The Best of Elizabeth Bear, page 42
Hoelun Khatun rose from her cushions, a gold-rimmed china cup of fragrant tea in her right hand. She moved from among her attendants, dismissing them with trailing gestures until only the Witch remained, slumped like a shaggy, softly snoring boulder before the brazier.
The hall echoed when it was empty. The Khatun paced the length of it, her back straight as the many pillars supporting the arched roof above them. Nilufer fell in beside her, so their steps clicked and their trains shushed over the flagstones.
“Toghrul Khanzadeh would come here, if you were to marry him,” said Nilufer’s mother. “He would come here, and rule as your husband. It is what the Khagan wants for him—a safe place for a weak son.”
Nilufer would have wet her lips with her tongue, but the paint would smear her teeth if she did so. She tried to think on what it would be like, to be married to a weak man. She could not imagine.
She did not, she realized, have much experience of men.
But Hoelun Khatun was speaking again, as they reached the far end of the hall and turned. “You will not marry Toghrul Khanzadeh. It is not possible.”
The spaces between the columns were white spaces. Nilufer’s footsteps closed them before and opened them behind as she walked beside her mother and waited for her to find her words.
Hoelun Khatun stepped more slowly. “Seventeen years ago, I made a bargain with the Khagan. Seventeen years, before you were born. It has kept our province free, Nilufer. I did what he asked, and in repayment I had his pledge that only you shall rule when I am gone. You must marry, but it is not possible for you to marry his son. Any of his sons.”
Nilufer wore her face like a mask. Her mother’s training made it possible; another irony no one but she would ever notice. “He does not mean to stand by it.”
“He means to protect a weak son.” Hoelun Khatun glanced at her daughter through lowered lashes. “Parents will go to great lengths to protect their children.”
Nilufer made a noncommittal noise. Hoelun Khatun caught Nilufer’s sleeve, heedless of the paper that crinkled in the sleeve-pocket. She said, too quickly: “Temel could rise to be Khagan.”
Nilufer cast a glance over her shoulder at the Witch, but the Witch was sleeping. They were alone, the princess and her mother. “Khan of Khans?” she said, too mannered to show incredulity. “Temel is a bandit.”
“Nonetheless,” Hoelun Khatun said, letting the silk of Nilufer’s raiment slip between her fingers. “They say the Khagan was a prince of bandits when he was young.”
She turned away, and Nilufer watched the recessional of her straight back beneath the lacquered black tower of her hair. The princess folded her arms inside the sleeves of her robes, as if serenely.
Inside the left one, the crumpled wings of the red bird pricked her right palm.
That night, in the tower, Nilufer unfolded the spell-bird in the darkness, while her attendants slept. For a rushed breathless moment her night-robes fell about her and she thought that she might suffocate under their quilted weight, but then she lifted her wings and won free, sailing out of the pile of laundry and into the frost-cold night. Her pinions were a blur in the dark as a dancing glimmer drew her; she chased it, and followed it down, over the rice-paddies where sleepless children watched over the tender seedlings, armed with sticks and rocks so wild deer would not graze them; over the village where oxen slept on their feet and men slept with their heads pillowed in the laps of spinning women; over the mines where the talus-herders mostly slumbered and the talus toiled through the night, grinding out their eerie songs.
It was to the mountains that it led her, and when she followed it down, she found she had lost her wings. If she had been expecting it, she could have landed lightly, for the drop was no more than a few feet. Instead she stumbled, and bruised the soles of her feet on the stones.
She stood naked in the moonlight, cold, toes bleeding, in the midst of a rocky slope. A soft crunching vibration revealed that the mossy thing looming in the darkness beside her was a talus. She set out a hand, both to steady herself on its hide and so it would not roll over her in the dark, and so felt the great sweet chime roll through it when it begin to sing. It was early for the mating season, but perhaps a cold spring made the talus fear a cold and early winter, and the ground frozen too hard for babies to gnaw.
And over the sound of its song, she heard a familiar voice, as the bandit prince spoke behind her.
“And where is your bow now, Nilufer?”
She thought he might expect her to gasp and cover her nakedness, so when she turned, she did it slowly, brushing her fingers down the hide of the hulk that broke the icy wind. Temel had slipped up on her, and stood only a few armlengths distant, one hand extended, offering a fur-lined cloak. She could see the way the fur caught amber and silver gleams in the moonlight. It was the fur of wolves.
“Take it,” he said.
“I am not cold,” she answered, while the blood froze on the sides of her feet. Eventually, he let his elbow flex, and swung the cloak over his shoulder.
When he spoke, his breath poised on the air. Even without the cloak she felt warmer; something had paused the wind, so there was only the chill in the air to consider. “Why did you come, Nilufer?”
“My mother wants me to marry you,” she answered. “For your armies.”
His teeth flashed. He wore no mask now, and in the moonlight she could see that he was comely and well-made. His eyes stayed on her face. She would not cross her arms for warmth, lest he think she was ashamed, and covering herself. “We are married now,” he said. “We were married when you unfolded that paper. For who is there to stop me?”
There was no paint on her mouth now. She bit her lip freely. “I could gouge your eyes out with my thumbs,” she said. “You’d make a fine bandit prince with no eyes.”
He stepped closer. He had boots, and the rocks shifted under them. She put her back to the cold side of the talus. It hummed against her shoulders, warbling. “You would,” he said. “If you wanted to. But wouldn’t you rather live free, Khatun to a Khagan, and collect the tithes rather than going in payment of them?”
“And what of the peace of the Khanate? It has been a long time, Temel, since there was war. The only discord is your discord.”
“What of your freedom from an overlord’s rule?”
“My freedom to become an overlord?” she countered.
He smiled. He was a handsome man.
“How vast are your armies?” she asked. He was close enough now that she almost felt his warmth. She clenched her teeth, not with fear, but because she did not choose to allow them to chatter. In the dark, she heard more singing, more rumbling. Another talus answered the first.
“Vast enough.” He reached past her and patted the rough hide of the beast she leaned upon. “There is much of value in a talus.” And then he touched her shoulder, with much the same affection. “Come, princess,” he said. “You have a tiger’s heart, it is so. But I would make this easy.”
She accepted the cloak when he draped it over her shoulders and then she climbed up the talus beside him, onto the great wide back of the ancient animal. There were smoother places there, soft with moss and lichen, and it was lovely to lie back and look at the stars, to watch the moon slide down the sky.
This was a feral beast, she was sure. Not one of the miners. Just a wild thing living its wild slow existence, singing its wild slow songs. Alone, and not unhappy, in the way such creatures were. And now it would mate (she felt the second talus come alongside, though there was no danger; the talus docked side by side like ships, rather than one mounting the other like an overwrought stallion) and it might have borne young, or fathered them, or however talus worked these things.
But Temel warmed her with his body, and the talus would never have the chance. In the morning, he would lead his men upon it, and its lichen and moss and bouldery aspect would mean nothing. Its slow meandering songs and the fire that lay at its heart would be as nothing. It was armies. It was revolution. It was freedom from the Khan.
He would butcher it for the jewels that lay at its heart, and feel nothing.
Nilufer lay back on the cold stone, pressed herself to the resonant bulk and let her fingers curl how they would. Her nails picked and shredded the lichen that grew in its crevices like nervous birds picking their plumage until they bled.
Temel slid a gentle hand under the wolf-fur cloak, across her belly, over the mound of her breast. Nilufer opened her thighs.
She flew home alone, wings in her window, and dressed in haste. Her attendants slept on, under the same small spell which she had left them, and she went to find the Witch.
Who crouched beside the brazier, as before, in the empty hall. But now, her eyes were open, wide, and bright.
The Witch did not speak. That fell to Nilufer.
“She killed my father,” Nilufer said. “She betrayed my father and my brother, and she slept with the Khagan, and I am the Khagan’s daughter, and she did it all so she could be Khatun.”
“So you will not marry the Khanzadeh, your brother?”
Nilufer felt a muscle twitch along her jaw. “That does not seem to trouble the Khagan.”
The Witch settled her shoulders under the scrofular mass of her cloak. “Before I was the Witch,” she said, in a voice that creaked only a little, “I was your father’s mother.”
Nilufer straightened her already-straight back. She drew her neck up like a pillar. “And when did you become a Witch and stop being a mother?”
The Witch’s teeth showed black moons at the root where her gums had receded. “No matter how long you’re a Witch, you never stop being a mother.”
Nilufer licked her lips, tasting stone grit and blood. Her feet left red prints on white stone. “I need a spell, grandmother. A spell to make a man love a woman, in spite of whatever flaw may be in her.” Even the chance of another man’s child?
The Witch stood up straighter. “Are you certain?”
Nilufer turned on her cut foot, leaving behind a smear. “I am going to talk to the emissary,” she said. “You will have, I think, at least a month to make ready.”
Hoelun Khatun came herself, to dress the princess in her wedding robes. They should have been red for life, but the princess had chosen white, for death of the old life, and the Khatun would permit her daughter the conceit. Mourning upon a marriage, after all, was flattering to the mother.
Upon the day appointed, Nilufer sat in her tower, all her maids and warriors dismissed. Her chaperones had been sent away. Other service had been found for her tutors. The princess waited alone, while her mother and the men-at-arms rode out in the valley before the palace to receive the bandit prince Temel, who some said would be the next Khan of Khans. Nilufer watched them from her tower window. No more than a bowshot distant, they made a brave sight with banners snapping.
But the bandit prince Temel never made it to his wedding. He was found upon that day by the entourage and garrison of Toghrul Khanzadeh, sixth son of the Khagan, who was riding to woo the same woman, upon her express invitation. Temel was taken in surprise, in light armor, his armies arrayed to show peace rather than ready for war.
There might have been more of a battle, perhaps even the beginnings of a successful rebellion, if Hoelun Khatun had not fallen in the first moments of the battle, struck down by a bandit’s black arrow. This evidence of treachery from their supposed allies swayed the old queen’s men to obey the orders of the three monkish warrior women who had been allies of the Khatun’s husband before he died. They entered the fray at the Khanzadeh’s flank.
Of the bandit army, there were said to be no survivors.
No one mentioned to the princess that the black fletchings were still damp with the ink in which they had been dipped. No one told her that Hoelun Khatun had fallen facing the enemy, with a crescent-headed arrow in her back.
And when the three monkish warrior women came to inform Nilufer in her tower of her mother’s death and found her scrubbing with blackened fingertips at the dark drops spotting her wedding dress, they also did not tell her that the outline of a bowstring still lay livid across her rosebud mouth and the tip of her tilted nose.
If she wept, her tears were dried before she descended the stair.
Of the Dowager Queen Nilufer Khatun—she who was wife and then widow of Toghrul Khanzadeh, called the Barricade of Heaven for his defense of his father’s empire from the bandit hordes at the foothills of the Steles of the Sky—history tells us little.
But, that she died old.
The Deeps of the Sky
Stormchases’ little skiff skipped and glided across the tropopause, skimming the denser atmosphere of the warm cloud-sea beneath, running before a fierce wind. The skiff’s hull was broad and shallow, supported by buoyant pontoons, the whole designed to float atop the heavy, opaque atmosphere beneath. Stormchases had shot the sails high into the stratosphere and good winds blew the skiff onward, against the current of the dark belt beneath.
Ahead, the vast ruddy wall of a Deep Storm loomed, the base wreathed in shreds of tossing white mist: caustic water clouds churned up from deep in the deadly, layered troposphere. The Deep Storm stretched from horizon to horizon, disappearing on either end in a blur of perspective and atmospheric haze. Its breadth was so great as to make even its massive height seem insignificant, though the billowing ammonia cloud wall was smeared flat-topped by stratospheric winds where it broke the tropopause.
The storm glowed with the heat of the deep atmosphere, other skiffs silhouetted cool against it. Their chatter rang over Stormchases’ talker. Briefly, he leaned down to the pickup and greeted his colleagues. His competition. Many of them came from the same long lines of miners that he did; many carried the same long-hoarded knowledge.
But Stormchases was determined that, with the addition of his own skill and practice, he would be among the best sky-miners of them all.
Behind and above, clear skies showed a swallowing indigo, speckled with bright stars. The hurtling crescents of a dozen or so of the moons were currently visible, as was the searing pinpoint of the world’s primary—so bright it washed out nearby stars. Warmth made the sky glow too, the variegated brightness of the thermosphere far above. Stormchases’ thorax squeezed with emotion as he gazed upon the elegant canopies of a group of Drift-Worlds rising in slow sunlit coils along the warm vanguard of the Deep Storm, their colors bright by sunlight, their silhouettes dark by thermal sense.
He should not look; he should not hope. But there—a distance-hazed shape behind her lesser daughters and sisters, her great canopy dappled in sheeny gold and violet—soared the Mothergraves. Stormchases was too far and too low to see the teeming ecosystem she bore on her vast back, up high above the colorful clouds where the sunlight could reach and nurture them. He could just make out the color variations caused by the dripping net-roots of veil trees that draped the Mothergraves’ sides, capturing life-giving ammonia from the atmosphere and drawing it in to plump leaves and firm nutritious fruit.
Stormchases arched his face up to her, eyes shivering with longing. His wings hummed against his back. There was no desire like the pain of being separate from the Mothergraves, no need like the need to go to her. But he must resist it. He must brave the Deep Storm and harvest it, and perhaps then she would deem him worthy to be one of hers. He had the provider-status to pay court to one of the younger Drift-Worlds…but they could not give his young the safety and stability that a berth on the greatest and oldest of the Mothers would.
In the hot deeps of the sky, too high even for the Mothers and their symbiotic colony-flyers or too low even for the boldest and most intrepid of Stormchases’ brethren, other things lived.
Above were other kinds of flyers and the drifters, winged or buoyant or merely infinitesimal things that could not survive even the moderate pressure and chill of the tropopause. Below, swimmers dwelled in the ammoniated thicks of the mid-troposphere that never knew the light of stars or sun. They saw only thermally. They could endure massive pressures, searing temperatures, and the lashings of molten water and even oxygen, the gas so reactive that it could set an exhalation on fire. That environment would crush Stormchases to a pulp, dissolve his delicate wing membranes, burn him from the gills to the bone.
Stormchases’ folk were built for more moderate climes—the clear skies and thick, buoying atmosphere of the tropopause, where life flourished and the skies were full of food. But even here, in this temperate part of the sky, survival required a certain element of risk. And there were things that could only be mined where a Deep Storm pulled them up through the layers of atmosphere to an accessible height.
Which was why Stormchases sailed directly into the lowering wings of the Deep Storm, one manipulator on the skiff’s controls, the other watching the perspective-shrunken sail shimmering so high above. Flyers would avoid the cable, which was monofilament spun into an intentionally refractive, high-visibility lattice with good tensile properties. But the enormous, translucent-bodied Drift-Worlds were not nimble. Chances were good that the Mother would survive a sail-impact, albeit with some scars—and some damage to the sky-island ecosystems she carried on her backs—and the skiff would likely hold together through such an incident. If he tangled a Mother in the monofilament shroud-lines spun from the same material that reinforced the Drift-World’s great canopies…it didn’t bear thinking of. That was why the lines were so gaily streamered: so anyone could see them from afar.
If Stormchases lost the skiff, it would just be a long flight home and probably a period of indenturehood to another miner until he could earn another, and begin proving himself again. But injuring a Mother, even a minor one who floated low, would be the end of his hopes to serve the Mothergraves.
So he watched the cable, and the overhead skies. And—of course—the storm.
