The Lady (24 page)

No humour in his look now. If she were some decoy, she could expect a short wedding night.

“Yes, I'm Deyandara. But—but Catairanach can't approve a wedding like this. She won't give her blessing for a wedding by force. Whatever you do on the Grass—”

“Hah, on the Grass your brother cut off—” he grinned and made a gesture that left her in no doubt what was to be cut off, “if he catch. Or you do,” he added. “More likely you, eh, if you good Grasslander woman? But not little Praitan girls. Not Praitan kings. Weak folk, Praitans. Weak gods.”

There was a knife in her sling. It probably wasn't very sharp.

“Catairanach,” he said again and, his face serious, touched hers with his fingertips. She flinched away. “She curses us,” he said, and touched his own face.

“The pox,” she said.

“Yes. It comes, the burning. I feel it. Very sick. Very tired. They come from villages, they say, Praitans curse us, many die, but Chieh, others, they know it, they say the pox, from the sea, from the desert. Fevers in the
dinaz
, fevers in my hall. They start to die, my folk, this week, here. But I marry you, goddess blesses, land is good, happy wife, we live. Can be good king, was good lord of Serakallash. You see?”

She shook her head. “It won't work. Catairanach won't—” But if he didn't believe that, he didn't have any use for her. Beyond the obvious. She drew up her knees, made herself small, and felt she was back on that hillside in the rain, with the brigands—outlaws of the Duina Catairna, her own folk—debating her death at their fire. And no Ghu to come throwing stones at them and cut her free, no Ahjvar . . . her hand went to her throat, the animal heads of the torc and the spot between them his blade had pricked. No Marnoch, waiting, trusting she'd come back. She blinked furiously until the heat of tears faded. Ketsim was watching her. He looked old, older than he maybe was, and tired, as he said. He touched her face again, the dimpled scars of the eastern pox, which had been bad enough for her, down her throat.

“Little leopards,” he said. “A kitten, I think. Soft claws.” Down to circle her nipple with a thumb, cup her breast. She couldn't breathe. “Go to sleep, little Praitan kitten,” he said. “Too tired, too sick, for a fourth wife tonight. If Deyandara's goddess has no blessing even now, we all die, I think. Deyandara too, if her king dies. No one else will have her. I say so. Lug knows to do it.”

He fumbled with the blanket, eyelids sagging. After a moment she helped him, covering him like a child before she crept, quietly as she could, to the window.

How soundly did they sleep below? She sat, good arm hugging her knees, waiting. The singing had long died away; would they sleep, or did they keep a watch? If she could get to a horse—no, better to climb the wall. With one arm? Would Catairanach send a fog to hide her again, if she prayed, if she begged?

The trapdoor rose, carefully, without a creak or a thump, and Chieh appeared.

Deyandara raised a face embarrassingly tear-stained, wiped it on her sleeve, and glared defiance.

Chieh went to her lord, knelt and felt his forehead, shook her head and came to Deyandara.

“He'll sleep the night away, and probably the best thing for him. Barley-spirit in his wine. He's dying, isn't he? It is the bloody pox they've had here since the winter, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Lug's taken the fever now,” Chieh said, and sat down beside her. “We've been married twenty years.”

Chieh didn't look old enough for that, but Deyandara didn't say so. Couldn't make herself say she was sorry, either, when the man had orders to kill her if Ketsim died.

“My father did inoculations,” said Chieh. “You know about that? You take scabs from someone, best someone with the eastern pox, but even if it's the southern you can, and—”

“I've heard. People die. People who weren't sick, before.”

“Not very often. Hardly at all. Just—once in a while. My brother did. The only one my father treated who ever did. So he stopped. And I had the southern pox, but not the bleeding strain, and I lived. But I remember watching him. I know how it's done. When they first talked of disease spreading, six weeks ago, it must have been, I said to Lug, I can fix you so you don't die of this. You'll be sick a bit, but you won't die. And he said, no bloody way was I sticking his leg with someone else's pus, and I didn't argue.” She was silent a while. “Those bodies out in the houses—the living are rotting with the dead. You can't recognize faces. Friends. And the damned Praitans, the servants are sneaking away, and the ones that came over to Ketsim willingly, they're most of them as safe as you or I. They've had it, and still they're refusing to bury the dead. Saying they won't touch cursed bodies and they're not their dead. Treacherous bastards. They're waiting for us all to die so they can seize the
duina
themselves. There's ghosts out there, and the living, all weeping together.”

“Go back to Lug,” said Deyandara. “He needs you. I don't. I'm not going to leap out the window.”

“You remember who your friends are,” Chieh said. “You'll be a bone thrown among the dogs without me to look after you, once Ketsim goes to the road.”

“Where's Pagel?” she asked. “The soothsayer. You said Ketsim kept him.”

Chieh shrugged. “They're saying the Red Masks took him when they went. He'd have been no use to you anyway; Ketsim was forcing so much of whatever that hellbrew was, into him, that he had the tremors and twitches like an old man. His wits weren't in any better shape. No great loss.” She stood up. “I wouldn't betray my lord. He's been a good friend to me these long years, he'd have been no cruel husband to you, and many a girl's faced worse than an old man in her bed, but he's not got many days before the Old Great Gods call him and I've got to look to my future. So you remember, girl, you remember tonight. I was your friend.”

“I do remember.” She remembered Fairu, who didn't like her and had been going to switch horses to lead the supposed Red Masks after himself to save her, and Mag, who would have lured them with her wizardry, knowing it was her death, and Marnoch, most of all Marnoch. And Ghu, and Ahjvar. She touched the animal heads of the torc. Leopards. The pommel of Ahjvar's sword was a leopard's head. Chieh crept away again. After a while she tried the trapdoor, setting a candle quavering in the draft on the floor, but there was a bed made up right at the landing of the stairs below, where Chieh sat bathing Lug's face and chest with water in the light of another candle, singing softly in the Grasslander language, while he tossed and turned in his fever, so she lowered the trap softly as she could and went back to her window.

Maybe she slept, sitting there. She must have, because she grew stiff and her hips ached, and her shoulder. Water flowed around her, cool and clean. She wasn't surprised to see Catairanach standing by Ketsim's bed, mist eddying around her feet, water rippling the floor. The goddess turned, a shimmer of blue gown and brown hair that flowed down into the water, became the water, coiling around the room.

“You aren't meant for him,” the goddess said. “I sent you for the Leopard. Where is he?”

“He went to Marakand to kill the Voice. You told him to.”

“The Voice is dead. He should have come here.”

“I'm not answerable for him,” Deyandara snapped. She should have bitten her tongue. Her fear was worn out, nothing left. “I'm sorry, Catairanach.”

“He will come,” the goddess said. She looked down at the sleeping Grasslander. “He will. He must. I've seen it. You didn't give yourself to this one?”

Didn't she know? Deyandara felt her face heating. “‘Giving' wasn't going to come into it. But no, he's ill, too ill, he said. He fell asleep. Where were you? Why did you let this happen? How could you abandon your folk this way?” The last came out almost a wail, and she muffled her sudden sob on her arm, because maybe it was a dream, and maybe it wasn't.

“I have abandoned no one,” the goddess hissed, and for a moment she seemed to tower to the peak of the roof overhead. “Least of all you, last child of Hyllau, foreign-born though you are. The Lady of Marakand is great, and she hampers me in everything I reach to do, she and her wizard slaves. They sing and raise their foreign spells against me so that I barely have strength to leave my waters. She thinks she will come to set words against me in the end, if we do not retake our land, and my spring will be dry and I will be no more—but not yet. Not yet, and not ever, now that her army is fled, carrying hidden disease back to her city. Within her walls, her folk will burn in fevers and die bleeding and rotting in their beds. In Marakand's streets the pox will make itself a nest and never leave, and the yards will stand empty, the markets and the mines fall silent, the fields grow weeds, and it will be long before she has the strength or the gold or the men to think of conquest again. But this,” a hand flicked dismissively at Ketsim, who moaned and twisted in his blankets, “this is not my doing. I only make the way easy for it, a little, as I can. This is his curse on the blood of Hyllau and through the kings of the land, the land. Our weakness. This is Catairlau's legacy. We can all be thankful for it at last.”

She dwindled to a human woman again, squatted down, and put a hand on Ketsim's forehead, as Chieh had done. Whispered something, breathed on him. Not, Deyandara thought, any blessing of healing. She edged away as the goddess crossed, her pace slow as though she waded in water, to join her at the window. The stars were fading, the moon near setting.

“You don't yet know what it is to be a mother,” Catairanach said at last.

There wasn't much answer she could make to that. She didn't know what it was to have a mother, either.

“It is sorrow. To see what you love taken from you by the world, battered and twisted, changed. I tried to keep her with me, within my heart, but a child cannot grow so. He had gone. He was a wanderer, and I knew it, I knew he would not stay, and he did not. I tried, so long, to keep her safe in my waters, years and long years, lives of men, but finally I had to give her out to the world, and the world, the folk, would not understand that she could not be like they were, that she was meant to be different. How could she not be? She was my child, and his. They came to me, again and again, to complain of her, but they would not believe when I told them she was only willful, a little selfish, and what child is not? She only needed them to love her and guide her, and she would have grown straight and true. They were too harsh, too jealous of her. And in the end she would not listen even to me, and so she set her feet on a mistaken path. She was betrayed by the one who should have stood faithful at her side, and he destroyed her.”

“Lady Hyllau—the wife of King Cairangorm, was your daughter?” Deyandara asked stupidly. “Hyllau of the day of the three kings?”

“She wasn't meant for Cairangorm, but she was beautiful and she wanted to be the king's wife and the mother of kings. She was young and impatient. She didn't want to
wait
.”

“To wait for what?”

“For Cairangorm to die,” Catairanach answered, as if it was of little importance. “She shouldn't have accepted him, but she did, because he was king, and Catairlau wasn't. Since she did choose Cairangorm, she could have waited. He was old.”

Hyllau wasn't meant for Cairangorm, and Deyandara not meant for Ketsim. She shivered. The water of the spring was icy, and the branches of the mountain ashes weaving together overhead looked like flexing claws. Ketsim moaned again and the tower room was back around her.

“That's—the bards don't say she was your daughter.”

“Hyllanim her son didn't like them to sing those songs.”

Deyandara looked at the goddess's profile, her golden-brown eyes, like pebbles under water in a brook of the peaty hills. If she had been Hyllanim's grandmother, and Hyllanim was her own great-grandfather . . . that was very far removed. She didn't feel any kinship to the goddess. It took more than descent to make family. “I'm sorry. But it was a long time ago, and now—now we're here, with Marakand still ruling us, no matter how ill Ketsim is, and the Red Masks are still out there somewhere, even if they've abandoned Ketsim. Marnoch may be dead—”

“He lives.”

“Thank you.
Thank
you.”

“You're not meant for him, either.”

“I don't—”

“They've named you queen, but without my blessing. You wear the leopards of Cairangorm's house that Hyllanim rejected, but you are not queen of my folk and land, child of Andara's hills.”

“I don't—”

“You are meant for the mother of a queen, the mother of a line of kings.”

“Then I had better get out of here, hadn't I?” She wanted to go home, where her god was kind and thoughtful and—everything a father should have been, but which hers had not. This was like talking to her second brother's wife, who brought everything back to her gowns and her babies, in that order of importance, no matter what you said, as if she were deaf to any words but her own. “Maybe helping me walk out of here, as you took me out of the
dinaz
before, when Ketsim was coming to attack it, would get me out where I could find—your queen is going to need a father.”

“She will have one. He carries her now, until the time comes he can give her to you to bear and bring into the world again. But he can't hear me. He's denied me, and he cannot hear, and I think—I cannot even see him, but I know he is near, very near. The Lady has him, but she can't have slain him. The world holds him. It will, it must, till Hyllau is born into it again.”

“
What?
Catairanach, blessed lady, what do you mean?”

“He won't hear you. He won't hear me. But I think there is one he will hear. You will have to deal with that, afterwards, but it shouldn't be too difficult. You are so lovely, so like her . . . you can win him back. He wasn't meant for a lover of men. But the Nabbani spirit has already walked in your dreams. He still touches you. Perhaps he sees you, already. Perhaps he will come in time and bring Catairlau with him. If he doesn't—perhaps you will live long enough to bear a child, but you will be very unlovely to look upon, I fear. I don't think I can do for you what I did for him. So much of my heart went into him, to cradle her safe . . . I have made myself hollow.” The goddess touched one cool finger to Deyandara's forehead, her sing-song voice sharpening. “The Nabbani spirit who rides with the Leopard. Call him to you. I will not have the mother of my darling die this way, not have Catairlau come back to you too late. She needs you. Call him.”