City of Death

by Laurence Yep

  “Dionysus sounds like a dockworker on payday,” Koko observed. “It’s always a good idea to give one of them a wide berth.”

  Lady Sudarshane shook her head. “You don’t understand. He filled normal women with such ecstasy that they lost all control and did terrible things. Maenads, they were called, and they would chase down wild animals, tear them apart, and devour them raw. Once, under Dionysus’s spell, a queen killed and ate her own son.”

  “Is he still around?” Leech asked with a shiver.

  Lord Tsirauñe scratched his throat. “I’ve always thought they were just traveler’s tales, but one man claimed to have found the prints of a giant tiger like the one that He rides.”

  “And I met a man once,” Kat said in a hushed voice, “who said he’d seen the lights of His maenads flitting across the hills at night. They were calling something like this.” She threw back her head and made a ghostly whisper from the back of her throat. “‘Euoi. Euoi.’ He left everything—camel, tent, trade goods—and ran for his life.”

  Cautiously, Scirye retreated several steps. She hoped she hadn’t done anything to annoy him.

  Only Māka remained by the statue. “Roland’s fools have just condemned themselves,” she said as somber as a judge delivering a death sentence. “The land will rise up against them now.” She placed a palm upon the statue as she gazed up into Dionysus’s blank eyes. “But as you carry out your vengeance, lord, please also remember the kindness that Lady Scirye did you.”

  By common consent, they made camp farther along the trail, out of sight of the statue. The walls of snow on either side gave them shelter from the fierce winds of the pass, but not the keening from the passages of the dead eyrie. No one, not even Koko, felt much like talking and they turned in after a quick meal.

  All too soon, though, Scirye felt Wali shaking her shoulder.

  “It’s midnight, lady. Time for you to take my place at keeping watch,” whispered the Pippal.

  Scirye became aware of herself lying on a blanket on the ground with her arms around her griffin and his foreleg around her. Carefully, she tried to disentangle herself, but Kles woke up anyway.

  “Go back to sleep, Kles,” she whispered as she sat up.

  “I’m awake anyway,” Kles said. His beak clacked in a big yawn.

  As Wali lay down, Scirye said to Kles, “You don’t have to take my turn with me. After all, you don’t expect me to stay up when you do it.”

  The griffin crept up her arm to her shoulder. “I’ll make sure you keep awake.” His paws began to groom her. “And your hair’s in a frightful mess again.”

  Scirye wrapped her blanket around them, submitting to the soothing rhythm of his claws. It wasn’t long before she noticed that his paws slowed and then stopped all together. With a smile, she gently lowered the snoring griffin onto her lap.

  As Scirye listened to the others sleeping, she suddenly felt very protective of them. They trusted her while they were in such a helpless state. Well, she wouldn’t let them down.

  She was startled by a puff of warm, moist air on the back of her neck and jerked around. A tiger as big as a bull stared down at her. Tilting on the tiger’s head—almost hanging from one ear, in fact—was an ivy wreath. The tiger’s large eyes glowed like green coals as they regarded her.

  She opened her mouth to warn the others, but the tiger’s rider leaned forward so that his chest rested against the tiger’s great head. He wore a tunic of red and gold silk, cut in the style of the antique costumes that the Kushan men had worn when the exhibit had opened at the museum in San Francisco. Small gold pendants shaped like clusters of grapes dangled from his curly hair.

  The rider’s face was the same as the statue’s, but every strand, every detail of the face, the very pores of his perfect skin, seemed sharply etched while everything around him seemed blurred in comparison, as if Dionysus were the most real thing here, far realer than his statue or Scirye or any other living creature.

  Scirye couldn’t move. All she could do was gaze upward into eyes that glittered like sparks whirling above a bonfire with wild and energetic and unpredictable joy.

  Scirye was so frightened that her voice came out as a raspy whisper. “Wh-what do you want, l-l-lord?”

  Dionysus smiled as if the two of them were sharing a private joke and then he beckoned to her.

  Suddenly she was no longer in the pass but on a hillside on an autumn night among rows of vines climbing up stakes, their clusters of ripe, round grapes silvered by the moonlight. Leaves rustled everywhere, making a sound of distant surf, and the air was filled with a heady, sweet smell of ripening fruit.

  And she was throwing herself recklessly through the grape vines in a headlong plunge down a hill, feet pounding the earth as if it were a giant drum. Girls and women were singing and laughing all around her, laurel wreaths entwined in their hair in time to the beating of tambourines and jingling sistra and notes of reed pipes.

  Though she did not recognize the words of the song, she cried out the chorus as loudly as everyone else, “Euoi! Euoi!” The syllables were like drops of honey to her tongue. The earth itself pumped its energy into her each time the soles of her bare feet pattered against the dirt so that she felt like she could dance forever.

  Were these the maenads her mother had warned her about? But these were no wild hunters. These were people who were enjoying being alive.

  “Euoi!” Scirye said.

  “What did you say, lady?” Kles asked as if from faraway.

  Scirye felt as if she had forgotten something important that she had to do. And her hand burned as if she were holding a red-hot coal.

  “Euoi-euoi-euoi!” The singing and the music became louder and more frantic, and caught up in the frenetic rhythm, Scirye told herself that the errand could wait for tomorrow. Right now, she was enjoying herself too much.

  “Lady?” Kles called again. She felt something light, soft blows on her chin like dry raindrops.

  And suddenly Scirye remembered the arrows.

  She sat up, panting to see that her griffin had reared up from her lap and was using his paws to pat either side of her jaw. The mark on her hand shone with a fierce light.

  Heart still pounding, she looked about. She was no longer dancing through the autumn hills but was once more sitting in a wintry mountain pass.

  Suddenly she felt so empty, so dead inside—gone was the energy and the joy and the laughter. And she began to cry.

  Kles surged up to her shoulder so he could stroke her head and coo to her as if she were a frightened hatchling. “Sa, sa, it’s all right, lady. Your Kles is here.”

  She leaned her forehead against his as she did when she was confessing her innermost secrets. “I had a dream. No, I met Dionysus and joined His maenads. And it was so wonderful.” Even now, she felt an itch in her legs that she could only satisfy by dancing.

  “Perhaps He was inviting you to join Him because you tried to fix His statue,” Kles suggested as he wiped her tears away with the soft back of his paw.

  She raised a hand and pressed him closer. “If you hadn’t woken me when you did, maybe I would have gone too deep into that dream and never have come back.” Even now, she felt regret that the griffin had roused her.

  “I’m beginning to think that Dionysus isn’t as cruel as I thought,” Kles said. “The problem is that He doesn’t understand humans very well, so He can’t see that some of His good deeds can harm mere mortals.”

  She thought of the maenads. At least Nanaia had never filled her with such a hunger as Dionysus had. “So maybe it’s better if the goddess doesn’t change things for me. I’ve got to do it myself.”

  “There’s a fine line between helping and interfering,” the griffin observed. “Perhaps this is why the goddess gives you hints rather than getting involved directly,” Kles said. “She’s so powerful that when she came to you in a vision, just that slight bit of Her knocked you out for an hour. If she were to appear right now to tell you what to do—.” />
  “I might go into a coma for years and years,” Scirye said. “Or maybe I wouldn’t wake up at all.” The new insight didn’t erase all the frustration she felt, but at least it helped.

  “Bayang warned you about getting mixed up with gods and goddesses,” Kles reminded her. “Speaking of which, it’s her turn to keep watch.”

  When they woke Bayang, Scirye told her what she had seen and heard.

  Bayang gazed at her a moment, the golden orbs of her pupils almost gleaming. No human had such eyes, only a dragon.

  “Maybe I’ll take the rest of the watches,” Bayang said. “Dionysus holds no sway over dragons.”

  * * *

  Scirye did not dream again of the maenads and she felt a little sad when she woke up the next morning. Apparently, you could not expect more than one invitation from Dionysus to join the dance, and she had missed her chance.

  But as she sniffed the cold air, she smelled the sweet, heady scents of her dream, and she sat up. The dragon was lying coiled in the snow, casually popping grapes into her mouth from a basket as she gazed at the sleeping Leech. She’d been doing that a lot since Leech had become distracted, as if she were trying to figure out what was happening inside their friend’s mind.

  “Where did you get grapes in winter?” Scirye gasped.

  Bayang held a grape up between her claws. “I was keeping watch and as I turned my head—poof!—the basket was right next to you.”

  Scirye plucked a grape from the cluster. It was about the size of her thumb and greenish gold. When she bit into it, her mouth was flooded with a golden warmth like a summer sun. Maybe this was Dionysus’s way of encouraging her—a sort of consolation prize.

  She watched Kles take a grape between his paws and begin to nibble it enthusiastically. “I’ve never tasted anything this good,” he said.

  Bayang held a claw up to her muzzle. “Listen. What do you hear?”

  Scirye’s ears strained in the hopes of catching the sound of drums and reed pipes again, but it was silent. The air was still and the pass was no longer wailing.

  “I don’t hear anything. The winds have died down. Do you think Dionysus calmed the winds for us?” Kles asked.

  Scirye wrapped her arms around her griffin as if he were an anchor. “I think He did. He’s helping us along and not bearing any grudges because I didn’t join His maenads.”

  “I’d better wake up everyone else, or I’ll eat all the grapes,” Bayang said and began rousing the rest of the company.

  Scirye had to agree. It was hard to stop with just one.

  When they were all awake, Scirye told the others about what had happened last night.

  Kat nodded when she finished. “Dionysus has blessed you—and us.”

  But Māka was actually annoyed. “He had no right to claim you because you belong to Nanaia.”

  “You might want to keep your voice down,” Tute warned.

  “A follower of the True Path must scold even a god when he misbehaves,” Māka said indignantly as she got to her feet.

  Scirye tried to pull her friend back down. “I think He was offering me a gift, and I was free to turn it down.”

  Māka, though, was determined to protect Scirye. Māka balled her hands into fists and defiantly faced the direction of Dionysus’s statue. “Scirye has been chosen by Nanaia already,” she scolded. “She cannot be yours.”

  Koko cringed as her voice echoed from the frozen walls. “Now you’ve done it.”

  No one moved. No one said anything. They hardly dared to breathe as they waited for hordes of vengeful maenads to attack.

  When nothing happened after several minutes, Māka began to look sheepish. Scirye reached up and tugged at her sleeve. “Thanks for defending me, but why don’t you sit down and enjoy the god’s gift?”

  Koko helped himself to a handful of grapes. “Don’t scare me like that. I almost lost my appetite.”

  But as each of the Pippalanta took their share, they dipped their heads respectfully first to Dionysus and then to Scirye, much to her surprise and discomfort. Even her parents regarded her thoughtfully as they sampled the grapes.

  Back in the palace, I resented that they treated me like a little girl, Scirye thought sadly. Now I wish they would. But as she ate another grape, she felt a new energy wash away any sadness. Anything, even getting the arrows, seemed possible this morning.

  She hoped so.

  48

  Bayang

  Refreshed, they soared through the pass with all the ease of a holiday flight. And as they neared the end of Dionysus’s pass, Scirye turned around and called behind them, “Thank you.”

  As they left the pass, the winds became strong again as they roared up the steep slope. Angling downward, Wali’s griffin bobbed up and down and swayed from side to side as if drunk. Even so, the Pippal and her griffin remained as calm as if they were out for just a little exercise.

  Though Bayang would usually have preferred to be flying on her own, she was glad to leave it to Wali right now. Her body still ached from the torture at the villa, and though she had slept well, she would still need many more hours of rest to make up for what she had lost. Even a dragon’s iron constitution had its limits.

  As they descended, they paralleled the frozen waterfall that looked like a tower of ice had fallen on the slope. Fringes of icicles decorated the sides, and judging by the waterfall’s width, the river must be impressive in the spring thaw.

  Snow lay in crevices and on ledges in cottony lumps as if the mountains had just been pulled from a giant box and the packing was still clinging to it. Here and there a scrawny, leafless tree twisted out of some crack in the rock as it struggled to survive.

  The base of the mountain ridge thrust out in a series of wider shelves that descended to the foothills below.

  The next ridge was lower than the pass, but steepness of its barren slopes gave them an impression of greater height. Wingless because of her injuries, Bayang was glad she was riding a griffin rather than trying to climb the sheer sides with just her paws. She could just make out the snowy road that snaked up the ridge and a wrecked truck lying off to the side. It would be amazing if Roland got any of his vehicles through.

  But it was Leech who dominated her gloomy thoughts. The clever hatchling had obviously been arguing not only with Bayang but with Lee No Cha as well. That meant that Leech was still in control of his mind and body and not the monster Lee. But how long could the human hatchling hold out against a strong-willed killer like Lee?

  Wait. Leech had been trying to get me to look at things as a human, not as a dragon. She owed that much at least to the hatchling who had saved her life.

  It would not have been easy for most dragons whose lives were bound by tradition, but as an assassin, she had taken pride in her ability to disguise herself in posture, thought, words, and actions as well as in costume. To pull that off, she’d learned how to cast off her dragonness and think like the character she wanted to become.

  So she tried to see things through the eyes of a human almost newly hatched facing a dragon prince in all his righteous indignation—the large, strong body; the sharp claws and fangs. She would have used her most powerful weapon to smash the threat too.

  And afterward a hatchling’s primary concern would be avoiding his or her parents’ anger and might not be aware of what other dragons would say if he or she mutilated the corpse.

  At least Bayang had been able to grow up and become a warrior who never again had to feel so afraid and helpless. The Lee that was trapped inside Leech had remained that terrified hatchling whose inexperienced mind believed violence was the answer to any threat.

  She remembered how frightened and angry she had been during Badik’s invasion. What if her mind had remained forever locked as that scared hatchling, never to mature, never to escape?

  Shame washed over her. And what if Lee had been awake in some of the reincarnations when Bayang had come? She shut her eyes in shame as she remembered the face of one terrifi
ed hatchling after another—two hatchlings if Lee had also roused. No wonder he thought she was the monster instead of him.

  She glanced at Leech who was clinging to a Pippal on her griffin. If Bayang could not convince Lee that he was safe, he could again become a deadly threat to dragon-kind.

  Could she allow that to happen? Or could she break her promise to Leech? Either way, the dragons and Lee would be trapped in the ancient cycle of killing or being killed. The madness had been going on for centuries, acquiring the ponderous weight of tradition so that no one looked for another solution.

  Until now.

  There had to be another way to end this craziness. But what?

  49

  Scirye

  They passed over one desolate ridge after another until, on the afternoon of the fifth day, they reached the inmost circle of foothills with level after level of terraces cut into the sides. Scirye could see the outlines of walls under the snow like someone had drawn the parts of a jigsaw puzzle with vanilla icing on a giant white cake.

  Her father signaled to the other riders to fly lower so sentries would have a harder time seeing them, but not so low as to raise a curtain of snow with the downdraft of the griffins’ wingbeats. They finally landed upon a broad ledge upon the western side of a hill.

  When Scirye slid off, she heard an odd clack beneath her boots. With her foot, she scraped away the snow and dirt to reveal bits of brown and yellow tile that formed the head of a mosaic lion.

  She glanced around until she saw the odd bumps that must have marked a wall. “I think we’re on what’s left of a house.”

  Leech pointed up the slope to the hilltop, which had split down the middle so that the two halves stuck up like horns. “Did that happen in the battle?”

  “Probably,” Kles said, fluttering nearby. “Since there were no survivors from either side, we don’t know what really happened, but it must have been powerful magic unleashed that day.”

  “Well, for once no one can blame that on me,” Koko said, waving a paw at the destruction.