The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  She settled down by him, one knee drawn up. Her caftan was a dull pink, with a pattern of faded black diamonds in the weave, the elbows patched with a streaky red that did not match. She should wear crimson, and the golden-brown of her eyes, and the blue of the evening twilight. Her right cuff was ink-spattered. A clerk, a scribe, and not one who could do better than a second-hand caftan. A market letter-writer? He eyed her hands sidelong. Bitten nails and further ink-stains, but old scars, too, of cut and callus. Not indoor hands. He shut his eyes; her heart was silk banners and horses running, an ocean of grass and a sabre, fear in the darkness. A great weight, a great sin. She was a wizard, too, magic pulsing with her heartbeat. He opened his eyes, and the storyteller was watching the both of them, sombre, unsmiling.

  “Now this tale is from the saga of Red Geir and concerns the wizard Heuslar, who was brother to King Geir’s mother, and who was at this time become the devil Ogada. And it concerns the sword of Red Geir, which he cursed with his dying, that ever after, it betrayed the one who claimed it, so that there was blood between him and one dear to him, either to slay or be slain, witting or unwitting, murder in the dark night or an ill-chancing accident.”

  The young scribe’s fear eased. To be a secret wizard within Marakand’s city walls must be to live in fear, and yet it was what the story might have been, and was not, that had worried her.

  “And it concerns the lady Gisel, a sea-rover owning no lord, who had borne a child to Red Geir, all unknown to his wife. For Heuslar loved Red Geir’s wife . . .”

  It was a different style of storytelling than one met on the caravan road, with no place for the clown and the broad jest, not within the tale, though her knowing asides had somewhat of the same effect, lightening the telling, as the story spun out into spell and curse and tragedy that echoed down the generations. Ghu listened, entranced, forgetting, mostly, his apprehension of the city and the storyteller, forgetting the young woman sitting so close he heard every catch of breath as the story ensnared her too. It came to its end, if it could be called that, in vengeance and death and a war between brothers, with the promise of more to follow another day. The scribe sighed, as one returning out of dream, and the storyteller bowed, not mockingly but a Northron ducking of the head, hand to her chest. Coins rattled in her bowl. She sang, then, without any instrument, not even the drum that any storyteller of the Five Cities would carry like a part of themselves—he saw her with a harp, and a high-raftered roof of straw, and a fire leaping against the cold night. He saw ice, and shadows like old blood, murky brown and thick. It was maybe part of the story, untranslated, a music of language that ran both harsh and soaring, and was soon over. She swept up the bowl and the coins and swung the dark cloak about herself, hiding the eye-catching shawl.

  He would have expected the listeners to press her for another tale, a song, though she would of course refuse; whatever else she was, she was bard, skald, or whatever the Northron word was. He knew market-storytellers from every city he had ever seen, and they always left their listeners to look for them another day, not growing fretful and stiff with sitting. But their listeners always asked. Instead of doing so, the audience faded away into the passages between the carts and awnings and booths, as if she had already gone.

  Only he and the scribe still stood, risen expectant to their feet. The storyteller studied him, head a little to one side. He’d seen such a look before, though not—all thanks to Mother and Father Nabban—directed at him. He’d had the one master his whole life, till he ran. It was the look of a buyer in the slave-market, considering utility.

  “What do you see?” she asked suddenly. “Here.” And she raised a hand, touched the inscription behind her.

  She spoke Imperial Nabbani, her accent strange but not precisely foreign. Ghu glanced at the scribe, who frowned and answered in good court speech. “I—” and that was a royal I, where was she from that she knew no better than to use that? “—can’t read it. Is it some Pirakuli script?”

  The grey eyes were back on him, and there was an odd light in their depths. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled again. Ghu shook his head, wide-eyed, innocent, young, and harmless. “I can’t read.” He didn’t think that was what she wanted to know. He should have taken warning by the scribe’s fear and gone his way sooner. “Lady,” he added, to be safe. He gave her a little bow and smiled, made to slide out of the glare of her attention. Dangerous, very dangerous to have such focussed will upon him.

  “I do see you,” she said.

  And I see you. Almost. But he didn’t quite let that thought float to the surface. He hoped.

  “Tears and fire and binding,” he jerked out, pinned there. Steel catching firelight, that was the colour of her eye now. “The slow death of a god, smothering. Starving. Cut off from the earth.”

  The scribe turned on him, a hawk’s fierce stare, just for a heartbeat, before moving away, making it clear they did not stand together. “I know your name,” she told the woman. “I figured it out. I know my father’s name, too. All the road does. And they say the Red Masks can smell wizardry.” Her voice shook a little as she dared. “If you sent those folk on their way and didn’t just drive them off by growling in Northron at them, you’d better leave. Stay away from me. I have to live here.”

  “Do you?” The storyteller didn’t seem much to care. “It wasn’t wizardry, Ivah. I’d be interested to see what it does bring. But what is this thing? I asked and was told it was Ilbialla’s tomb, built by the Voice. The man I asked admitted that much and scurried off as if he’d seen a devil.” She grinned wolfishly. “Who was Ilbialla and why is she sealed within?”

  “She was one of the goddesses of the city,” the scribe said, edging back still farther. Ivah. Not a Nabbani name. “Don’t you know even that much of Marakand? Where have you been the past year? It’s not so long a road from Lissavakail—as the hawk flies.”

  “In the mountains,” the storyteller said shortly. “We were in no hurry. A wild god in the Salt took a dislike to me. And Mikki was ill. The deserts were too hot.”

  “Who?”

  “You never met him.” Another smile, self-amused. “Just—a bear I know. We lost ourselves for a while, wandering out of the world, nearly, up into the heights. There are valleys in those mountains, streams and caves no human has ever seen. He slept. We went fishing.”

  That seemed to puzzle the scribe as much as it did Ghu. She frowned, shrugged, dismissing it. “There’s another tomb, a sealed cave, up on the hill.” Ivah nodded to the south. “Gurhan’s tomb. Those two gods are supposed to have betrayed the Lady, some thirty years or so ago. Plotted with wizards to destroy the city by earthquake and died. The old people believe it’s a lie, though they won’t say so. What does the inscription say?”

  “I can’t read it either.” The storyteller considered. “Not all of it. We’ve been camped up there by Gurhan’s cave a couple of days now, and we can’t make anything within hear us. There’s such strength in the binding, as if all the wizards of a land had worked it together. I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe some of the great imperial works in Nabban, and the words I can read—aren’t ones you or any wizard could. Tell me, was it the Lady built these tombs or the Voice?”

  Ivah shook her head. “They’re the same thing.”

  “I wonder. And you, son of Nabban, you say, slow death—” She broke off, looking past them. “I came down the road from the south, through the silver mines. We didn’t travel with any gossiping company to learn much of the city. What’s a Red Mask?”

  Ivah turned a sickly pallor and spun on her heel, but her colour came back almost at once. “The Red Masks are an order of warrior-priests who serve the Voice and the Lady. They’re the ones they send to arrest wizards, and no magic works on them. They can kill with a touch, it’s said. They dress all in red and never show their faces. I’ve never seen one; I lie low when there’s even a rumour of them passing out into the city. Those are simply a pair of street guard from the gate-fo
rt, and—and the licensed singer who usually lays his rug down just over there.” She nodded across to where a couple were doing a brisk trade in greens and eggs from the back of a high-wheeled oxcart. “He was standing over there, just listening, till almost the end. I suppose he was busy learning your story to make it his own, but figured on balance, better to make his own ending for it and be rid of you. Did you apply for a licence?”

  “For what?”

  “This is Marakand! You can’t just stand on a street-corner and tell stories. It doesn’t much matter what you’re doing, you have to prove your skill to some guild or other. You have to register and buy a licence.”

  “It’s the middle of a market, not a street-corner.”

  “Yes, and that old singer decided he didn’t want to start a fight with you for taking over his pitch. He’s decided getting you hustled off the street is worth the bribe it’ll have taken to get the guard to pay any attention. They’re going to ask to see your licence, and when they learn you don’t have one, they’ll arrest you and lock you up till you or your friends can pay their fine, and the one the guild of entertainers will levy.”

  “Huh,” the storyteller said. “I never did like cities.” And she turned and walked away.

  Ivah started to stride off as well. Ghu, he wasn’t sure why, took a few steps after her, but the male street guard grabbed him by the arm.

  “You the outlander storyteller without a licence?”

  Ghu looked up, wary, docile, and timid. The guard’s grip on his sleeve slackened.

  “It was a woman,” said a withered old man with a flat drum tucked under his arm, puffing for breath. “I told you. An outlander woman, a tall one. I don’t know what she was. Something up from the caravanserais. Stealing the bread from honest men’s mouths. No better than a beggar.”

  The street guard let Ghu go, held up a warning finger as he began to sidle off. Ghu ducked his head meekly and stood still. The storyteller had vanished. The other street guard, a young woman, had followed Ivah and was greeting her by name.

  No, Ivah hadn’t seen where the beggar had gone, either. No, she couldn’t really describe her. Tallish. Foreign. She smiled apologetically. She needed to get back to work herself. It was getting near noon, and she was expecting a trader’s clerk with a sheaf of contracts that needed copying . . .

  She didn’t look back as she walked away. Why should she?

  The lawfully licensed storyteller went off to unroll the rug over his shoulder on the ground beside the oxcart, looking disgruntled. Ghu faded back a step or two. It didn’t do to run at such times. If you ran, you were noticed. If you were noticed, you were chased.

  “What was that runner from Riverbend fort saying to the adjutant about a Nabbani man at the Eastern Wall?”

  The woman guard shrugged, returning from her talk with Ivah. “Arrest him, I think?”

  “What, every male Nabbani who comes through the gate? Waste of time,” the man grumbled. “Better we let him go and have nothing to report, don’t you think?”

  “But what if he is the one they’re looking for? An enemy of the Lady?”

  “He can’t be, not unless he outran the couriers.”

  Both street guards unfortunately looked over just as Ghu was sauntering behind a basket of green nakatis and the shawl-wrapped woman selling them.

  “You! Stay put!” the man shouted. He plunged after Ghu, who in the eyeblink of decision chose to run. He’d never fared well in the hands of any sort of city watch, and it was harder, these days, to endure being beaten. He dodged a pair of hobbled donkeys and the array of baskets piled with radishes and onions just out of their reach, doubled up a narrow aisle of carts and awnings and thick-pressed folk, squirming, twisting sideways. Behind him, someone clanged a handbell. Plenty of almost-Nabbani faces here, but not so many desert coats, and his Five Cities dress was going to stand out if he dropped the coat. He swarmed between legs, rolled under a cart, came up startling a dog on the market’s edge and had a clear run for a narrow street, darkly shadowed with the balconies above. Let him get into narrow alleys that would twist between enclosing walls, and he would lose them, find some dark crevice, and they would miss him. He could be still, still as a wild thing, and unseen as his hunters trod within arm’s reach.

  He went sprawling, landed rolling. The male guard had been closer on his heels than he realized, under the cart and all. Now he had hurled his short staff like a spear to tangle between Ghu’s feet. The man was on him as he bounced up and staggered, his ankle failing him. He pinned Ghu’s arms, lifting him onto his toes. Ghu dropped his weight, but the guard was ready for that, twisted his arm up so that pain burned in his shoulder as well as his ankle and he had to stand where he was put, favouring his right leg.

  A donkey brayed shrilly, and someone else began to screech what sounded like protests, with the clanging of the bell and a woman shouting, “Make way, street guard, get that damn beast out of the way.”

  The guard glanced towards the noise of his partner; only a moment’s inattention, but it was enough. Ghu wrenched himself free and hurtled back into the market, down the line of houses facing it, ignoring for the moment the pain in his ankle, but it slowed him. He sidestepped a pony laden with empty baskets and a crowd of running children who broke and re-formed, giving chase, shouting. When someone seized his arm again he swung with the heel of his palm at her chin, turning the blow aside when he saw it was the scribe who had stood by him to hear the storyteller. She didn’t waste words, just hauled, so that he went staggering through an open doorway, under a low lintel and down a sudden drop of three steps, into a cool room that after the glare of the noon outside was all shadows and softness, dappled with light from the carved screens. The woman dragged him between low tables and people seated on cushions, talking over coffee and pastries, quiet murmurs, a sudden burst of laughter, intense indignation and placatory shushing . . . but none seemed at all startled by his sudden entrance. None looked around at all. They crossed the length of the room in silence. The room smelt of coffee, but the woman of honeysuckles and wizardry. Ghu submitted to being towed, though he was gritting his teeth on the pain now and wanted very much to sit down. Still in silence, they passed between two empty, dark rooms to either side, then through another doorway, this one hung with a bead curtain that shimmered and clattered like falling rain. A short passage opened out into a kitchen, swelteringly hot, where a thin, bearded man squatted by a clay stove built like a bench along the wall, just lifting a frothing copper pot from the fire. Even he didn’t seem to notice them, nor did the boy and girl arranging cups on a tray. Only a second man, with his brown hair in long braids, looked up. He wore a Marakander caftan and was seeding raisins, but his sun-lined face told of the caravans. He frowned, looked around, towards another door through which daylight streamed, and went back to his raisins. The scribe tugged Ghu across the red-tiled floor and to a narrow flight of stairs. He hobbled up as quietly as he could, sweating now with the effort of it, clutching her hard enough to make her stagger with him.

  It was very dark, and they went up two flights and along a passageway, till she shouldered open a door and they both stumbled into a narrow room. If he had had his wits about him he should have gone out the back into the coffeehouse’s yard, where there would be sheds or a gate or a wall to be scaled, more streets and allies into which he could disappear, not this dead end of a room, to condemn the scribe when the guards came searching.

  “Sit,” she said, and he did, because he couldn’t stand once she let go of him. The bed was a thin quilted mattress on the floor, neatly made up with a striped blanket over it, and at the head, a carefully wrapped and strapped bundle that looked not so much a pillow as something to be snatched and fled with when some long-awaited emergency arrived.

  Ghu sat, and sighed, and remembered the balconies of the houses, thrusting out over walls and streets, all enclosed with wooden walls and carved screens or shielding wickerwork. “Is there a balcony? I can get out there. Could I clim
b to the roof?” And jump down to another house’s roof and make his escape, but not with this ankle, no.

  “They won’t follow,” said the woman. Since first grabbing him she had touched him only with one hand. Now she breathed on the other and wiped it on her caftan, leaving a dark trace of ink. She fished strings out of her sleeve and began weaving a cat’s-cradle. “I hope,” she added. “Here, hold this loop.”

  He did so and felt her pulse in the string, but maybe it was his own, from his racing heart to his fingers. The crossing and recrossing strands trapped his eye. He was falling into it, circling down . . .

  “Not you,” she said. “Don’t look, if it does that to you.” He looked at her instead, biting her lip as if she found what she was doing difficult, and yet the pulse was hers, making the world shiver. Her fingers flashed and plucked confidently, swiftly, at odds with the expression on her face, and then she shook the pattern free.

  “Ivah,” he said, tasting the name. Not mistress, not lady. Just Ivah. She looked startled. A heart-shaped face, pale from an indoor life that did not much suit her, he thought, and he smiled. She flinched and looked away.

  “That—the storyteller knows you,” she said. “Who are you?”

  He considered. “Ghu. I don’t know her.”

  “Why did she think you would know anything about Ilbialla’s tomb?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “She thought you might. Why?”

  “You should ask her,” he suggested gently, “if she’s your friend.”

  “She’s not my friend. She’s . . .” Ivah shook her head. “I don’t even know her name.” She frowned. “No, I know a name. I doubt it’s one she’s using now. What did you do, to have street guard after you?”

  “I’m not sure. They want a Nabbani.”

  “Oh.”

  “A man,” he added, and touched her hand. She was frightened again, and she had been so bold. But she had been working wizardry in the Voice’s city, and the Red Masks would kill her for simply being what she was, and where. “But you’re not a man, and you’re . . .” silk and horses and that bundle pretending it was a pillow had a sword’s length to it. A sabre’s length. That was what he saw. “Are you of the western deserts, or the Grass? You don’t belong to this city.”