Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“But surely,” Samarkar said, “Once you’ve sailed in five or ten times…?”
Kebede shook his head. “They come out and move ’em around.”
Samarkar swallowed unwilling respect. Indeed, the caliphs had been serious about defending it. And were again, it seemed. “How did your grandfather ever take that?”
Temur gave a funny smile and would not look at her. “Starved them out, as I heard it. Or droughted, more precisely. The city was fed by underground aqueducts—called qanats—and my relatives destroyed them. Now it’s probably all hauled water, if you can imagine.”
“Well,” said Kebede, making a judicious smacking sound with lips that Samarkar found, on due reflection, sensuous. “I think I’m glad he didn’t burn it. And those aqueducts are smuggler tunnels now. I’ll draw you a map, but you must memorize it. We can’t risk the watch finding out what we know about them. They’re
your
route back out of the city, too.”
* * *
If Asmaracanda bestrode the world, a regal queen of cities, clothed in shining samite and jeweled in blue stones, the trade town that clutched at her hem was a motley procession of beggars. Patchwork roofs shoved for space behind a palisade of mismatched stone. Samarkar identified red clay tile, slates, thatch from the marshes that—once they rounded the headland—spread off to the horizon north of the ragged range of hills that so elevated the city.
On the north end of the harbor, a far more forbidding headland hulked: bronze-black basalt, streaked with rusty color, at its top a fortification clearly manned and bristling with the iron muzzles of cannon. There was water here, where two great rivers ran together and into the sea, and the hills to the south were thick with orchards and olive trees, vineyards and the white dots of flocks—goats or sheep or some more exotic animal, Samarkar could not determine at this distance.
The piers at least looked as if some central authority maintained them: they were black stone, with bobbing docks defining the slips. Samarkar had changed into men’s plain homespun, strapped her breasts, and hidden her hair under a mustard-colored head wrap such as those some of the sailors wore to keep the sun off and the sweat out of their eyes. She played at hauling a line, but mostly watched as a sleek small boat rowed by a dozen slaves came out to meet them. A man dressed in white with a blue head wrap—as if he were an extension of the city himself—sat at the prow in a folding chair like the one the caliph had affected. Even from this distance he looked bored.
He brought his boat alongside Kebede’s dhow, and Samarkar saw the captain toss him down a bag that clinked musically when he caught it. She wondered if that was a sanctioned—even demanded—payment of fees, or if it was an illicit bribe. It would tell her something about the culture of the place to know, and she resolved to ask Kebede before she left the vessel.
The pilot brought his boat around and struck back toward the harbor. Kebede followed precisely in his wake. Samarkar leaned over the rail with her knee hooked through it like Temur sideways in a saddle, staring down into the sun-streaked water—and pale and dark shadows beneath it, close enough that she could have spit to them, gave the hints of where those ship-killing traps might be. One vessel—pirates? smugglers? a raiding ship of war?—that had tried to do without a pilot had not been lucky; a sun-silvered hulk lay twisted on rocks she could not see, the waves hissing through its lacework hull.
They must have been through the worst of the traps, because Kebede left his helmsman to the task and walked back to her. When he stood at the rail she had hooked her legs through, he hailed her in a common speaking tone that would not carry. “Come, corpse. Time for your coffin.”
Reluctantly, Samarkar cast one more longing look at the dusty corrals of the caravanserais huddled at the base of the hills, the patchwork trading town, the white walls of Asmaracanda rising behind it, the blue water and the western sky lit up pink and gold like a princess’s bridal gown. She sighed and pulled herself into the railing, swinging her outside leg over as her inside foot touched the deck. The ship rose and fell beneath her; she wondered how the motion had ever felt alien.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Kebede nodded. “Just remember they’ll pull you apart between four camels if they catch you inside, if it helps you stay wary.”
Her eyes ached with widening. “What happens if they find the coffins being smuggled in and
don’t
open them?”
“They burn them.” Kebede gave her a level look. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to a body in the Scholar-God’s religion—destruction … Yes, I thought that might make an impression.”
* * *
The coffin was tight and hot in the humidity of the dhow’s hold, and it smelled strongly of salt and faintly of rot. While it lent a certain authenticity to the operation not to use a fresh casket, and while Samarkar’s royal fastidiousness had not survived the sometimes revolting toil of her apprenticeship as a wizard, she would have confessed a preference for a box nobody else had already anointed with the products of their decomposition. Salt gritted under her head—gray salt, sea salt, not the purple salt of home—and the coffin bumped in a most disconcerting fashion as it was rolled off the ship—she assumed—and secreted on a cart with the three others; one, like hers, modified with breathing holes, Temur huddled within; two each packed with salt and the mummified corpse of a true believer.
Lying silently in the darkness, listening to the coffin lid being screwed into place and the raggedly accelerating beat of her heart, had required all her discipline. She wore Uthman dress and a Rahazeen man’s veil, and the cloth binding her breasts seemed to constrict every breath—or perhaps that was just the anxiety provoked by the closeness and stench of her shipping case.
She had wondered how Temur, already once a survivor of vivisepulture, was bearing it. Perhaps it was better for him, coming as he did from a culture with no tradition of coffins. In Samarkar’s experience, they were ritual objects, only briefly used before the fire. She hoped in this case that would not prove prophetic.
Kebede’s warnings and her own uncertainties chased each other through her mind. Could they trust the smugglers to whom Kebede had entrusted them?
She had longed fiercely to be going off with Hsiung and Hrahima to the trade town and the caravanserais. And then she had resigned herself, to destiny and to the plans of the Six Thousand. Surely, if she was not dead yet, it was because they had still some uses for her.
I shall build you a shrine in the Shattered Pillars,
she promised the small gods of her homeland. For a moment, she wondered if—if she lived to do so—a tiny patch of sky in those uninhabited mountains might change.
Concealed airholes or not, the coffin grew only hotter and more close once the shade of the ship’s hold was left behind. They had waited until afternoon to unload, leaving Hsiung and Hrahima plenty of time to begin canvassing the trade town and caravanserais for assistance westward—and also leaving time for the worst heat of midafternoon to begin to fade. Nevertheless, Samarkar was quickly left lying in a puddle of her own sweat. At least the sweat melted the gritty salt, and she supposed if she fainted from heat stress, she—clammy and barely breathing—would make a pretty good impression of a corpse if anybody pried the lid up. Assuming she wasn’t already
actually
a corpse by then.
You are a wizard, Samarkar,
she told herself.
If cold cannot daunt you, why heat?
And it was true. She should be able to find the necessary focus to cool herself, to move the heat outside her body and away. It was simply a matter of meditation, of focus, just as when she had found her power.
Simply. While the coffin bumped and rattled and something slid atop it, making the olive-wood top creak. Samarkar paused a moment to wonder that these desert people would inter their dead in boxes made of wood … but then she remembered the orchards. There were trees here.
She thought of Temur suffering a few panel-intermediated inches away, and wished she could ease his pain at the oppressive heat also.
Rumble of wheels on packed hardpan; smell of hot dust filtering in, even over the resin and salt and putrescence. It seemed as if they rode that cart for a long time, but it might have been only minutes when somebody stopped them, and there were voices. Samarkar held her breath and either heard or fancied she heard the musical click of coins changing hands.
After the hot, dusty, bumpy portion of the journey came the cool, damp, bumpy portion of the journey. Even within the coffin, Samarkar could hear how the echoes of the bearers’ footfalls resonated along endless tunnels, though she lay in a darkness unrelieved even by the flickering lanterns whose burning oil she could faintly smell.
It didn’t take as long as she’d expected—even listening to her own heartbeat contained by the coffin’s walls—but less long as she had expected turned out to be more than long enough. Her feet were always slightly higher than her head, and her head was to the front, so she knew the abandoned qanat still angled down.
Eventually, the quality of the echoes changed. They had emerged into a larger space, and now a widely spiraled stair bore them upward. Samarkar imagined that this was the dry cistern, and that the stair must wind around the outside edge, intended to give access in order to affect repairs or to draw water—no matter how much or how little water remained. But the engineers had not foreseen that an enemy would sever the qanats and that they would never be repaired.
They didn’t climb for long before they entered a close space again: more of the loud, tight sounds of the tunnels. This time, though, they were carried for only a few hundred steps. Some grunting and scraping—and a few hard, painful bangs—indicated that the coffins were being pushed through a close and uneven space. After that, Samarkar thought that ropes were passed through the handles and that the boxes were dragged. It was not the most comfortable of experiences for the passengers.
When that ended, though, the coffins were not lifted again, though Samarkar braced herself against the sides with her hands and winced in anticipation. After a brief pause, she heard the unbelievably welcome sound of screws being backed out of the lid.
Samarkar kept her hands and nose pulled away, counting herself lucky that the men opening her unorthodox mode of transport did not drop the trailing edge of the lid inside the coffin—on top of the occupant—as it scraped off. Blinded, she extended a gloved hand, shielding her eyes with the other. Someone’s strong fingers grasped hers. Someone solid and heavy lifted her to her feet.
When she opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was that they were in another cistern—she presumed another cistern—much like the one she had envisioned from the echoes, complete with the spiraling stair. As her vision cleared with blinking, she found herself looking at a petite Nameless woman whose fragile frame under her masculine robes and indigo veil gave no hint of the unyielding strength Samarkar had just experienced. She was surrounded by a dozen other Nameless warriors, faceless behind veils, swords and long knives ready in their hands.
In her left hand, the woman held a pistol leveled at Samarkar’s abdomen.
15
Edene, clad in long red ghul-woven robes, leaned her head back and let the light of three suns bathe her face, a sweet searing heat that should have blistered skin and blackened the flesh beneath but only warmed her while she wore the ring. The half-healed gouges on her back stung as she filled her lungs. She could draw a fuller breath, it seemed, than she had been able to in months, as if the baby had finally decided to let her get some air inside her.
Besha Ghul huddled in the shadow of the cliff behind her, a conjured darkness shielding the ghul despite Edene’s continuing assurances that in her presence, the sunlight could do the ghulim no harm. Along with Besha stood the three ghul midwives—or perhaps doctors; Edene had not troubled herself to learn their sexes, if they had sexes—who now accompanied Edene everywhere.
At Edene’s right hand stood the djinn, wreathed in blue flames and the captured light of the suns. Overhead, the pallid sky was bright enough to blind an unprotected eye, but Edene could make out its graduated tints of dilute, dusty mauve.
“Do you like the fire, my lady?” the djinn asked.
Edene rested a hand on the sun-warmed curve of her belly, feeling her own flesh deform with each of the infant’s kicks or punches. Another squeezing pain—tiresome things—tightened her back and belly, followed by a sharp popping sensation as if the babe had coughed.
“There is,” she said, “no better thing.”
A rush of hot fluid soaked her legs and bare feet and smoked instantly into nothingness against the burning sand.
* * *
Physicians were everywhere the same. They might not step out of the shadow of the rocks at Edene’s suggestion, but the moment her labor came upon her, all three of the cloaked and hooded ghulim surrounded her, their gray hands supporting her elbows, their clawed feet scattering sand in their haste to hurry her within. Once they were in the tunnels of the city, other ghulim surrounded them—offering water, slipping Edene’s robes from her shoulders and leading her to a chamber with a bathing pool, a birthing chair, and a pallet padded with woven blankets. She imagined the ghulim must steal the materials for their textiles from the same sources where they stole their food—unless somewhere down their secret ways there were people who traded with ghulim. Even if there were, ancient Erem, blasted and sere, offered little in the way of resources—and yet the ghulim were more than adequately supplied.
The ghulim would have ushered the djinn from the birthing chamber, but they had no power to move him where he did not wish to be moved. And so he stood, arms folded, and said nothing unless Edene addressed him directly. Mostly, she did not wish to speak—to him, to the midwives—unless they were physicians—or even to Besha Ghul, hovering so nervously near.
Now the ghulim made Edene squat and probed inside her body with bony fingers, the hooked nails clipped and filed blunt. They bent their fanged jaws together and murmured things she was not meant to hear. They encouraged her to pace, while Besha Ghul brought cool water flavored with exotic fruits and also cups of a nourishing gruel. The incense in the chamber was cinnamon; the lamps were dimmed by yellow horn shades. Edene walked in circles within the stone, and the water flooded out of her, and she felt mysteriously lighter and stronger with every moment that went by.