City of Death (26 page)

The howling wind intensified until the griffins were straining just to keep from being blown backward. Her father listened to the panting of the griffins and saw the irregular, awkward strokes of their wings. And despite Pele's charm, Scirye's cheeks felt numb from the cold. She could only imagine how her parents and the Pippalanta were managing in just their flying gear.

“This is no good,” her father finally announced to the company. He motioned at the floor of the pass. “We'll have to camp here and hope the winds slacken in the morning.”

The pass answered him with a deep moan followed by wails from other caves. Even though Scirye knew there was a logical explanation for the sound, she could not shake an eerie feeling.

Roland's men had shoveled a path across the floor of the pass, but on either side the snow rose to six feet high. When they landed on the trail and Koko got off, he gave a little hop. “Yikes! There's someone there.”

Readying his weapon armband, Leech jumped from Oko's griffin and aimed at the spot where the pale face peered through the snow on the right side. He squinted at it a moment and then stood up. “It's a statue, you idiot. The eyes aren't blinking.”

Curious, Scirye high-stepped through the snow to where Leech was hovering. Squatting down, she scraped the snow off to reveal a head broken off some statue.

The full-fleshed lips were smiling at some secret prank being played on them, and the eyes seemed to mock them.

“There's the rest of him,” Kles said, pointing at the torso that stuck up from the snow on the side.

Scirye looked at the head and then leaned against the snowbank to examine the torso. “It's pitted all over with bullet holes.”

“The holes are new too,” Kat observed with a professional eye.

“Maybe Roland's guards used it for target practice,” Koko said.

Kneeling, M
ā
ka studied the head. “It looks Greek. To think it survived intact all those centuries until those modern barbarians damaged it for sport.”

“And in his own home too.” Bending over, Scirye began to dig through the snow toward the statue. “It's not Tumarg to do this to something this old.”

“What are you doing, lady?” Wali asked.

“I'm going to put this head back on the statue.” Scirye kept flinging handfuls of snow to the side until a few minutes later, Kat joined her with a collapsible shovel.

“Allow me a turn, lady,” Kat said. The Pippal made short work of digging a trench to the statue. Straightening, she called to her friends, “Wali, Oko, bring the head here.”

With a boost from Kat, Scirye managed to lie on top of the snowbank next to the statue. As Oko and Wali lifted the heavy head, Scirye cleaned the snowflakes and bits of ice from the cheeks and nose and then tried to position it on the neck. Some bits must have been lost from the neck because it tilted slightly off center.

“I'm sorry,” Scirye said to the statue, dusting the snow from her palms. “I'm afraid that's the best we can do for now. But when”—she made a point of using
when
—“we get back, I'll make sure it's done right.”

As the Pippalanta helped lift her from the snowbank down to the trail, her father scraped enough snow away from the torso until he revealed the pedestal on which it stood. Bending over, he read the inscription on its plaque. “This is Dionysus himself,” Lord Tsirauñe gasped and stepped back.

Lady Sudarshane nodded. “You'd expect to find a shrine to him up here. The Greeks claimed He was born in these very mountains. They loved Him for His wine and wild songs—and feared Him for what his gifts did to humans.”

“Dionysus sounds like a dockworker on payday,” Koko observed. “It's always a good idea to give one of them a wide berth.”

Lady Sudarshane shook her head. “You don't understand. He filled normal women with such ecstasy that they lost all control and did terrible things. Maenads, they were called, and they would chase down wild animals, tear them apart, and devour them raw. Once, under Dionysus's spell, a queen killed and ate her own son.”

“Is he still around?” Leech asked with a shiver.

Lord Tsirauñe scratched his throat. “I've always thought they were just traveler's tales, but one man claimed to have found the prints of a giant tiger like the one that He rides.”

“And I met a man once,” Kat said in a hushed voice, “who said he'd seen the lights of His maenads flitting across the hills at night. They were calling something like this.” She threw back her head and made a ghostly whisper from the back of her throat. “‘
Euoi. Euoi.
' He left everything—camel, tent, trade goods—and ran for his life.”

Cautiously, Scirye retreated several steps. She hoped she hadn't done anything to annoy him.

Only M
ā
ka remained by the statue. “Roland's fools have just condemned themselves,” she said as somber as a judge delivering a death sentence. “The land will rise up against them now.” She placed a palm upon the statue as she gazed up into Dionysus's blank eyes. “But as you carry out your vengeance, lord, please also remember the kindness that Lady Scirye did you.”

By common consent, they made camp farther along the trail, out of sight of the statue. The walls of snow on either side gave them shelter from the fierce winds of the pass, but not the keening from the passages of the dead eyrie. No one, not even Koko, felt much like talking and they turned in after a quick meal.

All too soon, though, Scirye felt Wali shaking her shoulder.

“It's midnight, lady. Time for you to take my place at keeping watch,” whispered the Pippal.

Scirye became aware of herself lying on a blanket on the ground with her arms around her griffin and his foreleg around her. Carefully, she tried to disentangle herself, but Kles woke up anyway.

“Go back to sleep, Kles,” she whispered as she sat up.

“I'm awake anyway,” Kles said. His beak clacked in a big yawn.

As Wali lay down, Scirye said to Kles, “You don't have to take my turn with me. After all, you don't expect me to stay up when you do it.”

The griffin crept up her arm to her shoulder. “I'll make sure you keep awake.” His paws began to groom her. “And your hair's in a frightful mess again.”

Scirye wrapped her blanket around them, submitting to the soothing rhythm of his claws. It wasn't long before she noticed that his paws slowed and then stopped all together. With a smile, she gently lowered the snoring griffin onto her lap.

As Scirye listened to the others sleeping, she suddenly felt very protective of them. They trusted her while they were in such a helpless state. Well, she wouldn't let them down.

She was startled by a puff of warm, moist air on the back of her neck and jerked around. A tiger as big as a bull stared down at her. Tilting on the tiger's head—almost hanging from one ear, in fact—was an ivy wreath. The tiger's large eyes glowed like green coals as they regarded her.

She opened her mouth to warn the others, but the tiger's rider leaned forward so that his chest rested against the tiger's great head. He wore a tunic of red and gold silk, cut in the style of the antique costumes that the Kushan men had worn when the exhibit had opened at the museum in San Francisco. Small gold pendants shaped like clusters of grapes dangled from his curly hair.

The rider's face was the same as the statue's, but every strand, every detail of the face, the very pores of his perfect skin, seemed sharply etched while everything around him seemed blurred in comparison, as if Dionysus were the most real thing here, far realer than his statue or Scirye or any other living creature.

Scirye couldn't move. All she could do was gaze upward into eyes that glittered like sparks whirling above a bonfire with wild and energetic and unpredictable joy.

Scirye was so frightened that her voice came out as a raspy whisper. “Wh-what do you want, l-l-lord?”

Dionysus smiled as if the two of them were sharing a private joke and then he beckoned to her.

Suddenly she was no longer in the pass but on a hillside on an autumn night among rows of vines climbing up stakes, their clusters of ripe, round grapes silvered by the moonlight. Leaves rustled everywhere, making a sound of distant surf, and the air was filled with a heady, sweet smell of ripening fruit.

And she was throwing herself recklessly through the grape vines in a headlong plunge down a hill, feet pounding the earth as if it were a giant drum. Girls and women were singing and laughing all around her, laurel wreaths entwined in their hair in time to the beating of tambourines and jingling sistra and notes of reed pipes.

Though she did not recognize the words of the song, she cried out the chorus as loudly as everyone else,
“Euoi! Euoi!”
The syllables were like drops of honey to her tongue. The earth itself pumped its energy into her each time the soles of her bare feet pattered against the dirt so that she felt like she could dance forever.

Were these the maenads her mother had warned her about? But these were no wild hunters. These were people who were enjoying being alive.

“Euoi!” Scirye said.

“What did you say, lady?” Kles asked as if from faraway.

Scirye felt as if she had forgotten something important that she had to do. And her hand burned as if she were holding a red-hot coal.

“Euoi-euoi-euoi!” The singing and the music became louder and more frantic, and caught up in the frenetic rhythm, Scirye told herself that the errand could wait for tomorrow. Right now, she was enjoying herself too much.

“Lady?” Kles called again. She felt something light, soft blows on her chin like dry raindrops.

And suddenly Scirye remembered the arrows.

She sat up, panting to see that her griffin had reared up from her lap and was using his paws to pat either side of her jaw. The mark on her hand shone with a fierce light.

Heart still pounding, she looked about. She was no longer dancing through the autumn hills but was once more sitting in a wintry mountain pass.

Suddenly she felt so empty, so dead inside—gone was the energy and the joy and the laughter. And she began to cry.

Kles surged up to her shoulder so he could stroke her head and coo to her as if she were a frightened hatchling. “Sa, sa, it's all right, lady. Your Kles is here.”

She leaned her forehead against his as she did when she was confessing her innermost secrets. “I had a dream. No, I met Dionysus and joined His maenads. And it was so wonderful.” Even now, she felt an itch in her legs that she could only satisfy by dancing.

“Perhaps He was inviting you to join Him because you tried to fix His statue,” Kles suggested as he wiped her tears away with the soft back of his paw.

She raised a hand and pressed him closer. “If you hadn't woken me when you did, maybe I would have gone too deep into that dream and never have come back.” Even now, she felt regret that the griffin had roused her.

“I'm beginning to think that Dionysus isn't as cruel as I thought,” Kles said. “The problem is that He doesn't understand humans very well, so He can't see that some of His good deeds can harm mere mortals.”

She thought of the maenads. At least Nanaia had never filled her with such a hunger as Dionysus had. “So maybe it's better if the goddess doesn't change things for me. I've got to do it myself.”

“There's a fine line between helping and interfering,” the griffin observed. “Perhaps this is why the goddess gives you hints rather than getting involved directly,” Kles said. “She's so powerful that when she came to you in a vision, just that slight bit of Her knocked you out for an hour. If she were to appear right now to tell you what to do—.”

“I might go into a coma for years and years,” Scirye said. “Or maybe I wouldn't wake up at all.” The new insight didn't erase all the frustration she felt, but at least it helped.

“Bayang warned you about getting mixed up with gods and goddesses,” Kles reminded her. “Speaking of which, it's her turn to keep watch.”

When they woke Bayang, Scirye told her what she had seen and heard.

Bayang gazed at her a moment, the golden orbs of her pupils almost gleaming. No human had such eyes, only a dragon.

“Maybe I'll take the rest of the watches,” Bayang said. “Dionysus holds no sway over dragons.”

*   *   *

Scirye did not
dream again of the maenads and she felt a little sad when she woke up the next morning. Apparently, you could not expect more than one invitation from Dionysus to join the dance, and she had missed her chance.

But as she sniffed the cold air, she smelled the sweet, heady scents of her dream, and she sat up. The dragon was lying coiled in the snow, casually popping grapes into her mouth from a basket as she gazed at the sleeping Leech. She'd been doing that a lot since Leech had become distracted, as if she were trying to figure out what was happening inside their friend's mind.

“Where did you get grapes in winter?” Scirye gasped.

Bayang held a grape up between her claws. “I was keeping watch and as I turned my head—poof!—the basket was right next to you.”

Scirye plucked a grape from the cluster. It was about the size of her thumb and greenish gold. When she bit into it, her mouth was flooded with a golden warmth like a summer sun. Maybe this was Dionysus's way of encouraging her—a sort of consolation prize.

She watched Kles take a grape between his paws and begin to nibble it enthusiastically. “I've never tasted anything this good,” he said.

Bayang held a claw up to her muzzle. “Listen. What do you hear?”

Scirye's ears strained in the hopes of catching the sound of drums and reed pipes again, but it was silent. The air was still and the pass was no longer wailing.

“I don't hear anything. The winds have died down. Do you think Dionysus calmed the winds for us?” Kles asked.