Blackdog (34 page)

Tsuzas had his long knife in his hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Give me your hand.”

“No.” Her voice slurred like a drunkard's. The Narvabarkashi simply seized her left hand, forced her fist to unclench with hands too strong to resist, and dragged her palm across the blade.

She slammed her other arm and fist into his face.

“Cold hells!” But he wrestled her half-off the pony and onto his lap, leg an agony this barely increased, used his upper arm to pin her right arm against his chest, held her left. “Hold still,” he said, mildly and indistinctly. Drops of blood spattered her. His nose was bleeding, or a lip, she couldn't twist her head to see. She was seeing double, and everything heaved sickeningly, as though she rode a galloping camel again. Her pony, with its ill-timed instincts, pulled away. She screamed at the wrenching in her leg and Tsuzas dragged her more securely into his embrace.

The dun pony, perverse beast, stopped and looked back, as if wondering how she had managed to get over there, on the brown.

Tsuzas had let go of her hand, but her own body was in the way and she only flailed feebly as a child, trying to strike him again.

“Don't keep squirming.”

“Squirming!” she repeated, amazement, outrage, she couldn't have said what. She thought she said it, at least. All she heard was a sort of mewling whimper. She survived Tamghat and the temple, survived Serakallash, and she was going to die here in her own mountains, killed by a god, when she only thought to serve the gods. Not her own mountains, as Narva chose to remind her. With a mad priest.

The mad priest managed, despite her struggles, to bring the knife to his own left hand and cut across his own palm, with a hiss of indrawn breath.

“Here.” He caught for her hand again, interlaced fingers with hers, clasping bleeding palms together.

“Blood and blood,” he said, and sniffed loudly. His bleeding nose dripped down her face. “Mine to yours, yours to mine, in the sight of Narva and the Old Great Gods, till the worlds end and the sky falls. Say it.”

“Blood—What? Why?”

The ringing in her ears was fading, a little, the red swirling fog clearing, enough she could focus clearly, the bleeding hands squeezed tightly, not so much blood, after all. It was mostly his nose.

“Say it. Blood and blood…”

She swallowed an urge to throw up, still too stupefied by the pounding in her head and leg and the sense of weight pressing on her chest to think. Repeated, at Tsuzas's reiterated prompting, his words, stumbling and slurring and barely audible to her own ears.

Headache ebbed. Pounding. It was his heart; she leaned her head on his chest. For a moment it was a very comfortable place to lean. Warm. Solid, and the world spun less, as though the heat of his blood flowed into hers, drove strength through her again. Leg, dully aching, no worse than it had been, before he led her over the ridge and into mad Narva's awareness.

“
Bastard!
” She pushed away from him, slid, and he clutched her indecently under the arms, held her so she could get her good leg on the ground.

Backed the brown pony away, as if he thought he might need the space between them, and wadded the hem of his jacket to his nose.

“Sorry,” she added, foolishly. “Did I break it?”

Tsuzas shook his head.

“What was that? Magic?” She clenched and unclenched her hand. The cut was deep enough it was going to scar, not deep enough to do permanent damage, she hoped. The bleeding had already stopped, which was more than could be said for the priest's nose. She shivered. Her clothing was damp with sweat, and she felt strangely hollow and light. Shaky.

“You look better,” he said cautiously. “Are you better?”

Attavaia took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“You were…your lips were blue. You looked…like a corpse. Stopped breathing for a moment, there.”

“Yes, well. You could have told me what you were doing. What
were
you doing? Was it magic?”

Tsuzas made a vague noise, muffled by the jacket pulled up to his face.

“Here.” Her crutch was out of reach on her pony, but she staggered a step or two, held out his shawl. He took it, gripping his nose and tilting his head back.

“Last person gave me a bloody nose was my sister,” he said resignedly. “Can I say,
women
, in tones of despair?”

“No. Your dogs and the yaks have disappeared, by the way.”

“They'll stop when they realize they've lost us. We keep a herding hut just in a fold of the mountain, there, that's where they'll be. They know the way. We bring them down to graze this valley often. It gives a good excuse for wandering off towards the road, keeping an eye on things. You can always say, ‘Oh, sirs, looking for a straying yak.’ And there's the herd to prove it. Can you find my knife?”

“What are you planning to do with it?”

“I thought,” he said, “that before I bleed quite all over this utterly ruined shawl, which I can't help noticing now actually belongs to my sister, we both might want to wrap up our hands.”

Attavaia found him his knife, dropped on the ground, and he dismounted, used the blade to rip the clean end of the shawl into bandages. She submitted to having a folded pad pressed onto her hand, another strip knotted tightly round it. Wrapped his for him, pride driving her to do as neat a job, and not to tighten it so as to make him wince.

“You still haven't answered. Are you a wizard? What sort of spell was that?”

“Not a spell,” Tsuzas said awkwardly, and went to catch her pony.

“So?”

“So,” he said, and helped her into the saddle, helped her settle her skirts around the stiff unbending leg as politely as if she had been his nose-bloodying sister. “So, like I said, Narva is not all there. He doesn't perceive things the way we do. You can't argue, you can't reason, you can't explain. He just reacts.”

“And?”

“And now you're his, in a way. So you can walk on the peak and enter the holy mines—which no sister of Attalissa's has ever seen despite what you all think, and if you tell your temple, when you have a temple again, I may have to kill myself.” He said that unexpectedly sombrely, as though it was not a joke. But then he flashed that grin, his face filthy, blood in his beard. “Honoured beyond the dreams of the greediest Old Lady. But the turquoise is long gone.”

Attavaia let the insult pass, thinking of her brother Rideen and his friends, all dead now, the sorts of games and leagues and solemn vows boys of nine and ten indulged in.

“Like children, making blood brothers? Your god thinks that counts, somehow?”

“Narva doesn't think. He
felt
it. Truth in the blood, blood to bind us.” Tsuzas had the black, vacant look in his eye again. “It's not a game, Sister. Never think that.”

“No, I suppose not.” But it seemed like it ought to be. Though there were tales of wizards who worked great magic in blood. She snorted, mind-numbingly weary and feeling that if she once started laughing at this, she would never stop. “So we're blood brothers. I always wanted to be, but my brother and his friends said I was just a sissy little girl and couldn't join.”

“Not
blood brothers,” he said, with his eyes still ringed dark, looking up at her.

“What, then?” She couldn't help the smile. “Blood cousins, maybe?”

Tsuzas shook his head, not smiling. He went to his ponies, rode back to her, looking a bit worn and weary himself. Anxious. The sun was setting, throwing long shadows over them, painting the stones with fire.

“What have you done?” she asked, soberly, wondering, some forbidden Narvabarkashi ritual, not meant for outsiders, some priestly secret…“Cold hells! You didn't…that isn't—” Attalissa save her, she remembered now.

“It was all I could think of. You'd have been dead before I got you back over the spur. Understand, I've seen a priestess die that way before, when I was small. One of the tribute assessors. She got lost in the mines, the working mines, wandered and wandered and came into the mountain's heart. And the god said, through my father, poor man,
leave her.
So we did. And my grandfather stayed with her, and made me stay. To learn. What I should learn, he didn't say. That a few hours is a very long time, for dying?” Tsuzas turned the horse's head, said flatly, “The hut's a few more miles, but it's more sheltered. We'll catch up with the herd on the way.”

No one she knew, was her first thought. Before her time. How old was Tsuzas, though, when it happened? She could wish the grandfather a slow death himself, making a child connive at murder. She felt sick again.

And her hand throbbed, at least a distraction from her leg. She swallowed, clicked her tongue at the pony until it shuffled into the jolting trot she'd been discouraging for days now. Caught up with Tsuzas.

“You
married
me,” she said, and heard her voice sounding quite reasonable, not accusing, not shrill with outrage. Calm.

“It was all I could think to do,” he said again. Eyed her sidelong, and that damned smile crept back. “Narva recognizes blood, after all. You could have done worse. At least I don't beat my wives.”

“Wives! How many—?”

“None. Till now, I mean. Do you think I need more already? It's not like you have a lot of children to look after.”

“I…I think you're…” She could find no words. “I'm a
priestess
of
Attalissa
.”

“Yes, that was rather at the root of the matter, wasn't it?”

“Celibate.”

“Big word.”

“It means—” She saw the smile broaden and bit her tongue. Determinedly kept her own face straight. But it was too ridiculous. “You can explain matters to my goddess, when she returns. You realize I'll be thrown out of the temple?” That wasn't ridiculous, that was serious. “I'll be turned out.” All she'd ever dreamed of, all she fought to regain, lost.

“But you'll be alive. Is Attalissa so unreasonable? If you keep your vows?”

“If you say I'm married, how am I keeping my vows?”

Tsuzas shrugged, serious in turn. “Keep the spirit of your vows. At least she's a goddess you can talk to and have her listen to what you say, judge the truth of your words and your heart for herself.”

Attavaia sighed. He hadn't seemed the type of man to resort to force, or she would have been less willing to wait for him as a guide back at the ice field. But it was as well to hear it said, that he didn't regard this marriage as giving him any rights.

“Of course, if you did change your mind…” He seemed irrepressible. “Better lawful marriage than unlawful lust.”

“I'm not feeling any unlawful lust at the moment.”

“As your lawful husband, I'm glad to hear that.” His smile deepened. “So, anyhow, I refuse to call my wife ‘Sister,’ and where we're going, you'll find yourself beset with sisters. What's your name?”

T
suzas's family and the secret mines, the ones the temple thought it knew about, and didn't, were reached around noon the next day, after a weary morning that seemed all climbing, braced forward in the saddle. Tsuzas walked, leading the ponies, and they all went at the yaks’ pace. There was frost in the air, and snow coming.

Attavaia stole a glance at her bandaged hand from time to time. It seemed too distant for a joke. Not something that changed her in any way. Except, somehow, it did. She was where no priestess of Attalissa could come, for all they had never even been fully aware of that fact—did that mean Attalissa too could hide some fold of the mountains and in it elude the wizard's searching? And she was, somehow, bound to this man. About whom she knew nothing.

“Where's your house?” Attavaia asked, when it seemed they were leaving even the thin brown grasses behind and about to start climbing the stone of the peak, with the undying snow not so far distant above. The dogs, at a whistle and a gesture, had turned the willing yaks aside, heading at what seemed an eager trot on the cows’ part for a larger herd, maybe two dozen, which grazed at the farther side of the steep valley, along with half a dozen ponies. A wealthy family, if these all belonged to the priests. The herd was watched over by a small figure on a pony. Boy or girl, she couldn't tell. It waved, Tsuzas waved, the dogs nipped at the yaks’ heels, other dogs barked. Homecoming.

Except she saw no settlement, no solitary house, to come home to. Sheer rock, ridges, a herd of wild sheep picking a scrambling course…speckled hens scratching among the rocks, out of place.

“Here.” Tsuzas was enjoying himself. “The threshold of the first mine, of all the mines of the mountains.”

“Where?” Attavaia asked impatiently, not seeing any dark mine-mouth, either.

Tsuzas pointed.

He led her towards an overhang, where the mountain lunged out, shielding shadow, the darkness of night, of the Old Chapel when the lamps were extinguished.

“Under…?” Attavaia swallowed. “Is it safe?”

“The mountain hasn't fallen on us yet.”

“You haven't brought a priestess of Attalissa home yet.”

Tsuzas gave her a sidelong look, perhaps checking to see if she smiled.

“I'm not joking. Why would your god tell you—”

“He doesn't tell.”