by Carol Berg
“I knew you were going to do something stupid,” said the Prince as Sovari unhooked the ropes from his saddle and hauled me up behind him. “When are you going to leave off this damned playacting? Do you want to be a slave again?”
With the tail of Sovari’s scarf, I blotted a cut on my forehead that was bleeding enough to blind my right eye. “I can’t ever seem to think of anything else at the time,” I said, vowing to improve my repertoire of deceptions as soon as I could think clearly again. “The results are always predictable, and people notice the slave rings before they notice my face. Gives me time to figure out what I’m doing. Where in the name of the gods did you get the Fontezhi tef-coat?”
“After I watched your little performance—”
“You watched?” Of course he had watched. I remembered the scrabbling noises behind the goat shed. No wonder he had gone off without arguing. Damned, hardheaded fool of a Derzhi.
“As I said, I knew you were going to do something stupid. The back of that shed is built right into the hill. Easy enough to crawl up and take a look inside. Thought I was going to have to come in after you. You didn’t have a rabbit’s twitch of a chance to convince them of that story—”
“Until Borian confirmed it.”
“The potter did well. Indeed he did.” Aleksander shrugged. “Anyway, when I saw the guardsman getting different tales from all sides, I knew we needed to prevent your having to do anything too extraordinary to get away.”
“You roused the neighbors!”
“Easy enough. Gave us time to go hunting. I’ve had some good times in Karn‘Hegeth. So I knew where to look for some stupid young bastard who had drunk too much and was seeking pleasures where he oughtn’t. Found one, too. Sovari bashed him on the head and left him in an alley. He’ll wake without a clue as to where his clothes got off to.” Even as he told me, Aleksander stripped off the tef-coat and threw it into the muck.
“I’d recommend you keep your leg well covered, my lord,” I said. “They’re going to be looking everywhere for you.”
We rode quickly through the streets and into the unsleeping caravan quarter, seeking Malver among the wagons and chastou, casks and barrels and boxes, slaves and sledges. We threaded our way between two teams of mountain oxen, their wickedly pointed horns wider than a man’s arm span, only to be brought to a standstill by a herd of pigs. The beasts squealed in frantic chorus as they were herded into a torchlit slaughterhouse, there to be hacked into slabs or ground into sausage to hang in the meat merchants’ stalls at dawn.
“Where is the blasted fellow?” said Aleksander, peering into the crowds of merchants and vendors of every race who were haggling with each other over accounts and market spaces and screaming at their slaves and bondsmen who were loading and unloading their merchandise. “How can you find anyone in such chaos?” He cursed as two brawny men, carrying a wooden booth on their shoulders, bumped his leg.
“How does a warrior tell his enemies from his brothers in a battle?” I said. “You just have to know where to expect them. Besides, Malver said he knew some cloth merchants.” I pointed to a knot of men and women arguing and gesticulating as they clustered around an open chest. A tall woman with braided hair and skin the color of ebony stood serenely in the middle of the small crowd. She wore a purple loobah—a graceful Thrid garment made of one long strip of cloth draped about the body—and a necklace of interlaced rings of ivory or bone. Every once in a while she would point to one of her agitated customers, and the one so favored would pull a length of colored fabric from the chest and drop coins into the woman’s slender hand. She transferred the coins into the folds of her richly colored garment. Watching the proceedings from the seat of a long wagon hung with scraps of fabric was Malver.
Sovari raised a hand, and Malver jumped down from the wagon, surveying the milling throng anxiously as he motioned us to ride around behind the knot of cloth buyers. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here tonight, my lord,” he said, pulling our horses into a shadowed nook. “Something’s not gone quite to plan?”
“We need a place to stay out of sight for a few hours,” said Aleksander. “I’m still seeing Kestor before leaving the city.”
I could think of few worse ideas than for Aleksander to meet with a Fontezhi noble, even if the man was bound to him by the blood of their first battle, and if I could have worked some sorcery to remove the Prince from Karn‘Hegeth in that hour, I would have done it. But I was in no condition to be of use. I’d been holding on to Sovari’s waist with my left arm, because I could scarcely move my right, and indeed the numbness was affecting more than my arm. When I looked down, the ground seemed very far away. Sovari got himself off the horse gracefully, while I sat there wondering how I was going to manage my own dismount.
“W’ Assani will transport you, my lord,” said Malver, moving close and keeping his voice low. “She’s joined up with a caravan that leaves after tomorrow’s evening market. I told her only that I had a friend—pardon the presumption, my lord—who needed to get out of the city discreetly. She has moved goods that were perhaps... not properly taxed... in the past.”
“What kind of fool are you to trust the Prince to a Thrid smuggler—and a woman?” said Sovari. “I thought you had sense. Thrid take whatever position pays them best, and the usurper can pay better than we can at the moment.”
Malver was not ruffled in the least. “I’ve fought beside Thrid half my life. They hold to their bargains. Once paid, no one is more trustworthy. She—”
I heard no more of Thrid virtues, for just then a ripple of unease passed through the throngs in the streets: here and there an edgy glance cast toward the center of the city, a noisy conversation dropped to whispers, a hand reaching out for friends or children, drawing them out of the center of activity. I passed the back of my hand before my eyes, forcing my senses alert. The source of the disturbance was a distant knot of Derzhi warriors moving slowly through the crowd in our direction. A second group rounded a corner at the opposite end of the long street. Farther away, horses were galloping through the main streets of the city. Hunters.
“We can’t wait for evening market,” I said, my tongue thick. “And we can’t wait to see the Fontezhi. We need to go now.” The night was closing in. “With the Thrid woman or without.”
Aleksander inspected me from bruised head to bootless feet. “Perhaps we’ve done all we can do here.”
Malver ran to speak to the woman, while Sovari helped Aleksander from his horse. I gripped the lip of the saddle with my left hand and swung my leg over, but the horse was very tall, and I was suddenly very dizzy, and the ground was very hard when my face met the dirt.
CHAPTER 17
I didn’t meet W’ Assani until the chest she dropped on my arm waked me abruptly from a dead sleep with a vow to dismember whomever had done it.
“You’ve had the free use of my home all morning. I’ll not apologize for reclaiming a bit of it.”
I pulled my left arm out from under the hide-covered box, relieved to find the limb intact, and I tried to disengage my head from a pile of colorful woven goods. I scarcely had time to glimpse the flat silver light of desert noonday before a wad of coarse gray linen hit me in the face.
“Put this on.” The woman was not at all in good humor.
Her command was easier spoken than obeyed, as first I had to untangle myself from the unending folds of the garment, and one of my hands seemed to be firmly attached somewhere else. And even beyond these difficulties, my head ached so ferociously I could scarcely see.
Someone released the immovable hand by untying the ropes that bound it. A similar activity in the region of my ankles told me they had been tied, too—a disconcerting discovery.
“Sorry for the bindings. We said you were W‘Assani’s new slave who had misbehaved.” Malver’s dark face swam in a blur of sunlight and gray cloth. “Didn’t have time to see to you. Here.” He shoved a waterskin into my hand. “W’ Assani will look at your head.”
�
��Where are the others?” I had only vague recollections of falling and whispers and hurried jostling. Someone had told me to keep my mouth shut or she would sew it that way.
“Captain Sovari’s been sent off to Tanzire to set a meeting with the Bek. The Prince is up forward. Safe for now.” Malver backed away into the dazzling sunlight.
I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to look at my head, much less a woman who had dropped a chest on me. But as I sat up and began to assess the damage, trying to resist draining the entire contents of the waterskin, I realized that part of my vision problem was that blood had congealed over my left eye. From the feel of the rest of my face, there was likely a good deal of dirt crusted in with it. And manure and considerable other filth. I was rank.
“Bloody Athos, woman, were you trained in healing arts by a shengar?” Aleksander’s bellow sounded quite healthy. I dribbled a few drops of water on a corner of the gray haffai and dabbed at my eye, more convinced than ever that I had best tend to my own problems.
“Forward” was the half of a large, deep wagon bed that was exposed to the brutal sun, as opposed to the semi-shade provided by the roof of woven cloth scraps above my head. Once my eyelid came unstuck, I crept toward the light, threading my way between stacked barrels and chests and overflowing baskets of cloth, slightly nauseated from the heat, my head, and the stink.
The wagon wasn’t moving. We seemed to be sitting on the edge of nothing; to my left, as far as I could see, were rocks and sand. Four donkeys harnessed to the well-built wagon were nosing at a mud hole on my right, where the last remnant of a stream had cut through this rocky apron of the desert. Jutting out of the jumbled rocks on the far side of the cracked mud were a few dusty tamarisks and a tangle of brown and brittle weeds. I could not see Malver.
Aleksander was sitting just behind the wagon seat with his back braced against the side of the wagon and his arms stretched out along the rim. The unlaced riding boot was tossed on top of a pile of ropes and harness, and someone in a white haffai was kneeling beside him, bent over his bare leg. Her long black hair was tied into a hundred tiny falls, each of them wound tightly with purple and blue thread.
“Look,” said Aleksander, jerking his head at me, “here’s a fellow so wounded he gets off a horse face first. Can scarcely move his sorry bones. Why don’t you go tend him for a while?”
The woman straightened up and pointed a long finger at the Prince. “One more word from you and the both of you are out of my cart.” Her brown eyes sparked like dry tinder lit in a desert midnight. As the sunlight bathed the fine planes and angles of her narrow face, I could not but think of the exquisitely carved obsidian game pieces on Nyel’s game board. “You cost me a day’s profits in the best market west from Zhagad, and instead of having a pleasant evening’s journey to Khessida, where women appreciate fine weaving, I’m in the middle of Srif Naj on my way into Manganar, where people think they’re god-blessed to wear goat hide. And who is like to be chasing me but every blood-handed Derzhi in your cursed Empire’s service? No more push than a moth’s wing on my backside would convince me to put bakza thorns in these wounds instead of this ointment that costs me fifty zenars a box. So you, my Derzhi friend, had best curb your proud tongue.” With a single movement of her finger that directed every word of her diatribe to me as well as the Prince, she went back to work.
Aleksander’s expression was such a perfection of astonishment that I grinned, thinking that perhaps I liked this woman after all. “Is he all right?” I said, crawling forward where I could see what she was doing. “Other than his tongue, I mean.”
She was wrapping a thin strip of clean white linen just above the Prince’s ankle. Two other strips were already in place beside the dreadful red-and-purple scar just below his knee. “Sores from this boot,” she said. “Ate right through his tender royal skin. One almost to the bone. Has he no cleverness at all?”
“His cleverness has always been a matter of debate,” I said. “But no one can fault him for lack of persistence.”
The woman glanced up. She kept a smile at bay, except in her wide, dark eyes, where it settled as if in a familiar place. “I am W‘Assani. How is your head?”
“Seyonne,” I said. Her qualifications as guest-friend were unquestionable; thus I did not chafe at exchanging names. “It feels like your donkeys kicked it.”
“Looks like it, too,” Aleksander mumbled, pulling his haffai scarf down low over his face.
“Leave off the boot until these heal, lord of princes, or you’ll have no need of boots.” With a quick rip of a small knife, W‘Assani trimmed off the end of the bandage and turned her attention to me. The line of her lip immediately informed me that I should not have used the gray haffai to clean my eye. “I thought Ezzarians were a cleanly people,” she said. Before she could get started on another lecture, urgent hoofbeats and a choking shower of red dust announced Malver’s return.
“Caravan!” he shouted as he slid from the saddle.
W‘Assani slapped her hand on a wooden chest. “I knew Kavel would come this way.” She thrust a ragged square of clean linen and a small brass box into my hand. “Use this to clean it. Then put a bit of the ointment on it; only a bit, mind, or I’ll take payment from your hide. When we stop again, I’ll make mavroa to ease your head.” She jumped down from the wagon, grabbed the donkey harness, and hauled the beasts away from the mud hole, cursing at them in a mixture of Thrid and Aseol, the common language of the Empire. Malver leaped onto the wagon seat and grabbed the traces just as the wagon lurched forward.
“I’ll make the arrangements,” W‘Assani yelled to Malver. “You get the cart to the road.” She snatched a trailing fold of her purple loobah, pulled it up between her legs, and tucked it somewhere in the other folds. Moments later she was astride Malver’s horse, riding off the way from which he had just come, her berib boned black hair flying and her haffai streaming behind her like white wings.
I crawled over beside the Prince, leaned my back against the side of the wagon box, and closed my eyes, hoping that I wasn’t going to have to wait for W‘Assani’s tea to ease my head, content for the moment to contemplate her striking image behind my eyelids.
“Have you had a woman since you left Ezzaria?” I had thought he was asleep.
Even under the dirt and crusted blood I felt my color rise.
“I thought not.”
“I thought you couldn’t read me anymore.”
“The donkeys could read this.”
“I have a wife—”
“—who tried to murder you, and will do it yet if you should cross her path. Worthy wives do not drop their wedding tokens into their husband’s blood.”
Fiona must have told him about Ysanne and the ring. “I vowed to be faithful until death,” I said. “It makes no difference what she’s done.”
Aleksander pulled his scarf lower and settled as if to sleep. “Well, if you should ever change your mind, I’d not start with this one. She would devour you as a kayeet eats a rabbit.”
An hour later, I was sitting in the back of the jostling wagon, dreaming of a bath. I had made one swipe at my face and was trying to find a clean spot on the square of linen to start on my hands. Unfortunately I made no progress on the stink, which seemed to be getting worse. A number of things had come to mind that were worth wishing for—food, rain, boots—and other nonsensical yearnings seemed to be written on my face for all to see, but I would have traded the prospect of any of them for a sliver of soap and an hour in a tub, pool, or river.
Aleksander had moved underneath the shade of the colorful canopy also, but had not shown any further inclination to talk. He sat across from me, his fingers tracing the engraving of his sword hilt. No pleasant thoughts there.
“I told Pujat Kavel that you were my new bond-servants,” said W‘Assani, who rode up beside the wagon and matched the horse’s pace to the donkeys’ plodding. “He thinks M’Alver there is my new partner, and I have acquired you—a cripple and a freed slave—to st
rip and clean the bones. You must show your diligence, or he won’t believe me. When we stop at midday, you can start on those in the basket.” She spurred the horse and left us spitting dust, but not before I saw the crinkle in the corners of her eyes.
Aleksander had seen it, too. “Damnable smirking Thrid witch. I’ll let Edik have his way with me before I do her bidding.”
“Bones?” I said. My head had eased considerably, but I was still confused.
Aleksander grimaced and shoved his sword belt back under an oaken chest. “Cast your sorcerer’s eye inside the basket. No, the long one just behind you.”
The object to which he was referring was about the length and width of a coffin, but twice as deep and made of tightly woven reeds with handles of rope. The moment I cracked the lid, I realized that the dreadful stench I had assumed my own was from quite another source—two animals, very dead. “Foxes?”
W‘Assani had gotten us out of Karn’Hegeth through one of the closed gates, so Aleksander told me. Evidently she regularly needed a quiet way out of the city and knew several guardsmen who were willing to let her pass for a share of her profits. This time she had paid a man with Aleksander’s horse and mine. The guardsman had poked around her wagon to see what was worth such an expensive bribe, finding only one battered, insensible slave, supposedly acquired in trade, her usual baskets and chests of woven goods, and a large, vile-smelling basket that held two fox carcasses. The foxes were sufficient explanation.
Ornaments of fox bone were prized by a good many men across the Empire, for they were believed to enhance virility. Derzhi from those hegeds that permitted multiple wives, and Suzaini who often had three or more, had been known to pay handsomely for fox-bone arm or finger rings, pendants, bracelets, or brooches. Especially valued were the bones of the elusive red Azhaki fox. As a certain Fontezhi lord who resided in Karn‘Hegeth maintained his own supply of them, captive, the guardsman had no difficulty understanding W’Assani’s hurry. He was not in the least inclined to poke around in the smelly basket, so he failed to discover that just below the quickly ripening carcasses were a false bottom and his anointed Emperor.