“Momi.” Kantu touched a frizzled tendril of her hair, and the Rokka Mama shuddered again, like an earthquake of the bones. “We can’t run any more, momi. We must go to him.”
Kantu had one strong memory of her father. The rest she had built patchwork, like Mikiel’s wings, out of things the Rokka Mama had told her.
The memory was this. She was nearly five and the joy of the Shiprock. She was let to run loose wherever her dimpled limbs could carry her, and it was general knowledge that, like a cat, she followed the sun, to play in its rays or nap in its warmth at whim. When her father was at the Shiprock, she followed him, for the sun rose in his ankle and set in his eyebrow. Momi said so. Everyone said so.
Momi was father’s thirteenth wife and his favorite. The Fa kept her bed-night sacred, shared with no other wife, and Tesserree was at his side most every day, his best friend and confidante. One night a week the Fa took a rest from his conjugal duties, and this night, too, he spent at Tesserree’s side. Often Kantu joined them on the Fa’s enormous bed, as they read to each other, or talked softly over palace matters.
The other Modest Women did not grudge Tesserree the Fa’s partiality. Rather, they came to her for counsel, to mediate domestic squabbles before they escalated into feuds, or for comfort when they missed their families and homelands. Tesserree was Mother to all the Shiprock, it seemed, but never less than Kantu’s own momi.
One evening, perhaps for the first time, Kantu found herself alone with the Fa her father. It was sunset, and they were standing on the roof of the Shiprock, overlooking all of Sanis Al. They saw the golden domes of her father’s palace, the graceful arches and promenades and flowering towers of the city, the painted rooftops, the warm white stucco, the rainbow mosaics tiling every sidewalk and street. Best of all, running through the city and out into the distance, were the Mighty Rivers Anisaaht and Kannerak, Serpents in the Thundergod’s Claws, which brought fertility and abundance to the Red Crescent.
“Do you like what you see, pili?”
Kantu smiled up at him. Momi was taller than the Fa, but he was as large as the sky. His face was painted gold like the sun, and his eyes were deep and black as night.
“It is yours. It belongs to you, as your godright. And you belong to it. Do you know why?”
Kantu nodded, bringing her right hand to her left breast. Beneath her thin cotton shift, a red handprint burned across her skin, where the god had touched her in momi’s womb. The Fa had a mark very like it on his face, beneath all the gilding.
“You are my daughter,” he said, “my beloved daughter. That mark sets you apart. Had you been born my son…” Here his voice frayed into sadness, and he looked away from her, across the scarlet sands.
“But you are better than a son,” he said. “For if you were my son, you would be mortal, destined to bear the heavy mantle of mortality on your shoulders, the weight of living and loving and knowing that all good will sift from your fingers like sand. Had you been a boy, at the hour of your birth, I, the Fa, would have died, and passed like breath between your lips and lived again in you. She who had been your wife would become your mother, and you would have no father but yourself. From that hour to the birth of your heir, you would rule as Fa. Alone.”
“But I am not a boy!” exclaimed Kantu. This she knew, and she was proud of it.
“No,” he said, smiling a little, at last. “You are my beloved daughter. You are our hope, and you shall be our god. Do you understand?”
Again Kantu nodded, although she did not.
“In another month, on your birthday…”
Kantu held up five fingers, like the handprint on her chest.
“Yes, my love, when you turn five years old, we shall stand here, on the roof of the Shiprock, which is the tallest point of Sanis Al, and you shall fly.”
The Shiprock jutted from the sands, like a stone ship with stone wings, as if it had been abandoned by colossal seafarers in the days when Sanis Al was a kingdom of merpeople and Bellisaar still an ocean. The volcanic breccia and igneous rock that composed the formation had been hollowed out and reinforced over the centuries by the mason-artisans of Sanis Al, and now the stone was home to the Fa’s hundred wives, their servants, and the Army of Childless Men who guarded them. Kantu loved the Shiprock, loved her desert, loved her father, and she took his slender brown hand and kissed it.
For one warm and splendid moment, his hand rested on her head. Then he squatted down, which he had never done before, to be eye to eye with her.
“Kantu,” he said, “what I am about to say is most important. On the day of your birthday, you must come to this great height willing to fly. You must say to yourself, and to me, and to all the people who will be waiting below: This is my choice. This is my will. My life for yours. My blood for rain. Repeat that.”
Kantu did. She said it until he knew she had memorized it.
“And so,” sighed the Fa, “your sacrifice saves us all.”
Not long after that, momi came up and joined them. She kissed the Fa and smiled at him, kissed and smiled at Kantu, chatted lightly about the lustrous wheel of sunset, about the first shimmering constellations and the stories told of them, about nothing much at all.
But Kantu saw, hidden in the folds of her robes, how momi’s fists were clenched like stones.
Every Bird Person who could still walk ascended with Kantu and the Rokka Mama to the surface of Rok Moris. Crizion went before them, the blue nimbus that crowned her lighting the way.
With the effortlessness of a shadow, Mikiel slipped in next to Kantu, saying in her deceptively mild way, “So the Fa’s some kind of demonic ventriloquist, is he? Tough luck on Crizion.”
But Kantu, whose fear and weariness had rubbed her nerves to screaming sensitivity, caught the shark’s glint in Mikiel’s eye as she gazed at Crizion’s unprotected back. It reflected the razored steel in her hand.
“No, Mikiel,” Kantu said quietly. “It won’t hurt him, but it will kill her.”
“She might thank me.”
Mikiel’s pitiless whisper did not carry, but Crizion turned her head. She turned it, and kept turning it, until one degree further would snap her cervical vertebrae for certain, and Crizion said nothing, but something screamed beneath the blue-eaten fires of her eyes.
The knife clattered to the ground.
The Bird People marched with Kantu and the Rokka Mama, once again driven from their sanctuary. The walking wounded bore nothing but their anguish. Others carried carpet rolls upon their backs. The carpets whispered to one another, rippling like wind things, like water things. Some Bird People carried those who could not walk but who would not be left behind. Only a few remained in the tunnels, with heartsick volunteers to tend them.
When the Rokka Mama had tried to convince everyone to stay, that the coming exchange was nothing to them, Manuway stopped her.
“We have followed you for twenty years, Rokka Mama,” he said. “Do not forget—this city is ours, and you were born of it, long before you became wife to a god.”
And mother of one, Kantu thought. Then—not yet.
Men awaited them on the mounds of Paupers’ Grave. Hundreds of men, Childless Men, dressed in their vests of white bone, their red tunics that bared shoulder and knee, their sandals that laced up the legs. These were the sons of the Fa, and the sons of the Fa before him, all those who had been born without the red handprint marking him heir to the god-right. These sons had been given to drink a potion at their comings-of-age which rendered them impotent, they might never bear rogue wizard offspring in the fullness of manhood. They were at that time sent from their mothers to be trained at the barracks of the Shiprock.