by Judith Tarr
Not at all, maybe. Vanyi did not share the emperor’s concern for his heirs; or at least not his concern that they be kept close, and therefore safe. Vanyi in fact cared little for royalty at all, that Daruya could discern. She was a commoner, and an Islander into the bargain. Kings to her were a blasted nuisance, no good at all for mending nets or catching fish or sailing a boat in the teeth of a gale.
Daruya, who had learned from Vanyi herself to do all three, caught the thread of power as it spun toward her, and drew it taut. On it she strung a web of shadow. It was the same working she had used to conceal herself on the way through the Gate, and she used Chakan’s shield as she had then, but this was wider, stronger. Anyone not a mage who looked at the passing of their company would see four oxen with their riders, the train of pack-oxen that waited outside the temple, and a confused image of guards, riders, caravanners, but no clear faces and no certainty as to their numbers.
With five of them working the concealment, it was a simple enough thing, and no great effort. Daruya was able to see the town as they rode through it, to be startled at its earthen plainness. After the wild extravagance of the temple, she had expected the rest to be as gaudy.
The temples were eye-searing spectacles, to be sure, and there were a great number of them, but in among them the houses of the people, large and small, were simple blocky shapes of mud brick, unadorned even by a scrap of gilding over a lintel. The people were of like mold: dressed in grey or brown or at most a deep blue, hung with amulets but boasting no other adornment—until she saw a procession of what must be priests.
They marched in a long undulating line, matching pace to the deep clang of a bell, chanting in a slow drone. Their heads were shaven and painted like the carvings in the temple. Their bodies were bare in what to her was a wintry chill, but for the simplest of robes, a length of cloth, saffron or scarlet or a searing green, falling to the ground before and behind, open else, and hung about with a clashing array of gold, silver, copper, lumps of amber, river pearls, firestones cut and uncut, strung together without art or distinction. They made an astonishing spectacle, the more astonishing for that passersby seemed to take no notice of them except to move out of their way.
The caravan bade fair to run afoul of the procession, but just before the two collided, the priests swayed aside down another road. The caravan paused, waited for the rest of the procession to pass.
Daruya, forced to leisure, took in as much of the town as she could see. It was built on level ground, but beyond it reared the wall of a mountain, so sheer and so high that it seemed to crown the sky. Snow gleamed on its summit and far down its slopes—small wonder the air was so cold here. There seemed no way over or past it.
She was warmly dressed in gleanings from the temple’s stores, her coat lined with fur and a cloak over that, and a hat on her head, but still she shivered. Kimeri, cradled in her arms, nuzzled toward her breast. It ached as if in answer, though the child had been weaned since her second year. Daruya brushed the warm smooth forehead with a kiss, and swayed as the mare started forward again.
oOo
They left Kianat unseen and took the caravans’ road to the north and west. It was steep, and in places it was very narrow, but it found the pass that went over the mountain and climbed it, higher than Daruya had ever been in her life.
When they came to the top, the second day out of Kianat, unshielded now and riding openly as they were, demons and dark gods and all, Daruya caught her breath. What she had fancied to be a lofty mountain was, indeed, but slave and servant to the peaks that marched away before her, wave on jagged snow-white wave of them, mounting up and up into the pitiless sky.
It was beyond imagining. She was ant-small, mote-small, crushed under the immensity of mountains and sky. But the sun that rode over them, casting fire on the snow, was her own, the face of her forefather. Its fire burned in her hand. Her blood was full of it.
That raised her head before it bowed too low, and straightened her back. She bore the weight of the sky. She faced the mountains’ vastness and gave it tribute, but no fear; no submission.
oOo
“Here,” said Chakan, “be demons.”
They had made camp just below the top of the pass, where the land dropped away to a brief level. That this was a frequent resort of caravans, Daruya could well see. There was grazing for beasts, with a well-cropped look, and stone hearths to build fires in, with walls about them that kept out the wind.
The guides unloaded a heap of tanned hides that, sewn together swiftly with strips of leather and secured to the walls, made roofs for a cluster of huts about the yard in which the beasts would be penned. They were not to graze all night, it seemed, for the reason Chakan had hinted at.
“Just until sundown,” he said, “and then they come in, no matter how hungry they still are. Demons eat oxen, we’re told, and would discover a taste for senelflesh if given the opportunity.”
“You were told all that?” Daruya asked, prodding at the fire she had built of dried ox-dung and dried grass and a flash of magery. “You don’t speak their language at all.”
“No, and I’m not turning mage, either, to know what their babble means.” He squatted on his heels, warming his hands at the blaze. “Still and all, signs are clear enough, and the three husbands seem to think that when a demon wants to know something about his cousins of the peaks, the demon should get an answer however he may. Besides,” he added, “I asked a mage to translate for me. We’re judged not to be the man-eating kind of demon, did you know that? The Old Woman—that’s what they call the Guildmaster—has us enslaved, and we’re condemned to live and eat like mortals until she lets us go.”
“Including me?” Daruya asked with lifted brows.
His eyes danced. He was grinning behind the veil. “Why, of course. You’re the chief of us. We’re your husbands, so hideous that our faces must never be seen lest they drive men mad; but you’re merely mortally ugly, so you don’t hide yourself or your little demon, who they think was conceived of the night wind and suckled on milk of the snow-cat. They’re not far off, are they?”
She bit her tongue. He would laugh if she said what she wanted to say, which was that if she was ugly, then what in the world did they reckon beautiful?
Vanity. It stung her nonetheless. She had been the Beauty of Starios for as long as she could remember. It could be a nuisance when men young and not so young, and not a few women, flung themselves at her feet; but she took no displeasure in what her mirror showed her, all honey and amber, and queenly proud.
Chakan read her much too easily for a man with no magery at all. “Beauty’s an odd thing. Changeable. Madam Aku’s a great beauty here.”
“She’s built like a brick,” said Daruya, with a snap in it.
“Maybe a brick is beautiful,” said Chakan serenely, “where they don’t value gold. Silly of them, but there you are. It could be worse. They could have decided that it would be an act of virtue to murder us in our beds.”
“They may yet,” said Vanyi, lowering herself to sit beside the fire. She had a flask in her hand, which she passed to Daruya.
Daruya sniffed, then tasted. Wine, and good wine too. She drank a swallow, then two, and handed the flask to Chakan. He did not hesitate, but slipped it under his veils and drank with practiced ease.
“Dinner’s coming when it’s had time to cook,” Vanyi said.
She looked about, drawing Daruya to do the same. This was the largest of the huts, with room enough for a good half-dozen people. Through the open side, the one that faced the yard, she saw the beasts being herded in, in dusk that had fallen with startling suddenness.
The seneldi did not like to be crowded together with the oxen, but they were getting better about it. There was only a little squealing and kicking, and only one bellow as Daruya’s mare gored a dilatory ox.
It was a shallow gore, and little blood shed through that shaggy pelt and thick hide. The mare looked pleased with herself. With the contrarine
ss of her sex and her kind, she settled to share a heap of fodder with the offending ox, as peaceful as if the beast had been a herdmate, and one she honored, at that.
Daruya sensed nothing beyond the circle of huts but empty spaces, height and cold and raw wind. Her head ached vaguely with the thinness of the air, and her breath came shorter than it should, but that was nothing to take particular notice of. If there were demons, they avoided this place.
Even so, she ate with little appetite and slept ill. Height-sickness again. One or two of the Olenyai and both the elder mages were in worse state than she. She fretted for Kimeri, but the child was no more and no less well than she had been since the journey began.
oOo
Kimeri kept wanting to fall asleep. She did not like it, and at first she thought it was something her mother or Vanyi was doing to keep her quiet. But they were worried. They tried to hide it, but she knew.
She could not think of anything to say that would make them feel better. Certainly not that she kept seeing Gates and feeling them inside of her, broken and hurting, and a Guardian who thought he was dead.
Something happened when they went over the pass. She stopped being so terribly sleepy. She still saw Gates, but the mountains were stronger, a little. She could look at them, at their sharp white teeth against the purple sky, and even, almost, forget about the Guardian.
But only almost. The Guardian was inside of her too, now, like the Gates.
The mountains outside of her were stubborn. They tried to make her think that they were the only thing that mattered, but she knew better. “There are people like you at home,” she said to them while everybody was making camp for another cold restless night, but nobody was paying much attention to her.
She was too wise to wander out of sight, too restless to stay where she was put. She climbed on top of one of the big patient oxen, the way she had seen its rider do, up its side with the harness like a ladder, and sat on its back that was as broad as a table. The mountains stood all around the place where they were, a high valley full of new green grass, with bits of snow in the hollows, and a spring that bubbled out of a tree-root and filled a bowl of rock; stood and stared.
The seneldi had decided after a great deal of fuss that the oxen were sort of distant cousins. The oxen thought the seneldi very silly. They got on well enough, and Daruya’s mare had made friends with the ox that Kimeri was sitting on, the big queen ox who told the others what to do.
Now as they grazed side by side the mare threw up her head and snorted. The ox kept on grazing peacefully, but it was awake inside its armor of horns and shaggy hair. Kimeri looked where they were looking.
Something sat in the branches of the tree that overhung the spring. It looked a little like a bird and a little like a man and a great deal like neither. It had feathers, white and grey and silver and faint grassy green, and a wide round face with wide round yellow eyes, and very sharp, very pointed teeth. It showed them to her, and flexed curved claws like a cat’s, and hissed.
The senel was ready to bolt, but the ox sighed and yawned and chewed its cud. Kimeri decided that if the ox was not afraid, then neither would she be.
It took some deciding. This was a demon. She had heard the guides talking about them, especially their yellow eyes and their long fangs. The guides thought the Olenyai wore veils to hide fangs just like these, though of course Olenyai were only men, with plain Asanian faces and ordinary Asanian eyes, yellow and gold and amber and ocher-brown.
This was not a man at all. It did not have a babble of thoughts like a man, but neither was it the wordless nowness of an animal. It felt most of all like a mage when he worked his magic—a singing presence, a flicker like a fire on the skin. But it was not as strong as a mage, not as solid on the earth. She thought of ice, that was like stone but very different.
She must be careful, she thought. She was Sun-blood—she burned too fierce sometimes for magical things to bear. Things like spirits of air, or fetches on their masters’ errands, or demons of the mountains come to see what trespassed in their country.
The demon was surprised that she did not shriek and run away. She was supposed to do that; all the earthborn did. Even earthborn who were demon-eyed.
She stayed where she was. The demon tried jumping up and down on its branch. It had no weight: the branch never moved. That was interesting. The demon started to chitter and gnash its teeth.
“Why do you do all that?” she asked it. “You can’t hurt me.”
The demon stopped. Its big yellow eyes blinked. It filled her mouth with the taste of blood, like iron but strangely sweet. That was the blood of an earthborn man, fresh from his throat that the demon had torn.
“That was because he was afraid,” Kimeri said. “He let you eat him. I’m not afraid of you.”
Her great-grandfather would know what to say to that. It was a long word. Arrogance, that was it.
“But it’s true,” she said. “You don’t need to drink blood. You have the air up here, and the wind off the snow.”
Blood was sweet, the demon told her. It was warm.
“Mine would burn you,” she said. She clambered down off the ox’s back, holding on to harness and pelt, and went to stand under the tree.
The demon stared down at her. She stared up. “You won’t be drinking any blood here. If you do I’ll tell my mother. She’s much stronger than I am. Her blood is like the sun.”
The demon shut its big round eyes. When it opened them, they were all of the demon that was left; then they were gone, and so was the demon. But it was near—she felt it, it and its brothers and sisters and cousins.
“Remember,” she said to them. “No bad tricks. I’ll know it was you, and I’ll do something about it.”
9
There were people in this country. What seemed inhospitable beyond believing and beautiful in the coldest way imaginable, a jagged landscape of peaks and lofty valleys, snowfields and icefields and sudden plunges into green oases, had its own thin tough populace. Villages clung to the sides of crags or huddled round the warmth of a valley. There were fortresses on peaks that should have been too steep for any creature to climb, inhabited often by wind and dust and sky, but often again by a dirty scrabble of people whose only pride seemed to be in the sharpness of their weapons.
The people were like the land they lived in, harsh, stark, often cruel, but showing flashes of sudden beauty. In a town so steep it had no streets, only ladders from house to stone-built house, and no open space but the level in its center, where its market was set up and doing a brisk trade, Daruya heard a singer whose voice could have called the stars out the sky. The singer was blind, and therefore oblivious to Daruya’s strangeness; he sang on even when the rest of the listeners drew back, giving her demon-eyes a wide space.
She heard a hiss and a scuffle behind her, where Chakan was insisting on guarding her back. She glanced over her shoulder. The Olenyas had a wizened townsman by the throat. He shook the man as a hound shakes a rat. Something fell tinkling: a fistful of coins that wore familiar faces.
“Right out of my purse,” said Chakan, almost too amused to be angry. “It’s no defense to be a demon, it seems. Not against thieves.”
The thief struggled in his grip. He laid the point of a dagger against the man’s throat, just under the chin, and hissed. The man went grey.
Chakan laughed and let him go. He bolted.
“That should warn off the rest,” said Chakan.
Daruya had her doubts. She had observed that demons in this country were as fair game as any other travelers. She has also noticed that they seemed to have no fear of theft among themselves. It was only dishonor, she supposed, to steal from one’s own kind.
Her own valuables were wrapped in silk and hung between her breasts. A thief would have to pass a heavy coat and a leather tunic and a pair of shirts to reach the treasure. She wished him well of it if he came that far; he would have earned it.
The singer’s song ended on a wailing not
e. It wound up and up, spiraled down, and faded. She plucked a coin or two from Chakan’s hand and tossed them into the bowl at the singer’s feet. They would be safe there, since the singer was not a foreigner.
oOo
Daruya was still pondering thieves and honor and the relation of foreigners to both as their caravan scrambled up yet another steep and stony pass. The town on the crag was far behind. Shurakan, the guides said, was far ahead: at least half a Brightmoon-month of journeying, as much time as lay behind them since they left Kianat. It went slow; it always went slow in this country of endless up and down and very little level.
This pass was like a knife-cut in the earth, a thin slash in the mountain’s side. Steep as it was, its walls nearly sheer, closing in on them as they went on, it seemed likely to narrow to nothing and so trap them, and leave them at the mountain’s mercy.
She let out her breath at long last as the narrow wall—barely wide enough for the oxen to scrape by—began to widen again, and the slope to soften slightly. The caravan, with her in the middle, kept on at its plodding pace; no wall in front of it yet, and light still in the gap. Echoes ran up and down the walls: snort of senel, grunt of ox, thud of hooves, low mutter of voices as Vanyi, up ahead, conferred with Aku the guide.
There was no getting closer. The way was too narrow. Daruya tried stretching her ears to more than simple human keenness, but Vanyi was too canny a mage for that; she and her companion rode as if globed in glass. Daruya had to content herself with straining to catch the odd word, and praying for the walls to open before she went out of her wits—the more so for that the one word she caught was ambush.
Her eyes ran up the walls of the cleft. Too steep surely for any man to come down, and too high to leap. If she were a bandit or mountain lord, she would close off the ends of the cleft and trap her prey within. But no one had done that. Her magery, seeking, found nothing. The way was open behind as in front.