by K V Johansen
CHAPTER XII
“Something’s wrong.”
Deyandara looked up wearily. Chieh, the Nabbani woman from Gold Harbour, was scowling across the valley to the rising hill crowned by Dinaz Catairna. Deyandara had been riding in such a pain-numbed daze she hadn’t noticed when cresting the last ridge brought them within sight of it.
It was wrong, the way the very shape of the land had changed. As Lin—cold hells take her for a false and lying traitor—had reported, the south side of the hill had been quarried away into a cliff, and a stone wall topped the ramparts. A square stone tower of three storeys, its roof thatched—easy to set that alight with a fire-arrow—overlooked the wall at the south.
The Grasslander man, whose name sounded like Lug, tugged at Deyandara’s reins, drawing her horse closer. Not the white mare but some stray from the battle they had captured in passing as they raced away. She had woken from her faint to find the two of them shoving and kneading at her dislocated shoulder. Screamed in agony and fainted again. Now it ached mind-numbingly and her left arm was useless, strapped to her chest. Chieh claimed her father had been a surgeon and she knew what she was doing, the arm would be fine given time and rest, but Deyandara didn’t think she trusted that. And her right wrist was tied to her saddle, which meant she was going to pull that arm as well out of joint, at best, if the stupid horse shied at anything and she fell.
A day and a half they had ridden, and there had been no pursuit that Deyandara noticed, though they had dodged and twisted up and down the valleys. Neither had there been any sign of the rest of the Marakander mercenaries, either flying back to the dinaz in defeat or returning victorious with Marnoch’s head on a spear. She ought to be glad of that, at any rate, but it had become hard to rise above the pain to feel anything except a sort of hopelessness.
She was Lord Ketsim’s prize, and he was going to make himself king through her. Red Masks. That plan was a secret from the Red Masks. The Voice of Marakand and her temple certainly wouldn’t want Ketsim setting up as king in his own right.
“The Voice is dead,” she had said with satisfaction, but that was yesterday when rage still bubbled through the pain and exhaustion. “You don’t have a paymaster in Marakand anymore.”
Chieh had shrugged. “There’s always a new high priestess,” she had returned. “Anyway, if there’s no paymaster in the city, all the more reason for the warlord to take the kingdom for himself, right? But I wouldn’t believe that. If the temple meant to cut us off and abandon their plans for the Duina Catairna, they’d recall the Red Masks.”
How had they dared imitate the Red Masks?
If anyone had even looked closely, Chieh had said, laughing, they’d have been done for. Painted imitations of the masked helmets, odds and ends of red changed into just before the battle—Ketsim’s own folk had known nothing of any Red Masks riding with them, which had made their fear that much worse, a good joke on her own comrades, Chieh thought. Deyandara did not find it amusing. There was something shaming in knowing that it was her own belief, the belief of every man and woman there, that had so reduced them to senseless flight, Praitan and Marakander mercenary alike. Even the white mare had panicked, recognizing the look of what had so terrorized her at Marakand’s Eastern Wall. All a ruse to capture her, because Ketsim had known that the rightful queen was with Marnoch and marching south to meet up with the high king.
She was reminded of how it had seemed she was sought in Marakand, and how it had seemed more likely it was Ahjvar, a Praitannec fighting man, who drew their attention, and she only as his companion. Heir to the duina or not, she didn’t feel important enough that the Voice of Marakand should have been dreaming of her, but in Dinaz Catairna, someone certainly had been. Pagel, the soothsayer scout captured not long after Marnoch’s band set out. The Red Masks, said Chieh, didn’t after all kill but carried off all captive wizards to Marakand.
“Ketsim argued them out of taking Pagel, said he had better uses for him that served their Voice,” Chieh said. “They don’t say a thing, so no knowing what they thought, but they let him take the soothsayer. Not that he’s worth much. It takes that liquor the Grasslanders brew up from some root or other to get anything useful out of him. I tried to teach him coin-throwing—my gran did a bit of that—but it was no use. This business of throwing leaves on smouldering coals to get a smoke, it seems to me you might as well play with the dregs of your tea, which my gran did too and admitted she always made it all up. Less coughing if you use tea, and you get a nice drink out of it. Pagel said the queen was with the rebel lords, ‘Not the queen but the bride of the king, the mother of kings,’ he said, which gave Ketsim ideas, if he didn’t have them already. He’s setting up trouble for himself, I think, with Marakand and his sons, but that’s his look-out. Yours too,” she had added, generously. “But there’s years before your sons would be any threat to his. A lot can happen between now and then.” She had eyed Deyandara speculatively. “You’re going to need friends in the hall, as your folk say. I don’t have much liking for Ketsim’s sons.”
Deyandara had managed a nod. She had learned enough sense, she hoped, not to throw away a weapon when one was offered to her.
She tried to make herself take an interest now. Information. She needed to know everything she could, if she were to have any chance of escape, or of survival.
Escape to what? Marnoch, Fairu, Gelyn . . . they were probably all dead behind her, and the oath Lin claimed she had made to Ghu was worth nothing.
But now Chieh said, “Something’s wrong.”
“What?”
Chieh gave her a look that suggested she was half-witted not to see it for herself.
“No banners at the gate.” She spoke to the Grasslander man Lug, and when he nodded, urged her horse ahead, while he waited with Deyandara.
Deyandara shut her eyes for a while and imagined her brothers, all of them, at the head of an army, rushing over the crest of the long ridge to the south. She would fall weeping in Durandau’s arms now, if he came for her. When she opened her eyes again the day seemed colder, grey despite the sun. Nothing moved except some sheep, straying shepherdless along the slope below them.
That seemed wrong. Chieh appeared again, winding back between the snaking dykes that made the approach to the dinaz gate a trap for the attacker. She waved her arm in broad sweeps. Lug grunted—he mostly seemed to grunt, or maybe that was what the Grasslander tongue was meant to sound like—and put the horses into a trot down across the valley bottom, over the stream, and up to meet her.
They talked together anxiously in the speech of the western road. Lug drew out a little pouch on a thong about his neck and kissed it before hiding it away under his shirt again. In reaction, Deyandara’s free hand went to her own amulet, the carved disc of thorn from Andara’s hill, but her bonds wouldn’t let her raise her hand so far.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Trouble,” said Chieh. “Come on. Your lord needs you. Maybe it will make a difference.”
She spoke to Lug again, and they rode forward together, with Deyandara in the middle. Voices carried, as they approached the gate itself, out of the muffling baffles of the dykes. Shouting. Grasslander.
She sat back hard, and the war-trained horse stopped, braced a moment against Lug’s tugging, till he slapped it.
“What kind of trouble?” she demanded.
“You know what I said about Ketsim’s sons? Son trouble.” Chieh frowned. “We’ve only been gone a week, Lug and I. Everything was fine when we left, or my lord would never have sent us. He needs his tent guard about him, with this lot. Someone said there’s fever in the dinaz, too.”
Fever . . .
“What kind of fever?” she asked sharply, and Chieh, native Over-Malagru like herself, with a few faint silvered pock-marks on her cheeks, which were hardly noticeable, the eye distracted by some longer, ritualistic slashes, turned a sour smile on her.
“Your guess is as good as mine, at this point. Is it true there w
as a curse on this land before we ever came?”
“Yes,” said Deyandara.
“That explains a lot. We should have gone west. I’m going to cut your hand free. You’re going to smile nicely at Ketsim—he’s the man on the steps—like a proper bride rescued from the rebels with her brother’s blessing, and you’re not going to bolt for the gate or shout at any Praitans you see or spit in his face, right? There’s enough here still loyal to Ketsim to make mincemeat of you, and the rest will make mincemeat of you anyway, if you don’t have our protection.”
Deyandara, dry-mouthed, nodded. Chieh was as good as her word, and, Deyandara’s wrist cut free, sheathed her knife and drew her sabre, shouting something as they emerged from between the gates.
From inside, Deyandara would not have recognized the place. The round, dry-stone walled houses with their thatched roofs were Praitan enough, but they were marshalled in rows, occupying only a small area of the scorched and weed-grown ground, and none had any wattle-fenced vegetable-garden or fruiting bushes about it; no hens scratched in the lanes, no children scampered about. Most of it, especially near the gate, was given over to paddocks for horses and camels. They rode down the central lane, turned sharply, and came to another open space where mounted riders on horses and camels milled about the foot of the tower she had seen rising above the walls. Banners—presumably the ones Chieh had missed at the gate—drooped from several spears, long scarves of brilliant orange.
Men and women turned at Chieh’s shout, hostile faces, mostly Grasslanders, a few Nabbani or Praitan, a few Marakanders or tattooed desert folk.
One man stood alone in the doorway of the tower, with spearmen ranged below on the stone stairs. He folded his arms, smiled, and roared something. Deyandara clenched her teeth and swallowed. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t snatch for her reins to wheel the horse away, either. This wasn’t the time. Not yet.
Ketsim—that must be he—had the look of a stout man who’d lost too much weight too quickly, his face sagging, maybe ageing him past his due. His cheeks were marked with parallel slashes that had left scars deep enough to stop his beard growing there, the same deliberate scars that marked Chieh’s face, and Lug’s. His hair and skin and eyes were all light brown like just-turned beech-leaves, but near his head his many long braids had turned white. He wore bears’ teeth clattering in the ends of braids, a bright cloak of Praitannec plaid over a leather jerkin, and no shirt, so that his arms showed the same fleshiness-gone-slack as his face.
“He’s saying that your coming is proof of the alliance with your brother, that the Marakanders are soft and priest-ruled and will never even challenge us.” Chieh kept close at her side. Ketsim kept speaking, against a low undertone of other voices. Deyandara wasn’t the only one there who didn’t speak Grasslander, or the tongue of the western road, or whatever this was. “And he says that now you’ve come, Catairanach will bless him and bless the land and lift her curse from it, they don’t need to fear the fever. . . . Cold hells, I don’t like the sound of that. Now his eldest son—that’s him there, with the beard dyed with henna—is saying that the Praitans have always known the land was cursed, and the Voice of Marakand knew it, and that’s why the temple sent foreigners to do the fighting for them, so the curse would fall on us rather than Marakand, and they could reap the spoils after the land was barren of folk—he’s a fool, what’s here worth fighting for? All Marakand’s ever wanted is an easy route to the iron of the forest kingdoms, and that trade vanished east as soon as you surrendered to us. They won’t be half so easy a conquest. And look, that’s a man of the Marakander temple guard right beside him, smiling, he doesn’t have any idea what’s being said. So Siman, that’s my lord’s son, now he’s saying he’s not keeping good men and women here to die, now that the Red Masks have abandoned Ketsim and gone to their Marakander captain—Old Great Gods, is that what’s set spark in the tinder? He and his brothers are going to fight for the captain from the city, who isn’t afraid to move against the king, but then they’ll go to Marakand and demand what’s owing to them, and go home to the Grass wealthy; they’ve had nothing but ill-luck since the Lake-Lord died, and his father’s a fool for thinking he could ever wear those boots.”
Now both men were shouting at once. Chieh took Deyandara’s reins and said something urgent to Lug, who nodded and forced his way ahead of them. Deyandara was glad enough to have the mercenaries guarding her; there was a lot of jeering at her and jostling of her horse, as if she were somehow an agent of all this. The man from the temple guard gave her an intense look. Scuffling fights broke out, but more closed up with Chieh and Lug, though Praitan voices among even those said things like “That’s one in the eye for old Yvarr, thought he’d snagged her for his dog-loving son, didn’t he?”
That snapped her out of her witless morass. She looked for those faces, committing them to memory, and she let them see her doing so. Traitors.
“Down,” Chieh ordered, and Lug was there to grab her, bustle her up the steps with Chieh at her back, the horses left to others. Ketsim put out a hard arm and crushed her to his side, fingers digging in. He looked down at her, flushed and sweating, now she saw him close to, and grinned, saying something.
“Welcome to Dinaz Catairna, princess,” said Chieh. She gave her lord a nod, stared, and her face seemed to lose its colour.
Camels cried, horses whinnied, men and women shouted, but it didn’t turn into war then and there; they sorted into a rough order behind the orange banners and poured away through the lanes towards the gate, mocked and jeered at by others just as much as Deyandara had been. Ketsim’s loyalists came swarming back then, cheering, brandishing spears, wheeling horses and camels as if they’d won some victory, driven the rebels away, though the son—sons—had taken the banners and by far the great numbers with them.
“That,” said Chieh, her voice unsteady, “was Ketsim being deposed as warlord of the orange banners, and it’s a title his fool sons are going to find he lost his claim to long ago, for all his bragging otherwise, if they ever make it past Marakand alive and ride beneath those rags on the Grass.” Ketsim raised his voice again, a hand in the air, speaking. More cheering. “He says, what’s a chieftain of the Grass compared to the king of a land rich in grazing and the tolls of the great trade roads, and brother by marriage to the high king Over-Malagru. He says, Durandau is marching to your wedding and this new captain it’s said has come from Marakand is nothing but a soft-handed priest, and Durandau will bring you his head as a wedding gift.” Then she laughed, a bit wildly. “How long till you’re a widow, my lady? You remember I’ve stood your friend in this, when you take back your land.”
Deyandara swallowed hard and licked dry lips, still looking up into Ketsim’s fevered face, with the first signs of the rash already burning in his skin. In a day or two he would be covered in stinking, pus-filled boils, if he were blessed by the Old Great Gods. He might live, if he survived for a fortnight, long enough for the scabs to come. If not, it would be the blood breaking free and weeping under his skin, flushing him black, with no blisters oozing to expel the poisons, and he would be dead within a week.
“A friend?” she said. “Maybe. See that you remember to be one, then.” She tried to smile as the Leopard might have.
There was a strange, nightmare quality to the wedding feast, if that was what Ketsim thought it. Two long tables were arrayed down either side of the ground floor of the tower, with a third across the wall opposite the door, the high table for Ketsim, his bride, and the favoured lords of his tent guard, which included Chieh and Lug. Others of that guard, not feasting, stood armed behind him, and held once again the gates of the dinaz, but Chieh and Lug had served well and the celebration was in part theirs. They were chiefs of the queen’s tent guard now, her bench-companions, she was given to understand. Queen, as Ketsim used it, did not mean ruler, but merely the king’s lady. A new banner to replace his orange rags.
Deyandara, bathed under Chieh’s watchful eye, her armour laid
aside and fresh clothes found for her somewhere, strange loose embroidered shirt and baggy black trousers, her left arm in a clean linen sling bound across her ribs, ate bread and sipped water they brought from Catairanach’s spring, offering it as though they thought it had some significance to do so, although the mercenaries and their Praitan traitors drank wine. The neck of her shirt was unlaced, the blue plaid shawl Chieh had brought her pinned low on her breast with an admittedly fine brooch of gold and turquoise, Ketsim’s orders again, to show the golden torc. Her hair was combed and her braids coiled around her head, like a married woman’s, not a bride’s loose cascade, and there were no flowers woven into it, but she didn’t argue. The Praitans snickered at that. A widow might wear her hair so at a second marriage; it implied she was no maiden bride, and she blushed for that, ashamed that she could care, with what was to come. Chieh drank far too much. There was an empty place left between Ketsim and Deyandara at the high table, for the goddess, who did not, despite Deyandara’s stilted praying at Ketsim’s order, appear to bless them. Or to save her.
Ketsim told his people that Deyandara had come with her brother’s blessing, that they were now allied with the high king of all Praitan against Marakand, that come morning Durandau would be marching from his camp a mere twenty miles to the southeast to join them; they would quash the rebel lords and drive his traitor sons from the land, with the blessing of Catairanach to strengthen them.
But his sons had ridden out to join some Marakander force in fighting her brother. Durandau wouldn’t be coming, even if Ketsim, trusting in Chieh’s and Lug’s success, had sent some message announcing her capture and this mockery of a wedding. There were Red Masks, real ones, out there. Durandau, and Elissa and Lord Launval the Younger, any of her other brothers who had ridden with the high king, all would be killed by them. Deyandara blinked rapidly and swallowed to stop the tears spilling from her eyes. She wouldn’t let Ketsim think she was weeping for fear of him. He brushed the back of his hand over his moustaches and looked over at her assessingly. The cheering seemed more due to the wine and a desire to believe than to any confidence in him. The Praitan lords murmured together, their eyes on Deyandara as well. A prize for the snatching, the moment the warlord’s grasp faltered. They’d seen the fever and the rash on him as clearly as she had. Lug watched them, narrow-eyed, but staggered out from the hall halfway through the meal, greasy and sweating in the face. He had eaten little and drunk less. As Chieh’s gaze followed him anxiously and Ketsim turned to make what was probably some coarse Grasslander joke about men who couldn’t hold their wine, Deyandara leaned to watch him as well and slid the knife from Catairanach’s place into her sling.
