‘It was horrible,’ Aiwaz said. ‘Hazro’s father found the body. He went down to unlock the back gates, and there it was.’
‘What?’ Warkannan did his best to look shocked. ‘Just thrown onto the street?’
‘No. Here’s the fiendish part. There was a basket there, smelling of spice, just as if someone had left some sort of gift. Inside was the body.’ Aiwaz paused, swallowing heavily. ‘Mutilated. Cut and burned in the cuts. The poor old man fainted. Just let out one sob and fainted.’
Warkannan looked away fast. His memory of that night in Indan’s attic rose up and sickened him. He had never thought that Hazro’s father would find the thing himself.
‘Yes, the poor old man.’ Warkannan could hear his voice choking on the words. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘So are we all.’ Aiwaz dabbed his mouth again. ‘Of course, none of the Mustavas could possibly know who did this.’ He raised a plucked eyebrow significantly. ‘But the boy’s uncle swears he’ll have his revenge. He seems to know whom he’d choose for a suspect.’
‘Ah, yes, I see what you mean.’
They shared a grim smile. Warkannan turned away to find Arkazo, wearing only a pair of white trousers, standing in the hall that led back to the bedrooms. From a window sunlight fell across his pale brown chest in a stripe and left his face in shadow. The boy stood with his back against the door jamb as if he thought someone might attack him from behind.
‘It’s a horrible thing,’ Aiwaz repeated. ‘I’d best be on my way. A couple of other families need to hear the news.’
Warkannan showed him out, then turned back to his nephew. Arkazo took a couple of uncertain steps into the room, staring at Warkannan as if at a stranger.
‘You’re wondering how I could do such a thing,’ Warkannan said.
Arkazo nodded.
‘Because all our lives depended on it. Because our khan’s life depends on it.’
Arkazo looked away, his shoulders high as if he feared a blow. Warkannan could hear Lazzo clattering dishes in the kitchen. The sound seemed to ring as loud as gongs.
‘Do you still want to go along on this ride?’ Warkannan said at last.
‘Yes.’ Arkazo turned back to him. ‘I just –’ He paused for a long moment. ‘I didn’t realize it was – well – real before. I mean, the whole idea of riding east and all that. It seemed like one of those stories they tell in the coffee houses.’ He forced a twisted smile. ‘It sure as hell doesn’t feel like that any more.’
‘Good. This is going to be the hardest ride of your life. Remember that.’
‘I will, sir.’
‘Good. Now get something to eat and get dressed. We’ve got to get on the road.’
Arkazo nodded and trotted back down the hall to his room.
Once they were ready to leave, Warkannan attended to one last detail while Arkazo went to fetch their horses. He wrote a letter to Indan asking him to take care of Lazzo and gave it to the old servant to carry out to the villa.
‘It’ll be a long walk for you, Lazzo, but you don’t dare stay here once I’m gone. Indan will tell you why.’
Lazzo’s pouchy eyes widened in fear.
‘Don’t linger, no,’ Warkannan said. ‘Leave before sunset, just in case. Don’t worry about the furniture. The Chosen are welcome to it if they want it.’
Warkannan gave him a small bag of coins for the trip, then slung his saddlebags over his shoulder and strode out. Soon, if the Lord allowed, by bringing Jezro home he would be freeing Haz Kazrak from a madman.
Nehzaym heard about their departure later that same day. She was working on her payroll accounts out in the warehouse office when Lubahva arrived, her arms full of bags and boxes from the shops. She laid them down on the floor, dropped her grey veils on top of them, and pulled a high stool over to Nehzaym’s desk. She perched on it with a sigh and wiggled her feet as if her sandals pained her.
‘Idres and Arkazo are leaving today,’ Lubahva announced. ‘They wanted to get an early start, so I suppose they’re gone.’
‘Well, it’s a good bit after noon now,’ Nehzaym said. ‘I was beginning to worry about you.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I had a lot of shopping to do for the secluded girls.’
‘All right.’ Nehzaym laid down her pen. ‘I’m glad that things are finally moving. The longer Soutan stayed in Haz Kazrak, the more anxious I got.’
‘I hope the Chosen don’t suspect Idres, is all. He’d never break under torture, but I bet he’d tell them everything to save his nephew from it.’
Nehzaym felt her stomach clench. There was so much to fear, and all the time. ‘That’s true. Kaz has always been more like Idres’ son than his nephew.’ Nehzaym turned her palms upward. ‘Inshallah.’
‘Yes, whatever the Lord wills.’ Lubahva paused, thinking. ‘Are we meeting again tonight? I don’t have a rehearsal, so I could come.’
‘I don’t think it’s wise. You came here last night, and you’ve been out of the palace all morning. The eunuchs might wonder about you if you stay out for the evening as well.’
‘I can tell them the truth. They know we meet for women’s prayers. I don’t have to tell them what we’re praying for.’
‘Yes, but the Chosen also know that Soutan’s part of my new business venture. I don’t want anyone adding things up.’
‘You’re right about that.’ Lubahva considered, sucking on her lower lip. ‘The Fourth Prophet. Do you truly think she’ll be female?’
‘That’s what the Sibyl’s prophecies tell us.’
‘But what if the mullahs are right, and she’s a demon?’
‘The mullahs condemn anything they don’t understand. Now remember: we can’t tell if the Fourth Prophet’s meant to come in our lifetime. All we can do is watch and wait.’
‘But – no, you’re right. I won’t carp any more. If she comes to us, she comes. Inshallah.’
‘Oh yes. Inshallah.’ Nehzaym suddenly smiled. ‘But if she does come, she’ll find us waiting.’
On their second day out of Haz Kazrak, Warkannan and Arkazo met up with Soutan in the little resort town of Samahgan, famous for its hot springs. So many people flowed into and out of its spas and medical clinics that no one would question why a retired cavalry officer and his ward would turn up at the same hotel as a foreigner like Soutan. Still, all three of them pretended to great surprise when they met in the dining room. Soutan made a show of insisting they eat with him.
‘It’s good to see a familiar face,’ Soutan said. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, though.’ He paused, letting a waiter get within earshot. ‘I have to be back in Haz Kazrak to meet with the bankers.’
‘We’re moving on ourselves.’ Warkannan spoke clearly for the benefit of a passing group of customers. ‘Now that I’m retired, I’m going to visit my sister, Arkazo’s mother, that is. She lives up in Merrok.’
‘Give me the address. When I know how much working capital we can raise, I’ll send you a letter.’
The waiter, young and shiny clean in his loose white pants and white tunic, showed them to a low table surrounded by velvet cushions. Soutan had chosen an expensive establishment. The dining room held a good fifty tables placed on fine carpets. True-wood panels hung from the reed and bamboid walls. The men all sat, arranging themselves while a young servant girl dressed in a white shift brought warm water, towels, and a large basin. The waiter rattled off the evening’s menu as they washed their hands, then helped the girl carry the utensils away. Soutan leaned close to Warkannan and spoke quietly.
‘We’ve had great luck, or else the Great Khan has had very bad luck. Either might be possible.’
‘I suppose so, if you want to split hairs,’ Warkannan said. ‘What was it?’
‘I was in the marketplace yesterday when I saw two cavalrymen ride in. They were official messengers from the look of their saddlebags, and they rode straight to the fort here in town.’ Soutan paused, glancing around him. ‘I have ways of learning things. They were carrying messages to
Blosk.’
‘I’m sure they would have told anyone who asked them that.’
‘Indeed? Would they and their fort commander tell anyone who asked what the messages said?’ Soutan paused for another look round. ‘One of my spirits followed them into the post. They were discussing a certain officer down on the border who’s about to get cashiered and turned out of the cavalry. Both of them thought the situation was odd for some reason.’
‘So?’ Arkazo leaned forward to interrupt. ‘What does that have to do –’
The waiter came back, bowing and smiling. They ordered, he bowed again, three, four times, then strode away at last.
‘If the Chosen are sending a man east,’ Soutan said to Arkazo, ‘he’d never make it across the Rift alone. This time of year the Tribes come to the border, and he might well be able to travel with one of them.’
Arkazo’s mouth framed an ‘oh’. The waiter came back with a large brass tray of appetizers and set them down with a flourish.
‘Your first course, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Shall I bring coffee?’
‘No, not yet,’ Warkannan said. ‘At the end of the meal.’
With narrow eyes Soutan watched the waiter leave. ‘I wonder if that boy is just a waiter,’ he remarked. ‘Probably so.’
‘Probably.’ Warkannan allowed himself a brief smile. ‘We’ll talk more once we’re in our cottage. You can see what it’s like, Soutan, to live with the threat of the Chosen.’
‘Yes, I can. I can’t say I like it.’
After the meal they left the dining room and walked outside, heading for the gardens and their guest cottage. Beside the outer doors crouched a woman, her face bound with the black ribbons of widowhood. Two small children clung to her.
‘Charity, sirs?’ she whispered and held out trembling hands. ‘Charity, oh please?’
The others hurried past, but Warkannan stopped. Beggars here, in wealthy Samahgan, even here! He fished a couple of silver deenahs out of his pocket and pressed them into her hand.
‘May God provide better,’ he said. ‘And soon.’
Out to the east of the khanate, all of the grass grew purple. No one kept a garden or tilled a field on the other side of the sunset-coloured hills that marked the khanate’s border. A treaty dating back to Landfall forbade it, a pact so sacred that not even the ambitions of the Third Prophet could force the Kazraks to break it. Besides, without the open grasslands, there would be no horse-herds, and without a large number of horses the Kazraks would have no cavalry. All ambitions would become empty, then.
On the night that Warkannan was dining in Samahgan, the Tribes brought their stock into the border town of Blosk for the spring horse fair. The comnees, as the travelling groups were called, came out of the lavender grasslands, herding their horses ahead of them. Most rode, but some of the women drove rickety orange wagons, made of lashed-together bamboid, heaped with their possessions. Down by the river that flowed near town, they set up round tents stitched together in a patchwork of coloured saurskins and grey horsehair felt. In the meadows they tethered their horses with tasselled halters and drew the gaudy wagons into a circle. By the third day over a hundred tents stood in clusters out on the grass.
Children ran and played in the impromptu village while their parents brought out hoards of dried horse dung to fuel cooking fires or walked from tent to tent to greet old friends. Everyone talked about the trading ahead. The Great Khan’s gold bought the necessities that only farmers could supply, such as grain, soap, and lamp oil, as well as trinkets like brightly coloured cloth and gold jewellery. Men and women both wore gaudy belt buckles, brooches, and clasps for cloaks, cast or hammered into the shapes of mythological beasts, such as the stag, the wolf, and the lion.
Ammadin picked the spot for her maroon and grey tent on the edge of the encampment, a good distance from all this convivial chaos. In silent respect, the members of her comnee, sixteen extended families in all, raised her tent, carried her possessions over from the communal wagons, then left her alone. Inside she arranged her belongings: her roll of blankets, her leather-and-wood folding stool, her two cooking pots, and the four big grey-and-blue woven tent bags that held her clothes and tools. Her most precious belongings never travelled in the wagons. In saddlebags of purple leather she carried her spirit crystals, her silver talismans, and her feathered spirit wands. The god figures of her tribe had their own pair of saddlebags, lined in fine white cloth from the Cantons far to the east.
Ammadin was arranging the god figures on their red-and-white striped rug when Maradin crawled through the tent flap. A blonde, handsome woman with skin the colour of gold, Maradin was the only person who dared enter Ammadin’s tent uninvited. She pressed her palms together and bowed to the god figures, squat stone carvings, wrapped in coloured thread and decorated with feathers and precious stones. Only then did she speak.
‘Dallador bought some mutton, and he’s making stew. Do you want to come eat with us?’
‘Yes, thanks. Have the Kazraks got here yet?’
‘A couple of their officers rode up a few minutes ago. Apanador’s taken them into his tent for some keese.’
In front of Maradin’s tent, pieced together from mottled purple and white skins, her husband Dallador was cutting chunks of meat from a haunch and putting them into an iron kettle. Their three-year-old son sat on the ground nearby and watched him. A good-looking fellow with hair so pale it was almost white, Dallador was dressed in the usual leather trousers of the Tribes and a red-and-blue cloth shirt; his belt had a palm-sized gold buckle in the shape of a horse, its legs tucked up, its head turned as if it were looking behind it.
‘I hear the Kazraks are in the mood to buy,’ Dallador said. ‘Are you going to sell that pair of greys?’
‘If they’re stupid enough to take them,’ Maradin said. ‘I’ll give them a dose of herbs before I bring them over.’
While Dallador tended the stew pot, Maradin brought out wooden drinking bowls and a leather skin of keese, a liquor made of fermented mare’s milk. She was pouring it round when Palindor strolled up to the fire. A handsome, almost pretty young man with strikingly large blue eyes and coppery skin, Palindor smiled once at Ammadin, then squatted down beside Dallador.
‘I invited Palindor to eat with us,’ Maradin announced.
Ammadin felt like kicking her – she was match-making again, damn her! Palindor accepted a bowl of keese with a murmured ‘thank you’ and looked at the ground. As an unmarried man, he had no standing in the comnee and no horses but the one his mother had given him to ride. He did, however, have a fine reputation as a warrior in the endless squabbles and raids that went on between the comnees. One of the bravest of the brave, men said of him, and as good with the long knife as he was with the bow. For the sake of that, Ammadin did her best to be pleasant to him during the meal.
By the time they were done eating, the skin of keese was empty, and Dallador brought out another. As he was refilling Palindor’s bowl, he splashed keese on the back of his unsteady hand.
‘Dallo?’ Maradin said.
‘I know. I’ve had enough.’ Dallador handed the skin to Palindor, then began licking the spilled keese off his hand while he smiled, heavy-lidded, at Maradin, who smiled back as languidly as if she were drunk herself.
All through the camp, fires glowed like golden blossoms among the tents. Here and there, men began to sing to the dahsimmer, a three-stringed instrument, one for the melody, two for the drone. Every time he had a sip of keese, Palindor would look at Ammadin so longingly that she realized that he was in love with her, not merely greedy for the horses a wife would bring him. Ye gods! she thought. What’s he doing, taking lessons from Dallo? She got up, excused herself, and went to her tent. Before she closed the flap, she listened for a moment to the clear strong voices of the men, singing of the two things they loved above all else: the hunt and war.
About an hour after dawn, the Kazrak officers rode down from the fort in Blosk to start the day’s haggling. The wo
men and girls cut the horses they wanted to sell out of the herds and brought them down to the riverbank in a snorting, prancing procession. Their husbands and brothers stood nearby to make sure the Kazraks treated their women with the proper respect. Every man had the short curved bow slung over his back and in his belt, the leaf-blades steel knife, about eighteen inches long, that marked a man as an adult. In their red tunics, buttoned tight with silver pegs, and grey wool trousers, the Kazrak officers moved stiffly, their backs as straight as arrows.
When Ammadin brought down two bay geldings from her herd, the comnee women fell back to let her have the first place in line. A dark young officer introduced himself to her as Brison and began to examine the bays. He ran practised hands down their legs and over their chests, then looked into their mouths.
‘Four-year-olds, huh?’
‘Yes, and halter-broken.’
‘Very well. A gold imperial each.’
‘Two each.’
Brison hesitated, looking at her cloak, the entire black and purple mottled skin of a slasher saur, and a big specimen at that. Even for a comnee woman Ammadin was tall, but although she had the saur’s front paws clasped at her neck, the middle feet hung well below her belt and the hind set trailed behind her on the ground. Apparently Brison had been on the border long enough to know what the cloak signified.
‘Very well.’ He motioned to another officer. ‘Give the Holy One what she asked for.’
The assistant counted four gold imperials out of a cloth sack and handed them over. Ammadin put them in the pocket of her leather trousers and walked away without another word.
During the day, other comnees rode up to join the camp. The fair would go on for weeks, though it would migrate as the horses ate down the grass. Outside the town, which lay across the only hill for miles in this part of the grasslands, booths built of bundled rushes stood side by side with peddlers who spread their goods out on old blankets and shepherds selling raw fleeces and baskets of rough-spun yarn. Women hawking food in baskets mingled with the crowd; here and there, a juggler or story-teller performed for a clot of onlookers. Round it all swarmed the tiny flying yellabuhs, scavenging on scraps and spills.
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