Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  On one such evening he evaded the last of the petty demands from haughty lordlings, hid from the gang of Omerans looking to avenge themselves for some imagined insult, and walked quietly beyond the tethered camels. A group of travel-hardened veterans sat around a fire, drinking ti from small cups and playing counters; they looked up as he passed, smiled at him—probably mistaking him for a fellow veteran, dressed as he was in his voluminous burnous, a kind of desert cloak—and went on with their game. He nodded politely to them, then walked out into the silent twilight like a lone ship leaving the safety of a busy port.

  The horizon turned turquoise, and then closed in around him as it faded to black. Torve shivered as the sterile heat of day bled away, to be replaced by a creeping coolness that, by dawn, would turn to real cold. He stood still as an owl hooted softly somewhere ahead of him, to be answered by a second owl close by, giving him the sense he’d interrupted an ongoing debate over territory. From the distance came the snarl of a fox. Desert survivors.

  He inhaled the night air and blew out a long, sighing breath, as though he could expel the anger and bitterness his treatment had sown within him. Tonight he would make his bed out here, away from the others, alone in the land he had been told when young—by his parents, perhaps—had once belonged to his mother’s ancestors. The Amaqi had come fatherwards and crushed the gentle people living here, leaving nothing, not even a name to remember them by.

  Torve settled down to his supper: a heel of bread, lightly seasoned with cinnamon, followed by a small pouch of tepid water. The moon rose as he ate, a fragile silver disc imparting a ghostly sheen to the stone plain around him. A few paces to his left lay a small area of sand, piled against a stony ridge. It would do. He laid down his bread and shrugged off his burnous. His Defiance was a morning practice, but the stony ground had prevented him conducting the full ritual. He would take the opportunity now.

  For the first time in his life his opponent was an Omeran. No specific person, just a mélange of all those he had encountered in the last week. They sought to reject him, to push him into a state of non-being, he realised as he defended himself against random, uneven strikes. They did not want him to be Omeran. He occupied some middle place, neither Omeran nor Amaqi, and they found this threatening. A foot whistled past his ear: more than one opponent, then. He would be tested.

  Defiance had never been so difficult. They were right, they were right: he had betrayed his race by allowing the Emperor to use him; it would be better to find a way of killing himself, better to wander out into the desert until he died of thirst. He dropped onto his back, his legs whirring out in the direction of the expedition camp. Nothing held back, no attempt to establish dominance and withdraw; his kicks were aimed at chests, throats, faces twisted with hatred.

  With no warning his opponents melted away like the ghosts they were, leaving him alone, panting as he lay on the sand. No, not alone. Three small, dark-skinned children sat huddled together on the gravel, their wide eyes watching him, heads turning in unison to follow him as he levered himself from his back to his knees. Each was dressed in an identical strip of black cloth with a hole in the centre through which to put one’s head, allowing the fabric to hang down in front and behind. It was tied at the waist by a cord of rope, leaving their limbs free. Their hair lay in tight curls, uniformly short, and the moon silvered their black limbs. Two boys, leaning forward as though drinking him in with their eyes; one girl, sitting shyly back on her heels.

  One of the boys, the taller and so probably the elder, stood and took a step forward onto the sand. He raised his narrow eyebrows and stretched out a hand, palm up. Asking permission. Torve nodded, both hands pushing forward, fingers crooked. Go ahead. Show me.

  The boy glided forward, amazingly light on his feet, and beckoned the other two children to his side; then—Torve’s skin chilled as he watched—the three of them mimicked exactly the Defiance he had just completed.

  Well, not exactly. Where he had been jerky, they were smooth; where he had overbalanced, they retained their poise. Where he performed a ritual, they danced. An immensely sweet sorrow settled upon him as he watched them measure his worth in their fluid movements.

  These are not children of camp followers. Who would let these ones run about practically unclothed in the darkness, prey to wild animals? And he had not seen such faces before, wider even than his own, with the barest of turned-up snub noses, unaffected smiles playing across their lips. And the way they moved, like nothing he had ever seen.

  The three children finished their—his—dance, and smiled timidly at him. Hoping for his approval. Approval? He wanted to fall at their feet, beg them to explain to him how they turned defiance into dance.

  Or perhaps we turned dance into defiance?

  He tried to mask his shock at this thought, making his smile as welcoming as he could, concerned he might appear to them like a lynxcat or some other predator. ‘Here,’ he said, reaching behind himself, not daring to take his eyes from them, to bring out the remainder of his bread.

  The otherworldly children stared at his offering; he put it down carefully on the sand and backed away a few paces. A slender hand darted out, snaring the bread. In a moment the children were nibbling at it, laughing with sparkling dark eyes at the unfamiliar flavour, a language of sibilants flowing between them like the hiss of a fountain in the Garden of Angels. No, an unfortunate metaphor; the thought of that terrible place, of the Emperor and his victims, the children buried there, shadowed the night with ugliness. He closed his eyes and passed his hand across his face.

  When he opened his eyes the children were gone.

  They must be close by, I only closed my eyes for a moment. There was enough light to enable him to see, but absolutely no movement anywhere around him.

  His heart plummeted. A dream, a desert vision. Yet there were scuff marks in the sand, too light to have been his, his bread was gone, and a faint, strange scent hung in the air. He did not know what was possible here in the desert. While his logical mind told him to believe the evidence of his eyes, he wondered if his thoughts about ancestors had led to the dream. Perhaps he had noted the marks in the sand before his Defiance, his mind providing a fanciful interpretation.

  He lay himself down to sleep, careful not to erase the scuff marks, and dreamed of dancing limbs.

  When Torve awoke near dawn the three children had returned. They were kneeling beside what Torve first took to be a weathered rock, but was in fact an old woman in robes of black. All four faces, the three smooth and the one wrinkled, gazed at him with ardent curiosity.

  He gazed at them in turn. He found himself unable to give a name to the glow behind their eyes, the light that danced across their faces. Mischief, perhaps; a joyful enchantment, a shining innocence—no, all descriptions were inadequate. Totally bewitching. When the old woman held out a wooden bowl and beckoned for him to drink, he did not think of refusing. Goat’s milk mixed with something narcotic; it went down smoothly and lingered on his tongue.

  His grin widened as the effects of the drink whirled in his head. The woman stood and indicated he should follow. He gave the expedition and his duties no thought, and slipped away after the four dream-figures, placing his feet in their footprints, stepping on the stones they had used. Five figures bearing away from the camp, even their walk a dance to some desert rhythm.

  Torve had no idea how long the journey took, nor which direction they went; at times the sun shone from over his left shoulder, and later over his right. They left the stone plain behind and weaved a path among a dune sea. Finally they arrived at a camp. Seven low leather tents, in the process of being struck. Men, women and children robed in blue or black, the older with black head coverings, moving with efficiency and purpose in almost complete silence, as though they feared discovery. Goats and camels and donkeys, loaded up with everything these people owned, waited patiently for the order to move out.

  One of the men welcomed him, offering a hand, palm out. Torve reciprocated
, and the man let his palm touch that of the Omeran, drawing it slowly back so that his callused fingers ran across Torve’s palm, then pulled his hand away and touched his chest. Words of greeting were spoken, but Torve understood nothing. It did not seem to matter. The others left their packing and gathered around him in a circle. At the man’s signal everyone sank to the sand. Torve followed suit.

  The people told him a story. The younger children, of which there were nine, walked gracefully back and forth in front of him, as though travelling from place to place. Nomadic, bearing their burdens on their backs. Then the adults and youths, numbering about twenty, stood up and accosted the children. Their movements were jerky, awkward, a pointed caricature of the businesslike Amaqi gait. Dancing around the bemused adults, the children continued on their way, only to be confronted again at the next pass. This time one of the adults knocked a child to the ground as if using a club or a spear. The other children, wearing confusion on their faces like a mourning veil, mimed the burial of their fallen sister; while they mourned, the adults attacked them from behind. Two of the children escaped, hand in hand, darting away from the camp, while the others were beaten to the ground, where they lay still.

  Perhaps it was the effect of the narcotic, or that Torve’s imagination had been augmented by the simplicity and power of the story, but he believed he heard the thump of sword on bone and the bewildered cries of the people as they were erased from the desert by the callous Amaqi. Though the story was told in complete silence, he imagined he heard weeping, a sound of distress that pulled at him at such a fundamental level he searched in vain for something he could do to help.

  The story ended, the man—the leader of the clan, it appeared—bowed to him, every member of the clan filed past him and touched his cheek with the palm of their right hand, and the three children led him away from the camp. Through and over dunes they went, the sand scorching beneath their feet, the relentless sun hammering down on them in waves of oppressive heat; they kept to the shadows where possible, and wound long black cloths around their heads when it was not. Ahead of them the horizon danced, a lake-like shimmer. Mirage. I’ve heard of mirages, he thought woozily, his lack of head covering beginning to tell. When you see things that are not there. Like that long line of camels and people hovering well above the glittering horizon. No, that was real. The expedition. Somehow not as real as the children accompanying him—

  —who were gone.

  This day, Lenares considered, had rapidly become the hottest yet. The whole sonward third of the sky was difficult to look at; the sun blazed at them, a small, fierce white circle angry that city-dwellers in colourful clothes would dare intrude into its dominion.

  Near noon the palanquin halted. Their chatelain, the man with the fatherback accent, poked his pretty head through the curtains. ‘Ma dama Mahudia, ma dama Lenares, Captain Duon has judged the weather too hot for afternoon travel. We are resting here for two or three hours until the afternoon cool comes. Can I offer either of you some water?’

  Lenares hated the man. Saying one thing and meaning another was behaviour bound to unsettle her; and when this was a man’s only mode of behaviour, it set her teeth on edge. He might as well be saying: ‘I’m doing you a favour, one of many; why not grant me a favour in return?’ She knew what sort of favour he would want.

  Mahudia, though, was almost as bad. She spoke politely with the chatelain, but Lenares suspected she had granted him at least one favour in the past week. How else to explain the proprietorial smugness on his face, or the eagerness in her voice? Twice now, when Lenares walked through the camp on some errand of Mahudia’s, the man had cornered her, his clove-cloaked breath in her face, his hands twitching. Both times she had kicked him on the knee. Next time she would aim higher.

  ‘Water would be wonderful, thank you, Chasico,’ Mahudia trilled.

  ‘I will fetch a jug for you immediately. Would ma dama Lenares care to come with me? She must be careful to stretch her legs. It would not do for her to be carried all the way to the land of the barbarians. She would arrive there the consistency of a giant dumpling.’ He laughed genially, his mouth contorting in its lying shape under his predator eyes.

  ‘She will not be going anywhere with you, Sico the Letch,’ said a gruff voice, and a bearded man appeared at the opposite curtain. ‘Ma dama Lenares is required to attend upon ma sor Duon at the instant. She is to bring any documents or papers in her possession.’

  ‘Well then, we must make ready,’ Mahudia said, and began to smooth down her robe.

  ‘I am sorry, ma dama, but the invitation specifies ma dama Lenares and no other. We will return her to you in time for the caravan to resume its journey later this afternoon.’

  Mahudia frowned but forbore further comment. The chatelain snapped the curtain closed in what seemed like disgust, while Duon’s messenger waited patiently.

  ‘I have no documents or papers,’ Lenares said.

  ‘Oh? You are Lenares the Cosmographer?’ The man appeared surprised.

  ‘I’m a special cosmographer,’ she told him. ‘I don’t need parchment to hold my ideas. They are all stored here,’ and she tapped her forehead.

  ‘Very well, special cosmographer,’ the man said. ‘Come with me, and bring your head full of ideas with you. Captain Duon has others to meet, and does not take kindly to waiting.’

  The day outside the palanquin was intolerably hot. The intense heat made every step an effort, as though the air pressed against her limbs. Above her the bronzed sky appeared to draw closer. She knew it for a trick of the light, but the sky and the sun reminded her uncomfortably of the skin of the world and the hole in it, growing larger, nearer. There was no one specific set of numbers, no one calculation that offered her warning, but rather a combination of probabilities. How likely was this, given that, that and that? The strange numbers she had invented to summarise these ever-shifting probabilities ticked away constantly at the back of her head, their overall shape bearing a summary colour she had come to regard as predictive. When enough unlikely things intersected in the environment around her, the shape attenuated and changed colour.

  As it did now.

  A surge of red filled her mind. The shape changed to a funnel, with the narrow end pointing towards her. At the same time a sharp pain seized her temples and squeezed. She stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, cutting her left palm on an unusually sharp stone.

  ‘Are you all right, ma dama?’ the messenger enquired, a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, her words partly mangled by a suddenly thick tongue. Could the hole reach into her mind, or was this shock due to the swiftness of the change?

  ‘Very well,’ the man said, and withdrew his hand.

  She clambered to her feet and sucked at her bleeding palm. The pain in her head died away somewhat, but the redness continued to pulse in time with her rapid heartbeat. She could see nothing nearby to account for the sudden change, even though she knew the hole was drawing closer.

  ‘Take me to Captain Duon, quickly,’ she gasped out. ‘He has to warn…’ Who? About what? Her numbers were not yet specific enough to be of any use.

  ‘That’s where we’re going,’ said the messenger. ‘If you would care to follow me?’

  They approached a small knot of angry men. ‘Slaves come and go,’ said one man, a gourd in his hand. ‘We buried our Omeran last night. That’s why we want to use the Emperor’s pet.’

  The last two words pulsed bright red in Lenares’ mind. She halted just outside the circle of men, who were gathered around a well.

  ‘Ma dama, we do not have time—’

  ‘No!’ she snapped, slapping at the messenger. ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘You can’t have him because we cannot find him,’ said a man in the blue robe of the Elboran Alliance. ‘We have men searching the camp for him, and when he is found he is likely to be incapacitated for a few days. So find another to carry your water.’

  ‘It pleases you to humble t
he Emperor in his absence?’ the man with the gourd asked.

  ‘As it would you. A small piece in an elaborate game, to be sure, but we have made the Emperor’s pet ours to use.’

  Something significant was being said, Lenares sensed, but she was slow to work out what it was.

  ‘Or would be, if you could find him!’ The men around the well laughed.

  ‘Excuse me, ma sor,’ Lenares said, her tongue still unwieldy. ‘Excuse me!’ The men moved aside, thinking she had come for water.

  Lenares faced the man from the Elboran Alliance. He was a big man, dark-faced and with a well-trimmed beard. She cleared her throat. ‘You are looking for the Omeran called Torve?’

  ‘We are, girl. What of it?’

  ‘Ma dama Lenares, the Emperor’s cosmographer, not “girl”, if you please,’ she said, her tone occasioning a lift in the Elboran’s eyebrows.

  ‘The numbers girl,’ someone muttered. ‘The one who put the wind up old Tumille.’

  ‘Doesn’t look so pretty without that dress,’ said a voice behind her. Lenares did not turn around.

  ‘As you will, ma dama Lenares,’ the Elboran said with exaggerated courtesy. ‘What is this about the Emperor’s Omeran?’

  ‘He is currently serving the cosmographers, ma sor,’ Lenares said, the lie coming from her swollen tongue with difficulty; but immediately it was spoken, the pulsing red light in her head halved in intensity.

  ‘Oh? And when will he be returned? Ma dama?’

  ‘Ma sor, there is no one to return him to.’ She hoped she had read the conversation correctly. ‘He is here to serve the Emperor, not any particular group.’