The clack of the capstan on the decks of the trader ship Coalteca slowed and stopped with a jar against wood as the heavy, leather-wrapped stone anchor thudded home against the cathead. The captain bellowed orders for the sailors in the rigging to loose the brails. The squeal of halyards followed, as yardarms lifted, and brightly painted canvas bellied to the sea wind. Confined belowdecks, Mara paced across the tiny stern cabin. Against her every wish and instinct, to be in the open as the vessel set sail, her concealment was necessary. Still, after weeks denied fresh air and sunlight, Mara chafed. She flashed a glance at her Force Commander, whose normally weathered face also had grown pale during their journey through the cho-ja tunnels from the city of Sulan-Qu to the remote, peninsular port of Kolth.
Mara had never journeyed through the southernmost reaches of Hokani Province. But she had heard secondhand descriptions from Jican, and balked curiosity left her irritable. How she would have loved to have stolen aboveground, even in the dead of night, to view the City of the Plains! The great rift that led to Midkemia was located there, where Kevin had been sent back to his homeland, as well as the mansion-like stone guild halls that were the hub of southern imperial commerce.
But the Assembly's anger was not to be risked for frivolous whims. Luck and Lujan's ingenuity had left a false trail that ended with the Lady of the Acoma in apparent seclusion in Turakamu's temple in Sulan-Qu. If the Black Robes were even to suspect they had been deceived, if one lowly beggar on the street chanced to recognise her as Servant of the Empire, her life and the lives of her family could immediately become forfeit. And so Mara had done the unthinkable, by the mores of Tsurani aristocracy: she had donned the robes of a slave woman, and left Sulan-Qu in the company of Lujan and Saric, both wearing the unmarked armor of mercenaries. The farmers and merchants who were abroad before dawn had assumed she was a battle prize. They had not thought to question her slave's grey, but stared openly at her slim figure and lustrous hair. A few had called ribald comments, to which Lujan, with strength of imagination, had responded in kind. His shocking coarseness had hidden that Saric at first had been unable to shed tradition for an act, and had stiffened at the insults to her person.
A message left with an agent of Arakasi's network had brought quick action. When Mara and her two officers had reached the cho-ja hive on her estates, she was joined by ten hand-picked warriors in armor without house markings, and another, a dock worker she had never seen before, who spoke Thuril as his birth tongue. With them came Kamlio, clad again in the rags in which Arakasi had delivered her, and made sullen by the prospect of traveling underground with the insectoids, who terrified her.
The journey south had been trying. Weary from nerves and confinement, and the alien experience of being stared at as chattel, Mara threw herself down in the cushioned alcove she had once shared with Kevin on a long-past journey to Tsubar. In these familiar quarters, the loss of him stung deep, as if their parting had happened yesterday. Almost she regretted her long ago purchase of the Coalteca; why had she not had the sense to let go of sentiment and buy some other blue-water trader?
Yet the Coalteca had been available; she had acted without consulting Jican. The ship was lucky, she felt; her triumph with Lord Xacatecas in Dustari still held the admiration of the Nations, and now that she had such dire forces as Jiro and the Assembly arrayed against her, she needed every reassurance to bolster her, even those rooted in superstition.
Kevin might have laughed at her irrationality. Impatient with herself for dwelling in the past when all the future lay in jeopardy, Mara turned from memories of her barbarian lover, only to find herself worrying for Hokanu.
Her husband did not know where she was, and must not, for safety's sake, receive even clandestine word until she was deep into Thuril territory. Sharply Mara regretted that she had had small opportunity to speak with him since their unhappy meeting after Kasuma's birth. Now, more than anything, she longed to confide in Hokanu, to receive his steady understanding and his apt insights. She worried for him, as he dealt with relations who sought to move up in the family hierarchy. Contentions inevitably arose after the deaths of strong Ruling Lords, when others who saw themselves as rivals to the heir emerged to assuage their ambitions. Mara sighed. She hoped, if Hokanu chose to accept the staff of office offered him by Ichindar, that he would visit their children in the Imperial Court. Kasuma should not grow older without knowing the love of a father, and Justin certainly was more of a handful than any of the imperial servants had backbone enough to handle. Again Mara sighed, wondering if she would return from Thuril with aid against the fearsome might of magic, only to be bested by two little ones who had turned into spoiled brats.
'You're thinking that maybe this whole voyage was a mistaken endeavor?' observed a quiet voice by the companionway.
Mara looked up, surprised to find Saric standing in the doorway to her cabin. The creaking sounds of the working ship had masked her adviser's approach, and the plain robe he wore made him blend into shadow.
Mara smiled wanly. 'I'm thinking we could have done without Kamlio's sullenness,' she said, not wishing to divulge her true thoughts.
Saric returned the mercurial, triangular grin that showed when his mood was mischievous. 'Certainly, from that one's complaints over sleeping arrangements, one would have thought she was the great Lady and you the browbeaten servant.'
Mara laughed. 'Have I been so dour?'
Her adviser folded himself onto a sea chest with neat grace. 'Have you felt so dour?' he asked.
'Yes.' Suddenly aware that her heart had lifted with the motion of the ship's sailing, Mara raked the pins out of her hair and let it unfold down her back. She gestured around the dim cabin, with its brightly woven cushions and its beaded curtains, bought from a desert trader, that clacked and rattled with each heel of the ship. 'I am tired of close walls and secrecy.' She did not add that she was nervous. To go into a foreign land, bearing none of the grand trappings of her rank, and with only ten soldiers and a guide who had been born a beast herd! This was not at all the same as her past trip into Dustari, when she had moved in the company of her own loyal army, with her command tent, and all of her accustomed comforts at hand.
Saric gave her a wry look. 'You are wishing you had given in to risk, and bought another litter in Kolth.' The sparkle in his eye indicated he had more to say. Mara withheld comment, until her First Adviser raked back his straight-cut bangs and added, 'Lujan did try the markets, you know. He found a used litter, an immense black lacquered affair all set with river stones and fringes.'
A storyteller's pause developed.
'Go on,' Mara prompted, skillfully distracted from ill temper. 'Why did our brave Force Commander not buy the monstrosity?'
Saric's smile widened with devilry. 'No bearers in the slave market had enough meat on their bones to lift the damned thing, and we'd not have enough hands free for swords if your honor guard was left to take the burden. Besides, Lujan said, if you and Arakasi's courtesan were mewed up in that thing together for more than an hour, you'd wind up fighting like tseeshas.'
Mara's jaw dropped at his allusion to the catlike creature known for combativeness between females. 'Lujan said that?'
Saric said nothing, which gave her an inkling. 'Lujan said no such thing!' she cried back in indignation. 'Are you trying to brew up mischief again, and see your cousin disgraced?'
Saric had the honesty to look sheepish.
'Out!' his mistress cried. 'Leave me, and send in Kamlio. If she doesn't want a bath, I most certainly do, before we've passed so far beyond shore that the seas become too rough for a basin.'
'As my Lady wishes,' Saric said, smoothly arising for his bow. As he stepped out, not at all shamefaced, his Lady realised that he had accomplished his objective; her downcast mood had lightened. She might have missed the City of the Plains, and the excitement of embarkation from Kolth; but she was headed for territory no Acoma in her memory had ever trodden.
All of the mountains of Thuril l
ay before her, and her heart leaped in anticipation of unknown adventure.
Later, bathed and scented, if plainly clothed, Mara stood in the bow of the Coalteca, watching the splash and tumble of foam and the leaping play of the iridescent jalor fish. She laughed in delight at the flash of their scales in the sunset, oblivious to the piercing regard of Kamlio.
'What do you see that is amusing in these desolate waters?' the onetime courtesan asked sourly. Deliberately, it seemed, she omitted the honorific of 'Lady', as if daring Mara to take umbrage.
'I see beauty,' Mara replied, as if the question had not stemmed from bitterness, 'I see life. Our moments of peace between contentions are to be cherished. This I have learned since I came to be Ruling Lady.'
Lujan approached from amidships, his plumeless helm taking on a cobalt gleam from the deepening sky overhead. He bowed to Mara and said, 'We make good speed, mistress.'
Mara raised her eyebrows. 'Have you become a sailor, Force Commander?'
Lujan smiled, his expression less devious than Saric's, but every bit as jaunty. Mara was struck afresh that this was a moment to be treasured. 'No,' her officer admitted, 'but the captain said as much.' Removing his helm with a grimace, for it did not fit as well as the more elaborate one he had left behind in Sulan-Qu, he raked his fingers through damp hair and breathed deeply of the sea air.
Disregarding Kamlio's uninterested presence at her side, Mara observed, 'This voyage brings back memories.'
Lujan peered up the height of the foremast, to the gaudy spread of canvas that netted the last golden sunlight. 'I miss the barbarian, too, mistress. Even if he did spend half the last voyage with his face buried in a basin.'
Mara couldn't resist laughing. 'Hard-hearted soldier,' she accused. 'One day a storm will get the better of your stomach, and then you will stop thinking sea sickness is funny.'
'Gods,' Lujan said with bitter pungency, 'don't wish such a fate upon me with my cousin aboard. He would cook me soup with fish scales in it as a remedy, and then tell all of my favorite reed girls what I looked like with green skin.' As Kamlio stiffened in silent antagonism, Lujan turned toward her the charming grin that lured half the prostitutes in the province to lean dangerously far over their gallery railings to call to him. 'No offense, lovely flower, but my girls all adore their jobs. They don't begrudge me their favors, and I don't treat them as property. I am not the merchant who bought and molded you for bed sport, and neither am I one of the masters who used you. Hear wisdom, and stop looking for those others in the face of every man you chance to meet.'
Kamlio looked as though she might spit venom. Then she shook back her pale gold hair, gathered her tawdry, patchwork robe, and swept away in stiff-backed silence. She did not turn her head a hair at the whispered comments and admiring looks of the sailors, but hustled down the companion way. into the mate's cabin she had been given for her quarters.
'Don't say it,' Mara murmured quickly, as she sensed the epithet her Force Commander was about to utter under his breath. 'You would certainly antagonise her less if you ceased calling her "lovely flower."'
Lujan looked pained. 'But she is one. If she were to tear her face and become scarred, her body would still make a man itch and sweat.' Then he reddened at his frankness of speech, as if only then recalling that the person he so addressed was female, and his mistress.
Mara touched his arm in reassurance. 'I am not offended that you speak intimately with me, Lujan. You have become like the brother I have lost, since the hour you took service in that distant glen.'
Lujan jammed his helm back over untidy hair. 'I know you, Lady, as I know my own heart. But that Kamlio confounds me. I don't know what Arakasi sees in her.'
'He sees himself,' the Lady replied. 'He sees things he recalls from his past, and wishes to spare her the pain he once suffered. That is a powerful attraction.' She stared off into the gloom, wondering if that was also the reason she ached so sorely from her strained relations with Hokanu. Silently she pondered whether Lujan, as another man, might understand the reason for her husband's cold reaction to the birth of his daughter. Were Lujan a brother, and not her Force Commander, she might have asked him. But here, in public on a ship's deck, traditions and appearance prevented her.
The falling dark spread around them like a curtain of privacy. Mara studied her Force Commander's face in the gathering twilight. He had new lines, and the beginnings of white at his temples, since she had taken him from his life as a grey warrior. Without her noticing until now, she saw that his face had begun to weather with the hours he spent drilling troops. More and more, his complexion was growing as leathery as Keyoke's. We are growing older, Mara thought sadly. And what have we to show for our days and our labors? Her children were no more secure than she had been from their enemies; and if Hokanu had been less skilled at command, he might have had to shed his own family's blood to keep his pack of cousins at bay.
Mara sighed, knowing that if her brother had survived to inherit, instead of she, the Minwanabi would very likely have succeeded to the Warlordship, and the precarious changes won by the shift in power to the Emperor would never have happened at all. Sometimes Lujan's teasing humor recalled Lanokota. But her brother had been barely into his manhood, just testing himself against the challenges of life, when she lost him. This man at her side was fully come into his power and maturity as a warrior. The hardness ingrained through his outlaw years had never entirely left Lujan, despite the fervor of his loyalty, and the affection he had won from his predecessor, Keyoke. Struck that such a fine man should have sons, Mara said impulsively, 'You ought to marry, you know.'
Lujan set his back to the rail and grinned at her. 'I have thought, recently, that it might be time to have a son or daughter.'
Made sensitive by what had happened between Arakasi and Kamlio, Mara wondered suddenly if he did have a love, but perhaps one that was not freely his to ask. 'Have you a woman in mind?'
Laughing, regarding her fondly, Lujan said, 'I am down to fewer than a dozen.'
Aware that she had been mildly baited, Mara said, 'You will always be a rogue! Find an understanding woman, else she will take you to task for your flirting ways, Lujan.'
'She would scold me anyway,' the Force Commander admitted. 'I have this terrible habit, you see, of wearing my weapons while in bed.'
He was only halfway joking; events through the years since she had come to power as Ruling Lady had caused all her warriors to take on a battle-ready alertness. There had simply been too many attacks, from too many unseen sources. Now, worst of all, no sword in the Nations could save her. Mara lost her inclination toward humor. She stared ahead, toward the horizon, and wondered if she would find what she desperately needed to ensure Acoma survival on that distant, unseen shore.
The lookout cried from the crosstree, 'Land ahead!'
Mara rushed to the rail, her cheeks flushed in the morning breeze. Even Kamlio, who moved nowhere with enthusiasm, followed. Off Coalteca's eastern forequarter lay the faintest hump of indigo, the first shoreline anyone on board had glimpsed through the days of a brisk but uneventful passage.
'Honshoni,' said Lujan. 'They say the red-bee honey from those hills is sweeter than any in the Empire.'
Lepala also was famous for silks and exotic dyes, and the beautifully patterned weaving such luxuries encouraged.
Mara sighed, longing with girlish curiosity to pause and explore the wharf markets of the south. Xula, Lepala, and Rujije were places of enchanting tales of spired buildings and scarlet-railed galleries. Lords of Lepala were said to keep rare fish in pools, and harems numbering in the hundreds. Homes there had pierced shutters to shade from the sun and break the force of the sea winds, and gardens with huge, hot-climate flowers which bloomed only at dusk, but which filled the evening air with exotic fragrances until night's chill caused them to close up again. The streets were paved in a stone that shone like gold when damp. The sailors' gossip made the vendors' stalls and bordellos seem exotic. They spoke of drinks of
prodigious potency, inns filled with colorful caged birds, and eating establishments where customers were cooled by pretty girls and boys with large feather fans. But Coalteca would not make port in any of these busy cities of commerce until Mara's party had been safely seen ashore in a secluded, uninhabited cove far inside the bay between Honshoni and Sweto. Only a few fishing villages dotted the north and south shorelines.
The Thuril Confederacy claimed the eastern edge of the bay, its only access to deep water; and since the magicians of the Assembly were apt to appear and disappear at whim anywhere within imperial borders, Mara had agreed with her advisers that she must not risk any unnecessary landfall. Coalteca's legitimate cargo would be offloaded on her return trip north, and if the Black Robes or any lurking Anasati spy should come to suspect the deviation in her normal sailing course, the Lady would already be away, deep into foreign territory and, if the gods were kind, beyond reach.
The landing, when it happened a few days later, was in as bleak a site as anything Mara might have dreamed in nightmare. The beachhead where the longboat delivered her was deserted, a grey-blue crescent of flinty, sea-smoothed shale alive with the scything forms of birds. As Lujan lifted her over the thwart and carried her ashore, white and indigo shorebirds circled overhead. Their cries echoed mournfully above the wind and the crash of breakers. Dust blew across the rugged hills beyond, scrub-covered and forlorn, and high above these, turning grey-blue with distance, rose the tables of the highlands, bordered at the horizon by mountains whose peaks were lost in brooding masses of cloud. The slate-backed spine of the range had proven a fortress impregnable for the Tsurani who had attempted to make war upon Thuril. Time and again the Empire forces had invaded these inhospitable lands, only to be harried back through the foothills by the fierce, naked swordsmen with their dyed Skins and their barbarous war cries.
Short, soft-spoken, and wrinkled like the skin of a dried fruit, the guide paused before her and said in his stilted accent, 'Lady, it were best you command your people to stand out of plain sight.'
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