Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse (19 page)

I shook my head.

“She has. She has forbidden a lot of things that make no sense. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I nodded enthusiastically. Just then, the red priestesses arrived in a procession carrying all the supplies Maud had requested. They laid them at her feet like offerings. Once they had retreated, the high priestess looked at me. “Are you ready?”

“I…I think so. What are you going to do?”

After she had explained the general principals of her spell—that she would cast a protective shield around me that would block my mother’s gift—she said, “Do you trust me?” Her voice was gentle, reassuring. I saw no reason not to trust her so I said, “I do.”

“Then let’s begin.” I did as she instructed and sat on the white sheets beside Shea’s Fire. I arranged the food and drink around me, close enough that I could reach them if I needed them during the night.

Maud climbed to the top of the pit. “You have everything you need. You are not to move from the pit, do you understand? No matter how afraid you are. You won’t burn. Lie down. Try to find rayta.” Maud clasped her staff with both hands and muttered a prayer to Ayfra under her breath. She pointed at Shea’s Fire and spoke to it, “Those above and below, those on this side and the next. Listen to my words, listen, listen.” With her staff she drew a line of fire along the ground. The fire was faint, barely a flicker, so she knelt and caressed it and it burst to life. She dragged her glowing staff across the floor like flint against steel and another line of fire ignited. She completed the square. The flames grew into four walls. A fire roof closed in to complete my prison.

Surprisingly, I was calm. The heat was bearable. There was no ash. I could see Maud shimmering through the blaze. She called to me over the crackling and hissing, “If your mother is behind this, we will find out.”

I nodded and did as I was told, lying down with my arms beneath my head so I could watch the inferno coiling and dancing overhead. The high priestess watched for a moment, pleased with her work, and then left me.

The only sound was the roar of the fire. Soon, the smell of smoke was so strong it made me weep and cough until it was easier to do as Maud had suggested and hide beneath the damp cloth and sleep.

My slumber was disturbed. Even in my dreams the fire burnt. Images played in front of my eyes. I saw my mother marching down the hallway to my apartment carrying a whale-oil lantern with her army—Piebald and her war-wits—behind her. She did not stop to announce herself outside my door but, seeing Bolt was missing, burst in on Harryet, who was sitting in my solar by the unlit fire in the centre of the room, sewing. Their voices were like a distant echo.

“Your majesty,” Harryet said, startled. She jumped to her feet and curtsied.

“Where is she?”

My friend’s voice quivered like a lyre string. “I…I don’t know. Perhaps she’s in the kitchen. Sometimes she goes down there when she’s hungry.”

“She’s not in the palace. I can’t feel her.” My mother took a turn around the large room with its high ceilings as if looking for me in the shadows. “What is she up to? What plan did she concoct? Speak, girl, or face the Seawall.”

To her credit, Harryet shook her head. “I am sorry, your majesty, if there was a plan she did not share it with me.”

Piebald sneered. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Yes, thank you, Piebald,” my mother said, shooting him a deadly look. She tucked her hands into the sleeves of her flowing black peplos. “Nike, Adamon. Put her in the Seawall.”

In my dream I screamed and lashed out at my mother. Harryet, in comparison, accepted her fate like a martyr and let the war-wits lead her from the apartments.

I surfaced from the dream with perspiration on my brow and a scream on my lips. Panting, I took a deep sip from the water skin beside me. I dunked the sheet in the water surrounding Shea’s Fire and placed it back over my head. I ignored the flames and dove back into sleep.

This time Drayk was sitting at the end of a long bench in the mess hall opposite his friends Alexis and Carmyl. Alexis and Carmyl were both file leaders in the Queen’s Guard, one rank below Drayk and destined to surpass him within a few years. Alexis was tall and broad, a true descendent of the Ooruk. Carmyl was kindly looking with soft features and long flowing hair. Theirs was a friendship uncomplicated by lust or jealousy, which made me only more conscious of my age and my isolation from the immortal’s world. The two women rested their heads in their hands.

“I’ve not felt this way about anyone since I met my first wife,” Drayk said.

“Then you must tell her,” said Carmyl, pushing her long flowing hair behind her ears. “Otherwise it will be too late.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t.” Alexis laughed.

“I am so far below her she would never accept me and even if she did, her mother wouldn’t approve.”

“This is Tibuta. She could take you as her second.”

“Or third,” said Alexis and Drayk shot her a disapproving look.

I woke before I heard his retort and assumed the dream was about the woman in red. I was clenching my chest. My breath came in heavy rasps. Fragments of my dream drifted around my head and were forgotten.

After that, I slept soundly until morning when I woke, stiff and hungry, to discover that the flame had burnt out. All that remained was a line of ash. I inspected my white sheet. It was stained with three tiny red droplets of blood; three times the proof.

“So?” Maud said, appearing at the top of the pit.

I nodded. “There is blood.”

Both of us were reluctant to speak. This was neither a joyous occasion nor one for tears. It was a time of mourning and of reflection. It was a time for making plans. She offered me her hand and helped me out of the pit. “Your mother has betrayed the very gods by doing this to you,” she said.

One question burnt in my chest: “What is my gift?”

“There is no way to know. Not until you experience it in full. It is always subtle at first, and then it grows as you train it.”

“What should I do? Can you stop her long enough for it to grow?”

“I can’t stop her: nothing can. Not for any prolonged period. Even if I could make a spell powerful enough to protect you, she would sense it. She has probably sensed this.”

“So I have to leave?”

“You can’t leave. Tibuta needs you.”

“What then?”

She walked towards the back of the room, expecting me to follow. “You must realise there was a time when your mother trusted me as her most respected advisor. Now her faith is clouded by suspicion and fear. Your mother disregards the old ways. Maybe because of what happened to Evada. Maybe—and perhaps more likely—because she thirsts for eternal power. You must not turn your back on Tibuta because of what your mother has done. You must trust me, Verne.” The high priestess was quiet for a moment. She rested by the golden statue of the First Mother to catch her breath.

“I do trust you.”

“Then know this,” she said and continued through the passageways to her room where Callirhoe had been nesting. “The people grow suspicious. They fear your mother is turning her back on the ways of the First Mother. Some whisper that she has abandoned the gods completely.” Our eyes met and in that expression I discovered more than I anticipated. I saw contempt for my mother, yes, but also a deep pain that I did not expect. “Your mother may have lost her faith but the Shark’s Teeth are firm believers. They know the Tempest is coming. They have known it for some time, since your uncle returned from the war. The Shark’s Teeth are not to be trifled with—no, their power is growing, Verne.”

As she continued down the dark halls, the high priestess’s voice became so faint I could barely hear it. “The Shark’s Teeth trust me as their religious leader. They know I have Tibuta’s best interests in mind. If I asked them, they would follow you. And it is my opinion that you would make a powerful queen with their support.” She reached her door and rested her hand on the knob.

“It is treason to suggest such a thing.”

She turned back to look at me. “What is treason to a woman my age? My only wish is to see Tibuta in good hands so I know she will survive once I am gone. You and I want the same thing. We love the people of Tibuta.”

“How can you suggest I accept the Shark’s Teeth’s support? They want to destroy the monarchy.”

“Not true. Your Uncle Kratos started the Shark’s Teeth because he knew the child of sophrosyne would need an army. Admittedly there are those who are misguided and grow restless in their hunger and desperation but a true Shark’s Tooth has no desire to bring down the monarchy. She is concerned only with facing the Tempest.”

I took a deep breath. “I…I don’t know.” It was a lot to process. I had suffered a serious concussion. I had discovered my mother was stealing my gift. I had barely come to terms with the possibility that I might be the woman of sophrosyne. Now the high priestess, the only woman I trusted, was suggesting my uncle had returned from the war only to build me an army in anticipation of this moment. It was something that would happen to someone else. Not me..

“The Shark’s Teeth are no different from you or me. They want a leader who believes in the First Mother as they do, who acknowledges the sacred texts as they do. They must see that she is willing to face the Tempest. They must have faith that she is the woman of balance.” She stopped, panting slightly, and continued, “They would get behind the
right
person, the
right
Golding. You need only prove yourself.”

I was quiet for a long time while her words sank in. “You suggest I take the throne by force? Before my time?”

She shrugged.

“Be candid.”

She fixed her milky eyes on me. “You need your gift to prove you are the chosen one. While your mother lives you will not get your gift.”

Callirhoe squawked from behind the door. She wanted to be liberated.

So here we are. Just last night I was lying by Shea’s Fire protected by Maud’s spell. This morning I was discussing high treason. Now I am on my way to the Seawall.

I know my mother sensed my absence last night. I know she felt the release as Maud blocked her gift, like when you pull on the cork from a wine bottle and it finally gives. But to openly punish me for it would mean admitting she has been stealing my gift and my mother will do no such thing. Even if I confronted her she would deny it. “Don’t be absurd,” she would say before confining me to my room yet again. Or worse. Poisoning me or pushing me off the Wall like her mother did poor Tansy and Evada. No, I cannot confront my mother. Not yet. Not until I have formed a plan.

My mother’s dismembered head floats over the banister above us. “I have put up with a lot from you Verne, but this time you go too far. I told you not to leave the palace and yet you spent the entire night at the temple. What am I supposed to think?”

“I told you, I got trapped by the storm.”

She ignores me and addresses her war-wit. “Nike, when she comes back from the Seawall you and Adamon are to guard the exit to her room. She is not to leave the palace again.”

My freedom is shrinking and I want to scream but I remain silent in my defiance. I wait until she has turned away then speak to Nike. “I think she has lost it.”

When he smiles, Nike’s teeth are big and white.

Passing through the gardens,
the sound of running water and the willow leaves rustling against the riverbank soothe my anxious atrama. Ash from the fires in Minesend fills my nostrils and threatens to make me sneeze. There is a litter waiting and I step lightly up. The big war-wit walks beside me.

We exit the palace behind the apartments through the rarely-used East Gate which opens onto a narrow dirt road, rutted like a washboard. It leads to only two places: the killing fields, a mass grave for the executed, and the Seawall. I travel with my head lowered, lost in thought.

We stop at the base of the Seawall which rises up and up, perfectly straight and smooth. Around us the earth undulates, each hill covered in tufts of dry grass, each smooth valley all that remains of the corpses that have been covered over.

Nike uses a key to open a tiny iron gate in the Seawall and we pass through a long dark tunnel that drips with water. The ground is damp beneath our feet. Algae grows along the edges. We step out into the light and onto a stone platform. It is low tide and the ocean crashes at our feet. At high tide, water will cover the platform and make it half way up the tunnel.

We stand with our backs to the Seawall admiring the view. The blue ocean reaches out to a blue sky. The horizon is a perfectly straight line between our world and the next.

“It’s easy to forget how insignificant we are until you see that,” I say and the war-wit nods in agreement. I am thankful for my ability to see the beauty of the world despite the growing darkness inside me. “We may as well get this over and done with.”

I turn back to the Seawall and look up. Scars, outlines of bricked-up doorways, are made more sinister by the unnatural sounds that emanate from within. Behind the doorways criminals die from starvation and dehydration. The Seawall moans and weeps. At times it bangs and demands to be set free.

Nike points to an empty niche positioned a foot above the high water mark. “That’ll do,” I say. He holds out his hand to steady me as I step up into the hole. It is a perfect fit. My arms hang freely beside me without quite touching the sides. There is an inch between my head and the ceiling. I turn to face Nike and smile sadly. He makes a gesture that says, “Forgive me.”

“It is not your fault,” I say then laugh without humour. “Just don’t forget I’m in here.”

As he goes to shut me in, a thought occurs to me and I jam my foot in the door. “Nike?” I say, opening it to look at the war-wit. A frown pulls at my skin as I remember the dream. “Was Harryet put in here last night?”

The war-wit nods.

I gasp. So my dream was true.

“Is she all right?”

He points back towards the tunnel.

“She is already out?”

He nods.

“Good,” I say. “Will you tell her I have returned and I am safe?”

He nods and I settle back into my coffin so he can shut the door. I watch a slice of light diminish and then disappear completely. The dark is an old acquaintance. A familiar sense of panic flickers in my belly—
There’s no air! You are going to suffocate! They’ll forget you and you’ll die in here!—
and I squash it by closing my eyes and focusing on my breathing. Bricks prickle the skin on my back and arms. I am aware of a very faint stream of air coming through the base of the door. The compartment is too small for me to kneel and drink it but I picture it seeping into my death-chamber and flowing in absolving circles around my head and into my lungs.

Beneath me the waves crash against the Seawall. I try to distract myself from thoughts of freedom.

Can there be freedom when our perspective is restricted and our view limited to that which we see down our nose, our hands and our feet?
I ask myself to keep myself from going mad with fear. The immense ocean creeps up and up and up. Drayk’s words come to me:
Our perspective is all we know. We cannot know another’s truth. We are the victims of our shortsightedness, our desire, our rage.

I imagine the sea seeping in through the crack at my feet. I have to work hard to breathe normally.

Our passion blinds us to the hopes and feelings of those around us. We cannot even know the reality of our neighbour or our beloved.
We believe they see as we see, feel as we feel, but this is a fallacy. Unless we can see them from within, unless we can be them, we are blind and our blindness holds us back.

I am almost certain the crashing waves are louder now. If the water gets in I’ll drown.

I try to see from the perspective of another being. I imagine I am both beside and within the bird Callirhoe flying over Tibuta.

We are out at sea.

The dusty-grey-and-white shearwater soars a few feet from the surface using the windshear between the waves to gather energy. Skating down the face of a rolling hill she launches off an upwards draft and climbs into the air. I imagine I am soaring. I feel instantly better.

Tibuta’s Seawall juts out of the sea like a great column. It encircles the entire island with only one break, a watergate where supply ships can pass beneath the portcullis and travel up Elea Bay. Millennia ago the miners dug deeper and deeper in search of the rare Tibutan Gold Marble. They scraped away at Tibuta’s core like surgeons working on a festering tumour. That they risked waking the Fire did not stop them. They kept on digging even though it meant almost certain destruction. But as the miners dug, the stonemasons built the Seawall to keep the water at bay. It got higher and higher and the ground sank lower and lower until the city sat below water level in a bowl of sand and red dirt.

The bird soars vertically up, up, and over the Seawall, where slaves gather seawater in large copper drums to douse the fires in Minesend. Below, Tibuta Island stretches out: a rutted landscape of brown where the new mines in the hills surrounding the city are like yawning mouths. The slaves run between the Seawall and the fire with the water drums over their heads like ants. When one collapses with exhaustion the others simply find a new path around him.

High above Tibuta the sounds of the mines, which stop for no fire, reach the bird: the sound of spades and axes—
clunk, clunk clunk
—of heaving, and of great weight being dragged over great distances.

Tentacles of fire coil from the windows at the palace in Minesend. The palace staff—war-wits, holy consorts, chefs and stableboys—spew out the front gate to face the Shark’s Teeth. Others, including my cousin Gelesia and her son Chase, escape out the back into the narrow streets of Minesend.

The bird flies past the agora in Veraura, a collection of stalls where the truly destitute—cripples and the elderly—have put up tents and mounds of rocks with makeshift walls as symbolic boundaries around their territory. An old woman in rags rummages through a mound of rubbish looking for scraps of corn husks or rotting parsley. A scrawny cat with tattered ears waits at the woman’s feet for a morsel of food tossed her way. Mangy kylons lie in the shade. They are starving the lot of them and could not care less whether the Shark’s Teeth have chosen their home for headquarters.

The bird flies through the wealthier suburbs of Lete and Bidwell Heights and finally into Elea Bay where two large buildings jut out from the horizon: the palace at the district’s geological centre and the temple, which is arguably Tibuta’s spiritual heart, on the city’s rim to the north.

When Nike opens the door the night sky glows red. It is low tide again. I gasp with relief as I step into the glorious fresh air and gulp it up. “Nike, has the castle in Minesend been attacked?” I say and the war-wit nods. A screech from above makes me call in delight, “
Callirhoe
!” I know that bird circling above us; I know her long white wings tipped in brown-grey, cruciform in flight, her tubular white body and her head capped in brown. And somehow I know that Callirhoe is responsible for my visions. My dreams, the things I see: this is my gift. It is underdeveloped yes, but it is a gift nonetheless and with it I may just learn to overcome my shortsightedness.

“Nike, speak to Cook. He has been hoarding food in the lower storeroom. Have him send supplies to Minesend. I doubt Gelesia will be in a position to help her people for some time and they are starving.”

The war-wit nods.

“And don’t tell my mother.”

His grin dazzles. He signs, “I wouldn’t dare.”

At the East Gate, I step out of the litter on shaky legs. The ocean still rages in my ears. My lips are dry and cracked. I have not eaten in close to twelve hours and my belly aches. A shriek like that of an excited child reaches me through the dark: “Verne!” A pair of soldiers standing at the rear of the East Terrace look up, see Harryet bounding across the grass, and go back to their conversation. She races towards me as though she is going to sweep me into the air then pulls up short. “You’re all right.” It is a statement that brings her much relief. Her chest rises and falls as she tries to catch her breath; her big eyes glisten in the dark.

“I’m sorry she put you in the Seawall,” I say, linking arms with her and heading towards the apartments.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I did.”

“Then it was worth it.” She waves at the guards as we pass. Only her eyes show she is mocking them. I laugh and slap her arm playfully. “What?” she says in feigned innocence.

Security is all Harryet Nathos ever wanted. She has found it in the bubbling stews in the kitchen, the crisp white sheets on the washing line and the trinkets on my dresser, which she dusts and lines up neatly every morning. But security is an illusion. We seek that which gives us a semblance of it—routine, predictability—to convince ourselves we are masters of our own destiny when in reality the gods fill our sails and blow our ships where they will: to safe shores or against the rocks—whatever suits their purpose. A false sense of security is what lets us flaunt our freedom.

“You shouldn’t mock them. One day they’ll lock us in the Seawall and they won’t let us out again.”

She frowns at me, knowing I am right but disappointed that I have to remind her. Only when we reach the veranda does she speak. “So?”

“She is stealing my gift.”

Harryet’s eyes go round. “No?”

“There is no doubt.”

The light shining through the limestone columns illuminates the blue flowers in Harryet’s wavy blond hair and makes her glow like a celestial being from the Elysian Fields. Her bodice reveals two snowy hills with a plunging valley between them. And yet a frown eclipses her beauty. She has given her life to me, made it her purpose to absorb my pain, and the resulting weariness has accumulated on her face. “What are you going to do?”

She greets Bolt, who is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The war-wit turns a bright shade of red. It is impossible to hide it on his white skin but Harryet does not notice. She grips the banister with one smooth plump hand.

“I don’t know,” I admit and follow her upstairs. She does not respond. She will not verbalise her objection to my mother’s behaviour. Not here in public. She is right to hold her tongue. As we walk along the hallways, we pass Piebald coming the other way. He bows melodramatically: “Highness, I am glad to see you have endured your ordeal.”

“Piebald, it is so nice to see you. Will you send for food and water? I am famished,” I say and shoot him an expression that dares him to disobey then keep walking. My mind churns my thoughts like butter.

“Harryet, do you trust the high priestess? It is true she
seems
like a friend but any chameleon could play at friendship.”

“She is a holy woman,” she says as if this is proof enough of her trustworthiness.

I retreat back into my thoughts to consider this. Bolt inspects my rooms for imposters and, finding none, resumes his position in the hall. His gaze follows Harryet as she passes but she is oblivious. Whale-oil lanterns line the hallway, omitting a warm glow that illuminates the frescos on the wall.