I could hear the creak of a bowstring already being drawn again, and I knew the heater shield wouldn't last. The more arrows in it, the less useful it became. Thinking on my feet, I switched my grip on my spear and threw it. The archer went down, pierced through.
My sword hissed from its scabbard as I continued to advance. Holding it at waist height under the curve of the shield, I stepped forward and stabbed, stepped forward and stabbed, driving them before me. One clumsy swing got through my guard but wasted itself on my breastplate. The sword bounced off my bronze like a hammer hitting a bell, and inflicted barely a bruise. I gutted the man behind it with one stroke.
The assailants regrouped in a hurry. A cavalry mace thundered into my shield and numbed my arm, even as two lancers tried to poke underneath it. One sharp point scraped my ankle, and I stumbled, dropping to my knees. Vulnerable and without any other options, I struck blindly upwards, forcing the maceman to jump back into his mates. They all struggled together in a tangle of limbs and weapons. Then Faro appeared behind me, launching arrows into the fray while their guards were down. From the screams, at least one of his shots found a mark.
Three distinct pairs of footsteps turned and bolted for the exit.
At that precise moment Sir Erroll bulled past us and chased after the enemy with a fantastic war cry. They outpaced him easily, although that didn't seem to discourage his vain attempt to catch them up.
I was more interested in the bodies I'd just stepped over. The first lancer lay right next to me, his pot helm gone, rolled away and forgotten. Even through the blood and dim light I could make out fair skin, blond hair. I picked up the helm and found a rough reproduction of the Duke's coat of arms staring back at me.
“These aren't Harari,” I spat. “It's the damned skirmishers from the other day!”
I crawled over to one Faro had shot. He sat awkwardly up against the wall, panting for breath. He was still a boy, barely a year older than the squire. A light black beard covered his chin, and his blue eyes were wide with pain and panic.
The arrow had pierced his boiled leather breastplate and gone clean through one of his lungs. He wouldn't last an hour. But perhaps he could tell us something.
“Karl Byren, Sergeant, King's Own Angian Guard,” I introduced myself as a small audience grew behind me. Even Sir Erroll returned, sheepishly, from his berserker charge. “Who are you, soldier?”
His glassy eyes jittered for a moment, then focussed on me. His voice was forced and high with fear. “Colm. Colm Handleigh, Fourth Light Horse, Hawk Battalion. Please, the arrow, it hurts!”
“Leave it. Don't try to move.”
“But... Sergeant, I don't understand...”
I thought about lying to him, but found I couldn't do it. “You're dying, son. Nobody here can save you, and there isn't a surgeon for leagues around. All you can do now is answer a few questions which may help some of your friends to live.”
A strange calmness settled over him as I explained his situation. “I don't want to die,” he whispered. His breathing slowed, and his skin grew more pale by the second.
“Colm, listen to me. How many others of your unit are waiting outside?”
“T-two,” he moaned.
“Two? Where's the rest?”
“We got separated... ah, in the storm. We were tracking you when Sergeant Arravis and the others disappeared. We wandered for hours before ending up here... Nnh!”
“Easy. Colm, quickly, why were you tracking us?”
“Saw you coming out of Farrowhale. Sergeant Arravis thought you might be smuggling something, someone...” His eyes rolled sideways, staring over my shoulder at the others, struggling to focus. His lips parted in a bloody grin. “He was right.”
With that the light left him as if a candle had been pinched out. His head sagged lifelessly to the side. I cursed the boy under my breath. If only he'd lasted a minute longer!
“It doesn't matter how many there are,” said Sir Erroll. “We have to head them off before they destroy all our supplies!”
That, at least, I could agree with. I dragged myself up off the floor, retrieved my spear from one of the bodies, and followed the knight back to the mausoleum entrance at a run.
The Duke's troops were gone, and they'd killed our horses.
The rest of us were poking through the smashed, burned-out debris of the camp when Faro brought back the news, ashen-faced, trying not to retch. Yazizi made a noise of raw, despairing horror and she ran past the squire to the animal pen. I looked back and forth between Sir Erroll and the woman. His whole body trembled where he stood, maille crunching in his clenched fists.
She was almost the opposite. The set of her jaw betrayed mild annoyance, but her eyes gleamed with steely calculations about how to proceed from here.
I sighed, “They took everything they could carry, destroyed what was left, then made sure we couldn't give chase. Clever. It's what I would've done.”
“What in blazes are we supposed to do without horses?” the knight spat. “We're in the middle of the bloody desert!”
“I believe we're all painfully aware of that, Sir Erroll,” Aemedd offered snidely, still pale but no longer shaking in his boots. He grabbed Adar by the shoulder. “Boy, go and salvage anything you can find. There's little time.”
Adar stared at the scholar's hand where it touched him, and an icy expression flashed across his face, so briefly I had to wonder if I hadn't just imagined it. The boy said nothing as he sheathed his sword and went to do as he was told.
I allowed myself to fade into the background, too. Let the others talk. I needed to take stock of the damage.
Our bags lay all over the campsite, most of the contents ripped or torched. Everything obviously valuable was gone, along with our food and drink. The remnants of a few old food packages flapped in the gentle breeze. There really was nothing left.
It was a familiar sight for me. I'd learned a long time ago that nobody looted baggage like Ducal skirmishers. No matter how well you hid your things, the Duke's boys could sniff them out. If you wanted to save a penny in the King's Army, you carried it with you. I patted the purse on my belt with a hint of satisfaction. It wouldn't feed me or get me out of the desert, but it was mine, and you never knew when a pile of silver might come in handy.
A burst of tortured laughter from the animal pens caught my attention, and I hurried to investigate. The sick knowledge of what I would find sat in the pit of my stomach.
The pen was a slaughterhouse. I saw my rouncey, Faro's little gelding and Sir Erroll's destrier all laid out in a row. Their eyes were locked open in death, throats cut, the wounds covered in windblown sand. Yazizi sat on her knees next to the butchered animals, on cracked ground stained crimson-red. She was hunched down, her face in her hands, shaking. She raised tear-filled eyes when she heard me coming.
“She's not here,” she stuttered in between fits of laughter and great wracking sobs. “Zayara isn't here.”
I tried to sound comforting. “They must've taken her alive, or maybe she ran away.”
“They took her,” she answered with stony certainty.
I offered my hand. At first I wasn't sure if she even saw it, with eyes that looked straight through, but she took it and let me pull her to her feet. I said, “If you want to see her again, we'll need to to survive here without mounts, food or water.”
“This is my home.” The fragile edge in her voice faded a little, given a real and immediate problem to focus on. “Food and water can be found if you know where to look. With the Tzan blowing, though...”
“You think it's still out there?”
She nodded. Not an instant of doubt about that.
I scratched my chin, and a thought occurred to me. “If you're right, the damned storm will slow them down. They haven't been gone long. Is there any chance you could find their tracks in the sand?”
“In the middle of the Tzan? Of course not, I...” She trailed off and gave me a strange look, haunted and longing at the same time. “Maybe
.”
“Maybe?”
“You won't like it. The lady will never agree. It violates every law I was raised to believe in. But for Zayara...”
Trying my best to sound reassuring, I said, “Necessity is a harsh mistress. Tell me what's on your mind.”
She nodded reluctantly, turned away from the horses, and found a rock to sit on that would keep her back to the massacre. Quietly, subdued with guilt, she began to talk.
“There is a stag in the land of the gods,” Yazizi recited. “He was consecrated to Orrobok, khan of the gods, the prize of the khan's divine herd, but he escaped and ran away into the forest. Orrobok was enraged. He called all Harari warriors to a great hunt, offering a place at his feasting table to any man who could track and kill the sacred stag.
“This story been told since the dawn of my people. Every warrior attempts the hunt in his lifetime. It's like your holy pilgrimage. The ritual is so sacred it's blasphemous to even discuss it with infidels.” Here she struggled, but forced herself to carry on. “No one has ever succeeded. However, the ritual has great power. Chasing the stag can help a hunter find the things he seeks in the worlds of men as well as the realm of the gods.”
The expressions around us ranged from skepticism to outright hostility. The idea went down as well as I expected, but I was determined to make everyone hear what she had to say.
“It's not as mad as it sounds,” said I. “The Harari ritually swallow a kind of steppe plant they call 'irit', or Stag's Thistle, which really is known to heighten senses and intuition. The Professor can attest to that. Supposedly the irit is the means by which they enter the 'realm of the gods.'“
“Are we to entrust our lives to pagan magic now?” Sir Erroll was red in the face, apoplectic with rage. “To heresy?”
A deep frown carved its way into Aemedd's forehead as he rounded on the knight. “There is no such thing as magic. I've read about this thistle, it's reputed to be quite potent. Mountain shamen sometimes brew tea from the dried leaves. It can create the illusion of a religious experience based on what the imbiber expects to see.”
“Is there such a big difference between visions and illusions?”
Things went quiet, and all eyes swung around to the unexpected speaker. Faro had sat quietly in the background, until now, next to the remains of an old campfire. Even now he didn't look at us, and kept his head down to avoid the vicious looks from Sir Erroll.
So the mood threatened to turn even uglier. Aemedd was already in the middle of launching his rebuttal. “Why not ask the difference between something base and something divine‒”
The woman cut him off without a thought. She looked straight at me as she said, “The girl has given us no reason to trust her. She's obstructed and betrayed us at every opportunity.”
“Yes, Milady. That is why I'll be going with her.”
Sir Erroll sputtered. “You can't be serious. The very idea of it is blasphemous!”
“I appreciate your uneasiness, Sir, but I'll make my own peace with God. Right now my greatest concern is survival, for all of us.”
That seemed to calm things down a little. I thought I could see the faintest smile playing at the corners of the woman's mouth, and she gave me an infinitessimal nod.
The knight wasn't quite ready to concede defeat, though. “Think it through. We already have what we came for. The only sensible thing to do now is to strike out eastward as fast as we can and keep going until we hit a village.”
“Sensible, if you forget that we'll die of hunger and thirst halfway to the border,” Aemedd explained impatiently. He looked at me with pale, inquisitive eyes. “Byren has made his point. I would take a mad chance over a sensible suicide.”
The woman laughed, and the others fell silent.
“Mad and blasphemous,” she giggled serenely, “but I find myself agreeing with Byren and the Professor. Please make the arrangements. I want to be ready to travel as soon as possible.”
She strode back to the most intact of the remaining tents while everyone else found something to do, whether it was packing what little we had left, taking notes, or searching for a small thistle in the shadow of these desolate ruins.
Maybe I really was mad.
It took the better part of an hour, but our search turned up a healthy irit plant growing out from under one of the toppled columns. Yazizi cut two spiny leaves from the stem and handed one to me, then instructed me on how to blunt the thorns along the edge with my fingers. There was a fixed quality to her smile. I sensed her worry underneath the attempt to put me at ease.
“Place the whole leaf under your tongue,” she said when I was finished. “Don't bite down. Let it rest there while its essence becomes one with yours.”
“Have you ever done this before?”
“I've... watched.”
I feigned confidence and popped the leaf under my tongue.
Somehow, that act seemed to firm Yazizi up, too. She knelt in front of me and took my hands as the thistle dissolved bitterly in my mouth.
“See with your mind's eye. Imagine a forest, green, brown, yellow. The trees are thick and old, the bushes bristling with berries and thorns. There is grass, flowers, mushrooms, all living things that grow under shade and sunlight. Animals of every kind are making noise in the distance. The sky above you is blue and gold.”
My eyes blurred from the unrelenting, harsh taste, and I desperately wanted to spit. I still saw nothing but a girl and a desert. “I can imagine it, but...”
I hesitated. The thought slipped away from me. My head lightened, as if it could float off my shoulders at any moment.
A faint sound drew my attention, a soft bubble of water, totally out of place. I looked around and noticed a narrow creek tumbling through the world. It hadn't been there a moment ago, but now I watched it run along the floor of a lush grove of trees, as clear and convincing as anything real.
“Is‒ Is there a stream?”
“Yes,” said Yazizi. “Can you see me?”
I looked up, and lost all my words again. Her dirty cotton dress was gone. Instead she stood before me in the painted leather vest of a Harari horsewoman, her hair bound in a thick plait and gleaming with oil. Her sun-kissed skin glowed in the soft light. The rough hide breeches hugging her thighs brought out the curves of her slender body. She was ten times more savage and beautiful than I remembered.
I swallowed hard. “I can see you.”
“You look strange.” She giggled and gestured at my clothes. “What armour is that?”
When I saw myself, I made a sound of pure confusion. “Uh... It's my uniform. I mean, it used to be, when I first joined the Army. Light spearman, Gernland Regiment of Foot. What is this? What's going on?”
“Irit is known to reveal a man's true self. Perhaps, deep down, you are still a young soldier.”
“Mm.” That explanation didn't sit right. My days as a Lightfoot were long gone, and I knew it. “Perhaps it shows us what we wish we still were.”
I shook my head and made myself focus on the task at hand. “How do we hunt this stag?”
“Like any other, but faster.”
My heart began to pound in anticipation of the chase. I could see the woman and her company standing off to one side, loaded up and ready to travel, but they were somehow muted, insubstantial. Nothing but pale ghosts compared to the forest around me, complete with its leafy smells and the sound of birds and insects fluttering about their daily business.
“Is this real?”
“Everything is real,” she replied. She was serious as a stone.
We spread out and began to look for tracks. The muddy riverbank felt wet and cold on my feet. It was a chaos of bird prints, claw marks and the padded paws of dogs or wolves. Hooves seemed a rare thing in this forest.
Then I saw a trail of deep cloven imprints in the mud. They jumped out at me plain as day.
“Here!”
Yazizi came running, and her eyes lit up when she saw. “That's him,” she breat
hed reverentially. She took my arm and pulled me along into the trees.
We ran. Fresh grass and dirt felt so good under my feet. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure the others were keeping up but it was becoming difficult to remind myself they even existed.
The vegetation thickened and became more difficult to push through. Everywhere I looked I saw a wall of leaves, though I wasn't sure if they were actually attached to any plant. They got into my eyes, my clothes, everything, despite my clothing.
“Is it the...” I struggled to recall the name, or to think about wind and sand right now. “The Tzan?”
“The realm of the gods is a mirror to ours,” she said distantly, as though she too had to fight to remember. “Desert becomes forest. Autumn becomes spring. Even wind turns solid.”
Gradually I began to see what she meant. Everything about this forest seemed just off kilter. The sounds and smells were familiar, but if I tried to pick one out, I couldn't put a name to anything. Once I was sure I glimpsed a tree with blue leaves in the distance, surrounded by brightly striped birds that were every colour of the rainbow at once. I blinked, and the vision vanished like smoke.
The ground hardened, but we didn't lose the trail. Faint tracks in the dust and dirt guided us. We didn't speak much. Thoughts of the hunt filled my mind to the exclusion of everything else, the relentless chase, senses sweeping the forest for any further sign of my prey. Yazizi didn't even do that. She seemed utterly focused on the stag. Her body must've weakened in all the months she spent as a slave, but she almost outdistanced me as she weaved through the trees, driven on by desperate fervour.
Finally we had to stop to catch our breath. We sat together on the forest floor, and I shuddered as my burning lungs sucked in air, grateful for the reprieve. For a moment I spied our companions through a gap in the foliage. Their images shimmered and swam, making my eyes water, becoming mere blurs of strange colours and garments I didn't recognise. They maintained their distance so as not to spoil the illusion, but from that one glimpse, it looked like the pace was taking its toll on them too.
Written in Blood Page 13