by Andre Norton
Murri’s measuring gaze went from me to the two adult cats as if he expected them to back his proud refusal to carry a burden like a yaksen. But neither of them moved nor made a sound. Then he looked back to me and I nodded.
Showing by every muscle movement of his lithe body his distaste for what I asked, he advanced a stride and stood while I made fast the pack, settling and securing it as best I could to accommodate his movements. I took up my staff and then it was my turn to face the older cats. Farewells come hard. My people are clannish and find it difficult to cut any ties. This rested upon me now even though I fronted Sand Cats and not kin of my own kind.
I bowed my head, as I would to the Head of some House and spoke the words of going forth—as I had not been encouraged to say them by any of my blood on the night I left my own home.
“To Myrourr and Maraya, this visitor within their land gives thanks for hearthright and homeright. May the Great Essence of all enclose and keep you, and may the end of the trail be that which you most wish.”
Myrourr answered me:
“Smoothskin, I have taken the gift of life from your hands—as none of my kind have done. Between us there is no claw nor fang, no knife, no spear. Those are for ones who have no understanding. Go in peace to follow the trail set for you—there is more than chance in what you do.”
Then, with Murri trotting confidently in the lead as if he followed a visible marking of foot and hoof prints, we left the isle of Myrourr and Maraya. I looked back once over my shoulder, but so akin were the marking of their fur to the color of the rocks that I could not see if they still watched us, or if they were already about business of their own.
Murri appeared to be entirely certain of the way, and I could only accept his confidence in hope that he knew what he was doing. The coming of day found us passing out of the sand waves onto a bone white land where there was only a spread of sharp pebbles under foot. Our pace slowed as each step brought with it pain, for those pebbles could be felt even through the boots I had cobbled over with dried skin. Murri began to limp well before the coming of morning.
There was no sign of another isle where we might be able to find shelter or food. From our two packs, my cloak and staff I devised a limited cover from the glare of the rising sun and set about treating Murri’s bruised and torn paws, smearing them with algae salve. Over them I then tied foot coverings fashioned from rat skin, making sure these were tightly lashed into place. Murri aided me as best he could by the stretching of paws.
We ate very little of our supplies and then huddled together within the shelter knowing we had the fire blast of the day to get through.
10
“Allitta!”
I set the square of black-painted hide carefully on the table so that the beads laid upon it in intricate pattern would not be shaken from the lines upon which they were to be firmly attached. There was the scent of incense in the room and I turned down the lamp under the basin where the tree gum from the far east simmered. I was purposefully deliberate in all my movements, having learned long ago that haste was the enemy of many of the tasks left for my hands.
Now I passed from the workroom into the shop. Mancol was gone, having his list of errands for the morning. So the outer curtains were still pegged into place, leaving the interior in shadows.
Though I knew very well all which was about me, I felt as always that uneasiness which plagued me in any half light in Ravinga’s house. I had seen all, or most all, of those tiny bead eyes, set in place to give a lifelike appearance to the ranks of dolls. Still the skillful fingers of my mistress appeared to have awakened all images into life so that they stared at me, weighed me. Almost I could believe that I was the object of gossip among those eyes’ owners when I was not present.
There were times when I was sure that Ravinga’s skill was far too great—that now and then a doll passed out of her hands which was so akin to a living person that it might have been an illusion projected from flesh and bone.
During the past four seasons a new, macabre demand had arisen among the Vapalans to keep Ravinga busied—a fashion for portraits of the newly dead. Even to being clad in scraps from the favorite robes of the deceased, these foot-high figures had been fashioned as permanent records of friends and kin lost to their Houses. The making of these had not been introduced by Ravinga. In fact I was certain that she made such against her will. Yet she had not refused to accept a commission no matter from whom—grieving lifemate, sister, brother.
I remember quite well the first of her making—it had been of Wefolan-ji, one of the elders of a House now prominently represented at court by Giarribari, the Grand Chancellor, and the customer, Ravinga was informed, was from the far eastern inner lands which are legend to us.
Since then Ravinga had wrought a full dozen more, and I heard that such were now on display in the halls their models had once known in life.
Very recently it had not been only the dead that friends chose to honor so—but upon the coming of anyone into fame, those of the House would order such a figure to be clad in full court dress.
Two such lay even now in boxes behind Ravinga on the shelf, well wrapped and sealed against any jar. Now her hands were busy shuffling through a packet of dried and beaten tav leaves on which were drawings in color, plainly the specifications of another such representative of the living, or the dead.
She did not look up as I drew closer, only fanned the last of the leaf pictures out upon the counter where a low-trimmed lamp banished the shadows immediately around.
“Haban-ji.” Her voice was very close to a whisper.
I shivered. There was that in her tone, in the tense stance of her body, which was a warning.
“Who brought this order?” I kept my voice low to match her own hiss. “And why?”
“Who—the confidential clerk of Giarribari. Why—?”
The Grand Chancellor was not one to draw upon Ravinga’s skill in a need to flatter her lord. All knew her for what she was, a shrewd, somewhat calculating autocrat, true servant not of Haban-ji—rather sealed in loyalty to the office she now filled. To Giarribari the laws, rights, very life of the Empire were infinitely greater than any one man.
“She does not wish to flatter,” I spoke my first thought aloud. “There is no need for her to do so. She knows her own worth and weighs well the worth of him whom she serves—”
“Haban-ji has been more than thirty storm seasons on the throne. There have been no speeches against him.”
Ravinga nodded. “Nor has there been much speech for him. There has been no true testing of him.”
“But truly there was! Otherwise how would he carry the leopard staff?” I protested.
“True—he won the crown testing. However, matters change through the years. He who was a bold young hunter becomes, when lapped in power, another. There has been much coming and going lately between Vapala and the far eastern inner lands. Their merchants make journeys hither lately in large numbers. And each of those pays two tolls—”
Now she was repeating a rumor of the marketplace. Though the Six Houses were long established and among them controlled most of the trade, still they might well be complacent now, not too quick to follow up some whisper that one or another of their kind had sudden access to luxuries unknown in the outer lands.
However—the Emperor! One who had passed through the great trials to reach the throne—what need had he of foreign merchant favor or greater riches than his office gave him?
“There was a difference in the past,” Ravinga continued. “Then an Emperor did not gain the throne and forget he might have to struggle to hold it. For there was once a set period of seasons and then he knew the challenge might come. We of Vapala now speak of such action as barbarian and not for us to follow. Yet it was once the law that the Emperor was to be the nourisher of his people—he was to give all himself to the land, strengthening the Essence in a free surrender. Now he is not the sacrifice but rather makes token offerings and such are accepted.”<
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A token offering! I looked to the patterns she still shuffled back and forth as one might treat papers which carried ill news, wishing to throw them away and yet unable to do so.
I need not ask the question in my mind—she had caught it.
“A token? Perhaps. If so—” she shook her head slowly, “that is sensible reasoning. Yet I wonder. There is Shank-ji.”
Our rulers, the five Queens, the Emperor, do not take lifemates. Though that does not mean that they live celibate lives. However, any children born of such matings had no standing above any others of noble Houses, nor were such ever recognized at any of the courts, unless they won to high place by their own efforts. For the past three seasons we had heard much of Shank-ji, the Emperor’s son in all but formal name.
He was said to have openly vowed, before the great ones of the court, that when the time came that his father died he would enter the contest for Emperor and that he fully meant to take the High Crown.
“This is,” Ravinga’s hand curled into a fist and she brought it down upon the lined leaves, “an honor doll for which there is no honor to celebrate. Therefore it can become—”
“A death doll!” I clapped my hand over my mouth even as I said that. “But there is no talk of the Emperor ailing—more than the general ills of age.”
“Just so,” Ravinga agreed. “Yet this is also the season of fevers. Haban-ji is interested in curiosities from the east. There have been reports from the sentries at the far border that there is grave sickness beyond. One caravan was discovered with all the traders dead about their beasts. They did not die of any sword or knife thrust—their killer was a thing unseen. Let Haban-ji be given some toy from such an infected camp—or seem to be given such—and there can well be good reasoning for a death doll.”
“And the Grand Chancellor?”
“Who are such as we to know the intrigues of the court? They have little to do, those noble ones, and thus they may play some odd games such as we commoners would not try. Yes, there are changes coming. Have you not also foreseen it so?”
“And if I have? I tell you, mistress, I will have no part in such! Have I not been life twisted already, and by none of my own doing, because there are those who clutch with greedy fingers? There is no longer any House of Vurope.”
I was angry. She was pushing me into paths of memory I had no wish to travel—paths I had worn so deep over the past seasons that they were only too open to entrap my course of thought.
Ravinga had put together in one packet those leaves and now she placed them in a flat envelope. But that did not join the rest of the patterns in a side drawer, instead she pushed it into a seam pocket of her robe.
“You will make it then?”
“What excuse can I rightfully raise to refuse such a commission?” she countered. “I delay by this much. I have asked for the proper jewels with which to fashion a crown of state. Outwardly, Allitta, this must be accepted as any other order. However, there is also this—”
She half turned to pick up from the shelf immediately behind her a box of some dull black substance. There was a strange look to the surface of that container, as if it could swallow light, a devouring shadow, so that any color or gleam of metal, even warm lamp glow, was dimmed in its presence.
Ravinga had jerked from a crumpled mass of dust-laden cloths such as Mancol used each morning to rid the counter of debris, a square which was streaked with black back and forth. Some artist might have used it to wipe a brush upon it.
She used that to handle the box, spreading out the dirty cloth beneath it. We often received oddly protected materials in the shop, and this was not the first time my mistress was so very careful about how she handled some such container.
Ravinga now pressed at either end of the tightly sealed lid. There came a whiff of vile odor, like the stink of a waste pit under the sun. When she raised her thumbs again the lid adhered to them, was so carried up.
The inside of the coffer was splattered with red which had thickened in some places into gummy bubbles. Amid this rested, not such a doll as I had more than half expected to see, but rather the representation of a beast.
We of Vapala might not he threatened by the desert rats but I had seen their carcasses enough to know what this was. Still keeping her flesh covered, Ravinga levered up the creature and dumped it on the counter between us.
It had been made of some material I did not recognize—seemingly of a bit of real skin stuffed, but it was manifestly too heavy for that, for it landed with a heavy thump. Save for its size it was complete in every detail, even to the bloodlike spots which glistened as if it had been recently slaughtered.
The head of the creature moved! There were sparks of yellow-red fire filling the eye cavities and which I sensed were aware of me, of Ravinga. What I thought of was the skitter of clawed feet on stone, many such.
I watched my mistress pinch together where the cloth lay beneath the monstrous thing. There she held a grip which made her knuckles stand out.
“So—so it is—” I said and then I moved. From my girdle I jerked a short rod carven from fire-born rock such as gushes out of the mountain crevices in Thnossis. And I flailed out with that, the end of it catching the creature on the side of the head even as it lifted lip to me in threat.
At the same moment I armed that blow, Ravinga also jerked her hands. The touch of my rod rocked the figure, and it fell back into the cloth. Then my second blow followed the first. The beast’s body jerked—simulating life which I was sure it did not have before it crumpled into small crumbs.
I stood, rod ready for a third blow, staring down at the broken mass.
“I was right! I was right!” I said and my breath seemed to hiss between my teeth. “It was no dream—but the truth!”
Anger as hot as the stuff of my wand had once been surged in me. Behind me arose all the times I had heard a story, only to be told—soothingly by some, angrily by others—that I had fastened on some dream and claimed it for reality.
I had learned through pain of both mind and body that the truth of one is very often lost by the will of many.
Now, once more, I saw the mat bed—and the woman who lay upon it, the struggle of childbirth and pain twisting her. Imposed upon that scene the half-seen face grinning, grinning with a second mouth which opened wide inches below the one nature had granted him. I saw once more the vicious gleam of those eyes, which only I had seen alive then. I heard my own voice, a much younger voice, cry out protests and pleas as he held me in a grip which near tore my skin with its savagery, and I felt the flash of red-hot fire about my shoulders again and again!
So beaten had I been that there was hardly a shred of life left to me when I was thrust into a place of darkness and knew, through the pain, that this was only the beginning of suffering to come.
However, I did not meet that death. I never knew whom I had to thank for that. A spark of stubbornness, of the growth of that need for vengeance, had set me crawling through a place of shadows. I sensed that there was that also crawling through the dark which was even worse than he who had attacked me.
I looked to Ravinga again and her eyes met mine. “What and who?”
It was true that my hot-tempered father had had the two rights over me—life which he had given me and death which was his for the asking. He had many enemies—which one of them had devised such a scheme, one to attack me past any hope of either belief or forgiveness? Yet it was not the battle of kin which I had ever fought, but more my own. Nothing dampened my wrath, but I had learned to bury it deep for a space.
“Who—why?” My mouth was so dry those two words came as croaks.
“Who—why—?” she echoed me. “Someone tries now a variation of a game played so well before. There is an order for a ceremonial figure of Haban-ji—then comes this filth secretly. Mancol found it on an upper shelf of the store room this morning. Tongues wag freely—an Emperor ages—perhaps dies. In my hands there is an honor image—with something far worse to be
found if the guard comes to search. Was it not something of the sort before, girl?”
I was not too overwrought by memories of the past to see the dark and threatening logic of what she said. A web woven.
“Someone fears—” I said slowly. “But why me? Power is yours, but who has anything to fear from me?”
Ravinga swept the stained cloth together and thrust it into the box which had held the rat. She pulled towards her the brazier meant to scent the air with burning powers. Into the coals which still existed in the heart of that she slammed the cloth and the now empty box.
There was an explosion of raw light, a noise which hurt through my ears far into my head. The upward blaze of the flames obscured the box at once.
“There may be two who play—one may be a searcher into lost knowledge who strives to turn bits and pieces into weapons—the other—the other may also be a seeker—of other things. For this time what can we do but watch—listen—sense—We must be the guardians of our own lives and freedom.”
11
For as long as I can remember I had heard tales of the Plain of Desolation, a heat-blasted land closed to all life forms save bands of rats. These seemed to have become adjusted to its lack of any water except algae beds so minerally poisoned as to kill the wanderer with the first mouthful.
Even the most desperate of raiders would not venture therein and there were accounts of outlaw bands turning at bay on the edge of the Plain to face a death they knew, rather than a worse one than any sword or spear offered. Traders made lengthy trips to north or south to avoid that death trap.
Where Murri and I now traveled was the very edge of that ominous waste. It was not speedy travel, as the sharp pebble footing slowed us. The stores we had started with I stretched as far as possible. Murri might outlast me, for the great predators were better used to going longer without food. Yet there would come an end to strength for both of us unless we could find some sustenance in time.