The Empire's Ruin, page 27
“Some of the Worthy survive,” Ruc observed grimly. “That’s the whole point. If they didn’t, there’d be no one to send to your gods.”
“Some of them survive,” the Greenshirt agreed genially, then laughed again. “But I’m not putting my coin on the two of you.”
He punctuated the sentiment with another jab to the back, and the whole small procession lurched into motion once more.
Two hundred paces farther on, the causeway passed beneath a wooden arch, plunging from the sickly light of the day into gloom. Judging from the madness of beams and braces high overhead, they had entered beneath a large section of stands. The causeway ran straight another dozen paces, then climbed in a wide flight of stairs toward a mouth of daylight. The Greenshirts, however, guided Ruc and Bien off the main thoroughfare and onto a narrow gangplank branching off to the right, one with a worn wooden railing to either side. This they followed through the shadows to a spiral stair leading up, up, up, then out finally onto a ship’s slightly canted deck, up near the prow.
A few paces away stood a stump as wide as Ruc’s waist—one of the masts, presumably, before someone hacked it down for timber. Beyond that, built along the inside rail, ran a long gallery covered with a tent of fluttering silk. Golden censers hung from golden chains, wafting threads of sweet-smelling smoke that masked the reek of the harbor mud. Ewers of cold water and plum wine waited on ornately carved tables. All for the city’s good and great, who required someplace a little more opulent from which to applaud the slaughter than the hard wooden benches of the surrounding stands. During the high holy days the gallery would be full, but those were still months off. Today there were only a dozen people sitting there, women in brocaded vests, hair piled atop their heads, men in their nocs leaning forward, pointing down into the Arena.
The rest of the stands weren’t close to filled either, but even the practice duels of the Worthy could draw a crowd of hundreds or even thousands. Today the gamblers and gawkers had come in about equal measure. Some reclined on the wooden benches, while others stood, screaming encouragement or invective at the figures sweating and bleeding down below.
From the ship’s deck, the two men looked tiny as household idols. Furious idols. Ruc paused, watching as a tall warrior with a huge sword advanced on a smaller, faster opponent. The smaller man moved like a whirlwind, lashing out with a pair of bronze daggers. The metal flashed in the sunlight. Those weapons would be blunted, but even a blunt length of bronze could maim or kill. The dagger-fighter seemed to be getting the better of the contest, striking at the knees and elbows. Each time he landed a blow, he tipped back his head and crowed.
“Rooster,” said the Greenshirt approvingly. “If you’re lucky, he’ll be the one to kill you.”
“Why would that be lucky?” Ruc asked.
“If any of this lot survive, it’ll be him. Not a bad thing for you, heretic, killed in the pit by a future high priest. There’s honor in it.”
Bien shook her head slowly, as though she were struggling to wake from a feverish dream. “There’s no honor in murder.”
It was impossible to know whether the murder she imagined was one wrought by or upon her.
The Greenshirt just laughed. “Not an attitude that’s going to get you far in here.”
A few of the men and women in the gallery had turned at the sound of their voices. Even in the brutal years after the revolution, some people had grown so rich and comfortable that novelty was the only luxury left to them. Evidently, he and Bien had just become that novelty.
“… newest Worthy…” one of the women murmured.
“They don’t look like much.”
“He’s tall, good reach, might be strong.”
“She’ll die on the first day.”
Bien twitched at the remark, but didn’t look up.
Ruc matched gazes with the assembled aristocrats. An old man, fingers aglitter with rings, studied him the way a shipwright might consider a newly built ship. A few seats farther on, a woman winked, then blew him a kiss.
“Come on,” said the Greenshirt. “No time for dawdling, lover boy.”
The soldier pointed with his spear toward the end of the deck, well beyond the opulent gallery, almost all the way in the ship’s stern, where a solitary woman gazed down at the fight below. She wore the bloodred robe of Dombâng’s high priests, but the hood was thrown back, revealing her beaked nose, hooded eyes, the web of scar marring her cheek. He’d seen her before, preaching in the city, but never up close. Standing there at the rail of the ship she reminded him of a bird of prey. There were half a dozen high priests in Dombâng, but the Arena belonged to Vang Vo, and so, in a way, did the rest of the priests.
It hadn’t always been that way. After the Annurians were driven from the city, after the last fires were put out and the final, straggling ranks of the occupying bureaucrats and legionaries fed to the delta, the oldest families of Dombâng, those with the names and the wealth and the history, seized control. They donned the robes of priests, decorated themselves in the raiment of the old ways, called themselves by the old titles, took control of what had been Annurian property and wealth—all for the good of the city, of course—and in those first months the people of Dombâng were so flushed with victory, so thrilled at having finally overthrown the imperial yoke, that they didn’t notice what was happening. Didn’t notice, or didn’t care. If the new high priests were really just the city’s richest citizens in different clothes, what did it matter? Annur had been vanquished. The legions were gone. The old faith could flourish once more.
That flourishing was one of the uglier periods of Dombângan history.
During the centuries of Annurian rule, imperial troops had driven the religion underground. The only ceremonies were held in secret; forbidden prayers whispered furtively in the dark. Priests of the Three, or those suspected of being priests, were beheaded each week on the steps of the Shipwreck. Without any guidance in their faith, the people of Dombâng lost track of the old ways. Sacrifice came to mean nothing more than killing. A fish could be a sacrifice, or a snake. A cock was a decent offering and a pig an opulent one.
Humans, of course, were the greatest sacrifice of all.
Unlike the Vuo Ton, who sent only their finest warriors to face their gods, the citizens of Dombâng were not so scrupulous. What mattered, they told themselves, was the simple fact of the death, and so drunks were snatched from the streets and docks, along with rotweed addicts, the very ill, the very poor, orphans too small to fight back or too slow to run.… Every night saw someone taken, drugged, bound, and abandoned in the delta to die. The Annurians outlawed the practice, but laws were weak things when set against hope and fear and faith, and when Annur was finally driven out, Dombâng erupted in a weeks-long orgy of slaughter. In the rough days of the early purges, that violence had been enough. If it didn’t sate the gods of the delta, at least it appeased the rage of the people who worshipped them.
It might have gone on like that a long time, had it not been for Vang Vo.
She was an unlikely challenger of the new order. She came from Sunrise, the slum at the city’s easterly, downstream edge, where even the fast water reeked of shit and rotten food. She had no manor, no family pedigree, no gold to support a private army, but she had three things that the new high priests lacked: ferocity, knowledge of the delta, and an unquenchable faith in the Three.
Before the war, Vo had been a croc wrangler. She caught and killed the beasts when they slipped into the city’s canals, or worked for the sweet-reed farmers at the fringes, clearing their crop before harvest twice a year. It was a common occupation in Dombâng, and a deadly one. Most wranglers didn’t reach thirty. Some never made it out of their teens. Vo was forty when the revolution against Annur finally erupted, and during the long battle for independence she seemed to be everywhere—burning buildings, ambushing patrols, poling out into the delta in her swallowtail boat with nothing more than a hand brace and saw to hole the Annurian ships. There were no ranks during the revolution, but she quickly became a hero of the resistance. Babies were named for her. People whispered her exploits on the bridges and in the taverns. Most didn’t know what she looked like, but everyone knew what she’d done.
Then, when it was all over, just as the Annurian oppressors were being fed to the delta, Vang Vo disappeared.
Some people said she’d died during the final battle. Others insisted they’d seen her take that swallowtail of hers out into the watery labyrinth, poling it all alone into the reeds. Either way, she was gone, a fact that suited the new high priests just fine. Heroes were invaluable during a revolution, but when the revolution was won they could be inconvenient, especially for whoever ended up on top. The priests erected a small wooden statue to the woman just north of Thum’s Bridge, praised her bravery, her nobility, said a few words about how she’d been the best of them, and then proceeded to forget all about her. She might have stayed forgotten, too, or nearly so, except for the fact that after a full month alone in the delta, Vang Vo returned.
She poled her narrow boat through the water gate, up Cao’s Canal, and past the Heights, tied off to a piling beneath Thum’s Bridge, got out, walked into the tiny square, unsheathed a machete—the kind the reed farmers used to harvest their crop—and proceeded to chop down the statue of herself. When it fell, she looped a rope around the wooden neck and dragged it—by now with a large crowd following her—to the center of the bridge. Then she heaved it over the side into the canal.
Right there, at the top of the bridge’s span, as the current carried off the monument to her greatness, she preached her first sermon.
The Three, she said, were not interested in statues.
They were not interested in gold or jewels.
She knew this because she had gone deep into the delta, beached her keel on a sandbank, built a huge fire and tended it day and night until they came. They were gorgeous, she said, more beautiful than any painting or carving could possibly convey, and what they wanted was not faith or prayers. They scorned the gory sacrifices ordered by the new high priests. To cripple anyone—a helpless child or an Annurian legionary—and leave them in the delta was as useless to the gods as it was cruel. What the gods wanted was not a bloody, fish-gnawed flank of meat, but a fight.
And so Vang Vo, all alone on that sandbank in the middle of the delta, remembering what the Vuo Ton had never forgotten, fought her gods.
That was how she lost her right hand—twisted off at the wrist—although as she spoke she changed her mind. It wasn’t lost, she said, shaking her head, but traded, traded for wisdom, and part of that wisdom was this: Dombâng must change. The gods wanted no more waterlogged bodies clogging the channels of the delta. And they were less than pleased by those in the comfortable halls of power who invoked their names without ever setting foot in the reeds, where blood ran hot in the water.
Not that any of that came as a surprise to Ruc. He could have preached the thing himself, had he been so inclined. To the masses of Dombâng, however, Vang Vo’s claims were a revelation. Hardship and struggle, formerly marks of failure, became the new yardstick for piety. Suddenly, it wasn’t necessary to trade one set of impossibly rich overlords for another. After the Sermon on the Bridge, anyone brave or insane enough to step into the delta could lay an equal claim to the faith.
The self-proclaimed high priests were less thrilled. They held a hasty and secret confabulation, named Vang Vo a heretic and a traitor, and placed a bounty on her head. It proved a poor decision. Everyone knew where she was, of course—living out of her swallowtail beneath Thum’s Bridge—but no one made any attempt to claim the bounty. The high priests might have killed her then, but they were too frightened by the mass of the faithful encamped on the bridge above—hundreds and then thousands who came to listen to her preach, hundreds and then thousands who had begun to call her the one true high priest.
There might have been a civil war, except that, with the Annurians gone, Vo was no longer interested in war. Instead, she offered the high priests a challenge they couldn’t refuse: she would guarantee their safe conduct to Thum’s Bridge where she would meet them to determine whose faith was the most pure, the most true. They would put their piety to the test in the old way—a fight to the death. None of the high priests wanted to fight a croc wrangler, of course, but Vo added one detail to make the offer more tantalizing. As three was a sacred number to the gods of the delta, they could fight her in groups of three.
There were nine high priests at the time.
In three fights over three days, she killed them all.
When it was done, the people lifted her up on their shoulders and proclaimed her the new high priest of all Dombâng. She refused the honor, or most of it, at least. She would accept the role, but only on the condition that others could rise to the position in the same way that she had—by entering the delta, facing the Three, taking their wounds, and returning. And so that the gods would not find their supplicants weak and wanting, Vang Vo insisted on overseeing a series of sanctified fights, duels to the death that would determine who had earned that sacred right.
And so the Arena was built.
In the intervening years, dozens of warriors—trained and blooded in that Arena—went to face their gods. Six had emerged. Most of these new priests turned their attention to the governance of the city, to the necessary questions of defense, infrastructure, taxation, trade. Vang Vo, however, continued to involve herself only with the Arena. She lived inside the hulk of one of the abandoned ships. Every day she made the rounds of the training yards. For every fight, whether training or sacred, she took her place at the stern of the wooden ship where Ruc and Bien stood. And it was Vang Vo who made the final decision regarding all those conscripted to the ranks of the Worthy.
As Ruc and Bien approached, however, she didn’t take her eyes from the fight.
Out in the ring, the larger man was staggering, sweeping his sword in wild, desperate arcs. The people on the benches screamed their eagerness, demanded to see him beaten, broken, finished, though it wasn’t clear that they hated anything about him aside from his weakness. One clean blow would have put him down, but Rooster refused. Instead, he danced around his opponent, flapped his elbows, crowed louder and louder.
Finally Vang Vo spoke.
“Who are these two?”
Gao Ji stepped forward. “Survivors from the Annurian temple, High Priestess.”
“It wasn’t an Annurian temple,” Ruc said. “It was a temple to Eira, to the goddess of love.”
“She did a shitty job defending it.” Vo didn’t take her eyes from the fight as she spoke. “For a goddess.”
“Defense is not Eira’s way.”
“Why would you worship a goddess who refuses to defend you?”
“Her gifts are of a different order.”
Vo snorted. “Sounds like you ought to rethink your faith.”
“It was rethinking my faith,” Ruc replied, “that led me to Eira’s temple in the first place.”
The woman turned to face them at last. She ran her eyes over Ruc, pausing on the tattoos snaking down his arms, then looked up at his face, her gaze frank, appraising.
“Vuo Ton ink.”
Ruc nodded.
“On a love priest.”
Another nod.
“There’s a story there.”
“There are stories everywhere.”
“This one I need to know.”
“Are you in the habit of getting everything you want?”
Gao Ji surged forward, biting off a curse as he brought the blade of his spear up to Ruc’s throat.
“Apologies, High Priestess. Allow me to open the throat of this heretic.”
Vang Vo studied Ruc a moment, then shook her head. The spear vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“I keep going looking for the village of the Vuo Ton,” the priestess said. “I never find it.”
“They don’t like to be found.”
“No shit.” She narrowed her eyes. “Where is it?”
“It moves,” Ruc replied. “With the rains. With the season.”
“Can you show me?”
“Not a chance,” he lied. “I left the delta fifteen years ago.”
Vang Vo sucked at something in her teeth, then shook her head.
“I tell the Greenshirts to bring them to me—the Vuo Ton who come to the city.” She frowned. “They barely talk, even the ones who know the language.”
“Why would they?”
“We serve the same gods. They could teach us. They remember things we’ve forgotten.”
“They don’t want to be polluted.”
She laughed. “Polluted by a croc wrangler?”
“Polluted by a priestess of Dombâng. Worship in this city is sick, twisted. For hundreds of years you were dumping kids with slit throats into the canals.”
Vo nodded thoughtfully. “That was wrong. We stopped it. Your people had the right of it all along.”
“They are not my people.”
“You were raised by them,” she said, gesturing to the ink corded around his wrists.
“And I left.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted something more than blood, and struggle, and suffering.”
Because, he didn’t add, I was afraid of what I might become. What I was already becoming.
The high priestess offered a surprising smile. “And did you leave them behind?”
“The Vuo Ton?”
“The blood and struggle. The suffering.”
Ruc hesitated.
“You can’t, you know,” the woman went on after a pause. “There’s no way to get free of it. It’s part of us.”
“An ugly part.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Her gaze went distant. “You haven’t seen them. I’m not much with words, but I don’t think there are words for our gods.”
“Of course there are. Bestial, brutal, savage, merciless.”
“Merciless,” Vo mused, raising her right arm to study the stump. The wound had not been clean. The pocked, scarred brown skin looked like so much melted wax dripped down over the bone’s end. “But when our fight was over, they left me alive.”
