“Thank you, Yemon. You may go.”
Queen Utuk’ku’s summons, of course, was the reason Viyeki had gone searching for solitude, and why he had been tempted into taking out the forbidden book. Although the poet was long, long dead, Shun’y’asu of Blue Spirit Peak had written in sorrowful yet dancing words of just such moments as this, of trying to choose between perfect duty and the importunities of conscience. Viyeki had stood atop such high and frightening places before, but he had never learned to like them.
This time his dilemma was a simple one, at least in its root: Viyeki had been summoned to the highest honor any Hikeda’ya could have, a meeting with Queen Utuk’ku, the immortal ruler of his people and mother of the race. But he did not want to go. In fact, the high magister had to admit to himself, he was afraid.
The messenger had arrived at the door only an hour before with the summons to the royal palace. It would be his first time waiting on the queen since she had awakened from the deep, decades-long sleep called keta yi’indra, and also his first time meeting her since he had been elevated to high magister of the Builders. The thought of the coming audience filled him with dread, in part because his loyalty to his old master Yaarike meant that Viyeki had kept secrets even from the palace itself. Viyeki had made difficult decisions during the years of the queen’s sleep, always trying to do what was best for his monarch and his people, but he knew as well as anyone that good faith and good intentions were no defense against the queen’s unhappiness. The pits in the Field of the Nameless were full of the scorched bones of those who had meant well but failed to please her.
He sighed and called out for a servant. Moments later a bent, older Hikeda’ya whose name Viyeki always had difficulty remembering crept in on silent, bare feet.
“Please remind Lady Khimabu that I am called to attend the queen herself at the evening bell, may she reign over us always,” Viyeki told him. “I do not know when I will return, because I will be at the disposal of the Mother of All, so please give my wife my most sincere regrets and bid her dine without me.”
The servant bowed and withdrew. The interruptions had long ago sent the birds swooping back up the shaft, so the pond was again still. For a moment Viyeki hoped he might calm his thoughts once more and try to find a measure of peace, but the garden now seemed corrupted, the shaft of falling light too harshly bright, the pond too shallow, as though the darkness that had been lurking in his heart since the summons now touched his eyes and ears as well.
Why do I fear the one who has given us so much? What is wrong with me that I cannot unreservedly love and trust our queen, who protects us against a world that hates us?
Viyeki could find no answer to that. He stood, straightened his clothing, and went in search of his mortal concubine, hoping that she had returned by now from the market outside the gates.
• • •
As they lay naked in her narrow bed, the great stone bell in the distant Temple of Martyrs tolled once for the mid-hour.
“I must rise again,” said Viyeki.
“I look forward to that.”
“Don’t be wicked, Tzoja. I am called to the queen.” But he did not wish to leave her embrace. Her warm skin against his seemed a sort of magic that defeated worry. How strange, he thought, that this mortal slave, this savage, short-lived creature from despised Rimmersgard, should be able to bring him peace when nothing and no one else could.
“Then you must go, of course,” she said. “Surely you won’t refuse?”
“Refuse?” Viyeki almost laughed, but the surprise of it was like a stumble while walking on a thin bridge above an abyss—even to be amused was to be reminded of the depths that yawned beneath him. “I know you are ignorant of many things, little mortal, but any other of my people would strike you for that. Refuse the queen? I might as well tear my heart out of my breast and step on it.”
“But surely you have nothing to fear from her, my great lord. While she slept, you have done everything she would wish and done it well.” Tzoja sat up a little, resting on one elbow, and her breasts settled against his arm. Viyeki reached out and let his finger trail across them. How innocent she was! And how little she knew of the thorny tangle that was life in the queen’s service. “Even I have done my part,” she said brightly. “Did I not provide her with a warrior for our great Order of Sacrifice?”
“Do not jest!”
Tzoja frowned. Her dark hair was disarranged and damp with sweat. She shook the strands out of her face. “I didn’t intend to, my lord. Together we made a daughter so clever and capable that she was chosen to be a Queen’s Talon at a younger age than any other. Your true wife cannot make such a claim—although she treats me as if she birthed Nezeru and I only order supper for you.”
“Enough,” said Viyeki. Why did everyone seek to trouble him today? “We will speak of this no longer. Our laws come from the Garden itself and are not to be disputed. If anyone hears you speak this way you will die in pain and there will be nothing I can do to save you.”
Tzoja fell silent. Viyeki nodded his approval. Mortals, even the cleverest ones, were like the birds of the meadows, chattering and piping at all hours. But this one still charmed him, he had to admit, even as the first signs of her mortality began to show on her face and body. Even in the brief bloom of her youth she had never possessed anything like the icy beauty of his wife Khimabu, but something in her had drawn him from the first. Tzoja’s youth was fading now, in the same way the end of summer taught the edges of the leaves to curl, but the thing that had drawn Viyeki—the thing that even now he could not name—still burned in her every glance, every movement.
Is it that mystery itself that fascinates me? he wondered. Or the terrifying pleasure of something stolen, something forbidden? After all, if any of his underlings saw him this way, talking freely with a mortal animal as if she were the equal of a Hikeda’ya, they would denounce him immediately.
Thus the problem with climbing to a great height, he thought, weary already, and with the true ordeal still ahead. All the more can look at you with envy, and the height of the waiting fall grows with each upward step.
He rose from her bed and began to dress.
“I will miss you, my lord,” she said. “My days are lonely.”
He ignored her. She always said such things after they coupled. He did not know how to respond, any more than he would if his warhorse or hunting owl should speak to him the same way.
When he had pulled his robe tight and belted it, Viyeki patted himself to make sure he carried no weapon or other implement forbidden to the queen’s visitors. He wholeheartedly approved this ban, but it also seemed a bit foolish: after all, who would be so mad as to dare attack Utuk’ku the Ever-Living? And not only because of the constant presence of her personal guards, the Queen’s Teeth, the finest warriors in Nakkiga. No, the most daunting of all Utuk’ku’s defenses was the queen herself. Nobody living could even guess at the limits of her power. The Hikeda’ya’s immortal monarch inspired the reverence of all her people, but she inspired fear as well and in even the most potent of her underlings.
Viyeki was still annoyed with Tzoja for her irresponsible questions; he left her rooms without the usual sentimental exchange she so valued.
• • •
The royal summoner’s torch bobbed before him, serving more as a ritual banner than a source of light. Trailed by his secretary Yemon and a small contingent of his household guards, Viyeki followed the messenger up the great open stairway toward the third tier and the palace, past the dimly glowing expanse of the White Gardens, which stood on a high stone island midway between the tiers. Viyeki had always found the fungus gardens soothing. Once he had even brought Tzoja to see them, but instead of understanding, his mortal concubine had been disturbed by the forest of snaking, dead-white stems, the delicately spreading fans and huge parasol caps that nodded in even the smallest shift of air. She had told Viyek
i they made her think of writhing worms in a shovel full of dark, moist earth, and had pressed him to take her out again after only a short time. He had been disappointed, almost irritated, at her inability to recognize the sublime beauty of the place, but Tzoja was only a mortal, after all. Small wonder she saw death and decay in everything.
Still, Viyeki would have given much to be walking in those gardens now, even with an unappreciative companion.
As the royal messenger led them upward, an almost imperceptible breeze lifted a cloud of spores that drifted to the summons party and swirled with every step they took. He found himself recalling what the poet Lu’uya had written about this very spot:
“When earthstar and snowtongue send up their seed, I walk the naked night, constellations dancing around my feet.”
More than a dozen Great Years had passed since Lu’uya’s death—almost eight mortal centuries—but what she had written of the White Garden was still true. The unchanging nature of Nakkiga was its greatest beauty.
As they drew closer and closer to the palace, uneasy thoughts followed Viyeki’s every step like Sun’y’asu’s beggars. He wanted to believe this summons was only part of ordinary protocol, the awakened queen summoning her highest ministers to an audience, but Viyeki knew that he had greater crimes on his conscience than simply reading forbidden verses.
He had colluded with his master Yaarike and others to hide the things they had done while Utuk’ku slept. What did it matter that they had acted for what they believed was the good of the Hikeda’ya people? The queen was not merely power, she was justice itself, the spirit and conscience of the race. How could he stand before her and not confess everything he had done or had even thought of doing? And if he did, how could his punishment be anything less than the end of honor and the utter destruction of himself and his family?
Breathe and grow calm, Viyeki sey-Enduya, he urged himself. You are a noble of the Hikeda’ya and a child of the sacred Garden. Even if death itself awaits you, do you wish to meet it like a cowering child?
High Celebrant Zuniyabe stepped up to meet him as Viyeki entered the palace’s front gate. At first it seemed an honor that ancient Zuniyabe had come himself instead of sending an underling, but today the masked high celebrant did not speak a word to Viyeki, only made a ritual gesture of respect before signing for him to follow. Viyeki showed no reaction to this ominous silence, of course, but only made a sign of assent and let the masked Zuniyabe lead him.
A guide through the royal palace was always necessary for visitors, although that guide was seldom anyone so elevated: the Omeiyo Hamakh was a maze in truth as well as in name, an unfathomably complicated puzzle of carved chambers and corridors, of slender bridges and apparently pointless staircases that led nowhere, a vast mystery that could never be untangled by chance alone. Only the highest Celebrants knew their way to the heart of the labyrinth where the queen waited.
As venerable Zuniyabe led him deeper and deeper into the maze, Viyeki could only think of who had summoned him, of who sat waiting at the heart of this web of stone. Utuk’ku the eldest, the Mother of All, the heart of our race. The honorifics he had learned in childhood presented themselves to his fretful mind, one after another. Wise beyond wisdom. Strong beyond strength. Immortal. All-Seeing.
At last they reached a corridor full of doors, each as plain and unprepossessing as the rest. Zuniyabe paused and laid his gloved hand on Viyeki’s sleeve. “Now I leave you,” said the High Celebrant, any expression hidden behind his ivory mask. He pointed to one of the doors. “She waits.” Zuniyabe made a courteous but abbreviated bow, then turned away.
For perhaps the half-dozenth time since leaving his house, Viyeki commended his soul to the Garden. Begone, beggars, he commanded the useless, plaguing thoughts as he opened the door and stepped through into shadows. Didn’t the old heroes say that one is only truly alive when death is close?
The darkness behind the door was not as complete as he had first thought. A single torch burned at the far end of a corridor of featureless stone, above a door as simple as the one he had just entered. For a moment he mistook the row of unmoving figures on either side of the hallway for statues, but then he saw they wore the unadorned, face-hiding helmets and snowy white armor of Utuk’ku’s personal guard, the Queen’s Teeth. These were no stone carvings; unmoving silence was their ordinary state.
Viyeki’s father Urayeki was a court artist, always sober and correct with his noble subjects but more high-spirited at home with his family, and on occasion almost fanciful. When Viyeki was a child his father told him that the Queen’s Teeth were actually the spirits of warriors who had fallen in the queen’s defense, their bravery earning them the privilege of guarding her for all eternity. Viyeki had eventually learned the truth, but the memory remained. And though they might not be spirits, none except for those in the highest precincts of the Maze and the Order of Sacrifice knew much about the Teeth, how they were chosen and trained, where in the great palace they were housed, or even any of their names. A drunken commander of Sacrifices had once told Viyeki that the queen’s elite guards surrendered their tongues to the knife during the ceremony when they donned their sacred helms of white witchwood.
What a world it must have been when witchwood was so plentiful, Viyeki thought as he passed between the rows of silent, helmeted sentries. Little of it still grew, and the sacred groves were now all but empty. Only the queen herself remains undying and unchanged. Everything else that belongs to the People falls away, grows slack, crumbles to dust . . .
As he reached the end of the corridor the door there opened, though none of the guards had moved and no one stood behind. Viyeki stepped across the threshold, back into space and light.
Faces. They were the first thing he saw, spread across every wall of the vast chamber and stretched across its ceiling as well—huge faces, some staring nobly, some grimacing in agony; and every face belonged to the same person. Viyeki had seen those features a thousand times on monuments and murals. He knew them as well as those of his own family. It was Drukhi the White Prince, the queen’s martyred son, who stared at him from all directions, most of the portraits rendered in srinyedu, a sacred weaving art that the Hikeda’ya had brought with them from the Garden, though even the tile floor displayed different moments of Drukhi’s foreshortened life. In the middle of the chamber, under the eyes of all those weeping, suffering Drukhis, a spherical, filigree frame surrounded a massive bed, both supported by a single plinth of black stone. And at the center of the bed, like an egg waiting on a nest, sat the silver-masked form of Utuk’ku herself.
Viyeki was in the queen’s own state bedchamber.
Shocked nearly witless by this realization, he dropped to his knees so quickly that he hurt himself against the hard floor, then pressed his head down on his hands in a pose of utter subjugation. He waited, eyes closed, but when someone finally spoke, the voice was not the queen’s.
“Greetings, High Magister Viyeki. You are welcomed into the presence of the Mother of the People.”
Still face down, Viyeki clenched his teeth. He knew those harsh tones all too well, and he did not like hearing them now. What was Akhenabi doing here, alone of all the queen’s ministers?
“Her majesty speaks, and we all obey,” Viyeki replied carefully. “Her majesty spoke and I obeyed.”
“Rise, Magister,” said the Lord of Song. “No need for excessive ceremony. The queen does not wish it.”
“All thanks to the Mother of the People,” he said, “and thanks to you for your welcome as well, Lord Akhenabi.” Viyeki climbed to his feet but still avoided looking too directly at the slender, shrouded white figure on the great bed. The high magister of all Singers made an easier, if more unpleasant, object for his attention.
“You may address the queen,” Akhenabi instructed him, as though Viyeki were some new-minted acolyte. “You are permitted.”
It was all Viyeki could do
to turn toward his ruler, though he still could not gaze at her directly. His heart was racing like a stone bounding downhill. He had been elevated to high magister during her long sleep, and had never met her face to face. He had not thought he would be so overwhelmed by the queen’s presence, but every childhood story, every bit of his people’s long history under her rule, had suddenly risen inside him like a flood and swept away his other thoughts. What did it matter what he believed or intended? Viyeki’s entire existence belonged to the mind behind that shining, imperturbable silver mask; his life was utterly hers. How could it ever be otherwise?
Still, he could not help noticing that the Mother of All seemed a surprisingly small figure in the great bed with its spherical canopy of filigreed witchwood. Despite its great size, the canopy was as delicate as fine jewelry, as boldly beautiful as a ring of ice around the moon. Viyeki realized after a little discreet study that it was meant to resemble the porous casing around a witchwood kernel. And by that shape, he then realized, the canopy announced that the queen herself was the kei-in, the holy witchwood seed from which everything else sprang—the beginning of the Hikeda’ya people, as well as the source of all their race’s gifts. Small wonder this was where she held audiences with her servitors.
That seed of all growth, the ageless queen, reclined on cushions in the center of the bed, her lower half covered by blankets. As always, Utuk’ku wore mourning colors—gown and gloves and hooded cloak of icy white—but the eyes that stared at him from the holes in her shining mask were as dark as the emptiness between stars.
She was staring at him, Viyeki abruptly realized—and he was staring back at the Mother of the People. Horrified by this accidental effrontery, he pressed his forehead against the tiles once more. “I offer the Garden a thousand thanks every day that you have returned to us, Majesty.”
An ivory mantis in a cage on the queen’s nightstand turned its head at Viyeki’s sudden movement, then resumed cleaning itself. The silence stretched. At last he looked up, stilling the urge to blurt out more praise and more thanks, because that would suggest weakness or guilt, both bad things to show before the queen. At last Utuk’ku nodded, a tiny dip of the head that was the first movement he had seen from her. Her words, when they came, were not spoken from her mouth, but leaped directly into his thoughts like molten metal poured into his ears, abrupt, shocking, and painful.