The Veiled Throne, page 5
Dathama held up a hand; the soldiers’ whips hung in the air. The Lyucu men looked up, their eyes defiant. Goztan clutched the shell so tightly that her knuckles turned white. At that moment, she locked eyes with Oga Kidosu, and two minds seemed to touch briefly, exchanging an understanding that could not be put into words. They nodded at each other, barely perceptibly.
“Oh, pity the All-Father!” she shouted in Dara, her eyes bulging out of her skull as she stared at the turtle shell. “What strength must your gods have to breath-burn word-scars into the back of a turtle?”
“The word you’re looking for is writing,” said Dathama indulgently, “not word-scars.” He liked to instruct her, constantly criticizing her accent and pointing out her mistakes. He enjoyed teaching her the civilized language of Dara, sculpting her into a proper lady. “There’s no writing on this thing anyway, just pictures. But I don’t expect you to understand the difference.”
“Oh, such fl-flower! Such mighty breath to make the dead turtle’s shell blossom!” she cried.
“The word you’re looking for is power,” said Dathama, “and breathing has nothing to do with it. Our gods are indeed mighty, beyond your understanding.”
“Yes, such power—” She seemed to choke on the Dara word. Gasping, she fell back on the litter and convulsed, as though in the feverish grip of a tolyusa-inspired trance. The turtle shell fell from her trembling fingers.
“What’s wrong?” asked Dathama, alarmed. He rather liked this barbarian girl. She was pretty, pliant, and quick to learn what pleased him. He did not want to have to train another. “Are you ill, my little Obedience?”
Goztan was now at the edge of the litter, curled up in the fetal position. She struggled to get as far away from the turtle shell as possible, as though it were a flame whose heat she could not withstand. “Toa-tolyusa. Tento! Tento!” she screamed, as though the language of Dara had deserted her.
She stopped abruptly. A gurgling noise emerged from her throat, and white foam spilled from between her lips. Her eyelids fluttered, revealing only the whites of her eyes.
The Dara soldiers looked on in consternation, the whips in their hands forgotten.
The still-kneeling Lyucu litter-bearers stiffened at Goztan’s shouts. A few exchanged quick looks, then, almost at once, they started to shake and convulse uncontrollably, pointing at the turtle shell and yelling incomprehensibly. A few fell down and touched their foreheads to the sand in the direction of the litter.
“By Kiji’s beard!” Dathama swore. “Help her! Get that turtle shell away from her!”
Two servants ran up and tried to calm Goztan down, wiping her face with a cool washcloth and whispering comforting words. Oga Kidosu ran up and removed the shell from the litter, and once again returned to kneeling before Captain Dathama, holding up the magical object.
“The Lyucu do not understand writing,” said Oga. “Even an illiterate man of Dara like me feels a sense of awe at the magic of the written word, so imagine how much greater that awe must be in the hearts of these barbarians!”
“There’s no writing on the turtle shell,” objected Dathama.
“But they don’t know that. To them, all the symbols of Dara are indistinguishable. Seeing a human design grown in a product of nature must be utterly shocking. Look at how they’ve all been seized by religious fervor. This was probably why the litter-bearing slave had stumbled. This is proof of the portent!”
Dathama had his doubts over Oga’s interpretation of events. To be sure, he could readily see how his concubine and the Lyucu slaves, being ignorant primitives, would be so terrified of this portent that they descended into hysterics. But he did not quite believe that a glance at a shell in the sand would cause a dull-witted barbarian to stumble—and why had they started convulsing only after Obedience reacted like that? Was there, perhaps, some kind of deception?
But he brushed his doubts aside. After months of living with Obedience and being served by the other Lyucu, he had come to the conclusion that the natives were strong in limb but simple in mind, incapable of planning beyond their next meal. It was enough to know that the artifact could awe and shock the natives, adding even more to its value for Admiral Krita. And Oga’s interpretation did make for a better story, which was all that mattered.
“Wash the blood from their bodies and dress their wounds,” intoned Dathama as he surveyed the litter-bearers. The Lyucu men gradually stopped convulsing as the soldiers dropped their whips and approached with washcloths. After a moment, he added, “Send for fresh clothes. Get them changed when we’re closer to the fleet. Oil their bodies and spray them with perfume so that their sweaty odor doesn’t offend the admiral. We need to make a proper presentation of this omen.”
“It would show more honor to bear the shell on the litter,” suggested Oga, his head bowed. “Though your august personage would have to suffer the burden of a hike back on foot.”
“Ah!… Good idea.”
This Oga Kidosu has an instinct for theater. Dathama looked at the middle-aged former fisherman with pleasure. There was no better way to ensure that this “message from the gods” would be properly received than to elaborate upon every detail and present the admiral with a perfect tableau. If he was going to gamble, he had to go all in.
* * *
Later—after a panting and sweating Captain Dathama had finally made it back to the anchored fleet, his arm draped over Goztan’s shoulder so that the Lyucu woman practically carried him like an invalid; after the excited captain had recounted his miraculous discovery and presented the turtle shell to the admiral; after Admiral Krita had declared Dathama was henceforth to be known as “First Comber of the Immortal Shore, the Most Pious and Loyal Lord of Dara”; after Dathama’s men had carried the trunks filled with jewels and gold and bundles of silk—originally intended as gifts for the immortals but now repurposed as rewards for those who pleased the admiral—to the captain’s quarters; after the other Lords of Dara, their eyes brimming with envy as well as reluctant admiration, had streamed past Dathama’s seat on the banquet deck to toast him for his good fortune; after the celebration and revelry that lasted late into the night and then early into the morning; and after all the captains had retired to their own ships and Dathama, asleep in a drunken stupor, had been carried back to his cabin—Goztan crept quietly through the ship’s winding and narrow passageways, climbed down steep ladders and up dimly lit stairs, and finally emerged onto the upper deck under the last starlight before dawn.
There, she found the hunched-over figure of Oga Kidosu gutting and cleaning fish.
“Why?” she asked in Dara. There was no need to say more.
“We have some old words in Dara—” he began, enunciating each syllable with care.
It was as though a peal of thunder had exploded over her head. He was speaking Lyucu.
She had never heard Dathama or any of his lieutenants, courtiers, maids, cooks, laundresses, servants, or soldiers speak a single word of her own language. Pékyu Tenryo had admonished the Lyucu who came to serve the Lords of Dara to learn but not to teach, and none of the men and women of Dara had ever seemed to want to learn her tongue. Why bother speaking like the barbarians if the barbarians were so eager to learn to talk like civilized people?
“Before the sea, all are—” He struggled, unable to come up with the right word. Then he switched to Dara. “Brothers.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Votan-ru-taasa,” she said, teaching him the Lyucu word, knowing that she was breaking Pékyu Tenryo’s order yet not caring.
He nodded, his face breaking into a smile. “Ah, ‘older-younger,’ or maybe ‘grander-smaller.’ That makes sense.” He switched back to Lyucu. “Before the sea, all are brothers.”
She could see now how he had managed to learn her language. He had a pure curiosity that made you want to give him the answer, and he showed such joy in learning that you felt elated just watching him, as though the gods had warmed you on a winter’s night by exhaling on you.
“We have a saying as well,” she said, sticking with Lyucu. “A horrid wolf doesn’t care if you’re Lyucu or Agon. You taste the same.”
She had to repeat herself a few times and mime the snapping jaws and wild flowing mane of the horrid wolf before he understood.
He laughed, a deep and resonant guffaw that made her think of the warm springs near Aluro’s Basin. “The horrid wolf today was very loud. Very scary.” He saw that she was confused, so he turned and lifted up the back of his pelt vest to show the whipping scars on his back. “Even a peasant of Dara tastes the same to the horrid wolf.”
Oga managed to say the whole thing in Lyucu save for a single word, a word that she had heard before but didn’t understand. “Peasant?”
He mimed digging in dirt. She couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to show her. Perhaps in Dara there were people who made a living by digging things out of the earth. It was hard to imagine, but so many things about this people were hard to believe.
She found it unsettling to see those scars on Oga’s body, as vivid and as raw as the ones on the bodies of the Lyucu litter-bearers. She had seen Dara servants being whipped for minor infractions before, but until now, she had not truly thought of them as being akin to her, men and women at the mercy of the Lords of Dara. Perhaps being a peasant was like being a Lyucu.
He pointed at her and then at himself, and then said, “Votan-ru-taasa?”
She shook her head. His face fell.
She laughed. Then she pointed at herself and mimed the curves of her body. “Votan-sa-taasa,” she said. Only a few moments earlier, she would never have believed that she would ever say that to a man of Dara.
He grinned as the first rays of dawn lit up the eastern sky over the scrublands. “Sister-and-brother,” he said, in Dara.
They continued to converse in a mix of two languages as the world emerged gradually from the darkness.
“Why does Dathama beat you and tell you what to do?” she asked.
“Ah, that is perhaps the hardest question of all,” he said.
Oga explained to her the ranks in Dara. He sketched a pyramid in the air, like the shape of the top of the Great Tent. There was the mighty emperor at the apex, and just below him stood the grand nobles and generals and officials who served at his pleasure. Below them were the scholars who knew the magic of writing and the wisdom of the sages, the merchants who slept on silk and ate with silver eating sticks, the landowners who drew lines on sheets of paper and counted their coins. At the very bottom were the peasants who owned nothing except themselves—and sometimes not even that—and dug for food out of both land and water.
“Some are born Lords of Dara, and some are born peasants,” Oga said, pointing to the top and bottom of the imaginary pyramid. “It just is.”
She didn’t understand everything—there were just too many words whose meaning eluded her—but she was struck by how much it sounded like life on the scrublands, at least the way it was after the final defeat of the Agon. At the top was the pékyu, and below him stood the garinafin-thanes and tiger-thanes and wolf-thanes who served at his pleasure. Most of the thanes were chieftains of small tribes, composed of a few clans, or chiefs of bigger, multi-homed roaming tribes, formed by aggregating the territories and peoples of several ancient tribes. Below them were the naros-votan, who owned large herds of cattle and sheep and slaves, and the naros, who owned smaller herds and fewer slaves. Warriors from these ranks fought in Pékyu Tenryo’s army as commanders and garinafin riders. Below them were the culeks, who owned nothing and received their meat and milk by caring for the naros’ herds and fighting as foot soldiers. At the very bottom were the Agon slaves, who didn't even own their own bodies and lived only as long as the Lyucu allowed them to.
Some were born thanes, and some were born as slaves. It was the nature of things.
Or was it? Didn’t Pékyu Tenryo turn the old pyramid upside down, and make the Agon lords into slaves? Now these strangers from Dara were here, seeking to stand on top of her people. Who knew what the future held?
“Was it a portrait of your family that you etched into the turtle shell?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, his face filled with anguish and longing. “I was hoping… to have something to let them know that I’ve never stopped thinking about them for a single day.”
He told her about his life as a fisherman-farmer on the shore of the island of Dasu. He told her about his wife and two grown sons, and the great storm that had accompanied the birth of his infant daughter. He told her about the even greater storm in the form of the temperamental magistrate whose whims had separated him from his family, cast him away from home through the Wall of Storms.
“The Lords of Dara really treat you no better than us!” exclaimed Goztan.
“The sea laps the shores of Dara as well as of Ukyu,” agreed Oga.
“I once thought you were one herd, one flock.”
“And I once thought you were one school, one pod.”
“What were your sons like?”
The way his voice caught when he spoke of his children reminded her of her father, Dayu, who was born with one leg shorter than the other and was thus deemed unfit to be a warrior. But he had the gift of reading the signs of Diasa, the club-maiden and huntress, and was unerring in his interpretation of the movements of horrid wolves and wild aurochs from droppings and tracks. Hunters who followed his directions always had great success.
But whenever she went out on a hunt or raid with him, he spent more time fasting and praying to Diasa than helping her track down wandering mouflon and moss-antlered deer. He was no help to her at all.
“Why won’t you help me?” she had asked once, exasperated.
“When you were in your mother’s belly,” he had told her, “I promised Diasa that I would offer her my portion of the hunt for the rest of my life if she would keep you healthy and safe. When you were born, I must have counted all your fingers and toes and measured your legs and arms twenty times over before I believed that the goddess had accepted my pledge. That is why I never eat the meat and marrow you bring me from your hunts, daughter, and I must remind the goddess of her promise whenever you’re in danger.”
She had not known what to say then. The nascent understanding of a father’s love and mortality by a daughter who was no longer a child and not yet a woman could not be expressed in words. Turning away from him so he would not see her moistening eyes, she had raced after what she claimed was a fleet-footed mouflon.
He was probably praying for her now.
To distract herself from the tears that now also threatened to spill from her eyes, she asked hurriedly, “Who taught you to etch with the juice of the gash cactus?”
“Can’t say I learned it from any single person. Like your language, I’ve had to pick up bits and pieces of your ways from whoever was willing to teach me. When I go onshore to bring supplies back to the ship, I watch and listen, and sometimes I find an opportunity to ask a question. It hasn’t been easy to get to know any of you.”
“That tends to happen when your people want to make us slaves and kill whoever dares to say no,” she said.
After an awkward pause, he said, “Some of us just want to go home.”
She thought of the scars on his body, and her voice softened. “Maybe Dathama will treat you better now that you’ve brought him a miracle.”
Again, his deep, warm, infectious laugh. “Dathama gave me nothing except a promise of jewels and my own cabin, but I best stay out of his sight and never bring up the promise again. Men like him do not like to be reminded of who has done them service.”
“But how can your lords be so foolish? Have they never seen Lyucu children play with etched sheep bones or maids and lads fetch water in waterskins with etched-shell spouts?”
“The world looks very different through the eyes of a Lord of Dara than a peasant.”
She shook her head, still not understanding. That word again, peasant.
He elaborated. “Dathama’s eyes are so attuned to the flow of power that he is blind to everything else. Because he expected to see nothing of beauty or use from the Lyucu, he passed by Lyucu children with etched shell jewelry and Lyucu dwellings with etched bone posts without noticing them. When I employed a Lyucu skill to make a map on that shell turtle, he saw only what he needed and wanted to see. He could no more see the arts of the Lyucu than a dome-headed whale diving after a giant squid could see the cities built by the skittering shrimp on a nearby coral reef.”
“Cities built by shrimp?” She was confused.
“Let me tell you a story.”
CHAPTER FOUR STORYTELLERS
UKYU-GONDÉ: THE YEAR THE CITY-SHIPS ARRIVED FROM DARA (KNOWN IN DARA AS THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE, WHEN EMPEROR ERISHI ASCENDED TO THE THRONE AFTER THE DEATH OF EMPEROR MAPIDÉRÉ).
Long ago, when the gods were young and humans even younger, Lutho and his brother Tazu, the two gods of the sea, debated the wisdom of the mortals.
“The mortals cannot ever be as wise as we are,” said Tazu. “While we were gifted with Moäno’s divine insight from the moment of our birth, the mortals are born knowing nothing. How can they ever hope to know what we know?”
“But the mortals have the gift of growth and change,” said Lutho. “They are born ignorant, yet that also makes them ideal vessels for understanding the world. They are blank pages upon which their feeble senses etch the truth, bit by bit, like a child pricking out her future upon oracle bones with the spine of a cactus. They may yet, through nurture, become as wise as the gods.”
“Your faith in nurture is misplaced,” said Tazu. “The mortals emerge through the veil of oblivion into this world with natures that cannot be altered. They are bits of foam carried upon waves, their understanding of the world constrained by their natal forms and stations in life.”
