42

‘I’ll go back to Where the Fords Meet,’ Maniye decided.

‘And then to the Crown of the World,’ Kalameshli added.

‘If so, it’ll be no sooner for you making up my mind for me,’ she warned him. She wasn’t sure where she was with him, now. Something had thawed, and she wouldn’t have thought it possible. Hesprec had changed him, worked him into a new shape that fit the hand more easily, even though he was all Wolf’s iron.

‘The warband has been blooded,’ he observed. Hesprec watched them both through unblinking eyes. Out on the river, the boats were massing: all the vessels that Tecumet had brought with her, crammed with her servants and soldiers and advisers.

‘A little.’ Perhaps the Plains would have new trouble for them to get into. It was what the Plains were for, or so said everyone except the people who actually lived there.

‘The north needs you,’ Kalameshli noted.

‘And what do I need?’

‘The Wolf’s true blessing.’

She rounded on him, feeling him trying to take possession of her again, but then she understood. ‘Iron.’

‘You heard the words the Serpent speaks. A terrible thing is coming to all the world. So you will need the Wolf to guard you. You will need the rite of Iron.’ All his pomp and slyness was gone from him. She found herself nodding, feeling her younger self reeling at the reconciliation.

The thought of Where the Fords Meet was a bittersweet one. She knew Kalameshli was right: they would not stay long there. But perhaps a certain hand-son of the Horse Society might be heading north. She found that absence had not smothered her fondness for Alladai. Yes, well past time they were away from the River.

Not that all of them would be going. Moon Eye had not known how to speak to her about it, but she had been able to speak for him. Yes, he would stay here because Tchoche knew the angry spirit like a brother. The priests of the Stone Men could build cages for it, inside the mind, so that Moon Eye would be able to let it out and send it back whenever he wished. Tchoche was calling him Brother and Blood of Champions. Her comrade would be well looked after.

A horn sounded out across the river. All of Tecumet’s people were aboard now, out of the House of the Bluegreen Reach. Tecumet was back on her barge, and Tecuman and Asman with her – young Asman, as they were calling the youth who had been Asmander. Maniye would never understand southerners and their names. One lone figure stood at the dock, watching the River Lord boatmen prepare to cast off. Maniye drifted over to her.

‘I’d thought you were going with him.’

Shyri gave her a look without expression. ‘Why? Am I his dog?’

‘I thought he’d asked you.’

‘Maybe he did. What did he think? That I would sit at the foot of his bed while he and his Riverwoman fumbled at each other?’

‘I don’t think he knew what he thought. I don’t think he ever does.’

That raised the slightest smile on Shyri’s face. She was still carrying herself gingerly, the mark of Old Asman’s dagger-blow in every movement. ‘I am of the Laughing Men. We go where we wish. We pay no heed to the words of arrogant River Lord boys.’ The need to believe it was in each word but they rang hollow nonetheless.

‘Come with us.’

‘Back north?’ Shyri asked her, wrinkling her nose. ‘Cold place, Many Tracks.’

Maniye shrugged. ‘Come and wrestle the men of the Crown of the World and teach them lessons.’

‘Asmander told you about that, did he?’ Shyri grinned at the memory.

‘Venat did.’

The grin died. ‘Maybe I will,’ and the Laughing Girl took a few steps back from the edge of the dock. The barge was just beginning to move now, its crew shoving at the dockside with poles to get it into the river, and oars being unshipped all down its length: against the current, all the way to Atahlan.

Shyri looked from Maniye to the boat, watching the gulf of water slowly widen, bunching to run and jump after it, and then relaxing. Maniye waited, knowing nothing she said would alter what might happen. The choice was Shyri’s to make.

On the barge’s deck, Tecuman sat and stared out over the water. He was wearing robes befitting a high-ranking clansman rather than the rough garb of an estuary peasant, and the change made him seem smaller for some reason.

He glanced up, sensing Asmander’s gaze on him. ‘You wonder if I have second thoughts now, Asa.’

Asman – Young Asman – said nothing.

‘Would your father have married you to me, do you think, if he’d found me the stronger?’ Tecuman grinned faintly. ‘But you’re to be my brother in truth now, as you always were in here.’ He tapped his chest. ‘If the day comes when I decide I must be Kasra, I will be raising my hand against you as well as Te. And if she decides she cannot share the River with me, then she, too, sets herself against you. If the Serpent’s knot holds, it will be because of you. Do you think Hesprec foresaw that?’

‘These things are known: Serpent only tells half a story.’ Asman shrugged.

The barge was starting to pull away from the dock, its sail snapping taut as it caught the wind. Tecuman smiled again. ‘I will never have to wear that mask and that robe, and have your father put words into my mouth. The Daybreak Throne is the only cage people are desperate to cram themselves in. Well: they will not cage me in it now.’ He cocked his head towards the awning at the rear of the deck. ‘Speaking of which . . .’

Asman followed his gaze and knew he was right. Time to go to the woman he would marry.

Behind the cloth walls, Tecumet had divested herself of that mask and the ritual robes: just a slender River Lord girl, surely too young to sway the might of the Sun River Nation.

‘It’s not like they think,’ she said, ‘being Kasra.’

Asman watched her silently as she dropped onto the piled furs and cushions that were her bed.

‘When people look at the Daybreak Throne,’ Tecumet went on, ‘they see the sun, and who can sway the sun? The sun gives warmth and light, and everyone knows the course of the sun is inviolable. You live your life by its movements. You can’t reach up and pluck down the sun.

‘But when you wear the mask and sit on the throne, you find there are a hundred strings dragging the sun about the sky,’ she explained. ‘It only looks as though it cuts a straight course. There are the Serpent, who can’t be ignored because they’re wise and old. There are the clan chiefs who can’t be ignored because they have a hundred ways of causing trouble that aren’t quite disobedience. There are the estuary tribes, who give us half our food and don’t like us. There are the Stone Kingdoms who always want something – and now they have their own Stone Serpents it’s hard to say no, because they dress up each demand as wisdom. You can’t make everyone happy, but everyone expects you to.’

Asman regarded her. They’d had little chance to be together since the fight, save when he stood beside her and swore his devotion, as a clan chief and the future Kasrani, as he would be.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked him. Without the mask he saw again the girl he had grown up with, whom he had loved along with her brother.

‘Terrible things,’ he replied.

‘Wait until you hear what warnings Hesprec Essen Skese brings.’

‘I’ve heard them.’ He shrugged. ‘Probably she’s right. The world is full of terrible things.’

‘Asmander—’ She stopped herself. ‘Asman.’

‘Tecumet.’ Asa and Te; Asmander and Tecuma; Asman and Tecumet. They were both grown up now, as in control of their own destinies as anyone ever was, which is to say, not at all. ‘You know I’m here because my father promised me. Because he can’t be happy being just a great clan chief. He had to have more for his family.’ He scowled suddenly. ‘You know my heart is split.’

‘It always was.’ Before he could correct her, she added, ‘And you do not just mean my brother. I know. I do not ask for all of your heart. It is enough that you are no longer my enemy. Do not let your other loves make you my enemy.’ Kasras had fallen out with their Kasranis before.

It was the warning that melted him. He had always valued people who pushed against him. They gave his life shape. ‘If I was your enemy, I wouldn’t be here talking. I’d fight. I’m not my father. I have more souls than faces.’

Tecumet thought about that. ‘Your father will find a way to Atahlan sooner or later, you know.’

‘I think not.’

‘He is not a man to live out his last days in thought and reading. If not him, then he will suborn others to speak for him. Clan chiefs will come with his words in their mouth.’

Asman shook his head. ‘I have friends who are proof against his words.’

‘Then keep them close.’

Asman had to smile at that. ‘Soon enough.’

***

Asmaten, as old Asman was now, awaited news of the coronation from his spies. The retreat his son had sent him to was neither near the capital nor close to his old haunts of power by the estuary. But that would not stop him getting word. Already he had begun to influence the other anchorites in the retreat: they might all be old men but they had their weaknesses, wants and foibles. He would make them his creatures and twist them to his purpose soon enough. He had lived his whole life like that. His son was a fool to think he would just shuffle into retirement and fade away. And foolish to think of him as an enemy, too. All Asmaten’s plots and schemes were to further the power of his family, after all. Couldn’t he see that?

True, he had not always been his son’s friend. Until recently, he had thought the world might be simpler if he were not lumbered with a firstborn so blind to matters political. His first son had always been a boy far too fond of tales and heroes. If the Champion had not lit on him, then he might have been salvaged, but that had made him inflexible, simple-minded.

Asmaten told himself that he had known his son would return victorious from the cruel north, but that was only because he was just as capable of lying to himself as he was to everyone else.

Yet now, his first son had become a valuable piece in the game at last. Despite his great disrespect to his father, he had done his familial duty. It just remained for Asmaten to keep smoothing his way, peopling Atahlan with those sympathetic to his cause – and perhaps creating the odd accident here or there for rivals or enemies. Such matters could be arranged easily enough from a retreat once he had taken control of it, and had messengers speeding back and forth along the river as he wished. It was a shame that young Asman would never be the cunning man old Asman had been, but he would always have his father watching over him. Whether he liked it or not.

His cell was still quite bare: a pallet bed, a chest for the simple, homely clothes he was supposed to wear. That would change, too. The retreats had rules about fine living, but Asmaten was a man who made rules, not meekly followed them.

A shadow fell on him through the door of his cell and he stood, squaring his shoulders in anticipation of breaking down another of his fellow anchorites. He had a lot of work ahead of him before he restored himself to the heart of the world. The figure in the doorway was far too broad of shoulder to be one of the old men of the retreat, though. Asmaten froze, staring into the long, lantern-jawed face of the Dragon, Venat.

The old pirate smiled. ‘Comfy, eh? I never got these places, myself. When a man’s too old to stick the knife in, it’s time he takes his final Step and goes away. But you River Lords, you make things easy for yourselves. Too many of you grow old.’

Asmaten took a deep breath. ‘Son of the Dragon,’ he started, as imperiously as he had ever spoken, ‘do not think that I don’t know what you want.’

‘What does the Dragon ever want?’ Venat asked lazily.

‘You’ve more ambition than the other Dragon. You’d see your people become something more than just the River’s dark joke.’

The old pirate nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s crossed my mind.’

‘Then listen to me, because I’m the only one who can bring about such a thing. If you will let me.’

‘Last I heard, you were telling everyone I murdered the Kasra,’ Venat pointed out.

‘And the river flows on, and here we are now. Where we can help each other. Son of the Dragon, I can give you what you want.’

Venat considered this. ‘I reckon so.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve a message from your son first, though.’

‘He’s made you his messenger?’

‘I offered.’ The Dragon shook his head disgustedly. ‘You’ve got me half-tame already, you people. He says: you win.’

Asmaten stared at him, feeling a sudden leap of hope.

‘You’ve made him like you, after all,’ Venat explained, grinning. He drew out his meret, the greenstone blade gleaming. ‘And as to what I want, old man, I want to go back to young Asman with some good news about his father, and there’s only one thing I could say about you that’d bring a smile to him.’

***

The Kasrani wore a simple white robe to be married, weighted down with jewellery at neck and wrists that was heavy and constricting. The tale went that a Kasra of old had allowed his mate to arrive Stepped, and had married the wrong crocodile. The belt was the worst, formed of linked squares of precious stone: jade, chalcedony, amethyst, greenstone. It weighed so much that young Asman was terrified it would slip from his hips and shatter on the marble floor before the pit.

Old Crocodile’s pit stood in the square before the Kasra’s palace, its stepped sides descending to a pool in a way that now reminded him of the Strangler ruin out in the estuary. The pool was linked to the Tsotec’s flow, and the crocodiles knew to gather there on certain days when the priests or the courts of justice were in session.

Tecumet was coming to him. She dragged her scaled belly up the tiers of stone, her jaws still smeared with blood. He had not seen her Stepped for a long time; the priests had painted her back with designs of blue and green and red that meant the river and the land and the sun. That was the only way he knew which of the beasts in the pit was coming to marry him. When she Stepped, he was no wiser. The regalia of her office hid every inch of her.

The High Priest of Old Crocodile, his own face hidden within its gape-jawed mask, gave his sonorous blessings. The man had been old when Asman was a child here, long overdue to Step one last time and go to the river. There were a handful of priests of estuary gods there as well, Toad and Turtle and Heron, each permitted a few heartbeats to call the benevolence of their totems. Nothing for the Dragon, of course, but then weddings usually went more smoothly without the kind of blessings the Dragon brought.

Next came the Serpent, a delegation of a dozen of them with Esumit at their head. Asman kept his face carefully neutral, because when his father had made plans to decide who sat on the Daybreak Throne, Esumit Aras Talien had been at his elbow. Still, the Serpent’s road was a crooked one. Perhaps she had done what she must, to bring this moment about.

Then there was one final Serpent, Hesprec Essen Skese. The diminutive figure spared him a brief smile as she skipped through the proper words and every eye was upon her: the Serpent who had returned from the north; the priest who had stopped the war.

At last it was time for the clan chiefs and their delegates to kneel, one after another, with gifts and ever more effusive declarations of loyalty. The ceremony would drag on and on, and Asman wondered how Tecumet could stand the weight of the mask and robe. There was only one declaration he was interested in, and that came first.

Tecuman stood before his sister and his friend, and everyone must have seen him hesitate just for a moment. Probably he even gained for it; who wouldn’t have, on the cliff-edge of all their ambitions?

But he Stepped and laid his long, scaled body before Tecumet, who set her foot on his back for a moment to show she accepted his fealty. When he had given place for the first of the clan chiefs, Tecuman Stepped back and his eyes met Asman’s. There was a smile there, a private one between the two of them. Terrible things, he mouthed. Asman did his best not to grin back, because apparently it was unseemly for the Kasrani to show himself happy on his wedding day.

After all the speeches, and then the feast, and then the entertainment – the dancers, the fighters, the Stone Men songs – Hesprec slipped away. The other Serpents were leaving too, Stepping and sliding off into cracks and holes until they gathered in their own temple in the city, where no others went.

There, Hesprec told them what she had found in the north. It was the confirmation of all the fears that had sent her there in the first place. The threat to the Sun River Nation, fear of which had driven such a scrabble over the throne, was greater than they could have guessed. It was a threat to the world, from the endless ice all the way to the banks of the Tsotec.

She came close to telling them what other forces were stirring in the world; what she had met in the estuary, and the invitation it had given. In the end she decided those revelations could wait for another day. They would only divide what she was desperately trying to unite.

And at the day’s end, Tecumet Kasra and her new Kasrani retired to the palace, and at last the servants took away the robes and the mask and left just the woman, weary and sweating.

Her look at Asman was shy, a little fearful. The ceremony was done but the demands of tradition were still upon them. Neither of them had thought about this moment. Not so long ago he had held a knife to her throat. She was Kasra now, not the girl he remembered from childhood. The boy she knew had been chosen by the Champion, had gone to the north and returned changed, just like Hesprec. And his heart was measured out like sand: a handful for her, a handful for her brother, a handful elsewhere.

But when the servants had disrobed her, he slipped out of his own garments, removing all the priceless clutter with relief. He took her in his arms and she saw that he was happy at last, because all the things he valued were friends at last. He might not love her to the exclusion of all else, but right then he loved her enough.

They were still awake past midnight when the commotion outside drew them from their bed to the window. There were guards chasing back and forth in the courtyard, and what they chased was sometimes a great black bird and sometimes a man with half his face painted, yelling like a madman that something terrible had happened.