“I was never in danger,” he answered me, haughty as a man may be with his mouth full and greasy. “Your diversion was well enough, but completely unnecessary. It was my play.”
I said, “They would have killed you. I saved your life.” For once he did not speak, but only turned his head, watching me out of the sides of his eyes. “Man or fox, you are in my debt,” I said. “You know you are in my debt.”
His mustache truly bristled, and he licked it down again. “Why, so are you in mine, boy, with my food and water in your belly. If you saved me indeed, you did it by chance—and well you know that—but I chose to help you, when I could have left you to get on about your business of dying. I hunt for no one, but I hunted for you, and so we are well quits in your world and mine.” And he would say nothing further until we had finished the bird and buried the scraps, to leave no trace for the Mildasis.
“If you want to wash your face and paws,” I said then, “I could look away.” I yawned as I spoke, because the good meal made me want to sleep immediately. The old man sat back with his arms around his knees, considering me long and long after that, not moving at all. Kind and cozy as a grandfather he looked, but I felt the way that bird must have felt in the last seconds, seeing him too late.
“You’ll never catch them, you know. Not on a Mildasi horse, not on any other. And if you did, you would dearly wish you hadn’t.”
I did not ask whom he meant, or how he knew. I said,
“The black woman is a great wizard, surely, for my Lukassa was drowned and she brought her back to life. And whatever terrible things she can do to me, she will have to do, and do them all twice over to make sure of me. For I will find her, and I will bring Lukassa home again.”
“Boys’ talk,” he answered contemptuously. “The woman’s no more magical than you are, but what she does not know about flight and following, about tracking and covering tracks, about sending the hounds howling off after their own smell, even I do not know. And now my lady Nyateneri has joined her—yes, as you guessed—and between the pair of them, a poor fox can only chew his paws and pray not to be too corrupted by their subtlety. Give over, boy, go home.”
“Fox talk,” I said in my turn, praying myself not to be convinced. “Tell your mistress, tell them both that Lukassa’s man is coming after her.” I swung myself up on the Rabbit’s back and sat still, glaring down at the old man as fiercely as I could, though I could hardly see him for the sudden giddiness that took me. “You tell them,” I said.
The old man never moved. He licked his mustache and licked it, and each time his smile slid a little wider. He said, “What will you give me if I leave you a trail to follow?”
The yellow-gray eyes and barking voice were so mocking that I could not believe what I had heard. “What will you give me? You’re still too near death for vanity—you know you’ve lost their track forever unless I help you. Give me that locket you wear on your neck. It’s cheap, it’s no loss to you, but I help no one without pay. The locket will do.”
“Lukassa gave it to me,” I said. “For my name-day, when I was thirteen.”
The old man’s teeth glittered in his mouth like ice. “Do you hear, Lukassa? Your swineherd sweetheart prefers your bauble to you. Joy of it, then, boy, and good luck.” He was on his feet, turning away.
I threw the locket at him then, and he whisked it out of the air without looking back at me. He said, “Get down, you are in no case to travel yet. Sleep out the day there”—he pointed, still not turning, to a rocky overhang where I could lie shadowed—“and start north at moon-rise, keeping those hills on your left. There is no road. There will be a trail.”
“A trail to where?” I demanded. “Where are they bound, and why are they taking Lukassa with them?” The old man began to walk away down the slope, leaving me infuriated. I slipped from the Rabbit’s saddle and ran after him, reaching for his shoulder, but he wheeled swiftly, and I did not touch him. I said, “What about yourself, tell me that at least. That’s not north, the way you’re going.”
Pink cheeks, white mustache, hair as wicked-white as the water that took my girl, he grinned until his eyes stretched shut to see me afraid of him. Even his whisper was harsh. “Why, I’m off after that black horse, where else?” And he was the fox again, loping off without a glance or farewell, brushy tail swaggering high as a housecat’s until he thought himself out of my sight. But I watched him a long way, and I knew when that tail came down.
LAL
The dreams began again as soon as I gave my ring to that girl. I knew they would, but there was nothing for it, because of the other dream, the one my friend sent. Drowned white, crying out with all the unused strength of her unlived life, calling so desperately from the riverbed that even my skin hurt with it, miles distant, even the soles of my feet. She was still alive when that dream came to me, three nights before.
But that was not one of the bad dreams, that is only the way my friend talks to me, as he has done for all the years since I first knew him. The bad dreams are older, far older and come from another place; the bad dreams are the way I bleed—I, Lal, Lalkhamsin-khamsolal, sleek and lean and fearless, Sailor Lal, Swordcane Lal, Lal-Alone, prowling the seas and alleys of the world for her own mysterious delight. Lal who wept and screamed in the night, every night from the time she was twelve years old, until my friend gave her that emerald ring that a dead queen gave him.
“You have dreamed enough,” he told me, the smile hiding in his braided beard like a small wild animal. “There will be no more dreams, no dreams, I promise, not unless I send them, as I may. Keep the ring until you meet one whose need is greater than your own. You will know that one when the time comes, and after that you will need my ring no longer. I promise you this, chamata.” That was always his name for me, from the first, and I still have not the least idea of its meaning.
Well, he was wrong, wise as he is, wrong about me, not the ring. Every one of those old terrors had been laired up in wait for the moment when I handed it on; every last one of them came hopping and hissing and grinning to crouch on my heart, even before I closed my eyes when I finally had to sleep. Jaejian, with his mouth like a hot mudhole, Jaejian and his nameless friend, and me not three hours stolen from my home. Shavak. Daradara, who killed him, and what she did to me in his blood. Loum, that little boy, I could not have helped him, I could not have helped, I was little too. Unavavia, with his striped nightgowns and his knives. Edkilos, who pretended to be kind.
Bismaya, who sold me.
I am not a queen, nor ever claimed to be one, though the story follows me. I was raised from birth to be somewhat less and something much more than a queen: a storyteller, a chronicler, a rememberer. The word we use is inbarati, and in my family the oldest daughter has been the Inbarati of Khaidun since the word and the city have existed. By the time I was nine years old, I could sing the history of every family in Khaidun, both in the formal language I was taught and in the market speech my teachers whipped me for using. I could still—if I ever spoke either tongue anymore—along with every battle song, every beast-tale, every version of the founding of our city and the floods and droughts and plagues we survived. Not to mention every legend imaginable of great loves and magical, terrible lovers, forever testing each other’s faithfulness. My people are extremely romantic.
Bismaya. Cousin, playmate, dearest friend. Dead in childbirth before I could kill her, not for arranging to have me stolen and sold, but because she did it out of a child’s boredom. If we had loved the same boy, quarreled once too often over my bullying ways (and I did bully Bismaya, it was impossible not to), if it had even been that she wanted to be Inbarati in my stead—well, I doubt I could yet forgive her, but at least there would be something to forgive. But she betrayed me out of a vague need for excitement, and for enough money to buy a pet bird. I dream of Bismaya more than any of the others.
But I know a way of dealing with dreams, a way that I taught myself before ever I met my friend, because, though I wanted so to die, I refused to go mad. There is a story that I tell myself in the night, an old Khaidun waterfront tale of a boatwoman who knew the talk of fish and could call them where she chose or, with a word, empty the harbor of everything but children diving for coins. This gift made her much courted, though not popular, and her many adventures will usually see me from moonrise to moonset in something like peace. If I am yet awake, I know an endless praise-song for a king, full of heroes, victories, and feasts enough to guard me until dawn. The ring was better, the ring let me sleep truly, but this other is an old friend, too.
The girl slept like the dead she was those first nights, while I lay watching the low, prowling stars of this country and listening with all of myself for my friend to call a third time. The first dream had wrenched me out of a lover’s bed—which, in this case, was probably just as well—but the second woke me in sick convulsions, vomiting with another’s pain, feverish with another’s fear. There was a rage of despair in it such as I—who thought I understood helplessness as well as any—have never known. Nor could I imagine a magus powerful enough to crumble great ships of war into the sea like biscuits in soup (and kind enough to send dolphins to bear the sailors home) so desperate as to cry out for the aid of an escaped never-mind-what whom he found hiding naked under a fish-basket on the wharf at Lameddin. But he had called, and I was in the saddle within half an hour and on my unprepared way into an alien land. There are those to whom I owe my life, as others owe me theirs—this one gave me back my soul.
The third dream came to me in the Barrens, on the night that we ran out of road. Lukassa—I had her name from that boy’s crying after her—was as much herself as she could be by then: a pretty, gentle, ignorant village girl who had never been anywhere in her life, except dead. She had no memory of that, nor of much else before— neither name, family nor friends, nor that idiot boy still blundering after us, stupid as a rock tumbling downhill. Everything began for her with my voice and the moon.
That night, like a child begging to hear a favorite story again and again in the same words, she asked me to tell her once more how I sang over her and raised her from the river. I said, weary and impatient, “Lukassa, it was only a song an old man taught me long ago. He generally used it in his vegetable garden.”
“I want to know it,” she insisted. “It is my song now, I have a right to know it.” With shy peasant guile she looked sideways at me and added, “I could never be a great wizard like you, but maybe I can learn just a few things.”
“That’s all I know,” I said, “a few things, a few tricks, and it has taken me all my life to learn that much. Be still, I’ll tell you another tale about Zivinaki, who was the king of liars.” I wanted her to sleep quickly and leave me to think what I must do if no third dream came. But it was a long time before she gave up asking me to teach her that song. Stubborn as that boy, really, in her way. It must be a remarkable village.
I did not sleep at all that night, but my friend came to me even so. He rose from the fire as I knelt to feed it: a trembling old man, as scarred and naked as he had first found me. The jewels were gone from his ears—four in the left, three in the right, I remember everything, my friend— the color from his eyes, the braids and the silly little ribbons from his beard. No rings, no robes, no staff; and, most terrible of all, he cast no shadow, neither in the moon nor the firelight. In my country—in what was my country—it is believed that to see a man or woman without a shadow is a sure sign that you will die soon, alone, in a bad place. I believe it myself, though it is nonsense.
But I went to him with joy, trying to put my cloak around him. It fell to the ground, of course, and my arms passed through the shivering image of his body; wherever he was cold, it was not here. I spoke to him then, saying, “Tell me what to do,” and he saw me, but he could not answer. Instead he pointed to where the stars were graying over the blunt, broken-nosed hills of the Northern Barrens. A ribbon of light, green as his eyes had been, leaped from his finger: it fled away across the Barrens, straight on into mountains too far to see clearly even by day. When he lowered his arm and looked at me again, I had to turn away from the pale terror in his face, because it was wrong for me to see even his ghost so. I said, “I will find you. Lal is coming to find you.”
If he heard, it was no comfort to him. He vanished with the words, but the smell of his anguish burned in my throat long past dawn, as that glowing green trail lingered on the hills even after Lukassa and I were on our way once again. I pointed it out to her, but she could not see it. I thought then that my friend had just enough strength left to call to me, no one else.
That day, I remember, I told Lukassa a little of myself and more of where we were bound, and why. For all her persistence, she asked no real questions yet but only, in different ways, “Am I alive, am I alive?” Beyond that, she seemed perfectly content to ride behind me, day after day, across a land so bitter and desolate that she might well have wished herself drowned again, safe in the sweet, rushing waters of her own country. I told her that a friend of mine was in great danger and need, and that I was journeying to aid him. That was when she smiled for the first time, and I saw what that village boy was following. She said, “It’s your lover.”
“Of course not,” I said. I was actually shocked at the idea. “He is my teacher, he helped me when there was no help for me in all the world. I would be more truly dead than you ever were, but for him.”
“The old man who sang to his vegetables,” she said, and I nodded. Lukassa was quiet for a while; then she asked, “Why am I with you? Do I belong to you now, the way that song belongs to me?”
“The dead belong to no one. I could not leave you, neither could I stay to tend you. What else could I do?” I spoke flatly and harshly, because she was making me uneasy. “As for lovers, yours has been hot after us from the night I took you away. Perhaps you would like to stop and wait for him. He certainly must care dearly for you, and I am not used to company.” Whatever power was besieging my friend so terribly, she could be no help against it. I had no business bringing her any further, for all of our sakes. “Go home with him,” I said. “Life is back that way, not where we are going.”
But she cried that one road was as foreign to her as the other, that in a world of strangers she knew only death and me. So we went on together, and her boy after us, losing and losing ground, but still coming on. As frantic for speed as I was, we began to walk by turns, to spare my horse; and there came days in that ugly land when we both walked. As for food, I can live on very little when I have to—not forever, but for a while—which was fortunate, because Lukassa ate, not merely like the healthy child she was, but as though only by eating almost to sickness could she remind herself that she was truly alive in her own body. I have been just so myself, over food and more.
Water. I have never known country where I could not find water—where I was born, a two-year-old can smell it as easily as dinner. It is not nearly as hard as most people think, but most people only think about finding water when they are already in a panic of thirst and not thinking well about anything. But those Barrens came as close as ever I saw to being completely dry, and if it had not been that the green trail, glimmering more faintly every night, sometimes crossed the course of an underground trickle, Lukassa and I might have been in serious trouble. As it was, most times we had enough to keep the horse going and our mouths and throats from closing against the burning air. How that boy following managed, I have no idea.
When we began climbing, the country improved, though not by much. There was more water, there were birds and rabbits to snare, and a small, small wind began to pity us just a bit. But from our first night, I could no longer make out the green trail, and I wept with rage when Lukassa was asleep, because I knew that it was still there, still trying to lead me to where my friend waited, but grown too weak now for even my eyes. The road, such as it was, forked and frayed and split constantly, going off in every possible direction: up box canyons, treacherous with tumbled stones; down and away into thinly wooded gullies; around and around through endless foothills, half of them sheared away by old landslides, and any or all of them the right path to take, for all I knew. I trusted to my luck, and to the fact that a wizard’s desires have body in the world: what one of those people wants to tell you exists, like a stone or an apple, whether or not the wizard has the strength to make you see it plainly. I could only hope that the reality of my friend’s road would call me by day, as the reality of his pain did by night.
