The Leopard (Marakand) (4 page)

The widow—she had already introduced herself as such, as if it were a title, Widow Akay—laughed. “He’s on a cliff, that’s true enough. And this is Sand Cove. Master Ahjvar has been living in that ruin on the headland to the west there, oh, it seems years now. Since before my husband died, anyway. Just him alone, and now the boy, too.”

“What boy? I didn’t hear he had a child.”

“Ghu, of course. Not his son, at least, I don’t think he is. A city boy, a Nabbani. He came along a few years ago to do for Master Ahjvar, you know, look after his horses, cook his meals.” A smile touched the widow’s lips. “Maybe he’s something more. We all thought it a pity Master Ahjvar didn’t marry. The sea takes so many men, you know. But wherever he came from, anyone can see they’re fond of one another, and the boy’s been good for him. Master Ahjvar was—well, he didn’t look after himself properly, didn’t think about regular meals. You know what men are like when they live alone. Now that the boy’s there, he does whatever it is lords can’t do for themselves, and Master Ahjvar’s the better for it, even if young Ghu is a bit short in his wits. I can’t see there’s any harm in his being simple, myself, so long as his master treats him fairly, and Master Ahjvar’s not a man to hurt the innocent. A quick wit’s more likely to grow restless and discontent, when the Old Great Gods’ doom for you is nothing but a spade and stewing-kettle, now, isn’t it?”

Deyandara smiled, consolingly, she hoped, as one who had never had to face that fate. “Master Ahjvar’s a lord? Of where?”

A godless man could not be a lord of anywhere, not among the tribes of Praitan, surely not even among the tribes of the Tributary Lands. And godless he was. The goddess of the Duina Catairna had told her so.

“Where from? That I couldn’t tell you. He’s never said as much, but we all know. He has that air about him. The north, maybe, by his speech. Praitannec. Maybe you’d know better than I?”

Deyandara shook her head. “He might be the man I’m seeking. He might not be.” But he had to be.

“You’re a bard, mistress?”

A question asked for mere courtesy, to introduce the topic, with the bard’s ribbons garlanded around her brow and fluttering down behind, and the komuz at her shoulder. Deyandara’s bow was wrapped and slung behind the saddle, the muddy leathers she wore when she was not about to enter a village cleaned and bundled away. This close to the cities, the tribes were peaceful, and a bard could not afford to look like a straying hunter.

“You’ll be coming back when your errand’s done? The smith’s our headman, and his wife keeps the tavern. Travellers always have a good welcome from them. You’ll be heading inland to the chief’s hall, of course, but stay a night here, first. If you go to the smithy and ask . . .”

“Tell them I’ll be back by this afternoon, then, if not before.” Or else she’d have the whole village trooping up to Master Ahjvar’s to make sure she didn’t escape them. That she was a bard was a lie, of course, but wearing the ribbons seemed safer than not. Still, the woman should have questioned it. Or was she so worn by the road that she looked old enough to be what she claimed?

It was simple ignorance on the widow’s part of what it really meant to be a bard, that was all; there were few left among the tribes of the Tributary Lands. They took their news from tramp pedlars and drovers and entertainers from the city, their stories from play-actors and puppeteers. Nabbani stories. These here were a lost folk who had forgotten their own tales. Deyandara’s tutor Lin, no bard but a foreign wizard, had said so. She had given Deyandara old stories of the southlands of Over-Malagru, stories from before the colonies were ever planted, from the days when the tribes had had kings and paid tribute to no overlord, from even more ancient times, from the great years of peace under the emperor of Marakand, and back and back, to when the summer rains were frequent and kind, and the forest stretched all the way to the coast and the folk, using only axes of stone, cleared lands in the river bottoms, worshipping the goddesses of the waters. They had feared the darkness under the oaks and burnt the hills of the gods to make new pastures . . . Deyandara might not believe all the tales, but she had drunk them in.

She would give this folk some of those stories back, when her errand to Master Ahjvar was done. And they would not understand it was their own history, and the hill overlooking the bay at Gold Harbour a stronghold from which a queen had ridden to battle and defeat and death, hacked to pieces on the plain of the Yellow Stone, which was now lost under the city of Gold Harbour.

Perhaps whatever god cared for this folk saw no point in keeping old stories alive. Better they dwindled into a peasantry, tilling their fields and guarding their herds and no longer dreaming of past glory, which would serve only to stir up the young and the rash to no good end. Not all the villages of the Tributary Lands were free and governed by free headmen under a chief of the tribe. Nearer the colony-cities, manors engulfed the village fields in walls and legalities, and the folk paid rent to work the lands that had once been held of god and king alone, or traded labour in the vast vineyards and olive groves and wheatfields of the city clans’ estates for the right to feed themselves by tilling a scrap of land they did not even own. She had seen it for herself. The kings and the blood of the kings were gone in this land, gone to ash and smoke, forgotten, and the gods diminished, withdrawn, defeated, some even forgotten by their folk, who made their prayers to the gods of the cities, grown in grandeur, adapted to the ways of their new folk. Lady Lin, her tutor, had told her that gods, bound to their hills and waters, unable to flee, must do so when war swept over their lands and their kings failed them.

As Queen Cattiga had failed the goddess Catairanach of the spring of the mountain ash and the tribe called the Duina Catairna in the north? Surely not; to die a victim of murder was not failure. Even the abandonment of the
dinaz
, the royal hill-fort, was not failure but a tactical retreat on the part of her bench-companions. In the hills, they could not be pinned down. Lord Seneschal Yvarr and Marnoch, his son, could not be said to have failed the goddess, not unless and until they surrendered, which Deyandara was sure they would not do. And Catairanach had no intention of relinquishing her folk’s freedom without action, un-Praitannec though that action was.

Deyandara gave the widow a Two Hills fish-copper in thanks, mounted her pony again, called Badger from his gossiping with the widow’s bitch, and turned to the path that left the fields and groves of the village to climb the rising downland towards the ruin on the cliff. Two miles, she made it. Not a sociable man. A long walk for a child with a jug and basket.

In her own land, Praitan of the two rivers, of the seven
duinas
, the seven tribes and seven kings, part of a bard’s duty was to remember and carry messages between the kings of the tribes, but she had never heard of anyone taking a message for a god before. Certainly not such a message, and not to such a man.

The track seemed nothing more than a sheep-path, plodding between hummocks of wiry grass and mats of fragrant thyme and lavender and rue, over patches where the wind had blown the very soil away, rock bare and slippery, fissures opening into mysterious depths. It wound without apparent purpose. Always, though, Deyandara was exposed to the gaze of the ruin on the headland, which was surely only a few more years of gnawing storm from becoming an island. Lin had taught her to look at the very earth that way, as not fixed and immutable but a thing in flux, like the lives of men and their tribes.

She left a stone shed and a thorn-hedged field on her right, inland. Three sleek horses watched her, white and piebald and lion-hued. Looking at the way ahead, she tied her own bay pony to a branch of the thorn, dwarfed and bent by the wind, told Badger to stay there on guard—a whistle would bring the big mastiff running to her defence—and went on foot. The path forked, onwards along the cliff and, her way, out, abruptly down and up again, across the narrow stem of stone that was all that connected the peninsula of the ruin to the mainland. Below her, waves crashed and threw white spume into the air.

Deyandara did not like heights. Wind and heights were worse. It was no comfort that the neck of land was a clear three yards across and that, so long as she kept to the well-trodden track in the middle, she could not trip and plunge to her death without a running start.

“Andara guide my feet,” she muttered. She clutched the amulet-pouch on its thong under her shirt, as if the touch could run from the little carved thorn-wood disc away to the god on the Gayl Andara, the hill that rose higher even than the hill of her brother’s hall. Then, self-conscious, she let it go. A bard was a free-comer to all Praitans, sacred; that was as true among the folk of the Tributary Lands and the lands west beyond the Malagru as it was among her own folk. And she was on a god’s errand. No godless outcast murderer who sold himself to the merchant-lords of the Five Cities was going to see her cringing.

But she did not like heights.

Her bravado was wasted, anyway. No one hailed her. No one watched. She flicked her braids over her shoulders, made sure her ribbons were secure against the wind, and walked on.

The ruin was fenced with a drystone wall, itself fallen into ruin. Someone had filled the gaps with dead thorn boughs. The servant was hoeing weeds. He only straightened up to watch Deyandara when she coughed, politely—though perhaps he had been watching her crossing, as she stared at her feet, shuffling. She wiped a slick of sweat from her upper lip and pretended it was sea-spray, wishing she could sit down. At any rate, the boy did not seem startled to see her, but gazed with as little reaction as the hens scratching about his feet. His thick black hair was short and shaggy, and his narrow eyes, too, were black, his skin a golden brown. He looked Nabbani, as the widow had said, not colony Nabbani but someone new-come from the empire, without a grandparent from the Tributary Lands to give him height and a sterner nose. He was slightly built, with high cheekbones. Quite . . . good-looking, really. Not quite all there, the widow claimed, and yet . . . what made her think so? There was none of the deformity of face, the slack mouth or dull eyes, to warn of it.

Something was missing, though. She couldn’t put her finger on what. He seemed a child, in the open innocence of his gaze, but when she looked carefully, she realized he was older than she by several years, a man and not a boy at all, for all his hairless chin.

“I’m Deyandara of the Duina Andara,” she said. “I bear a message for Ahjvar the Leopard of Sand Cove, if this is his dwelling.” And she repeated herself in the Nabbani of the cities, what they called trade Nabbani or bastard Nabbani; it slid half into a bastard Praitannec and was the usual speech of the Tributary Lands.

He replied with a bow and a soft-voiced “Master Ahjvar’s down on the shore” in trade Nabbani. “He’ll be back soon.”

He bent to his hoe again and did not offer to show her in or even open the gate to her.

She didn’t see a gate to open. One of the thorn-blocked gaps, probably. Deyandara shrugged and seated herself on the wall. She could hear the waves below, like the ocean’s breath over the stones. She had no desire to go and look.

Half a dozen speckled hens and a clutch of chickens, in that motley half-fuzz, half-pinfeathers stage, followed the boy’s hoe between the young cabbages and onions, clucking with satisfaction over turned-up grubs, while the red rooster eyed her warily from a wind-ragged plum tree. A peasant’s garden, a peasant’s morning. When the boy straightened up, looking towards the sea, Deyandara turned, though she had heard nothing, in time to see the man appear over the edge of the cliff.

There must be some path there, climbing down. He paused, a shaggy, unbraided head of brass-gold hair that made her think of nothing so much as a lion’s mane, gold hoops in his ears, low, straight eyebrows shielding pale-blue eyes, deep-set and startlingly bright against the oak-tan brown of his skin, the sort of eyes that could make a girl forget she had promised her brother to live a chaste and virtuous life if he let her go to the road for a season . . . No. Not this man. Nothing of warmth and playfulness there, as remote as his servant’s gaze and not nearly so gentle. His beard needed trimming. He wore a grubby tunic of chequered white and brown and carried a wood-tined fork over his shoulder. If you disregarded the earrings that marked him a man of modest wealth, he looked, in fact, neither lord nor lawyer nor assassin—save for the bleak, winter-sky eyes, so rare among even those light-haired Praitans—but some villager returning, mud-spattered, from his fields.

“Master Ahjvar?” Deyandara rose and bowed. “I’m—” But the boy Ghu was speaking rapid and unintelligible Imperial Nabbani. She caught her own name and, in Praitannec, “leopard”; that was all.

The man answered in the same tongue. No peasant, indeed. The widow’s tale of his being a man of law became more plausible, as who but a scholar of the Five Cities spoke Imperial Nabbani outside of the empire?

“I’m—” she began again, when the boy’s introduction or explanation had ended and they were both regarding her steadily, as if waiting, without any great faith, for wonders.

“Lady Deyandara, of the Duina Andara,” the man interrupted. “High King Durandau’s sister, I take it? And travelling alone? I’m Ahjvar, yes, called the Leopard in the Five Cities, these days. What does the high king want of me? Is his champion and the law of the kings not enough now to keep the peace of the kings?”

She bristled. “My brother has no need of—of your sort.”

And she had not given the boy any title. Master Ahjvar was Praitannec enough to know that only a child of the royal house would be named for the god. He simply guessed she was . . . herself. Everyone knew the high king had four younger brothers and only the one sister. Speculation as to which king or heir she might marry had circulated around the tribes ever since Durandau’s election to the high kingship three years before. Her name was known to those who took an interest in the shifts of power among the tribes, which even a Five Cities assassin might, as it could affect trade, and that certainly affected the clan-fathers. That was Lady Lin’s teaching, making her see the whole branching tangle. She didn’t want to have to think about such things. She should have called herself Yselly, as she had on her way south, appropriating the dead bard’s name along with her right to the ribbons.