Tsorreh found herself smiling. This sea captain was a poet! After that, they walked on deck together and he showed her the various parts of the ship. They watched the waves, slightly luminescent along the curve of beach and the black line of the headland. Points of light glimmered through a rent in the clouds. On the following nights, Tsorreh continued the reading lessons, this time from the Gelonian histories.
As Bynthos had said, they came eventually to Verenzza, formed from massive jagged peaks that thrust upward from the ocean. The harbor was deep, its wharves built out from the narrow rocky beaches. Tsorreh had learned from her reading that the island was an important center for Gelonian naval power. The attack on Gatacinne had been launched from here. Even as she had sensed a deep, brooding intelligence below the waves, so now something reached out to her from the dark volcanic peaks, a wordless elemental power, long slumbering, beyond human comprehension. She felt it even in the confines of the cabin.
At Verenzza, they rested for a few days while the ship was reprovisioned. Tsorreh glimpsed wharves of weather-bleached wood, ships with square or triangular sails, white sails, red sails, black sails, prows carved with dragons and sea beasts, all crowded in between smaller vessels, boats laden with fish and sponges, and coracles paddled by half-naked boys who shouted and held out strings of shells for sale. The smells of fish and salt water, of refuse and seaweed, filled the air. Seabirds wheeled overhead, emitting shrill cries. Once or twice, Tsorreh caught sight of a sleek-headed creature keeping pace with their boat. It was not a dolphin, but she could not think what else it might be.
She and Menelaia were not allowed to go ashore, but sufficient fresh water was brought onboard for them to wash themselves and their clothes. By this time, Menelaia had recovered from her seasickness. She took charge, hanging the clean garments from ropes strung across the deck. To Tsorreh, even the abbreviated bath in a small tub of cold water with a knob of strong smelling soap was a relief. The soap stung her skin as she scrubbed away the grime. She lathered her hair three times and used the last of the water to rinse it. At home, she remembered with a pang, the last rinse would have been scented with chamomile or citron to leave her hair silky and sweet-smelling. Since there was no oil, either, her hair dried rough and knotted. She made no sound as Menelaia yanked the bone comb through her tangles.
They set to sea again. At night, Tsorreh emerged from the cabin to walk the Silver Gull’s deck. The moon, almost full, swept the sky with glimmering light. Brightness reflected off the waves. She could see her own wavering shadow on the deck. The ship stood at sea-anchor, moving rhythmically with the gentle surge and pull of the water. The te-alvar in her breast had gone quiescent, as if the peace of the evening had laid all past sorrow and present fears to rest.
In two or three days, they would reach the mainland and she must bid farewell to the Silver Gull. For the journey to Aidon by barge, Mortan would undoubtedly order her chained. Bynthos came to stand beside her. He held something in his hands. He waited until she had noticed him, and then held out a book. She held it up to the moonlight to read the title.
It was the Odes. A lump rose in her throat for all the things that meant, for the beauty of the words, the solace of their sharing, the heartache that the author had penned into those words.
She shook her head. “I cannot accept this. It is too rich a gift.”
“I will find another copy.” And someday I will be able to read it.
For an instant, her fingers closed over the worn leather. Even in Meklavar, such a book would be a treasure. But she was not in Meklavar, nor was she te-ravah or even the daughter of an Isarran princess. She was a captive of war and, in all likelihood, a slave. Nothing she owned from now on would be hers.
“The offer is gift enough,” she said, and this time she pressed it back into his hands. “If you would have it be more, then remember me whenever you read it.”
“Aye, that I’ll do.” He glanced away, and she read in his movement that if either of them said more, the perfect grace of the moment would shatter, gone beyond recall.
In silence, they watched the first pale light seep into the east.
Chapter Fourteen
HALFWAY to the mainland, a storm came up. Tsorreh heard a clatter and running feet outside the cabin. The ship heaved under her, timbers groaning. She felt the rigging vibrate through the wooden planks. The ship tilted alarmingly. Menelaia, losing her balance, let out a shriek that pierced the sound of the wind.
Tsorreh went out on deck. She could hardly see through the downpour. Day had turned almost as dark as night. Waves surged over the decks. Wind whipped the water to a froth. Flying spray drenched her.
In snatches, she heard men’s voices, shouted orders, and cries of alarm. Water, bone-chillingly cold, engulfed the deck. She clung to the railing. Behind her, in the cabin, Menelaia shrieked again.
Tsorreh was no sailor, and only a fragile craft stood between everyone aboard and the long cold plummet into darkness. If the ship split apart or crashed on the jagged rocky shore, she would drown and what she carried would be lost.
Between her breasts, she felt the steady pulse of the te-alvar. With it, Khored of Blessed Memory had conjured Fire and Ice, had raised mountains from meadows, and caused the very bowels of the earth to open. She pressed both hands over the living gem and tried to imagine its power flowing into her, into the sea, the waves calming to green and slate-blue instead of wind-whipped gray, the wind softening, a warm breeze stirring the clouds, blue sky above glassy swells.
Almost, almost she felt an answer.
The ship lurched under her like a great beast rising to its feet, then seemed to catch its balance. The clamor of the gale hushed, and the voices of the sailors rose like a fractured chorus.
Deep beneath the waters, something moved. She sensed a shifting of dark upon dark, of cold within cold. Strands of pearls, sea-jade, and coral glinted in the abyss.
“Rocks to port!” a man’s voice rang out, his next words swallowed by the rising wind.
Through a gap in the seething gray, Tsorreh looked where the seaman had pointed. A promontory jutted from the sea, its black stones drenched and gleaming.
Bynthos shouted out orders. Men leaped to their ropes.
Slowly, the Silver Gull turned. The rocks disappeared in a swirl of flying spray as the ship pulled away. Then the storm closed in on them once again, and Tsorreh sagged against the railing. She felt utterly drained, caught between astonishment and terror.
Hands closed around her arms. She turned to see the hard, set features of the Gelonian officer, Lord Mortan. Yet there was nothing of cruelty in the way he guided her back to the cabin, only the disciplined focus of his purpose. In all probability, he’d been afraid she would seize the moment to throw herself overboard, and he would lose his prize.
Two steps further, and she fell into Menelaia’s waiting arms. Sobbing, the maid took her to the bed, sat her down, and stripped off her sodden clothing. In her brief exposure, Tsorreh’s skin had gone numb with cold. Menelaia found a length of cloth to rub her dry, then wrapped her in blankets.
As Tsorreh sank back on the bed, bone-deep shivers rippled through her. There was nothing hot to drink, and no fire with which to prepare it. She would have to trust the resilience of her body, even as she relied on the skill of the sailors.
She felt Menelaia’s weight beside her, the arms enfolding her, heard the little wordless cries. Reaching up with one hand, she felt the girl’s fingers, knotted in the blanket. Gradually, warmth seeped into her muscles. Her shivering faded, replaced by a heavy lassitude. She felt drained in spirit as well as body.
Lying cradled by the young Isarran woman, Tsorreh tried to sleep. Images continued to flare and dance behind her closed lids. She saw again—was it seeing?—the beast in the shadowed deep, trailing strands of benthic gems.
Almost, almost it had answered her call.
* * *
Two oxen, their horns sawed off near their shaggy, white-and-gray spotted
heads, drew the barge. The barge itself was large and flat-bottomed, topped by an open-sided shed. Flaps of canvas, heavy and stiff, could be rolled up during the day for fresh air or dropped for privacy. As Tsorreh had expected, Mortan attached her chains to a ring set in the deck.
Once away from the port, the air turned dense and sticky. The heat drained Tsorreh’s strength, so that she felt no desire to move about the barge, even if she were free to do so. The occasional breeze was delicious beyond words.
Enervated as she was by the unaccustomed climate, Tsorreh watched the passing countryside. The histories she had studied had given her little idea of what the land and ordinary people of Gelon were like. The pastures and farms, the rivers teeming with fish and waterfowl, presented a panorama of fertility. Green plants grew everywhere, trees, vines, bushes, hedges, waterweeds, and reeds. The Gelonian guards, as well as the people she saw working in the fields, astonished her with their discipline and energy. On first glance, she had thought the land so naturally bountiful that its inhabitants must be fat and lazy. Quickly, she modified her opinion. The lush green and gold, the plentiful water and crops, covered an iron core, a ruthless determination. Gelon was not a weak and idle land.
On the last day of travel, they passed through the outskirts of Aidon. Tsorreh had no idea the capital city extended so far nor how many villages lined the river itself. Most of what she could see were piers and landings, buildings of sun-bleached wood and beyond them, warehouses, barns, roads, and taverns. Strings of fish hung drying in the sun. The mud, red like rust or old blood, smelled like dead weeds.
In her heat-drenched sleep, motes of colored light roused from water and sky and riverbank. They drew near her, their motions hesitant and indirect, as if they were shy to approach. She felt their curiosity, and then realized what they were: tiny elemental spirits of land and air and water. The countryside was rich in magic, even as Meklavar was, but these were domestic spirits, each content with its own small domain. In their swirling bits of color, she sensed their pleasure in the humble shrines, the curl of aromatic incense, and the offerings of flowers or fruit or new-spun wool.
The closer she drew to Aidon itself, the fewer and weaker the spirits became. At first, Tsorreh thought the buildings along the bank damped the voices of the river, the fish and frogs and reeds. Then, in the long hours of daylight, when she had nothing to do but stare at the passing shores, she realized that the nature spirits were still there but hiding, as if cowed. Frightened?
A shadow crept over river and earth, at first very faint, like a colorless mist. The closer they got to Aidon, the darker it became, clotting into darkness below the pillars of the wharves and in the hidden places between the buildings, in the rotting felled trees.
Aidon itself swept all thought of nature spirits from Tsorreh’s mind. Its hugeness struck her like a wall of brass and granite, like the clangor of a thousand gongs. It rose into hills, revealing layer upon layer of white and gray and sand-colored stone, rows of lacy branched trees, towers of gleaming marble or painted wood, spires and shaded colonnades, and high-rising arches. Flags and pennons trailed from balconies, ribbons intertwined with dangling ivy or massed blossoms of purple, yellow, and orange.
Meklavar had been Tsorreh’s world and the birthplace of her world, deep with the wearing of ages, of rock dust and books. This place, the heart of Gelon, was deep in a different way, with the weight of looted riches and the passionate energies of engineering and commerce.
They disembarked and joined several other parties heading into the center of the city. The officers rode standing in a chariot drawn by three dun onagers. The harness was studded with medallions of brass. Fringe covered the beasts’ faces, and their long, tapered ears had been painted blue.
Tsorreh walked behind them, along with the other captives, more than a dozen but no more than two or three from any single land. An Isarran man, gray-bearded and limping, was tied at his wrist to the knotted rope that joined them all, but he was too far along for her to speak with him. She recognized a Xian, naked to the waist, eyes impassive, tattoos covering face and scalp. A slash of crusted blood ran across his cheek, and one eye was swollen shut.
No one tried to speak. Several of the captives had made an attempt while being tied to the rope, and the guards had used their whips freely. Tsorreh did not think they had any language in common, save Gelone. A conqueror’s tongue now became a slave’s tongue as well.
Morning light splashed hard and brittle off the whiteness of the city and yet, as if her bones had grown eyes, Tsorreh saw shadows shifting beneath the brightness. Their weight pressed against her heart. She thought of how the priest in Gatacinne had probed her and how the te-alvar had hidden itself, throwing up a lesser truth as a shield.
They have me now, but they do not know what they have. They must never find out.
Her mouth went dry. She tried to think of Zevaron, to see him in her mind free and unhurt, on a Sand Lands horse, the one he had been so pleased with, racing through the desert or into the fastness of the Var, or fighting among the free Isarrans. No images came to her, no fleeting comfort. She shuddered under the invisible density of the shadows. Something in them elongated, like articulated limbs.
“You there!” A voice lashed out in coarse Gelone. “Move along!”
The rope jerked. The loops binding her wrists dug into her already raw flesh. She lurched forward. The te-alvar lay quiescent, silent, yet something within her turned adamantine.
Tsorreh lifted her chin. The pain in her wrists and the cramping in her belly receded. She drew the ancient grandeur of Meklavar around her, a mantle woven of holy languages, of texts and light and prayers, of song and stone and blood. The shadows would not touch her.
They proceeded up from the harbor, past warehouses and shanties, to a broad avenue. Here they followed a mass of soldiers, accompanied by the sounds of flutes and drums. People watched from outside the buildings or on balconies. Their clothing gave them the aspect of gaudy birds in mating plumage, robes from shoulder to ankle, draperies and high-collared vests, garments that flowed or hugged the body in a riot of concatenated styles.
The crowd cheered and pointed at the captives, and tossed flower petals, bits of red paper, and apples. One went wild and hit Tsorreh on the shoulder. She tried to catch it, for she had been given no food that day, but it rolled free and she could not reach it with her bound hands.
A handful of half-grown boys in mud-colored tunics ran alongside the procession. Some hurled pebbles and hooted in glee as the black-skinned woman beside Tsorreh stumbled. One of the guards raised his whip, but he did not use it and only laughed. Tsorreh was close enough to reach out her hands to the other woman and steady her. Their eyes met in understanding.
The road led up, curving between the two nearest, lowest hills. Beyond them rose a third hill, flat-topped, that commanded a view of the harbor in one direction and the city in another. Wide, terraced gardens striped its slopes, interrupting the sweep of buildings. Tsorreh, gathering herself for the climb, tried to establish landmarks, but the city was too dense, too strange. The entire meklat could have fit on one hill.
As they went on, Tsorreh saw that they were headed to a palace of columned silver-white stone. Each corner supported a huge bronze statue, and she wondered who or what they represented. Figurative sculpture was rare in Meklavar, but she had seen many examples in Isarre. She had no chance to examine them as the chariot pulled up at the wide step. The soldiers shifted their formation, and the rope was untied and the captives separated, their hands still bound. They went up the steps, each pair between two guards with drawn swords.
By the time Tsorreh arrived at what was clearly a chamber of audience, she was thoroughly disoriented. The size of the entrance hall, the riotous color and strange shapes of the furnishings—statuary, tapestries, pillars—battered her already saturated senses. Her ears caught snatches of a dozen different languages; some she recognized from a word or two, but in others, she heard only strangeness.
The lesser halls and corridors were filled with people, some standing in groups talking, and some on raised platforms, perhaps performing rites or orations, she could not tell. Others stood in attendance or hurried about their business. As before, some wore the familiar armor of Gelonian soldiers, others loosely flowing robes, yet many more were in outland garb.
Tsorreh’s vision blurred as she tried to take it all in. Moment by moment, she felt herself retreating into the inner sanctuary of her own prayer.
In the desert, my soul cries out in thirst,
On the heights, my heart is filled with longing,
In the temple, I find no rest.
All is dust between my hands.
My fire gives no warmth, my bread no savor.
Come to me, O Holy One of Old;
Speak to me as you spoke to my fathers!
Let me not perish alone.
Reach out your hand, lift up my soul,
Be with me now, be with me now…
Silently, Tsorreh chanted the ancient words until their rhythm matched the beating of her own heart. The thought came to her, as if in answer to her prayer, that these same words had been spoken by her ancestors, loudly or in whispers, over more years than a man could count. Her father had prayed in this way, as had her grandfather and the grandmother she had never known, perhaps even Khored of Blessed Memory. Her trembling eased, and her vision cleared. Calmly, she looked about her at the courtiers and the king seated at the far end of the hall.
The procession came to a halt, followed by a good deal of ceremony, most of which made no sense to Tsorreh. She and the other captives were left standing toward the back of the room. At the front, men and women in ornate dress, some holding what looked like instruments of office, sat in a half-circle.
At the center, raised above the others, a man in robes of pristine white, edged with blue and purple, glared down at the assembly. Like the other Gelon, he was pale-skinned and clean-shaven. His red-and-gray hair had been cropped short. The sleeves of the robe had fallen back, to reveal large, thick-fingered hands and muscular forearms. He was a tall, well-made man, broad in the shoulders and now run a little to fat, but he radiated a power beyond the strength of his physical body. Although he wore no crown, he could be none other than Ar-Cinath-Gelon.
The Seven-Petaled Shield Page 18