The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  She would give this folk some of those stories back, when her errand to Master Ahjvar was done. And they would not understand it was their own history, and the hill overlooking the bay at Gold Harbour a stronghold from which a queen had ridden to battle and defeat and death, hacked to pieces on the plain of the Yellow Stone, which was now lost under the city of Gold Harbour.

  Perhaps whatever god cared for this folk saw no point in keeping old stories alive. Better they dwindled into a peasantry, tilling their fields and guarding their herds and no longer dreaming of past glory, which would serve only to stir up the young and the rash to no good end. Not all the villages of the Tributary Lands were free and governed by free headmen under a chief of the tribe. Nearer the colony-cities, manors engulfed the village fields in walls and legalities, and the folk paid rent to work the lands that had once been held of god and king alone, or traded labour in the vast vineyards and olive groves and wheatfields of the city clans’ estates for the right to feed themselves by tilling a scrap of land they did not even own. She had seen it for herself. The kings and the blood of the kings were gone in this land, gone to ash and smoke, forgotten, and the gods diminished, withdrawn, defeated, some even forgotten by their folk, who made their prayers to the gods of the cities, grown in grandeur, adapted to the ways of their new folk. Lady Lin, her tutor, had told her that gods, bound to their hills and waters, unable to flee, must do so when war swept over their lands and their kings failed them.

  As Queen Cattiga had failed the goddess Catairanach of the spring of the mountain ash and the tribe called the Duina Catairna in the north? Surely not; to die a victim of murder was not failure. Even the abandonment of the dinaz, the royal hill-fort, was not failure but a tactical retreat on the part of her bench-companions. In the hills, they could not be pinned down. Lord Seneschal Yvarr and Marnoch, his son, could not be said to have failed the goddess, not unless and until they surrendered, which Deyandara was sure they would not do. And Catairanach had no intention of relinquishing her folk’s freedom without action, un-Praitannec though that action was.

  Deyandara gave the widow a Two Hills fish-copper in thanks, mounted her pony again, called Badger from his gossiping with the widow’s bitch, and turned to the path that left the fields and groves of the village to climb the rising downland towards the ruin on the cliff. Two miles, she made it. Not a sociable man. A long walk for a child with a jug and basket.

  In her own land, Praitan of the two rivers, of the seven duinas, the seven tribes and seven kings, part of a bard’s duty was to remember and carry messages between the kings of the tribes, but she had never heard of anyone taking a message for a god before. Certainly not such a message, and not to such a man.

  The track seemed nothing more than a sheep-path, plodding between hummocks of wiry grass and mats of fragrant thyme and lavender and rue, over patches where the wind had blown the very soil away, rock bare and slippery, fissures opening into mysterious depths. It wound without apparent purpose. Always, though, Deyandara was exposed to the gaze of the ruin on the headland, which was surely only a few more years of gnawing storm from becoming an island. Lin had taught her to look at the very earth that way, as not fixed and immutable but a thing in flux, like the lives of men and their tribes.

  She left a stone shed and a thorn-hedged field on her right, inland. Three sleek horses watched her, white and piebald and lion-hued. Looking at the way ahead, she tied her own bay pony to a branch of the thorn, dwarfed and bent by the wind, told Badger to stay there on guard—a whistle would bring the big mastiff running to her defence—and went on foot. The path forked, onwards along the cliff and, her way, out, abruptly down and up again, across the narrow stem of stone that was all that connected the peninsula of the ruin to the mainland. Below her, waves crashed and threw white spume into the air.

  Deyandara did not like heights. Wind and heights were worse. It was no comfort that the neck of land was a clear three yards across and that, so long as she kept to the well-trodden track in the middle, she could not trip and plunge to her death without a running start.

  “Andara guide my feet,” she muttered. She clutched the amulet-pouch on its thong under her shirt, as if the touch could run from the little carved thorn-wood disc away to the god on the Gayl Andara, the hill that rose higher even than the hill of her brother’s hall. Then, self-conscious, she let it go. A bard was a free-comer to all Praitans, sacred; that was as true among the folk of the Tributary Lands and the lands west beyond the Malagru as it was among her own folk. And she was on a god’s errand. No godless outcast murderer who sold himself to the merchant-lords of the Five Cities was going to see her cringing.

  But she did not like heights.

  Her bravado was wasted, anyway. No one hailed her. No one watched. She flicked her braids over her shoulders, made sure her ribbons were secure against the wind, and walked on.

  The ruin was fenced with a drystone wall, itself fallen into ruin. Someone had filled the gaps with dead thorn boughs. The servant was hoeing weeds. He only straightened up to watch Deyandara when she coughed, politely—though perhaps he had been watching her crossing, as she stared at her feet, shuffling. She wiped a slick of sweat from her upper lip and pretended it was sea-spray, wishing she could sit down. At any rate, the boy did not seem startled to see her, but gazed with as little reaction as the hens scratching about his feet. His thick black hair was short and shaggy, and his narrow eyes, too, were black, his skin a golden brown. He looked Nabbani, as the widow had said, not colony Nabbani but someone new-come from the empire, without a grandparent from the Tributary Lands to give him height and a sterner nose. He was slightly built, with high cheekbones. Quite . . . good-looking, really. Not quite all there, the widow claimed, and yet . . . what made her think so? There was none of the deformity of face, the slack mouth or dull eyes, to warn of it.

  Something was missing, though. She couldn’t put her finger on what. He seemed a child, in the open innocence of his gaze, but when she looked carefully, she realized he was older than she by several years, a man and not a boy at all, for all his hairless chin.

  “I’m Deyandara of the Duina Andara,” she said. “I bear a message for Ahjvar the Leopard of Sand Cove, if this is his dwelling.” And she repeated herself in the Nabbani of the cities, what they called trade Nabbani or bastard Nabbani; it slid half into a bastard Praitannec and was the usual speech of the Tributary Lands.

  He replied with a bow and a soft-voiced “Master Ahjvar’s down on the shore” in trade Nabbani. “He’ll be back soon.”

  He bent to his hoe again and did not offer to show her in or even open the gate to her.

  She didn’t see a gate to open. One of the thorn-blocked gaps, probably. Deyandara shrugged and seated herself on the wall. She could hear the waves below, like the ocean’s breath over the stones. She had no desire to go and look.

  Half a dozen speckled hens and a clutch of chickens, in that motley half-fuzz, half-pinfeathers stage, followed the boy’s hoe between the young cabbages and onions, clucking with satisfaction over turned-up grubs, while the red rooster eyed her warily from a wind-ragged plum tree. A peasant’s garden, a peasant’s morning. When the boy straightened up, looking towards the sea, Deyandara turned, though she had heard nothing, in time to see the man appear over the edge of the cliff.

  There must be some path there, climbing down. He paused, a shaggy, unbraided head of brass-gold hair that made her think of nothing so much as a lion’s mane, gold hoops in his ears, low, straight eyebrows shielding pale-blue eyes, deep-set and startlingly bright against the oak-tan brown of his skin, the sort of eyes that could make a girl forget she had promised her brother to live a chaste and virtuous life if he let her go to the road for a season . . . No. Not this man. Nothing of warmth and playfulness there, as remote as his servant’s gaze and not nearly so gentle. His beard needed trimming. He wore a grubby tunic of chequered white and brown and carried a wood-tined fork over his shoulder. If you disregarded the earrings that marked
him a man of modest wealth, he looked, in fact, neither lord nor lawyer nor assassin—save for the bleak, winter-sky eyes, so rare among even those light-haired Praitans—but some villager returning, mud-spattered, from his fields.

  “Master Ahjvar?” Deyandara rose and bowed. “I’m—” But the boy Ghu was speaking rapid and unintelligible Imperial Nabbani. She caught her own name and, in Praitannec, “leopard”; that was all.

  The man answered in the same tongue. No peasant, indeed. The widow’s tale of his being a man of law became more plausible, as who but a scholar of the Five Cities spoke Imperial Nabbani outside of the empire?

  “I’m—” she began again, when the boy’s introduction or explanation had ended and they were both regarding her steadily, as if waiting, without any great faith, for wonders.

  “Lady Deyandara, of the Duina Andara,” the man interrupted. “High King Durandau’s sister, I take it? And travelling alone? I’m Ahjvar, yes, called the Leopard in the Five Cities, these days. What does the high king want of me? Is his champion and the law of the kings not enough now to keep the peace of the kings?”

  She bristled. “My brother has no need of—of your sort.”

  And she had not given the boy any title. Master Ahjvar was Praitannec enough to know that only a child of the royal house would be named for the god. He simply guessed she was . . . herself. Everyone knew the high king had four younger brothers and only the one sister. Speculation as to which king or heir she might marry had circulated around the tribes ever since Durandau’s election to the high kingship three years before. Her name was known to those who took an interest in the shifts of power among the tribes, which even a Five Cities assassin might, as it could affect trade, and that certainly affected the clan-fathers. That was Lady Lin’s teaching, making her see the whole branching tangle. She didn’t want to have to think about such things. She should have called herself Yselly, as she had on her way south, appropriating the dead bard’s name along with her right to the ribbons.

  Deyandara tried again, more courteously. “The high king wants nothing of you, Master Ahjvar.” She wouldn’t call him lord without better proof than a foreign peasant-woman’s guess. “My errand to you is from Catairanach of the Avain Catairna, the goddess of the Duina Catairna.”

  “I know who Catairanach is,” he said, mildly enough, but his voice was ice. “And I’ve no interest in any words from that goddess or that folk. So you can be off.”

  He came the last way up the cliff, revealing muscular bare legs, black nearly to the knee with mud, and a wooden pail.

  “My lord—” That slipped out without her intending. “I gave my word to carry the message.”

  “Consider it carried.” He climbed over the wall. “Now go away. Ghu, is there milk today? We can make a chowder.”

  The boy spoke in Imperial again and seemed to find whatever he said amusing as he took the pail. The assassin ripped up a fistful of grass to wipe down his legs, scrubbing his hands on the skirt of his tunic after, running still-muddy hands through his hair, defying her to comment. When it seemed he was going to follow the boy into the house without another word to her, Deyandara slid down off the wall into the garden herself.

  He heard the movement and turned, swift and balanced and . . . yes, she did think leopard suited. Her heart beating a little too rapidly, she bowed, which she shouldn’t have done, since he knew who she was and no princess should be bowing to a lordless exile. “I gave my word to deliver the message.”

  He said something. It sounded obscene, but Nabbani, so the fact that she could pick out the name of the goddess Catairanach did not need to offend her. “Come in, then, and say your piece.”

  He ushered her in ahead of him with mocking courtesy. The ruin had no door, only a curtain of hide. She had sheltered in such places before. One of those grand halls built without mortar, in form like a giant stone beehive, which dotted the high places of all the lands Over-Malagru, abandoned, except maybe as shelters for straying cattle or wandering tramps, long before the first colonists came from Imperial Nabban to claim the coast, or so her tutor had said. They mostly stood open to the sky. This one had been inexpertly re-roofed with poles and turf. Even to Deyandara’s eye, not used to troubling about such things, it seemed likely to let in wind and rain in equal measure, and probably to come down in a mess of beams and mud in some spring gale.

  It didn’t look like a home, only a place to camp, despite the hens and the garden.

  Ahjvar left her standing and flung himself onto a block of stone with a striped rug thrown over it, part of the wall that had fallen, but he made it look like a throne. A sword, unsheathed, leaned against the wall. A fire burned on a central hearth. The boy squatted beside it, prying the big white clams open with a crook-bladed forage-knife, a peasant’s tool. He left off and brought Deyandara a beaker of water from a jar in the corner, courtesy his master hadn’t offered. She thanked him and drank, as he went back to his cookery.

  Neither man asked her to sit.

  Walls thrust inward, dividing the place into dark bays, though there was better light than she would have expected in the open central room, due to a hole in the roof, which might have been for the smoke or might have something to do with a heap of muddy grassroots on the floor.

  “Two months ago,” she began, “I was in the Duina Catairna, when Queen Cattiga died . . .”

  The queen gave a little grunt, almost a mew, and her eyes, meeting Deyandara’s across the fire, went wide. Deyandara felt the fumbling, the notes gone wrong, as if her fingers understood before she did. Cattiga, in her great chair draped with a black bull’s hide, stared, open-mouthed. Deyandara slung her komuz to her shoulder by its leather strap—she couldn’t say why, except an instinct not to drop it—and rose to her feet, mouth open like a mirror to Cattiga’s. The queen’s chief bard and his daughter Gelyn both trailed off their own playing, a squawk of flute and a soft dying of the great harp, turning to her, then to see where she stared, the shout—or would it be shriek?—still rising in her throat. The queen’s champion, Lord Angress, had his sword singing free before Deyandara made a sound, before the queen had begun to slump, the dark flood spreading down her blue and white tunic.

  The red-armoured, red-masked priest beside her, courtesy guard to the yellow-robed one who had been bending a knee to speak, the queen leaning forward a little to hear, straightened up. She—a slight thing, so probably she, though the shirt of lacquered scales and the triple-crested helmet with its narrow eyeslits flattened or hid any feature that might say—still held the long, slender dagger an ambassador should not have been carrying in the hall. The yellow priest sprang away, back against the wall, as the champion’s sword came around in a swing that should have taken the Red Mask’s head.

  It did not. The red priest staggered aside, and there was a flare of the firelight so that it seemed her body was outlined for a moment in flame. She punched Lord Angress in the chest with the staff of office the Red Masks all carried, a two-foot-long, carved, whitened rod. It should not have been allowed, but the staff was a sign of their service, their oaths, their honour, and Cattiga, against Lord Angress’s advice, had permitted it.

  The champion seemed to have been struck with a fist of lightning. White sparks and spiderwebs crackled; there was a stink of smoke, and he dropped.

  Gilru, the prince, a brat of nine or ten, red-haired and freckled, had been by Deyandara’s feet. Probably considering his chances of tying her bootlaces together. He shouted—she could never afterwards recall the words—and flung himself away around the hearth, running to his mother even as Deyandara grabbed for him. After that it was all swords and spears and shouting, taller, broader people between her and the queen and the boy she was still trying to reach, and the fire gone mad, leaping and twisting and then dying away to embers and choking smoke as if someone had smothered it in wet straw. Lord Marnoch, chief huntsman and the seneschal’s son, came down the stairs from the upper room with an axe in his hands and felled two yellow priests
before he himself was laid low by a glancing blow from a Red Mask’s white staff, something that hit his axe-haft, not his body. One of his own hunters stumbled on him, was struck across her shoulders, and did not get up. The lamps on the posts that supported the upper storey, an enclosed loft, went out then. In the darkness someone’s elbow struck Deyandara’s chin and she fell.

  “Gilru!” she heard Syallan screaming. The champion’s shield-bearer was a young woman some few years older than Deyandara, everything Deyandara was not—she didn’t tell the assassin that—handsome, skilled, respected and honoured in the hall even though she was the bastard-born daughter of the queen’s late husband—loved.

  And what followed . . . Dim light from the embers on the hearth, painting everything in faded red and shadow. Someone trod on Deyandara’s hand as she tried to reach Syallan’s voice, to be what aid she could to the prince, and then a trampling foot struck her head. Sick and momentarily blind, she grabbed it, heaved, and the man fell on her. He was one of the queen’s bench-companions, and as he rolled away a Marakander temple guardsman stabbed down with a Praitannec spear, and the man grunted and spewed blood over her. She didn’t dare move, face to face with the dying man, whose eyes, surely, looked beyond her and did not accuse, please, Andara, she hadn’t meant—Great Gods forgive her, it wasn’t her fault, everything she did went twisted, but that didn’t mean she was cursed, it did not.