Endurance (11 page)

An older man—not Selistani—in an undyed linen robe of a simple cut sat on a chair before the gate, a walking stick across his lap. He looked at me incuriously as I stood bent with hands on my knees, gasping. My lungs burned as the air puffed away from me in thin, white shreds.

Finally I found my breath, straightened, and approached him.

“Been in a fight, have yer?”

I grimaced. “A master of the understatement, I see. Please, I seek admittance.”

“Temple's open.” He didn't shift his position or lay his stick aside. I could have stepped around the man easily enough, but this had the feel of a test.

“The temple is open, but I have not been invited to enter.”

A smile dawned upon his face. “Now, that is a different matter.”

“I am Green,” I told him. “Summoned by the god.”

“A silent god has spoken to you.” His words were flat but his eyes twinkled.

I'd already had this stupid argument, with Chowdry, and I knew the secret answer. “Endurance is mute, not silent.” I leaned closer. “Besides,
he was
my
ox
!”

The old man spun his staff so close to my face he might have taken a tooth out, then rose from his cane chair. “We know who you are, Mother Green. We are glad of your return.” A swift, mocking bow. “Welcome, and bid fair to enter.”

I walked past him a couple of strides, then turned. The man was gone, only his chair remaining. Stepping back, I ran my fingers across the fraying cane. Cool, and still beaded with the morning's frost now dripping to water.

Another one of this city's avatars, or possibly a ghost. Building a temple atop a minehead, when the local tulpas haunted the dangerous galleries and tunnels of Below, had not been the wisest judgment ever made. I tried to remember if this had been my idea.

Somehow I had the feeling that it was.

The last time I'd passed this way, the area within the walls had been a forest of brambles and broken machinery. Those were difficult days indeed. Now the lot was cleared. A low fence stood around the open shaft, apparently to keep people from wandering into it and breaking their necks. Though there was a ladder below, it would be a long, fatal fall for the inattentive or unlucky. Oddly, Chowdry and his acolytes had not blocked or guarded the opening, as I might have done in their place.

Most of the metalwork and timber baulks about the property had been taken down or hauled away. A hasty wooden structure about two rods square obviously serving as a temporary temple stood to the south of the shaft, while foundation stones and colored posts laid around the shaft showed where a more ambitious structure would someday rise.

The small building was set on piers, raised far enough above the ground that three steps led to the porch. Chowdry sat there with hands folded, watching my approach. Several faces peered from within.

“You have come,” he called in Seliu.

“I am here.”

“Would you like aid with those wounds?”

I staggered forward and sat beside him, my loosened bundle of belongings slipping to the ground. The time was not yet right for me to enter the god's sanctuary. Though I served the Lily Goddess, Endurance was my god in the most literal sense. I still wasn't prepared to face him just then.

“The blood on my mouth is not my own,” I said. “But if someone can see to my arm, I'd be obliged. Everything else will heal. Oh, and you had an avatar at the gate when I came in. Saucy old bastard.”

“You are being as a lamp to moths for the spirits of this place.” Then, in Petraean, over his shoulder, “Fetch Sister Gammage out here, with her needles and bandages.”

Chowdry held my hand as Sister Gammage—an older Stone Coast woman with a squint and not very many teeth, but a steady hand with a needle—cleaned and sewed my arm. I could almost forgive Chowdry for Little Baji being in the city, but was not prepared to ask the questions that rose from that unfortunate business.

After they were done I allowed myself to be led to a large tent among a stand of them behind the temple where hot water was being poured into an enormous copper bath. Chowdry brought my silk and leathers before excusing himself. Sister Gammage chased everyone else away, persuaded me to give up my knives for a little while, stripped my damaged robe from me, and helped me slip into the water. Once there she brought me a flowered tea I did not recognize—which is saying something, given my early training—and left me to soak in peace.

Soak I did until I slept. The water was so hot my muscles did not knot.

*   *   *

I rested two days in another tent, in truth sulking while people chattered, laughed, and labored outside. Sister Gammage or Chowdry brought me lentils and watered milk, for the baby. My gut would suddenly tolerate nothing else. Where had these food sicknesses come from?

Also at my request I'd been provided with boys' clothing. The robe was a silly idea, proven pointless. I refused to return to the leathers, was all but ready to be shut of them completely; so brown corduroy breeches, canvas shirt, low sturdy workboots, and wide, flat cap seemed far more practical. There was even a quilted cotton jacket adequate at least to the autumn chill. I could run roofs, tumble through dirt, and, best of all, attract no attention whatsoever while dressed as an everyday youth of this city.

Well, except for my dark skin and the slashed scars upon my cheeks, but one thing at a time. Perhaps some profession here wore masks or veils I could adopt without causing comment. Beekeepers? Temple virgins?

In the meantime, I hid my leathers and my good fighting boots in a bundle beneath a pile of stones between the tent complex and the wall. I wrapped them carefully in waxed linen, then tent canvas, and scattered herbs within the folds to keep off the molder. I did not know how long I might need the Blade costume to wait in secret for me, but it required care much as anyone or anything else might.

Best of all, no one bothered me. Whoever was looking for me—the Interim Council, the Kalimpuri embassy—Chowdry and his people were having none of it. I had not yet been to see the ox god, but I was certainly under his protection. Much as I had been as a small child, and likewise down the years since.

This situation was not so restful as being at Ilona's cottage had proven, but it was peace enough to be worth my while. Still, I knew events moved in the city. The ghost Erio had been worried about what might happen here soon. Regardless of my usual opinion of the ancient dead, that one had been lucid, focused, and afraid of
something
.

Mostly the baby needed me to rest. I tried to keep relatively still and calm, let my back ease up, my shoulder heal, all my bruises fade, and the stitches on my arm be reduced from weeping pink fluid to a horrid scratching that smelled faintly of the gin that Sister Gammage splashed on the wound every few hours.

Gin and hot baths, they seemed to be the entirety of her book of healing. Well, that and stitches. Definitely my kind of woman.

On my third morning, the lentils did not satisfy, and my own laziness was beginning to irritate me. When restfulness became a problem, it was no longer a solution, as the Lily Blades liked to say. I rose, gathered my belled silk and adjusted my boy's clothing, then headed out to find better fare. I needed to be well-fed before I could square accounts with my ox god. The baby did not seem to mind, and my appetite was drawn to the crackling smell of sausages on a fire nearby.

“Mother Green!” said a cheerful young man who looked Selistani and sounded Stone Coast. He appeared vaguely familiar—one of the drawers of water for my bath two days ago? He also held a large, flat pan covered with the sizzling meat.

“I am no one's mother,” I snapped.
Not true, of course.
And it was better than “Lady Green.” “But I have a mother of a hunger.”

“Take a place.” He pointed to a long wide wooden table under a thin canvas roof where a dozen young people, mixed Selistani and Petraean, sat wearing undyed linen robes, chattering happily as they ate their way through scrambled eggs, sausage, and chunks of brown bread.

This was so utterly unlike the refectory at the Temple of the Silver Lily that I had to gawk a moment. All the aspirants there had lived with intense discipline, not just the Blades. Here the atmosphere was more that of a fair, or a camp. Children playing at ritual for a lark, not serious acolytes. Not at all like my poor Septio had been, either.

I shook off my mood and laughed. “Sit? No.
You
sit!” I gently shoved him aside from his pan and took over the cooking. They had a decent selection of spices, and I called for cheese and white wine to enrich the eggs. If only I could have remade the bread.…

A hot stove in front of me, a pan in my hands—these things much improved my spirit. Cooking absorbed my energy and calmed my spirit awhile. I fed Endurance's young acolytes until I could resist the smell no more, then loaded my own crockery plate and found a place among them while the boy resumed cooking, somewhat educated and chastened both.

I ate so much that eventually most of the acolytes stopped talking and watched me shovel food in. The baby seemed happy, and so did my stomach. I would not waste the opportunity.

Finally I pushed aside my fifth serving. The young cook began to clap. After an embarrassed moment, the rest of them did so, too. There was nothing for it but to rise and take my bow. At least I was properly fed. “I have been called before the god,” I told them, and headed off through the tents toward the small wooden temple.

As I walked past the foundation markers of Chowdry's larger ambitions—for I was sure Endurance did not so much care about his temple—I realized what my friend the priest had meant about the god calling him. Two days I'd lain in my tent, but when it was time to rise and go forth, I had risen and gone forth unquestioningly.

I stopped at the front, still not quite ready to mount the steps. The facade was a very plain, rough-ripped wood framed up competently enough. The interior would be cold in winter, for there was no chinking between the planks, and I did not think they had placed anything behind it. I wondered if Chowdry planned to lay a course of bricks or daub-and-wattle over the exposed wood.

“Enough,” I said aloud as I slipped my cloak of bells over my shoulder. How else to approach the ox that had carried my grandmother to her funeral at the beginning of my days? I had nothing to be afraid of.

Did I?

That answer came to me as I mounted the steps: Endurance had been Papa's ox. Not mine. Somehow I was returning to the presence of my father, who'd sold me as a girl, and must have died long since of whatever rotting of the mind had already claimed him when I'd found him once more these four years past.

The image of Shar, his second wife, sprang unbidden to my mind. So ragged, so afraid of me.

With that thought, I passed within, the music of my birthplace jingling with each stride. The doorway was obscured by a curtain of beads. The room beyond could have held thirty or forty close-packed worshippers at most, and smelled of incense and people's feet. This was the whole of it—there was no space for priestly chambers or tiring rooms or secret dungeons. A life-sized marble statue of an ox kneeling on the ground occupied the far end, opposite the door. Straw scattered about the ox and the rough beams over my head finally cued me to the nature of this temple.

It was a
stable
.

Endurance's followers had put him in a stable.

I had to laugh at that as I approached the statue. Back in the half-remembered days of my youth, Endurance had lived outside. By the time of my ill-fated visit four years ago, someone had built the ox a small hut to shelter in. But a stable?

Ribbons had been tied to the ox horns. Some had slips of paper dangling from them, others curls of ash. I leaned forward and turned a scrap in my hands.

help aunt jem for her crab disese

Prayers, then. Given most directly to the god. Some sped on their way with a little offering of flame. Narrow, long trays of sand held dozens of burnt incense sticks just below the statue's nose. That struck me as a bit odd—I did not think that Copper Downs worshipped so. This
was
a Selistani god. Plates of fruit and dried-up bread were scattered among the incense holders, around the god's knees.

I settled into a comfortable tailor's seat. The belled silk gathered around my thighs and flowed to the floor at my back. In this place I did not even have my short knives, but Endurance was not the Lily Goddess. My offerings to him were drawn neither from strength nor violence.

This god I had seen in direct manifestation, the day we had brought down Choybalsan and poor Federo. I
knew
Endurance. He had risen unbidden from my own memories to take form in a numinous moment of theogeny.

Closing my eyes, I leaned forward until the top of my head rested against the nose of the ox. I let the smell of incense and feet—and this close to the fane, rotting fruit—wash around me.

The heat came first. Those halcyon days of my earliest youth, when the sunlight was a hammer to smash flat anyone's ambitions. I felt it pass through me like fire through a hay barn.

I strained for the smells that went with that heat. Scorched air. The dank water of the rice paddies. Clay banks at the edges. Plantains and bougainvillea. Ox dung. My father's musky sweat.

When I found those I began to weep. Pinarjee, Shar had said his name was Pinarjee, but my father had sold me away, sold away my name and turned his face from me. He'd never even told his second wife of my existence.

A shadow fell upon me. Once again I was small enough to fit beneath the standing ox. The white hair of his flanks met in a troubled gray line like a storm cloud down the center of his belly. I could have reached up and grasped onto it as monkey infants cling to their mother's fur.

I let the shade protect me from the heat. I let the ox's earthworn smell protect me from the memories of my father. His solid presence shielded me from all that had passed before and all that was yet to come. Surely he saw better than I, but Endurance did not warn me of the future. Looking back now after all that happened, I suppose I would not have turned away even if he had.