The Leopard (Marakand) (26 page)

Gurhan would make himself known to her, Mansour had said, that last long night. Gurhan whispered still in his dreams; he could hear the god’s voice, now that he could no longer see. Gurhan said that their enemy was in the temple of the Lady, hidden in the temple, within the temple, under the temple, and they must fight, or the city would perish.

Promise. Swear to me you’ll do what I cannot, and find the truth within the temple. Trust no one, not your mother’s family, not Hadidu, not Petrimos.
She swore. She didn’t even know any Petrimos, unless he meant the Barraya senator who had died in the cages. Someone long dead, anyway. And her mother’s family had disowned Samra when she ran away to marry Mansour; Zora didn’t even know their names.

As for Hadidu . . . but she had sworn.

Now, seven years older, she could understand it was the illness, whatever killed Mansour from within, leaving him bereft of sight and, ultimately, reason that had extracted that promise, not her father in himself. But then, she had been a child, and she had always been loved and protected and expected to learn and obey and hold secrets, too, because when he was gone she would be the last priestess of Gurhan, and someone must remember the old songs, the old dances. Someone must carry Gurhan in the heart. So she was used to secrets, to obedience; their survival depended on it. She trusted him. What did she know, in those days, of how the brain, the seat of thought, could be overthrown and broken by illness, just as surely as the heart or the lungs or the bowels?

There had been no one to help her do any of the necessary things when his breath finally stopped. She had used her last coin to pay the oilman next door for use of his handcart and dragged her father’s body out to the pauper’s graveyard in the Gore where the roads from Riverbend Gate and Sunset ran together, and then, having returned the cart, she left everything behind, like one walking to execution. She had gone to the temple, to audition for the dancers.

Zora had never had any doubt they would take her. She knew she was beautiful, even at an age when the body was all arms and legs and flat as a stack of bricks. That she could already sing and dance and play flute and tanbur was mere gilding.

She had passed the Doves, Hadidu’s coffeehouse overlooking the Sunset Ward market square, both going out to the Gore and trudging back. She hadn’t even thought of going in to ask the last priest of Ilbialla for help, still tangled, then, in her father’s web of fears.

Maybe it was time. She never had gone to the Doves on her monthly free-days, at first because she had promised her father and she half believed that he must have known some truth, that Hadidu was unfaithful, would betray them to the temple in return for, what, amnesty for Nour, who was a wizard? And then because she was ashamed, and she was a temple dancer; Master Hadidu would see her scarlet robes and think she betrayed
him
.

And then, even later, because she was shy, and she did not think he would know her.

Should she go and say,
Master Hadidu, I’m the daughter of Mansour and Samra, who were once your friends, and my father made me promise to enter the temple, so I did. I found what I’m sure you already know, that the Voice, in her own person, is a senile old woman, that even the priests fear the Red Masks, who never, ever raise their veils, and no servants ever enter their hall. That the wealth that pours in goes out again at the Voice’s word on walls and warriors and gifts to false senators who approve whatever Revered Rahel the Beholder of the Face tells them.

I can tell you that the Voice truly speaks with the Lady’s voice. I have heard her, hiding where I should not have been, and sick to my stomach with fear. If there is a monster in Marakand, it is the Lady herself, and though my father claimed Gurhan whispered to him behind the darkness of his eyes, my god never comes to me, to put thoughts into my head. Does yours?

She would. She had to. It was that or spend her life tutoring Family brats in calligraphy and music, dance and geometry, forgetting, as the city did, that there had ever been a god of Palace Hill. Not that she could see how mere remembering did anyone any good.

Zora tried stretching and then curling up small. It didn’t slow her rat-scrabbling thoughts any.

No getting up before the rising bell was sounded outside the dancer’s dormitory. A discipline priestesses did not have to keep. No grey showed at the dormitory window. How long till the dawn? Thunder still grumbled distant over the mountains, and just when she thought the storm must have passed from the city, the world lit white again and it sounded as though the clouds smashed together like falling rocks. Had she dozed after all, as she lay thinking of Master Hadidu? He had had some plan, he and Nour—and her father, back before he began to fear them and cut himself off from all his friends. The gods were not dead, they believed. And they could be freed. Nour travelled the eastern road with a caravan. Nour sought something that could help. That was all she knew. If there was something her father had wanted her to do in the temple, to further that end, he had never made it clear to her.

Perhaps he never knew himself.

Whisper, scuff of sandals and slippers, the hushed rustling of bodies. Zora’s nerves prickled to the alert. Again? Had one of the elderly widowed priestesses gone to the Old Great Gods? But their rooms were all on the lower floors, to spare them so many stairs.

A narrow crack of light widened, as someone opened the door at the far end of the dormitory. Zora blinked at it and sat up before she could wonder if it might be wiser to pretend to be asleep. A dozen priests and priestesses came in, rustling, scuffing, all the noises of people trying very hard to be silent. Several carried lamps. Two Red Masks followed. Her heart lurched. For Red Masks to come into the girl-dancers’ dormitory . . . that had simply never happened in all her seven years in the temple. A sickness rose into her chest, and she felt her pulse racing—
they know you, they’ve found you out
—but she swallowed down the panic, kept her voice merely puzzled.

“What is it?” she whispered, and a few of the other girls, waking at the stir, repeated the question.

Startled, the clergy whispered among themselves, which gave everyone else time to wake. The Red Masks stood aloof, but then, they always did. Zora frowned at them. One at least was definitely a man: tall, broad-shouldered. A pillar of menacing, fluttering drapery. Red Masks walked in her nightmares.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, as anyone might, no longer whispering.

“The Voice . . .” a priest murmured, but there was still a whispering among them, as if they debated, not certain.

If the Voice had warned of some danger, the priests shouldn’t stand muttering together in the girls’ dormitory. There shouldn’t be
priests
in the girls’ dormitory, on the upper floor of the priestesses’ hall.

If the Voice had revealed a traitor, a spy in their midst . . . But why now, after almost seven years, and she’d been into the forbidden building, the old hospice, she’d seen the Voice stripped of her robes and mask and veils, seen her vacant, slack face, and no goddess had woken in pitiable Revered Lilace to shout denouncement then.

“How many girls here are orphans?” demanded Revered Rahel, Beholder of the Face of the Lady.

A few hesitant hands were raised. Zora’s was not among them. “Why do you ask, Revered?” she asked.

There was no answer, but fingers pointed. “Zora’s an orphan too.”

“Yes, our senior dancer,” Revered Rahel said. “What’s your Family, dear?”

Zora shook her head. Her father’s family had been here before the city, her father always said. Not that she was about to make that fact known.

“Well, where are you from? What ward of the city?”

“Fleshmarket Ward, Revered.” That was in the entry register next to her name, along with a note that, since she was an orphan, the ward magistrate’s permission as her guardian had been obtained.

“Very well, very well.” Revered Rahel glanced over them dismissively. “You may put your hands down now, girls.” Those who were orphans did so. Half of them were Family, not merely by name. Bastards and orphans. Was Zora imagining it, or had Revered Rahel not bothered even to glance at those?

“And, Zora, you are accounted by all the most beautiful of the dancers.”

That didn’t seem to be a question; just as well, because how could she answer? Her mother’s dark, narrow face, soft black hair that rippled in waves, when unbound, to her waist, Samra’s dusky, long-lashed eyes as well—her father’s slender musician’s hands. Beauty, she saw, in the polished black pillars of the Hall of the Dome, but it was not something a decently modest girl ought to say about herself.

“Through her blessed Voice Lilace, the Lady has said, ‘I will have youth. I will have beauty. I will have a dancer. Let the orphan girl be my daughter. Let the orphan girl become my child, my beloved.’ Zora, dear, a great blessing has fallen upon you. The Voice of the Lady has risen from her labours here and set out upon her road. Her final act for our Lady was to name the one who should take her place.”

Zora sat dazed. Did Rahel mean . . . ? The Voice of the Lady was dead, and they wanted her—

She licked her lips and tried to swallow, but her mouth felt paper dry. “I . . .”

“You will be the next Voice of Marakand,” said Revered Ashir, Right Hand of the Lady and husband of Revered Rahel.

“But I’m not a priestess, Revered.” The words croaked.

“Beautiful and beloved,” whispered the Mistress of the Dance. “The Voice of the Lady has spoken.”

And what other rubbish did she spew? Zora wondered. Measured by her thundering heart, it seemed to take a very long time for them to come farther into the long room, with its double row of beds. To stop blocking the door. Her own bed was farthest from that door, under the window, privilege claimed by the senior girl. The window, unfortunately, was blocked by a wooden screen and on the uppermost storey. Even within the holy grounds of the temple, certain precautions had to be taken when one had thirty of the most beautiful maidens of the city under one roof.

The other girls stared, blank, startled, awed, horrified . . . envious?

“Come, Zora,” said Revered Ashir. “The Lady awaits you in the deep well.”

A long breath. She went. Down the centre aisle between the beds, then up, bounding bed to bed past them, nightgown hitched above her knees. Out the door and down the stairs, long strides. To reach the main gate meant crossing courtyards and gardens and dodging around other buildings, then passing up a sloping tunnel and beneath the compound’s outer wall to the higher level of the city. They’d be expecting that, and the gates were defended by temple guard, locked at night. But she could hide; there were deserted ruins even within the temple. She knew the grounds in the dark. Few of the priests could say the same.

She heard them shouting behind her for torches. Lamps blew out as they ran, and most of them were old, puffing; even the young lacked a dancer’s fit body. She might have a chance.

But they took her in the end. The Red Masks ran swiftly as she, anticipated her, more coming, bearing torches, to cut her off, blocking her in on the landing of a stairway. Revered Ashir pushed past the silent red priests, trying to seize her by the shoulders as if she were a naughty little girl, to be shaken into sense. She kicked him where it hurt, knocked another priest’s legs out from under him, punched some grey-haired senior priestess in the eye, and was brought down by a blow between the shoulders from a Red Mask’s carved staff. Nobody escaped the Red Masks. Certainly not she. They hauled her up, Revered Rahel shouting at another priest to take her legs. Revered Ashir was being sick in the corner.

“Thankless beggar’s brat,” the Beholder of the Face was almost shrieking. “Impious trollop’s bastard, is this how you show gratitude to your Lady for the great honour given you?”

Shija, the Mistress of the Dance, was sobbing. None of them looked happy, except possibly Revered Rahel, who wiped her mouth and gave a mirthless grin of satisfaction at Zora’s now-useless struggles.

“If it’s such an honour, you go to her,” Zora spat. “Go on! Tell her I’m not looking to be anyone’s daughter.”

Revered Rahel slapped her. Zora yelled and twisted but could not break free.

She stopped yelling when yet another pair of Red Masks came. These two wore their armour, and the light of the Lady shone on them. They set her on her feet, but she fell to her knees again. The priests themselves backed away, tight against the walls.

Go now. She should go now, run, run run . . . Get up. Knock them over. Run. They’re not ghosts. They’re not devils. They’re people in stupid vestments. Run.

But the divine light of the Lady shone from them, muddy scarlet edging eyeslits, nostrils, crawling slowly over the helmets and chest-armour like ripples in dark water. The watching priests crowded away. One priestess whimpered under her breath.

Run!
Zora screamed at herself in the silence of her mind. But her joints had gone watery and her teeth chattered and she couldn’t move.

The armoured Red Masks each took her under an arm, the merely veiled falling in behind. They dragged her out the main door, past a stern-faced portress there to protect the virtue of the dancers and the other unmarried women, across the rainy courtyard walled by the married priests’ apartments, past the scriptorium and the house where the Right Hand and Beholder of the Face lived in splendour befitting their rank. Across the public courtyards, glistening with puddles, under the colonnade of the Hall of the Dome. The hall of the Red Masks stood near the sacred well-house, fortress-like, windowless on its ground storey. They all hurried down the uneven steps into the well-house courtyard, the old level of the temple grounds before the rubble had been built over. There were more Red Masks watching from behind the screened upper windows of their hall, from within the dark mouth of their doorway; she felt their eyes, burning, and even the priests hunched and kept their faces averted, as if their grim colleagues might read some hidden guilt in their thoughts. The two Red Masks holding her set her on her feet, still gripping her by either arm, and Zora walked stumbling. Revered Rahel unlocked the well-house door with an iron key a handspan long.