Tyrant Trouble (Mudflat Magic) (6 page)

The
woman's hair was twisted above her head, held by threads of gold and shiny bits
of bright stone.

Nance
raised the lamp higher. Above the two heads a golden circlet glittered in the
flame, catching the light and shooting out reflected glitter like some oversize
halo.

After
Nance replaced the lamp on the rock, she led me behind the rock to another
doorway and into another room. Its walls and door were covered with draperies.
Here she relaxed, slowly letting out her breath.

Peering
at me, she said, “Do you know them?”

“The
portraits on the wall. No. They look more like me than like you, but I don't
know them.”

She
shook her head. “I don't believe you. Did you not recognize them at all?”

“No.
Does it matter?”

Stamping
her foot, she snapped, “Not to me. I shall call the guards and let them drag
you to the prison cell if you do not wish to trust me.”

“Should
I trust you?”

Her
face dimpled. She grabbed my hand. “Yes, I want you here as a priest and
templekeeper. For years I have been alone in this place, except for the slaves
who bring me whatever I request, and they don't speak. I need someone else. You
could be my friend. I would so like a friend.”

“Oh
come off it, Nance. When did you get here, two weeks ago? A month?”

Her
little round face scrunched into a perplexed expression, freckles and all.

“I
have always lived here. My needs are left at the gate. Other than my cousin,
you are the only person to ever enter these rooms where I live.”

“Explain.
Give me the big picture because I am totally missing some clue. What is this
place?”

“A
place of prayer. Have you no temples in your land?” Her voice dropped to a
dismayed whisper. “Have you no gods?”

“Define
gods,” I said. Damn, she sounded sincere and that was scary.

A
mixture of confusion and fear crossed her face. Like Tarvik, her emotions were
easy to see. “The Sun is our god. The Sun shines above the heads of the
Daughter and her beloved. She, too, is a god. Do you not know her face?”

“Sorry.
Why, is she famous? Rock star? Film star?”

“Look!
Look here!” Nance cried. She reached behind a curtain, pulled out a small hand
mirror, and held it up in front of me.

I
glanced at it to satisfy her. Yup, dark hair, narrow face, a bod that bordered
on skinny, me and a few million other women.

“Okay,
we have similar coloring and maybe I look a bit like the both of them. Is that
what you mean? But so do lots of people.”

“No
one here! No one I have ever seen before!”

“You're
putting me on and I am tired of it, Nance. Come on, I don't mind playing games
but I have had a long hot exhausting day and honestly, I am ready to head back
to Seattle.”

Do
I sound impossibly thick headed? Okay, if I woke up on Mars my reactions would
be the same. I would be in denial for a ton of reasons, even when little green
people tried to steal my shoelaces. And that's about where I was, not on Mars
but definitely in denial because I knew gut deep by now that Nance was not an
actress, not a festival participant, not anything I had ever met before.

Nance
said, “That is the Daughter and her beloved. They arrived during the time of
the fever and she saved my uncle's life. That is when he knew she was the
Daughter of the Sun, the daughter of a god greater than the Thunder god. He
built this temple for her and her beloved. He is sworn to her service, as are
we all, and I was chosen by her to be her priest until her return.”

“Where
is she now?”

“Their
ghosts left their fevered earth bodies eight years ago. Before she died she
told my uncle I must be her priest and she and her beloved must leave us. Their
souls hungered for their home in the heavens, yet one day they would return. I
was seven years old then and I have lived here since. I had a nursemaid for
companion until she - she - she died, too.” Her lip quivered and tears shone in
her eyes. “I have lived alone here for three years now.”

My
astonishment blotted out my discretion. “The sun is not a god!”

“Not
a god? Then what power keeps the Sun in the sky? I have tended this temple all
these years, waiting for the Daughter's return. Now I see you and you look so
much like her, you, too, must be a god and I will serve you with my life.”

Nance
knelt before me, which was really creepy, and buried her face in her hands. Her
small shoulders shook with sobs. I didn't know if she cried in joy or sorrow.
But damn, the tears were real. Which meant hey, Toto, I wasn't in any known
American city anymore. Even Disneyworld couldn't have conjured up this place.

And
you know what finally convinced me? Disneyworld might toss in similar
illusions, but down the hall there would be proper rest rooms. No clean and
shining tile here, not even running water. So that's when I accepted as fact
somehow I was now in the middle of Weirdville surrounded by people who took
beheading seriously and me without my trusty troll.

Back
in Seattle, in my own weird neighborhood I had friends who, from time to time,
had a neighbor show up on the doorstep to tell them they had inherited magic
tendencies, anything from wizard to psychic, and it was time for them to either
follow that path or learn to keep things under control, because the deal with
inherited magic is it tends to put force behind emotions. Um, for example, a
fight in your own kitchen with your own boyfriend could blow out the neighbor's
cable reception. So anyhow, whether anyone in Mudflat wanted to admit it or
not, facing up to genetics was necessary. Gotta say, I know a very long list of
magic sidelines and have heard a lot of prophecies, but never have I known
anyone who was pronounced a god.

Time
for diplomacy, cooperation, and a whole lot of readjusted attitudes.

How
must a god act? I couldn't imagine. Terrified I might be forced to play a god,
I grasped her shoulders and shook her.

“Stop
that noise! Nance, listen to me, I need to know everything you can tell me
about this place.” I said it firmly.

She
stared up at me and smiled through her tears. “I will do whatever you bid me,
friend of the Daughter.”

What
could I bid that would give me the best opportunity to remain alive and
eventually escape?

“Start
by telling me how the Daughter got here.” I knew how she left. She died. I
wanted a better route out.

“She
and her consort appeared. From the outlands.”

“Okay,
is there a path? Do you know the way?”

“Of
course not. There is no way. They came by magic, the same as you.”

“So
you've never gone outside?”

“How
could I? Only a god can find the way. Though I think when we die, that's where
our souls go. If you find a way to the outside, you will be dead when you get
there, so you would be foolish to try.”

What
big choice did I have? I said, “Okay, kid, teach me how to be a priest.”

CHAPTER
4

When
I thought of the effort I’d put into learning astrology from Gran, it seemed
like a waste of time, right along withlearning to check credit records and
figuring out that Darryl was mixed up with illegal stuff. Or maybe not. That
move kept me from hanging around and being controlled by him. Still, whatever
else he had in mind, I doubted Darryl had ever considered beheading me.

Nothing
in my horoscope hinted at a career as a priest in a barbarian temple. Okay,
maybe they weren't barbarians, but they also weren't actors and whoever they
were, I was stuck with them, which is probably why I kept thinking of them as
barbarians.

It
was survive or perish time, inspiring me to work hard at my new role. I
memorized the senseless chants Nance taught me. When I asked her if they were
written down someplace, so I could study them, she frowned and asked me to
explain what I meant.

“In
a book, maybe? Or never mind, if you can rustle up a pen and paper for me, you
can recite the chants and I can write them down.”

“Book?
Pen? What is that?”

Sure,
I realized there wasn't a hope for a computer in a place that didn't even have
indoor plumbing, but I didn't expect to have to strip bark off of birch trees
and write with ink made from plant roots. “What do people here use to write
on?”

“Write?
Explain.”

Oh.
The barbarians were illiterate. Why had I presumed otherwise?

“How
did you learn these chants?” I asked.

“The
same way you must learn them,” she scolded. “The Daughter said a chant and I
said it after her until I had it memorized. And then she taught me to put
together chants and make new ones to fit the occasion.”

Hmm.
As the chants told people what to do and how to behave, composing chants could
be a powerful tool. Was it possible I could compose a chant that made clear to
them that all outsiders should be returned safely to their homelands? That
seemed unlikely but worth thinking about.

I
practiced speaking chants in a flat, unemotional tone.

“You
did it perfectly,” Nance cried, her eyes and mouth wide, her eyebrows halfway
up her forehead, her hands clutching mine. “For me, keeping my face blank is
the hardest!”

For
me, trying not to laugh was the hardest. I learned to lift the odd-scented
lamps and swing them above my head, while I gyrated in front of the rock she
called an altar. Odd plumes of scent floated through the cut grills of these
small metal lamps we carried on chains, much like incense. More difficult were
the heavy candlesticks used in another part of the ritual.

Like
Tarvik, she touched me constantly, nothing more than brushing her fingers
against my hand as she walked by, and once pressing her palm to my shoulder
with a quick touch, almost as though she meant to reassure herself I was truly
there. I had seen small children do that with parents, but not people our age.
When we hugged, we had a reason. Umm, except for Darryl. Those flowers and
kisses hadn't meant a thing, not that there had been many.

Nance
wound my hair up on top of my head to match the style of the Daughter's hair in
the portrait, and into it she wove gold threads and bright ornaments. She
dressed me in a long velvet robe dyed in strange and lovely patterns spreading
like moonlight across the fabric, rich deep purples and blues. The robe hung
straight from my shoulders to my ankles and was belted with a rope of gold silk
ending in beaded tassels.

“This
robe, it's way too long for you, ” I said.

“You're
the same size. I thought you would be,” Nance said, and it took me a minute for
the brain to wake up.

So
it wasn't only my face that resembled the poor slob hiker who had stumbled into
this place fifteen years ago and been dubbed a god. We were also the same height,
which was spooky, but also useful. The clothes were loose. Footwear was the
right length but wide. So she had more padding than me. I'd like to say that
I'm slim, but probably skinny is closer to the truth. In the time my
predecessor was here, she had acquired a collection of robes, tunics, pants, as
well as sandals and boots, all still stored in the temple, all available for me
to wear.

Am
I superstitious about wearing the duds of the dead? It beats facing each day
with one pair of shorts and two tee shirts. I buy most of my clothes at
secondhand stores, anyway, so I was okay with Madame X's leftovers. The next
day I dragged all the stuff out into the courtyard and did some heavy soaking
and scrubbing, then hung both clothes and footwear in the sun to dry. Nance
danced around me complaining bitterly, but Nance was easy to ignore.

Three
days later, robed and jeweled, I faced Tarvik when he led a procession of his
guards into the temple. Amazing how our grasp on reality morphs. At first he
was a bothersome kid in a costume, then I figured he was a member of a game,
then an actor in a reality show, and now I accepted him as the son of some sort
of ruling family in a puzzling setting. Magic? Time warp? Had I fallen down a
rabbit hole?

Nance
placed me at the front of the altar gripping a lighted candle in my hands. I
stood quietly, froze my face into a mask imitating the faces on the wall, and
held my eyes as wide open as I could manage. Nance had drawn dark lines around
my lids to make my eyes appear rounder and darker. She had even pasted
glittering bits of metal the size of grains of sand in my eyebrows. They
itched, and it took considerable concentration not to scratch at them.

When
she worked on me, she constantly stroked my face or brushed back my hair with
her fingertips. It was annoying, but when I tried to shrug away from her, she
looked so hurt.

Her
last gesture was to hug me tightly before leading me into the altar room and to
whisper, “You look wonderful. I know you will do well.”

Both
my robe and my hair ornaments matched the portrait of the Daughter. And in the
shadows cast by the candles, my gray eyes must have looked as large and dark.

You
could have crashed a lightening bolt through the temple.

Tarvik's
men gasped and fell back from him. They bowed and made strange motions in front
of themselves, leaving me to watch in silence and wonder if they were bowing to
me or if they were making signs to ward off evil. I stared straight at Tarvik.
His face paled but he made no sound. Nance, who stood to one side in the
shadows, began the ritual chant, her voice high and clear.

“Daughter
of the Sun, speak for us. Carry our devotion to our god. Lay down our gold and
promises at the blessed feet of the Sun. Beg him to smile on us, his forgotten
servants. Tell him of the black winters, the hunger. Thank him for sparing us
from fever. Remind him of his promise.”

And
so on, blah, blah, blah.

Now
I picked up the chant, did a singsong straight-faced version. My voice was
lower than hers. The men who had murmured in fear now fell silent. It was hard
to look at all those earnest faces and not giggle. How could they believe I was
a priest or maybe even related to gods, and why would they believe anything so
absurd?