The Birthgrave (16 page)

Raspar said, “Darros has suggested his lady rides with him.”

Bellan looked astonished.

“A woman? Graceful in bed perhaps, but in a chariot as clumsy as an ox.”

“
I
am Darros' archer,” I said.

Bellan looked at me, intense and interested for the first time.

“You? I thought you a tribal boy. I see you're not. I beg your pardon.”

“Only women of the tribes wear the shireen,” I said.

“Indeed?” Bellan was not concerned at this mistake. “Do you shoot?”

“I
am
Darros' archer.”

He assessed me fairly now.

“Small. Good weight for it.” He half turned and shouted for the groom who ran up at once. “Arrange the target. And get a bow and plain arrows.”

I thought I was to be tried on firm ground, but this was not the case.

The horses were uncovered. Darak was in the chariot and I up behind him. Bellan limped after us.

“What do you think now, my three songs of night?” Bellan asked the team. He rubbed his face against their faces and they responded at once. Then he moved to the chariot's back. “Take off the boots. You must feel the life under you, the life of the chariot. Your feet must be like hands and heartbeat to hold you steady. I'll get you sandals; your soles will be too soft for this as yet.”

“My feet are hard,” I said. I stripped the boots. The day was warming and the metal layers of the floor were hot from the sun. I felt giddy with tension, the air around me fragile as cracked blue glass. They handed up to me the bow and long-flighted arrows—I had not known what they meant when they called them “plain.” I would learn later.

The groom came up and fixed a metal bar against the open chariot back, about level with my waist, then locked it into place.

Two men on ponies rode onto the track behind the chariot, facing me. Between them they carried, swinging on a cord, a large oval wooden target, marked with patches of dark blue, yellow, and red.

“When the chariot is at full stretch,” Bellan said, “aim for the colors of the target. Blue is best, being hardest to see, red fair, and the bright yellow passable.”

Bellan moved out of the enclosure. The gate shut.

A jolt. I took it. A second jolt and I was flung against the metal bar, almost winded. Damn Darak. I heard him laugh.

“Courage, Imma.”

My feet balanced on the moving thudding floor, apart, over the backs of the wheels. I braced my body, taut against the metal, and waited. We were going fast now. The dusty ground whirled past, fizzing with speed. Behind, in front of me, the ponies galloped, the target swinging. I drew up the bow, steadied, aimed, fired. The arrow went wide. Hair blew forward around my face from speed. I would have to plait it or club it, like the warriors of a krarl. Again I aimed and fired. The arrow nicked the board and flopped in the dust. The chariot was still incredibly gaining. Another jolt that almost pitched me forward over the bar. I reeled back against the metal side, blinked my eyes clear of dust, took aim, and shot. The arrow lifted, came down, and caught red. I straightened, then relaxed my knees a little. I had more of the feel of the jouncing floor now. I leaned out over the bar and took three blues, one after the other.

“Darak,” I said, “three blues, one red.”

He did not hear me.

The ponies gained on us. I filled most of the reds, many blues. Ahead of us. I swung around and fired from the side. The rest of the reds. We passed. I took a yellow and two blues.

Bellan waved us down.

I left Darak with the horses and walked back to them. The target bristled like a porcupine. I had left five blues unscored.

“I see you did not really bother to try for yellow,” Bellan said. “This is very good. I have splendid archers among my horsemen here. They do this for sport. They score perhaps three or four blues, fifteen reds. You have twenty blues and all twenty-five reds.”

Raspar smiled.

“I will leave you in Bellan's charge,” he said. “Perhaps you'll dine at my house this evening?”

5

So our days formed a new pattern, a strange pattern, one strand wildness, one strand business, and one strand elegance, and the three plaited together.

The wildness was the practice track. That first day with its horse sweat, metal sweat, pepper of dust, and back-breaking, bone-bruising exercise, was merely the prologue to skill, discomfort, and danger. Bellan was a hard exacting tutor. He would swear as vilely as a bandit when Darak failed to achieve his demands, and Darak would listen, without apparent anger or resentment, and then try the thing again, and get it right. Each night, as he lay on the hostelry bed, I would rub salve into the tear along his spine, where the three blacks, straining at either of his strong arms, had tried to rip his body in half. Bellan, stripped, bore, among many scars, one long hard whiteness along his spine, tough as leather. As for me, my right arm was raw from the weals the shield bracelets had made, holding that bronze monster across my body. Here I saw the disadvantage in my inability to scar—I could not form protective tissue. Each dawn my arm was healed, but by evening the skin was gnawed open again. Unlike my feet, the soles of which had been like iron since I woke under the mountain, my self-renewing flesh made me vulnerable as a baby. Bellan did not think any more of it than that I was a soft girl, for all my archer's skill. He told me to wind linen bandages around the weal marks, and had leather rings set inside the metal bracelets. This helped, but it was still bad enough.

By the third day, when we thought ourselves masters of bow and chariot, Bellan began to wean us to the meat of the thing. I had not yet seen the stadium at Ankurum, or a design of the Straight, when prepared for the Sagare, but, by Raspar's grace, the practice track became a fair copy. We had Straight, turn, and Skora. Now we learned the pillars of Earth and Air. They were sheer treachery, and, more than the other two obstacles to come, we could only prove ourselves against them in the arena. Earth was an oak-wood wall on wheels, rolled in and fixed in the ground before the race. In the wall were four arches, each wide enough to take one chariot. There would always be six chariots at least competing to get through these four openings; we knew already that this year the Sagare had garnered seven contestants—besides ourselves. Air was represented by two pits, only five feet in diameter, it is true, but stretching down some ten yards. There was plenty of space between and to either side of them, so that a chariot ahead and on its own would manage well enough. But, given a bunch of them, some would be driven into the trap; a horse's legs would go in and snap; if the back wheels caught, the driver and archer would probably be thrown out despite the bar, down the shaft or under the hooves of the teams behind. Two days we spent on the wall of Earth, dodging two other practice chariots of Raspar's, held by Bellan's men. There were spills, but nothing bad. A man broke his leg, and one team, not ours, ran mad right through the wood—luckily flimsy stuff that did not do much harm. The two days after that we played the pits of Air, dug not so deep, and covered, fortunately, by a light mesh frame. Several times the blacks would have floundered into them, but by sunset of that second day, we had learned the trick of speed or dropping back that would take us clear or leave us last, to catch the others when the stretch was open again.

Water was next, and Raspar did not have the underground springs that bubbled beneath the Sirkunix; instead we learned our lesson hard under the torrents of gigantic tipped buckets swung by chains from above by Raspar's laughing, jibing servants. My bow and shafts hung wet and useless a hundred times before Darak had mastered it, and I had mastered the art of shield-covering them if he misjudged. And then came Fire.

It was the tenth day, and the Games had already begun at Ankurum. The Sirkunix was near enough the town walls, that in stillnesses during the day, the occasional roaring shout of loud anger or joy would soar up to the farm. It was the wrestling, beast fights, and acrobatics. The races would begin four days from now, and two days from that would be the crowning race, the empress, the Sagare. That tenth dawn, we knew we had six days left alone to prepare ourselves for victory or death.

And so, between those flaming poles, which were the symbols of the pillars in the arena, we rode well enough, because we must.

* * *

The farm villa was cool and white, a sparsely but tastefully furnished dwelling, which provided the elegance and business threads in the dangerous plait. Here, the transaction had long since been signed, witnessed, and almost forgotten, it was so light a thing now in this preparation for the race. Darak's goods were gone. In return he had a handsome price, a price, he assured me, beyond anything he could have hoped for otherwise, while working through an intermediary agent.

“Once we are the victors of the Sagare, we can ride back like kings,” he said to me, but his eyes had the lost, bright, fevered look of Bellan's now. He was charioteer, mind, flesh, and soul; even asleep. I felt his body quiver, alive with the rush of the chariot. Rarely did he turn to me for love in the dark. He was exhausted; besides, Bellan had warned us both, frank and expressionless.

“If you have sense, you'll leave each other be in bed till this is over. A man drives from his head, his hands, his feet, and his loins. As for your woman, if you should chance to get her pregnant now, you're lost. When do you bleed?” he added to me. “Not on the day of the race, I trust?” I told him I did not know. There seemed as yet to be no timing with me, as with other women. “I'll get you a draft,” Bellan said. “It'll dry you till the race is over. Women—” He made a gesture of disgust. “If you were not the genius you are with a bow, I'd never have let you near this thing.”

And so, on the tenth evening, the race six days away, we sat with Raspar, the dinner over. Candles flickered, licking light colors from the silver plates and onyx cups. Outside, crickets sounded in the warm dusk.

“You are what I guessed you to be,” Raspar said to Darak. “You held them through the fire. Mark you, they have been trained to look flame in the eye since they were foaled. I have seen men ride into the Sagare with horses unbroken to fire, and I shall see it again. A fool's trick. It only ends one way.” He refilled his own and Darak's cup. “I have entered your name already.”

Darak nodded.

“You ride as Darros of Sigko, not as my man. Best this way. Ankurum knows and marvels at your feat in bringing in your caravan. You're a famous hero. There will be no mention of me, but I'll have my men moving through the stadium, ready to explain who owns the three fine blacks. That should do it.” He smiled, his friendly, half-shuttered smile. “You said you would take scarlet as your color. That's very good. No Ankurum man has dared this race, and scarlet is Ankurum's device—from the vine. They'll shout for you for that. I believe the bills are already hammered up. And you'll win.”

Darak grinned, tense, amused, defiant. Raspar glanced at me.

“I cannot see your lady's face under her shireen. Does she have any doubts?”

“Bellan is a brilliant man for chariots,” I said, “but can we trust his judgment? Has he no longing to be in Darros' place?”

“You mean some slip of the tongue, lack of advice, through bitterness?” Raspar smiled again. “I see you understand a little of the human mind. Well, you've no need to fear. He will want Darros to take that race for a very fair reason. There is a man—Essandar of Coppain—who is entered for the Sagare. It was his chariot that tipped Bellan's into the Skora at the stadium there. It was not a Sagare, that one, a simpler race altogether, but still dangerous. The chariot axle gave from the impact, the horse inside left fell. Bellan was flung among the team behind. He hates Essandar, as well he might. I do not know all of it, but I gather it was less luck than a personal thing between them, over some girl.”

It was late when we left the farm.

“From tomorrow on you'll stay here at night,” Raspar said. “I know you like to keep one eye on your men, and, from what I've heard about them in the town, it's just as well. But give your Ellak charge. No more of this riding back and forth. You'll need cosseting after the day's work. I have a masseur coming, one for each of you, male and female. Besides, now that you have the mastery of the track, you'll be on show a little. Some of the Warden's ladies are coming to watch the famed and handsome Darros handle the team tomorrow, and they may well stay to eat with me. The rich idlers will want to come and judge your form so they can lay their bets.”

As we rode back along the dark road to the Ring Gate, I said: “I told you. Raspar tames dogs to do tricks for his customers and patrons.”

Darak laughed.

It would not trouble him, gypsy, boaster, showman that he was. Let them all come and stare.

* * *

And they came.

If anything, it was worse than all the fire and pain, that anger which must be restrained. I, with the arrow poised, how dear to my soul it would have been not to loose at the three running targets, but at that crowd of fools by the fence.

The curl-haired women in their litters and carriages, shimmering in their snow-white frocks. I had chosen my dress well indeed, for the agent's supper. White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled. With their white, they wore clusters of jewels of every color and in every setting, gold, silver, copper, and a metal they call alcum, a kind of dark gray stuff, that shines with an incredible blue light under the sun. The men were much the same, white tight trousers clinging as a second skin, with built-out shoulders and sleeves slashed red, orange, yellow.

The women, and some of the men also, cooed and sighed at Darak; called him over between runs. He had no time for the men, and showed it, yet despite their sulks, they could see he was a likely winner. They had spent time at the practice track attached to the Sirkunix itself, and apparently no one there came near the standard to which Bellan had got us. With the women, Darak was amenable. They gestured lightly at me with pale ringed hands, and laughed. Darak laughed with them.