Drinker of Souls dost-1

by Jo Clayton

  JARIL SLIPPED INTO the room where Harra was playing a muted accompaniment as Brann chatted with the jamika about her children, listening more than she spoke. He squatted beside Harm. “He’s guzzling it down,” he whispered.

  Harra nodded. She began simplifying the music until her fingers wandered idly over the daroud’s strings; she closed her eyes and began a soft whistling that twisted round and round and incorporated the play of her fingers. An intense look of concentration on her face, she wove the spell, the magic in it itching at Jaril, it made his outlines shiver and blur and started eddies, in his substance that acted on him like a powerful euphoric. Her cold nose nudged at his hand. Yaril as hound bitch had crawled over to him and was pressing against him, quivering a little, her outlines shimmering, the same eddies in her substance. She was as uncertain as he about this feeling as a longterm experience, but she was enjoying the sensation, being a measure more hedonistic than her brother, willing to live in the pleasures of the moment, while he tended to fuss more about abstracts and what-will-be than what-was in the point present.

  Harra stopped whistling. “It’s done,” she murmured. “Go back to him and whisper what you want in his ear.” Jaril jumped to his feet and went out.

  Brann turned to watch him go, missing something the jamika was saying. When the querulous voice snapped a reprimand at her, she swung back slowly and sat staring at the Temueng woman, her back very straight, waiting in silence until Tjena ran down. “If you’re finished?” she said with an icy hauteur that quelled the woman, then she looked down at her own palms. “We are at a change time,” she said, bringing each word out slowly, heavily as if she dropped over-ripe plums on the table and watched them mash. When she heard herself, she lightened up a bit, reminding herself that the woman might be thick but she wasn’t totally stupid. “Forces converge,” she said, “weaving strange patterns. It is a time to walk warily, every act will resonate far beyond the point of action. It is time that those tied to you experience a like courtesy. Give me your hands.”

  She held the jamika’s larger hands between her own, tilted her head back, closed her eyes. “The change is begun,” she said. “The threads are spun out and out, fine threads wound about one, about and about, the links are made, son to mother, mother to son. What the mother does to those about her will be done unto the son.” As she chanted the nonsense in a soft compelling voice, she tapped into the Temueng woman’s life force, draining her slowly, carefully, until the woman was in a deeply suggestible daze. Softly, softly, Brann whispered, “Anything you do to us will be done to you, prison us here and your son will be a prisoner, send bad report about us to the other jamars and jamikas and your son will suffer slander, hurt us in any way and you hurt your son, hear me Tjena Hamardan jamika, you will not remember my words, but you will feel them in your soul. Any harm you do to us, that same harm will come to your son. Hear my blessing, Tjena Hamardan jamika, the benign side of the change coin. What good you do to man and maid in your power, Hina, Temueng or other, that good will bless you and your son, praise will perfume his days and nights. Good will come to you in proportion to the good you give, a quiet soul, a contented life, sweet sleep at night and harmony by day. Hear me, Tjena Hamardan jamika, forget my words but feel them in your soul, forget my words, but find contentment in your life, forget my words.” She set the jamika’s hands on the table and heard a soft unassertive whistle die behind her and knew Han-a had reinforced her words with one of her whistle spells. “Sleep now, Tjena Hamardan jamika. Sleep now and wake to goodness at your high noon tea. Lie back on your couch and sleep. Wake with the nooning, knowing what you must do. Sleep, sleep, sleep…”

  With Harra’s help she straightened out the huge woman on the daycouch, smoothing out her robes and crossing her large but shapely hands below her breasts, smoothing her hair, fixing her so she would wake with as few as possible of those debilitating irritations that came from sleeping in day clothing. Brann frowned at her a moment, then trickled some of the life back in her, doing it carefully enough she didn’t disturb her sleep; she moved away from the couch, going to the door of the sitting room. Several maids were in the smaller room beyond, talking in whispers, working on embroideries and repairs while they waited to be summoned. She beckoned to the senior maidservant, showed her the sleeping form of the jamika. “Your mistress will sleep until time for tea; her night was disturbed and she was fretful.”

  An older Hina woman with a weary meekness from years of hectoring, the maid’s mouth pinched into a thin line; she knew all too well what, fretfulness in the jamika meant for her and the other maids.

  Brann smiled at her. “If she finishes her sleep without being disturbed, the jamika will wake in a sweeter temper and make your life easier for a while, at least until the moon turn’s again.”

  The maid nodded, understanding what was not said. “Godalau’s blessing on you if it be so, Sator,” she murmired, then went quickly away from Brann, appreciative but uneasy with the stranger’s powers.

  Brann, Harra and the Yaril-hound went back to their rooms to pack, having done everything they could to ensure good report and an uneventful departure on the morrow.

  THEY RUMBLED FROM the House early the next morning, leaving behind much good feeling among the Hina servants and a pair of contented but rather confused Temuengs. Linjijan, who’d grown restless and unhappy closed within those walls, was delighted to stretch his spirit and body-long thin legs propped up on the splash-board, neck propped on his blanket roll, he played his flute, the music ebullient and joy-filled, waking little devils in the horses who’d also grown bored in their sumptuous stables and were inclined to work off their excess energy in bursts of mischievous behavior. Brann’s dun shied at his own shadow, kicked up his heels, tried to rear, and gave his rider some energetic moments until she managed to settle him down a little. When they passed from sight of the House, she let him run a short while but pulled him back to an easy canter before he could blow himself and tire her more.

  Harra laughed and let her gray dance a bit, then quieted him and added the plink of her daroud to the wanderings of the flute and the dark music Negomas was stroking from his smallest drum.

  At midday they reached Hamardan again and stopped at the inn for a hearty lunch with hot tea and pleas from the Host to play again that night. Anxious to make up time Taguiloa shook his head to that but promised to stop there when the troupe returned to Silili.

  CERTAINLY TUNJII rode Taguiloa’s shoulder those next four weeks as they followed the river road north. The weather was perfect for traveling and for outdoor performances. In villages without an inn, they played to cheering crowds in the market square and more than once spent several nights in a jamar’s House, though there was no more trouble about leaving when they pleased. Word flew ahead of them; it seemed that every village and inland city was waiting and ready for them, folk swarming about the show wagon, following in shouting cheerful crowds as they drove through city streets or village lanes. The hiding places in the cart’s bottom grew heavy with coin and the mood of Temueng and Hina alike was as genially golden as the weather. Whether it was his timing, the long summer having worked up a mighty thirst in them for diversion, whether it was the strong leavening of Ternuengs in each audience, for whatever reason, the troupe met little of the resistance Taguiloa had expected to the strange and sometimes difficult music and the improvisational and wholly non-traditional dance and tumbling he was introducing. He began to worry. They were a tempting target for the Ular-drah, the hillwolves through whose territory they would have to pass, a small party of players coming of a phenomenally successful tour fat with gold, on their own, no soldiers, two of them women, two of them children, only the dog to worry about and they wouldn’t worry that much about her. He could hope Tungjii would stick around, but he knew only too well the fickleness of his patron and the quicksilver quality of such fortune as that they bathed in these golden glowing days, these warm dry silver nights.

  They left the city Kamanarc
ha early in a bright cool morning. There was a touch of frost on the earth, glittering in the long slant of the morning light. The guard at the city gate was yawning and stiff, more than half asleep as he operated the windlass that opened the gate. Taguiloa tossed him a small silver and got a shouted blessing from him along with a hearty request to come back soon. As an afterthought, the guard added, “Watch out for the drah, showman, word is they’re prowling.”

  On top of the wagon’s roof Negomas grinned and rattled his drum defiantly. Linjijan was stretched out more than half asleep, lost in the dreams he never spoke aloud. Of them all he’d changed the least during the tour, no closer now to the others than he’d been before, an amiable companion who did everything he was asked to do without skimping or complaint and nothing at all he was not asked to do. He was no burden and no help, irritating each of the others in turn until they learned to accept him as he was for he certainly wasn’t going to change. His flute was a blessing and a joy; that had to be enough.

  Negomas and Harra were much together, studying each other’s bits of magic. As Taguiloa had taken dance and tumbling and juggling and melded them into an exciting whole, had brought Harra and Negomas and Linjijan together and almost coerced them into producing the musical equivalent of his dance, so these orphan children of different traditions were blending their knowledge to make an odd, effective magic that belonged only to them and magnified their own power, the whole they made being greatly more than either apart.

  Brann was as isolated from the others as Linjijan though more aware of it; she was simply too different now from human folk and her purposes were too much apart from theirs. She was fascinated by the illusions Harra and Negomas created for their own entertainment and by the intimate connection magic had with music as if the patterning of sounds by drum, daroud, and Harra’s whistling somehow patterned the invisible in ways that allowed the boy and the young woman to control and manipulate it. After leaving Hamardan, Brann had tried to learn from Harra, but she could not. It was as if she were tone-deaf and trying to learn to sing. There was something in her or about her that would not tolerate magic. Han-a found this fascinating and tried a number of experiments and found that any spells or even unshaped power that she aimed at Brann was simply shunted aside. Magic would not touch her, refused to abide near her. Harra and Negomas both could do whatever they wanted in her presence as long as whatever they did wasn’t aimed at her. She wasn’t a quencher, therefore, not a sink where magic entered and was lost; she simply wasn’t present to it. At least, not any longer. She told Harra about the Marish shaman who’d netted her and the changechildren so neatly. Harra decided eventually that this had somehow immunized her and the children against any further vulnerability. Brann listened, sighed, nodded. “Slya’s work,” she said. “She doesn’t want me controlled by anyone but her.”

  The countryside was brown and turning stubbly, the harvest coming in. The pastures were taking on a yellow look with sparse patches where little grass grew and fewer weeds. They were coming to the barrens where the soil was hard and cracked, laced with salt and alkali so that only the hardiest plants grew there and those only sparsely. Even along the river where there was plenty of water there was little vegetation and the trees had a stunted look.

  For some hours they passed long straight lines of panja brush, low-growing bushes with smooth hard purplish bark, crooked branches and little round leaves hard as boiled leather. These lines were windbreaks against the winter storms that swept down off the northern plains, those flat gray grasslands that spawned the Temuengs. They left the last of the windbreaks behind a little after noon and were out of the Kamanarcha jamarak and into the barrens.

  The road began to rise and the trees thinned and fell away. There was a little yellowish grass on the slopes but it didn’t look healthy. The river sank farther below them into the great gorge that cut through the Matigunns; the road followed the lip of the gorge and the towpath continued far below them, the stone pilings that marked the edge of the canal jutting like gray fingers from cold pure water glinting bluer than blue in the late summer sun. The canal was part of the river here, the stone of the mountain heart too stubbornly resistant for anything else; the towpath was a massive project in itself, old tales said it was burned out of the stone by dragons breath in the mythtime before Popokanjo shot the moon. There were no barges on the river yet, floating down or being towed up. In a few weeks, when the harvest up and down the river was complete, the trading season would begin and the huge imperial dapplegrays that towed the barges from Hamardan to Lake Biraryry would be plodding northward in teams of eight or ten, escorted by the Emperor’s Horse Guards. The dapples were bred and reared only in imperial stables; anyone else found with one would be fed to them piece by piece because the dapples ate flesh as well as corn, human flesh by choice, though they’d make do with dog or cow or the flesh of other horses if there was no one in the Emperor’s prisons healthy enough to be fed to them. The tow master for each team was raised with them from their foaling; he slept with them, ate with them, arranged their matings, tended them in every way, shod them, plaited mane and tail, washed and combed the feathering at their hocks, polished their hooves, repaired their harness, kept it oiled and shining. He did all that from pride and affection for his charges and also because they’d kill and eat anyone else who tried to come near theth-. Even the fiercest of the Ular-drah bands left them alone. Barge travel was safe-but very expensive.

  High overhead a mountain eagle soared in wide graceful loops, Yaril keeping watch over the road and the surrounding hills. She’d spot any ambushes long before they ripened into danger. Hana and Taguiloa were joking together, both of them relaxed and unworried for the moment; Yaril’s presence was a guarantee that there was no present danger to the troupe. Brann rode ahead of the wagon, brooding over a problem that was becoming increasingly urgent. The children were hungry. The performing used up their strength far faster than she’d expected. She’d walked the alleys of Silili for a fortnight, taking the life force of every man who came after her intending to steal or rape or both, feeding the children until they were so sated they couldn’t take another draft of that energy they needed for their strange life, storing more of the stolen life in her own body until her flesh glowed with it. Since then she’d fed them from herself and from what animal life she could trap, dogs and cats that roamed the streets of the cities and villages they played in, careful to take no human life. She didn’t want anyone connecting mysterious deaths with the troupe. She cursed the Hamardan jamar, he was the source of the trouble now; if it hadn’t been for him, they’d have reached Andurya Durat already, the drain from the dregs of the city. A day or two more and she’d have to go hunting, anything she could find in these barren mountains, wolves two-legged or otherwise, deer, wildcats, anything the children could run to her. The children were patient, but need would begin to drive them and they would drive her.

  By nightfall they were deep in the barrens. Yaril had found one of the corrals the dapples used when they walked the road to Hamardan, returning to pick up another barge. It was a stone circle with a heavy plank gate and three-sided stalls, locked grain bins and a stone watering trough. At the roadside there was a tripod of huge beams that jutted out over the river, a bucket and a coil of rope; there’d be no problem about bringing water up for them and for the horses. They set up their night camp inside the circle, filled the trough with water, emptied half a sack of grain in the manger (they didn’t touch the grain bins, though the children could have opened them; that was dapple food and they’d be stealing directly from the Emperor. Not a good idea). The night promised to be cold and drear though Tungjii was still hanging about since the sky was clear and no rain threatened. The children went prowling about the hills and came back with lumps of coal for a fire, reporting a surface seam about a mile back from the road. Leaving Brann and the children to watch over the camp, Taguiloa, Linjijan and Harra took empty feed sacks and fetched back as much as they could carry, more of Tu
ngjii’s blessing, Taguiloa thought, for there was no wood to make a fine and wouldn’t be as long as they were in the barrens. And the nights were not going to get warmer.

  Leaving Han-a and Taguiloa making a stew from the store of dried meat and vegetables, arguing cheerfully over proportions and how much rice to put in the other pot, Negomas and Linjijan rubbing down the horses and going over them with stiff brushes, combing out manes and tails, cleaning their hooves, Brann went with the children to stand beside the tripod where they couldn’t be seen from those inside the corral. She held out her hands and the children pulled life from her she could feel them struggling to control the need that grew each night and she suffered with them. When they broke from her, she sighed. “You want to go hunting tonight?”

  Yaril kicked a pebble over the edge and watched it leap down the nearly vertical cliff and plop into the water. “Might not have to.”

  “Ular-drah?”

  “Uh-huh. A man’s been watching us since late afternoon.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Gone. He left before we found the coal. Left as soon as it was obvious we were settling for the night.”

  “Ah. You could be right.”

  Yaril nodded, her silver-gilt hair shining in the light of the Wounded Moon. She giggled. “Our meat coming to us.