Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  He gestured with a sweep of his left arm, fingers straight. “There's men from Haft and Shengy and Seres aboard these ships,” he said. “They're going off to deal with a danger that threatens every citizen of the Isles—whether or not they can afford to pay taxes. The people here can see that, and they'll tell the story to others. We're rebuilding the kingdom at this moment.”

  Carus put his great hand on Sharina's shoulder, steadying himself against a sudden surge of emotions. “When I was king in my own name, girl,” he said, his voice and arm trembling, “I talked about my army and my kingdom. As the Shepherd knows, I smashed every foe I faced, smashed them and ground their bones into the mud—until the day I died and the kingdom died with me.”

  Sharina put her hand flat on the hand of the dead king. She kept her eyes on the harbor so she wouldn't embarrass him with her concern.

  “Garric knows better than that, and I know better than that now,” Carus said. “It's the army and the kingdom of everybody in the Isles. Kings who remember that don't have to rule with their fists and their swords. And when they die, it doesn't mean chaos for all.”

  Carus laughed, shakily but still a gusty release of tension. “Mind, girl,” he went on, “this skin is a borrowed suit. I intend to return it to your brother with no worse than a scar or two that he might've gotten tripping into the cutlery when he got up from the table. Eh?”

  A trumpet blew; the last trireme from the opposite arm of the Arsenal now floated in the harbor, ready to begin boarding. Only The King of the Isles remained under the shed roof on the near side, the great five-banked flagship that Sharina and Tenoctris would board along with Carus.

  “But until Garric comes back,” Carus said, letting his voice rise more than he probably realized, “while I'm watching the kingdom for him—”

  His hand gripped his sword and drew it in a shimmer of sunlight. The crowd bellowed in delight.

  “Until then,” Carus shouted to his immediate companions over the sound of thousands of throats, “by the Shepherd! the kingdom's enemies will die in the mud as surely as they did in my day!”

  Cashel stretched, enjoying the light which dappled the ground beneath the tall bushes. He'd awakened at sunrise, but he'd been tired and Tilphosa was worn down to a nub of the girl he'd helped ashore during the storm a seeming lifetime ago. This grove of giant blueberries had been a good place for them to catch up on their rest.

  Tilphosa had never been plump, but it bothered Cashel to see the way the girl's cheeks had sunk inward in the time he'd known her. Her alert interest in all around her concealed her condition while she was awake, but she looked like a victim wasted by the flux now when her head was pillowed on springy branches covered by a corner of her cloak.

  Cashel rose quietly and began shaking fruit from low-hanging branches. He stretched out the skirt of his tunic as a basket. To avoid the noise he didn't rap the limbs with his staff, but the rustle of leaves woke Tilphosa anyway. She jumped to her feet, her teeth clenched. She was holding the broken sword close to her body ready to stab whatever threat was approaching.

  “Oh!” Tilphosa blurted as she lost her balance. She toppled backward, trying to grab a tree for support.

  Cashel let the berries spill and lunged to catch her. He caught her all right—when he needed to move, he was a lot faster than people expected—but the jerk he gave her right arm might have hurt as bad as the scrape she'd have gotten on the tree bark.

  Tilphosa straightened, and he released her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'd been having a dream.”

  She smiled wryly, massaging her right elbow with the other hand. Without meeting Cashel's eyes she continued, “A nightmare, I suppose. About a snake trying to swallow me.”

  She looked up at him finally, still forcing a smile. Her left hand caressed the crystal disk on her necklace. “I don't think it was sent by the Mistress.”

  Cashel squatted, thinking he'd pick up the fruit he'd lost when he grabbed for the girl. He had to give it up as a bad job, because most of them had sailed out of the grove when he jumped. He rose and brushed his staff through the tips of the nearest branches. The twigs were heavy with ripe berries; they dropped like a soft hailstorm about Cashel and the girl.

  “I haven't seen any snakes about here,” he said, popping blueberries into his mouth by the handful. Tilphosa was more ladylike, nibbling each berry individually, but she was hungry too. “There aren't any birds, either, and that's funny. I'd think these trees'd be thick with daws and magpies, but I don't hear a single one.”

  Tilphosa had put the broken sword—the dagger, you could call it; the blade had snapped into a point of sorts—under her sash, but at Cashel's comment her fingers toyed with the brass hilt again. “Cashel?” she said. “Do these bushes just grow, or were they planted?”

  Cashel eyed the grove carefully. “I'd guess somebody was keeping them up, whether or not they planted them,” he said. “There's no fruit on the ground except what I knocked down.”

  He cleared his throat. Blueberries, even very big ones, don't form a solid canopy; the ground should've been covered in grass. Instead he saw ivy and wildflowers. The soft leaves weren't being browsed by animals, neither domestic goats nor voles and rabbits.

  “I guess we could get on, now,” Cashel said. The sun was halfway to zenith, time and past to be moving; not that there was any clear place to be moving to, "If you're up to it, I mean?”

  Tilphosa smiled broadly around a mouthful of blueberries; juice trickled from a corner of her mouth, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I'm fine, Cashel,” she said. “I was just dizzy from jumping up the way I did.”

  Cashel wasn't sure that was the truth or, anyway, the whole truth, but if it was what Tilphosa wanted to say, then he wasn't about to call her a liar. “Walking toward the east has got us here,” he said, “and it's a better place than some we've seen. I guess we should keep on going.”

  Tilphosa nodded with determination, her mouth again full of berries. She held the skirt of her outer tunic up awkwardly to carry a further supply. Cashel wondered if the girl—if Lady Tilphosa—had ever used her tunic that way before he demonstrated the method a few moments earlier.

  She set off quickly, apparently to show that she was in good shape. Cashel smiled. All it proved was that Tilphosa had a good heart, which he'd known before now. “If you'll slow down, mistress,” he said, “I'll be able to keep up with you. I'm used to following sheep, remember.”

  “Oh,” Tilphosa said, looking back in concern. She saw his smile and blushed. “Oh. I'm sorry.”

  “We'll get there,” Cashel said, as they fell into step together. “Wherever there is, I mean.”

  Tilphosa turned to look at him as they walked. “Where do you want it to be, Cashel?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”

  He shrugged as he popped another berry into his mouth. “Well, the way home,” he said, his words a little slurred at the beginning. “I'll get there. I've always had a good sense of direction.”

  He smiled broadly at Tilphosa. “But I guess I'll see you safe to your Prince Thalemos, first, mistress,” he added. “We'll find the place you want to be, never fear.”

  “The place I want to be,” Tilphosa repeated without emphasis. Her eyes were on the ground. When she looked up again her expression was hard. Her voice rang as she said, “Cashel, I can't trust Metra. I'm not even sure I can trust...”

  Her face worked like she'd bitten something sour—or something worse than that. She continued firmly, “I'm not even sure I can trust the Mistress. What if we reach Prince Thalemos and find he's in league with the Archai? They aren't friends to human beings, whatever Metra seems to think!”

  Cashel shrugged again. “I guess things'll work out,” he said. He didn't know what else to say. This was the sort of conversation that other people liked to have but he'd never seen much use for.

  “Do things always work out for you, Master Cashel?” the girl said. “Because I haven't been so lucky myself!”<
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  He'd finished the berries, so he had both hands free again. He wiped his left palm on his tunic and let his fingers find their places on the smooth hickory of his quarterstaff.

  “Things pretty much work out, yes, mistress,” Cashel said. He started the staff in a slow spin off to his left side to keep it clear of Tilphosa. “Maybe not at first, but after a while I generally find a way.”

  Tilphosa made a sound, a funny kind of whoop. He looked over in concern, but she waved her left hand at him for reassurance. She was laughing, he guessed, though it still bothered him because he didn't see why.

  “It's all right, Cashel,” Tilphosa said through her laughter. “I'll just trust things to work out, you see? So long as I'm with you, I'll trust things to work out.”

  Maybe because Tilphosa had asked if the blueberries had been planted, Cashel began noticing signs of cultivation immediately as they resumed their way eastward. There was nothing overt, no stone walls nor grain growing from plowed furrows, but a mixture of tulips and periwinkles wandered like a stream of red and blue across the landscape in a fashion that Cashel couldn't imagine without cultivation. The boxwoods beyond them, though not trimmed into a hedge, still grew too tightly for nature.

  “Cashel—” the girl said. Then, frowning, she went on, “No, I guess not. I thought I saw somebody behind those little trees, but there isn't room to hide.”

  Cashel looked. “They're pears, it looks to me,” he said. The trees were off to the right of the course he'd been setting, but there was no reason not to bend a trifle in that direction. He angled toward them, stepping behind Tilphosa.

  “Pear trees that small?” she asked. She fell in with him again, this time on his other side. He noticed her hand rested on the dagger hilt.

  The trees were no taller than his shoulder, but they were perfectly formed and full of ripe fruit. The soil had been lightly turned and composted around each one in a circle that would just contain the branches, about where the rootlets would reach. There was somebody here who knew trees, no doubt about that, and who used what he knew.

  “I haven't seen them like this before,” Cashel said, “but the fruit's full-sized. Here—the juice'll be good till we find a stream to drink from.”

  He twisted a pear from its branch and handed it to Tilphosa. As he did so, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head around quickly, but even so he saw only a motion rather than a shape.

  “Cashel, what was it?” Tilphosa said, her voice clear. She'd drawn her dagger.

  “I don't know,” he said, frowning. “It ran into the hollies there. I don't guess it could've been bigger than a rabbit and slip through them like that, but it seemed...”

  He picked a pear for himself without looking down at the tree. “Well, anyway...” he said. “Let's keep on going. I'd like to find water, and chances are there'll be a path or something we can follow.”

  Cashel looked about them and frowned. He wiped his fingers clean of sticky pear juice on his tunic before he took the quarterstaff in both hands again.

  “I don't think there's a tree or bush I can see that people aren't caring for,” he said as he considered the landscape. “There must be quite a village close around here. I've seen more wildness in the palace gardens in Valles.”

  “It doesn't look like a garden to me,” Tilphosa said, frowning as well. She wasn't so much arguing as making a comment.

  “It's a different sort of taking care,” Cashel explained. “It's doing the things the plants want, do you see? Feeding the roots and trimming off dead limbs, but not making things look like people want in a garden.”

  He cleared his throat. “Let's keep going,” he said. “I mean, if you—”

  “Yes, of course,” Tilphosa said, stepping off briskly. She didn't put her dagger away, though Cashel didn't feel anything hostile in the setting. He'd have been hard put to imagine a more peaceful place.

  The ground rose slightly; as soon as they came over the rounded crest they saw the village. It was laid out in a circle, more huts than Cashel could have counted on his fingers twice over. They looked like straw beehives, though they were woven of leaves instead of proper straw thatching.

  “Have you seen any grass since we woke up this morning?” Cashel asked.

  “I don't remember,” Tilphosa said. “Does it matter?”

  He shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. “I haven't seen any myself—nor any grain or reeds either. It's just... well, different from what I'm used to.”

  He cleared his throat. “That's probably why it bothers me,” he said. That was true enough: "different" generally meant "bad" to a peasant, whether it was the weather or the way a neighbor offered to pay you for the work you'd done for him last season.

  There weren't any animals bigger than bugs in this place either. Not except for the folks who'd built the huts, and he hadn't seen them yet except for maybe a flash in the pear orchard.

  He and Tilphosa walked toward the village. There was no sound of people and no woodsmoke either, which was surprising too. Smoke always lingers, especially since Cashel hadn't been around a fire in some days and his nostrils were primed to notice it.

  The huts were side by side, as close together as rooms in a city. Houses in Barca's Hamlet weren't big, but there even the poorest people had more space between them and their neighbors than the way these folks lived. There were no windows. The doorways were small—even for the size of the huts—and faced the empty courtyard in the center.

  Cashel walked around the curve of the village. The only passage into the courtyard was on the eastern side.

  “Is anybody here?” Tilphosa asked. She held her elbows close to her sides as she looked about herself, like she was worried that she'd bump something nasty if she wasn't careful.

  Cashel frowned, then let his face smooth. Tilphosa wasn't asking a fool question: she was saying that the silence worried her and that she'd like Cashel to say it was all right... which it was, as far as he could tell.

  “Somewhere close, I'd guess,” he said. He pointed to the drying racks fixed to the back of the huts. They held fruits and vegetables of all sorts, though he didn't see any meat. “Some of those apple slices haven't been cut more than an hour.”

  Cashel eased through the alley into the courtyard, brushing the hut to either side though he moved sideways. He held his staff high, to clear the domed roofs and just possibly so he could swing it if he needed to.

  “Given the size they are,” he said, “and the size we are—”

  He smiled slightly to the girl following him, for she too was a giant compared to the folk who'd built these huts.

  “—I don't blame them for being nervous about whether we're friends.”

  Tilphosa knelt to look into a hut's open doorway. She must not have seen anything to interest her, because she rose with a dissatisfied expression and faced Cashel. Her mouth started to open for another needless question, then spread in a smile instead.

  “Those are willows further on the way we've been going,” Cashel said, matching her smile with one of his own. He dipped his staff toward the east; not far away a line of trees rose above the shrubbery. “There's likely a stream there; open water anyway. Maybe when the folks here see we're not doing any harm, they'll come out to see us.”

  They started off again. He hadn't yet seen a path, not even the little tracks that voles made running through a meadow.

  “What if they don't, Cashel?” Tilphosa said. “Come out and see us, I mean.”

  Cashel shrugged. “Then we keep going, like we've been doing anyhow,” he said. “It doesn't look to me that they'd be able to give us anything we can't get for ourselves. They don't cook their food, even, that I can see.”

  Tilphosa smiled cautiously "I'd like a roof if it rains,” she said. “But sky's clear, and I don't think those huts would be much shelter. They're just dead leaves sewn to a frame of a few sticks.”

  “I've seen bird nests that were built better,” Cashel agreed. Squ
irrels made that sort of ragged pile, of course. He started to grin at the notion of a village of big squirrels ... and then sobered, because he couldn't be sure that wasn't just what he'd seen.

  He chuckled.

  “Cashel?” the girl asked.

  “I don't guess it was squirrels that made the huts after all," he said. “A squirrel couldn't keep quiet the way the folks around here're doing.”

  Tilphosa gave him a puzzled look, but she didn't try to follow through on the thought.

  Most of the trees ahead were willows the way Cashel had said, but the one in the center of the line had darker foliage than a willow's pale green. It was huge, its branches spreading to cover as much ground as the village they'd just left. The branches dipped close to the ground like the necks of cattle drinking; from some of them hung huge pods.

  “Cashel, there's a man,” said Tilphosa, pointing with her left hand. Then, her voice rising, she said, “Cashel, he's caught! Cashel, it's—”

  “Right!” said Cashel, but he didn't say it loudly because he was already moving and concentrating on what he was going to do next. His staff was crosswise at mid-chest, slightly advanced.

  The strange tree had small, rounded leaves, more like an olive's than what belonged on a tree as big as this one. The pods hanging to the ground from the tips of many limbs were bigger than those of any locust or catalpa, though.

  Almost big enough to hold a man, Cashel had thought when he first saw them; but he was wrong about the "almost" because he hadn't appreciated quite how stunted the residents of this region were.

  Most of the pods were closed and brown. A still-open one off to the right side was the same dark green as the foliage. Cashel could see from the ribbed interior that it was really just a giant leaf, not a seedpod as he'd thought.

  A child-sized man, naked and almost hairless, stood as the leaf slowly closed around him. His skin was the color of polished bronze; his eyes glinted like those of a rabbit Cashel had once come upon in the jaws of a black rat snake.