Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter VI

The dragonfly rose up from the palace’s windyard in a dizzying rush, the roar of its wings like a hurricane to either side of Rupa where she sat behind her mistress in the howdah. Ahead, past Sima’s other two handmaidens, three Scorpion Guards, her midwife, and her soothsayer, Sahar Soyu, the pilot sat bent low over the great insect’s thorax. Rupa’s stomach churned as the city shrank beneath them, its tapestry of plazas, minarets, temples, parks, and aqueducts. The reservoir to the northeast of the city flashed like a mirror in the early morning sunlight. The palace looked tiny, a jumbled heap on its seaward crag.

One of the Scorpion Guards vomited into his leather sack. They’d all been given one, but as the earth fell away Rupa’s stomach settled and awe came into its place. She felt light-hearted as she hadn’t since her girlhood. Ahead, just behind the dragonfly’s head with its huge, bulbous compound eyes, the pilot strained at his reins, the muscles in his shoulders standing out like cables. He wore only a loincloth and a slitted bronze visor, to guard against the glare. Rupa didn’t know how he could stand the cold and wind. Even with the shelter of the howdah on the dragonfly’s back, the chill cut through her robes like a knife.

 The canvas of the howdah creaked and bellied as the dragonfly banked. The thundering drumbeat of its wings increased in tempo. Rupa turned from the entrance at a groan from Sima. Her mistress was white-faced and shaking, clinging to one of the howdah’s bamboo poles. Rupa edged toward her and took her by the elbow, leaning close to speak into her ear. “Calm, lady,” she whispered, rifling by touch through the little pockets sewn inside in her other sleeve. “I have ginger here for you to chew, to ease the nausea.”

“Hurry,” Sima groaned. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, we should have gone by caravan.”

As the Third Mistress frantically chewed her end of ginger root, moaning and clutching at Rupa’s sleeve, Rupa thought how funny it was that the million souls of Amnh could look so small, as though, if she willed it, she could flick it all into the sea.

***

They camped for the night on a ridge at the edge of a marsh, looking out over the stagnant water and the mangroves rising from it, draped in veils of moss and strangler figs, islands of low, muddy turf rising here and there from the murk. The pilot and the Scorpion Guard worked together to remove the howdah from the dragonfly’s back and ease it to the ground so that the great insect could hunt. Rupa wondered, watching it soar over the swamp, if it felt and thought the way men and elephants did, or if only brute instinct drove it. 

The guards dug a pit and built a fire of twigs and peat bricks, laughing and joking as they roasted ears of corn in their tough green skins. Their polished jade nasal bridges flashed in the firelight as the sun sank toward the distant mountains in the north, which hung as if suspended over a sea of fog. Sima could not eat and retired early to the howdah to have her horoscope read, leaving Rupa and the other handmaids to their own devices. Siti soon separated one of the Scorpion Guards from his fellows for a little fun in the underbrush. The pilot stretched on a clear patch of ground well away from the fire, contorting himself through yogic stances until sweat glistened on his dark skin. He had good form, and when he broke from his exercises and headed toward Rupa, she said nothing to dissuade him.

The pilot sat beside her, blowing out a long breath. He was perhaps fifty, much older than she’d thought at first, his frame lean and ropey, his face windburned and wrinkled, paler where he wore his bronze sun-mask, darker around it. He wore his graying hair in a heavy braid wrapped around his neck in the Chanian fashion. For a while they sat in companionable silence as the pilot packed and lit his clay pipe, and Rupa wondered how long it had been since she sat and had a conversation with another person about something other than palace gossip or Sima’s moods. Being a handmaid was much like being a mother, except your child never grew up and could sentence you to die at a whim. You could lose all sense of yourself outside the role.

The pilot glanced sidelong at Rupa. “Have you ever heard the story of Thirteen Red Tiger?” 

Rupa smiled at him. He had a good voice, rough and scratchy, and she had always loved stories. As a girl she often drove the nuns of Gray Heron Peak to madness pestering them with questions about their travels. “She was a Chanian chieftain, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” said the pilot. He puffed on his pipe, settling back against the heather on his elbow. “The last of the Tlonist warlords. It was said the Yellow Sages used blood alchemy to give her the might of twenty warriors and the wisdom of their greatest generals while she still slept in her mother’s womb, so that at birth she could speak and walk like a man grown, and when she reached her prime she had the strength of a water buffalo and the cunning of a devil.” 

Rupa remembered much of the story, but it was pleasant to sit and listen to the pilot’s voice, to smell the sweet smoke of his pipe. He passed it to her and she drew it in, exhaling twin jets from her nostrils. “It was a devil who gave her the magic sword, wasn’t it?”

“Seven of them,” said the pilot, smiling. “The Seven-Demon Sword, they called it. Forged in the Third Celestial Garden with silver hammers and quenched in the heart of a white elephant. They say it cut the very air itself, that it drank the souls of its victims and trapped them in its hilt, that its blade wept sweet ichor like a rotten peach. With it, Thirteen Red Tiger carved a kingdom from Chania and the Gujirat, struck down rajahs and satraps and emperors, slew the great khan Obodai and his three warrior daughters. They say she had a hundred husbands and a hundred wives, that she could travel between thunderstorms as quick as lightning flashes, that she could see through the eyes of jackals and calm a raging sea. It seemed the whole world was destined to bow before her. Her soldiers pressed east toward Amnh, the last land left unspoiled by her conquest.”

In spite of herself, Rupa found herself bewitched by the old man’s story. Her head was pleasantly empty, the hashish filling her limbs with a soporific weight. She watched the dragonfly skim the surface of the swamp and lurch suddenly skyward with an eight-foot scolopede in its mouthparts, its limbs hurriedly folding tight around the monstrous crustacean. Its wings threw up curtains of shimmering mist.

“The end came at the Pass of Danh Dang,” the old man continued. “The armies of Amnh, Barkult, the Onge Hordes, and Old Gujir came together to stop her from crossing the mountains, and for three weeks they fought her soldiers over every crag and pass until the peak was slick with frozen blood. Thirteen Red Tiger cut down men as a scythe cuts down wheat, beheading whole dynasties in the space of days. It is said she broke the back of the satrap of Enishugal’s war horse with only the strength of her arms, that she bit through the satrap’s spine and flung his head into a crevasse while his sons looked on. Finally, when it seemed the slaughter would never end, the shah of Barkult’s champion, prince Faizal i’Marak, pierced Thirteen Red Tiger’s breast with a threefold spear, pinning her fast against space, time, and memory.  Without her leadership, the Chanian legions crumbled and surrendered, and so Thirteen Red Tiger was hacked limb from limb, her organs and body parts separated and burned, her ashes mixed into the bricks of a hundred different buildings in every corner of the continent. The Seven-Demon Sword was taken by the Sages of Amnh to the ends of the earth and thrown into the abyss from whence nothing returns. And that was the end.”

He blew a smoke ring, then put out his pipe, got to his feet and stretched, knuckles popping as he laced his fingers together and raised his hands high overhead. The dragonfly swept by overhead, the downdraft of its thrumming wings washing them both in battering wind, and landed on a stretch of mossy ground to continue devouring its prize. The scolopede’s segmented body twitched. Yellow ichor dripped from the ruin of its head capsule. 

“Thank you, Uncle,” Rupa said respectfully. She bowed a little lower than was strictly required, and the old man received it with a comical flourish and a bow of his own.

“A good audience is a rare treat,” said the pilot, smiling. “My name is Myoro Mo, of the Mock-Horse People. My father was a griot in the court of Ulai Khan.”

“You have his talent,” said Rupa. Across the camp, Siti emerged from the underbrush with her Scorpion Guard in tow, both of them scratched and soiled. 

“Your manners are gracious,” said Myoro Mo. He settled back down beside her. “Tell me, lady Rupa, have you been to Danh Dang before?”

“Never,” said Rupa, imagining the bare, forbidding place Myoro had conjured in his story. “What is it like?”

The old pilot smiled. “You will not soon forget it.”