Free The Leopard (Marakand) by K.V. Johansen Page A

westward weavings of the road lay the Duina Catairna, but Ahjvar was not crossing that border.
    “Do we have rope?”
    Five nights. It was a nightmare, but Ghu had lived nightmares before. Ahjvar’s wrists and ankles were torn raw and bled, slow and sluggish, night and day now. He rolled his sleeves because the touch of cloth even through bandages was an agony. He wouldn’t let Ghu leave the bandages on when he bound him at night either, saying even that much give in the rope was too much. Ghu thought that at least wrists and ankles should be enough, but Ahj insisted, so when the sun sank near the horizon he tied him wrist and ankle and knee as well, and left him lying in some open place far from fire and rock and sharp stone. He took the horses, too, and rode on to make his own camp. And went back at dawn, to find wherever Ahj had crawled to, untie him, bandage him, make him eat and drink and put him to bed, because he needed rest even more than the horses, who suffered this additional nighttime back-and-forthing with patient grace. At noon they would break camp and travel on, Ahjvar silent, grim, and sometimes muttering, too low for any words to be heard.
    Ghu had been in the lands of many gods since he left Nabban, where there were only two, Mother Nabban of the great river and Father Nabban of the holy peak. It did not seem a natural state for all the godhead of a land to have drawn into only two beings, too great to know all their folk as they should, but Ahjvar’s talk of Catairanach showed him the other side of godhead, how dangerous it might be for a little god, an unwise god, to sink to the level of the folk she ought to have nurtured as a wise aunt, guarding and guiding. She had become as locked in petty, passing daily life as they, tormenting her folk through her unwisdom. A goddess should be impartial, patient, and thoughtful, slow in judgement, broad in love; encompassing all her folk, not favouring; devoted, not impassioned.
    During the sixth day of Ahjvar’s madness, cloud rolled up from the distant sea, low over the hilltops, smothering the sky.
    “Now,” Ahjvar said. “We have to stop now.” It was the first he had spoken all that day. Even his muttering had ceased.
    “It’s not sunset yet.”
    “Soon enough. She’s not waiting for full dark.”
    He did not like it when Ahjvar began talking of the curse as “she.” It raised the hairs prickling on the back of his neck, as if the very words brought some other presence with them, some stalking ghost. He could see ghosts, usually. This one—Ghu did not doubt it existed—but it never came out where it could be seen.
    “All right,” he agreed. “But it’s going to rain tonight.”
    “Good.”
    “At least let’s find a tree to give you some shelter.”
    “No.”
    “You’ll end up with catarrh or water on the lungs, lying out in the open.”
    “Good.”
    “Ahj—”
    “Now, Ghu.” And his teeth were clenched. Ahjvar flung himself from the horse, unbelted his sword and hurled it away. He dropped his cloak, too, kicked off his high riding boots, and held out his seeping wrists. “ Now. ”
    Last night’s ropes Ghu had burned, every length of them blood-soaked, fly-crawling by dawn, and the knots pulled so tight there was no untying them. He had needed to cut them out of Ahj’s swollen flesh. His hands ought to rot off. They wouldn’t, Ahj said. Rope. Ghu hadn’t thought they would need an anchor-cable’s length of it. They had leather harness-ties and spare straps, but those might stretch or be gnawed through, Ahjvar insisted. Well, the mountains marched closer. Another two or three days would bring them to a main branch of the caravan road, by Ahjvar’s reckoning, and they would turn west towards the dry valley where the coulee came down from the pass, carrying a remnant of mountain snowmelt in the spring. And then, on the rising, straight road, three days at most after that, Marakand. Ahjvar swore that he was safe, once he had