Those who don’t have to make all of the arrangements think that pomp and circumstance is easy. While I was out checking on our route, Yaendrid, the Third Seneschal of the Chamber of Lilies and Gold, was talking to flower sellers. I met her as I followed the wall up Arahabast Hill. She saw me and laughed and held out a hand for me. She was not a person who was much troubled by niggling tasks, and her flower ordering had left her fresh and smelling of vashdand blossoms. She had become a good friend in the past few years. We walked hand in hand through the Tunnel of Trees and Serpents, and the clerks and slaves had to bustle around us as they went about their mysterious errands and tasks.
“They say that Sahrpa Mahst is back in the city,” she said. “One of the flower sellers just told me. But I could tell that he didn’t believe it himself. There was that look in his eye, the one they get when they think they’re making merry.”
This Sahrpa Mahst had been quite famous a few years before. The toast of the town, you might say. All the merchants featured him at their salons, and since they are usually the only ones who go to each other’s salons, they must have heard his tale of woe at least a dozen times. And he appeared before the king, of course. There was a banquet given in his honor. There was even a rumor that he had formed an inappropriate connection with the sixth son of the Count of Taeltaht. All because he had spent three years marooned on a hillock, cut off from the rest of the world by the snake with many feet.
Yaendrid had rescued him, and that was why the flower sellers and paper makers and ribbon weavers all liked to tease her with these false sightings. She had been very young, then, and newly exiled from Libreigia. Her tower had lost one of the occasional squabbles that break out among the archivists, and she and her compatriot scholars were forced to flee. Being scholars, they didn’t flee randomly, but each headed in the direction of their scholarly interest. And Yaendrid had always been fascinated by the folktales of the Singing Woods. Or at least that’s how her legend went.
She passed through Rahasabahst on her way into the woods, perhaps knowing that she would eventually wind up here, spending many years making sure that the populace remained in awe of our king. Work that suited her. Those folktales that she loved are full of dances and scattered flowers and feasts that feature meat that has been shaped into elaborate designs. The cultural heritage of our fair kingdom.
Off she went, looking like a young and naive ink dribbler, and she soon found herself the captive of a bandit chief. But everyone loves to have a scholar around. Someone you can unburden your thoughts to, someone who will listen to your justifications and tell you that, in the eyes of history, you’re really no worse than anyone else.
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This bandit chief told her that he had once had a very annoying deputy, an aide-de-camp who delighted in telling him everything that he was doing wrong. It was so tiresome that the bandit chief led his entire band beyond the borders of our kingdom, into the Ordalamia wild lands, those tangled woods that don’t so much sing as hiss. There is a type of snake there that has many feet and divides its body like an aspen grove, and it inhabits an entire valley. The chief led his people to a hill above this valley and had them build a giant kite. He strapped his annoying deputy to this kite and sent him coasting down into the valley, and then sat down to watch the snake eat his victim as soon as the kite fell to earth. Only the kite landed on a hillock which was in the exact center of the valley, and strangely bare but for a single tree. For some reason the snake would not come up onto this hillock. The deputy shook himself free of the wreckage of the kite, shook his fist at his former master, and settled down to three long years spent stranded on that hill. This deputy was Sahrpa Mahst, of course, and he would delight the court and the merchant houses with stories of how the ravens had fed him and how he took his clothes off so they wouldn’t wear out and only put them back on for propriety’s sake to greet the rising of the new moon.
Yaendrid asked the bandit chief if they might go and see if Sahrpa Mahst was still alive, so off they went, back across the border into Ordalamia, battling snakes and the even tougher bandit chiefs who live there. Most of the gang died along the way, and when they came to the valley it was only Yaendrid and the chief who were left. But there was Sahrpa Mahst, waving at them from his hillock, as the ground of the valley seethed with the snake’s multifaceted body. Yaendrid, being a scholar, knew how to subdue the snake. Her method, unfortunately, involved the death of the bandit chief who had captured her. She soon returned to Rahasabahst, with Sahrpa Mahst traveling in her wake.
None of that is true, of course. It’s only a story that she told before the coup attempt. At any rate, Sahrpa Mahst only survived a season in the city. He was a very annoying man, and after charming the court and the rich merchants with his stories, he proceeded to aggravate them with his carping. The king was going about being a king in completely the wrong way. The merchant ladies didn’t know how to be merchant ladies. The princesses got princessing all wrong. That kind of thing. He wasn’t so much banished from court as ignored out of existence. And until the uprising I, and Yaendrid, and everyone else, assumed that he was dead. He was an object of fun, not a bogeyman but a butt-of-the-joke-man, and everyone thought they could embarrass Yaendrid by mentioning her former connection to him.
How many warnings did I need, I can hear you asking? The wattle-faced fellow in Barmzahva Plaza. This rumor that Sahrpa Mahst was back in the city. The clues were piling up. But I wasn’t aware that there was a mystery, so I didn’t understand that they were clues at all. Just random events, a little tune running through the day, but mostly drowned out by the great, booming music of my many tasks and worries.
I had a pleasant time wandering through the tunnel with Yaendrid, who teased me and blessed me with her friendship, and I went on my way in a lightened mood, thinking that a long trek out to the shrine might not be that bad after all. At least I’d get to witness Yaendrid’s clever ceremonials along the way.
