by Sylvia Kelso
Tanekhet smiled at him as he smiled at no-one else. “Yes,” he said. “We could be sure of Nathyx.”
“And Cataract would send.” Iatha turned it over, sure as Keshaq. “So with Cataract and Verrain behind it?”
“In that case, yes, Dhasdein might think twice about defying Amberlight.”
“So do we warn them beforehand? Have them back the Note?”
“Do we think Therkon will wait for a Note?” Asaskian’s mouth suddenly pinched. She remembered too, her face said. The speed, and the lack of scruple, with which Dhasdein could apply force.
Iatha’s hand clenched on the worn pine boards. She had lost a husband last time Dhasdein came in force to Iskarda.
Tanekhet’s eyes weighed them both. Then he said, quite gently, “Therkon is not his father. Nor is the Empress.”
Iatha sighed, letting hands, shoulders relax, and Two ran past me a collage of other times Iatha had moved so: accepting the advice of the expert. Preparing, on one man’s word, and he an Outlander, to hazard Iskarda. And so much more than Iskarda.
“So we send a quiet word to prime the Amberlight Assembly, and another to Nathyx in Assuana. And a signal to Cataract.”
Eria sat at the far table end beside Duitho, quieter than Keshaq. As my mother said, she had been village Head two years, but in more than looks she resembled her mother. And like Darthis, she had a way of scuttling plans almost made.
“How if Therkon doesn’t listen? If he already hasn’t listened? If he arrives tomorrow? With all his phalanx troops?”
Asaskian looked startled, Iatha taken aback. She never had been able to handle Darthis. But Tez answered coolly as a Navy officer.
“Then we do what we’d do in any last resort. Send Chaeris into the mountains with the trouble-crew and some trappers, and let Therkon do his worst.”
* * * *
I took Two’s recall of Dhasdein’s worst to bed with me, and the memories did more than trouble my sleep. I rose heavy-eyed and twitchy, to bungle half my workout with Ashar, the latest troublecrew second. Duitho, my previous sparring partner, was in the hills, checking tracks and setting sentry posts.
Going back inside, I braced myself for the usual onslaught: the consort’s eldest daughter was barely three years my junior, but my differences, let alone being troublecrew, always brought them round me like flies. It was a shock to find the inner corridor quite deserted. Run to earth among her records, Hanni eventually told me they had begun to pack.
“Tomorrow,” she said, abstracted among lists and notes, “Asaskian’s taking the three of them to Amberlight.”
It was one more crack in the new normality than I could bear. Duitho was still out. Tez was immured in the council-room with Iatha and the day’s first batch of mirror signals. Hurrying down the front steps I encountered Tanekhet and Keshaq, fresh from their own training bout.
“Tanekhet!” Foster-father or not, he had stopped me calling him “father” years ago, and given my father Sarth’s memories, I could understand why. “Tanekhet, what’s happening? Are you leaving us?”
“My dear.” I was shaken enough to make him reach out, though he had learnt before I was conceived not to lay hands, uninvited, on anything to do with qherrique.
“Be easy, Chaeris.” It was real concern. Sprung from affection, if not love. “Asaskian is going, yes, to Amberlight. To manage our concerns there.” He meant, to ensure the Assembly backed us over the Note. “And to be on hand should events demand an, ah, more immediate response.”
A front line, then. Or an outpost. Two’s glosses flew through my head, with more unnerving connections in their wake. “But taking Darr? Saarieq? Aretho? If it’s to be dangerous—!”
It would take more than one flustered girl, even such a girl as I, to panic Tanekhet. He gave me what I had heard Tez call his Suzerain look.
“Asaskian goes to manage affairs. Your cousins,” we all called them that, though in truth only Tez’s girl Saarieq was my blood-kin, and a convoluted blood-tie at that. “Your cousins are going, because we cannot afford to offer hostages.”
I gulped while Two’s explanations tore through everything else. Hostages. Beloved levers to force obedience to an enemy. Far more vulnerable to capture in a village like Iskarda than in a city like Amberlight. Even under direct attack.
Tanekhet held my eyes and kept that steely fidelity to truth. “You will never fall into hostile hands, Chaeris.”
No, I would be up the mountain, with trouble-crew to fight for me and trappers to hide me. Unlike my cousins, I would never come in risk. While in Iskarda . . .
“No, my dear.” He did take hold of me that time. Lightly as a practiced lover, a feather clasp around my wrist. “Tez and Keshaq and I—and the people—will be perfectly safe.”
“But how can you be sure? Two showed me, when they came before. Tanekhet—!”
“Nothing like that will happen now.”
“How can you say that . . .”
“Because Therkon remembers last time. Because whatever we may do, he will see it never happens again.”
I stared into those forest-pool eyes and saw a certainty whose basis was beyond Two’s scope. But Tanekhet had never pandered to my age or my status or my fidgets. What he said was his best shape of the truth.
“If he brings all those men—?”
“He will not bring all those men.”
“Oh. Then . . . Oh. You sent a Note?”
“We sent a Note.” This smile was real amusement, quick and glancing as forest water caught by passing sun. “Saying with great politeness that the Head’s daughter Chaeris is still very young, and must not have her home disturbed. Iskarda’s council has just ruled that any embassy be limited to the envoy and an escort of six troops.”
I stared like a witless boy while Two and I both tried to run the implications at once. “So they know you know why they’ll come. And they know you won’t let the escort in. And—what happens now?”
“I should expect Therkon, in a gentlemanly way, to dispute. Point out the distance, the risk of Mel’ethi bandits, perhaps. He will not be so crass as to remind me of his value, as crown prince.”
It was exactly like haggling in a market, I realised: a contention of strategies with compromise as its aim. “So what do we say next?”
“We repeat, the Head’s daughter is young, and further, shy. Should she be alarmed in any way, any embassy will have wasted its time.”
“Shy? Oh, I am not!” He grinned along with me. He too knew it was an utter lie. But all the same . . . “Isn’t that rather, rather—”
“Uncompromising?” He had followed very close on my thought. “At some point, one must draw the final line.”
“So he’ll know, if they try to push things—?”
“Six men or six hundred. If they push things, you will simply not be here.”
I let Two run the scenarios, and they almost came up clean. “Do you think you can bring him down to just six men?”
He chuckled softly and lifted a hand in a fencer’s salute. “Twenty, perhaps.”
Still a far cry from five or six hundred. I let myself breathe out. “And—it’s all going to take time, isn’t it? Like before? Our Note’s just gone. It has to go clean to Riversend. And then his has to come back. And then ours has to go downRiver again. Mother aid us. He said, here, second quarter next moon, but our Note will hardly be there!”
Tanekhet nodded. “It is always worth the effort,” he murmured, “to buy time.”
It all seemed far less intimidating, under his dry, long-schooled view. Only one question remained.
“So if it’s all so safe, and so far off anyhow: why send Darr away? And Saarieq?”
“Ah.” He gave me another quick, flicking smile. “It is not wise to tempt an opponent—even, in this case, an opponent like Therkon—beyond enticements he can resist.”<
br />
He changed a look with Keshaq that spoke volumes neither Two nor I could read. But the other question had already leapt into my head, the worst question of all.
“But if—if he knows all that, and he comes anyway . . . Then what will I do?”
The smile vanished. After a moment he said, “If he comes despite all that, we will call on Dhe and the Mother. And act as They command.”
* * * *
Which meant, in plain speech, that in the last resort he himself had no idea.
I could not put my trust in gods I had never met. The projected time-span was far more comforting. Second spring moon Therkon proposed to arrive. Errisal’s message had come down on the heels of the last winter flood, my mother and her consort would have the spring drop to help them upRiver. The River-fall would quicken voyages both ways, but the best speed Two could estimate for a double-bank galley would still not get messages between Dhasdein’s capital and Marbleport in less than a moon and a quarter each way. If the haggling went as Tanekhet seemed to expect, it could be mid-summer before the departure, let alone arrival, of the embassy itself.
By then, as Tanekhet hinted, anything might happen. A wrangle over the tolls, and the River closed to Therkon by Verrain. An insurrection in Dhasdein’s provinces of Quetzistan or Riversrun, some diplomatic intervention engineered by Asaskian in Amberlight. Even, I used to dream in the night-watches, that my mother would be back, the trouble upRiver already dissolved, all of them here again, making us safe.
In the meantime, working out with Ashar or Duitho, standing signal-watch, trying to draw comfort from the company of Tez and Tanekhet, I tried to tell myself that the Notes were still passing. At the least, we still had time.
We all reckoned without Therkon. He had written first from Riversend, but he followed his letter upRiver. His second Note was written from Deyiko, on the Dhasdein border, where he was negotiating River tolls with Verrain and Shirran and Mel’eth. The two former Dhasdein provinces were now independent, scandalously grasping states, but Therkon evidently did not expect problems with them. He accepted our conditions for an embassy, and looked to reach Iskarda, with his six man escort, on the second-last day in the third quarter of the moon.
“This moon! Blight and blast the man, that’s not eight days ahead!”
Iatha actually sounded alarmed. Tez was scowling, Keshaq a perfect thundercloud. Even Tanekhet had grown unwontedly, visibly tense.
“I thought you said the Notes would stop him. I thought you said—!”
“My lady Iatha, I am not qherrique.”
Tanekhet’s return anticipated even Tez’s defence. Flat and hard as a blow from a quarterstaff. All the eyes flicked, uncontrollably, to me.
“Neither,” Tanekhet finished coldly, “in the earth, or in the flesh.”
Now I could feel them trying not to look at me. Two was more than hackling. Two was charged to spark.
It came out in a husk, my throat was so dry. “Then do I—must I try—is it time—”
“No!” Iatha and Verrith yelled it almost in chorus. Iatha shouted, “Not with Tellurith away!”—“Not for Therkon!” Verrith bawled.
“But aren’t I supposed, one day, to be—”
Iatha leant across the table and gripped my hand in her gnarled paw and Two never made a spark.
“Dearling,” she said harshly, “nobody knows what you are supposed to be, beyond yourself. That’s all your mother wants for you. To grow up, and make your own choice in the matter. In your own time.”
I stared around. They had always found me strange, they had learnt to be wary with me, some might have feared me, once. Nothing showed but honest outrage now. And concern, strong as my fathers’. And protectiveness.
“I think . . .”
“I think,” Iatha growled, “you’re a twelve-year-old girl, and you’ll stay that way. Whatever or whoever says otherwise.”
“But he’s coming! He’s still coming! After everything we tried. When he gets here, what am I supposed to do?”
“Leave that,” snapped Iatha, “to us.”
Over her, Tez said in her Navy voice, “No.”
She ran her eyes around the table. The echo of my father Sarth marked her profile, but my mother filled her voice.
“This time,” she said, “I think the choice is for Chaeris.”
I half-saw Iatha bend like a drawn bow; I did hear Duitho’s gulp. The center of my vision was Tez, leaning forward on an elbow, almost casually, it looked.
“Chaeris,” she said levelly, “do you know what Dhasdein wants?”
I stared into her narrow golden-flecked eyes whose shape spoke neither my mother nor Sarth. Her own mother, I knew, had been a Navy captain. There were times I felt that presence still.
“An oracle?” I hazarded.
“A prophecy. Yes. Do you know what that means?”
“A question. And an answer. About—what’s going to be?”
“The future, yes. Do you know, when Dhasdein has sought one, why Iskarda has kept saying, No?”
I bit my lip to master the humiliation. “I thought—I was too young?”
Iatha growled in her throat. Still holding my eyes, Tez shook her head.
“Did you ever wonder why we never asked? For ourselves?”
The answer was the same. Mutely, I could only shake my head.
“Have you thought what would happen? If someone did ask? And you, or Two replied?”
“You mean—if it was right?”
Tez gave one silent nod. Two’s calculations were already running, memories, projections, extrapolations flaring like qherrique charges through my head. It was Two who replied.
“A true forecast would bring the River here. Wanting answers too.”
Iatha’s neck relaxed, and stiffened again. Tez sat back, with a look like a Navy gunner through her sights.
“Have you thought what that would mean, for you? For Iskarda?”
Two thought for me. All the River coming, as it had once to Amberlight. Embassies and rulers and nobles and this time everyone down to common folk, as they had not done to Amberlight. But Amberlight was a city, with people and arms and defended space, rules and the means to enforce them, to ensure the city could never be conquered, coerced, bribed. Or besieged night and day with petitioners, its own lands and places invaded, its life simply swamped. Whereas Iskarda . . .
“No!”
Tez nodded, sharp and curt. “Iskarda’s a village. We have our folk and our ways and room for ourselves. We couldn’t even handle a year’s worth of single pilgrims, we have nowhere to lodge them. And if we began building such a place—if we tried to provide the rest—”
“It would be like a Riversend temple, only, only worse. Houses and markets and horse-fairs, food at robber’s price. And people living off the, the petitioners, and bribes, and—”
My tongue locked. Even Two had not seen what I saw then.
Quite quietly, Tez said, “Yes. Without an escort, you’d never step outside again. Never go to the quarry. Visit the village. Work out. You’d lose your life.” She took a long breath. “You’d never be—human—again.”
The silence went down and down and down as if she had taken the cover off a pit. In that hush I looked into the depths, and met what I had always known. It took Two to reply.
“Are we human now?”
Tez’s very features seemed to change. I saw that she knew what I had born, from the children no less than the adults, even in Iskarda: the stares, the whispers, the near harassment, from those never sure who or what you were, and given far too much cause, in the early days, not to try finding out. A margin-dweller, a mystery, unintelligible and incalculable. At best, a strange, alien sort of hope.
Then she said fiercely, “Yes, you are human! Even if we have to say, Human, too. But you know now what Iatha means. Your, our mother said
it to me, once. ‘Everybody knows what she is. Nobody knows who she is. But if she has to carry a Head’s load, or worse things, it won’t be until she must’.”
I was swallowing tears, desperately. The nadir of unwomanliness, to break down in the council-room.
Tez fanned both hands on the table-top. “You are twelve years old, in human time. But you have Two’s memories. And all you’ve learned. So I think it’s time for you to choose, now: do you want to hear Dhasdein’s question, or not?”
I could only gulp, caught between pit and pit. If I said, Yes, and failed? If I really was too young? If I never had the gift at all?
“You will be Craft one day,” Tez added almost casually, “in any case. You have your mother’s blood. And my father’s, and that goes back to the best ears in Hafas House.” She meant, those best able to establish rapport with qherrique.
So it would not matter if I tried to be an oracle and failed. I could still learn to use a cutter, or a light-gun, one day. It might almost, in the long run, be better for Iskarda.
What if I tried, and it worked?
My hands were in my hair, tugging at the bushy tail that might one day be a plait. “I don’t want Iskarda to be like that!”
“No.” Tez’s voice was very quiet.
“But I can’t—I don’t know!”
“Can you ask?”
And now the whole room was holding its breath.
Can you ask, she had said, casually as ever, that ultimate question, only ever answered by a House-head in Amberlight. Make rapport with the qherrique, work it, with shaper or cutter, a Crafter could do that. But only a Head could ask for guidance, for an oracle, and get a reply.
“Two can tell you, and us, anything from the past.” Infinitesimally, Tez’s eyes narrowed. “Has Two ever, uh, spoken, about the future to you?”
I struggled to express what Two did, finding only the past’s answer, my own mother’s reply to the Dhasdein scribes about the nature of qherrique: your words do not work, do not work, do not work.
Two answered for us both.
