The sorcerer lifted her chin. “It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. A partnership.”
Nazia opened her mouth again, but swallowed what she might have said at the flicker of Sayeh’s lids. The girl was learning. Would learn more, if Sayeh could keep her alive long enough.
Whatever I have to do to get my son back, Sayeh told herself. “I shall have to consider your kind offer,” however, was what she said.
“Of course,” Ravani said smoothly.
“Are you sure you won’t have tea?” Sayeh asked.
Ravani shook her head, her wrist-thick braid slipping over her shoulder. She pushed it back. “I am afraid duty calls.”
Three times she refuses. I wonder if it is a ritual.
Sayeh said goodbye politely, and Ümmühan showed Ravani to the door. When the flap fell shut behind her, Nazia leaned close to Sayeh and whispered, “You cannot mean to trust her.”
“I do not mean to trust anyone,” Sayeh answered, with a show of placidity. “But I need a plan. And sitting here with a useless leg is not a plan. She says she’s Anuraja’s partner—”
“A partnership she’s willing to betray for the possibility of a very slight advantage.”
“We can perhaps use that too,” Sayeh said.
Ümmühan said, “My people speak of beasts that feed on war. For whom strife itself is food.”
Nazia nodded, and Sayeh felt herself inclining her head in agreement as well. “You mentioned that before. As a metaphor.”
“Well, as an actuality,” Ümmühan said amusedly. “But I offer it as a metaphor.”
“It is a good one. And it gives me an idea of how to proceed.” She looked at Ümmühan. “Do you still sing, my lady poetess?”
“Oh, yes,” Ümmühan answered, with a wicked smile. “Though my voice is not what in days of old broke hearts and laid thoughts to rest … yes, I still sing.”
Nazia cleared her throat. “And what will you do, my rajni?”
Sayeh sighed. “If I have no other choice, if my plan to steal his army does not work … quickly enough … I am going to tell Anuraja that I will speak to Mrithuri on his behalf. But not today.”
* * *
Sayeh survived a single day longer on her couch before she ordered them bring her a second crutch.
Well, “ordered” might not be the correct word. It would be more precise, though more painful to her pride, to admit that she prevailed upon Ümmühan against Ümmühan’s advice and better judgment. And Ümmühan—also against Ümmühan’s better judgment, and with many dire warnings that Sayeh’s leg would never be right again if she did not rest it—again went and persuaded the guards in her turn.
That turned out to be a wise choice. Ümmühan’s brand of persuasion was much more delicate than the one Sayeh, in her frustration, was inclined to. Delegating to strength was fortunately one of the tools of rulership. She embraced it, and recused herself while Ümmühan employed a good deal less “because I said so” than Sayeh would have been prone to. Effective, in a situation where one was without social power to back up one’s demands.
Najal, one of the guards currently on duty, brought her the crutches.
Good ones, too. Cut to her height and padded. And a sling to support and lift her lower leg, so it was not pulling on the bone within the splint. The contraption felt weird, belted around her, but it did the job. She almost wept at the lessening of pain.
It took her only moments to learn to use the crutches, though after days bedridden, Sayeh could tell it would require some time to get her strength back. And probably to summon up new strength, that she had not had before.
Najal and Sanjay would have carried her, she was sure. They would have to accompany her anyway. It’s not as if she would be allowed to wander the camp on her own. But she had had enough of being treated as a parcel. She had had enough of being regarded as a parcel, even more so. And the key to ending that was to get up on her feet.
She had been right about the crutches hurting, after the first few minutes, even though the handholds and the crossbars that tucked under her arms were padded. Well, no matter. She touched the scar on her belly, just visible between the blouse and wrap of the southern-style drape that Nazia had managed to somehow barter or blandish from one of the camp followers. She touched the splint that held her femur straight. She touched her breast over her heart, where the ache of widowhood and the loss of her child and people remained.
This was not the first time Sayeh Rajni had encountered pain.
It was not even bad enough to make her scream this time.
“Where would you like to go, my rajni?” Nazia asked her, as if this were any outing. She carried a little basket with what might be deemed necessities by a spoiled dowager.
“Out,” Sayeh intoned on a sigh. “I have been trapped within this pavilion for days. I would see the sky, and the stars, since there is no rain. Is there usually rain here in this season?” she asked Najal, all innocence.
“In this season, Your Abundance, there is indeed usually rain. It might be wise to bring an umbrella—”
“Pluck me a palm frond if it comes to it,” she said with a lighthearted laugh that she did not even think sounded calculated.
And so they set out, the five of them. Toward the river, because it seemed to Sayeh that that was the swiftest way to get the lay of the land. And as a priestess of the Mother—called Fecund, called White Honey—she both desired and needed to pay her respects.
First, though. She must make her way through the rubble of the abandoned town where many of Anuraja’s men had bivouacked.
The residents, in falling back to the castle or taking to the road—or the river—as refugees—had obviously done their best to leave nothing useful behind. Holes had been hacked in walls and roofs, covered now with waxed canvas sheets, and in some cases one or more legs had been hacked out from under stilted huts, leaving them off-kilter drunken storks.
Cleanup was still underway, for those given abandoned residences as shelter, though the waste and rubble was just being heaped in the street. Sayeh kept having to pick her way around it, except the pieces small enough for Najal and Sanjay to kick aside. The huts had been intentionally befouled, that much was plain, and among the trash in the streets were little piles of reeking human waste.
“What a mess for you,” she said, as sympathetically as she could manage. It was too easy to imagine her own city invaded, infested, overrun with foreigners. She needed to remember that, even as these men were kind to her and she encouraged them to be kind.
Except she had no city anymore.
Quite unexpectedly, Sergeant Sanjay turned to her and said, “Would you like to see ours?”
“Excuse me?”
He hesitated, as if afraid he had overstepped. Then said, “Your Abundance. No offense is intended. I merely wondered if you would like to see the hut where Pren, Najal, Vaneer, and I are staying.”
All my guards together, Sayeh thought. Not the best of tactics. Though it did facilitate communication. “I can’t climb up,” she said.
“You can shout encouragement,” Sanjay said, with an unexpected flash of humor. “I think Pren is washing the floor down again. It still stinks, somehow.”
They turned to the south and wound through passageways that were neither formal nor defined enough to really be considered streets. The routes left open for foot traffic wound around the huts, between and sometimes under them, and might be blocked here or there with withy hurdles laced together to make a sort of wall, or with piles of junk or ordure.
It was slow going on the crutches, especially after Sayeh stubbed the toe of her good foot on a cracked-open chest, lying shattered on its side. But they persisted.
She visited her guards’ domicile—barracks, or dormitory, she was not quite sure what to call it—and did in fact shout encouragement to Pren. He was outside on a narrow catwalk, lying down and nailing a strip of wood to the inside of a cracked stilt.
“That seems like a lot of work
for a house that isn’t yours,” Nazia said softly to Sanjay.
He grinned at her. “We’re going to be here at least till the end of the rainy season, and probably longer. Might as well be comfortable. Anyway, someday it might be mine.”
She looked at him, a furrow between her brows.
“Spoils of war,” he said cheerily. “Somebody’s going to wind up with all this land!”
Sayeh took her leave of Pren and turned away as if she had not heard. She knew from Sanjay’s accent that he was from a poor class, and his parents were probably tenant farmers on someone else’s land.
It was only a few long swings between the crutches from here to the edge of the river.
Sayeh handed one of her props to Ümmühan, who—deep in her protest against Sayeh’s stupidity—had not spoken a single word since the crutches were obtained and fitted. She used the other to brace herself as she leaned down over her one good leg, the broken one serving as a cantilever. It still felt … fragile, and disconnected, and Sayeh felt that she was taking an unbelievably careless chance.
A chance she could not avoid taking, if she stood any chance of winning a scrap of power with these people, in this place.
She lowered her free hand and at full, aching extension, just managed to dabble her fingertips in the water that kissed the sloped edge of the bank. Murmuring a prayer, she lifted her fingers to her lips and sucked.
Silt, algae. Cool sweetness. The green taste of living water. The presence of the Goddess was here with her, and Sayeh almost closed her eyes.
Until a long ripple stroked the surface of the opaque, white water. She straightened, in case it was a crocodile coming toward her. It might be one of the blind river dolphins; a long arc of those was some distance upstream, leaping and playing and squeaking as if the unusually boatless river were a special treat only for them. They moved away fast, and their pale wet skin gleamed the same clay white as the water. It was moments only before they vanished against it, or perhaps fell into it between the floating leaves and flowers of lotus.
The wake of whatever cut the water from beneath turned away from the bank and slipped upstream, leaving the papercut flowers of lotus lifting, falling, and then bobbing in its wake.
Clopping hoofbeats on mud drew Sayeh’s attention. She turned with a deft-enough swing of her single crutch that she felt a little smug about it, and found Anuraja on his horse on the packed trail beside the river.
She drew her drapes around her and with the assistance of her prop, managed a fairly creditable courtesy.
Wordlessly, scowling behind her veil, Ümmühan handed her the other crutch back.
Sayeh drew herself up straight, aware of Anuraja’s appraising gaze. She might as well have been a broodmare in foal. From the way he assessed her, she expected him to demand she produce a pedigree.
He knew her antecedents as well as he knew his own. They were … very similar.
“That is quite a scar,” he admitted grudgingly. “Your Wizard does good work.”
She smiled at him. “I’m alive,” she said.
He did not seem to register the coldness in her voice.
She turned and pointed. “What’s that, Your Competence?”
“The dolphins?”
“Whatever’s chasing the dolphins.”
“Oh, that.” His head turned, as if he too were tracking the heavy ripple in the water.
“Something terrible,” Anuraja said with an air of great self-satisfaction.
11
The storm had not broken on that day. The dark heat of the Cauled Sun was unmitigated by the low, gray, rainless overcast that lidded Sarathai-tia. Mrithuri slept poorly, and no artifice of servants wielding fans to make a whisper of breeze could ameliorate the heat for her comfort, to make slumber possible.
Tsering-la had offered to settle a chill over the palace. But Mrithuri, though tempted, had told the foreign Wizard to save his strength for war.
The rajni’s insomnia was the reason she walked the city walls just before the end of day, more plainly garbed than usual in tunic and trousers. And so she was there to see Anuraja’s army begin to move.
Anuraja commenced his attack at sunset. The troops did not cross the Mother River—called Giver of Bread, called Milk of the Earth, called Pearl—in the shadow of the city walls, where the defenders might rain death on them. They formed companies, as Mrithuri watched first with her spyglass and then with a naked eye, to get a sense of the scale of the thing. They marched north—upstream—and men and livestock towed confiscated barges, sculls, and whatnot along the far bank, long out of bowshot.
Just as they began to move, the alarm sounded behind Mrithuri. She did not shift from her position, though running feet broke around her, and barrels of oil and siege stones for dropping on enemy heads continued to be winched into place behind the dragonglass topped battlements.
Anuraja’s army did not begin ferrying themselves across the water immediately, as Mrithuri had expected. Instead, they lashed their boats stem to stern, creating a long and flexible floating finger. The current bent it down until it pointed at Sarathai-tia.
“Anuraja’s boat-dick is limp, I’d say.” Yavashuri’s voice was acerbic and unexpectedly close to Mrithuri’s elbow. Mrithuri jumped, banging herself in the eye with the spyglass. She whirled, lowering it, and gasped in surprise.
“Yavashuri!”
The old woman grinned. “I can still walk quiet when I want to.”
The Dead Man stood behind her. He walked to the wall, careful not to lean against the faintly glowing shards of dragonglass. “He’s got means to make it stick out enough to be useful. Watch.”
He pointed.
One more boat, with four men rowing and four more seated idle between them, crossed the current. Mrithuri, through her spyglass, could see the curved rill behind it. It was towing something like a net.
The boat reached the near shore and the men jumped out, wading through shallow water and slick mud to beach it. They hauled the trailing thing out. Not a net: a rope.
The light was still dim, gloaming, though growing brighter. When Mrithuri lowered the spyglass to get a better sense of the scene, the men were squirmy dots, just discernable. They were hauling the rope, and it seemed unreasonably heavy and hard to pull. She raised her spyglass again and saw that they were struggling against the rope with all their might. And that slowly—slowly—the long trail of lashed boats across the river was bending toward them.
“I bet they wish they had an elephant,” Mrithuri said.
“Anuraja thought this through better than I had hoped,” the Dead Man answered. “Look, they are lashing another rank of boats alongside the first.”
“What is it for?” Mrithuri asked.
Yavashuri drew her drape up tight around her. “It’s a bridge. It gives them a route of attack. And a route of escape if we drive them back.”
“Anuraja has a lot more men than I do.”
“Aye, and his stronghold is tents pitched in the smoldering ruins of the village beyond. You have walls.” The Dead Man touched her arm in reassurance.
“We can try to burn the flotilla once it gets dark again,” Yavashuri suggested, gallantly keeping her eyes averted from the scandalous breach of protocol going on beside her.
“We shall,” agreed Mrithuri.
Of course, Anuraja could then go upriver, or even—more inconveniently—down, and steal more of the boats Mrithuri’s people relied upon to live. But those people, if they were wise, had fled already. And maybe many of them had taken their boats, though they would have to travel through the delta and the main channel of the river past Anuraja’s trade city, Sarathai-lae. And perhaps be captured there.
After that, there was the Arid Sea to brave. In tiny boats meant for calm river swells.
No one would be fishing this river soon.
Mrithuri and her lieutenants watched in silence as Anuraja’s men in their incongruously cheery orange-and-blue livery finished lashing together their crude
bridge. By the time they finished the sun had set, and the sky behind the weirdly unfecund clouds was brightening.
The spyglass, when Mrithuri raised it again, showed her an army massed on the far bank, its first ranks making their cautious way over the bridge.
“We could sortie,” said Yavashuri. “This will go better for us if we keep them on the other side.”
“We have to sortie,” the Dead Man agreed. “We have to get that bridge down. It makes it too easy for him to bring troops across the river.”
“Yes.” Mrithuri’s face was a death mask. “Do it now, while we still have lee to open the gates.”
“What about the Rasan Wizard?” the Dead Man said. “Can’t he manage something?”
Mrithuri lowered her glass once more. She turned to a nervous young soldier shivering within earshot.
“Send for my general,” she told the lad. He was beardless, and she wondered if he would ever grow one. “And also send for Tsering-la.”
* * *
The Dead Man did not lead the charge when they sortied. That was not his place in this fight. His place was to guard what the queen deemed precious, and that was more important: at least to the well-being of the queen. So he rode beside Hathi, Mrithuri’s elephant, and the Wizards on her back. And he thought he knew Mrithuri well enough to appreciate what trust in him that indicated.
Even at this remove, there was a heady delight in riding toward the enemy. In having something simple and direct to do, after so much painful waiting.
The vanguard was well before them, moving much faster with its chariots and cavalry than the rumbling pace of an armored and elderly white elephant. Hathi wore the armor as if it were a costume, using her trunk to fiddle with the buckles, weaving her head from side to side to make the starlight that streamed through the rents in the cloud cover gleam on the facets in her brass chamfron.
Hathi was not meant to be a combatant, and it was the Dead Man’s job to keep her out of the fight. She did serve as a mobile spellcasting platform, a vantage point for Ata Akhimah and Tsering-la to get above the fight and see what was going on.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 15