Last First Snow (29 page)

They ate in the garden. For once the clouds' reflected light did not trouble him with memories of the stars that should have hung above. He ate with his family. They laughed together. He served them, then returned to the kitchen, mixed the wine, and poured glasses for Mina and for himself, and even for Caleb. “You're acting,” Mina said, “as if this were a special night.”

“It is,” he said. “I didn't go. I might have. In a way, this is the beginning of the rest of our lives.”

They drank together. Temoc cleared the table, washed the dishes, and returned to the courtyard where his wife and son rested. Cactuses rose around them, and fern fronds bobbed in a cool breeze. The northern wind had broken, and for the first time in days he felt the breath of the sea.

He wanted to weep. He did not. He could not afford to waste his remaining time.

He told coyote stories beneath the covered sky. No gods in these, not really, no heroes either as such, only clever creatures trying to outwit larger, stronger foes. Tricksters did not lead. No one looked to them for guidance. That would be a good life. That was how human beings learned to live, at the dawn of time: by scavenging and treachery.

When he finished an old eastern fable about the day the dawn froze, he heard deep breathing and looked left to see Caleb slumped in his chair, head lolled to one side. The boy's fingers twitched, but his eyes were still behind closed lids. “Asleep,” he said, and Mina said, “That was fast.”

“Too much wine.” He lifted his son in his arms and carried him to bed. The boy shifted against Temoc's chest. Remember this, he told himself. The living weight. The heat of him, the pressure of his chest rising, falling against yours, and against your arms.

He removed Caleb's shoes and pants and shirt, slid him under the sheets and patted the covers. Caleb hated that, would have groaned if he was awake.

“Look at him,” Mina said from the door. Faint light through the window blinds lit the boy, burnished him like bronze, his features perfect as his mother's. Strong, he'd said.

He would need to be.

Temoc and Mina went to their room, and lay together, and loved one another. He wanted so much to drift off to sleep beside her, to wake the next morning knowing the night had passed and the riots of Chakal Square were done.

He rose from bed without a sound, and dressed slowly. Heavy canvas trousers. Boots. A long-sleeved shirt. A belt. And to that belt he added the knife he always carried, the black glass blade that had not drawn blood for decades. The knife was a symbol of his office: its sharkskin hilt, the curved white reflection along its edge as if the blade cut light when drawn. That was all he could take. If he survived, he might not be able to return for a long time. Even if Mina forgave him, the Wardens would not, for the deeds he would do in battle not yet joined.

He had watched the skyline, waited for the fire-fountains that would signal the King in Red's attack. The dread master tapped his finger bones together atop his throne, and reveled in his siege-facade, patient as a spider, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Temoc hoped he would delay an hour more.

The hall to his son's room was longer in the dark. The boards did not creak beneath his feet.

He lit a candle outside Caleb's door, ran his blade through the flame, and snuffed the candle with his fingers.

Toys loomed in stuffed lumps from shelves and tables. Caleb's cards lay on the table, on their slip of silk. A half-built block city cast strange shadows on the floor—unfinished arches and tumbled towers.

Temoc prayed.

Praise be to the two sisters

To the sisters Aquel and Achal

To Aquel and Achal who descended into darkness

Who descending into darkness found the Serpents

And finding the Serpents bound them with their hearts

Binding as we bind, giving as we give

Flesh to the gods, and gods to flesh.

Don't do this. Just leave. Go fight the war you know you need to fight. Mina will take care of him. He will take care of himself.

But the boy needs his father. Without a father, he needs strength to guard him, guide him. And guard and guide both lay in the blade of Temoc's knife.

He turned the covers down. Caleb was still as death. The drugs mixed in the wine held him fast. No time for vision quests. No time to confront the Gods of the Three Gates—and anyway one of those gods was forty years dead. The ritual would have to do. The ritual, and the scars.

The knife trembled in Temoc's hand.

Hubris, to think he could dedicate his son to gods the boy barely knew. Folly, to think a few cuts would make his son an Eagle Knight.

He prayed, using no traditional form, to any god or goddess who might hear him. Is this right? I must serve You, I must help my son. Do I presume upon Your power, when I pass my path to him? Did my father presume, when he passed his to me? When he gave me the choice, at age nine, atop the obsidian pyramid at our city's heart? Should I not give Caleb the choice I faced?

And what choice was that? Temoc's father had towered above him, a giant, ancient of days, slabs of muscle and a grim countenance: a lord of men, a servant of the gods. When that man asked his son if he would walk the knight's path, how would his son reply? When every day for nine years he'd heard tales of the Eagle Knights as he drifted off to sleep, and hoped one day he would be worthy to join their number? When every eldest son of his line had taken the oath, received the scars, for centuries?

Temoc was an instrument. He was a knife held in the hand of greater men, of forces greater than men. A knight was a servant, and so was a king: a tool of gods who were history, who were the sum of men and transcended men. Their hands held him. Though they slept, they held him still, fingers tight around his hand, around the haft of the knife descending.

The second cut was the hardest—the first almost an accident, a dip of blade into belly-skin, a shallow nick from which blood welled slowly. Caleb did not stir. The drugs held him, and the gods too, even as they held Temoc and the knife. The second cut, though, was a long curve beneath that first puncture. Temoc needed focus and a steady hand. He could not think of the boy beneath him as his son. Caleb belonged to the line. Belonged to the scars his family had worn since before the Quechal homeland sank beneath the sea. Blood flowed faster now. He should have brought a towel.

As Temoc drew the scar, he feared the gods had deserted him. That, sleeping, they might not imbue the scars with power. But the wound his knife left blazed green, and knit itself closed. Still, blood was lost, and more would be. So much more.

He prayed as he worked, spoke the words and fixed his mind in proper posture for the gods. Dead Ixchitli first, the Sun who fixed the sky, fiercest warrior in the battles against the skazzerai between the stars. Envision a man blood-soaked astride a green field under a blue sky. Two spears in one hand, a club in the other. First see his strength, then see his age. See him as a mountain that bleeds. See his feet entangled with the grass, see him as a fire inside all that grows, a fire too in the bowels of the earth. Then his daughters Aquel and Achal, the twins of one heart with the two Serpents who twine beneath the world, guardian and doom of our people. Qet and Isil. The Hunchback. God after god, each presented as a burning curve through his son's skin. Caleb knew the stories. As Temoc cut, they became part of him.

Arms and legs belonged to the Spider whose web was flame, rebel child of the stars. The Serpents coiled around the boy's heart, guarding and troubling it, their stirrings its constant beat, their magma rolling through his veins. The lungs were Isil's and his salt blood Qet's. Steady the hand, ensure the lines meet cleanly. No fine manipulations of the chisel here, no elegant glyphs: he carved gods and their prayers in elemental forms onto his son, into the boy's soul.

Blood stained the bedsheets. Blood stuck to Temoc's fingers when he wiped it away to clear the ground for the next incision. Blood did not stick to the knife's edge. It rolled off, leaving droplet-trails on skin. The boy's breathing did not change. His eyelids fluttered, eyes danced beneath them, but he lay locked in a sleep the gods invaded.

Sweat ran down his brow, and stung his eyes.

Time passed. An angel of blood spread from Caleb on the bed, wings flared beneath his outstretched arms. The wounds closed, most of them, but he was pale, and shivered from the blood he'd lost. Green and silver lines shimmered beneath his scabs.

One final scar remained: the vertical cut atop the heart, below and above the Serpents' gaping mouths. Anyone could draw the other scars, though there was honor in drawing them yourself. Only the recipient could make the last, symbol of the sacrifice he would perform, of the life he would lead, as if he were a man already dead.

No time to explain all this to Caleb. Temoc hoped, this once, that form would be enough. The gods knew his need. The gods guided them both. The gods would forgive one distortion.

He lifted his son's slick, sticky hand and wrapped his small fingers around the knife. Bones ran straight and thin beneath Caleb's inscribed skin: phalanges and metacarpals and small round knuckles. Strong. Temoc's hand held his son's, which held the knife, and the gods' hand held his. The wrist didn't want to turn quite perpendicular to the chest, so Temoc had to lift Caleb's elbow and move it in. He expected the arm to feel heavy. It did not.

One last cut, a finger's breadth. Skin parted slowly, as if the knife had grown dull. This was the signature, the permission, the act that tied the disconnected scars into a whole.

And the gods entered Temoc.

His spine was a live wire. His flesh crisped, his skin peeled back. Fire tore through him, stretched him to impossible size, and passed down his hand to his son's, to the knife, to the blood. Caleb's eyes snapped open. He gasped for breath, and beams of coherent light shone from his eyes. The scars thrummed as if Caleb's soul were a drum with which the gods beat time. A sound escaped his son's mouth, a hollow, animal screech.

It was done.

The scars dimmed, though they pulsed still. Caleb fell back to the bed. His body struck the sodden sheets with a wet heavy sound. His eyes remained open. They stared up blank, unseeing. Breath ran rapid over his lips, in and out and in and out, too fast. Shadows unfolded from the boy's scars and folded again, spasmodically, no more subject to Caleb's will than were his trembling hands.

Temoc did not remember this. Perhaps he would not have remembered it. Or else this was new, some reaction to the way the deed was done, or to the drug. He would stay, and watch until it passed.

The blade in his hand was clean as ever. The gods kept it so.

He had done what he came to do.

He hated himself. He hated the gods. He hated the war, and Chakal Square, and Chel for finding him, and he hated the King in Red most of all. But what was done was done.

“Temoc.” The voice behind him, the waking whisper, wrapped him in ice. Mina's voice. “Temoc, what's wrong? Why are you still up?”

Her footfall on the floor of Caleb's room was soft and clear. A single gentle press on a piano key. The last time he would ever hear that note.

He did not turn. He did not look at her. He was brave enough for everything but this.

She saw, and screamed.

Passed him in a rush, a sweep of hair and nightgown. He tried to stand, and staggered back. She bent over the bed, a curve in the darkness, holding Caleb, her hands stained red. Words were a rush of breath pulsed with consonants: “Oh, gods. Oh, gods.” Could she see the light in their son's scars? Or did she only see the blood? “Caleb. Caleb, honey, wake up.” Caleb coughed, gasped, shivered, did not wake.

“It's okay,” he said. “He's okay.”

She wheeled on him. “There's blood, Temoc. There's—”

He held his hands out between them. Voice low. Voice level. “It's okay. Mina. You don't understand. This is good.”

He still held the knife. His hands were red.

Her eyes flared black and large in the night.

“What. The
hells
. Have you done.”

So many ways to say it. I scarred our son. Gave him strength. Joined him to the ways of his family since the dawn of time. Warded him against the legions that will one day wish to do him harm. The words did not come. None but the simplest. Only an “I.”

That was all she needed. “You.”

He stepped toward her. She drew back.

“The wounds are closed.”

“Go.”

“He'll be fine.”

“You want to go. So fucking go already.” Her voice broke to a ragged edge.

He sheathed his knife. He could not reach for her.

“Get out of here. Get out of here right now or I will—” She cut off. Anger closed her throat. She grabbed a lamp from Caleb's bedside table, lifted it like a mace. “Go.”

“Mina.”

“Not one fucking step.” A scream. Caleb convulsed, moaned.

Temoc wanted to say something. Anything.

He raised his hand.

“No.”

That word was a wall, and the wall fell onto him.

Stop her. Grab her, calm her down. Explain.

How? He couldn't even explain to himself.

He stepped back. Turned halfway. By the time he reached the living room, he was running. Fast, and faster still. His eyes burned. His hands burned—from the blood. It stained him, covered him. Waking gods licked his hands and sang sweetly in his ears. He ran faster, as if he could outrun himself.

Faster yet, and every step carried him to war.

Behind, on the rooftops, two figures watched the house, and exchanged a long, silver, hungry look.

Soon, they said. Very soon, now.

They licked their lips, and savored their fangs.

 

48

Rage flowed cold and waterfall-fast, mixed with and inseparable from fear. Mina stood surrounded by Caleb's room. Shelves. Books. Cards. Blocks. Right angles and sharp edges, askew. The door gaped before her, where Temoc had stood a moment ago, and the black beyond.