The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  “I don’t want to be queen. I’m not fit for it. I wasn’t educated for it.” She wasn’t educated at all, till these last few years after her acknowledged father’s death, when her brother Durandau realized he had a pretty and potentially useful tool for alliance-making on his hands, who was running wild as a feral cat about the dinaz. He’d inflicted a tutor on her, an elegant and ladylike Nabbani wizard who’d been travelling through the duina, and tried too late and all at once to make her a princess of the folk. Letting her have one season travelling with a minor bard of her mother’s folk had been a concession he proposed to stop the fights about learning court Nabbani, the accusations that he meant to sell her to some foreign merchant of the eastern desert. Her quarrels with brother and tutor—to herself she admitted she had thrown outright tantrums—had far more to do with the secrets no one would discuss than with any lessons of Lady Lin’s. She had never been Mistress Yselly’s apprentice.

  “There’s no one else,” Marnoch had said. “Deya—my lady. We need you. We need to be able to summon the lords, the ones who think the duina is already lost, the ones who didn’t answer the beacons. And Deya, you know the high king as we don’t. My father’s already sent to him, in the name of the folk, but if we beg aid in your name—will your brother come?”

  A good and dutiful and half-educated little sister, who had no idea how to be a queen, and needed counsellors and officers and . . .

  “He’ll come,” she said wearily, and looked around them all. “Even if he won’t come to save Catairanach’s land from Marakand, he’ll come to make me your queen.”

  After a moment, Yvarr had said, “Lady, you’re already our queen.” Though that wasn’t quite true, not without the approval of the lords and the blessing of the goddess.

  After the letters were written and she had signed them, and the messengers who would carry them to Dinaz Andara had come and gone, she had gone herself to where her pony was penned with others of the royal hall, meaning only to check on him and on her gear in the stable, since she would be going wherever Yvarr and Marnoch fled to make their new fastness, no doubt of that, now. But in the dusky twilight of the stable there had been water rushing around her, a wind in her ears . . .

  “The night that Lord Marnoch returned,” she told the Leopard, “the goddess Catairanach drew me into a waking dream and gave me a message to carry. I seemed to be at her spring below the dinaz walls. The boughs of the mountain ash over me were heavy with creamy blossom, and the bees . . .”

  “Leave out the bard’s embroidery. I know the place. What did Catairanach have to say for herself?”

  “She said that the Marakanders dreamed of drowning, and darkness, and storms off the hills in the night, and that their hearts were heavy, but that the Lady was stronger and overwhelmed her.”

  She stands in water to her waist, though the deepest part of the pool is no more than knee-high, and the current buffets, threatening to sweep her away. The eyes of Catairanach are golden-brown like water-covered pebbles in the sunlight, but her hair, satin-brown like the bark of young twigs, is wild and twisting and flows into the water, wrapping Deyandara’s legs, hobbled and heavy in a formal gown of blue and white, and the weight of the cloth threatens to pull her under. “I will have no child of another land rule my folk,” Catairanach says. “No tool of Andara of the Gayl Andara, no high king’s puppet, bastard blood of my blood or not. I will have revenge on the ruler of the city who murdered my Cattiga, my sweet Gilru. I see my way and you will be my messenger, child. You have come lying to this hall, claiming a bard’s rights. Fulfil now a bard’s duties . . .”

  “She charged me to say—” Catairanach had said more than she remembered at the time, Deyandara found, when she began. Words came she had not known she had heard. “She told me to travel to Sand Cove on the western coast of the bay to find Ahjvar the Leopard, to carry this message. She said, ‘As the Voice of the Lady of Marakand is a mortal woman chosen to carry out her goddess’s will in the world, so will I also choose a champion. And now Ahjvar the Leopard is all that is left to me. Let him go, because this was murder and foul treachery and a war without justice. And tell him, that as a king’s champion should, he is to be justice and judgement and the sword in the open court, and as he has chosen to walk in the darkness and be the knife in the night—’”

  The man made some noise of protest.

  “‘—I also name him to be my blade in the darkness, for there are shadows in the deep well of Marakand that I cannot see, and he may find that the time for a trial of champions in the open court is past.’”

  “Long past, by the sound of it,” Ahjvar muttered.

  “She says, ‘By day or by darkness, in open battle or in secret death, make an end to this Voice who has taken from me the last of my royal children born to my land. Leave the Lady bereft as I am bereft. Kill her Voice, and the priests who planned this, and the lords of Marakand who sanctioned it, so many as you can. But the Voice first of all, because she will be the nearest and dearest to the Lady, her chosen one, and her death, most of all, I demand in payment for my queen and her son.’”

  And what else she had said, before Deyandara, in a dream, a trance, hardly knowing what she did, saddled Cricket, taking bread and a skin of water from some scout’s untended pony to ride unchallenged out the gate in the fog that had crept up the hill from the spring and the narrow brook it fed, was entirely between Deyandara and the goddess.

  Come back to me when your errand is done, and we shall see then if you are worthy of the duina you would claim.

  “Selfish,” Ahjvar said. “She doesn’t mention the sufferings of her folk, I note.”

  Deyandara frowned. Had there been more? “She says, say to the Leopard, ‘You will not do this for me. But you will do it for the Duina Catairna. You will do it for the drovers and the shepherds of the hills, and you will do it for your own honour, lest the Duina Catairna be called slaves of the city of Marakand. And you will do it, because when it is done and you stand before me I will give back all that I have taken, and I will take back what was put upon you, and you will be free.’”

  So. The man was an outcast and an exile of the Duina Catairna, clearly, but beyond that . . . it wasn’t her business to understand, only to convey. Deyandara flinched as the sword thudded into the earthen floor before her feet.

  “You won’t get an answer to take back to her,” Ahjvar said. The sword still shivered. She stepped away.

  “I wasn’t charged to bring any, my lord.” Catairanach had not said she was to carry an answer, only to return. And she had done it again, giving him honours she had no reason to believe he owned. “Master Ahjvar. I suppose . . . I suppose my duty now is to reach my—to reach the high king at Dinaz Andara as swiftly as I can.” Though she would rather ride in almost any other direction. He was bound to be searching for her. Maybe after all she should go back to the Duina Catairna, as Catairanach had demanded, but to ride alone into an occupied land—no. Even she was not that much a fool, whatever the goddess wanted. She would go to Durandau and, if he had not by then raised all Praitan against Marakand, add her voice and her arguments in defence of Marnoch’s folk.

  Her folk.

  “The high king should already be on the march, depending on how long it took him to win the other kings to moving.” Ahjvar frowned, calculating the time, it seemed. “This war should have been fought by now, though the kings might prove reluctant, or the gods themselves may be so. They’d turned their backs on Catairanach, and all that’s hers, at one time.”

  “That’s an old story,” Deyandara protested.

  “Has anyone asked them if they’ve forgiven her?”

  “For what?” she protested. There were different songs of why Catairanach had fallen out with the other patron deities of the Praitan kingdoms, everything from a curse she herself had loosed on all of them, to some quarrel over who should hold the high kingship, to a disagreement with Praitanna herself, the greatest of the seven, over a man. It seemed somehow as tho
ugh it ought to be connected to the curse of misfortune on the royal family and the folk, but no song had it so.

  “There’s the curse on the duina,” Ahjvar said, not answering her question, “Maybe Praitan would be better off without the Duina Catairna, that’s what some kings and their counsellors will say. Let the Catairnan ill-fortune pass to Marakand, lest it spread.”

  That at least had a known cause, a dying wizard’s curse, though who the wizard had been, varied. Some songs even had it one of the seven devils, the Northron Ogada, who had wooed some long-ago queen, or Tu’usha the Restless, who had fought a wild goddess and a band of demons in the Malagru, though why she would then have cursed the Duina Catairna was not clear. “No wizard could ill-wish an entire folk, even if he put his death into it,” Deyandara protested. “That they were cursed is only a story.”

  “And you, a bard, say so, yes? After saying yourself its kings are ill-fated? ‘A twisted root and poison in the vein,’ you said. Only a story. But you’re not a bard, are you? Not in the marrow where it counts. You’re a lady of the Duina Andara, a king’s sister. You get to enjoy a few years of running free. When the way gets too long and the road too cold and your bones start to ache in the night, you’ll let your brother persuade you to be useful, to be off to some prince’s bed, be a lady of the royal hall again.” The Leopard bowed, on his feet, sweeping her towards the door. “Good day, Lady Deyandara. Go sing them a song at the tavern. Give them a clown’s wedding.”

  She was scrambling back over the garden wall before she knew it, face burning. How dare he? How dare he speak to the high king’s sister so? A godless, outcast murderer, by Catairanach’s word and his own failure to deny it, a city merchant’s hireling, that was all he was . . . and everything he had said was true but hurt threefold because it was unjust. She wasn’t a bard; she hadn’t taken on the pretence to claim undue honours but as a shield for the road. She looked back and the assassin was in the garden, watching her, arms folded, with the naked sword tucked in against his body, the hilt against his cheek.

  A bare-legged peasant come in muddy from the struggle for his daily meal. The hem of his tunic was ragged, and the sun was gold in his hair. She blinked and swallowed and looked away, straightened her shoulders. He didn’t look someone to creep up walls and murder fat old merchant-lords in their beds on behalf of impatient nephews.

  He looked some king’s champion, awaiting the summons to enter the circle, with the judgement of the Old Great Gods to prove in the outcome of battle, and his own death waiting.

  Deyandara hardly noticed the height of the cliff, the waves that crashed and the flying spray. Her hands were shaking as she knelt to Badger’s greeting and rested her head on the dog’s shoulder, blinking. She shouldn’t be ashamed that the assassin was right and she was no bard, for all she could sing, and play the komuz and the harp. She knew she would never be one; she loved the music, but the long years of study, the secret alphabet of the trees, the true histories that lay behind the songs, the long, so long chants of the kings—she didn’t have the mind for it. Like her mother, shallow and inconstant. She had tried to learn all that Yselly was willing to teach, being no true apprentice and so cut off from many secrets, but Yselly must have known, too, that she was fit to be a tramp-singer, nothing more. A princess could be nothing so commonplace, not if her brother knew. All she really wanted was a dog and a horse and place by the fire, the feel of the strings beneath her fingers, her voice rising.

  “Come on,” she told Badger, freeing Cricket from the thorn bush. “They’re waiting for us at the tavern.”

  In the rough-cobbled yard under the grape arbours by the smith’s house, all the tavern the village offered, the story of the last queen of the land before the ships came from Nabban fled her, came out ragged and stiff and lifeless. She hurried it to its end for her restless hosts, put away her komuz for the drum, and gave them the old comic tale of the fox-demon and the shepherd’s daughter instead. A clown’s wedding.

  Ahjvar sat on the garden wall, watching the sea.

  Ghu vaulted over to sit cross-legged at his feet. “You weren’t very kind,” he pointed out, leaning back, head against Ahjvar’s leg.

  “She was too full of her own worth, unearned.”

  “You don’t know what she may have earned.”

  Ahjvar shrugged. “I don’t like red-haired girls, and that child was over-stuffed with her own importance. Let her go away and think about whether she’s to be a bard or her brother’s sister.”

  “She never mentioned it till you did.”

  “It was in every word she spoke and every glance down her little upturned nose.”

  “If you hadn’t left her standing, she wouldn’t have had to look down on you.”

  “She’s not old enough to have earned those ribbons she wears. And I didn’t like her face.”

  “I thought it was her hair. And it was a rather pretty face.”

  “I don’t think there’ve been any marriages between the royal lines of the Duina Catairna and the Duina Andara. Though there was some rumour about a Catairnan bard, that wild brother of the queen of the Duina Catairna . . . I don’t know. The king’s wife of the Duina Andara was sent back to her own people after her last child, this girl, was born.” Ahjvar’s mouth twisted. “It almost caused a war with the Duina Lellandi, I think.”

  “But that there was once rumour of a bard of the royal Catairnans doesn’t make the lady his daughter, even if she does have orange hair. If you think it’s so, send her to her brother to be made queen, and tell the goddess she has an heir and no need for vengeance on the city.”

  “You think she doesn’t know already, if it’s so? Don’t wish that on the child. The Duina Catairna is truly cursed, whatever she believes.”

  “Who cursed them?”

  “I did.” Ahjvar hurled a chip of stone out over the cliff. It was a long time falling, and the splash was lost in the rising tide. “When the hag killed me. I told you that.” He added peevishly, “You make me tell you things. I don’t know why I do. I don’t know why—”

  He didn’t finish that thought. Why I can’t get free of you? because the obvious answer was that he could. Ghu dead could not dog his steps. Such thoughts came too easily, too lightly, and it was likely to come true, though the boy—man, now, but he seemed so young still, save for the unguarded eyes that strangers never saw—had survived four, or maybe it was five, years with him and had never been . . . never been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Ahjvar was careful, too. He wasn’t so far gone in madness but that he knew such thoughts shouldn’t be his own. And there was work enough for the clan-fathers of the Five Cities to feed the madness. Assassination wasn’t law and it wasn’t justice, but it was . . . not innocence, either. Their lords had bodyguards, and wizard guards, and the ones who hired assassins expected assassins. There was a code, of sorts. It was warfare of a different type, maybe, and it kept the blackness eased and quiescent and . . . how, by the cold hells, was he to get to Marakand, on the long road, with Ghu by his side?

  There was a time, a long time, lifetimes, when everything was dark and nothing mattered, so long as he kept within the walls he made himself, let nothing in, and ran away from anything that tried to get in, or pushed it away, or—Ghu was a cat. He always found a way in.

  Going away didn’t seem to be an option. The man would simply follow.

  How, Old Great Gods forgive him, did he end up keeping Ghu, when he wouldn’t even let himself have a dog to care about, to see innocence defiled by loving him? The boy—and Ghu had been a boy, then, though the tale he told of his life packed too much into too few years—had followed him all the way from Gold Harbour, had sat on the garden wall in a spring gale, wet and shivering and turning blue, until Ahjvar dragged him in by the collar of his ragged robe and dropped him by the fire. Feed a cat and you were stuck with it.

  “So . . .” Ghu rose to his feet, stretching. He wasn’t all skin and bone and hollow eyes now, anyway, but compact, taut musc
le. And no gang of street-toughs was going to be able to work him over for their own amusement ever again; Ahjvar had made sure of that. Nobody hit Ghu but him, these days. The man refused to learn the sword, though. Someday I may have to learn to kill. Not this day. Ghu hadn’t meant it as reproof. Sometimes it sounded prophecy, what fell from his lips. “That’s why we’re going to Marakand? For Catairanach and what she offers?”

  “I am going.” Ahjvar frowned. “Not for Catairanach.” But because he did take her at her word? Maybe. But more, because the goddess who’d flung him out to damnation knew him. He would not see the Duina Catairna made subject to any foreign temple.

  He shrugged. “Maybe they’ll kill me at last, for good. These Red Masks sound . . . a challenge. But you’re not going.”

  “You need me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t need you. You followed me home, remember?”

  “Because you needed me.”

  “I needed you to hold my horse. For an hour or so. I paid you a quarter-gull and that should have been that. I don’t remember at all, I really don’t, saying anything like, ‘Why don’t you trail me home and move in with me and convince all these good folk, who think I’m a nice respectable man of law, that I’ve brought home a half-witted beggar’s brat as a catamite? I’m sure I’d remember if I’d said anything of the sort. It’s not the kind of thing one says in passing and forgets.”

  Ghu walked to the cliff’s brink, staring out past the sea, beyond the horizon, into what depths or heights Ahjvar couldn’t think. Ghu’s soul wandered, and sometimes he seemed nothing but a shell, a little, hollow child, waiting. To be filled with what?

  “There is death, in Marakand,” he said abruptly, but his voice was still soft, gentle, sleepy, even, and very far away. “Death and deep water. Death and fire. Death and ice.”