Dead Rivers - Freedom's Gate Part 23

Tamar looked only moderately rea.s.sured.

"Go get your vests and put them on."

We'd both had them off to embroider new designs. I was working on a horse; I'd borrowed Saken's old vest to copy the horse she'd embroidered on hers, since it looked so real. Tamar was embroidering a bird clutching a flower in its claw. We both knotted the thread, trimmed off the needle we were using, stuck it in another cloth for safekeeping, and put our vests on.

Meanwhile, Zhanna fetched a carved box from the other side of the yurt and opened it. Inside were ritual items much like the things Jaran had used to banish Aislan's djinn back in the harem: an incense burner, a bundle of feathers knotted together with thread, and a small clay jar. In Sophos's harem, the small jar had held river water, drawn from the Syr Darya when water flowed there during the spring rains; here, to my surprise, it held a mixture of dirt and ash.

On Zhanna's instructions, we each plucked a hair from our heads and placed it in the palm of Maydan's hand. Then Zhanna took the feathers, dipped the tips into the clay pot, and brushed the gray ash onto Maydan's forehead, hands, and heart. "Maydan, daughter of Aiday, daughter of Alina, you are a child of the river, the steppe, and the djinni." Jaran had asked each of us in turn if we claimed her, but that didn't seem to be part of the ritual here. Zhanna set down the feathers and turned to us. "To banish the djinn, you draw it into yourself and then tell it to go away. Put your hand on her forehead and think of yourself drawing the djinn out like you would pull a bucket from a well, or like you'd draw a thorn from your foot.

To banish a djinn, we say, 'Return to the Silent Lands, lost one of your kind, and trouble us no more.' "

Jaran had said that, I remembered. Tamar was nodding.

"It's difficult to describe it. Why don't you each give it a try. Who wants to go first?"

"I do," Tamar said, and Zhanna nodded to her.

Tamar stood up and began to dance. She hadn't asked either of us to play a drum for her so it seemed like it would be intrusive to start; she whirled herself in circles until I was dizzy looking at her, then dropped to her knees beside Maydan and placed her small hand on Maydan's forehead. She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. I watched her curiously, wondering if she felt open and what, exactly, this meant to her. Time pa.s.sed; her nostrils were white from tension. Finally she sat back, looking exhausted.

"I think I can-kind of feel it there," she said. "But I couldn't pull it out."

"That's fine," Zhanna said. "And not surprising. You're doing well to be able to touch it at all. Lauria, you try."

I refused to dance in front of Tamar and Zhanna, especially as I knew it wouldn't help, so I took my drum and beat it for a little while. I was faking, and I knew I was faking, but I didn't know what else to do. After a while, my feet started to go to sleep, and my mind also almost felt a little dazed and numb, like my p.r.i.c.kling feet; maybe that's what she's talking about. It seemed like it was worth a try. I touched Maydan's forehead and reached in.

And suddenly, I realized that I could see the djinn, even though it was inside Maydan: a whirl of golden dust, like sparks flying to the sky from a roaring fire.

I gasped and blurted out the phrase Zhanna had given us: "Return to the Silent Lands, lost one of your kind, and trouble us no more."

" Gate," it hissed, and I wanted to clap my hands to my ears as I had when the other rogue djinn had laughed. I felt it swirl into my chest, and for a moment I thought it was going to take me over, as it had Maydan. But it kept moving- through me like an arrow, I thought-and a moment later I realized it was gone.

I opened my eyes. Maydan stirred and raised her head with a groan. "What on earth-how did I get in here? Did I take sunstroke?"

"Djinn," Zhanna said. "You should take a nap."

"Ugh, I have so much to do..." Maydan muttered, then rolled over and went to sleep.

"You did it," Tamar said, staring at me with open envy. "You made it leave."

"I didn't make it do anything," I said. "It chose to leave."

"But it chose to leave for you."

"Sometimes that's all a shaman does," Zhanna said. "We provide a door, and the djinn decides to take it."

It seemed unfair, I had to admit, as I avoided Tamar's resentful eyes. I had barely begun to sweat. And Tamar was clearly understanding the training in a way that I was not. I could dance all day, drum all day, and not feel the way I thought I was supposed to feel. It was playing with me. With us. "I bet it left for me just to p.i.s.s you off," I said to Tamar. "It could feel that you had a grip on it, even if you didn't have the strength to make it go. I could see it was there, but I couldn't grasp it-so it left for me, just to make you feel like I was a better shaman."

Humor flickered in her eyes. "You don't have to try to make me feel better, you know, Lauria. But, well, it's nice that you do."

"It said something as it was leaving," I said, trying to keep my voice casual. " ' Gate.' Do you know why it might have said that?"

"Gate? Back to the Silent Lands, I guess."

Tamar and I stepped back out into the sunshine. I shaded my eyes, blinking, and went over to where Maydan's herbs still lay out on the ground; I figured I would gather them up for her and put them away so that her work wouldn't be scattered by the wind while she slept.

"Lauria!" Janiya's voice broke into my thoughts. "Go fetch some water for the rice."

I stiffened, then took a deep breath and turned to Janiya. "I'm busy," I said. "Get it yourself."

She gave me a faint smile and a little nod. "Better," she said, and turned away.

"Better?" I strode after her, furious. " Better? I told you to get it yourself, what the h.e.l.l more am I supposed to do?"

"You need to mean it." She turned back toward me and raised the edge of one eyebrow. "You had to rehea.r.s.e that, you had to practice it, you had to think about it. It didn't come from here." She tapped her chest.

Now I turned away, heading back to Maydan's herbs. Janiya grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face her. "Aren't you even going to argue with me? Tell me that it did come from your heart?"

"What the h.e.l.l good would it do? You've already decided how I feel."

"Maybe if you stood up for yourself you'd start to feel like you really are one of us."

"I stood up for myself to Ruan."

"You did. But you still treat me as if I could have you flogged for disobedience. Sometimes I think I could order you to butcher your horse, and you'd doit!"

"You're a military commander,'" I said. "Don't you want to be obeyed?"

"In battle, yes. But most of the time we aren't in battle. I want to know that my women are thinking for themselves. And even in battle, this isn't the Greek army! You need to be able to take initiative, to notice a change in conditions and act accordingly, not to stand by your orders like, like, like a slave who knows she'll be executed for disobedience."

"I haven't seen anyone else here telling you to get your own water. Or your own tea."

"That's right. Because I don't talk to them the way you let me talk to you. They all know that they're free."

I was never a slave, either, I thought, and clamped down hard on that thought. "Fine," I said, hearing my voice shake, and turned away.

"Lauria..." Janiya glanced around; all the sisters were industriously occupying themselves, listening silently. "Come with me for a walk. Please."

I fell into step beside her as we walked a little distance away from the camp.

"You remind me of another former slave who joined us, some years ago," Janiya said. "Though she wouldn't admit it right away, she had not actually been born into slavery."

I stiffened even as I tried not to; I glanced at Janiya, but her eyes were fastened on some distant point on the horizon.

"The Sisterhood of Weavers has their own sword sisterhood as well-women who work as bodyguards for the sorceresses, or who serve in the small standing army that the Sisterhood maintains to guard the seat of their power in Penelopeia. This woman served in that army. But as punishment for some misdeed-she was falsely accused, or so she told me-she was stripped of her rank and sold into slavery. She wound up as a slave here on the edges of Greek territory, ran away, and found the Alashi."

"Good for her," I murmured, since Janiya had paused and seemed to expect a response.

"She quickly put her days as a slave behind her. In some respects, her heart was as free as any woman born to the Alashi. But her days as a sworn servant to the Weavers were harder to leave in the dust. She had taken vows, you see, before their G.o.ddess, Athena. Even though she no longer felt loyalty to her old masters, those vows bound her to them. There is magic in vows like that, as tangible as the magic of blood sisterhood. It's as real as the bindings on an aeriko-on a djinn, I mean."

I didn't dare look at Janiya now, but I thought she was looking at me. My cheeks were burning.

"Lauria, I don't wish to force my way into your confidence. But remember, we are a people of escaped slaves, ultimately, even if most of us now are born in freedom. We have a ritual to repudiate the vows we now have to leave behind-whether they were forced on us by our slavery, or we thought at the time that they were freely chosen. Sometimes our vows are our masters. Will you go through this ritual?"

I thought about the silver bindings the djinn had shown me. My loyalty to Kyros is the loyalty he's earned. Nothing more, nothing less. But then, what would be the harm in this? Even if the ritual broke the magic of the vows, that would just mean I could choose freely to keep them... And I need to do this to be accepted, that's very clear. To accomplish my mission... To become one of the Alashi. ..

"I'll do it," I said.

"Good. Tonight, after moonrise. I'll wake you when it's time."

Janiya stalked back to camp; I looked at her straight back and her hunched shoulders and was quite certain that she was the slave she'd just spoken about.

She shook me awake a few hours after I'd gone to sleep, and I followed her out of the yurt. It was a cold night with a stiff breeze and I shivered. Janiya had a small bundle under her arm, and a lantern, and I followed her out from camp onto the steppe.

Even with the moonlight and the lantern, it was a dark night and we had to walk slowly. We walked past the horses and down to the stream, and then upstream a short distance to the big tree that grew at the bend in the stream.

"You need to understand, our G.o.ds have been where we are," Janiya said. "Prometheus gave the gift of fire to humans, and for that, Zeus-the old king of Olympus-had him chained to a mountain west of here, where an eagle came each day and tore out his liver. Arachne was a mortal woman and a weaver, and then had the misfortune to fairly beat Athena in a contest of weaving skill; for that, Athena tried to enslave her, and when Arachne chose death over slavery, Athena turned her into a spider.

"And so they lived, for thousands of years. But Arachne heard of the G.o.d that had been imprisoned by her own enemies, and slowly she found her way to the mountain where he was chained; she wove a web to trap the eagle, and she forced the eagle to set Prometheus free. Prometheus, in turn, returned Arachne to human form and gave her immortality. And then they headed east, away from Olympus, and became our G.o.ds, the G.o.ds of people who were once the slaves of the Greeks, but have set themselves free."

"I see," I mumbled, thinking about how cold I was.

Janiya was also shivering by the time we reached our destination. "I should've brought blankets," she said, and set the lantern down.

I had half expected Janiya to drum or dance or something to summon djinni, but instead she unfolded her bundle and laid out some strips of cloth and a sharp knife. Then she turned her palms up and spoke simply and directly: "Prometheus, hear us."

I wondered if I should repeat her words, but she didn't give me any sort of nudge, so I remained silent.

"You were free, then enslaved, then free again: you, of all the G.o.ds, understand. Like you, we were slaves; like you, we are free. Once, we took vows in order to survive; now we ask to be released from those vows." She lowered her hands and looked at me. "Lauria, on your honor as a free woman, answer these questions truthfully. Were your vows taken freely?"

"Yes." My heart began to pound in my ears; some part of my mind began screaming, What are you thinking? Lie to her; lie!

"Did those to whom you swore your loyalty betray it?"

"Yes." I sounded almost relieved. This is true. Kyros and Sophos did betray my loyalty.

"The binding is already broken; Lauria asks to be released." She picked up the knife and cut the palm of her hand; she held one of the strips of cloth to her injury and bled onto it, blotting until almost the whole strip of cloth was stained with blood. She wiped the knife and gave it to me. "Cut yourself and put your blood on the strip of cloth."

I'd done something like this once before, when I became Tamar's blood sister. I wondered it this ritual was going to require that I become blood sister to Janiya. This knife wasn't as sharp as the sword Tamar and I had used, and my first attempt to cut myself only scored my hand, drawing no blood. Gritting my teeth, I twisted the knife; this time, I cut more than I really had to, and had no trouble bleeding all over the strip of cloth that Janiya handed me. She wrapped her own hand in a bandage as she watched me, then gave me a bandage to cover my wound when I was done. We laid our blood-soaked cloth strips under the tree.

"Prometheus has never asked for blood sacrifice, but there are other G.o.ds who demand it; we'll leave our blood here, so that Prometheus can give it to the G.o.ds before whom we made our vows. Now we'll walk through the water: as the two rivers will make all of us free someday, so may the waters tonight make you free."

We stripped naked and plunged into the stream; the water came up to my waist at the deepest part. We crossed to the other side, turned, and crossed back. Now I was really cold; the wind felt as it if were going straight to my bones. I dressed as quickly as I could, Janiya bundled up the knife again, and we walked back to camp.

As we reached the edge of the camp, Janiya said, "I had a daughter once, back when I lived with the Greeks."

"I thought you..." I turned and blinked at her, trying to phrase what I wanted to say.

"You thought I was one of the women who has winter friends as well as summer friends?" Janiya laughed.

"Well, you were right. But back in the Guard of the Sisterhood of Weavers, some of us would endure a man's company, briefly, in order to have children. I wanted a daughter, and I had one. A beautiful young girl. She was six when I was sold into slavery."

"What happened to her?"

"It was I who was accused-not Xanthe. We were separated. She stayed with the Sisterhood; one of my old friends promised to raise her. I never saw her again." Janiya sighed. "She is very close to your age. I've imagined, a few times, that you were her. I would be proud to have a daughter like you."

"Why didn't you go look for her?"

"She was six when I was sold. She would have been twelve when I escaped. They would have told her terrible things about me-that I was a traitor to the Sisterhood, a thief. Better, far better, to let her alone, to live her own life."

Something else occurred to me. "If you worked for the Sisterhood, wouldn't you have seen people using spell-chains?"

"Oh." Janiya brushed her hair away from her face.

"Once or twice, yes. I knew what the chain was, I knew how it was used-but it was a rare thing that I heard the careful way that requests were phrased. Also, I think sorceresses are able to control their own summoned djinni better than those who bear spell-chains on sufferance."

I nodded. "My own mother is rather disappointed with how I turned out," I said. "I think she'd have preferred a young woman like Erdene."

Janiya's eyes flickered with humor. "I'm sure that's often how it turns out. Perhaps Xanthe spends her days brushing her hair and mooning over young Greek officers."

I pulled my vest out, before I went to sleep, and put it on; I was still freezing cold. I had no dream, and woke at dawn, feeling surprisingly well rested despite my interrupted night.

A little while after the midday meal, Janiya wandered past and said, "Lauria, go get the manure baskets from the supply yurt and gather up the camel and horse dung."

I was sitting cross-legged, sc.r.a.ping the last of my lunch from my bowl. I glared up at Janiya and said, "Not until I get my G.o.dd.a.m.n bead."

Janiya laughed, as if she'd been expecting that response, and tossed a small blue bead through the air. It landed in my lap. "There you go," she said. "Now go get the baskets, if you please."

We gathered up the droppings from all our livestock-horses, camels, and goats-in a pair of big baskets, then spread it out along the riverbank to dry. It seemed silly to me to pick it up while it was still wet and smelly, only to dump it on the ground again, but Saken had pointed out that left with the animals, it just got stepped on. I picked my way across the grazing area, thinking that I probably looked as disgusted and squeamish as Erdene usually did when it was her turn to do this task. The other sisters gave me a wide berth, not wanting to feel obligated to pitch in and help me. Even Tamar stayed well away.

"Lauria," a voice said, and I started, dropping a handful of manure. It was a djinn. Kyros's djinn, I thought. I couldn't say what made it so distinctive, but I knew it like I'd have known Tamar even if all I could see was her hand. I'm getting better at this, I thought.

"Kyros sends the following words: 'Lauria, this is something I wish I could tell you in person, but it is past time that you knew.' " The djinn was good at imitating Kyros's voice and I felt a faint p.r.i.c.kle of recognition. " 'It was not only because of your talent that you attracted my attention. It was because of your talents that I asked you to join my service, but the reason I was paying attention to you is much more simple.' " The djinn paused, then spoke again: " 'You are my daughter. I am your father.' "

It should have been a terrible surprise, but I felt only a sad, quiet coldness spreading through my chest.

" 'My daughter, I know I can count on you, and you must realize that you can trust me.' " The djinn kept talking but I was listening to the coldness in my heart, not to Kyros's words, and it was saying, His words are not sincere; he is trying to control me.

" 'Tell me, Lauria, how close you are to winning the trust of the Alashi. That's all I want to know.' "

"Very close," I said.

With that, the djinn winked out, and I was left breathless with the basket of manure in my hands. After a shaken moment I began to pick up manure again, trying to shrug off my disgust. The contact with Kyros's djinn made me feel as dirty as the goat s.h.i.t all over my hands. I don't want to serve him anymore, I thought. I don't want to go back there.

I don't have to go back there.

The thought startled me so much that I stepped right in an apple-shaped pile of horse s.h.i.t, and I stopped to swear, in Greek, and pick up what was left, hurling it in the basket. I'd rather be picking up horse s.h.i.t than tracking down escaping slaves. I could never do that again. I couldn't. If I looked at Alibek now-Kyros's little straying bird-I would see Tamar. Zhanna. Janiya. Ruan. And I wouldn't wish slavery on any of them. Even Ruan.

I'd rather spend the rest of my life picking up s.h.i.t than do that again.