House of the Rain King, page 10
“My companions and I were listening to your speech through the wall back there,” Warlock said. “We thought it was interesting. Do you want to come inside and tell us more?”
Tarwin’s eyes lit up. He looked like a stray dog that had just been invited in from the rain.
Warlock went into the hall first, and Tarwin came after. The Sparrows were all seated around the fire, their backs straight and their weapons close to hand. They had evidently wanted to give an impression of martial fitness, but the effect on Tarwin was more of an ambush by thirty-three armed bandits. He froze in the doorway and reached for his knife with his free hand, still holding tight to the skeleton bundle.
“Easy, easy,” said Warlock, “give the lad some space.”
The Sparrows leaned back and made an effort to look casual—sipping their beers, fondling their dice—but they were all still obviously staring at Tarwin. He gave a nervous cough.
“Why don’t you sit down here and have a drink?” said Warlock.
“I think I’ve had enough. But… some food?”
Tarwin sat cautiously before the fire. He accepted a plate of Uthman’s garlic damper, took one bite, then devoured it. “This is really good,” he said through a full mouth. “Actually, I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning.”
They gave him more food and a cup of water. When he lifted it to his lips, his hand was shaking.
“Kid looks sick,” said Knocks.
They called up the Cutter, just before she began tucking in to another round of ale. She pressed two fingers to Tarwin’s forehead and clucked her tongue. “He’s got a fever.”
“I’m alright,” Tarwin croaked. “I didn’t sleep last night. I came up the valley in the dark. I kept going down to homesteads to show them the hand and the ring, but nobody wanted to listen. Most of them didn’t even believe me about the flood, let alone the Tombs…”
The Cutter opened her medicine case. It contained a great range of medicinal herbs, some foraged on the road, others stolen from the Rain House apothecary. She picked out several types of leaf and flower, chewed them all into a paste, and spat this into a mug of ale that she heated over the fire. She added a nip of gin and made Tarwin drink it. “He should lie down as well,” she said.
So they laid out a bedroll on a couple of crates and let Tarwin stretch on top of it. “Thank you,” he said. He drank some of the hot potion, spluttered, drank some more. “This is really good.” He seemed uncommonly grateful for their crude hospitality, and at the same time a little wary of it. Warlock had noticed that under all the mud, the kid’s tunic was pale grey. That was the colour worn by indentured servants in this part of the world. Warlock had a hunch the Sparrows might be the first people Tarwin had met in a while who treated him like an equal.
“Alright, kid,” he said. “Tell us more about these Rose Tombs.”
But Tarwin had finished the drink and fallen asleep.
10
BRYWNA AND VIVIEN
Brywna put on her boots and shouldered her pack. Vivien did the same beside her. They went out through the chapel door and into the rain.
Neither woman spoke as they splashed through the monastery yard. There were people standing around everywhere, bedraggled, confused and hungry. Old women knelt in the backs of covered wagons, offering prayers to portable icons of the Bird Saints. On the porch of the foundling-house were a dozen children, leaning against the rail, their bare knees knocking in the wind.
Everyone gave Vivien a wide berth. The cold fury was plain to see in her eyes, her gait. She walked straight out of the monastery grounds without a glance to either side. Brywna followed behind, staring at the back of Vivien’s hood.
As they walked, Brywna interrogated herself. Had she suspected something like this? Had she avoided asking about the Rain King’s marriage because she didn’t want to know?
Perhaps. It was too hard to say. Thirty-seven years living with herself had made her only a middling judge of what really drove her, deep down inside. Even recent memories came to her through a fog of error, misattribution, self-justification.
She had known, of course, that the gods were not bound by mortal laws. That they were held to no account but their own. But she had imagined the Rain King as a neutral and natural force, who brought bounty to some and calamity to others without discrimination. Emwort’s story made her think again. To flood the valley was one thing. To hold the valley hostage, to demand the sacrifice of a particular life, was something very different.
She thought: if we had met him before senility drew a curtain behind his eyes—would he then have been kinder? Or crueller?
They left the outskirts of the monastery and set their feet on Tall Woman’s Track. This was the same route they had come in by, a wide dirt road flanked on either side by wattle trees and flood ruins. Water poured freely down its gullies, collecting here and there in big oblong potholes, which the locals claimed were the footprints of the legendary ur-woman who gave the road its name.
There were people on the road, but not as many as there should have been. Sometimes through the trees there would be glimpses of farmsteads with their lamps lit and their chimneys smoking. Or fields where workmen drove their plows, as though nothing was going on besides a patch of unseasonal rain. Brywna could imagine the arguments being put forward in those houses right now. She had heard them before, more often in advance of armies on the march. “Wait and see,” would be the first line of defence, followed by: “Someone will tell us when it’s time to go,” and then: “It won’t come this far.” It had been well over a hundred years since the last flood, beyond the living memory of the valley’s eldest elder. And Brywna had a mind that the mythmaking of it—the constant prophecies and stories about the King’s return—would make it harder, not easier, to believe in the real thing when it came.
They walked on, the Rain House fading into mist behind them. Vivien was still quiet. Finally, she turned to Brywna and said:
“There must be a way to save her.”
Brywna didn’t reply. It was better to let it all come out at once.
“We brought the Rain King here. We’re responsible. Her death will be on our hands too.” Vivien’s face was severe, earnest, beautiful. “We’re the Sparrows, aren’t we? We’re tough, clever. We have Warlock. If we all put our heads together we can come up with a plan.”
Even as she said it, her voice faltered a little. Brywna felt awful. She was letting Vivien walk out onto a crumbling cliff, knowing full well it would collapse beneath her weight.
“I know we can’t fight the King directly. But if we could find the Bird Princess before she reaches the monastery—then perhaps…”
Still, Brywna kept quiet. The silence spoke better than any words. If Emwort’s story could be believed—and she did believe it, sensed truth running through it like a thread—then the bird-woman did not want saving. She was giving her life willingly for the sake of the Tile. To rescue her, perhaps against her will, would mean drowning the entire valley. All these people would never return to their homes, but go wandering the world in search of succour. The mythic pattern was unbreakable; there was no seam into which the Sparrows could insert themselves and cut away the good from the bad. And this was always the way of the world: the gap between what could be done and what ought.
Vivien trailed off. Brywna waited a minute to let the silence do its work. Then she said:
“Have you ever seen someone try to fight a god? I have.”
They kept on walking. Brywna told the story as plain as she could, just as she would tell any story from the Company’s past for the benefit of its youngest member.
“This was in the Tatterdowns,” she began. “A long time before you joined up. They had a god up there that lived in the hills. A two-headed wolf. Apparently it never ate anyone as long as they fed it a white stallion three times a year.
“One day this wizard-prince came through with a whole regiment of hired swords. He had alchemists, barrels of pale fire, and big war machines like giant crossbows. When he heard we were in town he tried to hire us too. The Commander spoke to him for five minutes and said no way. He was going to hunt the wolf. He thought its pelt would make him immortal or some such. He might even have been right.
“So he goes with his soldiers into the hills. A day or two later we started to see smoke on the horizon. Then the soldiers came straggling back into town, dragging their wounded behind them. They told us how it had gone down. Said the wolf had run through sheets of pale fire like it was bead curtains. The giant crossbows had just glanced off its hide. The last they saw of their employer, he was being carried away over the hills in both sets of jaws.
“That was a minor deity, some wild animal blessed with a spark of the divine. The Rain King is something way, way beyond that. An Old Power of the earth. You don’t fight the rain, Vivien. You just have to let it fall where it falls.”
She fell silent again. Vivien was looking away into the trees.
“Alright,” she said. “I won’t talk about it any more.”
Her voice was flat. The righteous fire had all been snuffed out. Brywna had got what she wanted, though she felt like shit about it.
They had been comrades now for two years, Brywna and this girl, this fierce and deadly girl who could not see injustice without running toward it to strike it out. Vivien was still young as Sparrows went. She might yet withdraw from the Company, go her separate way, if the life did not agree with her. If she was to stay, she would have to learn to live within the boundaries of their calling.
And Brywna hoped she would stay, dearly, very dearly.
It was hard to say when Brywna had begun to fall in love with Vivien. It was a thing as gradual and inevitable as the turning of the year. A chaste love; love from afar; a love that didn’t reach or touch but only wanted to protect its object and nurture it. A love she would never speak of out loud, not with her dying breath on some blood-spotted battlefield, but that rose in her nevertheless each time she saw the girl’s smile, and warmed her better than any soup or fire. No, she did not want Vivien to leave. And so she must teach these lessons, how to fit inside the world, though it broke her heart to do so.
It was a quarter-mile further to the Big Inn. They walked in silence. The warm light of the windows appeared through the mist, and they could hear the melody of Feastfamine’s flute. They took off their boots and went in. All the Sparrows cheered, banged the tables, and forced frothing mugs of ale into their hands. Vivien and Brywna smiled and sat down and began talking again as if nothing had happened.
11
SHE-OAK
Tarwin dreamed of sharp fingers clutching him in the dark. He woke with the taste of vomit in the back of his mouth, the smell of rain and dust and bird shit all around him. He remembered blearily that he was in the old derelict side of the Swan's Head Inn. He was lying in a nook between two crates, with a blanket pulled over him. His head hurt, but the rest of his body felt much better.
A man with a narrow nose and piercing grey eyes was kneeling over him. It didn’t seem like this man had woken Tarwin, but rather had been watching and waiting for Tarwin to wake, so that their eyes met as soon as Tarwin’s were open.
“Where did you get this feather?” the man said.
He held up the vagrant feather that Tarwin had found the day before. It had been soaked and crushed in the mudslide, but the man had apparently cleaned it with great care. The white of the feather was now only faintly brown.
Tarwin swallowed. “The bird gave it to me.” He regretted saying this at once, and braced himself for questions he couldn’t answer. But the man simply nodded.
“Where was this?”
“In the south end of the valley. Near the Rose Tombs I was telling you about.”
“You are a woodsman.”
Nobody had ever called Tarwin that before. He had not called himself that before. He was a farm hand. Twenty-nine and a half days each month he worked the fields, and only on the last half-day did he even set foot among the trees. Yet the way the man said it filled him up with pride and he said: “Yes,” and then: “How could you tell?”
“There are leaves and twigs stuck to your boots from trees that don’t grow near the roadside. You told us you came up the valley in a day and a night. That’s very quick, so you must have gone through the woods, not along the river. Also you watched when our medic mixed a potion for you. You knew the herbs she was using, which is why you drank it without suspicion.”
Tarwin blinked. It was all true—though he had hardly thought about suspicion when he watched the medic, only that she might give him something bad by mistake.
“Hold on,” he said. “Aren’t you an outlander?” A foolish question: the man’s olive-brown skin was unlike any in the Tile. “How do you know so much about our trees?”
“I watch. I learn.” The man reached for one of Tarwin’s boots, which was sitting nearby. There was a she-oak needle stuck to the sole and the man pulled it off. “This is the tree I was talking about. I’ve seen it only grows deeper in the forest, not near the fields. But I don’t know its name. Can you tell me?”
“She-oak,” said Tarwin.
“And my name is Tarsas Fitchin,” said the man, as though he and the tree had just been introduced.
He then asked Tarwin a long series of questions about the plants and animals of the valley: from blue gums and wattle trees to swamphens and sugar gliders. He even asked questions about the lichen and moss. For every one Tarwin could answer, there were three or four he couldn’t. It made him feel the limits of his bush knowledge, and showed him how much more there was to learn. It was humbling and also exciting.
The questions circled back at last to the foreign bird. But here too, Tarwin found he knew less than Fitchin. It was a rainbird, Fitchin said; he had been out hunting it the night before, but had had no success. There was a gleam in Fitchin’s eyes as he spoke about this, which Tarwin found a little frightening and a little familiar.
The rest of the Sparrows went on drinking and dicing all around. They didn’t notice Tarwin was awake, and he hardly noticed them.
The door opened and two more soldiers came in. They were both women: one short and built like a brick, the other tall, young and willowy. The rest of the company gave a cheer and raised their cups to the newcomers. Fitchin, whose face had been utterly impassive throughout their conversation, now showed a flicker of something like annoyance, though it was very slight. He said: “That’s enough for now. It’s time to talk about the contract.”
There was a round of backslapping as the two women joined their comrades. Then they called Tarwin over and set him on a makeshift podium to speak.
He recounted the same story he had told in the other side of the inn, adding more detail since these outlanders had never heard of the Rose Tombs before. He struggled to explain the dead things clearly. “They weren’t rotting,” he said. “I’ve seen corpses left out—animals, not people—but it wasn’t like that. Their flesh was gone but their skin was still there, and it was dry under the mud, like leather.” He shuddered. “I didn’t really get a good look at them. They were so quiet, and then they moved all at once, and all I could think about was getting away.”
He glanced around the room. The Sparrows were listening intently. He wondered if this was strange to them, or if such things were ordinary occurrences in lives like theirs.
They asked him many questions. How many creatures were in the Tombs? He didn’t know. How much gold? He didn’t know that either, but he had seen a lot. They asked how far away the place was, and how they could get clear of the floodwaters when the time came to leave.
The short woman, Brywna, who seemed to be something like a leader, asked: “Is it a sacred place?”
“What do you mean?” said Tarwin.
“Will we offend anyone—mortals, spirits or gods—by trespassing there.”
“No… no. The Tombs aren’t sacred. Not to the Bird Saints or the Ancestors. If people tell stories about them at all, it’s only silly ghost stories to frighten children. And you can tell they aren’t old stories because they change every few years.”
Brywna nodded, apparently satisfied. There were a handful more questions. The conversation slowly petered out.
Fitchin stood up. “I will make the proposal, if there are no objections.”
There were none. Fitchin then addressed Tarwin. “This is a provisional offer. The Company will still need to vote on it. You will be a client without privileges; that means we will decide how to complete the contract, not you. Our payment will be nine parts in ten of all the gold we retrieve from the Tombs. Your side of the contract will be to lead us to the location. The contract will be closed when the flood waters start to recede. Do you have any questions?”
Tarwin swallowed. One-tenth of the gold was much less than he had hoped. But what other choice did he have? Indeed, once he led the Sparrows to the Rose Tombs, what was to stop them simply taking everything for themselves? These were outlanders. They owed no debts to anyone and were owed nothing either. He felt for the first time the full vertigo of life after all bonds had been dissolved.
And yet he trusted them. Or at least he trusted Fitchin. In those cold eyes, he could imagine no hint of duplicity.
“Alright. I agree. I mean if your Company does.”
Fitchin did not smile—did he ever?—but he nodded.
“We’ll have to ask you to wait outside for the next part,” said Warlock. “Having a client around can prejudice the vote. Well. It’s more of a formality in your case. But here, take my cloak. It’s a lot drier than yours.”
Tarwin’s cloak was soaked through, and carrying enough mud to double its weight. He very gladly shucked it off and put on Warlock’s. Then he went outside to stand under the eaves.
The waiting was difficult. The events of the past day and night kept flashing before his eyes, heavy with meaning: the mudslide and the severed hand, the gold glittering in the Tombs, then the long miserable march through the night, the feverish morning, the inn, the Sparrows, Fitchin, now, now. He paced nervously in the yard. The space under the eaves was too narrow to contain his energies, and he kept circling out into the rain.
