by Ben Blake
*
He sent a message to Darien, telling the Lord Marshal he was taking a few days off. Baruch had it coming; the Hand really was his life, and he rarely took the time to go fishing, or plant cabbages in his garden. He went to the stables, his mind whirling as he gathered tack and a saddle and went back to the stalls.
Calesh was back. That was something Baruch had never thought to see, though it wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong. After three years, he still couldn’t quite grow accustomed to the sight of Luthien in the green robe of an Elite. When they met up they still went to taverns, and it felt strange to drink wine while Luthien stuck to tisanes and fruit juice, and dined on salad and nuts. But Baruch was certain that no threat, however severe, would be enough to make Luthien abandon his vows and take up arms again. From what Japh had said, it seemed that Calesh wasn’t convinced of that yet.
“I was told to take the same message to him,” the boy had said, when Baruch tried to save him a wasted trip to Parrien. “So I will. Whether he comes or not, I’ll do as I promised I would.”
The boy might make a decent soldier one day. The short sword at his hip was still so new to him that his movements with it were awkward; once he’d tripped on the scabbard and fallen against a wall. But he had the right spirit, and in the end survival in a battle was as much due to courage and heart as it was to ability. You couldn’t teach those. The Hand spent years training its recruits, building up their strength and skill, yet even so a few of them froze when they first found themselves on a battlefield. It was the smell of slaughter that did it, Baruch believed. Up until that stink hit the nose it was just a game, played with swords and armour but still a game, and somehow not real. When you smelled the spilled insides of shrieking men, it was suddenly real all at once.
That was when you found out who might be able to survive. It was those men who, leaden-armed and soul weary after three hours of constant fighting, found a fire still burning in them and managed to keep going. Those without it, however gifted, ended in the dirt with the dead men.
After Gidren Field, Calesh had told the company to just lay down and rest, right in the middle of a valley thick with dead and dying men. And they had done it, sleeping through the pitiful pleas and screams of the wounded. Battle did that to men. Something in them grew hard. It was learning how to live with death, and yet still remember how to live, that broke so many of them.
One thing young men never realised, or believed if they were told, was that battle wasn’t about heroism and glory. It was about staying alive no matter what came; sieges inside the walls and out, standing with spears levelled as heavy cavalry charged in, or trying to hold a company together in the middle of a swirling storm of steel. A good soldier was simply someone who could stay alive through all that, and find the courage in himself to face it again.
Baruch had only ever known two men he would call heroes. One was Cammar a Amalik, captain of the Nazir infantry of the Madai. His men claimed he walked across water and sharpened his blade on the rays of the rising sun. They would follow him into the desert with no water, or into battle against an endless sea of foes. In the battle of Azerun they had shattered twice their number of Justified, strewing the dry ground with dead men. At Gidren Field, shortly afterwards, three regiments of Justified had shifted and begun to shrink back at the mere sight of the Nazir starting forward, threatening to leave a wide hole in the centre of the All-Church army. Amalik had swung his men straight towards the gap. The rest of the Crusaders hesitated, on the point of flight.
Then the second hero, unasked, raised a cry and charged.
Baruch remembered plunging forward as well, the rest of the Hand’s soldiers behind and alongside him, barely keeping something like order as they raced across the broken ground. Shields went up as bowstrings sang, somewhere to the left of them. A heartbeat passed, then two, before arrows rattled off metal. Baruch heard one pass close by, whining like metal on glass. The Nazir turned to meet the threat in perfect ranks, unruffled, frighteningly competent. Amalik was in the centre, just ahead of his green banner marked with a flowering palm. And Calesh, who had given that shout and charged, was aiming right for him, three paces ahead of anyone else in the company.
Around them the battle seemed to stand still, everyone in both armies turning to see. Then the last few yards between the companies were gone, and men crashed together with a volley of shouts and ringing steel.
That was the day when Baruch lost half his ear. A Madai sword struck his helmet before he could duck and cracked it, driving torn steel into the side of Baruch’s head. His vision blurred and he stumbled back, cursing, blinded on one side by blood. He was too stunned to feel much pain, but he was afraid the eye might be gone. The Nazir warrior came after him and then the huge shape of Raigal Tai was there, bounding forward with his axe coming down. The Nazir collapsed, cut almost in half despite his armour, and Raigal’s backswing sent another man flying. The big man grinned ferociously through a beard soaked in blood – his own helmet was gone, somewhere – but Baruch wasn’t looking at him.
He was looking past, towards the green banner, and Calesh. The tall man delivered a short, chopping stroke, reversed his sword, chopped again. And Cammar a Amalik went down amidst his men, immortal or no, sunlight-sharpened sword dropping from his fingers as he fell. Baruch could see the splash of blood on his surcoat. The Madai nearby screamed in horror and disbelief, and all at once they were running, as though their spirit had been lost along with their captain. They even abandoned the green banner, something no Madai ever did. Luthien pulled it out of the dust and snapped the staff across his knee, a gesture of utter contempt, but one hardly spoken of, afterwards.
Soldiers on both sides remembered those two quick, hacking blows, and the fall of a champion. And they remembered Calesh, raising his bloodied sword to point at the fleeing Nazir. The emergence of a new champion, standing astride the body of the old, while a hot wind off the mountains whipped dust devils along the space between the two armies.
Baruch shook his head. He had a hundred memories of Tura d’Madai, some pleasant and others less so, but none more vivid than that. There had been talk among the army’s leaders of commissioning a painting of the scene, an idea that foundered on Calesh’s indifference and the opposition of the Justified. It was their men who had been humiliated at Azerun, after all, and who had shrunk back like dying flowers when the Nazir approached them at Gidren Field. They were not eager to be reminded of it.
A bard here in Sarténe had written a ballad around the scene, though. Ando something or other, if Baruch’s memory didn’t fail him. He hadn’t heard the song, which was likely the usual sort of romanticised mush written by fools who’d never breathed the carrion stench of a battlefield, but if word spread that Calesh was back home it would be impossible to avoid. Second-rate bards would sing it three times a night at every hostel and tavern in Mayence. It was enough to make Baruch glad he was leaving the city.
With his mount saddled he appropriated a pack horse and loaded it with his armour, carefully wrapped in muslin and then oiled leather to keep out the rain. He couldn’t remember having used the breastplate once since he came back from Tura d’Madai, six years before. After a quick trip to the larders he’d added enough dried food to keep him going for a few days. There were benefits, he decided as he rode out of the barracks, to being a soldier in the city rather than a Watchman, who would have had to pay for a pack animal and supplies. As it was the purse behind his belt was nearly full, and he had some coins registered with the Notaries in case of emergency. He’d didn’t need to go to them yet. The money he had would keep his belly full for a while.
On impulse, he reined the horses into a narrow side street near the racing track, and hitching them to a rail he went into a circular temple to pray. It wasn’t something he usually did: he preferred to leave the god-bothering to Luthien. The small man prayed enough for half an army, after all, and surely even God didn’t have time to listen to every plea mortals made
. God knew what you did anyway, and no amount of begging would make an iota of difference to His plans, so if God was in your heart then why bother to pray?
But this time it was different. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Baruch thought he could feel a quickening in his blood, or perhaps in the air around him.
Calesh was back. They were four again.
Passing through the gate in the north wall, he began to whistle.
Five
The Orange Groves
Calesh assured her they could trust Raigal Tai. Very well, then; she would trust him. Farajalla knew how deep her husband’s bond with his old comrades ran in him. It was a thing never to be questioned, never doubted, as much a part of him as his soul, or his bones, and she could not be part of it.
She held his heart, though. She couldn’t doubt that. Calesh’s love was a shining truth in her life, bright rainbow colours reaching into every part of her, everything she did and thought and felt. So he was part of a close fellowship of men; well, he was allowed that. A wife could not be everything to her husband. He needed some things she couldn’t give.
In honesty, she found that… difficult. It had been easier in Tura d’Madai, when she was the sole focus of his love, and his friends no more than cherished memories. Farajalla didn’t speak of that though. Her husband needed to know she trusted him still, and loved him as much as ever. And she did love him, fiercely and with all the heart she had. She would not let him be harmed, whether the All-Church sent an army or not. For him she would stand against the world with a dagger in her hand, and never complain.
So Raigal had stayed in the ruined windmill, up on the ridge overlooking a narrow, deep valley, with five thousand soldiers around him and a quarter of a million gold sesters in promissory notes stacked against a wall in the upstairs room. And she was trusting him with that.
It was strange, the things love could lead you to do.
The hillside was a quilt of fields, mostly olive groves at this height, gnarled knots of root driving into the soil to anchor them to the steep slopes. Orange orchards stood further down and then ploughed fields at the bottom, either ready to be planted or already fresh-sown. It reminded her of home a little, though it was certainly more fertile, and the scents were different. She inhaled deeply, tasting rosemary and tarragon, swift and sharp on her tongue.
In the valley houses clustered to form a half-hearted village, with farmhouses scattered apparently at random among fields that climbed the lower slopes of the ridge. On the far side, facing north, the hill had been left in its natural state, a ragged spill of loose stones and hardy bushes. It gave the vale a lopsided look, like an unfinished sculpture.
“There,” Calesh said, when they were a little lower down. He pointed to his right. “That was my father’s farm. The house with the yellow gate.”
Farajalla stopped to shade her eyes against the afternoon sunlight. She picked out the gate at once, though what had once been a splash of canary yellow was now a pale peach, desultory against the green of trees and vineyards. Behind it stood a ramshackle house, roofed with reddish slates, its walls seeming made entirely of ivy. It was tiny. She wondered if there was only one room, or two very small ones.
“It looks very peaceful,” she said tactfully.
“It looks like a shack,” Calesh said. He wasn’t wearing his armour, though his sword still hung at his waist. He’d stopped to stare at the house, frowning slightly. “A rundown little shack. Isn’t that peculiar? Even in my memories, I never saw it that way before.”
“Sometimes memories play tricks. You’re seeing with fresh eyes now.”
He nodded slowly. “I’m not the same man. Not the youth who left here eleven years ago.”
“Who owns the farm now?”
“After my father died it passed to me.” He shrugged. “I sold it to buy my first set of mail, a sword, and a horse. Not much to show for my father’s life, was it?” He shook his head. “And at that, I needn’t have done it. The Hand supplies all recruits with weapons and armour better than anything I could have bought myself. I didn’t know that at the time.”
“You sound as though it still bothers you,” she said carefully. She’d never seen Calesh this way before. He hadn’t looked at her since he first spoke.
“I suppose it does,” he said, and then he did look at her, sensing her disquiet. “It shouldn’t, I know. My life has gone another way since I was last here, and it was a long time ago. No point living in the mud of the past.” His lips quirked in the not-quite smile she so loved in him. “I’ve become a hero, of all things. No doubt it’s silk sheets and palaces for me now.”
She laughed. “Last night we slept in a derelict windmill, and the night before in a little inn huddled tight against the sea. I haven’t seen a silk sheet since we left Harenc. Have you been hoarding them for yourself?”
“Of course I have,” he said, with a proper smile now.
“Then you owe me a forfeit.” She grinned back, glad to see him more like his usual self. “What will it be? Maybe I’ll ask you to sing me to sleep every night for a month.”
“Better not,” he said. “There’s a reason Raigal calls me Bullfrog. And knowing you, the forfeit will be to make love to you all night with a rose clenched in my teeth, and make you purr like a cat.”
“You don’t need the rose,” she said, “and as for the rest, you already do that. Didn’t you know?”
He turned to face her. Not a muscle moved in his face, but she saw something flash in his eyes. Everything fell away from her. The hillside, the valley, might not have existed. There was only him.
“By my heart and eyes,” he said, his voice thick, “I could take you now, right here on the hillside.”
Warmth rushed into her, flushing her throat and stomach and thighs. Damn him for being able to do that to her, with just a few words, or a glance across a crowded room. It was suddenly hard to breathe. She pushed all that away and made herself smile at him, as cool and calm as a lady of the court, bewitching without being bewitched.
“I’m not sure that would be wise,” she said. “We’re trying not to attract attention, after all, and the way you yelp and gasp would bring every yokel for miles around.”
Startled, Calesh broke into laughter, which gave Farajalla the chance to draw a steadying breath without being noticed. Her mother had once told her that real love was like this, sharp daggers in the heart and hot enough to burn, but that it faded after a year or two. She’d been half right. It was all daggers and heat, but it hadn’t faded in the least.
“Tonight,” she said when his mirth faded. “If you can wait that long, and be extremely quiet. That windmill isn’t large enough for privacy.”
“I can wait that long,” he said. “Barely. The sweetest water is the glass that ends a long thirst.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So you say. As though you’ve been thirsty once since we were married.”
“I’m terribly weak,” he conceded. His gaze slipped away from her, down into the valley. A hint of his earlier distance came back. “Come on. We need to move if we’re to be back at the windmill by sundown.”
They went on down the hillside. Soon they reached a field of apples trees and entered the shade beneath, hidden from prying eyes. Even after all these years away, Calesh obviously knew where he was going. He led her through the orchard, close enough to a farmhouse that Farajalla could see it through a thin screen of branches, and then into an orange grove whose trees were barely taller than she was. A pig with brown stripes on brown looked up from snuffling at roots to give them a glance, then went back to more interesting things.
“There,” Calesh said again.
Ahead of them a low wall cut across their path, built of dry stones fitted more or less together. When Farajalla stepped atop it the slab moved under her foot, almost tipping her over. She jumped hastily down on the far side and looked around, still in the shade of the orange trees.
The curved wall of a building stood ten yards in fr
ont of her, white plaster shining in the sun. It was plainly made, and devoid of even the simplest decoration. Only grass grew in the space enclosed by the wall. Here and there it covered a mound, each one marked at the eastern end with a slate, carved into an oval and engraved.
Calesh stepped down beside her. His face was very pale. When he moved on Farajalla hung back a pace, letting him go first, if not quite alone. He walked up to the rounded wall of the temple and knelt beside a grassy mound with an aged wooden board at one end. After a moment his fingers reached out to touch the grass, a bare kiss of his skin.
“Hello, brother,” he said softly. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”