Bloodflower

by Bloodflower (The Returning) (retail) (epub)

  ‘No, Mother. He was free to go.’

  They walked in an easy silence, one turn about the fish pond, a second.

  ‘You must start looking,’ said Mother.

  ‘Looking?’ said Gyaar blankly, wondering at her interest in the Downlander with his brother’s face.

  ‘There is time yet, for there is a lack of suitable brides.’

  ‘Marriage!’ Gyaar stilled in shock. A knife-sharp glance from Mother and he walked again.

  ‘It is the war. It has left you no time to consider your future, the future of this family.’

  ‘I would have time to consider it, Mother.’

  ‘Is your father right? Are you really meant for the temple, and not for marriage, for children?’

  ‘No, Mother. I do not believe that he is.’

  ‘You have an obligation.’

  To your father, your family, your people. The words ran an echo in his head as Mother spoke them.

  ‘All my life, all I do, is an obligation.’

  She was giving him a look, that look.

  ‘In this, in this one thing, I would not be driven by obligation, but rather to have a . . .’ Choice. Gyaar did not say it, knew that he could not.

  ‘In this one thing, of all of them, you must be driven by obligation.’

  ‘My Lady Mother, of course.’

  She halted, the ladies as one with her, their robes swinging and stilling. Gyaar kissed his mother’s hand. ‘Thank you.’ He backed away until he could politely turn, and retreated to the castle.

  Marriage. Father still beat him with the whip of it, a year on. The morning council done with, Gyaar untied his sash and tossed it aside. Aah.’ He pulled a cushion under his head, closed his eyes.

  ‘You must marry soon,’ said Father. ‘The continuation of the Ryuu line rests on you.’

  Gyaar sighed. ‘Who is it this time?’ For there had been a girl, remnant of one of the great houses of the City whose remaining family had been negotiating with Father. But this girl had chosen suicide before betrayal of her people by marriage to the enemy upstart Ryuus. ‘I do not want another death on my conscience.’ He sat up and bowed from the waist.

  Even Shi-karu, his flower-faced, light-stepping sister, lashed him with it when he visited her, as he did every day after council. Gyaar came as close as he ever did to losing his temper.

  ‘I do not object to being wed.’ He pushed the words out between his teeth. ‘I even wish to. But I do not like to be forced to it.’

  ‘Mother says you have had time enough to reconcile your wants to the needs of the family.’

  ‘Youngest Sister! If you love your brother, leave this topic silent between us.’

  ‘One more word on it.’ Shi-karu rapped him with her fan. ‘You may not wish a marriage to be arranged for you, but I wish one for myself.’

  Gyaar stared at her and realised: even Shi-karu was grown now. ‘If you wed, you will go away, and then who will I talk nonsense to?’

  It was right though, it was sense, that his young sister talked.

  When next Gyaar visited the women’s quarters, it was to congratulate Shi-mii, and not Shi-karu, on her impending marriage.

  ‘You spoke true, Older Brother.’ Shi-karu danced about him. ‘You have married her to an old general.’

  ‘He is a war hero, and he does not smell. Shi-mii, come sit with me.’

  Impassive, her reserve a wall, Shi-mii revealed nothing of how she felt.

  Gyaar wrote of himself in his notebook later: hypocrite.

  KOI–BOI

  ‘Free,’ the Lord would say. ‘Make yourself free.’ In his mind, Cam saw the mailed arm making a slow sweep of the air: ‘Free of the palace, the grounds, the village.’ Free of the North and the South. Free.

  No, thought Cam, he would say . . . Then he looked up, up at the blue sky and the castle’s high white walls, blinding in the sunlight, rearing to meet it. Even from a distance you could see these walls. He tapped his heels against Geyard’s sides and walked him slowly eastward, following that white line to the town. When he had been here last, Dorn-Lannet had fit comfortably in the strip of land between the castle and the sea. Now it filled it, overflowed it, spreading south along the edges of the bordering sward.

  The East Gate let traffic into the town. The guards waved Cam through, but they commanded the Downlander behind him to wait while they ransacked his satchel.

  ‘That’s my dinner knife!’ The Downlander reached for it.

  ‘You want in, you leave it here.’

  The Downlander spat as he passed Cam. Cam moved back, then realised: He does think I’m one of them, an Uplander.

  There was an inn Cam remembered. He sat there ahorse, looking at it, his left hand clasping the stump of his right arm, like he used to do when he could not believe his arm wasn’t there, when the pain nagged him nearly from his mind. ‘Come up,’ he said to Geyard and rode on, looking for somewhere he did not know, where he would not be known. He found it just within the North Gate, a tired-looking place with a small dirt-floored yard, and a small dirt-floored taproom.

  The innkeeper was a woman. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘No room.’

  Cam tipped his head and looked around her, at the nearly empty taproom, up at the dark windows, vacant.

  The woman eyed him up and down: mount, sword and leather jerkin. ‘Left over from the war, are you? They’ll take you up at the castle. They always want fighting men there.’

  ‘No.’ Cam made a cutting gesture with his hand, Uplander-fashion.

  ‘You soldiers never pay.’

  ‘I can work my board.’

  ‘Huh! I took you for Uplander.’ She looked hard at his hanging right sleeve. ‘Any so how, work your board doing what? Chopping wood? Ha ha ha.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The tavern emptied into the yard, to watch him, the one-armed Downlander chopping wood. He split half a dozen logs more or less true, hitting hard but unevenly so that flying splinters had them all dodging back. Then he leaned on the axe and looked at the innkeeper.

  ‘All right, all right. You got a week’s board if you get through that lot.’ She jerked her head at a woodpile that stood nearly shoulder high.

  Cam hefted the axe.

  ‘Let be.’ She waved her hands, laughing. ‘Tomorrow. Start on it tomorrow.’

  Inside he sat quietly in a corner and shook out his arm, which was stiffening from showing off with the axe. He sipped at the beer, which tasted different from that at home, tasted of his time here before, smelt of it. What would he say, the Uplander Lord? And his son, would he be there?

  The next morning was wet, humid. Cam took the road that led west to the keep’s gate, striding at first, but gradually slowing.

  Snatches of sea showed between the houses, a jumble of pine-adorned Downlander homes side-by-side with white-painted Uplander dwellings. He listened to people talking, each in their own tongue, or together in a kind of broken Uplander dialect heavily sown with Downlander words.

  Everywhere there was building going on. A third wall, a moat and a maze were under construction around the furthest spread of the town. Great blocks of stone were being dragged up Mount Lannet on sleds. Lord Ryuu must be rebuilding the watchtower, for there had been one once, on the mount’s summit. Had Lord Garaman maintained it, thought Cam, perhaps he would yet rule Dorn-Lannet.

  There seemed a chaotic harmony to it all, until Cam spied three Downlander men on a corner, all grey and worn, each carrying Lord Garaman’s banner. They paced in a circle, chanting, ‘Out! Out! Out!’, and Cam was jogged aside as a group of young Uplander men encircled them, pelting them with rotten fruit and vegetables, manure, abuse. He backed away.

  The clouds thinned and broke apart as he approached the keep wall. The wet ground, the roofs steamed.

  During the war the guards had catcalled down at the passing crowd from this wall, spat on them, worse. Now they stood spear-stiff, two by two: at the base of the stair to the keep; at the two right-angle turns the stair took
to the gate; on either side of the open gate; and more, Cam knew, within.

  He was one of a crowd who had come to see the keep; stood with them and gawped at the guards, gawped up at the wall, the stone base four or five times his height, the wall atop it now rendered that stark white. Everything about it was wide, high, thick.

  Among the throng, Cam glimpsed red – the red of Gyaar Ryuu’s armour. Sweat broke out on his skin, and his stomach churned so that he thought he would be sick. People seemed to push him in from all sides, and he could not see, could not think how to get out; then in front of him they cleared, and it was not Gyaar Ryuu, it was a girl. She wore the trousers and long jacket of an Uplander man, in the same glaring colour as the Lord’s armour. And just as he stared at her, she stared at him . . . stared, and snapped her fingers.

  ‘Seen enough? Yah.’

  Cam whirled about and bulled through the jostle of people, ran from her, from the keep. Just a maid, a maid in a red robe, and he so distressed he couldn’t think clearly. Shame rode him.

  He walked into the taproom thinking his landlady would likely turn him out, for the woodpile stood untouched and here he was turning up for a second night, for food, for ale.

  ‘I will,’ he said, gesturing towards the yard and the mound of wood.

  The innkeeper said nothing, lifted her brows. She put a wooden bowl into his hand and dipped soup into it. ‘Been looking at the new Lord’s keep?’ Cam spilled hot soup over his fingers, swore. ‘So does everyone that comes to Dorn-Lannet. All crushing up around the gate to stare. Huh.’

  ‘It looks like Lord Ryuu expects another war, the way he’s built up those walls, reinforced the gate.’

  ‘That’s lords for you. Any so how, I can sleep easier knowing those walls can’t be beaten down.’ The innkeeper laughed.

  Cam nodded. ‘Only way in would be to fly over them.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ His landlady spread her hands on the bench and leaned her weight onto them. ‘Siasen – he was my husband – he always used to say you Downlanders were a witchy kind of folk, so castle walls are probably real easy huh?’

  ‘I fought down here during the war,’ said someone. ‘And I saw some things.’

  Cam put the bowl down and licked soup from his fingers. ‘Saw what?’

  ‘One night, hunting for the pot, I shot a rabbit. When I got up to it, there was no rabbit, but a young woman, an arrow through her throat.’

  ‘Siasen said he knew a man got lured off the road by a beautiful maid, who turned into a soldier and killed him.’

  Us. Cam turned his bowl in circles, the soup untouched. They mean us, Downlanders. He thought it should make him laugh, but it did not.

  The stair to the guests’ sleeping loft was a cupboard, crafted to form a miniature staircase, with storage inside. Cam, obedient to his landlady’s direction, took off his boots and padded up the tiny steps in his stockings, she wiping the wood with a cloth after him. He had been given a candle but chose not to light it, instead opening the shutter to the starlight. His bed was like to his one at home: a straw-filled pallet on the floor. Crouching, he propped his elbow on one knee and wound his fingers into his hair, pulling it until his scalp burned, but it was not enough to take his mind from the track it was wearing.

  Gyaar Ryuu. That one visit to the infirmary, when Cam was fevered and dazed with pain, then nothing further. They had walked the same ground, he and the Uplander Lord’s son, but never once did their paths cross, save at a distance, remote. What would he say?

  Bah! What do you think, Cam Attling? Clap eyes on the man and the answers to all your questions are writ on him? He stripped and lay down, spent the night watching the slow spin of the stars past his window

  The keep was spread across the feet of Mount Lannet, grey in the pre-dawn light: tower and hall, barracks and stables, storeroom, smithy, weapons house, cookhouse, bathhouse, women’s quarters and men’s, all wrapped about by the first of the great walls. Between the inner and outer walls to the north was the garden: a pond fed by a stream, all with bridge and island; a wide sweep of lawn; a belt of woods about its outer edges, and flimsy wooden palings – decoration, not defence. The keep lofted tower and gables over it all.

  In Lord Garaman’s time, the bailey had stretched empty all the way from outer wall to inner. By the time Cam left after the war, Lord Ryuu had begun planting saplings, diverting the stream so it ran across the garden, and digging the pond. Now trees and pool looked as if they had always been here, as if the Uplander Lord had always lived here.

  This early, no one was about in the bailey – none but the guards patrolling the inner wall. Cam watched them pace east to west, west to east, spaced so that one was always within sight of the next, all the way around. The outer wall, though, was manned only at its three gates.

  Even here there was construction underway. The tower, mostly hidden beneath scaffolding, was growing both wider and taller. It would, when finished, stand nearly as high as the point on the hill where Cam now hid. He would be able to look straight into its windows, and anyone in it would be able to see him. Cam sank lower behind the mad lacework of whippy spring branches, stretched out on his belly, chin propped on his forearm, and watched the sun lift into the sky.

  He felt as if his eyes and ears were wide open, every sense – smell and touch and taste. His mind. The smell of the smoke that he watched pile into the morning from the keep’s kitchen chimneys stung his nostrils; he tasted it in the air, air that stirred against his sweating skin. He did not know why it should have his heart drumming, but it did.

  Maids and menservants began to appear, moving about their work, all order and purpose. Guards started practice, and the rhythmic clash of arms, voices and laughter and shouts, the sounds of people being, wafted up to Cam in his hiding place.

  A girl burst out of the woods and ran across the lawn, as if all the beasts of the Afterlife bit at her jacket-tails. Cam yelped aloud with fright, flattened himself against the ground, for he knew her, knew her by that jacket bright as blood against the green of the grass: the girl from the keep gate. She pulled up short of the border of trees and stood rigid, as though she had been turned to stone.

  After a time, she made her way to the pond and began to pace the water’s edge. As she paced, the girl sang. Something of it carried up the hill to Cam. It drew at his heart so that he could not bear to listen, yet he found himself edging forward, to hear her better, see her. Not until her singing stopped did Cam wriggle back through the trees and steal away.

  Cam watched the keep, staying longer each day as if by spying he would know how to walk in the gate, what to say, to do . . . what would be said to him. What would be done.

  Lord Ryuu was often in the garden. He had a favourite place, a flat-topped rock on the edge of the pond, where he would sit for hours at a time, looking around, always alert. An older woman walked the grounds. Lady Ryuu, Cam guessed, although he had not seen her before. She was always surrounded by girls, all of them tall and dark. And were they her ladies or her daughters? If her daughters, that made them sisters to the Lord’s son, which had Cam thinking of his own sister, Pin. They stalked the garden in formation, like parade soldiers. The men and women of the court were ever about, taking the air, talking and laughing, singing and reading aloud from books or papers. But Gyaar Ryuu . . . though he waited and watched, Cam did not lay eyes on him.

  In this way Cam let a handful of days wear away, and another, following a pattern. He would creep to watch the keep at dawn, then ramble about the town, from docks to marketplace to square, until he tired of walking, and of the curious way they had here of staring him in the face. Often he would sit the remainder of the day away at a small shrine he’d found, a pond at its centre, the one tree fingering the water with sweeping branches. Here Cam would rest, watch the fish lolloping through the water, until the lilies fisted themselves up against the coming dark. The quiet stillness of the place steadied him. His nights were spent more in waking than sleeping, until he rose to creep acr
oss the hillside to watch the keep again.

  Cam hung over the stone basin at the entrance to the shrine, made faces at his reflection. ‘Get on with you,’ said someone behind him. He stabbed the water with the dipper and watched his face shatter into a thousand fragments, washed his hand and entered the yard; stretched out by the pool, on the only grass allowed to grow in this place of scrubbed stone, and watched the fish. For all the banners on the walls that proclaimed the Lord’s son was resident in the keep, why had Cam not sighted him? Free. He could not imagine the Lord saying it.

  The nights of sleeplessness weighed heavily. Cam closed his eyes, and the sunwarmed quiet wrapped him about.

  ‘Yah!’ Something had stung him on the face. Cam lurched up onto his elbow and saw that the sun was right overhead – he had slept the morning away.

  The red-robed girl stood above him, feet set square, eating a cherry. She spat the pip into her hand and aimed exactly between Cam’s eyes. He came up onto his heels, suddenly wide awake.

  ‘Followed you,’ she said. ‘Master Sneak.’ Cam’s heart jumped in his chest. She threw the pip. ‘Think you’re clever, slipping around like a ghost, aiii. I follow you and do you even know? Hah.’

  Cam flicked her pips back at her. ‘Leave me be. Get about the business you should be about and leave mine to me.’

  ‘What you in a snit about? Because I followed you? Or because you didn’t know I was following?’

  ‘I said, leave me be.’

  She didn’t. She plunked herself down next to him. Cam ripped up handfuls of grass, glowering at the water.

  ‘Them.’ The girl pointed to the carp. ‘They’re given, see, on the birth of a son, to make him strong and bold. I know a lot about koi. I know a lot about that place.’ She pointed to the keep. ‘You know why?’ She leaned close. ‘Sing the fish, I do.’

  ‘Followed me?’ Cam shook grass blades from his hand.

  ‘From the marketplace. And you never knew. You know how I came to be singing for the Lord?’