Sigrun and I were in one of the smaller private courtyards where warmth from the sun still collected. She was flat on her back on the tiled floor, with her long yellow hair spread in the sun like a fan, reeking of lemon.
Her blonde hair had begun to darken, and the remedy was lemon juice. I was enlisted to anoint her hair with the skin-shrivelling liquid and ward off flies and observers. I understood her vanity, and envied her a bit. My own hair was imperviously black, no matter what I tried.
Sigrun was chatting animatedly about our plans for tomorrow, which included showing off her newly lightened tresses at worship. We had been several times to daytime services at Petru’s temporary Communica, wearing our finest robes and veils, and it was rather fun if you ignored the screams of penitents being whipped and concentrated on looking at boys. Sigrun liked it better than I did. But if Eneko had been there…
“Lord Petru says that the more one suffers in this life, the less one will in the afterlife,” stated Sigrun. “We should all find ways to suffer.”
“I could let one of these wasps sting you,” I suggested helpfully.
She sat up, her blue eyes blazing. “See this, you unbeliever!” She pulled down her tunic and turned her back to me. Her pale skin was patterned with thin pink lines.
She didn’t seem to be suffering much. “My, those must hurt terribly.” I kept my face straight.
“Of course they do! I got Ceta to lay on as hard as she could with a cord of leather, though I had to beat her to make her do it. I plan to work up to the flagrum as soon as I can.”
She had to be joking. I almost laughed. But her face was burning with passion. “Sigrun… I’m sorry.” What did she want me to say? That I thought she was crazy? She wanted me to admire her pious devotion to the cult of Saraf, and I wasn’t going to do it.
I sensed a difficult time approaching in the downward arc of our friendship.
Huffily she lay back down, making a show of groaning and arching her back in pain.
Just then my mother came in, and beckoned me to rise and follow her.
“But, Sigrun and I—”
“Sigrun will be taken care of. Come.”
What did she mean by that? “I have no lessons—this is my free time! Why—”
“Hush.” Without sparing a glance at Sigrun, she took my arm and hustled me past a couple of our guardsmen who had followed her. I glanced back. Sigrun was clambering to her feet, looking angry and apprehensive as the guards closed in on her.
That was the last I ever saw of my friend.
That evening I accosted my mother as she sat staring at the remnants of our dinner, which neither of us had eaten. Servants were carrying picked-at platters of food back to the kitchen. “What’s going on? Where is Sigrun?”
Mother looked at me, and after a pause, said, “Sigrun will not be returning. Neither will her father or brother. The family has been dismissed from our service.”
After only a moment’s thought I knew exactly what she was going to say. I felt the blood drain from my face, turned and tried to flee, but she jumped up, taking me by the arm and pulling me close. “Vara. It isn’t her fault. She’s been corrupted by Petru and his insanity. I had to clear out the whole lot of them.”
“What do you mean?” But I knew. Sigrun was a spy.
The next day word went round the streets. Sigrun’s father had run, with his two children and a couple of slaves, straight to his master. Petru, realizing that his spy family was of no use any more, did the obvious thing: he killed them. He might have taken the time to enjoy it, or he might have thought it no more of an annoyance than finding a broken tool among the rest and throwing it away. Why hadn’t Sigrun’s foolish father realized what was going to happen, and tried to save his children, if not his own skin? They should have run away from the city, not into the Scorpion’s pincers.
After a while I stopped crying and started to think. Mother had been foolish too. She should have kept them, once she knew the truth. Used them to pass false information to Petru. But she hadn’t. The betrayal had incensed her, and, I had to admit, perhaps she hadn’t trusted me to play my part with Sigrun. She might have kept me in the dark, used me as a channel of misinformation to Petru via my only friend.
Now I had no friend, not that I’d really had one in Sigrun. She had betrayed us all. Yet I cried every night for a long time.
*
The months turned as they always did.
Winter came. Grain reserves were still high, and the City of Perpignan had enough to sell at a good price to some northern cities, whose stores had run out and whose cabbages had fallen prey to rot. Lord Petru was magnanimous in his aid to the less fortunate, as long as they had gold. Which, of course, they couldn’t eat.
At the spring celebration of Venus, which nobody but us seemed to bother with any more, Miss Carolina Marsh presented my parents with a beautifully carved ivory tusk, the like of which no one had ever seen, as thanks for letting her stay with them. It was longer than my father was tall, straight as a spear, with a spiralling pattern embellished with hammered-in gold wire.
Mother hefted it in one hand like a sword, looking like a Valkyrie. “So, this is the fabled horn of a unicorn.”
Miss Marsh smiled enigmatically, and winked at me.
Iunius and its summer heat arrived once again. Papa left on his usual extended tour of his trading contacts, intending to start a liaison with a company of Mongols from a place called Tibet. Or so he said publicly.
I turned sixteen that month, and things began to change for me.
Apparently I had become tall, willowy and attractive. Useless to one not in need of enticing male attention. Even my precious memories of Eneko Saratxaga were starting to fade. I hated that most of all.
The biggest change was that I now inhabited the upstairs room, where I would die. I begged not to be sent there, but Mama insisted. “Defiance will only tempt a worse fate.”
Was she trying to make the vision come true? She and my father were heartless, I told myself, staring up at the rafters where my ghostly self would cling. I had spent the first few nights here waking constantly, alert and panicky, and had tried sneaking out to sleep elsewhere. But mother had found out, made me go back, and after a while I settled in. It’s amazing what the human mind can accept.
One night I lay awake, going over in my mind the short, surreptitious lesson I had had that day in close-fighting with a dagger. Mother had hired a lanky, underfed Arab man who, under the lamplight in the cool of a root cellar, had shown me a few things, his eyes holding a calm, disinterested sheen that I found reassuring.
I held the wicked little instrument in my hands now, under the covers, and was testing its point with my thumb. There are many kinds of knives and ways to wield them, depending on what outcome is desired. To kill or merely wound? To humiliate or just warn? All the while avoiding being cut by your own blade, as well as your enemy’s.
I was ready to fall asleep when Mother came in like a whirlwind. She didn’t waste any time softening the news she’d brought. “Petru suspects us for what we are. He has ordered both of us to present ourselves before him at dawn.”
I sat up, feeling a throb in my guts. Petru had been in Perpignan for several weeks, away from his home base of Massalia. Of course he would time it for when my father was away and unable to protect us. “What should we do? Should we run? Can we hide?”
“No! We obey, of course.” Her voice was faint, even though since old Kai slept elsewhere now, being unwilling to climb another set of stairs, there was no need to whisper. I’d never heard her so agitated. “He has posted guards around our home, Vara. Even if I thought it was wise to try it, we couldn’t escape. We will do as he orders.”
“I’m not afraid of Petru.” Of course I was afraid of him, but this was a good time for a little bravado.
She grunted, or maybe it was a laugh. “You know I told you that one of your forms should be a snake. A venomous snake.”
“I hate snakes. You know that and you don’t even care.”
She shook her head and put her hands to her temples.
I was tired of my mother’s dramatics. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know! Any choice is terrible. If you take a deadly form—a snake, for instance—and your soul is captured by an evil person or a capricious God, he or it will use you to kill.”
I understood at last. She thought we were going to die within the next few hours. I put my hands over my ears, but she pulled them down. “We are both in the same predicament, Vara. My forms can kill too—we must prepare ourselves for any opportunity. But…there are men and Gods who love killing, and forcing a slave to do it for them. You might find yourself eternally an assassin.”
And what was I supposed to do about that? If it was my fate, then nothing I or anyone did would change it. I tried logic. “As would you, Mother. But you and father want an assassin. What’s the difference? Isn’t killing a sin no matter what?”
She groaned. “Vara, we don’t have time for a discussion of morals and ethics. Of course it’s a sin to kill—but perhaps not if done for the right reasons. I would do it, your father and grandfather would do it. Do you understand? Do you have any idea—any at all—” She flung up her hands and spat out an oath.
By now I was out of bed jittering nervously in my bare feet, my dagger still in my hand.
“There’s no saving Petru, and no pitying him,” she continued. “He loves the evil he spreads, and it’s only getting worse. The Gods cluster around him and use him like a puppet. One day he is dull as a tortoise, the next he is a rabid dog again. Jameel and I had thought things were bad before you were born, and were prepared to do what we had to, but that was nothing. We are at war with the devil and he must not be allowed to win.”
I kept my mouth shut. Did she want me to become a snake, or not? Was she implying that she might kill me in Petru’s palace, take a chance that my soul would become hers, and order her snake assassin to kill? But if it fell into the possession of a God, or of Petru…
My long-ago vision had been cruelly incomplete.
More logic. “In my vision I was alive, here at home in this very bed. Petru won’t kill us today.” And what if I were to kill her, claim her soul? Could I doom my mother to sin and guilt?
She stared at me. “But was I in that vision? I know why he suspects us—it’s that wicked, Egyptian whore Nebtu that’s put ideas in his head. She thinks she’s another Cleopatra, but all she has is money. Roman tariffs and tribute, bah! She’s got their balls in her hands and loves it.” She spat on my floor. Which was better than trembling in fear. “He found out that Nebtu has a resura and has been using it for years. It made him look like a fool—and he is a fool. He doesn’t believe that women can be just as ruthless and venal as men. Apparently someone has finally informed him that he’d met the creature, in its form of a Nubian male dressed up as a king, there to spy for her, flatter him into giving her what she wanted.” Her eyes narrowed. “His own falci hid her knowledge for years. Hah!”
“His falci? What is that?”
“A falci is a trained adept, a person—usually a woman—who can detect the connection between a resura and its alanbir.”
I gritted my teeth. “And what is an alanbir?” I wanted to scream.
“The owner of the resura soul. Somehow the falci can see the link. I don’t know.” She waved one hand, showing, by an impatient shake of her head, just how frightened she was. “Petru’s trusted tattle-tale valued her children over herself. Nebtu had taken the falci woman’s two boys and was ready to kill them if she didn’t obey.”
How did my mother know all these things? How many spies did she have?
“Since she used pigeons to send her messages, he’s ordered all his own birds killed, the idiot. As if that will stop word from spreading.”
I remembered the adoring throngs when Petru had paraded through our city streets. People had tried to touch him or his horse—he hadn’t feared any of them, then. Things would be different now. I could imagine his suspicion should a rat-faced peasant or his sweating wife be so audacious now.
Any of them, even one of the horses, might have been resura.
I suddenly wondered: what if Petru had friends, supporters who tasked their own resura slaves with protecting him? Without one of these falci adepts, how could anyone tell?
Mother came to some kind of decision, and turned to me. “What do you know of that automaton your Grandfather has been working on? Is it operating as it should?”
I blinked. Now what was she thinking? “I think so. He’s been tinkering with it for days. He won’t let me look at it.”
“I hope he can have it ready by dawn. I hate those evil things—alive but not alive.” She bared her teeth. “The damned thing had better work.”
“Shall I wake him?”
“No. I’ll go to him. Stay here, and dress in your finest clothes.” She looked at me hard, and perhaps she read my mind. “Don’t even think of bringing that dagger.”