Mistress of the Empire (59 page)

The Kaliane’s eyes flickered with what might have been guarded admiration, or maybe pity. ‘You have courage,’ she admitted, and then sighed. ‘You also do not know what you face. But very well. Be assured that your servants and warriors will be shown the hospitality of guests until your fate is known. If you return, they will be restored to you. If you die, they will bear your remains back to your homeland. So say I, the Kaliane.’

Mara inclined her head to seal her agreement that these arrangements were satisfactory.

‘Well,’ Mirana snapped from the sidelines, ‘husband, are you going to stand there gaping in disappointment because you could not wrest away the gold-haired lass for our son,
or are you going to go to the soldiers’ compound and roust out Force Commander Lujan?’

‘Shut up, old woman! The peace of the dawn is sacred, and you profane life itself with your noise.’ He squared his shoulders and glared, until the Kaliane cast him a glance of disapproval. Then he hurried off at a shuffling, comical run on the errand as his wife had bidden him.

As he vanished, the Kaliane gathered her robes against the streaming mist. To Mara she said, ‘You will leave as soon as supplies can be gathered for your journey. You will go on foot, as the uplands are too rough for other conveyance.’ She paused, as if assessing some inward thought, then added, ‘Gittania, one of our acolytes, will act as your guide through the passes. May the gods smile upon your efforts, Lady Mara. It is no easy task you have set for yourself, for the cho-ja are a fierce race with a memory that does not readily allow forgiveness.’

An hour later, following a hot meal, Mara and her one-man delegation were ready to set off. A small crowd of noisy children and idle house matrons, headed by Hotaba and his council, gathered to see them off. They were joined by the acolyte Gittania, who proved to be a slight, mousy-haired girl who looked lost in the voluminous folds of the cloak of her order, a knee-length garment woven in blinding patterns of red upon white. She had flushed cheeks, a sharp nose, and an irrepressible smile. Where the sober, broken colors of Thuril plaids tended to blend with the landscape, Gittania’s garb would mark her like a target.

Lujan was quick to comment upon this. ‘Perhaps,’ he philosophised in rare reflection, ‘she wears her gaudiness like those birds or berries that are poison, a warning that her magical powers bring retribution to any who might attack her.’

Although he spoke quietly, the acolyte heard him.
‘Actually not, warrior. We who take vows as apprentices are marked apart because we wish to be seen. For the years of our learning, we are bound to serve any man or woman who needs assistance. The cloaks serve as badges of recognition, that we may be easily found.’

Huddled against the streaming mist, Mara asked, ‘How many years do your kind apprentice to the masters?’

Gittania gave back a rueful grin. ‘Some, up to twenty-five years. Others never reach passage, and wear the white and scarlet for life. The youngest master on record held apprenticeship for seventeen years. He was a prodigy. His accomplishment has stood unbettered for a thousand years.’

‘The requirements of your peers are tasking indeed,’ Lujan observed. Since war was a young man’s trade, he could hardly contemplate the patience it must take to spend half a lifetime in study.

Yet Gittania did not seem resentful of such arduous standards. ‘A master wields great power, and with it, tremendous responsibility. His years as an acolyte teach temperance, patience, and, above all, humility, and provide time to develop wisdom. When one has tended sick babies at the bequest of every herder mother in the fells, one learns in time that the small things count for as much as, or perhaps more than, the great affairs of rulership and politics.’ Here the girl paused for a saucy, sidelong grin. ‘At least, of this my elders assure me. My years are too few yet to understand the significance of a baby’s rash in all the great turnings of the universe.’

Tired as she was, Mara laughed. Gittania’s outgoing honesty was a pleasant change after Kamlio’s difficult moods and sullen bitterness. Although the Lady had fears enough concerning the outcome of her forthcoming encounter with the Thuril cho-ja, she looked forward to the journey as a time to settle her worn nerves, and to
contemplate how she would handle her audience with a strange cho-ja Queen. Gittania’s blithe humor would certainly be a balm to ease the strain.

The Kaliane had silently observed the conversation, while the bundles of food and waterskins were made ready on the back of a querdidra. ‘The cho-ja are secretive, untrusting,’ she confided in last minute counsel. ‘Once this was not so. Their masters and ours mingled freely, exchanging ideas and knowledge. In fact, much of our foundational training as mages derives from cho-ja philosophies. But the war centuries ago between cho-ja and Tsuranuanni taught the creatures that men with power can be treacherous. Since then the hives have been reticent, and contact reluctant to nonexistent.’ She moved to stand before Mara, and said, ‘I do not know what you will face, Good Servant. But I warn you one last time: Tsurani are anathema to these cho-ja. They do not forgive what has happened to their counterpart hives across the border, and they may well hold you accountable as if you had been the very one who forced the treaty upon them.’

At Mara’s expression of surprise, the Kaliane reacted sternly. ‘Believe me, Lady Mara. Cho-ja
do not forget
, and to them good does not tolerate the presence of repression or evil. Right-thinking men, they would say, would have dissolved the so-called treaty that forbids Tsurani cho-ja their rights to magic. Each day that passes without such remission keeps the crime fresh; to them the insult of centuries past is as one committed this moment. In the hives of Thuril, you might find no ally against your Assembly, but only a swift death.’

Sobering the words might be, but Mara was not deterred. ‘Not to go is to embrace defeat.’ With a nod to Lujan and a wave to Gittania to indicate her readiness, she faced the town gates.

From behind, Kamlio watched her mistress’s departure
with wide eyes. Mara had captured her admiration. Had the Lady looked back, she might have seen the ex-courtesan’s lips move in a vow that, should any of the Acoma party survive to return to the Acoma estates, she would give the Lady what she so plainly hoped: an attempt to be friends with Arakasi. Kamlio bowed her head as Mara became lost to view and Lujan’s plumes disappeared in the mists. She swore her oath, humbled that the fears that seemed overwhelming to her had little substance when compared with the dangers that Mara strode to meet with straight back and raised chin, and no sign at all of trepidation.

The journey through the Thuril high pass proved an arduous trail. After one day’s travel, the terrain steepened; gorse-covered highlands reared up into rocky outcrops scoured clean of moss by wind. The sun seemed always scudded over by clouds, and the valleys, swathed in streamers of mists that twined over the courses of becks and streams. Mara managed the stony footing with difficulty, helped over the rougher patches by Lujan’s steadying hand. Her sandals became scuffed on the shale, and she had no breath to spare for talk.

Gittania seemed as untroubled by the territory as the querdidra billy they brought to carry their supplies and bedding. She chattered almost constantly. From her comments as they passed by this valley or that, which sheltered its little village or cluster of herders’ hamlets, Mara learned more about Thuril life. The highlanders were a fierce race, wedded inseparably to their independence, but contrary to the opinion held by most Tsurani, they were not warlike.

‘Oh, our young men play at battle,’ Gittania allowed, leaning during a rest break upon the tall herder’s staff she used to steady her walking. Lujan also guessed she knew how to use it as a weapon, if it did not also serve as a staff for magic. But that assumption was shattered
when Gittania accidentally broke the wood and, without ceremony, bought another stick from a man who trained herd dogs. Now her fingers ran up and down, stripping off the rough bark that might give blisters. ‘But raids, fighting, these are things young men do to gain the skills to steal their wives. A few boastful ones venture into imperial lands. Most do not return. If they are caught, and fight, they have broken the treaty and are outlaws.’ Her face darkened as she said the last.

Mara recalled the captives condemned to die as sport for Tsurani nobles in the arena, and was shamed. Did any of the games masters who staged such atrocities have a clue that the men they sent out to duel were just boys who might have first committed no worse a mistake than a prank? Had any imperial warrior or official ever troubled to question the ones who strayed across the border, naked and painted as if for war? Sadly, she thought not.

Gittania seemed not to notice the Lady’s melancholy contemplation. She gestured with her staff over the scrub-covered valley, dotted, here and there, with the querdidra herds bred for cheese and wool. ‘Mostly we are a nation of traders and herdsmen. Our soil is largely too poor to farm, and our strongest industry is weaving. The dyes, of course, are very costly, imported as they are from your warmer lowlands, and from Tsubar.’

Gittania chided herself for her rambling talk, and urged Mara and Lujan to set off once again. The pace she set was brisk. Days were shorter in the uplands, where the high crowns of the hills pushed the sunsets earlier. The place where at last they made camp was in a hollow between two rock-crowned knolls. A stream gushed from a spring there, and short, wind-stunted trees offered shelter.

‘Wrap well in your blankets,’ Gittania urged as she and Mara scoured the dinner utensils clean in the icy water.
‘Nights get cold in these highlands. Even in summer, there can be an occasional frost.’

Morning saw leaves and grass etched in a silvery patina of ice crystals. Mara marveled at their intricate patterns, and admired the fragile beauty as a chance ray of sun fired the edges like gilt. Barren this land might be, but it had a wild grace all its own.

The trail steepened. More and more, Lujan had to assist Mara in the climb, as his studded battle sandals gained better purchase than hers, which were soled in plain leather. The roof of the clouds seemed close enough to touch, and the querdidra herds thinned, forage being too sparse to sustain them. Here the splash and tumble of spring-fed streams formed the sole sound, beyond the whip and moan of the wind.

The pass itself was a winding ledge that snaked between steep, slate faces that glistened black where water seeped from the earth. Mara gulped deep breaths of the thin air, and commented on the strange, sharp smell that seemed to ride the gusts.

‘Snow,’ Gittania explained, her cheeks nipped red by the chill, and her smile the warmer by contrast. She tugged her scarlet-and-white sleeves down over her hands for comfort, and added, ‘Were the clouds thinner, you might see ice on the peaks. Not a sight you Tsurani are accustomed to, I’ll warrant.’

Mara shook her head, too breathless to speak. Hardier than she, Lujan said, ‘There are glaciers in the great range we call the High Wall. Wealthy lords in the northern provinces are said to post runners into the hills to gather rare ice for their drinks. But for myself, I have never seen water harden from the cold.’

‘It is a magic of nature,’ Gittania allowed and, seeing Mara’s distress, called for another short rest.

The passes fell behind, and the trail descended. On this
side of the mountains, the lands were less arid, and the plantlife thorny and leaved in silver grey. By Gittania’s explanation, more rain fell here. ‘The clouds will thin before long, and then we will be able to see the cho-ja city of Chakaha in the distance.’

No querdidra herds grazed these slopes, the vegetation being too thorny to be edible, but a few families eked out a living by harvesting plant fibers to twist into rope. ‘A hard living,’ Gittania allowed. ‘The cordage is among the best available for strength and longevity, but this valley is a long, difficult distance from the seaside markets. Carts cannot cross the pass, so all of the haulage must be done by packbeast, or on the backs of strong men.’

It occurred to Mara that the sure-legged cho-ja might handle such a burden over the rugged trails with an ease unmatched by any human, but she was too unsure of what relationship the Thuril hives might share with humans to offer any such suggestion. And then the thought left her mind, for the trail crooked and dipped down, and the clouds thinned and parted to reveal the valley below, spread out like a tapestry beneath a high, pale green Tsurani sky.

‘Oh!’ Mara exclaimed, utterly forgetful of protocol. For the sight that greeted her and Lujan was a wonder more overwhelming than even the intricate beauty she had witnessed in Dorales.

The mountains fell away, thorny growth and stony washes descending into a lush, tropical valley. The breezes carried the scent of jungle vines, exotic flowers, and rich earth. Frond trees raised fanlike crowns skyward, and beyond them, more delicate than the gold filigree wrought by the most skilled of the Emperor’s jewelers, arose the cho-ja hives.

‘Chakaha,’ said Gittania. ‘This is the cho-ja’s crystal city.’

As if spun from glass, fingerlike spirals rose from pastel
domes that sparkled in all colors, like gems in a crown. Rose, aquamarine, and amethyst arches of impossible delicacy spanned the gaps between. Shiny black cho-ja workers, looking like strings of obsidian beads in the distance, scampered across these narrow catwalks. Mara feasted her eyes upon the gossamer, sparkling architecture, and was further astounded. In the air above, winged cho-ja flew. They were not the jet black she was accustomed to, but bronze and blue, with accenting stripes of maroon. ‘They are so beautiful!’ she breathed. ‘Our Queens in Tsuranuanni birth only black cho-ja. The only color I ever saw was the shade of an immature Queen, and she darkened like the rest with her maturity.’