Shallows of night, p.14
Shallows of Night, page 14
“The ancient of ancients,” said the apothecary softly. “The primeval fears of man. The terrors of a child alone and afraid at night. Nightmare given free reign, embodied now, substantive.”
A dry wind at the core of his being, plucking.
“It does not seem possible.” Merely a whisper in the aged dust.
“It is a most monstrous creation.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Perhaps the root?”
“Then where is the root from?”
“The gods themselves cannot know—”
“She wishes to see you.”
“Good, she has returned then.”
“She asks for you to wait for her.”
He regarded Matsu in the tawny light. The slender face, with the planes and angles of a man-made structure. Small, wide-lipped mouth, large black eyes as soft as velvet dusk at the waterside. She wore a robe of pastel blue with brown cicadas embroidered across the body and wide sleeves. It was edged in deep gilt with a sash of the same color. He thought—
“Wait for her here, please.” She studied the floor at his feet.
“Will you stay with me tonight?”
“I cannot.” The voice barely a whisper. He tried to find her eyes. “Yung will see that you have wine.”
She bowed to him, a curiously formal gesture.
“Matsu?”
She went away from him, across the room of tawny light, through the buzzing conversations, the opulent silks, the exquisite bodies, the perfect faces.
These people are still a mystery to me, after all, he thought.
He found an empty chair and sat wearily. Almost immediately, tiny Yung in her pink quilted jacket appeared with a lacquered tray with a wine pot and cups. She knelt at his side and poured the wine, handed him the cup.
He sipped and she left. He savored its warmth down the length of his throat, tasting all the spices, and he was reminded that he had not had a full meal that day.
Afterward, the apothecary had returned to the woman while Ronin withdrew his sword. He removed the hilt and produced the scroll of dor-Sefrith. Once again he studied its glyph-covered face. So many times. It stared at him blankly.
He turned. Evidently the old man had found a wound on the woman. He had tied a poultice in place on the inside of her thigh.
“Do not change the bandages even if they should become dirty. There is medicine underneath.” Then he saw the scroll and began to shake his head.
“Do you know what this is?”
He looked away. “I cannot aid you in this.”
“You have not even looked at it.” Ronin thrust the scroll toward him.
“It does not matter.”
Ronin’s eyes blazed. “Chill take you, it does! You know of The Dolman, you alone of all the people I have met in Sha’angh’sei. You know that he exists so you must know that he is coming once again to the world of man.”
The old tired eyes stared at him without expression.
Desperately Ronin said, “His minions are even now prowling the streets of the city. The Makkon killed this morning.”
A faint tremor began at the corner of the old man’s mouth and he appeared about to crumble from misery and pain.
“Why do you speak to me of such things?” he asked in a cracked voice made thin by fear and something else. “There is not a day in my life that I have not suffered and I have seen many days; I wish now but an end to the suffering.”
“Do you wish the death of mankind?” Ronin cried, suddenly furious. “By not speaking of what you may know, you become an ally of The Dolman.”
“A new age is dawning. Man must look after himself.”
“Are you not a man?”
“I am unable to help you by reading that scroll.”
“Tell me then who can.”
“Perhaps no one, any more. But I can tell you this. The Dolman does in fact come and this time the world may be ground into the utter oblivion that is The Dolman’s victory. It is the destroyer of all life, warrior, wielding a power beyond imagining. Already its strengthening forces are marshaling themselves in the north. Ah, I see that you have suspected this. Good. Now go. Take the woman and care for her well. Remember what I have told you. I have done all that I may for now.”
Yet what was he to do now? The Council of Sha’angh’sei would not see him for many days and he could not now return to the walled city because the Greens would never allow him through the gate. Kiri was his only hope. She knew many people, a large number of them extremely influential, for through the saffron doors of Tenchō flowed nightly the cream of Sha’angh’sei society and business; Tenchō was for the wealthy and the powerful. Among these were, no doubt, several officials of the Council itself. There leverage could be applied, if she would consent to aid him. He had to ask her now. Time was fast growing short. With each passing day the chill shadow of The Dolman reached farther into the continent of man as his legions consolidated their strength.
Thus he waited for her, as she had bidden, sprawled in the plush chair, his scabbarded sword scraping the polished floor, drinking the clear wine—Yung had already come and gone twice more—his mind drifting, his eyes watching. The women passing were colored reeds, pastel and slender, bending, robes sweeping in perfect folds and rustling in the gentle wind, fans and long lashes fluttering like nervous insects in the oblique rays of the sun at day’s humid end as it dazzles the still water. Placid oval faces, helmets of flowing hair, the fabulous blossoms of impossible flowers, mysterious and erotic.
Two willowy girls in matching quilted jackets came for him then and led him off to be bathed and dressed and he knew that tonight would be special.
“Am I not worth the wait?” she said without coyness.
She was dressed in a formal robe of rich purple silk, like a plum sunset with threads of the palest dove gray woven into a pattern of opening flowers.
Her lips and long nails were purple and she wore an amethyst pin in the shape of a fantastic winged animal in her hair. Her extraordinary black eyes danced with diamond-point lights.
Still, she looked subtly different.
They had bathed him and dressed him in black silk pants and wide-sleeved shirt laced with platinum thread which glittered in the light. When he was ready, they had led him to a small room and she had come in.
“Are you hungry?” she asked now.
“Yes, very.”
She laughed and it was like hot sun glancing off a naked blade. “Well, come then, my strong man, and remember well what you have said.”
Out into the Sha’angh’sei night they went, of moist wispy fog, lavender and blue, of a thousand eyes and ten thousand knives and one million running feet.
Down the wide sweeping stairs and into a square covered carriage Kiri called a ricksha. They climbed in and the bare-footed kubaru lifted his poles and set off without a word, the ride much smoother than Ronin would have imagined because it contained a peculiar rocking motion tied to the runner’s gait that he found soothing.
The blazing streets of the city, aflame with the swinging lanterns and the crush of people, the smells of broiling food and boiling rice, fresh shellfish and spiced wine flowed past them in a rippling without end, a vast variegated canvas upon which it seemed all the events of the ages of man must be painted in subtle colors too potent to be real.
He breathed the musk of her perfume and stared into her eyes when he could tear his vision away from the flashing city. They were so huge that he imagined that an entire universe resided within their depths. Platinum flecks shivering and he saw with a start that her eyes were not black but the deepest shade of violet that he had ever seen.
Upward they climbed, away from the crawling delta of the port, onto higher reaches of the city where silver taels made room for spired houses, ornate balconies, sculpted stone walls, and landscaped greenery.
Trees whispered their mysterious messages and the night deepened as the intense light from the multitude of lamps drifted silently away from them, down the mountainside, the fast receding shore of an incandescent isle, remote now and unreal, just choppy splashes on the dense ocean of the night.
Just the panting of the jogging kubaru’s breath, the slap-slap of his feet, soles burnished like leather, the intermittent tiny sounds of the nocturnal insects, an owl hooting high up in a tree.
Once he thought about telling her but the pale oval of her face caused his words to catch in his throat and he said nothing, but watched the platinum motes.
The ricksha stopped before a two-storied house of dark brick and carved hardwood, columnated, flamboyant. Slender lamps like torches stood on either side of the wide yellow-metal-bound doors.
Ronin stepped out of the ricksha and turned. Kiri came into his arms. Together, they walked up the stone steps. The doors opened inward as they approached. A rather overly dramatic welcome, Ronin thought.
Two tall men stood before them. They were clad in black cotton shirts and leggings, armed with short single-edged swords which hung unscabbarded on thick brass chains at their sides. They had eyes like slits, mouths thin-lipped and wide, their faces peculiarly canine. They bowed to Kiri and stepped impassively away from the doors, allowing them entrance. They stared curiously at Ronin as he passed them.
They were in a towering hallway the height of the entire structure. The whole of its far end was taken up by a forked staircase curving upward to the second story. To the left were two closed doors. To the right opened sliding doors of oiled fragrant wood through which they entered a large room, warmly furnished with satin-cushioned chairs and plush settees without legs. The floor was covered with an enormous rug of dark swirling patterns. The pale green walls were edged in gilt. The room was windowless.
There were perhaps ten people arranged about the room; less than half were women. A tall slender man turned as they entered and a curiously white smile split his long face. He came toward them. He had round eyes of a pale blue and thick graying hair which he contrived to wear very long. Unbound and brushed, it framed his face in such a way as to give him a startlingly leonine appearance. He was dressed in a formal Sha’angh’sei suit, leggings and loose shirt, in a shadow pattern of gilt on gilt.
“Ah, Kiri.”
The voice was deep, well modulated. He smiled again and Ronin saw the semicircular arc of raised white flesh beginning at the left corner of the mouth and terminating at the side of his nose, which at some earlier time had had its left nostril sheared off.
“Llowan,” said Kiri, “this is Ronin, a warrior from the north.”
The man turned his ice eyes on Ronin and bowed formally.
“I am most pleased that Kiri brought you.”
“Llowan is the city’s bundsman. He oversees the transactions of all the harbor hongs, collecting for Sha’angh’sei, duties on each shipment coming in and departing the port.”
Again that strange smile, unnaturally extended by the livid scar.
“You honor me, lady.” Then to both of them: “You must have some wine. Hara,” he called to a servant, who served them a sparkling white wine in stemmed crystal glasses.
“Are you really from another civilization?” asked Llowan, leading them into the vortex of figures, beginning the introductions over Ronin’s reply, then, coaxed into a peripheral conversation, leaving Kiri to continue, names tumbling like leaves in an autumn wind, and he concentrated then on the faces.
“Rikkagin,” said the large man with no chin and tiny eyes like broiled insects, “one is becoming quite alarmed by the tales being told of the fighting in the north.”
They were sitting on silk pillows on the bare floor around a low table made of a wood with grain like a stormy sea, polished to a high gloss upon which were laid out glazed pots of hot wine and bowls of various small foods such as pieces of fish, battered and dipped in hot oil, steamed vegetables, small sticky sweetmeats.
“What of it?” said the rikkagin in a tone of voice clearly indicating that he had no wish to discuss the matter. He was a wide-shouldered man with a ruddy complexion vanguarded by a wide red-veined nose. He had a thick gray beard stained yellow around his red lips. “This is a city of tales, Chi’en. Most of them, as I am sure you are well aware, are utterly false.”
“Yet these persist,” said Chi’en, his yellow jowls quivering. He reclined on the pillows, an ornate fan waving at the side of his sad face.
“Tales to frighten hongs such as yourself are easy to create,” the rikkagin said with some disdain. “Do not be an old lady.”
The large man bristled. “But the fighting is not—”
“My dear sir.” The rikkagin was frowning now, his thick brows beetling like thunderheads. “Without the war Sha’angh’sei would still be a muddy swamp with primitive paper houses collapsing in the first high wind and you would be in the rice paddies with your wife earning just enough to survive. It will come as no great news to any of us here that the war is what has made us rich. Without it—”
“You speak of war,” said a thin, dour man with dark eyes and close-cropped hair, “as if it were an object to hold in one’s hand and use as one pleases.” Ronin thought for a moment, recalled his name: Mantu, a priest of the House of Canton. “Yet war is death for thousands and mutilation, starvation, and suffering for countless others.”
“How would you know?” interjected a high-cheekboned woman, another hong. “You who have never ventured forth from the sanctity of your region of Sha’angh’sei.”
“I am not required to do so,” the priest said acidly. “I have quite enough on my hands with the refugees that daily stream into the city from the north seeking sanctuary and solace at the House.”
“Your piousness sickens me, Mantu,” said the rikkagin. “Where would the Canton House be without the war? Without the great suffering who would come to fill your cathedral?”
“Tradition would—”
“Do not talk of your tradition.”
The voice was harsh and heads turned. The man was slender and muscular, with a bony face dominated by eyes like slatted windows, black as night. He had dark curling hair and a long drooping mustache that gave him a sinister appearance. He alone at the table wore plain clothes and a traveling cloak. “Your people came to this land before the rikkagin but as surely as they preached the faith of Canton you took from my people as much as the soldiers. The House of Canton. My tongue grows thick with rage whenever I am forced to utter that hideous name. Yours is not the religion of Sha’angh’sei.”
“Po,” said Llowan kindly, “your people are traders, nomads from the west.”
The slatted eyes flashed like dark lightning. “You delude yourself if you believe that there is a difference. Are not my eyes the same as Chi’en’s? Is not my skin the same color as Li Su’s? They were wealthy hongs of Sha’angh’sei just as their parents were before them. They are from the south, their origins far from my people, is that what you would have me believe? Yes?” His fist hammered the table and the sound was like the crash of hammer onto anvil in the green and gilt room. “I tell you no! Ours is a land of unlimited wealth yet my people eat half bowls of rice and, if they are fortunate, week-old fish heads which they find discarded on garbage heaps. And all the while they toil to distill the fruit of the poppy for the lords of Sha’angh’sei.”
“The tradition of the Canton House is without reproach,” said Mantu somewhat didactically. “It has stood for many years—”
“Growing fat like the rikkagin and hongs from the sweat of our labor,” sneered Po.
“You obviously do not understand the Canton teachings and, like most men, you are misdirected,” Mantu said. “All men crave permanence.” He lifted his arms. “Hence they acquire many things as if in these possessions they may truly find the belief that they will not die.” The arms folded in on themselves, somehow communicating pity without condescension. “Yet all life is transient, and man, in desiring permanence, is inevitably defeated and thus suffers; and in his suffering, makes those around him suffer.”
“Philosophy is all well and good for those with time on their hands,” said Chi’en irritably, “but I am more concerned with what I have been hearing, Rikkagin, that the war has changed.”
“Oh, out with it,” said the rikkagin in exasperation, wiping at his beard. “If we must listen to your prattle, best get it over with.”
Chi’en ignored this outburst. “The tales,” he said quite carefully, “filtering into Sha’angh’sei are that the soldiers in the north no longer fight men.”
There was a small uncomfortable silence in the room then, as if an uninvited and unwelcome guest had arrived unexpectedly with news they all dreaded yet wished to hear.
“A tale to be believed by fools,” said the rikkagin disgustedly. “Come then, tell us, Chi’en, what these beings ‘other than men’ are like. No doubt you have detailed descriptions for us.”
The large man’s jowls quivered and his eyes blinked several times in surprise. “No, I have told you all that I have heard.”
The rikkagin grunted and leaned forward to snag a piece of fried fish with his sticks. He sighed rather contentedly. “Yes, it is always most enlightening to hear how the truth is twisted to serve the needs of the individual—”
Po laughed at this, a short discomforting sound like the abrupt cracking of a dry twig in a forest when one had been certain that no one else was around.
The rikkagin looked down his nose at Po and continued. “The Reds have enlisted the aid of a savage tribe, a northern people who, it seems, are much addicted to the fruit of the poppy. From what I understand, they extract the syrup, freeze it, and then chew it.”
“What?” exclaimed Li Su. “Uncured and uncut? It cannot be! The effect would be—”
“Most extraordinary,” said Llowan with his white lopsided smile. “I believe we are all agreed on that point, Godaigo.”
“Quite a frightening habit, I agree,” said the rikkagin.
“I did not say that,” replied Llowan, and they all laughed.
Godaigo wiped his red lips on a silk cloth provided by the host. “Be that as it may, it is this unusual lever that the Reds are using to induce the tribe to join with them against us.” He put his hands up. “And I admit that until reinforcements are in place we will be rather inconvenienced. But that is all.”
