He had served. Until the city burned again, and this time the caliphate fell completely.
He had heard they were once more rebuilding; it was an advantageous location. He did not wish to go home, and see what the place of his birth had become that was not home any longer.
He went to the mirror: dragonglass, backed with silver. They had, and used, so much of the strange green mineral here. It was amazing that more of them weren’t dying of the wasting illness from being cut by it or inhaling its dust.
Perhaps they knew how to handle it better than most did.
The Dead Man looked at his image. Lean still, though not as bone-skinny as when he had arrived. That might change.
He unbuckled his belt, and laid his pistols—new and old—and his new sword aside. One by one, he undid the buttons on his old red coat.
He slipped it off, and let it hang from his hand for a moment.
Then he dusted it, smoothed the fabric, and hung it from a peg by the door. It was too hot for this wet climate anyway. He’d do better in his billowing white shirt.
He belted his weapons on again and stepped toward the door. At the last moment, he stopped. He turned over his shoulder.
“I won’t forget you,” he said to the silently reproachful garment. “But I don’t need you right now.”
14
Most of Anuraja’s troops had moved across the river. Sayeh and her women were left in an encampment like an abandoned city. The forward lines must be sleeping rough, which would be no hardship in the dry season to men accustomed to hard bunking on the earth, but in the rainy season meant mud in every crevice, wet blankets, exposure—
Except there was no rain. Again, this day and this night … there was no rain.
It was impossible. Inconceivable. Sayeh knew there were legends from before the Alchemical Emperor’s day of the rains failing, but it had not happened in living memory and beyond. Every child in Ansh-Sahal knew that the emperor had brokered a deal with the Mother River that she would shed the richness of her heavenly body upon the land as long as the rituals and the auguries were honored by his daughters and his granddaughters, all down the line of his blood. And Sayeh had done her part. And she was sure Mrithuri had not neglected hers, in turn.
She was trapped in her couch, or on her crutches. Her litter-bearers were also her jailers. She cajoled and flattered and sweet-talked and flirted and charmed. Ümmühan flirted too, and charmed, with a dignity that became her age and a kind of coquettishness that bordered on command. Sayeh had never seen such wiles, and stood—or reclined, rather—in awe of them. The women of the Uthman Empire were justly famed for their powers of persuasion, it seemed.
Nazia flirted with no one, but with the tutelage of Ümmühan and Sayeh, she certainly charmed. She was silent and seemingly shy, keeping her face turned aside and a half-smile flickering across her lips from time to time. “It’s a pity your hair is still shorn,” said Ümmühan. “You can’t flirt from behind it, and you don’t wear a veil. But it does show the lovely line of your neck to advantage.”
No more than half a day had passed since Ravani’s latest visit when Sayeh first overheard the men at the pavilion entrance muttering to one another about the kindness of the foreign rajni. They took her where she wanted, within the confines of the camp. They took to bringing her little presents—sweetmeats, and cakes, which she then shared with them. If an army traveled on its stomach, Anuraja’s army rolled as if on wheels. He did not believe in stinting on chefs, did the raja from Sarathai-lae.
Ravani did not come again. Sayeh assumed that Ravani had crossed the river, and gone over to the war. “I will go and spy on them,” Nazia said, head high. “At the very least let us have information.”
“You will find yourself strangled in a ditch,” Sayeh said. “You stay here with me, child, where the tatters of my royalty can protect you.”
Nazia’s face crumpled. She plucked at her own sleeve, a nervous habit, her mouth scrunched up around silent fury.
Sayeh sighed. They were all restless. All feeling ineffectual and bored. “It is not that I do not trust you, or respect your skill,” she said, more gently. She reached out and captured Nazia’s chin. “But this is an army, and you are a young girl. These men are gentle to me because Anuraja says so, and the others are gentle to us because they see us under the raja’s … well, ‘protection’ might be too gentle a word. Bit by bit I must make them love me. I cannot do that if you are harmed.”
“They’re just trying to suck up to you, you know.” Sulkily, Nazia picked at the tassels on the cushion she sat upon. It was new; one of the men-at-arms had left it by the door while Ümmühan was singing. “Why are you accepting gifts from them?”
“A gift creates a bond of obligation that flows both ways.”
“I am so bored.”
“I know,” Sayeh said gently. “Come, bring my crutches. Let us go and review the troops, and see if we cannot make some friends.”
On the third day, in her boredom, she asked for an audience with Anuraja again. The messenger returned to ask if she was ready to be his emissary. When she sent back that she wished to discuss it, her suit was refused.
“Right,” she told Nazia. “We’re going for a stroll.”
* * *
Nazia walked out with Sayeh as Sayeh went forth on her crutches to make a few more friends. She greeted the men, remembering the names of the ones she had met before. There were not so many, and these soldiers were clerks and quartermasters, the sort of people without whom an army falls apart, but who—unless they are very unlucky indeed—never see the front lines.
She wondered where her own soldiers were. Vidhya, and Tsering-la, and Guang Bao. And all of Vidhya’s men who had ridden out with them to seek Himadra and her kidnapped son.
Her chest cramped with worse pain than her fractured leg when she thought of that. And when she thought that those men, and the refugees who had fled the first earthquake, might be the only ones of her people who still survived.
Ansh-Sahal had fallen. Sayeh was rajni of nothing now. Why did she pretend otherwise, even to herself? She was not fooling anyone.
The despair threatened to suck her down like the cold waters of the Bitter Sea. She felt the whirlpool pull, and kicked upward, forcing herself to remember that there was, indeed, a reason why.
That reason was Drupada. That reason was her son.
There could be no surrender to despair while he lived, and while he needed her.
So. The first thing she needed to do, while she gritted her teeth behind a smile and exerted an iron will to seem to bear her pained, exhausted body gracefully, was assess what resources she had to work with. She charmed a teamster and a couple of stable lads exactly as if they were generals, pretending an interest in the merits of one mule over another. At least the mules’ ears were long and soft, and their inquisitive noses served as a welcome distraction from the pain she could not permit herself to show. The familiar connection with animals did soothe, though it made her (all the more) miss Guang Bao.
Anuraja, she got a sense, was not the sort to get out of a morning and handle the daily business of reviewing his troops himself. As with his servants, he preferred a relationship built on fear and distance, and he did not foster the kind of personal bonds and personal loyalty that Sayeh had been raised to treat as the source of her power. Her father had been very clear to her that a raja—or rajni, when it became increasingly obvious that that would be her fate—owed a duty of service to land, to Mother, to people. That loyalty was to be earned and not demanded. That duty flowed both ways.
She was increasingly certain that Anuraja, if he had gotten the same lecture from his parents, had scoffed at it.
Sayeh might be third-sex. She might be shandha, and of a people often scorned. But she was also chosen and blessed of the Mother, and a true daughter of the Alchemical Emperor. She had not been perfectly popular with her people because of those first things, it was true. The army had never really accepted her as do
wager, feeling perhaps that she had dodged a man’s fate as a soldier through cowardice. As if there were no courage in the bearing of children.
But she had been popular enough to hold a throne in her son’s name after her husband’s passing, and that was no small thing for one such as herself. Her people had bragged upon her uniqueness, after Drupada was born.
That—that ability—was one of her resources. Her charm, her political sense.
Another resource was Anuraja’s protection. She was wise enough to know that it stemmed from her status as a chosen one of the Mother, and that his interest in her was entirely cynical. He was not a religious man. He was, in fact, an utter blasphemer. So it would only help him with those who did worship faithfully to be seen with one so incontrovertibly chosen as Sayeh. It would lend the air of divine approval to what he did.
Unless a sufficient number of someones decided that the destruction of Ansh-Sahal was an expression of divine disfavor in her.
Sayeh was excruciatingly aware that she was secure only so long as Anuraja thought he could use her. She had that even less reassuring offer from the sorcerer, whose trustworthiness she doubted even more than she doubted Anuraja’s.
She stroked the curious nose of a mule. They looked ragged and hungry. Poor animals, dragged to a war they had no use for or control over. All they wanted to do was go back to their pastures and crop cool grass in the shade.
“You might as well have been wives, poor things,” she said too softly for the stableboys to hear. They wouldn’t understand her grief, and she didn’t want to explain it. Or make herself seem strange in their eyes when what she needed was to seem calm and thoughtful and regal, most of all regal. Regal and kind.
Nazia heard, though, and looked up at Sayeh with a compressed grin. “At least they’re mules. They don’t have to worry about bearing themselves to death.”
“No,” Sayeh said sadly, turning away. “They only have to worry about bearing others.”
* * *
The rescue party rejoined the rest of Himadra’s scouts before they had finished butchering the bear-boars, though the first joints were already turning over trenches filled with coals. Himadra could see where his men had hacked their way into a thorny jharber thicket for the wood and to collect armloads of leafy fronds as fodder for the horses. The shrubs would have offered fruit for men to eat as well, if Himadra and his troops had traveled through at the beginning of the previous winter. For now they were shedding their flowers too soon in the dryness, and it seemed likely there would be no date-sweet fruit this year.
The men who had remained behind were cheered to see the extra horses. The rescue party was cheered to see the meat.
They camped there for two days, which was far longer than he would have liked. Himadra fretted invisibly the entire time, chafing at the delay. But there was a long ride ahead of them, and the horses would do with a rest where there was forage and water available. The delay also meant they could smoke and dry some of the meat. Where they were going, food would be invaluable.
His men would travel better for a rest as well, though with the livestock to care for and the pigs to process, it wasn’t exactly indolence. Still, when they left again, the steps of the horses seemed lighter and the men sat straighter in their saddles.
Ravana was again nowhere to be found when the time for breaking camp came. When Himadra remarked on this, Farkhad snorted. “Of course he’s fucked off again. This part is no fun.”
“I wish I knew where he went,” Himadra answered.
“So you could go with him?” Farkhad asked.
Himadra laughed and nudged Velvet forward.
The nurse rode beside him, and Prince Drupada rode in front of her. She had taken the boy from his sling and now let him sit astride the saddle before her, his chubby toddler legs sticking out to either side. It turned out that both of them were better riders than Himadra had been led to believe.
Next time, don’t believe the self-assessment of skills offered by your kidnap victims, he told himself wryly.
Would there be a next time? He hoped not. Kidnapping was not, precisely, to his taste.
Watching the young prince slowly come out of his shell—point to things, ask endless questions, and collapse into unpredictable sobbing fits—made Himadra homesick for his brothers. They were not toddlers now; they would not have been toddlers for a long time. But that was how he recalled them.
Drupada seemed scared. Himadra guessed the boy was missing his mother and his accustomed nurse and surroundings. That cut at Himadra, because it too made him think of his brothers. But the boy was beginning to come out of his shell. He was still unnaturally quiet and watchful whenever he noticed Himadra, to be sure. But where before he had hidden his face and huddled, as time passed he became willing to look around, point to things, and ask questions about the changing environment.
Children are resilient, Himadra comforted himself. Children were preternaturally strong.
They had hills to cross, along with some tricky mountains that seemed low only in comparison to the mighty Steles of the Sky, and multiple smaller rivers to ford before they reached the broad Sarathai. The deserts at least were less obstacle in this season. If the rains had failed in the Lotus Kingdoms, at least they had fallen for a while in the early season, and there was water in the mountains still.
It was a long ride, in other words, no matter how fast they journeyed. Himadra hoped—and even prayed a little—that the remainder would be uneventful.
As is ever the case, his wishes were not entirely honored by destiny.
* * *
They managed a few days’ hard ride before the first interruption came. The additional horses made all the difference, though the bandits no-doubt stolen animals were (unsurprisingly) not as well-cared-for as Himadra would have preferred. At least they all proved sound. And they were as fit and hard as might be hoped, though he worried at their thin condition and their unshod hooves on the rocky ground.
“The bandits probably ate the soft-footed ones,” Farkhad commented, when Himadra expressed as much.
Not much room for sentiment in these barrens. Even less so than in Chandranath, and Chandranath was not a place in itself to make men soft.
Neither, for that matter, was Ansh-Sahal. The destroyed principality of which young Drupada was, technically speaking, the rightful raja—under his mother’s regency, if Sayeh Rajni was even still alive—was a harsh place where the populace had been forced to exercise their creativity and will to survive the dry seasons. None of these northern regions made for easy lives or easy folk to live them.
So Himadra was understandably cautious when they overtook an army on the road.
* * *
The first sign of men ahead was dust. Despite the dryness, the air had mostly been clear for days. There were not many outposts here between Ansh-Sahal and Chandranath, and even fewer habitations. On the dry side of the Razorback Mountains, and before the Sarathai began to enrich the earth of her shoulders, there was very nearly nothing.
The dust could have been a herd of some beast crossing the high desert. But animals did not migrate in the rainy season, and it seemed likely that wisdom applied even to such an atypical rainy season as this. Their instincts would be honed to drive them to seek safety, not brave a journey their ancestors would have learned was full of raging rivers, flash floods, and the sort of mud that could bog an animal until it died if it didn’t just swallow the poor thing entire.
Better to travel when the earth was hard and the rivers low. Thirst was a terrible death but a slow one, and there was and had always been—would always be—water on the other side.
So the dust must be men.
Himadra’s next thought was that it must be a caravan. Traders who had left Ansh-Sahal ahead of catastrophe, driven by the well-honed paranoia such merchants must cultivate to survive. Caravans also did not travel in the wet season, if they could avoid it … though those coming across the Steles of the Sky were often constrained
by the terrifying weather in those mountains, and so reduced to braving floods and mudslides once they reached the Lotus Kingdoms.
An earthquake and a boiling sea were certainly impetus enough to move even the most conservative caravan master.
The pall of dust seemed to Himadra’s experienced eye to be subtly wrong to have been produced by a caravan. It followed the curve of the road, which Himadra knew from having traveled it made a broad, roughly southward bend to the west of the Razorbacks. So he could estimate from each convenient height roughly how long the cloud extended.
“Admit it to yourself,” Farkhad said, the third time Himadra paused to raise a spyglass. “That’s an army.”
“Marching on Chandranath,” Himadra agreed, when he managed to make his lips stop twitching.
“They’ve still got time to turn south,” Farkhad said unconvincingly. “Anuraja?”
“Half the Lotus Kingdoms from where he is supposed to be according to Ravana, if it is.”
Farkhad grunted. He didn’t need speak any words, however. Himadra already knew his lieutenant thought Anuraja would be hard-pressed to navigate his thumb out of his own asshole. After a suitable pause, Farkhad added, “Want to catch up to him, if it is?”
“Mother, no.” Himadra turned his head and spat over Velvet’s shoulder.
“Well, I suppose we’re not exactly where we said we would be either.”
“We should send up a scout once it’s darker. If they are marching on Chandranath, we are going to have to get past them.”
* * *
They made camp while Navin, a veteran among Himadra’s men, reconnoitered. Farkhad lifted Himadra off Velvet and set him down on a round shield in a shaded place not too far from the pickets. He could walk if he had to. He could manage his own necessities. But given the risk of broken bones and the pain involved, it was prudent if he avoided taking risks when it was not absolutely necessary.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 21