Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  "Can you imagine our disbelief? After nearly a thousand years of peace, to be plunged without warning into such horror? I laughed in the beginning, along with many others, but the Primate went alone into the sanctuary, and when he returned to us his face was grave and he had a bundle tied under his cloak. It was then that he gave the command to provision the ship, and to take the royal children and the cream of the archives to the harbour. And he chose twenty Flamens—but that part you know.

  "With my own eyes—I had two then—I saw those who were to become the Exiles make their departure from the harbour. When the ship was safely away, the Primate led the rest of us back to the Gilgard and gathered us in the Lady's antechamber. He knew the island was lost. We all knew by that point. We could hear the battle coming; Lord Kishr and his army of murderers had entered the suburbs of the city, and nothing in Gil could stand against them, except perhaps the Lady herself. There was still, at that moment, a desperate hope that the Priest-King was alive, and would reach us before Kishr did.

  "But when the messenger came—a harpist, the only survivor of the royal party, and he delivered the news with his dying breath—the Primate only sighed, as if the Priest-King's death were no news at all, and ordered us to join the defenders in the towers. Before going to my post, I saw him and two others, the First and Second Flamens, enter the passage to the sanctuary. As far as I know, they were never seen to come out. When Kishr battered the door down, the sanctuary was empty. The Primate had vanished, taking the Lady with him. There was no other exit from the chamber, and none was ever found, even though the hangings were torn from the walls and the stones sounded over and over again for hidden doorways. Those of us who remained knew nothing of the Secrets of the Ancients."

  Bekri's voice trailed away. He sat in silence for a long moment, his twisted slice of mouth set, his one eye clenched shut. One of the men in green leaned forward to touch him on the shoulder, and he started, then relaxed and continued in a stronger voice.

  "They interrogated us—all the Flamens they could find, of whatever rank—for several days. I shall not describe their ways of asking questions, Scion: you can see the results for yourself." I looked at his scars, and turned my eyes away. "In any case," he continued, "whatever they did to us, we had nothing to tell them; but even when that became clear to Kishr, the torture went on. It was vengeance, I suppose; Lord Kishr was a very disappointed man."

  He pulled the blanket up about his shoulders. I looked around at the others and saw that all their faces were grave and hard, cast in a mould of remembered pain and old bitterness—even those of the children. Dimly, deep inside, I felt the same feelings stir.

  "Kishr spared no trouble in wiping the Flamens out. Those who were not tortured to death in Gilgard Castle were herded into the Great Garden for a victory bonfire around the statue of the Lady. The priesthood, of course, provided the fuel."

  I nodded, feeling sick. That story, reaching the Flamens-in-Exile, had become part of the official memoirs of the catastrophe. As far as we knew, no Flamens at all had been left alive in Gil—and yet here was Bekri, with the figure of the Lady at his throat.

  "Revered Bekri," I asked cautiously, eying his phalanx of supporters, "I do not wish to seem discourteous, but—if all the Flamens were killed—?"

  "How did I come to be here? Why am I not dead too?"

  "Yes."

  "Chance, Lord of Gil, or perhaps the Lady's doing. When my interrogation was over—that is, when my questioners believed me to be dead—I joined a stack of my brother Flamens awaiting our last phase of usefulness. Adornments for the lower castle walls. The festoons of carcasses remained for years—but enough of that. One of the Gilmen who was forced to load the bodies into wains noticed that I was still bleeding, and realized I was alive. Ignoring his own danger, he managed to smuggle me out of the city, where those with the spirit to resist Kishr nursed me back to strength. They realized my importance, you see; however young, I was the sole survivor of the Flamens left on the island of Gil."

  "So these others—?"

  "—were trained by me, in as much of the lore of the priesthood as I had learned and could remember. I call myself First Flamen; taking the title of Primate-in-Gil would, I think, be pretentious. We are not many—only thirty feel entitled to wear the green—but we have a large body of support all over the island."

  "The Web?"

  "Yes, the Web, my lord Tigrallef. Think of what a web is like—how gossamer, how subtle, how nearly invisible, but how strong, out of all proportion to the strength of its member filaments." He grinned lopsidedly. "I named it myself. A good name, don't you think?"

  "Oh yes, very apt. How many of you are there?"

  Bekri waved his stump vaguely. "It's hard to say exactly, but between three and four thousand—almost one in every hundred." I nodded, both impressed and saddened, remembering that the population of Gil before the Sherkin invasion had been in the order of eight hundred thousand. "Almost weekly we lose one to the Sherank, and gain another or two from among the people of Gil," Bekri went on. "The Sherank know that we're here, but there's not much they can do about us. They would have to put the whole population to the sword to be sure of suppressing us altogether. It may come to that someday, of course."

  Cheerful, very cheerful. From what I'd seen and heard so far, they were just the sort of doom-laden lunatics who would happily get themselves killed, and me along with them, just so long as they could get up a few Sherkin noses beforetimes. I shut my eyes and comforted myself for a few moments with my new favourite fantasy—that I was safely back in Exile, in the archives, reading about the exploits of Tigrallef the Great, Saviour of Gil, Finder of the Lady, Bane of the Sherank . . .

  "My lord Tigrallef?"

  "Yes, just thinking. Revered Bekri, I need to hear more before sealing an agreement with you. I am the twentieth Scion of Oballef to come to Gil. What happened to the other nineteen?"

  Bekri's ruined face twisted again. "Dead, most of them, may their bones bring forth flowers," he said flatly. "That is, we can confirm the deaths of most, and have seen some of the bodies. There are a few whose fates are unknown to us, though it seems a safe guess that they are also dead."

  "Like my father?"

  "Yes, like your father. I'm sorry." Bekri hesitated for a moment, then went on. "We know he was taken by the Sherank, captured as he tried to scale one of the towers of Gilgard Castle from the outside. Very brave; still it was a mad thing to attempt: we tried to dissuade him. No Gilman ever saw him again, alive or dead, but we assume he was tortured to death in the south dungeon, as—as others were, before and after him."

  I choked back the grief and certainty that was filling my throat. Of course he was dead; my mother was simply reluctant to be a widow. "Did you offer him your help?"

  "Naturally. We have made the same offer to every Scion of Oballef who ever reached Gil. Each decided not to accept our help, and to follow the quest alone."

  "Why?" That is, what did they know that I didn't?

  Bekri grimaced horribly. "The Heroic Code."

  I waited for more, but he had slammed his mouth shut. I sighed. "All right. What about the Heroic Code?"

  "Think about it, Lord of Gil. You know the Code?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Then tell me—what is a hero?"

  "The strong and good matched against the strong and evil," I answered promptly.

  "And what must the hero do?"

  "Defend the weak and combat evil through the strength of his own sinews and the power of his own pure motives."

  "You've memorized it well. But what do you think of its teachings?"

  I shuffled my feet. It was an embarrassing question. "Good in theory, I suppose, but it rather assumes that the opposition is playing by the same rules. And, to tell the truth, it seems to put less weight on succeeding, or even surviving, than on behaving as the ancients thought a hero should behave."

  "Exactly!" Bekri turned to shoot a triumphant glance at Handsome Hawelli
and the others. "It was not fitting, according to the Code, to accept the aid of the 'weak' against the strong; therefore, with varying degrees of reluctance, all your predecessors turned down our offer. We could not force them to accept our help, although we helped where we could without them knowing, as we did for you yesterday." He brushed off my surprise. "And they, poor murdered fools, threw themselves away in strict accordance with the Code which those murdering fools of Flamens-in-Exile had drummed into them. Now tell me, my lord Tigrallef, why are you different?"

  Hesitating, I had a flash of pure recognition—what he was saying was precisely the heresy I had always held about the Code myself, but was unable to say. Afraid to say, rather, such was the hold of the Flamens-in-Exile over the Scions of Oballef. The look of Arkolef's putrid, gangrenous leg came to mind, an apt metaphor for the practical implications of Heroic theory. I fumbled for words. "It—it never made much sense to me. I always thought that the quest should come first, and bugger how you do it."

  Bekri began to laugh, and continued until the others in the room picked it up and began laughing as well, slumping against each other, men, women and children, holding their aching sides. They roared helplessly until their laughter faded to hoots, and the hoots to giggles, and the giggles to a silence broken by hilarious hiccups. I sat morosely through the whole outburst. I didn't think it was funny at all.

  "Forgive us, Lord of Gil," said Bekri at last, wiping his eye, "but those may be the first sensible words to be spoken by a Scion of Oballef since the day of catastrophe. I'm happy to see you're a fullborn sceptic. In fact, we had high hopes of you yesterday, when you wisely hid yourself and worked on your camouflage instead of striding about the streets of Gil looking for trouble."

  I gaped. "You saw me? You know about that?"

  "Of course. We first spotted you on the corniche and trailed you through the streets to your hiding place. Not badly chosen, by the way, though you needed extra cover."

  "The wain?" Pieces were starting to fall into place.

  "Yes, we rolled it in front of your hole. And had our people ready to provide a diversion if any Sherkin patrol came too close."

  "I'm grateful." And stupid, I added to myself, and blind.

  Bekri gestured graciously. "Our hopes rose even more when you admitted thinking of killing me," he went on. "A proper hero, in true thrall to the Code, would never think of killing one weaker than himself, no matter how dangerous. We'd come to think of it as a kind of test."

  I stared at him. It was true. It was the sort of thing that would never have crossed Arko's well-trained mind.

  "And another thing," Bekri said, leaning forwards, "a few moments ago, you confessed to being afraid. Good. Properly used, fear is a potent tool, for there are dangers which it is better to face with respect than with blind courage. In the Web, there are no heroes—but there are many frightened men and women who do brave things."

  "I see." Well, well, I said to myself, maybe they were my kind of people after all; and if what they wanted was a careful coward, that was precisely what I was equipped to give them. I dredged another gestural sign out of my repertoire, the one that meant acceptance of help from esteemed inferiors. Anyway, that's what I thought I was gesturing. Bekri stirred with surprise.

  "I don't think you mean that, exactly," he said. Behind him, Hawelli, whom I was beginning to dislike intensely, barked with laughter. I realized, horrorstruck, that I had sketched the sign of blessing for a new mother on the birth of male twins; the old gestural system was full of subtle pitfalls. Blushing, I corrected myself. Bekri signed the appropriate reply. A sigh went round the room.

  "All right," I said, "I've agreed to accept your help. Now what happens?"

  * * *

  7

  "HOW DO I look?"

  "You look filthy, my lord." Mysheba scanned me critically, pulled a noisome cloak out of a chest, and draped it around my shoulders. I wrinkled my nose at the waft of ancient armpits. She seemed pleased with the result though, and turned away to wash her hands in a pottery bowl. She was Bekri's granddaughter, Calla's aunt, and one of the Web's greatest experts in the smelly art of camouflage. Bekri and the Council of Flamens, as the men in green called themselves, had insisted on sending me to her for one of her famous make-overs before setting me loose on the streets of Gil.

  Calla appeared at the door in her street clothes, looking twice the age of Mysheba. "Aren't you finished, aunt?" she said impatiently. "He looks quite foul enough already. The council wants him back."

  "Almost done," said Mysheba. "We don't want the Lord of Gil to stand out, do we?" So saying, she used a small bellows to spray some kind of rancid grease over my head, and energetically worked the resulting mess into authentic but itchy strings. In the large square of polished bronze that hung on the wall, I looked villainous, famished and grimy—a typical Gilman. My boots, with the troublesome knife-sheath, had been replaced by worn leather sandals; my clothes, which the Flamens-in-Exile had thought so clever a disguise, were in a heap on the floor.

  "Very good," said Calla. I looked at her glumly. What would the Primate have said if he could see me? I bet myself that Arkolef would never submit to being mud-streaked, greased-sprayed, daubed with artificial pus and stuffed into stained and stinking old clothes; but then, Arko was a proper hero and I was not. Which was, of course, the whole point.

  As a final touch, Mysheba bandaged my dirty hands in strips of yellowing cloth. "There," she said proudly. Calla nodded her head. "He'll pass," she said. "Come on, my lord Tigrallef, the council is ready for you."

  Together we trudged through the empty corridors of the vast, gloomy tenement. It was like a warren, full of branching hallways and odd little staircases that wound up into darkness or down into darkness, and an endless series of doors, some shut, some hanging open to show empty rooms with faded, cracking walls. Dusty light fought its way through a window-sized hole at the end of each corridor; there were old candle-brackets spaced along the walls, but all of these were empty. I wondered how many of the closed doors hid surprises like the council chamber.

  "Does the Web own this building?" I asked Calla.

  She shrugged. "No Gilman owns anything in Gil. But we control the building at this moment, and some others like it. The council never stays in one place for very long, though, because it's too dangerous."

  "Why? Do the Sherank come searching?"

  Calla caught my arm to guide me past a hole gaping in the floor in the centre of the passage. "Yes and no. They make random raids, mostly for entertainment when they feel bored—for example, when they haven't executed anyone in public for a while. We don't worry about those too much, because the raiding parties are easily distracted from anything we don't want them to see." She stopped and swung me to face her. "But be warned, my lord—we can never be certain. Sometimes it seems that they're looking for someone or something in particular, and there's no distracting them then. That's when they're most dangerous."

  "You mean—?"

  "I mean they have their spies. Even the Web is not completely immune from treachery, though we try to be careful. Watch out for that hole, my lord."

  I walked along behind her, wishing she would stop treating me like an idiot. She was as bad as the worst of my old teaching Flamens—perhaps even more talented in constructive humiliation, I thought, faultlessly picking my way through a rubble of fallen bricks. She wasn't even watching.

  She stopped by the foot of one of the little winding staircases, dark as the middle of the night, and lit a candle out of her pocket with one expert swipe at a flint. Motioning me to follow, she started up the stairs. "Watch yourself, Lord of Gil," she said, "some of the treads are broken."

  "Oof."

  "I warned you." She sighed deeply and groped for my hand, but something snapped inside me. I pulled away, straightened myself and sketched a sign in the air: a brusque and rather insulting instruction to an inferior to shut up and get going—and I got it right first time. For once, for a few seconds, Calla se
emed unsure of herself; then she shrugged, turned on her heel and led on up the stairs.

  I followed silently, being very careful with my feet and enjoying the savour of triumph, though it was already tinged with guilt. How could I honestly object to this woman treating me like a clumsy oaf? I was a clumsy oaf. Being treated like one had never bothered me before. By the time she stopped on a landing in front of a solid-looking door, I was feeling humble and had reached the point of berating myself for my rudeness to her. She knocked on the door in a complicated rhythm, then opened it and motioned me past her. Haughtily, she avoided my eyes.

  We were back in the council chamber, entering through a door hidden behind one of the tapestries, which was now looped back. Bekri and about a dozen others were there, all wearing the green. I recognized Handsome Hawelli, Jebri the Second Flamen, and a few others who had been there the previous day, plus Namis the music teacher and, to my surprise, the keeper of the inn where Bekri had picked me up.

  I walked to the centre of the room, acutely conscious of my hideous street camouflage. The council, however, looked pleased, and most lifted their hands or whispered approvingly—except for Hawelli, who was sitting on the edge of the group with his arms folded and a sulky look on his face.

  "My lord Tigrallef," said Bekri, "we've been discussing some ways in which the Web can assist you. First, we propose that you spend a few days exploring Gil, to see with your own eyes the state of the land and how the Sherank operate. We also propose to send Calla with you as your guide, since she's among the best of our street people—you can learn a great deal from her if you choose. Does this meet with your approval?"

  I hesitated for a moment, thinking of my gaffe on the stairs, then signed acceptance with the most formal possible gesture. Calla shifted beside me, obviously surprised, but whether at the council's choice of guide or my acceptance of it, I could not guess. I caught Hawelli's eye, and was startled by the flash of virulence across his face. A second later, I was not sure—was that hostility for me, or for Bekri?