by Melanie Rawn
Qamar found much to curse about the King of Cazdeyya, his fanatical daughter, and the simple-minded child who were all causing him so much misery. Why couldn’t they practice their silly religion in their great gray mountains, and leave the peaceful south alone? Consensus was that Chaydann Il-Mamnoua’a had instilled in them these evil notions, and it was the duty of the Believers in Acuyib’s glory to defend the green land against the invader. It was all yet another move in the vast game of chadarang that went on throughout eternity, for Chaydann forever refused to concede defeat in the conflict between death and life, darkness and light. Empress Mirzah’s pious prayers were said to have kept the Empire at peace for years even after her death; now her grandson Qamar was one of the pawns in the renewed game.
Qamar did not hold to this view of life in general and the Cazdeyyan threat in particular. But when others expounded upon it, more or less lyrically as their rhetorical gifts allowed, he did not mention the days he had spent sitting with his grandmother in her room of seven cradles, answering to the name “Azzad” instead of his own.
Ayia, he did acknowledge, reluctantly, that he was nothing more than a pawn. An exalted one, to be sure, mounted on a fine horse and jingling with hazziri. But a pawn all the same, and in no way enjoying it.
His father, Jefar Shagara, was not too old to command the army in the field, but he had given over the position to Khalila’s husband, Allil Azwadh. Someday, when Khalila was Empress, Allil would have authority over the Riders on the Golden Wind, and this was as good a time as any to get them used to him. Ten years Qamar’s senior, and a cousin of the famous Black Rose, Allil was as ill-favored as Ka’arli had been beautiful—but he knew how to lead troops. He inspired them with his steely will, underwent the same privations as they did, and had not even brought with him the silken tent that was his right as commander. Had he done so, Qamar could at least have claimed a portion of its floor and a few of its pillows and slept in comfort. But Allil was tough-minded, wilderness-raised, and had no use for even the simplest luxury. Still less had he time for the complaints of his wife’s little brother.
“I weary of listening to you, Qamar,” growled Allil one evening. “Today you have plagued me. Tomorrow I want you out of my sight.”
Qamar clapped his hands together with delight. “Excellent! You’re sending me home!”
“No, I am sending you forward with the scouts. Do exactly as they say, cause no trouble, make no mistakes, and perhaps I will consider giving you back your horse.”
“What?”
“Do you think a scout can gallop along, raising clouds of dust for the enemy to see? You go on foot, my fine Sheyqir.”
The twelve scouts left before dawn, ranging in a wide arc ahead of the army. The positions of farms and villages were reported back to Allim, who then guided his troops in maneuvers that skirted any habitation. Qamar thought this ridiculous. If they happened upon anyone, they should simply kill him so he wouldn’t be able to warn of the oncoming Tza’ab. Qamar supposed his sister’s husband was attempting to live up to his name: Allim meant “gentle and patient.” But as Qamar followed the experienced scouts into hills covered with scrub oak and dry brush, he wondered irritably why Allim couldn’t have chosen to exercise gentleness and patience on Qamar instead of the enemy.
The saddle soreness of these last weeks was a horror to him and a totally unforeseen imposition. It turned out that riding a cavalry horse from dawn until dusk, day after strenuous day, was a rather different thing from executing pretty patterns around a riding ring, or galloping off into the hills for an hour or two, or ambling along city streets. That first morning as a scout, the aching in his buttocks and thighs competed with blisters on his heels and toes. By midafternoon, the blisters had won the victory. He couldn’t even indulge in a satisfying moan of anguish; his fellow scouts would have gagged him, throttled him, or worse. They were singularly unimpressed by his status as a son of the Empress. Qamar knew why. His mother had given orders: no special treatment. Indeed, they should consider him as if he were nothing more than the lowliest youngest son of the humblest family in all of Tza’ab Rih.
Grandfather would have come to his defense, he told himself as he concentrated on not snapping twigs beneath his sore feet. Grandfather would never have allowed this to happen to him. Grandfather would have been appalled by the conditions his adored Qamar lived in, and the mockery visited upon him by the common soldiers, and—
The screeching of a hawk made his head jerk up, and for a moment he was stunned by the size of the creature, its wingspan half again as broad as his own shoulders. It cried out again and soared away into the silent sky.
He had spent time enough with the Shagara to know that birds did not scream and fly without reason. But he could see nothing that should not have been in the forest: oaks studded with green acorns, various kinds of undergrowth, a bird’s nest high in one of the trees, perhaps the hawk’s own. The good farmland was farther north; Qamar supposed people here gathered the acorns, but he didn’t much care as long as they did their gathering some other day.
Qamar brushed against a large bush, its prickles sticking into his shirt, scraping his skin. By the time he freed himself, his left arm was throbbing. His skin itched. His hand began to go numb. He had crossed a small stream about an hour ago—if he could find it again, he could bathe the rash in its coolness. He looked about him, swaying with sudden dizziness.
“Here’s another of them, Father.”
At least, Qamar surmised that was the meaning; the boy spoke a mangle of syllables combining civilized speech and barbarian gabble. Raffiq Murah, who had almost finished his biography of Alessid al-Ma’aliq, had drawn up a list of useful words for all troops of Tza’ab Rih to learn. Qamar had thought this pointless. Empty your hands and Be silent or die were hardly calculated to persuade a pretty girl into bed. Ayia, but when had he ever needed anything but his face and his big, melting dark eyes?
He rather wished right now that his eyes could actually see something besides sparks and great foggy swirls. His thorn-pricked arm hung heavy and useless from his shoulder. He staggered a few steps and leaned against an oak tree. On his finger the ring that had belonged to Azzad al-Ma’aliq, tawny topaz carved with a leaf, seemed to pulse with the pounding of his blood against swollen flesh. Dimly he perceived he was about to be captured and all his possessions stolen—stupid to have worn the ring to war, and the pearl ring of his great-great-grandfather al-Gallidh, but he’d promised himself he’d never take them off—indeed, the swelling would make them impossible to remove . . .
Ayia, of all the silly things to think! These barbarians would simply cut off his fingers. But before or after they killed him?
Another, deeper voice: “Let’s have a look at him.” His accent was excruciating, but he was comprehensible. Qamar saw two shapes, one tall and one shorter, approach through the trees, and wondered blurrily if he would ever see home again.
“Eiha, poisoned,” said the man. “Come, Raffael, help him.”
An unknown time later, Qamar came back to consciousness with no memory of passing out. He was propped against a wall beside a doorway, a hard pillow at his back, his left arm and shoulder bare and tingling.
“Never touch fire nettles!” scolded a woman’s voice, and he looked up to find a face framed in dark hair above him.
“Woman, into the house!”
That tone of voice, that curt a command, would have almost any woman in Tza’ab Rih lunging for the nearest blunt instrument. Qamar’s mother, his sisters, his cousins would all have reached instantly for their belt knives. And thrown them most accurately, too.
Alone in the sunshine with the man who had saved his life—an odd thing for an enemy to do—Qamar took the cup the man proffered, and drank. “Thank you.”
Evidently his pronunciation left much to be desired. It took the man a moment to stop frowning and nod his understanding. But then he frowned even more deeply. “Tza’ab. Your army, it moves.”
Had Q
amar the use of both hands, he would have applauded the brilliance of this insight. “Yes.” There was no point in denying it.
The man sat on his heels, head tilted slightly to one side. “We know.”
Qamar shrugged and blinked in surprise when his left shoulder moved just as usual, without pain or stiffness. He looked down at his arm: normal size, the topaz ring fitting his hand again, with only a pink flush on his skin and a few darker pinpricks of red to show he had been poisoned. “Are all your healers as skilled as this?”
“We know plants to use. Your land is desert, so you know nothing.”
“Nothing at all,” he agreed cheerfully. “Our own healers have different ways.” He sat up straighter, glancing into the cottage. Humble but clean, replete with flowers—where had they found flowers in this dryness?—and more comfortable than anywhere he’d been in the last month. But he had to leave. “Ayia, my thanks again, but I must go.” He pushed himself to his feet—and remembered that he hadn’t the vaguest idea where he was.
“Your army,” the man told him, pointing to the western hills.
Qamar gulped and nodded. Then, curiously: “You won’t try to stop me?”
“Why? Your army, your Empire, your Acuyib—these are nothings.”
That stung his pride. “You won’t think that way when we’ve conquered your land!”
A sound that Qamar supposed was laughter rumbled from the man’s throat. “Ours. Not yours. Never yours.”
We’ll see about that, Qamar thought.
His expression must have invited further comment. The man said, “The Mother gives, the Son protects. This is all, and you are nothing.”
It took Qamar a moment to understand that he was speaking of religion. How unutterably uninspiring.
The wife returned then, with a little tin pot of salve for use this evening as instructed. She eyed Qamar with interest—though not entirely in the manner he was used to from women: she was more intrigued by his strangeness than his beauty. He thanked her politely and went on his way.
If he half-expected to be felled by an arrow in the back, he was disappointed. It seemed the man really had no interest in what went on in the world beyond his house. Qamar could empathize. He didn’t want to be anywhere but at home, either.
He slept that night beneath a shrub carefully chosen for its distance from anything that looked even remotely like that bush of stinging nettles. Perhaps sleep was the wrong word. He dozed, jerked awake, dozed again, and finally rose before dawn no more rested than he’d been when he lay down.
“I want to go home,” he told a small reddish-brown rodent that eyed him from a clump of twigs obscuring its nest. “I am a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih, and I do not belong in this Acuyib-forsaken wilderness!”
If he was being honest with himself, he would have to admit that he was no more impressed by this than the rodent. What irked him was that the creature obviously considered him no more of a threat than the insects that flitted past. He was nothing against which anything, man or beast, must defend his home.
His waterskin was empty, but he didn’t dare fill it at any of the sluggish streams he crossed. That he had absolutely no idea where he was did not prevent him from putting one blistered foot in front of the other. That the most beloved grandson of Alessid al-Ma’aliq should be reduced to this gave him the energy of anger. Besides, he knew his cousin’s men would be looking for him, and he was determined to greet them on his feet and not huddled like a coward beneath a tree. It wasn’t his fault the damned shrub had attacked him.
It was well after noon before he limped toward a sentry tent on the outskirts of the Tza’ab camp. He was hungry, thirsty, hot, exhausted, and his arm was throbbing again. Within the hour he was with the healers, who exclaimed over the nettle wounds and the salve as they tended him. Their learned discussion of local plants and indigenous medicaments interested him not at all, and especially not compared to the cool water assuaging his dry throat and his sore feet.
“Can you describe the exact shape of the nettles?”
“Was there any smell? Sweet, sour, pungent—”
“What was the length of time between touch and pain?”
“Was the pain sharp like a knife or acidic like a poison—”
“—or burning, like a—like a—”
“Like a burn?” Qamar narrowed his gaze at the little knot of Shagara healers. “I don’t remember, and I don’t care. I want to see my sister’s husband.”
“This salve,” one of them said, sniffing at the little clay pot. “Do you know what it’s made of?”
“If I had only brought my apparatus!” another mourned. “I wish I was back in my own tent, with all my instruments—”
Qamar scowled. “And I wish I was back in Hazganni! My sister’s husband Allim! Summon him now! And give me that damned stuff, my hand hurts.”
Rubbing the smooth cream into his arm, he smelled things he could not identify, odd pungencies that repelled him. He didn’t belong here; he had nearly been killed by this land. Yet the thorns that had poisoned him had been counteracted by plants that also grew here, and perhaps Ab’ya Alessid would have found meaning in that. Qamar simply knew that this land wanted him gone, and he was most willing to oblige.
He was still rubbing the cream into his wounds when Allim arrived—through no effort of the healers. Word had filtered up from the sentry all the way up through the various levels of qabda’ans to the Sheyqir himself that his wife’s wayward brother had finally returned.
“Your secret presence here is no secret,” Qamar said without preamble. “Even the most isolated family living in a shed I wouldn’t wish on a dying rat knows we’re here. And they also know where we are.”
“Explain yourself,” Allim ordered.
“Over a large plate of food and a very large jug of wine? Certainly. Lead on.”
By the time Qamar had finished his recital—and his meal—Allim was compelled to agree that he had earned a second jug of wine. “It seems you have stumbled across valuable information, Qamar. If the Cazdeyyans know we are here, and they know where we are, we have two choices. First, we can attempt to be where they think we are not.”
“That’s not feasible. They know their own lands, Allim. And I swear, their land is against us—or at least what grows on it is, which amounts to the same thing.”
Allim arched a brow, as if to enquire if Qamar truly thought his opinion was worth hearing. “Your reasons are not my reasons. In fact, I have no idea what you think you mean, but that matters not at all. I won’t march far and fast to outmaneuver the barbarians. It would be too great a hardship on the men.”
Qamar poured himself another measure of wine and said nothing.
“I have decided to pull these Cazdeyyans into battle as soon as possible. We will make no secret of our movements—”
“Not that they were secret before,” Qamar muttered into his winecup.
“—but we will move in such a way and to such a place as will invite them to believe us vulnerable to attack. Which, of course, we will not be.”
“Of course.” He did not say it as if he knew what he was talking about; they both knew he didn’t. But it seemed easier to agree with Allim, and besides, he wanted something. “May I have my horse back?”
“By Acuyib the Merciful, I wish I could lash you to the saddle and send you back to Hazganni! But the Empress would want an explanation of why I have failed to make a man of you, and I have no intention of failing.” He smiled grimly. “I trust we understand each other.”
“Perfectly.” Qamar smiled his sweetest and most innocent smile, rose, bowed, and left the tent—taking the second wine jug with him.
As far as Qamar understood, the Tza’ab then marched to a place no commander in his right mind would have chosen for a battle and waited for the Cazdeyyans to catch up. The barbarians accepted the invitation to a seemingly easy victory and hurried to the place Allim had chosen. Personally, Qamar didn’t see it—neither the apparent idiocy of the locat
ion nor the battle itself. If it had been his mother’s hope that he would find himself in war, she was wrong. He found nothing. In fact, he lost his horse, his sword, and his breakfast.
He’d had much too much to drink the night before, of course. But that wasn’t his fault: his arm was aching again, and the stench of the salve disgusted him past bearing. It had needed the best part of three winejugs before the pain was gone. Unfortunately, his balance went with it, and although he’d been aiming for his bedroll, he’d spent the night on the ground beside it. Dawn came hours earlier than it should have. The meal that came with it churned in his stomach, competing with the dreadful thud in his head. His arm hurt so much that it was scant wonder he couldn’t cinch the saddle girth quite tightly enough, nor grip his sword as firmly as he ought. So none of it was really his fault.
But his mother was going to flay him alive all the same.
A qabda’an screamed the charge. The onslaught of Cazdeyyan warriors on their tough little horses came over a hill like an ocean wave of dappled brown hides and red-and-yellow tunics and flashing swords. Qamar was never sure when exactly it was that his own sword slipped from his fingers, or when the saddle lurched to one side and he fell off his horse. But all at once he was sprawled on the ground, and the wave broke open to avoid him as if he was an inconveniently placed rock. All around him was the same disgusting pungent odor that had nearly turned his stomach in the forester’s hut. Nearly became definitely, and he curled onto his side and vomited.