The Maiden and the Wealthgiver

Wealthgiver, Prologue

This is the prologue of Wealthgiver, an alternate history serial romance about nationalism and cave-Thracians. For the back-of-the-book description and an index of chapters, click here.

MOOD MUSIC

1868, October 15

Kori Chthamali was sixteen when she realized that the myth of Persephone was about her.

"Now, Hades was the eldest son of Chronos and master of the underworld," Madame the Classics teacher had said. "Attributes: scepter, cornucopia, rooster, key, Cerberus, the dog-skin cap of invisibility, snakes, narcissus, cypress. Also called Polydégmon, 'Host of Many,' Ploútōn, 'Wealthy,' Ploutodotḗr, 'Giver of Wealth.'" His bride was Persephone, also called Kórē, Maiden, whom he carried off."

That was all Kori needed. The prophetess of the Good went out upon the Earth to learn and returned to the Sacred Depths every winter. When she bore a daughter, she stayed, and that daughter went out in her place. Knowing that, Kori had never once wondered who her father might have been, or who the father of her children might one day be. Kori had felt as if she'd walked into a wall.

Now, as she climbed the slope of the graveyard, Kori berated herself again for her naivety. Ten years in a Balkan cave learning the mysteries and disciplines of the Good, and the third Classics lessons in a Swiss boarding school taught her what any of it meant. Hadn't she been listening during her initiation? Hadn't she known who it was whose words had poured from her mother's mouth?

Kori stopped herself. Her gaze rose, captured by the Moon and the thought that opened like a pit before her. She would fall into that thought upon waking, or eating, or walking between classes. Her mother was dead. Now, when Kori finally understood her purpose, there was no one left to ask about it. Carried off by Hades, indeed.

She lowered her gaze to the ground, laden with sticks and dry leaves, rocks that might roll and make a sound.

Kori put her arm over her face, tucking her eyes into the hollow of her elbow to block out the Moon. On the hillside cemetery far from her home, she flexed her toes in her shoes, and breathed, and listened.

Sounds returned from the Earth below, were lost in the empty sky above. A mountain rose under Kori, but it turned about another, the Mountain that hid her people. A few old men and children stared into the dark, asking their questions with no one to speak the answers. Their old Mistress was dead, and their Maiden was in a boarding school in Switzerland.

This is fear. Fear of being trapped.

Kori saw herself as if from above. She struggled against bonds she hadn't known existed. Behind her stood a figure of deepest black: her only certainty.

Her lips moved soundlessly: how can I escape?

The answer came like an echo: your kidnapping.

Kori had been raised to believe that fate was a gift. The Wealthgiver pushed things out of the ground—gold, wheat, plagues—and left the rest to mortals. Now that Kori understood her fate, how should she use that knowledge? The answer was the same every time Kori asked: your kidnapping.

The October wind chilled her, but heat still rose from the Earth. The smell of dying leaves was like wine in her nose, and the Moon raged unopposed in a cloudless sky. Even the stars were banished by that terrible shine.

Normally, under a full Moon, Kori would shield her eyes and use her ears to navigate. Better, she would keep a stone roof over her head to block the influence of the goddess of insanity. Tonight, she was grateful for the unholy light. It allowed her to see and step around the fallen leaves, and it might dazzle her pursuers.

No, she told herself. There would be no pursuit. Her guardians would be watching the girl Kori had convinced to sleep in her bed. Or they would be at the train station, having found the receipt for the tickets she had bought. In the library, where she had been found on her last attempt at evasion.

Kori's eyes skipped from gravestone to tomb roof to wind-whipped treetop. Flinched away from moonlight. A life was at stake. How could she be sure? She could not. Certainty was impossible above the Earth. One could only take the gifts that came into her hands, and run with them.

Nikolai was waiting for Kori, sitting on a stone bench in front of a grave, the moonlight shining on his hair. Kori glanced up, wincing. The goddess of insanity might protect them, might keep away the devout agents of the Good, she hoped. Or else she was mad herself, and had doomed this boy to die.

He was from Moscow, an orphan, and technically a prince. She found him sitting in a corner, reading, during one of their schools' periodic dances. Kori had sidled up to him, seen the title of his book—Ἱστορίαι—and loudly quoted: "For if one were to offer men to choose out of all the customs in the world such as seemed to them the best, they would examine the whole number, and end by preferring their own." From there, they had worked out a system of correspondence.

There were policies in place specifically to prevent unsupervised conversations between the young ladies of the school with young gentlemen, but Kori was the heiress of more than thirteen centuries of cryptic ritual and espionage. She could use a Vigenère cipher.

Nikolai had taken to the game easily. He was expected to serve his government one day as a civil engineer, but every moment he wasn't doing the minimum required to scrape by in his mathematics and physics classes, he devoted to philology. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and the relations between them.

For more reasons than one, therefore, Nikolai was delighted to come to Kori's school's library and examine Gothic psalms or Zoroastrian gathas. He would leave notes of page and verse numbers, which would lead Kori to words in Herodotus' Histories. Kori would drop her notes in a specific wastepaper basket the morning before Nikolai was due to arrive, and check for responses pressed between the pages of a book in the library. She had loved that library.

But Nikolai was a good choice for several reasons. First, he was an orphan, and his paternal great uncle in Moscow cared more for his historic collection of cavalry sabers than for his ward. Nikolai had resources without many strings attached to them. Second, he was quite tall, and in fact Kori didn't know very many other young men who might carry her off. Third, Kori knew exactly how to snare this boy's interest.

"Meet me behind the cathedral at midnight," her most recent message had read. "Bring clothes and money. The Thracians are after me."

Nikolai could not resist correcting a misapprehension. "The Thracians cannot be after you," he said, hands clasping hers. "I looked it up after I got your message. The last tribe of the Thracians were the Bessi, who Christianized in the fourth century, then died out. Did you make a mistake with the cipher?"

Kori knew that "no, I did not make a mistake," would not be the most useful response. Instead, she said breathlessly, "You've researched them?"

"Oh, yes. As much as I could find." The boy shrugged like a griffon vulture. "There isn't much. Herodotus mentions them. A wild and warlike people; worshipers of Ares and Dionysus."

Kori lowered her lashes and smiled at a patch of shadowed Earth. Not any more, we aren't.

"Their language is almost entirely unknown, of course. Some glosses. Some borrowings into Greek. Rhamphḗ, the hooked beak of a bird of prey, and rhompháia, a curved Thracian sword …"

Kori's neck prickled at the memory of cold water around her hips. The burning chill of the sickle-shaped blade around her wrist. Kori's blood had been the only hot thing in that deep, cold cavern.

"Herodotus mentions the god Zalmoxis, which Porphyrius says is from zalmós, possibly cognate to English helm and Sanskrit śárman."

The dog-skin cap of invisibility. The shroud on the face of the priest as he said, "Press your thumb to the wound." Kori kept her face a mask, but she remembered the blood running down her wrist, the only hot thing in that deep, cold cavern.

"And another deity name," said Nikolai. "Pleistoros. It could mean 'The Extreme One.'"

The pronunciation wasn't right, but it was close enough to spell death for a Fool. Kori held her breath. Kori's right ear pricked. Was that the rustle of a hedgehog in the rose-bush behind the tomb? Was that a fox breathing on the slope behind her, or was she about to kill this boy?

No attack came. No sounds in the cemetery but hers and his.

"It means 'Giver of Wealth,'" Kori said, resigning them both to their fate.

"Well!" said Nikolai. "Indeed, it could. If you assume the devoicing of the—why are you grabbing at me like that?"

Kori put her face close to his, cheek by cheek, and whispered. "Me éma Béssatsa."

"Béssatsa," Nikolai repeated. "Now that is interesting."

"We are the Good," she said. "We have been hiding for fifteen hundred years."

Nikolai pulled back and glanced around the silent cemetery. "Is this a game?"

"Listen. There aren't many of us left. All of us, aside from spies sent out to learn the ways of the Fools, live around and under the western Rhodope mountains in the Ottoman Vilayet of Edirne."

"I know where—"

"Sht! We kill any Fools—outsiders—who might discover us." Kori spoke lower, faster, rushing to get out the words she had prepared. "We are delvers for gold and secrets, herders of sheep and men. For fifteen hundred years we have twisted the great game of empires toward the revealed will of The Wealthgiver and his wife."

Nikolai leaned back, head on one side. "And you are," he said, "A princess of these…Pluto-worshipping Thracian cultists?"

"We don't say 'Thracian,'" said Kori, "and I'm not a princess. My destiny is to speak the words that the gods pour into me."

"These gods being Hades," said Nikolai thoughtfully, "and Perseophone."

"Yes, but what if that isn't my destiny?" With an effort, Kori kept her voice low. "What if I've been miscast in this role? Shouldn't I escape," she asked, "and find something better to do?"

Nikolai hung his head, curly hair falling between his eyes and hers. "That's the question I ask myself, too."

"I know." She took his hands. "You feel the same way I do. We can spend the night in a tomb, and then tomorrow, while they're searching the rail stations, we can hire a coach."

"Ha." Nikolai smiled bitterly, and turned his face up and away. Chill moonlight washed his forehead, his nose. "I've had similar plans myself. But even my uncle would send someone to retrieve me. What would your worshipers do?"

"Not my worshipers." Although the priests' agents would indeed hound her to the ends of the Earth. Kori shook the thought off. "I don't care," she declared. "They can find a new avatar of Persephone."

"Avatar?" Only now did he look at her. "Does the goddess really speak to you? Is she really real?"

Kori had often imagined revealing herself to a Fool, but she hadn't thought he would be so desperate. What was it that made this prince look like a orphan begging from a gutter? "She is more than real."

"How do you know? How can you know for certain that she isn't just a myth?"

Kori's throat ached at the need in his voice. She tried to comfort him. Words. He liked the histories of words. "Myths are what is mysterious, and mysteries are truths that are hidden." That was what the priests had told her, at least.

"Yes!" said Nikolai. "That is so. Can you show me these truths? Can I hear the gods speak to me as well?"

Kori tried to think of an answer that would bring them back to the essential problem of escaping. Her eyes caught on a shadow behind the tomb. Was that another gravestone, or a concealed head rising? She shoved the fears away, remembering her vision. The solid, black figure behind her, and the answer to her question: your kidnapping!

"No," she said. "I speak for the goddess and the priests interpret what she makes me sing. Nikolai, stand up."

He obeyed. "Can I do that, then? Can I be one of your priests?"

"No." Kori could not think to answer. Chill terror lapped up her legs, as if she stood in a pool. That was not the sound of a hedgehog in the rose-bush. That was an agent of the Good. They knew she was here. They had followed her. She had been insane to hope. "No, you can't."

"But please! I can learn the mysteries. I can join your people. Go on, ask your gods." Nikolai spread his arms, but not to sweep her up and carry her away. Looking up at the sky, the lonely boy spun, head tilted back, demanding answers from the sky. "Just tell me what I have to do!"

And a man stepped out from behind a tomb. He was dressed in dark, tightly-fitted clothes and wore a shroud below his eyes. The curved dagger in his hand flashed silver as it rose for the strike.

She stepped in front of Nikolai, but Kori could not defend him with her body. The assassins were all around them, and a dagger punched between his ribs would work just as well as one ripped across his throat.

"Stop!" she ordered in Good, although she knew that would not help either. It was death for a Fool to hear the Good language, and Kori was no princess to order these men about. She was only their prophetess.

So she closed her eyes, shut out the light, and spoke.

Xēthópeti pós iá

("With Master at hand")

stas zýn Xēthópaniâ

("The Mistress will stand")

"What was that?" asked Nikolai. "Then, who are you?" He had finally noticed the assassins.

"My Maiden," hissed a voice from behind her ear. "From what source issue those words? Why did you bring us here?" And, more practically. "Who is this Fool?"

"Brother Theodoros." She recognized the other by his pattern of breathing. "Brother Murad. This boy is mine. The Master will stand behind the Mistress. When I am Mistress." Her voice was too high. She strengthened it. "Would you work against this oracle of the gods?"

They clicked their tongues, calling forth echoes from the stones, considering.

"Kori," asked Nikolai, "what are you saying to them? Who are these men?"

She turned to him. "Nikolai, I'm sorry. I was wrong. You will have to come with us," she said. "And you may never leave our Holy Mountain."

"Stay with you, you mean?"

Kori shook her head, teeth gritted. "You don't understand. We can't escape. It is my fate to speak for the gods, and you - "

He took her hands. "It's alright!" he said. "Kori, I want this! My Lady, I am yours."

A weight settled onto Kori's shoulders. A weight like a mountain filled with souls.

"The correct form of address," she said, "is 'My Maiden.'"

Next: Chapter 1: Escape

More about Wealthgiver