The Jaguar Knights

by Dave Duncan

  “Keep hoping, Muscles.” She turned to the humble Manuel and reported whatever she thought the reply should be.

  No expression showed on Lizard-drumming’s muzzle, of course, and Celeste frowned at the response. “He asks if you support the Hairy Ones who perform such terrible acts against his Emperor. I think Emperor is what they mean.”

  Whatever the truth, there could be only one reply. “Say that the King of Chivial is very much against the Distliards and strongly supports the noble Emperor and people of wherever this is. When he sends us home we will tell our King the true story.”

  “Don’t look so scrutable, Lynx! Be mighty. Kitty-cat is honored to have you as his guest. He’s hedging on sending us home.”

  Lynx sensed that Celeste was hedging too, suddenly. Was her Blade a better bet than her present owner or wasn’t he?

  “Tell him the first time you throw one of your tantrums he’ll get you straight back and welcome.”

  She told Manuel something suitable. Lizard-drumming replied. Celeste queried the answer.

  Eventually she said, “The great lord offers you rest and security for tonight. Tomorrow he will send word to the great family of Plumed-pillar, telling them that you have brought back his regalia. He thinks Plumed-pillar’s heir will load you with rich gifts in return. He’s fishing for something, but I don’t understand what!”

  “He may be threatening—I admitted to killing one of his buddies. Just tell him his generosity outshines the sun and the stars and can we go to bed now, please?” Lechery was not Lynx’s only aim, or even his main one, for fatigue sat on him like a cartload of rocks.

  Celeste spoke to Manuel. Whatever she said worked. Their host gave them leave to retire. He saluted his guest by touching the floor before him and then kissing his paw. Lynx responded in kind, and then demonstrated a courtly bow. Lizard-drumming purred in amusement and gave him one, graceful as a cat for all his size. Everything was very genteel and elegant, and a dozen torchbearers lighted the guests’ way through the grounds. Lynx walked on his toes.

  They arrived at a small guest house, containing a single sumptuous bedchamber, decorated with multicolored murals, but furnished sparsely, with mats and some baskets. Attendants were already laying out food. Celeste chased them all away, demonstrating that she had already learned a little Tlixilian. They closed the door behind them and Lynx flopped down on a mat, deathly tired. That Spirit Wind traveling really took it out of a man! He did not even want to eat.

  She said, “Where is this?” just as he said, “What in flames is going on?”

  He reached a hand for her. She stepped away.

  “Talk first!”

  And love later, he hoped. Once in Ironhall, long ago. Never at Court. Since then, five years of close-quarter longing. Celeste dulled the appetite for all other women, as Athelgar had been heard to admit more than once. He got over her eventually, but Lynx was forever bound and never would.

  “This is El Dorado.” He explained what little he knew of the geography.

  Unimpressed, she tossed her head. “Why was I brought here?”

  He explained about her brooch. She pouted when she heard how her other Blades had died in her defense, but did not give way to emotion. Celeste never did. Even her tantrums were staged.

  “That’s ridiculous! Now tell me how you’re going to get me out of here.”

  “No, you tell me what that overgrown mouser thinks is going on.”

  The result was a roaring row, but no ward had ever quarreled with her Blades as often or as fiercely as Celeste did, and she had always picked on Lynx more than on the other two. They had fought every day at Quondam. He was too weary to go stamping around the room as she did, but he could yell louder. If Lizard-drumming had posted guards outside, they would surely be amazed to hear a handmaiden shouting at her mighty conjurer lord.

  Celeste could be utterly unreasonable. “Of course you will get me out of here! You’re my Blade. That’s what you’re for. I have been waiting a whole month for you to turn up and rescue me!”

  “Then show me a map. Bring me some horses. Tell me which way the sea is and how we get over those mountains—Food? Port? Ships?” They could not even speak the language.

  She howled that he was useless, Blades were useless. He repeated that two had died for her. She would not listen. She would not look at his scars or hear how he had crossed half the world to reach her.

  “What’s wrong with your ears?” she demanded.

  He told her what his plaque had been up to.

  “Take it off! Now! This instant! I will not have you turning into another monster. Can you imagine what I’ve been through? He has a tongue like a wood rasp and those claws…! I’ve seen him rip a bed apart with his feet when he’s worked up. And the teeth…!”

  “I can’t take it off. It’s like Ratter now, part of me. And you’re just mad because you made a mistake. You backed the wrong horse tonight.”

  A hit! Celeste screamed even louder, because she would never admit a mistake. She should have spurned the penniless castaway and stayed with the power-wielder, Lizard-drumming. Believing Lynx had come to rescue her, she had chosen the wrong man for the first time in her life.

  Lynx was too tired for more argument, and he had a bad toothache. He shed his cloak and loincloth, rolled himself in a blanket, and pretended to go to sleep. He knew Celeste, though. He was not surprised when she jabbed him in the ribs a few moments later.

  “You’re not fooling me, Muscles,” she said. “Say please.”

  5

  Forget the Emperor. He was ruled by the Great Council and the Great Council could do nothing without the knights. The Eagles and Jaguars were the real power in the Empire, the cream of the nobility, owners of great estates, and their personal troops were the Empire’s army. Every knight was a superlative warrior himself, trained from childhood, proven in battle. Only knights possessed spiritual power. They gained that virtue by sacrificing prisoners and used it to bless their warrior followers with special abilities, keeping them loyal and making them better fighters. Better fighters took more prisoners, which they turned over to their lords for sacrifice. It was a delicious circle, and no one understood it better than the third most senior Jaguar, old Basket-fox.

  All his life he had excelled at the scheming and infighting that kept the knights amused when they were not engaged in a real war. Now the Empire was fighting for its life, the Eagles and Jaguars were at logger-heads and divided among themselves. The winners of the current struggle would determine the strategy that would decide who won the war—El Dorado or the Hairy Ones. Now, suddenly, just tonight, Basket-fox had seen an opening. It would be expensive for him, but if his idea worked he could confound the opposition within his own order, so his views would prevail. United, the Jaguars could persuade the Eagles, so the Empire would crush the rebel states and drive the Hairy Ones into the sea. These were worthy stakes.

  A Jaguar could expect to be spied on, and there was nothing much to be done about it if the spies were Eagles, who could see anything anywhere anytime. But Eagles were outnumbered by Jaguars in the service of the Emperor and they had many duties more important than just snooping on their rivals, even wily old Basket-fox. Besides, eagles usually slept at night, when jaguars were at their best.

  Against his rivals within the Jaguar order he should take precautions, though, which explained why Basket-fox was not visible as he paced the grounds of his own palace in the floating city, known to the Hairy Ones as El Dorado. Another knight could have seen him, if he tried hard enough, but his own guards could not. Monkey-blue, the boy he had been talking with earlier, had not yet been blessed with true sight and could not even see the guards standing over him. He knelt there in the moonlight, completely unaware of the four spears poised ready to strike him the moment their lord gave the order—which Basket-fox never would, because that would be a wasteful way to dispose of a man, even if he turned out to be a traitor. Another fifty or so warriors patrolled the grounds and palac
e, equally unseen.

  Basket-fox was almost as rich as the Emperor. His palace was one of the greatest and his pyramid the second highest in the city, shining in the moonlight. Even home alone, as now, he wore the finest feather-crafted cloak, and was bedecked in gold and jade and seashell. Bats flitting overhead made more noise than his paws on the gravel paths.

  Monkey-blue was a spy—a very fortunate spy, because he had been present that evening when that spotted idiot, Lizard-drumming, had spoken with a very unusual Hairy One. Also a very clever young spy, because he had seen that the talk he overheard justified his climbing the wall and running to report to his true lord, Basket-fox. Since he could never dare go back to spying on Lizard-drumming, he had risked the wrath of his lord for wasting two years’ work, but his lord was not wrathful at all.

  Pacing, pondering, Basket-fox came to the marble edge of a fish pool and paused to peer down, past his furry toes. He saw only the moon like a great silver bubble, a few stars struggling against its glare. Idly he thinned his virtual cloak until his reflection began to appear—old and scraggy, ugly and grizzled, with one ear gone altogether and the other tattered. Soon he must go to the altar stone. But not yet! Chuckling, he faded out of sight again.

  El Dorado had been at war for generations. It was always finding excuses for war—extending the limits of the Empire or bringing subject cities back into line when they fell behind in their tribute, which they did all the time because they were run by the same system. Their Jaguars and Eagles needed prisoners also. The dry season was wartime, every year. The cities ran real wars or pretend wars, and the losers were the peasant boys conscripted to fight them. It was they who fed the altars. Senior warriors were usually safe enough and the knights almost invincible. In a pinch, an Eagle could simply transport himself and his favored followers right off the battlefield. Jaguars and their warriors just vanished.

  Knights did die eventually. They lived a long time, preserved from decay by their spiritual power, but when an old campaigner began to slip, he issued a challenge to an aging counterpart in an opposing force, and the loser went to the altar. That was the honorable way to die. Basket-fox had been challenged three times so far and had not lost yet.

  The Distliards, the accursed Hairy Ones, had changed everything. They had little use for prisoners and observed none of the proper rites of battle. They cared only for victory, had no respect for rank. No atrocity was too shameful for them, even using trained dogs to track invisible Jaguars.

  Thus poor Quetzal-star—longtime friend of Basket-fox and one of the most respected jaguar knights of El Dorado—had gotten himself slain in one of the first battles, one that Basket-fox remembered well. Tlixilians had not even known what a crossbow was in those days and Quetzal-star had not expected any rank-and-file archer to be so uncouth as to shoot at a great lord like him. So he finished up dead on the battlefield and his regalia went to the Hairy Ones. That had been a national tragedy.

  Ah! Basket-fox sniffed the air. A moment later a ragged black-clad figure came hurrying through the grounds, hugging himself against the chill. When he reached a small lawn, he stopped and knelt down to wait, confident that his lord would know he had arrived. Even a commoner could have smelled him before seeing him, for acolytes never washed. They were black all over from dried blood and wore their clothes until they rotted away under newer layers.

  Basket-fox padded around to approach from upwind. When he was about two spear-lengths away, he revealed himself. The acolyte doubled over in obeisance.

  “Speak,” the knight said. If acolytes had names, those were known only to other acolytes. “Speak of the death of Plumed-pillar.”

  “A most noble knight of your great order, lord,” the acolyte told the grass. “Slain by demons in the battle of the Feast of Conches.” He paused and took silence as an order to continue. “His cousin, the noble Lizard-drumming, having heard the soul of his dead father, the great Quetzal-star, lamenting from afar, asked the valorous Plumed-pillar to aid him, and together they besought mighty Eagles, Bone-peak-runner and Amaranth-talon, to bear them to this place of torment. Alas, the demon defenders slew many fine warriors and the deadly Plumed-pillar also.”

  Lizard-drumming was a fool. He had done so well in several recent battles that he had ended up with more captives than his slave pens could hold. Instead of using the excess to buy friends and alliances, he had squandered them on a mission of utter folly. Why would he want his dead father around anyway—to claim back his inheritance after all these years? Honor should not be carried to such extremes. Worse, anyone knew that riding the Spirit Wind a great distance jangled wits. From what Basket-fox had heard, the young idiots had led their troops straight into battle, without giving them time to recover.

  “Did they really find the soul of Quetzal-star?”

  “Lord!” the acolyte quavered. “We do not know! They brought back a woman. She had been wearing…Lord, a knight’s regalia is burned with him, always! We do not know what happens if it is not.”

  The thought that some part of a knight’s soul might be left trapped in his regalia after his death was extremely disconcerting.

  “You’re saying that there was enough virtue still in the emblem to bless a commoner who wore it, even a woman?”

  “It may be as my lord says.”

  Or not. “And then the soul of Plumed-pillar was heard weeping?”

  “As my lord says. But much, much louder, stronger.”

  The regalia had been fresher, the death more recent. But Lizard-drumming had been in terrible straits, a laughingstock, having suffered humiliating losses with nothing to show in return except a female captive and some exotic, unfamiliar jewels. He was out of favor with everybody—the knightly orders, Plumed-pillar’s family, the survivors of Plumed-pillar’s retinue, even the Grand Council. Nobody needed more enemies than that. Basket-fox neither knew nor cared which of them had forced Lizard-drumming to try to make amends.

  “I hear now that he tried…” When a knight made a statement a mere acolyte would not contradict him. “Tell me what you have heard about him lately.”

  “Lord, it is said that he persuaded the great lord, Whirlwind, to aid him but the noble Eagle agreed only to go and see.”

  “Just to look? You don’t happen to know what he paid Whirlwind, do you?” Whirlwind was a very new Eagle with a great need to acquire captives; borrowing them from some greater lord might require him to mortgage the rest of his career.

  “Alas, I fail my lord. I am ignorant and worthless.”

  “No matter. Continue.”

  “I did hear a rumor tonight that the Eagle Whirlwind brought back a warrior of the Hairy Ones wearing the emblem of Plumed-pillar, but this is mere gossip, lord.”

  Yet it was the confirmation Basket-fox needed. If an emblem could respond to a woman, it would certainly react to a warrior.

  “I heard the same. And I heard that the warrior has started the Flowering. Could the regalia alone do that? Without ritual, without sacrifice?”

  “It may be as my lord says.” Pause. “But it cannot last long, lord.”

  “He will die?”

  “He will die of pain.”

  As every knight knew, the Flowering was ordeal enough even when correctly performed.

  “Could he be blessed just to let the change continue, or does it require the full ritual?”

  What Basket-fox was planning was very close to sacrilege. Even to suggest giving a foreigner slave a full initiation would land the pair of them on the altar stone in a twinkling, and his acolytes would never obey such orders. But something less might be possible.

  “I am worthless to my lord.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “The words of the ancestors do not speak of it.”

  “Then it may be interesting to try. You may go. Do not speak of this.” Mind made up, Basket-fox stalked off to where Monkey-blue knelt, shivering in the chill night air.

  Spying on brother knights was so close to di
shonorable that it was governed by very strict rules. To turn a colleague’s own followers from their loyalty was unthinkable. It was permissible only to choose a promising lad of one’s own clan and bless him with a disguise so he could enlist in the other’s retinue undetected. He faced vivisection on an altar if he was discovered, but he was serving his own true lord; his first oath took precedence. Monkey-blue had survived in Lizard-drumming’s retinue for over two years. That took real courage. And tonight he had displayed good sense.

  His lord appeared in front of him. He buried his face in the grass.

  “Tell me again,” Basket-fox said, “what Lizard-drumming told the Hairy One he was going to do with him?”

  “Lord, the knight said he would return his woman to him and his jewels and give him rich presents.” Pause. “Er…”

  “Continue.”

  “But later he told his steward that he would sell the man to the mighty Jaguar Flintknife, lord.”

  Of course. Flintknife was Plumed-pillar’s brother and heir.

  “Did great Lizard-drumming address the Hairy Warrior as Plumed-pillar?”

  There was a pause, while Monkey-blue stared at the ground in front of his nose. Good man, taking time to think. “Not that I heard, lord.” He sounded puzzled, so he had not seen the real game either. But that would be asking a lot of one so young.

  “On your feet!”

  Monkey-blue scrambled to his feet, keeping his eyes lowered, rigid with worry at standing in his lord’s presence. A sturdy, promising lad. Not by any means a close relative, but of a branch that had thrown up some excellent warriors in the last generation.

  “You have done me great service,” Basket-fox declared solemnly, “and displayed great courage. Long ago I served as a spy and I know how hard it is. If I send you back now you will be uncovered, and that would be a waste of a fine young warrior. What was your original company?”