Chained Adept

by Myers, Karen

  The throb faded under the noise of the rain on the canvas and Zandaril felt his whole body melt into it, his spine anchored between earth and sky, even while sitting in a wagon instead of on the good ground.

  His guest held her position in silence, and he could only hope some of it reached her, too, but he left her mind in privacy to feel what it might, outsider that she was.

  After a moment, she murmured, “Who are the ‘little gods’ in the verse?”

  Zandaril felt a spurt of approval. She questioned, as a child should question.

  “The lud, the manifestations of the dunaq wandim, the world-that-surrounds.”

  At her puzzled look, he sighed. “It is hard to explain to outsiders. The Zannib do not have the dozens of gods, large and small, that the Kigaliwen and Rasesni do. We do not see our world in that way. A… benevolence created our world, and we honor it. It is not much concerned with us as individuals, but we have a duty to that same benevolence, to righteous behavior. Sometimes we meet little manifestations of that spirit in the world.”

  He rose and led her back to his portable shrine. In honor of the day, he had unrolled it onto the top of a stack of food stores to display his two stones and the thunderbolt, a bit of iron ore fused by lightning in the ground. He picked up the first stone and placed it in her hand.

  “See the movement in its form, feel its personality, judge its balance. I found this one day, when I was a child in the zudiqazd, the winter village, too young to go on taridiqa. I had lost two ewes from the flock I was in charge of, and was ready to give up and go home, since I had never been so far away before and I was afraid. And when I stared down at the ground in despair, this… winked back at me and captured my soul. It was beautiful. It spoke to me.”

  He glanced at her attentive expression. “Not in words, mind you, but a sort of resonance. As if it had endured trouble, and would continue to endure, and the experience had shaped it.” He had bowed to it and stopped for several minutes considering, before he decided to take it with him. “If I had taken it, and not persisted until I had found the sheep, that would have been… unthinkable. A slap in the face of the world.”

  “And you would have been a coward not to take it, is that it?”

  “Exactly!”

  She sniffed the stone, then returned it to him, and he gave her the second one.

  She weighed it in her hand. “It’s sad, isn’t it? Yearning.”

  She glanced at him for the story, but he just took it back and replaced it on the soft sheepskin of the shrine. Not for strangers was his determination go wifeless yet, his conviction that his nayith, his masterwork, must go on, whatever the cost.

  “This one is different. I saw it born.” He picked up the thunderbolt, which still reeked of iron to his nose. “Lightning hit an oak tree not far from the camp of my taghulaj, my teacher. The tree was riven, but what was truly strange was that another oak nearby was also killed, though it hadn’t been struck. My teacher could not say why, but I wanted to know. I looked carefully along the ground between them and discovered traces of a line where the grass was damaged. I dug there, and this is what I found.”

  He handed it to her, and she smelled it as he had. “You can smell the iron—this was in the low hills where we sometimes dig for the ores that produce iron. The lightning made it all by itself. I don’t know why.”

  Something about power, he thought, but it didn’t make sense to him. Not yet.

  He shook off his thoughts. He had a guest to consider.

  “Please, sit. Now we drink.”

  She raised an eyebrow, but returned to her seat obediently. He picked up his binwit, his mead kit, and brought it back to lay between them, on the jimiz.

  “This is lovely,” Penrys said, stroking the fine leatherwork of the rolled kit.

  “It was a gift from my tigha, my first brother,” he said, “the day I became a tushkzurdtudin, a man of the tribe instead of a boy.”

  He started to untie the straps that held it together. “It is a customary gift, from a parent or a brother, or a close friend. Every Zan you meet will have one of their own, and sometimes more, waiting for the right recipient.”

  He unwrapped the three stoneware jukwit bottles, each the size of two fists, with an indentation around the middle for hanging from a cord, and the two rough stoneware cups, the abin, that fit his hand perfectly and sang out their presence. His brother had chosen well. He pulled the stopper from one bottle and offered it for Penrys to sniff.

  “Sweet! Honey?”

  “Yes. Khimar is almost a ‘little one’ for us, like the trees and rocks we get it from. The liquor from grain or grape is just drink. But mead, baijuk, is for special times, like this one. Even the bottles and cups are passed down in the family, when possible, or traded for.”

  He filled a cup for each of them, and restoppered the bottle. “It is not for drinking alone. You do me great honor by sharing with me.”

  They sipped in silence for a moment, and he felt the heat permeate his limbs and warm his chest. The rain sounded cozy now, defining their shelter by contrast. With the verse said, a brazier for a central fire, and a guest to share with, however strange this bikrajti might be, it began to feel like a real kuliqa, even far away in alien Kigali.

  “Tell me of your family,” Penrys said, and her voice had an odd, constrained sound.

  He took another sip of the mead. “I am Zandaril, son of Ilsahr of clan Zamjilah, of the Shubzah tribe, and my mother Kazrsulj is daughter of Khashjibrim of the same clan.

  “I am second-son, my brother Butraz being a scant year older, and celebrating the kuliqa on the taridiqa this night, as we are. His wife Yukjilah and our first-sister Ghuruma are both in the zudiqazd of my clan, awaiting births and tending their little ones.”

  He smiled fondly. “Ghuruma swore she would let our mother raise her infants so she could return to the taridiqa, but the babies changed her mind for her. Once they’re grown enough, she’ll return.”

  Penrys asked, “You don’t take children on the migration?”

  “Only those nine years or more, the yathbantudin who have proved their readiness, though sometimes an exception is made. Better for the younger ones to stay in the zudiqazd, under their mother’s care or a close relative.

  “Next are my two sisters, Rubti, almost sixteen, a tushkzurtudin, and Washi, and the youngest boy, Nirkazdhal, on his first taridiqa this year. I am sorry to miss it.”

  “Six children!”

  “Yes, I believe my mother is done, though she has not said so. She returned to the taridiqa six years ago, when my brother married and provided a caretaker for her youngest. It’s what our women do—travel with the herds when they can, unless they are too old, or have some specialty that keeps them in one place.”

  Zandaril noticed his cup was empty, and Penrys’s, too, so he refilled them both. It felt good to speak of home.

  “Is yours considered a large family?” Penrys asked.

  “Not at all. My father has seven siblings that lived, and my mother eight.”

  He felt her surprise and hastened to reassure her. “Not all in the same clan, of course. A few of the women married out-clan, and one of my mother’s sisters surprised us by joining the Kurighdunaq clan of the Undullah tribe, many miles away. I’ve never met her family.”

  “You must have dozens of cousins!”

  He cast her a puzzled look. “Well, yes. Everyone does. It’s very handy, good for introductions or trade.”

  He reached for the bottle to top up their cups, and was surprised to find it empty. When he glanced at his guest while he worked on the stopper of the next bottle, he thought she was looking more relaxed. She’s smaller than I am, she’ll never be able to keep up. I should be careful about that.

  “Can you name them all?” she asked.

  He straightened up. An easy challenge—all his brothers and sisters had learned the list, adding new members to it as needed.

  “In birth order or by branch? My father’s line f
irst, then my mother’s, and then those of their parents.”

  He started out, hearing an echo of his brother’s voice reciting with him as he went along. “My nephews and nieces…” As he continued he found his tongue betraying him and a growing smile on Penrys’s face, so he switched to mind-speech to remove the impediment. *…and Ilbirs, Nibarzan, and Surbushaz, the sons of my father’s second brother, and their children…*

  Penrys kept count for him, but he began fumbling badly in his grandparent’s generation and had to stumble to a stop. *If I had the family scroll, I could continue for quite a while, but I will admit the baijuk is a handicap. And the younger ones do keep having children.*

  Reminded of the cup in his hand, he took another sip. His touch on Penrys’s mind turned up peculiar emotions, with envy and loneliness chief among them. And not nearly as much drink confusion as he expected. He prodded her with a silent inquisitive. *Hmm?*

  *Seventy-three first cousins in your own generation, and more coming still. I can’t imagine it. And you’ve met them all?*

  *Most of them, except the very youngest. A few are close friends, the ones in my own clan. Like brothers and sisters, after a fashion.*

  *No one is without family, then? Even orphans or foundlings?*

  Zandaril sputtered out loud. “There’s always room for one more, somewhere. Of course there is.”

  He could feel her becoming more sober by the minute. He held up his cup and looked at her. “I don’t understand—why aren’t you drinking anymore?”

  She smiled sadly. “It doesn’t last very long, so after a while it’s pointless. Doesn’t mean you should stop, though.”

  “I’ve had enough,” he managed, with dignity. “I brought the blankets from my bedroll, in case we did not feel like returning to the wet tent. People curl up around the fire to finish sleeping out the night—it’s customary.”

  “Would you care to stay? No harm will come to you,” he said solemnly, blinking in the lantern light swaying overhead.

  His last clear memory was of someone tucking him into a blanket and the soft feel of the jimiz against his face.

  CHAPTER 17

  Despite her best intentions, Penrys knew her manner was still uncomfortable when she thanked Zandaril for his party the night before. When she tried to divert him by teasing him about his throbbing head, she could feel his concern and puzzlement, and pushed it away, returning to their professional discussion of the day before about how Veneshjug had been using the power-stones.

  He went along with her and they were still arguing about it inconclusively when they crested yet another low ridge.

  Penrys stopped in mid-rebuttal, stunned. Below them, a quarter of a mile away, rolled a brown river, wide and unstoppable. The bluffs were cut cleanly through for its passage, as if with a gigantic knife. Small wooded side streams snaked into it on both sides. There was no settlement here.

  “Well?” Zandaril said, looking with satisfaction at her stupefied expression.

  “You were right,” she said. “It’s big.”

  He beamed proudly as if he’d created it himself. “And this is just the south branch, and well upstream. You should see it at Yenit Ping where it enters the sea. The Endless City is perched well above, and still someday they will have to move it when the Junkawa eats away at the land and makes Pingmen Bay even bigger.”

  “No town here?”

  “There are big streams below here, two of them, and that’s the last of the biggest towns. Only smaller towns upstream. This is low water—the spring floods fill the channel.”

  Penrys blinked and re-evaluated the landscape. The ridge she stood on bounded one side of a large, level plain, and a companion ridge ran along the south. The river flowed down the middle between them in a broad braid of meandering channels, but it wasn’t difficult to envision it spreading out smoothly all the way from one side to the other. That’s how that flat ground was created, in the middle of these low rolling hills. No wonder no one built here.

  “Is the ground solid, d’ya think?” she asked.

  “This time of year, I think you can go right to the bank in most places, if you’re careful. It’s all dirt, this land, all the way down. No rock until the mountains, almost anywhere.”

  Penrys wanted to get a closer look, but they were expected to stay close to the column. “Is Chang going to cross it?”

  “If we were just a merchant train, no—he wouldn’t have to. The road through the gorge takes the left bank, as it flows—that’s this side. But if we have to fight our way in…”

  Penrys had marveled over the efficiency of the one river crossing she’d seen, the wagons driven through a ford and helping to break the flow for the herds swimming downstream. The troopers swam, too, clinging to their horses’ manes, and everyone else either did the same, or found a place in one of the wagons.

  In retrospect, that now seemed an insignificant stream, shallow and fordable. How would you cross this with a supply train?

  “Is there a bridge?”

  “Only ferries, until well within Wechinnat, on the other side of the Gates.”

  She walked her horse back up a few yards so she could see down the other side of the slope. The column was clearly aiming for a point further upstream.

  “Can’t we go take a look at it?” she said.

  “Tired of walking, are you?” Zandaril replied, with a gleam in his eye. “Let’s see what that new horse of yours can do.”

  He pointed his black mare at a diagonal down the slope and took off. Penrys was left behind, and then she pulled herself together and followed. When they reached the flat they stretched into a smooth canter, keeping a sharp eye out for burrows and holes that could trip up their horses.

  She laughed with the exhilaration of speed. They kept the easy pace for a while, until she judged they had come as far on the flat as the head of the column on the other side of the ridge. When she cast her mind out to check where they were, relative to them, she picked up two people on her own side of the ridge, near the river, and spun her horse in a quarter circle to find them.

  Zandaril followed. *What?*

  *People. Kids.*

  She found them where a small stream wandered in from the north. A small copse of water-rooted trees hid them, but she trotted straight at them. She already knew they weren’t the Rasesni she was looking for, and one was very young.

  She felt the older one’s fear and pulled up several yards away. Zandaril trotted up behind her and stopped.

  A dirty Kigali boy, not yet full-grown, stood up from his hiding spot below the stream bank. He had a toddler by one hand, and the other hovered close to his belt knife.

  This wasn’t the Kigali army Tak Tuzap had hoped to find. The man was clearly a Zan, both by his turban and his robes, and the way he sat his horse as if born to it was unmistakable. He didn’t know what the woman was, and when she called to him, her accent was strange. But he’d heard merchant trains before, and the noise in the distance sounded like it might be an army. Now that he’d met them, would anyone listen to him?

  Gailen held his hand and half-hid behind his leg, and stared at the woman from there, fascinated. He was embarrassed by her clothes, a mix of what he’d found her in, cleaned, and a cut-down shirt from her father’s pack.

  The woman dismounted and tossed her reins to the Zan. She glanced at Tak briefly but focused on Gailen.

  “Hey, little one, what’s happened to you?” She kept her voice low and her approach calm. “What’s her name?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know, she won’t talk to me. I’ve been calling her Gailen, ‘Sunshine.’”

  “I’m Penrys, and that’s Zandaril,” she said, keeping her eyes on the girl. “We’re with the column just over there.” She pointed north.

  “I am Tak Tuzap, minochi. We’ve come out of Wechinnat.”

  “Through the gorge?” the man said, with a tone of amazement.

  Tak nodded. “Three days ago.”

  He stood there in his m
uddy rags with a little girl waif and drew himself up to his fullest height, an inch or two shorter than the woman.

  “I want to see the man in charge. I have things to tell him he needs to know.”

  Zandaril bit the inside of his cheeks to avoid any suggestion of humor and nodded soberly in reply to the boy’s demand. “I think our Commander Chang will want to speak with you,” he assured him. “Can you ride? It’s not far—we can go double.”

  Tak Tuzap hesitated. “We have two packs.”

  “Show me,” Zandaril said, and he dismounted. He looked over at Penrys and caught her kneeling in front of the child and murmuring something softly.

  “If you’ll hold the horses, I’ll get the boy’s packs tied on,” he called to her.

  “Let’s go see the horses,” she said to the little girl, and she picked her up and tucked her on her hip. The child clung to her as if she’d always been carried that way.

  When Penrys came up to take the reins for both horses, she told him, “She’s scared, hiding. Something bad happened.”

  “The boy’s not her family, so I think you can guess…” Zandaril said.

  She nodded. “I’ll carry her.”

  “The packs, too,” he said, as he saw the boy struggling with two backpacks, one larger than the other. “I’ll take the boy.”

  He opened the two packs and rebalanced the contents, moving some of the metal cookware to the smaller one so that they weighed roughly the same. Then he tied them top-to-top together so he could drape them over the rump of Penrys’s horse and fasten them to the saddle tie-downs as a single unit.

  Penrys handed the child to Zandaril so she could mount and, before the little girl had time to protest, took her back again and curled one arm around her, holding both the reins in the other hand.

  Zandaril mounted his own horse and reached one hand down to swing the boy up behind him. “Wrap your arms around my waist and hold on,” he told him.

  He looked over at the child fused to Penrys’s hip, a leg on each side, and smiled fondly.

  “What?” she said.

  *You look like you’ve done that a thousand times. You must have children.*