by K V Johansen
The pox, regardless of whether it would take the mild eastern or the dangerous southern course, began with an aching back and queasy stomach, Deyandara remembered that much, and then the swelling pimples in the mouth. Chieh watched Lug when he returned with a face like death but said nothing, refilling her cup and holding his hand under the table. Deyandara counted a dozen Grasslanders who seemed to be having trouble eating, choosing only the softest foods, picking at them, trying to hide the pain of chewing and swallowing. Others, like Ketsim, already showed a rash.
She was dining with the dead, she thought.
The drinking seemed set to go on and on. Ketsim’s bench-companions, tent guard, or whatever they were called and the Catairnans seemed set on trying to outdo one another. Lug sat slumped on the bench with his eyes shut, not making even a pretence of drinking any longer. Chieh slipped away at some point, leaving Deyandara feeling naked and small. She was gone a long time, came back looking grim and sickened to slide in between Lug and Deyandara again, taking up her earthenware cup and draining it.
“What?” Deyandara was emboldened to ask.
The Five Cities woman turned bleak eyes on her. “The houses,” she said. “They’re full of the dying and the dead. Those damnable traitor sons of his rode off and left them lying.” She murmured in Lug’s ear; he shook his head, looked at Deyandara, shrugged, and left again, came back carrying another jug of wine, which he poured for the warlord with some jest and a desperate grin. Ketsim drained his cup, refilled it, and waved for the jug to be passed on. Servants, a couple of young Praitans who weren’t folk of Dinaz Catairanach that Deyandara recognized, hurried to do so. When they tried to pour for Deyandara, who had long ago emptied her cup of water, Chieh put a hand over it and shook her head. “The lady’s had enough, I think. She has a long night ahead of her and she doesn’t want to sleep through it.” Deyandara cringed under her wink at her lord.
Ketsim rose not long after that, which seemed a sign for all to rise, most stumbling out the door, some helping the servants drag the benches to the walls, where they seemed prepared to sleep, as the boards of the tables and the trestles were carried out of the tower. He took her by the hand and kissed it, then hauled her close and kissed her, while the hall whooped and cheered. He smelt of wine, but he didn’t linger over the kiss, didn’t open his mouth on hers. She had a hard job not to recoil anyhow, thinking of the blisters within his mouth bursting, oozing . . . she managed only to stand unbowed and wooden. He didn’t seem to notice, took her hand again and tugged her away up the stairs. They were followed by raucous, singing Grasslanders, waving torches.
Andara help her, Andara save her, they didn’t—they weren’t—there were stories that the kings of Tiypur long ago had taken new-wed brides to their beds with witnesses, all the night, so that no one could deny the marriage had been consummated. Tiypur was in the west and so was the Great Grass. . . . She should have kicked her horse around and tried to flee so soon as Chieh cut her hand free. Her god Andara was far away, Ketsim beyond any justice of his, and Catairanach wouldn’t care; Catairanach had rejected her, Lin abandoned her, her brother would—her brother would use Ketsim as her husband, if it suited him, and it might, to have a strong king in the west, bound to him, except that Ketsim would die, Ketsim was dying. She knew she couldn’t take the pox again, no one had it more than once. . . . Her breath came in frantic pants and her ears rang; she was going to faint again.
They continued up the stairs through the second storey’s single room, an armoury and dormitory, with pallets and rugs and quilts scattered among baskets of arrows and bundled spears. Lug dodged ahead of them, to push open a trapdoor. They climbed through it and up to the upper floor under the eaves, shedding most of their escort behind them. It still smelt of clean straw from the new thatch. Here the only light was a candle, carried by Chieh. Even Grasslanders wouldn’t be such fools as to bring torches beneath thatch, she thought a bit drunkenly, and when Ketsim released her arm she huddled away to the nearest window and the cool night air. South. It looked south, where the waxing moon silvered the hills. Light bloomed around the room behind her, Chieh lighting more candles.
Ketsim spoke, sounding irritated. Chieh made some soothing reply and asked, “Do you want some help with your shirt, my lady? Your arm—”
“No,” she snapped.
“You could find a good many worse husbands in the hall down below,” Chieh retorted. “Or suffer your sister’s fate, which is what Marakand wanted for you. Be grateful to him.”
“Cattiga was my aunt,” she muttered under her breath, but Lug spoke, Chieh answered, and the trapdoor dropped behind the two tent guard with a slam, leaving her alone with the warlord.
“Deyandara.”
She had to look at him then. The bed was only a pallet on the floor with a strawtick on it, no grander than what his tent guard slept on below. He undid his belt, set boots and sabre aside, and sat, slowly and carefully, patting the blankets beside him.
“Come,” Ketsim said. “Sit. Talk.”
She shook her head. His brows lowered, lips turning down. A powerful man, a lord of a tribe, and he had this day lost that rule, seen his sons turn their backs on him. She shouldn’t be a fool. If she had been going to die in a grand gesture of defiance, she should have done it while there was someone to see. She crossed the room to the bed, shaking a little, and sat where he indicated, shoulders hunched.
“Catairanach,” he said. She waited. He waved a hand in what she realized was frustration. Almost she hoped he would shout for Chieh to come translate again. “Nabbani,” he said.
Catairanach was Nabbani? He wanted her to call Chieh, his Nabbani bench-companion? Foolish. He wanted to know if she spoke Nabbani.
“Colony-Nabbani, yes. A little,” she made haste to add, in case it would be useful not to understand, at some point.
He sighed. “Good, good.” Smiled, carefully and deliberately. “How old?”
“How old—how old am I? Seventeen winters.”
“Ah. Old enough.”
She scowled. “How old are you?”
He laughed then and slapped her back. “Old enough, little girl. Don’t worry. Deyandara is my fourth wife. They all happy till they die. Good husband, I.”
“How did they die?”
He frowned. “Maca, first wife, she die . . .” He frowned. “Baby. Long time since. Both we very young. Better that baby die then, I think, than grow to be this son. I not so—so tired, I kill him, now, ride after. Too much trouble. Sons always trouble. Better to be king of quiet land with good daughters, I think. Lysen had sickness, very long, very bad. I cry long time, brother take clan, I go with warlord, leave sadness behind, great lord. Governor of Serakallash, I was. Serakallashi wife, Adva, died in fighting, little daughter killed too, rebels kill her. She only five, very little, very sweet. Very sad. Not there, I with my lord in mountains. He dies too.”
“I’m not sorry for you,” she muttered in Praitan. “They’re all dead and it won’t do you any good, marrying me. Catairanach says I’ll never be queen.”
“Yes, queen for Catairanach,” he agreed, catching those few words. “We talk of Catairanach. She not come to bless. You call her and she refuse. You true Deyandara, not other girl?”
No humour in his look now. If she were some decoy, she could expect a short wedding night.
“Yes, I’m Deyandara. But—but Catairanach can’t approve a wedding like this. She won’t give her blessing for a wedding by force. Whatever you do on the Grass—”
“Hah, on the Grass your brother cut off—” he grinned and made a gesture that left her in no doubt what was to be cut off, “if he catch. Or you do,” he added. “More likely you, eh, if you good Grasslander woman? But not little Praitan girls. Not Praitan kings. Weak folk, Praitans. Weak gods.”
There was a knife in her sling. It probably wasn’t very sharp.
“Catairanach,” he said again and, his face serious, touched hers with his fingertips. She flinched away. “She c
urses us,” he said, and touched his own face.
“The pox,” she said.
“Yes. It comes, the burning. I feel it. Very sick. Very tired. They come from villages, they say, Praitans curse us, many die, but Chieh, others, they know it, they say the pox, from the sea, from the desert. Fevers in the dinaz, fevers in my hall. They start to die, my folk, this week, here. But I marry you, goddess blesses, land is good, happy wife, we live. Can be good king, was good lord of Serakallash. You see?”
She shook her head. “It won’t work. Catairanach won’t—” But if he didn’t believe that, he didn’t have any use for her. Beyond the obvious. She drew up her knees, made herself small, and felt she was back on that hillside in the rain, with the brigands—outlaws of the Duina Catairna, her own folk—debating her death at their fire. And no Ghu to come throwing stones at them and cut her free, no Ahjvar . . . her hand went to her throat, the animal heads of the torc and the spot between them his blade had pricked. No Marnoch, waiting, trusting she’d come back. She blinked furiously until the heat of tears faded. Ketsim was watching her. He looked old, older than he maybe was, and tired, as he said. He touched her face again, the dimpled scars of the eastern pox, which had been bad enough for her, down her throat.
“Little leopards,” he said. “A kitten, I think. Soft claws.” Down to circle her nipple with a thumb, cup her breast. She couldn’t breathe. “Go to sleep, little Praitan kitten,” he said. “Too tired, too sick, for a fourth wife tonight. If Deyandara’s goddess has no blessing even now, we all die, I think. Deyandara too, if her king dies. No one else will have her. I say so. Lug knows to do it.”
He fumbled with the blanket, eyelids sagging. After a moment she helped him, covering him like a child before she crept, quietly as she could, to the window.
How soundly did they sleep below? She sat, good arm hugging her knees, waiting. The singing had long died away; would they sleep, or did they keep a watch? If she could get to a horse—no, better to climb the wall. With one arm? Would Catairanach send a fog to hide her again, if she prayed, if she begged?
The trapdoor rose, carefully, without a creak or a thump, and Chieh appeared.
Deyandara raised a face embarrassingly tear-stained, wiped it on her sleeve, and glared defiance.
Chieh went to her lord, knelt and felt his forehead, shook her head and came to Deyandara.
“He’ll sleep the night away, and probably the best thing for him. Barley-spirit in his wine. He’s dying, isn’t he? It is the bloody pox they’ve had here since the winter, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Lug’s taken the fever now,” Chieh said, and sat down beside her. “We’ve been married twenty years.”
Chieh didn’t look old enough for that, but Deyandara didn’t say so. Couldn’t make herself say she was sorry, either, when the man had orders to kill her if Ketsim died.
“My father did inoculations,” said Chieh. “You know about that? You take scabs from someone, best someone with the eastern pox, but even if it’s the southern you can, and—”
“I’ve heard. People die. People who weren’t sick, before.”
“Not very often. Hardly at all. Just—once in a while. My brother did. The only one my father treated who ever did. So he stopped. And I had the southern pox, but not the bleeding strain, and I lived. But I remember watching him. I know how it’s done. When they first talked of disease spreading, six weeks ago, it must have been, I said to Lug, I can fix you so you don’t die of this. You’ll be sick a bit, but you won’t die. And he said, no bloody way was I sticking his leg with someone else’s pus, and I didn’t argue.” She was silent a while. “Those bodies out in the houses—the living are rotting with the dead. You can’t recognize faces. Friends. And the damned Praitans, the servants are sneaking away, and the ones that came over to Ketsim willingly, they’re most of them as safe as you or I. They’ve had it, and still they’re refusing to bury the dead. Saying they won’t touch cursed bodies and they’re not their dead. Treacherous bastards. They’re waiting for us all to die so they can seize the duina themselves. There’s ghosts out there, and the living, all weeping together.”
“Go back to Lug,” said Deyandara. “He needs you. I don’t. I’m not going to leap out the window.”
“You remember who your friends are,” Chieh said. “You’ll be a bone thrown among the dogs without me to look after you, once Ketsim goes to the road.”
“Where’s Pagel?” she asked. “The soothsayer. You said Ketsim kept him.”
Chieh shrugged. “They’re saying the Red Masks took him when they went. He’d have been no use to you anyway; Ketsim was forcing so much of whatever that hellbrew was, into him, that he had the tremors and twitches like an old man. His wits weren’t in any better shape. No great loss.” She stood up. “I wouldn’t betray my lord. He’s been a good friend to me these long years, he’d have been no cruel husband to you, and many a girl’s faced worse than an old man in her bed, but he’s not got many days before the Old Great Gods call him and I’ve got to look to my future. So you remember, girl, you remember tonight. I was your friend.”
“I do remember.” She remembered Fairu, who didn’t like her and had been going to switch horses to lead the supposed Red Masks after himself to save her, and Mag, who would have lured them with her wizardry, knowing it was her death, and Marnoch, most of all Marnoch. And Ghu, and Ahjvar. She touched the animal heads of the torc. Leopards. The pommel of Ahjvar’s sword was a leopard’s head. Chieh crept away again. After a while she tried the trapdoor, setting a candle quavering in the draft on the floor, but there was a bed made up right at the landing of the stairs below, where Chieh sat bathing Lug’s face and chest with water in the light of another candle, singing softly in the Grasslander language, while he tossed and turned in his fever, so she lowered the trap softly as she could and went back to her window.
Maybe she slept, sitting there. She must have, because she grew stiff and her hips ached, and her shoulder. Water flowed around her, cool and clean. She wasn’t surprised to see Catairanach standing by Ketsim’s bed, mist eddying around her feet, water rippling the floor. The goddess turned, a shimmer of blue gown and brown hair that flowed down into the water, became the water, coiling around the room.
“You aren’t meant for him,” the goddess said. “I sent you for the Leopard. Where is he?”
“He went to Marakand to kill the Voice. You told him to.”
“The Voice is dead. He should have come here.”
“I’m not answerable for him,” Deyandara snapped. She should have bitten her tongue. Her fear was worn out, nothing left. “I’m sorry, Catairanach.”
“He will come,” the goddess said. She looked down at the sleeping Grasslander. “He will. He must. I’ve seen it. You didn’t give yourself to this one?”
Didn’t she know? Deyandara felt her face heating. “‘Giving’ wasn’t going to come into it. But no, he’s ill, too ill, he said. He fell asleep. Where were you? Why did you let this happen? How could you abandon your folk this way?” The last came out almost a wail, and she muffled her sudden sob on her arm, because maybe it was a dream, and maybe it wasn’t.
“I have abandoned no one,” the goddess hissed, and for a moment she seemed to tower to the peak of the roof overhead. “Least of all you, last child of Hyllau, foreign-born though you are. The Lady of Marakand is great, and she hampers me in everything I reach to do, she and her wizard slaves. They sing and raise their foreign spells against me so that I barely have strength to leave my waters. She thinks she will come to set words against me in the end, if we do not retake our land, and my spring will be dry and I will be no more—but not yet. Not yet, and not ever, now that her army is fled, carrying hidden disease back to her city. Within her walls, her folk will burn in fevers and die bleeding and rotting in their beds. In Marakand’s streets the pox will make itself a nest and never leave, and the yards will stand empty, the markets and the mines fall silent, the fields grow weeds, and it will be long
before she has the strength or the gold or the men to think of conquest again. But this,” a hand flicked dismissively at Ketsim, who moaned and twisted in his blankets, “this is not my doing. I only make the way easy for it, a little, as I can. This is his curse on the blood of Hyllau and through the kings of the land, the land. Our weakness. This is Catairlau’s legacy. We can all be thankful for it at last.”
She dwindled to a human woman again, squatted down, and put a hand on Ketsim’s forehead, as Chieh had done. Whispered something, breathed on him. Not, Deyandara thought, any blessing of healing. She edged away as the goddess crossed, her pace slow as though she waded in water, to join her at the window. The stars were fading, the moon near setting.
“You don’t yet know what it is to be a mother,” Catairanach said at last.
There wasn’t much answer she could make to that. She didn’t know what it was to have a mother, either.
“It is sorrow. To see what you love taken from you by the world, battered and twisted, changed. I tried to keep her with me, within my heart, but a child cannot grow so. He had gone. He was a wanderer, and I knew it, I knew he would not stay, and he did not. I tried, so long, to keep her safe in my waters, years and long years, lives of men, but finally I had to give her out to the world, and the world, the folk, would not understand that she could not be like they were, that she was meant to be different. How could she not be? She was my child, and his. They came to me, again and again, to complain of her, but they would not believe when I told them she was only willful, a little selfish, and what child is not? She only needed them to love her and guide her, and she would have grown straight and true. They were too harsh, too jealous of her. And in the end she would not listen even to me, and so she set her feet on a mistaken path. She was betrayed by the one who should have stood faithful at her side, and he destroyed her.”