God's War (4 page)

The preponderance of bugs in the
magicians’ quarters made his blood sing, as if he was attuned to a bit of
everything, able to touch and manipulate pieces of the world. He felt more
alive here than he had anywhere else in his life, among those who spent their
days coming up with new and interesting ways to kill his people.

I’ll take what I need from them and
return, he thought. I’ll make it right.

The boxers’ locker rooms were three
steps to the right of the transmission rooms, a corridor away from the internal
betting booth, and three long bends of the hall from Yah Tayyib’s operating
theater, where magicians and bel dames came to receive treatment for cancer and
contagion. The corridors within a magicians’ gym were never the same length,
never quite in the same location. Beneath each gym, the world was bent and
twisted. The distance-bending corridors were relics from the times before
Umayma was habitable, back when magicians lived belowground while they remade
the world. This made it possible to step into a gym at the coast and emerge a few
minutes later at a gym in Mushtallah or Faleen and Aludra. Practical for long
distances, but dizzying over short ones.

As they approached the locker room
for outriders, Husayn—the magicians’ favorite boxing nag—passed them in the
hall, heading one twist of the hallway down to her own locker room. Husayn was
a stocky woman with a face like a shovel. A novice magician scurried after her,
carrying her gear.

“Hey, chimba!” Husayn called at
Rhys. Too loud. The women in this country were all too loud.

Rhys did not look at her.

“Those magicians haven’t been able
to wash that gravy stink off you, you know it?” Husayn persisted.

“I am still perplexed as to why it
is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it,” Rhys said. “Perhaps
Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness.”

“Well now, if all your boys are as
pretty as you, your
boys
best start covering up
too,” Husayn said. “Ah, the shit I’d like to do to you.” She laughed.

What a fool, Rhys thought. Chenjan
mullahs taught that men’s bodies were clean, asexual. Closer to God. Women,
real women, were not stirred to sin at the sight of men. If these godless
Nasheenian women were stirred at the sight of anything, it was blood.

Yah Reza shooed her away. “Come,
now, this isn’t a whorehouse.”

Husayn cackled and moved on.

Rhys ducked into the other locker
room. Inside, the light was dim, and a lean woman sat hunched on one of the
benches, staring into her hands.

When he stepped in, she looked up.
She was long in the face, like a dog, and she had narrow, little eyes and a set
to her mouth that reminded Rhys of one of his sisters, the look she got when
she wanted something so badly she made herself sick. He hoped this woman didn’t
vomit. He knew who would have to clean it up.

Yah Reza moved past him and greeted
the outrider.

The outrider stood. She looked
uneasy, like a cornered animal—a dog-shifter in form, or maybe some scraggly
adolescent sand cat. He might have guessed her for a shifter if he had seen
only an image or picture of her, but in person he was able to see clearly that
she was not. The air did not prickle and bend around her as it did a shifter.
She was just some kid, some standard—just another part of the world.

Yah Reza talked low to the girl and
rubbed her shoulders. She spit sen on the floor. Rhys knew who would have to
clean that up too.

“This is Rhys. Come here, boy,” Yah
Reza said, and Rhys walked close enough to see that he was a head and shoulders
taller than the outrider.

“You bring your wraps?” Yah Reza
asked the girl.

The outrider stabbed her fingers
toward two long, dirty pieces of tattered muslin on the bench next to her.

Yah Reza spit more sen. “Rhys,” she
said.

Rhys went to the locker at the back
of the room, where they kept the extra gear. He unraveled a couple of hand
wraps. He grabbed some tape and took a seat on the bench and finished
unraveling the wraps.

“He know how to box?” the outrider
asked, and even Rhys, with his nonnative Nasheenian, noticed her mushy inland
accent. Where had they picked her up? Working some border town? The magicians
were notorious for pushing girls into the ring before they were ready. It made
the fights bloodier.

“I don’t believe in violence,” Rhys
said.

“A shame too,” Yah Reza said. “He’s
a damn fine shot with a pistol. But don’t worry none about his technique. He’s
a magician, girl. He knows hands. You get on, and I’ll meet you in a
quarter-hour. We got some fancy visitors want to meet you and Husayn before the
fight.”

Yah Reza petted the outrider’s
cheek.

The outrider sat back on the bench
and eyed Rhys like he was a beetle turned over on its back, not sure if it was
harmless or just playing at docility until she got close.

Rhys asked for her right hand.

She hesitated, and he thought that
was odd from a woman who was about to go toe to toe with a seasoned fighter in
a magicians’ gym. He realized then how young she was, maybe seventeen. It was
hard to tell with Nasheenian women. They grew up fast, bore the marks of their
short, brutal childhoods on their bodies and faces. Most of them were broken
old crones at thirty.

He taped the wrap in place and began
to loop it around her wrist and between her fingers. She had her palm flat and
her fingers wide.

When he had first come to Nasheen,
he’d thought he would hate all of its women for their ugliness, their vanity,
but as he put the wraps on this little dog-faced girl, he found himself
admiring her hands. She had strong, beautiful fingers, calloused knuckles and
palms, and he saw her scars, and the dirt under her bitten nails. There was
something splendid and tragic about her all at once.

He tied off her right hand and moved
to the left. When he took her left hand in his, something about the way she
held it, the way it felt beneath his fingers, made him hesitate. He pulled at
her fingers.

She winced.

“You’ve done an injury to this
hand?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“An old injury,” he amended as he
pressed his thumb against the back of her hand, rubbed her knuckles, pushed in
slow circles up to her wrist. She had hairline fractures in the small bones of
her left hand. Some had healed, but badly. It was a brittle hand.

“You shouldn’t be fighting with
this,” he said.

She pulled her hand from him, and
her mouth got harder. Her shoulders stiffened. “I can wrap myself. They told me
magicians used tricks.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t finish.” He
took her hand in his again. His ability to diagnose illness and injury had been
the first sign that he’d inherited his father’s skill as a magician. A more
talented magician might have been able to heal her hands, if the injuries
weren’t so old, but Rhys’s skill was limited, his knowledge incomplete. The
longer he stayed among the Nasheenian magicians, the more he worried things
would stay that way.

“Does your family approve of you
boxing?” he asked to fill the cool silence. Three locusts climbed up his pant
leg. He moved his hand over them, and they dropped to the floor.

“Don’t have much family,” she said.
“Where you learn to wrap hands? They teach you that in magic school?”

“My uncle took me to fights in
Chenja,” he said, “when I was too young to know better. I wrapped his hands.”

“You got soft hands. You aren’t a
fighter. You never fought?”

“I don’t believe in violence.”

“You ain’t answered the question.”

He finished taping her bad hand. He
squeezed her fist in his palm. “There, that good?”

She made fists with both hands. “I
been taped worse.”

“I’m sure,” Rhys said. He hesitated.
If she had had a proper husband, or a brother, or a son, that man would have
told her not to fight. He would have taken care of her. “You shouldn’t fight
with that hand,” he repeated.

“I been doing it a long time. It’s
fight or die where I’m from. Sometimes you have to run away just to live. I
suppose you know something about that.”

Rhys did not answer.

“I don’t mind you’re black,” she
said, magnanimously.

“It doesn’t matter what we mind,”
Rhys said. “God sorts all that out.”

“Our God says your god is false.”

“They’re the same God.” He had not
always believed that, even when he pressed his head to the ground six times a
day in prayer and intoned the same litany in a dead language, the language of
Umayma, brought down from the moons with the Firsts at the beginning of the
world:
In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and
Merciful…

For years he had believed what the
Imams told them, that Nasheenians were godless infidels who worshipped women
and idols brought in from dead worlds, worlds blighted by God for their own
idolatry. But when the muezzin called the prayers here, those who were faithful
went to the same mosque he did with the other magicians, prayed in nearly the
same way, and spoke in the same language—God’s language—though his birth tongue
was Chenjan, and theirs, Nasheenian.

They were all Umaymans, the people
from the moons who had waited up there a thousand years while magicians made
Umayma half-habitable—all but the Mhorians, Ras Tiegans, the Heidians, and the
two-hundred-odd Drucians, who had come later. Survivors of other dead worlds,
worlds out of the darkest parts of the sky.

In the mosque, forehead pressed
against the floor, Rhys never understood the war. It was only when he raised
his head and saw the women praying among him, bareheaded, often bare-legged, shamelessly
displaying full heads of hair and ample flesh, that he questioned what these
women truly believed they were submitting to. Certainly not the will of God. On
the streets he saw widowed women reduced to begging, girls like this one
earning money with blood, and bloated women coming in from the coast after
giving birth to their unnatural broods of children. This was the life that
Chenja fought against. This godlessness.

Whenever the bakkie got sick or the
milk soured, his mothers would blame “those godless Nasheenians, daughters of
demons.”

“Rhys?”

He looked up from the outrider’s
hands to see Yah Reza in the doorway. A dozen fungus beetles skittered past her
into the room. The outrider flinched.

“Yah Tayyib needs you in surgery,”
Yah Reza said.

Rhys squeezed the girl’s fist a
final time. “Luck to you,” he said.

“We have some visitors come to see
you boxers,” Yah Reza said. “You up for it?” She was slipping further into
whatever vernacular the girl spoke.

“What sort of visitors?” the girl
asked.

Rhys stood, and put away the tape.
He walked toward the door.

“The foreign kind. They don’t bite,
though, so far as I can tell.”

“Yeah, that’s fine, then.”

Yah Reza clapped her hands. “Come.”

Rhys turned past the magician and
walked into the dim outer corridor. He saw a cluster of figures outside
Husayn’s locker room and paused to get a look at them.

Two black women wearing oddly cut
hijabs spoke in low tones. Though the hijabs were black, their long robes were
white, and dusty along the hem. They wore no jewelry, and instead of sandals
they wore black boots without a heel.

Despite their complexions, he knew
they were not Chenjan, or even Tirhani. They were too small, too thin,
fine-boned, and the way they held themselves—the way they spoke with heads
bent—was not Chenjan or Tirhani but something else.

One of them looked out at him and
ceased speaking. From across the long hall, he saw a broad face with high
cheekbones, large eyes, and dark brows. It was a startlingly open face, as if
she was not used to keeping secrets. Her skin was bright and clear and smoother
than any he’d seen save for the face of a child. She was old, he knew, by her
posture and her height, but the clarity of her skin made him want to call her a
girl. It was not the face of a woman who had grown up in the desert or even a
world with two suns. Unless she was the daughter of a rich merchant who had
kept her locked in a tower in some salty country, hidden from the suns by dark
curtains and filters for a quarter century, she was not from anywhere on
Umayma.

“You’re very young to be a man,” she
said, and laughed at him. Her accent was strange—a deep, throaty whir swallowed
all of her vowels, and when she laughed, she laughed from deep in her chest. It
was a boisterous sound, too loud to come from a woman with such a narrow chest.

“You’re not from Nasheen,” he said.

“Nor are you.”

She was not from anywhere in the
world. But that was impossible. The Mhorians had been the last allowed refuge
on Umayma, nearly a thousand years before. They had brought with them dangerous
idols and belief in a foreign prophet, but they claimed to be people of the
Book, and custom required that they be given sanctuary. It was a custom soon
discarded, though, and the ships that followed the Mhorians were shot out of
the sky. Their remains had rained down over the world like stars.

Were these women people of the Book?

“You’re an alien,” he said,
tentative, a question.

She laughed again, and the laughter
filled the corridor. “Your first?”

He nodded.

“Not the last, I hope,” she said.

And then Yah Reza and the outrider
entered the hall and blocked his view, and Rhys turned away and walked quickly
past a bend in the corridor, where he could no longer hear the alien woman’s
voice.

The memory of her laugh tugged at
something inside him, something he thought he’d left back in Chenja. He wanted
to pull back her hijab and run his fingers through the black waves of her
unbound hair. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. He had been too long
in Nasheen.