Portal of a Thousand Worlds Page 14

  The boy’s face had hardened. “And the Son of the Sun put his seal on such an edict? Truly, the poet said, Our monuments are broken and the streams do not run. These are small times. Why do I still live then?”

  “By the grace of Heaven, I think. The honorable warden had taken to his bed when the second warrant came. I took it to him at once, but he was sleeping, so I laid it on the table by his bed. One of the doctors or servants must have knocked it off there, because I found it on the floor, unopened, after he died. He never read it.”

  “Dying worries me less than it does most people,” the boy said with a smile that showed no humor. “But you assumed his responsibilities. Why did you not obey your Emperor’s instructions?”

  “I am a mere clerk, Holiness. I lack authority to administer such orders.”

  The boy chuckled. “Most men would not interpret your mandate so narrowly. They would see an opportunity to loose the demons that lurk within us all and use them to achieve great advancement. I am very thankful for your righteousness. Perhaps the delay in appointing a replacement for the eminent Serge Shallows is because the Golden Throne cannot find another servant willing to descend to such depths? One must hope that this is so.”

  The Humble Teacher had taught that one should think well of one’s neighbor until he proved himself unworthy, but that maxim could be carried to suicidal lengths. Although a gentleman would not have pursued the subject further, Gingko was growing desperate.

  “Serge Shallows was a man of honor. His first orders were to put you to death at once if the Bamboo Banner flew anywhere in Qiancheng.”

  The woman moaned, so she was understanding some of this. Even Mouse made a slight noise. His eyes were stretched wide, but then they always looked too large for his pinched face.

  “What is the Bamboo Banner?” The Urfather did not raise his voice, but it rang with more than mortal authority and his eyes burned.

  “Holy One … one hears tell of a rebellion, an insurrection, led by a man known only as Bamboo. It seems that he has been preaching sedition against the Golden Throne down south, in Dongguan and Kermang, for some time. The movement is spreading north. Late last year, his banner was raised in High Abode, here in Qiancheng.”

  The boy sighed and was suddenly just an odd-looking youth again. “And what happened next?”

  “The honorable governor sent troops, Ancient One. The ringleaders were put to the death of a thousand cuts. Yet I believe that High Abode was not the main fire, only a spark carried on the wind.”

  “Where there is one spark, there may be more. I had hoped that, leaving here, I could travel north to Heart of the World and converse with the Emperor. I have not seriously admonished the Golden Throne since his honored grandfather reigned. The need seems even greater now, after what you just told me. But I also wish to learn what this revered Bamboo has to say. Truly, he sounds like a very upright person! If the Son of the Sun is so determined that we shall not meet, there may be good reason that we do. The problem is you, noble Clerk of the Tablets. You have already put yourself at too much risk for me, and I will not endanger you further. When the new warden arrives, he must find me here, obedient to the Son of the Sun.”

  “I would be greatly blessed if Your Holiness would let me accompany him on his travels,” Shard said hopefully. “Such an honor would crown my existence on this tread of the staircase of worlds.”

  For the first time, he saw the boy hesitate.

  “Would it? If you know any part of my history, you know that those who consort with me often come to very sad ends.” His gaze flickered briefly to the other boy, the one in the corner.

  “Holy One,” Shard said. “I have nothing to keep me here. My wife went on without me many years ago. Heaven never sent me sons; my daughters are all married. My service with the Lord of the High and the Low will end as soon as the new warden arrives.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Because the Bamboo Banner was proclaimed in Qiancheng.”

  Shard was arguing that he might have enough authority to cut off a man’s head but not enough to torture him to death. The Urfather spotted the supposal at once and smiled. He made his familiar gesture of blessing.

  “You could have held your own in wrangling with the Courtly Teacher himself, Clerk of the Tablets. It is well. You knew that you might be buying my life with your own, yet you did what was right. I am grateful and honor you for it. I cannot walk far yet, but is not High Abode on the Clay River? We could take my mother home by boat and continue on to hear about the forbidden Bamboo Banner.”

  It was done! Feeling as if all the air had drained out of him, Shard nodded. He had the strange sensation that the Man of a Thousand Lives had been several steps ahead of him all the way.

  “I warn you again, Shard Gingko, that the paths I follow are hard and often shortcuts to the Fifth World.”

  “We all go there in time, Holy One.”

  “Except me.” The boy rose. “Then let us do that. Hare Moon is auspicious for fast travel. You must call me Sunlight and I will call you Grandfather. Mother, we will take you home to Long River now. Let us accompany the honorable Clerk of the Tablets down to the river and see what boats may be heading our way.”

  “Today, Urfather?” Shard said. A thousand essential delays arose in his mind like midges. Farewells? Clothes? It was raining!

  “The Rose Teacher did say, Today is a gift and tomorrow an illusion.”

  The boy in the corner sprang to his feet. Last fall, Mouse had been the Firstborn’s double, but he was too tall for such a pretense now; his body had not been starved and maltreated as the original’s had been.

  Sunlight looked up from folding his blanket and smiled at him, as if answering an unspoken question. “If you wish. Our feet will bless the road together.”

  Chapter 6

  Brother Horse was shoeing a pony. The pony’s name was High Stepper, and if High Stepper had been a little higher, Horse would not have had to bend over so painfully far. There were no farriers left in the ashes of Huarache, but there was one very ancient ex-farrier, Old Sturdy. He still owned many of the family tools, which his son, Young Sturdy, had been forced to leave behind as they were too heavy to carry when he went looking for work elsewhere. So Horse, wearing a ratty ancestral leather apron, was holding High Stepper’s left rear hoof between his knees and scraping it with an ancient rasp. It was a splendid way to spend a hot spring afternoon.

  Old Sturdy’s house stood in a little paddock outside the town, and had thus escaped the fire. Beyond the strip of dry mud that served as a road, the buildings had been reduced to heaps of ash and orphaned stone chimney stacks. Old Sturdy himself was sitting on a stool in the sunshine, telling a story he had already told Horse three times in the last three months. His dog lay at his feet, happily gnawing a paring from the pony’s hoof.

  Ice Moon had been astonishingly mild, as if to apologize for its elder sisters’ bad behavior. Hare Moon was starting off even better, so that the blossoms were out, and Horse, although wearing nothing under the wraparound apron, was sweating copiously. Tending a horse was one of his favorite occupations, and the old man’s steady babble was as soothing as a trickling stream. At sunset, he would share a convivial evening meal at the abbey and then enjoy another night with Moth. One day, all this bliss would end. Soon, his client would appear to put him to work, but Horse was certainly in no hurry for that to happen.

  “And then the mandarin said …” Old Sturdy chortled huskily as he built to his punch line.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Horse saw a youth running from the direction of the abbey.

  Think not on evil or you will summon it, the Humble Teacher warned. Someone was in a hurry, and in Huarache, only one event could trigger any sense of urgency. Horse snapped at High Stepper to stand still and carried on with the hoof.

  Huarache’s makeshift House of Joyful
Departure was woefully understaffed, with only three women and five men apart from himself, but all wonderfully friendly people. Only two were novices: Moth, whose duties were to educate Brother Horse in decorum and Palace Voice, and Simple, who was expected to do everything else, from washing discards to cooking meals. Simple was far from being simple, although he was driven to distraction by the need to satisfy six superiors. It was, of course, Novice Simple who came panting around High Stepper to accost Horse.

  “Brother Butterfly … Sword … The abbess … is back. … Your client … wants you. … Now, she says. … At once,” he gasped.

  “Tell her,” Horse said with deep satisfaction, “that I cannot leave a pony with one shoe off and two others loose. She will have to wait. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  The youth stared at him goggle-eyed.

  Horse chuckled as well as he could when bent almost double. “Go on,” he said quietly. “It isn’t often you get to say no to a shrill like her.”

  “May Heaven preserve me,” Simple muttered and turned tail. He had been grinning, though. Good lad.

  “Now, Grandfather, finish your story.”

  “That was a Gray Helper!” Old Sturdy said. “Don’t hold with them! Stole my mother’s necklace that she was supposed to wear to her ascent.”

  “They’re a shifty lot, yes.” Horse decided he had trimmed the hoof as well as he could and released it. Straightening with a sigh of relief, he headed for the forge and the bellows.

  Later, after Old Sturdy had finished story twelve and started on number eight, and when the shoe was glowing at the right heat, Horse carried it in the tongs back to High Stepper.

  “If my lady would hold still for a fitting?”

  He tried the fit and inspected the scorch marks on the hoof. Very good! It needed only a couple more scrapes with the rasp to make it perfect. With hammer and cutters and a mouthful of nails, he prepared to attach the shoe. And right after the first nail went in, he heard the rattle of a rickshaw. There was only one rickshaw left in Huarache, and Novice Simple was its runner. The dog jumped up and barked with excitement. Horse carried on with his work until he was addressed.

  “Brother Butterfly Sword!” It was his client’s agent, of course.

  He glanced up at her and pointed to the nails in his mouth. Then he went back to finishing the job. This was the end of Horse, he decided. He would just have to accept that his name was Butterfly Sword from now on. What it might be in a week or two did not bear thinking about, but it couldn’t be much worse than Butterfly Sword.

  Then he straightened up so he could bow to her, hammer in hand. High Stepper kicked the turf a couple of times and seemed to approve of her shoe.

  The anonymous abbess was still sitting in the rickshaw, which meant that Simple must stay holding up the bars to keep it level. He had been allowed to shed his robe in favor of a peasant’s loincloth, but it was just as well that his passenger could not see the expression on his face.

  “Had I known you were coming, my lady, I would not have appeared before you dressed like this,” Horse remarked humbly.

  “I should think not!”

  She was still robed as a high abbess. She looked older than he recalled; her face was even thinner, as if she had been sick. He had hoped that he might like her better the next time they met, but he felt no sign of that yet, which was strange, because there were very few people he did not get along with. He enjoyed people, studied them, collected them. He was on friendly terms with everyone he had met in Huarache, just as he had been with almost everyone in Sheep Rocks, both priory and village, all except this woman, who had bought his absolute allegiance. She grated on him like a mouthful of grit. The first evening, they had exchanged barely a dozen sentences. The next morning, she had merely told him to study hard and wait until she returned, and that had been all. Yet, even that fleeting correspondence had convinced him that he neither liked nor trusted her. Something about her reminded him of Deputy Prior Evening Fade at Sheep Rocks, who had enjoyed reminiscing about all the scores he had made in his long, and reportedly deadly, career. But even he had some redeeming features, so perhaps the nameless abbess would show some eventually.

  “We must leave this evening!” she announced. “The boat will leave before sunset.”

  “We should have plenty of—”

  “Before that, I must have an extended talk with you. There is no privacy on those boats.”

  “We can talk here,” Horse announced firmly. “Grandfather, how would you like a ride in a rickshaw?”

  Old Sturdy had never ridden in a rickshaw in his life and was so lame now that he had not even viewed all the damage done by the fire. The offer, once it had been made clear to him, made him cackle and spray spit in excitement. Novice Simple’s expression suggested that it was time to start his assassination practice and he had a good subject in mind. He was mollified when Horse told him to go very slowly so he did not rattle the old man’s bones too hard, and not to be gone long.

  The abbess settled on the stool with bad grace and waited until the rickshaw had left.

  “Are you a fool?” she began. “I told you to study for palace life and here you are shoeing horses. I am told you also dig bone pits, chop firewood, and wash kitchen floors.”

  Horse was bent over High Stepper’s left foreleg. “The abbey’s short-staffed. It’s all good exercise. I enjoy it.”

  “But it gives you hands like that file you are using! How do you expect to pass as nobility when you have the muscles of a stonemason and hands that will smooth planks?”

  “I can easily make muscle look just like fat under courtly robes, my lady. None of that matters. I’m a Gray Helper. Ask Novice Moth if my hands feel rough on her breasts.”

  There was a pause. Then the woman said, “I left you five books to read.”

  “I’d read them all at Sheep Rocks. I can quote a lot of them from memory. Got a good memory.”

  “Bah! Enjoy your exercise, then, because it may be the last you will get for a long time. How much have you guessed about your future duties?”

  Too much, far too much.

  “Palace Voice, court protocol?” If she had wanted a mandarin, she would have chosen an older man, and it would take him years to master their way of speaking, their constant citations and literary references. “I thought, at first, that you wanted me to play a prince, although princes have families and many servants. … Then I saw the picture in my room. The old Emperor Zealous Righteousness, may he prosper in all higher worlds. Why a print of him and not his son, our present beloved Lord of Ten Thousand Years?”

  He released the hoof and straightened up. They stared at each other.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “It smelled like treason, my lady. And then I discovered that Novice Moth had been given very specific instructions to discover if I am capable of fathering a child.”

  The abbess’s gaunt face grew even grimmer. “Is that what she told you?”

  He strode over to the forge, closer, so she had to look up at him. He began pumping the bellows furiously, resenting her contemptuous sneer. A brief leather apron that did not even close properly at the back was not appropriate dress for an interview with a client, especially one with the rank of high abbess, if indeed she was entitled to that.

  “It was obviously what she was trying to do,” he said. “And the other men’s complaints confirmed it. When I guessed and refused to cooperate, then she admitted the truth and begged me to help, because she had been promised a very great reward.”

  “For which she is now eligible, you will be pleased to hear.”

  “I already knew that, and no, I am not pleased. I don’t want to be a stud horse for even the Gray Order, and I fear that as soon as I leave here, Moth will receive the same reward as Prior Fraise.”

  That pulled the old snake up short. “Meaning what?”

/>   “Meaning that I knew that man very well, Your Holiness. He never came to see me after we parted that first evening. Next morning, I was told he had left already. Quite apart from his saddle sores and his piles, which would have stopped him traveling unless his life depended on it, he should have completed the naming ceremony by explaining the leash to me. That’s required so that new initiates aren’t tempted to run wild, thinking they can get away with anything. Prior Fraise would have wanted to do that. He would have wanted to hear me thank him for all his instruction and so on. I know he would. He had a strange, morbid sort of interest in me. It made me uncomfortable, but he never suggested anything improper, so I never complained. Yet he just disappeared without a word? That was not in character. Wasn’t like him.”

  Her eyes glittered. “If he didn’t tell you about the leash, then who did?”

  “I’m from Sheep Rocks, remember.” He took a moment to enjoy her mystified frown before he explained. “It’s a penal posting, didn’t you know? We had some really smart initiates there and I used to ask them why they stayed. So one of them told me—she stayed because she had no choice. She’d tried to cheat her house out of some loot and her abbot sentenced her to five years in Sheep Rocks.

  “Maybe,” Horse added when the woman was about to speak, “Prior Fraise was there for the same reason, I don’t know. If I was being posted to a new house, then he should have told you, my new superior, what my leash was. But a transfer of house is not a naming ceremony. You cannot be both my superior and my client. That was not a proper initiation, my lady.”

  Furious that he should be getting so close to losing his temper, Horse blatantly turned his back on her and marched over to the pony, carrying the tongs with the glowing shoe.

  “I never said it was.” Her voice remained calm and flat. “Have you any more spleen to vent, or are you ready to listen yet?”

  He hauled the pony’s leg up and gripped it with his knees. “Just that I am a loyal child of the Emperor. He is sacred and all his people owe him allegiance.”