by K V Johansen
“Narva doesn’t think. He felt it. Truth in the blood, blood to bind us.” Tsuzas had the black, vacant look in his eye again. “It’s not a game, Sister. Never think that.”
“No, I suppose not.” But it seemed like it ought to be. Though there were tales of wizards who worked great magic in blood. She snorted, mind-numbingly weary and feeling that if she once started laughing at this, she would never stop. “So we’re blood brothers. I always wanted to be, but my brother and his friends said I was just a sissy little girl and couldn’t join.”
“Not blood brothers,” he said, with his eyes still ringed dark, looking up at her.
“What, then?” She couldn’t help the smile. “Blood cousins, maybe?”
Tsuzas shook his head, not smiling. He went to his ponies, rode back to her, looking a bit worn and weary himself. Anxious. The sun was setting, throwing long shadows over them, painting the stones with fire.
“What have you done?” she asked, soberly, wondering, some forbidden Narvabarkashi ritual, not meant for outsiders, some priestly secret…“Cold hells! You didn’t…that isn’t—” Attalissa save her, she remembered now.
“It was all I could think of. You’d have been dead before I got you back over the spur. Understand, I’ve seen a priestess die that way before, when I was small. One of the tribute assessors. She got lost in the mines, the working mines, wandered and wandered and came into the mountain’s heart. And the god said, through my father, poor man, leave her. So we did. And my grandfather stayed with her, and made me stay. To learn. What I should learn, he didn’t say. That a few hours is a very long time, for dying?” Tsuzas turned the horse’s head, said flatly, “The hut’s a few more miles, but it’s more sheltered. We’ll catch up with the herd on the way.”
No one she knew, was her first thought. Before her time. How old was Tsuzas, though, when it happened? She could wish the grandfather a slow death himself, making a child connive at murder. She felt sick again.
And her hand throbbed, at least a distraction from her leg. She swallowed, clicked her tongue at the pony until it shuffled into the jolting trot she’d been discouraging for days now. Caught up with Tsuzas.
“You married me,” she said, and heard her voice sounding quite reasonable, not accusing, not shrill with outrage. Calm.
“It was all I could think to do,” he said again. Eyed her sidelong, and that damned smile crept back. “Narva recognizes blood, after all. You could have done worse. At least I don’t beat my wives.”
“Wives! How many—?”
“None. Till now, I mean. Do you think I need more already? It’s not like you have a lot of children to look after.”
“I…I think you’re…” She could find no words. “I’m a priestess of Attalissa.”
“Yes, that was rather at the root of the matter, wasn’t it?”
“Celibate.”
“Big word.”
“It means—” She saw the smile broaden and bit her tongue. Determinedly kept her own face straight. But it was too ridiculous. “You can explain matters to my goddess, when she returns. You realize I’ll be thrown out of the temple?” That wasn’t ridiculous, that was serious. “I’ll be turned out.” All she’d ever dreamed of, all she fought to regain, lost.
“But you’ll be alive. Is Attalissa so unreasonable? If you keep your vows?”
“If you say I’m married, how am I keeping my vows?”
Tsuzas shrugged, serious in turn. “Keep the spirit of your vows. At least she’s a goddess you can talk to and have her listen to what you say, judge the truth of your words and your heart for herself.”
Attavaia sighed. He hadn’t seemed the type of man to resort to force, or she would have been less willing to wait for him as a guide back at the ice field. But it was as well to hear it said, that he didn’t regard this marriage as giving him any rights.
“Of course, if you did change your mind…” He seemed irrepressible. “Better lawful marriage than unlawful lust.”
“I’m not feeling any unlawful lust at the moment.”
“As your lawful husband, I’m glad to hear that.” His smile deepened. “So, anyhow, I refuse to call my wife ‘Sister,’ and where we’re going, you’ll find yourself beset with sisters. What’s your name?”
Tsuzas’s family and the secret mines, the ones the temple thought it knew about, and didn’t, were reached around noon the next day, after a weary morning that seemed all climbing, braced forward in the saddle. Tsuzas walked, leading the ponies, and they all went at the yaks’ pace. There was frost in the air, and snow coming.
Attavaia stole a glance at her bandaged hand from time to time. It seemed too distant for a joke. Not something that changed her in any way. Except, somehow, it did. She was where no priestess of Attalissa could come, for all they had never even been fully aware of that fact—did that mean Attalissa too could hide some fold of the mountains and in it elude the wizard’s searching? And she was, somehow, bound to this man. About whom she knew nothing.
“Where’s your house?” Attavaia asked, when it seemed they were leaving even the thin brown grasses behind and about to start climbing the stone of the peak, with the undying snow not so far distant above. The dogs, at a whistle and a gesture, had turned the willing yaks aside, heading at what seemed an eager trot on the cows’ part for a larger herd, maybe two dozen, which grazed at the farther side of the steep valley, along with half a dozen ponies. A wealthy family, if these all belonged to the priests. The herd was watched over by a small figure on a pony. Boy or girl, she couldn’t tell. It waved, Tsuzas waved, the dogs nipped at the yaks’ heels, other dogs barked. Homecoming.
Except she saw no settlement, no solitary house, to come home to. Sheer rock, ridges, a herd of wild sheep picking a scrambling course…speckled hens scratching among the rocks, out of place.
“Here.” Tsuzas was enjoying himself. “The threshold of the first mine, of all the mines of the mountains.”
“Where?” Attavaia asked impatiently, not seeing any dark mine-mouth, either.
Tsuzas pointed.
He led her towards an overhang, where the mountain lunged out, shielding shadow, the darkness of night, of the Old Chapel when the lamps were extinguished.
“Under…?” Attavaia swallowed. “Is it safe?”
“The mountain hasn’t fallen on us yet.”
“You haven’t brought a priestess of Attalissa home yet.”
Tsuzas gave her a sidelong look, perhaps checking to see if she smiled.
“I’m not joking. Why would your god tell you—”
“He doesn’t tell.”
“Why would he let you know, however he does, that a priestess was coming, and then try to kill me?”
“No awareness,” Tsuzas said. “I did tell you that. Foreknowledge, without judgement of its consequences, even those he himself causes.”
“So all that rock could just come down and crush us, and then he’d wonder where his priests had gone?”
“Possibly. I don’t think it’s likely.”
“Attalissa save me,” Attavaia muttered under her breath. “Sera, help me. This is your service.”
The overhang seemed a mountain in itself. Under the overhang was a stone-walled corral and a stable against the mountainside, built of rough stone and almost impossible to tell from the natural wall of the cave, even seen close to. A small boy peered down from a loft, staring at them as warily as the furtive cat whose tail she had seen vanish up the ladder at their entrance. The boy came sliding down when Tsuzas called and was relieved of his basket of eggs, commandeered to tend the ponies. He studied Attavaia with wide, yellow-brown eyes, no smile, no words, but seemed competent enough as he took the reins from her, patting the dun’s neck. Tsuzas offered no explanation.
The house itself was harder to see in the twilight of the overhang than the stable, a cavemouth or perhaps mine entrance that had been filled, returning it to the look of the mountain, with only a narrow doorway left. Beyond, it opened out in small
, dark rooms, some with braziers or butter lamps burning, far warmer than she would have expected, but cold drafts blew in through cracks, black fissures in the walls. These were plastered white, to reflect what light there was, and painted. There were many images of what must be Narva, an inhuman-looking god: four-armed, blue-skinned, sharp-toothed. The eyes glittered, set with turquoise, jet, mother-of-pearl. They watched. She felt Narva watching and clenched her left hand, felt the cut burning. But he did nothing, other than to watch. Gloating, she imagined. Possessing her, now. Or perhaps, if she understood Tsuzas’s explanations of the level of the god’s existence, only confused, like a dog faced with too many smells.
Tsuzas had eight sisters, one older, the rest younger, all living in the family home; the eldest was married but had recently left her husband in Narvabarkash, bringing her two young boys to serve Narva, to carry on the priestly line. Tsuzas, murmuring that in her ear, did not sound as though that pleased him. All the sisters talked at once, leaving their work of spindles and looms and churns to crowd around her. And not all were there, two were out ranging the mountains, as Tsuzas so often did, she gathered. Their names passed her by in the chaos. There was Mother, quiet and calm, and a chattering woman Tsuzas called Auntie, whom Attavaia gathered was actually his father’s third wife and mother of five of the sisters, while the eldest, Teral, was daughter of a first wife now gone to the gods. His father was more recently dead. The terrible grandfather was a frail, bent old man, white-haired, whose hands and head trembled continually. The eyes were keen, though, peering up at her, down at her bandaged left hand, up again, yellow-brown like the little boy’s. And up, craning his head around because his neck would not quite straighten, at Tsuzas.
“She is no priestess of Sera.”
“I don’t think they have priestesses in the desert, Grandfather,” Tsuzas said easily, and he put a hand on Attavaia’s arm. Possessive, she thought, and almost struck it off, but the touch was quite light and as the grandfather swung his stare back at her, she was not so unhappy to be claimed, just then.
“A chosen maiden bearing the desert goddess to sleep in Narva’s bosom.” He sounded like he was quoting, but then he made a noise like a cat spitting. “Has Attalissa betrayed us all to this tyrant wizard and added the deserts to her own victims? She’s collecting defeated gods now? And we should be her jailers? I’ll see you dead, boy, before I let you prostitute what’s left of our freedom to Attalissa or her wizard paramour.”
“Grandpapa!” protested one of the sisters. “You shouldn’t use that kind of language.”
“Especially when we’ve a guest.”
“From town.” There was envy in that sister’s intonation.
Tsuzas only sighed, but his fingers tightened, ever so slightly, on her arm. Attavaia put a hand over his a moment. She could see him, dark eyes rather than light, but silent and wary, like the boy in the stable. Did the grandfather threaten so often the sisters didn’t hear? There had been venom in the words, and how much scarring did it take not to feel it any more?
“Sera was driven from her holy spring when Tamghat conquered her folk,” Tsuzas said. As they sat in the low-roofed herdsman’s hut, eating roast hare and partridge the night before, Attavaia had told him some of what passed in Serakallash, how she came to be carrying a dead lump of stone to the Narvabarkash, when she had her own slow-simmering and careful rebellion to prepare. “Sera sleeps. She charged Sister Attavaia, who fought for Attalissa in Lissavakail and for Sera in Serakallash, to carry her here, out of Tamghat’s sight, until Attalissa returns to fight the wizard. Treat her chosen servant with respect.”
“We all need to fight Tamghat together, brother,” Attavaia said, more mildly than she was inclined to. “If we don’t, the wizard will destroy our gods one by one.”
“Fighting. Narva hasn’t survived by fighting your Attalissa, and your Attalissa hasn’t done any fighting against Tamghat that I’ve noticed. Learnt from our lord, I’d guess. If you lie quiet, they don’t see you.” Grandfather gave her a yellow-toothed smile, not friendly. “Get used to it, or go serve Tamghat. Give us this Sera’s stone, and leave, before the wrath of Narva finds you.”
“I welcome her here, in Narva’s name,” Tsuzas said. “Narva admits her here, by my hand and blood. You have no right to deny her. And don’t, before all the Old Gods, threaten her,” he added, though that sounded more like the angry, defiant boy he might have been and less the priest.
“And that’s the final insult—don’t think I didn’t notice the moment you walked through the door. You have no right choosing a wife without my approval and no right before the god to be profaning yourself with such a one, I wonder Narva didn’t throw you off the mountainside like he did your father.”
“That’s enough!” Tsuzas’s mother straightened up from where she had squatted on her heels, stirring a pot on the brazier. “Leave the girl in peace, Ostap. And remember it was you kept Tsuzas here when he wanted to leave; it’s too late for you to deny him to Narva now.”
“Don’t mind Father Ostap, Sister,” Auntie chimed in. “His digestion’s bad and it puts him out of sorts. Tsutsu, stop trying to drag the girl away. She wants her dinner. Let the gods wait on it, they’re surely in no hurry after all this time.”
What seemed like a dozen work-roughened female hands, flashing jewelled rings and golden bracelets, caught at Attavaia, tugged her from Tsuzas to a low chair in a warm corner. Tsuzas watched darkly, leaning on a painted wall, arms folded. Not smiling. His sisters ignored him. His mother took him a bowl of stew first of all, but he shook his head and pushed away without a word, vanishing through a curtained doorway.
“It’s all right,” one of the sisters murmured to Attavaia, as Mother, since no one had given her any other name, pressed the bowl of stew on her instead. “He’s moody, but he gets over it. He takes himself far too seriously, and always thinks Grandfather means the things he says. He’s a dear, really.”
“Tsuzas or Grandfather Ostap?” Attavaia wondered, but the sister had been chivvied off to fetch bread and milk.
If she’d ever met a man who should run away godless to the caravan road and the mercenary’s life, surely this was one. The stew almost choked her, under Ostap’s eye, but she ate it to please Mother and spite him.
This was the main room of the house, the cooking hearth and the gathering place. The sisters dodged in and out about their business; the peevish-looking eldest, mother of the two boys, raised a surprisingly sweet voice in a weaving song in the next room.
There was an uncle, Umas, who sat, empty-eyed, rocking back and forth in his chair in the corner. Rocking and rocking and rocking. One of the sisters tucked a shawl more tightly around him, patted his head absently, like he was a pet. A white-eyed great-grandmother sat spinning and called the younger ones back to take up their spindles again, unheeded, as they giggled together, looking up at Attavaia as they poured out the tea and served it, Grandfather first, then the uncle, who had to have his hand folded around the cup and the cup guided to his lips. Then herself, as the guest. Tsuzas did not return, and Attavaia didn’t know whether to wait or go looking for him. The sisters, four of them bright in scarlet and indigo, crowded around her, cups in hand now, still giggling, asking questions, about Lissavakail, about the temple, about the embroidery patterns the townswomen worked for their shawls and coats. Innocent, girls’ questions, but they didn’t take the chill of Ostap’s words away.
Another sister, trousered and wrapped in grey and brown shawls, bow and quiver slung from her shoulder, strode in to say there was a patrol searching the village for weapons again and whose were the ponies in the stable. She brought the little boy with her, clinging close to her side, still silent. Perhaps silence was a perfectly normal reaction to this…this flock of aunts. Jays, Attavaia decided, and the little boy suddenly smiled at her, plunked himself at her feet.
“Stew?” asked that sister, whose name, Elsinna, Attavaia did catch, in the chorus of enquiry about affairs in the village and
news that Tsuzas had gone off chasing an oracle and returned with a priestess that he’d married, yes, married, and Narva alone knew why, but wasn’t it fun, to think Tsutsu had finally found a wife…no, it wasn’t a wife, it was a trick to fool the peevish old god, and serve him right. “If that’s stew, bring me some. I’m starved, I’ve had no breakfast.” She gave Attavaia a cool nod.
“People who go off hunting Tamghati and leave others to do the real work—”
“I wasn’t hunting Tamghati, we don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“It’s entirely your affair, of course,” Auntie said confidingly to Attavaia, continuing some conversation she wasn’t aware she was having. “We won’t think any the worse of you, dear, if you don’t give him children till after you’ve dealt with your wizard. Although it does seem peculiar to me, for him to marry in such a rush, when he’s been so set against the idea till now, and my own cousin’s two girls so willing. It’s not like there’s many would dare to come up here, and a true wife needs to live under Narva’s hand, not like that woman Umas married, who keeps herself and her boys in the village and calls herself a widow now. She’s only ever visited once or twice since the accident.”
“What accident?” Attavaia asked, out of a sort of horrified politeness.
“But is she pretty?” Great-grandmother’s voice rose querulously. “My Tsutsu should marry a pretty girl.”
“She’s got a sharp sword,” Elsinna answered, and for a moment her eyes met Attavaia’s and she grinned Tsuzas’s grin. “It’s like a rich man, Great-grandmama. A rich man is always handsome, and a woman with a good sword is always pretty.”
Great-grandmama dissolved into wheezing giggles, and Attavaia missed the tale of the accident. Something about Tamghat.
“Thank you,” Attavaia said firmly, setting her cup aside and reaching for her crutch. The little boy handed it to her. She levered herself up, dragged the saddlebag with the stone from Sera’s well in it over her shoulder.
“Where does she think she’s going?” Grandfather Ostap demanded of the world at large, unanswered. “That I should live to have one of Attalissa’s unnatural women under my roof, defiling my blood, and the god too lost in dreams to strike her down as she deserves…”