“A bit more intimidating than a stack of books, eh?” he said.
Ignoring Oriole, I hauled myself onto Wheat’s back and gripped the reins. The horse snorted, tossed his head, and started walking of his own accord. My hands curled desperately around the reins and saddle horn and I tried not to think of falling.
“Relax!” Oriole said. “Stiff as you’re sitting it’s no wonder he wants nothing to do with you.”
“How am I supposed to relax when he squirms like this?”
“Take a deep breath and let him walk,” Oriole said. “Just for a start, until you get used to being up there.”
Feeling utterly helpless, I loosened my grip. Wheat took a few more steps, but soon settled into place. He stood there, blowing through his nostrils and eyeing the grass, pretending as though I weren’t sitting on his back.
“Now try to stay up there without getting all tense,” Oriole said. He took the lead of Wheat’s reins and guided the gelding along at a slow walk. He spoke gently to the horse and reminded me from time to time to straighten my back, loosen my muscles, and stop worrying so much. Less than an hour had passed when my legs and lower back began to ache.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Let me down.”
“Giving up already?” Oriole said.
“Hand Usher was only joking.”
“Was he? I can never tell when that man means what he says.”
“Why would he want me to learn horseback riding?”
“How should I know? You’re his apprentice. Maybe he thinks you’ll be going to war soon.”
“Or it’s a joke.”
Oriole grinned up at me. “If I were you, I wouldn’t take that chance.”
I hated to admit it, but Oriole was right. Whatever Hand Usher’s reasons, this was the task he had given me. If I went against his wishes…I flexed my left hand and tried not to think of his second, foreboding warning on the day he had marked me.
Wheat carried me in circles until the sun began to set. Oriole helped me down and suppressed a laugh when I groaned.
“You laugh at a Hand of the Emperor?” I snapped at him, fighting the need to massage the stiffness from my thighs. “Any failure of mine reflects upon you, you realize. Hand Usher might have some right to waste my time, but you do not."
He narrowed his sharp eyes at me.
“Very well,,” he said. “I’ll take care of Wheat, if you feel brushing down your horse is beneath the dignity of your station.”
I felt the sting in his words, but had no desire to further my humiliation by trading barbs with the spoiled, idiot son of a nobleman. I turned to go.
“And you may want a pillow for your seat at dinner,” he called after me.
I glared at him, swallowed a cutting retort, and hobbled away..
* * *
After two weeks I was fed up. What little progress I was making hardly seemed worth the suffering. I could guide Wheat at a walk but tensed up as soon as the gelding began to trot. I’d fallen at least once a day, and Oriole seemed to find it impossible to help me to my feet without some sarcastic quip.
“Cheer up, Hand Alder,” he said on one such occasion, while I hauled myself back into the saddle. “There is no shame in tumbling from your horse. True, a Girzan five year old could outride you, but you would have them well in hand when the time came for a poetry contest.”
“Better fingers calloused by a writing brush than an ass calloused by the saddle,” I shot back. “They do not consider one's ability to ride a horse during the imperial examinations.”
“And is that the measure of something's worth?” Oriole said, voice suddenly cold. “Whether or not it is part of the exams?”
He spoke as though I had offended him. Which only stoked my anger. He had subjected me--his elder brother by way of my station, in the grand hierarchy of Empire--to near constant mockery. That he should take offense at my treating him in kind, as though he were deserving of more respect and dignity than I, was not only absurd, but the final and most egregious of his offenses.
I endured the rest of the lesson in silence, letting my anger burn down to hard, fierce coals. He said little, only pointing out a few small flaws in my posture, or the position of my feet in the stirrups, or my handling of the reins. Seeming to pick at every small flaw in my riding, as though trying to prove his superiority. When we had finished I dismounted and tossed him the reins.
“Brush down the horse for me,” I said. “I have business with Hand Usher.”
He stared at the reins in his hand. “You'll have to learn how to care for a mount sooner or later.”
“Not today,” I said, and turned to leave, muttering under my breath. “And not from you.”
I sought out Hand Usher and found him sipping sorghum wine and practising calligraphy. Dozens of sheets of rice paper littered his room. He had written the same logogram on each one--an archaic form of the word horse, in a sweeping, loose style.
He looked up when I entered the room and bade me sit across from him. I had to move a stack of pages to find the seat cushion.
“How go your lessons with Oriole?” he said.
Without waiting for me to answer he dipped his brush and pressed it to a fresh sheet, then with a single, smooth motion scrawled the logogram he had been practising. He held the sheet up to the light of his lamp, grimaced, and tossed it aside.
“Oriole and I do not get along,” I said, swallowing the words intolerable and lout. “I think my time learning horsemanship would be more productive with a different instructor.”
“More productive, or more pleasant?” Hand Usher said, while reaching for another sheet of paper.
“If my training were more pleasant,” I said, “I might be able to better focus and learn more quickly, instead of being distracted by constant annoyances.”
“Hmm.” Hand Usher selected a sheet and spread it between two slate paperweights. “Who would you prefer?”
“The governor has a Girzan nomad to train his sons.”
“Ah, yes, Yul Pekora.” The paper crinkled as Hand Usher smoothed it flat. He reached for his brush. “The cavalry commander for the province of Nayen. Doesn’t it seem indulgent to waste the commander’s time?”
I wanted to point to the piled sheets around me to show that Hand Usher seemed to take no issue with wasted time. I kept my hand in my lap. He pressed brush to paper, wrote the logogram, and discarded it as swiftly as the last.
“Nevertheless,” I said. “Oriole and I do not get along.”
“And you fault Oriole with this?” Hand Usher said, smoothing yet another sheet of paper.
“Of course I do!” I snapped. “He shows me nothing but contempt.”
“And what do you show him?”
Hand Usher wrote the logogram, set his brush aside, and held the sheet up to the light. I had no answer for his question. Thinking back, I had been cold and aloof with Oriole. But could anyone fault me? He had begun our interaction with open mockery.
“Do you know why handwriting is considered as part of the imperial examination?” Hand Usher said, still studying his scrawled horse.
“It reflects the character of the writer,” I said.
“It reflects temperament,” Hand Usher corrected me. “To quote the sage Rushes-in-Water, ‘The energy present in the body and the mind in the moment of writing is reflected in the brush stroke.’ By a close examination of a handwriting sample--and a proper understanding of the context in which that writing sample was composed--one can deduce a great deal about the personality and attitudes of an individual. People are far worse at regulating their handwriting than they are their facial expressions, tone of voice, and even body language. Yet masterful calligraphers learn such deft control of the brush that they can convey whatever temperament they wish. For instance, I have been trying to capture your particular stew of anxieties in this logogram for horse.”
He offered the sheet to me. To my eye, the lines were just the same as the others he had drawn. They were loose and q
uick and did not read to me like anxiety at all. Certainly, I saw nothing in that horse that reflected what I felt inside.
Hand Usher snapped the sheet back. “Pfa! It’s still not right.” He tossed it aside and reached for another. “It must be perfect, you understand.”
“How was it flawed?” I said, bewildered and grasping for whatever lesson Hand Usher was trying to teach.
“Precisely!” Hand Usher dipped his brush. “Like all the others, technically proficient in every way. But what it lacks is a certain unspeakable quality that hangs about you, Alder. The sense that your outward excellence hides some secret flaw. The guardedness which makes you so boring to drink with.” He wrote another logogram, then threw up his hands in frustration. “This horse? I could drink with this horse and enjoy myself thoroughly.”
I was already on edge, and his sudden talk of secrets nearly made me panic. What did Hand Usher suspect my hidden flaw might be?
“If I have disappointed you in some way--”
“You are careful, Alder, and that is commendable,” Hand Usher said. “But you must also be human. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to drink more and think less if I’m ever going to get this calligraphy right.”
I retreated, conscious of my every gesture and expression and how they might be interpreted. In the darkness and privacy of my room I collapsed to the bed. I flexed my right hand, feeling the tug of flesh against old scars.
From our first interaction Hand Usher had been toying with me. The tale of the pollical cat had cut through to the heart of my anxieties, and he had told it after knowing me for a smattering of minutes. I could not help but perceive everything he said or did or asked of me as a series of esoteric tests steeped in obtuse metaphors. But while the pollical cat had been clear to me as water, his insistence on my learning horsemanship from Oriole was opaque as stone.
A careful sifting of his words yielded no insight. Maybe something to do with sorcery? All of this had sprung from my finally asking to learn it. But I knew imperial sorcery only by the wake it left in the world, not nearly well enough to decipher whatever coded message Hand Usher meant for me.
I recalled the night when I had overstepped the bounds of my grandmother’s teaching and been left a twisted wreck of flesh and bone. I was older now. I had some experience with magic. Enough, I hoped, to touch this new power without it overwhelming me.
The tetragram on my left palm was familiar to be by now. Four logograms arranged into a square: axe, scroll, crown, and scale, all bounded by a thick wall--together the Emperor’s never-changing name. They seemed written in silver thread, and magic ever rushed beneath them. Cautiously, I dipped into that river of magic and hoped for a flash of insight.
It swept through me. Potent but constrained. As though someone had come before me and carved channels in stone through which magic now flowed like mercury. It filled the channels and battered at the floodgates, threatening to overflow.
With a gasp I withdrew. Magic drained out of me and left me with the feeling of a promise unkept. A feeling that slowly faded and left new understanding in its wake.
I reached again for sorcery. It rushed in, threatening again to overflow the channels in stone. Yet it did not. The channels contained it, and as I held that power, I saw that it was no threat to me.
Magic without pact or canon was wild and unwieldy. On that dark night so many years ago, it had overwhelmed me the moment I reached for it. The scars my grandmother had carved into my right hand provided a measure of control, but never enough to make me feel safe reaching for power.
Witchcraft, I now saw, was a loose bargain with an untamed power. Like a wolf that follows at the heels of a hunter, docile so long as it is regularly fed. Sorcery was mastery. Domestication. It bound magic with bit, bridle, and reins.
I let power drain out of me, this time with a feeling of satisfaction. This, then, was the purpose of my learning horsemanship, to understand that--though powerful--sorcery was constrained, and therefore safe.
Though I felt pleased with myself for solving Hand Usher's puzzle, the answer left me as disappointed as I had felt on the day my grandmother gave me my witch-marks. Imperial sorcery was just as constrained as witchcraft, if not more so. Yet where else in the world could I learn anything of magic?
Surely the Emperor himself had mastered it in the way I sought, and used that mastery to forge his Empire. There had to be clues in the imperial canon, however deeply buried, that could guide me back to that limitless, freeing, terrifying power I had once wielded. I would learn imperial sorcery, with all its constraints, and apply what I could to witchcraft. And in so doing begin to build my own theory of magic, to make my own path through the world.
But why had Hand Usher wanted me to learn all of this from Oriole? And what had he meant when he said that I needed to learn how to be human?
It occurred to me then that some lessons might be best delivered bluntly, rather than couched in metaphor.
Chapter Nine
Two Cups and a Game of Stones
The central house where the governor and his family lived was an estate-within-the-estate, a four-walled courtyard house in the classical Sienese style. At all hours two of the governor’s household guard flanked the gate that separated this inner courtyard from the rest of the garden. The guards watched my approach with hard eyes made flinty by the flickering lamplight and the steep brims of their helmets.
“I’m to meet with Master Oriole,” I said, and offered one of the two bottles I had brought with me. “When I went to fetch these, I thought of what a shame it is that we young men can spend our evening drinking, when you fine soldiers are left in the dark and cold with such dry throats.”
One of them took the bottle and studied the label. It was a rough but potent sorghum liquor that my father had preferred. The guard grunted, passed the bottle to his companion, and opened the gate.
“Many thanks, Hand Alder,” he said. “Enjoy your evening.”
Everything in the governor’s estate was of finer make than my father’s, of course--the house built from cedarwood, the steps from marble, and the carp in the courtyard pond were as long as I was tall--but it was all arranged along familiar lines. And, sure enough, Oriole’s rooms were in the eastern wing of the house, just as mine had been.
Lamplight flickered beneath Oriole’s door. I hesitated for a few dozen breaths. There would be awkwardness at first, I was sure, but I planned on only a few drinks, then a bit of friendly conversation. Enough to improve our relations and make my lessons in horsemanship bearable. What young man would refuse a few cups of liquor? I knocked and heard the rustle of paper and the squeak of a chair sliding across a tile floor.
“One moment!” Oriole said, then, likely thinking he could not be heard through the door, he muttered; “About time. I asked for tea when the sun was still out!”
He opened the door in rumpled clothes with ink stains on his fingers.
“Hand Alder!”
He stared at me, his eyebrows twitching with the effort of trying to reconcile my presence at his door with our simmering dislike for one another.
“Oriole,” I said, with a slight bob of the head. I lifted the bottle and shook it. “May I come in?”
“Ah,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder to a writing desk littered with books. “I mean, of course. Just…well, I wasn’t expecting you.”
I stood in the doorway as what little confidence I had felt in this plan gradually drained out of the soles of my feet. This was the sort of thing people did to seem friendly, wasn’t it?
“I didn't mean to impose,” I said.
“Of course you didn't,” he muttered. “Just like you didn't when you moved into my house and conscripted me into teaching you how to ride.”
“That was Hand Usher's imposition, and upon me as well as you,” I bristled. “I can make an appointment and can come back later, if you're too busy at the moment.”
“Who am I to turn away a Hand of the Emperor?” he said.
I ignored my bruised pride and shook the bottle again.
“Let's at least have a few drinks,” I said. “Perhaps discuss our mutual frustrations with my mentor.”
Whether he meant it as an accusation of arrogance or not, it was true that to decline my invitation without very good reason would mark him a poor host in his father's house, and could even be seen as an insult to the Emperor himself. In the end, that ingrained social pressure--and perhaps the promise of a heady drink at the end of what seemed a long evening--won out over his dislike for me. He reached for the bottle before opening the door wider to let me in.
“I knew Hands of the Emperor could feel magic being done nearby,” he said. “But I didn’t know you lot could sense students in distress as well.”
I followed him into the room. He pushed the books to one corner of the writing desk and thumped the bottle down in their place.
“I’ve got cups around here somewhere,” he said, rustling through his bookshelf, which held far more knick-knacks than books. A mismatched pair of cups--one white porcelain, the other rough terra-cotta in the Girzan style--emerged from behind a small bronze horse and a lacquer mask depicting the face of Ten Ox, a hero out of ancient legend who was the subject of several famous plays.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” I said, still taken aback to have found him studying. We were of an age, which meant that he should have taken the imperial examination with me. Yet I had not met him until I moved into the governor’s estate.
He followed my gaze to the writing desk. His expression hardened into a mask over embarrassment. After a moment, it collapsed into a sheepish smile. “I could use the break, to be honest.”
“My way of thanking you for your help,” I said, gesturing to the bottle.
The Hand of the Sun King Page 10