Kalimpura (Green Universe) (2 page)

Beyond the line of tents, a scaffolding rose around the stone temple under construction. I’d helped a little with laying out the foundations before the last months of my pregnancy. Since then, Chowdry and his congregation had made great progress without my aid. Endurance was well on his way to having a permanent fane here in Copper Downs. Pillars rose, and wooden forms were being hammered together to support the laying of a grand vault.

So odd, such a distinctively Selistani god here so far from home. And entirely my doing. Even more odd, this was the first new temple built in over four hundred years, thanks to the late Duke’s centuries-long interdiction of such activity. The lifting of his rule was also my doing, in point of fact.

We walked slowly toward a chattering crowd surrounding the wooden temple, the music of my silk ringing out our every step. This was the small, temporary place of worship, in effect a glorified stable built around the ox statue that was Endurance’s physical presence here amid his worshippers. Both dear friends and total strangers awaited us. The acolytes and functionaries of Chowdry’s growing sect were naturally in attendance. But also a few familiar faces from the Temple Quarter, and the women’s lazaret on Bustle Street. Several tall, pale young men who were surely sorcerer-engineers on a rare venture into sunlight. Even some of the clerks from the Textile Bourse, home of one of this city’s two competing governments struggling through a slow, apparently endless round of ineffective coup and countercoup.

Most important, Mother Vajpai and Mother Argai awaited me. Senior Blade Mothers from the Temple of the Silver Lily in Kalimpura, and Mother Vajpai one of my two greatest teachers, they had been stranded here by the betrayals of Surali of the Bittern Court when the Selistani embassy had come to Copper Downs the previous autumn. The Prince of the City had ostensibly arrived on these cold northern shores in pursuit of trade agreements, but he had really been brought across the Storm Sea to serve as the Bittern Court woman’s puppet in a far more convoluted series of plots. These two lonely Blades so far from home were the closest I had to family anymore. In many ways, these women knew me best.

I smiled at them all, warmed even by the pallid sunshine of this northern place, and walked slowly toward the plain doors of the wooden temple. The crowd parted around me like a pond confronted by a prophet. The babies gurgled, enjoying the outing it seemed, and without fear of the people.

May they live a life free of fear,
I prayed to no one in particular. I had too much experience of gifts from the gods to want any of them to hear me just now. Besides, twinned prophecies had hung over my children’s birth. Both could go forever unfulfilled for all I cared.

At the door to the wooden temple, I paused and turned to the crowd. Dozens of faces stared back at me. Joyous. Friendly. Loving, even.

It was such a strange feeling, to witness this outpouring.

“My friends,” I began. My son shifted in my arms, responding to my voice. He could not know this young that those simple words that were at once so inadequate and yet so true. “We are drawn together this day in celebration.” I sounded foolish to my ears. Like a tired priest lecturing an even more weary congregation. I summoned my courage and my sense and continued. “My children are my life. My life is yours. Thank you.”

With that, I rushed into the shadows behind me.

*   *   *

At that time, the temporary wooden temple was still little changed from the first occasion on which I had visited it. The beaded curtain on the doorway stroked me with the caress of a dozen dozen fingers. The walls held their same roughness, though prayers had been hung upon them. Brushwork in dark brown ink on raw linen, written in both Petraean and Seliu, they had the same beauty as those Hanchu poetry scrolls one sometimes sees decorating great houses.

Endurance was present in the form of a life-sized marble sculpture of an ox. His blank-eyed calm was soothing to me. Tiny prayer slips still dangled by red threads from his horns, but the usual array of incense, fruit, and flowers had been cleared away. Instead, I saw a line of offerings fresh from the bakeries and groceries of the city. Food still warm and crisp, the odors from the bread and nuts and, yes, more fruit, joined to form a lovely incense of their own. It was an offering for the eyes and nose and mouth all at once. I hoped Chowdry would allow the array of food to be eaten later.

The reluctant priest waited by the ox with Ilona. They were the only people in the wooden temple when I entered, though others pushed in behind me, led by Lucia carrying my girl. Chowdry wore a green silk salwar kameez that I’d never seen before. Ilona had found an orange silk dress that recalled the cotton dress of hers I’d loved so much back at the little cottage in the High Hills.

The two of them smiled, proud as any grandparents. I was pleased that Ilona did not feel the need to bestow her usual frown on Lucia. Not jealousy, precisely, but the two of them disagreed so much over me.

Holding both my children close, I advanced jingling toward Chowdry and Ilona. The jostling crowd behind me maintained a respectful silence.

“Who comes before Endurance?” Chowdry asked formally.

Resisting the urge to say,
Me, you idiot,
to this man upon whom I had bestowed both a god and the mantle of priesthood, I answered in kind. “Green, of Copper Downs and Kalimpura, to present my children to the god.”

He swept his hands together and beamed as if delighted by some strange and wonderful surprise. “Be welcome, and come before the god.”

Chowdry stepped to one side, Ilona to the other. Her face was troubled now. I knew why. My old would-be lover could hardly help thinking of her own daughter stolen away. With the heft of a baby in each of my arms, I was all too aware of how keenly Ilona missed Corinthia Anastasia, mourning her child’s absence.

I have not forgotten my promises,
I thought fiercely, willing her to hear the silent words from behind my eyes. Then I was before the god I myself had instantiated from a flood of uncontrolled divine energy, naïve hope, and my own earliest memories.

Kneeling, I placed my children against his belly. Had the artist sculpted him standing, I would have laid them between Endurance’s feet as I myself had once played and sheltered beneath my father’s ox. This was the best I could do.

Then I touched one of the horns. A few of the prayers tied there stirred, so I brushed my fingers across them. Whatever power or influence I had with the divine I put to wishing the prayers might be heard.

“I am here,” I told the ox.

Now all the prayers on his horns stirred. The air felt thick, even a bit curdled.
Something
was present.

“I know you will not answer me. That is not your way.” Endurance was a wordless god, given to guidance through inspiration rather than immediate intervention in the lives of his followers. “But when I was a small child, you watched over me. Your body sheltered me. Your lowing voice called me back from danger. You followed where I wandered, and led me home again.”

I paused for a shuddering breath, wishing in that moment that my father could have seen this time of my life. He would have been delighted at his grandchildren, I was certain of it. And amazed at what had become of his ox. That, too, was certain.

“Watch over these children of mine, so new to the world. They do not know its risks. Shelter them. Let them wander, and call them back from danger.” In a rush, I added, “Also, please watch over Samma and most especially Corinthia Anastasia, for they are in grave peril, needing of shelter, and surely wish more than anything to be called back as well.”

I touched my girl. She gurgled, bubbles forming on her lips, and stared up at the curving flank of the ox god with the myopic expression that all new babies seemed to share. “This girl-child I name Marya, to honor a goddess slain unfairly, and through her, to honor all women.”

Behind me rose a muttering. People didn’t like that name so much. Marya had been a woman’s goddess, her name unlucky now after her demise, though I had avenged her deicide. These grumblers could fall on their own blessed knives. I was hardly going to name this child Green after me, given that my own name was a product of my enslavement.

I touched my boy. He didn’t bubble or coo, but rather turned his head toward me with a gummy, toothless smile. “This boy-child I name Federo, to honor a friend who died badly but bravely, his entire being possessed by godhood. And to honor the fact that nothing in my life would be as it is today without him. For good or for ill.”

That
name raised a greater hubbub behind me. Federo had very nearly been the death of so many of us. But he was who he had been to me—the man who had bought me from my father as the smallest of girls, fostered my secret training to slay the late, unlamented Duke, protected me, before turning on us all when he was corrupted by divine power. Everything and nothing, enslaver and redeemer both. But in the end, he was just another of my kills, and a city’s-worth of trouble had come with that deed.

Careful of my balance and of their fragile little necks, I collected my children and turned to the crowd of well-wishers. “I give you Marya and Federo,” I called loudly enough for my voice to ring within the confines of the wooden building. “May they live long and happily under the protection of Endurance.”

That provoked a round of applause that was most pleasing to me. People pressed forward to touch the children, to touch me, to push gifts upon the three of us. I did not like this so much, but I understood it to be inescapable, at least not without deep gracelessness on my part.

So I smiled and let my children be welcomed into their lives.

*   *   *

Ilona had helped me back to the shadows of my tent. The brazier within was warm. I’d grown chill outside, and worried that the babies had as well. Their two little cradles were already drawn up before the potbellied brass heater on its curled-out chicken legs. Someone had placed chips of sandalwood on the fire. The scent was soothing.

My breasts ached again, and the children were fussing. I figured they would suckle a short while, then go down to nap. Both at the same time, if I were lucky. I was already learning what a trial twins could be.

“Let me hold Marya,” Ilona said. “You care for Federo first.”

I heard the pain in her voice. “If not for Federo, we would never have met,” I reminded her. Fleeing from his army, wounded and exhausted as I’d stumbled through the unfamiliar High Hills leagues north and inland of Copper Downs, I had been taken in and sheltered by Ilona and her daughter.

From that, so much had grown between us. I wished then and sometimes wish still that more might have grown between us. How different my life would have been.

“If not for Federo…” She couldn’t finish articulating her thought, though the words were clear enough to me.

“If not for Federo, Corinthia Anastasia would yet be with you. And your little house would still stand unclaimed by fire.” I slid out of my belled silk and my fine dress, pulled on a quilted cotton jacket that I left open, and settled little Federo into my breast—one privilege his adult namesake had never tried to claim from me, to the man’s credit. Looking up, I caught her eye and willed the haunting I saw in there to fade like darkness at dawn. “I know your pain, Ilona. And I
will
set it right.”

“No, Green. May you never know my pain.” She clutched little Marya so tightly that I briefly wondered if this was a threat. I was certain that Ilona had never trained to be a fighter, but a woman who’d lived alone in wild country as she had for years was dangerous enough in her own right.

“I have dreamed, over and over, of finding them. If I could run across the wave tops, I would already be gone.” My own words captured my imagination a moment, boots from some magic cavern out of a child’s tale that might take me from crest to crest in strides of a dozen rods per pace. I could feel how the wind would pluck at my hair, how the storms would dog my back without ever catching up to me.

“No one runs the waves except in a boat.”

“Ship,” I said absently, wincing as Federo sucked overhard. For a child with no teeth, he could chew far too well. “And I have crossed the Storm Sea three times already in my life.”

Ilona looked down at Marya. “You cannot take the children with you.”

There she touched on what had rubbed me hardest these past weeks. I had thought much about this exact question. “I cannot leave them behind,” I said gently. “They would be … well … claimed. They would be claimed by others.” Oh how true that would have been; I knew it then and still know it now all these years later.

“You stand too close to power.” She laughed, though there was no mirth in her voice. The joy of the Naming had leached from me as well, I realized. “The gods will strip you naked and bloody, and all you will get in return is a demand for more.”

The way she said that gave me a moment’s pause. After considering why, I spoke. “I have never seen you pray. Or lay out an offering. And you came of age under the Duke, when the gods here were stilled.”

“There are many voices in the High Hills.” Ilona stepped toward me and helped me switch the babies. “Not all of them boom from the grave,” she added as we completed our efforts.

She’d never spoken of her past, not between the time she’d left the Factor’s house and when I’d met her living in the cottage tucked within the feral apple orchards. Who had fathered Corinthia Anastasia, for example? How had Ilona come upon the trick of listening to the ghosts?

I’d just been handed a hint. Huge and painful and difficult, and one I could not pursue now. Would not, for love of her.

“There are many voices in this world,” I said gently. “As you said, not all of them boom from the grave. We will find your daughter, and we will bring her home. This I swear on the lives of my own children.”

“Don’t.” Ilona’s finger touched my lips. I shivered at the caress, though she meant nothing so intimate by it. “Do not make me promises you will not keep.”

Stung, I replied, “I keep all my promises.” But even in those days, I knew that was not true. Such a thing could be true of no one except she who was a miser of her spirit and never promised anything at all.