Mistress of the Empire (53 page)

But he concealed his fears from Mara as they were herded past the deadly meadow, and on, over a wooden bridge that spanned a moat, fed by a swift-running river. The water
rushed over rock snags and whirled in black eddies through pools too swift for a swimmer to cross. As Lujan’s eyes measured the possibility of escape across the current, the leader of the highlanders noticed.

He waved a leather-gauntleted arm at the rock pools. ‘Many Tsurani warriors drowned there, sword captain! More broke their necks on the stone, trying in vain to build a rope bridge.’ He shrugged, and his grin returned. ‘Your commanders are not stupid men, just stubborn. In time, they threw platforms across there’ – his cloak fringes danced as he pointed to a ledge by the lowered bridge – ‘and there.’ He indicated another outcrop farther down. Then, as if warriors from the past still screamed battle cries into the dusk-grey air, he glanced up at the looming wall of the palisade. ‘It was a near thing.’

Mara had pushed through her fatigue to follow the conversation. ‘You must have been a very small boy in those times. How do you remember?’

Distracted by vivid recall, the highlander leader forgot that he answered a woman. ‘I was up on the battlement, bringing water to my father and uncles. I helped carry the dead and wounded.’ His face twisted into long-nurtured bitterness. ‘I remember.’

He jabbed Lujan forward with a blow and led across the bridge. The looming shadow of the gateway cut off all view of sky and fortifications. The leader answered to a challenge from an unseen sentry then hustled the Tsurani captives through. Lujan took note of the log battlements, faced on the outside with smooth boards, but left unfinished inside, with bark and stubs of branches still left on the trunks, as if the defense works had been erected in haste. ‘It must have been a fierce battle.’

The leader laughed. ‘Not that fierce, Tsurani. We were up in the hills by the time the third attack came and your soldiers seized the palisades. Our leaders aren’t stupid,
either. If your people wanted the village so much, we would let you have it. Taking a place is one thing; holding it is another.’ With a sneer of contempt, he added, ‘We wouldn’t let you have the hills, Tsurani.’ He waved broadly toward the peaks that notched the sky above the wall. ‘There is our true home. In these valleys, we might build halls and houses to meet, and trade, and celebrate, but our families are raised in the high country. That is where your soldiers died, Tsurani, as we attacked your foragers and patrols. Hundreds perished in our raids, until your kind tired of the highlands and went home.’

By now past the fortifications, and into the avenue of commerce, the party of prisoners attracted notice. Women beating their laundry clean with stones in a wide public basin paused in their work to point and stare. Urchins in colored plaids screamed and ran to look, or stared wide-eyed from behind mothers who carried cloth-wrapped loaves of bread from the baker’s. Some of the dirtier, wilder children capered about the bound strangers, shouting; afraid some might fling stones, Lujan jerked his head at his warriors, who jostled closely around their mistress to give what protection they could.

But no hostilities were offered, beyond glares from middle-aged women, who perhaps had lost sons or husbands to imperial warriors in battle. The donkey bearing Kamlio caused the most furor, as children swooped close with excited chatter. The highlanders fended them off with mock gruffness. Still the little ones shouted. ‘It has only four legs!’

‘Why doesn’t it fall down?’ cried another about the age of Ayaki before he died.

The soldier who led the beast took the din in good stride, giving the children outrageous answers that made them squeal and scream with laughter.

After a studied silence, Mara observed, ‘If these noisy
barbarians intended to kill us, surely the mothers would not let their little ones mingle, but would be hustling them away home.’

Lujan crowded nearer to his mistress. ‘Gods grant you are right, my Lady.’ But his thoughts remained apprehensive. He could see the covetous glances Kamlio attracted from the men who passed on the street. The women who bundled up their washing looked sharp-faced and unfriendly, and a groom carrying a water pannikin spat in their direction in contempt. The Thuril were a fierce race, the veterans who had returned alive from fighting in these hills had insisted. Their young were toughened at the knees of mothers who were awarded as battle prizes, or carried off by force in raids.

As the highlanders brought their captives to a halt in the square, it could be seen that the entire village consisted of a ring of buildings built against the wall, leaving an open air market at the center, with portable tent stalls for traders, and palings of thorny stakes to enclose livestock. Mara’s party was driven into the largest of these pens, while onlookers laughed and called out in derision. Iayapa refused to answer Saric’s requests for translation, and Mara herself was too weary to care. She longed only for a patch of clean ground to sit down; the dirt she trod was thick with droppings left from its animal occupants. She envied Kamlio her seat on the donkey, until she looked over at the younger girl and realised by her pinched pallor that she probably had sores from sitting so long in the saddle. The men did not let her down, but tied her mount to a pole by the gate, then leaned on folded arms against the posts, and murmured in appreciation of her loose golden hair and her beauty.

Furious that so little care had been taken for even their most basic human needs, Mara shouldered past her officers. At the gate, where, the highlanders clustered, she demanded
in a loud voice, ‘What are you going to do with my people?’ Trembling with anger that was fueled the more by fear, she tossed her head to shake tangled hair from her eyes. ‘My warriors require food and water, and a decent place to rest! Is this the hospitality you show to strangers who come on a mission of peace? A slave’s bonds, and a livestock pen? Shame to you, carriers of vermin who were spawned in the dirt like pigs!’ Here she borrowed the Midkemian word for a beast whose habits were considered reprehensible.

The foreign word seemed to upset the Thuril, who scowled as their leader stamped forward. Red with anger, or maybe embarrassment, he shouted to Lujan, ‘Silence the woman, if you wish her to live.’

The Acoma Force Commander glowered back. He said in a voice that could easily be heard on a battlefield, ‘She is my mistress. I take my orders from her. If you have the wits not to make water in your bedding at night, you would do the same.’

The leader of the highlanders roared in fury at this insult. He might have drawn his sword and charged forward, but one of his companions caught him back. Words were exchanged in Thuril. Lujan could only stand in dumb but dignified incomprehension as the irate leader allowed himself to be placated. The highlander muttered something short and guttural to the spokesman who had restrained him. At length, he loosed a huge guffaw that cut off as the men around him snapped into attentiveness.

‘That must be their chieftain,’ Saric murmured. He had moved up to Mara’s shoulder, unnoticed until he had spoken. Mara noted that their escort all looked toward a cloaked man who had emerged down the wooden stair of the most imposing building that edged the square. Street children scattered from his path as he crossed the open expanse, and the women carrying their loads of damp wash homeward averted their faces in deference.

The newcomer was old and hunched, but he moved with a sureness that could still negotiate the roughest trail. Mara estimated his age to be about sixty years. Tokens of corcara carved by Tsurani hands were woven into his braid, no doubt worn as battle trophies. Mara repressed shiver as the elder neared enough for her to make out that the buttons on his cloak front were fashioned of polished bone. The tales were true, then, that Thuril believed that an artifact taken from a dead foe would lend them strength in life. Her finger bones could as easily wind up as an ornament in some warrior’s attire.

The highlander chief paused to share words with the squad captain who had charge of the prisoners. He pointed to the golden-haired courtesan and the donkey, said something else, and smiled. The squad leader saluted, plainly excused from duty. By his look of self-satisfaction, he would now be going home to his wife.

Mara seemed worn and disheartened, and driven by sympathy for her, Saric shouted, ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’

The highlander officer froze between strides. His men and his chieftain looked on in bright-eyed interest, as the man considered whether he should reply to the hail of a prisoner. Then, in burred accent, he called back, ‘Introduce yourself, Tsurani! Your woman seems capable enough with her tongue!’

Another of the highlander warriors offered with malicious amusement, ‘Our captain is Antaha, guideman of the Loso. I give you his name so that when you appeal to our chieftain to have him beaten, he will know whom to seek out.’

This interruption was greeted by uproarious laughter, shared by the old chief, and even the street children and the women by the washing well. Irked past restraint by these strange, annoying people, Mara again pressed to the fore.

To the chieftain, who chuckled and slapped his knees, she called imperiously, ‘I am Mara, Ruling Lady of the Acoma, and I have come to the Thuril Confederacy on a mission of peace.’

The chief lost his mirth as if slapped. Shocked to silent anger, he regrouped. ‘A woman standing in querdidra droppings comes claiming to be someone of rank and an emissary of peace?’

Mara looked whitely furious. Aware that she neared her breaking point, and that to insult this chieftain in public would earn her certain reprisal, Lujan turned desperately to Saric. ‘We must act, even if only to distract her.’

But the young First Adviser stepped forward without seeming to hear. As Mara opened her mouth to speak, Saric broke protocol and shouted down her voice with his own. ‘Chief among the Thuril,’ he cried, ‘you are a fool, who offers our Lady of the Acoma no better hospitality than a livestock pen! You speak of Mara, Servant of the Empire, and a member of the Emperor Ichindar’s royal family!’

The chieftain jerked up his square chin. ‘She?’ If his word seemed filled with contempt, Saric’s statement was not entirely wasted. The elderly man did not add any derogatory comment, but summarily waved Antaha back to duty. This time, the chief’s words were rapid and commanding, and Iayapa, under pressure from Saric, translated.

‘He says that if Antaha should bring animals into camp, then he must look after them: feed them, water them, and give them bedding. Not too much, though, for straw is scarce, and the gods do not love waste. The girl on the donkey is to be sheltered in a hut. Her beauty is great, and should be treasured for the man who will win rights to claim her to wife.’ Iayapa looked troubled, for at this, Mara’s eyes seemed to bore into him with the hardness of flint.

But her command held no personal resentment as she said, ‘Finish.’

Iayapa nodded and bleakly licked his lips. ‘The chief of this village says also that he has heard of the Servant of the Empire, who is family to the Tsurani Emperor. He adds that Ichindar is ruled by women, and that he, a born highlander, will not deign to speak with a woman of any claim to royal lineage on the open street. But because of the existing treaty between Tsuranuanni and the Confederacy, neither is he free to authorise his village men to claim Mara as spoils.’

Hoots of disappointment ran through the squad of highlanders who had escorted the Lady’s party in. Two of the more impudent ones made obscene gestures.

Then the chieftain turned toward the captives in the pen and addressed Mara’s Force Commander in Tsurani that was accentless, learned during former wars. ‘If you have a need that is not met, Antaha is charged responsible. Tomorrow he will gather an escort of twenty warriors, and take you and your females on to the high chief at Darabaldi. Judgment, if such is called for, will be dealt by the council there.’

Saric looked thunderous, but he listened when Iayapa touched his arm in entreaty. ‘First Adviser, do not provoke these men or their chieftain any further. They are not a people in love with arguments over points of etiquette. They mete out deaths very swiftly, and do not regret. Morning could have found all of us lying here with cut throats, or worse. To be sent to Darabaldi rather than parceled out among those who captured us is, in fact, a great concession.’

Saric regarded the dung that crusted his sandals, and exchanged a disgusted glance with Lujan, whose fingers seemed lost without sword to hand in his scabbard. ‘Cousin,’ the Acoma adviser said gravely, ‘if this is a
great concession, dare we even speculate what a small one might have been?’

The strain told, but could not entirely vanquish the spirit of Mara’s Force Commander. He broke his Tsurani façade of impassivity and stifled a deep chuckle. ‘Gods, man, you’ll be speculating on points of philosophy in the smoke of your funeral pyre, I know it.’ Then, as one, he and the First Adviser turned to tend their mistress, who to their experienced eyes looked small and disheartened and alone, though her back was straight, and her face as imperious as always.

She was watching an enterprising group of highlanders taking charge of Kamlio and the donkey. ‘Do you think they will harm her?’ she demanded of Iayapa, and to the ears of those closest to her, anxiety colored her tone.

The onetime herdsman shook his head. ‘There are never enough women of childbearing age in this harsh land, and Kamlio is beautiful, which makes her doubly valuable. But the chieftain of this tribe must grant his approval before any man could bargain for her as a wife. Lacking his consent, she may be admired, but not bedded. All the unmarried warriors know that to trouble her now would forfeit any chance to ask for her as a mate. Since many single men in the highlands die without ever winning wives, even so small a chance to claim a woman is not to be risked.’