Range of Ghosts (5 page)

“Oh, I wish I could have seen that.” Despite herself, Samarkar smiled. La, not tsa. Yes. And she could imagine the venerable, stick-straight Yongten-la, with his moustache that trailed down his chest like something out of a storybook, holding back the king-in-all-but-name of all Rasa with a raised finger, a stern look, and the authority of rightfulness.

Whether she grew magic or no, she was a wizarding woman now. She hoped she lived long enough to earn half of Yongten-la’s authority.

*   *   *

With good food—when she was finally allowed it—and rest, Samarkar mended quickly. Two days after she awoke from her poppy haze, she managed to spare herself the indignity of pans in bed by tottering across richly knotted carpets to squat over a pot in one bare corner. She relished the grate of cold stone beneath her naked feet, but it was all she could do to hold the skirts of her bed robe clear and not topple over in the process. She had to call Tsering to lead her back to bed and was astonished by the weakness of her own voice, how it almost got lost under the glassy chiming of the devil-bells guarding the open window.

Two days after that, however, the stitches came out of her wound. She knew the surgeon-wizards did their work with mirror and tweezers and long delicate tools, so they could operate through the smallest incision possible, but when Tsering brought her a mirror and showed her the red line of the scar, she was startled by how small it was: only the span of her hand, and no more.

A day later, when there was no additional bleeding, she was deemed well enough to be carried through the halls and down the stairwells of the Citadel, down to the steaming baths of mineral-rich water that flowed hot from the earth and was reheated over a coal-fired hypocaust. Because the kitchens and the baths also heated the Citadel, the halls themselves grew warmer as Samarkar descended with her litter-bearers—three novices from her own classes, would-be wizards as yet uncut and uncollared, and one newly elevated wizard younger than herself, still stiff in his pristine collar.

She knew the novices well; now, they pretended for her sake that they did not exist. She chose to believe it was a kindness, that they did not force her to think through their changed status and relationships yet.

In summer, the baths would be allowed to run from warm to tepid; the kitchens would go mostly cold. Now, with the nights still frosty, the water was kept steaming.

Samarkar had meant to protest that she could walk, but Tsering had been so efficient about bundling her into bed robes and cloaks and seating her among the cushions of the litter that by the time it occurred to Samarkar to resist, it would have been churlish.

Five minutes into the journey, she realized that these traditions had their sense.
Tsarepheth
meant “white and scarlet citadel,” and the Citadel that was now her home was the source of that ancient name.

The Citadel was a palace and a fortress and a library and a college. It was the home and shelter of all the wizards of the Rasan Empire. Its ivory and gold and crimson walls had sheltered them for centuries—through the fall of empires, the rise of conquerors, and a civil war or two. It was vast—spanning a promontory at the top of the narrow valley Tsarepheth inhabited, built to the buttresses of the mountains that flanked on either side so that its outline was a broad, irregular, and shallow triangle with the blunt tip pointed down. It was the tallest building in Tsarepheth—the city named for it—as well as the most massive, but the thirteen stories of its height were dwarfed by the basalt and granite peaks abutting it on either side. The domed basalt mountain on the left was called the Cold Fire; the taller granite peak whose flank it half enveloped was the Island-in-the-Mists.

The wild Tsarethi flowed through its foundations in an arched tunnel; the hot springs heating its belly sprang from the quiescent volcano that guarded its left flank. A thousand steps climbed its face; there were no doors at ground level, and no windows for thirty spans above the ground. Trade goods had to be hauled up in a basket, and for that reason bannered winches stood along its battlements.

On winter nights, mist dragons might creep down from their lairs among the heights of the Steles and drape themselves over and around those battlements for warmth. Samarkar had even once seen one, a translucent, ghosty thing with blue eyes winking along its feldspar length.

From the city below, the Citadel had the aspect of a great stone dam, a massive thing wrought of white and red granite, and in time of need it could become one, walling the sacred Tsarethi behind steel gates that only waited a command to fall into place across its tunnels. The city itself lay just below, rising in ranks to the steep valley walls above the river. Farther downstream, where the slope of the river’s descent lessened and the valley widened in response, brown fields and paddies that would soon hold rice and vegetables and oats lay tiered like ruffles on a gown.

Samarkar’s rooms, as befitted a new wizard, were in the highest and winter-coldest corner of the place. Twenty flights of stairs lay between the room where she slept and healed and the ones where hot baths pooled in cisterns scoured from the black basalt of the Cold Fire.

She would not have made it on her own.

Even being carried exhausted her beyond words. The ceilings in the pale granite corridors were high, so her bearers could hold her level even as they descended, but she fought not to clench her fists on the rails. She had not ridden in a litter, she realized, since her ill-fated trip to her husband’s court when she was fourteen.

When they set her down and the newly ranked wizard extended a hand, she took it gratefully. She had been trained from the age when she could stand by herself to move with the grace and dignity befitting a princess, but now it was all she could do to not lean too hard on the man’s arm as the bath attendants came for her, extending their tongues to show respect.

Two young women led her into the heat of the bath chamber. They were clothed in sheer white gowns that fell straight from the shoulder. Their arms were scandalously bare. Each of them was careful to hold Samarkar upright while making the touches seem natural and solicitous.

A heavy curtain fell behind Samarkar, and the heat of the bath chamber rolled over her. One of the servants opened her bed gowns and stripped her cloaks away while the other steadied her. She soon stood naked. It was an effort to hold her hands wide while the smaller of the two—a moon-faced beauty who could almost have been Samarkar’s daughter, if Samarkar had had a daughter swiftly upon her marriage—unwound the gauze and silk across her belly. Samarkar wanted to defend the wound, to hide it with her hands as if it shamed her. She forced herself to stand proud.

The young women conferred over her abdomen—shrunken now by her fasting and recovery, and the taller and perhaps older one nodded. “It is healing well,” she said. “Shall I help you into the water?”

“Thank you,” said Samarkar. “I shall walk. If I can.”

The entrance to the pools was shallow, not stepped but slanted, and scattered thickly with white sand that lay in pleasing ripples against the black basalt. Samarkar walked in slowly, as if savoring the warmth rising across the arches of her feet and the bones of her ankles, but in truth she did not trust her stability if she walked fast. From the way the attendants hovered, they were as worried as she. For the sake of her pride, though, she stayed upright.

The descent grew easier as the water took her weight. As the gentle swirl of the current washed her thighs and belly free of sweat and the crusts of dried blood and strong wine, as they soothed her shoulders and her neck, as they lapped her until she stood on tiptoe in hot water to her chin and felt it untangling her oiled hair down her back, she sighed and let go of a breath she had not known she was holding.

She stepped deeper. The water lifted her off her feet. Her toes dipped to brush the sand when she exhaled; her breasts bobbed weightlessly when she inhaled. Warm water licked her collarbone, shading hotter as she stroked deeper into the pool.

Each time she drew her arms forward, each time she lightly kicked, she felt the pull through the cramped and damaged muscles of her abdomen. But still she swam, as she had swum all her life except for the three terrible years in Song. She swam. And soon she would swim strongly once more.

Samarkar would live. And she would grow to become something new. Whatever the future held for her.

She would live.

*   *   *

Because she would live, she knew she could not avoid her brother forever. But still she stalled, giving herself another hand of days to recover and build her blood up with apples studded with nails (the nails were pulled out before serving) and a rich broth made with bones and liver, with plenty of wolfberries and the sweet, hard roots called beets that came all the way from Kyiv along the Celadon Highway. Everything she ate was served with the soy that came from Song along the same ancient road. She dined on the steamed immature beans, hot and crunchy with a sprinkling of Tsarepheth’s famous violet salt; the soft curd sweetened and served mixed with rice; the pressed curd fried crisp in toasted oil and sprinkled with crunchy seeds.

Yongten-la had explained that she must eat a great deal of soy now—soy with every meal, when she could—and a great deal of butter and yogurt and milk, or her bones would grow brittle as an old woman’s, without the life force harbored in her stones to keep her strong. It wasn’t an edict she found difficult to endure: Samarkar had always enjoyed her food.

She stalled too until she was permitted to return to her studies, which was several days before she faced Yongten-la on one of the great decked battlements of the Lower Citadel. Her brother and sister wizards and the novices gathered in every overlooking window and along the curves of the walls and the banks of white steps leading down to make a sort of auditorium, and she tried not to weep tears of joy and apprehension as the master bent her wizard’s collar about her throat. Fireworks—one of the sacred and secret sciences of her order, which she might one day undertake as a profession if she proved unmagicked as well as unwomaned—whistled and cracked overhead, showering bright sparks in all the colors of dragonfire across the evening sky.

Down in the city, Samarkar knew, across the valley at the great black basalt palace that stood opposite the Citadel like its far-cast shadow, in the terraced mountain farms—in all of these places, men and women looked up from their work and knew that a wizard had been made. One of the thousands of dark sets of eyes reflecting these fiery blooms probably belonged to her elder half brother.

Samarkar flourished. And after the ceremony of her elevation, she could no longer easily find excuses to avoid her brother. She was a ranked wizard now and could do as she liked. But somehow each day passed without her summoning a sedan chair—or simply walking down the Thousand Steps—crossing through the bustling streets of Tsarepheth to find him.

The mountains that embraced the Citadel meant that morning came late to its windows, and evening early—but Samarkar’s room, high in its towers, received the first light of the sun over the shoulder of Island-in-the-Mists. Still, it was only gray and not yet light when she awakened one morning from a terrible dream, clutching the covers to her collarbone and breathing loudly in her terror.

Her stomach no longer hurt with each deep breath. But she still remembered the horror of the dream, in which she had been sent back to her brother in disgrace by Yongten-la, because her gift had never manifested itself.

It was foolish, she thought, soothing herself, to stall an immediate duty because you were waiting for something that might never materialize.

Today
.
Today I will go to the palace.

4

The next morning, Temur again received an invitation to dine with the Tsareg—this time on marmot cooked in its skin, and tea with noodles. Before long, Temur found himself attached to the household of old Altantsetseg and her tiers of children and grandchildren.

Altantsetseg must have put her back to eighty winters, but she still rode upright on the shelf bench of her two-wheeled wagon, drawn by a pair of red oxen, the felt panels of her white-house and its long, precious wooden poles heaped up behind her. As evidenced on that first day, Altantsetseg’s kin-band was mostly women and boys—like the rest of the refugee train—and they were happy to have Temur’s companionship and protection. And Edene somehow managed to put herself in his way every day or two, a situation which he found more confusing than disagreeable.

You cannot have her,
his rational mind argued. And yet another part answered,
Why not?

After each break, Temur rode out before Altantsetseg’s people, pushing Bansh on until he found a camping site that was both unoccupied and desirable. He’d turn the mare loose to graze, as the distance he could travel in one day was limited by his lack of a remount, and he would begin building a fire, hunting game, and carrying water, if there was water to be had. When Altantsetseg’s granddaughters and grandsons arrived—the ones who had ponies ahead of the ones on foot, driving their few salvaged cattle, sheep, and goats with the help of a pack of scroungy dogs—they would set up the camp around him and take over the chores. At the very last came the adult women with the wagons and the heavy goods—the white-houses, an anvil, iron cook pots, and so on.

Temur had seen Song refugees when he rode with his uncle Mongke south and east to war. The Song were a sedentary people, with their farms and fields of millet and rice, their oxen yoked to turn earth with plow blades rather than haul women’s possessions in their carts. They had suffered greatly without their villages and their homes.

His own people were far more adapted to this life. They knew how to spread out, to make use of the land, to travel safely. Like tortoises, they carried their homes with them wherever they went. Indeed, if it had not been for the war, they would have been making this migration anyway. But now they were months early and moving in greater numbers than was their wont. And because of it, Temur worried for their food, come next winter.