Snare (5 page)

‘So?’ Arkazo leaned forward to interrupt. ‘What does that have to do –’

The waiter came back, bowing and smiling. They ordered, he bowed again, three, four times, then strode away at last.

‘If the Chosen are sending a man east,’ Soutan said to Arkazo, ‘he’d never make it across the Rift alone. This time of year the Tribes come to the border, and he might well be able to travel with one of them.’

Arkazo’s mouth framed an ‘oh’. The waiter came back with a large brass tray of appetizers and set them down with a flourish.

‘Your first course, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Shall I bring coffee?’

‘No, not yet,’ Warkannan said. ‘At the end of the meal.’

With narrow eyes Soutan watched the waiter leave. ‘I wonder if that boy is just a waiter,’ he remarked. ‘Probably so.’

‘Probably.’ Warkannan allowed himself a brief smile. ‘We’ll talk more once we’re in our cottage. You can see what it’s like, Soutan, to live with the threat of the Chosen.’

‘Yes, I can. I can’t say I like it.’

After the meal they left the dining room and walked outside, heading for the gardens and their guest cottage. Beside the outer doors crouched a woman, her face bound with the black ribbons of widowhood. Two small children clung to her.

‘Charity, sirs?’ she whispered and held out trembling hands. ‘Charity, oh please?’

The others hurried past, but Warkannan stopped. Beggars here, in wealthy Samahgan, even here! He fished a couple of silver deenahs out of his pocket and pressed them into her hand.

‘May God provide better,’ he said. ‘And soon.’

Out to the east of the khanate, all of the grass grew purple. No one kept a garden or tilled a field on the other side of the sunset-coloured hills that marked the khanate’s border. A treaty dating back to Landfall forbade it, a pact so sacred that not even the ambitions of the Third Prophet could force the Kazraks to break it. Besides, without the open grasslands, there would be no horse-herds, and without a large number of horses the Kazraks would have no cavalry. All ambitions would become empty, then.

On the night that Warkannan was dining in Samahgan, the Tribes brought their stock into the border town of Blosk for the spring horse fair. The comnees, as the travelling groups were called, came out of the lavender grasslands, herding their horses ahead of them. Most rode, but some of the women drove rickety orange wagons, made of lashed-together bamboid, heaped with their possessions. Down by the river that flowed near town, they set up round tents stitched together in a patchwork of coloured saurskins and grey horsehair felt. In the meadows they tethered their horses with tasselled halters and drew the gaudy wagons into a circle. By the third day over a hundred tents stood in clusters out on the grass.

Children ran and played in the impromptu village while their parents brought out hoards of dried horse dung to fuel cooking fires or walked from tent to tent to greet old friends. Everyone talked about the trading ahead. The Great Khan’s gold bought the necessities that only farmers could supply, such as grain, soap, and lamp oil, as well as trinkets like brightly coloured cloth and gold jewellery. Men and women both wore gaudy belt buckles, brooches, and clasps for cloaks, cast or hammered into the shapes of mythological beasts, such as the stag, the wolf, and the lion.

Ammadin picked the spot for her maroon and grey tent on the edge of the encampment, a good distance from all this convivial chaos. In silent respect, the members of her comnee, sixteen extended families in all, raised her tent, carried her possessions
over from the communal wagons, then left her alone. Inside she arranged her belongings: her roll of blankets, her leather-and-wood folding stool, her two cooking pots, and the four big grey-and-blue woven tent bags that held her clothes and tools. Her most precious belongings never travelled in the wagons. In saddlebags of purple leather she carried her spirit crystals, her silver talismans, and her feathered spirit wands. The god figures of her tribe had their own pair of saddlebags, lined in fine white cloth from the Cantons far to the east.

Ammadin was arranging the god figures on their red-and-white striped rug when Maradin crawled through the tent flap. A blonde, handsome woman with skin the colour of gold, Maradin was the only person who dared enter Ammadin’s tent uninvited. She pressed her palms together and bowed to the god figures, squat stone carvings, wrapped in coloured thread and decorated with feathers and precious stones. Only then did she speak.

‘Dallador bought some mutton, and he’s making stew. Do you want to come eat with us?’

‘Yes, thanks. Have the Kazraks got here yet?’

‘A couple of their officers rode up a few minutes ago. Apanador’s taken them into his tent for some keese.’

In front of Maradin’s tent, pieced together from mottled purple and white skins, her husband Dallador was cutting chunks of meat from a haunch and putting them into an iron kettle. Their three-year-old son sat on the ground nearby and watched him. A good-looking fellow with hair so pale it was almost white, Dallador was dressed in the usual leather trousers of the Tribes and a red-and-blue cloth shirt; his belt had a palm-sized gold buckle in the shape of a horse, its legs tucked up, its head turned as if it were looking behind it.

‘I hear the Kazraks are in the mood to buy,’ Dallador said. ‘Are you going to sell that pair of greys?’

‘If they’re stupid enough to take them,’ Maradin said. ‘I’ll give them a dose of herbs before I bring them over.’

While Dallador tended the stew pot, Maradin brought out wooden drinking bowls and a leather skin of keese, a liquor made of fermented mare’s milk. She was pouring it round when Palindor strolled up to the fire. A handsome, almost pretty young man with strikingly large blue eyes and coppery skin, Palindor smiled once at Ammadin, then squatted down beside Dallador.

‘I invited Palindor to eat with us,’ Maradin announced.

Ammadin felt like kicking her – she was match-making again, damn her! Palindor accepted a bowl of keese with a murmured ‘thank you’ and looked at the ground. As an unmarried man, he had no standing in the comnee and no horses but the one his mother had given him to ride. He did, however, have a fine reputation as a warrior in the endless squabbles and raids that went on between the comnees. One of the bravest of the brave, men said of him, and as good with the long knife as he was with the bow. For the sake of that, Ammadin did her best to be pleasant to him during the meal.

By the time they were done eating, the skin of keese was empty, and Dallador brought out another. As he was refilling Palindor’s bowl, he splashed keese on the back of his unsteady hand.

‘Dallo?’ Maradin said.

‘I know. I’ve had enough.’ Dallador handed the skin to Palindor, then began licking the spilled keese off his hand while he smiled, heavy-lidded, at Maradin, who smiled back as languidly as if she were drunk herself.

All through the camp, fires glowed like golden blossoms among the tents. Here and there, men began to sing to the dahsimmer, a three-stringed instrument, one for the melody, two for the drone. Every time he had a sip of keese, Palindor would look at Ammadin so longingly that she realized that he was in love with her, not merely greedy for the horses a wife would bring him. Ye gods! she thought. What’s he doing, taking lessons from Dallo? She got up, excused herself, and went to her tent. Before she closed the flap, she listened for a moment to the clear strong voices of the men, singing of the two things they loved above all else: the hunt and war.

About an hour after dawn, the Kazrak officers rode down from the fort in Blosk to start the day’s haggling. The women and girls cut the horses they wanted to sell out of the herds and brought them down to the riverbank in a snorting, prancing procession. Their husbands and brothers stood nearby to make sure the Kazraks treated their women with the proper respect. Every man had the short curved bow slung over his back and in his belt, the leaf-blades steel knife, about eighteen inches long, that marked a man as an adult. In their red tunics, buttoned tight with silver pegs, and grey wool trousers, the Kazrak officers moved stiffly, their backs as straight as arrows.

When Ammadin brought down two bay geldings from her herd, the comnee women fell back to let her have the first place in line. A dark young officer introduced himself to her as Brison and began to examine the bays. He ran practised hands down their legs and over their chests, then looked into their mouths.

‘Four-year-olds, huh?’

‘Yes, and halter-broken.’

‘Very well. A gold imperial each.’

‘Two each.’

Brison hesitated, looking at her cloak, the entire black and purple mottled skin of a slasher saur, and a big specimen at that. Even for a comnee woman Ammadin was tall, but although she had the saur’s front paws clasped at her neck, the middle feet hung well below her belt and the hind set trailed behind her on the ground. Apparently Brison had been on the border long enough to know what the cloak signified.

‘Very well.’ He motioned to another officer. ‘Give the Holy One what she asked for.’

The assistant counted four gold imperials out of a cloth sack and handed them over. Ammadin put them in the pocket of her leather trousers and walked away without another word.

During the day, other comnees rode up to join the camp. The fair would go on for weeks, though it would migrate as the horses ate down the grass. Outside the town, which lay across the only hill for miles in this part of the grasslands, booths built of bundled rushes stood side by side with peddlers who spread their goods out on old blankets and shepherds selling raw fleeces and baskets of rough-spun yarn. Women hawking food in baskets mingled with the crowd; here and there, a juggler or story-teller performed for a clot of onlookers. Round it all swarmed the tiny flying yellabuhs, scavenging on scraps and spills.

That afternoon Ammadin and Maradin strolled through the market, looked everything over before they bought anything, and stopped every now and then for a cup of Borderland wine, which tasted as light as water for someone used to keese. Since their First Prophet had specifically forbidden wine, the Kazraks weren’t supposed to drink it, of course, but here and there a drunken cavalryman staggered through the fair. Ammadin bought fine coloured threads, glass beads, and dyed hen’s feathers to use in making magic charms. Maradin bought lengths of striped cloth,
woven from the fine light thread spun in the water-powered mills of Kazrajistan. She lingered over a tray of brass buttons.

‘I should get some of these for Dallador,’ she said.

‘Why?’ Ammadin said. ‘You spoil him, you know, always fussing over him, always buying him things.’

‘Well, I happen to love him.’ Maradin hesitated, then turned away from the button seller’s booth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ammadin said. ‘Something is.’

Maradin shrugged, and they walked a few steps on. ‘I just get so jealous when women look at him,’ she said at last. ‘I remember when I asked him to marry me, and Mama warned me that watching other women chase him would break my heart. She was right. He’s not the most handsome man in the world, but there’s just something about him. Women do flirt with him. You must have noticed.’

‘It would be hard not to.’

‘After all, you –’

‘That was before you were married.’

‘I know, just teasing.’ Maradin paused for one of her wicked grins. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? If you looked at him and Palindor together, you’d think, oh, Palino’s so handsome, Dallo’s not. But there’s something cold about Palindor.’

‘Yes, cold and hard, like a face on a Kazraki coin.’

‘But my husband –’ Maradin hesitated, biting her lower lip. ‘My husband’s as warm as a winter fire. I was so proud when he said he’d marry me. Now, I worry all the time.’

‘Has he ever taken any of these women up on their offer?’

‘No. I just keep thinking he’ll meet someone with more horses.’

‘Maddi! Do you honestly think he’d leave you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I just get so jealous and sulky. And then I say things.’

‘Things you regret?’

Maradin nodded, looking away.

‘What about the men?’ Ammadin said. ‘There was that fellow the last time we rode to Nannes –’

‘Oh, that doesn’t bother me. He can’t get them pregnant, and they don’t have any horses.’

Ammadin knew two kinds of spells and charms, those that worked because they had magic, and those that worked because the wearer thought they did. Love charms fell into the latter category, but usually they did their job.

‘I’ll bind you a charm,’ Ammadin said. ‘You can wear it on a thong under your shirt. When you feel jealous, take it out and hold it in your hand, and it will soak up the jealousy.’

‘Thank you!’ Maradin turned to her with a brilliant smile. ‘I should have brought this to you earlier.’

Before heading back to the encampment they stopped for a last cup of wine. Nearby a juggler sent four saur eggs spinning through the air, but the crowd at the wine booth was talking about a different kind of show to be held that afternoon. One of the officers in the fort was going to be publicly cashiered.

‘I’ll bet they waited until the fair to do it,’ a local weaver told them. ‘What’s the good of shaming a man if there’s no one to watch it, eh?’

‘Well, true, I suppose,’ Maradin said. ‘What’s he done?’

‘I wouldn’t know. They flog a man for any little thing out here on the border.’

When the weaver drifted away, Maradin turned to Ammadin.

‘Let’s go back to camp. I don’t have the stomach for things like that.’

‘Well, you can go back. I’m going to stay and watch.’

‘Ammi! Ugh! How can you?’

‘I’m curious, that’s all. I don’t understand the Kazraks, I never have, but I should, you know. We all should. They’re dangerous.’

At that Maradin hesitated, but in the end she left, taking Ammadin’s purchases back for her. Ammadin followed the crowd up to the town itself.

Out in front of the thorn walls of the big square fort lay the typical Kazraki public square, a bleak gravelled ground with a stone pillar standing in the centre. Already onlookers lined three sides, jostling for the best view. Things were dull in Blosk. To the sound of a silver horn, the true-wood gates swung open. A contingent of a dozen men marched a young Kazrak officer out to the six-sided pillar while others ordered the pressing crowd to stay back. Ammadin, who was caught against the wall of a house, climbed up on a trash barrel so she could see over the crowd.