The Leopard (Marakand) Read Online Free Page B

battle and defeat and death, hacked to pieces on the plain of the Yellow Stone, which was now lost under the city of Gold Harbour.
    Perhaps whatever god cared for this folk saw no point in keeping old stories alive. Better they dwindled into a peasantry, tilling their fields and guarding their herds and no longer dreaming of past glory, which would serve only to stir up the young and the rash to no good end. Not all the villages of the Tributary Lands were free and governed by free headmen under a chief of the tribe. Nearer the colony-cities, manors engulfed the village fields in walls and legalities, and the folk paid rent to work the lands that had once been held of god and king alone, or traded labour in the vast vineyards and olive groves and wheatfields of the city clans’ estates for the right to feed themselves by tilling a scrap of land they did not even own. She had seen it for herself. The kings and the blood of the kings were gone in this land, gone to ash and smoke, forgotten, and the gods diminished, withdrawn, defeated, some even forgotten by their folk, who made their prayers to the gods of the cities, grown in grandeur, adapted to the ways of their new folk. Lady Lin, her tutor, had told her that gods, bound to their hills and waters, unable to flee, must do so when war swept over their lands and their kings failed them.
    As Queen Cattiga had failed the goddess Catairanach of the spring of the mountain ash and the tribe called the Duina Catairna in the north? Surely not; to die a victim of murder was not failure. Even the abandonment of the dinaz , the royal hill-fort, was not failure but a tactical retreat on the part of her bench-companions. In the hills, they could not be pinned down. Lord Seneschal Yvarr and Marnoch, his son, could not be said to have failed the goddess, not unless and until they surrendered, which Deyandara was sure they would not do. And Catairanach had no intention of relinquishing her folk’s freedom without action, un-Praitannec though that action was.
    Deyandara gave the widow a Two Hills fish-copper in thanks, mounted her pony again, called Badger from his gossiping with the widow’s bitch, and turned to the path that left the fields and groves of the village to climb the rising downland towards the ruin on the cliff. Two miles, she made it. Not a sociable man. A long walk for a child with a jug and basket.
    In her own land, Praitan of the two rivers, of the seven duinas , the seven tribes and seven kings, part of a bard’s duty was to remember and carry messages between the kings of the tribes, but she had never heard of anyone taking a message for a god before. Certainly not such a message, and not to such a man.
    The track seemed nothing more than a sheep-path, plodding between hummocks of wiry grass and mats of fragrant thyme and lavender and rue, over patches where the wind had blown the very soil away, rock bare and slippery, fissures opening into mysterious depths. It wound without apparent purpose. Always, though, Deyandara was exposed to the gaze of the ruin on the headland, which was surely only a few more years of gnawing storm from becoming an island. Lin had taught her to look at the very earth that way, as not fixed and immutable but a thing in flux, like the lives of men and their tribes.
    She left a stone shed and a thorn-hedged field on her right, inland. Three sleek horses watched her, white and piebald and lion-hued. Looking at the way ahead, she tied her own bay pony to a branch of the thorn, dwarfed and bent by the wind, told Badger to stay there on guard—a whistle would bring the big mastiff running to her defence—and went on foot. The path forked, onwards along the cliff and, her way, out, abruptly down and up again, across the narrow stem of stone that was all that connected the peninsula of the ruin to the mainland. Below her, waves crashed and threw white spume into the air.
    Deyandara did not like heights. Wind and heights were worse. It was no