Part 11 (2/2)

”Why don't you hang straw dollies on the walls while you're at it?” He named one of the old peasant cantrips against the Bad-Luck Shadow. ”Or plant marigolds around the walls to chase ghosts away? Poqs, I mean.” He spoke the nomad word for the thing the wandering people claimed was responsible for every ill from dead sheep to cross-eyed babies.

”Don't laugh at the Bad-Luck Shadow when you stand so near his abiding place,” responded Red Silk drily. ”You need not believe in the warding spells that guard you from him for them to work.” She reined her horse away.

Foxfire s.h.i.+vered. As a child she'd half believed in the Bad-Luck Shadow, as something that ”got” bad little girls, though she'd never heard or read of anyone who'd ever actually been ”gotten.” Unlike the djinni, who had been attested to by sightings and periodic contacts for centuries, there was nothing real called a poq. Yet out here in this utterly silent land-this exile where she and her grandmother were to come up with spells to deal with crocodiles, cobras, and whatever poison it was that the Priest of Time concocted for the test of the king-she felt the presence of Something.

Anything seemed possible here. She stretched out her hand to the other litter; Opal emerged through the curtains, gave her a protective hug.

Her father's voice called back her thoughts. ”You won't be here for long, my little vixen,” he promised. ”Indeed, the quicker you find an answer to our problem, the quicker you can return home. But for good or ill you will be back in the Yellow City in forty-three days.”

Foxfire started to say, but it's only thirteen to the Moon of Jubilee, and realized that her father wasn't thinking of Oryn's tests.

He was thinking of his own, to be held under the new moon that succeeded Oryn's death.

Late in the afternoon, with the gold sun lying two hands-breadths over the scraggy sagebrush to the west, Jethan's voice said, ”My lord king?” outside and Oryn pushed up the light inner curtain.

”I suppose Geb will have a stroke when he learns I've acted as my own porter,” sighed the king, beckoning the guardsman inside. Even on its downswing the sun was a power to be reckoned with, and the evening wind had not yet begun. ”But goodness knows where we'd put a porter inside here with us, and bringing along a lodge for one to sit outside would have meant another baggage a.s.s, and that sort of thing can get out of hand very quickly. Any sign of the reinforcements?”

”The pickets have just sighted a dust cloud in the west,” reported Jethan, kneeling upright under the tent's low roof. He had, Oryn observed, washed his face before presenting himself; water still glistened in his hair. ”That isn't why I've come, Lord King. The teyn appear to be gone.”

”As of when?”

”Not long ago, I don't think, my lord. I've been watching with a spygla.s.s all afternoon. I could see half a dozen of them most of that time, just sitting.”

”That's odd in itself, isn't it?” remarked Oryn. ”I mean, they can usually hide under pebbles, it seems. Why sit in the open?”

”To let us know they were there, perhaps?”

Oryn raised his brows. ”That isn't behavior one usually hears of with teyn-that kind of planning ahead, I mean. But, then, up until last winter one never heard of them attacking men, either. If they're no longer in evidence I suppose Numet should send out scouts.”

”I already went, sir,” said Jethan. ”When I didn't see any teyn I took a horse and rode two or three miles in the direction of Three Wells. I was unmolested.”

”Good heavens, my dear boy, you didn't need to do that!” cried Oryn, really distressed. ”You could have been killed.” He could see, beyond the edges of the bandages on the young man's arms, the blackening bruises of rock hits. ”The G.o.ds bear witness that just getting on a horse at this point would kill me.”

Jethan didn't smile. Oryn suspected he considered grimness part of his job. ”I was mounted, sir, and could probably have outrun them. When I wasn't attacked I checked for tracks. There were hundreds, dispersing in all directions. As if they'd all decided that they no longer needed to hold us here.”

”Or as if someone had decided for them.” Oryn heaved himself to his knees with a gasp. Jethan helped him to his feet and supported him to the tent door. As they both straightened up outside, Oryn untoggled his spygla.s.s from his belt again and scanned the eastern desert, the thinning column of smoke that was now almost extinguished in the pallid sky.

”I don't like this,” he said softly. ”I don't like it at all. They're behaving like soldiers-soldiers under some central command. Why murder the nomads who'd been through Three Wells? Why block the way to the town from us until it could be burned?”

”You make it sound as if there's someone controlling them,” said Jethan. ”Using them as tools. How?”

”I think at this point,” murmured Oryn, ”how doesn't matter as much as why.”

”My lord!” Captain Numet appeared between the low shelters as men began emerging, pouring out slim field rations from waterskins, preparing their horses for another ride. ”Reinforcements are approaching; we should be able to deal with the teyn now.” He saluted sharply. ”My advice is to press on as soon as you can be ready, my lord, so that we can be through them before dark.”

”Or we could, if they behaved like men and stayed put,” remarked Oryn. ”Thank you, Captain. Yes, I shall be ready in a few minutes. Geb, darling- Yes, there you are. No, I don't think I shall have time for you to shave me . . . No, what I'm wearing is quite all right. Thank you,” he added, with a smile to dispel his chamberlain's disapproving pout. ”Just have them make a horse ready for me and for my lady. I'm rather curious,” he added as captain and chamberlain went striding away in opposite directions, ”as to whether the teyn have actually dispersed, or whether this is simply a trap of some kind. And I'm even more curious as to what we shall find in Three Wells that someone would rather we didn't see.”

TWENTY-ONE.

With the evening's first cool, Raeshaldis made her way through the southern gate of the city and took one of the brightly decorated water taxis down the ca.n.a.l that led to the Fishmarket District on the lake's edge. This was still a pleasant trip of a mile or so through the relative coolness of palmeries and gardens, although the ward spells that had once kept the mosquitoes from the ca.n.a.l had-like all other wards-failed.

Mostly, the Fishmarket District was concerned with the fleet of big reed canoes that sailed each sunset out into the deeper waters and brought in netfuls of silvery trout, flopping ba.s.s, and millions upon millions of tiny, oily sardines-the staple food of the city's poor-and with the barge traffic from across the Lake of the Sun. Corn and dates and rice from the Jothek and Jamornid clan lands around the White Lake and the Lake of Roses came in here, and pigs, goats, cattle from the richer Sarn farmlands along the sh.o.r.es of the Great Lake to the north. As they approached the lake, Shaldis was interested to see how the ca.n.a.l had been deepened, to allow for the gradual retreat of the sh.o.r.eline over the past decade. On either side of the ca.n.a.l, land that up until a decade ago had been lake bottom was now a dispirited-looking tangle of reeds, ponds, and brush, alive with birds and crocodiles in the last red glow of the retreating sun.

This was the first year that the sh.o.r.eline hadn't retreated still further. Without the Sun Mages to sing the rains across the desert from the barren coasts of the distant ocean this spring, Shaldis wondered, watching the back of her veiled but otherwise nearly naked boatman dip and bend with the stroke, how soon would it be before the waters retreated too far for the distance to be traversed with ca.n.a.ls and bucket lines?

Eight women.

The G.o.ds help us.

And one of them, the G.o.ds help us, Cattail.

Cattail had had a new house built this year, on the site of the modest dwelling she'd shared with the long-suffering little nonent.i.ty who'd been her husband. The big, dark-haired woman liked to proclaim in her deep voice how nothing could induce her to abandon her friends and neighbors in the Fishmarket; the uncharitable (Shaldis among them) suspected that Cattail so loved the wors.h.i.+p of the coterie of neighbors whom she had dominated for years with advice and favors that she simply couldn't stand the thought of living elsewhere.

In either case, thought Shaldis, the house looked like exactly the sort of thing a laundress would have built if she should suddenly happen to have several hundred thousand gold pieces thrust upon her by merchants, land-chiefs, and wealthy gentlemen desirous of love potions or curses with no questions asked.

Cattail was sitting on her little roof-garden terrace, enjoying the cool breezes and the sight of the wharves below. As Shaldis was shown up by an extremely comely young serving man, Shaldis noted that reeking smudges of lemongra.s.s and pitch burned everywhere: Cattail hadn't figured out a mosquito ward, either. And the doors and windows of the little kiosk through which the stair from the house below opened into the garden were defended with ma.s.sive shutters and bars, so Cattail hadn't had any more luck with the problem of thieves, despite her reputation. The Fishmarket was a poor district.

”Raeshaldis, my dear child!” Cattail rose from her short-legged couch and crossed the garden to meet Shaldis, her jeweled hands held out. ”So good of you to call.” In the heat of noon, just before the dead hours of siesta, Shaldis had gazed into her crystal and spoken Cattail's name. When the swarthy, heavy-featured countenance of her sister Raven had appeared, she had asked if Cattail would do her the favor of receiving her that evening.

There'd been four other people in Cattail's downstairs waiting room when Shaldis had come in. They'd all glared daggers at her when the handsome young steward had heard her name and taken her up before them.

”Leopard, go fetch us coffee,” Cattail commanded with a wave, and the steward bowed deeply and departed. Shaldis had to admit she felt a little shock, since even slave men were never given the descriptive pet names that women-and, she reflected, teyn-went by. Even the lowest male slave was named by his father with one of the names that appertained to their clan, and that was that. Men kept their names, even slaves or entertainers like the graceful Belzinian who danced in the Circus District before scandalized crowds. Everyone Shaldis met was shocked, in one degree or another, that she'd taken a male clan name when she'd left her grandfather's house; it had never occurred to her that a woman would arbitrarily rename a male slave she'd bought, the way men routinely renamed women.

For that matter, she'd never heard of a woman owning slaves in her own name, and guessed that Cattail had a mud husband tucked away somewhere, the way the madams of the Blossom Houses and brothels did: a legal spouse contracted with and supported by a small stipend, who legally owned the woman's house and slaves and who knew better than to ever put forward his claim. Most of the Blossom Mothers and madams worked through gangsters contracted to murder the mud husband out of hand in the event of funny business.

Shaldis didn't envy Cattail's spouse.

Then she was embraced in a great wave of expensively perfumed flesh and guided to a chair. ”Dearest child, is it true about the King's Jubilee? Is he really going to go through with it? It will make it excessively awkward for poor Summerchild if he fails, and her without a son. Awkward for us all. I wonder she hasn't done more about getting herself to conceive by the king. It's really a fairly simple matter.”

She regarded Shaldis with those heavy-lidded dark eyes, and Shaldis's mind went back over the two or three attempts that had been made, over the past year, by various landchiefs to introduce new, youthful concubines into the king's harem. It was generally supposed that Summerchild used spells of her own on the king-which Shaldis didn't think was the case, though she'd never asked-and that she had placed some sort of spell ward on him to keep him proof against other women's love potions, something else Shaldis had no information about but which she considered only logical.

Maybe their love was simply beyond all that.

Three of the clients in Cattail's opulently decorated chamber downstairs were women, anonymously veiled in extremely costly silks. Spells of fertility, thought Shaldis, or spells of love, despite the fact that even when the men had been working magic, spells of fertility were dangerous things and as often as not killed the mother or produced a dead or deformed baby. Summerchild was keeping a record of such things, now that women were either trying to work men's spells or inventing their own. Despite Cattail's claims, there was little reason to believe they'd gotten any safer.

”I'm glad to hear you say that,” said Shaldis, watching her hostess's face carefully. ”The Lady Summerchild keeps her own counsel, the way she always does, but I was asked recently by one of my grandfather's household about a spell to make her conceive, and since that's not in my line, she asked me to come to you.”

The plucked brows arched up. ”Asked you to come to me? Dear child, and you agreed to run errands for a concubine? With that kind of att.i.tude I can see why the Sun Mages ran into trouble. No one respects even a Crafty who'll run their errands for them. Be advised by me, dearest, don't let yourself be imposed upon again in that way. Why didn't the poor thing come to me herself?”

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