Blackdog (31 page)

Attavaia leaned over and kissed her cheek.

“Why…stone?”

In a whisper herself, Attavaia told her. Enneas seemed to be sinking deeper into the bed, shadows taking her face.

“Tha's good. Tha's funny. Go'ess in a stone. You b'have y'self in Nar'barkash, you hear? My mama's—”

“I know. She's Narvabarkashi. Save your strength.”

“F'what? Used to visit Gran'mama, Grn'papa. Those priests…”

“What about them?”

“Goo’-lookin’ men. Pre'ey girls, too, but ha'some men. You be careful.”

Attavaia made herself smile. Enneas drifted away and Attavaia drifted too, emptiness filled by the throbbing of her leg.

“Tell Shevehan I'll miss him,” Enneas said once, distinctly. “Tell Mama I'm sorry.”

“Of course.”

“Attalissa, it hurts. Sorry, ’Vaia.”

That was the last she spoke.

Master Mooshka came back at some point, asked if there was anything his brother the physician could do. Attavaia, understanding what he offered, touched Enneas's face.

“I don't think so,” she said. “I don't think she's feeling anything now.”

He rested a hand on the top of her head and went away again.

Enneas died sometime soon after. It was not yet evening. Attavaia sat there holding her hand, not quite caring if Tamghat came in person looking for rebels or fugitives or Sera herself. After a while one of the servants came by with a cup of tea, which she set down very quietly, returning with Mooshka and his brother the physician. When Attavaia tried to rise from the bed she fainted.

Red light came and went through eyelids she could not drag open, and the touch of her clothes on her skin was too heavy. Her tongue felt foul, sweet and heavy and bitter behind it.

“The smaller bone of the calf's broken,” a man's voice said. The physician again. “I don't care who was dying, you shouldn't have left her sitting there like that all day, you should have said she was wounded. It's set and splinted. Keep her on her back, if you want her fit to travel when her gang comes back, if they ever do. This'll be no town for a crippled beggar.”

She did force her eyelids apart then. They felt glued together.

“How…long?” she slurred. The stone was a lump under her pillow. She remembered ‘Rusha putting it there, guiding her hand to touch it under her head.

“Back with us, are you?” The man frowned, as if he did not entirely approve of that. “Give it two months before you try hopping. Four months before the bone's strong and fit to run on. Mistress Jerusha, stop scratching around those stitches or I swear I'll splint up your arms and keep you immobile a month, too.”

“Yes, Uncle,” Jerusha said, too docile to be true, so perhaps Attavaia was falling back into the darkness, where she heard her own voice saying, “Uncle? I have to go home, tell them I have to go home, I have to take Enni home.”

“’Vaia—the stone. The gift you brought her? Is it some Lissavakaili thing? Do you want us to bury it with her?” Jerusha stood awkwardly at her father's side, hands twisting together. Her uncle had ordered her to bed, too. Attavaia remembered that. Thought and memory came and went in odd, hazy bursts.

“Gift? That was Enni's joke. Where is it?” she asked in a brief panic. “Don't bury it. It's a…it's a sacred thing. We're…I'm…I have to take it to…to a holy place I know of, for Sera. Don't ask more. I don't want you to know if Tamghat…if Tamghat asks. Bad enough you've helped us.” And then she slid into darkness again.

They buried Enneas early the next morning in the caravanserai yard, with her hands folded on the Northron sax, and as soon as it was done Master Mooshka's folk scattered a heap of hay over the grave and turned his horses loose, to hide any signs of new digging with their trampling and scuffling. Mooshka carried Attavaia down for it, and she said the prayers, quietly, so that Attalissa's name did not fall on other ears, no matter how loyal they might be to Mooshka and Jerusha. That the two mountain women were no caravaneers, that they were something in the tangle that had failed to overthrow Tamghat's chiefs, only put them with all the household in conspiracy, and that was enough for the servants to know, even if they were all kin, near or remote, to Mooshka or his late wife and held silent by family loyalties and their own honour.

Later the same day, they bundled Attavaia down the stairs again in panic, with word that Tamghat's people were checking the caravanserais for fugitive warriors from the so-called rebel septs. Mooshka was Rostvadim—not, by his name, counted a rebel.

“It won't do any good,” he said. “I've spoken openly against Siyd often enough. And they'll remember my wife was Battu'um, and Treyan my friend.”

They buried Attavaia in a tall stack of fodder in one of the arched alcoves, stuff meant for the camels, coarse, prickly shrubs and weeds and branches. Then they put one of Mooshka's own camels and her calf in, and fastened the gate. The camel yawned and made pleasure-filled snorting noises, and Attavaia, deep in the furthest, darkest corner, prayed she would confine herself to nibbling around the edges, and that camel calves were not playful and had no urge to clamber onto heights. Enneas would laugh—she pushed that thought down. She tracked the search anxiously by sound, thinking of some clever person probing the stack with a spear, but when the camel suddenly blew through its nose and then did its gurgling-pipe noise and stamped, she understood why she had its company, and a man said, “Damn, but they're ugly things,” before moving away.

That was the only search, and they carried her back up to Jerusha's room. Jerusha tended her like a sister, far quieter than before, all her sharp edge seeming ground away. Attavaia wished wearily for her old sarcasm, which at least did not go cowed and defeated.

Some days after Enneas had been buried—Attavaia lost count, but it might have been five, or a week—she heard shouting downstairs.

“You'll put us all in danger!” Mooshka roared. “You and your tongue. Think of the household, for once, and not just yourself!”

“I'm going!” Jerusha screamed. “And if you weren't such a coward you'd come with me!”

“Don't be a fool! If they're going to bring themselves to lie and swear fealty to save their children's lives, even Sera will forgive them, if it means they're still here to fight for her, later. You'll be dead before you've got more than six words out, if you start crying traitor on them.”

“I'm going!” Something thumped and crashed, crockery shattering, maybe, and after one female cry of dismay there were no more voices.

“What was all that?” she asked Ghiziam, Mooshka's sister-in-law who looked after the accounts and ran the household, when Ghiziam came up to sit with her, bringing her sewing to keep them both busy. Attavaia threaded her needle, found the pieces of shirt she had basted together the day before, and began on the seam of a shoulder. It was something to do with her hands, something to fix the mind on, better than lying and thinking,
If I hadn't sent her with Jerusha, if I'd gone with them, if we hadn't tried to get lowlander help…if Uncle wasn't in hiding and were here, to make the right choices for me…

Ghiziam's lips thinned. “Jerusha threw a jar of oil at her father.”

“Why?”

“To make him let her out the back door.”

“Where did she go?”

Ghiziam sighed. “Word is, there's something afoot in town this morning. They say there's mercenaries, what you were calling Tamghati—his folk, not caravaneers—gathering at Sera's spring and in the market. A young lad from next door came by just now, said he'd heard the chiefs were going to be taking oaths to Tamghat at the spring.”

“Jerusha's not a fool. She'll keep her mouth shut.” But Attavaia's doubt must have showed in her voice.

Ghiziam drove her needle like it was a dagger and shook her head. “She's young, and that's the same as saying a fool, in most cases—’Vaia, I wouldn't include you in that.”

“All the chiefs?” Attavaia asked, and Ghiziam nodded grimly.

The stories that came into the town, passing among kinsfolk and neighbour to neighbour or swept in with the caravans, which could not halt their progress or turn aside just because Serakallash had fallen to Tamghat, agreed. The bulk of Tamghat's
noekar
and his mercenary army had attacked the outlying septs on the same dawn he had ridden into Serakallash. It was as Attavaia had suspected and Sera had confirmed, but worse. They had known exactly where they were going. They attacked and killed the sept-chiefs with their entire families, or captured them. Over the past week the captured were brought in chains to Serakallash and imprisoned in the sept-halls, which were the strongest fortified houses of the town, and all now Tamghat's. The heads of those chiefs and their families who had been killed were piled in a cart in the market, stinking under a cloud of flies that gathered and would not land.

Rumour abounded, though, of sept-chiefs who had sent children away with the caravans, or slipped away themselves, who would reappear at the head of an army of desert tribesmen or Marakander mercenaries, or with a cohort of wizards, to drive the warlord out. But Mooshka said he knew for a fact that two of the three admitted wizards in town had fled with the caravans themselves, and any sept-chiefs who had warning of the attack in time to send their children away were probably in Tamghat's pocket, and had had no need to do so.

But he had looked, Attavaia thought, like a man who knew more than he said. She wondered who had escaped that mattered to him, and if they would be any help. Treyan and his family, she could hope. But she doubted it. Treyan Battu'um had not seemed the type to run and hide; like Sister Chanalugh, he would have seen it as his duty to protect those under him to his heart's last blood.

Ghiziam looked up from her seam and gave Attavaia a crooked smile. “I've seen you pray, Sister. Do you pray for us, as well?”

“Every day.”

Ghiziam nodded. She was one of the few to know officially who Attavaia was. Most of the rest of Mooshka's household probably knew as well, and still talked of her as a laid-up caravaneer.

“The spring's gone dry,” Ghiziam said matter-of-factly. “Sera's dead. The wizard killed her. So please, even when you go home, pray for us. We can't pray for ourselves any longer.”

“You can,” Attavaia said, and slid a hand under the pillows that propped her up, to touch the rough chunk of sandstone she slept on. “You must. Sera may be gone, but she'll return. I promise that.”

Bad enough she made herself Attalissa's voice in the mountains; she did not need the weight of all Serakallash's belief on her as well. But Ghiziam appeared to take some ease from the reassurance. When she left Attavaia to the needlework and went off about her other chores, she seemed to walk a little lighter, for all that she frowned and went still at every noise below or out in the great courtyard, that might be Jerusha's return.

Attavaia kept at the shirt in a desultory way, but without Ghiziam's eye on her she could not force enough focus on it to stop herself brooding, listening, as Ghiziam had done for her niece. This room she shared with Jerusha had a deep window looking out over the yard, but it was filled with a carved latticework to screen the sun, and from the bed she could see only light and speckles of sky, and some sticks from an untidy dove's nest on the sill, nothing of what went on below.

Jerusha came back when Attavaia had almost given up listening for her. The bustle of the noon meal being prepared in the kitchen, which spilled out into the arcade and drifted in the window, along with the smells of spices and oil, gave way to a sudden stillness, and then rapid feet on the stairs. In the yard, someone was calling for Mooshka. Attavaia had swung her good leg over the edge of the bed and was trying to shift the bundle of splints and tight wrappings that was the other when Jerusha came in.

The girl flung herself on her knees by the bed, head on her arms.

Attavaia hesitated, not sure if Jerusha even remembered she wasn't alone. But she was crying, silently, achingly, and since Attavaia could hardly leave her to her grief in private, she put a hand on ‘Rusha's head, felt her shaking. Jerusha seized the hand and buried her face in Attavaia's lap like a child.

“What happened?” Attavaia asked gently.

“They're dead,” Jerusha said. “He killed them all.”

“The chiefs?”

Mooshka and Ghiziam stood in the doorway, with some of the household folk crowded behind. Ghiziam had a fist crammed against her mouth and Mooshka…Mooshka looked like a corpse, he had gone so pale.

“All of them,” Jerusha moaned. “The chiefs and their families. Everyone. Laicha's baby, even, Treyan's little grandson. No one escaped. He killed them all. The wizard had anyone who survived when he attacked them and burned their houses chained up in the Rostvadim Hall. All the chiefs and their families. No one escaped, not one, they were all there, from every sept. And he brought them to the spring, with a great crowd there, we all thought…a lot of the crowd were Siyd's folk and even they thought they'd be given a choice, asked to swear to him, and they weren't. They just shoved them down and cut off their heads. There were a hundred of his vassals there, more, and those Lissavakaili archers, and everyone was so afraid of his magic…everyone. Me! We all stood there and we let him do it. And Davvy saw me and she didn't…she didn't…she just smiled.”

Jerusha was shivering. Attavaia wrapped her arms around her, bent low and rocking her, as a mother might have.

“How can the gods see that and let him live? He's not human. He's a monster, a devil, worse than the Seven. How can they let him live? You know the gods. You're a priestess. You know these things.
How?
He killed our goddess. He killed babies. And Davvy.” She choked on her sobs and Attavaia shook her head.

“I don't know, ‘Rusha. I…we can't understand these things. The Old Great Gods have left the world to us and the gods of the earth. It's our fight, now.”

“He killed Sera. How can we fight him?”

“Sera isn't dead. Believe me. Believe she'll come back when Attalissa does.”

Mooshka came treading silently across the floor and knelt at Jerusha's side, an awkward hand on her shoulder.