The Warrior of the Third Veil Read online

  Pali had spent the later afternoon and evening discussing her travels with Ania in more detail, to her aunt’s increasing astonishment and marvel. Her cousins had managed to get up early enough to watch the last third of her exercises. They had been puzzled at the slow movements that seemed to have nothing at all to do with violence.

  After two days she was already restless of being within the stone buildings. “Yes,” she said.

  Ania watched them go with a feeling between worry and pleasure, and noticed that although they both wore their veils, Sardeet had now fixed hers like her sister’s, so that her eyes were uncovered.

  THIS TIME THEY RODE straight to the river gate. They cantered down to the exercise ground, and Sardeet called to Pali: “How did I not know I needed this?”

  She led the race, and Pali let her choose the direction. Down the long side along the river, around the bends, and then diagonally across the field back to the river—around the bend—across the centre again, weaving figure-eights over and over, at the trot, at the canter, at the gallop, at the high floating step of the horse dances.

  Pali set her horse to match the golden mare’s gait, and smiled to herself at the thought of what they looked like to those watching from the middle of the side they did not pass along.

  THAT NIGHT THEY ASKED their uncle what the caravan was, and were told they were travelling entertainers from the western bank of the river, who had come to the eastern cities for the first time. They performed, he said, a kind of mobile festival in each of the cities along the river, from Issuol in the north to Calkinu in the south. They stayed seven nights in each city, he added, a bit disapprovingly, and their entertainment went from sunset to midnight.

  “Oh,” said Naarun’s sons and his nephew, who was going to become a priest the next holy-day.

  “Oh,” said Sardeet, her eyes shining.

  “Ah,” said Pali, exchanging a glance with her aunt.

  ON THE THIRD MORNING they rode the long way around to come to the caravan, but sedately, so lightly that their horses had barely raised a sweat. They found the young man throwing daggers at a target on a wall.

  “You have missed it,” Sardeet said at length, when his third knife bounced its hilt against the outer line of the target.

  He glanced across at her with what Pali thought a reasonably well-done affectation of nonchalance—she had seen how hastily he had pretended to be in the midst of his exercises when they had finally rounded the corner to come down the caravan side of the grounds. “I am a knife thrower by my trade,” he said haughtily. “The intention is to miss.”

  “I see,” said Sardeet. She looked about the site. The tents were bright, constructed of many-coloured fabrics joined together in patterns—stripes of many orientations and widths predominated—and the place quiet, though the hard-packed sand and fragments of litter showed how many people must have been there the night before.

  “Say, Warrior,” he said, plucking out one of the knives and presenting it to Pali hilt first. “Would you like to try?”

  She opened her hands in a gesture of rejection. “No. I may bear no blade until I have completed the ceremony of the Second Veil.”

  His eyes flashed with astonishment and something like disdain. Pali could hear the amusement in Sardeet’s voice as she said, “May I?”

  She had dismounted and ground-tied her horse before he could recover. Sardeet plucked the knife from his hand, stood where he had, and paused in consideration. Pali saw that a few others, men and women both, had emerged from their tents to see what was toward. They broke into smiles as they saw the white-robed Bride of the Wind—by this time they had heard the stories from the city folk—stand with a dagger in her hand and a frown between her perfect brows, just visible above her veil.

  The entertainers travelled by barge down the Ihil, and took to wagons on the western bank, and had even less to do with the nomads of the Middle Desert than did the clans of the eastern cities. They had only really listened to the accounts of her beauty; the people of Rin were a bit superstitious about telling stories of the gods to strangers, and the entertainers had taken the vague hints as mere metaphors and similes and tales of the old legends from far away.

  Pali guessed that Sardeet had not spun daggers since she was married, but it was mostly in the wrist, not the arm, and their rides had shown her that her sister might be out of practice and out of shape, but had not lost her technique. She smiled behind her veil at the open amusement visible from the entertainers. Clearly they had only met the pastoral nomads of the western hills, whose clans shared the city folk’s views on the roles and skills appropriate to women.

  With a curious yearning for something she could not name to herself, Sardeet flipped the dagger accurately into the centre of the target.

  “We are of the desert,” she said to the young man, who was gawping as if she’d struck him in his heart, and swung back up on her horse. “We do not miss.”

  Four

  THE FOURTH DAY WAS a market day, and Ania invited the sisters to join her and her own sister Saara as they purveyed the souk. Pali agreed readily, for she had not spent a week in one place for most of a year, and not since her time in the mountain fastness of the Warriors of the Mountains so long within a stone building. She delighted in her sister’s company, enjoyed her aunt’s, was amused at her cousins’ awe, and was ready to head back to the desert. And also, as she had discovered in her travels, she liked markets.

  Sardeet agreed in anticipation and calculation, and again wore her veil as Pali tied hers, eyes visible above the cloth. She still wore her widow’s white, and, as Ania and Saara were uncomfortably aware, remained highly conspicuous. Still, with Pali stalking beside her in Warrior’s veils, no one offered any trouble at all.

  Numerous young men (and several older ones) were immediately inspired to write poetry to what little they could see of the Bride of the Wind, and one young sheik from Oclaresh City, in Rin to hire the best stone-carvers for his new palace, immediately began to scheme how he might win her for his bride. He made the mistake of asking the nomad guards for their clan’s traditions, and slunk away again in the knowledge that even his wealth could not pay the initial token of intent, let alone the bride-price that would be asked for Sardeet-savarel.

  They made the rounds of the spice vendors, the glassworkers, the carvers of small figures, the metal smiths, and those who brought beans and fruit and vegetables. Ania and Saara bought their week’s needs, and Pali and Sardeet observed and occasionally murmured to each other, and behind them the rumours flew.

  When they came to the nuts, Sardeet suddenly became animated. She passed up and down the great stone crocks the merchants used, and after a good few turns finally chose the merchant she would speak to. Pali, amused, stood beside her looking threatening in her very lack of weaponry; Ania and Saara hovered a few feet away in agonies of suspense.

  “Does the glorious lady see something of interest?” began the nut merchant, a middle-aged man of the name of Jomol, who came from a small village downriver in the midst of the orchard country, and thought he knew how to haggle.

  “You have seven kinds of pistachios,” said Sardeet. “Why are those two in the same container?”

  She pointed at the smallest of the crocks. Jomol looked at it in astonishment, for he had not thought anyone would notice that he had cut his highest-quality nuts with those of a very similar but lesser variety. “Ah,” he said. “Those are of the highest quality, the pistachios of the Oclaresh, glorious one, but with the greatest flavour comes a certain irregularity of size.”

  Sardeet regarded him for a long moment. It was not usual, for the tribes along the river, for a woman to look directly at a man; he put his sudden flush and trickle of sweat down to her breaking that custom, and to the fact that even her eyes were more beautiful than most women’s eyes.

  “I see,” she said finally. “It was not from your gift-offerings that my husband brought me pistachios. A pity.”

  And with a nod
she beckoned to her sister and walked off, leaving Jomol to sweat and the rest of the nut-sellers of the market, who knew well enough that his were the best quality, to decide between public humiliation or the possible reward of the Bride of the Wind’s patronage, but by the time the bravest—or most foolhardy—of them had called out to her, Sardeet and Pali had already turned the corner of the marketplace to come to the sellers of cloth.

  WHEN JOMOL TOLD HIS wife what had happened at the market, she said: “Hurry, you fool, separate out the best and send them as a gift to Naarun’s house before the day is over.”

  Jomol, being a prudent man, also gave a portion as a gift-offering to the temple, in the name of the newest god, the Flame of the Fire of Love.

  AMONG THE SELLERS OF cloth Sardeet was entranced, and even Pali delighted. They examined the great swaths of silk and linen and cotton and wool, coloured brightly with dyes of many lands. The vendors told them stories about where the cloths were from, making up most of it until Pali said to one, who was explaining how the cloth that he sold was dyed by the dew in the land of Rish by women the colour of onyx, that she had been to that land, and that while the people there could conceivably be called the colour of onyx (though to her mind they were more of a dark brown), the dew had not had any effect on any cloth in her possession.

  “But it is a very pretty orange,” Sardeet said, and bought a length, so the shame-faced vendor was able to laugh; though his price fell by more than half.

  Pali noticed her sister shied away from the blues and chose instead the hot colours, saffron and crimson and purple and orange and bronze. Sardeet bought one length of each, enough for several wardrobes. Pali did not buy anything for herself, having little room in her saddle-bags for more than the few small trinkets and gifts she had already acquired in her travels.

  At length they wearied of the crowds. Leaving Ania and Saara to finish their gossiping with Ania’s friends, Pali and Sardeet returned to their uncle’s house. Once there they sat in Sardeet’s room and spread out the cloth.

  “It looks like the southern hills,” Pali said. “Their earth was like this, layers of colour swirling up and down.”

  Sardeet spoke suddenly. “How many Veils are there for the Warriors?”

  Pali smiled at her. They’d both removed their veils, and she sat brushing out her hair from its braid. “Five, though few indeed have attained even to the fourth. The First Veils are black with a black sash, and I have told you of them. The Second Veils are black as well, with a sash of any colour one chooses; one has earned one’s sword, and is to be respected. Most Warriors remain of the Second Veil.”

  “And the others?”

  “Warriors of the Third Veil wear indigo, with a sky-blue sash. That is earned by achieving a great victory against a most worthy foe; our mother earned her right to the indigo by her defeat of Ondariin of the Djinn. Warriors of the Fourth Veil wear saffron yellow, with a sash of green. My masters are of the Fourth Veil. Each of them is the greatest living master of their weapon.”

  She fell quiet. Sardeet looked at the faint, slightly embarrassed longing in her sister’s eyes, and it was her turn to pat her gently. “And the Fifth Veil?”

  “There have been only nine Warriors of the Fifth Veil in the annals of the Warriors of the Mountains. They are the heroes of legend that the Twelve Great Wind Lords have called upon as their champions.”

  “And what do they wear?”

  Pali laughed. “Whatever they want. Their reputations are their garments and their glory.”

  ON THE FIFTH MORNING they rode in their veils to the exercise grounds. Pali again let Sardeet choose their route: they danced their horses through the motions of a duel fought with invisible weapons, as they had done as children for the festival games. Pali held herself back so that she did not win too easily or too soon, and knew that from a distance it probably looked like Sardeet’s flashiness—for she had not yet trained in adult subtleties—far surpassed her own quiet competence.

  They halted before the caravan of entertainers. A dozen men and women had emerged to watch them, not even the knife-thrower pretending to be busy. Their horses were blowing with some excitement, as they had been bred and trained for such activities.

  One of the entertainers, a tall older woman dressed in a robe the colour of an aubergine, hung all over with tiny golden coins, looked up at them in consideration. “May we offer you water?” she asked, and by her accent and her question Pali knew her to be from the western bank of the Ihil.

  “We will take it from your hands,” said Sardeet, and she and Pali dismounted.

  The woman first brought a basin of water for their horses, which action Pali approved, before returning a second time with an ewer and a tin cup. They drank politely, for the sun was not yet too hot, but were glad enough to be invited to sit on cushions beneath a canopy.

  “We are given to understand that you are entertainers, a kind of festival that travels,” said Sardeet, looking with curiosity at the colourful tents and the mostly-shabby garments worn by the men and women sitting beside them. “Is that so?”

  The older woman gestured gracefully. “Yes, it is so. Visitors of an evening pay to see us perform: I dance with snakes, Laqi is a strong man, Zamir has his knives, and so on. Some of us cook food of many lands, others tell fortunes or perform magic. That sort of thing. It is our first time on this side of the river, we wished to expand our travels.”

  Laqi, whose muscles Pali certainly respected, smiled bashfully when he saw her considering him. Zamir was gazing in adoration at Sardeet. When the woman stopped speaking, he said, “If you were to return this evening, you could see.”

  “There would be no charge,” the woman who danced with snakes said, “not for those who have given us such pleasure as we watched them at their riding.”

  “We are honoured by your attention,” said Sardeet, not looking at Zamir the knife-thrower.

  THEY SPENT THE AFTERNOON assisting their aunt in her storeroom.

  They both found the cavernous stone cellar beneath the house marvellous. Their people kept their wealth in livestock and jewellery and knowledge, never in food. People of the cities and djinn of the desert dealt in food, though the food of the djinn was never quite what one expected.

  Ania’s pantry was crammed with huge stone jars, each of them full of oil, or wine, or water, or dried figs or dates, raisins, nuts, and elsewhere there were spices from far away. Naarun’s skills as a carver of façades were in solid demand, and Ania’s dowry had been substantial.

  Sardeet and Pali helped her count quantities. Ania watched them peer with girlish pleasure into the jars and crocks, even Pali losing her aloofness as they searched lentils and dried beans and wheat for evidence that insects or rodents had come in.

  “You do not have places where you keep your food?” Ania asked at last.

  “There are caches at the oases,” Pali said, “but not like this. We carry what we need with us, or if we need more ...” She shrugged, and Ania remembered with a shiver that her nieces’ mother was called the Bandit Queen for good reason.

  Sardeet spoke a bit dreamily, running her hand through the lentils. “My husband’s servant winds brought food from the offerings people gave to him. It was rarely ordinary food.”

  It was at this point that the pistachios sent from Jomol arrived, the major-domo peeking apologetically in to find his mistress and present them to Sardeet-savarel. Sardeet smiled when she saw that the pistachios were all the highest quality. “These were the food I liked best,” she said. “They tasted like home. He is more honest with his sorting now.”

  “He is no more honest than any other merchant,” Ania said. “I see the hand of his wife in this gift. She is a shrewd woman. Her brother tends the orchards where those pistachios come from. Jomol’s business has thrived since he married her.”

  “Hmm,” said Sardeet.

  THE EVENING MEAL WAS usually taken at sunset. After they had eaten, Sardeet and Pali went to their room to wash their hands
and replace their veils. Sardeet looked at the bronze and orange and pink cloths, and tugged at her white robes. “I do not want to wear my widow’s white any longer.”

  “Then you must give yourself to another life,” said Pali, fastening the black cloth that transformed her from a beautiful young woman to a Warrior of the First Veil, and wondering for the first time if ever she would choose to take off the veils for good.

  Five

  THEY TOOK THE THREE nomad guards with them to the caravan. These were young men a few years older than Pali, in their mid-twenties, who had spent three months flirting with the women in the city. One had fallen in love with a woman of the house next to Naarun’s, and was shaping in his mind a worthy bride-price for her. The other two were quite ready to return to the desert now that Sardeet was so much recovered from her grief. All three of them were delighted to see Pali, though disappointed she remained of the First Veil, and would not spar with them.

  There were many others streaming out of the city to the entertainers’ caravan. Mostly men, mostly young men, and a few groups of women with husbands and attendants and chaperones. Pali and Sardeet were conspicuous, Sardeet’s white robes and veils both immediately recognizable and brilliant in the torchlight that lined the route. Pali in her black faded into the shadows, but the nomads were fierce and warlike as ever, and on seeing them, people immediately sought out the mysterious Warrior.

  They detailed one of the guards to wait with the horses outside of the way of the crowds, with instructions to the other two to spell him off every hour, that all might see the entertainers. Sardeet gave them coins to spend, as she stood in place as their liege, and then they turned to the throngs under the lights.