Ages of Wonder Page 4

  Things got complicated as the Boy grew into the Great King (everyone called him this, but to me he was always the Boy). There was no reason for it: the game was going so well, had all the elements the gods so desired. The political: the Boy was a natural, intelligent, often ruthless leader, from the time he assumed his assassinated father’s throne at age eighteen until he was thirty-three and king of the known world. The intellectual: he was insatiably curious, sent plant specimens home to his old tutor, sketched the flora and fauna he encountered in the strange lands he conquered. The emotional too, of course: he continued to be obsessed with his mother, who was overbearing even when vast distances separated them. He loved a boyhood companion, tolerated the jealousies of his two wives. Drunken murders, the burning of cities and razing of temples: he did it all with the protection of my presence, and the gods wept and rejoiced, as he did.

  But for me, it got complicated.

  He talked to me. “A hard day, Ox-Head.” The darkness of a palace stable, or a tent pitched in hissing sand. “He’s angry at me; he’s thinks I’m paying too much attention to the dancing boy . . .” I should have been happy about this latest fodder for the Peak-dwellers—but there was the Boy’s head, heavy against my neck, and his hand wrapped in my mane. His fear and sadness dragged at me—and his joy, when the Companion called his name from the darkness outside, gave me joy.

  Maybe if he had been a petulant fool like the Hero, nothing would have come of it, for me. But for every moment the Boy sulked, or declared himself a deity, or—gods forbid—called himself the Hero, there was a moment of selflessness or humor or compassion. He unsettled me so much that I forgot about the game.

  “It’s me again, old friend.” Tired, smiling, brushing me until my own weariness fell away. (His long marches were exhausting, even for a supernatural being like myself.) “My men want to go home. So many of them hate what I’ve done, accepting the foreigners, adopting their dress, their ways. Marrying them to my people, so that their children will inherit my kingdom. Maybe they simply fear the strangeness of it all, and only think they hate.” More brush-strokes, and a whistled tune. He always whistled under his breath when he was worried. “They’re not ready for my vision. I’m forging one new world out of all the old ones, Ox-Head, and all they want to do is shut their eyes and run back to the memory of a place that hasn’t changed. But . . .” His head against my neck again. “What if they’re right? What if . . . I don’t know. And even though I offer prayers and sacrifices, the gods give me no guidance.”

  Perhaps my doubts were born of his.

  The order to let the Boy die came from the Warrior.

  “You’re just jealous,” said the Huntress (her voice was thin, carried to me on a southern breeze).

  “Ha!” the Warrior scoffed. “Never! I might just as well be jealous of you, wench”—which caused a scuffle and a yelp, and the sound of footsteps retreating into woods.

  “You may be right.” The Thinker now, speaking in his careful, measured way. “He’s winning too much. He’s faced no serious trials of late. There’s no real balance in his life.”

  I gave my head a violent shake, but the wind still wrapped me in words.

  “Ox-Head?” The Boy was with me. Of course, the divine conversation had to happen when he was at my side. The Companion was leaning against a tent pole, staring intently at a map, clicking his tongue against his teeth (this always made the Boy growl with false annoyance). “What’s troubling you, old man?”

  I whickered to reassure him, but the words didn’t go away.

  “Yes,” the Father said, “it’s getting tiresome. We’ve seen it all before. May be time to move on.”

  I felt a rush of relief; after all, it had been twenty human years since I’d frolicked in the Peak’s meadows. A rush of relief, and then a rush of dread.

  “Tomorrow’s battle. Do you hear me, servant? We’ll give you further orders then.”

  No other night has ever seemed longer to me. Even now, after countless nights in hell, I can say this without exaggeration. I tried not to think, and when I did, I thought ridiculous things like, “The Reveler will get them all drunk and they’ll forget.” But they didn’t forget, and neither did I.

  The Boy came to get me before dawn. The river before us was nearly invisible; lightning-shot clouds roiled above it. “The gods’ Father speaks,” the Boy said, lifting his head to the thunder, and I wished he were wrong. He led his men and their mounts down the mud-slick bank and into the water, whose cold I hardly felt. Winds tore at my mane—the dry winds of this desert country, but others as well, which smelled of mountain spring. The Boy’s legs and hands guided me firmly, as always. He sat upon me with coiled, expectant joy, as he had before so many other battles. This one was no different, to him—except for the elephants (his army had never even seen one of these before, let alone 200), and the seven-foot-tall king who sat astride the largest of the beasts. “Look, Ox-Head,” I heard Alexander say, as the gale shrieked around us and the river rose up tall and white. “Look, but don’t be afraid. Let’s show them now, you and I.”

  He did show them. From the cover of an island, he determined that a direct approach would fail, for the horses were all petrified of the elephants. (I didn’t blame them.) So he deployed a lesser force behind and around the opposing army’s right flank. He ordered this calmly, addressing several soldiers by name, smiling at them, even as the distant elephants trumpeted and stamped their enormous feet. He waited for the surprise attack to have its effect; then, as daylight broke the storm apart, he cried out and drove his army back into the river.

  “Let him fall.” The Father’s voice; thunder within thunder. “Leave him, now—return to us.”

  I could have obeyed my master and thrown the Boy, or pretended to stumble—something that would have left him unprotected, vulnerable to a spear or an arrow or the underside of an elephant’s foot. (I had so often saved him from these sorts of disasters, simply by bearing him.) This might have been easier for both of us. I could have sped home to the Peak; he could have died quickly and gloriously, just as the Hero had, after my brother and I removed our divine protection from him during the War.

  “The Father of all Gods commands you: Leave him now!”

  I carried the Boy up the steep, muddy bank. I carried him through ranks of elephants and men, which parted before us and fell behind. The screams and clashing of metal were muffled, for although the skies of men had cleared, the storm still roared within me.

  “You have one more chance to obey—one more chance, and if you do not take it, you will be punished. You cannot imagine the suffering . . . Look there, to your left. The Great King’s enemies retreat or die, save that one—he has an arrow, and it will fly soon. Let it find its mark. Let it find its mark.”

  I did.

  I reared, higher than I’d ever allowed myself to before, among men. The Boy slid and clung but didn’t fall. I held myself like this, too tall and still to be a mortal beast—held myself, until the arrow had sped past the place where his throat had been and found my own instead.

  I had been injured in battle before: slashes, stabs, glancing blows. The gods’ favor had kept me safe (though they did have me shed some blood and retain some scars for the sake of credibility). There was no such favor now. A maelstrom engulfed me: words and winds, agonies of mind and body. I assume the Boy cried out my name, or something of the sort, though I wasn’t sure: the gods allowed me no more time to play the game of men.

  I know what happened afterward. (The winds still reach the Abyss, though their news is often out-of-date.) The Boy won the battle and granted clemency to the giant-king. The Boy mourned me, built a city in my honor. His men mutinied. The Companion died. The Boy went mad. He fell ill in a city of gardens and then he died. His worlds fractured, and yet the one that was born was still his. The stuff, all of it, of divine desire. It must have frustrated the gods to no end that there was no divine design involved.

  I protested my innocence after the
river battle. I had to: I knew where I’d end up and I was terrified. “I was sentimental,” I stammered, hanging my head. “I was confused. I made a bad decision.” I didn’t look up at them, even when the silence stretched on.

  “Down,” the Father rumbled at last.

  I fell, through layers of sky and then the hard, jagged flesh of the earth. Down, down, into night and smoke and stink, until the stones of the pit broke my fall.

  And now here I stand, chewing on blackened straw (though I suppose I should be grateful, listening to the Yearner’s racket, that I have anything to chew on), remembering the dew-sweet grass of the Peak and wondering, as I will for all eternity, what I was thinking. Sometimes, when I catch one of those glimpses of myself in the bronze wall, I imagine for a moment that there’s a rider on my back—a boy, a youth, a man?—and that both of us are gilded with sun. At such moments my foolishness almost makes sense.

  “The Great King rode to glory,” men will say (of this, at least, I have no doubt). “The Great King rode into a new world.”

  Only the world’s old winds will know the rest.

  Mist Wraith

  Urania Fung

  Trinh hugged her knees as she sat on a beach, the red scarf around her hair wafting in the sea breeze, her rainbow belt contrasting with her black dress. Alone, she watched her husband’s skiff distance itself from her and join the company of others. Van was an excellent fisherman, and all the younger villagers treated him like their leader. Trinh and her family had thought she would do well with him, but now she wondered how well she could do if Van never loved her. She told herself to be patient as they were only four months into their arranged marriage.

  Fog rose over the sea, moving like a mass of wraiths among the boats. Fearful of the blinding whiteness, fishermen in cone-shaped straw hats and sandals hurried back to shore. Van arrived first, and Trinh helped him pull his skiff onto the beach. Lying inside was a drenched woman, pale with a mole beside her nose. Her green silk gown and white trousers were so tattered they exposed her battered limbs and threatened to slide off her body.

  “What happened to her?” Trinh asked, checking the woman for breath.

  Van shrugged and lifted the woman out, water from her rags seeping into his gray shirt and rolled-up pants.

  They returned to the village, which was much like Trinh’s old home. Laundry flapped from clotheslines strung between thatched houses. Small altars offered cups of tea to ancestors and gods. But instead of her relatives, it was Van’s mother and aunts cleaning the day’s catch while gulls snatched the discarded guts. It was his sister and his cousins hanging fish from racks, placed in the shade of palms to keep the drying flesh from souring in the sun.

  “Back already?” Van’s sister asked, pulling twine through a slit in a cod tail. Her gaze fell on the stranger. “Where did she come from?”

  “Saw her floating in the sea and rescued her,” Van replied.

  Scaling a catfish, his mother beamed from her shaded chair. “How good of you!”

  “She can stay with me,” his sister said.

  “I don’t want to burden you,” Van replied, tightening his grip on the stranger. “I’m sure Trinh won’t mind having her with us.”

  “How generous of you!” his mother gushed.

  Trinh had prided herself in having the blackest hair and the largest eyes of everyone she knew, but next to the stranger’s luscious breasts and hips, she felt too flat and boyish to be attractive.

  She tugged at Van’s sleeve. “It is a little awkward.”

  Van turned on her. “How can you be so heartless?”

  Trinh wanted to say nothing was heartless about letting his sister care for the stranger, but Van’s temper warned her against the temptation.

  “It’s laziness,” Van’s sister said, smirking at Trinh. “I knew any girl of Trinh’s lowly family couldn’t be bothered to help others, but this marriage was Grandfather’s dying wish.”

  “And it was only his wish because he lost so much money playing dice,” a cousin said, elbowing Van’s sister.

  Trinh wanted to argue that her family was equal to theirs and their grandfathers had been best friends, desirous of seeing a connection between their families, but she knew it would be futile.

  “Your choice,” she told Van.

  As they headed home, Trinh imagined going beyond the village to the fields of yellow slipper flowers mixed with pink cuckoo flowers, and farther, to the three mountains smothered in fog and evergreens. The tallest was Suong Ma Mountain, whose majesty had inspired plenty of stories. Trinh loved the peace she felt when looking at it, a peace she longed for more than ever now that a stranger was about to complicate her life.

  At home she discarded the woman’s rags, bathed her in a wooden tub, bandaged her limbs, and wrapped her in a cotton robe. Their house was one of the largest with two bedrooms, Van’s and hers. Trinh heaved the unconscious woman into her bed, fed her porridge, and slept on a mat that night.

  The next day Van came home early, demanding to know how well Trinh had taken care of their guest. Then he shooed her out of her room. Trinh was scrubbing her anger out on chopsticks and clay bowls when she heard croaking. She stopped washing and pressed her ear against the wall.

  The woman was speaking. She called herself Hong Yen and asked where she was and how she had come to be here. After Van explained, Hong Yen didn’t thank him for saving her and refused to answer questions about her past. She only wanted to know how to reach Suong Ma Mountain.

  “Why do you want to go there?” Van asked.

  “On Suong Ma Mountain is Mist Wraith Pond,” Hong Yen replied. “When I’m in sight of it, the pond’s spirit, the Mist Wraith, will quench my longing and shape itself into my son.”

  “That legend is false. Even if it were true, you shouldn’t spend your life with an inhuman thing. You’re better off having another baby.”

  “Is Suong Ma Mountain one of those three over there?”

  “It’s nowhere in sight.”

  Trinh was stunned to hear Van lie. Why not let Hong Yen go to the mountain and see for herself?

  Hong Yen cried, and Van stayed with her until morning. After that, Van spent all his nights with her and made Trinh sleep in his room instead. Loneliness lengthened Trinh’s nights and made her sensitive to the songs of frogs and crickets blending in a harmony that surrounded but excluded her. It darkened her days, making her wish she could talk to someone, but none of the villagers would tolerate her complaints. Trinh put in more effort to pretty herself, padding her breasts and wearing jewelry. She tried to make meals more delicious and keep their house cleaner, but Van noticed none of it.

  One day when Van was out fishing, Trinh took the chair next to her rival, who was sitting up in bed. Hollowness expanded in Trinh’s chest as she faced the fact that her bed had become Van and Hong Yen’s. Trinh had taught her rival to repair baskets the day before. They worked on a pile of them while Trinh tried to compose herself. She finished replacing a handle and admired her work.

  “Hong Yen, don’t you think these baskets are lucky? Here we are, restoring them, making them wanted.”

  “They are lucky since they can be restored. Many things cannot,” Hong Yen said, looking from her basket to the window. “Do you really not know where Suong Ma Mountain is?”

  Van had ordered Trinh not to tell, but after watching him spend night after night with Hong Yen, Trinh considered risking his wrath.

  “If you can help me, perhaps I’ll help you,” Trinh said, setting down a basket and picking up another.

  Hong Yen raised an eyebrow. “Really? What do you need help with?”

  “I’m treated like a ghost here. Unseen. Unwanted. I’ve been Van’s wife for nearly five months, yet I’m still a virgin. My husband spends his nights with you. Why?”

  Hong Yen’s face contorted into a snarl. “Why care about a beast like him? You can give and give, but he won’t give back.”

  Trinh had assumed from Hong Yen’s silk rags that
she had come from high society. Now she was sure Hong Yen had been a prostitute, accustomed to manipulating men. Trinh scooted away. She wanted to leave the house but forced herself to complete her mission.

  “Don’t avoid my question.”

  Hong Yen groaned as though finally realizing how stupid her hostess was. “Perhaps because I’m new. Different. His fascination should wear off soon.”

  Months of helpless rage erupted. Trinh threw her basket at the floor and stood up. “I’ve been new! I was new to this village when I married him. He didn’t care for that. I had thought Van liked everyone else better because he had known them longer. But you’re a newcomer. You’re more of a newcomer than I am. You don’t tell anyone about your past, most likely because it’s dirty. Why doesn’t Van care? Are you that much more attractive?”

  “I don’t know,” Hong Yen said, “but if you tell me where Suong Ma Mountain is, I’ll leave the village. I’m sure that’ll help.”

  Trinh clenched her fists. Hong Yen wouldn’t spare a thought for anyone or anything except a worthless legend. “There’s no such thing as a Mist Wraith.”

  “Yes, there is. When I find it, it’ll look like my son and know everything I know about him,” Hong Yen insisted, a wildness kindling in her eyes. “I’ll have him back. My dear son!”

  Realizing she couldn’t change Hong Yen’s mind about the Wraith’s existence, Trinh tried another angle. “I’m sure the spirit has its own shape to be content with. Why not leave it alone?”

  “Water doesn’t have its own shape. Its nature is to fill in gaps. Its spirit can be no different.”

  “How many Mist Wraiths do you think there are?”