The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood) (46 page)

“Only of the flesh,” she said. “You Gatherers have always taken care of the soul.”

He gave her a smile so gentle and kind that she wondered how she had ever thought him cold. “There’s more overlap than you think, Apprentice. Your mentor taught me that.”

Before she could speak again, he paused and abruptly looked away, frowning. “I must go. My dreamer is waking.” Like all Gatherers, he could not dream on his own. He must have come to her through the dreams of some acolyte or apprentice at the Hetawa, or
perhaps a fellow Servant of some other path. It was odd, however, that he had not simply put his jungissa on the dreamer to hold that person asleep.

“Be well, Hanani,” he said, stepping back. “Dayu and Mni-inh were not your only friends in the Hetawa, no matter how you might feel. You aren’t alone.” Then, holding up a hand in farewell, he vanished.

*  *  *

Hanani opened her eyes in the dimness of the tent. She couldn’t tell the hour, but the sounds of the celebration outside had faded. There was still plenty of activity in the camp, but the music was softer and slower now. She could hear no children running or shouting, which meant that it was at least past their bedtimes.

Beside her—her head still rested on his shoulder—Wanahomen slept, his eyes flickering beneath their lids. She wondered what Gatherer Nijiri would have made of her decision to train him. Had Mni-inh told him about that? Knowing Mni-inh, she doubted it. For that matter, she wondered what Nijiri would have made of Wanahomen in her bed, however innocently. She would not be the first in the Hetawa to endure embarrassing rumors. There was Gatherer Nijiri himself, and Sentinel Renamhut was said to have a woman and daughter in the artisans’ district, and Teacher Ide was known to have a taste for shunha-dark apprentices. In fact, to judge by the rumors, quite a few of the Hetawa’s acolytes and priests carried on secret affairs, though much of that was probably exaggeration. Hanani had never understood why Mni-inh took such care to keep his distance from her when half the Hetawa suspected them anyhow, and the rest had their own secrets to hide.

She sighed, contemplating the weight of Wanahomen’s arm against her back. Gatherer Nijiri would have understood, she decided. Wanahomen was not a Gatherer himself, and he had no dreamblood to give her, but he had a Gatherer’s gift for sensing
when comfort was needed. She would have broken if not for him. Mni-inh: she closed her eyes, allowing the pain to wash over her for a moment. It was as if someone had reached inside her and hollowed out her soul. The edges of the empty place were raw, shaped to fit him; nothing would ever fill it. Still, Wanahomen’s presence eased the ache.

Restless from her own thoughts, she shifted to get more comfortable. Her hand, on his belly, caught on a line of roughness; a scar. Puzzled—the belly-wound she’d healed should have left no scar—she traced the roughness and realized it was a different injury. This one was not as long, but the thickness and shape of the scar was troubling, as was its location just under his rib cage. It had been deep, this wound, and it had healed badly, reopening at least once.

“It was a serrated knife,” Wanahomen said.

He’d spoken softly, but Hanani still started in surprise. She felt his hand rub her back, soothing, which almost made her jump again. She had noticed that the Banbarra constantly touched one another in ways that Gujaareen did not: casual linking of the arms, nudges, affectionate caresses for children or even animals. Wanahomen had been among them long enough that he must have picked up some of their habits. She found his easy, careless touches exotic and disturbing.

Then she focused on his words. “A
serrated
knife? Why would anyone use such a thing on a man?”

“To cause pain, I assume. Probably encourages festering, too. I almost died from the fever alone.” His voice was heavy with sleep; in the Moonlight she could see that he had not opened his eyes. “It’s a foolish sort of thing to use in battle—too likely to catch on something at the wrong moment. But the man who used it on me was no warrior. Just a coward, corrupt as any other slaver.”

Hanani shook her head, privately amazed that he had survived at all without a Sharer’s aid. “You were a slave?”

He nodded and yawned, coming more awake. “For a brief time, I and my mother and Charris. We were captured fleeing the city by Damlushi traders, who had camped out along the northgoing trails like vultures to take any Gujaareen they could because they knew our army was busy elsewhere. Apparently Gujaareen are known to make good slaves—healthy, educated, nonviolent.” Wanahomen’s lip curled. “And though we’d taken the last of the Sunset Guard with us, we were overwhelmed. They’d hoped to get riches from us too.”

Hanani frowned and looked down at his wrists. She had noticed marks there before, though they were faint. The remnants of scars. “They chained you.”

He nodded again, opening his eyes at last. “They were taking us south, afraid to sell Gujaareen so close to home. In the south we might have been separated, and it would have been much harder to escape or buy our way free. So I challenged the head of the caravan to some game. I don’t remember what. If I won, he had to sell us hereabouts. I won, but he was a poor loser. As they made us ready for the sale, he knifed me and bound the wound so that it wouldn’t show. I had to pretend I felt nothing, and look healthy, or no one would buy me.”

Hanani caught her breath. Such an act was indeed corrupt—but then, out here beyond the Gatherers’ reach, corrupt souls seemed plentiful as ants. “And the Banbarra bought you?”

“Mmm-hmm. Unte’s firstwife, Widanu. She was furious when she found out about my wound. My mother saved us then, because I was already coming down sick with wound-fever and Widanu would have killed me to put me out of my misery. Mother bargained with Widanu for my life, offering all the jewels she’d brought out of Gujaareh; we had hidden them in a cave in the foothills before the Damlushi took us. That established her as a woman of value in the eyes of the Banbarra, and gave me value too as her son, so we were
set free. Charris… Well. Widanu had to bring back
something
. But as soon as Mother had built our wealth enough—she’s always been shrewd—we bought him back. He won’t let us free him because having a slave adds to our clan’s prestige. Stubborn old man.”

Hanani absorbed this, tracing the scar again with her fingers for the simple novelty of the thing; she had not seen many scars. Magic left no marks. Then her eyes picked out another blemish on his skin—a little divot the size of a glass coin, carved from the flesh just beneath his collarbone. She sat up, curious, and then noticed two other marks: one just above his hipbone, and another perilously near his heart. If all of them had stories like the first, she understood better why there was so little peace in him.

His skin was soft as chamois leather around the scars. Such fragile stuff to have withstood so much violence. She traced along his collarbone to his shoulder, then drew her fingers down one arm, over the rise and fall of the muscles there. She had studied the bodies of the Gathered as part of her training, knew the names of every tendon and bone, had searched within parts that had no name to find the soul’s ever-moving seat—but that was a different matter, somehow, from contemplating the warm, breathing whole of a living being. It took so little to reduce all this solid
aliveness
into ash. Someday Wanahomen would be like Mni-inh, a little jar of nothing. All that mattered of him would have gone on to Ina-Karekh.

So important to treasure life, protect it, understand it in fullness, while it yet lived.

“Prince,” she said. His eyes were still on her, faintly puzzled now. It was the Banbarra way to touch casually; it was not the Gujaareen way. She had confused him with her explorations. “Are you Gujaareen?”

He stiffened, angry all of a sudden. “You know damn well that I am—”

“You act more Banbarra than you realize, I think,” she said, still
studying his body, tracking his breathing. “I understand why—out here, it’s safer to be Banbarra than Gujaareen. Safer to be
anything
than Gujaareen.” She stopped then, her hand on his belly. Beneath her fingers, his abdominal muscles were more tense than they should have been. “But is it an act? Something you’ve pulled over your true self like a cloak? Or have you
become
the cloak? I ask because you have been kind to me, and you have also been cruel, and I don’t know which is the real you.”

His belly rose slightly with his inhalation, though he was silent for a moment. “Both, I suppose,” he said at last. “It isn’t a thing I think about. I’ve lived among the Banbarra for nearly half my life; when I’m with them I think as they do. I even think in Chakti. But when I’m around you, and your mentor—” He sighed. “I suppose I must become a bit more Gujaareen. A strange feeling, being two men.” He hesitated a moment more, then reached down and caught her hand. She felt him searching her face. “But the cruelty is not a
Banbarra
thing, Hanani, if that’s what you want to know. That part of me is all Gujaareen, and it comes from my father. You’ve helped me understand that, these past few days.”

She nodded. “Does it please you? To be as cruel as your father?”

He did not answer for several breaths; when he spoke, the word was very soft, and tinged with shame. “No. I need that cruelty. I would not have survived this long without it. But I do not
like
it.”

Hanani nodded. She got to her feet, then, and stepped out of her shoes, beginning the laborious process of removing all the dangling bangles and tinkling jewels Yanassa had made her wear. She dropped them into the decorative bag they were meant to be stored in. “Then you aren’t corrupt.”

Wanahomen sat up on one elbow, frowning at her. “Good to know. But what are you doing?”

“Undressing.” She was surprised at her own calm.

There was sudden, startled stillness behind her. She tugged off
her overshirt and hung it from a tent-peg; when she turned back to him, he was staring at her. “That isn’t a good idea, Hanani.”

She was heartily sick of people speaking to her as though she could not understand the implications of her own actions.

“I do not demand. I ask.” She stepped out of her skirts; his eyes followed them down her legs, as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing. “I ask your Banbarra self, or your kinder self, however you prefer to think of it. I would like sex. Will you do this with me?”

When she turned back from hanging the skirts, Wanahomen’s expression showed something close to fright. He had grabbed his own shirt, clutching it in his hands as if he meant to ward her off with it. “Have you gone mad again?”

“I was never mad.” He had helped her back from that edge, and she was glad for it. It was unfair of her to ask him for more, perhaps, but there was no one else who would understand. She had to hope that the part of him that was a Gatherer, however unrefined it might be, would want to help again.

“You’re serious. This is—” He froze as she untied her loincloth and dropped it in a basket. “You really mean it.”

Hanani tugged off the shift that had been beneath her shirt. She wore only her breast-wrappings beneath, and when she finished laying the shift aside, she was amused to see that his eyes had gone straight to this part of her, as though he had never seen her in Sharers’ garb. Perhaps her breasts had been unattractive to him then, framed by men’s clothing? She began the laborious process of unwinding the wrappings as he gazed at her like a thirsty man in the desert. “Obviously I do, Prince.”

He dragged his eyes upward, and there was a clear wariness in his expression. “You don’t love me.”

At this she paused, surprised. “No, I don’t. Must I?”

A half-smile, half-grimace rippled across his face. “I suppose not.
No one can fault you for honesty, templewoman, I’ll give you that.” He got to his feet and turned to face her at last, still holding his shirt, though he made no move to put it on. “But you must
trust
me for this, at least, and—” He looked away. “And as you said: I have been cruel to you.”

Hanani sighed and began to wonder whether she’d made a mistake. He felt so deeply, so quickly, this man. She had hoped he would simply act on his desire, not talk things to death. Yet she should have expected this too: a man so ruled by his emotions must of course serve them before making any decision. Mni-inh had taught her that long ago, when she’d asked him why he’d volunteered to serve as her mentor.
It wasn’t something I thought about
, he’d told her.
I just saw you needing a mentor, and the other Sharers balking as though your femaleness were a plague that would taint them. That sort of foolishness—I suppose it made me angry. I acted because of that.

The thought that Wanahomen had something of Mni-inh in him, however unwelcome he would find the comparison, made Hanani feel better about her decision.

“I’ve let you into my dreams,” she said. “I have seen the secrets of your soul, and shown you a few of my own. The body—” She shrugged. “It can be healed, changed, ended. It’s an easy thing to manipulate. But the soul has meaning and permanence…” His frown deepened, and she faltered silent. It was too hard to explain. She was no Teacher.

“This is nothing to you, then.” He sounded bitter, and she didn’t know why. She stepped closer, touching his arm to try and understand, but he would not meet her eyes. Was he offended that she wanted to use him in this way? Perhaps. But perhaps she could still persuade him with the truth.

“No, Prince.” Up close, he smelled of sweat and sand—but also herbs, like those used by most Gujaareen for bathing and medicine. Anise and calendula, which she had seen growing around the
canyon, and something finer that he must have bought in Gujaareh: aged ambergris. It was a scent that reminded her of the Hetawa, where it was burned as incense. Another luxury she’d failed to question, like her red Sharer-drapes; she’d seen ambergris in the market, and it was fantastically expensive. But it did not surprise her at all that Wanahomen, despite his exile and spare barbaric existence, would still find some small way to treat himself like a prince.