Children of the Dragon Page 4

  Tnem Sarbat laughed once more. “I have seen enough of this Man Eater. Let him sink now into the horrorl” The Emperor turned to Warden Grebzreh. “You shall see that my decrees are carried out, Warden. Any deviation will mean that the same punishment will be your own. Lord Irajdhan will monitor you, to make certain my commands are followed.

  “I have one more stipulation. Do not torture him nor feed him any flesh today. Let him sit and contemplate the nightmare that awaits him. Perhaps by tomorrow he will have gone mad.”

  “That would be merciful,” whispered the Empress.

  “Our generous Emperor is not without mercy!” said Halaf.

  “Oh, merciful now too, not only generous?” said the Empress drily. “O, Sarbat the merciful; may Sexrexatra save us!”

  To this, the clown ventured no reply. With the crash of the cymbals and horns, the caravan began its journey up out of the dungeons.

  Tnem Sarbat watched the Empress Denoi Devodhrisha, saying nothing.

  BERGHARRA—Tnemghadi Empire, cast brass temple token, circa 12th century. Used to gain admission to the temple and for placement on the altar as a substitute for the sacrificial offering; generally the offerings themselves were appropriated by the priests. Obverse: temple building flanked by palms. Reverse: dragon, similar to that on regular imperial coinage. Breitenbach 2833, attributed to Taroloweh Province, 37 mm., Very fine with pleasing greenish patina, but holed as is usual for these. Scarce. (Hauchschild Collection Catalog)

  5

  THE SUN BEAT down on the land of Samud Mussopo with glittering rays that shimmered through the heated air. As though seen through rippling water, the backs of the purple hills vibrated too. Half-visible streaks of heat wended their way across the landscape.

  Samud Mussopo squinted at his land. Like an elephant’s were Samud’s eyes, small and black and framed with deep wrinkles from squinting into brilliant light like this. And the field was like his eyes, small and wrinkled. Its misshapen contours were heavy with growing rice.

  Samud shielded his eyes with his hand and scanned the sky, as blue and endless as the sea. The sea was not far off, just sixty lim, a few days’ journey eastward. Yet Samud had never seen it. Once, a neighbor who had been there told him of it, but Samud could not conceive of such a vast expanse of water. The farthest he had ever traveled was the forty lim to Anayatnas, to the nearest temple. He went there every month; it was coming time to go again.

  Only a single puff of cloud marred the sky today. The man watched that cloud, hung on it, looking for darkness or movement. But it was white and motionless; the sky promised neither rain nor wind.

  He dropped his hand, closed his eyes and stood quietly, baking in the sun. He gave himself over to the mallet of heat hammering down on him. Brilliant colors splashed inside his head. He felt close to sleep, unwilling to move.

  In his mind’s eye he saw the field: the spread of tall stalks, standing upright, unjostled by any wind, being enervated by the sun. Like Mussopo, the stalks of rice were close to sleep, unwilling to fend it off. Like him, they lacked the means to fight for their own lives; they could accept only what the implacable elements might do to them, and if they begged the sky for mercy, it had no ears with which to hear them. It didn’t care what happened to the rice, or to Samud Mussopo.

  Samud could smell the sweat that oozed from his brown skin and caught the dust to make a gritty coating. He felt smothered by the dirt he carried on his clothes and body, and the River Qurwa was not far away. The man pictured himself being cleansed in the river, plunging in and dunking his head in the lukewarm but still refreshing water, taking strength from it. That water could give him new life, just as it could for his rice.

  The river might not be far away, but it was unfortunately in the opposite direction from Anayatnas. Samud could not go to the river now, any more than could his rice go to it. Instead, he must go to Anayatnas.

  “It’s not going to rain soon, is it, Paban?”

  The man turned sharply around. It was always a surprise to Samud when he looked at this son of his and saw how the boy was growing: his honey-colored limbs lean and well formed, his face and eyes clear, not yet crinkled from squinting at the sun.

  “No, Gaffar. As you can see, there are no clouds or wind.”

  The boy felt a queasy foreboding. “The rice will be ruined,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t worry. It’s never happened.”

  This was untrue; there had been years in which the crop was wrecked by too much sun and too little water. Gaffar knew this as well did his father, but didn’t contradict him. The boy also had some idea of what kind of year the Mussopo family would face if the crop failed. Already there was a knot in his stomach.

  “We mustn’t leave things to chance, though, Paban,” he argued earnestly. “We could go to the river—make trips back and forth—bringing water in jugs. We should try to put some shades over the crop, to keep off the sun. With work, we could save some of it.”

  Samud slowly shook his head back and forth. “Surely you haven’t forgotten what time of the month it is! I must go to Anayatnas.”

  Hot breath filled Gaffar’s nostrils. He was infuriated and struggled to rein it in. “You would go—even now?” the boy said, gesturing at the field of rice.

  Samud looked harshly down at him. “It is time. There is nothing to discuss.”

  This enraged Gaffar even further, and his tone was no longer respectful. “Yes, there is something to discuss! This time, by Urhem, there is! Paban, you know what I’ve always thought of your going to Anayatnas to bow and scrape—”

  “Hold your tongue!”

  “. . . to the Tnemghadi tyrant—”

  “Take care what you say!”

  “No! What have you got to be afraid of? The priests aren’t here now, they can’t hear us. Paban, surely you must hate them as much as I do—more.”

  “What I may think of the Tnemghadi and their priests doesn’t matter. I must do what the law says. You foolish boy, you know well enough what happens to those who defy the Tnemghadi.”

  “But our crop is at stake. We’ll lose it if you go!”

  “Better to lose the crop than our heads.”

  “No, Paban. Better to lose our heads standing up for Urhem than to keep them bowing to the Emperor.”

  “Urhem!” Samud spat the name with contempt. “What has Urhem ever done for us? Will Urhem save our crop, will Urhem placate the Tnemghadi? Oh, yes, your Urhem is a pretty god. But the Tnemghadi rule this world, and it’s them I bow before. The only thing a prayer to Urhem can bring you is death, if you’re caught at it.”

  “Paban, don’t you see? It’s just that kind of thinking that keeps us all in slavery. If all the people of the South were united in defiance of the Emperor, there would not be enough Tnemghadi soldiers to keep them down. If everyone proclaimed his faith in Urhem, then we would be free.”

  “But that will never happen, Gaffar. You’re dreaming.”

  “It will happen someday. It will!”

  “When? When the Ur-Rasvadhi comes? Ha! I tell you, I’m not fool enough to wait holding my breath for the Ur-Rasvadhi. If all the millions in the South have not produced him after eight hundred years, he will never come. Such a man could never be.”

  “Paban, you just don’t understand. It’s not that there haven’t been men great enough. But our people weren’t ready. When the time is right, there will be an Ur- Rasvadhi. When we are ready, we will find him among us.”

  “All right, Gaffar. When you find him, you will tell me. Then I’ll stop going to Anayatnas, and I’ll join you in celebration. But in the meantime I must go, whether I like it or not, even if it means neglecting the rice. Yes, I will go, and I will bow with my head in the dust to Sarbat the Generous, and I will offer up a goat.”

  “Oh, no, not a goat! We can’t afford it—not with the rice in danger!”

 
“But it will be a goat all the same. A choice offering it will be; and maybe then, for once, Sarbat will grant our prayer for rain.”

  “Pah!”

  “Besides,” Samud said quietly, “the priests have been dissatisfied with our offerings. I have no choice now. Last month, old man Relleth bluntly warned me to do better.”

  “Damn them, thieving jackals! Aren’t the priests rich enough from our sweat? Will they next want our blood?”

  “It does no good to talk so rashly. There’s not a thing we can do about it.”

  Gaffar wasn’t even listening to his father. “Our sweat’s not good enough,” he cried, “they’ll want our blood next!”

  Samud seized the boy by the shoulders and shook him hard. “And if they ask for blood, Gaffar, I’ll have to give them blood!”

  “Are you so spineless, you’d give the monsters anything they demand? If they ask for your son, will you comply with that too? Will you take the knife yourself and cut out my heart on the altar to Sarbat?”

  Samud gawked at his son, unnerved by the fire he saw in the boy’s eyes and by his chilling words. He relaxed his grip on Gaffar’s shoulders. “How can you ask such a question?”

  Gaffar was looking straight through his father, as though transfixed by his own flight of rhetoric.

  “Enough of this,” said Samud with a quaver. “There’s work to do.”

  The boy clenched his fists as his father walked away. His eyes stung with the tears he thought himself too big to let fall. It was incomprehensible that his father could endure such subservience to the Tnemghadi, even to the point of endangering the family’s survival in order to pay homage to the Emperor. Gaffar vowed he would never suffer such humiliation. He would stand up to the oppressors!

  But would he? Did he not love his life? Would he sacrifice it just to become yet another pointless Urhemmedhin martyr? Or, when the time arrived, would he, like countless other millions, swallow his pride and grit his teeth and bow before the idol of the Emperor?

  Gaffar wished fervently that he might never have to confront such a choice. If only the Ur-Rasvadhi would come! Gaffar ached for the triumph of right, for the freedom of his people, and for the destruction of the Tnemghadi, avenging their degradation of his father.

  But perhaps his father was right, that there would never be an Ur-Rasvadhi. How many like Gaffar had prayed for his coming, only to die disappointed? Why should Gaffar be blessed with a deliverance denied the millions before him?

  For, in the end, the dream was too ridiculous: a man who would arise, not with a sword but with a book, who would triumph without force of arms but instead by force of love and wisdom. How could the invincible Tnemghadi, with their horses, spears, and steel armor, melt before such a preposterous challenge? This love and wisdom would not pierce the hearts of the cruel warriors; they would merely laugh at it, and trample its disciples.

  That the Urhemmedhins had invented such a dream, and clung to it, was pathetic; it proved how weak and hopeless was their cause.

  Gaffar Mussopo cried and beat his fists against his knees. He hated the Tnemghadi, hated them most of all for their invincibility. It was not love and virtue that he yearned to hurl against them. He dreamed instead of a vengeful savior who would visit fire and death upon them, who would make them suffer for the sufferings they had caused, who would annihilate them.

  It was not the Ur-Rasvadhi for whose coming Gaffar prayed. It was Sexrexatra.

  6

  THE EASTERNMOST PROVINCE in the Empire of Bergharra was Taroloweh. It pushed out into the sea as a timid bulge along the coastline, as Though testing the waters without plunging into them.

  Appropriately, Taroloweh’s map had outlines resembling a boat, with its bow at the shore and its rudder five hundred lim inland. Once a part of Urhem’s great southern empire, then an independent kingdom, this was the first Urhemmedhin province to be conquered by Tnem Khatto Trevendhani. It was also the most trouble-ridden and rebellious: Jehan Henghmani had been merely the latest Taroloweh outlaw quashed by the Tnemghadi.

  Taroloweh was a place of rolling hills—gentle slopes, not mountains. Although this province was one of the Empire’s breadbaskets, its agricultural endowments were not great. The soil was mediocre, the weather mercurial, and often the peasants had to wrench their grain and rice from an unwilling earth.

  Almost all of those who worked this land were Urhemmedhin sharecroppers, tied to little plots sectioned off on great estates, sometimes hundreds of them all paying half their crops in rent to one great lord, to whom they half belonged. By law, although these tenant farmers were not free, they had certain meager rights. In practice, however, even those few legal rights were worthless. They were unenforceable against a nobleman who gouged on the rent, stole his tenant’s goods, seized his tenant’s daughter as a concubine or sold her into slavery. The only justice in the land was that meted out by the barons themselves. In the name of justice, they could punish and behead at will. A not untypical example of this justice was a case in which twenty men and twenty women had their eyes and tongues cut out in retribution for a theft of silver from the manor house.

  The social and economic structure in Taroloweh (and indeed, throughout most of Bergharra) had not changed in centuries. There were actually many estates still owned by Urhemmedhin clans whose dominion dated back before the Tnemghadi conquest. But the great majority of these fiefdoms were in the hands of Tnemghadi, descendants of satrap officials, of officers in the occupation armies, or of priests who had enriched themselves upon the offerings in the temples.

  In crushing any defiance by the peasants, the Tnemghadi land barons had always found ready allies in their less numerous Urhemmedhin counterparts. The survivors of Urhemmedhin nobility were allowed to prosper, securing their allegiance to the Emperor and their cooperation with the occupiers. These people formed a society unto themselves, despised by their peasant countrymen and the Tnemghadi alike. For while mutual self-interest bound all the barons together, the Tnemghadi held themselves to be superior. Intermarriage was unheard of. The proud people from the north kept their eyebrows meeting in the middle of their foreheads.

  Such were the salient facts of life in Taroloweh.

  Two cities dominated this province, perched at opposite ends of its boat-shaped map. In the east, by the sea, was the port of Zidneppa, home to fishing boats and trading ships that huddled up and down the coast. Toward the western end was the bigger city, Arbadakhar, the provincial capital.

  There was also, in Taroloweh, a scattering of villages. One of these was known as Anayatnas.

  Samud Mussopo rode to Anayatnas on his gaar. The Bergharran gaar is a large cow, dun-colored and of gentle disposition, valued for its milk, a staple of the peasants’ diet. The beast has a long face topped with tiny eyes, a great expanse of nose between them and a small pursed mouth. This makes it look perpetually morose. But the gaar’s most striking feature is its hump, a mountain topped with a thatch of strawlike hair; and it is a double hump, like the Bactrian camel’s, easy for a man to ride.

  Samud’s gaar, Rassav, was the only big animal belonging to the Mussopo family. At this, they were considered quite well-off for peasants, and they had some goats and chickens too. One of the goats now was tied to the gaar, as a bundle on the side of the hump, her feet bound to restrain her kicking. Every so often she would bleat, and Samud Mussopo would give her a gentle pat to reassure her.

  A slow, plodding creature is the Bergharran gaar, and so the forty-lim journey to Anayatnas took almost a full day. Samud had left in the morning, would arrive in the late afternoon, finish his business at the temple, and find a place to spend the night—probably in the open, by the road. Then, not until near evening of the next day would he reach home again. He made this journey once each month, as required by law.

  This time the trip passed quickly; Samud was startled when he looked up and saw ahead the whitewashed town of Ana
yatnas, glowing from the sidelong rays of the waning sun. He had spent the day on the road wrapped deeply in thought. He had arrived at Anayatnas, but his mind was still back on his farm, and with his headstrong son, Gaffar.

  For there was much to occupy the man’s thoughts. Even here at Anayatnas, after journeying for a day, he found the sky blue and cloudless—no sign of the dearly needed rain. Along the way, Samud had passed fields where the crops were already withering in the heat and drought. He could see the ominous signs in the faces of the people and the boniness of their livestock. The desperation measures had begun: here and there Samud had noticed gaars dragging carts loaded with great water jugs, the peasants sloshing down parts of their fields, and erecting crude shades of palm leaves to blunt the relentless sun.

  Tears came to his eyes as he thought of his rice fields, where he had sweated and labored so, and on which his very life and family depended. His absence at this critical time could mean their loss, and for this he cursed the priests of Anayatnas and the Tnemghadi law that required him to go to the temple once a month without fail.

  Alone with his gaar, Samud Mussopo cursed the oppressors as darkly as might his son, Gaffar.

  But he could never allow Gaffar to know how deeply ran his own hatred for the Tnemghadi—and for this, too, Samud Mussopo wanted to weep. He understood Gaffar’s passion—only too well! But he was afraid for the boy. Hot-headed zealots could wind up hanging from a pole. Samud just had to make his son see the necessity of swallowing one’s indignation in order to survive. He might bum with hatred against Tnemghadi injustice, curse the landlords, priests, and soldiers under his breath, but he must smile to their faces like a pet lap-dog. The cruelties were dreadful enough without provoking them to worse. Nothing was ever served by the deaths of Urhemmedhin fanatics.

  This, Gaffar would have to learn. Active opposition was madness. It was well to adhere to the high-minded creed of Urhem, as Samud himself did; but it was foolish to persist in faith in the Ur-Rasvadhi. In younger days, Samud too had prayed for the savior, but by now he knew how hopeless that was. He had heard too many stories of rebellions smashed, too many would-be Ur- Rasvadhimartyred, and he had seen too many smug, armored Tnemghadi soldiers patrolling Anayatnas. Deliverance, yarushkadharra, would likely never come, and surely never through a messiah whose only weapons were piety and wisdom. Samud had learned what little they counted for in this world.