The Dead Man stared at him.

  “What?” said the Gage.

  “I am memorizing the moment for posterity,” the Dead Man said. “In all seriousness? ‘I need my pain.’ You sound like an adolescent prat with his first broken heart, who’s just learned about black cloaks and shocking his parents, and who thinks what he’s discovered is a true eternal secret of the universe. ‘I need my pain.’ The Scholar-God weeps a single inky tear for you, and wipes it into her pen. This may come as a startlement to you, metal man, but pain isn’t good for anything. Pain is merely suffering. Pain is the proof that sometimes God is too busy thinking about blowjobs to do Her work properly, and in the interstices people get hurt. Pain is just a thing that happens, like a broken toe, and it doesn’t teach you anything except to wear boots if you’re out kicking stone walls.”

  The Gage might have been staring right back. How was one to be sure? Light dimmed on the curve of the mirrored skull as the automaton flipped up the hood of his rough-spun robe.

  “What?” the Dead Man asked, in turn.

  “I never thought I’d hear you blaspheme quite so enthusiastically,” the Gage admitted.

  The Dead Man’s veil hid his smile. “It is the province of true believers above all.”

  Silently, the Gage crouched, picked up a ballast stone as big as the Dead Man’s fist. Effortlessly and without ceremony, he crushed it into powder in his hand. He cast the sand on the Dead Man’s boots and said, “It would not be good, for me to forget compassion. Pain reminds me that other creatures suffer.”

  The Dead Man drew himself up. He paused, considered. Then said, “Your pain does not make you deep or creative or compassionate. It just limits you.”

  “Maybe so,” said the Gage. He dusted sand from his palm, leaving a dusty smear on his homespun. “But a lack of limits would make me a monster, my friend.” He put a hand on the Dead Man’s shoulder. The touch was light, feather-gentle. Controlled. “Are you sure you’re not arguing with yourself, and all you’ve left behind or had taken from you? I have wondered how deep your own equanimity at your loss lies.”

  “Equanimity?” the Dead Man said. “What’s that? I can’t go back. There is no back to go to. My duty is lost, and my love lost with it. If I recollected my honor, I suppose I would lie down and die. So I can’t go back, no. But I can go forward, and perhaps make a new life somewhere.”

  “This is not a life?” The Gage’s careful gesture took in the sweep of fields to the horizon, and the star-bright sky beyond.

  “This is a passage. Between lives, or into eternity. I do not yet know.”

  There came no answer.

  “Look,” the Dead Man said. “It is not a betrayal of your old love to have new relationships. I know you know that, or else we could not be friends.”

  The Gage shifted injudiciously, twisting to stare at the Dead Man exactly as if he had eyes. The ice-boat rocked. The Gage stabilized himself, and carefully made an incredulous gesture down the length of his own massive brazen body. “Are you telling me to go out and get laid, Dead Man? That seems impossible in every particular. As well as tragically unfortunate for the family of any young man or lady that I might so burden.”

  The Dead Man felt his face burning behind his veil. He hadn’t meant that, not exactly. But even eunuchs had those they loved. The Dead Man had not been young enough in decades to imagine sex was all that tied two people together.

  He didn’t get a chance to answer, because the Gage continued. “I think you assign your own desires to me, Dead Man. We have both lost homes, both lost families. That much is true. Both lost our purpose, also true. We move through the world and leave no lasting trace, much as this boat cuts through the river.”

  “Nobody actually does that,” the Dead Man said. “A charismatic loner from some tale is just a man who won’t take responsibility for the effect he has on people’s lives. He doesn’t help pick up the pieces when something shatters. He just leaves them lying around to cut others and create work for them. I do not care to find myself behaving like that … that irresponsible jackass. Your metal skin doesn’t keep the world out, Gage, and it doesn’t keep you out of the world.”

  The Gage thought about it—the Dead Man had to credit him that. Then he shook his shrouded head and chuckled. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do want to be a jackass. Maybe I am one.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to be,” the Dead Man said. The Gage was all he had left in the world too—a precarious position for both of them. And he—the Dead Man—wasn’t getting any younger. Which was hard for the Gage to remember, because the Gag
e wasn’t getting any older.

  Hadn’t, in decades. Wouldn’t, for centuries to come.

  “I’m going to have to settle down eventually,” the Dead Man reminded him. “Flesh is brittle, old friend.”

  The Gage gleamed down at him innocently, like some faceless angel of the Scholar-God, some beatific djinn. It was blasphemy to think so, and the Dead Man put the image from him.

  The Gage said, “I won’t abandon you when you need rest, you know.”

  “I just don’t think it would cause you any hurt to have more friends,” the Dead Man answered. “I can’t be here forever.”

  The Gage nodded thoughtfully. “You’re worried I won’t want to go on alone if I lose my little mascot?”

  The Dead Man snorted. “I wouldn’t put it in those words exactly.”

  “You’re not that old, Serhan.”

  “Old enough for a mercenary,” the Dead Man answered.

  The Gage shook his head. “When are you going to retire that red coat? It looks like somebody boiled it in beet juice a hundred years ago and then dragged it through a midden.”

  The Dead Man touched his sleeve. It was a fair question, he supposed. And here he was, claiming the Gage was too spiderwebbed into his past, and unable to commit to a future. “When we settle down somewhere,” he said finally. “And take up jobs as greengrocers. Failing that, when the sleeves wear through.”

  “You mean, besides at the elbows?” the Gage said archly.

  The Dead Man unfolded and refolded his arms, relieved that they seemed to be friends again. Side by side, they stood and watched the horizon slip by.

  * * *

  They came into sight of Sarathai-tia several uneventful days later, at nightfall as the sky was brightening. As the city hove into sight over the horizon, the Dead Man thought that this was probably the best of all possible approaches.

  The first thundering, ceaseless downpours of the rainy season had given way to daily afternoon showers. The river was high, having spread across its banks to enrich the fields beyond, but had begun receding. Druja still had men in small boats rowing out ahead of the caravan to pole the depth of the channel and seek out snags and hazards, but their work was slowly becoming less critical as the waters calmed and slowed.