The women and the warlords coaaod-3

by Hugh Cook

  Haveros wished Lord Alagrace had not involved his father in this business. What had the old fool been thinking of, calling Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk together? He should have realized that was the worst possible thing he could have done. The old man was slipping.

  Haveros reached the exit, and departed from Karling Drask, scarcely acknowledging the salutes of the guards on duty there. The sun was bright, the sky high: it was a good day to die.

  ***

  Alone in a frost-cold room, Yen Olass woke. There was someone outside the screen. 'Who is it?' she said.

  Was someone about to demand a reading? That would be unusual. While Yen Olass sometimes gave readings of other people living in tooth 44, most of them observed the conventions and made appointments well in advance. Nevertheless, while unusual, it would not be unprece^ dented; Yen Olass had no right to deny any patron at any hour of the day or night.

  Her visitor slipped round the screen, entering the room: it was only Nuana.

  'Where have you been?' said Nuana.

  'Molychosh,' said Yen Olass curtly, using the Eparget word which meant 'pasturing', and, by extension, denoted retirement or a holiday.

  'Sa?!' said Nuana, using the generalized expression for surprise and disbelief. 'An oracle, pasturing? Since when did the Sisterhood treat you so sweetly?’

  'What do you want?' said Yen Olass.

  Her voice was sharp. She had more than enough to cope with today, without being bothered by Nuana.

  'You know what I want.’

  'I haven't got it.’

  'You must get it!’

  'I don't for you or anyone.' said Yen Olass, stretching, allowing herself to luxuriate in the quilted warmth of her bed.

  'He beats me,' said Nuana. 'Because you don't get it, he beats me.’

  'Get out,' said Yen Olass.

  But Nuana Nanalako, a sun-dark Southsearcher woman, was not disposed of that easily.

  'He doesn't just beat me, either,' said Nuana.

  'You heard me,' said Yen Olass. 'Get out!’

  Her cat Lefrey, awakened by these female voices, stirred, stretched, then curled down deeper into the layered warmth of the featherbed dreamquilt.

  'You're the lucky one,' said Nuana, advancing. 'He gave you away. You never had to…’

  'What?’

  'He's a filthy old man,' said Nuana.

  Yen Olass got out of bed and stood on the stone floor in her sleep-shift, shivering in the biting morning chill.

  'You get out of here,' said Yen Olass, 'or I'll rip your face apart.’

  Yen Olass was bigger and stronger than Nuana. And she was angry. After being nagged by Nuana for half a season, Yen Olass had had enough. Unless Nuana retreated – now! – there would be a regular scratching match.

  Nuana, confronted by an angry and advancing oracle,

  broke and ran. They were both slaves, but if they were caught brawling, Nuana would be the one who went under the spikes. Even the high-born could not lay hands on an oracle with impunity. When Nuana had gone, Yen Olass stood trembling with anger.

  Not for the first time, Yen Olass wished she had a proper door which she could close and bolt against the world.

  ***

  Elsewhere, the warrior Chonjara was already up and about. He had been sharpening a battle-axe. Now he tested the blade: and was satisfied.

  ***

  Alone in her room, Yen Olass attended to her ablutions, then broke her fast with a barley-meal cake. All things considered, she would rather have been in her cave to the north, eking out a bare existence with pemican and milk curds.

  With breakfast over, Yen Olass settled her mind by meditation, contemplating the everspan slumber of the bubbles of light encapsulated in her piece of amber, which was one of the few beautiful things she owned.

  Her day was commanded by a single duty, which was to attend a duel at the Enskandalon Square. Seeking to disarm a possible conflict between Haveros and Chonjara, Lord Alagrace had banqueted the fathers of those two famous warriors, hoping that he could persuade the fathers to tell the sons to end their quarrel. Instead, the fathers had taken up that quarrel themselves, and were now preparing to fight to the death.

  Before combat, Yen Olass would give a reading for the fighters. This was no delicate matter of statecraft or high politics; she only had to provide two arrogant old men with an excuse to apologize to each other, and thus to evade the intolerable demands of honour.

  With her meditations finished, Yen Olass donned her outdoor clothes, tucked a rug under her arm and picked up her nordigin, the lacquered carrier box safeguarding her Casting Board and her 365 Indicators. Thus equipped, she made her way to the Enskandalon Square. She was the first to arrive: there was no other life in the square except for a few old women, dressed in black, who were sweeping away the snow on the far side of that empty expanse of white.

  Yen Olass had arrived very early, because that was her duty: the Sisterhood believed that an oracle should avoid the temptation of making a grand entrance, and accordingly ruled that an oracle should arrive first, wherever possible. She unfolded her rug of double-layer yaquern fur, and settled herself to wait.

  After a while, someone entered on the far side of the Enskandalon Square. Slowly, the figure trekked across the snow, eventually revealing itself as the text-master Eldegen Terzanagel. That worthy was dressed in grey furs; his hair was cropped short and dyed grey if it was not grey by nature; he wore a severely-disciplined short-cropped grey beard, and about his garments hung a rope of grey beads, a tuft of grey feathers and one skull, painted grey.

  'Is that you?' said Terzanagel.

  'Whom were you seeking?' said Yen Olass coldly.

  'So it's you,' said Terzanagel, her voice having confirmed an identity which had been put in doubt by snuggling furs and three wrap-around scarves. 'Did Nuana speak to you?’

  'Your whorebit slave intruded on my quarters this morning,' said Yen Olass. 'Send her again, and you'll get her back with her face torn off.’

  'Yen Olass,' said Terzanagel, managing to sound hurt. 'Why so fierce? Haven't I always done well by you?’

  In a sense, he had. When Yen Olass had arrived in Gendormargensis as part of the plunder from Monogail,

  Terzanagel had purchased her at auction. This wilful slavegirl had then resisted his advances – to be precise, she had bitten his penis, drawing blood, and had punched him in the testicles. He could have had her skinned alive for that, and many men would have done so without hesitation; however, instead of taking revenge, he had donated her to the Sisterhood, and had paid for the five years of study at the Imperial School needed to equip her to be an oracle instead of just one of the Sisterhood's working slaves.

  However, Yen Olass had suffered badly when she had been initiated into the Sisterhood. Besides:

  'Anything you did was for your own purposes,' said Yen Olass.

  She knew very well that Terzanagel's lifetime ambition was to journey to the Stepping Stone Islands of the southern continent, Argan, so he could complete his research on the life and times of that famous poet of antiquity, Saba Yavendar. Nuana Nanalako came from that region, and Terzanagel, needing someone to teach him the local dialect, had spent two years and a lot of money acquiring that Southsearcher woman.

  Unfortunately for Terzanagel, the law forbade text-masters to leave Tameran; to fulfil his ambitions, he constantly sought favour and influence, ^nd his every act of good citizenship was calculated to further this quest. It was said that the Sisterhood could not be bribed; nevertheless, ambitious men did well to ingratiate themselves with that school of oracles.

  'Yen Olass, I'm not asking much. All I want is a map.’

  'Patience melts snow,' said Yen Olass, which was a local idiom meaning all things come to those who wait.

  Yen Olass, I don't have much time. I'm an old man.’

  'Tratz!' said Yen Olass, using a word meaning gelding's testicles – or, to translate idiom into idiom, horse feathers.

  'I'm sixty years ol
d!’

  'My great grandfather was ninety on the day he died – and he died fighting. I saw.’

  Terzanagel obviously had more to say, but was silent, for someone else was approaching. Footsteps crunched over the snow behind Yen Olass; she did not move, but as the newcomer entered her field of vision she saw it was the Ondrask of Noth.

  Today, the high priest of the horse cult was dressed in his full ceremonial regalia. He wore animal skins garnished with a gaudy array of rainbow feathers, beads, skulls, miniature knives and obsidian arrowheads, and, even on a day like this, when the cold tended to subdue most smells, he stank generously. Today, the smell of rancid fat was dominant.

  'Brother!' said the Ondrask, embracing Terzanagel.

  'Brother,' responded Terzanagel, as ritual required; he engaged the Ondrask's embrace with something less than enthusiasm.

  They were brothers in name only; the ritual demanding their embrace celebrated the historical links between the priesthood of Noth and the modern-day text-masters, links which the text-masters, for their part, would have been happy to forget.

  While the Ondrask did his best to prolong the embrace – knowing exactly how it discomforted the text-master – General Chonjara arrived. This fierce, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five was overshadowed by a hulking heavyweight bruiser – Karahaj Nan Nulador, his bodyguard. Nan Nulador now dropped down on one knee in front of Yen Olass.

  'No,' said Yen Olass.

  'Give him what he wants,' said Chonjara.

  Earlier, the text-master Eldegen Terzanagel had been unable to tell that Yen Olass was Yen Olass because of all her winterweight clothing. But Chonjara and his bodyguard knew her for an oracle: the lacquered, box at her side betrayed her calling. Reluctantly, Yen Olass reached out and touched Karahaj Nan Nulador on the forehead, dabbing at him lightly with her layers of wool. And she said, as the Sura Woman does:

  'Peace for your daylight.’

  And Nan Nulador was content.

  Yen Olass would happily have spent all day handing out blessings and doing other forbidden things – reading fortunes, interpreting dreams and making charms – but the Sisterhood rigorously discouraged any and all involvement in the kind of occult practices which might lead an oracle to become mistaken for a dralkosh.

  An oracle's work must necessarily have a gloss of mystery – men accepted the intervention of magic when they would have crucified any woman who dared present herself as an arbitrator – but the Sisterhood was determined that the order must not become entangled with religion, superstition or the practice of evil arts.

  As the Book of the Sisterhood put it:

  'The Method is not a way of Power or a way of Decision. The Method calls on nothing outside itself, for the oracle exercises no Power and makes no Decision. Instead, when a patron so requests, an oracle enters a conflict at the centre, making of herself a pivot. The Art is no Summoning, no Shaping. It serves only to reveal possibilities.’

  Now more people were starting to arrive. Some of them were Yarglat clansmen, bearing weapons, and clearly spoiling for a fight. Others were league riders, foreign mercenaries who gave their loyalty to Lord Alagrace alone. Today, Lord Alagrace could not use the army to keep order, since most of the army's officers were men of the Yarglat. However, his league riders were reliable, and their presence would lessen the possibility of outright slaughter in Enskandalon Square.

  Yen Olass looked for the two old men, Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk. Neither had yet arrived. Yen Olass closed her eyes, and imagined:

  Snow.

  Wafting snow beneath ricepaper skies. A world of frozen mud, silence, and bloodless horizons stretching away across leagues of ice and tundra toward distant infinities of cloud.

  Between her thighs, the bulk of a long-haired grender-strander, its travelling rhythm urging past a herd of musk ox, past huge browsing beasts with snorting breath -

  'Lord Alagrace ordered you here, didn't he?' said Chonjara.

  Yen Olass, her reveries thus interrupted, opened her eyes.

  'I am here,' she said.

  'My father certainly didn't ask for you,' said Chonjara. 'So it must have been Alagrace. Unless Lonth Denesk

  'Haveros, maybe,' said Nan Nulador.

  'No,' said Chonjara. 'He was boasting last night about how his father would kill mine. It must have been Alagrace. Isn't that so, girl?’

  As they were speaking Eparget, the dominant dialect of the northern horse tribes, and thus the ruling language of Gendormargensis, the word Chonjara used for 'girl' was 'lakux', a word also meaning 'filly', and carrying implications of naivety, inexperience and frivolity.

  And Yen Olass could hardly answer 'I am a woman', for the word for woman, 'narinii' – a word also meaning 'mare' – implied a mature, sexually experienced female of proven fertility.

  Yen Olass felt hurt. She did not analyse her pain – the Sisterhood discouraged introspection – but the dynamic producing her pain could reasonably be stated like this:

  I am Yen Olass. I am not a girl. But not a woman (narinii). Language has no word for me. Unless I choose to call myself fench oddock ('thinning blood', meaning 'old maid' or 'crone', or – sometimes in a different context, and sometimes not – 'soup stock'.) But I'm not that. So what am I? Myself. Alone.

  'Why so silent, girl?' said Chonjara.

  'Do you wish for a reading?' said Yen Olass, who saw that he was one of those who hated the Sisterhood, and that she could match insult for insult by treating him as if he were a patron.

  'In another time and another place, I'd rip you open and rape you,' said Chonjara.

  'My lord!' said Nan Nulador – and Yen Olass saw that General Chonjara's bodyguard was shocked.

  For that matter, she was shocked herself.

  And so, perhaps, was Chonjara, for he looked around uneasily, seeing who might have overheard him. The Ondrask of Noth certainly had, but that hardly mattered, for the high priest of the horse cult had no love for the Sisterhood. Yen Olass doubted that the brief time they had shared together counted for anything now that they were back in Gendormargensis. Who else had heard? The text-master, Eldegen Terzanagel. That, for Chonjara, might be unfortunate.

  Sensing her advantage, Yen Olass pressed it home:

  'In another time, another place, healthy young sons might take care of their senile old fathers instead of encouraging them to hack each other to pieces with battle-axes.’

  Chonjara turned on her, and now it was Yen Olass's turn to realize she had gone too far. Chonjara's face was white with anger, for she had insulted his father with an unpardonable expression: in Eparget, 'shasha', the word for 'senile', meant not just old and weak-minded, but also implied impotence, incontinence, coprophagic habits and a tendency to indulge in a desire to practise fellatio on dead sheep. Among other things.

  A confrontation was prevented by the arrival of Lord Alagrace, Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk, together with a crowd of underlings, onlookers, friends and functionaries. Amongst the new arrivals was Haveros, Lonth Denesk's son, who looked around, frowning when he saw how many league riders were on the scene.

  Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk were relaxed and jovial, and seemed to have been drinking a little. Yen Olass realized Lord Alagrace had settled the matter with some last-minute diplomacy; in all probability, the old men had been draining a cup of friendship just before coming to the Enskandalon Square.

  Yen Olass knew Lord Alagrace would be pleased with his success. Any duel amongst the Yarglat was dangerous to the peace of Gendormargensis. Arid, in itself, duelling claimed the lives of too many bright young officers, and allowing old men to kill each other encouraged the young.

  Yen Olass knew that Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk must be every bit as glad as Lord Alagrace. When the Lawmaker had banqueted them, they had got drunk; siding with their sons, they had called each other iiar', 'coward' and 'woman', and then they had called each other out. Sober, they must have cursed their stupidity – they had been comrades in battle for twenty years in their younger da
ys.

  Nevertheless, unrelenting shame would ride the man who shied away from combat; an excuse was needed to avoid a fight to the death, and Yen Olass, at Lord Alagrace's request, was going to provide that excuse.

  The two old men composed themselves while a herald declared the details of the challenge; then Lord Alagrace, surprising nobody, intervened:

  'Fight if you wish,' said Lord Alagrace, 'but before combat, please give your consideration to a reading.’

  Lonth Denesk and Tonaganuk both agreed. General Chonjara scowled. For the reading, Yen Olass threw back her hood, unwrapped her scarves and took off her mittens; she opened her laquered box, took out the Casting Board and slotted its two halves together, shook the 365 Indicators in their leather bag, then began.

  Yen Olass placed sixteen Indicators on the Casting Board. What did those sixteen ivory tablets tell her? Nothing. The Book of the Sisterhood taught methods and ways of reading the Indicators, but those were only for the guidance of novices; most skilled oracles used the Indicators only as the starting point, and completed the reading by intuition.

  Yen Olass used neither Indicators nor intuition; she had planned her campaign beforehand, devising four sequences of pointless destruction and two of reconciliation. Now, with her planning done, she let these images possess her, and become visions; as a skilled orator, she submitted to the eloquence of her own words, permitting them their own life of passion.

  Nobody would dare interrupt until she was finished; here, in the public eye, she was guaranteed absolute freedom from intrusion. Her own room in Moon Stallion Strait had never provided her such security.

  'A horse,' said Yen Olass. 'A stallion. Rider of winds. Women tremble before him. A rider. Woman-master. Who can say which is which? Masters of all horizons. Only the sun can ride them out. Rider tells the horse to stay – now! Stay still. A fly. What? Nothing. No, a fly.’

  And now she no longer saw the Casting Board, the Indicators, Chonjara's fur-lined boots or the people in the Enskandalon Square. Her eyes were unfocused, staring through reality. Her head was lifted, her voice pitched to carry over the heads of those who listened. Talking to whom? To what? She saw the horse, and she saw the fly.