The Lady (27 page)

“Until . . . I don't know,” he said hazily. “They need to free their gods . . .”

“Damn you, anyway, Holla-Sayan.” Gaguush put her arms around him, hauled him close. “Look at you. When did you last sleep?”

“Last night?” he protested. Admitted, “An hour or two.”

“You've got shadows under your eyes so badly I'd think someone had blacked them for you, if I didn't know better.”

He leaned on her, eyes shut. She smelt of roses. And camels, of course. And was trying to kiss him. Her lips were soft, not angry at all.

“Bed,” she said.

“I—”

“Shut up. Bed. Sleep. You're useless. I might as well be a doorpost, if all you're going to do is lean on me. I duck, you'll fall over. I mean, here's your lawful wedded wife trying her damnedest to seduce you and you're practically snoring. If a simple kiss is that much effort . . .”

He protested. He'd only come to let her know he was all right; he had to get back, to guard Hadidu. She found his mouth again but then dropped the bar of the door behind him and started shoving him across the room.

“Bed. You're going to sleep, and if your damned priest himself comes looking for you he can sit outside and whistle.”

Outside on the stairs with Tamarisk. Hadidu might enjoy a few hours with none of his own folk able to find him, come to that. Which reminded him . . . “Where is everyone?”

“Everyone who?”

“The camels are gone.”

“Oh, you noticed?” Gaguush was hauling his coat off, unbuckling his belt. He tried to protest that, got shoved onto the bed—the cat leapt away and spat at him—while she pulled off his boots. “There's a war going on. The temple, the senate, I don't know who may decide next they want camels, or what might come and burn this end of the suburb. I scrounged up a load for a short haul, mostly barley for Serakallash, since their granaries are so empty still, after Tamghat, and it's been a poor summer there. We'll get a good price even given what I had to pay to get it. I sent the gang under Django. Kapuzeh and Thekla went with him, and the new hires, what did you think I wanted them for? Not to sit around the caravanserai doing nothing on my charity. Tihmrose has gone to her brother's mill up over the pass, says he wants her help with all their sister's kids and he'll need a fighter to protect what's his, if things get worse than they are, and Judeh's got the same idea, more or less; his mother and sister are both widows in Silvergate Ward, so he's gone home to them.”

“Zavel?”

“Varro says he's hanging around in the city, picking up a living somehow. He's run into him a couple of times, bought him a meal once, which is more than I'd have done. I haven't seen the boy for weeks. Not since the day before the battle in the suburb, when he showed up drunk and begging. I hate to say it of Asmin-Luya's son, but he's no great loss. I wasn't going to take him on again anyhow. He's had too many second chances.”

Varro hadn't mentioned that to him, and he'd been half expecting, all this time, that the boy's body would turn up somewhere, slain in the fighting. Of course, he hadn't asked, till now. He was too tired to even feel particularly relieved.

“Holla-Sayan, go to sleep.”

That was easy. When Gaguush lay down with him, he pulled her close, arm over her, but really had no urge for more. Sleep, feeling her warmth.

“Holla . . .”

He grunted. Her hand was winding its way inside his shirt, and he was going to annoy her by simply not responding to that, but she only let it rest there, covering old scars.

“I bought the caravanserai.”

“Urm.”

“Stay awake just a moment longer. This is important.”

He forced his eyes open, found her leaning up on an elbow over him. Beautiful, long, slanted eyes, smudged black with kohl.

“Caravanserai?”

“From Rasta. Half of it, anyway, with an understanding to buy him out entire when he decides he's had enough of it. Partners, for now.”

“You—”

“We can't take a baby on the road. Not for a year or two, anyway, and I can't make another trip pregnant. It's too dangerous. Talfan says that at my age I'm mad to think of it. I'm starting to—to listen. I won't risk this child of ours. I won't. So. I was thinking . . . and Master Rasta's been talking about how old and tired he is for years now, and he's got no heir, no kinsfolk at all. He wanted a partner.”

“How?”

“Holla, I'm old and plain and bad-tempered. Haven't you noticed that everyone says you married me for my money?”

“You're beautiful. They're joking.”

“You don't deny ‘bad-tempered.' You never do,
I've
noticed.” She kissed him. “Y'know, you are so damned oblivious at times. It's not all in camels. I've been putting it into various things for years, with the Barrayas and Xuas”—the banking families that invested so much with the eastern road and the ships of the Five Cities—“Well, I pulled it back, some of it, middle of a revolt or not. That's all.”

“All right,” he mumbled.

“Holla!” A thumb jabbed his ribs.

“I'm awake!”

“You're not. Are you—do you mind?”

He blinked and tried to look alert, tried to get his thoughts into some rational vein. Saying, Great Gods, no, let's run away to the Western Grass where there's space and quiet and the gods leave their folk to think for themselves, was about the worst thing he could think of to say. Gaguush in a sod-roofed house, with a wealth measured in sheep and horses and blue cattle . . . not very likely.

How many head of cattle in the worth of a caravanserai?

“You're going to run a caravanserai?”

“With Rasta, yes, I am. You can take the caravan out, if you ever get free of the priest and his senate. Later on, maybe I'll hire someone and we can both go, teach our brat the road. But it's wise. I think it's wise. We have to settle somewhere for the baby, and since you're so deep into Marakand's affairs—”

“Gaguush, there's a civil war going on. There's a devil in the city. The gods are lost—”

“Then fix it! That's what you're trying to do, isn't it? Fix it, because our baby's going to be born here and it's her gods—”

“His gods.”

“Oh, you know that, do you? Fine, we won't name him Pakdhala, then.
His
gods you'd better save,
his
city you'd better set straight, because this is a mess, and you've got seven months before he's born into it.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” she mocked, and lay down again, tight against him. After a moment she asked, quietly, “It will be all right, won't it? The Lady must know she's beaten, or she wouldn't be hiding. She's afraid. She'll run, or you'll finish her once and for all, when she comes out of the temple again. You and Mikki and that damned Ivah, who's turned out to be so great a wizard. The three of you together can kill her.”

The gods of the earth and the greatest wizards of the time hadn't been able to destroy the seven devils of the north, if the tales were true, only bind them in a deathlike sleep, and that was with the help of the Old Great Gods.

The Lady wasn't afraid. She couldn't be. She was waiting. He didn't know for what. Allies, if the rumours her agents leaked were to be believed. Jugurthos said the Praitans, even under a high king, never held together for long. Too quarrelsome a folk, cattle-thieves who couldn't trust their own kin. Or she was preparing some new attack, something that would make the Red Masks inconsequential. She hadn't really done anything yet that frightened him as Tamghat—Tamghiz Ghatai—had. If he hadn't smelt her, felt her and known her by the shape of her soul, the weight of her on the world, he would have thought her nothing more than some powerful wizard turned necromancer. Except for what she had done to defend the temple, the fire on the walls. That was no wizard's work, and that, he and Mikki and Ivah between them, could not find a way to defeat. He didn't know what she was, who she was, really.

Something pretending to be smaller and weaker than it was, a strategy with some aim he couldn't imagine.

He slid a hand down over Gaguush's belly, no more rounded than ever, but he could feel the life that pulsed there, something separate, something that was not Gaguush, such a small and fragile ember, so easy to extinguish. All human life seemed that way. “You should have gone with Django,” he said. “Serakallash would be safer.” He didn't suggest Lissavakail. Didn't, when it came down to it, want his son born Attalissa's.

“At least here, I can stay in bed half the morning and have Tamarisk bring me ginger tea till I stop throwing up. Since you aren't around to do it.”

“Sorry.”

“Go to sleep, Holla.”

But he had her shirt untied.

“I thought you were too tired even to stand up.”

“You keep talking. You're keeping me awake. Anyhow, I'm not standing up.”

“Oh? Something is.”

Eventually, he did sleep, lightly and uneasily; even then awareness of the fire on the temple walls never left him, like a ringing in the ears on the very edge of hearing, that nevertheless won't fade. In his dreams, he still seemed to be prowling the temple's boundaries, walking again through Greenmarket and Templefoot and East Wards, with a band of ash, and of adobe and mud brick and even stone gone to glassy rubble along the wall that topped the sunken temple grounds. How the fire had reached such a kiln-heat without damaging either the temple wall behind or the houses across the streets, nobody could explain. By day the fire still burned pale, without fuel, casting a heat-shimmer high into the air, and at night it was a curtain that rippled the colour of an autumn moon seen through desert dust. The narrow streets that followed the temple's walls were still passable, barely, if you kept to the far side. Most houses along the other sides of those streets and lanes had been abandoned now. No one knew, or trusted, that the wall of fire would not suddenly flare up in greater strength. Along the outer wall, where the temple boundary formed part of the city's defences, the woods of the ravine, which had been a river so long ago it was hardly remembered even in song, were burnt in an ashy strip. There would be no return of green, not in the spring rains, not next year or ten or fifty years hence, no thistle, no bitter cliff-rose, not even the shiny veil of blister-vine. It was dead as the eastern shore of the Kinsai-av along the cataracts, which folk said, untruly, was the scarring of a wizards' war. It hadn't been wizards did that. The dog remembered . . .

No. No. No, he did not.

Not his war, not his folk, not his gods. But Gaguush wanted now to make this city their home. He wasn't asleep but drifting between sleep and waking, restless, half lying over her as if to shield her from some attack. She muttered, “Holla, it's too hot and you're too heavy to use me as a pillow,” shoving him over so she could escape. “I'm going down. You sleep. If anyone comes, I'll tell them I haven't seen you.”

“Don't.”

“Not unless they convince me the Lady's coming out of the temple.” Her hand stroked around his ear, down his jaw, a finger tracing over his lips. “Now go back to sleep. A few hours, at least. I'll cook you some supper, too, before you go back.”

Thekla cooked. Gaguush did not. But he hadn't known she could read and write, either. He smiled, words too much effort, and watched through eyes half-closed as she dressed again, muttering, Gaguush-like, as she hunted for odds and ends of clothing lost under the bed.

After that, sleep did take him, engulfing him like deep water.

CHAPTER XIV

It was all falling apart, and Zora didn't understand, the fool girl didn't understand what she could do about it. Nearly a month, she had been besieged in the temple. No, not besieged. Her citadel. Where else should she await her champion? He would meet the Praitannec high king soon. Now. Today. And Praitan would be hers. Then he would return. She would bring him back to her, and the priest who had gone to be her voice would stay behind to speak her will as the Voiceless Red Masks could not; the armies of Praitan would follow the Red Masks. She might allow Ketsim to live; his Grasslanders, certainly, would follow her king-to-be. Grasslanders always followed a victor.

—It has all gone wrong
.

So she was not besieged. She held her hand above her next move, that was all. Pointless to throw away resources she did not need to spend yet. Pointless, dangerous, to send her Red Masks out needlessly into the city, for the demon and the Blackdog to kill. Working through the Red Masks, she had long since rebuilt the spell of the divine terror. It had been no difficult thing at all to do so, a matter of a few days, and she did not think the wretched Grasslander wizard would find it so easy to tear apart, this time, when it came to the test. But not yet. Not here, yet. No, she did not reveal it by sending them out against the city. Only to be her eyes, she sent them, not to fight. She could not lose any more. Every death weakened her, leached wizardry away, she had none left but theirs, and she feared now her enemies knew it. But when the time came to send the Red Masks out openly again . . . the yellow-eyed wizard would be dead. Or of their number. She had not quite decided. Or perhaps she should even invite her to . . . but the folk could not love a Lady so hard, so worn by war. Besides, the Grasslander wizard would not be so easily seduced as the innocent dancer Zora had been.

Don't think of that.
I am the Lady
.

The sowing of the fields, the summer days. These were the dances of hope and trust in the Lady's kindness. Zora was on her third cycle through the pairing, and the santur-player had just brushed his mallets over the wrong strings, sounding a jarring discord. He would not play in the temple again; she would turn him out, priest or no. The Lady was dishonoured by such imperfection. Sweat trickled down her face, between her breasts, made her limbs slick, as she circled under the bright patch of daylight beneath the shattered eye of the dome, the blue glass flown to shards in her anger—anger, not fear—when Vartu came seeking her. Her feet were so light on the patterned floor. In the dance, there was quiet, the deep, restful quiet of the mind, where truth could rise and understanding blossom.