A New Order
Lill woke with a jerk. The room was brighter, the sun coming in the window at a different angle than before. His head ached, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He also felt cold.
On the other side of the room, in the doorway leading to the next room, he saw Master Dumuz and Abrazash, the sword master. He couldn’t see Master Dumuz’s face, but Master Abrazash had an expression like a thundercloud.
“It cannot happen again,” he said.
“It has not happened at all,” Master Dumuz replied haughtily. “You are grievously mistaken.”
Lill had no idea what they were talking about, but even so he could tell Master Dumuz was lying.
He felt suddenly nauseous, and he rolled over on the couch, fighting the need to vomit.
He saw some crumpled fabric on the floor and recognized it as the sash from his uniform.
He realized that he was cold because his tunic, which should have been held closed by the sash, was gaping open and slipping off one shoulder.
This was such a peculiar, inexplicable thing that for a moment he forgot his nausea as he contemplated it.
“Get up.”
Master Dumuz was standing over him. There was a strange look on his face. Lill swallowed hard and slid off the couch onto his feet.
“Excuse me, something seems to have happened to my sash.” His tongue felt odd in his mouth.
He bent to retrieve the sash, moving slowly because he felt unsteady. He should apologize for falling asleep. He straightened up.
Master Dumuz struck him across the face with the back of his hand.
Lill staggered and righted himself with an embarrassing amount of effort. What was wrong with him? Had he been drunk? That would explain why the Grandmaster had slapped him.
“I called you here to tell you that you’ll be leaving the Order.”
“Sir?”
Lill couldn’t process the words, couldn’t make sense of this. To leave the Order, to exist outside its protection—there was nothing worse that could happen to him.
“We have no more need of you. You’ve always been … ” Master Dumuz seemed agitated, in a way that Lill couldn’t understand. “It was always a bad idea. It’s your fault!” he burst out. “Your fault, not mine!”
Lill stared at him as if he had begun speaking an unknown language. What had anyone said about anything being Master Dumuz’s fault? That made no sense.
“Put your damn clothes on.” Master Dumuz’s voice sounded choked. “Your fault,” he muttered again. “All your fault.”
He left the room. One of the servants came a few moments later to shoo Lill out, and Master Dumuz must have relayed some orders, because there was a cart waiting at the gate to take him away from the training house within the hour.
Lill sat in the straw at the bottom of the cart and watched the white buildings of the Order recede as the cart’s wheels bounced over the uneven road.
He felt empty, like a collapsed water skin.
All his life he had followed orders, and now he had been ordered to leave, so of course he was going.
A new order would surely come—it had to.
But from whom? He tried not to think about the fact that he didn’t know.
“Now then,” said Padunu, perching on the edge of the well and arranging his cloak. “I have a few matters to go over with regard to the wedding.”
Vanu looked over his shoulder from where he was building the fire in the bread oven so the women could get to their baking. It was barely past dawn; did they really have to talk about this now?
“The other lowlander, Halza Son of Javrush, has been very helpful. He and I have devised what I feel is an entirely workable plan. Obviously we cannot follow their custom fully in the matter of selecting the wedding date, as that would require consulting a Zashian astrologer, but between us Halza and I have devised a solution which was satisfactory to Lill.”
Lill, that was his bride’s name. Vanu had learned it the night before. A name almost entirely composed of Ls, the hardest of the Zashian letters for anyone who had grown up speaking Hawada. Vanu couldn’t say it at all.
Learning his name, though, had suddenly made Vanu want to ask for all sorts of other information about him.
What did he like to eat? Did he like jewellery or fine clothing?
What gifts could Vanu give him? And above all, where had he trained, and what other skills did he have besides hiding in cupboards and dropping out of trees to take hostages much larger than himself?
How had Davanu found him? He was so perfect.
Padunu was still talking, explaining something about how he had chosen the wedding dates.
Apparently the dates of things mattered in the lowlands, that was what Vanu took from all of this, so he was going to have to wait five more days before the boy with the name he’d never be able to say would be his—as much as that fierce little person would ever be anybody’s.
He had got the fire drawing well now, but he continued to poke at it, pretending it still commanded all of his attention, so his expression wouldn’t betray any of his thoughts to the shaman.
“We’ll need various things in addition to the usual items for the wedding rituals, which I can of course procure myself in Sakka.
Turmeric for the doorposts, incense of the type favoured in the lowlands, which Khatu has volunteered to seek out, though I have grave reservations about entrusting him with the task.
Prayer beads—though one would have thought that the bride would have brought some of his own if he cared for such things—cardamom, I am not at all sure what for, henna, likewise, lamps and candles, a curtain … ”
What could Vanu himself do for these five days, to get ready?
“There is a bathing ritual for the bride, the details of which my informant was very vague about—understandably, I suppose—and the bride himself was completely ignorant of the whole thing … also understandable, I suppose. So I very much doubt that will be occurring, although I will pass on the information I have received to the women, for what it’s worth. ”
He’d air out the second bedchamber in his house and make up a bed in there—he’d get Susami to repair Mikhi’s old mattress, which would be big enough for Lill.
On second thought, Susami had enough to do with the wedding dress and the biscuits and whatever else these fools had dreamed up.
He could probably repair the mattress himself.
“I assume you would prefer to dispense with the usual custom of throwing rag dolls and children’s garments at the bride and groom on their way home … ”
He’d get Lill some jewellery, since he seemed to have come without any ornaments apart from the beads on his wedding headdress. Maybe it wasn’t the custom in the lowlands, but up here a bride was usually decked out with all the silver and gold her family could get their hands on.
“ … a similar custom in the lowlands, though performed with rose petals—I’m told dried petals can be used in the off season—but since we are already using rose petals to bake biscuits … ”
He’d make some plasinta. That was something he’d learned from his aunt years ago, not a skill picked up out of necessity during the last three years. He made very good plasinta, and they had honey, so he could make the sweet as well as the savoury kind.
He’d like to give his bride a proper gift. Something plain and straightforward, nothing that he’d have to send Khatu to Sakka for, but also something … unnecessary. A little impractical. What did you call that kind of thing? A token of something. He had an idea.
“I don’t know how we would pull this off without Padunu, honestly,” said Halza.
He was pacing the short distance from the window to the door between their two beds, leaning on a staff that Tirtu had procured him and fingering his prayer beads.
Apparently the prevailing medical wisdom in the mountains held that it was better to get up and walk around than to lie still too long while recovering.
Lill had read that himself, in one of the Order’s manuals, so he approved.
“He’s by far the most sensible person I’ve met up here. Don’t you agree?”
Lill made a noncommittal noise. The shaman had been in favour of throwing him over the fortress wall, which hadn’t endeared him to Lill. And none of his fussing about the wedding arrangements had struck Lill as precisely sensible. He twisted the gold ring on his finger as he listened to Halza talk.
He was glad to have these few extra days to rest. The bruises from his fall were subsiding, and his head was aching less.
He listened with only half his attention to what Halza was saying about processions and rituals.
Instead what he was thinking about was what would happen after the wedding.
How long would he need to go on playing the role of Vanu’s bride before the signal would arrive for him to complete the mission?
It would be just as well if it were some little time, because he would need to secure a weapon, plan his attack, and find a way out of the fortress in the meantime.
He would need his exit to be well secured before he made his move, that much was clear.
He was glad too that he had remembered that business about consulting astrologers.
Evidently it wasn’t something villagers in Akramarra did; Halza had never heard of it.
But they certainly did it at the Zashian court when they were planning a wedding, and it had provided some very good material to impress Padunu and bought Lill a few more days to rest. He needed them, because he wanted to have all his wits about him for the wedding and what followed.
He needed to be sure of the role he was playing.
He needed to focus on the mission. It wasn’t that he was scared.
“He said he can get henna,” Halza was saying when Lill paid attention to him again. “But he didn’t seem to know what it was for. How do you suppose he thinks he can get it? Why would they have something like that in here?”