The Pattern Scars (30 page)

Teldaru was wearing one of his finest tunics: deep blue, embroidered with whorls of silver and gold thread. His cloak was mostly gold, and seemed to pulse in the sunlight. Borl walked at his right side. He was the Great Teldaru, and everyone who saw him in the city recognized him. I watched them gape and murmur to each other. A group of girls by a well let out a series of squeals. Teldaru paused and turned to them and they clustered together, gasping now, clutching each other’s hands. He produced a slender lycus branch from beneath his cloak and held it out to the girl in the centre, who was short and plump and had lank brown hair and sweat-sheened skin. “Mistress,” he said, in a sonorous voice. He smiled as she took the branch and held its white and pink blossoms to her face. His perfect, “my world is you alone” smile.

The girls began to whisper as soon as we walked away. I looked over my shoulder and found their eyes on me, and again my insides crawled with pride and shame.

“So you always carry flowers,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Yes,” he said, already smiling at someone else.

A little boy ran up to give
him
a flower, when we were walking along the wide road of the wealthy east-town merchants. Teldaru wound it around his cloak pin. There were many children in the poor lower town, with its narrow streets and mud and the smell of rot and waste that I remembered so well. He gave them coins—every one of them, even when more came running from alleys and houses, whooping and holding out their dirty hands.

“And me, O revered Master Teldaru?” I said, cupping my own palm. The children were behind us now. He did not respond; he was walking faster, toward the faded awnings of the lowtown market. When he reached the stalls (with me behind him, trying not to pant) he slowed again, and put a hand on my arm.

“Look, Nola.” I did. “What do you see?”

The ragged cloth of the awnings; lengths of bleached, weathered wood covered in salt fish or fruit—pale lycus, picked too soon, and other scarlet ones I did not recognize. Women with dresses as worn as the awnings, and faces pinched beneath headscarves that were not faded, but bright greens and oranges. Like Yigranzi’s.

He saw where I was looking. “Belakaoan cloth,” he said. “Yes. And Belakaoan fruit. I have ensured that even the poorest of our citizens will be able to obtain at least some of the items that are so prized among wealthier Sarsenayans.”

The giggling girls by the well had been wearing jewels in their hair, I remembered. And strips of bright material tied around their waists.

“Belakao,” he said, as if to himself. I was suddenly cold.
He has forgotten nothing
, I thought.
He has been busy for years, plotting, and I have no idea what’s been going on outside the school
.

“So this is what you wished to show me?” I said. “Some scarves and fruit? And how beloved you are to girls and poor children?”

He gazed at me. I was as tall as he was, but this look of his always made me feel smaller—a girl again, craning up at him. “In part. I thought it would help you, after all this time, to see that I have been hard at work, drawing Belakao close. For it must be close, before we break it.” He shook his head, smiled a slow smile. “But there is more. There is something to be
done
.”

He led me swiftly away from the market. Whenever I lagged too far behind, Borl growled and snapped at my heels. I was so intent on avoiding his jaws that I hardly noticed where we were. Only when Teldaru halted abruptly—and I stepped aside to keep from walking into him—did I raise my head.

We were at the city gate. The eastern one, with the great carved doors and the round towers with conical tops and the green banners that were prettier than the silver ones that flew above the southern gate. I had walked between these doors once a year, since my arrival at the castle, on Ranior’s Pathday. The entire city seemed to empty out on that day in late summer. I had never joined the procession as a child; the Lady had not allowed anyone to leave the brothel, since business used to increase dramatically during the festival.

The guards atop the towers saluted Teldaru, and we walked together onto the road that stretched like a ribbon or a snake—like a vision from the Otherworld, except that it was not. It was a real path, made of cobbles, crowded with wagons and people. But we walked among these people, all of them staring, whispering as the others had, and very soon there were fewer of them, and the way unfolded before us, among trees and over hills, beneath the empty sky.

“You see now where we are going.”

“Yes.”

I had never really noticed the details of this road and the land around it. All the other times I had come this way I had been giddy, surrounded not by walls but by people I knew: Grasni, who would insist on holding onto my skirt so that we would not be separated, and the younger students behind us, wide-eyed and gripping each other’s hands. Teldaru had stayed close to us, but I had not cared: there was too much singing and laughter, too much sun.

Now there was quiet. Our footsteps, and the clicking of Borl’s nails on the stone, and the wind stirring leaves and the tall, slender grasses that lined the road. Once or twice something moved in the grass and Borl plunged after it, but Teldaru whistled for him and he came, whining and slavering, and resumed his place behind me. The light was a pressure now, thrusting at my face, and then—as the sun moved, above—at my shoulders and my back. I was so tiny, here.

“Tell me.”

The first words in several hours; I started. “What?” My voice seemed too loud, even as it vanished.

“Tell me where we’re going.”

I swallowed. Thirst and dread; I wondered if there would be room for words. “Ranior’s Tomb,” I said, and just as I did I saw the turning—the place where a path of beaten dirt began. It curved away from the road, into a copse of trees. Beyond the trees was a meadow, which I did remember. I also remembered watching the line of celebrants surge up and up, toward the rocky hill that reared like a ragged tooth from the meadow. The high place where the War Hound had finally died, at the hand of the Flamebird of the islands. The place where Mambura too had died—his throat torn out by Ranior’s own dogs. The place where Ranior’s bones rested; where, once a year, his descendants came to give thanks for the Pattern he had made, and for the Pattern that had made him.

The climb was difficult, and knots of people settled at the base of the hill to watch the others wend their slow way among the rocks and the bent, squat trees. There were many paths up to the single stone at the summit—many ways moulded by centuries of feet and hands, by people who had struggled to feel, in some small way, as Ranior must have felt. Grasni and I had reached the top last year; it had been our first time, and we had spun each other around as the wind tore at our hair and skirts and voices. The world below had been both vast and tiny: the crowd, the road, the farmers’ fields, the city itself, with its wall and its castle. Even the castle was dwarfed, from here. Just some spears of red stone surrounded by sky.

With Grasni, pressed about by others, I had been able to gaze upon Ranior’s monument with simple awe. I could forget, as I looked at the carved lines and spirals that showed the hero’s Path, that Teldaru was behind me. I could forget the stories he had told me as I lay on my narrow, filthy pallet and waited for him to use his mirror and his knife.
Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru
—these words were echoes, snatched away by wind. Now, though, I stood where the path began to climb and he was the only one beside me and every one of his mad words rang in my ears, as if he had spoken them days, not years, ago.

I started up the hill. I had taken about twenty steps when he called, “Mistress Intrepid Seer. Where are you going?”

I turned. A stream of pebbles skittered down the slope; Borl barked and lunged at them. “To the top,” I called back. “Where you will do whatever it is you mean to do.”

He was shading his eyes with his hand but I could still see them. Black waves; they would have lapped up around my feet if I had let myself look at them for too long. “No, dearest Nola,” he said, “we’re going in and under. Beneath.
That
is where I will do what I mean to do.”

He led me around the base of the hill to a low stone door. The stone was the same colour as the hillside’s dirt and spreading plants, and even when he brushed at the ivy that concealed the latch I had trouble seeing its whole shape. He drew a bunch of keys from beneath his tunic and up over his head and I thought suddenly of Uja and her cage. Uja, who had belonged to an island Otherseer; Uja, who did not need keys.

“You must lead now.”

I looked from him to the open door. Stepped toward it and crouched to look inside. “We’ll need a light,” I said. I smelled darkness and earth.

“No,” he said. “This is a place where seers become like their unsighted fellows. Where they stumble down pathways, seeking a bright centre that will make sense of the rest. No, Nola—here you have only your eyes.”

I crawled forward before I could feel fear. I heard Teldaru behind me; I heard Borl whine and scuffle. The door shut the outside away. I groped and felt an edge that was a stair, and another below it. I reached above me and found only space, and stood.

“I hear your own Paths are black,” Teldaru said. His breath was warm on my neck.

Mistress Ket
, I thought.
Grasni
. “I had to know,” I said—just a murmur, but it wrapped around us both. “I had to try.”

“Of course you did.” I could hear his smile. “I’m a little disappointed, in fact, that it took you so long to ask someone to help you try. But I told myself that you were happy, and that this was good for both of us.”

“I wasn’t happy.” Louder, so that my real voice would drown out the one in my head:
He’s right, he’s right.

“I was relieved when Mistress Ket came to tell me what you’d asked Grasni to do. When she told me what Grasni had seen. Because now you are ready to return to me.”

His hands were on my neck, beneath my hair. I remembered how I used to stand and tremble, when he touched me like this years ago. I twisted around and found him in the darkness: his cheekbones with my fingertips, his lips with my lips. He started backward and I drew my hands over his chest and down his sides and held him still. His mouth was open a bit; I ran my tongue around and in and forced it wide. My head was filled with words—chattering, noisy ones that were more insistent than the throbbing of my skin.
You have no idea I’m grown now I’m not fourteen any more I’m not yours I’ll show you I’m not afraid. . . .

I pulled away. His breath left him in a rush that was almost a whistle. Before he could speak or grope for me again I turned and began to pick my way down the stairs. I moved slowly from step to step, words still spinning.
Idiot; he knows the way and you don’t; he could reach out anywhere and have you.

At first my breathing and footsteps were so loud that I heard nothing else. I imagined him three steps behind me, smiling, listening. Ten stairs, eleven, twelve, and then floor; I shuffled forward, drawing my hand along the wall. It was stone, pocked with holes or carvings, and so cool that I longed to pause and lay my forehead against it. I followed the wall—its bends and sharp corners—my free hand waving in front of me, lest there be a dead end. Which, very soon, there was.

I turned and retraced my steps. More bends and corners, and another wall before me, as well as the ones beside. I leaned against this one, my fingers feeling for a door or a crack, a space I could climb through, but there was only rock.

“Teldaru.” I expected my voice to echo, but it was flat. I set my back to the dead-end wall and called, more loudly, “Teldaru! I’m lost—I’m sure this will please you. I need your help, which will please you even more.”

I tried to be very quiet. I listened for his footsteps or Borl’s wet panting. Silence pressed on my ears. “Teldaru!” I shouted as loudly as I could, yet still my voice was swallowed before it could truly sound.

Maybe he
is
angry at me for having Grasni Othersee . . . maybe he doesn’t need me at all any more and this is where I’ll die.

“No,” I said, to the darkness and to myself, and straightened.

“The Pattern is ocean,” Yigranzi had said to me once, “too big to see entire, its currents too numerous to feel all at once. So we watch our own shores—the tides and waves we
can
see—and we hope they show us more.” I—only eight or nine—had frowned my incomprehension and Yigranzi had clicked her tongue against her teeth. “But how will this ocean talk help you, Sarsenayan land-girl? Let me try this: the Pattern is all the roads, all the paths that lie across the world. You see only the one your own feet are on; you feel its little familiar stones and you know that it will lead you to walk some of the others that you do not know.”

The small
, I thought, in the night-dark beneath Ranior’s Hill.
The small within the large. Something I can feel.

I put my hands back on the wall. Traced bumps and zigzags and spirals: the frenzied, inscrutable shapes of the Pattern. So many shapes; I could feel nothing but confusion, beneath my fingertips. I took several paces and my hands slipped from the raised carvings into the hollows among them. These hollows were smooth and long—so long they had no end I could feel. They ran around the carvings and off into the black, and as I traced one and then another, the space around me shifted. Perhaps it lightened, too; I blinked and saw the wriggling, wobbling images that usually appeared after I had Otherseen.