Atlan saga omnibus, p.121
Atlan Saga Omnibus, page 121
The lord of Fourthcrag then went over to my mother and took her hem and kissed it reverently, and he spoke not to her but the captain with her. “Would the goddess accept from me,” he inquired, “a small and unworthy tribute, a little herd of kine, just a little personal herd of my own and my dear wife’s, in token of our joy at the recent birth of our son? A small celebration with the Goddess in our territory.”
He turned to the assembled company. “Let all debts be forgiven!’ he said, “in recognition of the gracious presence of the Goddess.”
While everyone was drinking with fitting forgiving grace, Zerd wandered over to myself and Scridol. “That’s very good mapping going on here,” he told me. “But do you write yet? It would seem that your letters might be of value to you. Scridol, would you take her on as a pupil? She would need several hours a day, I am sure, while your assistant could of course take over some of your other arduous duties.”
“Sire,” Scridol addressed him by the Atlantean title, “it would be my treasured joy and my privilege to do all. I have no assistant.”
“Well, you shall have now,” Zerd said, and signed to a secretary to see to it.
What to do with all this steak?
The little herd of Fourthcrag was a milling lowing horned mass of beef. Cija of course turned it over to the quartermaster, but he insisted that she should be properly paid, and so she had money in hand which she said would come in useful for the paying of our bodyguard when that got into arrears. Since any bodyguard is prepared to count their pay as permanently in arrears, this resolution made her very popular in our corner of camp.
The Dictatress, otherwise, was not particularly kindly thought of in the Army. Before the outset of campaign, there had been a new issue of arms, and a lot of grumbling from men not used to the new designs—“it had only put money,” they said, “in the pockets of the Dictatress’ ironsmiths.”
The newer designs were all based on the idea of lightness and flexibility, for speed and ease of carrying on long marches; an innovation for Northern weaponry. They had always laughed at the heavy body armour of, for instance, the troops of the far South. But they were unhappy with these new spears, so light that cast once or twice their points were twisted, and so incidentally of no use to the enemy in whose ranks they ended up. Our Northerners had the feeling they must cosset their spears now like babies, for fear of spoiling them before their time, and it made them nervy.
Their sulkiness extended to the new jerkins, lined with light quilting, into which they swore the seamstresses of the Dictatress’s City had stitched poisonous fleas. But soon, with the chill of the hills increasing, the jerkins were found to be an improvement and were forgiven.
I was more often at conferences now, because Scridol would be in the middle of a lesson with me when suddenly he remembered there was something on at HQ which he really wasn’t supposed to miss. He would haul me along with him, my legs aching, and sit me down by him to finish writing out my alphabet or, quite soon, my exercise—while he listened to the discussions of a change of route, and made notes. I often felt that poor Scridol was struggling on his own against quite literally the rest of the world —against the mountains, their foothills, the rivers, their sources and tributaries, the plains and peninsulas. Not only that, Eng would turn to him and say: “Scridol told us this was friendly territory,” and I would pray that enemy tribes hadn’t moved in meantime; I was sure Scridol would be blamed for their mobility. I often thought he would be wiser to pretend everything was enemy territory, so he couldn’t be blamed if it was. I realised too that though I couldn’t say so to Scridol when I got important ideas like that, that one day I would be able to write messages to people I wanted to tell particular things to, so I hurried on very carefully with my lessons.
Neither Scridol nor my mother had any real idea of time, so often I would still be copying out my letters by candlelight, or scurrying through the camp after Scridol on his way to a late call at the big tent, while he sorted through his mapping notes and at the same time muttered to me, “Now don’t forget, I don’t want to see those fat undisciplined loops on your glutinants, they climb all over each other like lizards on a stone if you have more than one in the same word.”
Almost invariably, the conference went on for longer than we expected, and halfway through Scridol might send me home with a captain or a cup-boy, whoever was handy, or he would find time to take me himself; he always carried a screwdriver for adjustments to box-lids and frames, and this he would take out and heft meaningfully when walking through the camp at night with me. He didn’t trust soldiers at all.
I liked to look at the lords’ faces, on the whole, more than the faces of Sedili’s ladies when they were around.
There were lords and officers with marvellous encrusted waistcoats, all precious buttons. Short cloaks, slung from one shoulder.
I liked Zerd’s big red cloak too. I found it a sort of landmark, to show me where he was even in a crowd or in the distance, and I liked its shorn corner from when he had let me sleep on it and not wanted to disturb me.
I used vaguely to gaze at one of Sedili’s women, idly trying to work out why sometimes the socket of her eye was edged with blue and yellow. I realise now, of course, this was the woman currently spending time with Ael.
Sedili’s women were giggly and elocutionary, most of them, chosen for their sheer femininity. They were supposed to set the mood of her entourage, just as her potted plants and her pink dagger were remarking: “All right, I’m a career woman, and shall be distressed if you don’t treat me like any of the officers—unless you actually treat me like one of the officers.” Her women were picked for a quality of cosy cunning, a way of presenting a united front to the enemy—the men and officers of our entire Army— no matter how divided among themselves.
In spite of their style—they felt themselves to be on a stage constantly—Sedili’s women were hard put to it to maintain decorative standards. Most housewives in most towns or homesteads could present a better appearance without thinking about it. Sedili’s ladies had in common a fetching feverish eye, but bits were always falling off them. They were slaves, not exactly to their lovers but to the pace which they all set each other. One woman, I remember, lost a nipple—bitten off one night by her bandit of the week. Ravage-repairing was more grim a fight for the ladies than an entire campaign might be for our soldiers.
Still, the war was already grim for Scridol. He had got three maps mixed up with each other and he would have to check with Sedili herself the whereabouts of a city we were making for sooner or later, which would welcome and replenish us because it actually belonged to Sedili. It was Ilxtrith, her dower city, which under the terms of an old will had become hers on the date of her marriage, and which remained hers because her father had told Zerd, newly married to the Princess, that he was not to claim it.
But she had not visited Ilxtrith for years, and she found it nearly impossible to place it.
When Scridol again and again said: “No, that can’t be right,” Sedili became unamused. She injected her bored face with another candied orchid (unlike her regularly distraught ladies, she never ran to fat) and simultaneously yawned cheroot smoke into Scridol's intent concentrating eyes: “Then since I am obviously misinformed as to the locality of my own city, perhaps you had better sort out your own problems. Are you paid for map-making, or are you not?”
This wasn’t really fair, since I knew Scridol hadn’t actually been paid for a long time.
Scridol struggled on with the Ilxtrith thing, talking to a brigade-major of Sedili’s who tried to be helpful but knew less than she did, and I got bored copying out my lessons and stared at the candle-flame on the dish on the camp-stool beside me. The candle, which had begun to sweat, now trembled, now died. Now had I killed it? I had indeed thought: ’That candle ought to gutter now’ in a vehement spiteful kind of voice inside my own head. I tried the opposite. I tried to relight the candle by order. It wouldn’t light. I lit it with the flame from another, and then told it to go out. It did, at once. I was very pleased with my new game, although I had discovered it is easier to be destructive than creative. I worked out what at the time I thought must be the explanation. I thought, ‘My mind has kept my speech bottled up for so long, with such clarity and yet so formless and frustrated, that my thoughts and demands have got to come out somehow.’ Now I am not so sure. That would be simply elementalism, I know, the frustrated pops and bangs of strong emotionalism. Too self-indulgent to be disciplined, that kind of intensity has to reveal itself in small savagely motivated tricks.
Or perhaps I began like that, and within years learnt how to direct and hone and withhold and send it far, and at what strength; it became, at any rate, my present measured skill and not simply a blind phenomenon.
“With two more days’ steady march, we should arrive,” Scridol said, “on the borders of this—this desert—” and he placed his finger tentatively, as though afraid of burning his finger in scalding sands and winds, on a large blank area on his map.
“How about two days’ erratic unstable march?” Zerd inquired.
Something firmly descended on my shoulder, a hand with quite a weight and a grip to it. I twisted round and looked up into a pale bland face, seemingly more scars than actual features, except for the two dark blue eyes running as fast and deep and cold as Northern tides.
“Here, Seka, and plait my hair,” commanded the bandit Ael.
I stared at him a moment, as I always inclined to stare when someone ordered me to do something and I was surprised; I couldn’t ask for confirmation, I couldn’t ask had my ears tricked me, so I left a pause in which he and I could hear the echo of his request. He didn’t say “Oh, well never mind after all, I realise it’s an odd command;” so then I clambered up on to the small dais behind us, and crouched by his shoulder, and took in my hands his mane of soft light hair which flew up at me and stayed on my fingers, for it was alive with electricity.
Without changing the flow of his conversation with Zerd and Scridol, he passed up over his shoulder to me a broad bone comb with wide spaced hook-ended teeth.
I divided Ael’s fair mane into strands of three, and started to plait them awfully neatly. The smoothed strands smelt of smoke and leather and something else—rather like dog-fur. I’m a cat-person myself.
Zerd glanced at the tableau we made, his bandit and, unexpectedly, his child. When he saw that I had caught his brief glance, he smiled.
“And now,” Zerd said, “It is time my daughter was taken back to her mother.”
He stood and held down a hand for me. I was amazed when I realised that he was going to take me himself back to our tent.
Sedili put down her embroidery and stubbed out her cheroot.
Ael asked might Zerd wish for company on a fresh fine night. Zerd’s mouth quirked. Ael beckoned one of his bandits, and as we left he was speaking to this warrior sweetly: “My love, my syphilitic sweetheart, do thus and thus—”
Zerd swung me up on to his saddle outside the huge tent, and mounted behind me.
Between the regimental fires, sentries, tents, pallets. Men still grilling and charcoaling meat which had been soaked on march in the ale and onions in their canteens—to be eaten accompanied by high-calibre sunsets. Sun had left by now. Up there, nebula spawning its new stars. I always thought of the constellation of the Dragon as my father. I knew that Dragons and great war-leaders were born under the sign of Capricorn, the hooves which climb and climb again only to stay on their allotted un-deviate course, all four hooves on the cardinal earth, but bound for the heights of it. The stars stang the sky up there, and I was uneasy on the General’s saddle. I had seen the faces around us as we mounted. Scridol’s startled eyes; Ael’s watchful impassivity, which showed that something was afoot; Sedili’s terrible face.
Past the 9th’s pickets, and so to the baggage lines. Down a hollow of silky smoky grass. My mother at the tent opening.
Her hand flew to her breast, as she saw us, as though to protect it.
Zerd rode to her and he looked at her, down at her from the saddle.
This big ab-human had wanted my mother with a steady, patient, determined cold fever (which to her seemed intrusion) ever since he first saw her. He still wanted her, I by now could see it and she uneasily fascinated as she was could not, with every hourly twitch of his testicles. But he is a waiter. He is a placer of priorities. He could still not believe that a small madwoman was of abiding priority to him.
She hesitated, her eyes almost completely blank, so great was her effort to hide her agitation. Then she reached up to take me from the giant mount. Zerd took her hand before she touched me. He gravely held it and he bent low so that he could place it to his mouth and he licked her hand, gazing at her under his straight brows.
I thought my mother had stopped breathing.
She stood, sensuously paralysed, a full moment and then snatched away her raped hand and covered it with the other as though wiping it cleaner or hiding its shame.
In this way, she made it impossible to take me after all.
Zerd dismounted, swinging me down in the crook of his arm—my head seemed about to pass the stars, to descend to the grass, till I was righted and set down on my feet. Zerd brushed me down a bit, as though delivering quality goods door to door. He said of me, “She is useful in my tent, she can groom Ael’s head, but she must sleep or she will be unable to shave him in the morning.” I nodded to him, he nodded to me, I kissed my mother and she suddenly clung to me and as suddenly, as though she were afraid she might contaminate me, she let me go and kissed me very delicately and said: “Sleep, little pearl.” I crawled into my sleeping-rugs in the dark inner tent and I gazed through the canvas-slit and in our outer tent the stars were blacked out a moment as they entered and then her face was limned again. My mother and Zerd stood, stared at each other. I could hear the bird moving outside. I saw the grey silk on my mother’s breast moving to the volcanic silence of her heart. Cija’s ladylike dressing-gown was knotted too tight for him to undo. Cija looked sadly at him, divided from him by her careful garments. Zerd didn’t laugh. He gazed sombrely at her. He bent his dark head to the knot, and tore it apart with his teeth. It hung ripped and shredded.
Later in the night there were sounds outside which, since no one else paid them any apparent attention, I too ignored, feeling secure. There were grunts on the slope of our hollow, and the controlled stamping of feet, the sort of stamping men make when locked one with another. There was heavy panting. And a long gurgling. Then the bitter parting curse, already familiar to me for I had heard many men murdered, of the winner as he wends his way still hating.
Still later, Cija came to bed.
I woke to glimpse her as she crawled across me to her own rugs. The whites of her eyes could have been washed in silver. The arches of her feet were nowhere near the ground. She entered her holy bed as though its sheets, too, had been washed in silver. I had no need to pretend to be asleep—needn’t fear she’d have suspected or investigated me.
In the morning two men were lying knifed to death on the slope of grass by our tent. They wore Sedili’s uniform. There was a lot of blood mucky on the grass around them.
Someone from their company arrived later with a cart to take responsibility for them.
Cija ate an abstracted breakfast. Presently she rode in search of Zerd. I was with Scridol by now in the big tent and I heard her talking with Zerd, amongst the usual morning bustle as HQ made ready for marching. “Zerd,” she said very urgently, and I heard her words “It is impolitic…”
“It would be less politic,” Zerd said lazily, “if—” and something about “still in your Mother’s lands and her allies’ lands.”
“There will be reprisals,” she said. “Ael’s bandits will be ‘punished.’ Anyone could see Sedili’s men were lying there—anyone could see those were bandit slashes and stabs. Those were vicious deaths.”
“More vicious,” and Zerd laughed, “if they had not died.”
She paused then. “Ael sent his men beside you last night,” she said in a thoughtful frightened way, “because he knew Sedili would also send men, spies to watch if you stayed with me.”
Zerd shrugged, and fed her with meat from his duckling bone. “Ael merely seized his excuse to amuse his men at Sedili’s expense. He knows there is no need to kill Sedili’s spies. He simply likes to kill her spies.”
“No need?” Cija cried, though still in her urgent hushed voice. “They might have assassinated me, on Sedili’s orders, after you had left me. They may do so tonight, or on the march today.”
“They might have done so yesterday, or last week,” Zerd reassured her, kissing the meat into her mouth, “if I had not had a cordon of my guards around you since the first five minutes of our march.”
She sat and chewed while her eyes narrowed. “So,” she said, swallowing. “You have chosen the right time for us? When it has become obvious to Sedili’s armies that I am necessary to our safe conduct through these lands?”
“You are more or less useful,” he agreed, picking over the bone.
“Then what is it you are telling Sedili by your public acknowledgement of me? That she must be careful? That she must not feel too necessary?”
“Come, Cija,” he said mildly, amused, “can a night of affection, very precious to me and I hope not regretted by you, maybe occur for its own sake?”
She rode stiffly that day. For Ael’s sake; for Sedili’s sake, she was obviously quite sure the night of affection had been. Her eyes throughout any conversation followed involuntarily any flash of red. She stared during conversation in directions which I noted always revealed, in some vista, some red-cloaked back, until generally it turned around and wasn’t him. That night he came again to us and stayed till morning. As Scridol arrived at our breakfast fire, his eyes widened on the General emerging from our tent, his black shirt open and the scales on the wide bas-relief chest shining dully. Ael and a half-dozen bandits arrived too on their ponies. “Shall we breakfast in the bright air?” Ael greeted Zerd. Ael bowed to Cija, and smiled very cheerfully. He held out a hand to me. “Good morning, little one. Are there boiled eggs and hot biscuits?”
