Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

Sarmin had last looked from the Sayakarva window on the previous evening. The nothing appeared as a stain against the eye, a blot on the imagination, seated in a sinkhole of sand and dust, whiter than bone, where once Sarmin’s fathers had lain in their splendour. Soon the outer wall would fall, the courtyard where Eyul killed Sarmin’s brothers would erode into rotten pieces, the nothing would touch his tower and it too would topple. Panic ran in the corridors, djinn haunted each shadow and stole the unwary, empty men and empty women wandered without purpose or will, corrupting all they touched, and slaves ran through it all, blood on their hands, fire in their wake.

“The empress-”

“I cannot go! I will not watch my son drain away. Do you understand that?” He found himself shouting.

“My emperor.”

“I didn’t ask you to say “my emperor”. I asked if you understood what I said.” Sarmin advanced on Ta-Sann, his body alight, rage flaring through him, throwing the shadows of fire signs across the walls. Something in the sword-son’s patience exasperated him-as obdurate in its way as Helmar’s damned stone.

“Does Govnan do anything for Pelar? Are all my mages useless? Every single one?”

He slapped a hand to Ta-Sann’s chest, solid like the timbers of the throne room doors. The sword-son flinched despite himself. Sarmin saw only patterns, this thing, that thing, written out, twisted, coiled, interwritten, interwoven. He could hook his fingers about any piece of it and pull the symbols forth, rob Ta-Sann of some vital part of who he was.

Sarmin spun away with an animal cry, rage, frustration, Helmar’s stone raised high like a weapon, ready to open skulls.

“The food-” Ta-Sann pursued his path with dogged determination.

“Damn your food!” Sarmin spun again, roaring the words, the stone leaving his fingertips before regret could close them. It flew straight and true, with deadly speed, a single black dot, a single point of simplicity in a room of swirling pattern-stuff.

Ta-Sann moved so fast it didn’t seem human-as if his entire life had been spent tensed for this moment, waiting to spring. And even so the stone grazed his ear before hammering into the doorjamb. Plaster and brick dust plumed. The stone fell.

“I’m sorry.” An emperor never apologises. Page six of the Book of Etiquette. “So sorry.”

The two halves of Helmar’s stone slid apart, the split running along the length of it, a finger’s width of the inner surface exposed. All patterns fled, those written in the plaster, the ancient ones still showing in painted ceiling, the patterns overlaying Sarmin’s vision, all of them erased. And the room filled with light. Ta-Sann stepped away as Sarmin advanced, a hand raised to shield his eyes from the glare.

Sarmin reached for the stone. His hand felt the ghosts of jagged edges, emotions bled into him, all of them, from melancholy to madness, joy to rage. He slid the two sides together again, sealing away all but a thread of the light within, and stood, trembling. Then, like a book, like the only book that ever mattered, he opened the two halves before his face.

“A butterfly?” Written there in crystals of many hues, every pattern of its wings, every scale captured, formed with exquisite care from without, melted and reset, melted and reset in the long night of that oubliette so many years ago. Helmar was ever Meksha’s child, a son of rock and fire. “A butterfly.” And Sarmin fell, stricken so suddenly that he never felt the ground.

In a bright summer meadow he’s running with the slope, out of breath but laughing. It’s hot and the heat folds round him, flows through him. The air is full of seeds, floating on their white fluff, swirling in his wake, like the memory of the first snow that falls fat flaked and lazy into the early days of autumn. Sarmin understands he is caught in someone else’s memory. He has only read of snow.

He’s a child, chubby armed, almost chest deep in the longest greenest grass he has ever known, running without direction, chasing butterflies, swinging a thin stick with no hope of hitting. There’s no tiredness in this memory, he runs and runs some more, always laughing. And Sarmin laughs too, he has found Helmar before the austeres of Yrkmir, before the dungeon, before even the tower. Sarmin has days like this walled within the record of his past-someday he will open those too.

Butterflies rise before him in hues too vivid for the world. And then he stumbles. Just a little trip, a snagged foot, a headlong plunge into the lushness of the grass, his stick snapping beneath him. The sky is so blue, as if the heat and brightness of the day has woken its true colours, given them meaning. Motion draws his gaze from the sky, something fluttering but wrong. There in the canyon that his fall scored into the grass is a butterfly, lunging skyward, failing, veering in crazy spirals, battering against the green stems. Is it sick?

This is why he’s here, Sarmin knows it. This is the anchor point, the fractured moment that has defined a life, defined many lives. A child’s stumble, an instant’s thoughtlessness and something beautiful lies broken. A lesson every child learns. Perhaps the first and sharpest truth of all those that slice us through the years, that carve away innocence, make bitter men of joyous boys.

The thing is a frenzy of beating wings, iridescent green slashed with crimson. For a heartbeat it pauses on the ground. A jagged hole spoils the symmetry of its wings, breaks the interwoven pattern of their markings. Some swing of his stick has taken a chunk from the back of both wings. The butterfly rises again in its broken dance. And falls.

Helmar’s hands close around the insect, cupping, holding. The crazed fluttering continues, the beat of broken wings within the darkness he encloses. The feel of it against his palms turns his stomach.

This is the first lesson. What’s done is done. Beauty is too easy to destroy. “No.” Helmar refuses the lesson.

“Let it go.” A whisper from Sarmin’s lips. Madness lies in such refusal.

Deny but one truth, however small, and your world must twist and twist again at each turn through your days to accommodate that lie, until at last there is no hint of truth in any corner of your existence.

“No,” Helmar says again, and opens his hands, just a crack, to study his captive, now resting on the lower palm.

There is a pattern here, boldly stamped in iridescent green, metallic blue, a symmetry of circles within circles, curves and divides. Where the wing is gone the eye fills in what is missing, symmetry demands it, completeness requires that this circle is finished, this line carried to the end.

The child closes his hands again, closes his eyes, tight until the reds and greens a summer day leaves behind the eyelids flare bright as fire. He sees the pattern, the necessary pattern of the butterfly, whole, intact, brilliant in memory. He sees it, he lives it, he prints it into his hands, stamping it with every breath, every beat of his heart.

The pattern is not the butterfly, Sarmin tells him. The butterfly is so much more. The butterfly is whatever mystery of insect blood and insect bone serves such creatures, it is egg and chrysalis, it is dew sucked from grass and nectar from flowers. It is this morning there, that morning here, a close escape, five miles in the grip of a sudden gale. The pattern is not the butterfly.

The child sees the pattern, whole, complete. He believes it. He opens his hands and the butterfly flutters away, gone amongst the floating seeds.

The pattern was no more than a story, a tale of the butterfly, but it showed it the way to be whole once more. It showed the butterfly how to heal itself.

The pattern was a lie. The pattern was also true.