The Leopard (Marakand) (13 page)

He didn’t really want to stay in a caravanserai. They tended to watch their gates very closely, with all the caravans’ goods and gear and beasts within to defend. An inn would be better, but first he paused in the road to seize Deyandara by the arm, when she incautiously rode within reach.

“If you say one word to embroider that story any further, I will beat you.”

“Let go!” She tried to pull away. “You’re hurting me.”

Ahjvar didn’t slacken his grip. “Do you understand me? Did you ever stop to think I had a reason for what I said?”

She glared, white-faced, every freckle standing stark against her pallor.

“If they take me, and I am yours, they will kill you too,” he said, and shook her for emphasis. “They will drag you up to the palace plaza and hang you. They will probably torture you first. You won’t be able to say you just met me on the road; you don’t know anything about me. You won’t be able to say your royal brother will be angry, because they won’t care about that, unless it’s to use you as a hostage and hang you later, once they’ve got what they want from him. Hanging is not a nice death, and not always a quick death.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but he thought it fury, not pain.

“We’re blocking the road,” Ghu said, low-voiced warning. Ahjvar turned the girl loose as a party of caravaneers afoot came by, all dusty coats and headscarves and the rank reek of camels and sweat, arguing with one another about whether to go to the bathhouse or find food first.

He chose an inn not quite at random, a place with the usual flat Marakander roof and a useful accretion of porches and galleries. As the aristocratic bard’s retainer, it made sense for him to handle the money, and the girl’s fuming silence could be mistaken for lordly disdain. A private room, stabling for four horses, a meal to be brought to them. Mistress Deya was obviously a woman of wealth, about as much in keeping with a youthful bard as having her own sworn spearman. Ghu disappeared with the horses as befitted a responsible groom, which he would have done just the same if he’d been emperor of all Nabban. He reappeared, draped with the last of the baggage, to find Ahjvar staring out the window and Deyandara, arms folded, face tear-stained, squatting with her back against the wall.

“I didn’t touch her,” Ahjvar growled, looking around, though there was no accusation in Ghu’s face. The girl’s brief outbreak of weeping had been silent and private. Anger, definitely. A better outlet than shouting or throwing things, when it was him she was angry with. But maybe it was herself. He wasn’t feeling sorry for her. She’d been a fool, and folly could get her killed. She was so damned young.

Ghu nodded, dropped the bags and patted the girl’s head in passing, joining him at the window. A rap at the door announced a servant hard on his heels with a tray of filled dumplings and a jug each of wine and water.

“Eat,” Ahjvar told them. He couldn’t face the food, himself. He needed to think. To walk. Somewhere well away from anyone he wanted to hurt. “I’m going out. Ghu, you explain things to her again, in nice easy words so she can understand, and then take her out and trot her around to wherever a bard might reasonably go, if she were hunting new stories. Don’t forget to lock the door and bar the window-shutters. There’s a porch roof right below, easy to get in.” Or out. “You keep the key, not her. Keep her out of fights and don’t let any drunken caravan-mercenaries fondle her.” What else? He tossed the man a purse. “In case you need it. Don’t give it all to beggars. Don’t buy any more horses.”

“Sword,” Ghu said.

“Who said I was going into the city?” He didn’t plan on it, not yet. But he unbelted the sword and handed it over. “I should be back before too late. Don’t come looking for me if I’m not.”

Ghu gave no answer to that. He would, of course. Ahjvar left without a word to the bard.

“Dumplings,” he heard Ghu saying to her. “Here, try. They’re good. Spicy.”

There were a few purchases he wanted to make, anyway. The caravanserai district was always a good place for picking up odds and ends. And he needed a new rope.

Travellers new-come to the city would find themselves a bathhouse, have their linens laundered, find a tavern, hear the news. Not in necessarily that order. Ahjvar walked, and kept his ears open. He bought his rope, then picked up a cameleer’s coat in a lean-to against a caravanserai wall that functioned as a pawnshop, in another, a couple of the striped shawls or scarves of the sort caravaneers so often wore swathed about their neck and shoulders, ready to pull up over head and face against the dust. Deyandara wore a scarf, but it was a very Praitannec weave and too memorably bright. He bundled it all up and found a tavern serving something claimed for Northron-style beer, though he didn’t see many Northrons drinking there, and the host was a woman from the Great Grass. Tasted it and thought he knew why his was the only blond head in the place. Listened, asked a few questions. They’d travelled so swiftly and secretly, keeping well away from even outlying farmsteads, dodging other travellers until they were on Marakand’s own highway rising to the pass, that he’d had no news out of the east. Even with an army, the high king could have been in the Duina Catairna by now, if he’d set out as soon as he had word of the queen’s murder. If Durandau had taken such swift action, Ahjvar wanted to know.

This tavern was full of gangs come in from the west who knew nothing of the Duina Catairna and cared less. Useless. Still in his role as Clentara, he wandered on, tried other places. Picked up a rumour here, a word there. Had a worrying thought about the rider in the red tunic, as the red did mean temple guard, and it was couriers who rode ponies between the eastern and western forts and the city. Temple courier. Watching for Praitans? Not much he could do now if they had been. What he really wanted to know about was the Voice, though. She kept to the temple and was never seen in public, these days. Was she the real power in the city? No one knew. The other chief priests weren’t spoken of as if they were rulers; nor was the Lady herself. It was always
the temple
and
the Voice
. Maybe Catairanach had identified her enemy accurately after all.

No curfew in the suburb, though by full dark the place had quieted down, most gangs gone to their rest. He found a wineshop full of stragglers, edged into them, asking about the road, as anyone might, and the army the city had sent to the Duina Catairna. He’d had to leave his homeland out in the east, not their business why, was it? Wandering a bit now, took service with a lady to get here, but didn’t think much of her. Wondering if there would be much profit in going back to join this army, was there any land promised . . .

There was not, he was told, and no hope of it. The temple had hired the war-band of a Grasslander chieftain last winter, and they had their own temple guard and their own corps of holy warriors, the Red Masks, as well. The Grasslander warlord Ketsim might take him, if he really thought he wanted to take oath to Ketsim, but he wouldn’t get any land out of it.

“The same godless bastard that was governor of Serakallash after the Lake-Lord took it, and we all thought he was dead when Sera retook her town,” said a Red Desert man with a horse-tattooed face. “And up he pops here, not so long after, with far too many of the Lake-Lord’s scum trailing after him. Collected them on the way, I guess. They’ll sell their spears to anyone. The temple bought them and sent them Over-Malagru.”

“It’s the temple will be getting what land’s going,” someone else said, leaning in from the shadows. “No hope for you, friend. Go home and marry a rich widow, if you want land.”

Someone threw in a story about someone they knew who’d done just that, only to have the first husband turn up, not lost with his caravan after all, and how the threesome settled down together, back in the Western Grass . . . After a while, Ahjvar asked a question or two about the Voice. Goddess and queen of the city, wasn’t she?

Ignorant tribesman. The business of setting him right took another two jugs of wine, which somehow he ended up paying for, and a platter or two of greasy flatbread and salty cheeses, likewise. Not only was the Voice neither the goddess nor a queen, she was possessed, she was mad, she was the power ruling the city, she was a hermit living in a cave beneath the temple, she was kept locked in a tower above the ravine—this though anyone on the road could see there was no tower—she didn’t exist at all. The Marakander-born mistress of the wineshop grew fed up with them and squeezed in on the bench between Ahjvar and the Red Desert man. He flinched away from her, losing the thread of what he had been saying. He hated being trapped, hated being touched at all. He let nobody but Ghu that close to him, and pinned against a heavyset Grasslander, he had nowhere to go when the woman spread herself contentedly, thigh against his, to set them all straight over a third? fifth? jug, for which nobody seemed to need to pay. He ducked his head, shut his eyes a moment against the panic, the racing of his heart, forced his breath to slow, hands to unclench on the table. Pay attention, now that he’d finally worked them around to what he wanted to know. The Voice of the Lady was not the ruler of the city. The goddess of the deep well, the Lady herself, was; she spoke for the Lady, that was what
Voice
meant. And no, you could not go and ask her to tell your fortune, she wasn’t some hill-folk soothsayer, she spoke only to the priests.

“And it’s a base lie that she’s mad.” The woman glared around the table. “She’s a pious, holy woman living a modest, secluded life, not like some of the priestesses you hear about in foreign parts.”

A few sidelong glances, a few shrugs. Grass and desert folk; their gods and goddesses had no priests.

“She lives in an apartment in the old hospice along the ravine, where they used to tend the dying in my father’s day. I should know; my own brother’s wife’s sister is a cook there. Towers and caves! The Voice spends her day in meditation and prayer, and the world would be none the worse if a few more did likewise.”

“What about the Lady, then?” Ahjvar—or Clentara—asked. “Have you ever seen her?”

Shock. Only the priests and priestesses, and the Red Masks, were permitted to visit the Lady. Not like some gods, out carrying on like everyday people.

“Goddess in the mountains took a human husband,” a darkly tattooed Westgrasslander man said, and started a wandering tale about a battle up in the Pillars of the Sky and a lake-goddess there, wizards, demons; the human husband never did get into the story. Hard to say what his point actually was, as he kept forgetting what he had said, repeating himself, interrupted by the Red Desert man; it became a muddle of horse-goddesses and sandstorms and warrior-priestesses. The wineshop-keeper’s hand was doing some wandering too. Ahjvar let the conversation go and tried to shut her hand out from his mind, since he couldn’t do much else about it without drawing attention to his doing so. They were on—he’d lost track, but it was someone else paying now, and he hadn’t even been drinking, really, since the first cup. A lot of gesturing and sloshing took care of most of it. His good tunic, too. He caught the woman’s hand and pulled it up to the table. Avoided her eye. She wasn’t getting the reaction she hoped for, and he kept thinking of how a knife between the bones of the wrist would keep her damn hand on the table where it belonged, which wasn’t quite the shape of his mind, Great Gods, please. It was a plump, beringed hand, clean nails, and it turned, fingers closing over his. She oozed a substantial pair of breasts around his shoulder, lips hotly crawling on the back of his neck.

Sliding under the table as if drunk to insensibility would just leave him stuck there getting kicked for the next hour or so. Leaning over to the desert man and saying, “Here, I don’t want her, she’s all yours,” might get him kicked too, more maliciously. A graceful exit, that was what was needed, now that they were onto the merits of Serakallashi horses, and the Voice was a topic long in the past. Before he turned the table over and killed someone, without even the madness to blame it on.

“Here,” he said, and squirmed out from under the wineshop-keeper. “You talk to my friend. Ou’side a moment. Be back.”

He staggered away, bouncing, he hoped convincingly, off a few other tables, making a wide circle around a boy collecting empty cups. Found the street door by fumbling his way along the wall. He stumbled down the steps from the porch. Movement in the corner of his eye, shadow on shadow in the black corner by the door, scent of a body.

He continued unsteadily along the dusty, churned-up lane, turned the corner of the building, as a man might in such need.

Another corner. Around that too. He waited. Waited. Finally heard breathing, cautious movement, and then saw the hint of solidity in the darkness. He shoved the heel of his hand into where a face should be, kicked high as the shape reeled back with a grunt, and heard the man fall, followed by the reassuring moan of a body that wouldn’t be getting up in haste.

Thief, preying on drunken caravan-mercenaries? Working alone didn’t seem too wise. Most of them would be leaving in straggling gangs. A spy set on to watch the little band of Mistress Deya, because of all wandering Praitans a bard was the most obvious agent to be gleaner of information for her high king? Fast work, if so, but his party was perhaps not so hard to find. He left the man curled up groaning and slunk warily back to the inn, where the young porter wasn’t any too pleased to be woken to let him in, but since he’d left by the door, better to return by it as well.

Ghu had, of course, given up the one bed, easily big enough for three, not that he’d intended to allow her into it, to the girl’s modest solitude. Ahjvar stripped off his wine-reeking tunic and shirt to join him on a thin mat on the floor.

“Nice evening?” he asked. Deyandara seemed to be asleep. He didn’t much care if he did wake her.

“We met a family of Stone Desert singers. They juggle knives, too, and dance on a rope. Deya told a few stories.”

“Kept her out of mischief, anyway.”

“About the Duina Catairna, mostly. It seems to be on her mind, and of course, people are interested, since Marakand’s at war with the Catairnans. She was looking,” said Ghu, in his ear, “at your sword. I took it away from her. How about you?”