Priestess of the Dragons' Temple

Chapter 6: The Ambassadress Returns-2

“We’ll see,” Iola soothed. “The Aralel says you’ll be fine.”

Jasela didn’t seem to hear her. She closed her eyes and went limp as if she’d fainted, or worse. Iola glanced back to the Aralel who motioned for her to close the curtains. The wall of purple cloth surrounding them dropped, revealing the tightly shuttered palanquin to the crowd around them. The Aralel stepped forward to lead the way back to the temple. Elder priestesses crowded around the palanquin, and the hooded oarsmen stepped up to carry it to the temple gates with Iola, Tiagasa, Ganie and Savasa beside them. The oarsmen were all more or less alike in height, but now Iola was not quite certain that all of them were men. One was shorter and a little thinner than the rest. Something about that figure suggested a womanly form beneath the robes.

Soon they reached the entrance to the temple and the young priestesses took their places at each pole again. As they were changing places with the oarsmen – or women – the Aralel paused to speak to one of the governor’s men just outside the gates. In recent years, the governor had stayed in his palace at the ambassadress’s return, and had come to speak with her after she had recovered from her journey. Iola supposed that this year would be no different, but that was before she’d seen the ambassadress up close on the morning of her return. Would the Aralel even allow the governor to see her in this state? Iola searched the Aralel’s face for a trace of worry but found none. Still, she did not feel reassured.

The heavy curtains of the palanquin muffled the sound of Jasela’s moans, which started in a whisper as they entered the temple gates and crescendoed as they moved through the peresi’s courtyard. The litter was light, and Jasela not much heavier, but even so, the weight dug into Iola’s shoulder. The Aralel unlocked the gate to the ambassadress’s quarters before them and a pair of elder priestesses – healers – followed them in.

Once inside that innermost gate, they set the palanquin down on four pillars just like the ones by the harbor. The ambassadress’s garden was in shambles. Her quarters were sealed away from human hands when she made her yearly journey to the dragons’ realm, so a half-year’s growth and decay had gone unchecked. There would be a great deal of cleaning-up work to do. Fallen leaves lay in irregular clusters across the paving stones, making them as slippery and treacherous as mountain paths.

The elder priestesses opened the shutters of the ambassadress’s chamber. Inside, her quarters looked soft and inviting despite the dust lightly blanketing everything, dimming the rays of the morning sun. The healers motioned for the younger priestesses to step aside. No one spoke as the elders took the palanquin and carried it up into the chamber and through an inner door to the ambassadress’s private baths.

Ganie raised her eyebrows at Iola, as if to say, “What now?”

Iola shook her head. She didn’t know what would come next. They waited. Savasa shifted from one foot to another and Ganie kept glancing at the gate. They could just catch the scent of morning bread coming from the kitchens, or maybe from some common hearth outside the temple walls.

After what felt like a long time, one of the elders emerged. She motioned for the four young peresi to follow her. Just outside the ambassadress’s gate, she spoke to them.

“Iola and Ganie,” she said. “Fetch clean linens for the ambassadress’s chamber and arrange them. Tiagasa, Savasa, I’ll show you where to find the brooms and mops. We need her chamber clean by the time she’s done in the baths.”

“Yes, honored one,” Iola said, in unison with the others. The elder priestess went back into the ambassadress’s garden. Tiagasa caught Iola as soon as the elder’s back was turned.

“What did Jasela say to you?” she asked Iola in a whisper.

“Nothing important,” Iola said, though it had been important, of course. It was just that Jasela had said it to her, and not to anyone else.

Tiagasa frowned, then they both hurried to carry out their assigned tasks. Iola and Ganie went to the treasury for the linens, clean and bundled with dried herbs. They hurried back to shake them out in the ambassadress’s garden. As they worked, Iola took a moment to look around. If the peresi’s garden was otherworldly in comparison with the streets of Anamat, the ambassadress’s quarters made yet another step toward the perfection of the dragons’ realm. Inside, the chamber’s white marble walls stretched up to a high vaulted ceiling, as luminous as an eggshell. The elders had opened the shuttered windows around the top of the wall and the light streaming in made it look as if the roof were floating. A sunbeam streamed down onto the offering place. Looking at it, Iola felt the presence of the dragons there, the strength of the generations of offerings laid down in that spot.

“Hurry now, she’ll be out of the bath soon,” one of the elders reminded them.

Tiagasa emerged carrying a long-handled broom. Savasa followed her with a pail and rags.

“Cleaning, would you believe it?” Tiagasa complained. “They have us cleaning?”

Iola began to lay out the bed linens, pillows, and blankets in the sleeping nook first, then on the altar, while Ganie unrolled the rugs and brushed them smooth. From the bath came the strains of a healing chant, drifting in with the steam. Iola joined in under her breath.

The elder healers tended to the ambassadress while Iola, Tiagasa, Savasa, and Ganie worked through the morning, snatching only a bit of bread for sustenance. By midday they had swept, mopped, and draped the chamber in its winter cloths, filled its wall sconces with oil, dusted the shutters, and prepared the altar. The Aralel assessed their work and nodded her grudging approval. She dismissed them to the refectory.

“You will all be called on in the next few days to attend the ambassadress until she emerges, or until she flies again,” the Aralel said. The four young peresi bowed. Iola looked back over her shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the ambassadress, but the bath chamber was still sealed from view.

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Darna watched the ambassadress’s palanquin disappear into her inner realm, along with Ganie and Iola. She wondered why dragon-blind Ganie – not to mention Savasa – had been chosen to attend the ambassadress. Maybe Myril or Sunna would know, but they were both fast asleep. Darna yawned.

Inside her own chamber, Darna took off her ceremonial robes and lay down under a warm blanket, but as tired as she was she couldn’t sleep. It was past Midwinter now, and the ambassadress had returned alive. Darna watched the sunbeam creep a finger’s breadth down the wall. She sat up. She would go out, if anyone were there to take her, or maybe they would all be asleep and she could go out alone at last.

Darna put on her street robes and made her way to the side-house door. She saw no one, as if the entire temple were asleep or attending the ambassadress. She lifted the latch, but it was closed from the other side, locked. She was trapped, but that was nothing new. Still, on this after-festival day the streets of Anamat would be as safe as they ever were, and she had not forgotten everything she’d learned as a scrappling, had she?

On her way back past the elders’ courtyard, she saw a movement on the porch of the Aralel’s study. Well, someone was awake, then. She crossed past the reflecting pool and went up the stairs. A wizened elder priestess sat on the bench outside the Aralel’s door. She squinted at Darna with her cloudy eyes.

“Darnasa again,” she creaked. “Trying my door, were you?”

Darna stopped. It was the Grandmother, but she was out of place, and almost unrecognizable for her dislocation. “I was,” Darna said. “I wished to go out.”

The Grandmother sniffed. “Best speak to Her Holiness, then.” She turned away, her unfocused eyes gazing in the general direction of the ambassadress’s quarters.

“Now, that should do it,” muttered a voice behind her. Darna turned around just in time to see the Aralel hurry past, moving down the stairs as fast as an errant peresi after her forbidden lover. Darna started after her, but on the second step a muscle in her leg knotted painfully and she had to stop to straighten it before she could go on. By then, the Aralel was already halfway to the ambassadress’s gate.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” the Grandmother said, trailing off into a half-hearted cackle.

Darna ignored her and limped off after the Aralel, knowing that she was too late to catch her attention, that the ambassadress was far more important than her own restlessness.

At the entrance to the peresi’s courtyard, she paused. A soak in the baths would ease her muscles. She didn’t have a towel with her, but usually there were a few lying around in the bathing chamber and nooks, forgotten and not too well-used. She started to take the turn into the priestesses’ half of the baths, then she had a thought. The petitioners would all be gone for the day, the front gates closed now that the Most Blessed had returned. Darna had never seen the petitioners’ part of the baths. She wondered what it was like. She retraced her steps and found her way to the petitioners’ half of the main bathing chambers. They were separated by a high wall with a screen at the top. The water, like the sound, flowed through from one side to the other. Darna walked past a few niches set into the corridor wall. Some man had left a pouch of beads in one of them, forgetting his offering to the priestess. She didn’t stop to pick it up.

She stepped into the petitioners’ baths and stopped still at what she saw: gold. There was gold everywhere. It was just a gilding on the tiles, but she hadn’t seen so much of it anywhere else in the temple, not even in the new sanctuary. It was as if someone had taken the pinnacles from the dragons’ towers and inverted them. This was what the treasurers wanted. They wanted all the gold in Anamat to pour into the temples. They had made this place to mock the petitioners’ nakedness, and to make nothing of any wealth they’d left outside. No wonder the princes grew uneasy of the priestesses. Darna could see how it would awe and cow the petitioners, but somehow she didn’t like it. The rest of the temple wasn’t like this. It was rich, but not ostentatious. The gilding wasn’t honest … not that she’d come to expect honesty from the temple’s treasurers, any more than she would expect it from Cerean traders.

She heard a voice in the passageway behind her and looked around for somewhere to hide. Inside the petitioners’ baths, there were none of the semi-private nooks where the priestesses washed themselves before going in to soak. There was only a long, flat edge with a few solid blocks of benches, some discarded towels, and no place to hide.

“I think he must have forgotten it down here,” the voice said. It might have been Irean, but she wasn’t sure.

“If he didn’t bring it to you, it belongs to the treasury.” No question what kind of priestess that was.

“He meant to bring it, though, he said so,” Irean – or whoever it was – argued.

With a little luck, they wouldn’t come into the baths, but Darna doubted that this was going to be a lucky day for her.

Then, in the corner of the very empty bath chamber, she saw a flicker of movement. A rat? No, it was golden, more golden than the tiles, and it shifted in and out of sight. Darna’s heart lifted. It was a dragonlet. Maybe it was her lucky day after all. She followed the dragonlet’s flashing wings into a sudden gap in the gilt-tiled wall. The way was open. The dragons would let her out at last.

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The hidden passage was dank. Water dripped from its walls. No one had come this way for a long time. Darna followed the dragonlet past the laundry landing where another, slightly more stable opening appeared. It wasn’t an ordinary passage, though. Not everyone would be able to see it, especially if they hadn’t been shown. She walked on until the passage widened a little. Soon, she would be able to go through it without squeezing herself sideways, without getting her robes damp. She hoped that the sun outside would be bright enough to dry them. She walked on, one foot after another, feeling her way through the darkness. She wasn’t sure how far she’d gone when a glimmer of light started showing her the cracks in between the stones. She guessed that she was out from under the temple. She hurried on.

By the time she reached the end of the hidden passage, the dragonlet had long since disappeared. She emerged onto a narrow stream of a canal. It had to be the side branch of the east canal. Darna turned to her right and followed it upstream, away from the harbor. The houses overlooking the canal were mostly shuttered. Lazy spirals of smoke rose up from a few cooking fires. She passed a yard where a donkey chewed on its hay, looking at her through lazy eyes.

Sure enough, there around the next bend was the narrow arc of Minstrel’s Bridge. She was only a few steps from the planners’ hall. She paused to listen for traffic on the streets, some stirring in the little square there, but there was only a yawning dog and the subdued coo of a few roosting pigeons. She climbed up onto the street.

With her feet on the once-familiar cobbles, Darna felt off balance. She wished she had her old stick with her. When she’d been out earlier, arm in arm with one elder peresi or another, she hadn’t noticed its absence, but now she felt half undressed without it. Still, she was free and in the open air, and the planners’ hall would be around the next bend.

At the corner, she paused. A large sleek-coated dog slept outside the hall gates, but a window beside the gates was open, too. She advanced. The dog stirred, pricked up its ears, and fell back to sleep. Inside the window, someone turned over a large piece of parchment. She approached quietly, glad now that years of dance training had taught her to walk silently and without the tip-tap of her stick. The dog kept sleeping. She came level with the window and looked in.

Someone sat inside the bars with his stylus poised over a large sheet of parchment laid out on a broad table. There was writing there, “Watchmen’s Shrine,” and a series of symbols altogether mysterious to her. The man – a young man to judge by the smoothness of his hands – lifted the stylus and leaned forward, his brown hair curtaining his cheeks as he considered the plans before him.

Darna was thinking of backing away when he looked up and saw her. She froze while the young man fixed her in his gaze.

“It’s you,” he said, as if he’d been waiting for her. “You are a priestess. Yes, you’re back.”

Darna started to shake her head. Why? She wasn’t sure. The dog stirred to life and growled. She backed away as the dog stood.

“Stay, Raggy,” the young man ordered. The dog sat again, still looking at Darna, alert and ready to strike.

“Wait there,” the young man said to Darna. “I’ll be out.”

“But – ” Darna began. The shutter closed before she could say anything else.

He emerged from a small door halfway down the block. It looked like it was in the next building, but they must have been connected. There was something familiar about him. Darna thought back. In her last days on the streets of Anamat, she’d brought a bag full of Cerean gold beads to the planners’ hall. This must have been the apprentice she’d talked to then, though he was a journeyman now, to judge by his robes. He was taller than he’d been, too. A good-looking young man, but he made her uneasy.

“Tevan,” he said. “You remember me, priestess?”

“My name is Darna,” she said. For the first time ever, she almost felt like calling herself Darnasa, as if it would stop him from looking down on her with that smirk.

“Darna, then,” he said. “I remember you. You’ve become quite pretty.”

Darna backed away. The dog got up lazily and came to Tevan’s side, wagging its tail. His tongue hung out as he looked at Darna.

“It’s just the priestess robes,” she said. “I came to see about my apprentice fee.”

“We still have it,” Tevan said. “You want it back?”

Darna shook her head.

“It’s not the season for apprentices,” he said. “But if you want to visit me sometime, I’d like that. I don’t sleep at midday, never could. You’re like me that way, aren’t you?”

Darna looked back over her shoulder. There was still no one else on the street. The dog sniffed at her robes. She shrugged.

“I could show you a few things,” he said. He smiled, but she didn’t feel reassured. “I’m sure you could show me something, too.”

He came much too close then, reaching toward her. She spun away just before his hand landed on her shoulder.

Somewhere behind her, a gate banged open. The journeyman and the guild’s dog turned to look. Darna ran, back over Minstrel’s Bridge, back to the narrow opening in the canal wall, and all the way back to the launderers’ landing, where, mercifully, no one waited for her.

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