Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  She had begun to think that the fierce reputation of the Afghan hill tribes had been greatly exaggerated when they happened upon Aab, a small village at the confluence of two trickles of water contaminated by the effluent from the lapis mine at the head of one of them. “The mine is played out, young miss,” Firas said, “and they are wondering if they should abandon their village to look for another.”

  A slow smile had spread across Johanna’s face. “Were they thinking they would have to walk out?”

  “They were, young miss, until I explained matters to them, and suggested our plan.”

  “And?”

  “And the village elders would be pleased to assist us,” Firas had said demurely.

  “And us? Will they leave us alone afterward?”

  “They can always attempt to take North Wind by force,” Firas said.

  After the village of Aab had agreed to join forces with them, they had had to backtrack two days to allow Gokudo and his men to pick up their trail again. Now they sheltered beneath this rock overhang, damp, shivering and content. The steep sides of the narrow canyon they were in were thickly covered in stunted cedars and junipers, twisted from wind and lack of sun. The stream that had carved it was narrow and deep and filled with boulders that had broken free of the cliffs above, and it was running very high from all the rain.

  “Today, then?” Johanna said.

  Firas gave no quick answer. The decision was too important to be made without thought.

  “You said they were using the cover of the rain to advance,” Johanna said. “They think to surprise us in our wet and cold misery.” Her grin was fierce.

  If she could be brought to admit it, which she never would, Johanna would have said that she had thoroughly enjoyed this month in the mountains. She had seen Gokudo, oh yes, but he had not seen her, and would not unless she meant him to.

  “Today,” Firas said. He looked down the narrow canyon. “We’ll never find a better place.”

  They rose to their feet, and the three women stood patiently while Firas personally checked to see that all their weapons drew freely and that each had at least one edge that could cut. After which Johanna led their horses away and Alma and Hayat began to rummage in their packs for their harem clothing.

  Gokudo and his troop of twenty men, none of them known to him before Terak Pass, had been chasing a rumor of their objective for thirty days. Their diet had been hard rations, their beds, when they were allowed them, hard and rocky and cold and often damp, if not wet. The men vaguely remembered Johanna—they remembered North Wind much more clearly—and the others with her they neither knew of nor cared. They were with Gokudo because Ogodei, their ruler in all things, had ordered them to be.

  Thus far, following Ogodei’s orders had led to riches beyond imagining, their pick of beautiful women, treasure in the form of anything they fancied from any of the cities that had fallen beneath their swords, full bellies and whatever soft noble’s bed they chose each night, so long as they hadn’t burned down the noble’s house first. But the last month had been a long, hard slog with no reward. They had been subsisting on wild game, ibex and urial and boar when they could find them, marmots and weasels and lizards when they could not, supplemented by wild fruits and nuts and fish from the mountain streams, which were not plentiful, the local villagers having cleaned them out when times were hard. And times in these mountains were almost always hard.

  They had no thought of rebellion because they would follow Ogodei unto death, and anyone he named unto death as well. There was no thought of mutiny, and as yet none of them had questioned Gokudo’s authority, not even out of his hearing. But they were cold, and tired, and hungry, a little annoyed that none of the mountain villages they had stumbled across in their peregrinations had anything to plunder. They were perhaps even a little impatient with the single-minded obsession of this foreign captain, which was to purse his quarry to what appeared to be the ends of the earth, no matter how long the journey, how remote the destination or how uncomfortable the weather.

  It was in this mood that they turned a rocky corner of this narrow canyon and found a small stretch of smooth gravel next to the stream. Two women were kneeling next to the water, washing clothes.

  It occurred to none of Gokudo’s men to wonder why two very attractive women were washing clothes next to an isolated mountain stream, without male supervision, in the rain, or why in this weather and these rough surroundings they were dressed in the flimsy vest and baggy pants of the harem, which had dampened enough to cling enticingly to their curves. They were here, they were within reach, they promised some relief from the hard days past, and what fool would question such a gift?

  Since rape was not best accomplished from the back of a horse, and since it was obvious that the canyon ended not much further on and that it appeared the people their captain had had them chasing for the last month had finally run out of places to run, half of them naturally dismounted. The two women dropped their wash, screamed convincingly and ran to the nearest cliff and began to scramble up, grabbing at stunted bushes, their frantic feet causing tiny avalanches of loose rock. Gokudo’s men laughed and exchanged ribald comments as they started after them. There was no hurry.

  “Gokudo!”

  Their captain’s head snapped up, eyes fierce. A feral grin curled one corner of his mouth.

  Johanna sat on North Wind’s back at the head of the narrow little canyon. Her bronze-streaked hair was loose around her head and curling damply in the rain. She wore her black raw silk tunic and trousers, the last clothing she would ever have from material that had been traded for by her father. At her waist she wore a sash made from the gauzy silk of a harem veil, blood red in color. Over it she wore a belt and scabbard.

  Johanna had her blade out, and she’d choked up on North Wind’s reins enough so that he danced impatiently in place. He was wet and hungry and tired, too, and disinclined to take any correction to his manners, which were wearing thin as it was. This mountain travel was all very well, especially as he had his favorite person on his back, but he was more accustomed to flat racecourses and the adulation of the crowds and the sooner he returned to them, the better.

  “Did you want me, Gokudo?” Johanna said. She worked hard to put a bit of a quaver in her voice, which wasn’t difficult because she was terrified on behalf of Alma and Hayat, now engaged in pulling down half the cliff face in their manifestly desperate attempt to escape the attentions of Gokudo’s men. “You certainly have been trying hard enough to find me!” She waved her sword with all the expertise of a ten-year old issuing a challenge to a playmate of equal years and experience. She was no threat to Gokudo and she was demonstrating it as blatantly as possible. “Because you have certainly been persistent in following me.”

  “And now I have you, Wu Li’s daughter,” Gokudo said, his voice coming out in a growling purr.

  “Not yet, you don’t!” she cried, brandishing her blade again even more clumsily.

  Gokudo sat astride a steppe pony, the same animal that mounted his troop. “Come!” he said in his broken Mongol, raising his naginata. “We have them now!”

  He kicked the sides of his mount and it began to pick its way up the side of the stream, avoiding rocks and holes with nimble sureness. Those of his men who were still astride, perhaps ten of them, followed.

  Johanna wheeled North Wind and appeared to vanish around the corner of granite at her back. Gokudo urged his shaggy pony into as fast a gait as the terrain allowed.

  He heard the sound of hooves plunking through water, and North Wind whinnied, high and loud. When he rounded the corner Johanna and North Wind were standing at the end of the canyon, boxed in on three sides by steep walls and the mass of green undergrowth hanging from them. The headwaters of the narrow creek cascaded down the rock face behind her in a small waterfall, where it splashed to earth to form the stream that rushed between them.

  The rain was easing. Finally, things were going his way. “Yield, Wu Li’s daugh
ter,” he said, his voice thick with anticipation. “Yield to me, and I will not kill you.” Or not immediately, he thought. Not until Dai Fang insisted that he must, long after he bore this impudent, thieving bitch back to Cambaluc in triumph.

  He slowed the pace of his pony, allowing it to pick its way without haste. Behind him the last of his men rounded the corner. The move effectively split his force in two, which he didn’t realize until too late.

  The hand of some fickle god parted the clouds at just that moment, and a slender ray of sunshine slipped through and fell in a golden shower on the girl and the horse, illuminating them against the green and gray background. It was so unexpected and the subsequent vision so striking that it halted Gokudo for a moment in something like awe.

  It was just long enough, although it wasn’t necessary. From their cover in the dense green growth, the men of Aab rose in a body, drew bowstrings and let fly. One of Gokudo’s men was killed instantly by an arrow through the eye. Three fell from the saddle, clutching at arrows in their sides. One man took the measure of their hopeless situation at a glance and pulled his mount around to head back downstream and out of range as fast as his pony could carry him, riding right over one of his wounded comrades. In his haste his sleeve caught the edge of the rock corner and unhorsed him. When he landed he was immediately skewered with arrows. He screamed and groaned, and went still.

  After the first volley, the men of Aab scrambled nimbly down the canyon wall, more arrows already fitted to their bows. Gokudo’s men, in the act of reaching for the bow slung on their own backs, raised their hands in surrender. They were capable and knowledgeable warriors, veterans of many battles. If they had chosen to fight they knew they could have inflicted much damage on the men of Aab, but they could not have won the day. Ogodei had not commanded them to follow Gokudo into a situation that was certain suicide for them all.

  Those that remained mounted were pulled summarily to the ground, including Gokudo. Some of the men of Aab began to lead the captured steppe ponies away at once, while others relieved the men of their weapons and, wounded and hale alike, kicked them stumbling downstream in the direction from which they had come. Half a dozen others grouped around Gokudo, arrows nocked and ready. He stood with his mouth half open in disbelief. From one second to the next, he had moved from a position where he had all the power, where he finally had Johanna in his hands to do with as he pleased, to a position where he had none and was entirely at her mercy. The change of fortune was impossible for him to immediately comprehend.

  Nor did she intend to give him time to fully understand it. Beyond the corner Johanna heard shouts and screams and the clash of arms and the thrum of arrows even now diminishing.

  She nudged North Wind into motion, and he picked his way down to where Gokudo stood. His naginata slipped easily from his slack grasp to hers, and she rested the butt on her foot. It felt heavy and cold and alien in her hand. “Bring him,” she said over her shoulder, and she and North Wind continued down the little canyon.

  Behind her, she heard a muffled grunt and the stumble of feet.

  Around the corner, only two of Gokudo’s remaining men were left standing and were being efficiently divested of their weapons. Like their fellows upstream, they did not resist. Firas was flicking blood from his sword, others were dispatching the wounded. Her eyes searched feverishly for Hayat and Alma, and found them just then rising from a crouch in a thick patch of brush halfway up the side of the cliff. “All well?” she said.

  Their smiles were shaky. “All well,” Hayat said.

  Johanna nodded. The troop’s horses had been attached to two leading reins and were being led downstream by two young boys. The men of Aab waited in a circle, exchanging contemptuous remarks on the caliber of soldier that had pursued their benefactors into the mountains. One of them laughed and said something to Firas, who wiped his blade clean and sheathed it again, and replied with a comment Johanna didn’t hear. They all laughed this time. Gokudo’s men, some of whom must have understood what was being said, stood with blank faces, motionless beneath the strung arrows.

  All but one. “Bitch!” one of Gokudo’s men said. “Cunt! Daughter and granddaughter of pimps and whores, may God curse them all! May you suffer in sixty thousand hells for all eternity!”

  Johanna looked at him, puzzled at first, and then on an indrawn breath recognized the contorted features beneath the filth. “Farhad,” she said.

  Firas turned to follow her gaze. “Why, so it is.”

  There was little remaining of the elegant sheik’s son. He wore a torn and tattered coat that looked from the stains as if it had been taken off a dead man who had taken a long time to die. His beard, once neatly barbered, was now a wild bush, and his hair hung greasily down from beneath a rolled cap that looked as if it harbored a healthy population of vermin. Two of the men of Aab were advancing with knives drawn, while Farhad’s companions were trying to restrain him. He struggled, maddened, as he called more curses down upon her head.

  Her head remained remarkably unbowed. “Not dead of snake bite after all, I see,” she said pleasantly. “What a pity. How did you convince Ogodei to let you live, I wonder?” She paused and let her gaze wander over him insultingly. “Or maybe I don’t. You used to be almost attractive.” She smiled. “And Ogodei is known to be…liberal, in his tastes.”

  He was nearly sobbing and his eyes were wild. He struggled futilely against the hands holding him. “Daughter of pigs! May you give birth only to more!”

  Firas walked up to Johanna, who brought her leg over the saddle to slide from North Wind’s back. “The men of Aab want to know what they should do with the living.”

  She shrugged, indifferent. “As they wish.”

  “They don’t want them among their own,” Firas said.

  “Well,” Johanna said, “if they are inclined to set them free, Ogodei’s men can return to their master. If they think he’ll take them back after this.”

  “May you never know the father of your child!”

  Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “But they’ll have to walk.”

  Farhad was almost weeping. “Bitch,” he said, “cunt that has seen a thousand cocks!”

  “Come, Farhad,” she said in a silken voice, “surely the prospect isn’t so bad as that.”

  And with that echo of his own words in his ears, his companions dragged him away from her, shrieking more and worse imprecations to the sky.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Firas said, indicating the naginata she still held.

  “Which one is the headman of Aab?” she said.

  Firas beckoned one of the men forward. He was older than the rest but still very fit, and he kept a wary eye on the curved blade of the naginata as he inclined his head in salute. He said something in a dialect Johanna hadn’t had time to pick up. It was almost Persian, but not quite.

  “Jibran complimented me on the success of my plan,” Firas said. “I told him it was your plan. He offers you his compliments.”

  “Tell him it would not have succeeded without the courageous and able men of Aab,” she said, and held up the naginata. “Tell him I would give this to him as a personal gift, in gratitude.”

  The headman’s eyes widened and he replied vociferously, at extensive length and with sweeping gestures to an approving murmur from his men.

  “He accepts,” Firas said.

  “I am pleased to hear it,” she said. “Tell him it has one more task to accomplish before it passes into his hands. I would ask him, as leader of his tribe, to bear witness to that task.”

  Firas translated. Jibran squared his shoulders and replied with a long and complicated sentence that went on for five minutes, ending it with a bow and a flourish. All of his men bowed, too.

  “He is honored,” Firas said.

  She turned and looked at Gokudo. He was on his knees in the middle of the stream, his hands bound behind his back. He was muttering to himself in his own tongue. Johanna had been to Cipangu with her
father and while she was by no means fluent in Gokudo’s tongue, she had spent enough time on the docks to realize that his insults were by an order of magnitude even more insulting than Farhad’s.

  “Not here,” Johanna said. “I don’t want to get my feet wet. Or foul the water.”

  They hauled him up on the little gravel shoal where Hayat and Alma had been washing their clothes only minutes before.

  She stood before him. “You dishonored my father with his second wife,” she said in Mandarin, “and then you tried to kill him by cutting the girth on his saddle. When he didn’t die quickly enough, at Dai Fang’s order you smothered him in his own sick bed.”

  His muttering died away, and he blinked up at her as if he had just realized she was there. Behind her, she could hear Firas translating her works for Jibran and his men.

  “My only mistake was in leaving justice for my father in other hands. Today, I rectify that mistake.”

  Johanna took a few practice swings with the naginata. Watching from behind and to her left, Firas motioned everyone farther back, which may have been an unusually superfluous gesture. Though she tried to hide it, it was obvious she found the staff heavy and the blade weighting its end heavier still.

  He saw her set her jaw and square her shoulders. She choked up a little on the staff, but only a little. She readjusted her stance, moving her feet farther apart, bending her knees slightly, and adjusted the height of the blade to where it looked to Firas like she was aiming for the level of Gokudo’s ear. Her torso twisted so that if she had pulled the naginata any more to her left she would have broken her spine off at the base and commenced the swing. Its own weight brought the blade down to the height of Gokudo’s neck just as the edge touched his skin. Her momentum and the weight and acute sharpness of the blade did the rest.