Golden Daughter (22 page)

Trailing her by a good ten paces were Tu Syed, Tu Domchu, and another of the temple slaves. The men were embarrassed by their mistress’s loose hair and seemed to be making every effort not to look at it as they followed in her wake.

So Lady Hariawan passed by the infirmary, her head bowed, her hands folded, moving at the slow, sedate pace of a temple girl in a ritual parade, as though she heard the beat of drums in her head. If not for her loose hair, she would have seemed a prayerful and sacred creature.

Sairu felt Jovann tense beneath her hand. Then suddenly he cried out in a loud voice, “Umeer’s daughter!”

He was stronger in that moment than Sairu realized. He slipped her grasp and had covered half the distance between the infirmary and Lady Hariawan before Sairu quite knew what was happening. “No!” she cried and hastened after him. But she could not stop him, so great was his urgency.

“Umeer’s daughter!” he cried again, and still Lady Hariawan did not turn her head toward him. So he threw himself at her. What a threatening figure he must have seemed to the slaves—so tall and broad even in his weakness, and full of a passion none of them could understand. He grabbed Lady Hariawan by her arm, turning her to him. “Umeer’s daughter, do you know me?”

Seeing the burn upon her cheek, he gasped in dismay.

Across Sairu’s mind flashed a vision of her duty. She saw herself taking hold of that tall Chhayan, knowing full well where his wounds were, where his weaknesses lay. She saw herself bringing him to ruin there at her feet, leaving him writhing, screaming, as she stood over him, her body strategically placed between him and her mistress. Her mistress whom he should never have dared touch.

She saw it all in a horrible flash. And the vision made her stumble.

So it was not she who fell upon Jovann, but the temple slaves. Shouting in terror of what would be done to them should any harm befall their mistress, they fell upon Jovann, grabbing him and hauling him away, striking him with their fists. Tu Syed carried a cane, and he lashed out with it savagely. In two strokes, red lines darkened Jovann’s back and shoulders. And all Sairu’s work of the last seven days was undone.

Jovann screamed as he sank to his knees. But still he reached his hands to the lady, saying, “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me?”

Lady Hariawan, her countenance unchanging, stood by and watched. Her hands were folded prayerfully, and the wind tugged at her hair and her robes. She made no move to interfere.

“Enough!” Sairu cried, flinging herself into the midst of the slaves. She grabbed Tu Syed’s cane, wrenched it from his hands, and tossed it aside, then whirled upon Tu Syed himself. He had seen and trembled at her smile before. But he had never seen this expression on her face. She looked the very likeness of a panther, and he quailed beneath the heat of her eyes.

“I think you’ve made your point,” Sairu said. “It was a mistake, that’s all. A mistake! And now
look
what you’ve done.”

Jovann lay upon his side, groaning, curled up as though to fortify himself against the pain he could not escape. But none of the temple slaves looked at him. They stared only at Sairu.

Tu Syed said humbly, “He assaulted the mistress.”

He may as well have kicked Sairu in the gut. She flinched, and her face went a terrible shade of green as though she would be sick. She said nothing more, did not even turn to address Lady Hariawan.

One by one the slaves gathered themselves and surrounded their lady. They plied her with questions she did not answer and urged her to return to her chambers. She said nothing. Briefly, ever so briefly, her gaze flashed toward Jovann where he lay groaning. Then she turned and continued her way down the path toward some destination even she did not know. The slaves fell in behind her once more.

Sairu almost did as well. After all, she had not set eyes upon Lady Hariawan in many days. Her sworn mistress. Her very life. She should not be parted from her again!

And yet she found herself kneeling and carefully put her hands on Jovann’s shoulders, avoiding the places she knew to be tender. “You stupid Chhayan calf,” she murmured gently. “I told you to go back to bed, didn’t I? And now we’ll have to start all over.”

With much coaxing and prodding and even pinching, she managed to get him to his feet. He slumped against her, but she was stronger than she looked, and she braced herself to support him for the walk back to the infirmary. She could feel priests and acolytes all around, staring at her from hidden places, and their unasked questions burned in her mind.

She felt Brother Tenuk, as clearly as though she saw him standing at his prayer room window, watching them with his too-young eyes in his too-old face.

She ignored them all; and she ignored the roaring in her head as her heart demanded of her,
Where are your loyalties, Masayi girl?
She could not face that question, not now. Perhaps not ever.

“Come, Jovann. Come, noble prince,” she said over and over, along with “Come, idiot bumpkin” now and then. So they reached the shadows and seclusion of the infirmary, and Jovann sat on the edge of his pallet, bent over with his head in his hands. Sairu undid his shirt and carefully pulled it back from the bloody patches where his wounds were reopened.

“Idiot,” she hissed again, and set to work cleaning. “What were you thinking? Approaching Lady Hariawan as bold as the empress’s monkey! Laying hands on her, even! I’d like to cane you myself for your stupidity.”

He groaned again and shook his head even as his fingers dug into his hair. “She did not recognize me.”

“What was that?”

He lifted his head then, glaring at Sairu in his frustration. “She did not recognize me. She did not know me at all.” Along with the frustration, there was despair in his voice.

Sairu had no time for despair. “Well, why should she? You’re only a slave, remember. One slave to whom she decided, in her grace, to show a little kindness. And this is how you repay that kindness? By insulting her? By declaring you’ll not serve as her slave one minute and approaching her unbidden the next? Anwar’s scepter and Hulan’s crown, you couldn’t have behaved more like a Chhayan dog-boy had you tried!”

She thought this insult would rouse him. But instead he merely sank his head back into his hands and did not speak. She heard his breath hiss between his teeth a few times as she applied salve to his wounds and wrapped them in bandages.

“Why did you call her Umeer’s daughter?” Sairu asked at length.

“It was all she would tell me of her name.”

Sairu studied what she could see of his face, which was part of his jaw and one ear. She didn’t think even Princess Safiya could successfully read so little. “You have been sick with fever since we found you, and you have had no conversation with Lady Hariawan.”

“I have,” he insisted, his voice near a growl. “I’ve walked with her. In the Dream.”

It was important for a Golden Daughter not to mistake suspicion for intuition. The latter was a gift of instinct, a gift to be used. But the former too often led the inquiring mind astray.

And yet Sairu could not shake the suspicion she had felt from the first evening in Daramuti, the same evening Lady Hariawan had banished her from her presence. The suspicion that the wounded stranger lying under her hand was no longer present within his body.

That he had gone dream-walking.

But that was impossible, she had reasoned with herself since then. She knew little enough about the Dream Walkers of the temple. They were a secret as closely kept as the Golden Daughters themselves. But she believed—and didn’t think she was wrong to do so—that dream-walking was a carefully monitored skill that required precision, prayer, incense, rituals, and an entire network of holy men focused together in joint concentration. Until she’d met her mistress, she had not believed it could be accomplished by a woman. Which was foolish, she now realized.

And perhaps it was equally foolish to disbelieve that a Chhayan could dream-walk as well.

Sairu took a step back, her arms folded, eyeing her patient. Some of the bandages were already soaked through. “Does it hurt very much?” she asked.

He nodded without looking up.

She knelt before him and took hold of his hands, pulling them away from his head. He sat up straighter, scowling at her, and tried to withdraw, but she held on and turned his hands over so that they cupped empty air. “Let me help you,” she said.

Then she touched his forehead and whispered, “The pain is here. Feel it. Beneath my finger. Feel your pain.”

He winced. Then he closed his eyes, his brow knitting beneath her finger. She drew it down his cheek, down his neck, and rested on his shoulder. “The pain is here. Feel it here. Feel the pain resting here.”

She felt his shoulder tense. She placed both hands on his upper arms now and slid her fingers gently down, over his elbows, over his wrists, and placed her palms atop his.

“Your pain is here, in your hands. Hold it. Feel it. It rests here in your hands. Hold your pain in the palms of your hands.”

His face was relaxed now. She heard his breath come more easily, deeply, in through his nose, out through his mouth. His pain was resting, and for the moment he held it.

Suddenly he fixed a stare upon her, studying. She saw questions in his face, questions he dared not ask but kept at bay. She could see them growling behind the gates of his eyes.

“So.” Sairu sat back and folded her hands. “You saw my mistress in your dreams. Are you then a Dream Walker?”

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” he replied. His concentration broken, he settled down into his cot, lying on his side. He no longer held his pain, but it was not so unbearable as it had been. “What is a Dream Walker?”

“It’s a self-explanatory title. A Dream Walker walks in the Realm of Dreams.”

“In that case, yes,” Jovann replied. “Yes, I am.”

Sairu tilted her head to one side. She looked like a dainty doll, incapable of cunning, incapable of inflicting pain, incapable of anything but decorative charm.

And she said, “Prove it.”

“I have nothing to prove to you, little miss.”

Sairu regarded the wary face before her, considering many things and choosing her next words with care. After all, the idea had only just come to her, and it was not politic to rush ahead without at least a moment’s reflection.

But then, Golden Daughters were trained to make swift judgments—judgments which, right or wrong, had the potential to alter entire histories. In that moment Sairu believed that history was a knife balanced by its point on the end of her finger. She could only hold it upright for so long. It must, very soon now, tilt. But she could manipulate, by a twist of the wrist, which direction it would fall.

“You say my Lady Hariawan is this Umeer’s daughter whom you met in the Dream,” she said slowly, lacing her words with sweetness and masking her face in guileless concern. “If what you say is true, it verifies my suspicion that my mistress is one of the Dream Walkers. A rare, a wonderful individual.”

“She is that,” Jovann agreed, and Sairu could have pitied him his ardor. What a love-sick pup he looked, lying there in pain, his eyes full of emotions he did not quite understand.

“Love is a great asset to a Golden Daughter,”
Princess Safiya had explained to Sairu years before. “
It is the most powerful force in the worlds and therefore a dangerous weapon. Only take care you never permit this weapon to be used against you! Recognize love. Feed it in others. Root it out in yourself.
”

Sairu breathed three times, in and out, as she allowed her next words to play through her mind, testing them. Satisfied they would serve her purpose, she said, “I believe Lady Hariawan is in danger.”

It worked like magic. She could almost have laughed. For Jovann’s head came up, and by the burning in his eyes, she saw that all thought of his father and his desire to hasten home had vanished. No other thought could fit alongside his concern for the beautiful lady of his dream. No other passion could flourish while this fire raged.

Sairu thought she could take his love, drive it through his heart, and watch it kill him as effectively as any blade. Her stomach turned. For the second time that day, she feared she might be ill. And that was odd, for she was never unwell. So she shook herself, painted a new smile on her mouth, and watched the ongoing effect of her words.

“What kind of danger?” Jovann demanded. “From whom?” He looked about the infirmary, as though assassins and brigands might even now lurk in the deeper shadows or behind the humble screens. “This is a holy place, is it not? Is she not safe here?”

“She comes from the Crown of the Moon, the holiest, the mightiest temple in all the Noorhitam Empire,” Sairu said, her voice low. “If she is not safe in that holy place, why would she be safer here?”

Jovann gazed at her long and hard, and she made doubly certain there was nothing for him to read on her face beyond a simple handmaiden’s concern for her mistress. “We were sent to these mountains in disguise, and I was told that she is sick and needs the freshness of mountain air. But I have traveled with her for many months now, and I know that Lady Hariawan is not sick. At least, not in body. And I believe not in mind.”

“But perhaps,” Jovann finished for her, “in dream?”

“Perhaps.” Sairu bowed her head demurely. “I fear for her. I suspect she travels into the Dream alone, unprotected by the brothers of the temple. Who knows what might assault her there, beyond the boundaries of our own world?”

She could see memories on his face now, recent memories. Try though she might, glancing at him from beneath her eyelashes, she could not read what those memories were. But she was almost certain now that he had indeed done as he said: He had walked with Lady Hariawan in the Dream.

And he knew something of her danger.

“I will protect her,” Jovann said, sitting up, then winced at the pain in his back and hunched over.

Sairu laughed. “
You
? You can scarcely turn your head to look over your shoulder! How will you protect my mistress?”

The goading worked. “I am not as you see me now when I walk in the Dream. I am strong there. I can guard her; I can keep her from harm.”

“But I do not know for certain that what you claim is the truth. I do not know that you are a Dream Walker.” She leaned forward then, her hands still folded in her lap, and caught his gaze with her own. “I want proof.”

“What sort of proof?”

“Dream-walk tonight. And when you return, bring me back something from the Realm of Dreams.”

How anyone could sleep with that girl sitting across from him, silent as a shadow but watching, always watching, was a mystery Jovann did not like to try fathoming. It was unnerving.

Lying on his stomach so as not to add pressure to his wounded back, he turned his head on his pillow and glared at Sairu. “Do you
have
to be here?”

“Yes,” she answered, and smiled.

He shivered. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

Nothing but the smile in return.

Night fell heavily in the mountains, as though the darkness of the sky reached the peaks sooner than the valleys. Outside, the priests walked by light of torches, and Jovann could hear their haunting chants to welcome the rising of Hulan. He heard other sounds of the night as well, beyond the temple walls: the lonely cry of an owl on the hunt; the voice of an evening songbird singing the sorrow of another day lost; and even, Jovann believed, the far-off howl of a wolf, and another wolf answering, still more distant.

But no wolf was ever more threatening than the little handmaiden watching him.

“It’s not as though you’ll be able to
watch
my dream,” Jovann persisted. “Go to your own rooms and come back in the morning. I’ll bring back your proof.”

“I know you will,” Sairu replied. “But I’m going to watch and make certain you do so while sleeping.”

He couldn’t argue with that. After all, none of his own people believed him when he claimed to see the future in his dreams. Why should this little maid credit his tale of walking in the Dream itself?

He thought bitterly of his conversation with Sunan, which seemed so long ago. What a fool. What a
fool
he’d been! Did he really think anything would be changed, that somehow years could soften hatred? But he had. He always, somehow, managed to fool himself into thinking Sunan would see him as his brother one day. He was wrong. They were enemies. As surely as warrior and wolf would always be enemies, competing for land, for respect, for game, for life, so he and Sunan would hate each other to the end of time.

But his heart hurt at this thought, and he cursed himself again and again. Such a fool. Such a fool!

“You should lie still,” Sairu said.

“I am still. Can’t move much, can I?”

“You’re not still inside. You’re racing around within your head.”

How could she see that from across the room? A single low lamp sat before her, casting most of its flickering light on her face, leaving him in shadow. How could she see his restlessness? Little witch-woman, he thought, and crushed his pillow under his arms.

“Do you know any lullabies?” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Lullabies. Know any?”

She gave him such a look, he almost laughed. How delightful to see that smile of hers fall away, even for a moment! “Come,” he said, his voice gentler than it had been, “surely Kitar handmaidens are taught a lullaby or two with which to soothe their masters and mistresses? Or, if nothing else, I’ll bet your mother sang to you when you were small.”

“She did not,” said Sairu.

Something about her voice startled Jovann, and while he had opened his mouth to continue his harangue, he closed it again, all words cut off. Then he sighed heavily and turned his face away from her again. But he could still feel her eyes on the back of his head.

Then, to his surprise, he heard a soft voice singing. It found the notes with difficulty, wavering and weak at first. But as it sang, it grew stronger, until he could hear the words. And, surprising him most of all, he realized that she sang a Chhayan lullaby. One he knew as well as his own mother’s voice.

“Go to sleep, go to sleep,

My good boy, go to sleep.

Where did the songbird go?

Beyond the mountains of the sun.

Beyond the gardens of the moon.

Where did the Dara go?

Beyond the Final Water’s waves

To sing before the mighty throne.

Go to sleep, go to sleep,

My good boy, go to sleep.”

The first few uncertain notes touched his ear, and he was back home once more in his father’s gurta. And the fires were low outside, casting only the ember glow through the door flap to rest on his mother’s face. The buffalo lowed in their pastures. The plains-wind sighed on its long journey to the mountains, to the sea.

And far away, beyond the handmaiden’s voice, beyond the remembered voice of his own mother, he heard another voice calling, its words like river water.

Won’t you follow me, Jovann?

By the time the song ended, Jovann was asleep.

Sairu got up slowly and stepped across the room to bend over him. She listened to his breathing and knew that he was gone beyond the waking world. Nodding, satisfied, she knelt, this time beside his bed, and waited to see if he could do as she asked.

Jovann stepped out of his body, gladly leaving it and all its reopened wounds behind. He followed the voice of the wood thrush, which seemed to blend with the handmaiden’s song until the two became one.

Beyond the mountains of the sun.

Beyond the gardens of the moon.

Where did the Dara go?

The white emptiness surrounded him, but it could not be entirely emptiness so long as that song reached out to him, guiding him from his own world into the Between. He felt as though he climbed into the sky and wondered if he would be able to glimpse Daramuti far below him if he looked hard enough. Would he be able to espy the dreams of all those who slept tucked away in the high Khir Mountains?

But even the mountains, he knew, were too small for him to discern them. Not from here. Not from so far away. So he did not look. The song called to him, silver and bright and welcoming, and he pursued it.