Endurance

by Jay Lake

  “Mistress Danae,” I called in a gentle but carrying voice. My judgment was that it would not be meet to shout, either for the dignity of the place or for the sake of her fragile mind. “Green is here.” I took a deep breath and uttered a word I’d long ago sworn away amid blood, pain, and murder. “Emerald. You knew me as Emerald. Of the Pomegranate Court.”

  I received no answer but the wind, which took little note of my name—either of my names. A bird trilled nearby. Clouds sighed slowly across the sky, dragging their shadows behind them here upon the ground. Flowers and seed-heavy grass stalks nodded. In time, I tried again with cupped hands and raised voice. “This is Emerald, Mistress Danae. I am here. Ilona sent me.”

  Then I picked up my bundle and trudged to the tower’s broken entrance. I could leave the food in the shadows within the shattered door, look about for any sign of her as news to bring to Ilona. After that I would be free to return to the necessities of my life, those violences and demands that I’d had no business bringing into these High Hills and laying upon my hostess’ quiet hearth.

  * * *

  The tower’s interior was a domain of bats and spiders. Something occluded the open roof above, though my eyes could not make out what within the shadows. A crosswork of sticks and branches, up here so far from the trees? The dirt floor was scuffed and tamped down, confirming Mistress Danae’s at least occasional presence.

  I had bent to lay the bundle just inside the door when I realized the floor was not dirt, but rather soil scattered over stone. Washed in by generations of rain, spread by the tracks of animals, and finally carried upon the feet of this broken woman I sought.

  Tracing my fingers through the layer of grime, I found marble beneath. Of course this was a tomb—everything was in the grave-meadows of the High Hills—but instead of a mound or a mausoleum, whoever was buried here had caused a tower to be built in his name. This left no doubt that he was a man.

  “Erio,” croaked a voice in the inner darkness. I jumped so hard I banged my shoulder against the rocky jamb of the doorway.

  “Erio?” I slipped my long knife free from my thigh scabbard.

  “That is who abides here.” The voice …

  “Mistress Danae,” I gasped, fears of ghosts slipping from me with an overwhelming sense of having simply been silly.

  “She has died.”

  My eyes were already adjusting to the shadows within. A small, pale figure huddled bent-limbed and askew not four yards from me, at the back wall of the tower, surrounded with lumpy mounds of scavenged belongings.

  “Ilona sends food, and needful things. Stockings for your feet at night, and a small comb.” After a moment I added with a shyness that surprised me, “I baked the bread for you.”

  Some insect whined close to my ear for a moment before she replied. “Danae is dead.”

  “I-I’m sorry to hear that.” I didn’t know what more to say. My failure of words shamed me. I could not thank this woman, or apologize to her, or heal her in any way. A gulf opened in my heart then, as I realized once again that some wounds were too deep to treat. “Mistress Danae was kind to me when I was young.”

  Her voice flashed, the broken, growling quaver momentarily fading to return me to afternoons in the still air bent over the classics of the city’s literature. “You are still young.”

  And you will never be young again, I thought, but halted the words before they passed my lips. Thus is the foolishness of youth, to think such things, as if I would be immune to the ravages of time. As yet uneducated by the years, I bent down to lay the bundle on a piece of broken masonry. “Whoever you are, take this offering in peace.”

  “None of it is mine.”

  That was almost an aphorism from Alimander’s Booke of Thought, which she and I had spent several weeks studying. “Nothing belongs to any of us but the breath in our lungs,” I replied, quoting the ancient philosopher back to her.

  This was an old game, and it must have caught at some corner of her memories of herself. “If we do not hunt, we do not kill.”

  I supplied the next line of that quatrain. “If we do not kill, we do not eat.”

  “If we do not eat, we do not live,” she answered.

  The closing line was “If we do not live to hunt, why do we live?”

  “I don’t know, girl,” Danae said. “I do not know why we live.” That was when I knew beyond doubt that she was my old mistress of letters, and that, furthermore, she knew exactly who I was.

  “I am so very sorry,” I whispered. My eyes stung with unshed bitterness. But for my deeds, she would still be hale and whole. “I lit the white candle and the black for everyone I could name within the walls of the Factor’s house, and also more for those whose shades were beyond my knowing.”

  She made no answer. I waited, as the bright meadow at my back came further alive with the morning. The eddying breeze brought a grassy smell to war with the rotting funk of Mistress Danae’s lair, while some troupe of insects began a cycling, buzzing hum.

  Eventually, I turned to step into the sunlight.

  “Wait, girl.”

  I paused, unwilling to face her again. Mistress Danae did not need my sharp gaze when trying to draw her own words forth. Instead I stared down across the shoulder of the meadow at the rucked-up forest of the lower slopes. A flock of birds—starlings?—circled above a towering oak, as if something moved beneath. A haze of mist lay in the valleys farther below. Somewhere out of my line of sight Briarpool glimmered, and the Greenbriar River, which eventually spilled into the sea just west of Copper Downs. All through those woods and hills were mossy walls, stretches of paved trackway, tumbled towers. What was now almost a wildland had once been a daughter city of my adopted home.

  I could see the sweep of the land, the benison of history given over once more to the wilderness. Whatever impulse or power had drawn the people of Copper Downs north into these High Hills had long since released them back to the chilly margins of the coast. The wonder of the struggle between the Dancing Mistress’ fading people and the power of the old Duke was that it had not prevailed over a much deeper time.

  Or perhaps it had done so. Were humans driven from this land by pardines, some years after the grave builders had given up on their hilltop refuges?

  My thoughts brought me back to where I stood, facing away from a woman who could not speak to me but had something she needed to say. I was not expected to answer her, that much was clear. Knowing this would take some time, I settled into a more comfortable crouch to ease a twinge in my back. This allowed me to remain faced three-quarters away from her while keeping her at the edge of my sight.

  I did not fear attack. No matter how feral or desperate Mistress Danae might be, that slight, bookish woman could not overpower me. Rather, I wanted to see what she would do.

  My patience was rewarded as she eased out into the middle of the tower floor. She was not hiding her movements from me, I think, so much as from herself. I closed my left eye to block the greater part of the sun, and cocked my head slightly to bring my right into shadow where I could see her better without quite watching her.

  At the pace of a flower opening, Mistress Danae shifted her bundles of rotting straw and cloth and began to sweep the dirt on the floor with her left forearm. She was making a place at the center of the little round room. If the tower truly was a grave marker, that was most likely the occupant’s resting place.

  Was he one of the uneasy dead with whom Ilona spoke? My hostess and protector had a secret life among the graves of which she would sometimes hint in fragments, but had never shared directly. For my own part, I had too many dead of my own to want to open congress with that world.

  Erio.

  That was the word she had first whispered to me. “Erio” must be the name of whoever slept away the centuries here.

  Eventually she cleared a spot about the size of a coffin lid. Marble gleamed faintly in the shadows, the stone catching the sunlight from my doorway. I watched sidelong as Danae polis
hed the exposed stone for a while. When her voice cracked to life again, though almost an hour had passed, it seemed no surprise. “Erio wishes to speak with you.”

  One hand patted the empty spot.

  I knew what happened to those who slept among the graves. Besides Mistress Danae, Ilona was the only permanent resident up here. She acted as a sort of guardian, though these dead seemed quite capable of maintaining themselves. Others came and went, I had been told, seeking the wisdoms of the past by taking a night or two or ten among the graves, until the whispering ghosts drove them out again.

  What no one ever seemed to understand about the past was that the people who lived there were just as petty and thoughtless and misinformed as those today. The dead had only the advantage of the veil of years to make them seem noble and wise.

  Still, this was why Ilona had sent me up these hills one last time before I made to take my leave of her. To learn what might be here for me to learn.

  Moving very slowly, though nowhere near Danae’s creeping pace, I stretched to my feet and sidled once more into her shadows. I was careful not to turn head-on, but rather kept myself sideways to her. That seemed to alarm my old mistress less. At the cleared spot, I lowered myself to the marble and stretched out as if for a nap. The stone was far colder than I had expected. I rolled to one side and placed my ear against the ground.

  From outside, the autumnal insect hum built louder. Winter lurked already in this patch of ground to which I had pressed my face. Though I had not seen them in the dim light of the tower’s interior, I could feel incised letters against my cheek.

  Mistress Danae’s hand brushed my ankle, only for a moment; then she scuttled back to her resting place with a speed that must have felt blinding in her silent, years-long stupor. I closed my eyes and let the dank quiet of the tower wrap me. Already the noises and scents of the day outside seemed to be fading. It was as if I had taken ship, and the meadow was a receding shoreline.

  “Why do you tarry here, little foreign girl?”

  The male voice was so close, so normal, that I startled. My muscles twitched as my free hand brushed the hilt of my long knife. Mistress Danae squeaked some small, animal terror, but did not flee.

  “I was bid to lie down in this place.” As I spoke, my lips brushed against the slab of the grave. I felt foolish.

  “You are needed in your city.”

  A man, definitely. Speaking the Petraean of Copper Downs with a curious accent, but clear enough. He sounded old, tired, and distracted. Or perhaps bored. Surely death was the most uninteresting part of life?

  I denied Copper Downs again. “It is not my city.”

  “You who birthed a god and slew one on the streets?” He laughed, though the sound of it was airless and frightening. “You have made the city your own, and the city has made you into its own.”

  “No,” I told him, kissing his grave with every word. “Your people stole me away. I gave myself back to myself.”

  “You will learn. All you have worked for is in the balance once again.”

  “All I have worked for is ever in the balance,” I protested. “There is no going back, no setting things to rights. Not the way people play at politics. I will not be the fulcrum on which the fate of Copper Downs rests.” It occurred to me to wonder why I was arguing this point with a ghost.

  “You do not carry the seeds of choice.”

  No, I carry another seed. How deeply did this ghost-Erio see? How deeply did he spar with me? “The choices are always mine.”

  His tone grew more plaintive. “Go. Please. I speak as a king of old begging one of the queens of latter days. Return and see what they are making in your absence. Set things to rights. I fear for our city.”

  My blood curdled. “I am no queen, and never would be one.”

  “Go.” Now his voice was hollow, lost, more like the whispers I’d learned to ignore while walking among the graves. “Go, go, go, go…”

  A cold silence followed.

  “Erio is the strongest of them,” Mistress Danae finally said, though it took me a moment to recognize that it was she who had spoken.

  I sat up slowly and looked toward her shadowed face. “Is that why you live here?”

  “I would rather borrow his purpose than have none at all.”

  Those words wrenched at my heart, but I had nothing else to offer her, so I rose and stepped back into the world of daylight.

  All the way down through the meadow the graves called to me, some pleading, others crying, as if Erio’s spirit yet clung to me and drew them forth in their broken numbers. Mistress Danae was no different from these, except for the accident of breath still in her lungs.

  I prayed that when I died the Wheel would swiftly take me up and pass me onward. Their fate seemed immeasurably sad.

  * * *

  Scrambling down the cliff from Lady Ingard’s Hill, I fell almost two body lengths. I knew how to take such a drop, and managed to protect the baby, though I wrenched my left shoulder doing it, and surely collected some bruises. I might not yet be showing much of my pregnancy to the casual eye, but my balance was clumsier than ever it had been. Ilona had already let out my leathers once, which embarrassed me to no end, even just between the two of us.

  The Dancing Mistress would have known what to do. For a moment I mourned my absent teacher and friend; then I limped down through the woods and into the apple orchard, careful as always to make no path where I could help it.

  Approaching Ilona’s cottage, I heard adult voices. Living voices. That put me very much in mind of Corinthia Anastasia’s report of someone searching for me down at Briarpool. I crouched lower, moving now as I might have running with Mother Shesturi’s handle. Blade training was never far from my mind; though I had been lazy enough in my months up here, I still maintained my form. Even with my poor balance and aching shoulder.

  I drifted into a stand of brambles that would afford me a view of the house. A dark-haired man stood in the open doorway, his back to me. I could hear Ilona’s voice from within. Her tone did not sound panicked or afraid, though the rise and fall of argument was clear enough. And the visitor’s accent held the familiar rhythms of Seliu. The searcher from Briarpool was here! Carefully I scanned for guards, for watchers, for reinforcements.

  Had this one come alone?

  From the tenor of the conversation, their contention seemed likely to continue, so I slipped to my left and carefully circled the house from about a dozen rods into the trees. I would have to cross the gardens outside the south wall, or considerably widen my arc of travel, but otherwise I could flush out whatever wards the visitor had set. It was the work of twenty minutes or so to creep full circle. I found nothing except a fox and a few angry jays bickering amid the fall corn.

  Now was time to face whatever hunted for me. While I was skulking in the woods, the intruder had gained access to the interior of the cottage. Not gone, certainly, for I would have marked his departure, but Ilona had admitted him within. Or she had been forced.

  Abandoning caution, I sprinted for the door and burst through, short knife held low in my right hand. Ilona jumped up from the kitchen table, dropping her second-best crockery bowl to shatter in a shower of beans on the flagstone floor, while Chowdry stood to meet my attack.

  I turned my blade in to the wood, unable to stop from slamming bodily into my old friend and sending him flying across the table. Grabbing the edge to right myself, I gasped several short, sharp breaths to regain my usual calm.

  “What in the name of the Wheel are you doing here?” I shouted in Seliu.

  Chowdry picked himself up and wiped beans from his hand and arms. He bled from several cuts. Ilona rose to stand beside him, her skin flushed. My heart missed several beats at the fear and panic in her face, though she smoothed her expression swiftly enough. “He was looking for you, Green,” she said slowly, picking up my meaning without understanding the language.

  “Endurance asks for you,” Chowdry said by explanation, answering in P
etraean for the sake of politeness.

  Onetime sailor, cook, and reluctant pirate—or at least coastal raider—I had left this man in charge of the cult I had accidentally founded in the process of bringing down the bandit god Choybalsan. Many prices were paid that day. One of them was that I had made this man who he was. How dare he come to fetch me?

  “I do not answer to you,” I snapped.

  “And you are not answering to the god either,” Chowdry replied mildly. “But he asks for you anyway. Your work in Copper Downs is in danger.”

  “That is the second time I have been told this thing today,” I muttered. “It is not my city, and there are tens of thousands living there. Surely someone among them can step forward.”

  “You sulk, Green,” Ilona said mildly in her most maternal voice, as if chastising Corinthia Anastasia. “It is unbecoming.”

  I whirled away from both of them to regain my composure. “S-sorry about the bowl,” I told the fireplace.

  Chowdry touched my shoulder, a brief gesture of comfort or camaraderie. “I know how you are,” he said in Seliu. “I was wrong not to wait outside where you could see and hear me.”

  “You don’t assassinate someone for the sake of a bowl of beans and a conversation,” Ilona added, though I knew she had not taken the meaning of Chowdry’s words.

  “I have killed for less,” I said in my smallest voice, and screwed my eyes shut against the tears. My breath shuddered in my chest, and I was shamed that the two of them could hear it. When I turned back, the compassion in their faces stung me even more. “Why did you come up for me, Chowdry? Your man at Briarpool was already looking.”

  He glanced sidelong at Ilona before answering. “I am not knowing of Briarpool. I am sending only me. I knew you would listen to no one. You never do. Especially not me. But I can be arguing with you. Anyone else is too frightened.”

  Ashamed all over again, I leaned forward and snatched my short knife from the tabletop. I was not a difficult woman! “If you were not frightened, you weren’t paying attention. And who was looking for me at Briarpool?”