The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  He had killed that man. He knew he had, the tall one with the Northron sword. But this one had two strong arms, and he had shorn the other’s left nearly away. But the same. The water-dripping sleeve had been in tatters, the scales over the breast twisted and rent apart.

  Mist had followed the reborn, recovered Red Mask from the well. Now it rose, shaping itself to a pillar.

  Dead king.

  No words. A whisper in the mind. Ahjvar was on his knees without willing it, too weak to stand. He had no right to stand before this.

  No bloody way did he kneel to gods, not foreign ones and not his thrice-cursed own, either. Hands on the hilt of the sword, he lurched up again, put his back to the wall and leaned there.

  She stood between him and the well. He hadn’t seen her move. He shut his eyes and opened them again, and she was closer, the mist coiling around her feet, her knees. No, he hadn’t seen her form herself.

  He saw through her. A reflection on water, a heat-shimmer on the baking dust of the road. She was naked, her skin burnished gold as if lit by firelight; her eyes caught and held it, blood and flame. Young. A girl just turned woman.

  “Dead man,” she said, and saluted him, flat of her sword to her forehead. Her smile was quite, quite mad, like a little child that took pleasure in tormenting weak and helpless things. Hyllau, her foster-father had warned him, warned him to warn the king when Cairangorm first began to watch her in the hall, Hyllau as a little girl had penned frogs in stone in the sun, he said, to watch them die, she had taken a kitten . . .

  Pay attention! The Lady had not held a sword a moment before. It was a single-edged slashing weapon, wider towards the point and red in the firelight, like her eyes, and she was solid flesh, not mist and shadow. He drove straight, two-handed towards her while she still posed elegant, smiling faintly, and did she think her body distracted him? More fool she. He had the longer reach and longer blade, and the leopard-dappled steel, demon-forged, they said, took her, as he leaned from her downward slash, felt his stroke meet flesh, grate bone. But though she could not have moved so fast, she had opened his ribs again, and he was on the damp floor, a wind rising in his ears that was his own blood failing him, fleeing him. She held his sword by the blade, slick with her blood, disdainfully. He hadn’t seen her withdraw it from her flesh. She rubbed the place below her breasts with the fist that held her own sword as if it merely itched, no gout of blood, no wound at all but a faint smear, and then set her point at the angle of his jaw.

  “Wasteful, when I had you so nicely sewed up,” she said.

  The cavern was lit briefly white by lightning. The patter of the rain intensified, and distant thunder cracked the unseen sky.

  For a moment she changed. Still naked, her hair now a streaky, shadowy brown, loose down her back, her skin dark enough to be a child of some sailor from south across the sea, but her eyes were blue as his father’s, calm as some summer sky in the light, she seemed to shed herself, a memory of daylight, bright dawns. She was no longer young but wide-hipped, heavy-bosomed. Her body sagged, face lined, mouth and eyes grey-shadowed, as if with long illness.

  “Praitan,” she said. “Warn them. They must not listen—”

  Then the golden girl smiled down at him again, until he felt as if it were he who were naked, wanted to cover himself, to crawl beneath some blanket and get on with dying in peace.

  Except he wouldn’t, of course.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I do want you, we do want you are the one I have waited for Marakand waits for you I have seen you dreamed you made you mine. We will take you into the well and you will be ours.”

  There was smoke in the cave.

  She licked her lips, squatted down beside Ahjvar. There was blood on her hand, her own life-blood from his blade, though she had faded again to mist, a reflection on water, yet still she cast a shadow in her own light. She sucked a finger thoughtfully. “He’s a wizard,” she said, “but a wizard who is not a wizard who is not death not our death not his eye, not his spy, no. A wizard behind walls.”

  Two Red Masks, veiled and robed, walked from the tunnel. Ahjvar shut his eyes. He was tired of the lot of them. The pain welled up around him, thick, smothering, clouds of it like pillows, a deep mattress, water into which he sank, mud, choking him. A sudden sharp burst of fire. The Lady had slapped him with the flat of her blade.

  “Open your eyes, dead man.”

  They were open. She wiped bloody fingers over his lips, forced a way between them as he panted, found his tongue, her fingers obscene. Her blood tasted of old dead fires. Shadows chased over her face. A pretty face, girlish, with long-lashed eyes, dark with secrets. Her saffron-hued robe was silk, and lent warm lights to the eyes. Was this any time to notice such things? She had been naked a moment before. She made him see them, as if she thought such things could have any power over him; she stole his pain and gave him the thoughts she wanted him to have. Her shaven head was repulsive, slick and bony, her skin blistered, black in patches, like bread from a too-hot oven. He tried to shut his eyes and he couldn’t. Her hands fluttered, spattering blood, and she flung his sword away, standing up. Her own had vanished. She swooped down on him, the beautiful firelit girl again, hand behind his head, and kissed him, tongue searching where her fingers had gone. He tried to turn his head away, couldn’t, too weak, and her grip was iron. Then she found his ear, whispered, “King’s champion, were you? Where were you when he died alone in the night, calling for you?” Or was that his own thought?

  She kissed him again. The mist wrapped around him and dragged him into the well.

  There was fire, and he burned. Again. Still.

  Another month until the anniversary of her acceptance, the end of her seventh year, and Zora would be free. What would she do then? Seven years as a temple dancer. She had had the best education someone not born to wealth in the Twenty Families could get in the city. Clerk, scribe, musician with a wealthy patron, library copyist, tutor of mathematics and literature . . . A dancer’s education fitted you for any of those.

  She could even join the priesthood.

  It would be a fast way to die. A priestess, unlike a dancer, was taken to the deep well to be made known to the Lady. Best, perhaps, not.

  Thunder broke over the mountains. Zora turned, beat her pillow into better shape. She couldn’t sleep, and surely the night must be half over by now. The rain had begun not long after the bells for second curfew rang over the city, in a jagged ripple spreading from the temple, two hours after sunset. She had been listening to its steady drumming on the roof for what must have been another couple of hours, but rather than cooling, the air was growing heavier, more stifling. The dance of the morning prayers would be the sort that left you stinking, robes stuck to slick skin, face-paint prickling and itching with sweat, left you longing for the bath-house. She had three youngsters to give a lesson on the zither afterwards, as well, and they would be cranky and stupid, with the heat weighing on them, unless the storm had washed the city clean by then. It didn’t seem likely. No wind.

  At this rate dawn would find her still wakeful in a nest of wrinkled and sweat-damp bedding. She needed to sleep, to stop stewing in her worries. She wasn’t supposed to have any worries, an innocent girl, content in her place. She forced herself to lie flat on her back, hands folded below her breasts. Breathe. Breathe slowly. Relax. Count breaths. Put all thinking aside.

  Sleep still failed to take her.

  Had she heard footsteps, earlier, on the stairs? A hushed stir from the rooms at the end of the corridor, where several unmarried priestesses lived? Someone taken ill?

  Revered Shija, Mistress of the Dance, was pushing her to take her vows and stay, promising that she would be made Shija’s own assistant. Zora couldn’t say that every year, on her anniversary, she made her way to one of the several abandoned and half-ruined buildings down along the ravine—out of sight of the former hospice where the Voice was kept, shut up like a demented old auntie to stop her embarrassing the family befor
e neighbours—and danced a solemn prayer of thanks for another year’s survival. That was all she hoped for, each year when the day came around. One more year.

  That the god she danced for was unaware of her prayer was irrelevant. She prayed, that was the important thing. She remembered. Thus she was not forsworn, not of the promises that mattered, regardless of what other oaths she had falsely taken since, a dancer’s vows of chastity—well, that one she kept—and obedience and service to the Lady. She was promised, long before, to her father and to her god. It was their service that brought her here.

  Her father’s story was the foundation of her own, the root of all she was. He had told it to her often and over the years it had become real, until it seemed she must have been there, must have seen him, skinny, dreaming, love-stricken boy, younger than she was now.

  On the evening of the great earthquake, the rambling compound of the priestly family that had served the god Gurhan since before there was ever a city at all (or so they claimed), came down in rubble. Dogs howled, mothers and fathers ran shouting, cousins wailed. Young Mansour, who intended running away to the caravan road as soon as he could persuade the daughter of a certain wineshop-keeper in Spicemarket Ward to run with him, was at the god’s sacred cave in a narrow folded valley of the many-folded hill, composing not a hymn but a love-song, with Gurhan’s tolerant and somewhat amused assistance in the rhyme. He was shielded by Gurhan’s own body shimmering into solid flesh as what seemed half the slope above and a copse of silver-leafed poplars slid down in thunder on them both.

  “Run!” the god said. He was over the ridge and in the priests’ compound before the youth, shifting stones with his own hands, easing pain, keeping life in broken bodies that might yet mend, if the first shock did not sever soul from flesh. Others there was no saving; Mansour was an orphan by the time all the family of priests were dug free and the god left them to do what a god of the earth might do throughout the rest of the Palace Ward, in the wailing dark of the night.

  It was some nights later that the servants of the Lady came, and all the family of the priests of Gurhan were dragged out into the yard of their compound and butchered, men, women, children, babes, and dogs, their bodies left lying, and the children, as if even the servants of the Lady could not face what they had done, thrown into the well.

  Mansour had been in the city, seeking the comfort of Samra, the wineshop-keeper’s daughter.

  Mind you—and Zora rolled over, head on her arms, though she had long ceased crying in the night about it—at nearly nineteen, she knew her father’s plans for folly, and worse even than folly, if more blameless: the dreams of a mind losing its reason, as his final illness claimed him. Get into the temple. Find the truth of the Voice who rules us in the Lady’s name. Find the power that commands the Red Masks. Find who has imprisoned our gods.

  And?

  And what? What then, Papa?

  What had she thought, what had he thought? That she would discover the Voice to be some human tyrant enthroned, whom she could denounce from the steps of the senate palace, raising the city in revolt?

  It would have to be the senate palace steps. There was no senate palace any longer. There was a senate, but the elders of the Families who sat in it were appointed by the Voice, or by the Right Hand and the Beholder of the Face in the name of the Voice and the Lady. It met in the Hall of the Dome, with the Right Hand and the Beholder watching all in the Lady’s name.

  The work of recovery and salvage after the earthquake had gone on through the dark, her father had told her, and it was only afterwards that the folk of Marakand truly realized what had come upon them. The gilded dome of the library of the senate palace still stood, triumphant over all in a red dawn haze, but the great basilica adjoining it, with its pillars of black marble, the famous mosaic floor and the green copper roof, was gone, fallen into jumbled stone and twisted metal. That had seemed, to many, the symbol of it all. Marakand was its senate, its folk. No kings, no princes, no priests ruled them, but the folk, ruling itself, or at least the folk allowing itself to be ruled by its most noble and deserving and gods-blessed representatives, the elders of the founding Twenty Families, Barraya and Xua, Arrac-Nourril and Feizi, and the rest. In theory, everyone had some adherence to the Families, based on ward or distant blood or adoption, and so they all, in theory, belonged and were spoken for. But in the earthquake the basilica that was the heart of that rule had been utterly destroyed. The senate had been meeting with the Over-Malagru Five Cities clan-fathers, and the bickering over customs duties had stretched into the evening. Those very few senators who had survived had been truant from the debate or had been fortunate enough to have their benches at the north corner, where not all the pillars had fallen. The god Gurhan led searches to find them on the second day. Nearly all the Twenty Families had lost their most respected, or at least most powerful, elders in that one ruin.

  Who governs the city? the folk had asked. Listen, her father said. This is important. The young magistrate Petrimos Barraya, who had lost father and mother, becoming thereby head of the two most powerful branches of the wealthiest Family, had said, “Let the gate-captains and the wardens of the street guard rule the wards. Let them do what seems best to keep peace and order, to save what can be saved and look to the dead, for a ten-day, and then the Families must meet here, in the open air, with the gods of the city, and convene the senate anew.”

  And it had been done. Because they were the folk of Marakand, and Marakand’s folk was sovereign still.

  The senate, the survivors, the successors, had denounced the Voice and the temple, a few months after the earthquake. They had met on the steps of the palace . . . how had her father put it, his voice falling into a priest’s, a storyteller’s cadence? . . . as was the tradition when great matters were debated and the wards were summoned to send a man for every hundred, to cry yea or nay. And they voted to censure the temple and demand that the Red Masks be disbanded and return to their plain yellow robes and bare their faces to the city like honest men and women. Red Masks marched to arrest them. There were no trials. Cages of iron were set up in the plaza at the foot of Palace Hill, and the rebel senators, as they are set down in the temple’s histories, were thrust into them, Petrimos Barraya and his wife Elias first of all. By the third day without water, all were dead, and it was said the flies could be heard before a man ever entered the gates of the plaza.

  So had her father believed she could somehow bring the true senate into being again, with some word or revelation? Or had he believed that she would find the gods themselves, Gurhan and Ilbialla and the Lady, in some locked room, and a bull-headed, wolf-fanged monster devouring wizards, while the corrupt priests and priestesses knelt before it in servile awe?

  Her mother, Samra, had died of the wasting cough when she was small. What took her father several years later was something subtler, unseen. First he had lost the sight in one eye, and his hand had gone clumsy, devastating, for a street-musician. He still sang, but it had been she who earned the most, singing and dancing with the tambourine while he played the drum, which did not betray him as flute and tanbur did. He had begun to sweat in night-time fevers, and talk, too loudly, sometimes too publicly, of the god, his god, lost Gurhan, till she persuaded him he had to stay within doors, for both their sakes. He turned that into conviction they were in danger of betrayal, not from his own wandering words but from their friends. They moved several times from ward to ward, hiding not from the enemies that might truly threaten them if the singer Makul claimed to the wrong ears to be Mansour, the last priest of Gurhan, god of the Palace Hill, but from those who might have helped her care for him, those who already knew his secrets: Master Hadidu of the Doves, Hadidu’s wife Beccan and his brother-by-marriage, the wizard Nour. They ended up lodging in a hot and foetid room over the wool-shed at the back of a weaver’s yard in Greenmarket Ward, and there, finally, blind and shaking and stuttering, her father died.

  Gurhan would make himself known to her, Mansour had
said, that last long night. Gurhan whispered still in his dreams; he could hear the god’s voice, now that he could no longer see. Gurhan said that their enemy was in the temple of the Lady, hidden in the temple, within the temple, under the temple, and they must fight, or the city would perish.

  Promise. Swear to me you’ll do what I cannot, and find the truth within the temple. Trust no one, not your mother’s family, not Hadidu, not Petrimos. She swore. She didn’t even know any Petrimos, unless he meant the Barraya senator who had died in the cages. Someone long dead, anyway. And her mother’s family had disowned Samra when she ran away to marry Mansour; Zora didn’t even know their names.

  As for Hadidu . . . but she had sworn.

  Now, seven years older, she could understand it was the illness, whatever killed Mansour from within, leaving him bereft of sight and, ultimately, reason that had extracted that promise, not her father in himself. But then, she had been a child, and she had always been loved and protected and expected to learn and obey and hold secrets, too, because when he was gone she would be the last priestess of Gurhan, and someone must remember the old songs, the old dances. Someone must carry Gurhan in the heart. So she was used to secrets, to obedience; their survival depended on it. She trusted him. What did she know, in those days, of how the brain, the seat of thought, could be overthrown and broken by illness, just as surely as the heart or the lungs or the bowels?