The Shadow of Tyr

by Glenda Larke

  Thankful, she was just glad he was there.

  ‘Lean on me,’ Brand said.

  ‘I thought we agreed to meet at the shrine down the road.’ The shrine to Barcius, God of Travellers, where you could buy blessed oil and light a votive lamp for a safe trip, was not even half a mile further on.

  ‘Yes, but I knew you would have exhausted yourself.’ Brand sounded like an exasperated mother with a tiresome child, but she was too exhausted to be anything but grateful.

  ‘Has everything gone well?’ she asked.

  ‘The Villa Gayed is empty. Nothing incriminating left behind. Slight change in plan, though. I got us a cart ride instead of just horses. It’s at the shrine.’

  ‘A cart? Why?’

  ‘So you could rest on the way. I hired it. The driver delivered hay from a farm up north, so he was delighted to have paying passengers for part of the journey back.’

  They walked down the path to the shrine in silence. He didn’t bother to hide his worry, but it made her feel safe. For once, she was glad to surrender her independence. Just for a while, she thought. Tomorrow I can be me again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Reality impinged long before she was ready for it.

  Her sense of emotions dragged her back to rational thought. Pain, intense deep-felt grief. Impossible to ignore. It came from inside the shrine itself, shrieking at her, snaring her with its need for amelioration. Brand was intent on getting her to the cart and leaving the area as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t walk away from such agony.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said as he tried to lead her away. ‘There’s someone who needs help—’

  She slipped out of her sandals and mounted shrine steps silvered with starlight and cold underfoot. A man sat back on his heels before the altar, rocking to and fro, illuminated by the single oil lamp burning there. Something lay across his knees. His anguish burned at her, so solid she could taste the bitterness of it like wormwood in her mouth. Several people stood nearby, sobbing with a quieter grief. She approached across the marble floor, buffeted by their emotions.

  It was a child he held, although in the feeble light she could see little else and her senses were overwhelmed by the man’s pain. ‘Can I help?’ she asked. ‘I have some skill with healing—’ Behind her Brand gave a grunt of disapproval, as if to ask how she thought she could help in her present weak state. In truth she wasn’t sure. She had held a little of her power in reserve for personal protection, but she needed food and rest; she needed it desperately.

  The man moved without speaking, and the child’s head flopped back over his arm like a rag doll. It was only then that she saw: the jagged tear across the side of the throat, right through to the spine, red and moist like the bloodied muzzle of a predator. Above that flapping gape, a girl’s face, white, drained of all blood, framed with curls. No more than six years old. Her blood was everywhere, soaking her father’s wrap, pooling on the floor, congealing on his hands.

  She drew in a sharp breath, wanting not to have seen. Wanting not to have that evening’s work reduced in her memory to its worst specific detail.

  ‘She was hit by a roof tile flying through the air,’ someone said. Almost too prosaic an explanation for a tragedy of such proportions.

  Ligea stood, bludgeoned into immobility. A child. Dead. She may as well have slit the throat herself…

  Goddess forgive…

  This is what it is to start a war.

  It was Brand who turned her away, led her out of the shrine to the cart. ‘You can’t do anything here, Ligea. And we have to get away. Climb in.’

  She was incapable of resisting; incapable, even, of any thought except to remember what she had just seen and then revisit it again. And yet again. She clambered up into the open cart, and Brand followed. She sat huddled against a heap of empty sacks slung behind the driver’s seat. Brand nodded to the man and he whipped awake a pair of sleepy horses. As he guided them over to the dirt track alongside the paved road, Ligea stirred herself enough to redirect him.

  ‘No,’ she said, and her tone was sharp. ‘Stay on the paveway.’

  ‘I am not authorised,’ he began. The paveway was for legionnaires, for the rich. Not for plodding carts bringing hay to the city or returning to the farm for another load.

  ‘I’m authorising you,’ she snapped.

  The driver looked at Brand. ‘You’ll pay the fine, then?’

  ‘If there is one.’

  It was a long time before she spoke again, and then it was to whisper, ‘It is one thing to speak of the future and to think you can bear it. It is quite another to see it.’

  ‘You are weak at the moment,’ he said. ‘You’ve used too much power. You have to eat something and then you must sleep. Remember your baby.’ He handed her a hunk of bread and meat wrapped in a cloth. ‘Eat.’

  ‘Eat? Sleep?’ She looked at him, but could not discern the details of his expression. ‘Goddess, Brand, that was a child, and just one of many I may have killed tonight. Probably was one of many.’

  ‘Listen, Ligea. You made a decision to do this. I don’t know whether it was a good decision or not, but I do know this: once it was made, there was no turning back. Only with success will you give that child’s death a meaning.’

  ‘Acheron’s hells, Brand, giving it meaning won’t help her!’

  ‘Perhaps it will. Who’s to know? Maybe she will look back at us through Acheron’s mists and know it was all for a reason…’

  She scorned his remark for what it was: a platitude from someone who didn’t believe what he said.

  He indicated the food. ‘Eat.’

  She took a slice of meat, stuffed it between two slices of bread and ate hungrily, despising herself for her appetite, yet unable to curb her need to replenish her energy. ‘Brand,’ she asked, words muffled by her chewing, ‘what did you say were the words written on the lintel of the Temple of the Unknown God?’

  ‘“Do no person harm”.’

  ‘One day that will be written across the lintel of the Meletian Temple in the Forum Publicum.’

  He didn’t reply and, tired, she was about to doze off, when suddenly her senses alerted her to something she hadn’t felt in weeks. She sat up, suddenly wakeful. ‘Stop the cart!’

  The driver turned around to see if he had heard aright. ‘Stop the cart,’ she said again, and he hauled on the reins. She sat for a moment without moving, as if listening, but it was another sense she had called into play.

  ‘Magor,’ she whispered to Brand. ‘I can sense one of the Magor…but so faint.’ She stood up in the cart and looked around. There were still people out there, some walking in the darkness, others huddled against the low burial vaults that lined either side of the paveway. Tombs, where Tyr buried the dead who could not afford a place in the necropolis. She switched to the Kardi language. ‘Is there someone out there who understands me?’ she called. ‘Please, come—I am in the cart on the paveway.’

  Heads swung in her direction, pale patches in the dimness of night. Then someone stepped forward. ‘I do. I understand.’ A woman’s voice, stumbling with her imperfect memories of a language she hadn’t used in a long time.

  Ligea went to the back of the cart and leaned over the tailgate. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, still speaking Kardi. ‘You are Magor, surely!’ And yet something didn’t feel right.

  The woman came closer. She was perhaps fifty years old, and wore a slave collar. ‘I was once, but no longer,’ she said. ‘How did you know—?’

  ‘I am a Magoria.’

  Ligea allowed her cabochon to glow slightly and held her hand out in greeting, but the woman did not move to take it. ‘I am not one of the Magor now,’ she said, her sorrow so crushing it took Ligea’s breath away. ‘I feel nothing any more.’

  Ligea flashed the light from her cabochon into the woman’s opened palm. There was a green gem there, but it was crazed through with lines like a Mirage sky. ‘Sweet Elysium! How did that happen?’

  ‘Does
it matter how?’

  Ligea felt the bite of her pain again, as strong as if it were her own. She swallowed, forcing down the mass of fears it roused in her. What if that was done to me? ‘What is your name, Theura?’

  ‘Narjemah.’ A brief pause, then, ‘Magoria.’ There was so much pride there. The bitter, wrenching pride of a woman daring another to pity her, or even to acknowledge her tragedy.

  ‘I am Sarana.’ She looked across at the edge of the road where Narjemah’s companions still waited in watchful silence, their faces indistinct in the starlight. ‘Are you with friends or your, um, master?’

  There was a moment’s silence, before Narjemah replied. ‘We are slaves, all of us. We decided to escape. We heard rumours—there have been tales through all the slave quarters, all over the city, for several weeks, about the day of the whirlwinds. I even heard the Brotherhood was looking for Kardis with gems. We heard that Tyr would fall and slaves would be free if they, er, fled when the whirlwinds came. We had a bad master, and—and many reasons to take the risk.’ Ligea felt her implacable determination. ‘They say we should go to the Ammalonian shrine. Do you know where that is, Magoria?’

  ‘Ocrastes’ balls,’ Brand said in Ligea’s ear, ‘the rumour has gained a tongue and a tail since I started it. Do they really think all slaves are going to be freed, just like that?’

  She ignored him and said, ‘Freedom has to be fought for, Narjemah. It is rarely granted gratis to those who have lost it. The shrine is at the twentieth milestone. We are going that way, if you wish to ride with us.’

  The woman shook her head. She waved a hand at the group by the roadside, abandoning her hesitant Kardi for Tyranian. ‘They may not be Kardi, but they are my friends. My family now—all I have. I do not leave them so easily, Magoria.’ She looked at the cart. ‘We can all fit.’

  Ligea laughed. ‘Ah, why not? Brand, move over.’

  ‘I don’t take more people unless I get more money,’ the driver growled.

  Brand sighed and fished out his purse as the slaves, in answer to Narjemah’s call, crossed the road towards the cart.

  Rathrox Ligatan felt ill. His insides curdled. Ligea Gayed. She had betrayed them. She must have found out that as a child she had been kidnapped rather than rescued.

  His own plan—so carefully woven, so beautifully timed, so ingeniously executed, at least in the beginning—to have her rule in Madrinya as Tyrans’ puppet, it was all in ruins at his feet.

  Bator Korbus must never find out. Ocrastes’ balls, he blames me enough already…If he ever learned Ligea was involved in the downfall of the Stalwarts, it would be Rathrox who was nailed to a cross.

  And now Tyr had suffered at the hands of another of her kind. And if it takes me the rest of my life I will bring both the bitches down in a way that will make their souls weep before they die.

  This one in Tyr, she is pregnant, whoever she is. And already worried about her baby. That’s a weakness. All I have to do is get my hands on that child once it is born, and I will have her in my power…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Ligea?’

  Brand’s voice, penetrating her sleep. Dragging her back, upwards, into a world of light and wakefulness. Into the problems waiting for her. Into a world, she realised with more than a touch of depression, where problems would always be waiting.

  They had arrived at milestone twenty earlier in the day and said goodbye to the cart driver. She’d led their small group away from the paveway, past the shrine to Ammalonia and over a low hill. There, in a coppice with a spring, workers from her country estate waited with a wagon just as she had arranged. They had a fire going, and were cooking food. She sent one of them back to the shrine to direct anyone else who turned up there, hoping that in fact some would.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Brand had said, ‘we’re the first because we travelled all night and we used the paveway. They’ll come. We passed people trudging along the road, and I’m sure there were more waiting for daylight.’

  Since then, she’d spent most of the time dozing and eating, trying to recover her Magor strength. At intervals during the day, more slaves did indeed arrive, tired and hungry and afraid, looking over their shoulders for the pursuit they knew would eventually come. Now, as Brand shook her awake and she looked around, the number of people present shocked her.

  She stood up, wide-eyed with surprise. ‘Goddessdamn, Brand, these are all people you enticed to leave Tyr and follow us?’

  He shook his head. ‘Hardly.’ He sounded bemused; there must have been more than four hundred people sheltering in the coppice.

  ‘Then where in the hells did they all come from?’

  ‘We have a saying back in Altan: “One may as well harness the flood as contain a whisper”. There could be even more people arriving tonight or tomorrow. I did warn you rumours are dangerous. We just have to hope that this one didn’t spread too far, or we could have legionnaire javelins jabbing at our backsides any minute.’

  ‘I’m hoping I left enough mess back in Tyr to keep them occupied. And are these people prepared to fight for freedom?’

  ‘Looks like.’

  ‘Like her?’ Ligea pointed at a small girl playing with some leaves nearby.

  He shrugged. ‘A few brought their families.’

  ‘Damn it, Brand, this is no place for children. We’re raising a rebellion!’

  ‘Slavery is no place for children, either.’

  She gave him a sour look and changed the subject. ‘Have there been any signs of pursuit?’

  ‘No. Dispatch riders up and down the road all day. And a mounted squad of legionnaires went past going towards Tyr this evening. That’s all. I rather think you’re right. The legions were needed inside the city walls today.’

  She breathed a little easier and looked around again. ‘These people have all been fed?’

  He nodded. ‘Took some doing, though. Your farmers brought an ox from the farm and slaughtered it. The meat’s so fresh it’s as tough as bear hide, but there’s plenty left if you want some. I spoke to Homfridus, by the way,’ he added, referring to the controller of Ligea’s country estate. ‘He says he doesn’t have enough carts or horses to transport everyone to our new farm hideaway. Some of these people are going to have to walk to the new place. I didn’t tell him how far it was.’

  She heaved a sigh. ‘We will have to split them up to be less obvious. Goddess, this is going to be difficult, Brand. There’s only two of us! Maybe once I’ve spoken to them all, I’ll be able to identify a couple more leaders with enough flair to get a group from here to the foot of the mountains.’

  ‘Homfridus is a good man. Gevenan, too, perhaps.’

  She brightened. ‘Did he turn up?’

  ‘He did indeed. With no less than thirty other horse-handlers and stable boys from several households—and eighty-two horses.’

  ‘Vortexdamn! You’re joking!’

  ‘No.’ He grinned. ‘Several of the slave owners actually told their horse-handlers to take the horses out of Tyr for safety’s sake. They were supposed to head for their masters’ country estates, of course, but…’

  They exchanged glances and then burst into laughter. ‘Where are they all?’ she asked when they sobered.

  ‘The horses? I sent them—plus most of the horse-handlers—on to the estate stables to be fed and looked after. Gevenan’s still here. But he could be a problem, Ligea. He’s cynical and sarcastic. Keeps people on edge.’

  ‘Yes, I figured he was a cantankerous bastard.’

  She ran her fingers through her hair and straightened her tunic. ‘It’s almost sundown. Get them together where I can speak to them, Brand. I’ll stand in the food wagon, I think. Oh, and could you find a good strong staff? Or a cudgel or something similar? But send Gevenan across to me first.’

  She washed in the stream, then slung on her baldric and sword. Her anxiety was making her stomach churn. These folk were her responsibility now, hers to save or fail. And somehow she had first to get the
m across Tyrans to the foot of the northern mountains.

  There would be those who scorned her because she was a woman. There would be those who despised her because she was Kardi. What she did in the next few minutes would determine her success, would determine the future of these people.

  Why didn’t I pay more attention to my rhetoric lessons as I was growing up? I can’t sway a crowd!

  ‘So,’ Gevenan drawled when he strolled across to talk to her, ‘Brand tells me you are the force behind all this. You really do have divine help? All that whirlwind fire and stuff, very impressive.’ The air around him shimmered with his ambivalence.

  Carefully neutral, she said, ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘You and Brand told me to bring folk who would be of help, and I did.’ He gave a disparaging sweep of his hand at those around them. ‘But most of this lot you’ve dredged up, they’re just scum. Floor sweepings from a kitchen hearth, or a stable midden. And some of them have families, by all that’s holy.’ He said that as though it was a crime. ‘What kind of rebellion is this, lady?’ His sneer left a trail of nastiness behind, but she caught other things too: a tinge of fear, of wariness, of watchful hope.

  She shrugged. ‘I’m going to have to weed some of them out.’

  He leaned against the trunk of the closest tree, arms folded; an insolent pose, deliberately chosen, she guessed, to show his lack of deference. ‘This Ingean standing here doesn’t believe all he sees, Domina. What’s more, I was once a soldier, and soldiers know one another. They know how easy it is to be enslaved by a battle lost, y’see. And so they talk of things, even to soldiers who now wear slave collars, like me. Legionnaires told me tales of the Kardi Uprising. Of the highborn Kardi who can do unnatural things. And you’re Kardi—I can see that much. You’re Ligea Gayed, aren’t you? The old General’s adopted daughter. I’ve been a bit dense. That scar on your face, I suppose.’ He unfolded his arms to flick a finger close to her shattered cheek. ‘I should have recognised you before.’