Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “If you want to see someone crucified,” Torrant said pleasantly, “there are less painful ways, like buggering him in the middle of the square with a jeering crowd. But if you’re going to just sit here and peck him to death like a rabid duck, I’d just as soon go get my coffee elsewhere.”

  “No!” Aerk protested, glaring at Dimitri. “He’s just being a pig and a bully. Ignore him and talk to us.”

  “I’m not that interesting,” Torrant dismissed, and Keon snorted coffee out his nose.

  “Brother, that book collection in your apartment alone would make you the most interesting thing to happen in this city for months.” Keon’s frayed black cuffs and untucked shirt were apparently the result of spending his wardrobe money on forbidden books, and Torrant took that as a hopeful sign. Anyone who loved books had an open mind. Keon was a definite ally, as was Aerk, who felt the same way about books, but more particularly about music and songs. The two of them, although clean and groomed for this day, had a look about them, as though looks were secondary to the constant, thoughtful activity of active minds.

  “That library will get you censured and arrested if you aren’t careful,” Dimitri said ominously, and Torrant turned to him with more than a little dislike.

  “Only if you tell Rath about it, right?” He was watching Dimitri carefully, and he caught the panicked flush behind the cavalier shrug. Well, it was obvious he wouldn’t tell Rath now.

  The boys were amusing enough company, Torrant decided after they had brought him to a booth in the marketplace that featured chocolate-laced coffee and sausage pastries. He sat in the morning sun of early summer and drank quite a lot of the coffee, trying to get rid of the fog in his head, and was content, for the most part, to be a friendly observer to their conversation. It was obvious the young men had grown up in this position of leaden responsibility without ever having learned firsthand what it was they were actually doing.

  The only stinking cabbage in the lot was Dimitri, but as much as he tried to share the stench of his disdain, the other young regents were doing their best to keep him in line. Marv’s defense of Djali and Aerk’s defense of Eljean were common moments. Dimitri would bully, and the other boys would defend.

  Although they took turns parrying comments about Jino’s womanizing, Marv’s swordsmanship, Keon’s clothes, and Aerk’s shaggy hair, most of the barbs were aimed at Djali’s clumsy embarrassment and Eljean’s potential to be a Goddess boy. It seemed to be a common understanding that Djali and Eljean were the weakest of the group, the least able to defend themselves, and it was heartening to see the four other men were prepared to take care of them if it was needed. It spoke of good hearts on their parts, even though it was worrisome on behalf of Djali, and especially of Eljean. If a person was constantly afraid of something, he was more likely to fold under pressure, more likely to betray at an inopportune moment. Eljean had that potential; Torrant could see it in his miserable, dreamy determination to simply huddle in and endure Dimitri’s endless taunting.

  Torrant wondered if any of them realized they were allowing one man to demoralize them one nasty, demeaning comment at a time. They’d been doing a good job of fending off his cancerous personality so far, but Torrant was a healer; the best way to deal with a malignant growth was to excise it, permanently.

  “Is the marketplace always this busy?” he asked idly, mulling over what to do about Dimitri and his poisonous tongue. In spite of many gambits into politics, he was trying hard to stay neutral. It wasn’t easy; every time they swore by Dueant’s pride, Torrant wanted to shout to the wind that pride wasn’t what the god stood for. Every time they whored the Goddess, he wanted to weep. It seemed as though every exchange, every veiled taunt Dimitri made to Eljean, every brandish of the unblemished swords at the waists of Marv and Jino, every thoughtful, funny exchange by Keon and Aerk as they felt their way blindly through ideas Torrant himself had learned on his fathers’ knees, grated on him subtly, like pants worn wet to dry.

  “Ugh,” Dimitri grunted. “It’s Goddess day; the ghetto rats are out in filthy force. It’s a good thing we got here early or we might have been in the privy all day with the trots ourselves.”

  “I’m sure the cholera epidemic occurred just to annoy you, Dimitri,” Torrant snapped, out of patience at the careless remark.

  “Well, if they weren’t filthy worshippers, it wouldn’t have happened!” Dimitri responded with blind arrogance, and just like that Torrant became political.

  “It’s their fault they were put into a ghetto and then denied basic sanitation?” he asked, his eyes suddenly sharp and awake.

  “What do you mean, ‘denied?’” Aerk asked at the same time Dimitri said, “It’s their fault they were fit to herd in a corner!”

  Torrant eyed Dimitri with such extreme contempt that the handsome, brown-haired youth backed away. “I’ll answer that when I’m not afraid of killing you for stupidity,” he grunted, not looking to see if Dimitri took him seriously or not.

  He turned to Aerk. “The ghettoes were made especially for the Goddess’s chosen, you know that, right?” At Aerk’s and Keon’s somber nods, he continued. “Well, the government—you people—made them, herded the people in there that fit your criteria, and then cut off all funding to them whatsoever. You tax their food, you tax their market time, you tax any means they have of making a living—and whose roads do you pave with that tax money?”

  “The city’s roads?” Marv asked, confused.

  “Which part of the city?” Torrant replied patiently. “Because it’s not their part. Every part of the city is paved, and every part of the city has sewage culverts installed, except the Goddess ghetto. That leaves two parts of the city for the shite to go, me boyos, and one of them is dug into a raised concrete trench on higher ground than most of the rest of the city, so it’s right out. Besides, you won’t let them drink out of it anyway. No, remember? The only place the ghetto can drink is from the wells dug in the ghetto. The wells that are running with the whole of the city’s shite.”

  “We caused the cholera epidemics?” Keon asked, his shocked hush carrying over the bustle of the marketplace.

  “Oh come on, Keon,” Dimitri mocked, but Keon cut him off with a hand.

  “Don’t you ever look out your windows, Dimitri? I do. I watched body carts going from house to house three years ago.” His voice grew a little dusty, like dry earth. “There were tiny bodies being thrown into them. I… I heard the bills being passed, the ones telling us which parts of the city were being paved, and it never occurred to me….”

  “See?” Dimitri challenged, even as Keon and Aerk were looking at each other in shocked horror. Marv and Jino were watching the exchange thoughtfully, trying to decide if the outcome was worth the emotional investment. “It’s just part of his plan of vengeance on Rath. He saw a boogeyman when his old playmates turned on his family, and now he’s here to blame our king!”

  Torrant laughed without any humor at all. The last two days simply fell out of the sky, past the comforting pillow of chocolate and coffee, landing on his shoulders and crushing him to the ground. With eyes that were unutterably weary, he turned to Dimitri and cut through all pretense in a few sentences.

  “I know I wasn’t told about the early session for a reason,” he said, his usually eloquent voice flat and still. “And although I’m grateful you chose to give me a warning, I’m pretty sure you all arrived at my doorstep just to see if I was worth the novelty. I hope I’ve met your expectations.” He tilted his head back, drained his hot chocolate, and stood deliberately, aware he had their attention as completely as the earth had the sun’s.

  “Let’s clear something up right now—if I had been bred for vengeance, I would have found it.” Planting his hands squarely on the wooden trestle table, he leaned forward, speaking quietly but with intensity. “I took my sister and my brother-of-the-heart over Hammer Pass in the dead of winter when I was fourteen years old. The only thing that’s kept me from sneaking into this city and s
litting Rath’s throat while he slept has been the knowledge that nothing would change. You people would make a show of how awful it was that someone would do such a thing, and then you’d go back to perpetrating his policies. He has enough true believers around him now that this could happen, and my people and my sister’s people would be just as bollixed as they were when we were children and our family was slaughtered practically before our eyes.”

  They all just looked at him, seven fresh-faced, young men, six innocent sets of eyes, listening in breathless anticipation of what he would reveal next. He’d better make it good.

  “Vengeance is fleeting,” he told them, believing it. “Vengeance is four beats of the heart as the blood gushes to the floor. Vengeance is a body dropping in the woods. Vengeance won’t keep my family safe. It won’t keep my sister from being raped in an alleyway. It won’t keep the children of our future from being locked in their school, where it should be safe, and burned alive by the people you’ve been paying with your naïveté. Vengeance is not what I came for.”

  He let the silence throb, waiting for them to ask the question.

  “What did you come for?” Djali asked tentatively, crossing his arms in front of his chest and bobbing his moon face convulsively away from Torrant’s intensity. Always for Djali there was that painful hesitation, and in spite of the weighted cushion of silence around the young men, Torrant couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like to have an opinion in the house of Rath.

  “He’s going to tell you so you can go bleat to your daddy?” Dimitri snapped, obviously trying to shake the heaviness of Ellyot Moon’s steely words.

  “Djali’s not the one who would bleat to his father, and we all know it, don’t we, Dimitri?” Torrant responded evenly.

  Dimitri flinched, and a twitch of a cheek too thin to be a smile crossed his handsome features.

  Torrant nodded as though he had spoken. “So since I know you’re going to go report this morning to whoever cares to listen, I’ll spell it out in careful letters, with no big words. I didn’t come for vengeance. What I came for is much more frightening and much more difficult to achieve. I came for change.”

  The sounds of the vendors, the customers, and the calling children faded completely into the background as the young men all regarded him, digesting his words like cold porridge. The silence was only more pronounced as the bell chimed the half-hour before the convocation.

  Torrant swallowed, not as tired as he had been, and stepped back into a courteous little bow. “Now, if Djali can point me to his father’s tailor, I’d like to settle up for some serious kindness before I meet you all back at the Regents’ Hall.”

  “It’s right over there, down that block and on the right,” Djali said in a dazed voice, fumbling his coffee as he did another head-bob away from Torrant’s eyes. Torrant bowed again.

  “Wait, Ellyot…,” Aerk said uncertainly, and Torrant gave him a small smile. Aerk had, after all, been listening. “Did they really lock the doors at Triannon and burn it down?”

  “Oh yes,” Torrant assured him.

  “What were you doing to stop them?” Keon asked seriously.

  Torrant grimaced, the memory still too fresh to wash over with strength. “I was fighting with two old professors and a group of schoolboys who had never fought without a tipped sword.”

  “Against a company of Clough soldiers?” Dimitri scoffed. “However did you escape?

  Torrant’s face closed down into a mask so absolute it could only be covering pain. “With my hands dripping in treason,” he said faintly. “Now, if you will excuse me?”

  This time they let him go.

  THE TAILOR was surprised to see him and even more surprised at the gratitude.

  “I was just doing my job!” he exclaimed, taking twice the tip Djali had suggested from Torrant’s hands nonetheless.

  “Your job has nothing to do with keeping me from looking foolish and yet you did it anyway. Triane’s best frock, my friend, having the first cloak done last night alone was worth twice that tip!”

  But to his dismay, Coryal’s face blanched white, and the look of shock was enough to tie Torrant’s tongue up in his mouth with fierce knots. “Sir, young sir…. Don’t spill that name here. Please, for my sake, not in my house….”

  Torrant closed his eyes and mentally slapped himself. “My apologies,” he said, bowing with full sincerity. “I had no intention of causing offense. In my home, Triane’s name is always welcome. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.”

  The tailor nodded, then closed his eyes and swallowed. “Your home? Eiran, right? That’s how the gossip runs.”

  Torrant nodded and smiled, grateful the hunched and hunted look had lifted.

  “Do they really… love her children, there in Eiran?” he asked with a terrible wistfulness in his voice.

  “Yes,” Torrant told him, thinking of the Beltanes he’d attended, with the handfasts and the dancing and the township spreading its arms to all the citizens, celebrating their humanity under the spring sun.

  Suddenly the tailor’s voice dropped, and he rabbitted a glance out his window, his entire posture screaming I want this kept private! “I don’t know if you want to know this or not, young Moon, but I was in the consort’s rooms this morning, and he was furious. It seems he’d ordered some sort of purge in the ghetto last night, and the results were three dead guards and an entire company locked up in their own manacles. He doesn’t have many to send out again tonight—too many injuries—but he’s pacing the carpet, trying to order the secretary general to pull more troops from the outside of the city to take care of this menace.”

  Torrant nodded, trying to keep his face neutral. This was good to know, even if all it told him was that he might get some sleep this night. “Does this menace have a name?” he asked, curious.

  “No, and it’s making them both rabid. It seems there’re other crimes that have the same description—a terrible creature, half man, half beast, who can fight like the tides at eclipse or the winds in the blizzard season, and no one has a clue.”

  Torrant nodded and searched the tailor’s face for some signs of dissembling. “Why have you not left the city?” he asked gently. He wasn’t sure what the man’s affiliation with the Goddess was, whether he dyed his hair to cover a white streak or monitored his appetites so no one knew his choice of bedmates, but he was obviously as afraid of being seen for who he really was as he was desperate to have some hope of liberation.

  “My… my friend. He’s in the ghettoes. I can’t leave him….” The man grimaced, and there was the answer to the question Torrant hadn’t asked.

  “Well, the next time you meet your friend, or hear Rath asking for a name, you give them one, right?”

  “Yes, young Sir Moon?” Coryal asked, his voice neutral.

  “You tell them Triane’s Son is here, and he’s not leaving until his brethren are safe.”

  Hope, terrible and bright, sparkled from the man’s eyes. “Triane’s Son?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” Torrant nodded. “Thank you again for the cloak.”

  With a sniff and a stiffened spine, the tailor responded with pride. “I’ll have that next item up to your room before the session is out,” he said with a bow, and Torrant rewarded him with a smile as he left.

  AERK AND his friends were the most senior of the junior regents, but they were still juniors. They didn’t get to sit on the regents’ floor, but sat instead at the balcony and watched with some fascination as the secretary general tried unsuccessfully to grill Ellyot Moon like a trout on the floor of the Regents’ Hall.

  “Are you expecting us to believe that a serving woman risked her life to give you a chance to escape?” The contempt dripping from General Rishard’s face almost ate holes through the floor.

  “She loved us.” Ellyot’s voice was fierce but composed. “She would have done anything to help my sis—Yarri and me live.”

  That was his one inconsistency, Aerk mulled. In an unhe
ard-of, nine-hour session that featured questions both stupid and painful, he had stumbled exactly three times. Each time had been over the words “my sister.” Aerk was starting to wonder if the poor girl hadn’t died in Triannon after all. Something was definitely amiss, although looking at his fellows, Aerk thought he might be the only one to notice it. Other than that, Ellyot didn’t seem to be capable of sweating.

  “She ‘loved’ you? She was a Goddess-whoring, serving wen—”

  “She was a mother to us all!” Ellyot snarled. The flesh drew back from his handsome features and that sculpted upper lip curled up from his teeth in a way that was almost feral. “If you want to ask a pertinent question, ask me how it felt to come back to the house to see the two women who had mothered me since babyhood with their skirts over their waists and blood on their thighs because your men couldn’t keep their pricks in their pants. Otherwise, you don’t speak of her!”

  The secretary general—in fact, all of the Regents’ Hall—was struck silent. If Ellyot Moon was going to show his temper, that was the line with which to cut loose. So much of their culture was built upon celibacy and restraint, so to actually speak of rape, and a rape perpetrated by the people who were supposed to be protecting them, in public, was sure to get the attention of even the most junior adjunct in the room.

  “We… well.” The secretary general stumbled on his words and wiped his suddenly sweating brow. He risked a ferret’s glance at the consort, whose face had gone so totally blank with shock that he was effectively left on his own. “We don’t speak of such things here,” he said at last, thinly. “This is a place for gentlemen.”

  “If you were truly gentlemen, you wouldn’t have sanctioned such a thing,” Ellyot returned, his eyes level and unflinching.

  Aerk and Keon sucked their breath through their teeth in tandem. Marv and Jino leaned so far over the wrought iron railing that it was a wonder they didn’t topple over. Eljean and Djali whistled lowly, and as the silence rang through the hall like a bell, they all met each other’s eyes.