The Awakened City Page 4

  “His stronghold? You know where he is?”

  “I know how to get there.” The boy grinned. “But if you want to know, scribe, you’ll have to do the ritual. He’s at the Red Lantern on Shiriya Street in the western quarter—the holy man, I mean. You’ll know him by the scar on his neck, a prison-collar scar. He doesn’t try to hide it.” His expression grew dreamy. “They say the Messenger is beautiful, more beautiful than any human man. They say he’s clothed in light. He made the place where we’re going, made it with his power so the faithful could have shelter. They eat the food of the gods there, and every day the Messenger works a miracle.”

  Gyalo could not restrain himself. “There’s nothing miraculous about it.”

  The boy drew back, affronted. “What do you know about it, scribe?”

  “This is a fraud, boy. A cheat. A lie to blacken your soul.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Listen to me.” Gyalo willed into his voice the authority of the religious rank he had once held. “You’ve been deceived. This so-called Messenger is false. There’s no holiness at the end of your journey, only suffering and blasphemy.”

  The boy surged to his feet, oversetting the stool, and spat on the worn flagstones beside him. “That’s how much I care for what you think, scribe! You’re just an ash-cursed unbeliever like all the rest. When I’m living in bliss in the new primal age, you’ll still be roasting in rata’s fires. And I hope you scream so much you tear your throat out!”

  He wrenched around, and was gone in a blur of copper light.

  For a moment Gyalo sat looking after him. He was aware of the regard of the nearby scribes and their customers, their interest drawn by the boy’s raised voice. Stupid, he chided himself. Secure as he was in his new life, he still had the habits of a fugitive; he did not like to attract attention.

  He returned to the task of packing up, loading his desk and other materials into his pushcart and binding a canvas cover over the whole. He maneuvered the cart across the uneven pavement toward the temple’s entrance, where stood a bronze image of Inriku, holding the symbols of his patronage in his hands. The image was modeled in a contemporary style, no doubt to replace an original destroyed by the Caryaxists; its clean sharp contours did not quite fit the time-smoothed stones and columns of its home. Before it, separated by the requisite distance, a smaller image of rata Eon Sleeper reclined upon a plinth. This was Inriku’s temple, but all who entered it must acknowledge that Inriku was only an Aspect of the greater god, dreamed into being during rata’s long slumber. On all four sides of the plinth, the Five Foundations of the Way were written out, words that were recognizable even to those who could not read: Faith, Affirmation, Increase, Consciousness, Compassion.

  On the temple’s broad porch Gyalo paused to exchange his indoor shoes for a pair of high-soled sandals, then bumped his cart down the shallow steps and joined the procession of human and animal traffic. Shops and houses crowded on either side, their roofs tiled red and green and yellow, their fronts festooned with shuttered balconies. An unseasonable heat had settled on the city, and the air was summer-thick with stink: animals, cooking, sewage, the smoke of a thousand braziers. From all directions came the sound of temple bells, announcing evening services. These things Gyalo perceived with his ordinary senses. But he was a free Shaper, and so he also perceived what ordinary senses could not encompass: the gemlike light shed by all living things, the patterns of being and change that composed unliving objects, which a free Shaper could manipulate at will—though to do so openly would be to break ecclesiastical law, which for all intents and purposes was also civil law, and transform himself again into a fugitive.

  He reached one of the many bridges that spanned the Year-Canal, the great water thoroughfare that split the city into northern and southern halves, and joined the slow line of traffic across it. On the Canal’s south side the streets grew meaner, the buildings more ramshackle; if Gyalo continued on for half a mile he would come upon the Nines, a sprawling slum that clung to the city’s southern flank. But the sections nearest the Canal possessed a kind of shabby gentility, and four months ago, on the strength of a new copying commission, he had rented a house on a small enclosed court, with a roof of green-glazed tiles and a tiny garden in back. He and Axane had worked for weeks, cleaning, replastering, painting. Like him, Axane had never lived in a house of her own. He still caught her, sometimes, looking around her as if she could not quite believe it; it made him smile, for he felt the same.

  He pushed the cart across the ancient paving of the court, rounding the fountain that bubbled at its center (a rare amenity in that part of the city, and one of the reasons they had taken the house), nodding a greeting to his neighbors. He chained the cart beside the door, which he had painted green to match the roof, and carried his materials inside, leaving his sandals on the mat. The interior was simple—one room and a kitchen downstairs, a single long chamber upstairs where he had a desk, and he and Axane and the baby slept. As yet they owned only the meager furnishings from the apartment where they had lived before. But bare as it was, Gyalo was more content than in any of the finely appointed suites he had commanded in his monastic days, when he had had access to all the luxury of one who served the Brethren.

  “I’m home,” he called, and went into the kitchen, where Axane, enclosed in the astonishing emerald-sapphire of her lifelight, was slicing onions for the evening meal. She dropped her knife and turned toward him, smiling; he closed her into an embrace, her sea colors filling up his vision. When they were first reunited, he had not been able to stop touching her, as if her body were bound to his by the same force that pulls a dropped object inevitably to the ground; when she was not with him he had felt unbearably restrained, wanting always to fall toward her. They had been together for eight months (and married for all but one day of that time), and the urgency had eased. But there were still no moments in his life as sweet as these, when he held her in his arms.

  She pulled away and returned to her preparations. “It’ll be a little while, I’m afraid. I was called out this afternoon. It took longer than I expected.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “A little girl bitten by a street dog. She needed stitching. Her father waited two days before he called for me, and it wasn’t because he couldn’t pay. It made me so angry I charged half again what I normally would have.”

  Gyalo smiled. When he had first met her, she had not understood the use of currency, for she had grown up in a place that did not employ it. But she had become as sharp with money as anyone he had ever known. “A paying customer. How unusual.”

  “They all pay, Gyalo, just not always in coin. I know you don’t like me helping the poor ones. But the registered healers won’t, and all they have is someone like me.”

  “It’s you going down into the Nines that I don’t like.”

  “I never go alone.”

  It was an old argument. Axane was fiercely devoted to her healing craft, which she had insisted on following into the eighth month of her pregnancy, and had taken up again only a few weeks after Chokyi’s birth. She had been angered by the restrictions of Ninyâser’s registration requirements, which, being who and what she was, she could not fulfill; but she had found a different mission in her service among the poor. Gyalo was aware that most men of his income and profession would not have permitted their wives to go out as she did, or tolerated the late suppers and dusty corners that resulted. But in the profoundly isolated community into which Axane had been born, everyone had worked, and it had not occurred to her that she should not be a healer in Arsace as well. In truth, Gyalo had as little experience of the world’s convention as she. Between them they did what seemed right, rather than what was proper, and thus far it had worked out very well.

  From her basket near the stove, Chokyi began to cry. “Would you see to her, love?” Axane said. “My hands are all over onions.”<
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  Gyalo went to lift the baby, warm and milky-smelling in her linen wrappings. She quieted at his touch. He carried her to the kitchen door, open against the heat of the room, and settled on the threshold. She gurgled at him, waving tiny fists.

  “Little bird,” he whispered. “Little bird.”

  She was not his child. She did not even have similar features, for both her father and Axane were of a different racial stock than he, round-eyed and dark-skinned where he was almond-eyed and pale. But from the beginning he had loved her completely—he, who had never thought to be a father or a husband. They had named her for his mother. Her lifelight, which like Axane’s leaped flamelike around her body, was the color of apple jade.

  He sat in the doorway, the dozing baby in his arms, as the soft spring twilight descended on the garden and Axane moved about the kitchen. Ordinarily he took deep pleasure in such moments of tranquil domesticity, the heart and essence of the new life he led. But he could not banish the young pilgrim from his mind, and below the peace of the evening the unease the encounter had woken in him stirred like an incipient sickness.

  When the meal was ready he put Chokyi in her basket and carried her out to the low table in the other room, and lit the lamps and drew the shutters while Axane set out the food. They sat across from one another on cushions and talked of small things as they ate. All the while his thoughts kept returning to the boy. At last he said, across the end of one of Axane’s sentences:

  “A customer came to me today for a letter.”

  She stilled at once, perhaps hearing something in his voice, and listened without interrupting as he told her the boy’s story. When he was finished she drew a long breath, and said: “Râvar.”

  The name lingered on the air. They sat listening to its echoes. Chokyi slept on the floor, plump arms clasped atop her covers. Lamplight trembled on the walls, into whose plaster Gyalo had mixed a yellow tint so they would look sunlit even in shadow.

  “How long has it been?” Axane said. “Since his missionaries were ordered out of Ninyâser?”

  “Seven months at least.”

  “And now they’re back.”

  “Or maybe they never left. Maybe they just went underground. Recruiting by word of mouth, rather than by public proselytizing.”

  It was hard to talk of that. Just after they were reunited, Axane had told Gyalo everything: how, after her escape from Baushpar, she had inserted herself among the camp followers of the Brethren’s army so she might get across the Burning Land and warn her people, how she and Râvar escaped Refuge’s destruction and the massacre that followed, how Râvar dragged her back across the desert, and, at the end of that harsh journey, brought down the walls of Thuxra City and declared himself Next Messenger before a throng of awestruck prisoners. She and Gyalo had speculated about where Râvar might be hiding, when he might emerge, how much of his planned vengeance he might accomplish—conjectures that contained no ifs, but only whens. But then Râvar’s missionaries, who had begun openly preaching in Ninyâser several weeks before Axane arrived, were ejected by decree of the King. It had felt like a reprieve. For a little while it became possible to ignore the approaching darkness, to immerse themselves in the joys and challenges of their life as if there were no other future. Since the missionaries’ departure, neither had spoken Râvar’s name aloud.

  Gyalo looked at his wife. She sat very still, her face calm, her eyes cast down, her hands folded neatly in her lap. To someone who did not know her, it might have seemed the pose of a quiet woman, at ease within her world, tranquil in her thoughts. But Gyalo did know her, knew the truth of her restless, fierce nature, which for much of her life she had kept hidden. He understood, therefore, that what he saw was not tranquillity, but concealment. It was when she was most still that she was least like herself.

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “I’ve begun dreaming again.” Axane was a Dreamer, one whose mind was capable of traveling out across the world in sleep. In the late stages of her pregnancy her Dreams had ceased; he knew that without them she felt blind. This should, therefore, have been good news. But her manner told him it was not, and it seemed to him he had already heard her next words, even as she spoke them: “About Râvar.”

  It was inevitable, he told himself. It had to happen. “For how long?”

  “Since just after Chokyi was born.”

  “What? You’ve been dreaming about him for four months and you never told me?”

  She did not look at him. “I’m telling you now.”

  “rata’s wounds, Axane! How many of these Dreams have you had?”

  “Nine or ten, maybe. They take me to the place where he lives with his followers.” She had begun to turn her rice bowl between her hands, around and around on the glossy surface of the table. “It’s a cave, or rather a lot of caves, all interconnected. I think … there must be a thousand people living there. Maybe more.”

  “So many? Are you sure?”

  “We knew he planned to build an army, didn’t we?” She gave the bowl a savage twist. “It’s very organized. There are living areas, places where they make things—clothing, furnishings, tools. There are food stores. It’s like a little city.”

  “The Awakened City,” Gyalo said, hearing the boy.

  “What?”

  “The Awakened City. That’s what they call it. Can you tell where it is?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve only seen the caves. Never what’s outside them.”

  “Have you seen anything to tell you what he’s planning?”

  “I’m only there when people are asleep, Gyalo. I don’t hear them talking. Even when I dream of … him, he’s always alone.” She shuddered, a tremor that ran through her from head to foot. “All I know is that there are a lot of them. And they keep coming.”

  Gyalo sat silent. A thousand, he thought. It did not surprise him, not at all. Yet it was one thing to suspect, another to know.

  Axane said: “You’re angry.”

  “No.” But that was not exactly true. “Axane, you shouldn’t have waited so long to tell me.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Worry me? Axane—”

  “Do you think I want to dream of him?” She pushed her bowl away, sharply, so that it skated across the table. “I’m bound to him by blood, by Chokyi’s blood, and … and by Refuge—” She dragged in her breath. “As bound to him in a way as I am to you, for all he doesn’t know it. You know what that means for me. Some of the time … some of the time I can fight it. I can make myself wake up. But I can’t stop the dreaming, any more than I could not dream you when we were apart.”

  “I know that, Axane.”

  “What would have been the good of telling you? It’s not as if it would have changed anything. I knew you’d hate it, I knew you’d just get angry, the way you are now. You think of him, I know you do—I see the way you look at Chokyi sometimes. As if … as if you were judging her.”

  Gyalo felt a stab of guilt, for he did sometimes look into Chokyi’s face and search for her father there. “I don’t judge her.”

  “No? She has his eyes! His skin! How can you look into her face and not see him? How can you not think of … of … of …”

  “I don’t think of that. Axane, I don’t judge her, and I don’t judge you. Why should I, when you judge yourself so harshly?” She drew in her breath, turned her face away. “You know that, just as you know I love Chokyi. As you know I love you.”

  “Oh, Gyalo.” Her voice cracked. “I’m sorry.”

  “My love, I understand.”

  “I should have told you about the Dreams. But I didn’t want to speak of him. I didn’t want to say his name. I’m so happy, with you and Chokyi, but I feel … sometimes I feel I must be imagining it all, and any minute I’ll look around and none of it will
be true. I feel that if I stop paying attention, it’ll all turn to smoke and blow away, and I’ll be in the Burning Land again, with him …”

  Gyalo pushed himself off his cushion and went to her. She clutched the fabric of his shirt and buried her face in his shoulder. “This is real,” he said into her hair. “It can’t vanish. Do you believe me?”

  Against his shoulder, she nodded.

  “No more secrets, Axane. Promise me. When you dream him, you must tell me. This is our burden, both of us together.”

  “I promise,” she whispered.

  He tightened his arms around her and closed his eyes against her light, breathing her in. If, when he was still a vowed ratist, he had been asked whether he regretted renouncing a life like the one he now lived, he would in all honesty have said no. Though he had struggled sometimes with the celibacy his religious service required, he had never felt any great grief, as some of his colleagues did, to be barred from the secular comforts of marriage and family. But that was only because he had not understood. He still did not entirely comprehend how to live this new life of his, which often seemed like a complicated city whose streets he would never fully know, whose turns and junctions could not be anticipated, but only chosen, one by one, as he encountered them. Yet for every blind alley, for every wrong turning, there was this simple wonder: the weight of another’s body, the cage of another’s arms. Far more precious to him, perhaps, than to someone who had not discovered them so late.

  “Do you think,” he said softly after a time, “that he may actually have come to believe himself the Next Messenger?”

  “No.” He felt her voice against his chest. “To blaspheme against the god he rejected. To come as a counterfeit Messenger to Galea, as he thinks you came as a counterfeit Messenger to Refuge. To destroy the Brethren, as they destroyed our people. He must not just be false, but know himself as false. It won’t be the proper revenge otherwise.”