Rise of a Hero (The Farsala Trilogy)

by Bell, Hilari

  Jiaan sighed. “I know more than before, and I thank you for this. And for the tea. Can I . . . I don’t want to ill-speak you, but . . .”

  The smith smiled bitterly. “This is a poor village. We’ll take what coin you offer and be grateful for it.”

  We. Whatever coin Jiaan could spare would feed the hungry children he’d never seen, because they ran in fear when an armed man approached.

  He had pulled out his purse and was sorting out coins when the thought struck him: “You would not tell me if you knew, would you?”

  “What?”

  “Even if you knew the secrets of watersteel, you would not tell me. You want the Hrum to come here.”

  “In Farsala, I don’t care one way or the other,” the smith admitted. “I don’t think winning or losing in your land would stop the Hrum from coming here. In fact, if you beat them quickly they might come here faster, so the only thing that stops me from telling you the secret is that I don’t know it. But if it would make a difference, I’d do nothing that might stop the Hrum from taking this land as fast as they can. A Hrum invasion is the best thing that could happen for our people. Even at worst . . . it couldn’t be worse.”

  JIAAN RODE OUT WITH a lighter purse, and a heavier heart. Being stopped in Farsala might make the Hrum hesitate, at least for a few years, before pressing on. But deeply as he pitied these people, he couldn’t sacrifice his own land for them.

  Fasal had been right, for once; the Kadeshi were worse than the Hrum. The thought of having them as an ally made Jiaan’s flesh creep—and he knew they wouldn’t remain allies for long.

  Jiaan was glad that Siatt had refused him. Though now, there was only one place he could turn.

  SORAHB WANDERED THE war-torn land alone. When it rained, he paid farmers to let him shelter in some barn or shed, but on the dry nights, he made his camp in the wilderness to spare his purse even the loss of those few meager coins, for equipping an army had left him with little.

  On one such night, a ragged old man with a peasant’s accent approached and asked to share his fire. Sorahb would have preferred to be alone, but the deghan code of hospitality prevailed, and he agreed.

  Sorahb had only a pot of thin soup and a bit of coarse bread for his own supper, but the stranger ate the share Sorahb offered as eagerly as if he were starving. Seeing this, Sorahb ate lightly so the other could have more.

  Later they fell to talking, as men will by a fire. Sorahb learned that the man had been a prosperous farmer, whose wife was some years dead, and whose daughters had married and gone. A Hrum squadron had demanded that the old man sell them his grain store, and offered a price far lower than the seed was worth. When the farmer refused, they accused him of resisting the empire; his farm was taken, and he himself barely escaped. So now he wandered a conquered Farsala, where few dared shelter him for long.

  When he came to the end of his tragic tale, Sorahb sighed. “I can do nothing to stop the Hrum,” he said. “But I can ease your way in the world, at least for a time.” And Sorahb gave the peasant his purse, which held all the scant funds he had left.

  He expected the peasant to make some objection and was prepared to argue, for the old man clearly needed the money more than he.

  But the old peasant took the purse without protest.

  “You offer me a great gift,” he said. “And though you don’t know it, I have given you a greater one in return, for only a man who has nothing left to lose is truly free.”

  With that, he rolled himself into his tattered vest and went to sleep beside the fire. When Sorahb awakened in the morning, he was gone.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JIAAN

  THEY SEEMED TO COME OUT of nowhere, out of the muddy hummocks of swamp grass, the rustling leaves of the mull bushes, the shimmering glare of light on water. Only Rakesh’s frantic leap saved Jiaan from the club that whistled past his shoulder.

  Unfortunately Rakesh’s sudden movement also cost him his balance. Jiaan, slipping on the smooth leather of the saddle, gripping Rakesh’s mane with both hands and his body with both legs, had all he could do to stay on the horse’s back. He couldn’t draw his sword.

  Rakesh must have known his rider was in trouble, but he had no time to let Jiaan regain his seat. The gelding spun in place, forcing the man who was trying to catch his bridle to jump back. Then he planted his front feet and kicked.

  Jiaan heard the cry of pain and grinned, even as Rakesh’s violent movement broke his grip and he slid off into the mud.

  Rakesh had been trained to go on fighting if his rider was thrown, but Jiaan wanted to talk to these men, not to kill them—and he didn’t want Rakesh to be hurt.

  As he floundered out of the mud, rough hands seizing him, he saw Rakesh sink his teeth into a man’s arm. The man shouted, dropped the short cudgel he held, and reached for his knife instead.

  “Go!” Jiaan yelled. “Get out of here!”

  Rakesh stopped, snorting in confusion. He knew that command, but he usually heard it after he’d been unsaddled, groomed, and given a handful of grain—and it was accompanied by a friendly slap on the shoulder or rump.

  The bandit drew his knife, swore, and transferred it to his left hand. Panic sharpened Jiaan’s voice. “Rakesh, go!”

  The gelding snorted again and wheeled around, knocking the knife wielder into a bush. Then he galloped off, splashing in and out of sinkholes with little grace, but with a speed no human could match in this muck—though the man with the knife tried. Within moments the man saw it was useless and came stamping back to the others, rubbing the scratches on his face and swearing.

  With Rakesh safe away, Jiaan took stock of his own situation—it wasn’t good. There were six assailants, bearded and dirty—now that he had time to count them. Though at this point Jiaan wasn’t exactly clean. They’d all carried cudgels at the start, and had knives at their belts, though two had dropped the short clubs to hold his arms, pressing him down to his knees. The swearing man had lost his cudgel when Rakesh bit him, and yet another stood clutching his shoulder, his face pale and tight with pain.

  “Broken,” he said. “That Flame-begotten monster broke my collarbone.”

  Jiaan had recently broken a collarbone himself. Remembering how much it hurt, he was glad Rakesh was well away.

  “Flame-begotten?” One of the men who still had his club, taller than the others, gazed after the departing horse admiringly. “That was Kanarang with hooves!” He looked down at Jiaan. “I hope you’re carrying enough to recompense us for his loss, or we’re likely to get . . . disappointed. You’ll be real sorry if you disappoint us.”

  Jiaan fought down a chill of fear. This was what he’d come to accomplish—even if he hadn’t intended to accomplish it in quite this way. “The offer I carry is worth more than anything in my purse.” He tried to sound bold and calm at the same time. “I need to speak with your leader.”

  “If all you want is to talk to him, then you won’t mind if we take this,” said the other man who’d kept his cudgel. He pulled Jiaan’s purse off his belt and poured out the coins to count them. All but the two who held Jiaan gathered around him, and even they were watching.

  “Humph. Not much,” one of them snorted. Jiaan bit his lip. It was all the money he had, for he’d left most of the funds he’d been offered for the army with Fasal. Crossing half the width of Farsala, from Kadesh to the swamps of Dugaz, had taken much of it, and he still had to cross the land lengthwise to get back to the army. It had been over a month since he left, but he hadn’t wanted to return until he accomplished something.

  “Not nearly enough to compensate us for the loss of a warhorse as fine as that,” said one of the men who held Jiaan’s shoulder. His grip tightened enough to make Jiaan wince.

  “I have a message, an offer, that your leader will want to hear,” Jiaan told them firmly. Showing fear might prove fatal—and not just for his plans. “He’ll be angry if you keep him from hearing it.”

  “He’ll be angry we lost t
he horse,” said the tall man. “And he won’t know about the offer, if you’re not there to tell him.”

  “He won’t know about the horse unless we tell him either,” the man Rakesh had bitten pointed out. “And I’m glad we’re not trying to drag that djinn-beast back to camp. We might not be surviving it. If this ‘offer’ he’s talking about is profitable, we might get a share.”

  The other man who held Jiaan snorted. “Not much of a share, once Shir takes his cut.”

  “Better than a thin purse,” said Bitten. “Which is all we’ve got now.”

  “My shoulder’s broke,” moaned the man Rakesh had kicked. “I need a sling. I need someone to strap it up for me.”

  “What exactly is this offer you’re talking about?” asked one of the men holding Jiaan.

  Somehow Jiaan didn’t think an offer to help them fight the Hrum would interest these men. “That’s for your leader’s ears—not for yours.”

  Bitten drew his knife. “I bet I can change that.”

  Jiaan was grateful he was already on his knees—otherwise, the way his legs were wobbling might have been visible. “You might,” he admitted. “But Shir won’t be pleased if you do.”

  And if this Shir wasn’t their leader, he was probably dead. He hoped Rakesh would end up in good hands.

  Bitten stopped. “How do you know Shir’s name?”

  Jiaan shrugged. “My offer is for him.”

  “He’s lying,” said the taller man. “We mentioned Shir’s name. Didn’t we?”

  It took them a short eternity of terrifying debate, but eventually they decided they had more to gain from taking Jiaan to see Shir than from a corpse left floating in the swamp.

  Jiaan prayed this Shir wasn’t cut from the same cloth. He might be gambling his life on it.

  *

  IT WAS SOME TIME AFTER he arrived at the bandits’ village before Shir came to see him. At least, Jiaan supposed it was a village. The strange houses, perched on wooden stilts, with their silk walls, were unlike anything he’d ever seen. If it wasn’t for the smears of mud that coated everything in sight, they might have been pretty. As it was, they were almost as drab as the scrubby trees that surrounded them. Jiaan had plenty of time to form impressions, for they tied his wrists to a tree at one side of an open space between the houses—Jiaan hesitated to call it a square—and left him there.

  The sun was past the top of its arc, his wrists and back hurt, and he was certain he’d been bitten by every bug in the swamp by the time he saw a slender man, smooth shaven and cleaner than most, approaching with three other men.

  He probably wasn’t much older than thirty, and at first Jiaan thought he was one of Shir’s aides, come to fetch Jiaan to see the leader. But as he came nearer Jiaan noticed the wide, gold bracelets on his wrists, and the woman’s earring—a ruby, he thought—that glinted in the man’s ear.

  “Are you Shir?” he asked, as the man reached him. “If so, I’ve an offer for you.” Jiaan hesitated, but he had to say it sooner or later. “An offer of alliance, against the Hrum.”

  The slim man laughed. “Why do people keep thinking we want to fight the Hrum? Do we look like soldiers? Or idiots?”

  The men with him grinned—Jiaan had never seen such wolflike smiles on human faces. “I heard you killed the Hrum’s new governor of Dugaz, within a week of his arrival. I hear they’re sending another man,” Jiaan said.

  “They already did,” said the man he assumed to be Shir. “We sent him back. Well, pieces of him. Meddlesome men, these Hrum governors.”

  He drew his knife. Glass glowed on the hilt, but the blade was plain steel, honed to a razor’s edge. Jiaan swallowed, struggling desperately to think of something more persuasive to say, but the bandit simply reached down and slit the sleeves of Jiaan’s shirt from cuff to shoulder, baring his arms.

  “Why are you doing that?” Jiaan asked, hoping that the fear that made his heart hammer couldn’t be heard in his voice.

  “I was wondering if you were working for ‘Sorahb,’ like the last one was.”

  “In a way, I suppose I am,” said Jiaan. “These days everyone who commits an act of resistance uses that name.”

  “Ah, but some of you are more Sorahb than others.”

  What did that mean? Had the other Sorahb, the one he wanted to meet, already been here? He thought about asking, but too many questions might make his hosts nervous . . . and that was the last thing Jiaan wanted.

  “If you’ve killed two of their governors, then you’re already at war with the Hrum,” he said. “They won’t rest until they’ve captured or killed you. You need allies. And you need to help the people who are trying to hold out for a year, because you can’t fight them alone. Not forever.”

  Shir gazed down at him for a moment, a smile lingering on his lips. “It’s too hot to talk here. Cut him loose, Hassa. He’s not foolish enough to be trying anything without his weapons.”

  Jiaan knew he was right. “Thank you,” he said, and then cursed himself for sounding so pathetically sincere.

  “I’m not doing it for you,” said Shir, turning away.

  Still, it was cooler in the open-walled shade of the house they took him to, and a woman brought Jiaan a flagon of mint tea that was almost cool. And if he was forced to sit on the floor at Shir’s feet, well, it was better than sitting on the ground at his feet, tied to a tree. And much better than having his throat slit, which was looking more like a possibility all the time.

  “You’ve told me what you think is going to happen,” said Shir. “And you sound like you believe it. But let me give you my . . . vision of the future. The Hrum will send us a few more meddlesome governors and we’ll send them back—just like we have in the past, when some foolish gahn tried the same thing. But sooner or later the Hrum will pick a man who’s not as suicidal as the rest, and he’ll come live in the manor, and collect a few taxes, and not interfere with . . . well, me, not to put too fine a point on it. I’ll return the favor by not killing him. And the Hrum will figure out that a live governor and some taxes are better than a stream of dead governors and no taxes, and they’ll stop sending governors who interfere. And life will go on, and we’ll all keep getting richer and richer. That’s my vision of the future. What do you think?”

  “I think the Hrum care more about their laws, and their taxes, than you think they do. I think—you know about their time limit, don’t you?”

  The bandit chieftain nodded. All Farsalans knew about the time limit now. Jiaan couldn’t believe the news had spread that rapidly without someone behind it. The other Sorahb? It felt like his methods: quick, subtle, and above all, untraceable. The men who were now coming to join his army, from every corner of the land, had all heard it from different sources—a neighbor, a peddler, a river bargeman. It was as if the wind itself carried the rumor.

  “Well,” Jiaan went on, “I think that they’ll keep sending governors until about two months before their year is up—or maybe a month after Mazad has fallen, and that army is rested. Then they’ll send about five tacti to search the marshes and kill or capture every man here. And when they’re finished with you, they’ll leave a few tacti with the new, strong governor, and then rule all the land, including Dugaz and its marshes, till the end of time. But as a slave, or a corpse, that part won’t bother you.”

  “Not bad,” said Shir. “Mind, these swamps will swallow five thousand men without even belching, but it’s a good prediction and well argued. Might even come true. But consider this version instead. You take my offer—not to trouble any governor who doesn’t trouble us—back to your masters. Then the Hrum can claim the land is subdued without killing thousands of their own men in the marshes. For whoever we don’t get, the fever probably will. Outlanders are particularly susceptible to it, especially if they come from a cold land, which I’m told the empire is.”

  Jiaan frowned. “My masters? Do you mean Sorahb? But—”

  “I’m assuming that the Hrum have finally had the sense to stop marki
ng their own spies,” said Shir calmly. “At least, I hope you’re a Hrum spy, because if you can’t carry my message back to them, I’ve very little use for you.”

  This was probably the point where he ought to say that he was whatever Shir wanted him to be, and get out while he could, but Jiaan’s head was spinning. “I heard about the Hrum marking their spies, but how do you know about it? I thought it was a secret.”

  Shir grinned. “Dugaz is a seaport, boy. Sailors talk about the places they’ve been, and the things they’ve seen. Especially to women. I started learning everything I could about the Hrum, oh, eight years ago I think. I knew they’d get to us eventually, and I wanted to be prepared. And one of the things I learned is that most Hrum governors are too practical to go to war when there’s no need. Particularly when their year is still running. So you take my message back to Governor Garren like a good spy, and we can all go about our business.”

  “But I’m . . .” Deny it or not? If he denied it, he might not leave their camp alive, but if he didn’t, he’d lose his only chance to convince this ruffian to continue to resist the Hrum. Five tacti floundering around the swamp, trying to catch these tough bastards, struck Jiaan as a really promising way to end the Hrum’s year with Farsala still unconquered. “I’m . . .”

  Shir’s expression changed. “You’re not a Hrum spy.” It wasn’t a question. Jiaan had waited too long.

  “What made you think I was?” Jiaan asked. “You know the Hrum mark their spies, and I’m not marked.” He tugged one of his ruined sleeves.

  “I thought that because the last ‘Sorahb’ who came here, trying to convince me to resist the Hrum, was one of their spies.” Shir settled back in his chair with a thoughtful scowl. “I figured he was here to scout out our camp, but he . . . departed before I thought to have him carry my counteroffer back to Governor Garren.”

  A chill swept over Jiaan, despite the sweaty heat. “Departed. You mean you—”