Sestia, p.19
Sestia, page 19
As careful as Aster was, keeping the secret for more than a season, it could not last. One night, sharing a meager meal of porridge in the light of a single candle next to their hearth, Aster made their mistake. Rahul sat in the better chair nearer the fire, where the pot of porridge sat on the coals.
“May I have another scoop?” asked Aster, breaking the silence.
Rahul didn’t look up, intent on his own bowl. “Sure. Help yourself.”
“You’re closer,” said Aster.
Rahul grunted, indicating that he wasn’t going to put himself out to help. Annoyed, Aster reached out and took most of the remaining porridge, scooping it into their bowl with a satisfying splat. Except—instead of their hands, they’d used their mind to take action.
The next thing they knew, Rahul had leapt up from his chair, sending it tumbling, and dropped to his knees.
Aster, shocked at his sudden movement, let their entire bowl of porridge drop.
Rahul didn’t seem to notice. He reached out and grabbed Aster’s hands tightly, painfully tight. His voice was rich with wonder as he said, “Magnificent. Do you understand what this means?”
Aster gave a negative shake of their head.
Rahul didn’t acknowledge the response; he was in some other place, Aster could see, his mind already working at lightning speed. This frightened them more than all the energy he had poured year after year into finding Aster’s magic.
Aster had never allowed themselves to think very deeply about what Rahul so badly wanted that magic for.
In a halting voice, they said, “Well, can you tell me? What happens now?”
Rahul’s grin was wide, terrifying. “I figured you had some magic. I mean, my daughter, right? I don’t know if you realize how strong I am, how unusual it is to be able to accomplish such a wide range of illusions, for a man.”
Aster had heard him say this many times back in Odimisk, to other men whom he spoke with in shadow, but he was afraid to speak. Rahul seemed not to need an answer, anyway.
He said, “So it follows that my daughter would be talented. I just didn’t know how talented.”
Aster shrugged. “I just do little things. Move things around here and there.”
“Just moving things?”
At this point, there was no reason to hold back. He’d gotten a taste now. Rahul wouldn’t stop until he’d swallowed Aster’s world whole.
“Move them around,” Aster mumbled, staring down at the floor next to the hearth, where thick porridge puddled around their overturned bowl. Every word felt like a stone. “Heat things up, cool things down.”
“Like water?” Even without seeing his face, Aster could hear his joy.
“Yes, like water. Milk. Oil. Any liquid.”
“Can you make fire?”
“A little.”
“We’ll work on that,” he said, partly to Aster, partly to himself. “What else? Can you affect bodies? Other people’s, your own?”
Suddenly, Aster’s annoyance flared. They couldn’t stand to be bled dry by a thousand cuts. So Aster held up one hand, spread their fingers wide, and made Rahul’s fingers do the same.
Now, Aster watched his face. Anger and amazement flickered there as he tried to force his hand to close. It would not. Not until Aster said, “Here,” and let their control drop. Rahul’s anger became joy again. Then, one expression that Aster had never seen on their father’s face: pride.
“At last. All our hard work paid off. Velja is truly great.”
Aster didn’t explain the role Velja had played, which was to answer Aster’s prayer with the opposite of what they had asked for. Aster had prayed to have no magic at all. Velja’s apparent answer was to give them all-magic, the most powerful magic there could possibly be.
Rahul said, “Now we can do what we came here to do.”
Aster felt like everything was crumbling. Yet they couldn’t help saying the three words they knew Rahul wanted them to say. “What is that?”
Rahul’s grin was like a wolf’s, sharp and threatening in the hearth fire’s flickering light. He said, “You’re going to help me kill the queen.”
CHAPTER 17 MOON RITES
Midsummer, the All-Mother’s Year 519
Holy City, Sestia
Olivi, Concordia
As the Holy City prepared for the Moon Rites, on an errand for one of the Daras, Olivi took a shortcut through an alleyway. Her hasty steps carried her almost straight into a tangle of limbs and faces it took her several long, stunned moments to interpret. When Olivi finally figured out that she was looking at three people and not two, her blood rushed to her cheeks, hot like scarlet fire.
Back home on the farm, pleasures were quiet, overheard sighs from neighboring bedchambers in the dark, not intertwined bodies in daylight, and certainly not in a public place where anyone might see. Not a long-necked woman with a bearded man behind her, his hips rocking against hers in a slow, regular rhythm, and a lush-figured woman in front of her, one hand bringing the first woman’s mouth to hers, the other hand dipping low to disappear between their entwined legs. Reeling from the shock and some other feeling she couldn’t identify, Olivi’s mind was too busy to suggest to her body that she might simply move and be gone. The long-necked woman writhed as if in pain but moaned in a way that clearly indicated pleasure. The only motion Olivi made while she watched, mind working madly, heart hammering, was when her mouth fell open in a soft squeak.
At the sound of Olivi’s shock, the woman with generous hips and breasts, whose back was pressed against the alleyway wall, turned her head. Bare as the day she was born, she cocked her head with a smile and released the other woman’s neck to reach out toward Olivi, beckoning with her long fingers, a clear invitation to join them.
Olivi remained frozen.
After the length of several heartbeats—Olivi’s heart was as fast as a bird’s now—the long-necked woman growled to her distracted lover, “No, don’t stop.” A plea, a command.
Turning at last to go back the way she’d come, Olivi heard the laughter of all three of them, two women whose laughter pealed like bells and one man’s laugh as deep and brassy as a gong. Just before she emerged from the alleyway back into the street, she heard one woman’s laughter cut off with a sharp, warm groan. Innocent as she was, Olivi could still guess what she was hearing. The urgency of that groan, the way it seemed to tear itself free of the woman’s throat against her will, lingered with Olivi as she hastened back to the Edifice.
When the Dara she’d run the errand for asked why it had taken her so long to return, Olivi told an abridged version of the story, saying a pair engaged in pleasures had been blocking her shortcut, so she’d gone the long way around. She couldn’t say what had kept her from mentioning that there’d been three people and not two—was there a difference, to the Holy One? Did the god smile on two more than three, or the other way around?—but the Dara had chuckled at Olivi’s obvious naivete.
“You should find someone to pursue pleasures with,” the Dara suggested, raising an eyebrow. “You’re old enough. The city is flooded with willing participants. But only for another day or two. Take your chance while you can.”
Olivi had bobbed her head quickly, handed over the package she’d retrieved, and stepped away. Yet she was curious enough that it lingered in her mind, and finally, she gathered the courage to mention it to Concordia.
Pretending nonchalance, she said, “Is it one or two more days of the Moon Rites? I thought perhaps I might… join in.”
“Join in?”
She felt the blood rushing to her cheeks again, but she’d come this far. She’d see it through. “Pleasures. That’s what the Holy One wants during the rites, isn’t it?”
The look on Concordia’s face was inscrutable. Olivi regretted her question instantly, but there was no taking it back.
After a long moment of hesitation, the High Xara said, “Xaras refrain from pleasures because the god demands it of us. We can have no earthly attachments. We reject pleasures of the body because after Her consort betrayed Her, the Holy One never sought pleasures of the body again.”
There was something mechanical about the way the High Xara said these words, as if she were reading from a text. Olivi just wanted the moment to be over, so she did not point out the obvious, which was that she herself, Olivi, was not a Xara of any kind. Nor even a Dara. There was no word for what she was.
What role did the High Xara expect her to play in the long term, if any? That was exactly the kind of thing Olivi couldn’t bring herself to ask. Just as she never asked whether she could send a message to her mother. Olivi felt better pretending that she’d never had a family at all, that her existence was only this circumscribed dance in the walls of the Edifice.
Concordia sometimes seemed to be training Olivi for the role of High Xara, teaching her the thousands of rules and strictures and responsibilities that governed life at the Edifice. But at other times she seemed to treat the young woman as a servant or a shadow, telling her what to do, dismissing her with an offhand wave or a sharp word. Sometimes Olivi even worried that Concordia intended that at the next Sun Rites, Olivi would be the sacrifice.
Of course Olivi knew the sacrifices were always ten-and-four years of age, and Olivi would be ten-and-nine by the time of the next Sun Rites, a woman and not a girl. But she remembered well the story of what had happened two Sun Rites ago, when she herself had not even been ten years old. The sacrifices were always one boy and one girl, until they weren’t. It had been the time of the Drought and desperate action had been called for, and the High Xara had done the most desperate—some said bravest—thing, giving the greatest sacrifice the Five Queendoms had ever seen. But it hadn’t ended the Drought, and so over the years the story of that sacrifice had changed, from something brave to something foolish or even malevolent. Some people complained that the High Xara had not done enough, and others complained that she had done too much. The complaints didn’t end when the Drought did. The gossips wondered whether the High Xara had made her choice for the god’s sake or her own.
Because here she was, years after most High Xaras had passed their power on to their successors, and she had no successor at all. She still hadn’t gathered another class of Xaras-to-be. Perhaps when there were five-year-old girls again, said some, she would. But if that particularly bloody Sun Rites during the Drought had proven anything, it was that no one could predict exactly what High Xara Concordia would do.
So while Olivi thought it was highly unlikely she would be designated the sacrifice to the Holy One, neither did she think it impossible.
In the meantime, there were Moon Rites to complete, and she didn’t think she would be substituted for any of the traditional sacrifices at those rites: mouflon, ram, goat, dove, sparrow. The day before the Rites, in the lacrum, Concordia turned to Olivi and said, as if it were a perfectly regular thing to say, “You’ll help me with tomorrow’s sacrifices.”
Stunned, Olivi said, “Will I?”
Concordia seemed unbothered by the young woman’s shock. “Yes. The Holy One wills it.”
Olivi couldn’t help venturing, half-question, half-prayer, Do You? Is that what You wish?
But she heard no answer from the Holy One. She felt only a warm, smothering silence, like a blanket or a fog that would not lift. And the next morning, as the rites began, she joined the procession as always, following the High Xara in her saffron through the torchlit dark.
Seeing the shadowed outlines of the amphitheater again, hearing the breathing audience in the predawn quiet, was somehow both joyous and terrifying. Olivi could shake neither feeling, both twisted up in a knot that sat squarely in her chest between her throat and her heart, as if she had swallowed a stone.
Olivi breathed shallowly, expectantly, through the ritual dances. At the Moon Rites there were no bone beds, only a broad altar with grooves cut for blood-draining. The High Xara was the only queen in attendance. And as the sun rose, Olivi could see that this year’s audience was typical for a Moon Rites, nowhere near as large as the Sun Rites’ crowd had been. When she heard the long, mournful note of the ceremonial horn, she heard the answering calls of the dove and the sparrow, the bleating of the goat, the muttering of the mouflon and ram, and then she finally began to relax. The Moon Rites were different enough from the Sun Rites that even though the place was the same, the expressionless High Xara in the same ceremonial saffron, Olivi’s body allowed her to let go of the threatened feeling.
Once the ritual dances were complete, the High Xara stepped forward and looked out over the gathered audience. When she spoke, it was in the voice of command. “Let the god be fed.”
The mouflon was first, wrestled onto the altar by burly attendants, Olivi hovering uselessly nearby. Unhesitatingly, the High Xara drew her blade across the animal’s throat. Olivi’s breath caught, knowing what came next.
Blood ran down, down into the notches, down, down onto the grain, staining the gold red, blessing the future as a Dara stirred the blood in.
The other four animals died the same way, not without struggle but without undue suffering, and Olivi stood by the entire time. Had the god really wanted her nearby just for this?
And then Olivi heard Concordia call her name, not loudly but clearly. “Olivi. Here.”
Olivi’s skin prickled as if she’d been doused in a cold pool, the world rushing at her too fast to feel.
But she went to the High Xara’s side immediately. She couldn’t help coming when she was called, no matter what. In a sense, she’d been training for this every day with Concordia. Olivi took the few steps between them with due haste, as if she had been summoned to bring a bowl of water or offer a rag, and she stood at the priest’s side, heart hammering. All she could do was keep her eyes unfocused, not looking at the High Xara’s face or eyes, and particularly not anywhere near that sharp, bloody knife.
“Closer,” said Concordia.
Olivi took one more step. Her shoulder was almost touching the High Xara’s now, her pale yellow robe about to brush the priest’s royal saffron. She swallowed.
When the High Xara spoke again, it was in an urgent, plaintive whisper, too soft for anyone but Olivi to hear. “Take the knife from me. Lay it on the cushion the Dara Joiaca bears. With reverence. Show nothing on your face, absolutely nothing. Do it quickly now.”
Finally Olivi let herself look down at the High Xara’s hands, and when she did, she saw they were shaking. The tremor looked uncontrollable, even painful. Concordia’s right hand had tightened into a kind of claw around the blade’s hilt, like a panicked crake clutching a branch for fear of falling.
As she’d been bid, face impassive, Olivi reached over and eased the blade out of Concordia’s hands. Olivi got blood on her own hands in the process when she had to uncurl the High Xara’s frozen fingers one by one. It was like taking the blade from a statue, or a corpse. She forced one finger to straighten just enough to pull it free, then did the same with the next, hoping she wasn’t hurting Concordia, but knowing she couldn’t stop regardless. The High Xara had commanded her. She would follow through.
Olivi’s eyes met Concordia’s, and the fear she saw there stopped her cold; but Concordia hissed wordlessly, reminding Olivi that she was to show no emotion. So Olivi rearranged her facial features into a calm, emotionless mask. Then she got back to the task before her, shoving hard on the base of the High Xara’s thumb with the pad of her own thumb until the priest’s cramped, spasming hand finally released the bloody, sacred dagger.
Turning deliberately, as if she had all the time in the world, Olivi then lay the sharp blade on the pale cushion borne by the Dara Joiaca, a slight woman who usually wore a bored, incurious expression. The Dara Joiaca did not look bored now.
Once the sacred blade was squared away, it was time for the procession to begin, but the High Xara didn’t move. Olivi panicked, but didn’t let herself react. All eyes were on the High Xara at this point in the rites; everyone knew what was supposed to happen next. There was a huge chance that whatever Olivi chose to do would be the wrong thing. So she did nothing, only waited with the rest of the crowd, an entire amphitheater of held breath.
Then the High Xara turned at last, gesturing to Olivi to take a place at her side—but for the first time, Olivi noted with surprise, Concordia gestured to her right instead of her left, as was tradition.
When Olivi took her new place on Concordia’s right, she realized why Concordia had placed her there. The High Xara’s right hand had curled up into a claw again and was trembling, the tremor so strong it might be visible from a distance. Having Olivi next to her, between her and the audience in the amphitheater, blocked the crowd’s view of the trembling right hand. But would that be enough? Olivi wondered whether the closer women, including the Dara Joiaca, could see.
Just to be sure they wouldn’t, Olivi reached out and tucked the High Xara’s trembling hand beneath her own arm, making it look as if she were simply escorting the priest out of respect. They matched their steps to the same rhythm as they proceeded down the steps and back toward the temple-palace, the rest of the attendants trailing behind.
As she sometimes did in these situations, Olivi sent up a quick prayer to the Holy One. Let the High Xara be healed, if it is Your will.
And in that same moment, the answering voice came back. Yes, help her. Take her to the lacrum and tell her to dip her hands in the well. If she is truly penitent, I will take her affliction away.
When the Holy One spoke to Olivi in the High Xara’s presence, Olivi wondered why the High Xara didn’t seem to react. Why didn’t the god just speak to her directly, instead of using Olivi as a go-between? She supposed that perhaps the god spoke this way when She said something Concordia didn’t want to hear. Olivi assumed Concordia’s physical weakness was shameful to her; if it weren’t, she wouldn’t try to hide it.
