Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  Change came suddenly to Gil, seventy-two years before I did, when the Sherank, a race of murderers and thieves with the most abhorrent national habits since the latter days of Fathan, swept out of the desert-continent of Sher bent on conquering the world. Their first stop was Gil—partly to rape the island of its wealth in order to finance their ambitions, but mainly to capture the Lady in Gil herself, in the belief that her power could make them invincible. In the first aim, they achieved a notable and tragic success. In the second, they failed.

  Had my great-great-grandfather, Oballef the Eleventh (may his bones bring forth flowers), had access to the Lady, the outcome might have been different—but Kishr, High Prince of Iklankish, capital of Sher, knew perfectly well what a hazard the Lady represented. He and his hordes approached stealthily, cunningly, and took Gil by surprise. The thunderbolt of their arrival was timed to coincide with the Festival of Harps at Malvi Point on the south end of the island, trapping the Priest-King and most of his court away from the safety of Gilgard Castle. Gil was helpless, plucked like an apple from a tree. The Priest-King and Queen were among the first to be butchered.

  Prince Kishr did not pause to celebrate, even though oceans of the peerless Vintage of Gil had just come into his hands. He swept through the shattered gates of the Gilgard, past heaped corpses of castle guardsmen, past piles of looted treasures, into the violated sanctuary of the Temple Palace, searching for the one object he had really come to capture: the Lady in Gil. He was very disappointed. The pedestal was empty. The Lady was gone. The few surviving Flamens were unable to tell him where she was, even when asked in Kishr's most pressing manner. The last one had scarcely stopped screaming when more bad news reached Kishr's ears: several younger members of the royal family (among them my great-grandfather) and a small number of Flamens could not be accounted for, and were presumed to have left the island.

  Kishr's anger was terrible. First he eviscerated the messenger, by way of soothing his feelings. Then he ordered the castle and the island to be scoured—no traces were found. In time he gave up and proceeded to further conquests, but without the Lady (and a Scion of Oballef to conjure her for him) his success was only partial. Calloon fell messily, and Storica, and Kuttumm; Tata and Glishor surrendered and suffered anyway. Koroska, that nest of collaborating rump-lickers, welcomed Kishr as a hero, and prospered. The others, profiting from the period of Kishr's distraction, banded together into the League of Free Nations and managed to strike an armed truce with Sher and its new slave empire. That uneasy balance of power still held at the time of my arrival in Gil—but the Lady in Gil, depending on who found her first, could tip the scales either way, or so the theory went.

  This is what had happened with the Lady: when news of the Sherkin invasion reached the Gilgard, the Primate of the Flamens made a rapid and largely correct decision. He packed the royal children and twenty Flamens of various ranks into a fishing boat, along with whatever archives could be quickly assembled, and told them to take refuge in Sathelforn, in the Archipelago, three days' journey across the sea. This was a precaution in case the worst happened and the Gilgard fell. According to eye-witnesses in the party, something, probably the Lady herself, was hidden under the Primate's cloak as he waved the boat off at the harbour. That was his mistake.

  Why he did not send the Lady to safety with the royal children was debated among the Flamens-in-Exile for decades. If he had done so, the first little Scion to mature could have returned to Gil in triumph within a matter of years. It is possible the Primate did not know that the Priest-King and his brothers were dead, and was waiting for them to return to the Gilgard. It may be that he himself attempted the Will that would work the downfall of Kishr's armies, but failed to control the Lady—he was not a Scion of Oballef. In any event, the Primate and the Lady both vanished.

  On the other hand, the fishing boat managed to reach Sathelforn with its royal and priestly supercargo, followed by pitifully few shiploads of other Gillish refugees, all that were able to escape the Sherkin net. They were given sanctuary on a small island in the Archipelago, which the Satheli royals courteously, although not very tactfully, renamed Exile. The Archipelago, as a charter member of the League of Free Nations, managed not to be overrun by the Sherkin empire-builders. The little colony of exiled priests and princes remained safe, and so able to turn their entire energies to training up the royal children, and latterly their descendants, to penetrate the Sherkin security system, find the Lady and retrieve the fortunes of Gil.

  This proved somewhat more difficult than it sounded. And, I am forced to say, I never thought the Flamens' approach was at all intelligent. Nineteen of my close relations embarked on the mission over the years, starting with my greatgrandfather, in the seventh year of Exile, and continuing with my great-great-uncle, great-uncles and a great-aunt, uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, and also my own father, whom I could just barely remember. None succeeded. None was directly heard from again.

  This, you might think, should have made the Flamens suspect the fitness of their strategy. Not so. The Flamens blithely continued to train their royal heroes in the old, formalized ethics of warfare and combat, firmly believing that what had been honourable and sufficient in the old Gil would be equally effective in the new; the Scions of Oballef continued to sail off to messy or unknown dooms in the Gilgard caverns, or on the swordpoints of the appalling Sherank. As far as I could tell, this worried nobody but me, and perhaps my mother. It certainly did not worry my brother Arkolef.

  But it was not Arkolef who hunkered miserably by the parapet of the sea-wall in Gil that morning; it was I, Tigrallef, and I had no time to contemplate the ironies of history. I heard voices and footsteps approaching down the street, and hid myself behind a stack of barrels. It was a party of Gilmen heading towards the quays; they muttered as they walked with hunched shoulders and bent heads, like men accustomed to frequent beatings and precious few hot dinners. A greater shock was how they were dressed—britches, tunics and cloaks, like my own in design, but horribly different in state, so ragged, begrimed and worn that only the filth seemed to hold them together. My own clothes had been carefully dirtied and aged by a team of Flamens-in-Exile who fancied they were being very clever, but the cloth was basically sound. I would stick out like a boil.

  That realization determined my strategy for the whole of the first long, long day. Not for this Scion the tactic of striding up to the Gilgard and demanding a champion from the Sherank—that approach was quite counter-productive, as one of my great-uncles had discovered. He was posted in the great marketplace, in small pieces, over a period of several years, with the compliments of Lord Kishr. What the other Scions had done, I had no way of knowing. Nobody knew. Me? I hid.

  I crept first along narrow tortuous alleys where only a few early fires added their smoke to the general stink. It looked like a whole section of the city had been razed to the ground and built over with sticks and straw and broken masonry, hovel against hovel, into one sprawling continuous honeycomb of squalor. I saw few people at that hour, and every one I saw sent me scuttling into the nearest shadow. One figure in particular, hunched and hooded, kept appearing behind me, or on one of the little cross-alleys, or even ahead of me; it took me some time to realize that nearly everyone in Gil looked like that.

  As the dawn progressed dangerously, I found myself wandering into a sector where the makeshift hovels gave way to stone buildings towering as many as six or seven floors above street level, really very impressive until I realized the state they were in. They were the the sordid wreckage of the ancient Gil; the scars of old damage might have been unrepaired since the invasion, and the rare rebuildings in brick and wormy wood were also on the point of collapse. The streets were deeply puddled, scummed with raw sewage. Rubbish lay everywhere in blankets and mounds. All of the landmarks I had carefully memorized had disappeared. I was lost.

  There were more people moving about this quarter, which worried me, but there were also more possibilitie
s for concealment. Many of the buildings looked deserted; screes of rubble blocked the alleyways here and there, in front of promising cavities in the thickness of collapsing walls. Under stairways, inside abandoned yards, deep in the shadows of half-exposed cellars—it seemed one could hide an army here, not to mention one short hero. After a hasty scout around, I chose a prime spot near the mouth of a dark alley, where a rockfall from one of the buildings had partially demolished a tiny shed. It was cramped and mucky, but by sitting against the rear wall I could see out into the main street without being seen myself.

  I felt sick enough, and my covert felt secure enough, that I actually curled up in the rubble and slept. Around midday, I was wakened by a commotion in the street. Someone had obligingly parked a wain in front of my hiding place, but I crept forward and peered cautiously through the slatted side. A Sherkin patrol was riding by, and the Gilmen were either scattering or flattening themselves against the house-fronts. Over their bowed heads, I could see a caped and helmeted man on horseback and could hear others calling to him in the rough consonantal growl of Sheranik; he was the first Sherkin I had seen above ankle-level.

  After he rode out of sight, I crept back into the furthest corner of my shelter, grinning to myself. So this was fear, true fear, the genuine stamped-in-the-selvedge, scratched-in-the-wet-clay article. I had been afraid before, many times—you do not survive six months of the Flamens' training programme without a number of bad moments—but this was different. This was the real thing.

  By Oballef, the rest of that day passed slowly! I entertained myself by working on my attire, attacking it with handfuls of muck, abrading my cloak with a rock, rubbing mud and dust into the pores of my face—but I didn't enjoy myself. I was cold, and desperately hungry after four days of seasickness; I was also depressed by everything I saw. When at last the drab day limped to a close, I waited until the darkness was complete, and then waited a little more. Finally, too hungry to put it off any longer, I emerged cautiously from my hiding place. A few Gilmen trudged by, but nobody looked at me. Down the black street, a dimly-lit sign announced an inn.

  It was not prepossessing, but cooking smells battled bravely with the stench outside and drew me in. The door opened on to a large smoky room filled with long tables, dismal but warm, and already crowded. Nobody looked up. The other customers hunched over their bowls, muttering drearily to each other or spooning stew into their mouths with no appearance of pleasure. When I sat hesitantly down at an empty table, the innkeeper slapped a bowl of stew and a mug of beery-smelling liquid in front of me, then left me alone. That cheered me up—until I tasted the stew.

  While I picked at the clots of unidentifiable gristle floating in my bowl, my eyes were caught by an old man crouched in the opposite corner. He was staring at me fixedly with one bloodshot eye; where the other used to be was an empty socket rimmed with sores. Deep gouges ran down both sides of his face, lifting the corners of his lips into a permanent smirk. He was drooling.

  He waved at me with an arm that ended in a pucker of scar tissue instead of a hand. I looked away. Of all the demoralizing objects I'd seen that day, he could well have been the worst, with the notable exception of the Sherkin patrol. When I looked again, he was stumping in my direction on a crude wooden leg and a twisted real one, head lolling on his shoulders. He sat down at my table and leaned that ghastly face close to mine. He smelled very bad, even for a Gilman.

  "I've been waiting for you," he croaked.

  I sighed and moved minutely along the bench. He followed.

  "I thought you'd never come," he added, spraying generously into my dinner. I stared at the bowl and pushed it away.

  "You're mistaken," I said politely, "we're strangers."

  "You're no stranger. It's been a while since the last one, though."

  "What are you talking about?"

  He screwed up his face as if calculating where to bite. "You know."

  I was suddenly afraid that I did know; either that, or the cross-purposes we were talking at were uncannily well matched. "Tell me what you mean," I whispered.

  He glanced around and leaned even closer. "I mean—that I know who you are."

  * * *

  4

  I FROZE INSIDE—the old man continued to watch me with that jugular-first look on his face.

  "All right," I whispered. "Who am I?"

  He didn't answer. Silently, he delved through layers of rags at his neck and brought out a small object on a tarnished chain. He held it close to my eyes, cupping it in his palm so that it was hidden from the others in the room. It was a tiny silver figurine, a woman, the only beautiful thing I had seen all day. Moreover, it was a miniature of the Lady—something worn only around the necks of the Flamens in Gil. It was brightly polished, unlike the chain, and gleamed against the setting of his dirt-encrusted palm. He chuckled soundlessly and pushed it back into its hiding place.

  "Who are you?" I whispered.

  "Come with me and I'll tell you—Scion. It's up to you."

  He jerked his head towards the door, then heaved himself up from the bench and hobbled out without looking back. Nobody's eyes followed him except mine; he may as well have been invisible. When the door had closed behind him, I settled thoughtfully back on to the bench.

  Marori's words came to me. Trust no one. Everyone is an enemy. It was true, I told myself, the old man's appearance was not one to inspire confidence; also, he had recognized me immediately for who and what I was, which made him a source of potentially terrible danger. However, he had shown me the unique insignia of a Flamen of the Lady in Gil, a turn of events that nobody, including Marori, could have predicted. As far as the Exiles knew, the Sherank had wiped out the Gil priesthood entirely within a month of the invasion.

  I could see only two options: to take the chance of betrayal and listen to what he had to say, or to kill him quickly, before he had a chance to expose me to the nearest Sherkin patrol. Still undecided, I rose and headed for the door.

  The street, hazily lit by the one smoking lantern on a pole, appeared at first to be empty, but then a shadow moved by a heap of rubble. It was the old man, beckoning impatiently. I hesitated on the doorstep.

  The old man deplored my indecision, judging by the disgusted noise he made in his throat before he turned and plunged with surprising agility into the mouth of an alley across the way. That settled the question—whether I'd need to silence him or not, I could not risk letting him out of my sight.

  Heart in mouth and hand over nose, I followed the old man's grotesque lead into a labyrinth of narrow, winding lanes, becoming steadily more miserable. The night was freezing, and stank with the pools of filth in the road. Rickety tenements loomed above me on both sides, their dark windows watching me with the eerie, intent stare of the blind. The alleys were utterly empty of people; only the shadows seemed alive. The old man flitted silently ahead of me like a dark spirit.

  At last he stopped before a cavernous entrance lacking a door, looked back to make sure I saw him, and vanished inside. I followed him, but nervously, worried that he was leading me into a trap, half-convinced that I should kill him while I still had the chance. Caution demanded that I do so; compassion—and curiosity—suggested not. I hesitated on the threshold, hand on the hilt of my swordstick.

  The old man took no notice, but went on as if confident I would follow. I followed. He led me up a staircase, perilous with age and rot, into a darkness blacker than I believed possible. Up and up I climbed, guided only by the laboured breathing a few steps above me and the wall at my right hand; there seemed to be no banister at all on my left. Once I thought I heard a soft padding of feet in the dark chasm behind me; I assured myself that it was an echo, but the skin of my back itched with dread.

  Finally I sensed that the old man had stopped. There was a scratching, like a key in a reluctant lock, and then a door swung slowly open to allow a dim wedge of light to creep on to the landing. I followed the old man inside.

  And stopped short in
surprise. The room was not the filthy, sordid chaos I had come to expect after one day in Gil. By lamplight I could see that the floor was clean and polished, and scattered with thick-piled carpets. Tapestries covered the walls, heavy with metallic golden traceries separating woven scenes of life in the old Gil. The air was warm and blue with incense. From behind a gilded screen came a tentative plucking of harp-strings and a soft tenor voice humming a phrase of music. The old man hushed me with a finger on his lips, and beckoned me towards the screen.

  "No, no, no!" cried a voice behind it. "Melody with the first finger, harmony with the fourth. I've told you a thousand times! Try it over from the half-mark. And if that third finger gets in the act again, I swear by the Lady I'll bite it off!"

  The old man coughed gently and disappeared behind the screen. The music broke off and was replaced by a shrill chorus of welcome. Shyly, I stepped around the edge of the screen.

  A middle-aged man in a clean but much-mended green robe was sitting on a carpet in the centre of a circle of children, all with harps in their hands. It appeared to be a music class. The teacher rose to greet my guide, giving me a hard look at the same time. "Is that the one?" he said to the old man. "Are you sure?"

  "Quite sure."

  The music teacher surveyed me sceptically, up and down, and shook his head. "Shorter than usual, wouldn't you say?"

  "By a span, at least."

  "Not very tidy in his habits, either."

  "Filthy as a Gilman, as the Sherank would say."