A name at last. And an exarch, no less.
Highest of the governing caste, they followed circuits of their own, moving from city to city to oversee the legal affairs of the most eminent Houses. This one was probably here about some oversight in the records of one of his recent trials, and wasn’t that just like one of the governing caste to sit around half a year sending summons just to have a handful of questions answered? Meoraq grunted again, less politely, and walked on toward the gate.
Behind him, the sentries conferred in uneasy mutters. The one who had called him by name now called out again, saying, “Have you a message for me to carry, honored one?”
“I do not ask my brothers under the Blade to carry my messages,” Meoraq replied, still walking.
It was a rare thing for a sentry to hear himself addressed as brother by a Sheulek and it gave these three pause enough that Meoraq had nearly reached the outer gate before they tried again.
“When shall I tell Exarch Ylsathoc you will see him?”
“Name any hour that plea
ses you,” said Meoraq, drawing his kzung to strike against the gate. “But any lie is a lie before God and you must answer for it. If I choose to see this man you speak of at all, it will be in my own time.”
“I mark you, sir. “T
he sentry sighed, rubbing at the bony ridges over his brows in a dejected manner. “I only give the message I am given.”
The sentries retreated and Meoraq was given a few moments in the relatively dry pass-way to kick the worst of the mud from his boots while the
gatekeeper finished locking them in and turned around. He made an offensively cursory salute, which Meoraq immediately forgave since he also offered both a flask of twice-brewed nai and to carry Meoraq’s pack. The drink was hot and strong and good—Sheul’s love in a swallow, as his father often said—and it was difficult to bear in mind that he would have as much nai as he wished once he was settled, but this flask would be all the gatekeeper could claim until the end of his shift. A Sheulek had the right to seize whatever goods he desired of any man he wished, but Meoraq did try not to be an ass.
“Suppose I should ask your name,” grunted the gatekeeper, striking a lamp. “See your bands and the seal of your blades and all the rest of that ribbony shit, but I’ve had that over-groomed slaveson bleating in my face six times today alone and if you aren’t the Uyane he wants, by God and Gann, you’re still the man he’ll get.”
Meoraq grunted, flexing his spines forward to show some degree of acknowledgement, but he had no intention of seeing anyone until he’d had a bath and a hot meal.
The rest of the walk through the pass-way was comfortably quiet. The
gatekeeper made a mutter when the urge came on him, but like Meoraq’s own mutterings were so often apt to be, they were not made in expectation of answers. The flask passed back and forth between them freely, and Meoraq never refused it, although he did limit himself to sparing sips. By the time they had reached the inner gate, it was down to the dregs and bitter with coarse, smoky grounds.
“Keep it,” grunted the
gatekeeper when Meoraq tried to return it. “I see you’ve not got one and that’s a hard lack when the weather turns.”
“I do not ask the gate to make provision when the temple summons me,” said Meoraq, and firmly held out the flask.
The gatekeeper snorted humor as he brought out his keys. “Ask for a flask from that crowd and they’ll bring you the finest jeweled
cup
your eyes will ever clap to. Priests. They think worth is in riches, not use. Hear me and mark well,” he went on, just as if he were a training master and Meoraq a boy on his field. “A thing is not what it looks like, but what it
does
. Finest priestliest cup in the world won’t keep nai hot in its belly on a long walk in the rain.”
“I mark,” said Meoraq, amused.
The gatekeeper grunted again, swinging the door wide open. He bellowed for an usher then turned in the same breath to give the proper formal farewell, since little ears were around to hear them: “Tothax is yours, honored one. Show mercy to us.”
Meoraq raised the flask as he would raise his sabk in the arena, then slung its strap around his neck and walked on, smiling.
* * *
One city was very much like another, each one being made after
Oracle Mykrm’s design at the Prophet’s direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the busy streets of the inner ring with his usher hurrying to keep ahead of him.
Th
is was the living body of any city: the inner ring, where farmers and cattlemen met abbots and oracles, where merchants ruled over lords and the taxman ruled over all. Voices struck out on every side—hailing friends, hawking wares, protesting price—until they all came together in a great cursing, laughing, chanting wave of chaos. After so many days alone with nothing to see but the rain and the empty road, the thousand sights and sounds and smells of the city were both welcome and abrasive. They were close enough to the terrace that the grey shine of true light could be seen if Meoraq looked to his left down the long rows of shopfronts, but if he looked to his right, orderly rows of hanging lamps burned a far brighter path deeper into the protected city and that was how he turned as soon as he reached the wide archway that led to Xi’Tothax—heart of Tothax—the Temple district.
Gradually, the crowds
loosened and the clamor faded. The many noisy bodies became a few strolling priests and even fewer scampering boys. Meoraq slowed his long strides to let his particular boy take a proper place before him.
The Temple gates were closing as he neared them, but the watchmen posted there gave the sabks riding at Meoraq’s arms a glance and opened them right up again.
“Exarch Ylsathoc—” one of them began, bowing, but shut his mouth at Meoraq’s upraised hand. He basked in the warmth of their uncomfortable silence as his usher exchanged himself for one of the temple’s own boys and then he walked on.
“I will meet with the abbot,” he said to his new boy,
making certain the watchmen at the gates could hear. “And him alone.”
The usher, oblivious to everything but the naked blades adorning Meoraq’s harness, gave breathless obedience and set off.
Meoraq followed, thinking pleasantly vindictive thoughts of the faceless Exarch Ylsathoc pacing himself into a frothing fury in some priestly corner of the temple, and it was some time before he realized he was not being led to the cloister, but to the stronghold. He started to say something about it being the custom to show a Sheulek to his chambers before all else, but turned the half-formed sound to a wordless grunt instead. He had said he would meet with the abbot, so the boy was by-Gann taking him to the abbot and if he went there tired and wet and muddy as a cattleman, he had only his own peevishness to blame for it.
‘Life is filled with small lessons,’ thought Meoraq, casting a dour eye up at the soot-black ceiling
and through it, to Sheul’s ever-watchful gaze. ‘I hear You, O my Father, and I am humble at Your instruction, but just once I would like to indulge a mortal failing without having to learn from it.’
Sheul did not reply.
The boy brought him into the hold as far as the doors to the Halls of Judgment and there delivered him with great importance to an amused council guard. They waited, showing each other the proper motions of dominance and submission with one eye on the boy until he was entirely gone. Immediately after the closing of the door, the guard dropped his arm mid-genuflection and gave Meoraq a slap to the chest.
“Ssh, you’re wet!” he said, shaking out his hand.
“It’s raining. Or has been. Ten days and nights. Here.” Meoraq thrust his damp, muddy pack maliciously into the other man’s arms. “You can carry that.”
“You are a low man, Raq.”
“The man who walks in the sight of Sheul walks the high path at every hour,” Meoraq replied piously and walked around the low wall separating them to help himself to the guard’s cup. Also nai, but quite cold. Meoraq drank it anyway, fingering thoughtfully at his new flask. “How are you, Nkosa?”
“Walking, working and getting dipped. Guess that means I can’t complain.”
Nkosa folded his arms and watched as Meoraq forced the last bitter swallow down and turned the empty cup over on the wall.
They were
somewhat related, Nkosa’s mother having been a servant in a house where Meoraq’s father had once stayed on a circuit. She claimed him for the sire, and even though she carried no scars to prove it, when the baby opened up male, Rasozul had paid for the boy’s placement at a training hall (or whatever passed for one in a city like Tothax). Of course, the woman had been swiftly married to one of her own caste, the man whose name Nkosa carried. Meoraq had known nothing of this until their first meeting, when Nkosa rather shyly asked if he was by chance related to Rasozul and the whole story had come out. Meoraq had seen no reason to query his father for confirmation. The Uyanes were Sheulek all the way back to the founding of the House; it was inevitable that he should find blood-kin. Really, it was a wonder he didn’t find more of them.
“You’re late,”
Nkosa said now, cocking his head to a censuring angle.
“Impossible.”
“You come through twice a year, early sowing and second reaping, regular as a cattleman bathes or an abbot shits. Last harvest was a quarter-brace ago. You’re late.”
“A Sheulek moves at God’s hour.”
“Mm. Was it a woman?” Nkosa asked, with just a hint of wistfulness. During their infrequent and much-enjoyed chats together, he had confided that he had stood twelve years of the seventeen required of a Sheulek’s training before he had been culled, but he was still a bastard, even if he was one of Rasozul’s, and there never was much hope of him being called higher than he stood now. “It was my mother’s doing,” he liked to sigh at the end of this confession. “If only she’d been presented to him as a daughter of the House instead of some linen-girl who helped him rumple up the sheets before she changed them, I’d be wearing a set of my own blades.” Such things were not supposed to factor in a Sheulek’s selection, but of course they did. Politics had no place in Sheul’s sight, but this was Gann’s world.
“There was no woman,” said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul’s granting and never entered his mind.
“Was it two women?”
“No.”
“Ten?”
“No
,” said Meoraq, grinning. “Although I appreciate your high opinion of me.”
“I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night,” sighed
Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.
“And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right,” said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, “but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best.”
“I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten.” Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. “I suppose you heard I married.”
“No. It was only rumor when I was here last.”
“Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something,” he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. “It’s been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead.”
Meoraq frowned.
Nkosa noticed and snorted. “It’s not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it’s just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we’re kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?”
Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he sai
d merely, “How does she suit you?”
“Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father’s wife and the servants.
I hardly know her.”
“Your women share rooms with the servants?”
“We don’t all have Houses, Raq,” said Nkosa with a snort. “Some of us just have homes. But she’s all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her.”
“Your father really should have explained that to you years ago,” Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave
Nkosa a comradely tap and said, “Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—”
“Y
ou are such an idiot,” snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.
The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles.
Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn’t hot enough to steam. “
What
did you say?”
Nkosa
opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.