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CHAPTER III

Settling. Week 8.

Tellurith’s Diary

Shameful to squander such a leverage so easily, but with an epidemic in the offing, what could I do? Had Darthis guessed at that . . . And it was thrifty, at least, to bring off my two men under the one shield. I only hope that Darthis, when she recovers, will not devise some hill-felling counter-stroke.

Because we cannot truly alienate her. When our daughters are grown, when, I dream, we no longer marry House fashion, so far more men will be needed—when, in any case, the blood wants widening—then Iskarda must provide their mates.

* * *

Meanwhile we have an epidemic, if not strangle-cough; some sort of mountain fever, Caitha says, which brings us outsiders down in sneezing, aching heaps. The medicine store is stripped; they are down to boiled willow-tea for the joints and hellien-leaf steam for the chest. The children are the worst. Yet every woman who takes to her bed is another empty worker’s place, another house delayed. And we are nearer winter by another day.

Which has thrown most of the nursing onto the men, so I would hardly have seen my husbands this last half-moon, even had I not been ears under in housing plans.

The houses have been the most long-drawn change of all. Women from Downhill, women from Uphill, shattered clan affiliations to somehow merge, old-style Iskardan houses to adapt. And men to fit as well. “Not a tower, no,” said Ahio, rubbing her ruin of an ear; memento from the shaper’s shop. “But Mother, how’s a woman to bed her husband when he’s running all over the house? What if he’s married out of the house? Give ’em a place of their own and let us go to them.”

So the new houses are usually cluster-shape: suites of rooms for work, for men, women, children, sub-sets of clan or kin, about a central kitchen-hall, store-rooms outermost, to chill perishables. Stone outer walls, mostly: with arrow-slit windows, and the sort of vantage point where you can use a light gun, as well as a bow.

This house, though, is Iskardan built. Meant for a single two or three generation family, and hence segregated except for the kitchen. Which is useless to me, who needs a workplace and meeting-room, and cannot make it among the looms.

Nor, when the time came, would my household disperse. So Charras, who has become our architect, has designed outliers and wings, and what looks alarmingly like a perimeter wall, with storehouses and a couple of byres inside. And now it will be a household, if not a House. My troublecrew and their kin in the uphill wing, and Iatha’s folk across the hall, Shia and Hanni’s suites where the old weaving-room was; my own work-room next the kitchen, for warmth, and the old dining chamber for a council place. My—our—sleeping quarters, just behind that, will be the only thing unchanged; since, as Charras said, “I’d uproot the hill before I tried to shift that bed of yours.”

This afternoon has shifted almost everything else.

* * *

Charras haled me from pay tallies at Zariah’s house, amid a roomful of hacking, coughing toddlers and filthy, harried men. They had half the house gutted, on a dour, overcast autumn day; no light weather, up here in Iskarda. We had just settled an underground store-room entrance, for after all, the cave is there, and were on to heating pipes when Verrith came striding through the stone-dust, calling, “Ruand! There’s a new one in!”

The Korite youngsters’ influx has masked a steady dribble of other strangers; fugitives, afterthoughts, slipping away from our old world. The River, Amberlight. And of course their news must be sifted, though their expectation, if not need to see Telluir’s Head in person was growing near ritual. I opened my mouth to say, Iatha can handle this. Verrith said, too blank-faced, “Desis said, Get you.”

I shut my mouth and moved.

Desis had taken the incomer to Quetho’s house, the only place out of quarantine. She was hunched over the makeshift hearth, a fiery silhouette; elbows, Crafter’s plait, Dhasdein soldier’s cloak. Then she rose and turned and time ran widdershins.

“You,” I said, like the veriest numbskull. “You’re dead.”

“Ruand.” Not a House or Craft greeting; a Navy salute. Everything else, the sharp nose, the tawny eyes, the crinkled Amberlight hair, a perfect duplicate. Except the face, drawn with exhaustion; sharpening, as I looked, with something else.

“That was my sister, Ruand.”

“But—!”

“My mother went with Wasp. Yes.”

I opened my eyes in time to see her within a hairsbreadth of breaking Navy stance and springing to hold me up. “Ah, Ruand . . .”

I had grieved, of course I grieved, as we all had for Wasp, most gallant of Navy craft, lost in the last battle against the massed galleys of Dhasdein. And the family with her, mother, sisters, all the precious command chain; except the youngest daughter, who had potential to be a cutter, who had come into the House the season before.

Who died in my arms, during the city’s fall.

“But how did you—”

She had been wounded all but mortally in the ship’s loss. Dragged ashore by Dhasdein marines among their own casualties, still lying, when the city fell, in a hospital tent. Struggling back to convalescence in a world from which her world had gone.

“They want to keep the Houses up; Terraqa and Jerrish. But without the pearl-rock . . .”

The curl of her nostrils said the rest. Would she putter about a wharf or vie for copper fiels in a rowing boat amid the ragged longshoremen of a city that no longer tithed, and graced, and centered the River’s world?

And she had another, closer reason for coming after us.

They had been a well-to-do Telluir clan, already with their own modest men’s tower just down the hill. As a cutter, her sister might have been their foothold inside the House itself. Mother knows, they paid a bankruptcy price for Khira to marry there. To share marriage-ties with the very Head.

In the long run, it was probably all that saved Sarth from the cataclysm of divorce.

My household had gathered already: Iatha to deputize, Hanni with the slate for notes; Zuri, more granite-like than usual. Of course, they knew. When does a House-head expect privacy?

I said, “Your father’s here.”

“M-my—”

This one had known too. Yet for all she had gone through, a Navy officer, she stuttered on the word.

“You needn’t see him yet. I thought you might like to know he was safe.” How scurrilously easy it is, in possession, to be generous. “Sit down, first, and get warm. And give me the Riverword, while they make you something to eat.”

I could feel Charras’ scowl on my back. Neglect the house for a Head to play secretary? Zuri’s too: Usurp troublecrew’s place? But the incomer, Navy by skill and blood, turned to business with relief.

Damas and Eutharie, the chief surviving House-heads, were bent on preserving the forms without the substance of Amberlight, from tithes on the Kora grain to rebuilt towers. There was no real resistance. The sack had decimated River Quarter; the Downhill clan folk who chose to stay had fallen in, willy-nilly. It was, and again the faint curl of the lip spoke her opinion, their only choice.

However paltry, there was trade to offer tolls; there were soldiers, deserters, wounded straggling home, who needed quarters and food. There was a trickle of caravan commerce upriver from Verrain, and another of Heartland exotics, mahogany, ivory, coming down from Cataract.

“Assassination, faction battles, civil war up there.” Had she been a River Quarter stevedore, she would have smacked her lips. “Seems Dinda was worse than most.”

Dinda being Cataract’s half-crazy military tyrant, who had died among the first in the fall of Amberlight. And being from a line of military tyrants, had left the city to settle his successor in a more than usually bloody way.

“Shuya’s got her hands full with an Oasis uprising; they say she’s lost another five caravans.”

President of Verrain, our downstream neighbor; whose wealth comes cross-desert from the Oases, gold freighted in on the endless camel caravans, to sustain the forty Families, over whom she ruled by uneasy consent. And, as with the Oases, by plentiful coercion. For which she had used qherrique. Before I recalled we used to supply her, I had almost answered, Good.

“And Dhasdein?”

She frowned. The impersonal talk had relaxed her; it was the shrewd, informed judgment of a politics-reader, a report such as any officer might give her Head.

“No trouble in the colonies. No word that the Emperor wanted to hang his general, or crucify the officers, or even fell down and foamed. He’s got his busted army back. There’s trade, or at least, they’re buying some timber. But . . .”

But Dhasdein was the River’s strongest state, whose army and navy had been the mainspring of our overthrow. Whose might had been hurled down in turn. Whose general had absconded with the enemy. Surely, one might expect more action from Dhasdein?

Such worries are for House-heads, to gnaw the vitals in some sleepless morning watch. I said, “Your news is precious.” With a Navy officer, no call for more. “Iatha, will you see to Tez here?” Find what she needed, what she had brought—some came with what they stood in, some lacked shoes to stand—where she could be quartered, what she was good for now. Despite everything, I could not withhold a smile.

“I’m so glad to know you’re safe. To have someone here from Wasp.”

To keep the honor, and the memory, and the family alive.

We had both risen. The smile came back to me, but with constraint. “Ah—Ruand—”

“Your father. Of course. I think they’re in Zariah’s house.” Hanni nodded. “Then let’s find him now.”

* * *

Settling. Week 8.

Journal kept by Sarth

One could wish, at times, that House-heads were less—god-like in their resolutions. I see quite clearly why Tellurith spoke as she did with Darthis: balancing consecration against sacrilege, saving the House. Shielding us both. I understand I had no more right to cry, I want to save myself! than he to protest his breached privacy. But—!

There has been no time for nursing wounds or grudges since. The epidemic has left us no time for nursing anything. Except the sick, where and whenever Caitha sends us. Heat hellien-steam, boil willow-tea. Wash faces, wipe noses, wipe bottoms, boil nose-wipes, boil bottom-wipes, mop up vomit, carry, wipe, clean . . . And I must admit, Alkhes has amazed me. I thought he would jib, or turn up his general’s nose, and the perverse creature has kept with me in the thick of it. With his arm healed he has even learnt, after a fashion, to rock a fractious toddler to sleep.

I asked him how, once, in a house-nursery’s bedlam: fifteen children from one to ten bellowing, weeping, coughing, choking, throwing up . . . He gave me one of those looks, all eyes and dagger-points, and said, “Nobody’s bleeding here.”

Meaning, I think, that it is worse in a field hospital. Astonishing that one who kills so proficiently should be at all concerned about patching the debris. Let alone confronting his victories’ price.

I was the more astounded when he shot into the dispensary this morning squeaking, “Sarth, what am I supposed to—Sarth!”

The dispensary is the storeroom of Zariah’s barrack-half: shelves for medical supplies, filthy clothes and gear in heaps, stairs to the wash-tub and boiling cauldron. Huis and I had just heaved another load of water home. Unsighted indoors, I read only the body-stance. But experience, let be Tower skills, forbade, What’s wrong?

I grabbed the newest basket of foul linen and said, “Help me get these on.”

“I can’t, I need—”

A fresh child began crying. Huis rubbed his head and hurried off, I hissed, “We can’t talk now!”

Down in the washing bay I tipped water in the big cauldron: four trips, and half of it gone. Automatically he shoved wood underneath, and while I sorted fouled blankets from used nose-wipes I demanded, “What’s wrong?”

“Sarth, I can’t—!” He burst up from the wood-pile looking wild enough to bolt. “I’ve done everything else but I—”

“What is it?” I did manage to soften the tone.

“Asaskian.” Suddenly he was red to the ears. “She wants—she needs—and I—”

“Asaskian!” Laundry went every way. With mother and eldest sister among the rare cutter-wielders, vital to the stone-work, Zariah’s second daughter had become the pillar of her house. Just fifteen, she had carried us all, calm, unflustered, resources never failing, until she fell ill herself. “You haven’t let her out of bed?”

“Gods, of course not!” She had gone from fever to chest chokeage. Caitha said it was worry atop exhaustion and dosed her with as much sleep-syrup as she dared. “But she—she—”

Asaskian was a daughter to dream of: slim and lithe and elegant as a walking palm, perfect honey-gold skin and great amber eyes and clouds of copper-auburn hair. There were times I wondered if my heart would break, just looking at her.

And when the complications began . . . I tore up the stairs, snapping back at him, “Then what is it, for the Mother’s sake?”

“Sarth . . . !”

The tone swung me round. If he had been scarlet before he was crimson now. “She’s all right, she just—I just—oh, gods!”

All too clearly, the crisis was here.

I came back down. Threw the last nose-wipes in. Got flint and tinder. When I thought he could suffer it, asked quietly, “What is it, Alkhes?”

His ears were still scarlet. He was so like some Tower adolescent netted in disaster, it was all I could do not to push his hair back as on that first day. At last he muttered it, to the distant floor.

“She needs a—uh—a bed . . .”

A bed-pan. When he had been emptying chamber-pots and wiping bottoms for a solid three-quarter moon.

“And I—Sarth, I can’t go in there and do that, she’s a grown girl!”

Mother, the Outland notion of modesty is something I will never plumb. I managed to swallow that too. To say, almost reasonably, “You’ve done it for all the rest. You’d do it,” a stroke of genius, “for Tellurith.”

“I’m married to Tellurith! I’m not even related to this one!”

“Oh.” It was modesty, then decorum, however convolute. Meanwhile, the girl was probably bursting. “Watch the cauldron,” I said, and shot upstairs.

Asaskian shared her mother’s room, halfway down the corridor. Having been all but embraced for my rescue, having listened for a renewed whisper in her chest; having once again sheathed in my own flesh the thought that said, These speaking eyes, this daybreak smile, the bones under this peaked skin and the delicately wasted shape under this coverlet, these could, these should have been yours; having kicked up the brazier, I hurried for the slops buckets inside the front entry; and ran straight into Tellurith.

With Iatha, and Zuri, and another pocketful of luminaries, some House progress. And—

My very bones solidified. Sharp nose, amber eyes, Navy stance. Thick-crinkled, Amberlight hair.

“There you are, Sarth,” said Tellurith. She smiled. “We’ve been so lucky. Do you remember Tez?”

Trust a House-head at once to find and bridge the gap between a father and a daughter seen once, a baby, in her twenty years. A daughter the image of the mother that I lost, ten years before she died.

And she spoke so calmly. Too calmly. It steadied me, to smother the gulp. To manage, “This is a blessing unlooked-for. The Mother has smiled on us.”

It seemed enough for Tez. Her stance unlocked. She even managed the beginnings of a smile. “Father . . .”

Father. The elision, the absence in her life. The unmentionable scandal. The loss, the bleeding lacuna, that I had blanked out of mine.

“I—uh—uh—”

“Tez is quartered in our house,” said Tellurith. This smile would have thawed the Iskans. “We can talk properly when we all finish work.”

When the River runs back to Cataract. She meant it was temporary lodging until Tez was provisioned and chose work, and she—or I—made it her living place. And a graceful solution to the clash of clutching a full bedpan and greeting—or Mother avert, trying to embrace—a daughter. While still feeling hit over the head.

* * *

Settling. Week 8.

Meditations. Alkhes-Assandar

I will never, never, never understand these people. In or out of Amberlight.

Do Sarth justice, he’s run this hospital like a veteran orderly, never flinched, not with three brats puking on him at once. To have him come back down those stairs looking like—like—

I dropped the cauldron-stick in the muck and grabbed him and said, “Sit down.”

An earthquake, that Sarth should show so much. A cataclysm, that he sat down, plump on the wood-heap. That he did what I said.

In seven weeks I’ve learnt a little. If they show it, and you have to notice, you never, ever ask these men what’s wrong.

I stirred splashes out of the cauldron and muttered, “Sorry about that.”

That got a jerk. A blink. I never thought I’d be sorry to see him so, so . . . That he’s beautiful makes it worse. If you can call beautiful a nursing orderly at shift end, with his week-worn gear stinking like a latrine and circles under his eyes and his hair in witch-knots all over his face.

He shook his head. Shook it again. I forgot all about tower manners and blurted, “Sarth, what’s wrong?”

He looked at me then. Those eyes . . . I dropped the stick and put both hands on him.

“Nothing’s wrong.” It was still wobbling like an over-galloped horse. “I just—she just—my daughter just arrived.”

That time, I nearly sat down.

And did bite my tongue on, What daughter? She said that was the tragedy. Tellurith said you had only sons!

I can bottle it up, but I still can’t ask politely. The best I could manage was, “Uh—Sarth?”

If you lean, it steadies him. He only wobbles when you try to prop him up.

“Khira’s daughter. My third wife. She was,” a deep breath, “captain on the Wasp.”

Forget that name? When she and her hell-hounds cost me three good war-galleys, not to mention the men? And what in the River-lord’s hell did that matter now?

“Sarth . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t understand!”

It got his attention back. It even, can you believe it, produced a breath of a laugh.

“I beg your pardon.” Who else, here, would say that? Or omit, Of course, you’re outlander. “She. Khira. Children go to—the mother. They belong to—her house.”

“But you sired her! You had a goddamn daughter, why didn’t that count—oh,” I said, and grabbed him. “Oh, damn. Oh, gods.”

In a minute he had breath enough to move. To manage, “It’s all right.”

It was not all right. It never would be all right. But there comes a time when it’s kinder to cut an arrowhead out.

“If you had a daughter,” I said deliberately, “Tellurith’s children don’t matter. You can’t be cursed.”

“Not in the House!”

Time was, if he’d spoken like that, I’d have kicked in his throat.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But surely, wherever she was—”

He shook his head. Got up. Found the stirring stick. Prodding clothes, said quietly—oh, how quietly—“The only children that matter are those by your first wife. The children of her own House.”

I had the wit—gods be thanked, I did have the wit not to say, Well at least she’s here, alive, we can be grateful something survived. I levered the stick away from him and said, “They probably need you upstairs. I’ll see to this.”

* * *

How can a man get a child and lose her? Have her taken out of his life, neat as a haircut, for twenty living years? How can she not count as his daughter, just because she lives in another house? In another part of the same House?

I never had a daughter. A son by a—camp-follower. Back in Verrain, working the caravans, I was still a boy myself. She swore it was mine, it had black hair. I gave her two fistfuls of pay tokens—unminted gold—and said, “All right, he’s mine, goodbye.” She was a camp-follower, she understood.

I wonder, did he die of fever or strangle-cough or all the other multitudinous children’s ills I’ve seen in Iskarda?

With Cherisa, the question never arose.

The River-lord witness, she was beautiful. And well-dowered, a fine Dhasdeini merchant’s daughter, a trader to the colonies, climbing the noble ladder faster than I was myself. Antastes’ newest corps commander, risen from guard officer, surely going higher, heavens, sir, marry my daughter, I’ll be proud.

For the ceremony, even the Emperor came.

So I settled her in a corps commander’s house, and went blithely off to campaign in Quetzistan, all set to dream of white fingers and pearl-painted toenails and nubile breasts and hair like a black waterfall, just waiting for me to come home.

While she never waited at all.

Kuris and I had a duel over it. I put the point in his shoulder and disabled him for a season. He was a valued officer.

And she divorced me within the year.

Not for Kuris. Or any of the others, for all I know. Sir, her father said, at the settling up, it’s not what she expected. A husband who’s never home.

I thought, It’s the price of war. It can be paid. What war leaves a mess like this?

* * *

By some mercy, this evening our off-duty shift matched a gap in House business. So when I reached the kitchen, leg-weary and brain-wrecked but clean of stench and filth for once, the person stirring the supper pot was Tellurith.

“Tel!” I pounced. “Quick, explain about Sarth . . .”

And knew better before I finished. And had no time to groan, before she took me by the wrist and tugged.

I had the wit not to let I’m sorry off my tongue.

She pushed back my hair. Not looking. But she likes to do that, and at least, this time, it was clean. I leant against the hearth-stool and side-eyed her profile, and kept quiet.

“I tried not to hate her,” she said.

From a thousand miles away. From a world I would never, ever enter. Never know.

I got up on my knees and put both arms around her. With Tellurith, I know where I am. With Tellurith, we can both lean.

She laid her head against mine. Grief, her muscles brought me, long-festered, long-fought grief. And jealousy. And hate.

“Four daughters. The only ones he ever sired. After my first two—the others—” a sharp breath, “avoided him. And I—”

Had been House-head. Daughterless. Unable to acknowledge his. Unable to forget them, unable to share them. Small wonder she had hated. I would have cut Khira’s throat.

“Ah, caissyl . . .”

My muscles too had translated things. She buried her face in my hair.

“And now . . . all the rest are dead.”

The rest of Khira’s brood. The daughters she had envied, and hungered for, and feared she had wished, if not sent, to their deaths.

Of a surety a god gave me the rest. I gathered her face up, and kissed her, more than carefully, on the lips.

“But she’s here,” I said. “Alive. And he’s out of the tower. He can live in the same house with her. Talk to her. Be with her. Whatever else you did, you’ve given them that.”

When you can convince her—can save her from herself—Tellurith has the loveliest smile.

* * *

So as soon as we were in bed, she destroyed my night’s rest.

There is no way Antastes will sit still for a lost army, a wrecked fleet, an absconding general. The mere cost would cripple him. The loss of face, the threat to the empire from emboldened enemies, is worse.

“Um,” said Tellurith. “The River has other news.”

The word on Verrain and Cataract did make me breathe easier. Plenty there to distract Antastes. We lay as we had in her House-head’s quarters: discussing the River, discussing policy, her head on my arm, her hair across my shoulder, the qherrique a whisper of light on the marbled walls. Trust, safety, warmth. Communion. Two minds matched, shared.

As here, amid the bleakness beyond the dying brazier, the furs, Sarth’s breathing, the waxing moonshine on unpolished planks.

A third excluded, because politics was beyond him.

Or so I thought. Until Tellurith took a handful of that hair, as she so often does when he considers it groomed enough, and said, “Sarth, what do you think?”

I thought the quiet was shock. Surely, she had never sought advice in the tower?

But in a minute or two he said, “There is a very good road from here.”

“And we’re north of Marbleport.”

The pair of them were thirty strides ahead. He meant the leveled, surveyed, double-wagon width by which the marble goes straight to the Riverside. A good road for messengers. She meant, advance warning from downRiver of incursion by land or water, possibly a spy-ring’s base for news earlier still. It was out on my own thought. “A marble factor would be perfect cover. Could you spare a light gun or so for signaling?”

Quite clearly I felt Tellurith gasp. The little startled laugh. Before the tousle of my hair that was a caress, which other times have taught me was compliment. To the speed of my own wits.

She said, “We need a marble factor anyhow, and well before winter’s end. We can’t spare light guns. But perhaps signal fires.”

“Signal posts?” Sarth sounded dubious.

“Once the houses are done, some convalescents might winter down there. Must see Iatha . . .”

The rest came on a mighty yawn. She turned on her side, sleep-time’s signal. And, as she did scrupulously, laid her head on one or other of our shoulders. This time, the turn was Sarth’s.

I still wonder what she would have done if it were not.

* * *

Settling. Week 8.

Journal kept by Sarth

Blessings on Tellurith, that after the unseaming awkwardness of that supper, she talked politics in bed, and did not try to ease or clarify other things for either of us. Not in front of Alkhes.

So there was a night to absorb it: a daughter, again, still, after all. A presence to learn and share, flesh and blood.

And exhumed ghosts.

Better, perhaps, that Alkhes was there. All those years between us, and the words never spoken. Four daughters. But what could I have said? Tellurith, I would cut my heart out if it gave you a girl?

While she, the Mother knows what she suffered, not to avenge herself on Khira, who had her heart’s desire. And now, to welcome Khira’s child. What was I to tell her now?

Tellurith, forgive me. I need—I want—you both?

Bless the Mother for mundanity that turned us all out before daylight, and had me emptying bedpans before breakfast, with the length of a shift until we met again. Or so I thought, until the hands across Pheroka’s clean sheet grew an owner. Tez.

“I learnt quite a bit,” she said, “in the hospital.”

As a prisoner-of-war. Mother bless, that there were sheets to pick up, a face to wash, hair to brush.

“I can do that.”

In the last resort, a door.

And with it, a message: I don’t want you. Go away.

I waited with the sheets. Walked with her. We kept stealing glances, silly as a pair of brats. With Alkhes I would have said, Do this, Can you fetch that? But she was a woman, as well as my daughter. The clash disabled me.

“Father?”

Sorting laundry. More deftly, that morning, than I. The last pile went down, the eyes rose. “I can go away.”

Sharp-boned, controlled, her mother’s mirror, down to those masked bronze eyes. The face that had left me, in the Tower.

But we were not in the Tower.

I had time to bless Tellurith, and feel the smile blossom even as I thanked Sethar and his antecedent generations who taught me to read and tender a woman, and shape fitting words round my own joy.

“Tez, you’re a Navy officer; a woman grown. And you must go where your duty is. I would bless the Mother to have you here. To know you. But whatever you do, you are my daughter. And I know—I’ve known this long time—you will make me—I am—so proud.”

One would not say such a thing to a woman, in the Tower. Nor had I ever touched a woman outside marriage. But I mustered the nerve to kiss her cheek. And to accept—the Mother knows, how well I’ve learnt acceptance—her embrace.

She was smiling when she looked up. Wet-eyed, radiant. It was “duty” did it. I have not husbanded a Navy captain for nothing. She patted me like a child with a new toy.

“The Ruand wants a factor down at Marbleport. And somebody to run an information net. Iatha said troublecrew, but they don’t know ships, and we can’t afford to get cheated over freight. And on Wasp I gathered the intelligence-reports.”

Here, and gone. “Duty” cuts both ways.

“But I wondered. I was worried—”

About her father. Her mother’s relict. Her responsibility. She feared Tellurith might have borne a grudge. After the way I treated her, who would be surprised?

She laughed out loud. “But it’s all right. It’s better than I ever thought. I can come back and see you. And you’re doing all this, you’re just as good as a woman—”

The eyes flickered, a glint that once had tweaked my heart.

“Except,” it became a wicked grin, “so much prettier.”

Then she patted my rump and grabbed a water jar on her way to the outer door.

* * *

Settling. Week 9.

Tellurith’s Diary

Thank the Mother, the epidemic has eased at last; we never had more need, for autumn is dwindling too. We have already lost two days to the first storm, and the weather is chilling fast. Mother bless that we still have supplies coming to pack the new storerooms; and six houses done, and thanks to our scavengers, a supply of semi-winter clothes. At times I swear the whole village walks about in those lined double-worsted Dhasdein officers’ cloaks, or quilted jackets that still stink of cameleer.

But it is a time to walk, and not just to the workshops or the market-place. Outside the houses the air is beautiful, cutting, but sharp as wine. We finished here yesterday: sealed the roof, set the threshold step, burnt the incense sticks. I gave the workcrew the rest of the day off, and on impulse told my household, “Let’s spend tomorrow in the hills.”

A cold, austere beauty they have now, the shedding trees stripped, skeletal between the viridian or snow-silver of pine and hellien, the grass a tawny silk that plays like cat fur under the slicing winds. Their eddies sketch out the range front, contour after contour, crest, valley, spur beyond. Drawing your eyes to the horizon, where already the peaks are blanched with snow.

By now troublecrew know the mountain like their hands. Zuri and Azo and Verrith and Desis, they all came; and Hanni, and Shia, and her sisters, and Iatha, and her mother, and the house’s children. And the men. And Tez.

I will never know what Sarth said to her; but from the early sunlight as we climbed, crystal-sharp under that pale autumn sky, to the stride back in twilight, the vast bowl of River plain darkening eastward under the jewel-drop of a rising star, in a day clear-cut as a fine intaglio, their commerce has been the purest line. Walking, talking, just sitting together; sometimes with no more than a smile. Until she swatted his rump, as we separated to our sleeping quarters, and called, “Night, Father!” before she whistled off down the passageway.

Alkhes grinned. Zuri gave her an eye. Sarth . . .

Indubitably, unmistakably. Sarth smirked.

Blessings on the Mother. Alkhes was right. Whatever else falls, wherever else we fail, I, we, have given him his daughter. At last.

* * *

Settling. Week 9.

Meditations. Alkhes-Assandar

If there was just some warning of these things!

I knew damn well Tellurith would try it again. With the sickness, we’ve been too blind tired to think, let alone sleep at the same time in the same bed. But I should have thought, when yesterday was so easy—so different—

We shave and clean up every night we’re home. How else, sleeping with Tellurith? And at any chance Sarth will wash that hair of his. Thick as a rope, sheeny as burnished bronze, halfway down his back. If there’s rosemary, he rinses with it. I even helped comb it, before supper, I never thought anything different.

Until Tellurith rolled over. And started kissing him.

What could I do? Climb out and run? I knew how far I’d get. Lie there like a brothel spy?

Join in?

I’ve been in battles and less terrified. Probably I twitched—who could help it? She let him go, and rolled back over to me.

And I nearly tore the furs clean off the bed.

“Caissyl . . .”

So soft. So quiet. I almost choked. I did manage, “I can’t, Tel! You know I can’t!”

“No demands, caissyl.” Her fingers in my hair, running up behind my ear. She knows what that does to me. “Nothing you don’t want. But you could at least hold me—touch me—”

While he . . . I practically squawked, “I can’t!”

She kept quiet. Of course that was worse. What could I do? What could I say? I swear, they’ll never understand!

I was still trying to find words when the lamp took light.

He had found the flint, rekindled the wick, before I felt him move. When it caught he leant up over her. A statue moving, all those gilded muscle curves, the hair a bronze flood across his shoulder, the light dark as distilled amber on his eyes.

“Touch me, then.” It was weird to hear Sarth talk through his teeth. “If she’s too much for you, touch me. Or is your manhood too fragile? Does it rub off like face-paint? Can you only say, I’m a man because I do what a man’s supposed to? Do you dare say, Being a man is whatever I do?”

I never . . . never thought he could sound like that. But even before breath returned, I understood.

It wasn’t anger. Or jealousy. It was a challenge.

And if I ran out, I’d never look him in the face again.

I got out of bed. Tellurith never moved. I stamped round the bed foot, and yanked the covers back, and said through my own teeth, “Move over and see.”

He slid across without a word. That hair was everywhere. All over the pillows, mixed in the furs, tawny, gold-streaked, skeins of black-bronze silk. I leant over and dug both hands full of it.

* * *

It has taken a long time to write this.

I’m still not sure I can write it. How in the gods’ name can you think—can you admit—can you feel something like this and still be a man?

Hang him. That’s just where he challenged me. Are you a man because you only do what’s allowed for a man? Or can you say, Being a man is whatever I do?

Before I came to Amberlight, I never thought about it. I was a man, and being a man was what I did, and what I did was right; because that was what men did.

Only, which men?

Is Sarth less of a man, because he was raised a woman’s plaything? Because he spent his life in a tower, and lost his sons, and never killed?

When he can carry water till I drop, and coax a child I’d strangle, and read Tellurith ten times better than I. When he has manners, and control, and endurance—

When he doesn’t need a weapon. Beyond his tongue.

When he can dare me to—that—and probably feel, know, face already what I still can’t bear to write.

That when I took hold of his hair—it was because I wanted to.

Had long wanted to.

How does a man cope with that?

It was so thick. And soft. And warm. Finer than silk. Smoother than Tellurith’s. Hers is full of kinks. I wanted to fill my hands with it and smell it and wallow in it. I wanted—

So I put both elbows on it. And slid right down on top of him. And kissed the bastard. Full on the mouth.

That was—something else.

To start with, a man’s skin is different. Smoother than a woman’s and harder, both at once. But so is the—the bone, the musculature. Harder, more pronounced, more . . . the only word is, masculine. Not in size, even shape. Proportions, perhaps. The shaping under the flesh.

And his response . . . Women—some women wait for your lead. Some women open their mouths like a trap. Some women sit like a lump of meat. Men—I don’t know about any other men. Sarth left me the lead and hardly moved his lips, and it was a dozen nuances of reply. Aware. Alive. Answering.

Does he kiss a woman like that?

It was something to wonder while I was asking: What in the River-lord’s hell do I do next?

Till he put his free arm round my neck and slid his fingers up into my hair.

With Tellurith, that’s one thing. With Sarth . . .

The weight, the heft of well-developed man’s muscle in that position almost panicked me. Too much unarmed combat, I was too vulnerable. I half pulled back. He laughed into my mouth. Just the slightest breath.

So I kept still, of course. And his fingers slid . . .

Maybe he learnt it with women. But damn, he has a touch.

My backbone went to bubbling air. And whatever Tellurith was doing came through him to me. Twitch, locked-up muscles. Catching breath. It’s the weirdest experience, to respond to someone who’s responding to somebody else.

If she hadn’t, I doubt I could have gone on with it.

* * *

This is hard to admit too. I learnt—we all learnt, I realize—a long time ago. As a boy, when I saw someone put a hand on someone else in a barrack-yard and have his face smashed in. As a man, with a squadron commander cashiered because he loved—showed he loved—another man. “They gave me a crown,” he said, “for killing five men. Then they threw me out for loving one.” Nobody ever had to explain it: if you’re a real man you never want, never love, never look at, never touch other men.

I’m a man. Until now, I’ve never known what that means.

Lying there, my hands on him, my weight on him, his hair, his body under me, physically there—I understood what I was. How “man” isn’t “woman.” What we truly are.

And then—

I felt it happen. Rules broke. Ties—bonds broke. A wall opened. Something said: You can want to do this now. And if you want it, you can do.

As much as Sarth, I have been inside a Tower.

Worse than Sarth, because I didn’t—wouldn’t—know.

* * *

I touched his face. You do it with a woman. Learning who they are, how they’re different. But this was more than women’s differences. Skin, bone, body structure.

And—

I have to be honest. If anywhere, here. Ever since I saw the bastard I’ve—over and over, I’ve thought, he’s beautiful.

Touching him wasn’t just exploration. It was pleasure. It was possession.

Be hung, but it was desire.

Except—not like with a woman. Because a woman—You want to have her, yes, to join with her, to be more than human, for a minute, a moment, one time out of time, losing your whole self. But a man—a man is—

You.

And if he’s beautiful, the pleasure, the possession, even desire is different. Because wanting him, touching, just accepting that you want him—is to want, to accept—yourself.

* * *

I think, maybe, I can do that. Will do it. Have done it, or why am I writing this?

Or how could I have gone on with it? Once Tellurith drew his attention back, first to kiss, then embrace, then touching him. Jaw, throat, chest. Nipples. And when Tellurith does that . . .

I knew what he felt from both sides. Enough to disorient anyone. But when he rolled over, I could have let be. Could have lain there like a lump. Like the ones who watch for pay.

Even then I would have learnt enough to put me out of the bed. How I ever thought I had technique with a woman—Tel’s taught me everything I know.

And everything she knows, I know now, came from him.

But I didn’t lie there. And at some stage . . . touching him stopped being for my pleasure. And moved to making his.

Probably I was a perfect irritant. An amateur flute-player in a trio, out of time, out of tune. Tellurith has a better feel for the other’s feelings, a better sense of mutual pleasures, of give and take between the two.

I don’t think I did a good job of making it three. But I tried.

And River-lord witness, I will run if they try that on me!

* * *

Settling. Week 9.

Journal kept by Sarth

How can a man become a general—one supposes this is at least the equivalent of Sethar’s reputation—and be all but ignorant of love? What do they teach Outlanders?

And, the Mother defend me, what has he inflicted on Tellurith?

To be sure, it had a certain—poignance. Like the shy, the clumsy ardor of a very young boy, when he first tries to repay what he has learned. The Mother knows, it was the last thing I expected when he stalked round that bed. I thought I had gone too far at last. That he meant, at least, to murder me.

Who was the more surprised, when he kissed me instead?

It does seem to have eased something. Too subtle to call change, too slight to show in speech, almost too little to read in a glance. One cannot even say he looks me in the eye more often. But he does look. And even without looks, when we meet, or are together now, his stance, all his body language says, All right. Yes. You can be near me.

Going for water this morning, it made me notice the Iskardans more than usual.

Tellurith says that when we finally finish building, the next project will be water pipes. The Mother knows, of the myriad lost joys I yearn for, running water in the house—oh, inconceivable delight, hot running water in the house!—is among the first. During the epidemic, to have had even the Tower hallway fountain, where visitors used to wash their shoes . . .

It would be churlish to complain. There are plenty of other austerities, from miserly heating to the foul-burning fat-lamps, from soldiers’ hand-me-downs to the mere lack of once taken-for-granted delicacies. Oh, for something beyond corn bread and salted meat and rationed honey or dried fruit!

Until we have a trade balance, that must be foregone too. Meanwhile, we chop wood and carry water, and try not to think that, because they are all among the work-crews, the women shirk.

So we were tramping yet again to the fountain where, ever since his arm healed, Alkhes insists on taking a yoke. We climbed the five stone steps from the washing bay; tucked hoods down against the wind. Thanked our gods it had not begun to rain, and started through the mud, trying not to let the empty buckets bang our knees.

More Iskardans were abroad than usual, it being what passes for a market-day: folk up from the Kora, some hunters from the upper valleys, where fur-trapping has begun. Threading the street, we kept our eyes down. Though it is only sensible, a token appeasement, in different ways it chafes us both. But since I am far better at glancing under lashes, it was I who noticed how they looked at him.

In his own way, Alkhes is worth a look. Over-small by Tower standards, but well-cut features, and the eyes and hair . . . pools blacker than ebony, sentient midnight sea. Falls of silken mahogany, fine and straight and forever tumbling in his face. It goes up under a helmet, he says. And for all his size, well-proportioned. Subtle, lithe, exquisitely resilient; in heavy coat and infantry boots, he still has a killer’s grace.

So they look, if it is only one in ten, with something more than censure. Since the confrontation with Darthis, there has been a spice of awe. But this morning . . .

Recognition? Acknowledgement? Anticipation? Too slight, too enigmatic for analysis. But there is something—

Something they know, and we do not.

Should I mention it to Tellurith? But what would I say? I can hear Zuri now: a presentiment, some man’s fancy. And is it anything more?

* * *