by Jo Clayton
The road dipped slightly, went round a clump of olivine weepers and turned onto a wooden bridge, a single humped curve with a lovely arch and side rails of bent and molded watercane. Serroi exclaimed with pleasure. Hern looked back for the first time since they’d started down the mountain, raised his brows, then urged his macai onto the bridge.
Serroi stopped at the top of the arch. A comparatively cool breeze was drifting along with the water. She drew her sleeve across her face, looked at the brown stain on the fine white cloth with distaste, looked at the blue-green water and sighed, started on after Hern.
He was waiting for her in the shade of a clump of watercane. With a flip of a hand at the sun, he said, “Time to eat.”
Again suppressing a smile, Serroi nodded, slid out of the saddle and stood bending her knees and kicking briskly to work some of the stiffness out of her legs, gazing thoughtfully at the bridge and the river. “Be better to get out of sight; those minarka back there weren’t exactly friendly.” Without waiting for an answer she led her macai around the reeds and along the riverbank.
A tree grew out of the water, some of its roots clinging to the gently sloping bank, the dirt washed away from the others, a weeper with dark yellow-grey-green leaves like flat teardrops on fawn and saffron withes that hung to the water, ticking at the surface, dancing and swaying with the wind. Serroi led her macai to the water beside this tree. As the beast drank, she pulled off her boots, rolled up her trousers (dark blue wool, Braddon’s gift), dug into her saddlebags for the nourishing but monotonous trail bars (nuts, dried fruits, honey) and the tough strips of jerky. Dropping Hern’s share into a shallow pannikin, she set it down on the grass and took her own food to the tree, where she straddled a root and dangled her feet in the eddies teasing at the other roots. She ate slowly, relaxed except for a niggling little itch that continued to plague her, a warning of some danger to come or simply her own reaction to the near stifling hostility that filled the Vale.
Once his mount was drinking Hern stripped off his tunic, tossed it down beside the pannikin. He dumped the bars and jerky on the tunic and used the pannikin to dip water from the river which he dumped over his head and torso. With a sigh of relief he settled on a patch of grass, pulled off his boots and inspected his feet. The abraded places were still faintly pink but had healed without sign of infection. The blisters were redder but they too were healing. He wiggled his toes and looked at the water, then at Serroi. Grunting with the effort it took to bend that far, he rolled his trousers above his knees, scooped up his food and came over to the tree. He found a stouter root, settled with his back against the trunk, his feet in the water. His eyelids came down sleepily over his pale eyes as he contemplated her a moment, then he looked down at what he held in his hand and grimaced. He began eating, chewing slowly as if he wanted to make the meager meal last as long as possible. Except for several considering glances, he didn’t acknowledge her presence.
Serroi brushed her hands off, bent precariously and dipped first one hand then the other into the water, swishing them about, straightened, slanting a glance at Hern, daring him to match her acrobatics. Smiling, she wiped her hands dry on her trousers, kicked her feet gently in the water. “Sulky little baby boy,” she murmured, her voice a whisper just loud enough for him to hear.
He chewed steadily, his eyes on the swaying withes. In his face or body there was no sign he heard her.
“The meie’s always right. You said it.”
He brushed the sticky crumbs from his hands, but he made no attempt to reach the water. Lacing his fingers behind his head, he stared dreamily at the river and the withe tips, at the ever changing shadows breaking and reforming on the water.
“Hern, I don’t know what you saw in the dust.” He stiffened as if she’d flicked him with a whip. “I can only hope your ghosts weren’t as … as troubling as mine.” It was an indirect apology for the things she’d said to him at the Cisterns. If she had to, she’d say the words; for her own pride’s sake, she’d rather not. If he made her say them, it would be deliberate; she had (she hoped) stopped underestimating his intelligence and sensitivity.
He folded his hands over his shrinking paunch. “You’ve got a nasty tongue when you turn it loose.”
“You’re no gentle soul yourself, Dom.”
“It’ll probably happen again, cutting at each other like that.”
“Probably.” She kicked her foot up, watched the crystal drops fall back. “I’ve always felt that grudges were a profitless waste of time and energy.”
Hern smiled. “I’m a lazy man, meie.”
Feeling absurdly buoyant, she balanced on her root and grinned at him. “As long as we know.”
“Uh-huh.” He glanced up at the fragments of sun visible through the leaves. “Hate to say it, but we better get moving if we want to reach Skup by sundown.”
They rode through a silent land, the laughter and high-pitched gabbling of the minarka dying away as soon as the strangers were spotted. Hern’s face grew slowly grimmer as he took in what she’d sensed so strongly before. “They’d make a fine mob,” he said finally. “Better than that bunch in Sadnaji.”
“They’ve had more experience with Assurtilas as a neighbor. We should be safe enough as long as we stay on the road and don’t bother them.”
“I would like to depend on that.”
“They’re used to Sleykynin riding through the Vale, going from Assurtilas to the Mijloc; they’ve learned to leave them alone if they stick to the road.”
“Good for them. But we’re not Sleykyn.”
“The habit should hold.”
“Habit.” He snorted, then looked about. “I haven’t seen any houses.”
“They live in walled villages.” Serroi wiped at her face. “Maiden bless, it’s hot. Villages built on the least fertile ground, of course.”
“Walled?”
“Sleykyn raids. When they don’t keep to the road.”
They crossed the river twice more as its wide bends swept it away and back, then away again. Not long after the second bridge, when the sun was perching on the points of the Vachhorns, the road widened and the plantings ceased. Herds of hauhaus and rambuts—cream-colored hooved beasts with crimson strips running vertically along their barrel bodies—grazed on the grassy pasturage that lay before the high blue walls of Skup. Straight ahead of them, on the far side of a broad moat, two high square towers flanked the gates of Skup. The outer gate was higher than two houses and made of ironwood planks, a wood so dense it weighed as much as the metal it was named for. Behind the ironwood gates, black iron gates stood open. Only closed in wartime, they were oiled daily and moved a little on their hinges. The minarka took no chances. Skup had never fallen, not even when the Mad Prime of Assurtilas two centuries before had assembled a Sleykyn army and burned the rest of the Vale to dust and ashes. Serroi saw with relief that the outer gates were still open. She glanced at Hern. He was scanning the walls, his eyes narrowed, a measuring intentness in his face. “Dom.”
“Mmmmh. You know who built those walls? When this is over.…”
Serroi pulled her mount to a slow shuffle and waited for him to match his speed to hers. “Do you speak the sulMinar?”
“No. Why should I? There was.…”
“No need before.” She tilted her head, ran her eyes over him, grinned when she finished. “Probably just as well you don’t.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you’re less likely to get us skinned.”
Hern looked pained. “Viper.”
“O mighty one.”
“Crawl for them?”
“Want to spend the night with the hauhaus?”
“Not especially.”
“Thing to remember is that most of the minarks in the High Palaces …” She nodded at the villas on the higher terraces partly visible above the walls, catching the colors of the sunset in their glittering sides. “They’re getting madder by the moment, apt to act on whatever
thought flits through their crazy heads. Which can be very dangerous to the hapless passerby. We’ll have to hope we can avoid being noticed, that’s the safest way through Skup.”
“Why not go around?”
“Can’t. The walls go into the sea, faced with tiles like those.” She flicked a hand at the blue walls (turning purple now as they sucked in red light from the sunset). “Too slippery to climb and too high to jump.” She rubbed at her eyes, patted a yawn. “Maiden bless, I’m tired. That’s the only gate. Let me do the talking.”
His brows lifted, then he said amiably, “Viper.”
Serroi patted her macai’s neck. “Poor man, his brain’s rotting. That’s all he can say now.”
“If I answer that, we will be here till morning.” He looked around at the herd of blocky hauhaus grazing close by. “I can think of pleasanter bedmates.” He kneed his beast into a faster walk, his brows rising again as he took in the guard strolling to the center of the gate.
The minark wore elaborately chased and gilded plating. Three tall white plumes swayed above a gilded helmet whose outer surface was molded into spikes that glistened in the light from the setting sun. His long thin legs were uncovered from mid-thigh to ankle, his feet thrust into gilded sandals. He stood waiting for them to come across the drawbridge, leaning on the pole of a halberd whose head shimmered like silver above the sway of the plumes. Hern’s eyes narrowed.
“Watch it, Dom,” Serroi whispered.
“Stop nagging at me, meie, you’re worse than Floarin in a bitchy mood.” Reason prevailed over irritation so he kept his voice low, though he scowled at her.
“I like my skin, Dom, even if it is green. I want to keep it right where it is, wrapped around my bones.” She sniffed, then lifted her head, her eyes twinkling, the corners of her mouth twitching. “Relax, man, and remember you’re no longer Domnor of Oras and the Plains. Here, now, you’re a beggar. No, less than a beggar. If it helps, so am I.”
He shook his head, tilted it and contemplated her. “You look like a scruffy boy. Why should you have such a boundless capacity for annoying me?” His rueful grin dissolved into a scowl. “I’m not a half-witted infant.”
They stopped before the guard, waiting with an assumed patience while he inspected them. Hern slumped in the saddle, looking sleepily moronic. He’s not the half-witted one, she thought, I am. When the guard spoke, she blinked, then forced her tired brain to take in his words, her mind having to shift from the mijlocker she’d just been speaking to the sulMinar she was hearing.
“… want?” the guard finished.
Serroi blinked again, bowed as low as she could. Picking careful between phrases, she addressed him in the seeker’s mode, low to high. “If the magnificent one before me in whose shadow this one is unworthy to stand, the incomparable and compassionate guardian of this most glorious of cities, this worm beneath his feet would contrive to find the words in his ignoble head to reply.” It was hard to keep her face straight as she mouthed this nonsense, but minark culture demanded this formalized hypocrisy.
Mollified by the string of compliments and the mode of address, the guard preened himself and repeated the question. “Where you going, slave-dung, and what do you want here?” His blunt speech was the worst of insults but Serroi was glad enough to get to the point that quickly. The sun was almost gone and the guard was quite capable of shutting the gate in their faces.
She bowed again, slipping her fingers quickly into the pouch hanging at her side, drawing out two of Yael-mri’s grudged gold coins. With them concealed in her hand, she spoke again. “Oh most honorable and warlike of guardians before whom these worms tremble, this useless and disgusting uncle of this person who is less than the dust on your divine feet and he who speaks these stumbling words have ridden across the Mountains of the Dead at the bidding of They-Who-Heal. It is required that we take ship at Skup and proceed on their business. This one who is blinded by the glory of your person.…” She let one of the coins fall as she raised her hand and placed it before her face, fingers spread, thumb holding the second coin against her palm. “… must ask passage through this domain of mind-dazzling glory. Noble sir, may this unworthy one note that in the liberality of your wealth you have dropped a trifle of gold. Doubtless you have so many coins that it has escaped your notice.”
The guard’s eyes searched the paving stone. The breath hissed between his teeth when he spotted the golden round. He scooped it up, tucked it into a pouch, then began looking round again.
Greedy bastard, Serroi thought. She dropped the second coin.
The minark straightened, sneered at them, then waved them past. “Keep to the low way, dung.”
As they rode through the ironwood gate, he stood watching them, making no move as yet to close the gate behind them. They rode past the towers that looked down on the open way between ironwood and ironmetal gates, their shiny blue surfaces pierced at various levels by bow slits. When Hern and Serroi emerged from between the black iron gates glistening with oil, they passed into a narrow ugly street more like a posser-run than anything men should be expected to traverse. On both sides of the inner gate, ornate grills shut off wider streets that climbed steeply up and around the dark foliage of stiff, spear-like conifers. Hern glanced at these, then ahead. The corner of his mouth twitched up, but he made no comment.
The low way was a narrow cobbled passage between two high, dirty walls. On each side of the roadway were deep stinking gutters filled with sewage and scraps of garbage. The farther they got into the city, the more noxious the air became. Hern wrinkled his nose. “They make it obvious what they think of us.”
Serroi yawned and immediately regretted it. “What I told you.” The street curved sharply some distance ahead. She straightened, stretched out a hand to stop Hern as she heard a blare of horns, several instruments played loudly with no attempt at anything but noisemaking. “Maiden grant.…” She heard a clatter of hooves, high giggling laughter in between the blasts of noise, cursed softly, looked up to meet Hern’s startled gaze. She urged her macai to the edge of the gutter and motioned Hern to ride close behind her. “A Brissai,” she said quickly. “Young minarks from the High Terraces out on a tear, juiced to the ears on dream dust or worse and up to any mischief that appeals to them. Chasing some unfortunate, sounds like.” She chewed on her lip, anxious eyes on Hern’s face. “If they only push us into the gutter and sweep on past, we’ll be lucky.”
“Into that?”
“A little stink is better than a skinning, and that’s the nicest thing that will happen to us if we so much as touch one of them.” The sounds were coming rapidly nearer, more raucous than ever. “They’re after blood. Don’t move, don’t say anything no matter what, don’t even breathe.”
She heard the pattering of bare feet on the cobbles then a ragged furtive little man bleeding from hundreds of small wounds came stumbling around the curve. He was so blind with his terror he blundered past them without seeing them, struggling to reach the great gates before they were shut.
The Brissai came round the bend a moment later, five young men in loose robes that whipped open about naked golden bodies. Long loose tresses of russet hair fluttered in the stinking air, golden eyes were fire-hot, golden skin wore a film of sweat, not from exertion but from emotional extravagance. They rode sleek rambuts with silken ribbons braided into their crimson manes, strips of azure and silver, red and gold and green, fluttering in the wind of their tempestuous passage. Each youth carried a long slender rod with a needle-spiked knob at the end of it. The leader saw Serroi and Hern, pulled his mount to a sliding halt, sitting the plunging beast with the easy grace of a superb rider. He looked lovingly at them, delight shining in his metallic eyes, a tender smile on his delicately curved lips. With an unregarded grace, he pointed at the stumbling fugitive. “Ban Abbal, get that.”
One of the five rode after the little man and smashed the spiked ball into the back of his head. The minark went on a few strides then jerked his mount around and
forced it to trample on the small body before he left it lying, flung out on the cobbles like a bit of rubbish and came back to the Brissai.
