Mother of Winter (21 page)

Who are you?
Rudy cried, and dreamlike found himself unable to make a sound. In any case, the Bald Lady did not turn her head.
Where are you going? Where did you hide the answers?

He reached out to catch her arm but could not touch her. The white glowstone light flickered in a tear as it slid down her face, and she pressed out of sight again into darkness.

The first village of the Alketch lands that Gil and Ingold entered burned to the ground within hours of their arrival. Gil gathered that such a thing wasn’t uncommon these days in the territory that lay between the Penambra hinterland and the Kingdom of D’haalac-Ar, northernmost of the Alketch realms. But it wasn’t an auspicious start

“It’s the end of the world,” said the steward of the largest landholder in town, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen yard with an armload of shirts gathered to her bosom—she doubled as seamstress and brew-mistress of the house as well. “First it was the Dark, sent by the Lord of the Demons to divide the godly from those ungodly in their hearts. Since that time, it seems that demons have been loose in the land, what with the Golden Sickness, and famine, and the old Emperor and his son both dying and his daughter turning rebel and disobedient.”

She shook her head wearily. “That has to be the work of demons, too.” Gil guessed her age at forty or so, though it was difficult to tell because her hair was hidden by the caps and veils customarily worn by women in the south. She looked sixty, with the slackness of flesh of one who had been fat five years before.

“Now it’s all armies on the march, Lord na-Chandros and General Esbosheth with his young king, as if him saying so could make the prince’s concubine’s little brother heir … 
pfui!
And the bishop stripping the land of every standing man for troops, as if poor Father Crimael didn’t have worries enough.”

Father Crimael, Gil had deduced, was the head of the
household, not only priest of the Straight God but the wealthiest man in the village.

After five years of seeing no one but the population of the Keep and its settlements—with occasional visits from peripatetic bands of murderers—Gil found it strange to encounter whole communities of people she’d never met. She hadn’t realized she had become so insular. From the bench where she sat scouring rust from the harness buckles of every piece of tack in the stables, she found herself marveling at the freestanding house of soft local brick and pink-washed plaster, even as she had found herself subconsciously offended at the fact that the humans of the household shared living space with pigs and cows as well as the usual Keep fauna of cats, dogs, chickens, and rodents. Odd to smell pepper and cinnamon in the steam that floated from the brick cookhouse on the other side of the court. Odder still to realize that not only was every female over the age of nine veiled, but to see their stares, to hear the catcalls and comments they had shouted at her because she was not.

The Dark had been here, that Gil could see. There were houses in the village that bore signs of extensive repair, and from conversation Gil understood that no one went out-of-doors after twilight for any reason whatsoever. But the scourge here and in all the Alketch lands was the political anarchy that had erupted in the wake of the Dark’s rising. The Golden Sickness had followed that—she and Ingold had passed the rock cairns of the mass graves on the outskirts of the village that morning—fueled by years of famine as warm-weather crops like rice and millet failed. The steward’s dress and zgapchin—the sacklike mob cap of country women—were faded to wan echoes of their original green and yellow,
and
the stables Ingold was currently cleaning would have accommodated a score of horses and cattle but bore signs of occupancy by only a few of each.

When Gil had suggested to Ingold that they earn food and shelter for the night by healing, as they’d done in the only other inhabited settlement they’d found, five days’ walk north in the swamps of the delta, he’d shaken his head. “We’re in the
Alketch now, my child,” he said softly. “Even herbalists are looked upon askance, be they not priests of the Church.” The only spells he had used since coming out of the forested highlands of the border had been those of concealment from the armed bands, sometimes hundreds strong, that had passed them, harness jingling in the dry heatless afternoons, and the Spell of Tongues that enabled her to understand the gummy, circumlocutory borderland patois. In the negotiations for lunch, the priest-landlord’s steward evidently hadn’t even been aware that Gil wasn’t using the ha’al tongue.

They were a brown race, here in D’haalac-Ar, with the blue eyes of the Wathe or sometimes the silvery irises of the true Alketch, and in the town square Gil had seen children with the white Alketch hair. According to Ingold, the color bar was stringently observed in the more civilized lands around Khirsrit, both by blacks and by whites. From behind the parched yellow rocks yesterday she had seen a marching force of them, gray eyes startling in the coal-dark faces, long plumes of white hair—or raven-black, there didn’t seem to be anything in between—gathered up through the tops of red leather helmets, like panaches moving in the wind.

All were mounted—Gil hadn’t seen that many horses together in years.

And all were men.

Gil tried to tell herself that that was why people stared at her—though goodness knew, living on the border they must have seen breeched and armed female bandits. She told herself that what was happening to her couldn’t possibly be so far along as to show. Not yet.

But her hands strayed from the harness to touch her chin, her brow, her wrists, and the long bones of her hands. The changes couldn’t be showing yet. Ingold had said nothing.

The conviction that she was mutating as the animals had mutated could even be illusion, like the pseudomemories that haunted her dreams and plagued even her waking hours now. Memories of rape at Ingold’s hands; memories of his beating her, shouting names at her that it sickened her to recall—if it was recollection. Sometimes she could remember that it
wasn’t. Sometimes she couldn’t tell, just as she couldn’t tell whether or not her arms were growing longer, her fingers turning into spike-tipped horrors like the hands of the thing that had bitten her. She’d look in anything—she stared now into the polished silver pectoral of a martingale—trying to determine the truth.

But the truth eluded her. Sometimes it was impossible to focus her mind on her own image. Sometimes she thought she looked normal. Other times she found she could not remember what normal had been.

“Gil?” He stood in the stable doorway, soiled hay flecking his patched deerskin breeches and boots, his eyes filled with concern. “Are you all right?”

Was he staring oddly at her face? Her hands?
You can see it
, she had asked, and he had replied,
Yes
. What else, if not that?

She made herself sniff, and said, “I was just thinking that any kind of work is okay for a woman to do here, as long as it doesn’t involve defending herself.”

Ingold grinned and slipped his shoulders from beneath the yoke that held him to a sledgeload of equine by-products.

“My dear Gil, a woman’s defense lies in not catching a man’s eye and in trusting the saints.” The wizard stretched his cramped shoulders and crossed to the bench where she sat, to drink of the water gourd at her side. “Just ask any man hereabouts.”

He picked up his staff from the well head and sketched a word in the courtyard dust.

“That’s
attes:
man. See this diacritical mark? It’s an honorific, but it’s always part of the spelling of the word. All men are Honored Men.
Tattesh:
woman. Literally, not-a-man or, more precisely, not-of-us, and as you notice, no honorific diacritical in sight.”

“So we’re here in an entire empire that thinks with its honorific diacriticals?” She cocked a wry grin up at him, and all was for a moment as it had been.

“More or less. See here:
pia’an
. Wizard. And
pjan:
demon.” Every house bore hex signs against demons, as well as the customary bright-painted images of God’s saints.

“Those two dots there mean nonhuman. You’ll see them on the names of all animals except horses, falcons, and cats. The Emperor’s horse, falcon, and cat all get honorifics, by the way, something none of his wives do. So one can mortally insult a pretender like our one-handed friend Vair na-Chandros simply by referring to his horse as
katüsh
rather than
kattush—
mortally for oneself, I mean.”

“Get along to your work, old fool!” the steward called out, returning to the back door. “When Father Crimael gets back, he’ll—”

She stopped. From over the courtyard wall came the sound of running feet, women’s voices crying out. Then the fast thud of hooves, and men cursing, and a high, shrill child’s shriek, “Soldiers! Soldiers!”

Gil dropped the harnesswork and grabbed her sword from the bench by her side; Ingold’s was already in his hand. The wooden gate of the court blasted open under the weight of a horse, black and fully armored and ridden shoulder-first into the barrier, the man on its back gigantic in armor of bronze-lacquered bamboo. Ingold caught Gil’s arm and fled through the still-room door—Gil could hear men shouting in both directions, the crash of furniture breaking, and the steward’s shriek of helpless terror and pain.

They emerged into a shoving chaos in the town square, women holding their veils over their faces or their babies in their arms as they fled screaming, children underfoot like terrified piglets. Only a handful of men, most of them elderly, had been working the fields, and they were dying in pitched battle near the town fountain against three times their number of leather-armored soldiers. On the steps of the church, its curlicued facade a clutter of brilliant-hued statues and gilded sunbursts, a man in a red robe who had to be Father Crimael was shouting, beckoning the women and children who streamed past him into the blue-tiled sanctuary, Ingold tried to dodge down an alley and cut back as three horsemen rode at them, knocking into and almost falling over an elderly man fleeing a house with a bag of money in his arms. Gil cursed the miser as she and the wizard sprang up the church steps and into
its shadows, the horsemen crashing after them, monsters of bronze and black.

Among the carnival house of tiny pavilion chapels, of sunken pits and spiral stairs and hanging lofts on a dozen different levels, women crowded, weeping, holding their children to them or shrieking their names. Down six steps and through a circular pit where a fountain bubbled softly, Ingold sprang, with Gil at his heels wondering how he knew where the back door was—and of course there was a back door that way, but though it stood open, it was jammed with frightened old men and women, pressing back as men in buglike black armor mounted the steps, weapons flashing. Ingold threw his shoulder against the door, and Gil, behind him, thought with sudden viciousness,
Shove him out … They’ll cut him to pieces …

She stepped back fast. People pressed her on all sides as she leaned her back to a twisted double pillar, fighting to breathe—for a moment her vision narrowed to a slim girl beside her, with Alde’s morning-glory eyes staring at her over the stained gray cotton of a veil. By the time Gil’s vision cleared, the girl was gone.

Hooves crashed behind her, booming within the church’s fretted ceiling groins. Sunlight from the high windows fleered across armor, beaded plumes, the black captain’s silvery eyes. Father Crimael, very young, came from among the refugees and stood before him, crimson robes faded but his clean-shaved head smooth as an egg, his face placid with the serenity of one whose reservation has already been phoned in to Heaven.

“Are you a heretic, then, to break the law of sanctuary, Captain Tsman-el?”

“We break no law.” The bandit captain spoke the harsh c’uatal of the south. “We’re here to collect tribute for His Lordship Esbosheth, regent for the true king. If a man can’t pay it out of his goods, he owes what he can give, a woman or a couple of brats. We’ll take those, saint-kisser.”

“Then let Lord Esbosheth come here himself and make an accounting,” the priest said steadily. “But any man who takes
any living human from sanctuary is liable before God—not Lord Esbosheth, not the young king, but the man who himself performs the deed. You are liable before the Judges of the Straight Way, and the saints of God, and all the fires of Hell.”

The captain grinned evilly. “Well, I can’t have that, now can I? Can’t let the Judges of the Straight Way and the saints of God be snickerin’ bad things about me behind my back.” He reined his horse around, its iron shoes ringing on the soft, pitted brick floor, so that he faced those who’d crowded through the door after him: dark faces, brown, and white, peering like demons from among a forest of ax blades and swords. “You boys heard the saint-kisser. Guess we’ll just have to wait for volunteers to come out of their own free will.”

The men laughed, and some of them called out obscenities to the women closest to them, or to the priest. Even before the captain had ridden his horse from the sanctuary and away down the front steps, Gil heard them dragging logs and brushwood to pile around the outside walls. She looked around quickly for Ingold, but there was an anger flaring in her, cold and deliberate—she knew the old man could get the two of them past the soldiers just by causing a couple of the horses to spook, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Above her in a thick-carved shrine projecting from the wall she heard a girl sobbing, “I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” over and over; the babble of voices, soprano mostly and terrified, was growing louder as the heat-dance from the fires began to waver against the high windows and smoke poured in to roil in the ceiling’s pendants and hammerbeams.

She wanted to kill them, those men in the square. Like the heat-dance the lying visions shuddered in her mind, hands holding her down—Ingold’s hands. Angerless cold rose in her like a wave.

“Are you a bandit?” a voice beside her asked. “A robber?” The tone was that of one who seeks information only.