Part 1 (2/2)

'Gently, child.'

'The men are angry. They're breaking the lower limbs.'

'Why don't they see you?'

'I'm underground. There is a trapdoor hidden in the gra.s.s, overlooking the house.'

'A trapdoor? Leading where?'

'Into a tunnel. My birth-father dug it with his smuggler friends. I don't know where it leads. Under the orchards, maybe, back into the hills. I thought he might be here, my birth-father, after leaving us long ago. But no one's here. I'm in the tunnel alone.'

'And the men are looting your house.'

'All the houses, Father. But ours they chose first--Aya !' !'

The girl's cry was little more than a whimper, but her face creased in misery.

'Tell me, Neda.'

'My brother is there in the street. He's so young. He is staring at the men in the garden.'

'Why do you not call to him?'

'I do. I call Pazel, Pazel - but he can't hear, and if I raise my voice they'll turn and see him. And now he's running to the garden wall.'

The Father let her continue, sipping thoughtfully at his milk. Neda told how her brother pulled himself up by the thrushberry vine, crept in at his bedroom window, emerged moments later with a skipper's knife and a whale statuette. How he fled into the plum orchards. How a mob of soldiers drew near her hiding place and spoke of her mother and the girl herself in terms that made the Father put the cup down, shaking with rage. As if they were cannibals in truth. As if souls were nothing and bodies mere cuts of meat. These men who would civilise the world. As if they were cannibals in truth. As if souls were nothing and bodies mere cuts of meat. These men who would civilise the world.

The dawn light grew. He pinched his candle out and beckoned the vestment-boy near to keep her face in shadow, and the lad quaked when her blue eyes fixed on him. But Neda was gone - gone to Ormael, possessed by the dream she was speaking. The soldiers' roar at the discovery of the liquor cabinet. Her girlish clothes tossed with laughter from a window, socks in the orange tree, blouses held up to armoured chests. Bottles shattered, windows smashed; a ruined bleat from the neighbour's concertina. Sunset, and endless dark hours in the cave, and frost on the trapdoor at morning.

Then she cried much louder than before and he could not comfort her, for she was watching the soldiers drag her brother down the hillside, hurl him flat and beat him with their fists and a branch of her tree.

'They hate him. They want to kill him. Father. Father. They are screaming in his face.'

'Screaming what?'

'The same words over and over. I did not speak their language, then. Pazel did but he was silent.'

'And you recall those words, don't you?'

She was shaking all over. She spoke in a voice not quite her own. '”Madhu ideji? Madhu ideji?” '

The Father closed his eyes, not trusting himself to speak. Even his own slight Arquali was enough. He could hear it, in all its snarled violence, bellowed at a child in pain: Where are the women? Where are the women? And the boy had held his tongue. And the boy had held his tongue.

When he opened his eyes she was gazing right at him. He tried to be stern. 'Tears, Neda? You know that is not our way. And no fury or grief or shame can best a child of the Old Faith. And no Arquali is your equal. Stop crying. You are sfvantskor sfvantskor, best beloved.'

'I wasn't then,' she said.

True enough. No sfvantskor sfvantskor or anything like. A girl of seventeen at the time. Captured that very night, when thieves skulking deeper inside the tunnel chased her out at knife-point, into the hands of the Arqualis. Unable to speak to them, to plead. Brutalised, as he would not ask her to recall, before the strange Doctor Chadfallow intervened, freeing her in a shouting match with a general that came almost to blows. or anything like. A girl of seventeen at the time. Captured that very night, when thieves skulking deeper inside the tunnel chased her out at knife-point, into the hands of the Arqualis. Unable to speak to them, to plead. Brutalised, as he would not ask her to recall, before the strange Doctor Chadfallow intervened, freeing her in a shouting match with a general that came almost to blows.

The doctor was a favourite of the Arquali Emperor, who had named him Special Envoy to the city before the invasion. A friend to Neda and her family too, it seemed, for he took the girl bleeding as she was to his Mzithrini counterpart, who was to be expelled with his household that same afternoon.

'Save her, Acheleg,' he pleaded. 'Take her with you as a daughter, open your heart.'

But this Acheleg was a beast. He had failed to predict the invasion, and so was returning to the Mzithrin in some disgrace. He saw no reason to help his rival. Both he and Chadfallow had wished to marry Suthinia, Neda's mother, and although she had refused both and vanished none knew where, Acheleg still fancied himself particularly spurned. Now fate had given him Suthinia's child. Not the great beauty her mother was, and left unclean by the enemy, but still a prize for a slouching ex-diplomat whose future conquests would be scarce. He took her to Babqri - but as a concubine, not a daughter. And only because the man was fool enough to bring her to court, when he came beetling through with his lies and flattery for the king, had the Father spotted her.

Blue eyes. He had heard of such things in the East. And when the girl saw him watching and raised those eyes, the Father knew she would be sfvantskor sfvantskor. A foreign sfvantskor sfvantskor! It was a sign of catastrophe, of the old world's end. But in a hundred years of choosing he had never needed more than a glance.

Such an odd fate, Neda's. Saved from an Arquali by an Arquali, and from one Mzithrini by another. Twice taken as plunder, the third time as a warrior for the G.o.ds.

But still not a sfvantskor sfvantskor, in point of fact. None of his children (he moved among them, speaking the dawn prayer, breaking their sleep-trance with his fingertips) could claim the t.i.tle until he gave them up. It had always been so, and always would be: only when they knelt before one of the Five Kings and swore fealty were they sfvantskor sfvantskors, warrior-priests of the Mzithrin. Until that day they were his aspirants, his children. Afterwards he would not even speak their names.

Not a sfvantskor sfvantskor, thought the girl, her dream dissolving and the tears quite gone. Not even a normal aspirant, for she was foreign-born. It made a difference. Even the Father could not pretend otherwise, although he forbid the others to mention it. For two thousand years the elders had moulded youth into sfvantskor sfvantskors to serve the Mzithrin Kings, to lead their armies and terrify their foes. Power dwelt in them, power from the Forts of Forever, from the shards of the Black Casket and the vault of the wind. It was more than an honour: it was a life's destiny and a sacred trust. And only native-born Mzithrini youths were called. That was the order of things, until the Father brought Neda to his Citadel.

Neda Pathkendle. A row of old Masters spoke her name in the Greeting Hall that first day, as if the very syllables displeased them.

Neda Ygrael, said the Father. I have renamed her. Watch her; you will understand in time.

Ygrael, Phoenix-Flame. The grandness of his gesture did not help. The other six aspirants (four boys, two perfect girls) were scandalised. A hazel-skinned refugee from Ormael, one of the va.s.sal-states of the enemy? Had they been singled out for shame? Were they such poor candidates that the timeless customs need not apply?

One did not question the Father - he who had sucked a black demon from a wound in King Ahbsan's neck, and spat the thing into a coal stove, where it howled and clattered for a month - but his choice tested faith. There was open hissing at the feast of Winterbane, when the new aspirants marched through Babqri City. There was the dove's carca.s.s, burned black and left on her pillow, with the words Never to Rise Never to Rise in ash upon the floor. There was the day she learned about Belligerent Expulsion: an ancient rule by which the other aspirants, if they declared unanimously that one of their brethren had 'sought to make enemies of them all,' could cast that member out. in ash upon the floor. There was the day she learned about Belligerent Expulsion: an ancient rule by which the other aspirants, if they declared unanimously that one of their brethren had 'sought to make enemies of them all,' could cast that member out.

Neda had done no such thing; she had been obedient to their whims, tolerant of their spite; and yet five of the six had voted for her removal. When the effort failed, Neda had gone quietly to the one who sided with her, a tall proud girl named Suridin. Neda knelt before her and whispered her thanks, but the girl kicked her over with a bitter laugh.

'It wasn't for you you,' she said. 'I want to serve the navy, like my birth-father, and they bring witches who can smell a lie to the swearing-in. What am I going to say when they ask if I've ever given false testimony?'

Suridin's birth-father was an admiral in the White Fleet. 'I understand, sister,' said Neda.

'You don't understand a thing. I wish you would would start a fight with one of us. You don't belong here, and I'd vote against you in a heartbeat if I could.' start a fight with one of us. You don't belong here, and I'd vote against you in a heartbeat if I could.'

All this was horrid and prolonged. But five years later it was over, and it had ended just as the Father said it would: with Neda trained and deadly and strong in the Faith, and her six brethren embracing her (some loving, others merely obedient), and the Mzithrini common folk no longer quite sure why they had objected.

Neda, however, suffered no such confusion. They were right, her enemies. They saw what the Father did not: that she would fail, disgracing her t.i.tle, if it were ever bestowed. She had fired an arrow over the River Bhosfal and struck a moving target. She had walked a rope stretched over the Devil's Gorge, and carried her own weight in water up the three hundred steps of the Citadel. But the way of the sfvantskor sfvantskor was perfection, and in one matter she was gravely imperfect. She could not forget. was perfection, and in one matter she was gravely imperfect. She could not forget.

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