A few of the traders looked up from their record books and their accounts to give the general’s party a scornful examination before returning to their work, but no one seemed to care about the dandy prancing about with his mismatched boys.
Their trader of the day before, however, heard the demand for her attention, and scuttled over. “My lord!” she tucked her hands into her sleeves and bowed deeply before General Shou, a grin pasted on her painted lips. She narrowed her eyes when she caught sight of Bixei, and grabbed his jaw in her hand to count his teeth. “Hmmm,” she said, taking his measure with one cold glance.
“Pretty. He’s a bit too tall, and shows some wear—” The latter she said with a well-chosen combination of sly admiration and motherly rebuke. “Some like sweeter flesh, but I can get you a good price. This one, too,” she pointed to Llesho and explained, “Thebin stock. He will look like an untried youth well past twenty summers.”
“I told you yesterday, old woman. I want to buy, not sell. If you don’t have what I want, I will find it elsewhere.”
Llesho gave the general a sharp glance, but the woman assured him with much hand-waving that he would have what he wanted. “This way,” she said, stopping in her tracks to look at Bixei again. “I can sell you a close match,” she bargained. “Female, if you like that sort. The height and skin tones are close enough. Brown hair; a bit of bleach would make a perfect match, but perhaps you’d rather color the girl.”
Bixei sniffed indignantly at her, but Shou petted him and gave the trader a simpering smile. “Perhaps next time; I’m looking for Thebins today,”
The trader’s shoulders sagged a bit as the prospect of a second sale to the rich but foolish customer faded. Llesho wondered if she would try again, but the trader opened a door at the very back of the countinghouse, and led them into a room empty but for two men standing at a small table. The taller, slimmer man with the tanned, chiseled features in the simply cut jacket and breeches of a gentleman farmer came forward to greet them. His shorter, darker companion in the robe of a healer remained out of the light, a little behind his master.
Llesho had schooled his expression to remain neutral when he saw his brother. He said nothing when the tall man approached General Shou and bowed formally, but Llesho noted the flare around the nostrils, the sudden whitening around his lips. Adar recognized him, and was keeping his own counsel as well.
“I understand you wish to purchase a Thebin healer,” Adar said, and Llesho stared at him in confusion.
“I am in need of such a one in my household, yes,” Shou answered, a proprietary hand on Llesho’s shoulder.
The tall man’s eyes narrowed, but he shrugged in a show of indifference. “I am not selling,” he said.
“You said you were interested in the offer,” the trader huffed, and Adar, masquerading as a farmer, quieted her with a gesture. “I am interested,” he said. “I have a mind to purchase the boy.”
“Then perhaps it is time to show our bids.” Shou pulled a coin purse from his belt and took out three gold coins, which he set on the table between the bidders.
Adar held out a hand to his attendant. When the second man moved out of his shadow to put a stack of coins on Adar’s outstretched palm, Llesho gasped.
“Shokar,” he said, and the tears he had been holding back spilled down his face. “Shokar.”
Llesho pushed his way passed the general. Bixei reached to stop him, but he slipped by him, and lunged for the short, stocky stranger, burying his face in the man’s shoulder.
“Llesho?” the man whispered, and the other, Adar, stepped in front of the two so that he could hide their embrace at almost the same moment that Llesho realized the danger they were in.
“Sell!” he whispered to his older brother, and released Shokar with a blush and an apology.
“It has been so long since I have seen someone new from my own lands,” he explained, bowing as deeply as he could to the general. “I did not mean to distress your lordship.”
“The exuberance of youth!” The general waved a hand. “Show such enthusiasm when we return home, and it will not go ill for you.” Shou placed the gold coins in the hand of the trader with a smile. “For your trouble,” he told her. “We will continue this negotiation over wine, I think.”
Adar said nothing for a moment, and Llesho urged him silently to agree. Finally, the healer nodded.
“I have rooms nearby.” The general bowed as he offered his hospitality. “And the wine is excellent. If we can come to no permanent agreement, perhaps you will do me the favor of having your man look at my boy.”
Adar who wore the clothing of the master rather than the slave, seemed little inclined to trust the offer. Taking advantage of the cover Adar gave him, Llesho reached out and pressed his fingers against his brother’s hand, signaling reassurance, he hoped. Adar finally bowed his agreement.
The trader narrowed her eyes, but General Shou, in his disguise as a merchant, returned her suspicion with a guileless smile. He took another coin out of the purse and handed it over. “For your efforts on my behalf, and so that you will remember me if you see something to my taste cross your block,” he said.
Llesho was amazed at how stupid the general looked at that moment, but it seemed to disarm the trader, who bit into the coin with her cracked teeth and pronounced herself happy to be of service to his lordship. With much bowing, they made their way back through the press of commerce at the front of the countinghouse, and found themselves once again in the market square.
“The boys must be hungry,” Shou announced, still in the guise of the foolish merchant. He made his way across the square toward Darit’s booth, and waved four fingers in the air to order four of her wonderful breads. When they drew close enough to reach their food, she gave General Shou a crinkling smile. “You’ve collected another one, I see.” She handed Bixei and Llesho two each of the delicacies, and then held out a fifth, wrapped in paper, to Shou himself. “I have a new filling I thought you might like to try.”
She gave a loud laugh which did not startle her customers at all, who were used to her manner, but her eyes were serious. Llesho thought he read a warning in their depths. General Shou’s smile likewise did not move beyond the mechanical flexing of his mouth, which caused Llesho to wonder what Darit was to the general, besides a source of delicious food.
Shou did not say anything, however, but tucked the packet into his coat. “Do you still want to see the dancing bear?” he asked. Shokar tensed, and Adar placed a comforting hand on Llesho’s shoulder. Both men were surprised when Llesho answered around a mouthful of food: “Yes! I hope we are able to see the monkey as well!”
“Your master seems very kind,” Adar ventured in low tones as their party skirted the shops of the cloth merchants, which were again blocked by the laughing crowds.
“He’s an unusual man,” Llesho agreed. He had picked up on the general’s guarded study of the crowds in the marketplace, and it had heightened his own alertness. He wondered what the general saw that he did not know enough to recognize.
Shou led them around the crowd, and up the steps of the impoverished Temple of The Seven Gods on the far side of the crowd.
Adar gave him a strange look, but held his tongue when Llesho frowned, darting quick glances over the heads of the crowds.
“Soldiers,” Llesho muttered, and Shokar communicated his surprise and his question with a raised eyebrow. Llesho shrugged, trying to put “later” in the gesture. The troops were not wearing the uniforms of guard or militia, but soldiers going into battle carried themselves as no one else in Llesho’s experience. And if that were true, there were too many of them in the market square. And far too many wore the garb of Harnish traders.
At the center of the laughing crowd, a monkey in the uniform of an Imperial Guard did backflips on the shoulders of a brown bear. Kaydu carried a basket which she stuck under the noses of the audience, many of whom had a coarse word or joke about the uniform the monkey wore. A slim young woman
in a long, flowing gown sat on the steps, smiling at the antics of the bear, but watching the crowd with careful, attentive eyes. She looked like Mara, except that she was too young, too straight and slim to be the old healer woman. But she had Mara’s face and Mara’s eyes. She caught Llesho’s glance and rose from her perch, skipping down the steps with light dance moves.
“Come back later!” she called to the crowd as she took the bear’s paw in her hand and danced him once around the little open circle. Kaydu finished her collection with a flourishing bow, and gathered Little Brother to her as the bear and its leader danced their way around the corner of the temple.
General Shou waited only until the market performers were out of sight before ducking into the temple. Bixei followed, and Llesho came after with Adar and Shokar.
“That didn’t go quite as I’d planned it,” Shou remarked. “What exactly were you doing, Llesho?”
The two newcomers stepped between Llesho and the man they took to be a merchant, but Llesho responded to the familiar commanding tone with a quick snap to attention.
“May I present my brothers,” he said, stepping between them and bowing to the general. “Adar, the healer of whom I have often spoken—” he smiled and gestured at the taller man, “—and Shokar, whom I had thought lost to us.”
Shou made a bow to the brothers, and would have spoken, except that a priest of the temple approached, a frown creasing his forehead. “As always, you come to us with trouble close behind,” the priest said.
“Master Markko’s people?” Shou skinned out of his merchant’s robe. Under it he wore his uniform and had a sword strapped to his side.
“He does seem to be in the thick of it.” The priest took the merchant’s robe and handed Shou his helmet. “And he seems to command not just the remnant of the force he brought from Farshore Province, but Harnish raiders as well, scattered among the honest tradesmen in the marketplace.”
“A man would have to be mad to trust the Harn as allies,” Adar swore heatedly.
“Mad he may be,” Llesho agreed, “but no less dangerous for it.”
His brothers stared at him, surprised at the force and confidence of his words. Their surprise turned to astonishment when Kaydu skidded into the temple. She had shed her fool’s costume, and wore the uniform of Thousand Lakes Province. Little Brother sat on her shoulder, his paws clinging around her neck, and the bear from the marketplace scampered at her heels. The bear’s companion from the marketplace followed at a more sedate pace.
“Mara?” Llesho asked Kaydu.
The stranger answered, with a smile. “I’m Carina, Mara’s daughter. But my companion is an old friend of yours.”
“Lleck?” Llesho whispered. The cub nuzzled his hand and moaned, “Lleeee-shooooo!”
“Lleck?” Shokar choked on the name. “You have named a dancing bear after our father’s chief adviser?”
Llesho shrugged with a rueful smile. “Not exactly.”
“Shoooooo-karrrrrr?” the bear sniffed at his hand. “Shoookarrrrr!”
Shokar gasped. “That bear said my name!”
“It is Lleck,” Llesho explained, “our father’s adviser. He has taken the form of a bear as protector until Thebin is regained.”
Adar looked shaken and seemed about to speak, but General Shou was addressing Kaydu, and Llesho turned to listen.
“Are the emperor’s troops holding?” Shou asked her.
“They are outnumbered,” she gasped. “My father is bringing his reinforcements from outside the city.”
“We need time,” the general muttered. “We have to hold Markko to the square.”
A second priest joined them, and Llesho grinned when he saw the bundles he carried. “Is that my sword?” he asked. The bundle was wrapped in his Thebin coat and he unbound the pack and put on his coat first. His sword belt and sheath followed; Llesho drew the sword and loosened his wrist by twirling the weapon in small circles pointed at the floor.
Shokar was still confused, but one thing seemed clear. “I take it you are not the pampered pleasure slave of a stupid Shannish merchant, then?” he asked dryly.
“No, brother.” Llesho flashed a predatory grin that was new to him since the battle with Master Markko on the border of Shan Province. He drew his Thebin knife and tossed it in the air, catching it again by the hilt and casting about with it to measure the balance of it in his hand. Bixei was testing the heft of his spear, and Kaydu had drawn her sword and taken up a trident with it.
“Are you certain of what you are doing?” Shokar asked his brother. “You’re just a boy. This temple would surely protect you if there is to be fighting.”
“I’m a soldier,” Llesho answered with a shrug. “And it is my battle as much as Shan Province’s. Master Markko followed me here. If he now conspires with the Harn, all of Shan may soon fall under the same yoke as Thebin.”
Shokar pulled off his healer’s robe and handed it to Adar. Beneath the robe, he wore his own sword belted to his waist, and he loosened it in its scabbard. “Would you mind if I joined you, then?” he asked, with a bow to General Shou.
“Be my guest,” the general invited him with a tight smile.
They had begun to move, following the priest to the back of the temple, when the first priest returned bearing a slim burden in his hands.
“This was delivered for you, young master.” The priest bowed and unwrapped the oiled cloths that protected the short spear contained within.
Llesho shuddered.
“Is that what I think it is?” Adar asked, his voice grown husky with awe.
“I don’t know what it is, except that her ladyship has bid me carry it, and that I feel my own death clinging to it like a cobra waiting to strike.” He thrust the weapon into his brother’s hands.
Pain crossed Adar’s face, but he did not let the spear fall, even when it blistered his palm.
“Why is it doing that?” Horrified, Llesho snatched it back, too late to save his brother from the hurt that bubbled on his hand.
“Because it belongs to you.” Adar smiled, though his hand must still hurt.
Llesho didn’t want to understand, but they had run out of time, and Carina was leading his brother away with words soothing as the burble of a dove: “My mother has taught me much of her herb lore, and the tending of wounds.”
Torn between protecting his brother and his own duty to the battle’s wounded soon to come, Adar hesitated.
“Go,” Llesho said. “If we win, there will be time to talk later. If we lose, we already know what we needed to say.”
“Go with the goddess,” Adar whispered his farewell like a prayer.
Still as stone, General Shou waited until Carina had taken the wounded healer away.
“It’s time,” he said, and led their small force out of the temple.
Chapter Thirty-five
IN the market square Harnish raiders had drawn their short, thick swords. The soldiers who had marched from Farshore with Master Markko brandished the more familiar weapons they had kept hidden under their disguises until the signal ordered them into action. Llesho figured they had expected only the weak opposition of shopkeepers and their customers in the square.
But General Shou had laid his plans carefully, and the invaders found themselves confronting grim-faced Imperial Guardsmen who threw off their own disguises and fought to defend their homes and their families. The very auction block at the center of the marketplace served as a reminder of Harn’s treatment of its conquests, and civilians fought alongside the emperor’s guards with any implement they could find.
Stalls overturned in the fray spilled food and trinkets and pots and pans onto the square. Wares scattered underfoot as raiders hacked at the proprietors with their swords. Llesho saw the food vendor Darit hit a Harnish raider over the head with a heavy copper platter and then swing her makeshift weapon in the face of another soldier.
Finally she whirled it like a discus at a Harnishman who directed the action of his raiders
from the auction block. He went down, spilling blood from a deep gash in his brow and Darit was over her counter, with a chopping knife in one hand and a bone cleaver in the other. He lost sight of her when Markko’s troops rushed his own position on the steps of the temple.
“Can you fight?” he asked Shokar, who stood at his shoulder.
“For you, I can fight,” Shokar answered, and drew his own Thebin knife. He took the two-handed defensive stance of the Thebin fighter, sword raised, knife extended, and soon proved his worth. A band of soldiers in the uniform of Lord Yueh’s guards rushed their position, laying about them with bloodied swords. From the determined savagery of their attack, Llesho knew they had but one objective: to bring down Master Markko’s chosen prey at all costs.
Llesho slashed with his knife, jumped out of range of a swinging sword, and jabbed with his own long blade. He heard his brother grunt with the exertion of wielding his weapons. Shokar did not move with Llesho’s practiced ease, but he had not forgotten all he had learned as a young man in Thebin.
Bixei fought at his right side, his battle cry a low growl in his throat. Kaydu screeched like the spirits of the thirsty dead as she cleared the steps on his right. Llesho whipped around to take on the next assault, and discovered that for the moment they had driven back their attackers.
Trying to catch his breath and his senses at the same time, Llesho looked about him in dismay. General Shou had placed cadres of Imperial Guardsmen in disguise throughout the square, but they were seriously outnumbered. Though the emperor’s men strove valiantly to contain the attack, the Harnish raiders pressed outward, unstoppable in their attempt to escape the square and join up with reinforcements flooding into the square from the streets of the city.
Already two of the Harnish bands had drawn off from the fighting, making for the eastern corner of the square, from which a tangle of paths and roads led to the palace. In the chaos of the fighting, he had no intelligence about how many Harnish reinforcements lurked in the city, or if they waged their battle against the palace as well as in the market square. It must have been like this on the streets of Kungol, he thought, except that the Thebin palace had no high walls to protect it, nor a standing army to defend it.
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