Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  “Be very quiet now,” said Shaso abruptly, putting out his arm to stop her. They were in the deepest shadow they had yet found, the only illumination the nearly invisible, clouddimmed moon, and it took her a moment to realize they were standing beside a high stone wall. When he had listened for a moment—Briony could hear nothing at all except her own breathing and the never-ending patter of rain—the old man stepped toward the wall and, to her astonishment, pounded his knuckles on what sounded like a wooden door. How he could have found such a thing in the near-perfect darkness, let alone known it was there in the first place, she had no idea.

  There was a long silence. Shaso knocked again, this time in a discernible pattern. A moment later a man’s low voice said something and Shaso answered, neither question nor reply in a language she recognized. The door creaked inward and light splashed out into the rain-rippled muck of the street.

  A man in a strange, baggy robe stood in the entrance; as Shaso stepped back to let Briony step through the man bowed. For a moment she wondered if the robe marked him as a mantis, if this was indeed, despite Shaso’s own denial, some back-alley temple, but when the gatekeeper finished his bow and looked up at her he proved to be a bearded youth as dark-skinned as Shaso.

  “Welcome, guest,” he said to her. “If you accompany Lord Shaso, you are a flower in the house of Effir dan-Mozan.”

  They entered the main part of the house by a covered passage beside a courtyard—Briony could dimly see what looked like a bare fruit tree at its center—which led into a low building that seemed to take up a great deal of space. A covey of women came to her and surrounded her, murmuring, only every fifth or sixth word in Briony’s own tongue. They smelled charmingly of violets and rosewater and other, less familiar scents; for a moment she was happy just to breathe in as they took her hands and tugged her toward a passageway. She looked back at Shaso in bemusement and alarm, but he was already in urgent conversation with the bearded youth and only waved her on. That was the last she saw of him, or of any man, for the rest of the evening.

  The women, a mixture of old and young, but all darkskinned, black-haired Southerners like the man at the door, led her—herded her, in truth—into a sumptuous tiled chamber lit with dozens of candles, so warm that the air was steamy. Briony was so astounded to find this palatial luxury in the poorest quarter of a fishing town that she did not realize for a moment that some of the women were trying to pull her clothes off. Shocked, she fought back, and was about to give one of them a good blow of her fist (a skill learned in childhood to deal with a pair of brawling brothers) when one of the smaller women stepped toward her, both hands raised in supplication.

  “Please,” she said, “what is your name?”

  Briony stared. The woman was fine-boned and handsome, but though her hair was shiny and black as tar, it was clear she was old enough to be Briony’s mother, or even her grandmother. “Briony,” she said, remembering only too late that she was a fugitive. Still, Shaso had passed her to the women as though she were a saddlebag to be unpacked: she could not be expected to keep her caution while under attack by this murmuring pigeon flock.

  “Please, Bri-oh-nee-zisaya,” the small woman said, “you are cold and tired. You are a guest for us, yes? You cannot eat in the hada until you are bathing, yes?”

  “Bathing?” Briony suddenly realized that the great dark rectangular emptiness in the middle of the room, which she had thought only a lower part of the floor, was a bath—a bath bigger than her own huge bed in the Southmarch royal residence! “There?” she added stupidly.

  The women, sensing a lull in her resistance, swooped in and pulled off the rest of her sodden clothes, murmuring in pity and amusement as Briony’s pale, goose-pimpled skin was exposed. She was helped to the edge of the bath—it had steps leading down!—and, to her further astonishment, several of the women disrobed and climbed in with her. Now at least she understood why the bath was so large.

  The first shock of the hot water almost made her faint, then as she settled in and grew used to it a deep languor crept over her, so that she nearly fell asleep. The women giggled, soaping and scrubbing her in a way she would have found unduly intimate if it had been Rose and Moina, who had known her for years, but somehow she could not make herself care. It was warm in the bath—so blessedly warm! —and the scent of flowery oils in the steamy air made her feel as though she were floating in a summer cloud.

  Out of the bath, wrapped in a thick white robe like those the women wore, she was led to a room full of cushions with a fire in a brazier at its center. Here too an inordinate number of candles burned, the flames wavering as the women walked in and out, talking quietly, laughing, some even singing.

  Have I died? she wondered without truly believing it. Is this what it will be like in Zoria’s court in heaven?

  They seated her amid the cushions and the older woman brought her food; the others whispered in fascination at this, as though it were an unusual honor. The bowl was heaped with fruit and a cooked grain she did not recognize, with pieces of some roasted bird sitting on top, and Briony could not help remembering the woman back in Kinemarket with her broods of chickens and children. She wondered if that woman in her damp, smoky cottage could even imagine a place like this, less than a day’s walk away.

  The food was excellent, hot and flavored with spices Briony did not know, which at other moments might have put her off, but now only added to the waking dream. At last she lolled back on the cushions, full, warm, and gloriously dry. The younger women cleared away Briony’s bowl and the empty goblet from which she had drunk some watered wine, and the older woman sat beside her.

  “Thank you,” Briony said, although that did not suffice.

  “You are tired. Sleep.” The woman waved and one of the others brought a blanket which they draped on Briony where she lay among the embroidered cushions.

  “But...where am I? What is this place?”

  “The hada of Effir dan-Mozan,” the woman said. “My... married?”

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes. Just so.” The woman smiled. One of her teeth was covered in gold. “And you are our honored guest. Sleep now.”

  “But why...?” She wanted to ask why this house in such a strange place, why the bath, why all these beautiful darkskinned women in the middle of Marrinswalk, but all that came out was that word again. “Why?”

  “Because the Lord Shaso brought you here,” the woman said. “He is a great man, cousin of our old king. He honors our house.”

  They didn’t even know who she was. Shaso was the royalty here.

  Briony slept then, floundering through confusing dreams of warm rivers and icy cold rain.

  5. At Liberty

  But the first son of Zo and Sva, who they named Rud, the golden arrow of the daytime sky, was killed in the fight against the demons of Old Night.

  Their younger son Sveros, lord of twilight, seized Rud’s widow Madi Oneyna for his own, and swore that he would be a father to Rud’s son Yirrud, but in truth he sent a cloud to breathe upon Yirrud where Onyena had hidden him in the mountain fastness and the child sickened and died.

  Instead of giving Oneyna a new child to replace the one he had taken, Sveros also took her twin, Surazem, who we call Moist Mother Earth, and fathered three children upon her, who were the great brothers, Perin, Erivor, and Kernios.

  —from The Beginnings of Things, The Book of the Trigon

  Freedom was both frightening and exhilarating. It was wonderful to be able to walk the streets on her own, with nothing between her and life but a hooded robe—she had not known such liberty since she was a young child, when she had known nothing else and had not appreciated what a sublime gift it truly was.

  In fact, it was a bit confounding to have so many choices. Just now, Qinnitan couldn’t decide whether to return to the main road winding through Onir Soteros, the neighborhood just behind the Harbor of Kalkas which she had called home for almost a month, or to continue following the winding streets far
ther into the great city, expanding her area of conquest as she had almost every day.

  What a place in which to have gained her freedom! Hierosol was a huge city, perhaps not quite as large as Xis, the place she had escaped, but not a great deal smaller, either—a massive rumpled blanket of hills and valleys sitting athwart several bays, commanding both the Kulloan Strait and the Osteian Sea, nearly every inch covered with the constructions of several different centuries. Ancient Xis sat on a high plain as flat as a marble floor, and from any of its high places you could see all the way to both the northern sea and the southern desert. Here in Hierosol she had not yet managed to climb high enough to see anything but other hills, Citadel Hill the tallest of them all, looming above the others like a noble head gazing out across the straits, the rest of the city trailing down the slopes behind it like a cape.

  Hierosol was so old and complex and ingrown that to Qinnitan every neighborhood seemed to be its own city, its own world—tree-covered Fox-gate Hill sloping gently behind her, home of rich merchants, and just below the sailmakers’ and shipwrights’ quarter of Sandy Head, bustling with work from the adjacent Harbor of Kalkas. Not just a new city to explore but dozens of new worlds, all waiting for her and her newfound freedom. For a girl who had spent the last several years in the cloistered ways of the Hive and the Seclusion, it was dizzying to contemplate.

  She had been brought here across the narrow sea from Xis by Axamis Dorza, the captain of the boat that had carried her away from her lifelong home when Dorza’s master Jeddin fell suddenly and precipitously from the autarch’s favor. When word of Jeddin’s capture had caught up to them in Hierosol, most of the sailors on the Morning Star of Kirous had melted away into the shadowy alleys of the port. Those few that remained were even now scraping the ship’s old name off the hull and repainting it. Qinnitan supposed Jeddin’s slim, fast ship would belong to Dorza now, which must be at least some small compensation to him for being associated with the now infamous traitor.

  It had been kind of Axamis Dorza, she knew, if also pragmatic, to take her into his home in the Onir Soteros district at the base of the rocky hills that leaned above Sandy Head. Although he could not know it, Dorza must suspect that Qinnitan was in even greater jeopardy than himself, and though hiding her from the autarch’s spies might keep Dorza himself safe in the short run, it was bound to look bad if she was ever captured. In fact, the captain had made it clear that he was not happy with Qinnitan roaming the streets, even dressed in the fashion of a respectable Xandian girl (which left little of her visible) but she had made it equally clear to him that she would no longer be anyone’s prisoner, especially in Dorza’s small house. It was not his house at all, really, but the property of his Hierosoline wife, Tedora. Qinnitan suspected the captain had a larger, more respectable house and also a more respectable wife and family back home in Xis, but she was too polite to inquire. Qinnitan also suspected that she would not have been allowed such freedom in that other house, but Tedora was a woman of Eion, not Xand, and was more interested in drinking wine and gossiping with her neighbors than watching over the moral education of a fugitive Xixian girl. Because of that, and a certain confused subservience Qinnitan inspired in Dorza, most of the freedom which had been stolen from her since her girlhood in Cat’s Alley had been returned.

  In fact, other than her terror of the autarch and her fear of being recaptured, there was only one sizeable fly in the honey of her current Hierosoline harbor.... “Ho, there you are! Wait for me!”

  Qinnitan flinched reflexively—in the back of her mind she was always waiting for the moment one of the autarch’s minions would lay a hand on her—although within half a heartbeat she had known who it was.

  “Nikos.” She sighed and turned around. “Were you following me?”

  “No.” He was taller than his father Axamis, all the size of a man and none of the gravity or sense, the fuzz of his first black beard covering his chin, cheeks, and neck. He had trailed her like an oversized puppy since his father had first brought her home. “But he was, and I followed him.” Nikos pointed at the small, silent boy who was standing so close to her he must have come within arm’s reach without her even hearing.

  “Pigeon!” she said, frowning at him. “You were to stay in bed until you’re well.”

  The mute boy smiled and shook his head. His face was even paler than usual, and he had a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. He held out his hands, palm up, to show that as far as he was concerned he was too healthy to be left at home.

  “Where are you going, Qinnitan?” Nikos asked.

  “Don’t call me by that name! I wasn’t going anywhere. I was thinking, enjoying the quiet. Now it’s gone.”

  Nikos was immune to such remarks. “Some big ships just came in from Xis. Do you want to go down to the harbor to look at them? Maybe you know some of the people on board.”

  Qinnitan could not think of anything more foolish or dangerous. “No, I do not want to go look at them. I’ve told you—your father has told you—that I can have nothing to do with anyone from the south. Nothing! Do you never learn?”

  Now he did look a little hurt, her tone finally piercing the armor of his nearly invincible disinterest in anything outside his tiny circle of familiarity. “I just thought you might like it,” he said sullenly. “That you might be a little homesick.”

  She took a breath. She could not afford to anger Nikos as long as she lived in his house. The problem was, the boy fancied her. It was ludicrous that she was suffering from the unwanted attentions of a lumbering child her own age when only weeks before the greatest king in the world had kept her locked away in the Seclusion, threatening death to any whole man who so much as looked at her, but along with freedom, she was learning, came the costs of freedom.

  She let Nikos trail after her as they climbed the winding streets of Fox-gate Hill in the shadow of the old citadel walls, up into the crocus-starred heights where shops and taverns gave way to the houses of the wealthy, pretty whiteplastered places with high walls that concealed gardens and shady courtyards, although all these secrets could be seen from the streets above, so that each level of society was exposed to the inspection of its wealthier neighbors. These houses, despite their size and beauty, still stood close together, side by side along the hilly roads like seashells left along the line of the retreating tide. She could only imagine what it would be like to live in such a place instead of Captain Dorza’s noisy, rickety house that smelled of fish and spilled wine. She wondered even more acutely what it would be like to have a house of her own, a place where no one entered without her permission, where she did what she wanted, spoke as she wanted.

  It was not to be, of course. She could hide here in Hierosol with people who spoke her language, or she could go back to Xis and die. What other choices were there?

  Pigeon was tugging at her arm; she was suddenly reminded that her own life was not her only responsibility.

  Freedom. Sometimes it seemed that the more of it she had, the more she lacked.

  Nikos had pretended to bump against her for the fifth or sixth time, and this time had actually managed to put his hand on her rump and give it a squeeze before she could slap it away, when she decided to turn back to the captain’s house. Her privacy stolen, her thoughts dragged down by Nikos’ innocently stupid questions and less innocent attempts to paw her, she knew the best of the day was over. Qinnitan sighed. Time to go back to Tedora and that laugh of hers like the cry of an irritated goat, to the thick smoke in the air and the endless noise and the jumble of screeching children. She couldn’t blame Nikos for wanting to spend time out of doors, she just wished he would spend it somewhere other than in her vicinity.

  She put her arm around Pigeon, who pressed against her happily—he, at least, seemed quite content with their new life, and played with the younger children as comfortably as if they were his own brothers and sisters—then pulled her hood a little closer around her face, as she always did when she walked through the neighborho
od around the captain’s house, where nearly half the people seemed to come from Xis and many of them were sailors who shipped back and forth across the Osteian Sea several times a year. The house seemed oddly quiet as they walked down the long path: she could hear one of the younger children talking cheerful nonsense, but not much else.

  The captain’s wife Tedora looked up from her stool by the table. She had started her day of drinking wine early that morning—part of the reason Qinnitan had left the house— and judging by the jug and cup set beside her, not to mention the blurry, sly look on her seamed face, she had not slackened her pace in Qinnitan’s absence.

  She must have been pretty once, Qinnitan often thought. Pretty enough to catch a captain, no small trick in Onir Soteros. The bones were still good, but Tedora’s skin was as cracked as old leather, her fingers knobby with age and hard work—not that Qinnitan had seen her do much of that.

  “He’s waiting for you.” Tedora gestured to the bedroom, a sour smile flitting across her face. “Dorza. He wants to see you.”

  “What?” For a moment Qinnitan could make no sense of it. Was Tedora sending her in to become the master’s concubine? Then she realized that, of course, in a house so small, the single bedroom would be the only place to carry on a private conversation—she had seen Dorza take some of his crewmen back to talk about matters of the ship and of their involuntary exile from Xis.

  A chilly heaviness lodged in her gut. A private conversation, was it? She felt certain she knew what he wanted, and had been fearing it for days. Axamis Dorza, saddled with the feeding of two people who should have not been his responsibility, was going to try to marry her off to young Nikos, to bind her properly to his household so that she could be set to work. Qinnitan had no doubt it was Tedora’s idea. If, as she suspected, Dorza had another family back in Xis, he would be more than willing to do it, just to keep the peace here in his Hierosoline harbor. The thought made her heart as cold as her stomach.