by Fiona Patton
Graize tipped his head to one side.
“Well?”
Danjel frowned as his eyes returned to their jewellike green tone. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Kardos,” he warned, fingering the pommel of the kinjal at his belt.
“But ... ?”
“But one you just might win with our help. With my help.”
“And will you help me?”
After a moment’s thought, Danjel nodded. “Timur may not believe you and the Yuruk may not follow you, but I’ll help you, if only to bring my own future greatness into being.”
Graize laughed. “Yours and mine, Kardos. Done.” As the others broke out into excited chatter, he tipped his head back, staring into the cloudy sky with a triumphant expression. The game had begun and nothing would break it up early this time, not Havo’s Dance, nor any other God-made catastrophe, not until somebody’s stag beetle was dead.
And this time it wasn’t going to be his.
Above him, the lights grew brighter and brighter with the promise of strength and power. The spirits, however, fluttered nervously about his face, fearing a future that both Graize and the lights chose to ignore; a future where a dark-haired man and a hitherto unseen black-eyed, golden-haired woman could ruin everything with a simple glance, for creation and destruction were still far too intertwined for their comfort. But, with a dismissive wave, Graize swept them away. He would not allow past or future ghosts to interfere with his plans. Not again. Looking past the settlement to the wild lands and beyond, he bared his teeth in the direction of Anavatan.
Never again.
8
Gol-Beyaz
“CAN YOU READ and write?” “No.”
“Can you cipher?”
“Some.”
“What weapons are you familiar with?”
“How do you mean, familiar‘?”
After the initial excitement of Brax and Spar’s acceptance had worn off, most of Estavia’s senior officers’d had no idea what to do with them. Finally, Kemal and Yashar had brought them along to the Cyan Company training yard. After the beginnings of an awkward interview, Kaptin Julide’s second-in-command, Birin-Kaptin Arjion, had pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose before fixing Brax with a stem expression from under his black brows.
“What weapons do you know how to use?” he amended stiffly.
“Oh. Knife and sling.”
“And?”
Brax shrugged. “Fists.”
“Is that all?”
“Pretty much.”
“I see. So, basically you’ve received no training whatsoever.”
“None you’d want to know about.”
“But you did serve a kind of apprenticeship?”
Brax straightened sharply at his tone. “I served a full apprenticeship,” he retorted. “In a year’s time, Cindar and I would have been splitting our take fifty-fifty. There isn’t a lock I can’t open and Spar could get behind you and cut your purse before you’d even known he’d moved.”
Seated to one side, his arms draped about Jaq’s neck, the younger boy nodded solemnly as the gathered warriors shook their heads. Arjion briefly closed his eyes.
“So you’re dexterous and Spar is fast,” he allowed. “Which is fine on the streets, but Estavia’s warriors meet the enemy face to face, not from behind, and they don’t split any form of take. They serve the God and the God’s temple provides them with all they need.”
Brax stared up at him in disbelief. “You mean, you don’t make any shine at all?” he asked in a horrified voice.
Ghazi-Priest Tersar guffawed out loud and even Kaptin Julide broke a smile, but Arjion merely raised an eyebrow in Kemal’s direction. “Clearly, your new abayon haven’t explained our terms of service to you,” he said in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “Having second thoughts?”
Brax narrowed his eyes, then gave a shrug of studied disdain. “No.” As the God’s presence tickled against the back of his mind, he frowned. “It just feels ... wrong somehow,” he added.
“As it should.”
“What?”
“Estavia’s warriors receive payment and tribute just like any other elite fighting force,” the birin-kaptin explained, “otherwise we’d be possessions, not soldiers. Does that make you feel any better?”
“So why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Brax muttered under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. How much do they get?”
“That depends.”
“All right. How much do I get?”
“Delinkon chosen to serve at the temple receive a silver soldis in recognition of their achievement and another after their first year of service. I imagine you’ll receive the same.” Arjion glanced over at Kaptin Julide, who nodded. “And considering that the temple provides food, clothing, board, and weapons,” he continued, “I’d say that’s a more than adequate sum.”
“How much do they get later on?” Brax pressed.
“Again, that depends.”
“On what?”
“Your status, based on your achievements and dedication to the God.”
Brax tipped his head to one side, debating whether to ask the most obvious, albeit the most tactless question, then gave a mental shrug. It’s not like the man would be surprised.
“How much do you get?” he asked.
Arjion merely smiled tightly. “Forty golden soldon per year.”
Spar straightened with a jerk, but Brax just nodded, his expression carefully neutral.
“When would I get that?”
“You want my best guess?”
“Yes.”
“Never.”
“Why?”
Arjion raised a fist, lifting one finger per point until he’d made an empty hand. “You’re too suspicious, you’re too argumentative, you’re too undisciplined, you haven’t had enough training, and what training you have had has obviously taught you to seek the less than honorable path. You can’t do that when you serve the will of a God. They take offense ...” he blew across his palm. “... and you end up with nothing.”
“And if that changed?”
“Why would it change? Just so you can make a lot of shine? There are easier ways.”
Brax folded his arms, but nodded stiffly. “Point,” he acknowledged, echoing Yashar’s phrase from earlier that morning. “But suppose I wanted to do it for Estavia? Suppose I wanted to rise in Her temple as high as I could go just for Her glory?”
“Do you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet. Does anybody?”
“A few serve that selflessly, yes, but they don’t tend to be interested in money.”
“But they still get it, right?”
“Yes,” Arjion sighed. “They still get it.”
“So how long would it take for me to get it?”
Arjion gave a shrug as disdainful as Brax’s own. “With tremendous effort on both your part and on the part of your instructors, forty years, give or take a few.”
“That’s a long time.”
“You have a lot of ground to cover and a lot more to make up.”
“Up! Down! Up! Lift your arm, Brax! Higher, it’s a sword, not a stick! Like you see Brin doing. Higher! All right, everyone stop for a moment.”
“Square! Come on, faster! Brax, get into line! Hurry! No, beside Levith where I showed you before; we’ve been over this a dozen times!”
After that first interview, Kaptin Julide had placed Brax in a unit of first-year delinkon, but when it became obvious that he needed more training just to keep in line, she’d added two hours of individual sword and spear practice in the early morning with Tersar and another two hours of bow practice in the late evening with Arjion. Three days later when his unit began formation drill in the central courtyard; his training increased by yet another hour in midafternoon. On the fourth day he could barely walk but had refused both Kemal and Tanay’s ministrations. On the fifth day, his legs had collapsed underneath him as he’d
tried to get out of bed. Gritting his teeth, he’d sworn Spar to secrecy and made his morning practice with moments to spare. Somehow he’d gotten through the day, the constant strengthening presence of the God the only thing keeping him on his feet, but on the sixth and final day before Cyan Company was to leave for Anahtar-Hisar, he’d vanished before dawn.
Kemal found him sitting against Estavia’s onyx statue in the temple’s central shrine, the secondhand sandals Tanay had managed to find him tossed into one corner.
He raised his dark eyes to the man’s face with a look of stony acceptance.
“I can’t do it,” he said bluntly.
Kemal took a seat beside him, carefully avoiding the sharp end of the statue’s downward pointing sword.
“No,” he agreed. “Not like this, anyway.”
Brax’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t run out on practice, you know,” he said stiffly, misinterpreting his abayos’ words. “She told me to come here.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Looking up into the God’s crimson gaze for guidance, Kemal felt a single name take form in his mind on the faintest breath of wind and nodded. “Have you ever heard of Kaptin Haldin?” he asked.
“No.”
“He was Estavia’s first and only Champion, many hundreds of years ago. He commanded the army which protected Anavatan’s builders. He and Marshal Nurcan—the Warriors’ first fighting-priest—laid the foundation stones for Her temple, right here before this very altar. He’s buried under Her statue behind us.”
Brax glanced over at the polished black marble slab beneath the God’s onyx feet, but said nothing. “Since that day, Estavia’s ghazi-priests have trained thousands of warriors to follow in Haldin and Nurcan’s footsteps,” Kemal continued. “And they’ve been doing it the same way for centuries.”
“If it’s not broken ...” Brax muttered, his voice tinged with bitter sarcasm.
“Exactly, because up until this point it hasn’t been. Most of Estavia’s fighters come from families that are already sworn to Her worship so they’re familiar with Her ways. They begin at age six, serving under an abayos or older kardos, sometimes a ghazi or even a senior delinkos. They assist them, fetch and carry for them, get to know the life. What little formation training they do is carried out within their family or in small village groups. During battle they stay behind, sometimes at home, sometimes behind the lines. By the time they pick up their first real weapons at age eleven, it almost comes naturally.”
Rubbing at one tightly swollen wrist, Brax frowned. “So Spar has two years before he even has to start real training?” he asked.
“Yes. He has two years to catch up on five instead of nine.”
“Lucky him,” Brax said under his breath.
“Hm?”
“Nothing.”
Kemal frowned. “You really need to stop doing that,” he admonished gently. “It’s disrespectful to Estavia’s officers and.therefore disrespectful to the God Herself.”
Brax glanced over at him with the beginnings of a scowl, then nodded sharply. “All right.”
“What I meant before,” Kemal continued, “was that we can’t go on blindly assuming that your training can follow the usual path. You’re not usual and neither is your circumstance. To believe otherwise is to fail you and so ultimately to fail the God.”
Brax glared at the floor. “It all comes back to that, doesn’t it?” he said after a moment.
“Always.”
“And that ... chews at you, to fail Her, I mean.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Life used to be a lot more simple,” he mused. “You did what you had to do and you didn’t worry about what anyone else thought about it, especially not the Gods. I never thought that would change. I never thought it could change.” He gave a deep sigh.
“It chews at me, too, you know, even with it being so soon.”
“I know,” Kemal said sympathetically. “I can see it.”
When Brax gave him a suspicious frown, Kemal smiled.
“You’re not very good at hiding your thoughts or your feelings,” he explained. “You’re the least subtle person I’ve ever met, even given your age.”
Brax mulled over his words for a moment, trying to discover any criticism or sarcasm despite Kemal’s warm tone, then just shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I can’t get it. Not even with Her help. Kaptin Omal’s right. I’d get killed, or get someone else killed.”
Kemal sighed. “No, you won’t.” As Brax frowned at him again, he stood. “Lesson one,” he said, crossing his arms. “The essence of strategy is adaptability, to use what works and discard what doesn’t. So, delinkos,” he stressed the word with a smile, “the traditional training regimes aren’t working. Why?”
“Because I’m too old.”
“No, because you haven’t had the nine years of preliminary groundwork that you require. So the answer
is ...?“
“I dunno, to get them?”
“Exactly. Now, how?”
Brax shrugged wordlessly.
“Well, how would you learn any new skill?”
“You’d start at the beginning.”
“That’s right.”
Brax frowned at him. “You want me to fetch and carry for five years before I pick up a sword?” he asked.
“Maybe. If that’s what it takes. Could you do that?”
Staring intently at a spot just past Kemal’s right shoulder, Brax considered everything that would mean while the God whispered Her demands of battle and glory in his ears. Five years. In five years he would be ... old. Her impatience with the thought of waiting at all was almost audible.
So was his.
“I don’t know,” he replied finally. “Probably not.”
“An honest answer. As it happens, you’re forgetting the main point from the other direction. You’re in an unusual circumstance requiring unusual strategy, remember. You haven’t had nine years of training, but you haven’t got nine years to catch up either.” When Brax looked at him questioningly, he just shrugged. “Do you really want to be nineteen before you pick up a real sword and twenty-four before you become ghazi-delinkos?”
“No.”
“It would be detrimental anyway. You need to become familiar with your weapons now, but you also need the groundwork. So, the only answer is to take you out of traditional unit training and put you into individual training more similar to that of other non-temple apprenticeships.”
“Under who?”
Kemal shrugged. “Myself and Yashar probably, but possibly not; we have to think this through very carefully. The Warriors of Estavia are not a collection of individual Champions, Brax, we’re an army; we’re soldiers. To take you out of that hierarchy could hamper your ability to work within it and you’re already far too self-centered for the council’s liking. And the decision—the order—to deviate from traditional training would ultimately have to be theirs anyway. All we can do is try to convince them that it’s the right way to go.”
“So how do we do that?”
“Well, precedents wouldn’t hurt.”
“What does that mean?”
“That it’s been done before.”
“Has it?”
“I don’t know.”
Brax laid his hand on the cool marble slab beneath the statue’s feet. “You said Kaptin Haldin was a Champion, but he had to have been a soldier, too, right?”
“Yes.”
“So how did he manage both?”
“I don’t know. There aren’t a lot of stories surviving from before the building of Anavatan.”
“Why not?”
Kemal shrugged. “Some people believe that literacy destroyed the oral traditions that kept such stories alive—very few of Estavia’s warriors could read and write before that time—only the stories that were written down are still with us and the priests of Ystazia, not Estavia, tended to be the ones who did the writing. So, naturally, more stories of the Art God’s peopl
e exist. Others—mostly the priests of Incasa, for obvious reasons—believe that something happened during those years that the Gods want shrouded in mystery.”
“But they’re not sure?”
“No.”
“Can’t they just ask?”
“They have. No one’s ever received an answer. Incasa’s particularly aggressive in His silence, Estavia less so, but even Ystazia, the scholars’ and historians’ own God, won’t satisfy their curiosity.”
“Sounds like They’ve got something to hide.”
“Possibly. Ask Estavia yourself. See what She says.”
Brax closed his eyes. Then opened them again with a frown.
Kemal raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
“Nothing. It’s like She didn’t even hear me. Does that mean She doesn’t want me to know?”
“Not necessarily. It may mean She wants you to find out for yourself. If the Gods tell us everything, we don’t learn anything, do we?”
Brax made a face. “So what do we do?”
“We go hunting for what stories have been written down.” Kemal straightened. “You need to start your reading and writing soon anyway or Spar will outstrip you there. Ihsan say’s he’s coming along very quickly.”
“So that’s what he’s been doing. He wouldn’t say.”
“I imagine he thought you’d disapprove.”
“He knows I wouldn’t. He probably just wanted to show off what he could do later on.”
“Oh?”
“When you’re the youngest and the smallest, people underestimate you. In our trade that can be either good or bad; depends on how you play it. So it helps to have a few surprises up your sleeve.”
Kemal raised an eyebrow at him and Brax shrugged. “All right, in our old trade,” he amended. “The point is that Spar likes to play things close until he’s sure it’s safe.”
“I see. Well, it’s safe now, so why don’t you give him the chance to show off and ask him to help you find stories about Kaptin Haldin. There’s a reasonable library at Calmak-Koy.”
“Where?”
“Calmak-Koy. It’s a village and recuperative hospice southeast of Anavatan’s Eastern Trisect on Gol-Beyaz. In the old Gol-Yearli lake tongue it means ‘gathering place of many flowers.’ I’d like to spend a day or two there and have the physicians get you back on your feet before you start training again.”