The Lady

by K V Johansen

  “Holla . . .”

  He grunted. Her hand was winding its way inside his shirt, and he was going to annoy her by simply not responding to that, but she only let it rest there, covering old scars.

  “I bought the caravanserai.”

  “Urm.”

  “Stay awake just a moment longer. This is important.”

  He forced his eyes open, found her leaning up on an elbow over him. Beautiful, long, slanted eyes, smudged black with kohl.

  “Caravanserai?”

  “From Rasta. Half of it, anyway, with an understanding to buy him out entire when he decides he’s had enough of it. Partners, for now.”

  “You—”

  “We can’t take a baby on the road. Not for a year or two, anyway, and I can’t make another trip pregnant. It’s too dangerous. Talfan says that at my age I’m mad to think of it. I’m starting to—to listen. I won’t risk this child of ours. I won’t. So. I was thinking . . . and Master Rasta’s been talking about how old and tired he is for years now, and he’s got no heir, no kinsfolk at all. He wanted a partner.”

  “How?”

  “Holla, I’m old and plain and bad-tempered. Haven’t you noticed that everyone says you married me for my money?”

  “You’re beautiful. They’re joking.”

  “You don’t deny ‘bad-tempered.’ You never do, I’ve noticed.” She kissed him. “Y’know, you are so damned oblivious at times. It’s not all in camels. I’ve been putting it into various things for years, with the Barrayas and Xuas”—the banking families that invested so much with the eastern road and the ships of the Five Cities—“Well, I pulled it back, some of it, middle of a revolt or not. That’s all.”

  “All right,” he mumbled.

  “Holla!” A thumb jabbed his ribs.

  “I’m awake!”

  “You’re not. Are you—do you mind?”

  He blinked and tried to look alert, tried to get his thoughts into some rational vein. Saying, Great Gods, no, let’s run away to the Western Grass where there’s space and quiet and the gods leave their folk to think for themselves, was about the worst thing he could think of to say. Gaguush in a sod-roofed house, with a wealth measured in sheep and horses and blue cattle . . . not very likely.

  How many head of cattle in the worth of a caravanserai?

  “You’re going to run a caravanserai?”

  “With Rasta, yes, I am. You can take the caravan out, if you ever get free of the priest and his senate. Later on, maybe I’ll hire someone and we can both go, teach our brat the road. But it’s wise. I think it’s wise. We have to settle somewhere for the baby, and since you’re so deep into Marakand’s affairs—”

  “Gaguush, there’s a civil war going on. There’s a devil in the city. The gods are lost—”

  “Then fix it! That’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Fix it, because our baby’s going to be born here and it’s her gods—”

  “His gods.”

  “Oh, you know that, do you? Fine, we won’t name him Pakdhala, then. His gods you’d better save, his city you’d better set straight, because this is a mess, and you’ve got seven months before he’s born into it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh,” she mocked, and lay down again, tight against him. After a moment she asked, quietly, “It will be all right, won’t it? The Lady must know she’s beaten, or she wouldn’t be hiding. She’s afraid. She’ll run, or you’ll finish her once and for all, when she comes out of the temple again. You and Mikki and that damned Ivah, who’s turned out to be so great a wizard. The three of you together can kill her.”

  The gods of the earth and the greatest wizards of the time hadn’t been able to destroy the seven devils of the north, if the tales were true, only bind them in a deathlike sleep, and that was with the help of the Old Great Gods.

  The Lady wasn’t afraid. She couldn’t be. She was waiting. He didn’t know for what. Allies, if the rumours her agents leaked were to be believed. Jugurthos said the Praitans, even under a high king, never held together for long. Too quarrelsome a folk, cattle-thieves who couldn’t trust their own kin. Or she was preparing some new attack, something that would make the Red Masks inconsequential. She hadn’t really done anything yet that frightened him as Tamghat—Tamghiz Ghatai—had. If he hadn’t smelt her, felt her and known her by the shape of her soul, the weight of her on the world, he would have thought her nothing more than some powerful wizard turned necromancer. Except for what she had done to defend the temple, the fire on the walls. That was no wizard’s work, and that, he and Mikki and Ivah between them, could not find a way to defeat. He didn’t know what she was, who she was, really.

  Something pretending to be smaller and weaker than it was, a strategy with some aim he couldn’t imagine.

  He slid a hand down over Gaguush’s belly, no more rounded than ever, but he could feel the life that pulsed there, something separate, something that was not Gaguush, such a small and fragile ember, so easy to extinguish. All human life seemed that way. “You should have gone with Django,” he said. “Serakallash would be safer.” He didn’t suggest Lissavakail. Didn’t, when it came down to it, want his son born Attalissa’s.

  “At least here, I can stay in bed half the morning and have Tamarisk bring me ginger tea till I stop throwing up. Since you aren’t around to do it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Go to sleep, Holla.”

  But he had her shirt untied.

  “I thought you were too tired even to stand up.”

  “You keep talking. You’re keeping me awake. Anyhow, I’m not standing up.”

  “Oh? Something is.”

  Eventually, he did sleep, lightly and uneasily; even then awareness of the fire on the temple walls never left him, like a ringing in the ears on the very edge of hearing, that nevertheless won’t fade. In his dreams, he still seemed to be prowling the temple’s boundaries, walking again through Greenmarket and Templefoot and East Wards, with a band of ash, and of adobe and mud brick and even stone gone to glassy rubble along the wall that topped the sunken temple grounds. How the fire had reached such a kiln-heat without damaging either the temple wall behind or the houses across the streets, nobody could explain. By day the fire still burned pale, without fuel, casting a heat-shimmer high into the air, and at night it was a curtain that rippled the colour of an autumn moon seen through desert dust. The narrow streets that followed the temple’s walls were still passable, barely, if you kept to the far side. Most houses along the other sides of those streets and lanes had been abandoned now. No one knew, or trusted, that the wall of fire would not suddenly flare up in greater strength. Along the outer wall, where the temple boundary formed part of the city’s defences, the woods of the ravine, which had been a river so long ago it was hardly remembered even in song, were burnt in an ashy strip. There would be no return of green, not in the spring rains, not next year or ten or fifty years hence, no thistle, no bitter cliff-rose, not even the shiny veil of blister-vine. It was dead as the eastern shore of the Kinsai-av along the cataracts, which folk said, untruly, was the scarring of a wizards’ war. It hadn’t been wizards did that. The dog remembered . . .

  No. No. No, he did not.

  Not his war, not his folk, not his gods. But Gaguush wanted now to make this city their home. He wasn’t asleep but drifting between sleep and waking, restless, half lying over her as if to shield her from some attack. She muttered, “Holla, it’s too hot and you’re too heavy to use me as a pillow,” shoving him over so she could escape. “I’m going down. You sleep. If anyone comes, I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Not unless they convince me the Lady’s coming out of the temple.” Her hand stroked around his ear, down his jaw, a finger tracing over his lips. “Now go back to sleep. A few hours, at least. I’ll cook you some supper, too, before you go back.”

  Thekla cooked. Gaguush did not. But he hadn’t known she could read and write, either. He smiled, words too much
effort, and watched through eyes half-closed as she dressed again, muttering, Gaguush-like, as she hunted for odds and ends of clothing lost under the bed.

  After that, sleep did take him, engulfing him like deep water.

  CHAPTER XIV

  It was all falling apart, and Zora didn’t understand, the fool girl didn’t understand what she could do about it. Nearly a month, she had been besieged in the temple. No, not besieged. Her citadel. Where else should she await her champion? He would meet the Praitannec high king soon. Now. Today. And Praitan would be hers. Then he would return. She would bring him back to her, and the priest who had gone to be her voice would stay behind to speak her will as the Voiceless Red Masks could not; the armies of Praitan would follow the Red Masks. She might allow Ketsim to live; his Grasslanders, certainly, would follow her king-to-be. Grasslanders always followed a victor.

  —It has all gone wrong.

  So she was not besieged. She held her hand above her next move, that was all. Pointless to throw away resources she did not need to spend yet. Pointless, dangerous, to send her Red Masks out needlessly into the city, for the demon and the Blackdog to kill. Working through the Red Masks, she had long since rebuilt the spell of the divine terror. It had been no difficult thing at all to do so, a matter of a few days, and she did not think the wretched Grasslander wizard would find it so easy to tear apart, this time, when it came to the test. But not yet. Not here, yet. No, she did not reveal it by sending them out against the city. Only to be her eyes, she sent them, not to fight. She could not lose any more. Every death weakened her, leached wizardry away, she had none left but theirs, and she feared now her enemies knew it. But when the time came to send the Red Masks out openly again . . . the yellow-eyed wizard would be dead. Or of their number. She had not quite decided. Or perhaps she should even invite her to . . . but the folk could not love a Lady so hard, so worn by war. Besides, the Grasslander wizard would not be so easily seduced as the innocent dancer Zora had been.

  Don’t think of that. I am the Lady.

  The sowing of the fields, the summer days. These were the dances of hope and trust in the Lady’s kindness. Zora was on her third cycle through the pairing, and the santur-player had just brushed his mallets over the wrong strings, sounding a jarring discord. He would not play in the temple again; she would turn him out, priest or no. The Lady was dishonoured by such imperfection. Sweat trickled down her face, between her breasts, made her limbs slick, as she circled under the bright patch of daylight beneath the shattered eye of the dome, the blue glass flown to shards in her anger—anger, not fear—when Vartu came seeking her. Her feet were so light on the patterned floor. In the dance, there was quiet, the deep, restful quiet of the mind, where truth could rise and understanding blossom.

  Silent Red Masks stood along the walls, stood at every door, watching. Awaiting her will.

  —It is a lie. The devils lie. The caravans brought the songs of the Northrons, the songs of the Grasslanders. I heard my father sing them. The devils use. The devils devour. They have their own ends, and the wizards were deceived as I was deceived.

  No. She could see, yes, how it was, she, Tu’usha, was wiser than the girl. There were lies told against her, stories in the streets. Vartu had spread them, Ulfhild the skald had scattered the seed before Zora trapped her, or let her be trapped, and she had not seen. She had her ears on the streets now, her folk who loved her still, her priests, her loyal temple guard, who could walk abroad openly in the wards that still held true to their faith, Templefoot, Greenmarket, East Ward, and Fleshmarket . . . but Fleshmarket had fallen, and now its gateway into Greenmarket was barricaded and guarded against her folk. She had priests and loyal guard who dared the rebel wards; they were too trusting, those rebel street guard and the untrained militias, when a man or a woman said they had business, or family, and they let them cross over the walls, roof to roof or through the houses that straddled broken wall. As well, there were doors, more than one, in the ravine wall. Oh, it was so easy to send a man out, to bring word in, and supplies. They thought they caged her, but they did not see she sat in a citadel, watching them strut, kings of their little dunghill, while she sharpened her axe.

  —This is not the city I would have made. The folk are afraid.

  The priest should have died. The wizard should have been hers.

  —Hadidu lives yet. Nour lives. Red Masks sacrificed in vain. No satisfaction in that, no, she did not feel it was only the girl’s memory it was anger she felt, yes.

  It did not matter. Her champion would come, with his Red Masks and the Grasslander mercenaries turned to follow a true leader, and her Praitannec army, out of the east. They would sweep up the road from the Eastern Wall and teach the suburb it was Marakand’s, and the city would learn to obey their Lady’s word, yes, and to bow their rebel heads. The wizard of the Great Grass, the mistress of demons, would not be made Red Mask, no, she would be hung in a cage over the temple gate, bound impotent, and left to die over many days; the Lady would grant her water, but no food, and so her suffering would be lengthened, yes, and she would know her sin in rebelling against the Lady of Marakand. The Warden of the City would join her. The traitors of the senate would die, all the senators would die, those who defied her and those who cowered in hiding, who had let the rebels take their name from them, they would all die together, slowly, publicly, and this time there would be no forgiveness, no pretence that the Twenty Families had any say in the rule of Marakand.

  The city would understand its error. Soon.

  —I understand my error. I can’t say I was deceived. Because I knew. I was threatened, I was afraid, and I fell. Better I had died, better I had lived possessed as Lilace the Voice lived, and kept my soul. Papa would have been strong. That Grasslander woman would never have given herself away to this. I have sinned, worse than a harlot, selling my soul to keep my body. Gurhan knows it. He sees. He weeps for me.

  Gurhan is lost and will never wake. He sees nothing. Folly to think otherwise.

  The folk of the city . . . so fickle.

  They had loved her, adored her, only a few weeks before, and within days, mere days of that no it was hours by nightfall they had arisen in hatred of her they had turned against her they had betrayed their love—

  —Because I killed folk in the suburb. Not even outlanders, caravan mercenaries, foreign merchants. I killed Marakander folk. Not wizards, not rebels. They made me angry and I killed them and the people saw and they know I am mad.

  Vartu had done that, forced her to it. Vartu was his spy, sent to find her, to tear down her walls, to leave her naked to the stars where he would see her—

  —Why didn’t the stupid girl kill her brother, back when . . . the days are so clear in my mind, the canoe dancing up the long breast of the ocean and sliding to the dark valleys, and rising again against the sky, and the distant islands are only circling birds and a roughening of the smooth horizon of the sea. I remember—I don’t want to remember. Not my memory. I would have killed him. I know myself now, weak, foolish, I’m a stupid child trapped beyond my understanding, but even as a child I would have known such a wrongness should die, and that there would be no sin in a knife in the dark. Why did a devil, a power even the gods of the earth fear, how did she-Tu’usha fall into this mad and broken mind of Sien-Mor’s and not sweep it all away, burn her clean and rule her?

  Was am I she so weak?

  Because we are one and Sien-Mor is dead she burned he burnt her the fire ate her bones.

  —Then why am I are we mad?

  She shut her thoughts to the whisper, which was not hers, she had no doubts of herself. She was safe, safe behind walls, safe behind the barrier of the divine fire, even the Blackdog of the mountains, whoever he was had been what was he—could not pierce that veil to come at her, and if she parted it, so briefly, to let her true and chosen folk in or out of the temple on her business, that parting was always watched. The Red Masks would not let any enemy in. The Red Masks were true.


  The Red Masks were too few. She could not replace them without sending them out to capture the wizards of the suburb, who had either fled to the road or joined the rebels, and if she did send them hunting wizards, they would be destroyed by the Blackdog, and her strength weakened. She could not afford that. Their interwoven wizardry was her strength.

  Zora danced. The Red Masks watched. Every day, she had done so, since she sealed the temple walls behind her undying fires. The priests gathered in secret corners, out of sight, out of mind, they thought, and whispered. Temple guard sent out on patrol of her faithful wards did not all return. Deserters. Traitors.

  Vartu’s lies grew and grew, even though Ulfhild Vartu was lost, gone, trapped, forgotten. Storytellers retold them. The Lady sent temple guard to kill the storytellers, the street-singers, but now they were guarded by the folk themselves, the rebels, and knowing the temple sought them only made more gather to hear them.

  The streets said that Red Masks had burned down a house in Sunset Ward, where a hidden priest of Ilbialla had still lived and served his people, but the priest and his child had escaped, though his wife had perished. Proof they told lies against her. Hadidu’s wife Beccan had been long dead. Zora had not killed her, kind, sharp Beccan, who had let her help make pastries in the kitchen of the Doves. They sang hymns in praise of Ilbialla again, Ilbialla, goddess of the well in Sunset Ward, goddess whose care had been Sunset and Riverbend. A kindly goddess. A humble goddess, who did not take from her folk. Like Gurhan on the hill, who had dug out earthquake victims with his own hands. Where had the Lady been, that night? Where had her priests been?

  The Red Mask priests were no priests, the city said, and the old order of the yellow priests grew fat on taxes and tithes and tolls meant for the public good of the city. The rebels whispered everywhere. The folk listened. It was because they were hungry. There was still food, if you had money. She must remember to issue a ration from the temple granary. They had said it was empty, but that would be a lie. Her faithful wards would praise the Lady for it. The mountain villages sent nothing, had sent nothing even when she had held the Fleshmarket gate. The rebels had warned them, threatened them, they feared demons, or they were traitors, defiant of Marakand, they were—and the manors of the south road and the southern foothills, and the poor, proud, free villages of the Malagru were all denied her.