Bloodflower

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

  ‘No.’ Cam folded his arm across his chest. ‘But I will soon, will I not?’

  ‘One day there I am fishing in the river, and a woman comes up, speaks to me, a Downlander this woman, and her speaking was like a spell. When she stopped I found myself in the dark. A small dark wooden room that rocked. Can you guess?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘A boat, slave trader. The dark was so heavy that it squashed us silent. Day or night, no telling, I just lay in the dark and my gut was peeling I was so hungry and scared. Then I did what City people do when things turn bad. I sang. Well, they pulled me up to the captain’s table and made me sing to him. Don’t lay a hand on her, he says. She’s worth something, this one. I didn’t go back to the hold, and when we docked I didn’t have to go up on the blocks at the market. That captain knew the Lord had been looking and looking for a Koi-boi, ever since the last one had died.’

  ‘Koi-boi?’

  ‘Koi-boi’s got to sing the fish, be-strong, grow-happy My song is what they eat, in the keep.’

  Cam grinned.

  ‘There’s more than that.’ The girl held up her hand. ‘You look.’ Between each finger the skin grew right up to the first knuckle, webbed. ‘Part fish.’

  Cam held his hand up and they looked each at the other’s and laughed.

  ‘Why?’ he asked her. ‘Why follow me?’

  ‘I got to go.’ And she did.

  ‘It needs sharpening.’ Cam showed the landlady the blunt edge of the axe-head.

  ‘Yes, well, I’ve not the money for that.’

  ‘Have you a grindstone? I could sharpen it.’

  ‘No.’

  She does want me to go, he thought. Does not like having me here. He pushed his thumb against the edge of the axe-head. ‘I can do it.’ Pushed harder and watched the skin break and a thin line of blood mark it. He wiped it off, placed a log on the chopping block.

  ‘Not out and about today, then?’ She was leaning against the woodheap.

  Cam took another log. Split it. ‘Thought I’d get this done.’

  ‘You’d want to. You’re a two-day over your week already and that’ – her clog tip-tapped the base of the woodpile – ‘that but half done.’

  ‘Then best you find some other task for me, if you want me to pay my way, for I’m not leaving, not yet.’

  ‘Huh.’ She moved so that she stood right by the chopping block, right by him. ‘What you doing here, Soldier-boy?’

  ‘Chopping wood.’

  ‘You know what I mean. How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘I was once nineteen. Married. One babe in arms and another on the way.’

  Cam grinned, swung, and watched the two halves of the log split, clean and pale inside. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Oh, my girls live in—’ She jerked her head southwards, in the direction of the town.

  ‘Husband?’ said Cam.

  ‘The war.’

  ‘I wonder . . .’

  ‘What you wonder, Solider-boy?’

  ‘Why do you prick and prick at me?’

  ‘What you doing, huh? Killing time, or going to kill the Lord? Don’t think folk haven’t noticed you, skulking about up on that hill.’

  Cam dropped the axe. ‘Kill him? Is that what you think?’

  She said nothing, just looked at him.

  ‘If Pelister Garaman had won the war, Lord Ryuu would be dead, his head on the spike over the gate.’ Lord Ryuu and his son, his lady wife, his stiff-spined daughters. ‘But Lord Garaman lost Dorn-Lannet, and here to stay are the Ryuu – and with them a town of Uplanders and Downlanders both.’ He bent, picked up the axe. ‘You have matters by the wrong end entirely.’

  ‘Then I am right about you, and glad of it.’

  ‘Can we be done with this now?’ Cam rested his weight on the haft of the axe.

  ‘I tell you what I wonder. I wonder why you don’t just go in the front gate. They’re always looking for fighting men, like I said.’ She flicked her apron at him and went inside.

  He shouted after her: ‘You’re the one should be going in the castle gate.’ Don’t, he thought, but crossed the yard to the door anyway. ‘Better scout than they’ve got mounted on their walls.’

  He turned back to the chopping block, dug at the ground with the axe. The guards, did they really not see him come and go on the hill, spying, if his landlady knew what he did?

  ‘Diido!’ A creaking voice carried clear up to Cam in his eyrie. ‘Diiiii-do!’

  The girl in the garden slumped, then made her lagging way across the lawn. An enclosure sat on the far edge of the woods. Cam spotted gleaming disks, like outsized mirrors – tubs of water. Sapling trees stood in rows, and forcing beds; sheds and greenhouses. He’d seen the man working there before, shuffling about, recognisable despite the distance by his old-man hair that stood straight out from his brown scalp.

  Cam watched him await the girl’s approach now, hold her to his side by the gate. Taller than him, half his width, she listened to what he said with her head averted. When she walked back the way she’d come, the old man did not move until a curve of the path carried her out of his line of sight.

  The girl began a circuit of the pond. She had a basket on one arm, the other reaching to it, then she would draw an arc over the water as she fed the Lord’s carp. Diido. Cam thought the name lilted like song in the mind.

  Voices carried from the taproom into the night when Cam returned to the inn that evening. A woman screeched with laughter. Cam kept to the deeper shadow under the eaves and peered in. Sitting up at a bench was the girl, Diido. Opposite her was Cam’s landlady, and between them an empty jug. They were leaning forward so their heads almost met, and Diido was speaking.

  ‘. . . sing in the marketplace, I did, we all did. Traded our songs for our keep – and money. We could’ve lived high on what they threw us—’

  ‘Where you sing? Here in Dorn-Lannet?’ Cam’s landlady pushed a plate closer to the girl.

  ‘All over! We travelled from town to town. Had a fancy cart, and a horse to pull it, see—’ She had looked up and seen Cam standing in the doorway.

  ‘What?’ His landlady beckoned him in. ‘You stuck there?’

  Cam stared. He opened his mouth, closed it.

  ‘Followed you,’ said the girl in the red. ‘Master Sneak.’ She nodded at him, then took some bread from the plate and stuffed it into her mouth, pushing at the dangling crusts that did not quite fit until they were all in and her cheeks looked ready to pop.

  ‘I . . . I am becoming used to it.’

  Later, when Cam sat with his landlady drinking a seemingly bottomless tankard, she said, ‘You know her then?’

  ‘I wondered what you wanted to talk about.’

  ‘I can read between the lines,’ said his landlady. ‘Trading songs, my gold ring! The trade is not what she says it is.’

  ‘Hnn.’

  ‘I feel for her. Thank the gods my daughters were not taken up in it all like that. Who is it, who keeps her?’

  It was only as she asked the question that Cam understood what his landlady meant.

  ‘I don’t know his name. He breeds up the fish for Lord Ryuu.’ And is old as her grandda.

  ‘Tseri,’ said his landlady. ‘She mentioned the gardener; his name is Tseri.’

  Cam saw with his mind’s eye a girl in red fleeing something to the furthest edge of the garden; heard a voice like a leash calling, Diiiii-do.

  Diido was sat on Lord Ryuu’s rock, hugging her knees and staring at the water. Cam leaned forward, caught himself doing so, and settled against a tree to watch her.

  She was singing. Her voice came to him only in snatches, faint, but it closed his throat, stung his eyes. Cam rolled onto his back. The grass bobbed seed-heads above him, cut the keep off from view. Free. He turned his face into the rough stems and wept.

  ‘I’ve a gift for you,’ Cam said to his landlady that night. He placed a grindstone on the table and bowed. If she
was pleased about it, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Where’d you get that? Steal it?’

  In Cam’s head, Ban and Da’s voices sounded together: Where did you get that horse? ‘W-won it.’ Cam snatched the stone back up.

  ‘What’s put that look on your face?’ Then she seemed to realise, and caught his arm. Cam shook her off.

  ‘I was jesting, that’s all.’

  Cam thought about running again – as he had run from keep to Kayforl, Kayforl to keep – but to where?

  ‘Where’s the axe?’ He settled its haft between his knees and jerked at it to see if he held it firm. The ringing of the stone against the axe-head was almost musical. The rust vanished and the edge showed all bright and silver and sharp, the metal etched with a circular pattern from the grindstone. Cam stopped, put the stone down and worked his hand.

  ‘You’d struggle, did you take up arms again,’ said his landlady.

  Cam blushed. He felt the heat of it, right up to his scalp. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘One year. And a half.’

  ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘You’ll come good with a bit of practice.’

  He shrugged, went back to the axe.

  ‘One and a half years . . . that’d be the Battle for Dorn-Lannet.’

  ‘Leave it!’ Cam said it in his own tongue, shouted it. He found himself on his feet, slapping the grindstone down on the counter. ‘There’s that back.’ And he swung out of the room.

  Outside, the dim cool of the evening dropped a kind of stillness over him. He sat on the chopping block, and his thoughts trudged along their old track. ‘Curse it!’ He took up a stick, shredded it. And found his mind circling again, not about Gyaar Ryuu now but about Diido. He went back inside to finish sharpening the axe.

  Cam and Diido sat side-by-side next to the shrine’s little pool. Diido stuck her skinny elbow into Cam’s side. ‘I’m like you, I know about being different.’

  ‘You mean your hands.’ Cam held her left hand up, the webbed part of her skin reddening with the sunlight against it. Then he drew it to the stump of his right arm, pressed it there. Diido jerked, but Cam pretended not to notice. ‘That is not the difference.’ He let her go. ‘At home . . .’ For a moment that was all he could see, the cot on its hillock, and the seeing hurt. ‘At home I was never different, for all I look it. Here? I look like any of you.’ He flung his arm wide. ‘But everyone knows I am not. Free!’ He turned his head aside and spat.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Diido. ‘I thought you was just another soldier. Till you opened your mouth. Your words are right but you change the sound of them.’

  ‘Wonder how you would mangle my language.’

  ‘Say something in Downlander.’

  Cam swore in his own tongue, then translated it for her.

  ‘What? You all speak like that down there? You know’ – Diido started picking a thread out of her robe – ‘the first Downlander I seen, I thought she was a demon.’ She told Cam how she had looked, pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin.

  Cam sprawled on the grass, laughing, laughing. ‘Demon!’ He watched Diido mince about, mimicking the Downlander she had seen. Abruptly she stopped, fists clenched against her chest.

  ‘You done looking at me, yet?’

  ‘You . . .’ Cam’s breath stuck, his words. ‘I thought you were showing me what that Downlander—’

  ‘I got to go.’ She was up and on her feet, but stopped as suddenly as she’d done a moment before, then turned and walked backwards a pace or two. ‘You coming, then?’

  ‘Coming?’ Cam was up on his feet in one movement. ‘Where?’

  ‘Got something I’d show you, then, haven’t I?’

  Close by the building works for the third wall, modest behind a veil of trees, was a shrine. It was flat-roofed, all new white paint and gold leaf.

  ‘Told you I know everything about this place.’ Diido ran lightly up to the door and pushed it open. Cam, watching her, took the steps slowly, passed under a door wide and high. Sunlight, dropping through it, lit the space. He glanced up and recoiled.

  It was a man, young. Cam looked again, closer, and he felt what he had felt whenever he’d beheld Gyaar: shock. Breath-hard, sweat-wet shock. ‘Me.’ And he spread his hand on the plaster, framing one side of the portrait. ‘Uplander.’ He let his hand fall. There could be no doubt of it. He was still a long time, looking at the picture.

  ‘See,’ Diido whispered. ‘Not so different at all.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Gyodan Ryuu, eldest son to Lord Ryuu.’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Alive again in you. When I saw you, I thought you must be a ghost. Because of this.’

  ‘I am not a ghost.’ Cam laughed. ‘Though I sometimes feel like one.’

  Diido looked at him from the corners of her eyes.

  ‘My . . .’ Cam bit on his lip. ‘My mam is a Margil, from Lodden way, you know, north of Dorn-Lannet. And they are their own kind of people, known for it. I guess long ago they came . . . maybe even from this House.’

  ‘Whatever it is, the blood runs true in you.’

  Cam did not realise how he was staring at her until she began to fidget and look aside. ‘You . . . why did you follow me, from the marketplace?’

  ‘You was staring at me at the wall that time. Like I was the ghost. I wanted to know why.’

  Cam sat on his heels. ‘You have given me this, now I would give you something.’

  She looked down at him, eyes narrowing.

  ‘Tseri. I will free you from him.’

  Diido went red, then white. ‘Yah. Downlander soldier without a brass bit to your name. I know what you mean. Free me, pah!’

  He was horrified by what she did then. She bent her knees to the floor, her head into her hands, and she wept. ‘Get away. Leave me.’

  ‘Don’t.’ He shouldered himself off the wall and sat beside her. ‘Please don’t.’ He put his arm around her and hugged her, like he would his sister Pin, and then – aware of her shoulders, slight against his arm, of his arm against her skin – not like that at all.

  A shadow was fallen from the bridge onto the water, lay there rippling faintly. Even from his viewpoint on the hill, Cam could see it. A man, cloaked and hooded, one of the lords or warriors taking some air. But something about how he moved, the set of his shoulders . . . Lord Gyaar, Cam knew it. The breath stopped in his chest and he thought he would die, it took him so long to get his wind again, his wits back about himself. Fool, fool, he thought, what are you here for hut to see him? Before his mind’s eye was the sword swinging down, and the spray of blood.

  A long time Gyaar Ryuu stood there, as if he were waiting for someone, something. The sun cleared the walls, dappling the bridge with a shifting print of leaves and branches. Then Lord Gyaar spun abruptly about and headed brisk and businesslike for the keep.

  Cam fisted his hand in the grass and watched until he was lost to sight. What are you doing? he asked himself Skulking in the trees, skulking about the inn, and watching, watching, watching.

  Go,’ he whispered. Go home, stop sitting aside from everything. Just go. Cam got to his feet, to go back to the inn, to go . . . where? Home? He found himself moving downhill and towards the wall. His old skill of silent stalking was unblunted – Too hard learned to ever lose, he thought – and he slipped through the trees with no more noise than a wraith.

  Close to, the wall was not pure and white and smooth. It was dusty and lichened, the plaster pocked and showing the grey stone underneath. Cam took a run-up and, flinging himself at it, hung spreadeagled on its outer face, the roughness of the plaster cutting up his cheek. He found a foothold, and another, shunted himself up high enough to risk letting go and reaching for the top. Grunting and panting, he hauled himself over and let himself drop more than twice his height to the ground; lay still until his breath came evenly and his fingers had feeling in them again.

  He had landed on a wedge of gravel, the wall t
o his back, sapling woods surrounding him. He huddled under the shadow the wall threw down, afraid to move, afraid not to. Lookout was kept from the tower. Had he been seen, there would have been guards out by now, to drag him up before the Lord. He played that through his mind, the guard clanking across the lawn for him. Would he wait for them or would he run? If he ran, would they shoot him? He stopped it there, the strange fancy, and picking himself up worked his way into the trees.

  The keep’s windows were still shuttered, the grounds noisy with breeze and birdsong but silent of people. The trees clumped thickly along the western rim of the pond, their branches dangling to the water. Cam snaked through them to the enclosure on their further side.

  Bamboo stalks tied in a loose criss-cross fenced off the area. This close, Cam could see the fish in the tubs, the seedlings in the greenhouses. The old man shuffled out. His round belly sagged a little over the drawstring of his trousers, the brown flesh sagged on his skinny arms. Tseri.

  Cam heard Diido’s voice and the blood beat suddenly in his ears so that he could hear nothing else: to see her with Tseri – if he could have run, leapt the wall that moment, he would have. But he did not think the guard could miss him. She stopped at the gate, and Cam could see their feet, Tseri’s splaying over the edge of his clogs, Diido’s long and thin, delicate, one toe drawing arcs in the gravel, right to left, left to right. The gate screeeked and Diido walked away. Cam melted into the trees.

  Diido circled the pond, silent. Lord Ryuu walked stiff-hipped to the pond, sat on the flat rock that overlooked the water. One of his courtiers joined him. After a time, the man helped the Lord up and together they strolled across the grass and away.

  Lady Ryuu took the air, one of her daughters for companion, no maids. She spoke to Diido in passing, words lost in the plash of water from the pond. One and another they went: Diido sped off, Lady Ryuu returned to the keep at a sedate walk.

  Cam sagged, limp, into the earth. Though he watched and waited and bit his nails away, Diido did not come back – nor Gyaar. It seemed that the day would never crawl to an end, let him go.