The desert was called Shunkare in the tongue of the merchants—one I did not yet know, and was unlikely to learn, traveling alone except for my horse—and it was made of dust, fine as silk and permeable as water. Save for the few days of the year when the rains came, the air burned to breathe and carried dust into the lungs, slaying the unwise and unmasked slowly and painfully while it painted the sky in streaks of violet with each rising and setting of the sun. As I set out from the oasis, I could see for miles: endless drifts of fine sand, carved by flooding and dried in place, like a frozen white sea.
West, then—as the river turned away toward the sea, and the distant peak of Mount Abora faded into memory, I pursued the setting sun through monsoon-flooded lowlands. Somewhere far to the north lay Phyreios, sleeping quietly under the watchful eye of its god, the mines empty and quiet; farther still stood the land of my birth, winter spreading over it like a cloak.
Word had spread from house to house while I was away from the village, and by the time I returned, a small crowd had formed beside the rope bridge, watching for Taherah’s strange visitor to return. I was accustomed to being a stranger, having spent so long away from my people, but their stares gave me pause. Khalim had looked at me in much the same way, when first we met, with guileless, wide-eyed curiosity. You’re a long way from home, he had said, and now I was even farther. My chest ached, and I considered turning back to the forest, but I pressed on.
The river-folk were a tall people, but I was half again as broad as the young farmers, with blue spirals tattooed on my paler skin. Dressed in the borrowed clothing of Hamilcar’s crew, I was a strange sight indeed—and I had arrived on horseback, with news of the faraway city that none of them had ever seen. They looked at me without judgment, but I felt heat rise to my face nonetheless.
Sala broke away from the group and met me halfway across the bridge. He offered to help carry the burden of the deer, but I refused. I had brought it this far.
“We have enough food for a single traveler,” Sala told me, echoing Taherah’s words from early that morning. “You need not have gone to all this trouble.”
“I’m happy to do it,” I said. A sudden fear struck me as I adjusted the weight of the carcass, and I asked, “Is it not permitted to hunt the deer?” I knew little of their gods and the commandments they might have given. Khalim had eaten no flesh, but that was a peculiarity of his own.
Sala smiled and shook his head. “Not at all. But you are a guest. I would not have it said that Nagara treats its guests so poorly.”
I assured him that I would say no such thing. “I only wanted to repay your hospitality,” I said.
“Then we shall hold a feast in your honor,” said Sala, “and in honor of Khalim.”
Sala believed Khalim was dead. Taherah was the only one to whom I had told the long tale, and she was not among those gathered by the bridge. Would she tell them, when the wound of her loss had begun to heal? Would she cast me as a madman in her retelling, a fanatic who beat his fists uselessly against the barrier between life and death, surely to call down the wrath of every god who took notice of him? I hoped not, but I could not convince her otherwise, if that was how she perceived me. It was only through careful focus and determination—delusion, perhaps—that I did not see myself the same way.
Two gray-haired women took the deer from me without so much as asking, lifting it from my shoulders and taking it away to be butchered. My part in this was done, and I was to get out of the way.
I returned to Bran, tethered outside Taherah’s door, and cared for him in the way that Aysulu had taught me, so long ago. I brushed his coat from his ears to his tail, and checked his hooves for stones and his iron shoes for damage. We had traveled for so long in lands with no horses, and the metal was wearing down, and the leather of his harness was deteriorating from use and humidity, cracking at the joints and the places where my hands wore it down. It would be some months before I could find a proper replacement.
Bran was healthy enough, and he’d had a feast of his own of the tall green grass that grew around Taherah’s house. A small pile of rice stalks lay beside the path, at the far reach of his tether, and a small girl in a sky-blue dress left another handful, watching Bran and me with huge, dark eyes. I beckoned her closer, my hand on Bran’s neck, but she turned and ran into the second house on the left side of the path.
In Taherah’s house, the rhythm of her loom continued at a frantic pace, as though weaving could drive out grief by force and speed. Though she would leave it if I entered, and feed me if I asked, I knew I would not truly be welcome. Perhaps she would feel differently by evening, or perhaps I would find a different place to sleep. I intended to depart soon; in the morning if I could be ready.
I would not become ready to leave Nagara by waiting outside Taherah’s door. As the air filled with the smell of smoke and spices, I went to find Sala again. When I found him, directing several adolescents in the placement of a long table. The earth had turned to mud, and had only just begun to dry after half a day of sun, and finding stable ground was a delicate matter.
I asked if I could help, but I arrived just as the table thudded to the ground, rocked once, and was still.
“No need,” Sala told me. “There will be more things to carry later. You traveled for many days to reach us. You should rest.”
It had been several weeks—or, from another view, it had been more than two years—but I did not correct him. Instead, I said, “If you have the time, I would like to hear all that you remember about Khalim.”
Sala paused, and a troubled frown creased his heavy brow. He was solidly built, his arms thickened and knotted by years at the forge, though he reported his hammer had lain all but still for the past several months. Nagara’s meager supply of iron came, by way of desert caravans and river boats, from the mines of Phyreios. The villagers used very little, only enough for the heads of their plows and the blades of their hunting knives. They forged no weapons of war.
“I’m not sure what I can tell you that couldn’t be better told by Taherah,” Sala said, “but I will say what I can. I offered to marry her, after her husband died, and raise the child as my own, but she refused me as she did all the others. It was nearly six summers before Khalim spoke at all, and then, only to his mother—we all thought the plague had affected his mind while Taherah carried him, but it wasn’t that at all. He did not speak because he was listening.”
He showed me his arm, where faint white scarring dappled his skin from his elbow to his wrist. “I was burned down to the bone,” he explained. “It was an accident. Red-hot iron. Thanks to Khalim, this is all that remains; this, and the memory. He was nine, I think. By then, he was talking to anyone, but he was always quiet.”
I thanked him, and he left for the storehouse, to fetch sacks of last year’s rice for the feast. Though I stood still and had undergone no exertion, my pulse raced and my chest tightened. The desire to flee the village, and warn the others that something terrible was about to occur so they could escape as well, flooded my vision, and I could see nothing but the road up the hill.
I closed my eyes and covered them with one hand, and I breathed in the heavy, pungent air until my heart had slowed to near its usual pace. I had a better grasp on my fear, but yet it remained, as though a weapon that had wounded me had left a fragment of metal behind.
It was only as I opened my eyes again, and was surprised to find flooded fields and small houses with heavy, overhanging roofs instead of tents and a wooden palisade, that I understood what had happened to me. I had helped with the preparations for a feast two years ago, on the side of the Iron Mountain, after my companions and I had driven away the tribe of reavers the Ascended had sent to smash our defenses and remove us from their sight. We had celebrated into the night, until an earthquake passed through the mountain and signaled the beginning of the end, and the god Torr spoke through Khalim for the first time. Standing here, in the center of a village six months’ journey from that place, I feared the arrival of another calamity.
I could keep the memory from creeping into the present, now that I had identified it, but it remained in my mind like a shadow over the sun, dark and untouchable.
In an effort to turn my thoughts elsewhere, I entered the largest building in the village, from whence smoke and the smell of cooking meat poured into the wet air and across the fields. It was twice as large as Taherah’s house, and it stood away from the river—the last house on the way into the forest.
Heat washed over me as I entered the curtained door. Inside, the shadowed figures of four women and two men moved in a faint haze of smoke. A low, wide fire smoldered underneath a huge ceramic basin. The meat I had brought could only be a small part of what bubbled tantalizingly within. It was enough food to feed a town twice the size of Nagara.
Hunger overtook my chagrin at the relative insignificance of my offering, and I asked what I could do to help, and so I spent the next hour standing beside a steaming clay oven, adding and removing discs of flat bread as they baked. Soon, my sweat-drenched arms were streaked with flour and ash.
The woman who handed me the dough had once been the village midwife, she told me, though she had passed on the title to another woman five years ago. Khalim, being a young man, had not been permitted to work with her except in the most dire of circumstances, when mother or child were certain to die without his help. She told me a story that Khalim had told me, that night on the mountain, of a baby born breathless and blue that he had restored to life. He had called it the greatest thing he had ever done.
That story gave rise to another, as a young woman beside the cooking pot told of an ox with a broken leg that Khalim had restored, and one of the men added a tale of his small son falling out of a tree. The people of Nagara remembered Khalim as a healer, and nothing else. How could they do otherwise, when he shared so little of his own thoughts?
I sat beside Taherah as the feast was served in the late afternoon, when the sun turned the fields to liquid amber and a cool wind promised more rain. She ate little, and she kept her head bowed.
“Will you be leaving, then?” she asked.
I nodded. “Soon. Perhaps tomorrow. I have a long journey ahead of me.”
She considered that for a long moment, and then said, “Do you remember what you promised me, yesterday evening?”
“That I will tell him that you love him,” I said, “that he did the best he could, and that you are sorry for not sparing him.” I remembered it well. I would carry it with me as long as I lived.
“You would be welcome, if ever you were to return to Nagara,” she told me.
I knew that already, just as I knew that I would never see her again.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded of the stag. “Will you take me to Khalim?”
Gnarled, gray trees pressed in around me. Making my way through them was like shouldering a path through a crowd of people. The bark yielded to my efforts like flesh, but it was cold as death—cold as a Northern winter. I drew my hand back in surprise. Crumbling brown leaves littered the ground beneath my feet, and above, a sickly, yellow-green sky cast eerie light on a lattice of gray branches.
Despite having spoken before, the stag gave me no answer. It walked with heavy footsteps as the trees parted before it, not even turning its oak-crowned head to acknowledge me.
The rest of the tale of the falling star I knew already. It had landed near Phyreios, in the form of a lump of enchanted iron, and the Ascended had forged it into the Sword of Heaven, the tool of their own destruction. They could no more resist the will of Khalim’s god than he could, as much as they tried. It was only by Torr’s volition that the sword now lay safely among the other treasures beneath the mountain where the dragon made its home.
What could I do in the face of a destiny already preordained? Seven gods had failed even to prevent the creation of the Sword of Heaven and the arrival of their former master to the city they ruled, even carried as he was by one man crossing the wastes on foot. A sandstorm, a single arrow, a knife in the dark, or some slight injury to their forge could have sent Torr back to the nether world for another thousand years. Instead, he walked the new streets of Phyreios with an iron crown on his head, and Khalim was gone.
Taherah stared into the fire, and two burning points reflected in her eyes, but she saw nothing. It was as though she gone far away, and left her body behind to stir her copper pot and keep my sad company.
The man who greeted me at the bridge gave his name as Sala and his profession as the village smith, though Nagara had not seen a new shipment of iron for many months. I feared the great mine of Phyreios had not yet reopened, and that it perhaps never would, but Sala had no way of knowing what occurred on the other side of the rust-red desert, and I would not press him for answers that he would not possess. The less I knew of Phyreios, the better I could focus on the task before me.
Though I had sailed many miles and walked for four long weeks to reach this place, a terrible dread came over me in place of my anticipated relief. Sala’s face was grim, his brows heavy and his mouth a thin line. I had brought this quiet village the news it had feared for two long years, that their favored son would not return.
For four weeks I journeyed through those mountains, in the shadow of the sacred peak of Abora. At its top, the villagers among the cliffs told me, was the shrine of the great serpent-god, the wisest and craftiest of all the ancient beings that had once built cities in the highest reaches, whose eyes were like rubies and whose feathered wings could blot out the sun. Each morning, sunlight blazed from behind the mountain, and I thought again of climbing it; by the time I had packed up my camp and saddled Bran again, the desire had burned away like fog. I returned to the road north and did not stop again until nightfall.
The sun set a little earlier each evening, and as I followed the pilgrim’s road, the forest turned from deep emerald to the yellow-brown of the kelp that grew in the warm waters of the south. From the highest places of the world to the bottom of the ocean, the turn of the seasons followed me. I had allowed my quest to stretch on for two years, and I was determined not to let another pass without Khalim by my side.
Fate, however, had other plans for me. Perhaps if I had sought the aid of the winged serpent of Mount Abora, my journey would have proceeded differently.
The Lady of Osona passed into the storm’s eye. Where there had been wailing wind and rain beating against my back, there was now an empty, yawning stillness. The ship rested lightly upon calm waters.
My hands had contorted into stiff, aching claws, and splinters dug into my palms and the exposed skin of my legs. I climbed down from the mast, forcing my limbs to stretch. My head spun; though the ship beneath me lay as if in a deep, dreamless sleep, I felt as though it would throw me into the sea. When my rope-burned feet reached the deck, I fell to my knees and shut my eyes, forcing myself to breathe evenly until rain brushed against my shoulders and the back of my neck once again.
The creature clung to Khalim’s back, breathing a quick, shallow rhythm against his neck. It was light as a bird, and its fingers ended in tiny, sharp talons, black and shiny as obsidian, that clicked together as it adjusted its hold on his shoulders. It was a meat-eating creature, Khalim guessed, based on the claws and its many pointed teeth—though maybe it didn’t eat anything. He hadn’t been hungry since his still-shaky memories of the world before the citadel, and there wasn’t anything identifiable to eat in this place even if he had been. He was lost, and so very cold, but the world beyond had not been as cruel as he’d feared.
The question remained, then, why someone would lay a trap to catch small creatures in the wood, if not to eat them. Its iron jaws could have easily closed on Khalim, had he been less fortunate. At the very least, he wouldn’t have starved to death before he freed himself.
“So,” he said. His voice was flat and muffled to his own ears, swallowed up by the forest. “Where are we going?”
We left the shallow seas and the sandy isles the following day, our ship heavy with provisions and our hearts light. We would sail north, Hamilcar said, and in a few short weeks we would find ourselves on the shores of a vast green country, the land that my Khalim had called home. It must have been a gentle land, I thought, one of soft rains and bountiful harvests. My homeland was harsh, and my people scratched out a living among the mountain stones and struggled with one another for everything we had, and it had made me a warrior. I feared I would be too much a stranger in a country that produced healers.
Space Whales Press 