Kaydu waited still, expecting something more. When it didn’t come, she offered, hesitantly, “Ac cording to my father, many lands have rituals of symbolic union with their gods and goddesses—”
“Not symbolic,” Llesho blushed. He would explain in words even an outlander could understand if he had to, but he could not, would not look at her.
“The prince takes his vigil in the temple, and the goddess comes to him. Dressed in the flesh he most covets. And they . . . she . . . if he pleases her body, he will find himself changed in the morning. Not that anyone can see, at first,” he rushed to explain, “but gradually, he develops some gift, a skill or power from the goddess. Adar is a healer. Balar centers the universe. Lluka sees the past and the future.” He laughed a short, familiar snort. “Three of my brothers fell asleep and did not please the goddess. They are ordinary men. They say, of course, that they pleased Her best of all, and their gift is to live in peace within their own heads.”
He wondered what peace his brothers had found in the years since the fall of Thebin, but Kaydu stirred restlessly.
“What do the religious beliefs of Thebin have to do with Lord Yueh’s traitorous magician?”
“ ‘The seventh prince is blessed beyond measure,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘most favored of the goddess, his gifts are beyond compare.’ Yesterday was my natal day. I was in the shrine when the attack began, but there wasn’t enough time to complete my vigil.” He pleaded with her to understand, “The goddess did not come! Or I thought not, but her ladyship says she did, and that she was pleased with me, though I did not give her pleasure as a prince must. But if she has given me the powers of the seventh prince, then better that you kill me now than Master Markko have the shaping of them. Because he is evil, and everything he touches he bends out of true. I don’t know who he serves—not Lord Chin-shi, who is dead, or Lord Yueh, who carries the serpent at his breast and believes he is the master when he is just another servant of Master Markko’s ambition.
“Somehow, Markko knows what I am. If he captures me alive, he will wield my soul like a weapon, and my people will die. Your people will die as well. Better to kill me here, now, than let that happen.”
He let himself fall back against his saddle and shut his eyes, recognizing the light-headed drift away from his body that he felt in times of greatest weariness. In that state of separation from his surroundings he didn’t really care that she didn’t believe him. As long as she let him sleep. He didn’t mention the promise he had made to the ghost, though, figuring one shock at a time was all either of them could handle.
“Damn!” Kaydu’s voice, drifting out of dreamy distance, surprised him. “My father knew Master Markko was powerful,” she explained when he cracked a heavy eyelid to look at her; and even from the far place where he floated he could see the worry in her frown. “How strong is he?”
Llesho thought about that. “In Thebin, there is a saying. ‘Apprentices do magic. Around masters, things just happen.’ Also, ‘A good magician leaves no tracks on dry ground. A bad magician leaves no tracks in the snow.’ To a Thebin, magic you can see is poorly done. It is difficult to tell a great Thebin magician from someone with no gifts at all who stands, by some coincidence, near the center of great moments.
“Markko isn’t Thebin, of course, but if he knows what I think he does, and if he has set in motion the deaths of Lord Chin-shi and the governor, and her ladyship’s flight for Thousand Lakes Province, as I think he has, then he is very, very strong.”
“Stronger than my father?” she asked him, and Llesho saw the fear within the question.
He shrugged, his shoulders rubbing against the leather of the saddle propping his head. “I don’t know, I’m not a magician myself, I just know the sayings.”
“Among the witches of Shan, there is also a saying,” Kaydu told him. “A good witch should always wear a bell around her neck.”
“The question is,” Llesho suggested, “how much between them is difference of philosophy, and how much a difference of art?”
“My father should wear a bigger bell,” she admitted, and he figured that meant that he didn’t let all his workings show. Good. Maybe Habiba had a chance. If so, maybe they had a chance, too. The thought gave him some comfort.
“Wake me in an hour to take my turn at guard duty,” he mumbled, then rolled on his side and fell soundly asleep.
Llesho woke to the snuffling of hot breath against his neck. “Stop it,” he insisted. Still more asleep than awake, he took a random swipe at the direction from which the annoyance seemed to come. His hand connected with a hard snout, slid down over long, sharp teeth. Not Kaydu, then. He opened one eye, and gulped. A bear stood over him, its muzzle wet and its fangs still colored with the blood of its last kill.
“Don’t move,” Lling instructed in hushed tones. She stood next to the tree she’d been sitting in, her bow drawn taut, arrow seated, waiting for a clear shot. Standing over Llesho’s terror-frozen body, the bear shook its head at her. Opening its bloody maw wide, it roared a challenge across the grassy clearing. Kaydu jerked awake at the deep-voiced growl. She rolled away from the bear, coming to her feet with a short sword in her hand.
The bear pushed at Llesho’s shoulder with its nose, whoofing a mournful tone in his ear. It was a very small bear, he realized, scarcely more than a cub; he wondered if the mother was around somewhere.
“Lleee-sshoo!” the creature sneezed. It sounded like his name, in spite of the bear spittle running down his neck. Looking into the glowing coals of the ferocious creature’s eyes, Llesho found an ageless wisdom there, and perhaps a hint of rueful humor as well.
“Where is Little Brother?” Kaydu drew their attention to the fact that the monkey would have awakened them with his own high shrieks if he’d still been alive. Lling pulled her bowstring a little tauter.
Llesho sat up, his arms outstretched protectively. “Wait!” he cried to his companions, and the bear raised its head, gargling a high-pitched growl of gratitude.
“Let me kill it,” Kaydu whispered, though Llesho figured the bear had better hearing than any of them. Nobody moved, especially not Llesho, and she could not reach the bear without endangering its protector.
The bear sneezed again: “Lrlrl-eck!” it spewed at Llesho, and took a swat at his head with the pads of its paw.
“He could have taken your head off, Llesho,” Lling hissed at him.
Llesho shook his head. “Could have, maybe. But he didn’t. He retracted his claws before he hit me.” He reached out and touched the bear. “Lleck?”
The bear tossed his head in a semblance of an affirmative, and emitted another high gargle of support before nuzzling at Llesho’s hand with his nose.
“See! He knows me!” Llesho reached up to scritch behind the bear’s ear. “He’s just a baby,” he said, and added, for Lling’s benefit. “It’s Lleck. I don’t know what he is doing here in the body of a bear, but I know it’s him.”
The cub howled his agreement, bobbing his head up and down to emphasize the truth of Llesho’s explanation. “Ll-iiiiing!” he said, and the sound of her name, coming from the wide open jaws of the bear, so startled her that Lling let the bow fall to her side, and gaped at him.
“Is it really Lleck?” she asked Llesho.
Released from the immediate threat of death from his allies, the bear who had been Lleck lumbered across the clearing in the direction from which they had come, then galloped back again. He repeated this dance several times, honking a series of high, panicky tones answered by the hysterical chattering of a monkey high in the walnut tree where Lling had been hiding. At least for the moment, Lleck was freed of suspicion of eating Little Brother for lunch, but the horses tossed their heads and added their nervous whickering to the clamor. Something was coming.
Llesho jumped to his feet, reaching for the knife and sword fastened to his saddle, just as Hmishi crashed through the low brush around them.
“Yueh’s . . . men . . .” Hmishi gasped. “One o
f his forward scouts, dead, back there, mauled by an animal—” He pointed back in the direction he’d come from, then stooped with his hands on his knees, whooping for breath. The bear cub who had once been Lleck the minister joined his noisy warning to Hmishi’s.
“Goddess!” Hmishi swore and reached for his knife, but Kaydu shook her head.
“Llesho has strange allies.” She shrugged, as if the explanation made no sense to her either, but was nevertheless the only one she had, and started toward the horses.
“No time to run.” Hmishi pulled her up short with the warning. He drew his bow and arrows and turned toward the sound of men on horseback shouting to each other and to their animals as they crashed through the forest. Lling moved up to Hmishi’s right flank and Kaydu stood at his left. Lleck the bear ran awkwardly across the clearing and disappeared into the afternoon shadows creeping over the forest.
Llesho stood a little apart from his companions, his knife and sword both drawn and held at the ready. A scream arrowed through the clearing, and another, despair and terror gurgling to a wet end that sent a chill through the lonely young defenders. Then a horse broke from the forest, an ax swinging from the fist of its rider. Llesho ducked and raised his sword, but the rider was already falling, Lling’s arrow in his throat. The horse, a roan bred for battle on flat open territory, reared up in terror, froth flying from her nostrils, her eyes rolling with her panic. Hmishi reached for her dragging reins, but she tossed him aside and crashed away into the forest again. They heard an animal scream of terror, and the fading sound of her hooves growing more distant.
Then the next and the next of Yueh’s soldiers were upon them, and Llesho had cut the legs from under the horse that thundered by him, and finished off the fallen rider with a knife to his breast. Kaydu dragged the next from his seat and crushed his windpipe under her foot as she swung a sword in the path of the soldier who followed him.
Llesho heard the high battle cry of the bear cub at his side, darted a quick look to where the creature stood at the center of the clearing, blood dripping from his muzzle and bits of flesh and hair and cloth hanging from the claws of his outstretched forepaws. A mad light shone in his beady black animal eyes and the straggling few soldiers left alive turned and fled in terror at the sight of the savage beast fighting at the side of the magician’s enemies. They were trained to fight and kill human beings, with capabilities no greater than their own. Only the fear of their master, following hard after them, could have induced the soldiers to confront the young witch and her Thebin team.
The bear was more than their terror could endure, and so they ran, not back to report to their master, but scattering for escape in every direction, the bear cub snapping at their heels. It seemed as good a plan as any to Llesho, who rapped out his order, “Mount up, we move now!” and reached for his own saddle. His hand slid on the pommel, and he gave the wet red smear an annoyed frown for a moment, before checking his hand for the source of the blood.
“Llesho!”
He turned at Lling’s call, and noted her sudden pallor. She reached a hand to him across the clearing. “You’re hurt,” she said, and ran to his side. He didn’t remember being wounded, but an arrow pierced his breast. Lling’s words seemed to cut through the fog of adrenaline and shock, and Llesho realized that it hurt, deep in his chest. Suddenly, it hurt a lot.
“Lling?” The clearing tilted, trees turning sideways in his vision. What was happening to him? He fell to his knees, sat back on his heels with a grunt as the jolt shivered pain through the arrow jutting out of his chest. His comrades gathered in a claustrophobic circle around him, and Llesho glared up at them. “Stop it,” he said, “I’m not ready to have my throat cut yet.”
“Nobody’s going to cut your throat,” Lling responded tartly. Llesho didn’t notice what Kaydu was about until the pressure against the arrow brought him back to himself.
“We can’t take it out now; you would bleed to death before we could find help for you.” Kaydu snapped the shaft off an inch or so from where it entered Llesho’s tunic. He screamed, a high shrill sound that tore at his throat. A part of his mind that stood outside his body wondered what animal was being slaughtered in the forest. A prince, the part of him in agony answered himself. A prince is dying. The daylight dimmed, and he fought unconsciousness while the pain thrummed in him like the arrow was a live thing, digging its way through muscle and bone.
“Lord Yueh, or his servant, won’t be far behind his scouts. He’ll send a bigger force when the patrol doesn’t come back,” Kaydu said. He knew what that meant: ride or die.
“We ride,” Llesho gasped. “Help me to my horse.”
Hmishi and Lling each slipped under an arm and grabbed hold of Llesho’s belt.
“One, two, three,” Lling counted, and on the mark of three, they hoisted him to his feet, then to his stirrup. He managed to swing his own leg over the horse’s back, and Kaydu settled his foot on the other side.
When he was set, Kaydu teased Little Brother from his walnut tree but did not tuck him back into his sling. Instead, she took his hat and coat so that he would look like the wild monkeys that populated the forest, and slipped a thin band around his body, under his arms. “Find Father,” she instructed. “Give him this message.”
She tried to lift him from her shoulder to a low branch of his hiding tree, but Little Brother clung to her neck, his little face grave and fearful. Kaydu sighed heavily, but she untangled the monkey arms from around her neck and chirped at him in the strange language they shared.
“Llesho is hurt,” she murmured, “Find Father, bring him,” and this time Little Brother leaped into the tree with a shrill stream of monkey curses. As they watched, he scurried out to the edge of his branch and flung himself into the next tree, and the next, his cries disappearing into the answers of the wild monkeys shaking their branches as he passed.
Llesho peered into the forest. His vision blurred, and sweat ran down his brow into his eyes. Something within him was drawing him farther away from his surroundings. He hoped to see the bear cub that had warned them of their danger but he didn’t have the strength, and his companions lacked the time, to search for the cub.
Kaydu took the reins of his horse and led them out of the clearing. After a while, when their camp had fallen behind and only the deep woods surrounded them, Llesho thought he heard the sounds of an animal in the underbrush. He could see nothing but the occasional sway of a branch in the windless air, however, and gradually his sight faded to a twilit gray tunnel down which he staggered for an eternal afternoon. When he felt himself falling into the darkness, he called out to his old teacher, Lleck, though he had no idea how much of Lleck remained alive in the mind of the bear cub, or how much of his teacher had reverted to the wild nature of the bear. In the clearing they’d needed the savagery of the bear, but now, with his own life fading with the daylight, he missed the wise teacher.
“Help me, Lleck,” he called, and the sound of his voice reminded him of other times, another march. When his horse stumbled, and he fell from his saddle, he struggled to rise lest he be trampled underfoot. “Mama,” he thought at first, but remembered she was dead, “Adar!” he called for the brother who had soothed his fever when Llesho was a child. Healer king. Adar, where are you?
Chapter Nineteen
UNTIL their flight from the governor’s compound at Farshore, Llesho had never seen a mountain or a forest. There had been the tangle of sand-loving trees and vines that crowned the hill at the center of Pearl Island, of course, and Llesho had once thought of that as a jungle or wood. But nothing had prepared him for the cycle of life and death played out in tones of black and gray in the night forest. Vaguely, through the fever that radiated from the arrowhead lodged in his chest, Llesho remembered that he’d once thought the forest must be silent at night, not this rackety clatter of birds calling and monkeys chittering and a thousand different kinds of insects chirping to each other with the clicking of their wings.
The soun
ds at a distance were a comfort. Those same creatures had fallen silent where they passed; that they resumed their nightly concert meant Master Markko’s soldiers were not following yet, would not be looking for them until morning when his patrol did not return.
But the skulking hiss of predators keeping pace with their party over the leaf fall on the floor of the forest, and slinking from tree to tree overhead, raised the hackles of Llesho’s neck. He sweated hot and cold by turns, fear and the oppressive heat of the forest confusing his damaged body. The creatures knew by smell that he was weak and waited only for his companions to let down their guard, and then the jaws of some huge cat or flying monster would seize him. Llesho could feel the prickle of anticipation in his legs, his shoulders, his neck. His flesh seemed to reach for the tooth and the beak in the eager rise of the hairs on his body.
As his fever rose, the sounds blurred, changed, and he heard skirts brushing through the grass, the cough and wheeze of old men driven beyond their strength. In Llesho’s mind, the wail of a predator celebrating its kill mingled with the death cry of its prey, and he heard it as the curses of the guards and the death of another child strangled for its misery on the Long March. A keening wail for his mother and his father, dead and lost to him forever, started in the back of his throat. He wanted his brothers to hold him and tell him it was a bad dream, but no one came. He pressed onward through the night, through the pain and the numbness that was creeping across his shoulder and down his arm, and through the terrible, terrible grief of a seven-year-old child with the blood of his first murder still on his hands.
He knew he must not let his screams out, that if he started screaming the guards would come and they would stop him with their huge hands wrapped around his throat, and his eyes would bug out, and his tongue would turn purple, and they would throw him by the wayside to appease the jackals that fought with each other and yapped their selfish demands for the carrion left in the wake of the Long March. He did not want to be set upon his own feet, gradually to drift to the rear, where the lions who paced the human herd roared their challenge and watched for the weak, the small, the sickly, to fall behind. He had seen a lioness attack a child fallen on the trail, how quickly the tawny cat sneaked up on them and snatched the child away before its mother rightly knew her precious burden was gone.
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