Blackdog (28 page)

“Attalissa watch over us,” Attavaia prayed aloud, and the camel twitched an ear.

One of the Battu'um retainers flashed along the street, and then another on the other side, or was that Treyan himself? The camels ignored them, used to the reckless haste of horses, perhaps. Rear guard? Someone to pick up any battered and broken priestesses?

More shouting. Attavaia loosened the sword in its sheath, testing a little, to see how fast it would draw. Edged, single-edged, remember that. Like an overgrown version of the hacking knives they used for cutting bamboo in the lowest valleys. How did you fight from atop a camel, without overbalancing and sliding off? She'd like to have Enneas by her now, but a nudge of the heel against the camel's shoulder did nothing but make it stamp, as though it twitched off a fly. It would move when the rest moved.

“Hi! Away!”

Bells jangled discordantly, and the camels ahead began to lurch forward, urged with cries and a few snaps of the short whips from their stately plod into a rocking run, beating the street up into dust. Attavaia clutched at straps again as her own camel took off after them. No need to steer. She clung with both hands as they rounded the corner and veered off, not following the road, where she had a hazy vision of more camels, people afoot, people on horseback, packs pulled down into the road, glint of light on swords and helmets…Veered off, down a narrow path between caravanserai walls. They would hit, she would be smashed against either side—

They were through, and worse to come. The open, naked stretch of the desert before her. Her camel lurched and pitched forward, slowing somewhat but still moving far too quickly for what she would have called sense, heading down the long, steep slope of the ridge. Attavaia felt her balance going, the red stone below tugging at her. She tipped over sideways, clinging on but bouncing too wildly to pull herself up. The camel must have felt the shifting weight; it groaned again and slowed its pace and then Treyan Battu'um appeared, a black horse on the edge of her vision. Strong fingers dug into her hip and heaved. With that help, she jerked herself upright, settled again, and his eyes crinkled above the scarf shielding his face. He slapped her camel's flank and was gone.

“This one needs stirrups,” she muttered to herself, and found her throat dry as sand. She was trembling all over, and flushed with embarrassment, too.

Better embarrassed than her head broken on the rocks.

On the dark track over the desert, in a deep-pounded rut dug out by year on year of passing caravans, they settled into a fast, swaying, jolting pace that might have been a trot. Four cameleers, Baruni among them, passed back down the line, two with sabres drawn, two with lances. Attavaia tried to look back, bit her tongue as she banged her chin on her shoulder, and saw pursuing horsemen.

Only two. They slowed their gallop as the four camels went into a flat-out run and several Battu'um riders swooped around to join them.

The two pursuers thought better of it and headed back towards the town.

Attavaia faced forward again, touched her tongue to her hand and found that it was bleeding. Wounded without ever drawing her sword. But they had allies now—friends? Maybe. But allies, an honourable man like Treyan Battu'um to speak for them to his sept and perhaps to all of Serakallash once this Serakallashi civil strife was sorted out. An agreement that would supply them with arms and armour. Work well done. Her uncle would be proud.

S
omething kept dragging Attavaia from sleep, a nagging unease. Probably it was a combination of exhaustion and sleeping in a strange place, although really, she hadn't slept more than one night in the same place since she and Enneas returned from Serakallash, two months before. It had been a long two months, gone in the blink of an eye.

And now they were back in the desert town, trying to pass the last hours of a hot summer night on the flat roof of Master Mooshka's caravanserai. Enneas lay curled on her side on the thin mat next to her, breathing softly. Jerusha lay an arm's-length away, sprawled under a thin blanket. Master Mooshka and a few of the servants had also chosen to sleep up under the stars, where the air was cool. Not all the servants, fortunately, or pounding at the caravanserai's narrow back door in the alley would have done nothing. They had arrived some time after midnight, and Jerusha, summoned to deal with them, had scowled and rubbed her eyes and disappeared with the turquoise they'd brought, not raw stone this time but jewellery, gathered from women who may not have known exactly where it was going, but understood why. ‘Rusha grudgingly offered them a supper of spicy cold lentils, complaining the while about people who hadn't the sense to leave business for daylight. But they hadn't wanted to walk through the hills by daylight, with Tamghat keeping a closer eye than ever on the main tracks and the road to the lowlands.

Trying to force herself to sleep was just keeping her awake. Locusts and crickets clicked and chirped unceasingly, and nightbirds strange to her ears called. One sang, sweet liquid notes, somewhere near the caravanserai. Attavaia gave up and rolled onto her back to watch the stars. She wasn't used to seeing so many spread over her, a great dome. Not used to so much sky, without the mountains walling her round. She felt a little as though she might step off the edge of the world as easily as stepping off the roof of the house. Step off into the stars.

Some said they were the souls of dead heroes, given shining light in the land of the Old Great Gods. Some said they were a map by which the wise could read the future. Her uncle said they were something to fill up the sky at night, to stop it being dull, like the painted patterns that filled blank spaces on the temple walls.

It would be nice to read the future in them, to know she was following the right path.

Restless, she sat up, feeling as though this night all the fears and doubts she carried had become living things, burrowing insects that crawled over her skin and wormed their way in. She wanted to scratch and claw at her mind until they fled.

The sky was lightening in the east, not yet dawn but the first creeping whisper of it. To the northwest, pearly fog pooled, perhaps around Sera's sacred spring. The caravanserai would be stirring soon. Already a few hopeful cocks were crowing. Attavaia went to the eastern edge of the roof and knelt there, arms folded on the parapet, to watch the sun rise. Not so easy to step off as all that. The roof of the caravanserai was like another house in itself, with stairs from one level to another, walls higher than a man's head in some places, arched doorways from one section to the next, and in only a few places just this low parapet, to allow views out over town and desert. The walls overlooking the yard were lower all around, allowing easy observation of activity below. Not much of it yet, night's shadow still lying thick.

Pigeons roosting in a nearby corner took off with a thunderous beating of wings, and Attavaia turned her head at the soft scuff of bare feet. Jerusha.

The Serakallashi girl settled again beside her. “I'd have thought you'd be dead to the world.”

“Couldn't sleep.”

“Me neither. Not well.” Jerusha yawned. “Bad dreams,” she admitted. “Nothing I can put my finger on, but you know the sort—you wake up feeling miserable and anxious.”

A plump young man joined them, scratching his beard. “The air's bad tonight,” he muttered. “Can't seem to stay asleep. You want tea, Mistress Jerusha?”

“Thanks, Koneh. Yes, tea.” Jerusha rose to her feet again and stretched, outlining her figure rather indecently in her nearly sheer shirt, even in the dimness. Koneh averted his eyes and then hissed sharply, “Jerusha?”

His tone brought Attavaia to her feet as well. The man was looking to the south, where a higher wall hid what would be the densely packed roofs of the town. The dawn twilight illumined mist on the hills with a dun glow.

She had her mouth open to ask the servingman what he had seen when ‘Rusha said flatly, “Dust?” and then called, “Papa?” in a voice that woke all the rest of them.

Not mist in the south but dust. A cloud of dust, hanging just south of the town on the mountain road. There were duststorms in the desert, but the hills to the south, though dry, were grassed, and there was no wind to raise it.

Attavaia felt numb, her hands and feet lost, far away. Felt herself unreal as a ghost in her own body.
My fault
, she thought.

“Run to the bell,” Master Mooshka said. She had not heard him approach either. He turned, looked at her.

“Ah, Sister Vakail is with us again. Did you know about this?”

Attavaia shook her head, senses coming back. “If I had, we'd have warned you.” She swallowed. “They must have been behind us on the road. If we'd been slower…”

Jerusha pulled the caftan she'd been using as a pillow over her head and went down the stairs into the house. A few moments later there was noise below in the yard, querulous voices raised and dropped again, and the creak of the big gates opening. Hooves pounded.

“What is it?” Enneas mumbled, standing on tiptoe to lean her chin on Attavaia's shoulder. “’S too early to be up.”

Attavaia pointed.

“It could be someone bringing a herd in to the market,” the servant said, too hopefully.

“That much dust? No.” Master Mooshka dragged his hands through his desert-braided hair. “I dreamed…I dreamed of my wife. Calling me. Waking and searching for her. I dreamed of a sandstorm that buried the town.”

“I dreamed that too,” the servant admitted. “I heard my father, and the sand came.”

Mooshka nodded. “That's not anyone coming to market. Sera was warning us, urging us to wake.”

Her sleeplessness…no. That was a product of her own overtired mind, scrabbling in circles. Sera was not her goddess.

The bell they had heard summoning the folk for a chief's announcement last time they were in Serakallash began to toll, its notes uneven at first, settling into a steady rhythm of alarm.

For a dizzying moment Attavaia was back in the temple, but this time, she knew what was coming. It seemed…inevitable, the end of a path the summer had followed, step by necessary step. All—not all, Serakallash had taken its fate into its own hands, but there was no avoiding the truth that some—some of the blame lay on Attavaia's head. One grave misjudgement.

The summer's promise had turned to disaster almost at once. Within days of the first Serakallashi weapons being cached in the mountains, a few hotheaded men in Ishkul Valley had learned from an incautious kinswoman of the weapons stored there. They appropriated them to ambush one of Tamghat's patrols, stirring up their neighbours with that self-destroying victory to think they had the goddess on their side and could declare their valley free of the warlord's rule.

Tamghat marched on Ishkul Valley. The uprising was quickly put down, the leaders executed—swift and ruthless punishment that did not delay to interrogate them, which was just as well. One of the two elderly sisters in Ishkul killed herself when she knew Tamghat was coming, and the other joined the uprising and died in the battle—justice, maybe, since one or the other of them must have been the betrayer of the weapons. At least they had taken care not to fall into his hands, where torture or magical compulsion might have revealed the roots put down for a wider uprising in the future.

So far—so far Tamghat did not seem to suspect any sign of temple involvement in it.

While he carried out his revenge, Attavaia and Enneas had gone to the sisters who guarded the hidden weapons and themselves moved any caches the sisters admitted to having revealed to friends and relations and neighbours. Never two nights in the same place, never a day's rest. Sometimes not even a night's.

Put the fear of Attalissa's wrath on them, Enneas had said. Tell them they blasphemed, using Attalissa's dedicated weapons before the time of her return.

Attavaia tried, but she could not convince herself she spoke with authority, despite all the respect even the oldest sisters accorded her, as the Blackdog's niece who had, now a belief two years strong, been guided by Attalissa's own hand to escape the temple and lead them. She put more faith in fear of Tamghat to prevent any other too-early uprisings.

Ishkul Valley would be remembered not for the sake of that failed and foolish revolt, but for the girls of Ishkul who died because of it. Tamghat returned to Lissavakail and executed his hostages from Ishkul, the girls he had taken as novices for his false temple. Their heads were set on spears along the path into the valley.

Searches for weapons were still going on in other valleys, but by now Attavaia's were well and secretly hidden, and perhaps invoking the goddess's blessing had had some effect. The
noekar
sent to oversee the searches had so far found only the odd bamboo spear or bow they deemed too heavy for hunting. Probably because they had to punish one or two of the people in each valley, to remind the folk they could.

He would need to teach Serakallash the same lesson. They had defied him, driven his warriors away and deposed the sept-chiefs who had allied with him, the aftermath of that wild ride from town with the caravan and Treyan Battu'um. Serakallash had also armed Tamghat's rebellious bondfolk—he had to know the spears used by the men of Ishkul Valley were of Serakallashi make, blades longer and more slender than the mountain style, despite their shafts of green birch and reused tool-handles. At least one
noekar
, no mere mercenary hireling but a vassal bound to him with mutual oaths and long loyalty, had died. Tamghat was a Great Grasslander warlord; such a crime demanded redress, they all knew that.