Nooria and beyond.
Mesema rode on, trailing the emperor, until the orange-lit rock face filled her vision. Here the mountain threw out two great stony arms, boulderstrewn and riven with deep clefts, in a protective embrace around an area of sand. The emperor steered his horse into the gap. Mesema looked up at the huge rocks that looked poised to fall and crush him.
“Come,” he called back to her. Cerantic did not have the authoritative inflection her own language provided, but she recognised the command in his tone. She followed, clinging to Tumble’s mane.
Once through, she drew in her breath. A riot of colours, yellow, purple and blue, danced from rock to rock. It could be the plains for all the flowers, except for the pale, shifting earth that lay beneath them. She slipped off Tumble and knelt by a sky-tinted blossom. She ran her fingers over the thick and fleshy petals.
“It looks like you,” he said. He’d come to stand beside her.
“The zabrina.”
Mesema stood and backed away.
“I meant the color is the same as your eyes.” He leaned over and snapped it from its stem.
Mesema frowned at the flower as he twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. “Why did you bring me here, Your Majesty?” Behind him, the soldiers had dismounted and were standing guard. She didn’t see the man in white and was glad for it.
“Do you see nothing here worth the bringing?” He threw the flower aside.
“It is pretty.” Mesema looked around at the colours, intensifying now in the last light of the sun. “Where is my father’s voice-and-hands, Your Majesty?”
Shadows reached across the valley.
“He has gone to join the rest of his body.”
She hoped he spoke truly. Mesema fingered the blue feather in her pocket. More questions bubbled up inside her. “Why didn’t you bring your brother the prince to greet me? Are you angry with him because of the general?”
“No.” He studied her with copper eyes.
She hugged her arms around herself. “Did he not wish to come?”
“He-” The emperor glanced back at his guards, but they were not within earshot. “He’s not like us.”
“Us? I am not like you, Your Majesty.” The words came out before she could stop them. She braced herself, but he only laughed.
“Correct: nobody is like me. I am the Son of Heaven.” He laughed again. “The gods’ favour is obvious, is it not?”
Mesema watched him laugh, feeling uncertain. Cerani humour eluded her. She took a few steps away, admiring the flowers that rose impossibly from the sand. The desert: this was the heart of the Cerani Empire. Her father had told her that a person who can live in the desert can live anywhere-fight anywhere. These flowers looked delicate, but they must be strong, to survive here. Indomitable.
The soldiers pierced the ground with long torches and touched them with flame. Flowers did not look so pretty in firelight, but Mesema could still smell their perfume, and if she closed her eyes she could imagine springtime on the plains.
Mesema felt something hard underfoot and when she drew back her shoe she could see metal, glimmering low in the sand. She glanced at the emperor, but he had turned away and was looking at something in his hand.
Mesema lifted the item and turned it over in her palm. She’d seen such round discs before, in the sacks of the traders-who-walked. It was a coin, for people to use when they had nothing to barter. The face stamped on the coin looked like the emperor, but older. She dropped it and studied the desert floor. Other objects glittered in the flames, and she picked up each in its turn: a colored gemstone, a ring, a charm. She lifted the charm and held it up to the light of torches and sunset. A golden ship, held aloft by great clouds, twirled from her fingers. She turned it this way and that, trying to imagine if such a ship existed, one that could fly through the air. Sand shifted behind her and she tensed as the emperor spoke.
“These are offerings to Mirra, goddess of beauty, children, and healing.” One does not take what belongs to the gods. Mesema gave a solemn nod and replaced the cloud-ship, but not before its golden mast pricked her index finger. She hissed and pressed her thumb against it to stop the bleeding. “Your goddess has blessed this place, Your Majesty.”
He said nothing, but she could still sense him at her back. He expected her to make an offering.
Perhaps the goddess could be a friend. She might ensure Mesema’s child would be a glorious ruler as her great-uncle had foreseen. Mesema fingered the beads around her neck. Glass and ceramic brought across the mountains by the traders-who-walked, strung with some of her mother’s gold on a woollen string. She had nothing better other than the silk clothing Sahree had given her.
No sooner had she begun to lift the necklace over her head than she felt the string snap between her fingers. The beads cascaded over her palm and onto the sand, a fall of sparkling colour. She watched them roll and bounce between other, half-buried offerings, until they came to rest in a serpentine line.
A wind blew from the west, sweeping the sand from around her feet and casting it against the mountain face. A long note sounded from the stone, higher and fuller than anything blown from a singing-stick. It seemed the final note of a longer piece, the last broken-hearted syllable of a mourningchant; it spoke of all the unheard notes that had come before it, chords that told of beauty, sorrow and violence. She felt it vibrate in her chest, and she knew that the entire song would have been too much for her to bear.
The guards fell into a whispered chant, while the emperor laughed once more. In a voice meant for only her, he said, “The ignorant say that Mirra sings for those She favors.”
The wind shifted then, bending the flower-heads towards the south, where she knew the city lay. The sand scattered around her feet, hinting at shapes and lines, moving towards something she almost recognised. The Hidden God offered at first only two vague figures and a few spidery lines, but then the wind blew harder and for one moment the image lay clear before her: a woman, knife in hand, with a fallen man at her feet. The sand offered no detail but she knew them even so: herself and the emperor.
Mesema felt each hair on her head standing on end. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug deep. Her lungs began to burn before she remembered to inhale, and even then her breath came in gasps and gulps. She was more frightened now than when the Red Hooves had flown through her village on their cursed horses. Why would she kill an emperor? What would happen to her after she did?
She had to run away.
If she could get to Tumble, and start riding, the River of a Hundred Names would take her to the folk in the mountains, and they could take her home.
She swung about. The emperor stood directly behind her. No. She put out her hand and tried to push him away. The cut on her finger burned, and she screamed.
Darkness. Flowers, tobacco and leather. Someone held her.
“Mirra’s song was too much for her. Bring me the water, now, quick!” The emperor. She opened her eyes and looked at his face. He glared over her at the soldiers in blue, his eyes wild and furious, and she saw the cruelty there, the other side of his strength. Had he killed Eldra, after all? How long before she too became a problem best solved with a cut throat or an arrow?
He looked down at her and put a hand to her cheek. “Are you well?” She closed her eyes, fighting nausea. A message from the Hidden God. Its meaning was clear, and unavoidable, the most definite and most terrible message He had ever sent. It filled her mouth like a bitter root. “It is sometimes hard to serve the gods, Your Majesty.”
The emperor snorted. “Then don’t, unless you want to find your efforts wasted.”
He held her in silence for a time and she gathered herself. The emperor felt different from Banreh. Softer. His hair reminded her of her father’s. But my father doesn’t kill girls. Or did he? She remembered what Eldra had told her about pulling a spear from her sister’s neck. She didn’t know what to believe. I may be a killer, too.
“I’m better now,” she said. Her finger hurt.
As they rode towards the caravan, Mesema held tight to her reins, feeling so dizzy she feared a grain of sand might knock her from the saddle. The Hidden God had shown her a future, but she hoped it wasn’t true. Gods do not lie. They can be unclear, but they do not lie.
