Banner of the Damned (3 page)

Ah-yedi, I think now, as I pen this defense, for the next question is one of those coincidences that aren’t, when you reflect.

I do not claim that the following conversation caused my subsequent actions, but did it shape them? I’ve had occasion to think back over every one of the following words.

“Before I bespell the light,” the senior scribe said, “I require each of you to tell me what greatness is.”

Sheris quoted confidently, “‘Greatness is service to the kingdom.’”

Scribe Halimas did not respond.

Birdy gave another quote that we’d often written when practicing our handwriting, “‘Greatness is the term we give to those whose virtue earns them a position of outstanding eminence.’”

“Verbose,” Scribe Halimas observed. “But good practice for your hands when you are ten. Come, come, I said everyone, and we have much more to do.”

He turned to Tiflis, who said, “It’s the quality of… of influence.” We could not use any form of a word in a definition, so she’d avoided saying ‘great influence’ but at the cost of making sense.

“Nashande?”

“I’m not entirely certain,” the oldest boy said in his ponderous manner. “When we were young, it seemed clear. Greatness is implied in the doing of a mighty deed that, as one might say, alters events. For the better, as it were. But…”

Scribe Halimas prompted, “But?”

He wasn’t sarcastic, yet Nashande hurried his words together into almost normal speech. “I… wonder sometimes, is it great from everyone’s view?”

“I am quite certain that the Chwahir whose remains so sanguinely decorate the mural we are about to scrutinize would not—had they lived—have considered Martande Lirendi great. But they do not have my sympathy, as they ought not to have invaded our land in the first place. Emras.”

Nashande’s words hadn’t made me think of the Chwahir, but of the senior cook. Startled by hearing my name, I said, “Could it be that greatness is a lot of little deeds? That add up, I mean.”

No one scoffed in words, but I heard it in the tiny scrape of a foot on the cold inlaid marble floor and in a soft breath, not quite a snort, from someone directly behind me.

Scribe Halimas said mildly, “It’s a fine idea, but the truth is rather more pragmatic. Most of us will live exemplary lives, doing good work every day, and no one will call us great. Few will even know our names. Yet our civilization will, perhaps, be called great. Faura. Since you appear to find little wit in Emras’s answer, you may now stun us with your great wit.”

Faura wriggled her shoulders. Her chin lifted as she enunciated, “Greatness can be a state, a quality, a condition, or a virtue. Of eminence.”

“A virtue of eminence. I am almost afraid to ask what that means.”

Faura made a little business of flinging her hair back, obviously struggling for a response. But the senior scribe gestured to the rest, who’d by now had time to think. They offered familiar quotations in well modulated voices.

He listened, gazing on the mural, until they were done. “Next question. It’s probably unfair to ask, and no doubt the lower school tutors will tell me so. I usually put this question to the journey-scribes, and so it would have been for you. But Queen Hatahra has recently decreed that this building be pulled down, once the mural here behind the dais is recorded by the herald-mages for the archive. As you all know very well, archive portraits and paintings are intended to fit against the archive display wall.” He flung out his arms, fingers perpendicular. “Reducing a work so mighty and awe-inspiring to a wall five paces in length is… a necessary disservice. Never again will people experience this hall as King Martande intended. You should regard yourselves as privileged. So tell me what you see.”

He whispered the light spell. The glow globes set in entwined lily sconces lit, and there was the mural of King Martande and his allies fighting against the Chwahir. At least a hundred paces long, it towered above our heads, so that the central figure of the king must have been the size of a ten-year-old oak. Age-spotted mirrors on the other side threw back the color, intensifying the fiery reds in flaring cloaks, the rich glint of gilt, the twilight blues and summer greens and daffodil yellows and stately violets of the outlandish clothing worn so proudly aback those dashing chargers. Even the horses looked proud, eyes fiery, manes tossing in winds that seem to come from all directions at once, the better to stream tails and capes like gonfalons.

“It’s very barbaric,” Sheris the Empress pronounced.

I sneaked a look Tiflis’s way. We used to share private grins if we didn’t dare signal our disgust at the way Sheris
always
pushed to be first.
But Tif just looked up solemnly as Sheris elaborated into the silence: “What makes it barbaric are those swords and blood. And those dead people lying on the ground.”

“‘War is the failure of civilized negotiation,’” quoted Birdy. His beaky nose pointed up at the mural. “According to Queen Alian II.”

“Look at them wearing metal all over themselves, along with swords, like outland brigands,” said the new girl.

“The patterns on the metal are old knots, from the Venn,” began the quiet boy we called Thumb, on account of his inky fingers. “Those patterns came out of the west, from—”

“The figures are way too large,” Tiflis interrupted Thumb while looking Sheris’s way. For approval? From Sheris the Empress? “The king must be twenty paces high. That style is very outmoded.” Tif was repeating what Sheris had said—she
did
want her approval!

“So say our artists, and the queen concurs. What is the effect of the painting?” Scribe Halimas asked. “Nashande?”

Nashande blushed, his slow voice rumbling as he measured out his words. “Its being larger than life gives emphasis to, I will say, a sense of power. The swords add to the impression.”

The tutorial gaze flicked my way. “Emras? Do you see power?”

“Yes, Senior Scribe Halimas,” I said, hoping that I showed no sign of the wild mix of disgust, anger, and perplexity that assailed me. Tif and Sheris? Friends?

“How is it powerful? Besides the presence of steel weapons.”

The back of my neck tingled as I struggled for sense. I would
not
sound like the Empress, no matter who admired her. “Like Nashande said, it’s larger than real life. And, ah-ye! It’s the way they wave those swords, and the bright contrasts of colors, and everything flying in the air. Their clothes and hair. Not the horses. They are galloping. Though actually horses stretch their necks out when they gallop. They don’t arch like that. And…” I was acutely aware of babbling.

“Go on.”

Everyone stared at me, Sheris with a curled lip. Faura flicked looks between Sheris and Tiflis and me, then curled her lip. Tif had turned Sheris’s way. Oh yes. Things had changed not only between Tiflis and me, but between all the girls in our class.

Birdy bobbed his head in tiny motions, as if urging me on, but I did not know if he was teasing or encouraging me. The tingles of warning worsened.

“And the jewelry. I didn’t think they wore all that golden jewelry in battle. I thought they had armor,” I finished uncertainly.

Senior Scribe Halimas addressed the group. “They did embellish their armor with the intention of impressing the enemy. Warriors traditionally will bedeck themselves to appear larger or fiercer or more imposing. I believe what we are seeing here, and perhaps it is too soon for you to understand it, is a calculated augmentation of personal beauty. Martande Lirendi, as you all know, was not just presented as handsome by heralds bent on enhancing his prestige, he really was. He used that as well as prowess to knit the kingdom into a single state, and then to beguile the Sartorans into accepting us as a separate entity.”

The senior scribe stepped back and swept his gaze over the enormous figures with their flowing braids and the golden diadems with winking gems framing their faces, the tight clothing emphasized by flaring jackets, the men turned so that their broad shoulders were their widest point.

“Now.” Scribe Halimas smiled at us. “You are to take yourselves into the antechamber, and you have a quarter glass to write out your impression of this mural, in Old Sartoran. You may use what I told you, providing your own examples of how the mural illustrates—or disproves—my conjecture.”

For a heartbeat we stared as the senior scribe perched on the edge of the empty dais where queens and kings had once presided, turned his glass over, then clasped his hands around his bony knee as he surveyed the riotous colors of the mural.

Then we filed out at our hastiest walk, taking care not to make noise.

A quarter glass later Scribe Halimas took us outside to the garden, where he indicated the silver blue junipers so large their pointed tops were level with the palace roof. They soughed deeply, stirring in the breeze.

“We used to study here,” the senior scribe said in a reflective tone that I would not understand for a long time.

He turned our way and raised his brows. “Sit. Wait. Nashande, you are a year overdue and then some, so let us begin with you.”

They settled under a king willow so old that its foliage hung down in a solid curtain. The rest of us sat where he had left us.

Though the willow curtain warded sun and sight, it did not ward sound, but the senior scribe pitched his voice so that we could not hear the words. None of us had that control of modulation. We certainly heard Nashande’s slow recitation of the different forms of written diplomatic
discourse, ending with his answer to the easy question,
When are scribes permitted to use blue ink?
Nashande was not even roundabout and ponderous when he said,
Only when directed by the royal family
.

The new girl was called next. It was unsettling for me to see someone younger, and I didn’t understand until that moment how proud I’d been of that distinction.

“There goes the brat,” Sheris whispered. “Always pushing herself first.”

“She only has to see a page, and she can remember it in its entirety,” Birdy whispered to me.

Birdy, not Tiflis.

The girl’s voice was so light that we heard nothing of her interview.

The senior scribe called me next and took my rolled paper. “Emras, I will ask a question, then you may ask me a question,” he said when I sat on the waiting mat.

The willow formed a green curtain all around, but I was aware of the others all listening a few paces away. I braced for close examination in dates or the minutiae of court protocol—anything but, “Why were you sent to the kitchens half a year ago?”

I clipped my lips tight on the response,
But you sent me there!

He waited, his face blank.

The emotions stirred by that memory were so immediate that I forgot about modulating my voice. “Kaleri the day servant asked me to get the tray of dishes after Tiflis’s Name Day fête. Kaleri was in a hurry. I told her to do it herself, because I am a scribe. We don’t—didn’t—don’t do kitchen work.” My face burned. “And so you sent me to the kitchen to work. You said, being a scribe is not a rank but a vocation. If I was—am—was truly a scribe, I would find a way to stay with my studies on my own time. I would find the time to visit Scribe Aulumbe for instruction and assignments, and bring work back to her when finished.”

I could not look up but waited miserably for a repeat of the lecture on arrogance, and how I obviously did not understand the Second Rule, every word of which I could have repeated.

“Your turn for a question,” the senior scribe prompted.

I still could not look up. “Does my question have to be about that?”

“You may ask me anything. My second question. What did you learn during your sojourn in the kitchen?”

Instinct prompted me to say,
Never be arrogant to servants
, or I could say
Never break the Second Rule,
but that sounded Too Obvious—and I heard it inside my head in Sheris’s voice. Smug.

I could repeat the angry conclusion I’d reached during my first few
weeks in the kitchen, which was, “Never be
overheard
breaking a Rule.” Except that as my anger faded I’d come to wonder if that wasn’t breaking the Rule after all. You’re not keeping The Peace if you only heed Rules when others are watching.

So what did I learn in the kitchens?

“Since I was too ignorant to help with pastry or cooking, I learned all the different kinds of bread. I learned that bread can be an art, and that messages are conveyed in bread, from the measure to the knead to the shape. I learned who loves making bread and wants to spend a life making bread, and who… who… who… wants to be famed for their bread. That’s what I meant by lots of little deeds. Ah-ye, some think pastry the true art, and…” I’d talked myself into a tangle.

But when I halted abruptly, he did not comment on my lack of reasoned, elegant diction. “We spend all these years instilling the first two Rules into you students,” he said. “The First Rule—
do not interfere
—is seldom an issue when you are young. The hardest to live by is the Second.”

His fingers lifted, inviting my question, so I asked it, though my stomach knotted with dread. “Am I to return to the kitchen?” I could bear it—the work was important and some loved it above everything—but I had never lost my desire to be a scribe. Even after half a year’s exile.

“You will recommence classes today. Who among your class was the most helpful, while you were striving to keep up?”

Now I was truly caught. Tattling was scorned, diplomacy was prized—those came under the Second Rule. And yet, there was the painful awareness of six months of avoidance. Of being forgotten on my Name Day, except by my family. “I worked alone,” I said, trying hard to sound neutral. But my voice shook.

“Your last question?” he asked.

My mind careened wildly, trying to think up some historically significant question—something to show off the studies that had kept me up until midnight so frequently, even when I had to rise before dawn for duty—but need was too strong. “When will we know how we did on this test?”

He smiled. “You will all find out when you are assigned your new classes, at the Hour of the Quill.” He made The Peace, palms together, the signal that my interview was over.