Chapter Nine

 

 

Perhaps it was jest, perhaps justice. The plain around Ferangipur reminded Gard so much of the plain around Sardis that he kept craning his neck looking for the scarlet-and-purple pennons of Andrion’s legions, straining his ears listening for the inescapable cadences of their marching feet. The dragonet lay, chin on paw, elbow planted in Gard’s liver, watching intently.

The delta of the Mohan, Gard told it. The delta of the Sar. Each dominated by a great city. The gods’ game board repeated certain squares.

He glanced at Deva, who she walked at his side instead of the customary one pace behind. One long brown hand held the small bundle of their belongings—clothing and Senmut’s herbs and her own fortune-telling bones. The other hand drew the end of her sari around her head and across the bottom half of her face. She was wearing not only her plain cotton sari, but her plain uninspiring features; her hair was parted severely in the middle and knotted, her feet and the hem of her garment were gray with the dust of the road.

Gard dodged the tasseled bridle of the neighboring camel and settled his turban more firmly on his head. We are certainly, he thought sarcastically, going to make a grand entrance into Ferangipur. Where our fortunes shall be found.

Although Deva made it obvious she would prefer to find her fortune elsewhere. Her eyes this afternoon were mud-brown, as flat as the landscape, as they scanned the roofs of Ferangipur.

From this distance the city was muted by the moist haze of the afternoon, reminding Gard of the sand castles he and Tembujin’s sons used to build. Surely the sea, murmuring beyond a sweep of gravel, boats and arching palm trees, would at high tide rush in and dissolve those towers, domes, spires and massive walls into little piles of wet sand.

Was this the same Great Sea that had encompassed Minras? It would be great indeed if it stretched from the Mohan to Minras, girdling all the world with its indifferent depths. But two Great Seas within the confines of one world seemed impossible. It would depend on how far the world reached; surely the valley of the Mohan was upon its very rim, and yet the steppes which gave birth to the Khazyari were farther still . . .

A thunder of hoofbeats. Gard started. Two chariots raced up the road, scattering pedestrians and camels. Gard caught a glimpse of a saturnine face in the lead vehicle, mouth and eyes wide with the excitement of the race; Rajinder? No, it was a similar face, not the same one.

Beyond the fields, Ferangipur grew with each step more and more solid. It was built high upon a mound which might once have been a natural eminence, but which Gard was willing to bet was the piled ruins of previous cities dating back to the youth of the gods. An ancient city, and a rich one.

There, beyond several feathery acacias, a long centipede-like shape glistening in crimson and saffron silks wended its way along a path. A faint bray of trumpets echoed. The procession paused. Banners snapped in a sudden gust of wind. A huge storage jar was lowered into the ground. A funeral?

The road passed a villa, whitewashed stone walls and the inquisitive faces of monkeys peeking out from a riot of pink and magenta rhododendron blossoms. A bird sang like the tap of a hammer upon a metal pot—tink tink, tink tink tink. Several richly bedizened elephants shoved the pack train aside; their mahouts exchanged good-natured shouts with the camel drivers, even as their masters set their faces toward the city, ignoring the peasants beneath them. A litter, surrounded by bearers waving ostrich fans, swept by in the elephants’ perfumed wake.

The dragonet’s tongue curled out in a yawn quickly suppressed by the snap of its sharp teeth. Deva plodded on, unimpressed.

Flags in every imaginable hue flapped atop the walls of Ferangipur. The surrounding clumps of thatched huts disgorged more and more people, women clad in orange and pink and saffron saris, men bedecked in marigolds and starched turbans. It was as if the city were a whirlpool, sucking the surrounding countryside into . . .

“The Festival of the Fool,” said Deva, as usual a half-breath before Gard asked. “A spring planting festival.”

“A festival! What fun!”

“For some, perhaps,” she muttered, and he shot her an aggravated look which coasted smoothly past her submissive mask and evaporated unacknowledged.

Here came the merchant in whose pack train they had traveled. Gard offered him an obeisance that the man was too good-natured to recognize as more ironic than polite. He threw Gard a couple of paise. “Thank you for your service. And the girl’s dancing was most entertaining. What a shame you did not want to make a few rupees by selling her body as well.”

Gard concealed the coins in his empty purse, smiled, and through his smile thought: A good thing I am an honest man, or I would have turned her loose upon you. While she, ah, amused you, I could have taken every coin you are carrying behind your sash. “I am pleased we met in Chandrigore,” he replied, “and were going the same way.”

“Those robbers might have made off with more than the one donkey without your sword,” the merchant continued. “You once served in the imperial legions, you said?”

“I learned my little skill as a warrior under General Miklos of Farsahn,” returned Gard, with a self-effacing bow. And he thought, all caravan-masters should have someone with itchy bones to warn of lurking robbers. He had fought quite well, if he did say so himself; those exercises with Jofar had not been wasted. Stab, thrust, parry—and blood staining his hands. The dragonet’s ears wilted onto the crown of its head and it shuddered.

“You were lucky to escape,” said Deva, her voice muffled behind her sari. “Such recklessness does not insure a long life.”

As the merchant trotted away, Gard replied to Deva, “You were a great help, cowering behind the boxes and bales.”

“Who was it,” she replied imperturbably, “who so confused the leader of the raiders with visions of armed warriors and scythed chariots that he called off the attack and ran screaming into the jungle?”

Gard rolled his eyes and laughed. The pouch with the pentacle and the slaver’s seal bounced with a brief clang against his chest. He and Deva already knew each other too well. The recognition had been as swift, disorienting and inspiring as a dose of Senmut’s honey. Whether either honey or recognition warned of powers best avoided, or beckoned to powers impossible to deny, he did not care to analyze.

Deva looked not at him but at the dragonet. Roused by her scrutiny the creature blinked its bright and beady gray eyes, simpering. Honestly! Gard snorted. The little beast had no integrity . . .

Deva smiled, and her eyes in the shadow of the pale cloth flickered blue, green, amethyst, and returned to brown. It was his personal smile, made even more appealing by a conspiratorial wink: we have withstood the haunted hours of darkness, you and I. Gard relaxed into a grin—the daemon may have little integrity, but it had excellent taste—and nudged her with his elbow in a comradely gesture.

The road rose onto a low promontory and curved. From it, Gard glimpsed the waters of the Mohan itself, lying like a silken drape beyond the city, its brown hem fanning far out into the blue of the sea. Fishing boats pleated the water among green islands that were like the heads of bathing giants; Gard imagined them rising suddenly from the water that surrounded them, spitting and laughing like schoolboys at play. But no. What he had taken for logs floating among the islands jerked, and were revealed as gharials of those schoolboys’ gruesome stories. The long scaly reptiles lurked just below the surface of the water, protuberant eyes and snouts filled with saw-like teeth making ripples in the sluggish current.

“The monsoon will not come for three months yet,” said Deva. So that was why the river, while wide, was so turgid and dark, edged with mud flats upon which myriad white and gray and brown birds pranced and swirled like confetti at a wedding.

The camel train veered toward a teeming encampment. Gard and Deva consigned themselves to the thickening throng of people hurrying into the city. With a sigh, less of resignation than of resolution, she said, “Here I am, back where I started three months ago, thinking I was leaving for good.”

“I grew up on Sumitra’s stories of Ferangipur,” he told her. “I was meant to come here. Not to ask for help, though.”

“You will not show Sumitra’s letter to Jamshid?”

“I can succeed alone.”

Her mouth twitched, the corners struggling with amusement.

Oh, Gard thought. Well, virtually alone. “You are mine now,” he said soothingly. “You will never even see Bogatyl; we will stay far away from the court. And in time we shall make our way to Apsurakand. Your appointment with Saavedra is not for any particular month, is it? I mean, she does not exactly have a place set for you at dinner.”

It was Deva’s turn to fire an aggravated look at him. “The lady in her infinite wisdom knows when I will come to her. Despite all impediments.”

Gard hated to think of himself as being an impediment to Deva’s wishes, warped though they were. But he got a wicked thrill from being an impediment to a goddess.

They were carried by the crowd across an open space—in Iksandarun it would be a parade ground—between the city gates and the sprawl of docks on the banks of the river. They were swept up the ramp leading to the great portals of the city. The huge iron-studded doors were open; armed guards stood beside them, leaning on their spears. Gard stopped and looked up, almost toppling over. Close by the gate was the tallest tower he had ever seen, sheer walls of brick and stone stretching upward almost to infinity.

A surge in the crowd. Gard and Deva were squashed against the door. Trumpets sounded, their music no longer a harsh bray, but a high clear note of pride, almost bravado. A procession of chariots and elephants escorted by soldiers in polished helmets moved through the gates. “The royal family,” hissed Deva in Gard’s ear. “Coming from the burial of last year’s Festival.”

Was that what that funeral in the fields had been? How could you put an event in a pot? Gard opened his mouth to ask and saw that saturnine face in the chariot again. Beside it—yes, it really was Rajinder this time, a remote and almost regretful expression upon his handsome features as he waved to the cheering people. Gard exhaled and nodded. So the other man, the charioteer with the self-satisfied grin, must be Vijay, the baby of the family, hardly older than Gard himself. And that woman in the howdah atop the elephant, her gold embroidered sari held modestly before her face, was the—what had Shikar said?—moonstruck?—Srivastava. She seemed perfectly lucid to Gard, her kohl-lined eyes shining like black pearls.

Those eyes widened slightly and looked down. Out of all those in the crowd they met Gard’s, and for a long moment black held gray, unblinking. The pentacle tingled and the dragonet tilted its head to the side inquisitively, fluffing its wings. Then the vehicles and beasts vanished under the gateway, attendants furling the banners, soldiers presenting arms.

Gard, shaking his head, was carried by the crowd through the throat of the gate and into the city. Deva, at his elbow, was chattering something, “—after the Rani Nuralini’s death Srivastava became head of the zenana. Which is one reason she refused to marry Shikar, I daresay, knowing that her power here was greater than it would be in woman-wary Muktardagh, and she could exercise that power without having to submit to a man’s attentions.”

Once, Gard had never understood why women spoke of the bedchamber as though it were a battlefield. But that was before he had met Deva.

They entered a broad avenue. On either side were market booths, mounds of figs, cherries, chestnuts, pistachios. Gard’s mouth watered at the tantalizing odor of larks and rose syrup cooked over a tiny charcoal grill, at mangoes and sticks of incense. Carved sandalwood chests, teak and ebony game boards, ivory figurines, cascades of silk and vast necklaces of jasper and lapis and gold lay heaped like the spoils from a conquered city.

He and Deva bought handfuls of dates. Munching, they wandered through the celebrating crowds. Here, girls wearing horn and brass anklets danced to the music of shenai and cymbals. Nearby, a saffron-clad holy man repeated some obscure litany. There, a woman ran from a drunken soldier, uttering playful shrieks, her mongoose scurrying on a leash behind her. The bright sunlight was muted by dust and smoke into a blue haze. Otherworldly, Gard thought. Objects implied rather than real. Rather like the misty complacency of inebriation.

He liked Ferangipur. The dragonet’s ears turned from side to side, its pink tongue flicked out and returned, its tail jounced up and down across his spine setting it aquiver with delight.

“Across the maidan,” said Deva, gesturing beyond the body-clogged avenue, “is the temple of Harus. Should you go pay your respects?”

“Why not?” Gard replied, his mood expansive enough to include even the gods. They threaded their way through the crowd.

The temple was only a red brick cell inside a dirt courtyard, a far and desperate cry from the great ziggurat in Sardis. But a Ferangi sentry stood respectfully outside the door, and the little image of the falcon was bronze, not gilded wood. Gard bowed before the hard jet eyes of the god and his turban fell off. The eyes looked past him, slightly bored.

With a tight smile Gard reached behind him, pulled Deva to his side, and said, “Great-grandfather, this is Deva.”

She nodded a polite greeting. The little falcon image remained impassive. Gard shrugged, turned and saw an alcove no larger than a crack in the wall, holding not an idol but a spray of pale asphodel. “When the Empire acknowledged Ashtar as Harus’s consort,” Deva whispered, “Jamshid asked the imperial envoys to make a place for her here.”

Gard visualized the heights of Cylandra, the mountain that watched over Sabazel, and grimaced. Ashtar in her fickleness probably regarded this pitiful shrine as an insult. But Ashtar hardly needed him to defend her.

Neither did Saavedra, he thought when Deva led him to the temple next door. Even though it was a shabby little mud brick edifice containing a rude wooden representation of a naked and ridiculously fat woman, the row of candles before her—white, blue, red, as had been the tapers in Dhan Bagrat—were newly lit, and the camellias and roses laid about her feet were so fresh that their odor seemed to have replaced the air in the temple. Deva bowed deeply and genuflected, muttering some kind of apology, while Gard fidgeted.

Back out into the sunlight. Voices and music, odors and shapes, rippled through Gard’s head. Wonderfully stimulating. Perhaps they should find themselves a room at an inn—unless the inns were all full. A bed of straw in a stable would not be too bad, if it were clean . . . The breeze tickled his hair. Oh yes, the turban. It had come unwound. He had yet to master the technique of folding it, at least without an open space to lay it out in; he wrapped the length of cloth around his waist and forgot about it.

Other temples lined the maidan, growing larger and more elaborate the closer they got to the domed building at the very end. “Vaiswanara?” Gard asked Deva.

“Of course,” she replied.

Some of the doorways they passed opened into sunlit atria, others into smoky black holes like passages into the netherworld. Hurmazi’s temple was a respectable stone building, its forecourt decorated with three little woman-images. “The god’s wives,” Deva explained. “Pallias, Ranithra, and Kyphasia. Just aspects of Saavedra.”

He nodded sagely—whatever you say, dear—and peered at a stone idol that looked suspiciously phallic. Only a few people stood, furtively, about the shrine of Hurmazi, patron deity of the Alliance. Apsuri merchants, perhaps. And a noblewoman clad in a brilliant turquoise sari, serving-women in attendance, who delicately laid a garland of marigolds over the stone and bowed before it.

They moved on. The crowd grew thicker and the shouting louder. Several children began to follow Gard, pointing and gesturing. Every time he turned and offered them his remaining dates, they fled in a storm of giggles. The red hair, of course. At least they thought it was funny.

The temple of Raman, Hurmazi’s evil brother, was a waste disposal pit. So much for Raman, Gard thought. The Ferangi had an appealing sense of humor. Beyond it lay another temple, and another; gods of the hearth and the hedgerow, of the monsoon and of the jungle, of every minute aspect of human life. Offerings lay before them all, brooms, flowers, bunches of grapes, brass pots of wine, a tiger skin.

In all this swarm of shrines was not one to Tenebrio. If these people had ever heard of the ancient and evil god of Minras, he had now been forgotten. Good—such a feeble shadow had no power over the pleasures of today.

The deities, Gard thought with a grin, swarmed in Ferangipur like gnats. The people were not so much god-ridden as god-bitten. He whispered to Deva, “Where is the temple of the god of hangnails? Is there a snail-god, humping his shrine on his back? What about priests to bless the chamber pot, surely an integral part of human existence? Or is that Raman’s duty?”

“Sssh,” Deva hissed, and swallowed an echoing grin.

At last she led him through a torrent of people up the vast marble steps of Vaiswanara’s shrine and into the cool interior. Intricately carved lattices half concealed the idol; silver, Gard saw, with a face of what looked like rough burned stone. “It fell from the heavens many generations ago,” said Deva in his ear. “A sign from Vaiswanara himself.”

Priests in elaborate maroon and saffron robes, with funny conical hats like haystacks, marched around the building waving censers and chanting. The words echoed from the height of the dome above, setting a multitude of hanging lamps to swaying. Just illusion, surely, that it was the ground swaying beneath Gard’s feet. The dragonet wrapped its tail around his spine and held on as his head spun again. The slight drunkenness was far from unpleasant, but he would have preferred it to be induced, not by the fever heat of crowded divinities, but by wine. “Come,” he said. “I have had enough gods for one day. I am hungry for physical, not moral sustenance.”

Deva nodded; evidently only Saavedra had the power to stir her.

Atop the flight of steps the sunlight seared his eyes. Something fell on him like a light rain. Deva’s gasp was oddly loud. He peered out between slitted eyes to see a sea of faces all upturned to him and his clothing stained with colored dust. The children had thrown red and yellow chalk all over him. “Hail,” voices called. “Hail the Festival of the Fool!”

“Welcome, fool, to Ferangipur!”

How did they know his birth sign was the jester? The dragonet leaped up and bumped Gard’s heart into his throat. Huge soldiers, surely the largest in the garrison, were advancing up the steps. The priests were closing in behind him. Deva, with a short wail, was elbowed aside.

The soldiers lifted their hands and threatened him with—garlands of marigold? He was going mad. Too many gods for the rational mind to take. Soldiers and priests piled the flowers so high on his shoulders he had to lift his chin to see over them.

Stranger and stranger. Everyone was nodding and bowing and smiling at him. Two priests took his arms and escorted him to a waiting elephant, its vast flanks painted with gold leaf and carmine. Gard seized one glimpse of Deva’s oddly pale face before it was eclipsed by the laughing faces of others.

“What is your name?” asked one of the priests.

Gard told them.

“Hail, Rajah Gard!” shouted the man. The shout was taken up and repeated by the crowd so that Gard heard his own name rolling like thunder across the maidan.

“Rajah!” he exclaimed. Very perceptive indeed, to know not only his birth sign but his regal ancestry. The dragonet reared, rampant, and unfurled its wings.

Several people started talking at once, leaving Gard to grope through their words as if hacking his way through underbrush. “Festival of the Fool.” “Every year pick a stranger to be rajah.” “All powers of rajah.” “Based on ancient festival in which the rajah was killed to make land fertile, but that was wasteful, so now every year the rajah simply steps aside and a stranger is chosen to play the part for a day. Just to bring luck.”

Oh yes, they once killed the king of Minras too. But that was a dark and solemn occasion, not one of light and laughter. “All the powers of the Rajah?” Gard inquired, commending himself for his caution.

“Assuredly, my lord. Will you play the part for us today?”

They must be divinely inspired. Ferangipur was a good place, a good place indeed. “Sure. Why not?”

The man turned and declaimed, “This stranger, Gard . . .” He paused and looked at Gard questioningly. Oh, he needed a patronymic. “Gard ed Bellasteros” sounded good, but would only be accurate in the maternal line; he could hardly say, “ed Andrion,” and he would not utter his real father’s name. “Gard ed Minras,” he announced.

“Gard ed Minras,” the man continued, “has agreed to play the fool for us today!” Again he heard his own name repeated by a thousand voices. Except for one sudden obscenity that cut through the clamor—was that Deva? He had not realized she knew such a word. Why was she upset?

But this was too good to pass by. “Bring me my woman, there,” Gard commanded. Heads turned. Hands grasped Deva, still clutching their bundle, and thrust her and Gard together up the short ladder into the howdah on the elephant’s back. The mahout goaded the beast’s ears. The elephant lurched to its feet and lumbered away, Gard and Deva clutching at the railings.

The temples bobbed up and down before Gard’s eyes like ships in a storm. Surely the children gamboling under the elephant’s huge feet would be crushed. No, they leaped away, laughing and pointing. “Red hair! The Fool has red hair!”

So that was why they had chosen him. He laughed at his pretensions—divinely inspired, regal ancestry—hah!

“Gods,” said Deva faintly. Her complexion was pale green. “By Saavedra’s brows, Gard . . .”

Was she seasick? The elephant curled its trunk and trumpeted. A path opened through the crowd, and elephant, priests, and guards moved in stately procession down the maidan. Before them was a whitewashed building decorated with so many carved lattices and spires that it looked like a confectioner’s castle. “The palace?” Gard asked Deva. “What fun! We will have a place to spend the night, after all.” He waved to the people of Ferangipur, and they cheered again.

Her mouth worked. Her eyes flashed. “Oh, you are a fool.”

“I have spent a great deal of my life playing the fool,” he told her, nettled. “We might as well profit by it. I know we wanted to make a slightly quieter entrance. But this is a stroke of luck. Surely they will give us rich gifts, and we can make our journeys in style, not as servants. Be glad I cannot claim the rule of Minras; on Minras they sacrifice kings.”

“And what do you think they do here?” she retorted hoarsely. “Why do you think they always choose a stranger? What do you think was in that pot they were burying as we approached the city?”

Gard’s elation froze and sprayed in icy droplets over the dragonet. It flailed indignantly, entangling itself in Gard’s intestines, raking his bones with its tail and producing a note in his mind like that made by a hand sweeping across harp strings. His spine responded in a sympathetic vibration and he shuddered violently. Cold sober again.

The happy shouts were oddly muted. All he could hear was the blood rushing in his head and the insistent, almost maddening, cry of a bird—fever, fever, fever. “But,” he said, “all the powers of the Rajah?”

“Until sunset! Then a quick poison—at least they are merciful in that—and burial in a pot in the cellars until the next year. Fine compost a fool makes, I suppose. Perhaps your red hair will bring even more fertility to the fields!”

Gard sat back on the cushions. They heaved beneath him like a queasy stomach. “I cannot refuse now?”

“No.”

“I should have known better than to consort with so many gods,” he muttered. It was when he bowed to Harus that his turban fell off, revealing his hair—he was a flame attracting not moths but the stinging gnats of godly mordant jokes—tempting fate . . . The pinions of the dragonet’s wings swept through his mind, kissing him with stubborn tenacity. The pentacle chimed against his heart. Oh no, I shall not be the butt of yet another divine jest. “So,” he exclaimed, “make fate tempt me!”

“What?” demanded Deva.

“There must be some way we can not only free ourselves from this turn of the game but make it into our advantage.”

“How?” The smooth planes of Deva’s face were twisted with anger and fear. But at least she did not deny the “we”. And unlike any other woman, she did not remind him that this would not have happened had they gone to Apsurakand as she had wished.

“I thought you were the one with faith,” he told her, smiling sweetly.

Her eyes snapped. She drew breath, opened her mouth, tilted her head to the side and then, surprisingly, shrugged extravagantly, hands fluttering into the air and falling again.

Admirable woman. She knew when to be quiet.

In the late afternoon sun the palace glistened before them like mother-of-pearl. The smoke of cooking fires and incense cleared from Gard’s eyes and he saw every bit of stone filigree atop the palace, every block in the city tower behind it, every fleck of colored chalk upon his own breast as clearly defined as a tile in a mosaic. The sky was a pure azure blue. As were Deva’s sparkling eyes.

Well, he thought, as the elephant came to a ponderous halt, I have never fulfilled anyone’s expectations. I shall not start now.

He handed Deva down the ladder and with her on his arm passed into the cool scented air of the palace, trailing majesty and obstinacy and little whorls of colored dust.