The Last Stormlord (37 page)

She raised an eyebrow. “Lord Kaneth, are you attempting to charm me?”

“Er… yes. I guess I am. Trying to charm the breeches, um, the dress off you. Ry, I do think we can make this work, if we try.”

She took his hand. “Especially as the alternative is a little grim, eh? All right, let’s give that spy outside the door something to think about.” And she lifted her face to receive his kiss, hoping he would not feel the wild beating of her unruly heart.

Red Quarter

Dune Scarmaker

Vara Redmane had been born on the dune called the Scarmaker and expected to die somewhere along its mighty length. She was sixty-four years old and the furthest she had ever been from the red sands of the dune was the edge of a nearby waterhole, to fill dayjars, as she was doing now. It was a task she and the other women performed every morning, in the cool of the long dune shadows, carting the dayjars in panniers on the back of two packpedes.

It was Vara’s favourite job and collecting the water was a pleasant time between waking in her tent and facing the true work of the day. At the edge of the waterhole, where bab palms grew and flame creeper insinuated itself like a thread-snake among the rocks, she was at peace, in harmony with life and the water of life. Here she could, with trueness, offer up a prayer to the god of Dune Scarmaker; here she really did feel grateful for the gift of living water and life. And here, when she spilled the water in sacrifice to their dune god, she took pleasure in the idea that the precious drops would find their way back into the cool greenness of the pool where they belonged and not be sucked up into the greediness of the dry air.

Vara was old enough to remember many different dune camps and waterholes. It didn’t seem so very long ago that this hole had been at the foot of the dune. Now the round trip and the filling of the jars took far too long. If it had been up to her, the camp would already have moved somewhere east or west along the length of the dune, after finding and digging out a new waterhole that the dune had recently left behind as it moved. All it took was a message to Breccia to tell the Cloudmaster where to send the next rains.

As though she had read Vara’s thoughts, one of the other women grumbled, “Vara, when are you going to ask that husband of yours to move camp? I swear, the dune is moving away from us as we speak! The trip back is longer than the one out, and every day it’s longer than the day before.”

“Fully the length of your big toe,” Vara agreed, seeping sarcasm. “If you lost weight, Irinat Redlander, the walk would be easier.”

“And if you’d talk to Makdim, we’d have it easier still!” Irinat shot back.

A new voice intervened. “Makdim is not going to take any notice of what Vara says.” Zuzan, of course, her voice carefully neutral, even as her words stung. She was an ancient, almost beyond making the trip for water, and known for her forthright opinions now that her great age had bestowed her with status. “He is a leader who does not consult his womenfolk.”

“No? Maybe that’s because we’re asking the wrong one of his womenfolk. Maybe we should ask
her
,” Irinat said, her tone full of spite, as she nodded towards the girl who was filling her jars at a distance from the others. “Maybe he’ll take notice of the pretty little bauble Davim dropped in his lap.”

Her head is filled with sand,
Vara thought without rancour.
She hasn’t the wits to see how Davim’s bribery attempts have angered Makdim.

Sandmaster of the Scarmaker and the most senior of all the dune leaders, Makdim loathed the upstart sandmaster of the Watergatherer, but he was finding himself increasingly powerless to stop the excesses of the man. The gift of a girl that Davim had seized on one of his forays into the Gibber had not pleased Makdim; it had infuriated him. Scarmaker did not deal in slaves and had not done so since before the days of Stormlord Garouth. To present Makdim with the gift of a human being was an insult; worse still, Davim had known that. He argued that the anti-slave laws were a Scarpen innovation and should not be followed by the Red Quarter. And he had presented Makdim with a dilemma: if the Scarmaker sandmaster refused the gift, then Davim could say that Makdim was a lackey of the Cloudmaster and his laws, and that he, Davim, had been gravely insulted. He could even insist on a zigger duel to avenge his honour. On the other hand, if Makdim accepted the gift, then he was giving tacit agreement to Davim’s espousal of slavery and his slave raids.

Vara had thought Makdim should refuse, but he hadn’t. He was an old man and he had long since lost a warrior’s ability to kill a zigger with a sweep of the sword. He was vulnerable. However, neither had he accepted the gift of a slave and thus lost his honour. Instead, he had welcomed the woman as a guest and taken her in. But the incident had diminished him. He ought to have confronted Davim; he hadn’t, thus he had lost face among the men of the Reduner tribes. The other women might not have realised that, but Vara did.

She had married the youthful and headstrong Makdim when she was fourteen, and in the lifetime of years since then, she sometimes thought she had moved no further in her life than the dune had travelled on its slow journey across the plains. She had borne Makdim’s children, fetched his water, cooked his meals, embroidered his robes and hooked the lace for his mount’s trimmings. Under her supervision, his sons had grown up to be strong and noble warriors. They had learned the science of battle and the art of pede carving—but she might as well have been a grain of sand beneath his feet for all the public recognition he had given her. In fifty years of marriage he’d never offered her praise or thanks. And yet he loved her; she knew that. And she loved him, understood him. And now she grieved for him. For his loss of integrity.

When Vara thought of the girl Davim had captured in the Gibber, it was with pity.

“Speak of the spiny devil and his eye will find you,” Zuzan said suddenly. “He comes.”

Vara looked up from her work. At first she thought it was their own menfolk back from the hunting trip that had sent them out over the plains the day before; then she saw what the old woman had already seen: the red banners carried by the first of the myriapede riders, the blood-red banners of the Watergatherer dune. Her heart pounded as she straightened from her task to take in the lines of myriapedes as they flowed down the dune in black rivulets, joining at the base behind the fluttering banners.

Dune god save us
, she thought.
Makdim, you should be here now.

“What shall we do?” Zuzan asked. Although she was older than Vara, she rightfully looked to Makdim’s wife for leadership.

“Nothing,” Vara said calmly. “Fill your jars.” She topped up the last of her own jars and closed the pannier. Then she went to the head of the beast, gathering up the reins. Reduner women did not ride pedes, except sometimes as passengers behind their menfolk. When the women fetched water, they led the animals, as was proper.

Patiently she waited for the others to finish their tasks, but the Watergatherer party was upon them before they were ready to move off. Vara had hoped that Davim was not among them, but she soon recognised his mount, the formidable beast he called Burnish, reputedly the strongest and most intelligent of pedes ever born. And Davim himself, tall and straight and handsome—and arrogant.

He urged his mount right up to hers, until he was just a body length away, facing her.

“I have a gift for you, woman,” he said. His voice was without expression.

“It is not meet that I should receive a gift from a man of another dune,” she said evenly. Her voice lied; it was her pounding heart that told the truth. She
feared.
She feared the flatness of his tone, the fanaticism of his eyes.

“This one belongs to you,” he said. He signalled one of his men, who then opened a pannier on his mount and began to throw out the contents at the feet of Vara’s pede. At first, absurdly, she thought he was throwing down bunches of overripe bab fruit. They spattered onto the crust of sand, scattering tiny crowns of red drops where they fell. Drops of blood.

Not fruit bunches.
Heads.

One rolled and came to rest against Vara’s toes. She stared, seeing and yet not comprehending. How could it be her son’s eyes looking up at her from the ground? How could it be? He had ridden out with his father and brothers and friends, a hunting trip. Just a hunting trip, after the desert elans, or tasty night-parrots. Her eyes went from head to head as they rolled—but her mind lagged behind, and her ears hardly heard the keening of the other women.

“Your husband and his brother and your sons,” Davim said. “We left the others in the desert for the spindevil winds to cover.”

Stricken, Vara began to shake. Makdim’s head had fallen face down, but his hat had come off and she knew that balding patch and the way his braided hair curled around his ears. And that over there was Bejanim. Gentle Bejanim, Makdim’s brother, who had travelled to the great Scarpen cities and returned with such tales of wonder. His head had landed on its neck, so that he appeared to be buried chin-deep in sand. Impossibly, he seemed at peace, sleeping. She dragged her gaze away, her attention snagged by the voice that was still speaking words to her, meaningless words concerning a world that no longer existed.

“The Watergatherer rules here now, woman. Submit to us—or die. The choice is simple. Join with us as your menfolk would not, and we will take you to a victory in which you need never fear for your water again, in a world where we need never bow again before those who blot out the sky with their buildings. Or you can defy us, and die now.”

Vaguely she was aware of Irinat, fat stupid Irinat, throwing herself at Davim’s feet in submission, sobbing. Vaguely she was aware of others looking at her for leadership. The old woman’s sharp eyes saying things that spoke deep in Vara’s soul. The girl from the Gibber looking at her with indifference.

“Respect not the spindevil wind and you reap its wrath,” she said. “That is my prophecy to you, drover. You have stirred the sand of the dunes; your time will come to receive just harvest.” Without haste she wrapped her shawl tight around her head and shoulders, gathered the reins together and pulled herself up onto the lead segment of her pede. One of the women gasped. Several of Davim’s men stirred angrily and would have intervened except that Davim made no move to stop her.

She turned the head of the beast away, clumsily because she had never before controlled the reins from the back of a mount. Then she jabbed the riding prod between the segments, pushing deep into the vulnerable flesh. The animal—unused to such abuse—responded immediately. It raised itself up onto the points of its feet and leaped forward, plunging straight into the waiting group of Reduner warriors. Mounts scuttled sideways to dodge and Vara broke free of the encircling group.

Behind her one of the men gave a snort of disparagement. There was no way that a transport packpede laden with water could outrun a myriapede hack. “Shall I run her down?” he asked Davim, his eyes gleaming at the thought.

“Send a zigger,” Davim said.

With a disappointed shrug, the man reached behind to his zigger cage. When he allowed a single zigger to crawl into his zigtube, the other ziggers went into a frenzy of frustration at having missed out on the opportunity of a meal. The man turned to face the direction that Vara had taken. The riders around him drew back to give him an open view of her flight, even though they doubtless all wore the perfume of the tribe.

The man raised the tube, sighted along its length, and tapped on the side to release the cover.

The zigger flew.

There was a collective sigh from the women as the animal flew true: straight at the first moving thing it saw when the tube opened. And then it was gone, gathering speed until it was a blur against desert sands, invisible to the naked eye, a tiny missile with deadly intent.

Davim did not even wait to see it hit. He turned back to the women. “Your menfolk no longer exist,” he said. “The Scarmaker tribe no longer rules the Red Quarter. Choose your fates.”

In the distance, the red of Vara’s shawl momentarily flared as if caught in the wind, then the figure on the back of the packpede faltered and slumped. One by one the women dropped to their knees on the red sands, until the only person standing was the old woman, Zuzan, finding her final dignity.

Davim shrugged. “Kill her,” he said indifferently. Then, as someone speared her with casual skill, he turned to the man who had sent the zigger after Vara. “Go get that packpede back,” he said. “Leave the woman out there for the desert cats to fight over.”

He turned to the rest of his men, smiling. “The Red Quarter is ours,” he said. “The woman was right: there will be those who reap the wrath of the spindevil winds—but it is
we
who are the spindevils.” He grabbed one of the Watergatherer banners from the saddle of another rider and waved it high. “The Quartern will feel the greatness of the wind sweeping out of the dunes!”

Vara would have said he was a man who wasted his water on flamboyant gestures, but Vara was not there to see. Far away, still slumped over the back of the running pede, her shawl clutched in her hand, she gave a smile, part grimace—and all hatred. She came from a long line of sandmasters, and in her family, everyone knew how to deal with a lone zigger. Her shawl, thrown like a bird catcher’s net and then slammed against the pede’s back with the zigger caught in its folds, was now soiled.