by Gayle Greeno
The Seeker General? What was Byrta talking about? Except for Byrta, Doyce saw side-turned, averted faces, no one else looking directly at her. The fine hairs on the back of her neck began to rise and prickle, just as they had the night before.
“Doyce,” Byrta swallowed hard. “Doyce, Oriel is dead. Saam badly hurt, a ghatt-shell without the mindspeech. We ... we don’t know what happened or how it happened.”
The leftover stew on her plate grew ugly, she was sure of that, the fat and juices congealing in dead white globs ... like flesh. A smear of pulped tomato hovered at the plate’s edge, red as a gout of blood. Yes, quite ugly ... no question about that. Doyce set her fork down with precision and leaned back, swallowing hard, willing her gorge not to rise. Ramming the back of her wrist against her mouth, she bit, not conscious of what she did.
Parcellus, Lady bless him even if She never had before, was sliding the body ... no, the plate ... out from in front of her. She opened her eyes and stared into the middle distance, toward the burnished counter with its candles reflecting off their pinked tin backs, the warm, intimate glow of oil lamps, the bustle, the people ... alive, alive, alive, and Oriel dead! Ah, thrust all the suddenly staring faces, all the concerned faces, thrust them away, each mouth silently shaping the word “dead.” Not Oriel, not again!
Easier to pretend another, a self-controlled Doyce watched Doyce, distancing herself from what she saw, heard, felt. Oh, dearest Lady, to be able for once to distance the pain of loss! If she stayed locked in this present moment, the now, could she not pretend the past had never happened, that the future would not unroll itself in this new pattern, that only this frozen moment deserved her total concentration? Better to watch, to lose herself in the wonder of each individual gesture, each sound, refuse to tally their cost, their meanings as a whole. Best to simply be, divorced from her outer being.
From a distant spectator’s seat in her mind, she peered down at herself, the slight figure of Doyce with her cap of red-brown hair thatching the oval face with its slightly too prominent patrician nose, the hazel eyes now dark and dilated with fear. Interesting, how the wiry body held itself coiled, ready to spring away, escape, but found no place to hide; she was hemmed in, forced to concentrate on the activity around her, activity that abruptly captured her interest, pushed everything away from her cowering, frantic thoughts. Watch, don’t think, the distant Doyce commanded—and she did. Time enough for thinking later; for now she transformed herself into an audience, assigned to sit and watch the drama. Make-believe, it was only make-believe, wasn’t it?
What missed cue made the boy at the bar pale to suety-white, his mouth pinched with a muffled exclamation he dared not utter, his eyes darting everywhere except down to his hands as he fumbled beneath the bar? He pulled up a dusty, squat bottle with a long neck and red wax seal impressed on it, set it on the bar, knocked it over, righted it, still without looking at his hands.
She watched with close concern, focusing with him on his effort to extract the sticky cork, all the while not looking at what he was doing. The small, rounded glass—real glass, not pottery—was knocked over twice, once nearly rolling off the bar, but the boy’s hands, at least, “saw” better than his eyes. It all appeared highly significant and necessary that she should scrutinize his actions, deduce what would happen next.
When had Chak sprung to the top of the counter? Ah, she’d missed that, intent on the boy. Chak threaded a fastidious path amongst the damp ale-rings and the steins, past a smoldering pipe in a cracked china saucer, his dainty white paws negotiating the spills. “Sweet old Chak, what would Rolf do without you?” she thought idly as the boy backed as far from the counter and the ghatt as he could and still keep his hands in motion over the bar. Chak located a small, dry island and sat, twining his tail around his toes as he leveled his head in the boy’s direction. ,
Myllard stood at the other end of the counter, dead-still, drops of perspiration at his temples, only his eyes winking from her to the boy and the patient ghatt, back and back again, as if she somehow bore responsibility. But she was not responsible for anything except sitting politely through the end of this scene; she was the audience, not the director, not one of the actors. Nor had she any idea who had written the script.
“Pour it,” Myllard croaked, one hand shooting up to twist at the tuft of hair over his left ear. The boy gathered his courage and tilted the dusty bottle.
With infinite concentration, Chak collected the small, rounded glass to him with a crooked white paw and began easing his way down the bar, scooting the glass along with him. The deep amber liquid trembled, threatened to slosh, but the ghatt persisted, gaining ground, bar patrons pulling back, out of his path.
Rolf jumped to his feet and snatched the glass from the ghatt. She could feel the tension in his rigid stance, a match for her own. “Don’t press your luck, old boy, but Lady bless, there’s one cool head in the bunch of us. Now let them be.” He took a few steps along the bar and hoisted the bottle from the boy’s limp grasp, said, “Sorry,” and nodded at Myllard in thanks. Chak jumped down from the bar, landing hard and standing stock-still for a moment, elderly bones jarred by the landing. Everything appeared normal, as if no ghatt had ever paraded across the bar, although the boy polished that piece of counter with mindless compulsion, damp towel swooping in widening circles as if to eradicate something from his memory as well.
“Chak, you know full-well that’s how rumors and bad tales get their start,” Rolf admonished. Then he sighed and shrugged ruefully as he topped off the glass Chak had retrieved with such care.
Tossing her head back as Rolf thrust the glass under her nose, she dropped her hand from her mouth and sniffed too deeply, barely avoiding a sneeze at the strength of the sharp, biting smell. “Brandy,” Rolf encouraged, tilting the glass to her lips, wetting them. “Enough for all by the heft of it, though we’ll have to do without the pretty glassware.” Chak levered himself to his feet again, head cocked in query, hind legs bunched for another spring. Rolf froze him with a sharp command. “Leave it be! Do you want the boy to lose his wits?” Chak sat, licked at his ruff and around to his shoulder, head turned from the rebuke spoken aloud.
The smooth fire of the brandy trickled a pang of warmth into her inner being, acted as a release, dropping a curtain of reality between actors and audience. Now she had no choice but to concentrate, assess, and reluctantly become involved although she had no script to follow, no idea of her cue. She pressed the brandy glass against her lips, tongued the slickness of the glass, the stickiness of the curved side where the liquid had slopped just a little. She took a tiny sip, wondered why the back of her wrist showed twin bite-marks, red and white crescents imprinted in flesh. Oriel always relished a well-aged brandy, but she had never been able to appreciate the complexities and subtleties of taste he could identify. Brandy, enough for all, Rolf had said, enough for all, but none for Oriel because Oriel is dead. Dead.
Dead. At least that’s what Byrta had said, and Doyce looked up for confirmation, hoping not to receive it. But Byrta nodded once, captured the bottle from Rolf, and gave it a defiant hoist, throat working. She thumped the bottle hard on the table, the alcohol raising a hectic flush on her cool, golden skin. “Oriel is dead,” she repeated as if to a child, “and Saam probably soon to follow. The body wounds will heal, but without his mindspeech and without his Bondmate, will he desire to live?” Bard reached over, cupped a hand under Khar’s chin, and turned her face toward the light, his grip firm when she tried to pull free. He conferred silently with M‘wa and P’wa for an instant, let his eyes question his twin. “I know,” Byrta replied. “I could feel that she knew, couldn’t you? It showed in her eyes as soon as we came in.”
Who had known? Khar? Doyce gazed down at the huddled ghatta beside her on the bench. She had known, she had known, she whispered fiercely to herself. That was the burden the ghatta had carried with her since last night. Unreasoning anger flared, burned through her mind; she’d been shut out, depri
ved of the truth, the sharing and the sorrowing. Lady take the ghatta to the furthest reaches of ... ! No, no, no, not and lose Khar, too! Khar’s amber eyes met hers without flinching.
“I knew. I knew but I didn’t know who. Don’t you understand? I could feel it, but I couldn’t sense where or how or why. Only the dread, the dread! Evil twining through the air! I kept straining, trying to read it, to form the truth, but it disappeared ... ! Everything disappeared, all the mindlinks fractured and in ruins. I reached everywhere my mind could search, but no one answered! No one! Oh, why didn’t I try harder? I failed!” The misery masked her face, her eyes sunken and shadowed, her fur suddenly lusterless and shabby. Per‘la shouldered closer and began to lick, working her way around Khar’s face. M’wa started on a flank, P’wa down the back of her neck as if they could erase her sickness of spirit.
“What happened to Oriel? How did you find him? Where did you find him?” Doyce steadied her voice but needed both hands to steady her glass—that, and her elbows on the table.
Byrta leaned against her twin and took a deep breath. “At the foot of the cliff that overhangs Wyllow Gorge, just short of where it joins the river.” She struggled to continue, as if shamed by what she was admitting. “We rode out so early, well before dawn ... a wager, a silly little wager with Oriel that we’d catch him outside the walls before he got in. It ... it wasn’t the wager, so much, we’d not seen him in a long time. Our circuits hadn’t meshed lately. We ... missed him.” Her voice trailed off and Bard’s long arm captured the brandy bottle from the table, held it out to her, smoke-hazed eyes bright with concern.
She took a judicious sip, passed the bottle back to Bard. “When the mindscreams started... P‘wa and M’wa became near-crazed with the pain, twisting and yowling, batting at their heads. We couldn’t ’speak them, couldn’t understand what was wrong. At first we thought poison. When they went limp, fainted, we turned back to Gaernett to get help for them ... we didn’t realize others were affected, we didn’t know what had happened, what to do! We feared their dying!” Her face twisted at the pain of the memories.
Now Bard’s voice picked up the tale, allowing his sister time to compose herself. “M‘wa came to very quickly, but he still couldn’t ’speak me. And no matter how hard I reined the gelding back toward the city walls, he wouldn’t go, just kept galloping toward the cliff, M‘wa wobbling and weak on the platform as if begging him to speed on. When we finally pulled up, ’twas clear there’d been a vicious struggle all the way to cliffs edge, and M‘wa and P’wa slipped down the cliffside to see. That was how we found them.”
“Rider, horse, and ghatt toppled off together.” Byrta took a breath and retrieved the telling, as if by private signal. “Or that’s what it was meant to seem. More tracks than theirs alone at clifftop. Oriel’s horse held the faintest breath of life in him, when we’d scrambled down, but he faded away. Saam unconscious, bleeding from gouges and scrapes and a bad wound on his right hip. With the ghatti still weak, still unable to ‘speak any distance to call for aid, we dared not move him ’til dawn when we could judge what we were doing. Oriel was dead from the fall, his head smashed in.” She buried her face against Bard’s chest to muffle the next words, but they heard them nonetheless. “His ... his brain was gone!”
“No so surprising after a fall like that.” So cool and controlled, so analytical over her friend and lover’s death. Someone had to be, someone had to be. “It’s not a straight, unbroken fall. He must have crashed and hit several times on the ledges, lost bits of skull and brain matter each time he hit. Those outcroppings are brutally sharp.”
“No! You don’t understand!” Byrta straightened, her usual flowing gestures choppy with anger. “I don’t mean that it leaked out, that he was flecked with bits of brain. It was scooped out—clean as a melon! And we found further signs of a struggle down below. Especially around Saam, and a shred of black cloth snagged in his teeth. M’wa saw it.” The ghatt’s head bobbed once in mute agreement, and he went back to licking Khar.
M‘wa finished Khar’s ablutions and began to speak. “My twin and I searched every spot we could reach, clifftop down. Trouble at the top, trouble at the bottom. No horse, no Seeker,” he paused and sniffed emphatically, “and most of all, no ghatt would seek his death that way to escape from danger. Our ways are our ways, and that is not one of them.” Per’la and Chak bowed their heads, eyes squeezed shut, as M’wa continued. “Something, someone, made them take that leap.” And then a last sentence so low and vehement, so strictly ghatti-directed that Doyce strained to hear, sure that she must understand falanese. “And when we find them....” No additional words were wasted.
Khar’s eyes cleared and she listened. “What of Saam?” she stared at M‘wa, awaiting his answer. P’wa and M’wa consulted between themselves before the ghatt with the long left white stocking spoke again.
“In body—fair. With rest and the medications, he would heal. But he will not be still. When Twylla tried to administer the sleeping draught, he struck at her! Mem’now blocked his blow, had to growl to make him desist!” No one, Seeker or Bondmate, had ever raised hand or paw to Twylla before, despite the pain, the mind-disorientation brought on by sickness or injury. Her very touch soothed the fretful. “But he cannot mindspeak. We regained our powers slowly. He ... not at all.”
The enormity of the loss was only beginning to sink in on the others, ghatti and Seekers alike. P’wa looked at her sib and coughed. “Let me speak, brotherling.” He nodded wearily and the ghatta with the long white stocking on her right leg began to speak. “We have conversed, Saam and ourselves ... in falanese, our own tongue, but not through our minds. He can remember nothing, nothing but the loss of Oriel, and he knows not how or why. Only that he is gone and it is like to tear his very essence apart. The few words he speaks are forced, distracting him from the seeking for his Bond. Whether he will stay or go, I cannot say. If he seeks far enough, his body must follow after.”
“What is there to stay for?” Chak growled and placed a protective white paw on Rolf’s thigh. “Without one’s Bond....” Rolf’s eyes swam with tears and he cuffed the ghatt softly.
“May you travel, then, before I,” he whispered. “The pain will be there for me, but my memories will help.” The intimacy of his words resounded with unbearable pain to the others after the news they had heard.
“Brandy?” Jenret cocked a suggestive eyebrow at the decanter the servant had left on the sideboard. He stretched back in his chair, brought his arms above his head and interlaced his fingers, in no rush for an answer. Much as the thought of the brandy pleased him, he had no eagerness about rising to retrieve it.
“Lazy,” Rawn scolded, “Fill your belly so full and there’ll be no room for me on the pommel platform.”
Mahafny sat arrow-straight, folding and refolding her napkin, thin fingers recreasing each fold. Lower lip caught between her teeth, she examined the napkin as if she’d never seen one before, then slipped it inside its ring. “A small one, perhaps. As long as you promise this isn’t part of the ritual your father and uncle used to indulge in—brandy and cigars. The stench permeates everything.”
Rocking onto the chair’s back legs, he stretched his arms further, higher, then brought his hands behind his head, twisted his neck from side to side. “I think I can do without the cigars, and not just in honor of your presence.” He leaned forward, the chair’s front legs hitting the floor with a protesting thunk, and rose, heading toward the sideboard where the drinks tray sat. Strange, how familiar the room seemed, even though he’d been here only a few times before. It was the furniture he recognized, had known since childhood. Old pieces, the sideboard and a matching hutch, sturdily made but with a charm of caring workmanship and more than a modicum of inventiveness; most decorated in old, soft faded colors, stenciled with fruited cornucopias, sheaves of wheat, flowers ... mustards, ochers, mullein greens, dusky roses, slate and navy blues. Wycherley furniture, long in the family, his uncle’s, Mahafny’s dead h
usband. The dining room chairs he well remembered for their discomfort, spindled backs always poking and paining whenever one dared relax backward. Certainly more effective with both children and adults than an admonishment against slouching.
“How much?” he asked over his shoulder, poising bottle over glass. Eyes closed as if she dozed, Mahafny jerked forward at the sound, arm sending a table knife spinning off the table. Rawn jerked upright, dignity offended as the knife cartwheeled and clattered beside his paws.
“What?” Mahafny’s head bent below the table to follow the knife’s flight. “Ah, Jenret, tender my apologies, please. The beast will think I’m ambushing him.”
“I told you she doesn’t like me!” Rawn sat perfectly still, tail wrapped tight around his feet, whiskers twitching as he glared at the offending knife.
Jenret gave the bottle a little shake, chinked the mouth against the rim of the glass to draw her attention. “Rawn thinks you’re bent on foul deeds, basest murder, my dear aunt. I know it was accidental, Mahafny, but an apology might be in order. Now, how much would you like? Your humble servant awaits your command.”
“And did I not ask you to tell him I was sorry?” Mahafny returned Rawn’s glare, the ghatt pretending not to notice.
He exhaled, invoking patience. First Rawn’s touchiness, and now Mahafny’s as well. He wasn’t used to playing the conciliator. “And I’ve explained to you before that Rawn does not care to be addressed at second hand when he’s right here in the room. He’s not invisible. Or deaf.” He poured brandy for himself and set the bottle down to wait it out. “If you won’t respect his wishes, my dear, humor me. Apologize to him directly.”
He waited for her expostulation, her anger. He hated crossing her like this, but he hated betraying Rawn even more. Enough fools in the world when it came to ghatti, without his aunt joining their ranks. Just wait it out, wait it out, he counseled himself as he sipped at the brandy.