She managed to sound irritated by Salata’s burst of emotion, but Tilja knew her well enough to see that really she was very moved herself, and didn’t want to show it.
Salata pulled herself together.
“Since you are strangers in this place, I will say this to you,” she whispered. “That is a great power you have. Such things are very dangerous. Even here, so far from people, they are dangerous. Among people you must be very careful.”
“What do you mean, careful?” said Meena.
But Salata would say no more.
The elder daughter brought the goats home at sunset to be herded into a corral under the trees and milked, while the younger daughter stirred the pile of ashes in front of the tent and got a fire going. They sat round it and ate again, and talked; that’s to say Tahl asked endless questions and Salata answered. She now seemed happy to do so, but still asked none herself. It was clear that she positively didn’t want to know anything about the forest, or what lay beyond it.
She told them that her goats and all the land around there, as far as the eye could see, belonged to an official in the court of the Emperor. She made cheese from the milk, and once she had made a certain weight could keep what was left. She could also keep one in twenty of the male kids to fatten and eat, when the rest were driven off to market. Her husband was a trapper, hunting a kind of rock squirrel that lived among the hills to the north, whose fur was prized. Then, two years ago, soldiers had come to look for a way through the forest. Some of them had died of the sickness, and they had made up their numbers by seizing any able-bodied men they could lay their hands on, including Salata’s husband. Now she and her daughters had to live on her allowance from the goats and whatever they could glean from the land.
“A bad season, and we will all three die,” she said.
“So you’re some kind of slave?” said Tahl, in his usual pert way.
“If I were a slave I would be better off,” she said, and explained that all land belonged to the Emperor, who then gave the use of it to his nobles, and the officials who ran the Empire for him, to pay them for their services. These were the Landholders, and long ago everyone who lived on the land, including Salata’s ancestors, had had to buy the right to do so from them. Since they’d not had the money to pay the price outright, they had borrowed the money from the Landholders themselves. The cheese Salata made and the kids she reared to send to market were the interest she was still paying on that debt, fixed so that it could never be paid off. And under that ancient contract neither she nor her descendants could leave the land until it was.
Salata told them this without anger, just accepting that that was how things were, but Meena became very indignant.
“Well, I say it’s a scandal and a shame,” she said. “I’d not put up with it, and I’d give this Landholder of yours a piece of my mind, and the Emperor too, if I was to run into him.”
Salata, who had been reaching to stir the fire, dropped the branch she was using, stared at Meena for a moment, drawing herself away, then rose and moved round to the far side of the fire, where she knelt and scooped up a handful of ashes and poured them over her bowed head. Her two daughters copied her. All three stayed like that while Salata muttered rapidly, under her breath, what sounded like some kind of charm or prayer.
They rose. At a gesture from Salata the children went into the tent, but she stayed and stared at Meena across the embers.
“Do you wish to bring more misfortune on me and my tent?” she said.
“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” said Meena. “It’s just my way of speaking. I didn’t mean to offend. Besides, who’s to know, apart from us here? There’s no one else, miles around.”
“A bird may fly to Talagh with your saying. A wind may carry it there. The Emperor keeps great magicians at his court, who listen for all such whispers. If your words come to his ears, you who spoke them, and your friends and I and my daughters who heard them, will be thrown into the furnaces. If you were not my guests I would set my dog on you and turn you from my tent.”
She spoke with such hissing vehemence that even Meena was grudgingly impressed.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I see I’d best watch my tongue— it runs away with me sometimes.”
Salata nodded, but didn’t relax.
“I accept that you spoke in ignorance,” she said. “When you came to my tent you foretold good fortune for me and mine. Now, perhaps, you have undone it. How can I feel the friendship for you that I did only a moment ago?”
Meena heaved herself to her feet, hobbled round the fire and took Salata by the hands.
“You’ve done right by us, and more than right,” she said, “and I’m not laying my head down tonight with this kind of feeling between us. Even just now, telling me to my face what a fool I’d been, why, that was a help, or who knows what I might’ve come out with somewhere, with a pack of strangers listening? Now, listen. You read the spoons just now. You saw what they said was coming to you. It was clear as clear, and there wasn’t anything there of the sort of bad luck you’re talking about. If there’d been something like that on its way to you, you’d’ve seen it, just as clear—I promise you that. But if there’s anything I can do to make you feel better about it, just tell me, and I’ll do it.”
Salata gave a stiff half smile and shook her head.
“It is done,” she said. “We will do as you say, and lay our heads down in friendship. And tomorrow I will take you to the house of Ellion. He is our Landholder’s steward, a good man, who does what he can to protect us. He will advise you.”
“That is Ellion’s house,” said Salata, pointing.
They had started soon after sunrise and walked steadily all morning. Alnor and Tahl had almost recovered from the forest sickness, but Calico was so stiff that she was nearly lame, and in an even worse mood than usual. Now it was early afternoon and they were standing at the edge of the open, half-wild country where Salata and the other herdspeople grazed their animals. In front of them lay mile on mile of farmland, small fields, every inch tilled and sown, and the first crops already green and reaching for the sun. Tilja couldn’t see anything that looked like a real farmhouse, though, only a scatter of shabby little huts among the fields, each no more than four windowless mud walls and a straw roof, with a rolled mat above the entrance to act as a door. Three or four miles ahead a mound—you couldn’t have called it a hill— rose above the rest of the plain. On it stood what looked like a village, a tight cluster of buildings with whitewashed walls and orange-tiled roofs.
The path picked its way between the fields. In some of them several people were working together, two or three adults and some children, just as you might have seen in the Valley at this time of year. The women were dressed like Salata, though their long scarves were of different colors and patterns. The men wore little conical hats with upturned brims and a tassel, loose brown jackets and baggy knee-breeches without stockings or shoes. They looked up, called their greetings to Salata, stared for a moment at the strangers, and went back to their tasks.
Slowly the village came nearer, and now Tilja could see that it was nothing like the villages in the Valley, where the houses all stood separate from each other with their own garden plots around them. Here, beneath the jumble of roofs, the walls of one building mostly joined straight on to the next, with only a few gaps between them. Perhaps, she realized, it wasn’t a village after all. The whole thing was Ellion’s house.
Salata led the way to one of these gaps. A man stood there, wearing a loose pale cloak and a red floppy cap with several tassels, and carrying a long staff with a sort of badge at the top. Salata spoke to him. He frowned at the strangers and looked as if he wanted to refuse them entry, but Salata argued urgently with him and he gave way. The gap was the start of a steep alley, so narrow that Calico’s saddlebags scraped against either wall. It led into a central courtyard, almost as large as some of the fields they’d passed, with many doors opening onto it, and more onto a sort of balcony that ran almost the whole way round the upper story. Toward one end of the courtyard there was a roofed-over area where three men sat at a table piled with hundreds of scrolls and ledgers. (Coarse paper was made in the Valley and bound into handwritten books. Ma had two, a recipe book and a collection of herb remedies, from which she’d taught her daughters to read and write, but Tilja had never seen anything as huge as those ledgers.)
One or two people stood opposite each of the men at the tables, discussing whatever had brought them there, while thirty or forty others waited their turn in groups around the courtyard. As Tahl and Tilja were helping Meena down from Calico’s back a man dressed like the guard at the entrance came over and spoke to Salata. He too frowned at the strangers, cut Salata short, and beckoned brusquely to them. They started to follow, but stopped when they realized Salata wasn’t coming with them and turned to thank her and say goodbye. Before they could do so, the guard took Alnor by the shoulder and pulled him away.
“Hey! This won’t do—” Meena began, but Salata at once cut in.
“No, you must go with him,” she said urgently. “Do as he tells you. Make no trouble. Ellion is not here. His wife is Lananeth. She is a good woman. Tell her all you told me. I will look after your horse. Good fortune go with you.”
“And with you,” said Meena. “Come on, then. We’ll do as we’re told, this once.”
Without a word the guard led them through one of the doorways, along a dark passage and into a much smaller courtyard, where he told them to wait, and left them. After some while he came back and led them on through several more archways and courtyards, until they reached one where he opened a heavy door and motioned to them to go through. He closed the door behind them. They heard the bolts rasp to.
There was nothing in the room apart from a low table with two unlit lamps on it. A little light came through a barred window high in one wall. All their food and belongings were in the saddlebags.
6
Ellion’s House
They sat down with their backs against the chill walls. Time passed. Alnor seemed to go to sleep. Meena muttered to herself. Tahl fidgeted. Tilja thought about Woodbourne, trying to imagine, detail by detail, what her family might be doing at each moment. She wondered if they were missing her. Did it feel very strange without her? Were the cedars telling Ma and Anja what was happening to her? Oh, why didn’t she have anything that could tell her about them?
The old bitterness was welling up inside her when Alnor spoke.
“I have a strange feeling,” he said. “Now I think of it, I believe I have had it ever since we landed from the raft, but then I put it down to the sickness. Now the sickness is gone and my mind is clear, yet the feeling is still there, like the pressure one feels before a thunderstorm breaks. I dreamed dreams of water all night. . . .”
“So did I,” said Tahl. “I often do, but these weren’t the usual ones. The water was sort of alive. I was part of it.”
“Me, I dreamed I was a tree,” said Meena. “There’s a lot more to being a tree than you’d think, too. I thought maybe it was reading the spoons so clear for Salata put it into my head.”
“What about you, Til?” said Tahl. “What did you dream about?”
“Nothing,” she answered crossly. “I must have dreamed, I suppose, but I can’t remember what.”
“There’s no need to sound like that, girl,” said Meena. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing,” said Tilja, almost weeping now, and furious with herself for the unreasonableness of it, as if not having dreams like the others was the same sort of being-left-out as not being able to hear what the cedars were saying or listen to the waters. And then . . . she didn’t know where the idea came from . . .
“I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said slowly. “What you’re feeling is magic. And what you’re dreaming about. There isn’t any magic in the Valley, so you aren’t used to it. But there’s lots of it here and you can feel it because you can do it a bit yourselves. Alnor and Tahl can do stuff with water and Meena can do stuff with trees. I can’t feel it and I don’t have that sort of dream because I can’t do any of that. But you . . . yes, look how it was with your spoons yesterday. You said it was extraordinary. It wasn’t. It’s ordinary here.”
“Yes, I believe you are right, “ said Alnor. “This is the feeling of magic. Perhaps we three are extra sensitive to it, not being used to it.”
“And I’ll tell you something else,” said Tilja. “Magic may be ordinary here, but it’s dangerous too. That’s what Salata was trying to tell you about the spoons last night, Meena.”
“Good thing she didn’t pick on old Axtrig, then,” said Meena.
Time passed. Voices came and went in the little courtyard, speaking with the same twangy accent that Salata used. Occasionally a man coughed close outside the door, and once Tilja heard soft footsteps approaching, a woman’s brief murmur and the man’s reply, and the footsteps receding. It must have been well into the afternoon and she was hungry and thirsty and desperate for a pee before there was more of a stir outside and the bolts were drawn. Two guards led them away to the latrines. They returned to find a woman waiting for them in the center of the room, where the light from the little window fell most strongly. She motioned for them to sit, but herself stayed standing. It didn’t need anyone to tell them that this was somebody of importance.
She was very short, no taller than Tilja, but twice as broad, with a pale, round face and dark hair. Tilja guessed that she might be the same age as Ma, but that could have been only that she wore much the same slight, permanent worry-frown. Otherwise her expression gave nothing away. Her clothes were in the same style as those of all the women Tilja had seen in the fields, but she wore golden earrings, and several rings on her fingers, and a jeweled brooch to pin her scarf in place. This was longer and more elaborate than the ones that the other women had worn, with a lot of gold thread and a double row of tassels. When she spoke her voice was soft, but clear and even, neither warm nor cold. It too gave nothing away.
“I am Lananeth, wife of Ellion, who is Steward of this estate for the Lord Kzuva, Oversecretary of the Northern Roadways. My husband is away, and I hold his ring and seal in his absence. I regret your treatment, but it has been necessary. If I make you welcome and feed you, I am compelled by custom to help you, and I cannot decide on that until I have spoken with you. Meanwhile the fewer people who see you, the better. So, first, will you tell me who you are, how you came here and what you want?”
“Alnor’d better do that,” said Meena.
Alnor didn’t answer at once, and then, speaking even more slowly and carefully than usual, he told the Northbeck half of their story, with his decision to come to the Empire and find someone who could renew the barrier of snow that guarded the Valley from the north. He didn’t mention the name of Faheel, but only explained that the barrier had first been put in place by a magician in a city called Talak, so that had been where he intended to start his search. He said nothing about the Woodbourne end of the story, apart from the fact that there was this strange sickness in the forest, which was why he had come by the river and brought Meena and Tilja to control the raft if he and Tahl passed out.
“My intention was that they should turn back as soon as we were safely through the forest,” he concluded, “but I and my grandson were overcome by the sickness and the women were unable to prevent the raft from being carried on until it grounded on a sandbank. Here at last I woke from my stupor and we came ashore and found Salata, who was kind to us and brought us to you.”
Lananeth said nothing for a while, then turned and nodded to the guard, who went outside and spoke to somebody else out there. Several people came in, two carrying trays of food, which they put on the table, three with large cushions, which they spread around it, and two more bringing the saddlebags and blanket rolls that Calico had carried. One of them lit the lamps. They all kept their eyes on the floor the whole time, not once glancing at the strangers, and left in silence. The guard went with them, closing the door behind him.
“Sit and eat,” said Lananeth. “Look, I eat with you, as a sign that I have taken you into my house and there is trust between us.”
She bent and picked up a little yellow cake and nibbled at it while Tahl and Tilja made their grandparents comfortable at one end of the table and settled themselves either side of them. Lananeth sat facing them.
“I meant what I said just now, “ she said. “There is trust between us, because we all five have need of it. We are in great danger. Mine is different from yours, in part, but you can help me with mine as I can help you with yours. When I first came in I told you that I couldn’t feed you until I had decided whether to help you, but the truth is that I didn’t then know whether I would need to give the order for your throats to be cut and your bodies secretly buried. I would not have given that order easily, but I would have done so rather than simply send you on your way. I couldn’t in any case do that. I will tell you why in a moment.
“I am encouraged to trust you not by what Alnor has said, but by what he has not. You must know more than he has told me about the forest, and the nature of the sickness in it, but you seem to have understood that your danger lies in that very knowledge. It is something the Emperor needs. If your coming is heard of, you will be sent for to Talagh and questioned, and when you have told all you know you will be tortured, in case there is anything you have left unsaid. Nobody comes alive from the torturers’ hands in Talagh.”
She paused, letting what she’d said sink in. Her soft, steady voice had barely changed, but that only made the horrors and dangers she was talking about seem nearer and more real. The silence filled the little room. Footsteps entered the courtyard, crossed it and died away. As they dwindled, Tilja let out a soft sigh, and realized that she had been holding her breath, half certain that the steps had been those of the Emperor’s torturers, coming toward the door.
“There are two reasons why I cannot simply send you on your way,” Lananeth went on. “The first is that you have no way-leaves. Nobody in the Empire may leave the land to which he is assigned without a way-leave, bearing the Emperor’s approval of the journey. If I let you go without them, I would have committed a serious offense. If I gave them to you, which I could do as holder of the Steward’s seal in my husband’s absence, and you were then found and questioned, that would be far worse for me, because you have come from beyond the forest, and I did not send you at once to Talagh.
“This brings me to the second reason. Every new Emperor, when he first ascends the Opal Stair to his throne, turns at each step and repeats one of the oaths and promises he has inherited with the Empire. These are unchangeable and unappealable. So nineteen Emperors have now turned at the third step and sworn that in the course of their reign they will regain the lost province beyond the northern forest.
“Three years ago a new Emperor climbed the Stair. Two years ago an army arrived to fulfill that oath. They quartered in our houses, they pitched their tents in our fields, full on the ripening crops. They emptied our barns and our byres, they robbed and they ravished, and on any that resisted they used their swords. But after many deaths the forest defeated them and they left, taking with them the best of our men to make up for those they had lost, Salata’s husband among them. When they were gone we counted the cost and found that we had less than half of what we had had before they came, and from that less-than-half we still had to send to our Landholder in Talagh all that we would have sent in any other year. None of our people would willingly reawaken the interest of our Lord the Emperor in his lost province. I don’t need to rely on their loyalty to keep your coming secret.
“So you see, I cannot simply send you away from here. You must have a reason to travel, so that I can give you way-leaves, and a story to tell, so that you will not be questioned too closely.”
“My, what a pickle,” said Meena. “Who’d’ve thought we’d be causing this much trouble? Look, why don’t we just go back to the river, and then somehow get our raft off from where it’s stuck, and carry on that way, and all of you can forget you’ve ever seen us?”
Lananeth shook her head, smiling.
“Wherever you landed you would have the same problem,” she said.
“And further from the forest, people wouldn’t have any reason not to send us straight on to Talak,” said Tahl. “And it wouldn’t stop the Emperor sending his armies here again, either.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Lananeth. “But I’ve a third reason why we should all do as I suggest. This is where you can help me. First, you have to understand something that may seem strange to you. I have already told you that we may travel only by the permission of the Emperor, but that is not all. We eat, sleep, breathe by the permission of our Lord the Emperor. We live or die at his will. Those are no mere words. When he reaches the highest step of the Opal Stair each new Emperor places his foot upon the Sapphire Stool and recites his final decree, that all who live in his Empire live by his permission and die by his choice, and for any man or woman to do otherwise is treason, for which the penalty is death. At the start of each reign there is a strict census, and all names missing from the previous census must be accounted for.”
“Am I hearing you right?” said Meena. “Suppose I lived here and I fell out of my apple tree and broke my neck—might happen to anyone—you’re saying I’d be a traitor?”
“Yes, and since you’d be already dead, your heir would either have to pay the penalty in your stead or renounce his inheritance, in which case all your goods would be forfeited to the Emperor. So as soon as they become men or women all who can afford it journey to Talagh and pay the fees and obtain the Emperor’s permission to die, renewable by sending a further fee to Talagh each year. If they can, they take with them on that first journey a child of their household, as a kind of insurance, to be sold into slavery and thus pay the penalty in case they should die on the road. Those who can less afford it often delay, sometimes until they feel their end is almost on them, and so at some risk to their heirs save the permission fees. Those who cannot afford any fees travel to Goloroth in the far south when they feel it is time for them to go, but that need not concern you. You are going to Talagh.
“I can see from your faces that you think what I have told you appalling, and you are right. I am sorry to say that we have lived so long with it that we no longer think it even strange.
“Now, we had two old servants, very dear to us, who when they retired from our service went to live with one of their daughters who is married to a substeward of the estate on an outlying parcel of land. They planned, when their time came, to go to Goloroth, but they seemed well and cheerful, so we did not worry. But then the old man died, suddenly and without warning, and the woman, distraught with grief and the fret about the penalty, and the journey to Goloroth without him, climbed a steep hill nearby and threw herself off a cliff. This was no accidental death, but a deliberate flouting of the Imperial decree, entailing a tenfold penalty, and disgrace for all who might have prevented it.
“Worse yet, the daughter and her husband concealed the deaths for a while, thus involving my husband and with him all his household, since the man had been appointed on my husband’s recommendation and he had not discovered the crime. Everything we possess, including our own lives, would not be enough to pay the various penalties. When we found what had happened we had no recourse but to continue the concealment.
“Yet worse again. As I told you, the Emperor climbed the Opal Stair barely three years ago. The census on his accession has not yet reached this outlying district, but will do so before the year is out. At that point, further concealment will become impossible. My husband has gone to Talagh on our Landholder’s business. While there he hopes to explore what possibilities there are for the purchase of false death permits for the old couple and the insertion of their names in the ledgers. This will be both expensive and dangerous, for he will put our very lives into the hands of unknown officials, who will be in a position to blackmail us for the rest of our days.