The Warrior of the Third Veil Read online

  Ania smiled. “I am merely glad to see you so recovered. Your sister’s news must be very good.”

  She looked about to reply, but after much whispering and giggles Ania’s younger son had developed the courage to speak—for though only a woman, Paliammë-ivanar was both Warrior and beautiful, and he was only thirteen—and he interrupted to ask,“C-cousin, what does it mean to be a Warrior of the First Veil?”

  Paliammë-ivanar laughed, with a merriment Ania had not thought to hear from any of that family. “Cousin,” she replied, “it means that I am fully trained, but not yet permitted to bear a sword of name.”

  “How is it, Pali,” said Sardeet-savarel, frowning, “that you are not yet of the Second Veil? I thought when you returned to the mountains after—after rescuing me, that you went for that ceremony.”

  Ania was glad to know the short form of her niece’s name. Pali replied, “It was not until now that I could say I had finished righting the injustice.” She looked around the room at the eager faces, and smiled a bit wryly. “After one has trained with the Warriors, one is sent into the world weaponless on a quest to find some injustice and right it. The masters believe that one must not forget that bloodshed is not the answer to all problems, and that if one cannot achieve righteousness unarmed, one will never do so caparisoned.”

  “What injustice did you find?” asked Ania’s youngest son, who was (as the rest of the assembly were grateful) just young enough for it not to be an intolerable insult.

  Pali looked at Sardeet-savarel, who blushed like a sunset, and said, “They have been good to me. Tell them.”

  “HEAR ME,” SAID PALI, hiding her discomfort at speaking in public as best she could, though she was accustomed to face veils and was not good at keeping her expression calm. She locked into her heart the deeper disquiet she would never share with the sister whose injuries Pali had worked to remedy. That would be no gift, to lay that burden on Sardeet.

  “On her vision quest in the desert, my sister Sardeet-savarel was taken by the Wind Lord Olu-olurin to be his bride. This is no injustice; it is a great honour. We mourned, and we rejoiced, as was appropriate.

  “But even the gods can commit crimes against the greater gods, and this Olu-olurin did. He was Lord of the Blue Wind, and yearned to become one of the Twelve by his own doing, and not their will. So it was that he delved into forbidden knowledge, and sought through ensorcellment, incantations, and many wicked deeds to achieve the power that he sought. Six wives he killed in his evil search, and the seventh of his brides was my sister Sardeet-savarel.”

  She spoke plainly, almost brusquely, but all in that room hung on her words. Sardeet hung her head so her black hair slid across her face.

  “Our eldest sister Arzu-aldizarin is gifted in knots, and in her studies she came to the realization that there was some wrong done to our sister. I had just come to the taking of the First Veil when I received her message, and so with the permission of my masters I set out with Arzu to remedy this wrong. We passed together along the road of the dead through the Gate of the Mountains, and came at length to the palace of glass which housed the Lord of the Blue Wind, and our sister his bride. From thence we rescued her.”

  Her face was so grim, and Sardeet’s bent in such grief, that not even the youngest son of Naarun and Ania dared ask how that had been achieved, though all wondered, and thought of the stories of how many people failed at that attempt to pass through the Gate of the Mountains.

  Pali drank some of her wine. The servants brought in the next course, lingering to gaze on the two sisters and hear a few words of the tale.

  “The bones of the dead wives were housed in that palace, and they cried out to be returned to their peoples. As I had claimed the injustice as mine to right, I set out to do so. From the southern jungles where the people are dark as burnt earth, to the north where they are pale as fresh milk, and west even across the great Salt Sea, where the pearl-fishers call the Wind Lords the Masters of Thunder, and give them the shape of dragons, I followed the voices of the dead.

  “Seven of the greatest beauties of the last thousand years did I take home: Nwayë the Swift, whose people make wine out of wild honey and dance in circles of ecstasy when the north wind blows her voice to them. Aulai of the Snow, whose people tell stories of how she sang the wind down in the shape of a swan. Mei Song daughter of the Emperor-of-the-Yellow-Throne, whose calligraphy was reckoned one of the three great treasures of the Empire, but who followed the taste of a peach into the blue distance. Dhava Flower of the Yrchain, who is worshipped now in the springtime, when the wind blows soft over the hills from the east. Eijian the Fair, with hair like cornsilk and eyes the colour of the sky, whose people live in a world half night, half day, in a desert of ice, and ride a kind of deer as we do camels. Imröd-imardel, daughter of a djinni and a woman of the southern clans of Ihil, whose name we know on the lists of the sacred beloveds. Sardeet-savarel my sister, the fairest woman of the Oclaresh. All these did I take home.

  “Nine months have I travelled, from the lands at the back of the north wind to the place where the sun stands direct overhead, and so I say to my sister: it is done. The prayers are made, the songs are sung, the sacred fires are lit, the ghosts are laid, and in seven lands the son of my sister by the Blue Wind, Arvoliin, the Flame of the Fire of Love, is named as the newest of the gods.”

  Each of those sitting there looked from the Warrior to the Bride of the Wind, and though these were names out of ancient legends and the wildest accounts of travellers, none of them could bring themselves either to believe or disbelieve it.

  Pali herself smiled at her sister, and Sardeet smiled back, both of them quite as if they’d forgotten that they no longer wore veils, and that all the rest could see the sisters’ amusement at their civilized disbelief.

  Three

  THE NEXT DAY THE YOUNG men of the household were disappointed, for Pali had already finished her morning exercises before they thought to come down to watch her at them. They found the two sisters sitting beside the courtyard fountain, breaking their fast on coffee and cookies. Pali again wore her Warrior’s black, and Sardeet still her widow’s white, but their veils lay on the stone plinth beside them.

  Ania came out to shoo away Khalef and her sons, and greeted her nieces. They smiled and invited her to join them, and she did, wondering mightily at how cheerful they looked this morning. “Aunt of my heart,” said Sardeet shyly, “I have not yet thanked you for all you have done for me.”

  “Our house is humbled by the legends that walk within it,” she replied, quite seriously, but at the wry edge to Pali’s smile she laughed. “My mother’s people come of Vador, and I weave in that tradition. With your permission I shall make tapestry hangings telling this your tale, if you will tell me details so that it may be the more faithful.”

  “There are many details to be said of Pali’s journey,” said Sardeet; “little of mine.”

  Pali patted her sister on her hand. “Never shall I bear a god,” she said briskly. “It is a harder task. Now, come, sister mine. What is there in this city to be seen?”

  Sardeet looked a little panicked. “I have seen nothing but the temple.”

  “What have you been doing? Learning of our aunt the weaving of Vador? Reading poetry despite our mother’s views on the corruption of literacy?”

  That was obviously intended to be a joke, Ania knew, but Sardeet plucked anxiously at her veil. “I have sat here.”

  “What, here? For three months? Doing what?”

  Sardeet ignored this. “We are not all called to be warriors.”

  “No, but no human is called to be utterly idle. Do you pray? Would you enter the temple or the mountain priories, that you might spend your life in holiness? Any would welcome you, who have lived already in such high places.”

  “Pali, no, I do not want ...” Sardeet’s voice fell to a whisper. “I should want that, should I not? But ... no. No. I could not bear the walls—Pali, I should go mad from the walls!” br />
  Ania looked around the high stone walls of her courtyard, which she loved, and shivered at the thought of having only the fabric walls of a tent between her and the world.

  Pali said, “The winds no longer cry for their fellow. Will you come riding with me? I would see this city of our fathers.”

  Ania opened her mouth to protest this—unmarried women of the cities did not go riding alone with no chaperones—but Pali looked over her sister’s bent head to her, with another wry smile and a lift of her eyebrows, and Ania said nothing.

  She was nevertheless relieved that both sisters went out veiled.

  SARDEET HAD NOT RIDDEN for three months, and little for six before that, and not at all for the years of her marriage, so Pali took pity on her with her pace. And anyway, the city was too crowded for riding fast. Nevertheless the crowds melted out of the way of the black horse and the golden, the black rider and the white, without apparent glances, though the whispers rose up behind them as they passed.

  They rode aimlessly, gazing in wonder at the carved stone façades about them, their veils hiding their wonderment and leaving them apparently aloof. They came unexpectedly to the southern gate of the city.

  The guards on the gates saluted the Bride of the Wind and the Warrior, and wished very much to know what lay behind the white veils of the one and the black veils of the other, and whether the lack of visible weapon meant that Pali bore none.

  On the other side of the walls ran, first, gardens, and secondly the palaces of the very rich, the urban sheiks of the cities, and, thirdly, a great sinuous ribbon the colour of the desert that was the river.

  “Is that the Ihil?” asked Sardeet, who had never seen a river before.

  “Yes,” said Pali, who had followed it down to its mouth, and up to its head, in her journeys. “This road appears to lead to it, if you would like to go see.”

  Sardeet nodded, and so they rode slowly, even though now that they were out of the city and the sun was high, the crowds had dissipated. Those who lived in the city did not venture far outside its bounds even in the daytime unless they had work to do in the gardens or the palaces or the orchards or the quarries, and they were not desert nomads for whom the midmorning sun and a river breeze was cool. And so the sisters were able at last to talk.

  “Pali,” said Sardeet, “what will you do now?”

  “Now? I will return to the mountains and claim my sword and the robes of the Second Veil.”

  “And then what? Return to the clan? Arzu is our mother’s right hand; will you be hers when she is head of our people?”

  Pali looked through the frame made by the alert black ears of her horse at the fine stone road ahead of them. She made a face beneath her veil. “Perhaps. And you? What will you do, if you spoke truly that you do not want to enter the temples?”

  “I spoke truly. I know that is what is expected of me ...” Her voice trailed off. Pali reached over and touched her on the arm.

  “Sardeet, no one expects anything of you. They are frightened because your life entered into legend, and because it fell into tragedy. They were prepared for you to become a goddess; they can imagine you becoming a holy one in the mountains. But if that is not what you desire, what then? You know better than the rest of us what the voice of the divine calling you sounds like.”

  They rode in silence for a few more minutes, hearing the cicadas and the clip-clip-clip of their horses’ hooves on the road. This time Sardeet looked through the golden ears of her horse, faintly obscured as the view was by the gauze of her veil, and suddenly she tore off the veil and exclaimed: “I want to live.” And she dug her heels into her horse’s side and with an excited neigh the fine horse shot forward at a full gallop.

  Pali rode her horse in a circle, and, to the amazement of a man trudging along far behind them, she bent from her horse to pick up the white cloth her sister had dropped without dismounting, and sent forth her black horse like a bird to follow after.

  They thundered down the road for a good few furlongs until they came out suddenly on the edge of an open space laid out for contests and training. They raced their horses across the open expanse, Sardeet whooping, Pali laughing, until Pali caught her up and they dropped down to a more sedate walk to let their horses breathe. “Those people,” Sardeet said with a flash in her eyes and high colour in her cheeks, “over there, they think we are mad to ride like that at noon.”

  Pali looked across an open area to where a double handful of men had stopped in their work to watch them. They seemed to be setting up tents and enclosures, though the tents were not of any of the nomad clans of the Oclaresh. She smiled, recognizing their general shape from her journey. “They are a caravan of entertainers,” she replied; “they are more probably impressed.”

  She thought Sardeet might turn her horse that way at first, but the Bride of the Wind shook her head and went off the other direction, towards the river, which ran close to the exercise grounds. There was a kind of dock with a ramp down to it, for loading boats perhaps (even Pali had only the faintest idea of how travel on water worked; when she had gone to the Pearl Islands she had begged a flying carpet of her sister, that she might not fail at her task to a storm on the sea). They let their horses drink, and then continued their slow circuit of the arena.

  In her long solitary journeys Pali had gotten out of the habit of speaking her thoughts. She did not wait for Sardeet to speak; she merely rode, though her thoughts were indeed turning more and more to what she would do once she had her sword, and wore the coloured sash of the Second Veil, and might choose her own road. If she won the right to bear the sword of her great-grandmother, the Flower of Time, who had cut down the sun. But she would not think of that, not now, when Sardeet needed her to be certain.

  “I am not yet eighteen,” Sardeet whispered. “I do not want my life to be over already. But in my visions, before the Blue Wind came, I saw myself only in bridal scarlet.”

  They rode around a curve that took them out of sight of the entertainers. Pali considered her words carefully. “I saw myself with a sword in my hand and joy in my heart as I fought in a battle. Does that mean I will never find a husband of my own and wear the scarlet myself?”

  “No, but ...”

  “Arzu saw knots and threads and magic, but does that mean she has forgotten her love of riding, or the sword, or the hunt?”

  “No, but ...”

  “Our father was a stone-carver of Rin, as frightened of the open as any of the ones there now, and yet he fell in love with the desert. Does that mean he lost his love for the work of his hands?”

  “No, but ...”

  “Your life will always be shaped by the fact that you were wed and widowed and bore the Flame of the Fire of Love to Olu-olurin the Lord of the Blue Wind before you were yet seventeen. Yet look at the river.”

  Sardeet obediently looked over. They’d come around another corner, and were now riding down the long side of the arena towards the caravan. The river was a huge glitter to the right. Sardeet winced away from the light in her eyes. Pali passed her back her veil, but she did not put it on.

  “The Yrchainné say that a person’s life is like a river. It begins from a small source, a gathering of raindrops in a bowl in the mountains, as our souls from the forces gathered from the mother and the father and the gods in the womb. When the bowl overflows—when the soul is born—the river begins to flow, until finally it reaches its home in the sea. It is shaped by the land it crosses and the waters that feed it, and the people that work its banks, and the storms that rage and the gods that will it to change.”

  “I don’t think I understand how a river works,” said Sardeet, “but I thank you.”

  Pali laughed a little behind her veil. “Perhaps it is I that cannot explain well. Sardeet, my dear, you will always be the one who was the seventh wife of the Blue Wind, just as you will always be the third daughter of Lonar Avramapul and Aldizar aq Naarun aq Lo of the city of Rin, just as you will always be my younger sister. Bei
ng my sister shapes you, as you being mine shapes me, but it does not mean I cannot stand up tomorrow and say: ‘Today I will choose a different path than the one my feet have been taking’.”

  “‘All roads lead east,’” Sardeet said, the old proverb pointing to the holy desert, and the tombs of the dead along the way.

  “You and I and Arzu have already passed those roads,” Pali said, “and we are free of the bonds of fate.”

  “Heavy talk for a hot day!” a male voice said cheerfully. “Come have a drink with us, for you cannot be of this city, we have never seen such clothes as yours before! Who and what are you?”

  They had drawn abreast of the caravan, Pali on the inner side and Sardeet on the outer. Pali looked down in astonishment at the speaker, and reined in her horse. Sardeet followed suit a moment later, fumbling with the veil that she had not yet replaced.

  He had been grinning pleasantly at Pali—pleasant was her first impression, followed quickly by an appreciative oh!, for the young man before her was nearly as handsome as Sardeet was beautiful. He had curly black hair and bronze-brown skin, and flashing eyes that met hers in appreciation—until he looked past her to the rider in white, and his mouth fell open in amazement.

  “Oh,” he added weakly.

  Pali looked quickly at Sardeet, who was looking both frightened of and pleased by his attention, and so she smiled behind her own veil and spoke in the low tones that rendered her voice ambiguous in gender. “We are children of the Middle Desert. I am a Warrior of the First Veil, and this is my sister, the Bride of the Wind.”

  “Oh,” he said again.

  “Perhaps another day,” she added, and with her hidden hand gave Sardeet a family signal, and their horses lifted in unison into a canter away from where the young man stood staring and his companions laughed at his discomfiture.

  AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT morning, Sardeet said to Pali, “Would you like to go riding by the river again with me?”