The Blackgod

“That is very strange,” Tsem said.

“No stranger than putting the children of nobility beneath the Darkness Stair,” she countered.

“I suppose not.” Tsem sighed. “It's just that everything these people do seems to involve blood and killing. Even worshipping their gods.”

“Perhaps they recognize that life is about blood and killing.”

Tsem touched her shoulder lightly with his thick fingers. “Qey used to say that life was about birth and eating. And sex.”

“Qey said something about sex?” Hezhi could simply not associate the concept with the servant woman who had raised her.

Tsem chuckled. “She is, after all, a Human Being,” he reminded her.

“But sex! When? With whom?”

Tsem squeezed her shoulder. “Not often, I suppose, and with an old friend of hers in the palace. She would have been married to him, I suppose, if it had been allowed.”

“Who?”

“Oh, I shouldn't tell you that,” Tsem said, mischief creeping into his voice.

“I think you should,” she rejoined.

“Well, perhaps if you were a princess and I your slave, I would obey that command. However, since you insist that such is no longer the case …”

“Tsem.” She sighed, opening her eyes and arching her brows dangerously.

Tsem rolled his eyes and put on an exaggerated air of secrecy. He leaned very near, as if confiding a bit of court gossip. “You remember old J'ehl?”

Hezhi's mouth dropped open. “J'ehl? Qey and J'ehl? Why, he was a wrinkled little old man! He looked just like one of those turtles with soft shells and thin long noses! How could she—”

“Perhaps he had more use for such a nose than you might imagine,” Tsem remarked.

“Oh!” Hezhi cried. “No! Darken your mouth! I won't hear any more of this. You're inventing this because no one can call you a liar out here. Except me! Qey and J'ehl indeed. Qey and anyone. She was too old, too dignified—”

“Oh, yes,” Tsem said. “Do you remember that time when J'ehl came to deliver flour, and I took you into your room and sang very loudly to you, the same song, over and over?”

“The only song you knew!” Hezhi exploded. “I kept telling you to sing a different song, but you wouldn't. After a while it got to be ftin, though, me trying to put a pillow over your face, and you just singing and singing …” She stopped. “What are you saying?”

“Qey made me do that. So you wouldn't hear.”

“No!” Hezhi almost shrieked, but she was laughing. Laughing. It was shocking, horrible even to think of Qey and that little man making love as Tsem roared and she squealed, but somehow it was funny. And she realized that Tsem had tricked her, tricked her into an instant of happiness, despite everything.

“Those were good days,” she told him as her laughter trailed off. “How old was I?”

“Six years old, I think.”

“Before D'en vanished.”

“Yes, Princess.”

“And how did that song go?”

“You don't really want me to sing it!”

“I think perhaps I do!” she commanded.

Tsem sighed hugely and squared his shoulders.

“Look at me.

A giant monkey

Live in a tree

A giant monkey !”

His deep voice bellowed out into the evening air, and three dozen Mang heads turned in their direction. Though they could not understand his words, most smiled and a few laughed, for off-key is off-key in any language.

“Abig monkey! Him love Hezhi!”

Tsem shouted on, until Hezhi was wiping tears of mirth from her eyes.

“Stop, stop,” she said. “We've too many serious things to worry about.”

“You told me to sing,” Tsem answered.

“You haven't sung that to me in a long while.”

“Well, you haven't asked me to, and when you got a bit older and started wandering about with D'en so much, Qey and J'ehl had little trouble finding time for their passions.”

“I still refuse to credit that!”

“Believe it, little Princess. I could not imagine such a thing myself were it not true.”

“I think you imagine sex all of the time!”

“Yes, but not with Qey!”

She chuckled at that, too, but her brief happiness was already waning. It amazed her that she could have forgotten her troubles for even such a trivial moment, but Tsem had always been good at that.

“You are a big monkey,” she told him. ”And I love you.”

Tsem blushed but read her sobering mood, and from long experience he made no attempt to keep her laughing.

“I know, Princess, and thank you. Out here it is good to have someone who loves you.”

Hezhi turned her face back to the bonfire. She felt braver, and dared to look at it full on. “You've never said anything truer than that,” she said.

There was a small cough behind them. Hezhi turned to see Brother Horse regarding them.

“I need to speak to you, Granddaughter.”

“Call me Hezhi,” she said, frowning.

He sighed. “Hezhi.”

“Tsem will stay with us,” she informed him.

“Very well. An old man will sit, if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind.”

Brother Horse shook his head. “Look at that. They don't need to make the fire that big! They must have burned everything for a hundred leagues.”

Hezhi frowned over at the old man to let him know that today she had no patience for the Mang propensity to chitchat before getting down to the business at hand. He caught the hint.

“Perkar is very ill,” he announced, the playfulness suddenly gone from his voice and replaced by an almost shocking weariness. “He has been witched.”

“Witched?”

“You saw the thing on his chest.”

“I saw it.”

“You are strong, or you would be mad now. What you saw was a sort of spirit— something like a ghost, or god—perhaps the offspring of a ghost and a god. We call them 'Breath Feasting,' because they eat the life in a person. Usually they eat it right away, but Perkar's sword continues to heal him.”

“I don't understand. I thought Perkar was hit with a Slap paddle.”

“It must have been a witched paddle. Such things have been known to happen.”

“You mean someone did this to him.”

Brother Horse nodded. “Of course. It would have to be a gaan, someone with the power to bind spirits.”

“Like yourself, you mean.”

The old man grunted. “No. Someone with much more power than I ever possessed. Someone who could put the Breath Feasting in a Slap paddle and command it to wait.” He turned a frank gaze on her. “I know you were frightened by what you saw in me. I know you do not trust me now, and I should have explained before you saw. But I never believed that you could see into me so easily. That is one of the hardest things to do, to see a gaan. Gods are often disguised by mortal flesh, even from the