The Assassins of Tamurin (21 page)

“You won’t forget me?” she asked, trying to smile. We were in the little courtyard with its mist trees and stone benches; the wine finches were there, too, chirping and squabbling among the leaves. Tossi and the others were down in the Lower Court, waiting to see me off. Knowing how close Dilara and I were, they’d left us alone to say our private farewells.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “How could I forget you? Anyway, we’ll see each other again. It may not even be that long. Maybe Mother will give you an assignment in Istana.”

“I
wish
I knew where she’s going to send me,” Dilara said grumpily. “There was nothing in the dispatches that came last night.”

“I’m sure you’ll know soon,” I told her. But we both knew also, though we didn’t say it, that if Dilara did go to Istana for some secret purpose. I’d never know she was there. It was against the rules.

“I hope so. Oh, Lale, Fm going to miss you so—”

She didn’t cry because she never did. But I got the sniffles and Dilara put her arm around me.

“We’re soldiers,” I said eventually, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I shouldn’t make so much of it. It’s not forever.”

“No, not forever. We’ll have fun together again. Maybe, when the wars are over, we can go somewhere and just be ourselves.” She gave me her old sideways grin. “You can be an actress in some despicable low-class theater and I'll weave gossamin robes for rich ladies, and we’ll have a house and live in it and let the rest of the world go by. And Mother can come and stay with us whenever she likes.”

It was such a wonderful, ludicrous vision that I burst out laughing. “You’re mad,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “The world is mad, but we’re not.” She squinted at the rising sun, a hand’s breadth now above the eastern horizon. “You’d better go. But I won’t come down. I'll watch from here and wave before you get into the trees. Remember to look.”

“I will,” I said huskily, and embraced her before hurrying away. Down the stairs I went. So many times my feet had trod their cool stones; not a step was without its memories.

My other sisters were on the Lower Terrace, waiting for me. I said good-bye to them all, to Tossi and the two newest girls and the older ones, and to Master Aa and Mistress Ipip and the other instructors. Master Aa said, “You are very good, very well trained, one of the best. Do not forget the exercises, though. Always do the exercises.”

“I promise,” I told him.

Then I embraced Tossi, who hugged me and said, “Now, Lale, you really must go.”

The Green Heron escort that had brought the supply train up the mountain was waiting for me. The same six troopers had been coming for years and I knew them by name, but they were always very taciturn—^not surprisingly, given the oaths that bound them and their wariness of Nilang. An especially silent one named Jassar was to escort me across the Gulf of the Pearl, and it would, I realized with a sigh, be a journey without much conversation.

I mounted a gray gelding, and we all rode out through the narrow gate, my sisters calling their farewells. As we cleared the gate’s shadow, I tumed to look up. Far above, on Three Springs’ topmost terrace, her white bodice a shining speck in the early moming light, Dilara was waving to me. I waved back as hard as I could. Then tears blurred my vision and I rode under the trees, and she was gone.

Opinions differ on sea travel. Many people dislike it because of storms, shipwreck, and possible attack by pirates. The food is usually boring or even outright bad, and then there is the probability of seasickness.

But I loved every moment of it. When Jassar and I rode into Tamurin’s eastem port of Kalshel, and I saw the ship that was to take me across the Gulf of the Pearl to the mainland, I could hardly contain my excitement. As a young lady of education and breeding, I had to appear composed and unimpressed, but under my cool demeanor I was aquiver with anticipation.

We left our horses at the stables of the city garrison, hurried down to the port, and were aboard the vessel by the fourth hour of the sun watch. She was a cargo pelican rejoicing in the name of
Celestial Diadem,
broad beamed and slab sided, with a long overhanging stem and a blunt prow carved with a garland of stars. Being a Gulf trader, she wasn’t as big as the ocean-going pelicans I’d seen in Chi-ran’s Plum Harbor, and she had three masts instead of four or five. But I’d never been on a real ship, and
Celestial Diadem
seemed very big. She carried washed fleeces, aromatic cedar planks, and kegs of preserved cherries, so she didn’t smell as bad as ships often do. Her crew was mixed, the officers and half the men Durdana and the rest Ris Rua and Yellow Smoke Islanders, with one amber-eyed Khalaka for variety.

I went up to the bow as we sailed past the twin beacons at the harbor entrance and out into the Gulf of the Pearl. As soon as we cleared the long stone breakwaters, the wind strengthened and
Celestial Diadem
began to pitch and roll to the long swing of the sea. The motion, the wind’s rush, the roar of the waves, all exhilarated me. Spray dashed cool on my face and I tasted the ocean’s salt, like tears. Ahead of me stretched the blue horizon, and waiting beyond it was the mouth of the Pearl, and Istana and Master Luasin’s school and all my future.

Jassar and I were the only passengers, and he was seasick, so I passed our brief voyage pretty much alone. As the end of the second day approached I went up to the bow and gazed into the watery distances ahead, thinking about where I was going.

I knew I’d be successful. I’d known that ever since I trudged out of Riversong, and so far everything had worked out just as I’d hoped. But now I was entering the real world, far from Mother, Repose, and the Midnight School, and my choices were up to me.

For example, nobody would stop me if I wanted to take a lover. As for the possible results of such dalliance, Nilang had taught us how to avoid children, and had given me a selection of potions and salves for this purpose, which I carried in a secret compartment in my traveling chest.

I thought about the possibility of lovers as the wind blew my hair around my face. I’d known since I was fourteen that I was comely enough to make men look over their shoulders as I went by, which pleased me. But given the memories of my own childhood, and knowing what had happened to many of the girls in the school at men’s hands, I wasn’t inclined to trust them a thumb’s breadth.

And in any case, taking a lover was as yet mere theory to me. I’d never had that particular experience, nor even the opportunity for it. Still, I knew I could charm a man if I needed to, and that I could appear to trust him if necessary. And I knew how the bouncy part worked, since it was part of our schooling. Every Durdana girl is taught about the art of love-making and how it can lead to both pleasure and children. Girls with families are instructed by their mothers or aunts, and every youth is similarly taught by his father or uncle. And while it’s a source of much humor, especially around the time of the Plough Festival, we believe beneath our laughter that the act is sacred, since it is how Father Heaven and the Bee Goddess created the world. We don’t look on it as do the Exiles, as something dirty and shameful and not to be spoken of. Nor, unlike them, do we regard a woman’s virginity as her most precious asset, and it is therefore no real disadvantage to a Durdana girl if she chooses to discard it before marriage.

But I knew very well, from Adrine’s example, how love could lead to calamity. I couldn’t imagine being that foolish, but I decided, as
Celestial Diadem
heaved with the waves, that I’d better be careful anyway. High Theater actresses sometimes married but more often had lovers, and I might find myself in situations where I’d be expected to take one. I had all the normal inclinations of a healthy young woman, and I was a little worried that I might be tempted. But I told myself sternly that I would never, never, let such inclinations affect my judgment. I had far too much to lose, and I wasn’t going to ruin my life for any man.

I felt much better once I’d settled this. And just as I did, I saw something out on the horizon: a hazy gray line on the blue rim of the Gulf.

“What’s that?” I asked a sailor, who was splicing a line nearby. “A storm cloud?” A storm would be an exciting way to end my first sea journey.

He squinted, then grinned. “No, mistress,” he said, “that’s not a cloud, it’s land. We’ll lie offshore at anchor tonight, ’cause we don’t want to thread the shoals in the dark. But you’ll be walking dry tomorrow.”

The city of Dimn lies at the Mouth of the Pearl, on the river’s south bank, in the Despotate of Guidarat. North across the river’s estuary is the territory of Bethiya, but the shore there is low and swampy and supports only a handful of fishing villages. Dirun therefore has the great advantage of being the first landfall for vessels making for the Pearl. However, the lower reaches of the Pearl are so wide and deep that even the biggest pelicans can navigate all the way upstream to the city of Sutkagin, which is on the Bethiyan shore of the river. Above Sutkagin, freight has to be carried on smaller river lorchas, so the city is also a transshipment depot. This gives Sutkagin its own special advantage, and its merchants and those of Dirun have engaged in a furious commercial rivalry for centuries.

I was up early next morning as we sailed into the Pearl’s estuary. Tlie breeze was light from the west and the ship moved easily across the waves, which were tawny brown with silt and touched with pink where the dawn caught their crests. This disappointed me a little, since I’d always imagined the Pearl as a sparkling blue river, with necklaces of white foam where its waves broke in the wind. But otherwise the sight was everything I could have hoped: the sky crimson and gold and azure, the broad expanse of the Pearl with the low, dark line of the north shore to my left, and to my right the green hills of the south bank. And there was Dirun, its walls russet and cream in the morning light, the old prefect’s palace on the hill in the city center, and along the waterfront a thicket of masts and spars.

Jassar was still indisposed and hadn’t risen yet, but one of the ship’s junior officers happened to be on the foredeck with me. He asked if I’d ever been to Dirun, and I admitted I hadn’t. It was his native city, and he told me how, back in the old days, it had sent fleets of great ocean-going pelicans to trade on the most distant shores of the Great Green, returning with rare spices, tortoiseshell, coral, musk, aromatic woods, and the marvelous gem that looks like clear glass but cannot be scratched, even by the hardest jade. They were voyages that took years, he said, and although many ships never came back, the ones that did could make their owners as rich as Despots, But no such fleets had sailed now for a century and more, he said, and added sadly that Dirun was no longer the glorious place it once had been.

I saw, as
Celestial Diadem
glided though the fortified entrance of the commercial port, what he meant. The great basin could have held three ships for every one that was moored at the quays, and many of the waterfront warehouses were derelict, with huge gaps in their roof tiles and the harbor gulls swooping in and out. There were enormous stone slipways where Dirun shipwrights had built the great long-range ships for the ocean trade, but these were empty and moss grown. Three new vessels—two gulf pelicans and a river lorcha—^were under construction near the port entrance, but you could have fitted them all onto one of the old slipways.

Jassar recovered fi’om his seasickness once we reached the calmer waters inshore, and joined me as the ship came alongside the quay. I wanted to go ashore and look around the waterfi*ont, but he said we were to be met. Frustrated, I sat on a companionway roof to watch the crew unload. We might, I reflected irritably, be forced to dawdle here for hours, wasting time that I could much better spend in exploration.

The seamen had barely got the hatch covers off, though, when a man came up the gangway. He saw Jassar and me and picked his way toward us among the ropes, hatch boards, and shouting sailors. He was a lean, bony-faced fellow of about thirty, dressed without any suggestion of either wealth or the lack of it. But I noticed that he had very watchful eyes, and at his waist was the narrow scabbard of a scathata, the expensive and nimble blade favored by Durdana cavalry officers.

He stopped in front of Jassar and they sized each other up. They must have approved of what they saw, for they bowed courteously to each other and the man said, “You’re from the Despotana in Chiran?”

“We are,” Jassar answered. “And you?”

The man removed a thin wooden tablet from his jacket and handed it to Jassar, who glanced at it and gave it to me. I inspected the man’s bona fides, found them in order, and gave the tablet back.

“Fm Birek Artaj of Wayfarer’s Guard,” the man said. He bowed to me and touched his throat respectfully; it wasn’t every day he’d meet a Despotana’s adopted daughter. ‘T am at your service. Lady Mistress Navari.”

I said, “As Fm also at your service. Master Artaj. You’re escorting me to Istana?”

“Yes, mistress. Our lorcha leaves in the morning, and Master Luasin has been notified that you are on your way. I have made arrangements for Master Jassar to sail back to Tamurin in two days.”

“Fm going to Istana by water?” I asked hopefully. I'd discovered that I liked boats very much.

He nodded. “We’d need four men to guard you by land. Mistress Navari, and that’s expensive. The river’s a lot safer, especially since I know the lorcha’s master.”