The Emperors Knife - By Mazarkis Williams Page 0,78
a person who can live in the desert can live anywhere—fight anywhere. These flowers looked delicate, but they must be
strong, to survive here. Indomitable.
The soldiers pierced the ground with long torches and touched them with flame. Flowers did not look so pretty in firelight, but Mesema could still smell their perfume, and if she closed her eyes she could imagine springtime on the plains.
Mesema felt something hard underfoot and when she drew back her shoe she could see metal, glimmering low in the sand. She glanced at the emperor, but he had turned away and was looking at something in his hand.
Mesema lifted the item and turned it over in her palm. She’d seen such round discs before, in the sacks of the traders-who-walked. It was a coin, for people to use when they had nothing to barter. The face stamped on the coin looked like the emperor, but older. She dropped it and studied the desert floor. Other objects glittered in the flames, and she picked up each in its turn: a colored gemstone, a ring, a charm. She lifted the charm and held it up to the light of torches and sunset. A golden ship, held aloft by great clouds, twirled from her fingers. She turned it this way and that, trying to imagine if such a ship existed, one that could fly through the air. Sand shifted behind her and she tensed as the emperor spoke.
“These are offerings to Mirra, goddess of beauty, children, and healing.” One does not take what belongs to the gods. Mesema gave a solemn nod and replaced the cloud-ship, but not before its golden mast pricked her index finger. She hissed and pressed her thumb against it to stop the bleeding. “Your goddess has blessed this place, Your Majesty.”
He said nothing, but she could still sense him at her back. He expected her to make an offering.
Perhaps the goddess could be a friend. She might ensure Mesema’s child would be a glorious ruler as her great-uncle had foreseen. Mesema fingered the beads around her neck. Glass and ceramic brought across the mountains by the traders-who-walked, strung with some of her mother’s gold on a woollen string. She had nothing better other than the silk clothing Sahree
had given her.
No sooner had she begun to lift the necklace over her head than she felt the string snap between her fingers. The beads cascaded over her palm and onto the sand, a fall of sparkling colour. She watched them roll and bounce between other, half-buried offerings, until they came to rest in a serpentine line.
A wind blew from the west, sweeping the sand from around her feet and casting it against the mountain face. A long note sounded from the stone, higher and fuller than anything blown from a singing-stick. It seemed the final note of a longer piece, the last broken-hearted syllable of a mourningchant; it spoke of all the unheard notes that had come before it, chords that told of beauty, sorrow and violence. She felt it vibrate in her chest, and she knew that the entire song would have been too much for her to bear.
The guards fell into a whispered chant, while the emperor laughed once more. In a voice meant for only her, he said, “The ignorant say that Mirra sings for those She favors.”
The wind shifted then, bending the flower-heads towards the south, where she knew the city lay. The sand scattered around her feet, hinting at shapes and lines, moving towards something she almost recognised. The Hidden God offered at first only two vague figures and a few spidery lines, but then the wind blew harder and for one moment the image lay clear before her: a woman, knife in hand, with a fallen man at her feet. The sand offered no detail but she knew them even so: herself and the emperor.
Mesema felt each hair on her head standing on end. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug deep. Her lungs began to burn before she remembered to inhale, and even then her breath came in gasps and gulps. She was more frightened now than when the Red Hooves had flown through her village on their cursed horses. Why would she kill an emperor? What would happen to her after she did?
She had to run away.
If she could get to Tumble, and start riding, the River of a Hundred Names would take her to the folk in the mountains, and they could take her home.