by Micah Yongo
Thick pillars of sunlight shone down into the forestbed like giant gleaming blades where the canopy parted, glinting off the gold in the young Súnamite’s glittering headdress and vestures and making Daneel squint. A minor problem. If he kept following much longer he’d have bigger things to worry about. It was going to be dark soon, and this place wasn’t like the Sovereignty. In the Summerlands, the sun didn’t leave by degrees. Instead day turned to night like a snuffed-out candle. Which meant if Daneel was still following this… whoever she was an hour from now, he was going to struggle to find his way back.
He watched the woman step clear of the forest into a broad clearing of broken rocks and ruined walls. Her guards didn’t follow, remaining along the fringe of the glade and turning away to stare back out to the forest. The place seemed like some kind of ancient shrine. Markings were dug into the large bulky stones of the walls on the far side, grooved divots so deep it was hard to imagine what sort of tool could have made them. The stone-carved head of a bull lay upended in the centre of the space on a paved platform, lying on its cheek as though trying to hear secrets of the earth. Daneel stayed low and still, staring at it, and then realized the head had more than one face, a bull on one side, the face of a woman on another, and who knew what lay on the side facing away from him. It reminded him of the temple ruins near his home as a child, and the ancient defaced monument of Gilamek that lay near it – a huge full-body likeness of the old god with his torso bared, and his arm cocked back like a javelin thrower’s as he clasped a spear. Daneel had always liked it, the way the whole thing had been carved deep into a cliffside the size of a palace too many centuries ago for anyone to remember how or why. It wasn’t until he was brought to Ilysia that he realized the country was littered with the things – broken, scratched out murals on the outskirts of cities, huge defaced statues in forests, ancient rubbled walls with strange markings sitting in open plains – fragments of a time before the Sovereignty, scattered throughout the Five Lands like tombstones from another world.
He was crawling nearer on his belly, trying to get a better look when a hooded figure seemed to suddenly emerge from behind it. And that was when things got confusing.
Daneel watched as the supposed Súnamite royal stepped toward the hooded figure and – after saying a few words, and still decked in her gold and turquoise accoutrements – knelt, bowing her head. Daneel frowned. As unfamiliar with Súnamite custom as he was, he felt certain royalty were not in the habit of bending their knee to any man or woman who did not themselves sit on a throne, and even then they mostly only did it when compelled by conquest or the threat of death.
He stayed and watched as the hooded figure moved forward, resting a hand on the Súnamite’s shoulder and gesturing for her to rise. She got slowly to her feet, and then walked away with the man beyond the ruins and into more jungle on the other side, leaving the guards by the clearing to bar the approach for any who might attempt to follow.
Daneel stayed for what might have been another quarter hour, watching the guardsmen and hoping for the royal or the hooded figure to return. When neither did, he crawled through the brush and out of sight before making his way back along the route he’d taken as the sun swiftly lowered and ushered in the night. It took him longer to return than it had to go, only the glow of fireflies and whatever moonlight managed to slip through the dense canopy overhead there to guide him. By the time he’d made it back to the village he’d been gone for several hours.
Josef eyed him carefully as he finally returned to their camp. “So,” he said drily, as Daneel sat down. “You decided to come back.”
“Well, you know me, brother. Wouldn’t have you lonely.”
“So, is she royal or no?”
“Hard to say.”
“Why? What did you see?”
“That’s hard to say too.”
Josef looked at him.
Daneel just turned and held his gaze for a moment, daring his brother – after having hidden this scroll of his and who knows what else – to insist on the full truth. “I followed them into the forest,” he eventually said. “Watched them make camp, and roast a rat or two. The woman is an able cook. As for what else she may be… well. Like I said, brother. It’s hard to say.”
Fifteen
C O U N T R Y
An old man with one eye and beer-stained teeth tried to sell Neythan a limping goat as they came into the village.
“He is a fine beast. Good meat. Sweet. See?”
The goat was speckled. It had sleepy, jaundiced eyes and a loose lower lip, hanging a little from black gums whilst flies congregated in the air around its tired head, making the animal’s ears twitch.
The man hopped and danced alongside, following as they went along the village’s main street.
“I have figs too. Fresh. See? Good figs. Sweeter than honey. You try? No? Spices. Good taste. Look. Smell. Good spices.”
Two little boys, with streaks of dried snot or saliva on their cheeks and crusting their eyelashes, scampered at the old man’s hip, switching to his hand a calabash, a gourd or some other sample of whatever he wanted to show the visitors. It had been the same in the last village, stone hovels squatting along the roadside like waiting sentries, mostly deserted but every so often surrounded by old women and solemn staring children who gazed without expression as the strangers passed by.
“This, this you will like.” The man’s sore-ridden hand lifted, dangling wood-beaded bracelets. They were actually well made, the beads smoothed and brought together by a thin bind of twisted leather. The man proffered them, his malnourished eye bulging from its sad wrinkled socket as he grinned with stained teeth. “You like?”
Neythan considered them briefly. “We are looking for a place to stay.”
The man pocketed his smile like a rejected trinket.
Caleb, still on his mule, came alongside. He glanced dubiously at Neythan before bending to flip a silver coin for the man to catch and then lifting the bracelet from his fingers. “This is good.”
“I have more.” The man turned to beckon the children.
Caleb lifted a hand. “My friends and I, we’ve come a long way. We’re weary, looking for a place to stay, shelter and fodder for the beasts. Perhaps later, when we are rested, we will look to other things.”
The man looked again at the silver coin in his hand, then back up at Caleb’s wrinkled face, then nodded. “There.” He pointed vaguely. “There is a house and a keeper,” he said. “A goatherd, the only flock and pen in the village. He’ll have shelter and fodder for the beasts.”
Caleb nodded thanks.
The man went on his way.
Caleb turned and saw Neythan watching him. He shrugged. “Likely he sees real custom no more than once or twice a year,” he explained. “Yet he’ll dance about this place, offering what he has, all of it of no use to anyone here.”
“Why?”
Caleb shrugged again. “To pretend,” he said dully, and then looked out over the dilapidated settlement, the children stooped on their haunches picking idly at the beetles in the dust and the dry weeds sprouting through the cracked ground. “To pretend.”
He nudged his mule onwards and went the way of the old man’s counsel. Neythan lingered and watched the old man dole his trinkets and mouldy figs to the dull-eyed women sitting in front of the hovels along the street, each one waving him away like they might a persistent fly or bad smell.
“These outlands are not pleasant,” Filani said, hovering at Neythan’s shoulder as he watched. “But for those here they are refuge.”
Neythan glanced at her briefly before turning back to watch the children as they followed the old man. “Strange kind of refuge.”
She followed his gaze. “There’d be no life for an orphan in Hanesda or Qadesh but that of a slave or harlot. Some become so, and find kind masters. But not all masters are kind, and it is from these they flee to here. For the widows it is the same, they flee from creditors. Then there are the mad, the leper
s, they flee too. All are of one infirmity or another, and so will dwell here or places like it… Brokenness, Neythan. It makes bedfellows of those who know it.”
They continued along the main street to the settlement’s back side where the buildings turned from hovels to wooden shanty sheds, some with small yards next to them. They were beyond the ash plains of Calapaar now, likely no more than a few days from the crown city of Hanesda and the other Sumerian river towns, and yet here, away from the Swift’s fertile banks, the land was as hard and desolate as salt.
They found the goatherd’s house on the next backstreet, the only house in the street to be built of cut sandstone. A large pen stood beside it. A stable adjoined the corner. A young girl, no more than six or seven, stood in the dry grassless yard alongside, clutching a squawking hen by the feet.
“I caught it myself,” the girl said. She stood there grinning, waiting for them to approve.
Only Filani smiled back. “Well done, child.”
“Nadia. Come.”
The girl’s father came walking slowly up from the house. A paunchy man, blotches of sweat on his caftan, hanging loose from his gut like a drape. He squinted up at them on their horse and mules, then rubbed his beard, awaiting an answer.
“We are looking for somewhere to stay,” Caleb said. “Ourselves and the beasts.”
The man stared at the scars on Caleb’s face. A habit of almost everyone who met him, Neythan noticed. He wondered how Caleb felt about it, but Caleb just showed the man his purse, hefting it gently in his palm to allow the dead bandits’ silver to clink.
The man grunted and nodded. “I will show you the place for the beasts.”
“My father, he was a goatherd too,” the man, whose name was Bazra, said later between mouthfuls.
They were sitting on the ground as they ate, settled on mats of hemp beneath the large juniper tree at the house’s rear. The fire they’d been sitting around was beginning to grow dim and small.
“He’d a large flock, larger than this,” he went on. “I inherited mine from him when he died. These are all offspring.” He gestured across the yard to the goat pen. “Save that.” He picked out an old he-goat standing nearest the fence watching them. “That one was his. The old man’s been dead near twenty years but this one’s too stubborn to follow.”
“Didn’t know goats lived that long,” Caleb said.
“A goat, if he’s stubborn enough, can live thirty years,” Bazra answered. He took a loud slurp of his soup, tipping the bowl to his lips. “But then there’s much men don’t know of goats. Noble animals, though men seldom think so. They favour sheep, just because sheep are heedful and goats are not. As if that makes sheep nobler.” The man laughed drily. “All it makes them is more cunning. They heed only because they’ve no choice. Blind as bats. Barely able to see a ditch from a duck. May as well heed if you’ve not eyes to test what you hear. But tell a goat to come or go and he’ll watch first. Speculate.” The man tapped a finger against his temple. “A thinking animal, you see. Eyes of his own to consider a thing, weigh it up. Men don’t like that. Don’t like aught that’ll think for himself.”
They ate out of wood bowls from a pot of lentil soup the man’s wife had cooked. She stood by the house with their daughters watching whilst the sons, three of them, not much younger than Neythan, sat around the juniper tree on the mats with their father and the strangers, listening to Bazra hold court.
“You’re a strange band though,” he said, looking them over. “A Súnamite, a leper, and a boy.”
Caleb considered the man’s assessment. Filani continued eating.
“What’s your business?” he asked. “Where are you going?” He munched loudly on the soup, then waved his spoon. “Ah, no, don’t tell me… You’re going south.”
Neythan and Caleb exchanged a glance.
“Only two ways from which men come to a place like this,” the man explained. “North. Or south. There are no other roads, you see… and you,” he pointed with his spoon, “you don’t have the look of southerners. You’re not so… polished.”
“Polished?” Caleb said.
“They who’ll come this way from the south, they smell of rose oils and honey balms and spikenard. You three… you smell of country.”
Caleb cocked an eyebrow.
The man raised a palm. “Pay it no mind, though. Don’t. I like the smell of country better. The other rankles my nostrils, makes me itch.”
“They come this way often then?” Neythan asked.
“Southerners? Not often, no. Just now and then. Exiles, you see. They never say so but you can always tell. They come flanked by soldiers. The soldiers are happy for shelter and somewhere to put the horses, but the exiles, they’re here in their fancy robes and frankincense and signet rings, you can see their noses twitching at every turn. They are courtiers and councilmen and high-minded house servants. Not used to country.”
“Why are they exiled?” Neythan said. “From where?”
“From Hanesda,” Caleb answered. “They who fall from the sharíf’s favour, or perhaps that of his chamber.”
Bazra laughed and nodded at Caleb, glancing at Neythan. “Your friend here regards the crown city a little darkly perhaps, no? They who pass here would be at fault for more than lost favour. The last one to come this way, the soldier guarding him said he’d been caught in a bribe. They’re weak-stomached down south, you see. My father, he’d have had such a one scourged. When I was a boy, he had the herdsmen marked up for far less. Hired hands, he’d say, hired hands have two sides to them, one is to work, but only the scourge keeps the other from cheating you.”
“Where do they go?” Neythan asked.
“Who?”
“The exiles. Where do they take them?”
Bazra shrugged. “You’d know better than I. They go north. Always north.”
“No,” Filani said quietly. “They go west, to Dumea.”
Neythan looked at her. The old dark-skinned woman was sitting beneath the shade of the juniper tree, chewing and cracking the shells of pram nuts and spitting them out into a small dish of stripped bark. She didn’t look up. Just let the word hang in the air. Dumea. Weeks since Neythan had thought of the place, weeks since he’d thought of his decree. Both had fallen away from his thoughts the night he looked on the bloodied body of Yannick. Josef and Daneel would be there now, waiting for him, his absence noted. Did the Brotherhood know? Did they know yet of Yannick, of Arianna? He glanced up at Filani again, as if she would answer. The old woman cracked another nut in her mouth and spat out the shell.
“Dumea?” Bazra said. “Passing here would be a strange way to take. May as well go by the river.” He shrugged and slurped another spoonful. “Worse places to be exiled, though.”
“You have been?” Caleb asked.
He bobbed his head and tapped his ear as he downed another spoonful. “To Dumea? No. Heard only, from travellers like you. No bad city from what they say. An unusual place though. Murals on every wall and clerics on every corner. But then that’s Hardeny for you. Talkers and artisans and not much else. Still, I’d like to go and see for myself one day. Always better to trust the eyes in your head than the words of others. Like the goats do.”
They left early the following morning, riding up into the hilly pastures behind the house as the sun rose ahead of them. They carried on southwards until nightfall, beyond the cattlefields to where the grass grew wild and long. The sky thundered when the darkness came, clattering overhead like the moving of furniture, the storm clouds lodged invisible in the blackness. As a boy, Neythan had feared nights like this. Even now, the lightning flickering to the east, shimmering violet-white beyond mountainous clouds, unnerved him. It was as if the sky was cracking, another world trying to push its way in.
They wandered on through the rainless tumult until the sun came again, its golden eye peeping above the foothills along the horizon. Neythan took a gulp of water from his gourd as Caleb slumped, sleeping, in the saddle of the mule a
head of him.
“You will need to sleep soon too,” Filani said.
Neythan turned to look at her and offered the gourd. “As shall you.”
She took it and opened the cap to drink. She nodded thanks and looked around. “The Pepper Hills.”
Neythan glanced around at the sloping field of black poppies. The snatch of dry grassland interrupted the dusty plain like a giant rug.
“You will be a few days from Hanesda,” she said. “But just half a day from the next town. I have friends there who will provide you with food and shelter. I will stay with them as you go on your way.” She drank and then reached over to hand the gourd back. Neythan took it and fastened it with the other provisions behind his saddle.
“You know the land well,” he said.
“I have had to. I am a merchant, a seller of purple. Or at least I was before the bandits took me.”
Neythan looked at her.
“You are surprised,” she said.
“You’re a little old for that kind of work.”
She laughed. “Perhaps you are a little young for your work. It’s uncommon for someone your age.”
“What do you know of my work?”
But she just turned to look at the horizon as if she hadn’t heard him. Her skin, as dark as Uncle Sol’s, turned black against the light of the sun rising beyond her.
“Tell me,” Neythan said.
She turned back around and considered him for a long moment. “I know that you are troubled, Neythan,” she said finally. “And I know that you cannot understand why. Because you do not understand yourself. What you are. Why you feel things you wish you did not, why you can’t feel things you think you should. I know that your sha knows what you do not: that you belong to a war you have never seen or heard, or touched, but a war nonetheless. Around you. Within you. Everywhere.”