The veiled throne, p.9
The Veiled Throne, page 9
Goztan had heard the grumblings of the elders, blaming her for the Third Tribe of the Antler’s lack of wealth. She had hoped that the elders would understand that she had fought for something far more valuable; she had fought for who they were.
“You’re the one who’s weak,” she said to her mother, her heart convulsing in pain. “You can’t even look me in the eye and tell me the truth, instead of making up that ridiculous excuse about my womb.”
Her mother refused to meet her gaze. “The elders have spoken.”
Tenlek explained that Goztan had two choices: exile herself to the scrublands and live alone, looking only to the gods for aid; or stay with the tribe but give up all claims to her birthright, including changing her name so that she was no longer counted as a member of Clan Ryoto. She would be known by the single name of Goztan, like one of the culeks or low-status naros, without cattle, without sheep, without even kin who acknowledged her.
Goztan stood rooted to the spot, unable to comprehend how, after all she had endured and borne, her mother and the elders could turn on her like this.
“Let me know of your choice by sundown,” her mother said. She turned and strode away without a second glance at her.
A limping figure appeared out of nowhere and knelt in Tenlek’s way. Goztan saw that it was her father, Dayu Ryoto.
“It wasn’t her fault,” he pleaded. “She’s a true daughter of the Lyucu, and everything she did was for love of the tribe and our people. If you must punish anyone, punish me. I know it’s my weak nature that you despise. Take away my name and exile me in her stead.”
“I gave you the name Ryoto when you married into my family, thereby elevating your lineage,” said her mother coldly, “so it’s hardly your name. My father should never have agreed to have me marry a cripple who can’t even climb onto the back of a yearling garinafin. What good is the ability to speak to the gods when your prayers couldn’t even keep our daughter pure from barbarian seed?”
“I know you want the son of your younger husband to succeed you,” Dayu said. “But there will never be another leader like Goztan for our people. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
“It’s hardly your place to tell me who should succeed me in my lineage.”
She tried to step around him, but he wrapped his arms around her knees and hung on. “I won’t let you go until you agree to accept our daughter back and give her her birthright.”
Enraged by this display of defiance, her mother struggled to free herself. She finally twisted out of his embrace and kicked him in the face. He fell, and the back of his skull made a sickening sound as it struck a rock on the ground. He lay very still.
Her mother knelt by his head, saying nothing. After a long while, she stood up and walked away, never looking back.
Goztan ran up to the body of her father and howled. In her mind, she seemed to hear a voice.
… eyes so attuned to the flow of power that she is blind to everything else…
Goztan left before sunset.
* * *
She built her own tribe.
Alone on the scrublands, she could have given up all hope and joined the tanto-lyu-naro, tribeless bands of wanderers who had renounced all warfare so that they could live on handouts and pray to their weak, useless god, an aspect of the god of healing called Toryoana of Still Hands. She could have pleaded to be adopted by another tribe, to become one of the culeks without lineage or pride, little better than an Agon slave.
But she refused to submit to those lesser fates. By dint of her prowess as a fighter, she gradually gathered around her other exiles from the Five Tribes of the Antler. Some were younger siblings driven away from home to enlarge the inheritance of elder siblings; some were naros and culeks who had broken tribal laws or offended powerful clans; still others were warriors who simply didn’t fit into the places others wanted to assign to them. Under her leadership, they lived as robbers and thieves, raiders who preyed upon lone herdsmen and caravans.
When she felt strong enough, she approached the other thanes of the Five Tribes, seeking contracts of marriage and alliances to bolster her claim as successor to the thane of the Third Tribe. She learned to see the flow of power and to manipulate it, to promise this elder better grazing rights and that chieftain’s son her support in his own succession bid, to trade one favor for another, to plot and cajole and lie and threaten.
By the time she challenged her mother, enough shamans had been paid off with tolyusa and garinafin stomach lining to give her the prophecies she needed, and enough herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and bars of gold and bundles of silk had changed hands for the tribes’ elders to declare neutrality. When she finally landed in her mother’s camp, she was at the head of a garinafin force composed of contributions from all her four fiancés. Her mother offered to go into exile, but Goztan refused her terms. There was only one thing Tenlek had that she wanted.
And so, after the shamans took Tenlek’s spirit portrait, Goztan plunged a bone dagger into her mother’s heart and received her last breath, as though they weren’t related by blood. She even made sure that the whole ceremony was performed outside, so that her mother’s shame of not dying in battle would be fully exposed to the sun, the Eye of Cudyufin.
She went to Taten to see Pékyu Tenryo and to seek his confirmation of her thanage.
“Declare your lineage,” the pékyu said.
“I am called Goztan Ryoto, daughter of Dayu Ryoto, son of Péfir Vagapé. I wish to serve you as the Thane of the Five Tribes of the Antler.”
To deny her mother’s name in her lineage was the greatest revenge she could have.
The pékyu nodded and that was so.
CHAPTER SIX IT’S MY NATURE
VICTORY COVE, UKYU-GONDÉ: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWELFTH YEAR AFTER STRANGERS FROM AFAR ARRIVED IN THEIR CITY-SHIPS (KNOWN IN DARA AS THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF FOUR PLACID SEAS).
Recovering from her recognition of the storyteller performing by the bonfire, Goztan told Vadyu an abbreviated version of the history of how she had come to be the Thane of the Five Tribes of the Antler.
She did not mention her encounter with Oga. She did not describe her rage and sorrow when she witnessed her father’s death. She did not linger on the details of greed and power or emphasize the parallels between her tale and the experience of Pékyu Tenryo. She stuck to only the essential parts.
Vadyu stared at her, dumbfounded.
Goztan turned to regard the figure of Oga, the slave in the middle of his tale.
… The three new sharks swam around the pod in large circles, grinning in grim determination. Beckoned by the steady whistles of their matriarch, the dolphins retreated to the center in a tight huddle, their heads pointing outward vigilantly. After that bloody initial skirmish, the two sides now settled into a tense standoff.
Any dolphin that strayed from the huddled pod was sure to meet a fate as grisly as the two hotheaded dolphins who had lost their lives to rows of daggerlike teeth, but if any of the three sharks made a foolhardy attempt to break into the pod, it was sure to meet deadly resistance from the agile dolphins as well….
She saw that his face had grown more lined and scarred in the intervening dozen-odd years. His beard, now rather long and unkempt, was peppered with gray streaks. A collar made from a bull’s ribs was locked around his neck, and a long leash of twisted sinew dangled from the collar to a stake pounded into the ground about twenty feet away, giving him freedom to move only within the circle described by the leash.
The Lyucu audience was completely absorbed by the scene painted by Oga’s words as they sipped kyoffir and occasionally clapped at an exciting moment. No one paid attention to the pékyu-taasa and her captive.
Vadyu recovered from her shock. “Your mother blamed you for bearing the seed of Dara? But that only happened because you were doing what the pékyu asked you to do to bring victory to the Lyucu!”
Goztan let out a long puff of breath. She seldom brought up this part of her life with anyone, but somehow trying to explain it to a young girl who believed that anyone who did what her father asked must have been right made the task easier.
“She saw my pregnancy as a sign of my weak nature, of the part of me that came from my father, whom she despised. Perhaps it was also a way for her to show disapproval of the pékyu’s method of gaining victory over the Lords of Dara, which she found beneath her ideals.”
Hadn’t someone once told her that stories had to change for the teller and the audience? In the years since, she had come to reluctantly embrace that wisdom.
“You weren’t being weak at all, and neither was my father. My father says that only the truly strong dare to use their weakness as a weapon.”
“Argh—” Goztan moaned. “My head…” She was certainly not above using her weakness as a weapon. “Now that you know my story, will you let me go?” She looked pleadingly at the pékyu-taasa.
Vadyu bit her bottom lip as she weighed her choices.
… What will the shark-who-thinks-it’s-a-dolphin do? we wondered.
It swam in tight, agitated circles in the middle of the dolphin pod. Its eyes darted from one shark to another, utterly fascinated.
“Do you think it has ever seen another shark?” my friend Pama asked me. He was an old salt, and had seen more of the ocean than even I, who made a living from the fruits of the sea. It was said that he had hooked more than fifty species of sharks in his life, including the ice sharks who lived for hundreds of years and moved as slowly as drifting icebergs.
I shook my head, uncertain of the answer….
* * *
The thane could almost see the struggle inside the girl’s head. Should she believe the thane? She was proud of the fact that she had deduced that Goztan was a spy, and believing Goztan now meant she had to give up that triumph. No one liked having their own cleverness taken away.
“No,” the pékyu-taasa finally said. “You spun a good tale, but you’ve offered no proof. Let’s wait until morning, after Korva’s recovered, and I’ll have her watch you while I go back to Taten to check out your story. If you’re telling the truth, I’ll come back and have you ride back with me on Korva—”
“Ride back with you on Korva?!”
“Exactly so. And we’ll tell people that… that… Korva escaped and got lost, but I recaptured her so she wouldn’t injure any roguish children who tried to ride her.” The pékyu-taasa’s eyes shone with excitement as she went on. “Of course, despite my undaunted courage, the beast proved too much for me, and just then you came to my aid—”
“Wait a—”
“This way, I won’t get in trouble, and my father will be grateful to you for saving me. I’m sure the pékyu’s gratitude can be useful to a thane, even a tiger-thane and hero of the campaign to humble the Dara barbarians.”
Goztan sucked in her breath. The pékyu-taasa’s mind was supple and quick. For a brief moment, she even considered going along with Vadyu’s absurd plan, but then she remembered that she was the Thane of the Five Tribes of the Antler. How could she live with herself if she succeeded only by going along with the lies of her lord’s minor daughter?
“That’s not even close to what actually—”
“It’s pretty close to what happened. On the other hand, if I find out you aren’t telling the truth, I’ll get Korva to bite you as a traitor, which was my first plan.”
Goztan shook her head.
“Suit yourself, but I’m not letting you go tonight.”
Goztan sighed. Vadyu, despite her young age, was as headstrong as her father. Explaining to her that Goztan needed to see the pékyu first thing in the morning would do no good. Even if Vadyu were to believe her, she was now committed to the thought of using Goztan as part of her own scheme to get out of trouble for stealing Korva.
Goztan had to get out of this mess herself.
The captive and the pékyu-taasa, each deep in her own thoughts, listened halfheartedly to the tale spun by the bonfire. Oga was now leaping about, tethered to the end of his leash, his dancing, elongated shadow sweeping over the faces of his rapt audience, his voice rising and falling like waves in a stormy ocean.
* * *
… one of the circling sharks lunged for the dolphin that had wandered too far from the pod, and the water instantly erupted into a confusion of flapping fins and flashing teeth.
The grinning demon snapped its jaws on the unwary gray arc.
The azure surface turned carmine, first blood drawn by the sly shark.
Six bottle-nosed briny battlers, their spear-snouts steadied with pride,
Aimed at the killer: Wham! Slam! Bam! In the belly, the soft side.
Thrashing, leaping, snapping, bashing. Fluke meets fin; spine parries tail.
Bloodier than wolves hounding a tiger, this fight-ring of sail.
With coordination and determination, a team of six dolphins managed to flip the much larger shark onto its back. And as was the wont with those dagger-jawed fish, the shark fell into a stupor, its sail-fin slacking. The pod of dolphins celebrated with a symphony of chirps and whistles and squeaks.
The dolphin-shark, meanwhile, stared at the catatonic shark with unblinking eyes. It was not celebrating with the rest of the pod, but neither did it make a move to help its fellow fish.
Meanwhile, the dolphins tried to finish their assault on the shark, but since their teeth were far less fearsome than the shark’s, they could only nip at the lolling torso and draw spurts of blood, unable to open up a fatal gash in the shark’s belly.
With little warning, the other two sharks abandoned their careful orbit around the pod and headed straight for the dolphins in a frenzied dash, heedless of their own safety. With a series of clicks and high-pitched whistles, the matriarch of the pod ordered her warriors to retreat for a final stand.
The only one who didn’t obey was the dolphin-shark. Still gazing at the upside-down shark that was bobbling gently with the waves, blood streaming from its wounds like the tendrils of some deformed sea jelly, the dolphin-shark drifted farther and farther from the pod, no matter how loudly the matriarch squeaked. Its tail thrashed wildly in the water, as though it was having trouble keeping its body under control.
“It’s the blood,” Pama said. “It’s all that blood in the water.”
I understood. With the wounded shark and the dolphin carcasses in the area, the turbulent seawater must have inundated the noses of the sharks with the scent of blood. That was why those two sharks had abandoned their careful plan and charged at the dolphins, mad and senseless. They couldn’t help it. It was their nature.
“I don’t know if that shark who thinks it’s a dolphin had ever felt the blood-madness,” said Pama.
* * *
“Is he going too?” Goztan asked abruptly.
“What?”
“The storyteller from Dara. You said that everyone around the bonfire is leaving on the expedition to Dara in the morning. So… is he going with them as a guide?”
“You mean Oga the Re-rememberer? Father was going to keep him around, but he turned out to be too sly to be trusted.”
Goztan thought she heard a mixture of anger and disappointment in the pékyu-taasa’s voice. There was probably a more complicated relationship between Vadyu and this slave. “The re-rememberer?” she asked cautiously.
“He’s a… strange one. At first, Father kept him around to interpret the wax logograms, but he turned out to be illiterate. But then he discovered that Oga knew many stories from Dara, including some that weren’t even known to the Lords of Dara.”
Goztan nodded. She was certainly familiar with Oga’s narrative skills.
“And of all the slaves from Dara, he learned our language faster than anyone else. He has a gift for learning our stories and retelling them in the fashion of the Dara poets. Father realized that he was probably an example of an odd kind of shaman they have in Dara called historians—though Oga denied it—whose job is to observe the deeds of the great lords, shape them into stories, and recount them.”
“Like the shamans who record the deeds of the pékyu with voice paintings or the elders who memorialize treaties with knotted ropes?” asked Goztan.
“It’s not quite the same thing. Historians in Dara don’t just recall facts, but must explain them,” said Vadyu.
“With the aid of their gods, surely?” asked Goztan.
“Actually, no,” said Vadyu. “Father thinks the historians of Dara prefer to explain everything without ever invoking the gods. I told you they were odd shamans.”
Goztan nodded. The irreverence of the people of Dara toward their gods was something she had noted herself.
“Father described the historian’s work as a kind of re-remembering, and he found it amusing. Father wanted Oga to teach all the pékyus-taasa the language and stories of Dara so that we could understand our enemies better.”
There was no mistaking the wistfulness in Vadyu’s tone. She respected the old storyteller. “That sounds like a nice position,” Goztan said.
“Of course it was. He was saved from heavy labor and had double the rations given the other slaves. But the insolent fool kept on telling me and my siblings false stories filled with messages from their sages about how it was wrong to kill and how living a better life meant not conquering your enemies. Father grew tired of his attempts at weakening our resolve, and so he’s been stripped of his post and sent here to go along on the expedition as a guide.”
The bitterness in her voice surprised Goztan. “So you’ve heard many of his fables, then?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.
“I have,” said Vadyu begrudgingly. “They can be quite fun, even if they have unbecoming morals.”
So he’s still not given up on the idea of “teaching” us, barbarians in his mind, thought Goztan.
She had done everything the pékyu had demanded of her; she had fought in whichever direction he had thrown Langiaboto, his battle axe, without question; she had killed and maimed for him, first to overcome the Agon and then the invaders of Dara; she had believed his promises that everything would be better after just one more battle.
