Suddenly: Scion—that one is more than she seems.
Those were the Lady's first words to me in days, and for a change they cleared something up for me. I had a flash of understanding.
It was you that knew her, I said to the Lady, it was your recognition I was feeling, not mine . . .
The two are one, Scion. The wind and tree are one. And she is more than she seems.
Typically cryptic, and it was all she would say. After a while I gave up on her and returned my attention to the real world.
Meantime, the Burgher Lillifer had begun a speech of formal welcome. I could understand most of what he said, even without the interpreter, a young Vassashin named Coll. The language of Vassashinay turned out to be a dialect of Sheranik, with slight differences in vocabulary and case endings, and an accent that was far more melodious than the rasping Sheranik growl. I caught Shree's eye. He was doing a good job of looking blank while Lillifer was speaking, pretending to understand only Coll's rendering into Miisheli.
The speech went on and on. Vassashinay was honoured. More than honoured—awed by our grandeur, grateful for the privilege of serving us, shamed by the humble hospitality that was the poor best they could offer. Vassashinay was enchanted. More than enchanted—for the esteemed visitors were more than beautiful, more than noble, more than wise and puissant; Vassashinay covered its dazzled eyes, fearing to look upon such brilliance. And so forth.
At last, after a series of especially florid and bejewelled metaphors, greeted by the crowd with roars of appreciation, Lillifer appeared to be finished. My party heaved deep sighs almost in unison, and gratefully prepared to move. Lillifer, however, turned to one of the worthies behind him and motioned him forwards. In a low, monotonous and unstoppable voice, the wretched man began to speak.
Inwardly, I groaned. I counted the eminent citizens in the wedge behind Lillifer: there were thirteen, not counting the one who was currently in full drone. Some hot and tired corner of me knew by instinct that every one of those good men was going to welcome us with a speech. I was right, too.
* * *
21
BY SUNSET WE had been well and truly welcomed. Every one of us, from the Frath Major right down to the Satheli envoy's page, was cross-eyed with boredom and aching in muscle and gut from standing so long in one place. At least one of the Fraths Minor was desperate to relieve himself, and the old Bequiin Ardin was swaying on his feet. Rinn, in spite of her marked talent for disrupting ceremonies, behaved herself with such impeccable apathy that I began to fear I was having a good influence on her.
The people of Vassashinay, in contrast, seemed to be having a wonderful time, their enthusiasm never waning, the cheers that rewarded each speaker never diminishing in fervour. I began to realize that the Vassashin liked speeches.
Just when I was starting to think it would take the Han-Frath Zimin and his battery of spearchuckers to get us off the beach, it was over. Drums and whistles and chanting started up; the sudden flaming of scores of torches pushed back the gathering shadows of dusk. We were swept along in a body with Lillifer and the Frath in the lead, towards that opening in the treeline. I could still see nothing that resembled a town.
Nevertheless, the town was there. The gap turned out to be the mouth of a long basalt-paved avenue that curved gently towards a distant square, beyond which loomed the dim beehive shape of a large building. It was the only structure in sight at first, and the forest seemed to press threateningly up against both edges of the avenue; but a minute or so later, I realized that the squat, black shadows of many little houses were hidden among the trees, already showing the pale circles of lighted windows. I got a clear impression that they were small and tightly clustered together, and that the jungle was trying earnestly to cram itself into every remaining pinhole of space. Looking ahead, I saw that the beehive building had blossomed with four tiers of glowing windows, and was both larger and somewhat further away than it had seemed at first.
All around us, the trees rustled in the evening breeze; birds disturbed by the procession's noisy approach leapt into flight with odd screeching cries. The town was otherwise so empty and peaceful ahead of us that I realized most of the population must be in the chanting, foot-stomping, drum-banging mob behind us. The air was heavy with unfamiliar flower scents, but I could also detect the lingering traces of cooking smells, fish and woodsmoke, and the inevitable subtle underlay of sewage and decay.
We reached the square in front of the beehive building and halted before a broad flight of stairs leading to a great pillared porch, where Lillifer delivered a surprisingly short speech of welcome to his humble dwelling. I tried to catch Shree's eye, but found that he was staring fixedly at the edge of the square, to one side of the building. I followed his eyes.
There were three great posts planted in the ground there, thick and solid as old tree-trunks, perhaps nine feet tall; on top of each was a cage, not quite high enough for a man to stand in, and in each cage a dark figure was slumped. The silhouettes were strangely familiar. I was still trying to puzzle out why when the moon came out and struck full into the square, illuminating the cages. Snouty helmets; high black boots; Sherkin armour that might have been empty, except that something white and knobby caught the moonlight where the sleeves ended. It appeared that at least three of the Sherkin garrison had not been fed to the volcano.
The chambers assigned to us were small but comfortable and looked down on the main square of Vass from the third tier of the building, as I discovered when I awoke not long after sunrise. A hummocky carpet of green treetops spread beyond the square, broken here and there by the dull black humps of beehive buildings. There were a few small clearings jammed with earth-coloured awnings that suggested market stalls, but no discernible streets except the broad paved avenue we had traversed the night before. I could not see any houses. Beyond the trees stretched the polished expanse of the Sherkin Sea, with only the mast-tops of the Tasiil marking where the harbour lay.
It was a drowsy, golden morning; even the volcano's rumble was somehow slumbrous. Although I could not see anyone from that angle, a soft murmur of voices drifted up from the square below my window.
I lay down on the pallet again, quietly, so as not to disturb Rinn. Contrary as always, she awoke at once. She sat up and stretched, then propped her cheek on one hand and looked at me inquisitorially from under her long curling lashes.
"What were you dreaming, Tigrallef? You were talking in your sleep."
"Was I? I'm sorry." I laid my arm over my eyes.
She poked me. "What were you dreaming?"
"I don't remember." A lie. All night, the people had been dancing in my dreams, dancing and dropping in the main square of Vass, under the grisly guard of the Sherkin corpses in the cages. Blood had glistened in pools on the dark basalt pavement. Calla had been watching with me, with tears on her cheeks and the fair-headed child in her arms. I remembered that she had buried his face in her black-silk shoulder to hide his eyes from the carnage . . .
"Tigrallef?" Rinn shook my elbow.
"What is it, Rinn?"
She edged closer, until I could feel her warm breath fanning my cheek. I opened my eyes to see her face suspended confidently over mine. "You were dreaming about me."
"No. Not about you."
She looked surprised—and offended. I reached up and patted her cheek, and tucked some stray wisps of hair behind her ear.
"It wasn't a pleasant dream, Rinn. You wouldn't have liked being in it."
That only halfway mollified her; it seemed I was being self-indulgent in having a nightmare when I should have been dreaming about her. She moved a few inches away, pouting, apparently forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be nice to me. I remembered at that point that I was also supposed to be nice to her.
"I'm only joking, my darling Rinn, of course I was dreaming about you."
She cocked her head at me coolly. I was not yet forgiven. "A bad dream?"
"A wonderful dream."
"Tel
l me about it."
I thought quickly. "I dreamed we were in Cansh Miishel at last, and the people were dancing in the streets to celebrate our safe return. You were covered in gold. I think you had a circlet in your hair."
"A circlet?" For some reason, her interest sharpened. She sat up straight and stared avidly down at me. "What kind of circlet?"
"Oh, just a circlet," I said. I was getting tired of feeding Rinn's vanity, and I was not feeling creative. I put my arm back over my eyes.
She pulled it away. "Blue brilliants?"
"Could be."
"Set in gold, on a silver fillet? Tell me, Tigrallef."
"Maybe. I didn't notice, really. I was too wonderstruck by your beauty—"
"Never mind that. Were there little gold vipers along the bottom edge of the fillet?"
"I suppose there could have been."
"Ah." Her smile was calculating. "You were dreaming about the crown of Miishel!"
"What?"
"The crown of Miishel. It rests now on the brow of my uncle the King, the ugly old fool. He has warts and bad breath and a cast in one eye, and the crown does not suit him at all." Her lips turned down at the corners. "My cousin the Frath Major wants that crown for himself, Scion. How strange that you dreamed it was resting on my brow." Her voice vibrated on the last two words. Her eyes were snapping with excitement.
"Now, wait just a minute!" I sat up, horrified. It was already as clear as Crosthic crystal that the Frath had personal designs on both the crown of Miishel and the Fathidiic Cloak of Empire; and the various attempts on my life showed that others knew and disapproved of his plans. Life was complicated enough without Rinn getting ambitious on her own account.
Or was it?
I looked thoughtfully at my bride, who was all but rubbing her hands with unholy glee. Perhaps it would not be such a bad thing to set one cousin intriguing against the other. At least it would be entertaining.
"You know, now I think about it, you've described the circlet in my dream exactly, right down to the last detail. Rinn—do you think perhaps we've been given an omen?"
Rinn didn't reply in words. She turned to me with the smile of a cablesnake about to swallow a chick, and proceeded to be very, very nice to me indeed.
As near as I can reckon, it was that same morning on which my uncle the High Prince of Sathelforn died. Later that afternoon, my poor father followed him. The gods alone know where he found the strength to dance. The Primate was still pacing the floor of the great audience chamber, issuing useless edicts through my brother's lips. In Gil, the Last Dance was in mid-measure.
The Gilgard gates had been sealed on the third day after the plague first broke in the streets of the city. This was a prudent if somewhat heartless move on the part of the Primate—but in any event it was too late. Not more than two nights after the gates were barred against the wretched multitudes who were battering to get in, a young Flamen danced pus-faced out of the Contemplation Hall of the Novices and dropped at the Primate's feet. Before long, there was another; and then a third and a fourth and a fifth; and soon after, too many to count. Death had leapt the ramparts of the Gilgard as easily as a child might jump a line drawn in the dirt. A few days later, because it no longer mattered, the gates of the Gilgard were thrown open; but by that time nobody wanted to come in.
I have heard how the citizens of Gil and Malvi fled to the villages; and finding the village streets alive with dancers, they fled to the countryside; and there, many of them ended by dancing among the cornfields and fruit groves, and others gave up and went home to the cities, where at least they had the dubious comfort of the priests, shrivers and doomsayers.
Indeed, it was a grand time for the cults. The prophets of doom stood on the street corners and in the squares and ranted over the wickedness that had brought this terror upon mankind. Naturally, they could not agree upon which brand of wickedness bore most of the blame, nor which of a wide range of deities might most fruitfully be invoked. It is said that more than one priest cheated the plague by getting himself murdered in the course of some theological wrangle. In that respect only, life was almost normal.
I have calculated that as many as six in ten danced themselves to death in Calloon, Canzitar and the Storican ports, and five in ten in Glishor, Luc and Plav. Gil and Sathelforn escaped more lightly, losing no more than four in every ten, but this was quite enough to overburden the wains hauling the dead to a hasty charnel-ground in the Great Garden. I can see this in my mind's eye: the statue of the Lady smiling vacantly across the long silent stinking rows; a doomsayer preaching to the dead from the fountain's foot until he stops and looks thoughtful and then slowly starts to dance; a deathly quiet in the streets.
* * *
22
I PEERED OUT through the portal of Lillifer's residence at the dusty, shimmering heat of the square. Inside, the main hall was as cool and dim as a cave; the few windows were no more than narrow slits and great puddles of shadow lay behind the columns that supported the high ceiling.
Coll, the Vassashin interpreter, noticed my hesitation. "We only have to cross the square," he said comfortingly in Miisheli, "and then we will be among the trees. It will be cooler there."
Chasco shrugged. Shree pushed past me and surveyed the empty square carefully before crossing the threshold. I noticed that his eyes narrowed as they reached the corner where the Sherkin dead were continuing their long hot bake in the sun. I nudged Coll's shoulder and pointed to the cages as we hurried across the burning basalt pavement.
"Who were they?" I asked.
Coll had a long, cheerful face, handsome as all the Vassashin were. He grinned and stooped to pick a pebble off the pavement, and hurled it towards one of the cages. It pinged off the side of the Sherkin helmet.
"They were our overlords, Gilman. The Sherkin commandant and his brothers. The rest, we fed to the volcano or killed in other interesting ways. Did you know we were once part of the Sherkin Empire?"
"Yes, I'd heard something about that. But the wrack of Sher was more than six years ago. Why have you kept these dismal reminders up all that time? A sort of monument?"
"In a way. But mostly," he picked up another pebble, "we keep them to throw things at." This pebble missed its mark, but Coll only made a rude gesture at the dead Sherkin and laughed again.
I noticed a certain stiffness in Shree's back, which was just in front of me. It occurred to me that the commandant and his brothers might just have been relations of Shree's, given the tangled web of kinship in the warcourt of Iklankish.
We were inside the shade of the forest by this time, and at last I could see the houses plainly. It was obvious at once that Vass was like no other town I'd ever seen or read about. For one thing, it did not look as if any trees had been cleared. The houses sprouted at random out of the undergrowth, haphazard little drystone hovels thrown together out of slabs of volcanic rock and chunks of coral, thatched with broad-flanged leaves. Very few were free-standing—they seemed to have grown up in clumps and colonies, or bubbled out of the ground like yeast. Scores of narrow paths wandered mazily through this architectural jumble, but there was nothing that could be called a street. Overhead, sunlight filtered dimly through the unbroken canopy of the treetops; creepers and mosses seemed to flow down the trunks from the upper branches and wash up the sides of the houses, and heavy-scented blossoms were everywhere.
Coll led us through the labyrinth along a bewildering series of pathways. Not many adults were about—it was mid-morning, and I suppose that most of them were either fishing or at the market—but it took something under two minutes to gather a long and ever-lengthening tail of children. They trailed silently after us, stopping whenever we stopped, watching in hushed fascination when Chasco knelt to tighten his sandal-strap, cooing when I took my notebook out of my tunic and jotted down a few observations. If we stopped for any length of time, we'd find them creeping forwards to finger the cloth of our tunics or our strangely coloured hair, scattering when Coll barked
at them, only to gather again when his back was turned.
"You must forgive them," Coll told us. "Your ship is the first to land in Vassashinay in nearly two years. Some of these little ones never saw an outlander before."
I nodded. We were coming to the first clearing we'd seen since leaving the square, and the black curve of one of those massive beehive structures was just becoming visible through the foliage. Another few steps and we were in the open, gawking up at a small mountain of beautifully fitted black masonry. The structure was neither as large nor as impressive as Lillifer's residence, but it was still a respectable pile of stone. It looked deserted. Green branches leaned like anxious maidens out of the upper window-holes, and the undergrowth was rampant in the clearing, almost waist-deep in places. Nobody had cut it back for some time.
"Coll?" I asked. "Doesn't anyone live here?"
"In this one? Nobody."
"Why not? It seems solid enough."
Coll whacked the flank of the building, almost affectionately. "Of course it is solid. It was built to last. But nobody has used it since the Sherank were overthrown—too many terrible things happened here. This one, they used as a prison."
"But the Burgher's house—?"
"It was the main Sherkin barracks. The only bad thing that happened there happened to the Sherank. But it was Vassashin blood that was spilt on these stones." He paused and shivered, although the sun was beating down on our unprotected heads. "There are strange noises here at night, Gilmen. No man, woman or child comes here after dark."
I tried to visualize the view from my high window. "But there must be eight or nine of these structures. Is Lillifer's the only one that you've reclaimed."
"No, there are two others—the Sherank used them as a storehouse and a granary, and there is no Vassashin blood on the stones. But we leave the rest of them alone."
Shree had been staring thoughtfully up at the perfect parabola of the building against the deep blue sky, running his finger along the tight joints between the courses. Now he turned to Coll, scowling. "Who built them? It wasn't your lot, considering what the rest of your architecture is like."
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 16
