The Warrior of the Third Veil Page 5

  “Mine?” retorted the Bandit Queen. “It comes of sullying their minds with books.”

  “You cannot blame all their poor choices on their learning to read and write,” her father replied, stung, and as the argument turned to the differing cultural values of city and desert Pali left the tent to sit by the fire.

  After some time her eldest sister came to sit beside her. For a long time they were silent, until at length Arzu said: “Are you sorry he didn’t ask you?”

  Pali had taken off her veils. She missed them. She kept staring at the fire. “I would not say that.”

  “But perhaps you might say you are sorry no one has?”

  “I am going to the Mountain tomorrow,” Pali said firmly.

  Arzu sighed but asked no more questions. She did, nevertheless, give Pali a carpet of her own weaving for her to use as a sleeping mat.

  In the steel blue light of the hours before dawn, Pali readied herself. Before she mounted, Arzu exited from the tent she shared with her own new husband, embraced her, and said: “The name of the carpet is Khirasoon-no, which is Beloved of the Daystar, and it will bear you safe as the eagle that carried us in the Black Mountains when we went to rescue our sister from the Lord of the Blue Wind.”

  Pali thought to herself that there was safe and then there was being carried by a giant eagle to confront a god, and she smiled behind her veils.

  SHE RODE EAST FIRST, to the crossroads where the tombs of the dead began.

  South led to the monasteries where Arzu had learned to weave and knot magic.

  East was the road of the gods, the dead, and the damned.

  For a long while Pali sat on her horse looking to the passage into the Black Mountains, thinking of the glass palace on the other side of the guardians of the way, and the sight of the Great Desert of Kaph that stretched beyond knowledge to the heart of the world and the home of the Twelve, the greater gods.

  Then she turned her horse north, and rode seven days with the Middle Desert to her left and the bare black mountains to her right. On the seventh day she came to a dead tree.

  The Warriors of the Mountain said that the tree had been planted in the youth of the world, and had once borne the light of the world in its branches. Now it was dead, silver-branched, spreading high and far but nothing like what it must have been in its glory. In her travels Pali had seen trees, and in her visions greater ones even than the jungles of the southern Ihil or pine trees of the Pearl Islands, but whenever she thought the word tree, this was the one she imagined. It had been the first tree she had ever seen that was not a date palm, six years before when she first rode to request instruction at the feet of the masters.

  The tree was hollow-trunked, blackened within as with fire, and on its branches were hung sashes.

  Supplicants going to the Mountain came sashless, earning theirs from the Masters by their deeds and their words. Pali tended her horse near the spring hidden by the tree—that at least she knew to find, daughter of the desert as she was—and spent a three-day vigil sitting within the hollow.

  Then she undid the black sash from her waist and with her robes billowing around her she tied it carefully on the highest branch she could reach, standing on her horse’s saddle to do so. The horse blew its nose at her and she smiled wanly at the noise.

  “Sister of the shadow lands, do you reassure me I will not be shamed before the masters?” The horse tossed its head vigorously, sending dander flying, and Pali laughed aloud, though she rode with a heavy heart east from the dry tree towards the forbidding mountains.

  THREE DAYS FROM THE tree, she came to the first of the long stretches of black lava. She turned her horse onto the secret trail that had taken her a week of searching to find on her first journey, and rode away from the sun into the shadowed valleys. Far to the south was the path of the dead: this was the path of those who sought to open those doors. Healers and Warriors, wielders of blade and potion and silent courtesy.

  Pali rode with her stomach feeling loose and unmoored from the loss of her sash. Black horse and black rider in a black landscape, dry and deep in shadow from the high cliffs on either side of her. She felt she was being watched, even though she knew that the Warriors of the Mountain had no need of watchers. Still, there were others who dwelt in the Black Mountains.

  Three days on the secret path, and Pali came to the wide green valley. She passed between two narrow cliffs, her horse nervous with the rock pressing so close, but scenting water and growing things long before Pali herself did.

  The path entered half-way up the slope. Down to the left, cupped in the hollow of the valley, a river formed a crescent-shaped lake. In the arms of the crescent was a house, built of white stone brought, so the Warriors said, by the djinn from the other side of the world. Its gardens were as complex and beautiful as the patterns on Arzu’s carpets, and nightingales sang in its trees.

  Pali turned her horse firmly away from the valley, and led it along the second of the secret paths to the upper pass.

  She had been warned, by her mother who had studied for her Veils, not to go below the level of the black rocks in the valley walls, for fear of becoming one of the statues in that beautiful garden. A legend dwelled in that white house, and had since the dry tree illuminated the world. Time had worn the tree old and dead, and no one knew the tale of the one who lived in the white house; it guarded its privacy.

  So said the stories.

  KEEPING ALWAYS TO THE upper side of the black rocks in the valley, Pali rode to its southern end. The path forked before a stone monument, and she paused her horse before it.

  Made of one very large round boulder balanced upon a very small stone, it was called Ialaar, the wishing rock. There was a shallow dish before it, made of bronze and almost as old as the tree or the house behind her. You were supposed to leave an offering of your wishes there, and pass to the left or the right of Ialaar, as your heart moved you.

  They did not lead to the same place, though the paths rejoined on the far side.

  “Ialaar,” Pali said, and threw her token into the dish: a stone she had picked up on the shore of the Pearl Islands, when she had taken the bones of the sixth wife of Olu-olurin to her people. While the Emperor-of-the-Yellow-Throne wept and honoured the remains of his legendary ancestress, Pali had escaped the great palace and walked along the shore of the sea.

  She had spoken the truth of it to Sardeet: she had used Arzu’s carpet to fly across the sea’s expanse in a night, and had not known what she was seeing. But walking along the strand, where the waves rolled up towards her from a horizon as vast as the desert’s, Pali had heard the sea winds calling her name, and shivered.

  The stone made a chiming noise when it hit the basin. She had bound her wishes to it with thread of scarlet and gold and white: bridal scarlet for her mortal body’s dreams of carnal happiness; divine gold for her soul’s hope of joy in knowledge and love; and white for her calling to deal death with the sword, her acceptance that death would be her intimate companion all her life, and call her home when he list.

  But the stone itself meant for her that her deeds would make her name immortal, and her name would be sung through the ages the way the sea carried its stories, wave over wave.

  Then she let her horse take the lead, and went right-hand around the stone, to one life instead of another, blinder than her sister choosing to put on bridal scarlet a second time after her widow’s whites rather than the golden robes of a holy saint.

  Seven

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF Ialaar the wishing stone was, at last, the Black Mountain.

  There was a long approach, smoothly sloping from where the paths rejoined to the opening that pierced the outer wall of the Mountain. At the mouth of the cave stood three figures, each of them in saffron robes with sashes the colour of the valley behind her.

  When she came to the right distance Pali bowed her horse down, then dismounted and knelt before them.

  The three masters gestured for her to speak her name and her business.

  “I am Paliammë-ivanar of the Middle Desert of the Oclaresh, a Warrior of the First Veil, and I am returned after my quest to perform the ceremony of the Second Veil, if it please the masters of the Mountain.”

  “We will hear your tale,” said one of the masters, and so Pali returned to her second home.

  PALI WALKED DOWN THE cool stone hall behind her masters. Her horse clopped along behind her, nervous at the stone passageway—it was not the horse she had trained with—but confident in Pali’s leadership. The warm breath at her back was deeply reassuring, even as dread grew in her stomach with every silent stride forward. Over the years of her training Warriors of the First Veil had come for the ceremony of the Second Veils, spoken of their quests.

  No one who had won the Second Veil had raised his hand against the unjust in violence. They spoke of the wrongs they had righted through laughter, stories, clever diplomacy, soft words, shining examples. They had carried no weapons and learned not to need them, that they might go forth in their robes and their sashes confident in their hearts that they sought justice, not simply power.

  Not everyone had returned from their quests. Sometimes the novices heard rumours, that so-and-so had died in his quest, or so-and-so had raised up a weapon and, shamed, thrown down his sash, or so-and-so had acted unbefitting for a Warrior and had his name struck from the book the Masters kept in the secret recess of the Mountain.

  Pali thought of the god’s neck breaking under her hand, and the horror of the Scorpion-Men in the dark tunnel between the mortal world and the divine, and of the words her sister’s son, newest of the gods, had spoken on his assumption of his divine form. Be joyous, he had said to her. She felt no joy in her heart, walking through the Mountain.

  At last they passed i
nto the central crater. Many ages of the world since it had been a volcano, hollowed out in fire. It had been inhabited later by a dragon, who had worn caverns smooth with its ceaseless motion, and later still by stonemasons who had transformed the dragon-caves into a city fit for men. In the centre of the crater was a lake, blue as the wind who had married Pali’s sister, and verdant terraces filled with orchards and gardens and fields where the Warriors raised their food and practised their arts.

  At a gesture from one of the Masters an umber-clad novice ran up to take Pali’s horse. He was a boy of sixteen, had come the year before Pali had left; he stared at her sidelong under his hair, wondering no doubt how it had taken her two years to finish her quest, when she had been considered one of the greatest students the Mountain had seen for many a year. Pali nodded gravely. At a second gesture from the Master another novice appeared; this one she did not know.

  “Take our daughter to the Supplicants’ quarters,” the Master said to the novice, and then, turning to Pali: “Refresh yourself, daughter, and we will hear your story at the evening meal.”

  Four hours, thought Pali, and bowed.

  APART FROM BEING BROUGHT water to drink, Pali was left alone to wash and shake the dust from her robes. She bathed luxuriously, in a pool heated from the fires of the Mountain. When she had first come to the Mountain she had not known what to do with all that water, far more precious than gold or even horses in the desert.

  Unbound from its braids and the tight swaddling veils, her hair reached down to her waist. It was black and shining as a horse’s coat. Pali brushed it out slowly, feeling the hair slither around her shoulders and catch around her arms. On her first departure from the family tent, her mother had given her a golden comb. She usually wore it tucked into her sash, but now used it, awkward with the unfamiliar freedom, to hold her hair back from her face.

  The small white freckles down her right side glowed like the sparks that had caused them. She rubbed one on her hand, frowned, and forced herself to be still.

  WITHOUT THE VEILS ACROSS her face people recognized her. Not the new novices, of course, but there were only ever a handful of those each year, and the rest of the Warriors were those she had studied under and with. The usual routine was for a novice to come in their early teens, study for several years—seven was usual; that Pali had taken the First Veils after four was exceptional—before taking the Ceremony of the First Veil. There were always some losses in numbers over these years, as students decided that the arduous training was not for them, and returned unveiled and sashless to their people.

  Those who succeeded to the First Veil went out clad in black, with a black sash, and unarmed, to fulfil their quests. Usually they returned within a year, often after three or five or six months, and presented their story to the Masters—and before the whole complement of those in the Mountain.

  As Warriors of the Second Veil they were expected to go out into the world to increase their knowledge, to seek justice, and to live full lives. Most Warriors remained of the Second Veil, in black robes, sashes of any colour they chose. Some returned to the Mountain when they felt their deeds might have earned them the Third Veil; others returned when their children were grown to study, to teach, or to learn the art of healing after a lifetime spent by the sword. Others, who had left their clans and chosen the road, came to the Mountain between their journeys as the best home of their hearts.

  When Pali was led by the unknown novice to the refectory she found a few new faces among the Veiled. (In the Mountain they did not wear the face-veils, but the robes and the sashes marked out the ranks.) She saw also that there was a very old man wearing simple grey robes with a silvery sash. He was seated in the place of honour, and Pali realized, with great astonishment, that he must be the only living Warrior of the Fifth Veil, Andrej of the Vaarno, who in his prime had battled five dragons under the stars of an Arctic winter.

  Pali bowed deeply to Lord Andrej, who smiled, and to the five Masters of the Fourth Veil who were the primary teachers of the Warriors.

  Her own master, Azaiah of the Malacong (whose people were the ones who made wine from honey and danced in ecstasy and sang songs about Nwayë the Swift, first wife of the Blue Wind), inclined her head. “We welcome our daughter’s return to the Mountain to seek the Second Veil. Unfold to us the deeds of your quest, child.”

  The words were ritual; the warmth in them raising both encouragement and dread in Pali’s heart, for fear of the disappointment she might bring to her Master. Pali took a deep breath, centred herself as for a fight, and in much the simple, brusque words she had used in her uncle’s house, told her story.

  Told of meeting her sister Arzu at the crossroads, and riding East among the dead to the Gate of the Mountains. Since she spoke to people who knew more of the secret things of the world than did the urban tribes of the cities along the Ihil, she added details of that journey: how she and Arzu had passed the Sphinx by Arzu’s clever words and knotwork; how they had fought their way through the black tunnel (twelve days in the darkness, with the Scorpion-Men guarding the way against the living), and came out to the crevasse, and finally how they came to the edge of the holy desert and bargained with the great eagle until he agreed to carry them to the palace of the Blue Wind.

  She paused there, aware of the silence, remembering how other Warriors in their turns had spoken to a room of enthusiastic listeners, ones who gasped or laughed or hissed at the tale. One person had gasped when she spoke of the iron pyrite hitting the first of the Scorpion-Men in the dark of the tunnel, and raised her right hand to show the white freckles that now marked her, but all else were silent. She wondered uneasily if this already was too much violence, not enough cleverness, for the quest, and quailed inwardly.

  Master Azaiah said: “What injustice did you find?”

  Pali looked at her masters: the greatest living experts at their weapons, bow, sword, dagger, spear, hands. The living champion of the Twelve, whose name was sung by the sea. She readied her thoughts and spoke clearly, as she and Arzu had spoken to the eagle.

  “My sister Sardeet-savarel was taken by the Lord of the Blue Wind to be his bride. There is no injustice there. She lost therefore her mortal family: we mourned, and we rejoiced, as was appropriate. But when we came to the palace of the Blue Wind, drawn by my sister Arzu’s intimation of some great wrong, we found sins agains the greater gods and crimes against my sister, for Olu-olurin the Blue Wind sought to make himself one of the Twelve through perverse rites. He had murdered six wives for the magic of their death in rituals meant to seize their newest-born children for his own body, soul, and power, and my sister was the seventh and her child the last he thought he needed for his growth into one of the greater gods.”

  Pali paused, mouth dry with so much talking, and no wine to wash her words down nor warmth from her audience to call them forth. The Masters were grave, the other Warriors and novices shocked and solemn; but Lord Andrej of the Vaarno was smiling in gentle encouragement. Pali was more grateful than she could express for his smile, and directed her words to him.

  “When we came, my sister Arzu-aldizar and I, we found the Blue Wind about to work his obscenities upon our sister in the moments of her labour to bring forth her child.”

  Pali paused again, as a cool wind danced through the hall, a whisper from her fellows or a warning from the gods. Her stomach fluttered; she wished passionately for her sash, her robes, her veils.

  She made herself speak clearly and strong.

  “I killed him.”

  Pause. Lord Andrej was still smiling, and she thought: his hands killed five dragons, his hands brought the light back to his people that had been stolen by the Frost King, he walked unafraid of the night—or if afraid, at least he still walked—until he found the sun, and he climbed the hall of the sky to set the sun back in his place. And he is here, in grey robes and silver sash, smiling at me.

  (And, she thought, never will I bear my great-grandmother’s sword, who cut down the false sun so that Lord Andrej could fulfil his task.)