The Year of Our War (33 page)

“How did you find out about…Genya?”

“I just asked her. Men can be so blind. If we get through this you should find her and treat her well as she deserves; see if she doesn’t come to you as promptly as a trained hawk.”

“Yes, Ata.”

“Isn’t it strange that Rhydanne will soon be the only people left, even though they have never joined the fight against the Insects? Your kind will discover Insects scaling the Darkling massif only when the last Awian is extinct and the last human in Hacilith is bitten in two.”

“Yes, Ata,” I said, knowing no one could make Rhydanne cooperate long enough to fight. It was all too clear I had to take the only path left open, and become her accomplice.

Ata extended her calloused hand and we both promised to keep silent. I would have to live beside this lady forever, and I worried about how long our mutual secrets might last.

“I will be Mist Ata Dei. Immortal again, for good.” She stood up briskly. I sneezed three times in close succession. The tendons were burning in the backs of my hands.

“Let’s end our discussion,” she said, returning to Morenzian vernacular. “It’s late, and I perceive you’re unwell.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Jant, you’re smoother when you’re lying than when you’re straight! Listen, I have eighty carracks, and eleven thousand men. You were on the deck of the
Honeybuzzard
when Shearwater ran my ambush, so you saw what I saw. He made a castle of his ship. He barricaded the railings and blocked my arrows. Shame, but I learned from that—how ships carrying soldiers can be as sound as a fortress afloat. Ah, look at you! What’s the use in talking?”

I wiped my watering eyes with a sleeve. I was having trouble concentrating;
I need a shot
kept drifting into my mind. I leaned and rubbed my thighs and shins, trying to stop them aching, but tension made them stone-hard.

“What about Swallow?” Swallow had ten well-guarded caravels, and her fyrd could sail them. Swallow also had charge of Cyan. It was essential to know what Ata thought.

“The savante’s music is breathtaking. What else?” I could tell from her hooded tone that if she had any plans concerning Swallow I would certainly not hear them.

“She’s proved herself in battle…I think…and she will still try for a place in the Circle; I know she won’t ever give up.”

“Jant, you’re inexperienced. I’ll be free of the Zascai in less than sixty years. She’s a genius in music only—”

“The Circle is
based
on merit!” What am I, god’s sake, but a specialist?

“Supposed to be,” Ata said wryly. “Lightning, the eternal bachelor, will realize one day that what he pursues in all these wild young redhead girls is something he should find in himself. He tries to marry freedom rather than learn it. He should realize he doesn’t need their carefree cheer to replace what he’s long forgotten, and has to rediscover.”

“And Awia?”

“Flags and boundaries mean nothing to me; if we live I’ll help the decadent kingdom. But perhaps we’ll set the balance right in favor of Morenzia for once.” Carmine Dei began to smile.

“Now, Jant, I can tell you’re worse now than you were when we started, all curled up like that, so let me give you a bed and see you in the morning.” An unintentional lightening of her tone crept in, reminding me again of her hundred children. I was desperately tired and longing, longing to lie down, but I refused her offer. I knew better than to give her the chance to cut my throat. I demanded to stay in the tower room, close to the window, and alone.

From behind her desk, Ata scrutinized me, intrigued, although her manner still appeared kindly; then she called her daughter and they left. The sound of the waves slipped back. Soon I thought it would wear my nerves away.

I lay by the window, on the floorboards like
Honeybuzzard
’s deck, and wrapped myself in the soldier’s coat. I began trembling violently, which was nothing to do with the cold. I lay awake all night, sore-eyed with visions of the needle, Insects and ice.

I
relived my first meeting with the girl from the roof of the world. In winter, Scree pueblo nestled roof-deep into the snow, tiny firelit windows by the edge of a sheer gorge. I found the pass and sailed rapidly above the arête, down over a sharp rock buttress. The mountains sped by too fast for breathing. I flew below the level of the peaks, vast black splinters cutting a clear sprinkled sky. I navigated by Polaris and the scent of peat smoke, and I came home to Darkling, to stay in the Filigree Spider for a few days of rest.

A harsh, intensely cold wind blew down from the high peaks, Mhadaidh and Bhachnadich, straight off the glaciers. It dried the skin tight to the bones of my face. I rode that wind in, ice forming on my wings’ leading edges. I landed in powdery snow, knee-deep on the pueblo’s low roof, slid off in a minor avalanche and hammered on the door of the Spider.

Lascanne opened the top half, and grinned. “You’re late.”

“I’m
never
late.”

“Oh…We’ve already started.”

“Free drinks?” I could smell warm whiskey.

“In your honor, Jant.”

God, it was good to be back.

T
here were about twenty people in the little pub, flickered by firelight, quite drunk on gut-wrenching spirits, eating rye bread and smoked goat. Tern bought the Spider as my wedding present because I always used to say I was born in the bar in Scree; the only place where Rhydanne cooperate.

Unlike a human or Awian pub, there is very little conversation, and no music; Rhydanne society is a contradiction in terms. They are not gregarious creatures, each is used to a solitary, independent existence, and so even in the bar they were aloof, keeping distance from each other, and concentrating on drinking. I occasionally told stories, five-minute-long fables—as five minutes heavily stretches a Rhydanne attention span.

The second day was a solid and relentless blizzard, and few people visited. I must have taken too much cat because I stayed awake all night, buzzing with vitality. I checked the Spider’s accounts, finding them very out of date. Hollow-cheeked Lascanne couldn’t write; he kept all the numbers in his head. Nobody could fault him, he had the best memory for who owed a goat for their jug of whiskey.

Lascanne was tall and stick-thin, with hair cut very short and spiked. The bones of his skull could be seen through it, knobbly and asymmetrical. His long fingers moved in self-deprecating gestures. Lascanne was scared rigid of me.

In the early hours of the morning he was still serving the Spider’s patrons, in a lazy, relaxed atmosphere, safe from the snow. A peat fire had burned down to sheaves of white ash, creeping orange sparks. The kilim-covered floor was warm, the room pine-scented.

Gradually I found my attention drawn to a figure sitting at a table, on a rough wood bench by the door. It was strange because people usually tried to sit close to the hearth. Female, although it was difficult to tell. She had her back to me and was drinking vodka steadily, making a pyramid of the pottery cups after downing each shot. I counted thirteen of them. Her very fine black hair brushed off her shoulders and hung to her waist. Her face was away from me and as I watched no one acknowledged her presence. They left her well alone.

Like me she had pale skin, Rhydanne eyes with vertical oval pupils that cut out snow-glare. A very rapid flicker-fusion speed in our vision gives us faster reactions—which a flatlander would call overreactions. Her arms and legs were collections of long muscles, sinewy and toned. Wearing? A black vest, loose and discolored by a thousand stonewashings, pushed out by her tiny pointed tits—I strained to see—and a short skirt, no, a very short skirt, from the same valuable black cotton traded up from Awia. She had leather pumps with string grips, and that was all. As I stared quite openly taking all this in, she kept drowning herself in the house’s best vodka.

“Lascanne,” I called. “Come over here a minute.” He strode across, wiping a horn tumbler.

I pointed at the skinny girl. “Who is that?” He shrugged and turned away but I leaned over the bar and grabbed his elbow.

“Oh…just some bitch,” he said.

“The name of the bitch?” I prompted.

“Jant, keep away from her. She’s not all…Well, she’s a bit strange.” He smiled nervously, with thin lips.

“You’re bloody weird yourself, Lascanne, and I do not need your advice. If you don’t tell me I’m going to get angry. Three…Two…”

“Genya Dara!”

I released him and he rubbed his bony elbow. “She’s a Dara…” he asserted. “She’s Labhra’s daughter, so…my half sister.”

“I didn’t know Labhra had a daughter!”

“He didn’t want you to know, Jant.”

Curiosity momentarily stole my attention from the narrow-shouldered girl. “What happened to Labhra in the end?” I queried.

Lascanne shrugged, a gesture he was built for. “Oh…his wife killed him,” he said.

I helped myself to a quaich of whiskey, sinking back onto the bar stool. I felt like I walked on a feather’s edge. When fate throws something as delicious as this my way I find it hard to believe I have not strayed into someone else’s life. The bar seemed slightly unreal and I was shivering with delight. Lascanne saw the decision set hard in my eyes after a few moments’ thought. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said softly, with the lilting Darkling accent I so often miss.

“Why haven’t I seen her before?”

“Jant, I—Oh. All right. She doesn’t come down much…She only visits in when the weather’s too harsh up on the peaks; the rest of the time she’s out on Chir or Greaderich.”

“Is she, indeed? And what does she do there?” The thin ice of Lascanne’s patience cracked and he told me perhaps I should ask her myself. “She’s a lone wolf bitch, that’s all I know,” he said bitterly. He could tell how much I wanted her, I was charged with need. I had thought I would never have another chance since Dellin rejected me. And here she was, my other chance. My last chance. I had to have her.

“She’s taller than Dellin,” I murmured, thinking aloud. The barman caught the comment, and smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “I know what happened back then.”

“Mortals can’t remember that!”

“Jant, your thorough failure with Shira Dellin is legendary up here.”

That was a hundred years ago. This is here and now. “What sort of man does this one like?” I asked, leveling a finger at Genya Dara’s scrawny shape.

The bitterness in Lascanne’s voice took on a strain of self-pity. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “She won’t let me near her.”

Over the next day and night, I put in some hard work. All my efforts were in vain; Genya refused to notice me. Eventually I couldn’t decide whether Genya’s world was too untranslatable even for me, whether she was just obstinate, engaged, or simply bloody stupid. Two things were clear: she was as beautiful as she was intractable and she was a very dedicated alcoholic.

When in a drug haze I called her Dellin by mistake she simply smiled, showing teeth white as snow. I bought her whiskey and she drank it (as fast as I could bring it) but she never thanked me. I ran through my repertoire to no avail—which only made my desire for her worse. She declined to dance. Cards? She didn’t know how to play. Stories of other lands? She was less than interested. Would Genya like me to accompany her home? This caused a flurry of icy laughter, which set in little drifts around my feet.

The Rhydanne girl had a mannish face, although still with high cheekbones and a graceful jaw. She always wore the same clothes, thin vest or a polonaise. She was too leggy, starved and muscular to resemble petite Dellin, but my anger at Dellin, preserved over the years, was now directed at her.

When I lay awake and the rest of the house was sleeping, I thought of her. I was eaten alive by thoughts of her, which I tried to salve with scolopendium. But desire pooled in me like melt water. So much desire. I had to have her. A gram of cantharides would have done the trick in an Awian court, but nothing’s aphrodisiac above the snowline.

I wanted to fuck her. What a chase she would give me! I would catch her. Bring her down among the ice formations.

Or I would screw her in a warm bed while snow plumes fell past the window. I wanted her to ride me, muscles appearing and disappearing in those long legs. I was erect again. I was so hard I felt my heart beat blunt in my groin. Genya made me like this. It’s what she has to answer for. Lying on the pallet, I cup and caress my balls with one hand, rub my hard cock. My cock is narrow but average long, the tip is smooth. These painted nails are hers. The fist around my cock is hers, tightening on the upstroke. Her body is stretched out underneath me. Little tits, chalky with cold. Cat-eyes, shining with pleasure. When I come, I spurt into her mouth. I sigh. It’s just lust, Shira. It’s never been “love them and leave them” so much as “fuck them and flee.”

O
n the last night I was at my wits’ end. I was expected at the Castle next day and was preparing for a long and uncomfortable flight. My habit was serious, I had run out of money and had no success at all with Genya Dara.

“You’ve failed, Comet,” said Lascanne happily.

“Not yet, struidhear. Not yet, damn it.”

“Ha! Try again in a hundred years’ time. What do you want the sullen bitch for, anyway?”

Because she’s a piece of the mountains, a potential memory. Because she’s Rhydanne, quick and feral. Because she looks just like me, Lascanne; she’s our kind. I’m a rape child, so is Lascanne Shira; I pity his mother when Labhra pounced on her. The mountain people considered illegitimacy to be a curse—a curse you can pass on.

I hogged the bar, feeling faint, my movements blurred, and forgot about Genya until she pushed past. She usually avoided contact but wanted to know why the drinks had dried up. She had come in from outside, where people go round the back of the pub to piss in the snow, and her skin was cold although she looked flushed and panicky. I saw her brush her hand down the front of her skirt. “Let me do that?” I suggested. Silence. “Sweet vixen,” I said, “I’ll probably never see you again.”

Dara came close for me to grasp her round the waist, thin enough to encircle with one arm. She didn’t pull away.

“I want you,” I told her, in all honesty.

“Then chase me!” she said, and ran.

She sprang over a bench, over a pile of skis, and was out of the door before my next breath. Lascanne whined behind me. He looked like he was going to vault the bar and follow her. I slipped off my sword belt, threw it at him. “Stay!” I ordered. And I was gone. Running.

Freezing night air burned my lungs. I sipped at the air, spit gathering in the back of my throat. The road was snow; Genya’s footprints led up a little rise. I followed, long-legged. I trod in her footprints, shallow with speed. Genya was nowhere. She had completely vanished. God, she’s fast. Without the weight of wings to carry, she was my equal. I hoped she would tire easily.

I ran up the rise and onto a narrow plateau above Scree. She kept close to the cornice. I swept doubt from my mind and concentrated on running. Fast. One foot in front of the other, for hours. My heart thundering on cat and whiskey. Genya slipping always ahead of me like a black ghost. Watch my own thin legs. Desire is a splinter of ice in my mind. Shadows spindly on snow, the frost-twisted trees. She led me between them and I thought she would stop there. She had no intention of surrendering. She was leading to a better place. I wanted to bite her, fast and hard.

We went up a stone chute between sharp rock pillars. Quartz is rock snow, granite froth. We ran on, flight in her mind, fucking in mine. We ran up to the edge of the Klannich glacier, a rearing white wall. Ice crackled as she high-stepped through a frozen stream.

My cock was so hard I could hardly run. I could see her, in the distance, starting the climb of a massive crag. I closed the distance as she gained altitude. At the foot of the cliff, I looked up and she was way above me. I put a hand to the frost-shattered rock. Cold. Detailed in gray. See—this is not a dream. I’m going to fuck that bitch, I thought, as I paused for breath and bent over, coughing and spitting.

Genya had made a mistake. We had run the length of the corrie, into the heart of the mountains. She outpaced me, but she had led to a sheer escarpment, where the hanging valley ended. It stretched up onto a knife-sharp ridge. She climbed with a quick, sure grace, stabbing the hard, pointed nails on her long fingers into every crack. But she didn’t have wings and so she had to take care. Falling is nothing to me. I took little heed and climbed faster still. Meagre handholds offered themselves. I flowed my weight each to each and climbed. Fast. I overtook her halfway up that wall of rock, reached the ledge first and gave her a hand over the top.

Wide clear sky. Vertigo view—peaks linked by ridges marching out for kilometers. The mountains were stark, ice-spattered. Their slopes were fir-lined and patched with black shadows.

I clasped her wrist hard enough to bruise and dragged her over the edge. In that vast empty sky I touched her.

She cut at me with her free hand. I twisted her arm behind her back and made her kneel. I would have taken her like that, on her knees, grabbing her flat tits. She kicked me. I didn’t slap her; I wrestled her onto her back. She smelled of stone, she was shivering.

That isn’t right. She shouldn’t be shivering. It isn’t cold enough yet. I put my weight on top of her, forearms on her shoulders, forced her to lie supine. She squirmed. I struggled with a cold button and shoved my buckskin trousers down. My cock was so hard it ached. I rubbed a hand over it, in the chill air. Lying between her legs I was already flicking my hips against her. I felt my feathers rustle. My tongue was dry from gulping the cold air but I licked at her neck, holding one hand entwined in dark hair to stop her biting me. So I could look into her eyes. I was desperate for orgasm. I ripped her thin panties, she seized my arm and licked it.

“Is this good?” I said.

“Deyn.”