The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  One of the queen’s household, slain, fell beside her; that was what she told the Leopard, who had his eyes shut, as if he saw the hall and the smouldering light and the dying men and women there. Deyandara had snatched the dead warrior’s dagger from his hand—she was lying on her own—and come up onto her knees, driving the long blade upwards with both hands into the Marakander temple guard’s back ribs under his short shirt of lacquered scales. He had tried to look around at her and come down on top of her, coughing and bubbling, spitting blood onto her face. His helmeted head had struck hers, a last savage blow at his enemy as he died or plain ill-chance. That second blow to the head had been one too many, and that was all Deyandara had seen of the battle in Cattiga’s hall.

  By some miracle, her komuz had survived unharmed.

  Gilru and Syallan they found in the morning, hacked down in the yard as they tried to flee, the young warrior’s body still lying over the boy’s, protecting him. It had not been enough against the axes.

  And the Marakanders, the red priests and the yellow and the temple guardsmen who had escorted them, were all fled, those that lived. Of yellow priests and guards they had bodies enough, but not a single one of the mute Red Masks seemed to have fallen. The tales of the road called them divinely protected, of course, but no one had thought that was more than poetry.

  “Gilru was the youngest son,” the Leopard said, opening his eyes again. He didn’t seem moved by the tale in the least, now; his voice was quiet, soft, even, as if he feared waking some sleeping child. “What of the older boy, and the daughter?”

  He knew the duina so well?

  “The queen’s elder son and only daughter both died last autumn, and her husband and—and her brother as well. The bloody pox, the southern pox.” She had the scars herself, scattered white over cheeks and forehead and hands, from an earlier, less deadly outbreak of the eastern pox when she was a child. One could save you from the other. Somehow it was always the bleeding southern pox, which came with the ships from the sea beyond the Gulf of Taren and was almost always fatal, that broke out in the Duina Catairna. “There was a tide of it last year, flowing up the river valleys from the Five Cities, it’s said.” But he’d know that, living so close, though neither he nor his boy bore the scars of it. “All of the queen’s near kinsfolk died. People believe they’re an ill-fated family. An ill-fated folk. Every plague, every murrain, every slow cold spring or summer of drought hits them hardest. The old song says, ‘A broken branch, a twisted root, and poison in the vein.’” This was how Mistress Yselly would have given the message, anyway, casting in scraps of song, embroidering a great vision in words, but Deyandara wished she had not said it as soon as the words were spoken. The tale of the curse on the royal blood of the Duina Catairna and on the folk itself couldn’t be true, because if it were, it meant . . . it couldn’t.

  What if she were a plague herself and had somehow brought doom to Cattiga and Gilru and all their folk? No. Because if she were cursed, so were they in their own right.

  “It came on the ships, last summer,” the man offered. “Some captain bribed the harbour-master to clear them out of the quarantine, call something the four-day fever that wasn’t.” He frowned, and apparently not at that criminal failure in honour and duty. “These priests murdered the queen and her son, and the folk of the hall let them get away? What were Marakander priests doing in the hall, anyway? And armed?”

  She did not like the way he sat now, so still, hands fisted on his thighs. She was reminded of that staring frozen stillness that could snap like a string over-tuned and become the snarling, spitting, ripping blur of a catfight.

  “They came as an embassy, seeking alliance—so they said, for the benefit of the tribe and Marakand both. The queen and her council welcomed this.”

  “Fools,” Ahjvar said mildly. The boy shook his head. Ahjvar shrugged, and Deyandara was left feeling that there had been some whole conversation in that. The Leopard took up the sword and a bit of oily fleece. He didn’t watch her any longer but stretched out his legs, ankles crossed, and frowned over the blade, polishing at flecks she could not see, if they were there at all. Long, strong, brown fingers. The blade had a dappled pattern in the steel, which caught the firelight. Northron work; they were the only ones who made blades with such patterns enfolded in the very fabric of the metal, a demon’s art they had brought over the western sea, and a secret jealously guarded by their swordsmiths. Her brother had a Northron-bladed sword, inherited from his father. Even the hilt of the Leopard’s looked antique, though, made her brother’s look like some merchant’s showpiece, no life in it. On Ahjvar’s, the grip was carved ivory, a twisted animal-form gone creamy brown with age and . . . stained.

  He raised his eyebrows, waiting, and she pulled her gaze from the sword. The pommel was an animal’s snarling head, cast bronze dull and smooth, with traces of worn gilding still caught in the fine detailing. A sword for a story, if she could find one it suited . . .

  The boy had finished with the clams, setting them in a wide pot with butter and milk on the edge of the fire. The smell turned her stomach. Now he sat, arms wrapped around his knees, listening wide-eyed, as if it were a tale told for fireside pleasure.

  The huntsmen of the dinaz turned scout and pursued the assassins. Deyandara stumbled over the word, but Ahjvar didn’t react. As if some other will opposed Marnoch and his scouts, opposed what should surely be Catairanach’s blessing on their hunt, they lost the enemy in the night, in fog and dark-lashing rain. And then they found the army.

  Overrunning the little unwalled settlements in its path, an army of Marakand was coming straight up from the caravan road, following the well-trodden track that skirted the butt end of the hills. The folk, the lucky ones, scattered into the hills with what they could carry and drive before them, while the laggards died amid the looting and the thatch burned. The invading army travelled light, without wagons to slow and mire it in the winter mud. The largest part of the force consisted of warriors of the Great Grass and the deserts, mounted on good horses and camels; a much smaller company were priest-led Marakanders, not so able in the saddle or at travelling cross-country, easy prey. There were twenty or thirty Red Masks. It was not so large an army as all that, sixty-score, a hundred-score—both estimates swore they had lain in hiding to count, so whether one was in error or whether it had divided, and when and where the other part was, no one reported, but either way it was large enough to threaten the dinaz, especially in the wake of last autumn’s plague, which had killed so many. If all the spearmen of all the lords could be summoned in time . . . they could not.

  They lit the hill-beacons, but of course there was no time for the lords of the outlying regions to come down the valleys and over the hills with their warriors. Dinaz Catairna was only a day’s hard ride on a good horse from the caravan road, and though the Marakanders weren’t advancing quite so swiftly, they were not dallying over-long at their looting, either. Deyandara was sick with headaches, throwing up whenever she moved too quickly, though the queen’s physician said her skull was sound and she had taken no permanent harm. She had strange dreams, of the Avain Praitanna, the western of the two rivers of Praitan, rising in flood and carrying her away; of drowning in a bog, a great weight on her; of a burning roof falling in on her while she screamed and beat at someone she could not see, who held her down by the wrists and shrieked with laughter. Fever, Lord Yvarr told her.

  The assassin stirred restlessly. Yes, this wasn’t meant to be her story.

  There had been no warning from Catairanach their goddess. Her spring on the hillside, where the clear water welled up into a pool of mossy stones overhung by three mountain ash trees, still naked and winter-grey, was troubled, cloudy with sand. When Yvarr knelt on the flat stone where the kings stood to call her, there was no answer but a skirl of wind and a spatter of rain, like tears, from an unclouded sky.

  “Nothing but tears,” he reported back to the old bard in the hall.

  “A goddess may
mourn as much as a man,” the bard said.

  “But we need her. If men crawled away and hid in their grief, the world would soon fall to ruin. If she would speak to someone, anyone . . .”

  Marnoch was appointed war-leader, in default of any other, before the lords could begin quarrelling over that right. He led out a war-band to nip at the army’s heels, test them, harry them in the twilight and by night. He didn’t have the force to meet them in the open. Before long he was falling back on the dinaz, though they still made harrying attacks on the Marakander camp in the dawn and dusk, and few of the enemy scouts got far when they left the protection of their main body. But he could not hold up the advancing Marakanders for long. The nearby lords who answered the summons of the beacons had come with the bare minimum of spears, thinking it no more than a raid out of the Tributary Lands south of the road.

  Who went to war now, in the cold rains of the lambing season?

  A city folk. Mercenaries, with no land and no god.

  And the Duina Broasoran to their east would not come to their aid, would not set old quarrels aside and stand together as Praitans should. Yvarr sent a messenger, but without much hope. There was outstanding between them the matter of a raiding party led by Queen Cattiga’s late brother, he who had died last autumn of the southern pox, and a woman of the Broasorans carried off from her husband, who was kin to the Broasoran queen. The Catairnans said it had been elopement, the woman a willing conspirator, but folk of the husband’s household had died in the pursuit, and the woman had died of the southern pox as well, so there was blood between them, and they had not agreed on asking a wizard to divine for the truth, neither tribe trusting the divination of the other.

  If truth be told, they had expected either a demand for a combat of champions or outright war with the Broasorans to follow the lambing and spring planting. That did not mean they were ready for Marakand; maybe it was the threat of the Duina Broasoran that had led Cattiga to listen when the Marakander priests falsely spoke of alliance.

  Lord Yvarr sent couriers bearing messages, pleas, to the high king in Dinaz Andara as well, but that was a ride of many days. Dinaz Andara lay east and north, between the two great rivers of Praitan, the Avain Praitanna and the Avain Noreia, and quite far north of the caravan road that was the southern boundary of Praitannec lands. Deyandara signed them, as Yvarr asked, and then she went away to the queen’s bower, a separate, stone-walled building, hung with tapestries from the distant east, where it was quiet. There she carried on turning words, discarding words, making a song of the death of Cattiga and Gilru. But they fell stiff and leaden, never the ring of true silver. She was not a poet. She thought she never would be, and there was an ache in her heart for that lack in herself, heavy as the weight of Cattiga’s death.

  What followed was her own story. She did not need to tell the assassin how, when Marnoch returned to the dinaz, she, with Badger at her side, met him at the gate, watching as the file of men and a few women threaded their little horses up the twisting path between the earthen banks. They eyed her warily, wearily . . . knowingly. It was late afternoon, and the sun slanted over the hills, touching gorse-flower into golden fire. A few of the lords reined aside, once through the gate in the innermost dyke, the outer face of which had a drystone facing and was topped with wooden pales. They were already preparing to burn all that would burn, including the wooden gates, and flee, not to be penned up here like pigs awaiting slaughter. The lords milled about between the low-eaved roundhouses, as if waiting. Deyandara’s stomach had grown tight and sick. She wasn’t waiting for them; she had only come to see that Marnoch was safely returned. He rode near the last, muddy and tattered; he would have gone out with the scouts, she knew, war-leader or no. He was a fox of the hills, not a wolf. But maybe a fox was what the folk needed, now. For a moment she had thought that she should tell him so. There was defeat already in his eyes. But he saw her and swung a leg over his horse and came down to fling his arms around her, which startled them both. She pulled away, heart racing, and cursed herself the next moment for the look on his face, gone careful and closed.

  “My lady,” he said. She had always been Deya, before. “When I left, I feared I’d come back to find you’d joined the dead.”

  “It was only a knock on the head,” she said, and felt the blush burning from her breasts to the roots of her hair. “I’m—I didn’t come out here to be in the way. I wanted to see you were safe, you all were safe.” Damn her tongue for adding the last.

  “Those we didn’t leave on the hills,” he said. “The Marakanders are close behind. They’ll be here tomorrow.” He crouched to scratch Badger’s ears, and the dog leaned into him, tail stirring welcome. “I should go to my father.” He eyed the hovering lords, sought Deyandara’s eye, which dropped to her boots; he waved the lords on. They went without a word, though they leaned heads together and whispered.

  “We need to talk, lady,” Marnoch had said. “You and I and my father.”

  She nodded, with a sick churning in her stomach that had nothing to do with the headaches that still chased her. She should have ridden with the first couriers sent to her brother, but had been too ill. And now . . . before she died, Queen Cattiga had spoken to Lord Yvarr about Deyandara and what she had sought in the Duina Catairna. Of course she had.

  “Once we’ve started readying the folk to flee to the hills,” he said, “we’ll talk. The land’s lordless; Catairanach can’t like that.”

  She had licked her lips and nodded; he had given her a weary smile and gone away.

  It had not been only Yvarr and Marnoch waiting for her in the queen’s bower, later. The old bard and his daughter, all the lords and ladies who had answered the beacons, they all stood, waiting, when she came, hesitating in the doorway, a hand on Badger’s head for courage.

  “Lady,” said Yvarr, “we need to know. Are you our—are you kin to our queen?” He looked around, a challenge, but no one disagreed. “All the hall has watched you all the winter, ever since you came in the last of the autumn. All the hall could see it, when you stood by the queen, like enough to be her sister. All the hall,” he sighed, “knew Prince Palin, and there have always been rumours out of the Duina Andara. Your mother was sent back to her own people after your birth, was she not?”

  And died of a broken heart within a year. Deyandara nodded, took a breath, and looked up.

  “I didn’t know,” she said. “Nobody told me. I was supposed to be a seven-months’ baby, though my nurse says I was born fat and hale. But—but if I had been carried the full term, then my father, my mother’s husband, was away beyond the river fighting the eastern hillfolk with the Duina Noreia at the time I should have been begotten, and—and the bard Palin was in Dinaz Andara, they say, then.” She hadn’t dared ask the god the truth; she had been too angry with him, angry at all the hall, at all her kin and the lords who had kept this from her all her life. By the time anger cooled, she was with Yselly in the Duina Galatan, far from Andara’s land. And after Yselly died . . . “I came here to ask Prince Palin the truth.”

  And came too late, on the heels of the bloody pox, to find him dead, and the queen’s husband dead, and the queen’s two elder children dead, and here she was, the high king’s sister, or half-sister, almost claiming to be the queen’s niece and next heir after her only surviving child, as if she wanted, as if she hoped . . . but all she had wanted was to know, to understand if that was why her mother’s husband, for all he claimed her and gave her a royal name, possibly just to spite her mother, had shoved her out of the way all his life, and taught her brothers to do likewise, to call her clumsy, unlucky, a lodestone for mischance.

  Tainted with the curse on the royal blood of the Duina Catairna, she understood now.

  “What did Cattiga say of it, lady?” Yvarr asked gently.

  She took another steadying breath. “Cattiga said it was all too likely, knowing her brother, but that none other of his bastards had ever survived their first year; they were born sickly and
never did thrive. He thought it was the curse and treated it as a blessing, freeing him from responsibility. She put our faces side by side in her mirror and said, ‘No one can doubt it.’” Red hair, golden-brown eyes, the dusting of freckles; that was something a score of women within a day’s ride might claim. Deyandara had her mother’s longer face, darker lashes, but the nose, the chin, the set of her mouth, were all doubled in Cattiga’s mirror. “‘I don’t wish another heir,’ the queen said,”—with sorrow in her eyes, because she knew and Deyandara knew that one child was not enough to safeguard her line—“and I said I was not looking to be one, that I wanted only to find my kin, to be—to be among friends.” She raised her chin. “So. Yes, she acknowledged me her niece. And no, she did not publicly acknowledge me her next heir after my cousin Gilru. Why should she have? She was still a young woman; she would likely have other children; she knew the need to remarry soon, whatever her grief. I didn’t come here for that. I’m a bard’s apprentice—” Still that lie. “I’m not of age. I’m no warrior, no wise old woman, I’m not the queen you need.”

  “But you are the last descendent of King Hyllanim,” the seneschal had said.

  “A bastard,” had been her harsh retort.

  “Some,” the old bard said, with his fingers touching the strings of his lap-harp, waking no sound, “say that King Hyllanim was likewise.”

  Silence greeted that. White-haired Lady Senara, lord of a valley in the north of the duina, coughed. “Well,” she said, “at least his father was a king.” And she chuckled. Marnoch made a face as if suppressing a smile, but most looked disapproving, blond young Lord Fairu outright shocked. It was not a story in which the folk of the Duina Catairna took any pride. Deyandara didn’t much care who Hyllanim’s father had been. He was her great-grandfather, and it was a long time ago.