The Veiled Throne, page 4
The Third Tribe of the Antler prospered. Though she was too young to be a mother herself, Goztan watched with pleasure as the tribe’s mothers grew fat and beautiful from the meat and milk yielded by the herds of long-haired cattle and flocks of knob-horned sheep she captured, their children cared for by the Agon slaves she abducted. Though her own parents were still young and vigorous, Goztan sighed with relief as feeble elders of the tribe no longer had to say farewell to their families and walk into winter storms—sure, that meant more aged Agon starved in their stead, but that was the way of life on the scrublands.
“You’re better than any of your sisters and brothers,” Tenlek said, her voice full of pride. “You’re just like me.”
And then, in the same year that she reached the age at which she could take a husband and have her own children, strangers from across the sea arrived in monstrous city-ships.
Despite the cautious welcome given to them by the Lyucu under the direction of Pékyu Tenryo, the strangers soon revealed their bestial natures and slaughtered scores of Lyucu with their fantastic metal weapons.
The barbarians from Dara were powerful. They killed from a distance with little spears launched from half-moon-shaped frames, far more accurate and deadly than Lyucu slingshots and slings; they dressed in wisps of clouds, which were much more colorful and comfortable against the skin than the hide and leather and fur worn by the Lyucu; their city-ships rode confidently over towering waves that would have capsized Lyucu coracles, propelled by enormous vertical wings that yoked the power of the wind like the wings of a garinafin; they seemed completely immune from the mysterious new plagues that swept through the Lyucu ranks.
Their pékyu, a man by the name of Admiral Krita, declared that he intended to enslave the people of the scrublands and bind them in chains from which they could never escape, even unto the seventh generation. Many cried out in confusion and terror to the All-Father and the Every-Mother, wondering why such darkness had been allowed to descend upon their mortal children.
Instead of riding forth with his warriors mounted on garinafins to fight these barbarians to the death, Pékyu Tenryo called for women, thanes and naros, to volunteer to be sexual companions for the men who styled themselves the Lords of Dara. Many of the thanes seethed at the pékyu’s weakness, including Goztan’s mother. But Goztan, having witnessed Tenryo getting the better of his enemies time after time, volunteered, trusting instinctively that the pékyu had in mind some grander scheme.
The pékyu held a banquet for the women warriors on the night before they were to be sent to the city-ships, asking them to keep their eyes and ears open for the ways of Dara, but to reveal as little of the Lyucu way of life as possible.
“There is a long winter ahead,” the pékyu said. “The clever wolf wags her tail and drinks the offered milk, adopting the guise of the domesticated dog. But her true nature is held deep inside, like a sheathed bone dagger.”
She endured the barbarians’ vile caresses and lewd gazes and acted the part of the humiliated captive, gradually gaining the trust of Dathama, captain of one of the city-ships, to whom she had been gifted. She fed him his meals, bathed his body, slept in his bed. Word by word, phrase by phrase, she learned to speak his language; hour by hour, day by day, she studied how he fought and how he thought; square foot by square foot, deck by deck, she memorized the layout of the city-ship and the caches of weapons and food.
One early spring day, Captain Dathama, who usually spent all his time on his ship and had grown ever more flabby and lethargic on the rich food and idleness made possible by the Lyucu servants, decided that he wanted to take in some fresh air. He demanded that a team of Lyucu men be sent to bear himself and his native mistress—whom he had renamed “Obedience” for he could not be bothered to learn her “barbarian” name—on a large litter fashioned from whale ribs and woven seagrass, its cushions covered in smooth Dara silk and stuffed with soft yearling cattle hair.
As if to make up for his unimpressive physique—weedy, uncoordinated, with a high-pitched voice and a face that reminded one of a scavenging prairie vole—Dathama stuffed the litter with supplies catering to his creature comforts: two jugs of wine, eight baskets of food to snack on, sea-chilled stones to soothe his hemorrhoids, a bucket of flower-scented water that Goztan was supposed to sprinkle over him to keep him cool…. As the Lyucu warriors huffed and labored to carry the litter at a jog up and down the desolate sand dunes of the beach, indolent Dara soldiers followed along with a few servants and maids, all entertaining themselves with anecdotes that supposedly demonstrated the lack of intelligence among the men of the scrublands and speculating aloud whether some ancestral sin had doomed the Lyucu to a squalid existence. Luckily, as the Lyucu men could not understand the speech of Dara, the insults deflected off them like water off a tidal tern’s back.
But Goztan seethed. She had thought she was inured to such insults, yet seeing her people treated like beasts of burden by the Lords of Dara made her scabbed-over heart bleed anew. She struggled to smile coquettishly and to ply Dathama with more cups of aged wine the way the vile man had taught her.
And then, one of the litter-bearers stumbled, and a corner of the litter sank, almost tossing the ungainly captain out. Only by grabbing for Goztan did he avoid an embarrassing fall, but the wine in one of the jugs spilled all over his fine silk robe.
Enraged, Dathama halted the procession and ordered all the litter-bearers whipped. As bloody streaks crisscrossed the backs of the kneeling Lyucu men, Goztan could see the fire of rage and humiliation build in their eyes. The Dara soldiers stood vigilantly to the side, their swords unsheathed, waiting for any sign of resistance to give them the excuse for slaughter. Desperately, she pleaded with the captain to show mercy upon the litter-bearers, and the captain slapped her hard across the face. It was all she could do not to leap up and strangle him right then and there.
The clever wolf, she spoke to herself through the blinding fury. I must be the clever wolf.
“A sign! A sign!” a voice cried out a few paces away from the foot of the litter.
Everyone turned.
The speaker was a wiry, long-limbed man of Dara dressed in a mix of woven hemp rags and rough-cut pelt like many of the barbarian servants. The long sea voyage had left their clothes in tatters, and they did not yet know how to make proper garments the native way (or perhaps didn’t want to learn). Goztan couldn’t recall ever seeing him, which meant that he was probably a sailor or deckhand rather than a personal servant attending to Dathama. The Dara man’s tanned face was dominated by large, intelligent eyes, and his hands and exposed arms were covered by scars. Goztan thought his scraggly beard made him resemble a placid but watchful ram. He was kneeling in the sand and cradling a turtle shell as though it were the greatest treasure in the world.
“Oga Kidosu,” Dathama said, “what are you babbling about?”
The soldiers observed this unexpected development with interest, temporarily halting the whipping of the Lyucu litter-bearers.
Oga lifted the turtle shell, which was the size of a small coconut, above his head with both hands. “A most auspicious portent, Captain!”
The captain awkwardly climbed off the litter, took a few clumsy steps forward, and plucked the shell out of Oga’s hands. It was from a young turtle, and so weathered that the bones inside the shell had long since disintegrated. In addition to the regular seams between the plates, a strange series of markings covered both the carapace and the plastron.
On the carapace were a set of irregularly shaped blobs outlined in white that the captain immediately recognized as a map of the Islands of Dara. On the plastron, on the other hand, appeared five human figures. An older man, a woman, two younger men holding long weapons, and a swaddled baby in the older man’s arms. From the woman’s raised hand trailed a rope, the other end of which was attached to a suspended horizontal stick, but not at the stick’s center. A fish dangled from the short end of the stick while a small bell-shaped weight hung from the long end—it was a scale for weighing things, used by everyone in Dara from petty fishmongers to jewelry appraisers. All the figures had Dara hairstyles and clothing.
The drawings were etched into the surface of the shell, but didn’t show the sharp turns and angular streaks characteristic of knife carving. Indeed, as the captain’s fingers ran over the marks, they were so smooth that they seemed natural, part of the shell itself.
“Where did you find this?” asked Dathama.
“When that foolish litter-bearer stumbled, I saw him kick something from the sand. I retrieved it, thinking it a rock or a conch shell. But when I saw what was on it, I realized that it’s a sign from Lutho, a message borne by his pawi.”
Dathama’s glance flitted between the shell in his hand and the kneeling figure of Oga Kidosu. The man’s story was ridiculous, and he was certain that the markings had not come about naturally. Clearly, Oga, an unlettered fisherman-peasant, was presenting some kind of forged “supernatural” artifact in the hopes of being rewarded. He was just about to order the man whipped for lying when his eyes took in the Dara soldiers nearby, who were staring at the shell in his hand with a mixture of curiosity and awe.
“The admiral said there might be omens,” a soldier whispered to his companion.
“I heard Captain Talo was purifying himself so he could meditate and seek divine guidance,” whispered another.
Omens.
Dathama swallowed the order and reviewed the political situation.
Admiral Krita’s harsh treatment of the natives had drawn plenty of objections from his own people, especially among the Moralist scholars brought along for the purpose of persuading the immortals to return to Dara for the glory of Emperor Mapidéré. Many scholars denounced Krita’s policies as inhumane and contrary to the teachings of the One True Sage. They peppered him with flowery Classical Ano quotations at every turn, insisting that he had to treat the natives with more compassion. To the admiral, these naive scholars were fools whose heads had been stuffed with useless ideals like “mutual respect” and “common humanity.” They had no understanding that harsh militaristic policies were absolutely necessary for the expedition to survive in a hostile land.
Krita was sick of the Moralists and would have buried them alive, the way the emperor had silenced their outspoken colleagues back in Dara. But the common soldiers and sailors, illiterate themselves, revered these men of learning. Killing the scholars would have sent an unmistakable signal that the military commanders had given up on the expedition’s primary objective: the search for immortals to be brought back to Dara for Emperor Mapidéré. And the common soldiers, once they realized that Krita and his top commanders had no interest in returning home, would surely mutiny. Thus, the military leadership had no choice but to tolerate the scholars’ wagging tongues to sustain the legitimacy of their authority.
But the common soldiers and sailors were also a superstitious lot, and there was a long tradition in Dara of clever leaders invoking signs of the supernatural to enhance their own standing and to defang their political opponents among the elite. Leaders of peasant rebellions during the era of the Tiro states often rallied men to their cause by claiming authority from inscrutable oracles, and even Mapidéré himself justified the disarming of the populace by melting down weapons to construct gigantic statues of the gods. Krita had been dropping hints that he wished to be thought of as a divinely inspired representative, sent here by the gods of Dara to rule over the benighted natives.
The shell’s markings could be readily interpreted to support Krita’s claim. To have a map of Dara appear on a native turtle shell was to symbolically suggest that this unenlightened land needed to be remade in the image of Dara. Under that reading, the older male figure in the picture, the one holding the baby, was obviously a reference to Admiral Krita as the giver of life and source of protection, safety, stability. The woman holding the fish and scales was likely a reference to a native consort—though Krita seemed to prefer a large harem—as a synecdoche for all the Lyucu, charged with the duty of feeding her lord and extracting the full value of the bounty of this land. The whole image could thus be interpreted to mean that Krita was not just a lord of Dara, but fated to produce many strong descendants—those young men holding weapons—in this new homeland and become the progenitor of a new race.
Even Dathama was impressed by the planning and thought that had obviously gone into the picture.
The scholars’ moral objections would be powerless against such a divine vision, and once they found their authority waning, they’d surely find a way to rationalize themselves into supporting the vision to secure their own positions. Forget about Emperor Mapidéré; Krita would be emperor himself!
And if Dathama presented the turtle shell with its prophecy to the admiral, the captain was sure to gain favor and would be elevated into the highest rank of the new emperor’s court.
I’m not the only one sensing an opportunity—that sneaky Talo, always sniffing the political winds with his rat-like nose, must be crafting his own “omen” right now. I’d better act quick.
To be sure, there were risks to such a course of action. The other captains, jealous of Dathama’s success, might choose to question the authenticity of the “omen,” but they would then have to explain how the marks came to be on the turtle shell. The natives obviously could not be the source of the drawing since they knew nothing of Dara—indeed, Captain Dathama doubted they had any notion of art or geography at all. And there was no known method of carving or etching in Dara that could produce such smooth results on bone or shell. Besides, what foolish man would dare to question the authenticity of such an object if Admiral Krita was pleased by it? Their efforts would be better spent in finding their own portents to present in hopes of currying favor.
A lie became the truth when enough people had reasons to pretend it was true.
Is this a risk worth taking?
“If I recall correctly, you were rescued by the fleet after almost losing your life in a terrible storm before we left Dara and passed through the Wall of Storms,” said Dathama, gazing at the kneeling Oga. He had to test this man, a likely forger and the biggest unknown in his calculations. “It’s clear that Lutho, god of those lost at sea, favors you. As the discoverer of this marvel, I imagine you’ll be richly rewarded.”
“I picked it up only because the gods smile upon you, Captain,” said Oga Kidosu as he touched his forehead to the ground. Then he looked up, careless of the sand grains stuck to his brow. “Without your magnificent presence, the gods would not have made that barbarian stumble. Without that fortunate fall, who knows how long this divine wonder would have remained hidden? I am but the witness of your grace and the hand by which you discovered the portent. I am at most like a treasure-hunter’s probing stick: helpful perhaps, but hardly where the credit is due.”
Dathama nodded, satisfied. The man might speak like a groveling fool who learned his ideas of elevated speech from traveling folk opera troupes, but his answer indicated that he understood the stakes. He was yielding to Captain Dathama all the credit for the discovery—though that was so obviously the right thing to do that it hardly merited remarking on—and more importantly, he had tied his fate to the captain’s. By publicly reaffirming his belief in the divine origin of the carved shell, he was also making a promise never to reveal the truth—whatever that was—lest he be executed for sacrilege and attempting to deceive his superiors.
“Even a treasure-hunter’s stick may be gilded and sheltered in a pouch of silk for the good luck it has brought its master,” the captain said.
Oga said nothing but touched his forehead to the sand again.
The captain laughed and tossed the shell into the lap of Goztan, sitting on the litter. “Behold the reason why even the gods have decreed that it is right for the Lords of Dara to rule over you and your people.”
Goztan examined the turtle shell. The marks presented no mystery at all to her—the Lyucu had long etched decorative figures onto shells and bones with the concentrated, fermented juice of the gash cactus, whose oozing sap produced a prickling, tingling sensation against the tongue and skin. Lyucu artisans would cover a shell in a thin layer of animal fat mixed with sand, and then scrape figures into the mixture with a cactus spine or a bone needle. The shell was then soaked in gash cactus juice for a few days to allow the caustic fluid to eat into the exposed bony surface where the protective layer of fat had been scraped away. When the shell was finally retrieved and the fat layer cleaned off, the figures carved by the artisan would be etched into the surface, smooth and shiny, as though they had grown in the shell naturally.
But she could not tell why the human figures on the plastron were dressed like the Lords of Dara or what the odd shapes on the carapace were. And she certainly could not understand why Dathama treated the artifact as a message from his gods. Surely he had seen etchings just like this one. They were all over the ceremonial skull cups and shamans’ headdresses that the Lords of Dara had seized from the Lyucu as trophies and then distributed to the captains and officers to decorate their cabins. Indeed, Dathama himself had an etched garinafin skull that he used as a stool in his quarters, though he had never bothered to ask her what animal the skull was from.
She looked thoughtfully at the kneeling figure of Oga Kidosu.
With the turtle-shell interlude concluded, the Dara soldiers prepared to resume their whipping of the Lyucu litter-bearers. But Oga once again interrupted.
“Captain Dathama, you may show more piety if you forgive these clumsy slaves their error. After all, they stumbled only because they were in the presence of divinity. If you bring them back to the fleet as men who have carried out the will of the gods of Dara—albeit inadvertently—you may provide yet more evidence for the power of the portent.”
