by K V Johansen
“Door?” she rasped.
Deyandara shook her head.
“Ketsim’s dead.”
“I know.”
“You weren’t worth it.”
“This isn’t my fault!”
“Bloody Praitan wasn’t worth it. Cheating Marakand. What is it with you barbarian tribesmen, always wanting to be kings?”
“I don’t.”
“Lug’s dead.” Chieh was crying, and her tears were dark. She was hard to see, though they crouched face to face. Someone else was coughing, the third man, but he stopped.
“Going to find Lug,” Chieh said, and shoved her away.
Deyandara clutched after her. Lug had been killed on the stairs. She had seen him lying at the foot of them, they’d had to leap his body, and there was fire between them, now. But Chieh vanished into smoke and didn’t return. She crawled until she found a wall, felt over it, but didn’t remember any open windows in the hall, remembered, somewhere, wooden shutters, but not where, and didn’t feel any. It was hotter in both directions she turned, and she couldn’t stand. She curled up small with her good arm around her knees, Chieh’s useless knife long lost, and tried to breathe through her shirt and shawl. It hurt.
It wasn’t Ghu who found her after all, but Ahjvar. She wouldn’t have cared if it were Ketsim himself who heaved her up in his arms and mashed her face into his chest, but Ketsim was dead, of course, and Ghu wouldn’t let Ahjvar hurt her, so everything was all right, and it was a good enough dream to die to. She’d rather it had been Marnoch, though. The flames roared and the heat seared her.
In a dream she wouldn’t have cut her lips on her teeth, banging her face on his collarbone as he leapt and landed rolling, and dropped her at the bottom of the outside stairs.
She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t breathe—she could, but it hurt, and she couldn’t stop coughing, but she wasn’t dead. Yet.
There were dead Grasslanders, dead Praitans, living men and women in the dawn, weapons bare. She got to hands and knees and sat back on her haunches like a dog, still gasping. The air was sharp and winter-cold in her throat. A white-and-grey dog came gliding in beside her, licking her face. Its fur went black and smudged as it brushed against her. She ducked away from the dog, even her head wobbling, and tried to make her swimming eyes see Ahjvar, standing above her on the first step. He was black with smoke, even his hair dulled with soot, his coat scorched, and the skin of his hands was red and swelling against the gold bracelets on his wrists. Leopards, she thought. Like his sword. Little leopards. Leopards of the old royal line, before Hyllanim changed his emblem to the bull. Her eyes ran with tears. The Praitans just stood. Not that many of them, not so many as she had seen in the night, but it had been supposed to be all over, hadn’t it? Ketsim and Cattiga’s heir, dying together in the fire, the southern pox wiping the land clean of invaders, the valleys a prize for whoever could hold them, and what could a goddess do but bless the victor? In Hicca’s place she’d have sent her men off to round up straying horses, and anything else of value that could be salvaged, before they abandoned this cursed place. Now they wouldn’t have to rake through the ashes for the gold about her neck. She wondered, if she simply twisted it off and threw it, would they fight over it like hungry dogs for a scrap of meat? Worth a try. Ahjvar couldn’t fight them all.
“Which one of you claims the kingship of the duina?” Ahjvar asked. His voice was little more than a whisper, but the silence was such that they heard. It resounded in her ears like a challenge, though there was no circle cut, there were no bards to witness. Her breath caught when she tried to tell him, “Hicca,” and the dog was there, breathing out warmth, still trying to clean her face, so that her gasping breathed in moist dog-breath, and she found the next breath easier. The dog grinned.
She didn’t have to be heard. Hicca stood forward, with gold about his own neck. “And why does a,” his lip curled, “godless and drug-crazed mercenary have any right to ask? Ketsim’s man. Traitor to your folk.”
“I wish I were godless,” Ahjvar said, and sounded as though he meant it. She could see why Hicca said drug-crazed; when she looked up, ducking the dog again, she saw how bright his eyes were, pupils too dark, large against the blue. He swayed where he stood, and it wasn’t her own feeble shaking that made it seem so. “I wish the world were godless. But it isn’t, and here we are, traitor to your queen’s heir, traitor to the men who kept their faith and fought in their queen’s memory, for the whole of the folk and the land, forsworn traitor to the invader whose boots you rushed to lick. Crow, come late to the field when even the ravens are done their feasting, to feed on the rotten scraps they disdain. You burnt the sick and the dying alive in their beds.”
“I defeated Ketsim. The high king will uphold my claim against whatever’s left of Marnoch and Yvarr the Seneschal. They’ve got no queen to follow, and you won’t live to sell her back to her brother. This is my victory. If the Duina Catairna has a king this morning, it’s me.”
Ahjvar laughed, which brought on a fit of coughing. He smothered it on his sleeve, and there was blood. “There is only one king of the duina standing in this place, before cursed Catairanach and the Old Great Gods. He is not you.”
He came past Deyandara, down the steps, and if Hicca had time or wit to raise his sword Deyandara didn’t see it. His head fell, body crumpling after. “Out!” Ahjvar roared, as with a yell the spearman at Hicca’s shoulder thrust at him. She didn’t see all that followed, but two more of Hicca’s men were on the ground, and Ahj hadn’t given back so much as a step. “Get out, run, before the curse on the duina takes you all for this night’s work. Traitors and murderers!”
They closed in about him in a rush, but there was a fog coiling about their feet, flowing around the corner of the burning tower, through the lanes between the smouldering ruins, ankle-high, knee-high, like rising water, cold as the waters from the depths of the earth were cold, and the air blew morning-cool, fresh and clean, for all the rising smoke. The dog sat back, head tilted to one side. Deyandara got to her feet, finding she could, as if the warmth of the dog had given her new strength.
The men about Ahjvar fell back, leaving him alone, chest heaving and wounded, but still on his feet. A woman walked up the lane behind with the fog running to twist about her like welcoming cats. Catairanach, dressed in the long blue and white gown of a queen, with the dawn sparking in her hair as if she wore a net of spiderweb and dew, or diamonds. Those of Hicca’s folk who had never seen her in the hall at some blessing or judgement would nonetheless know godhead when it stood among them.
The goddess looked around them, at the men and the few women, nodded to Ahjvar, and turned her back, gazing out over the ruins of the duina.
“Enemies,” she said, and her voice was like it had always been in Deyandara’s dreams, but real, with earth and water in it. “My enemies, but—” As Hicca’s people drew themselves up a little, “—I defend as I must, with the land and the powers of the land, and this epidemic was not my curse on them, but their own misfortune, in coming so vulnerable to a land where the pox was running. What king kills his enemies so, helpless in their beds? You did not even have the mercy to kill them outright, but left them to burn. What king demands murder of his folk and puts that burden on their souls? There is only one king left to the Duina Catairna, and he is Catairlau, Cairangorm’s son, returned out of fire, through death and long years, to make my duina great again. If you think you can kill him, with my hand over him and my blessing on him, you are welcome to try. But touch the Lady Deyandara at your peril.”
Somehow, such attention did not make Deyandara feel safer. She found the dog’s head under her hand, thrusting upward as if to give her heart. Something moved in the mist behind the goddess. Ghu, another dog at his feet, leading three stocky horses. He waited there, fading in and out of vision, Catairanach’s fog folding about him like a cloak. He looked very weary and sad, and he had a dark cut on his face.
“You don’t notice any contradic
tion in your lovely words?” Ahjvar said, his own broken by another fit of coughing. He spat, and his spittle was ashy black. “Every name you give, every curse you speak—”
The goddess held up a hand, silencing him.
“Go,” she said to Hicca’s folk. “Go back to your own valleys, your hills, unblessed, denied. Go lordless and unforgiven, and take this word to your fellows, too, who have set out to raid the hills for Hicca’s gain. Sleep in torment, seeing the faces of these enemies you have so dishonourably slain. Hear their cries in the night. And in a year and a day, if you live so long, come back to stand before your king, and ask his forgiveness in my name. Now go.”
Her face was terrible. She lifted a hand towards the gate, and they went, running.
“Every curse you speak fell on me long ago,” Ahjvar said. “Go away.” He swayed so, Deyandara went to him without thinking to put her arm about his waist. He was terribly heavy when he leaned against her.
The goddess smiled at them, kindly, as if she were some queen and they her lords, standing before her to ask—but Deya couldn’t have let Ahjvar fall. He braced himself on her shoulder. But Ahjvar’s defiance gave her heart. And rage.
“You said you couldn’t come into the dinaz,” she accused, and was startled to hear her own voice ring loud, clear and unchoking. “You could have come any time, you could have sent Hicca’s folk away before they set fire to it all. They died—they were my enemies and yours, but Ketsim died putting himself between me and Hicca’s spearmen. Chieh came back into the fire for me, even though she’d been willing to hand me over to Hicca to be killed, before. You could have come any time.”
“No,” said Catairanach, cold and reproving. Deyandara cringed under the look she gave, but Ahjvar’s arm went about her, so that they propped one another up. The goddess dismissed her but smiled on Ahjvar. “But you invoked me, Catairlau, you alone could do so, so old in this place, which was yours before these walls were ever built. You called me within the Lady’s ban.”
“Cursed you, I thought.”
“Love me or hate me, I’m still your goddess, and you called on me. Did you know the high king, the Andaran, has defeated the Marakander army, the Grasslanders who came before and the new force that rode from the west only now?”
“I know. I was there.”
“He will come here, with the kings and the queens of the tribes,” Catairanach went on. “No doubt he thinks to set someone of his own blood over a kingless land, one of his brothers, perhaps. You will deny him. You will ask him for his sister’s hand, and he will not deny you.”
Ahjvar’s grip on Deyandara tightened—reassuringly, she realized, and she took a deep breath.
“No,” he said.
The goddess drifted closer, hardly seeming to move. Her hand rose to touch Ahjvar’s face, and he flinched back, dragging Deyandara with him. The dog growled.
“Will you live with Hyllau still?” Catairanach asked. “Carry her in this twisted, perverted state? You’ve made her what she is. I never intended that.”
“You made what you didn’t understand,” he said. “You’ve twisted the world against nature. You’ve denied her the road she should have taken long ago. You’ve created a creature cut off from the strength of the earth and the Old Great Gods both. What did you expect? She finds what sustenance she can, all you’ve left her able to touch. And she was twisted to begin with.”
“She must be reborn, her soul clean and renewed. She will live again.”
“I would sooner kill the girl myself, here and now, than see her made mother to that soul, and by me,” Ahjvar said levelly. “I told you to go. If you say I called you . . . then I can send you. Go. I deny this place to you, these walls, this child of Hyllanim. Out.”
“Some night will come when you do not wake at all,” the goddess snarled. “Do you want that for yourself, or for my daughter? You loved her once.”
But she was fading as the mist sank. Deyandara was shaking, her knees weak, and when Ahjvar folded to the ground he pulled her down with him. The dog whined and nuzzled at both of them. Ghu was there, taking Ahjvar’s weight so Deyandara could free her arm and sit aside, head on her knees, weeping, she couldn’t have said why. Relief and exhaustion and terror combined. The white-and-grey dog thrust its nose in under her face, and the brown-and-black growled at the last of the fog.
“Come, Ahj. Up. We should go.” Burning straw floated down around them like the first snowflakes of a winter storm. The tower creaked and groaned in a rising wind.
Ahjvar said nothing, but he levered himself up by Ghu’s shoulder, and the horses were there.
“New horses,” he said, after a moment, while Ghu, like the shield-bearer Ahjvar had called him so long ago, took his sword from him, and cleaned it, and gave it back, and, shoving him towards the horse perhaps more brother-like than as a respectful shield-bearer would, held his stirrup.
“Stealing horses is very easy, once you get started. The last were too tired. These are fresh. I think they were the traitor lord’s. I’ve opened the gates of the pens, so the rest can find their own way out. Nothing living should stay in this place, I think, though the ghosts are all gone. Come, Ahj,” as if he cajoled a cranky, overtired child, “before the roof-beams fall.”
Ahjvar looked dreadful, now Deyandara saw him in full daylight, grey and gaunt and blistered with burns, wounds crusting and sticky, binding his coat to him.
But when Ahjvar was in the saddle with the reins in hand, Ghu took a moment to embrace Deyandara before he boosted her up.
CHAPTER XX
Holla-Sayan woke out of deep sleep and lay wondering where he was, and why. A bed, his bed, he supposed, since the arm before his face was his own, and the sprawl of black braids over it belonged to Gaguush. If they didn’t, he really was in trouble. The room was dark, and there had been tremors of the earth in his dreams. He’d slept the afternoon away.
All hells, no, not unless Rasta had spun his caravanserai on its axis. The faintest of grey showed through the piercings of the carved window screen, and the round-arched window under the eaves faced the east. He rolled from the bed and began dressing. Gaguush had tidied up at some point. Clean linens, a shirt that couldn’t stand up on its own, and the leather jerkin he hadn’t been wearing last time he went to the city. She woke and rolled over to watch him.
“I did try to wake you,” she mumbled, yawning, forestalling whatever he had been about to say, which might have been shouting, and probably unjust. “I cooked you supper. I said I would. I shook you, and you groaned and rolled over. Then you growled at me and went back to sleep. So Tamarisk and Rasta and I ate it.”
For a moment they were eye to eye, nose to nose, as he groped for his boots, set under the bed.
“Really growled,” she said, eyes wide, lacking his night vision, and very solemn. “I suppose I’m lucky you didn’t bite.”
He kissed her, since she was so close, her false solemnity curling into a smile, and she made him take his time over it. When he resumed dressing she grinned at him. “It’s the truth.”
“You should have thumped me.”
“If you were that tired, you needed to sleep. They would have sent if they needed you.”
“If they needed me, they wouldn’t have had time to send. Anyway, nobody knows where I am.”
“Then you should have told them before you came out here.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay so long.” And he didn’t bloody well belong to them.
“Insulting. Is it still night? It is. Eat some breakfast anyway.”
“Did you leave me anything?”
“Of my lovely fowl stewed with prunes and saffron? To sit overnight in this heat? No, we did not. But Rasta’s cook makes very good fried bread, better than Thekla’s, though I won’t tell her that, and I wrapped some up for you, because I thought you’d likely be waking by midnight and in a tearing hurry.”
“You’re beautiful and I love you.”
“Tell me that when you aren’t dres
sed and running out the door.” Gaguush pulled on drawers and a caftan, handed him his coat, and locked the door behind them both as they went out to the gallery. No one else was stirring, except a cat sitting on the railing. They went down the stairs and cut across the dark yard. It felt like trespassing, to push uninvited into Master Rasta’s own kitchen, but Gaguush seemed comfortably at home, humming as she turned a cat off the low table, finding her way by feel to a cupboard, sniffing until she found a stack of flat, oil-fried slabs wrapped in a cloth, scented with garlic and cumin. Holla didn’t remember when he’d last eaten, and cold and greasy as the bread was, he tore off chunks like, as Gaguush helpfully said, a starving dog. She had taken the clay cover off the hearth in the gallery before the kitchen and was feeding last night’s carefully conserved embers with dung-cakes.
“Tea?” she suggested. “It won’t take long.”
“I shouldn’t.” But he sat with his back to a pillar and watched her fill the kettle at the water jar.
She hadn’t put on a shirt, and the caftan fell loose. There was enough light for her to catch him looking. She put a hand over her face, then cinched her sash tighter. “Idiot.”
“What?”
“Smirking like that. What is it about breasts, anyway, that are so damned fascinating? Udders, that’s all they are. Udders and teats.”
