by Jay Lake
That I had seen for myself, though the cowards had not stood to the test. And besides, Selistani was the people, Seliu was the language, but I did not trouble to correct him then. How did he not know this?
Ponce continued: “They came with weapons and demanded to see all the dark-skinned w-women. When one of the girls, Amitra, scratched at them, they killed her.”
“Me.” I was aghast. “They were searching for me.” And a girl had died for it. Who, though? Surali would have sent Street Guild, or maybe even the Prince’s peacocks. The Interim Council would have dispatched men from Lampet’s new regiment. My list of enemies was not so long-this left Blackblood. I made a serious error of thinking then, one that I have regretted ever since. I assumed that the god had made another play! Even while he’d sent Skinless for me. The late Pater Primus might have done such a thing, and I suppose in the heat of the moment I confused the priest’s tactics with the god’s.
I could see only my fear for my child, my fear of being taken by the gods, my revulsion at the death of an innocent in my place. I could not see what was really happening.
Thoughtless rage replaced my sick horror. I could feel it boiling within me. I was never giving this child up to anyone. Not if I had to carry her beyond the farthest horizon to keep her safe. Or kill everyone in this city.
“Yes.” Chowdry stared at the knife still in my hand. The tip was weaving in tight circles now, lusting for guilty flesh to plunge into. “You should find a different path.”
He was right. I could not simply fight my way out of this. Such a strategy had never worked so well in the past, though I was not ashamed of some of my victims. The Pater Primus, for example. Or the Duke himself. I had slain others for pride or for fear, rather than necessity or the greater good. Killing was an easy habit to fall into, especially if one’s conscience had already been burned away.
I was a mother now. I needed to think differently. No longer could I just be a storm of swords. Resheathing my knife, I took a deep breath and prayed to the Lily Goddess.
I know You cannot hear me so far across the water. I know I abandoned You, and that You sent me away. But still You are a mother. I need a mother’s wisdom now. Not an assassin’s instincts. Please. Guide me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was touched with a deeper calm. Not the peace of the High Hills, but at least my boiling rage had leached away. I felt slightly sick. A weakness had taken my muscles.
“If you and the god Endurance will allow me to do so,” I said, “I would like to see to the dead. Her life was taken in my name.”
***
In fact, two lives were taken in my name. Spite, misplaced vengeance, or someone’s idea of a warning, I could not say. And it did not matter.
Amitra was a young woman, barely older than I. Her skin was a rich and lovely brown much as my own. Her eyebrows were fiercely dark, a cloud upon her pretty face. When I reached to press her eyes closed, their deep amber was already tinged with a milky dullness. She was forever young now.
Ponce and the others had laid her out in the middle of the foundation project. The other girl, Nitsa, was placed next to her. Nitsa would have been a solid woman, already thicker-bodied than I, and with a paler cast of skin. Only a fool would have mistaken her for me.
The side of Nitsa’s face was crushed and her neck broken, from the blow of a heavy stick swung hard. Or perhaps a mallet. I traced the wounds. The dark, thickened blood stained my fingertips. She must have died in the moment, for there was not so much of it.
Amitra had been struck down with a blade. Her shoulder was gashed open. That would be the first blow. I imagined the assailant, some brute with money in his pocket and a target on his mind. One of the old Ducal Guard, perhaps, who hadn’t been taken up by Lampet’s new thugs. It was rumored they were behind much of the street crime now. He’d followed up the first blow by stabbing her in the throat, probably to silence her screams. She’d died bloody, which meant slow enough to feel the pain and terror.
“I will wash the bodies now,” I announced. “I will need white clay and red.”
Chowdry knew what I was about, as would any Selistani who was from the eastern portions of our native land, or who had lived among the Bhopuri for a while. This was what my people did. I remembered just a little from my grandmother’s funeral, before I was taken, and I had learned more during my time in the Temple of the Silver Lily at Kalimpura. The rest of Selistan considered us Bhopuri to be silly peasants, with our cloaks of bells and our sky burials and our huts amid the paddies, but this was the bottom of who I was.
Though I had laid aside my anger and the violence that quivered within its grip, everyone around me scrambled to my bidding as if murder were still in my eye. That was fine with me. I wanted obedience right now far more than I wanted argument.
First I removed Amitra’s robes, and washed her body with a strip of linen torn from their hem. There were rites and blessings that should be said, though I did not know many of the words. But I knew that everyone needed to be helped from the world if they could. I had even made a prayer for my bandit, the third person I’d killed with my own hands, after Mistress Tirelle and the Duke.
It was only fit that I do far more here.
She had been lithe and pretty, this woman. Her skin was already cold and her body stiff. That spark which makes a person sensual or beautiful was fled from this cooling meat. Still, I could see her as she had been in life. I wondered if Amitra had come on one of the ships. Or if her family had lived here awhile as merchants. Traders perhaps?
I had no need to ask. The girl would tell me whatever stories she had.
Wordlessly I prayed to both Endurance and the Lily Goddess as I wiped Amitra’s hurts and cleaned the grime of work from her hands and feet. She had tiny bruises along her breasts, lover’s nips. I was glad she had embraced that part of life before she died.
When she was clean, I covered her over with her robes, except for her face. Then I took a bowl of white clay someone had laid down as I worked. It was already properly mixed with water to form a paste. I painted over Amitra’s face, preparing her for whatever the white prepared a body for when the soul had left it. I had been told at the Temple of the Silver Lily that this was how the ancestors would know their own, taking her for the ghost she was. I had never been certain if this was a true belief or a jest at the expense of peasant ignorance.
The red I took to paint dots across her forehead, her nose and lips and chin. Drops of the blood of life, kisses of the gods, offerings to the demons to let her pass the gates of the hells unharmed. Again, the reason was of no matter. That was simply what was done.
Then I did the same for Nitsa. Her body was solid and hard, not so fat as I’d thought when I’d first seen her collapsed in her bloody robes. I could do little to hide her wounds, but I cleaned them as well. That took a great while. Her fingers were long and slender for a woman of her build, and strange little calluses on the pads made me wonder if she’d played an instrument. Had lovers danced to this one’s music?
In time I covered her over and painted her with the white and the red. I used the clay to smooth the depression in Nitsa’s temple, so her face would be even when she met her mothers.
There were no sky burials here. Endurance was in a very real sense a Bhopuri god, but Copper Downs had no such towers, nor the servant birds that came to clean away the flesh and polish the bones laid atop them.
I looked up to see that the day was almost gone. Several dozen people gathered around me in a wide circle. Chowdry, Ponce, faces both familiar and strange from my days staying here.
“Are you back with us?” Chowdry asked quietly.
Wondering where I had been, I said, “Yes.”
“You did not work alone,” he added in Seliu.
I looked to see a few stray lily petals scattered around me. The air smelled of wet ox. How great had my prayers been?
“The rite is not quite complete,” I told him. “I will need two white candles and two black. B
ring me also paper, pen, ink, and a writing board.”
Someone had thought ahead, for these were produced immediately. Or perhaps, I realized with a wry twist, Endurance had made his will known again.
I placed the black candle to the left of each girl’s head, and the white to the right. Then I took the board and with care drew out word-houses of the Hanchu script from the few that Lao Jia had taught me aboard Southern Escape when I’d first fled Copper Downs.
For Amitra I drew the word-house that meant “beauty.” As Lao Jia had said when teaching me, each word-house has little rooms of meaning. And so “beauty” was woman and the western sun and an eel swimming in a river.
For Nitsa I drew the word-house for “peace.” Those little rooms of meaning were sky and hearth and an open door.
I laid the papers down upon each girl’s chest for a time, and prayed voicelessly once more. It was fit that a mute god such as Endurance should be met with silent prayer. As for the Lily Goddess, She had been close enough to hear me, but we did not have so many words to spare that I needed to speak aloud to Her another time this day.
When I picked up Amitra’s “beauty,” it smoldered into flame. The flare lit the gathering shadows of evening as someone gasped. I put the little fire to the black candle first, then spoke quickly before it burned my fingers. “Doubtless she was vain,” I said, bespeaking her sins and sorrows. “As all the beautiful are.” I reached for the white candle and spoke to her hopes and dreams. “She believed in something beyond this life, or she would not have been here.”
When I moved around the bodies to reach for Nitsa’s “peace,” that slip of paper also flared of its own accord. I lit the black candle. “She might have resented others their grace.” I could not know this, of course, but I had known solid girls in the Temple of the Silver Lily, and it was a fair guess. I had no need or desire to understand this dead woman’s more shameful sins. Then the white candle. “She made music that others might know joy, which is one of the greatest gifts.”
I shook the last of the paper away from my fingertips in a shower of sparks and ash, then walked back toward the smoke reek of the tent camp. The circle of watchers melted before me. Someone called out in a soft voice, “What shall we do with the bodies?”
“Bury them,” I said. “Or send them Below to sleep with the echoes of history.” My work was done.
I found my cot and slipped into a deep, dreamless silence. Even the worry of another attack was too far from my mind. The last thing I heard was a buzz of voices without, as the people of Endurance’s temple took up their watch over me.
***
Sunlight glowing through the canvas brought me awake hard and fast. My fingers were blistered, the tips sore and ground in with clay. I took a long moment to recall why that might be.
What had I done? Armed men on the loose looking for me, and I’d spent half a day playing at being a psychopomp. The memory of timeless peace was close by, though. I realized that I must have been under the protection of the gods.
And goddesses.
This morning, I was protected by nothing more than my wits and my knife, as had been the case for so much of my life. I rolled out of the cot and looked to my workboots. I didn’t recall taking them off last night, but someone must have. These boy’s clothes stank more than my old leathers by now, but they were not uncomfortable. I was better off without the sleek drama of an assassin’s guise in any case.
Food.
I needed food. At that thought, my gut roiled. The baby made me hungry. I had not eaten at all yesterday afternoon. I was fairly certain this was poor practice for a woman with child.
Patting myself down, I slipped my long knife within my corduroy trousers and into the scabbard alongside my thigh. My short knives I tucked inside my sleeves. The arrangement was not ideal, but carrying a sheathed weapon openly would defeat the purpose of this guise.
I slipped outside the tent to find breakfast.
Half a dozen of Endurance’s young acolytes stood waiting for me, along with several older men and women. Their faces were a mix of pale and dark. Neither Chowdry nor Ponce was present.
“What do you want?” My tone was more brusque than I’d intended.
“Nothing,” one of the young women said.
“Well, I need breakfast. Then I must go out into the city, and make sure the tragedy of yesterday is not repeated.”
“W-will you visit the wounded before you depart?”
A sharp retort was on my lips, but I swallowed the words unspoken. “Yes, but not to dress them for death.”
They trailed me to the tables next to the ruined kitchen tent. The canvas cover was gone, but in the morning’s unusually decent warmth I did not care. Ponce was once more frying sausages, this time over an open fire, camp style. Some of their cookery gear had been salvaged. He smiled to see me, though without his grinning enthusiasm of before. With some effort, I smiled back.
That seemed safe enough.
When he offered me the pan, my smile grew more genuine. The world was hard, lives had been snuffed out, but as Mistress Tirelle had beaten into me, good cooking makes up for a multitude of sins. Using the same simple ingredients as before, I made up light, tangy eggs with the sausage cut into them.
Also as before, once I’d cooked a sufficiency, I ate as if food had just been invented for the first time. The watching circle was different, though. Not amazed at a young woman eating like a cartload of soldiers. More like people waiting for a miracle.
Between mouthfuls of egg, I made to shoo them off. “Don’t you have work to do? I am not entertainment.”
Ponce touched my shoulder. “They hunger for your words.”
“Silly fools,” I spat in Seliu, before I recalled that almost half the people here were Selistani, and surely could understand me.
Those took no offense, but smiled shyly.
I am rarely pleased to be told what to do, and never dance when called upon, so I finished my meal in a grim silence. This did nothing to discourage my watchers. I resolved to depart the temple grounds as swiftly as possible. Let them try to follow me through the city. I could swarm the roofs or go Below and lose every one of these soft, wealthy children within a block or two.
With that thought I glanced at my older watchers, wondering if they were truly seeking wisdom from me, or keeping an eye on their younger charges.
No matter. I had to take some action. I had sulked and skulked too long, and it was never my way to let the fight be brought to me. “I shall visit the wounded,” I announced as I scraped my fourth plate clean. “Then I will head out into the city.” Someone else could clean this makeshift kitchen.
Now that I knew that Surali and the rest of the embassy were in the Velviere District, I counted it reasonably safe to head back to the Tavernkeep’s place. There I might find some answers from my friends among the pardines, for whom the human politics of all this would be little more than an amusement. If that.
I rose, looked around, and realized I had no idea where the wounded had been taken.
“The temple,” said Ponce helpfully. He made to lead me there, though I knew perfectly well where it was. We trailed acolytes and elders as a duck trails her hatchlings.
Chowdry was within, alongside a Stone Coast woman in a formal dress of the last decade’s style among the wealthy. She was covered in blue silk falls with a shallow bustle; not the richest mode anymore, but the clothing signaled her status as a respectable, decent matron-Mistress Leonie would have approved of my quick analysis. The woman was also a doctor, judging from the black case opened wide with the metal instruments of her trade spread across a square of white silk.
I was struck by how pretty she was. A nose too broad for the tastes of the elite here in Copper Downs, but snubbed and sweet upon her lightly freckled face. Gray eyes flashed, and brown hair streaked gray seemed to match.
In another time, at another moment, I might have approached her with a smile. Instead I looked to the men and women lying on p
allets on the floor.
Five of them. Three were sleeping, and seemed to have their color, so I did not fear for a sudden death. One was awake and staring at me with bright enough eyes that her fate did not concern me so much either. The fifth had been receiving the attentions of Chowdry and the doctor. He looked sickly pale, especially for a Selistani.
“I am here.” First I went and knelt by the bright-eyed watcher. Taking her hand in mine, I smiled, and thanked her quietly. The three sleepers I stroked slowly across the brow one after another. Each sighed in their turn. Finally I sat beside the severely wounded boy.
“What of him?” I looked at the doctor.
“A hard blow to the belly with the butt of a staff.” Her voice caught at me, stirred something within. “He has ruptured inside. Bodily humors that should never mix are being drawn together.”
I reached my hand toward his gut. Chowdry gasped. Looking up again, I snapped, “I am no miracle worker. I just sorrow for his pain.”
In the end, that was all I could say to them. The wounded were wounded in my name. I had a fight to carry forth to my enemies.
***
Out on the streets, I walked like a boy. Which is to say, not the supple, confident lope of a Lily Blade-a stride we had cultivated carefully both for its efficiency in a night-long run through Kalimpura and for the air of power even a small woman could project-but, rather, the cocky strut of a young man balanced between pride and embarrassment, angry at the prospect of being discovered for an impostor in his manhood.
More Selistani were on the streets here than I remembered there being even a few months ago. Far more than had been resident in Copper Downs when I’d first escaped the Factor’s house. With my short hair and my cap low, so long as I kept my face down, even with my darker skin I was just another working lad. I had not yet found a way to hide my scars, and continued to be torn as to whether I should even try to do such a thing.
Still, I swaggered a bit, not enough to attract challenge. A fine line in its own right, and a distracting little piece of playacting while I muddled over the meaning of yesterday’s attack on the Temple of Endurance. More to the point, I muddled over my sudden devotion to funerary rites.