Draw Breath
Lill was looking up into rafters of pale wood arranged in a circle—a wheel, spinning, as the cart carried him away from the familiar life of the Order.
“I’ll grant that you have skill,” Master Dumuz had said, “but you’ll never be strong enough, big enough, good enough to really belong here. And you’re too pretty. If you were a girl, I’d marry you and get sons on you.” His laughter sounded harsh, as if forced out of him with violence.
Lill remembered hazily that he had been dressed as a bride, in blue silk with silver trim, the fabric rustling when he moved, strings of beads clacking on a heavy headdress. Had it been to marry Master Dumuz after all? But Master Dumuz had sent him away in that cart, Master Dumuz hadn’t wanted him.
His bridal finery was gone, replaced by something soft and black.
He was lying on a pallet on the floor, half-covered in a light blanket.
The room was round, stone walls sealed with whitewash, sunlight coming through small, high windows.
Around the top of the wall ran a painted frieze of stylized flowers with elaborately intertwined stems.
“You’re awake!” someone said. “Are you awake? Lill?”
He turned his head, a small movement that made the room sway sickeningly around him.
There was a faded carpet on the floor and a hearth, swept clean and unlit under a masonry chimney.
On the other side of the carpet and the hearth, just out of striking range, was another pallet, with a young man lying prone on it, black-haired like Lill, but older than him, with a short beard and thin moustache.
Lill recognized him and groped for his name.
“You’ve been mostly asleep since yesterday,” the man said. “I’ve been worried. There’s a woman who’s been taking care of us, and I’ve seen one man, but no one else. They won’t talk to me, and I don’t know what they intend to do with us.”
“Why are you in here?” Lill fought against a rising panic that was trying to choke him. He knew who the man was—he was the mountain guide from Radush—but what was his name? “You brought me up the mountain from Radush. You were supposed to leave me.”
The room had only one exit, a door to the outside to judge by the light coming under it. The windows were too high to make feasible points of escape. Lill noticed these things mechanically.
“I couldn’t leave you—I saw arrows fly by, and you fell, and I had to find out what had happened.
So I followed you up. Then you fell all the way down and landed on that cart full of straw.
” He shuddered. “You hit your head on the side. You were lucky to survive. I think the bridal crown must have protected your head, actually. Lucky you were wearing such a traditional one.”
“But … why are you … ” It was hard to get the words out through the fog in his mind.
“I jumped from the wall,” the guide explained proudly. “I landed in the hay—I wasn’t hurt, but then that … ” He lowered his voice, glancing nervously around the bare room: “That maniac with the bow shot me in the leg while I was lying there catching my breath.”
Vanu Urártu. Lill remembered the name suddenly. They were in Vanu Urártu’s fortress in the mountains, they had been walled in—or he had been walled in, the Lion of the Summer Pass, and they had fallen in, jumped in, apparently, one of them—and they could not leave.
Panic squeezed his ribs so he could not catch his breath. He felt for his knives in their sheath on his thigh. They were not there. Someone had taken his knives.
Calm, he needed to be calm. Draw breath, steady his nerves—he knew how to do this, they had taught him this, there was no reason for him to find it so hard. (No reason except that he had never been good enough; that was why Master Dumuz had sent him away.) Calm. Steady. Draw breath.
And get up. Force his heavy limbs to move. Make his shaky legs take his weight. Take stock. Catalogue his injuries. His back hurt, his right shoulder hurt fiercely, his head throbbed. Nothing he couldn’t push through. He had done this before.
“What are you doing?” The guide’s yelp sent tension shooting through Lill’s body—Shouting means punishment! his instincts screamed stupidly—and pain flared in his head. “You can’t get up!”
Clearly untrue, because he had got up. He was on his feet. He felt as if he might fall at any moment, but so far he hadn’t.
Take it one moment at a time. One step at a time. Sometimes, when your situation was very bad, that was the best that you could do.
His situation was very bad. Vanu Urártu was the Lion of the Summer Pass who had kept the Great King of Zash out of Hawakhurta for ten years, killed Dallang-Ghan the White Viper and slaughtered the Kuro Clan.
Lill and this other man whose name he could not remember were now his captives.
The gate of the stronghold was filled in with rubble, and no one could escape.
He had lost his knives, and he had forgotten what he was supposed to do with his knives anyway. Was he here to gather information? Or was it a different kind of mission?
He staggered toward the doorway while the man behind him called that he should go back to bed. Any moment someone might come in response to the noise. Lill had to get away.
He remembered a house with a fountain, the soft sound of a sampan playing, a shadowed doorway. Somehow the memory seemed important.
He emerged from the interior of the round house into blinding sunlight.
It was so bright that he threw up a hand to shield his eyes.
He made himself keep moving, step after step.
He was barefoot, his clothes—he inventoried them briefly—consisting of a loose, knee-length shirt and short trousers, both garments plain black.
He walked through a passage between two buildings, trailing a hand along the curving stone wall of one.
There was so much less sky here, as if the village were at the bottom of a huge stone bowl. When he looked up, he could see the mountains on all sides, looming above the fortress wall.
Looking down again, he found his path suddenly blocked by a shaggy black goat with long horns, which seemed to appear out of nowhere and stood staring at him.
He made a gesture against bad luck. Steady.
Draw breath and let it out. One moment and then the next.
It was just a goat, they kept them in the mountains, not observing the taboo of the Zashians.
A couple of generations back, his own ancestors hadn’t observed it either.
He backed away, then turned and took another passage, this one leading out to a paved path.
On the other side of the path was the doorway of a house, screened with a light curtain that fluttered in the breeze.
As Lill watched, the curtain was pulled aside, and a man ducked through the doorway and straightened up.
It was not a low doorway; the man was dauntingly tall. He was broad-shouldered too, and carried a huge clay jar under one arm as if it weighed nothing. He wore black, and his pale gold hair was pulled severely back from his face.
He hadn’t been a dream or a vision; he was really here, the warrior angel pursuing Lill for leaving the Order. There would of course be no escaping him, but still Lill shuffled silently backward before the man looked in his direction. Then he turned and broke into a lurching run.
He ran blindly between houses, scaring a flock of ducks and dodging goats—maybe it was just one goat, but it seemed to be everywhere—until he reached the wall.
The wall. It was pale yellow-grey and old and rough-hewn and impossibly high and thick.
He had come over it, but no one who did that ever went back.
A wave of nausea rolled over him, and he leaned on the wall and doubled over to vomit on the ground.
His head swam, and he was shivering uncontrollably.
He heard voices and running footsteps approaching.
Someone was touching him, pulling him firmly but gently away from the wall.
He was shamefully weak. He thought again of that house with the fountain in the courtyard, but he knew they were not taking him there.
He let himself be led back to the round house where he had woken, where he was cleaned up and given water to sip as he lay propped on pillows. He felt feeble and dizzy and grateful to lie down.
Two people had brought him back: a woman and a man.
The woman wore her hair in two long braids the colour of the stones of the fortress walls.
Her gown, shawl, headscarf and apron were all black, with bands of intricate white and blue decoration rather like the flowers painted on the walls.
She looked of an age to be a mother of grown children.
The man looked a similar age. He had darker brown, floppy hair with a stubby braid on one side, and a worried set to his pale, angular features.
He wore a long, unbelted shirt of an ugly shade of yellow over loose trousers tucked into calf-high boots.
Lill recognized him as the man who had been pushing the cart full of straw and calling to him to hold on.
“Now, lad,” he said, speaking Zashian, “you must rest. No running about. You hit your head, hey?” He rapped his knuckles against the side of his own skull indicatively.
“Ask him if he knows where he is,” the woman suggested as she took the cup of water from Lill’s hands. For a moment he wondered why she didn’t ask him herself. Then he realized that she was speaking the Mountain Pass language and must have thought he didn’t understand it.
“Do you know where you are, lad?” the man asked. “This is Umtúshta, in the Spring Pass, formerly the stronghold of Khashu Gukhártu, who—”
“I said ask him,” the woman interrupted, “not tell him. Ask him, to find out whether the blow to his head scrambled his brains or not. Ask him his name, or whether he knows why he’s here.”
“Ah, ah—right. Lad, do you know who you are?”
“I’m Lill.”