Niente
HE HAD NEVER BEEN AT SEA before, and he wasn’t
certain that he was entirely enjoying the experience.
Niente stood at the
aftcastle bow of the captured Holdings galleon, once the
Marguerite and now renamed Yaoyotl—which was “War” in his own language.
Yaoyotl sailed in the middle of the
Tehuantin fleet; from his perch, Niente could look out over long
azure swells decorated with the white sails of well over a hundred
ships. Behind them, lost over the horizon days ago, was the eastern
coast of his land and the foul smoke of burned and razed Munereo,
now the gravepit for the Holdings’ Garde Civile, except for those
few who had retreated to the Easterners’ last small fingerhold on
the continent, the city of Tobarro. The army of the Tehuantin had
taken Munereo, taken back all the land south and west of its walls,
and had taken the ships of the Holdings fleet in the harbor, at
least those that had escaped the spell-fire from the Tehuantin
fleet, or that had not been scuttled by their own crews and sent to
the bottom when it was obvious the day was lost. Most of the ships
accompanying the Yaoyotl were the
seacraft called acalli: the two-masted,
lateen-sailed ships with which the Tehuantin plied the Western Sea
between the great cities the Eastern invaders had never seen. The
acalli could not carry the number of crew or soldiers that the
square-sailed Nessantican galleons could muster, nor were they as
fast, but they were far more maneuverable, especially in shallow
coastal waters or when the wind was against them.
The winds of the
Strettosei however, blew steadily west to east at this latitude,
and the wind of their passage sighed past the taut lines holding
the sails as the prows of the ships carved long lines of white
water through the swells, dipping and rising and falling yet again,
relentless and eternal.
A motion that still,
after several days, made Niente’s stomach lurch and burn. His
limbs, twisted and ravaged by the efforts of the spell he’d placed
in the Easterner Enéas, ached as he tried to remain steady against
the ship’s lurching. Two of the lesser nahualli stood on the
aftcastle with him, watching as Niente used his bowl to perform the
scrying spell; he dared not show them the weakness of his stomach
or his body, or word would go to the other nahualli and eventually
come to the ear of Tecuhtli Zolin, who was also on the Yaoyotl. The fate of every Nahual awaited him, the
fate that may have even come to Mahri and perhaps to Talis as well:
as a nahualli, every use of the X’in Ka took its toll, and the
greater the spell, the larger the payment the gods
demanded.
Eventually, the
payment would be death.
The rolling of the
ship shivered the water in his scrying bowl, rendering murky the
visions of the future: that bothered Niente more than the nausea.
Niente peered into the water, sloshing to the rim of the brass
bowl. His eyes didn’t want to focus; the left eye, clouded ever
since his enchantment of Enéas, had become worse since the assault
on Munereo. He blinked, but the scenes in the bowl refused to
become clear. He grunted, scowling, and tossed the water in disgust
over the rear rail of the ship. The other nahualli raised eyebrows
but said nothing. “I need to speak with the Tecuhtli,” Niente said.
“Take the bowl back to my room and cleanse it.”
They bent their heads
obediently as Niente, shuffling, pushed past them.
Niente had argued
with Tecuhtli Zolin that this strategy was foolish, though he’d not
dared to use that word. He wanted desperately to go home, back
beyond the Knife-Edge Mountains to the great cities by the lake.
Home to Xaria, his wife; home to his children. Home to
familiarity.
He hadn’t been alone.
The High Warrior Citlali had taken the same position, as had
several of the lesser warriors. “Why should we sail to the
Easterners’ land? Let us take the last city they hold here and push
their bodies into the great water. Then let us return to our homes
and our families, and if the Easterners return to trouble our
cousins again, we’ll push them back once more.”
But Zolin was
adamant. “Sakal demands more of us,” he’d declared. “It is time to
show these Easterners that we can hurt them as they hurt us. If one
is attacked by a wolf, driving it off leaves the wolf to attack
again, perhaps when it is stronger or you are weaker. Killing the
wolf is the only way to be truly safe.”
“This is not a wolf,”
Niente had persisted. “This is a many-headed beast, only one small
face of which we’ve seen, and we are going to its lair. It may be
that it will devour us completely.”
Zolin had grunted at
that. “Running from the wolf because you’re afraid is the worst
strategy of all. It only gives the wolf your unprotected
back.”
In the end, Zolin had
won over the High Warriors, and Niente had no choice but to tell
the nahualli that their task was not yet done. He’d almost been
surprised that none of the nahualli had risen up to challenge him
for Nahual as a result.
The quarters of the
former captain were below in the ship’s aftcastle, and that was
where Tecuhtli Zolin had taken up residence. The Easterner
furniture had been tossed overboard, to be replaced by the more
familiar geometric lines and patterns of their own styles. The room
was ablaze with reds and browns, the colors of blood and earth. The
smell of incense wrinkled Niente’s nose as he entered, the
techutli’s servants prostrating themselves on the rugs tossed over
the wooden planks.
Tecuhtli Zolin
reclined in a chair carved from a single block of green rock,
cushioned by pillows and blankets. His face and torso, like those
of all soldiers, was tattooed with swirls of dashes and curling
lines: a record of their prowess in battle and their rank. His head
was shaved as always and now adorned with the sprawling red tattoo
of the eagle. The High Warriors Citlali and Mazatl had been
speaking to him in low tones, but broke off their conversation as
Niente entered. Their marked, grim faces turned to
him.
“Ah, Nahual Niente,”
Tecuhtli Zolin said, gesturing. Niente strode across the room to
the throne and dropped to his knees. “Get up, get up. Tell me, what
do the gods say?”
Niente shook his head
as he rose to his feet. He could feel the appraising stares of the
High Warriors on him. “I’m sorry, Tecuhtli, but the motion of the
ship . . . it disturbs the waters. I saw a battle and a city afire
at the edge of a sea, and your banner flying above it, but the
rest—I saw nothing of the Easterner I sent back to this Kraljiki. I
saw nothing of their great city.”
“Ah, but the banner
and a city afire . . . that can only speak of victory. As to your
Easterner—” Zolin exhaled a scoff and then spat on the floor,
“—that was old Necalli’s strategy, and not even the great Mahri had
been able to make it work.”
Niente flushed at the
mention, irritated at Zolin’s dismissal of Mahri, whose gifts with
the X’in Ka were legendary. Mahri had evidently failed, yes, but it
must have been because some force with the Easterners had been even
stronger. Niente bowed his head more to hide his face than in
submission. “It must be as you say, Tecuhtli.”
Zolin laughed at
that. “Come now, Niente. Don’t be so modest. Why, you are a
far-seer and a nahualli the like of which we haven’t seen since
Mahri. Better, since Mahri failed to stop the Easterners from
invading our lands and those of our cousins. Necalli was a fool who
wasted valuable resources. He wasted you as well—all the effort you
put into that Easterner. But now . . .” A broad smile spread over
Zolin’s face. “I have thrown the Easterners back to one unimportant
town on our cousins’ land—with the help of your advice and your
skill—and now we go to plunder the Easterners as they once
plundered our cousins of the Eastern Sea.” He waved a hand. “I will
chop the head from this Eastern serpent myself, and I will make
certain that it never grows a new one.” His hand sliced downward.
Zolin grinned, but the two High Warriors’ faces were stoic and
unmoving.
Niente wondered which
one of them might one day challenge Zolin if this expedition
failed, as Niente feared it would.
Niente shared the
dour attitude of Citlali and Mazatl. Zolin was no different than
many of those outside the nahualli. They all thought his gift was a
simple thing: peer into the water and let the moon-goddess Axat
send the future spinning past your eyes. They didn’t understand
that Axat’s visions were confusing and sometimes dim, that what
swam in the sacred water were only possibilities, and that those
possibilities could be altered and shifted and even averted by
other’s abilities. Mahri—whose skills, it was said, had surpassed
any nahualli’s—had discovered how fickle Axat could be: Mahri’s
death had been one of the first visions Niente had ever seen in a
scrying bowl; it had been that vision that had demonstrated to
Niente’s mentors how fully Axat and Sakal had blessed him. Talis,
who Tecuhtli Necalli had sent to Nessantico, had since confirmed
Niente’s vision: Mahri had failed and been killed.
Those without the
gift thought that it must be wonderful to wield the power of Axat
and Sakal, of moon and sun. They didn’t see how using the gift
stole strength and vitality; how it disfigured and twisted those
who used it. Already Niente could look into the bronze mirror in
his room and see the deep lines in his face, lines that no one of
his age should yet bear. He could see how his mouth sagged, how his
left eye wept constantly and was now whitened with a spell-cloud,
how his hair was thinning and marbled with silver strands. He could
feel the constant ache in his joints that would one day turn into
obsidian knives of agony. Niente had never met Mahri, but he had
glimpsed the man’s face in the scrying bowl, and it terrified him
that one day he, too, would see people turning away rather than
look on him, and he would hear the cries of frightened children as
he passed.
And he knew that
Tecuhtli Zolin might be pleased now with him, but that the
Tecuhtli’s pleasure was fragile, and could vanish as quickly as
mist in sunlight. A battle lost . . . That was all it would take,
and Tecuhtli Zolin would be looking for a new Nahual to be at his
side.
“I pray to Axat that
you will slay the Eastern serpent,” he told Zolin. “But
I—”
He stopped, hearing a
call from the deck. “Land . . .”
someone was shouting. “The Easterner coast . .
.”
Zolin’s grin grew
wider. “Good,” he said to his High Warriors, to Niente. “It’s time
to see a city burn and watch our banners floating over their land.”
He rose to his feet, gesturing away the servants who rushed to
help. “Come,” the Tecuhtli said. “Let’s see this land together with
our own eyes, before we take it.”