The Burning Shadow Read online

  “I know you will,” she said.

  What she couldn’t tell him was that she too had made an oath.

  She had sworn that she would not let herself be taken to Arzawa. That somehow, whatever it took, she would escape.

  6

  It was still dark when Pirra woke up.

  The lamp by her bed gave off a smoky glow and a whiff of jasmine. Mice scurried in the roof and she heard the distant click of loom-weights.

  Curled on her side, she clutched the little lizard-skin pouch that held her falcon feather and the lion claw. She wondered what Hylas was doing, far to the north across the Sea. Maybe he’d found his sister. Even if he hadn’t, at least he was free.

  “Mistress?” Silea poked her head around the door-hanging.

  “Go ’way,” muttered Pirra. “I’m asleep.”

  “Nonsense.” Silea bustled in with a pile of clothes. “Up, now! We want you looking your best for the Feast.”

  Pirra glanced with dislike at her chief slave girl. Silea took orders from the High Priestess, for whom she also spied.

  Another girl brought a tray of walnut cakes and barley milk, with a pellet of frankincense for Pirra to chew to clean her teeth. A third girl combed her dark hair and twisted it into coils, while Silea none too gently got her dressed. A shift of fine saffron wool, a split blue overskirt embroidered with flying fish, a tight scarlet jacket, and a tasseled belt of gilded lambskin. Her feet were still hennaed from yesterday, so Silea just re-did the dots on her palms and forehead, which Pirra was always rubbing off.

  As Silea wielded the tiny ivory wand with sharp little jabs, Pirra wondered whether the slave girl had told the High Priestess of her mistress’ failed attempt to escape—or was keeping it quiet, since it reflected badly on her. Either way, she was in a rotten mood.

  On impulse, Pirra snatched the wand and hennaed in her scar. There. Her bronze mirror showed her a stark red sickle that cut across her cheek like an open wound.

  Silea’s plump face puckered with outrage. “The Great One won’t like that.”

  “That’s the point,” Pirra said drily. “And don’t pretend you’re annoyed, you love it when I get into trouble.”

  “Oh mistress!” chided Silea, opening her eyes wide.

  “Oh Silea!” mimicked Pirra.

  The Feast of Blue Swordfish was in its seventh day, and Yassassara would be conducting the rites in the Great Court. Pirra sent the others ahead, saying she’d follow later with Userref. Silea didn’t like that, but Pirra gave her one of her stares, and not even Silea was brave enough to insist.

  Shortly after the slave girls had gone, Userref came in. He crossed his arms on his chest and eyed Pirra with suspicion. “You’re not going to try anything else, are you?”

  “Of course not,” said Pirra; but her mind was darting like a trapped sparrow. Two more days till she was sent to Arzawa—and she’d run out of ideas.

  Instead of making for the Great Court, she headed for the Court of Swallows, where the common folk gathered.

  “What do you hope to find there?” said Userref.

  “I don’t know.” She only knew that she couldn’t face her mother. Whether or not Silea had told her, Yassassara would know by now. She always did.

  Sacrifice was over for the morning, and the Court of Swallows was noisy with peasants bartering their wares and consulting the cheaper seers. There was a smell of sweat and sesame, dust and honey and blood.

  A woman hawked wine from a wineskin, with a stack of rough clay beakers in the crook of her arm. A fisherman roasted octopus over an olive-kernel fire and kept an eye on a pail where more waited their turn in a squirming mass. An old man guarded his little earthenware bulls from a gaggle of slack-jawed children. “They’re not toys,” he snapped, “they’re offerings. No touching if you don’t pay, and I only take almonds or cheese.”

  Three peasant girls stood gossiping in their feast-day best. When they saw Pirra, they fingered their necklaces of painted limpets and gazed enviously at her gold collar and the green jasper lilies in her ears. She wondered what they’d say if they knew that she envied them. They could walk out of the gates whenever they liked.

  Suddenly, she felt eyes on her.

  In a corner beneath a rickety reed shade, a woman sat cross-legged on the ground, watching her. With a shock, Pirra recognized the white magpie streak in her hair.

  Almost against her will, Pirra went over to her. Userref followed, clicking his tongue in disapproval.

  Close up, the woman appeared to be just another wandering seer. The Sun had burned her the same dusty brown as her tunic, and her sandals curled up at the ends, like a donkey’s untrimmed hooves. On a wovengrass mat she’d scattered some bunches of wilting herbs, but she had no takers and she didn’t seem to care. Her face was slatted with shadow and sunlight—it was hard to tell if she was young or old—and her forearms were ringed with small round scars that looked like burns.

  She stared at the scar on Pirra’s cheek. “How did you get that?” she said baldly.

  “How dare you!” cried Userref. “This is the daughter of—”

  “It’s all right,” said Pirra. Then to the woman, “What’s your name?”

  “Hekabi.” She spoke Keftian with an accent Pirra couldn’t place. “Your mark. How?”

  Pirra blinked. “I did it last summer. I burned it to stop my mother wedding me to the son of a Lykonian Chieftain.”

  “But how did you burn it?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Fire always matters, mistress. The question is, what does it mean?”

  Despite herself, Pirra was unsettled. She told herself this was just some cheap seer who talked in riddles to seem wiser than she was; but this woman was better at it than most.

  Brusquely, Pirra asked her where she was from.

  “The White Mountains,” she replied.

  That might explain the accent, but not the attitude. The White Mountains were far away at the other end of Keftiu, and few people lived there. Those who journeyed to the House of the Goddess were awestruck and humbled. This woman was neither.

  “What are you doing here?” said Pirra.

  “Visiting my cousin.”

  “Who is?”

  “A seal-cutter.”

  Pirra concealed a surge of excitement. The seal-cutters’ workshop was built into the western wall—she’d had her eye on it as an escape route—but the seal-cutters were notoriously reserved, and she’d never managed to gain their trust. This could be her chance.

  “So what does a rich young mistress want from Hekabi?” said the woman. “A smoke reading? A telling of the spirits through Hekabi’s seeing-stone?”

  “I don’t want anything,” said Pirra.

  “Ah but you do. Yesterday. I saw you on the roof.” Her brown eyes were uncomfortably bright. “The seeing-stone, yes.” She nodded, as if Pirra had made her choice.

  Userref touched Pirra’s shoulder. “What are you doing?” he said in Akean, so that the woman wouldn’t understand. “The Great One won’t like you meddling with a common seer—”

  “That’s why,” snapped Pirra, also in Akean.

  By now, a handful of peasants had gathered to watch, and they stirred expectantly as the woman set before her a round shallow dish of burnished black stone. Pirra was surprised. The stone was obsidian: rare on Keftiu, and not something a traveling seer would own.

  First, the woman filled the dish with water from a greasy skin. Then from a goathide bag she took a nut-sized pellet of searing yellow. She crumbled it in her fingers and rubbed the yellow powder over her palms. “The lion rock,” she murmured.

  Sulfur, thought Pirra. She’d seen it once in a priest’s medicine pouch. It was used to ward off bad spirits and fleas.

  Rocking and chanting under her breath, the woman took three lumpy gray pebbles fr
om the bag and cast them into the water. They didn’t sink, but bobbed to the surface.

  Gasps from the peasants. “They float! What power has she, that she can make stones float!”

  Pirra crossed her arms, unimpressed.

  The woman drew another stone from her bag. It was round and flat, of white marble with a hole in the middle. “My seeing-stone,” she said with a sly smile. “The spirits gave it me.”

  Putting the stone to her eye, she peered through the hole at the floating pebbles. “Ah . . . they do the bidding of the spirits . . .”

  “Pirra,” said Userref, “you really can’t—”

  “Yes I can,” she retorted. Then to the peasants, “Get back, all of you! I must be alone with the seer. You too, Userref. Out of earshot.”

  Grumbling, the peasants did as they were told, but Userref stood his ground. “What are you planning?”

  “Nothing,” lied Pirra. “Now do as I say. That’s an order.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Userref. I mean it.”

  They locked gazes. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head. Then he heaved a sigh and moved away.

  When everyone was well out of earshot, the woman put the seeing-stone to her eye once more and peered at the floating pebbles. “Three will come together,” she murmured. “Yes. That’s what my seeing-stone tells me.”

  “Three what?” Pirra said coldly. “When? Where?”

  “That the spirits don’t tell.”

  Pirra knelt and leaned closer. She caught the woman’s smell of dusty hair and roadside thyme. She whispered in her ear: “Help me escape, and I’ll give you enough gold to last your whole life.”

  The woman met her eyes and slowly shook her head.

  Pirra licked her lips. “Then do it because I ask it. I’m desperate.”

  Again the woman shook her head.

  “It would be easy for you!” breathed Pirra. “You’re kin to a seal-cutter, you could share the gold with him; he could help me get out through his workshop and down the wall—”

  “No,” said the woman.

  Pirra clenched her fists.

  Twenty paces away, Userref was staring at her in consternation. She leaned even closer. “Then what about this,” she hissed. “You’re a fake. Those pebbles float because they’re pumice. Peasants don’t know that, but I do. And you made that ‘seeing-stone’ yourself, I can see the chisel marks.” She paused to let that sink in. Then she added, “My mother—High Priestess Yassassara—deals harshly with fakes.”

  The woman recoiled. Her gaze hardened. “You’re bluffing,” she spat. “If that was true, she’d have to punish half the wisewomen here.” But beneath her sunburn, she’d turned pale.

  Pirra gave her a thin smile. “Do you want to take that risk?”

  7

  Midnight in the seal-cutters’ workshop, the woman had said.

  It was nearly midnight now, but Userref had only just fallen asleep outside Pirra’s room, and she was still trying to retrieve her gear from its hiding place.

  Teetering on the lamp pedestal, she groped for the gap behind the roofbeam. At last she grabbed the calfhide bag.

  The lamp tipped and she leaped for the bed, catching the pedestal a heartbeat before it hit the floor. The bed’s latticework creaked. Behind the door-hanging, Userref murmured in his sleep.

  Pirra held her breath.

  He went on sleeping.

  The bag held everything she’d collected over the winter and hidden from him and from her slave girls’ prying eyes. Shakily, she emptied it and put on her disguise. A rough peasant tunic, a belt and knife-sheath of stained goathide, a plain bronze knife, a hairy cloak that stank of the weaver-woman who’d sold it to her for two carnelian beads. The sandals must stay in the bag; their cracked oxhide would be too noisy on the polished floors of the House of the Goddess.

  Next came a handful of earth filched from the pot of the sacred olive tree in the Great Court: Pirra smeared it on every bit of her that showed, especially her scar. She’d already covered the amethyst sealstone on her wrist with clay, and the falcon feather and lion claw were safe in the pouch at her neck.

  Recently, Userref had warned her that she’d reached the age when men looked at her. Even if you did escape, he’d said, you couldn’t go wandering on your own. Well then, I’ll be a boy, thought Pirra as she hacked her hair to shoulder length. She would take the cuttings with her, so that her mother couldn’t use them in a charm to track her down.

  With pounding heart, she stuffed everything back in the bag: a block of pressed figs wrapped in vine leaves, some dried lambs’ tongues, eight salted and slightly mouse-eaten mullets; and two bundles of gold bracelets wrapped in linen to stop them clinking—one to pay the wisewoman, the other for herself.

  There. Hylas would have been impressed. Or maybe not. He was used to living by his wits.

  Again Userref stirred in his sleep. Pirra’s heart twisted. She would never see him again. And she couldn’t even say good-bye.

  On impulse, she placed the little wooden leopard on her pillow. Would he understand how much she would miss him?

  Quietly, she drew aside the door-hanging.

  He lay as he always did, across the threshold. Pirra saw that he’d smeared some of his precious green wadju on his eyelids, to help him dream of Egypt. She hoped it was working.

  Farther along the passage, her slave girls were snoring. At her evening meal she’d drunk little, and drugged the rest of her wine with poppy juice, knowing they’d finish what was left. She hoped she hadn’t overdone it.

  It was still early spring, and a chill breeze was moaning through the House of the Goddess. The passages were dark, except for the odd guttering lamp. She groped past chambers where people muttered in their dreams, and nearly trod on a sleeping slave. A sliver of darkness slunk toward her, and a cat’s furry warmth brushed her calf.

  Moonlight silvered the Great Court and the olive tree in the middle. Keeping to the shadows against the walls, she made for the far corner. The olive tree watched her go. Silently, she begged it not to betray her.

  Footsteps echoed through the Great Court.

  Pirra froze.

  A priest emerged from a doorway, horrifyingly close.

  Rigid with tension, she watched him make for the Hall of the Double Axe. She heard the faint rattle as he parted the beaded hanging and disappeared inside.

  It was past midnight when she reached the workshops in the western wall, and she was terrified that the woman had gone.

  In the darkness, she banged her shins against a pile of copper ingots, and nearly sent a shelf of clay jars crashing to the floor. Her heart jerked. Eyes glared at her from a corner. She breathed out in relief. The rock-crystal gaze of the ivory god followed her as she crossed to the seal-cutters’ workshop.

  It was empty. Had she missed her chance?

  A shadow detached itself from the blackness, and in the gloom she made out the white magpie streak.

  “You’re late!” whispered the woman.

  “I couldn’t get away! I brought the gold—”

  “Not now. There’s an olive press in the next room. My cousin left rope. We tie it to the press and climb out. He’ll untie it before dawn, to cover our tracks.”

  By the faint light from a small window, they found the press—two massive grooved stones—and a thick coil of rope.

  Pirra peered out of the window. The night wind blew cold in her face, and she couldn’t see the rocks below. “How do we know the rope’s long enough?” she breathed.

  “We don’t,” muttered the woman.

  The rigging creaked and the sails snapped as the black ship sped across the waves. Huddled in the prow, Pirra drew her scratchy cloak around her and felt the salt spray stinging her face.

  Freedom.

  Where would she go? How would she
survive in the White Mountains, far from everything she knew? She felt frightened and exhilarated. It was too huge to take in.

  The rope had been too short, and she’d nearly broken her ankle jumping onto the rocks. The settlement dogs had sniffed her suspiciously, but Hekabi had brought scraps to keep them quiet.

  After walking through the night, they’d reached the gray Sea and a ship rocking in the shallows. The captain was expecting them, and they’d set off along the coast.

  Hekabi said that if the wind kept up, they should reach the White Mountains by the following dusk. To throw off pursuit, she’d laid a false trail, and if that failed, she knew secret places in the Mountains where no one would find them.

  The stars faded and a red slash appeared on the eastern horizon: The Goddess was walking across the Sea to wake the Sun. Pirra cut a sliver of dried mullet and threw it over the side for an offering, then cut another piece for herself.

  She stopped in mid-chew. The Sun was in the wrong place. If they were heading west, it should be behind her.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes widened. Keftiu had dwindled to a black line on the edge of the Sea.

  She lurched along the deck to where Hekabi stood staring across the waves. “We’re heading north!” she cried.

  “Well spotted,” Hekabi said drily.

  “You said we were going to the White Mountains!”

  “I lied.”

  “But I paid you!” shouted Pirra.

  The brown eyes studied her with amusement. “I needed gold to buy my passage. Now you’re just a nuisance I’ll have to put up with for a while.”

  Pirra’s outrage turned to unease. She seemed to have swapped one form of captivity for another. “Where are you taking me?” she said.

  Hekabi turned back to the horizon. The red dawn lit the strong planes of her face, and the wind whipped her strange streaky hair across her cheeks. “There is a ring of islands with hearts of flame,” she told the waves. “Once long ago, the Lady of Fire tore off Her bright necklace and flung it across the great green Sea . . .”