Bloodflower

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

  ‘On this occasion, I knocked at the gate.’ The Downlander slid a glance up at Gyaar, and away. A guard struck him to the floor, then pulled him back onto his knees.

  ‘Dangerous pastime, the trespass into Ryuu land.’ Gyaar trod a second circuit about the prisoner. ‘Death is the penalty for that.’

  ‘If it were so, I would be dead now, My Lord.’

  Father spun on his heel and walked to the window, where he stood motionless.

  ‘You offend my father.’ Gyaar stood over the Downlander, who was wise enough to keep his gaze bent downwards now

  ‘I am sorry.’ His speech was fluent but marred by his strong Downlander accent.

  ‘What do you think you do, playing at hide-and-go-seek?’

  The young man’s left hand came up to the stump of his right. ‘When I left, last time, I was offered service. I did not take it then, but I would now.’ He glanced up again, and it was Gyodan’s eyes, but never their expression.

  The room was very, very quiet. ‘I . . .’ Gyaar had to clear his throat, speech was so unwilling to come. ‘I must make a decision, death or service. You will hear from me.’ To the guards he said, ‘Take him back to the gatehouse.’

  They went in procession, a dozen men to hold a cripple who had volunteered himself up to their keeping in the first place.

  Gyaar poured tea for Father, who sat with his arms folded across his chest and refused to take it.

  ‘What will you do with him?’

  Gyaar did not know.

  Father rose up, kicking his cushion out of the way. ‘Born for the shrine, you.’ He left the council chamber.

  That Father could still say that – Gyaar waited while the room emptied, then dropped his face into his hands. He thinks me weak, thought Gyaar, or soft, or womanish, or some such un-Ryuu-like thing. He drew himself up, and folded his arms, and pondered how to show Father that tolerance, patience were not weaknesses, but strengths.

  ‘Pheew’ – Urasu rocked his chair onto its back legs – ‘but he’s like to Gyodan! What will you do with him?’

  ‘Do with him?’

  ‘You can’t keep him shovelling horseshit, beg pardon, Lord Gyaar, but you can’t. He’s a fighting man. Out of practice, but that’s what he is.’

  ‘Have him practise, then.’

  The man stared hard at nothing, and chewed at his bottom lip. ‘Bow’s out of the question with a one-armed man, likewise the quarter staff.’

  ‘Put him to learning the sword.’

  ‘If that is what you wish, Lord Gyaar.’

  ‘It is. Where is he?’

  ‘Mucking out stalls in the stable, like you said.’

  Gyaar strode down the long central aisle of the stable to speak to his Downlander. In this he had taken Father’s advice: If you must take him on, have him make his way up from the bottom.

  ‘Ver-cam-er Att-ling.’

  Shirtless and sweating and stinking of horse dung, the Downlander bowed.

  ‘Verucam— pah.’ Gyaar spread his hands. ‘You Downlanders speak with your tongues between your teeth.’

  ‘Cam will do,’ said his Downlander. ‘If you can manage that.’

  Gyaar did something that he did rarely. He laughed.

  The Guard Captain was warming one hand at the brazier, against the autumn chill, the other tucked into his armpit, then swapping them around. ‘He’s wasted on this, your Downlander.’

  ‘He’s no good?’ Gyaar touched his own, whole, right arm.

  ‘It’s not that, Lord Gyaar. He’s shaping fine, not brilliant, but fine. Ha, ha. Not too impressed at first, he wasn’t.’ He tucked his right arm behind him and became Cam: ‘From the heginning? You want I learn sword-fighting from the heginning?’ Dropped his arm and the accent and was himself again: ‘The very beginning. What do you think? You’re learning it left-handed, it’s all new.’ Muttered under his breath, swearing in Downlander.

  Gyaar grinned.

  The man hesitated, opened his mouth, frowned and closed it. ‘He was watching the keep for half a month, longer, before we were ever aware of his presence.’

  Gyaar hoped his face did not show the extent of his shock. ‘A half month!’

  ‘He has an instinct for it.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You know how Downlanders fight, all creep and prowl and ambuscade. He’s got that. He knows . . . who is there and where, and who should not be, what they intend.’

  ‘What are you telling me, Urasu?’

  ‘Personal Guard, My Lord.’ The Guard Captain propped his foot on a stool and crossed his arms on his thigh. ‘Let us look at it . . . he’d need support – another handful of men to back him up, of full strength and full capability, but—’

  ‘I see.’ Gyaar nodded.

  ‘With the town being just that little bit unsettled, you need one.’

  ‘I do see.’ He slapped the Guard Captain on the shoulder. ‘It’s worth thinking on.’

  Urasu stood very straight, and looked Gyaar in the eye. ‘You’re shaping all right, young Lord Gyaar.’

  Cam was promoted to the barracks, with five men under his command. Gyaar stood with the Guard Captain on the top of the gatehouse and watched his Downlander train them, watched them creeping, climbing, sneaking up on one another.

  ‘Good,’ said Urasu, quietly, to himself. And to Gyaar: ‘Proving me right, My Lord, he is.’

  Now that Father’s lands were too large for the bimonthly Hearings, he instead made the circuit by moving the household four times yearly: winter in the City; summer at home, at Ryuu; spring and autumn in the new keep to the south. The winter Hearings in the City were coming due, and Father rode north to the City at month’s end with Mother and Shi-karu, their retinue of one hundred and twenty that they needed to ensure their comfort, and the guard that numbered in the hundreds, for their safety during the journey north.

  ‘I do not like to leave Dorn-Lannet,’ Father said. ‘While it remains so restless.’ He was saddling his horse himself, as he always did. They walked the length of the stable, to the bailey, Cam a pace behind them.

  ‘You have entrusted it to me, Father. Do you not have faith in your decision?’

  Father stopped to look straight at Cam, where he stood at Gyaar’s back. He mounted, reined the horse about, and rode out without further word for Gyaar. As the bailey emptied, Gyaar felt a lifting of his spirits: happiness.

  With Father gone, Gyaar had less time to spend with Cam. The town remains unquiet, he wrote to Father. This despite the reduced taxes and the preparations for the Winter Festival. He looked across at Father’s empty seat, knowing what Father would do, and knowing as surely that he, Gyaar, would turn from it: Father would choose no sides, he would strike at all who had been caught up in the conflict – innocent and guilty alike – and crush them, merciless, brutal.

  Laying down his brush, he stared at the cold white walls of the council chamber. Empty, it was not just chilly, it was lonely. He went to the barracks.

  Cam had set up a table with a brazier beneath it and a blanket over the top, and was sitting like an old grandmother, blanket tucked about him. He had papers and brushes and inkstones spread before him. ‘Curse all the great gods, it’s cold. How does it go, being Lord of Dorn-Lannet?’

  ‘I have put it aside for the night.’

  Cam grinned, and Gyaar could not help but smile back.

  ‘I can put my alphabet aside for the night. Let’s go,’ said Cam. ‘And get warm.’

  Gyaar reckoned up three things, not to say them, but just to know them: that he had never been to a tavern; that he had never been drunk; and that he must know why this Downlander, so like to his brother, had sought him out. What he said was, ‘Let us.’

  They went afoot into the town, walked all the way through it. ‘Where do you take me?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cam. ‘I thought we should work up our thirst.’

  There were young men and boys weaving the streets, in bands. Nearing one group, Gyaar felt the skin on his back
prick. He looked at Cam, who was watching the group approach. The youths were drunk, but that was not it. It was the knives and truncheons they had stuck into their belts. It was the swagger they walked with.

  ‘I liked that not at all,’ said Cam once they were well past them.

  Gyaar nudged him. ‘I suppose we’re not the only ones looking to shake the winter chill.’

  Cam did not answer, only nodded.

  ‘Where did you say you were taking me?’

  It was the White Mule. If the innkeeper was confounded by Gyaar guesting there, she did not show it. Gyaar wondered if Cam knew her role in his coming into Ryuu service, and decided that it did not matter.

  They staggered out of the yard as the sun was rising.

  Frost dusted the branches of the vines, the gravel. In the witch-light of the early dusk it glowed silver. Gyaar wriggled his toes in his boots; they were numb. Two abreast, he and Cam walked the length of the arbour.

  ‘My Father comes here with his mistresses.’

  ‘I hope not at this time of year.’

  Gyaar laughed aloud.

  At the end of the arbour stood the three-walled shelter that was the tea pavilion. Gyaar set the fire in its bed of sand, went about the business of making tea, Cam watching all of it.

  ‘You’re as bad as my mam for fussing, warming the pot and adding a leaf or two, as if it mattered.’

  ‘It matters.’ Gyaar put the tea bowls on the tray, the tray between them. ‘No, like this. Hold the cup like this.’ Gyaar watched Cam move his fingers on the bowl. ‘Better.’

  They drank the first cup in silence. On the second, Gyaar broke the quiet between them. ‘How goes your reading and writing?’

  ‘Phhht.’

  ‘You must persist. You cannot remain illiterate and attend court. You cannot remain ignorant and attend council.’

  Cam set his cup down, so his hand was free to help him talk. ‘Gyaar, I am not your brother. I have brothers, and a sister of my own.’

  ‘I did not say you were.’

  Cam lifted his bowl and this second round was finished in silence.

  ‘Why must we not talk, with that first cup?’

  ‘The silence is time in which to reflect, to relax.’ Gyaar broke it again. ‘I knew you would come back to Dorn-Lannet.’

  ‘I don’t know how, for I had no clear idea of it myself.’ Cam lifted a shoulder. ‘Nothing is ever quite as you think it might be. Dorn-Lannet is different, different from when I left after the war. I came back thinking to return to one thing, but it was like coming to another, so much was new or altered.’

  Gyaar laughed softly. ‘Has it changed such a great deal since we took it?’

  Cam did not at once answer, seemed not to have heard. He was staring at the pond, at the Koi-boi. She was prancing about the water’s edge, singing, and it was that which Cam seemed to be listening to; her that his eyes were following. ‘Uh . . .’

  Gyaar looked at him: go on.

  Cam turned his shoulder to the pond. ‘What I came back to was not what I left. And it’s changed even since I returned: the troubles have got worse. I spent most of the spring just wandering about and there was . . . was . . .’

  ‘Friction,’ said Gyaar.

  ‘Yes, friction, here and there, but this trouble now?’ He was gazing again at the pond. ‘Someone is stirring this up—’ He shook his head. ‘Her singing always . . . it draws me . . .’

  By the pond, the Koi-boi had stilled, to stare at the teahouse. Gyaar looked from one to the other, and grinned.

  The morning air ceased nipping quite so much at fingers and toes. Late winter blossoms sprang from bare earth, bare branches. Father and Mother returned, Shi-karu, the court.

  Council was called. Gyaar returned to his own seat, and Father once again sat on the dais at the head of the chamber. Strangely, though, Gyaar found he still ran the meeting. After the council was done and the councillors gone from the chamber, they stayed to drink tea, as they had done before the winter.

  Gyaar looked down at the clean, blank page of his notebook. He picked up his brush, and could not find the right word to put there on the paper.

  ‘So.’ Father poured tea for him. ‘Dorn-Lannet seethes yet, Only Son?’

  Gyaar set the brush back down, closed the book. Father waited in silence. Gyaar looked at Father’s empty tea bowl and did not pour. ‘I have not found who is behind the unrest, but there has been no further violence.’

  Still Father said nothing.

  ‘Someone, some body, is working on the young men, pushing them to conflict.’

  ‘Someone, who? Some body? What body?’

  ‘I believe a disaffected—’

  ‘We know they are disaffected—’

  ‘—a disaffected member of the old power here, once under the old Downlander Lord; or of one of the Uplander Houses we destroyed, as we took over the lands south of the City.’

  ‘Yet you know not who.’

  ‘Do not tell me how to find out, Father. I will not butcher people in the marketplace to force the information from those afraid that such an end is for them.’

  Born for the shrine. Gyaar waited, but Father did not say it.

  What Father did next astounded him. He loosed his sash, and said, ‘I have a happier topic for discussion.’ And he passed Gyaar a small silver circle.

  A miniature. A girl looked at him, a pink-and-white, pale-haired, plump Downlander girl, grass-green eyes wide and wary.

  ‘Fenister Fort,’ said Father.

  Gyaar knew it, part of that ancient line of defence, southern sister to Dorn-Lannet. Knew it because it was part of Cam’s world, the village he had come from. He looked up at the white walls of the chamber and saw Cam through the window, sitting under the arbour, watching the Koi-boi. If I moved her into the women’s quarters, they could wed. It was like a chain, each thing linked to the one before and after it, all of them a thing together: Downlander to Uplander. Man to woman, friend to friend.

  ‘If I make Dorn-Lannet over to you, you will need to be married, for you will need heirs to . . .’ Father’s hand swept the room, bringing the fort and the township into it. ‘Heirs, to take it on after you.’

  Gyaar could not speak.

  ‘Think on it. I will not force you.’ Father left him with the miniature, and no answer to make.

  The koi-breeder stepped into the room, but would come no further: not disobedience, but awe.

  ‘Koi-master,’ said Gyaar. The man bowed, so bent he looked folded in two. ‘My Koi-boi. Tell me what you know of her.’

  ‘Caught her hiding in back there, My Lord.’ The Koi-master turned in a stiff semicircle and pointed through the wall, towards the nursery compound. ‘Kick her out but what do I find? Eh? Eh?’ He leaned forward. ‘Get back to my room at noon and she’s cleaned it, and got my noon meal ready – and it was just what I always have, bowl of cold rice and curd and salt.’

  ‘So she stayed.’

  ‘Huh, guess so, My Lord. Put her to work with the fish, once I hear her sing. She sings real sweet.’

  ‘She may remain your Koi-boi, if she wishes it, but she no longer . . . keeps house for you. She has been given a room in the women’s quarters, and she is now under the care of my mother, Lady Ryuu.’

  ‘My Lord.’ The old man bowed and unfolded himself with difficulty. Just as he was stepping out the door, he paused. ‘I’m happy for her, it isn’t that I grudge her, My Lord, but I tell you this: if not for me, she’d ‘a been working a tavern back room.’

  Gyaar said nothing, and after a moment the Koi-master shambled away.

  ‘Your accent is fading,’ said Gyaar.

  Cam looked reflective, worked the strap through the buckle.

  Gyaar leaned on the saddle-bow and yawned. ‘You think one arm is an excuse to take forever to saddle your mount?’

  The thinking look left Cam’s face: he grinned.

  They skirted the burial meadows that spread out in front of the castle. Cam said that to ride o
n them would wake the ghosts; Gyaar did not want to crush the spring flowers. So they walked their mounts alongside them, to the open land beyond.

  Gyaar rode knee to knee with Cam. A breeze beat, vigorous and constant, on Gyaar’s right cheek. ‘Of all of the Ryuu homes, it is Dorn-Lannet I am fondest of.’ He gazed at the keep, its white walls and gabled tower, elegant, formidable. ‘It may be that fighting in the South gave me a liking for this country.’

  Cam’s expression was unreadable. ‘The war . . . such a thing should never happen again, but the Ryuus . . . they have turned this town around. It was a bandit’s den under Lord Garaman, or little more than that. And this!’ Cam looked about at the town, spreading beyond the walls, the new farmsteads that had sprung up to feed the growing population.

  Gyaar reached into his pocket, handed Cam what he had pulled from it. ‘She is one of yours.’

  Cam looked at the miniature, drew his grey to a halt ‘Graceful Fenister? You are betrothed to Graceful Fenister?’

  ‘You know her. I thought you must.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘It is . . . that is . . . she is mine to wed, I know that, but . . .’ But.

  ‘Yours to wed.’ Cam said something more in his own tongue. He passed the miniature back.

  Gyaar ran his thumb over the image, put it in his pocket. ‘The final touch, a marriage between Up- and Downlander. This might still the last unrest in town.’

  Cam abruptly steered Geyard aside, so that they now rode far enough apart to make talk difficult. Gyaar closed the gap. ‘There is a thing I would offer you.’ He fished around in his mind, trying to find the right words to explain that he knew about the Koi-boi, that he wished to see Cam wed, if that was what Cam wished—

  Cam turned his head aside and spat, then wheeled his mount about. Gyaar halted, shaken, then pushed across his path. ‘What have I said to so offend you, Cam?’

  ‘Excuse me, My Lord.’

  ‘Get down, we will talk.’ Backing off a space, Gyaar swung down from the saddle. Cam put his horse between them and regarded Gyaar over the saddle. The grey was fidgeting, Cam’s upset showing itself through the horse.