The Sacred Band

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I think I have names for the hounds,” Dariel said.

“What?” Birke lay beside him, the two of them staring at the stars, absurdly bright and numerous above them. “More colors? Flowers?”

Dariel nudged him with an elbow. He held a few of the odd, slimy plee-berries in his mouth, rolling them around on his tongue. He swallowed them and said, “When I was young, my father used to tell us stories. There was one about Bashar and Cashen.”

“The two cousins?”

“No, brothers. They were brothers.”

Birke made a skeptical noise low in his throat. “Bashar and Cashen were cousins. Bashar could throw lightning bolts, and Cashen was jealous of it. He roared every time Bashar showed off. He pounded on the earth and grumbled.”

Dariel said, “That’s not the way we tell it.”

“How does your way start?”

“Bashar and Cashen were two brothers. They had a great fight over power.”

“That would make more sense.”

“I always remembered that story. It scared me. I didn’t want to think of brothers fighting-not with the way I loved my brother. Anyway, later Aliver told me that the Santoth had explained that tale differently. He said Bashar and Cashen were not brothers. They were tribes, whole races of people. The friction between them was that of a world turning on itself. Once, though, they had been close. And they could be again. That’s what Aliver told me.”

Birke cleared his throat. “So Bashar and Cashen. Brothers or tribes or cousins… and now hounds?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Better than Scarlet and Blue, or whatever colors you were thinking of naming them.” Dariel reached over and jabbed him in the ribs with a finger. The motion brought one pup’s attention. Cashen, the reddish one, scurried between them, plopped his butt down, and sat waiting for something interesting to happen.

“Tell me your tale,” Birke said.

“Which version?”

“Both. Tell me both. I’ll judge them for myself.”

Dariel did so as best he could, hearing his father’s voice and taking on the cadence of it. He told both stories, and did not mind losing sleep that night. Tomorrow they would reach the Sky Isle. He would finally meet Yoen and the elders. For some reason, he felt he needed to be awake for as long as he could. He needed to sort through all the things Na Gamen had told him.

D ariel, I’ve been waiting for you, the Watcher said. At first I thought it might be a short wait. I thought our sins could not go long without punishment. And then, later, I began to doubt that you would come. There was no Giver, after all. Why should there be justice? There isn’t, but all things do come to pass. Just never in the ways that we imagine.

Yes, Dariel thought. They sat side by side in a dark, rectangular room now. The wall in front of them was blank. The floor bare, smooth stone. A river of air rushed from one side of the room to the other. Had Dariel to name the purpose of the room, he would have failed. Had they needed to speak words, they would have had to yell. Because they spoke directly to each other’s minds they conversed despite the roar of the air and the flapping of their garments. Na Gamen sat as if he did not notice it all. Dariel did the same, and it was almost true.

I want you to know how I came to be here. Why I waited for you. Look.

A magnificent palace appeared on the wall before them. Dariel saw it from high above, dizzying, as if he were somehow a bird on the wing. It lay like a lace scarf draped in serpentine curves across the high reaches of one of the barrier islands. So it looked from a distance. Closer, it was a flowing, molten structure similar to the Sky Mount, only sumptuous and alive in a way the mount was not. Gardens of trees sculpted by the wind into fantastic, eerie shapes. Fishponds and waterfalls and dining terraces cut into improbable promontories, with views of the sea and the other barrier isles, many with similar estates.

See this? This was my home for several hundred years. I adored it. I built it from nothing, first by my own labor, soon by the labor of others. I made something of a rock that had never known human habitation. I was proud. And I was angry. I hated Tinhadin as fiercely as any among us. I jumped at the opportunity to punish his people. For many years it was I who sorted the spirits that eat death. Do you know what that means?

No.

I chose which children would go into the soul catcher. Not all souls are strong enough for it. Some have a greater force within them than others. I learned to sense it. That became my work. I decided which children would give their lives in labor, and which would give their lives through the gift of the soul energy. I was good at this work, and I did horrible things because of it.

The things he did Dariel saw and felt, though for a time he did not hear the Watcher’s voice in his head. It was not just that the children were scared seven- and eight-year-olds, who had been stolen from their homes and families and taken across a vast ocean to a foreign land. It was not just that he sorted through them and decided which ones would receive a fate worse than death. Wasn’t being fed to the soul catcher worse than death? They lost their bodies. Their identity. They became the life fuel of strangers. They died, yet were reborn more completely as slaves to others than any that labored in the thread fields or as builders or farmers or served as fodder for military slaughter.

Not just the fact that he was responsible for this. He went further. For a time, he chose the children he would reserve for himself. Not all Lothan Aklun took souls into themselves, but he did. In his youth this was because he hungered for years and years of life in which to punish Tinhadin’s people. He did not care that one who accepts a soul inside himself loses the ability to father children. That did not matter, not when he could go on forever. He set his hands on the shoulders of child after child. He smiled in their faces and looked through their eyes and into them. If he truly liked what he saw, he had only to nod, or gesture with his fingers, and the child was his.

There is more.

With the passing of decades he aged. Physically, no, but still, he aged inside. His body stayed young, but as he passed the normal span of a long mortal life he began to forget his own childhood. The lack of it became a yawning chasm chasing him. His work grew harder. He felt different when he set his hands on children’s shoulders and looked into them. More and more often, his gaze lingered on their faces, on the small curves of their muscles and the lines of their collarbones. More and more, he found a beauty in their small, growing life.

One day, performing his duties as selector, he met a boy. Perhaps it would have happened with another boy or a girl. The next day or the week after or in a year’s time. It would have happened at some point, he now believed, but fate had it that it was this boy. Ebrahem, a Halaly boy from one of the tiny villages along the western coast of Talay. The boy gazed up at Na Gamen’s face with timorous, hungry, desperate hope. He had seen this expression a thousand times. All the boy’s hopes were there on his face. All his dreams written in the lines of his lips and the bushy flares of his eyebrows and in the uneven circlets of his nostrils. All the things he had left behind, all that would not be for him-the loved ones lost, the home he would never see again.

Na Gamen knew all these were there, things that he had always thought small, just punishments. Childish things that he recognized because in them he recognized himself. He had always understood them, and, understanding, he had found the strength to be cruel. But this time, written there… was nothing. Features like he had seen before, and yet this time he saw nothing but the boy himself.

L ater that night, after telling both his stories, Dariel could not find sleep. Birke lay flat on his back, snoring. Bashar sat beside him, studying the night. Cashen walked the patrol he had set up from their boulder down to the hollow where the others were and back again.

Nothing but the boy himself, Dariel thought. He remembered the boy’s face as if he had seen it with his own eyes. That face began to change Na Gamen from what he was into what he became. Dariel wondered if Val had seen the same thing on the night he found Dariel shivering and hopeless in a mountain shack in Senival. He had never considered the changes he created in his adopted father’s life. He had shied away from thoughts of himself. Perhaps he had changed Val. Maybe that was what he was telling him when he stayed behind to set the platforms ablaze.

“I’ve never forgiven you for that,” he whispered.

“For what?” Anira’s voice startled him. She had walked up behind Cashen and stood with her face shadowed. Her body, in silhouette, was muscularly feminine, strong as a man’s but contoured like the woman she was.

“You like seeking me out in the night?”

“Yes, I do. I hope you’re more vigilant when you’re on watch.”

“Sorry. My mind is elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere can be a good place to be,” she said. After studying him for a moment, she added, “Or not. Sometimes it’s better to be right here. Are you worried about tomorrow?”

“Should I be?”

“I used to be afraid of Yoen… when I was a child. When I grew up, I learned to love him. He’s gentle, wise. Deliberate. He’ll see through you if you lie to him. So don’t do that.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Then you’ve nothing to fear. Now, tonight, come swim with me. There’s a pool just down the ravine a little.”

“It’s too cold,” Dariel said.

“We can warm each other. Come.” She stretched a hand toward him.

C hildren are how we return to youth, Na Gamen had said. There is no other way. A span of years does not make one immortal. Children do .

That was why he selected that boy whose face told him nothing. He did not take the boy to the soul catcher. It took him some time to understand what was happening to him, but he knew it was not the boy’s soul he wanted. He did not want to steal his life. Instead, he watched him. The boy lived in his fabulous palace. Na Gamen let him explore it, fed him, had him cared for. He watched as the child lost his timidity and began to play. He marveled at the sound of his laughter, at the way he made stories in his head. He brought another boy to him. And then a girl.

There, in secret, I became the father that I couldn’t be. I raised child after child. For years upon years I thought nothing of it. It was simply my way, a kindness I did to my slaves, treating them as my children. That’s how I thought of it. In truth, it was more than that. I had forgotten my own childhood. Do you understand? I had forgotten part of what it means to be human. Without them, I would have lost my humanity entirely.

Na Gamen told of how much he loved to have them near. The vibrancy within them. The innocence. The capacity to heal and thrive no matter what the world threw at them. He gave those children the happiest lives he could. He gave to them-for increasingly it felt like he owed them and the other quota children a great debt-but they also gave to him. He watched them grow into men and women over and over again, and then grow old and die. In all of it he learned and relearned the natural order of life.

They made me human again, Na Gamen said. After all the wrongs I did to them, they made me human again.

Why did you walk away from that? Dariel asked. How did you end up here?

The Watcher’s ears flexed and rippled in the air currents. It took him some time to find the words to go on with. Eventually, his voice resumed inside Dariel’s head.

I had a network of swimming pools on the upper level of my palace. I didn’t swim in them myself. Hadn’t for hundreds of years. But the children did. One day I was lounging near the pools, at a short distance. There was a barrier. He divided the air in front of his face with the edge of his hand, squinting one eye closed. I could see the edge of the pool, but not the area just next to it. Two boys… I remember their names, but I’ll hold them inside me, if you don’t mind. Two boys would both run to the edge as if to jump in, but pull back at the last minute. I would just see them appear, sprinting suddenly at the edge, in motion and then skidding, arms wheeling around to stop them. One would tease the other. Plead to jump the next time. Again and again they did this. I wanted to call out to them to stop it. They might slip and crack their heads. The words were in my throat, but I couldn’t speak. They were so joyful-and I so afraid-that I couldn’t speak.

For a moment Na Gamen’s face was warm with the memory. Then the expression faded. And that was it.

What do you mean? What was it?

Watching them, I realized for the first time that I would die so that either of them could live. That’s what I thought: I would trade my life for either of theirs in an instant. And if that were so, what sense did it make for me to steal the lives of other children? What a crime. It all came to me at once. Not understanding our crimes. I had always done that. But the knowing. That was new. The horrible knowing. It was love, Dariel. I loved those children. I had loved all of them, from Ebrahem onward. I loved them as if they were part of me. Knowing that, I could no longer sort souls. I feared what became of the stolen souls once they died. Would they know peace? Would they understand who they were, or would they be trapped in between? I knew the answers, and I hated them.

Images poured into Dariel’s mind again. He watched Na Gamen speaking before an audience of the Lothan Aklun. They watched him with faces of sublime indifference as he implored them to stop the trade. He asked them to search in their hearts. They knew how wrong it was. They knew that the punishment of Tinhadin was hurting innocents and also making them into greater villains than the one they hated. He railed at them, but he could not change their course. He could not stop them. Their hatred was too deep. If they had looked into so many children’s souls-as he had-they might have understood, but they had not. They did not wish to listen. Nor could he fight them. They were his brethren. He loved them, more so, perhaps, because of the sadness of their error.

I did not sort souls after that. Instead, I learned to shepherd them.

He traveled to Rath Batatt with the quota slaves he had learned to call his family. He chose the peak atop which to build the Sky Mount, and he set to work. He used the song trapped in simple tools to work the stone. He made it malleable and shaped it to suit him. There he lived through the lives of those mortal children, doing the best he could to give them joyous childhoods, meaningful lives, ease in the elder years, and painless deaths to true release. One by one, he shepherded them through lives worthy of them and then let them go.

I have not done enough. I took apart an evil castle built of stone one small block at a time. Much of it remains, and ever will. I did what I could, though. Now, I hope you will as well. Dariel, seeing what I have done, can you forgive me? Do you forgive me?

Of course, Dariel said.

Na Gamen closed his eyes for a time. Opened them. Thank you. Forgiveness is a circle, Dariel. A band that joins us. Thank you. If you will accept it from me, I will give you a blessing. It’s the last thing I have to offer you. Will you accept?

Of course.

T he pool was beautiful. Boulders hemmed it in on all sides, with a large shelf of rock blocking most of the downstream end. It was deep enough to dive into, lit from below by some of the rocks-which glowed the same pale green as the stones of Amratseer.

“Is this safe?” Dariel asked.

“It’s not the Sheeven Lek, if that’s what you mean,” Anira said. “Don’t just stand, gaping. Off with your clothes!”

A few moments later, naked herself, Anira dove. Her body speared the glassy water, sending the clear image of the riverbed stones into sudden confusion. She kicked toward the depths. At the bottom she turned and stared up at Dariel, as if taunting him. He finished stepping out of his trousers and jumped.

The shock of the cold water froze the air he had just pulled into his lungs. He had planned to slice toward the bottom gracefully, but instead his arms and legs set hooks in the water. He pivoted toward the surface and broke into the air, gasping. Had it been possible, he would have clawed his way right out of the water. Instead, he paddled in circles, looking for a place to get ashore, teeth chattering.

Anira rose from underneath him. She ran her hand up his abdomen, her body sliding up after it. Her breasts slipped over his chest. Surfacing with her face inches from his, she parted her lips. Dariel thought she was going to kiss him. She seemed close to it, but instead she exhaled her long-held breath. Her legs kicked rhythmically to keep her up, close enough that he felt her thigh brush his. No accident, for she did not draw away.

“Dariel, I want you to dance with me,” she said. The green, liquid shifting light was lovely on her skin. Droplets of water slicked the scaled plates beneath her eyes and over the bridge of her nose. They highlighted her eyes. “I need you to. Do you know what I mean by dance?”

It would have been hard not to know, considering the way her hands caressed his torso. They were so warm, as were her legs, smooth against his. He felt himself stiffening despite the chill water. “It wouldn’t be right,” he said. “I have someone back on Acacia.”

“I would be surprised if you didn’t have someone. Can I take the love you feel for her from you?”

The image of Wren that popped into his head was an unlikely one. He saw her as she had been the night they blew up Sire Fen’s warship. Just after they dropped the pill that ignited fires inside it, she had climbed over the tall ship’s railing and leaped into the air. He remembered the way her hair rose, waving at him. He remembered exactly what her face had looked like and how much he had wanted her.

“No,” he said, “you can’t take my feelings for her from me.”

“Good. I don’t want to. Are you sure that you will live to see her again?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I hope you do see her again. If you do, it’s up to you to tell her of the evening you spent making love to a black-skinned snake woman. Or not.” Anira smiled. Her teeth shone wonderfully white in the moonlight, like little jewels. They looked so smooth and clean and cheerful. “You are part of my destiny, Dariel Akaran. Making love with you is part of that. Anyway, you made your decision when you took my hand to come down here. Can we stop talking now?”

He felt her hand take hold of his sex. That did it. He could well imagine that Wren would box him bare knuckled when she found out, but what Anira said was true. He had already consented. Being with her already felt necessary in a way he could not explain. He pulled her closer. He touched the tip of his tongue to the enamel of her teeth. It was as he had thought. They were smooth and clean and cheerful. When her lips pressed full against his, he responded with more hunger than he knew he had felt.