Kushiel 03 - [Moirin 02] - Naamah's Curse, Page 2

  Auntie Li smiled wryly, refilling our cups with rice-wine. “There are no end of mistakes to be made, dear.”

  “Am I making one now?” I asked her.

  Her face softened. “Ah, child! I cannot tell you that, either. Do you love the boy? Is that why you seek him?”

  A hundred memories of Bao cascaded through my mind: Bao staring insolently at me as I sought to master the Five Styles of Breathing, Bao shouting at me as he drove the demon spirit back, Bao helping Master Lo tenderly to his feet, Bao sporting his battle-grin as he sparred with Snow Tiger.

  It should have been simple, only it wasn’t.

  I did love him. I remembered the moment I had realized it. When I had first fled Shuntian with the dragon-possessed princess and a handful of loyal ruffians, Bao and Master Lo had gone ahead to lay a false trail. They had been late in returning, and I’d begun to fear they weren’t coming.

  I would not let that happen, Moirin.

  Those were the words Bao had spoken when they did arrive and I confessed my fear to him, the closest he’d ever come to a declaration of love. My heart had leapt.

  And yet…

  It wasn’t why I was following him. I was following him because he had half of my diadh-anam and I couldn’t do otherwise.

  “I don’t know, Auntie,” I said truthfully at last. “It’s a question I’m hoping to answer, and I cannot do it alone.”

  “Poor child.” Auntie Li patted my hand. The look of kindness in her shrewd eyes nearly undid me. “Don’t pay too much heed to an old lady’s rambling. If the boy’s got a lick of sense, he won’t run far.”

  I smiled despite the sting of tears. “I’m not sure he does.”

  She sipped her rice-wine. “That probably makes two of you.”

  I laughed. “You’re probably right.”

  THREE

  So began the pattern of my days.

  For the most part, it was a lonely time. I thought I was accustomed to solitude. I’d grown up in the Alban wilderness with only my mother’s companionship. But she had been a constant in my life; and later, there had been Cillian, my lost first love, killed in a foolish cattle-raid.

  Here, I had no one.

  Oh, there were folk I met along the way, though none who took so lively an interest in me as Auntie Li. But with each new day that dawned, I was forced to leave them behind and set out on my lonely road.

  I was grateful for the company of my horses. I named the chestnut saddle-horse Ember, and the grey pack-horse I called Coal. As a child of the Maghuin Dhonn, I was able to sense their thoughts and moods in a way most folk couldn’t. Betimes I would let my thoughts drift, touching theirs, enjoying the simplicity of their reactions to the world around them.

  Betimes I immersed my own thoughts in the world around me, breathing the Breath of Trees Growing and listening to nature.

  Winter was coming, sooner than I would have hoped. I heard it in the sleepy murmurings of the trees, the sap growing sluggish in their veins. I heard it in the anxious whispers of the winter wheat in the fields, straining to outrace the coming frost. I saw it in the worried faces of farmers along the way.

  The days began to grow shorter.

  I wasn’t worried, not yet. So long as I was in the empire of Ch’in, I was safe. I could always find a place to lodge, supplies to purchase. It grew harder to communicate as I rode, for the farther away from Shuntian I went, the fewer folk spoke the scholar’s tongue. Still, I managed with friendly gestures and a few words of dialect picked up along the way; and the Emperor’s seal spoke for itself.

  But I was fairly certain Bao was no longer in Ch’in.

  I couldn’t be sure beyond doubt. It was a vast country. Still, when Snow Tiger had bade me consult my diadh-anam in conjunction with a map, it had been clear that Bao was headed for Tatar territory.

  And I had a suspicion of the reason why.

  Master Lo’s tranquil voice echoed in my memory. Through no fault of his own, Bao is a child of violence.

  Violence.

  Rape, he meant—the crime D’Angelines called heresy. Folk who know no better reckon D’Angelines are a licentious lot. They are not entirely wrong—in Terre d’Ange, all manner of love and desire is freely celebrated—but it is far from the whole truth. Blessed Elua, the earth-begotten son of Yeshua ben Yosef and Mary the Magdalene, the deity who Naamah and the other Companions chose to follow, turning their backs on the One God’s Heaven, gave his people one simple precept: Love as thou wilt.

  So they do, but it is within the bounds of the sacred tenet of consensuality. To violate it is to commit heresy.

  Bao’s mother had been raped during a Tatar raid, that much I knew. When it became evident that he was the result of that violence, and not the legitimate offspring of his parents’ marriage, they had sold him into servitude to a travelling circus. He had been trained and raised as an acrobat, but fighting was in his blood. At the age of thirteen, he had begged the troupe’s best stick-fighter to teach him. And Bao had been willing to pay any price to learn.

  He say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you.

  Thinking on it, I shuddered.

  In some ways, I think it troubled me more than it did Bao. I hadn’t been raised to think of myself as a D’Angeline—indeed, I was ten years old before it occurred to me to wonder who my father was—but I had always felt Naamah’s presence in my life. The bright lady, I had called her. When the Maghuin Dhonn Herself at once accepted me as Her child and sent me forth to seek my destiny, I had no idea where to begin. So I set out to solve the only mystery I knew, and crossed the Straits to seek my father in Terre d’Ange.

  I had found him, too; and as it transpired, he was one of the loveliest, gentlest souls I had ever encountered. When I was in a mood to resent my infernal destiny, one of the things I resented the most was that it had taken me away from my father so soon, when I’d scarce had a chance to know him.

  The other, of course, was leaving Jehanne.

  Well and so, it was done, and even on my darkest days, I could not deny there was a purpose in it. And I could not help but think that Bao travelled a similar path. He had died. His soul had travelled to the Ch’in spirit world. Because he had died a hero’s death, the merciful Maiden of Gentle Aspect had intervened to spare him the judgment of the Yama Kings. And then he found himself reborn into his body, with his soul inextricably yoked to mine and his mentor Master Lo Feng dead.

  None of that was reason to seek out his marauding rapist of a father, of course. Not at all. On the surface of things, it made no sense. But I thought he would do the same thing I had done when confronted with an unwanted destiny, and set out to solve the only mystery he knew. With Master Lo dead, Bao had nowhere else to go.

  Besides, I could sense him somewhere beyond me, moving farther and farther away.

  If I could have followed him as the crow flies, I could have closed the distance between us more swiftly, but I was constrained by the terrain to follow the roads. Still, Bao would have faced the same constraints. In village after village I asked after him as best I could, usually with mixed results.

  I didn’t have the luxury of keeping a low profile in face-to-face encounters. Bao did. A young Ch’in man travelling on his own, carrying little more than a satchel and a battered bamboo staff across his back, was not a remarkable sight. And I didn’t even know for a surety under what name he went. I knew him as Bao, but I had learned that that wasn’t a proper name, but the baby-name his mother had called him. Treasure, it meant; at least when spoken with the right intonation.

  It was a name Bao had reclaimed when he cast his lot in with Master Lo Feng, abandoning the stick-fighters and thugs in Shuntian he had once led, leaving everything behind to become Master Lo’s magpie, a journey that had taken him all the way to Terre d’Ange. For a long time, I’d wondered why he’d made such a choice.

  It wasn’t a pretty tale.

  Bao had told me on the greatship. A young boy had come to him and begged him to teach him to fi
ght. Bao had agreed… for the same price that the man who taught him had charged.

  I don’t know how I would have responded to Bao’s tale had he gone through with the bargain. I might not have been raised with Blessed Elua’s precept and the sacred tenet of consensuality, but I was Naamah’s child as surely as the Maghuin Dhonn Herself’s, and I had taken those beliefs deep to heart.

  But he hadn’t gone through with it. Confronted with the naked, shivering, stripling boy, Bao had walked away from his bargain, walked away from his life. He had taken Master Lo’s offer, an offer he had jeered at only days before, and reinvented himself.

  Everything I have done in my life, good and bad, I have chosen. But this, I did not choose.

  That was what Bao said the day he left me.

  “Stupid boy,” I muttered to myself as I rode, not really meaning it. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to wonder if he would be angry at me for following him. He had to know I was on his trail. He could feel my presence as surely as I could sense his.

  And I tried not to worry about the distance that yet lay between us, the shortening days, the trees growing increasingly barren of leaves, the chill in the air.

  Here and there, I found folk who remembered Bao’s passage. He might not have stood out as unmistakably as I did, but he was memorable in his own way. Even from the beginning, there had been an air of coiled intensity to him, a feral glitter to his dark eyes that put me in mind of my own people. It was not unthinkable; although the Maghuin Dhonn have dwelled in Alba for time out of mind, there are tales among us of an older time, when the world was covered in ice and we followed the Great Bear Herself out of a frozen wasteland to warmer climes.

  That was when there were still great magicians among us, shape-changers capable of taking the form of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself. We lost that gift generations ago when the magician Berlik broke an oath he swore by stone and sea and all that they encompass, on his very diadh-anam. Now, only small gifts remain to us; or so I had thought. My mother taught me to summon the twilight when I was but a child, a gift meant for hiding and concealment.

  But as I’d grown to adulthood, I’d found it has other uses. To summon the twilight is to take half a step into the spirit world. It could also serve to make a gateway that allows the energy of the spirit world to spill into ours.

  I discovered first that I had a knack for coaxing plants to grow. It seemed a simple and benign gift, mayhap a legacy of my father. Although he is a child of Naamah through and through, the lineage of Anael, the Good Steward, also runs in his veins.

  It was Raphael de Mereliot who discovered that my gift could be used for other purposes. In a twisted way, I supposed I owed him a debt of gratitude. Had he not done so, had he not used my magic to work miracles of healing, my lovely father would have died of an infection of the lungs. Had Raphael not persuaded me to help him summon fallen spirits, I would not possess the gift one of them gave me on a whim, a charm to reveal hidden things. Were it not for that charm, Snow Tiger would have drowned in the lake below White Jade Mountain with the pearl that lodged the dragon’s soul hidden in her mortal flesh.

  Gods, the links that bind one person’s ambition and desire to another’s fate are complicated things! One could go mad thinking on it. But I knew for a surety that if Raphael had not used my gift thusly, Bao would still be dead. Master Lo Feng would never have known to use my gift to exchange his life for Bao’s.

  Being touched by death had changed Bao. Its touch clung to him, lent him a faint aura of shimmering darkness. Bao had died, and yet lived. He alone in the world was twice-born. So it did not surprise me to find folk who remembered him along the way.

  And having guessed at his purpose, it should not have surprised me to come across the village of his birth as I followed in his tracks.

  Yet somehow, it did.

  FOUR

  The village was called Tonghe. There was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of others through which I had passed along the way, and I would not have chosen to stay there if my inquiries in the market had not proved fruitful. When I described Bao using a combination of dialect and gestures, an elderly woman selling squashes nodded vigorously and pointed across the square toward a handful of men huddled over a set of dominoes.

  Even though my diadh-anam assured me that Bao was many, many leagues away, my heart soared, and I had to look twice to assure myself he wasn’t among them. The squash seller tugged my arm and spoke volubly.

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother.” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  She scowled at me, then gave a penetrating shout. A boy of some ten years came at a pelting run, listening and nodding as she spoke to him.

  “Greetings, Noble Barbarian Lady!” Despite his rough-spun attire, he addressed me in the scholar’s tongue, speaking with careful precision. He bowed three times in rapid succession and then straightened, his wide eyes taking in my horses, my robes, and the Emperor’s medallion around my neck. “I am Hui. Grandmother Fang says I am to translate for you. You seek the stick-fighter from Shuntian?”

  “I do.” I smiled at him. “Was he here?”

  “Oh, yes!” Hui pointed at the men playing dominoes. “That is his father.” His grandmother cuffed him and muttered. He lowered his voice. “Or at least, that is the husband of his mother.”

  I tried to guess which of the men he was indicating. None of them looked like Bao—but then, none of them would. “I see.”

  Grandmother Fang offered helpful commentary. The boy listened, then translated. “Once he was a farmer. Now he does nothing but drink rice-wine and gamble at dominoes all day. Do you want to meet him?”

  “I do,” I said. “Is the stick-fighter’s mother here, too?”

  Hui nodded and relayed the question to his grandmother. “Yes, but she works in a sewing shop, she and her daughter. They must make a living since Ang Shen has become a drunk.”

  “I would like to meet all of them.” I clasped my hand over my fist and bowed from the saddle. “My thanks to you and your honored grandmother. Is there an inn where I might lodge?”

  He shook his head, then turned to his grandmother. After another exchange, he said, “Grandmother Fang says you must stay with us as an honored guest. Your horses can stay in the pen with the goat.”

  I inclined my head, touching the purse that hung from my belt. “Of course, she will allow me a small gesture of thanks.”

  That at least needed no translation. Grandmother Fang grinned and gave an effusive nod.

  I let Hui lead me to the home he shared with his mother, father, two younger sisters, and his grandmother on the outskirts of town, collecting my thoughts while he chattered excitedly, telling me that he was the prodigy of the family and he meant to sit for the scholar’s examination that would allow him to become a civil servant when he came of age. In the doorway of their humble house, his mother greeted us with gracious amazement, a round-faced toddler peering out from behind her skirts.

  “Come around back!” Hui reached up to tug on Ember’s reins. “I will show you the goat pen.”

  In the rear of the house, there was a sizable garden with well-tended crops of squash and soybean—and indeed, a small pen with a wise-eyed goat. With Hui’s assistance, I unsaddled Ember and unloaded Coal’s packs, stowing the gear beneath a weathered lean-to. He fetched a fresh bucket of water and watched with avid curiosity as I checked both horses’ hooves for cracks or stones.

  “Why do you not have servants, Noble Barbarian Lady?” Hui asked.

  I worked at prying a pebble loose from the frog of Ember’s right front hoof. The chestnut bent his neck and lipped my hair with idle affection. “Because I do not think the man I am following would like it if I came after him with an army of servants. And you may call me by my name, which is Moirin.”

  “Moirin.” He pronounced it with the awkward Ch’in lilt I found charming. “Is it true what he said, then? The stick-fighter from Shuntian?”

  “I don’t know.” I releas
ed Ember’s foreleg and stroked his neck. “What did he say?”

  Hui glanced around. “It is rumored that he claimed to be one of those who guarded Princess Snow Tiger on her quest to free the dragon and end the war.”

  “Aye,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “You were there?”

  I nodded. “I was there.”

  Hui’s dark gaze travelled from the medallion around my neck to my face. “You’re her. The Emperor’s jade-eyed witch.”

  I smiled. “Some say so. I say I am my own, and no one else’s. But aye, the tales are true, and I was there. So was Bao.”

  “Oh.” The boy whispered the word, then swallowed visibly. “Ang Shen did not believe the stories. He told the stick-fighter to go away.”

  My heart ached for Bao. “Mayhap Ang Shen will believe it when I tell him.”

  Hui looked dubious. “Mayhap he will.”

  He didn’t.

  In the early hours of the afternoon, I returned to the village square to meet with Bao’s father—or at least, the husband of his mother. Hui came with me to translate, his pride in the task offset by a certain degree of anxiety. There were four men yet huddled over the dominoes, sharing a jar of rice-wine.

  “Ang Shen?” I bowed politely to the man Hui pointed out to me, a Ch’in fellow with a prematurely lined face, his black hair peppered with silver, clad in well-mended clothes. Since he did not rise, I knelt to offer him the respect due an elder in Ch’in society, sitting on my heels in the D’Angeline courtesan’s manner that Jehanne had shown me. “I would speak to you of your son, Bao.”

  Hui translated.

  The other three domino players left off their game and stared at me with open fascination. Villagers drifted near to eavesdrop. Ang Shen grunted, fingered the tiles, and refused to meet my eyes. “I have no son,” he said in a rough variant of the scholar’s tongue.

  “Your wife’s son, then,” I said.

  His shoulders tensed. “My wife bore no sons.”

  “Aye,” I said softly. “She did. And it seems he sought you out. ’Tis no business of mine to tell you how to respond to such circumstances. But one thing I will tell you. Whatever Bao told you was true, and I doubt he told you the half of it. He is a hero. I know, for I was there. He saved the princess’ life and mine at the cost of his own. He died, and was born again.”