The Lady (20 page)

What had woken her was hooves. She scrambled groggily from the blankets as Rozen yelped and sat up, someone else treading on her.

“Marakanders in the camp.” The voice was that of Shaugh, one of her bench-companions, a man formerly of Lord Goran's household. “My lady, quickly, arm yourself.”

Rozen was already there, stumbling into her, fumbling to drag Deyandara's mail shirt over her head. “Hold still, my lady!” Deyandara groped for her boots, glad she'd slept more or less full clothed. She held still long enough for Rozen to cinch her belt tight, assured herself her dagger was easy to hand, but couldn't find her boots.

“Lin, make a light!”

Shaugh seized her by the shoulder. “My lady, to the horses, now.”

“Lin? Where is she?”

“She's gone!” Deyandara heard Rozen moving around the dark tent, blundering into things. “There's no one else here. My lady, I swear she didn't go out past me, but she's gone!”

“No time,” said Shaugh.

“Boots,” Deyandara protested, and they were thrust at her. She got them on over bare feet, hopping as she was half dragged out the door, Rozen running at her side, spear in hand.

Grey twilight, harbinger of dawn. No small affray, a party of Marakanders stumbling upon their watch unawares. They had come up the valley of the brook, and if the alarm had been sounded at all, it had not given her people much warning. Most had slept in the open, and as she ran, Shaugh's hand still gripping her arm, a wave of riders on horses and camels swept in amongst them. Some, the heavier sleepers, were ridden down where they lay. The screams were sickening. Some ran for horses, but the picket-lines were a snorting, stamping frenzy of spooked beasts, as much danger to their masters as the enemy was; others ran to rally at their lords' tents.

A string of galloping horses turned out to be Faullen and most of her own bench-companions. There was Marnoch, fully armed and on foot.

“Deya!” He grabbed her, hustled her to the white mare, heaved her up. “Devils take it, why bring her a horse so easily seen? Ride for your brother, don't wait for stragglers. Go!” He slapped the mare's rump and leapt out of the way as the horse surged forward, the other riders, six, seven, a dozen, a score of them, including Lord Fairu, closing in around her. Deyandara found her stirrups. She had to hold the mare back to keep her from leaving the others behind. A quick glance behind. Rozen was running after Marnoch. Someone had broken out the banner of the royal house, Hyllanim's black bull, and pursued Marnoch with it to the slope of the hill below the pine. Men and women, on foot and ahorse, fell back on him. Order was emerging, archers, spearmen, lord's men, but the ground where they had camped was thick with enemies, not a lord's warband, maybe, but enough for a raiding party. If they'd met in open battle, not been taken unawares, they could have prevailed, but—Red Masks.

Where in the cold hells had Lin gone, tonight of all nights?

Two Red Masks, only two, but they swerved to ride hard after Deyandara's flying party. She saw the Marakanders close up into a tight body again—some of the shouting was orders—leaving their pursuit of men still chasing horses or running solitary to join larger groups, and then split like a flock of birds, like water meeting a stone, half to gather, waiting, planning, a threat to Marnoch, assessing the moment, half to ride hard after the Red Masks, after her. She looked away, as the Marakanders loosed a flight of arrows against Marnoch's company.

She and hers crested the long slope of the hill and pelted down, angling west, though who was choosing their route she couldn't say. The white mare, maybe. It certainly wasn't she. Her brother's army would be somewhere to the south and east, but they could hardly gallop all the way to him even if it didn't take them under the walls of Dinaz Catairna and Ketsim's nose. Lose themselves in the hills and valleys, find the regions of stone, of ravines and scarps and steep forest, hunters' land. They needed to abandon the horses, go furtive on foot.

“My lady!” Fairu had come in next to her, shouting, pointing. “We need to stop and switch horses, break up, while they can't see us. They'll follow the white. Those poplars!”

A quick glance at the poplars climbing a steep bank away to the left, a quick glance back. The Marakanders were already pouring down the hillside after them, desert-breds pulling ahead. She pointed back. Even if they could put the trees between their pursuers and themselves, there wouldn't be time to halt. Fairu looked behind, spurred his horse cruelly, crouched low, and the white mare surged ahead with him.

“You and me,” he shouted. “Mag, I'm taking the queen's horse, you'll come with me.” Mag, white-faced behind, nodded. The Red Masks might be lured to follow a wizard. A wizard, rashly working magic, might deliberately lure them, if their obsession overrode whatever orders they had. “Faullen, go with the queen, no matter what.”

Slowly, she and Fairu lengthened their lead, leaving their companions to follow. Lord Fairu's bay was red-nostrilled and lathered; it was not going to have much left by the time they did reach the poplars. A horse squealed and screamed, and she looked back, though she shouldn't have, to see legs flailing, neck twisting, someone's mount down screaming with another atop it. One horse staggered up, riderless, limped a few yards, and then stood, head hanging. Its rider turned to face the onrushing Marakanders, spear braced. Some of the others checked briefly as if to go back to his aid, then came on, leaving the fallen. The other horse that had gone down still flailed, trying to rise and unable to. Its rider, Andara bless, Shaugh, lay half under it, unmoving. She saw the arrow then, standing from its ribs. It gave up the struggle and stretched itself on the grass, though its side still heaved. The Grasslanders and desert folk shot from the saddle. The man afoot fell and did not rise.

Fairu looked back as well. “No good,” he said. “We're not going to have a chance to switch mounts. You might outrun them on your own. Lose yourself in the hills and get to the road and your brother.”

He let his labouring beast drop back and turned. The white mare slowed, without a challenger at her side, and tried to turn as well. Deyandara set her straight again, kicked her to a new burst of speed. Behind her, there was shouting and the clash of blades.

She was only the banner. They shouldn't be dying for her. She wasn't any more use than one of the younger scouts, no more worth than any of those who only followed their lords because it was their duty. But she was the sign they defied Marakand, that they were still one folk and not a scattering of brigand-lords. She looked back again. Horses ran, riders lashing them. Those unhorsed, both her own and the mercenaries, ran, ignoring one another, or cowered like children fearing monsters, hands over their head.

The Red Masks rode straight and hard after her on long-legged desert horses. Deyandara felt the edge of the panic claw into her.

They shouldn't know her. They shouldn't care about her. She still couldn't believe Lin would have betrayed her. Lin might haul her back to her brother by her ear, though she hadn't, but not betray her life. The mare had the bit in her teeth and was going flat out, swerving away from the valley bottom towards clearer land, but steeper, too. Deyandara crouched lower, smaller, but no arrows came, only the pounding of hooves. “Andara, Andara, please, no, please—” over and over, all the prayer she could shape, mouth dry as sand. The mare suddenly decided safety lay in the shelter of the poplars after all. She veered, flinging Deyandara off-balance, and lifted, leaping like a deer over a summer-dry rivulet that came twisting down the slope, and with her last flash of sense Deya got her foot out of the one stirrup she still possessed, knowing herself falling, lost. She rolled, stunned, with the wind knocked out of her and a searing pain in her shoulder, heard the hooves fade and grow louder again, the mare fleeing, the Red Masks circling, trampling. Her breath came rapid and wheezing, and she couldn't move even to crawl, couldn't even open her eyes. Creak and thump, a rider dismounting. There would be the blow of the white staff, a moment of agony, burning, and she would be dead, or they would hack at her, like Gilru, but she wore armour. Her helmet was lost; they would crack open her skull. She heard herself whimpering, high and shrill like a blind puppy strayed too far from its mother's warm belly, and found that like the puppy she was crawling, blind, flat, and every reach of her left arm was as if their swords had thrust into her shoulder.

She was seized, struggling, screaming and crying, kicking and punching, eyes finally open and the red woollen tunic filling her vision as he clutched her by the throat, holding her off.

“Settle down, girl,” said the other, “or it'll be the worse for you.” The woman caught her arms, twisting them behind her.

Her knees gave way. She shrieked, because the fire in her shoulder was worse than anything, even the terror. Everything went red with the fire, or maybe it was that the Red Masks filled the world. Her crying was lost. Even her own panting breath was drowned by the hot wasp-buzzing that filled her ears, till that, too, was lost, and darkness claimed her. But she thought, as she slid away,
Red tunic, not armour. There was armour underneath. I punched it. Mail. Red Masks don't speak—and not the Praitan of the tributary lands
.

CHAPTER X

The winds were not so favourable this night as when Yeh-Lin Dotemon had made her last journey to the city. They came from the south, carrying memory of the sea, the airs of the lands beyond, the great trees and the blue hills. . . .

She had to use them anyway. Powers brooded over Marakand. Her mirror had shown her something there, warning, something to come, a rift in the world. The ice of the cold hells. All was still, waiting, poised, but the balance shifted. She could feel it, like muscles tensing to deal the great and fatal blow, something was set in motion, the first shiver far below that would wake the great wave. And the ice would reach for them, draw them in, hungry.

They were fools. They had all been fools, and they still were. Lin saw them, in her mind's eye, three powers of the distant fires, grappling over Marakand, tearing one another to pieces over—what? Rule of a little human city, the glory of mere human tyranny? To be a lord over the little lives? They had fallen so far, forgotten so much of what, and of why. Especially, perhaps, of why.

They were here, she would say to them—but they would not listen.
We are here. We are now. We have only here and only now. The ice is behind, the stars beyond our reach. Be here, be now, be in this world and use it with more honour. Be the careful guest in the hall, mindful of your lord and hosts, small and weak and swift-dying as they are
.

Be quiet, and patient, and walk gently
.

She thought of the Eastern Wall three, almost four weeks ago now, and the soldiers who had died there, and shook her head at herself. Hypocrite. Well, she tried. At least the fools at the gate had started that fight. She did try. She held memory of the tree in her inmost heart, her tree, who had wrapped her into
her
heart and held her like the tender worm in the cocoon, and sang to her, long, long years, sang the life of her land and her folk, the goddess in the baobab with her roots in the deep aquifer under the hills.

She had learnt patience there. She thought she had. The patience, not of the spider—that she had always had, when she was Yeh-Lin, who had been serf and concubine, poisoner and wizard, mistress and mother and empress and exile—but the patience of roots in the earth, of the elephant crossing the dry plain, of the hills awaiting rain. Patience of the goddess who one day opened her heart and told the prisoner she held,
Go, fly free again
. The chains that bound her had long worn away, and she had been content to stay, to watch, as the baobab-river goddess watched, the folk of that land. But like a fledging, or a moth new-hatched, Yeh-Lin had crawled from the nest, her cocoon, to stretch stiff and clumsy wings and find life in them after all.

She still did not know quite why she was released to the world again. The Old Great Gods would not have wished it so.

Find out for yourself
, the baobab river had told her.
Walk gently in the world. You hold it in your hands. The least child does
.

In her wanderings in the dawn-fresh world she had found Deyandara, prickly, angry, unlovable child. She had never done well at motherhood. She had found it no easier, and yet the child needed someone. Not her, really, but she was the only one who seemed willing to take an interest, until the bard Yselly. Better Yselly than her, she had thought, but since she had failed for all her careful trying to pluck that tangled curse fully from the girl—what a mess that was, and so strangely woven, through life and death, and rooted in the land and the goddess of the land—Yselly had fallen to it. Her fault? Maybe.

Now she had sworn to protect the girl. Sworn to what, she wasn't sure. Sworn to eyes like the night between the unreachable stars and a weight, a weight in the world she felt heavy even weighed against herself, and yet held so lightly in a single hand.

Was that what she did, now? Did she act to protect Deyandara? This gathering of powers in Marakand was a great danger; she did not lie to herself in saying so. But a danger how, and to whom? And when?

To all the human world, maybe? Surely they knew better than to be so. There was the wasteland of Tiypur to remind them, and the blasted dead lands of the eastern shore of the Kinsai'aa. A danger to Over-Malagru, which was Deyandara's land, they were that. This day, this season?

Maybe not, but in the long run, they were a danger worse than the mercenaries and traitor lords arrayed against Marnoch's pitiful band, a danger worse than that army, small though it was, anchored on invulnerable priests that humans and human wizardry could not oppose, and if she did not do—something, she had no idea what—who would? Who could?