CHAPTER XVII

“Papers,” the young soldier said, and Ivah, bowing, dug in the pocket of her caravaneer’s coat for the short section of bamboo that held the rolled paper. One only needed a pass if one was travelling between towns, but here in Dernang imperial officials had gone house to house making a census of inhabitants, each vouched for by the others, and any deemed suspicious investigated further. Suspected runaway slaves had been stripped to check for brands.

General Zhung Musan still searched the town for agents and sympathizers of Prince Dan’s and held executions every morning, before he allowed the market to open. The road to the south was a stinking riot of crows, the heads of Lord Sia’s banner-lords and officers and all who remained with him to the end as they were driven back into Dernang. The old lord had refused to open the gates of the castle to them. The young lord had refused, so they said in the town, refused to ask him to, so that the old lord could not be accused of aiding his son’s rebellion. Dead now, or as good as, prisoner in his own castle and doomed to a traitor’s death on the Isle of Crows with the empress presiding.

Ivah the Grasslander, formerly a caravaneer, now servant of the priestess Daro Aoda of the shrine of Father Nabban in Dernang in Choa.

The soldier, a boy still high-voiced, frowned over the brief few characters and the red stamped seal, lips pursed. Illiterate. They were all conscripts, Aoda had told her, poor tenant-farmers’ sons summoned to the emperor’s service and eating no better now than they had been before they were impounded for this duty that might, after a few years, release them, maybe far from home, to become beggars and vagrants and bandits on the road. Sons only. Conscripted girls were too likely to end up pregnant.

Ivah kept her face impassive, bored. She had seen this particular soldier around, watching her as she did Mother Aoda’s marketing, seen him watching the shrine of Father Nabban. Looking for an excuse to harass them in the name of the empress, the new goddess of the land, she assumed; twice they had been searched for fugitives from the rebel army. The most recent time, the soldiers had taken the last of Aoda’s yams and barley, along with the copper bells that had chimed in the wind on the holy pine tree. There was nothing left to loot, unless they plundered her library. Now the soldier held the paper turned sideways. Ivah resisted the urge to correct it for him. A caravaneer who read court Nabbani would be suspicious.

“Good,” the soldier said, looking up at Ivah, his stare intense. “You work for the priestess.”

“Yes,” she said, carefully using the form of the word that indicated submissive respect. It did not often enter her vocabulary. And she must be very, very careful with her pronouns. Remember how Wolan and Koulang mocked her use of regal forms. It wasn’t teasing she’d bring down on herself here, letting her mother’s speech slip through.

“The priestess,” the soldier said, frowning down as he slowly rolled the paper again and slipped it into its bamboo envelope, “has had too much to drink.”

“Oh?” Ivah said, wary. Food was in short supply in the town, at least for all but the occupying imperial army of the empress, but Mother Aoda had a large jar of white-spirit from somewhere. For three nights now she had sat under her holy tree, with the jar and a cup beside her. She never drank; she simply sat cross-legged, lips moving in silent prayer, rocking with the cycle of her words, and breaking off only to snarl at any who approached to leave her to her meditations.

“She’s at the building site of the new temple.”

“Oh.” Ivah kept her eyes from turning that way, across the length of the market.

“She’s speaking against the goddess of Nabban.”

“Ah.” Devils damn.

The soldier held her eyes a moment, licked his lips, offered her back her pass. His hand shook. Ivah returned it automatically to her pocket. “I don’t know what you can do,” he said. “It’s too late, far too late. But there are children at your shrine. They shouldn’t be there.”

Her stomach clenched, sick. Ivah gave the boy a curt nod of understanding, in thanks that could not be spoken, and was waved off. The soldier turned on his heel and continued down the street, the clusters of people venturing out to the market making way for him, eyes averted. He stopped an old man, demanded his residence and business, barely listened to the answer, and moved on.

Ivah didn’t turn her stroll through the market into a run, though she quickened her pace. There was a stir over in the northwest, where three big merchant houses had been demolished by deliberate fires and the rubble already carted away. The outer wall of the new temple was rising there, a clamour of masons and labourers, slave and conscripts of the town, starting with the dawn. They would demand Aoda serve there, when it was done, and if she refused . . .

Almost running. Don’t. Stand and gawk like all the rest. A figure in a faded gown, easy to see up on the bamboo scaffolding. Speaking, her voice a thin thread of words. She glanced down, turned and scrambled, gained greater height, heaving herself to the top of the unfinished wall.

Soldiers were clambering after the old woman. She stood straight, raised her voice again.

“The heir of the gods of Nabban will come among you, and he will throw down the temples of the empress, the false daughter of the Gods, and break the land, and remake the land, and the days of the sons of Min-Jan will be ended!” Aoda shouted. “I am a priestess of Father Nabban. I have seen.”

She spread her arms as though she blessed them . . . jumped. Her gown billowed up obscenely to expose scrawny legs, sagging drawers. The crowd cried out, almost as one, and then began to shove and shout, some to push closer, others to take themselves away. Screams and shrieks. Help her! Don’t touch her! A bellow. Don’t kill her—take her alive! The general will have your head if you . . . ! Old Great Gods, was Aoda not dead? Something squealed shrill, high, unending, like a rabbit in a snare. Abruptly, it ceased.

Ivah had already been backing away. So much for worries about how to make the gruel go further. Now she began to run, one among many, until she was hidden in the shadows of the porch of the shrine, built against the town wall at the southeast corner of the market square.

The fool. What had Aoda been thinking? She might as well have set fire to the shrine and torn down its walls herself.

Someone within heard her pounding, a distinctive rhythm of two and three, and the door, always barred these days, jerked open.

“What’s happening?” the old man there asked. Elderly potter, left behind by his family, his hands too crooked and stiff to handle the clay any longer.

“Aoda,” she said.

The potter peered past her at the crowd in the upper end of the market. “She went out. I couldn’t stop her. She said the gods had given her the words she must speak. Mistress Ivah, what has she done?”

“She’s dead,” she said. “She spoke heresy and treason and jumped off the wall of the new temple, and when that didn’t kill her the soldiers did. You’ve got maybe long enough to grab your blanket and get out before they get here. I’m sorry. We all need to scatter.”

For a moment the shrine seemed very still and peaceful, a haven, a hiding place inviolable. There were weeds rooted between the cracked roof tiles, new green sprouting there in the first spring sun, and moss bright in the damp about the well. A bird sang in the pine.

The bird could fly.

Ivah could not save them all. She headed for the stairs to the gallery and second floor of the hollow square of the shrine. “Go!” she called as she started up. “Aoda is dead. Soldiers are coming. Run!”

Others were joining the potter in the courtyard. When she looked back again, she could see the woman with her two grandchildren, the three slave-boys from the livery stable that had burned when the wizards and fire-masters of General Zhung Musan broke down the town’s southern gate in dust and thunder and destroyed half the street in the following inferno, and the man with the terrible, barely healed wounds to his head, who could not seem to speak or see despite his intact tongue and eyes. What chance did any of them have? The man was too clearly an officer, maybe even a banner-lord, with his well-fed height and his sword-calloused hands. Imperial or rebel, who could say? What did it matter, Aoda had asked, when a soul came to the gods? There were others, too, all pinched and frightened and staring eyes.

“Go!” Ivah yelled in sudden panic for them all. “Now! Don’t wait!”

The littlest child began to wail.

The grandmother grabbed the witless banner-ranked and shoved the little one into his arms. “Look after her,” she said, and grabbed the boy, a few years older, by the hand. “Come, come quick, we’ll fetch our basket.”

The old potter hobbled in haste, leaning on his stick, for the little room he had claimed as his own. A cape or blanket was a precious thing in this town, in this time. The probable-lord had stridden off, not staying for any possessions, the little girl’s cries muffled against his shoulder, feeling his way out of the gate of the shrine with his bamboo pole, leaving it open behind him. The grandmother—the boys from the stables had run for Aoda’s chambers, as if perhaps she had any better blankets than the rest of them, or some secret stash of food. Another old man ran to grab the bottle of white-spirit that sat by the holy tree. Still sealed, Ivah noticed. Oh, Aoda.

Folly to delay for anything. But she ran for the long upper room Aoda had called the library, though half its cupboards were bare, scrolls long crumbled beyond repair or claimed, if they had any uniqueness in content or ornament, by the corps of wizards. She slept there, her heavy sheepskin overcoat, her bow-case, her scribe’s portable desk, all tucked down in the far corner. Old habit: her heavy quilt was rolled and tied. She snatched the nearest scroll-case, a book she had been studying for hints of the gods in the days before they gave themselves up to become the Father and Mother. It would only be looted by the soldiers or torn for lighting cookfires. A translation of a very ancient account of a Pirakuli wizard’s journey through Nabban a hundred years before Yeh-Lin’s time. It recounted stories of the many kings and queens and the emperor, wonder-tales of the myriad gods, but it also contained many strange characters she had never seen or heard, the sound of which she could not even guess. Into her pack, with her change of linen and the painted calfskin star-chart. She grabbed brushes and ink-cakes from her desk, the inkstone, the little knife, her last few scraps of paper, stowed them in her quiver. The desk must be abandoned, and she had carried it all the way from Marakand, thinking she might take up a scribe’s position again here. The winter coat likewise, a treasure for someone, if they didn’t burn the place first. Pack, bow, quiver, her sabre hidden under her striped camel-hair coat, bedroll last of all because it was still too cold for sleeping out without cover.

They were on the stairs. Thumping of bare feet and sandals.

She stood where she was, spat on her wrist and drew characters there, felt not so much the words as the whole intent of them flowing into the shape, drawing close about her. Took a breath. Walked, quiet in her felt boots, to the door, stepping aside as half a dozen soldiers poured in.

They did not notice her.

She wove through more of them, went along the gallery to the ladder-like stairs to the attic. An officer was shouting in the courtyard. Someone screamed. She did not look down. They swarmed down there like a pack of wolves about a staggering fawn, and what could she do? She did look, one hasty glance too many. The old grandmother, the boy. It was swiftly over.

They should have run. Why didn’t they run?

They had done no more than she had, lingered to gather what little they had left. Old Great Gods keep them safe on their road.

Shuttered window. Bats stirred, clinging to the beams.

She hauled the shutters opened on oiled hinges. She and Aoda had planned this when it seemed likely the town would fall, a route out, at least for the fit and able, of which there were hardly any sheltering in the shrine, of course.

Only she, really, and the boys from the livery stable.

She looked out, and down. Quite far down, to the alleyway between the shrine and a joiner’s workshop. The roof of the workshop was lower, and not too steep. No one below. She had made the jump to show Aoda it could be done, but not with all her belongings on her back. And if she threw them, they would simply roll off. Nothing for it, unless she meant to abandon all but the clothes on her back and her sword.

Burdened as she was, she fit, barely, into the window frame, if she crouched like a frog.

Jumped like one, arms and legs splayed, landing flat as she could on the tiles to keep her weight low.

More screaming, someone hauled out of hiding down below. Sudden silence. General Zhung Musan had led an attack on the mountain shrine of the Mother and the family of priests there in person, just over a week ago. They had been sheltering spies of Prince Dan, it was said, or maybe the prince himself, though that could not have been true, or he or parts of him at least would have been brought back to the town for triumphant display. There had nonetheless been a great slaughter. A shrine was no place of safety. The so-called Daughter of the Gods did not tolerate priests who denied her godhead for long. This would have come to the shrine here anyway, today, tomorrow, in a week.

They should have sent these homeless folk to the street and gone themselves before this. Foolish hope, not us, not here, not today . . .

Carefully, Ivah began to crawl, up to the ridgepole, over and down, angling towards where there was a lower shed for ageing wood. She slipped, slid ten feet, horribly close to the eaves. Lost her hold on the spell of concealment. Travelled sideways sweating until she could drop to the shed roof and lie there to catch her breath and reform the spell. It did not render her invisible, really, but it made the eye slide away, think her only shadows, leaf-shimmer, a broken form of light and dark. An intent searcher might still discover her.

None of those here. All busy ransacking the shrine. She heard axes on wood. Destroying it, rather. Felling the sacred tree.

She dropped to the ground and walked down the laneway, out to the street.

Best find some place to lie up for a little, where she could clear her mind, throw the coins, or the stones, and find her way again. Dernang had seemed the place to be, but she had found nothing here of gods on white horses, no god in the old tales whose colours were black and sky-blue. She should head south—to the cities? To rebel-held Shihpan? The road to Bitha ran west from Shihpan.

The ruin of the livery stable by the south gate offered a fragment of roof and a cavelike back room still intact. The soldiers had cleared out squatters; that was where the stableboys had come from. She could shield it from any chance inspection, if only an imperial wizard did not come by to notice the working.

It would do for a night or two, at any rate. Perhaps the coins would guide her to a road. Nothing else seemed to be helping to make a choice.

If she stole a horse, she might reach Bitha before Kharduin’s gang ever did.