The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  The Lady began to turn, looking his way. He bowed his own head, a simpleton child, a stray of no account. There were enough taller folk before him that he would have had to make great effort to see her face again. He felt her eyes, though. They passed over, moved on. He did move a little aside then to watch her passing, the slender shoulder, trim waist. Not, he thought, a rider. That stallion would have her off and be into the crowd and probably killing in its angry panic if she let the grip of her will on its mind falter. The Red Mask, though . . . the armoured Red Mask like a captain at the Lady’s side, he rode well, if only his horse were not so terrified.

  The Red Mask wrenched the horse’s head savagely around, and it wheeled, reared and struck out, scattering the second group of Red Masks who followed close on foot, though they moved only so much as was needed, without fear, even without urgency, while ranks of spear-bearing temple guard behind shouted alarm and the onlookers shrieked and shoved back against those behind. But the horse plunged trampling in place, mouthing the bit, and was hauled around again even as the Lady glanced back. The Red Mask took station at her side once more, her dumb shadow.

  Ghu was on his knees, and as the crowd, exuberant in the aftermath of its brief alarm, surged past, pressing against the temple guard, crying out for the Lady’s notice, he wrapped his hands over his head against their kicking and shoving. Darkness. Snow, and wind, and the mountain night. The cold depths of the river. His mother had drowned him.

  Ahjvar.

  Ahj had died and died and his soul was chained to his body and Catairanach’s curse twisted fate and chance so that he never was free to die. Ghu had known since last night, he had known it, if he had dared to chase what he heard in the silence; he had felt the hollowness, the place where Ahj should have been, become an emptiness in the world. She took wizards, and if she drowned them in her deep well as the city said, she did not discard them afterwards. Living or dead, ghost or monster, Ahjvar was a wizard, and so was the thing that possessed him. If he could not reach his magic, that did not strip it from his blood. He was a wizard, and the Lady had taken him and severed his soul; it was not the freedom, not the death he had longed for. It was possession worse than Hyllau’s murderous-mad ghost; it was perversion worse than any slavery, an abomination, a defilement of the dead and a torment of the soul that could not escape the world’s pain.

  It was beyond weeping for. Ghu stayed where he was, curled up in the darkness, shivering, with the blizzard of Father Nabban’s mountain thrusting fingers into his bones. There were distant voices, but they passed, faded, a tide ebbing and leaving him, the street clearing, pursuing the Lady. Someone touched his shoulder once and spoke kindly but went away when he did not stir. Someone, less kindly, tugged at the bundle still slung around his body, but someone else shouted and footsteps ran clattering away. Vague voices poured over him, something about awe of the Lady taking them that way, sometimes, leave him. They went away.

  Another touch came thrusting at him, butting. Beyond weeping, but there were tears, and something found the salt on his face, two muzzles, one licking, one sniffing, each shoving at the other. There was no spring blizzard, and if there were, he had still the mare and foal to find, and there was no voice of the god, no whisper of his goddess, only the need to get up, to go on, because he had been lent life and it was not his to throw away, was it?

  Ahjvar was not his, only something he had found for a little time, and there was still his road to follow. He could do one more thing, though. He could destroy the body and unchain the last rags of the dismembered soul. He was sorry for Ivah, sorry for Nour, but Ahjvar had the greater claim on him.

  The dogs flinched back when he pushed himself up, sitting on his knees. One crouched and growled. It was a gaunt, dun-coloured dog with a black stripe down its back and black wolf’s ears, which flattened when he looked at it, changing its growl to a whine. A second shadow, paler, mottled ash and silvery like sand under moonlight, flitted around behind it, tail stirring, ears folded back. It rolled over, exposing its belly. All legs and ribs. He leaned back against the wall, tilted to find the sky, blue and clear and beyond human reach forever. He could drown in the sky. Maybe he did. The sun moved, and the dogs disappeared. People hustled up and down the streets, talking, uneasy, excited. The Lady came to them, rode among them warning of danger. Their enemies gathered strength in the west and in the east, their land of Catairna, their province, given to the Voice of the Lady by the desperate goddess there, who had been beset by wizards and so sought her sister’s aid, rose in rebellion and sent assassins into the city. The faithful Voice was dead, murdered. No one was safe. Enemies, wizards prepared to assault the city. An enemy gathered strength far in the west, but the Lady would make Marakand great once more. They must all be prepared to fight when the day came, or the men must. The women had a greater task. Marakand needed folk, true-born Marakander folk, who could go out to the new lands they would win Over-Malagru, to serve the new king, the Lady’s chosen, who would go to Praitan to teach and civilize the seven Praitannec tribes. Young men went to the palace plaza, to take an oath to join her militia, to be assigned companies by ward, to learn to stand and fight for when the fated day should come and Marakand would close the bronze gates of its Western Wall. Ghu slowly drifted down from the sky and frowned across the street. Shadows stretched out, the sun turning towards setting.

  He understood, he thought. Ahjvar was his. To this last.

  The feral dogs came slinking back, crouched, both of them, in the mouth of the next alley along, watching him with the patience of stalking predators, yet most unpredatory. The pale one carried a dead rat in its mouth, waiting to be noticed.

  Half-grown strays, with sores on their faces and the tawny one with a dirty, blackened bite on its shoulder.

  A one-eyed cat watched from a porch roof, watched him, not the sparrows that hopped, took flight and circled only to return farther along. They, too, watched, with their shiny lacquer eyes, twittering at him. He drew them. He didn’t want to, didn’t mean to. Not here, not now. Not yet. If even the sparrows saw him, what else might?

  Red Masks. The storyteller. Lady Deyandara’s wizard.

  Not Red Masks. No, not Red Masks, yet; the Lady hadn’t seen him, not with her own eyes to see, and he had been lost in the crowd. But Ahjvar, Ahj . . . had seen him. Ahjvar had seen him, and yet the Lady had not turned back.

  He drew a long, shuddering breath and felt sun reach through the dying storm, thought, a blessing on Catairanach’s curse, a binding in the white-hot rage and fury of a goddess, a mother . . . a curse no other god, and there had been other gods asked, could break.

  The Lady was . . . mistaken, perhaps, in what she thought she held. Perhaps.

  The pale dog crept nearer, on its belly, dropped its rat and gave the slightest wag of its tail.

  He had eaten rat, raw, on his first ship, when he was stowaway rather than crew, but this one had been dead too long. Both dogs turned and ran when Ghu went to hands and knees, pulling himself up by the wall. His ankle throbbed and he swayed, dizzy. Hungry, but not enough for the gift of bloated rat.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely, because it was well to be thankful for gifts, all gifts, when they came from a clean heart. The dogs had turned and crouched again, staring. The pale one had dark eyes; the other, amber-brown. “I think, not now.”

  The sparrows took flight in a twittering cloud. The cat stretched, blinked, and slid fluid along the roof and away. The dogs sat up, staring fixedly.

  “I don’t think I can give you anything in return,” he told them.

  An old woman clearing away a tray of coloured threads from a tiny shopfront little wider than her door laughed at him, not pleasantly, went in and came out with a broom. Both dogs vanished. “You get off,” she said. “Or I’ll send for the street guard. I’ve been watching you. Overcome by the Lady’s presence, hah! We don’t need dirty opium-smokers from the Five Cities hanging around here, begging and stealing.” He gave her a wide-eyed, dream-h
azed look. Maybe he did seem so. He felt half-wrapped in dreams, still. “Go join the blessed Lady’s militia and learn to be a man, why don’t you?”

  He shook his head and limped up the street. “Come on, then,” he called softly, as he passed a crack between two buildings, shoulder-wide, no more. “If you will, come.”

  If Ahjvar were dead and could only be killed as Red Mask and freed, Ghu had still a duty of friendship to do so, and set him free. And after . . . and after . . .

  It would be a long, lonely road home to Nabban. There was nothing else for him here, now.

  His dogs slunk out to follow. It would be good to have company on the road.

  There is a storyteller’s cycle of tales, and they begin like this:

  Long ago, in the days of the first kings in the north—who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, as all but fools should know—there were seven devils, and their names were Honeytongued Ogada, Vartu Kingsbane, Jasberek Fireborn, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, Tu’usha the Restless, and Jochiz Stonebreaker. And these seven devils escaped from the cold hells, where the Old Great Gods had sealed them after the great war in the heavens.

  And in the days of the first kings in the north, there were seven wizards. Two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from over the western sea, and one was of a people unknown; one was of the Great Grass and one of Imperial Nabban, and two were from beyond far Nabban, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded, who was uncle to Red Geir; Ulfhild the King’s Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise; Anganurth Wanderer; Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship; Yeh-Lin the Beautiful; and Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie. These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet more, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

  Now the devils, having no place, had no bodies, but were like smoke or like a flame, and not of the earth at all. Some folk even call them kin to the Old Great Gods, though this is heresy. And these seven devils who had escaped the cold hells hungered to be of the stuff of the world, as the gods and the goddesses and the demons of the earth may be at will, and as men and women are whether they will or no. But they did not desire loving worship and the friendship of living men and women, as do the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters. They did not watch and judge and cherish the souls of human-folk after death, as the Old Great Gods are said to do in the land beyond the stars. The devils craved dominion as the desert craves water, and they knew neither love nor justice nor mercy. They made a bargain with the seven wizards, that they would join their souls to the wizards’ souls, and share the wizards’ bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power.

  But the devils deceived the wizards, and betrayed them. The devils took the souls of the wizards into their own, and become one with them, and devoured them. They walked as wizards among the wizards, and destroyed those who would not obey, or who counselled against their counsel. They desired the homage of kings and the enslavement of the folk, and they were never sated, as the desert is never sated with rain. They would have ruled the earth and the folk of the earth and its gods and its goddesses; they would have devoured the spirit of the living earth and turned the strength of the earth against the Great Gods in their heaven.

  So the kings of the north and the tribes of the grass and those wizards whom the devils had not yet slain pretended submission, and plotted in secret, and they rose up against the tyranny of the devils and overthrew them. But the devils were devils, even in human bodies, and not easily slain. Only with the help of the Old Great Gods were they bound, one by one, and imprisoned—Honeytongued Ogada in stone, Vartu Kingsbane in earth, Jasberek Fireborn in water, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai in the breath of a burning mountain, Dotemon Dreamshaper in the oldest of trees, Tu’usha the Restless in the heart of a flame, Jochiz Stonebreaker in the youngest of rivers. And they were guarded by demons, and goddesses, and gods. And the Old Great Gods withdrew from the world, and await the souls of human folk in the heavens beyond the stars, which men call the Land of the Old Great Gods.

  It is said that the seven devils did not sleep but lay ever-waking within their bonds, and they worked against their bonds and weakened them, and they worked against their captors and their gaolers slept or they died, as even gods and goddesses can die, when the fates allow it.

  And a devil came to Ulvsness of the Hravningas in the north, when Ragnvor was queen, and a devil came to Lissavakail in the Pillars of the Sky when the last human incarnation of the goddess was a child, and there was fire, and battle, and death. The skalds of the north have long sung it; now the bards of the Western Grass begin to shape the tales; the soothsayers see shadows of what yet may come when they cast their stones. The waking devils walk the world again.

  Catairlau dreamed. He thought he had been dreaming forever, but Hyllau knew that was not true. There was a girl in his arms, slim and sweet, her head snugged against his shoulder. The girl had been there forever where no one should ever be, wrapped in the same dream, the two of them, lying in deep water, and the girl’s hands on his body, which was hers, were an abomination. The girl’s hand over his, fingers laced into his own, pushing it down the curve of her breast, across her belly, through the curling hair and between—no.

  She found a memory. He clutched a corpse. Miara, that square, plain, middle-aged wizard who had dared try to claim him. Thought of Miara stirred something in him, the wrongness of it. Too light a weight, too perfumed, too clinging, her fingers pushing his, caressing . . . Not a corpse; hot and alive, burning against his skin. He moved to hurl himself away and was still dreaming, still drowning, unable to move, and the water was so heavy, holding her down as well. She should have slept longer. She was meant to sleep; her mother had meant her to sleep, to drift in soft dreams of gentle water while her Catairlau carried her safe through the years, till the time should come when she would find her rightful place in the world again.

  This wasn’t the gentle water of her dreams; this was dark, deep, and cold, and her dreams were soft but tormenting. She never slept quiet. The terror of the great empty void, the maw of nothingness that waited to claim her halfling soul never allowed her the dreams her mother would have sent. Always there was the burning, the hungry fire that woke her, the knowing that she was fading into the void as the stuff of her soul fed Catairlau’s unnatural life. Her mother had unwittingly cursed her when shaping this refuge, had made her his prey, and as a sleeping man’s body, with the assassin’s cord around its neck, wakes to defend itself before he is even aware that he fights for life, she, too, would wake, and fight as she must for the breath of her life, the fire of the soul’s breaking with its body, as it tore itself away to the long road.

  This was a different threat, nightmare, but she stirred and could not wake, as he could not. She was dreaming of herself, of her Catairlau, of the girl who was fire and water and hungry eyes rolling astride him, with thoughts of a child, a king, an emperor Over-Malagru in her mind.

  Mine! she hissed, and woke herself with her own fury to take him. She flung the girl aside with Catairlau’s strength and followed, seizing her to snap the neck, and drink the fire of her souls, but the girl twisted free of him and struck him down, with a sword in her hand. Hyllau had not seen her draw it. It burned in the air; it was of the air, iron and fire, and the girl smiled seeing her behind Catairlau’s eyes and said, Little death that sleeps in him, I said I would feed you. Shall I feed you on him, and watch you both die beyond any hope of the Old Great Gods? And she pushed Catairlau down to lie where he had fallen, so that he looked dead, dead and empty, an abandoned corpse, not even breathing, but his eyes
were open.

  The girl breathed, rapid and shallow, and her eyes went wide and dark in the light of the gilded lamp that burned in a niche by the door. Shocked. Her hand stole down to cover herself, and the sword was gone; Hyllau had not seen it dropped. The girl snatched a blanket from the bed and wrapped herself, wiping her mouth on her arm.

  Silly virgin fool. Hyllau could show her . . .

  But as she gathered nerve and sinew again the girl crossed the floor in three brisk strides and knelt, a hand spread over Catairlau’s chest. She sang, foreign words, high and wavering. Power flowed through them.

  The waters of Hyllau’s dreaming wrapped about her again.

  The Lady would send the commander of the Red Masks, her champion, to aid Ketsim against Durandau the high king. She had said it; it would be so. She had not meant it to be so soon, when she said it, but—it was better so. Yes. Deal with Praitan and have it done. Then she would ride east herself and crown her captain king, and she would—yes.

  In the pale twilight before dawn, they assembled to march away. The priests, those who had woken at the stir through the sacred precinct and naturally Rahel and Ashir, whom she had woken with her own early rising, were with her to witness their marching. Zora had ordered Rahel to dress her hair with white flowers, scented jessamine and lacy mist-on-the-river, some twisted into a braid about her head, some loose, coiling down her back. She enjoyed the tight-lipped obedience of the Beholder, reduced to lady’s maidservant. She called a little of the haze of the morning to trail about her hems, the white goddess with the breath of the well clinging to her.