Bloodflower

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

  ‘Quiet tonight, Soldier-boy, yes, no, uh, uh.’ His landlady mocked him, head tipped a little to one side, face parodying his own (he knew it) sullen look.

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘Call you what I like, while you don’t pay rent.’ She smoothed her skirts.

  ‘I pay – I work for you. You’re paid. So you don’t call me that.’

  The silence that followed was awful. Cam turned apologies over in his mind but couldn’t find words to fit.

  ‘Siasen, he never died in the war,’ said his landlady at last. ‘He ran off with the tap-maid.’

  Cam looked up at her.

  ‘I never told a soul. They all think he’s dead, a hero. Hah. You know what I do? Every year I set a candle floating for him on the sea, just as if he was.’

  ‘That’s what we do too, but on the river!’

  ‘Here’s your next job,’ said his landlady. ‘I want you to come with me, when I set his candle off. There’s all kinds of riffraff down at the waterfront. Reckon you can keep them at a distance?’

  Cam lifted one shoulder. ‘Do you?’

  He wanted to see the ocean by night, but it was completely invisible, just a darkness that could have been anything – night, hell, nothing. The lanterns of the brothels on the waterfront showed, the white-painted pier was a pale ghost pier, but the ocean simply was not. Cam held the little wicker raft steady while his landlady lit the candle. The edges of the raft curved up, sheltering the flame. His landlady hoicked up her skirts and waded thigh-deep into the water, and the receding tide took the candle from her. She splashed back to the sand where Cam waited. Side-by-side they walked the road back to the inn, with neither sight nor sound of the riffraff she had spoken of.

  ‘You didn’t need me for this.’ He saw her shoulders lift, the movement faint in the dark. ‘At least you find work for me.’ He laughed and the sound was hard. ‘My father wouldn’t let me do anything around the farm. I had to leave – I was rotting, just, just . . . You did earn it, he said. Earn what?’

  After a long time of walking she said, ‘Just there when the sword fell, you were.’

  ‘How can I go in the castle gate, if that’s it?’ He shivered. ‘My only claim?’

  ‘Then why you here?’

  Cam pulled Ban’s words out of memory, beat himself with them, and Da’s. Lying, drinking, lazy. There was no going home. ‘What if he says no? What then?’ He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, sniffed.

  ‘If you keep on this way, you’ll never know.’

  Cam shivered, the sea breeze chill on his wet face. They walked in silence the rest of the way back to the inn.

  ‘I’ve another job for you,’ said the innkeeper, once they were there. She took the bench across the table from him, fussing with her apron and skirts. Cam tipped his head and tried to catch her eyes, to say with his: What? She’d brought cups and a jug of beer, poured for him, then for herself. ‘Well.’ Fiddled with the cup and apron again.

  Cam leaned forward, laughing a little. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s been good having a man about the place and I thought that maybe you . . .’

  He did not know what to say. She reached across the table. For the first time he saw her long black eyes and full lower lip. Long, slim hands. Her breasts. But there was Gyaar Ryuu, there was Diido, and he . . .

  ‘I . . . I’m . . .’ He looked left, right, looked at her.

  She gave him a smile, small and sad. ‘All right, all right.’ She got up.

  Cam tried to explain. ‘When first I left Kayforl, Dorn-Lannet was the edge of the world. But that edge has moved, keeps moving.’

  She had folded both slender hands about her beer cup, holding to it as if it were very precious.

  ‘If I’d stayed there, slave to the seasons, my horizon would never have moved. If I stayed here with you, it would be a good life, but it would be like Kayforl.’

  ‘If you thought less, you’d be easier in yourself.’

  Cam caught her hand. ‘Tomorrow I’ll try the castle gate.’

  His landlady nodded, slipped her hand free. After a moment, she laughed. ‘About time.’

  GYAAR’S DOWNLANDER

  ‘I would know everything, everything!’ Father struck the table with his palm and the tea bowls rattled. ‘Every single thing that can be known about every living body in this place, but see it done so that they know as little as possible of it.’ He leaned back, flicked his hand. Where they usually wandered out in twos or threes, chatting, the councillors stalked out singly, in silence.

  In his notebook Gyaar drew circles and spirals until his inkstone dried.

  ‘And I would start here, in this keep.’ Father looked at him. ‘In this room.’

  Gyaar laid his inkbrush down, closed his notebook. He thought, but did not dare say, You know that I kept some secret from you. Why do you not ask me? Why do you order me, come at it from behind?

  ‘I . . . I have an odd ritual, that I have recently come into.’ Every morning, before sunrise, he went to the guard tower, to watch the man that everyone called Gyaar’s Down-lander (never, though, to Gyaar’s face) watch the keep. ‘Day after day, the same pattern.’

  ‘How long now?’

  Gyaar held up the fingers of one hand, with the forefinger of the other laid across his palm. ‘Six days.’

  ‘And you did not tell me.’

  Gyaar looked at his father eye to eye. ‘I did not tell you, Father.’

  Lord Ryuu struck him, with all his strength. Gyaar spun from his cushion and sprawled on all fours on the mats. Righting himself, he adjusted his sash. ‘You will not do that again. I am no longer a child.’

  Father smiled and Gyaar’s heart lurched.

  ‘What a risk you take.’ Father reached and picked up Gyaar’s knife, which had fallen from his sash. ‘He is yours, but I do not like this.’ He toyed with the knife, turning it on its point, the base of its grip, its point. It made a dull light thunk, thunk, thunk on the wooden surface, as regular as a heartbeat. Then he spun it, a gleaming wheel, and caught it by the haft. As a child, Gyaar had loved that trick.

  ‘He is carefully watched, Father, and I am sure means no harm.’

  ‘Of what he intends you cannot be sure. That he is carefully watched, you must be certain.’

  Gyaar shifted in the seat the Captain of the Guard had vacated for him.

  ‘Were you caught playing with one girl too many, My Lord?’ the man teased. He had a slab of ice brought from the cellar and made Gyaar hold it to his bruised cheek.

  ‘Captain Urasu.’ Gyaar’s cheek throbbed. ‘We must take a census of the town.’

  ‘Pheeew.’ Urasu shook his head. ‘We have trouble enough keeping things peaceful.’

  ‘So, we do it peacefully.’ A servant dressed in eye-burning red crept past the door. ‘Captain? Is that the new Koi-boi?’

  Urasu went to the door and leaned out to look. ‘Yes, My Lord. We let her steal through—’

  ‘Too low-ranking to worry about?’

  ‘Er, My Lord, I think she might have found herself a . . . protector, in town.’

  Gyaar frowned. ‘Urasu the Soft-hearted?’

  ‘Well . . .’ The Guard Captain did not continue. Gyaar wondered if he had daughters the Koi-boi’s age.

  ‘Have her followed. I would know everything she does. Where, who, when.’

  The man looked at him sidelong. Why her? that glance said. Of all the staff here? ‘Ofcourse, My Lord, I will do what you ask, as you ask it, but I would know what you know of her?’

  ‘If she had not crept out, I would never have seen her,’ said Gyaar. ‘It was the manner of her going.’

  Urasu nodded. Gyaar took the ice from his cheek, and prodded at the bruise until his eyes watered. ‘A census, and they’ll think it’s about taxes, increasing them. Then we work behind that front and gather the real information.’

  ‘Easier to leave that front out, Lord Gyaar. Here, that bruise will swell right up if you don’t keep the ice to it.’
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  There was no choice about it, but Gyaar was not going to admit as much. He put the ice in the man’s hands and left.

  ‘I will not ride in a palanquin.’ Gyaar folded his arms.

  ‘How like to your Father you look when you do that.’

  Gyaar let his arms drop to his sides.

  Stepping closer, Mother looked at him. ‘Surely you cannot see out of your eye. You should have it treated.’

  ‘Mother!’

  She bent her head and stepped into the gilded box. ‘I would visit your brother’s shrine, and I will not walk.’ She rang a bell, and the carriers lifted her. Guards rode before her, and after, but Gyaar walked beside. Ahead the road was clear, although crowds stood to either side, where the vanguard had tidied them. They waved, they cheered, as Gyaar and Mother went by – most of them. Gyaar looked closely at the unsmiling faces, tried to commit them to memory.

  Gyodan’s shrine had been newly built after the taking of Dorn-Lannet, but already little stone dolls lined the path, put there by people who had lost loved ones to the war. The Shrine of the War Dead, it was called in the town, though Gyaar always thought of it as Gyodan’s Shrine.

  As soon as he passed beneath the gate, Gyaar felt the quiet of the place work on him. He crooked his arm so that Mother could put her hand there.

  ‘Your Downlander is back.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘You have a most untoward method of managing him.’

  ‘I am curious, to see . . . I am not sure.’

  She led him to the altar room. One wall had a niche built into it, with a lamp burning. ‘Gyodan.’ Mother reached up and smoothed Gyodan’s painted hair. ‘My shrine-son. He was my baby, once. But he is dead, and he is not reborn in this Downlander.’

  Gyaar could not, for a moment, speak. ‘I did not think—’

  ‘You do.’ She laid her hand on his arm for a moment, a brief, delicate touch, the only way she had ever touched her children. ‘I am your mother and I may say this to you.’

  They returned to the keep, walked the garden, his mother’s arm through his, the ever-present ladies trailing them, their voices tink-tink-tinkling.

  Gyaar sat on a dais, in the inner courtyard, gazing down on a wall of clerks on low wooden stools at low wooden tables. Long lines of townspeople, brought and kept there by Ryuu soldiers, were feeding them information. Name, age, birth month, family, address, property and assets, employment – every single person in Dorn-Lannet. The clerks worked in shifts, but Gyaar spent the day entire watching the proceedings. Spent days. He looked for the Downlander, and looked, but saw nothing of him.

  Information, wrote Gyaar, and found he was listening. This many goats, chickens, sacks of grain, bolts of cloth, brothers, sisters, children. Downlander and Uplander. Who worshipped at which shrine. Our people, he thought.

  At the council following, he stood up. ‘I would report to you personally the results of the census.’ He did so, at length.

  ‘Where does it come from, this excess of energy and interest?’ Father asked of him when they sat as they always did after the meeting had finished.

  How to explain that part of this place had become his? Gyaar sidestepped. ‘I had thought you would be pleased by it.’

  ‘Hnn.’ Father was watching him, the corners of his mouth turned down, his upside-down smile. At length, he shifted his gaze from Gyaar, rolled the papers from the morning’s meeting together tightly.

  Gyaar untied his sash and drew a full breath. Lying back on the cushions, he looked up at the ceiling, the dark wood and the box-like pattern of the rafters. The morning sun brushed the undersides of the beams with pale yellow light.

  ‘Enough of this,’ said Father abruptly. ‘Bring him in or I will.’

  Gyaar started. ‘He is mine, Father, you said so.’

  ‘You have three days more, and then I’ll have the guards put an arrow in him and he can join his fellows under the plain out there.’ Father thwacked the rolled papers on the table.

  Three days more. Gyaar went directly to the Guard Captain’s office, his steps sounding a rhythm that fitted the words: three, days, more.

  Urasu offered his chair, but Gyaar waved him into it, chose to stand.

  Urasu leaned forward. ‘We found him – where he hides when he isn’t spying on us.’

  Gyaar turned and paced out the room, to hide the moil of fear and excitement that leapt in him. ‘Well?’

  ‘The Koi-boi led us to him!’ Urasu rocked his chair onto its back legs. ‘As we suspected, she’s stabling more than one horse.’ Something in Gyaar’s expression flattened the man’s coarse laughter. ‘Ahem. She’s Tseri’s bit – Tseri who breeds up the koi, My Lord – and she’s . . . dallying with this Downlander, of all folk, or he with her.’ Urasu looked up at Gyaar, quickly away. ‘We tracked her to an inn, found him there. The White Mule, it’s call—’

  ‘Do they know they’re being trailed?’ Gyaar was too astonished to put the pieces he had together in any order.

  ‘Hard to say, My Lord. He slips away from us, just turns to smoke and wafts away. I don’t know if it’s because he knows, or because he’s careful. Her? She’s no idea of it.’

  ‘What of the innkeeper? Have you questioned him?’

  ‘Her.’

  Gyaar waved a hand, impatient. ‘I would see her. It can be done discreetly, can it not?’

  ‘There’s further information needed from her to complete the census, I would think.’ Urasu winked.

  Gyaar gave the man a cold look, then turned away to grin. ‘Arrange it.’

  Long black eyes, long graceful hands, grey heavy in the black hair, and a voice straight from the taproom.

  ‘You got it in the census,’ she said. ‘Why ask me again, Sir?’

  The guard was a junior, helmet jaunty on the back of his head, whipping his sheathed sword about. ‘Just tell my superior what you told me, when we spoke a two-day ago.’

  She shook her skirt out, and smoothed her hair. ‘He comes and asks to work his board.’ She shrugged. ‘Now he works here, for me.’

  ‘And what you did not tell me.’

  ‘Bossy snippy thing, aren’t you?’ She smiled at the young guard until he reddened, then she turned to Urasu; folded her arms and looked him up and down. She nodded, slowly. ‘He’s real interested in this place here.’ She stuck a thumb in the direction of the keep, behind her. ‘I ask him about it, but he won’t be drawn. Rises early, before sun-up, and takes that long pull up the Mount.’

  ‘Mount Lannet,’ the young guard murmured for Gyaar’s benefit.

  ‘I see him go up the track that way. Some days, he’s not back until sundown. Some days, he’s around the day long, working.’ She looked at the guard. ‘Does a good job too, when he does do it.’

  ‘Tell me about your other guests.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only him?’

  ‘Only that one.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘You can ask.’

  ‘I am asking.’

  ‘Think I’m a traitor, do you? Turning in information on people who trust me?’

  ‘This Downlander, he does not trust you? Is that why you’ll tell us about him?’

  ‘Need the money don’t I?’

  The guard turned to the Guard Captain. ‘Sir, she won’t be drawn.’ Gyaar had to wipe his hand over his moustache to hide his smile.

  ‘I think . . .’ The landlady of the White Mule did that, for some while. ‘I think I’m helping him, doing this.’

  ‘You can help him some more, Mistress Innkeeper. He has a three-day After that . . .’ The guard drew his finger across his throat. ‘Help him a little more, and see he comes to the keep.’ He set a bag of coins down on the table. ‘There’ll be more, if he comes within that time.’

  The innkeeper pushed the money away from her, roughly enough that the bag fell to the floor. ‘I’ll tell him if he’ll be safe.’

  ‘He’s dead if he doesn’t; he lives if he does. Is that safe enoug
h for you?’

  The next morning, Gyaar changed his ritual, ignoring the tower and instead walking out under the setting moon and standing upon the bridge, in clear view of the hillside. A breeze blew inland from the sea, carried the salt smell with it as it ran invisible over the water, riffling the surface.

  Father’s voice sounded in his head – Of what he intends you cannot he sure – and Gyaar wondered, What does he intend, this Downlander? What? He weighed that against the image he carried of the boy in the marsh, lowering his bow, sparing his enemy. There had been a trust seeded in that moment, Gyaar was sure, and he would not betray it.

  He would not? Was the Downlander watching? Did he understand the message Gyaar was sending? Tomorrow would be the third day.

  Faint colour washed into the garden, with the dawn. It was like the census: the more time Gyaar spent here in the garden, the more he grew into it, and it grew into him. He thought of the new laid over the old, lawn and trees over the grey gravel that had been here before. Uplander over Downlander.

  ‘A tavern girl raped, and a Downlander man butchered in front of his family. Retaliation for the rape, so it is said.’ The councillor reporting sat down.

  ‘We cannot split the town and give them half each.’ Father sat very still. The stiller he was, the greater his anger. ‘We—what is it?’

  A page knelt at the door. ‘My lords, the Guard Captain sent to say we have Lord Gyaar’s Downlander.’

  ‘Where?’ Gyaar spoke over the top of his father. ‘When?’

  ‘At the gatehouse,’ said the page.

  ‘Have him brought here.’

  The Downlander was manhandled into the hall. Released, he bowed to the ground. Father did not move, nor did he speak, and the Downlander remained on his knees, eyes upon the floor, hand upon his thigh, calm.

  Father lifted the little finger of his right hand. Mailed guards thumped to attention, the clashing of their armour bringing sweat out on the Downlander’s skin.

  Gyaar walked a circle around him, the clack of his boot heels reminding him of Gyodan, though he did not know why. He swallowed. ‘How did you get in?’