It got a weak laugh out of Ergund. ‘That’s right. Taking Greasing Night all the wrong way, isn’t he?’
‘He is neglecting his duties, yes.’ More seriously now. ‘Not all men are born to lead, there is no shame in that. But those who are not must accept the fact, and cede to those who can carry the responsibility better.’
Ergund’s eyes darted to the shaman’s face, and then away.
‘I don’t want it,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m not, this isn’t—’
‘I know, I know.’ Soothing now. ‘You have always been content to tend your herds and your family, Ergund.’ And be driven and harried by that nagging, malcontent bitch of a wife. ‘To raise your voice in council only where necessary and otherwise stay out of such matters. You are a man who understands his strengths, the paths the powers have laid out for him. But don’t you see? That is what makes you the perfect intermediary for those powers.’
A hard stare. ‘No, I don’t see that at all.’
‘Look.’ Poltar tried to quell a rising sense of moment, of destiny that must be handled with painstaking care. ‘Suppose one of your brothers had come to me with this, Alrag, say, or Gant. Then, I would have to question whether this dream were true or—’
‘My brothers don’t lie!’
‘Right, of course. You misunderstand me. I say true in the sense of meaningful. Truly sent by the Dwellers. Alrag is an honourable man, of course. But it’s no secret he’s always wanted the clan mastery for himself. And Gant, like you, questions Egar’s suitability to lead, but he is not circumspect like you. He speaks openly of these things. The word in camp is that he is simply jealous.’
‘Ungoverned women’s tongues,’ said Ergund bitterly.
‘Perhaps. But the fact remains that both Gant and Alrag might well dream such a dream because it speaks to their own personal desires. With you, I know that’s not true. You want no more than what is best for the Skaranak. Through such vessels, the Dwellers speak best.’
Ergund sat, head down. Perhaps he was dealing with the weight of Poltar’s words, perhaps simply with the unwelcome idea that a steppe wolf really had got up on its hind legs and walked out of the darkness to find him. When he finally spoke, his voice shook slightly.
‘So what do we do?’
‘For the moment, nothing.’ Poltar kept his tone carefully neutral.
‘If this is the Dwellers’ will, as it seems it is, then there will be other signs. There are rites I can perform for guidance, but they take time to prepare. Have you spoken to anyone else about this?’
‘Only Grela.’
‘Good.’ It wasn’t - you could trust Grela about as far as you could herd campfire smoke. But Poltar knew she had little enough love for Egar. ‘Then let’s keep it that way. We’ll talk again, after the ceremonies. But for now, let all three of us be servants of the Sky Home with our silence.’
Later, when the children had faced down Ynprpral with their grinning, freshly-greased firelit faces and their pummelling barrages of half-delighted, half-terrified shouting and their running about at their parents’ urging, when they’d chased the ice demon from his flapping, haunting circuits of the great bonfire and back out into the cold dark he belonged to, when all that was done and the Skaranak had settled to their customary drinking and singing and tale-telling and staring owlishly into the spit-crackle warmth of the flames ...
... then Poltar crouched out in the windswept chill of the steppe, staying later away from the camp than he could remember himself doing for a dozen or more years, biting back his shivers and hugging himself beneath his father’s wolf-skin cloak, muttering under his steaming breath and waiting ...
Out of the darkness and bending grasses and the wind and the cold, she came walking. Bandlight broke through cloud and touched her.
Grinning, tongue lolling, all sharp white puncturing fangs and eyes, balancing back on legs never made for walking upright, wrapped head to foot in wolf the way she had in Ishlin-ichan wrapped herself in whore.
She did not speak. The wind howled on her behalf.
He rose, the chill in his bones and on his face forgotten, and he went to her like a man to the marriage bed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gingren was installed in the western lounge when Ringil got in, pacing noisily up and down and barking at someone whose responses were much softer. They’d left the door ajar, which seemed invitation enough to eavesdrop. Ringil hovered for a moment in the corridor outside, listening to his father’s gruff tones, and a low, diffident voice that he made out as that of his oldest brother, Gingren junior. A cold memory gusted through him at the sound.
A long corridor ...
He was about to slip away when Gingren, showing a quite remarkable sixth sense, looked up and caught him there.
‘Ringil !’ he bellowed. ‘Just the man. Get in here, will you!’
Ringil sighed. He took a couple of steps inside the room and stood there, barely over the threshold.
‘Yes, Father.’
Gingren and Gingren junior exchanged a glance. Ringil’s brother was sprawled on a couch by the window, rigged for the street in boots and court sword, clearly on a visit from his own family home over in Linardin. It was the first time Ringil had seen him in nearly seven years, and the changes weren’t flattering. He’d put on weight, and grown a beard that didn’t really suit him.
‘We were just talking about you.’
‘That’s nice.’
His father cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, Ging’s been saying, we can probably nip this idiocy in the bud. Kaad doesn’t want it any more than we do, looks like Iscon just went overboard on his own account. It’s not the right time for the notable families of Trelayne to be squabbling over trivia like this.’
‘The Kaads are a notable family now, are they?’
Gingren junior chortled, then shut up abruptly as his father glared at him.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Not really, no.’ Ringil looked at his elder brother and Gingren junior looked away. ‘You come to offer yourself as a second, Ging?’
An awkward silence.
‘I didn’t think so.’
His brother flushed. ‘Gil, it’s not like that.’
‘No?’
‘What your brother is trying to say is that there is no need for seconds, or any other element of this ridiculous charade. Iscon Kaad will not fight, and neither will you. We will resolve this with intelligence. ’
‘Yeah? What if I don’t want to?’
Gingren made a noise in his throat. ‘I’m getting tired of this attitude, Ringil. Why would you want to fight?’
Ringil shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s your family name he insulted coming here the way he did. Threatening steel on the premises.’
Gingren junior bristled forward in his seat. It’s your family too.’
‘Good. We’re agreed then.’
‘No, we are not fucking agreed !’ Gingren yelled. ‘You cannot just cut your way through everything with that cursed sword of yours, Ringil. That’s not how we do things here in the city. Not any more.’
Ringil examined his nails. ‘Well, I’ve been away.’
‘Yeah.’ His father clenched a fist at his hip. ‘Maybe you should have fucking stayed away.’
‘Hey - blame your gracious lady wife.’
Ging came to his feet. ‘Don’t you dare talk about mother like that!’ ‘Oh, shut up.’ Ringil closed his eyes briefly in exasperation. ‘Look, I’m fucking sick of this. Are you in on this Etterkal thing as well, Ging? You keen to stop me looking for our cousin Sherin too, in case it puts too many lucrative backstreet deals in the lamplight? Upsets too many of our scummy new harbour-end friends?’
‘Sherin always was a stupid little tart,’ said Ging bluntly. ‘We all told her not to marry Bilgrest.’
‘Stupid little tart or not, your honoured mother wants her back.’
‘I told you—’
Ringil grinned wolfishly. ‘Shame she had to work her
way down all three brothers before she found one with the balls to do what she asked.’
Gingren junior surged forward. Ringil went to meet him. He was still shaken up from the events at the gate, would welcome the chance to hit something.
‘Ging! Ringil !’
At the sound of their father’s voice, both brothers stopped, arm’s reach apart in the centre of the lounge, gazes locked. Ringil watched his brother’s furious face, distantly aware that there was nothing in his own expression to match, nothing there at all but a faint smile and the blank promise of violence.
‘Well?’ he asked gently.
Ging looked away. ‘She never asked me.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘Hey - fuck you.’ Ging doubled his lowered fists, an unconscious echo of his father’s anger. Ringil remembered Ging picking it up, back in their shared youth. ‘I came here to see if I could help.’
‘You can’t help me, Ging, you never could. You were always too fucking obedient.’
A long corridor ...
A long corridor in the Academy dormitory wing, and cold winter afternoon light slanting down through the row of side windows. Dark reek of the waxed wood floor he was pinned to, stinging in his bloodied nose. The reflection of the windows shimmered up out of the polished surface for him, made a receding line of pale pools in the wood, down the corridor to the unattainable door at the end. There was weight on his back from the little knot of seniors holding him down. They were too many to fight, and they were dragging him back from the doorway he’d made a break for, back into the gloom and seclusion of the dormitory. He remembered the chill around his thighs and arse as they forced his breeches down.
He remembered his brother, stopped dead in the corridor coming the other way and staring, just staring.
Most of all, he remembered the look on Ging’s face, queasy and weak, as if he’d just eaten something that was going to make him sick. Ringil knew, looking at that expression, that he’d get no help.
The seniors knew it too.
‘Fuck are you doing here, Gingren?’ Mershist, the pledge guardian and ring leader, breathing heavily, climbing up off Ringil’s neck and squaring up in the corridor. He got his breath back, seemed almost amused. ‘This isn’t your affair. Get the fuck back to drill where you belong. Before I put you on report.’
Gingren said nothing, didn’t move. He had no weapon - outside of the training yards and salons, the Academy didn’t permit the cadets to go armed - but he had some of his father’s build about him, was bulkier than Ringil would ever be and, three years into the Academy programme, was getting a reputation as a canny fighter.
The moment hovered for heartbeats, like a crow on beating wings the instant before it lands. Even Ringil paused in his attempts to thrash free, eyes suddenly on Gingren’s face. Hope quavered up in him like small, newly kindled flames.
Then, another of the seniors came and stood at Mershist’s shoulder, and something indefinable changed about the setting. Even with his face pressed hard to the floor, Ringil felt it. Perhaps Ging might have faced Mershist down alone. But not this. The balance tipped, the moment side-slipped, skidded and landed on its black-feathered arse. Mershist glanced sideways at his supporting companion, then back to Gingren and grinned. His tone turned conversational, reasonable.
‘Look, mate. Little Gil here’s getting initiated, whether he fancies it or not. What did you think, your little brother’d get a pass for some reason? You know that’s not going to happen. You know how this place works.’
Ging’s mouth twitched. He was going to try for talk. ‘It doesn’t—’
‘I’m doing him a fucking favour, Ging.’ Mershist let a tinge of exasperated warning seep into his voice. ‘Gil hasn’t exactly made a lot of friends since he matriculated. There’s seniors over in Dolmen house want to do him with a fucking mace head. And to be honest with you, I can see their point. He took Kerril’s eye right fucking out, you know.’
Ging swallowed. It made an audible click. ‘Kerril shouldn’t have—’
‘Kerril was doing what needed to be done.’ Now the reasonable tone was shredding thin and through. Play-time was coming to an end. Mershist stabbed a finger at Ringil where he lay on the floor. ‘Your little brother here thinks he’s something special, and he fucking isn’t. We all go through this, Ging, and we’re all stronger for it. You know that. It binds us together, it makes us what we are. Hoiran’s fucking balls, it’s not like you didn’t have old man Reshin’s prick up your arse three years ago, just like the rest of us.’
Something shifted in Gingren’s face then, and the last hope in Ringil guttered out for good. His elder brother’s eyes flickered to meet his, skittered away again. He’d flushed with shame. When he spoke again, his voice was almost pleading.
‘Mershist, he’s only—’
Mershist trod down the words. His voice rasped like steel coming out of the scabbard.
‘He’s a little fucking pansy, is what he is, Ging. You know it, and so do I. So now he’s going to get what he probably secretly wanted all along, from all of us. And you will not fucking stop us. So unless you want to join in or watch, I suggest you fuck off back to practice.’
And Gingren went.
Just once, as he faltered and turned away, he looked at Ringil, and Ringil thought, later or at that moment, he could not recall which, that it was like meeting someone’s eyes across jail-cell bars. Ging’s mouth worked again, but nothing came out.
Ringil stared back at him. He would not beg.
And Gingren went away, down the dark wood corridor, slowly, like a man carrying an injury, and the declining afternoon lit him coldly at each window he passed.
Ringil closed his eyes.
They dragged him back in.
Now, in the riverside lounge, he looked at Ging out of the welter of memories, and he saw that his brother was pinned there too.
Those memories, and all that came after.
The pain, and the bleeding that he kept thinking had stopped but then found hadn’t. He didn’t need the infirmary the way some initiates did, Mershist and his crew had known what they were about to that extent at least. He supposed he had that much to thank them for. But he had to bite back screams at his toilet for a week.
Then there was the sniggering. The whispered stories about the way Ringil’s body had reacted to the rape. No big surprise, it was a fairly common occurrence and cadets at the Academy were used to seeing it. But coupled with the gossip about Ringil’s preferences, it provoked an entirely predictable set of minor myths. Should have seen him, they would mutter as Ringil limped past on the other side of a courtyard. Came like a fucking fountain, man, all over everything. You could fucking see he was loving it, every minute of it. Didn’t even scream once.
That much was true. He hadn’t given up a single cry.
As they crammed brutally inside him, one after the other, as he was at first just scraped, and then torn, and then for what seemed like a long time, far too long, searingly raw at each stroke, and then finally just increasingly numb to it all, as they dragged clawed hands through his long dark hair and caught it up in savage fistfuls, as they grunted into their own climaxes and spat on him and whispered excited filth in his ears - through it all he gritted his teeth and ground his tongue against the tiny serrated gaps where they met, he fixed his eyes on the weave of the blanket under his face, and he remembered Jelim, and somehow he kept silent.
‘I came to help,’ Ging repeated. His voice sounded hollow, used up. Ringil just looked at him.
‘Don’t underestimate Kaad,’ Gingren rumbled. ‘That’d be a big mistake. Ringil, he may look like a fop on his father’s sinecure, but he took a silver medal at the Tervinala salons last year. They let imperial bodyguards compete in that one. It means something when you take a medal there.’
‘All right.’
Brief pause. Ging and his father exchanged glances again.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Gingren asked.
&nbs
p; ‘It means I won’t take any chances tomorrow, and I’ll make sure I kill him the first opening I get. Happy now?’
‘You really expect me to second you in this duel?’ Ging asked him.
‘No.’
The monosyllable hung there. It silenced both father and brother for longer this time. They both stood there waiting for it to lead somewhere, to an explanation, Ringil supposed.
Fuck that.
Sometimes, it seemed that his whole life had been that silent wait, that cold-eyed, staring demand from someone or other, from everyone, that he explain himself. Explain himself away.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 19
