The Mountain of Kept Memory

by Rachel Neumeier

  An instant later Kelian turned his head. Oressa glared at him above the loosened gag, and reassured, he turned back to study the gates.

  This time, so did she, though she also twisted her left hand slowly and painfully back and forth, trying to pull her hand through the loosened loop of the thong.

  The scorpion banner was flying there, she saw at once, but then she saw that the Madalin falcon was flying above the gates as well. Of course her father and Bherijda were still pretending to be allies. Who knew what their men thought of that, but at the moment both had men guarding the gates of the city. She should have expected that, but she hadn’t. Four of her father’s men, she saw, and four of Bherijda’s, and couldn’t she do something with that? Because even from this distance she could just see the radiating distrust between the two groups.

  But it wasn’t just the guards and soldiers at the gate: Ordinary people were lined up to leave Caras, especially families, which made sense if they had relatives out in the drylands with whom to take shelter while waiting to see what happened. She could also glimpse farmers waiting to enter, their wagons loaded with pears or grain or cages of chickens, which surprised her until she thought about it. But of course those pears wouldn’t keep, so the farmers had to sell them or see them spoil. Besides, everyone in the city still had to eat, and if Bherijda’s men frightened off the farmers, they would find themselves in serious trouble, so perhaps that made sense after all.

  All those people also offered Oressa a chance. Kelian knew it, too, and studied her warily. She glowered back, trying to look like a young woman who was cowed and helpless but trying to look brave. It was a complicated role; she wasn’t certain she pulled it off. She jerked at the thongs, pretending they were still secure. How did Kelian expect to explain her to the Carastindin guardsmen? Surely they would want to know what he was about, gagging and binding young women and dragging them about the countryside, even if they didn’t recognize her.

  He must have thought he could get away with it, though, because he squared his shoulders, lifted his chin, put on a confident expression like a mask, and nudged his horse toward the gates, tugging hers along.

  People turned to stare as Kelian hauled her after him, using his horse to shoulder a way forward past the common folk. The people, respecting his uniform or his confidence, pressed back to give them space to go forward. The guardsmen and the scorpion soldiers turned too, hands on the hilts of their swords, all of them posturing at one another like feist dogs after the same bone, and the farmer who had just brought his wagon inside the walls took the chance of their distraction to urge his mule forward. The wagon rolled forward, and the soldiers stepped back to let it get out of their way, and suddenly, unexpectedly, the way was completely clear between Oressa and the north road.

  She knew if she hesitated the moment would be lost, so she didn’t let herself think. It was like leaping from a height—speed and balance and trusting the wind to carry you that last inch. She jerked her left hand out through the loosened thong, ignoring the burn as she scraped the back of her hand raw, snatched down the gag, whipped out the necklaces she’d hidden in her bodice, snapped the chain of gold disks, and flung all the glittering gold in a high, wide arc so that the disks scattered over the road. At the same time she lashed her horse with the pearl necklace, screaming.

  The horse, already nervous because it had sensed her fear and fury, leaped straight into a dead gallop, jerking the reins out of Kelian’s hand, pinning its ears back, and pointing its head straight at the open road. Oressa wrapped her hands in its mane, pearls scattering in her wake and rolling in the dust of the road. She wanted the reins, but as long as the horse bolted straight down the road, that was fine. When she managed a glance back, she wanted to laugh: Kelian, tangled in a brawl of furious soldiers and scrambling farmers, did not look likely to get clear of the gate anytime soon.

  Oressa was small and light, and the horse was a good one. By the time he came after her, she hoped she would be so far ahead he would never catch up.

  Much later, afraid of pushing the horse too hard in the heat of the day, Oressa dared stop at a farmhouse for a few minutes. She traded a pearl for a bucket of water for the horse and a dipperful for herself, and for a loaf of bread layered with roasted chicken and spicy mustard, and a comb. She would have liked to trade the horse for a fresh one, but the farm owned only draft mules, so that was no good. Oressa told the curious farmwife that her husband had hit her once too often and she was going back to her father’s house in Addas, and the woman nodded and exclaimed and gave her salve for the whip mark on her cheek and listened carefully to the description of her “husband.” Oressa took great pains to describe Kelian accurately.

  “Just hope you didn’t catch a baby, my dear,” the woman told Oressa. “Your father will take you back, won’t he?”

  “Oh yes. He never wanted me to marry that man at all. He’ll be so surprised to hear me admit he was right that he probably won’t say a word of blame. And I’ll never be fooled by a handsome face again,” Oressa declared emphatically, and the farmwife nodded and said that was a lesson all girls needed to learn, and she had daughters herself, and if that man came by this farm, as was likely enough as farms were few this far from the city, well, she also had big strong sons who would be happy to tell him what they thought of men who beat their wives. And she gave Oressa a little knife to tuck in her pocket, in case she met the wrong kind of trouble before she made her way back to her family. The woman showed Oressa just the right way to stab a man to make sure he wouldn’t get up again. That certainly seemed very practical. Oressa tucked the knife away in her skirt pocket and thanked the woman profusely.

  When she left the farm, Kelian still had not shown up. Careful of the horse, Oressa rode gently all the rest of the day, and she told the same tale of a violent husband to the man at the public house where she spent the night. He believed it too, so apparently it was a good story, or maybe he just liked the look of the garnets she offered him in payment for the room and for food for herself and the horse. Certainly the man wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as the woman at the farm. He did stir himself to say, “A young woman your age, alone on the road, you’re asking for worse trouble than a husband who’s a little rough! You should travel with someone. Them, maybe.” He indicated a farmer and his sons. “I know ’em, and they’re decent people. If you’re smart you’ll ask the old man tonight and be up bright and early tomorrow.”

  Oressa meekly thanked the man for his advice, and she was indeed up very early, although she was so tired that this time a whole night on a prickly straw mattress seemed the height of luxury. If she dreamed, she didn’t remember her dreams on waking, and she was glad of that, because whenever she let herself think about anything, she only made herself afraid.

  But she rode out alone because she didn’t dare let herself be slowed down by the farmer’s wagons. She thought it was five or six days to Addas, and she didn’t know exactly where she might find Gajdosik’s people.

  But Oressa’s recently acquired horse was really very good, and Oressa herself hardly a weight for him, and though twice a man or a couple of men tried to approach her, she let her horse gallop and got well away without waiting to see what they might want. She felt a little guilty about it. At least one of them looked concerned, not threatening, but you couldn’t tell, really. Kelian had fooled her completely, after all. She hoped very much that he had stopped to ask about her at that farm with the woman who had the big, strong sons.

  But she never reached Addas, because before noon the day after that, she met Gajdosik’s Tamaristan soldiers instead.

  First she began to pass ordinary people startled out of their homes by the Tamaristans. Some, seeing the column of foreign soldiers approaching, had ridden to carry warning to Caras, and those were the people she met. They warned everyone they passed, and Oressa saw how farm families drove their livestock away from the road, into the drylands. The women herded the cattle and goats; children drove carts loaded wit
h chicken cages and such small belongings as their families owned. Most of the men saddled their horses and rode toward Caras.

  Four different times someone stopped to urgently warn Oressa against riding north, and once an old man tried to get her to join his own family. “Those Tamaristan bastards aren’t burning and looting, not so there’s word of it come south, but they’re soldiers and they’re foreign and a pretty young woman like you doesn’t need to meet men like that,” the man said earnestly. “I’m sorry you’ve family in Addas, but there’s nothing you can do for ’em except keep yourself safe and find ’em later. Now, don’t tell me you’d be any trouble, child. We won’t hardly notice another girl in among all the grandchildren.”

  Touched, Oressa thanked the old man and promised she would turn her horse off the road and ride through the drylands, well outside the sight of any soldiers on the road, but of course she didn’t. She met the Tamaristan army an hour later. There were scouts out in front, which she hadn’t expected, though of course she should have. She stayed on the road to meet them, though they weren’t riding under any banner, so she just had to assume they belonged to Gajdosik. She wished the gods weren’t all dead because she would have liked to pray to someone she trusted.

  The scouts looked her over carefully, evidently seeing nothing to alarm them. One, a grizzled veteran with scars on his hands and only three fingers on his right hand, said in rough Esse, “Off the road, girl. Mens coming, lot of mens. Go over there and wait. No ones bother you.” He pointed to a nearby farmhouse, now deserted.

  Instead, Oressa showed him Gajdosik’s ring.

  It was a little like dropping a stone into a pool: a sudden noise that turned into silence, with ripples spreading out and out. The man, perfectly speechless, stared at the ring, then at her face, then at the ring again.

  Oressa tried not to show what a tremendous relief this reaction was. “I want to see Laasat Jerant,” she said firmly.

  “Yes,” said the man, still stunned. He waved the younger scout to ride out ahead again and escorted her himself.

  Laasat rode at the forefront of the Tamaristan army, under the sea-eagle banner, with half a dozen other men and Sergeant Mattin and, to Oressa’s surprise, two older women. She was surprised too at how grateful she was to find Laasat. She instantly felt safe. She hadn’t realized how frightened she’d been until she saw Laasat at the head of Gajdosik’s small army, and the fear went away. Not because it was really her army. That was just a polite fiction—wasn’t that how people put it? But because it was Gajdosik’s army, and she trusted that his were civilized people. For the first time since she’d gotten away from Kelian, she felt herself begin to relax.

  The army itself didn’t seem so small when you had a chance to look at it. It seemed to stretch back along the road for a long way. Nearly all the men marched on foot, at the pace of the mule wagons that kept to the left side of the road. There were women walking between and among those wagons. Not woman soldiers like there were said to be in distant Illian, and not the women that were politely referred to as camp followers. These Tamaristan women looked like they might be the soldiers’ mothers and wives and little sisters. Ordinary civilized women in modest dresses, who looked tired and anxious but somehow like they belonged where they were.

  Oressa almost asked Laasat, Do you always go to war with your wives and your mothers? But then she didn’t ask, because she suddenly figured out the answer. She hadn’t understood before that Gajdosik had come to Carastind not only with soldiers to conquer, but also with their families because he had meant from the first for them to build permanent lives here. She could see now that Gajdosik would do anything he had to, anything at all, to establish a place for them in Carastind. No wonder he had been willing to humble himself before Gulien once he had realized that force of arms couldn’t get him what he wanted. She was awed by how determined he must have been before he even arrived on this side of the Narrow Sea. He hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, exactly what he would find here. But he had known his people had no option but to go forward.

  Laasat didn’t recognize Oressa as instantly as she had recognized him, but then she had expected to find him exactly where he was: at the head of Gajdosik’s army. He hadn’t expected to see her anywhere along the road. He looked first at the scout with an expression of weary resignation, as though wondering what new calamity the man had brought word of. Then he glanced past the scout at Oressa, blinked, looked at her again, lifted his eyes to contemplate the empty road beyond her, notably empty of any proper escort, and checked his people to wait for her. Once she’d come close enough, he said, “I expected to be met, Your Highness, but not by you and not like this. Tell me . . .” He hesitated.

  “Prince Gajdosik was still alive when I left Caras,” Oressa assured him quickly, and looked at Sergeant Mattin. “So was Gulien. That’s the, um, good news.”

  “Ah.” Laasat was silent for a moment, absorbing the implications of so qualified a reassurance, and of Oressa’s arriving, unescorted, to meet them. Then he said, “I’ve bad news of my own, I fear. Who should go first?”

  “Well . . . Let’s hear your bad news first.” She hoped that knowing what else had gone wrong might make it easier to decide what to do now. Gulien could probably use these men in Caras, so maybe she should split this force and send some men to help Gulien and only take some east with her. On the other hand, a lot of scorpion soldiers had gone east with her father and Bherijda, and she might need all these men to deal with them.

  It was all very complicated now that it came to actually making decisions.

  Laasat grimaced. “Another complication. Estenda apparently thinks the confusion in Carastind offers a wonderful chance to bite off a chunk of your north for themselves—”

  “Oh, gods dead and forgotten, I know they do. Of course they didn’t wait for Kelian,” said Oressa, and rubbed her forehead.

  “Kelian? Huh,” muttered Sergeant Mattin.

  “I know!” Oressa told him. “It’s obvious now! But what’s happening with Estenda?”

  Laasat said, “We could have kept them pinned forever in those highlands along the border, but unfortunately the militia commander in Addas doesn’t trust us. He was quite prepared to throw his people against two enemies at once, for all your honorable sergeant could do—”

  “Oh, forgotten gods,” muttered Oressa.

  “Yes. So we pulled our people out as quickly as we could, to relieve the commander’s mind of the distraction. We’ve no idea what’s happened in Addas since—though your militia might be holding yet; we haven’t had a stream of refugees passing us on the road. And, ah,” he asked cautiously, “your news, Your Highness?”

  Oressa looked around. She was surrounded by Tamaristan officers she didn’t know. They looked hard-faced and weary. Oressa swallowed, focused on Laasat, and told them all about Kelian and her father and Prince Bherijda, what she surmised had happened to the company of Tamaristan soldiers Gajdosik had taken into Caras, and what her father had done with Gulien and Gajdosik. She explained, not in detail, that she had gotten away and had thought she’d better come north to meet them so they would know everything. Then she added that she’d seen her father ride east with Bherijda, and since she’d freed Gulien, she thought maybe her brother could do something in Caras, especially with Gajdosik to help him. Then she stopped. She hardly dared look around again. So much news, and so much of it bad, and those were their friends and companions Bherijda had murdered, and she hadn’t stopped it.

  “Our prince needs us. We’ll go on at our best speed,” Laasat said at last. He glanced around at the rest. They were all nodding.

  “No,” said Oressa. Everyone stared at her. Oressa didn’t blame them. It wasn’t that she doubted her decision exactly. Only . . . it was such a big decision. Bigger and more important, maybe, than any other decision she’d ever made in her entire life. But she didn’t have any choice except to stand up and make it, because nobody else here would—nobody else here even could. Sh
e was the only one who cared about Carastind and her brother, and about Gajdosik’s people, and understood that the Kieba had to be defended first of all, before anything else. She shivered, remembering her father’s cold certainty: I shall demonstrate that we may claim the Kieba’s power, and the world will not end. Her father would never have gone east to challenge the Kieba unless he was certain he could challenge her.

  It occurred to Oressa that this might be a little like being the Kieba, not just because everything was so big and so important, but because no one but her saw all the parts of it. The Kieba must feel like this all the time, only about everything. She shivered again. But she also fixed her mind on the Kieba’s cool, ruthless purposefulness, so like her father’s heartless determination to get everything exactly his way, and yet completely different. The Kieba, she thought, had shown her a whole different idea of what power was, or maybe . . . maybe a different idea of what power was for.

  Only she didn’t have time to think about this now. Because she had to make a choice right now, and she had to make it for all of them, and it had to be the right one. She lifted her chin and met Laasat’s eyes. “I understand why you think you need to get to Gajdosik. But you’re wrong. Caras isn’t the biggest problem. Neither is whatever’s going on in Addas. I might be able to make the militia commander there cooperate with you—”

  “Nothing could make that man cooperate with us,” muttered Sergeant Mattin.

  “But,” Oressa said with some force, “the biggest problem is Bherijda and my father and what they might be planning to do when they get to the Kieba’s mountain. Because I happen to know they took a lot of their soldiers and headed down the east road two days ago.” Or was it three now? She could hardly tell, but it wasn’t important; everything she said was still true.