woof
of air, he went down to his knees.
We’d been fighting for several furious minutes in an al ley, swinging crazily, our missed blows hissing like cane switches through the night air and hammering like mallets against the ground. Flamelight from the tall torches that we’d pounded into the ground prior to our clash danced over our sweating bodies.
I felled Alliak and stepped away from him. The crowd watched askance as Alliak rose with a grimace.
“The series of moves that I just used”—I panted, address ing the gathered men—“is called zahi hawass merensen: water crashing down the chute. Dragonmaster apprentices use it while fighting one another in Arena. I’ll do it again, slowly, and then
you
can try it against me. If you’re not afraid.” I pointed to a big, broad-bellied man who looked as if he’d move as slow as setting gruel and sooner die than admit to being afraid of a woman.
Everyone was taken aback by my speech; idle spectators don’t expect, nor want, to be drawn into the drama they’re watching. I’d thrown them off balance, especially as I was a woman, and a woman who was fighting. They stared at me for several heartbeats; some of them hastily turned away, as if I were doing something shameful. The man I’d pointed to looked confounded; should he leave? Should he stay? Why him? What was going on?
Alliak could have nodded at the man in that noncom mital way men often have with one another, but he just stood scowling at nothing in particular. He’d agreed to par ticipate only because Tansan had strongly encouraged him to do so and, I suspect, because of the opportunity to take a few swings at me.
I raised my staff and nodded at him to attack again. He looked ill pleased and obeyed with a little more force than was necessary.
A few of our spectators left. Most moved back a bit but stayed to watch, giving themselves enough distance to readily leave should they so choose. But Alliak and I were a diversion, a good story to talk about later. Entertainment didn’t happen often for rishi, so why pass it up?
More boys and men gathered, to see what the commotion was about.
As the crowd grew,Alliak’s attacks seemed less of a mock fight and more like the real thing. Several times I bellowed at him to stop, so I could explain to the crowd the position a leg should be in, that a groin might be protected, or the stance of the torso, to shield the heart. He always stopped with ill grace. I’d use Piah as a sparring partner next time.
The crowd continued to swell.
When I eventually drew my chosen participant into the torchlight, I had to request that those in front crouch down, so that those in the back could see. With the larger crowd had come acceptance of the spectacle; aping a great fighter, the big man swaggered into the light, flexing his muscles to hoots of encouragement.
I took several rather heavy blows that I could have dodged, and there were many cheers and guffaws from the crowd. I parried and dodged the rest, though; with his great arms, the man was capable of crippling me. He fought stoutly, with heart but little skill; when I’d had enough, I swept his feet out from under him, and the crowd roared good-naturedly. I bowed to my opponent and held the posi tion while he lumbered to his feet, panting. After a pause, he chose to make light of the situation, grinned, and theat rically returned the bow. He received several claps on his broad shoulders as he returned to the crowd.
“Zahi hawass merensen.” I projected my voice so all could hear. The group was comprised mainly of men and boys—all rishi, Clutch serfs—but several women and young girls hovered at the back. The spectators settled down again and waited for me to continue. “Zahi hawass merensen: water crashing down the chute. Those words are comprised of seven hieratics, the first of which is water.”
I approached one of our guttering torches; at its base lay several lumps of charcoal from an arbiyesku fire. I bent, picked one up, and I scribed upon the back of the near est tenement the hieratic for water: three cursive parallel lines.
A moment of astonishment in the crowd, followed swiftly by swelling fear: The Emperor forbade all Djimbi from knowing how to read and write, and the punishment for a Djimbi doing so was decapitation.
Heart pounding, I spoke, voice clear and strong.
“We’re a free people, free from hunger and Temple. Now we need to free ourselves from ignorance. A staff that can strike a blow to the body can also be used to strike a blow to the mind: We can burn the ends of our staffs and use them as quills. We won’t be afraid of the scholar’s art, no more than we are of the swordmaster’s. In this Clutch,
our
Clutch, we’ll claim the power of reading and writing for ourselves.”
The silence that followed was so complete I could hear every sputter of flame from the torch warming my face, an arm’s length from where I stood. Trembling a little, I turned back to the tenement wall.
“This is Nieth,” I said as charcoal rasped over wood. “Nieth means things are equal. It’s comprised of the sym bols for bow—here—and arrow and heart—here and here— because when the heart is centered, as an arrow fits into a bow, it’s balanced. Nieth.”
I turned around again.
They were watching closely, realization dawning on their faces: They were learning a forbidden skill, and no one was going to stop them. No one, ever again.
They were realizing the full extent of their freedom.
Though I saw the same epiphany light other faces over the weeks that followed, it’s the memory of that first night that I treasure most: my charcoal glyphs scribing the breadth, width, and depth of possibility that awaited them. It wasn’t just glyphs I was drawing upon the walls. I was writing a whole new future.
Days were swallowed by nights. My sparring partners varied: Sometimes Piah accompanied me, sometimes Myamyo, sometimes Keau. Occasionally I brought old Yimtranu with me, the crone from the Poultice Zone with whom Savga and I had boarded. She was a font of medici nal lore, and the knowledge she shared with the women and children who clustered at the crowd’s fringes was re ceived like water upon a drought-blasted land. Mothers thirsted for cures for their children’s festering cuts and ear infections, for ways to alleviate fevers, dull pain, ease childbirth. Yimtranu showed them what healing plants they could forage in the savanna and jungle, now that Temple daronpuis wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—flog them for practicing pagan arts. Sometimes old women in the crowd would re member things Yimtranu had forgotten: Slowly knowledge was resurrected. Liberated. Shared.
Each day I worked. Sometimes Savga worked alongside me, if I was in the arbiyesku. But there was so much work to be done, and I drove myself so relentlessly, I wasn’t in the arbiyesku three days out of eight. Trees had to be hewn and transported from the jungle’s edge. Bonfires had to be kept lit. Land had to be tilled, vegetables dug up, water fetched. Brooders that had begun secreting death wax had to be collected from the egg stables and convinced—by means of hobbles and stakes—to hunker down amongst the bonfires in the warehouse.
My debilitating venom-withdrawal attacks had to be suf fered through, and my yearnings for dragonsong.
With every sleep I dreamed of Jotan Bri and the ec stasy on her face as she’d offered herself to Sak Chidil’s venomous dragon. Since I’d imbibed the dragons’ poison in her mansion, a hole had ripped open in my soul, and I feared—how I feared; or was it hoped?—that I would weaken, and that like Jotan I’d find some way, any way, to regularly indulge in the sensual numinosity of venom and dragonsong.
So my new addiction became this: Every day I worked, and every night I roamed the Clutch, drawing listeners as I disseminated fighting and writing skills, Yimtranu’s heal ing lore, and my radical ideas. That’s what an addict does: replaces one obsession for another. Work replaced venom. Teaching, dragonsong.
People came to see me. They came by the clawfuls. I was a curious mixture of entertainment, propaganda, novelty, and erudition. I inspired; I outraged; I educated; I empow ered. Me, the aosogi-via who wore a bayen man’s jerkin and leather breeches. Me, the One-eared Radical who preached against the oppression of women and Djimbi and the bar barity shown dragons.
I could
feel
the Clutch changing. Its pulse was beat ing faster, its muscles flexing, its bones growing stronger, straighter. The changes frightened me, even though change had been what I’d wanted. Change embraces the unknown, the unpredictable; few of us readily embrace either. I, alas, proved no different from most in this regard. So I kept busy doing what needed to be done. Yes. Yes. I was do ing
good
. I kept busy and exhausted, because exhausted, I fell asleep quickly, like plummeting off a cliff, and had no time to worry, to wonder, to fear. To crave. I worked and I worked, and that work was my shield that protected me against both my base needs and the changes I was pro voking. Frightening, vast changes that affected not just a Clutch, but an entire nation.
Don’t think on it.
Work.
As I worked, myazedo rebels were flown in from Chinion’s other camps. I saw them sometimes—gaunt, wildhaired, and keen-eyed—listening from the back of the night crowds that I drew. Sometimes I saw hard-looking aosogi men lurking there, too: ikap-fen operatives from Liru. Dragonmaster Ordipti’s apprentices, when given leave from the confines of the heavily guarded destrier stables to search for female company, also squatted amongst the rishi gathered before me; the apprentices’ old whip scars glistened like white snakes upon their bodies. Groups of Forsaken were brought to Xxamer Zu from their Hamlets, for their own safety and to provide the Great Uprising with much-needed labor; I saw them, too, in my crowds, telltale clay disks pierced through their lower lips.
During my nightly roving I also learned while I taught. I gleaned information about what was happening throughout our nation and beyond: Xxelteker corsairs were suddenly thick on the Derwent Sea, plundering Archipelagic ships. In the southwest and northeast of Malacar, Clutch Bashinn and Clutch Maht were harried again and again by the mysterious Chinion’s myazedo rebels. Granaries and crop fields were torched. Incendiaries were hurled into the bas tions where the overseers lived. Kratt was still in Bashinn upon the Ashgon’s orders, and was suffering heavy losses from the rebels’ attacks. And, too, I learned when the Ash gon deployed a regiment of holy soldiers to Bashinn, so Kratt could return to Re. Clutch Maht no longer had a bull dragon; the Ashgon didn’t bother to send soldiers
there
. What was the point? A huge success: In essence, Clutch Maht now belonged to the myazedo leader, Chinion.
In Lireh, the rebels who called themselves Kindlers disobeyed Temple curfews and harassed Temple soldiers. Temple responded with beatings and arrests. The Kindlers rejoined with murder. In a marble palace in Liru, an ebani— her name unknown to history—poisoned the lord who kept her. Overnight no one was safe: Servants poisoned their lords and ladies with abandon, and inadvertently poisoned one another and themselves when aristocrats demanded that their domestics taste their food before they did.
Skirmish after skirmish, death after death, arson after ar son: Decades of festering resentment erupted into purulent brutality in Liru and elsewhere. The nation was intoxicated by insurrection, went mad with murder.
It wasn’t all
my
doing. No. It had existed before me, all that violence, that primal need for freedom. I couldn’t be blamed for the deaths, the pain, the loss and grief. Please, no. Surely, no. I couldn’t.
Work.
Work.
Drown my worries in exhaustion. Divert my fears. Deny my cravings.
Like a magnet I was drawn to the pottery clan of Xxamer Zu. At the time I didn’t realize it, but looking back, it’s clear: my night teachings took me closer and closer to fleshand-blood family. Closer to my roots. Until one night I saw my mother in the crowd.
My mind went blank; Piah’s staff connected hard against my back. I went down. Blacked out. When I came to, I’d been rolled faceup. A circle of women surrounded me, my mother amongst them.
Her hair: glossy as a wild animal’s, falling to her waist. Mahogony, shot with gray. Her eyes, trapped by wrinkles. Concerned and a little frightened.
“Would you want water?” she asked. Her voice was deeper than my mother’s, and raspy, as if she smoked wa terpipes like a man. Indeed, I could smell oily tobacco leaf on her. “Can you sit?”
“I thought . . . You’re not . . .” I struggled to gather my wits. “Who are you?”
Lips: black from a lifetime of sucking slii stones to dull hunger. Teeth: cracked or missing. A canker sore on her upper lip. Papery hands, soft on my arm. “I am Mawenab, from the danku. If you can stand, teacher, you should join us for the night. He hit you hard, hey.”
She shot a withering look at Piah, hovering above the crouched women who protected me from the press of the crowd.
“Wasn’t your fault, Piah,” I croaked. “I wasn’t paying at tention. You taught us all a good lesson tonight.”
He smiled gratefully and looked a question at me. Would I come back to the arbiyesku? Or stay?
I was not brave; my first instinct was to flee with him. But then I gave in to weariness, to the ache in my heart and the ache where he’d struck me.
“I’ll stay in the danku tonight,” I said, and my pulse sped up, for it felt as if I were divulging a shameful secret. Heat surged up my cheeks.
He nodded, and the danku women clucked about me, pushing the gawkers back, easing me upright, bashful in and honored by my presence. With an arm draped about two of the women, I was taken into the danku.
I saw a hint of my sister in the face and carriage and full-hipped sway of an adolescent girl walking before me. I saw a glimpse of my mother in the chin gestures of an old woman who had gums as wrinkled and black as raisins. I heard Mother’s laugh from the woman on my left. My chest hurt so much, I was certain my heart was failing.
Up rickety wooden stairs, into the danku women’s barracks. Gentle smiles, fleeting touches. Water. Food. Toddlers staring wide-eyed at me.
They didn’t recognize my mother in me. I was bursting with words I was too frightened to utter: My mother was born here! You’re my navel auntie, my greatmother, my niece. But I couldn’t reveal my identity to them; I was the One-eared Radical, respected for how I inspired, for what I taught. They knew me and accepted me as that, and I was afraid, so afraid, of being turned away should they learn I was more—or less—than what they thought I was. I’d been turned away by kith and kin too often in the past. I wasn’t brave enough to risk that happening again, even at the cost of forgoing the very family I was afraid to lose. Don’t ask me where the reason is in that. There is none. Only fear.
See? I’m not brave and admirable, when stripped to my core. But I wonder: Are any of us?
“Sleep now,” Mawenab rasped, her old-lady hands strok ing my brow. I was stretched upon a sleeping mat; the wine I’d been given had been spiked with something. “Sleep.”
“Mama,” I whispered. And I slept.
I awoke late morning to shouts. I at once remembered where I was, and bolted upright with a gasp. The barracks was empty; the clamor was coming from outside. My mouth felt as sticky as drying sap.
With a thumping head I clambered to my feet, staggered to the door, and flung it open. I stopped, momentarily blinded by light; beneath my feet the stairs jiggled as some one rapidly mounted them.
“Teacher! Teacher!”A small hand grasped mine. I opened my eyes; it wasn’t Savga, but a girl about her age, and her eyes glistened with excitement. “A bull has hatched! Come quickly; they’re taking it into the stables; we’re all going to see it!”
Women were ululating and clinging to one another, swinging around and around. Young men were vaulting off one another’s backs. Old folk were beaming, weeping, lift ing arms to the sky in praise of the One Dragon. Somehow, I’d come full circle back to my ninth year in the pottery clan of Clutch Re, for I’d last seen such joy and celebration when the dragonmaster had honored our clan by choosing Dono to join his apprenticeship.
Old Mawenab—my navel auntie—came partway up the steps. Tears coursed down her wrinkled cheeks. She held my hands within her soft ones. “Join us, teacher,” she said quietly. “Our joy is yours. Bull wings have hatched upon Clutch Xxamer Zu.”
“One of our cocoons?” I sounded as stupid as I felt.
“We are blessed, teacher. Truly.”
We joined hundreds of others who were surging toward the old daronpuis’ stockade. My heart pounded overloud in my ears. I was too stunned to feel the fierce triumph that was rightfully mine. A queer sort of disbelief disengaged me instead.
“I did it,” I murmured as I was jostled to and fro by elbows and knees and feet. I couldn’t see where we were going, not really: thatch roofs, tenement buildings, the red bricks of caravansary walls. A crush of people.
I realized we’d reached the market square only when I saw the domes of the temple looming before me. It was frightening, the surge and swell of the crowd. I felt as if I were drowning in it.
I was separated from Mawenab in the crush. For a mo ment I felt panicked and grief-stricken. I looked from face to unknown face, seeking her. She was gone. Lost to me.
No. Not lost. I knew where she was, knew where the danku would always be. I had met my navel kin; they’d sheltered me, fed me, accepted me. I had their respect. That was enough. My panic turned to relief. I could go celebrate my victory with my family.
And family, I now knew, is not necessarily those who share one’s blood.