Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  Marnda had only to see the rest of us to unloose a pent-up string of orders. As I had foreseen, my acquiescence had set a precedent. I was helping with plain sewing and laundry, so that the dressers could use their more skilled fingers for fine work.

  The first nights, we hurt so much we did our work and went straight to sleep. Gradually that changed. When Lasva sat with us, she liked hearing poetry. At first, I was called upon to recite and then to read from one of the few books that Lasva had chosen to bring along.

  But one night, when I had made an excuse to distance myself from the camp in order to practice my magic, I returned to discover Anhar reading. I had been trained to read well and to mimic the style of the speaker if I had to deliver a spoken message, but she was able to vary the voices of the poems’ different narrators.

  When Lasva was alone with Ivandred in her tent, Tesar, Lnand, and Fnor Eveneth sat around the campfire. The female lancers traded off teaching Marloven lettering to Anhar, tall, thoughtful Pelis, and me. Occasionally Birdy joined us, sitting between Anhar and me and glancing from side to side as she wrote with her left hand, and I with my right.

  I forced myself to practice magic each night before I laid my aching body at last in the bedroll. I thought about magic during the ride—better than thinking about how much I hurt—and each night I tried something a little different. I lit one candle, then two. One night I pulled a lick of flame from the campfire instead of another candle. The point of heat behind my brow intensified for a heartbeat, as it did when I lit two. But now I expected it, and instinctively enclosed it as soon as it appeared, like closing walnut shells around a spark. The faster I did that, the stronger the flame. Speed and control, then. Pull, speed, control.

  Now that I understood the process, I began reviewing the patterns of syllables I’d memorized. As if someone had clapped on a glowglobe in a dark room, everything began to make sense. So I started from the beginning, and worked out how the patterns fit together.

  The easiest was illusion, as it was ephemeral, a trick of light. It still did not mean I knew how to weave more complicated spells, but I could see that magic built on syllables that were fragments of Old Sartoran.

  The pain from riding was incrementally less agonizing. I had learned to be grateful for those moments of rest, for the bitter willow-bark steep that Tesar made for me, and even for the crude pan rye bread with cheese and boiled greens that formed our usual night meal. Ivandred had offered to find cooks familiar with Colendi food, but Lasva—of course—had said, “We shall begin as we shall live and eat the foods that you do.”

  Belimas wept silently the rest of that night.

  One night I squatted before the campfire, briefly alone. I used my time to make tiny illusory blossoms grow on my palm. They lasted no longer than a bubble, but I was charmed with my success. I made illusory blossoms until others of the staff joined me, talking as they often did about how much we might be paid once we reached Lasva’s new home. Nobody thought of it as our future home.

  Then the Marlovens joined us. Tesar and Lnand brought out the slate on which Ivandred sketched the day’s map and how they would divide up their patrols. Lnand used her long pale braid to clean the chalk off, and they sat before the fire near two of the dressers. The Marloven women’s movements were easy and strong.

  “Let’s see what you remember of the alphabet,” Tesar said, her gray eyes black in the ruddy firelight.

  Chalk was difficult to write with, but I gripped it tightly and scrawled the letters.

  “Good.”

  Lnand smiled at Pelis, who blushed a little as she handed the slate back. “Good! You learn fast.” She smudged with her finger, then gave a soft chuckle, her breath clouding. Firelight gleamed in her eyelashes and warmed the brown of her eyes as she said, “When we were girls. We used to draw the vowel-sounds as close to circles as we could. When my grandmother was young they made them slanting down, see? Between the letters, like tufts of grass—”

  She stilled, head lifting in a tiny jerk.

  All I heard was galloping. Tesar exchanged a glance with Lnand while tipping her head, a hand briefly turned palm down. This was like fan language, but no signal I understood.

  Tesar rose and loped away into the darkness, where I heard low, urgent voices. Then Lnand handed the slate and chalk to Anhar. “Before we rode into your country, people sometimes said to us, Do not take ‘no’ as ‘no’ and ‘yes’ as ‘yes’ from a Colendi. We spoke so little to your people when we were there. So I ask you, does ‘no’ mean ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ mean ‘no’?”

  Pelis blushed. Anhar smiled. “Sometimes.”

  “It is our custom to avoid a flat denial,” I said, “In particular in public, except with children or for purposes of instruction.” And to assert rank. “So we have words of compromise and degree, and gestures that modify.”

  Tesar reappeared within the golden circle of firelight and dropped cross-legged to the ground in a single easy move.

  I said, “May I ask if something might be amiss?”

  Lnand’s lips moved as she repeated my words. Then she said, “By treaty, we must let the Telyers know if we cross the border.”

  It was now us Colendi who turned from one to the other, each seeking enlightenment but only finding our own puzzlement mirrored. What could be worrying in so sensible and civilized a rule being properly observed?

  Anhar said, “And so?”

  “And so we have,” Lnand said.

  She and Tesar waited, as if that explained everything. Lnand’s brows puckered. She could not have been over eighteen. Tesar was, at most, around twenty, like me. From a distance they had seemed older, harder, made of stone and steel.

  “Shall we resume?” Lnand held up the slate in her scarred, callused hands.

  Later, I walked out into the cold air, to check on our laundry scrupulously segregated from the plain Marloven cotton-linen. Segregated, but taking up exactly half of the available drying line. I looked at those drying clothes, aware that we Colendi numbered far fewer than the Marlovens, and remembered something disturbing that Nifta had said about bloodstains on some of their shirts.

  I felt that sense of being observed. When I turned, there was Birdy with a cluster of Marlovens. The urge for civilized conversation—for his particular perspective—was irresistible, and so I said, “I would offer my aid with the animals if it might help.” I found it difficult to speak a conditional sentence in Marloven. Their verbs seemed variations of what must be, rather than what might, could, should, or would be.

  Birdy said politely, “I don’t believe you have been trained.”

  “I would like to learn,” I said, equally politely.

  Birdy said in a dismissive voice very unlike his own, “You can scrub saddles. But don’t touch anything until I show you how.” I knew Birdy, so I could hear the laughter down deep, forming just the faintest tremor on the word “anything.”

  That is how we ended up alone at a stream far from anyone else (except for the eternal roving guard) as I forced my protesting muscles to learn yet another new thing in soft-brushing quilted pads and saddle gear, so that Birdy could carry it back to air out near the picket line, as it was a clear night.

  “Just copy what I do,” Birdy said in Old Sartoran. “They will assume that I am instructing you exhaustively the way they did me. As if I was four years old. Though I must say, their ways really are quite effective.”

  There was a quick step. We both turned, and there was Anhar, carrying in each hand one of the Marlovens’ plain round travel cups. She held them out to us, saying, “Pelis made a tisane to warm us up and take away the aches.”

  I took mine and gratefully sipped the listerblossom mixed with Sartoran leaf. Birdy sipped, closed his eyes, then held his cup out to Anhar and said, “Shall we share?”

  “I thank you for the kind thought, but I already had mine,” Anhar said. “Birdy, are we in danger?”

  “I was going to ask that very thing,” I exclaimed. “Nifta said she
thinks that someone among them had been beaten. Why? They never do anything wrong.”

  “A scout chose the wrong road. We’re having to correct that as best we can.”

  “That’s reason to thrash someone?” I asked.

  Anhar threw up her hands in the shadow-warding. “Is that going to happen to us?”

  “They’ve never touched me,” Birdy said. “And I’ve made plenty of mistakes. They seem to have a different standard for themselves. It’s like court has its rules that are more elaborate than the rules for the rest of us Colendi.” He handed his empty cup to Anhar and the brush back to me, hefted a load of gear, and carried it swiftly away.

  She looked after him, then sighed. Marnda was watching. Anhar took my empty cup and started back to our tents.

  I remained where I was, working with the brush by the light of lanterns. Birdy’s voice drifted back, quick and assured in Marloven, and then came the swift chuff-chuff-chuff of his returning footsteps.

  I tried to lift the saddle gear, and my lower back muscles protested.

  “Don’t,” he cautioned, and then laughed, a puff of breath. “I couldn’t either, at first. You’ll want to bend at the knees, like the low sweep with the fan, and lift with your legs, not your back.” He stretched out his fingers to brush them against my back.

  It was not a possessive caress, but—like Pelis’s touch on my hand—the signal was there: interest, question.

  I backed away instinctively, saying, “That is most awkward.” I sensed in the way his hand dropped to his side, the subtle stiffening of his shoulders that I’d hurt him, so I pretended that the moment had not happened as I reached behind me to press my knuckles alongside my spine. “Can you tell me this, at least? Is there danger?”

  “I don’t know. Prince Ivandred sent the outriders two days ahead instead of a day. That’s why you won’t see but two of Fnor’s women—they are scouting in teams.”

  “What might be the problem? I would think scrupulous attention to a treaty is to be lauded.”

  “Not if they think enemies will find out they are here.”

  “Enemies!”

  “That is the word they used, though they did not name anyone.” He sighed.

  “The notion makes my neck cold, as if inimical eyes observe us.”

  Birdy chuckled. “If it helps, they find you and the princess intimidating.”

  “Me!”

  “They call us peacocks. About you, they say you dance when you walk, like the princess, and they think we all sing our language, especially Anhar, when she reads to us at camp. And they are amazed that Colendi servants dress beautifully and smell like flowers.” Birdy’s voice changed a little, from teasing to reflective. “Though I notice Nifta no longer tucks flowers in those red braids of hers, and Belimas no longer arranges her hair in blossom-knots.”

  “They are unhappy. And who can blame them?” I spread my hands. “I move as stiffly as an old goat, my backside hurts so. My clothes are always damp and grimy, and my new scent is essence of horse.”

  The more I complained the more he laughed. I marveled over how that made me feel better as I walked back to my bedroll. Laughter was good—that was a common truism—but it was the quality of his laughter that warmed me, the shared companionship.

  We had been proud of our ability to keep pace with the Marlovens until the day after my conversation with Birdy, when Ivandred gave the order for a hard ride, and our lancers relayed it to us.

  “We’ve been on a hard ride.” Belimas was too angry to keep her voice low.

  “Too hard,” Nifta mumbled. “I’m as skinny as…” She cast a look my way, then at Anhar, who was the thinnest of us all, and returned to her work without finishing her sentence. Nifta had been justifiably proud of her rounded shape, but it was true, we were all much more spare. It was not flattering to any of us. Our clothes would not fit when we reached civilization again.

  “This has been an easy ride,” Fnor said as she slung her bow over her shoulder and walked away.

  “As if we haven’t been shaken awake every day at Repose,” Anhar whispered to me as we walked back to our tents. She took a quick look around, then twitched her hip one way, her chin over her shoulder, tossed her tumbled hair and fingered it, her nose lifted as if something smelled—it was Belimas to the life. I gasped, and from behind came a snort of laughter as Birdy walked by, his arms loaded with horse gear. Anhar and I both smiled back.

  The Marlovens’ idea of “on the road before dawn” meant waking just after the Hour of Reeds—three hours before Daybreak—so that everyone could be fed and the horses prepared, while the lancers went off in small groups to do whatever it was that they did each morning before we rode, and each evening after we halted. Hitherto, we’d taken horse around the Hour of the Bird, when the sun was at least a finger above the horizon. That, we discovered, was a rare luxury.

  Lasva shared a horse with Fnor or one of her women, riding next to Ivandred. Each day’s ride ended with silence, her face tight with tension. But she would not complain, or request an easier pace. One night, I was approaching our tent with dragging steps, after forcing myself to practice my spells on the pretext of fetching water, when I heard low, choked sobs from red-haired Nifta, then Marnda’s angry whisper.

  I already knew that Belimas longed to return to Colend, in spite of the disgrace that had sent her, Pelis, and Nifta on this journey. Now there were two of them. When they emerged to get their share of the never-changing rye panbreads with fried fish and cheese, one look at those lowered, reddened eyes, the compressed lips, and I knew they would have left if they’d dared. But even more terrible than this journey was the image of being alone without coin or even a common language. It was Adamas Dei, who had lived in this very same part of the world, who had written long ago, Nobody wants a beggar to stay. They had Colendi skills, but who in this horrible part of the world would want those?

  That next morning, when Birdy brought a lantern to our tent to waken us, Nifta put out a hand to halt Anhar in the act of rolling her bedding in the tight form the Marlovens required. “Anhar. You actually were there for our war, last summer. We three were in herb-sleep because of the spy. What was the war like?”

  Anhar flushed, obviously pleased to be the expert, yet she was too honest to parade a knowledge she did not have. “I saw nothing,” she admitted. “Just the princess when she returned, all mud-covered, and her hand bleeding. No one actually saw the war.”

  “Lnand says it was not a war,” Pelis said as she swiftly braided up her rope of brown hair—for those with longer hair had adopted the Marloven style, which was simpler to achieve and maintain than our more complicated loops and twists. “She said it was a brief skirmish.”

  “Skirmish?” Belimas said, tossing her head. “What is that?”

  “A very small war, I believe,” I said. And when all the faces turned my way, I added, “I saw the word in that record about Prince Ivandred’s ancestor, Elgar the Fox. There were many assumptions in the record, things the Marloven writer thought everyone knew, so I can’t define it further, except it seems that it takes many many skirmishes to make up a war.”

  “But two people were killed!” Belimas spread her hands, fingers stiff.

  “War is when the entire kingdom is fighting another kingdom,” Pelis said. “At least, I gather so. Yet Lnand also said that no kingdom has ever attacked their capital, which is ringed with great walls and has many guards. So we will be safe.”

  Belimas snapped her hand northward toward Thorn Gate. “What is to stop them from fighting each other within those walls? We’ve all seen the blood.”

  We looked at one another for answers that none could give, then Pelis shrugged. “Why frighten yourself with what-if? The point is, these very same Marlovens won our war, or skirmish, so they’re sure to win whatever it is they think might be waiting.”

  “Ah-yedi!” Nifta flickered her fingers in the petals-in-the-wind gesture, meaning a flirt. “You just want to see that Lnand Dunrend ri
ding about with a lance in her arms. So barbaric!” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “How I hate this,” she whispered.

  “This what?” Pelis lifted her shoulders. “We’re going to a barbaric kingdom. If we wish to find someone besides one another for rompery, then we must adjust our discrimination.”

  Pelis had been eyeing Lnand? Had Lnand returned her interest? Of course she had. Now I understood at least some of the motivation for our writing lessons. As Nifta and Belimas (who never ceased weeping, it seemed) gave each other, then Pelis, resentful looks, I walked to the stream wondering what else I’d missed—and saw Anhar had slipped away before I had. She was over by the horses, one hand fingering burrs out of a horse’s mane as she talked to Birdy.

  I’d assumed that the famous lances had been thrown away after the war—that is, the skirmish—with the Chwahir, for I hadn’t seen any great sticks on the ride. I discovered the next day that the lances disassembled and then reassembled.

  When Tesar and I climbed onto the horse (and I could get up by myself now, though still without much grace) she seemed larger and harder. She was wearing chain mail beneath her black coat and carried a number of weapons close at hand.

  Fully armed also meant bows slung at their saddles. Bows! The forbidden weapon! But the Marlovens had not agreed to the Compact.

  “Are you going to… shoot arrows at persons?” I asked, my heartbeat thrumming.

  “Not unless ordered,” she replied soberly.

  Once again, though we traveled so thoroughly together that our bodies touched on horseback, Marloven and Colendi were as if separated. I could see Lasva’s fear in her wide gaze, in the tight grip of her hands. The Marlovens talked past us to one another, short, quick conversations.

  When we camped, we found two riders waiting.

  Once the fires were built and the tents set up, Ivandred drew Lasva as usual to the command tent. The rest of us could hear her sweet, polite voice and his deeper clipped one as we lined up for the excruciatingly predictable heavy bread, thick and stale, studded with nuts, the flavor a horrible mix of cloying honey, dates, and raisins, that mixed discordantly with the bitterness of their ubiquitous rye.