Chapter 56
“Siniq-elb.”
The voice was distant, thin as silk thread. A dull pounding, and more voices, and then, finally, blessed quiet.
It was time they all left him alone; he had failed them. All of them. His parents. Inara. Vas. Mece.
The last hurt most of all, and so he hid from that autumn-sunlight hair, from violet eyes, the color of the sky before a storm. From broken hands that had struggled, through so much pain, to teach him to play the harp. The flood of memories was more than he could bear, heavy as the earth itself, and it bore him under the surface of his thoughts, to a place almost like sleep.
That escape could not silence everything though. For the first time, Siniq-elb had to face the fact that he was not a soldier, not a warrior. He had thought that he could still fight, still find meaning in life, even if he could not wield a sword. He had thought there were many ways to fight for the people that he loved.
He had thought wrong.
Khylar had tossed him aside like a child, had taken his crutches and snapped them like kindling. The eses had taken him by force from his squad. Natam had betrayed him and subdued him by force. Dakel had taken his feet—his life—by force. What use was fighting when strength was the final arbiter of right? The tair took life because of his power; the rebels were no better, for they overthrew the tair with equal violence, slaughtering the gods-made-flesh and their servants without remorse. There was no escape; it was a world where the strong ruled and the weak suffered, and Siniq-elb was weak.
A crash met the wall of his self-imposed isolation, rebounding and echoing strangely inside him, threatening to stir the dark waters and bring him back to the waking world. Siniq-elb resisted, plunging deeper into that void, wrapping himself in brackish half-memory. Nothing remained for him in the world of the living; Khylar would return soon, and when he did, he would put an end to Siniq-elb’s existence. It would be better that way.
“Siniq-elb.”
The same voice, no longer distant, no longer thin, but full of compassion. Siniq-elb had heard it long ago, during a night when there was nothing but pain and the thin spaces between, where the voice found him. It was a beacon on the shore, but one on which Siniq-elb turned his back.
“That’s not going to wake him,” a different voice said.
Pain burst along the side of Siniq-elb’s face, red-hot and tingling like a swarm of bees. That stirred the waters, but Siniq-elb dove deeper.
Another blow that was like ice and then fire. Another. And another.
Each one shook the walls of self-pity, stirred the water of sleeping memory, and Siniq-elb, in spite of himself, felt his anger awaken. Bright and hot, to match the pain in his cheeks, but with a dark, slow-burning core that came from deep within, where disappointment and failure fed it like coal.
The world snapped into focus around him. Siniq-elb caught Agahm’s fist as it descended toward him. With a twist, he pulled Agahm off balance, and as the bigger man fell forward, Siniq-elb brought his free hand around and landed a solid punch on the carpenter’s jaw.
The shock of the blow traveled up Siniq-elb’s arm. Agahm let out a grunt and wobbled on his knees for a moment. Rubbing his jaw, he wrenched his arm free of Siniq-elb’s grip and returned to his seat.
“Tair help us, boy,” he said. “I’d hate to see you in the mornings. You wake up worse than a bear between harvests.”
Siniq-elb glared at him, shaking his hand. “What in the Father’s glory are you doing?” He glanced at Vas, who sat next to Agahm. “Why is he here?”
Vas looked at Agahm. “I brought him when I couldn’t get the door open. Something hit me from behind, and when I woke, the door was locked and you wouldn’t answer. I didn’t know who else to get.”
It took some of the heat from Siniq-elb’s anger; Vas had been attacked, hurt as well. Another person Siniq-elb had failed to defend. As though in answer to Siniq-elb’s thoughts, Vas said, “I’m alright, don’t worry. I don’t know how they snuck up on me, though; I’m not that oblivious. Am I?”
Agahm snorted.
“He had the brachal,” Siniq-elb said. “He had it, the whole time, and he knew what we were planning. And he has Mece.”
“Then we need to go get her,” Vas said. “What does he want with her?”
Siniq-elb shook his head and closed his eyes.
“Don’t make me hit you again,” Agahm said. “Get on your feet and go find her.”
“I don’t have feet!” Siniq-elb screamed, his eyes flashing open. “In case you haven’t noticed, neither do you.”
Agahm paled and drew back.
“Calm down, Siniq-elb,” Vas said. “We’re trying to help. And Agahm’s right; we need to find Mece. Listen—they’ve started the High Harvest.”
With some surprise, Siniq-elb realized that the drums were sounding. In his self-pity, he had not noticed them, but they were there—muted by the walls of the temple, but deep and resonant. His bones, the deepest tissues of muscle, strands of sinew and cartilage, all vibrated in time with the drums, strings plucked by an unseen hand. For the first time since arriving at the temple, Siniq-elb felt the swirl of harvest-madness deep inside him. It rippled through his body, waves of lust humming in answer to the reverberations in his bones. With practice born of a lifetime in the Paths, Siniq-elb pressed the sensation down, bottled it up; there were those in the city who would let it wash over them, enraptured by the call of the god-made-flesh, but Siniq-elb was not one of them.
“Let’s go,” Vas said.
“Why?” Siniq-elb said.
“Because Mece needs our help! What if he’s taken her to the High Harvest?”
“I can’t do anything,” Siniq-elb said. “What will I do? Crawl down there on my hands and knees and ask Khylar to give her back? Do you think if I apologize for hitting him with the harp, he’ll let her go? Will an apology make him stop using me as a tool against my family, a knife he can hold to their throats?”
“Ah,” Agahm said, sympathy filling his face. “So you know?”
“Yes I know,” Siniq-elb said. “And the Father take both of you for not telling me.”
“It’s easier if you don’t know,” Agahm said. “If you think you’re being punished, it can give you a sense of purpose. The goal of redemption. Finding out—well, it can break a person. It broke me.”
“So kind of you,” Siniq-elb snapped. “Well you needn’t have bothered; it makes no difference. Even if I hadn’t been brought here as a hostage, a guarantee for my parents’ good behavior, having my feet taken was enough. What’s left of me? What can I do? You both say I should go help Mece, as though that would make any difference. Even if I take Khylar by surprise, he’s still a whole man, and what’s more, he has a brachal. He has the power of a god running through his veins. He tossed me around like a sick kitten, and he wasn’t even trying. He held Mece like a rag doll. Tell me, what can a man with no feet do in a world where strength is the only law?”
Agahm’s emerald eyes hardened, and he turned his face away.
“You know I’m right,” Siniq-elb said. “You saw this yourself, and that’s why you gave up. You knew that the strong do what they want, and the weak are trampled underfoot.”
“And then I met you,” Agahm said. He looked up at Siniq-elb. “And I realized I was wrong.”
“No,” Siniq-elb said. “I was wrong. I was a fool to think that I could make anything different; tair bless me, a child could beat the life from me with no trouble. I could do nothing to stop him; and I can’t do anything to stop Khylar, and the world won’t give a gloried second thought about it, because Khylar is stronger.”
“That’s not true,” Vas said, his voice so soft that Siniq-elb barely heard him.
“It is true!” Siniq-elb said. “You have all these ideas about understanding each other, about communication, about learning, and it’s all worth less than a rotted seed. What did it get you? A life in the Garden. An example for people who think differently than the temple.
A hostage used against those who want to learn. Show me that it’s not true!”
“It’s just not,” Vas said, his voice firm. He lifted his head and met Siniq-elb’s gaze, his dark eyes firm. “You know it’s not; it’s just easier for you to believe that it’s true.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what I think!”
“Right now, you’re hurting,” Vas said. “You’re upset because Khylar was able to keep you from what you wanted, from what you had chosen. He was stronger. He won. But you’re wrong. People like Khylar can’t win, because there is more to life than what we accomplish, and there are more ways to measure victory than by success.”
Siniq-elb shook his head.
“It’s true,” Vas said. “Take the Garden, for example. Take Agahm. He is a different man because of you; he is happier, he has meaning in his life. Look at how that has changed other people: the hog-women, Ishgh. Mece. Me. We’re all happier; we have something to live for, and we want to live, because of you. Because you decided that sitting in the Garden wasn’t enough for you.”
“And the eses will take that away,” Siniq-elb. “They will beat us down, they will stop letting us work, they will cripple and maim us until we can do nothing but lie on the floor and drool. And they will have won.”
“No,” Vas said. “Because it doesn’t matter if we can make crutches or build a pavilion. It doesn’t matter if we can sing and weave. Tair forgive me, but it doesn’t matter if we can chop onions and crimp the crust of a tart. And it doesn’t matter if we can walk. It only matters what we choose. And you can choose life, and happiness, and to try to save Mece.”
“Those are fine words,” Siniq-elb said, “but it won’t bring back my feet; I cannot choose to be whole again.”
“That’s true. We all have bad things happen to us. We can accept what has happened to us, acknowledge it, and then we can choose what we will do next. And we can choose how we will treat the people around us. That’s all that is ever allowed to anyone; being in the Garden doesn’t make it any different. Being in the Garden is not an excuse; it’s not an escape from our responsibility to act, to choose to be better every day, to try to understand and to help the people around us. And you showed me that when you came to the Garden.”
“He’s right,” Agahm said, his voice thick. “Sometimes you don’t get to choose the type of wood you get to work with, or even the job that you have to do, but you can choose how you go about it, and you can choose how you make it.
Siniq-elb sat there. A part of him knew that Vas was right; it was not the decision to make the crutches that had made Agahm feel better about himself; it was not the weaving that had made the hog-women wash and dress themselves. It was not even the cutting onions that had given Siniq-elb a sense of purpose, a meaning to his life—although at the time, it had felt that way. Instead, he realized, it was the decision, taken in those painful moments after being beaten, that he would not let his situation control him, that he would find a way to escape, to make his life his own.
And, in that moment, Siniq-elb realized that it did not matter if he escaped. It did not matter if he lived another day. In a way, it did not matter if he saved Mece. All that mattered was that he tried.
It was like water to a man dying of thirst; bright and sweet and painful, all at the same time, but it brought clarity. And with that clarity, it brought urgency. And urgency, pressing in on him, brought insight.
With a start, Siniq-elb looked up at Vas and Agahm.
“I know where he took her.”