Golden Daughter (41 page)

Wrapped in leper’s rags, Sairu passed almost invisible down the road. Not quite invisible, because while every eye did all it could to keep from looking at her, every man, woman, and child found her an object of fear and fascination and, even if they did not look, were keenly aware of her until she was gone on her way.

It was a good disguise. She had bound up her hands so that they looked as though she had lost several fingers on each. She walked with a limp, though anyone paying full attention would have noticed that she moved much faster than someone with such a limp should. Her face was wrapped in several layers of musty cloth, and the little bits that showed were caked with the most repulsive cosmetics she had ever applied, a display of great red boils and blisters.

She smiled grimly at her own disguise and the horror she inspired in all those she passed. But the smile faltered the nearer she came to Lembu Rana. Though she had spent the full three months of her journey down from Daramuti with this plan firmly in mind, when it came to it, she was terrified at the prospect of entering the lepers’ colony.

Even now, as she drew near once more to the Valley of Suffering, Sairu felt her footsteps faltering. If it weren’t for the knowledge that her mistress waited for her down below, she could not have brought herself to descend that path so many poor souls traveled to face isolation and lingering death.

“The Living Dead.” That’s what they were called within the sheltered walls of Manusbau. A deliciously gruesome name when considered as a distant story only. But now Sairu, as the stink of the valley rose up to greet her with a ominous foreboding deeper than the night’s own shadows, shuddered and wished she’d never heard of the valley or of those who dwelled therein.

Yet she knew it was the one place her mistress could be safe from all those who sought her. It was the one place she could hide Lady Hariawan and leave her, as she hunted down the answers to her many questions.

The glow of the lepers’ campfires rose up from the valley like the lights of any other village. But this light seemed ghastly to Sairu as she tottered, limped, and dragged herself to the lip of the valley, mimicking the walk of other lepers she had witnessed. In her heart she felt the same revulsion she had sensed from those she passed on her way out of Lunthea Maly. She would not dare judge those who shunned her, for she would do the same in their place.

The path down into the valley was well worn and broad. Few traversed it at this hour, so Sairu was surprised when, as she approached the bottom, she was jostled quite severely by someone hastening past. He must not have seen her in the darkness, and he nearly knocked her flat. She felt hands reach out and grab her, and a voice of unconscious politeness muttering, “Forgive me, I’m—”

The voice broke off as Sairu looked up. She saw a handsome, unscarred or sullied man’s face half revealed in the firelight, staring down at her as he realized that he held the arms of a leper. She saw the sickening fear wash over his eyes, felt his hands begin to tremble.

And yet he was a gentleman. He set her right on her feet before dropping his hold and hurrying on his way.

She stood a moment as though frozen in place, watching his shadow scurry up the valley wall after him. Her first thought was
Why would a healthy man venture here at this hour?

Her second thought was
He is so like his brother.

This thought brought her up short when she realized what it was. So like
what
brother? Surely not . . . not
him
! How could that be? And here of all places? She must have imagined the likeness in the midst of all her fear and worry and enormous exhaustion.

She shook her head and started into the village. Unable to bear looking at those wraithlike forms all around her, she kept her gaze firmly on the ground at her feet and hastened, against the roiling of her stomach and the lightness of her head, to that small hut in the center where her mistress waited.

The little old man who laid claim to the hut sat outside the door with a sick child at his side. He raised his covered head at Sairu’s approach and uplifted his handless arm in greeting. “Dear lady,” he said, “your angel is safe.”

“You have watched over her in my absence?” Sairu asked, fumbling under the heavy folds of her rags for something hidden. She withdrew a small purse of coins gained from the sale of those precious items she had removed from her trunk early that same morning.

“I have followed your instructions,” said the old man, nodding. “I have made certain that none of my poor brothers or sisters came near her and that she touched none of our food or drink. She has scarcely moved all day, but I do not think she is afraid.”

“No,” Sairu agreed, pouring the contents of her purse into the man’s lap. “No, my Lady Hariawan fears nothing I know of.”

The little girl, her eyes wide with fascination at the sight of the bright coins piled up in the man’s lap, put out a mangled hand, ugly with open sores, and touched them tentatively. Sairu’s heart lurched at the sight, and she felt shame for the abhorrence she could not repress at the stench and destitution all around. The abhorrence she felt toward this poor, sad child.

She turned quickly to the hut door, slipping inside and away from the sight of the man and the girl. One of the lamps within had gone out, but by the light of the other two, Sairu could see her mistress sitting as calmly as she had left her, eyes closed, hands folded, wrapped in beggar’s rags.

“
Prrrrrlt?
”

“Monster,” Sairu breathed as the cat appeared from behind Lady Hariawan, his eyes bright, his tail twitching. “Did you find Lord Dok-Kasemsan?”

“No,” said the cat. “What’s more, I think I was followed here.”

“Followed? By whom?”

“I’m not certain. He’s gone now, though. I believe I lost him. It took me some time to find this hut, and I won’t lie”—the cat shivered from the tip of his nose down to the end of his tail—“this valley is the worst, most horrid example of everything mortal I have experienced in all my long life! Why you had to choose this, of all places—”

“Never mind,” said Sairu sharply even as she knelt before her mistress. “If you were followed, we will leave.” She bowed her head, suddenly so tired she thought she might fall to pieces. When was the last time she had truly slept? Slept without fear that her lady would wander off or try to kill her in the night? Slept without keeping one eye open for assassins and phantoms and dangers she had not yet even imagined? How she longed to lay her head down, even here in this sickening darkness, and close her eyes!

But no. They must go. She did not know where, but they must. If the cat had been followed, she must assume their position was compromised. “We will leave,” she repeated, as though to convince herself. “At once.”

“Not at once, for I have something else to tell you,” said the cat, placing a white paw on her arm. “I did not find your Lord Dok-Kasemsan as you asked, but I did find someone in the temple dungeons. Someone who might very well interest you.”

“Who?”

“Jovann.” The cat grinned at the expression that flashed across her face. “So you still remember him, do you?”

He would never forget the look in her eyes.

As he stumbled out the of the hut and fled through the dying figures of the lepers and their tomblike shelters, Sunan’s heart beat with such a horror as he had never before felt. Not horror at the sickness, or fear for his body or of potential suffering. Instead he felt the horror of love, something akin to possession.

The angel had looked into his eyes, and he had known that he would do anything for her. It was as though he had lost his very soul.

So he fled. He did not hear the man called Granddad call out to him, nor did he turn to see the child with the marred face watch him rush by. He avoided the phantom forms of other lepers and sought escape from their cursed valley. But though he might escape Lembu Rana, he would never again be free of that look in her endless eyes. That look of, he believed, beauty so pure and so powerful as to shame Hulan herself.

He gained the path out of the valley and collided with a leper there, a small huddling woman who could have broken beneath his careless hands. He caught her before she fell and set her right, realizing too late that he held in his hands the very living form of contagion. But his Pen-Chan breeding was strong, and he murmured apologies before hastening on his way, climbing up, out of the valley, into the dark of falling night beyond.

How far outside the city had he come? How far had he to walk to gain those docks where he had disembarked that very morning? It did not matter. He walked, his head bent, his tired feet crying out for rest, but his heart driving him onward. He believed he would never rest again, not now that he knew this angel on earth existed.

What a fool he was, he decided a good forty minutes later as he passed through the encampments and hastened toward the city walls. He had never been a lad to fall for a pretty face. Since his transference to Suthinnakor and the house of his uncle, he had had time for nothing but his studies, so intense was the regimen, so exacting were the requirements made of all true scholars. He had no time for fancies or vain, poetic ideals of romance.

Indeed, by the time he gained the city walls and passed unhindered through the gates, he had half convinced himself that the entire encounter had been his invention. Or not the encounter, but merely his reaction to it. That leaping of his heart and quickening of his pulse were not the signs and sensations of sudden love. Oh, no! These were merely the results of a long, tiring day without food, without drink, without rest. And the girl? Certainly she was pretty. But no face was so perfect, no form so sublime that at first sight a man of Sunan’s intellect and learning would lose his head completely!

He did not realize, as he made his way down the dark, winding streets of Lunthea Maly at night how many times he came close to his own demise. Thieves lurked in doorways, and murderers hunted in back alleys. These, upon first seeing a tall, slender man in once-fine robes making his way unwittingly through territory not his own, bared their teeth like so many wolves eager for the hunt.

Yet in the end, all of these turned aside, allowing Sunan to pass unmolested through their midst. For something about his face, some light too bright in the depths of his eye . . . they did not like. Thieves and murderers are cowards at heart, and they were none of them willing to face a man who might not prove so defenseless as he at first appeared.

So it was that Sunan came to the long dockyard of the city in one piece, his heart still beating a wild pace in his breast, but his mind composed under the stern intellectual restraint he had learned to practice years ago. He had found the girl of the vision. This was all that mattered. And he had fulfilled his blood oath by returning to the docks.

These docks were ghostly and not quite silent at night as Sunan walked up and down the shoreline. The ships in their moorings made many sounds, creaking, groaning, whispering to one another secrets of their various voyages. Sailors on watch patrolled the decks, keeping a wary eye out for sly forms and sly hands which might think a ship at rest a worthy trove to plunder.

The docks themselves crawled with rats. Sunan’s stomach heaved at the sight of them gathering here and there to collect refuse. Little lordlings of the night come out to gambol and play now that the human-folk had fled the darkness. Their eyes glinted in the light of ships’ lanterns, evil mimics of Hulan’s starry children in the sky above.

Sunan paced beneath the stars, gazing up as he went. He had come to the docks. Now what? What would become of him and this life he led that was no longer his own? What new service would they require without any offered explanation? Was this existence truly worth the price?

“But am I ready to die in order to be free?” he whispered to the unquiet dark. He knew that he was not. Not yet, anyway.

Suddenly someone stood before him. He sucked in a quick breath but otherwise did not make a sound or a move.

“Did you find the girl?”

He did not recognize the voice. It was not the voice of Tu Domchu. But then, having seen Tu Domchu’s disguises, he did not doubt that the Crouching Shadow could disguise his voice with equal ease. One way or the other, Sunan knew that he spoke to a Crouching Shadow, and he hastened to give his report.

“I found her,” he said. The light of the nearest lantern was too far away to reveal the features of the face before him. He could see nothing more than a large, broad-shouldered form, and he sensed strength and purpose. “I found her. She is in—”

“Do not tell me. I am watched,” said the Crouching Shadow, and there was the faintest trace of fear in his voice. “Take this.”

Something was pressed into Sunan’s hand. Something cold and long and unfamiliar. It took him some moments to realize what he held: a knife. “What is this?” he asked, although, with a sickening drop of his stomach, he knew the answer to his question already. “What would you have me do?”

“Kill her,” said the Crouching Shadow, “or we are all dead men.”

Jovann wanted to knock his head against the wall at his back. Repeatedly. He wanted to knock harder and harder and harder until his whole skull rattled and broke, and the thing inside it slithered out, leaving him in peace.

Instead he sat in his chains, perfectly rigid and upright, breathing deep. He had seen the warriors of the Khla clan sit in just this way before and after a battle, clearing their minds, focusing their energies, driving back the bloodlust that could so quickly overwhelm a warrior’s heart and leave his soul open to madness. Jovann himself, as a boy, had practiced this meditation before and after a good hunt, though he knew that the killing of animals for food was quite unlike the killing of men for honor.

The lantern burned low in its base of oil. The flame, gone red with sickly waning, made the corpse lying in chains at Jovann’s side so much ghastlier. He shivered where he sat, and once more forced himself to concentrate on his breathing.

My father did not know me!

This thought, too strong and too close to panic, destroyed the tentative equilibrium he had achieved, and Jovann, though he had not moved, found himself dizzy with sickness. Something in his brain shifted, something that should not be there. Whatever it was, it had so changed his outward appearance that Juong-Khla—so miraculously appearing in this underground cell, far, far, far from the Chhayan plains where last Jovann had seen him—had not recognized his son and heir.

“It’s a dream,” Jovann whispered. “It’s a nightmare.”

What else could it be? How else could he explain the warping of his body into the form of another? How else could he explain the sensation of looking down at his own hands and seeing someone else’s? How else could he account for his father and two warriors of the Khla clan stepping out of thin air and back into it again? It must be a nightmare!

“But no,” Jovann admitted, squeezing his eyes tighter shut. “You have walked in the Dream. You have witnessed the nightmares of many men. You know this is real.”

If only he could sleep. If only he could step out of his body and return to the Wood, return to the Grandmother Tree and the serenity of endless green life surrounding. But he had been unable to leave his body behind and walk in other worlds ever since he was dragged through the gates of Daramuti and on down the Khir Road. He had heard no silver voice calling to him on the edge of sleep. He had seen no path opening beneath his feet.

He was trapped in the nightmare of mortal reality, and that nightmare grew ever worse.

The thing in his brain throbbed, aggravated. Jovann knew it wanted out. If only he could give it that wish! But he didn’t know how, so it battered about in his consciousness. His temples throbbed, and the base of his neck felt like an iron rod had been shoved up into his head. If he relaxed and simply permitted the imp to exist in his head without a fight, the pain would go away. This he knew, yet he could not help himself. Over and over again he tried to push it from his mind. And so the thing grew ever angrier and caused still more pain. At last even the meditation of his forefathers proved impossible, and Jovann put his hands to his head, clutching at his hair.

A gentle voice, speaking with command, whispered in the back of his memory.

“
Your pain is here. Beneath my hand. Feel it here beneath my hand.
”

“My pain is here,” he whispered, pressing his hands flat on either side of his head. He concentrated all his focus on the sensations of his palms and fingertips, and he felt the pain shift beneath them. He drew them down, whispering as he did so, “My pain is here. In my hands. I feel it in my hands.”

He heard her voice in his memory, drowning out even the scurrying of the imp.

“
Hold your pain in the palms of your hands.
”

The cell door creaked.

Jovann looked up, expecting to see the prison-keeper, hoping perhaps someone had realized that Lord Dok-Kasemsan was dead and had come to remove the corpse. He had sat far too long now in this chamber beside the dead man’s body. Even the sight of the prison-keeper’s ugly face would be welcome.

But it wasn’t the prison-keeper peering into the red-lit room. It was Sairu.

“By Hulan’s shining crown! Is that you, little miss?” Jovann exclaimed, surging up onto his knees, his pain momentarily forgotten. Then he cursed more bitterly, “Anwar blight it!” because he heard with his own ears how his words turned to gibberish the moment they left his mouth.

Sairu stared in at him, and without her smile she seemed strange to him. But he knew it was she, especially when the orange cat, her constant companion, appeared at her feet. She looked down at the cat, which purred and flicked its tail. “Are you certain?” she asked.

The cat blinked up at her then trotted into the chamber, stepping daintily around piles of musty straw. It sat in front of Jovann and stared at him in a manner most disconcerting. Jovann ignored the beast as best he could and addressed himself to Sairu. “I know you can’t see me,” he said, cringing at the horror his voice became in his own ears, like a madman’s chatter. “I know you can’t hear me. But please,
please,
know who I am! You’re smart. You’re clever. You see what others miss. See who I am!”

She crossed the cell more slowly than the cat and stood with the dying lamp above her head. She carried a small lantern of her own, a bamboo frame housing a single thick candle. The light was bright from the rice-paper wick, and she held it high to illuminate as much of the cell and the prisoner as she could. But the corpse lying so near drew her attention away from him, and he saw her cheek twitch at the sight of it, though he could not read the emotion.