Source

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter 6

Section 2

Summer

Cataract

Whatever else he was, Wonsa had been an efficient as well as a new tyrant; he chose officers with both loyalty and wits. They could no sooner have found the citadel breach than they took our aim, and no sooner took it than they had detachments pelting down our trail and the wall ringing to cacophonies of alarm.

When the sound rose behind us, the bay of warriors on a hot trail, Zuri swung round to me; a mud-dark shadow like a stray leopard in an alley-mouth.  Stop here, said the glitter in her eyes. Turn around and teach them, once and for all. Give them the fire.

Thought is faster than anything but qherrique. There was time to share that blood-lust, festered through so many indignities; and time to remember the audience hall, the spearmen writhing, limbs and livelihood seared away, eyes burnt out, dying.

I jerked my chin. Go on.

Her eyes blazed. There was time to wonder if it was trouble-Head tactics or killer’s protest, before she slid around and ran.

We reached the wall unhindered, if not unmarked. I could hear it as we stumbled along, the qherrique lighting alley-walls like an endless lightning flash, to the bow-wave of slamming shutters above our heads. The city knew we were here, and whatever we were, they wanted nothing to do with us.

There is another glacis behind the wall. We emerged to find the sentry-walk alive with torches and reinforcements prancing like agitated cats, and the qherrique’s appearance raised an uproar that would have signaled our position beyond doubt.

Zuri swung back on me, teeth baring now, a look that said, Can we run this time? The men on the wall danced and pointed and yowled all together, so like a convocation of cowardly dogs that I almost laughed. Then Sarth beside me said sharply, “Tellurith!”

In that escalading madness, the one sane voice. I could not touch him, I had both hands full of . . . light? Hope? Death? I did splutter, “Alkhes . . .?”

“He’s all right. Tellurith?”

Are you all right? Or have you been sucked into this frenzy as well?

Someone pulled a veil off my brain. Of a sudden I was back in River Quarter, looking out a gutted warehouse wall onto great beams of light-gun fire sweeping the River, with Averion’s voice an ice-slide in my memory: Be prepared to disengage.

I lifted my voice and said with only a few gasps, “Never mind the men. I’ll cut down the wall.”

Zuri heard me. It woke her, for I saw the berserker’s grimace fade. She nodded and turned to settle what passed for our battle array.

I leveled the statuette, and started forward, and in my mind I pictured a light-gun beam, spread horizontally like a chisel of light, for a span of perhaps twenty feet just above the ground.

 The wall-wards hullooed with terror rather than bravado. If there had been slingers with any nerve we might well have died before we crossed, but if there were slingers, the sight of the qherrique was more than their aim could bear. We bore down on the wall unhindered until, less than twenty feet away, the light-beam bit.

This time the timber crumpled rather than disintegrated, as the beam cut through like a hot knife in cheese. The sentry-walk buckled, sagged and ripped apart and its occupants screamed and jumped or fell or ran for their lives as one, two, three solid cedars bowed majestically outward and the partitions between them collapsed in a great cloud of flying dust.

There was an almighty tangle of subsidiary timber and frantic humans everywhere, including the base of an overturned catapult. But the trace-hounds, who might have engaged us hand-to-hand, were just too far behind. We marched out as solemnly as a Dhasdein engineering company behind its battering ram, through the entanglements of the breach and into the welcoming dark.

#

Almost instantly Zuri made me douse the statuette. I remember struggling to stow the seed while trying to decide how to carry the statuette itself, against a background of Zuri cursing our troop away to the right, stumbling and grunting in a maze of bean-trellises and potato furrows and the boulder-cumbersome exigencies of a well-fruited pumpkin patch. Cataract grows its greenstuffs close about the walls, on the rich River silt.

I understood vaguely that we had veered off our now predictable northern line and away from the River, the way we might be expected to break. I heard with equal vagueness the city tumult behind us, its military folk seething like outraged ants. I do recall, after I got the seed pouched, and Ahio commandeered the statuette to cradle in the remnants of her shirt, that I looked up into the infinity, the blessed largesse of open sky. And saw the Reaper, the great white summer star, rising eastward behind the Hunter in his jeweled belt, and identified the deeper darkness beneath him as trees; before the thick scratchy refuge of their foliage closed round us and Zuri panted, “Stop.”

We dropped in our tracks. I remember that. And the feel of a trunk against my back, and the renewed awareness of jail-pit filth and stench and the passionate desire for a bath, the tally of bruises and scrapes and a raging thirst. With them came the sub-anxieties of flight; direction, transport, supplies, fresh clothes. Awareness that we might have escaped, but we were afoot and weaponless in Cataract’s back yard, with neither provisions nor guidance for the obstacle that loomed so close ahead.

The cataracts. The Jump-up Cliffs.

I thought about that, when my mind insisted on seeing a larger view. I did not, I would not think about the questions that had opened behind us. The greatest one, least of all.

If it did not help us, was it because it could not or it would not, Tanekhet?

And was what happened with the statuette the work of the new qherrique, or a last shadow from the old?

Worst of all; if we could no longer trust it, or respect it, what was the point in going on?

#

Zuri, the Mother look upon her, still had the momentum of escape. In spaces of attention I heard her allotting this and tallying that, setting guards, planning all the necessities I could not face myself. Far more clearly I felt, at my other side, the silence, the entire absence that was Alkhes.

And with him, Sarth.

I will admit, Tanekhet, that what questions Sarth might raise made my very spirit quail. I was still cowering when Zuri slid down beside me to whisper hoarsely, “Ruand, we’ve spelled long as we can. We can head upRiver till daylight and then go to ground. Sunya and Deor’re foraging, Ahio’ll blot our trail. We can get clean later. Plenty of farmsteads close to Cataract, we can steal new clothes.”

And weapons. To replace the irreplaceable we had left.

I tucked my legs under me. With the loss of action’s drug, every muscle was solid lead. “All right,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry, Zuri, I’m so slow . . . but you’ve done well.”

Beside me, Alkhes said, “No.”

He had stood up; I could tell from the voice’s source. He was staring back the way we had come. Over the low blur of vegetable fields to that blot of darkness limned in patrol torches, under its lurid corona of flame.

Zuri said, “Huh?”

I thought I understood. And scourged myself, who had stopped thinking beyond the blood and fisticuffs, who had forgotten the very priorities I once enforced on him. Cataract. Whoever died, whatever turmoil ensued, the city would survive. And with it, a vendetta. And now as then, whether we escaped or not, that vendetta would recoil on those we left behind.

I think I heard Zuri groan. I did feel my own heart sink, as if someone had just weighted my back with one more impossible load.

“Oh, caissyl. Oh, Mother. Well, I suppose . . .”

He ignored me. He was still staring out at Cataract. As if I had not spoken, he said, “It was; it is his city. I won’t let them throw it away.”

I heard what he had said, then. And if I did not understand, I did realize as much.

Very carefully, very quietly, I said, “Caissyl . . . could you explain?”

More quietly, Sarth added, “Sit down, Aglis. Here. Now.”

He obeyed that voice, as he must have obeyed it, sleepwalking out of the city, folding himself up, neatly as a child, in the crook of Sarth’s arm. But his attention never shifted. Not even when I murmured to Zuri, “Move the others back,” and then slid closer, so he was lapped in both our arms. Before I said, feeling as if I would waken some more terrible qherrique, “Go on, caissyl. We’re listening.”

#

It took him a minute or two to collect himself. I felt him breathe in the dark, three or four long, steadying inhalations. Before he started to speak.

They had struck off the chains in the citadel ward; mid-afternoon, full dazzling light. In the yard among their quarters, with a detachment of soldiers as surety, they had made him strip, given him a bucket of River water and a scrubbing brush and bade him clean up; for what cause, they were all too explicitly clear.

“I didn’t—care—all that much.” He meant the jail-crew’s stares and taunts. His voice was breathy, broken, but now with a bone-deep, aftermath weariness. “I knew already . . . what it meant.”

If the clean-up did not extend to a shave, they gave him some sort of short overrobe. Before they bound his arms behind him, at the elbows, Cataract style, and the soldiers marched him into the palace itself.

“I can’t remember a thing about—where we went.” I felt his ribs shift against my arm with the quicker, shakier breath. “I was just—trying to—trying not to—the thing I was most terrified of wasn’t—it was that I’d—”

That he would fall out of the world. As he nearly did with you that day in Riversend, Tanekhet. As he would do when his mind could not bear any more reality, and involuntarily, uncontrollably, wiped it out.

And in Cataract, it was the one flight he could not make.

I have thought of that often, Tanekhet. I am not sure I can forgive the vice; the injustice, of whatever it was that sent us up the River, and deserted us in that prison, and left Alkhes, of all people, to bear that final, cruelest demand of all.

The march ended in some large inner room. “Living quarters. I think. There were rugs—I remember rugs like they hang in the Heartland—on the wall. I can see that . . . clay-red, yellow and green patterns—zigzags, spearheads—” his voice wavered again, and we did not try to draw him from the refuge of detail to what waited beyond.

“There were people—quite a few people. . . I couldn’t see them, I don’t think I saw much at all. Voices . . . maybe ten.” Trying now, with an intelligencer’s deep-burnt reflex, to recall the details a spymaster would need. Fighting off, as he had fought off then, the knowledge of what those voices implied.

“Then I heard—him.”

Sarth’s arm tightened, for I felt it. But he did not speak.

Wonsa had sent the soldiers off, he remembered that. And before they left, one of them produced a rope from somewhere, and with the others’ spears as deterrent, bound his feet.

“Wonsa was saying something about not so stupid—been at Amberlight.” Doubtless word of Zuri’s footwork, that first day in our cell, had filtered up. “I remember, falling over—was what worried me most.”

As you use toothache to shade out an amputation’s pain. He took another long, effortful breath.

“Then he must have walked over. He spoke to me, up close.

‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘General. It cools my heart to see you here. Trussed like a chicken for the pot. Let me tell you, we have quite a way with chickens in Cataract.’”

I felt every muscle shudder as he fought, hard as he must have in that moment, for control.

“I had my eyes shut. I thought, if I can’t see I won’t know if it, if it happens, if I can just think about something else . . . So I bit my lip, I kept thinking, if I can just concentrate on that, maybe I won’t, won’t—”

Sarth shifted closer. Under my arm, I could feel Alkhes’ side and back, the light cloth dampening with sweat.

“H-he must have come up close . . .”

He broke off, drawing, catching, releasing another ragged, effortful breath.

“And I—And I—”

He could not have blacked out. I knew that already, but I had no idea of the rest; or of what I could do to salve it. Except hold him tighter, until he half-turned, groping, catching my hand.

“Then—it was like, like somebody else talking. Somebody entirely different.

He said, ‘Who did this?’”

He drew another huge, shivering breath.

“I didn’t—I couldn’t listen. The one thing in my head was, if I only bite hard enough, feeling that will keep me here, I won’t notice the rest . . .

But he must have—sent them away. I can remember the noise . . . A wooden floor. Because I heard the boots. And I heard him walk back.

Then he said, ‘Assandar.’”

His hand turned in mine, and the nails almost went through my palm.

“I can’t tell—I can’t explain—the way he said that. As if it was—as if my name was something he’d been keeping—like the loot they’ll steal in a sack. Precious things—but not for the wealth. For what they mean in themselves—for the way they’ve been kept.

Then he said, ‘Look at me.’”

Beyond him, I felt Sarth twitch. And Alkhes shift to lay a hand on him, some understanding they alone could share.

“And I’ve always—whatever else I did, Tel, I’ve always—looked things in the face.”

So he opened his eyes, and looked at Wonsa too.

“I don’t—didn’t know what had happened. But he looked—he even looked like somebody else.

“And something happened then. I could tell. Even though he—I—neither of us moved. I didn’t—I had no idea what it meant.”

He quivered a little, another long, faltering breath.

“But he put out his hand . . .”

Very slowly, as to the wildest of jungle creatures; touching, at last, with a single finger; to Alkhes’ lower lip.

“It was the blood. I must have bitten right through, I never felt—He took his hand away, and looked at it. Just a little smear. I was—too gone to care. But he looked up at me, and he said—he said . . .”

He stopped again, filling his lungs, as for some giant leap.

“’You,’ he said. ‘Assandar. Witless as a deer in a trap. Because some man is going to come near you. Did That Woman do this?”

His hand clenched on mine, silencing hurt along with wrath.

“I was so angry I said it straight out at him. I said, ‘I was raped.’”

He turned his hand once more to contain mine, as if he remembered now whose it was, and I felt the shock’s aftershock, and with it a double bewilderment.

“And he—Tel, it stopped him like That. Then he seemed to—get bigger all over. And then he said—so quiet, it was like drawing a knife. ‘I will cut off their members and stake them out on an ant-bed. Just tell me which.’

“He must have thought it was down—that it happened here. I—the whole thing was so crazy, it was almost worse than—it was like some sort of spell. I was so—lost—I just answered, like he was a truth-seer. ‘It was in Amberlight.’”

He swallowed and shook his head.

“He—It was like something threw his bearings too. He didn’t say anything. But then . . .

He got uncomfortable. Not moving. But I could tell. He looked at the ground, and then he braced himself. And then he said—he said—

‘That night in the parade-tent. It was a mistake.’”

This, I could tell, he had by heart from pure shock.

“’I did not understand,’ he said, ‘how it is between men in Dhasdein. In the Heartlands it would all have been by custom—right. I would have set down my sleeping skin and hung my spears at your gate. I would have gifted you my kill, and made songs in your praise. And you would have told me, clearly, properly. Yes. Or, No.’

Tel, I couldn’t say a word. The last thing I expected—that I ever dreamt of—was that.

‘But I had to stand, and be silent, and watch those others, those fat Dhasdeinis, those Verrain—blacks—speak to you, sit by you, touching you—I was a Cataract underling. I had no voice in council, not the right to speak your name . . . In the parade-tent, I got drunk, it made me silly as a little boy. I could not wait to find a mannerly way. So I grabbed you—spoke stupidly—And all I managed was demotion. Dinda wanted to appease the General; I could not come to council again. And you—’

Will you believe, Tel—he didn’t blame me. But I understood—I remembered—And I was so ashamed.

He knew what I felt. He gave this shrug, and a little shake of his head, and it was like there’d been some mix-up with Catheor, someone I’d served with, known for years.”

He stopped short. His head went down on his knee, and he said, muffled, half-strangled, “If it had happened some other way—if we’d met elsewhere—if I wasn’t who I am—we could have been friends—”

It was Sarth who held him closer, and rubbed a hand up his back. But he still had hold of my hand, as if it were a lifeline. When he lifted his head again, it was to me he spoke.

“I was beyond . . . He came round beside me. Took my hand,” I felt his own hand tremble. “Spread the fingers, ran his own across the palm . . . almost the way he first said, ‘Assandar.’ He said, ‘I would watch you touch things—maps, the table edge, your sword, her coat—I longed to do this. So quick, so fine, so nervous. Like a Kawashi gazelle.’

Then he let me go. And he said, ‘I have had no dreams.’

He’s—he was—so quick, Tel. Like you. He’d worked out why I came. He knew what I—expected. He wanted to make it short. Maybe, by that time, even save me something . . .

I c-couldn’t answer. There’d been too many—shocks—and the plan was looking—I didn’t know if I could do it at all.” The anguish was raw in his voice.

“He must have seen that too. He touched me again. Just the back of his fingers, over the heart.

‘Semba,’ he said.”

I know the word now. In the Heartlands, it means, Lion. Young, small lion.

“He didn’t really understand. He just thought he’d given me a knock-down and I wouldn’t give up. I was—I was past thinking. But he walked round to face me. And I said, ‘Neither have we.’

That did surprise him. But he knew what it meant, Tel. For us—for me.

‘You still want me to listen,’ he said.”

He dropped his head back on his knee; now his voice was more than raw.

“And I—I had to say, ‘Yes’—and know how he would take it—and know what was hidden under that—oh, Gods, I don’t think I’ll ever be clean again . . .”

Presently his breathing steadied; but he did not lift his head.

“He put his hands on my shoulders, and then he really looked at me. And after a while he said—he said—‘You have found a man who does not make you scared.’

I was past getting upset. I just said, ‘Yes. I think I have.’”

Sarth leant across, drew his face up, and kissed him. Gently, lovingly, as for a sacrament.

“I—we both understood what that meant, too.

So he gave me this funny little smile. And he said, ‘Then I will ask no more than you came prepared to give. Lie with me, Semba. And then I will listen to you.’”

I felt Sarth, too, catch his breath as if he had been hit in the wind.

“No, I didn’t pass out. We both knew it was—what I’d been ready to—But I couldn’t—I just couldn’t—do it so, so . . .

When I didn’t answer straight away, he put his hand on me. On my chest. Very gently. He said, ‘I will not hurt you. I pledge it on my name. I will not hurt a hair of your head.’

Oh, yes . . .” He sounded halfway between the laughter of distress and outright tears. “He misread that too. He patted me, and then he let me go. And stood back. And waited. And I—”

He took another huge, shaking breath. “I thought, This is what I expected. I thought it would be far worse than—I will have to do far worse—

But Gods, the worst of it was that he wasn’t vicious. That you could tell—I could tell—it meant—it meant so much to him. It was something he’d dreamt about—and if he had to take this way to get it—he would compromise himself too.”

He straightened up between us, and put one arm around my neck, the other round Sarth’s. And spoke with the deliberation of an officer to a firing squad.

“So I said, ‘Yes.’”

I could feel what he expected of me; jealousy, anger, outright abuse. It was Sarth who turned him about first, and embraced him, saying in the body’s language, You are absolved. But he did not relax, and release another huge sigh, until I hugged him too.

I could have left it there; but the tension of his arms told me there was more. And in a moment or two, he began again.

“After that . . . it was worse. He didn’t show much, but . . . Gods, Tel, I have never felt such a worm. He put his hand on my elbow. Not pawing. It was . . . It was—more like—respect. And then he said, and he was almost smiling, you know, playing serious? ‘I can untie these now, perhaps, without you trying to kill me again?’”

Sarth hugged him roughly. He sighed and dropped his head, as if mortally fatigued now, against that sanctuary.

“He rubbed my arms where they’d gone numb. I would rather he’d beaten in my head. Then he took me into the sleeping room—it must have been the ruler’s personal suite, there were all these th-things . . .” His voice cracked. “Clothes; armor; little things . . .

And he was gentle. He knew how to . . . He hardly hurt me at all.”

#

He was silent then for so long I heard the others move behind us, the draw of Zuri’s wary, edgy, watchful breath. I saw the light change, on the distant hill of fire. And still, his muscles told me it was not done.

At last he drew another great sigh and lifted his head.

“Afterwards . . . He took me in his arm, the way—the way. . .”

For a minute his voice failed completely. The silence finished it. As you have, both of you. In the time of secrets that is closer than flesh’s intimacy, the time when you are not merely lovers but sharers of the soul.

“And he s-said, ‘Now, Semba. I am listening.’”

He knuckled at his eyes.

“I did my best, Tel. I told him about Iskarda. I told him why we had to leave. That we meant no harm to him or anything of his, we just wanted to pass. I know I’m not good with words—but I did my best.

And he listened. He did listen, it wasn’t just for show. He heard me right out. Then he rolled up on his arm, so he could see my face. And nodded, and touched my cheek. You’ve done well. And then he said . . .

‘Semba, you are a brave man and a loyal spearblade, and for you this is heart’s truth. But you are not of Cataract.’

Then he told me about the mess when he—they got back. He put the rags of their army back together, Tel. A junior—a demoted junior officer, with fifty Heartland rabble, and he got it all under control, and he brought them clean upRiver, and then he took on the factions in the city itself. Dinda’s tag-ends. His own traitors. Every clan that had made its officer a war-lord. He cut or bashed or frightened the hearts out of them. And he made himself ruler, and he got the city on its feet.”

He paused for breath. It was with shock that I identified the note in his voice. It was more pride than respect.

“’Now you come here and say, Let us pass, Semba. But what will happen, if you reach your Source?’

I . . . Tel, I didn’t know what to say. He smiled at me, just a little, and he patted my cheek. ‘You will come back downriver. You and your women, and your women’s weapons. And what will happen, when you rebuild Amberlight?’

We won’t, I started to say. Haven’t you seen that? He just shook his head.

‘Semba, it is happening already. Or what did you do downstream?’

What could I say?

‘Already you have restored Amberlight. A new government, a new age, fuh. They will be powerful, and they are women. And when you come back, what will they be to Iskarda?’

I tried to say it wouldn’t be like that . . . He put his finger across my mouth.

‘You gave us back the timber fief, and still you do not see. We have nothing but the River, Semba. And on the River, the gain of Amberlight is the loss of Cataract.’

He let go then. He was watching me. As close as you are . . . With such a look . . .

‘I could make this city live, Semba,’ he said. ‘I was Downriver. I understand what is wrong. We are a poor folk, we have no resources but the silver. And that is only good to buy from someone else. We must make others spend with us.’ He lay back down beside me, then, and he was—he was talking the way we have, he was talking as if—as if he’d needed to speak like this forever, as if nobody around him could understand.

And I don’t suppose anybody could. Because he spoke to me like I—like I could to Antastes. To a leader you can trust. More than that—as if I was, as if I was his—hero—the one you more than admire. The one you expect to understand your ideas. Your greatest hopes. And I was there to hear him, finally. In the flesh.

‘It is no use,’ he said ‘to export cedar. We must work it here. We must make the chests and carvings and the expensive furniture, even the ships. We have the slips, we could turn out more than war-galleys. If we had the craftsmen, we could keep their profit. And then we could grow.

And so with the Heartland trade. We should not sell, we must work the ebony, and the ivory, and all the rest. If we had people to do that, here . . .’

He got up on his elbow again, and he looked at me as if—as if—I was some sort of oracle.

‘If we had people for that, Semba . . . we could forget the flesh-trade. We could forget war. We could be a true city. Whole. Strong. At peace.”

Then he remembered who else I was.”

He stopped, struggling to steady his voice.

“I could see his eyes change. And he said to me, and he knew what he was saying:

‘I did not spend my kin and folk and people’s blood, Semba, to bring back the city. And then to have it taken away.’”

He put his head against Sarth’s shoulder, as he had in the citadel, as if, in memory, vision was still unbearable.

“He . . . knew what I felt. He took my face in his hands. Then he kissed me, and he said, ‘Stay with me a while, Semba. Later, we will think what to do.’

And then he put his arm around me—and he went to sleep.”

His voice broke. His breathing caught, for one terrible moment I thought it was a seizure and clutched him like my last hope of life.

“And I c-could see his side of it—and I unders-stood, I respected him—and I knew, whatever he felt about me—he w-wouldn’t let us go . . .”

He put his hands over mine around his waist, and buried his forehead against Sarth. And even our refuge was not enough.

“I tried to think . . . I asked for a sign—a message—anything—”

I could see him in that inner room, left beside a sleeping enemy, with no sign, human or unhuman, to show him the lesser betrayal. I could imagine the torture of that denial, the despair. I tightened my arms about him, the last, futile refuge, and waited for the end.

“It wouldn’t . . . answer. Nothing . . . answered. I had to decide . . .”

The words were dying in his throat.

“And in the end . . . this had come first.”

I had to go back, he said to me, when we met outside Amberlight during the siege. When I thought he had betrayed the city as well as me. I’d made contracts, I had obligations. I couldn’t betray them without betraying myself.

“I put . . . put . . . We were so close . . . I put my hands . . . on the big arteries. It only took a mo-oment. I took the p-pillow and I held . . .h-held . . .”

Sarth cupped a hand around his head and pushed it tight against his own chest and Alkhes broke into a spasm of sobbing that all but tore him apart.

#

Eternities afterwards, the tempest began to subside. Sarth still held him, and rocked him, very slightly, as you do a grievously grieving child. I hugged him in my turn; but then the light shifted, and Zuri was bending over me.

“Ruand?”

 “No trouble.” She stilled my jump. Troublecrew speech, no carrying whisper but a murmur in her throat. “But the moon’s up, and there’s half a watch gone. If you think we could be going . . .?”

Alkhes pulled his head up, drew back and turned about in Sarth’s embrace. Came to his knees, his feet, the moonlight I only now noticed catching the sheet-white face, the death-dark of his eyes.

“I am not going anywhere,” he said it so quietly, “until I have a reason. And a justification. For a—for a brave man’s murder, and a city’s crippling and the—the dirtiest breach of faith I ever made. I won’t move, until we have an answer. And proof that we should go on at all.”

Sarth said, “Neither will I.”

  © 2010 Sylvia Kelso

  Jupiter Gardens Press

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