The Assassins of Tamurin (3 page)

I hiLtled around a pauxa cote and without warning slammed into a man’s midriff. The man yelped. I gasped, and as I tried to collect myself, his burden of cane slid from his shoulder sling and knocked me flat on my face. Before I could scramble away, the heavy bundle had rolled across my legs, pinning me to the mud.

“Curse you, Lale,” Chefen snarled. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Hold her!” Detrim came up, spattering mud. Behind him trotted Tamzu and Rana. Stumbling after them, bent over and still fighting for breath, was Adumar. I saw my aunt’s eyes and wished I had not.

I tried to get up, but it was already too late. Chefen had been in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. He grabbed my upper arm and held me with a grip like a mooring rope. Half crushed into the dirt, all I could do was lever myself onto one elbow. A small crowd was gathering, mostly women and children. The latter stared at me wide-eyed, without a single jeer or catcall. Their silence only added to my terror. The afternoon sun had come out, and the thatch of the houses was beginning to steam.

“You, Feriti,” Adumar wheezed at a woman standing over me. “You were supposed to get the needles after the priestess. But now you won’t.”

“I won’t? Why not?”

“Because Lale lost them!” Adumar shrilled. “Everything else we’ve had to suffer, and now this! She’s a curse on us all, the litde demon. She’s been bad luck for everyone since we pulled her out of the river! Better she’d gone into the rapids!”

I saw their faces change. I’d seen them harsh before or angry or cold and indifferent, but I had never seen them become less than human. Their eyes were like the eyes of the boar we kept in the swine byre. The furies they’d stored up against one another, against the soldiers who had robbed them, against the thin soil and the bad crops and the Despot’s taxmen at last boiled over.

Feriti began it. She kicked at me almost tentatively, as if unsure of what she was doing. Then she did it again with more conviction. I moaned but no one protested, so Feriti kicked me harder. This time she hurt my ribs, and then Adumar kicked me and another woman did and then another and it hurt, it hurt a
lot,
and I heard someone screaming and it was me,
Please I'm only eleven please please please I didn't mean to oh please
but they were all screaming too.

mad, demented, and went on kicking me, kicking me until I was bleeding at the mouth, blood on my tongue hot and salt like tears, curled up now with my arms over my head so they couldn’t reach my stomach and then, oh horror, fingers clutching my hair, straightening me so they could get at my belly and my eyes, not just bare feet and fists now, but thick canes from the firewood bundle—

Shouts through the din. I was barely conscious now, but I heard the priest’s voice bellowing,
Stop stop it's blasphemy.
The grip on my hair vanished, and I could curl up again as the kicks and blows slowed little by little, faded away like rain diminishing. One person kept at it, two kicks at my face, the priest’s voice,
Adumar leave her be I warn you.
And finally it stopped, and so did I, sliding away into silence and darkness, into a place that lay deeper than the riverbed of my dreams.

I was alive but seemed dead. I walked, but no one saw me. I spoke, but no one heard me.

Even the smaller children, when I held one by an arm, waited silently for me to let go. If I persisted or if I threatened anyone, an adult or an older child would intervene and remove me bodily. But they didn’t look at me or speak to me. If I went into a house, I would be picked up and put outside as if they were shifting a piece of wood. They didn’t even try to hurt me when they did it.

As for the beating, it didn’t leave any lasting damage. The Water Lord’s priest had kept me in the god’s shrine for five days, but during that time no one came to look for me. That was a relief, but I reckoned I’d have to go home eventually, and I dreaded it. I didn’t think the village was through with punishing me, and the knowledge made me feel sick and frightened. I asked the priest what was going to happen, but he refused to answer.

On the fifth day, when he saw that I could walk without a limp, he told me that I was to suffer the punishment called Negation of Being. I knew nothing of this, so the priest had to explain it. It was, he said, my penalty for lying, blasphemy, false swearing, and
shegeshvai,
the crime of stealing from a kinsman. Kin theft was worse than simple theft, and in places like Riversong
shegeshvai
was a very serious matter. Adults could have a hand cut off for it, and repeated offenses could bring death.

But, the priest went on, the Goddess of Mercy did not permit the mutilation of a child. Moreover, the Water Lord had preserved me from death when I was a baby, and if I needed killing, the god himself would arrange it. But I must be punished for my many offenses, and inflicting the Negation of Being was within the village’s rights. While I remained in Riversong, I would be allowed food enough to sustain my life, but that was all I would receive. Otherwise, as far as the village was concerned, I would cease to exist.

Then the priest fell silent. He would never speak to me again nor would anyone else; my punishment was forever. To the people of Riversong, I was as good as dead.

But for the first few days of being deceased, I thought I must have fallen into the lap of Our Lady of Mercy herself. Nobody hit me or shouted at me, and Rana put out a dish of food for me once a day. Since I couldn’t enter the house, I slept in the cooking porch, wrapping myself in my ragged cloak, which I retrieved from the midden where somebody had tossed it. When I was thirsty I drank from the butt beside the Stock House, and if I didn’t get enough food from Rana, I slipped into the breadnut plantation at night and ate some of the fallen nuts raw.

And best of all, I did not have to work. The thing that puzzled me was why more people didn’t get themselves punished by a Negation on purpose. It seemed a fine life, as long as you didn’t mind being outside all the time.

I spent much of my time at play, and several days passed very happily. Sometimes I pretended I was Vahir, the maiden in the old tale who could conjure a hat of invisibility—this was very apt, because I did seem to be invisible. Or I played at being a place god, as if I were one of the minor spirits that liked to associate themselves with particular locations: a woodland glade, an old house, a tree, a bridge, a waterfall. But nobody made the usual small sacrifices to me, so the place god game wasn’t very realistic. I liked being Vahir better.

Once I pretended I was an ancestor spirit, but it turned out rather unhappily. As everybody knows, you’re most likely to encounter one of these on your birthday, provided you call them with the proper rituals. It so happened that Feriti had her natal day shortly after I was Negated, and for revenge I decided to present myself at the end of her ritual, as if I were an ancestor, and make nasty faces at her. I hoped I'd make her scream or even faint.

It didn’t work out that way. I plastered my face and hair with white dust as a sort of ancestor disguise, then listened outside her house until she’d finished the chant and I smelled the musky offering smoke. Then I jumped up and peered through the window, with a horrible leering grimace on my face.

But she wasn’t looking at me. Instead she was on her knees, praying as fast as she could to
something
near the ancestor shrine. And I glimpsed it, too, as solid as Feriti was: a young man I’d never seen, wearing peculiar clothes, frowning down at her. I saw him for no more than an instant, but his presence startled me so badly I ran away and hid in the Stock House. It took me some time to get used to the fact that I’d seen an actual ancestor, even if it belonged to somebody else. It wasn’t common for people to meet such a spirit, even on their birthdays and even with the rituals, and I was astonished that I’d seen as much as I had. But then, after I got over my fright, I felt a wave of sadness. I didn’t know my birthday and never would, so I could never summon a spirit of my bloodline to give me advice or encouragement.

I moped over this for a day, but then tried to restore my spirits by imagining I was a different person entirely, a girl who looked like me but was someone else. This was an old game, one I’d enjoyed since I first discovered I had an imagination. Instead of drudging in poor shabby Riversong, I lived in one of the rich cities of the north. There I was no foundling, but the beloved daughter of a great and respected bloodline. My father was handsome and brave, and my mother was beautiful and wise, and they loved me very much. We lived in a big house with sunlit courtyards and a secret garden luminous with flowers. Just like the people in

Master Lim’s stories, we ate from plates of gold and drank from cups of crystal; my gowns and jackets were woven of gossamin patterned in purple and red and lilac, and my skirts rang with tiny silver bells. Everything in that world was lovely, and now I could spend as much time there as I pleased, because nobody yelled at me to stop daydreaming and get to work.

But despite such delights, after six or seven days I began to tire of having no one to talk to. Even the younger children wouldn’t acknowledge my presence, except to steal a sidelong glance at me, and finally I realized that being invisible was not as wonderful as I’d thought. Then I began to have awful nightmares, in which I tumed into a ghost and had to walk the earth instead of going to the Quiet World where I belonged.

And then I woke up one morning and realized, for the first time, what Negation really meant. It meant that I would be alone until I died.

In that instant, terror overwhelmed me. I ran through the village lanes, crying out for someone to notice my existence. Then I tried to go inside my old house. I got into the common room, where Rana sat with her face turned away. But Adumar hit me without looking at me; and Kefsen, Burad, and Tamzu silently picked me up by the arms and legs and threw me into the lane. Then they closed the door.

I lay there in the mud under the overcast sky, and after a while a soft drizzle began. The rain fell on me as people walked past; some stepped over me as if I were a length of cane, and I didn’t move for a long time.

But when the drizzle stopped and a pale silver smear in the clouds showed that midday had come, I made myself get up. Then I stumbled around to the rear of the house, where I sat down on a stone. Rana and Aunt Tamzu were in the cooking porch, simmering fish and greens in a clay pot for the midday meal. A stack of flatbread, baked that moming, waited in a straw basket. I dully considered going and getting in their way, but I knew nothing would come of it.

Then I thought:
I have to leave here, I have to go somewhere else, where people won't do this to me.

Before my Negation, the idea of leaving would have scared me, even though my life in Riversong was so difficult. But now I realized my loneliness would madden me until I killed myself or until I did something that would justify my being put to death. That was the purpose of Negation; the person either died or ran off, and the village was rid of them one way or the other.

I don't
want to die,
I thought. I'
m only eleven. But I'll die if I stay here. And they'll be happy about it, and I don't
want them to be happy.

All right, then, I'll leave. Maybe I'll die somewhere else, but at least someone might talk to me before it happens,

I couldn’t just walk away, though; I’d need supplies to sustain me until I found a village where I could beg or work. To start off. I’d head for Gladewater, some two days’ walk along the road to the northwest. If I couldn’t find anything there. I’d keep going; according to Detrim, there was a town named High Lake somewhere beyond Gladewater. He’d been there for a few months as a young man, when he was impressed into the Despot’s army.

And beyond those two places lay the great world and all its countries. I knew a little about that world, knowledge I had gleaned from the half-comprehended tales carried by the infrequent wanderers who found their way to Riversong. I knew that the villagers and I were of the race called the Durdana, and that our empire of Durdane had once been great but was now broken and cast down. I knew that there had been no Emperor of Durdane for a hundred years—only the Despots, who governed a dozen petty states in the soudi of our ancient realm, and the Sun Lord of Bethiya, who watched over his larger domain in the north. I knew also that our ruin had come at the hands of the people we called the Exiles, and that they still ruled half the lands of the old empire—the Six Kingdoms—and that neither Despot nor Sun Lord had the power to drive them out.

But I had no clear understanding then of how vast my world really was. Our empire had once stretched fifteen hundred miles from east to west and a thousand from south to north, and beyond those borders lay other places and peoples yet: the wintry northern chiefdoms of the Daisa and the Huazin; the archipelagoes of the Chechesh, the Khalaka, and the Yellow Smoke Islanders in the western ocean; the Country of Circular Paths, the Bone Tree Kingdom, and Narappa-lo on that ocean’s far shores; and in the east, the brooding and barbarous realm of Abaris. And there were others beyond these, but so far away that they were more like rumors than real places and had no names.

If I’d known more than I did, I might have been daunted at the prospect of leaving. But in my innocence, I felt that the whole world was mine to discover, if I were daring enough to seize my opportunities with determined hands. My fortune, I told myself, lay in rich foreign places, not here in this wretched village where the road ended.