Blackdog (18 page)

You'll stay away from my spring, you and she both. I deny you the blessing of my water so long as the Blackdog is in you. But because you were a good man of the road once, Holla-Sayan, my town and its wells will still be open to you. But I will not have you here at my spring.

“Tell your folk about the wizard, Sera. Warn them. Serakallash is a short march down from Lissavakail.”

Go away!
Sera screamed, and the wind lashed around the spring, raising a red cloud of sand, every grain a needle on the skin.

Pakdhala cried out. Holla grabbed her hand, an arm across his eyes as he lurched up, blinded, eyes stinging, and dragged her away.

The wind calmed as his feet found the well-worn path between the rocks, and he stumbled to a stop where it ran straight between the walls of two caravanserais, blinking till his watering, grit-scratched eyes cleared. Fell to his knees, hands in the mud left by the last rain, swallowing hard against rising bile. He shook like a man in a fever. Pakdhala sniffed, tears running down her cheeks, and flung her arms suddenly around his neck. He shoved her away, finally sat back on his heels, looking at her. She pressed herself against the wall, hands twisting together, lost in the rolled-up sleeves of Thekla the cook's old striped coat.

Pakdhala sniffled again and wiped her face on her unrolling sleeve, but said nothing.

Why?
Holla-Sayan asked flatly.
What did you do to her?

You remember, dog.

No
. “I don't want to,” he muttered. “They're not my memories.”

“It was a long time ago.”

He didn't want to remember, but the Blackdog's memory leaked in, like sound from another room which he would rather not overhear. Dog's memory, host's memory, it seemed all one. Demands for tribute, demands for acknowledgement of Lissavakail's overlordship, acknowledgement that the wealth and prestige of Serakallash was due not so much to the caravan-road but the road into the jewel-rich mountains. Sisters of Attalissa's temple, striding down out of those mountains, and mercenaries hired from the desert tribes. The famous horse-herds of Serakallash driven off, the longhouses of the foothills razed, the market square where the chiefs of the great families held their council burned on a market day. It was not the sept-chiefs and the warriors but the folk who came to buy and sell who were trapped, boxed in by the surrounding buildings, trampled in the struggle to escape, suffocated, burned, as the stalls and the awnings burned.

Our Spear Lady was in error. She believed the council was meeting that day.

“And that made it right?”

The girl looked up at him, looked down at her bare feet in the dust.

“It was a long time ago. Father.”

“Don't call me—” He rubbed his face, slickly cold with sweat, with hands that still shook, and forced himself up, leaning back against the wall. “You lied to her. The Blackdog lied to her. You…we told her the sept-council was meeting there, with all their warriors, assembling to march out. You tricked her into attacking unarmed folk. Children. Children younger than you died there.” That long-forgotten Spear Lady drowned herself a few years later.

He had heard no songs of any war between Serakallash and Lissavakail, that was how long-forgotten it all was. The burning market…he had heard that in Serakallashi songs, but the villains were desert raiders.

It wasn't me.

Pakdhala shook her head, scuffed a foot in the dust.

Terror. It had seemed to him—to that man—an effective way to break the Serakallashi will to resist.

Tamghat had plainly thought the same, and indiscriminate slaughter of the townsfolk had worked to break the Lissavakaili. The Serakallashi were a harder folk, as Attalissa's warriors had learned.

Justice, maybe, on some vast, cruel scale.

“It wasn't me,” he repeated aloud.

“No,” Pakdhala said, just that.

Sera's awareness watched them as they went on in silence, not touching, up to the dusty street.

Pakdhala kept her silence as they rejoined the chaos of departure at Mooshka's caravanserai. She kept it as they set out, the strings of soft-padding camels falling into one line, the harsh tin bells clanking as the day's outriders, the Great Grass woman Tusa and her husband Asmin-Luya, who had been a bondman to her father till he ran away with her, loped up the line.

He couldn't put a child who'd never even ridden a horse till a few days ago up on one of the pack-camels alone, so Pakdhala rode with him, steadied in the crook of his arm. He pulled her hood low, wound a scarf over her face against the dust, all without a word. Holla shut his mind against any sympathy.

It seeped into him anyway. Otokas's memories. A lonely, caged child. The girl had had no toys in the temple. No occupations but ritual and calligraphy, copying scrolls in her own praise. No games with the youngest novices, no lessons with them, no drilling as they learned the martial arts. No friends. She learned needlework, embroidering hangings for the temple, ceremonial gowns. Otokas had opened what windows he could for her in the high walls of ceremony and precedent that had built up like a shell, layer upon layer, life upon life. She swam. Otokas took her out boating and fishing, though Old Lady said it was highly improper and took from the goddess's dignity.

Holla-Sayan pushed those memories away. He touched her as little as he could, as though contact, body against body, would bind them closer.

That Blackdog's name was Laykas
, the goddess said suddenly, as russet Sihdy swayed and lurched, descending the steep road to the desert.
Do you remember him, dog?

Holla in turn kept his silence. A hard man, Laykas. A cruel man, contemptuous of weakness. He did remember. Like Otokas, Laykas had raised Attalissa from an infant. Unlike Oto, he never called her anything but “Goddess.” No calligraphy in those days. Blades and bows and study of Nabbani scrolls on the arts of war and rule. He had not failed to beat her, when she failed to learn swiftly enough, and she had believed her punishments earned. What had Oto said? You can trust him, the Blackdog always knows…Surely not.

The man shapes the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan. You are not Laykas.

Parents do as much as blood to shape the child. He remembered his mother declaring that, her voice shaking with suppressed anger when some kinswoman called him worthless, doomed to trouble and a lodestone for ill-luck.

Who had shaped the goddess? Attalissa was Attalissa unending, but she experienced life like any child, grew and learned, was shaped and shaped herself, died and began again. The Blackdogs and the women of the temple shaped her, over and over, and if so, they made some part of her and carried that responsibility.

The Blackdog was an animal, and perhaps carried no more guilt than the blameless beast of a bad master—he could try to believe that, that it was the man to whom guilt belonged, Laykas and not the Blackdog—but the goddess was not pardoned for Serakallash's market by blaming her teachers. No matter what they had done to her in that life. She was immortal, a reasoning mind as the dog was not, and she had seen more of life than those who reared her, whatever her age. She was old, old, old, and could make her own choices, or should.

“Where are we going?” Pakdhala asked faintly, and her voice trembled. Otokas, at least, had never been angry with her, and this child's life knew nothing worse than Old Lady's tight-lipped disapproval.

Holla sighed and made himself speak. “The caravan's going all the way up to At-Landi on the Kinsai-av, the great river where the Northrons come in their ships down the Bakanav from Varrgash and the forests. We're going to cross the Kinsai-av below the Five Cataracts and go to my family.”

“We're going to live there?”

“I don't know.”

She twisted around to stare up at him.
Dog…

“We'll see when we get there,” he said, more gently. “I haven't decided.”

He had, but the dog disagreed.

After a moment she nodded and turned to stare ahead over the stretching reaches of desert, into the unending sky. When she leaned back against him he tightened his arm around her.

Holla-Sayan could not keep the anger alive, could not keep Pakdhala, in his mind, the same being as Attalissa, who had made war on Serakallash. Shyly, the child made friends with the gang, beginning with young Bikkim, who treated her like his own younger sister, a mixture of teasing and affection, and Westron Thekla, who was the most foreign of them all. Small, tough, and wiry as grass-roots, she could barely communicate in any intelligible language, but Pakdhala seemed to grasp her meaning, even when she strung together the desert trade tongue and the Stone Desert speech she picked up from her lover Kapuzeh. But they all tolerated the child, the hot-tempered Stone Desert brothers Kapuzeh and Django, bronze-haired Northron Varro, the Marakander twins Immerose and Tihmrose, Judeh the camel-leech, the Great Grasslanders Tusa and Asmin-Luya, who did not complain overmuch that Holla-Sayan was allowed to bring his child along and they were not. Doha accepted her as family. Even Gaguush, in her way, took an interest, teaching her all the camels’ names. The Marakander merchant they escorted called her a pretty little thing and gave her sweetmeats.

She was a girl, nothing more, seeing for the first time the great open spaces of the world. Pakdhala watched the soaring buzzards, eyes wide with wonder. She cried out in delight at spotting a herd of elegant kulan, wild asses, their long-legged foals galloping at their sides. Pakdhala learned to play Grasslander cat's-cradle games with Tusa and forced dreadful squealing noises from Tihmrose's flute, danced to Doha's fiddle and teased Bikkim into letting her throw his spear at foxtail lilies and clumps of grass. She turned over rocks to watch lizards and scorpions scuttle away, learned to dress herself and not wait to be waited on at mealtimes. She proudly showed Holla-Sayan how Tihmrose had taught her to braid her hair, though it was too short, yet. The scraggle-ended braids stuck out stiffly around her head. No one laughed.

The girl needed his mother. But the dog did not care if she lived a childhood or not. The dog wanted her safe at any cost, and did not understand what it was to watch her coming alive.

It did not take many days of travel for that unfolding of life in Pakdhala to falter. She slept more and more, until she was passing most of the day as well as the night in a restless doze. She ate, with what seemed grim determination, but her round face grew thinner every morning, eyes hollow, lips pale.

Limp against Holla on Sihdy's back, she clutched the amulet-pouch. She no longer ran chasing bird-shadows on the sand. No longer helped to groom the camels, now shedding their thick winter coats, the wool of which was carefully bagged up for sale in At-Landi. No longer watched Thekla at her pots, frowning with concentration when the Westron woman allowed her to knead the evening's bread. If she was not sleeping as they rode, she leaned back against Holla, watching the foothills and the distant mountains away to the south with an old woman's eyes.

The Blackdog could not endure her decline. It clawed at Holla-Sayan, fought him, so he rode with clenched teeth and hardly dared to sleep because of the dreams it brought him, images of its own fears, the girl wasting away, a baby born in Lissavakail with Tamghat to midwife her birth, Tamghat a monstrous thing of teeth and eyes, a gaping maw tearing at the girl's dead flesh.

Waking, he could imagine the dog within him, like a dog of his youngest brother's, one of those surly, devoted, one-man dogs. They shut it into a summer-empty cowshed while a bard did Fanag's final tattooing, before he went off to keep the vigil of his coming of age on the god's hill. The dog had seemed to know something terrible was underway; terrible as it saw it, at least: its master's pain. It paced and paced, and howled, and dug in frenzy at the door until its front claws were bleeding, torn away to the quick, and the pads of its feet full of jagged splinters. When Fanag did ride off to Sayan's barkash, numbed and bleeding and proud, Holla and his mother had gone to let the dog out. It could not walk, then, and he had almost wept to see it. His mother was more practical. She went for rags and tweezers and a jug of his grandmother's fennel-flavoured grain-spirit. They used some to clean the paws and some, in a dish of milk, to calm the dog into a snoring sleep until Fanag's return.

The Blackdog was doing the same thing. Tearing and tearing at the walls of his soul, to attack with mindless fury anything that came near its suffering mistress. As Fanag's dog would have gone for the bard, with his needles and dyes, the Blackdog would turn on anyone it saw as causing Attalissa's pain. And the gang were the only targets near.

He made a wall around himself, because he flinched whenever any of the others moved too suddenly, had to check a reach for his sabre's hilt or a tightening of his grip on his spear when some outrider swerved in close to Sihdy. It was better they kept away, out of reach, and left him to whatever they named it, exhausted worry for the girl's evident decline in health or sulking over the desertion of his mountain woman. He avoided, most of all, Gaguush's eye. He did not think he could bear to have her touch him with this thing in him, and he ached for her.

Not that there was any chance they could sleep together, as matters stood. Pakdhala, who had since she was a child of three always slept alone in her vast bed in the goddess's great lofty apartment in the temple, would not lie down at night except curled tight against him; she whimpered and reached out for him if he so much as rolled an arm's length away.

He tried to summon his mother's patience. Pakdhala was young, and afraid, and had lived through terrible things. She knew every woman in the temple by name, had felt their deaths, each and every one that fell before he—Otokas—took her away across the lake. No child could witness that many deaths sanely, goddess or not. She needed to know she was safe, that someone was there to protect her, of course she did. And she was too clearly ill, on top of it. But she was past the age when she should be sleeping with her father. It was as though she began to retreat to some younger child, to become a toddler cuddled with a nurse again. She looked panicked and on the edge of tears when he suggested she could more properly sleep with the Marakander twins. He was too worn from fighting to keep the dog down to argue.