The Quartered Sea (20 page)

Xhojee had not inherited his mother's hawklike profile nor her bedside manner, but Benedikt ignored the undercurrent of discontent and concentrated on mastering words enough to ask what Tul Altun had planned. Although his new teacher seemed not to care how fast or even if he learned, language was a bardic skill that had nothing to do with the number of quarters Sung.

A few days later, Imixara pronounced her patient fit to be moved, and the lessons continued in what Benedikt was made to understand were his rooms.

"All mine?" he asked, clutching close his sleeveless robe.

Imixara looked impressed. "All yours," she told him, then turned to Xhojee. "He seems to understand a great deal. I will see that the tul knows of your success."

"I cannot take the credit, Physician." Xhojee bowed, a momentary expression of pleasure replaced by resignation. "If I were not here to teach him, Benedikt would learn from the birdsong. He takes in meaning like a sponge."

"Then perhaps the tul should hear of your honesty." She nodded toward the wall of shutters. "He may go out onto the terrace if it rains or at night. I do not want him in Tulpayotee's sight until I am certain it will not blind him."

"Does Tulpayotee punish his warrior for becoming a man?"

The sarcasm in Xhojee's voice drew Benedikt out of the adjoining bathing room.

"Don't ever take that tone with me, young man." The physician tapped him on the chest with a polished fingernail. "I will ignore your sulks for your mother's sake—don't think for a moment I haven't noticed—but if you ever speak to me like that again, I will have your head shaved and return you to the children's compound. I don't care what attitude Bon Kytee put up with from you, do you understand?"

"Yes, Physician."

"Good. Let me know the instant you believe him capable of conversing with the tul."

Benedikt bowed as she nodded toward him, then waited until her footsteps died in the distance before crossing to Xhojee. When the other man turned toward him, he poked his finger toward his chest, rolled his eyes, and mimed an overreaction.

The tall golden man did a wicked imitation of the short dark woman. Xhojee couldn't help it, he started to laugh.

So Benedikt expanded on the performance.

A few moments later, they sagged against the wall, exhausted. Xhojee couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed so hard. Then Benedikt jabbed his finger at the air and it set them off again.

Gasping in, gasping out lungful after lungful of air, Xhojee thought he was going to be sick, his stomach hurt so. He managed to bring the last of the giggles under control and realized that the gnawing resentment at being dragged away from his position with Bon Kytee was gone. The laughter had released his grip on it. He felt cleansed.

Breathing finally back to normal he turned to Benedikt, still gasping for breath beside him, a little worried that his student hadn't seemed to have recovered.

Benedikt wasn't certain when the laughter had turned to tears, he'd moved so effortlessly between them. It was as if in allowing the one, he'd somehow left himself open to the other. Drawing in great gulping breaths, he closed his left fist around the queen's coin and punched his right into the wall, over and over. The steel bands around his chest were gone, and all the grief and all the fear came pouring out. He was making some kind of horrible noise, he could hear it but he couldn't stop it.

The
Starfarer
would never return to Shkoder.

Xhojee barely managed to catch the bigger man when his knees buckled. All he could do was guide the collapse to the floor and use his own body to cushion the impact. Bracing his back again the wall, he tucked the golden head into his shoulder and searched his heart for words of comfort. When he couldn't find any Benedikt would have understood, he tightened his grip and quietly sang a cradle song. To his surprise, although the weeping continued, it lost the wild sound that had frightened him so. When he finished, he sang another and another until Benedikt finally slept, exhausted.

Settling them both a little more comfortably, Xhojee brushed his lips against the golden hair and sighed. All of a sudden, in spite of his lost position with the bon, his life didn't seem so bad.

* * *

"No, you're karjet if you have more than one braid so to the karjen, the one braids, pretty much anyone is karjet. If you have six braids, then anyone with seven braids or more is karjet."

Benedikt frowned. "Then what is person with six braids called?"

"That depends. He's a karjet to anyone with five braids or less but just a person with six braids to anyone with more braids." Xhojee scrubbed his face with his palms. "It's like an oven in here. Let's take a break. Is there any juice left?"

Scooping up the pitcher, Benedikt walked to the alcove that led out to the hall. The louvered shutters separating the terrace from his suite were the closest things to doors he'd seen. Privacy seemed to be maintained by closetlike entries—with the outer door in the side wall at one end and the inner door in the opposite wall at the other end—and a hanging string of bells placed so that they were impossible to avoid.

He wasn't permitted to go out into the hall—not that he was sure he wanted to while wearing only a knee-length skirt—but if he put the empty pitcher outside the alcove and retreated back into the room, in a few moments the bells would ring, and he could retrieve it refilled. It was a spooky system. When he'd asked about it, Xhojee'd explained that the tul had given orders he was not to be seen.

" I don't see them?"

"No. They don't see you."

It didn't seem to make much sense, but by now he knew better than to question the orders given by Tul Altun. Tul was his title, Altun, his name. Actually, his full name was Kohunlich-tul Tulpay Altun. Tul Altun for short. Kohunlich was the house he was head of—Benedikt knew that house meant more than dwelling but didn't quite understand how much more. He was twenty-four years old and had been tul since he was sixteen. Tul meant he was the male head of the house. His sister was the female head, which made no sense to Benedikt at all, but Xhojee had promised it would in time. Tulpay was a name to honor Tulpayotee, the sun. Because he was tul, he didn't have a name to honor Xaantalicta, the moon, although everyone else did. Everyone except Tul Altun's sister, Xaan Mijandra, who didn't have a name to honor Tulpayotee. Xhojee's full name was Kohunlich Payo Alans Xhojee. The whole thing made Benedikt's head ache. He'd explained in turn that he only had one name and left it at that.

And the tul had a use for him, although Xhojee didn't know what it was.

The bells rang. The pitcher was full.

"Is too hot," he agreed as he filled Xhojee's glass and passed it over. "Open shutters all the way?" The louvers were open, but the shutters themselves were closed. "Maybe find breeze?"

"
To
Imixara. Wouldn't matter, she'd still skin me."

Benedikt gave up, stretched his legs out on the floor, and leaned against the triangular stone back rest. He hadn't expected it to be as comfortable as it was, but in the heat it was a lot cooler than the pile of cushions they used after dark. Xhojee had snickered derisively at his explanation of chairs. Since there were no drafts and cool floors were to be welcomed not avoided, Benedikt supposed he understood the lack. He took a swallow of an unidentifiable fruit juice and stared down into the amber liquid. "You sing good."

"I sing… ? Oh. I wasn't sure you'd even heard me."

They hadn't spoken of that afternoon and although nightmares of bloated, crab-eaten faces threw him out of sleep every night, Benedikt had managed to keep his grieving private. Sometimes, lying awake in the dark, he softly sang what he remembered of the first lullaby, and it helped.

The kigh had smashed the
Starfarer
, taken her and all on board her to the bottom of the sea.

Benedikt shook his head. "Not very good."

Unable to sleep, Benedikt stared up at the ceiling. Shadow hid the complex tile pattern, flowed down the walls, and pooled around the furniture. Head aching, Benedikt couldn't decide wether he was the source of the shadow or its destination—whether it poured out of, or into, his heart. The dim light seeping through the open louvers managed to push the shadow back, and all at once, Benedikt wanted to be on the other side of that fragile barricade.

He slid out of bed and into a loose robe, its weight lost amid the dark weight of memory he carried on his shoulders. Feet bare, he padded quietly to the first shutter, unlatched it, and pushed it open just far enough to slide through.

Barely on the terrace, not really outside, he paused and listened to the silence. Xhojee slept in a small room just off his, an attendant's room—he'd laughed when Benedikt had asked him if he'd minded—and slept lightly enough to have heard the soft sigh of the folding hinges. It wasn't that Xhojee would insist he stay inside; he'd been on the terrace after dark and in the rain a number of times, but, following orders, Xhojee would insist he come along.

Benedikt wanted to be alone.

His rooms were on the second floor. The broad terrace overlooked a large enclosed courtyard filled with fruit trees and a garden so lush its growth masked the first-floor rooms. There were other terraces—on his side of the square as well as on the other three—and all but his had been screened by huge pots of plants.

About fifteen feet from the building, a low sculpted stone wall provided more of a decorative than a functional barricade at the edge of the drop. Benedikt walked to it slowly, welcoming the feel of the cool tiles beneath his feet—the stored heat of the day having long since been given up to the night.

Then a shadow moved. Heart in his throat, Benedikt froze in place, hardly daring to breathe.

A gray cat, larger and more angular than the cats at home, launched itself off the stonework and into the branches of a flowering tree. From there, it seemed to flow to the ground like smoke, disappearing into shifting patterns of gray and black. Once his heart started beating again, Benedikt was glad to see it. They had cats at home, in Shkoder, and just for a moment home didn't seem so terribly, horribly far away.

The stars, barely holding their own against a lightening sky, were not the stars of home. They might have been the stars that had kept watch the last few nights on board the
Starfarer
, but Benedikt wasn't sure. It was as if the storm had driven all the extra details of the trip out of his head, leaving him only with the painful certainty that he was responsible for the sea's victory.

The upper edge of the low stone wall pressing into his thighs, he hugged himself and listened to the quiet. As the sky grew paler and paler and the gardens below more and more distinct, greens and golds replacing black and gray, it felt as though the world were waiting for something.

Then a bird began to sing. The very uppermost tiles on the roof across the courtyard were touched with gold. A hundred birds joined the first.

Dawn.

Without stopping to think, Benedikt drew in a deep lungful of air and began the sunrise song. He started softly, for he hadn't sung a note since he'd lost the Song that held the kigh, carefully working around the highs and lows as he warmed up. He'd sung the sun into the sky every morning on board
Starfarer
. His voice knew what to do with no conscious direction.

The last of the stars disappeared, the line of gold moved down the tiles. Eyes blurred with unshed tears, Benedikt drew in a deep breath of warm, damp, scented, unfamiliar air and surrendered to the Song. It filled the courtyard and terraces perfectly and then lifted up to touch the rising sun.