ASHE
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Chapter Eight
In the north a council of the elders of Caer Arianrhod was meeting beneath the bright cold gleam of the Pole Star. The news that Lammor and Mercia had formed an alliance had travelled as briskly as it could through the deep valleys, over the mountains and across the Cold Sea. Betany had gone up onto the palace roof and stood looking out into the night and wondering what the heir of Mercia had in mind. She had sat with the elders until she could bear the static quality of their decisions no longer. She looked up at the moon, which was in its first quarter.
The news was regularly updated: it seemed that the alliance between Lammor and Mercia had caused widespread unrest. Betany meditated on the issue and paced about the room when it became too cold to sit still. She knew that Mercia was a young country, hungry and avaricious. She knew that Calypso had a reputation for acting first and thinking later. She had believed that Lammor was out of the business of warring with its neighbours. Leanna and Jura had brought peace to Lammor. Now it looked as if the easy time was over.
Betany walked down the great hall and looked at the historical tapestries. She saw them every day of her life, but they never stopped impressing her. Their stories were as much a part of Betany as her flesh and blood. She knew that Mercia would grow fat with the acquisition of Lammor. But not so fat as to be ungainly. Betany frowned at the thought.
*******
Jura had relieved Laure at the queen’s bedside, and Laure found herself back in her own chambers again, bathed and dressed in fresh clothes. She hadn’t eaten, though: she didn’t think she would ever want to eat.
Calypso was at Alexis’s bedside. This much one of the servants had told Laure, and it was a reflection on how very much things could change in a short space of time that Laure should find herself utterly unmoved by the news. She sat with the one she loved, and Calypso? It seemed to the princess that Calypso’s suggestion about getting Alexis to show her what to do had been a genuine one. There was a strong tie between the two. It seemed that Alexis had been Calypso’s captain for a long time. They had campaigned together, fought together.
Laure walked across her room and stopped in front of the fire. She did not believe in the superstition that the flames showed pictures of what would happen to those who asked. She sat down on the rug before the fire and pulled her knees up to her body. She didn’t hear the door open and close. A beat. Two beats. Calypso sat down on the rug beside Laure.
The crackling of the fire was the only sound in the room for the longest time. At last Laure said, “Your…” she sought for the right word and then just gave up the unequal struggle: “Alexis. How is she?”
“One of the Elders told me that they can’t stop her wound from bleeding. It’s not gushing or anything, but it is a constant. If she dies,” said Calypso, quietly, and her words frightened Laure not simply because of their meaning, but on account of Calypso’s low, unemotional tones, “I will tear apart this city to find her killer. And if I cannot find her killer within the confines of this city I will tear apart the land.” Laure felt her blood run cold at the intensity of Calypso’s will. It would be later that she’d sit and think about how strong and deep ran Calypso’s feeling for Alexis. For the time being, she was too tired and depressed to follow her thoughts down that particular avenue.
“Everyone says that it cannot have been a person,” she said. Then, “Calypso, why was she there in the first place? Rhea had gone from there. Why was she in the seer’s tower?”
“She was looking for Cairo,” said her new consort, flatly. “That is all that I can guess, and Cairo is the one person I cannot find.”
“Cairo’s gone?”
“You didn’t know?” Calypso eyed Laure for a moment as if testing her resolve. Then she said, “No, you didn’t. I can see that. Well, she’s just up and gone. No-one has seen Cairo since the day after the party.” The party… Laure felt her throat dry with constraint.
“Not much of a party, really.”
Calypso raised her eyebrows. “No. Well, the first bit was alright.” She thought about the queen’s collapse. “No, it wasn’t. Does it strike you, Laure, that we have had nothing but ill omens since the announcement was made?”
Laure looked at her without saying anything. After a while Calypso added, “When I first thought up all this, it seemed like the perfect arrangement. And then when we had that first night together, and we lay together in my bed, discussing all the things we do for Lammor and Mercia’s future, I think I was happier than I’ve ever been. Now I look back and see that I wasn’t really planning anything: everything was already decided. I would have you, and we would rule the two countries. And then I find you with that…” her voice broke off as she searched for the right words and couldn’t find them.
“The day we arrived I understood everything, I just didn’t know that I understood. We could only have what we wanted by sacrificing everything in between. Your mother is ill – she might be dying, for all I know – and her partner hates me, and distrusts you. The wise-woman’s gone insane, my…” Calypso seemed to have caught Laure’s unwillingness-to-face-the-truth disease. She came back with, “Alexis is hurt and may die…” She looked at Laure. “We’re really good together, aren’t we? I mean, just look at what we’ve achieved in such a short time. Goddess! Give us another year or so together and we could probably depopulate the country. A decade and we could depopulate the world.” Her voice was so thick with anger and irony that Laure could hardly understand her.
Calypso walked across the room to the window. She touched her hand to the wooden shutters, which were closed. “It’s going to be a cold night,” she said. “Spring has forgotten itself. Tonight there will be a frost, and all the young plants that broke through the crust of the earth for our celebrations will be burned black. Gods! It seems that our deadly touch has notched up another casualty.” She ran her hands through her hair. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at that. We have even corrupted Nature.”
She bent down, began to unlace her boots and then came to an abrupt halt. “I can’t even make my fingers work properly, Laure. Do you know why that is?” Laure shook her head.
“It’s because I held the wise woman while Alexis did her thing. Oh, yes, I held her and Alexis did all the talking. And the taking. And now that Rhea’s as good as dead, Alexis is quietly bleeding out the rest of her life and I… can’t… use my fingers properly.” She looked at her own hands with surprise and mute amusement. “I thought that magic was limited to being spoken. Now I see that there were swords in Rhea’s eyes. I imagine it’s only temporary – I hope it’s temporary – but it hurts.”
Laure still stared at her in silence and at length this behaviour began to annoy Calypso. “For the Gods’ sake, Laure, say something! React! Doesn’t the list of the dead and almost-dead mean anything to you?”
Laure said, “I must have been out of my mind…” Calypso looked up.
“In what way?”
“All this… What you’ve said. What I’ve done. It’s as though I’ve been under some kind of,… I don’t know. Some kind of spell? Did you have me bewitched when I came to your country?”
“Oh, no, your highness.” Calypso was falling back on the title, and presenting it in ironic terms, more and more. “That won’t work. You want a way of escaping your share of the responsibility, don’t you? You want me to say that it was something I did that made you throw over that poor bloody hapless girl for me? No, Laure. I’m afraid that all you’ve done has been because you wanted to. No magic at all. I didn’t need any. Everything from kicking out – you know, the little foreigner – to the way in which you homed in on my bed before we’d kept company for more than a day.” She saw an embarrassed flush cross Laure’s face. “It’s a bitter truth, your highness,” the last words came out bitterly. “Lust really was your downfall. It wasn’t just the farewell fuck that did for you.”
They sat on in silence. Laure thought: I really have screwed up everything. She was horrified at the idea of Alexis and Calypso doing harm to Rhea, and the bland indifference with which Calypso informed her of the act. She said at last, “What did you two… do to Rhea? She never harmed you, surely?”
Calypso poured herself a cup of wine and downed half of it in a single swallow before replying. She poured a cup for Laure and passed it to her, offhandedly. “Rhea? Well, Alexis is something of a wise-woman in her own right. And for real. Her powers are a little darker than Rhea’s were. Alexis was apprenticed to some very strange and perverse instructors when she was a child. All that she learned is literally burned into her. Or cut,” she added, without explanation. “When we came here, Alexis learned that Rhea was well thought of in magical circles. Combine that with Ashe going, and we decided that Rhea presented a potential risk. So Alexis… appropriated Rhea’s power. But Alexis took more than she meant to take, or the cup was poisoned, so to speak, and the result – for Rhea - was that it took most of her mind, too. The result for us being - ”
“That you can’t use your hands properly because you held Rhea, and that the Elders can’t stop Alexis’s bleeding because she took Rhea’s power.”
“In a nutshell.”
“Some nutshell.” Laure drank her wine. She sat down on the floor beside the fire and put out her hands to the welcome warmth. Calypso was right: it was a cold night. She wondered how Ashe was doing in the mountains. For some reason, that was where she imagined Ashe would be.
“I know.” Calypso sat down opposite her. She looked at her hands. “They hurt,” she said. “I’m getting clumsy with them. I hope it’s temporary. The way things are now, I can’t even threaten to kill Rhea if she refused to lift this… curse. The way she is, she wouldn’t know the difference between life and death. She might even prefer death,” she added.
“I wonder if I’m starting to feel the same way,” said Laure. Her heart ached. She wanted to cry and found that she couldn’t.
Calypso looked up. “You really think so? Stick around: everyone seems to be flagging. But it’s not real misery, Laure, it’s just a temporary down. You’ve got plenty to live for: me, for one.” An ironic tone returned to her voice with her last remark.
Laure wondered why the words made her so angry. Probably just Calypso’s rather patronising tones. A beat and then Calypso said, “If you’re thinking about your little buddy, I’ve got some news about her, if you want it.”
Calypso was smiling faintly. Laure didn’t want to ask her what she knew, but sooner or later she knew that she’d weaken, and need to know. She bent her head, looked down at her hands, which were fine, and decorated with rings. She didn’t look at Calypso, and she didn’t ask her what she knew about Ashe. She really didn’t want to know.
*******
Ashe was walking across the plain, Sam on one side, Calliope on the other. She’d tried to get them to go back to the river, but had finally accepted that they wanted to go with her. She was still fuzzy on the issue of their being almost-cousins, but she didn’t want to ask for more information. If they volunteered the information, she’d be happy. If they stayed quiet, well, she could bear that easily enough. More and more it felt as if her capacity to withstand worry had developed from nothing to something noticeable. A part of her was still amazed at what had happened with the karg, and although her arm still hurt (considerably) she didn’t resent the wound. She’d wrapped up her arm: she must have known what was coming. It wasn’t the karg’s fault that she was bruised. And it wasn’t her sword-arm, after all.
Sam and Calliope seemed to be as curious about the world as Ashe was. She wasn’t a water spirit, but she certainly had a lot in common with them. When they found a pool in a shady spot, they had all dived in. For Sam and Calliope clothes remained a misunderstood necessity. They walked on, dripping, afterwards, and neither seemed to notice that Ashe wrung the water out of her own hair, and that she had stripped off before swimming. Neither of them seemed bothered by the fact that they were still wringing wet, and after a while Ashe decided that it would be rude to bring up the subject.
There was something that had surprised Ashe. Before she dived in, she had for an instant seen her own reflection, and it had changed. Ashe had never been keen on mirrors: what she saw in them was never what she felt herself to be. Now it looked as if she might have been right all along. She wanted to ask Calliope and Sam if they knew anything about the mild transformation, but decided it would only puzzle them. The Gods knew, Cal and Sam were having enough to contend with, just getting used to being on dry land. For the main part, they were both very adept, but sometimes Sam would just forget herself and fall over. Ashe would rather have cut her own throat than laugh.
They kept heading north. No-one knew why, but it seemed to be the way to go. With every stride they seemed to get closer to what looked like the jagged tops of white mountains. The weather stayed mild – Ashe wasn’t to know that in Lascar there were heavy frosts. Ashe liked the two river spirits, and they seemed to be very fond of her. They were protective of her: Sam kept looking out for other big cats, although Ashe’s arm was healing well. The pain was almost gone. Ashe made this last discovery only the day after the incident. When the bruise faded entirely it would leave a faint line on the skin. Ashe tried not to look at the pale scars: they made her uneasy.
*******
Betany was sitting with her ministers. The news from Lascar – and the rumours from Mercia – were slowly seeping through the fabric of the court. Betany knew that her people were anxious, and secretly she thought there was a foundation to their fear. She consulted with her ministers all through that day and most of the night. Everyone felt the same thing: that it was only a matter of time before either Lammor or Mercia – or both – set off on a expedition to put a chain around the surrounding lands. Everyone had heard of Calypso. No-one had known much about Laure, but that was no long necessary: Laure was with Calypso. That made her at the very least a unpredictable force, and at most, Calypso’s right hand, and an enemy.
*******
Alexis lay in a state like sleep but without the restorative virtues of rest. Every hour or so the soft dressing that covered the wound on her back would be inspected and changed. The blood loss was still slight, but it wasn’t stopping. Unmoving, feverish, Alexis was dreaming. She dreamed a strange new world, peopled with those who lived beneath the surface of the water, in lakes, rivers, seas and ponds, and those who lived in the air.
She saw the beings beneath the surface of the water: their hair looked like weed, and their skins seemed almost translucent. The creatures that flew were another matter entirely: they were much darker, their eyes were black, and they had wings. Not just wings, she thought, teeth, too. These creatures flew across the sky in great swathes, so that they resembled storm clouds. And going between the two worlds she saw the intermediaries: she saw women who looked like Rhea. And then she saw her own apprenticeship again, felt the heat of the irons they’d used to burn the patterns onto her skin, felt the sudden impression of pain and new learning. She should not have taken Rhea’s power. Alexis had thought herself strong enough, but she should have remembered the spur of knowledge, the spur like a thorn on the stem of a rose, that snagged the flesh and would not let go. No-one ever lost their power without some cost to the thief. For a moment Alexis came close to waking. She drifted up through a blur of dreams and fever and tried to open up her eyes, but her eyelids seemed to be made of marble, and she had not the strength to shift them.
She saw her long relationship with Calypso, too. Indeed, in this dream-state she was closer than she had ever previously been to seeing the anatomy of relationships she had witnessed or shared. She saw for the first time the hold that Calypso had over Laure, and knew it to be of far coarser fabric than her own relationship with the Mercian. She knew that Calypso saw her as possessing a certain magical status, but not one that threatened or equalled her own. She had heard – she was barely conscious and unable to form a response – the pain in Calypso’s voice when Alexis had herself been carried into the palace. This gave her a small degree of pleasure, but she didn’t think she would ever experience real happiness ever again. She knew about the bleeding: she had broken the seals on a world she was not meant to touch, and until she was rid of that knowledge, she could not heal. If she didn’t begin to heal very soon, the problem would be lifted from her. Then she’d only have to worry about the afterlife, whatever that was.
*******
Laure sat by her mother’s bed. Jura and she had been there all the time, turn and turn about. Days came and went, and she didn’t notice them. The fabric of the court hung loosely for a day or so before Calypso moved into the space created by the queen and her daughter, and brought with her a new order. No-one said out loud that the preparations Calypso was making looked like a general planning for a war, but that was what everyone was thinking. Everywhere you looked, there would be both a Lammoran and a Mercian at their posts. There were parts of the city – already – where only Lammorans or only Mercians would gather. The fabric of the court was unravelling at little at the edges, but Calypso thought she could overcome the doubters.
Laure had lost weight. She still looked lovely, but she was beginning not to care. She did not – would not – think about Ashe, but she sometimes asked her servants (Lascar’s best) if Calypso had been to see Alexis that day, and the answer was always yes. The night before Laure had gone back to her own chambers determined to do no more than to eat a late supper and then to fall, senselessly, into bed, and she had found Calypso already there.
Calypso lay asleep across the bed, the purple and green of the silk covers rumpled beneath her. Laure stopped at the edge of the bed and looked at her partner.
She is very lovely, Laure thought. She has that kind of casual beauty that you can easily overlook at first sight.
She looked at Calypso’s hands, which were handsome and well-kept but scarred, too, and shaped by warfare. She thought of how those hands had felt on her body and for an instant she could remember the sexual hunger that had taken her in Calypso’s arms and Calypso’s bed. She stood for a long time looking at the sleeping form, and then she turned away, and went back to her chair before the fire. This is madness, she told herself. You’re the woman’s lover, her partner: you’re pledged to move forth in the world with her at your side and you at hers. It isn’t just the formality of it: you’re stuck with her, unless death or some other disaster undoes the tie. I have made my bed, Laure thought, without any sense of irony: I may as well lie in it. She went back to the bed and lay down beside Calypso’s sleeping form. And she wrapped her arms around herself in a failed attempt to fight the cold.
*******
Ashe caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and was already turning, already drawing her sword, already putting up an arm to shield Cal and Sam, when a karg ran directly out of the woodland and straight for them.
The karg stopped, a hundred yards from Ashe. Sam and Calliope stood on either side of Ashe and the three seemed to breathe in tandem. The karg bared its teeth. Ashe stood still, waiting, staring into the greeny-gold eyes of the big cat.