Wildfire (49 page)

  
It was useless to ask questions. I watched instead, searching each man’s face for signs of likeness to a father I’d seen only in dreams. He’d be twelve years older now, if he lived. Would I recognize him? And this was just one town on a lake more than ten leagues long—I saw how foolish I’d been to hope.

 

  
We drove about thirty of the horses up to a pasture on the mountain behind the king’s summer palace, and I sat on a boulder with Lame, tired and out of breath. A redheaded Lambaneish horseboy came over and squatted beside us. He looked about my age, maybe a little older. He said in the High, “Who is this man you search for? Your father?”

 

  
I nodded.

 

  
“But you don’t know his name. How will you find him?”

 

  
“I won’t,” I said. “I disremember too much, I was too young when I was taken.”

 

  
“Taken?”

 

  
“In the war.”

 

  
“What do you remember?”

 

  
“He had a horse named Ganos.” I laughed a sour laugh and pitched a pebble down the hill. “We were riding back from market over the pass, and he saw soldiers coming, and we left the horse and my sorry pony—I mean the pony was sorry in color, she had hide like my eyebrows, this color, see?—and we climbed down that big foot at the head of the lake. And I had a pretty red vest, and a little felt cat…cap that came down around my ears and tied with strings under my chin, like the children wear here. That’s all I know.”

 

  
“Was there embroidery on the cap? What was the pattern?”

 

  
“It was red and yellow chicks, checks.”

 

  
The boy shrugged. “So many died then. I expect he’s dead.”

 

  
“I expect so,” I said.

 

  
That night Catena and I slept curled up together, and it was a comfort to us both. But I awoke suddenly, disturbed by a forgotten dream, and found my left side was damp with sweat and my right side had gooseflesh. I couldn’t go back to sleep.

 

  
We were a hand of days on the lakeshore, while the king collected mounts and provisions. Some he sent up the pass above the Town of One Hundred Mares, to aid his men coming down, but he didn’t wait for the rest of his army to arrive. We set out on a winding road that clung to the folds of the mountains, riding south to Allaxios to find out what hospitality Arkhon Kyphos, the king’s father-in-law, would offer him. Behind us stretched a mule train laden with treasures, for the king had plundered his palace of silver platters, golden ewers, hangings, robes, bales of wool from coveted breeds of mountain sheep, and casks of doublewine from his vineyards; gifts for the arkhon, Garrio said, to sweeten his disposition.

 

  
We had a long ride ahead of us, long days to cover many leagues. Catena and I shared one of the sturdy, shaggy mountain horses. I didn’t regret leaving the Lake of Sapheiros behind, for our stay there had awakened a sleeping sorrow. When we reached the plains at the southern end of the lake, I turned in the saddle for a last look at the valley. The peaks of the Ferinus, all ice and stone, were a rampart stretching from horizon to horizon, and Galan was on one side of that wall and I was on the other. My manacles had been struck off, but I was still imprisoned.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 19
  

  
The Manufactory
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
t was a journey of eight days from Sapheiros to the easternmost gate of Allaxios, home of Arkhon Kyphos, the ruler of Lambanein. The city was built on a steeply terraced mount that stood solitary among the gentle swells of the lowlands. Mount Allaxios wasn’t much of a mountain compared to those of the Ferinus, but we saw it shimmering from a long way off, for it had a shining crown, the golden rooftops of the Inner Palace where the arkhon dwelled. Solid gold tiles, Garrio claimed, each one worth a fortune. He didn’t mind reminding us he’d been here before.

 

  
Mount Allaxios showed a forbidding face to travelers approaching from the north or west, craggy precipices rising above a river that bent around the mount like an elbow. But we arrived from north-of-east, and saw welcoming terraces covered with buildings and gardens. A broad canal seemed to issue from the very summit of the mount—though surely that was impossible—and it flowed down the great stairway of terraces and straight across the fertile plains like a shining road.

 

  
This much we saw from outside the high walls of the city. I expected that the gates would be flung open for King Corvus, that he would be greeted with the pomp and courtesy befitting the arrival of a king, no matter that he came as a beggar, having lost his wife, her dowry, and his kingdom. But no one was permitted to enter Allaxios without being clean, and the Lambaneish had a strict notion of cleanliness. We followed attendants into a magnificent building that delved into the ground instead of rising above it, with five stories of colonnades around a central atrium. Catena and I descended the slippery marble stairs together, as close as if we were still shackled, and we seemed to climb down toward a wavering oblong of silver sky, for the lowest level of the building was half submerged in water. Shining ripples doubled the stacked colonnades.

 

  
I took the building to be a temple of Torrent Wellspring, though I didn’t see her statue among the limestone carvings softened by time and water. And in its way it was sacred, but it was also a crowded bathhouse that
echoed with voices and laughter, and the music of water flowing from spouts into basins, from basins into pools and channels, and from channels into the atrium, in shimmering veils between the columns. Men and women and children bathed naked in the chill winter air, rinsing under stone spouts and sitting in small pools that smoked with steam. They seemed to have no notion of modesty, and yet our male attendants, clothed only in loincloths, covered their heads with brown shawls as if ashamed to show their faces.

 

  
We descended to the third level, and the attendants bade us with gestures to take off our clothing. The king undressed first, saying he was sick of his own stink and the stench from the rest of us, and then his men couldn’t refuse. A bowlegged man carried our garments away. I turned my back, for it was a pitiful sight, all of us stripped naked of everything but our amulets, the king and about fifty of his men and Catena and I. A poorer lot of clapped-out mules you never saw, ribs and girdlebones and wingbones sticking out, skin cracked, fingers and toes blackened from frostbite, open sores.

 

  
Catena and I washed under a spout carved like a ram’s head, with a beard of moss hanging from its chin. I scrubbed hard with a small sack of sand, ridding myself of grime and ashy skin, and I found it a pleasure to be clean. Catena shivered under the water, saying she’d never bathed in her life and saw no reason to start now.

 

  
The attendants had razors of black obsidian, long shards keener than knives, with which they offered to shave us. The king told his warriors that the noblewomen of Lambanein would refuse to couple with them if they had hairy bodies—which gave much cause for banter and gibes. He lay down on a marble bench and permitted his body to be shaved, even the hair around his dangle. The barber trimmed his beard and the hair of his head, and combed out his nits with a fine tortoiseshell comb. Then most of his warriors were willing to allow the same liberties; the priests of Rift were downright eager. They had their heads shaved too, and their scalps and jaws burnished with pumice.

 

  
Then it was the turn of the mudfolk, and suddenly it was plain why our attendants were burly men with fists like small boulders. They meant to take all our hair, make us bald naked as priests of Rift, and they were not as courteous as they had been with the Blood. Lame hit his barber, and the barber hit him back, and there would have been a brawl if one of the king’s Auspices hadn’t struck Lame down with a heavy blow, and threatened the same to anyone else who made a fuss.

 

  
A woman barbered Catena and me. Her face was concealed under a yellow shawl with a brown stripe, but she showed her disgust by picking a
louse from my scalp and crushing it between her fingernails. She hissed. She scraped me with the obsidian razor all over my body and between my legs, and I trembled in shame and smarted in all my tender places. She cut away my long hair and did not even leave me eyebrows.

 

  
We never saw our clothes again. Catena and I were each given two unequal lengths of yellow cloth, a wooden disk, and a cord. With these we were expected to clothe ourselves. We were so puzzled by this that another woman—whose face wasn’t hidden—helped us dress with the patience afforded to simpletons or young children. She wrapped the longest cloth around me twice, pleating it in front to leave room to walk, and brought two ends of the cloth over my shoulders and fastened them to the front with the disk and cord. In this way, without sewing a stitch, she made me a garment. The shorter cloth served as a shawl. After she dressed us, she dusted our arms with yellow powder, from the backs of our hands to our elbows.

 

  
I leaned over the railing of the colonnade and saw myself in the pool two stories below. Dried marigold petals floated over my reflection, and below it a long white carp waved its tail. I looked strange without the red hair that made me familiar to myself. My head seemed so vulnerable in its nakedness. I twisted the shawl around my bald scalp like a headcloth, to protect myself from gazes.

 

  
This day, by the tally of knots on my red cord, I had been two months captive: six tennights, each represented by a double-knot.

 

  
There was one last indignity before we could enter the city. We were each given a paste of herbs formed into a ball the size of a cherry. Among other flavors I recognized bindweed, which might as well be called the unbinding weed. We stayed outside the city walls in a long hostel full of tiny rooms, while we got over the squirts brought on by the purgative. It was a hive of women; where the men lodged I never knew. We rested and ate, and healers gave us salves for our sores, and by the end of the three days Catena and I had stubble on our scalps.

 
  

 

  
It was the spring Equinox, and the tenth day since Catena and I had entered the gates of Allaxios. We’d been taken straightaway to the palace of Arthygater Katharos, one of the arkhon’s many daughters, and put to work as textrices in her manufactory, Catena as a spinner, and I as a weaver. We hadn’t seen the king or any of his men. No one told us why we were bondservants, or how long we’d be obliged to serve, and we quickly found questions were considered impertinent, especially if asked in a foreign tongue.

 

  
The manufactory was two stories high, with arcades on both floors overlooking the inner courtyard. This court had paved paths, a fountain
with a hollow bronze woman ceaselessly pouring water into a stone basin from her water jar, a tiled watercourse, and an old pear tree, and it was pleasant enough. But all I’d seen of the sky for ten days was the small rectangle above the green-tiled manufactory roof. There were no windows in the outer walls, and but one door, and that was locked and guarded.

 

  
The Equinox wasn’t a Lambaneish festival, but Catena and I were celebrating it nevertheless with bondwomen from Incus: Dulcis, Dame Abeo, Nitida, and Migra. Shortly after we came, they had invited us into their small circle, glad of the company of others who spoke the High, and now we sat under the vaulted roof of the arcade, chatting and spinning like old friends. It was a chilly evening, but one couldn’t welcome Growan Maid indoors. The sky above the courtyard was streaked with drizzling rain, and silver drops clung to the black twigs and buds of the pear tree. We sang a few prayers to honor the coming of the Maid, and Dame Abeo treated us to sesame and honey fritters bought from a peddler. She was the only one of us High speakers born of the Blood, but on this side of the mountains she was just another bondwoman.

 

  
I gave Catena a present I’d made for her, a little doll of straw wrapped around with thread, and she thanked me prettily and tucked it away. Perhaps she thought it too childish—though she could be childish too, I was delighted to find out. Sometimes she played with other young girls, running around the courtyard or dormitory at night until tired women scolded them and made them stop. But tonight she seemed content to ply her spindle with the rest of us. When she came she hadn’t known how to spin, and her taskmistress had covered her arms with pinches from sharpened fingernails.

 

  
We worked all day for Arthygater Katharos, but in the evening we spun for ourselves to earn a few coins. One could always sell thread. A single weaver might require thread from as many as ten spinners to keep her busy; the finer the weave, the more spinners. The woman who oversaw the dormitory lent us wool and flax, and we spun it, and she paid us a few coins and advanced us more fiber, and so on. No doubt the arthygater profited from this trade somehow, as she profited from the few peddlers allowed into the manufactory, who sold us sweets, needles, fuel for small fires, lamp oil, songbirds, and such.

 

  
Lambaneish coins were cylindrical beads stamped with figures; the least valuable were of pewter. The women wore these beadcoins strung on the cord fringes of the net caps they wore in place of headcloths. I’d been shocked at first to see women going about with their hair showing under these caps as if they still had maidenheads, but I had my own net cap now, and a couple of beadcoins to hang on it. Someday I hoped to have many coins, enough to get me home.

 

  
Dulcis was prattling on, and likely I was the only one listening to her, for she told the same stories over and over. Her conversation was still new to me, and perplexing enough to be interesting. She was saying, “Diakonan was smitten with me, poor fellow, but he hadn’t a coin to call his own. Instead of buying wax figurines, he’d make them out of clay himself, clumsy things, most unflattering, and mark them with his teeth and nails to show how he meant to mark me—if I gave him a chance, which I wouldn’t.”