Outside Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs
211th day of the Great Star at morning.
He’d expected more than this. The way the dogs and Dakto spoke of Pechacan, calling it the heart of the Empire, he’d expected every home to be a stone palace or for the song to be stronger, purer, finer than before. But nothing was different. Nothing. It was just the same expanses of fields separated by tiny strips of jungle supporting nothing more than a few monkeys and birds.
The slaves were the same mix of empty-eyed and zealous converts. Their Pechaqueh owners were neither taller nor more impressive than the lowest of the dog warriors escorting them. Perhaps the hundreds of Star cycles they’d lived inside the song had changed them in some hidden, fundamental way, but Lilla thought not.
He was, being honest, disappointed. Where were the riches and the splendour? Where was the visible proof that this tribe was closer to the gods, or more powerful or beautiful, stronger or more intelligent? How could this be the people who had conquered nearly all Ixachipan?
But they did have one startling, incomprehensible difference, and the Singing City epitomized it. Pechaqueh built their towns and cities next to water, and in that water swam the Drowned – lots of Drowned, both Greater and Lesser. Captives and slaves alike shied away, but the dog warriors and Dakto made them stand close. Made them watch as one of their number was untied, marched down to the water’s edge and shoved in. She screamed and thrashed and the Drowned tore her apart.
The sight had quelled the embers of rebellion more effectively than any beating could, and the days had passed in quiet, hopeless silence as they filed past towns and cities dotted among the farmland, ever farmland. As if there could be nothing else in the world but fields in various stages of green, abundant growth.
‘I had expected beauty,’ he said to Dakto when the macaw came to walk by his side for the final sticks to the Singing City. It grew on the horizon, sprawling and vast, and there were several other limestone roads winding towards it from all corners of the Empire.
‘What you see is wealth.’
‘No. Not wealth. Greed. Where is the balance in this, Dakto?’ Lilla jerked his chin at their surroundings. ‘We would never destroy the jungle or kill all the animals around our homes, tipping that balance from plenty into poverty. You have done all this and more, and all for greed. As children with honeycomb, you are likely to give yourselves a bellyache.’
He had been like this for days now, unable to stop himself poking, poking. Perhaps it was the continuing pain in his skull, the weakness it brought, or the endless high-pitched fucking whine in his head that not even the song could blot out.
The captured Paws had been absorbed into a much larger caravan made up of slaves from the Empire escorted by armed free. Dakto had remained with them when the dog warriors turned around to head back to the war.
Dakto, who still found time to talk to Lilla each day as the long lines of bound prisoners weaved through the naked, open farmland. The others must have been enslaved for years, because they weren’t roped. Lilla watched them walk ahead on the road with a mix of horror and incomprehension, wondering why they didn’t run from the tiny number of people leading them. But he knew why. He’d known why ever since he first heard the song.
The music was in his heart now, a worm twisting inside him, threaded through every limb and muscle and nerve. He knew the Pechaqueh were no better than him, but there was a small part that was grateful to them for bringing him under the song so that he might know its majesty. The song he’d sworn to die before hearing.
He worried that small part would grow like a cancer and eat away at who he was, so he sang songs under his breath as they walked, focusing on the old tales set to music he’d learnt as a boy. Yet always, within only a few lines of verse, he’d fall into the same rhythm as the song. It was as if it moulded his chants and hymns to itself so that even they became a part of it. So that his worship of Malel and the ancestors became worship of the song – and by extension, he realised with a sickening lurch, of the Singer, the Empire, and the so-called holy Setatmeh. He stopped singing after that.
‘Those dog warriors feared you,’ Lilla commented.
‘As they should,’ Dakto said, proud and haughty. ‘I could kill any of them in combat without breaking a sweat.’
‘What would happen if they disobeyed you?’
‘They would die. Disobedience of superiors is not tolerated.’
‘What if their disobedience saved your life? In battle, for instance? What if you told them to move away and then your life was in danger and someone came back and saved you? Would you still kill them?’
‘Glory is won in the Melody in three ways: by capturing slaves, by acts of bravery, by saving lives. If a dog disobeyed me but saved my life, they would be rewarded. You will learn all this soon enough.’
‘And if you were not saved?’ Lilla pressed. Dakto wouldn’t answer and the Toko forced a laugh. ‘I see. So your slave and dog warriors only risk their lives for yours if they receive a direct order or there’s a guarantee of success? Otherwise they watch you die and feel, well, not very much at all, I expect. Relief, perhaps. And yet you still believe they all fight for the same cause? You think they actually believe all this monkey shit about the song and Pechaqueh superiority? No, my friend. They’ve learnt the rules of the game and they’re playing to win. Fight and stay alive until they’re freed, then get away from Pechaqueh control as soon as they can. They may never get their land and traditions back, but they’ve got more freedom than you have.’
‘Says the slave to the free man,’ Dakto said, but his smile was tight.
Lilla shook his head, knowing he was provoking the macaw and yet caring nothing for the consequences. ‘Says the free man to the slave,’ he contradicted. ‘Out of the two of us, I am the one with pure blood; it is yours that is mixed.’
Lilla didn’t give a single shit about the purity or otherwise of his blood or anyone else’s, and there had been enough inter-tribal marriages over the years for there to be no such thing as a full-blood anyway, probably, but he knew Dakto did care, and so he poked. And Dakto, for so long the garrulous warrior and friend, was tight-lipped. Lilla wondered whether anything the other man had said during the previous year had been true. Whether any of his traits or jokes or responses had been genuine. The cloak of his disguise had been perfect.
Dakto glared at him and Lilla made himself laugh again, though he could taste the sudden danger in the air. Sweat trickled down his back, itching.
‘Once they’re free, as long as they keep their heads down and pay lip service to your barbaric beliefs, they can do what they like. You, as a half-blood, will forever be at the mercy of their expectations. A free Axi fucks up? Well, they’re savages, what do you expect? But if a half-blood fucks up … you betray every Pecha, don’t you? You bring the blood into disrepute. Your shame is all Pechaqueh shame.’ Lilla shook his head in mocking sympathy. ‘Slave,’ he whispered. ‘Until the day you die.’
Dakto ripped his knife out of his belt and Lilla braced, breathing a swift prayer to Malel that she would find his spirit for rebirth. Instead of killing him, the macaw cut the rope at his neck free of the main line and dragged him away. He punched Lilla to his knees, kept on punching until Lilla was curled on the ground, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut and muscles tensed to try and absorb the impact. The pain in his head, which had finally begun to settle, roared back with a vengeance when Dakto punched him in the face.
Nobody came to his aid, not even when Dakto started in with his feet, not even when, heaving for air, he kicked Lilla onto his back and sat on him, ripped open his tunic and sliced into the skin of his chest with the knife.
Lilla screamed then, barely able to see Dakto through the swelling around his eyes and the pain that ripped through his head and chest. The cutting stopped and he lay there, gasping for breath, until he felt the man climb off him. He tried to roll onto his side but was kicked flat again, and moments later the macaw was back. He rubbed a handful of something into the cuts on Lilla’s chest, making him screech again as it burned and grated in the wounds, as if he’d poured warrior wasps into his lung.
‘Get up.’ Dakto’s voice was implacable. ‘Get up and get in line or I’ll cut your balls off.’
Lilla rolled onto his side and got to his knees, wobbling. He spat a mouthful of blood and half a tooth into the rich black earth at the edge of the limestone road. He held his breath and made himself stand, groaning. He staggered towards the line of prisoners, his balance gone and his hearing muffled in his right ear. The whine in his head was louder.
The cut ends of the cord were knotted back through the wide collar on Lilla’s neck. He could feel Dakto’s breath and body heat as the other man stood right next to him, far too close for comfort. ‘Walk. If you slow us down I’ll flog the skin from your back and make you eat it.’
Limping, gasping, and counting up his hurts one at a time so he’d know the exact number to repay, Lilla walked into the Singing City, through estates and gardens and craft quarters, over a flat bridge spanning a river that made his skin crawl with horror, and into a wide space of beaten earth filled with tall bamboo cages. The flesh markets of Pechacan.
Dakto sought him out one last time, and Lilla braced for another beating. The macaw stood close enough to kiss, so Lilla could see him through the swelling around his eyes. ‘You told me once you would not have me because you were married.’
‘I did and I am, even if Tayan is dead. Why? Are you going to buy me for yourself?’ Lilla tried to sneer, but his stomach tightened. What if Dakto did exactly that?
‘For what you did, how you made me welcome in your home, I give you this and only this.’ Dakto lowered his voice and leant even closer, making a pretence of fiddling with Lilla’s collar. The Toko fought not to shy away. ‘I didn’t find his body.’
Lilla rocked and the Whisper had to grab him by one arm to prevent him from collapsing. ‘But even if he lives, you should not be married. It is how they control their slaves. If you defy them, they will kill your family one by one and send you their heads. If you want any sort of freedom despite your bonds, your brand, and the cage they’ll keep you in – do not be married. Don’t claim him. That way at least he lives, even if you do not.’
And with that he walked away.