Blackdog (24 page)

“Three
days
” he said. “Back in a moment.”

Gaguush politely turned her back.

“Those damn ferrymen wouldn't let me come up till a few hours ago,” she said, when he returned. She sat, legs outstretched, invited him down beside her with an open arm. Holla sat by her, leaning on her shoulder. He felt weak, light, and empty. No food, that was it. “Told me the gods were with you and I'd better keep out of it. Three days, I've been trapped down in that madhouse. There's dozens of them, you know, and they're all mad. What gods did they mean? I thought there weren't any in these hills but the river.”

“Sayan. And Kinsai.”

“Kinsai. I was sort of afraid of that. Really?”

He shrugged, face hot.

Gaguush snorted. “I prefer that to mountain women, anyway. She won't be dumping bastards on you, at least. You tell me about it, someday?”

“Maybe.”

“And Sayan came to you, too? Your god answered a prayer, this far away? You never struck me as that deservingly holy.”

“How do you know he answered?” he asked, curious.

“I saw the brat. She's quite definitely no longer at death's door. I never met a miracle before, but whichever gods you found here, they seem to have helped. The ferrymen—they are good sorts, even if they are all mad—they had Pakdhala in a bed piled with quilts, keeping her warm. And she was just lying there, looking like she'd been laid out for burial, hardly even breathing. They'd pour a few spoonfuls of fish broth down her every so often, pile more driftwood on the fire. And aside from that they just sat there, always a couple of them, watching. Like they were waiting for something. And maybe a little after midnight, last night, she woke up and said, if it wasn't any trouble, could she have breakfast. Oh, and she said I should wait till morning and then I could go and get you, and I wasn't to yell at you about anything at all, thank you very much. She's been tattooed, Bashra knows when, because I'm sure she wasn't when I first saw her here, and, well, I didn't leave her alone with those odd-eyed river-folk very often. She shouldn't be up and running around after so much tattooing, that on top of being so sick. But she looks fine, it's all healed up. Some sort of little bird on either side of her eyes—”

“Larks.”

“You knew about this?”

He found her hand, traced a finger across the palm, half-lost in just the touch of her skin. “Yes. No. But that's what they are. Larks for women, owls for men. Snakes when you come of age.”

“I think people need to keep away from gods, you know. It isn't good for us. She has what she told me were snow-leopards on her forearms. Really strange, that it's all healed, like it was done weeks ago. Wizards’ magic, right?”

“You want me to tell you that.”

“I'd be happy if you did. I can only handle a small dose of miracle.” Gaguush closed her hand over his.

He smiled at her. “Right. It was wizards.”

“That's good. Because miracles are too worrying. Miracles don't happen to caravaneers. Tell me you know that, and we won't talk about it again.”

“No miracles.”

“Yeah. Wizards are bad enough. I told the brat that Sayan didn't have leopards and she grinned like a monkey and said we'd pretend they were cheetahs. You sure they haven't dumped a changeling on you?”

“Gaguush—Pakdhala's coming with me.”

Gaguush was silent, but she did not turn his hand loose.

He brushed the sleek braids back from her face with his other hand. “She has to. I can't tell you why. We can't go home yet—” Home. Lissavakail. The Sayanbarkash. He could not have said which he meant. “—and I can't send her away. If you really won't have a child along, I'll have to find a gang that will.” His voice was hoarse. Three days with nothing to drink, unless losing himself in the distant river counted. Suddenly he wanted nothing so much as water. Almost nothing.

Gaguush pulled her hand free, traced lines in the dust with her forefinger. “You mean that,” she said flatly. “What do I tell Immerose and Tusa, why they can't bring theirs along, why they have to find fostering and you don't?”

“Tell them whatever you need to.”

“She's special, is she? Is that what I'm supposed to say?”

“Yes.”

“The gods think she's so damn special they work miracles for her, and I have to make exceptions and let a brat tag along, to get trampled by camels and shot at by bandits and kidnapped by Nabbani slavers?”

“Yes.”

Gaguush threw an angry stone clattering down the hillside. “Great Gods save me. Immerose has gone and gotten herself pregnant yet again, she thinks. Why in all the cold hells she can't learn to be careful, like the rest of them…Some damned tinker back in the Salt Desert and probably married, not that she remembers his name. It's always that way with her, isn't it? She'll be staying in Marakand the next year and then some, till it's weaned. I don't want to be short two men.”

“No.”

“I might take on Tusa and Asmin-Luya's eldest, maybe, when we head back through Serakallash. He ought to be old enough to earn his keep now.”

“Probably should.”

“You look terrible, Holla.”

Another shrug. Gaguush pushed him over backwards with a hand spread on his chest, rolled over on him, and he forgot about being thirsty.

“Holla-Sayan?”

He folded his arms around her, kissed her.

“You can bring her. If you must. If it'll keep you from acting as crazy as you have since you found her, and because the world has gotten all too strange, the past few days. But no starting fights because someone comes too close to her—I know you haven't, but I've seen and it's been a damned close thing, a few times. You act like we're a bunch of slavers, or worse. So no more of that. Anyone needs hitting in my gang, I do it. And that includes you. Hey!” Her fingers closed over his, fumbling with the bone toggles of her coat. “I know it's been a while, but that's not my fault, and this is not a good idea. Your brat and a couple of those ferrymen's kids followed me along with a donkey, something about digging coltsfoot root at the bottom of the hill. They're children; they aren't going to stay at the bottom of the hill, you know.”

“Yes, they are.” It was simple enough to shut himself away from the goddess, now she was no longer clinging like the tick Gaguush had called her. She let him go; she had let him go when she sent Gaguush to him. He could still feel her, if he reached out. But he was free, and alone, as much as he could be with the Blackdog in him.

“Oh, well then, of course they'll stay down there. If you say so.” Sarcasm was lost in a longer kiss, and they rolled again. Easier to get her coat unfastened with Holla on top. Gaguush stopped trying to prevent him, locked her hands behind her head and watched him, smiling a little.

“She really yours, Holla? Because I don't think you'd ever crossed the Kinsai-av yet, when that one was born.”

“She's mine now.”

“Huh. Well. I'll try to put up with her, then. But she damn well better stay down the bottom of the hill.”

The devils took the souls of the wizards into their own, and became one with them, and devoured them. They walked as wizards among the wizards, and destroyed those who would not obey, or who counselled against their counsel. They desired the worship of kings and the enslavement of the folk, and they were never sated, as the desert is never sated with rain
.

A
ttavaia had been cursed as Tamghat's whore and spat at and told to take her spying elsewhere when she asked around the caravanserais, with all due caution, she thought, about merchants who dealt regularly in iron goods. Ingots, blades finished or unfinished…Tin, she asked about as well. Copper they had in plenty in the mountains, and there were still those who knew the secrets of casting bronze. Every village had its bells. There had been bronze swords and spearheads in the armoury still, relics of earlier days, and the temple's armour had still been made to the old patterns. Even the few shirts she and her eleven had abandoned before swimming from the islet would have been a boon, now.

They would make do, when the time came, with what had been stolen or scavenged or salvaged, and with boiled leather. What metal they had would go to spears and arrowheads and swords for those who knew them, iron or bronze. They had a few pattern-welded steel blades taken from Northron mercenaries who came to grief in the mountains, long, heavy swords, unwieldy for those used to the short mountain sword. One, taken from an ambushed
noekar
, was even finer, a steel blade with a maker's mark and other Northron writing none of them could read, but the smith Shevehan, a cousin of Enneas, had nearly wept when he saw it. He said it was an ancient sword from the time of the first kings in the north, maybe from the lost Isles of the West, a
named
sword, the secrets of making which were long forgotten, and it was a sin it had ever been soiled by a raider's hand. Shevehan kept that one wrapped in wool and oiled leather, buried under the floor of his forge like some talisman, and would not hand it out to be taken with the rest of their slow accumulation of weapons to the hidden sisters in the villages. He spoke of it as “the lady,” which amused Attavaia, but Enneas said it made her skin crawl.

Attavaia told her she was just jealous she had lost her place in Shevehan's heart.

They would make do, but they needed more. Tamghat, or the Lord of the Lake as he called himself these days, had confiscated the weapons of Lissavakail and the villages, leaving herdsmen with only bamboo spears to defend against predators. The hunters resorted to older ways and chipped their arrowheads from turquoise. Turquoise could kill an unarmoured person as well as an iron point, and there were fletchers in the mountain villages. Something Tamghat seemed to have overlooked.

“I don't like it,” Enneas reported in a murmur, as they met up at noon in the busy market square. A man leading a horse past slowed to look back over his shoulder, a look that ran over Enneas head to foot and back again. Enni turned her shoulder on him, pursed her lips in disdain, but spoiled the effect by peeking over her shoulder.

“He's gone,” Attavaia said, with a grin. “Wasted effort.”

“Well, I hope he enjoyed the view.”

Enneas had changed hardly at all in the long two years since they'd fled the temple; she still looked barely out of girlhood, her heart-shaped face still perfect, soft-skinned, her pointed chin and large eyes suggesting a carefree innocence, except when she demurely dropped her gaze. Then the long lashes beneath perfect arching eyebrows transformed her expression to a meekness that in the old days had made her always Old Lady's example of pious, which was to say passive, submission to divine will. Old Lady had never seen Enni running barefoot along the kitchen ridgepole dressed only in a very short shift. That meek demeanour came in useful. Enneas could still pass as barely out of childhood, too young to be any threat to anyone. Attavaia felt as though she'd aged ten years, herself, and thought her face probably showed it. Lines around her eyes and mouth like a mountain wife with six children. Not that she should care about such things. She should stay away from her mother's mirror.

They spent some of their precious Marakander coin, ate over-spiced meat and unfamiliar vegetables off a skewer and drank sweetened mint tea, watching the market with no more than the interest of villagers come to the busy town.

“There are three septs who control the town,” Enneas continued, keeping her voice too low for anyone but Attavaia to hear. “And the chiefs of two of them are all for friendship with Tamghat. They have their own retainers collecting tolls on his behalf from the caravans when they come up from the desert road—they've even built a blockhouse by the road, a little square fort, to do it. They're getting a cut, rumour has it, these chiefs personally, and even the lesser folk of their own septs aren't happy with that. I haven't found anyone who'll admit to knowing a caravan merchant who'd carry blades for us. It's too obvious why we want them, and no one's willing to risk standing up to Tamghat, with their own leaders in his bed.”

“Don't be vulgar.”

“You want to hear vulgar, ‘Vaia? You should hear what this Nabbani merchant suggested I could do for him.”