Source

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter 4

Summer.

Cataract.

It appears this letter has become conflated with my journal; partly since the writing is so perilous, and the materials so precious, that I cannot afford letter and journal both; partly because I will write, if only for sheer contrariness; and partly that I am all too sure this, at least, will never reach your eyes, Tanekhet.

I had your first, your only letter, no more than a quarter-moon from Amberlight. Still in our old farming country of the northern Kora, where the River runs languidly between those elegant copses of creamy-trunked plains hellien, while the desert retreats beyond wide but meager grasslands that stretch, so I am told, clear to the Jump-up Cliffs. Pretty country. Rich country; more than enough to feed Amberlight, despite the timber fief’s return to Cataract.

Where we had hove to for the night when the Customs cutter came racing round a jink in that great right-handed swing of the River, with shouts of delight and cries of, “Dispatches! Ruand, dispatches from Amberlight!”

Let me dwell on that awhile, however precious the paper, however great the risk. The truly miraculous harvest, vindication of our loss. Zuri herself has to admit that revolution, and an end of Houses, and a people’s government, with men among them, comes cheap at the price.

I think of that often nowadays. Taking it out to dandle in my mind as I dare not take the seed itself in my hand, a jewel to outweigh all the rest. That we have freed our city, whatever comes to us.

If this were a letter, I doubt such stuff would interest you. I can see you, it feels now a world away, running your great lord’s eye down this page fast as a huntsman’s skinning knife. I can see the curl of lip and tweak of brows when you find nothing but complacent maunderings. Nothing for yourself.

What can I say, Tanekhet? If you did get this letter, it would be worse than useless, being wholly out of date. If we are to take an ideal solution, if I could speak to you only once . . .

Then I would have to offer the hardest counsel. Asaskian is Iskardan, and a grown woman. If she fixes her choice on you, you will have to say, Yes, or, No, for yourself.

I will admit there might be worse outcomes. I will say here, where you will not read it, that I had hoped for something else. We have married men enough. But if your enterprise, and your experience, and to be honest, your vanity, cannot preserve your independence, then it probably cannot be done.

#

But first, let me recall that evening just once more; with the fish cooked, the news traded, all three crews round the fire on the little pebbly beach while the moon rose, whetting down her blade in her third quarter, so the stars came with her, clear in that pure sky that made me yearn for Spring Thanks in Iskarda. When Sarth and Alkhes and I had rolled out our blankets in a bay of sweet-scented shiver-bush, where the slightest touch will bring a rain of little white flowers. The Mother knows, I could accept the necessity of the patrol-boat, and live amiably with thirteen others’ elbows in my ear; but even if Alkhes could have faced making love behind a cabin curtain, it would have been impossible on those bunks.

So we luxuriated in solitude no less than in the opulence of lying side by side and touch for touch. Shadow and silver tapestry of branches and moonlight on our bodies, on the labyrinthine smoke of Sarth’s hair; my head on his breast, the light-drinking black of Alkhes’ head on mine. The dear, familiar warmth and shapes of them, the dwindling interchanges that, as in Iskarda, would see us into sleep. Alkhes tucking an arm closer round me, so his hand splayed possessively on Sarth’s breast. Murmuring round the final sigh. “Never do that again, Tel. Thought I’d go crazy. So damn long . . .”

And I felt the rise of Sarth’s answering breath. Knowing clearly as he did, that it was not the River and love’s rationing, but the prison-time in Amberlight that Alkhes meant. Hearing as easily the inflexible note of the answering murmur that vibrated up to me through his flesh.

“Never again, Tellurith.”

How too like an omen that looks, written down. Let it stand. Because it was that resolution, so damnably calm as all Sarth’s notions, that would have undone any caution you could give me about Cataract. In the Mother’s name! As if I, and Zuri, and Sarth if not Zuri, and Alkhes before any of them, did not know the danger before the start.

At any rate, we sailed peaceably enough through the timber fief, where the River runs blue-shadowed under the cedars’ immensities. Every nation’s ship-womb, long-standing bone of contention and greatest prize Cataract ever ceded Amberlight. The wisest thing Alkhes ever did was to gift it back as soon as the city fell.

Because so far as I can tell now, Tanekhet, that is Cataract’s only resource. Oh, they have the Heartland exotics, the wild beasts and hides and gold and ebony, but those come down in exotic quantities; little enough for a family in Verrain, let alone a whole hungry turbulent convocation like Cataract.

The silver? There is that pathetic mine where Dinda used to send his enemies, but silver was the tyrant’s prerogative, and it went wholly on making war. Which is Cataract’s chief, almost its only trade. Except for one.

I think now that the Heartlands must be poorer yet; only dire impoverishment will make a nation trade in men, and that is what they trade. Warriors, young landless men who stream downRiver to sell their spears to Cataract. Or others, boarded at the way station under the Jump-up falls, wearing chains rather than shields.

As Telluir House-head I found Cataract economics of peripheral interest. So we kept the tyrant’s fingers off our lands and scalped him for his statuettes, what did we care what went on beyond? But I think now that the Heartlands are less a nation than a faction of clans and tribes within a race, all at each other’s throats. So they export their own young men, and raid or intrigue away the neighbors’, to sell them off as well.

It is a black stain on the River, and Amberlight’s one saving grace that we would never dabble in slaves. As Zhee said flatly, the one time I remember it raised, it was far too dangerous. A truth Cataract knows to the bone; how long have the tyrants balanced one foot on their scanty resources and the other on the flesh-trade, draining off the price of statuettes to control mercenaries whose attention they kept on wars in the Heartlands or grasslands, if not down the River itself? How much of Dinda’s last assault on Amberlight was flat necessity?

That scrambling danger speaks from every line of Cataract. There is a sort of anchorage, in the back eddy behind a long spit, every scallop of shoreline daubed in black upRiver mud: a wasps’ nest of anchored freighters and the low-slung menace of city galleys at their buoy-lines, a stewpot of Heartland trade and local fishing canoes, all glaring and dazzling in the harsh upRiver light; strange how it hardens, beyond the timber fief. There is a sort of citadel, no equal to the hill of Amberlight, with wooden palisades and a plethora of catapult heads lowering over the city walls that are, as Alkhes once recalled, new-split side-piled logs. And between them lies a low, dun-gray, windowless stew of uncobbled marketplaces and rat-run alleyways. A city that is all River Quarter. Whose danger comes off it, palpable as the miasma of the slave and army barracks and the mendicant bivouacs, with every passing breeze.

#

We had hoped to slip into anchorage with your freighter, whose captain would claim us as protection for downRiver. He had already coached us in Cataract shipping ways. No Customs, however bumptious. Instead you blow a conch-horn and lie to in mid-stream, until whoever has toll-right that season sends a boat to negotiate the bribe. Only then will a fly-cloud of officials allot you mooring, and water and victualing privileges, all at an outrageous price. As the Mother sees me, how you have made a living here is beyond me.

We, however, had hardly seen the envoy board when signals began to fly above the city’s, for want of a better word, water gate. At least, there was a waving of pennanted lance-heads and a great many halloos, and then another boat shot from the beach, a double-handed paddler that fairly flew across to us.

Its crew hung bawling on the freighter-side. We all understood. We were waiting, when the captain reached the stern-rail to speak.

“Lady Tellurith.” He is a good, competent ship’s captain, nothing more, nothing less. Now his sober Dhasdein trader’s brows were somewhere near his hair. “The—ah—Ruler wants to speak with you.”

I daresay the first word upRiver outstripped even the spring fresh. I will freely confess that my stomach squirmed when I called back, “On whose authority?”

That brought us a half a glass’s grace, while the canoe-boys skated away for stronger backing. Which had to come, judging from the fuss, clear from the citadel; a high official, or at any rate high army officer, in parade gear to his silver plumed helmet, who requested the honor of escorting the City’s guests.

For all his obvious Heartland blood, he spoke clearly enough. And the blighted summons was just broad enough for Sarth to say with justification atop that note of soft-voiced danger, “That means all of us.”

I did argue, Tanekhet. At least, I raised my voice once or twice. It was not the foreign audience, or the stance on Zuri, or the way Sunya and Deor had already gathered their shore-harness, or Quiran’s pallor, or that copy of her mother’s worst obduracy on Keraz’ face, that silenced me. It was Sarth, watching from the rail. Quiet, and decorous as ever, and bland as porridge without salt.

And I knew that he would disable guards, and get out of any restraint, and swim ashore behind me if I said anything but, Yes.

I did almost manage a schism belowdecks, when we retired to don suitable gear, and I asked Zuri, “What about the guns?”

Even on Zuri’s face, dismay was eloquent. She and Azo had genuine light-guns, Ahio her shaper; Alkhes had annexed my cutter. No doubt at all the Cataract high command would know light-guns, at least, at a glance. A good chance the envoy himself had been at Amberlight.

Zuri talked in a glance to Azo, and Alkhes, whose jaw matched hers, and Sarth as well. Before she grunted, “Get the blades.”

Broad-bladed, slashing-hooked Amberlight belt-weapons, that every Navy deckhand once wore by right. Half of them with gold-blazoned hilts, gifted us in Amberlight.

A choice that, again, was no sort of choice; if they wore other weapons openly, the light-guns still would not survive a proper search. But no doubt, by Zuri’s hard reasoning, if it came to the worst scenario, they would be armed for a brawl; and at the very worst, the weapons would be ashore with us if we lost.

And there was the small consolation that they would work for nobody else.

They charged up and disappeared the weapons as troublecrew know how. I did not ask. But I did wish a better time for taking them all into the fire. A musician, a shaper, a quartet of Amberlight men, a pair of junior Navy officers, a Ruand’s daughter and a medical apprentice; what sort of war-team is that?

They landed us in a series of little paddler-boats. An escort waited on the glacis, under the stare of a pair of big unmanned catapults. The gate proper was a pair of huge cedar trunks with steel-shod slabs of timber hung between, to lock with enormous swinging bars of iron. The gate guard were every color from midnight black to near-Dhasdein white, with weapons from Dhasdein infantry short swords to the long stabbing spears of the Heartland itself, and gear ranging from loin-cloths and bull-hide shields to the back-and-breast corselet of the officer. Nor did they show any sort of military discipline, even when a group peeled off to escort us.

The messenger, as by right, walked with me at the front. Zuri set the infants next, then Ahio and Esrafal, then the Navy women, and then all the men, with Sarth and Alkhes next to her and Azo at the back. I caught a single scuffle, but after that, the procession was decorous.

That tramp to the citadel was, I confess, all I saw of Cataract; not that it was not noisome enough, with the stench of offal and excrement and undried mud in the alleyways, and market yammer in the open spaces, you would not call them squares, that we passed. The clothes seemed a River’s cast-offs; the people scuttled like rats. Most of the architecture looks as lasting as this year’s rains; mud-brick and occasional dingy plaster, blank outer walls and measly little entrances, with never a tree or a flowering vine in sight. I could reckon my way out again, I daresay, blindstabbing by the stars or sun, but otherwise, I know far more of Riversend.

And I may  not get the chance.

The citadel gate did at least have a portcullis, if of wood, and a ramshackle sentry-coop, above the equally ramshackle fighting walk that matched the rampart logs. Upright, deep-planted, solid cedar trees, the Mother knows how old. The one place the tyrants have been profligate with their resource.

Inside was another medley of mud-brick, hardly grander than the streets, with a couple of stone buildings that resemble Dhasdein work; the armory and treasury, I suspect. I wish I had taken more note of your Upriver intelligence, Tanekhet. And the tyrant’s hall atop the crest.

Doubtless Cataract has administrators and scribes, and does not conduct its affairs entirely like an Oasis chief. I know they wrote decent letters to us. You would never think it from the hall, barely two stories high and thatched, if you can believe it; slab walls and plaster stuffed into the chinks; and inside, a positive beehive of idle military and waving weaponry, with the tyrant sprawled like a drunken dekarch on a throne at the farther end.

The great chair of Heartland mahogany is overlaid with a sunburst of leopard hides: the fiercest hunter the Heartlands know. It appeared to be the hall’s only furniture, beyond the ceremonial fire-irons beside the great rectangular central hearth.

We entered to an uproar that may or may not have been a ceremonial greeting, but sounded more like a feeding shout. There must have been two hundred men inside, most armed with Heartland shields and stabbing spears. But their security was good enough. On the threshold another military peacock halted us, hand upheld, subordinates bristling at his back. They wanted the weaponry.

Zuri glanced at me. I lifted my shoulders. Public charade of troublecrew doubt, leader’s assent. She unbuckled her belt. Following suit, Deor glowered at the taker and growled, “Watch what you do with that.”

They propped the lot against the wall. Then they marched us down to the space between the tyrant’s honor guard and the hearth, where the messenger brought us to a halt. Smote sword-hilt to breast, and abandoned us.

The new tyrant, Wonsa, is almost certainly pure Heartland blood; if any blood is not Heartland, in Cataract. Darker than Dhasdeini or Amberlight bronze, but no trace of the true Verrain black. No brute to look at; fine open eyes and carven mouth and eagle’s beak of nose, limber and young enough to fulfill the promise of well-shaped legs and defined arm muscle, that was showing aplenty as he sprawled in sleeveless corselet and crimson kilt. Gold on his forearms and throat, flaunted in the manner of a high military officer, in guards rather than ornament. Waving a lordly hand, weighted with the glitter of a seal-ring, and that an emerald.

“Ssso,” he said. “Ruand.”

The “s” is often drawled in Upriver speech. Not so deliberately, so insolently, as that. Inclining my head, I heard Alkhes smother a snort at my back.

Wonsa is a tyrant of Cataract. Given that, his ploy was still more than forthright. He straightened by half an elbow and stretched out a regally peremptory hand and said, “Give me the qherrique.”

I did control my face. I was trained in Amberlight. But I shaped manners to circumstance. I simply shook my head.

The fine brows arched together like a falcon’s strike. There can be few times Wonsa was gainsaid, even at his mother’s breast.

“It’s not yours,” I said.

I could wish to imagine your laughter, Tanekhet. But what would imperial manners have done for me?

He shut his mouth up short. Such flat refusal evidently took some thinking on.

“You are in my power,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You want to keep it from me! You think—!”

But he is tyrant of Cataract. Brains as well as bloodthirst are inevitable. The tirade snapped off like a breaking hilt.

“Why not?”

“You can’t use it.”

He smiled then. Brief and perfunctory as his other sketches of courtesy. “Then neither will anyone else.”

Inevitable as the rest.

I said, “You know why we are here.”

He waved the other hand. Stupid stories of a Quest and the River Source, women’s gabble. Irrelevant.

“Do you know what happened to Amberlight?”

The brows arched.

“They tried to stop us too.”

A pause; and I will admit, a laudably short pause, while he fathomed that; all that. From the fact that we were here, to the assumptions I had left, to the question he would have to ask.

Then he smiled, as economically and emptily as everything else he did. A gesture for an audience, and it was not us.

The hand waved. “You will change your mind.”

Behind me came a, shush! and a short thick thunk and I whipped about to see Sunya’s man Gearth drop in his tracks.

To a grunt and an animal scream as Azo whipped the light-gun from her sleeve and fired on the draw and the slinger behind the spear-fringe watched his throwing hand hit the floor, whap! while he clutched his cauterized stump of wrist.

The sling landed too, a scrickle of tangling leather, drum-loud in the hush. Then the spearmen bellowed like wounded lions and jumped.

Azo cut the right-hand leaders off at the knees. Zuri leveled the men behind the fireplace, Alkhes swept the cutter across it like a scythe. Ahio was not behindhand. She too had fought at Amberlight. The sound and stink breached heaven; burnt flesh, warcries and hideous screams, agony’s urine and excrement. The more hideous sight of thirty men writhing amid amputated legs where Azo’s first slash had swept below the shields, a dozen others screaming like half-beheaded chickens from Zuri’s slice across their eyes, going down like foundered drunkards, dying . . .

I cannot finish it. I could not finish it then. As the Cataract recoil swirled into backlash I screeched, “Stop!” in chorus with Wonsa’s, “Halt!”

I whipped about. My limbs shook, my heart pounded like a bolting horse. He glared back at me, a leopard half out of his lair, bloody massacre teetering on a finger-tip. Then the snarl twisted and he gestured, pure obscenity, as if ushering me through a door.

Look past your casualties, that gesture said. Consider their maddened survivors, the multitude beyond, the limited charge in those four guns, the absolute unlimitedness of my will. I will cheerfully waste them all. Will you?

And if you do fight your way out, what lies beyond? A boat that could never outstrip galleys, if there were somewhere to sail? A foot-race upRiver, to be trapped against the Jump-up cliffs by hounds like these?

A backlash upon Amberlight?

And Iskarda?

In one spring Wonsa hurled himself clear over the throne back. A fire-slash bisected the chair back with slashed leopard-skins curling and stinking in its wake and I screamed, “No!”

Sarth got Alkhes’ other arm. He fought the pair of us, the cutter-beam slashing perilously and perhaps vitally; because it checked the honor guard just long enough for me to shriek at him, “Iskarda!”

Even in that extremity, his wits worked. He had struck at Wonsa to have a leaderless enemy if all else failed. Now he too remembered the rancor, the eternal memory with which the state of Cataract will hold a killing grudge.

I slapped his fist; the cutter died. I spun back to the throne and bawled, “I respect guest-truce!”

Wonsa charged round the throne with shield and throwing spear. And he as much as Damas could subdue wish to wits. Because he stopped—he posed, in his stride. Drew himself up. Roared at his men, whose wounded were still screaming, howling, thrashing around us.

“Take them away!”

My grip had bitten Alkhes’ wrist to the bone. He had never flinched and I did not dare let go. We stood heaving, panting, the sweat slick under my fingers, until Sarth’s hand closed over mine.

Wonsa too was panting like a bellows, glaring like a gargoyle. He had broken truce first, and he knew it. And it had cost a bitter price.

“Throw them down!”

The light-guns. Elaborately, I scanned the hall.

“Have all your slingers gone?”

He looked murder at me. Gestured with the spear. The honor-guard hissed. The survivors backed off, rumbling and glaring over their shields.

“Throw them down!”

I gestured at Zuri, then at Ahio. The beams died. I said, “Who will pick them up?”

His face contorted. I heard Alkhes wrestle Sarth.

“Give me the qherrique!”

“All of it?”

“All of it!”

 The shambles had subsided behind me. I waved Zuri back, and looked once at Gearth, with Quiran kneeling over him. The diagnosis was in the bend of his head. I slid the pouch out of my shirt, took the seed in my hand, and turned to Wonsa.

“Catch,” I said.

He had a soldier’s eye. The spear fell, he grabbed automatically as the tiny white comet arced over the guards’ heads, his fingers shut, he had time for half a savage grin. Before he screamed like another wounded lion and hurled.

The qherrique landed halfway down the hall, between Zuri and the enemy’s margin, a white flash on bloodied stone. Wonsa wrung his right hand and bellowed filth at me like the veriest backstreet whore.

When he sucked in breath I to spoke as a Head.

 “My lord Wonsa, you requested this meeting. You demanded what is not yours. Then you broke guest-truce. You have killed one of my folk. An innocent man,” I could not quite control my voice there, “who had taken no weapon against you. Is the god’s message still not clear?”

He was breathing like a winded runner and his mouth-corners wore a rim of foam. It was no time to let face-saving drive him to a true holocaust.

“I will accept truce,” I said.

He spat at me. Then he cursed, an incomprehensible gout of malice, and then he yelled. “Pick it up! Put the rest in there!”

The wood-container by the fireplace, an immense bucket-shaped brass bowl. Empty now, at summer’s dawn.

I picked up the qherrique. For some reason the blood had not clung to it. But blood clung to my fingers, and to my shoes as I walked back, leaving a line of red, red tracks.

Face distorted, Wonsa pointed again.

Alkhes’ hand bit my arm. I understood all too well. Relinquish the guns, be left weaponless; Wonsa need only order a massacre, and the Quest was over. What could we do? What could even the qherrique do?

I cupped it in my palm and looked up at him, rolling it to and fro. Then I held it out to Sarth.

Who took it, face inscrutable. Wonsa’s eyes, following my hand, said it all.

“It will come to no-one but the chosen,” I said. “If you destroy the chosen, it will only find more.”

In Cataract. He turned gray, then, at last.

Before he got his bravado back and trumpeted at me. “Put the weapons down. Or I finish the lot of you here and now!”

The warriors surged. He bawled, they hung on the leash like rabid dogs. He pointed at the bucket and roared, and I knew we had reached the end of bluff.

I gestured to Zuri. Her face was always like granite. It was Alkhes’ that spoke.

Ahio glanced at me. That look too spoke volumes in a single question, and laid an intolerable load on my shoulders. Of faith, of broken bonds. Of unredeemed trust.

I bent my head.

She laid her shaper gently down; carefully, with the stance of a mother leaving her child’s funeral, straightened up.

Wonsa let his breath out. No longer gray, or livid now, but as wild-eyed and shaky, however he tried to hide it, as the rest of us.

“You do not go.” He had to wave to signify it. Out of here. UpRiver. “You stay here. They stay here.” The guns. “Until you change your mind. Until you make it come to me.”

I did not say, When the River runs back to Cataract. I let him see it, in my eye, the line of my shoulders, before I began to turn away.

He did not notice. His eyes had gone past me, whipped by a struggle’s whirl, and then fixing with a glow of unholy joy.

Quite softly, but very clearly, he said, “Assandar.”

Sarth let go then. Alkhes turned, slowly, carefully, knowing all too well what he had done. Fatal, too fatal conspicuousness, that had not only drawn attention, but shown Wonsa a lethal flaw.

To intervene would only affirm the breach’s mortality. So I had to stand there, while Wonsa set down his shield, the insolence of a very leopard now, and stretched, his eyes never moving, and the murder clear in that unnatural smile.

Then he said, all but in a whisper, “The gods are truly kind.”

I did not look. I did not want to look. I did not need to see Alkhes’ face.

“What a splendid—coincidence.” The sweat was drying on his cheeks, he was as brutally cool as when we arrived. “What a splendid chance.” Dhasdein caricatured in every vowel. “After all those days, weeks, months, dancing to your tune, fussing with your fidgets, paying for your whims—General.” He spat it like blood. “Watching you squander our troops, and waste our time, and betray the City’s leader, the great Ruler, the god’s child,” he had slid from Dhasdein manners to Cataract leader in a stride. “And now—here you are.”

Alkhes said nothing. What could anyone say?

Wonsa stretched his arms wide. Spreading the whole insolent width of muscle and chest and corselet, knowing that, now, he was perfectly safe.

“Charming.” He kissed his fingers, and it became a true tiger’s grin. “Be sure, ‘general’, that I will be seeing you.”

He waved again. The troops moved. The stabbing spears came down, the way opened, beside the firepit, down the left side of the hall. The unlucky, the doomed, prisoners’ side. There was a delay, as Quiran and Herar gathered up our fallen, on a makeshift litter of gripped hands. Wonsa leaned on his throne, a leopard’s regained grace against the ruined leopard skins, to watch us led away.

#

They must be hardened to slaughter in Cataract; even among their own. The guard shoved us and hustled us, but nothing like the retribution we would have exacted for such a—an obscenity.

I am not hardened, Tanekhet. I am in a muck sweat, writing it. Even after Amberlight. It is printed on my eyelids, that cauterized wrist, the amputees, the others dying, eyes, brains burnt out . . . Sweet Work-mother, how can such things be done?

And done with qherrique?

I was shivering then too, as they herded us into the prison-halls, which are dug down in the hill, their entrance just behind the tyrants’ own quarters; they like to oversee their prey. The mayhem did begin then. The first in a series of truly villainous jailers grabbed Keraz’ breast and got his face scratched to blood just before Zuri all but kicked his belly out his mouth.

She must have intended to make it spectacular. I have seen Zuri kill with much less fuss. But the great ox fell down as if poleaxed, and Zuri looked at the rest over him. Unlike Wonsa, she did not bother to smile.

The jailcrew are probably damaged soldiers; not a woman among them, mostly huge, fat to grossness, with a truly hideous array of false limbs and villainous scars. If they are Wonsa’s own choice, then the man knows how to parody his role. Beyond the dirt and the stench, they carry the air of petty, uncontrolled power; no doubt most prisoners suffer all too bitterly.

After that, they were wary with us. I know I could not have taken too much more; I feared worse for the rest. I ought to have remembered that all except Quiran and Keraz had chosen to come to Iskarda; they had been through the fall of Amberlight. And even Quiran and Keraz had grown up in the hills, aware of worse predators than men. Sunya herself bore the gropings and obscenities with a face of hewn stone.

That, of course, was not the worst. Nor the petty galls of confiscated personal possessions, not just Quiran’s few instruments but the merest keepsakes, anything we might treasure, anything that took their eye. Nor the battle I had, working off my own backlash in Headly ferocity to stop them throwing Gearth’s body on the midden under the wall.

After which they made us take the corpse ourselves.

That, I think, was the cruelest part. That, and the way, when they lined us up to have the chains hammered on, I had Alkhes next to me, to feel how he was shaking, and see his face in the grimy torchglow, bloodless white.

I shut my hands on his, saying silently, You were only a pretext. It was not your fault. And felt Sarth press close too, slipping both arms round him as he stood just behind.

Zuri had usurped first place; the jackals understand that in prison or not, leaders have some rights. Under the hammer noise I pressed back into Alkhes and said in his ear, “We’re here. It’s all right.”

He could not speak. He tried three times. It was Sarth who leant down to us and said in that lion’s purr, “He was at Amberlight. A junior officer. He gave you trouble before.”

Alkhes did manage to nod.

Sarth’s face said the rest, still so implacably polite. With the knowledge that goes beyond every imaginable sort of corruption in those topaz eyes.

I understood too. Wonsa had been more than a military rebel. He had been one of those Alkhes fears worse than death itself.

One like you, Tanekhet.

It is not my husband’s fault, any more than his choice, that he draws some men’s desire. Even if it has all but ruined his life.

Sarth’s arm tightened, for I felt it. And I saw the look with which he said, quiet as ever, “Don’t worry, Aglis.”

I do not know what Sarth could do if he were pushed to it. Remembering that look, I know I do not want to find out. But I felt Alkhes catch a breath, and the shuddering tension eased, if only for that instant. Before he exhaled again and looked past me at the jailers trying to get Azo into manacles, and said quite quietly, “I won’t.”

And I said, loud enough for the others to hear us, “The qherrique got us into this. It will get us out.”

#

It could be worse. We are on the lowest floor, three cellars down, the River’s level, so paved in all but liquid mud, and open right along one side on a lattice of bars. Which means no privacy, even at night. The walls re-grow the vilest mildew within a day, however we scrub, with what little we have, and the stench . . . But we buried Gearth in one corner, with the shovels I made them bring us. And we have two slop buckets, if we have to dig them into the other corner once a day, and a water bucket changed every two days. And we wear chains, but not fastened to the wall as they do with slaves, which was my blackest fear. And they give us food, if only the filthiest soup and a couple of porridge pots. And the one compensation for the way they stand to watch us through the bars whenever we have to relieve ourselves, is that we are all together; if all but in the dark.

I daresay I shall come out looking as pale as winter-wasted grass.

#

False bravery. We have been here twelve days.

I am in the nearest corner to what passes for light; they have to keep a torch down here, to maintain their guard. Irritations, more like. I am sitting on the shelf, the one place we can sleep, with the precious, precious papyrus roll that Esrafal used to pad her drum on the boat, and the soot and water mixed in Ahio’s perfume vial that passes for ink, and the whittled reed Quiran had, for some reason, in the pouch that once held his instruments. And I have this lull, between the midday guard change and the time they grow bored and begin baiting us, to say to you what no-one else can hear me speak.

The very first thing I did that very first night when we had finally settled down, so far as anyone could, on this miserable crowded shelf, with torchlight glaring and jackals tramping and hallooing beyond the bars and sleep impossible . . .

Was to invoke the qherrique.

As near as possible I tried to imitate the way I prayed in Damas’ cell at Amberlight. I shut out the foulness along with everything else, drew into myself as if to approach the face, and I threw the filaments of thought and demand as I had that night, out into unresponsive space. This time I was not deterred when it did not reply.

“It will send me a dream,” I said to the others as we crowded the breakfast bucket. “Or it will send one somewhere else.”

Only it has not.

#

We have waited eleven days, Tanekhet. In this dank pit where they will not so much as let us talk together without shouts, and orders, and then punitive charges inside. After Herar was beaten senseless and Azo all but raped, just because they wanted to hug each other, husband and wife, we have not spoken much. They will not even let Esrafal tap a rhythm on the shelf, so either she or we can sing aloud.

The sole exception was when Deor’s cycle began.

Naturally none of us has a proper moss-pack that you can use once and throw away. None of us had brought ashore a cup or sponge, although we should have had the wits. We have had to use pads torn off our clothes, and wash them in the hoarded drinking water, turn and turn about. And every second of it before our own men’s eyes.

But not the jackals’. Ha! The seven of us had hardly gathered around Deor, who was biting her lips after she muttered the news in my ear, even her Navy composure sorely tried, when they started howling and roaring, and when we ignored them the arch-oaf headed a posse for the door.

Where Zuri met them, looking down her nose, with the ice only a trouble-Head can achieve, to announce, “She’s bleeding. Do you want to search for that?”

I never thought, in this pit, that I could want to laugh.

Because they do search us women, at the slightest provocation, my moments of greatest terror, for Sarth rather than myself. But this time the minions recoiled, and the leader brought up in his tracks.

Zuri examined them, a regard to make matricides blush. I thought it was time to back her up. So I strolled across and said, “Don’t worry. It’s only magic in Amberlight.”

And that frightened them clear up the stairs. Amberlight’s witchcraft, it seems, extends from qherrique to ruling a women’s courses as well as causing abortions and ruining a man’s potency or actually, dread thought, making his little weapon drop off.

So we women, if only for a scatter of moments, can talk.

I cannot answer them, Tanekhet. Because it has not spoken. There have been no dreams, for me or anyone else. Not in here, and surely, not outside. If Wonsa had dreamed like that, Cataract would be upside down.

It has not heard us. It is not listening.

I know already what this is doing to Sarth. I see the way he looks at me, each morning; or at least, when they rouse us to take the porridge through the bars. I know what happens behind those eyes of his, so redoubtably inscrutable, I make no doubt, to anyone else. I know the questions he asks. I know what he asked, after that morning on the Riverside. For him, this journey is as much an interrogation as a Quest.

And it is the qherrique, and the Mother Herself, and the way the world is made, and the foundations of his own soul that are on trial.

It is easier for me. Oh, Mother, it is far easier for me than for either of them, Alkhes who must be awaiting Wonsa’s personal attention, a torture that increases every day. And Sarth, whose world, or whatever he staked on the qherrique, is crumbling under his feet.

The Mother aid us, Tanekhet. Why will it not help us? Why?

#

For this question the Mother may not be enough. Sarth did it. This morning, as we brushed past on the way to the bars. Bending his head, so briefly the jackals never noticed, as he breathed in my ear, “Is this a test?”

May your own Mother goddess sustain me, Tanekhet.

Because if he is right; if it has heard me, which it did before, and it has not answered, not because it cannot help, simply because it wants to see if we are, if we have whatever such a test could prove, our courage, our tenacity—our wits?

Then I have chased a will-o-the-wisp, and wasted, on a thing that does not merit a copper fiel to a beggar brat, not only blood but my comrades’ suffering, and a decent man’s, a quiet, harmless, kindly human’s life.

#

It is getting worse, Tanekhet.

Ordered or not, the jailcrew have moved from tormenting to outright provoking us. Especially the men. I am terrified they will get what they want from Alkhes, even before Sarth. Sarth does have the better control, if he is as bloodily unreasonable about seeing his women struck, groped, pushed  . . . all the petty indignities they can inflict on us, and always, always before the men’s eyes.

I think they take Quiran, or Herar, or Sunya’s gentle Chenath to be the same as Alkhes or Sarth; outland masculine, all war-skilled, all troublecrew, and used to requiting such insults in blood.

When it is the women that they really ought to watch.

And if they are not careful, I will have to stop Zuri myself.

Sweet Work-mother, does it not realize that Wonsa may come for Alkhes any day? Does it expect us to break out of here alone? Are we supposed to die as martyrs and let some other take up the load? Did I speak in too sober truth? If that is so, why doesn’t it tell me, then? Why doesn’t it answer us?

I have made a decision. This cannot continue. We must act, before it is too—

    © 2010 Sylvia Kelso