Steles of the Sky (37 page)

She sighed. “I miss Shuffle.”

“You miss the freedom. Now that we’re here, you’re picking a fight not because you are angry at me, but because you’re angry at yourself.”

She stepped back and glared at him. “I’m sure you’re very wise, Doctor Anil. Now leave me.”

He turned to the door. Wizard or not, she could have him dismembered for disobedience. Every step he took burned in her lungs, in the corners of her eyes.

His hand was on the latch when she said, “No. I cannot bear it. Anil, come to bed. I … I need you. I need your counsel. I have an empire to run.”

He turned back, squinting with mirth and relief. Startled, she saw that it had been as hurtful for him to walk away as for her to send him. “What about our argument?”

“I am sure,” she said, “that it will still be there in the morning.”

*   *   *

Master War did not return. Hsiung kept his head bowed, his sore body slowly congealing around its immobility. Eventually, a novice came to bring Hsiung to the baths—he could stand only with assistance, though the steam and scraping helped his locked muscles to release—and then to clothe him. The robes laid before him were dull yellow, onion-dyed. The belt was plain homespun, with no color in it.

Seeing this, Hsiung’s heart gave a strange, sad-glad leap. He put a hand to his mouth, wishing there were someone he could ask.

But no.

He would have to accept the evidence, and the evidence suggested that the Wretched Mountain Temple had not expelled him. Though apparently he would have to start over again from the very beginning.

When he was clothed, they fed him—millet and vegetables—and the novice led him to a pallet. Still no words had passed between them: the novice would be required not to speak unless spoken to. And Brother Hsiung, of course, could not speak.

And was a novice again himself, in any case.

The novice left him there, in a bare wickerwork cell just long enough to stretch out in and just tall enough to stand. He could touch the opposite walls if he extended his arms. There was nothing for Hsiung here except his forms, or sleep—and he did not know yet if he was permitted to sleep.

Slowly, limited by the size of the space, he began to take himself through his daily meditation. He wobbled with tiredness; he was careful and precise. His muscles ached, but with the movement they gradually softened.

He was two-thirds done when a shadow fell across the empty doorway. It was Master War, but since the master did not enter Hsiung’s penitent’s quarters, Hsiung continued his forms. When he finished, he stood trembling, and could not raise his eyes to the master’s.

“The masters have read your letter and discussed it,” Master War said.

That brought Hsiung’s head up, hope and anxiety flaring. He waited silently; the hardest silence of so many.

Master War took a breath and frowned. Then, as if considering each word, he slowly said, “Rest, Brother Hsiung. There will be no war before spring, and in any case we must make preparations.”

18

Long before the snows made travel impossible, the wind off the steppe grew killing cold. The clans had withdrawn into Qarash’s walls, or had left for their winter ranges. Al-Sepehr might have raged inwardly at the delay—winter was no impediment to war in the Rahazeen wastes, rather making them easier to navigate—but if he did so, he buried it deep. Even Saadet barely suspected his anger, studying him across the council table. It was where she saw him now, almost exclusively, except for his occasional and inexplicable absences.

They were ameliorated by the gift he brought back for her from one such trip: a breech-loading rifle, an elegant wand of metal two thirds as tall as she, with a flintlock mechanism and a supply of wadding, powder, and balls. She took to carrying it with her, especially on the hunt. It was a wonderful tool, accurate as far as she could see, and she learned very quickly to steady it and use it in the saddle. The Qersnyk she rode with laughed at her—what good was a weapon you could shoot only once?—but even Esen admired its range.

In truth, Shahruz sulked under the neglect worse than Saadet did.

She
was distracted. Her time was taken up with those council meetings, with learning to rule, and with learning the Qersnyk arts that would let her subjects see her as a fitting Khatun. She was coming to love the stride of her gray mare under her, the tension that was almost-pain of her eagle’s talons against her fist, the wind so cold it blinded.

Determined to match any Qersnyk woman, she rode until the eighth month of what would have been her confinement in any civilized land. Often her rides were taken with the brothers Esen and Paian flanking her—warrior and shaman-rememberer, the two extremes of the Qersnyk culture. Between them, they could answer any question she might have—and she had many.

The pregnancy troubled her little. Saadet had witnessed the miseries of other women, but she experienced few of those. Instead, she felt flushed with strength and well-being. Esen was not the only one to tell her she glowed.

As the twins had caused the palace to be reclaimed and cleaned, al-Sepehr imported some few of his comforts from Ala-Din—Rahazeen men, though they wore their veils wrapped like sashes here and wore gloves over their tattooed hands, and Rahazeen women, who knew how to cook the food and make the music of home. Saadet sometimes slipped into the comfort of the harem that her adopted father had established to hear them play and sing. Shahruz never spoke to her when she did so.

As she grew more gravid, the winter more fierce, and her life more constrained, Shahruz abandoned her almost completely. She could not blame him, she supposed. She could not blame a man for wanting to divorce himself from the awkward realities of her pregnant, female, sacred body with its sacred impositions. Hunger and the inability to eat, simultaneously. Her ever-shifting balance. Her feet that swelled like an old woman’s. Her bladder, and her constant and humiliating need to piss.

Still, the Qersnyk seemed not to care about those things. To them, she was a bearing woman. Mothers-to-be were meant to be celebrated and spoiled, the minor inconveniences of her condition accepted with humor: honored rather than held as evidence of physical frailty and a woman’s sacred unsuitedness to worldly concerns. She sought out their company more and more.

She felt as if she navigated behind a plow, as if her belly were a great curved share that cut conversations and turned them to other topics before she could arrive. The joy and ease never left her, but anticipation outshone them. She could not wait to be delivered, and she felt herself a little sad that the herbs al-Sepehr had given her to dose herself with ensured she would birth a boy.

She discovered that she would have preferred a daughter.

Although it was late spring by anyone’s reckoning but a Qersnyk, she was brought to childbed—not that the Qersnyk approach to birthing involved a bed—in the midst of a tremendous blizzard, as so often happens. Following the Qersnyk tradition, it was the shaman-rememberer Paian who attended her, along with two of al-Sepehr’s blind wives. Al-Sepehr might have waited in the antechamber with propriety by either nation’s standards, especially (to the Qersnyk way of thinking) in the absence of a father in the birthing room, but he chose to busy himself with other duties.

Shahruz absented himself from the proceedings as well, though Saadet called for him again and again. He didn’t approve of men in the birthing room, even if that man were a shaman-rememberer. He certainly wouldn’t be there himself to witness his sister’s disgrace as she crouched, Qersnyk-style, clutching the ornately silver-gilt birthing-frame with its carvings of running mares.

The birth was as easy as the pregnancy had been. No more than a quarter of the day had passed in labor when Saadet’s child slipped into Paian’s hands. While she still strained to bring forth the afterbirth, he slipped the lustily wailing babe from its membranes, laid it in a nest of clean lamb’s wool, and squeezed the cord with fingers that knew milking, so the blood would be in the child instead of on the floor. As warmth surrounded it, the babe’s screams subsided.

Then, as Saadet finished with the afterbirth, he collected that—there would be a ceremony, she vaguely knew—and allowed the women to help her to a pallet. As they washed the blood from her thighs, she turned to Paian. “My son?” she asked.

Paian’s mouth flickered momentarily into a stricken frown, an expression she had never seen on the face of a shaman-rememberer. “Khatun—”

She raised herself on her elbows. “My son.”

He lifted the wool-swaddled child in the crook of his arm and came to crouch beside her. Servants were entering the room now, on what signal she had not seen, to disassemble the birthing-frame and carry the bloody rags and water away. Saadet extended her arms, but Paian did not immediately place the child in them.

“Paian,” she said.

He turned to the nearest servant. “Clear the room,” he said, and waited while they led the blind wives out and further excused themselves. Saadet waited, sick horror growing inside her.
There is something wrong with the child!
She pictured a monster, malformed, with a cleft lip or an exposed spine. So many things could go wrong, and now she cursed herself for failing to prepare herself.

If I had considered this in advance, it might not have happened. I could have prayed against it.
Even as the thought formed, she knew it was ridiculous.

You are hysterical,
her brother said.

She did not wish him to think her weak. Breath by breath, she calmed herself. “Is there something wrong?” she asked, proud that her voice did not shake.

Let them think her weak.

Paian smiled. “Not wrong,” he said. “But you were not Qersnyk, and it may take a little while for you to understand. Your son is…” He shook his head. “It is a thing that has happened only once before, so long ago the truth of it is lost in legends.”

“Paian,”
she said, desperately.

He opened the loose robe the women had draped around her, baring her ribcage and one breast. The room was warm; there were braziers set at every corner.

He lifted the child from its swaddlings, supporting the overlarge head, and Saadet could see that the blood was drying sticky on its skin. Dimly, she remembered that it was her task, if she was capable, to wash the birth fluids from it. Her eyes took it in: tiny red fists, strangely cylindrical newborn’s body writhing, face screwed up in wrath as the babe screamed its displeasure at being once more exposed.
Anyone would think it was being boiled, from the fuss.

All the parts in place, except—

“Your son is Khagan,” Paian said. “But he is also a shaman-rememberer.”

Saadet blinked, reached out, let her hand fall back. “It can’t be a girl!”

“It is not a girl,” said Paian.

He laid the naked babe upon her belly and drew the robe closed over both of them. Saadet was almost too startled to help guide the child to her breast. Paian showed her how to press her nipple to its lips; she felt a sweet, dazed relief as it took the teat and began, reflexively, to suck instead of screaming.

“He’s determined to be no trouble at all,” Paian said.

“He!”

“He. Your son is a boy, born as I was born, in a body that honors Mother Night. I recognize this as the shaman-rememberer who tended my birth recognized me. Congratulations, Khatun. The portents attending the birth of your son are strong indeed.”

Saadet leaned back against the pillows and tried to think, to plan. To understand. She was sliding under a wave of exhaustion.

“Send for my father,” she said, and let her eyes close gently.

*   *   *

She had barely risen from childbed, still sick and dizzy with lost blood and a clout wrapped between her legs to soak up whatever might drop out of her, when al-Sepehr entered the room unheralded. He came to where she sat, supported by an ox-yoke chair, and made an elaborate pretense of kneeling before her. She sensed his discomfort in the angle of his shoulders, the way his body wished to lean away from her even as he forced it close.

Paian had told him, then.

He said, “Is this my grandson?” in a rush that told her how he had practiced the words, in order to get them out without choking on them.

She nodded, trying to appear gracious, suspecting she only looked tired. The baby in her arms scrunched its face up as al-Sepehr rose and bent over both of them. He touched the baby’s face, something that could have been mistaken for a smile bending his mouth as it turned reflexively to suckle the finger.

“Have you named him?”

“Re Tsaagan Buqa,” she said. She had the unworthy desire to snatch her child away from its grandfather, and managed to limit herself to a quick, grasping ripple of her fingers on the swaddled babe. She ached all over; she did not care to receive anyone. She wanted to lie down.

Al-Sepehr perched on the arm of the chair, looming over her. She wanted to lean away from him, and chastised herself before Shahruz could do it for her.
He is your father. He is the head of your order. You will treat him with respect!

She said, “I trust you are well?”

“An emissary has come from Kyiv,” he said. “They will send us troops in the spring, when travel becomes possible again. They support us, in that we oppose Re Temur and his poisonous witch.”

Saadet sat silently, digesting what he said. Of course Edene had killed dozens, burned an entire village. How did that compare to al-Sepehr releasing his blood ghosts on the residents of this very keep?

The Rahazeen sky overhead told her that the Scholar-God, at least, was moved to support them. Maybe. Or at least, not oppose what they did in Her name.

She said, “How did a rider come through the snow?”

It was shoulder-deep on a tall mare, and drifted in the lowest windows of the keep and houses if they were left unshuttered.

Al-Sepehr smiled. “I do not require riders for news to find me.”

“Your djinn.”

“Not mine. I am only lucky to command him a little. Kara Mehmed Caliph will send us men as well, in thanks for our assistance in claiming his own royal seat.”