Hegira (13 page)

“You'll be excused for a while,” she said. “You work here now anyway.”

They left the plaza and followed a twisting, dark road through Mappu. Hundreds of fire doves were out like glowing insects now. He wanted to take her then and there, with an insane pressure he could hardly control. But she kept his hand loosely in hers and led him through a gate into a courtyard.

“I don't feel too well,” something made him say. She smiled back, and he knew he was lying.

The inside of the courtyard was paved with tile and had a fountain in the middle, a bronze dish supported by stone lions so old they were almost shapeless. Lamplight came through the upper windows of the house at the end of the yard. A jagged crack ran from the rounded top of the door frame to a window above. It all looked as old as the fountain. Next to it, Ual was as fresh and young as a flower.

They went through the door and stood in a hallway across the front of the house, doors at either end. He asked why the hall had no door in the middle, and she said that was to keep the gingerii out — demons. Demons could only travel in a straight line. She quickly demonstrated that there was no way a demon could get from the door to the end of the hall in a straight line in either direction. Kuril nodded. She led him to the right and opened the door with an iron key tied around her waist.

She left him standing alone in a small, bare room with a window at eye level in the outer wall. He sat on a smooth wooden bench, crossing his legs. Elena came to mind, and he frowned. Something feral was working in him. He turned his guilt into a kind of anger at Elena; she had no right to expect him to be inhumanly chaste.

“This is the household of my brother, Hualao,” she told him when she returned. “He died in the waves.” Kiril apologized, and she looked at him curiously.

“You had nothing to do with it.”

“But I'm sorry he's dead.”

“If he wasn't dead, you wouldn't be here. Your ship would have sailed away, and I'd have never even thought about choosing you.”

Kiril nodded, though he didn't understand. He followed her into a high-ceilinged room filled with a stone hearth, a heavy plush rug, and comfortably padded rattan furniture.

“I'm a virgin,” she said. He nodded agreeably until he realized what she'd said. He felt stupid and clumsy. This was a sensuous ocean island — weren't all girls soon experienced here? His nervousness trebled.

“But you won't be able — ”he began to say.

“Hm?”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“You're sorry all the time.”

“I'll be sleeping out here,” he said. In Mediweva husbands always spent the first few nights sleeping separately from their wives. It supposedly built up friendship and confidence and confirmed the relationship in the eyes of God.

“You'll be cold. You don't want to sleep out here.”

“Why did you choose me? I can't stay in Golumbine. I'd make a very poor husband.”

“You don't like me?” she asked. “I'm very likable. Lots of men want me.”

“I like you — I want you very much.”

“You don't sound sure.”

“How old are you, Ual?”

“Marriage age.”

“I mean, how many years?”

“That is one word I've never been able to understand.”

They took seats next to each other on a divan with cotton cushions. Kiril told her what a year was, and she laughed. Without Obelisk texts to influence a person, Hegira was virtually timeless, divided only into night and day. Seasons weren't important when the prevailing winds were warm and the currents brought a tropical surge day in, day out.

Unknown

“I am many, many days old,” she said. “I must be many years old, maybe fifty.”

“No,” he said. “You can't be fifty. I'd say you're about twenty. Maybe twenty-two.”

“That must be your age.”

“About,” he said. “I'm twenty-one, very young.”

“Marriage age.”

“But I can't stay.”

“That's okay. I will have many other husbands, perhaps before you leave.”

He held his hands together between his knees and swallowed. He'd almost forgotten. Something ached inside him, and it wasn't his healing rib cage.

“I'm not used to that, Ual,” he said. “Where I come from, a man can only have one wife.”

“Same here, sometimes,” she said.

“But a woman can only have one husband.”

“Oh.” She looked at his hands and put her hand on them. “Listen. I am an important woman here. Lots of men want to marry me. But I am important enough I won't need to have more husbands until after you go. Ship will stay here another ...” she paused. “Thirty or forty days. Part of a year. I can wait. I like you enough to wait.”

He didn't know what to do. But someone inside of him did. He held her hand up to his and kissed it. It reminded him of kissing Elena's hand, but not in an unpleasant way. It was as if all women were wonderfully the same, with the same ability to soothe and attract . . . and to hurt terribly if he didn't handle things right. If he did something wrong. He felt very mixed up, but wonderful. “I'm honored,” he whispered.

“That's the way,” she said. “Now I know why I picked you. You're a virgin too!”

Kiril opened and closed his mouth like a fish. He resented her implication all the more because it was true. He looked at her steadfastly. “Why would you want to choose a virgin? Both of us will be stumbling in the dark.”

“There will be no advantages . . . Both will learn.”

She had moved no closer to him, but the heat of her body and her subtle perfume were already bothering him. There were many texts on the Obelisks that gave intimate details of the love habits of the First-born. There was no reason to think things were any different on the far island of Golumbine. But did they kiss with their lips?

It was necessary for him to find out.

They did, and apparently by long tradition.

He was still nervous as she stroked the back of his neck and nibbled at his nose. But he noted with some pride that it wasn't a debilitating anxiety. He knew little about disrobing a young woman, but Golumbine's fashions weren't nearly as difficult to remove as Mediweva's had been. He ruefully remembered having tried several times with Elena. If the stays and girdles had been less restraining she might have given in. But he had been ham-handed and both had retreated in discouragement.

Ual did not retreat. She helped. He grew accustomed to her willingness, but it took some time to get used to her unnerving familiarity with his own clothing and his own person.

He thought of Elena, not with guilt, but with a sharp, grieving pain. By rights this should have been her night, her privilege — their privilege — and not the smiling, willing joy of an umber-skinned woman in a land Elena had never heard of. Knowing this, and feeling the stab, he understood with more than his mind that he had no choice.

All of Golumbine was demanding a rebirth. Who was he to resist? He went with her to a room illuminated by small oil lamps, where there was a thick, soft mattress woven of rattan and cotton yarn covered with a sheet of fine linen. The sheet was printed with blocks and circles of purple and brown. As she removed her final garment, a small pair of pants with a skirt around them, and turned to face him, he felt his entire chest alternately weakening and growing strong with the push-pull of his heart and lungs. It was a flutter he'd never felt before, a thick-running excitement that was a mixture of terror and pride.

He was afraid of hurting her. She pulled him down, her eyes so dark in the dim lamplight that he couldn't see their whites, just narrow gaps of brown, almost black.

Later, her hips and thighs crimsoned, she took his hand and moved him off the bed. She gathered up the cloth and cut it into small strips with a sharp knife. Then in the sitting room she soaked it in oil and put it in the fire. She squatted before it, an awesome, youthful idol, flames mirrored in her eyes.

She cleaned both of them off with a soft wet rag and spread another sheet like the first. Kiril found it hard to go to sleep quickly. He stayed awake an hour or more longer than Ual, staring into the dark.

Birds rose from the lake, pink and white and midnight blue, as Bar-Woten plunged his paddle into the water and scooted the reed boat along. Jungle circled the lake and even extended onto it on long legs of twisted roots. Birds and aquatic lizards flocked across the roots in squawking conflict. The sky was a hot, pale blue. The north was no longer dark. Through a smoked glass a bright band of light could be seen extending from the western Obelisk and widening to form an ovoid where the northern Obelisk had been.

A head with glittering, opalescent eyes rose in the water where he was about to dip his paddle, making him jerk his arm back. The head vanished, and water sprayed with the swish of a tail. This was no lake for unaided swimmers. Insects as long as a finger scurried over it and dipped below to pierce small fish and tadpoles with wicked mandibles. They could just as easily bite through an unwary hand. White snakes — a delicate side dish for the Golumbines — gathered in floating lacework colonies to swim and bask.

The lake was a soup of life. It was tepid and brackish at one end, clogged with leech-infested reeds and matted algae. It did not smell too offensive because the wind was fresh and strong. The wind dried off the sweat of his paddling and made the jungle hum and whistle. Drifts of spider web floated from the trees.

He brought the boat up onto a dirt embankment and pulled it out of the water. Then he sat on a mossy rock to think. His foot found a hold in the spotted gray stone, and he bent to examine the niche. It was more than a rock — it was a head. Worn gray eyes peered at him, eyebrows cracked and covered with lichen. The stone nose was half-buried in thick damp soil. Ageless idols were not rare here, but the head still fascinated him. He had often dreamed of exploring long-deserted cities. Perhaps temples existed in the jungle that could begin to slake that thirst. But the deep jungle wasn't recommended for inexpert visitors.

He had borrowed the boat and crossed the lake to find a place to sit and think alone and in relative silence. But now that he was alone, he couldn't concentrate. His mind kept drifting off into the past, but that way led to blood and cruelty and mind-blanked hatred. It also reminded him of a great love for Sulay.

He still felt sad for Sulay. The memories welled up, and he couldn't put them aside: The day he had fought with the bear and lost his eye, and that evening as the surgeons had bandaged him . . . Sulay had stood over him in the dark and firelight with the dark forest all around, chuckling and reassuring. “You're Bear-killer now . . . Woten would be proud, and so would the Thunder-Bearer, Eloshim.”

Years later, as an aide to the general, he had been given the pick of the captured Khemites to choose a servant from. Tired from the fighting and feeling dirty with blood and self-anger, Bar-Woten had recognized a face among the children. Barthel — “Servant of Bar,” originally named Amma bin Akka — had been small, dark, and scrappy with more spirit and fear and hate than Bar-Woten had ever thought he could control. But the young Khemite had taken to Bar-Woten as if to a second father, imitating him and absorbing all he had to teach, although retaining his Momadan faith. For years Bar-Woten had trusted the Khemite not to plunge a knife into his back. There was good reason for him to try, Bar-Woten knew — but the Khemite didn't know.

And Bar-Woten would never tell, because his stomach heaved at the memory. It was just as well that Barthel had hidden under reed baskets that day in Khem and seen so little.

An insect crawled up his leg, and he let it climb onto his finger, chancing that it might sting or prick, but it did nothing, and he set it off on the jungle floor.

He brought out bis leather pouch and ate. What was most terrible of all was that he didn't feel nearly as guilty as he should. He took his pain with a sort of zest. He knew he could repeat the past at any time, because though forbidding, it wasn't nearly as frightening as what lay ahead. Establishing familiar territory in the future was necessary, even though the landmarks should be blood and destructions.

Bar-Woten shook his head slowly, chewing on his piece of fruit. He packed his waste into the leather pouch and put the boat in the river to continue his journey.

Golumbine offered any number of marvels to the casual eye. There were deep green gorges slashed by long plumes of waterfalls where circular rainbows dazzled. There were multicolored reptile herds, some carnivorous but most not, that stalked through the forest on then- hind feet, hunting or browsing on the lower branches and ferns. Butterflies as wide as two hands thumb-to-thumb bobbed in and out of shadow. There were marble quarries and quartz hillsides.

And there was Mappu itself, where men were in abundance, and neither he nor Barthel found themselves in much demand. He smiled at that, thinking of Kirn's distress.

He was envious. He'd grown a little bored with the women of the Trident.

Barthel looked at the maps laid out before him on a forecastle capstan and drew his finger along the Bicht of Weggismarche. There was a small circle that showed the former position of the Obelisk. He used a pencil to sketch in the probable path of the fall.

Their trade route took them through several broad curves from Golumbine to southern Weggismarche. Depending on what they found after delivering their chief cargo — saffron and several other ton-lots of spice — they'd make a brief journey into the Pale Seas to pick up goods in the port of Dambapur, the farthest northern city of Weggismarche's tiny sister-state, Nin. Then they'd sail with the currents to the southeast and begin another long circle, which, in five or six years, would again end in Weggismarche.

If there was nothing left of Weggismarche their plans would have to change, of course. At any rate Barthel knew that Bar-Woten, Kiril, and himself would probably leave the ship before then. They might travel along the coast of the Pale Seas, though the map showed little of what lay in those regions beyond a cursory trace of probable coastal zones.