Squint-eyed and in pain, I shambled down row after row of blighted oilseed stalks, snapping off the wizened clus ters between thumb and forefinger and placing them in the worn sack I carried upon my back by means of a wide strap across my forehead. I felt gelatinous on the outside, my in terior scraped hollow and raw by the rake of my fractured ribs. Every now and then a creaking sound issued from them, accompanied by a nasty, bubbling pain. Not that I let the pain prevent me from working the fields, not after what Tansan had suffered. For the love of the Dragon, I’d work the damn fields.
Savga couldn’t understand my lethargy and fragility— she was impatient with my mutterings about fractured ribs—and by noon, she worked several rows ahead of me with two other girls her age, their small fingers expertly de capitating clusters of oilseeds from stalks.
While picking, I could have reflected upon what had hap pened to Tansan. Could have. Maybe should have. Didn’t. I worked with the mindless determination to get through the day and collapse upon my sleeping mat come dusk.
But come dusk, I was not permitted to. It was Naso Yobet Offering Eve; I had to join my new clan in their humble observances. There were flatcakes to share, however hard and thin, and there was the hair of elders to wash. For the first time, my hair was washed by another during Naso Yobet: Savga. She worked at my head with a vigor that left my ears ringing and scalp throbbing.
I remembered washing the hair of my elders, to gain merit. I remembered breaking off segments of flatcake for my child hood friends, Rutvia and Makvia, and placing them in their mouths as a show of friendship and trust. I remembered the smell of clay and the talcum softness of kaolin on my skin as I worked alongside my mother in the pottery shed, making moon-shaped candleholders. On Naso Yobet night, every compound in Clutch Re had been lit up with candles cradled in such holders, and then
whoosh!
We’d blow the candles out at the sound of the Naso Yobet horns resounding from the many temples in the Clutch. In the smoky darkness that fol lowed, we rejoiced, knowing that the Fire Season would be extinguished by the Pure Dragon’s breath and no drought would come. Extinguished, just like those candles.
Extinguished, just like my mother.
Naso Yobet had been adapted slightly to suit the lack of candles in the impoverished arbiyesku. Instead of a candle, a glowing fagot represented the Fire Season, balanced pre cariously upon a rock cupped in palms. The clean, herbal scent of the hair wash made the air smell crisp, despite the smoke from the smoldering fagots. My damp hair clung to my ears, and water dripped over my collarbone and down my spine and belly, pleasantly cool.
From the center of Xxamer Zu, from the four compass windows in the temple’s golden spire, unseen daronpuis blew their long Naso Yobet horns. The sound rolled across the fields like the resonant braying of musk stags. The ar biyesku dropped their glowing coals to the ground and crushed them with their rocks. I dropped my own and re leased my rock atop it. I had no desire to crouch and smash the fagot to ashes, not with my ribs as painful as they were.
The dragonmaster appeared at my shoulder, the glass bead at the end of his goatee braid swinging to and fro. He rubbed a hand over his bald pate in agitation, leaving behind sooty marks. He opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. He smelled of rotting teeth and tumorous disease.
He thrust something toward me. Grabbed my hand, squeezed hard to open it. He dropped a pebble on my palm.
“To place in the bowl,” he said, his words sounding re hearsed. “So the One Dragon blesses our union.”
I stared at the pebble in my hand, then gaped at him. He was summoning me to the mating shack.
Did he really expect me to follow? Did he really think I would allow him to pull off my bitoo, place his hands upon me, straddle my hips . . . ? Damn him to eternal mulching in a Skykeeper’s gullet, if he thought I’d follow.
He scowled at the look on my face. “Splayfooted fool,” he hissed, leaning close, spittle spraying my cheeks. “Not that. Think! Use your tit-soft head for once.”
It took me a moment to realize: He wanted a place where we could speak privately.
He’d heard from Gen.
Adrenaline, hope, and expectation instantly enlivened me. Gen had summoned us! He’d secured a portion of the stables, had found a way for me to lie, undetected, with a venomous dragon, that I might again hear dragonsong, that I might divine the secret to breeding bull dragons in captiv ity. It was time for me to leave the arbiyesku.
People were watching us from the corners of their eyes. Fwipi was watching, sinewy old body taut.
The dragonmaster flared his nostrils, angry that I wasn’t giving the appropriate response for a woman who’d just re ceived a summons by her claimer, but I couldn’t for the life of me recall it. I’d heard my own mother say it plenty of times to my father during my childhood, after he’d pressed a congle nut into her palm. Numerous times I’d heard other women murmur the traditional response when summoned by their claimers. But I couldn’t recall a word of it now.
For a moment I thought the dragonmaster might strike me for my idiocy. His hand, which still clenched mine, tight ened hard, grinding my bones together. He twitched, once, released me, turned, and lurched in his simian gait toward the mating shack.
I swallowed and nursed my hand against my belly. Savga slid to my side.
“Will he hurt you?” No doubt she was thinking of the welts and bruises so fresh on her mother’s face. She was far too young to be bearing such concerns.
“No,” I said, and I smiled. The tension went out of her body, for she could see my smile wasn’t forced. And it wasn’t; my heart was soaring at the thought that Gen had succeeded, that I would taste venom and hear dragonsong soon. I ruffled Savga’s hair, knuckled her crown gently. “Not at all, Little Ant. He won’t hurt me.”
I smiled at Fwipi to reassure her, too. She looked non plussed by my blithe grin.
Clenching my hand about the pebble the dragonmaster had forced into my palm—no congle nuts out on the sa vanna—I wove my way quickly through chatting people, toward the mating shack. I ascended the rickety wooden stairs, carefully and painfully stretched up to the lintel, and placed the pebble within the clay bowl that sat there, so the One Dragon might bless my womb with my claimer’s fertile seed.
It was dark and stifling inside the mating shack, and stank of unaired dust. A narrow corridor ran down the middle of the shack, so narrow both my shoulders touched the woven-reed partition walls on either side of me. An other couple was inside; their heavy breaths permeated the air like salty musk, and the shack was rocking slightly from their movements.
The shack was small. It contained only four mating cu bicles, plus the necessary men’s party room at the back. I knew which cubicle the dragonmaster was sat within by the impatient
tap-tap-tap
of a foot upon the floor. I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark; then, moving sideways because of the narrowness of the corridor, I shuf fled to the cubicle where the dragonmaster was waiting.
I stepped inside and slid the paper-thin partition door shut. The dragonmaster sat on the far end of a pallet, hunched slightly.
“You’ve heard from Gen,” I gleefully whispered.
“What?”
I started to repeat myself, but the dragonmaster impa tiently waved me silent. “Forget Gen. We won’t hear from him for weeks—”
“Weeks!”
He scowled at the volume of my reply. “The mother of that get who follows you like a puling kitten, what’s her name? Who’s her claimer?”
My discouragement turned into malice, and I savored the fact that I knew something the dragonmaster didn’t. I waited long moments before responding. “Her name is Tansan. Her claimer is Keau. Why?”
“Those three young bulls that sat at her feet the night we arrived . . . who are they?”
“I can find out. I expect the information isn’t secret.”
He rolled his shoulders and suddenly stood. “I’ve over heard them talking, those four. They’ve no love for bayen, or the Emperor. There’ll be more like them. I want to know them all.”
“Why?” The word Savga had used,
myazedo
, echoed in my mind.
He flapped his hands before my face. “Why, why, why! Have I taught you nothing?”
For an instant I was gripped with the urge to smack his flapping hands aside. Instead I snapped, “You can’t put these people in danger.”
His eyes bulged. “These are
my
people. Don’t think you can tell me what I can and can’t do, aosogi get.”
Staring into his blood-marbled eyes was like staring into the eyes of some wild creature that lived in a supernatural hinterland. I met his gaze for several long moments before dropping it and muttering, “I know I’m not Djimbi. But they’ve taken me into their clan. And this is my Clutch. I won’t see them come to any harm.”
“Idiot whelp,” the dragonmaster said, but astonishment robbed the vitriol from his words. “What I do, I do to free us from the tyrant’s hold.”
I remained silent and continued to stare at his horny feet.
“Fine,” he spat at last, and I tried not to flinch. “I’ll learn what they whisper amongst themselves yet. You live with the illusion that these people are happy and satisfied. Fine. You live with that around your scrawny neck till it chokes you.”
He grabbed my chin and jerked it up so that I was look ing at him. Again I was gripped with the urge to smack his leathery hands aside.
“More is demanded of the Skykeeper’s Daughter than silence,” he hissed. “Much more. I’ll light a fire under your feet till it blazes and consumes you. So help me, rishi via, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll force you to fulfill your destiny yet.”
We stared at each other, frustration, contempt, and fury showering like firesparks from his eyes, aversion and defi ance smoldering behind mine.
He snapped his hand away from my chin. “Move aside,” he growled, twitching like a leathery toad skewered on a stick.
“No,” I said, and yes, I was afraid of him in such close quarters, madness foaming from his eyes, but no, I couldn’t hold my tongue as I should, that cursed insolence I’d inher ited from my mother looming, as ever, to the fore.
He went still. I swear his eyes glowed.
“We’re supposed to be mating,” I said, nostrils flared. “Even the quickest fuck takes a little longer than this.”
An interminable time passed, him poised on the brink of dervish anger, battling inner demons for self-control.
Breathing heavily, he moved away from me. Bandy legs braced, hands clenching and unclenching, he waited the ap proximate length of time it might take a man to sow his seed in a woman’s womb. With the stab of a finger at the door, he then indicated we should leave.
His ferine eyes burned through me the entire time.
A good place to disappear, that.
Wind. Rodent squeak and child chatter. The swish and whisper of feathery grainheads beneath a hard, empty blue sky. I felt infinitesimally small on those undulating plains, exposed daily to the sun’s bone-bleaching glare and the night’s myriad stars. Small, but relatively safe from Tem ple’s grasp.
Within a matter of days I grew used to the rhythm of life out there, succored by the illusion that I was experi encing the security of my childhood.
Long before each dawn, I woke to the rousing of the water fetchers, those women whose daily duty it was to walk the many dusty miles through the dark to the Sangsusif Chodo, the Indulgent River, with great urns upon their heads. They returned just as the sun began rising, and woke their chil dren, who would then stumble, yawning, to the arbiyesku’s kadoob field, a furrowed tract of land surrounded by gnarled slii trees.With their infant siblings strapped to their backs, the children would till, harrow, weed, and irrigate the stubblemulched earth, returning with a sack of wizened tubers.
After partaking of a meager meal of cold roasted kadoobs—or sometimes, nothing but silty water—all but the very eldest of the arbiyesku would then go work the surrounding fields. The elders who remained—those lame and bent by age, who didn’t walk so much as lurch and scut tle and drag themselves forward—did kwano duty, touring round the stinking warehouse, weaving amongst the yam dalar cinaigours, looking for kwano snakes to behead. They found few, for the kwano snake is a jungle serpent, but occasionally their rheumy eyes located a snake—kwano or otherwise—that had slithered into the warehouse, at tracted to the fetor of death, and the intruder was always decapitated in a flurry of revulsion, panic, and fear.
Temple teaches that the kwano snake is the embodiment of evil; the Progenitor, the father of all kwano snakes, is the eternal enemy of the One Dragon. Thus the yamdalar warehouse needed to be daily eradicated of the diabolic snakes—along with any other hapless snake that had slith ered into the vicinity.
While the elders were thus engaged, the rest of the ar biyesku tilled arid soil, breaking up weed-choked clods, cultivating the meager crops that sustained them. Gaunt bodies dotted the fields for miles in every direction, brown backs, mottled by stormy green whorls, turning ebon under the sun.
I soon learned that all rishi on Xxamer Zu worked its fields, regardless of guild clan. Occasionally I was exempted from such work if my ribs were exceptionally sore and the work particularly strenuous, but, shamed by the exemption, I kept myself busy from dawn to dusk at other tasks.
With Savga by my side, I wove mats and baskets and repaired the holes in the barracks walls by plaiting new jute rushes amongst the old. Savga chopped wild grass; I mixed it with dragon dung fetched by others from the brooder stables; together we made fagots for fuel.
Slap, slap, slap,
went our palms on the warm, pungent stuff as we formed it into bricks for drying, and when we finished forming fagots, we made a slurry with the remaining bar row of dung and smeared it over the men’s mud-brick do miciles, to strengthen and smooth out the exterior. The thin mud dried fast on the sunbaked walls, and we had to move quickly to coat them smoothly and evenly, squinting in the glare, ignoring the buzz and nip of flies and the pulsing heat on our backs.
Savga’s presence was bittersweet. On the one hand, I felt her devotion was wholly undeserved, and every day and hour that we were together, Tansan grew colder toward me. But on the other hand, I enjoyed Savga’s company and guiltily relished the affection I was stealing from her mother.
Sometimes Savga would shyly slip her small hand into mine during our workday, and the simple, unquestioning trust of that action would hold me in its thrall, as if I’d cap tured something delicate, vulnerable, and rare. It awed me. I was loath to reject it.
Her warmth by my side each night was a gift, a reminder that not all of life was harsh and merciless. The soft swell and ebb of her little ribs as she breathed in her sleep, and the smell of her—like a smooth, sunwarmed stone, like sugared nutmilk—permeated my sleep and cradled me in memories of my own childhood. I recalled how safe and certain I’d felt, curled each night between my older sis ter and my mother. I remembered the playmates I’d once had—Rutvia and Makvia—and grew wistful watching Savga whisper serious nonsense to Runami or Wanlen or Oblan, the other arbiyesku girls her age. Because of Savga I learned anew why I cared so much for the fate of all rishi, why I had vowed to one day own a dragon estate where a child could grow up fearless, unaffected by Temple’s laws and brutal punishments.
But the cost of encouraging Savga’s affection was, as I mentioned, Tansan’s biting coldness toward me.
Whenever I was in Tansan’s presence I grew clumsy, knowing I should be grateful for how she’d spared me from rape, but feeling only impotent anger over the entire inci dent. I’d drop things when Tansan was around, spill things, trip, and fumble, and, hotter than the merciless sun, her si lent scorn would scorch over me.
It shouldn’t have been that way. Tansan was everything I admired: a strong woman and mother, respected by her kith and kin. Her wild beauty was emphasized by her physi cal strength, by her grace and composure, and yes, I admit it: The sight of her oft drew a flush to my throat and heat to my belly. Too often at nights my dreams centered around her, and more than once I woke in the dark with my heart pounding, my thighs damp, my desire for venom and drag onsong spiked so high from my dreams about Tansan that I felt I’d burst.
The dark Djimbi man who’d stormed into a hut upon hearing my news the night Tansan had been ordered to pleasure the two lordlings turned out to be Tansan’s claimer. Name of Keau, he was at least a decade older than Tansan, and as meek and quiet a man as I’d ever met. He never once summoned her to the mating shack, nor pub licly displayed affection toward her, and I had my doubts as to whether Agawan, Tansan’s infant, had been fathered by him, for the child was as light-skinned as Savga.
The days bled into each other.
The dragonmaster became known as the suwembai kam, the madman, for the way he muttered angrily to himself and twitched. No more lords trolled our fields, and as the sun grew hotter and the meager crops browned, and as food grew scarcer and water was rationed, exhaustion helped me convince myself that trolling was rare. Fatigue and relentless hunger can whittle away all but the need to survive the next hour, the next day, the next week, so that one becomes willingly blinded to the larger obstacles looming in the distance.
With each harsh new day, I tried not to envision Ghepp living a life of ease as the new overseer of the Clutch, had to distract myself from the cravings I occasionally suffered for venom by encouraging Savga’s prattle. True, Daronpu Gen had given me many charmed purgatives prior to my entry in Arena, to cleanse me of the desire for the drag ons’ poison . . . but as the days crept onward, sometimes a smell—the stringent scent of a crushed insect, the sweet ish smell of soaking grain—would powerfully evoke the citric, sweet scent of venom, and all at once I’d be dizzy and sweat-slicked and filled with a craving so strong I could have howled.
It was after a day when I’d thrice been wrenched by such visceral cravings that I realized Daronpu Gen’s charmed purgatives must have had a limit to them, and that my ad diction to venom was returning with a vengeance. Unless Gen secured a venomous dragon for me soon, I’d have to seek out my own source of the dragons’ poison . . . regard less of the risk.
I came to this bitter conclusion that evening, as I was sat, exhausted, upon the dusty hardpan outside the women’s barracks, my body drinking up the twilight as if it were cool water. Sprawled about me was the rest of the arbiyesku, minus the dragonmaster, who had retired at sunset into a domicile, twitching and muttering vehemently to himself. Beside me, Savga played pick-up-sticks with her friends, Ob lan, Wanlen, and Runami. As always, Oblan held her infant brother on her lap; she lugged the child with her everywhere, carting him to their mother only when he needed feeding. Oblan’s mother, pregnant again, was suffering terrible roi dan yin sickness; thus Oblan’s duty as surrogate mother.
The arbiyesku elders were talking quietly amongst them selves about days gone by, remembering aloud how Clutch Xxamer Zu had once been, the population more than three times its current number. They whispered the names of nephews and sons who, rather than stay on in the blighted Clutch, had left Xxamer Zu as adolescents and disappeared. They spoke of siblings, aunties, and children who had been taken by the former overseer and sold into slavery to pay off the Clutch’s increasing debts and the Roshu’s own reck less gambling wagers. And while they talked, I sat hunched in misery, hating myself for how weak I was against my need for venom, exhausted by the mere prospect of trying to find a source of the stuff.
Why couldn’t life be easier? Why always the endless strife and turmoil? This was
not
how I’d envisioned living, when I’d dreamed of owning my own Clutch. How did it come about that even while obtaining that which I’d wanted, I’d fallen so far from my goal?
My eyes drifted toward Tansan. She sat with her claimer, Keau, and the three young arbiyesku men who were con stantly at her side. The youths were leaning toward one another, talking animatedly, stabbing the air with gestures. They kept their voices low, but their vivacity broke through now and then by exclamation or curse.
“Look how he’s smiling,” Savga said, of Oblan’s infant brother.
Savga tugged on my arm. “When a baby smiles like that, it’s because jealous spirits have taunted it by saying, ‘Your mother is dead,’ and the baby knows it’s untrue, since it feeds at its mother’s breast daily.”
“Yes, yes,” Oblan interrupted. “And when a baby cries, it’s because jealous spirits say, ‘Your father is dead,’ and the baby, not yet knowing the father, believes them.”
Hush,
I wanted to say.
Will you not be quiet for just a little while?
But I held my tongue and watched Tansan.
She was passionate in her beliefs; that was obvious by the intense, focused way she spoke, by the weight and thought she put into each word. But unlike her three companions, she voiced her opinions infrequently. When she did, her comments started a fresh volley of debate amongst her friends.
I studied those friends of hers.
The youngest was Piah, a gangly fifteen-year-old with a prominent larynx. He gesticulated wildly as he talked and spat frequently to the side when others were speaking. Al liak was my age, eighteen, and carried anger on his dark, whorled shoulders like a sack of rocks. From Savga’s gos sip, I knew he’d not yet claimed any woman as his roidan yin, despite his maturity. The third young man was Oblan’s father, Myamyo, a cocky, large-eared young man with skin as dark as Oblan’s. Savga and Runami always giggled when he spoke to them.
Beside me, Savga suddenly stiffened and ceased her prattle. Two Djimbi men sauntered into the arbiyesku com pound, appearing suddenly, casually, from behind a domi cile, from the direction of the center of the Clutch. The duo ambled into the compound and exchanged nods and polite greetings with several of the arbiyesku elders. The elders’ responses were brief.
Savga slipped her hand into mine. She was looking at her mother with the flared nostrils and intent gaze of a deer scenting the wind for danger.
Tansan murmured something to Keau. He looked away from her and gave an imperceptible nod. She stood up from where she’d been nursing Agawan and walked over to Fwipi. Without a word, Fwipi took the babe from Tansan.
The three arbiyesku men who’d sat beside Tansan rose to their feet and, alongside Tansan, joined the two visitors. Keau rose to his feet and followed. Without exchanging a word, the seven walked past me.
It was then that I caught a whiff of fragrance that punched the air from my lungs and sent my senses reeling.
My eyes watered; my belly cramped. Phantom fire blazed through my sinus cavities as I relived, for one nauseating moment, a bitter taste like unripe limes, but tinged at the corners with an aniseed sweetness unmatched by honey or sugar.
Venom.
But no, I hadn’t smelled it, couldn’t have; it was impos sible. I was merely experiencing another withdrawal at tack, like those I’d suffered thrice earlier that day. How the ghosts of our past haunt us when we’re most vulnerable.
The attack ended as swiftly as it had begun, and I sat there, limp and chilled, as my vision resolved on Fwipi. She was dandling Agawan on her knee, muttering dourly to Tiwana-auntie. No one had noticed my mute agony.
I looked down at Savga. I knew at once by her shuttered eyes that I shouldn’t ask her who those two rishi visitors were, nor where her mother had gone for the night.
But those were questions I wanted answers for, regard less. Because what if I
had
smelled venom on one of those men? Something had triggered my withdrawal attack, some fragrance or another. . . .
Don’t be foolish. It wasn’t venom. You’re addled, de luded....
But what if it had been venom? I couldn’t continue to suf fer withdrawal attacks; they were getting worse and more frequent. I’d need only a little venom to rectify the situation. I couldn’t pass by the opportunity. . . .
I rose unsteadily to my feet and headed for the latrines, but once out of sight behind a mud-brick domicile, I swung wide around the arbiyesku, grateful for the relative dark ness due to the thin phase of the moon. Teeth chattering, I wondered what would happen if someone noticed me lurk ing through the dark, along the grassy paths that surrounded the arbiyesku. Would I be hailed, followed, stopped?
No time to consider it. I wouldn’t be able to find Tansan and her companions if I hesitated.
Loping half crouched through the dark, ignoring the tweaks of my healing fractures, I bisected the path Tansan had taken. For a moment I feared I’d lost her already, but no: Some way ahead of me walked the group, silhouettes cut from the dark cloth of night.
Staying low—though the dry, knee-high grasses afforded little real cover—I followed them.
We walked westward, the ghostly central dome of Xxamer Zu’s temple bobbing in the distance to our right. After a time, unpleasant odors began tainting the wind, and be neath them the silty smell of the sluggish Clutch river. The aggregate of odors was vaguely familiar, and it took me some moments to identify why: We were approaching the nerifruku, the leather tanners’ guild clan. The nerifruku of Clutch Re had been situated not that far from the potters’ clan of my youth, and the stench of raw, salted hides, pickling dung, and the caustic fumes from limed carcasses turning to leather in tanning pits had occasionally sullied the air in the pottery compound.