The early heat had distilled hallucinatory glimmers from the roofs. Along the hillside, feather trees lifted their slim plumes. In the courtyard below, a slave was scrubbing the household ahar.
Panduv offered now to Cah the goddess, since women were granted this boon, here. Alternative ethics of worship, like those Arud had exposed in the mountains, were unmentioned.
Yet she was aware that Arud was a powerful member of his temple, part of an inner elect, and had risen effortlessly in the past three years to the high office of Adorer. His priestly robes were heavily fringed with silver, and vessels of gold, and thin glass, had appeared as if by magic almost overnight in the house. Content and sanguine and no longer sent about on the tasks of a Watcher, Arud also gained in weight.
Panduv supposed she, too, had thickened. Child bearing, and the somnolence of her days, would have padded her satin flesh. Despite that, she was to all the women of the capital, where plumpness if not obesity stayed the vogue, a bone. She ate sparingly, even in boredom, and had continued her dancer’s athletics in the concealment of the villa.
Arud, partly anxious for his exotic pet Zakr, half eager to display flashy lack of convention, gave her the handling of a light chariot. She was not, by Iscaian law, able to drive on the streets, but once up among the hills, she discarded the driver. The sight of his merry back, bounding for the nearest tavern, had come to symbolize to her a holiday. The hiddraxi were imported, another evidence of Arud’s wealth. She trained them to flight on the sidelong paths, hurtling into the upland valleys, where she would herself break loose to swim the streams and sleep in the grass. When the child was older, she should be taken, too. Arud would not object. Approached deviously, he was nearly always compliant. He had come to see his generosity to a woman as an aspect of free thinking, and sometimes referred to it impressively before colleagues.
Already, Panduv paid heed to the diet of Teis. (The nurse was a problem, endlessly slipping her sweetmeats.) Panduv lessoned the little girl in embryonic moves of an acrobat and dancer. Teis had natural ability, but her attention was inconstant. It would be an extravagance besides, to bank upon any future for a girl. Had it not been hard enough, letting go all plans for herself?
Only torches twined now in the dance of fire.
Panduv turned. Like two spiders, the nurse-woman, and her daughter, were weaving a web of beads.
“Be wary, nurse.” Panduv was harsh. “I’ll leave her with you until sunset. Remember your duty to the Master’s child.”
Infallible words.
The child laughed again, seeing her mother desert her.
In point of fact, Panduv got no farther than the market place.
Tomorrow was a holy day, the festival of Cah the Giver. (Arud had set off for the temple at sunrise and would not leave its precincts until tomorrow’s midnight. Another motive for Panduv’s restlessness; when he was in the house, at least he was a cause of occupation.)
By temple law, all buying and selling must cease before this evening’s sun went down, and the market was a madhouse.
After a negligent try or two, Arud’s chariot driver stalled the vehicle at a herd of orynx. The hiddrax stood trembling.
Panduv would have wished to call the man a fool and cuff him.
Instead, “Master,” she remarked, in tones of burnt honey, “Arud’s animals are distressed. Please do turn into that side street there,”
“Impossible, woman,” said the driver. In her instance, “woman” was title rather than dismissal, uttered quite deferentially. Panduv gritted her teeth, waited. “See, the pigs’re almost past.”
And past the orynx continued, thumping with their bristly sides the wheels and left flanks of the unhappy team, while men leered and grinned at the Black One, and mere women scurried by like ticks across a dog.
Superfluous to protest. Emblem of everything now. She had accepted. Like the ageless fire-sorceress in the mountains, Thioo . . . Nothing matters. Here we are. Here, it’s the custom. A Lowlander philosophy: We have all time and in time anything can be accomplished. The waste of one small life is nothing.
Why think of such things? Life was radiant and absolute.
But maybe it would be more comfortable to accede. Not only in her outward values, but through and through. What then? Eat confectionery, render to Arud a tribe of male brats, grow lush and portly—
Panduv surfaced as if from under a river, returning gasping into the scalding heat and the market noise.
Across the humps of jostling pigs, a rabble of drovers, the sweetmakers’ booths and the towering jars of the sugar-sellers, Panduv saw into the enclosure of the slave-market. The fence was scanty, a rope run round between posts. On to the auction block had been pushed a gang of five men, wrist-chained together. They were all but naked in five skins of metallic darkness foreign to Iscah. On this dark, appalling scars and lacerations indicated their former employment. They were off a slave-galley, men of abnormal strengths, but actually useless in terms of service. It was well-known, they could be bent to nothing else having outlasted the oar and the whip of an oars master. The fifth man was the Lydian. Rehger.
The floor of the chariot seemed to evaporate and leave her adrift in the air. Even as this happened to her, reason grasped her firmly and set her down again on a solid surface. No, it was not Rehger, not Saardsinmey and living life. No.
Yet, if not Rehger, a man so like him—
Though lean and muscular—how else would he have survived?—he did not have the distinctive build of the professional Swordsman, a Son of Daigoth. This man, too, was older than Rehger would have been, had he lived. But handsome, and in manner off-hand, princely almost, divorced from the chain and the company. He stood and looked about, while the other four crouched snarling.
“There,” said Panduv to her driver. “Lord Arud lacks a bodyguard.”
“No, woman,” said the driver, slightly offended and reproachful—she had forgotten in her desire to joy her lord her proper address of master. “No good. Those are off some Zakr pirate the Vardians trounced. Such muck can only be put in the mines.”
Panduv braced herself.
“Master, your leave to tell you. Lord Arud has said to look out for such a slave.”
Dismissing female stupidity, the driver did not respond. While, from the auction, Panduv could hear the other men saying much the same as he had. Certain of the capital’s priestly factions held a stake in mining concerns of Shansarian Alisaar. Presently there would come a bid of this sort.
Even though a mirage, it was imperative to save him.
Panduv left the chariot. Her driver gawped at her.
Women did not behave in this way. Only the lowest went about here on foot and unescorted. Leopard-black, veil-less, slender and upright, Panduv stalked upon the enclosure, stepped over the rope and trod forbidden ground.
Outrage was immediate, but tended more to ridicule than brutality. In the silence which succeeded the oaths and sneers, Panduv approached the auction block. The men made way, affronted beyond words. The auctioneer was stone.
“Your pardon, master,” said Panduv, head lifted and eyes cast down. “It is the business of my Lord Arud the Priest, the Adorer of Cah.”
Someone yelled, “Yes, we know who keeps this black bitch.”
But the auctioneer, a traveled fellow, aware that times and etiquette might change, prudently murmured, “What then?”
Panduv whispered in turn, “He would buy that fifth man. Keep him for Lord Arud. Money shall be sent inside the hour. Don’t fail. You’ll make a profit.”
The auctioneer drew a long breath. “All right. Now for the sake of Cah, get out, out!”