Chapter Twenty-Three
The Temple of the Black Well
When Yama woke, the first thing he saw was Pandaras sitting cross-legged by the foot of the bed, sewing up a rip in his second-best shirt. Yama was naked under the scratchy starched sheet, and clammy with old sweat. His head ached, and some time ago a small animal seemed to have crept into the dry cavern of his mouth and died there. Perhaps it was a cousin of the bright green gecko which clung upside-down in a patch of sunlight on the far wall, its scarlet throat pulsing. This was a small room, with ochre plaster walls painted with twining patterns of blue vines, and dusty rafters under a slanted ceiling. Afternoon light fell through the two tall windows, and with it the noise and dust and smells of a busy street.
Pandaras helped him up, fussing with the bolster, and brought him a beaker of water. “It has salt and sugar in it, master. Drink. It will make you stronger.”
Yama obeyed the boy. It seemed that he had been asleep for a night and most of the day that followed. Pandaras and Tamora had brought him here from the docks.
“She has gone out to talk with the man we should have met yesterday. And we didn’t get paid by the star-sailor, so she’s angry with you.”
“I remember that you tried to help me.” Yama discovered that at some time he had bitten his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. He said, “You killed the guard with that kidney puncher she gave you.”
“That was before, master. At the gate of the merchant’s estate. After that there was the voidship lighter, when you snatched the circlet from the guard and put it on your head.”
“The merchant was wearing the circlet. It was how he controlled his household. But I broke it when I took it away from him.”
“This was in the voidship lighter. Please try and remember, master! You put the circlet on your head and straightaway you collapsed with foam on your lips and your eyes rolled right back. One of my half-sisters has the falling sickness, and that’s what it looked like.”
“A woman. I saw a woman. But she fled from me.”
Pandaras pressed on with his story. “I snatched the circlet from your head, but you didn’t wake. More guards came, and they marched us off the lighter. The first guard, the one you took the circlet from, he and Tamora had an argument about the fee. I thought she might kill him, but he and his fellows drew their pistols, and there was no argument after that. We took some of your money to pay for the room, and for the palanquin that carried you here. I hope we did right.”
“Tamora must be angry with you, too.”
“She doesn’t take any account of me, which is just as well. I bit her pretty badly when she tried to stop you taking the circlet, but she bandaged up her legs and said nothing of it. Wouldn’t admit I could hurt her, neh? And now I’m not frightened of her because I know I can hurt her, and I’ll do it again if I have to. I didn’t want to fight with her, master, but she shouldn’t have tried to stop you. She didn’t have the right.”
Yama closed his eyes. Clusters of lights hanging from the ceiling of the round room at the top of the voidship lighter.
The thing in the bottle, with rose-red gills and a lily-white mantle folded around a thick braid of naked nerve tissue. “I remember,” he said. “I tried to find out about my bloodline. The country of the mind—”
Pandaras nodded eagerly. “You took the circlet from the guard and put it on your own head.”
“Perhaps it would have been better if Tamora had stopped me. She was worried that I would no longer have any need of her.”
Pandaras took the empty beaker from Yama and said, “Well, and do you need her, master? You stood face to face with that thing and talked to it direct. Did it tell you what you wanted to know?”
It seemed like a dream, fading even as Yama tried to remember its details. The woman fleeing, the faint stars of other minds. Yama said, “I saw something wonderful, but I did not learn anything about myself, except that the people who crew the voidships are scared of me.”
“You scared me too, master. I thought you had gone into the place where they live and left your body behind. I’ll have some food sent up. You haven’t eaten in two days.”
“You have been good to me, Pandaras.”
“Why, it’s a fine novelty to order people about in a place like this. A while ago it was me running at any cock’s shout, and I haven’t forgotten what it was like.”
“It was not that long ago. A few days.”
“Longer for me than for you. Rest, master. I’ll be back soon.”
But Pandaras was gone a long time. The room was hot and close, and Yama wrapped the sheet around himself and sat at one of the windows, where there was a little breeze. He felt weak, but rested and alert. The bandage was gone from the wound on his forearm and the flesh had knitted about the puckers made by the black crosses of the stitches; the self-inflicted wound on his palm was no more than a faint silvery line. All the bruises and small cuts from his recent adventures were healed, too, and someone, presumably Pandaras, had shaved him while he had been sleeping.
The inn stood on a broad avenue divided down the center by a line of palm trees. The crowds which jostled along the dusty white thoroughfare contained more people than Yama had ever seen in his life, thousands of people of a hundred different bloodlines. There were hawkers and sky-clad mendicants, parties of palmers, priests, officials hurrying along in groups of two or three, scribes, musicians, tumblers, whores and mountebanks. An acrobat walked above the heads of the crowd on a wire strung from one side of the avenue to the other. Vendors fried plantains and yams on heated iron plates, or roasted nuts in huge copper basins set over oil burners.
Ragged boys ran amongst the people, selling flavored ice, twists of licorice, boiled sweets, roast nuts, cigarettes, plastic trinkets representing one or another of the long-lost aspects of the Preservers, and medals stamped with the likenesses of official heroes of the war against the heretics. Beggars exhibited a hundred different kinds of mutilation and deformity.
Messengers on nimble genets or black-plumaged ratites rode at full tilt through the crowds. A few important personages walked under silk canopies held up by dragomen, or were carried on litters or palanquins. A party of solemn giants walked waist-high amidst the throng as if wading in a stream.
Directly across the avenue, people gathered at a stone altar, burning incense cones bought from a priest, muttering prayers and wafting the smoke toward themselves. A procession of ordinands in red robes, their freshly shaven heads gleaming with oil, wound in a long straggling line behind men banging tambours.
In the distance, the sound of braying, discordant trumpets rang above the noise of the crowded avenue, and presently the procession heralded by the trumpeters hove into view. It was a huge cart pulled by a team of a hundred sweating, half-naked men, with priests swinging fuming censers on either side. It was painted scarlet and gold and bedecked with garlands of flowers, and amidst the heaps of flowers stood a screen, its black oval framed by ornate golden scrollwork.
The cart stopped almost directly opposite Yama’s window, and people gathered on the rooftops and threw down bucketfuls of water on the men who pulled it, and dropped more garlands of flowers onto the cart and around the men and the attendant priests in a soft, multicolored snowstorm. Yama leaned out farther to get a better view, and at that moment heard a noise in the room behind him and turned, thinking it was Pandaras.
A patch of ocher plaster on the wall opposite the window was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and in the center of the web stood an arbalest bolt.