The Coronation Portrait

Sirodati of Deitalas Taiké sat in a wooden wheelchair that was too big for him, in a rest home in Teyoru Tusoreané, mulling over a life that had gone wrong.

Three years ago, he would have said that life was good enough. He was a bootmaker, taking contracts for the Ikoskasé clan. He wasn't the heroic lineage founder that he'd thought he'd grow up to be. He hadn't even saved the money to pay bride price. But he had a roof over his head, meat on his table, and a regular flow of work. He even had a couple of hired hands. And when the next war with the Nachuru started, business would be so good that he would certainly be able to marry. Maybe he could found his lineage at last.

Then Kasiri had swept in, with the armies of the Chehirainan behind him. The Ikoskasé had withdrawn from Deitalas Taiké, and had taken everything that wasn't nailed down, including everything Sirodati owned. So he missed the windfall he was counting on.

After the war, he still had his receipt, but the Ikoskasé records said that the receipt had already been cashed in. He was sternly instructed to take his fraud attempt elsewhere.

Sirodati had petitioned everyone he could think of for redress, but all he was offered was a loan from Kasiri's land-development board, at twenty percent interest. Twenty percent! At a time when peace was established, and no one would need hundreds of new boots. So when the Wind's Wish had offered arms and equipment to anyone who joined the holy war against Saitoasis, he had signed up. He had nothing better to do, and maybe he could find a warrior's death.

Then a cannonball had shattered his right femur, in the fighting around Inbasan. The medics had offered him euthanasia. It would've been a warrior's death, but he'd lost everything once already. Twice in one incarnation was too much.

So here he sat in his wheelchair, living on the charity of the Alicorn Mountain paladins. No one was rude enough to say it, but he wasn't supposed to be here. Chehirainan were supposed to choose to die.

#

There were books in the rest home, some of them printed on the newly-designed book striker, two of them older and hand-written. He failed to pace himself, and read them all in two months.

There were visitors, but they were mostly local Karanaiyan, visiting their relatives. A few do-gooders looked for anyone lonely to talk to, but Sirodati soon wearied of them. There was no steel in their souls, no fire in their blood. Chehirainan didn't fret over the sick and weak; they dreamed of great, heroic deeds. And he was still Chehiraineh, even if he was missing a leg.

He tried to interest his fellow patients in a performance of "The Survival of the Hundred Beeches," but it was too Chehiraineh of a story for them, even as they rested here taking the charity of Khâratayi, the greatest of the Chehiraineh gods.

He tried to buy a walking staff so he could go out on the town, and asked if he could get the tools of his trade again, or get training in some other trade. But the attendants wouldn't hear of it. Their oaths to Khâratayi, Lord of Cranes, the great destroyer of the wicked and of oathbreakers, said that they would not allow anyone here to work, or to make purchases from outside, lest permission become encouragement, and encouragement become a mandate.

Their oaths also said that he could only leave if he could be released to someone's recognizance. This oath too was a safeguard, to make sure they didn't start expelling people. But Sirodati was Chehiraineh. He had left his parents' house at twelve, and it would be incestuous to have contact with them again. Chehirainan everywhere cared for each other, but he could hardly ask for someone to take him in.

The grandmaster of the Alicorn Mountain Society could waive the oath, and allow him to be released on his own recognizance, but apparently it wasn't clear who the grandmaster was at the moment. The attendants absolutely refused to share any details.

So there was nothing to do.

#

Presently he found something. Each ward bore an immense painting, and the great dining hall had two. He undertook to comprehend these paintings completely, to know them better than the painters themselves.

He began with the painting that spoke to him most. It hung in the dining hall; it was a coronation portrait from the Kingdom of the Golden Plains, which was now the Wood of Emptiness, not too far to the northwest.

This immense painting showed the king standing at the edge of a cliff, on the great mountain called the Alicorn. He faced the viewer with his right foot on a rock, his sword in its scabbard, both hands on his right knee. Arrayed before him were his officers, and Sirodati studied them when he was done with the king. They had what were now called imperial features, half Chehiraineh and half eastern: leaner and lighter than the easterners, smaller-framed, but still too tall and heavy-featured to be proper Chehirainan. They wore ugly Federation-era garments, elaborately over-tailored and deliberately not timeless. The king was dressed in a compromise manner that Sirodati doubted was historical.

Behind the king, the countryside of the Golden Plains sprawled out into the canvas. The great boast of the kingdom had been that, from the summit of the Alicorn in early summer, the countryside was golden with wheat for as far as the eye could see. He wondered if the towns and villages that dotted the golden fields were only fantasies, or if something could be learned from them.

He spent several months on this, as the staff grew increasingly worried that he had gone mad. When he took a few days to ask them what was going on in the wider world, they were relieved, even though the news was dire. And after that, when he asked for maps of the Wood of Emptiness, and for paper and writing implements, they fell over themselves to give him whatever he pleased.

#

Sirodati began by charting out the settlements shown on the painting. He wasn't a cartographer, and it was only a best guess. But he saw what techniques the painter had used to convey distances, and in less than a month, he had a full chart of where the painting said that the settlements near the Alicorn had been.

He learned that another invalid here was a retired superintendent of local tax collectors. He spent several days talking with this garrulous old man, by the name of Dohaitas, who was delighted to meet someone who took an interest in his work.

But one day, the hidden aim of his questions grew a little too obvious. Dohaitas chuckled, and stopped him short.

"Everyone this side of South Tacheiyis," Dohaitas said, "knows what happened in the Golden Plains. How their last king Hukeitas was certain that someone would drop an atomic bomb on him, and our first grandmaster Naluyas half expected the same fate.

"So everyone knows about the riches of the Wood of Emptiness. The empire didn't like people poking around in there, but with Grandmaster Lasi dead and Ridachiti knocking the imperials silly, what does that matter now?

"If you want to know how big a town would be before it got stay-behind equipment, I'll tell you. But you have to take me along on this scheme you're hatching."

"At your age, grandfather? It will mean danger and a long journey. We might find nothing in the end."

"I'm not _your_ grandfather at least," Dohaitas said with a chuckle. "And I still have my legs and my wits. Find somebody with recognizance to release me to."

"Not your children or grandchildren?"

Dohaitas' whole expression darkened. "My children and their endless expenses kept me from saving so much as a copper gallon. As soon as they found a chance to stuff me in here, they took it. They haven't visited in ten years."

"In the Indoru, they'd die for it," Sirodati spat.

"You and your people," Dohaitas said. "Casting off lives like husks and broken nutshells. I want none of that if I get you rich, you understand?"

Sirodati smiled.

#

A few heartfelt pleas to the attendants later, and Sirodati had a good walking staff again, along with permission to withdraw some of the money he'd deposited with the priests of Hasutanu. Once he'd learned to walk well again, and could venture out into the city, his first purchase was a walking staff for Dohaitas.

His next purchase...

Well, he was Chehiraineh. He knew how to talk to people. How to insinuate; how to seek out knowledge; how to hold his own in sketchy situations. And even here, in a city ruled by paladins of the god of justice, there were poor and shady parts of town.

As the chill of autumn set in, drinks and time and patient conversation led him to a listless band of scavengers, most of them fellow Chehirainan, who'd had no leads for two years and no big successes for four. Most of them had day jobs now, but they were still scavengers at heart.

Sirodati was only a bootmaker, not a master intriguer, certainly not a seihipati. But he thought, or at least he hoped, that these scavengers were... the right balance. Shady enough to steal off with him into the night, to go digging for ancient goods that were not quite theirs to take. Not so shady as to knife him between the ribs and take his map for themselves. There was only so directly he could inquire about them, but the risk seemed to be worth running.

He got an evening meeting with their chief, at a quiet table in a corner of a run-down tavern. This man called himself Auschi, "Golden Man," an obvious nom de guerre. At least it was the nom de guerre he always used.

"I know you're a spy," Auschi said, after they had eaten and drunk, and Sirodati had covered the bill. "And not for the paladins. Who are you with? What does Dorutuné or whoever want with me?"

"I swear by Khâratayi and Aitakeiro," Sirodati said, "that Khâratayi is better than Kuchehaiki, and that I am not an octopus. And I further swear, by the same witnesses, that I'm working for myself and a single friend. I end my oath."

"Swear your friend's not a prince," Auschi said.

Sirodati swore it.

"Then I swear by Nakashoti that whatever you're up to, we'll keep it quiet."

Nakashoti was the god of the wild woods, of adventurers and warriors. An oath by him could be broken for many reasons, but not simply to enrich oneself.

"That's a better oath than I'd expected," Sirodati said.

"I think that maybe you're not stupid," Auschi evenly replied. "Maybe there's something you know."

Sirodati nodded, and looked in a direction that he thought might be north. "Tell me," he said. "Was there ever much scavenging or exploration around the Alicorn?"

"Is that all you've got? It was wheat fields. There was never anything to look for."

"There's a painting I studied extensively. I think it was done from a photograph, if you know what those were."

Auschi didn't. Sirodati explained.

"So by working off a photograph," Sirodati said, "the artist preserved a record of the towns near the Alicorn. But no one has ever gone looking for them. We can be the first, and you know what we'll find."

Auschi nodded. "Was anything big enough to rate a cache of arms?"

"Two towns were. Thanks to a friend who we'll be taking along, I know exactly where they were."

"Another one-legged man from the Porotis?"

"A Karanaiyi," Sirodati said. "A local whose children abandoned him."

"What does a Karanaiyi want with greatness? Isn't he happy with food and warmth where he is?"

"Even a deer would be hurt if its children abandoned it," Sirodati said. "Are Karanaiyan less human than wild animals?"

Auschi was silent; it looked like he wanted to say yes. Many humble Chehirainan had this old belief, that Karanaiyan were somehow outside the ladder of incarnations, that lifted you up from animal to Chehiraineh to divine. That they shouldn't exist at all.

Auschi exhaled. He took out his dagger, and idly picked at some splinters on the table.

"This is worth the attempt," he said at last. "You were shrewd to put me under oath."

Sirodati carefully avoided nodding.

"Name your price for your maps."

"First that we wait until spring," Sirodati said. "And then, when the thaw comes, you take Dohaitas the Karanaiyi, and myself, into the woods with you. You'll be using carts anyways."

Auschi nodded.

"And if you find the money to found a lineage, Dohaitas becomes one of its officers, and I'm the rapahaiti."

"You?" Auschi asked. "I'm the one with the men. You only brought the map."

"One band of scavengers is as good as another," Sirodati said. "If you want another guide to untouched salvage, you'll have a much harder hunt."

Auschi was silent once again.