Asook led him to a field of brilliant red flowers with a carefully managed stream trickling through it, and when she sat on the bank he gathered his courage and sat beside her. He wasn’t close but she leaned a little away from him, an instinctive flinch. Then she smiled and shuffled forward instead, until her warm thigh was pressed against his. She was doing it deliberately, he could tell.
A jolt of lust went through him, and for a moment all he could do was breathe and try to keep his body from betraying his thoughts. She pulled out meat and bread from the basket and set them on a blanket in front of him, the same strain in her expression that was in his. Except, he realised with a far less pleasant jolt in his stomach, it had another cause.
He felt foolish for not recognising it sooner. Back home, Saman always had girls talking to him and laughing at his jokes, although he was a knobbly, bad-tempered youth with warts on all his fingers. But he was the son of Isuru the headman and whoever married him would one day live off a share of the other villagers’ tithes in a big white tent.
And Uin had sent Asook to eat with him after he’d seen Krish’s look. It wasn’t even Asook who wanted the prestige of a union with him. That might have been bearable.
‘Uin ordered you to spend time with me, didn’t he?’ Krish asked.
His voice was harsher than he meant it to be and he could see the effort it took her to keep her smile in place. ‘He asked me to show you this place, yes.’
‘But you didn’t want to come.’
‘No! Why would you—’
‘Don’t lie to me!’ he snapped. Fury swept through him, and then a sudden understanding of how much power he had here. ‘I command you to tell me the truth.’
She swallowed and looked away.
‘I won’t hurt you for it,’ he said more gently. ‘I just want to know.’
‘I didn’t … My father said you looked at me like a man who wants a wife, and that I should encourage it.’
Even though Krish had known it must be true, it still hurt to hear it. ‘But you don’t want me for a husband.’
She hesitated a long moment, and then shook her head.
He had all the power here. He could see her punished for this. He could force her to be with him. No, he wouldn’t need force. Uin had already compelled her and Krish could look away from her face as he lay with her and never need to know what she truly felt. His cock hardened at the thought of having her round, firm body under him, but his stomach rebelled at it. He remembered his da, forcing his ma down to the bedding when he’d been drinking, ignoring her cry of pain when he pressed against the bruises he’d put on her.
‘I don’t want you if you don’t want me,’ he said, and was relieved to realise it was true.
She nodded, but didn’t relax.
‘Will your da be angry?’
‘Not angry, no. There’s my sister still.’
‘I see.’ He tried to smile at her. ‘I wouldn’t be such a terrible husband. I don’t think so anyway.’
That won a very small return smile, but her eyes wouldn’t stick to him. Krish realised that they kept drifting away to the slave boy in their boat.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s him you want to be with, is it?’
‘What? No! Of course not!’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your ways yet. Is it forbidden to be with slaves?’
‘No, it’s not forbidden, but a woman would never … Only the men do it. My father—’ She snapped her mouth shut on the rest of what she would have said.
‘Your father lies with his slaves?’ She was still looking at the slave by the boat and suddenly Krish understood. The boy looked like a full Ashane, but his skin was a little pale, his hair very straight. ‘He’s your brother.’
‘No!’ She looked appalled at the idea, but Krish didn’t think he’d got it wrong.
‘Not your brother, but your da’s son,’ he tried again.
She nodded reluctantly.
‘And still a slave.’
‘Of course.’
He thought he was beginning to understand. ‘And when you look at me, you see him.’ She squirmed uncomfortably, but he didn’t really need an answer. ‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
And what he’d seen, he couldn’t unsee. Any man and woman here who wasn’t Rah – any child – must be a slave. He was ashamed to realise that he’d been ignoring them, just as the Rah themselves did, the way a man would ignore a chair until he wanted to sit in it.
He made himself pay attention that night, at another dinner with more of Uin’s wealthy friends. They’d all brought their slaves with them. They were a part of that wealth, Krish realised, and one these men were proud to show off. So they ate and drank and laughed and their slaves hovered around them, smiling their empty smiles.
The boy, Uin’s son, served Krish his meal. ‘What’s your name?’ Krish asked as he spooned vegetables onto Krish’s dish.
The boy hesitated, head tipped sideways, as if this was a question he needed to consider carefully. ‘It’s Dinesh. My name, my name, my name is Dinesh.’
‘Dinesh can show me,’ Krish said the next day, when Uin suggested he might like to see the shipyards.
Uin glanced at Asook, sitting prim and upright in her chair. ‘Perhaps my daughter …?’
‘There’s no need to disturb her,’ Krish said.
Uin studied his face and then smiled knowingly, as if he’d seen something a little shameful there. ‘Very well. Dinesh, you will take the great lord to the yards. The shipyards, do you understand? The place where the new ships are, not the fishing fleet.’
‘The shipyard, yes, yes, yes,’ Dinesh said, nodding happily.
Krish thought the boy would lead him seaward, but instead they turned inland and he wondered if Dinesh had truly understood Uin’s instructions. Yet water was never far away in Rah territory and soon they came to the banks of the broadest river he’d yet seen, its waters flat and silver and stretching many hundreds of paces to the far bank. And here indeed were ships, dozens upon dozens of them in states of construction from simple wooden frames to high-masted, white-sailed completeness.
‘Ships,’ Dinesh said, as if Krish couldn’t see them himself.
‘For trading?’
‘No, no, no, no.’
‘Not trading?’
‘Oh yes, trade and fishing but not these ships. These are to take back what’s ours.’
The slave’s face was as vacant as ever, and Krish knew he must be repeating Uin’s words. ‘The ships are for war?’
‘To travel into the other lands. The other, the other, the other tribes, they see the water as a wall but we know it’s a road. There are roads into all their lands and we can sail them. Only the Ahn use the rivers already and they can, they can, they can be bought.’
The Rah had money from their singing spinner to buy weapons and the crops from the reborn lands to feed the men to wield them. ‘Was Uin waiting for me?’ Krish asked Dinesh. ‘Before he went to war, was he waiting for me?’
‘You are the great lord.’ Dinesh smiled even wider.
‘And what do you think? About the war. About Uin.’
‘I …’ Dinesh shook his head, face slack with incomprehension.
‘Is Uin good to you?’
‘Uin, Uin, Uin gives me bliss.’
‘And are you happy to … to be his slave?’
‘Uin gives me bliss.’
Uin gave his slaves bliss. He gave Krish worship and shelter from his father’s men. Uin would give Krish his daughter if he desired her, and all he wanted in exchange was his blessing on this conflict, for Krish to smile and wave off his people as they went to fight the other tribes. Krish looked at Dinesh’s empty, smiling face and wondered if the bargains were fair: freedom for pleasure and security for war.
10
The attack came at moonrise. Sang Ki woke to screams, fire and the pounding of hooves.
Smoke billowed beneath the canvas and with it the smell of burning fles
h. Muzzy with sleep, he thought he was back in the pyre of Smiler’s Fair. He rolled to his side, coughing wretchedly and loose-bowelled with fear.
Sanity returned with his mother’s entry into the tent. ‘Control your bird!’ she snapped before his gluey eyes had fully opened.
‘What bird?’ he asked. And then, more importantly, ‘What’s happening?’
‘We’re under attack.’
He forced his ungainly bulk upright with more haste than dignity. ‘Who by? No, of course, the Brotherband.’
‘Probably. At least a hundred mounted warriors. Our pickets gave warning but the sentries were overwhelmed. Come – the bird must be controlled.’
‘The bird?’ he said again, puzzled and frightened as he followed her out of the tent still wearing his nightgown. His bladder was early-morning full and in humiliating danger of leaking.
Outside was chaos. The Smiler’s Fair refugees who’d attached themselves to his retinue like limpets ran about uselessly, and his soldiers pushed them aside as they sprinted from one side of the camp to the other. The fire at least was more limited than he’d feared. Two supply tents were aflame but a few of the refugees had found the sense to form a line and douse them with buckets of water. He saw riders circling the camp and arrows flying towards it, but none of the enemy appeared to have crossed the caltrop-strewn ditch that surrounded it.
And yet the noisiest commotion came from his left, well within the defended perimeter. There was a horrible inhuman shrieking and panicked human cries.
It was the carrion mount. Too big to take wing without her wheel perch to glide from and too stupid to understand what was happening, she was flapping her great wings and pecking with her viciously curved beak at anyone within reach. Sang Ki wobbled to a stop, a little impressed to see the elderly creature so warlike, and utterly unwilling to come within reach of her fury.
His mother pushed against him, forcing him forward a stumbling step. ‘You must calm it – it’s blocking the armoury.’
It was true: the bird had planted herself in front of the tent filled with spare arrows and a few precious metal swords, and was resisting all efforts to shift her. But Sang Ki failed to see why he might succeed where the strapping soldiers ringing her had failed. One was cradling his arm, which hung from his shoulder at a painfully unnatural angle. All were pecked and bleeding.
‘It trusts you,’ his mother said, pushing him again. ‘Quick. Only our arrows are holding them back.’
At her words, the bird turned her beady black eyes on them. For a moment he thought the mount might have recognised him, and then she threw back her filthy grey head and screamed again.
‘Laali.’ He sidled forward a cautious step. ‘Calm yourself, Laali: there’s no danger to you here.’
‘You can’t reason with it,’ his mother said, exasperated.
Well he certainly didn’t want to grapple with her, but several of his soldiers had turned to watch him now, and some of the dollymops and merchants too. There was fear in their faces and not very much hope and he felt shamed by their lack of trust. He would do this. He must.
Speaking was clearly worthless. He tried a low cooing instead, a sound he’d heard Gurjot make when calming the creature. But there was no way she could hear him over the din of battle, and so he clenched his fists and eased nearer again.
Laali’s ragged head turned, her wings fanned and he wanted nothing more than to flee. But a fire arrow streaked through the sky, a tent blazed and more victims screamed, and so he held out his trembling hand and stepped within reach of the bird.
She reared, flapped her wings and then fell back to earth with a thud that shook the ground. Sang Ki bit through his lip, determined not to scream, and held his legs rigid so he wouldn’t run. He accomplished his aims at the cost of a whimper, but no one was close enough to hear. Wiser than he, they’d retreated at the carrion mount’s actions. And he felt them take a further pace back as Laali lowered her head, stared straight into his eyes and screeched her displeasure.
This was no good. He was achieving nothing. He drew in a breath, ready to move back – and the perverse creature chose that moment to bend her neck and rest her head against his still-raised hand. She made another sound, a soft caw that was almost like a cat’s purr. Very cautiously, he stroked his fingers over her gullet and the purr deepened.
‘Move the thing!’ his mother said sharply.
The bird’s eye rolled towards her in alarm but he cooed at her again, feeling ridiculous, and she calmed. ‘Come with me then, Laali. Let’s leave battle to those better suited to it.’
The fighting sputtered on for a short while, increasingly half-hearted attacks by the Brotherband driven off by increasingly heavy flights of arrows, until at last a force of Jorlith sortied from the vestiges of Smiler’s Fair and the warriors were driven off.
Sang Ki ventured out when it seemed certain the danger was past. Laali accompanied him and he was grateful for her presence. Any surviving Brotherband warrior might think twice about attacking a man accompanied by the huge bird. And at least her stink was no worse than the smell of a battlefield.
There were Ashane corpses here and there, and the occasional blond Jorlith. Most were black-haired tribesmen, though, and Sang Ki frowned as he realised how few of them there truly were. He waited, his hand against Laali’s back as scavengers both human and animal began to descend on the dead. Laali herself leaned down to peck out the eyes of one poor unfortunate and Sang Ki held down his heaving stomach and looked away. All must act according to their natures.
Very soon, the scavengers outnumbered the dead and his mind circled back round to examine that fact. Chung Cheol’s band alone had comprised more than lay here, and the Brotherband in its entirety was said to number in the thousands. So where were they?
He was still pondering the question when he heard a loud moan and a curse simultaneously to his left. It was a thin Moon Forest man, swaying back from the body he’d been looting and paler than usual with fright. The man on the ground, the Brotherband warrior, was snarling up at him, his hands clutched tight against the wound in his belly.
A survivor. Well, that could be useful.
At Sang Ki’s orders, they brought the warrior to the tent that held Nethmi. The man screamed when he was lifted and hurled abuse at the Ashane soldiers carrying him. He didn’t sound like a person who intended to die any time soon.
Min Soo crossed his arms when he saw the warrior tied down to one of his cots. The physician’s purple hair looked black in the dim light and the orange dye on his face was beginning to flake.
‘This man is in need of your assistance,’ Sang Ki said.
‘This man is Brotherband,’ Min Soo countered.
‘I thought your kind aspired to help all those in need?’
‘The Eom? I can’t imagine where you heard such a thing.’
‘Not the Eom – physicians.’ As it often did when talking to this man, Sang Ki’s patience began to fray. ‘Are you not in the business of making the sick well? Or do you object to the fact that he’s a prisoner?’
‘I don’t treat rapists or the murderers of children.’
‘Oh. If it’s any consolation, I want him alive so that I can question him.’
‘Do you intend to torture him?’ Min Soo asked.
‘No!’
‘Really? You have curious principles, Ashaneman. You refuse to lay a hand on a man guilty of crimes that would turn any civilised person’s stomach, and yet you intend to hang a woman so badly burnt you were able to mistake her for your father’s killer.’
Sang Ki looked across at Nethmi, and was startled to see that her eyes were open and a few of the bandages on her face had been removed to reveal the ravaged skin beneath. She was propped half-sitting against her pillows and had clearly been listening to the entire exchange.
‘This woman is Nethmi,’ he told Min Soo. ‘She may claim I’m mistaken, but she was wearing Nethmi’s blade when I found her. It’s easy to lie about your identity w
hen your face looks like … that.’
‘Yes, things must be very easy for her, with her body so burnt she may yet die and scars that might make her wish she had.’
‘I … I could still die?’ Nethmi asked.
Min Soo snapped his head toward her and – rather surprisingly – blushed. He clearly hadn’t realised she was conscious. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘The chance of death is slight. And the scarring … others have learned to live with worse.’
She shrugged and then whimpered at the pain the movement caused her. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’d rather know the truth.’
‘The truth. Ha!’ Sang Ki laughed, not entirely spontaneously.
‘I am Mahvesh,’ she said. ‘I ran the Laughing Rabbit – an anchor for an ale, the cheapest in the fair. Ask anyone, they all know me.’
‘I did ask,’ Sang Ki admitted.
‘And?’ Min Soo glared at him.
He sighed. ‘There was such a woman, but her establishment burned down with the rest of the fair.’
‘I see. And did she resemble my patient?’
‘She was Ashane and she was short. I brought one of Mahvesh’s former customers in when Nethmi was sleeping to see if he recognised her, but the bandages were hardly helpful and why should I have believed him even if he’d claimed an acquaintance? The citizens of Smiler’s Fair were never known for their honesty.’
‘So it is impossible to know,’ Min Soo said.
‘Well, I suppose it’s impossible to be entirely certain.’
‘And yet you still mean to hang her after her babe comes out.’ The disdain on the physician’s face shone through the flaking orange dye. ‘I stand by what I said. And if you don’t have the stomach to torture this Brotherband scum, I don’t have the time to heal him.’
‘But …’ The argument was so absurd, Sang Ki couldn’t quite frame the words to refute it. And now he saw that the warrior was watching them too, eyes wide with his pain.
‘You can torture him,’ Nethmi said, looking at Min Soo.
The physician frowned. ‘I may not care for him, but—’
‘Not physically,’ she said. She shifted, painfully slowly, until she was upright and facing him. Her tongue darted out to lick what had once been her lips. ‘The Eom have … potions, medicines. I’ve heard about them. You can cause pain, or pleasure or—’
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 11