High Couch of Silistra (16 page)

Slowly, under the physician’s ministrations, the room focused and my body returned to my control. I could hear and had an awareness of the placement of my extremities.

“I am almost fine,” I said to him, and waved more bitter drink away. I had had enough drugs. Sereth’s hand was on my shoulder; his arm held me upright. Dellin looked strained and white under his dark skin. The Day-Keeper was gesturing to him and leaning confidentially close. I wondered if Dellin would learn tonight what chaldra entailed.

“Should I take you upstairs?” Sereth offered. I declined. “Food it is, then,” he said cheerfully, slipping from his seat beside me to hunt up a server, that I might have some solid nourishment in my stomach, and rana, as I had asked him, to wash it down. I leaned my head in my hands, my elbows steadied on the trestle table. The meal would not be served for another bell.

I tried to listen attentively to Dellin and Vedrev. I no longer cared whether Dellin acquired chaldra or not, I told myself. What mattered his problems, when I had so many of my own? How could I feel so strongly about a man who had so viciously used me? Sereth had such in his nature, and he did what he did without thought. Dellin, on the other hand, seemed to do everything with ulterior motives. An opportunist and plotter, he now used his moments with the Day-Keeper, as he had used me to his advantage with Ganrom and Sereth, to further his position in Arlet.

A shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see a trader in pelts and leather towering over me. Brown eyes under prominent brows, a flattish nose, and petulant lower lip were all that were visible of his features, save for a mass of unkempt dark beard that rested on his chest. He had his well token in his hand, and I was about to explain my indisposition when I realized I could not read him. I could get nothing from his mind! The burly man stood staring down at me. I raised my hand and pulled hair from my face.

As I opened my mouth to speak, a well token landed with a crack in my empty plate, where it rolled on its edge in ever smaller circles until, finally, it fell quivering to its side and lay still.

It was not the trader’s token, for he still held his in his hand. I looked around. The Day-Keeper’s eyes smiled at me, and he turned back to Dellin. Celendra, quick on her feet, was up and had her arms around the trader’s massive neck, soothing.

“We will find you another girl,” she said, leading the red-flushed, grumbling man toward the second table. “One with more strength and stamina. That one will be of little use to any man tonight. She is worn and weak. We will find you a nice fresh girl who can do justice to a Morrltan’s needs.”

I saw Sereth making his way cautiously through the crowd with a tray on which were covered dishes and a steaming pot. He placed the tray between his place and mine and reached for my plate.

“Whose?” he asked me, referring to the well token. He slid it off the plate onto the wisper-log table.

I gestured to the Day-Keeper. He had presented me with an easy out from the hoary trader, and I had thought no more about it.

“What do you want with her?” said Sereth Crill Tyris in his deadly quiet voice. “She is in no shape for anything but sleep.” Perhaps I had waxed hysterical, but I had to jam my hand into my mouth to keep from laughing. Sereth of the Slayers’ Seven was going to protect me from Vedrev, the Day-Keeper.

“Precisely. While you were gone to the kitchen, a trader came to take her. I have no need of a well woman, especially one who has been so badly mistreated.” Vedrev looked with hard eyes at Sereth. His mouth was an angry white line.

Sereth’s hand went to his hilt, and then to the table. He gripped the thick edge hard with pale knuckles, looking at his hands.

Then he took a deep breath and handed the well token that had been on my plate to Vedrev, who raised an eyebrow and laid it down. He held the Slayer’s gaze until that one looked away.

“I will see that she sleeps,” said Sereth, “and is not disturbed.” He seemed to want to say more. He shook his head and took his seat abruptly.

I was then served my early dinner by Sereth of Arlet, who said not a word to anyone until I was finished, but sat with his arms folded across his chest, slid down on his spine. His face was tightly drawn. One could not gainsay a high Day-Keeper. They are categorically above reproach.

The food stopped my head from spinning and brought strength back into my limbs.

I was even able to sort the sounds of Dellin and Celendra and the Day-Keeper from the noise around us. The subject of the conversation was the legend of the seed-sowers. Dellin recalled similar M’ksakkan legends. Celendra was intrigued. I thought that the Day-Keeper must be very sure to sow his own seed so early.

Sereth leaned close to me, as if to pick at the remains on my plate.

“What did you tell him, that he put responsibility for your state on me? I have my differences with the Day-Keepers. I do not need you to make it worse.”

“I told him nothing except that I had been with you, and you had told me of the artifact at the Falls of Santha.” I apologized sincerely. “I think he simply assumed it, because of the seating and your reaction to his token. That man, the one who would have couched me—I could not read him. Nothing. That has never happened to me before.”

“I would have you make the matter of who did how much to whom clear with the high one before we go to Santha. I can do without another call to stand judgment before that pack of old ladies. I know nothing of this reading, except it is said that the fore-readers and the girls of Astria do it. Can you tell me what I am thinking?”

“Not exactly. Not conscious words you are framing for communication. Deep-seated emotion, underlying motivation, primal drives I can read with clarity when I am myself. At this moment I doubt if I could read you the alphabet.”

“What, then, is the import of your inability to read the trader?”

“Perhaps you are right, perhaps it is just that I am so very tired.”

“Let me take you upstairs. You have done your duty to the Well.”

“You are my will,” I sighed, an old phrase for acquiescence I had not used since my training years. “But allow me just to watch Genisha dance first.”

So we sat in the common room while the Feast of Conception roared around us, and on that most joyous occasion I struggled to keep my eyelids from closing of their own accord. By the time the six courses had been served and cleared and the great dessert tray was making its way up and down the aisles between the trestle tables, I was sleeping for seconds, catching myself and starting back to consciousness, then fading again. Thus I missed Genisha’s dance to Jerin, that which is the most beautiful of Silistran dances, where the elements of submission and free will, sex and love, swirl around the dancers like sheer silks. I dozed on Sereth’s shoulder and did not awaken until I found myself in his arms at the door to my keep.

Once within, in the soft-lit blue-and-gold chamber, he stripped from me the silvery silk Dellin had given me and laid me on the couch, pulling the covers up around me almost tenderly. Some while later I was again awakened, to take the bath he had drawn for me. He bathed with me, but not with the intent other than helpful. So I did let Sereth of Arlet, of the Slayers’ Seven, wash and bathe me like a child and dry me in the soft toweling and put me again in my couch.

I told him drowsily to go back downstairs and enjoy the feast, but he would not.

“I,” he said, “am also tired from my set’s activities. I will, if you permit, rest here with you. Trouble seeks you, lady, like the ebvrasea the mountain taslings, and I think it better that you not be alone, lest it strike when we least expect it.”

“Lest the days all slip away.” I smiled at him, quoting from the beautiful old song about two lovers who pegged every moment of their time, so that they might spend eternity together. Sereth pegged this time that I might survive it.

“Doubtless,” he said, pulling the cover up around him and settling on his side, “the days will all slip away regardless. But I have gotten into a habit, and it is a hard one to break.” He leaned over and kissed me on the lips, so lightly, and the hair of his thick-matted chest tickled me.

I wonder whether he meant the habit of me, or the habit of pegging time, but I was too sleepy to ask.

We were awakened by the four bells of Arlet, tolling stridently together. Each bell, on a normal day, has seven enths to toll, but when all bells ring together, twelve soundings, it is said they weep for a soul. Someone was dead in Arlet. It is not often that such sounds are heard, for death is long coming to take us on Silistra. But come it does. I shivered and pressed closer to Sereth.

He was frowning. As the only member of the Slayers’ Seven in Arlet, if the passing was other than natural, it was his duty to make an inquiry. If natural, he must still take a hand. The bearers would have to be chosen from the ranks of the Slayers. The family, if they were not aware, informed, the deceased one’s goods apportioned fairly. The ceremony and the writing of the name in the Day-Keeper’s roll were the responsibility of the ranking Day-Keeper. All else was the chaldra of the Slayers’ Seven.

Sereth slid out from between the couch covers and began to dress.

“May I join you?” I asked.

“Do as you will, Estri, but this is nothing I expected, and it may not be pleasant.”

Then the death was no timely one of old age and infirmity.

I threw back the silken couch spread and the web-cloth undercover and went to retrieve the breech and band Celendra had given me from the smaller thala chest.

“How do you feel?” asked Sereth, watching me, bent over from the waist, untangle my hair with rapid strokes of the bone comb. Its ends touched my toes.

“Fine.” I straightened up, throwing back my head, feeling the strands around me crackle with static. “I needed the rest badly, I guess. I am not one to pamper myself, however, and I feel a trifle foolish.”

He shrugged and guided me out the door.

“I must change into more suitable clothing. Will you eat with me in my hostel?”

I agreed. I was curious to see how the Slayers lived in Arlet, and what Sereth of the Slayers’ Seven chose to keep around him.

We were halfway across the Inner Well when Celendra caught up with us. I thought that it was the first time I had seen that woman hurry.

She gasped for breath.

“Do you need me for the inquiry?” she panted, her hand on the Slayer’s arm.

“I do not know if there will be one.”

“There will doubtless be one.”

“Then you know more than I.”

“I know that Fressa had nothing to do with it.”

“With what, woman?” demanded the Slayer. “If you have something to say, tell me. I must get to the hostel and sort this thing out.” He held her by the shoulders, his hands digging into her flesh, so that her feet barely touched the ground.

“Put me down and I will walk you there.”

As we walked across the Inner Well, me in my band and breech, studded with silver, Celendra clothed in her dusky skin, and Sereth in his worn slate Slayer’s garb, she told us.

“Remember that trader that wanted you last night, Estri? He was found this morning, after leaving Fressa’s couch before sun’s rising, wandering mindless in the Inner Well. He died within a bell of being discovered. He could neither see nor hear, nor did he respond to touch. The physicians say his mind was totally isolated, cut off from all sensory input. He died horribly, degenerating before the healers’ eyes.

There is no known poison that could do such a thing. No traces of foreign chemicals in the blood. But every sensory path to the brain was destroyed.”

“If there is no poison, and no marks of violence on the body, why are you worried about your girl? Why would we blame her, or anyone, for the inexplicable?” We stood before the Slayers’ hostel, an imposing structure of silvery gol, with thala door and lintel. The hostel had no windows, but narrow open slits through which a man could aim a weapon. It had been long since those slits had been needed in Arlet, but the Slayers stand ever ready to defend her.

Celendra hesitated before the door.

“I must get back to the Well. I just wanted you to know what I knew, lest the physicians, having no answer to your questions, use Fressa to take the blame. They seldom admit to ignorance.”

“I appreciate it. Tasa,” said Sereth.

We passed many men in the winding passages of the hostel, hurrying through the corridors, metal clanking, gathered in small knots of subdued conversation. In the kitchen, where the serving alcove was filled with them, in their slate and silver and black leathers, the talk was louder, a maddening rumble. There was little laughter.

A table of light needle-wood was clear in a corner of the high-ceilinged gray alcove. Swords and shields were racked upon the walls, many ancient beyond description, jewel-hilted, and with precious-metal inlay. Other than weapons, the severity of the man-height gray gol-blocks was unbroken. The floor was planked thala, the southern variety, with brown over grain.

Sereth steered me toward the empty table. Men got up from their grilled parr and eggs to query him.

“What rises, Seven?” asked a large man, blocking our path.

“What indeed? I like it not when the enemy is not clear. Give me something I can fight,” put in another.

“Think you that this be some new disease?” said one with an accent I did not recognize. Disease had long ago been conquered on Silistra. The men were much shaken by the thought of a microscopic enemy, against whom there was no defense.

“I think nothing yet. I have to find out. Would you have me tell you a guess, perhaps a wrong one, just to tell you something? Are you a clutch of old ladies, that I must comfort you in your fears? Leave me be. When I have something to say, I will say it.” Angry, the Seven pushed his way through the men that had circled around us.

One, more persistent than the others, followed us to the table.

“Tyith, do not hover over me. If you would be of help, then bring us a meal. And lots of rana. I need a clear head.”

The younger, red-haired Slayer, whose skin was darker than tan, hurried to obey. He wore the red knotted cord of apprentice at his waist.