The Empire's Ruin, page 57
The girl’s eyes flashed fury. She bared her teeth, then turned away.
Gwenna hesitated. “I call her Rat. We found her on shore. There’s a city there. We found…” She shook her head, lowered herself to the deck, leaned back against the bulkhead. She might be a prisoner, but it felt good to finally sit. “We found a lot of things we didn’t expect to find,” she concluded finally. “I’ll tell you about it, but first, I’m going to sleep.”
* * *
She woke to the gentle motion of a ship under way. Rat was still snoring, her gangly arms wrapped around Gwenna like a snare. Gradually, gently, Gwenna disentangled herself. Across the brig, Dhar was awake—she could tell by his breathing—but his head was bowed, eyes closed. Praying, maybe, or just waiting.
“A long time in here alone,” she said finally. “I’m glad to see you haven’t gone mad.”
He stared into the darkness for a while before replying.
“The solitude plays tricks on the mind, but my davi is not yet complete.”
“Your duty.”
He nodded.
“How is it not complete? Your ship is at the bottom of the ocean, along with your men. What’s the duty of a commander who has nothing and no one to command?”
“Are you asking this question of me?” Dhar replied. “Or of yourself?”
“Does it matter?”
“Naturally it matters. Your davi is not the same as my own.”
“Is it your davi to sit in the fucking brig until Jonon decides to kill you?”
“Right now, my davi is to endure.”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“Because there is work still to do.”
“What work?”
“When the time comes, it will be revealed.”
“It will be revealed.” She let her head fall back against the bulkhead. “So it’s all some kind of mystical bullshit.”
Dhar studied the darkness where she sat.
“You are changed from when you left.”
“That happens, right?” she asked wearily. “People change?”
“Tell me, Commander Sharpe—in what do you believe?”
“No.” She closed her eyes. She’d met religious fanatics before—there had been more than a few back on the Islands—but she hadn’t figured Dhar for one. “Just—forget it.”
“You are locked in this space with me. We have weeks if not months before our return to your empire. Yet you would prefer silence over honest conversation.”
“If I want conversation, I’ll talk to Rat,” Gwenna said. The girl shifted in her sleep without waking. “At least she doesn’t know enough Annurian to make shit up.”
The captain cocked his head to the side. “Why does it frighten you, the thought of your unfinished duty?”
“What bothers me isn’t the unfinishedness of it. What bothers me is the thought that it’s knowable in the first place. What bothers me is that I used to think I knew it.”
She exhaled slowly, steadily. Since killing the kettral, the worst of her fear had dissipated. The stabbing panic was gone. She could still feel the dread, like a weight settled on her shoulders, but it had slumped into something she could bear, something she could carry. Hesitation threaded every thought, but it was now the hesitation of a woman who didn’t trust her own growing health. Better wasn’t a word she dared think, let alone speak aloud. She didn’t know if she would ever be better, but something was … different.
That difference, however, left her baffled. Relieved as she was to have climbed free of her mind’s abyss, she didn’t recognize the land where she’d arrived. She wasn’t the useless wreck from the voyage south—she’d proved that to herself—but she wasn’t Kettral either. She wasn’t the Gwenna Sharpe who’d quit on everything, who’d been ready to give up and die, but she wasn’t the Gwenna Sharpe who’d commanded the defense of Andt-Kyl, not the woman who’d stormed into fights never quite thinking she could fail. That woman had known things, believed in things, trusted things. As she sat there, wrapped in Rat’s arms and the darkness of the brig, she had no idea what to believe.
Finally, she tipped her head toward the vessel’s stern. “There was a city back there, a huge city, where people worshipped monsters, where they fed their own families to them. What about them?”
“What about them?” Dhar replied.
“They probably thought they were doing the right thing, right? When they listened to the screams of their parents, of their children, did they think they were just following their davi?”
“People err. It is not uncommon.”
“And how do you know,” Gwenna demanded, “that we’re not the ones in error? All these years, I went where they told me. I fought the people I was told to fight, saved the people I was told to save, killed the people I was told to kill.…”
As she spoke, her own father’s words floated back to her: I got tired of fighting other people’s wars.
“When you first spotted the Daybreak on the horizon,” she went on, “you attacked us. We attacked you back. We can’t both have been right.”
“I told you already that I was wrong. I have accepted it.”
“You have accepted it?” The boldness of the notion stole her breath. “What about all the people who died? Have they accepted it?”
“Perhaps a few. For most, no. It is for this,” he said, ducking his head between his spread hands, “that I carry my shame.”
“And do you ever think that instead of carrying it, you should just … do something else?” In the darkness she saw again her farm at the valley’s mouth, saw herself harvesting crops, feeding livestock, living a clean, quiet, decent life. No chance of that now, not anymore. “Don’t you ever think you should get out before you make another mistake, before you get more people killed?”
Dhar pursed his lips. “If I were visiting my brother, and, in trying to cook a chicken, I burned down his house, should I walk away? Or should I help him to rebuild?”
“It wasn’t a house, it was a ship. And they weren’t your brothers, they were your men. And they’re not irritated. They’re dead.”
“No, Commander Sharpe. The whole world is my brother’s house.”
She stared at him. “The world’s a big place. And it’s pretty fucking broken.”
“All the more need, then, for the people who would rebuild it.”
“I’m not one of those people.”
“You will pardon me if I do not believe this.”
“Why wouldn’t you believe it, you stubborn prick? Do you know what Kettral do? They don’t rebuild houses. They stab people, and they shoot people, and they poison people. They tear things down and blow things up, they burn what’s left, and then they salt the fucking ground. That’s what Kettral do. That’s what they are.”
The words hung there a moment, trembling in the air, then fell away. Rat muttered something in her sleep that might have been a plea or a curse.
“And yet,” Dhar replied gravely, “as you have never tired of reminding me, you are not Kettral.”
* * *
Sometime in the middle of the watch on the fourth or fifth day after leaving port, the small slot at the bottom of the door—the space where the guard delivered and removed the food and water—darkened. Something black and furred squirmed its way through the gap.
The creature smelled of piss and bilge water, scuttled boldly across the decking, confident in the darkness, sniffing out a few fishbones that Gwenna had set aside, brushing up against Rat in the darkness. The girl jerked away, then lashed out with her heel, hammering the creature on the hindquarters so hard that it squealed.
“Thing!” she shouted, kicking out blindly again and again. “Fucking thing!”
The creature hissed, snapped at the girl, snatched a bone, then fled back through the slot beneath the door.
“Just a rat,” Gwenna said. She felt the word as it left her mouth, the barb of it, the regret welling like blood.
She could smell the child’s anger bleeding into the soft, too-sweet smell of confusion.
“Rat?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
“Rat?” the girl pressed.
“Just a little animal. What we call that kind of animal.”
The girl stared into darkness. “Lives on ships? Eats trash?”
“Some of them, I guess. There’s all kinds—”
“Ugly. Filthy.”
Gwenna shook her head, tried to take the helm of the conversation. “What’s your real name?”
Rat closed her eyes, turned her face away. All her laughter had evaporated.
“What’s your name?” Gwenna asked again. She tried to make her voice gentle, found she had no idea how.
“Rat,” the girl replied. “Real name is Rat.”
38
The light of the fish-scale lantern washed Bien’s face a bloody red. She was finishing up the stitching on a leather bracer. She looked, Ruc thought, almost nothing like the priestess of Eira who had fled the burning temple months earlier. The scars were the most obvious change—she’d picked up a gash over her right eye that carved a puckered hook down through the brow, along with a split lower lip that had healed a little crooked. She was leaner, too, more muscled, like a woman who’d spent her life tossing nets in the delta or rowing loads of reeds and timber up and down Dombâng’s canals. Her hands were callused, her black hair hacked short, one of her front teeth chipped. It was her eyes, though, that he had the most trouble recognizing. They were still that same, rich brown, but her gaze, which had once been earnest and open, had grown hard, guarded, wary.
“That was my fault,” she said.
“It was Rooster’s fault, and Snakebones’s,” Ruc replied. “They’re the ones who attacked us.”
Monster, Mouse, and Stupid, along with Talal, were over at the mess hall, listening to the latest gossip. Apparently some fishers had seen monsters out in the delta. Not the usual crocs and jaguars, but something stranger, something worse. On another night, Ruc would have stayed, too. After the afternoon’s assault, though, it seemed safer to stay out of sight for a while. Besides, he already knew there were monsters in the delta. He’d seen them. He could get the details later.
“They attacked us because I gave them the chance.” She stared into the lantern’s flame. “I was the one who insisted we go back there.”
“Doesn’t mean you should blame yourself. Besides, we survived.”
She made a sound like a hacked-up laugh. “That’s what we’re down to, isn’t it? Survival.”
“It’s a start.”
“More like an end.”
Hot night air, thick with the scent of mud and shit, stirred the canvas covering the window. She pulled another stitch through the leather.
“Do you ever think about the temple?” he asked. “About the goddess?”
She glanced over at him. “All the time.”
“What do you think about?”
“How I’ve failed her.”
“You’re alive. That’s not a failure. You can’t spread Eira’s truth if you die in here.”
“What truth?” Her voice was quiet, but the tendons in her wrists stood rigid with the strain of trying to force the needle through the thick leather. “That love is a flame? That it can light a way for the lost, warm the weary, prepare a forge for the sword, or a pyre for the impious?”
“Sure, if you want to quote directly from the Teachings.”
She shook her head. “What does any of it mean?”
Ruc hesitated. There was an answer to the question. Dozens of answers, actually. For centuries priests had written commentaries, and sermons, and treatises on the Teachings, elucidating every paragraph, every line, every word. Bien, however, knew those writings even better than he did. She wasn’t asking him to trot out the old exegetical certainties. He wasn’t sure, in fact, that she was really asking him anything at all. The short distance between them felt almost unbridgeable. He wanted to comfort her, to hold her, could have dealt with some comfort of his own, in fact, but they were like two people who shared a horrible secret. Each of them knew—knew in a way that none of the other Worthy could ever understand—what the other had betrayed in order to stay alive. In the early days, Ruc thought that knowledge might draw them closer. It had not.
She glanced up from her work. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“You’re staring at me the same way you did back in the temple, when I first used my power. Like I’m a stranger, someone you’ve never even seen before.”
“You’re not a stranger,” he said, wondering, even as he spoke the words, if they were true.
“I’m glad you recognize me,” she replied wearily, “because I don’t. I don’t recognize these hands,” she said, raising them. “I don’t recognize my face when I stare in a scrub bucket. I don’t recognize my dreams—they’re all just spear thrusts and fire and screaming and killing.”
“A lot has changed.”
It was such a preposterous understatement he half expected her to laugh. Instead she picked up the bracer once more, went back to her stitching as she spoke.
“It’s when things change that we need most to keep the faith.”
“Have you lost it?”
“I don’t know. I know that I used to be filled with love, filled to overflowing. I loved the beggars and bakers and the young brides with flowers in their hair. Now”—she punched the needle through the leather, drew it out the other side—“that’s almost impossible for me to imagine. I certainly don’t love Rooster. Or fucking Snakebones. That bitch.”
“Rooster and Snakebones tried to rape us.”
She shook her head. “Love those who come bearing bread in their hands and those who bear only burdens.
“Love the cruel with the kind, the beautiful with the beasts, your foes alongside your friends.”
“Easy to say,” Ruc replied, “when those foes aren’t burning down your temple, murdering everyone you know, trying to feed you to the creatures of the delta.”
“And is that the kind of priestess I was? One who believed things only when they were easy?”
“You’re still a priestess. They can force you to fight, but they can’t take that from you.”
“They didn’t take it,” she replied grimly. “I gave it up.”
Suddenly, the needle punched through the leather, stabbed into her hand. Instead of yelping, or cursing, or dropping the bracer, she just stared numbly at that length of steel protruding from her skin. When she pulled it out, a drop of blood welled from the puncture. Gently, she laid the leather on the table, then looked at him.
“I thought we would have kids together.”
The world seemed to spin around him the way it had years before, when he dove too deep, held his breath too long.
“Me too.”
“I’m glad we didn’t.”
The words landed like a slap, but he forced himself to nod. “Dombâng is broken. It’s no place to raise a family.”
“The problem isn’t the city, Ruc. Or not only that. It’s us. We’re not what we thought we were.”
“What did we think we were?”
“Priests. Heralds of a goddess of mercy and light.”
“I was never much of a herald.”
“You were my herald,” she replied quietly. “If someone can love me like that, I thought, someone like him…”
“Like him?” he asked quietly.
She met his eyes. “You weren’t … a typical priest.”
“Neither were you.”
“But we were priests.” Tears stood in her eyes. “And it wasn’t just the Teachings and the prayers. Whenever I doubted, I just needed to look at you, to see your strength, your love—”
“You have it backward,” he said, cupping her cheek in his hand. “I was the one who stumbled out of the delta. Eira found me eventually, but you found me first.”
She shifted away from his touch.
“It’s not the same now.”
“Of course it’s not the same. Our friends were burned to death. Our home was destroyed. We were dragged here—”
“I mean between us.” Bien’s gaze was a snare. “I saw how you looked at me when I killed those men, back in the temple. I see how you look at me now, whenever Talal and I work on finding my well.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we’ve failed the goddess, but we haven’t failed each other.”
“Haven’t we?” She bit her lip so hard it looked ready to burst. “I’m a fucking leach, Ruc. I told myself that I’d learn to use my power so we could escape, but we haven’t escaped. All I’ve used it to do is murder people. There’s a reason people hate leaches. There’s a reason they think we’re polluted.”
He wanted to gather her in his arms, but there was something about the way she was sitting—at an angle to him, as though she were hiding something, or preparing to flee.
“I don’t hate you. I don’t think you’re polluted.”
She smiled an exhausted smile. “But that’s not the same as loving me, or thinking I’m beautiful.”
Ruc stared at her. “There’s nothing I can say, is there?”
“Love’s not just a matter of saying the right words.”
“What about the feeling underneath the words?”
“What feeling is that?”
“That you are brilliant, and beautiful, and brave.”
She looked at him awhile, then turned away. “I didn’t understand.”
“Didn’t understand what?”
“Right up until the temple burned, I believed all of that, too—that I was brave, that I was beautiful, that I was a capable servant who deserved the favor of the goddess.”
“You are.”
She picked up the needle once more, prodded at a scab across the back of her fingers. “There is so much hate in my heart now, so much rage.…”
He reached out, gently withdrew the needle from her grip. She let it go without complaint.
“Even Eira has a dark side,” he said. “Think of the avesh.” If there was a way to reach her, to draw her back, maybe this was it. “Even the goddess of love has a line she will not cross. The avesh is a monster; it devours its own children. All the statues, all the paintings show Eira and her faithful creatures fighting the thing, defeating it. Sometimes she’s impaling it with her sword. Sometimes the wolves have it in their teeth.…”
