The Emperors Knife

CHAPTER Twelve

"Why are we going the long way?” Mesema fanned herself with her sleeve.

“The road follows the mountain range,” said Banreh. While Mesema was restless, he was utterly still. He sat with his eyes closed, sweat soaking the collar of his shirt. “It seems long, but in the end it will be faster than going over the sand.”

The Cerani had begun to hurry. At first they’d travelled the road only at night, but lately they set out while the sun still simmered low in the sky. Two hours had passed since they had climbed into the carriage, and Mesema was counting the burning seconds until nightfall.

Eldra made a little noise as the carriage rocked. “Why isn’t there any wind?” There was no answer to that. Without opening his eyes, Banreh said,

“Let’s begin another lesson. This time about the weather.”

“I wish I could swim in a mountain stream,” Eldra said in Cerantic. “That was very good.” Banreh smiled. “That’s not easy to say.” Mesema shot him a look, but he still had his eyes closed. Not to be outdone by a Red Hoof, she bent her tongue around the rough Cerantic words. “Windreaders can tolerate any weather without pain.” She used simpler grammar than Eldra, but she knew her accent was better.

Banreh cracked open one eye to give her a look of disapproval. “I want to learn how to say something to Arigu,” said Eldra. She smiled and shifted on the hard seat. “How do I say, ‘I enjoy your manhood very much’?”

Mesema looked out of the window while Banreh told her. He was as calm as ever. She felt like kicking him.

“What about, “Cerani are very good riders’?”

“Stop,” said Mesema.

Eldra giggled. “You’re just jealous. These men don’t want you.”

“There are no men here,” Mesema said, “only Cerani.”

“Banreh’s a man.” Eldra put a hand on Banreh’s good leg and squeezed. “Have you forgotten him already, Princess?”

Mesema turned away to the window, to the rock wall of the mountains. She would dash herself against them if she could.

“You’re an idiot,” she said to Eldra.

“You are,” Eldra said. “This is a strong man, a fine man, but because of his leg you think he is a woman.”

“I—I didn’t—” Mesema hung her head out of the window and let the desert air dry the tears from her eyes.

Banreh kept silent.

Mesema looked up at the purplish rock of the mountains and the clouds that shrouded their peaks. There were Felting people up there in the cool, green valleys: Rockfighters and River People. She would never see them now. Her life would be sand, heat, and silk. In the spring, when her mother packed the wool into the stretcher, she would be idle, dipping her feet in the palace fountain. How strange, never to make felt again.

A flicker, and she saw it, or him; a man stepped back into the shadow of a dune. She watched him as the carriage passed. He kept his face turned her way, but it held no interest, nor fear. She felt a tingle along her arms when she remembered where she’d seen eyes like that before. When they had pulled her dead brother from his horse and lain him out on the ground, his face had held the same look.

The man grew small with distance before she could gather herself. “Banreh,” she whispered at last, “there’s a man watching us.”

“Probably just a bandit. They wouldn’t dare attack this caravan, not with so many imperial guards.”

“A bandit?” She didn’t know how to explain his eyes, so she said, “I don’t know.”

“Let me see.” Banreh moved to the window and she pointed. The dune was too far away now, its shadows hard to discern.

“I can’t see him. But we passed him all right, didn’t we?”

“I suppose so.” The man’s gaze had her shaking still. She hugged herself and leaned away from the window.

The time passed; the sun lowered in the sky. Eldra sang little songs to herself about the strange god of her people. The tunes were not of the Felting folk; the rises and falls held the sounds of some distant place. When Eldra finished singing, she pulled a shawl from under her seat and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Arigu will fetch me soon,” she said, and it was true; the carriage stopped, and the general rode up on his horse. Behind it came Eldra’s own horse, bedecked with bells and ribbons in the Felting way.

“Come now, girl,” Arigu said to Eldra. He made Cerantic sound even uglier than it did already. His eyes were sharp as he glanced around the carriage.

Mesema wanted to tell Arigu about the strange man she had seen, but she was frightened.

Eldra giggled and jumped out of the box. Mesema could hear the horse’s little bells ringing, moving ahead of them. Soon the carriage lurched forwards once more.

“Why does he… ?” Mesema let her voice trail off.

“He is a man,” said Banreh.

“And so are you,” said Mesema. Changing to the softer, affectionate tone, she said, “Banreh, before, I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” Banreh moved on the wooden bench, shifting his leg with one hand.

“Will you forgive me?”

He smiled. “As long as you promise to be nicer to Eldra.” She liked his voice when he spoke as family. It sounded soft, like the rustling of the lambskins he wrote on.

The desert had already begun to cool. Mesema took Eldra’s place next to Banreh and put her head on his shoulder. “I will. I want you to be proud of me.”

He turned his head towards hers, so close she could feel his breath blowing against the hairs on her temple. “I am proud of you.” He placed a gentle, ink-stained hand on her shoulder and pushed her away. “We won’t speak of it again,” he said in the formal tone.

We carry on.

Mesema slid across the bench to the other window. The west, beyond the desert, was a place of mystery: cruel fighting men who rode boats like horses, buildings bigger than her whole village, and an ocean so large that all of the Cerani and Felting lands could hide inside it. This was all true, if the traders-who-walked could be believed.

Wind rippled the sand, and Mesema tried to count the grains on her arm. How many questions would she like to ask Banreh? They couldn’t be numbered, and she knew it. There was no way he could answer them all before he returned to her father and his war.

It hit her, as hard as the desert sun: Banreh would be gone, and she would be alone. There would be no intermediary, no protector, no adviser. An image of the dead-eyed bandit arose in her mind.

“Banreh,” she said, still looking out towards the west, steadying one trembling hand on the window frame, “let’s continue our lessons. I want to speak excellent Cerantic.”

Sarmin moved through a darkened hallway. He passed a door to the right, two more to the left. He longed to turn and open one, but his body would not obey him. His feet moved forwards unbidden. Some force held his eyes fixed ahead to where, beneath shadowed tapestries, a man stood in a dim entryway. Above the man’s head, tiles depicted a battle in shades of brown—perhaps the famous Battle of the Well, where the Cerani had defeated the Parigols once and for all. Sarmin tried to judge for certain, but he was too close now to study the tiles. He couldn’t lift his head. Something forced him to look upon the man instead.

Tuvaini. Sarmin would have smiled, but his face paid him no heed. A dream. He left his room so often in dreams, and yet it always took a second miracle to make him realise he was travelling through nothing more substantial than imagination.

The vizier’s lips curled back, revealing small white teeth.

He looked up rather than down at Sarmin, his eyes full of disgust, and held back, as if he thought Sarmin would make him dirty.

Even Sarmin’s fever dreams had never seemed so strange. He’d never dreamed his body to be a traitor to his will—or taller, come to that.

Tuvaini’s manner fascinated Sarmin. If everyone were to treat him with such disdain, he could move through the palace practically unseen. He tried to ask Tuvaini what had caused the sudden change, but his lips held still.

“I did my part; you can hardly blame me that you failed.” Tuvaini held out a clean palm.

To Sarmin’s surprise, he felt himself hand Tuvaini a rolled parchment.

“You’ve put me in an awkward position, to say the least,’

said Tuvaini, tucking the scroll into his robe.

“You have what you wanted,” Sarmin said. His voice felt odd, gravelly.

“So I do. And next I will cleanse your stench from the palace.”

Sarmin involuntarily glanced behind, to where he had started his walk. All lay dark. He turned back to Tuvaini. “I will leave, if it is in the design.”

“In the design.” Tuvaini’s voice mocked Sarmin’s.

For an instant a pattern flashed across Sarmin’s eyes, overlaid on the scene, familiar, compelling and fearsome all at once.

Sarmin tried to reprove the vizier for his tone, but he could not. Instead he turned away, into the darkness, where he felt something shift.

The corridors melted away into night.

“Dada?” A young girl looked up at him with wide eyes, her hair wild with sleep.

Sarmin could see the pattern woven around his arm, spiralling to the hand that held the cleaver. A meat cleaver? Was Sarmin now a butcher in the Maze, chopping goat and mutton to sell in pieces?

“Dada?” the girl asked again. “Are you still sick, Dada?” Sarmin thought the girl very pretty. She was dark, like his sister Shala. He felt the blood from the cleaver running warm and powerful across his fingers. Shouldn’t the man be practising his trade in his shop? But instead he stood in a dim mud-walled bedchamber, crammed with sleeping pallets pushed together. He had been sick. Patterned. Hidden away. Sarmin understood.

The man—Sarmin—both of them—they caught the little girl by the hair and raised the cleaver.

No!

With every fibre of his being Sarmin commanded his hand to drop the blade. The hand, bloody and dripping, hesitated, trembled. A hundred faint voices rose at the back of his mind, a thousand, more:

“The pattern finds no hold on her.”

“The child resists. The wife resisted. The sons.”

“She stands against the pattern.”

“No, she is my child.”

“She resists.”

“Erase her.”

And the cleaver swung, biting home with the wet sound of butchers’ work, a clean cut between the vertebrae.

Sarmin howled, or tried to, but he didn’t own his mouth. He tried to look away, but his eyes watched the meat open and the blood spurt. He tried to leave—with all his being he tried to leave.

Sarmin fell to his hands and knees, feeling sand beneath his fingers. No blood, no child. An unusual smell filled his nostrils and prickled his skin, but he couldn’t identify it, not until he felt sand beneath his fingers. Fresh air. He lifted his head and peered over the crest of a dune. Fifty feet away he saw an older man and a dark-skinned woman, both injured. The man held the woman, who sat with her shoulders hunched inwards.

“Where am I?” he asked, but no sound came forth. The sun rose, fast and faster, and he stood beneath a different dune, watching a caravan go by. A young woman with wheat-colored curls stuck her head out of the carriage and looked at him. The world spun again and Sarmin was in his room, staring at the ceiling gods.

“What have you wrought of me?” he asked them in his own voice. The gods did not have to tell him that his dreams were of his own making.

Mesema’s lessons lasted until full moonlight, and her tongue and throat felt sore by then. Banreh asked for extra water from the soldiers, and when they brought it, she took a long drink and looked out of the carriage for the Bright One. He’d come halfway towards the moon since she first started watching. His inevitable journey, marking her own path from daughterhood to motherhood, was too short, but she knew there was nothing she could do to slow the stars.

“Banreh,” she said, but stopped; she heard the slow breath of sleep. She

bunched a cushion behind her head and tried to close her own eyes. She thought of her prince, and made him like Arigu, only younger, and with curly hair like Banreh’s.

She must have dreamed of him, for the next thing she knew was the faint light of dawn and the shouts of the soldiers as they set up camp. Banreh had already gone. She threw down her pillow and took another drink. The water still felt cool against her tongue.

She jumped out of the carriage and surveyed the wide landscape. Eldra was standing by her horse, facing the dark west, as she did every morning; she enjoyed watching the dawn spread across the desert. The Bright One hovered on Eldra’s left. Mesema scowled at it, willing the day to come and make it disappear. Then she took a breath and prepared herself. It was time to be friendly. She wasn’t doing it just for Banreh; when she got to Nooria, she would need a friend. She dragged herself to where Eldra stood, trying to think of a nice thing to say, but she needn’t have worried, for Eldra spoke first.

“The sun comes from the east, as do my people. Soon it will light the entire world.”

Mesema tried to think of a way to respond. Finally she offered, “I thought your people were to the north, like mine.”

“God’s people live in the east.” Eldra closed her eyes, a faint smile on her lips.

The east. Mesema imagined it as a place of snow and high keeps, tall men of Fryth and Mythyck and Yrkmir beyond, shaggy mountain beasts, and strange, halting songs. From them the traders-who-walked carried many things, useful and pretty, but their dead god had never appealed to any People on this side of the mountains except for the Red Hooves. Mesema thought a moment, searching for common ground.

“I believe in the gods too.”

“But there is only one god.”

One god, dead, but with all the power of the many. It made no sense, but Mesema had to learn to guard her tongue. She switched to the intimate tone, a soft teasing between friends.

“What does Arigu think of your god?”

Eldra laughed. “Like any man, he doesn’t care what I think.” She spoke as a sister, crushing her consonants together like soft felt. “Anyway, God is not my god; he’s everyone’s god.”

“Well, I understand that,” Mesema allowed. “Anyone can worship a god, even if he belongs to other people.”

“Mesema, listen. My god is everyone’s god.”

Mesema felt the heat of the sun on her back; she looked to the Bright One and was relieved to find him gone. “Why did your family send you to Arigu, Eldra? Are you to marry him?” Eldra glanced over her shoulder at the camp. “No… I never proved myself, and anyway, Arigu doesn’t really care for me. I can tell.” She turned back and squared her shoulders.

“Then what?”

“Never mind.”

Mesema thought about Eldra’s arrival. Banreh didn’t appear to know why she was with them. Arigu had some design they couldn’t see. Instead of one girl from the Felt, Arigu was bringing two. An honest assessment forced Mesema to allow that Eldra was prettier and more womanly than she was, but Eldra had two points against her. She wasn’t a virgin, and she couldn’t bear children, so she couldn’t be meant for the prince. It bothered Eldra, the not-knowing; Mesema could see that now. All her jokes and flirtations served to disguise her worry.

“Well,” Mesema said, taking Eldra’s hand, “you’re my companion, perhaps.”

Eldra giggled. “I’d rather be Banreh’s companion.”

“You’d have to talk to him about that,” said Mesema, hiding her stab of annoyance.

Eldra looked over her shoulder. “The general.” She rolled her eyes and squeezed Mesema’s hand. “I’ll see you in the afternoon.”

Mesema felt sorry for the girl. It was supposed to be fun, trying for a plainschild—or perhaps it was a sandchild in this case—but Eldra and Arigu didn’t have a real romance, and as long as Arigu dominated their caravan, Eldra could never be with the man she really cared for. Mesema’s cheeks grew hot when she realised she was glad of that. She wished the Hidden God had chosen a more blessed birthday for her, but instead she had been born selfish, under the Scorpion’s tail. He’d also chosen her fate, in being sent away; she had yet to understand if that was a punishment or a reward.

She turned and looked for her tent. Banreh always tied a Windreader scarf to the pointed top so that she could find it. She crawled in and lay down on her mat, not bothering with her nightdress. She would ask for water to wash herself when she woke. The soldiers washed in the sand; they would consider it a waste, but they might allow it.

And then, without quite knowing why, Mesema cried herself to sleep.