Cold Steel

34

Some days later, on a sunny afternoon, I read sentences aloud as the girls wrote them out on slate tablets. Vai’s mother rested on her bed. In this isolated wing of the huge complex, the sounds and smells of each day had a familiar rhythm as the servants went about their tasks. An unexpected drum of footfalls surprised me into setting down the schoolbook. The door opened and four guards entered. I grabbed my cane.

The mansa strode in. The damask of his flowing indigo robes gleamed. His hair was braided into canerows, the ends ornamented with white beads that clacked softly. I looked in vain for the old djeli, Bakary, who I was sure liked me. In the passage waited a younger man with a djeli’s gold earrings; he wore a dash jacket instead of Bakary’s traditional robes.

Vai’s mother got to her feet as Bintou and Wasa rose, Wasa fumbling with her crutch.

The mansa barely glanced at them. He studied the cacica’s skull briefly, but in truth his interest was all for me. “Catherine Bell Barahal, I have been blind to how valuable a person you are.”

He glanced toward the door as Lord Marius walked in. The soldier had an arm in a sling and a lurid but healing cut across his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

I made a pretty courtesy. “Your Excellency. My lord! You arrive with no warning, quite to my astonishment. I find surprise has made my mouth too dry to speak. Surely a soothing pot of tea and some news of my husband might help me find my voice.”

Lord Marius slapped me.

The force rocked me back. My skin stung so fiercely that tears welled in my eyes.

Wasa lost hold of her crutch and fell. Lord Marius grabbed my arm to stop me from going to her, so Bintou had to help her sister to her feet, both girls crying with fear.

“For shame,” said Vai’s mother. “The girl is defenseless and a prisoner.”

“Enough!” The mansa signaled toward the door. “Bring tea.” He regarded Vai’s mother with a considering frown. “I was told you were likely to die on the journey here to Lutetia, and sure to die within a week. Yet here you stand, still living. How does this come about?”

“Mansa,” she said, not answering, although she kept her gaze lowered.

“Stubborn, like your son. He lives,” he added, looking at me. “Satisfy me, and you will be allowed to see him. Defy me, and he will bide here never knowing you are held so close.”

I kept my chin high, for of course if Vai were here, he knew I was here.

The mansa chuckled, reading more into my expression than I intended. “Do not think to be prowling about to find him with the curious magic you possess. We have djeliw set to watch you. Right now, I have promised Lord Marius a full accounting of the fate of Legate Amadou Barry.”

“Will you be seated, Your Excellency, so Andevai’s mother may be seated?”

“They may sit, for whom standing is a burden,” he agreed magnanimously. A chair was brought for him. The moment he sat, Vai’s mother sank onto the bed, the girls pressed to either side.

With the chair came a pot of tea with two cups only. I took the pot from the servant and poured for the men. Lord Marius paced as I described Amadou Barry’s brief sojourn in the spirit world. He asked questions, and I answered each one in such excruciating detail that eventually he admitted defeat. Never let it be said I could not talk longer than they could listen!

“We shall never know the truth,” Marius said with the narrowed eyes of a man who has decided you are a liar.

“Perhaps not,” said the mansa, “but her account tallies with what Andevai told us.”

“They have colluded on their story. The magister never saw Amadou Barry at all.”

“If we colluded,” I pointed out reasonably, “then we might as easily have woven up a tale in which the magister was present for every part of the business. Or I might have claimed we never saw the legate at all in the spirit world, thus leaving you to wonder if he became lost in some benighted realm. But I did not. I am telling the truth.”

“Yes, I think you are telling the truth, if not all of the truth.” The mansa studied me across the rim of his cup before he drained the last.

“More tea, Your Excellency?” I asked.

“I have quite underestimated you. I daresay the Hassi Barahals sent you to spy on us. But I wonder if even the Hassi Barahals know the whole. I am certain we do not. Perhaps Andevai does.”

I smiled politely.

The mansa rose, gesturing for Vai’s mother to remain seated. “Do you dine with us this evening, Marius?”

“I do not. I am summoned to the Parisi court to give a report on the campaign. The prince was angered I did not come to his palace the moment I set foot in Lutetia, but this business of Amadou took precedence. I will call on you tomorrow.” He did not take his leave of me, and Vai’s mother and the girls were too far beneath a man of his rank for him to notice them, any more than he would have deigned to say goodbye to the servants.

“You will accompany me, Catherine,” the mansa said as he went to the door.

“Will supper be brought for Andevai’s honored mother and his innocent young sisters? Who will watch over them if I am not here to make sure they are safe?”

He paused under the threshold. “Do you think it is your presence that has made them safe? Please disabuse yourself of that notion. It is my word that makes them safe. As long as Andevai obeys me, they remain safe. Come.”

I kissed the girls and knelt before Vai’s mother to get her blessing. Then, with my cane, I followed the mansa through long corridors into a grand part of the House.

“It is the opinion of the healer of this House that you saved the woman’s life,” he said. “Your stubborn persistence brought her through the crisis.”

“My thanks, Your Excellency,” I said. He stood a head taller than me, big-boned and meaty without being ungainly. He went beardless in the Celtic fashion, which made him look younger than he probably was. His praise made me nervous. “That is a very fine damask. The color suits you.”

He chuckled. “Flattery may work on your husband, but it does not work with me.”

We halted before a set of doors carved with scenes of wolves leaping upon hapless deer. Attendants ushered us into a private parlor and shut the doors, leaving us alone. Dusk had settled over a garden outside. The mansa casually pulled a spark of cold fire from the air and let it grow to the size of his head. The chamber had gilt wallpaper and a ceiling painted with running gazelles and turbaned horsemen in pursuit. A second set of double doors, also closed, led to an unknown chamber on the right, while a single door on the left marked another unseen room beyond.

“You are an interesting creature, Catherine Bell Barahal. What do you want?”

“Your Excellency, do not think I am being disrespectful when I admit I am startled to be asked such a question by a man who previously sought to have me killed.”

“I am not often wrong, but now and again I make a mistake. You have many strange talents, and a command of magic outside my knowledge. As well, quite unexpectedly, I have seen changes in Andevai. It is true you brought him to defy me, when he never had before. But in showing complete loyalty to you, he has comported himself with remarkable discipline. A mansa would be well served with a wife like you.” My wince made him chuckle. “Do not misunderstand me. I have no interest in you on my own behalf.”

He clapped his hands thrice. The single door opened. A dignified and beautiful young woman entered. She wore a truly magnificent purple boubou with patterns of white roundels and a matching head wrap elaborately towered and knotted. Beside her, in my worn skirt and village tunic, I looked like the drab girl I was.

“What is your wish, Husband?” Her voice was elegant and cultured, her black complexion flawless, her wrists weighted with gold bracelets. “Ah, yes, as we discussed. I will take charge of you now, Maestra. I am Serena. You are Catherine. Please come with me.”

She offered a hand not to shake but to clasp in a sisterly greeting as she drew me into a woman’s sitting room decorated with low couches heaped with embroidered cushions on which people might comfortably relax and converse. Under one window stood a table with a chess set. Attendants hustled me behind a screen. They stripped me, washed me in scented water, dressed me in new underthings, and combed and braided my hair. Last they dressed me in a burgundy challis skirt, cut for striding, with a short jacket in thin stripes of rose and burgundy. I was no peacock, but then, I had never wanted to be. These well-tailored and sober clothes suited me perfectly.

Serena led me back through the parlor and through the double doors into a splendid dining room decorated in the old style, a long table surrounded by twenty-four cushions. Past another door I saw a staging area where male servants were arranging a veritable army of platters. At a side table an elderly steward supervised the decanting of multiple bottles of wine. After washing and drying our hands in a brass basin, we waited by the wine.

“I am told you are not House-raised, Catherine. In the mage Houses, when the mansa presides over a meal with important guests, it is customary for his wife to pour the wine and keep the glasses of the guests filled.” She sighed with a hint of exasperation. “I told the mansa it would be best to give me time with you to instruct you in the proper handling of the carafe and how to pour. Under the circumstances he cannot wish you to stumble, but…”

The far doors opened and the mansa entered. In his wake men streamed in, chatting as stewards showed them to their seats and brought bowls and towels for them to wash their fingers. No doubt the mansa had his own reasons for throwing me straight into the fire. Well! There was a lot about me he did not know!

As host of the gathering, the mansa naturally sat at one end of the table. The older guests were placed next to and then down from him in, I had to suppose, declining degrees of importance. The younger men were seated at the other half of the table. I recognized the mansa’s nephew, who had tried to kill me at Cold Fort and whom I had met again in Adurnam. When a steward directed him to a place midway down the table, close to neither end, the nephew cast me such a hostile look that I flinched.

Serena patted my hand. Under cover of the men’s talk she whispered, “Be gracious and silent. You must expect hostility from those who expected they were to be raised highest.”

To my surprise Mansa Viridor entered. He was seated in a place of honor among the younger men, to the left of the empty end cushion. Viridor saw me, then glanced toward the door.

Just when I realized Vai had not the status to be invited to such an exalted gathering of august magisters and princely allies, he walked in, last of all. His beard was freshly trimmed. He had let his hair grow out a little. He wore a long black-and-gold riding jacket trimmed with soldierly red braid, slim trousers, and gleaming boots. Possibly, I might have sighed longingly.

Serena’s fingers caught mine as she whispered, “You are staring at him. Do not. It makes you look like the cheapest sort of serving girl in a tavern where laborers congregate after work.”

Vai glanced at the mansa, already seated, and dipped his chin respectfully as he looked down at the only cushion left, the place at the opposite end that faced the mansa down the length of the table. He paused there for long enough that every man had to acknowledge that Andevai Diarisso Haranwy would take the seat that mirrored the mansa’s. His gaze flashed up to mark me, the message in his beautiful eyes so searing in its intensity that Serena sucked in a sharp breath. Maybe he meant it to be a private intimacy shared between us, but he hadn’t my years of experience in effacing myself in order to let Bee absorb all the notice. Every man at the table turned to look at us two women.

“I serve the elder men, you the younger,” Serena murmured, careful not to look any of them in the eye. “Be graceful and serene.”

With an aplomb I admired, she picked up a carafe and swept over to the mansa. The steward indicated another carafe, which I carried to the other end where Vai was seated. This was no different from serving drinks at Aunty Djeneba’s boardinghouse, except any mistake here would reveal me as a waddling duck pretending to be a swan and allow every mage who hated Vai the chance to laugh at him.

I watched Serena kneel behind the mansa to pour into the offering cup and then his cup. She poured for the older men in a zigzag order according to their proximity to the mansa. A steward hovered at her right hand to replace the emptying carafe with a new one. Only when she had finished did I kneel just behind and to the right of Vai and reach past him for his wineglass. My arm brushed his, and his eyes closed briefly. After filling his cup, I poured for the young men in the proper order, copying her movements in reverse, and retreated to the side table. Serena’s approving nod saturated me with an unreasonable amount of satisfaction.

I could be serene!

Male servants carried in platters of delicacies never seen in our weeks in custody: chicken simmered in onion and mustard, fish cooked with tomatoes, a haunch of peppered beef, and skewers of grilled goat on beds of spinach, a constant stream of dishes. The men set to their meal.

Young men drink faster than their elders, and my job was to anticipate before any glass was emptied. Conversation flowed as steadily as the wine, the older men in serious discussion and the younger men jesting in quiet voices among themselves, for they had not the right to interrupt the older men’s conversation. Vai spoke rarely and only in answer to questions put directly to him. Not that I was looking at him all the time. I was too busy pouring wine.

How the men did stare at me as I moved around the table! Not in the flirtatious way I had enjoyed at the boardinghouse but as a man may measure an ill-fitting suit of clothes he is surprised to see offered to him as one of good quality. The mansa’s nephew and several cronies seated beside him were the worst, calling me over before their cups were empty as if to suggest I had not noticed. I did my duty in as patient a manner as possible, for I was determined not to shame Vai. Furthermore, at last I had the opportunity to spy in the mage House.

Confined in the chamber and garden, I had heard no news at all for over four months. Now I heard every word they said.

War had come to Europa.

General Camjiata had united the Iberians and marched an army over the Pyrene Mountains. In a series of running battles he had pushed north and, with a mastery of strategy and tactics that utilized his modern rifles and cannons to best effect, he had defeated every force sent against him. Worst, several Gallic princes had declared neutrality or even shifted allegiance to support the Iberian Monster. Inflamed by radical agitators, towns and villages had risen up against their masters and welcomed the general’s troops.

A month ago, on the Midsummer solstice, an alliance of princely and mage House troops under the command of Lord Marius had fought Camjiata’s army to a standstill at the city of Lemovis. Both sides had been forced to withdraw without a clear victor. Lord Marius had pulled his troops back to Lutetia to resupply and to wait for help from Rome.

“The Romans have fielded their legions at last,” said the mansa. “They have taken their time, considering we princes and mages have borne the brunt of the monster’s aggression for four months.” He looked down the length of the table. “Andevai, by the quiver of your eyebrow I discern you have a comment you wish to make. You may speak.”

Vai’s gaze skipped to me, where I stood holding a carafe, and back to his master. “Mansa, no useful campaign can be planned without taking into account that the general is using fire mages.”

The mansa’s nephew leaned forward with a sneer. “What proof have you for this insane assertion? To call fire is to die in fire.” He turned to the mansa. “Uncle, the village boy is either trying to impress you with lies or is simply too ignorant to know he is wrong.”

No wonder he hated Vai, for no man at the table could mistake the privileged place at which the mansa had seated the village boy.

“What do you think?” the mansa asked the table at large.

Vai sat in perfect rigid silence as they debated the question, some mocking, some serious.

To my surprise Viridor spoke in Vai’s defense, exactly as if he had not betrayed him. “I have seen these troubling incidents also. We cannot ignore them.”

“Blacksmiths forge weapons, and weapons are used by troops,” said the mansa’s nephew, pressing his point with the snicker of a belligerent man who believes he is being challenged by a weaker opponent. “That is not the same as mages who wield fire magic, which is an impossibility. The people in the Amerikes gulled him with tricks and illusions. One such as he cannot help believing anything he is told.”

Vai fixed his gaze on his hands, which he had laid flat on the table as if to remind himself not to clench them into fists. “I do not believe this is going on. I know it. Mansa, I have given you numerous examples, the most obvious of which are the burned estates and palaces of enemy princes, and the burn-scarred bodies of dead soldiers.”

The mansa said, “Burning down buildings is the work of the angry mob. It needs no magic. Likewise, men will deface the bodies of those they hate and fear.”

Vai nodded. “It is true that to tell the difference between what is begun by a fire mage and finished by angry men is difficult.”

The mansa’s nephew snorted. “How convenient! If it is difficult, then one can keep claiming it is true! Why would a fire mage not just burn all enemy soldiers alive, if they could do it?”

“I do not know if blood protects the living body, or if no fire mage dares unleash such a monstrous power. But regardless, all who with their own eyes witnessed the death of the mansa of Gold Cup House at Lemovis know of what I speak.” Vai looked directly at the mansa, his gaze not quite a challenge. “If the Coalition Army and the Romans do not recognize the threat of fire magic and change their tactics, they will lose.”

The mansa’s nephew drained the last of his wine, then laughed as I hastened to refill his cup before he could complain of my incompetence. “The wrath of fire mages is a story told by credulous villagers who know no better than to believe the pap they nurse from their mother’s breast. If, indeed, they even know who their mother really is.”

Vai looked up. “A man can bray like a jackass, but that doesn’t mean his noise means anything.”

Every man tensed. In a chamber full of cold mages, the temperature’s drop came as no surprise. Vai’s expression remained impassive, except for the stab of fury that twitched in his cheek.

The mansa’s nephew raised his newly filled wineglass in mocking salute. “Rumor has it you’re the only magister on campaign who sleeps alone every night. If you need some help to make a woman of the Phoenician girl, I would be happy to oblige. Most of the time they like it best when they claim they don’t want it. Just like you. I haven’t forgotten how I had to make a woman of you when you first came to Four Moons House because you stubbornly refused to acknowledge your betters. Someone had to put you in your place.”

I had a moment of stunning clarity as Vai rocked back as if he had been punched.

The gods do watch over us, even if we cannot always recognize the shape their hand takes. A serving man bearing a tureen of beet soup had halted in embarrassment an arm’s length from me. I snatched the tureen out of his hands and dumped its contents over the head of the mansa’s nephew.

He shouted, staggering up so off balance that I needed only to nudge his knee to send him tumbling ignominiously onto his backside.

“Noble Ba’al, forgive me, Magister!” I cried, slapping a hand to my chest in an exaggerated gesture worthy of Bee. “From the garbage that came out of your mouth, I mistook you for the slops bucket.”

The older men laughed appreciatively and the younger nervously, while the servants looked as if they wished they were anywhere except in the dining room.

I knelt under cover of laughter. “One word more, Magister,” I whispered, “and I will tell the tale of what a fool the Phoenician girl made of you, the day you and your soldiers and your highborn magic could not catch me when you found me unarmed on the road. I’m sure every man here wants to hear the part about how I mocked you and then stole your horse.”

Picking up the fallen wineglass, I rose, handed the empty tureen back to the stunned serving man, and to my surprise was greeted by the head wine steward handing me a full carafe.

“Well done, Maestra,” he murmured.

“Do go clean up, Jata,” said the mansa to his fuming nephew, who was picking bay leaves out of his hair. “Now, Andevai, describe in greater detail for our guests why and how you believe General Camjiata is using fire mages to fight his battles. More wine.”

As if more wine were what a pack of half-drunken men needed! But Serena nodded at me, so I poured, one eye always on Vai. He did not drink or eat a single morsel more. He explained crisply and in detail what he had seen and what conclusions he had drawn. Someone who did not know him might have mistaken the edge to his voice as arrogance when by the set of his shoulders and the angle of his chin it was clear he was covering humiliation.

The meal dragged on long past my patience for it, but I smiled and served to the end. The men departed in a mood half martial and half jocular, soaked in wine. Vai was sent out with the visitors to see them safely on their way home.

The mansa remained, lost in thought as the servants cleared the table around him and themselves departed. When only the mansa and Serena and I were left in the room, she poured three glasses of wine. The first she gave to me. She set the other two on the table and seated herself on a cushion next to her husband with an enigmatic smile.

I was so thirsty and angry that I drained the wine in one swallow, a rush like wet earth and giddy flowers. “Why do you let the powerful abuse the powerless? Why would you allow the one who had the least to fear to abuse the one who had no one to help him?”

“The magic should never have bloomed so strongly in a common-born slave like him, a boy whose own mother has not even a village lineage to claim,” said the mansa harshly. “When it did so, he ought to have been grateful we brought him into the House.”

“Where he was mocked and reviled every single day?”

“Boys will fight and compete to prove who is strongest. He should have bowed his head to those who stand above him, as a courtesy if nothing else. He would have done better with the youths he took his lessons with if he had not insisted on besting them in every trial.”

“That excuses it? Did all of you just look the other way while this kind of thing went on?”

A chill shuddered the air as his gaze tightened, but I did not retreat. “Do not be insolent, Catherine. One time it happened, in his first year at the House. Never after. The youths were warned they had gone too far in this instance.”

“Because you saw how powerful his cold magic could be? How useful he could be to you? Had he been a village child with no such promise, would anyone have cared?” Serena gave a shake of her head to remind me to be serene and placid. But I could not. “His own grandmother was impregnated against her will! She was not the only woman so used!”

He shrugged. “You will understand better when you must supervise the whole.”

“When I must supervise the whole…” I stared at the brilliant stain of beet soup mottling the rug. A dreadful fear gripped my heart. “What do you mean?”

He rose, leaving his full cup untouched. Serena rose gracefully alongside, a superb ornament, the sort of polished and splendid young woman of high rank a man may marry as his third or fourth wife, when he can choose for his own desire rather than the House’s needs and convenience. But he did not look at her. He was sure of her. He looked at me.

“You would do well to remember that he belongs to me, Catherine. Not to you. Not to himself. I will keep him in Four Moons House by whatever means I must.”

He clapped his hands. A steward appeared to escort me back to my prison.

I found Vai kneeling before his stern-faced mother, his head bowed. He had an arm around each sister. Servants collected our things.

Seeing me enter, Bintou leaped up. “Cat, we’re leaving.”

“Leaving Lutetia?” I asked, watching Vai. He did not look at me.

“No, we’re leaving this room. Vai says we are to have a grand set of rooms with a large garden! What do you think of that?”

Grand they were, as we soon discovered. An invalid chair was wheeled in, big enough for Wasa to sit on her mother’s lap. Although servants now swarmed everywhere, Vai himself pushed the chair through the corridors to the guest wing and a suite of rooms just down the hall from the parlor and dining hall where the mansa and I had had our conversations. A lovely entry and a charming little audience room gave onto a sitting room, off of which lay two bedrooms.

One of the sleeping chambers had been arranged with two beds, one for the girls and another for Vai’s mother. Its glass doors opened onto a courtyard lit by cressets of cold fire to display a fountain, benches surrounded by troughs of blooming flowers, and an arbor that screened a garden beyond. The girls hung on him, whispering secrets to him and giggling at their own jokes, as I settled his mother comfortably for the night and placed the cacica’s skull to watch over them.

After we kissed the girls he took my hand. He led me past the arbor and into the garden to a tiny summer cottage, a gazebo hung with cloth walls. Inside stood a bed draped with gauze curtains and flanked by two privacy screens. Bowls of food crowded a small table set for two people. Servants waited. He thanked and dismissed them, and they left.

“You must not have eaten,” he said. “There is fish, and fruit. And yam pudding that I had the kitchen make specially for you.”

Looking at the proud lift of his chin and the mulish set of his lips, I knew he would not speak of it, not now and maybe not ever.

“Vai, do you remember the Griffin Inn, in Southbridge Londun? When I came out from the supper room and you took one look at me and got up and came over to me? Why did you just get up like that and take my word there was trouble?”

He blinked. “But there was trouble, Catherine. It seemed obvious by your haste and tone. I could as well ask why you warned me. You could have said nothing and hoped they killed me, since they vastly outnumbered me. The people at the inn were not inclined to take my part.”

“Think of how many people would have been hurt or killed if you had unleashed your magic! It was better to go on with you than to risk injury to people who had no part in the fight.”

He slipped his fingers between mine until our palms touched. “You chose their safety over what you must have believed to be your own happiness. That is how it is with you, Catherine. You never questioned what your aunt and uncle thrust on you. You stayed loyal to their wishes up to the moment the mansa commanded me to kill you. Even then, love, you stayed loyal to your cousin. You didn’t run away to save yourself. You ran back to save her. Just as you jumped into the river because you thought my sisters looked frightened, and probably because you thought that together you and I could rescue them. Just as you tirelessly nursed my mother.” I thought he was going to kiss me, but that was not what he was about. “Your mother was right about you. ‘Loyalty will be the bright light this child will bring to the world.’ Never think otherwise, my sweet Catherine.”

A balmy night breeze chased through the cloth hangings that shielded us from view. Every cresset of cold fire in the garden went out.

I leaned into him.

He kissed my hair.

I raised my head and brushed his mouth with mine.

For a very long while neither of us spoke a single word, except what was in our hearts.

Much later we lay in the bed, drowsy and contented, yet I could not stop caressing him. I traced his lips, his chin, his throat, and then his shoulders and up the back of his neck.

“You’ve kept your beard trimmed but decided to let your hair grow out.”

“I promised myself I would not cut it until we were reunited.”

I would have made a joke about it, but my heart was too full. He held me as I lightly stroked his chest, and after a while I thought he had fallen asleep.

“Catherine.” His whisper made me shiver as from a touch of winter. “Everything has changed, love. Everything.”

My wandering hand stilled. “What has changed, Vai?”

I wished I could see his face, and then, after all, I was glad he could not see me.

“You must have suspected when you were brought in to pour wine. That honor is granted only to the mansa’s wife or daughters. When you saw where I was seated. The mansa has adopted me as his son and named me as his heir.”

“But… what about… your village, and clientage, and Chartji’s court case, and Camjiata’s legal code, and Kofi and the radicals?”

“It’s not even that I’ve bested them, every cursed one of them. For all those years the mansa scorned me as the village boy. He never thought I would amount to more than a lamplighter who renews cold fire each night at mage inns. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. But now he knows. Think of the honor to my mother! I will become mansa of Four Moons House.”

Exhausted by his climb up Triumph Spire, he fell asleep in my arms. But every time I closed my eyes, I remembered the troll lunging to rip out the belly of the horse.

The mansa had trapped him in the most gilded cage of all.