Temoc celebrated the sunset sacrifice in Chakal Square. As he chanted he saw Chel near the mats with another man beside her, a broken-nosed dockhand who tensed when Temoc raised his blade.
Hungry gods pleaded, promised: give us blood this time, and joy, and new power. A heart might even wake the old ones, and woken they will dance with you the great gavotte of war.
No, he told them, and himself.
Not all the frustration he felt belonged to the gods.
The knife fell, pommel first, and the echo of sacrifice yielded an echo of bliss. For the gathered faithful on the mats, even an echo was more than they had known. It was enough. New light kindled in the broken-nosed guard’s eyes.
After the ceremony, Temoc walked among milling parishioners. Chel seemed ready to lead her companion off, but she stopped when Temoc raised his hand.
“Sir,” she said as he approached. And then, an awkward afterthought: “This is my partner, Tay.”
Temoc bowed his head to each of them in turn. “Welcome.”
“Thanks,” Tay said. “I’ve never been to one of these before. It’s one hell of a thing. Excuse me. I don’t know what to say.”
“The sacrament is strange. It occasions prayer and reflection, and sometimes sacrilege.” Temoc wished he felt as sure as he made himself sound. “Are you busy tonight? I would appreciate your company at a meeting.”
“Of course,” Chel said.
“I—” Tay buried his hand in his pocket, and gripped something there. Not a weapon, Temoc’s old training reported. Cigarettes. “It’s my shift. I should go.”
Chel touched the man’s arm. “I’ll catch you back at the tents.”
“Sure,” Tay said, then stuck out a hand. Temoc clasped with him, and felt his calluses, patterned wrong for a warrior. Tay broke the handshake and walked away. After five steps he lit a cigarette. Smoke trailed him through the camp.
“How can I help, sir?”
“There is no need for ‘sir,’” he said. “My name is enough.”
She waited.
“The King in Red and Tan Batac want to negotiate. I must convince the leaders of our group to speak with them.”
“You don’t need an escort to talk with the Kemals over at Food Com,” she said. “Or with Red Bel or Xotoc. Might even hurt with Bel, if she thinks you’re trying to intimidate her.”
“All those you mention will listen to reason,” he replied. “We will start with the man who won’t.”
* * *
The Major’s troops drilled by firelight to the beat of deep drums.
Temoc counted one hundred men and women dressed in street clothes and patchwork armor, fighting mock wars two by two. When the drums beat four-four time, those to the north attacked with fists and knives. When the beat shifted to five-six, the south mounted their assault in turn. Flesh and metal struck metal and flesh. Groans and meat percussion mixed with drummers’ blows on taut hide.
The Major’s jagged metal edges reflected his army and the flame. He kept time with one hand. No—Temoc saw the beat he kept shift before the drummers’ did. He did not keep time. He called it.
“Hello,” Temoc said. Chel stood by his arm, playing silent attaché. He was grateful for her presence: the Major came from the docks. Perhaps he would listen more to voices from his homestead.
“Come to join us, Temoc?” The Major’s mask warped his voice into a chorus of wheels and gears and twanging banjo strings. “To teach us ancient arts of war?”
“The King in Red has sued for peace,” Temoc said.
The Major’s hand faltered. The beat tripped, and the ordered clash dissolved to a chaos more reminiscent of the battles Temoc knew. The Major passed the conductor’s role to an aide, and turned to Temoc. “A trap.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know Craftsmen better than anyone. Their ‘due process’ is all deadfalls. During the dockworkers’ strike they called us to parlay, and those who went emerged from that meeting room speaking competition and market forces like fresh graduates from the Hidden Schools. These people turned the Siege of Alt Selene into a massacre, and torched the jungles of Southern Kath. The only way to break their smug self-sufficiency is to refuse to deal with them.”
“Which,” Temoc replied, “only makes them angry.”
“Good. Then they will show their true faces.”
“Most of these people do not want war.” He kept his voice low and level.
“War comes whether or not it’s wanted,” the Major said. “The Craftsmen are too sure of their own righteousness to compromise. There can be no change without revolution.”
This was why Temoc rarely visited the Major, though many of the man’s soldiers came to service. Rhetoric ran circles in the Major’s mind. War was its own end. Temoc, gods help him, understood the appeal. “But are you ready? Are they?”
“History decides the moment for transition.”
“I have fought Craftsmen. Your troops are impressive.” A sop to the Major’s pride: their ferocity had merit, even if their technique fell short. “But they can’t beat sorcery. The Craft will scour us from the soil and let our ashes testify that none can beat the Deathless Kings. If you refuse to deal, the others will, and their deal will be more a surrender for your absence. Chakal Square will be the dockworkers’ strike repeated. Bide your time. Build your strength. But for now, join us at the table.”
The Major’s aide broke the rhythm of the measure, and again the drill tangled. Flames danced on steel as the Major pondered the vanguard of his revolution.
“I will come,” he said at last.
“Thank you.”
Temoc left, and did not let himself sag until he was certain no one but Chel was watching.
* * *
Temoc walked the camp in glory. One night was not enough to change the world, but it was enough to start, if one walked fast, and with the gods.
Stars wheeled overhead, and fire in his mind. He mended broken bones. Soothed fears. A woman came to him shaking of withdrawal from a drug he did not know, a drug that, when he looked upon it with eyes of faith, curled as a centipede around her spine. Its jaws he broke, and the legs too, one by one. Screams rose to the clouds. He could not tell the difference between the woman’s screams and the drug’s.
In the end, the centipede died and the woman lived. She could barely stand on her own, and when she lay down she fell asleep in moments.
He spoke with Red Bel. He wheedled Xotoc. The Kemals at Food Com acquiesced: Bill was eager, Kapania not so much.
Temoc worked until his scars’ light faded to the faintest emerald glow.
Chel walked him out. The press of bodies and the furnace cackle of song, debate, and prayer warmed him. The rest of the city, and the Wardens, stood cold and sharp beyond the square. “Do you really think we can deal with the King in Red?” she asked.
“What would you want from such a deal?”
“For him and Tan Batac to stay out of the Skittersill.”
“And I want them to let us praise the old gods. The Kemals want housing for God Wars refugees. The Major will settle for nothing less than peace on earth and goodwill toward men, even if he has to kill everyone on the planet to achieve it.”
“So, no.”
“Compromise is possible. But possibility is a vast empire, and likelihood its smallest province. Still, the province is rich, and so we work to seize it.”
He felt her gaze as a weight, this woman he could lift one-handed, in her early twenties perhaps, work-hardened but innocent of war. Temoc had been born and raised in Dresediel Lex. But Chel could say the same and yet she had never seen the Serpents dance before Quechaltan, never known the glory of a true sacrifice or the deep surf-rhythm of a city’s voices raised in prayer, never fought the butchery dark sorcerers called Liberation beneath shattered skies and down alleys slick with blood and melted snow. Temoc had not left his city. His city left him, replaced by another. He’d been born scant miles from this spot, yet felt a half a world away from everything he knew.
“My family waits,” he said.
“We’ll be here in the morning.”
“I know.” He set his palm on her forehead, felt its warmth and the curve of bone beneath, and sent the remains of his sunset power into her. Green light danced in the blacks of her eyes, and faded. When he withdrew his hand, she did not stagger, but neither was she still. She seemed to grow in all directions at once. “Watch, in my absence.”
* * *
He hailed a cab two blocks from Chakal Square and rode home past lit windows in tenement houses, rectangles of yellow light cut with human silhouettes. Old men drank in a bar while a Shining Empire poet played the zither under a spotlight that made his silk gown shine. In an open-air park, a crowd danced to a brass band. Three college kids gathered around a fourth vomiting in a rose bush. Red lights transformed half-naked men and women writhing in massage parlor windows into Old World devils. Foreign music, foreign poems, foreign lust. Never such perversion under the old gods: bodies and their deeds were celebrated in song and story, and sex itself was worship.
The lights of his courtyard gate were lit, but the yard was dim. Furniture protruded from vines and bushes and cactus swells. By the reflected glow off the belly of the clouds he found his door, unlocked it, and entered the dining room. Mina had stacked her books on the buffet table, bookmarks tonguing at odd angles from pressed pages.
Something shifted beneath his foot and he stumbled. Lifted the offending object: a small rubber bouncing ball, translucent with fools’-gold flecks inside. He shook his head and pocketed the ball.
No lights in the hallway, either, and darker here without windows. Lamp flame flickered in the gap between Caleb’s closed door and the jamb. He heard giggles, groans, and shouts in High Quechal: “Mine!” “No!” “Unfair.” The language of the priests, the language of his youth, spoken nowhere now but in this house.
He knocked once on the door, and opened without waiting for an answer. “Hello?”
Two lamps lit his son’s narrow room and its furnishings: a small bed with a cotton sheet, a table, a bookcase. Mina insisted Caleb learn to own, and care for, books. Sponge-printed multicolored lizards climbed the walls. They’d done that as a family, when Caleb passed through a brief but intense lizard fixation at age five. The boy printed the ones nearer the baseboards himself, blurred and blotted. Temoc and Mina took turns hoisting Caleb on their shoulders to do the ceiling. Drops of paint dried in their hair, and Mina’d cut hers short to get the clumps out.
Caleb and Mina crouched on the floor beside a lamp, each holding a small stack of cards, with a larger pile between them. They dealt cards into the center by turns, and every few deals one or the other slapped the pile with a triumphant cry, matched by their opponent’s wail.
“Be careful,” Temoc said. “You’ll knock over the lamp.”
“Give us some credit,” Mina answered without turning.
“Hi, Dad!” Caleb waved, and Mina dealt a card and slapped the pile. “Hey, no fair.”
“If you don’t mind the game, you lose.”
“Can I join?”
Caleb frowned. “We can’t deal three equal piles. Someone would have eighteen.”
Temoc sat by the foot of his son’s bed, legs curled beneath him. Prayer position, they called this in the old days. “I will take your cards from under you.”
“No cheating,” Mina warned.
Temoc raised his hands, and adopted as innocent an expression as he could manage.
They played Apophitan Rat Screw for a half hour more. Even without the gods’ help, Temoc’s reflexes were fast enough for him to seize a small stack of cards, though Caleb and Mina both seemed to have access to a side of the game denied him. Caleb sometimes slapped cards he could not possibly have read.
“Counting cards,” Temoc said, “will lead to your being thrown from most games.”
“If they catch you,” Mina pointed out.
“So the idea is don’t get caught?”
“The idea is to win through virtuous play.”
“Mostly to win, though.”
No one lost that night, though Mina’s pile was largest in the end. Caleb purified the cards, wrapped them in silk, and returned them to the box. So simple a contest, with no soulstuff at stake, invited only an echo of the Lady of Games, but still they observed her rites. These, at least, the boy understood. Temoc had invited Caleb to his services, and watched him from the altar. Sacrifice scared the boy. The long litanies of heroes’ names and deeds that once made young Temoc hunger to prove himself, these bored his son. But Caleb understood games and their goddess, who was for all her limits the last still worshipped openly as in Dresediel Lex of old.
Caleb went to brush his teeth, and Temoc and Mina waited in the bedroom. He sat on his son’s bed, and she watched painted lizards climb the wall. “It’s late,” she said.
“More work today than I planned.”
“Good work?” They’d been slow to learn this skill of marriage: to take time, and let each other bring as much of the office home as needed.
“I hope. A chance for peace.”
“Caleb worried.” Meaning, I worried, but she had trouble saying that. Neither one liked to admit weakness. Luckily, they knew each other well enough to hear the unsaid words.
“I know. I’m sorry.” He smoothed the covers of his son’s bed. “I appreciate his wanting to wait up.”
“Not just him,” she said, before the faucet shut off and Caleb returned.
Temoc let the boy climb into bed himself. Mina kissed their son, and so did he, and hugged Caleb back when Caleb threw his arms around Temoc’s neck. There was no word in High Quechal or any other tongue Temoc knew for the way his son smelled.
“Good night. Sleep well. Dream noble dreams.”
“You too, Dad. I love you.”
“We love you, too,” he said, and they left his room, closed the door, and took the lantern with them.
Mina led him down the hall, silent.
“Good day for you?”
“I’m worried about my translation of the Oxulhat cenotaph.”
“It’s fine.”
“I know. I’m still worried.”
Their bedroom lacked lizards. A painting of her family hung from the off-white walls beside a pre-Wars lithograph of his. She closed the door behind him, and set the lantern on the dresser. Lamplight painted her sandstone colors. Shade-swathed, she might have been a bas relief on an ancient temple, or one of the cave-wall paintings she studied. Beautiful, raw, and real.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” he said.
“I know.” She rushed against him like a wave, and, as always, he was swept away.
He stumbled back, tossed in her embrace, in her kiss, his hand under her shirt, on her spine. Flame flowered in her eyes. Her smooth lips found his cheek, his mouth, and still stumbling he lifted her and they fell together to the bed. They kissed again, and he held her harder, as if she might slip away and leave the world in shadow. Her fingers caught in the buttons of his shirt; he pulled hers up over her head in one motion, and she laughed.
But as they moved together on the bed, the red glow of her recalled bonfires reflected on the Major’s armor, and the Wardens’ silver stares. Sunrise flickered on the edge of a knife. He pulled her to him, his line out of the depths, the rope a goddess cast down so poor Temoc could climb out of the maze of his own bad choices.
He clutched her, hard—then let go, and let himself fall.
She felt him change. He watched for disappointment, but saw only a slight, sad smile before she bent close and ran her cheek along his, smooth skin against smooth. He’d never been able to grow a beard. “It doesn’t need to be everything,” she said. “Just be here, now, with me. Please.”
She kissed him, and he kissed her back. Outstretched, they explored each other as if wandering through their house on a moonless midnight. No Wardens, no knives, no sacrifices, no battles to fight. Only her.
After, they lay sky-clad amid strewn pillows. His fingers trailed over her stomach, and she stretched like a cat to his touch. “We don’t do that enough,” she said.
“What would be enough?”
“Let’s experiment.”
“A scholar even in the sheets.”
“Mankind deserves to know. Womankind, too.”
“The boy might notice.”
“He needs to learn the facts of life someday.”
“I thought that was your job.”
“Yours.”
“I missed you.” He did not know why he said those words. They saw each other every day, unless she was on a research trip, or he on retreat. But still, they sounded right.
“I missed you, too.” Her fingers rested against the inside of his thigh, not sensual so much as there. “Sometimes I miss you even when you’re around.”
“I worry.” Hard to say, harder still to hear himself say. But no one in this room could hear them.
Her hand tightened on his leg. She climbed cliffs for fun out in the desert, a regular patron too of the university climbing gym. She was strong enough to hold him. “You don’t need to be a part of this, if you don’t want to be.”
“I told Elayne I would bring the camp together, to compromise. It might work.”
The warmth of their sex had faded, and sweat cooled them both. That was all, he told himself: that was why goose bumps rose on her arms and on the skin of her belly beneath his fingertips.
“They need protection,” he said.
“The Wars are over, Temoc.”
“I was the gods’ sword, once,” he said. “At least I can be these people’s shield.”
“I’d rather you be yourself,” she said. “My husband. Father to our son.” The mattress creaked. She rolled against him, her arm across his chest, her legs clasping his. “No one can ask you to be anything but that.”
“No.” Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history.
She pulled the covers over them and slept. He pretended to sleep too, memorizing instead her imprint, the smell of her hair, the weight of her head and leg and arm.
It was enough.
Why shouldn’t it be enough?