The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  Choose.

  “Yes,” she whispered, crouched on the floor.

  She felt the surge of joy, of hunger, and almost cried again, “No!” but she saw her hand on the muddy stone, the fine bones, the lean strong fingers, her father’s hand, and she saw the skin stretched to bursting over obscene, fat, grey-hued flesh, the knuckles twisted, swollen, fevered, the hand grown to a feeble claw that pawed with nails chewed ragged at her own face.

  Strength, the Lady whispered. Unity. Power, to build, to save, to make anew. Understanding, yes, clear sight. Come to me. I cannot stand before so many.

  They would see, too many would see, would fear, would suspect, if she failed to be their Lady, the grave, shy goddess to whom they sang their songs and danced their prayers—they would see as the true Lady fought for a toehold in the world, for a moment’s meeting with her folk, they would fear . . . The thought was snatched away from Zora, but she hardly noticed. She was shivering, trembling, shuddering, retching in her fear.

  “Is it yes?” she asked, the Voice of the Lady asked the Voice. “Do you choose, do you choose me choose us choose to be?

  “Yes.” Her teeth chattered.

  “You must come to me—

  “Do you give yourself to me?” her own voice asked. Was that not a part of the vows of marriage? Did she marry the Lady, then? That was the mad babble of the Voice’s thought, and the Lady laughed. Do you give yourself to me, Zora of Gurhan?

  “I—”

  The Lady waited. The priests, kept away by Red Masks, waited, not certain for what. For the Voice to gather herself, to prophesy, to give them the Lady’s will. Or for the girl to pass out, overwhelmed by the glory and blessing that had come upon her, so they could carry her off to her apartments in the hospice where she could not disturb them, so they could haul their rheumatic bones from this damp cavern where the rain once more sheeted down from the open eye of the dome far above.

  “I do.” Not her mother, in the bed of the new hospice. Too late for her mother. Some other mother. Some other child.

  She crawled to the lip of the crack in the floor.

  “Stop her!” Revered Ashir cried suddenly. “She’ll drown herself!”

  Shija moved to grab her, but Red Masks were swifter, putting themselves between the Voice and the priests. Zora crouched, shivering.

  “You must come to me,” the Lady whispered through her, patient, kind. “Come to me in the Lady’s well.”

  Zora rolled over the edge, into dark water, and she fell.

  She drowned. The goddess poured into her, ripped her soul open and fastened claws, flayed her and crawled in and wore her skin. Fire. Burning. This was how wizards died, she thought. Died, yes, and were forged anew. The water was fire, surrounding her, pulling her under.

  The deep water, the heart of the goddess. The weight of nothingness beneath, sinking down, down, drowning down, burning in the secrets. Marrow, sinew, bone, heart and blood, the taste of cold water, stone on the tongue, the fire behind the eyes, the ice, the prisoning ice and the light of the stars that called, that flowed in her veins . . .

  No, no, no, the Lady of Marakand cried, a faint voice, a prisoner, a cyst within.

  We are you are I am.

  Black ice. Copper sky, murky, the moon low, moons. Sea, the outrigger canoe dancing on the waves. Long journeys. The white roads of the empire. The seas of sand, the seas of grass. The hunger that drove them—her brother’s, not hers—to know more, to be more, to hold all in his hand. A new folk, a new magic, a strong magic, a folk come like he and she over the sea, but the sea of the cold grey north. What could they learn from them? The magic of blood. The wars, the folk dead in the valleys, the Great Grass stirred to war, to spill to sweep over the land, to slaughter even the babes in arms and the cattle in the fields, the north in flames, as they fought one another, rivals, friends, lovers, and the world itself the prize once one should make his empire there. But the gods and the wizards and the kings found strength and stood, and summoned the Old Great Gods, and they were thrown down, and slain, insofar as such as they could be slain, and the Old Great Gods bound them, chained them, and set powers of the earth, gods and demons, to guard them, and the world was safe.

  Not the Lady. No, she was not the Lady. She wore the mask of the Lady; she was a parasite engulfing the Lady, a worm grown great, holding the Lady within. She had taken Lilace through the bond of love that bound servant to goddess, she had used her because it suited, because the temple would obey, when the Lady spoke through the Voice, and she had begun to shape her Marakand.

  Our Marakand.

  My Marakand.

  Not the Lady. I was Sien-Mor, and I came over the warm, sweet, killing sea of the south and up the chain of islands in my brother’s shadow. I am Tu’usha the Restless, and the cold hells could not hold me. And if the madwoman of the southern islands taints me though her bones are burnt to ash, you are not she and I am not what I was. I was Sien-Mor, but I am Tu’usha, and I am Zora, and we are one.

  They had to hide twice more from patrols of street guard, but at least no further Red Masks passed them on their slow and halting progress back to the Doves. Ghu did not want to be going to the Doves, but for the moment, he could only drift, rudderless.

  “Smoke,” Nour said uneasily, as they staggered their way along a narrow street overhung with buildings. Ghu blinked, waking out of a nightmare doze. Yes, smoke. Nour dragged him on a little more swiftly.

  They hesitated on the edge of an empty openness, the Sunset Ward market. Not empty enough, though stalls and carts and awnings were gone. Lantern-light bobbed a pallid yellow, flung back at them by puddles and the slick, clean-swept stones. The street before the Doves was crowded, guards in red, with spears and swords, guards in grey with short staves, lanterns on poles, several flaring torches. The door of the Doves stood open, gaping dark. Behind the pierced window-shutters of the upper floor, though, firelight flickered red.

  It was all strangely still. No crowd of clamouring folk, no urgent calls for water, for buckets. No onlookers at all, though the weight of them pressed, huddled fearfully behind shutters, on rooftops, behind doors just ajar. Still, but not silent. Grey tunics and red seemed to be arguing. A grey tunic with black ribbons trailing from his helmet turned away. He wore a sword, which the other greys didn’t. He said something, and a slim girl in grey took off running, crossing the square, disappearing down the broad main road towards the gate-fort.

  “I forbid it, I said I forbid it, Captain Jugurthos, I’ll have you dragged before the bloody Voice herself if you interfere in this—leave it to the Revered Red Masks!” That was a red tunic, also with black ribbons on his helmet, shouting.

  “And I’m not standing by to see my ward burnt down!” the grey roared. “What did you want to go starting fires for?” He said something further, not shouting quite so loudly, and waved his sword around at his guardsmen, who scattered to begin banging on doors. “Fire!” they called, men deep, women shrill. “Curfew’s lifted, fire, in the Lady’s name!”

  “Anyone sets foot out of doors will be arrested for curfew-breaking!” shouted the red captain. “This is temple business!”

  A child’s wail pierced the night, and it came from the Doves. “Oh gods, oh Great Gods,” Nour breathed, and took off running. Ghu, dropped and abandoned, almost fell. He caught himself on the corner of a house and took a few tentative steps after Nour, but he couldn’t hope to overtake him, or to fight his way through those clustering temple guards, waiting to arrest anyone who fled out, he had no doubt.

  Nour hit them with a shout. They yelled and scattered back, taken unawares, till they saw he was only one. Then they closed in, but Ghu saw a temple guardsman go down, punched in the face, and another kicked in the belly, before Nour vanished through the dark doorway.

  “Leave him!” the temple captain shouted, as his men rushed to follow. “The lieutenant can deal with him, or the Red Masks. Get those people back indoors!” People were creeping out now, some with pails an
d jars, as if waiting for the fire to spread. It gave them an excuse, maybe. Nobody dashed into the burning coffeehouse with their water.

  “Who has a cistern?” the street-guard captain shouted. “You all, get up to your roofs, start wetting everything down. Get axes, cut away any balconies that catch.”

  The heat would crack the adobe of the roofs and walls, given time, send tendrils of flame down the beams, but the wooden galleries which so nearly touched, house to house, would take no time at all to catch and spread, despite the night’s rain and the drizzle that continued to fall.

  “Curfew!” shrieked the temple captain. “Get back inside. Stay off your roofs. Close your shutters. This is the Lady’s business.”

  A bell began to toll from the gate, five strokes, a pause, and five, repeated over and over. It seemed to embolden the onlookers. Still none made to carry their water into the Doves, where it might do some good, but more appeared from further houses; window-shutters were flung back, one group came running with a ladder and stopped halfway, in the middle of the market, uncertain. The temple guard tightened up, outnumbered now. Even women with little children in their arms turned out, staring, muttering among themselves, shifting from group to group. The general intention seemed to be to get everyone out of the nearby houses, to move folk farther away and to wet down all the nearby wooden accretions to the buildings. People ran back and forth on the flat rooftops, pulled down the reed screens in the galleries. The temple guards seemed uncertain of how far they ought to go in driving them back indoors. They closed on one group only to have everyone fade away, but to other, more distant clusters. A few threatening spears weren’t backed up with any rush.

  Ghu couldn’t fight his way in the front door as Nour had done, not with the nervous temple guard so thick about it now. The child’s distant wail was abruptly cut off, muffled, he hoped, against some loving shoulder. Surely they could get out the way he had or up to their roof. There would be doors, ladders . . . Ghu set off at a halting trot, dodging from crowd to watching crowd. Not the front door. He went up the narrow alleyway nearest to the Doves, barely wide enough for two men to pass without rubbing shoulders. It was a tunnel, overhung with galleries, close and silent, unswept, the muck underfoot muffling his footfalls. He turned down another, just as narrow. This ought to run behind the Doves and the houses facing the market. Gates, doorways set into house walls and high yard-walls, but which? There, a flicker of red behind upper windows. Locked or barred, naturally. He leapt and caught the upper edge, swarmed up and rolled over, into a clean-swept cobbled yard, with a large cistern and a grape arbour, and a shed where a goat tugged bleating at her rope and hens roosted, hunched together, undisturbed as yet. He cut the goat free as he paused for thought. She forgot the scent of smoke, headed for the pile of green fodder in the corner, so he grabbed her and shoved her out the gate, closing it again to keep her out, but leaving it unbarred. A cat fled over the wall and away. No humans, though. He’d half expected—hoped—to find the back door open and everyone dashing out. Warily, he tried the latch of the house-door. It opened. He edged through into the dark kitchen and froze.

  There were two figures standing, one kneeling, dim shapes half seen. Something lay prone on the floor between them. Nour, at a guess. It felt like him.

  The triple crests of the Red Masks’ helmets turned, all of them, towards him, though he’d been silent. He could feel something pressing at him, a great will, a weight of fear that tried to tell him he was tiny, a weak and twitching mouseling, exposed naked and blind to the hunting fox. He frowned at it as it flowed over him, a summer’s breeze, sensed on the skin, but nothing he had to bow to, nothing that could move him. The fear wasn’t born of the Red Masks themselves; they merely carried it. They . . . stank. Not to the nose, no. But there was a foul air about them, a corruption of the soul. A price they had paid for sharing their Lady’s power?

  No. Oh no, not that, not that at all. The stink of death, faint, like a memory. The echo of a scream more animal than human, wordless, born as much of despair as of pain. Red firelight flared along the eyeslits of the masks, and his stomach turned, but it wasn’t the unmanning fear their goddess desired.

  I see you, Great Gods have mercy on you, I do see you, but you don’t see me, he told it, the thing that lay behind the firelight. I do not will that you see me. Not here, just a stranger, a wizard, maybe a wizard, that’s all, another wizard . . . And he stepped sideways, not so smoothly as he would have liked, when circling some crazed beast, drawing his forage knife as he moved. He came up behind the kneeling Red Mask while they still stood uncertain, merely turning to watch him, jerked the helmet back, and slashed the exposed neck, parting the cords of the throat with a blade a hand’s breadth wide.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Go, be free, find your road in peace.” He let the body fall, empty, but shoved it aside from falling on their victim, who groaned faintly and stirred.

  “Stay down,” he warned, and blocked a blow that he barely felt coming. The white staff crackled against his knife like a cat stroked in black mountain winter. The other had a sword. He could see their eyes, glowing, but little beyond that. The man underfoot was a hazard.

  Light, he wanted light.

  Methodically, he kicked a Red Mask, ignoring the flare of pain in his ankle, and sent it reeling back, hooked the tip of the knife under the other’s helmet edge and jerked it off balance, staggering as clumsy as he, heard a cry but couldn’t look around. He followed and managed to slash that second one’s throat, enough to let it know it should be dead. “Go,” he told it. “Take your road, if you can. Find yourself. Be safe.”

  It was in tatters, what soul still clung to it. Rags of memory. It crumpled.

  Steel skittered on armour. It was Nour, on his feet, swaying drunkenly, and he had a sabre. His left arm hung a dead weight at his side. The Red Mask sprang back, lacings cut, lacquered plates gaping and a flake of bone exposed. It drove swiftly forward again, but Ghu lunged after it. The Red Mask went down as it stabbed with a guardsman’s short sword, intending to run Nour through, but Ghu had severed the tendons of the knee. Again, he cut its throat to be sure it knew its death, sent it on its way. Nour fell forward on top of it.

  “Light?” Ghu asked. He didn’t want to see, but he needed to.

  After a moment, though the wizard didn’t speak, his hand groped, drawing on the floor. There was light, a lamp on the table suddenly sparking to life, a clean, white-gold light. Nour knelt, grey and swaying, teeth set. One side of his face was blistering, oozing dark as if burnt.

  Ghu tugged the nearest Red Mask’s helmet free. A brown face, desert tattooed, bearded, a young man’s face, black-haired, but the staring eyes were white with cataract.

  “Ilbialla save,” Nour panted. “How’d you—? Nobody kills Red Masks.”

  “How many?” Ghu asked urgently. “Upstairs?”

  “Hadidu. I called. I heard them. ’S on fire. Temple up there. Red Masks.”

  Nour was going to be no help, and how many could Ghu sever from the will that gave them this perversion of life before they overwhelmed and hacked him to pieces in turn? But there were living folk upstairs yet, he felt them, and maybe they were temple guard, and maybe they were Hadidu and Ivah and who knew what servants of the house, still, and the little boy with the carved camel.

  “Get yourself away. I’ll see.”

  “No blood,” said Nour, but he was bleeding; it dripped from his fingertips, seeped to colour his face.

  Ghu looked down. The Red Mask’s throat oozed blackish sludge, old, sick, dead blood, though the yellowish fluids of a weeping wound ran swifter, staining the edge of a white shirt. “No,” he agreed. “They don’t bleed. They’re dead. Get outside.”

  “’ll watch your back,” Nour offered. “I’case more guard come in.” He half-stepped, half-fell towards the bottom of the stairs, ended up on his knees there, sabre laid before him.

  Ghu stepped around him. “Don’t wait too long,” he said. “They may b
e long gone over the roofs.”

  “Go.” There was a puddle dripping by Nour, not any wound from his brawl with Ghu earlier.

  “Tie that,” Ghu advised, and went, haltingly, left hand on the wall, into darkness and the edge of torchlight. Maybe he grew too used to men who could not die.

  “Master Hadidu?” he called up the stairs, but there was no answer.

  The far end of the passageway dividing the second floor was crowded. There was light from the temple guard lantern, but also an odd, dim firelight, as if it were leaking around a curtain. A Red Mask in the passageway turned towards him, but five or six temple guards clustered, looking away, up the narrow stairs to where yet another Red Mask stood, staring up, like a cat at a mousehole.

  The one that had seen him charged, white staff in one hand, a short sword in the other. The forage-knife was no weapon to meet that. He lowered his hand, as if terrified, numb, but he floated in the calm of snow and deep water. The Red Mask moved so slowly, it seemed so simple to duck under the white staff raised like a shield to guard the stabbing sword, to come up embraced in the Red Mask’s arms and spread his other hand against the chest, feeling the man’s heart, the cold, dead heart that still pulsed in weak sympathy to some slower rhythm than a running man’s should. He spread fingers over it, seeing, for a moment, a young man’s pride that he could do this thing, summoned to aid the Lady in restoring the city, he whom his brothers had thought a feeble, book-bound scholar, unfit for the rough world.

  “You’re dead,” Ghu said. “Know it again. Go. Be free. Find yourself if you can and take the Old Great Gods’ road.” He clenched his fingers, twisted the fiery umbilical that was not quite only poetry for what he felt.

  The Red Mask folded up at his feet, and Ghu went down on one knee, propping himself on the body, which was cold. His arm hurt, his ankle hurt. His heart hurt; he wasn’t sure he could stand much more, in any sense.