“There is enough fighting in this world,” Chowdry replied sadly in Seliu. “I learned that from you, and from Utavi before you. We will not be taking up arms, or hiring others to do so for us.”
“Then you will not long keep a temple treasury,” I growled in the same language. Idiots. Nonviolence never solved anything. Then, in Petraean: “Who were they?”
Chowdry glanced at Ponce. The young man wiped his eyes. “Petraeans, not Seliu.”
That I had seen for myself, though the cowards had not stood to the test. And besides, Selistani was the people, Seliu was the language, but I did not trouble to correct him then. How did he not know this?
Ponce continued: “They came with weapons and demanded to see all the dark-skinned w-women. When one of the girls, Amitra, scratched at them, they killed her.”
“Me.” I was aghast. “They were searching for me.” And a girl had died for it. Who, though? Surali would have sent Street Guild, or maybe even the Prince’s peacocks. The Interim Council would have dispatched men from Lampet’s new regiment. My list of enemies was not so long-this left Blackblood. I made a serious error of thinking then, one that I have regretted ever since. I assumed that the god had made another play! Even while he’d sent Skinless for me. The late Pater Primus might have done such a thing, and I suppose in the heat of the moment I confused the priest’s tactics with the god’s.
I could see only my fear for my child, my fear of being taken by the gods, my revulsion at the death of an innocent in my place. I could not see what was really happening.
Thoughtless rage replaced my sick horror. I could feel it boiling within me. I was never giving this child up to anyone. Not if I had to carry her beyond the farthest horizon to keep her safe. Or kill everyone in this city.
“Yes.” Chowdry stared at the knife still in my hand. The tip was weaving in tight circles now, lusting for guilty flesh to plunge into. “You should find a different path.”
He was right. I could not simply fight my way out of this. Such a strategy had never worked so well in the past, though I was not ashamed of some of my victims. The Pater Primus, for example. Or the Duke himself. I had slain others for pride or for fear, rather than necessity or the greater good. Killing was an easy habit to fall into, especially if one’s conscience had already been burned away.
I was a mother now. I needed to think differently. No longer could I just be a storm of swords. Resheathing my knife, I took a deep breath and prayed to the Lily Goddess.
I know You cannot hear me so far across the water. I know I abandoned You, and that You sent me away. But still You are a mother. I need a mother’s wisdom now. Not an assassin’s instincts. Please. Guide me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was touched with a deeper calm. Not the peace of the High Hills, but at least my boiling rage had leached away. I felt slightly sick. A weakness had taken my muscles.
“If you and the god Endurance will allow me to do so,” I said, “I would like to see to the dead. Her life was taken in my name.”
In fact, two lives were taken in my name. Spite, misplaced vengeance, or someone’s idea of a warning, I could not say. And it did not matter.
Amitra was a young woman, barely older than I. Her skin was a rich and lovely brown much as my own. Her eyebrows were fiercely dark, a cloud upon her pretty face. When I reached to press her eyes closed, their deep amber was already tinged with a milky dullness. She was forever young now.
Ponce and the others had laid her out in the middle of the foundation project. The other girl, Nitsa, was placed next to her. Nitsa would have been a solid woman, already thicker-bodied than I, and with a paler cast of skin. Only a fool would have mistaken her for me.
The side of Nitsa’s face was crushed and her neck broken, from the blow of a heavy stick swung hard. Or perhaps a mallet. I traced the wounds. The dark, thickened blood stained my fingertips. She must have died in the moment, for there was not so much of it.
Amitra had been struck down with a blade. Her shoulder was gashed open. That would be the first blow. I imagined the assailant, some brute with money in his pocket and a target on his mind. One of the old Ducal Guard, perhaps, who hadn’t been taken up by Lampet’s new thugs. It was rumored they were behind much of the street crime now. He’d followed up the first blow by stabbing her in the throat, probably to silence her screams. She’d died bloody, which meant slow enough to feel the pain and terror.
“I will wash the bodies now,” I announced. “I will need white clay and red.”
Chowdry knew what I was about, as would any Selistani who was from the eastern portions of our native land, or who had lived among the Bhopuri for a while. This was what my people did. I remembered just a little from my grandmother’s funeral, before I was taken, and I had learned more during my time in the Temple of the Silver Lily at Kalimpura. The rest of Selistan considered us Bhopuri to be silly peasants, with our cloaks of bells and our sky burials and our huts amid the paddies, but this was the bottom of who I was.
Though I had laid aside my anger and the violence that quivered within its grip, everyone around me scrambled to my bidding as if murder were still in my eye. That was fine with me. I wanted obedience right now far more than I wanted argument.
First I removed Amitra’s robes, and washed her body with a strip of linen torn from their hem. There were rites and blessings that should be said, though I did not know many of the words. But I knew that everyone needed to be helped from the world if they could. I had even made a prayer for my bandit, the third person I’d killed with my own hands, after Mistress Tirelle and the Duke.
It was only fit that I do far more here.
She had been lithe and pretty, this woman. Her skin was already cold and her body stiff. That spark which makes a person sensual or beautiful was fled from this cooling meat. Still, I could see her as she had been in life. I wondered if Amitra had come on one of the ships. Or if her family had lived here awhile as merchants. Traders perhaps?
I had no need to ask. The girl would tell me whatever stories she had.
Wordlessly I prayed to both Endurance and the Lily Goddess as I wiped Amitra’s hurts and cleaned the grime of work from her hands and feet. She had tiny bruises along her breasts, lover’s nips. I was glad she had embraced that part of life before she died.
When she was clean, I covered her over with her robes, except for her face. Then I took a bowl of white clay someone had laid down as I worked. It was already properly mixed with water to form a paste. I painted over Amitra’s face, preparing her for whatever the white prepared a body for when the soul had left it. I had been told at the Temple of the Silver Lily that this was how the ancestors would know their own, taking her for the ghost she was. I had never been certain if this was a true belief or a jest at the expense of peasant ignorance.
The red I took to paint dots across her forehead, her nose and lips and chin. Drops of the blood of life, kisses of the gods, offerings to the demons to let her pass the gates of the hells unharmed. Again, the reason was of no matter. That was simply what was done.
Then I did the same for Nitsa. Her body was solid and hard, not so fat as I’d thought when I’d first seen her collapsed in her bloody robes. I could do little to hide her wounds, but I cleaned them as well. That took a great while. Her fingers were long and slender for a woman of her build, and strange little calluses on the pads made me wonder if she’d played an instrument. Had lovers danced to this one’s music?
In time I covered her over and painted her with the white and the red. I used the clay to smooth the depression in Nitsa’s temple, so her face would be even when she met her mothers.
There were no sky burials here. Endurance was in a very real sense a Bhopuri god, but Copper Downs had no such towers, nor the servant birds that came to clean away the flesh and polish the bones laid atop them.