Traitors' Gate (37 page)

Mai peeked out through a slit in the curtains she'd opened with her fingers. Where the River Olossi met the Olo'o Sea, a green sway of reeds carpeted the shallows while blue sky melded with blue-green sea out beyond the last channels. She licked her lips, but all she tasted was her own anxiety. She let the cloth close.

“You're out early, ver,” said the boatman, speaking to the hirelings as they set the curtained palanquin on the dock. “Your mistress or master can't wait, eh?”

“Don't ask me,” said one of the hirelings brusquely. “We were hired to carry the palanquin at Crow's Gate and were told to deliver it to the boat and wait to deliver it back to Crow's Gate. Can we get going? Cursed cold out here by the water. We want to go wait in an inn.”

Mai had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, but not for the cold; it was for a covering should she need to conceal her face. Miravia sat on the narrow bench opposite, clutching the baby beneath her long cloak. She had looked so fragile at the beginning of this journey, and therefore Mai had handed Atani over to her as soon as they were hidden inside the curtains of the palanquin. Holding a baby gave one a measure of stability.

The palanquin was heaved up, pitched right and then left, and settled into the boat. Coins changed hands with a clink of vey counted out in pairs. The boatman grunted as he poled away from the dock. He made no attempt to converse. The boat rolled as they hit choppy waters, and then they glided through a long calm stretch and at last bumped up against another pier. The tang of salt was now flavored with a brush of bitter incense. A whisper of bells chimed an ornament to the hiss of wind and water in reeds. She heard the slap of feet running down to meet the boat.

“Eh, this isn't our early day, ver. What were you thinking?” The voice was cheerful, followed by laughter from others on the shore.

Mai slipped a folded piece of paper through the curtains. “Take this to the Hieros, I beg you. I assure you, she will want to read it.”

A person wrenched the message from her fingers.

After a moment, the first voice said, “Go!” and footsteps raced away. “Bring the palanquin onto the dock. Quickly, you clod-foots.”

With much pitching, the palanquin got hoisted out of the boat and set on mercifully firm ground. Mai rubbed legs and arms sore from the journey smuggled in the chest. Miravia shut her eyes.

“Eh, that was a good game, the last of the hooks-and-ropes tournament,” said the boatman, determined to make the time pass by visiting with the unseen loiterers. “You see it?”

“You think we get a festival day off? Wasn't there a new team competing?”

“A militia team, yeh. I was impressed. They'd only been practicing together for four months, at the order of the commander, and yet they came in third at the stakes. They'll win next year.”

A new voice chimed in, older and female. “You see all the checkpoints and such they're setting up? I'm not sure I like it!”

The boatman snorted. “I don't mind! Better than fearing bandits and criminals, neh?”

Outside, the voices argued about the new road regulations. The curtains stirred, and a tooth-filled snout poked into the palanquin. A scaly shape shimmied in so fast Miravia shrieked, and Mai gasped, and the baby woke and began to cry.

Outside, the temple folk laughed.

Inside, a ginny lizard nudged Miravia's leg and tried to crawl up onto the bench beside her.

Mai snatched Atani from Miravia as her friend smothered laughter and crying beneath a hand clapped over her own mouth. “I—I—I never thought I would see one,” she whispered. “I read about them in books.”

Mai was struggling with her taloos and at last got the crying baby latched on. He began sucking noisily. The ginny backed down from Miravia and spun so quickly it seemed it had levitated, turning with a whip of its long tail. It nosed at Mai's feet, showed the merest edge of teeth, and tried to climb up on Mai's lap.

“You will not!” she said indignantly.

Its crest lifted, and a spasm like faintly glimmering threads of blue traced its knobbly spine. Atani let go of the breast, milk squirting his round face as he turned his head. Almost as if he knew it was there.

A voice called. “Heya! The Hieros says to bring up the palanquin
right away
!”

The ginny scrambled out, curtains swaying in its wake. The palanquin rose; they rocked. The baby burped and burbled and, like any newborn, complained as he rooted, seeking the breast. Their bearers were less experienced than the hirelings who had carried them smoothly from Crow's Gate to Dast Olo's docks; Mai could not get a moment of stillness to let the poor little one fasten on, and by the time they were dropped roughly to solid ground, he was wailing, inconsolable.

Miravia twitched aside a lip of curtain to peer outside. Her eyes widened. “It's a lovely garden!”

If joy had a fragrance, it might be something like this: flowers exhaling, the sun shedding warmth, the earth sighing, the air braced by a light breeze off the salty inland sea. Atani got hold again and began suckling. Mai sighed as the milk flowed, and a tingle of well-being, the breath of the Merciful One that penetrates all living things, coursed through her.

Miravia opened the curtain a little wider. “There's a pavilion here. How pretty! But I don't see anyone, just plants. Musk vine. Both orange
and
yellow proudhorn. Heaven-kiss. Look at those falls of purple muzz! I've never seen so thick a flowering!”

“What if we're not supposed to see onto sacred ground—?”

“You say that now?”

Their gazes met. They both began to giggle, then to laugh, the anxiety and tension like water overtopping a cup, pouring over the lip, coursing everywhere.

“Are you coming out?” The voice was old, strong, and not kind. But it wasn't angry. Like Anji, it expected to be obeyed.

Miravia grasped and released Mai's hand before pushing aside the curtain. Mai tucked Atani into the crook of an arm and followed.

The Hieros sat on a low couch under the pavilion's roof. Miravia and Mai kicked off their sandals and climbed three steps to kneel on pillows in front of her. For a while there was silence as Atani nursed contentedly. A spectacular taloos wrapped the old woman's slender form: silk of the most delicate sea-green hue. Woven with an inner pattern of scallops like waves, it might have been an actual layer of water skinned off the surface of the deeps of the inland sea and spun into fabric.

The baby let go of the breast, smacked his tiny, perfect lips. As soon as Mai burped him he closed his eyes and sighed into a doze. She adjusted her taloos and shifted him to the other arm.

“I admit,” said the Hieros, examining first Mai and then Miravia with a cool gaze, “that I did not expect to see the wife of the outlander captain enter the precincts of the holy temple, not after he expressed so strongly to me on a separate occasion that his wife would never set foot in Ushara's temple. Yet even less did I expect ever to see the face of a Ri Amarah woman.”

Miravia glanced at Mai, and Mai nodded. “I am named Miravia, ken Haf Gi Ri, daughter of Isar and his wife, whose name I am not free to mention.”

The Hieros looked at Mai. “Why have you come?”

“We have come, Holy One, to ask you to give refuge to this woman.”

“You have not come—one newly a mother and the other soon to be married, so it is rumored, to a rich man of poor reputation in Nessumara—to gain some pleasure in our gardens?”

“No!” said Mai, genuinely shocked.

The Hieros's expression darkened as a storm front occludes the horizon.

Mai plunged on. “I beg you, Holy One, listen to my petition. Miravia has run away from her family. She does not want to marry the man they've chosen for her.”

“Does not want to marry? Is she asking to dedicate herself as a hierodule at the temple?” She surveyed Miravia with a look that made the girl blush to a sodden red.

“I am not, begging your pardon, Holy One,” Miravia said hoarsely. “Meaning no disrespect. It's just—” She gulped out words between sobs. “Oh, what good will it do, Mai? No one will help us! Everyone will just tell me to accept the marriage for the honor of my clan! I would have been better off to sell myself as a debt slave!”

“Do you believe you would be better treated as a debt slave, you who are Ri Amarah and scorn all those who sell their bodies and their labor?” asked the Hieros coldly.

“Yes! It would be better! My life in Nessumara will be like living in one of the hells. But maybe I should just let that reeve fly me there. If the Star of Life invades Nessumara and overruns it, then I can hope to be raped and killed and that would still be better than living in a prison with a wicked old man who abuses those he controls!”

The Hieros clapped her hands. An attendant, an older woman with a sharp gaze and a curious eye, appeared on a path shrouded by flowering plants.

“Tea,” said the Hieros, and the attendant nodded and vanished. The Hieros turned to Mai. “Does your husband know you are here?”

“No.” Mai tucked her chin, her body remembering the lessons learned in the Mei clan, when you kept your gaze down and shoulders bowed as Father Mei or Grandmother addressed you in that scolding way. But then she remembered she was mistress of her own household. She was a good businesswoman. She had overseen the birth of a new settlement. She had blessed the marriages of more than forty local women and Qin soldiers, bonds that would carry them into the years to come, that would bind them to the land. She lifted her chin and looked the Hieros in the eye. “He is away on militia business. I have taken this action on my own.”

“Ah.”

“I did not know who else to turn to. Can you shelter her?”

“The Ri Amarah will take me to the assizes once they know
she is here. They'll demand her return, according to their laws, by whose measure she is still a child because not married. How old are you, Miravia?”

“I was born in the Year of the Deer.”

Her frown deepened. “Twenty. Far too old to be called a child.” The attendant walked up the steps, set a tray on a low table, and poured three cups of steaming tea. Birds called from the trees, and a ginny lizard—maybe the same one who had nosed into the palanquin—ambled into a patch of sun and settled to its full length.

“However, few love the Ri Amarah,” added the Hieros. “Fewer will support them in a dispute against the temples. What will Captain Anji recommend?”

Mai nodded as the old woman examined her. “You already know. That is a magnificent length of silk, Holy One.”

The compliment drew a smile. “A fine bolt of first quality out of Sirniaka. No one else produces such exquisite silk. Miravia, you will hand out the cups.”

Miravia took them one at a time, each one cupped in her palms, offering the first to the Hieros, settling the second in Mai's free hand, and sitting back on her heels with the third held close to her mouth as she inhaled the scent. “You've put in a tincture of rice-grain-flower.”

“The Ri Amarah women are known for their herbal knowledge.” The old woman sipped, and Mai sipped, and Miravia sipped and smiled her approval.

In silence, they finished drinking.

“As I said,” continued the Hieros, “the displeasure of the Ri Amarah I can weather. They do not enter or tithe to the temples. But I am not as eager to set myself against Captain Anji. We negotiate difficult times. We are beset with creatures wearing the cloaks of Guardians who have raised an army that can be turned against us at any time, and no doubt will be if they gain control of the north, as they seem likely to do. Am I willing to offend a competent commander who may be key to our ability to withstand the storm? His ability to organize others into an effective force makes him valuable. He himself knows this. What if he were to change loyalties? To ride north and
offer his services to the army in the north because we offended him here?”

“He would not!” Mai cried.

“Why not? Are you saying Qin soldiers did not conquer territory in lands far away from the Hundred? Is it not true that you grew up in a town they conquered? That you are yourself a prize for a victorious warrior?”

All the words she wanted to say—to protest that Anji would never ally himself with folk who burned and raped and killed—died in her throat. Her tongue was dry, and her hands had gotten cold.

“It's all true,” she said in a low voice, never dropping her gaze from the Hieros's fierce glare. “Beyond the Hundred, the Qin are conquerors. You could say I am a prize taken in war. But we came here as exiles. I speak because I have done my best to find willing and honest wives for the Qin soldiers. To encourage women to marry men they might not otherwise look at because they began their lives as outlanders.”

“There's been much discussion about how you encouraged young women and Qin men to make their own choices. In this country, clans and elders arrange marriages. That is the proper way to do things. Youth is not celebrated for its wisdom. Lust is a slender reed on which to build a house. We recognize the power of the Merciless One. We do not construct homes on her body.”

“That's also how it was arranged in Kartu Town, where I grew up. Yet it seems to me, Holy One, that people did not treat each other very well in the house where I grew up. I sold produce in the market for several years and I heard plenty about the misery folk endured in their households. Maybe people could have at the least the right to say no to an arrangement. Then maybe more would treat each other decently and fewer fall into abuse.”

“Spoken passionately, verea. And with some understanding of human nature, rare to see in one so young as you. Yet you must know, having seen the ceremony of binding, that we do not force young women to accept a marriage. She doesn't have to eat the rice.”

“There are other means of coercion.”

“Those who truly fear the arrangement made by their clans are not required to suffer. The temples can always serve as their refuge.”