Page 37 of Heir to a Curse

Chapter 14

In the dream, the doors to the shrine were open, and I walked through them expecting the familiar cramped space and gurgling fountain. Instead it was the entrance to a grand sort of palace, sprawled in section after section of square walkways and small detached buildings. Much like that first one I’d been lost in. Though it wasn’t cold. At least not yet.

I could hear the sound of that instrument in the distance. Faint. Slow and sad. And I wasn’t walking alone. Instead my steps echoed. I glanced back to find myself followed by what looked like Chinese soldiers from several centuries gone by. I was dressed much the same, and so was the man beside me.

If asked to describe him to some sort of sketch artist, I’d have failed. I got the sense he was older, some sort of wispy beard, and dark eyes. Hair pulled back with that small sort of cap hat I couldn’t recall the name for. But I knew I stood taller and my back firmer, perhaps due to youth, although we kept in step as we headed deeper into the palace.

At first the conversation seemed an incoherent babble of noise, though slowly words began to make sense. Odd as I never spoke to people in dreams. Never recalled conversations. Yet, here it was happening again.

“It’s a waste for you to be here,” the man was telling me.

“I’m honored to be guardian,” I replied feeling the well of emotion surge in my gut. It was honor and pride. Like what I was doing meant more to the entire world than anyone understood.

“We are at war. We could use you at the front. Perhaps one of the others…”

But I had already accepted the post. We both knew that. Escorting the Mandate away from the danger befalling his family had been the last assignment before full battle was to engage. And I alone would remain behind.

“He’s safer here,” I reminded the man. “Away from it all.”

“Fairytales,” the man said. “If they lose the Mandate it is the will of the gods.”

Those were treasonous words and I didn’t need to point them out. The man stopped, letting out a sigh of annoyance. “I will send messages from the front.”

“I appreciate that,” I told him. We stopped at a door, music floating on the wind. Trained from an early age to be a guard, I’d heard the music a million times. Usually it was filled with dancing joy and lighthearted wonder. Though over the years it had slowly begun to change. I’d come to recognize the sound and attribute it to a feeling of home. Only now that music had shifted into something darker. Gone was that lilting dance of peaceful freedom. Replaced with sadness. Loneliness.

I understood. I put my hand over my heart and bid the others farewell. My duty to guard the Mandate meant a lot. Though I watched them all walk away with a great deal of sadness and desire to join them. The battlefield had honed my skills, made me who I was, from a worthless pauper’s son, into a general with the ear of royalty. Having watched the Mandate grow much as I had, I understood his importance and his burden. Neither were kind nor peaceful things.

Watching the soldiers walk away, I prayed for their safety, then turned to the door to knock lightly. The music stopped and he beckoned me inside. When I opened the door, I was shocked to find the room cluttered, full of books, musical instruments, even bolts of fabric. There hardly seemed any space left for him, though he’d carved out a small section to play his sorrow-filled song.

An entire sprawling estate of space and he’d taken only this small room for himself. It seemed odd, though I knew part of it was because the soldiers would have dropped it all in one place. The fact that he seemed unwilling to move it, or spread out, instead gathered what little he had around him, made me wonder if taking him away from the city and the people, had been a wise idea.

The command had been to protect the Mandate with a sort of exile that kept him out of the reach of the battle. Though this seemed like more than that. Almost a punishment. Imprisonment, far away from the people who had made up his family. I tried to brush away the thought inspired by the man and his music of mourning. I was here to guard him, and that itself was an honor.

At first, I thought he was different than the man I’d seen at the shrine, since his hair wasn’t white, and instead an inky sort of black, adorned with one of those haircap things covered in jewels. The end of the hairpiece appeared to be the dragon statue, though more colorful and with gems inset. But his face matched the man I’d seen at the shrine, younger now, almost an innocence of youth, though I knew somehow that hairpin indicated he was an adult.

His robes were just as divine and elegant, the dress fitting a Mandate. Much like the Emperor himself, a touch of what a god should be, breathlessly beautiful and perfect in all ways.

A smile lit his face as he saw me, cracking the sadness that filled his eyes. “Come sit,” he called motioning to the space on the other side of his instrument. “Let me play for you.”

“I should walk the grounds. Ensure you are safe,” I said.

His shoulders drooped. “There is none here but you and me,” he said. He looked around the room, and endless stacks of things which really seemed useless to two men in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s better for you to be safe here. Good that they’ve given you things to do.” Somehow I knew that he’d been given all this to keep him entertained and occupied while still confined. “There is a garden too. The troops will need medicine, and we can provide them with some.” Another of his skills, I thought, knowing without really remembering how.

“Please stay for a while. Let me play for you.”

I stared at him for a few moments, marveling at his beauty, grace, and perfection. My heart wanted all of that, all of him wrapped up in my arms. Though viscerally I knew that was wrong. Like a commoner thinking they had the right to touch an Emperor. He really was what the Mandate should be. I was nothing but a soldier, not worthy of even being in his presence. Though I felt like that was an excuse on my part, for keeping a distance. The sadness in his eyes said a lot without the need for words. He knew what I thought without having to hear me say any of it.

My inner self warred a bit about it. Debating on whether or not to stay, to provide him some company. Yet I knew my place. Understood that he had to be protected at all costs, even despite our own comforts. Instead of sitting down with him, I said, “Perhaps you’ll continue to play while I patrol the grounds? I love to hear your music, but need to ensure your safety.”

He wilted a little more, bowed his head and began to play. I watched a few moments longer, the ashen fall of his long lashes resting on his cheeks. He wouldn’t let me see his eyes, which stung. But I’d hurt him. When the first tear slipped down his cheek, I took myself out the door, shutting it behind me, like somehow I could close the door on the desire to comfort him. As I walked away, I felt like screaming, and wished I had the control make myself go back as the music turned sour and sad. But it was only a single memory of hundreds. Tiny daggers stabbing into them, as bits of watching him in the garden, or even stealing a few kisses only to turn away replayed within my mind.

“Fuck you,” I told my dream self, for leading him on, and using every possible excuse to hurt him. I was so angry. Betrayed by my own actions. How often I’d chanted that he was the Mandate and therefore untouchable as an excuse to not offer him comfort. I’d watched how the joy and life had faded from his eyes over time. The sprawling palace little more than a prison with me as a guard.

I couldn’t even complain that the trouble was one-sided, or that he had simply seen things wrong. No, I felt all the stupid rationalizing, remembered the self-talk that kept him contained and made it easier when the time came to leave.

That cold winter morning. We’d taken to sleeping in the same small space to keep warm. For a Mandate he seemed to have little actual power. I’d watched him for months on end, expecting a change, some sort of eruption of energy that would rise like stories of legend to save everyone. But there had been nothing. Endless skill in arts and education as was required of his station. An affinity for music, language, even weaving, but where was the power they claimed he had? A thousand stories of the Mandate’s mystical power rising to quash a rebel army and there he sat, in grace and beauty, someone who seemed to not have much else.