Shadowed By Wings (31 page)

I could stand it no longer. I rose, went to the cool, dew-beaded stone walls, and licked. The dust-gritted pearls of condensation at once disappeared upon the swollen surface of my tongue. Lizardlike, I continued lapping the walls. It wasn’t long before others copied me.

With our thirst not so much satiated as masked by the dampness now in our mouths, we returned to our divans. Greatmother, I noticed, had not permitted herself the dew on the stone walls. She sat rigidly staring at nothing, eyes slightly wider than usual. Her lips were parted, the gap of her missing front teeth visible to all.

We waited, and with each passing heartbeat, the tension and our thirst climbed higher. At last, one of the new women spoke. She addressed Misutvia.

“Who will do it, then? Ask for water?”

We all looked at the door. On the other side stood two Retainers, burly criminals permitted to assault us at scheduled dates as remuneration for their service to fortress, Temple, and dragon.

“Naji will do it,” Misutvia said.

“Why me?” I cried.

“Someone must, else we expire from thirst.”

“I went to Prelude. You do this.”

She shook her head. One of the new women whimpered.

“And what if the Retainers’ answer is rape?” Greatmother said, and her voice husked from her parched throat like sand rasping over a reed mat. “Or simply an order to get back inside and remain silent? Then what has Naji gained for her audacity? Nothing but shame and punishment. No, we stay. We wait. It is our duty.”

Sutkabde neither nodded nor disagreed. She merely stared at Greatmother. One of the new women began weeping.

Misutvia met my eyes. “I’d rather know I’m to die, and suffer in gaining the knowledge, than have death creep gradually over me.”

“Isn’t that what happens here regardless?” gasped the weeping woman. “Death by slow degrees.”

Misutvia colored and pursed her lips.

“Our duty here,” Greatmother rasped, “is to serve Temple. We know not in our ignorance the great workings of holy minds, of holy ways. We will sit here and wait for the eunuchs’ return.”

“We’re prisoners, not acolytes,” Misutvia growled. “I have no duty to Temple. I don’t willingly serve it. I’m enslaved.”

“You have lain with the dragons,” Greatmother breathed. “You are privy to divinity. You are blessed by being permitted such a hallowed touch, by performing such a sacred service.”

“I’m a prisoner!” Misutvia barked.

“You deny that you’ve experienced divinity?” Greatmother asked.

“Of course I do. We suffer nothing but hallucinations provoked by the venom. There’s nothing divine about whoring to a dragon.”

“A hallucination does not preclude the divine, but is merely the form the divine dialogue takes,” Greatmother rasped. “As recipients of such, as the dragons’ chosen servants, our duty is to submit and obey.”

“To rape? Humiliation? Death?”

“We earn with our suffering the reward of lying with the dragons. The blood we spill cleanses us, washes away our impurities.”

“You’re mad to believe such.”

“If I did not believe such, Misutvia, how could I daily submit to all I’m subjected to?” Greatmother said, chin lifted, blood-bathed eyes unblinking. “Who is mad, you who submit for no reason, or I who submit out of faith?”

Misutvia stared, words eluding her, and I suddenly saw myself for what I’d become.

“Greatmother’s right,” I said slowly. “If we don’t want to be here, why do we remain? That door”—I pointed a bony, pale finger—“is unlocked. It’s guarded by unarmed men. There are seven of us to their two. At night, when their snores rattle the door, what’s ever stopped us from overcoming them?”

“With what?” one of the new women asked. “Look how feeble we are.”

“We use those.” Misutvia nodded at the art easels. “We break them apart, use the wood as bludgeons and stakes.”

I frowned. “The Retainers would hear us smashing the easels. They’d come in and stop us before we were armed.”

“We wrap the easels in carpet before breaking them apart, place pillows over the door to muffle the sound.” Misutvia’s color was high.

I licked my lips. “How do we break them?”

“With our feet. The easels are old, the joints rickety. I’ve checked.”

“You’ve thought of this before,” I said, and Misutvia nodded slowly. “Then why … ?”

But no sooner did I start asking the question than I stopped. I knew why she’d never suggested it before: Revolt required collective effort, required teamwork and collusion. Until now, we’d been too set in our submissive ways, too focused on gathering transgressions against each other. We’d been unified by our sudden abandonment by the eunuchs. The old order was broken.

The other reason why Misutvia had never before suggested revolt was because to escape was to turn away from the dragons’ numinous embrace. Even if she scoffed at the divinity of the rite, she was not immune to venom’s addictive power and pleasures. Where else but here would these women ever have the opportunity to offer themselves to a dragon’s tongue?

Greatmother echoed my thought by speaking it aloud. “Once you leave this fortress, you leave forever the dragons’ grace. Never again will you be lifted to the great world of light that lies behind our paltry destinies. Never again will you be embraced by celestial glory, merged with bliss. You forgo ecstasy for starvation in the jungle, celestial union for the tear of feral teeth through heart and brain.”

“No,” I countered, heart beating as if I’d recently quaffed venom. “Some onais do this thing, too. They’ve trained the infirm bulls in their care to perform this rite. We could survive the jungle. I’ve survived it before. We could join a convent somewhere. We’d have access to dragons then.”

Misutvia and the three new women gaped at me.

Greatmother shook her head. “You’re forbidden to speak of your former life, Naji. In doing so, you turn the devout away from their duties here, beguile them with your tongue.”

I swallowed, defiance brewing a spume of turmoil in my gut. “My name isn’t Naji. It’s Zarq.”

Silence followed, as great as a sail that a gust has just blown full and taut.

“Zarq,” Misutvia said slowly. “Named after Zarq Car Mano. A woman named after a rebel, then.”

I lifted my chin. “Yes.”

“Extraordinary.”

“Evil,” Greatmother breathed. “Do not listen to the beguiling tongue of evil.”

“You no longer plan to ask the Retainers for water and direction,” Sutkabde breathed. “You plot murder and escape.”

Misutvia and I refused to glance at her.

“Shall we make ourselves bludgeons and stakes, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” Misutvia said, and she smiled for the first time and last time behind those walls. “Let’s arm ourselves.”

SIXTEEN

N
ot only did we break apart the art easels, but I taught the three new women how to break a nose by slamming the heel of a palm against the bridge, a skill I’d learned as a nine-year-old while living in a traveling merchant’s train. They were the strongest of us, those three new women, and the most energetic. They were therefore the most likely to subdue the Retainers and survive. They listened closely, eyes bright.

“If you’re close enough, use your forehead, like so,” I said, and I clasped Misutvia’s temples and, without making contact, demonstrated how to shatter bone and cartilage and stun a victim by slamming forehead against nose. “Remember the testicles: A man’s strength is sapped by a blow to the area. But move fast and decisively, yes?”

Swaying from the effort of so much speech and dizzy from lack of water and ill health, I leaned against a wall to steady myself. We all rested for some time, high-strung yet motionless, eyes flitting to and from the door, guarded on the opposite side by the Retainers. At last, Misutvia spoke.

“We know what to do. We’ll act now, then.”

“Now,” I whispered, heart hammering insanely inside of me, my fingers as charged as lightning.

“Now,” the three new women breathed.

“Kwano the One Snake, the First Father, the progenitor and spirit of all kwano everywhere, I bid you begone,” Greatmother intoned, sanguine eyes riveted upon me. She was uttering the Gyin-gyin, which I’d last heard back in the dragonmaster’s stables on Clutch Re, when Ringus had feverishly murmured the incantation against my mother’s haunt. “I evoke the powers of Ranon ki Cinai, governed by the exalted Emperor Mak Fa-sren—”

Sutkabde wrapped her arms about herself and began rocking, much as a child about to witness the murder of her father might.

Holding our primitive spears with jagged ends thrust forward, we approached the door. Misutvia laid a hand upon the wooden handle.

“We know what to do. Do it fast; don’t hesitate,” she mouthed.

“We can do this,” I said. Nods all about me.

“On the count of eight, I open the door.” She began counting, and for a moment, the room swooped, I tasted death, and my mother’s haunt was an oyster-cold clot in my mouth, lodged at the back of my tongue, trying to thrust its way to freedom.

“Eight,” Misutvia said, and she flung the door open and we spilled forth, wraithlike and murderous.

Our charge was short-lived.

We spun right, left, turning this way and that in confusion, so intent on clubbing and stabbing that we almost fell upon each other with each dizzy turn. We stopped, chests heaving, and looked about in confusion. Cold bumps shivered over my skin.

“There’s no one here,” I gasped.

The gloomy corridor was unlit save for the grassy light crawling through the narrow, ivy-choked casement high up at the corridor’s end.

“There’s no one here,” I repeated, and the reality soared through us on hope-feathered wings. As one, we dashed to the end of the corridor, though by the time Misutvia and I reached it, we were stumbling and wheezing and scarce able to stand upright.

We all stopped and stared in disbelief.

Where the corridor turned right, into what had been another corridor only days before, stood a stone wall. One of the new women reached out with a trembling hand and touched it, checking that it was real.

“We’ve been sealed in,” she whispered. Horror rippled over us and turned my scalp prickly. “There’s no way out.”

We returned to the chambers and shut the door. It felt safer, somehow, to have that door shut.

Misutvia walked straight toward Greatmother, who sat motionless, still droning the Gyin-gyin.

“Close your lips, old woman,” she snapped. “No murder has been done. We’ve been sealed in by stone.”

Greatmother stopped breathing for long moments. Then her chest swelled mightily and she exhaled her words on a rattled breath. “The One Dragon has subverted your evil plans. Now we shall await whatever befalls us next.”

Sutkabde stared at the floor, face expressionless.

Gloom crept through the casements in the chambers and the air grew cool and damp with the promise of rain. A gust slapped broad hosta leaves one against the other, sounding like meat fillets smacked upon a butchering table. I collapsed on a divan, heart and thoughts racing.

I remembered, now, how uneasy the plump eunuch had seemed when last he’d visited us, and how cold, paltry, and ill prepared that evening’s feast had been. His shins had been scraped, too, as if he’d recently fallen … or as if he’d had to clamber over a partially constructed wall to reach us. The water boy had glanced repeatedly over his shoulder, toward the door, the entire time he ladled water into our mouths.

Of course. He’d been afraid he’d be sealed in with us.

Why had we women not been concerned by those subtle yet portentous changes? Especially the greatest change: The mincing eunuch had not led us to the latrines that night, but instead produced two chamber pots and ordered us to use them. Why had we not questioned his hasty explanation that the latrines were undergoing repair and could not be used until morn?

Passivity can be smothering. Passivity can be as lethal as an adder’s poison.

The eunuchs had known, at least three days ago, what was to be our fate. They’d brought us a cursory last meal even as the Retainers were erecting a stone wall to seal us in. Had Greatmother guessed then that something had been amiss? Or had she truly believed, in her unwavering faith, that the latrines were being repaired? And as for the rest of us, how could we not even have heard the activity at the corridor’s end, beyond the chamber’s door?

Little it mattered now.

Outside, a sudden rain squall drummed against frond and leaf alike. My throat clenched at the watery profusion and my swollen tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth as if it were a block of chalk.

“We need water,” I croaked. My eyes fell upon the paint crocks overspilling with urine. “Misutvia. If we pushed three divans over to that wall, and if we stacked them, might we not climb up to the casement and catch water in those crocks?”

“And drink it?” squealed one of the new women.

“We’ve soiled those crocks, we can’t drink from them! And we most certainly can’t consume water unpurified by Temple.”

“Rainwater is clean enough,” I said shortly. “Rishi drink it all the time without Temple’s interference.”

“I am not rishi,” the woman declared, outraged.