Star of Cursrah (27 page)

“I’m glad we had them,” Tafir said. The cadet still wore the linen tunic of Oxonsis, so quickly had they been hustled from Pallaton’s camp. “How many roving patrols did we spot? We might be prisoners of Zubat or even Coramshan if not for their protection.”

Gheqet clambered off his horse, stiff and sore. Mincing to the aqueduct, he pried up a small stone slab. The underside displayed damp moss. On hands and knees, the architect’s apprentice stuck his head down the hole, then rocked back on his rump.

“Gheq,” asked Tafir, “what’s down there?”

“Nothing.” Gheqet rubbed his curly head, clearly worried. “Almost nothing. Six inches of water at most. I can see moss on the bottom waving in the current. The aqueduct’s never been this low. Even in the years of drought following the genies’ war there was six feet. Now it’s … six inches.”

“It’s not the only water that feeds Cursrah,” insisted Star. “It rains in winter sometimes, and the Mother of Flowers gives us water. Calim founded Cursrah around that spring.”

“It’s just a trickle, Star.” Gheqet levered the slab back over the hole, twisted it tight, and said, “Nomads stopped and filled their waterskins from it, watered their goats, then moved on. You can’t feed a city from a puddle.”

Amenstar gazed along the gray aqueduct to far off where it dwindled into the horizon. Gheqet shook his head. “Without water to fill it, the aqueduct will cave in. The sides will shift, and the slabs will collapse. Once it fills with sand, no one will ever know it existed.”

“We’d better mount up,” Tafir advised. He pointed to a party approaching from Cursrah that carried spears at their shoulders hung with bundles. “This could be trouble.”

“Trouble?”

Amenstar shook her head as if dazed. She hadn’t sleep well lately. The oncomers were dressed in Cursrah’s uniform, yet lacked the flat collar of a citizen-soldier, so they were foreign mercenaries obviously deserting her father’s army, taking along their short swords and spears. Befuddled, Star was unsure if they suggested danger. Lacking any place to run, she just sat.

“Good day!” Tafir’s cheer was strained.

The mercenaries looked up. There were ten men and three women. Besides the weapons, they were burdened with blankets, bulging packs, spare sandals, and two waterskins apiece. A tall man with the light skin of a northerner shrugged so his spear bobbed.

“The day’s improvin’,” the mercenary said, “now that we’re finally movin’ on.”

“Where are you bound?” asked the cadet.

“Uh, north, to the river.” The party stalled to a stop. The leader asked, “You from Oxonsis?”

Tafir glanced down at his foreign uniform with the red ox head. “No,” he laughed. “We were, uh, guests of Samir Pallaton.”

“Oh?” The man weighed his words. “And what’s he up to?”

“Pallaton musters an army—defensive so far. He even trains slaves who fight for their freedom.”

As Tafir and the leader talked, Amenstar squirmed under the scrutiny of the soldiers. A woman whispered to a companion, who whispered to another, which sparked a hushed but intense argument. Flame-faced, Amenstar ignored them.

Tafir announced loudly, “I’d suggest you try Pallaton’s camp for work. He’d welcome good soldiers, and it’s not far. Just walk northeast and flag down any cavalry patrol wearing ox heads.”

“That’s a bonny—” The leader stopped as a soldier tapped his arm and whispered. Irritated, the leader glanced at Star, but snapped, “No, we ain’t doin’ such a damn fool thing. He’s give us an idea where to enlist, and we’re going. To the front—march!”

Nodding to Tafir, the leader led his party away, a sure destination putting pep in their step.

When they passed out of earshot, Tafir wiped his brow and said, “By the Sword That Drips Anger, that was close.”

“Why all the secrecy?” Star complained. “It’s immeasurably rude to whisper before royalty.”

“Rude to kidnap royalty, too,” replied Tafir. “They recognized you as a princess. Someone suggested holding you for ransom. They’d probably have killed me and Gheq. Mercenaries make their money where they can.”

“Oh,” squeaked Star. “My father’s own soldiers acting like such … dastards? How could their loyalty expire so quickly?”

“It evaporated with the water,” sighed Hakiim.

Shaking her head, Star jerked her reins.

“We’d best move on,” she said. “Cursrah needs us.”

“What’s happening there?”

Gheqet pointed down into Cursrah’s valley. As twilight deepened, birds ceased to sing and homes were lit with tiny fires. The shallow bowl dropped away from their feet, down past terraces of manor houses and burial vaults, down past mud-brick cottages, stone walls, and parks, down past square apartment buildings with canopied sundecks, down past two-story shops and civic buildings and temples, finally down to the center, where the moated Palace of the Phoenix glittered dusk red.

Gheqet pointed west to Cursrah’s lake reservoir and said, “I’ve never seen activity at the pump house before.”

According to legend, the stone hut in the lake contained the marid Bitrabi, an ocean genie tasked centuries ago by Calim to protect and circulate Cursrah’s water all the way from the distant River Agis to the tiny pump house. Now the water had been diverted, and the Mouth of Cursrah ran dry.

The pump house’s tiny island swarmed with people. Two barges packed with stones had been poled to the island, and only the bargemen idled, leaning on poles stuck in the lake bottom. Directed by an architect or master mason, slaves in loincloths off-loaded the stones and piled them against the walls and roof of the pump house.

Gheqet frowned, “It looks as if they’re sealing the pump house… .”

“You mean, to lock in Bitrabi?” Tafir asked, then slid off his horse to stand still and better see.

“If she’s truly inside,” Gheqet said as he too dismounted, as did Star.

“Everyone’s always believed that Bitrabi is in there,” said the princess.

“That doesn’t make it true,” Gheqet fretted. “No one alive has ever seen the marid. The pump house has neither doors nor windows.”

Tafir sniped, “Then how can anyone even claim the marid exists?”

“We see results.” The architect’s apprentice sketched a finger around the valley and explained, “The city’s fountains are fed from pipes underground, and the water shoots up without any pumping. Same with the mansions along the valley rim. Older houses use gravity-fed pipes from the aqueduct’s head, but new ones tap water flowing uphill from the lake—”

“Look! They’re falling back,” yelled Amenstar, “and running!”

Far down on the tiny island, slaves and masters tumbled off their feet as if from an earthquake. People scrambled away from the pump house and into the barges while the bargemen poled off to save themselves. Some slaves plunged into the lake and swam.

“What is it?” demanded Amenstar. “What’s panicked—”

The pump house exploded.

Faster than the eye could follow, stone slabs and blank rock walls blew into the sky. Debris, from pebbles to boulders, dappled the lake water and pattered on the shore. Boulders crushed and decapitated slaves and slave masters alike. A partial wall landed in a barge, breaking the raft’s back and sinking the pieces.

“It’s—real,” Amenstar whispered. She could hardly breathe for wonder.

“It’s Bitrabi,” moaned Gheqet.

From the shattered pump house rose a waterspout. Thirty feet across, swamping the island, a column of pure pale blue wetness welled upward. Higher and higher rose the waterspout, taller than the Phoenix Palace, taller than the library’s ziggurats. Thinning as it rose, the column finally topped the valley walls. Thin and fragile, the waterspout poised, level with the awestruck adventurers.

In the tip of the glassy column, Amenstar, Tafir, and Gheqet could discern a huge and eerie being. Its skin was as aquamarine as the ocean it called home, and it went naked except for filmy green kelp swirling in patches around its blue-green frame. The marid wore a necklace, bracelets, and anklets, and the watchers imagined seashells, twined narwhal tusks, or precious pink-white coral.

Just for a second, the miraculous giant, a marid plucked from the sea’s darkest depths, hung suspended atop her ethereal waterspout like the finger of a god. Treading water, raising long slender arms, twisting her body to face west and the distant ocean—Amenstar saw this act clearly—the genie named Bitrabi clapped her hands.

A roar bellowed, like a waterfall, like a sandstorm, like the thunderous drumming of Calim himself, as the genie shot into the sky, propelled by the impossible column of water.

Out of danger, Amenstar and the others flinched as the waterspout zoomed into the ether like a magician’s toy rocket. Untold thousands of gallons shot up from the lake like a whale’s exhalation, following the aquamarine genie. For only seconds were the column and its mistress visible, then both arced away into the sky, soaring so high the trio craned their necks to see.

Far, far away, they knew, the watery arc would descend, and the genie that Cursrah had called Bitrabi would splash into the Trackless Sea. After centuries of slavery, the marid would plunge into her home once again.

Watching, the weary travelers gasped. For an instant, as the great waterspout bisected a sky tinged red by sunset, there flashed the biggest and most beautiful rainbow Calimshan had ever seen.

The brilliant band faded. The sky turned gray and empty as twilight sank upon the land.

“She’s gone,” murmured Tafir.

“She’s free,” breathed Amenstar.

“And she’s taken all the water with her,” lamented Gheqet.

Snapped back to reality, Amenstar stared into the valley. Cursrah’s lake, a glittering and happy place Star had seen all her life, was a mire of mud. Stippled about were stone blocks, drowned or broken bodies, smashed barges, and other jetsam. The only water was a few boggy pools that would evaporate by daybreak.

“The aqueduct,” muttered Gheqet, “must have finally run dry. That last six inches emptied into the lake. The last thread connecting us to the Agis snapped, so the spell binding Bitrabi must’ve expired. Even a tasked genie can’t protect what isn’t there, so her job was finished. She was free and bolted immediately.”

“Leaving us stranded,” said Amenstar, “to die of thirst.”

Cursrah normally came alive after sunset, as the day’s heat passed, but the homecomers found the city like a giant’s toppled body, dead but not yet cold. As Amenstar’s bay horse switchbacked down the valley road, trailed by her two friends, they passed an exodus already begun. Families had loaded carts, donkeys, drags, or their own backs. It was a short climb to the valley rim, but a long trek across grasslands and wilderness to the next town or the river, yet they braved the night rather than remain. As the road bottomed out, Amenstar saw more cottages lit with torches where people packed in sullen or weepy silence. She watched a woman lean from a second story apartment and drop blankets to her husband, calling that that was the last. When the woman descended, crying quietly, the two hoisted bundles, joined hands, and turned toward the valley rim.

Their horses’ hooves clip-clopped on cobblestones and echoed from empty buildings. Normally taverns, cafes, and gambling dens would sparkle with talk, laughter, and lovers’ cooing. Star saw only one cellar lit, and the patrons drank silently or muttered bitterly. Amenstar felt she’d blundered into some foreign and hostile port. Riding on, by and by a rustle and fuss welled ahead.

Gheqet said, “People gather at the city center. I wonder what they hope to find?”

“Not water, that’s for sure.” Tafir rubbed his throat and said, “I’m dry already.”

“Stop it, you two,” Star’s voice cracked the empty night. “People flock to the city center to hear my father reassure them. He’ll have sought auguries from the gods and will now reveal our plans for the future.”

Star saw the two young men exchange glances: What good can the bakkal promise? What kind of future? The princess scalded them with angry silence.

At the centralmost ring of streets, they dismounted and tied their horses to posts, for beasts of burden were not allowed in the civic quarter. The hitching posts hung above water troughs normally kept filled by city slaves, but the troughs had been bailed dry.

Proceeding afoot, Amenstar retied her yellow neck scarf into a veil to hide her face and the silver moonstone tiara. Her yellow trousers and green cloak were so grimy and dusty as to be colorless. Gheqet wore a worker’s white tunic and kilt like hundreds of others. Tafir had inverted his linen tunic to hide the red badge of Oxonsis.

Thousands of people, half Cursrah’s population it seemed to Star, milled at the city center. Not one stood still, but all walked this way or that as if searching for something, while a few ran headlong to escape or embrace disaster. People chattered alone or to others, some wept, a few laughed in hysteria. Many citizens were drunk, terrified to face the future sober. Anxious not to get separated, Amenstar touched her friends, who squeezed her hands.

“I can’t tell what transpires,” said Tafir. “Is everyone mad?”

“There’s no pattern.” Gheqet cast about. “Everyone’s just wandering around like …”

“Like cattle penned for the slaughterhouse,” finished Star. “What’s that old saying? ‘When strife eclipses the sun, only Bhaelros lights the consciousness of men.’ “

Standing at an intersection, the companions gazed at the Palace of the Phoenix. Torches burned in iron sconces on every column of the round palace, their lights reflected in the dark moat. Four guards, grim heavy infantry, barred each of the eight bridges to the palace. No activity showed, and Amenstar wondered what her parents did. At times, the crowd swelled toward the bridges, eager to glimpse the bakkal, but then surged away aimlessly.

Down the street Star saw people collected before the Temple of Selune, a tall crescent-shaped building that imitated the moon. The gentle Mistress of the Sky had always been favored in moonstruck Cursrah, but despite the fright, no one entered her temple. People shouted in frustration and beat at the doors as if they were locked.

Star murmured, “This can’t be….”

Tired of confusion and ignorance, Amenstar snagged the next person who passed. A woman, middle-aged and wrinkled, jolted to a halt and slapped the offending hand from her sleeve. Star demanded news, and the woman acceded to royal authority without recognizing it.