The Lady (18 page)

“And how did you do it?” demanded Hallet.

“I—” Lin waved hand. “It's not something I could teach you.”

“Hallet,” said Marnoch. “Not here.”

“That wasn't any divine fire, that drove—whatever it was—from this drawing of the wands,” Hallet persisted. “It was you, but what kind of spell—”

“I couldn't teach you,” Lin repeated.

“And after that, better the folk believe the gods do march with us,” muttered Haildroch. “As I'm sure Catairanach does, in spirit, at least, if she can't lend any practical aid. Marnoch . . .”

“I know.” The war-leader took Hallet's arm. “Listen to Haildroch. Don't speak of this beyond the lords in council. Only those at the front saw what happened; let it be thought the goddess's work, for now, to give them heart. Look after Mag.”

Mag was rubbing her temples as if with headache. The other two wizards swept her away, to find their horses and servants and make ready to set out. Marnoch spoke a few words to the lords and ladies, and they, too, scattered, to speak to their captains and their village-captains. In a very short time the company was on the move again, travelling in a single winding column, with pack-ponies in the rear, no wagons. The lords rode with their own mounted bench-companions, but over the course of the day each of the four tended to drift to Marnoch and away again. A council on the move.

It was Deyandara they discussed. She knew it. Whenever they stopped to rest the horses and let the stragglers catch up, the lords all came together with the wizards and Gelyn. Deyandara didn't feel comfortable joining them but kept a little apart with Lin and her shadowing scouts. When the purple dusk began to stretch long from the west and they made their camp—the last at which they would put up the tents or risk cook-fires—the bard came to summon her, bowing low.

They met in the open, and again, the bench-companions of the lords made a ring, and beyond . . . it seemed half the camp gathered, beyond. Deyandara's knees had gone watery. She knew what this was about, but when Lord Fairu stepped forward she thought for a moment she was wrong, and it was a challenge of her truth instead, till he dropped to his knees.

“Lady,” he said. “Will you swear, in the name of Catairanach our goddess and Andara your god, and in the sight of the Old Great Gods above, that you are the bastard-born daughter of Palin, only brother to our queen Catigga, and that she so acknowledged you to be?”

Deyandara swallowed. Why did he have to be their spokesman?

Because he was the one who had challenged her word and impugned her honour. He was the one who had most need to demonstrate loyalty now.

“Yes,” she said faintly. “So far as I know.” Luckily that did not carry far. Marnoch's mouth twitched. But then he went down on his knees too, and so did Lady Senara, stiffly, and Lord Goran, and Dellan, with their bench-companions, the wizards and Gelyn, and on in a tide outwards. Only Lin did not kneel, but a queen's champion would not, in such a time.

“Then you are our queen,” said Lady Senara, “by right of blood, by word of the late queen's will in her own voice, and by acclamation of the lords on behalf of the folk.”

“And when the land is free again, we will ask you to call Catairanach on our behalf, that she may give you her blessing,” finished Gelyn. It did not sound quite like the proper ritual for making a queen. Shorter than what she remembered of her brother's ritual of accession following their—his father's death, and the goddess should surely have been there. There was no heavy royal collar for the bard to place around her neck, either, no ancestral sword or spear to be laid across her hands.

She should have spoken before now. When Catairanach denied her blessing . . . but they needed her. Four lords and the seneschal's son to take back the
duina
? The tribe was already falling apart in ruin like an abandoned house. The high king wasn't coming to aid them as a lord should aid those who followed him; he would be coming, when he finally felt strong enough to be safe, as a greedy neighbour, to chase off the brigands and plunder what they had left, to claim the land and rob the stones to build his own outbuildings. No wonder their goddess had already given up.

It was the other way around, surely. The tribe fell apart because their goddess took no interest in seeing a new king or queen quickly named and blessed, to unite them against their enemy, and made no effort to fight the strange powers of the foreign goddess and her priests but pursued instead her own secret purposes of assassination and revenge. Catairanach left them sheep without a shepherd, straying lost on the hills.

But it wasn't over. Folk stirred and rose and began murmuring to one another, but as Gelyn paced towards her, carrying a folded dark cloth in both hands, her bard's ribbons fluttering behind, they fell silent again, craning to see.

“Lady,” Gelyn said. “We've carried this with us, hoping by Catairanach's blessing to find you with the high king. It's not the collar of the kings of the
duina
, which is hidden safe against a happier time, but it is an heirloom of your house and a token of your accession. Wear it as a sign you are ours, that you will do us justice, and be the messenger of Catairanach to your folk.”

After an awkward moment Deyandara remembered she should kneel, which she thought was right; at least, she remembered her brother kneeling, when the god Andara brought his father's collar to him. The bards stood for the gods, when there was need of a proxy. She went down with a thump and had an impression of braided gold and green-eyed animal heads, snarling, ears folded back, as Gelyn shook the torc free of the cloth, but she couldn't see it as the bard worked it on, pinching a little in the process, and cold. Cats, maybe? Heavy on her collarbones. Not so heavy as the great breast-covering collar of the kings would be. The cord and the amulet bag with the token of her own god's hill, the carved thornwood disc, was an odd thing to wear beneath a royal neck-ring.

Gelyn raised her by her hands and turned to the folk, raised her own hands high and they cheered, crying out for Catairanach's blessing, long life, victory, and death to the warlord of Marakand.

So she was queen, by the will of the lords of the Duina Catairna, or at least those of them who had not run to their own halls. Queen until the goddess refused her. At least she was not queen for the high king's convenience, which was what this ritual, and the royal heirloom, were really about. There remained only for Marnoch and the four lords and ladies to kiss her hands, and then to ride through the camp, with Marnoch and Lin at her side, Faullen and Rozen at her back, to show herself to the folk. Her folk, the warriors of her company. They knew her and they cheered her, but without Marnoch to lead the folk, they would all be scattered and hiding, waiting for their lords to fall to the Marakanders or to come to terms with Ketsim, one by one.

She was Marnoch's banner.

CHAPTER IX

Oats and barley and wheat were green in the crooked stone-fenced fields of the valley bottoms, where what earth there was, was sweet, as Marnoch's small band drew closer to Dinaz Catairna, but the scouts, trying to thread a way through the long ridges of the high, bare hills that would keep them from friendly as well as unfriendly eyes, reported seeing few folk on the tracks that ran from village to village. There ought to have been more sheep on the fells, and cattle and horses, too, on the lower hillsides. The few they did see wandered on their own, without humans or dogs to herd them. One village the scouts dared to approach in the early dawn they found deserted, and a great raucous flock of crows rose to circle from the village-centre chestnut, fading away like a scudding raincloud over the hills.

“New graves,” they reported. “And what looks like a single grave-pit too, very new. A new hall where the threshing floor used to be, up on the rise above, with a paling around it, but the gate was open and the place empty, except for wandering fowl and swine. Graves there, too, a few new, and a pit again. Not the number of carts you'd expect, and the houses empty of things like baskets and tools. They've gone in good order.”

The lords were still mulling over that, when another pair of scouts came to tell of traces, two weeks old or more, of beasts being driven away to the northwest, sheep and horses and maybe wagons.

“They're trying to escape the Marakanders” was Deyandara's suggestion, one made in desperate hope, maybe. “They rebelled, there were killings, maybe of the lords set over them, the survivors fled, and the folk are heading for the far hills.”

“But to leave their sown fields is desperation,” Gelyn said. “And, I'm sorry, my lady, but I don't think you can be right, not if there were no signs of violence.”

Nothing beyond the graves, the scouts who had gone to the village said. No burning, no smashed storage jars, no slain dogs.

“But that wasn't all,” said the elder of the two who had found the trail of the village's departure. “The tracks of sheep and horses, plenty of those.”

“No cattle?” guessed Marnoch. “Catairanach prevent, not again. It's been three years.”

“Cattle straying abandoned on the hills, my lord,” said the scout. “Some look pretty bad, just lying there, not even switching the flies off. Snotty muzzles and running eyes. Dead cattle, too. I took a look, though from the carcasses alone it's hard to say what they died of. The crows have been busy.”

“Cattle-murrain.”

“I'd say so. And the folk've simply given up and gone.”

“Last night I dreamt of empty houses,” said the wizard Mag, low-voiced. “It won't be only their cattle. There's bad air here. It's taken their Marakander lord's household and half the village, so the rest have fled it.”

A scout who had gone to the village wiped his arm over his face, as if to brush off some clinging taint.

Lin shook her head but said nothing aloud to contradict that verdict; they pressed on without lingering.

Bad air, Deyandara thought. It didn't look the place for that; the brook curving around the village ran swift and white over stones, plunging downwards between the green and purple hills. The fevers that came from living on swampy ground or by stagnant pools didn't make for a sudden filling of graves. It was the privilege of wizards, like bards, to speak in poetry, but this was no time to call one thing another.

“Plague, or the bloody pox?” she asked for Lin and Marnoch to hear.

“There's been no plague come along the eastern road in years, that I've heard of,” said Marnoch. “The pox, maybe. It should have burnt itself out by now, though. I wouldn't think there were so many in any village this close to the
dinaz
who hadn't already survived it.”

You didn't take the pox twice, even if you'd only had the milder eastern disease it was said had first come from the desert road. Marnoch's scattering of pitted scars were fainter than her own. He was safe, there was that, anyway.

Abandoned fields and families wandering as nomads, with only their sheep to support themselves. The folk, like the folk of all Praitan, were few, and settlements scattered. There'd be grazing they could take without fighting, but for anything other than what their flocks could give them, they'd have to fight, and it wouldn't be just the herd-raiding that was half a sport and so rarely led to deaths. There would be brigand-gangs laired in the folds of the high fells, come the autumn's cold rains. The queen and the leaders of the folk of these particular hills should be sending a warband to fetch the wanderers home to their planted fields, but she certainly couldn't spare any of her few lords and their companies to deal with it now. All she could do was hope they didn't carry the murrain with them, taking a few apparently healthy cows or oxen along to drink from other village streams and leave dead on other village pastures.

Even if Durandau did succeed in driving the Marakanders out of Dinaz Catairna, the fighting would be far from over.

Marnoch's band did swing westward again, putting more distance between themselves and the chance of Marakanders riding in search of the vanished villagers. The scouts later the same day reported a small party coming from the west and the villages of the far hills, Grasslanders and desert folk guarding a string of camels; Marnoch sent Fairu's company to take them, since they couldn't be avoided. They lost one man themselves, killed most of the Marakander mercenaries, and brought two back captive. The woolly, two-humped camels, loaded with wool and woven cloth, beer and cheeses, were stripped of their harness and turned loose, most of the load abandoned, since the scouts knew nothing of handling such beasts, but they brought back the foodstuffs.

Deyandara was not witness to what went on with the prisoners that evening. Perhaps she should have been, but she thought of herself that night in the thunderstorm with the brigands, bound and helpless whatever they chose to do, knowing that a few punches to the face were the least of what she might expect. She couldn't bring herself to go to watch. Marnoch had certainly not wanted her there.

She did hear the woman scream.

Lin appeared at her side while she was grooming Cricket, singing an old, slow, sad song of lovers parted by war, while Rozen, with more enthusiasm than tunefulness and certainly more lusty cheer than suited the song or her lady's state of mind, joined in the burden.

“Lord Marnoch says they are to be killed, and will you come, my lady?”

She kept her eyes on a knot in Cricket's mane, teasing it free. “Do I have to?” Low-voiced, her back to Rozen. Faullen was taking advantage of the early halt to clean the mud-stains from Ghu's white mare, downstream in the brook of the valley bottom, but she had bench-companions of her own besides the pair of scouts, two warriors of each household of her five lords. They were never far away.

“No,” Lin said.

“Should I?”

A hand under her chin, tilting her head up. No amusement, no mockery in the set of Lin's mouth, the corners of her eyes, which made her look almost a different woman, older and younger in one. “They're your enemies, executed in your name. Do you think you should?”