Gods of Nabban (40 page)

A company of Lord Hani Gahur's horse waited on the road below the castle to prevent any outbreak from the main gates, but the waters still rose, lapping over the road now, beginning to meet at its crown; they could make no camp and would be driven back before long.

In the town, some move, surely against the castle, was muster­­ing, order emerging from the scurrying consultation, a company—embassy? —assembling.

“Children!”

They were sleeping in a huddle under a blanket filched from a chamber within, but they came alert at her word, yawning and rubbing their eyes. A few hours' rest, while she had composed spells against the morning's need, gathering formal wizardry about her once more. They had slept deep in exhaustion, poor things, oblivious to the characters that glowed in the air as if traced by fireflies, written in mind, breathed out with a word, sent to settle and fade to secrecy where she would have them lodge.

Yeh-Lin had, in the end, rested herself, sitting precarious on the parapet, cross-legged, hands open on her knees, eyes fixed unseeing on the cloud-troubled stars. If she dreamed, back in Nabban with all in chaos and wanting only a strong hand . . . well, that was a matter for the night, and it was past, and the day lay before her. She had sworn.

They blinked at her and offered wary bows: her pages, newly named so, and still wondering and uncertain in their elevation. In their freedom. She must remember their names and not keep thinking of them as the little one and the girl and the other boy.

The previous evening, Yeh-Lin had realized that she needed and would go on needing loyal message-runners, willing fetch-and-carriers. She had conscripted three young slaves from garden and kitchen work as she passed through the castle, liking the look of them. Watchful intelligence behind those warily downcast eyes, all three. They ran at her heels and were dispatched about the castle with messages as she met with the Kho'anzi, with his captains and banner-lords, with the castellan, with all she must persuade and order and chivvy into obedience and action. They had been most helpful in rooting through the storerooms, too, for what, even she had not been certain. “Something to make a banner of . . .”

It had been the battered littlest one who found the sky-blue silk, several bolts of it, and had said, with un-slavelike confidence, “This, mistress! This is what you want.”

It had been so, most certainly.

There was a name for such service, even in Nabban, that was not slavery. Begin as her young god meant to go on?

They had helped her lug the several heavy bolts of silk to this balcony beneath the highest gable facing the town, and they had rested and eaten cold dumplings and tea together, the four of them.

She had dropped words into the dark of the night, startling their yawning into an apprehensive, disbelieving silence. “Children. I have decided that you three are to be my pages, if you will. Do you understand that? Only if you will. And if so, you must call me ‘my lady' or ‘Captain Nang Lin,' not ‘my mistress.'”

Pages came of high and free birth. They had not quite dared to understand.

“The heir of the gods of Nabban will have no slaves in his land.” So—it was said, and the castle must know it. How he thought this could be done and the land brought to peace and a place found for all, she did not know. There had always been debt-slaves in the law, with some limits on their terms and their service, even when she was a child. And then . . . there had been captives from Dar-Lathi, and from what were now the western provinces from Choa down to Asagama, once those were conquered, their kings and queens becoming Kho'anzis and high lords of their clans, but many of the lesser nobility had been taken captive and never freed. Hands had been required to work the land when the army called up the sons and daughters of the free peasantry to become soldiers for the invasion of Pirakul and the war there, where Jasberek Fireborn united the temples of the many gods against her. . . . And so it had grown, and sunk deep roots, and now it was the support and the frame of all the land.

Her god must surely understand that it was easier to break than to make. They must take thought for that future, not, as it seemed Prince Dan had done, wake rebellion with no consideration how the folk of the land, slave or serf or free, would then feed themselves.

Slave himself, and devoted servant, grown to manhood in his mad assassin's shadow trying only to keep him from the dark, had Nabban yet learnt to look more than a move or two ahead, when he set a force in play?

The game of long calculation held also the risk of paralysis. Dotemon had learnt that.

Sometimes, was it not better to unleash the storm and hope to ride it? Yeh-Lin had taught her so.

For now, they must all—all this castle's folk swept, whether they adored or doubted, to follow Nabban—feed on hope.

“If anyone presumes to order you back to your old places, you say you are the pages of the captain of the heir of the gods and they must come to me. And if you come to find you do not want to be in my service, we will find some other work you are suited to do, yes? But in these next days, I will need some quick-witted and willing servants. I would have those servants be you.”

“Yes, mistress.” The round-faced boy—Kufu, that was the name, and he was the grandson of the garden-mistress, no doubt an aristocrat among the hierarchy of at least the outdoor slaves—had seemed doubtful, mistrusting but not disagreeing. He had licked nervous lips. “Yes . . . Captain Lin.” But the eyes of the skinny lad from the kitchens, Ti, the little one with the bruised face, had been wide with an adoration he could not have known she saw. The tall, bushy-haired girl, Jang, another belonging to the gardens, had given a brisk nod, and a “Yes, my lady.”

Pages. So they must learn to read and write and have some training in arms and . . . had she so very much enjoyed playing tutor? Or did she yearn to be a mother and grandmother again? Perhaps she could do better this time around.

“Children, Lord Gahur is coming. I said he would. The silk—you remember what to do?”

“Yes, my lady.” That was Jang. Confident in the morning.

She sent them to relieve themselves in whatever chamber-pot they could find in the abandoned room of Lord Daro's imprisonment. Of such things must the god's captain—and a good grannie—take thought.

“Then wait. It may be a long wait. Kufu, you'll go to the kitchens and fetch back something to eat. Don't let them keep you. Don't send Ti near the kitchens. I do not have time to argue with cooks to get him back.” And she would have a word with Castellan Yuro about how the kitchen-master treated his underlings, so soon as she had a moment to spare. “It may be a long wait, but you must keep watch faithfully and not let anyone drive you out or order you away.”

A round of bows, nicely judged to the appropriate degree, but little Ti was frowning at her.

“Yes, Ti?”

He shook his head, suddenly afraid, staring at his bare feet, shoulders hunched.

Yeh-Lin dropped to her knees, a finger tilting his chin up. Eye to eye, she said, “Never be afraid to ask me a question, Ti.
Nang
Ti.” A full and formal name, freedman, free man. Her name, but it ought to have been Daro, as they were of the Daros. Too late. “What is it?”

“You changed your colour.” Whispered.

She laughed and sat back on her heels. “Good. I did. And did Daro Kufu and Daro Jang think it would not be polite to mention it, or did they not notice?”

“But you're a wizard, my lady,” said Jang, unquashed.

“Ah, but what Ti wants to know, really, is
why
I changed the colour—am I right?”

The boy still hardly dared nod. She ruffled his hair.

Changed her colours. Black-lacquered armour. Yesterday it had been deep-blue and rose, old colours from before the time of Min-Jan, which only an historian would know. The armour, her brocades, were all formed of memory, but as real as the roof beneath her, as the body she wore. What, stripped of the workings of power, had she actually clothed herself in? Some simple shirt and trousers of Praitan, she suspected. She did not remember. She shaped them to what she would. The blanket and scarf she had given Ahjvar were real enough; she had them from Deyandara when they parted.

“I changed the colour in the night, yes. Black is my god's colour, your new god's colour, the heir of Nabban. Black for the night sky, and blue,” she added, as his frown returned, puzzling over a god of night, maybe, or thinking of the bolts of silk, “for the day. As you knew was right, when you helped me in the storeroom.” And she touched the trailing silk ribbons of the helmet she had set on the parapet, drew them through her fingers and let them see the azure spread, like morn breaking upon the world. But she left the scarlet of her sword's tassel. Hers. Always. Real as her bones.

She vaulted back up to stand on the railing, forgetting till too late her grey hair. Ah well.

“Hah! They come from the town now, to demand word with their general. Perhaps I should go to greet them. Keep your watch, my faithful pages. You won't mistake my signal.”

“No, my lady.”

“No, Captain Lin.”

“It will be like in a song,” little Ti said abruptly, as she leapt down again and strode for the door.

Yeh-Lin paused, one foot over the threshold, to look back. “Yes,” she said. She had better find some instructor in the pipa or another minstrel's instrument for that one, it occurred to her, and some books of the old poetry. That was the seed that struggled to sprout in his heart. “Do it right, and it will be a song. And it may be that someday you will make it.”

“You can't mean to let them in,” Lord Daro Raku, the Kho'anzi's cousin and commander, protested. He leaned heavily on his sergeant rather than the pike he had taken as a prop. The last of the Daro prisoners to be released, he had been thought dead; mere chance found him in the deepest cellar, alone, with the water rising past his waist. Raw and festering wounds from his shackles girdled both ankles, though Yeh-Lin had claimed to have a minor talent in physician's wizardry and driven out the rot that would have killed him. The sergeant glowered at Yeh-Lin, as if holding her responsible for her commander's refusal to withdraw safely to his bed.

Lord Yuro chewed his lip, straightened up when he caught Yeh-Lin's eye on him. “She does mean it,” the new castellan said, which was vulgar, to talk about her so before her face, no title.

The sergeant switched her frown to him, but he was only as blunt and forthright as the peasant girl from Solan had been when first she sat smiling in the tea-house by the gate of Solan, hunting, as the orchid-spider hunted, by waiting under the guise of a passive flower for some lordling who might give her a chance at a wizard's education. No corps of imperial wizards to take her in, in
those
days.

“But what does she mean to do after?” Yuro asked. “Captain Lin?”

He was unnerved, greatly, though he hid it well. That he should take counsel with captains and lords, and be heard.

Yeh-Lin smiled sunnily. “We shall see,” she said. “That depends, of course, entirely on Lord Hani Gahur. Mount.”

Because their enemies were coming mounted, and it would not do to be looked down upon, or overridden. The blue-eyed piebald stallion a woman held for her was showy and restless. Yuro's choice. A test, a message, or an acknowledgement of confidence, she wasn't certain. No time to persuade it of her benevolence. It knew her for an alien thing and twitched its skin as if swarmed by flies, rolled its eyes. She took the lightest of holds on its mind, as if she seized a lock of mane in her fist. Twisted, to tighten her grip.

“Shh, shh. Behave,” she told the rolling eye, and settled it, not in any manner either Yuro or Nabban would approve, as she allowed the stable-hand to hold the stirrup for her mounting.

Despite the thick walls, they could hear the hooves on the bridge already. Bold. Stupid? Genuinely deceived by the banners and the report of illness? Surely not that stupid.
She
would not have trusted that the timbers were not sawn through. A sudden thunder of drums demanded entrance. She fastened her helmet, but left the mask raised.

A soldier signalled from over the gatehouse. Twenty. Was that really all? Yeh-Lin half-shut her eyes, counted what she felt, the small warmths of their souls, and the beasts they rode. Twenty-two riders, and many more afoot back behind the gate of the town on the other side of the moat. Three wizards out there somewhere, one of modest talent, something more than a common Camellia Badge diviner, the sort who could be Plum or Palm depending on how hard they strove, two surely among the greater of Palm Badge Rank, if not a Bamboo lord or lady. No, only one, somewhere; the others she had thought she had felt were gone. Both. A mistake? Unlikely. Odd. No time to pursue that vanished tickling presence.

“Open the gate,” she said.

No hesitation in obedience. Hesitation beyond, though, the bridge-narrow front of imperial officers clearly having expected some shouted negotiation from the gatehouse and an ultimate refusal.

The imperial commander faced pikes and crossbows, two dense wings of them, and a complete stranger in anonymous black armour flanked by lords blazoned with the Daro roundel.

They could, of course, still charge the gate, and they might very probably win through in the end, but it would be those in the van who died in the first piercing hail. She did not give them time to nerve themselves to it.

“Lieutenant-Commander Lord Hani Gahur? I am Nang Yeh-Lin, the captain-general of the Holy One of Nabban. With Lord Daro Korat the Kho'anzi of Choa, I hold the White River Dragon for my lord, the heir of the gods of Nabban. You will surrender Dernang and command of its army to me, in the name of the heir of the gods.”

Lord Gahur, his helmet slung at his saddle-bow, was a young man, soft-faced. Fat would come with age if he were not careful, but for the moment he had only a still-boyish roundness, and his arrogance was a boy's, too. His brief moment of startlement turned to a smile.