Blackdog (20 page)

Pakdhala stared at him. “I can't ride on you.”

Why not?

Some focus came into her eyes, and the corners of her mouth tipped up. “Can I, dog? Really?”

I can carry you back to the camp a lot faster, this way. And don't call me dog, I told you.

“Father. Old Lady would say it wasn't proper.” There was a certain degree of satisfaction in Pakdhala's voice.

Old Lady can go dance in the cold hells, for all I care. And what did Gaguush tell you about not running around barefoot?

“Snakes and scorpions and spiders,” she half-sang.
But they won't bite me, Father. You know that.

It was good to hear her sound like a child again.

Any daughter of mine would be smart enough to be afraid of walking on snakes and scorpions and spiders. Now get on.

He crouched, and she clambered onto his back, awkwardly, gripping his ruff. The child needed to learn to ride if he was going to make a Westgrasslander of her. They'd see she learned, at home…The Blackdog stirred at that, mistrust rising, and he snapped at it,
I didn't say I was leaving her. Let it be.

It settled, warily.

Holla-Sayan didn't run, not with Pakdhala so nervous of falling, ill-balanced, but he trotted, faster than he could have walked in a man's body carrying her. She lay forward, which spread her weight better, and sighed.

I was afraid the Blackdog would hurt you, Holla-Sayan. But it knows you're just as strong as it, now. It will listen to you.

Holla gave a grunt of assent. And he thought, she's lying. Somewhere in that, she's lying. It was the Blackdog's belief that shaped the thought. What she had feared when she felt that he and the Blackdog struggled was something entirely other.

They were nearly back to the camp when he felt the girl go limp and start to slither down his side. Faster than thought, dog and man in accord, he slid from dog to man and rolled to catch her before she hit the ground. She struggled weakly to wake, to get her feet on the ground, and then turned her face against him.

Dog
, she said, so faintly he barely felt the thought.
I'm sorry, dog. I'm so tired.

He held her tight against him and her eyes fluttered open once more.

“Past your bedtime,” he said hoarsely. The collapse was no attempt on her part to distract his roaming thoughts; the dog was on the edge of panic again, believing utterly her weakness. He did, too. She was shivering, and felt feverish to the touch.

I'm draining away, dog, like water into the sand. I was never meant to leave my place
.

Fight harder. Hold on to life. You must want to live
.

Wanting isn't enough, when the body wears out or the spirit flows away. You know that, you've lived it before. I do want. I see why you love the desert. I never understood before how large the world was. But it's too large for me, and when I'm born again in my own land, Tamghat will know
.

You need to grow larger, that's all. The world's always frightening when you leave home for the first time, and then you grow to fit it
. “Wait till you see the Kinsai-av, Pakdhala,” he said desperately. “So much water…you'll feel better, more at home.”

Not my home.

And no little magic of the road, no piece of Lissavakaili shale, was going to change that.

Holla-Sayan lifted her against his shoulder and set out again, walking, boots a quiet whisper and occasional crunch in the grasses for any watcher to hear. Kapuzeh might have wakened on his own. But he was able to circle the camels and come unhailed to where Bikkim still slept. Pakdhala was asleep again and did not wake when he wrapped her up beside Bikkim and trudged off to wake Kapuzeh. But there was no point, really. Dawn was already touching the east. Exhaustion hit him then, and he realized he ached as though he had been through a dogfight, had a stiffening shoulder from falling on it and then carrying the girl. The tips of the first two fingers of his right hand were still sore, tender as if burnt. Holla shrugged, and felt the dog, just there, aware. Not ill-contented. The ache of his bruises was already subsiding.

He reclaimed his abandoned spear, checked the camel lines once more instead of bothering the Stone Desert man, who lay entwined with Thekla, and found Gaguush up when he turned back to the fires.

“Thought Kapuzeh had the last watch,” she said.

“He looked happy enough where he was.”

She caught him as he came by, pulled him close. “Don't make yourself sick, worrying over the brat. She'll get used to us.”

“Yeah.”

“She'll do better once she's on the farm with your mama. These are long days for a little one.”

“I know.” He didn't meet her eyes, but leaned against her, felt her breath on his ear.

“You've lost your clinging tick. No one else's up,” she whispered then.

“Everyone will be up, any moment now.”

“They will if you stand around here making up your mind.”

The girl knew when he and the dog dragged one another to the desert. She was going to know what he did now. Too tired was not an excuse he wanted to give Gaguush; he wanted just to lie down and hold her, with no voices crying out for him and no overwrought spirit's nerves thrumming in his mind. The goddess had lived through generations of Blackdogs who'd taken lovers and married and raised families in the town; that didn't change that he knew she was a little girl. He felt, more than somewhat distracted by Gaguush's fingers searching inside his shirt, for a way to distance the goddess a little, shut her out, at least from the surface of his mind. There was a way. Otokas had cut her off all the time from what she did not need to know. Tick indeed. All unconscious, she clung to him the tighter.

“Hey, don't fall asleep on me,” Gaguush whispered against his neck, when he failed to respond but by tightening his arms around her. But he was tired, battered in spirit even if the body did heal, and for now, at least, any way to push the goddess aside eluded him.

They were out of time. Thekla crawled yawning away from Kapuzeh's side and began her morning prayers, bowing to the east and muttering to her long-dead gods in her incomprehensible Westron language. Gaguush muttered, “Bashra give me strength,” and rested her face on Holla's shoulder a moment. “See what happens when you don't take decisive action?”

Holla shrugged and gave her a kiss, more relieved than not. Kapuzeh woke the next moment, gave Holla-Sayan a grimace and a grin when he caught sight of them and called, loud enough to wake the camp, “Missed my watch, Holla? I don't want to know,” as he shambled past, long-legged and lanky, to give Thekla a hand building up the cookfire for breakfast.

Gaguush groaned, touched her tongue to his ear, and swung away with the usual morning shout, “Up, up, everybody up! I'm not paying you lot to sleep half the day.”

The look she gave him over her shoulder was not at all pleased.

They left the Red Desert not many days later and crossed the line of barren hills that ran up the shore of the Kinsai-av, then turned north to follow the river on the road between broken cliff and hills.

Pakdhala would go nowhere near the water, though everyone else seized the chance to wash themselves in the shallows. Holla-Sayan avoided entering the river, for what little good that would do if Kinsai took exception to the Blackdog's presence. He dragged up a goatskinfull to wash himself with, in the mornings before the camp stirred, and let them think he had been swimming, as crazy Northrons and Westgrasslanders did. Even letting the water lap his bare feet, filling the skin, made all the hairs on his arms rise and the dog's unseen hackles bristle. The current did not pull him under to drown, but it wrapped around him in a way that no water should, coiling like a snake. Curious, or undecided, as the little goddesses of the springs and gods of the hills and stone ridges had been in the Red Desert, lying low, letting him pass. Whatever the Blackdog was, they had mistrusted it. But Kinsai was no small goddess. He felt her quiet, the way the steppe was quiet before the wild thunderstorms of autumn. Breath held, waiting, staring at the gathering black clouds.

Black clouds within the gang, too. Gaguush was hardly speaking to him. He had never been able to persuade Pakdhala to sleep away from him since the night he fought the dog, and she looked so ill that he didn't have the heart to force her. Draining away, as she said, life seeping out of her. He and the dog pulled together well enough in their shared anxiety over that, and it kept him from worrying at the image of the sombre flame that was the dog's inmost heart, until he was able to let it slip away to the depths of memory. The tips of his fingers stayed pale and fire-scarred, but new calluses and engrained dust soon hid the scars even from him.

Another few days would bring them to the Fifth Cataract, lowest of the Five that made the Kinsai-av unnavigable below At-Landi. There was a ferry downriver of the cataracts, run by an extended family, who some said were mortal descendants of the river-goddess Kinsai and some said were her lovers, men and women alike. Either way, they were the closest thing the river had to priests, and they would carry a traveller across to the Western Grass for almost any trade—silver, gold, bread, wine, a lame dog, a book, a song, a scrap of ribbon, or a night of love, if you took their fancy. The rambling stone warren of their many-towered castle was filled with their takings, it was also said: dogs, cats, foals, and calves wandering through the rooms, tatterdemalion children, an emperor's fortune in gold and silver and jewels. Half of them were wizards, if the stories were true. Holla-Sayan had taken their ferry a dozen times, both at this lower castle and at its twin, which stood on the western shore halfway between the First Cataract and At-Landi; it provided a similar ferry-service, for similar fees. He never could decide if he believed even a quarter of what was said of the ferrymen, except that they were strange.

The thought of wizards stirred the Blackdog, drew wordless protest from it.

You might be able to swim the Kinsai-av and survive the current below the Cataracts
, he told it.
If the river's goddess lets you. But Sihdy can't, and I'm not walking to the Sayanbarkash with Pakdhala on my back.

No answer. Talking to himself. Swimming or the ferry, either way he put himself and Pakdhala at Kinsai's mercy, and Kinsai was capricious and powerful, a lioness to Sera's kitten. Kinsai could swallow them both, just as the goddess feared Tamghat meant to swallow her.

Holla looked up from blind staring at the top of Pakdhala's nodding head, catching movement closing in on him. It was only Tihmrose, guiding her dust-pale camel in close enough for the Blackdog to come fully alert, Holla's hand, for half a breath, moving to his sabre. The dog still turned hostile on them, if he did not keep a constant awareness of it.

Tihmrose failed to notice. “Poor little mite looks worn out, Holla-Sayan.”

“Looks, but it's more than being tired.” Immerose, the other of the Marakander twins, who were roaming up and down the string as outriders, closed in from the other side. Arranged beforehand, he had no doubt. They worked like that, cutting out a man in a tavern. They had picked him up that way, when he was new-come to At-Landi from the Western Grass, looking for work and a place. A long time ago, now, it seemed. They hadn't made a play for him since that one never-forgotten night; he had become too plainly Gaguush's, whatever he might do in the mountains. “Use your head, Holla. Healthy children don't sleep day and night. She's ill. We saw Judeh talking to you this morning. What does he think?”

Holla twitched at Sihdy's head as the camel stretched her neck towards Immerose's mount. “He offered to dose her with sulphur.”

“Ah.” Immerose snickered. “That would be why he's currently sulking. And you said?”

“Nothing I want to repeat to ladies.”

“’s all right, Thekla's out of earshot.”

“Sulphur. Poor beast. What do you expect from a camel-leech? Did he offer to check her teeth?”

“Did you want something?” he asked pointedly.

“Other than your handsome body? Since Gaguush doesn't seem to be getting much out of it.” Tihmrose sighed, a hand over her heart. “No.”

“Yes,” Immerose contradicted. “Django told me to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“To find out if you actually realize how ill the brat is. He's worried.”

“He said if he said anything, like you were a lousy father who didn't know how to look after a child, you'd take it the wrong way and hit him,” Tihmrose put in cheerfully.

“Probably.” Only a fool would hit either of the Stone Desert brothers.

“Oh, that'd be fun. We could lay bets and everything.”

But joking aside, the gang was worried, all of them. Tusa, who had several children of her own, all fostered in Serakallash, found an excuse to feel Pakdhala's forehead two or three times a day, and tell him she was too hot, or too cold. Often both within a few hours. Her husband Asmin-Luya was little better, always asking, didn't he think she was sleeping too much, didn't he think she was looking thinner…

Holla shifted Pakdhala in the crook of his arm, looking down at her. Her skin was cold, damp, and grey, especially around her eyes and mouth. Her breath came far too slowly.

“Feed her garlic soup with rice,” Immerose said. “That's what our mama always gave us, when we were sickening for something. And look how healthy we are.”

“With saffron,” Tihmrose added. “I bet Thekla even has a stash of saffron, somewhere. I'll ask.” She swung her camel away.

“Why not? Everyone else with a cure's had a go.” Holla gave Immerose a rueful smile. “Sounds better than sulphur, anyhow.”

Thekla had already suggested liver, which Django and Kapuzeh had provided by coming back from a scouting expedition with a brace of bustards. Varro recommended fish, and tried to shirk evening chores by going fishing in the Kinsai-av to provide it. The previous evening, Gaguush had stood over Pakdhala and ordered her to drink some foul-smelling infusion of herbs that Judeh said he wouldn't give a dying camel. Even one of the merchant's guards had offered soft, sticky, rose-scented sweets, and the merchant herself recommended bleeding, a suggestion which brought the dog to the edge of the world.