The Leopard (Marakand) (5 page)

Deyandara tried again, more courteously. “The high king wants nothing of you, Master Ahjvar.” She wouldn’t call him lord without better proof than a foreign peasant-woman’s guess. “My errand to you is from Catairanach of the Avain Catairna, the goddess of the Duina Catairna.”

“I know who Catairanach is,” he said, mildly enough, but his voice was ice. “And I’ve no interest in any words from that goddess or that folk. So you can be off.”

He came the last way up the cliff, revealing muscular bare legs, black nearly to the knee with mud, and a wooden pail.

“My lord—” That slipped out without her intending. “I gave my word to carry the message.”

“Consider it carried.” He climbed over the wall. “Now go away. Ghu, is there milk today? We can make a chowder.”

The boy spoke in Imperial again and seemed to find whatever he said amusing as he took the pail. The assassin ripped up a fistful of grass to wipe down his legs, scrubbing his hands on the skirt of his tunic after, running still-muddy hands through his hair, defying her to comment. When it seemed he was going to follow the boy into the house without another word to her, Deyandara slid down off the wall into the garden herself.

He heard the movement and turned, swift and balanced and . . . yes, she did think leopard suited. Her heart beating a little too rapidly, she bowed, which she shouldn’t have done, since he knew who she was and no princess should be bowing to a lordless exile. “I gave my word to deliver the message.”

He said something. It sounded obscene, but Nabbani, so the fact that she could pick out the name of the goddess Catairanach did not need to offend her. “Come in, then, and say your piece.”

He ushered her in ahead of him with mocking courtesy. The ruin had no door, only a curtain of hide. She had sheltered in such places before. One of those grand halls built without mortar, in form like a giant stone beehive, which dotted the high places of all the lands Over-Malagru, abandoned, except maybe as shelters for straying cattle or wandering tramps, long before the first colonists came from Imperial Nabban to claim the coast, or so her tutor had said. They mostly stood open to the sky. This one had been inexpertly re-roofed with poles and turf. Even to Deyandara’s eye, not used to troubling about such things, it seemed likely to let in wind and rain in equal measure, and probably to come down in a mess of beams and mud in some spring gale.

It didn’t look like a home, only a place to camp, despite the hens and the garden.

Ahjvar left her standing and flung himself onto a block of stone with a striped rug thrown over it, part of the wall that had fallen, but he made it look like a throne. A sword, unsheathed, leaned against the wall. A fire burned on a central hearth. The boy squatted beside it, prying the big white clams open with a crook-bladed forage-knife, a peasant’s tool. He left off and brought Deyandara a beaker of water from a jar in the corner, courtesy his master hadn’t offered. She thanked him and drank, as he went back to his cookery.

Neither man asked her to sit.

Walls thrust inward, dividing the place into dark bays, though there was better light than she would have expected in the open central room, due to a hole in the roof, which might have been for the smoke or might have something to do with a heap of muddy grassroots on the floor.

“Two months ago,” she began, “I was in the Duina Catairna, when Queen Cattiga died . . .”

The queen gave a little grunt, almost a mew, and her eyes, meeting Deyandara’s across the fire, went wide. Deyandara felt the fumbling, the notes gone wrong, as if her fingers understood before she did. Cattiga, in her great chair draped with a black bull’s hide, stared, open-mouthed. Deyandara slung her komuz to her shoulder by its leather strap—she couldn’t say why, except an instinct not to drop it—and rose to her feet, mouth open like a mirror to Cattiga’s. The queen’s chief bard and his daughter Gelyn both trailed off their own playing, a squawk of flute and a soft dying of the great harp, turning to her, then to see where she stared, the shout—or would it be shriek?—still rising in her throat. The queen’s champion, Lord Angress, had his sword singing free before Deyandara made a sound, before the queen had begun to slump, the dark flood spreading down her blue and white tunic.

The red-armoured, red-masked priest beside her, courtesy guard to the yellow-robed one who had been bending a knee to speak, the queen leaning forward a little to hear, straightened up. She—a slight thing, so probably she, though the shirt of lacquered scales and the triple-crested helmet with its narrow eyeslits flattened or hid any feature that might say—still held the long, slender dagger an ambassador should not have been carrying in the hall. The yellow priest sprang away, back against the wall, as the champion’s sword came around in a swing that should have taken the Red Mask’s head.

It did not. The red priest staggered aside, and there was a flare of the firelight so that it seemed her body was outlined for a moment in flame. She punched Lord Angress in the chest with the staff of office the Red Masks all carried, a two-foot-long, carved, whitened rod. It should not have been allowed, but the staff was a sign of their service, their oaths, their honour, and Cattiga, against Lord Angress’s advice, had permitted it.

The champion seemed to have been struck with a fist of lightning. White sparks and spiderwebs crackled; there was a stink of smoke, and he dropped.

Gilru, the prince, a brat of nine or ten, red-haired and freckled, had been by Deyandara’s feet. Probably considering his chances of tying her bootlaces together. He shouted—she could never afterwards recall the words—and flung himself away around the hearth, running to his mother even as Deyandara grabbed for him. After that it was all swords and spears and shouting, taller, broader people between her and the queen and the boy she was still trying to reach, and the fire gone mad, leaping and twisting and then dying away to embers and choking smoke as if someone had smothered it in wet straw. Lord Marnoch, chief huntsman and the seneschal’s son, came down the stairs from the upper room with an axe in his hands and felled two yellow priests before he himself was laid low by a glancing blow from a Red Mask’s white staff, something that hit his axe-haft, not his body. One of his own hunters stumbled on him, was struck across her shoulders, and did not get up. The lamps on the posts that supported the upper storey, an enclosed loft, went out then. In the darkness someone’s elbow struck Deyandara’s chin and she fell.

“Gilru!” she heard Syallan screaming. The champion’s shield-bearer was a young woman some few years older than Deyandara, everything Deyandara was not—she didn’t tell the assassin that—handsome, skilled, respected and honoured in the hall even though she was the bastard-born daughter of the queen’s late husband—loved.

And what followed . . .
Dim light from the embers on the hearth, painting everything in faded red and shadow. Someone trod on Deyandara’s hand as she tried to reach Syallan’s voice, to be what aid she could to the prince, and then a trampling foot struck her head. Sick and momentarily blind, she grabbed it, heaved, and the man fell on her. He was one of the queen’s bench-companions, and as he rolled away a Marakander temple guardsman stabbed down with a Praitannec spear, and the man grunted and spewed blood over her. She didn’t dare move, face to face with the dying man, whose eyes, surely, looked beyond her and did not accuse, please, Andara, she hadn’t meant—Great Gods forgive her, it wasn’t her fault, everything she did went twisted, but that didn’t mean she was cursed, it did not.

One of the queen’s household, slain, fell beside her; that was what she told the Leopard, who had his eyes shut, as if he saw the hall and the smouldering light and the dying men and women there. Deyandara had snatched the dead warrior’s dagger from his hand—she was lying on her own—and come up onto her knees, driving the long blade upwards with both hands into the Marakander temple guard’s back ribs under his short shirt of lacquered scales. He had tried to look around at her and come down on top of her, coughing and bubbling, spitting blood onto her face. His helmeted head had struck hers, a last savage blow at his enemy as he died or plain ill-chance. That second blow to the head had been one too many, and that was all Deyandara had seen of the battle in Cattiga’s hall.

By some miracle, her komuz had survived unharmed.

Gilru and Syallan they found in the morning, hacked down in the yard as they tried to flee, the young warrior’s body still lying over the boy’s, protecting him. It had not been enough against the axes.

And the Marakanders, the red priests and the yellow and the temple guardsmen who had escorted them, were all fled, those that lived. Of yellow priests and guards they had bodies enough, but not a single one of the mute Red Masks seemed to have fallen. The tales of the road called them divinely protected, of course, but no one had thought that was more than poetry.

“Gilru was the youngest son,” the Leopard said, opening his eyes again. He didn’t seem moved by the tale in the least, now; his voice was quiet, soft, even, as if he feared waking some sleeping child. “What of the older boy, and the daughter?”

He knew the
duina
so well?

“The queen’s elder son and only daughter both died last autumn, and her husband and—and her brother as well. The bloody pox, the southern pox.” She had the scars herself, scattered white over cheeks and forehead and hands, from an earlier, less deadly outbreak of the eastern pox when she was a child. One could save you from the other. Somehow it was always the bleeding southern pox, which came with the ships from the sea beyond the Gulf of Taren and was almost always fatal, that broke out in the Duina Catairna. “There was a tide of it last year, flowing up the river valleys from the Five Cities, it’s said.” But he’d know that, living so close, though neither he nor his boy bore the scars of it. “All of the queen’s near kinsfolk died. People believe they’re an ill-fated family. An ill-fated folk. Every plague, every murrain, every slow cold spring or summer of drought hits them hardest. The old song says, ‘A broken branch, a twisted root, and poison in the vein.’” This was how Mistress Yselly would have given the message, anyway, casting in scraps of song, embroidering a great vision in words, but Deyandara wished she had not said it as soon as the words were spoken. The tale of the curse on the royal blood of the Duina Catairna and on the folk itself couldn’t be true, because if it were, it meant . . . it couldn’t.

What if she were a plague herself and had somehow brought doom to Cattiga and Gilru and all their folk? No. Because if she were cursed, so were they in their own right.

“It came on the ships, last summer,” the man offered. “Some captain bribed the harbour-master to clear them out of the quarantine, call something the four-day fever that wasn’t.” He frowned, and apparently not at that criminal failure in honour and duty. “These priests murdered the queen and her son, and the folk of the hall let them get away? What were Marakander priests doing in the hall, anyway? And armed?”

She did not like the way he sat now, so still, hands fisted on his thighs. She was reminded of that staring frozen stillness that could snap like a string over-tuned and become the snarling, spitting, ripping blur of a catfight.

“They came as an embassy, seeking alliance—so they said, for the benefit of the tribe and Marakand both. The queen and her council welcomed this.”

“Fools,” Ahjvar said mildly. The boy shook his head. Ahjvar shrugged, and Deyandara was left feeling that there had been some whole conversation in that. The Leopard took up the sword and a bit of oily fleece. He didn’t watch her any longer but stretched out his legs, ankles crossed, and frowned over the blade, polishing at flecks she could not see, if they were there at all. Long, strong, brown fingers. The blade had a dappled pattern in the steel, which caught the firelight. Northron work; they were the only ones who made blades with such patterns enfolded in the very fabric of the metal, a demon’s art they had brought over the western sea, and a secret jealously guarded by their swordsmiths. Her brother had a Northron-bladed sword, inherited from his father. Even the hilt of the Leopard’s looked antique, though, made her brother’s look like some merchant’s showpiece, no life in it. On Ahjvar’s, the grip was carved ivory, a twisted animal-form gone creamy brown with age and . . . stained.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting, and she pulled her gaze from the sword. The pommel was an animal’s snarling head, cast bronze dull and smooth, with traces of worn gilding still caught in the fine detailing. A sword for a story, if she could find one it suited . . .

The boy had finished with the clams, setting them in a wide pot with butter and milk on the edge of the fire. The smell turned her stomach. Now he sat, arms wrapped around his knees, listening wide-eyed, as if it were a tale told for fireside pleasure.

The huntsmen of the
dinaz
turned scout and pursued the assassins. Deyandara stumbled over the word, but Ahjvar didn’t react. As if some other will opposed Marnoch and his scouts, opposed what should surely be Catairanach’s blessing on their hunt, they lost the enemy in the night, in fog and dark-lashing rain. And then they found the army.

Overrunning the little unwalled settlements in its path, an army of Marakand was coming straight up from the caravan road, following the well-trodden track that skirted the butt end of the hills. The folk, the lucky ones, scattered into the hills with what they could carry and drive before them, while the laggards died amid the looting and the thatch burned. The invading army travelled light, without wagons to slow and mire it in the winter mud. The largest part of the force consisted of warriors of the Great Grass and the deserts, mounted on good horses and camels; a much smaller company were priest-led Marakanders, not so able in the saddle or at travelling cross-country, easy prey. There were twenty or thirty Red Masks. It was not so large an army as all that, sixty-score, a hundred-score—both estimates swore they had lain in hiding to count, so whether one was in error or whether it had divided, and when and where the other part was, no one reported, but either way it was large enough to threaten the
dinaz
, especially in the wake of last autumn’s plague, which had killed so many. If all the spearmen of all the lords could be summoned in time . . . they could not.