Quiet Knives (2 page)

Inas arose and carried the
tray back to the cooking alcove. She washed and dried the teapot
and cup, and put the crackers back in their tin. The
sventi
she left
out.

She was wise in this, for not many minutes
later, Shereen slipped into the alcove, veils dangling and
flame-colored hair rippling free. She sighed, and reached for the
leaves, eating two, one after the other, before giving Inas a swift
glance out of the sides of her eyes, as if Shereen were the
youngest, and caught by her elder in some unwomanly bit of
mischief.

"Our sister was distraught," she said
softly. "She never meant to wound you."

"She did not wound me," Inas murmured. "She
opened my eyes to the truth."

Shereen stared,
sventi
leaf halfway to
her lips.

"You do not find the truth a fearsome thing,
then, sister?" she asked, and it was Inas who looked away this
time.

"The truth is merely a statement of what
is," she said, repeating the most basic of her father's lessons,
and wishing that her voice did not tremble so. "Once the truth is
known, it can be accepted. Truth defines the order of the universe.
By accepting truth, we accept the will of the gods."

Shereen ate her leaf in silence. "It must be
a wonderful thing to be a scholar," she said then, "and have no
reason to fear." She smiled, wearily.

"Give you sweet slumber, sister. The morrow
will be upon us too soon."

She went away, robes rustling, leaving Inas
alone with the truth.

* * *

THE TRUTH, BEING BRIGHT,
held Inas from sleep, until at last she sat up within her
chatrue
, lit her fragrant
lamp, and had the books of her own studies down from the
shelf.

In the doubled brightness, she read until
the astronomer on his distant column announced the sighting of the
Trio of morning with his baleful song.

She read as a scholar would, from books to
which her father, the elder scholar, had directed her, desiring her
to put aside those he might wish to study.

The book she read in the lamplight was
surely one which her father would find of interest. A volume of
Kenazari mythology, it listed the gods and saints by their various
praise names and detailed their honors.

Nawar caught her eye, "the one who guards."
A warrior's name, surely. Yet, her mother had been named Nawar. A
second aspect of the same god, Natesa--"blade dancer"--in the
Kenazari heresy that held each person was a spirit reincarnated
until perfected, alternatively took the form of male and female.
The duty of the god in either aspect was to confound the gods of
order and introduce random action into the universe, which was
heresy, as well, for the priests taught that the purpose of the
gods, enacted through mortal men, was to order and regulate the
universe.

Inas leaned back against her pillows and
considered what she knew of her father's third wife. Nawar had been
one of the married women chosen as guardians of the three dozen
maiden wives sent south from Kenazari as the peace tithe. Each
maiden was to be wed to a wise man or scholar, and it had been the
hope of the scholars who had negotiated it that these marriages
would heal the rifts which had opened between those who had
together tamed the wildlands.

Alas, it had been a peace worked out and
implemented locally, as the Holy Books taught, and it had left the
mountain generals unsatisfied.

Despite the agreement and the high hopes of
wise men, the generals and their soldiers swept through Kenazari
shortly after the rich caravan of dowries and oath-bound girls
passed beyond the walls of the redoubt. Fueled by greed, bearing
off-world weapons, they murdered and laid waste--and then
dispersed, melting back into the mountains, leaving nothing of
ancient, wealthy Kenazari, save stone and carrion.

The priests of the south found the married
escorts to be widows and awarded them to worthy husbands. Reyman
Bhar had lately performed a great service for the priests of
Iravati, and stood in need of a wife. Nawar was thus bestowed upon
him, and it had pleased the gods to allow them to find joy, each in
the other, for she was a daughter of an old house of scholars, and
could read, and write, and reason as well as any man. Her city was
dead, but she made shift to preserve what could be found of its
works, assisted gladly by her new husband.

So it was that numerous scrolls, books, and
tomes written in the soon-to-be-forgotten language found their way
into the house of Scholar Bhar, where eventually they came under
the study of a girl child, in the tradition of her mother's
house...

The astronomer on his tall, cold column
called the Trio. Inas looked to her store of oil, seeing it sadly
depleted, and turned the lamp back til the light fled and the smoky
wick gave its ghost to the distant dawn.

She slept then, her head full of the myths
of ancient Kenazari, marriage far removed from her dreams.

* * *

THEIR FATHER SENT WORD that he would be some
days in the city of Lahore-Gadani, one day to west across the
windswept ridges of the Marakwenti range that separated Iravati
from the river Gadan. He had happened upon his most excellent
friend and colleague, Scholar Baquar Hafeez, who begged him to shed
the light of his intellect upon a problem of rare complexity.

This news was conveyed to them by Nasir,
their father's servant, speaking through the screen in the guest
door.

Humaria at once commenced to weep, her face
buried in her hands as she rocked back and forth, moaning, "He has
forgotten my wedding! I will go to my husband ragged and
ashamed!"

Shereen rushed to embrace her, while Inas
sighed, irritable with lack of sleep.

"I do not think our father has forgotten
your wedding, sister," she said, softly, but Humaria only cried
harder.

As it happened, their father had not
forgotten his daughters, nor his mission in the city. The first
parcels arrived shortly after Uncu's prayer was called, and were
passed through the gate, one by one.

Bolts of saffron silk, from
which Humaria's bridal robes would be sewn; yards of pearls; rings
of gold and topaz; bracelets of gold;
ubaie
fragile as spider silk and as
white as salt; hairpins, headcloths, and combs; sandals; needles;
thread. More bolts, in brown and black, from which Humaria's new
dayrobes would be made, and a hooded black cloak, lined in
fleece.

Additional parcels arrived
as the day wore on: A bolt each of good black silk for Shereen and
Inas; headcloths,
ubaie
; silver bracelets, and silver rings set with onyx.

Humaria and Shereen fell upon each new
arrival with cries of gladness. Shereen ran for her patterns;
Humaria gave the saffron silk one last caress and scampered off for
scissors and chalk.

Inas put her silk and rings and bracelets
aside, and began to clear the worktable.

Across the room, the guest screen slid back
and a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with red string
was placed on the ledge.

Inas went forward, wondering what else was
here to adorn Humaria's wedding day, even as she recognized her
father's hand and the lines that formed her own name.

Smiling, she caught the package up and
hurried, light-footed, to her room. Once there, she broke the red
string and unwrapped the brown paper, exposing not a book, as she
had expected, from the weight and the size, but a box.

She put it aside, and searched the wrapping
for any note from her father. There was none, and she turned her
attention back to his gift.

It was an old box of leather-wrapped wood.
Doubtless, it had been handsome in its day, but it seemed lately to
have fallen on hard times. The leather was scuffed in places,
cracked in others, the ornamental gilt work all but worn away. She
turned it over in her hands, and rubbed her thumb along a tear in
the leather where the wood showed through--gray, which would be
ironwood, she thought, from her study of native product.

She turned the box again, set it on her
knee, released the three ivory hooks and lifted the lid.

Inside were seven small volumes, each bound
in leather much better preserved than that which sheathed the
box.

Carefully, she removed the
first volume on the right; carefully, she opened it--and all but
laughed aloud, for here was treasure, indeed, and all honor to her
father, for believing her worthy of so scholarly a gift. She had
read of such things, but this was the first she had seen. A
curiat
--a diary kept of a
journey, or a course of study, or a penance.

These... Quickly, she had
the remaining six out and opened, sliding the
ubaie
away from her eyes, the better
to see the handwritten words. Yes. These detailed a scholar's
journey--one volume dealt with geography, another with plants,
another with minerals, still another with animals. Volume five
detailed temples and universities, while volume six seemed a list
of expenditures. The seventh volume indexed the preceding six. All
were written in a fine, clear hand, using the common, or trade,
alphabet, rather than that of the scholars, which was odd, but not
entirely outside of the scope of possibility. Perhaps the scholar
in question had liked the resonances which had been evoked by
writing in the common script. Scholars often indulged in thought
experiments, and this seven volume curiat had a complexity, a
layering, that suggested it had been conceived and executed by a
scholar of the highest learning.

Carefully, she put volumes two through seven
back in the box and opened the first, being careful not to crack
the spine.

"Inas?" Shereen's voice startled her out of
her reading. Quickly, she thrust the book into the box and silently
shut the lid.

"Yes, sister?" she called.

"Wherever have you been?" her elder scolded
from the other side of the curtain. "We need your needle out here,
lazy girl. Will you send your sister to her husband in old
dayrobes?"

"Of course not," Inas said. Silently, she
stood, picked up the box, and slipped it beneath the mattress.
Later, she would move it to the secure hidey hole, but, for now,
the mattress would suffice.

"Well?" Shereen asked, acidic. "Are you
going to sleep all day?"

"No, sister," Inas said meekly and pushed
the curtain aside.

* * *

THE DAYS OF THEIR father's
absence was a frenzy of needlework. At night, after her sisters had
fallen, exhausted, into their beds, Inas read the
curiat
, and learned
amazing things.

First, she learned that the
geographical volume mislocated several key markers, such as the
Ilam Mountains, and the Sea of Lukistan. Distrustful of her own
knowledge in the face of a work of scholarship, she stole off to
her father's study in the deep of night, and pulled down the atlas.
She compared the latitudes and longitudes given in the
curiat
volume against
those established by the Geographical College, verifying that
the
curiat
was off
in some areas by a league, and in others by a day's hard
travel.

Next, she discovered that the habits of
certain animals were misrepresented--these, too, she double-checked
in the compendium of creatures issued by the Zoological
College.

Within the volume of universities and
temples were bits of myth, comparing those found in Lahore-Gadani
to others, from Selikot. Several fragments dealt with the exploits
of the disorderly Natesa; one such named the aspect Shiva, another
Nawar; all set against yet a third mythic creature, the Coyote of
the Nile.

Then, she discovered that
the whole of volume five had been machine printed, in perfect
reproduction of the fine hand of the scholar. So the
curiat
was not as ancient
as it appeared, which gave her cause to marvel upon the scholar who
had created it.

Minerals--well, but by the time she had
found the discrepancies in the weights of certain ores, she had
made the discovery which explained every error.

She had, as was her habit,
waited until her sisters retired, then lit her lamp, pulled up the
board under the carpet, and brought the box onto her
chatrue
. She released the
three ivory hooks, opened the lid--the box overbalanced and spilled
to the floor, books scattering every which way.

Inas slipped out of bed and tenderly
gathered the little volumes up, biting her lip when she found
several pages in the third book crumpled. Carefully, she smoothed
the damaged sheets, and replaced the book with its brothers inside
the box.

It was then that she
noticed pieces of the box itself had come loose, leaving two neat,
deep, holes in the wood, at opposite corners of the lid. Frowning,
she scanned the carpet, spying one long spindle, tightly wrapped in
cloth. The second had rolled beneath the
chatrue
, and by the time she reached
and squirmed and had it out with the very tips of her fingers, the
cloth covering had begun to unravel.

Daintily, she fingered it, wondering if
perhaps the cloth held some herb for protection against demons, or
perhaps salts, to insure the books kept dry, or--

There was writing on the
inside of the cloth. Tiny and meticulous, it was immediately
recognizable as the same hand which had penned the
curiat
.

Exquisitely careful, breath caught, she
unrolled the little scroll across the carpet, scanning the columns
of text; heart hammering into overdrive as she realized that she
had discovered her nameless scholar's key.