Tortall (9 page)

To my fear, the next village was two days’ travel down the road. Snow caught us at noon, slowing us down. It was well after dark when we reached the small hut that had been set up for the wandering priesthood. By then I had been forced to give my father poppy to ease the pain of his coughing. He was spitting up blood. Worse, when we reached the hut, I found he could not rest lying flat. He could not breathe. The healers had warned me, had said that only a great wizard could heal him when he got this ill. I arranged our packs until he could doze sitting up. “Drink,” I said, offering him a cup of the brewed medicinal tea.

My father opened his eyes.

“Mother?” he whispered, his beautiful voice only a ghost in his chest.

So I put on Omi Heza’s voice for him, becoming my grandmother to give him poppy and broth, to read his favorite parts of both Books to him, until he slept. Then I sat
next to him and the fire, holding his too-hot fingers to my cheek as I watched the flames.

This time I do not think I was sleeping. The flames danced for me, then pulled apart at the base to form a teardrop-shaped opening floored in embers.

The god spoke again in its twined voices. “Teky, three times we have asked, and three times you have given the wrong answer. One more chance do we give you to enter our service, to return the balance to our faithful. If you truly wish to carry on the work you have begun, then what do you see?”

And there they were, tall, short, plump, dark, pale, old and young and in between, a mass of black, with eyes so bright I thought they might burn me. Last time the god had said the answer lay in my talk with Fadal. Poor Fadal, who believed the veils were chains, until I made him—her—reconsider it, briefly, at least.

I looked at those fields of women, my sisters.

“Power,” I said.

The teardrop opening to the fire’s heart collapsed. I lifted my head. The heart was dark, as if something great had drawn the life from the fire.

The life was gone somewhere else, too. My father’s hand was cold against my cheek.

Through that long night I wept and said the prayers. I rebuilt the fire to sew his shroud, and the next day I built his pyre and sent his spirit flying in the flames to the god we both loved. I gathered wood to replace all I had used, then went back inside to decide what I could do with my life.

It was nearly midnight when I remembered my father wished me to return to my aunt.

“I don’t want to go,” I said aloud. The donkey snorted and glared at me.

I looked at the fire and remembered the god had said she—he—would help me. The next village did expect a wandering priest. There had been female wandering priests before, but … I looked at my trembling hands: a girl’s smooth, young hands. Then I considered the power of the veil and my last words to my father, spoken in my grandmother’s voice.

I had a bit of mirror in one of my packs. I scraped some ash from the hearth onto a plate and considered the look of age.

Two days, and much practice, later, I let a young man help me up onto a platform my hosts had set for me in their barn. “Is that all right, Omi Heza?” he asked me nervously. I had wrapped myself in my grandmother’s name like an extra veil, for strength.

I looked at a sea of male faces. It was so familiar, and yet it was not, because my father was not behind me.

“You cannot teach us!” cried some man. “You are a woman!”

“And if you were my grandson, I would give you my cane for disrespect!” I cried. Suddenly light spilled all around me, and other voices, a woman’s and a man’s, spoke entwined around mine. “Do you doubt I speak with the god’s voices? Will you walk farther from the true flame?”

As silence spread—as the men knelt, as that dreadful light began to fade—I said in my own, old-woman voice, “And bring the women and girls in here. I am too old to go on teaching once to the men and boys, and once to
them. From now on, I teach all together, as the balance is meant to be.”

Three days later, with a thirteen-year-old boy to be my new companion, I set forth, bound for the next village. I rode my donkey, as befitted my age.

In the Copper Isles, a tale is told of a crow who fell in love with a mortal woman and changed to human shape, as all crows can change, for her. Their love was sealed in the fire and blood of the Great Revolution that carried Queen Dovasary Balitang to the throne of the Isles. In that time crows, humans, and the black globe-creatures called darkings joined the rebel armies. Together they restored the native humans called raka to rule over their islands once more. This crow and his human love stood at Queen Dovasary’s left hand, where all secrets were kept.

Some secrets reveal themselves after a handful of months. At the usual time following that revelation, Nawat Crow held one of his shrieking wife, Aly’s, hands as she gripped an arm of the birthing chair with the other. Nawat was so tense that feathers kept popping from his human skin, which made the midwife uneasy. Aly, who usually noticed such things, had a mind only for her own efforts. With each strong pain she screamed, “I don’t want eggs! I don’t want eggs!”

Since humans came inconveniently arrayed with arms, legs, and a head, all of which might get stuck as they left their
laboring mother, Nawat thought that any woman would be glad to birth a nice, well-shaped egg. Aly had never come to see his point of view. Once, in her sixth month, as he tried to explain it yet again, she had vomited on an expensive silk rug. After that she had forbidden him to discuss the subject.

Now, in a lull between pains, she settled herself in the chair, looked up at him, and plucked a feather from his temple. “Ow!” Nawat cried. He rubbed the sore spot. “Don’t pull out big feathers, Aly!” He showed her the blood on his fingers. “It may not seem dangerous to you just now, but this would be serious if I was crow-shaped!”

Her face was red and dripping sweat, her hair soaked through. She waved the feather at him, tears rolling down her cheeks. “You’re half-changed. You don’t want to be with me. You want to go back to being a crow. You think I’m sweaty and ugly and horrible”—she began to sob—“and I
am
!”

Ah, thought Nawat, this. Pregnancy had not been kind to his dear one. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, ignoring her halfhearted attempts to shove him away. “You are so beautiful, as beautiful as sunrise and sunset,” he whispered. Holding the fingers of his free hand like a beak, he groomed her limp reddish blond hair with them. “I would not trade being your husband for all the sparkly things in the Isles. I will not return to crow shape and leave you. I—”

The groan began deep in her chest, deeper than any of the cries before. The raka midwife, Mistress Penolong, looked up from between Aly’s legs. “Now then, girl, do your work,” she said, her black eyes sharp. “Push.”

“No eggs,” Nawat heard his love mutter as she braced herself. He got in position to help her. “No eggs no eggs no
eggs …
”

She bellowed, her face turning purple. Nawat propped her up, silent, holding her tight.

“Here’s a crown,” the midwife said.

Aly tried to sit up straight against the back of the chair. “Is it an egg crown?”

Mistress Penolong snapped at Aly, “Give over these fantasies and
push
!”

Aly pushed. Nawat held her up, his eyes on her face more than her body. He had not confessed any of his fears to Aly, who had plenty of her own. She was the talker of the two of them. That amused him, because her work required that she keep so many secrets. She had to be the most chattery spymaster in all the Eastern Lands, without revealing anything important to anyone but Nawat or the queen. And it was only to Nawat that she had spoken her fears of dying in childbirth, as so many women did.

Not that she looked as if she might die today. If Nawat had to wager on such a thing, he would bet that Aly would kill the Black God of Death if he came for her at this moment.

“Now,” ordered the midwife. “Now, now …”

Aly roared, the midwife shouted in triumph, and a baby’s howls rose above both. “Finally!” Aly cried with relief.

Nawat reached for the cloth soaking in the basin and used it to wipe the sweat from the back of Aly’s neck. She was relaxing now, a satisfied look on her face. Mistress Penolong
was passing their child to her assistant, who did something with her finger, then with cloths. The bundle wailed over the indignities of birth.

The midwife smiled up at Aly and Nawat. “My lady, my lord, you have a daughter,” she said.

Her assistant handed the mite to Aly, who cuddled her. “Have you a name?” the young woman asked Aly. Nawat brushed Aly’s cheek with his hand. This they had settled long ago. Aly smiled up at him, though the smile quickly turned to a grimace. “Ochobai,” she said. “For a teacher and leader who left us for the Peaceful Realms.”

Mistress Penolong and her assistants bowed their heads and drew the sign of life on their breasts. In raka tradition it was bad luck to name a child exactly after someone living or recently dead, but everyone would know the baby’s name was a tribute to a leader of the recent revolution.

Honor to the mage Ochobu aside, Nawat thought his chick was very ugly, all red and crumpled. He saw no pinfeathers, beak, or claws on Ochobai. Perhaps those things would come later.

“You don’t like her,” Aly said accusingly.

Nawat reached a finger down to Ochobai. “I don’t know her,” he explained.

His daughter gripped his finger with one hand, hanging on hard. Something inside Nawat turned warm. Ochobai had a crow’s grip. She would not drop any prize she found. And this was not just a crow’s hold that she had. He smiled at Aly. “She holds on like you.”

He reached inside the child with his crow senses and
instantly knew something that only he could teach the nestli—the
baby
, he reminded himself. Aly stirred on the birthing chair, her face twisting in discomfort again. “May I take her?” Nawat asked.

Aly nodded. “I didn’t think afterbirth felt like another baby,” she told the midwife as Nawat lifted Ochobai from Aly’s arms.

Nawat took the child to the window and opened a shutter. “You are too young to know,” he murmured, “but I will help you. When our people relieve ourselves, we go to the edge of the nest and eliminate
outside
it.” He undid the newborn’s blankets—they were far too tight—and her diaper, draping them over his shoulder. None of the women noticed: they were busy around Aly. They did not see Nawat hold Ochobai outside the window as the infant peed.

The crows of the great flock of the city, perched in every tree within view, cawed wildly to welcome Nawat’s child. Then they saw that he held a human infant, not a nestling. Immediately they went quiet. Nawat sensed them talking silently with one another, but he had more on his mind than the disapproval of the Rajmuat flock.

“Good,” he said to Ochobai when she was done. He wiped her with the cloth he’d used on her mother, and then did up her diaper again. He was grateful that it was an ordinary day in the Isles—hot and sticky. Without feathers, his tiny daughter might have caught cold. “I’ll tell the servants what to do,” he said as the baby waved her hands. “There’s no reason they can’t teach you properly, even if they aren’t crows.”

Aly let out a cry. “What’s wrong? This
hurts
!”

“You know we spoke of twins, my lady,” the midwife told her calmly. “Here comes your second child.”

Aly grimaced. “I was just praying it would be one, despite everything. My mother’s bloodline runs to twins. Time to stop whining, then.”

Nawat looked at Ochobai. The little one waved her arms blindly, her eyes squeezed shut. Shouldn’t this nestling want grubs or insects right now? Inside her he felt the beginnings of hunger. He reached into his breeches pocket and found a worm he’d been saving for Aly. Although she had refused the insects he’d brought when he first courted her, Aly hadn’t been able to get enough shovel-headed worms or white-spotted caterpillars during her pregnancy. Nawat had smuggled a few into the birthing chamber in case his wife got hungry.

He dangled the worm over Ochobai’s face as he walked back to the birthing chair. If the little one reached for it, Nawat would chew it up for her. That was his plan, but between muscle contractions his love saw what he was doing.

“Nawat!” she screeched as she thrust a second child out of her womb. She reached out and seized the worm. “Goddess’s great
—heart
, what are you doing?!”

“Nestlings are hungry,” he explained. Their new boy was even bloodier and more wrinkled than Ochobai. Nawat smiled at Aly. “Junim has come,” he said, using the name they had chosen for a son. “You had better take Ochobai. I must carry Junim—”

But he was too late to take the boy to the window. Before
Mistress Penolong had cut the cord that tied him to his mother, little Junim had peed in her face.

“This is common,” one assistant explained to the horrified Aly. “It will happen again.”

Not if
I
am near, Nawat thought, eyeing Junim. “Our kind does not pee within the nest,” he said aloud.

Another assistant cleaned the boy as she smiled at Nawat. “These are
human
babies,” she said, as if Nawat were not very clever. “It’s different for them.”