Forgotten Suns (13 page)

~~~

The next morning she woke up long before sunrise, and couldn’t
get back to sleep. She pulled on riding clothes and crept out toward the barn.

A dark shape perched on the fence by the antelope pen, watching
the baby play. Even in the very early dawn, the black robes and veils were hard
to mistake.

It was Malia. Aisha would have known that set of the
shoulders anywhere.

“He’s still here,” Aisha said, swinging up beside her. The
baby shorted and shied and pretended to be horrified, but a few bucks and
caracoles later, she had her nose pressed against Aisha’s leg, demanding to
have her ears rubbed.

Malia slid her shorter sword out of its scabbard and set to
work sharpening it.

Aisha got the message. She was unperturbed—oddly, maybe. “I
don’t think he’s that easy to kill.”

“Legend says he can’t be killed at all.” Malia ran the stone
down the blade and up again, working by sound and feel more than sight, being
precise about strokes and edges. Blackrobes took pride in being able to take
care of their weapons in pitch dark if they had to. “I think a stake in the
heart or the sweep of a sword through his spine will do what it needs to.”

“Why?” Aisha asked. Still not afraid, though she knew she
should be. “Is he really that bad?”

“Grandmother says,” said Malia, “that he has a destiny, and
I am not to get in the way of it. Especially since he’s following it away from
this world. To which I say he might follow it back, and then where will we be?”

“Don’t you want to wait and find out?”

“I want,” said Malia, sheathing her sword with a sharp
snick
, “to keep my world and my people safe.”
She slid to the ground outside the pen. “Grandmother says come.”

For a long few seconds, Aisha forgot how to breathe. How
could the grandmother—what could she—

Of course she didn’t know what Aisha was up to. She wanted
to see Aisha, that was all. Maybe to find out if Rama had said anything about
the tribe or the world or where he intended to go. Or else she’d found out,
somehow, about the Department of Antiquities. Aisha had learned never to be
surprised by what the grandmother could know.

Aisha thought about refusing, but that would be suspicious.
Unless she lied and said she had to stay home today—but Malia would know, if
the grandmother didn’t. Malia always knew when people were lying. It was a
gift. A magic, Rama would say.

While she wibbled, Malia brought Jinni out and tied him for
Aisha to brush off, and fetched Ghazal for herself. Aisha could still say no,
but by the time Jinni was clean and saddled, there was no point in fighting it.

They slipped out the back way, through the gate in the wall
that was barely wide enough for a horse, and mounted outside. The sun was
bright but the air was chilly; Jinni felt fresh enough to buck, but settled
before Aisha could have words with him.

Jinni was glad for the run. Ghazal not so much, but Malia
wasn’t Jamal. She didn’t put up with his nonsense.

“Lazybutt,” she said. “For me you’ll move.”

For her he would actually consent to a grudging gallop,
before he broke to a pissy-eared, tail-swishing canter. She laughed and kept
him going.

~~~

They rode into Blackroot camp just as the sun was coming
up. The grandmother sat in front of her house with her face turned to the light
that she could feel but not see. She almost looked like Rama, the way she drank
the sun.

One of the children had brought her morning tea; the rest of
the pot bubbled over the fire. The little boy, who was one of Malia’s cousins,
filled each of the two cups that waited beside him, and gave them to Malia and
Aisha.

Aisha had grown up drinking tea in Blackroot camp. This was
waking tea, strong and bitter but pleasant. She thought it was nicer than
coffee.

She drank the first cup to be polite, and the second to
honor the host. Then she could turn the cup upside down and set it in front of
her and say, “I’ve come, Grandmother. What do you need of me?”

It was borderline rude to be that direct, but Aisha was
careful with her intonations. She tried to indicate respect and attentiveness,
and just enough curiosity to put an edge on it.

The grandmother held her cup to be filled a third time. She
took her time drinking, while Aisha and Malia had to wait. Malia could afford
to be patient. Aisha didn’t have a choice.

Finally, the grandmother drained the cup and set it in front
of her, right side up. She had things to say, that meant, and Aisha might not
like them.

Aisha bit her tongue before she started defending herself.
Never explain yourself to authority,
Mother
always said,
and never volunteer
information.

That was hard, if you were Aisha. Still, she managed it. She
waited for the grandmother to speak.

Which also took forever, but she held herself still, not
fidgeting the way she desperately wanted to. Having to look calm actually
helped her stop twitching. She was breathing deep and steady by the time the
grandmother said, “If you do what you intend to do, your soul will never be the
same.”

Aisha let her breath out more quickly than she meant to.

“What? What would I be—”

The grandmother said nothing. At all.

Aisha flushed. Lying to the grandmother was not possible.
She knew that. She’d known it since she was small.

“You’re not sending anyone with him,” she said. “You’re
letting him go out alone.”

“I have no authority to ‘let’ that one do anything,” the
grandmother said.

“You hate him that much?”

“He’s somewhat beyond either hate or fear,” the grandmother
said. “Love I can’t speak for. Or loyalty. We were left here to guard him, not
to serve him. Our service was given to those who came after him.”

“All of which is to say that you don’t want to give him one
fraction more than you absolutely have to.”

“Out of all the oldest stories,” said the grandmother, “one
repeats in every tribe. That the Sleeper hunts alone, and the people hold the
world behind him. When he comes back, if he comes back, the world and the
people will be waiting.”

“To do what? Kill him?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“I believe,” said Aisha, “that he’ll do everything he can to
find out where all the people went. If any of them can still be saved, he’ll
save them.”

“I believe that may be true,” the grandmother said.

Aisha studied her, narrow-eyed. She looked calm, the way she
always did. “What if he comes back, and the world isn’t here? Or it’s so
changed, there’s nothing to come back to? What if he’s not what you should be
afraid of?”

The grandmother didn’t flinch. “I think,” she said, “that if
this world suffers at anyone’s hands but his, that person should be very much
afraid.”

“I think so, too,” Aisha said.

She resisted the urge to duck down under the grandmother’s
stare, those blank silver eyes that shouldn’t have seen her at all. The
grandmother leaned toward Aisha. Then it was obvious she was blind: she traced
Aisha’s head and shoulders with her hands, touching very lightly. Aisha’s hair
crackled and tried to stand up.

The grandmother sat back. “Be careful, child. Think hard
about what you will do, and how, and with whom. He is difficult to resist. He’s
not even aware he does it. He makes people do as he wills, because neither he
nor they can imagine any other order in the world.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Aisha said as respectfully as
she could. “What I don’t see is any other way through this mess we’re in.
People out there—my people—want to tear apart this world and sell it for scrap.
He just wants to find out what happened to his people. And rule them, maybe,
though I’m not entirely sure about that.”

“I don’t think he can help it,” the grandmother said. She
spread her hands. “His is a long road, and a dark road, and no one who travels
on it will come back unchanged. If you follow him, it may be your death.”

Aisha knew that, down deep inside. It didn’t make any
difference. “If I don’t, this planet might die.”

“So it might,” said the grandmother. “But it’s not as clear
a choice as you may imagine. You think you know him; you see what he is and
what he does, and how he makes his way through this world he’s awakened to.
What you see is a dreamer still more than half in his dream, barely beginning
to wake.”

“I see that,” said Aisha. “He’s in shock. Everything he knew
is gone. He’s having to learn to live all over again. I studied—I looked it up.
People who are in stasis for a long time can take years to get over it.”

“So they can,” the grandmother said, “but has any of them
ever been what this one is? Your people have no kings or emperors. You outgrew
them, you say, long ages ago. You have never had or allowed the kind of powers
that were born in this man, that he mastered in his first life and has in no
way lost. He’s quiet now, and seems gentle, because as you say, he’s in shock—and
even in this state, he studies, he observes, he learns the ways of this new
world.”

“He’s not a monster,” Aisha said. “That was the trouble all
along, wasn’t it? Everybody thought he was this terrible, outlandish
thing
. So they shut him off and left him
for somebody else to deal with.”

“No,” the grandmother said. “He was no more a monster than
any other great lord of his world. There were others as powerful, if not more—some
of those shut him in the rock. He did what he had to; he acted as he believed
he should. He tried to be a good man and a good ruler, and for the most part he
was. Even those who were afraid of him or of what he tried to do never called
him evil. There was never any malice in him.”

“So why?” Aisha demanded. “What was so wrong that he had to
be punished all the way to the end of time?”

“He changed the world,” the grandmother answered, “but he
wasn’t able to change with it. When the time came to accept that not everything
could go exactly as he wanted it, he refused. He could conquer, you see, and he
could rule—well, by all accounts. But he never knew how to let go.”

“I think he knows now,” said Aisha.

The grandmother’s head shook. “This is not a tame animal. He
may like you, even love you, for yourself, and appreciate the qualities of your
people and your world, and do his best to do no harm. But as with the lion cub
who grows into a lion, the day will come when you or your people do something
or say something that wakes the native instincts. Then nothing else will
matter. He won’t mean to destroy you, but he will. He won’t be able to help it.”

“Maybe not,” Aisha said. “And maybe I’m not the one he’ll
destroy. I’m taking that gamble, Grandmother. I have to.”

“Child,” said the grandmother, and the word was meant to dig
in and twist, “his own family could not teach him to be other than he was. They
were the ones who laid the sentence on him. His wife, his child, the man who
raised him—they had to turn on him to save all that he had made. What makes you
think that you, who are not even of this world, can so much as sway him?”

Those were hard words, with terrifying thoughts in back of
them. But Aisha was born stubborn. “Everything is different now, including the
people he’s dealing with. He was supposed to learn a lesson. Someone has to
believe that he could.
They
believed
that. Or they’d have killed him and got it over with.”

Aisha had done the impossible. She had argued the
grandmother to a standstill. The grandmother hadn’t given in, not hardly, but
she stopped trying to talk Aisha out of what she’d made up her mind to do.

“Go with such gods as you believe in,” the grandmother said,
“and may those gods protect you.”

Because no one else would. That meaning was perfectly clear.

Aisha was not going to get any help from here. These people
weren’t any more hers than Rama was. They had an obligation to him, and they
had met it. But they didn’t have to like it, or really understand it, any more
than they liked or understood him.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nevermore was in
trouble, and no one else had the power to save it. Rama might not, either, but
Aisha had to help him try.

It was fair enough. After all, it was her fault he was
awake.

~~~

One thing Aisha could be sure of when she left Blackroot
camp: the grandmother wouldn’t report her to her parents. In the tribes, if you
were set on doing something insane, they tried their best to talk you out of
it; then they let you go. Really determined insanity, in their religion, came
from the gods. It wasn’t any mortal’s place to get in its way.

That made it obvious, at least to Aisha, that the people who
put Rama in stasis weren’t tribesmen. His own family—that must have hurt badly
enough to break him.

Malia followed her back toward the horses. Aisha would have
liked to avoid her, but there was no sensible way to go about it.

After Aisha had Jinni saddled and ready to mount, Malia held
Ghazal’s reins out of reach when Aisha moved to take them. “Tell me one thing,”
she said. “You were so determined not to leave here with the green man. Now you
want to leave anyway. How does that make sense?”

“The green man would have taken me away to turn me into
someone just like him,” Aisha said.

“You’d rather turn into someone just like the Sleeper?”

“
He
won’t open my
head and scramble my brains.”

“Oh, won’t he?” said Malia.

“Malia,” said Aisha, “if he finds his people, and brings
them back, Centrum won’t be able to keep this planet. Its own laws won’t let
it. If it breaks those—Rama will do what Rama will do. He’s a weapon, you’re
always saying so. I want to be sure he’s
our
weapon.”

“He’ll turn in your hand.”

“But Nevermore will be safe.”

“You hope.”