The Prayer of a Spider
“It is not pleasing to think that Lord Davanu far away in Torakand has knowledge of this weakness of yours, my lord.”
Faru sipped his wine. They were alone at the table in the village gathering place, everyone else having gone in. A lone candle supplemented the moonlight.
“Don’t care,” Vanu replied. He rubbed his throat, which was already feeling overtired. “Not weakness.”
“You may not feel it to be a weakness, my lord, but in the eyes of the world it is a different matter. And I tell you I do care what they say about you in Torakand.”
Vanu snorted. “Beaten. Finished. What they say. Seems true.”
“Do you think Davanu Shawa sent you a boy bride because he thinks you are finished?”
“Don’t know.” He really didn’t want to explain to Faru that Tirtu had made the request. He did his best to keep those two apart, the way you might have tried to keep your stupidest hunting dog away from a half-tame wolf.
Faru was regarding him now with a glittering intensity in the moonlight.
“My father put all his trust in you.” Faru’s voice was low. “Never could my heart betray the oath I made to him. Yet sometimes I wonder why he had me make it.”
Vanu shrugged. He was so weary of Faru’s nonsense. Three years of this he’d endured, every time he put up a wall or planted a new crop or painted a fucking doorpost: My father made me swear an oath to follow you, and yet sometimes I wonder why. You and me both, you tedious bastard.
“Don’t know,” he said again.
“Do you mean to keep the boy?”
Vanu clenched his jaw and wished there were more beer in his cup. Come to that, he would have liked to reach for the wine jug in front of Faru, which he knew was not empty. But he had made Susami a promise, and he hadn’t broken it lately.
“No.”
“You’ll send him back?”
Vanu nodded. It was the only possible answer.
Another mouth to feed wouldn’t be the ruin of them, but it would put strain on their resources, and he couldn’t think of doing that for selfish reasons.
They should wait until one of the younger men wanted a bride.
Even Tirtu—he deserved a companion if he wanted one.
“Good,” said Faru. “Let it be soon. My lord.”
Heart of the Blue Heaven, he was tired. He wanted a drink.
He wanted a fuck. A cup of strong, earthy red, the kind of wine that was sitting on the table in front of him, and a night in bed with a beautiful boy from one of the hostels in Torakand—the kind of boy that his old friend Davanu, who knew him so well, had sent him.
That was exactly what he wanted. But he wasn’t going to have the wine, and he wasn’t going to fuck the boy, either. If he did …
Well, he couldn’t tonight, because the poor fellow was still recovering from his fall.
And if he did it later, Tirtu and Faru would both think it meant he was going to keep him.
Faru would disapprove, which Vanu didn’t much care about, but Tirtu would get his hopes up.
He’d be waiting for Vanu to chew through the encircling walls and start murdering his way across the countryside. To what end, he didn’t know.
He remembered the days when he’d been a boy himself, learning what he liked with enthusiastic companions.
To relive some of that with a young lover …
Well. It was a dream, a foolish one. He was well past his own youth, and the boy from Torakand wasn’t one of his childhood friends.
However willing he might be, he was still basically a conscript—it would be a kindness to him to let him go home.
Faru got up and left, but Vanu stayed at the table, watching the older man walk back toward his father’s half-ruined hall, which he insisted on living in.
At the door, someone met him, a figure in a white cloak.
Earth’s tits. That dung-brained ancestor-fucker was back?
Vanu was denying himself the pleasure of keeping the lovely boy that Davanu had sent him, for the sake of conserving their resources, and Faru was welcoming that limp dick of a shaman back into the stronghold?
Vanu reached for the half-full wine jug on the table and tipped it to drink directly from the spout. It tasted good.
“He’s not an actual lion, but he does have a tail,” Temar said, swinging his foot as he sat perched on the edge of the long table.
“They all do in the mountains,” Zoha confirmed, as the younger boys’ eyes grew wider. “And they’re hairy like beasts.”
“Truth,” said Temar. “They’re not really human the way we are.”
“Deru and Rami are from the mountains,” said one of the younger boys, not objecting exactly, just as if the discrepancy puzzled him. “They don’t have tails.”
“Rami cut his off,” said Temar with authority. “He showed me the scar. I guess Deru’s never grew.” He shrugged.
Lill listened to all of this in silence from the other end of the library table.
It was true that Rami had a scar on his backside, but it wasn’t in the place where you’d expect a tail to grow.
And Rami was a joker; Lill could just imagine him making up that story.
He and Deru were brothers, and Lill was glad to have them as allies.
It had started as a means of learning their native language; it was still mostly about that.
But they were big enough that even the boys who didn’t like them wouldn’t bother them, and if Lill stuck close enough to them, and did favours for them consistently enough, their protection would extend to him too.
They didn’t need Lill speaking up now to set the record straight about their lack of tails, especially since it seemed like they might have started the story themselves. So why was it that he somehow wanted to? He frowned down at the tablet in front of him.
“You know he killed his own father and mother?” Zoha took up the thread. “Started a feud between their families, too—they’re always feuding up in the mountains.”
This, everyone knew. Lill had only a few memories of his mother and a rumour for a father. The thought of a man so monstrous that he could actually have known both his parents and then killed them—who cared whether or not he had a tail at that point, because clearly he wasn’t human.
Usually the conversation would go on from here to a recounting of the familiar story of the Tawa Valley and the death of White Viper.
Lill had long ago developed a picture of it in his mind: the man from the mountains a shadowy figure with a huge blade and hunched, bestial shoulders; White Viper standing straight as a pine tree in his orange, embellished robe of honour, hand on the hilt of his own sword, silver beard jutting proudly, just as he was shown in the painting in the central hall of the Order.
And like a tree he had been hacked down by the beast from the mountain, in spite of his grace and learning and superior skill.
And everything had changed because of that.
Lill banged the flat of his hand on the table to get the younger boys’ attention and stood up.
“Break’s over! Back to our lesson.” He picked up the clay tablet he had been reading from and found where he had left off.
“Listen carefully, because this is the part that concerns us. ‘In the year 600 from the birth of the prophet Vaksha, I, King Xshamaya, Great King, King of Kings, King of Nations, first brought the land of Akramarra under the rule of the Zashian throne, increasing the kingdom of my father and expanding the might of Zash into the fertile land of hills between the mountains. There I subdued the warlike Chiddang people and recruited from their fiercest warriors a royal guard loyal only to me, sworn defenders of my truth against the liars from inside and the liars from outside.’ That’s us.
At first the Order was made up of the best warriors of the Chiddang.
That was more than one hundred years ago. ”
“You’re Chiddang, aren’t you, Lill?” said one of the younger boys.
“Of course he is,” said someone else. “His grandfather—”
“You can tell by his eyes,” said Zoha, pulling his own eyelids sideways in a crude imitation of Lill’s.
“He’s half Chiddang,” Temar corrected them authoritatively. “No one knows who his father is—he might be anything.”
Lill picked up a writing stylus and threw it like a dart at Temar. It hit him in the forehead, making him jump satisfyingly.
“You are supposed to be listening to me, not gossiping about me,” Lill said coldly.
“‘King Xshamaya says, Let anyone cast doubt on my right to hold the throne of Zash, and my sworn defenders will fall on him like a destroying fire, like rocks falling from the mountain, like a snake that bites in the night … ’”
The lesson ended when the gong rang to summon the boys to devotions.
Lill replaced the tablet about King Xshamaya in its basket and ran upstairs with the others.
They arranged themselves smartly in the yard before filing inside, where they closed the shutters, blew out the lamps, and crouched on the cold floor in the darkness.
Hiding themselves, they’d been told, from the Almighty and his angels, that the divine eyes might not see the forbidden ancient rites.
Lill had read enough to suspect, even in those days, that this was useless; if God was all that the prophets said, you couldn’t hope to hide from him or his messengers.
Lill thought it more likely that the angels knew all about the Order and just grudgingly tolerated them, the way you did spiders in the house, because they kept the flies down.
You wouldn’t answer the prayer of a spider, though, if it came to you for help.
You expected it to stay in its web, doing its job.
But of course he did the devotions, spoke the words of worship for the Great King, poured the libation, took his turn lighting the fires and killing the sacrificial animals. It terrified him to think what could happen if he didn’t.
That day all was as normal until about halfway through devotions, when the doors burst open at the back of the hall, and one of the men from the main house, a dark shape against the sun outside, shouted, “Red Asp is dead!”
“I think it would be nice if Da marries,” Atari said stubbornly. “I do.”
Vanu had not expected this. Atari was the youngest of his girls, and the one he understood least, if he was honest. She was not bloodthirsty like Mikhi or practical like Susami, and he hadn’t known her as long as either. He was never sure what she was going to think or say about things.
The family was sitting together on the sunny seating platform in the front room of Vanu’s house, an area made comfortable with cushions and rugs. They had finished their lunch, and they had all brought work with them, but they were talking instead.
Mikhi rolled her eyes. “You haven’t seen the bride. He’s like a doll.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Atari. She still had a doll that she kept beside her bed, though she was too old to play with it anymore. She looked at Vanu. “Do you like him?” she asked shyly.
That was an entirely fair question.
“I don’t know him,” Vanu admitted. There was more to it than that, and Susami for one knew it, but for Atari that was a suitable answer.
“That is the problem,” said Susami. “Da does not know him, whether he will make a suitable wife. Tirtu should not have sent for him without asking first.”
“That is true,” said Vanu.
“We should invite him—the bride—to the house to eat with us,” said Atari. “Then you can get to know him.”
“He doesn’t need to get to know him,” Mikhi protested. “What is the point of Da having a bride? What would a useless doll like that do?”
Susami sighed, and even Atari looked embarrassed.
“Men want wives for different things,” said Susami. “It’s not just about what they can do.”
“I have not thought of wanting a wife,” Vanu said, to spare Susami—to spare all of them—further explanation. “Tirtu was kind to want to find me one. But we don’t know him, we don’t need him, and the best thing to do is to send him home. If you like, we will invite him to eat with us before we do.”
The girls all nodded, satisfied, although Atari did add, “I think we should keep him.”
It occurred to Vanu that she was just hoping for a friend.
“It would be nice to have someone new in the village, yes?” he said.
She smiled at him. “It would, but I understand why we can’t.”
“Speaking of new people,” said Susami, “I saw Padunu is back.”
This time both Mikhi and Atari rolled their eyes.
“Why?” said Mikhi to Vanu. “I thought you told him to stay away after the last time.”
Vanu frowned at her. “I did not do any such thing. The man is a shaman and must be respected.”
“But you hate his guts.”
“He speaks for the ancestors and the spirits,” said Susami quickly. “Of course our father does not hate him—and it is unfilial to suggest so,” she added emphatically.
Mikhi slumped back with a guilty look and muttered “Sorry,” to Vanu. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder. She was by far the most like him of the girls, and he often understood what she was thinking all too well.
“Anyway,” said Susami, “do you know why Padunu is back? I did not think he would return.”
“He did not say,” said Vanu, which wasn’t quite true.
Padunu had said something that morning about the will of the ancestors guiding him back to Umtúshta, but Vanu had simply not felt that was a sufficient or entirely honest answer.
“He brought some letters from our friends down the mountain, which had been waiting for us. Shall we read them together?”
The girls agreed eagerly, and he went to get the bundle of letters and returned to the seating platform.
Stepping up onto the platform with its ring of cushions, it occurred to him that there was certainly room here for another member of the family.
Someone else who could sit cosily here with the girls, drinking herb tea after lunch and poring over the letters from the outside world.
It meant nothing, the fact that he could imagine it, certainly not that it was a good idea, but it was hard to get the imagining out of his head all the same.
He’d woken that morning with a headache and damp clothes because he’d fallen asleep at the table in the gathering place, and a soft rain was falling as the sun rose.
Disgusted with himself and feeling ill, he’d got a long drink from the well and dragged himself back to his house, hoping the girls wouldn’t be up to see him come in.
That was part of why he’d put them in their own house, so he wouldn’t have to answer questions about his behaviour, so he could do as he liked.
And indeed, no one saw him as he crept into the house and stripped off his damp jacket to hang it to dry.
And then he found himself wishing that someone had.
He’d have been ashamed to have to explain what he’d done last night, how much wine he’d drunk sitting alone at the table, but in a strange way it would have felt good to do so.