'Meeee!'
But only the unseen wolves answer from somewhere on the higher hills, scoring the wash with cries of their own. Mocking her. Owoooooo! Poor little slit! Owoooooooo! Their laughter stings, but she is used to it, the hilarity of those who celebrate her pain. She has long ago learned how to break it into kindling, to cast it upon the bonfires behind her eyes.
'Teach me!'
Thunder cracks-the God's hammer striking the shield of the world. It echoes through the hiss of rain across the granite slopes. Hiss-hiss-hiss, like a thousand serpents warning. Mists rise like smoke.
'Curse you!' she shrieks. 'You will teach me!'
She pauses in the marauding manner of those well practised at provocation, searching for any sign of reaction. Then, through the veils, she sees it. The great door opens, rimmed by an upside-down L of interior light. A shadow watches her for several heartbeats, as though weighing her lunacy against the chill. Then it slips out into the rain.
She knows that it is him immediately, from his hobbling gait, from his bent shape, from the burning in the pit of her throat. From the deep, sorcerous bruise, like a darkness untied to any worldly light. He leans on a staff, setting it in the crooks between boulders to keep from slipping. The rain parts about him like string, and she can see it, the sense of eyes angling, of something not quite complete, that mars all sorcery from the epic to the petty.
He descends the slope like a stair, halting only when he stands immediately before and above her. They stare at each other for a moment, the young woman, standing as though risen from the sea, and the old Wizard, waiting between the lines of falling water. She swallows at the impossibility of him, his beard frayed and feathery, his cloak dust dry in light of her fire. The forests roar about them, a never-ending rain-world.
His eyes are hard and incurious. For a moment, she struggles with a strange embarrassment, like someone caught cursing an animal in tones reserved for people. She spits water from her lips.
'Teach me,' she says.
Without a word, he hefts his staff, which she could now see is made not of wood, but of bone. Quite unprepared, she watches him swing it like a mace-
An explosion against the side of her skull. Then sliding palms, knuckles scraped and skinned, arms and legs tangled rolling. She slams to a stop against a molar-shaped rock. Gasps for air.
Stunned, she watches him pick his way back up the shining slope. She tastes blood, bends her face hack to let the endless rain rinse her clean. The drops seem to fall out of nowhere.
She begins laughing.
'Teeeach meeeee!'
CHAPTER THREE
On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me.
My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens.
In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize.
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
When Nel-Saripal, the famed Ainoni poet, finished copying the final revised verses of his epic retelling of the Unification Wars, Monius, he had his body-slave run the manuscript to a specially commissioned galley waiting in the harbour. Seventy-three days later it was delivered to his divine patroness, Anasыrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who grasped it the way a barren woman might grasp a foundling babe.
Nel-Saripal's epic cycle would be read aloud the following morning with the entire Imperial Court in attendance. ''Momemn,'' the orator began, ''is the fist in our breast, the beating heart.''
These words struck Esmenet as surely as a husband's slap. Even the reader, the celebrated mummer Sarpella, faltered at their utterance, they seemed so obviously seditious. Whispers and serpentine glances were traded among those in attendance, and the Blessed Empress fumed behind her painted smile. To say that Momemn was the heart was to say that Momemn was the centre, the capital, something at once factual and laudable. But the word 'fist,' did that not intimate violence? And to subsequently say that Momemn was the 'beating' heart, did that not divide the meaning in troubling ways? Esmenet was no scholar, but after twenty years of rabid reading, she thought she knew something of words and their supernatural logic. Nel-Saripal was saying that Momemn maintained its power through brutality.
That it was a thug.
The poet was playing some kind of game-that much was obvious. Nevertheless, the elegance and imagistic splendour of the ensuing story quickly swept her away, and she decided to overlook what was at most a gesture to impertinence. What great artist failed to punish their patron? Afterwards she would decide that the insult was rather clumsy, no more subtle than the slit gowns worn by the Priestess-Whores of Gierra. Had Nel-Saripal been a greater poet, a rival to Protathis, say, the attack would have been more devious, more cutting-and well nigh impossible to punish. Monius would have been one of those deliciously barbed works, cutting those with the fingers to touch, and baffling the palms of all the others.
But her misgivings continued to plague her. Again and again, during whatever thoughtful lull her schedule permitted, she found herself reciting the line: Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart… Momemn… Momemn… At first she took his reference to Momemn at face value-perhaps because of the way the city and its convolutions encircled her apartments on the Andiamine Heights. Nel-Saripal, she assumed, had restricted his symbolic mischief to the latter half of the formula: The literal Momemn was the metaphoric heart. But the substitutions, she realized, went deeper, the way they always did when it came to poets and their obscure machinations. Momemn wasn't the heart, it was the heart's location. It too was a cipher…
Momemn was her, she finally decided. Now that her divine husband had taken the field against the Consult, she was the fist in her people's breast. She was the heart that beat them. Nel-Saripal, the thankless ingrate, was calling her a thug. A tyrant.
'You…' That was how Monius truly began.
'You are the fist that beats us.'
That night, tossing alone on the muslin planes of her bed, she found herself running in the manner of dreams, where distance, the jolt of earth, and rushing movement were little more than an inconsistent jumble. She could hear Mimara calling to her on the wind. Closer and closer, until the cries seemed to fall from the stars. But instead of her daughter, she found an apple tree, its branches bowed into skirts by the weight of crimson-shining fruit.
She fell very still. An aura of whispering sentience enclosed her. The imperceptible sway of branches. The listless flutter of black-green leaves. Sunlight showered down, pressing bright fingertips into the tree's shaded bowers. She could not move. The fallen apples seemed to glare at her, shrunken heads, withered heads, cheeks to the dirt, watching from the shadows with wormhole eyes.
She screamed when the first of the fingers and knuckles broke earth. They were as cautious as caterpillars at first, scabrous, rotted into spear points, tattered flesh wound like sackcloth about bones. Then blackened arms thrust upward, bearing hands like crabs. The meat of the fruit cracked. Branches were yanked down like fishing rods, then snapped up swishing.
The dead and their harvest.
She stood breathless, motionless, her limbs glassed with horror. And she could only think, Mimara… Mimara… A mumbling thought, nebulous with the confusion that hums through all dreams. Mimara…
