Blackdog Page 6

  “Yes, Sister.” Attavaia went obediently to collect Enneas and the others. Only four of them, of the six who had shared a room last night. The attackers had plenty of arrows, but the worst had been when the mercenaries came swarming up the ladders onto the walls. They only tried it once.

  As though the water-gate didn’t really matter.

  “We’re going to throw broken shards at them,” Enneas repeated. “That’ll send them running, I expect.”

  An older sister cuffed her ear. “None of that. Attalissa is our strength.”

  Attalissa is a timid little girl, Attavaia thought. She wondered if her uncle had these thoughts, which gnawed away at faith. Surely he couldn’t; he was the Blackdog; he shared Attalissa’s holiness. But sometimes…she wondered. She’d seen him wink at the goddess herself, during prayers, and once when he had taken her fishing with the goddess she had heard him tell the child, the great lady of the lake, that if she was going to fish she had to learn to bait her own hooks. Old Lady would have called it irreverence, or worse.

  “We’re going to die,” Enneas whispered in her ear, as they stacked broken tiles for the others to carry up over the gate. “What can Attalissa do?”

  Attavaia kept silent. Treachery, desertion. Had Uncle really meant that? Did he just want to save her life at any cost of honour, having no children of his own?

  No. He would do anything to save the goddess, he had no choice in that. He would not ask his niece to dirty her soul with dishonour—if he told her to do it, he had his reasons, and they were right. If the Blackdog could not fight the wizard alone, the Blackdog would not wait around for the wizard to take the goddess from him. So neither her uncle nor the goddess was still in the temple they defended.

  Turning this thought over, wondering if she was supposed to pass it on to Sister Chanalugh and how, Attavaia asked Enneas to give her a boost to the roof, to knock down more tiles.

  “The door!” someone screamed beyond it, and, “Chitora! They’re here!”

  Inside, someone did not know Sister Chitora was beyond hearing. A woman’s scream, short and terrible, and the thud and thump and dragging of the makeshift barricade being shoved aside.

  Attavaia snatched back a shard of tile from the sister about to take it up to the wall and wedged it under the door as it began to push open, throwing her shoulder against it, feet sliding. But the tile caught that slightly tilted stone that everyone always stubbed their toes on and the door, for a moment, stuck.

  “Sister Chanalugh!” she screamed. “Raiders inside!”

  Enneas was jamming whatever she could find under the door and into the crack of its hinged edge: more broken tile, a spearhead snapped from its shaft in the battle atop the wall. The door thudded and jumped. Others ran to throw on their weight with Attavaia’s, but tile ground and broke and they all slid.

  “To the tower!” Sister Chanalugh screamed. “Now!”

  Some of the women ran for the stairs. Some stayed to carry the wounded. The door shoved at them and those still pushing on it fell in a tangle. One girl never rose, as the first raider through reversed his grip on his sword and stabbed down, two-handed, into her chest, hammering between the joins of the overlapping scales. Attavaia screamed, wordless noise and outrage, and swung her blade, his right arm, a thing falling, dead and bloody meat like a joint severed for dinner, the sheep carcass hanging from a hook in the back shed…The man staggered to his knees, face an ugly, gaping mask, mouth open, eyes unholy sky-blue wells, and she kicked him as his other hand groped blind and clumsy for her, instinct more than thought as she half-severed his neck, and what thought she had was only, Clumsy, slow, weak, she should have taken his head off. But there were more, pushing after him.

  “Come on!” Attavaia and Enneas were the last, dragging one another up, running. Attavaia kicked over the brazier, scattering burning charcoal that glowed scarlet as it tumbled, but it was no real hazard to the men and women rushing through. Enneas fell again with a grunt. Attavaia caught her hand and hauled her up, and still clutching one another they made the stairs and the small belfry and watch-room over the water-gate. The door slammed behind them.

  The raiders did not immediately pursue. They went to loosen the bars of the gate.

  Sister Chanalugh came clattering down the narrow stairway from the tower roof.

  Someone had grabbed the iron teakettle and carried it along. Now that woman reached through the narrow window in the wall and poured hot tea down over the raiders below, which annoyed them, and then released the kettle, which dropped a man, possibly for good.

  “What have we got left?” Chanalugh demanded.

  “Nothing,” was the answer, “except those broken tiles the girls took up to the roof.”

  Shards of tile sailed past the window with the speaker’s words, those on the roof doing what they could to delay those opening the gate.

  The belfry was small and cramped. Without discussion they abandoned it, the first panic over, and went up to the roof, keeping safe behind the parapet. The bell was too heavy to manhandle up as a missile.

  Attavaia watched a Grasslander woman with a scarred face crouch over Sister Chitora lying down in the court, feeling for a pulse. A man with the same slanting scars stood nearby with a torch. The woman carefully cut the priestess’s throat. The others left behind, dead and dying, were treated similarly.

  One of the older sisters wept.

  “None of that,” Sister Chanalugh said. “If we die for Attalissa, we die gladly.”

  “Better to live for her,” Attavaia said. She had meant it as a low mutter for Enneas, but in the quiet of the roof, Chanalugh heard.

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” the senior sister said pragmatically. “Looks like the whole temple’s theirs.”

  Below them, the bars were dragged back and the narrow gate pulled open.

  “Hey!” a raider shouted to his fellows below, some accent making the words near-incomprehensible, “Up here, you lazy bastards! Leaving us to do your work for you.”

  “Well.” Chanalugh took off her helmet, scratched her head, and sighed, resettling it. “We’ll hold them off while we can and make our goddess proud in our deaths.”

  The senior sister seemed so calm about it. Attavaia wondered if Rideen had known he was going to die, or if it had just happened. She wondered if Attalissa could feel them all dying. If it would matter, when the goddess came again in her strength and glory, that they had fought so long before the end.

  “Sister,” she said, “my uncle told me that when the temple was lost, we should get away and hide in the mountains. He told me Attalissa would need us when she came back.”

  “She’s probably dead, Sister,” Chanalugh said. “She’s likely not even conceived yet. There’ll be other sisters to take our place in serving her, when she returns.”

  “No, there won’t,” Enneas said suddenly. “Not if that wizard kills us all and destroys the temple. What will she have to come back to then?”

  “She isn’t dead,” Attavaia said, and hoped it sounded like faith in the goddess, not in the man who used to carry her on his shoulders when she was small. “The Blackdog took her to safety. She’ll be back, once she’s a woman. And he told me it wasn’t running away. He told me she will need us. We need to be here when she comes back.”

  “Fine if you can fly,” Chanalugh said. “Personally, I can’t, stork or no.” Even there, even then, there was a sort of horrified holding of breath, and then a few giggles. “The stair’s too narrow for more than one at a time to come at us here, so at least we can make them pay for every one that’s died at this gate yet, before they get us all.”

  “We can go along the wall and down into the rough ground by the south corner,” Attavaia persisted. “Into the lake. Swim to shore.”

  Chanalugh turned and looked at her, and her stomach clenched. Coward, faithless traitor. Chanalugh had hard eyes.

  “You think you can get along the top of the wall without being seen? They’ve got a lot of light down
there.”

  “We can try. If we’re going to die tonight it doesn’t matter where.”

  “True enough. Right, then. Go.”

  She felt dizzy, tensed for argument. “Sister?”

  “Anyone who’s fit to, go. The water’s cold, and it’s not the shortest swim. Anyone who’s just going to die in the lake can stay and die here. We’ll give them something to think about, so they don’t notice the shadows on the wall.”

  Below, the raiders were making leisurely preparations to take the tower, clustered close, looking up. Reluctant to be the first.

  “Sister—”

  But Sister Chanalugh turned her back, making a quick count, muttering under her breath. Attavaia did the same, without the muttering. Seventeen left, of all who had defended the water-gate. So few.

  Quick interrogation by Chanalugh gave them five to stay, all with wounds that would weaken them in the lake, except for Sister Chanalugh herself. Twelve to go.

  “But you’re unhurt,” Attavaia protested. “And we could help the wounded, support them in the water. If we all just go quickly, now, we’ll be gone before they realize there’s no one here.”

  “Sister Chitora was ordered to hold the water-gate, and I’m her deputy,” Chanalugh said. “And I’ve got no orders otherwise from the Blackdog or anyone else. And you know how cold water will eat your strength; you can’t be hampered with the wounded. No, we don’t jeopardize your lives. We stay, and you have that much better a chance. Now quickly, as you say. And quietly. And make sure you are here, when Attalissa returns, whether it’s five years from now or fifteen. Sisters, you follow Attavaia now, since she’s the one with the Blackdog’s word.”

  “But I’m not—”

  Chanalugh saluted her, fist over heart. “The Blackdog’s word is the word of Attalissa’s servant, and the will of the goddess.”

  And Sister Chanalugh might have been deathly serious, or mocking her to stop her crying. Attavaia didn’t know, and returned the salute, swallowing hard.

  There was no time for any lingering farewell. A few quick kisses between the more demonstrative sisters, a touched hand. Attavaia and Enneas both hugged Orissa, a girl they’d grown up with, shared all those unlawful feasts and rooftop games with. She’d taken the thrust of a spear in her thigh on the wall.

  “Now for some noise,” Sister Chanalugh said cheerfully. “Attalissa go with you, and the Old Great Gods.”

  She gathered broken tiles, began pitching them down into the court, aiming at the torch-bearers, screaming, “Godless bastards, child-killers! The Old Great Gods damn your souls to the cold hells! Your mothers curse your names!”

  The others who were to remain joined in the abuse, making every sharp-edged fragment count. The raiders began screaming fouler insults, setting arrows to bows. The twelve followed Attavaia down the few steep steps to the wall, which had a low outer parapet but no inner. They crawled on hands and knees against that shielding edge, darkness in darkness.

  Attavaia looked back once. Raiders at the foot of the stairs, some with Northron round wooden shields raised high, beginning a methodical climb up.

  “Like the sun on the water rises our lady…” Chanalugh’s rich voice rose in a hymn. Other voices joined hers. “Come on up, then, you murdering bastards, or are you waiting for us to die of old age?”

  The first pale light of dawn flowed cold and clear over the eastern peaks in advance of the sun, and roosters crowed as though the morning was welcome. The air was harsh in the lungs; smoke rolled ashore on a northerly breeze off the water.

  The Blackdog and Attalissa huddled together under the eaves of an abandoned goatshed. The girl had her arm over the dog’s shoulders. Every so often she lost her battle for self-possession and gulped on a sob, tears leaking, tracing wet tracks down a face grubby from a scramble up the steep shore to this shadowed shelter at the roadside.

  Otokas could go no further. Despite all the dog’s will, the man faded, carrying the dog’s wounds even in whatever state he existed when the dog was their physical form in the world.

  A panicked trickle of people passed them, those who had reached boats to flee the island or who lived in the scattered steadings along the lakeshore. They carried whatever they had been able to snatch up, cloth-shrouded bundles or overflowing reed baskets. Some rode shaggy ponies, or yaks. Many drove a few yaks or sheep and goats before them, or carried squawking baskets of fowl.

  Most were making for the rough tracks to the high summer pastures, though the alpine grazing would hardly be greening and snow could linger on the northern slopes for weeks yet. Hardly any continued on towards the eastern end of the lake, the road that climbed down to Serakallash and the Red Desert, or the trail that rose from that road to high Narvabarkash. The people of the mountains were reluctant to leave their own valleys whatever fate of flood or rock or war overtook them.

  Some glanced at the girl and went on, too lost in their own terror to spare thought for any other. She was only a wet, dirty, lost child, clinging to a wounded dog that was now merely the size of the big guard-dogs for the herds, noticeable but not remarkable. A young man cursed them when the yaks he drove bellowed and swerved aside. An old woman perched amid bundles on a sway-backed pony shouted, “Hurry, child, before the raiders come,” but she did not rein in or look back once she had passed. The dogs among the fleeing scurried by, tails clamped low.

  They were none of them fit to carry the Blackdog, not while Otokas had breath left, and choice.

  We have to hide, Oto, Attalissa said, but the coherent shape of the thought was nearly swamped in the child’s terror. She had hardly been off the holy islet since the day he and Old Lady and the sister who had been Spear Lady before Kayugh carried her there, a little, week-old baby.

  Go to her birth family, up in a distant tributary village? They had been well paid for the honour they endured, bearing a daughter who was no daughter. They had not seen ‘Lissa since she had been weaned and the proud mother sent back to her family and her six elder children. The woman had died a few years later, Otokas remembered, in an eighth or ninth pregnancy. The father had been poor, the village yakherd, wealthier now with the temple’s gift, but still a yakherd. No warrior. A suddenly returned young girl, call her niece or cousin, would hardly go unnoticed even among his flock of children, especially when all his village knew the goddess had chosen him for her fathering.

  “Oto?”

  He had not answered the girl, found himself lying down across her feet without willing to do so. Even the dog weakened, as the man’s soul ebbed.

  “Oto! Dog, don’t die, you can’t die. I won’t let you.”

  Hush, love. The Blackdog will never leave you. I’ll always be with you.

  “I want you, Otokas!”

  A family hurried past the shed, father, heavily pregnant mother, sour-faced old man, four children, all carrying bundles. The father slowed, looked back. “Are you alone, child? Did you get separated from your mama? You’d better come with us. The goddess only knows how long those brutes will stay busy in the town.” He held out a hand.

  Attalissa buried her face in the dog’s heavy ruff, crying, “No! No!”

  He was an unhappy man, a fisherman who loved his children with a worried, remote love that stumbled at showing itself. He felt only weary tolerance of his ever-unsatisfied wife, greater loathing of her venom-tongued father. He planned to go up to his wife’s family’s summer grazing hut, no further, come back down as soon as the warlord had settled into some firmer control of the town and his bandits. What choice had he? His living was the water and his boat. A weak-souled man, and no fighter, either.

  Otokas was cold and weary, and even the dog’s body hurt. When it could no longer hold him in life he would die, and it would take what host it could find, any man near, willing or no, and break him to its will if it had to, for Attalissa’s sake. But that was not a fate he would wish on even a raider, and a man so taken could prove a poor guardian for a child—for the short time such an unwill
ing host would survive, before madness ate his mind away and death took him in turn.

  The fisherman might be the best Attalissa could hope for, for now.

  But the man had already shrugged and hurried on after his family.

  Not worthy. None of them had been worthy of Attalissa’s trust and love. Not one had stopped with any real will to help the child, no one had cared anything for a lost human girl, and if they could not care for an abandoned child, what right had they to say they loved their goddess?

  Then there was no one at all, until a young man clattered past on a dun stallion, a tall, fine-boned beast with a swallow’s grace, desert-bred.

  “Damn!”

  The man cursed and circled back to the girl and the dog. No local man; he was from one of the tribes of the Western Grass, the dry hills west of the deserts, beyond the great river, the Kinsai-av. His beardless, broad-cheekboned face and arms were dark with interlacing tattoos, twisting and knotted cats and birds and serpents, black and blue. Dark-brown hair swung over his shoulders in dozens of fine braids, each knotted with red yarn, and he wore a sabre at his side. The small buckler slung at his back was newly scored and notched, and fresh blood stained his leather jerkin.

  The Blackdog snarled, Otokas seeing threat there, thinking raider, lurching to his feet. Attalissa stood up too, a hand fisted in his fur.

  “Come on, little sister,” the man said. “You can’t stay here alone. Give me your hand.” He eyed the Blackdog warily. “Sayan bless the beast, he must have fought well for you, but he’s dying. You can’t stay here with him.”

  Attalissa stared up at him, wide-eyed. He grabbed for her over the dog’s back, but Otokas spun fast as a striking snake and seized his arm. And held him, only held him, teeth never breaking the skin. The man froze, and the horse laid back its ears. Attalissa stood on the toes of her bare feet, supporting herself on the dog, and stretched to touch the man’s leaning face.

  “He’s not a raider,” she said. Let him go, Oto. He doesn’t mean to hurt me.

  Otokas released him. No, no malice in the man’s sudden grab, just practical haste, to carry the child off to some greater safety than a crumbling shed and a dying dog.