A Brightness Long Ago, page 18
His horse sidles to the right, and she uses that to slip neatly inside another horse on his left. She is beside him now. The crowd is—if this is possible—even louder. A dignitary is trying to speak. He has no hope of being heard. The horses jostle each other, crowded, some rearing as they approach the rope. The Tower rider glares at her. He wants more room, she knows, space on both sides, so that when the rope drops he can point his horse forward, whichever way it has turned.
When the rope drops. No. When he signals for the rope to drop.
She absorbs his look and smiles, her sweetest smile. “Don’t like women next to you?” she says. “I’d not have guessed you that way. Not that it matters, of course.”
His head snaps back. The Fox district rider, on her other side, laughs aloud.
“Watch your mouth! I’ll fuck you with this stick,” the Tower man rasps.
“Not my favourite,” Adria says loudly. “If you must know. Is it yours? Is that it?”
More laughter. Not just the one rider this time. The Tower horseman swears. He turns away from her, starting to point his horse forward. He may be rushing it. She knows what he’s about to do, she knows what she’s doing. Men can be goaded so easily . . .
He has his horse almost aimed down the track, but she has her grey in position already. Still turning forward, he slaps his left thigh once—and the rope holders let go. The Tower rider gathers his reins, shouts at his horse, surges, positioned to go.
But Adria is ahead of him.
She is a Ripoli of Macera, is she not? She has spent her life riding. You jump in hunts—over walls, fences, streams, ditches, fallen trees. A different skill from racing along flat ground, or three times around a track. You learn how to get a horse up and over an obstacle.
Her grey has cleared the rope easily. It is only a rope, it is already dropping. A trivial jump.
And she is out on the course and ahead of them all. She slaps the grey’s neck once, feels him respond. Sauradia, her joy for this morning. There is so much joy in her just then, a hard, bright rush of it. It is not a feeling she knows intimately, but it is there to be found, if life allows.
* * *
I was astonished at how perfectly she timed it, taking the grey over the falling rope before it hit the ground. And there she was, in front of all the others, including the favoured Tower horse in the light and dark green colours.
“That clever bastard!” Monticola roared beside me. “He learned the signal!”
“What?” I cried.
He didn’t look away from the track. He said, “Tower bribed the rope men! But Folco bought the signal he used to tell them when to drop it! Jad’s blood and eyes, that woman can ride! Look at her!”
They were coming up to us now, on the first curve. I was remembering her arm around my neck on a dark stairway. She’d had a knife in her thigh six months ago, I thought, watching her urge her grey forward as Bischio went mad. It felt as if the air was shaking around me.
I stole a glance at Monticola. If she won, if Folco won, he’d win, too, probably even more—since he’d not have paid any bribes, and had every fifth wager on her to win not just come in the first three. He would undoubtedly let the other man know. With joy, I thought.
Tower was right behind Adria, two others close to him, the rest stringing out already. A bad start could ruin you in a race like this.
The leaders were at the trickiest curve for the first time, right where we were. It was brutally dangerous because the track sloped towards the wall even as you needed to curve away. Adria had her grey hugging the inside, the shorter path, away from that danger. Alone in front there was nothing to stop her, the track’s slant to the outside wall would not be a problem—this time.
Behind her, the Tower rider was using his hand already, slapping his horse hard. He, too, was clear, no rival beside him. The two behind him were side by side. The one on the inside—the Fox district horse—was drifting deliberately out towards the wall in front of us. The other rider, for the Shell district, tried to beat him away with his stick. It was parried. But then he needed to stop, to concentrate on the track, the wall, where he was being pushed, and—
He collided, right in front of us. I could see his left leg hit. The crowd roared, but the rider stayed in his light saddle somehow and his horse came off the wall, still running. The Shell district people screamed rapturous approval. But he was in fourth place now, the Fox rider had angled off just before the wall and was chasing Tower alone as Tower went hard after Adria in Falcon’s blue and white. Sky and clouds, I thought.
“He’ll move on her next time around!” Teobaldo Monticola shouted, to none of us and all of us. “He’s got the bigger horse. He’ll try to take her down. She can’t go down!”
So strange, I thought, the way things were that morning: both of them desperately hoping for a woman on a grey horse. Willing her to hold on.
Adria was taking the next curve, keeping low over her horse’s neck. I saw her glance back to place the pursuit. Then they were on the far side of the course and hard to see from where we were. If she could stay cleanly in front she couldn’t be hit, couldn’t be ridden into the wall.
But I didn’t think she could.
“Tower bought the best horse in the draw, too,” Monticola said flatly. I only heard it because I was right beside him. “Fuck them,” he said.
I wondered where Folco d’Acorsi was, if he was seeing the same thing. Saying the same thing.
* * *
“Look at that woman ride!” Antenami Sardi screamed.
He was aroused, excited. He was abruptly aware that this could be seen, and he adjusted his clothing. He wished, again, that the woman not the man was next to him. She might have let her hand drift, as if by chance, with everyone distracted, and . . .
He wanted that girl on the track. She might be awkwardly tall but she was so bold. It was compelling! She was also in trouble now. Anyone who knew horses could see that the man behind her, in the green and darker green, had a bigger mount, and there were still two laps to go as they came around the turn to the right and past the start line for the first time. Also, she was just a woman, and they were carrying sticks as big as clubs out there. A thought occurred to him: with those sticks being wielded, it might be just as well Fillaro wasn’t racing!
Watching, on his feet now, roaring with everyone else, he realized that the woman was about to encounter another problem—right in front of them. It was really very exciting.
“Giraffe is always with us!” said his host in his ear. He had to shout.
“What?”
“The yellow! He is lagging deliberately, letting her catch him!”
“I see it! Why?”
“Slow her down or take her down. Watch!”
Well, of course he was going to watch! But for some reason he glanced over at Folco d’Acorsi again. The man was biting his lower lip. He was clearly not happy. Antenami had no idea why.
His brother, he thought, would probably have known. But damn him.
* * *
Very well, Adria is thinking, you know what you have to do here.
Knowing and doing did not always marry, as her mother was fond of saying. Probably was still saying, at home, a long way north. She could be there now herself, enjoying the coming of spring to Macera, the woods and hills.
This is better. This is life. Whatever happens.
She is coming up fast on the Giraffe horse and rider, lapping him already. He has slowed, is waiting for her, helping the Tower. She’d been warned they’d work together. He is the biggest man in the field. The stick in his hand looks tiny, though they are all the same size, carefully measured. It is amusing, almost, how precisely the rules for this race are laid out—and how completely they are violated.
He isn’t even pretending to race. Has turned in his saddle—to his left, she sees—and is watching her bear down on him with Tower behind her. He has his weapon in his right hand, reins in his left.
She comes flying towards him along the straightaway at the start and finish line. She’s on his left because he’s been keeping to the right, blocking the shorter, inside path. Now he starts moving wide, left, towards the wall. In fact, he pulls hard at his reins to do that because she has angled Sauradia closer to that outside wall to pass him and he needs to get out there or she’ll go right by him. She’s moving faster than he expected. He has his horse almost diagonal on the track now, hurrying to cut her off, force her to the wall. He moves to switch hands—reins and club. He wants to hit her. No malice. It’s his task.
She’s been waiting for that.
She’d grown up with brothers willing to do whatever it took to beat each other. She was mostly at the back of every race, for years. She’d watched.
The moment the man riding for Giraffe goes to change hands, when his control and attention are claimed for a heartbeat or two as he needs to glance down, take his eyes off her, Adria moves Sauradia hard back to the right—reins and knees and voice and leaning far over that way—and her grey does exactly what she’s trained him to do, riding for two weeks here, twice a day, every day. He switches his lead—beautifully, for her—and goes by the big man’s horse on the inside.
She hears a colossal roar as she passes, and because this is about joy and anger, both, because it might be the last time she is in the world like this, free to be what she wants to be, and because the Tower rider is still just behind, she swings her club hard, with her left hand, at the big man just as he is turning back towards her, too late, his own weapon in the wrong hand, and she cracks him on the near forearm, so that he cries out in pain (bones are broken, she knows it) and lets fall his reins and . . .
It almost works. His horse skitters awkwardly as she passes him. The oncoming Tower horse could easily have bumped it, or stumbled avoiding it. But the rider for Tower, that hard southerner who has won here many times, really is good, and he’s been watching, has seen her cut back to the right, and so he is ready, he isn’t too close, and he takes his horse wider left, and past, as well.
So, he is still there behind her, though he’s lost ground, and she’s smashed the rider she passed, his ally, taken him out of the game for the last laps . . . he won’t be able to try this again with a broken arm.
Once more then, second time around the course. She stays safely away from the danger wall as they come to it. The Fontena Curve they call it, the one that other woman rider, the ruined one, had warned her about.
She knows about it, she is doing all she can. Knowing and doing do not always marry.
Her hat, worn so the brim would keep the sun from her eyes, flies off. Her hair had been pinned beneath it at the start, but not perfectly any more, and she feels it begin to stream out behind her as she rides.
Dear Jad, she prays, let this not be the last true thing I do.
* * *
He was preparing to take the woman down early in the last lap. He knew exactly what he’d do, and where. He’d done it before. There were advantages to having raced in Bischio for years on a course that never changed.
The useless fool for Giraffe had been tricked by her, and maimed (a clever move, he’d give her that), so he had to do it himself, and he would. He didn’t like the way she’d spoken to him at the start, or gotten out ahead of him. Made him look bad.
It had nothing to do with disliking women. He’d do exactly this if it were a man on the Falcon horse. He’d loved his mother, he mourned his sister every day he lived. She’d been taken as a slave by Asharite corsairs.
The southern tip of Batiara, where he’d been born, was a different world. They had no idea up here.
Infidel raids—even far inland—were a continuous, terrifying fear. His sister had been thirteen years old. He’d been nine, and had been rushed away with his mother to hide when a raid came one spring. They’d killed his father in their farmyard. They’d found and taken his sister where she was hiding.
He still prayed for her every morning, every night.
By now, decades later, he didn’t know if he was praying she was alive, or that she’d had a merciful death so that she might now be with the god in light.
He did know that he’d killed Asharites whenever he could when he was younger in the south. They were in the countryside where the so-tolerant duke insisted on employing them on farms and ranches, they were in the duke’s palace guard, allowed shops and trades, even permitted their Jad-denying temples to worship the stars. The duke even had them fighting the corsairs of their own faith. The Asharites living among them did do that. Very well. So be it. He didn’t care. Then, or now. It didn’t change anything. There were limits to what honour would let you tolerate.
Their duke could do whatever he wanted, Carlo Serrana had decided, still very young. He would kill infidels in his sister’s name. His father’s, too, he supposed, but he’d never liked his father, truth be told.
He’d made himself one of the best horsemen in the south, learning on the ranchlands, even from Asharites, in fact. They were superb horsemen, some of them. A couple of those men—his teachers—he’d later killed. They’d trusted him, it hadn’t been difficult. He was clever and careful, and young, no one ever knew it had been him.
When his mother died, Serrano headed north after laying her to rest. Eventually he’d found in Bischio a place to live and even flourish. He didn’t have many friends, he wasn’t a friend-making man, but by now every district prayed, come spring and the race, that his name would be drawn for their horse, and no one ever doubted his integrity. You couldn’t bribe Carlo Serrana. It was known. And you didn’t want to offend him, either.
You could fairly say he was a well-off man now, having won four times in nine years, using the money to buy land and build up a ranch south of the city, breeding horses for the well-to-do and for mercenary commanders, who always needed horses.
He had a wife, a son, a daughter who looked like his sister as he remembered her. His wife said his face was kind when he smiled.
He didn’t understand why one would want to look kind. Perhaps to children. But on this track softness was a thing that would cause you to lose. If Tower had spent substantial money (he could guess how much by now) to have him drawn to ride for them, and the Tower district was where the powerful in Bischio lived, Carlo Serrana would win his fifth race for them this morning, and no woman riding for a useless district that never won would prevent it. You fought for everything you had in life.
That was just the way things were, especially if you’d grown up fearing raiders from the sea coming to take you as a slave, and a sister you’d loved, a sweetness in the world, had been taken.
He hoped she was dead, he prayed she was alive and well. He’d killed a great many men in her name. She’d never know. Jad knew. The woman ahead of him on the track—she’d never tasted, never would, a life built around fear and vengeance, whoever she was. The south was a different world.
They were on the far straightaway again, opposite the start line. His horse was running well. They were all meant to be more or less the same, but more or less did carry a range, and he was a breeder of horses, knew them, and the Tower had money to spend. He’d mentioned, casually, which one he’d want if—by fortune and the god’s will—he should somehow happen to be drawn to ride for them this year.
Her grey was moving easily too, and she knew how to handle it. She was a rider. But she didn’t know Bischio, this track, Carlo Serrana’s life.
* * *
She’s made a mistake. Adria realizes it from the sound of the crowd, which has changed to something darker, like an animal hunting. She is the hunted.
Coming out of the curve before the start and finish, one lap to go, she’s done as she had before, as they are all doing . . . she’s let Sauradia drift from the inside enough that she doesn’t have to slow him or struggle to hold hard against the curving of the track. She’ll go back tight to the inside when they straighten from the curve.
Except that the southerner riding for Tower chooses that point, improbably, to make his move to pass her.
He doesn’t—he doesn’t get past. It is very hard for horses on a track put together a few days ago, loose and uneven, to pass on the inside of a curve. It is why they are all letting their mounts drift a little.
This man has won many times here, however, and now she is learning why. The crowd warns her, the sound makes her glance back—to see him coming hard on the inside, straining to go faster and hold.
This race is about weapons, not just horses, and he is . . . he is suddenly too close!
She leans all the way left in the saddle, pulls Sauradia hard that way, with the track, so the heavy stick aimed at her whistles through space—as a crowd of people goes collectively mad.
He can’t hit her horse. They banned you for doing that. Sometimes they killed you for it, she’d been told. But her evasion, his bold move with a big horse, has them almost level, and he is on the inside now, the shorter course. His horse will have to be exhausted, making that push, Adria thinks. Surely, surely it is!
Then she realizes that, indeed, it is, but the southern rider isn’t going to try to outrace her the rest of the way. That is not his plan.
Watch the Fontena, and watch the Tower.
Yes. Well. Knowing and doing.
They are on the straight, hurtling past the start and finish line again, one lap to go, but the man on her right has no intention of letting her run that last lap. Why race with a hard-worked horse when you can take down the rider beside you right now? The rider on the wrong side of you. Because Adria is towards the outer wall now as the most dangerous turn approaches.
He isn’t using his club, he can’t, positioning needs to be too careful. He is controlling his horse as it creeps up, bit by bit, until it is almost beside hers. He’s too close for her to come back away from the wall, to try to cut him off, he’s too close for her to stop what is coming, what he wants to do.
