The Lady

by K V Johansen

  Because he was the one who had challenged her word and impugned her honour. He was the one who had most need to demonstrate loyalty now.

  “Yes,” she said faintly. “So far as I know.” Luckily that did not carry far. Marnoch’s mouth twitched. But then he went down on his knees too, and so did Lady Senara, stiffly, and Lord Goran, and Dellan, with their bench-companions, the wizards and Gelyn, and on in a tide outwards. Only Lin did not kneel, but a queen’s champion would not, in such a time.

  “Then you are our queen,” said Lady Senara, “by right of blood, by word of the late queen’s will in her own voice, and by acclamation of the lords on behalf of the folk.”

  “And when the land is free again, we will ask you to call Catairanach on our behalf, that she may give you her blessing,” finished Gelyn. It did not sound quite like the proper ritual for making a queen. Shorter than what she remembered of her brother’s ritual of accession following their—his father’s death, and the goddess should surely have been there. There was no heavy royal collar for the bard to place around her neck, either, no ancestral sword or spear to be laid across her hands.

  She should have spoken before now. When Catairanach denied her blessing . . . but they needed her. Four lords and the seneschal’s son to take back the duina? The tribe was already falling apart in ruin like an abandoned house. The high king wasn’t coming to aid them as a lord should aid those who followed him; he would be coming, when he finally felt strong enough to be safe, as a greedy neighbour, to chase off the brigands and plunder what they had left, to claim the land and rob the stones to build his own outbuildings. No wonder their goddess had already given up.

  It was the other way around, surely. The tribe fell apart because their goddess took no interest in seeing a new king or queen quickly named and blessed, to unite them against their enemy, and made no effort to fight the strange powers of the foreign goddess and her priests but pursued instead her own secret purposes of assassination and revenge. Catairanach left them sheep without a shepherd, straying lost on the hills.

  But it wasn’t over. Folk stirred and rose and began murmuring to one another, but as Gelyn paced towards her, carrying a folded dark cloth in both hands, her bard’s ribbons fluttering behind, they fell silent again, craning to see.

  “Lady,” Gelyn said. “We’ve carried this with us, hoping by Catairanach’s blessing to find you with the high king. It’s not the collar of the kings of the duina, which is hidden safe against a happier time, but it is an heirloom of your house and a token of your accession. Wear it as a sign you are ours, that you will do us justice, and be the messenger of Catairanach to your folk.”

  After an awkward moment Deyandara remembered she should kneel, which she thought was right; at least, she remembered her brother kneeling, when the god Andara brought his father’s collar to him. The bards stood for the gods, when there was need of a proxy. She went down with a thump and had an impression of braided gold and green-eyed animal heads, snarling, ears folded back, as Gelyn shook the torc free of the cloth, but she couldn’t see it as the bard worked it on, pinching a little in the process, and cold. Cats, maybe? Heavy on her collarbones. Not so heavy as the great breast-covering collar of the kings would be. The cord and the amulet bag with the token of her own god’s hill, the carved thornwood disc, was an odd thing to wear beneath a royal neck-ring.

  Gelyn raised her by her hands and turned to the folk, raised her own hands high and they cheered, crying out for Catairanach’s blessing, long life, victory, and death to the warlord of Marakand.

  So she was queen, by the will of the lords of the Duina Catairna, or at least those of them who had not run to their own halls. Queen until the goddess refused her. At least she was not queen for the high king’s convenience, which was what this ritual, and the royal heirloom, were really about. There remained only for Marnoch and the four lords and ladies to kiss her hands, and then to ride through the camp, with Marnoch and Lin at her side, Faullen and Rozen at her back, to show herself to the folk. Her folk, the warriors of her company. They knew her and they cheered her, but without Marnoch to lead the folk, they would all be scattered and hiding, waiting for their lords to fall to the Marakanders or to come to terms with Ketsim, one by one.

  She was Marnoch’s banner.

  CHAPTER IX

  Oats and barley and wheat were green in the crooked stone-fenced fields of the valley bottoms, where what earth there was, was sweet, as Marnoch’s small band drew closer to Dinaz Catairna, but the scouts, trying to thread a way through the long ridges of the high, bare hills that would keep them from friendly as well as unfriendly eyes, reported seeing few folk on the tracks that ran from village to village. There ought to have been more sheep on the fells, and cattle and horses, too, on the lower hillsides. The few they did see wandered on their own, without humans or dogs to herd them. One village the scouts dared to approach in the early dawn they found deserted, and a great raucous flock of crows rose to circle from the village-centre chestnut, fading away like a scudding raincloud over the hills.

  “New graves,” they reported. “And what looks like a single grave-pit too, very new. A new hall where the threshing floor used to be, up on the rise above, with a paling around it, but the gate was open and the place empty, except for wandering fowl and swine. Graves there, too, a few new, and a pit again. Not the number of carts you’d expect, and the houses empty of things like baskets and tools. They’ve gone in good order.”

  The lords were still mulling over that, when another pair of scouts came to tell of traces, two weeks old or more, of beasts being driven away to the northwest, sheep and horses and maybe wagons.

  “They’re trying to escape the Marakanders” was Deyandara’s suggestion, one made in desperate hope, maybe. “They rebelled, there were killings, maybe of the lords set over them, the survivors fled, and the folk are heading for the far hills.”

  “But to leave their sown fields is desperation,” Gelyn said. “And, I’m sorry, my lady, but I don’t think you can be right, not if there were no signs of violence.”

  Nothing beyond the graves, the scouts who had gone to the village said. No burning, no smashed storage jars, no slain dogs.

  “But that wasn’t all,” said the elder of the two who had found the trail of the village’s departure. “The tracks of sheep and horses, plenty of those.”

  “No cattle?” guessed Marnoch. “Catairanach prevent, not again. It’s been three years.”

  “Cattle straying abandoned on the hills, my lord,” said the scout. “Some look pretty bad, just lying there, not even switching the flies off. Snotty muzzles and running eyes. Dead cattle, too. I took a look, though from the carcasses alone it’s hard to say what they died of. The crows have been busy.”

  “Cattle-murrain.”

  “I’d say so. And the folk’ve simply given up and gone.”

  “Last night I dreamt of empty houses,” said the wizard Mag, low-voiced. “It won’t be only their cattle. There’s bad air here. It’s taken their Marakander lord’s household and half the village, so the rest have fled it.”

  A scout who had gone to the village wiped his arm over his face, as if to brush off some clinging taint.

  Lin shook her head but said nothing aloud to contradict that verdict; they pressed on without lingering.

  Bad air, Deyandara thought. It didn’t look the place for that; the brook curving around the village ran swift and white over stones, plunging downwards between the green and purple hills. The fevers that came from living on swampy ground or by stagnant pools didn’t make for a sudden filling of graves. It was the privilege of wizards, like bards, to speak in poetry, but this was no time to call one thing another.

  “Plague, or the bloody pox?” she asked for Lin and Marnoch to hear.

  “There’s been no plague come along the eastern road in years, that I’ve heard of,” said Marnoch. “The pox, maybe. It should have burnt itself out by now, though. I wouldn’t think there were so many in any village t
his close to the dinaz who hadn’t already survived it.”

  You didn’t take the pox twice, even if you’d only had the milder eastern disease it was said had first come from the desert road. Marnoch’s scattering of pitted scars were fainter than her own. He was safe, there was that, anyway.

  Abandoned fields and families wandering as nomads, with only their sheep to support themselves. The folk, like the folk of all Praitan, were few, and settlements scattered. There’d be grazing they could take without fighting, but for anything other than what their flocks could give them, they’d have to fight, and it wouldn’t be just the herd-raiding that was half a sport and so rarely led to deaths. There would be brigand-gangs laired in the folds of the high fells, come the autumn’s cold rains. The queen and the leaders of the folk of these particular hills should be sending a warband to fetch the wanderers home to their planted fields, but she certainly couldn’t spare any of her few lords and their companies to deal with it now. All she could do was hope they didn’t carry the murrain with them, taking a few apparently healthy cows or oxen along to drink from other village streams and leave dead on other village pastures.

  Even if Durandau did succeed in driving the Marakanders out of Dinaz Catairna, the fighting would be far from over.

  Marnoch’s band did swing westward again, putting more distance between themselves and the chance of Marakanders riding in search of the vanished villagers. The scouts later the same day reported a small party coming from the west and the villages of the far hills, Grasslanders and desert folk guarding a string of camels; Marnoch sent Fairu’s company to take them, since they couldn’t be avoided. They lost one man themselves, killed most of the Marakander mercenaries, and brought two back captive. The woolly, two-humped camels, loaded with wool and woven cloth, beer and cheeses, were stripped of their harness and turned loose, most of the load abandoned, since the scouts knew nothing of handling such beasts, but they brought back the foodstuffs.

  Deyandara was not witness to what went on with the prisoners that evening. Perhaps she should have been, but she thought of herself that night in the thunderstorm with the brigands, bound and helpless whatever they chose to do, knowing that a few punches to the face were the least of what she might expect. She couldn’t bring herself to go to watch. Marnoch had certainly not wanted her there.

  She did hear the woman scream.

  Lin appeared at her side while she was grooming Cricket, singing an old, slow, sad song of lovers parted by war, while Rozen, with more enthusiasm than tunefulness and certainly more lusty cheer than suited the song or her lady’s state of mind, joined in the burden.

  “Lord Marnoch says they are to be killed, and will you come, my lady?”

  She kept her eyes on a knot in Cricket’s mane, teasing it free. “Do I have to?” Low-voiced, her back to Rozen. Faullen was taking advantage of the early halt to clean the mud-stains from Ghu’s white mare, downstream in the brook of the valley bottom, but she had bench-companions of her own besides the pair of scouts, two warriors of each household of her five lords. They were never far away.

  “No,” Lin said.

  “Should I?”

  A hand under her chin, tilting her head up. No amusement, no mockery in the set of Lin’s mouth, the corners of her eyes, which made her look almost a different woman, older and younger in one. “They’re your enemies, executed in your name. Do you think you should?”

  She dropped her gaze again. Nodded, shortly. The torc made the back of her neck ache. She handed the comb to Rozen and with a gesture borrowed from Lin, swept her warriors around her.

  “What did they do to them?” she asked.

  “You should ask, what we’ve learned. Or what they’ve done, in the months they’ve been taking such tribute from the villages.”

  “Marnoch will tell me that.”

  “This isn’t Pirakul. I don’t see your Marnoch skinning men alive, no matter what he wanted to know of them.”

  “I thought that was a Nabbani torture.”

  “Really? Huh. I wonder who they blame in Pirakul? Anyway, they were beaten. The woman’s hand was put in the fire when they tried to tell us that they saw a large party of Red Masks and temple guard to the southwest, two days ago. A hundred riders or so. Marnoch thinks it true, that Marakand is sending more of its red priests to reinforce Ketsim against Durandau’s coming. Goran thinks it a desperate lie to deceive us and set us fleeing.” Lin added thoughtfully, “It was true, or both of these Marakanders believed it to be so. They couldn’t agree how many were Red Masks. I wonder how many there ever were in Marakand?”

  “What about the village we saw?” Deyandara asked. “What did they say about that?”

  “They didn’t know anything. Their own captain’s assigned village is to the west; they were escorting tribute to Ketsim.”

  Deyandara frowned. “At least the Red Masks they saw—they say they saw—should pass south of us, if they haven’t already. We should camp here another day to be sure of it. They shouldn’t have any reason to turn up towards us. How near do they have to be to detect wizardry, do you think?”

  “Do you want me to find out?” Lin chuckled. “They’re likely at the dinaz by now. If my queen wishes, I’ll try to find them, once these are dealt with.”

  These were a woman with long braids and a man with swirling lines tattooed in black on his forehead. The man’s hands were bound behind him; the woman’s were not, and one was swollen and red, blistered and seeping. She clutched her wrist with her good hand, and her eyes were glazed with pain, not seeing them. The man’s nose and mouth bled, and his eyes were swelling shut.

  Marnoch caught Deyandara’s eye, so she went to his side, face set not to show anything, to him, to the prisoners, who probably could not see, to any of the lords who might yet doubt her fitness, or their warriors standing about. Which had held the woman’s hand in the fire? She didn’t want to know. It could have been Marnoch. It could have been any one of them. But any one of them, all of them, could die, if they rode unwitting into Ketsim’s mercenaries out in force, or if they met the company of Red Masks. She thought of Cattiga again, astonished, bleeding, murdered, and Gilru running to his mother. She was able to look at them then.

  “My lady,” said Marnoch. “Lady Lin’s told you what we learned of them?”

  “Briefly, yes.”

  “Is there anything else, my lady?”

  Should there be? She shook her head. “No.”

  Marnoch gave a sign to two of his household men. They killed the woman first, striking off her head where she knelt. The man struggled and was kicked down to his knees. Maybe they had been friends, lovers, kin. It took two blows of the axe to sever his head. Grooms dragged them to a shallow grave already dug. So swiftly it was over. So easily.

  Lin had not even stayed to watch. She had walked a little away from them all and stood alone, under a leaning pine atop the ridge they followed, looking west. No, looking at something she held in the palm of a hand. Deyandara touched Marnoch’s arm and started up that way, but of course, all her spearmen, eight men and two women, had to follow, spreading out around her, and his as well. Lin glanced over her shoulder and turned to them, looking down again. She held a disc of polished silver or a mirror of glass on silver, maybe, with a complex spiral pattern cut into it of cobweb-fine Nabbani characters. The reflections of clouds like wisps of fleece and the green boughs overhead seemed to hump and rise and twist away down the spiral as Lin angled it, becoming a stormy sky, leaden, copper-lit, with swirls of grey that could have been rain or smoke. She saw Deyandara craning to look and tucked it away inside the breast of her coat, leaning back against a shoulder-high cairn of piled stone beneath the tree. It marked the ridge as a holy place. Some god dwelt here, revered by the folk whose pastures these were, or had once been, who were nonetheless Catairanach’s. There were always a few lesser gods and goddesses scattered across any god’s duina. Lin treated the cairn as a piece of furniture.

  “Devils take it, Lin! Don’t
scry for Red Masks, you’ll bring them down on us! Remember that scout.”

  “I need to leave you for a little,” Lin said. “Lord Marnoch, you’ll keep her safe.”

  “Nobody is leaving,” Marnoch said.

  “Lady Deyandara did tell you I killed a Red Mask at Marakand, yes? You wanted to know how. I still can’t tell you. But those Red Masks and guard from the temple have changed their course and are heading for the track up from the road. They’re riding against Durandau now. The high king is just south of the dinaz, and no matter how small the troop, he has no way to fight Red Masks. I swore to protect Deyandara, though. Not your queen and not your tribe, not this land, but her. Since she is your queen now and the heart of your tribe, I do serve that, and by what I hear and what I see, I think I can probably serve her cause better . . . doing what has to be done now, than I would by standing among a crowd of perfectly able warriors all eager to lay down their lives for her.”

  “You’re going back to Durandau?” Deyandara asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re not going to fight dozens of Red Masks on your own?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. We don’t know how many there are with Ketsim. We don’t know how many more there may be in Marakand. It’s Marakand that sends them. I’m going to the city.”

  “Tell me why,” said Marnoch.

  “What good does that do us?” Deyandara demanded. “You know something about them you haven’t told us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You guess.”

  “I might, but I hardly serve you well with guessing. I need to know.”

  “Needing and wanting aren’t the same thing. You told me that.”

  Lin blinked. “Did I?”

  “Yes. I forget why.”

  “Probably you were being foolish.”

  “Probably I was. Possibly you are.”

  “Deya, dear child, I am old enough to have survived any number of follies. I have vast experience of them. This, however, is need. I can only be in one place at once. I can defend you against Red Masks. I can’t at the same time defend your brother, or the goddess of this land, or Marnoch, or his old father up north, or the folk. Remember what the wands told. The Voice is dead, but the power behind Marakand is ancient and unabated.”