Page 17 of Hemlock & Silver
(Also, if you’ve heard that two roosters put together will always kill each other, you’ve heard wrong. As long as one rooster has space to run away, they’ll establish a pecking order and settle down. Things only get tricky if there are hens to fight over. Probably there’s a moral in that somewhere.)
“No,” I said to Javier, “it’s a treatment for lotus-smoke overdose.”
“Really!” That was the most emotion I’d ever seen from Javier, who hewed closely to the silent-guardsman image I’d had in my head. “And it works?”
I grimaced. “Sometimes. If I get called in soon enough, and I’m lucky. One out of three or four times, say.”
I waited for him to say something about lotus addicts being criminals, but instead he said, “That’s still a great deal better than nothing.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
The road curved to the left, and I found myself looking back in the direction of the city. From this distance, it was dwarfed by the pale stone of the mesas that rose around it and by the three enormous figures painted across the cliff face above. Greatly elongated but still recognizably human, the paintings stretched several hundred feet before being abruptly truncated at the shoulder. In place of heads were the profiles of animals—a fish, a snake, a leaping hare. Saint Fish, Saint Adder, Saint Rabbit. And around the side of the mesa, hidden from view, was the last of the city’s four guardians, Saint Bird. They had been painted long ago, in ancient times, and their old names had been lost, but the saints themselves endured.
There were other saints etched in other places, though none so dramatic as the Four. Saint Toad could be found a day’s travel to the west, looming over his own town, and there were dozens of representations of Saint Lizard scattered across the region, often stained on rocks no taller than I was. Saint Toad’s shrines popped up wherever water seeped to the surface. And, of course, three of the Four also appeared in other places, though Saint Fish was rareand found only on permanent waterways. It was only Saint Adder who was unique to our city, the great serpent, arbiter of life and death, sickness and health, poison and antidote.
I murmured a prayer under my breath, then set my gaze resolutely forward. Before long, we reached the first switchback and began to descend into the low desert.
If you look at the Kingdom of Saints on a map, it resembles an elongated hand making a rude gesture with its middle finger at the ocean. The wrist begins in a tangle of mountains, and the heel of the hand is a set of valleys sheltered by those same mountains. (This is where much of our food and all of our wine comes from.) Mesas and canyons carve up the base of the thumb, and everything slopes downward from there, so that much of the palm lies in the low desert.
Eventually you reach the sea and the rude peninsula. Cholla Bay is the largest city there, mostly warehouses and fishing trawlers. We don’t have a deep enough port for really big ships, unfortunately, so about half our trade comes through our neighbor to the west, which charges us the sort of tariffs that make my father stomp up and down and snort obscenities. On the upside, between the mountains and the shallow ports, we’re quite hard to invade. Every few years, some warlord sets themselves up in the waste past the thumb and the army has to be called out, and there was one winter when flint-wolves came out of the mountains and started eating buildings, but for the most part, we’re fairly peaceful.
Witherleaf lay between the map’s first two knuckles, in the low desert. We followed switchback after switchback downward, the slope growing gradually gentler, until they were less switchbacks than curves, and then not even that. The vegetation changed around us, some shrubs giving way to cactus and grasses giving way to bare ground. The soil of the road bleached from cream to bone.
We continued down the white road through the desert for an hour or so, breathing in white dust and coughing and (in my case) cursing. I was wearing sensible riding clothes—trousers, a tunic,a light over-robe, and a broad-brimmed hat—all in sand colors so that the dust didn’t show, but I could feel it in my teeth and the inside of my nose. I pulled my scarf up over my face, which helped a little, but not much. It was hot. You get used to heat when you live in the desert, mostly by inventing ways to stay out of it. I checked on the chime-adder again worriedly. She seemed fine, but snakes always seem fine right up until they aren’t. I reminded myself that she was bred for the desert and I wasn’t.
Twice, Javier rode down the column of travelers and returned with water. Aaron and I traded the dripping waterskin back and forth gratefully. My guards were wearing long padded jackets that fell nearly to their knees, dark blue with a line of decorative silver closures. The jackets had half sleeves, with ordinary linen shirts underneath, and plain, loose brown trousers. I could hear Isobel in my head yelling that my guards were better dressed than I was. I took some comfort that the dust was showing up much more dramatically on the blue jackets than it did on mine. (Despite what you may have heard, black is just as cool in a desert as white, so long as you wear your clothing loose enough to let air circulate a bit.)
The third time Javier came back, it was to say that the king had requested my presence at the head of the column.
I said, “Uh?”
He repeated himself.
“Oh,” I said. “Err… sure?”
Both guards accompanied me along the side of the road, past the coaches and a knot of riders who had to be nobility. Half of them were dressed the same way that I was, and the other half were wearing clothes that had probably been quite attractive before the ride. Hats decked with enormous plumes drooped over the wearers, and gems sparkled in settings covered in white dust.
I was more than a little surprised to find the king alone at the head of the column. Insomuch as I had thought about it at all, I had assumed that he would be surrounded by attendants, perhaps conducting what matters of state could be conducted from thesaddle. He was dressed much the same as my guards were, except that the jacket was so stiff with embroidery that it probably functioned as another layer of armor.
What in Saint Adder’s name am I doing here? I can’t possibly have impressed him with my conversation earlier…
“Your Majesty,” I said, wondering how on earth one was supposed to curtsy on the back of a horse. I settled for an awkward dip of the shoulders. He lifted a hand in what was either an acknowledgment or a gesture not to bother.
I didn’t regret my choice of clothing, having just seen how the road treated gems and cloth of gold, but I did feel a brief pang that I didn’t have a fancier horse. The king was mounted on an elegant gray mare, and I was riding Ironwood, who was basically a sofa with hooves. I felt immediately guilty at the thought and patted his neck. Ironwood was a good animal, damn it. Horses weren’t like ball gowns you swapped out as the mood suited you.
“And how are you faring today, Mistress Anja?” the king asked.
“Oh… uh… fine, Your Majesty.” I cast around for some observation to make, and settled on, “It’s very dusty, though.”
“Yes,” he said, even though at the head of the column, he had much less dust to contend with. “Do you ride often?”
“Now and again. Mostly when I need to visit the hospital. It’s a long way to walk.” Oh, this was excruciating. I wasn’t good at small talk at the best of times. “Do you ride often, Your Majesty?”
“Not as often as I’d like,” he said ruefully. “When I was younger, it seemed like I was in the saddle every day, going somewhere to oversee something vital. Now everything vital comes to the palace, and by the time I think, ‘I wanted to go riding today,’ it’s already dark.”
“It’s easy to get caught up in work,” I agreed.
“I imagine you see patients regularly.”
