Gushi nodded sympathetically and tried to explain: “Gipu city lives off trade. Happy traders return to Gipu instead of Hotan or Fantu’veri. Some have family here; this is very good for Gipu. Some children stay, others become traders. Serica very rich but not peaceful. Gipu not rich, farming difficult. With peaceful trade, Gipu a thousand years old.”
Gushi looked at Sandun and smiled. “This very old tradition of city. Hotan, richer, better land. Fantu’veri, they have gold and mine precious stones. Gipu? Friendly city, beautiful women. Ashala, she likes you. Keltens, all very brave, very strong. This is good. Trade with Kelten would be very good for Gipu.”
It bothered Sandun that they were not actually traders. The leaders of Gipu were going to some lengths to feed and house the Archives Expedition, yet they had arrived in Gipu with very little to offer in exchange. One thing the expedition could offer the Lord Itor was an accurate map. Basil, with help from Sandun and Sir Ako, created a large, highly detailed map and then had a copy made for the Lord Itor. The map occasioned great excitement; soon, copies of Basil’s map were being made and sold by Lord Itor’s scribes. To Sandun’s surprise, cheap imitations were on sale a week later.
At first, it amused Sandun, as he walked through the market with Ashala, to see low-quality maps being sold in stalls. One urchin had the gall to run up to him and try and sell him one of these fraudulent maps.
But thinking on it later that day, he became concerned that the low-quality maps might well drive out the expensive, accurate maps, and so merchant caravans might fail to reach Erimasran because they followed a bad map.
He took one of the bad maps to Lord Itor and tried to convince him that the fake maps should be destroyed. This resulted in a frustrating conversation in which neither party was able to communicate his true thoughts to the other. Sandun resolved to work harder on learning the language of Serica, which he hoped would allow better communications with the leaders of Gipu.
He also spent an hour each market-day, if the weather wasn’t too foul, signing his name on good maps to Kelten and expressing his disapproval of bad maps. He tried speaking Serice to the locals; some knew it well enough to talk with him, the rest shrugged their shoulders or responded in their own language, which Sandun could make little of.
Kagne spent his time exploring Gipu. His woman, Amete, was rather shy, and it seemed they found little common ground. So Kagne went off by himself. Sometimes he brought back interesting plants from the market, and Amete would smile before taking them into the kitchen and cooking them. Kagne also visited the local temples; when he discovered a good one, he would take Sandun over to see it.
Both men found it odd that the worship of Sho’Ash was not to be found in Gipu. Sho’Ash was so well established throughout the lands of the Archipelago that it was hard to conceive of a city of men that lacked a temple or two. Yet in Gipu, there was no temple for Sho’Ash.
Instead, Kagne found several temples filled with small statues, all seeming the same, and each with a flame burning in front of it. The priests at the temples, rather impassive men in white robes, waved at the statues and said, “Janko’aran,” but what “Janko’aran” did or meant to the people who came into the temple was unclear. The language of religion and philosophy was far beyond Sandun’s skills after his few months of learning.
Other, larger temples were found by Kagne outside the city walls. Why the temples were outside the city was mysterious, as it flew in the face of all experience in Kelten. One of these temples was wooden, open to the air on three sides, with a roof covering a large human figure. Ashala explained this figure as “Gipu God.” However, the next temple they visited a week later had a different figure, seated and not standing, and Ashala also called it the “Gipu God.”
“Perhaps the people of Gipu worship a pantheon of gods, like the ancient religion of Akia?” Kagne offered. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
Ashala was with Sandun most of the time, except one day a week when she disappeared and did not talk about where she had been. Otherwise, she took her role as translator very seriously, and her knowledge of Kelten speech improved almost as fast as Sandun’s knowledge of Serice. He found her company enjoyable, and although she was not the Kelten ideal of a tall, thin blonde, she became—over the months—very pleasing to his eye.
Sandun had never lived with a woman before, and in other circumstances he might well have thrown her out after six weeks just so he could be alone again. But right now, Ashala was absolutely vital to his mission. He needed to know the language of Serica as fast and as thoroughly as possible.
He had worried about the language problem as soon as they’d begun planning the expedition eleven months ago. Diplomatic communication in the Archipelago was simple, thanks to the old empire and the work of the temple. In the Archipelago, every educated person could understand every other educated person. The Pellian Empire was dead and gone these last seven hundred years, but its language lived on and could be heard in temples from Erimasran in the east all the way to Maspan in the far western seas.
However, Serica had no common language with Kelten. Traders in olden days had somehow managed to get by, so Sandun was reasonably confident that something would work out, but really it had been pure hope as opposed to a plan. Discovering Gipu with its dim memory of Kelten was great good fortune, and Sandun intended to take the fullest advantage of it.
The language of Gipu remained difficult for Sandun, and so he ended up spending all his time learning Serice from Ashala. The people of Gipu seemed comfortable with the fact that none but they knew their own language. Outside of the Gipu women and Gushi, the Keltens made few friends in Gipu except one: Nagor.
Nagor was the captain of the north gate guards, and he developed a friendship with Sir Ako. Eria could translate a few words between the two men, and sometimes Ashala helped. But as leaders of warriors and skilled fighters, they shared a common outlook and camaraderie that transcended the language barrier. On several occasions, Nagor had dinner with the Kelten expedition. He was tall and quite agile, and he talked about leading scouting expeditions all around the borders of Gipu.
Nagor’s weapons and armor were of great interest to the Kelten soldiers, and the scouts discussed the fine points of the blades and armor of the Gipu warriors long past the point where Sandun cared.
One thing Sandun noticed in the deep winter nights was that his Piksie sword, Skathris, had a faint glow to it. He had been practicing with the sword under Sir Ako’s instruction ever since Basil gave it to him. But up until now, it hadn’t looked like anything more than a good blade of steel. Perhaps it was due to their schedule when they were traveling in the Tiralas: always up at dawn and in bed within an hour of night. Whatever the reason, the sword had a faint glow to it, most noticeably along the cutting edge. The color was a bit like fire, though more yellow than red.
Sandun asked Basil about his Piksie knife. Basil hardly touched it since it was not designed for skinning animals. When he took it out, it looked the same as any other steel knife. Inside Basil’s room, one evening, the two men experimented with the Piksie blades on various objects. They learned that Basil’s knife could cut metal as easily as stone, but Sandun’s sword had no special properties against stone. Neither blade had any special ability against wood or leather.
“It’s magic, for certain. No rhyme or reason to it,” Basil said with a shrug.
Sandun had to agree.
Once, in the middle of winter, just before the High Holy Week, Nagor invited the Keltens to dinner at his house. He lived in a modest dwelling near the wall, and it was filled to bursting with all the Kelten expedition, as well as his family and relatives and friends. Nagor was married to a woman only a bit shorter than himself, and he had three children. The two boys were like their father: unafraid of the strangers from across the mountains. His daughter, still very small, slept in a cradle carved from an aromatic wood; she smiled readily at the women who came over
to see her but frowned at every man except her father.
Food came in a steady stream from houses next door. The party spilled out into the street, and Padan and Damar, who both had consumed several mugs of the local agardoa, took off their shirts and wrestled in the snowy street for a quarter of an hour. Padan, bigger and stronger, had the early advantage, but Damar, with years of experience roping cattle, finally got him in a hold from which he could not escape.
Back inside Nagor’s house, musical instruments were brought out, and the Gipu men sang strange songs while three young women danced and spun around in the middle of the room.
The next week, the Kelten expedition held its own celebrations for High Holy Week; however, the celebrations were muted. High Holy Week meant a great deal to all of them. Every year, families tried to visit relatives, and on the day of renewal everyone gathered at the biggest temples to watch the story of Sho’Ash reenacted. Lacking family, friends, and a temple, they made do with what they had. The Gipu women helped to prepare food, but only Ashala and Eria stayed to watch the Keltens read selections from the book of prayers that Sir Ako carried with him.
After the readings and the feast, an early night settled over Gipu city. Sandun put on his heaviest cloak and walked the snow-clogged streets, thinking about life back home in Tebispoli. Time was marching along; this day was the dividing line between one year and the next. The image of a crow perched on a pine branch was often used to represent this division: one eye on the past, the other looking to the future.
He wondered about his sister and her family. She had married a modest brewer of beer and lived still in Hepedion with their four children, though the youngest was very ill when Sandun had left. He thought about his uncle and his family, who grew apples in the hills outside of town. Barring illness, Scribe Maklin should have returned to the Archives and sent word to Sandun’s relatives about his continued journey into the Tiralas, unless King Pandion thought the expedition should remain a secret.
I expect they have given me up for dead, Sandun thought to himself. The winter weather, the short days, the freezing nights, left him melancholy. He now chafed at the winter’s delay. On the maps he had seen in Gushi’s library, Serica looked so close! But the passes were closed. Gipu was a world unto itself, locked away while the snows held fast, until green-fingered spring put forth her power and melted the ice.
The longer they stayed in Gipu, the more mysterious the people became to Sandun, in some sense. There seemed to be something missing from the city, though Sandun couldn’t say what exactly. Gipu was welcoming on the surface yet insular. There were subtle rivalries between people born out of long-past slights, and he felt that he was floating on the surface while larger fish swam deep in the waters. To be sure, there were ancient enmities between the noble houses in Kelten, but the size of Kelten made it easy for enemies to avoid each other except at rare state occasions when all the nobles were expected to visit Seopolis and pay homage to the king. But here in Gipu, there was no escape from the internal conflicts and political games.
Sandun, somewhat by accident, learned from Ashala that each of the Gipu women was from a different clan and that the clans each expected “their man” would become their ally in the subterranean Gipu disputes. Due to the language barrier, the Keltens remained oblivious to this dimension of the relationship. This disappointed almost all of the Gipu clans except one: Lord Itor’s clan, Laska. By accident, when Sir Ako had rejected his first woman, her replacement, Eria, came from the Laska clan. Two months later, when she became pregnant, Lord Itor was positively jubilant and became much more friendly to Sir Ako and to Sandun, who could converse with him using Serice.
At least two of the other clans felt that the Keltens, having reached Gipu, should now turn back to Kelten and begin the process of guiding trade caravans across the Tiralas. Sandun, Sir Ako, and the rest of the expedition had no intention of returning home yet. They were here to see the fabled land of Serica, and nothing was going to stop them. Sandun’s response, that the merchants of Gipu could send their own expedition west across the Tiralas to Sirosfeld, elicited wary looks and the hand gestures used by the people of Gipu to ward off evil. Clearly, the path west was too dangerous for the men of Gipu.
As to the city of ghosts, Sandun had, reluctantly, made inquiries. He learned little more than a name: Karmo. It had been destroyed more than one hundred years ago, presumably by the Sogands, though what tribe had done the deed and why were unknown. The only survivor had been a teenage boy who stumbled into Gipu in the early spring, frostbitten and starving. He had raved on his sickbed for a week or more about fire and evil spirits, but when he finally recovered, he claimed to have no memory of how he had gotten to Gipu or what had happened to Karmo. One expedition, led by two brothers who had been born in Karmo, set out soon after, but it never returned. After that, Karmo was written off the trade routes and never talked about.
About one month after the Kelten new year, the people of Gipu held their own celebration, marking the coming end of winter. By now, Padan’s woman and Damar’s woman were both pregnant, making their clans happy; Wiyat’s woman had been replaced with a girl even younger than he was, and they appeared to be getting along very well. Perhaps most importantly to the expedition, Olef was pregnant, though that was not announced and, naturally, none of the Gipu clans cared.
At the conclusion of the new year’s festivities, Lord Itor invited the Kelten expedition to a great feast in the town’s main building. The highlight of the event was the music, which lasted for nearly two hours after the dinner.
Sandun was particularly struck by one song. It started out with an instrument much like a lute, though with fewer strings; the singer was a middle-aged man who stood, holding a walking stick in his hand. As he sang, a woman began tapping on small tubes of hollowed-out wood. The tapping sound spread insistently through the music, like the marching of feet or the clacking of gears inside a water mill. The singer was serious, almost biting off the words, and then the drummer joined in, hitting his drumskins with sharp blows like a pine branch cracking apart in a hot fire. The climax was reached when three men blew on horns, rapidly drowning out the singer as the horns called out a melody that was both triumphant and oddly sad.
Sandun saw a few of the older men and women in the audience brushing away tears at the end of the song. He asked Ashala what the song meant.
“Many years past, a terrible winter was,” she told him. “Lasted long and long. Food gone, many sick in Gipu. Dead and dying. Atuko, young and brave, caravan leader, he left town, going east to Serica. To bring back food and medicine. Returning, the snow tried to stop him, but he pushed on, through the storm, making a path for the others to follow. He died just when he saw the walls of Gipu. A great hero to us. Lord Itor is related by blood, through five generations. I have heard the song many times, we all have. I don’t know why the old ones cry when they hear the song.”
Five days later, a merchant caravan arrived in town.
The weather had been good for the previous seven days, cold but clear. The merchants’ arrival was not entirely unexpected as, according to Ashala, in many years a caravan would arrive during the winter.
The merchants, with shaggy cows as beasts of burden, were thickly bundled, looking more like walking heaps of leather and fur than men. Once inside the gates, they headed for the house of guests, which the expedition had been comfortably occupying for the last five months. Several of the merchants left the group and went off with women and children that they knew from previous trips. The others stayed in the large house and warmed themselves by the fire. Sandun was able to converse with them; the merchants were all from Serica, and they were heading back there soon. They expected to do just a little trading in Gipu, but they had been south in Hotan all winter and were now eager to return to their homeland and sell their goods.
The leader of the merchants was a tough, stocky man with graying hair, about forty-five years
of age; he gave his name as Rogge. His brother was with him on the trip, but he was off spending time with a woman in Gipu. So Rogge sat, warming his feet beside the fire in the guest house, and talked to Sandun.
After describing something of the trip across the Tiralas, Sandun asked Rogge about the news that had sent them north to Gipu.
It was bad news that had come to them—bad news from southern Serica. Refugees from the province of Vasvar had arrived in Hotan about one month past. They said that a senior general, a man called “Two-Swords Tuno,” had seized control over the government and had put to death the previous king and his family. The refugees were certain war was coming, as rumors of press-gangs combing the smaller towns for men swirled into the city. Some families, those willing to brave the snowy path and with connections in Hotan, fled Vasvar with what they could carry and counted themselves lucky when they arrived.
The merchants did not wish to run the risk of their goods being seized by soldiers preparing for war. It was an easy decision for them to head north to Gipu and then take the trail east out of the mountains. Rogge said their new destination was Tokolas.
“When do you expect to leave here?” Sandun asked.
“About a week’s rest here, then we go east,” Rogge replied.
“Will the passes be open? The men of Gipu say the passes are closed for at least another month.” Sandun was surprised at Rogge’s lack of concern.
“The men of Gipu…” Rogge waved his hands in the air as though brushing away cobwebs. “The trail east to the Tea Hills; its not that hard. Early, yes, but we are heading home. We have handled it several times before. This time will be no different.”
Sandun brought this information to Sir Ako. At the training hall, away from the Gipu women, they talked over the news.
Everyone in the Archives Expedition was eager to take the trail to Serica. They had waited out the long winter months with resignation, as the Gipu locals had assured them that the road east was too risky until the snows melted. The Serice merchants’ confidence was just the spark that the men of the expedition needed.
The Burning Tower Page 17