Tales of Neveryon (29 page)

‘Feyer Senth!’

They looked at Raven – indeed, half the feyers stopped bustling.

‘Feyer Senth, I will decline your hospitality.’ The masked woman stood with one foot on the ragged wall edging the porch. ‘My god is not your god. My habits are not your habits. I have a mission to complete now which cannot be completed. I must return to my employer and so inform him.’ The glazed smile took on the brilliance of ice smashed in the sun. Raven climbed up, jumped, and, to the sound of thrashing leaves, moved away.

Norema, sitting on one of the proffered chairs, looked at Bayle.

Feyer Senth laughed. ‘Such a fascinating girl, too. It’s sad she didn’t choose to stay. But here, have some wine. Lord Aldamir wishes us to do well by all his visitors. His family is illustrious and his history, which does honor to all Nevèrÿon, is intimately connected with these border territories. You, of course, would be too young to remember, but it was a branch of Lord Aldamir’s family who sat on the High Throne of Eagles, in the city then called Neveryóna, before the current Child Empress – whose reign has, at times, been both wrathful and rapacious, though I gather one would never dare say such a thing were we fifty miles closer to Kolhari. The Aldamirs have supported the Empress since her coming to power. But we here have always known – known since the time of Babàra’s invasions of the Garth – that such a relation
between the dragon and the eagle would never be truly easy. Well, his Lordship is of course concerned with maintaining the freest commerce back and forth with that city (called, under his unfortunate cousin’s reign, Neveryóna). That is no doubt why he has called you down to negotiate with him for the franchise of children’s rubber balls; and no doubt that also explains why he is so anxious that we entertain you as grandly as we can here during his unexpected absence. You have no idea how mortified he was that he had to leave. His messenger came down from the castle to me in person and conveyed his Lordship’s most sincere regrets and apologies,’ and, without punctuation, turned to Norema: ‘the presence of that Western Woman must have made you feel terribly upset. I mean, for a woman used to the place of women in this society.’ Recalling her expostulation when he had asked for her reaction to Raven’s creation tale, Bayle expected some similar restrained outburst now. But Norema returned that silent, serious look across the rim of her wine cup (and what cups they were! Metal creations of leaves and flowers in which were set ceramic plates so thin the light passed through, stained crimson with the wine! What sort of potters threw cups like this here in the south, wondered Bayle, as the glitter from his own deviled his vision from below), which said that though she of course would not say it, she felt no such thing.

What Bayle found himself thinking, as conversation, wine, and food drifted on their various ways through the morning (and what food they ate! Crisp, roasted birds stuffed with fruit and nuts! Pastries filled with spicy meats! Puddings that combined terrifying bitternesses and sweetnesses!), was just how present Raven, now she was gone, seemed. The conversation somehow managed to return to her at least once every hour. In between, it was almost as
if she were lurking just outside, or spying from the dark niches behind them, or hiding in some chapel near them, observing and overhearing every inane and innocuous word or gesture made or uttered.

‘So, you have made up your mind, my dear?’ Feyer Senth’s voice was nearly lost among the crickets’.

‘Lord Aldamir has gone to the south. No one knows when he’ll return. But you suspect it may be quite a while. It is silly to come all this way and give up just like that. I can hire people to carry my packages and guide me after him. I shall leave in the morning. After all, I have money.’

‘But you must remember,’ Feyer Senth said, ‘as one goes further and further south, money means something very different from what it does in the city once called Neveryóna.’

‘You have money.’ Bayle, a little drunkenly, swirled wine in the bottom of his goblet. ‘And I do not. At least not very much money. So tomorrow morning I shall get a ship back to Kolhari –’ For an hour, following Norema, he too had been saying ‘the city once called Neveryóna,’ as the priests did; but as the sky had gone salmon outside the porch, then indigo, and the wax had been pried from the mouth of yet another jug, he had gone back to the ‘Kolhari’ he had used all his life.

‘If I find his Lordship, I shall tell him you answered his messenger!’ Norema said with an intensity that probably came from the wine they had been drinking all day on the porch, or in the chapels near it, or about the grounds just in front of it. ‘I will! I promise you, Bayle!’

Bayle said nothing – though he smiled – and swirled his dregs. His feelings had alternated between a very real desire to accompany this city merchant’s bold little red-haired secretary and a very real apprehension; he was only
eighteen, this was the first time he had been away from the city; things had not gone according to plan; best return and leave heroics to a later year.

‘I have money,’ Norema repeated. ‘Now if I only knew
where
, to the south, Lord Aldamir has gone. But you say I should not have any trouble finding him …?’

Bayle stood up; the flares, in metal holders bolted to the stone, wavered and flapped uncertain light about the porch. ‘I must go to bed,’ he said thickly. ‘Good night, and thank you for a wonderful day … ’ Two feyers, who either had not drunk such amounts as he or who were used to imbibing such amounts, were instantly at his side, leading him toward his cell somewhere off in the wobbling dark.

‘I too should retire.’ Norema rose. She was by no means as drunk as the boy. Still, the last hour’s drinking, with only the smokey flares to keep away night bugs, had left her quite tired. And her thoughts and feelings over the day of priestly entertainment had been much closer to what yours and mine would have been: between polite interest and polite boredom, she too had wondered what part the ritual realities of actual religion played in the lives of these rather indolent feyers. The decision to continue her journey had been sudden, and the thought she had given to it since was the sort one lavishes on an onerous but inescapable obligation. Now she wanted to retire early enough for the coming travail of tomorrow’s tasks: the collecting of guides, bearers, tents, and provisions by the waterfront at dawn – a service she had performed several times for
Madame Keyne before at Kolhari and whose difficulties she therefore knew. ‘No, I can find my own way,’ she said, taking the flare from the priest who started forward to guide her.

Some ‘Good-night’s’ chorused beyond the flare’s glow. An arch, and she entered it. Smoke trickled from the brand to lick back on the ceiling, already ribboned with soot from how many years’ sleepy travelers’ lighting their way to bed. A stone doorway inches lower than the top of her head, and she ducked through.

The cell seemed much higher than she remembered; but it was the right one: there, in brand light, were her boxes and sacks. Through a window high in one corner she could see brand-lit leaves and beyond them faint stars. A bed; a metal wall-holder for the flare; a three-legged amphora of water, a standing basin for washing.

She put the brand in its holder.

When – after washing, after plunging the brand in the washed-in water, after dripping water on the tops of her bare feet in the dark while she tried to get the extinguished brand back in its brace, after turning once and then turning again on the fragrant bed – sleep came, she was not sure.

She woke at a strangled gasp, not hers; something fell down to hit the bed’s edge, thudded to the floor. Blinking, she pushed herself up, started to swing her feet to the stone –

‘Don’t, or your toes will be a-wash in blood,’ followed by a barking laugh above her – but a soft bark.

Norema looked down: someone lay with arms and legs at awkward angles, while wetness crawled out across the flags. She looked up; blocking moonlight, Raven squatted in the window. She put one leg in and let it hang.

With a shudder, Norema curled her feet up under her – and Raven dropped down on to the bed’s foot.

‘What’s
happened …?’
Norema whispered hoarsely.

‘Well, Heathen Woman,’ Raven whispered back squatting on the rumpled blanket and folding her arms, ‘someone was going to kill you. So I killed her – or him, as the case may be.’ She bent forward, rolled the body back – ‘Him … but I should have expected that by now in your strange and terrible land –’ and pulled something from the flank. An arm flopped on the floor; blood welled, Raven turned her two-pronged sword, examining it, wiped it on the bed, examined it again.

‘Kill me?’ Norema demanded, trying to match Raven’s whisper. ‘Why on earth …?’

‘Most probably – ‘Raven, still sitting, managed to get the sword, after several plunges, into its shaggy sheath – ‘because you were going to go on looking for Lord Aldamir and they don’t want you to find him – or rather they don’t want you to find out something about him once you start looking.’

In the silvered dark, Norema squinted; ‘But how did you know I was going to go on? You’d already left before –’

Raven laughed again. ‘After I left, I doubled back. Oh, I stayed around, lurking outside, spying from dark niches, even got in and hid in one of the chapels. I must have heard everything the bunch of you said this afternoon.’

‘You did?’

‘And you know what
they
did, these wine-bibing feyers? Sent a little herd of men out after me, very much of the cut of this one here. With orders to do me in.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Pretty much what I did to this one. Snuck up behind, got one, then another. Quick and silent.’ Raven put her feet on what was presumably drier stone and stood.

‘Bayle,’ Norema said suddenly. ‘What about Bayle?’

‘Well, I couldn’t keep guard on
both
your cells at once. When this one here climbed up into your window with a knife in her – in
his teeth
and a garrote cord knotted around his wrist, I was up behind and –’ Raven made the jabbing motion Norema supposed would sink a sword in a kidney. ‘Fell in down across your bed and on to the floor there. Are you ready to get out of here?’

Norema looked for a place to stand, saw it, stood on it. ‘Don’t you think we should check to see if Bayle’s alive or dead?’

‘Now why should these priests want to kill some poor, pudgy daughter of Eif’h? He was going home in the morning, and unless I miss my guess, if you’d volunteered to do the same, no one would have wanted to kill you either. But then,
you
had money. Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do. Get into your pants.’

‘I still don’t –’

‘Come, Eastern Heathen.’ Raven turned, stepped back on the bed, leaped for the window, and scrabbled up the wall; a moment later she was again perched in the moonlight. Turning, she reached down her hand. ‘Come on.’

Somehow, pants and sandals were gotten into.

Norema had to jump three times before Raven’s rough hand grappled hers. With her toes in the wall’s deep mortices she scrambled up to crowd beside the small masked woman on the sill. ‘Where are we going?’ Norema asked of the frayed black rag, inches from her face and punctured by eyes still indigo in the moon.

‘To visit Lord Aldamir’s great rubber orchards. And his magnificent castle,’ and she was off the sill on to a branch, climbing down. Norema was after her – it was longer down to the ground than it had been up from the bed. As Norema’s sandals hit the pine needles – Raven had already
taken several loping steps down the slope – there was a crashing in the brush beside them, and a creature jumped out, to land in a crouch, knuckles on the ground: ‘Raven, the coast is clear!’

‘Ha, ha!’ said Raven. ‘But we’re not going to the coast. It’s inland for us right now, back toward the castle.’

Norema took her hand from her mouth and asked, with thudding heart: ‘Who’s she?’

Raven said: ‘It is very hard in this strange and terrible land to be a true daughter of Jevim and not pick up little girls – like honey picks up flies – who desperately want to help.’ She reached down and tousled the curly hair of the crouching youngster. ‘Some of them are pretty plucky too. This one is even useful.’

The girl, who was clearly local, grubby, and about twelve, stood up and said: ‘Who’s she? The lady we’re saving?’

‘Lo,’ said Raven, ‘she is already saved, Juni. Norema, that’s Juni. And she’s smart,’ though Norema was not sure which of them the last sentence referred to. ‘Hurry up, both of you.’

They followed the masked woman down the tangled slope, minutes at a time scrambling by vine-laced trees that, for all the moon, were lightless.

The two women and the girl, now grunting, now whispering for one or the other to step this way rather than that, leaves a-whisper about them, small branches a-crackle under foot, made their way, now down, now up.

‘What’s that?’ Norema asked, as they reached fallen stones, those stones still standing covered with ivy.

A wing of moonlight flapped on Raven’s face. (A branch among blowy leaves above them bent and bent again, revealing that grin below the mask.) Raven chuckled.

Juni said: ‘This is the wall around the Dragon Castle’s parks and orchards.’

‘Lord Aldamir’s castle?’ Norema asked.

Juni blinked.

Raven nodded. ‘Let us examine them.’ She swung her leg over the lowest rock.