Roberson, Jennifer - Cheysuli 08 (4 page)

           
Rogan was patient. "Then why
did you try to burn down the tapestry?"

           
"Because it's made of lions,
too. You know that," Kellin firmed his mouth; none of them understood,
even when he explained. "I have to kill all the lions before they kill
me."

           
Summer was Kellin's favorite season,
and the fair the best part of it. Never searingly hot, Homana nonetheless
warmed considerably during midsummer, and the freedom everyone felt was
reflected in high spirits, habits, and clothing. Banished were the leathers and
furs and coarse woolens of winter, replaced by linens and cambrics and silks,
unless one was determinedly Cheysuli in habits at all times, as was Kellin, who
wore jerkin and leggings whenever he could. Everyone put on Summerfair
clothing, brightly dyed and embroidered, and went out into the streets to
celebrate the season.

           
Doors stood open and families
gathered before dwellings, trading news and stories, sharing food and drink. In
Market Square Mujharan merchants and foreign traders gathered to hawk wares.
The streets were choked with the music of laughter, jokes, tambors, pipes and
lutes, and the chime of coin exchanged. The air carried the aromas of spices
and sweetmeats, and the tang of roasting beef, pork, mutton, and various
delicacies.

           
"Sausage!" Kellin cried.
Then, correcting himself—he had taken pains to learn the proper foreign word:
"Suhoqla! Hurry, Rogan!"

           
Kellin's nose led him directly to
the wagons at the outermost edge of
Market Square
, conspicu-ously far from the worst of the
tangle in the center of the square. Already a small crowd gathered, Homanans
nudging one another with elbows and murmuring pointed comments about the
foreigners and foreign ways. That other traders were as foreign did not seem to
occur to them; these foreigners were rarely seen, and therefore all the more
fascinating.

           
Kellin did not care that they were
foreign, save their foreignness promised suhoqla, which he adored, and other
things as intriguing.

           
Rogan's voice was stem. "A more
deliberate pace, if you please—no darting through the crowd.

           
You make it difficult for the guard
to keep up in such crowded streets—and if we lose them, we must return to the
palace at once. Is that what you wish to risk?"

           
Kellin glanced around. There they
were, the guard: four men of the Mujharan Guard, hand-picked to protect the
Prince of Homana. They were unobtrusive in habits and clothing generally,
except now they wore the crimson tabards of their station to mark them for what
they were: bodyguards to the boy in whom the future of the Cheysuli—and Homana
herself—resided.

           
"But it's suhoqla ... you know
how I love it, Rogan."

           
"Indeed, so you have said many
times."

           
"And I haven't had it for
almost two years!"

           
"Then by all means have some
now. All I ask is that you recall I am almost four decades older than you. Old
men cannot keep up with small—" he altered it in midsentence, "—young
men."

           
Kellin grinned up at him. "A
man as tall as you need only stretch out prodigious legs, and he is in Ellas."

           
Rogan smiled faintly. "So I
have often been told," he looked beyond Kellin to the wagon. "Suhoqla
it is, then- Though how your belly can abide it . .." He shook his head in
despair. "You will have none left by the time you are my great age."

           
"It isn't my belly I care
about, it's my mouth."

           
Kellin edged his way more slowly
through the throng with Rogan and the watchdogs following closely. "By the
time it gets to my belly, it's tamed."

           
"Ah. Well, here you are."

           
Here he was. Kellin stared at the three
women kneeling around the bowl-shaped frying surface.

           
They had dug a hollow in the sand,
placed heated stones in the bottom, then the clay plank atop the stones. The
curling links of sausage were cooked slowly in their own grease, absorbing
spiced oil-The women were black-haired and black-eyed, with skins the color of
old ivory. Two of them were little more than crones, but the third was much
younger. Her eyes, tilted in an oval face, were bright and curious as she
flicked a quick assessive glance across the crowd, but only rarely did she look
anyone in the eye. She and her companions wore shapeless dark robes and bone
jewelry—necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. The old women wore cloth
head-coverings; the youngest had pulled her hair up high on the back of her
head, tying it so that it hung down her back in a series of tight braids. Two
yellow feathers fluttered from one braid as she moved-

           
"A harsh place, the
Steppes," Rogan murmured.

           
"You can see it in their
faces."

           
"Not in hers," Kellin
declared.

           
"She is young," Rogan said
sadly. "In time, she'll grow to look like the others."

           
Kellin didn't like to think so, but
filling his mouth was more important than concerning himself with a woman's
vanishing youth. "Buy me some, Rogan, if you please."

           
Obligingly Rogan fished a coin out
of the purse provided by the Mujhar, and handed it to one of the old women. The
young one speared two links with a sharpened stick, then held it out to Kellin.

           
"Ah," Rogan said, looking
beyond. "It isn't merely the women, after all, that attract so many . ..
Kellin, do you see the warrior?"

           
Tentatively testing the heat of the
spiced sausages, Kellin peered beyond the women and saw the man Rogan
indicated. He forgot his suhoqla almost at once; Steppes warriors only rarely
showed themselves in Mujhara, preferring to watch their womenfolk from the
wagons. This one had altered custom to present himself in the flesh.

           
The warrior was nearly naked, clad
only in a brief leather loin-kilt, an abundance of knives, and scars. He was
not tall, but compactly muscled.

           
Black hair was clubbed back and
greased, with a straight fringe cut across his brow. He wore a plug of ivory on
one nostril, and twin scars bisected each cheek, ridged and black, standing up
like ropes from butter-smooth flesh,

           
Kellin lost count of the scars on
the warrior's body; by their patterns and numbers, he began to wonder if
perhaps they were to the Steppes warriors as much a badge of honor and manhood
as lir-gold to a Cheysuli.

           
At the warrior's waist were belted
three knives of differing lengths, and he wore another on his right forearm
while yet another was hung about his throat. It depended from a narrow leather
thong, sheathed, its greenish hilt glinting oddly in the sunlight of a Homanan
summer. The warrior stood spread-legged, arms folded, seemingly deaf and blind
to those who gaped and commented, but Kellin knew instinctively the Steppesman
was prepared to defend the women—the young one, perhaps?—at a moment's notice.

           
Kellin looked up at his tutor.
"Homana has never fought the Steppes, has she?"

           
Rogan sighed. "You recall your
history, I see-No, Kellin, she has not. Homana has nothing to do with the
Steppes, no treaties, no alliances, nothing at all. A few warriors and woman
come occasionally to Summerfair, that is all."

           
"But—I remember
something—"

           
"That speaks well of your
learning," Rogan said dryly. "What you recall, I believe, is that one
of your ancestors, exiled from Homana, went into the service of
Caledon
and fought against Steppes border
raiders."

           
"Carillon." Kellin nodded.
"And Finn, his Cheysuli liege man." He grinned. "I am kin to
both."

           
"So you are." Rogan looked
again at the scarred warrior. "A formidable foe, but then Carillon himself
was a gifted soldier—"

           
"—and Finn was Cheysuli."
Kellin's tone was definitive; nothing more need be said.

           
"Aye." Rogan was resigned.
"Finn was indeed Cheysuli."

           
Kellin stared hard at the Steppes
warrior. The forgotten suhoqla dripped spiced grease down the front of his
jerkin. It was in his mind to make the warrior acknowledge the preeminence of
the Cheysuli, to mark the presence of superiority; he wanted badly for the
fierceness of the scarred man to pale to insignificance beside the power of his
own race, men—and some women—who could assume the shape of animals at will. It
was important that the man be made to look at him, to see him, to know he was
Cheysuli, as was Finn, who had battled Steppes raiders a hundred years before.

           
At last the black, slanting eyes
deigned to glance in his direction. Instinctively, Kellin raised his chin in
challenge. "I am Cheysuli."

           
Rogan grunted. "I doubt he
speaks Homanan."

           
"Then how does he know what
anyone says?"

           
The young woman moved slightly, eyes
downcast. "I speak." Her voice was very soft, the Homanan words
heavily accented. "I speak, tell Tuqhoc what is said, Tuqhoc decides if
speaker lives."

           
Kellin stared at her in
astonishment. "He decides!"

           
"If insult is given, speaker
must die." The young woman glanced at the warrior, Tuqhoc, whose eyes had
lost their impassivity, and spoke rapidly in a strange tongue.

           
Kellin felt a foolhardy courage fill
up his chest, driving him to further challenge. "Is he going to kill me
now?"

           
The young woman's eyes remained
downcast. "I told him you understand the custom."

           
"And if I insulted you?"

           
"Kellin," Rogan warned.
"Play at no semantics with these people; such folly promises danger."

           
The young woman was matter-of-fact.
"He would choose a knife, and you would die."

           
Kellin stared at the array of knives
strapped against scarred flesh. "Which one?"

           
She considered it seriously a
moment. "The king-knife. That one, one around his neck."

           
"That one?" Kellin looked
at it. "Why?"

           
Her smile was fleeting, and aimed at
the ground.

           
"A king-knife for a king—or a
king's son."

           
It was utterly unexpected. Heat
filled Kellin's face. Everyone else knew; he was no longer required to explain.
He had set aside such explanations years before. But now the young woman had
stirred up the emotions again, and he found the words difficult. "My
father is not a king."

           
"You walk with dogs."

           
"Dogs?" Baffled, Kellin
glanced up at Rogan.

           
"He is my tutor, not a dog. He
teaches me things."

           
"I try to," Rogan remarked
dryly.

           
She was undeterred by the irony.
"Them," Her glance indicated the alerted Mujharan Guard, moving
closer now that their charge conversed with strangers from the Steppes.

           
Kellin saw her gaze, saw her
expression, and imagined what she thought. It diminished him. In her eyes, he
was a boy guarded by dogs; in his, the son of a man who had renounced his rank
and legacy, as well as the seed of his loins. In that moment Kellin lost his
identity, stripped of it by foreigners, and it infuriated him.

           
He stared a challenge at the
warrior. "Show me."

           
Rogan's hand came down on Kellin's
shoulder.

           
Fingers gripped firmly, pressing him
to turn. "This is quite enough."

           
Kellin was wholly focused on the
warrior as he twisted free of the tutor's grip. "Show me."

           
Rogan's voice was clipped.
"Kellin, I said it was enough."