wrapping up the spirits. She laid each crystal down in the exact centre of a cloth, then folded the corners over in a precise motion while she murmured a few strange syllables under her breath. Once wrapped, each went into a separate soft leather pouch; while she tied a thong around the mouth, she chanted again. As he watched this long procedure, Zayn felt his body growing aware of her. There they were, in the dim tent together, with the rain drumming a drowsy rhythm on the roof.
She was a comnee woman, not one of the chastity-bound girls at home. Ammadin raised her head and looked at him.
‘No.’
Zayn nearly swore aloud. What had she done, read his thoughts? When she looked him over as if she could see through his eyes and into his soul, all his sexual interest vanished. He got up and busied himself with arranging his bedroll on the far side of the tent.
The rain came down intermittently all night. When the morning broke grey with clouds, the comnee decided to stay in camp. After he tended the horses, Zayn went to Dallador’s tent mostly because Ammadin had told him to leave her alone – to work, she said, and he wondered what strange ritual she had in hand.
A fire burned on the hearth stones under the smokehole, and Dallador sat near it, carving slices of a red animal horn into the little pegs used to fasten shirts and tent bags. His small son sat nearby and watched solemnly and silently where a Kazraki boy would have been pelting his father with questions. Zayn joined them and studied the way Dallador cut peg after peg with no wasted motion.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Zayn said at last.
‘What?’
‘It’s about Ammadin. Uh, is there something odd about her eyes?’
‘Very.’ Dallador looked up with a quick grin. ‘You’ve seen them flash, I’ll bet.’
‘Yes. I certainly did.’
‘That’s the mark of the spirit riders. It shows up when a child’s about as old as Benno here. That’s how the parents know their child’s going to be a spirit rider.’
‘What if a person didn’t have those eyes but wanted to study the lore anyway?’
‘They wouldn’t have a hope in hell. No one would teach them. It’s a sign that they can see things ordinary people can’t. If they have the spirit eyes, then they have spirit ears, too, and they can hear spirits talking.’
‘Hear spirits? How?’
‘How would I know?’ Dallador smiled briefly, then laid his knife down and considered the little heap of horn pegs. ‘That’s enough to last us a while. Now let me show you how to shell land-shrimp. I found a whole nest of them this morning, and if they’re cooked right, they’re pretty tasty.’
When Zayn returned to Ammadin’s tent, he brought her a skewer of grilled land-shrimp and some salted breadmoss in a polished stone bowl. He found her sitting cross-legged on her blankets with her saddlebags nearby.
‘That smells good,’ Ammadin remarked.
‘Dallador’s teaching me how to cook.’
He handed her the food, then laid his palms together and greeted the god figures before sitting down opposite her. She plucked a shrimp off the skewer, bit into it, and smiled.
‘Very good.’
While she ate, Zayn considered the god figures, sitting on a multi-coloured rug opposite the tent flap. There were six of them in all, most about a foot high, carved of different coloured stones, then decorated and dressed with cloth and feathers. One figure was obviously human, but the others – he’d never seen creatures like them before. Two were roughly human in shape, but the green one had scales and a wedge-shaped head like a ruffled lizard’s, and the small black one had what appeared to be fish’s gills pasted on either side of its chest. Another seemed to be only half-finished: a torso, studded with bits of gold to represent what might have been eyes, rose from an ill-defined mass of grey stone. The fifth had furled wings of stiffened cloth, huge in relation to its frail, many-legged body, and the sixth, the largest of them all, resembled a worm with leather tentacles at one end and paddle-shaped chips of shell stuck at the other.
‘What do you think those are?’ Ammadin said abruptly.
‘Well, your gods. Or representations of them, I should say. I know you don’t worship the bits of stone, of course.’
‘Of course.’ She smiled, but only faintly. ‘Why do you think our gods look so strange?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Neither do we.’
He waited for her to say more, but she merely finished her meal. When she handed him the dirty bowl he went to wash it out in the stream. Night had fallen, and the storm clouds had broken up. He could see the last of them off to the north, a lighter smudge on a dark horizon. When he turned to the east he saw the Spider glittering in the sky, a huge spiral of distant light, but the Flies had already set.
Zayn hunkered down at the stream bed and scrubbed the remnants of food out of the bowl with the side of his hand. Little flashes of blue light in the water greeted this gift from the heavens – tiny fish, dotted with luminescence, snapped at the crumbs as they sank. As a boy he’d wondered if the animals in grass and stream believed that their gods were the humans, those baffling beings who fed them or killed them according to some whim. We’d look just as strange to them as those bizarre little fetishes do to me, he thought. And what of Ammadin’s remark? Neither do we. Somehow, he knew, it held a challenge.
With the rising of the pale sun the comnee struck camp and moved on. Since the day promised heat, Ammadin folded up her saurskin cloak and put it away in its special tent bag. She had Zayn saddle her grey gelding, then rode out ahead, where she could think away from the noise and dust of the herds and wagons. No one, of course, questioned her leaving. Her people assumed that on her lonely rides Ammadin worked magic for the good of the comnee, perhaps invoking spirits to gain hidden knowledge or maybe driving away evil with powerful spells. In one way she was riding alone for their good, she supposed. How would it affect her people if they knew that their spirit rider, the guardian of their gods, their defender from dark forces, their healer and spiritual leader, was rapidly losing her faith in gods and magic both? Better that she take herself away than let her doubts show.
All around her the lavender grasslands stretched out to an endless horizon. As she rode, the grass crackled under her horse’s hooves. Yellabuhs swarmed but never bit. Now and again turquoise-blue winged lizards leapt from the grass and flew off, buzzing furiously at these huge intruders. Otherwise, nothing moved in the summer heat, nothing made a sound. Here and there she saw a cluster of blood-red pillars rising from the grass that meant distant spear trees and thus water. Eventually, when the sun was reaching its zenith, she headed for one of the groves to give her horse and herself some relief from the sun.
Along a violet stream bank, the red spears leapt from the earth and towered, far taller than a rider on horseback. Close up they appeared to have grown as a single leaf, wound around and around on itself to the thickness of a child’s waist, but down at the base, hidden by a clutter of mosses and ferns, were the traces of old leaves that had died back and withered. The spears grew in clumps from long tuberous roots, spiralling out from a mother plant. How the mother plants got their start, no one knew.
Ammadin unsaddled her gelding and let him roll, then led him to the stream to drink. When he finished
