“I have neither,” Akrana said, and Drann knew he should heed the threat in her voice. He chose not to, because what they had done left a sour taste, whether it had been necessary or not. Because he was tired, and frightened.
“But if —”
Akrana whirled on him, and pushed him back against the low wall bounding the track. She snatched the horses’ tethers away from him with one hand and pressed the other flat against his chest.
“If?” she snarled into his face, close enough to make him shrink away. “A meaningless question. Ifs are hares, starting from your feet as you walk a path. Chase the hare, lose the path. Just as with the past and the future. They are not real. There is only the now. That is where you live. You do what needs to be done now, in this place, in pursuit of this task. Don’t concern yourself with ifs.”
He nodded mutely. That was not enough, it turned out, to drain away Akrana’s fury.
“You know what it means if the Empire comes here?”
He could feel her breath. He could feel her spittle on his face. It seemed more than his questions deserved. He had – not a new experience this – said the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
“You know what it means to all these peasants you care so much about?” she shouted at him. “It means things a thousand times worse than having to sell a few horses, or having an empty belly. It means half the men being slaughtered. Any of the rest – men and women alike – who are unmarried going off into slavery. It means every child under the age of two, every one of them, being carried off to be raised a servant of the Empire. Any village that resists is burned; everyone in it, without exception, killed. You know how they kill people, the Orphans?”
Drann shook his head quickly, though of course he did. He had heard stories. Everyone had.
“They spit them. Whole families together, dying slowly on stakes in a circle. Always in a circle, facing one another. That is what it means, for the Bereaved to cross the border into the Empire. Within a month of that moment: a thousand forests of stakes, across this land, with families on them like split fruit. You think these people can stop that happening?”
She flailed a hand, the one still clutching the ropes, in the direction of the farmhouse, hidden now behind the rising ground and the long, low walls.
“No! They cannot. They are just little farm folk, fretting over a few horses. But we are the Free. We can change things. So we take their horses, and we go to fight. You think I care if they hate us for it? I do not. Their hate is too small a thing.”
She lurched away from him, and strode off, dragging the horses after her. Drann waited for a moment, leaning against the wall. Puffed his cheeks out in relief.
“I am not afraid of their hatred,” he heard Akrana saying as she marched downhill. “You make a gaol for yourself from it if you want to. I will not.’
14
Take My Son
Yulan knelt beside Hestin on the seat of the Clamour’s wagon. The Clever held the reins in limp hands. Her cowled head dipped down and forwards. The great grey bull was quiet between the shafts. The metal capping its horns caught fragments of the daylight seeping between the closed doors.
There was no one else in the stables. The rest of the Free were outside, mounted. Ready. Waiting in the street. Yulan was alone, with Hestin and with the Permanence she had given so much of her life to. Given so much of the time that might have been hers.
Her leaf cloak was green. She was in control, of herself and of the Clamour.
“Can you hear me, Hestin?” he asked quietly, lips close to her ear.
She said nothing, but made a noise at the back of her throat. A sort of humming groan. An affirmation.
“I am sorry to ask this of you,” Yulan said. “I think you will know – I hope you will remember – that I would not ask it if there was another way. Perhaps it’s my failing that I cannot think of one.”
He shifted a little to ease the discomfort in his foot. He was wearing a new boot to replace the one he had lost, and it was still stiff and pressing hard on his wounds.
“We have to go far and fast, Hestin. Some of the way across hard ground, I think. We are hunting a dangerous quarry now. We must get ahead of them. There will be no stopping to rest. I have more horses than riders, so I can spare them some of the punishment. But you cannot be parted from the rest of us, so your bull must keep pace. It will need your strength. Can you do that, Hestin?”
Again, that muted, neutral sound. Again, the guilt. Only twice in his life had he truly felt without choice. At Towers’ Shadow, and when he first met Hestin. She had been a beautiful young woman then. Soft, but strong. The only one who seemed able to subdue the Clamour and end the devastation it was spreading. She had wanted to do it, and he had agreed, because he had no other answer to the need. So he persuaded Merkent to take her and it into the ranks of the Free, and to this day he did not know whether he had saved Hestin or condemned her. He had, at the least, assisted in her willing sacrifice, and her ruin. If he thought it would remove the necessity of that sacrifice, he would gladly surrender his life. He would die for any of the Free – he was not sure how many of them knew that, and it did not matter – but none more so than this girl who was herself dying to save everyone, everywhere, from the Clamour.
“Two days, and the night in between,” he whispered. “No more than that, I hope. Your leaves will tell me if you falter, and I promise you I will stop if that happens. I will not let it wake. Even if that means our quarry escapes us.”
“I know,” she whispered. “This thing. All things, in you.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel the bone there, beneath the thin covering of woven green leaves.
“This is the last of it,” he promised her. “After this, we go away, you and I. We find peace somewhere. Somehow.”
She made no reply.
“Let’s go, then,” he said softly, and climbed down to throw open the stable doors.
People watched from their windows as the Free rode out of Curmen. Some few came out on to their doorsteps, or into the street itself, but most preferred to keep a little more distance. They watched in silence, and in that silence the rumble of the Clamour’s wagon was overbearing. It echoed from the walls, feeding on itself to become pervasive, as if the whole town was groaning.
Ordeller stayed out of sight. Pretending, no doubt, that the company had left her lodging house in a filthy state, near-beasts that they were, and that she must spend half the day setting it all to rights.
He had known Ordeller longer than most of those he now rode with. All of them, save Hamdan and Akrana, in fact. Before he had become Captain, he had been Merkent’s right hand, and that had meant looking after the company’s web of watchers and listeners and tellers, strewn across the kingdom and beyond. Ordeller was one of the best. He had more than once tried to persuade her to move somewhere she might be of greater use to the Free – Armadell-on-Lake, or Harvekka, perhaps – but she had only ever shaken her head ruefully, and told him that the Emperor would not enjoy the change of habit. He was, she judged, too old an ape to take to city life.
“Send Rudran and his lancers on after us,” he had said to her as they parted. “But only by their consent. You’ll make them understand what it is they’re riding into, and that there’ll be none who think the less of them, whatever happens?”
“I will,” Ordeller said. “And luck to you, brown boy. I think you might need a little dusting of it this time.” And then something more, that had heartened him: “Might be with you already. Feels like the first storm of the season’s on the air to me. It’ll be short – the early ones always are – but it’ll make a mire of the Old Road. You’ll be the only things moving fast up there, if you crack the whip hard.”
He rode just a little behind Drann as they worked their way out of the town. He watched the contract-holder, curious about the likelihood of him staying in the saddle once the pace quickened, but paid more heed to the townsfolk at their windows, at their door
s. Caution was seldom wasted, and he could all but taste the sour hostility.
Because of that caution, he saw the woman and youth coming before Drann did. They emerged from the last building, a workshop built up against the remnants of the town’s wall, and strode quickly, purposefully towards Drann. Yulan kicked his horse forward, but even as he did so, he understood the two of them, their manner and mood, and the alarm that had briefly stirred in him fell away.
The woman was swaddled in ragged, dirty blankets. The youth – her son, Yulan did not doubt – was lean but strong, carrying a pitchfork. He did not carry it as if he meant to use it. Their faces spoke not of anger, but of more complicated emotions. Weary hope, Yulan might have called it if required to name it.
“Take my son, sir,” the woman said, reaching for the halter of Drann’s horse. “Please. He’s a good —”
“Take him?” Drann asked in puzzlement as his mount came to a rather reluctant halt.
Yulan slowed his own horse and drew up alongside Drann.
“Let him join you,” the woman implored. “He can fight. There’s nothing for him here now. His father’s dead, my purse is empty. He wants to go, don’t you, boy?”
She looked at her son, and he nodded, staring up at Drann with contrived firmness, putting on the mask he thought would please the Free. Trying to look fierce. But Yulan could see the fear and uncertainty beneath the paint.
“Oh, no,” Drann murmured. “I’m not… I’m not —”
“We’ve no place for him,” Yulan said loudly, to spare Drann.
It was not hard to read Creel’s contract-holder. There was nothing in him that Yulan had not seen before in others encountering the Free: the like and dislike, teetering as one side or the other of the scales was pressed down. The desire – longing, in some – to join, and be a part of, something that they nevertheless half thought cruel and violent and ruthless. Any pleasure Drann found now in being mistaken for one of the Free would bring its own sharp shadow of troubling discomfort.
Mother and son turned their attention to Yulan. She looked anguished at his refusal. The boy did not; not so much, at least.
“I’m sure he’s all you say,” Yulan said, “but believe me: you don’t want him riding with us. Not today. Pitchforks won’t suffice.”
The Clamour’s wagon went grinding along, passing out through the wall and into the fields.
“Please…” the woman said.
“I’m sorry,” Yulan told her. “I’m doing you a kindness. Both of you. I can promise you that.”
And he reached across to tap Drann’s horse on its rump, nudge it onwards. They rode away, and left Curmen behind them. When Yulan glanced back, as they followed the road down towards the first valley of the broken lands to the east, the woman and the youth were still standing there, watching them go.
The rain came just as Ordeller had prophesied, and it came as if it deeply resented having been held at bay through the dry summer months. It had a great deal of fierce displeasure to vent, and it beat the land like a drum.
The Old Threetower Road quickly betrayed its diminished nature. It had once been clad in smooth cobbles, raised and graded to shed water into drains along its flanks. Now, many of those cobbles were gone, or cracked or sunken, and the drains were blocked or in places deliberately broken. Water pooled. It raised dirt from crevices and holes, spread it over the road as mud.
The low bund between the road and the little river that accompanied it was breached in many places. If the watercourse rose much, it would spill through.
All of this was good, to Yulan’s mind. He needed the road only for a little while. After that, there was the older drover’s way that climbed up and around the ragged, canyoned ground ahead. That, he hoped, would carry the Free ahead of Callotec’s more cumbersome column. So long as they could bear the pace he intended for them, and so long as Callotec kept crawling up the unhelpful road, through unhelpful weather.
Hoods came up, capes on, and the rain pounded out its thrumming song on them, and on the canvas draped over the wagon. The horses dropped their heads. The huge bull hauling Hestin and the Clamour broke into a leaden trot now and again to keep up. The wagon thumped and shook through potholes and ruts. It was made to withstand such harsh treatment. And the bull could sustain it for even longer; for as long as Hestin could feed it vigour from the entelechs.
They had done this only once or twice before. Requiring from Hestin anything that might distract or detract from her unremitting focus upon the Clamour was not safe. Not something to be lightly done. It demanded a close watch, and Yulan gave it that. He rode alongside the wagon. He paid more heed to Hestin, and her cloak of green, than to the road ahead. If trouble was to come now, that would be where the first sign of it showed.
Hamdan dropped back to fall in beside him.
“Shall I take a couple up ahead, then?” the archer asked with a slightly rueful smile. Rainwater was dripping from his nose and from his bearded chin.
“Just to be sure,” nodded Yulan. “They’ll likely have outriders at their back, now they know someone’s paying attention to them, but with any luck they’re more interested in moving on. Look for stone markers, three of them climbing up on your left hand. That’ll show us the turn off the road. Don’t go beyond that; we’ll find you there. Be careful.”
That last was not a thing he needed to say, and seldom did.
Hamdan brushed the rain from his bow, and trotted off into the storm with a pair of his archers. They would be an unpleasant surprise for any eyes Callotec had sent back down the road. Mounted archers were not a thing well known in these parts. Hamdan had brought the habit north years ago from their homeland in the south, and found most of the Free’s opponents pleasingly unprepared to meet it.
Not that arrows could win the battle to come. It would be the Clevers who delivered any victory. Their willingness to sacrifice some part of themselves when it was needed.
Kerig most of all. He was a troublesome sort, not always to be entirely relied upon – he had proved that well enough at Creel’s camp – but Yulan had no great doubt he would play his part. Reluctantly, perhaps, but well in the end. With any luck, whatever faint guilt he felt at his self-indulgent antics outside the Weaponsmith’s tent might make him a little more pliable. And Wren would do what she always did: that which was needed, to serve the purposes of the Free.
Akrana was always the one, of all the Free’s Clevers, about whom Yulan felt least certain. She was, he was reasonably confident, more than a match for Kerig and Wren, though everyone assumed those two to be the company’s most inventive, potent Clevers. Her profound reluctance to employ her skills had concealed that from most people. That and her remarkable facility with a blade, to which she turned with vastly less reluctance.
Much of it was rooted in her past, of course. She had been taught anger, and isolation, at a cruelly young age. She rode best alone. He would need her in what was to come, though. One more sword – however skilfully and ferociously wielded – would not win them the day. One more Clever might.
She would answer the need if it came, he believed. If for no other reason than that it was the Orphans who would gain the most if Callotec and Kasuman and the Bereaved reached the border. Akrana had, after all, seen the Empire kill her family on stakes when she was only five years old.
The standing stones were there, as he remembered, to mark the place where the droveway climbed up and away from the Old Threetower Road. Two of them were, at least. The third and highest was lost somewhere on the high ground, veiled by the sweeping rain.
Hamdan and his archers were waiting by the first of the stones, at the edge of the road. They did not look overly happy, slouched there on their sodden horses. There was no shelter to be had here.
“Nothing,” Hamdan grunted. “No sport for us.”
Yulan was glad of it. He would as soon see neither hide nor hair of his quarry until he was ready for the meeting.
The marker stone was as tall as Yulan,
atop his great horse. As he looked at it, he saw, almost weathered away but still faintly legible, the carved symbol of the long-gone Sorentine Kingdom: a bull’s head, with sharply recurved horns. The Sorentines had been crude and wayward – still were, the unruly rump of them in the valleys – but they had put great store by an ordered net of roads and tracks. Their waystones had once covered all the land. Few remained.
He watched Hestin’s bull haul the heavy wagon off the road and begin the long, wet climb up towards the rain clouds. A needle, for the world to prick him with, that he should be returning to Towers’ Shadow in the company of a bull, with bull’s heads marking the way. Those inclined to think in such ways might have called it an ill omen. Yulan was not, and did not. He took it only as a bitter reaffirmation of his need to finish what he had started. He did not know how many people now lived in Towers’ Shadow – a hundred? Two? – but he knew how many would live there after Callotec had swept through on his way to exile.
It was always the way with such ancient tracks that they found, as if by animal instinct, the easiest line through even the least forgiving terrain. The slope up which the Free now went looked unpromising, for it was the beginning of the broken lands of bare rock and sharp crags that covered perhaps half the distance between Curmen and Threetower. Somehow, the droveway made it hard but not impossible, skirting the worst of the scree, cutting across the steepest stretches, revealing hidden gentleness.
Had it not been for the torrential rain, it would have seemed the most modest of feats to make that ascent. Though even then, and even with Hestin’s aid, it would have been asking a great deal of wagon and bull. As it was, more than once it took firm shoulders and strong legs to heave the wagon’s wheels over some stubborn rock.
The Free, when they emerged on to higher, flatter ground, were a sorry-looking assembly. Drenched and wearied. It spoke to their resilience that there was no lingering, no great catching of breath. The droveway offered them a long, flat path out towards gentler, thinly grassed hills beyond, and one by one they took it. Pausing for only a moment, one or two of them, to spill some of the water from their capes.
The Free Page 15