Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  It was discernibly drier here in the Edgelands. Stony streambeds held only a trickle of water, then none. The grasses clumped together in small brown huddles, narrow leaves and spikes closed against the bullying sun. A light dew would fall overnight, rising again as a thin mist in the hour after dawn. Every morning the sun arrived with more ferocity, relentlessly searching for hidden reservoirs of water. Unlike the travellers, the land had no wagons in which to hide, and was baked dry. Soil cracked, allowing the heat to penetrate the ground; the ends of the cracks flaked and crumbled, continuing the process by which soil turned to sand.

  The donkey wilted noticeably. Robal rigged up a shade for her eyes, a clever combination of twine and canvas that kept the worst of the sun off her face. He noted with satisfaction that Kilfor and his father made a similar device for their pony. The guardsman considered making one for himself; he found he had to constantly shade his own eyes as they ground their way southwards towards the sun.

  The man from Haurn walked beside Kilfor’s wagon, showing no difficulty in keeping up. The more Robal thought about this, the more unlikely it seemed. This was a man from the cold northern climes, where snow covered the ground at least three months out of twelve. How, then, could he continue to match pace with beasts of burden in this arid environment? Yet there he strode, talking with Stella and Sauxa who rode on the wagon.

  Robal could not pin down the source of his resentment towards Heredrew. The man behaved pleasantly, spoke with intelligence and good sense, and did more than his share of the work setting up and dismantling the camp, hunting for game and carrying water on the occasions they found a well. But he seemed too knowledgeable to be a first-time traveller, showing experience beyond his years. He behaved more like a Trader, one of those who chose the cover of merchanting to conduct spying missions for their sovereign. As a guard Robal had met a few of these people. King Leith’s father had been a Trader, apparently, in the employ of the King of Firanes.

  The guardsman would wait until Heredrew provided him with more substantial evidence. Should Robal voice his unease now, Stella would think him jealous; and to be fair, his feelings for her were confused and not to be relied upon. These feelings might well be influencing his view of this tall, handsome stranger who seemed so easily to captivate the Falthan queen.

  Robal admired Stella greatly. Love was perhaps too strong a word, but to be near her was to experience the world a different way. In the past, he had listened with little tolerance to the romantic maunderings of his fellow guardsmen. He apologised to them in his mind. Now I know what you were trying to say. She knew of his feelings for her, but had not given any real indication whether she returned them. Certainly nothing a man could hold on to. A softening around the eyes, a gentle smile: these were things that could easily be misinterpreted.

  As Conal the priest showed daily. The fool mooned over Stella, casting cow’s-eyes at her whenever he thought she might be looking. He favoured her with his ill-informed, opinionated views about the world at every opportunity. All because she had thanked him for saving her life. He behaved exactly like a prickly desert plant: uncomfortable to be near, but with a small fall of rain would blossom into a gaudy flower until withered by the sun. It seemed only a matter of time before the priest proposed marriage to her.

  Stella didn’t seem to notice. She talked with him for some time each day, telling him more of her story—though not while Heredrew was nearby. She retained at least some sense. Robal listened whenever he could, whenever other duties did not demand his time—not that Conal performed any other duties.

  You are a jealous idiot, he told himself.

  The wagons crossed yet another broken ridge. The last of the spiny grasses were now behind them; they had completed the crossing of the Edgelands. Ahead lay Desicca, the Deep Desert.

  A chaotic landscape spread before them. Huge untidy heaps of debris dotted a rubble-filled plain, sloping away into the distance where, at a much lower level than where they stood, a cliff rose cleanly into the clear sky. The plateau behind was broken by backlit rock towers, reminding Robal of Instruere viewed from the southern bank of the Aleinus River. Why, there was the Hall of Meeting, though obviously fallen victim to an earthquake; over there the Tower of Worship, leaning tipsily to one side. This wasn’t how he had imagined the desert.

  Travellers’ tales spoke of enormous dune seas, slow-moving sand waves inexorably smothering villages and oases. Of sterile landscapes, of the complete absence of living things. But here, in a crevice, a small acacia thorn bush grew. It even showed a few tiny leaves, reflecting recent rain. The thorns had not protected the bush from grazing animals, however. Tracks went from bush to bush; though none of the animals were evident, the desert clearly harboured life.

  Things are never as they seem, the desert seemed to be saying to him. Something appears inhospitable, yet harbours life. Learn your lesson, put aside your prejudices.

  He could make an effort to accept the stranger from Haurn—Heredrew, call him by name—and even the pr—Conal. He would remain vigilant: the desert was a dangerous place, and only taught a lesson once. But for now he would extend his friendship to the others in the party.

  First it was time to farewell Kilfor and Sauxa. The travellers continued a little way into the desert, reaching the partial shelter afforded by one of the debris mounds, then dismounted and made ready their goodbyes.

  ‘Sauxa and I have been talking,’ Kilfor said as they gathered together.

  ‘All you ever do,’ his father mumbled, but his heart wasn’t in the insult. Kilfor ignored him.

  ‘We wish to continue with you,’ he said in a rush. ‘I know it will put some pressure on the supplies, but we are confident we can bring down a gazelle or two to supplement the fare we provided you with. It’s been a while since either of us left the steppes, and neither of us has been far into the desert. What it comes down to is this: we’d like to see Dhauria and the Vale of Youth with our own eyes. Call it a pilgrimage, whatever you like.’ He ran out of words, but the hopeful expression on his face remained.

  His father maintained an air of studied indifference, but Robal knew better.

  ‘Well…’ Robal said, scratching his chin in an exaggerated fashion, as though on the cusp of a difficult decision. ‘It would be a sore trial on our already stretched patience. Stella, could you abide a few more days of coarse Austrau chatter?’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Goodness me, how much more do you expect me to bear?’

  ‘But how will the wagons travel across the desert? Surely the wheels will sink into the sand?’ The priest had that superior look on his face as he asked the question, the one that made Robal’s fists itch.

  ‘Go and have a close look at the wheels, friend,’ Kilfor said quietly. ‘Wide-built rims, designed to travel in anything short of quicksand. And a desert doesn’t have much sand, actually. Mostly rock and stones. We shouldn’t have a problem unless we encounter a sandstorm.’

  ‘Ah, I…Forgive my ignorance,’ Conal said.

  No one responded, no one said they forgave him, which pleased the guardsman. The silence stretched on.

  ‘All right,’ Kilfor said with a false heaviness, his face a wide smile. ‘I’ll just turn Bessa around and we’ll make our lonely way back to Chardzou.’ He made to step forward, moving with overstated slowness.

  ‘You’re going to make us beg, you rogue.’ Robal went over and hugged Kilfor. ‘Stay with us as long as you wish.’ To his embarrassment he found tears forming in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t squeeze me so hard, you fool,’ Kilfor said. ‘You’re a big man. I’ll be no use to you broken.’

  They made camp under the cliff, and that night they set a large fire and drank some of Kilfor’s cognac while watching the flickering shadows on the rocks behind them. Later they sang together, the droning songs of the southern plainsmen interspersed with the few lively ditties Robal knew without filthy words, and Heredrew taught them a resistance song of Tor Hailan. Stella had none of the cognac
, Robal noted, but otherwise seemed to enjoy herself. Not entirely a tragic figure, then. He watched Heredrew capering to ‘I Met Her In The Alley’ and the last of his doubts dissipated.

  The following morning the travellers struck out towards Tammanoussa, the largest oasis east of Ghadir Foum and the intersecting place of all important paths in this part of the Deep Desert. They crossed the Noussa Plateau in the furnace of midday—a mistake, Kilfor later admitted, as it took a great deal out of them. Only the desert lizards shared the plateau with the travellers, though a few birds hung in the thermals above, perhaps wondering when the foolish humans would collapse.

  They rested in the heat of the second day, travelling only in the hours around dawn and dusk. Thus they found themselves approaching Tammanoussa as darkness spread across the desert, making setting up camp and gathering firewood difficult. Robal helped Sauxa unload the donkey and the pony. They hobbled the beasts with short ropes and left them to graze and drink at the large pool at the centre of the oasis.

  Heredrew assisted Robal with some overdue repairs on the trap. A few of the metal rings through which were threaded the ropes holding the canvas to the tray had come loose; a couple could be fixed easily, but three needed new canvas sewn into the old. The northerner’s long fingers proved nimble and dextrous as well as strong, forcing the large needle through two layers of canvas with ease, even in the poor light thrown by the fire.

  ‘Interesting skills they teach in Tor Hailan,’ Robal remarked.

  ‘Not a lot else to do while waiting for an invasion that will never happen,’ came the reply.

  ‘Look, I apologise for mistrusting you. I’m a guard; it’s in my nature and training to be suspicious of strangers.’

  ‘I understand,’ the tall man said, his voice as rich as syrup. ‘I, too, am a guard. Let us say no more about it.’

  They reached the far edge of the plateau late the next day. Here the spine of central Faltha finally gave way, collapsing three thousand feet down to a vast white-sand sea studded with black debris cones. The effect was bizarre and unsettling. Heat shimmered across the horizon, hinting at true seas but offering nothing more substantial than a mirage.

  The desert’s second lesson. If you see what you wish for, it is likely to be an illusion. Don’t trust your senses.

  But what sort of teaching was that? It ran entirely in contrast to the first lesson. Perhaps that would be the third lesson: There are no lessons to be learned from the desert. To trust or not to trust. It seemed to have nothing to do with facts and everything to do with faith.

  ‘Cast your eye along the ridge below us and out across the sands.’ Kilfor stood at his shoulder. ‘Perhaps a league or more out—look, can you see it? Watch closely.’

  Robal watched, and eventually his eyes picked up movement through the shimmering air. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Could be a herd of gazelle, but we don’t think so, not down there in that inferno. The old man says it’s a camel train, heading our way. All we have to do is wait. By this time tomorrow, or even earlier, it will be upon us.’

  It seemed Stella couldn’t wait. Early the next morning the travellers climbed down from the plateau into what Robal had always imagined desert to be. Heat so intense it stifled thought; sand hot enough to blister unprotected skin; and worse, a steady wind moving a man-high carpet of sand across their path from right to left. A profoundly inimical landscape. They ventured a little way into this harsh, unfriendly world, then halted.

  ‘We won’t survive a day of this,’ Kilfor said as they gathered behind the wagons. ‘The sand will kill the animals, then us.’

  ‘Then we wait until the wind stops,’ said Stella. ‘It can’t blow like this forever.’

  And if it does, only you will be here to see it cease, Robal thought.

  At that moment shadows emerged through the sand haze: a camel, then another and another. The train had veered from the path to pass the wagons.

  ‘A day and a half to Tammanoussa,’ Kilfor cried helpfully to the shrouded figure astride the lead camel.

  Immediately the figure leapt from the beast and unwound the cloth wrapped around his face. The man was young, fair of face, and not at all the sort of weatherbeaten fellow Robal would have expected in the desert. He looked more like a northman.

  He spoke a few words in an unknown tongue, then called what sounded like a name. Another figure approached and unwound her face-covering.

  ‘Tammanoussa?’ she said, her eyes filled with hope. ‘The oasis is close by?’

  ‘Indeed, yes,’ Kilfor reassured her. ‘We camped there the night before last. You are at the foot of the Noussa Plateau.’

  She turned and barked out instructions to those behind her, then addressed Kilfor. ‘We have an injured man who needs treatment. Are any of your party physicians?’

  Robal’s eyes narrowed: he had heard accents from all over Faltha, but not one like this.

  ‘Alas, no. My father can do a little doctoring—’

  Heredrew stepped forward, his height eliciting a start from the woman. ‘I am a physician,’ he announced. ‘Show me your wounded man.’

  Robal closed his eyes. This was too much: would their companion next present himself as a swordmaster, a jeweller or a midwife?

  Stella went with him. The two of them accompanied the woman into the sand wind, vanishing from sight. Robal checked on Lindha, ensuring the donkey did not suffer too greatly in the annoying wind.

  A woman’s cry knifed through the desert air. Even before his conscious mind recognised it as Stella, Robal had dropped the handful of oats he was feeding the donkey and was rushing along the camel train towards her. His mind filled with a dozen different developments, most involving Heredrew threatening his queen. I should not have let them out of my sight…

  He found her standing outside a covered wagon, her face pressed into Heredrew’s chest. Robal grabbed at her shoulder. ‘What is it? What has he done?’

  ‘Drew has done nothing,’ Stella said, turning her wet-cheeked face towards him. ‘The man who is injured is the man I wished to meet in Dhauria. He…he is near death.’

  Cursing himself for jumping to such a foolish conclusion, Robal pulled aside the cover and looked down upon the ancient man lying there, then turned his head away.

  ‘He was caught in a desert storm,’ Stella said.

  ‘It happened a week since,’ the woman from the camel train added. ‘We set out for Instruere six weeks ago, and last week, while camping on the shores of Soba salt lake, a courier stopped on his way east. “The Falthan king is dead,” he told us, and our master wept.

  ‘Since then he has driven us by the force of his will. He fears for the safety of the Falthan queen. We expected the king to live another year, at the least. So when the great sandstorm came he took a gamble and pushed on into it. We were eventually forced to take shelter, but when we counted ourselves we realised we had lost a man. My master went out into the storm to retrieve him. We found my master the next morning as you see him, on the threshold of death.’

  ‘Oh, Stella, I’m sorry,’ Robal said. His sympathy was the only thing he could offer. He held her hand as Heredrew stepped forward to examine the injured man.

  His exposed skin had literally been sandblasted away. Worst were his eyes: what had once been clear orbs were now completely opaque. Robal could only imagine the agony the man must have suffered.

  ‘Oh, Phemanderac,’ Stella said brokenly. ‘Look what Leith and I have done to you.’

  CHAPTER 19

  THE VALE OF YOUTH

  FEW OF THE TRAVELLERS slept that night. Stella was inconsolable in her grief. The others suggested she find a place to sleep, to relax until morning, telling her she could not help Phemanderac by staying awake, that there was nothing she could do. They meant well, but none of them understood.

  Now Leith had gone, Phemanderac was the last left alive of those involved in the Falthan War, save herself. The last of the Company. The only one remaining to whom she could talk about
her feelings, who would understand her troubles. Tender-hearted Phemanderac, who had loved Leith more than she herself had.

  The gentle scholar would be approaching a hundred years of age, but had kept himself in relatively good health. Until now.

  If he died, she would be alone.

  So she stood by the wagon through the night, braving the relentless wind, feeling it pile sand up over her feet as she waited. Occasionally Heredrew would allow her in to check on his patient, to find there had been no change in his condition.

  ‘He requires salves beyond my reach,’ Drew explained to her. ‘I am doing what I can for him, which is mostly easing his pain. I fear we will have to decide whether to take him east or west; and it is my opinion that he will not survive either journey. I am sorry to bear this news, as it is clear you know this man. But death would be a mercy.’

  ‘It would not,’ she said with all the ferocity she could muster. ‘You do not know him. I have seen him keep a hall filled with people silent for hours with his voice or his harp. He is one of the few men I know with the patience to make children laugh.’ Her voice steadied as she revived a long-forgotten memory. ‘He is a philosopher without peer; already they talk about him in the same breath as Hauthius and Pyrinius, the two greatest scholars since the Fall of the Vale. He is the link between Faltha and Dhauria, our best hope of understanding what really happened in the Falthan War. He is priceless, do you understand?’

  Drew looked at her with a faintly amused expression, though his eyes burned bright. ‘Such passion! I am overmatched. And rare for a farmer’s child from troublesome, rebellious southern Austrau to care so deeply for Falthan matters. There is more to you, Bandy, than you choose to reveal.’

  ‘This is not about me, not now. We might talk later of an exchange of secrets, warrior-physician of Haurn. In the meantime, heal my friend.’

  He nodded, acknowledging the point. Secrets kept might become secrets shared.