The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1) Page 15

  He raised his hand and a lash of lightning erupted from it to tear the tent in half.

  Roars and arrows alike flew up at Tenshing, but his own archers were ready, and soon the insurgents nearest the walls were running from a hail of arrows. Know the marks of kingship, Tenshing called to them as they ran. Know its privileges. Know that, should you seek death from me, it will come from the front.

  At a signal from Tenshing, Gyaltsen raised his hand to stop the arrows. The fallen men on the battlefield began to groan and stir; not one had an arrow in his body, for in place of steel barbs, the shafts had been tipped with tiny bags of gravel. The King spoke once more. And know that all men of peace are welcome here. You are men of Uä, and this is your city. But I will not let you tear it down.

  The rider had climbed halfway up the walls of Rassha, though his face betrayed terror and considerable physical pain, both compounded by the loss of two fingernails in his progress. Tenshing met his eye. You need not complete the climb. Tell your master this: I will entertain proof of his claim in the Orchid Palace at his convenience. He may bring sixteen men armed as he pleases, but they will not be admitted unless he is with them. If any of my citizens harms a hair of his head, or his men’s heads, I will open the gates of Rassha and let you do your work.

  Although there had been no real injuries from the enfilade, no insurgent dared approach the walls again. The King’s Lama and General Gyaltsen waited for the King to hop down from the crenellation and accompany them back to the Orchid Palace, where a full night’s work awaited them. But King Tenshing Astama would not join his general and priest until Kandro’s lieutenant had climbed safely down to solid ground.

  Of the night’s work we have mentioned, all was crucial and little is of any interest later. General Gyaltsen drew up plans for contingencies and contingencies of contingencies and distributed them to the lowliest soldier, who had his orders even should every officer and fellow-armsman have been killed. The King’s Lama, who had not eaten since news of Goat Ridge had reached the Orchid Palace (which, the reader may be interested to know, was slightly before it reached the Orchid Throne—and not merely through the exigencies of geometry, which make it impossible to reach the throne before the palace, but rather the exigencies of running a large religious organization, which provides fine training in the gentle arts of spymastering), prayed as mightily as he had ever prayed… but we kept callously to our pledge of silence, even the Thousand Arm Deity, who has always had a soft spot for King’s Lamas and other ranking clerics.

  The King, for his part, offered assistance in both strategy and prayer, and was rebuffed in each case. The King’s Lama suggested he meditate on the demands of kingship; General Gyaltsen suggested he decide whether, in the event of a betrayal, Kandro ought to be left alive and tried, or whether royal purposes would be better served by his disparition. Neither of these topics much interested Tenshing, who thought himself well acquainted with the demands of kingship and did not care to plan the fate of an adversary whose measure he barely knew. He visited each of his children and wives, some together and some separately, and it need hardly be said that the two hours spent in this pursuit were full of tenderness and great joy, and proved most restorative to the King’s good humor—if not to his wardrobe, which fell victim once to baby Tsetsen’s digestion and once to the affections of young Nyatri, who had been drawing with colored pastels just before he embraced his father on that night. Nyatri pleaded in heartstring-tugging fashion for the story of White Tenshing and the Priestkiller Worm, and although Netten found the material overfamiliar and grim, he made a game effort, lavishing lapidary detail on the Worm’s dagger-claws and sabre-teeth, its snakelike form that coiled and darted like an eel through the sky above Pongyo Gorge, the choking miasma that poured from steel-hard scales of red, white, yellow, and black. But, as battle was joined and the action advanced to the inevitable moment where the Reflecting Pool Mind would fail Nyatri’s six-times-great-grandfather, the King found himself stumbling over the tale—not, strangely, out of any morbid sentiment vis-à-vis his own fate, but rather out of distraction, his attention snagged again and again by his son’s yellow and blue handprints on the raised mandala embroidered on his white coat. Nyatri, thankfully, was not an exacting listener, remarking only, at the tale’s close, “You told it a little funny, Appa.”

  “May I candidly share the reason for my faltering?” Tenshing asked solemnly. Nyatri, eyes widening a shade with uncertainly, nodded. “Your work with pastel is nothing short of inspirational,” Tenshing said. “That is what pulled my attention from the story. May I borrow one of yours for my own attempt?”

  Nyatri was only too happy to grant the boon—albeit with a lurid shade of salmon, his least favorite color. After the visit with Nyatri, King Tenshing retired to his study, where Mother-of-Daughters was slightly startled to find him bare-chested, looking back and forth between his vomit- and pastel-stained coat and a piece of paper marked with a labyrinthine design in thick strokes of lurid salmon.

  “Are you occupied, husband?” she asked, and was even more startled than she had been to see she had startled him. She could not think of another time in her life when he had not heard her coming. Once he had determined who she was, he summoned her impatiently in and turned back to his work.

  “I am occupied, Pema. But perhaps to no purpose. You have a discerning eye for patterns; lend it me.”

  Mother-of-Daughters wavered at the entrance. “I might do more good by fetching you another coat, Your Holiness. I do not believe half-naked study is either seemly or, in these chill stones, well-advised.”

  “Pema.” He turned back around to snare her eyes. “Come in.” And she was reminded that she had married a well-made man, and that she had not seen him this way in some time, and took a seat beside him.

  “I do not think Kamala would approve,” she said.

  “Kamala will not approve of anything involving you until she stops being terrified of you,” said Tenshing. “Seba was the same way. That did not bother you twelve years ago.”

  “Seba hid her fear less proficiently,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “That was why I liked her.” She leaned over to look at her husband’s project. The mandala on the coat and the maze on the paper were clearly reminiscent of one another, but there were discrepancies—right turns where there should have been left, continuations where there should have been dead ends, larger sections switched completely. “What is this, husband?”

  “Nyatri stained my coat.” He gestured at the handprints. “The pattern is a mandala. The one I drew, that is, copied from the path a dzo ate in some alfalfa field in Dhakamma. The poor thing has been starving, or so I am informed by the plowman who petitioned me on her behalf.”

  “Are they meant to be the same?” said Mother-of-Daughters.

  “Possibly,” said Tenshing. “The patterns on the coat are so complex. It is hard to know whether I have skipped a section.”

  “Why does it matter anyway?” said Mother-of-Daughters. “Let us grant that the beast has received the first communication from the gods that any creature has in a century and a half—”

  “Any creature that we know of,” said Tenshing. “I do not dare to think what we might discover if we made a map of where the grouse nest, or listened with attention to the howls of the wolves in the foothills.”

  Mother-of-Daughters gave her husband a puzzled look, then reached out to lay a careful hand on his shoulder, the warmth of her hard palm a balm on cold skin. “I allow that this dzo’s divine communion may be more typical of animal existence than I have assumed. What about it? Why should it retrace your mandala? What is the purpose of an animal starving itself to reiterate to you what you see every day?”

  “I am told that one function of literature is to render the familiar strange,” said Tenshing. “How much more powerful a rendering could be done with four stomachs?”

  “Husband, I regret my harsh words last night, but I will look ill upon it if I learn you have chosen the night be
fore you treat with your greatest enemy to take up drinking.”

  “Not my greatest enemy, Pema,” said Tenshing, and now his voice was deadly serious.

  “I apologize,” she said. “It was a hasty thought. But even if you truly believe that the dzo’s mission was to render your mandala strange—and, if that was her mission, I do not suggest that she has executed it poorly—what relevance can it have the night before you treat with Kandro?”

  “The mandala is the armor of the spirit,” Tenshing said, his eyes far off. “Or so say the priests. It is fitted to the soul like fine greaves or gauntlets, tempered to turn the strokes of the lesser spirits, to whose attentions a King can ill afford to succumb. And it has worked, historically. We are a hale line, the sons of Tenshing. I fear that there is no match to my own mandala, Pema. I fear that this proleptic herd-beast is showing me the cracks in my spirit’s armor, the places where the kingship does not move with me, or rubs against my skin.” He widened his eyes for a moment, then closed them, running a hand across his scalp. “I fear that it shows me the mandala of the true King of Uä.”

  At this Mother-of-Daughters sat on the desk’s edge and again rested a hand on Tenshing’s cool shoulder. “Written in an alfalfa field by the teeth of a grazing beast.”

  “The vessels of truth are often lowly,” said Tenshing. “The scriptures remind us of this time and again, to warn us of our folly.”

  There was justice in this, and Mother-of-Daughters did not deny it, although it would be excessive to suggest that she was thereafter reconciled to the prospect that Mingma the dzo should have so exercised the normally calm mind of the King of Uä. “Did you see the field itself?”

  “No,” said Tenshing.

  “Perhaps there is no oracular dzo,” said Mother-of-Daughters. “Perhaps this plowman is of a subtler turn of mind than first you credited him for.”

  “I doubt it,” said Tenshing. “He showed all signs of great sincerity. And he did not once suggest that the pattern could be a mandala, much less mine. Besides, what a risk to take! A Demon Guard would have been within his rights to execute the man on sight for copying a King’s mandala. To what profit?”

  “To keep the King up nights,” said Mother-of-Daughters with great gentleness, “in fits of fruitless study, and to score his spirit with self-doubt. To a dedicated foe, such distraction is worth no small risk.”

  “If Thogmey vassal, plowman to Baron Huchul, is a dedicated foe, then all is lost,” said Tenshing, “though I am not sure for whom. You did not see him. I cannot believe it of him. I do not think he could survive the thought of touching a King’s mandala.” Tenshing’s eyes widened again, and he looked up at Mother-of-Daughters with an open mouth. “Come with me, Pema.” He began walking swiftly down the hallway, salmon-colored mandala in hand, to the royal archive. Mother-of-Daughters could not quite keep up, and even less when the impatient King began to leap ten feet at a time with the Crane’s Migration Step. He disappeared into the vaults of the archive well in advance of Mother-of-Daughters, and when she entered, she could not find him at first, spending several fruitless minutes in the maze of scrolls and other old texts that her father-in-law had accumulated over the course of his abbreviated reign. At last she heard a rustling sound, and negotiated her way to a different section of the archive, where her still-shirtless husband was ransacking the racks of his ancestors’ clothing as though looking for a coat to wear himself. Or, well, perhaps “ransacking” is an inexact term; he was going through the old Kings’ coats, one by one, turning them inside out and upside down, smearing them with little dabs of salmon pastel and turning the copy of the dzo’s mandala up and down in the hopes of finding a match. Without a word, Mother-of-Daughters summoned up the mandala in her mind and began to examine the coats at the opposite end.

  It was Tenshing who found the match, for he had had a head start and was closer. “My great-grandfather,” he breathed. “Tenshing Panchama. This is his mandala.” He held up a leather thong threaded through an ivory medallion; all but one of the fifth King’s coats were paired with a similar talisman. He looked at Mother-of-Daughters and his face began to wrinkle, unwillingly, into a laugh. “Well,” he said, barely containing himself, “no one ever accused a dzo of good taste in Kings.”

  At this he seemed unable to contain a spate of laughter—not a gale, the sort of stomach-clutching laugh by which one might find oneself paralyzed at the antics of the Fool of the Gods, but a trickle of irregular chortles that started again as soon as it stopped. It seemed Tenshing was expecting Mother-of-Daughters to join him, but instead she merely took the coat from him before he could stain it with more salmon fingerprints. She knelt until the laughing ceased, then stood and held out a hand, which he silently accepted. They walked to her chambers in silence, arm in arm.

  Five Prosperities

  fter the Lady Pema was returned safely to her chambers, Datang and Lin Gyat repaired at once to the Jugged Dragon, where Datang related the episode in the Hall of Bats and Orchids over warm wine and drunken noodles at a table barely accessible through the throng, speaking quickly so as to finish before Netten and Lin Yongten’s friend arrived. “That is a curious tale,” Lin Yongten said to Datang after she had finished. “It would seem nothing more than another tawdry scheme on the part of the Versicolor Guard, but for one evocative phrase—”

  “’Our august superior,’” said Datang.

  “Well, that is a large category,” said Lin Gyat. “Such men can hardly be said to have inferiors.”

  Lin Yongten smiled thinly up at his immense fellow-armsman. “Well argued. Netten, who works in the Hall of Bats and Orchids?”

  Netten spread his hands. “From the Left Hand’s description, I cannot place the man. I do not know of any mandarin who bedecks his surroundings with the symbol of his rank—which, in light of the mandarins I do know, is surprising, for they do not stint to boast of even the most modest scholarly achievement—and, in any case, not many mandarins of my acquaintance remain at the Orchid Palace. But there are not many mandarins named ‘Magistrate.’ There are the Magistrates of the four borders; the Magistrate of the Great South Plain, who governs in place of a duke; the Magistrate of the Spirit Provinces, who has not been seen in decades.” Netten frowned, trying to summon more. “It would have been helpful to know this an hour ago.”

  “We were protecting the august person of the Lady Pema an hour ago,” Datang said, not without irritation.

  “There is no nobler duty,” said Netten. “I meant no offense, Ape’s Left Hand. I only mean to say it would have been convenient.”

  Lin Yongten gave a thin smile and excused himself to seek relief. Datang took a longer pull of wine than she had meant. “If you mean no offense,” she said, “use my name rather than the repulsive style with which the contemptible Golden Bat has tarred me.”

  Lin Gyat clapped Netten on the back. “Be of good cheer, friend. She means no harm; the moon has been on her for weeks now. Once her physical equilibria are restored and she is at last prepared to receive my advances, I promise you her disposition will be so elevated as to be unrecognizable.”

  Netten had assumed a quizzical expression at Lin Gyat’s reference to the moon, but Datang shot him a look as full of meaning as she could make it, and when Lin Gyat left off, Netten did not press the point. “Well, Envied of Snakes,” Netten said carefully, “I wish you the very apex of conjugal felicity, but I confess that I derive some pleasure from our friend’s character in all its dimensions.”

  “Ah, Netten,” said Lin Gyat, “we barely know each other. Regale me not with your perversions.”

  Netten raised an eyebrow. “As you wish.” He took a sip from his own wine, less deep than Datang’s. “I apologize, Ape’s Left Hand. But a style in the gallant fraternity is no small thing, and everyone knows a backhanded style is the highest compliment of all.” Datang drew breath to interrupt, but Netten kept speaking. “It is true. You are a woman, barely more than a girl, yet a student of the Crane’s Migration S
tep, which fencers twice your age would maim themselves to master; you faced down a half dozen warriors and heaped hard-earned shame on the fraternity’s greatest irritant. You would have left the Road of Bulls a styled fighter one way or the other. That your enemies took pains to make your style derisive is testament to great hate and great shame, which can only be drawn out by a great opponent.” He smiled. “Besides, had Golden Bat not staked his claim, imagine what style the Versicolor Guard would have forged for you after you killed their colonel at the Bat Gate.”

  Datang blew out a sigh and took another sip of wine. “It is not only the derisive nature of the style that grates. Had they chosen to call me the Flea that Starves or Scent of Rotten Celery, I would have been unhappy, to be sure—for I do not relish even honorable insults, and it is still my ambition to be known as Whirlwind of Tigers. But what I despise about the style is the link to the Glib Ape, who is a false friend and, worse, a traitor to the throne.”

  “Yet even that link is a gift,” said Netten. “For the ape can gain no honor from subduing his hand, but the hand gains great honor from subduing the ape.”

  “The Ape is dead,” said Datang, “and the Hand has gained no honor from it.”

  “He is not dead,” said Netten. “He led a feint near Okko Shrine a week ago that nearly served its purpose—to distract us from an upstream attack with cannon on the Chusrin Gate. The gunboats were routed, yes, but only because General Gyaltsen knows the tricksome nature of the Ape.”

  “Perhaps the Ape trained a subordinate.”

  “He was sighted at Okko, Left Hand.”

  “By whom?”

  “By me.”

  Datang clicked the bottom of her empty bowl thrice against the counter to request refreshment. A slim, smooth-faced young man appeared at her elbow as though conjured from the very floorboards, made a tick on the side of the bowl with a greasepaint stick, and replenished her wine. Lin Gyat was staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Netten,” he said, “what is your style?”