Chosen of the Changeling

by Greg Keyes

  “Ngess’e’ is the old word for ‘body,’” she mused. “Does this mean that a person’s body is like a pot?”

  Ghan nodded. “Sungulh really means ‘vessel,’” he explained. “Anything that holds something.”

  “I see, I see!” she said, nearly forgetting herself and giggling. How could she have been so stupid? “‘Ship’ is made from that, too, isn’t it? And so is ‘house’! A vessel with someone in it!” She doodled the two glyphs quickly, imperfectly—but legibly. Now that she could see that the lines weren’t just random squiggles but other, simpler glyphs, they were easier to write.

  Ghan watched her do that for a while, impassive. Then he reached over and stopped her with a touch on the wrist.

  “Now,” he said. “Now draw su’.”

  Su’ was water, a little swirly coil. Hezhi put it down, but her mind was slipping ahead. Of course; ice had this in it, and so did weep—that was “water” and “face.” She waited eagerly for Ghan’s next command.

  “Do the glyph for road,” he said, using the modern—not the ancient—word for “road.” That puzzled her but did not give her pause. She etched out the complex symbol. Then she stared at it, surprised. It looked like “water” and “land” mixed together.

  “That should mean marsh, or island, or something, shouldn’t it?”

  “Why is that?”

  “These are the glyphs for ‘water’ and ‘land.’”

  “Say what you just said slowly,” he said, eyes intent on her face, watching as if he could see how she thought

  Hezhi complied. “These—are—the—glyphs—for—‘water’—and—‘land.’”

  “Just the two words now.”

  “She’, nyun,” she said. “Water, land.”

  “Doesn’t that sound like shengu, ‘road’?”

  Hezhi wrinkled her brow. “A little, but not very much.”

  “But what if you name those glyphs like that in the Old Language, with the old pronunciation?”

  “Su’-ngan,” she said carefully, then smiled. “I see! Su’ngan sounds like sungu, the old word for ‘road.’”

  “Indeed,” Ghan said. “In those two ways, all complex glyphs are constructed.” He smirked. “Rather than having to learn thousands of glyphs, you need only learn the hundred basic symbols.”

  Hezhi nodded, lost in the wonder of it. “How beautiful,” she breathed.

  “Now,” Ghan asked softly, “do you think you can take these with you and know them by tomorrow?”

  “I can take the book and the paper?”

  “I want you to learn this quickly,” Ghan explained. “I have no time to indulge you every day. You must work at home, as well.”

  “I’ll know them tomorrow,” she promised.

  That afternoon, she had to restrain herself from dancing out into the hall where Tsem waited. He seemed puzzled by the happy look on her face.

  “You seem to be feeling better, Princess,” he observed.

  “Yes, Tsem, I do feel better. Ghan is teaching me to read”

  “Ah. I can think of nothing that would make me feel better.”

  Hezhi noticed that as he spoke, he kept glancing distractedly up and down the hall.

  “Something wrong, Tsem?” she asked.

  “No, Princess, nothing you need worry about.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Hezhi remarked. “Whenever someone tells me that, it is almost certainly something I should worry about.”

  “No, not this time,” Tsem said. “This is my own problem.”

  “Can I help?”

  Tsem looked sharply at her, as if he thought she were joking. When he saw how earnest she was, though, he chuckled and tousled her hair. “No, Princess, but thank you for the offer. Shall we go on home now? Qey was making crescent-moons with cheese, I think.”

  “Fine,” Hezhi said. “I have a lot to do, anyway. Come on, race me.”

  “Race you?”

  “Like we used to do. Remember? I used to beat you all of the time.”

  “I remember letting you win so you wouldn’t have a tantrum and order me beheaded,” Tsem corrected.

  Hezhi pretended to pout, then changed her expression to one of surprised discovery. She pointed up the corridor, where Tsem had been so nervously gazing. “Is that who you were looking for?” she asked.

  Tsem turned to look, a flash of concern passing over his heavy features. When he turned back, puzzled—there was no one in the direction she pointed—it was just in time to see Hezhi’s skirt vanishing around the corner. He rolled his eyes, bellowed, and gave pursuit.

  Her servitude became joy after that. Each day her knowledge of the old script advanced, and, soon enough, Ghan began to teach her indexing. Indexing was actually simple enough; it involved reading—or at least skimming—a book and making a list of the subjects and important personages detailed or mentioned in it. There was a master index—a truly enormous book that Ghan kept hidden away—composed of entries under various subjects and persons. Under each heading could be found a list of the manuscripts that mentioned them and a set of numbers indicating where in the library the book was likely to be found. Hezhi was amazed—and a bit chagrined—to learn of this index. It would have made her earlier search much simpler. Books were shelved in the order that they were acquired, and as soon as they were placed on a shelf, that shelf was labeled with a number—the number following the one before it, naturally—and the same number was written on the inside cover or first page of the book, so that it could be reshelved. This meant there was no telling where a book on a particular subject was without the index.

  Indexing was by turns boring and interesting, depending upon the book she was reading. Ghan seemed satisfied enough with her work, however, though he was gruff and even caustic when she made mistakes. As time went on, however, her mistakes became fewer and fewer; her eyes could dance through the glyphs, discerning their meanings, and, now that she could understand the complex play of metaphor and even outright punning that the script was based upon, she began to catch subtle shades of meaning she had never guessed at.

  So absorbed was she in her work that she did not think much about the ghost that had attacked her in the hall or the strange forest she continued to dream of so often. Her mind had returned to the earlier question of D’en and her inescapable conclusion that she needed to better understand her own family if she was ever going to discover his fate—and her own possible fate, as well. So in the evenings, when she was done with whatever Ghan asked her to do, she would turn not to geographies of strange places or treatises on ghosts, but instead to Royal Chronicles. She did briefly glance at one rather recent geography that seemed to suggest that while there were no forests such as she dreamed of in the central part of the world, the distant reaches—north, west, east south, and west of the sea—seemed to be all forest, occupied by monsters and subhuman creatures. Under such circumstances, locating her dream forest seemed unlikely at best.

  She had almost as much trouble with her researches into the royal family.

  “The index lists a number of books that are not on the shelves,” she mentioned to Ghan one day.

  “There are many books that need reshelving,” Ghan observed. “You can do that this afternoon.”

  Hezhi did so, but the books she sought were not among them. She brought this to Ghan’s attention.

  “Tell me the titles,” he said, and when she did, his eyes narrowed with anger.

  “The priesthood took those,” he practically snarled.

  “Why?”

  “Let me rather ask you why you want them.”

  “I am a princess, and I have an interest in the royal family.”

  Ghan shook his head. “Ah, no, Princess. You tell me the truth—so I will not punish you—but you omit much, as well. Your interest in the royal family seems very specific. The genealogies we have, and the Book of the Waterborn, which merely details the emperors and their deeds. But these—Manifestations of Godhead in the Waterborn, The
Origin and Uses of Royal Power, The She’teng—these are unusual books.”

  “Is that why the priesthood has them?”

  “The priesthood has them for many reasons, not the least of which I think is the rare child like yourself.” As he said this, he shuddered, and his eyes half closed.

  “Well,” he muttered, sitting down.

  “They Forbid you?” Hezhi whispered.

  “Hush,” Ghan snapped. “Don’t speak of it. And I advise you not to speak of those books anymore, either, to anyone.”

  “I … won’t.”

  Ghan nodded. “The priesthood is singularly unimaginative,” Ghan said, after he seemed recovered. “They take books from me in which puzzles are pieced together, but they leave the original pieces of the puzzle in the library.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ghan sighed. “The whole cloth is no longer here, but the warp, the weft, and the loom may lie around.” Another tremor ran through him, and Hezhi raised her fingers to her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Ghan. We won’t talk about this again.”

  “No, I don’t think we will,” Ghan agreed, breathing heavily.

  In the next few days, Hezhi read some of the texts on the royal family very closely—especially the histories. She turned up a number of rather cryptic references. One manuscript referred to the “River-Blessed,” and at first she was certain that this meant people like her father, to whom the River gave powerful sorcery. Another mentioned a time when no suitable heir could be found who had reached the “age of investment,” so that a vizier had to be appointed to rule until such time as someone reached that age. She discovered that many emperors had been no older than she when they ascended the throne—but none were much younger. On her paper, she wrote these two things down side by side. She returned briefly to a book on the history of the city’s architecture, now that she could really read it In it she found an oblique reference to a large portion of the palace being destroyed, not by flood or fire, but by a “River-Blessed unleashed.” This “River-Blessed” was named: Ta’nganata Yehd Zha’dune. She looked him up in one of the genealogies and discovered that he had been placed on the throne as Chakunge at the age of ten—the youngest emperor ever to rule. The chronicle recorded that he ruled for just over a year. This work did not mention any general destruction of the palace; it merely mentioned that the -nata ghost suffix was added to his name at that time. This particularly intrigued her because it occurred at the very beginning of her own dynasty; Zha’dune was the old pronunciation of Cha’dune.

  On her way home, rather than talking to Tsem—who seemed distracted anyway—she tried to piece together what she had learned. She could see clearly now what Ghan meant in his metaphor of the loom, warp, and weft. In no single book would she find all of the information about any person or event. The book on architecture had failed to note Ta’nganata’s date of ascension and his untimely death, but the genealogy—which contained that fact—neglected the small detail that he had, in that year, destroyed much of the palace. These were threads she could weave together, threads that, she hoped, would form some tapestry with a picture she could comprehend. The loom, she guessed, was herself—no, that was wrong, she would be the weaver, wouldn’t she? No matter. It was just an analogy.

  Much of the evidence seemed to point to her own age—about twelve—as somehow critical in the royal family, at least for men who might be emperor. She suspected that it was somehow connected with her bleeding. If that technically made her a woman, there might be some similar change that made boys into men—though she knew for a fact that men did not bleed, had quite different organs than women. She decided that this would be the object of her research the next day. Whatever this change might be, it occurred at different times for different men, though within the same few years. This also fit with what she knew of women. The story she had reconstructed about Ta’nganata seemed especially important: a boy somehow raised to the role of emperor while still too young; at least that was her reading of it. Even in the genealogy there was a sense, though a very subtle one, that some mistake had been made in choosing him. She connected the fact that he had been the youngest emperor—she felt that this was emphasized in the text—revealed the nature of the mistake. And this boy—this eleven-year-old boy—had somehow destroyed a vast portion of the palace.

  She was certain her father—and probably her mother—could do the same, if they wished. But there was no sane reason to do such a thing. That could be the source of the problem with Ta’-nganata; eleven-year-olds, she knew from experience, were hardly sane. And yet, neither were many people, of any age. And why would someone incapable of suppressing awesome power at the age of eleven suddenly be able to at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen? The center of the riddle was in that question, Hezhi knew. This was the age at which royal children either went down the Hall of Moments to live with their parents or vanished, had the -nata suffix added to their names. Like D’en.

  And inexorably, she was drawn back to the fact that she was now D’en’s age—or, rather, the age he had been when she last saw him. She was also Ta’nganata’s age, for that matter.

  Something wasn’t right when she reached home. Qey met her at the door, twisting a dishrag mercilessly in both hands. Her eyes were red, and Hezhi abruptly realized that Qey had been crying. Next to her, Tsem stiffened. She felt his tension like a brittleness in the air itself.

  “Hezhi,” Qey said softly. “Some people have come to see you. I want you to do what they say, and not be worried.”

  Qey was clearly worried, but Hezhi did not say so. She caught the faint whiff of smoke; it was the same scent that the brooms of the priests gave off. She edged around Qey into the courtyard.

  Four priests stood there, watching her entrance. They all wore cottonwood masks of a kind she had never seen before, blank-eyed, round-mouthed. They were fully robed, as if for some ceremony.

  “Hezhi Yehd Cha’dune,” one of them intoned, in a singsong voice as high and clear as a silver bell. “We have come to administer the rite of Ngess’e’.”

  The name of the rite was in the old tongue, but Hezhi knew it: “body.” She recalled the glyph for “body,” a vessel affixed to a Human Being.

  “What? I have never heard of this rite.”

  “It is one of the rites of passage into adulthood,” the same priest explained. “One does not learn of it until the time comes.”

  “Sh-she has not begun bleeding yet,” Qey stammered. One of the priests turned his masked face toward her rather sharply.

  “That does not matter, whether it is true or not,” he asserted implacably. “The rite may be repeated, if we do it when she is too young. But we must not wait until she is too old,” he said, his smooth voice seeming to imply more than he said. Whatever the implication was, Qey shrank away from it.

  This was it, Hezhi was certain. Events had caught up with her before she could understand them. This was the day she would vanish or join her parents. Tsem knew it, too. He was as immobile as a statue.

  If they take me, she realized, he will kill them. He will kill them all. She remembered Tsem, hugging her to his breast as he bore her away from the demon ghost, pulling her from the water when she was younger, insisting that she would never disappear as D’en had.

  She laid a hand on his arm. “Tsem,” she whispered. “I wish some flowers from the west roof garden, the blue ones and the red ones. Go gather them for me.” The west roof garden was the farthest of their old haunts, above the deserted wing of the old palace. It would take some time for him to go there and back.

  Tsem suppressed a glare—only because he was in front of the priests. “Princess,” he said, voice thick with anguish, “the priests may have need of me …”

  “No. We have no need of you,” the priest contradicted. “You may gather her flowers. The rite is brief but uncomfortable—she may want them to cheer her up afterward.”

  “Yes, Tsem,” she said. “It cheers me to think of you picking flowers.” A
nd alive, she silently added.

  “I’m sure it does, Princess,” Tsem said, trying to sound like his normal, bantering self.

  “Go on, Tsem,” Qey murmured. “I’ll look after Hezhi.”

  Tsem nodded and turned rather quickly. He closed the door behind him.

  “What do I do?” Hezhi asked the priests.

  They motioned her toward her room.

  IV

  The Forest Lord

  The next day the rain was gone, the sky a cobalt dome unalloyed with clouds. Perkar trudged down the talus slope beneath the cave, rubbing his tired eyes. Sleep had not been kind to him; mostly it had eluded him, but when he did drop into its depths, weird frenzied dreams had allowed him no rest. In the clear light, he hoped to sort them out, to find their importance, if any. But his mind was dull, and a chill wind sweeping down from that bluest sky numbed his body, as well.

  This is like autumn, he thought. Autumn, though the season stood midway through summer. Hubara, the North Wind, should be sleeping yet in her faraway mountain. But perhaps another cold wind lived in the mountain Perkar could now see, for certainly the wind came down from there, with its smell of wet cinders and falling leaves. The mountain itself was a wonder, a nearly symmetrical cone, slopes pale in the morning light, crowned with dazzling brightness. Perkar wondered if he should offer something to it, but he didn’t know the Mountain God’s song or even his name. But then he remembered that the Mountain God was also the Forest Lord, Balati.

  So he burned some incense for Balati, though the wind took it in the wrong direction. Then he braided a little fishnet of horsetail reeds and walked down to the stream, the one that had spoken to the Alwat. There he cast the fishnet in, softly sang a little song—a greeting, since he did not know its own song.

  “Thank you for your words,” he told it then. “If you speak to her again, tell her I only do what I must.”