The Lion’s Den
The Lion’s Den
“The boy’s up and talking, my lord!” Tirtu bounded across Vanu’s front room and up the steps to the seating area.
Vanu looked up from the piece of wood and the knife in his hands.
He nodded acknowledgement of the good news and gestured Tirtu to a seat on the cushions opposite him.
Still, after all this time, the man wouldn’t sit down in Vanu’s presence without being given permission.
Yet if Vanu wasn’t mistaken, he’d taken a drastic step recently without permission or even discussion.
Vanu didn’t know whether to be proud of him or to worry what this might signal.
“Fair weather, Mikhi,” Tirtu greeted her where she sat wrestling with her spindle.
She muttered something without looking up. Vanu glanced at her and thought it was probably about time to suggest she give up on spinning and go do sword drills or something.
“What are you doing there, my lord?” Tirtu asked politely.
Vanu held up the scrap of wood on which he’d been working out a new braid pattern, though he knew Tirtu wouldn’t be interested.
He wasn’t. He said, “Well, I guess there are worse things you could do.”
Vanu didn’t bother to respond to that, either.
“Right,” said Tirtu. “The boy. It’s good news all round. He seems to have his wits about him—Gurti thought the blow to his head might have addled them, but it seems not, glory to the Blue Heaven. He’ll be back on his feet in no time—just needs a day or two more to rest. And then … ”
Vanu looked at him expectantly. For the better part of a day he’d waited for an explanation of why two men—or one man and one boy dressed as a lowland bride—had come unexpectedly toppling over the wall after three years of nobody so much as poking a head over it.
Tirtu had assured him, had assured them all, that he knew what it was about and would explain soon.
Vanu had been patient, partly because he was pretty sure he knew what the explanation was going to be.
“And then,” Tirtu repeated, looking pleased with himself, “we can hold the wedding.”
“What wedding?” Mikhi demanded.
Tirtu ignored her and treated the question as if it had come from Vanu. “Your wedding, my lord. I sent for him to make you a boy bride.” He beamed proudly.
Vanu stared at him blankly. His hand holding the knife had gone slack, and the knife slipped from his grasp and landed on the carpet by his knee.
This was not what he’d thought. He’d thought the boy was for Tirtu, some kind of half-brained idea to meet his needs without getting children that they would be hard put to feed in Umtúshta.
It had the stamp of the things the man did.
Vanu had thought it foolish because he’d never known Tirtu to have a desire for men, and as his own experience went, you couldn’t force a desire like that if it wasn’t in you.
But he’d guessed wrong. The boy bride was for him?
Vanu shook his head vehemently.
Tirtu held up his hands. “I knew you would have some objection, my lord, but I beg you to quell it. A bride will be good for you, and you can’t deny that this boy is the kind you like.”
“Da doesn’t need a bride!” Mikhi declared loudly.
Tirtu gave her a pained look. “Of course you don’t have to take the boy in a true marriage if that isn’t your wish, my lord. And you can always let him go. You can keep him a while and send him home if you tire of him.”
“Where does he come from?” Vanu asked finally. Mikhi frowned at him, obviously not liking anything short of total rejection of Tirtu’s scheme.
“Lord Davanu Shawa found him for you in Torakand. Working at one of those hostels that they have down there. When I wrote, I told him to find you a boy ‘like the summer sun for his beauty’—but who could take rough use. Knowing what you like, my lord.”
“Ew,” said Mikhi.
Vanu glared at Tirtu, but he couldn’t summon much real anger. He’d have preferred the man not say such things in front of his daughter, but it wasn’t as if Tirtu had made all this up.
“I hate to see you like this, my lord,” Tirtu said, not for the first time.
“Wasting away whittling trinkets and drinking weak beer. I want the Lion of the Summer Pass back. You’ve let your fire go out.
You need to drink deep again, my lord, and rut like a beast, and sink your blade into the skulls of your enemies again. ”
Mikhi made loud gagging noises. Vanu was distracted by a memory of a sword blade hitting bone, the way the sharp edge had stuck for a moment, the smell of blood …
“Go in the yard and see if your sisters need help,” Vanu told Mikhi.
She frowned and looked as if she’d protest, as if she’d like to stay and protect him from Tirtu with her disgust. Vanu gave her a look that got her to put down her spindle and get up to march out the door into the yard.
“Doesn’t need to hear,” Vanu told Tirtu irritably when she was gone.
“No, my lord, I know—forgive me. But she was with you in the glory days. She knows as well as any of us what you once were.”
Vanu sighed. There was truth in that, too, though what he took from it wasn’t the same as what Tirtu took.
He ran a thumb over the braid that he’d begun to chip out of the wood, three strands curling around each other in a satisfying pattern.
He’d thought it up all on his own, and that was satisfying too.
He could sink down into this kind of thing and forget so much.
“Think it over, my lord. The boy could be just what you need.”
Vanu reached down and picked up his carving knife from the carpet. He set it aside with his half-finished braid and got to his feet, signalling to Tirtu to stay seated. On the shelf over the window he found the rolled-up holster of knives where he had left it.
“What’s that?” Tirtu asked.
Vanu held it out between his hands for Tirtu to see, the supple leather housing six wicked little blades of an unfamiliar style.
“Took it off boy.” Vanu tapped his thigh in about the place where the boy had been wearing the knives under his torn skirt.
“Huh. I suppose he felt he ought to have something for defence, coming into the Lion’s den as he was! Not that these sewing needles would be much use to him.” Tirtu chuckled.
Vanu remembered how the boy had hit Khatu in the face with his shoe from the top of the wall, while holding on with one hand.
With aim like that, six light-weight, well-balanced throwing knives might be a lot of use.
Either of those things on its own might mean nothing, but both of them, the knives and the aim, belonging to a person who was supposedly a hostel-boy from Torakand?
Vanu put the knives back on the shelf and sat down again. If Tirtu’s mind hadn’t gone immediately to assassination, maybe that was because the idea was far-fetched. What need was there for anyone to assassinate him in here, after all?
He ran back over the events of the other day.
He’d been upstairs in his house when he heard Mikhi yelling, as only Mikhi could yell, for someone to stop something.
He’d swung down from the gallery to the main floor without taking the stairs and been out the front door in a couple of strides, scanning for where her voice had been coming from.
The big house next door that they used as a workshop; the door was open.
He heard Mikhi’s voice again, from inside: “What are you doing?”
Then Khatu burst out with his bow in his hand and went tearing around the corner of the building.
Vanu wanted to run after him and pull his head off, but there would be time for that later.
He plunged through the open door of the workshop and up the stairs to the loft.
Mikhi was leaning half out the window at the top.
She pulled herself in and turned toward him.
“Da, Da, there’s a girl on the wall, and Khatu’s shooting at her!”
“Are you all right?”
“What?” She gave him an are you mad? look and spun around to lean out the window again and shout rude things at Khatu.
She was fine; Khatu hadn’t done anything to her.
He heard Khatu howl back from outside: “We’re being attacked!” And other voices, unfamiliar ones, from further away. From beyond the wall, in fact. He leaned over Mikhi, hands on the window frame, to look out past her.
Below he could see Khatu standing between the crossroads and the gate, lining up a shot with his bow.
Tirtu ran past, shouting at someone to hang on.
Vanu looked up at the top of the wall. The figure hanging there looked unreal, slight as a doll, strings of beads and blue silk everywhere, dainty bare feet dangling.
“Hang on, lad!” Tirtu called as he heaved the cart piled with straw into position.
Vanu ran back down the stairs and around the corner in time to see Khatu get hit in the face with a shoe and the boy lose his grip on the capstones of the wall. Vanu ran as if he thought he could be in time to catch him.
Tirtu was distracted by yelling at Khatu as Vanu stood over the boy where he lay stunned on the ground beside the cart.
That was why Vanu was the first one to see the set of knives strapped to the boy’s thigh.
His first thought was that someone had finally come over the wall to finish the work that the king’s men had begun.
Just the sort of person he’d be likely to let down his guard for, too, so that one of those little sewing-needle knives, delivered at the right moment, would be enough.
So he’d been suspicious from the start, and what had he done? Taken the knives off the boy and hidden them and not mentioned them until now.
Of course he had; the boy had been winded and half-conscious and tiny, no threat at all, and Khatu had been trying to shoot him already. And then when Tirtu had seemed to know all about him and Vanu had assumed the boy was to be Tirtu’s bride, he’d put his suspicions aside.
If he had, after all, been sent to be Vanu’s bride … But he’d been requested by Tirtu and chosen by Davanu. There were no two men alive Vanu trusted more.
Heart of the Blue Heaven, it was a relief he wasn’t meant to be Tirtu’s bride, though.
Vanu hadn’t been sure how he was going to cope with that.
The boy was probably a bit like the summer sun for beauty, if you thought in those terms. Anyway, he was very good to look at, slight and delicate and endearing in a dress, with skin the colour of new parchment and dark eyes and silky black hair, pinned up in braids under the smashed bridal headdress.
And Vanu had slept alone for three years, a long time for him, a very long time.
“Boy’s name?” he asked Tirtu.
“Ah, er—some lowland thing, I can’t recall. Reera or something.”
He spoke as if it wouldn’t concern Vanu to know the name of his bride.
Vanu shrugged, because maybe it didn’t. Mikhi was right; he didn’t need a bride.
He didn’t need to condemn a youth with his life ahead of him to imprisonment in Umtúshta.
They didn’t need another mouth to feed. Besides, Faru wouldn’t like it, and things that Faru didn’t like became Vanu’s problem, in a tedious way that he could do without. There were many reasons to say no.
“Think it over,” Tirtu repeated, getting to his feet and clapping a hand to Vanu’s shoulder.
Vanu nodded.