Wildfire (92 page)

  
through a narrow place, a tunnel.

 

  
I emerged somewhere strange,

 

  
on a threshold, a place

 

  
I took to be the overworld.

 

  
Everything was scaly,

 

  
The walls, pillars, ceilings,

 

  
all covered with scales like serpents.

 

  
The beings too were scaled,

 

  
A gorgeous confusion

 

  
Of patterns bright and intricate.

 

  
I too wore serpent skin,

 

  
But I was slow, too slow.

 

  
The creatures there were swift as flames.

 

  
Swift as lightning they moved.

 

  
One being or many?

 

  
I could not tell—they joined, parted.

 

  
Their speech was bright and quick,

 

  
flickering and winding

 

  
around me like ribbons, long tongues,

 

  
serpent tongues touching me.

 

  
It was beyond my ken,

 

  
what they said. So I fell away,

 

  
down and down to the pain

 

  
of tormenting stitches.

 

  
I did not belong among them.

 

  
Blessed Katabaton

 

  
Bound my jaw, forbade speech.

 

  
But here, among her worshippers,

 

  
I must ask: Where was I?

 

  
Who are they, those others?

 

  
What were they trying to tell me?”

 

  

 

  
I sat down on the platform again, and Keros touched my arm briefly in a gesture of friendship. It seemed a long silence after I spoke, but perhaps it was not. Aeidin began to ululate in a high voice that gave me a chill, and another woman and another joined her, until the dining court resounded with their cries.

 

  
I didn’t truly expect my questions would be answered, not then and there. But I hoped in time I would learn the meaning of my vision from adepts who knew Katabaton’s mysteries. In time, in due time.

 
  

 

  
After the bitten course, a tharos servant approached me and whispered that Arthygater Katharos wished to meet me outside the dining court. I was flattered, thinking the arthygater did me an honor by speaking to me privately. When I reached the corridor, two burly tharais men seized me by the arms. I opened my mouth to scream and one of them thrust a dirty rag in it. They bent my arms behind my back until I feared I might crack at the elbows, and they marched me downstairs and through tunnels I had never seen.

 

  
Gnathin, the arthygater’s factotum, awaited me in a small damp room with two tharais women. I knew them by their hands: Lychnais from the bathing room, and the taskmistress of the napkins, with rings squeezed onto her plump fingers—she who had threatened to betray me to the arthygater’s tormentors if I didn’t give her gold. She must have recognized me.

 

  
“Let me see her hands,” Gnathin said, and the tharais men thrust my arms out in front of me. Gnathin had seen me many times veiled, in the bathing room. She hadn’t failed to notice the scar on my left wrist.

 

  
“Are you sure this is the one?” she asked the tharais women, and both of them nodded yes. The taskmistress of the napkins scraped powder from my cheeks with the knuckles of her left hand, a gesture that said more clearly than words that I was tharais and not beyond her reach.

 

  
One of the tharais men yanked my right arm behind my back again and wriggled his thumb against the inside of my elbow. When I tried to pull away, he wrenched my arm. I didn’t mean to kneel, but my knees gave way. Tears stung my cheeks like lemon juice in a cut.

 

  
They left me alone in that room, and I had time to consider my own stupidity, how I’d deceived myself and feared all the wrong things. Tormentors were outside the locked door. The room was deep underground and water seeped through the crumbling plaster, and the walls were smeared and spattered with brown stains I feared were old blood.

 

  
Arthygater Katharos came to the room after her guests had gone home, in the last passage of the night. She had questions to ask, and she asked them through Gnathin, for she wouldn’t speak to me directly. Who was I? Whose thrush was I? She had never believed Arkhyios Corvus sponsored me for the cult because he was enamored of me.

 

  
I tried to keep the arthygater’s tormentors away from me by talking, and I lied as well as I ever had, and that was well indeed. The lies were all mixed with truth and dreams. Didn’t she know I was the king’s dreamer, his seer, the one who had found a way for him across the Kerastes when all was lost? The king was impoverished, and he gave me to the arkhon as the greatest treasure in his possession, but the arkhon had disdained his gift. He’d bestowed me on the arthygater—to be a mere bondwoman, a weaver. I told her how Zostra had humiliated me and tried to make me tharais. How could I, a woman of Incus, be tharais? There was no such thing there. It was all a mistake. The taskmistress of the napkins had threatened to tell the arthygater I was a thrush, a false accusation, and I had to flee to the king, what else could I do? He was grateful to me for past services, and he found a place for me with Aghazal. The celebrant knew nothing of my past; she thought I was tharos, an ignorant provincial from the Kerastes.

 

  
Arthygater Katharos asked again why the king had sponsored me for the Serpent Cult. What did he hope to gain?

 

  
I was kneeling before her. I wanted it, I said, holding up my head and trying to look like someone the king could desire. I wanted to be more pleasing to him, his devoted Replacement.

 

  
I shouldn’t have made her think of her sister Kalos. The arthygater gestured to her tormentors and one put his foot on my back and the other hauled my hands up behind me with a rope around my wrists, until I felt as if the bones between my shoulders and my neck were twisting hard enough to break, and I screamed because it hurt, and also because I wanted the arthygater to believe she was forcing the truth from me. When the tormentors let go, I straightened up and shrieked at her: You think he isn’t besotted, ein? He broke his vow for me. I can make him do anything for me, the whore Alopexin. Now everyone knows it.

 

  
The arthygater wasn’t satisfied with my answer, and asked again. Such simple methods, pincers, ropes, hands. One tormentor pulled too hard and dislodged my left arm from its socket. I lay on the ground screaming, without any thought of artifice, while they wrenched it back in place again.

 

  
When at last I was able to speak, I said of course it wasn’t my idea, of course the king asked me to undertake the initiation. Had I known how dreadful it was, I’d never have done it. But I’m the one who is besotted, and I wanted to please him. He scorns me for a celebrant, they have no respect for them in Incus. But he needs me. I am a true dreamer and an oracle, and he offered me to serve Katabaton, the mother. He seeks her blessing and indulgence, he hopes to appease her for an offense he has yet to commit.

 

  
When she asked what offense, I said matricide, of course. Because he must kill his own mother, ein?

 

  
By daybreak each lie was less plausible than the one before, and at last they were all used up. I told the truth then, about the portrait, and the dowry King Corvus planned to steal, and how he meant to kill his brother Merle rather than his mother, and how I’d served as the king’s thrush even in the arthygater’s bathing room. And every word was a danger to the king, but I gave way. I gave way to pain and the threats of maiming. They said they’d take my tongue if I didn’t speak.

 

  
I was ashamed I told his secrets, but I wasn’t ashamed to take revenge on the taskmistress of the napkins by telling how she permitted me to spy in exchange for gold. The arthygater didn’t allow me even this petty triumph. Of course the taskmistress couldn’t be trusted. She was tharais, wasn’t she?

 

  
Arthygater Katharos was appalled that I’d passed for a tharos celebrant and tainted so many unsuspecting people. But it was worse that I’d sullied the sacred rites of the Serpent Cult. She called into the room a heirophant of the cult and the adept Horama to help question me. They insisted I had not seen the vision for myself—some initiate must have told me what to say. Who was it?

 

  
I swore I’d seen it. I said if an initiate had instructed me, surely she would have had me tell about the overworld, the home of the gods with its splendid garden and throne, and not the strange place I’d visited, wherever and whatever it was. They could see my bewilderment. Still Arthygater Katharos had her tormentors press me brutally. I was about to offer a lie to the arthygater, since the truth displeased her, when the hierophant halted the torments.

 

  
I owed my life to that vision. I’d seen the overworld in one of its true forms, baffling and terrifying; it was a sight granted to very few initiates, and those few were singled out to ascend step by step into the mysteries. Katabaton might easily have slain me for my trespass during the ceremony, the priestess said, but she had carried me to her jeweled serpent realm. Arthygater Katharos must not take it upon herself to kill someone the goddess had spared.

 

  
Instead the arthygater banished me from Allaxios. To make sure I did not and could not return, she had me marked so I would be known as tharais, with or without the shawl over my head. One of the tormentors used his pincers to sever two of my fingers between the top and middle joints: my mother finger, foremost on the left hand, and my father finger, foremost on the right. He knotted the bloody fingertips into a rag and tied the rag around my neck, and he roped my hands before me so everyone could see the amputations. They stripped me of my saffron tharos garments, and made me go naked, without even a shawl to cover my face. By face and snake tattoo and maimed hands I would be recognized and punished if I dared to return to the city. The arthygater found it shameful to reveal that an imposter had been initiated into the Serpent Cult, but it would have been worse to hide it, if it permitted me to deceive again.

 

  
I had no way to get word to the king, or to Lame and Chunner, who waited for me at the foregate of the palace with a rented cart. I left by the hindgate with a mob around me. The veiled tormentors had tied a horse’s bridle around my head and put the iron bit in my mouth, so I couldn’t speak; one of them led me by the reins. The other pulled me along by a rope around my arms, which were tightly bound at the wrists and elbows. The bit galled the corners of my mouth and pressed down my tongue so it was hard to swallow my spittle. I stooped, trying to hide my nakedness, and the tormentor yanked the rope and made me stumble. My blood was on his feet.

 

  
The Sun had risen. They let the bondwomen out of the manufactory to see me go. I recognized many, but at least Catena was not among them. Tharos kitchen servants followed to pelt me with rotten fruit, and stable-boys threw stones. Tharais servants were given onions to throw at me. The tormentors led me through the palace district, descending from one terrace to another, and there was such a clamor that many people came out of palaces to see what was happening and join the festivities. They shrieked at me in a fury, and I saw their mouths open and close, the sound like darkness welling from their throats, and I couldn’t hear a word they said for the roaring in my ears.

 

  
The tormentors pulled in different directions, my head one way and my hands another, so my feet didn’t know where to go, and this amused the mob. Dulcis walked behind me, striking my bare back with a stick she’d picked up somewhere, but her little sting was nothing to me. I was in agony from the arm that had been pulled from its socket and put back again. I hardly felt the pain in my hands.

 

  
I thought most of the followers would stop at the tharais gate, so as not to suffer pollution, but they accompanied me into the district. Then I understood this spectacle was a warning to all tharais of the punishment for trespassing.

 

  
We passed the fountain of the bronze sow Nephron, where I’d so often gone to fetch mountain water, and walked down streets well known to me, past the dyers and tanners and smelters and their familiar stinks. As we passed, tharais residents covered themselves with their shawls, if they had them, or put their hands before their faces if they did not. Some followed, some jeered, but most stood still and silent, watching.

 

  
Someone threw weeds at me, and they were bright on my path, dandelions for foresight and poppies for consolation. Tharais stood on rooftops and threw down flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, oleander meaning beware, and irises to say I was too haughty, and incensier for remembrance; even in the tharais district there were many gardens. A daring boy ran up and threw poplar leaves at me: courage. Stones struck my forehead and blood trickled into my right eyebrow.

 

  
The stones didn’t make me weep, whereas the flowers and leaves nearly undid me. But that well had gone dry. I’d wept all my tears during the night.

 

  
There were shades among the living. Sire Rodela jeered, but I paid him no mind. The Dame paced beside the tormentor who led me by the bridle, and Na beside the one who held the rope. I wondered if they’d come to escort me to the realm of the Queen of the Dead, for it was certain I’d never be permitted to enter the Lambaneish overworld when I died. If so, they’d come too soon, for I wasn’t going to die, not today.

 

  
The guards had closed the huge iron-studded tharais gate in the city wall because of the disturbance. For me they opened the small postern door. The tormentors let go of the reins and rope, and someone, Dulcis probably, gave me a shove. I fell sprawling through the doorway and a guard slammed and locked the door between the mob and me. I was banished.

 

  
I walked south between hovels crowded on either side of the road, and naked dusty children stood and watched me. Their parents hid, and no wonder. Misfortune in the city was often blamed on tharais, and those who lived unprotected, outside the gates, were driven away and their shanties burned.