Celestial Matters (28 page)

“What do you mean?” I asked. I opened a bag of figs Yellow Hare had obtained and ate one.

“I cannot seem to cultivate the proper Buddhist detachment.”

“Explain,” I said, handing him the bag. He took a fig and ate it. His face brightened as he savored the flavor; then he shook his head and resumed chewing with a forced disinterest.

“If I cannot resist the desire for fruit,” he said, sighing, “how can I possibly overcome the greater desires?”

I handed him a bag of water and he drank a little. Then, unprompted, he began to talk about Buddhism; how it had begun in India three centuries before Alexander conquered that country; how it took hold in many parts of India, Tibet, and the Middle Kingdom as well as the various smaller lands around that region; and how it was mostly ignored by both empires until a popular form of the religion began to preach pacifism throughout the eastern part of the Delian League and the western lands of the Middle Kingdom.

“This part I know,” I said. “Both the League and the Kingdom outlawed the practice of Buddhism and executed anybody found practicing it.”

“But Buddhism didn’t die,” Ramonojon said. “Its monasteries were burned, many of its teachers and adherents killed, and the wearing of a saffron robe was proscribed in both empires. But Buddhism does not need all that ritual. It became a secret religion, still attracting new disciples who felt the futility of the war.”

“Are you saying the Buddhist Rebellion is still going on covertly?”

“There never was a Buddhist Rebellion,” he said. “There was only a purely passive attempt to try to stop the war by making the people lay down their arms and refuse to fight.”

“Most people would regard that as rebellion,” I said, keeping a stern neutrality in my voice.

“Whatever you choose to call it,” he said, “preaching or rebellion, it failed. My teachers in Xan say that was because the other Buddhist sects do not follow the Tao.”

“What does the Tao have to do with this?” I asked. “The Middler science texts all talk about it as some sort of progression of natural actions. How can a natural course relate to the success or failure of a rebellion?”

“The scientific definition is too narrow,” he said. “Tao means ‘the Way,’ the natural process of all things. My sect joined the philosophy of the Tao to that of the Buddha.”

“So you understand the meaning of Tao?”

“A little, and not at all the way the Taoist technologists do; my teachers were philosophers, not scientists. They could no more explain the working of a Xi lance than Plato could understand the design of
Chandra’s Tear.
”

“Philosophers?”

“Yes,” Ramonojon said. “Taoist philosophy did not vanish the way Platonism did. When the first ’An emperor drafted the practical Taoists to make weapons, the real Taoists fled into the mountains of Tibet to hide. After the ‘rebellion’ they encountered some Buddhists who were also hiding, and Xan was born.”

“So that is the crime you were concealing,” Yellow Hare said, uncoiling from where she slept. She turned her golden eyes toward me and I felt the wrath of the Spartan spirit stab through my heart. “Aias,” she said, with a voice as cold as the touch of marble in winter, “how could you defend a Buddhist, a profaner of the gods?”

“Out of friendship,” I said quietly, facing her spirit with my own. Slowly, she lowered her gaze, accepting the answer.

“We do not profane,” Ramonojon said.

“You deny the divinity of war,” she replied.

“No,” he said. “We deny the Tightness of war; we deny that the soul is made greater by battle.”

“That is sacrilege,” she said, and laid her hand on the knife that hung from a strap around her neck.

“Enough!” I said. “Yellow Hare, Ramonojon’s offenses he between him and the gods and he will answer for them in a greater tribunal than we can convene. Anaxamander and Mihradarius’s crimes are our immediate concern.”

Yellow Hare deliberated with herself for a few seconds, then said “What are your orders, Commander?”

Her question paralyzed me for a moment. For the past two days I had been so intent on escape that I had given no thought to what should be done once we were free. Anaxamander and Mihradarius had to be stopped, of course, but …

“The first thing we have to do is get Aeson to safety,” I said.

“Why?” Ramonojon asked.

“Now that we’re out of the brig, anything the stowaways do will be blamed on us. Killing Aeson would consolidate Anaxamander’s control over the ship, which is just what Mihradarius wants.”

“Then we should go now,” Yellow Hare said. She offered swords and throwers to me and Ramonojon. I took them, but he refused.

“I will not harm anyone,” he said.

Yellow Hare glared at him contemptuously, then turned away and noiselessly opened the side of the huge crate. We emerged from our hiding place and slowly made our way aft, creeping low to the ground and darting from crate to crate so none of the slaves would see us. Yellow Hare directed our steps, showing us how to move quietly through the maze of boxes so that we reached the tunnel that led up to the hospital without being heard.

Yellow Hare slipped quietly up the curving passageway to take care of any guards Anaxamander might have posted in the wards. She returned in less than a minute. “Someone has killed the soldiers,” she said. “Follow me, but be careful.”

We ran up the ramp past four armored corpses, their hearts gashed open by throwing stars.

In the hospital’s dispensary we found two doctors and seven orderly-slaves lying on the ground, breathing irregularly. The air was laden with a heavy smell of jasmine and honey; sickly sweet, but alluring like a dewy glade on a summer’s day; some sort of alchemical gas. I ran over to a bolt of linen bandages in the far corner, tore off three strips, clamped one over my mouth, and gave the others to Yellow Hare and Ramonojon.

“Take short breaths,” I said in a muffled voice.

Yellow Hare wrapped the gauze around her mouth as she darted through the short, arched tunnel that led through the public ward and into the private; Ramonojon and I ran after her, holding our breaths until we needed to gasp in enough air to keep going. In the large circular lying-in area we found doctors, patients, guards, and slaves strewn across the couches and floor. Some of the patients had fallen off their couches as if they had been struggling to rise when the drug-filled air overcame them.

Yellow Hare did not pause to look at this scene, but ran directly into Aeson’s room. Ramonojon wanted to help the fallen, but I pulled him along after me into the private ward.

Aeson lay strapped down on the marble operating slab in the center of the room. His eyes were shut and his arms drooped at his sides as if he were dead, but his chest rose and fell with the gentle rhythms of sleep. But Aeson could never have slept through the battle going on right next to him.

To the left of the slab stood Euripos wearing a linen mask across his nose and mouth. In each hand the doctor held a long injection quill dripping with a pale green liquid. The old Roman was using the poisoned feathers to fend off a young Nipponian man in a gray silk gi armed with a curved steel sword and a miniature Xi lance. I would have thought the battle hopeless for Euripos, but the spirit of his city and the warrior-hero Romulos who founded it stood over him, guiding his aged hands as he fought to keep the attacker at bay.

Sword first, Yellow Hare leaped at the assassin. He whirled to meet her, parrying her wide, thick blade with his thin, angled one. She blocked his counterstroke and rolled past him to place herself between him and Euripos. Time froze as the two combatants eyed each other like Akhilleus and ’Ektor across the plains of Troy. Then they jumped toward each other, slicing through space with their swords, two whirlwinds weaving the formerly still air into a storm of iron.

Euripos fell back to give Yellow Hare room to fight, and as he did so the Roman spirit left him and the hero who had saved his commander’s life became again a frail old man.

Yellow Hare froze momentarily into stillness; the Nipponian slashed crosswise to decapitate her, but she ducked into a squat and cut upward, sliced into her opponent’s left hand, making him drop the lance at his feet. He took a step back, and she swept her leg sideways, kicking the weapon over to me. I grabbed the small wooden box and thrust it into the folds of my robe.

The assassin’s black eyes flicked from Yellow Hare to me to Aeson’s helpless form, then back to his opponent. He stood frozen in inaction. Yellow Hare sprang into midair and sliced downward with her blade. He turned to parry her, continued his turn, and ran from the battle directly toward me. But instead of cutting me down, he leaped straight over my head. I stabbed upward and felt my sword cut silk and possibly skin. But wounded or not, the assassin landed gracefully and ran out through the public ward.

Yellow Hare ran after him, calling to Euripos as she did so, “Tell Anaxamander there’s a Nipponian commando after Aeson.”

Ramonojon and I followed her.

“Mars and Romulos go with you,” Euripos called after us, gasping out his words through the pungent air.

We chased the assassin out through the curtains of the hospital onto the sunlit surface of the ship. The ship’s surface light was overwhelmed by the sun;
Chandra’s Tear’s
glow had dimmed from glorious silver to bland tin. ’Elios was directly overhead, blinding my ungoggled eyes. I threw my arm above my head to shield myself from the spears of the burning god.

I shielded my eyes as best I could and managed to make out the shape of Yellow Hare chasing the gray-clad man, who wore neither mask nor goggles, but seemed to suffer neither from his own poisoned air nor ’Elios’s raging heat. Ramonojon and I charged after them, but we had no hope of catching those running gazelles as they sped sternward. For every step Ramonojon and I took, they took two. I was about to tell Ramonojon to give up the chase when a spray of tetras flew over our heads, followed by a shout from behind us. “Stop!”

“Keep going!” I yelled, grabbing Ramonojon’s hand. We turned to port and ran low over the gaming fields, dodging and ducking the shots of guards we did not dare stop to look at. Ramonojon’s breathing was ragged. He was too old for this. So was I. After an eternity of running through the heat, we reached the hill and ducked to port of it, into the shadow it now cast from the sun’s obscuring light.

Ramonojon and I stood, shaking and wobbly, trying to catch our breaths. The heat was too much for him and he collapsed to the ground. It would not be long before the guards caught us.

A glance aft showed me that Yellow Hare and the assassin had reached the hill country above the laboratories. The Nipponian dove into one of the tunnels and Yellow Hare followed him. That gave me an idea.

“In here,” I said, pulling Ramonojon after me. We ran into the now deserted brig tunnel and hid in an empty cell.

We waited silently for hours, listening to the echo of soldiers searching above us. The noise finally died down, and we crept cautiously up the cramped tunnel. Halfway up we found Yellow Hare crouching against the wall.

“What happened to the Nipponian?” I asked.

“He eluded me in the laboratory warren,” she said, and I heard the self-accusation in her words. She would accept no excuses for herself, not her lack of protection from the sun, nor the toll the gas must have taken on her. “What are your orders, Commander?”

“Back to our hiding place,” I said. “Anaxamander now knows there is a threat to Aeson. He’ll have to guard him if he wants to keep the army’s loyalty.”

Return was uneventful. The storage guards were elsewhere, looking for us or the assassin, so we had only to evade the slaves, who were not at all vigilant.

“Rest,” Yellow Hare said to me when we were safely ensconced in our padded crate. “You look exhausted.”

That was a suggestion I gratefully accepted. I drank a little water, ate a crust of bread, and curled up to sleep on the linen padding.

An hour or so later, I was awakened by Kleon’s voice echoing through the storage cavern. “Brace for speed. Brace for speed. Everyone be in your quarters, strapped in. Oh, and make sure you have enough food and water. Repeat, brace for speed. Commander, wherever you are, I am doing this under Anaxamander’s orders.”

Anaxamander threatening my navigator? Make sure you have enough food and water? What in Athena’s name was going on? Then the ship lurched and we tumbled against the aft wall. My shoulder twisted. I put my hand in my mouth and bit hard on my knuckles to keep from screaming.

It took us ten painful minutes to get into speed positions, braced up against the wall with blankets under us for cushioning. We waited out the usual four hours, during which the pain in my shoulder subsided to a dull throb. But the ship did not slow down. We waited longer, managing to eat a little bread and drink a little water, but the speed and the pressure did not go away.

The constant pain made it impossible to sleep and barely possible to eat. I had no way of telling how long the relentless push of high speed remained pressing my body down. But some time during the flight Mania gripped my mind with perverse, lying visions. I saw myself as Prometheus chained to the cliff. Zeus was interrogating me in Anaxamander’s voice, demanding to know who the spy was and why I thought man deserved the gift of fire. I could not answer him; the eagle had torn out my throat.

Then we lurched to a stop and my mind came back to the world. Kleon’s voice boomed through my head like the thunderbolt of Zeus. “Solar orbit. Repeat, we have reached the sun. Do not go out onto the ship’s surface without protective clothing and goggles. And as for you, Anaxamander, I’ve done what you wanted, now take your cursed soldiers from my tower.”

The sun? Already? “How long were we flying?” I asked through a throat dry and ragged.

“Six days,” Yellow Hare said, standing up slowly. She stretched her arms, touched them nimbly to her toes, then straightened up and shook off that weeklong torture.

Ramonojon and I supported each other as we stood. He could barely walk. I had a raging thirst which I tried to quench with water, but it would not go away.