The Hidden Queen (19 page)

“You are surprised?”

“Yes!” That was torn from her. “I have lived all my life in this country, and have only ever seen one…and that was with the horses…”

“Dun’en. Yes. Sometimes we travel with them. But I am no horse trader.”

Anghara felt oddly chastened. She fought to collect her thoughts. When she spoke again, it was as a Kir Hama princess. “Your kind…are not common in this land.” This land. Now the phrase had popped naturally into her own mouth. And then the child which that princess still was, the impatient child who had too many questions and too few words to ask them, spoke again. “I know that people don’t…I mean, that Khelsies…”

The moment the word slipped out she would have given worlds to unsay it. That was what the frightened and the prejudiced called the people out of the desert, odd and shocking in their differences. She had heard it a hundred times, always denigratory, slighting, insulting—Khelsie, Khelsie abomination. And now she had flung it, without meaning to, without thinking…

But the Kheldrini woman merely gave a small nod. “Yes. I know. You do not expect to find one of us this deep in your land, alone. But this is not the first time I have been deep in Sheriha’drin.”

“Sheriha’drin?” echoed Anghara, distracted by the name.

“That is what we name your country in our tongue, Sheriha’drin, River Land, Land of Running Water. There are things here which are meaningful for us; and many things that are holy.”

“Holy? To you?”

“If nothing else, then the water alone,” said the Kheldrini woman softly. “There is no water that is not holy to us; every one of your rivers and lakes is a place of worship. Your people have never understood us—and never trusted us, unless for simple trade. We have many things they covet, and they are happy to give us grain in exchange for our horses, or jin’aaz silk. But often there are times when some of us must come—call it a pilgrimage—and when we do we come as shadows, and you never know. But I have been as far as the river you call the Rada, and never has a Sheriha’drini eye seen me pass.” She reached up to the mask and took it down, very slowly, with the measured and deliberate dignity of a queen. “Until now.”

She was old; that was the first thing to strike Anghara as she gazed at the face thus revealed. The bronze skin had darkened to chestnut, a deep golden brown, and her hair was no longer copper but a palely gleaming silvery-white. Her eyes were filmed over with white, with no iris and no pupil, and yet they were resting on Anghara with sight which was all the more compelling because it was so patently not of the physical world.

“My name is ai’Jihaar ma’Hariff,” the unmasked woman said. Her words were simple, but her tone was high pride, and Anghara had no doubt that in Kheldrin the name meant something. Here, in the land she had named Sheriha’drin, the words were just words—except that a great trust had been shown by the very fact that ai’Jihaar had chosen to unveil both her nature and her name to one who had still not returned the honor. And there would be no half-truths here, no Brynna Kelen could stand before this scrutiny. Anghara drew a deep breath.

“I am Anghara Kir Hama of Miranei,” she said, taking her name back for the first time in years. Her heart leapt to hear it.

“Kir Hama is a royal name,” said ai’Jihaar. “And you are very far from Miranei.”

“My mother was Rima of the Wells; my father Dynan, King Under the Mountain,” said Anghara, in response to the questions which had been so skillfully disguised as simple statements. “He fell in battle, and the son he begot in his youth seized the throne. He reigns now in Miranei.” It was bitter, this confession, her vulnerability and helplessness exposed for all eyes to see—especially these eyes, so penetrating, so swift to understand.

“Against your law.”

“Sif is king. He
is
the law.”

“And you are the terror that stands between him and true kingship, the thorn of unease lying deep in the heart of his reign.”

The words had the lilt and the cadence of a bard’s chant, hard truths wrapped in the velvet of metaphor and poetry. Anghara shivered at them, but stood silent.

“How is it that you live, and are free?” asked ai’Jihaar unexpectedly.

That lanced at pitiless memories, and drew blood. It was a moment before she could speak. “They hid me from him. And every place that hid me has had to pay for that sin.”

“Where are you headed now?” asked the Kheldrini woman, unexpectedly gently. The tone of her voice made the question one of concern, not mere prying.

“Calabra,” said Anghara, “and Sanctuary, with Nual.” She turned her head almost instinctively to peer again at the visible snatch of river, still golden in the sun.

“They have gone, your companions,” said ai’Jihaar with a precision that was eerie—it was as though she saw Anghara’s gesture and responded to it, as any ordinary person would do, despite her handicap. “They came here to look for you, but it was as if they were unable to see where you lay.”

Anghara’s head whipped around again. “You were here?”

“Yes.”

“You could have shown them, then…”

“No,” said ai’Jihaar regretfully, shaking her head. “Not without revealing myself. And let them see me here I could not.” Again, the oddness of her speech, the strange order of her words, the inescapable sense that this creature had come from elsewhere…

“But you showed yourself to me,” said Anghara slowly.

“I,” said ai’Jihaar enigmatically, “have my own Gods. And, if you will recall, I had little choice at the last. To reveal my presence to one who obviously already knew I was there would be breaking no rules.” She paused to fit the white mask back on her face. “I am bound for Calabra,” she said, once again in that matter-of-fact voice with which she had answered Anghara’s first question. “If you would come with me, you are welcome.”

Anghara spared another brief cheerless glance for the river, blazing more golden than ever. “I cannot take another boat,” she murmured, “all I owned in the world was on that one, and I do not know what became of it. I will walk with you.”

It was rather a graceless acceptance, but ai’Jihaar merely nodded with a degree of rather unsettling complacency, as though this had all been meticulously planned months ago, and the meeting in the Tanassa Dance preordained. “Come, then.”

She moved with an uncanny skill and speed, so much so that Anghara, taken a little by surprise at the suddenness of her departure, had to scramble to catch up to her. The woman’s outward frailty was deceptive; she was built for stamina and endurance—much like the fragile steeds which hailed from her homeland. She found paths where Anghara could see only trackless waste—for the back slopes of the Tanassa Hills were different from those which faced the river. No smooth meadowland here, it was all tussocks of wiry grass rooted in long expanses of naked stone, soft and crumbling, and loose rocks, which rolled treacherously beneath a foot and could turn an ankle with effortless malice. Anghara followed where ai’Jihaar led, but even so she was breathless with exertion when they finally reached the grassy plains. Looking around, ai’Jihaar paused, waiting for her. “It becomes easier from here.”

“You climbed that? Alone in the dark?” panted Anghara, coming abreast of her companion.

“There are far worse things in Khar’i’id, where I have walked at night,” said ai’Jihaar softly.

“What is Khar’i’id?”

“The Stone Desert of Kheldrin,” said ai’Jihaar, “where nothing thrives except se’i’din and diamondskins, and both of these are death.”

Anghara was suddenly overwhelmingly curious about the strange land of which she had heard little that was not legend, fable, or simply malicious fabrication of small and frightened minds. “Tell me of your country,” she said, and she was quite unaware of a tone of ringing command which had crept back into her voice as she had taken on again the mantle of the Kir Hama name.

While ai’Jihaar did not miss it, neither did she bow under it. “In time,” she said. A light breeze swirled around the walkers, twitching the ends of their cloaks, tousling Anghara’s hair—ai’Jihaar lifted her masked face into it, as though listening to tidings, or asking for them. And so she was, in a way.
Oh, ai’Shahn al’Sheriha, bright messenger of my people’s Gods, was it for this that you sent me to seek when you sent me into holy Sheriha’drin?
The wind was silent, but the quiet excitement that coursed through ai’Jihaar’s blood at the bright aura of the girl who walked beside her was answer enough to her prayer. And yet…it had been many ages since one of the sheriha’drini was taken into the heartland of Kheldrin. Many ages; the world had been broken and remade at least once since that time. There was pity in the old woman—for the child who was running, for royal blood cast adrift to survive on the wind, sustained only by the hope that one day she would reclaim what had been taken from her. But pity must not sway her decisions. She was
sen’thar,
chosen of her Gods, and it was their voices she must heed. She walked in silence, listening to the whisper of foreign winds in the grass of Roisinan’s plains.

It took them many days to reach Calabra, days in which Anghara learned to respect ai’Jihaar’s silences. She learned much more, as well, for there were times when ai’Jihaar was quite ready to talk, and the strange, enigmatic land of Kheldrin began to take shape before Anghara’s eyes. A shape more real than her own country, for all that they moved beneath familiar skies—for ai’Jihaar had a mesmeric power with words and Anghara had no other companion to dilute their impact on her mind.

Just how strange and alien her own land could become in a short space of time was borne in upon her only when, after avoiding every habitation in their path, they finally plunged into the outskirts of Calabra and Anghara saw for the first time the consequences of Bresse.

Because ai’Jihaar seemed to know where she was going, Anghara, who had never been alone in a big city before, was content to let her lead the way. She had taken Anghara’s arm, and although it looked like an able-bodied girl was helping a blind woman cope with the crowds, it was in fact very much the other way around, with ai’Jihaar leading and hanging on to Anghara lest they be swept apart by the jostling people in the broad main street.

“I’ll have us down one of the smaller streets in a moment,” murmured ai’Jihaar very softly, so that Anghara barely heard her. “It should be easier then. There should be…oh,
al’Khur!
” The sudden recoil came an instant before something slammed at Anghara’s own mind, a dark madness which pulsed in their direction from somewhere…somewhere above them. Anghara echoed ai’Jihaar’s gasp of pain, snapping her watering eyes upward.

It was bad. Very bad—ai’Jihaar felt the black silence of shock as it descended like night on Anghara’s bright presence beside her, even if it hadn’t been for the sudden tight, bone-crushing grip in which the girl had her arm. But it was something that escaped ai’Jihaar’s own senses, blurred them into dangerous fuzziness. For a moment she had known what real blindness meant.

“Go,” urged ai’Jihaar softly, for they had stopped dead in their tracks. “Take the next turning. Get us out of here.”

Anghara obeyed, but she moved jerkily, slowly, her breathing uneven and harsh. In the quieter atmosphere of the side street ai’Jihaar recaptured some of her composure, but under her hand Anghara was still rigid. Reaching up toward Anghara’s face, ai’Jihaar touched her cheek very gently.

“Tell me,” the Kheldrini woman said, and although the voice was very gentle the words were a command.

“A cage,” said Anghara, expressionlessly. “They have strung up a cage above the street. There are three women inside. One may be dead, or unconscious—she lies there, unmoving, and the other two trample her in their madness. And they
are
mad…” She shuddered violently, and then again.

Taking both of Anghara’s hands into her own small-boned ones, ai’Jihaar squeezed them with unexpected strength. “There is more,” she said. “Tell me.”

There was a moment of silence, and then ai’Jihaar became aware that Anghara was weeping. “They had no eyes,” she said at last, and ai’Jihaar understood.

“They were Sighted,” she said flatly.

Anghara’s hands were cold, her palms clammy. “Sif,” she forced out through stiff lips.

“Come,” ai’Jihaar said, taking charge. “I know a place of safety where we can rest. Tomorrow, we look for a ship to bear us across the sea.”

She felt Anghara grow very still. “We?” she asked softly.

There was no more doubt in her mind—ai’Jihaar’s Gods had spoken. Her voice was very gentle when she spoke again.

“Sheriha’drin cannot shelter you any longer,” she said. “There is no place in this land strong enough to offer you sanctuary in this hour. Sometimes love alone is not enough.”

I
t was a Kheldrini ship they boarded in the morning. It stood out from the other ships in the harbor in much the same way a Kheldrini face would stand out in a crowd of Roisinani. The ship from the desert country was smaller and narrower than its Roisinan counterparts, built, much as everything else from that land seemed to be, for endurance and speed. It was crewed by a handful of Kheldrini men, clad in narrow sand-colored trousers that fitted them like a second skin, their bronze torsos bare, their long hair tied back out of their way with thongs while they grappled with the complexities of wind and sail. Still, for creatures born and bred in oceans of sand, they seemed to be quietly efficient upon the water. The ship, with its cargo of grain from Roisinan and two passengers, glided out of Calabra at mid-morning.

Anghara had spent most of the previous night weeping quietly and, it seemed, quite inconsolably for the sight she had seen in Calabra’s street. Things were worse even than this; in the place where ai’Jihaar had taken them they received other news, and it seemed that the cage was only a small part of the whole. All over the land the countryside had been scoured, helpless Sighted women run to ground by armed men demanding they renounce Sight. Often, the wretched women could not do so. How could they renounce something they had been born with? They would be killed on the spot, spitted on lances or laid open with a sword or, if they were really unlucky, they died slowly under torture, before witnesses, so that Sif’s message could be brought home. Sif, or his advisors, had concocted a brew which his inquisitors and his soldiers administered to their victims, too often by force, that purported to “purge” the Sight from a mind which harbored it. That it had an effect was without doubt; it was very seldom, however, the effect that had been anticipated. Not a few of those who took it died. They were the lucky ones. Those who lived sometimes lost their minds, becoming less than idiots; some found its dulling effects were temporary, and were fed more and more until they became bitterly addicted. Others, like the ones in Calabra, had been senselessly maimed and exhibited as an example. Concealing a Sighted woman, or helping one flee Sif’s avenging soldiers, was a crime almost as great as Sight itself, and scores of husbands, fathers or brothers paid for their women’s gift with their own heads.

Something wild was riding Sif. He had unleashed a pogrom, made all the more horrifying because it was unexpected. Sight had been a part of Roisinan for hundreds of years—now Sif seemed intent on rooting it out within a single generation. He would rule human, as he had vowed, but more than that—he would rule a human people.

Anghara, to whom Sight meant so much more than her own wild gift, who had grown up with her gentle mother, venerable Feor and the Sisters at Bresse, could not comprehend so much hate. Sif could not hate an entire people this much, it was impossible, it was insane, and in her anguish Anghara even asked, lapsing into a childish logic which tore at ai’Jihaar’s heart, whether he would stop if she surrendered herself to him.

“He would not stop, dear heart,” murmured the Kheldrini woman compassionately, sitting by the bed where her young companion lay, stroking her hair with a gentle hand. “This has gone past the search for one girl, although he may hope to crush her together with the rest.”

“But the babies, ai’Jihaar, the babies…”

And that, perhaps, was the worst. The babies of Sighted women, children who had the possibility of Sight in their future, were dealt with just as ruthlessly. The tale of one particular village in the north, which had more than its fair share of Sighted women and to which this had been a source of some pride, had filtered southward, spoken of in fearful whispers. Soldiers had scourged the place; infants had been torn from their mothers’ arms and slain before their eyes. Children barely toddling had tasted the sword. When Sif’s men left, the place which had been so proud was left weeping, its streets red with innocent blood. The land reeled from the blows the king dealt them, noble and commoner alike. They had not yet had time to recover or react.

“But they will,” ai’Jihaar had said, with quiet certainty. “Sif believes he has started a crusade, but he has only sowed the seeds of his own end. Now they are afraid—but soon, very soon, they will start to hate him.”

Anghara had thought her tears cried out at last, boarding the foreign ship of her exile, her dry eyes red and swollen. And yet it was still not over, for more tears came, salty as the ocean which was widening between her and the shore of her land, as she felt herself physically torn from Roisinan. Her heart was breaking, but she stood straight and proud, her gray eyes locked on the shore until it faded from her sight.

“I will come back,” she murmured as the shape of her land sank beneath the sea, and it was not, after all, a vow of revenge. But it was a vow nonetheless.
I will return. I will not abandon you.

By the time she returned to where ai’Jihaar had been installed in one of the small cabins, the Kheldrini woman had undergone a remarkable transformation. The travelling cloak and the mask were gone; there was no further need. Instead, she wore a loose robe of gold jin’aaz silk and over it a white djellaba; a necklace of yellow amber set in silver lay around her neck. Her hair was gathered in a delicate net, sprinkled with amber beads.

She seemed completely unaware that anything was different, sitting cross-legged on cushions before a small table bearing a tray with tea things. In that uncanny way she had, she turned toward the door as Anghara opened it, and smiled. “Tea?”

Anghara wrinkled her nose at the unfamiliar, rather pungent aroma that arose from ai’Jihaar’s small handleless cup. “That is tea?”

“Lais,” said ai’Jihaar, gesturing at the small teapot on the tray. “Try some.”

Anghara poured out a small measure into a second cup and came to sit beside ai’Jihaar. Her face was disciplined, but her gray eyes were swimming with loss. Once again, impossibly, ai’Jihaar responded to things she could not have known.

“Do not think of it as exile,” she said unexpectedly, as though answering the unspoken thoughts that roiled inside Anghara’s mind.

But Anghara was becoming used to these sallies, and simply continued the conversation from that point, without pausing to wonder anew at ai’Jihaar’s sharp perceptions.

“I am grateful,” she murmured, “but it
is
exile…and it’s hard…” She swallowed convulsively. She would not,
would not,
start crying again. “Why did you show yourself at the Dance?” she asked, a question she had asked before. “You could have let me go and I would never have known that you were there.”

“I could not,” said ai’Jihaar, patiently repeating an answer she had already given. She was indulgent in this, because she was herself intrigued by their meeting. “Do you not remember? It was you who sensed my presence, before I spoke. Never before has a Sheriha’drini known me, as you did then. The choice was taken from me in that moment.”

“Have you been to…to Roisinan often before?” It was deliberate, that; the land was not Sheriha’drin, not to Anghara.

“Many times.”

It was suddenly very important to Anghara that she find out. “Why?”

“I am
sen’thar,
” said ai’Jihaar simply, as though that explained everything. And it would have, had Anghara been of Kheldrin. But there was much still for her to learn, and ai’Jihaar knew it; she went on smoothly, “There are those amongst us who are bound to our Gods. It is not with us as it is in your land, where a priest serves one God alone.
Sen’en’thari
know every God, serve every God, and when a voice speaks to us we obey. There are many reasons for making a pilgrimage.”

“And this time?”

Turning her uncanny eyes on Anghara, ai’Jihaar said, “This time…this time it was different. I was sent to seek for something.”

“For me?”

“Your Gods and mine, how can we mortals fully know their minds?” she said slowly. “It was only in Calabra that I was sure. And after that, it would have been a hard God who would have me leave you in Sif’s path. If you want to know why I was sent to seek for you, the answer is that I do not know. Yet. Certainly it was to spare you from the holocaust; but I do not think the Gods of Kheldrin would have sent me on a mission whose purpose was only that. This is why I tell you: do not think of it as exile. You were meant to come to Kheldrin; that was written before you were born, else you would not be on this ship. The true reasons will become clear to us in time.”

The cabin door opened softly and one of the crew bowed low in ai’Jihaar’s direction from the threshold.

“The winds are good,
an’sen’thar.
We make good speed. Is there anything you require?”

Lifting a slender arm weighted with silver bracelets, ai’Jihaar gestured gracefully. “No, that is all. Thank you.”

He bowed again and withdrew.

The lais tea was making Anghara drowsy, her eyelids drooping already as her gaze, drawn to the visitor, came back to ai’Jihaar—but she had a quick ear, and she could not fail to note the deep deference shown to her companion by the Kheldrini crew.
“An’sen’thar?”
she murmured, her eye still bright. “What are you, ai’Jihaar?”

“The chosen of the Gods,” said ai’Jihaar, “their instrument and their servant. A vessel for their visions, a seer, a dreamer of true dreams. And now, your teacher, and your friend.” Anghara’s eyes closed at the last word, as though ai’Jihaar had spoken an invocation, and she lay back, asleep. Producing a woollen coverlet, ai’Jihaar laid it over her, very gently. “Sleep, my child,” she whispered. “May ai’Shahn bring you good dreams.”

If the messenger of the Kheldrin Gods obeyed, Anghara could not say—she remembered no dreams when she woke. But she rose refreshed, and although her heart was still heavy at what had transpired during the last day or so she was in better spirits and seemed to have retreated from the narrow edge she had walked in Calabra. While ai’Jihaar had named herself Anghara’s teacher, she made no move in that direction on the voyage to Kheldrin, other than occasional information about the place where they were headed, leaving space for Anghara to find her equilibrium again, to calm her soul. When land appeared on the horizon before them, and the captain announced imminent landfall, Anghara was looking forward to setting foot in Kheldrin. Dressed in a white robe which the Kheldrini woman had procured for her, Anghara stood on the ship’s prow and eagerly awaited her first sight of ai’Jihaar’s country.

Which, when it came, was not at all what she had expected. “It looks much like the land around Calabra,” Anghara said, strangely disappointed at the pastures she could glimpse beyond the harbor. “I was somehow expecting…”

“You will see plenty of desert soon enough,” said ai’Jihaar, who had come to stand beside her, in mild rebuke. “There is very little green in Kheldrin once you go beyond those mountains. We treasure these grasslands; they are all we have.”

A glint of sunshine on water that was not the ocean drew Anghara’s eye, and seemed to find an echo somewhere in ai’Jihaar’s own exotic senses. She made a gesture that was at once a ritual of obeisance and a sign of pure, quiet love. “Sa’ila,” she said. “Our one river. The only flowing water west of Sheriha’drin.” And then her head turned a fraction, toward a city of slender spires amongst a profusion of low roofs tiled with oddly golden stone. “And that,” said ai’Jihaar, “is Sa’alah. Look closely; I do not think you will find much that will remind you of Calabra there.” There was both light teasing and an unexpected compassion in ai’Jihaar’s voice. She understood that in spite of the anticipation of her arrival in Kheldrin, Anghara must be feeling bereft of everything familiar. There had been disappointment in her voice a moment before—and the disappointment was deeper than even she knew, deeper than surface frustration at not seeing what she had expected to see. Yes, parts of the coastal plain near Sa’alah did look like the land around Calabra in Roisinan—and there was a part of her which would have been happier if it had not.

The captain himself handed ai’Jihaar down from his ship when it tied up at the main dock; Anghara followed, feeling not unlike her father’s stallion amongst dun’en. Less so than most Roisinani, perhaps—she was, after all slight and small boned, and her hair was bright enough to match any in Sa’alah, even if it didn’t have their pure shade of copper. But her face was pale-skinned, her cheekbones too high, her lips too full, her eyes gray and wide. This was a trade city, though, and people from Roisinan were not entirely unknown. There were a few bemused stares, but not enough to make her feel uncomfortable.

“Come,” said ai’Jihaar, adjusting her djellaba to her satisfaction and reaching a hand out to her young charge. “Tomorrow will be soon enough. It would be best if we stayed this night at the serai and tomorrow I will procure ki’thar’en.”

“Where will we be going?” asked Anghara, falling into step beside ai’Jihaar, finally asking a question she could not believe she had not asked before.

“Home,” said ai’Jihaar, not looking around.

Anghara recognized the following silence from the long days they had spent walking the plains to Calabra, and kept her peace as they walked down the pier. When that abruptly ended, ai’Jihaar turned into the city’s narrow streets, moving with the same singular assurance which had threaded her through Calabra. The serai, much like what Anghara would have called a han, was a low, rambling building on the outskirts of Sa’alah, fronting onto a narrow white beach. The man who came to meet them bowed from behind a brightly woven curtain hung in the doorway, as ai’Jihaar spoke to him in her guttural native tongue. He ushered them inside and along a small corridor, then through another set of curtains into a low, wide room full of soft pillows in shades of red and gold. Another curtained doorway, from which the curtains had been drawn back, opened onto a short stretch of lawn, which dropped away abruptly into the white sand and the ocean. Anghara crossed over to look outside.

“Dhim ki’thar’en ka’hailam, an’sen’thar?”

“Dai, saliha.”