Shadowed By Wings (24 page)

The second thing I realized was that all who had entered these walls had expired within them.

“Hand back the bladder,” the voice on the other side of my cell door growled, and I startled.

“Hand back the bladder,” the voice again demanded.

“Don’t shut the window,” I begged.

“Hand it back, or else I won’t bring you food and drink again.”

I shoved the bladder through the slot of light but didn’t withdraw my fingers. “Keep it open, please. I can’t see in here.”

A bamboo switch slashed my fingers. I cried out, snapped my hand back inside. At once the portal slid closed again.

“No!” I yelled, and I banged the door with my fists. “Open it, I can’t breathe, I can’t see, don’t leave me here!”

No answer.

Time blurred. The slot opened, food and water were pushed through, I drank and ate, and then the slot closed again, entombing me in stench and darkness. My teeth rattled in my head from chill, my legs trembled incessantly. My feet and ankles swelled and pulsed like pulpy bruises.

Dono’s betrayal sat on my shoulders and shattered my heart anew each time I woke from fitful, nervous sleep.

My mother’s haunt made its presence known; it was trapped within my body. Each time I slept I felt its presence pulsing within me. I saw it in my sleep, embedded in my belly in the shape of a yamdalar cinaigour, the mucus-coated cocoon an old brooder dragon secretes about herself in preparation for death. I could see claws trying to rip open the cocoon, that the haunt might fully invade me, might take over my body as its own. Only the residual venom left in my body held the haunt trapped in that cocoon. I knew it was only a matter of time before the weak enclosure would disintegrate, and then each time I slept, the haunt would occupy my frame and entrap me in limbo, and upon waking, I’d have to fight my way back into my body and subdue the presence occupying my flesh by giving voice to the haunt’s desire: Waivia.

Understand, such had happened to me before.

And, as the haunt gathered strength, I knew, too, that it would next begin to invade my waking hours. It would start to control me as a puppeteer controls a puppet.

I feared sleep, for it offered no escape, only provided a different source of misery and fear. So I kept myself awake, chanted the stories carved into the walls, even the few stories I’d found that had not been completed.

After some time, it became utterly necessary to include my name upon those walls, that my fate not go entirely unremarked, that my demise not be completely insignificant. I chose a stone from the filthy floor, ran my fingers over the wooden walls about me, and found an unmarked section.

It was not easy to carve hieratics upon those walls, despite the softness of the wood. But I persevered, triumphing with each cursive symbol I inscribed, feeling I’d won something great, something worthy, by my meager mastery. Yet picking up the stone each time I woke from a restless, chill sleep was supremely difficult. Rousing myself from despair, forcing myself to take action, however slight that action was, became a monumental task. Sometimes I could not bring myself to do it and instead spent my time rocking on the floor, my head between my knees.

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. Anyone who does not know this, knows not the livid loneliness of fear. And when I could find the courage to pick up that stone, I found, for a little while, a strange sort of peace.

This, then, is what I inscribed on those foul walls:

Some call me danku Re Darquel’s Zarq, but others call me Zarq-the-deviant. Both are correct, for at seventeen, I
am
a deviant. I am rishi, yet I can read and write. I
am
woman, yet I have served bull dragons. I am a deviant because I once dared believe I might one day attain the status of dragonmaster.

Writing this gave me purpose, kept me half sane. It felt as if I were burying Dono’s betrayal by stretching out a hand to the women who had known this cell prior to me, and I dreamed of them and knew them as dear friends. I was not alone, not with their names constantly rolling off my lips. Not with my history inscribed alongside theirs.

At some point during that dark eternity, it dawned on me that my litany was similar in a small way to the dragons’ music, to the ancestral ladder that connected each dragon with the dead, the living, and even the unborn. The act of scraping glyphs into damp wood joined my heart and breath and spirit to the women who had died in that place, and, by extension, it joined me to all women and men, for all of us would one day die, whether in cell or hammock, in childbirth or by mishap. Death was an undeniable unifier.

Then the door in front of me one day opened, shockingly, and I fell face-first into life again.

TWELVE

A
plump eunuch bathed me in tepid waters, in a blue-tiled room stained with ochre watermarks. I flinched from his touch, from the lantern light that glimmered overbright upon the cracked and chipped tiles. I was suspicious of the wooden tub he dipped water from, was overwhelmed by the feeling of tepid water poured over my head. I gasped, I spluttered, I trembled and hid my face behind my hands as I stood there naked, accepting his ministrations.

He used a grainy bar of soap on me. It smelled like crushed vines and stung my pressure sores, which he scrubbed vigorously.

Clucking, murmuring, occasionally patting my belly or back or shoulder as if each were a separate creature requiring soothing, he washed me thoroughly, and then, while I shivered and wept in anxiety, for I knew not what this washing meant and was terrified of it, he scrubbed my hair clean, running his fingers through the snarled mess until it lay in neat, wet ribbons to just below my chin.

He dried me with a linen sheet that at one time must have been very fine indeed, judging by the embroidery stitched along the edges, but was now stained and worn thin in multiple places.

When I was dry and my scalp throbbed hotly from his attentions, he dressed me in a bitoo, and I was astonished and unsettled anew by how fine the light, pale green linen was, by how softly it pooled about my ankles and how precisely it covered my arms.

He pulled the bitoo’s cowl up over my damp head and stood back. He beamed as if he’d created, not washed, me.

The eunuch looked about twenty years old, though because he was a eunuch, his age was difficult to guess. His cheeks were as full as a baby’s. His worn hemp tunic, wet from where he’d washed me, clung to his chest. Breasts bigger than mine and each jutting sideways a little, in perfect symmetry with his large, splayed feet, rested on his paunch. His hairless shins and thighs looked as soft as chamois, and his toenails had been painted orange with henna, as is the custom of all eunuchs.

As he beamed, dimples appeared on either side of his full lips.

“Better, hmmm?”

I felt like running from him, had a mad urge to find my prison cell and bar myself in it, for there I knew what to expect from each day, and a certain comfort may be derived from knowing such.

“I’ll introduce you to the rest of the viagand. Come.” Viagand: herd of girls.

He took my left hand and gently but firmly tugged me forward.

He was to do that a great deal, over the months that followed. Carefully take my one of my hands in one of his own and lead me about, whether it be to the Retainer’s bunks to be raped, the bathhouse to be washed, the latrines, the viagand chambers, the brooder stalls, the recovery berths, or the medic’s den. Always his grasp was gentle.

But firm. Undeniable. Absolute. Or so I let myself believe.

I get ahead of myself.

That first day, he led me through a labyrinth of stone corridors, upstairs and down, the verdigris-slicked walls lit here and there by a guttering sconce or greenish sunlight that trickled through long, narrow casements high up in the stone walls. We saw no one, heard no human sounds. Once, as we passed beneath the grassy light streaming through a casement through which liana vines had grown, I heard the squawk of a parrot, followed by the hooting of a troop of howler monkeys. Instantly I knew: Jungle surrounded this dank stone fortress. Jungle and nothing else.

And then we did see people, two of them. Men, standing sentry outside a door at the end of a dead corridor. Dour, stinking men with long snarled hair. They were dressed in a shabby mockery of a Cafar guard’s uniform, though they were unarmed. Their steel-studded leather skirts and plastrons were cracked with neglect, their sandals in equal disrepair.

My heart rattled against my chest as the eunuch led me toward the two, down that corridor, which ended only at the door they guarded.

The eunuch kowtowed to the two men.

“Retainers,” he murmured, either addressing the two or informing me of their titles, I knew not which. Nor did I care; the Retainers looked at me with such knowing lechery and smirking confidence that I instantly feared them.

The eunuch pushed open the wooden door and pulled me through, past the Retainers.

“The viagand chambers,” he said, beaming. “Your home.” He shut the door behind us.

My eyes roved over the chamber before me, skittering from one dark niche to the next. My “home” was a dark, vaulted stone room, lit only by the greenish sunlight that slid through the few narrow casements in the stone walls. Fraying draperies hung upon the stone walls in dusty folds. Once-fine rugs in faded greens and purples covered the stone floors, some overlapping others, most worn through in the center and unraveling at the ends. Pillows and musical instruments, floor tables and divans, art easels and inkwells, lay scattered about, intermingled with the occasional hand puppet or forsaken destiny wheel.

Everything looked shabby, as though decades of dust had been ingrained into every surface. The smell of women impregnated the damp air, a soft, briny odor that was familiar from my childhood in the pottery women’s barracks but was altered radically by the stone walls behind the mildewing draperies, and the fusty pools of darkness that lay beyond the rays of light seeping through the narrow casements.

Altered, too, by the unmistakable scent of venom pervading the entire place.

Saliva rushed into my mouth, a painful, puckering burst, and my heart stuttered and danced.

“Greatmother,” the eunuch called. He released my hand, clasped his belly. “Greatmother!”

From various dark corners—caves hollowed out here, niches ferreted away there, crannies that notched the circumference of the vaulted room we stood in—came slow, swishing sounds, as if the dead were rising from eternal slumber and shambling toward us.

My heart rattled against my chest and I half turned back to the door we’d just come through. I remembered the two guards, the Retainers so confident in their lechery. Swallowing hard, I turned away from the door and faced whatever was about to befall me.

“Come, come.” The eunuch clucked indulgently at the approaching sounds.

I saw them then, drifting toward us, as slim and pale as if they’d been shaped from moonlight.

Women.

“Here she is: One Hundredth Girl. Introduce yourselves to Najivia, girls.”

I stiffened, bit my tongue to hold back a scream.

The women shuffling toward me were unnatural, their skin almost as white as a Northerner’s but as waxy as an orchid’s petal. Their shoulders hung off them as if made of melting wax, and their hands hung slackly at their sides, as if too heavy to lift. Their hair hung long and thinly to their elbows, and their scalps were clearly visible beneath their hair roots. To a woman, their eyes were ringed in oozing red skin and looked too big, as if plucked from some larger creature and embedded like fat rotting plums in the glossy dough of their faces.

Not that their faces were plump, understand. No. They were lean. But nary a wrinkle, nary a crease, marred their cheeks, so that their faces reminded me exactly of the dough used to make holy cakes: round, smooth, damp, covered in a thin coat of lard.

It was their eyes, though, that made horror ripple along my spine. Overlarge eyes ringed by irritated, weeping skin. Dragon eyes.

Dragon eyes like I’d never seen before, like I’d never thought possible.

The whites of each woman’s eyes were so thickly webbed with broken blood vessels, her irises appeared to be suspended in pools of blood. And the irises, well.
They
were marbled with shards of white. Not a clean white, like that of an egret’s down, but the blue white of starlight on a cold, clear evening. The blue white that remains imprinted upon your eyesight for several heartbeats after a celestial feather has exploded like a spark upon your skin.

And they were as immovable as rocks set in mortar, those eyes.

“Hello,” said one of the women, coming to a stop before me. The air she exhaled was heavily perfumed with the scent of venom. Her front teeth were missing. Gray streaked her long black hair. “You’re Naji.”

“She is, Greatmother,” the eunuch said. “Fresh from the Prelude.”

“I see.” Her eyes dropped into mine like rocks sinking through silt. “I’m Makwaivia, Forty-one Girl. But call me Greatmother.”