Last First Snow (18 page)

“Then why fight the compromise we've built?”

“A compromise made in secret. A deal to hum lullabies to men almost awake.”

“We built a movement, and you want to destroy it.”

“Not destroy. Save.”

“The Chakal Square crowd has no weapons, no fortress. You're whipping these people toward a fight they will not win. If we make this deal, the movement builds. The momentum continues. The city changes for the better. If we fail, I see only pain ahead.”

“Sometimes we need pain.”

“Easy words to speak from the comfort of a penthouse.”

“We each aid the cause in our own way. If this sours, do you think it will be hard for the Wardens to find me? You had little difficulty, and the Wardens can be quite persuasive.”

Temoc set down his tea. He breathed deep. There was a fire within him, a fire he'd spent so much of the last few days trying to suppress, fed by fear, by frustrated hope, by intimations of mortality. “Alaxic.”

The old man turned.

“Stop this. Now. Change the tone of these papers you write. Or stop delivering them. You are endangering my people. And if you continue, I will set myself against you. I will speak, and they will listen. They will know you for a man who wishes to use them for his own gain. You sit behind your desk and concoct revolutions with your pen. These people know me. They look to me. I lead them.”

The wind blew from the north, hot and dry and angry as a dragon's breath.

Alaxic nodded. “I suppose you do.” He finished his tequila. “Too late to change the morning edition, but I will halt its delivery. Tomorrow afternoon's issue will endorse your compromise.”

“Just like that.”

“Of course,” he said. “You have no idea how long I've waited to hear you accept leadership. I thought your family would keep you away. But it is good to see you walk the true path. Do not waver.”

They looked into each other's eyes for a long time, both searching, neither finding.

“I must leave,” Temoc said.

“So soon?” Alaxic turned to set down his glass. “Why not stay? We could talk about old times.”

But when he turned back, Temoc was already gone.

 

27

Mina woke to a breeze through the open window, and stretched under cotton sheets. The hand that held her shoulder was warm, and firm. “What?” More groan than a word, elongated, final consonant missing.

“It's me.”

Temoc's voice. Well, that was good, at least.

“Hi.” She rolled over and sank back toward sleep until he kissed her on the forehead. “Shouldn't you be at work?”

“Come with me today.”

That opened her eyes, pulled her upright in bed. “What?” This time with the final “t” in place.

He was dressed, pressed and polished, with that slick wrinkle-resistant way of his, as if he'd sprung fully clothed from some god's forehead. Sharp, and beautiful. “It's a big day,” he said. She knuckled sleep out of her eyes, and stifled a yawn with her fist.

“Big day for you to let me sleep.”

He laughed, which annoyed her. “I've been pushing you away. I don't want to do that anymore.”

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty.”

“In the morning.”

“Of course.”

“How about you push me away until, say, six?”

“I thought you cared.”

“I will kill you.”

“Someday, maybe. Come on. I made coffee. And breakfast.”

He held out his hand. She took it, and he lifted her from bed. Half-blind, she groped for her robe and cinched it around her waist. “You sign it today.”

“Today, we save the Skittersill. Concessions on both sides, but there will be peace. And we can build from here. The Chakal Square Movement will be the first step in something big—the people have a voice now.” Such a smile, wide and bright as desert sunrise. She could see it even without her glasses. “What scholar wouldn't want to watch this?”

“When do we need to leave?”

“I have a sunrise service. Forty-five minutes, give or take.”

“Coffee first,” she said. “Shower. Then I decide whether you get to live.”

He handed her a mug, its contents dark and hot and beautiful as any tragedy. She grabbed it from him, spilled some over her fingers, ignored the pain, and drank.

“History in the making.”

She staggered out into the hall, into the bathroom, and shut the door in his face when he tried to follow.

“I'll wake Caleb.”

“Breakfast better be good,” she shouted through the door.

“It is!” he said, and maybe he said something else, but the water cut him off.

*   *   *

The shower improved her mood, or else the coffee. As usual when awake before sunrise she felt like she was moving through an underworld, one of the peripheral hells her mom used to tell stories about. Once she turned the lights on she could at least pretend it was a proper hour of the morning. Temoc didn't need indoor lights, eyes sensitive as a cat's, predawn glow filtered through curtained windows more than enough for him. Breakfast was good, as promised, though heavy: eggs, bacon, fried bread. “We'll need our strength,” he said. Caleb sat blank-eyed at the table. Refused offered coffee, shoved food into his mouth. “This,” Mina tried to explain, “is a big day for your father. For all of us.”

“Why?”

Reasonable question, though answering it would require an entire academic conference. “The King in Red,” she started, “has been arguing with people in our neighborhood. Most of the time he wins arguments. This time, we won. And he's coming to sign papers that say we won.”

“It's more exciting than it sounds,” Temoc said, and Caleb echoed his father's smile, even though Mina could see wheels turn behind the boy's eyes, evaluating, forming questions. Good instinct, though she worried sometimes that he was too quiet.

She wore khakis and a collared shirt, not wanting to seem overdressed for a mob or underdressed for the king. “Will we meet him, do you think?”

“Of course. He's come in person, the last two days.”

History embodied—master of Liberation, who deposed the old gods and rebuilt Dresediel Lex from the ashes of the city he'd burned. He'd already entered the folklore of the tribes she studied, leader of a pantheon of devils and trickster-spirits. Perhaps worth the early wakeup call.

Hot wind blew down dry gray streets. Dawn never felt quite like this in the field. Wilderness softened the transition from night to day: flowers opened, birds sang, the desert came alive to drink the dew. None of that here—only stone and sleep. Temoc sat beside her, silent. Contemplating the day to come? Reviewing his forty years of struggle, or the weeks he'd made this journey to Chakal Square alone? She wanted to ask, but couldn't with Caleb between them. Or, she could, but she couldn't trust him to give an answer that wasn't cushioned by the effect it might have on the boy.

“How did we win?” Caleb asked after a few silent minutes of cab ride.

Mina blinked. “What do you mean?”

“The King in Red beat the gods. So how could we win?”

“We fought differently this time,” Temoc said.

“It's easier to win some kinds of battles,” Mina added, “when you don't fight.”

“I don't understand.”

“Back in the God Wars, the King in Red and the people of Dresediel Lex were enemies. So he fought as hard as he wanted, without worrying what people thought of him. He's very strong, so he won. This time, he thinks the people in the square are his friends. He can't just kill them, like he did last time.”

“That's one reason,” Temoc said.

“Is there another?”

She smelled the camp then: woodsmoke, burnt meat, and sweat. Clothes worn and worn again until they became part of skin. Mingled breath. She heard the voices.

Temoc halted the carriage, dismounted, lifted Caleb from the cab. Mina followed, taking Caleb's other hand. The sky was lighter, but the city still felt unreal. Familiar paving stones lay underfoot, and plaster walls stood to either side; they walked past shuttered strip malls and convenience stores. A bail bondsman billboard blared yellow against the sky. The street was empty of traffic, empty and haunted. Then they turned the corner, and before them spread a human sea broken by canvas tent islands and ship mast signs. Chakal Square took her breath.

There was no Craft here, no power like she saw daily at the collegium—only the sheer weight of assembled human souls.

How could so many have dared to come here? Set against the King in Red, their passion was futile. Defiance invited death, torture, prison.

And yet they had won.

She had never been quite so proud of her people as in this moment. Sentries with red armbands called out to Temoc. Cheers greeted him.

As the red-arms received Temoc, as the crowd gave way, she swelled with pride and a little fear. She read the papers, of course, and knew Temoc's role. But to know her husband worked with these people, to know he was their totem against disaster, to know the Skittersill turned to him as nomads turned to shamans and for the same reason—none of this prepared her to walk beside him into the mouth of that crowd. Lead us, the people said. Command us. Be our strength.

She'd slain demons with the man beside her, and argued with the ghosts of desert gods. They'd faced down Scorpionkind and returned alive from deserts where only shadows walked. She had thought she knew what it was to be an Eagle Knight, what life Temoc would have lived if the world had never turned. But this too, was a part of that, a part she did not know. He walked beside her, unashamed, draped in authority.

Her father's people had been cooks in the temples, her mother's people servants. This never mattered to her before. It did not matter now. But it came closer than ever before to mattering.

She wanted to hug him, to slug him, to kiss him, to remind him he was human. But she held Caleb's hand, and walked beside him nobly as she could, chin up, and did not flinch when Temoc said, “This is the other reason.”

 

28

The sacrifice, at least, looked familiar. Mina waited behind the altar, flanked by Caleb and by the woman Chel, who Temoc had introduced as a friend—a strong figure, shorter, broader than Mina herself. Mina stood with hands clasped behind her back as the service progressed toward sacrifice. The people of Chakal Square clustered around the makeshift temple; the few hundred who could fit on the mats knelt there, and the rest, thousands she estimated, pressed near. Children rode on parents' shoulders. Men near the back perched on tiptoes. They muddled through the call and response, sludging the sharp consonants and glottal stops of High Quechal.

She knew this service, but it felt different in the open air under so many eyes. Temoc's muscles rippled as he raised his arms. Scars shone with faith.

Her husband. But he belonged to them as well.

“And nobody's thought to bring more mats in the last few weeks?” Mina asked Chel.

“No.”

“It would let more people sit.”

“But it would make those who sit less special.”

She nodded. “So there's status in kneeling.”

“Sure,” Chel said, though there was a hitch in her voice, uncertainty.

“How's it decided, who kneels on the mats and who stands?”

“Some wait all night.”

“Do the same people always kneel?”

“No.”

“Why not? If it's better to kneel than to stand, wouldn't people with enough influence want to kneel all the time?”

“People who haven't knelt before should have a chance,” Chel said as Temoc drew the knife.

“Who decided this?”

“Nobody,” Chel said. “It's just the way things are. You ask a lot of questions.”

“That's what I do,” she said. “I study this sort of thing. I don't usually have a chance to see its infancy. This is stuff we speculate about in journals—that makes us scream at one another if we've been drinking.”

“What stuff?”

“Construction of ritual. Ossification, or codification really, of performance. The extent to which it's intentional or accidental, or an intentional response to initial accident.”

“We're not an experiment.”

“That's not what I mean.” The blade came down. “Just—it's interesting to think, given what you have here, what it might look like in a hundred years, or a thousand.”

Mina turned to Chel, and turned away too, from the gods that were and were not her own, which rose from the altar to lick the sacrifice's blood. She shared Temoc's faith—but in Chakal Square, under the burnt orange sky, she felt alien. “Do you think we'll last that long?” Chel said.

And in that question she heard the fear Temoc buried under false certainty. “Why wouldn't you?”

As the gods feasted before them, she wanted to shake Chel and demand: tell me why you're scared. Tell me why I should leave here now, and take my son and husband home. But she did not.

“A hundred years is a long time. That's all.”

“You'll be fine,” Mina said, and hoped she was right.

 

29

Elayne landed behind the Wardens' barricade and released her opteran to buzz off into the morning.

Black-uniformed faceless figures marched around her, fortifying camp, feeding the feathered serpent mounts: a colony of large and surly ants. More Wardens had arrived overnight. A sandbag wall stood between Elayne and the crowd. Bad omen for the morning of a peace.

She sought the King in Red, and found Tan Batac waiting outside the Wardens' command tent, thumbs bowing out his suspenders, head bent, investigating his brown wingtips over the mound of his belly. His cheeks twitched, his mustache trembled. Always in motion, even when still—two thousand years before, Aristocritus used that phrase to describe the universe. He might have been prophecying Tan Batac.