The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  Ahjvar shivered. A thing said thrice bound itself into the world.

  “Death,” he said, “you should have learned to expect by now, chasing after me.” And he strode off barefoot, inland to the hills. Ghu didn’t come after him.

  He shouldn’t have come back, but slept out in the open. He should have expected what followed. The nightmares returned that night. Ahjvar woke shrieking, soaked in sweat, striking out blind and mad at Ghu, who withstood the blows to pin his arms and whisper stupid soothing nonsense into his hair like he was a wild and panicked horse. He ended up curled, shivering, with his head on his knees, pressed against the cold and reassuring wall, solid and rough and real, and had he hit Ghu’s head against it? He thought so, but the man was still on his feet and moving.

  “Stupid,” he said, and his speech was slurred, because sometime between then and now Ghu had forced more than one beaker of straight distilled barley-spirit on him. “Told you, get out of the house when I start screaming.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right.” He squeezed his eyes shut on the little bard’s face gone to stretched black skin, crackling on a grinning skull.

  “Go to sleep.” Ghu pushed him over and squirmed down to lie against his back, pulled one blanket over them both, an arm around him like a mother holding an infant against the night. And then he lay there singing Nabbani nonsense lullabies in a voice barely audible. Maybe they were charms, for all the man denied being a wizard, because Ahjvar slid away into deep sleep, and that night there were no more fires in his dreams.

  In the morning, Ghu had a scraped cheek that needed tending, and Ahjvar a thumping headache that he ignored, because he thoroughly deserved it, seeing the state of Ghu’s face. They stuffed the hens and chickens and the protesting rooster into two sacks and tipped them out in the widow’s garden as they rode by. The sun was barely rising. Only the widow’s dog saw them go.

  When Deyandara returned to the assassin’s house later that morning, having remembered in the midnight with a jolt a part of her errand unfinished, she found the hens gone and the ruin abandoned.

  The high road, a succession of rambling tracks and drovers’ trails, followed the snaking course of the Praitanna River, which was the Avain Praitanna in Praitan, north from the great port of Two Hills to the caravan way that ran from Marakand to the distant east. Even that was not a highway, not once it left the mountain pass, but a braided trail of many threads, wandering up and down to this walled dinaz and that village of watering-places and camping grounds, crossing and recrossing. Some threads, drovers’ tracks, mostly, swung away south again to the other ports of the Five Cities, where the coffee and incense and ivory came up into the Gulf of Taren from the southlands beyond the sea, and the iron of the hidden forest kingdoms, the wool and tin of northern Over-Malagru, the olives and wheat and wine of the Tributary Lands went to the lordly dark merchant-princes of the ships.

  Ahjvar set his course to the northwest instead. He took the wild paths, the ones only the locals and the wanderers knew, the steep climbs where winter rain stripped the thin soil from the stone between the thickets of myrtle and spiny gorse, humming with bees, the green hidden valleys known only to the herd-folk of the little chieftains, the wild heights of juniper and naked stone where even the shepherds rarely ventured, and the wooded ravines of laurel and holm-oak between the bare hills. He avoided the wider valleys, where villages were common, and the heights where gods dwelt and local folk might gather to them. He did not want to meet strangers, and yet . . . better strangers than Ghu, when the darkness came. But maybe they would reach Marakand first, where he would have an enemy to hunt, a focus, and that would be enough to satisfy it, knowing that a death lay at the end. He hoped it would hold off so long. He thought it probable, or he would have sent Ghu on some errand to the city, to be rid of him before he left.

  The poison in his soul had no steady tide, no warning moon. It came, like the four-day fever, with only a little warning, a growing fret once the signs were known, but there was no bitter bark from out of the southlands to head it off. Stalking a clan-father of the Five Cities, a man well guarded by steel and wizardry, who knew his enemies hired assassins against him, killing and coming through alive, could drive it away, often for as much as a few months. Time enough to ride to Marakand. It had fed—call it that—well enough in Gold Harbour lately, as the elderly governor had died—not of natural causes, although perhaps three walls scaled and two wizard guards and a devoted young swordsman dead was natural causes for a wily old Five Cities clan-mother. The merchant-lords and clan-fathers sorted out precedence and alliance in their usual way, choosing her successor. The Leopard had been much in demand by several factions and had spread his favours impartially, as befitted one who sold his body—for whatever use.

  There was no one but Ghu and the occasional shepherd or pedlar on the paths they took. One night Ahjvar found himself unable to sleep, restless, and came to himself pacing, prowling. By the stars, an hour had passed unnoted. Bad. The black tide was rising again. So soon. Too soon. Weren’t all the deaths in Gold Harbour enough to keep it satisfied? But he should have remembered that the nightmares could bring it on. Sometimes he thought it made him wilfully forgetful, hiding itself, to . . . to sneak up on him.

  He was mad, and sick in his soul, and he should have been mercifully slain like a mad dog years since. That had to be done, if a wizard was not handy to drive the sickness from its blood. Well, he’d had a friend try that, too. Both the latter and the former, back when he had still stupidly dared to have friends. And she had died, by his hand.

  He woke Ghu. The man was all edged in shivering light, which might be her, starting to see the world as ghosts saw it, or might be some headache illusion. There was no face within the tracery of light. His own hand looked the same but darker, a dirtier smudge of fire. “I’m leaving,” he said. “Don’t follow me. Take the horses and go where you will.”

  Ghu was silent a long moment. Ahjvar could imagine the wide-eyed, lackwit look. Then the man took his sleeve, and at the touch the light faded, leaving nothing but darkness, shadow and deeper shadow, night as it ought to be. After a moment, as if sense had slowly to seep back into him, Ghu found his voice. “There’s no one out here.”

  “That’s why I’m going.”

  “It will be all right,” Ghu said. “You won’t hurt me.”

  “I have hurt you.”

  “Barley-spirit?”

  “I’ve drunk myself insensible. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t stop it. Opium doesn’t help. I’ve tried. It makes me slower, maybe. That’s all. I’ve told you.”

  Ghu considered. “I could hit you on the head.”

  “Then do it now.”

  He saw the movement as Ghu rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth, considering, maybe, the practicality of hitting a much taller, stronger man over the head while he was crouching above and Ghu himself lying flat on his back.

  “Do it now, because later you won’t be able to.” His voice shook.

  Ghu sat up, yawned, and put both hands on Ahjvar’s shoulders. “It won’t be tonight,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” And he took his own advice, rolling over on his side, a hand still out, resting lightly on Ahjvar’s ankle. He was asleep again almost at once.

  Ahjvar left him, took his sword, and set off walking for Marakand. They were good horses. Ghu could sell them and live off the money for a long while—if he didn’t give them away to the first beggar who looked like he needed a ride.

  Ghu overtook him around noon the next day. Ahjvar had left the tracks entirely and climbed juniper- and heather-grown crags to follow another ridge, then cut down through a dense growth of pines and across a bog. The man was, by his own admission, a slave born on an estate in northern Nabban, a horse-boy, then a runaway, a stowaway, a sailor, and a beggar in the Five Cities, where for all their sins, slavery at least was outlawed and the runaways of the empire found sanctuary. None of that allowed for any fieldcraft, and ye
t he tracked Ahjvar with no particular effort and appeared over the skyline riding the piebald with the white and the lion in a string behind him, unmuddied, unhurried.

  Ahjvar shrugged defeat and took the yellow gelding’s reins. “I should have taken the horses myself and left you to walk back overland to Nabban.” His head ached. He smelt smoke on the edges of the wind. Heavy, thick smoke, acrid, and the sweet scent of roasting meat. Bad. It coiled in the corners of his eyes. “I’d tell you to kill me, but it won’t let you, and it would end with me killing you.”

  Ghu kept silent. It was his amiable simpleton’s look, listening without any word seeming to sink deeper than the surface of that vague, sweet smile.

  “I walked off a cliff once, you know,” Ahjvar told him. “Years ago. Fifty years, maybe. I woke up in the rain. Bruised like I’d rolled down a hill. It was a cliff. It should have smashed every bone in my body. Woke up in the rain and an old man asking, did I have the falling-sickness? The four-day fever? I could hardly walk. He tried to take me home. I told him not to, I told him to leave me, to run away. It was rising, I could feel it. It keeps me alive, you know. She keeps me alive. She’s watching. She wants me to kill you. I knocked his arm off me and I staggered away into the hills again, with him shouting behind me to come back. But I guess—I found them—later. I buried them under their threshold. There was an old woman too, his wife, did I tell you that? Did you know? I set their cottage alight after I buried them and I tried, I tried—I can’t walk into a fire, I can’t, not fire, I tried.”

  “Hush,” said Ghu. “I’ll tie you up, tonight.”

  “Devils have mercy.” It was half a groan, half a laugh, but at least it brought him back to some edge of reason. “Ghu, that won’t . . .”

  “I’ll tie you up,” Ghu said complacently. “And then I’ll hit you over the head with something if I have to. We’ll be fine.”

  “It’s no wonder all Sand Cove thinks you’re only half there, you know.” But it might, it might be safe. It might get them both to Marakand, where he could hunt the Voice, who sought to make the city an empire and sentenced wizards to death in her Lady’s waters. So long as he was actually hunting, it would sit, watchful, but leave him in peace to his work, leave him in sanity, and Ghu would be safe.

  And it would be over? Did he trust Catairanach to keep her word, to pluck the curse out from his soul? And then? It would be over and he would die, maybe. Fall away to old bones and dust, as he should have been by now, in the mound of his fathers.

  How many more nights to Marakand? They had been travelling for ten days now, and sometimes from a high ridge they could see pale peaks floating, a smudge of mist on the western horizon. North of the westward weavings of the road lay the Duina Catairna, but Ahjvar was not crossing that border.

  “Do we have rope?”

  Five nights. It was a nightmare, but Ghu had lived nightmares before. Ahjvar’s wrists and ankles were torn raw and bled, slow and sluggish, night and day now. He rolled his sleeves because the touch of cloth even through bandages was an agony. He wouldn’t let Ghu leave the bandages on when he bound him at night either, saying even that much give in the rope was too much. Ghu thought that at least wrists and ankles should be enough, but Ahj insisted, so when the sun sank near the horizon he tied him wrist and ankle and knee as well, and left him lying in some open place far from fire and rock and sharp stone. He took the horses, too, and rode on to make his own camp. And went back at dawn, to find wherever Ahj had crawled to, untie him, bandage him, make him eat and drink and put him to bed, because he needed rest even more than the horses, who suffered this additional nighttime back-and-forthing with patient grace. At noon they would break camp and travel on, Ahjvar silent, grim, and sometimes muttering, too low for any words to be heard.

  Ghu had been in the lands of many gods since he left Nabban, where there were only two, Mother Nabban of the great river and Father Nabban of the holy peak. It did not seem a natural state for all the godhead of a land to have drawn into only two beings, too great to know all their folk as they should, but Ahjvar’s talk of Catairanach showed him the other side of godhead, how dangerous it might be for a little god, an unwise god, to sink to the level of the folk she ought to have nurtured as a wise aunt, guarding and guiding. She had become as locked in petty, passing daily life as they, tormenting her folk through her unwisdom. A goddess should be impartial, patient, and thoughtful, slow in judgement, broad in love; encompassing all her folk, not favouring; devoted, not impassioned.

  During the sixth day of Ahjvar’s madness, cloud rolled up from the distant sea, low over the hilltops, smothering the sky.

  “Now,” Ahjvar said. “We have to stop now.” It was the first he had spoken all that day. Even his muttering had ceased.

  “It’s not sunset yet.”

  “Soon enough. She’s not waiting for full dark.”

  He did not like it when Ahjvar began talking of the curse as “she.” It raised the hairs prickling on the back of his neck, as if the very words brought some other presence with them, some stalking ghost. He could see ghosts, usually. This one—Ghu did not doubt it existed—but it never came out where it could be seen.

  “All right,” he agreed. “But it’s going to rain tonight.”

  “Good.”

  “At least let’s find a tree to give you some shelter.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll end up with catarrh or water on the lungs, lying out in the open.”

  “Good.”

  “Ahj—”

  “Now, Ghu.” And his teeth were clenched. Ahjvar flung himself from the horse, unbelted his sword and hurled it away. He dropped his cloak, too, kicked off his high riding boots, and held out his seeping wrists. “Now.”

  Last night’s ropes Ghu had burned, every length of them blood-soaked, fly-crawling by dawn, and the knots pulled so tight there was no untying them. He had needed to cut them out of Ahj’s swollen flesh. His hands ought to rot off. They wouldn’t, Ahj said. Rope. Ghu hadn’t thought they would need an anchor-cable’s length of it. They had leather harness-ties and spare straps, but those might stretch or be gnawed through, Ahjvar insisted. Well, the mountains marched closer. Another two or three days would bring them to a main branch of the caravan road, by Ahjvar’s reckoning, and they would turn west towards the dry valley where the coulee came down from the pass, carrying a remnant of mountain snowmelt in the spring. And then, on the rising, straight road, three days at most after that, Marakand. Ahjvar swore that he was safe, once he had prey to hunt. He would not be a random monster in the nighttime streets, at least. It might even be justice, Ghu supposed, for a change. The kings of the Praitannec tribes had champions to fight for them, to settle disputes short of war—though that was only rarely to the death. Why not the gods? But a goddess should not hunger after another’s folk. It was wrong, though. An elderly priestess was not much of a champion to set against a warrior who did not die.

  Ahjvar knelt, head bowed, like a man awaiting execution, and Ghu cut new lengths from the coil of thin rope to bind his arms behind his back. Ahjvar hissed and clenched his fingers white and said, “Tighter. Damn you, make the knots tighter.”

  “We could try what happens if I hit you,” Ghu said doubtfully. “I didn’t really mean to do it, but if you think I can’t kill you, I will, only I wouldn’t want to be the one to prove you wrong. About not dying, I mean. Your wrist is festering, Ahj. There are maggots in it.”

  “Knocking me out wouldn’t last the night. Pour the barley-spirit on the wrist to clean it; that’s what I brought it for. In the morning, not now! Wet rope will stretch.”

  “It’s going to rain.”

  “Then tie the damn knots tighter!”

  Ahjvar was trussed to his satisfaction at last, lying amid long grass on the hillside, eyes clenched shut. Shivering, but he said he wasn’t cold. He felt fevered, in fact. Too hot, skin dry, as if he lay near a fire.

  “Go,” he muttered, as Ghu still crouched, doubtful, a hand on hi
s forehead. “See you in the morning. Smoke’s getting thick. Go. She’s waiting. She’s coming. She’s here, Ghu. Go!” He cried out, a sound like a tortured animal, and kicked at Ghu with his bound feet. Ghu grabbed up the swordbelt and sprang away to the white mare’s back, dragging the weary horses into a trot down the hill, along the stream at the bottom. There was a track there. Too well-trodden for his liking. They were getting into a settled land again; some village must lie nearby. He rode on, till he could not hear Ahjvar’s screaming any longer. There were words in it, but he did not want to hear them. It was not truly Ahj anymore. He would have made camp there—the horses desperately needed rest—but it was not nearly far enough, he knew Ahjvar would say, and there was something on the wind. Smoke. Not the ghost-fire of Ahjvar’s madness. Smoke and roasting meat.

  He rode on, a little, as the rain began, a swift and rushing patter, drowning even the noise of the stream. Willows lined the valley, and when he heard voices even above the rain on the leaves he went back a ways, into shelter under the oldest of the trees, unbridled and unsaddled the horses and fed them some of the grain they carried. He didn’t bother to tie them. “Stay here,” he murmured, patting each smooth cheek in the darkness. Ahj laughed at him for speaking to the horses so, but they always did as he asked. Ahj pretended not to notice.

  Then he went on afoot. An outlying herdsman’s hut or a travellers’ camp, maybe. Whoever it might be, they weren’t likely to go roaming the hills in the dark and the rain, but he should keep an eye on them, in case.

  No dog barked to announce him as he worked his way up the ridge again, which argued against herdsmen. The fire was out-of-doors, a high blaze. He went over the hillcrest on his belly and lay to watch it. Five dark shapes in close, or six, and only one small horse, no shelter but a great chestnut tree. Chunks of meat were angled in over the fire on sticks. They didn’t look likely to go roaming, to stumble upon Ahjvar. Five sat close together under a shelter that was only cloaks or blankets sagging on propped branches. The sixth sat apart, hunched. Another stood up, crossed to it, and struck it in the face. Ghu bit his lower lip, frowning. Still on his belly, he worked his way in nearer. The standing figure hit the other several times more.