Goddess Tithe Read online

  But that night, when their duties were momentarily accomplished and neither could rest, they went together to the main deck and stood looking out upon the dark expanse of sea and the brighter expanse of sky where the Dara shone above.

  Did they truly sing? Munny wondered, standing there beside the clown, straining his ears to hear something beyond the waves and the wind and the creak of the Kulap Kanya.

  “They sing of the promise given their mother. The promise that her lost children would return to her one day.”

  Suddenly Leonard spoke. “He doesn’t want me to go. He doesn’t want me to search for Ay-Ibunda.”

  Munny turned at the only word he understood: “Ay-Ibunda,” the Hidden Temple. He shuddered at the name. He’d forgotten about the conversation overheard so long ago. Once more he wondered what this odd foreigner could possibly know about this darkest, most secret story, this myth of which Munny had heard only whispers.

  “But I have to,” Leonard said. “It’s my only hope. I cannot return home without some help for my family. My people. I cannot fail them.”

  The heaviness in Leonard’s voice was startling. Munny put out a hand and touched the clown-man’s shoulder comfortingly. He knew what that heaviness meant, if nothing else. He said in response, “I hope to find my mother. And I will give her white peonies.”

  Leonard smiled sadly and returned Munny’s gesture, touching a hand to the boy’s small shoulder. “I’m sorry about the old man. I’m sure you miss him. I wouldn’t have thought him one to be lost in a storm. But I suppose he would rather die at sea than on land. He was a good man. And you are a good man, Moo-ney.”

  So they turned again and faced the ocean. Eventually the sun rose, spreading crimson across the waves, and the lookout gave the cry: “Lunthea Maly! Lunthea Maly!”

  The Kulap Kanya was come home.

  Leonard stayed on board to help with the unloading of the cargo. Munny suspected that he was afraid to venture down into the city on his own, especially after his first morning glimpse of its sprawling, endless streets, alleys, shops, markets, palaces, and temples. To a Westerner, the vastness of Lunthea Maly, greatest city of the Noorhitam Empire, must seem like a labyrinth in which he would be swallowed up and never seen again.

  But Munny longed to spring from the deck and run; run into those familiar streets, up the narrow alleys he knew so well, on to the finer streets where he believed—where he must believe—he would find what he sought.

  They worked, however, most of that day, following Tu Bahurn’s shouted commands as swiftly as they could. Sweat poured down their faces and arms, and their muscles quivered with exhaustion, and still they worked until the sun was cresting the apex of the sky.

  Then Captain Sunan was beside them. Both Munny and Leonard stopped what they were doing and saluted.

  “You must go now, Fool,” the Captain spoke in Westerner. He pressed a purse into the clown’s hand. “You have served well. You have earned both your passage and this to help you on your way into the city.”

  Leonard accepted the purse with a bow, but his brow furrowed uncertainly. “Captain,” he said, “I have to ask . . . Did I . . .” He hesitated, swallowing hard. “Did I bring danger to you and your crew? Was it my fault that—”

  “The men of the Kulap Kanya know the risks and the laws of the sea,” Captain Sunan said. “They do not make them, and neither do you. Now go, Leonard the Lightning Tongue. Do what you have purposed in your heart. I pray that you will not live to regret it.”

  So Leonard bowed again, and the Captain bowed in return. Then Leonard turned to Munny and extended his hand in Westerner fashion. “Farewell, Moo-ney,” he said. “Thank you for everything. Someday I’ll write a song about you.”

  “Goodbye, Lhe-nad,” Munny said, and shook the clown’s hand.

  With that, Leonard tucked his purse into his shirt, where he wore the strange clown’s motley hidden beneath Tu Pich’s old cast-offs. Then he sprang down the gangplank, ignoring the shouts and jeers of the sailors, some of whom wished him luck, some of whom wished him dead, some of whom spat at his back. Soon he was losing himself in the port crowds, his odd voice becoming lost in the chaos as he sang:

  “Oh rum-tum-tiddle-dee ho, ho!

  Rum-tum-tiddle-dee ho!”

  Munny wondered if he would ever see the clown again.

  “Now,” said Captain Sunan, and the boy hastily turned back to his master and bowed. “You too have a purpose here in our city, do you not?”

  Munny nodded. “I do, Captain.”

  “Will you leave the Kulap Kanya for good? Or will you sail with me again?”

  Munny opened his mouth, but words would not come right away. He felt his heart torn inside, torn with unanswered questions. But then it seemed to come together, and he knew somehow what his answer must be.

  “I will sail with you,” he said.

  “That is good,” the Captain replied. He placed another purse in Munny’s hand. “This is your pay for a good voyage. I will see you back on deck in three days’ time.”

  The next moment Munny’s feet were flying. He was down the gangplank in a flash, unheeding of Tu Bahurn’s cries behind him. The Captain had given him permission, and he could not wait even a second longer.

  His world tilted when he reached land, for his legs were no longer accustomed to stable ground. But he staggered on, ignoring the sickness in his stomach, thrilling at the sights so familiar and yet so strange. He remembered all this, every turn of the port, and yet it seemed as though he must be dreaming to be back here. After everything he had seen, after everything he had experienced, this world of his home was more unreal even than Risafeth’s glassy ocean.

  He turned up a certain street and came upon a market. There was the stall he knew he would find, abounding in fresh-cut flowers. Only here had Munny ever smelled the fragrance attributed to his home city. Only here could he dream that Lunthea Maly was the garden of delights for which it had been named.

  Only here had he seen white peonies, his mother’s favorite.

  “Away, dirty rat!” the seller of flowers growled, shaking his fist at Munny’s approach. “Don’t touch my pretties with your smelly hands!”

  But Munny fumbled with his purse, and a flash of bright coin brought the seller round. “Please,” Munny gasped, hardly able to get the words out now that he was here. “Please, I need white peonies.”

  The seller took his coins and selected three of the biggest, frilliest blooms. Munny’s hand trembled as he accepted them; he felt as though he were given clouds of perfumed lace.

  He ran on then, holding the blooms as gently as he could, close to his heart. His feet turned up streets less familiar, away from the markets, away from the Chhayan alleys. For surely Mother would not be there.

  Surely when she had discovered him gone, she would have agreed to Uncle Mokhtar’s offer. She would return to the home of her birth.

  “I wore white peonies in my hair the night I met your father,” she had told him once, long ago. “He said I looked like a Faerie princess.”

  The Kitar streets were better swept, though the stench of lower Lunthea Maly still rose up to pollute the air of even the finest gardens. Munny had only ever come a handful of times to his uncle’s house, and the last time, Uncle Mokhtar had refused to let him through the gate. But he knew the way. He had run it in his head, in his dreams, a thousand times.

  He came to the gate, the peonies in his hands a little battered from his run, but still full, still beautiful. He rattled the lock and shouted, “Uncle Mokhtar! Uncle Mokhtar!”

  One of Mokhtar’s old servants appeared at the door of the house, and with him came two great, bounding dogs. They ran barking at the gate, showing their fangs, and their snarls drowned out the servant’s voice even as he shouted, “Go away! Go away, Chhayan brat!”

  But Munny had looked into the face of Risafeth. He ignored his uncle’s guard dogs and rattled the gate still louder. “Uncle, it’s me! Come out!”

  At las
t his uncle appeared at the door, wrapped in a blue silk robe, his feet shod in silver-tasseled slippers. He called off the dogs, called off his old servant, and waddled down the path to the gate, his face twisting into an ever-deeper sneer as he drew near.

  “So,” he said. “The rat returns to its hole. Never thought to see you again, Munny; no more than we saw your father.”

  “Uncle Mokhtar,” Munny said, one hand clutching the gate, the other holding the peonies. “Where is she? Is she here? Is she in your back garden?”

  Mokhtar’s mouth twisted, and his arms folded over his ample chest. “No,” he said. “She would not return to her father’s house. Even when you abandoned her, she refused my offer. She refused her own brother. She will not be laid to rest in the grounds of her family.”

  Munny’s heart sank. “Where is she?”

  “Down in that stink-hole where your father left her. Where you left her. Buried and dead.”

  Munny was running again before Mokhtar had reached the end of his sentence. He was mostly down the street when his uncle’s final words caught up to him in an angry bellow:

  “You are dead to us too, Chhayan-born! You are dead, do you hear me?”

  Munny shielded the peonies as best he could as he plunged once more into the Chhayan quarter, dodging and ducking all the bodies and carts and piles of garbage. No tears sprang to his eyes, for he could not cry, not yet. Perhaps he would cry later. Perhaps he would never cry again.

  The Chhayan alley-ghosts, as they were known, were buried in a ditch just beyond the city. There were no markers on their graves. They were lost and forgotten by all.

  But Munny would not think of that. He snarled his way through crowds, ignoring the shouts, avoiding thieving hands, his bare feet slapping on the stones, each step an agony as though he ran on hot coals.

  He saw it. A little door, half-fallen from its hinges. A doorway to nowhere. To nothing. To everything.

  Munny reached it and fell, his shoulder against the doorpost, unable to enter, unable to push through and find what he feared beyond. He stood there, the peonies cradled to his heart which beat to bursting in his breast.

  Then he heard it: the wet, tortured cough.

  His heart stopped.

  She sat at the only window, using the dirty light that spilled through as she bent over her work. She embroidered delicate leaves and birds and flowers into garments of silk, which her employer would collect at the end of the evening, leaving pennies for her efforts. She covered her mouth with a handkerchief when she coughed, permitting not even a trace of blood to mar her artistry.

  Her face was haggard and drawn. Long vanished was the bloom of the pretty Faerie princess who had danced with her Chhayan sailor in the moonlight.

  She was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  When the door creaked open, she looked up, blinking in her effort to see through the shadows. When she smiled, her whole face became sunlight.

  “There you are,” she said.

  Munny flew across the little chamber, across the dirty floor. He collapsed into her arms, crushing the white peonies against her, and their perfume filled the room. She held him close, pressing him to her, whispering over and over again his name. Not Munny, the name by which he was called, but his true name, the name she had given him at his birth. He wept and held her as though he would never let go, and she rocked him.

  Her trembling voice, weak from the cough, murmured gently in his ear:

  “Go to sleep, go to sleep,

  My good boy, go to sleep.

  Where did the songbird go?

  Beyond the mountains of the sun.

  Beyond the gardens of the moon.

  Where did my good boy go?

  Far beyond the western sea,

  Then home to me, then home to me.”

  A Note to the Reader

  Goddess Tithe takes place within the context of my larger novel, Veiled Rose. If you would like to learn answers to some of the questions about Leonard the Jester—Who is he really? Why is he traveling to Lunthea Maly? What does he want with the Hidden Temple?—I urge you to pick up that novel.

  About the Author

  Anne Elisabeth Stengl makes her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, Rohan, a kindle of kitties, and one long-suffering dog. When she’s not writing, she enjoys Shakespeare, opera, and tea, and practices piano, painting, and pastry baking. She studied illustration at Grace College and English literature at Campbell University. She is the author of Heartless, Veiled Rose, Moonblood, Starflower, and Dragonwitch. Heartless and Veiled Rose have each been honored with a Christy Award, and Starflower was voted winner of the 2013 Clive Staples Award.

  To learn more about Anne Elisabeth Stengl and her books visit: AnneElisabethStengl.blogspot.com

  Coming Soon

  An all-new

  Tale of Goldstone Wood

  GOLDEN DAUGHTER

  Timeless fantasy that will keep you spellbound!

  Don’t Miss the Rest of the

  TALES OF GOLDSTONE WOOD

  As Princess Una comes of age, a foolish decision leaves her vulnerable to an enemy she thought was only a myth. What will Una risk to save her kingdom—and her heart?

  Heartless

  When a terrifying evil lays siege to the land, the unusual friendship between Leo and Rose Red undergoes a deadly test. What began as a game will now decide the fate of a kingdom.

  Veiled Rose

  With the Night of Moonblood fast approaching, a prince embarks on a desperate quest to stop the goblin king from unleashing an ancient evil. But does he have the courage to save those he loves?

  Moonblood

  On a mission to save his ladylove from the Dragonwitch, Eanrin comes upon a mortal maid trapped in an enchanted sleep. One waking kiss later, he is caught up in an adventure beyond anything he ever dreamed.

  Starflower

  As a Death-House Gate opens into the mortal world, monsters and war threaten the North Country. Only one man can turn back this tide, but to do so he must face the realm of the Dragonwitch.

  Dragonwitch

  The above titles are published by

  BETHANY HOUSE,

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Discover more exciting

  ROOGLEWOOD PRESS titles!

  www.RooglewoodPress.com

  Like us on Facebook

  Find more information on GODDESS TITHE at www.GoddessTitheNovel.blogspot.com