Songs of the Earth (42 page)

‘The Caliph of Abu Nidar is a barbarian infidel.’ Danilar folded his hands in the sleeves of his robe.

‘True,’ Ansel conceded, ‘but a fabulously wealthy one. Is it just me, Danilar, or do you think infidels have a rather better time of it than we do?’

‘I understand the Caliph has to employ bodyguards and a food-taster, and spends his days pondering which of his cousins and nephews will try to murder him next.’

‘I think I could live with that, if I were as rich as him.’

‘That’s a perilously heretical thought, Ansel.’

The Preceptor grunted sourly. ‘Old age does that to a man.
Once your time starts running out, you start thinking about all the things you should have done with it.’

‘Are you doubting your vocation? So late in the day?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m hardly going to recant at the gates of Heaven, am I? If I had my time over again, I think the Goddess would still speak to me in my heart and call me to Her service. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if She had not, but it’s just a game. I am content.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Danilar said, and smiled. ‘All will be well, Ansel.’

‘I hope so,’ the Preceptor sighed. ‘It’s too late to change anything now. We have cast the dice. Only the Goddess knows which faces they will show when they come to rest.’ He looked down at the book on his lap, smoothing the pages over and over. ‘There is a letter, on my desk. Can you arrange to have it delivered?’

‘Of course.’

‘It has a long way to go. Perhaps I should have sent it sooner, not left it so late, but I didn’t know …’ He closed the book with a snap, arthritic fingers gripping the worn binding tightly. ‘I am blind, Danilar. I am fumbling in the dark, with no clue as to what I might be treading on, what I might stir up, and I am very afraid that I will not be here to see the outcome. It is torment, not knowing. I just wish there was some way that I could find out what will be!’

‘You know that is not possible, Ansel,’ Danilar said gently.

‘I know. Visions and oracles are the province of the Caliph of Abu Nidar and his like. Still, it would be good to know.’

Sinking back against his pillows, Ansel closed his eyes and his lips moved soundlessly, as if he prayed for strength and guidance.

Danilar watched him, thinking how frail he had come to look in recent weeks. Winter weather was unkind to him, stiffening his joints until every movement stabbed him with red-hot needles. Only heat brought any relief. The Preceptor should have spent his last years in a kinder climate. The Suvaeon maintained a retreat in
Gimrael, in the Glass Hills above El Maqqam, where the savage heat of the plains was tempered by cooling breezes. It was peaceful there, and more comfortable than a house of the Goddess should decently be. That would surely soothe Ansel’s old bones, but Danilar feared the journey alone would kill him now. It was far too late; too late for everything, now, except faith and hope.

Danilar crossed to the desk, where a letter he had not noticed before was propped against the inkwell. He slipped it under the napkin on the tray and reached for the door handle.

Ansel’s head turned on the pillow. In the shadows cast by the candle Danilar could see nothing of his expression but the glitter of his eyes.

‘I envy you the strength of your vocation, Danilar,’ he said, his voice so soft that it was barely louder than the whispering flames in the grate. ‘Mine has worn thin over the years. Lately when I listen for the voice of the Goddess in my heart, I can scarcely hear it for the beating of my own mortality.’

‘Maybe She is closer than you think.’

‘Aye, maybe She is.’ Ansel’s silhouette changed fractionally. It might have been a smile. ‘Good day, Danilar.’

Back in the vestry, the Chaplain took off his surplice, shook it out and hung it up in the closet ready for next service. Then he carefully rinsed and dried the silverware and stowed it away in the velvet-lined pyx-chest. Only when all the chores were done did he sit down and look at the letter sitting on the tray. The name and address on the front was written in Ansel’s spidery hand. Something small but solid, quite heavy, nestled inside the folds of parchment. Once he would have wondered what it was; perhaps even asked. Now he knew better.

Tucking the letter into a pocket of his robe, Danilar let himself out and locked the vestry door behind him. Later he would go down into the city, after evening service. A man lived by the Water-gate who could be trusted to carry out tasks discreetly; Danilar had used him before and knew he could be relied upon to
keep his silence. He would want to be paid well for this one, though, to go so far at this time of year, when the return journey would take him into the teeth of winter. Still, there remained gold enough. All that was in short measure was time.

He should not have come. Whatever he was being paid, it was not enough for stinking canals, and sin as thick in the air as the heat that made it so hard to sleep, heat that was unseasonable even for southern Syfria. He’d had to spend a month in it, eating their strangely spiced food and trawling the dives and doss-houses of Haven-port looking for a man he was beginning to think did not exist. He should not have come.

Pieter adjusted his mask again. The sequinned thing sat too close against his face, and the forked ribbon that was the serpent’s tongue kept catching in his mouth when he talked. But he’d needed it; an uncovered face in the Havens on Fools’ Night was conspicuous.

One more tavern to try. A couple of cups of cheap brandy and some artfully worded questions had led him here; he hoped it would be a fruitful visit. There were only two pigeons left in the cage he had brought from Dremen.

He peered round the corner again. The place looked quiet enough. Footsteps sounded behind him, and a stifled giggle. A man’s voice, too deep to make out, was followed by a woman’s purr of pleasure. Pieter glanced back over his shoulder. A burly fellow with docker’s tattoos and a raven’s mask had his hands all over a slim girl in a gauzy costume that barely reached her knees. As he watched she spread her legs and slid the docker’s hand up between her thighs. The raven fondled her, then backed her up against the wall, fumbling at the front of his trousers.

Pieter blinked.
Had she no shame?
The girl’s mask looked expensive, and she had the pale, soft flesh of gentle birth. Yet there she was, with her buttocks clutched in tattooed hands, rutting in an
alley in full view of the raucous revellers staggering down the main street. The docker grunted, his thrusting hips picking up speed, and the girl clung to his shoulders with her head thrown back and her moth mask swinging from her fingers in time with their coupling.
Shameless!

This city, on this night, was no place for a man of faith. Pieter dragged his eyes away from the brazen display in the alley and crossed the street to the tavern. Too many people, drinking and fornicating as if their actions were ephemeral and could be discarded on the morrow with the masks, when their old lives crept back into their rooms with the morning sun.

He glanced through the tavern window. Yes, there was the man he sought, alone in a corner nursing a pint mug, with his dog curled round his feet under the table. Perhaps the night would not be wasted after all.

Pieter pushed through the door and crossed to the counter, where he bought a bottle of brandy. Then he carried the bottle and two cups to the bargee’s table. ‘Forgive me intruding, friend, but are you the master of the
Trader Rose
?’

Skeff peered up at him. ‘Aye, that I am.’

‘Mind if I sit with you for a spell?’ Pieter set the bottle and cups down in the middle of the table and pulled up a stool.

Skeff eyed the bottle speculatively. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘You run to Mesarild, don’t you? Ever pick up passengers?’

‘Mebbe. When there’s coin to be had, only a fool turns it down.’

Pieter poured two measures from the bottle and pushed one cup across the table. ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine, came down this way from Mesarild in the summer. I’m worried something’s happened to him. Do you think you might have seen him?’

‘Might have, might not. People need a ride from here to there, I don’t ask no questions, so long as they pays me.’ He drained his mug in two noisy slurps, then wrapped his hands around the cup of spirit, but did not drink. His one bleary eye sharpened. ‘You say you’re a friend o’ his?’

‘I’m afraid he might have met some trouble. The river’s been bad for bandits this past year, so I hear.’

‘Aye, terrible bad.’ Finally Skeff raised the brandy to his lips and took a slug.

It might not have been anything like as good as the Elder’s goldwine, but the bargee smacked his lips and beamed all over his saggy face.

Pieter’s own cup remained untouched. ‘Anything you might be able to tell me would be helpful,’ he prompted.

‘Did take some passengers, this past St Tamastide. What’s he like, your friend?’

‘Tall lad, Leahn. Travelling with his uncle.’ Pieter topped up Skeff’s drink and tried not to smile as the bargee’s eye fixed on the golden liquid rising up the cup. ‘He wears a sword across his back.’

‘Aye, I saw him. Nice lad. Had manners.’ Skeff raised the brimming cup. ‘Good to have him aboard. Bandits was terrible bad that trip, terrible bad. He helped see them off when they came for the
Rose
.’

‘Lucky he was there, then. You brought him down to the Havens?’

‘Before the storms. Dunno where he was headed after. Never said, and I don’t ask no questions.’

So the trail ended there. A month of waiting and searching in this appalling city, all for nothing.

‘There’s nothing more you can remember?’

Skeff drained his cup and set it down, turning it round and round between his hands. Pieter filled it again, just in case it helped.

‘Not from that trip. O’ course, I seen his uncle afore, few times, mebbe twice a year. Sometimes on his own, sometimes not. Said he had a house on the Isles.’

Pieter’s spirits rose. ‘The Western Isles?’

‘Aye, think so. Said the climate suited him. Might know where
your friend went. There’re ships to Pencruik now, since the storms stopped.’

Good news at last. Standing, Pieter slid the half-empty bottle across the table to Skeff. ‘Thanks for your help, friend,’ he said. ‘Keep this, with my compliments.’

Then he hurried back out into the sultry night. The Western Isles weren’t that far, and he’d been careful with the gold Goran had given him. There was more than enough left to pay for passage. Finally, he had something to report.

Ten days short of Eventide, winter finally arrived on Penglas. A hard frost silvered the landscape overnight and left a shawl of white over the inland mountains that reminded Gair sharply of the Laraig Anor. He had a free day, his first since he’d given his word to Master Barin, but he was spending it alone. Aysha hadn’t called him. He wasn’t sure if she would ever call him again.

In the last few days the wind had backed to south of west and brought some welcome sunshine. The instant the weather changed she stepped into his thoughts, colours vibrant, compelling.
Come fly with me
. But he had given his word, and that he could not break. Morning and evening she railed at him, demanding, imprecating, occasionally lapsing into some lyrical desert epithet that made his ears burn even without translation. Though ignoring her twisted a guilty knife inside him, he stuck to his timetable and attended all his tutorials.