The Empire's Ruin, page 8
“They,” she said, her voice ragged, “were such assholes.”
He coughed up a chuckle.
“They were just men.”
“What did they want?”
He shook his head. What did men ever want?
“You are also an asshole,” she added, glaring at him as her strength returned.
“Because I got hit?”
“Because you didn’t run.”
He smiled down into her face. “I was practicing loving my enemies.”
“An asshole and an idiot.”
He shook his head again. “I prayed to the goddess. She sent you.”
Bien reached up, took him by the back of the neck, drew his face down to hers, kissed him softly on the lips.
“Truly,” he murmured, “the Lady of Love is great.”
“We should go back to the temple,” she replied, pushing him away at last, rising unsteadily to her feet. “Have someone tend to your wounds.”
She touched his split brow, frowned.
“They’ll heal.” He gestured toward the crowd gathered at the top of the bridge. “I want to see what’s happening.”
Bien took an unsteady breath. “It’s not safe to be out today. After the Baths … things are dangerous.”
“It’s Dombâng.”
She hesitated, then nodded.
Ruc was tall, almost a full head taller than most of the people, but he couldn’t see much except heads and parasols as he approached the top of the bridge. Two or three hundred people had gathered, but judging from the muttered questions of those around him, most had been drawn in by the simple fact of the crowd itself.
“It’s a sympathizer,” crowed an old woman to his right. “He helped the imperial bastards attack!”
She was half Ruc’s size, couldn’t have seen much more than backs and asses, but she waggled an authoritative finger toward the mob. “No end to those rats. Yesterday they hung one from Thum’s Bridge.” She cackled. “Heard he danced half the morning before quieting down.”
Ruc ignored her, threaded his way forward, Bien half a step behind. Finally, near the crown of the bridge, the crowd ended abruptly, as though someone had drawn a line across the decking that no one dared to cross.
On the other side of that line a man had leapt up onto the wide railing. Not Dombângan—that much was obvious at a glance. His skin was far too pale, and his eyes, and his hair, which was brown rather than black, and hung in luxurious waves down his back. He might have been Annurian—the empire counted pale-skinned people among its citizens—but he wasn’t a soldier.
An Annurian soldier would have been fighting or cringing or trying to flee; this man stood atop the railing as though he owned it, face split with a smile, arms spread to welcome the crowd. A soldier would have been armed, but the figure at the center of the crowd had no weapons. He was in fact, entirely naked, lean muscles slick with the rain.…
No, Ruc realized, not entirely naked.
He wore something around his throat, a wide collar cinched tight, the kind of thing a rich woman might purchase for her dog. This man, however, didn’t bear himself like a creature collared or kept. If anything, he gazed out over the assembled crowd, the men and women who would in all likelihood tear him apart, as though they in some obscure way already belonged to him.
4
Having achieved his perch above the rushing water, the pale-skinned foreigner spread his arms, fixed his gaze on the crowd, then said nothing, as though his naked, well-muscled presence were the only message necessary.
People in Dombâng were used to seeing human skin. Bathing was a daily ritual almost as important as eating. Public bathhouses dotted the city. Kids swam naked in the canals, and fishers thought nothing about stripping their clothes after a day’s labor, then scrubbing clean in the current. From any deck or dock at almost any time of day, you could probably find someone in some state of undress, and yet there was something different about this man, something flagrant. He wore his nakedness like a statement, a challenge.
“Oh my…” Bien murmured as she ran her gaze over his body.
“Love of the flesh is a shallow love.…” Ruc said, quoting from the Fifth Teaching.
She glanced over at him. “Remind me of that the next time you come scratching at my door.” When she turned back to the foreigner, however, her face darkened. “People aren’t going to put up with him standing there for long.”
It was true.
For the moment, the crowd didn’t move beyond gawking and muttering. The sight was so strange, so incongruous, so unexpected, that the man had, for the moment, failed to ignite the distrust and rage of the people staring at him. He might have been some exotic animal—a bear, or a moose—rather than a human being. The fact that he was naked and silent only reinforced the impression, but he did not remain silent for long.
Even as Ruc studied him, the morning gongs began tolling through the city, first just one bronze, then ten, then hundreds, until the sodden air shook with the sound. It drowned out the rain on the bridge, the surging of the current below, the voices of the individuals in the crowd. The stranger tilted back his head as though he were basking in the noise. The thick rope looped around his neck seemed to twitch, as though it were alive. Then, when the sky finally shivered itself still, he began to speak.
“Hail, people of Dombâng.”
“Hail?” Ruc shook his head. “Who says hail?”
“Dead men in books,” Bien replied.
“And evidently the people wherever he comes from.”
She frowned. “What accent is that?”
Again, Ruc shook his head. The words were clear enough, but the syllables drained strangely from one into the next, as though poured from vessel to vessel.
“Hail,” the man continued, “my brethren in faith! Hail, tenders of the ancient flame!”
He smiled as he spoke, ran his gaze over the crowd with the ease of a speaker confident of his reception.
“Hail, worshippers of the Three!”
An uneasy ripple ran through the crowd. Dombâng had rebelled against imperial control just five years earlier over that exact worship. In most corners of the empire, Annur allowed the local religious traditions, even encouraged them. At least that was what the sailors had insisted, when sailors were still welcome in the city. Ruc had never set foot outside of the delta, but those men talked about shrines on Basc to the twin gods of storm, idols carved into the stone of the Broken Bay, temples grown from living trees near the mouth of the Baivel River where villagers laid offerings to the spirits of the wood. They weren’t Annurian gods, these forest spirits and stone idols, but the empire tolerated them. Legionaries didn’t smash the statues and burn the shrines. They didn’t hang people for murmuring the sacred names.
“Why,” Ruc had asked a priest once—a priest of Eira—when he was younger and dumber, still just a child struggling to stitch together a world that seemed broken into opposing halves, “do the Annurians let the Bascans have their gods, and the Breatans, and the Raaltans, but not the people of Dombâng? Why do they hate the Three?”
“Because,” the man said, setting a kindly hand on his shoulder, “to worship the Three, one must become a murderer.”
That single sentence, offered so casually, had been a cold knife sliding through Ruc’s guts.
It only confirmed what he knew already, but the protest rose in him anyway, like some kind of reflex.
“It’s not murder. It’s sacrifice.”
“There is nothing sacred,” the priest replied gravely, “in dragging the sick or orphaned or drunk into the delta and leaving them to die.”
“That has nothing to do with the Three. The Three don’t want sick people or kids. They want warriors to hunt, to fight.”
The priest shook his head, regarded Ruc with sad eyes. “You were too long among the Vuo Ton, my child. Their faith, like the old faith of this city, is no faith at all, but hatred, violence, blood. Moreover, all of it is based on a lie. The Three are not real. Kem Anh, Sinn, Hang Loc—they’re just names people gave a long time ago to the worst sides of themselves, the ugly parts, their desire to hurt, to humiliate, to murder.”
You’re wrong, Ruc wanted to say. They’re not just names, and they’re not ugly. They’re so beautiful that it hurts to look at them.
But if he said that, the priest might ask more, might ask how he was so certain, and Ruc had no words to frame the answers. All he had were his memories, hundreds of them, thousands, of Kem Anh’s golden eyes as she held him at her breast; of Hang Loc cracking a snake’s skull, peeling back the scales, plucking out the tenderest portion—the eyes—then popping them one by one into Ruc’s tiny, eager mouth; of the two of them kneeling in the soft mud to plant river violets in the skulls; of the rise and fall of their bodies as he slept between them, warmed by the heat of their flesh.
You’re wrong, he wanted to say.
But, of course, the priest was not wrong. Alongside the memories of flowers and warmth and light stalked the other memories, the indelible visions of the things those gods had done, that they had taught him to do, that drove him from the delta in the first place. He felt his face hot with sunlight and splattered blood, his fingers tight around the knife.…
“It is love that makes us human, son,” the priest said.
And Ruc, child of the city and the delta both, had doubted those words almost as much as he believed them.
The priest died a few years after that conversation, which was probably lucky for him. The revolution turned the old world on its head. What had been profane for two hundred years became sacred once more, while the sacred became unsayable. If the priest had lived, if he had dared to spread his message in the streets of Dombâng after the overthrow of the empire, he would have been torn to pieces by an angry mob for his blasphemy, emissary of love or not. Eira’s temple and her priests had weathered the uprising and its aftermath in large part by avoiding all talk of Annur, of the larger pantheon of Annurian gods, and of the Three. It was a wise strategy for any foreigner who had survived the purges and wanted to keep surviving.
Evidently no one had informed the naked man atop the bridge.
“Dombâng alone,” he continued, “among all the cities of this land, remembers something of the old ways, the ways of tooth and fist, flower and bone.”
That earned him a little wary applause. It was a tricky situation. No one wanted to be seen supporting a foreigner, but, on the other hand, this particular foreigner seemed to be praising both the Three and the virtue of those who worshipped them. It could be wise to support such a declaration, to be seen supporting it. Even as they stared, however, most of the people in the crowd slid expressions of neutral disinterest down over their faces like masks. The high priests of the city had spies on every street, and even if they hadn’t, the revolution taught one lesson above all others: your neighbors are always watching.
“Dombâng alone remembers the rhythms of the land and the truth of the testing. It is here still, if only faintly.”
Bien shook her head. “Don’t say faintly,” she murmured.
“Probably don’t say anything,” Ruc added.
“I, Valaka Jarva, rashkta-bhura of the hoti of the armorers, beloved of the Lord and proud bearer of his axoch”—here he touched with two fingers the strange collar circling his throat—“am come before you with a greeting, a reminder, and a warning.” He spread his arms as though inviting the whole of Dombâng into his embrace. “The greeting is this: hail. Hail from he who holds us in his fist, who dreams the world into being. Hail from the First, your once and future Lord.”
Mutters and questions rippled through the crowd. The man spoke clearly enough, but half the words were nonsense. Rashkta-bhura? Axoch?
“What,” someone demanded finally, “is a hoti?”
The man’s smile grew.
“I was told you had forgotten, and so my reminder: you have lived before, people of Dombâng. You have lived and lost a thousand thousand lives. You have lived and you have forgotten, but the Lord will open your minds. He will fill you with the truth of what you have been and what you will be, and when you see, you people of Dombâng, you keepers of the old ways, you will join us in serving his great and holy purpose.”
The mutters rose to growls of displeasure.
More voices and louder sprouted from the mob, like traitor’s heart flowers after a hard rain.
“Fuck your great and noble truth.”
“… Annurian pig…”
“Dombâng bows before none but the Three!”
The messenger—Valaka Jarva—nodded as though he had expected this outburst, as though all the men and women gathered on the bridge were children bent on some small folly. He raised a hand.
“The Three are worthy of your worship, but they are not all. The Lord is of the Three and also above them, beyond them. It is for this that he is called the First. Your gods are to him as the moon beside the sun. He is coming, people of Dombâng, and you will see that he is like to those that you revere, but stronger, faster, wiser, more.”
Bien took Ruc by the elbow. “We need to get him out of here.”
Ruc glanced down at her. “How do you plan to do that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, shoving her way forward through the press of the crowd, “but he’s about ten sentences away from having his tongue nailed to that railing.”
All things considered, ending up with a nail through the tongue seemed like an optimistic outcome for the messenger. Ruc had seen men and women flayed during the Annurian purges, lashed to bridge pilings and left for the floods, cut into dozens of pieces and used as chum for the croc hunters. Things could go a lot worse than losing a tongue. They could, and, judging from the shifting temper of the crowd, they were about to.
Ruc and Bien weren’t the only people pushing toward the railing. The human bodies on the bridge might all have been part of one great snake, twisting tighter and tighter around its quarry. The only reason the idiot was still up there at all was that, despite the mounting outrage, no one had yet gathered the courage to strike the first blow. The restraint of the mob would last until it didn’t. When it collapsed, it would collapse utterly.
“Move,” Bien shouted as she shoved her way forward. “Get out of the way.”
A short, wiry man—a fisher, judging from his clothes—shot her an irritated glance. “Wait your turn. We all want a piece of the bastard.”
Not all of us, Ruc thought grimly, lifting the fisher as gently as he could, wincing at the pain in his ribs, then setting him aside.
“Hey!” Bien shouted when she was just a few paces away. “Hey!”
She waved her hands over her head.
Valaka Jarva turned, met her gaze, nodded to her as though she were some petitioner come to beg a favor. He seemed oblivious to the fury burning through the crowd, as though his own violent demise were a possibility he’d never bothered considering.
“Get down,” Bien shouted, pointing toward the bridge. “They’re going to kill you.”
Ruc stifled a curse, took Bien by the shoulder. “There’s no way to do this,” he said, careful to keep his voice low. “It’s too late. You’ve already saved one idiot today.”
She shoved his hand away. “Love the meek.…”
“He’s not all that fucking meek. He’s been standing naked on a railing shouting at anyone who will listen that he serves the world’s greatest and most holy purpose.”
“Love those on whom the world heaps hatred, the outcast and the shunned.…”
“Shunning is a colossal understatement for what these people are about to do to him. And to you, too, if you’re helping him when they take him down.”
He’d almost seen her killed once that morning. He wasn’t ready to see it again.
The bridge shook beneath the weight of the stamping feet. Hundreds of angry voices carved their fury on the stormy sky. A forest of raised fists had grown up around Ruc and Bien, all clenched to bursting. When he ran his gaze over the crowd, he almost couldn’t see the faces for the rage-red heat burning from the skin.
Bien rounded on him. Tears stood in her eyes.
“What will we be,” she demanded, “if we don’t try to help this man?”
There were hundreds of possible answers, thousands. We’ll be alive, Ruc wanted to say. We’ll be servants of Eira instead of food for the fish.
It was impossible to rescue every single person. Tens of thousands had died during the revolution while Ruc and Bien did nothing to save them. In the delta, he had learned one lesson very early: there was a time to fight, and a time to flee. A rush wren felt no shame taking to the air at the passage of a snake. Even a croc would retreat at the sight of a jaguar. Bred into the flesh of every bird and beast was a single, simple unalterable law: survive. No animal would risk its life for an unknown creature, but then, that was Bien’s point: she was not an animal, and despite his childhood, neither was Ruc.
“Finally,” the messenger declared, “my warning.” His gaze went stern. “If you insist on your forgetting, if you smear mud over your eyes, if you turn your backs on the truth…” He took a deep breath, seemed to fill with fury and regret, then shook his head. “If you deny him, he will destroy you all and utterly. He will take you apart as he has taken apart so many and so much greater than you, and you will wake in your next lives as grubs and worms, the meanest creatures ever to creep in terror through the wide spaces of the world.”
Even as the messenger finished speaking, a massive man surged forward out of the crowd—Striker, Ruc realized—his eyes on the stranger, lips twisted into a vicious smile. With a desperate cry, Bien hurled herself in front of him. The chaos saved her. In the crush and rain and swelling sound, no one could tell what she was trying to do. She might as well have been just one more citizen driven forward by righteous rage. The thought that she might be shielding the stranger with her body would have seemed insane.
Striker didn’t even glance down at her—another stroke of luck—just cursed and shoved her roughly aside. Bien fell, but instead of giving up, she wrapped herself around his leg like a child looking for a ride, indifferent to the fact that this was the man who had strangled her nearly to death not much earlier.
