1876 A.D. / 1192nd Year of the Lizard. Kirekune, Okimako
Saia Akila wiped sweaty hair off her forehead and squinted at her sister. Saonna’s black eyes were flat, distant. She held her baby against her shoulder, stroking its little back hard, as if she were trying to rub off a stain. Yet Saia knew the child was less present in its mother’s mind at that moment than the amulet of the Glorious Dynasty around Saonna’s neck. She caressed it constantly.
Saonna might as well be in Ferupe already. It had been pointless for Saia to come all the way out here just to say good-bye. She had had to hold Yozitaro between her knees while the cart jounced interminably through the smothering dust of the Sayonoshima Road. She had been squashed between her sister and brother-in-law, breathing Saonna’s soapy scent one minute and Vashisune’s perspiration the next, trying unsuccessfully to avoid his elbows as he manipulated the traces. He slouched now on the front seat of the canvas-covered cart drawn up at the side of the road, floating his whip over the backs of the big, stupid draybeasts. He did not look at Saonna and Saia. She always felt a vacuum between the couple, a void of love—even though they had made so much of their passion for each other that everyone else had got tired of it. Maybe that vacuity was common to all culties—it certainly hadn’t been in Saonna from the beginning—a symptom of their pretentious commitment to the Ferupian Queen.
Vashi was an initiate preacher in the Cult of the Glorious Dynasty, and proud as a tomcat. Saia despised him.
And the road was as busy as one would expect in late autumn. Everyone was rushing to get in or out of Okimako before the weather changed. Carts, chariots, and rickeys drawn variously by draybeasts, mules, horses, pakamels, and bicycles vied with the new, noisy motor-chariots and an occasional black-painted Disciple tank for space on the paved “trunk strip” that ran down the center of the broad, packed-earth road. Out here, beyond the old city walls, beyond the new city walls, the misnamed “City of the Dead” spread nobody knew how many leagues into the plain. One supposed that at some point in history the City of the Dead had not been there; but Saia could not imagine when. It was so festered. Here, the road had no real borders, only a direction. Paupers’ shacks, clustering together like soap bubbles, encroached on it only gingerly. Whenever the Disciples rumbled out of Okimako, the tanks came twenty abreast, spikes whickering around on their treads, and anything that was in their way suffered.
The soi-disant “leisured” Dead shunned the Sayonoshima Road. Their tall, ill-proportioned houses clustered along the river far away, red and white and yellow columns dimly visible through the haze. They had been upstarts for longer than anyone remembered; Saia could not imagine that they would ever not be upstarts. When they came into the new city with their baskets on their arms, noses twitching under the brims of their too-fashionable hats, she could tell what they were without even looking. Even the girls laughed at Dead men. They took their money, though: never sneeze at gold was the first lesson Saia had taught each of her girls. Keep it warm and cozy, and it’ll multiply, like baby rats.
“Sao,” boomed Vashi over the hullabaloo of drivers’ voices and the clatter of wheels. “Sao, let’s go.”
For the first time, Saonna looked straight at Saia. Her gaze was like a blast of cold air. Saia gripped Yozi’s hand so tightly that he squeaked. Docile little darling. He was sucking the tip of his tail.
“Tell June I promise we’ll send word,” Saonna said vaguely. “All right? Give him me and Vashi and Rae’s love.”
“I don’t know how you expect to reach Ferupe in that thing,” Saia said. “It’s not a fit conveyance. It looks like something a Dead peddler would cart his wares to the new city gates in.” Since Saonna’s conversion to the ascetic Dynasty, Saia had found it increasingly embarrassing to be seen in public with her. Strangers thought Saonna was her servant, and it was impossible for Saia to explain. A lady never explains anything: that was another of the lessons she taught her girls. And this explanation would have been professional suicide. The Dynasty and its imitator cults, like the flamboyant Easterners, were self-declared enemies of the Lizard Significant: the only reason they weren’t hounded out of existence was because the Disciples didn’t take them seriously.
The most rabid ones always took themselves off into Ferupe, anyway.
As Saonna was doing.
That made-over brown dress wasn’t fit garb for her! She said that the pauperish dress code of the Dynasty enforced absolute equality among its members. She loudly condemned her own family for their “vulgar show of affluence.” Saia would have none of it. In Okimako, showing who you were was a necessity not just for personal pleasure, but physical safety. She didn’t know what roots the Dynasty’s ascetism really sprang from, and she didn’t want to. Only she couldn’t help thinking it was strange that their dogma was near-identical to that of the Easterners, who dressed like harlequins and made nuisances of themselves in the streets until they had to scatter for fear of the Disciples.
On the other hand, she’d seen Saonna’s leader, her Prince, or whatever they called him—and he wasn’t wearing dull brown.
She could not refrain from speaking her mind. And in the corner of her eye quivered a drop of hope. Maybe—maybe—
“If that thing doesn’t fall to pieces under you, you’ll be luckier than I ever was,” she said. “And, Sao, I wish you’d tell me how much money you have with you! What if you have to buy a new conveyance? What if one of you is sick, and you have to stay at an inn? What if—”
“It’s not as if we’re the first to have gone to Ferupe, Sayi!” Saonna’s eyes crinkled as she turned to smile at Vashi. Saia felt cheated. Switching her tail, she stared at the cart.
Barely room under the canvas for two to stand up.
“Significant! What if you reach the pass in the middle of winter?”
“We’ll be crossing the plains all winter,” Saonna said patiently. “We’ll reach the snows next spring, just at the end of the blizzard season. And the pass isn’t dangerous, anyway. Thousands of people go by the northern route—even before there was a war, it was the only way to bypass the Raw Marches and the Daemon Waste. So of course it’s well traveled.”
Vashi says, Vashi says, Saia thought. The unspoken tag on each of Saonna’s sentences.
If it wasn’t for Vashi. He had drawn Saonna into the Cult of the Dynasty of the Glorious Decamillennium, he had planted in her this desire to journey to Ferupe, where their cult originated, where a goddess ruled the land. Neither of them seemed to care that Kirekune and Ferupe were at war! Saonna would not even acknowledge the dangers that she must be exposed to as a Kirekuni woman traveling in the hostile East! She seemed to think that all Ferupe belonged to the Dynasty, and that it would receive her with open arms. She had been full of plans for her “pilgrimage” so long Saia could hardly remember what the old Saonna had been like.
Ever since Saonna’s conversion, Saia and their brother June had been running the Akila family business on their own. When Saia first confronted Saonna with not pulling her weight, Sao insisted she had never had a head for business, anyway. Saia could not deny that. But Sao had once had a real knack for dealing with the girls when they nourished grievances.
Love blinds the eye. (Better to believe Saonna really was in love.) And if blindness ran in the family, Saonna was probably about as perspicacious as a blind dung-pig! Hari... Saia thought, as she always did.
Yozi whined, as if he could feel his mother’s sudden distress. Saia scooped him into her arms, and desperately played her trump card. “What about Rae? Don’t you care what happens to her? She’s barely a year old! Much too young for a journey like this!”
Saonna had been shifting her feet, curling her tail around her ankles, as if she felt she had to wait for Saia’s permission to make the final break. But when she focused on Saia, her eyes registered irritation. “Nothing is going to happen to her! Why should it? Vashi and I know the journey will be hard, but we’re both committed to looking after her. It’s not as if she’s replaceable.”
She curved her fingers around the sleek, scaly little tail that projected from under the baby’s summer dress. Rae had got her strange, meaningless name because Sao and Vashi thought it sounded Ferupian.
“She’s a child of the Dynasty.”
“Yes, poor midget,” Saia said.
“Oh, by the Lizard!” Saonna’s brows knitted. “You’re just jealous because I’m happy. But I tell you, it was the Dynasty that brought Vashi and me together. It’s the only way. If you would just seek it out, you’d discover your true identity and stop pining after Harame! I promise you!”
Saia blinked, stunned. Not just because Saonna could speak of Hari and the Dynasty in the same breath, but because she spoke of him without rancor, using his full name, as if he had been somebody she knew only vaguely, in passing.
Didn’t she remember? During that terrible time, the thing that saved Saia’s sanity—beside Yozi and his sisters, of course—had been sitting up at night with Saonna, crying in the candlelit kitchen, vilifying Hari and his fancy slut and his ancestors back to the nth generation. Flushed with indignation, Saonna had alternated between bursting into sympathetic tears and offering sisterly advice on tracking him down and ruining him.
Saia stared blearily at her dry-eyed sister. “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about what your joyous union will be like after you’ve lived in a three ells by three space with him for a year.”
Yozi snuggled in her arms like a baby, sucking her earlobe. He was too big for that. She lashed him gently with the tip of her tail.
“But we’re not just married,” Saonna said. “We’re joined in Waiting. That’s the beauty of it. Everything else—even love—loses importance when you contemplate the end of the Dynasty! It harmonizes all disparities! You don’t believe me, Sayi, but if you’d just—”
“We’ve been over this,” Saia said evenly.
“Now, Sao,” Vashi called.
Saonna spun around on her toes, lips parted. Saia hugged Yozi tightly, sinking her chin into the top of his head, as her sister hurried to the cart, her chastely long skirt sweeping the dust, tail held high—pulling everything Saia cherished after her on a string. The end of the string was anchored in Saia’s heart. What would happen to her when that doubtful cart bore the little family into the frozen north, and then, unimaginably, into Ferupe? Would she break in pieces?
She knew perfectly well what would happen. Slowly, stealthily, Saonna’s absence would camouflage itself. It had happened with her mother and her father. It had happened with her older brother Kitsune who died at eighteen, a Disciple in the service of the Lizard Significant. It had even happened with Hari. You eat and you sleep and you pee and shit and you deal with business. And the sun shines, and the Disciples parade the streets on historic days.
“Is Aunt Sao leaving, Mama?” Yozi said softly. “When is she coming back?” His wet little lips felt like the kiss of a lover.
“Never, dear.”
The cart diminished into the distance, one brown-clad hump among hundreds wrangling slowly north. A convoy of Disciple troop carriers rolled past. The weight of them on the road shook Saia’s bones.
“Don’t want to walk,” Yozi said when she started to put him down.
“Oh, you lazy thing. I’ll carry you then.” He giggled with glee. Quickly, she added: “Only for a little.”
Monkeylike, he wriggled around onto her back. “Giddy-up, Mama!”
“Mind your manners, Yozi!” Then, when he squeaked an apology: “My little black-haired dove.”
She began to trudge back the way they had come, walking beside the road.
Better suffer the dust than risk getting in among the paupers’ shacks. The cart drivers and rickeymen looked at her strangely—a woman alone with a child—but that was because she was dressed so much better than the kind of woman who did walk alone beside the Sayonoshima Road. Her neatly coiffed hair, the tattoos on her tail, her red dress with the yellow satin flounces. Even in her frozen grief, she could take pleasure in the rich swish of the cloth, could derive comfort from the weight of her money pocket bumping her leg inside her skirt. These things as good as guaranteed her safety inside the walls, where the name of her business was her password into a web of friends the size of the new city. Flaunting her affluence (even during the year after Kit’s death, when they were barely scraping by) had extracted her, in the past, from a number of unpleasant situations. Even the most unscrupulous in the new city tended to take the practical view, the long view, when it came to the question of whether to rape, rob, abduct, or not. If you were hated badly enough, you would be killed. So you just had to try not to make enemies. Money could extract you from all other situations.
The old city was another kettle of fish. In the old city, it didn’t matter how rich you were. An old maxim: where you are determines who you are. Unwary night wanderers faced long odds against getting out alive. During the day, the steep streets thronged with sightseers from the provinces, and the hordes of Okimakotes who came to prey on them; but when night fell the place emptied out faster than an overturned chamber pot. Even provincials knew that getting in the way of the Disciples—or worse, their Significant masters—was a one-way ticket to nowhere.
And the City of the Dead danced to another tune yet, one that no one in the city proper really understood. Certainly not Saia. She wouldn’t toss a coin in the air for her chances here once night fell.
In a blurred way, walking was easing her pain. She never wanted to stop. But she could not get all the way home on foot. She had cut it too fine. Already the sun swam redly among the spikes and spires prickling the back of the huge slain beast ahead of her.
Okimako was not built on a hill. Okimako was the hill. At its highest point, the Significant Palace at the top of the old city, the Orange River ran in a tunnel buried under a thousand feet of solid architecture.
The limbs of the beast stretched out toward Saia, curling imperceptibly around her. Its rusty red scales sparkled with a thousand points of light.
She could smell something fetid cooking nearby. Yozi was drifting off to sleep, a patch of child-drool soaking wet into her shoulder. There was a pain in her chest, as sharp and tender as that time she’d shattered a rib.
Can’t have this, she told herself. Home. It’ll be all right once I get home. That young miss June hired couldn’t get supper on her own if you threatened her with beheading.
She stepped into the road and lifted her arm to hail a rickey. A man with the elegant logo of the Comashi Concern stenciled on his vehicle pedaled, careening, across traffic, nearly destroying himself under the wheels of a horse-drawn gas tanker, and screeched to a breathless halt five paces away. She walked toward him.
Mother; keep your eyes from tears
Keep your heart from foolish fears
Keep your lips from dull complaining
Lest the baby thinks it’s raining.
—M. C. Bartlett, Baby’s Skies