by K V Johansen
“Larks.”
“You knew about this?”
He found her hand, traced a finger across the palm, half-lost in just the touch of her skin. “Yes. No. But that’s what they are. Larks for women, owls for men. Snakes when you come of age.”
“I think people need to keep away from gods, you know. It isn’t good for us. She has what she told me were snow-leopards on her forearms. Really strange, that it’s all healed, like it was done weeks ago. Wizards’ magic, right?”
“You want me to tell you that.”
“I’d be happy if you did. I can only handle a small dose of miracle.” Gaguush closed her hand over his.
He smiled at her. “Right. It was wizards.”
“That’s good. Because miracles are too worrying. Miracles don’t happen to caravaneers. Tell me you know that, and we won’t talk about it again.”
“No miracles.”
“Yeah. Wizards are bad enough. I told the brat that Sayan didn’t have leopards and she grinned like a monkey and said we’d pretend they were cheetahs. You sure they haven’t dumped a changeling on you?”
“Gaguush—Pakdhala’s coming with me.”
Gaguush was silent, but she did not turn his hand loose.
He brushed the sleek braids back from her face with his other hand. “She has to. I can’t tell you why. We can’t go home yet—” Home. Lissavakail. The Sayanbarkash. He could not have said which he meant. “—and I can’t send her away. If you really won’t have a child along, I’ll have to find a gang that will.” His voice was hoarse. Three days with nothing to drink, unless losing himself in the distant river counted. Suddenly he wanted nothing so much as water. Almost nothing.
Gaguush pulled her hand free, traced lines in the dust with her forefinger. “You mean that,” she said flatly. “What do I tell Immerose and Tusa, why they can’t bring theirs along, why they have to find fostering and you don’t?”
“Tell them whatever you need to.”
“She’s special, is she? Is that what I’m supposed to say?”
“Yes.”
“The gods think she’s so damn special they work miracles for her, and I have to make exceptions and let a brat tag along, to get trampled by camels and shot at by bandits and kidnapped by Nabbani slavers?”
“Yes.”
Gaguush threw an angry stone clattering down the hillside. “Great Gods save me. Immerose has gone and gotten herself pregnant yet again, she thinks. Why in all the cold hells she can’t learn to be careful, like the rest of them…Some damned tinker back in the Salt Desert and probably married, not that she remembers his name. It’s always that way with her, isn’t it? She’ll be staying in Marakand the next year and then some, till it’s weaned. I don’t want to be short two men.”
“No.”
“I might take on Tusa and Asmin-Luya’s eldest, maybe, when we head back through Serakallash. He ought to be old enough to earn his keep now.”
“Probably should.”
“You look terrible, Holla.”
Another shrug. Gaguush pushed him over backwards with a hand spread on his chest, rolled over on him, and he forgot about being thirsty.
“Holla-Sayan?”
He folded his arms around her, kissed her.
“You can bring her. If you must. If it’ll keep you from acting as crazy as you have since you found her, and because the world has gotten all too strange, the past few days. But no starting fights because someone comes too close to her—I know you haven’t, but I’ve seen and it’s been a damned close thing, a few times. You act like we’re a bunch of slavers, or worse. So no more of that. Anyone needs hitting in my gang, I do it. And that includes you. Hey!” Her fingers closed over his, fumbling with the bone toggles of her coat. “I know it’s been a while, but that’s not my fault, and this is not a good idea. Your brat and a couple of those ferrymen’s kids followed me along with a donkey, something about digging coltsfoot root at the bottom of the hill. They’re children; they aren’t going to stay at the bottom of the hill, you know.”
“Yes, they are.” It was simple enough to shut himself away from the goddess, now she was no longer clinging like the tick Gaguush had called her. She let him go; she had let him go when she sent Gaguush to him. He could still feel her, if he reached out. But he was free, and alone, as much as he could be with the Blackdog in him.
“Oh, well then, of course they’ll stay down there. If you say so.” Sarcasm was lost in a longer kiss, and they rolled again. Easier to get her coat unfastened with Holla on top. Gaguush stopped trying to prevent him, locked her hands behind her head and watched him, smiling a little.
“She really yours, Holla? Because I don’t think you’d ever crossed the Kinsai-av yet, when that one was born.”
“She’s mine now.”
“Huh. Well. I’ll try to put up with her, then. But she damn well better stay down the bottom of the hill.”
The devils took the souls of the wizards into their own, and became one with them, and devoured them. They walked as wizards among the wizards, and destroyed those who would not obey, or who counselled against their counsel. They desired the worship of kings and the enslavement of the folk, and they were never sated, as the desert is never sated with rain.
Attavaia had been cursed as Tamghat’s whore and spat at and told to take her spying elsewhere when she asked around the caravanserais, with all due caution, she thought, about merchants who dealt regularly in iron goods. Ingots, blades finished or unfinished…Tin, she asked about as well. Copper they had in plenty in the mountains, and there were still those who knew the secrets of casting bronze. Every village had its bells. There had been bronze swords and spearheads in the armoury still, relics of earlier days, and the temple’s armour had still been made to the old patterns. Even the few shirts she and her eleven had abandoned before swimming from the islet would have been a boon, now.
They would make do, when the time came, with what had been stolen or scavenged or salvaged, and with boiled leather. What metal they had would go to spears and arrowheads and swords for those who knew them, iron or bronze. They had a few pattern-welded steel blades taken from Northron mercenaries who came to grief in the mountains, long, heavy swords, unwieldy for those used to the short mountain sword. One, taken from an ambushed noekar, was even finer, a steel blade with a maker’s mark and other Northron writing none of them could read, but the smith Shevehan, a cousin of Enneas, had nearly wept when he saw it. He said it was an ancient sword from the time of the first kings in the north, maybe from the lost Isles of the West, a named sword, the secrets of making which were long forgotten, and it was a sin it had ever been soiled by a raider’s hand. Shevehan kept that one wrapped in wool and oiled leather, buried under the floor of his forge like some talisman, and would not hand it out to be taken with the rest of their slow accumulation of weapons to the hidden sisters in the villages. He spoke of it as “the lady,” which amused Attavaia, but Enneas said it made her skin crawl.
Attavaia told her she was just jealous she had lost her place in Shevehan’s heart.
They would make do, but they needed more. Tamghat, or the Lord of the Lake as he called himself these days, had confiscated the weapons of Lissavakail and the villages, leaving herdsmen with only bamboo spears to defend against predators. The hunters resorted to older ways and chipped their arrowheads from turquoise. Turquoise could kill an unarmoured person as well as an iron point, and there were fletchers in the mountain villages. Something Tamghat seemed to have overlooked.
“I don’t like it,” Enneas reported in a murmur, as they met up at noon in the busy market square. A man leading a horse past slowed to look back over his shoulder, a look that ran over Enneas head to foot and back again. Enni turned her shoulder on him, pursed her lips in disdain, but spoiled the effect by peeking over her shoulder.
“He’s gone,” Attavaia said, with a grin. “Wasted effort.”
“Well, I hope he enjoyed the view.”
Enneas had change
d hardly at all in the long two years since they’d fled the temple; she still looked barely out of girlhood, her heart-shaped face still perfect, soft-skinned, her pointed chin and large eyes suggesting a carefree innocence, except when she demurely dropped her gaze. Then the long lashes beneath perfect arching eyebrows transformed her expression to a meekness that in the old days had made her always Old Lady’s example of pious, which was to say passive, submission to divine will. Old Lady had never seen Enni running barefoot along the kitchen ridgepole dressed only in a very short shift. That meek demeanour came in useful. Enneas could still pass as barely out of childhood, too young to be any threat to anyone. Attavaia felt as though she’d aged ten years, herself, and thought her face probably showed it. Lines around her eyes and mouth like a mountain wife with six children. Not that she should care about such things. She should stay away from her mother’s mirror.
They spent some of their precious Marakander coin, ate over-spiced meat and unfamiliar vegetables off a skewer and drank sweetened mint tea, watching the market with no more than the interest of villagers come to the busy town.
“There are three septs who control the town,” Enneas continued, keeping her voice too low for anyone but Attavaia to hear. “And the chiefs of two of them are all for friendship with Tamghat. They have their own retainers collecting tolls on his behalf from the caravans when they come up from the desert road—they’ve even built a blockhouse by the road, a little square fort, to do it. They’re getting a cut, rumour has it, these chiefs personally, and even the lesser folk of their own septs aren’t happy with that. I haven’t found anyone who’ll admit to knowing a caravan merchant who’d carry blades for us. It’s too obvious why we want them, and no one’s willing to risk standing up to Tamghat, with their own leaders in his bed.”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“You want to hear vulgar, ‘Vaia? You should hear what this Nabbani merchant suggested I could do for him.”
A bell in a nearby tower tolled three times. People stopped talking and looked around before conversation resumed, in a more urgent buzz.
“What was that?”
“It didn’t sound like an alarm.” Attavaia shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t have any better luck than you. We should have come six months ago, before he bribed the sept-chiefs. And I think someone tried to follow me.”
“I was followed for a while, too. Not by a good-looking man, sadly, but still…”
Attavaia dropped the skewer on the food-seller’s brazier, sending up a puff of smoke, and handed back the crooked teacup, moving further from the brazier. “Was it a Serakallashi woman about our age?”
“And not even a good-looking one.”
“Enni!”
“Just trying to see if you can still smile.”
Attavaia ran her eye over the market crowd. Serakallashi, their cheeks tattooed with horses, some so strangely stylized it was hard to see that they were, until you knew. Strangers, tattooed and unmarked, mostly wearing calf-length coats, mostly the varied browns of camels and Red Desert dust. They were probably caravan-mercenaries or merchants’ guards, but they could just as easily be Tamghat’s folk.
“Next time we come, we should dress like caravan-mercenaries, coat and boots, to make ourselves invisible. Maybe then someone will sell to us. We can say we’re some merchant’s retainers.”
The dark full skirts and the fringed shawls of mountain village women were ordinary and inoffensive. But mountain folk, and women in particular, did not often leave their valleys.
If they did, she would have known better how to pass unnoticed in the lowlands.
“The one following me was a Serakallashi woman,” Enneas confirmed. “Tall and skinny. A girl, really. But I shook her off somewhere on the caravanserai ridge.”
“She had a turquoise stud in the side of her nose?”
Enneas nodded.
“The same person who followed me, then.”
“That’s not good. I went to the spring and said a prayer.” Enneas shrugged. “We’ll see if Sera heard.”
“What did you pray for?” Attavaia asked, wondering if she ought to suggest they shouldn’t be praying to other goddesses, even knowing their own was well out of earshot.
“A bit of friendly help, is all. Like maybe that the woman following me would stay lost till we were out of town.”
“Do you suppose Sera would listen? I haven’t found the lowlanders over-friendly, so far.”
“Hells, look there.” Enneas twitched her head, directing Attavaia’s eye across the market. Near where a Red Desert potter had laid out his bright wares on a contrasting black blanket, a half-dozen Grasslanders gathered, coming from two different directions, talking urgently among themselves. “Those aren’t caravaneers.”
“Tamghat’s.” Attavaia bit her lip. “At least one noekar—that woman with the cult-scarred cheeks? I’ve seen her in town. She’s one of his vassals.”
“Looking for us?” Enneas’s voice went shrill on the words. She swallowed. “That woman…he must have spies here.”
“Don’t look, don’t make any sudden moves to catch their eye.”
They were not the only ones made nervous. The potter scowled. A few Serakallashi who looked like someone’s armed retainers themselves joined the Grasslanders, as if by prior arrangement. The potter began packing up, threading cord through the handles, fastening festoons of pots and jugs to the camel which knelt beside him, chewing its cud. The camel rose like a small, ungainly mountain, unfolding itself in a succession of jerks, and the potter led it away. As it passed in front of the mercenaries, screening them from sight, Attavaia looped her arm through Enneas’s and headed for the nearest narrow street.
Though the crowd was thinning out, others were heading into the square as though anticipating something. A girl with a silk scarf over her head pushed past them, arguing with a slightly older woman in a cameleer’s coat, who wore a sabre on a baldric.
“I just want to hear what Silly Siyd’s going to say.”
“Your father’ll have my head if things turn nasty and you’re in it.”
“But it’s important to know what…”
“Something’s got them stirred up,” Enneas murmured. “Should we go back to find out what? Doesn’t seem like it’s anything to do with us after all.”
Attavaia was acutely aware of the weight bound around her middle, which made her look several months gone in pregnancy. The long roll, carefully sewn and padded, held several pounds of the best spiderweb turquoise.
“No,” she said. “We don’t want to catch their eye. Remember my condition.”
“Heh, yes. It definitely gives a girl a glow, just like they say.”
“That’s carrying all this extra weight in the lowland air.”
“But what are we going to do?” Enneas asked. “I even asked about scrap iron at a forge. They nearly set the dogs on me.”
“Do without,” Attavaia said. “Cut bamboo in the lower valleys, do what we can with that. When the time comes we should have a little warning. We can reforge or recast tools, if the villagers will give them up.”
“If,” said Enneas gloomily. She freed her arm from Attavaia’s, sliding a hand into the folds of her skirt, through the ripped seam to reach the long dagger strapped to her thigh. “There’s the woman who was following me, the thin one with the hooked nose.”
“I see her.”
She was the same one Attavaia had noticed a time or two, sauntering behind, talking to those with whom she had just spoken. The Serakallashi woman was dressed like the caravan-mercenaries, her coat striped in dun and white, with a cotton scarf loose about her neck and a square felt hat in the Marakander style over her swinging braids. No sword or sabre, but undoubtedly a knife or two in those pockets. She strolled their way, suddenly unavoidable.
“Enni, isn’t it?” she asked with tensely false cheer. “And ‘Vaia? Let’s go.”
“Where?” Attavaia demanded.
The woman turned a thin smile on her.
“To meet someone who might have what you’re looking to buy, but you’ve got to come right now.”
Attavaia and Enneas eyed one another, while the woman rocked on her heels.
“Now,” she repeated, a bit less cheerfully, her gaze straying over their shoulders. “Because, you know, there are Sevani guards, men belonging to one of the Lake-Lord’s lapdogs, out looking for a pair of mountain women right now. They think Tamghat’s people might be interested in them, ‘specially as they were talking to merchants about buying spearheads and the like. Tamghat’s people are playing bodyguards for Siyd Rostvadim at the moment but I expect they’ll take an interest once the great announcement is over with, whatever it is.”
“What great announcement?”
“Didn’t you hear the bell? The chiefs are going to speak. But since there’s been no council meeting, it’ll just be the chiefs of the town septs, and probably just Silly Siyd Rostvadim. Going to listen might conceivably be a more valuable use of my time, but others think different, so stop wasting it and come on. Unless you want to talk to the Lake-Lord’s people instead.”
She turned and walked off, swift and purposeful.
Attavaia waited for no more than a heartbeat before following, Enneas at her side.
The Serakallashi led them through a succession of narrow alleys, twisting between the high, blind walls of the houses. They emerged onto a lane only slightly wider, encountering a caravan moving out, the camels piled with burdens that nearly blocked the street. The dull tin bells clanked and dust rose from the huge padding feet, choking. Their guide threw a fold of her scarf over her mouth and nose, weaving through the tall beasts that plodded five or six together behind a rider.
