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Above the surface, sunlight glinted faintly through waves of vapor that shifted in discernible patterns, like a tapestry fashioned in the air. As the mist moved, the Degen Jassi, the glittering aristocracy of Matile Mala, gazed at the surface of the harbor from the section of the docks set aside for them. Seated on a gallery of stone benches polished smooth by the backsides of countless generations of ancestors, the lords and ladies of the Degen Jassi watched, and waited for Tiyana to begin her performance.
Gossamer wisps of mist swirled and eddied around their sandal-shod feet, and they tightened their brightly-striped mantles, or chammas, against a slight chill soon to be banished by the sun. Color combinations signified rank: only the Emperor, Dardar Alemeyu, could wear the royal black and gold. The chammas draped the men’s tunics and trousers of bleached cotton; and the women’s bodies, for chammas were the only garments Matile women wore, leaving one or both shoulders bare. The men decorated their trousers, called senafil, with strips of shells and beads sewn into the fabric.
The Emperor sat on a stone seat mounted on a dais that lifted him above the rest of the aristocracy. His white beard framed narrow, ascetic features over which dark skin stretched taut and only lightly wrinkled, despite his age. His hooded eyes stared far into the distance, beyond the place where Tiyana would rise from the water. His head tilted at a slight angle, as though the crown of kingship weighed heavily upon him. Yet Alemeyu’s title of Emperor was more symbolic than real; the present borders of Matile Mala encompassed only a fraction of the territory his people once held across the northern half of Abengoni.
Dardar Alemeyu’s Empress, Issa, sat at his side. Beneath her crown, her hair was beaded with gold and silver, and her royal chamma was striped like a sunset in crimson, gold, and orange. Although the jewelry looped around her neck and arms had been handed down through countless generations of Empresses, each piece looked as though it had been crafted only the day before the ceremony.
Decades younger than the Emperor, Issa had only recently taken the place of her barren predecessor, whom Alemeyu had set aside after too many childless years. She, too, had yet to produce an heir to carry on a royal line that counted its years of tenure on the throne in the thousands. Issa was not alone in suspecting the fault lay within the Emperor rather than herself. But she wisely kept that belief to herself.
If Dardar Alemeyu died childless, the throne would pass to his nephew, Jass Eshana, the Dejezmek, or commander of what remained of the Matile armies. Eshana was the son of the Emperor’s sister. Next in the line of succession was ... Gebrem, his first cousin, the son of Alemeyu’s father’s brother, who had been Leba before him.
To have either man follow him on the throne was the last thing Alemeyu wanted – he was determined that the dynasty would be continued through him. And so he continued his fruitless efforts to extend his ancient line efforts with wife after wife, while the Degen Jassi and others shook their heads in pity, and at times contempt, behind his royal back.
At the Emperor’s other side, a tame cheetah sat immobile as a spotted sculpture. The weak sunlight glinted from the jewels on the collar that encircled the great cat’s neck. At times, Alemeyu thought the beast, which he named Makah, was his most loyal courtier. Almost unconsciously, he stroked Makah’s fur as he waited for Gebrem’s daughter to appear above the waves.
Like the rest of the people gathered at the Khambawe docks, the Degen Jassi were dark of hue, with skin shades ranging from ebony to cinnamon. The hair of men and women alike was worked into rows of braids: for some people thick, others tiny; some short; others long; the men’s mostly unadorned, the women’s bedecked with colorful shells and beads and intricately-carved ornaments of ivory and amber, silver and gold. The stripes on their chammas spanned the spectrum of colors; the garments underneath were mostly white cotton. Some of the Degen Jassi were young; others old. Family resemblances stamped by many generations of ruling-class endogamy were clearly discernable.
Behind the benches of the Degen Jassi stood a row of attenuated statues that at first glance resembled a sculptor’s unfinished products. Their arms had no hands; their legs, no feet. The eyes of the statues were little more than indentations gouged into the slate-gray surface of their faces. Noses and mouths were afterthoughts, and their narrow bodies, standing several times the height of a human, were smooth and sexless.
These were the Ishimbi, and legends spoke of a time when the Jagasti themselves breathed life into the shapes of stone in times of need, and the Ishimbi walked and struck down the Matiles’ enemies. But no one now alive could remember the last time the Ishimbi had moved from their places.
Ranks of soldiers clad in carapace-like cuirasses of hardened leather and armed with huge, curved swords occupied the space between the Degen Jassi and the crowd of commoners who had come to witness First Calling before commencing their daily toils in the city that spread in precincts of flat-roofed houses and towering obelisks behind them.
Jass Eshana, a stalwart man of middle years, stood at their head. His helmet was crested with hair from the mane of a lion he had slain, and he wore a leopard-skin chamma over his armor. The role of the Dejezmek’s soldiers was strictly ceremonial. As the Degen Jassi well knew, the ordinary people of Khambawe were no more likely to rise against their ruling class than were the inanimate Ishimbi. Without the prestige and power of the Degen Jassi, the rest of the Matile would lose the scant standing they had left in the land they once ruled.
Behind the Degen Jassi, two separate groups sat on elaborately carved wooden stools. One of those groups was the Imba Jassi, rulers of the agricultural lands on the fringes of Matile that were once powerful kingdoms in their own right. Their garments were less elaborate than those of their urban cousins: solid-colored lengths of cloth knotted about their waists and shoulder-shawls, called harai, that bared most of their upper bodies. Their hair grew bushy and unbraided, and their weapons were their only ornaments. On their faces, they wore expressions of habitual ferocity, for they were the ones who had to directly face the threats to the frontiers of Matile territory. Their hard eyes showed their disdain for the soft decadence of city life.
The people the Imba Jassi ruled were part of the Empire in name only, the same way the Mala was an empire in name only. Direct governance from Khambawe was a thing of the distant past. Yet the historical and blood ties that connected them to the Empire remained strong, and they always attended First Calling, even though they no longer arrived laden with items of tribute for the Emperor.
The other guests were neither Matile nor human. They were emissaries from the hidden land of the Tokoloshe – the kingdom of the dwarves. Robes of gray, black and brown swathed the squat bodies of the half-dozen Tokoloshe delegated to attend the ceremony. Their faces were wide, dark, broad-featured slabs of hard flesh surrounded by manes and beards of frizzy black hair. Each of them wore a pendant of polished granite around his neck; the Tokoloshe valued simple stones far more than they did the precious metals and gems humans so avidly craved.
For years beyond counting, the Matile had maintained an alliance with the Tokoloshe kingdom, forged as a matter of necessity against their common enemies. It had continued long after those enemies had been vanquished, and the Tokoloshe were still welcome guests at Matile rites such as First Calling. But no human had ever visited the Tokoloshes’ underground homeland. No one even knew where it was.
As a sign of respect, Matile craftsmen had made the emissaries stools low enough to accommodate their short legs. The six emissaries sat silent and motionless as the rocks they revered.
There were no seats for the rest of the crowd: a brightly-clad throng of merchants, craftsmen, jewelers, dyers, incense-makers, stone-cutters, silversmiths, menial laborers and market-women who had roused their children early to witness First Calling. Still, their vantage point was better than that of the throngs of ragged slum-dwellers who hovered at the periphery of the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tiyana’s dance.
On a weathered platform carved with sorcerous symbols, one man stood apart from the rest, even the Emperor. This man was black-bearded, of middle years and stature, ordinary in appearance save for the saffron-and-white chamma that swathed his lean body, and the piercing power of his dark-eyed gaze.
This was Jass Gebrem, the One to Whom All Jagasti Spoke; the Leba, or supreme priest, of the Empire. Gebrem stood second in rank only to Dardar Alemeyu, but had influence that in at least one way exceeded that of the Emperor who, for all his royal prerogatives, could not communicate directly with the Jagasti.
Master of the few arcane arts that remained to the Matile people after the devastation wrought by the Storm Wars, Gebrem was the one who controlled the Calling. In his right hand, he held the abi: a long, flattened silver rod upon which the symbols of all the Jagasti were carved. The abi served as a focal point for the ashuma power he wielded.
So far, the ceremony had passed as it should. The drummers, arrayed on a wharf that jutted into the harbor, kept their hands motionless above the cowhide covers of their tall, cylindrical instruments. Behind them, other music-makers held long wooden flutes called imbiltas between their lips.
As well, the wharf held four young women who were so similar in appearance that they all seemed to be duplicates of each other. They wore long, ivory-colored chammas that left their slender brown shoulders bare, and head-cloths of the same hue that trailed down to the backs of their ankles.
These were the Callers of Nama-kwah, whose wordless song had filtered down to Tiyana. They were a four-birth; double-twins, an event so rare among the Matile that scholars and sooth-sayers were still debating its true significance. Among another people, the four sisters might have been put to death soon after they were born. The Matile, however, generally considered their birth as a miracle, a sign that the Jagasti had not totally forgotten them.
Jass Gebrem raised the abi, then lowered it. The time had come for Tiyana – and Nama-kwah – to appear.