Gallar imagines her withered lips twitching as that young voice falls from them. Had she stolen it? Roggon said she had. “What’s coming?” he asks, wanting to be gone, wanting to run from her and the bad thing both.
But The Megra doesn’t answer. Instead like any ancient she slips into something new.
“Old Helmar came here once upon a when-did you know that? He was a man grown, with nothing but a century on him, and I ran barefoot no higher than his hip.”
Gallar doesn’t ask who Helmar was. The Megra speaks to people as if they know everything and treats them as if they know nothing.
“Bad things are coming, boy. Helmar could have told you. He didn’t just catch people in his patterns, he caught the past too, and the future.”
The slither of the cloth bag being taken, the wet noise of chewing. Is she eating the flowers?
“Don’t ever eat a white-star, boy. Poisons the body quicker than it opens up the mind. But if you’re hardened to it-ain’t nothing better for seeing. For really seeing. Helmar would have known what’s coming through and through. Me, I have to chew poison just to catch a glimpse of-” She draws in a sharp breath. Another. A low moan. “…empty, the desert is empty, a place without time where the djinn howl in silence and the wind moans-” She sounds in pain. “There’s a hole in the world. A hole that devours and the sands are running through it. There’s a-” She stops, cut off and for a moment he thinks she’s fainted. The sudden sound of a chair scraping on stone makes him flinch.
“I’m leaving, boy. You should too. Yrkmen are coming up the passes, austeres laying their patterns. Rangers with them. Anyone who stays here will be dead by dawn.”
“What?” His mind can’t make sense of it. Yrkmen in the mountains? Fryth was their ally! And they didn’t need to take the high passes… “You were talking about the desert! You never said about Yrkmen!”
“The death of all of us is coming from the desert, boy. That’s for tomorrow though. The Yrkmen are here today and they’ll kill you just as good.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Do you believe in the gods?”
Sarmin blinked. He had been half in dreams, wondering at his last night’s vision. Though tied to his bed he had traveled far, to speak with a wise woman of the mountain clans while Yrkmen swarmed the passes, bound for Fryth. He recalled none of it from Histories, the book that had been ruined. Now Mesema’s voice pulled him back to her room where sunlight fell in bright spots against their cushions. “Do you?”
It seemed so odd a question. He answered as he would have answered before he saw the nothingness in Beyon’s tomb. “Ask me if I believe in stone.” He rolled across the rugs to be closer to Mesema, sprawled on her piled cushions, naked and still complaining of the heat.
“Do you believe in stone?” Mesema asked him, lifting her head to watch him in the sunlight that reached them through the perforations overhead.
“I do.”
“And why?” She lifted up, a sway of milk-heavy breasts, and reached for her fan.
“There are slaves-” Sarmin bit off the words. She wouldn’t allow her body slaves into the chamber when he visited. She would rather sweat in private than be cool beneath the gaze of others. And he liked it also, being truly alone with her, in the sunlight, without even the Many haunting him.
“Why?” she asked again.
“I see it, touch it, it’s all around us.” Uncertainty tinged his words. The nothingness in Beyon’s tomb made everything he felt, everything he saw, feel temporary, delicate.
“And the gods?” she asked.
“I have only to walk to the temple and I can see them too.”
“You see stone there, cut into the shapes men have imagined, impermanent.” Her hand fluttered and a breath of the fan reached him, an unseen caress.
She was right without knowing why, and irritation washed over him. “Should the gods be hidden? Nothing but ripples in the grass?” His annoyance was erased an instant later with shame at mocking her.
“The Hidden God watches over the Felt, or so my people say. The Red Hooves believe that the Hidden God revealed himself to them at last and that he is Mogyrk, still faceless but ready to guide those who will hear him. They say that he lives in the houses they build him from stone, as the Cerani say Herzu and Mirra and Ghesh and Meksha and so many others live in the statues that are made for their temples.” She rolled onto her back, spotted with bright points of light. “The gods of the Felt roam the sky and grass, but only the Hidden God cares if we live or die.”
“I believe in the gods but they don’t care if I believe or not.” Do they care about us at all? “Any more than that room cared if I were in it or not.”
“Do they not give you your magic?” Mesema asked.
“They put it there in the world, just like they put arithmetic there, and the wind. I don’t need to bother them each time I use it any more than Donato needs their approval to calculate the tax on a caravan or a leatherworker needs it to put his tools to good use.”
“I had a friend, Eldra of the Red Hooves. She followed Mogyrk,” Mesema said.
“The girl who travelled with you?” Sarmin remembered the blue feathers Mesema kept from the arrow that killed the Red Hoof woman.
Mesema nodded. “They don’t believe like you do, at least Eldra didn’t. It’s a different kind of faith. Just one god, always on her mind. She needed to speak about him all the time, and it’s a greedy faith. They hold that all other gods are false, just mistakes and imaginations.”
Greedy, indeed. Mogyrk’s end had been selfish, slowly drawing the world into death with him. Sarmin waited for Mesema’s next words. It was the Windreader way, to approach new topics along familiar paths. A nation of storytellers… he wondered how long it might take to relate even the simplest information in their longhouses when all of them gathered in the besna-smoke and made tales out of the day’s events.
“Windreaders live among the gods. We move through them every day, see them work. The Yrkmen have a dead god. They carry his corpse like a burden and demand you see it and know that all other gods are false. They need to stamp this fact on each thing they meet, like a herder marking his beasts with iron.”
“You’re worried about this peace envoy?” Sarmin watched the points of light slide over her as she moved. She had once taken a softer view of Mogyrk. Perhaps her father’s death at Mogyrk hands had altered her opinion.
“I want you to be worried,” Mesema said. “I want you to understand how these people think, not just what some scribe has put down about the church of Mogyrk.”
Oh, but I am worried. About this and so many other things. Sarmin sat and drew his knees up to rest his cheek on, bare feet among the cushions. He watched his wife and she watched the ceiling, the only sound the flutter of her fan and the distant wail of a tower-mage threading the sky with spells so old the words lost meaning long ago. He wanted to feel alive, to abandon himself in her flesh again, but her nakedness left him unmoved. Perhaps it was the other women he had seen on his way to her; finer figures and softer skin could be found by walking into the hall and pointing. The greatest beauties of the known world roamed this wing, forever drawing his eye, invading his imagination.
Mesema rolled towards him, tilting her head in that way of hers. What pleased him most were her imperfections, the faint pink lines on her belly where her child had stretched the skin, the scar on her collarbone, some riding injury from long ago. The things that made her Mesema.
She smiled, knowing where his eyes roamed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, perhaps the first question the first woman asked the first man when Mirra and Herzu scattered words into the world.
“I-” Sarmin opened his mouth but caught his tongue. In that instant Grada had filled his thoughts, solid, strong, honest with dirt, not shaped like the girls strewn before him, but every inch alive. “Marke Kavic.” The envoy’s name came to his rescue and Sarmin repeated it, laying the emphasis where Azeem had placed his, the
