Naamah's Blessing (Moirin's Trilogy #3)

“Balthasar told you, didn’t he?” Bao murmured. “I saw it in your face.”

I nodded against his shoulder.

“Moirin.” He stroked my hair. “The high priestesses Iniquill and Ocllo have an idea you may be able to help.”

A profound wave of weariness sapped me. “Oh, Bao!” I laughed in despair. “Do they imagine I can quicken the crops of an entire city?”

“The crops would need to be planted anew,” he said. “And yes.”

“No.” Pulling away from him, I shook my head. Thinking on the leagues and leagues of stripped and barren fields that would need to be replanted, the thousands upon thousands of plants that would need to be quickened from mere seeds, the enormity of the task seemed daunting and impossible. Never, ever had I even entertained the thought of attempting somewhat on that scale. Hot tears burned my eyes. “It’s too much! It was difficult enough to coax a single field of marigolds to bloom out of season in Bhaktipur, and I wasn’t drained to the dregs as I am now! Stone and sea, there’s not enough left of me! I cannot do it.”

Bao was silent. The shadow of Cusi’s death lay behind his eyes. He had done the unthinkable.

I’d thought that banishing Focalor and closing the doorway was the hardest task I faced; but I was wrong.

That was merely reparation for my own folly.

Trust me.

I had been spared the loss of my diadh-anam for a reason. The gift of life, Iniquill had called it. The Maidens of the Sun had wagered on my gift, pitting it against the black tide of death Raphael had brought. Cusi had offered herself as a sacrifice to save her people, and the ancestors had answered her.

I could not dishonor her memory. I could not let her people starve—and my own alongside them.

I bowed my head. “Do they at least have seeds to plant?”

“They do.” It was Balthasar who answered, standing off to the side, his voice unwontedly soft. “Seed grains and potatoes. The Sapa Inca’s set a guard on their stores. They’re the staples of life here in Tawantinsuyo. And we’ve had ample experience in planting them, my lady,” he added, striving gallantly for levity, rubbing his work-hardened hands together. “Thierry bids me tell you he will wield a digging-stick one last time if you think his efforts might bear fruit.”

Lifting my head, I drew a long, trembling breath, placing one hand on Bao’s chest. “Do you truly believe I can do this thing?”

“I do.” Bao covered my hand with his own. “Can you look me in the eye and love me still, Moirin? Knowing what I have done?”

“Aye.” Twining my fingers with his, I raised his hand to my lips, kissing his knuckles. “You did what was needful.”

He shuddered. “It was awful.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I was there. And I am here.”

Exactly when Balthasar Shahrizai made his discreet withdrawal, I could not say. Only that he did.

Lying entwined on the pallet, Bao and I held each other, taking solace in silence. I rested my head on his chest and listened to the slow, steady beat of his heart. I felt the spark of my diadh-anam grow stronger, the presence of his nurturing it. We were alive. We had survived. Focalor had been banished. Raphael, Lord Pachacuti with his army of ravenous ants, was no more. The starved ants, poor things, would return to their rightful habitats in the distant jungles.

The future I had seen in which the great empires of Terra Nova were crushed and eradicated would not come to pass. Cusi’s sacrifice had ensured it. And so, ironically, had Raphael’s actions. The physician with the healing hands I’d once thought I’d loved had taught the Nahuatl to stave off the killing pox.

“Mayhap there is a purpose in all this after all,” I murmured. “Mayhap the gods have their reasons after all.”

Bao’s arms tightened around me. “I believe it must be so,” he said, his warm breath stirring my hair. “But I hope they are done with us soon.”

I raised my head to kiss him. “So do I, my magpie. So do I.”

SEVENTY-THREE

Ispent the day at rest, breaking my fast with a bowl of thin stew that Machasu brought. It was mostly water, but there were bits of potato and stringy meat in it. I ate it slowly, trying to make it last.

Various visitors came and went. When Prince Thierry arrived, I heard the whole tale of the nerve-racking night he and his hand-picked dozen men had spent in the temple, and the struggle to subdue the priests with wurari poison. There had been a number of scuffles while they waited for the poison to take effect, but no one had been harmed.

“It wasn’t easy,” Thierry said wearily. “A few of them fought like mad once they realized what we were about.”

“But you kept your head, your highness,” Bao said with quiet respect. “And you saw to it that the others kept theirs. It was well done.”

“It was done,” Thierry said. “And that is all that matters.” They exchanged a glance, and I saw that the respect between them was mutual. “Moirin, I am sorry to have doubted you.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I doubted myself.”

I did not add that if I could have stayed Bao’s hand there at the end, I would have. He did not need to know that, ever.

On the morrow, we met with the Sapa Inca Huayna and went to view the devastation the ants had wrought.

At that, I did weep. All the terraced fields were stripped bare, the earth churned and barren. In their hunger, the ants had laid bare every stalk, burrowed the length of every furrow. Women and children scavenged the fields, sifting through the dirt with their fingers in the hope of finding an overlooked tuber.

But the ants had been thorough. Their passage had cut a swath a league wide across the land, a broad trail of lifeless brown leading eastward as far as the eye could see. Everywhere the land was cultivated, it had been ravaged.

“Ah, gods!” I whispered to the newly crowned Sapa Inca. “I’m so sorry.”

Huayna gave a stoic shrug. “You did not bring the plague of ants upon us, lady. Lord Pachacuti did, with my foolish youngest brother’s help.” His expression softened. “I do not forget that you wept for my father’s death, too.” He held out one hand. Three kernels of maize lay in his palm. “In the past, we would seek to appease the gods with sacrifices were such a tragedy to occur. But the Maidens of the Sun say you possess a gift of life, and it is to life we must now trust. Is it so?”

I took a deep breath. “I pray it is.”

He lowered himself to one knee, poking the kernels into the earth and making a mound. “Show me.”

I knelt, pressing my hands into the soil. Summoning the twilight, I breathed softly over the mound. I felt the kernels awake and quicken, sending out green shoots that pierced the mound.

The Sapa Inca Huayna’s eyes widened. “Can you do this for all?” He gestured across the devastated landscape. “All of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, brushing dirt from my hands. “Not like this, I think. Not all at once. But if you will set every man, woman, and child to replanting your fields, I will do my best to quicken them.”

“It is a risk,” he said slowly. “Many claim it would be better to eat the seeds we have in store, for there is no time for crops to ripen. Better to consume what we have, and send for new seed in the spring.”

Trust me.

I echoed the words aloud. “Trust me.”

His black gaze weighed me, and after a moment, he nodded. “We will attempt this thing.”

It was a prodigious undertaking. True to his word, Prince Thierry lent his own hand to the endeavor, ordering our entire company to do the same. Under the direction of the Quechua farmers, D’Angeline noblemen burnt brown by the sun worked side by side with the denizens of Qusqu, digging and stooping in endless rows, planting multicolored kernels of maize and sprouting chunks of seed potatoes.

Day after day, I walked the fields where they labored, my feet bare that I might feel the soil beneath them, coaxing a thousand hidden sparks of life to quicken. Betimes it felt as though I walked amidst constellations of earth-bound stars. I breathed the Breath of Earth’s Pulse and the Breath of Trees Growing. When the fields were irrigated, I breathed the Breath of Ocean’s Rolling Waves.

At night, I slept like the dead, drained and dreamless. But I was using my gift as it was intended, and every morning, I found the strength to rise.

Without the system of distribution that even Raphael had found worthy of praise, I daresay we would have starved. But even as the last meager hoard of stores had been distributed and the last pack-animal shorn and slaughtered, supplies began trickling in from distant quarters.

Not enough to survive the winter without crops, but enough to keep going. I tightened the woolen cord knotted around my waist and ignored the hunger pangs in my belly.

I prayed to the Maghuin Dhonn Herself, and to Blessed Elua and all of his Companions, most especially to Anael, the Good Steward—the man with the seedling cupped in his hand, I had called him since childhood.

When green seedlings emerged from the earth, unfurling leaves and tendrils, I breathed the Breath of Wind’s Sigh and the Breath of Embers Glowing, welcoming them to the open sky and the sun’s warm kiss.

I do not know how many days it lasted, or how many leagues I walked amidst the fields, following furrow after furrow. I felt weightless and insubstantial, suspended between sky and earth.

There was day and night, the fields and seedlings, and nothingness. But the crops grew. They quickened. The Quechua farmers tended them assiduously, weeding the fields and nurturing the growing plants.

Betimes the Maidens of the Sun walked the fields with me, adding their prayers to the gods of Tawantinsuyo. In the palace, Machasu fussed over me, insisting that I ate every night before I slept. Betimes I suspected her of giving me her share of whatever food there was, but she denied it indignantly, and I was too tired and hungry to argue.

Always, I had Bao at my side, a constant and reassuring presence, his diadh-anam burning steadily when mine guttered low. Others accompanied us in shifts: Thierry and Balthasar and Septimus Rousse, and Jean Grenville and Brice de Bretel, who sang L’Agnacite hymns I found soothing. The Jaguar Knight Temilotzin, who watched me like a worried hawk, as quick as Bao to lend a shoulder when I faltered.

And the crops grew.

Seedlings thickened into stalks, sprouting arching plumes of leaves. Knee-high, then waist-high, then taller than my head. I walked between row after row, letting my trailing hands touch the leaves. The stalks sprouted buds of tasseled flowers that grew, thickening and lengthening. In the potato fields, the tendrils turned to vines and issued broad leaves, then white and lavender blossoms.

I summoned the twilight and breathed life into them. The flowers expended themselves, withering and dying on the vine.

I thought of the skulls in the tzompantli in the city of Tenochtitlan, and the poem the Nahuatl Emperor had recited to me.

I thought of Cusi, and petals falling like rain.

And the crops grew and grew.

Until the day when I rose at dawn and walked out to the fields as I had done so many times before, and found them thronged with Quechua workers, hundreds upon hundreds of them, busy hands plucking and digging. All I could do was blink, uncomprehending.

“What are they doing?” My voice sounded hoarse with disuse. I tried to remember the last time I’d spoken, and couldn’t. It had been days.

“They’re harvesting,” Bao said in wonder. Loosing a victorious shout, he turned to me with a fierce grin, a grin I’d feared I might never see again. “They’re harvesting, Moirin!” Laying his hands on my shoulders, he gave me a little shake. “You did it!”

I felt bewildered. “I did?”

Bao cupped my face in his hands and gave me a resounding kiss. “Aye, Moirin. You did.”

“He is right, little warrior,” Temilotzin added. “You have won this battle.”

I looked.

It was true. Even as I looked, a woman with a friendly, careworn face, some Quechua farmer’s wife, approached us, a pair of young children following in her wake as she traversed the field. She held an ear of maize in her hands, cradling it like an offering.

“See,” she said reverently, peeling back the limp silken tassels and the coarse, pale green leaves to reveal rows of healthy kernels. “It is ripe!”

My knees gave way, so swiftly neither Bao nor Temilotzin caught me before I sank to the earth. “Oh…!”

The Quechua woman smiled. “This is for you, lady.” She pressed the ear of maize into my hands, patting them gently. In the manner of children everywhere, her toddlers peered at me around her skirt, their eyes wide and bright with a mixture of wariness and curiosity. “You have caused this to happen, and I come to give it to you. It is the first fruit of the harvest, and you should have it.”

“Sulpayki,” I whispered, clutching her offering. “Thank you.”

Her smile broadened, revealing unexpected dimples that tugged at my heart. “Imamanta,” she replied. “You are welcome.”

Now it was truly done.

SEVENTY-FOUR

Qusqu would survive.

There was a feast that evening, and it was a joyous thing to see the streets of the splendid city filled with folk celebrating the harvest. Exhausted as I was, the sight gladdened my heart, and I felt stronger for it.

A good deal of negotiating had transpired while I walked the fields in a waking daze. Counting on my success, Prince Thierry had engaged Eyahue to negotiate for the supplies everyone prayed were forthcoming for our return journey, and various live specimens and samples of Quechua workmanship. He was determined not to return to Terre d’Ange empty-handed after all his travail.