Authors: Alice Borchardt
“I don’t know what you need,” I told him. “I do know what you’ve got: nerve! You tried a kill-bite on me. Given any choice at all, I would have been your dinner. Now, get out of here!”
He laid his ears back. “Hey, listen! I can do things for you. If you’re traveling with one of us, we can usually help keep the rest off. And we’re the ones who make it so dangerous out here at night. Besides, why do you think they cut the nuts off the ones the city people catch? A big male is a high-status possession. People pay attention when one of us strolls by.
“Boy,” he continued, “when I tell the male clans I was in service with one of the Danae—”
“I’m a mortal Daughter of the Danae,” I told him.
He laid his ears back again, his eyes slitted. “I know that, but they don’t have to. Besides, I don’t know if it matters. Anything. Anything, babe, that has to do with the Danae is very high muck-a-muck. Believe me . . .”
“Why should I believe you about anything when you just told me you’d lie to your own people?”
He looked nonplussed, then indignant. “I expect to take an oath. I haven’t taken any oath not to string along the clans. Maybe just a little bit. So don’t get so hoity-toity with me!”
“You’re letting him talk too much,” Albe said. “If you let him keep on talking, he’ll convince you.”
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“He’s so . . . motivated.”
“You bet!” the cat answered. “What say?”
“Yes. And it’s got to be a solid oath. And no biting.”
He jumped up and placed his paws on my shoulders, then butted his forehead between my breasts. “I promise to obey orders, be faithful, and only bite dead food unless otherwise instructed. Want that more flowery? I’m up to a lyric, some blank verse, maybe.”
“No!” I said. “But there is one thing I do want to know. Your name.”
He had dropped back down and was looking up at me. “I don’t know,” he temporized.
“I do. The name!” I repeated. “Now!”
“Akeru,” he said.
“No!” I said. “That’s your people.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m not sure.” I wasn’t. Knowing the right name when given is part of power. I hadn’t realized before I had it, but I did.
“Tuau,” he said in a low voice. “And don’t spread it around.”
“Take point,” I said.
He hissed viciously.
“No arguments—point. Now!”
He lashed his tail and marched ahead of me down the narrow defile. It opened into a rather wide valley. It once must have been a lake that emptied into the sea. Now it was farmland or pastureland, irrigated by branches of the river that flowed through the city.
A city has to feed itself, and this was how this one did. Seven branches of the river were diverted into canals that irrigated the lake bed. It stretched away on either side as far as the eye could see until the edges were lost among the jagged tree-clad mountain slopes surrounding it. A fertile oasis in a barren land. A causeway ran along each canal to a separate city gate.
“I take it no other family would allow us to use their entrance to the city?”
“We’d be killed on the spot if we tried,” Meth said.
“I don’t know,” Cateyrin said. “We could try to bribe our way in using the mariglobes.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Meth said. “Once they had the jewels, none would feel any obligation to protect us.”
“Huh. How much obligation do you think the Fursa will feel toward us when he finds his ewe lamb among us dead and you wearing his armor?”
“Hush,” I said. The sun was westering, and the valley was filled with shadows and golden light. “We will take the devils we know in place of the devils we don’t.”
Tuau was beside Albe, rubbing his face on the laces of Talorcan’s sandals. “
Purrrrr . . . humm . . . purrr.
You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he told Albe.
She studied him cynically as she scratched his neck and ears.
“Oh, God.” He sighed. “This is so good. Gooood.” Then he caught sight of the knife in her other hand. She must have palmed it. He froze.
“You thinking of
usssing
that?” he hissed.
“No,” Albe said. “My lady approved you, but I’m not a trusting soul.”
“Ummmmm.”
He rubbed some more against her hand. “Oh, God, I’m such a sucker for that.” He went down on his back, wallowed, and let her scratch his stomach, while he emitted purrs of ecstasy. “They told me your kind could be wonderful. Sensual to the most.” His eyes rolled back in his head.
“Hup!” Albe shouted.
He twisted in the air like a snake and came up with her left wrist in his mouth, fangs denting the skin. However, her knife point was just about an inch from his eye.
“We aren’t going to hurt each other, are we?” Albe asked.
He released her wrist with an apologetic sound. “Sometimes it just gets too intense. We lose control.” He hunkered down, crouched at her feet, and sighed.
“We’ll get along,” Albe said reassuringly.
“Good,” I said. “Because I need the two of you to back us up when we talk to the man Meth has to see to get past the gate. Soon as he knows Amrun is dead, the Fursa’s going to order an attack. Meth said we’re going to have to fight.”
“We can get past them if we take them by surprise,” Cateyrin insisted stubbornly.
“Let’s hope,” Meth replied.
“The streets near the gates are a maze,” Cateyrin said. “If we can slip past them and run in among the buildings, they won’t dare follow.”
Rather ruefully, I wondered,
Why?
But I didn’t ask. Cateyrin and Meth would only get into another quarrel and delay us still more. If the Akeru infested the valley after dark, it certainly wasn’t safe here. He said he was a runt, but I had my doubts. He weighed about ninety pounds and carried a full complement of teeth and claws. I might be able to hole up and beat off an attack by his kind, but how could I protect the rest?
“Lead on,” I told Meth. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“That’s not consoling,” Meth said.
“It wasn’t meant to be. Albe, Tuau, you stay back. Cateyrin, take care of the contents of those boxes. You say they’re valuable. We may need to pay bribes.”
“Let’s give them to the Fursa,” Meth said. “I feel we owe him something for . . .”
“Bullshit!” Albe said. “Cateyrin, you hang onto those boxes. Hear me, girl. You, dreadcat, walk in front of me.”
“Dreadcat. I like that,” Tuau said.
“Now march!” I said.
We did.
The valley was as intensively cultivated as any place I’ve ever seen. As we walked along the causeway, I saw a lot of the lake remained. But it was covered with floating rafts that were made of poles and matting, then covered with dirt and intensively farmed. Many grew cereal crops, wheat, the low, hard wheat that makes such good dumplings and flat bread. But I saw others covered with rye, barley, and even oats.
Many had root crops with large arrowhead-shaped leaves wonderfully colored in red, gold, silver, and shiny dark green. Those were tethered at the center of the lake, where the sun was brightest, with canals between them that could be traveled by boat. But even the canals must have been a source of food, for they were choked with cattails, water lilies, and water hyacinths.
Tethered near the causeway were larger islands covered with trees: plum, peach, quince, medlar, and even fig, and others I didn’t recognize. On both sides of us, the lake stretched out into the distance as far as the eye could see; blue, green, gold, russet, covered by the richly cropped, floating islands. Its very lushness was in contrast to the barren hills and even more ferociously bare mountain slopes that cradled it. Close to the edges of the lake, greenery flourished. But even a hundred or so feet beyond the water, the plants thinned out into occasional islands of vegetation that dotted the slopes on the hillsides all around.
A lean place,
I thought. Leaner even than the sea-pounded, fissured shores where the Painted People struggled to get a living.
Just then, behind me, I heard a sound like thunder. The causeway was narrow, as I said.
“You women get in the mud.” He—the voice was male—spoke of the shallows and islands of farmland tethered beside the causeway.
I leaped out onto one covered with a low growth of barley. The rest followed, and the herd, in a double line tethered to each other neck to neck, thundered past.
The herd was led by a man running alongside the first two beasts. He was pulling a lead rope. The animals reminded me of antelope, but they were bigger, with long, twisting double horns, powerful bodies with thick chests and haunches. Bay animals with dark-brown coats, black legs, hooves, horns, and noses. They had fangs, something no hoofed beasts where I come from have ever had. Their mouths reminded me of a boar’s, with the fangs—no, tusks—pointed downward and large, serviceable teeth fit for grinding down though vegetation or biting off a man’s leg.
Another man was running beside the double column of animals. He also held a lead rope attached to two animals, and he kept them in line as they thundered along the causeway. Another man brought up the rear.
I flashed on the man at the rear. He was sun-browned and hard, wearing only the sort of loincloth that Roman gladiators once wore, ends tied at the waist, a long piece brought up between the legs and flapped over the front. Almost, it seemed he had a pelt of fine, light-brown hair that covered the tops of his arms, chest, back, neck, and bearded his chin. His stomach, inner arms, and hands were smooth and hairless, as were the backs of his legs.
The double column of animals must have slowed at the front, likely to pass the city gates, I thought. He threw his weight against the column rear and they slowed. The harnesses that bound the beasts together tightened.
The rearmost animal lashed out with one heel and caught the man holding the rope a hard blow to the thigh. He went down to one knee. Even as I watched, the purpling red mark leaped out on his skin. For a second, his weight was thrown against the double file of antelope and the column slowed and almost stopped.
Someone laughed. He glanced toward us and his eyes met Albe’s.
I remember I was stunned by the lightness of his eyes. They were so clear, a crystalline gray, that the irises seemed almost not to exist but would have melted into the whites but for the fact that they had a dark, almost black, ring around them.
The look he gave Albe was a devouring one that said, “I want you!” Stunning as a slap in the face.
Albe returned a frankly slow, salacious grin. This surprised me, and then I remembered her statement about taking pleasure even in rape. But then, she had not forgiven the one who had desired her, even to the destruction of her life. And the scars on her face were a testament to the ugly fact that she had forgiven neither herself nor him.
Then the herdsman (I later found out that’s what he was) writhed and clutched at his throat; and I saw he wore metal chain around his neck. In a second, he was on his feet, chasing the unruly animals toward the city and through its gate.
“How could you?” Cateyrin asked Albe.
“What?” Albe replied.
“Look at him as though he were a man.”
“Hell, he was, wasn’t he? And a damn fine-looking one, too.”
“No!” Cateyrin snapped. “He was Fir Blog.”
I was mystified, but didn’t get a chance to pursue it because Meth said, “Hurry! It’s our good luck the square inside the gate will be a mess because the herdsmen don’t stop for anything. Their drivers don’t allow it. And likely, the household guard, led by the Fursa, won’t be able to surround us. Maybe we can slip past.”
“Fine,” I said, jumping to the road. I started off at a jog, Meth running beside me.
He was right, but we were almost caught.
I had never seen a true city before. The plaza was filled with people. They all seemed to be cursing and running around, trying to put their sale stalls together again. That wasn’t what caught my eye, but the towers that surrounded the plaza. They were not completely black, but blue-black. The sides of some were translucent, and I could see beautifully garbed men and women moving around in them. Some were standing on balconies, looking down at the free show below.
The shops, grouped at the foot of the towers, were in the late afternoon light a collection of jewels. The nearest shop to the gate was a cloth seller. It was stuffed with streaming bolts of silk, velvet, and brocade, seemingly in every color of the rainbow; and a few, perhaps even the rainbow never knew.
The next shop, lit from above by a glass roof, was filled with bottles glowing with red, yellow, scarlet, blue, murky gold, orange, amber, brown, or black, the multiplicity of whose shapes almost defied description. Perfume? I wondered. Wine or something I did not know or had not yet encountered? The others, some sold raiment, some furniture. I saw beds, chairs, whatnots, who knows, all painted, polished, and inlaid with rich designs.
Intermingled with the more permanent shops were the food sellers’ stalls, and they seemed to have been the ones most disturbed by the herd’s passage. Chickens, ducks, and geese, and some animals that looked like rats, ran loose, getting under everyone’s feet as their owners frantically tried to catch them. Fruit, cabbages, onions, garlic, berries had been spilled and lay heaped near the baskets that once held them.
A rack hung with joints of meat sprawled at my feet. Tuau rushed forward and snatched up a plump roast.
“Indeed, it is truly a wonder,” I heard Albe say. “But don’t let us stay to admire it. Move, Guinevere.”
I moved, leading our party in a serpentine path over the dead, black rock that floored the square. I recognized the Fursa, who wore even more elaborate armor than Meth. He stood among his people at the center of the square, a dozen or more men with him.
I glanced right and left. Albe was on my right, Cateyrin at my left.
“When we get past him, follow me,” Cateyrin said.
“Do it!” I shouted to the rest, and went head-on, directly toward the Fursa.
He was smart enough to know something was wrong. His sword was out. I elbowed Meth aside and caught his blade with my own. Maeniel taught me the trick.
I locked his blade at the hilt, spun around, my back against his body, and jerked his right leg from under him with my right foot. He hit the stones, his armor making a very satisfactory crash.