The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

There had been no one to help her do any of the necessary things when his breath finally stopped. She had used her last coin to pay the oilman next door for use of his handcart and dragged her father’s body out to the pauper’s graveyard in the Gore where the roads from Riverbend Gate and Sunset ran together, and then, having returned the cart, she left everything behind, like one walking to execution. She had gone to the temple, to audition for the dancers.

  Zora had never had any doubt they would take her. She knew she was beautiful, even at an age when the body was all arms and legs and flat as a stack of bricks. That she could already sing and dance and play flute and tanbur was mere gilding.

  She had passed the Doves, Hadidu’s coffeehouse overlooking the Sunset Ward market square, both going out to the Gore and trudging back. She hadn’t even thought of going in to ask the last priest of Ilbialla for help, still tangled, then, in her father’s web of fears.

  Maybe it was time. She never had gone to the Doves on her monthly free-days, at first because she had promised her father and she half believed that he must have known some truth, that Hadidu was unfaithful, would betray them to the temple in return for, what, amnesty for Nour, who was a wizard? And then because she was ashamed, and she was a temple dancer; Master Hadidu would see her scarlet robes and think she betrayed him.

  And then, even later, because she was shy, and she did not think he would know her.

  Should she go and say, Master Hadidu, I’m the daughter of Mansour and Samra, who were once your friends, and my father made me promise to enter the temple, so I did. I found what I’m sure you already know, that the Voice, in her own person, is a senile old woman, that even the priests fear the Red Masks, who never, ever raise their veils, and no servants ever enter their hall. That the wealth that pours in goes out again at the Voice’s word on walls and warriors and gifts to false senators who approve whatever Revered Rahel the Beholder of the Face tells them.

  I can tell you that the Voice truly speaks with the Lady’s voice. I have heard her, hiding where I should not have been, and sick to my stomach with fear. If there is a monster in Marakand, it is the Lady herself, and though my father claimed Gurhan whispered to him behind the darkness of his eyes, my god never comes to me, to put thoughts into my head. Does yours?

  She would. She had to. It was that or spend her life tutoring Family brats in calligraphy and music, dance and geometry, forgetting, as the city did, that there had ever been a god of Palace Hill. Not that she could see how mere remembering did anyone any good.

  Zora tried stretching and then curling up small. It didn’t slow her rat-scrabbling thoughts any.

  No getting up before the rising bell was sounded outside the dancer’s dormitory. A discipline priestesses did not have to keep. No grey showed at the dormitory window. How long till the dawn? Thunder still grumbled distant over the mountains, and just when she thought the storm must have passed from the city, the world lit white again and it sounded as though the clouds smashed together like falling rocks. Had she dozed after all, as she lay thinking of Master Hadidu? He had had some plan, he and Nour—and her father, back before he began to fear them and cut himself off from all his friends. The gods were not dead, they believed. And they could be freed. Nour travelled the eastern road with a caravan. Nour sought something that could help. That was all she knew. If there was something her father had wanted her to do in the temple, to further that end, he had never made it clear to her.

  Perhaps he never knew himself.

  Whisper, scuff of sandals and slippers, the hushed rustling of bodies. Zora’s nerves prickled to the alert. Again? Had one of the elderly widowed priestesses gone to the Old Great Gods? But their rooms were all on the lower floors, to spare them so many stairs.

  A narrow crack of light widened, as someone opened the door at the far end of the dormitory. Zora blinked at it and sat up before she could wonder if it might be wiser to pretend to be asleep. A dozen priests and priestesses came in, rustling, scuffing, all the noises of people trying very hard to be silent. Several carried lamps. Two Red Masks followed. Her heart lurched. For Red Masks to come into the girl-dancers’ dormitory . . . that had simply never happened in all her seven years in the temple. A sickness rose into her chest, and she felt her pulse racing—they know you, they’ve found you out—but she swallowed down the panic, kept her voice merely puzzled.

  “What is it?” she whispered, and a few of the other girls, waking at the stir, repeated the question.

  Startled, the clergy whispered among themselves, which gave everyone else time to wake. The Red Masks stood aloof, but then, they always did. Zora frowned at them. One at least was definitely a man: tall, broad-shouldered. A pillar of menacing, fluttering drapery. Red Masks walked in her nightmares.

  “What’s happening?” she demanded, as anyone might, no longer whispering.

  “The Voice . . .” a priest murmured, but there was still a whispering among them, as if they debated, not certain.

  If the Voice had warned of some danger, the priests shouldn’t stand muttering together in the girls’ dormitory. There shouldn’t be priests in the girls’ dormitory, on the upper floor of the priestesses’ hall.

  If the Voice had revealed a traitor, a spy in their midst . . . But why now, after almost seven years, and she’d been into the forbidden building, the old hospice, she’d seen the Voice stripped of her robes and mask and veils, seen her vacant, slack face, and no goddess had woken in pitiable Revered Lilace to shout denouncement then.

  “How many girls here are orphans?” demanded Revered Rahel, Beholder of the Face of the Lady.

  A few hesitant hands were raised. Zora’s was not among them. “Why do you ask, Revered?” she asked.

  There was no answer, but fingers pointed. “Zora’s an orphan too.”

  “Yes, our senior dancer,” Revered Rahel said. “What’s your Family, dear?”

  Zora shook her head. Her father’s family had been here before the city, her father always said. Not that she was about to make that fact known.

  “Well, where are you from? What ward of the city?”

  “Fleshmarket Ward, Revered.” That was in the entry register next to her name, along with a note that, since she was an orphan, the ward magistrate’s permission as her guardian had been obtained.

  “Very well, very well.” Revered Rahel glanced over them dismissively. “You may put your hands down now, girls.” Those who were orphans did so. Half of them were Family, not merely by name. Bastards and orphans. Was Zora imagining it, or had Revered Rahel not bothered even to glance at those?

  “And, Zora, you are accounted by all the most beautiful of the dancers.”

  That didn’t seem to be a question; just as well, because how could she answer? Her mother’s dark, narrow face, soft black hair that rippled in waves, when unbound, to her waist, Samra’s dusky, long-lashed eyes as well—her father’s slender musician’s hands. Beauty, she saw, in the polished black pillars of the Hall of the Dome, but it was not something a decently modest girl ought to say about herself.

  “Through her blessed Voice Lilace, the Lady has said, ‘I will have youth. I will have beauty. I will have a dancer. Let the orphan girl be my daughter. Let the orphan girl become my child, my beloved.’ Zora, dear, a great blessing has fallen upon you. The Voice of the Lady has risen from her labours here and set out upon her road. Her final act for our Lady was to name the one who should take her place.”

  Zora sat dazed. Did Rahel mean . . . ? The Voice of the Lady was dead, and they wanted her—

  She licked her lips and tried to swallow, but her mouth felt paper dry. “I . . .”

  “You will be the next Voice of Marakand,” said Revered Ashir, Right Hand of the Lady and husband of Revered Rahel.

  “But I’m not a priestess, Revered.” The words croaked.

  “Beautiful and beloved,” whispered the Mistress of the Dance. “The Voice of the Lady has spoken.”

  And what other rubbish did she spew? Zora wondered. Measur
ed by her thundering heart, it seemed to take a very long time for them to come farther into the long room, with its double row of beds. To stop blocking the door. Her own bed was farthest from that door, under the window, privilege claimed by the senior girl. The window, unfortunately, was blocked by a wooden screen and on the uppermost storey. Even within the holy grounds of the temple, certain precautions had to be taken when one had thirty of the most beautiful maidens of the city under one roof.

  The other girls stared, blank, startled, awed, horrified . . . envious?

  “Come, Zora,” said Revered Ashir. “The Lady awaits you in the deep well.”

  A long breath. She went. Down the centre aisle between the beds, then up, bounding bed to bed past them, nightgown hitched above her knees. Out the door and down the stairs, long strides. To reach the main gate meant crossing courtyards and gardens and dodging around other buildings, then passing up a sloping tunnel and beneath the compound’s outer wall to the higher level of the city. They’d be expecting that, and the gates were defended by temple guard, locked at night. But she could hide; there were deserted ruins even within the temple. She knew the grounds in the dark. Few of the priests could say the same.

  She heard them shouting behind her for torches. Lamps blew out as they ran, and most of them were old, puffing; even the young lacked a dancer’s fit body. She might have a chance.

  But they took her in the end. The Red Masks ran swiftly as she, anticipated her, more coming, bearing torches, to cut her off, blocking her in on the landing of a stairway. Revered Ashir pushed past the silent red priests, trying to seize her by the shoulders as if she were a naughty little girl, to be shaken into sense. She kicked him where it hurt, knocked another priest’s legs out from under him, punched some grey-haired senior priestess in the eye, and was brought down by a blow between the shoulders from a Red Mask’s carved staff. Nobody escaped the Red Masks. Certainly not she. They hauled her up, Revered Rahel shouting at another priest to take her legs. Revered Ashir was being sick in the corner.

  “Thankless beggar’s brat,” the Beholder of the Face was almost shrieking. “Impious trollop’s bastard, is this how you show gratitude to your Lady for the great honour given you?”

  Shija, the Mistress of the Dance, was sobbing. None of them looked happy, except possibly Revered Rahel, who wiped her mouth and gave a mirthless grin of satisfaction at Zora’s now-useless struggles.

  “If it’s such an honour, you go to her,” Zora spat. “Go on! Tell her I’m not looking to be anyone’s daughter.”

  Revered Rahel slapped her. Zora yelled and twisted but could not break free.

  She stopped yelling when yet another pair of Red Masks came. These two wore their armour, and the light of the Lady shone on them. They set her on her feet, but she fell to her knees again. The priests themselves backed away, tight against the walls.

  Go now. She should go now, run, run run . . . Get up. Knock them over. Run. They’re not ghosts. They’re not devils. They’re people in stupid vestments. Run.

  But the divine light of the Lady shone from them, muddy scarlet edging eyeslits, nostrils, crawling slowly over the helmets and chest-armour like ripples in dark water. The watching priests crowded away. One priestess whimpered under her breath.

  Run! Zora screamed at herself in the silence of her mind. But her joints had gone watery and her teeth chattered and she couldn’t move.

  The armoured Red Masks each took her under an arm, the merely veiled falling in behind. They dragged her out the main door, past a stern-faced portress there to protect the virtue of the dancers and the other unmarried women, across the rainy courtyard walled by the married priests’ apartments, past the scriptorium and the house where the Right Hand and Beholder of the Face lived in splendour befitting their rank. Across the public courtyards, glistening with puddles, under the colonnade of the Hall of the Dome. The hall of the Red Masks stood near the sacred well-house, fortress-like, windowless on its ground storey. They all hurried down the uneven steps into the well-house courtyard, the old level of the temple grounds before the rubble had been built over. There were more Red Masks watching from behind the screened upper windows of their hall, from within the dark mouth of their doorway; she felt their eyes, burning, and even the priests hunched and kept their faces averted, as if their grim colleagues might read some hidden guilt in their thoughts. The two Red Masks holding her set her on her feet, still gripping her by either arm, and Zora walked stumbling. Revered Rahel unlocked the well-house door with an iron key a handspan long.

  Zora had never been within. Even priests did not approach the Lady unbidden by the Voice, and dancers never descended to the well and the Lady’s presence. Inside, the building was a single room with a stone-flagged floor that was merely a ring around its outer edge. It was roofed with a dome, the open eye of which let in a plume of rain. A gilded lamp burned in a niche, shedding just enough light to show that most of what should have been floor was a dark and gaping pit. They started down a stair that descended in a great spiral, without railing or banisters. It was carved of soft rock; the treads were worn into hollows, cracked and crumbling, damp. The air grew cool and moist. Four of the priests carried light now, two ahead and two behind. Zora was in the middle, in the pool of shadow. The Red Masks held her up whenever she slipped. The stairs were slick. Zora tried to catch the eyes of the Mistress of the Dance when she looked back.

  Revered Shija looked away.

  The stairs were abruptly newer, sharp-edged and less carefully matched, some with narrower treads or shorter rises, so that Zora was not the only one stumbling, though a torch burned below them, at the foot of the stairs. The walls here showed no sign of working. They were in a natural cavern deep beneath the temple. The deep well. The sacred well. Except it was no well; it was a dank cave. Zora’s legs were trembling so that the Red Masks had to take all her weight. She couldn’t have run even if they had taken their hands off her.

  This was what they worshipped? She wanted to scream hysterically at them, It’s a cave, an empty cave, but she could not. There was something. She felt it.

  The priests fixed their torches to brackets spaced along the wall, spreading the light. The floor of the cavern was natural rock, uneven but water-smoothed, a mottled pallor stained with streaks of green and red, fissured with dark earth in which a few pallid, straggling weeds had sprouted to grow beneath the dome’s eye. A rotting boat, its planks crumbling, caked with a white paste of mould, sat near the foot of the stairs, long abandoned on the stone.

  A veiled Red Mask stood guard, back against the wall on the far side of the cavern, unmoving.

  There was a well after all. Of sorts.

  Centre of the cavern. Mud and slick damp stone, and an edge of black water, reflecting torchlight. A crack in the floor.

  The water rippled as though something beneath were stirring, breaking the firelight into jagged shapes. Mist began to rise. Zora sagged to her knees and the Red Masks let her down, into mud. There were six of them now, seven with the motionless sentry. Where had they come from? Darkness. Cavern mouth. Could she run for that darkness, hide, escape? Not if Red Masks could walk out of it. Not if she could not stand.

  Her god was not this. She held that thought. This terror was not how a god should be.

  “Holy Lady,” Rahel said. “Great Lady of Marakand, we have brought you a devout and beautiful and virtuous virgin to be your Voice.”

  Nothing spoke, but tendrils of mist reached out towards her.

  “Do you hear us, Lady?” someone else asked, speaking not to the well but to Zora.

  She did not answer. Neither did anything else. Nothing happened. The Red Masks waited patiently. The mist wrapped around her. Her head ached, badly enough to make her queasy. That was all. It was cold, and she shivered from that as well as fear. The Lady’s divine light faded from the armoured Red Masks and the miasma of terror they carried ebbed with it. It was her own honest fear that kept her trembling. Zora clenched her hands to fists. Praye
d, never giving her prayer a name. Guide me, hide me, . . . save me.

  Eventually, “It’s been so long. How did the Lady used to approve her Voices?” a priestess asked in a whisper.

  “She came to them in dreams,” an old priest said. “She came in dreams and called them to her. They woke knowing they were called.”

  “But it’s all different now. This girl’s not even a priestess. Are we wrong? How do we know?”

  “The smoke,” said Revered Ashir, who must have hobbled after them. He stood propped on a younger priest. “It’s the smoke that makes the Voice receptive to the Lady.”

  “Well, you should have said so before,” Rahel snapped at her husband. “We need to do this in the Hall of the Dome instead.”

  “The Lady will receive her Voice in the deep well,” Ashir said, satisfaction in his voice. “I have all that is needed here.”

  “Prepare it, then,” Rahel said. “Do you have the mask?”

  Ashir made a noise of impatience. “The mask is for dignity, for respect of the Lady when the Voice ascends the pulpit. We’ll do without the mask. Shija, assist me.”

  The Mistress of the Dance nearly scurried in her haste to obey, to not be seen hesitating any longer. Zora tried to crane around to see what they were doing, but a priest moved between them, backing away from the crawling mist.

  That was not how you should feel about your gods.

  “There’s . . . there’s nothing to fear, child,” murmured an older priest, a man who had taught her to play the zither. “The smoke helps you to open yourself to the presence of the Lady, that’s all. Then she will enter your mind and you will speak the words she gives you. It is as though . . . as though you are the trumpet, and she the musician. She will fill your mind with holiness and make you Marakand. It is a blessing. A blessing.” But he looked down at his feet as he whispered, not meeting Zora’s eyes.

  “Lady of Marakand, you who hold the waters of the deep well in your cupped hands, be with us. Lady of Marakand, whose blessing is in the deep waters, protect us from all evils. Lady of Marakand . . .” Revered Ashir, pausing often to gasp for breath, was praying.