Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  "Revered Bekri?"

  "Yes, Lord of Gil?"

  I hesitated. Don't abdicate yet, is what I wanted to say. I'm not a good peg for your hopes to hang on. I could be caught or killed at any moment, I could fail abysmally in my mission. Don't neglect your other options. Don't depend on me. But what I did say was: "I think Jebri is right. You must make every effort to contact Hawelli and restrain him from doing anything impulsive."

  Calla pushed her hood back and glared at me as fiercely as she ever had. Bekri's reaction was far more disturbing; he opened his eye slowly, and sat up straight. He looked ancient again. He lifted his one whole arm and sketched decisively in the air the formal acquiescence of a Flamen to a Scion of Oballef. This was the disturbing part: the variant he used should only have been signed to a reigning Priest-King in Gil. Jebri did not react, and I did not recover in time to return the gesture, or to protest against it, before Bekri spoke out loud.

  "You heard, Jebri Flamen? Lord Tigrallef's intention is quite clear. So—we must then try to find Hawelli; and also, I suppose, to find out who his confederates were in today's escapade. Is that your wish, my lord? Jebri, start by finding out who is especially skilled with the dart-tube; also, check with whom Hawelli has been spending time lately. Corri may be able to help. Or Sibba. Calla?"

  Calla shook her head stiffly. "I've seen very little of Hawelli. If you'll remember, Revered Bekri, I have been assigned to duty with Lord Tigrallef for some weeks now."

  He transferred his sharp eye to her. "Yes, of course. Well then, do your duty. Take him down for supper. The shull's rather tasty tonight." He smiled, closed his eye again and leaned back on the sofa. The scars put on his face by the Sherank were suddenly less notable than those left by time, age and years of sorrow. I pulled at Calla's arm and we walked softly to the door, as softly as if Bekri were sleeping. Jebri went out with us, leaving the old man alone in the council chamber.

  We trooped down the stairs, the three of us, without speaking. On the landing that led to the communal kitchen, Jebri stopped us. "Are you sure you knew nothing of Hawelli's plot, Calla?" he asked.

  Calla shrugged. "Nothing, Second Flamen," she said. "It was a piece of foolishness. I'd never have been party to it."

  He nodded too many times, looking like an officious little gold- merchant I'd seen on one of my visits to the Sathelforn market. Then, with a respectful sign of leave-taking in my direction (though not, thank the Lady, one for a reigning Priest-King) he continued down the stairs. Calla lingered meaningfully on the landing. When Jebri was out of earshot, she turned on me furiously.

  "Why did you do that, Tig? You were the one who stopped me going after him. Now you've set the Web in motion against him. Why?"

  "You mean Hawelli?"

  "Of course I mean Hawelli, you fishbrain. Who else could I mean?"

  I began to pull the door open, but she slapped my arm down and put her back against the jamb. "Why?" she repeated.

  I sighed. "Calla, I have nothing against Hawelli. I must admit that I like him for what he did today, even if it was complete madness."

  "What do you mean, madness?" she flared. I caught my breath at the inconsistency of it. "Is it madness to keep hold of a few grains of dignity? A rag or two of pride? Maybe we need more of madness then, and a little less of this." She slumped dramatically into the blows-expected posture of a Gilman on the street.

  "Stop it, Calla. You know that we're not ready to take on the Sherank."

  "We'll never be ready," she said bitterly.

  "That may or may not be so," I said, "but are you hopeless enough that you're ready to get yourself killed?"

  "Of course not," she began, flaming, but she stopped short.

  There was a pause while she looked through me, then she closed her eyes. She leaned her head back against the door-jamb, tilting her chin upwards so her face was foreshortened. The skin of her throat was stretched tight; for the first time since I had known her, she looked tired and vulnerable. "Sometimes," she said softly.

  "What?"

  "I said, yes, yes, sometimes. Sometimes I'm that hopeless. Anyway, there are things you don't know. Things I can't tell you. Sometimes I get confused."

  "Oh." Now I was confused. This was not the abrasive, competent Calla of most days, nor the Calla who nursed me tenderly through a disgusting illness, nor yet the Calla who laughed with me at our lessons and treated me, now and then, like a comrade. This was a despairing stranger with Calla's face and eyes that wouldn't meet mine. I wondered if this one was the real face, the real face that hid behind the others.

  "Growing up under the Sherank—it's a hopeless business, Tig," she went on. "The Web gives us a measure of pride, makes us feel like we're fighting back in a small way. But what do we really do? We survive, some of us. We manage to fool the Sherank in little things, which makes us feel clever. But in the end, nothing changes. Nothing will ever change. I know that, better than most."

  "But Hawelli—"

  "Hawelli thinks things can be changed; the problem is, he thinks any change will be for the better, even if it's for the worse."

  "What?"

  She sighed impatiently, with a fractional return of spirit. "I mean, he would rather get the entire population of Gil slaughtered in the course of some grand heroic gesture than to have us go on like this. Something about our dignity. Most of the time, I think he's a lunatic. Sometimes I think he's the only sane Flamen on the island."

  "What do you feel right now?"

  "Tired, just tired. I shouldn't be saying these things anyhow. Let's not talk any more."

  "Wait a second." She dropped her chin to look at me as I hesitated. "How about the Lady—and me? Don't you feel there's any hope there?"

  "I don't know, Tig. I follow my orders because that's part of the game that keeps me alive. That's all. The Flamens say a Scion is the only thing that can save us, so I believe them. Sometimes. At any rate, it's worth a try."

  "And if I fail?"

  "Then we've lost nothing. To be honest, we have nothing to lose."

  I sighed. "I suppose that's as much enthusiasm as I deserve. But about Hawelli—"

  She shut her eyes again and let the corners of her mouth droop, as if mortally exhausted, and bored as well. "All right, go ahead, for what it's worth."

  "I stopped you going after him because I think you were prepared to kill him. Is that correct?"

  The eyes remained closed. "Maybe. If I could. And if he wouldn't stop."

  "Well, I couldn't let you. Bekri's right about that: how can we hope to destroy the Sherank if we start by destroying each other?"

  She opened her eyes at that and spoke with terrible sadness. "You've led a sheltered life, Tig."

  "As for sending the Web after him," I ploughed on, "it's because I do believe there is hope for Gil. The Lady is real, Calla; the magic works. If we find her, we will win. There is hope. It's just a pity that so much depends on me." She seemed about to comment on that, and I hurried to cut her off. "So I have to try—and I need time. I need Hawelli to defer any of those grand heroic gestures of his until I've tried and failed. Then it doesn't matter what happens."

  She grimaced. "Really. What would Bekri think of that?"

  "Bekri thinks the same."

  "How do you know?"

  "I saw it in the council chamber. Haven't you seen how he's aged in the last few weeks? He's only holding on long enough to see how I do. He thinks nothing else matters."

  "That's not like Bekri," Calla scoffed. "The Web is his life."

  "His life is nearly over. In any case, I think he designed the Web as a tool to help the Scion when the right Scion came along, nothing more than that. And he thinks, bless his heart, that I'm the right Scion. He thinks that if I fail, Gil is finished. You saw the gesture he gave me?"

  "Yes, but—" Calla began, then stopped short. A little of the burden I was feeling appeared in her face. She slid away from the door and pulled it open. "Don't talk of this to any of the others," she whispered
fiercely as she drew me into the warm kitchen. "They still think the Web is worth something."

  * * *

  14

  I WAS ARRESTED two days later.

  This was not due to any real mistake on my part, nor on the Web's. Treachery was not involved. Nor was I even arrested in my role as Scion of Oballef and dragged off to a private audience with Lord Kekashr. It was nothing so dignified. Nevertheless, it could have been fatal, and I did not understand until much later the reason why it was not.

  My main problem in those days of waiting was restlessness. It was not comfortable being poised on the brink of a quest, and I was at the point where, having accepted the Web's help, I also had to accept the Web's timetable. The scullery scheme was a good one, I knew that very well; so good that, had the Flamens-in-Exile possessed a feather's weight of sense among them, they'd have thought of it decades ago and put dish-washing high on the heroic curriculum. This was the scheme's great beauty: assuming the old palace plans in the archives were still accurate, there was a passage on the other side of the scullery wall that would give us direct access to the between-ways, with an absolute minimum of danger. That was a long way from finding the Lady, but it was a good, efficient start.

  Still, the final stages of preparation demanded patience. Calvo, the scullery master, was unobtrusively moving trustworthy people on to the shift that Calla and I would join; plans were being rehearsed to give us the few moments we'd need to reach the passageway door unobserved, and to cover for us afterwards. These things took time and occupied the attention of my erstwhile teachers, and none of them provided anything for me to do with myself. As my companion-elect, Calla was also supposed to be resting; it didn't suit her either.

  "Faruli says the delay will do you no harm," Mysheba said to comfort me. For want of anything better to do, Calla and I were sitting bored in the kitchen, pulling maggots out of a pot of fresh dirt from the marketplace. "You're not long over the Gil-gut, my lord, you're still looking drawn."

  "The better to pass as a Gilborn," I said grumpily. I had hoped to start at the scullery within a day or two; Jebri had just informed me it would be six at the earliest, and we'd have to work in the scullery for at least one full day before striking out for the between-ways. My training programme in the Web's kitchen had taught me, among other things, that I hated washing dishes.

  Calla sniffed irritably and said, "Perhaps you'd like to try a different entry to the Gilgard? The main gate, for instance?"

  "No, thank you, I can wait." I flicked a few maggots off my fingers into the writhing contents of a large colander. Proportionately speaking, those maggots were probably the fattest creatures in Gil, except for the Koroskan mercenaries. Mysheba knew a hundred ways to make them edible. This lot was destined to become a kind of pâté. I buried the thought of lunch.

  It was then that Mysheba made her fateful suggestion. "Why don't you go on a picnic, my lord? See a bit of the countryside? I'm sure Faruli would approve—he said you needed exercise and fresh air, and you're not getting either of those in here, Oballef knows. Calla, why don't you take Lord Tigrallef out along the Malvi Road?" She picked up the colander and poked a few climbers back down among their brethren.

  "It might improve his temper," Calla said thoughtfully.

  "Is there any risk?"

  "Not if we're careful. Don't worry, I won't let anything happen to you."

  "Thank you so much." I hated it when she dropped back into being my nursemaid. But the time was weighing on both of us and the inaction was giving my imagination, overly fertile at all times, too much poisoned compost to grow on. A day in the countryside might be a pleasant leafy distraction. "All right," I said, "we'll go."

  An hour later, dressed for the street and armed with a bag of bread and soured-milk cheese (the maggot pâté wasn't ready yet, bless Oballef), we set off. My spirits were already higher, especially since Calla was also in a better mood and disposed to be friendly. It was not easy to hang my head and shuffle along like a beaten old man; spring had followed me to the island.

  This is not to say that the suburbs of Gil were any prettier or more salubrious than the centre. The Malvi Road, once broad, paved and tree-lined, had become a sort of linear mud-flat, where the ruts from the morning wains were slowly congealing in the sun. The trees and pavements were gone, the hovels had encroached on both sides until in places the road was just barely wide enough for two wains to pass each other without their wheels locking. Here and there it broadened again into a small market, where peasants from the countryside peddled pallid vegetables from the tailgates of their wains. They looked no healthier than their urban counterparts.

  Eventually, however, the hovels thinned and trees began to appear. The air became fresher, or at least the stink lightened; there were even a few early spring flowers by the roadside. Just before the old Swan's Neck, where the road curved around what had been an ornamental lake, Calla pulled me over to the verge. She glanced about. No one else on the road was paying us any attention.

  "There's a Sherkin checkpoint just around the corner. To be safe, we'll have to leave the road here." She led me between one ramshackle cottage and the ruins of another, evidently used as combination rubbish dump and pisspit. Beyond these was a random sprouting of little huts, most of them cobbled together from weathered planks and disparate bits of garbage. Some of them were quite ingenious.

  I stopped to look with fascination at one made entirely of sherds from large water pots, cemented with a kind of lime plaster into a bee-hive shape. Bits of metal glittered like jewels here and there in the plaster. Through a round hole in the wall, an indistinct face peered out at me suspiciously.

  "Don't slow down," said Calla.

  "But it's rather good," I said, looking back. "I like the mosaic effect over the door-hole."

  Calla grinned. "The best things in Gil these days are made from garbage."

  "A new art form," I said, struck by the idea. "A whole new architecture. Look at the roof on that one—an old row-boat. This is exciting, Calla; I wish I'd brought a notebook."

  "You're strange, Tigrallef," she said.

  Now this had been said to me many times before, including by Calla. The odd thing was, for once it was said with neither resignation nor scorn, but as if strangeness were one of my better points. You heard her wrong, said the usual voice in the back of my head, but suddenly the sunshine, the trees, even the grubby hen-scratched vegetable patches among the dilapidated hovels took on a peculiar bright intensity, a kind of glamour. I trailed happily along behind her, resisting the impulse to pick her some flowers. They were scruffy little flowers anyway.

  She made a sudden sharp turn behind an abandoned cottage and dove into what looked like an impenetrable thicket. I followed her on faith, and found myself at the beginning of a path winding through the undergrowth, almost a tunnel. The branches met over our heads, lined with gravid buds; they would be in leaf soon. The air was warmer and full of fresh earthy smells. Calla took my hand and drew me along.

  "There's a place on the hill where it's safe. One of the ghost places. The Sherank haven't been there since they destroyed it, which means a long time ago, and the local people are afraid of it. Come on, I'm hungry. It's not far."

  "Not far" translated into almost an hour's energetic scramble. Although the path had charm, it was not easy going, and it disappeared altogether after a while. We pushed on through a sward of waist-deep grasses, up crumbling terraces of rubble where a hamlet had once clung to the hillside, on to an upland of dense brambles and scrub cut by an indistinct trail, by which time I was feeling all the effects of my recent illness, and halfway sorry we had come; but when we pushed through the last of the brambles and found ourselves on a massive stone podium, mossed and shaded, my malaise vanished. We were in a dimple between two peaks of the hilltop, with a view towards the Gilgard to the north and Malvi Point to the west. Beyond the far edge of the podium, we could see the ocean stretching tranquilly to the horizon. Everything was familiar.
>
  "I know this place," I said wonderingly.

  "How can you? You've never been here before."

  "But I know it anyway. I've read about it. It's the Contemplation Gardens—built by Oballef Third, I think it was, and renovated by Tallislef Second about four hundred years ago." I walked to the centre of the podium and rotated slowly, fitting the details of the ruins into what I remembered from the archives.

  "The minstrels would sit there, Calla; there was music from sunup to moonset, every day of the year. Over on that side there were stone benches under an arbour, and over there a colonnaded court where you could sit quietly and look at the sea—" I broke off and skated excitedly across the mossy stones. There had been a famous mosaic pavement inside that court, chrysoprase and alabaster and polished coral, one of the great art treasures of Oballef Third's reign. Gone now, of course, although a few fragmentary tesserae still lay among the shattered column drums. I squatted down and rooted in the dust.

  Calla followed and sat down on the ivied stump of a column. Smiling up at her, I put into her hand an alabaster tessera, whole except for one crushed corner. "That might bring something on the black market," I said.

  "Doesn't this bother you? Seeing it now and knowing what it used to be?"

  "It doesn't, somehow. I've accepted what happened. Does it bother you?"

  "How could it? We've never known it any different." She shivered and looked dubiously around as if she found the solitude menacing. "There's a strange feel about this place. I'm not sure now we should have come here."

  "Don't worry. The only ghosts here would be gentle and contemplative ones. And anyway," I expanded my chest dangerously, "I'm here to protect you."

  She laughed at that, not very tactful of her, but it broke the sombreness of her mood. I was glad to hear a real laugh from her, and didn't even mind that it was at my expense.