Snare

Once they’d emptied the ritual cup, Apanador filled ordinary ground-stone bowls and passed them round. The men drank silently and looked only at the fire unless they were reaching for a skin of keese. This was the right way to drink, Zayn decided, with neither courtly chatter nor the kind of bragging men do just to be bragging. Finally, after everyone had had three bowls, Apanador spoke.

‘It’s time to make some decisions about this summer.’

The unmarried men laid their bowls down and got up to leave. When Zayn followed them out, Palindor caught his arm from behind in the darkness. Out of sheer reflex, Zayn nearly killed him. He had his hunting knife out of his belt and in his hand before he even realized what he was doing, but just in time he caught himself, stepped back, and sheathed it. Palindor smiled at the gesture.

‘Listen, Kazrak. The Holy One was good enough to pick you off the street like a piece of garbage. Treat her with the respect she deserves, or I’ll kill you.’

‘I have every intention of treating her the way I’d treat the Great Khan’s favourite wife.’

‘Good. I’ll make sure you do.’

His tone of voice challenged, but Zayn had trained his emotions too highly to take offence. With a shrug, he walked off in the rain and left the comnee man scowling after him.

In the tent Zayn found Ammadin sitting close to the flickering lamp. Beside her, on a piece of blue cloth, lay four smooth spheres of transparent crystal, each a good size for cupping in a hand. The lamp light shone through one sphere and cast on the tent wall curving shadows of numbers and strange symbols. He focused his mind and captured a memory picture of them. When he returned to the khanate he would draw it for his superiors. Ammadin noticed him staring at the shadow.

‘There are tiny numbers engraved all around each crystal, like a sort of belt,’ she said. ‘That’s what you’re seeing.’

‘Interesting,’ Zayn said. ‘But should I be looking at them? I’ll leave if I’m breaking one of your Banes.’

‘It’s perfectly all right. They’re just glass at the moment. They don’t have any power unless you know the incantations that wake their spirits.’

As he sat down on his bedroll, Zayn tried to look solemn instead of sceptical. In the dim light, the crystals glittered as if they were faceted, but their surfaces appeared perfectly smooth.

‘Can the spirits answer questions?’

‘Oh yes, but only certain kinds.’

‘Can they tell me why Palindor hates me?’

‘What?’ Ammadin looked up with a laugh. ‘I don’t need spirit power to answer that. Palindor wants to marry me, and here you are, sleeping in my tent.’

It was just the sort of thing that might get in the way of his mission.

‘I can sleep outside under a wagon.’

‘Why? I’m not going to marry him, and he’ll have to get used to it. If he gives you any trouble, just tell me. I said you could sleep here, and that’s that.’

‘Look, I’m totally dependent on the comnee’s charity. I don’t want to cause any trouble.’

‘You’re a strange man for a Kazrak. Which reminds me. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Every other Kazrak I’ve ever known prayed to your god five times a day. You don’t. Why? No one here would say anything against it, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

Zayn froze. He could never tell her the truth, could never admit that men like him were forbidden to pray, that prayers from such a polluted creature would only offend the Lord.

‘Uh well,’ he said at last. ‘I do pray, but silently. Usually we’re riding when the time comes, and I don’t want to advertise my piety or anything like that. The Lord won’t mind.’

‘The Lord? I thought his name was Allah.’

‘That’s not a name, it’s a title. It just means “the lord” in the sacred language.’

Ammadin nodded, then took pieces of cloth from her saddlebags and began wrapping up the spirits. She laid each crystal down in the exact centre of a cloth, then folded the corners over in a precise motion while she murmured a few strange syllables under her breath. Once wrapped, each went into a separate soft leather pouch; while she tied a thong around the mouth, she chanted again. As he watched this long procedure, Zayn felt his body growing aware of her. There they were, in the dim tent together, with the rain drumming a drowsy rhythm on the roof.

She was a comnee woman, not one of the chastity-bound girls at home. Ammadin raised her head and looked at him.

‘No.’

Zayn nearly swore aloud. What had she done, read his thoughts? When she looked him over as if she could see through his eyes and into his soul, all his sexual interest vanished. He got up and busied himself with arranging his bedroll on the far side of the tent.

The rain came down intermittently all night. When the morning broke grey with clouds, the comnee decided to stay in camp. After he tended the horses, Zayn went to Dallador’s tent mostly because Ammadin had told him to leave her alone – to work, she said, and he wondered what strange ritual she had in hand.

A fire burned on the hearth stones under the smokehole, and Dallador sat near it, carving slices of a red animal horn into the little pegs used to fasten shirts and tent bags. His small son sat nearby and watched solemnly and silently where a Kazraki boy would have been pelting his father with questions. Zayn joined them and studied the way Dallador cut peg after peg with no wasted motion.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Zayn said at last.

‘What?’

‘It’s about Ammadin. Uh, is there something odd about her eyes?’

‘Very.’ Dallador looked up with a quick grin. ‘You’ve seen them flash, I’ll bet.’

‘Yes. I certainly did.’

‘That’s the mark of the spirit riders. It shows up when a child’s about as old as Benno here. That’s how the parents know their child’s going to be a spirit rider.’

‘What if a person didn’t have those eyes but wanted to study the lore anyway?’

‘They wouldn’t have a hope in hell. No one would teach them. It’s a sign that they can see things ordinary people can’t. If they have the spirit eyes, then they have spirit ears, too, and they can hear spirits talking.’

‘Hear spirits? How?’

‘How would I know?’ Dallador smiled briefly, then laid his knife down and considered the little heap of horn pegs. ‘That’s enough to last us a while. Now let me show you how to shell land-shrimp. I found a whole nest of them this morning, and if they’re cooked right, they’re pretty tasty.’

When Zayn returned to Ammadin’s tent, he brought her a skewer of grilled land-shrimp and some salted breadmoss in a polished stone bowl. He found her sitting cross-legged on her blankets with her saddlebags nearby.

‘That smells good,’ Ammadin remarked.

‘Dallador’s teaching me how to cook.’

He handed her the food, then laid his palms together and greeted the god figures before sitting down opposite her. She plucked a shrimp off the skewer, bit into it, and smiled.

‘Very good.’

While she ate, Zayn considered the god figures, sitting on a multi-coloured rug opposite the tent flap. There were six of them in all, most about a foot high, carved of different coloured stones, then decorated and dressed with cloth and feathers. One figure was obviously human, but the others – he’d never seen creatures like them before. Two were roughly human in shape, but the green one had scales and a wedge-shaped head like a ruffled lizard’s, and the small black one had what appeared to be fish’s gills pasted on either side of its chest. Another seemed to be only half-finished: a torso, studded with bits of gold to represent what might have been eyes, rose from an ill-defined mass of grey stone. The fifth had furled wings of stiffened cloth, huge in relation to its frail, many-legged body, and the sixth, the largest of them all, resembled a worm with leather tentacles at one end and paddle-shaped chips of shell stuck at the other.

‘What do you think those are?’ Ammadin said abruptly.

‘Well, your gods. Or representations of them, I should say. I know you don’t worship the bits of stone, of course.’

‘Of course.’ She smiled, but only faintly. ‘Why do you think our gods look so strange?’