The Heart of the Mirage (11 page)

I thought of the sword: how could it be so heavy to Brand that he could not lift it, yet so light to me I could pick it up with two fingers of one hand?
What was I?
The bastard child of a goddess? Immortal? Someone who could see the shades of the dead? Kardi nobility?
They say only the highborn fight in Kardiastan…

Remember
—
you are of the Magor…but from them you must always hide it
.

All that had once been solid was dissolving. I shivered.

I did not know myself.

Two days later, there was a report, which the Prefect immediately showed to me, from the city of Madrinya, capital of Kardiastan. A legionnaire, who had been present at both the slave auction in Sandmurram and at the execution, swore he had seen Mir Ager in the capital, very much alive.

There was other news from Madrinya as well, none of it good. Within the city itself, no less than four senior legionnaire officers, all men known for the severity of their treatment of local people, had been found slain. All had burn marks on their chests, and in each case there was no evidence to indicate who was to blame. In addition, there had been a steady stream of slave escapes from the city. The situation was so dire some Tyranians were reluctant to allow their slaves any freedom at all. Requests were being made for legionnaires to stand guard on the houses of high officials to stop further runaways.

Few of the escaped slaves had been found. Even worse, a military caravan carrying new supplies of weapons from Sandmurram to Madrinya was missing, gone with as little trace as water poured into desert
sand. Forty legionnaires, their mounts and the carts of supplies they had been accompanying had simply vanished between one wayhouse and the next. The only clue was a report that a group of twenty or so shleth-mounted Kardis had been seen in the area. ‘Terror riders,’ Prefect Martrinus muttered.

The backstreets of every town whispered of how a man called Mir Ager, or possibly Mirager, was responsible, directly or indirectly, for all the deaths, slave escapes and legionnaire disappearances—but nothing was ever said openly.

As soon as I heard all this, I made arrangements to set off for Madrinya.

I was glad to go. I hadn’t seen any more shades, but I had not been sleeping well in that bedroom, either.

When I spoke to Prefect Martrinus about my intended journey, he suggested we take horses, but I asked for shleth riding hacks. My request had sent legionnaires scurrying out all over the city searching for suitable mounts, because our army did not use them.

Unlike the Prefecta, I liked the look of the animals. The size of sturdy horses, they had coats of wool, large clawed paws rather than hoofs, and no tails or manes. Their main divergence from the horse, however, was their possession of a third set of limbs: long jointed feeding arms, usually kept tucked out of the way in grooves along the sides of the neck. To eat, they used the three digits at the end of these arms to pluck leaves or grass, which they then passed to the mouth.

When we all assembled at the army headquarters on the day of our departure, Brand contemplated the beasts with a jaundiced eye. ‘Why did you decide on them rather than horses?’ he asked.

‘Because the Kardis ride them, even though they also have horses,’ I said.

‘Ah.’ He nodded, following my reasoning. ‘The local barbarians know best, eh?’ He paused briefly to poke his riding crop at a snake trying to insinuate its way into one of our still-to-be loaded packs. ‘Let’s hope it’s not the breeding season. I understand they—the shleths, not the barbarians—have a tendency to become irascible when the females are on heat. It is common then for a rider to complain of being pinched black and blue by the fingers of his mount.’

I glanced at him, but his face was bland as he watched the thwarted snake glide away through the dust, and I couldn’t tell whether that last remark was a joke or not. Since the conversation we’d had in his room, he had reverted to his usual faintly amused, calm self. That night-time exchange might never have happened from all the signs he gave. Once again, I was left with the feeling that, for all we had grown up together, I scarcely knew him.

‘What do you think about our audience?’ he asked a moment later, jerking his head at a group of Kardi men and women who were standing across the square, watching the travel preparations with impassive faces.

I had become used to Kardis always turning away from us; suddenly to be the focus of Kardi attention was unsettling. The hostility of this particular group was obvious to me, as always, but this time I could also sense intense, urgent curiosity. These Kardis wanted to know what was happening. ‘They’re just interested,’ I said, but I was thinking:
They are spying on us.
I didn’t like the feeling.

Brand snorted, but didn’t comment. He said instead, ‘Tell me, Legata, how do we learn the trick of riding these beasts?’

‘Aemid will teach us. She is familiar with them.’ I looked across at the slave woman, who was standing patiently by the luggage, waiting to make sure it was correctly loaded. She was wearing an anoudain—which I certainly had not paid for—as she always did now. She delighted in emphasising her Kardi origins even as she discouraged me from publicly acknowledging my own.

I was still angry with her and had not solved the problem posed by her disloyalty. No doubt if I did anything to threaten the Kardis, Aemid would warn them. I did consider having her jailed under a military guard, but the thought of incarcerating the woman who had raised me was ultimately unthinkable, just as it was impossible to consider selling her. In the end, as much as the situation galled, I decided it was better to let Aemid keep watch on me. After all, I was an expert at manipulating things to my own advantage, wasn’t I?

I turned my attention back to the preparations for our journey. The mounted legionnaires accompanying the three of us to Madrinya milled around on their gorclaks. They were clad in their uniforms: short tunics leaving their knees bare, worn with the usual cuirasses, greaves, helmets and sandals. I myself had discarded my wrap for a tunic worn over loose trousers, a Tyranian outfit more commonly worn by artisans. I didn’t care if it was unstylish; I was determined to ride rather than endure the discomforts of a litter or cart, and it was impossible to ride anything wearing a Tyranian wrap.

I caught the eye of the legionnaire officer and asked, ‘I’m told the tradeway is paved the whole distance?’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘Designed by Tyranian military engineers, built by slaves. An easy journey
now compared to what it used to be. Used to take four weeks in the old days.’

Although most of Sandmurram was wholly Kardi, the administrative and commercial quarters around the Prefect’s residence had a distinctive Tyranian face and this was the area where I had spent most of my time. There was much that was familiar, toning down the strange. It was not until I left Sandmurram altogether that I appreciated just how different Kardiastan was from Tyrans.

Outside the town, even the Kardi sky had a character of its own: a vividness to the blue more intense than elsewhere, a clarity made more noticeable by the lack of clouds. When I remarked on the lack to Aemid, her reply was a terse: ‘It never rains in Kardiastan.’

Indeed, numerous tracts of stony soil and sand made her assertion easy to believe. Nothing seemed to live in these desolate areas, although they had a kaleidoscopic beauty. The sands were multicoloured, often spread with intertwined swirls of colour as though the wind had sorted out grains of different weights or densities to create patterns. Sometimes wind-blasted rocks were heaped in the centre of such patterns, their tortured shapes struggling out of the sand like the petrified remains of long-dead monsters.

And then, just when it seemed Kardiastan was a dead world, we would come upon a wide, gentle-sided valley where it was hard to believe it never rained. In these lush vales, the soil was rich, the vegetation prolific and flocks of waterbirds skimmed azure pools and lakes. I liked the contrast, the abrupt change from the hot reds and oranges and browns of the desert sands and stones to the cool greens and blues of the low-lying areas between.

‘But where does all the water come from?’ Brand asked in wonderment. Aemid’s explanation, begrudgingly given, was that in such low-lying areas water seeped up from under the ground to create havens for life; it was only the higher areas between that were dry.

Most of the valleys were settled by Kardis. Domestic animals grazed under the watchful eye of Kardi herders. Wild coppices separated fields planted with grain and other crops; fruit trees lined the meadows. Every so often, windmills with hide sails pumped water to irrigation systems. Villages and towns were never built in the centres of these dales as might have been expected, but on the edges where the soil was too dry and stony to be tilled. The houses were of adobe and blended unobtrusively into the desert landscape beyond them.

Curious to see the interiors, several times I stopped and asked an owner’s permission to enter. The request was never refused, but we were never offered the hospitality of a seat or a drink, either.

Cool and dim inside, the rooms had stone-tiled floors and simple wicker furniture. I thought them spartan and was inclined to be disparaging—until I saw what Tyrans had wrought.

Where the Tyranian civil or military administration wanted wayhouses, they had erected vast stone and marble buildings, usually on a lakeside, marking the landscape—as Brand asserted—like gorclak turds in a flowerbed. For the first time I found my admiration for Tyranian progress was tinged with embarrassment. I had once regarded such monuments as magnificent, symbolic of the might and grandeur of Tyrans; now I looked and saw an oppressive lack of imagination, a desire to dominate rather than to belong. What was Tyranian suddenly seemed to lack grace and subtlety.

The Tyranian architecture out of a Tyranian context might have irked me, but my reaction to it appalled me. I couldn’t understand how I, who had always loved all that was Tyranian, could feel that way. This strange land with its mystic beauty was shredding the solidness of the foundations on which I had built my life, and I didn’t want to look inside myself to find out why.

Still, ugly buildings or not, I was glad enough to accept the comforts of a wayhouse after a day in the saddle. To sink into a perfumed marble bath, to have clean clothes and a choice of seven or eight dishes at the evening meal, to lounge against the cushions of a divan and listen to a slave play the songs of Tyr—that was paradise, even if it meant putting up with the sullen service of Kardi slaves, slaves who became even less helpful than normal after they had spoken to Aemid.

The worst part of the journey was the crossing of the valley that furrowed through Kardiastan like a gorclak trail through snow. Kardis called it the Rift and it had a grandeur that was magnificent when seen from its southern lip: red walls sliced downwards in columns and pleats to a flat valley floor strung with lakes, far below. In the distance, two days’ ride away, was the north wall, just as steep and formidable. It took us a day to descend to the valley on a zigzag path, and once we were there, we were buffeted by fierce gales barrelling up the Rift. It may not have rained in Kardiastan, but it emulated it in that place. The wind swept up water from the lakes, mixed it with red dust and whipped it at us in stinging slashes; by the time we reached the north wall, everything we had was damply pink, including the shleths.

At least the shleths were stoic; the gorclaks were not nearly so composed. Even when the wind was at its
worst, the shleths shielded their eyes with their feeding arms and plodded on; the gorclaks tended to go berserk, baulking at every movement, bellowing their displeasure and distress, swinging their great heads to and fro as if they could shred the wind with their nose horns. Every legionnaire had trouble; several were thrown and others had their mounts bolt.

There were two wayhouses in the Rift, one clinging to the foot of the south wall, the other huddled up to the north face, neither with any permanent staff. The continuous whine of the wind would have crazed anyone forced to live there. None of our party slept much during the nights we stayed in them. I suppose we all spent time thinking about the legionnaire caravan that had vanished somewhere along the paveway to Madrinya…

The arduous day’s climb out of the valley seemed a pleasurable stroll after the hell of the floor of the Rift, and by comparison the rest of the journey was almost a carefree holiday.

Aemid cried when she saw Madrinya. She had been born there, raised there, but this was no longer the city of her childhood. That old adobe town with its brown buildings and quiet well-squares had largely disintegrated in war and conquest. White Tyranian marble and pink stone edifices now glowered like ungainly monsters along what had been a wooded lakeshore, while the once-fashionable Kardi buildings had begun to crumble into a semblance of the Snarls, complete with scum-covered drains, vermin and the stink of poverty. Even I, viewing the city first from the back of my shleth, felt a moment’s pang. It seemed alien, an excrescence on the face of the land.

‘The Pavilions have gone,’ Aemid whispered as we rode in through the outskirts.

‘What were they?’ I asked.

‘The palace…and other buildings. They used to stand over there…’ She pointed to where the city’s stadium, built of local stone, now stood. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘That’s where the Magoroth died,’ she added in a whisper. ‘In the Pavilions.’

I looked across at her and felt a twinge of anxiety. She had not stood up to the journey well and now the shock of seeing the Madrinya of the Exaltarchy rather than the Kardi city of her youth appeared to have shrunk both her body and her spirit, as if by growing smaller, by being less aggressive, she could avoid further pain. She was diminished. I felt her depression like a black cloud hovering about her, darkening her spirit.

‘We’ll be at the Governor’s residence soon,’ I said, trying not to show my alarm. ‘Then you can rest. I shall make sure someone attends to you.’ I glanced at Brand, reassuring myself that he, at least, had not changed. He’d enjoyed most of the journey just as I had and now rode his shleth with the same easy grace he possessed on horseback.

Still, since that night in his room, there had been a subtle shift in our relationship. He might have been the same, but I was finding it harder to see him as a slave first, and a man second. A man with a man’s desires and needs; a man who saw me as a desirable woman before he saw me as his owner. I pushed that unsettling idea away in a hurry. It was a complication I didn’t want to deal with right then, not when I had a job to do in difficult circumstances.