Gods and Warriors (10 page)

It was an old joke between them. She would have smiled if it hadn’t hurt so much.

“Two fishing boats have put in as well,” he added. “They were scared of the Crows, but they got over it when we bought their catch.” He made to withdraw, but she held him back.

“Userref? You will still be with me, won’t you? I mean, at the Chieftain’s stronghold?”

Something about his hesitation made her go cold. “I was to have gone with you,” he said gently. “But then you did this to your face, and now your mother says I must leave you and return to Keftiu.”

A black chasm opened before her. “But—I can’t be without you.”

“It isn’t up to me, Pirra. You know that.”

“But—
why?
”

“I told you. She means to punish you for spoiling your face. She knows this will hit hardest.”

“No!” Pirra clutched his arm. “No, she can’t do this!”

“I’m sorry, little one. I—I said I’d look after you. And I can’t.”

“Userref!”

But he was gone.

Pirra huddled in the dark, clutching her knees. She felt hollow and sick. Ever since she could remember, Userref had looked after her. Her first memory was of toddling along the top of a high wall, and him hauling her off it just before she fell. He’d caught lizards for her to play with, and told her stories of his animal-headed gods. He was more than a slave. He was the older brother she’d never had.

The walls of the tent pressed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. Without stopping to put on her sandals, she ran out into the dark.

Fog stole down her throat, and stones were sharp beneath her feet. She stumbled past shadowy figures in long black cloaks. They ignored her, heading for their camp among the pines.

Pirra hated the Crows. They’d emerged from the woods as the ship dropped anchor, like real crows descending on a carcass. They
said
they’d been sent by the Lykonian Chieftain, but Pirra didn’t believe that. Those hard-faced
warriors with their sinister obsidian arrows weren’t sent by anyone. She had been around powerful forces all her life, and she knew the smell of evil. In the Crows she sensed a darkness that made her skin crawl.

Through the murk, she glimpsed a battered rowing boat drawn up on the pebbles. She realized that she’d reached the end of the bay.

Next to the boat, an old man sat mending a net by the light of a smoky fish-oil lamp. He stank like a dunghill, and his tunic was the filthiest Pirra had ever seen. His straggly beard was crusted with snot.

She stared at him and he threw her a rheumy glance. Then his gaze dropped to the gold bracelets on her wrists.

Up in the hills, a bird called.
Kee-yow, kee-yow.

Pirra recognized it. Userref was good at bird calls, and he’d done this one because she’d wanted to hear the cry of a falcon.

Suddenly she knew. That falcon was calling to her. It was telling her that this was her chance.

Slipping one of the bracelets off her wrist, she held it out to the fisherman—and pointed at the Sea.

T
elamon quickened his pace, while the falcon wheeled overhead. It had flown up from the south. He hoped this meant that Hylas had reached the Sea.

He was sore from last night’s beating, and the food sack was chafing the weals on his back. His head was in a whirl. After the beating, his father had talked to him late into the night. “It’s time you played your part,” he’d said grimly. That turned out to mean wedding some Keftian girl from across the Sea, and shouldering the burden of who he was. His father had spoken of the Chieftaincy, and why he’d sought to distance Lykonia from what was happening in the rest of Akea. Afterward, Telamon had lain awake, feeling as if he was in a bad dream from which he couldn’t wake up. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he’d slipped from the stronghold and run away. He tried not to think of his father’s face when he found out his son was gone.

Telamon had taken the shortest trail up the Mountain, and around noon he reached the top of the pass. He ran to the rock where he and Hylas and Issi sometimes left
messages. There was a pebble in the secret hollow, with a sign scratched in charcoal: a leaping frog. Telamon chewed his lip. Had Issi left it for Hylas, to tell him she was still alive? Or had Hylas left it for her? Or had one of them left it for
him,
to tell him—what?

Hurriedly he scanned the ground for tracks, aware that he should have done this first, instead of trampling them. Hylas wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. Hylas knew all about following a trail: He could track a ghost over solid rock.

From the moment he’d first seen Hylas, Telamon had wanted to be his friend. It was four winters ago, and he’d been hunting with his father. As they were passing the village, they’d come on some boys chucking stones at a small girl in a grimy badgerskin cloak, who was laying about her with a stick, even though they were twice her size. Then another boy had emerged from the woods, a scruffy figure in a filthy hareskin cape and rawhide boots caked with mud. Grabbing the girl by the belt, he’d faced the bullies and said, “Touch her again and I’ll break your legs.” They’d jeered at him—and he’d stared. Just stared. And they’d seen that he meant it, and slunk away.

More than anything, Telamon had envied that boy. Those village boys had known at once that he would do what he said. Telamon feared that if it had been him, they would have put him to the test, and he would have failed.

Near the meeting rock, he found several of Issi’s footprints and one of her brother’s. There’d been a
storm in the night, and from the prints, he guessed that Hylas had been here before it, and Issi after.

Her trail led west, down toward the marshes of Messenia. From where Telamon stood, he could just make them out in the distance, and beyond them the blue-gray blur of the Sea. Maybe he could catch up with her and together they’d find Hylas, coming to look for them. What a reunion that would be…

He was about to start west when he saw the old woman crouching under the pine tree.

She squatted on her haunches, her mountainous flesh juddering as she rocked on her heels. Telamon knew her. Everyone did. He was instantly on his guard.

He should have guessed that Paria wouldn’t be deterred from roaming the Mountain. What did she care about warriors? She was Neleos’ mate and the village wisewoman; she could read the will of the gods in the ashes of a fire or the rustling of leaves, and she was skilled in curses and spells. No one wanted to cross a wisewoman, not even warriors of the House of Koronos.

“You’re far from home, young master,” she said, baring a fetid ruin of black teeth.

“And you, Old One,” he said warily. Drawing nearer, he caught her stink of stale urine, and saw lice moving in the folds of her tunic.

“Where are you off to?” she said with an obsequious bow.

He flushed. They both knew that her servility was a
sham and a form of mockery. She knew he was scared of her.

With a wheezy laugh, she patted the pine trunk. “Paria came to hear what her oracle has to say. But you, young master, you’re heading the wrong way. The Chieftain wants you at Lapithos.”

He bristled. “You can’t know what my father wants.”

“Ah, but Paria knows much without being told. Bad things afoot at Lapithos. Thestor wants his son.”

Telamon hesitated. Should he follow Issi west, or turn back for home? “Read the leaves,” he told the wisewoman. “Tell me which way I should go.”

From between her pendulous breasts she drew a little birdskin pouch. Shaking grit into her palm, she sprinkled it over the tree’s roots. “Bones,” she told him with a chuckle. “Bones ground fine, to feed my tree. The rich pay to ask the seer, while the poor pay Paria to listen to a tree—but it’s the same god that speaks through them both.”

“If you want payment,” Telamon said impatiently, “you’ll have to wait.”

She leered at him. “Paria is patient. She knows the young master will pay.”

From nowhere a wind got up and soughed in the pine, and she cocked her head to listen, fixing Telamon with her black beetle eyes. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades and stung the weals on his back. He felt her probing the dark corners of his spirit.

At last she spoke. “The ways of men are tangled as roots. So is your heart, young master. That’s what my tree says.”

“Th-that’s no answer,” stammered Telamon.

Another fetid grin. “But it’s the truth.”

“I didn’t ask for a riddle,” he cried angrily.

Paria laughed and went back to feeding her tree.

He paced up and down, thrashing at thistles with a stick. He had to find Issi and meet Hylas on the other side of the mountains—but his father needed him at Lapithos.
Bad things afoot
…

He threw away the stick. His friends needed him more.

With a curt nod to the wisewoman, Telamon shouldered his food sack and started west, toward the Sea.

T
he seabird had been following the boat all morning, glancing down at Hylas as if to say,
What, still alive?
He’d given up trying to hit it with an oar. He always missed.

He’d been rowing north, but the Sea kept dragging him south. And still no sight of land. The Sun scorched his shoulders and made his head throb. Salt stung his wounded arm. He was so thirsty he couldn’t swallow—and
hungry.
He thought with longing of his food sack, left behind at the coast.

He’d been scanning the horizon for ships till his eyes ached, but so far nothing, although he kept spotting sails in the distance that turned out to be waves. And yet he knew the Crows would come after him. They were relentless. They were like the Angry Ones in human form.

When the thirst became unbearable, he scooped up a handful of seawater and drank it. It made him retch. He peed in the boat and tried some of that, but it tasted so bad he spat it out.

He still had the bronze dagger strapped to his thigh, but
he hadn’t seen a single fish; just some weird see-through creatures without eyes, that floated like pulsing veils. He caught one, but it stung worse than nettles, so he chucked it back.

Then he had an idea. The willowbark twine had dried tight around his thigh, but he managed to unpick the knots and free the knife. Cutting a strip off the hem of his tunic, he dipped it in the Sea and wrapped it around his head. The wet cloth was blissfully cool.
Much
better. He splashed himself all over, soaking his tunic. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?