Trapped it was for sure, unable to bypass whatever hidden barrier the Princip had created to hold it. It seemed to seethe against a wall of wind, although there was none. Elisande had never been truly frightened of the thing before - more through idiocy than courage: she'd even meant to carry it from the Roq to Surayon, and had given barely a thought to bringing it unclaimed, unstolen through all those miles, all those men between there and here - but she was frightened now. Since it had been - what, hatched? - it had always been Marrons, almost a part of Marron, his will woven in blood and smoke; and she had always somehow trusted Marron, even where he was stupid, even where he was blind.
Her grandfather's fingers were moving inward now, into the rawness of the open wound, the flesh that would never skin or scar.
Grandfer, be careful. . .
She knew just what he was doing: how his mind was reaching into the beat of Marron's blood, how it followed that tide and coursed through his body till it found the damage in his arm, how it interfered. She had done the same herself or tried to, but only when the Daughter was in him, and so she had failed again and again. She'd never dared to risk this. She was frightened for all of them, terrified for Marron; she could almost hate her grandfather for taking such a chance, if she hadn't understood him so well.
His fingers moved inside Marron's gaping wound, to mirror how his awareness moved, so much deeper within. Slowly, carefully, thoroughly he would be mending what was ripped, sealing what lay open to the world; slowly, carefully, thoroughly he would be closing off the Daughter's gateway to its human host.
Elisande felt the sun's heat against the back of her neck, and hugged herself hard against a terrible chill.
Sometimes she remembered to breathe, or her body did: great wracking gasps that shook her like sobs, as though she were weeping after all when she was so determined not to do that.
Occasionally she remembered her friends and where they were, around her; she thought she might look about to find them, but she never did. There was a separation between thought and action, between mind and muscle. She was as harshly cut off as the Daughter, lacked the power to move at all.
It was the Princip who released her at last, by moving himself: by sighing, stretching, rising from his place at Marron's side. Even then, though, it was a frustrated freedom that he granted her. She'd barely taken the smallest pace forward before he was glancing at her, glaring at her, gesturing her back beyond the doorway. 'Grandfer...'
'No, Elisande. There is nothing that you can do in here but harm. The boy is well enough, for now; whether he stays so is not in your hands to determine. Neither yours, Jemel,' sharing his glare around. 'Coren, again I may need you, but wait my call.'
"When the Kings Shadow bowed in acceptance of the command, she could do nothing more than fidget and fret, chew on a fingernail, watch as she had been watching. Her eyes followed the Princip across the chamber, towards where the Daughter billowed against its constraints. Had she thought that there was danger before? She had deceived herself, too scared to see ahead. Now it was truly unfettered, it had no home, no master, and her grandfather was setting himself against it. He couldn't tame it, no man could. It was a wild thing, a spirit, beyond mortal managing. She had no idea what it would do when he released it from its current cage. Perhaps it would flee to Marrons body, find that shelter closed against it and so destroy him in its fury. Or perhaps destroy her grandfather; perhaps it would destroy them all...
Her breath came in whispers now, and she resented even so much noise. It was louder than the soft grating of the Princip's boots on the grit on the flagstone floor, and that was too loud already. For his sake she wanted utter silence in the world, she wanted the birds on the hillside to stop singing, the wind not to blow.
It had been an anxious time recently; she could find no nails left to chew. Instead she reached her hand out and snatched at Julianne's - Hasans asleep, Sherett is coming, you can share my worries for the next long minute or two, and if you resist me it'll be your nails that I'm chewing, girl- just as the Princip reached his own hands out towards the Daughter.
In the same moment, his mind must have unpicked the bonds that had held it pinned and confused. It drew together sharply, no longer a diffuse and harmless-seeming cloud but suddenly that familiar insect-shape, sharp and deadly.
She thought it would attack him, mindless and desperate; she felt mindless and desperate herself, knowing that even he could have no defence against it. Instead, it only hung in the air, potent but undriven, apparently adrift.
Her grandfather held his hands high, on either side of the thing, perilously close to touching where the wisps of its blurred edges frayed into the air. At the same time, he star-ded her by starting to sing.
Even before her ears had caught the words, the cadence and rhythm of his voice had sent her mind hurtling back to childhood, to those nights when she was too hot or too excited to sleep. Sometimes her mother had come to her, and that was always good; sometimes her father, and in those days that was better. Sometimes, though, occasionally it had been her grandfather who came, and that was best of all. He'd talk to her a little, cuddle and kiss her out of tearfulness, then he'd lie her down on her tummy and his strong peasant hands would caress her head and back, rough skin but a gentle and tender touch, while his voice sang this same song in a whisper that seemed to gather up her soul and carry it swiftly away into restful dreaming.
At the time, she didn't even understand the words. It wasn't until she'd made the trip to Rhabat and learned much from the women there that she'd finally recognised it as a form of the Sharai sodar. Her mother sang her lullabies to help her into sleeping; Rudel used the same strange song as her grandfer with the same soothing touch, and her child's mind had thought it just another kind of lullaby.
Which it was, she supposed, in a way. That it was also tribal magic had been a revelation; that she could find no tribe familiar with that particular song had been a curiosity, a question she'd have liked to put to her grandfather if she'd had any hope of winning an answer from him. By then, she'd been long past questioning her father.
To hear it used now, and to such a purpose, was bewildering. The sodar was a way to quiet fretful minds and bodies, to sway them into sleep; surely he didn't think that he could lull the Daughter as he'd lulled a restless girl?
He could, though, and he did. While she watched, aghast, while she listened and still felt the seductive tug of it despite all her apprehension and all the years since she'd last succumbed to its insistent magic, her grandfather sang his song.
To her continuing astonishment, the Daughter felt it too, or appeared to. It contracted slowly, its colour deepening and the lines of its body becoming clearer, more solid-seeming. The Princip's hands closed in around it as it curled into itself, much like an insect withdrawing into its shell; it looked almost as though he were guiding it, even pressing against it as its red skin turned hard and textured ...
Touch was always an important, even the crucial element in the sodar. Even so, she couldn't hold back a gasp when she saw that he was touching the Daughter for true, holding it firmly in both hands as his song died in his throat. The lightest touch was lethal, when it was blood-bound and alive. Never mind that she'd seen it handled before in this passive state, never mind that Julianne had carried it all through the Roq, never mind the logic that said her grandfather must be safe or else he would be dead already, she gasped regardless, and then she did the other thing that she'd been aching to do against all wisdom and instruction. If he wouldn't be wise, then neither need she.
She plunged forward through the doorway; she hurtled across the chamber to her grandfather's side and tried to wrest the thing — the globe, the sphere, the red ochre ball, the Daughter - from his hands.
He held on to it, as though he'd been expecting just such an assault.
'Elisande, stop it. You're being foolish.'
It was the unexpected mildness of the rebuke that stalled her, that quelled the ferocity of her
tongue, that left her with nothing to do but stutter feebly, 'If, if you'd been bleeding, anywhere at all; or if you'd touched it at all before it was ready, before you'd made it safe—'
'—Then I'd have died, or else it would have conjoined with me instead of Marron. Yes, I know. But neither of those things happened, and therefore I have made it safe, and therefore I can hold it perfectly well without your help.'
She let go then, realising only as she did so that her fingers had been quietly exploring the ridges and runnels, the glossy segments and the abrasive hollows of the Daughter's enclosing shell. She'd only seen before, she'd never touched. She remembered how it had been before, how Marron had woken it all unknowing; from that memory she found the resilience to scowl at her grandfather and say, 'You still shouldn't hold it like that, you don't know what might happen. You could tread on a nail, bite your tongue, stumble and fall and graze your knee... It isn't safe, it's never safe when a man is near it; and you especially, you shouldn't take such risks, your people need you...'
Especially now, she meant; and ‘ need you, especially now, she meant that too.
'It’s precisely because I'm fit to take such risks that my people need me as much as they do.'
Its being true, that was hard to argue with. Instead she turned the discussion, chanced one straight question.
'Did you, did you know that the sodar would make it sleep?'
'No, I didn't know. I knew that it had been left this way in the Roq, therefore I knew that the thing could be done; I guessed a while ago that the sodar— that particular sodar — might be an influence on it. The words are very old and hard to understand, but they clearly amount to more than a convenient way to hush a noisy child. I thought it worth the experiment.'
'Not worth your life! Marron has carried it a long way—' '—And should carry it no further. This kept him alive, to be sure, but he must have been a living ghost. Look at him, Elisande...'
She shook her head. Jemel would do that, was probably doing it already. She'd seen Marron before in fatigue, in weakness and in pain; she didn't need to see him now, she'd rather look at her grandfather. Who looked suddenly weak, exhausted, deeply hurt - worse than he'd been after driving the 'ifrit-fragment out of Hasan, worse by a distance, if only because this time he had not collapsed. She could see the determination in him, the absolute certainty that he could not allow himself that luxury, and therefore would not; and she could see how even that determination was draining him further, costing him more.
More than he could afford, she thought. This man lost a son today his only child, and very possibly his country too . . .
And slowly, respectfully, she reached out and took the Daughter gently from his grasp, so that he could at least afford to fall if he must.
This time, he let her take it; she'd been sure that he would. She saw herself reflected in his eyes, and thought that she'd grown since last they'd stood together.
It was surprisingly light in her hands, but he seemed to be stronger for being relieved of it, if only marginally.
'You should sleep,' she told him, 'recover your strength.' That was how she needed him, how they all needed him: bull-strong, the spirit of his land.
'I should; but when will I get the chance?' The glimmer of a smile accompanied the words. That was reassuring, but not enough.
'Right now, while I find somewhere secure to stow this.'
He shook his head; even so little movement had him rocking on his feet, but thankfully Coren was abruptly there to steady him with a grip on his elbow.
'No, child. I have one duty more, before I can think of resting. And so do you. The King's Shadow has kindly brought my son, your father home to me; it is for us to see to his resting now.'
And so she found herself going down, down many stairs to the crypt below the palace, with the Daughter still clutched like a talisman in her arms. Although she didn't like to use the slightest magic so close to something so old, so powerful, so little understood, she made a witchlight shine to show their way where no lamps burned. Her grandfather was past raising a glow - too old, too tired, too distressed: any one of those would have been excuse enough, and he could have offered all three if she'd asked him, which she didn't - and Coren didn't have a hand free to hold a torch, too busy using both to help and guard the Princip on the stairs.
Down and down, into the chill, still air that the hills hoarded in hidden caves. The crypt had been just such a cave once, that had been found by digging; quite how the Princip had known just where to dig, Elisande had never bothered to ask.
Now it was a place prepared, though never yet occupied. The walls were smoothly plastered white and set with sconces, with niches for lamps, with shelves for coffins or shrouded bodies. There were biers of white stone on the floor, on one of those lay Rudel, still in his travelling clothes, still in his blood.
On another were set bowls of steaming, scented water, cloths and oils, cerements of linen. Elisande thought this was a test, at Coren's instigation; she glowered at him, and he gazed neutrally back. Then she was certain.
Well, she could do this. With her grandfather at her side, she had to do this.
She set the Daughter to one side, lit the lamps in their niches and let the witchfire die. If she had to do it, she'd do it properly and with no distractions, nowhere to hide. Let these men see how grown she was, how ready.
She and her grandfather stripped Rudel's body, slowly and ceremonially. They washed blood and dirt from his skin, bound up the dreadful gaping hole that should have been his throat, anointed him and dressed him for his long sleep. At some point, one or the other of them had started to hum the sodar, now they were both doing it, though it was no part of any ritual that Elisande knew, Sharai or otherwise.
When they were done, the Princip said, ‘It should have been his task, to lay me here. I never thought to do the work for him. I built this place for me and mine, but they should follow me ...'
'Grandfer?'
'Yes, child?'
'Don't leave him here. It's cold. Too quiet for him, too far from, from Cireille.' Largely at Elisande's own sobbing insistence, her mother had been carried home to her family's estate on the other side of the valley, where she lay in warm earth in a grove of olives. 'Let him lie with her. Please? He'd have liked that so much more.'
‘I built this place for me and mine,' again. 'Am I to be lonely here, when I come?'
'No, Grandfer. I'll follow you,' if I don't come ahead 'Keep a place for me.'
'Would you not choose to be buried with your husband, little one, wherever he may lie? It is the custom. I miss my own wife's company, more even than I'll miss my son.'
Her grandmother was long dead, long buried in another land than this; she had never seen Surayon.
'I'll not marry,' she said softly, almost thankful for it as she gazed at the empty niches, that might otherwise have waited for her own children. 'I'll live and die as I am, and when I'm dead I'll come to you, Grandfer, and our ghosts can guard Surayon above till the stars fall.'
'If it's there yet, if we can guard it now,' was the dry response. 'Coren, I'm too weary for all those stairs again ...'
Coren smiled, and they all stepped into light; and she thought, remembered, realised that they could have done this coming down, he could have brought them here in a moment. Which meant he'd had a reason not to do it, which her grandfather had understood. Old men, they were hateful sometimes; it sometimes seemed to her that they had planned her every word and action. After the long toil of the descent and the hard reality of her father's body waiting at the bottom, of course she would rebel against leaving him here in the cold alone. They must have known that, they had known it. And so he would lie where he had wanted, where they wanted, where she had spent half her life insisting that he should not be, at his dead wife's side. They'd made her ask it; she felt used, manipulated, nothing new.
It was a small gesture towards a petty independence, but she needed something and she needed it now; so without askin
g consent, without even saying what she'd done, she left the Daughter where it was, in a vacant niche in the wall of her family crypt. It was, she thought, as safe as anywhere, now that Surayon was no longer safe at all. They would realise or remember soon enough, if they didn't know already, but just for this little while she could pretend, she could convince herself that she had made her own choice and acted on it. She could even make believe that her father was not entirely lost from her story, that she left him on watch over the Daughter, though she'd never let him watch over her.
A Blade for a Boy
Servants came, with an offer to carry Hasan and his pallet back inside the chamber; Julianne said no, persuaded them rather to help Jemel bring Marron out to join him. They would wake sooner, she thought, man and boy, with the sun on their faces and the whisper of a breeze across their skins. The breeze whispered war', even she could smell the taint of smoke though it came from miles off; she would have spared them that if she could, but thought grimly, bitterly that they were men and warriors both. They should rouse to that, if nothing else.
She had more trouble with the servants when they brought her food, and she refused to eat it.
I’ll eat when my husband eats,' she said softly, stubbornly, wiping the vivid scars on his cheek with a cool cloth and willing him to wake soon, now, at any rate before Sherett arrived. She had no idea how fast the djinni might fetch her sister-wife; it might have been an eyeblink, it might yet be hours, but Sherett was coming and should not come to find him still asleep.
He should wake, and he should do it soon if Julianne s wishing had any power; but what he should not do was wake to see her face-full and chewing, callous and careless of his needs. She explained this hotly to the Princip's servants, when they pressed.
Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 Page 30