Nijiri snorted. “He allowed you to stop him, to save yours.”
“What?”
He gestured around at the crowd, which had begun to murmur and shift, anguish and anger on many faces. “Look at these people, Speaker. They are Hananja’s faithful and they came to see Her highest Servant. If those guards had attacked him, do you think any force short of the gods themselves could have stopped their wrath?”
She stumbled to a halt. He kept walking, too angry to care whether the crowd closed in and tore her apart in that moment. But he heard her sandals clap on the stones behind him as she jogged to catch up, and reluctantly he forced himself to think of his mother, as Ehiru had taught him. That cooled his anger, and he slowed down for her.
“It would seem I’ve spent too many years studying foreigners and not enough with my own people,” she said, sounding chagrined. He took it for her version of an apology. “You see them more clearly than I.”
“People everywhere are the same.”
“All people except him.” From the corner of his eye he saw her nod toward Ehiru’s back.
Nijiri smiled, lifting his head proudly. “True. All people except him.”
Following along in Ehiru’s wake, they passed through the last of the crowd and returned to Sunandi’s house.
32
It is the sound of screaming that wakes the child Ehiru.
For a moment he lies on his bed, listening to the chorus of his brothers’ breath and wondering if the sound is the remnant of some dream. But he dismisses that thought, for he never forgets his dreams, and just a moment before he was skimming above the greenlands near Kite-iyan. There were no screams then, just the hollow rush of the wind and the pennant-flap of his loindrapes. He remembers the tickling caress of barley hairs against his skin, the fermenting smell of hot mud in the irrigation canals, the sun on his back, the sere blue sky. In the past he has dived into the mud to see what it feels like. Once it tried to drown him, but he is a proper child of Gujaareh. He proclaimed his soulname—I AM NSHA—and took hold of the dream so that the mud became like the womb he remembers only when he is asleep, harmless and enveloping and profoundly comforting.
But now the dream is gone and he lies in the real world, where he is just a little boy and his heart is full of sudden fear.
He sits up; several of his brothers do the same. This is the chamber where the youngest of the Prince’s sons sleep. Tehemau has seen seven floods of the river and is oldest, but it is Ehiru to whom the other boys look. He is only five, and does not understand that they see a peculiar wisdom in him; he merely accepts it. “Goddess-touched,” their tutors call it. “Blessed with the gift,” said the priest who came to Kite-iyan a few days before to examine him. He gave Ehiru a necklace with an intriguing pendant: an ovoid of polished obsidian etched with a stylized moontear. “Before forty days have passed you shall join us,” the priest told him then. “You are a child of the Hetawa now.” Ehiru knows this is foolish. He is the child of his mother, and the father he rarely sees but loves anyhow, and perhaps this Hananja of whom he has heard so much. But he fingers the pendant now and shivers as a flicker of foreboding moves through him.
Getting out of bed, he whispers to his brothers that they should find someplace to hide. He will go to see what is happening. Tehemau insists on accompanying him, mostly to save face. Ehiru nods even though Tehemau wets the bed and sometimes, after a nightmare, weeps like an infant. Ehiru wishes one of their older brothers were here—Eninket, who is kind and knows the best stories, or perhaps the warrior Tiyesset. But Tehemau’s presence will be a comfort, at least.
He and Tehemau slip into the corridor and run from one drape and flowering vase to another. Ahead is the solarium where usually they can find several of their mothers lounging on couches and cushions, chatting or playing dicing games, drawing letters or checking over figuring scrolls. A place of busy peace. Instead they find the aftermath of chaos—tables and couches overturned, cushions thrown to the floor, dice scattered. Tehemau starts to call out for his mother and Ehiru shushes him instinctively. They hear another scream nearby, followed by something stranger—sharp men’s voices, deeper and rougher than those of the eunuchs who normally serve in the Prince’s springtime palace. The palace guards are never allowed inside unless their father has come to visit. Is that what has happened? But if so then why do the men sound angry?
They peer around the corner and see:
Two of their mothers lie on the floor, unmoving, their fine clothing dark with spreading blood. Another cringes on a couch nearby, nearly gibbering as she asks why why why? The soldiers ignore her. They are arguing among themselves. One of them wants to spare her—“long enough to enjoy”—but the others are insisting that they follow orders. The argument ends abruptly when one of the men spits on the floor and thrusts his sword through the mother’s throat. She stops gibbering and stares at him in surprise, blood bubbling over her lips. Then she sags backward.
Tehemau screams. The soldiers see them.
Tehemau gets farther than Ehiru because his legs are longer. One soldier grabs Ehiru by his sidelock and yanks him backward so hard that his vision blurs; he cries out and falls. Fear slows all that follows. Through a haze of pain-tears he sees another soldier tackle Tehemau to the ground, cursing as the boy struggles wildly. When the soldier draws his knife it catches light from the colored lanterns. So does Tehemau’s blood, arcing forth and spreading over the marble after the soldier draws the knife across his throat.
Ehiru does not cry out—not even when the soldier dragging him stops and draws his own knife. It curves gracefully upward, casting blurred rainbows like the Dreaming Moon.
“Wait,” says one of the other men, catching the hand that holds the knife.
“I thought you wanted a woman?” laughs the one that holds Ehiru.
“No, look.” The soldier points and another makes an exclamation of surprise and Ehiru knows that they have seen the Hetawa’s pendant dangling around his neck.
“Take him to the captain,” says the first. The one holding him sheathes his knife and hauls Ehiru up by his hair.
“Try to escape and I’ll kill you anyway,” he says. Ehiru hears but does not respond. His eyes are locked on Tehemau, who has stopped moving now. Tehemau has wet himself again, Ehiru notices. Through the fear he feels sorrow, for wherever his soul has gone now, Tehemau is probably ashamed.
The soldiers drag Ehiru through the corridors where his mothers’ talk and music once echoed, intermingled with his siblings’ chatter and play. Now the corridors are filled with the sounds and smells of death. The scenes drift past slowly, like so many minstrel plays. In the corridor he sees several of his oldest brothers dead. Tiyesset lies facedown among them with a broken lantern pole in his hands, a warrior to the end. As they pass the atrium garden Ehiru can hear strange grunting sounds; through the leaves he sees one of his mothers struggling beneath a soldier who is hurting, but not killing, her. Ehiru’s soldiers see this and resume their bickering as they drag him along. They pass one of the girls’ sleeping chambers and there Ehiru sees many bodies. It was their screaming that woke Ehiru and his brothers.
At last they reach the grand hall. Here the soldiers stop before a man who wears more red and gold than they do. The man stoops to examine Ehiru’s pendant.