The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  “We stay here,” Talfan said. “There’s a cellar, from the house that was here before the earthquake. The street got shifted over a bit when they rebuilt, and in my front wall, under the shelves, there’s a block that can be moved. It doesn’t bear any weight. The cellar beyond’s half-filled with dust and rubble. You can’t stand upright. But it’s dry, and it’s hard to find, and if the house seems empty—we’ll leave the yard gate unbarred—they’ll think we’ve fled. Ilbialla and Gurhan willing.”

  In the night, the past was very present. Hadidu sat unsleeping, thinking of Shemal, keeping company with his ghosts.

  In the coffeehouse called the Doves, by the Sunset Ward market, Esau, son of the hereditary priestess of Ilbialla, his playmate Nour, and Nour’s annoying, hair-pulling toddler sister Beccan were all swept down the stairs to the cellar by Nour’s father at the first rumble and shudder of the earth. It may not have been the most sensible place to hide, but the Doves did not fall. They cowered there, crying, while the grown folk, family and guests alike, prayed. Hardly able to tell what was street and where the neighbours’ houses had stood, they emerged into a sunset of bloody dust and a landscape of ruin. Ilbialla, the goddess of the well in the market square, walked amid the rubble as a white-haired old woman, though Esau knew she was young and beautiful, really. She showed them where to dig, setting glimmers of a sacred light over the living, so they could shift stone with whatever they had, spades and forks and broken sticks, bare hands. Even Esau, escaping the crippled grandfather at the Doves who was minding all the little children of the street, tried to dig, tugging on stones he was too small and weak to lift until his nails were torn away and his hands stiff and black with blood and grime, until Ilbialla herself came and picked him up, carrying him off to his mother. Their house was gone. Grandmama sat by the low wall that surrounded the shallow steps down to the sacred pool in the corner of the market square, rocking his baby sister. Mama, grey-faced, set bones and wrapped broken bodies amid the ruins of the market booths. Esau’s little dog was dead. So was Papa. He had been standing in the door of his cobbler’s shop on the ground floor of their house when the earth flung the street skyward and dropped, and the lintel came down on his head.

  Time blurred. He didn’t know how many days it had been, but people came from the temple in the night, and in the morning there was a square tomb built over the steps down to Ilbialla’s well, and the goddess was silent. The folk of the ward, and folk from Riverbend Ward as well, gathered, with pick and hammer and chisel, and set about bringing it down, but lightning snapped over it at the first stroke, and the builder who had wielded the first pick dropped dead, and then the carpenter’s apprentices, and while they all stood, while Mama, weeping, called and called the goddess, the Red Masks came, priests such as the city had never seen, their faces hidden, and guardsmen in red tunics, and the crowd fled shrieking, and Mama, who didn’t flee, they hacked to pieces where she knelt before them.

  Had he seen or only made the pictures from the stories? Hadidu thought the former. He thought he had been there. He remembered running, running to the house, which was a ruin, but Grandmama was there with the baby, filling baskets with what could be salvaged and carried over the Doves. Did he speak, or did he simply sob and shriek? He didn’t remember. Did she cry out? She shushed him, he remembered, but the baby, who was teething, wailed and wailed. Grandmama boosted him up, and he slid scraping down into the cistern. It had cracked in the earthquake and all the water had run away, but it was wet inside still, and dark, and the sides were slimy. The wooden lid fell closed above him.

  Outside, the baby cried, and Grandmama sang over her.

  There were sounds. He couldn’t see out the crack that had let the water run. Voices, so he knew now, it had been temple guard, not Red Masks. Or there had been temple guard with the Red Masks, anyway. And Grandmama had shrieked and the baby had wailed and then there had been horrible sounds, and the baby had not cried, and Grandmama was silent. Then nothing. He had muffled his mouth in his tunic and sat, and sat, and waited. When the lid slid scraping aside it was dark, except for a little dim lamplight, shaking and unsteady. A voice called him, softly.

  “Esau? Esau, are you there?”

  It was Nour and Beccan’s father, from the Doves. He had hardly dared make a sound, even then, but the master of the coffeehouse must have heard something, whimper or gasp, or seen a shadow press back from the light, because arms reached and he was hauled out, his head muffled against a caftan so he wouldn’t see—what he struggled to see, what the small lamp held by another neighbour, the grumpy baker, showed, which was—was pieces—was—but Nour’s father folded his head into the breast of his caftan and muttered a whisper about the lamp and they took him away.

  He was never called Esau again.

  Hadidu didn’t much like sitting in the close, quiet dark of the hidden cellar. He did not.

  The Red Masks didn’t come to the apothecary’s house that night. In the morning, Talfan left Hadidu hidden and went out briefly, feeling as if she walked to her own execution, to hear the rumours of the streets. There were plenty of them. Rebels and heretics had set fire to Sunset Ward. A secret priest had prophesied the ending of the Lady’s rule and the return of Ilbialla. The Voice had been assassinated and a Praitannec army was marching on the city. The Lady had emerged from her well in human form and would show herself to the folk of the city. That one grew and grew, as she returned home to make a pretence of normalcy, opening up the shop, until in the afternoon it became, the Lady was coming, the Lady was riding through the ward, on her way to the plaza below the palace.

  Surely not. Surely . . . after a word with Hadidu, Talfan locked up the shop, and, baby in a sling and a sharp and slender knife in her pocket against the worst, the pointing the finger, the cry, the veiled heads of Red Masks turning her way, made her way out to the main thoroughfare of Clothmarket Ward, to see for herself.

  Ghu sat up, cold and stiff and aching, blinking at daylight. Day. He had crept into this ruin as the drizzle died and dawn began to paint the streets in misty light. Now the sun shone. Noon, more or less. He stretched, sitting, loosening the muscles of neck and back. The cut on his arm hurt; he’d forgotten about that, but his foot didn’t seem quite so bloated. That was from lying down. He should stay lying down, with his foot up on something. It wouldn’t heal if he kept running around on it. Why had he woken? He felt rather as though he had been running, hopping, crawling ever since Ahjvar’s nightmares woke him. No food, either, but sleep, sleep was like warm arms, a deep and resonant voice, enfolding him, calling him. But Ahjvar . . . Something was wrong, something bad. He had known it in the night; he had told Nour . . . nothing. He knew nothing, had nothing, just the hollow heart of loss, a sense of great wrong. And he needed to be . . . out, not here, not within city walls. Sun. Horses.

  Nour would be dead by now, and Ivah, Old Great Gods receive their souls—but the Gods could not. They would be broken and scattered, lost even to themselves, not even ghosts, like the poor soul-remnants of the Red Masks in the Doves. Not his doing, not his betrayal, but he felt as if he carried their deaths anyway, because he hadn’t saved them. One Red Mask too many, and they were dead and profaned. Red Masks, dead and enslaved by a necromancer devil.

  He could do nothing for Nour and Ivah. If ever he met them again, well, they would try to kill him, and he would free what was left of them then, but if the Lady was a devil, and the Northron storyteller was likewise, he was certain he had sent the little bard Deyandara riding out Over-Malagru with a third. That was a responsibility he carried as well, and what ought he to do about it?

  Ahjvar . . . that was where cold thought failed him. He should admit Ahj dead as Ivah was dead, as Nour was dead, dead and lost, and he should go back to his road. Maybe follow the little bard. Maybe go west, chase the sun to the great ocean’s edge. Maybe. The shape of sun and horses and green hills tugged at him. Back to the Praitan hills, then. Turning towards Nabban. The need to be outside the city pressed
at him, the same need that had put him in Ahjvar’s way, and before that, set him on the road to the Golden City, sent him to the harbour, and the islands . . . No, he told it. I don’t want to go on. I want to find Ahjvar.

  Whatever he did, he needed to know where he was. A ruin, that was in his mind, a hazy memory. Wandering aimless, only to get himself away from the stir and the fire. He thought he had wandered north, passing through a narrow, gateless opening in a wall. Clothmarket Ward, perhaps, where the wool warehouses and the workshops of the weavers stood shoulder to shoulder. He had found this ruin, unroofed, a pit with walls head-high along a narrow lane and overgrown with raspberry canes within. He had crawled down through a broken gap in the wall. It smelt of dogs and rubbish, and, as he crawled, bruised leaves. No beggars, not this rainy night.

  The knots securing Ivah’s bundle were odd. Maybe some Grasslander magic lay in them. He freed them easily enough and unrolled the coat that was the outer wrapping. It had all been tied so that the scabbard was the core of the roll and its mouth was uncovered; the hilt would be hidden within the roll. She could have set her hand to it without needing to untie anything, plunging it between the folds at the top. Clever. He cleaned the blade on raspberry leaves and wiry grass, and his own knife while he was thinking about it and sorted through what else he had carried off. Short, recurved bow and a decorated quiver, a silk purse and a leather one, the former light, the latter heavier. He did not open either. Boots, a cylindrical leather scroll-case, a folded packet of clean cotton rags—women’s necessities, that—a skein of red yarn. For her string-weaving wizardry? Clearly it was what she had held to be the bare essentials, anyway. It seemed Ivah had always slept ready to run, to vanish into the night at a moment’s notice. But she had not chosen to do so, in the end.

  She had carried no food. No more had he; it was all with Deyandara, save Ahjvar’s precious coffee. The raspberries were ripe but few remained. Birds had been at them, and the rain in the night had left them grey puffballs of spores. After a moment’s consideration, Ghu bandaged the cut on his arm with a couple of the cloths, wrapped his headscarf more in the manner of a turban, for what that would do to change his looks, and traded Ivah’s caravaneer’s coat, grey, striped with creamy white, for his own. Not only did it change the colour he had last been seen wearing; it got rid of the slashed and bloody sleeve. Her coat was a fine one and fit him not too badly, only a little tight across the shoulders. He transferred the contents of his pockets to hers, found them already full of string and ribbons and leather cords, as well as a sheathed knife. He rolled his coat around her boots and weapons and left that bundle deep under the raspberries, with his blessing for what beggar found it and a hope the finder would not have Nabbani-black hair, but he added the rest of her belongings to his own bundle. String was always useful, and the scroll-case could be pawned or sold, if need be. He was no archer, and the sabre he found too cumbersome.

  Last, he bandaged his ankle again and gritting his teeth, forced his boot on. It would swell, but a barefoot caravaneer would stand out. He clambered to his feet.

  Bad. Bearable. It would have to be.

  Ghu chose the best moment he could to limp up onto the street, yawning and scratching, a man who’d been enjoying the city maybe a bit too well, who’d found himself without coin or time enough to seek better lodgings, when the curfew rang. Nobody paid him much heed.

  This lane met another. He followed it, turned up an alley he thought he remembered, squeezed—a big man would have to turn sideways—past the corner of a building set on a different alignment, some earthquake survivor. It broadened, climbed several uneven steps, and came out on a proper street, or as much of one as Marakand seemed to manage away from its warehouses, so narrow that two carts could not have passed. It must be a main thoroughfare, though, since the ground-floor rooms all seemed to be small shops rather than blank house-fronts. He stood for a moment, leaning on a wall and getting his bearings; it was crowded enough that he was just another passer-by up from the suburb, not an intrusion among neighbours.

  There seemed an unusual tension among the folk. The crowds around the shopfronts huddled close. Their talk was low and urgent. Someone would break off, move to another with speed and purpose. People went in and out of houses, and every time one went in, more emerged when that one came back out, some hastily pulling on caftans, fastening belts or sandals. He was watching a tide of news flowing up the river of the street, a running fire’s edge, Ghu realized. It was hard to read their faces. Cautious reserve, excitement, eagerness . . . the younger they were, the more excited. Children were racing up and down the street, louder than all the rest, crying out to one another, screaming, squealing with what seemed an excess of excitement and outright joy.

  “Are they coming this way?” he thought he heard and “The Lady is coming! The Lady! The Lady is riding to the palace steps!” but mostly they spoke a babble, a mix of the two mongrel languages of Marakand into a third, and he had to fish for words. As he fished, though, they came.

  Two girls, older ones, almost grown, hugged one another while a third clapped her hands in excitement, seized both her friends, and led them all running hand in hand away, weaving through the ever-thickening crowd. A gang of boys chased after them, calling out. They caught up, merged, and whirled for a moment, into some dance, laughing and shouting, the boys circling, the girls in the middle. A few older women darted in to join them, swaying and stepping, hands in the air, and men, too, different steps, hands low, gesturing, and more women, and then the three girls who had begun it led off down the street and the ring turned into a line, spinning off into other knots and songs. He watched, bemused, while about him the talk rose in intensity. But the excitement that was spreading was not setting them all alight, no. There were wary faces, worried faces, doubtful faces, but very few of those so much as whispered together. Mostly they smiled and nodded. Only their eyes spoke of doubt or fear. Only a few put heads together and slipped away altogether, indoors or down narrow alleys. Reed blinds were rolled up in porches and galleries overhead, carved screens folded open. Whatever the cause of the stir was, they expected it to come this way. Not, possibly, a good thing for a fugitive so weakly disguised. And then, while he was hesitating over retreating down the alley at his back or crossing the street and striking out towards the central ward, whatever it was—Spicemarket?—the crowd began to flow. Initially it was a drift, not in the direction the dancers had gone but towards the south. “Market,” he thought he heard. “Maybe the market . . . she’ll speak there, too, maybe . . .” It started with a handful, going purposefully, others peeling away from their own clusters to join them, as when a few on the fringes of some flock of gleaning starlings grow uneasy and take flight, and their flight draws more after them until suddenly the whole sky is black and all are in the air, rising and wheeling above the field as one. The whole street seemed at once to be in motion, a flowing river, hasty strides lengthening to a run. Ghu backed against the wall.

  Not everyone ran. There were still people up on their balconies, still the clusters in the doorways and among the baskets and trestle-tables that spilled out of many shops onto the street. Ghu struggled to keep himself at the rear of the crowd, against the wall, as a surge of bodies engulfed him. He winced as someone brought a foot scraping down his ankle. Someone else caught his elbow as he staggered, impersonal kindness that almost made him yell, the slashed arm a brief agony. The man, not noticing the suppressed flinch, let him go with a nod as he found his balance again. The crowd that remained cleared the centre of the street, piling up on doorsteps and into every alley mouth; it stood and craned and jittered with its nerves. He spared a moment to be amazed there were still folk of the neighbourhood left to stand and stare, after the great outpouring towards the market, but they were gathering from all the ward, rushing to this thoroughfare. That was good. It meant the faces of strangers would not stand out.

  “Priests,” muttered a black-haired woman to his other side. “Ashir and Rahel th
emselves. And Red Masks behind them.” She subsided, chewing her lip, and carefully shaped a smile, jiggling the baby on her hip. Ghu gave her an innocent smile in turn and looked away again. The priests came on, singing.

  They walked, men and women in yellow robes. Most were carrying long yellow silk banners, with characters black on white medallions that looked like simple Nabbani, though he hadn’t the faintest notion what they said. In the midst of them a group of girls and boys in facepaint and scarlet robes played flutes and drums, while others danced before and through them, figures far more complex than those the spontaneous young people of the street had performed, all moving as one girl, one boy, bells on their ankles sweet and silver.

  Behind them came Red Masks. They were veiled, not armoured, and though there was a tightening up of the crowd, a more concerted pressing back against the walls, people did not react with the limb-loosening terror he had seen even temple guard afflicted with at the coffeehouse, though the woman with the baby clutched it tightly to her breast, a hand up as if to shield its head from their very gaze. As if that wasn’t protection enough, she then sank down on her heels, head bowed over the little thing, whispering to it. Ghu wanted to see, but he had to crane and twist, bobbing up and down to find any clear line of sight; too many taller folk in the way. Following the Red Masks were two riders. One was another Red Mask, armoured, a spear braced in his stirrup and a saffron banner with three tails trailing from it, the other a young woman dressed in a white tunic and leggings of leather, with her head uncovered, soft black hair rippling unbound over her shoulders. She had a lovely face, like a desert woman without tattoos, dark and narrow, the line of her nose a perfect parallel to her brow, her eyebrows flying up at the outer corners, like a lilting laugh in ink. Her keen eyes searched the crowd, with a smile for every person whose gaze she captured. No laughter on her lips. None in her eyes. Some cried out, reaching hands to her or fell to their knees, weeping. She rode a coppery chestnut stallion that sweated and rolled its eyes, chewing its bit, not a horse that should be in the midst of a crowd at all, and the mounted Red Mask’s black mare was sidling and fidgeting, held on too tight a rein, showing the whites of its eyes as it tossed its head. Frightened horses, constrained by more than leather and iron and human will. No goddess frightened horses or tolerated those who mistreated beasts of any sort; no sane god of the earth would view kindly any human who did so. Ghu felt in his own knees a little of what the Red Masks seemed to inflict on those nearby when the red light of the Lady’s power touched them.