The Golden Sword (16 page)

He strode to the double doors and passed through them, and I heard a great chiming. Chayin returned to his pile and dressed himself from it until there was nothing left of the pile and he stood armed and ready for the desert in brown web-cloth cloak and breech and untrapped leathers. I had seen him strap all manner of weapons about him, from tiniest sticker to razor-moons and gol-knives, but this armament was so cleverly hidden that one saw only a gol-knife at hip and short sword beside it.

He grinned through narrowed eyes at me, silently staring. I picked up the Shaper’s cloak and put it over my arm, and threaded the gol-knife through the sword belt before I belted the familiar northern straight blade about me, just below my Nemarsi chald.

There was a clatter in the hall, and another, and two jiasks burst through the double doors and skidded to a halt before their cahndor. Before Chayin could even turn to face them, two more followed. These two were noticeably winded, and both familiar to me from my confirmation.

“I leave for Frullo jer within the enth,” Chayin told them. “Wiraal, it is on you to get the remaining threxmen there safely.” Wiraal nodded.

“Yimon, Nemar North is in your hands,” he said to the second, and that one bowed his head.

“Asi, prepare Saer and Guanden, with a light hand. Send all I would have carried with Wiraal. Just see it is not forgotten, for I will need it, first first of Amarsa. And send to fetch desert gear for Estri. Those things I ordered are surely ready.” And the jiask Asi backed hurriedly from the room, without protestation as to the lateness of the hour.

Chayin turned to the fourth, a heavyset, grizzled veteran whose age I found it impossible to judge. He wore his scowl of disapproval as might another his weapon.

“Isre, I—”

The older jiask did not let his chandor finish, but broke right in. “You are not going again into the desert without me, Chayin! That last was my only folly. If anything had happened to you, your father’s spirit would surely—”

“It is time, Isre,” Chayin interrupted in kind, his hand raised palm up to the jiask. “That the father’s son be left on his own. I have my own spirit to temper in the caldron of time. You cannot do it for me. I must leave more than one man whose love is unquestioned in Nemar North.”

“I will not stay here,” said the jiask, crossing gnarled arms thick as thala saplings across his breasts.

“You will, for I shall not return with the others from Frullo jer, but continue on to Mount Opir. Would you leave Yimon to stand for Nemar against Hael upon his own? Surely your responsibility to the jiasks outweighs all else that might be balanced against it.”

The jiaskcahn Isre had that look of a man who only sees the trap when it has closed upon his ankle.

Chayin made a sign, and the three bowed down, and the cahndor, in his capacity as living god, blessed them and their endeavors in his name. He then bade them rise and leave us, which they did, as a fitterwoman with sleep still in her eyes stumbled through the double doors with the weapon-master. Both of them carried armfuls of their craft before them, the little fitterwoman such a load it was a wonder she could see around it.

At my feet they dropped enough to garb a yra of tiasks, rather than one.

From this assortment I soon found myself dressed a double to the cahndor, concealed weapons included, even down to the razor-moons in my thigh-high boots. My cloak, it was decided, was weapon enough without the wires and stickers Chayin’s contained, but still they insisted upon slipping the Shaper’s cloak within a brown double thickness of web-weave and sewing shut all the edges, so that the cloak was totally encased, except for the starburst clasps, which they dulled with some paste so that they no longer shone.

What occurred fit so exactly with my sorting that I was afraid to break the spell, and we rode long silent neras out of Nemar North to the southwest, through the decline of evening and sun’s rising and at midmorn we stopped in the middle of a dried-up streambed to rest the threx. The veil was heavy upon Chayin then, and in a sense it was on me also, for I made no move to alter what was to be, nor any judgment upon my part in it. We waited, silent, until the threx were rested, and we shared water, but neither ate, and then once again we set their noses toward Frullo jer. Halfway through that harrowing, silent trek, Guanden ceased his pulling and fighting. He had had, finally, enough run to suit him. And when the threx would have slowed, I urged him on, half in revenge for his ill manners.

The full moon was high when we made the ridge country, and higher when we reined them up to gaze upon FruIlo jer—a long day-bright hollow between two parallel ridges, ringed with a thousand torches beneath which a sea of appreis shone like jewels. In the center were huge pavilions, with the device of Nemar, a slitsa wound around the re-curved blade upon a field of crimson, emblazoned upon them. Frullo jer lies in Nemar, and the midsummer festival of Amarsa is always hosted by the Nemarsi. Three years in a row had Aknet of Menetph beaten the Nemarsi, upon their home ground, and taken back with him to Menetph the Golden Sword. This year Nemar would regain it. Men’s hoarse shouting came to us on the breeze, and the smells of food and threx and life. Appreis and pavilions were still being raised, work still being done. To our left, some gaen, Parset draft beasts, pulled a huge rake along a nera-around circular track, in the center of which were more web-structures. It was toward these we headed, down the slope, among the busy throng that seemed not to know or care about the night’s waning. I was to learn that Frullo jer, like many Parset institutions, is a day-and-night, nonstop affair. A tired Parset tastes his uris and keeps going, that he not be interrupted. This we did, also, as Chayin guided Saer across the beautifully graded track among the pavilions to one with the Nemarsi device upon it. Behind us was another, easily as imposing, that bore the amber star upon the black field of Menetph.

We were challenged by a querulous Nemarsi. Chayin casually dismounted, and I did likewise. The man, seeing his cahndor, reached out his hand for Saer’s reins. I handed him mine also, and we followed the threx’s rears to see where along the ropes they would be placed. Never have I seen more fine threx under one cover. A great part of the purpose of these festivals is to mix bloodlines, threx and Parset both, the rest being the meeting of tribal leaders and Day-Keepers and the checking of weights and measures to reaffirm them lawful. At such threx meets also it is not infrequent to see greedy grain merchants from Yardum-Or, for there is a truce of sorts about these affairs, and even safe passage for a few chosen outsiders. There are many northern threx breeders that would give a man’s weight in silver for a chance to stand where I stood; more even to contract for service of their best threx by such proven producers of race stock as Aknet’s Tycel. The Parsets do not cross-breed their stock outside their own tribes, and even among them, security about the threx was tight. All of thirty jiasks stalked the aisles between the ropes, constantly vigilant.

We passed along aisles where owners worked upon their beasts’ coats with razors, patterning their rumps, and with dyes upon their tripart hooves, and with all manner of beads and ribbons and brushes and combs beautified them. Many men were stripped down in the heat of the night, and their dark skins shone slick in the torchlight as they worked.

We regained the track and crossed it, and were among the awnings, where all manner of threx gear was available. I saw stone-studded headstalls and gold-worked rounded reins and great ruffed saddlepads of vibrant coloration. Parsets browsed and haggled about the stalls in all variety of dress, some eating or drinking as they wandered about. Chayin’s hand at my waist guided my steps; his voice was proud in my ear.

“Nowhere in all of the Parset Lands is there another meet to equal that of the Golden Sword. My people have been months preparing. Two hundred have been at this spot for three sets, that the track be perfect and the grounds free of slitsas and apths.”

“It is indeed overwhelming,” I said, as a prelude to a plea for food, but at the last of the threxfitters’ stalls I saw what I wanted, and put my arm about Chayin’s waist and stood on my toes to speak in his ear.

“Buy me that,” I said, pointing to a bitless head-stall with a nosepiece of metal wound with parr-hide, as is used in the north. This one had silver buckles, and the leathers were gilded, but it was the only one I had seen.

“Anything,” he said, and paid twice what it was worth to the merchant, without comment.

“Thank you,” I said as he handed it to me. “Since Guanden has no mouth, we will see if he has nerves in his nose.” And he knew what I meant: the threx had so much scar tissue in his mouth, he hardly felt the bits.

“Food?” he suggested, guiding me toward a number of fires that glowed up into the night.

“Your forereading is astounding,” I answered.

“And then some rest, perhaps?” His hand slipped from my waist to my hips.

“Indeed, for we must be up again by midday to take them around the track,” I reminded him.

“We have today and another before first first of Amarsa,” he objected. “They have both run this track.” We were among the food vendors, each of whom had spread deep-piled rugs upon the ground before their fires, that their customers might sit and eat.

Chayin sat me in a vacant corner and went to the fireside. Some jiasks, farther down the mat, regarded me curiously, talking in low tones to each other. I was maskless, I reminded myself, and of what that meant to them. Chayin met someone he knew, and they stood talking, bowls in hand. The jiask was Chayin’s height, but broader and darker, dressed similarly to the cahndor, but in black. They turned and headed toward me. The black-garbed one had a bladder over his shoulder.

I was getting to my feet when the spinning took me, and I sank back to my knees, and then I could no longer feel my body, or hear through its ears, or see through its eyes. I was in a different place, of pink phosphorescent seas and fuchsia cliffs where hump-eyed herbivores rose from the waves, their mouths dripping with brown vegetation. And then, not there, but another place, with a blaring angry call in my mind, that I had no business in that place. Hael’s mind, and others behind it I felt, pushing with the wrong tools upon the helsar, desperate, for now entwined in it, they had not the skill to free themselves. I thought the helsar would surely shatter from their force, the wrong way, at the wrong time. Sorters all, they had not thought to hest the filaments into order, but tried to push through them. And I had no choice but to aid the helsar, for its fate and my own were even then too closely linked.

From the inside, beyond the first gate, I set the filaments spinning in reverse; contrapuntal, it spewed them out. But I had by that step committed myself. A.portion of me lay trapped behind the golden gate, and would remain there until I could run the helsar in sequence and reacquire it. I slid out. The helsar was not unhappy at what had occurred, and what it had traded to me in return went with me, to see a world which for it is only a dream.

Then I knew that Chayin shook me, holding me by the shoulders, and I could feel the rug pile under my knees. Then sight, and his face, eyes narrowed in concern, membranes full across his eyes in his concentration. My mind met his before I found the skill of speech, and his sniffed mine all around, like a worried mother threx her newborn.

“Hael,” I said when I could, “knocked upon the gate, and he contrived to get his foot stuck there, he and his friends.”

“What did you leave there?” he demanded.

“Only a little time,” I reassured him.

“For him? I would have let him languish!”

“For myself; it is within my keep he would wreak his disorder and shriek his pain. How could I do otherwise?” I sat back on my heels and shook his hands off. The black-garbed jiask stood a little behind the cahndor, who knelt beside me. He stared. I tossed back my hair and wiped the beads of sweat from my upper lip. I could feel it running in rivulets from under my breasts down my ribs.

“It is done, and with little harm, Chayin.” I touched his face. “Let us eat our meal.”

He growled like a dorkat, but managed for me a wry grin, and handed me a bowl in which were a number of fried harth parts.

“Will you never introduce me, Chayin?” demanded the jiask, pulling on his beard with his hand.

“Jaheil, cahndor of Dordaisa, Estri of Nemar,” Chayin complied.

“Cahndor,” I acknowledged.

“You are too much of a woman to be the deadly tiask that Chayin paints you,” he said, leaning forward to take the hand I offered in Astrian greeting. This man had been in the north. He negotiated the three-turn grip with easy familiarity.

I smiled at his compliment but said nothing.

“I have been trying to convince Jaheil to take a yra of jiasks and accompany us to Mount Opir and beyond.” Chayin’s tone deepened suggestively. “Of all the cahndors, Jaheil is the only one to whom I would trust my back. I am going to have to turn it sometime in the near future.”

“It would suit me, such a romp. I have been too long a cahndor. I have not blooded my sword for a score of passes.”

“Even a cahndor, in Nemar, gets more exercise than that. Have you heard of Aknet’s attempted foul play?”

“I have heard.” The black-eyed jiask nodded. “Estri, tell Jaheil what you saw that day in the sky.”

“A M’ksakkan craft, big enough to have held that many Menetphers. It came from Nemar and then veered northeast,” I said.

“Think you what I suspect?” Jaheil demanded of Chayin, tugging so at his beard that his jaw wobbled.

“That the M’ksakkans aid the Menetphers? Doubtless. And they will aid us all against each other until there are none left to say what they may do in the desert!”

“What would you do about it?” Jaheil queried Chayin.

“Refuse them any ground. Unite all the cahndors against the M’ksakkans. If you will see to Itophe and Coseve, I will convince Aknet that it is not to Menetph’s benefit to treat with the star men.”

“And how will you do that? You and Aknet under the same web-cloth is reason enough to have one’s sword well whetted. Since I have known the two of you, the only agreement between you has been when to enter into battle. Have things so changed between Menetph and Nemar?”