Last First Snow (28 page)

“Craftsmen do not fight wars of attrition,” Temoc said. “They prefer disruptive victories, surgical strikes. If they press you on all sides, they do so only to focus your attention on the periphery so they can strike the center. Beware your skies. Protect vulnerable targets.”

“We need a leader,” she said.

“You have many.”

“The Major will not listen to Kapania Kemal. Bel acknowledges either of them grudgingly at best. I'm one more rip in a torn sheet. We need thread. Like this, we can't fight. We can't even surrender. If you went back, you could save us.”

“And doom you. If I go back, the King in Red stops fighting a new rebellion, and starts fighting an old war. People will die.”

“They're dying anyway, and worse. They're losing. Your generation got its last stand. This is ours, and we're falling apart. Ten years from now, we'll look around and say, remember when we couldn't fight back?”

“But you will be there to say it.”

“Dying by inches is still dying.”

“Spoken like a woman who has never died before.”

“I thought you would understand.” Those words hurt worse than the not-wolves' teeth.

“I would love to put the King in Red to flight,” he said. “To wake the gods from slumber and strike against the powers of the Craft. But the world has changed. I thought Chakal Square was a way forward.” Her eyes were bright and wet. “This isn't your fault. It isn't the Major's. It is barely the King in Red's. The peace is broken.”

“While you wait,” she said. “With your family.”

“Should I give them up? Should I burn my house to the ground, because others suffer?”

“You preach sacrifice. I liked those sermons. I hoped you might live up to them.”

He would not look away.

Chel set the glass on the table, and pushed herself to her feet. Her arms trembled, but she stood.

“You can't go,” Mina said. “You're in no shape to fight.”

“Then I won't fight. But I'll be where I belong.” She nodded. “Thank you for the bandages. The shirt—”

“Keep it,” Mina said.

“Thank you.”

She limped out into the blinding light where the lone bird cried.

The door took a long time to close.

Mina embraced him. “I know it was hard,” she said. “I know. But you did the right thing.”

“Yes,” he said.

 

46

Mina could not pull him into conversation. He remained a rock, staring at a blank spot of wall to the left of the screen door. At last she carried her books over from the shelf, spread them on the table, and began to read. Her pen scratched long lines under vital phrases. Mina had a steady hand despite the gallons of coffee she drank each day. When she'd stitched up Chel's side, she stopped her fingers from shaking with a breath. There were no sounds in the dining room other than her pen, and the occasional turn of a page. The five-chirp bird must have flown away.

The conversation they were not having filled the room. Branching vines of unsaid words tangled and knotted and rotted between them. The air smelled dry as library dust.

She was right. Down all the paths and side routes, she was right. He was a father, and a father owed first duty to his family. As a young single man he had walked faith-armored into war, spear raised, eyes bright with sunrise glory. He might have died then, without hesitation or regret, and he would have known, as the Craftsmen's claws tore out his guts, as their beasts ate his skin, that he had done all he was asked. But the gods had spared him from that fate, and they must have done so for a reason.

Or not.

“I will pray,” he said, and stood.

She looked up at him, as if a vast distance lay between them. He was that distance, and he hated himself for it. “Do you want me to pray with you?” she asked.

“I think I should be alone.”

She pointed her pen at him, but whatever objection she might have made died before it manifested on her tongue. “I'll be right here.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he must have said, because he always did, regular and natural as falling. But after he left the room he could not remember saying it, could not feel the imprint the words should have left—always left—on his soul. He felt only the certainty of habit, which was no certainty at all.

Their house was too small for a full chapel these days. When Caleb was born, they'd used the little chamber by the bathroom for a nursery, and Temoc set up his gods and saints in the bedroom down the hall. When Caleb outgrew his crib they made the switch, their son to a bed in the once-consecrated room, and the gods into the closet.

Closet was too meager a word. Temoc did not know the room's original purpose. Perhaps it had been an office once, or a storage chamber, six feet by six with a slit window. Temoc had slept in smaller nooks in post-Liberation chaos: under bridges, in the lee of Drakspine boulders, in clefts and caves and hidden tunnels beneath the desert. Once he added shelves, tapestries, and a woven grass mat, there was enough room here for his gods.

Most of them, anyway.

He opened the door and stepped into the shadow of divinity, into the oppression of incense. Stone faces stared down from the shelves. Fanged mouths opened. A small beaten iron statue of the Twin Serpents spiraled on the altar, flanked by the Hero Sisters, Aquel and Achal carved from basalt in the sweep of a dance or game. Suspended above the Serpents hung a black pearl, the heart to be consumed, the wisdom to be gained, the names to be transferred from devoured to devourer. And these were but one facet of worship, the central cult among many gods. Qet and Isil, Sea-Lord and Sky-Lady, upon whose praise Dresediel Lex was founded long before the ancient Quechal homeland sunk beneath the sea, hung in arras form beside the window. Ili of the White Sails watched from the walls, and Ixaqualtil Seven Eagle, and Tomtilat Spider-Lord, and the seven gods of the seventy-seven kinds of corn, and the Hunchback. On each statue's base, beneath the feet of every woven figure, ran double bars of Serpents' scales, the constant reminder: we walk on the skin of a world that at any moment might consume us. This was the mill of ages, and prayer the water that drove it round.

That at least was the idea, though so much was lost—though the gods themselves passed on. Ixchitli, Sun-Lord, torn open on his own altar by the King in Red. Isil gone. Qet Sea-Lord her consort reduced to a hollow husk and that husk imprisoned by foul Craft. The Hunchback burned, Tomtilat's web torn. No sacrifices to the Serpents on Quechaltan in forty years. And the others, bereft of their city, ripped from their people, faded. Slept, not quite dead, nor yet strong enough to speak. Some few still worshipped in their little ways, and the gods' songs and stories would linger in Lexican dreams for generations yet, even if their true names passed away. There would always be a spider who bargained with a fly, there would always be two sisters who played ball with demons, there would always be monsters who tried to eat the sun, even if marrow and majesty seeped out from the myths.

But he kept them alive. He prayed. He fasted. He taught. Others listened, and because they listened they assembled to protest the destruction of their homes, and because they assembled they would die, and he might save them, and even if he could not save them surely he owed them his leadership, or failing that his presence, because what did you call a priest who deserted his flock in their need—what but a liar? And yet, and yet. He was a man, too, no eidolon of justice, no messenger from beyond, no night terror to plague the sleep of evildoers. He was a man, and a man served his family. This was the duty the gods enjoined: for each man to seek his proper hour of sacrifice, and repay the debt of flesh he owed them.

Temoc was an Eagle Knight. He was a servant of the many Lords and Ladies—their champion, their instrument.

And he had sent a woman to her death. Why pretend otherwise? A woman almost broken by her pilgrimage to him, who sacrificed her friends to seek his help. He sent her away. No: he refused her because he was afraid, for his family and for himself. He let her limp into the light, into the courtyard where the sad bird sang its five-note song, because he knew she was right. He could have stopped her. He was strong enough. If she was choosing wrong, why had he not stopped her?

She was right, and strong as well. It was her strength he admired. Purity of intent. Loyalty. She was a fighter. Like Mina.

Isil smiled from her tapestry. Was that it after all? Chel was a beautiful woman. No. Chel was young, and her strength shamed him. Twice her width and six inches taller, he stood nonetheless in her shade.

She was the man he had been forty years ago.

Gods, he prayed. I am lost. Guide me. Please.

They watched.

Is this the path for which you saved me? To throw my life away? To abandon family, duty, hope, and future, to leave my son undefended? You have kept me young. I have a long road left to walk.

But if I walk it alone, I will always walk in the shadow of the pyres that burn in Chakal Square tonight.

He heard a knock on the door. Mina. He could not face her.

The knock repeated. Not Mina: lower on the door, he realized, in the second before he heard his son say, “Dad?”

He considered not answering. “Come in, Caleb.”

Caleb hesitated, doorknob half-turned. Temoc had shown him the small chapel, introduced him to the gods, let him feel their warmth and the rhythms of their dance. But he had never invited the boy to join him in his private prayer.

“It's fine,” Temoc said. “Come in.”

The door opened. Temoc turned on the mat. Caleb looked from him to the staring faces and back. He stood on the threshold, then stepped through with one foot first, as if testing a pool of water.

“Did you have a question?”

“The woman who came. She helped us in the crowd yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“She was hurt.”

“She was hurt. What she is trying to do now—what the crowd is trying to do—it's very difficult. When people try to do difficult things, sometimes they are hurt. Sometimes they are hurt bad.”

“I know that,” he said, with a tone of mild offense.

“Of course you do.” He reached out to tousle Caleb's hair, saw the flinch, and grinned and set his hand on his son's shoulder instead.

“Why didn't you help her? I mean,” Caleb said, when Temoc was about to answer, “I know you put her back together. But she wanted you to go with her, and you didn't.”

“I did not.”

“Even though she's your friend.”

“Even though.”

“Why?”

“She wanted my help with the difficult thing she's trying to do.”

“I heard.”

“You're a good listener.”

“Mom says that's how you win at cards.”

“I don't win at cards.”

“That's how she wins, I mean.”

“She wanted my help with Chakal Square.”

“Are you worried that you might get hurt?”

“Something like that,” he admitted.

“But you won't. You're strong. Really, really strong.”

“Even strong people get hurt sometimes. And anyway, I'm not the one I'm worried about.”

“Me and Mom?”

“You and Mom. It's a big tough world out there.”

“You don't need to worry about us.”

“That's what fathers do.”

“Mom can take care of herself. She's strong, too.”

“You're right.”

“And so am I.”

He laughed.

“I am. We both are.”

And there it was. The vow issued, the singing of the choir. His son would be strong. Strong enough to stand without Temoc. Strong enough to make his own way.

We will protect him, the gods sang. We will watch him. If you go forth to suffer in our service, if you cease to be a man and become instead a legend to glorify our name, he will not be alone. We watch always. We care for our people, and their children.

Only pave the way for us.

Only give us what is ours. Promised by your bloodline, father and son throughout history.

Give the boy the strength he needs. When you were his age, you knelt before the altar. When you were his age, you carved us into your skin. When you were his age, you dedicated yourself to the war that has found you now. We do not fault your hesitation. Years have passed, and the greatest battles come upon us unsuspecting. But do you think yourself so vital that your family will fail without you? Do you think time will cease if you die? You lack faith in your own blood. You need them to need you.

The boy wants to help. Let him.

“Dad?”

“I'm sorry,” Temoc said. His voice shook. He did not, could not, contemplate this certainty that opened within him now, as if time were skin and the gods the knife that cut and peeled it back to reveal the future. Don't make me do this. Don't pave this road for me. And yet nothing could take away that sense of knife and skin. “I'm sorry. I know you're strong. You can take care of yourself. I just need to help a little.”

Caleb hugged him, and he hugged the boy back, and felt ashamed.

 

47

By nightfall smoke from Chakal Square spread through the sky, darkening clouds. Temoc cooked dinner. Mina offered to help, and he refused at first, then relented, thanked her. She didn't mention Chel or the riots, and neither did he. They cooked together, and when they spoke they spoke of cooking: how many tomatoes, when to add the flour and how long to toast it, could she soak the dried chilis, where'd they leave the can opener, is that enough salt do you think. They filled the small kitchen, the two of them, trading the knife and chopping block. Stove heat made them sweat. This feeling was so easy to forget, so easy to miss even as you felt it: working with someone you loved on something small. Years had accustomed them to each other.

He tried to keep his eyes clear, tried to focus on the hiss of beef in pan, the smell of singed meat, the pop of grease. She slipped in beside him, slid chopped onions off the board with the back of the knife, and slipped away, leaving a memory in his skin and a tang in the air as the onions fried.