The Pattern Scars (56 page)

Look outward.

I gaze through the swirl of pictures. I see another layer, beyond the sky. The surging of my blood carries me out along the Paths, and I hold my hand out to break the fall I can feel coming—and there is another hand around mine. My fingers wriggle within its fingers. My palm rubs against a larger palm. I am dizzy again, and I think I may be sick, but after a moment I flex my fingers and my arm, and the strangeness of wearing another skin is not as intense.

I remade you, Flamebird
, I think,
and now I am inside you.

I grope. A crab scuttles by my cheek and a woman in a blue headscarf swoops to kiss my forehead and a sheet of lava rises and ripples. I reach past all this. I feel worn leather. My fingers remember how to wrap themselves around it. My hand and arm remember how to lift wood and balance it so that the bronze head does not dip. I see the spear lift. I see a man’s pale face, past the farthest hills, and a sword gleaming, and I remember rage and need.

I lunge.

“No!” someone cries, from the pale man’s lips, and “No!” I cry—me, Nola, writhing within other flesh, trying to be stronger. And I am. I hold us both still, though I think I will die from the effort of it, my breath squeezed away by the weight of sky and memory.

I was coughing. There was blood in my mouth. I spat so feebly that the blood ended up on my chin. I was sprawled on my belly; I realized this slowly, as my body ached its way back. My cheek was pressed against something yielding, and I thought that I was not back; I was caught in the Otherworld, on a Path that would soon envelop me. But I lifted my head, after a time, and I opened my burning eyes—and I saw the splotched skin of a thigh. It throbbed with after-vision. I was lying across Mambura’s lap. I heaved myself away, scrabbling and whimpering like Borl—because Mambura was sitting up now. He was sitting up, his left hand resting on the floor but still wrapped around the spear haft.

I crouched with the soles of my feet braced against the sarcophagus. I retched but nothing came up. I gazed through the squiggling black shapes at Teldaru, who was sitting back-to-back with Ranior.

Toys
, I thought.
All of us are toys, waiting for some great, guiding hand to move us.

“Your man,” I said eventually, slowly; exhausted, but also plucking words that would not call up the curse. Teldaru swung his head around to look at me. “Did he have images? Memories?”

Teldaru blinked as ponderously as the heroes were. He licked his lips but said nothing.

“Teldaru—they are real again. They are their own men, somehow.”

He fell forward onto hands and knees and pushed himself up into a crouch. “No,” he said, and stood. He swayed, dropped to one knee, then both. His eyes never left me. “They are ours—
ours
!”—and he coughed until blood sprayed from his mouth and nose.

Hours later. Close to dawn.

“What will happen when they do meet? What if one wounds the other—will we be wounded too?”

“That will not happen. They will meet, yes—they will stand, and their weapons will clang together once or twice, and then I will rise up and subdue them both. Mistress Nola’s vision made truth. The people will rejoice.”

“And—forgive me, Master—what will you tell them when they ask how the men came to meet again? How they came to
be
again?”

“Enough questions, my love. They are far too clumsy—my own fault, I know, but they irk me.”

“You will say you were blameless, won’t you? You will say that it was me. . . .” I was breathless. I had not thought of this before—how had I not thought of it?

“Hush, Nola! Dearest girl. Come here, now—quietly—there. There . . .”

And so he took me again, on the floor of Ranior’s Tomb. This time, afterward, I did not run.

Moabu
Bantayo and
Ispa
Neluja walked into Sarsenay City at noon on a hot, clear, late summer’s day. They were flanked by four Belakaoan men with spears. There were no drums. The rest of the Belakaoans—hundreds of them, our soldiers said—were encamped beyond Ranior’s Hill.

“Not enough,” Teldaru hissed. “Why are there not more? These hundreds might simply be the ones who left our city—where is his
army
?”

Bantayo and Neluja were led into the Great Hall, which had been cleared of everything except for one table, now a bier, draped in orange and green island cloth. Zemiya was lying on it. She had been dead for weeks, but thanks to the work of the healers, who attended to as many dead bodies as they did live ones, she looked smooth and clean—just resting, with her hands folded across her breast.

Bantayo did not even glance at her. He looked at Haldrin, who was standing next to the bier. The gems on the
moabu’s
golden tunic-dress winked as he lifted his hand and pointed at the king.

“What will you do,” Bantayo said in his voice of metal, “to repair the damage you have done to the honour of my land?”

“
Moabu
.” Haldrin was very pale, but he sounded stronger than he had since Layibe’s birth. “We will speak of this—now, if you wish. I thought, before we did, that you might want to see your sister and your niece.”

I stepped forward. Layibe was lying on my shoulder. Her curls tickled the skin under my jaw, and my neck. There were shells in the curls, threaded there by Jamenda, who would not leave the castle.

“My sister is dead,” Bantayo said, “thanks to Sarsenayan treachery. I have no reason to look on her. And I have no wish to see the child.” I wondered how he could hold his eyes so steady. He almost did not blink.

“But I do.” Neluja turned from the bier. One of Zemiya’s arms was lying straight now; Neluja must have moved it, perhaps to hold her hand.

She walked to me. She seemed even thinner than she had been: her arms and neck, her cheeks. She held out her arms and I passed the baby to her, thinking:
Surely the princess will be quiet with her own aunt
. But of course this was a ridiculous hope; the princess stiffened and lifted her head, and Neluja looked down into her face. Into her rolling, grey-white eyes.

I heard Neluja suck in her breath. As she did, the scarlet lizard slipped out of the neck of her dress and onto her shoulder.

“The child is blind,” she said—to Bantayo, but really, I thought, to me.

“Haldrin,” Bantayo said. He managed to make the word both taunt and threat. “Here is yet more shame. Tell me—is there some other insult you have prepared?”

“
Moabu
,” Haldrin said, between his teeth, “let us speak now. Privately.”

Layibe was wailing. Neluja gazed at her a moment longer and handed her back to me.

“
Ispa
Nola,” she said, “we should speak together also.”

Yes. Yes—you understand so much more than anyone else, so I will not need perfect words.

“And with me, perhaps?” Teldaru said from behind me. “For I am Master, here.”

“You.” In the silence after Neluja spoke this word, Haldrin and Bantayo’s footsteps sounded very loud. They fell on rushes and stone. They grew faint—out the door and into the courtyard—and died.

“You,” Neluja said again, when we three were alone (we three and a dead woman and a baby), “are even less than you were as a boy—and you were nothing then.”

She was taller than he was. She stared down at him with her black eyes that were edged and flecked with pearl, and I thought, She
is magnificent.
And yet she looked at Layibe and then at me, and she turned and went. Her lizard held itself up on its clawed feet and watched us, all the amber facets of its eyes reflecting sunlight and space.

“And so we are alone again.” Teldaru’s breath was stale with old wine and sleeplessness. I had not noticed this smell before.

I nodded. “But the king—will he not need you?”

“Oh, Nola,” Teldaru murmured, “there is only you, for me”—and he laughed as he kissed me, with his hot, cracked lips.

The king did not need Teldaru. Haldrin and Bantayo shut themselves in the library, as they had before. Days passed.

Teldaru and I began to ride back and forth from the Hill in full daylight. Only soldiers were allowed on the road now—but an exception was made for us, of course.

“We must be at the place where Sarsenay’s Pattern is strongest,” he told the guards. “We must be close to Ranior, and to those who threaten us.”

Except that no one
was
threatening us—not yet. We stood at the top of the Hill and gazed at the plain, which was patchy with fires and people and a few horses. “This is not an army!” Teldaru cried. “These are old men, women with babies, waiting to return home with their king. Bantayo has brought no
men
to defend the honour of his land!”

“You cannot possibly see that.” I squinted at the tiny people-shapes and their tiny coils of smoke. They were Pattern and Paths, and everything around them was shadow, even in the sun; I shuddered because I did not know whether to feel relief or dread.

We practised, on these days. We were Mambura and Ranior, and each time we had more power over them: over their limbs and movements and the memories that only drifted, now, like coloured mist. Several times I thought that I could lose myself—run out forever along Mambura’s endless, always-dying roads. But I did not. And every time I returned to the hard, painted stone of Ranior’s Tomb, I wondered why.

“You are never in your bed, Mistress,” said Leylen one morning.

“It is a busy time.” I pushed her hands away and undid my own laces with fingers that did not falter, since they knew the motion so well.

“And Bardo has sent no more notes.” Her voice was strange—clipped and shrill, as if she had expected to speak these words but had not expected to feel so awkward about it.

I pulled my dress over my head and took the clean one she held out to me. “As I just said, it is a busy time. But why should this concern you?”

“Oh, because I worry—you know I do, Mistress, too much—I think he might need me, or you might, and I want to be close by if you do.”

I wrenched the clean dress on. “We do not need you, Leylen, and we will not. In fact, do you have family you could go to? It might be best.”