The Silver City

  The Silver City

  Pamela Belle

  © Pamela Belle 1994

  Pamela Belle has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1994 by Pan Books.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Patrick, my second son. Welcome to the world.

  Table of Contents

  Notes on Pronunciation

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all those who have helped me with this book, and with its rather different predecessors. In particular, I owe a great debt to my mother, who as always read the whole manuscript and offered many helpful corrections and suggestions; to my husband, Steve, whose encouragement has never failed and whose assistance with various recalcitrant wonders of modern technology has been vital so many times; and last, but not least, to my agent, Vivienne Schuster, who has helped and guided me for twelve years, and without whom I would probably have given up writing long ago!

  Pamela Belle

  Notes on Pronunciation

  Most names are spelt as pronounced. As a general rule, stress is laid evenly on both syllables of two-syllable words, and on the second syllable of words of three syllables or more (e.g. ZiTHIRian, AnSARyon, TanATHi).

  An apostrophe indicates missing letters and should technically be pronounced as a brief pause, but in practice many speakers omit this altogether. Exceptions include Ska’i and D’thliss.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  They had flushed the deer from a scrub-filled gully on the side of a gentle slope, and it leapt up and away with a flash of its white rump, and half-a-dozen members of the Tanathi tribe in urgent pursuit.

  The stag ran for its life, with the wonderful flying grace of its kind, but the wide rolling grassland of the steppe could offer it no shelter, no chance to hide, or rest, or double back. The hunters slackened their speed a little. Despite their youth, they were too experienced to exhaust the horses to no good purpose.

  Halthris rode beside her brother, Abreth, leading the chase. This was what she loved above all: the wind streaming her braided hair; the vast wild space of the steppe all around her, seeming so empty yet so full of teeming and secret life; the feel of her horse Ennim beneath her, strong and warm and eager, friend as well as servant; and the company of the other hunters, her brother, her cousin, the men with whom she had grown up, and shared so much laughter.

  She had all this, and it was her life: how much longer would she be able to resist the clamour of voices, led by her father and her mother and her sister, urging her to marry that nice man Vinnath, and settle down by the Hearth?

  Abreth shouted something, and she followed his pointing hand. The white-rumped stag, leaping over the grass in huge tireless bounds, seemed to be in danger of escaping them altogether.

  Abreth gestured, and shouted again. ‘Fess — use Fess, or we’ll all go to bed hungry tonight!’

  Fess. She had run alongside them, a swift dappled shadow in the grass, silent, beautiful, deadly, waiting on the signal that would unleash her attack. Halthris turned in the saddle and made a swift, sweeping movement of her arm. And Fess, loosed from her invisible bond, began to accelerate away from them.

  She had watched the cat run so often, but still the astonishing speed, the power and the savagery freed at her command, could fill Halthris with a vast, choking, inexpressible joy. She shouted with delight as Fess streaked down the hill, eating up the ground with that enormous bounding stride, and swept on, across the shallow valley towards the long slope of the next low, rocky hill, where the deer, unaware of the spotted, feline death behind it, was springing towards safety.

  The huge muscles on the cat’s haunches propelled her into the air. One sweep of her paw, and the stag crashed down in the dust, the great bulk of the hunting cat clinging to its back: and then only the thrashing stems of the grass showed where the final struggle was taking place.

  Full stomachs tonight. Halthris, grinning, held out her right hand, palm upwards, and her brother slapped his own hand across it in the universal Tanathi gesture of triumph. They slowed their horses and trotted towards the kill, half-way up the next slope.

  As was customary, and only fair, Fess was taking her share of the meat, and they must wait until she had finished. At last replete, she stalked off into the grass, with her aloof, delicate stride, to wash and clean herself. Later, when they had returned to the camp, she might slip away during the night to catch herself one of the hares or rabbits that abounded in this part of the steppe. Fess was a free agent, owing loyalty only to Halthris, who had reared her from a small cub, and taught her to hunt and to kill for the tribe.

  Abreth and his cousin Kettan were dealing with the deer: they would each carry a piece back with them to the camp, where their companions waited with the horse herd. The other members of the hunting party took the opportunity to rest, and to check their mounts’ legs. And Halthris, still filled with the exultation of a successful chase, dismounted, leaving Ennim to graze, and went in search of Fess.

  No one else in all the Tanathi had a hunting-cat, although they were not unknown of in the tribe. In the wild, they were rare indeed, and seldom seen. She had found Fess more than two years ago, a tiny mewing cub, sole survivor of a spring flash flood which had swept away the rest of the litter, and left her stranded on a boulder, cold and drenched and close to death. Halthris had warmed her inside her tunic, carried her everywhere, and fed her mares’ milk from a leather bottle: and Fess had lived, and grown strong, and repaid the love and care which had saved her life by becoming Halthris’s companion and friend. One day, perhaps next spring, she would slip back to the wild, to find a mate and rear cubs of her own, but Halthris accepted this inevitable future parting. To have the assistance of a hunting-cat showed the especial favour of the gods: and like all such favours, the arrival of the gift, and its eventual departure, were matters entirely beyond her control.

  Halthris walked through the long grass. Here, on the exposed western side of the hill, it grew only knee-high: in the valleys, it sometimes reached her shoulder. At this time of year, with autumn approaching, there were no flowers, but the dry rustling heads of a stand of steppe poppies scattered their seeds as she brushed past them, to rise again next year in splashes of brilliant crimson and scarlet.

  She could not see Fess, whose spotted hide, brown and gold, blended perfectly with the dappled, flickering shadows crossing the grass, but there was rustling and movement just ahead of her, below the rocky crest of the hill. She whistled softly. ‘Fess?’

  And a man stood up right in front of her.

  He was short, ugly, clad in a jerkin of the badly cured leather worn by the southern tribes: and he brandished a double-headed axe, and grinned at her through a greasy moustache.

  Halthris yelled a warning and whipped her knife out of its scabbard, cursing the bad luck that had left her other weapons, her bow and arrows and spear, with her horse. She waved the knife threateningly, her eyes narrowed and intent, her brain working feverishly. Had Abreth heard her? More to the point, had Fess? Urgently, she whistled the two-toned signal that should bring the cat to her side.

  The man moved forward, still with that terrible, bloodthirsty grin splitting his broad, dun-coloured face. He spoke through brown, gapped teeth. ‘No good, Tanathi woman. You dead soon. Friends too.’ He swept the axe through the air with a swish, chopping at the grass. ‘Nice head. No run.’

  She backed away, and yelled again. Surely she had not strayed beyond earshot? Behind her, she could visualize the slope sinking downwards, the tall poppies, the tussocks and rocks waiting to trip her up, and if she fell she was surely dead.

  She changed her grip on the knife and threw it, in one fluid, desperate movement. The man’s reactions were too quick: he dodged sideways and the blade flicked past him to vanish in the grass, leaving her defenceless. She could only run, and pray to Emmesar the Hare that she would reach the others before he caught her, or threw the axe …

  Down the hill, someone shouted. And as the man’s glance shifted briefly to the source of the sound, Fess sprang silently out of the grass behind him, and struck him down.

  When Abreth, panting, arrived at his sister’s side a moment later, it was all over. The man lay prone in the grass, with Fess sitting watchfully by his side, one paw placed on his chest. A single, raking blow had ripped down his unprotected head, neck and arm, and he was b
leeding heavily.

  Halthris, the double axe in one hand and the man’s iron-bladed knife in the other, did not take her eyes off her captive. She said caustically to her brother, ‘What kept you? If it hadn’t been for Fess, I’d certainly be dead, and so might you.’

  Abreth ignored her: he was staring in astonished bewilderment at Fess’s prey. ‘A Ska’i tribesman! What in Hegeden’s name is he doing here? Their lands are a month’s ride away.’

  ‘I don’t know — but he’s here, as you can see.’ Halthris rammed the knife into her scabbard, which was too small for it. ‘And much more to the point, where are the rest of them? The Ska’i are like wolves — they always hunt in packs.’

  Kettan came loping up the hill, wiping his bloodstained hands on a hank of grass, his amber-coloured braids leaping with each stride. Like Abreth, he gaped in amazement at the prone Ska’i. ‘So that’s why you shouted! But you didn’t sound as if you were in any trouble.’

  ‘So you took your time.’ Halthris glared at him, wondering as so often before why she had taken Kettan as her first lover, seven years ago. He was so vain, with his golden jewelled quiver and scabbard, his intricately woven braids and over-handsome face: vain, and stupid. And one man’s stupidity, out here on the steppe, apparently concealing any number of murderous Ska’i tribesmen in addition to its countless other hazards, could be fatal to all of them.

  She silently gave thanks to Sarraliss, the Great Mother who watched over all women, for her deliverance from Kettan and from the tribesman, and turned to her brother. ‘You speak some Ska’i, don’t you? Ask him where the others are.’

  Abreth grimaced. ‘Even less than “some”. You don’t need any words to deal with them — either you kill them, or they kill you. Polite negotiation is a complete waste of time.’

  ‘I don’t think so — not in this case.’ Halthris stared down at the Ska’i. He had not moved a muscle since having been felled by the cat: every fibre of his body was rigid with terror, his eyes distended, fixed on Fess’s implacable, impassive face, while the blood, pumped by his frantic heart, soaked into the dry earth and grass beneath him.

  ‘Hegeden’s Wings!’ said Kettan gleefully. ‘Look at that — he’s terrified of Fess!’ He gave a whooping cry of triumph. ‘What a marvel — the terrible Ska’i are afraid of cats!’

  ‘This Ska’i may be — but what about the others?’ Abreth pointed out. ‘And don’t make so much noise — we don’t know where the rest of them are.’

  ‘Which is precisely why I told you to ask him,’ said Halthris in exasperation. ‘A hundred of them could be lurking just the other side of the hill, for all we know.’

  She clicked her tongue softly, and Fess gave a low, answering rumble deep in her throat. The tribesman, his face a white mask of absolute horror, pressed himself into the earth.

  ‘See? He’ll tell you. Either he thinks Fess is some kind of demon, or he’s afraid she’ll eat him alive as soon as I snap my fingers.’

  With a resigned glance at his sister, Abreth stepped forward and leaned menacingly over the Ska’i. His freckled, open face usually radiated cheerful good nature, and his intimidating scowl was an incongruous distortion. But their captive, already half-dead from terror and loss of blood, seemed to find it convincing. To add weight to the threat, Halthris whistled the ‘hold’ signal, and Fess obediently put her other front paw on the tribesman’s chest and thoughtfully flexed her claws a finger’s breadth from his throat.

  Abreth spoke three words of the harsh, guttural Ska’i tongue, his distaste plain in his tone. The man gulped, swallowed and whispered something too low and too hoarse to be heard. Fess stretched her claws again, and with a wild, desperate glance the Ska’i repeated the same phrase over and over, with the increasing shrillness of panic. Then abruptly his eyes rolled up, and his taut muscles relaxed.

  ‘He’s fainted,’ Kettan said contemptuously. ‘And I thought the Ska’i were afraid of nothing.’

  ‘Well, obviously that one is,’ Halthris pointed out. ‘What did he say, Abreth?’

  ‘I think — I think he said they were on the other side of the hill. Shall we go and look?’

  ‘I will!’ Kettan cried eagerly.

  Halthris gave him one of her most withering stares. ‘I can’t think of a quicker way to bring the whole pack of wolves howling down on us. You stay here with Fess, and watch him — if there’s any trouble, whistle, but I doubt there will be any. You know what’s required, don’t you, my lady?’

  The spotted cat, briefly tickled under her bristly chin, began to purr. Kettan opened his mouth to protest, but Halthris grabbed her brother by the arm and pulled him away before their cousin could object. Moving with the swift, unerring deftness of hunting Tanathi, they vanished into the grass.

  It was perhaps three bowshots, no more, to the top of the ridge. On the skyline, tumbled craggy rocks promised plenty of hiding places. But the Ska’i, like the Tanathi, were skilled steppe hunters, masters of concealment and cunning. Behind any one of those boulders a savage tribesman might be crouching, double axe in hand, eager to slaughter them and take their heads for trophies.

  The soft undyed leather of their hunting tunics blended perfectly with the dull dun colouring of the autumn grass. They climbed upwards with increasing wariness, alert for every rustle, every movement that might betray a hostile presence. Once a young steppe hare, its fur already beginning to turn white for winter, bounced up almost from under Abreth’s feet and sprang wildly away down the hill, and for a long while afterwards the brother and sister remained quite still, crouching beside a low, scrubby thorn-bush, listening intently. Only when they were sure that it was still safe did they move on.

  At last, they reached the shelter of the rocks. The soft soles of their riding boots made quiet climbing easy. Halthris led the way, negotiating obstacles and crevices with ease and unthinking agility. Like her brother, she was tall for a Tanathi, and lightly built, but on the steppes their lean frames and wiry strength conferred a considerable advantage. With infinite care, she slid her face and upper body between two worn, lichened lumps of stone, and looked down at the broad rolling valley which lay on the other side of the ridge.

  She remembered this place from previous occasions. Flat-bottomed and green, a small river ran through it after the infrequent but heavy spring and autumn rains, and it had often provided the Tanathi herds with good, lush grazing.

  Not this year, however. This year, others had seized the opportunity before them. As far as her sharp eyes could discern, the floor of the valley was covered with vast numbers of animals, people, tents and wagons. Even at this distance, the sounds and smells of the huge camp soared clearly up to her in the still afternoon air: shouts, the neighing of horses, the sharp tang of smoke, the richer aroma of roasting meat.

  This was not just a wolf-pack of Ska’i, an aberrant marauding band come north for a month of easy plunder before winter. This was the whole tribe, thousands upon thousands of them, the most ferocious warriors in all the known world, and each man trained and eager to kill without mercy …

  The tent nearest to them was still a good way off, and half obscured by a group of hobbled, grazing horses, but she did not need to strain her eyes to know that the round objects suspended from a pole stuck in the earth outside it were the heads of Ska’i enemies, proudly displayed as evidence of prowess in war. And she wondered, with sickened revulsion, how many of those heads had long, braided hair, and had once spoken Tanathi.

  A hand touched her, and she had the knife out of the scabbard before realizing that it was Abreth, unable to see past her and desperate to know what lay beyond the ridge. Her face white with shock, all the multitude of freckles stark on her skin, she put a finger to her lips and wriggled carefully backwards so that he could take her place.

  He stayed there for a long time, and she knew that her feelings of amazement, hatred and fear must be similar to his. For centuries the terrible, bloodthirsty Ska’i, trained to war from infancy and devoted to Ayak the Devourer, wolf-god of Death, had inspired fear and horror in all who were unfortunate enough to cross their path. Even though the Tanathi lived far to the north of the Ska’i homelands, the two tribes had come into conflict perhaps four or five times during her twenty-four years of life. When her father had been a boy, there had been twelve individual clans of the Tanathi: now there were only ten, for Ska’i raiders had wiped out two entire bands, each numbering some five or six hundred men, women and children, all their songs and spells and stories lost and spilled scarlet into the parched earth.