The Lady (38 page)

Somehow, such attention did not make Deyandara feel safer. She found the dog's head under her hand, thrusting upward as if to give her heart. Something moved in the mist behind the goddess. Ghu, another dog at his feet, leading three stocky horses. He waited there, fading in and out of vision, Catairanach's fog folding about him like a cloak. He looked very weary and sad, and he had a dark cut on his face.

“You don't notice any contradiction in your lovely words?” Ahjvar said, his own broken by another fit of coughing. He spat, and his spittle was ashy black. “Every name you give, every curse you speak—”

The goddess held up a hand, silencing him.

“Go,” she said to Hicca's folk. “Go back to your own valleys, your hills, unblessed, denied. Go lordless and unforgiven, and take this word to your fellows, too, who have set out to raid the hills for Hicca's gain. Sleep in torment, seeing the faces of these enemies you have so dishonourably slain. Hear their cries in the night. And in a year and a day, if you live so long, come back to stand before your king, and ask his forgiveness in my name. Now go.”

Her face was terrible. She lifted a hand towards the gate, and they went, running.

“Every curse you speak fell on me long ago,” Ahjvar said. “Go away.” He swayed so, Deyandara went to him without thinking to put her arm about his waist. He was terribly heavy when he leaned against her.

The goddess smiled at them, kindly, as if she were some queen and they her lords, standing before her to ask—but Deya couldn't have let Ahjvar fall. He braced himself on her shoulder. But Ahjvar's defiance gave her heart. And rage.

“You said you couldn't come into the
dinaz
,” she accused, and was startled to hear her own voice ring loud, clear and unchoking. “You could have come any time, you could have sent Hicca's folk away before they set fire to it all. They died—they were my enemies and yours, but Ketsim died putting himself between me and Hicca's spearmen. Chieh came back into the fire for me, even though she'd been willing to hand me over to Hicca to be killed, before. You could have come any time.”

“No,” said Catairanach, cold and reproving. Deyandara cringed under the look she gave, but Ahjvar's arm went about her, so that they propped one another up. The goddess dismissed her but smiled on Ahjvar. “But you invoked me, Catairlau, you alone could do so, so old in this place, which was yours before these walls were ever built. You called me within the Lady's ban.”

“Cursed you, I thought.”

“Love me or hate me, I'm still your goddess, and you called on me. Did you know the high king, the Andaran, has defeated the Marakander army, the Grasslanders who came before and the new force that rode from the west only now?”

“I know. I was there.”

“He will come here, with the kings and the queens of the tribes,” Catairanach went on. “No doubt he thinks to set someone of his own blood over a kingless land, one of his brothers, perhaps. You will deny him. You will ask him for his sister's hand, and he will not deny you.”

Ahjvar's grip on Deyandara tightened—reassuringly, she realized, and she took a deep breath.

“No,” he said.

The goddess drifted closer, hardly seeming to move. Her hand rose to touch Ahjvar's face, and he flinched back, dragging Deyandara with him. The dog growled.

“Will you live with Hyllau still?” Catairanach asked. “Carry her in this twisted, perverted state? You've made her what she is. I never intended that.”

“You made what you didn't understand,” he said. “You've twisted the world against nature. You've denied her the road she should have taken long ago. You've created a creature cut off from the strength of the earth and the Old Great Gods both. What did you expect? She finds what sustenance she can, all you've left her able to touch. And she was twisted to begin with.”

“She must be reborn, her soul clean and renewed. She will live again.”

“I would sooner kill the girl myself, here and now, than see her made mother to that soul, and by me,” Ahjvar said levelly. “I told you to go. If you say I called you . . . then I can send you. Go. I deny this place to you, these walls, this child of Hyllanim.
Out
.”

“Some night will come when you do not wake at all,” the goddess snarled. “Do you want that for yourself, or for my daughter? You loved her once.”

But she was fading as the mist sank. Deyandara was shaking, her knees weak, and when Ahjvar folded to the ground he pulled her down with him. The dog whined and nuzzled at both of them. Ghu was there, taking Ahjvar's weight so Deyandara could free her arm and sit aside, head on her knees, weeping, she couldn't have said why. Relief and exhaustion and terror combined. The white-and-grey dog thrust its nose in under her face, and the brown-and-black growled at the last of the fog.

“Come, Ahj. Up. We should go.” Burning straw floated down around them like the first snowflakes of a winter storm. The tower creaked and groaned in a rising wind.

Ahjvar said nothing, but he levered himself up by Ghu's shoulder, and the horses were there.

“New horses,” he said, after a moment, while Ghu, like the shield-bearer Ahjvar had called him so long ago, took his sword from him, and cleaned it, and gave it back, and, shoving him towards the horse perhaps more brother-like than as a respectful shield-bearer would, held his stirrup.

“Stealing horses is very easy, once you get started. The last were too tired. These are fresh. I think they were the traitor lord's. I've opened the gates of the pens, so the rest can find their own way out. Nothing living should stay in this place, I think, though the ghosts are all gone. Come, Ahj,” as if he cajoled a cranky, overtired child, “before the roof-beams fall.”

Ahjvar looked dreadful, now Deyandara saw him in full daylight, grey and gaunt and blistered with burns, wounds crusting and sticky, binding his coat to him.

But when Ahjvar was in the saddle with the reins in hand, Ghu took a moment to embrace Deyandara before he boosted her up.

CHAPTER XX

Holla-Sayan woke out of deep sleep and lay wondering where he was, and why. A bed, his bed, he supposed, since the arm before his face was his own, and the sprawl of black braids over it belonged to Gaguush. If they didn't, he really was in trouble. The room was dark, and there had been tremors of the earth in his dreams. He'd slept the afternoon away.

All hells, no, not unless Rasta had spun his caravanserai on its axis. The faintest of grey showed through the piercings of the carved window screen, and the round-arched window under the eaves faced the east. He rolled from the bed and began dressing. Gaguush had tidied up at some point. Clean linens, a shirt that couldn't stand up on its own, and the leather jerkin he hadn't been wearing last time he went to the city. She woke and rolled over to watch him.

“I did try to wake you,” she mumbled, yawning, forestalling whatever he had been about to say, which might have been shouting, and probably unjust. “I cooked you supper. I said I would. I shook you, and you groaned and rolled over. Then you growled at me and went back to sleep. So Tamarisk and Rasta and I ate it.”

For a moment they were eye to eye, nose to nose, as he groped for his boots, set under the bed.

“Really growled,” she said, eyes wide, lacking his night vision, and very solemn. “I suppose I'm lucky you didn't bite.”

He kissed her, since she was so close, her false solemnity curling into a smile, and she made him take his time over it. When he resumed dressing she grinned at him. “It's the truth.”

“You should have thumped me.”

“If you were that tired, you needed to sleep. They would have sent if they needed you.”

“If they needed me, they wouldn't have had time to send. Anyway, nobody knows where I am.”

“Then you should have told them before you came out here.”

“I wasn't planning to stay so long.” And he didn't bloody well belong to them.

“Insulting. Is it still night? It is. Eat some breakfast anyway.”

“Did you leave me anything?”

“Of my lovely fowl stewed with prunes and saffron? To sit overnight in this heat? No, we did not. But Rasta's cook makes very good fried bread, better than Thekla's, though I won't tell her that, and I wrapped some up for you, because I thought you'd likely be waking by midnight and in a tearing hurry.”

“You're beautiful and I love you.”

“Tell me that when you aren't dressed and running out the door.” Gaguush pulled on drawers and a caftan, handed him his coat, and locked the door behind them both as they went out to the gallery. No one else was stirring, except a cat sitting on the railing. They went down the stairs and cut across the dark yard. It felt like trespassing, to push uninvited into Master Rasta's own kitchen, but Gaguush seemed comfortably at home, humming as she turned a cat off the low table, finding her way by feel to a cupboard, sniffing until she found a stack of flat, oil-fried slabs wrapped in a cloth, scented with garlic and cumin. Holla didn't remember when he'd last eaten, and cold and greasy as the bread was, he tore off chunks like, as Gaguush helpfully said, a starving dog. She had taken the clay cover off the hearth in the gallery before the kitchen and was feeding last night's carefully conserved embers with dung-cakes.

“Tea?” she suggested. “It won't take long.”

“I shouldn't.” But he sat with his back to a pillar and watched her fill the kettle at the water jar.

She hadn't put on a shirt, and the caftan fell loose. There was enough light for her to catch him looking. She put a hand over her face, then cinched her sash tighter. “Idiot.”

“What?”

“Smirking like that. What is it about breasts, anyway, that are so damned fascinating? Udders, that's all they are. Udders and teats.”

Actually, he had been picturing her making tea so, with a black-haired toddler clinging to the skirts of her coat. Coat, not caftan. On the road, of course, which they wouldn't be, not with a toddler.

“Now what?” she asked, sounding exasperated. “I liked it better when you were so obviously having indecent thoughts.”

“I need to find Mikki.” Sudden urgency clawed at him. He stood up. “No tea.”

He felt the brickwork shake beneath his feet. There was the sound of thunder, not so distant. Camels heaved to theirs, groaning complaint, and the cat shot past, disappearing up the nearer stairs.

“No clouds,” said Gaguush, peering skyward. “Bashra grant it's not another big quake, just when I've sunk everything in a heap of mud bricks and stone.”

If he'd had hackles then they'd have been bristling. Holla-Sayan barely held himself human, felt the change of form shivering, crackling under his skin. Not thunder. Not an earthquake. He started for the gate, but Gaguush caught his sleeve and said, “Up,” so they ran to the upper gallery and then took the narrower stairs on the far side to the roof, which was cluttered with drying racks and Rasta's private garden of scented herbs in pots, to which favoured patrons were invited to drink wine and watch the moon rise.

Dust piled high into the sky over Gurhan's sacred hill, a sandstorm haze obscuring half the city, and the first edge of the rising sun burning livid scarlet through it.

Others were following: Master Rasta and the servants of his small household, Tamarisk, a handful of mountain folk who must have come with the mules from the mining villages, all bleary with sleep and babbling.

“If there's going to be another, I want my camels out in the open. Tamarisk!”

The master of the muleteers had had the same thought, and in the jostling for the stairs, Gaguush let the mountain men push ahead and turned back to take Holla-Sayan's arm. “Don't,” she said, “jump off the roof, not with all this lot watching.”

“What?” She was hard to hear, very small, very far away. Something gathered itself, heavy, like the feeling of impending thunder over the Stone Desert, the air heavy, pressing. Yellow-white light flared over the city, near the Sunset Gate, he thought, and there was thunder, but it was not sound, not storm, not the cracking of the earth but the world itself, maybe, that cried out. He staggered under the weight of it, leaning on the parapet of the roof. Gaguush seized him by the shoulders. For a moment he could not remember to breathe, and the world was strange, heavy and broken, meaningless lumps and jagged streaks of matter that had no order, no sense, and he was lost in it, nameless. Gaguush put a hand on his cheek, and he gasped, finding sense there, pattern, in her eyes, her touch, the world re-forming itself, plaster of the parapet smooth and cold under his fingers again, real. But her hand shook.

“Your eyes are burning,” she said. “Go, if you have to. But come back, Holla-Sayan. You promised me. You're mine. For all my life.”

Words had fled him. Too far, too alien, lost in the sound that was not a sound, dying slowly, and dust like smoke rising, broken stone, stone burning, and the cry of a god. He turned his face into her hand, kissed her palm, and went over the side of the caravanserai, straight down, landing on all fours, then fast as a horse could run, for the temple.

CHAPTER XXI

Hadidu woke with a cry, and Nour, who had just been drifting on the edge of waking, bolted up from the gate-captain's bed they were sharing, Jugurthos and Tulip having decamped to a sleeping-mat in the office and records-room so that anything coming after Hadidu would have to get by them first. They'd broken Hadi's promise to go up to Mikki, but they knew and trusted the men and women of the Sunset Gate, and besides, who knew they were here beyond those who'd been in the watch-room as they came in?

The room was lit white for a moment, and thunder crashed about them, but there was no sudden rumble of rain off the mountains beating on lower roofs below, only Hadidu like a child wakened from nightmare crying, “No! No!”

Ilbialla
. In the blindness after the flash Nour saw her as he remembered her from childhood, as he remembered Hadidu's parents, the cobbler and his priestess wife: vaguely, and yet vivid in outline, important, essential. Ilbialla standing before him, in the form of a woman younger now than he would have thought her then, a plain and pleasant woman with her hair loose over her shoulders and a caftan that somehow rippled and seemed still deep water, touched by breath beneath the sky, blue and dark. It wasn't him she came for. She reached for Hadidu, and kneeling up on the bed he seized her hands, but they faded from his grip.