Michelle West - Sun Sword 01 - The Broken Crown (8 page)

"And if I don't?"

"I do not know. Perhaps another woman will be asked to make
the choice that I ask of you." The stranger was silent a long time. And
then her face softened; she lifted a hand a moment, as if to touch the
older woman's face. She stopped, lowering the hand, letting the gesture
linger only in her expression. "I can promise you this: You will never
have to bury her."

And then, before Ashaf's eyes could sting at the words and the
memories they invoked, the stranger took a step into the room's
shadows—and silver light, pale and luminescent, swallowed her,
returning her, perhaps, to the Lady's Moon.

She missed the dawn, but met the day when the shadows cast
were still long and slender. The fields were full of moving bodies;
women toiled with their scythes in their personal plots in the common
before being called to serve upon the Lord's lands at the sides of
their husbands. This Tor'agar granted them that much. His father had
not. Small children gathered tied stalks; older children knotted and
bundled them. During this month, this, the only time of year when the
Lady's hand was felt during the daylight hours, there were no idle
hands.

Not even, she thought ruefully, her own. Her back was strong,
her arms stronger; she would be missed. And she did not care to offer
excuses, either of the two that she had, for her absence. She scurried
with haste to the edge of the Lord's field, knowing her own part of the
common serafs' plot would be tended by the younger women in the
village. Age granted her that unspoken right, but she hated to take
advantage of it now when in her dotage she might truly require it.
Unself-conscious in her movements, she rolled up her sleeves, inviting
the sun's touch as she ran.

"Ashaf!"

"Na'Carre," she said, smiling broadly at a slender, too tall
youth.

He blushed, almost ducking under the hand that ran through the
sun-bleached tuft of his curly hair. He was a young man now, and no
child, to be so called. When had he grown so? Last year, and he had
blushed and smiled, joining her a moment to brag about his new
exploits, his ability to trap small game in the forests outside of the
Lord's fields and the serafs' common. He brought her an almost
recognizable pelt, a gift of sorts, proof of the truth of his words.

She stopped a moment to look at him, and his mother, Valla
kep'Valente, thwacked him soundly on the shoulder for being what he
was: a youth yearning impatiently for the imagined grace of manhood.

She had been just such a youth except, of course, she had
desired to be woman and wife.

"Ashaf," Valla said, falling into step beside the older woman.
"Are you well? It's not like you to sleep so late."

Not, Ashaf thought, during harvest. "I slept poorly," she told
the younger woman, wondering if she had ever walked with such
unself-conscious, easy grace. "Yesterday was the start of the harvest
season; I rose too early."

"Ah," Valla said, her own face taking the shadows a moment.
Every seraf had her dead, be they mother or sister or child. Or father.
Or brother. Or husband. "We said our rites. My youngest—Tia—she
wouldn't mind me. Crawled all over the graves as if they were hillocks
made for child's play."

"The Lady," Ashaf said wryly and sadly both, "is
the
mother. She understands; the joy of children is no disrespect to either
her or those who now rest in her keeping. Believe that, Valla."

The younger woman smiled and nodded, just as Ashaf knew she
would. Ashaf, having lost so much, had done what she could to fill her
life; she was old enough now to be considered wise—at least by the
women. They came to her, when they could not or would not go to their
own mothers, and she let them come, taking a pain and a pleasure from
their youthful company. The what-ifs of her own family.

Her arms ached, but the smile across her lips, habit and more,
was pleasant and warm enough. "Now come. We've no time for talk; as it
is, we'll be under the headman's eyes. Look at the sun."

She loved the harvest season, and as she watched it unfold,
she wondered what the cooler weather would bring. Rain; probably too
much of it. Averda was the Lady's land; there was no doubt about it.
And those who called the Lady the weaker of the two were fools who
deserved to live in the harsh, wind-blasted desert plains. If the sand
made men, she thought, it scoured them so clean only their swords and
their will remained. And swords and will were a poor home and a poor
haven for life.

Here, with green and gold and red all about, she thought she
could be happy. No, she did not think it; she felt it, a deep and even
peace that came from working with life, for it. There were drummers on
the fields' edge, and a man who played the pipes as if the pipes were a
sweet, youthful voice. She did not recognize him, and that was odd; she
recognized all of the village serafs on sight.

"He's pretty, isn't he?" Valla said, catching the black
strands of hair that had worked free of her confining knot and tying
them up again.

"Do you know him?"

"1? No." The younger woman laughed. "But I would if Arrego
weren't so jealous!"

"Valla!"

"He's Voyani," she replied, as if that explained anything. Or
everything.

It explained much.

In the Dominion, there were the clansmen, and there were the
serafs. The clansmen were free, and where they had power and the will
to protect their holdings, they gathered serafs, branding and naming
them. If they were powerful enough, they chose to merely name; the name
was enough. Ashaf kep'Valente bore no scar, no brand. She understood
that she was owned by a powerful clan, and perhaps she was even blessed
by the ownership; today, under this sky, with the smell of the earth in
her nostrils, the soil beneath her nails, the harvest beside her bent
back, she felt so. And she knew it as the Lord's will, and the Lady's.
Some served. Some ruled.

But the Voyani were as old as the land. They traveled, many
upon the horses of the open plains, and many not; they moved in groups,
and they defended each other as fiercely as blood-born clansmen. But
they took no serafs. They owned no land. They carried no war with them.

It was said that they were not averse to robbing the clansmen
they found who were poor and unable to defend themselves properly, and
Ashaf knew it for truth. Yet they were suffered to survive, and survive
they did, trading and bartering and carrying information from one
Terrean to the next. They even moved out of the Dominion from time to
time, seeking the merchants in the Northern Empire. It was said that
some, one or two, settled there, like so many of the poor, free
clansmen who could make no mark for themselves in the Dominion. The
North took the weak ones, and accepted them; the Lord let them go. The
Lord had no use for weakness.

It was also said, although she did not know if it were true,
that serafs who escaped their clan could travel with the Voyani and
find both home and freedom in Essalieyan. She and her husband had
spoken of it in whispers when their first child was born. Perhaps the
Lady had heard them. Perhaps the Lady had been angered by it. Perhaps
the Lady had chosen to keep the children within her reach.

Too much darkness. During the Sun's dance. She shook herself.
"Why are the Voyani here?"

Valla shrugged.

"Which family?"

"Hers. Yollana's."

Ashaf felt a little chill in the sun's heat. She raised a
hand, adjusted her hat, feeling the edge of the wide brim as if its
presence were a comfort. "Has she come to trade?"

"I think it's too early for that. We're just starting our
harvest."

"Then what?"

"Yollana," Valla replied, lowering her voice, "is
moon-touched. She goes where she goes. You know that. I've even heard
that the Tor—"

"Enough," Ashaf said, raising a hand and touching the moving
lips of a careless young woman. The gesture brought the silence that
she hoped for—and demanded. Whether it was true or no, it was never
safe to speculate, beneath the day's open sky, about the habits and the
secrets of powerful men. The wind carried careless words farther than
arrows and spears.

Yes, she knew Yollana well. What girl, with a heart full of
foolish dreams in these, the richest lands of Annagar, did not? What
girl, with such a heart, could resist the trek over fields and hill,
before night had fully set, to offer the mysterious Voyani woman what
little food or item she could find in order to procure both a blessing
and a hint of the future?

She had already faced Yollana once, in the year before her
first marriage to the man of her desire. She could remember, clearly,
the icy night of Yollana's face, the darkness of unblinking eyes, as
Yollana had promised her that she would have her heart's desire. The
first intimation that her heart was a thing to be feared. She would
have others, but like so many things, the first was a scar that time
did not diminish.

That year, she had discovered that nightmare and dream come
from the same place. And it was nightmare that returned her to it, time
and again, stripping her of the strength of wisdom and experience,
paring her down to a girl's fear and helplessness.

Her arms ached, and her back, as the minutes dwindled into a
stream of time; hours passing.

Things happened, when they happened, in threes. Three
visitors: Isladar of no clan, Evayne of Nolan, and now Yollana of the
Havalla Voyani.

I am too old
, she thought.
I
haven't
the strength
. But she wiped her dirt-crusted hands on the
thick cotton drape of her long skirts and shielded her eyes against the
sun's fall. She could see the Voyani wagons at the crest of the gently
sloped hill beyond which her house lay. She knew that she would go
around them.

And that it would make no difference.

Dusk was the time of shadows.

Night, and the Lady's moon was brilliant against the speckled
backdrop of cool, dark blue. Day, and the Lord's face turned a
merciless, necessary heat upon the greens and the golds, the reds and
the browns, the earth's colors.

But at dusk, with neither Lord nor Lady in ascendance, the
light and the darkness intertwined and every possible path was a step
into the unknown.

She could not sleep.

And sleepless, she left the sanctity of her single-room
dwelling to stand a moment in the wash of a sky that was caught, in
crimson, between two shades of blue. Beneath that sky, crossing the
footpaths that had been worn by time and the steady movement of sturdy
heels, was a lone figure, illuminated from behind by the lamp that hung
across her left shoulder by the shaft of a long pole. The figure's face
was in shadow, but she did not need to see it to feel the apprehension
of recognition.

Fate.

Ashaf waited numbly as the figure came closer.

Yollana, the wisewoman of the Havalla Voyani.

But here, she felt a strange thing: not fear, as she had
expected, and not even resignation, although its touch was heavy upon
her unbent shoulders. No, she felt kinship; the kinship of those weary
with the burdens of the responsibilities they have chosen—and wearier
still with the loss of them.

The Yollana of her youth was gone in that instant; her perfect
midnight hair bleached everywhere by the touch of harsh sun and time.
Her pale skin was lined now, although not furrowed; it was no longer
translucence defined. But if she did not have the slenderness of youth,
she had the muscled, sturdy appearance of one who has been tried and
tested without breaking.

As if she had expected no less, Yollana looked up from the
ground's even slope as she at last approached the house, nodding at the
younger woman who waited. Her eyes were the eyes that Ashaf remembered.

"Well met," the Voyani wisewoman said, bowing low enough that
the folds of her voluminous shirt obscured the wide, red sash across
her midriff.

"And you," Ashaf said softly. She waited a long moment, and
then looked away. "I have no water to offer."

"I do," Yollana replied, and she lifted the skin from the
folds of her wide skirts. Those skirts could hide many a thing: water,
gold. A dagger. "Will you drink with me?"

It was formal; an offer of sorts. But of what, and for what,
Ashaf could not guess. She nodded quietly. "Night is coming," she said.
"I should sleep soon." But she turned quietly and opened the door to
her home, inviting by gesture this third visitor for whom she felt such
ambivalence.

The lamp was bright enough to illuminate the four walls of her
life; to cast a shadow around the sagging cotton mats upon which she
lay night by night; to show the marks and stains and scratches in the
wood of the small table before which she knelt to eat. To pray.

She crossed the room and knelt there now, taking from a small
shelf beside the table the delicate clay bowls that had been a gift
from her husband and placing them upon the worn wooden surface. After a
moment, Yollana joined her, unhooking the lamp and placing it on the
floor by her bent knees. They stared at each other a moment in uneasy
silence; it was the Voyani woman who spoke first.

Yollana's smile was crooked. "You've aged," she said. She took
the skin from her belt, uncapped it, and poured. She was skilled, and
it was clear from the way that she watched each drop that she had
traveled in the Lord's heartlands.

"And you," Ashaf replied. "But more gracefully."

"Voyani blood." Carefully lifting a bowl, she offered the
sweet water to Ashaf.

Ashaf took it and lifted it to her lips, accepting the
visitor's gift as if there was nothing unusual about such a visit. "All
blood is red," she said softly. Then she stopped; the water that
touched her tongue was sweet and cool—it was almost as if she drank
water's ideal, and not the water itself.