Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [55]
His expression softened. “Good girl.”
I lowered my gaze in a penitent manner, replying in vulgar Alban and a sweet, remorseful tone. “Go to hell, you miserable goat-fucking bastard.”
We made camp that night within the sight of mountains. After I finished the bowl of barley gruel that they gave me for the evening meal, I sat with my back against one of the wagon-wheels and gazed at the distant range. Here and there, I could make out carpets of dark green on the slopes.
Trees.
As much as I’d come to be fond of the vast, wide-open expanse of the Tatar steppe and its immense blue sky, I’d never stopped missing trees. I’d never imagined that my first glimpse of them would be aught but joyful. Instead, it was a reminder that I was bound and helpless, cut off from my own inner senses, and headed in the opposite direction from everything and everyone I had ever loved.
It was not a joyful moment.
NINETEEN
The older Vralian’s name was Ilya; the younger’s was Leonid.
I learned this through observation over the course of days, since neither of them deigned to tell me when I asked. It is more difficult than one might expect to pick out proper names in the midst of an utterly foreign tongue, especially among folk who speak seldom.
Beyond that, I learned nothing. By the time we had spent a week’s time jolting our way through the mountain passes, I was just as puzzled and confused as I had been from the moment Ilya first clamped a cuff around my wrist. I could not for the life of me understand what it was they wanted of me.
Not pleasure, that was certain. They were as reluctant to touch me as they were to look at me or talk to me.
For that, I was grateful. If they had been intent on committing heresy on me, I would have been helpless to prevent it. But instead, it seemed quite the opposite. I had the sense that they regarded me as unclean, and not in a way that owed to my limited and unsuccessful attempts to maintain good hygiene, a difficult task rendered near impossible by virtue of being chained within my dirty clothing.
No, it was somewhat deeper and more profound.
Over and over, in a thousand different ways, I asked what it was they wanted, why they had taken me. The only answer I ever got was, “God wills it.” Eventually, I gave up asking and pondered why Vralia’s god wanted me.
What little I knew of Vralian faith came from Berlik’s tale—Berlik the Oath-Breaker, who had fled to the snowy wastes, carrying his curse far, far away from his people. In the end, the Maghuin Dhonn Herself had accepted his atonement.
I knew that Berlik had fallen in with Yeshuite pilgrims on his journey, and that he had found a place of sanctuary in a Yeshuite monastery in Vralia. No one had clapped him in chains. No, the head priest had given Berlik his blessing, allowing him to retreat into hermitage and roam freely in an immense tract of pristine wilderness owned by the monastery. When Imriel de la Courcel came seeking vengeance for the life of his wife and unborn child, the priest begged him to spare Berlik.
Of course, we only know Prince Imriel’s side of the tale, but the Maghuin Dhonn have always believed he told it fairly. Tales say that Berlik bowed his head to the sword willingly, and the prince fell to his knees in the snow and wept after he took his life. A man with every right to vengeance would not lie about such a thing.
I wondered what had changed in a hundred and some years that Yeshua’s priests had gone from giving succor to a great magician of the Maghuin Dhonn, one with a dire curse on his head, to dragging me away in chains for the dubious sin of having been falsely accused of cheating in an archery contest.
It was madness.
Vralia had been a country at war in Berlik’s time, that I remembered. The Yeshuite faith was not born here; indeed, it had far closer ties to Terre d’Ange. Mayhap I was approaching the matter from the wrong direction, and Vralia’s gods were interested in me because of my D’Angeline blood.
I tried to think the matter through, looking for some thread of a clue woven into