by Tanith Lee
The council was because we were all going to Peshamba. The bandits hadn’t been there before, or not for generations, although they knew of the city. (At first I’d been confused and thought Peshamba was Nemian’s city, but it isn’t. I’d thought all cities had crumbled or been blown over. Wrong, obviously.) (The House told so many lies to us. Or else the House was extremely ignorant. Both?)
Anyway, the route to Peshamba is long and passes through this dust desert, or there’s another way, across something called the Rain Gardens. The council was to decide, by vote, which way we go.
I’m impressed, but sceptical. If Argul is leader, doesn’t he ever lead? What’s the point of having a leader if everyone has a hand in every decision?
(Blurn said they’d voted on rescuing me. I assumed they must all have been in favour, but apparently only half had. Now when I talk to them, I wonder which ones didn’t think I was worth the trouble. I don’t blame them. But yuk. In the end only five bandits went after the Featherers.)
I didn’t have the nerve to say to Blurn, Why did Argul bother? Afraid of what the answer will be. Oh, we’re going to sell you as a mule acrobat in Peshamba or something.
They talked about the Rain Gardens. It was vague. None of them are sure quite what happens there, although travellers tend to avoid the place. It does rain.
Personally, anything rather than this dust bowl.
But I didn’t get a vote, nor Nemian.
He didn’t seem put out. Princes are above such things? I’m only a pretend princess, aren’t I. Or was it less interesting than the bandit girl combing his hair? Hmm.
The vote was for the Gardens.
Afterwards, the bandits sat on, drinking. Some of them talked and played with their dogs. Several had stolen female dogs from the Featherer village. I was really glad, because already these dogs are being cared for and looking healthier and more calm.
This in mind, I went to see my mule. Also so as not to have to look at Nemian as the girl plaited blue beads into his golden lion’s mane. Come on, Nemian. That’s what the Sheepers did with the sheep.
The mule of course wasn’t pleased to see me.
I stood over it, rubbing its nose – it does have a nice nose – and offering it some mule food.
‘It’s Claidi,’ I said firmly. ‘Dear Claidi that you know and love. Giving you a delicious snack you don’t deserve.’
‘You expect too much of it,’ said someone. ‘With a horse, you’d have a better chance.’
It wasn’t Blurn, who I half-way trust – must remember I mustn’t – so I turned.
There stood Argul the Bandit Leader, gleaming from the distant fire and lamps at his back, as if rimmed in gold.
What should I do? Grovel because I owe him my life? Or be rude because I know I’m being used?
You’ll have guessed.
‘Well since I don’t have a horse, that’s such a help, isn’t it.’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t taken one,’ said Argul. ‘Just bite someone’s nose off and steal his mount. Why not.’
‘You’re the practised bandits, not me.’
‘You could learn.’
I thought, I’m Princess Claidissa Star. My mother was called Twilight Star. I raised my head.
‘Why did you save my life?’
‘Why did I.’
Inside my raised head I thought, Yes, and I spent my days as a slave.
I looked down.
Argul said, ‘You can have a horse instead of a mule. Starting to ride will be uncomfortable at your age, but it’ll be worth it. Want to try?’
Seeing me slipping and rolling off the mule wasn’t fun enough. Off a horse might really be a laugh.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Tronking hell,’ said Argul.
He turned his back and strode away. His hair swung like a wave. The cloak swung, and gold discs chimed on it. Musical.
I wish I’d said yes. And what did he mean, my Age, as if I was thirty or something.
A long time has gone by since I wrote that. A lot’s been happening. In all kinds of ways.
Something needs to be said about the bandits and the Hulta.
It’s awkward.
The House depended on life being carved in stone, and the rules of life were iron. You couldn’t make changes. You couldn’t change your mind about anything important.
But I think life isn’t about that. It’s about changing. If you grow, you change, don’t you. A kid becomes an adult. A puppy becomes a dog. You can’t stay still and you can’t stay always thinking one thing only, especially when you see it wasn’t right. It was a mistake.
But you know all this. I bet you do.
It’s just – I didn’t. Or did I?
First of all, I have to describe a morning, still in the floury desert, and me coming along to the fire, and there’s Blurn, stuffing himself with the nut porridge the bandits often have. And Mehmed, the knife-thrower, yells, ‘Kill it, Blurn!’ And another man, Ro, shouts, ‘Make sure it’s dead!’
And Claidi stands there, seeing for the first, that what she heard through a window wasn’t something horrible, but just a joke.
They were joking about Blurn’s method of eating. And then Blurn turned and made other appalling comments on Mehmed and Ro’s methods of eating (which, admittedly, are worse).
So, you don’t always learn the hard way. You can learn a silly, funny way.
Which, too, is another lesson.
I’m getting tangled up.
For example. Since leaving A’s wagon, I’ve slept each night in the open on a pillow with a blanket, supplied me by the woman who’d come by with the food.
She must have seen I was nervous.
She said, ‘There aren’t many insects here.’ Then, noting I was still unnerved, ‘No lions. But if they come around, the look-out will know.’ Then, seeing me still worried, she added, ‘If you don’t want a man friend, no one will disturb you.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. She looked me up and down and said, ‘Where you come from must have been a bad place. People don’t creep up on people here. We’re not leopards. If you like someone, tell him. If not, you can be private.’
Did I believe her? No.
I was panicky and couldn’t sleep.
I had a man friend. I had Nemian.
Correction. I hadn’t got a man friend. Or a friend?
In the House, people had fallen for each other. (Never me.) But you had to be so careful. (My parents, for instance. Exiled for being in love and having a child.)
One heard such stories about the Waste. And bandits—
They’re all right. No one intrudes.
Probably they just don’t notice me. I’m so bad-tempered, boring, jealous, tacky.
I saw Nemian one evening, one twilight, talking to the bandit girl. They were gazing into each other’s eyes. I felt a sort of pain, sharp and cold-hot. I slunk off.
Next day, a horse arrived. Blurn brought it.
Can’t help this. I like Blurn. It isn’t just that he rescued me, he’s just – I just like him. And he’s with Argul a lot. So … I don’t know. Somehow it helps. (Blurn, by the way, has a girlfriend. She’s terrific. Anyway I don’t mean I like Blurn that way.)
The horse. Let me tell you about the horse. It was blue-black – like the sky that night. And it had thinking black eyes. It stood there, thoughtful and beautiful, its silk tail swishing faintly, and Blurn said, ‘He says, for you.’
‘Who says?’ As if I didn’t know.
‘Him. Argul. This is a female horse, a mare. She’s bred down from—’ couldn’t follow – ‘something of something-something line. She can run like the wind, but she’s gentle as honey.’
Naturally I was about to refuse, but the horse, the mare, made a soft noise down her nose. I went up to her and stroked her face.
‘Not scared, are you,’ approved Blurn.
‘She’s wonderful.’
‘Hey, Claidi,’ said Blurn. He gave me his huge white smile. I felt happy. I’d done some
thing right. At last.
And the horse – she’s called Sirree – is a dream.
She’s so patient with me. You can tell she knows I’m learning, finding out. But when I feed her or talk to her, she listens. Absolute agony, though. I might as well be thirty. The bandit woman – she also has a name, Teil – explained that it will be awful for a while. Your body has to get used to getting into, and holding, this position. It isn’t too bad during the day. But when I totter off, and in the morning – Ow! Ow! Ow!
Don’t care.
That mule gave me a look. Blurn said mules always do. They have Mule Ideas. But horses understand people, as dogs and wolves do, and often cats and birds.
Then we came across some travellers in the desert.
In a valley, about five, low-slung carts, and some thing under lots of sacks, being pulled by dogs.
When Argul’s outriders spotted this, and we (me) heard and rode along the line of wagons to see, I thought, Oh, now A’s bandits will tear down and rob and murder everyone.
However, the bandits just went down and helped put a wheel back on one of the carts.
The dog teams were in fine tail-wagging condition. The bandits laughed and mucked about among the other travellers. Sounds of this jollity drifted up the valley.
They came to supper.
Speech was a problem. Hardly anyone spoke their language. Argul did a bit.
Among the sacks they had a big stone statue. They were taking it somewhere, for some reason.
No one was robbed.
Argul gave them supplies, bread and dried oranges, rice and beer.
The Hulta do rob people. They came after Nemian and me and the Sheeper, and wanted money. (Although A said he couldn’t use it and gave it back. And they were following us to see if I was going to be sacrificed …) They do kill people. Unless they just frightened the Featherers off.
Dawn broke, and the travellers went away with their statue, which was of a huge bear. (Blurn said it was a bear.)
Under the pink sky, we all saw a wash of land sweeping up and up, and beyond, something was giving off fumes, pushing redness into the pink.
‘Gardens,’ said Mehmed. (Did I say, Mehmed’s really all right too?)
I’ve lost touch with Nemian. He hasn’t been anywhere near where I am.
‘The Rain Gardens?’ I inquired.
‘Yup.’
We stared at red melting in pink.
It’s unknown, to me, to Nemian, and to the Hulta.
Just like life. No one knows what’s round the next bend, over the next hill. It could be heaven-on-earth or death. We can only go on, and find out.
Nemian appeared at this moment. He rode up on his smart horse, and the bandit girl was on a horse beside him.
He shot me a loving smile.
I glared.
‘Ah – Claidi … how are you?’
‘I haven’t thought about it. How do I seem?’
‘Fantastic,’ enthused my absent-now-present-‘friend’. ‘We must talk,’ said Nemian.
‘Oh, talk.’
‘Save it,’ said Mehmed. ‘We have to get through there first.’
Just then soft rain began to fall. It was pale, yet it smelled sooty, like old fires.
Nemian’s hair was flattened. Dark gold. Something hurt in me, and worse when the bandit girl, whose name I don’t even know, handed him her scarf to wipe his face.
As they rode off, he sent back a stare that seemed full of yearning, as if it was me he wanted to be with. As I say, as he rode off.
I can’t trust Nemian either, and I never could.
So on over the next hill, round the next bend.
I decided to go back to the wagon to write this. All right, Argul’s wagon – but he’d be out there in the rain, planning, and if he turned up here I’d be off like a shot. And I’d only borrowed Sirree. A borrowed friend’s better than none. I could feel my face getting very long.
When I was outside again, Mehmed said vaguely, ‘Still wondering which half of us didn’t want to rescue you?’
My head jerked up. He grinned at my defiance.
‘You’re a bit slow, Claidibaari.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It was a joke, Claidi.’
I wanted to hit his dark face. Was too sensible to do so.
Mehmed said, ‘I told Blurn you’d believe it, take it to heart, get all miserable. We didn’t vote, Claidibaabaa. There wasn’t time, anyway. When Argul found out, he just picked four of us who weren’t doing anything, and we rode after you. He is leader, you duppy girl.’
NIGHTMARES BY DAY
Once you’re really soaked, probably it doesn’t matter being in the rain.
So that’s all right.
Everyone looks half drowned.
Even inside the wagons it doesn’t stay dry, because crawling in and out of them, the rain rubs off.
The rain is red.
That is, it looks red, and stains reddish.
Teil brought me a piece of treated leather to wrap this book in, to protect the pages. She said, wasn’t this a long letter. She thinks it’s a letter. Is it? Maybe. She also told me the bandits have a store of ink pencils, so if this one runs out, that will be handy.
I’m not in A’s wagon now. In this weather, I assume he’s using it. I share one with some of the girls. I may be beginning to follow some of the bandits’ language, too. They have two languages really, the one I speak, and this other one mixed in it.
At night, as the red rain drives on the roof, we suck sticks of treacle-candy, and they tell stories. I told one, as well. I made it up as I went along, but sort of pinched bits from my memory of House books. They seemed to like it, but theirs are better. I think theirs are true.
No one likes this place at all.
There are rocks and stones, some of them hundreds of man-heights high, as the bandits say. Either they’ve been shaped by the weather, or people carved them long ago. There are arches, walls, columns, towers with openings, and peculiar stairways, partly steps and partly slopes. It could almost be another ruin of some great city, not fallen but melted, like old candles.
On the horizon, on either side, to which the stone shapes stretch, about a mile or so away, are craters, out of which smokes sift and sometimes bubbles of crimson fire.
From some of these smoke-holes pillars of smoulder rise into the sky, which is always cloudy and tinged like a blush.
The smokes, the cindery heat and sudden flares of fire, seem to set the rain off overhead.
When it comes down, which it’s always doing, it’s like wet fire.
Why do they call this place Rain Gardens???
Last night one of the bandit girls, who’s only a kid really, about seven, but she’s just like a woman, striding about with a knife in her belt, and fierce as anything, told us a story of the Rain Gardens. She said the earth burst open, and fire rushed out and over, and smothered everything here. She said the ground we’re riding and walking over is made of powdered and then cemented human bones.
Word goes it’ll take seven or ten days to get through. We’ve been in for five so far. It’s a bad dream, this.
Eleventh day, and no sign of the end. Argul rode round again, chatting to everyone. He was very cool. Blurn sat his horse, looking proud to have Argul for a leader. Even the older men listen to what Argul says. His father was the Hulta leader before him, and his mother was also very powerful. She was a herbalist and, they say, even skilled with chemicals. A magician.
‘Did you see that charm he wears round his neck?’ asked Teil. ‘His mother gave him that.’
I thought he was lucky to have known his mother. If that seems selfish, it is. I wish, how I wish, I’d known mine.
Then Teil said, ‘She died when he was a child.’ As if she’d read my mind, and was putting me right.
Today, from a rise, we could see where this ends, some miles off still. But the new region doesn’t look very promising.
Peshamba is this way. Somewhere south.
What’s first is apparently covered with some sort of vegetation. It looks thick and murky.
From books, I know lava and sulphur will nourish the soil once they’ve settled, and this vegetable area must be the result.
Everything tastes of soot and frequently smells of eggs that have gone off.
Sirree is damp, and streaked with red, no matter how I rub and groom her.
In the middle of last night we heard a weird sound.
It was a sort of booming scream.
The bandit girls and I pelted out of the wagon with our hair on end. Everyone else was doing the same. All the usually quiet dogs were barking and yapping and the horses trampling at their pickets.
It went on and on – then stopped.
We were all saying What is it? What is it? And children were crying with fear. It was like a nightmare that had woken up with us all.
About two miles off to the left, a particularly vivid volcanic crater then started puffing up wine-red streams.
People began to say to each other, the noise had come from a lava vent. The gasses build up there and can make strange sounds, before the lava bursts out.
We hung around in the rain for ages, afraid the dire noise would start again. But it didn’t.
Thought I would never sleep. But I did.
By the way, I haven’t seen Nemian for days and nights. If I still suspected the bandits as much as I did, and perhaps still should, I’d think they had, as they say in the Hulta, Put out his light.
One of the girls though told me he keeps to a wagon, with the family of the girl he’s taken up with.
He wouldn’t like the wet, I suppose. And I’m sure they fuss over him. ‘Ooh, can we get you another cushion, Nemian? Another slice of cake?’
Sometimes, when I think of it, I feel white-hot anger. And bitter, too. Oddly, I don’t think of him all that much. Am I the shallow one?
