Traitors' Gate (67 page)

“So be it. Come.”

Anji gave no order to stop her, nor did she look back.

The city of Horn was built against a spur of the Ossu Range. It had evidently begun as a citadel higher up and spread downward in walled layers, so the city descended in levels, each one separated from the next by gates. In midmorning, few folk walked the streets, but the hammer and beat of their labors rang everywhere as the party toiled upward on a wide stone staircase cut directly up the slope toward towers rising at the highest point. A few kites circled above Sorrowing Tower. Here in the Hundred they did not bury their dead but left their corpses out in the open air until their flesh was
devoured by beasts great and tiny. It seemed barbaric to her, a last insult.

She had to set aside her revulsion. This was their land, and if she wanted to make it hers, she must accept what she could and ignore the rest.

Seyon walked nimbly despite his seeming frailty. He chatted flirtatiously about silk and, once she mentioned her own dealings in oils, about the many varieties of oils used for cooking, cosmetics, light, perfume, healing, leatherwork, and wrestling.

“Naya oil of course is most difficult to come by, and thereby very expensive,” he added. “Yet it's well known it can heal certain skin conditions. We heard a story that the army that attacked Olossi was driven off by pots of naya thrown on them and set alight. That they burned to death.”

She stumbled on the next step, clipping the stone rim, and he caught her under an elbow and kept his hand there as she kept climbing, angry at her lapse. “The militia and the reeves working in concert used naya to break the enemy,” she said.

“I'd like a supply of naya, to be held in reserve to defend our walls.”

She carefully let her arm slip out of his grasp. “I believe, ver, that you are opening negotiations. Should that not wait until I stand before the entire council?”

He laughed, paused in his climbing although he was not at all out of breath, not as she was. A tree cast a modicum of shade on the sun-drenched steps. He plucked out of its dusty leaves a lush sunfruit.

“The last of the year,” he said, presenting the yellow globe to Mai with a flourish.

Poro laughed. “Ever the flatterer,” she said.

Master Calon raised an eyebrow. Jodoni shifted his writing box to the other arm and said, in his scrape of a voice, “Is it much further?”

Was Seyon only humoring her? Yet she had risen to face challenges more daunting than talking sense into the intransigent and fearful council of Horn. She only hoped they were not secretly in league with Lord Radas.

She tested the weight of the sunfruit in her hand. “Let us share both the sweet and the bitter, ver.”

As the others laughed, she peeled the fruit and handed out its slices, which they ate as they climbed the last and steepest stairs, licking the juice from their fingers.

The council hall sat between Watch Tower and Assizes Tower. The squat stone Sorrowing Tower stood isolated up a lone path through a field of uncleared boulders, on a spur of ridge behind. A message pole stood on open space sufficient for a pair of eagles to land, but no red eagle banners were folded at its base; it looked abandoned. Overhead, about ten eagles seemed to hang in the air, and although she shaded her eyes and squinted, she could not make out if any were carrying passengers, soldiers primed to drop in fast if there was trouble.

The council hall had a tile roof and many pillars to carry the load, but no walls. From any spot within the spacious covered area, the view was so tremendous that Mai stared. She saw the distant peak of Mount Aua and the rolling gap of land between which flattened into the golden Lend to the southwest and fell away in hazy hill country to the east, dropping down toward the Istrian plain. Any movement on the roads that met below the city's gates was visible from the height. The inhabitants of Horn had closed their gates and watched the army out of the north march past, heading to Olossi. They'd done nothing.

How often did folk do nothing because they believed no action of theirs could deflect the inevitable? Had she not done so herself in Kartu Town? All her life she had grown up as the favored daughter of the Mei clan. She might observe untouched while others toiled and suffered; not that she had not worked hard, but even when her father had agreed to the Qin captain's marriage offer—one he naturally could not have refused in any case—she had been fortunate in the husband who had chosen her. Yet she had learned on their long journey and in the Hundred that she had the means and opportunity to aid those who stood “outside the gate.” She could have done nothing. Instead, she had acted.

“Verea?”

She faced an assembly of forty-eight men and women, all considerably older than herself.

“The view is magnificent,” she said with a smile that caused half of them to smile and the others to snort or frown with the impatience of people who, like certain customers in the market, have already decided before negotiating begins that you are out to cheat them. “Horn is well situated.”

Half nodded, as if they were determined to be pleased by every word she spoke. The others sighed, tapped toes on the stone paving, nudged their companions; one old woman even rolled her eyes.

Mai gestured to Jodoni, and he opened his writing box. It was a capacious box, because clerks of Sapanasu carried all the tools of their trade with them. Instead of a brush or inkpot, he handed her a slender stick.

She stepped forward and offered the humble stick to the eye-rolling woman, who accepted it with an expression of skeptical bemusement. “If you will, verea, could you snap that stick in half?”

The old woman had a bit of Grandmother Mei's look to her, a complainer, but she also had a much cannier gaze. Grandmother Mei had never looked past her own desires, as if always gazing into her mirror rather than at the world beyond. With a grimace of satisfaction, she popped the stick in half.

Mai extended a hand, and Jodoni handed her a bundle of slender sticks tied together. Many chuckled as Mai raised the bundle.

“Can you break this so easily? It is only made up of flimsy sticks, just like that one.”

“You've made your point,” said the old woman, brandishing the two halves of the stick she had broken. “But haven't we already lost this war?”

Mai looked at each of them, forcing them to meet her gaze so they had to acknowledge her. “No. We haven't already lost. Listen! My nose is itching. Many whispers have tickled my ears. This is my tale.”

They listened as she spoke, at length, describing what might
be done: her speech contrived between her and Anji and Commander Joss spun a thread meant to convince without betraying too much of their purpose, in case traitors walked within Horn's council.

Afterward they questioned her at length, some hot, some cool, most doubtful, others with the troubled look of people who nourish hope but fear they are naïve for doing so. Calon and Jodoni gave answers when needed; they too had rehearsed their arguments and together agreed on a plan of attack.

“Why does Olossi only approach us now?” Seyon asked. “When we have all lost so much already? Why not before?”

“I myself and a consortium of merchants from Olossi attempted to send a party to Horn last year,” said Calon, “but the roads weren't safe, as you must yourselves recall. The party was killed by bandits.”

“Why now?” Mai continued. “Because now Olossi has acted to safeguard Olo'osson. But Olo'osson cannot stand alone. Only now are we strong enough to reach out for allies. It cannot have escaped any of you, sitting here on this hill with Aua Gap spread before you, that Horn provides an obvious assembly point for forces seeking to attack our enemy.”

“Difficult to know if we can trust an outlander,” said the eye-rolling old woman. “Yet it says in the tale that ‘an outlander will save them.' ”

The wind had picked up, a stiff blow rumbling over the high ridge and streaming across this height like a reminder of life's ceaseless disturbances.

“None of us can know what the future holds,” said Mai. “All we can do is decide what actions we will take. Will we do nothing as the Star of Life attacks Nessumara and spreads yet farther, stage by stage? Or will we do something?” She bent her head in a gesture meant to fall halfway between respect and dismissal. “We'll leave you to discuss it among yourselves. Is there a place we might rest while you confer?”

That startled them!

“Of course! But if we have other questions—”

“If you have other questions,” she said in her kindest voice,
“I think you might consider running up the message banner. Then you can question those who would actually prosecute the war: the reeve commander and Olo'osson's captain.”

They responded by coming to their feet in surprise and confusion. But Seyon called a hireling to escort her and her companions to a garden attached to the assizes hall built up against Assizes Tower. On the stony ground no vegetation grew except that planted in pots and troughs: miniature fruit trees barren at this season; a hedge of thorny heal-all dusted with purple blooms; ranks of bushy green growth waiting for the rains to flower again. Mai sank down on a stone bench, wiping her forehead as Calon sat beside her.

“Are you well, verea? You're pale and shaking.”

Jodoni was speaking with the hireling, then walked over. “I've asked them to bring kama juice, verea.”

She smiled weakly, feeling her energy ebb as if it had all been sucked out in a swollen rush. Her breasts felt heavy and were beginning to ache. It was well past time to feed Atani, and meanwhile the baby was safely ensconced with his aunt Miyara and Priya as nursemaid atop Horn Hall.

“Was it wise for you to dismiss them quite so abruptly?” Jodoni added.

“It makes them anxious, Holy One. Then they feel there is a sudden need to make a decision.”

“Eiya! We'll discover soon enough.”

Two women tattooed with debt marks carried in trays with a jar of kama juice, bitter this late in the season, and a platter of rice cakes and flat bread, nothing fancy but filling to one who was hungry. Mai was always hungry, although she carefully did not eat more than her fair share.

Master Calon wanted to rehash the meeting, going over every least question and gesture to squeeze from these hints any sense of the council's inclinations, but Mai pleaded weariness. Sipping the last juice from her cup, she wandered the angles of the garden's paths, her sandals crunching on stony earth, and found a secluded haven. The hedge screened off a smaller garden rimmed by a low rock wall that overlooked a
ravine with scrub brush. Falls of rock made the steep slopes impassable. A trickle of water, not even enough to make spray, spilled from the height down into the cut. The sparse growth reminded her of Dezara Mountain behind Kartu Town, washing her with nostalgia not for home precisely but for the landscape that once was the only one she knew.

She knelt before the wide stone wall and loosened her taloos enough to ease the pressure in her breasts by milking a bit into the cup. She straightened her clothing with a quick look around. Raptors still spiraled far overhead. From this vantage, she could see only a sliver of the city, roofs and alleys pairing light and dark. She set the full cup on the flat stone and settled back onto her heels, pressing her hands to her chest as she prayed.

“I offer this nourishment at the feet of the Merciful One. Through the merit of offering may I walk the path of awakening. The body withers and disintegrates; what power we have now may be shorn from us tomorrow. Receive this offering with compassion. May the world prosper, and justice be served. Peace.”

A whisper teased like wind through the tightly knit leaves of the hedge. Startled, she turned, hands touching her taloos, but it was safely pulled tight. Several women dressed humbly—hirelings and debt slaves—had gathered at the gap in the hedge. How long they had been watching Mai could not guess, but she composed her expression carefully as she rose.

“Forgive me if I was not meant to wander into this place, but it felt so peaceful.”

There were at least eight women, ranging from a pair of girls younger than she was to an old woman supporting herself with a cane.

The old woman came forward. “Were you praying, verea?”

“I was.”

“We never heard such prayers before, but we could understand most of them. Was that the Merciless One you were praying to? Were you a hierodule?”

She flushed. “I'm not that, nor was I praying to the Merciless One. I pray to the Merciful One, who gives us sanctuary.”

“Is that an outlander god?” asked one of the girls.

“The Merciful One rests in all places. Anywhere folk suffer trouble or despair, or wish to celebrate joy and prosperity, they can seek refuge and peace with the Merciful One.”

“They're saying you people come from Olo'osson to offer aid and protection.”

“That's right.” This was easier territory to negotiate. She smiled, and several smiled back at her. The younger girl skipped forward to touch her taloos, fingering the silk until the old woman rapped the girl's forearm with the tip of her cane.

“Don't be rude!”

“No matter,” said Mai. “No harm in her being curious.”

“It's very fine silk, verea,” said the girl, who had a fresh tattoo at her left eye and an ugly rash like an infection spreading down from the mark, inflaming her face. She was newly sold into debt slavery, no doubt, but she had also the pinched cheeks and fragile wrists of a child who has never had enough to eat.

“So it is. It comes from the Sirniakan Empire.”

“All the best silk comes from there,” agreed her interlocutors. “But we've seen none here for years. The roads haven't been safe. Trade has died. Folk are hungry.”

“If the Hundred joins in an alliance against this cruel army out of the north, then we can open the roads. Trade will flow. Merchants will haggle, and markets will spill over with wares from every town in the Hundred and even farther away, from the lands beyond. Folk won't have to sell themselves or their children into debt slavery—”