Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04

by Chaz Brenchley

  They came down the single narrow road between the high-walled fields, a mirror to those on the opposite side of the river; they issued out in pairs abreast and spread across the grassland like a flood indeed, a slow-seeping darkness that invaded the bright green like a poison. Or like a swarm, she thought, bees to sting, locusts to consume utterly whatever they lighted on.

  They could light on little here, except the earth itself to take possession of it; but that was bad enough, worse than bad. She had been guest of the Ransomers, she knew some of their intimacies at first hand and had heard tell of others. They were the last people she liked to see within these borders. Better the Sharai, who would pillage, burn the crops and houses and move on, leaving a corruptible governor behind to levy later tributes. That was slavery; but Ransomers would burn the people too. And build castles on the heights, and stay, and never trust because they never could. Their hand would always lie cold and heavy across this narrow, tender land. She tried to imagine a lifetime lived in its shadow and shuddered, and yearned to see the army of the Sharai come out of the smoke to the east there, to drive the Ransomers back. It was there, she knew, she had seen outriders come and go; she thought she could see a darker shadow building, the massing of the tribes. Under her husband Hasan, the only man who could bring them so together; and so it wasn't treachery to hope that the Sharai would be victorious over Outremer, it was loyalty to her new man and his people, and she could not be condemned for it.

  Except by her father, her friends, her first husband Imber, all her old loyalties to blood and family and belief. If they fight, we all lose, she reminded herself fiercely, and struggled to put aside all wondering about tomorrow, how armies once encamped could be removed from Surayon again. The Sharai might not follow Hasan if he tried to lead them back to the Sands, away from war and glory; the Ransomers certainly would not follow Imber, and there was all her little influence swallowed up already. Her father had more, with the King's authority behind him, but she doubted whether Fulke would withdraw even for the King, when he had the God's will to enact and a generation of support from the fathers of the church.

  Tomorrow, she would worry about that. If there were a tomorrow, for her or for any of them. At the moment, she was inclined to doubt it. She had no faith in these men, their muscles or their minds: not even in either her wise or her foolish husband, let alone in the hundreds and thousands else. Never mind their intentions, she thought that one or another of them would fling a blade or let an arrow fly, too soon and at the wrong target. Old enmities couldn't be put aside so speedily. There were too many blood-debts on either side, too heavy a burden of resentment. Each had their history, of cruelties and dispossession; each had their God, and as she had learned — or perhaps decided - those were the same thing, indistinguishable. What God or history demanded could not and would not be denied.

  That was her fear, and there was only one way to avoid it: that both sides see men die, and see who killed them.

  She waited, breathless and fearful, while long files of riders unwound across the plain; she watched a patrol detach to follow the line of the wall easterly, towards the hidden Sharai.

  She thought she knew what she had to fear. She thought her Hasan would appear from the smoke, riding alone with the tribes behind; she thought some high-minded Ransomer - Marron's Sieur Anton, as like as not: there was a man who carried his nobility in every haunted muscle of his body, every nuance that his mind could unpick — would go to meet him, man to man and face to face; she thought they would speak with courtesy and respect on both sides, and somehow there would be words said that must reluctandy, regretfully be answered with steel. She thought they would fight, because that was the style of the day. Hope must fail, men must be weak.

  She was letting her own unhappiness colour everything in grey, against the world’s truth. Bright sunshine, a gaudy green in the grass, only that taint of smoke to speak of shadow: sworn enemies might meet on such a day and not fight, or agree to fight together. It could happen. Would the djinni have helped work to make it happen, if all would fall apart in any case?

  She had no answers, to questions that couldn't be asked. What she had was fear; and actually it wasn't what she thought or what she knew that made her fearful. She thought she knew her man, and Sieur Anton and his ilk. If only Hasan could avoid Marshal Fulke, his good sense might carry the hour. What she truly feared was a fool, on either side: a man who could not see beyond his weapon's edge, some unthinking hero who would kill - from a distance, most likely with an arrow - and look for praise where he had bought disaster with a casually taken life.

  She watched for it to happen, any or all of it as her mind had played it out. She watched the men ride the wall and saw that she was wrong, she'd been too subtle and too grand. No meeting of proud captains, each of whom could honour the other; that was a girl's fancy, a nursery tale, no part of war.

  Instead there was simply a boiling, a sudden rush of shadow through a gateway in the wall. Men on foot, and no more than half a dozen of them against twice that many mounted: they might have the advantage of surprise, but even so it should have been a slaughter.

  It was not; or not as it should have been. Men on foot should not, could not stand against horsemen; she knew that from her earliest schooling, from before she knew that she was being schooled. And yet these few in their black robes swirled around the riders and their beasts, and one by one the horses fell. Then it was black against black, Patric against Sharai, but they were too far away and their dress was too similar to tell apart from this distance. Except that she did know, she was sure that when six men were left standing, they were not a surviving half of the Ransomers. It ought not to have been possible, but—

  'Sand Dancers,' Elisande said beside her.

  'How can you tell? From here? Are you counting their fingers for them?' Elisande was right, and they both knew it; but she hated the knowledge and did not want it in her head, nor any of the memories that two commonplace words could carry with them.

  'They killed the horses. Men of the tribes would have spared them, tried to capture them. But men of the tribes would have had better sense than to attack twice their number on horseback. Besides, those robes are black. But why are they here, and what are they fighting for?'

  'Sweet, I don't know. I never have known. Theirs is another war altogether, it seems to me.'

  'No, only another arm of the same, that we cannot track from here. Well, there are few of them; and here come the Ransomers for vengeance.'

  Indeed, a squad of horsemen was cantering along the wall, two dozen or more with a cloaked knight prominent among them. She said, 'The Ransomers won't care about the niceties, black robes or blue. They have seen Sharai slaughter their brothers; there will be no truce.'

  'Likely not. I never had much faith in it. But they can kill Dancers, and welcome so.'

  'If they can kill Dancers.'

  'Why not? We did. Those riders were surprised, and led by a fool. It's been how long, six hundred years that the Dancers have lived alone in the Sands? I'm sure they killed the odd braggart for reputation's sake, but reputation is all it is, Julianne. Reputation and good training, but the Ransomers also have both, and the Ransomers have been fighting for forty years. The Dancers haven't faced a real enemy in ten times that long. None of these living have risked their lives till now. They will not stand. Besides, they are Sharai; they are not stupid. Strike, and run ...'

  And so they did, back through the opening in the wall, where the horsemen could only have followed them slowly and one by one. Their leader had better sense.

  'Perhaps they'll lose themselves, and starve,' Julianne muttered vindictively.

  'Not they. Dancers think round corners; they'll know the secrets of those walls. Or they'll climb straight over them, as your 'ifrit did. Not your foolish boy...'

  She meant Imber, of course, not Roald - but Julianne still felt a pang, though she hoped her face had not shown it. Roald was dead, and laid with honour with his Pri
ncip's son; let him lie. She stared into the distant haze, eyes wide enough to smart with the smoke on the wind, looking for Hasan and desperate not to see him at this most inopportune of times.

  'Look,' Elisande said suddenly, startled. 'There, the Ransomers...'

  The horsemen were milling chaotically around that narrow opening. Not trying to go in, but what, then? For a moment she thought that they were somehow knocking down the wall, to allow them safe entrance and their just revenge, if they could only flatten walls faster than the Dancers could run. But then she saw a great section topple and fall - and it fell outwards, towards the Ransomers. Whose horses were backing, wheeling, kicking and rearing, caught in a crush and close to panic, she thought, though she could not read them well from here.

  It was impossible to see clearly through the massed bodies and their constant motion that took them nowhere, neither through the gap and into the field nor back and away from the wall; it was hard to see anything at all, but there was black against the green, dark and sinuous shapes gleaming in the sunlight as they came through the field's trampled crop and over the rubble of the fallen wall to vanish into the disorder of the mounted men.

  Some of those were mounted no more. There were riderless horses breaking free and running fast, their discipline as broken as their harness. Others were down; she watched one fall, seeming to subside into the heaving mass like meat sucked down into a boiling pot of stew.

  There were men on foot amid that desperate madness, then. If any could find space enough to stand, and keep their feet against the buffeting bodies, the raging maelstrom of noise and terror; if any could survive so long as this, survive at all against marauding 'ifrit with strength enough simply to push a strong wall over, where it lay between themselves and their prey.

  'Elisande, your eyes are sharper than mine,' desert-trained, though Jemel's were better yet, the best she knew now that Marron's were his own again. 'Can you see how it goes there? They are killing each other, look

  'I daresay they are,' Elisande replied in a voice so strange, so distracted that she might as well have spelled it out in syllables, I do not care what is happening, and I am not going to look.

  Julianne turned in bewilderment; and saw what she was seeing and so understood at once, although it seemed almost an impossible thing.

  Marron stood there, on their island, where he had not been a few bare moments earlier. Marron was meant to be still in the Princip's palace, far behind them; Esren had said so.

  Nor was he alone. He held Jemel in his arms, but not the Jemel that Julianne could have wished for, grim-eyed and fearsome and fierce. This was Jemel hurt, atrociously hurt, unconscious; his robe was darker even than it should have been, clinging wetly to his blood-streaked body where it was not hanging in rips and shreds.

  Marron lifted his eyes to gaze at both the girls. Deep crimson red they were, as though Jemel's blood had dyed them so, or else as though he wore them as a badge of war.

  'Oh, Marron ...'

  Was it Elisande’s voice, that despairing sigh, or was it her own? She couldn't tell.

  He didn't seem to care, either way. She never had been sure how much of him was Marron and how much the Daughter, when they shared one flesh like this. He was not entirely remote, he couldn't be, or there would have been nothing but distance written on his face when he'd looked at Jemel; and yet there was little enough written there now when he looked at Elisande.

  'Jemel needs your healing,' he said, as though she could not have seen that for herself.

  Was it only Julianne who thought again, Perhaps it was. Elisande's authoritative hands guided him to lay down the insensible Sharai; they pulled away the tattered remnants of his robe; they moved rapidly, assessingly from one torn wound to another, while her voice was weak, almost whispering, chasing after what was lost already. 'How did you find him? Or us?'

  'It knows,' he said, 'I could feel where he should be. I had to take him from some Patric men, but they gave me room enough, and only threw curses at me. Then I felt where you should be, and I came. Can you heal him?'

  'Easier than last time,' Elisande said. 'He's not so very dead. There'll be more scars, but you won't mind that,' you carry scars enough yourself her voice implied, and not all on that tender skin of yours. 'And I can't do it all at once; we will need those herbs, Julianne,' though her face was saying this cannot be the reason we are here, there would be no sense in it. 'But, Marron, I don't understand what you've done, how it helps. The djinni would have taken you to Jemel, brought you here, you didn't need ...'

  'I am not finished yet,' he said. 'Your father wanted me to fight, Julianne, he forced me to it; now I can, if I have to. If I must break one more oath, it may as well be broken beyond repair.'

  'That may not be all that is broken. Grandfer might not draw it out of you again, he might not be able to ...'

  'I have not said that I would ask him to. I did not ask before; how can it matter now? See to Jemel, Elisande.' And he pulled a dagger from his belt, pricked his arm, let the Daughter flow.

  Swiftly then, while his eyes were his own brown, Elisande chased him with one more question. 'Where are you going now?'

  'To find Sieur Anton,' and there was none of that chill, despairing certainty in his voice, nor in his look; only a determination so strong that yes, he would sacrifice anything, more even than he had given already if he had indeed anything more to give. 'Look after Jemel,' and this time it was a plea, or as near as he could come to it in the moment before he opened a blood-red gate and stepped through it into a golden light that folded itself around him and was gone.

  Distance was not and could not be an object; he was barely aware of it as a reality. He ran not to cover ground, not to save time, but only because running was there to be done, it was here for the doing, it was his and he belonged to it as it to him. He could have run for ever; he might yet run for ever, if his running fetched him no reason to stop.

  He was aware of but did not feel the heat of the world that surrounded him. He had fire in his veins that flowed to match his running, and he had a cool stillness in his mind that matched the static precision of his thoughts.

  He ran over dust and rock within a wide and open bowl, under an opal sky. He was alone, if not unobserved; there was a glitter in the air about him that was more than the eternal gold, an occasional line of darkness in a shadowless land.

  There was a river behind him, he remembered that, it steamed and hissed in its course, hot water on hot rocks. He had jumped from a rock in midstream and not thought twice about it, although it was a long and a perilous leap for a mortal body to attempt. His jump to the rock from the other bank had been made with a body in his arms, and he hadn't worried about that one either.

  Worry seemed not to be a part of him any more, to have been cauterised or cut out, cast aside. He ran quite untroubled by his awareness of trouble in the other world, and quite aware too of that unconcern. This time around, possession had been invited and had driven deeper, with a sharper edge; he carried twin divisions within this single body, himself and another that was not him, not male, not human. In this world, it was ascendant as if by right; in the other, only by his gift.

  So he, they stayed in this world for their running, until it understood and he from it understood that they had run enough in this world. Then the prick in his arm came without his ever thinking to make that happen, he didn't need to, it did the thing itself; and then it left him - but not entirely, not now, some vestige still remained, the coolness of the shadow cast — and pain flooded in to fill the vacancy, more pain than ever such a little cut deserved, and far more blood.

  And it made a doorway for him, he didn't need to think about that either; and he stepped through and swiftly took it back. He had done that before, after the transition from golden rock to green island, from steam to clear air, from solitude to girls; not only the pain found relief in his being whole again, wholly filled, entirely separated. He could lose himself in what possessed him, and find a te
rrible comfort in the red cast of its sight, the ice and hammer of its thinking. Why be what he had been before, when he could be this strong, this safe, this simple?

  This time there was a battle at a little distance, as it had known there would be. This was what he had wanted to see, or else what it had wanted him to see; despite that ruthless division in his head, he would have found it hard to say which was true, or more true. He did not try; it did not seem to matter.

  There were men in the battle, and horses, and 'ifrit. He had a cold certainty in his head, an utter knowledge that Sieur Anton was among the men. He would not have been brought here else. No need for him to scan the horsemen for one who wore white beneath his cloak, although he did.

  Sieur Anton was still mounted - of course, he was still mounted! — where many were not. His stallion reared and screamed, blind with terror, lashing out at man or monster indiscriminately. Not so Sieur Anton, whose blade Josette was neat, vicious, lethal. Blessed Josette, who has said a prayer over you? Did he do so himself, in his virtue?

  Men were dying and horses too, but Sieur Anton would survive this. That was axiomatic.

  Sieur Anton might survive alone. A look around showed no more men riding to his reinforcement; all that remained of the troops on the grassland were fighting now on their own account, clustered around the road that had led them down from the northern hills. There were 'ifrit there too, and broken walls, an ambush well repeated.

  This one had cut the Ransomer army in two, north and south of the walled fields; the 'ifrit had severed its spine as it marched that narrow road. Or crushed it, rather: he climbed up fallen rubble to the top of the long boundary wall - his decision, or he thought so; what shared his eyes did not need them, it knew already all that he could see - and there was the proof of their power, laid out before him like a map written upon the land.