With that he left the garrison yard, and left me to stand numbly, staring at the roiling clouds, waiting for my men to finish freeing the prisoners. Soon after I felt wakes of fire and battle-sorcery, then a cramping in my shoulders. Usher had found Burning Dog or Frothing Wolf, who had veered and escaped in turn. A thought which--to my surprise--filled me with bitter satisfaction. Though Frothing Wolf might survive and remain a thorn in the Empire’s side, her uprising had cost her one daughter and a defeat that would tarnish her legend. And Usher, despite his callousness, had not been able to kill her.
There was a horrible justice in these warriors circling each other without end, meting out petty wounds, slowly bleeding each other dry, but always failing to deal a killing blow.
If only they could do battle alone, isolated from the pattern of the world. Someplace where their war would not leave towns twice-besieged and starving. Where the romantic tales of wars long past could never trick the young into seeking glory, only to drag them down into death.
Chapter Fourteen
Grief and Translation
Those few of our soldiers who died were buried with all honors in Iron Town’s graveyard. The Nayeni were burned. Usher bade our medics prepare Oriole’s corpse for a long journey in the heat of summer. The wagon that bore his corpse smelled of salt and sand and cedar. They had done something to preserve him. What, I did not wish to know.
The early typhoons passed, and the sky cleared. Usher and I and the bulk of our force left Iron Town, hoping to be out of the mountains before the next storm cycle struck. All told, we were two weeks in Iron Town. Two weeks that left me hollowed out and broken-hearted. Sick of war, already, after my first taste.
Usher and I spoke little during the journey back to Eastern Fortress. We conversed mildly, talking of the weather--so much more amenable than the storms which had delayed our march to Iron Town--or discussing where to camp each night. Neither of us mentioned Oriole, though his absence left a notable emptiness and always his wagon followed at the back of our column, draped in a cloth of funerary white that bore his father’s tetragram. Neither did we speak of my outburst in the garrison yard, nor the binding sorcery Usher had used against me.
What ties there were between us felt raw and recently torn. Iron Town had been meant as a stepping stone. One of many on the path to the Imperial Academy. Instead, it had cost me my friend and my teacher, and left me more hopeless than I had ever been.
At the end of midsummer, when the typhoons again began to rain upon Nayen, we at last arrived at Eastern Fortress. Messengers had been sent ahead, and preparations already made for Oriole’s funeral. His wagon, now, smelled less of spices, and the men tasked with tending to it had taken to covering their mouths and noses in scented cloths.
Nevertheless, when Voice Golden-Finch met us at the gate to the governor’s citadel--dressed all in white, with his head and beard shaved in mourning--he lay across the wagon. A sob shook him, and he pressed the lines of the tetragram upon his brow to the funerary cloth, which was soaked and heavy with rain.
“My son,” he groaned. “Oh, my foolish son.”
He stood, and his eyes swept over me with a flash that I took for hatred before settling on Usher.
“We will have words, you and I,” he said.
Usher bowed. “As soon as your son is returned to the earth, and the period of mourning has ended, I will--”
“No,” Voice Golden-Finch said. “We will speak now. And then we will bury him.”
At his gesture, several of his guards took the leads of the mules who had been pulling Oriole’s wagon. They led it away, and Voice Golden-Finch gestured for Hand Usher to follow him. Neither of them so much as acknowledged me as they walked away. Left alone, I instructed a steward to unload my belongings and bring them to my rooms, then sought the secluded pavilion behind the porous stone, where Usher had taught so many of my lessons.
My path there led past the grassy field where Oriole had taught me to ride. A stablehand--his arm wrapped in white cloth to show that the household was in mourning--was putting a young stallion through its paces.
When I reached the pavilion, I sat and watched the kingfishers dive for their meal, undisturbed by the gentle rain. In that quiet place, alone, alienated in a garden that had been my home these last few years, the hollow within me filled suddenly, like the spillway below a broken dam.
I had lost Oriole. I had lost everything. I wept, and--perhaps seeking, unconsciously, the most comforting of memories--thought of my mother, sitting beside my bed as no Sienese mother should have done, feeding me sticky rice and bland broth.
I wished to return to that moment, with a mother and grandmother to care for me in my weakness. And in that wish, I felt for the first time the horrid isolation of adulthood.
* * *
Two days later, Voice Golden-Finch led the household in Oriole’s funeral procession. He and Oriole’s brother, Pinion, had stood vigil the night before, composing poems in his memory and writing them onto the bare wood of the coffin. At dawn, servants carried the coffin out of the inner courtyard, and Voice Golden-Finch and Pinion followed behind. After them--shrouded in layered veils of heavy white gauze--came his mother, along with the other women of the house, wailing and shaking, leaning upon one another for support, the demure affectation expected of Sienese women shattered by grief. Usher and I followed, side-by-side, without speaking. Behind us, professional mourners howled and tore their garments, while a troubadour played a flute song like the keening of countless ghosts.
We walked through the garden, its trees and pavilions papered over with prayers for the departed, until we reached the plot Voice Golden-Finch had chosen for Oriole’s burial. Servants had dug a chamber out of a hillside topped by a young plum tree. The coffin was placed within, and the servants piled earth to cover it. This done, Voice Golden-Finch took up the first of the hundred white bricks which would mark his son’s grave.
He weighed it in his hand and looked up at the plum tree, its branches dark with leaves but not yet blossoming.
“In the Classic of Living and Dying, Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way writes that all life is but a temporary emergence from the great pattern of the world. That we should mourn the dead, but only as we mourn the end of a song or the close of a dance. He goes on to write, ‘As a cresting wave must return to the body of the sea, so the dead return to the pattern.’ So it is with my son, Oriole, my first born.”
He placed his brick, the cornerstone of a gate that would mark Oriole’s passage from life into death. Pinion placed the next, and then his mother, and the other mourners. I longed to take one up, to participate in this ritual of closure. Yet while he had spoken, Voice Golden-Finch’s eye had rested on me for a moment, and I felt such shame that I dared not step forward.
Usher, too, hesitated. Only when Voice Golden-Finch himself handed Usher a brick did he step forward and place it. Then, perhaps following his father’s example, Pinion did the same for me.
It hurt me to look at the boy, three years Oriole’s junior but so like him in every way. The same dark hair and pale skin. A narrower nose, but the same hard jaw and sharp, clever eyes.
“Take it,” he said, offering the brick. “However things ended, you were a friend to him.”
His kindness threatened to break my composure, but I took a deep breath and accepted what he had offered. A white, rough brick, and forgiveness with it.
I placed it on the left-hand column and stepped away. When the last mourner had laid their brick, Voice Golden-Finch led the procession to his audience hall, where they would eat a simple feast in celebration of Oriole’s life. I lingered behind and watched the servants finish building the small waist-high gate, mortaring it, sealing Oriole’s coffin in the ground, where the raw wood would slowly decay and return his body to the earth and the pattern of the world.
* * *
Hand Usher assumed the governor’s duties while Voice Golden-Finch shut himself away to mourn his son. He sent couriers to me bear
ing documents and legers from the office of trade and instructed me to flag anything unusual or noteworthy for his attention. Work I performed to the best of my ability--I relished the occasions when I saw some flaw in trade policy and could spend hours distracted from my grief while I composed arguments and wrote memoranda in support of my suggested changes.
Grief always crept back in, the moment I put away my brushes.
My studies in magic had not resumed. I wondered if they ever would, and whether I truly wanted them to. Sorcery had not been able to save Oriole. In truth, every step I had thought would lead me toward greater power and greater mastery--my witch-marks; my tetragram--had further constrained me. Only the Imperial Academy, where I could pursue my curiosity to the hilt, promised any kind of true understanding of magic. But to get there, I would have to prove myself as Hand of the Emperor. As a weapon in fruitless wars, like the one that had cost Oriole his life.
I spent the autumn and winter after Iron Town in a pavilion that overlooked the plum tree above his grave, alone, and spent my free time reading the mythic romances that he had loved. Delicate white blossoms flecked with red and yellow bloomed in Oriole’s tree. Everything else had withered, save the bamboo, when Hand Usher at last came to visit me.
We had seen little of each other, allowing the divide rent between us at Iron Town to fester. He joined me with a pot of jasmine tea and filled two cups.
“You have done well these last months,” he said, offering me a cup. “As I said, you have a head for economics.”
I set down my book but did not take the cup he offered. Usher placed the cup on the table, then folded his hands.
“Voice Golden-Finch and I have been discussing your situation, and seeking the advice of the Emperor,” he said. “Together we have decided that you should finish your apprenticeship in sorcery outside of Nayen.”
I was unnerved to hear that Usher and Voice Golden-Finch had brought my failure to the Emperor’s attention, had spoken of me across the leagues between Nayen and Northern Capital through the canon of transmission. And they had decided that I should be reassigned. Had Usher stood up for me? More troubling--would the Academy ever be open to a Hand whose teacher had rejected him? I was lucky, I supposed, that he had not cut off my left hand as punishment for my failure.
“Where will you send me?” I asked.
In answer, he retrieved three small books from the pocket of his robe. One was bound in leather, its spine stamped with a strange linear script I did not recognize. The second was an ordinary cloth-bound volume entitled The Trade-Language of the An-Zabati: A Primer. The third was an old book of wooden slats. Its title was written in archaic logograms and read Folklore and Legends of the Batir Waste.
“There will be a position for a Minister of Trade opening soon in the city of An-Zabat, on the western edge of the Empire,” Usher said while I examined the books.
“You would name me a minister?” I said, looking up from the primer. “I am only an apprentice. I know only two of the channels of the canon--”
“In the last few months, you have thrice found flaws in Nayen’s trade ministry, and the new policies you have proposed have all been implemented and deemed successful,” Usher said, cutting me off. “Your instruction in the canon will continue in An-Zabat, under the tutelage of the Hands stationed there. An-Zabat is the center of trade in the west, and as such it is a nexus for all manner of strange knowledge and foreign science. A place that will surely fascinate you.”
“Usher, I…This isn’t a punishment for my failure in Iron Town?”
His face softened as I had never seen it. “There are many paths through the world a Hand of the Emperor might take,” he said. “Many uses for us within the grand project of Empire. War is but one of those. You have attempted first steps along two such paths--one towards military leadership, and the other towards a more bureaucratic, ministerial role. I think we all agree that you are much better suited to the latter.”
“I thought perhaps this was only the Voice's way of sending me far afield,” I said, some of my trepidation fading. “After what happened at Iron Town, and to his son.”
He laughed. “It may well be that he agreed to my suggestion for that very reason, but this placement in An-Zabat was my idea, not his. This truly is the best next step on your path to the Academy. If you distinguish yourself, you will command the Emperor’s attention and earn the place you desire.”
He gestured to the books on the table between us. “An-Zabat is far from here, and a newly conquered territory. Many of the people do not yet speak Sienese. With these, you can learn something of their language and culture before you arrive.”
I looked again at the books, and at his face, so open and expressive--at least, in affectation. I had never seen Usher so kindly, and I remembered our return from Iron Town, and Voice Golden-Finch’s sharp, hateful glare. If he had agreed to this new and sudden assignment, there must be some hidden thorn I was meant to prick myself upon. Or perhaps it was enough that reassignment would remove me from Golden-Finch’s sight, his house, and his province.
Yet, I was unwilling to pry. Hand Usher and I both knew--I was certain--that Iron Town had destroyed what working relationship had existed between us. I would leave Nayen not because the Empire wanted me for a Minster of Trade, but because I had alienated my teacher.
“Very well,” I said, and picked up the books he had brought me. At least I would not be a soldier, balancing life and death on the scales of strategy. “When do I leave?”
* * *
Hand Usher’s last task as my teacher would be to present me to the Emperor in Northern Capital--in person, at the foot of the Thousand-Armed Throne--and secure my commission as Minister of Trade. A task he could not undertake until Voice Golden-Finch completed the period of mourning for his son and resumed his duties as governor.
I became like a ghost in the governor’s gardens, haunting my apartments or the pavilion overlooking Oriole’s tree, and set my mind, for the final time, to a task Hand Usher had given me.
At first, the An-Zabati tongue baffled me. Unlike the logograms and Nayeni runes I knew, its writing system used symbols which represented single sounds rather than complete ideas. But once I accustomed myself to this difference, and had grappled long enough with An-Zabati's unfamiliar grammar and syntax to make effective, if rudimentary use of them, acquisition of the language became mainly a matter of expanding my vocabulary. For the rest of the winter I dug into the three books Usher had given me--the one written in An-Zabati turned out to be the original from which the book of folklore had been translated. I composed my own translations to practise the nuances of the language and lost myself in tales of desert demons, clan disputes, and the oft-angered god of the sky.
Most fascinating to me was the tale of Naphena, the most revered goddess of the An-Zabati. She was nothing like the gods of Nayen, who took the form of beasts and gave nothing to their followers without extracting a price in blood and worship. Neither was she like the Emperor, distant, powerful, and demanding of deference--though both were human, at least in form. Naphena’s defining act was one of self-sacrifice. When year upon year of drought left the Batir Grassland a barren waste, she had given her life to reshape the pattern of the world and create an oasis that the people named An, for water, Za, for rest, and Bat for the land beneath the endless sky.
She had rewritten the world. Made water where there was none. A miracle, as the An-Zabati told it. Or a primal, deeper magic, unconstrained by pact or canon. If her power was able to make an oasis in wasted lands, perhaps it could have pulled a man back from the mouth of the grave.
If only she still lived and could teach me.
The chill winds of winter gave way to the clear skies of early spring. Voice Golden-Finch resumed his duties, and Hand Usher informed me that we would leave Nayen in a month’s time, once preparations for the imperial examinations were complete. Propriety demanded that I spend some time at home to bid my parents farewell before undertaking su
ch a long and treacherous journey. On the morning of the day I was to depart, I paid a visit to Oriole’s grave.
The first buds of spring decorated the branches of the plum tree. Pinion stood beneath them, still wearing his white mourning stole, sweeping the dust and fallen leaves from the lintel of the small gate. I hesitated, not wanting to interrupt. Pinion must have heard my approach, for he turned and, when he saw me, bobbed his head in welcome.
“Hand Alder,” he said. “I thought you might have left already.”
Though his face was so eerily like his brother’s, Pinion held himself with a seriousness more akin to my tutor Koro Ha. He set the broom down and gestured for me to join him.
“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.
“You aren’t,” he said. “As I told you, you were his friend. In truth, he was closer to you than to me in his last years.”
“Yet I am the reason he is dead,” I said.
Pinion furrowed his brow at that. “Nevertheless,” he said, and stepped to the side.
Feeling somewhat embarrassed--he had not corrected me, after all--I could not reject his invitation. I stood beside him and ran my fingers along the beveled edges where Oriole’s name had been carved, feeling the roughness of the bricks.
“I don’t think he would blame you,” Pinion said at last. “I remember seeing him just before you left for Iron Town. He was happier than he’d been in years. I’m sure he would thank you, if he could, even after how badly things went.”
“You’re wrong,” I said, and felt something well within me as black and heavy as ink. “You didn’t see how he suffered--”
“And you are forgetting what it meant to him,” Pinion said.
I could think of no answer to that. We stood in silence, listening to the breeze through the branches of the plum tree, watching the sparrows of early spring build their nests.
The Hand of the Sun King Page 18