The Stone in the Skull
Page 31
The whole of the Bitter Sea had exploded from beneath. Ansh-Sahal, like the historical kingdoms of Tsering-la’s memory, was no more.
“Good Mother,” Sayeh whispered. “What have you done?”
* * *
They could not have outrun the wall of smoke and steam, so it might have been for the best that it faded out and flowed apart before it reached the lowest of the hills east of and below them. Might have been for the best, though in her heart Sayeh wished it would roll over her, melt her flesh from her bones, end this incredible pain in her breast and belly that made the pain of her broken leg seem like a minor irritation at best.
Tsering-la glanced that way over and over again, frowning, though Sayeh could tell he struggled to keep his attention on her, suddenly transformed as she was from his rajni to his patient. Once it became evident that they were not all about to die immediately, Vidhya took command again. Sayeh was somewhat surprised to discover that Nazia was still with them. Her manner was brittle and distant, but she stayed.
They found a place off the road, level enough to raise a tarpaulin and call it a pavilion, though nobody bothered, just now, with walls. Ümmühan built a fire, smoky from lack of dry wood, and started preparations for tea. Meanwhile, with the help of two of the largest men-at-arms, Tsering-la and Vidhya set Sayeh’s snapped bone.
She screamed for that, all right. Screamed, but still didn’t faint.
She hadn’t fainted either when Tsering cut Drupada from her belly. Now she wished she were weaker of spirit, so she could fall into a dreamless place and be untroubled instead of sending her nails savagely into Nazia’s callused hands.
She had a hazy recollection that she had first ordered, and then begged and pleaded with her men to go on without her, to follow Himadra and do whatever it took to retrieve Drupada. They had ignored her, and eventually she had found her dignity, silenced herself, and let them work.
When her leg was splinted, though, it was another matter. Now, she asked Vidhya to complete a task she could not order him to: to turn her over to Himadra as a hostage so she could be near her son.
“I have no kingdom to return him to, even if we could catch up to them.” Which she would not believe was impossible.
Vidhya shrugged. “We are alive, Rajni. Where there is breath, hope also lies. The evacuations you ordered had commenced: some of your people will have escaped. The Good Mother will see your loyalty, and perhaps she will aid you.”
It was a useless argument, trying to send them away. But she made it, over and over, with variations. Ümmühan poured tea, and food was passed around, and the rain stopped—and Sayeh was still repeating her argument when a rising sound interrupted her. Vidhya jumped to his feet, turning, a hand cupped to his ear until the rumble resolved into the steady thunder of hundreds of hoofbeats drumming across the hillsides, reverberating with layered echoes rolling from the sharp escarpments of the neighboring hills.
“Where is it coming from?” Ümmühan asked.
Vidhya said, “I can’t tell. I can’t read the echoes. There are too many.”
“But that’s an army,” Nazia said.
“Yes,” Tsering said. “I think we found them.”
* * *
Sayeh hitched herself higher on the dank linens of the pallet her people had made. She looked at them—Tsering, Vidhya, Nazia, the men-at-arms. Ümmühan, who was not hers, precisely, but who was under her authority and protection nonetheless.
They were staring, one and the other, each trying to decide if it was his or her decision to make. But Sayeh knew it was not any of theirs. It was her own.
“You have to flee,” she said to Vidhya.
Her captain started to argue. She straightened her arms, pushing herself as upright as she could get, and stared him in the eye. “Silence, Captain.”
He stammered to a halt.
She said, “You, Tsering, the men-at-arms. You will flee. Take Ümmühan. Himadra will not harm me: I am too useful to him for politics. All of you, he would kill. And there are too many of them even for a Wizard of Messaline to handle. Nazia—” She looked at the girl. “I won’t order you to stay with me. But I will ask you. They will not forbid me a maid, and I should be able to protect you.” She tapped her splinted leg. “I will need hands and feet that I can trust.”
Nazia blinked, her expression startled. Perhaps pleased. By that word, “trust”? Sayeh hoped so. One who was flattered by trust would strive to be worthy of trust.
“I will not leave you, Rajni,” she said in the formal inflections of an oath.
“Sayeh,” Tsering said sternly, abandoning her title for what she thought was the first time. “If this is just to save our lives, while you get close, again, to Drupada—”
Irritation rose up in Sayeh, a sharp hot burst that they thought so little of her tactical sense as that. She hoped she kept it from her tone: she wanted them working with her because they were convinced her plan was a good one, not because she had commanded it.
“Mrithuri,” she said. “Go to my cousin. Seek her help, offer her our men. Her lands are between those of Himadra and Anuraja. And it is she who holds the Peacock Throne, even if she cannot sit on it. Do you think for an instant that my bastard cousin thinks taking Drupada is anything except a prelude to an assault on her sovereignty? Go to her; help her. Take Guang Bao as proof of your service to her family, and ransom or rescue me when you can.”
“Rajni—”
“I cannot ride, Vidhya!” she snapped. “You cannot get away if I am with you. So go; go now. And live to fight another day. Ümmühan—”
“Oh, no, Rajni,” said the poetess with great dignity. “I am too old for such wild riding.” (A patent lie, given how she had kept up on the chase.) “Besides that, I am a historian. Where else would I go but beside you?”
* * *
Sayeh imagined they made a strange picture to the soldiers riding up on them. Three women—one in the last dry season of old age, one in the first bare flush of youth, and the other a middle-aged shandha propped under an improvised awning—waiting beside a muddy road. She almost wished she could see herself and her companions through the eyes of those men.
She felt a swell of unease looking at them, though. Because they did not wear the mountain russets of Himadra’s soldiers, but the blue and the orange ochre of her older cousin Anuraja, from the south. Two armies. There were two armies in her land. Or what had been her land, once upon a time not so very long ago. Was Anuraja allied with Himadra, then? For a moment, Sayeh wished she had her men back, to give them this bit of information as well. Mrithuri would need to know it.
Nazia had used her diver’s hook knife to razor the saddle off the cinch that bound it to the dead gelding. She’d set it up across a small boulder and helped Sayeh onto it sideways, as a sort of throne. Sayeh stretched her broken leg out before her and loosely held a crooked crutch Nazia had also cut for her as if it were a scepter, though the end remained a bit higher than her head even with the butt resting on the ground.
Her broken leg was a constant, heavy presence, like an angry spouse. The pain clouded her thoughts. Tsering had left her poppy oil, and she had touched a little under her tongue—but enough poppy to do more than slightly dull the agony would do much more than slightly dull her wits. It was a cobra’s bargain—suffer the venom, or be swallowed alive.
So she watched the vanguard of the army ride up to her, and she tried not to let the fear or the pain show on her features. A rajni was serene.
The men paused, seeming confused by the odd tableau of woman seated on a rock under a tarpaulin, dead horse, and attendant maiden and crone.
“Good afternoon,” Sayeh said. “I am Sayeh Rajni of Ansh-Sahal. I have broken my leg in a fall from my gelding. Please bring my cousin, Himadra Raja, to me, that he and I may parley now.”
* * *
After some confusion, they brought her a litter. Being loaded into it hurt, quite fiercely as it happened. Sayeh was a rajni. She did not cry out.
So she was forced to be satisfied with that.
When they carried her and Ümmühan—and led Nazia—into the camp, it was obvious to Sayeh’s experienced eye that it had been there for a while. Still, she saw very little sign of the russet livery she expected. A man here, a man there, scattered through the crowd wearing the uniform of Anuraja. How much of this army was his, after all? Where were all of Himadra’s men? Where were even the men he had brought into Ansh-Sahal?
And how had he known that Ansh-Sahal was in such dire danger? Had it been but an accident of timing? Or had either Himadra or Anuraja, through some sorcery, had something to do with the eruption?
Himadra had saved her son, whatever the incitement, whether it was intentional or accident. He had saved Drupada, and he had—quite incidentally—saved the life of Sayeh herself as well because she had pursued him. Did she owe him a debt?
Perhaps she owed him several, both for good and ill. But she did not think they cancelled one another out. Not until Drupada was safely returned to her own care.
When the men set her litter down, it was in a frame. She tried to arrange herself to make it easy for them to help her stand—whatever dignity she could salvage would only help her, though she was not above also relying on pity for her injuries—but they only drew the curtains back. It turned out that the entire top section of the litter, in fact, slid up and into itself like a curved wood-and-fabric fan, and when they had pulled it back Sayeh simply sat in a cushioned chair on a wooden and bamboo framework, exposed to the Cauled Sun which for once in the rainy season was plainly visible against the day-veiled stars and the Heavenly River above her.
Who moves armies in the rainy season? she thought yet again, and then forced herself to focus on what was before her.
Sayeh had heard Himadra could not walk on his own due to the brittleness of his limbs, which explained the existence and construction of both the palanquin that had brought her here and the framework upon which it rested. But it was not Himadra that she faced now, either in a litter or on the back of his satiny gray mare.
It was the thickset, gloriously raimented figure of Anuraja, her cousin from the south. His barrel-like body seemed the more stocky and impressive for his jeweled and bullion-embroidered robes. Like Sayeh, he clutched a walking stick. Unlike hers, his was clad in hammered gold and set with red stones too dark to be rubies: spinels or garnets, perhaps.
He was standing, and he came toward her, but he limped on his left leg and scowled with each step as if it pained him. Faintly, over the bright herbal stink of poultices, Sayeh could pick out the fetor of his abscessed leg.
She felt a sympathy for him that she had never quite managed before.
Still, she drew herself up to be as queenly as possibly when she could not stand. “Have you taken me prisoner, Cousin?”
Anuraja smiled. “You are my honored guest, royal cousin.” He stressed the word royal, perhaps to emphasize that she herself had omitted it. “Perhaps I had fantasized that you had come to pay me court in hopes of winning my hand.”
Sayeh had been a rajni for decades. She did not roll her eyes. How many queens had this fool buried now? “I am an old widow,” she told him. “And beyond bearing. I have only one heir and that is all I shall ever have.”
A test. He knew those facts: she was giving nothing away. Still she was sure she saw a flash of cupidity across his face at the thought of the single, defenselessly young heir of her body.
Good Daughter, dutiful and terrible, was Drupada here somewhere in this camp? Or had they already … dispensed with him? The spike of cold in her chest hurt more than the coals burning her leg.
She said, “Where is Himadra? I need to speak to him about my son.”
Anuraja sneered. “Ridden off west with his army, Rajni. You are with my army now.” His face enlivened as he considered what she had said. “Where is your son? Not in Ansh-Sahal, then? Not”—he waved a hand airily so that jewels glittered—“perished?”
She cursed herself. She could have kept her secrets so much better, for purposes of bargaining. The poppy, the pain, her own exhaustion and lack of information—all worked against her.
Nazia was still beside her, she realized. Nazia reached out and up and squeezed her fingers softly. Ümmühan did nothing so obvious, but Sayeh felt the comfort of the old woman’s presence nonetheless.
No respect for the rajni’s personal autonomy, Sayeh thought, even as she was grateful for the gesture. Anuraja might think the girl was her lover, to touch her unsolicited. Well, fine then. Let him think what he liked.
“Perhaps if you would consent to ally your house to mine, royal cousin, we could work together to protect your son.” He eyed her avariciously. If Sayeh has been standing, she would have stepped back. As it was, she felt herself edging into the cushions.
Anuraja leaned forward. He rested his hands on his knees, the richly embroidered fabric of his trousers smooth and unwrinkled under relaxed fingers. He smiled. “Give yourself to me. Or I shall forge your destruction—and your son’s destruction—upon the anvil of the world.”
* * *
She held herself together until the men set her palanquin down within the walls of the tent that had been assigned to her. Until they left, and she saw their shadows against the canvas walls. She sent Ümmühan out to fetch water or wine, if they would give her either, and sat without moving on the silks, staring.
How could she have made such a terrible mistake? How could she have miscalculated so badly, given herself to the wrong army entirely? She should have fought, should have hidden—
She was only being cruel to herself. She had had no choice, with her broken leg. She had done what she could. And perhaps her people would be able to find help and rescue him, even rescue her. Surely the Good Mother would not abandon a child who she had created by means of an outright miracle!
But where was Drupada? Where, where was her son? How could she protect him when she was captive of another raja entirely?
Nazia came to offer Sayeh her crutch, and a hand. Sayeh could not lift her own hand to accept either. She stared at them as if they were meaningless. She felt her lips move, the breath move through them. She did not form words with any intent, but she heard what her body, without her own volition, said to Nazia. “Get out. Get out. Get out.”
Her voice rose to a wail. “Get out! Go to hell! Get away from me!”
An older woman, a more experienced woman, might have stayed. Might have sat beside Sayeh, and even if she were too decorous to touch her rajni without an invitation, might have positioned herself so that if the rajni curled forward or on her side, she would fall into supporting arms.
Nazia was young. The girl backed away. She wouldn’t flee the tent, not with the alien men-at-arms waiting beyond. Not when her only protection was the rajni with whom she had chosen to allow herself to be taken prisoner, and Ümmühan already outside. But she backed into a corner of the canvas structure and pulled a rug up to conceal herself, hunched knees and hunched shoulders, leaving exposed only a corner of short regrowth of hair and two stark eyes.
Sayeh, for her part, curled on her side, as best she could manage with a splinted leg, and wailed as if she were an abandoned child and not a rajni at all.
Sayeh lay on her pallet and felt the shudders creep up her body from her tailbone to her ears. They ran up her spine as chilly shivers before detonating somewhere in the vicinity of
her shoulderblades. Each time she gasped, clutched her coverlet in both fists, and hoped it was the last. Each time, in a few seconds she found herself spasming again.
Ümmühan returned with wine and flat, buttered bread on a tray. She seemed to assess the situation at a glance, and set it down on a rack nearby before crossing to the palanquin. Sayeh ignored the old woman; the old woman said nothing. She simply sat down, and did not move at all except in the rising and falling of her breath.
Nazia lay beside the door, asleep or pretending, curled on her side. It was a comfortable captivity at least: even if they had not been trusted with a brazier—too much like a weapon—they were well-stocked with blankets.
Every time Sayeh closed her eyes, she heard her own voice in memory say, “You’ll be as old as Old Parrah before I go away.”
She had meant every word of it when she had said it. How was she to know it would turn out to be a lie?
Under her breath, Ümmühan began softly to hum.
Sayeh wished she had the strength of will to command the old woman to be silent. But that would require speech, and speech was a thing women did, not animals blind with grief and pain.
She thought of the story of the elephant prince and the tiger and sent a prayer to the Good Mother that she was doing the right thing, and a prayer to the Good Daughter that Drupada would be dutiful, and that she and Tsering-la had taught him enough to lay a foundation of love and trust. That Himadra could not suborn him in some way before she returned for him. Surely, no one could replace a mother’s love?
“I’ll come back for you,” she whispered under her breath. “I shall. I will.”
The shudders came again, worse this time, and worse again, until she was curled sobbing and her gasps for air woke Nazia. Nazia came to her, but Ümmühan stayed her with a hand. From somewhere, the old woman produced a thumb harp, an instrument Sayeh had always hated. But as Ümmühan played and softly began to sing, Sayeh found she did not hate the sound so much. First her sobbing eased, and then her breathing. She did not think she ever slept, quite, but at last she slipped into a sort of haze and half-dreamed.