Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  “To be sure,” the foreign lord said smoothly. He answered Sicheir’s respectful bow with a little nod of his own and added, “The road is a great undertaking. I have studied the plans carefully. Only the engineers of Casmantium could build such a structure. But perhaps you could explain to me the difference between an engineer and a builder?”

  Sicheir blinked, startled and disarmed by this interest. “Well, lord, the distinction is clear enough. An engineer understands the theory of building, but a builder has the gift of making. Engineers might direct the new construction, but it’s builders you want to actually lay their hands on the stone and iron. You have makers in Feierabiand, of course. Some, surely, must become builders?”

  “But not like yours. It seems to me the new road will come to rival any structure ever built by the hands of men. The plans for the bridges and the buttressed roads are quite extraordinary.”

  “You’re kind to say so, lord. If I may observe, you speak Prechen very well.”

  “Ah—” Lord Bertaud glanced at Tehre, who did not want to try to describe her insight about language as a made structure and therefore merely gazed back with bland, innocent eyes. “Ah,” murmured the foreign lord again. “Thank you. Ah, forgive me—”

  “One would say, ‘honored sir,’” Sicheir explained, apparently understanding the dilemma, which Tehre had not. “My sister has her title from our mother and her family—the title of nobility passes only from mother to daughter in a morganatic marriage such as our parents’. It’s different in Feierabiand, I believe.”

  Lord Bertaud gave an ambiguous little tip of the head and made a polite little gesture of invitation, meaning they should all sit. “You are my guests,” he declared. “No, please permit me the indulgence. Tell me about the road and the experience of building, honored Sicheir. What is your part in this great project? Have you been involved with anything comparable in the past?”

  Tehre sat back and watched as her brother was, despite his concerns and suspicions and more than half against his will, drawn out into a companionable discussion of the Arobern’s road. She had not precisely seen Lord Bertaud as a real court noble; he seemed too direct, too little pretentious. Now she saw that he was indeed an experienced courtier. Was charm, too, possibly a sort of making? Not even as structured as language, far less than a proper structure of stone or wood. What would the components of a courtier’s charm be? Come to that, what exactly would the finished structure be? Maybe the analogy would not stretch quite so far… Then, as Sicheir began to sketch the first of the great bridges that would span a wide chasm, she dismissed the question and leaned forward.

  “Is that to scale? Then it’s all wrong. Masonry’s too heavy for that width,” she commented. “You have to have too much rise for that run. It could be done if you had a series of arches, but you can’t put in a series if there’s too much fall under the bridge, and I’m sure there is. No, Sicheir, not only will this design be very difficult to build, it’ll be thoroughly unsound. Who designed this?”

  “Tirechkeir.”

  “Yes, it’s just like Emnon Tirechkeir to design something that looks like a radical departure but that really draws on a long tradition of design that doesn’t actually apply to the situation at hand. The first problem is a wrong choice of materials. I really don’t think masonry is the proper material to span such a long distance.”

  “It’s available. We can get any quantity of good stone out of those mountains. That’s a big asset, Tehre.”

  “However easy it is to get, it’s far too heavy for this use. You’ll never get it anchored properly, or if you do, it’ll be because it’s too steep to be practical.” Tehre looked around absently for paper. Someone pushed a whole stack of good-quality draftsman’s paper across the table to her—oh, Lord Bertaud, how clever of him to see what she wanted—she took the quill out of her brother’s hand and began to sketch. “Now something like this would be much lighter and far easier to build. See, you can make very steep arches, as long as you hang the bridge from the arches rather than making the arches the footing of the actual bridge itself. You’d cast these arches of iron, you can do that in Ehre, there’s no need to try to do it in place. Then just lift them into place from either side. Then use wrought-iron chains and suspend a timber bridge from the arches—”

  Sicheir picked up the sketch and stared at it.

  “It will work,” Tehre insisted. “The theory is perfectly sound. Just because no one’s used this kind of structure before doesn’t mean it’s not sound. Here, look, let me show you how the mathematics work out. I know the mathematics can be misleading, there’s something missing from our understanding of the equations…” She tapped the quill absently against her lips, thinking about missing quantities and concepts.

  Sicheir interrupted her abstraction with practiced emphasis. “Oh, I believe you. It’s not that I don’t believe you. Tehre, you ought to come back to Ehre with me; you should help me present this to Prince Bestreieten himself.” He saw her baffled expression and said patiently, “The Arobern’s brother is overseeing the whole project, Tehre, you knew that, surely! He’d be interested in this—and if no one else has ever built a bridge this way, he’ll only be more interested: He knows very well his brother would love to have special, unique bridges for his road. If you come—”

  “I can’t,” Tehre said, surprised. “You know I’m going north.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “You do know I’m going north. Sicheir, that isn’t kind, pretending you want me to come to Ehre when really you simply don’t want me going north with Lord Bertaud.”

  Everyone stopped, looking at the foreign lord.

  Lord Bertaud leaned back in his chair, tilted his head quizzically to one side, and regarded Sicheir with raised-eyebrow curiosity.

  Sicheir flushed. So did Tehre, realizing for the first time that she had, once again, managed to say something desperately tactless. She should have let Fareine come after all; Fareine would have known how to interrupt her, or what to say now to smooth the moment…

  “Honored lady, your honored brother undoubtedly did come find you to ask your advice about the bridges,” Meierin said in her quiet little voice. “It will be much harder for him to ask you about things like this,” she tapped the sketches they’d been drawing, “once you are so far away in your father’s house.”

  Then the girl turned gracefully to Lord Bertaud and went on, sweetly reasonable, “Of course the honored Sicheir Amnachudran is grateful for your offer to escort Lady Tehre to her father’s house, Lord Bertaud. It was so kind of you. You’ve seen how skilled a maker the honored lady is; perhaps you will be kind again and forgive the honored Sicheir his attempt to persuade his honored sister to go west with him now? Of course”—with an understanding nod for Tehre—“she will not go. You should know”—with a reproving look at Sicheir—“that when Lady Tehre says she means to visit your honored parents, she will not change her mind for anything.”

  Tehre stared at the girl. “You sound just like Fareine!”

  Meierin lowered her eyes modestly. “Thank you, honored lady. I hope I have profited from the honored Fareine’s instruction.”

  “I thought—” Tehre began, then stopped. She said instead, warmly, “Fareine did tell me you were sensible.” Then she turned to glare at her brother. “And I thought you were sensible, too! I want to know what’s going on in the north. Don’t you want to know?” She flung up her hands at Sicheir’s blank look. “What did Fareine write in that letter?”

  Sicheir hesitated, his gaze sliding sideways toward the foreign lord.

  “Never mind,” Meierin said before the pause could grow awkward. She patted Tehre’s hand urgently. “You can discuss the letters with your honored brother later, honored lady.”

  “There’s no need for haste,” Sicheir seconded. He rapped the table firmly to summon the inn’s staff. “We’ll have supper—Lord Bertaud, won’t you permit me the privilege?”

  Tehre rested her elbow on the table, set her chin on her
palm, and stopped listening to the polite argument about who was whose guest. She thought instead about time and travel and uncertainty, and who knew what about everything. Or anything.

  After some time, she put her spoon down, only then realizing that supper had been served and that she had been eating it. It was a thick barley soup with beef and carrots, a very northern dish that reminded Tehre, once she noticed it, of her home. She suddenly longed for home, for her mother’s voice calling cheerfully down the polished halls, for her father’s quick interest in building and materials and making and, really, everything… She thought of the griffin they had seen, the way the late sunlight had struck across the metallic feathers of its wings and turned its lion pelt to ruddy gold. The fierce unhuman stare it had turned their way.

  Then she thought of that griffin flying above her father’s lands and house. For some reason she did not understand, the image made her shudder with dread. Looking up at her brother, she said, “You need to come north with us, Sicheir.”

  A startled silence fell. Tehre looked from Sicheir to Lord Bertaud. They both looked equally baffled.

  “Yes, Tehre,” Sicheir said at last. “We were just agreeing that might be as well.”

  Tehre flushed. “Oh, were you?” She had missed this. “But your work?”

  Sicheir only shrugged. “Family comes first. I’ll send some of your drawings back to Prince Bestreieten with a suggestion that he consider something like it.”

  “Oh.” Tehre thought about this. “Tell him, tell them all, that the drawings are yours. The administrators are much more likely to try the design if all their pet builders think it’s yours and not mine.”

  “Tehre—”

  “Later, after the bridges are built, you can tell them the design is mine. There’s nothing they can do about it then. I want to see this,” she tapped her rough sketch with the tips of two fingers, “built and raised and carrying proper loads. Don’t you?”

  Sicheir gave a conceding little flip of his hand, frowning. “Maybe you’ll agree to go west with me later.”

  Lord Bertaud slid the sketch across the table and studied it with interest. “Most unusual.”

  “I got the idea from a Linularinan bridge,” Tehre explained. “And from thinking about ways to actually use really steep arches.”

  “I wish to see this design put to a practical test,” the foreign lord declared, and raised his eyebrows at Sicheir.

  “Huh.” Sicheir sat back in his chair, looking extremely thoughtful. “Yes. That might do.”

  Baffled, Tehre looked from one of them to the other. If Fareine had been here, she would have asked her later what they meant. But Fareine was not here. She glanced at Meierin. To her surprise, the girl was nodding and looking pleased. She leaned toward Tehre and whispered, “It’s how Lord Bertaud will explain why you agreed to guide him into the north: He promised you patronage and you knew he would be a very powerful patron, at least for a little while, until everyone can see your bridges are the best. Everyone will understand this explanation. It’ll prevent all sorts of, you know. Other questions.”

  “Oh.” Tehre tried to decide whether this actually made sense but gave up almost at once. Materials and mathematics were far more straightforward than deciphering what people thought. They so seldom seemed to think at all, really, which was probably part of the problem. “Well, if you think so,” she added, and, as everyone now seemed contented to go north, went back to sketching bridges. But even while structures of iron and stone flowed out of her quill, griffins continued to fly through the back of her mind.

  But they did not go north in the morning. Tehre stayed up for a long time, sketching by candlelight. She found griffins creeping into her sketches, flying above and through and below the cliffs and chasms and bridges that flowed out of her quill. The fierceness of the mountains she drew and the fierceness of the griffins informed each other, so that sometimes when she meant to draw a jagged cliff edge she instead found herself tracing the savage line of a beak or the clean-edged sweep of wing or the taut curve of muscle beneath a lion’s pelt.

  When she blew out the candles and made her way through the darkness to the bed she was sharing with Meierin, the glint of fire seemed to linger just out of sight, caught in a griffin’s fierce eye. When she finally slept, she dreamed of griffins soaring in high spirals over Breidechboden, fire falling from the wind from their wings… She murmured in her sleep, half waking in the dark.

  “Lady… you’re dreaming,” Meierin whispered back, sleepily, reaching to pat her arm. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Where are we?” Tehre asked her, her eyes still filled with dreams of fire, glad to have the practical, sensible girl to ask.

  “Dachsichten. Remember? The inn in Dachsichten.”

  “Oh,” Tehre said vaguely, not really remembering but willing to trust Meierin’s word for it. She closed her eyes again and dropped her head back to the pillow, and if she dreamed again after that, she did not remember.

  In the morning, Tehre felt exactly as though she’d stayed up too late and had too many strange dreams. Her eyes felt gritty, and the incipient headache she’d ignored the previous night had shifted to the back of her skull and settled in to stay. She wanted a long bath, several cups of hot astringent tea, and to go back to bed in her own room. What she had was a cold basin to wash her face in, a wrinkled travel dress, and a long, rough carriage ride to occupy the whole day. She sighed. There should at least be tea.

  She and Meierin washed their faces in the cold water, helped one another dress, came out into the hall, and found the doors of Sicheir’s room already standing open. Sicheir was sitting on the bed in his room, studying the sketch of the suspended bridge Tehre had drawn for him and frowning. He jumped up when Tehre peered around the edge of his door.

  “You’re up! Good!” he said, impatiently, as though she had slept very late.

  “It’s hardly past dawn,” Tehre protested. “If you’d wanted a very early start, you might have said so. Who knows if Lord Bertaud is even awake yet?”

  Meierin slipped past Sicheir’s room to rap gently on Lord Bertaud’s door. The lord opened it after a moment. He looked, Tehre thought, exactly like she felt: tired and headachy and like his rest had been troubled by unusual dreams. His smile was really more a grimace. “Lady Tehre,” he said. His eyes went to Sicheir and he hesitated for a moment, then looked back at her. “I am concerned about the griffin we saw; I am concerned about what may be happening in the north of your country,” he said baldly. “We must talk.”

  “Yes,” said Tehre, more certain than ever that he, too, had dreamed of griffins and fire. “But, please, over tea.”

  But when they came down to the common room, they found the innkeeper, harried and sweating lightly, coming to meet them. With a worried jerk of his head, he indicated the finest of his tables, the one set back away from the heat of the kitchens and closest to the wide east window. The pale dawn light lay across that table and the tea things and sliced bread it held, and across the bony face and deep-set eyes of a man who sat there, waiting for them.

  The man rose as they stared at him. He was clad in good-quality traveling clothes of leather and undyed linen, much too plain for a merchant but much too good for any simple tradesman or farmer. He was tall, lanky, his hands bare of rings, his face lined with weather and experience. He looked tired, as though he’d ridden through the night and only just arrived at the inn. Tehre had never seen him before in her life. She looked questioningly at her brother, at Lord Bertaud. Both men looked as puzzled as she felt.

  Then the man reached into the collar of his plain shirt and took out a fine gold chain, on which hung, pendent, a carved bone disk that had been dyed purple.

  Tehre stood frozen, and felt Meierin and her brother go as suddenly still beside her. Lord Bertaud, puzzled, glanced from each of them to the others. A wariness came into his eyes, and the politely neutral courtier’s expression came down across his face. He drew a breath, but he did not speak, waiti
ng instead for Tehre or Sicheir to give him a lead he could follow. Tehre would have been happy if she’d had an idea about what lead to give.

  The man let the token fall against his shirt in plain sight and came forward a step. “Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan?” he asked her. His eyes moved to Lord Bertaud. “Lord Bertaud, son of Boudan?”

  “Yes,” Tehre admitted, her mouth dry. Lord Bertaud lifted an eyebrow and inclined his head. If he felt in the least nervous, his courtier’s mask hid it so well Tehre could not tell.

  The man bowed his head a little and then asked Sicheir, “And you, honored sir?”

  “I—” Sicheir cleared her throat. “Sicheir Amnachudran, my lord. This lady’s brother.”

  “Of course,” the man murmured, neither surprised nor, apparently, curious about Sicheir’s presence. He turned back to Tehre. “Lady Tehre, I am Detreir Enteirich. My master, Brechen Glansent Arobern, sends me to you to proclaim his desire that you attend him at once in Breidechboden. Will you come?”

  It had never crossed Tehre’s mind that the king would actually care that she had ignored his wishes and instead headed north; it was so small a defiance, and she so unimportant, it seemed incredible he had even noticed. And instead he had not only noticed but cared enough to send one of his own agents after her… She wondered whether the agent had tracked them through the back roads around the capital, or whether he’d simply come straight to Dachsichten… Her family always did stay at this inn when they traveled either north or south. It had not occurred to her to stay anywhere else. She could only say, helplessly, “Of course.”