The Leopard (Marakand) (27 page)

Zora had never been within. Even priests did not approach the Lady unbidden by the Voice, and dancers never descended to the well and the Lady’s presence. Inside, the building was a single room with a stone-flagged floor that was merely a ring around its outer edge. It was roofed with a dome, the open eye of which let in a plume of rain. A gilded lamp burned in a niche, shedding just enough light to show that most of what should have been floor was a dark and gaping pit. They started down a stair that descended in a great spiral, without railing or banisters. It was carved of soft rock; the treads were worn into hollows, cracked and crumbling, damp. The air grew cool and moist. Four of the priests carried light now, two ahead and two behind. Zora was in the middle, in the pool of shadow. The Red Masks held her up whenever she slipped. The stairs were slick. Zora tried to catch the eyes of the Mistress of the Dance when she looked back.

Revered Shija looked away.

The stairs were abruptly newer, sharp-edged and less carefully matched, some with narrower treads or shorter rises, so that Zora was not the only one stumbling, though a torch burned below them, at the foot of the stairs. The walls here showed no sign of working. They were in a natural cavern deep beneath the temple. The deep well. The sacred well. Except it was no well; it was a dank cave. Zora’s legs were trembling so that the Red Masks had to take all her weight. She couldn’t have run even if they had taken their hands off her.

This was what they worshipped? She wanted to scream hysterically at them,
It’s a cave, an empty cave
, but she could not. There was something. She felt it.

The priests fixed their torches to brackets spaced along the wall, spreading the light. The floor of the cavern was natural rock, uneven but water-smoothed, a mottled pallor stained with streaks of green and red, fissured with dark earth in which a few pallid, straggling weeds had sprouted to grow beneath the dome’s eye. A rotting boat, its planks crumbling, caked with a white paste of mould, sat near the foot of the stairs, long abandoned on the stone.

A veiled Red Mask stood guard, back against the wall on the far side of the cavern, unmoving.

There was a well after all. Of sorts.

Centre of the cavern. Mud and slick damp stone, and an edge of black water, reflecting torchlight. A crack in the floor.

The water rippled as though something beneath were stirring, breaking the firelight into jagged shapes. Mist began to rise. Zora sagged to her knees and the Red Masks let her down, into mud. There were six of them now, seven with the motionless sentry. Where had they come from? Darkness. Cavern mouth. Could she run for that darkness, hide, escape? Not if Red Masks could walk out of it. Not if she could not stand.

Her god was not this. She held that thought. This terror was not how a god should be.

“Holy Lady,” Rahel said. “Great Lady of Marakand, we have brought you a devout and beautiful and virtuous virgin to be your Voice.”

Nothing spoke, but tendrils of mist reached out towards her.

“Do you hear us, Lady?” someone else asked, speaking not to the well but to Zora.

She did not answer. Neither did anything else. Nothing happened. The Red Masks waited patiently. The mist wrapped around her. Her head ached, badly enough to make her queasy. That was all. It was cold, and she shivered from that as well as fear. The Lady’s divine light faded from the armoured Red Masks and the miasma of terror they carried ebbed with it. It was her own honest fear that kept her trembling. Zora clenched her hands to fists. Prayed, never giving her prayer a name.
Guide me, hide me, . . . save me.

Eventually, “It’s been so long. How did the Lady used to approve her Voices?” a priestess asked in a whisper.

“She came to them in dreams,” an old priest said. “She came in dreams and called them to her. They woke knowing they were called.”

“But it’s all different now. This girl’s not even a priestess. Are we wrong? How do we know?”

“The smoke,” said Revered Ashir, who must have hobbled after them. He stood propped on a younger priest. “It’s the smoke that makes the Voice receptive to the Lady.”

“Well, you should have said so before,” Rahel snapped at her husband. “We need to do this in the Hall of the Dome instead.”

“The Lady will receive her Voice in the deep well,” Ashir said, satisfaction in his voice. “I have all that is needed here.”

“Prepare it, then,” Rahel said. “Do you have the mask?”

Ashir made a noise of impatience. “The mask is for dignity, for respect of the Lady when the Voice ascends the pulpit. We’ll do without the mask. Shija, assist me.”

The Mistress of the Dance nearly scurried in her haste to obey, to not be seen hesitating any longer. Zora tried to crane around to see what they were doing, but a priest moved between them, backing away from the crawling mist.

That was
not
how you should feel about your gods.

“There’s . . . there’s nothing to fear, child,” murmured an older priest, a man who had taught her to play the zither. “The smoke helps you to open yourself to the presence of the Lady, that’s all. Then she will enter your mind and you will speak the words she gives you. It is as though . . . as though you are the trumpet, and she the musician. She will fill your mind with holiness and make you Marakand. It is a blessing. A blessing.” But he looked down at his feet as he whispered, not meeting Zora’s eyes.

“Lady of Marakand, you who hold the waters of the deep well in your cupped hands, be with us. Lady of Marakand, whose blessing is in the deep waters, protect us from all evils. Lady of Marakand . . .” Revered Ashir, pausing often to gasp for breath, was praying.

The Lady is not Marakand
, said her father’s voice in her memory.

I am not the Lady’s, Zora told herself.

Revered Shija, a sleeve held across her face, came to her with a censer wreathed in blue smoke.

“Breathe,” said Revered Rahel, and forced Zora’s head down almost to touching the perforated brass globe, as Shija dangled it before her. “Breathe deeply. You will be the vessel of the Lady, filled with a holiness you could never deserve.”

“Just breathe, Zora,” whispered the Mistress of the Dance. “It won’t hurt. It will be easier. The Lady knows what’s best, she must.”

“Breathe,” said Ashir, and his hand on her hair was possessive, caressing. “Be the daughter of the Lady.”

Zora struggled, almost freeing herself, until the Red Masks moved even Ashir aside and held her, pushing her head into the thickest smoke. It stank. She tried not to breathe, but it seemed to crawl in by her eyes, up her nostrils, between her clenched lips, until finally she had to gasp. And once she did that, breathing was easy. Slow and easy. She was dizzy almost at once.

Whatever poison it was, it was swift. Poison. Remember that. Poison. Not holiness. She began to feel drunk, her body slow and heavy, but her arms strangely light, floating at her sides, though the guards gripped her as if their fingers would meet in her flesh. Her head sagged. Drunk. She’d only been drunk once, celebrating, celebrating something . . . One of her free-days, going with a friend to visit her family, and they had been celebrating a brother’s betrothal. The hangover had put her off unwatered wine altogether.

This was bad. She floated, muttering prayer. It wasn’t the Lady she prayed to. Had the priests heard? This was very bad. She felt . . . something. Touching her. Finding out the shape of her, like a woman holding up a garment, wondering if it would fit.

She had seen the Voice. There had been no room left in her own mind for herself, that was what had come upon that pitiable woman, the day of the earthquake. The Lady had ceased to speak to her, to whisper words for her to pass on, and had taken her, wearing her skin. And now Zora was going to die that same life in death. She would dribble and drool and shamble empty-eyed, while the Lady put on the husk of her to rant and froth in the temple.

“Papa!” she cried, because who else was there to come to save her?

He couldn’t save her. He was dead.

“Hadidu—No! Not him. No!”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing yet. It’s just the smoke speaking.”

“Smoke smoke smoke.” She was babbling already and was there nothing in her mind but herself? It was her mind, her place, her palace, a cave within which she dwelt, alone, darkness, waiting, until the day she could open the door and let the secrets fly free.

“Fly,” she said. “Not yet. I didn’t—I didn’t tell—not yet.” Something brushed over her. “So beautiful,” she giggled. Her own voice, not her thought, was it? “G-Great Gods,” she said, and clamped her mouth shut. She was a child of—a child of—the Lady could not take that from her, could not, could not, she was afraid, and there was a hand reaching for her and she took it, a man’s hand, broad and strong. Papa? His hands had been narrow, callused fingertips but delicate, musician’s hands, don’t think that don’t think it, don’t give them his name. She squeezed her eyes shut too, watering in the smoke. Eyes, she remembered, dark eyes and restless energy, he was never still, even sitting by her mother’s bed as she gasped and choked her last, hands drawing music from his tanbur, soft and soothing, at odds with his burning anger, till when the end of his own life came he had lost even that. He had stared with wide unseeing eyes, arm twitching, unable to make music even with a drum. She took his hands in hers and held them clasped together, feeling them hot, hot, hot, as if he burned. Don’t think of him. Mankul, a street-singer, died of a brain-fever. Nothing more.

What more is there?
Voices murmured in the distance of her mind, one so faint she could barely hear it. One was her own. One laughed, greedily.

Mansour, of Gurhan’s Hill. He died mad, of a growth in his brain. He sent his daughter here to die.

Child of Gurhan, I name you the Voice of the Lady of Marakand. Hear me. Hear
me
. In Gurhan’s name. Tell my city, warn them, the Lady is not the Lady is—

Let go now. Let go let go let go. You will fall. I will catch you. I will hold you, close under my heart, my heart, you will be my heart, mine.

She clung with both hands, digging in her very nails, but the big rough hand was gone, as if she had grasped smoke. She fell.

Zora went limp, as the words poured through her, a flood.

“Oh, you have lied and lied and lied and you think you are not mine but the city is mine, my city, he is dead he is gone he is fled he is buried he cannot have you lying cuckoo child—Shall we tell the priests what you are who you are what you do who are you—

“My city, mine, none other, tell them tell them tell them—

“She is dead she is dead she is dead. Let the child speak for me, oh let the priestess speak . . .

“—the child will be my child my daughter no other my daughter mine good daughter good girl to speak for me she will be my daughter—

“Treachery deceit and lies and lies in the mouth of the cuckoo child and you hate me you betray me and they will come back for me—

“Close too close death is coming.”

She—who was she was not Zora . . . she saw him, standing, smiling at her, as he had stood all her life since she was a little child, but then he was only a shape, a man-shape, a hole in the air, outlined in yellow-white flame. She saw
her
, smoke and scarlet fires twisting into a pillar. She saw a sword like a splinter of stone, spinning frost across the stars. “Death is walking the road of death of dreams of walking death is sleep is ice is death—”

Hide!

Voices. Her own. Two. Three, screaming in her head, vying for her tongue.

“Papa!” she screamed, and once started could not stop—“Papapapapa—” until she choked on mud.

“My daughter, my Voice. Hear, Marakand, our Marakand. No other god, no other power no goddess no mother none but me no no god no—”

I see your heart, traitor child. I see. Secret servant of Gurhan, who was too weak, too small, too blind to defend your city. What can your little gods do, when death comes in ice and flame and great armies of godless men? I see your lies, and lies upon lies. And they are coming he is coming he must be coming a Red Mask died this day you see as I see you know as I know but do you understand? A Red Mask died who cannot die, cut down at the Eastern Wall and she the killer rode away. You know. He it must be he plans to take the Praitans from me, but we need them, we will have them, they are meant for ours and one by one we will have them. All our enemies gather. You, my enemy, my daughter, close under my heart. You thought to see my secrets, you thought to know my truth, to betray my truth.

“No!”

I have sought them. I see them now I see them now.

No
, someone wept, and it did not seem to be her own voice.
No, no more death no more no more.

“Traitor!” she cried. “I see him now, the traitor—traitor of long years, slow treason, slow rot, slow poison. He betrays the city, he betrays me, you betray me, dreamer of empty dreams—you cannot see—you cannot free them—you cannot see them you are mine he is—he is—he is—he the worm in the heart of Marakand the enemy the rebel gods dead gods no gods but the Lady—

“No!—

“The daughter of the priest of Gurhan the daughter my daughter fool no threat no threat a whisper a dream too weak—

“No!—

“Before me bring me the man Hadidu of the Doves he will stand before me—he will stand will stand he will know he will hear himself condemned out of your mouth out of my mouth. I see him now I know him now. The priest of Ilbialla lives he plots to be my death to free the feeble gods to be our death—no!—and now I see him I know him I hear him—”

I see him in your memory, Mansour’s daughter, do you know yourself a traitor now?

“—there is a wizard visits his house who dares to creep within our gates my gates are closed against him bring him bring me the wizard to face the Lady in the deep well as is my law my word the Lady’s word—

“
No!

“We are betrayed betrayed betrayed,” she shrieked, and the words piled atop one another, tumbling, cascading. A woman, somewhere, wept.