The Revenants

by Tepper, Sheri S

  Jasmine asked about the occupants of the cages. ‘Why are they there?’ What have they done?’

  ‘Anything,’ said Medlo quietly. ‘Or nothing. The guards put them there for lack of obedience, for lack of attention to the bells, for having crossed eyes, for not having enough coin. I told you this place was a bad place. What did you think I meant?’

  After a moment she said, ‘Do you mean they would put us in a cage, like that, for nothing?’

  ‘They could. They still may, unless you are very quiet and very inconspicuous. I thought you understood that.’

  They understood it then. They melted into invisibility against the stone walls, letting the dust settle on them, watching the afternoon fogs rise once more to the very edge of the walls. Only after others in the yard had built fires did Jasmine risk setting a small blaze to huddle over, looking as old and juiceless as Jaer’s boots. Around them small groups gathered and dispersed, eyes peered from under hoods, voices muttered. Long lines of pack animals entered the great yard and clopped across it. Many of the caravanners went unrobed, their numbers protecting them. Animals were loaded and taken away. Medlo wandered away, only to return worried and pale. ‘No one goes east. We must find a train to join, or stay in Byssa through the night. This would not please me.’ He shook his head. ‘The people are more cautious than usual. I can find out nothing.’

  Beyond the wall a chilling sound rose, freezing those in the yard in their positions as though they had been statues. Voices were chanting, harshly, violently, over the slow beat of a great drum which echoed off the far, fog-hidden banks of the Del. There was a clang of heavy metal, a rattle of chains, then the reverberation of iron wheels, the rumbling of an iron cage like that Jaer had heard on the road to Candor. He held himself rigid, trembling. The sound pounded away, gave way to an uneasy silence.

  Into that silence a woman came into the yard, alone except for two enormous bridled hounds which walked at her side, eyes alert, backs straight under strapped packs. She gazed calmly about the yard, examining each group without hurry or nervousness, throwing back the hood which had covered her head to reveal silver hair drawn up through a slim circlet set with dark stones. Her eyes were so pale they seemed colourless, and her skin, also, was pale as the petals of a swamp flower. She moved with a striding, queenly grace.

  Medlo muttered to himself, almost beneath his breath, ‘There’s a likely guardian. I like the dogs.’ He made a covert gesture which caught her glance. She regarded them for a moment, then came toward them, inclining her head.

  ‘Gavil-leona, dai. V’lai chaggan? Preon? Urdan?’

  Medlo matched her nod, somewhat stiffly. ‘Medlo, dai. Benise urdan d’dao ni.’ He turned to the others. ‘She wants to know if we need huntress, guide or guard.’

  ‘I speak the western tongue,’ she interrupted him. ‘Yes. If you have need of a huntress, of a guide or guard, I seek such employment.’

  Jasmine turned from the cooking pot, cackling like an old woman. ‘I hope you have food for those beasts. Otherwise, they may choose to eat one of us, or more than one if they are very hungry.’

  The woman’s lips moved in what might have been a smile. ‘They eat at my let, starve at my order. They have eaten today.’

  ‘Then you are welcome. Medlo, here, can guide us well enough, but guards are much needed. How did you come to Byssa?’

  She gestured toward the north. ‘There, through the broken lands.’

  Jaer gaped at her. ‘Medlo says there are cannibals there.’

  She let the smile cross her mouth once more and stroked the heads of the huge dogs beside her. ‘We were bothered only once.’

  ‘And her doggies have eaten today,’ cackled Jasmine. Jaer saw a look of honest amusement on the pale woman’s face.

  ‘They have, and I have, old woman. Make what you will of that.’ She began to dicker with Medlo for the amount of her fee, Jaer paying careful attention lest Medlo send the woman away. When it was mentioned that they intended to go eastward, the woman paused thoughtfully. ‘You will need at least one more weapon carrier, then, for the tribes there are more dangerous with each passing season. I have seen only one traveller move east this day, the driver of that wagon which was sent away with such ugly noise. This in itself is strange, for the caravans usually flow through Byssa like beer through a drover. Such scant traffic increases the danger. Still, find one more to share watch with me and I will go with you.’

  She sat beside them in the dust and they watched the gate together. However, no one entered but a clot of priests who moved among the travellers demanding to know names and places of origin and reasons for travel. Medlo assumed that look of perky obsequious candour with which he masked fear. ‘Medlo, Holy One. From the westlands, now returning there. Only a poor musician with a poor wretched brother and an old servant. We will go east when a caravan goes.’

  ‘Leona,’ said the pale woman to the same questions. ‘I am a huntress for caravans. I go eastward with my beasts.’ The priest did not move on, and one of the great dogs growled low in his throat. ‘Hush, Mimo.’ She looked calmly at the black robe. The priest pursed his mouth and turned away.

  Medlo fretted. ‘I have been here before, and the priests did not come into the caravansary. I don’t like the feel of it.’

  Beside a long line of pack animals came a group of striding men, one among them tall and black, naked except for leather boots and loin guard, his hair tied into flowing tails by bright cylinders of yarn. He carried a spear half again as tall as he from which a cockatrice banner flew, and Leona looked him over carefully as though he were a horse she thought of buying. ‘There’s a passable man.’

  Medlo nodded, approached the dark spearman and spoke with him in a quiet mutter which the others could not hear over the clatter of hooves. They returned together, the dark one bowing, intoning his name in a muttering bass as though it were an invocation.

  ‘Thew-son,’ he rumbled. ‘I will sell-spear if you will give me food and drink this very time. The way south is all dust and salt meat. The bread was sour.’ He spat, then grinned as Medlo began to talk to him about his fee. As they ate together they agreed it was dangerous and unwise to stay in Byssa, even for one night, and yet it was too late to get away.

  ‘We must buy a room,’ decided Medlo. ‘It will get us out of this dust, noise and confusion, and it will get us out of sight. Something brews here. It has my hair itching.’

  ‘It feels like a nest of basilisks,’ agreed Thewson. ‘Many places are bad, but this is very bad. It stinks.’

  Medlo touched the strings of his jangle into a mockery of Thewson’s phrase. Pling plang. ‘Oh, yes, it does stink. All the dark sewers of Byssa come reeking into the air that the dark warrior may discover how they stink.’

  Thewson showed his teeth, ivory on brown. ‘What can be discovered about you, tune twister?’

  ‘Oh,’ Medlo jeered at himself, ‘that I went from bad place to bad place as you have done, to save my skin. And after that, decided to go seek what I had been sent seeking in the first place.’

  ‘Luxuf-razh,’ murmured Thewson. ‘Riddles. What thing do you seek?’

  ‘A sword which carries power. The Sword of Sud-Akwith. But it’s only a casual quest. If I should happen upon it.’

  ‘I too,’ said Leona. ‘I too have a quest. There is a vessel I would be glad to have, the Vessel of Healing. Though it is probably too late for it to do what I would have it do; still – if I happened upon it.’

  ‘And I seek the Girdle of Chu-Namu,’ said Jasmine, firmly, forgetting to be old and ignoring their startled glances. ‘I do seek it, purposefully. It is not casual at all….’

  ‘Wa’osu,’ breathed Thewson. ‘I too seek a thing, a Crown of Wisdom which belonged to the old chiefs of the Courts of the Lions. It is a place so far you do not know of it.’

  ‘Where all men are warriors, strong as lions,’ sang Medlo.

  Thewson lifted his brows. ‘True, tune twister. And where such as you are set to g
athering flowers.’

  Jaer frowned, but Medlo only shrugged in disdain. ‘So I was, warrior. I gathered flowers, and gathered scorn, and gathered evil intentions, and left them all at last to gather dust upon the road, as do we all. Still, you eat food which my songs have earned, and your spear may keep us alive until we eat again. If we can get under cover.’

  They bought a room, locked themselves inside, and divided the night into watches. Leona took the first, Thewson the second. Jaer drifted to sleep lulled by the breathing of the great dogs which lay beside him.

  Jaer dreamed. Someone said, ‘Is she a virgin?’ and she was walking among strangers dressed in filmy white with the little pink snouts of her breasts peeking out to see where they were going. Medlo, elegant in green velvet, answered, ‘Yes, she is. Oh, yes. Always.’

  Someone said there had been no harvest because there had been no unicorn, no unicorn because there had been no virgin. Jaer shook her long, yellow hair over her shoulders and tried to look remote. She was sitting on a large, sharp rock which was biting its way into her left buttock with sullen fervor. The rock was in a clearing. Concentration was difficult, but Jaer knew that the solemnity of the occasion demanded ritual, motionless purity.

  ‘Just the one we’ve been looking for,’ said someone. The unicorn at the edge of the clearing tossed its glittering mane in a veil of frost as it turned to get another look at her.

  ‘I have a sense of technical impropriety,’ said the unicorn in Ephraim’s old voice. Jaer muttered something, and the unicorn went on, ‘What was that? I wish you’d speak up. I hate virgins who won’t speak up.’

  ‘I said, you’re not the only one. I’ve had a sense of technical impropriety ever since I was born.’

  ‘I’ve met a lot of you virgins,’ said the unicorn. ‘Well, a lot of nonvirgins, too, if it comes to that. I’ve never had quite this feeling before.’

  ‘A kind of itch,’ suggested Jaer. ‘Mixed with a little spontaneous and irresolute anger.’

  ‘Rather like that,’ mused the unicorn.

  ‘Perhaps if I explained it to you …’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to know about it,’ said the unicorn, kicking moodily at a rotted stump. Large hunks of punky wood began to fly about the clearing. ‘Still, I need to know whether to go on with this or not.’

  ‘I was born with a genetic defect,’ said Jaer. In the dream this seemed entirely reasonable. ‘Sometimes I’m male, and sometimes I’m female. I switch. Technically, each new body may be a virgin. I suppose it is. Do you follow me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t follow that if it were in season,’ complained the unicorn. ‘I’m appalled at the idea. Great Mythos, why did this happen to me? Why not one of the colts who are always complaining about the status quo anyway?’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose to get staked out here in this damp clearing. It was Medlo, and the people of yon village.’

  ‘I wish the people of yon village would leave me alone. They twiddle on pipes and pound on drums and drag their stupid daughters out here in flocks expecting me to cuddle up to the coldest, vinegary smelling ones. I do it, to keep peace, but I don’t like it. What am I supposed to do about you?’

  ‘They have sent me to avert a famine. If a unicorn is led through the village, there will be no famine.’

  ‘A famine! I never heatd of anything so ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, they haven’t been able to catch you for several years, and there’s been famine for several years.’

  ‘They’ve been lolling about the tavern for several years,’ said the unicorn. ‘They haven’t put a plow to the fields.’

  ‘Famine was inevitable without a unicorn,’ said Medlo, who had joined her in the clearing. ‘So they didn’t bother.’

  ‘I won’t do it.’ He snorted. ‘I won’t, that’s all. I’m too old and fragile. Besides, the gryphon at the edge of the clearing won’t allow it. Gryphons frighten me….’

  The gryphon was there, enormous and very terrible, its beak wide as the tongue vibrated a brazen cry. ‘Jaer, Jaer get away. They are coming for you. They have come suddenly and they will find you here. Get away.’

  In the dream, Jaer thought that she should be frightened of the gryphon. Its wings were sharpened knives of steel and its feathers swords of brass. Its beak was a hooked eater of souls, and its awesome talons were renders of the lost. But Jaer was not afraid of the gryphon, only horribly, horribly afraid of the other thing which was coming. The unicorn screamed, and fled to the sound of its own screaming….

  Jaer woke to the sound of screaming from the yard outside the door. Leona had seized the dogs. ‘They say danger, terror, pain. There is no window here. We are trapped.’

  Thewson spoke from the corner. ‘No. I will not stay in a place which is a trap. There is loose thatch here where the beam is. Above this is a roof. We can go up.’

  ‘Quickly then.’ Leona thrust her pack together and went up Thewson’s crouched body as though he were a stair. She shoved the thatch aside and pushed through, calling the dogs after her. Thewson grimaced as their claws raked his shoulders. Medlo had shaken Jasmine awake, thrust a pack at Jaer, rolled his own things together. The noise in the courtyard grew louder, more agonized. The scream which had been few voices became many.

  Thewson came up last, lifting himself with bulging arms. They crouched while he rearranged the thatch to cover the hole, then slithered along the ridge to the neighbouring roof, higher and flat, speared through with stove-pipes and fogged with smoke and the smell of sausages. Medlo lay below the parapet, mumbling, ‘Did we leave that door locked from the inside? If they search rooms, they’ll know no one went out the door….’

  Thewson rumbled, ‘I unlocked it, flower picker. We who sell-spear learn to leave false trails.’

  ‘They have dogs.’

  Leona shushed him. ‘No dog can smell its way through air. Our stairway came through the roof with us. What makes them scream so?’

  Medlo whispered from his position at the parapet. ‘There are robed ones there, torturing some others. They have knives…. ‘He gagged and put his head down on his arms. They lay like lumps on the roof, even the dogs stretched flat, hidden behind the parapet and the lowering smoke. They could hear voices from the echoing courtyard below.

  ‘We want a girl, young, yellow-haired. She may be with a pale man. Possibly they are oddly dressed. If you have seen such, you will tell us.’ They could not hear answers, only panting, moaning, someone mumbling,’… women in there …’

  Beneath them the door to the room they had left was flung wide, striking the wall with a splintering crash. An oily, obsequious voice said, ‘Empty, Lord Lithos. No one here…’

  And another voice, cold as winter midnight and as dark. ‘This is the room women were said to occupy? Bring the dogs.’

  Then came scuffling, low growling, more scuffling and yelps of pain or fear and the sound of a whip being applied with more yelping woven into it.

  ‘What ails them?’

  ‘They are frightened, Lord Protector. Something they smell frightens them.’

  ‘Well it might. Do they scent those who were here?’

  ‘I think so, Lord Protector.’

  ‘Then make a circuit of the walls. Find the way they have gone, then follow them.’

  Leona rolled over to fumble beneath her robes for a moment, drawing out some article of clothing which she fastened to the dog, Mimo’s collar. She whispered urgently to Thewson who lifted the dog over the edge of the roof, lowering him to the ground in one, fluid motion before recoiling back onto the roof. Instantly the dog ran off into the darkness, the fabric tied to his collar dragging upon the ground. They lay silent, listening to the men and dogs who came to the place Mimo had touched, then moved off into the darkness the way Mimo had gone.

  ‘Will they catch him?’ Jasmine whispered. ‘Hurt him?’

  Leona patted her briefly. ‘He is not likely to be caught. After a time he will tear the cloth a
way and return to find our trail, a trail we must make swiftly, before the men return.’ She took a small vial from her pack, stretched to anoint Thewson’s feet with the contents, then her own, then the others. They squirmed over the wall, dropping soundlessly at its foot to flee into the night. They went upward and eastward, pausing at the crest of a hill while Thewson and Leona conferred. ‘We cannot go west, for that would take us back through the city. North are the broken lands, a fool’s journey. South is the desert, and we carry nothing for such a trip. We are paid to go east, and east is open to us. We go there.’

  A long, rocky slope led downward to the eastern roadway from Byssa, and they paralleled this road for several miles, scrambling over the rough land. At length they stopped to rest in a stony hollow above the road, and the bitch, Werem, whined as Mimo came trotting up to them, tongue hanging and teeth shining in the starlight. ‘He is trained to follow the stuff on the feet?’ asked Thewson.

  Leona nodded. ‘But the dogs the priests have are not trained to follow it. They will only whine and be beaten. They will not follow us.’

  ‘Why would they follow us anyhow?’ demanded Jasmine. ‘They must be looking for someone else. We just got caught in the middle. Pm not even sure why we ran away.’

  ‘Because from that city, from those people, the only wise thing to do is run,’ said Me-lo sombrely. ‘No matter who, or what they are looking for.’

  ‘They spoke of a girl,’ said Leona. ‘With a pale man, oddly dressed …’ Jaer caught at these words. They were like something seen recently, something known. Knees trembling, Jaer sat down upon the rock, head between knees.