I pushed Savga toward her people.
She called out for her mother.
Silence.
A woman stepped forward, an old woman. Tiwana auntie. “Tansan left. She took her son and claimer with her. My sister left with them, and Alliak. They’re gone.”
I tried to understand her gravelly words. Tansan, gone? Fwipi, gone?
“Where?” was all I managed.
Tiwana-auntie looked away from me, shrugged. “Too many children have been taken from the arbiyesku. Too many children from all the kus in this Clutch. No one can blame them for leaving.”
Savga’s hand slipped into mine. I stared down at her, in credulous, horrified. She looked up at me with eyes punched in and bruised.
“I’m hungry,” she whispered.
I licked chapped lips, struggled to find the words to tell her what she no doubt already understood. I crouched down to her level, placed both hands on her shoulders.
“You have family here, Savga. Tiwana-auntie. And friends, Oblan and Runami—”
“You made the chancellor bring us back. You’ll find my mother.” Her eyes didn’t waver from mine.
I swallowed. “Savga . . . I don’t know where she’s gone.”
She sighed, closed her eyes, and slowly leaned against me. “Carry me.”
I picked her up, her legs dangling against my knees, her small toes brushing my calves. She weighed far more than I could carry. I wondered how I had ever lifted her earlier that same day.
I staggered forward a pace. The fence of paras swung open like a gate. Tiwana-auntie stepped toward me, arms outstretched to take Savga. The veins on the backs of her wrinkled hands looked like rivulets of silver in the moon light. As her wiry hands enclosed Savga’s waist, Savga’s weight eased a little in my arms.
Savga stiffened. And screamed.
Her scream split open the night as if it were the belly of a dark jungle cat, and the moon and stars turned into crimson droplets, I swear they did, and the bloated black clouds creeping ever closer were suddenly lurid, and all of us—Temple acolytes, hired mercenaries, mothers, fathers, children—were bathed equally in the bloody culpability of the loss of Savga’s childhood.
I clutched her to me, begged her to stop screaming, closed my eyes against the ruddy ichor spilling from moon and starlight. I rocked her, I shook her, I wept.
No matter what, this one child, this one child, I would not turn away from, not now, not ever.
Her scream didn’t so much end as die; the secret places in her heart bled out. And when the exsanguination of her soul was complete, I was able to open my eyes. The unearthly crimson light that had bathed us all equally in blame and shame and rending loss had turned thin as se rum. Gradually, the glaucous rays of moon and stars driz zled down upon us, once more turning us slate-colored, leaden, into living stone.
Tiwana-auntie looked at me and muttered something in Djimbi, and I knew my heart was ransomed until death, that everything I thought and did would from that moment onward revolve around the child in my arms.
I hoisted Savga onto my hip. Her legs latched around me. With one last look at the silver-stippled clan of my daugh ter’s youth, I turned away.
I was a mother now.
I remembered walking down the avenue earlier that day, remembered how the old crones who’d sat under the lintels of each doorway had watched us from faces as withered as tinder fungus, with eyes that had looked at us as if survey ing the handwriting of the enraged Pure Dragon.
Rishi families were squatted outside the tenements, cooking meals upon smoking braziers in the humid night. Children played in the street. At our passage, people fell still and silent, became mere shadows in the dark. Over head, several great, black clouds skulked closer. There was a nasty pressure in the air, as if everything living were being slowly, inexorably compressed between the dark morass of cloud and the unyielding fist of the earth.
Candlelight crept between the age-warped planks of some of the tenements. Here and there a silhouette moved behind the planks, visible only in staccato, needle-thin stripes. Striated glimpses of life, those.
Gen reined our sluggish brooder to a halt in front of one of the flimsy buildings. The brooder blew foam from be tween her gums and twitched her bony tail. The diamondshaped membrane at the end flicked across the tip of my toes and slapped against the cart.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Noua Sor,” Gen replied. Poultice Zone, which meant nothing to me. He dropped his voice, aware that eyes watched us and ears were listening. “I know one of the in habitants here. Let me speak with her, hmm? I believe you and the child will be safe here. Yes. Safe.”
“You’re not taking us to the stables?”
“Stables, gaa! There’s no point, not now that we won’t have a destrier for months to come. And I’ll sleep easier if Ghepp doesn’t know your location. He’ll be ill pleased with your demand to stop Xxamer Zu’s slave trade. Damn you, and damn him.”
My eyebrows rose into my hairline. “You think he’d
harm
me?”
He sighed, weary. “Save this discussion for inside.” Be fore I could argue, he tossed aside his reins and jumped down from the bench. The cart rocked and creaked in re bound, and the brooder shifted in her yoke. Gen had to bend to duck through the coarse door leading into the tenement. A conglomerate of odors swirled out before the door clacked shut behind him—the nutmeg bite of yanew bark, the heavy musk of ferret, the soft scent of rose attar.
A ribby, one-eared cur slunk close. The brooder’s forked tongue flicked out, quivering. She slapped her tail adder-fast against one scaled flank as warning. The whipcrack startled the cur and it darted away. Several children came close— but not too close—and stood in a cluster some way in front of the brooder, ogling me. In the dark, the green whorls on their skin looked like large smudges of wet grime.
The door to the tenement creaked open again. Gen came out.
“It’s arranged. You’ll board here until I’ve smoothed things over with . . .” His voice trailed off as he became aware of the listening group of children. He nodded at Savga. “I’ll lift her down, what?”
Savga stiffened. She was not asleep, after all. Only feign ing it.
“I’ll carry her.” I slowly eased her off my thighs so that she lay stretched upon the bench. The sweaty patch where her hot cheek had been pressed against me felt at once cold without her presence. Gripping the worn wood of the cart, I climbed down cautiously, not quite trusting my legs to hold me up. Gen’s hand cupped my elbow to support me as I stood there, swaying a moment.
Without a sound, Savga flowed into my arms and melded to my skin.
She was too heavy to carry, but I wouldn’t ever again make the mistake of trying to pass the burden of her to an other. Pressing her little body against me, I staggered after Gen as he turned and pushed open the tenement’s narrow wooden door.
The moment I stepped into the gloomy interior, I was as saulted by the same odors that lingered outside, only inten sified: musk, yanew, attar, sulfur, moldering wood, greasy sleeping mats, sweat, and another odor, peculiar, like mashed sweet corn. A coarse trestle table practically filled the small room. Upon it sat a tallow candle, wheezing inky smoke into the air. Two crude cabinets stood sentinel at one end of the table, leaning against each other like fat old women exchanging secrets. At the other end of the table, nearest us, stood a crone dressed in a frayed yungshmi, the ubiquitous garment for rishi women on Clutch Xxamer Zu. The crone’s exposed legs were so thin, her knees looked swollen. Behind her, a narrow rectangle of inky darkness suggested the existence of another room.
“Where’s the rest of your family?” Gen asked.
“Jungle scavenging,” the crone answered. “They’ll be back in two days, maybe eight.”
Gen nodded as if this made sense to him. “Discretion, prudence—these things are necessary, understand?”
The old crone beside him smacked raisin purple gums together. “Our house discreet, hey-hey. No fast lips here, singing to the wind, oh, no.” She moved, crepitant, and lifted the candle from the table. “Follow me.”
Gen gestured me forward. I hefted Savga’s weight to a bet ter position on my hip and followed the crone. Gen lumbered behind me like a great boar enclosed in a wicker cage.
The crone led us up steep, narrow stairs that wobbled and scolded with each footfall. The top of the stairwell ended at the back wall of the tenement. To the left crouched a small room, to the right, another. In lieu of doors, long strips of barkcloth hung suspended in front of both rooms. The crone turned to the right and shoved the barkcloth strips aside. They rattled along the pole they were suspended from like the bones of gyin-gyin chimes.
“This is for you, all this.” She grandly swept a jointswollen claw across the room, which was no larger than a mating cubicle, four feet wide by eight long, though it boasted a shuttered window and a chamber pot.
Light from her candle oscillated upon the gap-planked walls. I imagined spiders burrowed between the cracks.
A water urn stood upon a single sleeping mat that had been unrolled upon the floor. Half of a congle gourd, pol ished from years of handling, sat beside the urn. A kadoob tuber, a slice of paak, and a tiny crescent of lemon sat in the gourd.
From where he stood on the top stair behind me, Gen peered over my shoulder. “They’ll need more food than that, blood-blood! For what I’m paying, you can supply it. This and ten times more.”
The crone champed her gums together and nodded brusquely.
“Leave us the candle,” Gen ordered. “We’ll be a while. Bring the food up later, hey.”
The crone handed the tallow candle to me. Hot wax dribbled down my wrist. I held it away from Savga and stepped into the tiny room. Gen followed me, squeezing by the crone on the stairwell. He drew the barkcloth strips closed.
We waited, motionless and silent, while we heard the crone descend the stairs.
He took the candle from me, crouched on his haunches, and set the candle on the floor. He steepled his fingers against his beard; it shone like wet pewter in the sooty light. I put Savga down, then slowly eased myself onto the floor across from Gen, legs trembling from fatigue. The soft, swollen smell of affluence surrounded him: laundered clothes, milky skin creams, roasted meat, stiff new leather.
Savga slunk onto my lap. She held herself intensely still, face buried against my chest, then shivered in a brief burst. I thought of a leaf shuddering after a raindrop strikes it.
“You’ll require a few things, Babu, if you’re to live here for some time,” Gen said. “Clothes, maybe creams . . . ?”
I thought for a moment, then spoke quietly. “Scrolls. From the daronpuis’ compound. About the history of Xxamer Zu.”
Surprise, hesitation, and concern flitted across his face.
“I’ll hide them. No one will know.”
He nodded slowly.
“And you’ll look for them, yes? You’ll have the road leading from Xxamer Zu checked?” I was talking about Tansan, her claimer, her infant son, and her mother, Fwipi.
“Useless, that, but I will. Wasted effort, like trying to see the wind.”
I knew he was probably right. Savga’s family was Djimbi. The savanna and jungle would show no tracks of their passing.
“We could use another sleeping mat,” I said, “and a nee dle and thread, so I can repair Savga’s yungshmi.”
“I’ll get her a new one.”
“No. I don’t want her to stand out from the other chil dren here.”
He acknowledged the wisdom of my answer with a nod.
We looked at each other for a while as candlelight made dark hollows in both of our faces.
“Tell me about Ghepp,” I finally asked.
He sighed and rubbed his hands over his face— something he’d done a great deal that day, as if his worries were coating his hoary cheeks in heavy layers, threatening to smother him. Candlelight made the age spots on his ton sured head ripple.
“Ghepp needs to be handled very carefully,” he muttered between his thick fingers. “Think glass, what-hey.”
“What does
that
mean?”
He withdrew his hands and frowned at me. “It means he wants to learn from you the secret to breeding bulls in cap tivity, so he’s willing to indulge us. To a point. But he’s also dubious of your ability to learn anything from a dragon. He has doubts, many doubts, bats and swallows and pigeons of doubt all flapping inside him.”
“He told you so?”
“Not in as many words!” Gen scowled. “Look at who he is, Babu; see with your wit instead of your eyes! He’s lived his life in the shadow of Kratt, knowing that because of a quirk of his father’s, a firstborn bastard would inherit Clutch Re instead of him. He’s lived with that shame while Kratt has lived with promised eminence. Tutors and scrolls and ballads were Ghepp’s teachers, all cradled in the women’s wing of Roshu-Lupini Re’s mansion. But Kratt? Ha! As a boy he was succored by swordmasters, chancellors, dragonmasters! Folk of a different ilk. One must tread carefully when dealing with a man such as Ghepp, a man who har bors both fear and dreams of greatness.”
“Does he know your plans for rebellion?”
He nodded. “They’re not just
my
plans. Others are in volved: foreign émigrés, merchant tycoons, retired Roshus, paras who’ve defected from the Emperor’s army . . . all planning for and dreaming of decolonization. Think I would have succeeded in convincing Ghepp to take the risk of laying that wager if I were acting alone in this? No more than I could convince a worm to attack a bird! The rebel lion is greater than you know.”
At that moment, the scope of Gen’s seditious network paled in comparison to the bitter truth that was sinking into me.
“This isn’t my Clutch, is it?” I quietly asked.
Gen studied me with eyes as glossy as burnished teak. He softly laid one of his great hands over mine. It was warm and heavy.
“When you broached the idea of securing this Clutch for Ghepp, a great mist that had hung before my eyes parted, and I saw this Clutch as key for the rebellion. When we get you a destrier, when you learn the bulls’ secret during the bestial rite, then everything else will fall into place, hey-o.”
I thought of Tansan. “Have you heard of the myazedo?”
He withdrew his hand. “Stay clear of such things, Babu.”
“Why?”
“Bandit warfare. People looking to plunder and rape the aristocrats. That’s not what makes rebellion successful, blood-blood!”
I thought of all the impassioned Djimbi who’d gathered at the tanners’ clan. They’d spoken of ending poverty and starvation, not of committing plunder and rape. With all his connections amongst the politically empowered and the elite, Gen’s view was skewed.
Or maybe not.
What did I know?
The full weight of the day’s events pressed down on me, and I remembered how exhausted I was. “I’ll stay away from them.” I murmured the lie with ease, believing it in my fatigue.
Gen picked up the tallow candle and toyed with it, press ing his thumbs into the soft wax and leaving behind tiny half-moon indentations. “You haven’t done Ghepp any fa vors by your demand to stop the slave trade, understand. The rishi will merely be wary, and when their wariness ends, they’ll turn demanding. As for the bayen lordlings of Xxamer Zu, they’ll be puzzled by the bizarre decision. Ap prehensive. Stinking mess, what.”
He put down the candle with a scowl and we looked at each other in silence. I pointed to Gen’s skin, still so baf flingly fa-pim. “How’d you do that?”
He spoke as he exhaled, exasperated by my question. “The cloud asks the rain how a monsoon is made! I employ the same Djimbi cosmetics as you do, hey-o.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
He stared at me. Slowly a look of wonder passed over his hawkish features. “Can it be that she doesn’t know? Does the pundar not know when the pigment of its skin has changed, to blend in with its surroundings?”
“Don’t talk like that. You sound deranged.”
His eyebrows raised; then he reached for my right hand. Savga recoiled and pressed against me. Gen ignored her fear. He slowly turned my hand this way, slowly that.
“Tell me, Babu,” he murmured. “Tell me the color of your skin.”
“Aosogi,” I said, deliberately choosing, in a spate of un ease, the insulting Archipelagic descriptive of poorly cured hide. “Tan.”
His great thumb stroked the back of my hand. “Aosogi,” he murmured. “Tan.”
The candle sputtered, released a jet of inky smoke.
My pulse quickened as I stared into his eyes, dark lagoons whose murky depths rippled as if concealing hidden life.
“Tell me, Babu,” he said softly, “what is the true color of your skin? You said before that you trusted me. If you spoke the truth then, tell the truth now.”
I withdrew my hand from his. “Don’t be yolkbrained. You can see for yourself what color it is. Aosogi.”
He shook his head: no.
My mouth turned dry. “Yes.”
“No, Babu. Your skin is mottled. Piebald. Like the blood that flows in your veins.”
My heart stopped. Thudded abruptly into life again.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I shook my head, tried to speak. Wanted water.
I remembered, then. Remembered how, throughout my childhood, I’d seen my mother as having the same aosogi skin as me. Remembered seeing my half sister, Waivia, the same way. Remembered dismissing the insults I’d over heard some of the adolescents of my birth clan mutter about my haughty, voluptuous sister, remembered dismiss ing them as being just the typical, groundless insults one hurled against one’s antagonist: Mottled Belly, jungle devi ant, dragonwhore.
Then, when I was nine years old, in her agitation over my being exposed to dragon venom by the dragonmaster of Clutch Re, my mother had revealed in an outburst that she was of the same ilk as the dragonmaster—a Djimbi. A veil I’d not known existed over my eyes had fallen away, and I’d seen my mother for what she had been. Piebald. Djimbi Sha.
Not many months after that, the same sort of outburst by Waivia had ripped away another charm that had lain over my eyes since birth, and I’d seen my half sister for what
she
was. Djimbi Sha. Mottled Belly.
Unlike me.
Or so I had thought.
“It is a most powerful enchantment that surrounds you. Like a shield, Babu! So powerful it prevents you from be ing wholly you. Your moonblood doesn’t flow, does it? Dammed, it is. That’s how powerful the enchantment is. You’ll never bear children while it’s wrapped about you. You didn’t know of it, girl?”
I couldn’t release the simple
no
that was caged in the back of my throat.
“The person who coated you with it would have had to practice and perfect it before achieving such a fine result. Not an easy pot of paint to mix, what-hey! Years ago I marred the skin of three Clutch Re makmakis in my at tempts to make this paint. It’s only the lucre I compensated them with, and the shrouds those servants of the dead wear, that allow them to go about their lives without being reviled for the improbable pigmentation I gave them.”
“I’m not Dj—”
Fast as an adder, Gen moved and clapped a great hand over my mouth. Savga flattened herself against me with a cry.