Golden Daughter (17 page)

He realized to his horror that he was weeping. The men of the Khla clan did not weep! Hastily he dashed his hand across his face, cursing harshly. He cursed himself first, then Sunan, but he felt no better for the cursing. And the tears welled up again, infuriating him still more.

He turned away from the Wood and moved back to the center of the clearing where the Grandmother stood. He did not know what he would do. He could not bear to return to his own body yet. Taking a seat amongst the Grandmother’s roots, he leaned his back against the trunk and stared up into the green-leaf canopy above. “Why have you left me here?” he whispered.

Then, suddenly, a voice he had never heard before spoke.

“I heard you. I heard you calling. I came as fast as I could.”

Jovann was on his feet in an instant. The trunk of the Grandmother Tree was so huge, he could not see who stood on the other side. And there shouldn’t be anyone! This was his world! This was his secret place hidden within the depths of his mind! No one,
no one
should be able to enter here without his invitation, without his knowledge!

His heart in his throat, Jovann cried out in an angry voice, “Who are you? Who is that speaking?”

And someone stepped out from behind the Grandmother Tree. Someone more beautiful than Jovann had ever dared to dream.

She did not speak. She did not need to. Jovann, at first sight of her, felt that his heart was no longer his.

“Who are you?” he gasped.

Slowly she raised a finger to her lips. “Hush,” she whispered, and her voice was like the shush of forest leaves under a gentle rain. “Hush. No names. Names are not safe.”

Jovann stared at her. Then he took a step, his hands outstretched. “How did you come here? How did you find me?”

She did not seem to move, but he could not reach her, could draw no closer to her. She stood beyond his reach. And she said, “No questions either. Your waking body is sick and must heal.”

With that she turned. He realized with a start of horror that she was walking into the Wood beyond the Grandmother’s sheltering reach. “Wait!” he cried. “Where are you going?”

She paused on the edge of the clearing and looked back at him once more. “I have never been able to reach this Wood. Never before now. You led me here. I will find you again. Wait for me.”

“I’ll wait,” he promised. “I’ll wait forever. But please tell me your name!”

She shook her head. Then she stepped into the trees and was gone.

“It takes me three days,” their guide, who introduced himself as Brother Nicho, informed Sairu as they began their ascent of the mountain trail. Morning mist rolled down from the higher slopes, and the going was treacherous from the beginning, even in the lower reaches. “I move swiftly on my own. But all of you and this sick man . . .” Brother Nicho clucked and shook his head. “It will take us five days and more.”

“No. Not five days,” Sairu said. “We’ll make it in three.”

Brother Nicho bowed and bobbed and murmured, “As you wish.” Sairu could see that he did not believe her, that he thought it only a matter of time before this little, unknowing girl learned the hard truth.

But he hadn’t reckoned on Sairu’s smile. Her smile, which encouraged obedience, which pushed and prodded and motivated lagging feet. Exhausted though they all were from a sleepless night, they continued on and on until the sun was quite high and Sairu permitted them an hour’s rest. Then she urged them to their feet, and on into the mountains they climbed. The pace seemed to her unbearably slow. She could not ride but led the mule all the long way, afraid to mount for fear she might fail to see any ruts in the road and accidentally ride over them, which would be disastrous. So far, her sapling-and-sling rig had held together even over the rougher terrain. But she scarcely trusted it and was careful to lead the mule around more difficult passes. When worse came to worst, she made the temple slaves carry the poor stranger for short stretches. But this seemed to cause him more pain even than the jostling he experienced in the sling.

He looked sicker than ever as the sun set. His skin, which was tanned and roughened from years of outdoor living, now wore a sickly sheen, grey and unnatural. Though Sairu ground her teeth, wishing to push her little crew onward even into the darkening evening, she gave the order to rest. She needed to check the injured man’s wounds.

Brother Nicho led them to a place where the road was especially broad, though a steep drop on one side plunged down to a forest far below. It was a safe enough place to pitch their tents, however, and soon the temple slaves had several campfires built and humble meals stewing (of which Brother Nicho took part with great smacking of his lips).

Sairu erected Lady Hariawan’s shelter as always, and after she placed her mistress safely inside and shoved a wafer or two into her hands, she made Tu Syed and Tu Domchu help her carry the injured man inside as well. Then she dismissed them, lit a lamp, and turned to work on the slave’s back.

His wounds were raw and red with fever and infection. Pus had built up under the skin in many places. She sterilized a knife over the flickering flame of her lamp, gliding the blade back and forth through the fire. Then she slid it under the pale skin and released the infected matter.

All this she did without a smile. All this she did with her mind firmly locked against the images of Idrus and his slain companions. But she could feel them, the ghosts of them, pounding at the locks; and she knew that when her work was done she would see their dead faces, and she would sleep little that night.

The poor man moaned, the side of his face pressed into the woven mat beneath him, and his eyelids twitched. He neither slept nor wakened but hovered between the two states. Sairu bandaged his wounds. She lacked the proper herbs to make a salve, but she washed his back as gently as she could, cringing at the sounds he made, then used clean cloths to bind it all. They must reach Daramuti in two more days if there was to be any hope for him.

She dared not roll him over but left him lying on his stomach. It was difficult to read anything of him from the side of his face, twisted as it was in pain. Princess Safiya would find it sufficient, but Sairu struggled.

“He’s no peasant, no servant,” she whispered as she looked at the line of his cheek. His lips curled back, revealing strong teeth. Whoever he was, he ate the choice cuts from among his people. A Chhayan nomad for certain, but a clan leader’s son, she thought. A prince of his kind. How could he have fallen afoul of slavers so very far from Chhayan territory?

He moaned again, and the sound cut her to the heart.

“He longs to Walk,” said Lady Hariawan.

Sairu looked up. Lady Hariawan sat where she had been placed, still holding her uneaten wafers. The flickering light of the lamp played gently on her face save across the hand-shaped burn, which looked alive and full of pain. But her features were as quiet as ever, her eyes watching Sairu’s every move. “He longs to escape the pain. But he must not Walk. Not yet.”

“What do you mean, my mistress?” Sairu asked. “He’s not going anywhere. He is too weak even to stand.”

He moaned again. Lady Hariawan’s eyes flashed. “Help him,” she said. “Help him with the pain.”

The words were as good as a command. Sairu turned back to her patient, momentarily at a loss. She didn’t like the feeling. She was a Golden Daughter. She always knew what to do, when to do it, and how. But here on this dark mountainside, kneeling before such agony, she felt more lost than when the cat had left her in the forest the night before.

She put her hands on the back of the slave’s head. His hair was dirty and matted with blood, but she did not pull away. She closed her eyes and murmured. “The pain is here. In your head. The pain is here. Draw it down.”

She did not know if he heard her, but somehow she thought he did, through the roaring of the fever.

“Draw it down, draw it down,” she said, and moved her hands down to the back of his neck. She felt his body shudder under the movement. “The pain is here beneath my fingers. Draw it down. Draw it down.”

She moved her hands, one onto each of his shoulders, still whispering, “The pain is here. Feel it here. Draw it down, draw it down.” And so she slid her hands down his arms to his elbows, which lay on either side of his body. She felt him shudder again. Gently she bent his arms so that his hands—large hands, strong hands accustomed to hard labor—lay on either side of his head. She turned them so that the palms faced up. She placed a finger in the center of each palm and again felt his body tremble in response. His eyelids fluttered.

“The pain is here. The pain rests in your hands. Hold it. Hold it here. Hold it in the palms of your hands. Hold the pain. Hold the pain.”

His eyes flew wide. For a long moment he looked up at her and she held his gaze, her own face intent. She spoke in a voice of command. “Hold the pain in your hands. Hold it tight. Hold it there.” She pressed into his palms with her fingers, pulsing a time.

And suddenly he was breathing deep. Long breaths into his nose and out his mouth. Rhythmic and controlled, he breathed in time to the pulse she beat into his hands. She knew then that he held his pain there, drawn from the rest of his body and focused beneath her fingers. He breathed, and she whispered, “Hold it tight. Hold it tight.”

Then he was asleep.

Sairu sighed and sat back, wiping sweat from her brow. She smiled weakly and looked over at Lady Hariawan. “It is done, my mistress. He is resting now.”

But Lady Hariawan did not answer. She was staring into the flame of the lamp, and her face was blank as a sheet of new parchment.

In another, colder part of the world . . .

The knock rang through the empty corridors of Lord Dok-Kasemsan’s home, finally reaching Sunan where he crouched over his work in a small chamber in the very back of the house. He startled and glanced at the patch of light on the floor, quickly gauging the time. The carrier wasn’t supposed to arrive for another three hours. Someone must have come to the wrong door. It must be a mistake.

Sunan shrugged it off and bent back over the document he was meticulously copying. Copying was rather beneath his dignity as a Tribute Scholar. Despite his inability to rise in the Center of Learning, Sunan was qualified to work with city chancellors, even to set up a small consulting business of his own. But to do so would be to admit that he had not passed the Gruung. To do so would proclaim to all the world his failure.

So sometime in the last few months he had found himself taking work as a copier for a small-time lawyer in a less-respected sector of Suthinnakor. And so he made pennies and survived.

The knock sounded again. Surely whoever it was would realize his mistake and go?

No one went to answer. Old Kiut had long since abandoned the household. When word arrived of Kasemsan’s incarceration in Lunthea Maly—and the king of Nua-Pratut’s refusal to become involved in a dispute with his much more powerful neighbor—the whole household staff had vanished overnight. Sunan suspected they had gone to join his uncle’s wife and family on the coast.

One way or the other, Sunan was alone now in the great house, surrounded by luxury not his own. He didn’t touch any of his uncle’s things. He would have died of starvation before selling so much as a single porcelain urn. He barricaded the doors against thieves, took a set of servants’ rooms for himself, scraped a small living copying endless pages of legal documents (many of them so full of lies and deceit they made his head spin), and . . .

And waited.

At night before he slept, he saw the face of the Mask in his mind’s eye. But the Mask hadn’t returned, not yet anyway. Why then did he always feel as though someone watched him? Even in the deepest recesses of his uncle’s empty house, with every door and window blocked and scarcely room for a breath of wind or sliver of sunlight to slip inside . . . why did he always feel as though someone stood mere steps behind him?

His hand trembled. He had to stop his work and wait for the trembling to pass. It took him much longer to finish any task these days, for he was painstaking, refusing to allow these intermittent tremors to disturb his flawless script. When the shakes came, he would set aside his brush and wait. They always passed eventually.

Another knock.

He would have to go check the outer gate at some point. The bolt must have come loose to allow whoever it was through to the courtyard. Usually he made the carrier wait on the street outside. He would make his way to the gate punctually each evening and slip the copy through the spy-hole without ever having to deal with anyone face-to-face. He had made similar arrangements with a local grocer and an egg-seller. He didn’t like to step beyond the gates of his uncle’s house unless absolutely necessary.

But someone was at the front door. And growing ever more insistent. The knocks were one long, continuous stream now, indicating a willingness to go on all day and into the night if necessary.

Well, assassins don’t knock. Or do they?

The tremors were too bad to continue his work, so Sunan gathered his robes and hastened through the quiet passages of the house, up a little flight of stairs, and on to the door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A large fist beat a steady rhythm, and Sunan could see the whole door shaking in its frame.

“Who’s there?” he called. His voice cracked from little use and he was obliged to clear his throat and try again to be heard over the thudding. “
Who is there?
”

The fist stopped. A deep voice with a thick Chhayan accent—though not an accent of the Khla tribe, Sunan noticed vaguely—spoke. “Are you Juong-Khla Sunan?”

“What do you want?” Sunan asked. He felt the tremors moving from his hands up his arms and into his shoulders.

“Juong-Khla of the Khla clan sends you a message.”

Sunan wondered if he would ever find his voice again. The tremors had reached his knees now, and he leaned against the wall beside the door to keep himself upright. His mind whirled with a number of impossibilities. He knew that there was perhaps
just
enough time for the gurta he had seen in the spring to have made the long trek back to Chhayan territory in the west. But to send a message in response? That wasn’t possible. It simply was
not
possible.

“Take the message, Juong-Khla Sunan,” said the voice on the other side of the door.

“Speak it,” Sunan gasped.

“I cannot. It is written.”

Chhayans did not read or write. But Sunan’s mother could. She rarely used the skill, sometimes pretending no longer to possess it. But perhaps, within a letter from Juong-Khla, she might have inscribed her own message?

Sunan hated himself. He hated the sudden surge of heart-sickness, the sudden feeling that he was once more a child, not a tall Tribute Scholar grown to manhood. He hated the sudden need for something, some word from his mother, some comfort, if comfort ever could be had again.

But perhaps the man on the other side of the door meant to kill him. Perhaps that was the message his father sent.

It didn’t matter. Drawing a deep breath, Sunan put his hand to the bolt, lifted it, and let the door swing wide. The light of day blinded him, and the stink of Chhayan buffalo washed unrelentingly over him.

“Juong-Khla Sunan?” spoke the Chhayan voice.

Sunan nodded. The next moment a scroll was placed in his hand. And no knife planted in his heart. So that was good. Probably.

“Do . . . do you need a response?” Sunan asked as his fingers closed tight around the parchment.

“No,” replied the Chhayan. He remained where he stood, his arms folded, silent.

“Um. Do you want to come in?”

“No.”

Sunan licked his dry lips. “Is there, um, anything else I can do for you?”

“No.”

Squinting into the sunlight, Sunan still could make out no features on the shadowed face, nothing beyond a thick, square jaw. “Well then, I, uh . . . thank you?”

At that, the Chhayan bowed. He stepped back from the door, turned around and . . .

And he didn’t disappear. Of course he didn’t. People don’t just disappear into thin air, not normal people anyway. Maybe the Crouching Shadows could (who knew with folks like that?) but certainly not a big, beef-fed, blunt-bladed Chhayan nomad. No, Sunan must have blacked out momentarily, miraculously staying on his feet in the process, and while he was out, the messenger had walked all the way back across the courtyard and through the closed gate—which was bolted from the inside, Sunan noticed—and disappeared into the city beyond. That’s how it must have been.

Once more Sunan felt the skin-crawling sensation that someone was watching him. He shut the door, but the sensation didn’t go away. So he scuttled back to his chamber at the back of the house like a mouse darting for its hole, and the thought came to him as from a great distance that he was a pathetic creature. Son of a warlord? Hardly!

But he lacked the energy to face such thoughts head-on. He dropped to his low cushion, panting, and stared at the scroll. As though it would catch fire in his hand. As though it would poison him by its very existence.

He must open it eventually, however, and eventually could not be avoided forever. At last he broke the seal and rolled out the page. His breath caught as he saw, after so many years, his mother’s hand.

But it was not his mother who addressed him now across the leagues. Within a neatly inscribed character or two, his mother’s neatness and beauty were lost in the words she wrote, dominated as she always was by the force of Juong-Khla.

Sunan heard his father’s voice in his head as he read:

Son of my Stolen Wife:

In this treachery at last you prove yourself my son. Only a man of the Tiger would find the passion within to see his hatred through to such an end. I only hope that you found enough of the Tiger’s rage in your veins to plunge the knife yourself. Somehow I cannot make myself believe as much.

The secret you have sent is a mighty gift. Should it prove true, you may consider yourself a free man. The life of my heir for the Long Fire—a worthy price and one a Tiger will always pay. But know this, son of my stolen wife: If we meet again, your life is mine.

And so his mother’s hand ended, her elegant calligraphy giving way to the ragged scrawl that served as Juong-Khla’s signature, like the slicing claws of a tiger. Nothing more. No personal message from his mother herself. Nothing. Final.

Sunan read it again. “How did it come here so swiftly?” he whispered. He pretended this question consumed all other thought, pretended to turn it over in his mind with all his academic intensity. He pretended his heart didn’t burn with two-fold shame: Shame at his brother’s death, which was his fault; shame that he had, even at the last, let his father down and failed to deliver the killing stroke.

“There’s no possible way on this mortal earth a man could have traveled so far, so fast. How then? How could—”

He broke off his pretense, and his eyes bulged in their sockets. At first he did not believe what he saw. But that was his own fault. Foolish Sunan! He knew better. He should have looked for it at once!

The letter was written in his mother’s hand. His clever, clever mother, outwardly so obedient to her lord and husband, inwardly so full of hate more potent than any tiger’s.

A line here. A dash there. A careful arrangement of form. Words that he knew could never have been spoken by his uncouth father, no matter how sincere the sentiment they contained.

As Sunan stared at the letter, he saw the code taking shape as though by magic. A secret message from his mother, and it said:

Beware the Greater Dark.

Beware the Dragon.