by Ben Blake
*
“He was eight,” he said. “We used to play in the orange groves behind our house. Father wouldn’t let us swim unless he was with us. A girl drowned in the river around the time I was born, apparently. I grew up with tales of Jinny Greenteeth, a spirit that lurked in the water and waited for the chance to seize small children and pull them in.”
They were sitting with their backs against the dry stone wall, facing the temple and the graves. To their right the sun sank towards the horizon. Everywhere was the buzz of cicadas, though none were in sight. Farajalla pushed braids away from her face and let him talk.
“So we played in the grove. Warriors and kings, mostly. I suppose little boys everywhere do that. We’d stalk each other through the trees, pretending to be heroes on a quest to rescue a princess. Tavi used to hate being the evil guard, so a lot of the time I let him be the hero. The good warrior always had to win, of course.” He looked away, up at the orange groves and back into memory. “I can’t remember how many times I pretended to die here.”
Make-believe heroes, rescuing a make-believe princess. Not guessing that one day, in the distant unimaginable time of adulthood, one of them would grow up to be a real hero, marry a beautiful lady in a distant land, and discover how different reality was from games.
And the other one…
“The plague came when I was ten,” Calesh said. “It wasn’t much of a plague, really. Father said he’d seen a lot worse. The three of us went to the funeral of an old man from the village, and later our neighbour Charn’s mother. That’s her grave,” he added, pointing. “A couple of other people died as well. All of them were better than sixty, and most were frail.”
He leaned against her, resting his head on her shoulder. Farajalla stroked his hair, waiting for him to speak again, but for a long time he said nothing. The cicadas sang on. Voices drifted up from the village, together with one man’s heavy laughter, and behind them the pig snuffled happily. The shadows of the trees were nearly at the temple wall.
“Tavi got sick the week after his birthday,” Calesh said at last. Her hand went on stroking his hair. “At first Father thought it was just a cold. For a week Tavi sneezed and coughed, and nobody thought anything of it until he complained that his arms were aching. Father made him take off his shirt, and saw his armpits were black with plague sores.”
“He sent me to stay with Charn. I wasn’t allowed near the house at all, even in the garden. Every evening I’d creep through the orange grove until I could see the window of the room Tavi and I shared, and I’d sit there until it grew dark, listening. If I heard him moan or cry out it meant he was still alive.” Calesh stopped, swallowed. “Then one day it was Father who cried out. It sounded as though his throat was torn in half.”
He closed his eyes. Nothing had shown in his voice, but a tear ran down his cheek. Most westerners let their emotions rage, but Calesh might have been born Madai, he controlled himself so well.
“We buried my brother that evening,” Calesh said. “Father wept so hard he could barely stand. I remember I kept looking around for Tavi, expecting him to spring out of the trees and say it had all been a joke. When they put him in the ground I screamed, I think. I know I did.” He paused to draw an unsteady breath. “Afterwards I ran into the orange grove and smashed every branch I could reach. Father never even lectured me for that.”
She kissed the top of his head and put her other arm around him. After a moment she felt his arms come up and encircle her waist.
They had sat the same way once before, in the mountains south of Harenc, only then it was she who wept for her lost family as Madai combed the burned ruins where the castle had once stood. Losing her father had been hard enough, but parents were expected to die before their children, so a part of the heart was always prepared for it. The loss of a sibling was different, sharper somehow. Farajalla still thought of her half-brothers, tall and young and proud, but fated never to watch their own children grow. They had used to give her sweets, when she was small. When the army came they stood on the walls and were lost.
She’d never known what happened to her mother.
She wondered if the pain would fade, when she and Calesh had a child of their own. Perhaps new life would make the deaths more bearable. In truth, Farajalla had expected to have a baby by now, after three years of marriage: her father’s wives and mistresses had spawned children like plums dropping from a tree. Women in Tura d’Madai never had to worry about fertility. Farajalla had begun to wonder about her own though, a worm of unease gnawing at her mind. What would Calesh do, if she couldn’t give him the children he longed for so desperately?
“I know my brother isn’t here,” Calesh said softly, breaking into her thoughts. “Even though I spoke as though he is. He’s gone to the next world, by God’s grace. I always thought I knew where I would go after my own death. But then I went to the East, and I realised that the All-Church’s god is the same as ours, and the Madai’s. They just worship him differently. And kill each other over details.” He shook his head. “Now I don’t know where souls go, and I want to cling to this world while I can, for as long as I can.”
He straightened, pulling away from her, and looking across the graveyard he said, “Hello, Charn.”
Farajalla gave a start of surprise. An old man was standing by the wall of the temple, staring as though shocked to find them there. In the last of the sunlight the creases in his face were plain. He looked like an ancient walnut. The blue eyes that stared from those wrinkles were bright and clear though, and after a moment they narrowed in recognition.
“Calesh,” he said in a voice like rasping sand. “By my heart and eyes, you’re Calesh Saissan, aren’t you?”
“Your eyes are still good.” Calesh climbed to his feet. “And you look as well as ever, Charn.”
“Liar. I’ve one foot in the next world already, and I look like it.” He studied the younger man for a moment. “Your face isn’t any worse than it was, though. It’s good to see you made it back alive.”
“And with a wife,” Calesh said as she stood up. “Farajalla.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said.
Charn glanced at her, then back to Calesh. “A Madai? I bet the All-Church just loves you for that.”
“They don’t need other reasons not to love me,” Calesh said. “We’re not staying, Charn. I just wanted to stop by and speak to my brother.”
The old man nodded. “He’ll be glad of that, I reckon. But I’m surprised you’re here, Calesh. I thought you’d never come back from the desert. Did you leave the Hand, then?”
“No,” he said. “I brought it with me, Every man. We’re needed more here, I think.” Farajalla shot him a sharp look, but he ignored her. “Do you know anything about that, Charn?”
The old man’s frown deepened. “The All-Church? I heard a man from the Basilica was murdered a couple of months ago, by the Rielle.”
“That’s why,” Calesh said. “They’re coming for us, Charn. Almost certainly. They want the Dualism gone.”
Charn chewed on that for a moment. “Then it’s good you’re here, I’d say. But still, you broke your oath to defend the holy city, didn’t you? There are some who’ll say you should have done differently.”
“Some oaths matter more than others,” he said. “Would you have me sit in the desert and fight for the All-Church, even while it burned my home?”
He couldn’t have done, of course, oath or no oath. The All-Church wouldn’t have stood for it, unless Calesh abandoned the Hand and joined one of the other Orders instead. Otherwise they would have had him killed, probably using a Justified highbinder to assassinate him. That Order had tried once already, she was sure: the man who had fired that arrow at Calesh in the courtyard of Harenc was almost certainly a highbinder, though dressed in the hooded robe of a Madai holy man. Calesh hadn’t seen the crossbow appear from under the robes. He ought to have died. The Madai had bitter reason, learned over years and in grief, to know how eff
icient the Justified assassins were.
It was said when the highbinders were alone they wore gloves backed with human bones, and once they had accepted a contract they never stopped until the target was dead.
But they weren’t perfect. The westerner hadn’t seen the woman with Calesh as a threat, as he ought to have done. Farajalla had seen the crossbow. She pushed Calesh aside, so the arrow struck him in the knee instead of the heart as the assassin tried to follow his sudden movement. Then she killed the man, her thrown dagger flashing into his throat while he still gaped at her, unable quite to believe that a woman could be dangerous. He must have been new to Tura d’Madai. Anyone who’d been there long would have known.
While Calesh had played games with his brother among the orange groves, Farajalla had learned to fight with her half-brothers, and that had not been a game. Not in Tura d’Madai.
“No,” Charn said at length. “No, I wouldn’t have you do that, Calesh. But you ought to go now. There’s a new All-Church priest in the village, and he’s keener than a sharp sickle. Likes to stick his nose in everyone’s business.” He sniffed. “The way most of them do.”
“We’re going,” Calesh said. He hesitated. “Don’t think too badly of me, Charn. Broken oath or no.”
The old man smiled. “I never thought badly of you before, lad, and I don’t see reason to start now. You always did try to do the right thing. I reckon your father knows that, even now.”
“Thank you,” Calesh said quietly. He glanced aside, towards his brother’s grassy grave, and then shrugged his shoulders as though shaking off a weight. “It will be good to think so, at least.”
He took her hand and they went away through the orange trees, climbing back the way they had come. Calesh didn’t talk, and she let him have his silence. He would come back to her, when he had shaken off the sombre mood that filled him now, close to his brother’s grave. She didn’t usually like to wait, but for him, she would.
At the edge of the valley she looked back, down at the tiny shack where he had been born. At this distance it was a vague shape among the fields, marked out only by that faded yellow gate. It would have been easy for Calesh to become like Charn, growing old in a village that might as well have been all the world, for all he knew or cared. Instead he had crossed the sea to the desert, and to her, and by the time he swung down from his horse in Harenc’s courtyard he had been nothing like Charn at all.
Raigal was still at the windmill when they got back, dozing with his back propped against the brass-bound chest and a half-eaten turkey leg in one hand. Soldiers stood at the building’s door, or what remained of it. The camp lay all around, stretching from the olive groves to the wood that crept up to the ridge line, and across the road between them.
“Let him rest,” Calesh said. He gestured at the sky, where gloomy clouds had begun to drift in from the west. “We’re going to have a blow tonight. I think sleep will be hard to come by.”
She looked at the trees that dotted the hillside, standing silent in the still air, and then at the clouds. Rain was rare in Tura d’Madai, but the occasional winter storms came from clouds that looked rather like these. She couldn’t see that this would be much of a storm.
She was wrong.