The Veiled Throne, page 3
“I knew you could help her,” said Vadyu. “I was so scared because we were sinking in the air, and I had to land. Then I saw how you looked at her like you knew what was wrong, so I decided—”
“Garinafins this young shouldn’t be ridden at all!” Goztan raised her voice, and her words came in a rapid torrent. “They don’t have the endurance for sustained flight, and their families may even have to carry them on long journeys. It takes time for them to learn how to conserve lift gas and to master their own bodies. You were pushing her too hard.”
“I didn’t know—”
“I know you didn’t know! The way you raise these war garinafins in massive corrals—” Goztan took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. Voicing her criticisms of the pékyu’s methods for raising large garinafin armies to his daughter was not going to gain her any favors. “I’m an old-style garinafin pilot, probably one of the best in your father’s army, even though he hasn’t needed my services for years now. I can’t stand seeing these fine beasts mishandled.”
“Korva’s not from the corrals,” objected Vadyu. “I’m trying to bond with her the old-fashioned way.”
Goztan’s eyes narrowed as she caressed the garinafin’s smooth antlers. “She has no marks of bonding…. Did you steal her? You were told you shouldn’t ride her, and you decided to disobey, didn’t you?”
Vadyu bit her bottom lip, her chin jutting forward defiantly. “She’s a gift to Father from the Thane of Windless Mesa. Her dam was supposed to be the fastest garinafin who ever fought for the thane—”
Goztan’s voice softened just a hint. “And so you wanted to see if she inherited her dam’s speed? She’s not going to be fully developed—”
“I know she’s too young to reach her full speed! You don’t even listen! Do you take me for an ignorant child?” Vadyu sputtered, her eyes wide with the rage of being misunderstood.
Goztan knew better than to answer that. “All right, Pékyu-taasa, please go on. I promise not to interrupt.”
Vadyu took a deep breath. “Even though I saw her first and begged Father to give her to me, he wants to offer her to my brother instead. ‘I need a war mount,’ I told him. ‘But this little beast has quite a temper,’ he said. ‘So do I!’ I said. ‘Cudyu has more experience,’ he said. ‘From riding cattle? I bet I can outlast Cudyu on any bucking bull,’ I said. ‘Cudyu is older and will need a war mount sooner,’ he said, and that was the end of the discussion. Well, that’s not fair! I never get what I want just because I’m younger. So I decided to take her on a long ride first so she would be bonded to me.”
Goztan laughed. “So I was right. You are a thief.”
“I am not! Until a garinafin bonds to a pilot, she doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“How can you call yourself a pilot when you don’t even know how to take care of your mount properly?”
Tears threatened to spill from Vadyu’s eyes. “I… I should have learned more, but don’t tell me you always did exactly as you were told when you were my age.”
Goztan sighed. Her voice softened when she spoke again. “You do have me there. My mother, who was thane before me, was bonded to a big bull garinafin, incredibly bad-tempered. He was supposed to be impossible to ride. Of course I decided that I had to try, even though his saddle was so wide that when I finally climbed up, my legs were horizontal, like I was doing a split….”
As Goztan reminisced, she gently caressed Korva’s head, gazing affectionately at the young garinafin’s fluttering eyelids.
Thus, she didn’t notice the sudden change in Vadyu’s expression as she listened to Goztan’s story, nor did she see the young girl slowly reach for the club lying at her feet, and she certainly was not prepared when the girl reared back and slammed the club into the back of her head.
CHAPTER TWO A SECRET EXPEDITION
VICTORY COVE, UKYU-GONDÉ: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWELFTH YEAR AFTER STRANGERS FROM AFAR ARRIVED IN THEIR CITY-SHIPS (KNOWN IN DARA AS THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF FOUR PLACID SEAS).
She came to.
Stars swimming in water filled her vision.
Gradually, she realized that the stars were not in water, but shimmering in heated air. Sparks from a roaring bonfire shot into the dark heavens like fireflies. The smell of burning dung and the aroma of roasted meat filled her nose. There was also a trace of the acrid tang of smoked tolyusa, consumed only at big feasts and celebrations. The back of her head hurt so much that she groaned.
A hypnotic chant filtered into her consciousness.
Brave warriors of Lyucu, heed my words,
A tale as rich as the pékyu’s vast herds.
Though I am still a stranger in your land,
I’ve beheld divine beauty with my hand.
The way the speaker pronounced a few of the words revealed that he hadn’t grown up speaking the language of the Lyucu, and the solecisms were telling—whoever heard of beholding beauty with the hand instead of the eye?—yet there was a compelling grace to the verse, a different rhythm and cadence that made the images stand out, that forced the listener to savor them, as though plain roasted wild marrow tubers had been spiced with tolyusa juice.
She thought the voice and accent both sounded familiar, though she couldn’t quite place the speaker. She tried to turn her head toward the voice and found that her arms and legs had been bound tightly with thick ropes of twisted sinew. She was a captive.
… Now you’ve all heard the old tale of the Agon herder who took in a starving puppy one winter and nurtured it back to health with the milk of his sheepdogs. When the puppy grew up, it turned out to be a wolf. One day, the herder caught the wolf with its jaws around a newborn calf’s neck.
“Why have you repaid my kindness with such treasury?” asked the herder.
“I can’t help it,” said the wolf. “It’s my nature.”
Laughter and loud shouting interrupted the tale.
“Serves him right!”
“Foolish Agon herder.”
“Even an Agon bitch’s milk is full of betrayal and ‘treasury’!”
A childish face hovered into Goztan’s still-fuzzy field of view: the pékyu-taasa, her hair glowing golden in the firelight.
“Why?” Goztan croaked. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again in an attempt to clear her vision. The back of her head throbbed. She hoped nothing was broken.
Vadyu leaned down to whisper into her ear, “Who are you, really?”
… in my land, there is a familiar saying that probably shares the same wisdom in diffident words. We say, “A cruben begets a cruben, a dyran begets a dyran, and an octopus’s daughter can crack eight oysters all at the same time.”
More guffaws and shouts.
“More kyoffir!”
“More tolyusa!”
“I wouldn’t mind some raw octopus right now.”
“I think you meant ‘different words,’ old man. Get that tongue untwisted!”
“Oh, shush. The slave talks a fair bit better than you do. I wouldn’t mind if you were more ‘diffident.’ ”
No one seemed to be paying attention to the captive tied up by the fire, or the girl interrogating her.
Goztan couldn’t understand why Vadyu was asking her a question whose answer she’d already given. Despite the pounding headache, her mind churned quickly. Somehow the girl was convinced that Goztan was not who she said she was and posed a threat, and until Goztan figured out the cause, she needed to take a different approach. “I’m impressed you managed to move me here all by yourself.”
The girl looked away in embarrassment. “I tried to, but you’re much too heavy for me to move by myself. I had to get a few of the naros here to help me. They were surprised to see me, but I told them that my father sent me to take note of their courage. They were grateful that I caught a saboteur along the way.”
“Aren’t you worried that your helpers will tell your father about Korva?”
Vadyu giggled. “Just about everyone here is going to sail off first thing in the morning to find the northwest passage to Dara. They won’t see my father again for years, if ever.”
Goztan craned her stiff neck to look at the sea. By the glow of the roaring bonfire, she could just make out a fleet of massive coracle-rafts resting upon the beach. These were an innovation of the pékyu. By lashing together multiple circular bone-and-hide coracles, the traditional watercraft of the coastal tribes, and adding a stiffening bone lattice with numerous flotation bladders, the Lyucu managed to construct novel seagoing vessels without dependence on Dara shipbuilding techniques. They didn’t have the load capacity of the city-ships, necessary for a full invasion force, but could carry an exploratory expedition into the open ocean.
Finally, the heavy security around the cove and the sentries that had barred her way earlier made sense. For years, Pékyu Tenryo had been obsessed with finding a way to Dara, the land of origin of the city-ships, so that he could launch an invasion against it. However, the remote location of the islands and the awe-inspiring Wall of Storms described by Dara captives presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Multiple expeditions had been launched to find a way to Dara, but most of the ships were never heard from again, and the crew of one of the few ships that had managed to return had been so frightened by their experience that they insisted Tenryo give up a mad dream of conquest. The pékyu had to have them executed lest they infect and corrupt the morale of the Lyucu.
As wreckage of failed expeditions occasionally washed up on the coast, carried there by the great belt current in the ocean, the pékyu had grown wary that support for these overseas adventures was waning. Perhaps the present expedition, in contrast to previous voyages, was shrouded in secrecy in order to minimize the possibility that ambitious thanes and recalcitrant elders who had lost children in previous expeditions would make a scene.
Goztan looked around some more but didn’t see the young garinafin.
“Where’s Korva?”
“Still sleeping. She’ll be safe enough, this close to the pens for the garinafins in training. I didn’t like leaving her alone, but it’s more important that I make sure a spy like you doesn’t harm my father’s brave naros.”
“If you’d just go find one of the older warriors who fought with me—”
“Ha, nice try. But you can’t fool me that easily. No one here is old enough to have fought the Dara barbarians to seize the city-ships. You were counting on that, weren’t you? That’s why you stole the identity of a hero from an obscure tribe who rarely visits Taten, knowing that no one here would be able to definitively say that you aren’t the person you claim to be.”
Of course, Goztan thought, only the young are foolish enough to volunteer for an expedition to find a scattering of remote islands in the boundless sea. It’s as mad as blindly leaping off the back of a garinafin swooping over the scrublands and hoping to land in a water bubble in the grass sea.
“You could go back to the Great Tent—”
“Do you think I’m five? I’m certainly not going to bring one of my father’s old retainers here so they can run into Korva on the way—”
“You could take them the long way around and approach the cove from the other side—”
“Right. Of course you’d want me to take the long way around so you’d have more time alone to escape and carry out some evil scheme. I may not know your plan yet, but I’m going to figure it out.”
Goztan wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. Like all children who seized upon an idea, the girl’s logic for defending her conviction was unassailable.
“So what are you going to do with me?”
Vadyu pointed to her eyes with two fingers and then jabbed them at Goztan, looking fierce.
“Until when?”
“Until the fleet sets sail in the morning and Korva has recovered. Then I’ll… I’ll get Korva and escort you back to Taten. Since I caught you, a dangerous spy, I won’t get in trouble for stealing Korva. In fact, Father may even give Korva to me as a reward. It is all going to work out for the best.”
… Tonight, the pékyu has ordered me to recite for you an account of my voyage here so that your dreams may be filled with visions of the whale’s way. I, not being born of this land, cannot speak to your gods as clearly as you do, but perhaps the gods will examine your dreams and descry a way across the pathless main and keep you safe.
So let me entertain you for a while with a few tales, some of them factual, and some merely possible—and I’m not telling you which is which—though all of them are true….
Only a few chuckles now, and those soon faded away. The audience quieted. The cadence of the storyteller cast a hypnotic spell over the crowd as they wondered if perhaps one of the tales would indeed illuminate the dark sea like a brilliant shooting star, guiding them over the unknown expanse.
Goztan had to admire the girl for her audacity. Hers was a preposterous plan, but it actually had a chance of working—if Goztan were really a spy.
As it was, of course, when Vadyu marched Goztan into Taten in the morning, the pékyu was going to be so furious that the pékyu-taasa might not even be able to sit on her bottom without wincing for some time, much less ride a garinafin. She would enjoy seeing the surprise on Vadyu’s face…
… except that if Vadyu kept Goztan here all night, Goztan would miss her audience with Pékyu Tenryo, scheduled at the crack of dawn. It would do no good for Tenryo to know the truth behind her tardiness. If the pékyu would look unkindly upon thanes who were too weak to solve their own problems at home and had to come beg him for help, he certainly would despise even more a thane who couldn’t even escape from a ten-year-old girl, and he would be positively furious with a thane whose lack of resourcefulness brought ridicule upon his favorite daughter and, by association, himself.
Goztan might as well say good-bye forever to those grazing rights by Aluro’s Basin.
… The whale’s way is turbulent and wild, and the wonders to be found in it as innumerable as the stars in the welkin.
One time, as we passed through a warm patch of water, the sails flapped and then drooped as the wind died. We had no choice but to drift along in the great oceanic current that had carried us away from Dara like dandelion seeds upon the wind.
A pod of dolphins swam next to the fleet along the starboard side. We could hear the finned air-breathers chatting in their whistling, joyful language, which offered some re-life from the boredom.
A sharp-eyed lookout shouted, “A shark! A shark!”
We rushed to the gunwale and found the words to be true. There, amidst the leaping and dancing dolphins, one fish stood out like a rat among mice. Instead of the sleek bottle-form snout, there was a wide toothy grin; instead of the pair of horizontal flukes that flexed like a man’s legs, there was a vertical, asymmetrical tail that waved like a caudal fin; instead of a blowhole on top of the head that sprayed mist in the air, there were gill slits next to the cheeks open to the brine….
The headache and vertigo had subsided enough for Goztan to turn and focus her eyes on Vadyu without feeling like she was going to throw up. She had to convince the girl to let her go. “What if you’re wrong and I really am who I say I am? How can you be so sure I’m a spy?”
Vadyu looked at her smugly. “Tell me again your lineage.”
“I am called Goztan Ryoto, daughter of Dayu Ryoto, son of Péfir Vagapé. I serve the pékyu as the Thane of—”
“Liar!” Vadyu shouted. “You almost had me. Almost. But you’re just like that wolf pup in the old tale. You can’t hide your true nature.”
Goztan was utterly confused. “You must be mis—”
“When we were with Korva, you said your mother was thane before you.”
“She was.”
“And yet you just named your father in your birthright lineage, not your mother,” Vadyu said triumphantly. “So either you are an imposter who didn’t prepare your lies well enough or you are a usurper, and my father would never have tolerated a usurper as one of his trusted thanes.”
… We expected to see bloodshed; we expected to see the dolphins turn on this killer fish, this ancient enemy of the cetacean race.
But there was no fight, no ramming of the intruder. The lumbering gray shark, twice as large as the largest dolphin, was acting just like a member of the pod. Though it could not leap as gracefully as the dolphins, it dove below the surface, accelerated with powerful strokes of the wrongly oriented tail, and heaved itself out of the water in imitation of its unfamilial family. And as it crashed back into the ocean, the dolphins let out a cheer of whistles and squeaks, celebrating the accomplishment as though the shark were an indulged child….
Goztan couldn’t help but chuckle. Given how Pékyu Tenryo himself had come to power, the idea that he would have no tolerance for usurpers was absurd, but she wasn’t sure that the pékyu-taasa had experienced enough of the world to understand the reasons behind her “lie.”
“Stop laughing! What’s so funny?”
“Eh, you really are mistaken, but where do I begin—”
The sentence stuck in her throat, unfinished, because she had finally caught a glimpse of the gesticulating figure of the storyteller by the bonfire, and she realized why his voice seemed so familiar.
CHAPTER THREE THE MESSAGE ON THE TURTLE SHELL
UKYU-GONDÉ: THE YEAR THE CITY-SHIPS ARRIVED FROM DARA (KNOWN IN DARA AS THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE, WHEN EMPEROR ERISHI ASCENDED TO THE THRONE AFTER THE DEATH OF EMPEROR MAPIDÉRÉ).
Goztan’s mother, Tenlek Ryoto, chieftain of the Third Tribe of the Antler, had been one of the first thanes of Pékyu Toluroru Roatan to pledge allegiance to Tenryo after the disfavored son murdered his father to usurp the position of pékyu. And as a little girl, Goztan watched with admiration as Tenryo bound the loose Lyucu tribes of the scrublands into a divine hammer with himself as its head and pounded the hated Agon, the ancient enemy and oppressor of the Lyucu, into submission. When she was old enough, she joined his army as a garinafin pilot. There, she studied Tenryo’s cold tactics, emulated his hot passions, and slaughtered so many that she ran out of room on her helmet for the little cross marks that she used to record the Agon corpses she left behind.
