Only belatedly did Mara realise that their march had slowed. Her captors paused in a vale between hills purpled with the shadows of late afternoon. Down the slopes ran a company of younger Thuril warriors. In a swirl of cloaks they brandished weapons and laughed boisterously. A jubilant rendezvous engulfed the party who shepherded the smaller band of prisoners. The newcomers viewed Kamlio with raised brows and hoots of appreciation. They fingered Mara’s plain robe, loudly talking, until the Lady grew annoyed at being stared at.
‘What do they say?’ she demanded sharply of Iayapa, who stood with his head hanging. He shrank still further at Mara’s imperious address.
‘Lady,’ admitted the herdsman, ‘these are rough men.’ Derisive shouts arose at his deferential manner, and someone said in gruff and broken Tsurani, ‘We should call that one Answers-to-Women, eh?’
Whoops and laughter arose, nearly drowning Mara’s furious inquiries and Iayapa’s desperate appeal: ‘Lady, do not ask me to translate.’ Behind her, one of the young men was gripping his crotch and rolling his eyes as if in pleasure. His companions found the remarks he uttered hilarious, for they clapped each other’s shoulders and chuckled.
Iayapa said over their din, ‘You would be offended, great Lady.’
‘Tell me!’ Mara demanded as Saric and Lujan shuffled closer and took their accustomed positions at her sides to shield her from the taunts of the foreigners.
‘Lady, I mean no disrespect.’ Had his hands been free, Iayapa would have prostrated himself. Bound helpless, he could only look strained. ‘You order me. The first one, the fellow with the green cloak, he asked our guide if he had taken you yet.’
Mara said nothing, but nodded.
Iayapa sweated, despite the cool highland air. ‘The one who guides us says he is waiting for us to reach the village, for you are bony and he needs many cushions and furs.’ Almost blushing, he blurted the rest. ‘The third one who grabbed himself says that a man has answered to you. That might mean you are a witch. Does the one who guides us not take a risk, should he attempt to touch you, that you might rip off his … manhood and feed it to him. The others think this is very funny indeed.’
Mara wrenched in annoyance at the thongs that tied her wrists. How could she answer such lewdness with dignity, bound as she was like livestock? She considered for a moment, glancing at Lujan and Saric. Both men looked fit to murder, but they were as helpless as she. Yet nothing under heaven would cause her to endure such abuse from strangers without even token resistance! Left only her tongue, Mara raised the most scathing shout she could muster. These crude barbarians might not understand Tsurani, but by Turakamu, they could comprehend her intent by her tone.
‘You!’ she snapped out, jerking her head in the direction of the highlander leader who had taken them. ‘What is your name!’
The crag-nosed man at the head of the troop stiffened, and, almost before thought, turned toward her. The younger man beside him left off clutching his crotch and stared at his elder in astonishment. He said something, to which his leader made a gesture of incomprehension. Instead, he addressed Iayapa in his own language, and the others laughed.
Mara did not wait for translation. ‘This swaggering fool with no more brains than the beast who carries my serving girl now claims he cannot understand me.’ Her consonants sharpened with malice. ‘Even after he exchanged words in Tsurani down the trail from here?’
Several of the highlanders turned at this, some revealing surprise. So! Mara thought. There are others who can speak our tongue, albeit badly. She must make the most of this.
Mara played along with the embarrassed highlander’s charade and addressed Iayapa alone. ‘Tell this buffoon, who forgets words as well as his mother forgot the name of his father, exactly what I say.’ Mara paused, then added into shocked silence, ‘Tell him he is a rude little boy. When we reach his village I shall ask that his chieftain beat him for inexcusable manners toward a guest. Inform him further that should I seek company for my bed, it would be with a man, not a child still longing for his mother’s shriveled breast, and more, that should he touch me, I will laugh when his manhood fails to rise. He is as ignorant as a needra, and smells worse. He is uglier than my most disreputable dog and worth less – for my dog can hunt and has less vermin. Tell him his very existence brings shame upon his already honorless ancestors.’
Suddenly inexplicably gleeful, Iayapa translated. Before he had finished the first sentence, the eyes of every Thuril warrior fixed upon the Lady of the Acoma. By the time the translation of her tirade was completed, their stony stillness frightened her. Her heart banged in her chest. They might easily kill her. Any Tsurani Lord so addressed by a captive would have had her strung up by her neck and kicking. But fate could hardly hold worse than to be dragged into slavery, Mara felt. Whether or not these men would hang her in total dishonor, she showed them nothing but the face of haughty contempt.
Then the mood broke. All but the target of Mara’s insults exploded into knee-slapping peals of mirth. ‘The shrew has a tongue for words, did you hear?’ someone cried to the insulted man in accented Tsurani. This confirmed that he spoke the language well enough to realise what had been said of him before Iayapa’s translation. Several of his companions were laughing so hard they had to sit down, lest their knees buckle. The warrior Mara had berated studied her, then, as color rose into his cheeks, he nodded once.
Lujan pressed closer to Mara’s side as another of the Thuril warriors shouted, waving his bow at Mara in salutation. Made aware by the man’s grin that she was not going to be summarily executed, Mara said, ‘What did he say?’
Iayapa shrugged. ‘That you know how to insult like a man. It is something of an art among the Thuril, mistress. As I learned well at my mother’s knee, they can be a most irritating people.’
In time the pandemonium subsided. The younger troop banded together and took their leave to resume duty, some still chuckling as they took the outbound trail. Mara’s captors, including their red-faced leader, hustled their Tsurani charges around the next bend toward home. Late sunlight slashed across a meadow. Beyond the open ground lay a wooden walled town of steeply peaked roofs. Curls of smoke rose from stone chimneys, and the spears of sentries could be seen on the wall walks. The town’s position guarded another trail that wound into the hills.
The highlander warriors quickened the pace, in a hurry to bring in their captive prizes.
‘Strange,’ murmured Saric, his indefatigable curiosity still evident despite the rigor of their march and the uncertain fate awaiting him. Unlike any Tsurani, these Thuril seemed indifferent to chatter between their prisoners. ‘While this grass offers good grazing for livestock, it is not eaten short, but only cut across by the paths of the flocks and herders.’
At this comment, the Thuril leader glanced over his shoulder, his lip half curled in contempt. In blatant contradiction of his earlier claim of ignorance of the Tsurani tongue, he said in a mangled accent, ‘You should be glad to have an escort through this meadow, Tsurani dog. Without us to show you which path to tread, you would be lost. For this ground is still trapped from the last visit your kind made to our hills!’
Lujan answered thoughtfully, ‘You mean your folk still maintain fortifications from the last war?’
‘But the fighting ceased more than a decade ago,’ Saric objected. Lujan confided softly to his cousin, ‘Long memories.’ Behind his insouciant tones lay foreboding. That the Thuril kept their village guarded with lethal deadfalls after so much time revealed a resentment that would complicate any overtures toward negotiation; as soldier, Lujan had heard the tales told by veterans of the ill-conceived invasion into Thuril. A man was better dead than taken prisoner, to be turned over alive to the vengeful treatment of highlander women.
But he concealed his fears from Mara as they were herded past the deadly meadow, and on, over a wooden bridge that spanned a moat, fed by a swift-running river. The water rushed over rock snags and whirled in black eddies through pools too
swift for a swimmer to cross. As Lujan’s eyes measured the possibility of escape across the current, the leader of the highlanders noticed.
He waved a leather-gauntleted arm at the rock pools. ‘Many Tsurani warriors drowned there, sword captain! More broke their necks on the stone, trying in vain to build a rope bridge.’ He shrugged, and his grin returned. ‘Your commanders are not stupid men, just stubborn. In time, they threw platforms across there’ – his cloak fringes danced as he pointed to a ledge by the lowered bridge – ‘and there.’ He indicated another outcrop farther down. Then, as if warriors from the past still screamed battle cries into the dusk-grey air, he glanced up at the looming wall of the palisade. ‘It was a near thing.’
Mara had pushed through her fatigue to follow the conversation. ‘You must have been a very small boy in those times. How do you remember?’
Distracted by vivid recall, the highlander leader forgot that he answered a woman. ‘I was up on the battlement, bringing water to my father and uncles. I helped carry the dead and wounded.’ His face twisted into long-nurtured bitterness. ‘I remember.’
He jabbed Lujan forward with a blow and led across the bridge. The looming shadow of the gateway cut off all view of sky and fortifications. The leader answered to a challenge from an unseen sentry then hustled the Tsurani captives through. Lujan took note of the log battlements, faced on the outside with smooth boards, but left unfinished inside, with bark and stubs of branches still left on the trunks, as if the defense works had been erected in haste. ‘It must have been a fierce battle.’
The leader laughed. ‘Not that fierce, Tsurani. We were up in the hills by the time the third attack came and your soldiers seized the palisades. Our leaders aren’t stupid, either. If your people wanted the village so much, we would let you have it. Taking a place is one thing; holding it is another.’ With a sneer of contempt, he added, ‘We wouldn’t let you have the hills, Tsurani.’ He waved broadly toward the peaks that notched the sky above the wall. ‘There is our true home. In these valleys, we might build halls and houses to meet, and trade, and celebrate, but our families are raised in the high country. That is where your soldiers died, Tsurani, as we attacked your foragers and patrols. Hundreds perished in our raids, until your kind tired of the highlands and went home.’
By now past the fortifications, and into the avenue of commerce, the party of prisoners attracted notice. Women beating their laundry clean with stones in a wide public basin paused in their work to point and stare. Urchins in colored plaids screamed and ran to look, or stared wide-eyed from behind mothers who carried cloth-wrapped loaves of bread from the baker’s. Some of the dirtier, wilder children capered about the bound strangers, shouting; afraid some might fling stones, Lujan jerked his head at his warriors, who jostled closely around their mistress to give what protection they could.
But no hostilities were offered, beyond glares from middle-aged women, who perhaps had lost sons or husbands to imperial warriors in battle. The donkey bearing Kamlio caused the most furor, as children swooped close with excited chatter. The highlanders fended them off with mock gruffness. Still the little ones shouted. ‘It has only four legs!’
‘Why doesn’t it fall down?’ cried another about the age of Ayaki before he died.
The soldier who led the beast took the din in good stride, giving the children outrageous answers that made them squeal and scream with laughter.
After a studied silence, Mara observed, ‘If these noisy barbarians intended to kill us, surely the mothers would not let their little ones mingle, but would be hustling them away home.’
Lujan crowded nearer to his mistress. ‘Gods grant you are right, my Lady.’ But his thoughts remained apprehensive. He could see the covetous glances Kamlio attracted from the men who passed on the street. The women who bundled up their washing looked sharp-faced and unfriendly, and a groom carrying a water pannikin spat in their direction in contempt. The Thuril were a fierce race, the veterans who had returned alive from fighting in these hills had insisted. Their young were toughened at the knees of mothers who were awarded as battle prizes, or carried off by force in raids.
As the highlanders brought their captives to a halt in the square, it could be seen that the entire village consisted of a ring of buildings built against the wall, leaving an open air market at the center, with portable tent stalls for traders, and palings of thorny stakes to enclose livestock. Mara’s party was driven into the largest of these pens, while onlookers laughed and called out in derision. Iayapa refused to answer Saric’s requests for translation, and Mara herself was too weary to care. She longed only for a patch of clean ground to sit down; the dirt she trod was thick with droppings left from its animal occupants. She envied Kamlio her seat on the donkey, until she looked over at the younger girl and realised by her pinched pallor that she probably had sores from sitting so long in the saddle. The men did not let her down, but tied her mount to a pole by the gate, then leaned on folded arms against the posts, and murmured in appreciation of her loose golden hair and her beauty.
Furious that so little care had been taken for even their most basic human needs, Mara shouldered past her officers. At the gate, where, the highlanders clustered, she demanded in a loud voice, ‘What are you going to do with my people?’ Trembling with anger that was fueled the more by fear, she tossed her head to shake tangled hair from her eyes. ‘My warriors require food and water, and a decent place to rest! Is this the hospitality you show to strangers who come on a mission of peace? A slave’s bonds, and a livestock pen? Shame to you, carriers of vermin who were spawned in the dirt like pigs!’ Here she borrowed the Midkemian word for a beast whose habits were considered reprehensible.
The foreign word seemed to upset the Thuril, who scowled as their leader stamped forward. Red with anger, or maybe embarrassment, he shouted to Lujan, ‘Silence the woman, if you wish her to live.’
The Acoma Force Commander glowered back. He said in a voice that could easily be heard on a battlefield, ‘She is my mistress. I take my orders from her. If you have the wits not to make water in your bedding at night, you would do the same.’
The leader of the highlanders roared in fury at this insult. He might have drawn his sword and charged forward, but one of his companions caught him back. Words were exchanged in Thuril. Lujan could only stand in dumb but dignified incomprehension as the irate leader allowed himself to be placated. The highlander muttered something short and guttural to the spokesman who had restrained him. At length, he loosed a huge guffaw that cut off as the men around him snapped into attentiveness.
‘That must be their chieftain,’ Saric murmured. He had moved up to Mara’s shoulder, unnoticed until he had spoken. Mara noted that their escort all looked toward a cloaked man who had emerged down the wooden stair of the most imposing building that edged the square. Street children scattered from his path as he crossed the open expanse, and the women carrying their loads of damp wash homeward averted their faces in deference.
The newcomer was old and hunched, but he moved with a sureness that could still negotiate the roughest trail. Mara estimated his age to be about sixty years. Tokens of corcara carved by Tsurani hands were woven into his braid, no doubt worn as battle trophies. Mara repressed shiver as the elder neared enough for her to make out that the buttons on his cloak front were fashioned of polished bone. The tales were true, then, that Thuril believed that an artifact taken from a dead foe would lend them strength in life. Her finger bones could as easily wind up as an ornament in some warrior’s attire.
The highlander chief paused to share words with the squad captain who had charge of the prisoners. He pointed to the golden-haired courtesan and the donkey, said something else, and smiled. The squad leader saluted, plainly excused from duty. By his look of self-satisfaction, he would now be going home to his wife.
Mara seemed worn and disheartened, and driven by sympathy for her, Saric shouted, ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’
The highlander officer f
roze between strides. His men and his chieftain looked on in bright-eyed interest, as the man considered whether he should reply to the hail of a prisoner. Then, in burred accent, he called back, ‘Introduce yourself, Tsurani! Your woman seems capable enough with her tongue!’
Another of the highlander warriors offered with malicious amusement, ‘Our captain is Antaha, guideman of the Loso. I give you his name so that when you appeal to our chieftain to have him beaten, he will know whom to seek out.’
This interruption was greeted by uproarious laughter, shared by the old chief, and even the street children and the women by the washing well. Irked past restraint by these strange, annoying people, Mara again pressed to the fore.
To the chieftain, who chuckled and slapped his knees, she called imperiously, ‘I am Mara, Ruling Lady of the Acoma, and I have come to the Thuril Confederacy on a mission of peace.’
The chief lost his mirth as if slapped. Shocked to silent anger, he regrouped. ‘A woman standing in querdidra droppings comes claiming to be someone of rank and an emissary of peace?’
Mara looked whitely furious. Aware that she neared her breaking point, and that to insult this chieftain in public would earn her certain reprisal, Lujan turned desperately to Saric. ‘We must act, even if only to distract her.’
But the young First Adviser stepped forward without seeming to hear. As Mara opened her mouth to speak, Saric broke protocol and shouted down her voice with his own. ‘Chief among the Thuril,’ he cried, ‘you are a fool, who offers our Lady of the Acoma no better hospitality than a livestock pen! You speak of Mara, Servant of the Empire, and a member of the Emperor Ichindar’s royal family!’
The chieftain jerked up his square chin. ‘She?’ If his word seemed filled with contempt, Saric’s statement was not entirely wasted. The elderly man did not add any derogatory comment, but summarily waved Antaha back to duty. This time, the chief’s words were rapid and commanding, and Iayapa, under pressure from Saric, translated.
The Complete Empire Trilogy Page 176