by Ben Blake
*
It was the glasses which gave Luthien away, he knew. They were still virtually unheard-of in Sarténe, though one of the Jaidi professors at the Academy wore a pair that perched on the end of his nose as though always on the point of slipping off. Like Luthien, he had acquired his glasses in the desert, where there were craftsmen with the skill to make such things. Perhaps they would be able to manufacture them in Sarténe, one day. Until then Luthien had to treat them as carefully as the souls of little children.
He was the only Elite who wore them. He knew they made him distinctive, especially taken together with the sandy hair that curled over his ears and the nape of his neck. People noticed Elite anyway. That went double for one with strange lenses before his eyes.
“I am,” he said to the gaunt man. When caught by surprise he often took refuge in irony, and he let his eyebrow climb a little higher. “Does Calesh expect five men of the Hand to save Mayence, then? I know you’re very good, but his opinion is considerably higher than mine, it seems.”
“Hardly,” Amand said. He really was incredibly thin, as though he had been boiled until all the moisture was gone from his flesh and only leathery skin remained. His face was all planes and angles, with no softening features at all. He looked to Luthien like a strip of old leather, and just as tough. “We’re not here to fight. We came to inform the Dean that the Hand believes it will not be possible to defend these buildings.”
“Calesh doesn’t waste any time,” Luthien muttered. Something heavy had lodged in his stomach with the soldier’s words. The Hand believes it will not be possible sounded bland enough, but Luthien knew the meaning of that phrase well enough: the Hand would make no effort to save the Academy, come what may. “But you’ve had a wasted trip. I think the Dean knows already.”
Amand brushed at the dust on his coat, making the dust into streaks. “Will he abandon the Academy?”
Students were still passing on the path, craning their heads to look at the soldiers as they passed. Luthien thought rapidly. “I suspect he will allow the students to return to their homes, on a temporary basis. You can stay to confirm that, if you like. But abandon the Academy?” He shook his head. “You don’t know Cerain. He’ll already be planning to come back.”
“I hope he has the chance,” Amand said. “But that’s his choice. My orders were only to warn the Dean, not to order him to one path or another.”
“Orders from Calesh?” Luthien asked shrewdly. Amand nodded. “He’s acting as though he’s in command of the Hand here.”
The gaunt man’s gaze flickered. “The Marshal Commander is a drunk, Elite Bourrel. What would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer that none of this was happening at all,” he answered, a little tartly. That was somewhat impolite but he let it pass without chastising himself, instead stepping closer to the soldiers so he could lower his voice. “What does Calesh plan to do?”
“Fight,” Amand said laconically. “But not here, or anywhere else too exposed. He plans to withdraw to the Aiguille and fight in the hills. Hit the All-Church and run, over and again.”
Luthien stared at him as realisation struck. “That would mean abandoning Parrien.”
“We can’t defend it,” Amand said. He too kept his voice low, so the last students straggling past them could not overhear. “The wall here isn’t high enough or well enough maintained. You were a soldier, you know that’s the truth. We don’t have the men, or the time to find them.”
“May God shelter us all,” Luthien breathed. “Because the Hand obviously won’t. You’ll be running for the hills while Parrien burns, and its people are butchered behind you.”
“A strange thing for you to say,” the soldier noted. “Given that you will leave your sword in its scabbard while people die, though you know you could save them if you chose.”
“You bastard,” Luthien ground out. “You bastard. How can you throw that accusation in my face?”
“Why not? You threw it at me.” Amand glanced back at his four men. “I have to go, Elite Bourrel. I only stopped because I recognised you, and wanted at least to meet the man behind the name. I almost wish I had not, now.” He began to turn away. “I wonder, will you still stand with your hands at your sides when women are killed in front of you? Or children?”
It took an effort to keep from hitting the man. Luthien had never been so close to violence since he had sworn the Consolation, three years before. Maybe it was just a question of time. He had never sworn either until Japh had made him curse in the manor house last week, and now here he was cussing again. He sucked in a needful breath. “I will keep my oath to God.”
“Then I hope he forgives you,” Amand said, “for loving that oath more than you love the hurt and the dying.”
He turned away, gesturing to the men to follow him. They had started along the gravel path before Luthien could find his voice; he was so choked with fury that he thought he might burst. But it was helpless rage; he was Consoled, and forbidden from violence. His fists clenched.
“I swore an oath!” he shouted after the soldiers. “Is that fact too much for your thick-skulled brain to grasp? I swore an oath!”
None of the soldiers acknowledged him, though several passing townsfolk gave Luthien surprised looks. It wasn’t often that an enraged Elite yelled insults in the street, and certainly not to soldiers. Their glances chilled his anger into a fragile calm. Underneath rage still roiled in him, but at least he could think, once he got past the terrible urge to give someone a ding upside the ear. Sometimes he almost thought God wanted him to break his oath. He made himself put that aside, breathing deeply until the tightness in his chest passed.
The Hand of the Lord was abandoning Parrien. He had to concede that it was a sound strategic decision, though thousands would die as a result of it. More interesting was that Calesh had given the order; not Darien, the leader of the Hand, and not Baruch either as the second-in-command in Sarténe. That Darien was a drunkard was common knowledge, but it was still surprising that he had surrendered his position so easily. If he had. It was possible that Calesh had simply taken authority on himself. He was capable of that sort of direct, decisive action, and Luthien could easily imagine the soldiers following him.
He wondered suddenly if Calesh had gone to the Hidden House, and Ailiss. If he was seizing authority here in Sarténe it would be the logical thing to do, to give his orders some legitimacy, but it would require time Calesh probably didn’t have. Luthien hesitated, wondering about that, but there was no way he could know. He certainly wasn’t about to run after Amand and ask.
So Parrien was to be thrown to the wolves. If the Hand was abandoning the town then Luthien was almost certain the Margrave’s Guard would do the same, probably so both forces could make a stand later, in the Aiguille. It was a way to trade space in return for time – time to build supplies for a siege, to recruit and train more men and build defences for them to stand behind – but it doomed Parrien. A couple of thousand decent soldiers might, just possibly, have been able to hold the walls against the All-Church army. Artisans, traders and watchmen would not, at least not for more than a few days. Anyone who had fled Parrien already had been right, whether they had left by merchant caravan or ship, or simply by walking with their lives packed into sacks on their backs.
The five soldiers were out of sight now. Luthien knew where they would be, at the small compound the Hand maintained in the Academy, ostensibly for recruitment purposes. Not many students joined though, especially from outside Sarténe. Mostly the compound was there so the All-Church would know that it was, and to make fathers feel their sons were safe in the lecture halls. Luthien would achieve nothing by going there. Instead he turned the other way, towards the manor house and the assembly he had been heading for when he stopped to help a grounds keeper with a makeshift shutter.
He was calmer when he reached the entrance hall. Walking always cleared his mind, however angry he might be, and today he was glad of it. He found the hal
l bustling with activity. Lines of students snaked from the doors to an assortment of carts or ponies, boxes in their arms, or small scrips thrown across their shoulders. Sometimes books poked their corners into sight, or balanced atop the boxes and tried to slide away whenever the owner’s arm joggled or his attention wandered. A couple of laden donkeys were already being drawn away on leading lines. Many of the students kept their eyes on the ground rather than meet anyone’s gaze. Obviously not everyone was waiting for the Dean’s announcement. Luthien found himself the focus of attention as he moved walked up to the doors.
“Tutor Luthien, do you know –”
“Can you tell us –”
“Is there news -?”
“I’ve heard nothing,” he answered quickly, without slowing down. He had to repeat the phrase over and again, and only realised it was a lie when he was through the throng and walking up the gravel path towards the offices in the old manor house. He said such things so as not to pre-empt one of the Dean’s decisions, and evidently it had become habit. He’d heard the Hand was abandoning Parrien, of course, and would not defend the Academy when the army came. The students would learn about that soon enough; morning at the latest, Luthien thought, if rumour sped as it usually did. There would be a surge of panic then. The few students who had already left, boxes in their arms or mules at their heels, would seem as wise as serpents when that happened.
“Luthien!”
Cerain hurried across the hall towards him. “Where have you been? We have word of the Hand.”
“I know,” he said, his voice dull. “They’re leaving Parrien.”
“How do you know that? Never mind.” Cerain waved away his own question, words tumbling as he hurried to get them all out. He caught Luthien’s sleeve and drew him into the shelter of a doorway. “I’m going to send the students home. I’ll tell them we plan to reopen next spring, but for now it will be safer for them to leave Sarténe, if they can.”
“Reopen in the spring,” Luthien repeated. He couldn’t help a snort of laughter. “Cerain, my friend, by the spring there will be nothing here. The All-Church army will destroy this place completely.”
The Dean stared at him. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they hate it,” Luthien said, “and fear it, too. The Academy, I mean. We teach things no priest would approve of. Some of our tutors openly debate the indivisibility of God, when the Basilica insists there is no debate. We have Cailevi philosophers, and theologians from among the Jaidi. We have been trying to light a candle here, a spark of knowledge, and the All-Church hates knowledge it doesn’t control. You know they do. In God’s name, Cerain, the all-Church hates mathematics. They will smash this place flat, believe me.”
“But nobody will be here.”
“That doesn’t matter.” He felt suddenly tired. All he had tried to do here, all that the tutors and scholars had attempted to achieve, would be lost. It had been for nothing. “They’re coming to Sarténe to burn, Cerain, to smash and destroy everything they can reach. When they get here they’ll set fire to the buildings and piss on the rubble. It’s the symbol they will wreck. Tell me, did you truly believe there were no book-burners in the clergy any more?”
Cerain stared at him, jaw working, and said nothing. There was such an expression of loss in his eyes that Luthien felt like crying. The old man had given his life to the Academy, from when he’d been a boy hired to help clean the stables on the far side of the pear orchards. From there he had enrolled, winning one of the few scholarships made available by the Margrave’s money. He had studied for six years, graduated in mathematics, and become a tutor soon afterwards. Everything he knew, or had known for decades, was within this campus. He was the Academy, and Luthien’s soul wept for him.
“I’m sorry,” Luthien said. He rubbed his eyes. “Go talk to the students, Cerain. Send them home.”
“I will,” the older man said in a husky voice. He cleared his throat. “And then I’ll speak to the faculty. We have to decide what to do.”
“Do?” Luthien stared at him. “Weren’t you listening? There’s nothing we can do. The Academy can’t be defended. Maybe we should have built it like a castle, and run a moat all the way around with angled spikes in the water.”
“So the Academy can’t be saved,” Cerain said. “All right. I accept that. But the books can be. We’ve spent almost a hundred years building up our library, and I am not about to let a mob of savages burn it all to ash.” The Dean’s thin face was grim. “The Muses have not been silenced yet, my friend.”
Luthien frowned at him. Cerain was a lugubrious man most of the time, but just then his face bore an expression of stern determination. It was hard not to be intrigued. “There are over eleven thousand original works in the library. How can you hope to get them all out?”
“That’s better,” Cerain said. “Don’t tell me what can’t be done, Luthien: tell me how to do. I need you thinking clearly, not letting yourself sink into despair. How? Wagons.”
Luthien thought about that. Losing the buildings of the Academy was bad, but not fatal: it was the books that really mattered. With them everything could be remade. But if they were lost… they were the product of decades of work in lecture halls and libraries, by discussion groups and students and scriveners, and copies made word by laborious word. Perhaps, in time, all that could be rebuilt. And perhaps not. Luthien wouldn’t wager on it, himself.
But the idea of transporting it all away was unthinkable. All the wagons would have to be covered, and preferably with rigid oiled fabric against which books could be piled, tied together in tall stacks. It would have to be waterproof, in case of another heavy storm like the one a few nights past. And it would have to be escorted, by enough men to keep the cargo safe even on roads thronged with refugees, half of them turning to banditry, and all of them desperate for transport and willing to throw out some old papers to acquire it.
“You’re a lunatic,” he said.
“There’s no other way,” Cerain told him. “We’ll never be able to arrange for a ship in time, and even if we could the rush would mean there were unsecured items, which would certainly be ruined by ocean spray. So we have to go by road. We don’t have a choice.”
“They’ll never make it,” Luthien insisted. “Someone will hijack the wagons before they’ve covered ten miles. Desperate people who can’t walk fast enough, or whose children need somewhere to sit. Your books will be thrown on the road before they even reach Mayence.”
“Ah, but I have a way to stop that,” Cerain said. “Two ways, in fact.”
Luthien looked at him. “If one of those ways is me, old friend, you had better put it out of your mind. I am Elite.”
“You’re a soldier,” the Dean said. “You always have been.”
“I’m beginning to get tired of people telling me what I am,” Luthien said in a strained voice. “You all seem to think my oath is a trivial thing, to be tossed aside when it becomes inconvenient. But the Consolation is holy, it’s sacred, and I will not abandon it when the world fills with trials. I am Elite.” He looked up at the thin man through his glasses. “If you think I’ll use violence to defend your books, you are making a mistake.”
Cerain shrugged. “Well, if that’s so, I still have the second part of my plan.”
“Which is?”
“The students,” the Dean said. “They’re leaving anyway, and a lot will head west on their way home. And many of them are the sons of nobles or wealthy merchants, and have at least a little ability with a sword. I’m not saying they’re a fighting force, Luthien, but they ought to be able to protect our manuscripts on a journey through the Raima Mountains.”
“Through the mountains?”
“Into Alinaur, yes. I have a friend in Samanta, on the coast, who might be willing to store them for us.”
He would have to be a wealthy friend, with perhaps a country villa he didn’t happen to be using at the moment. A suspicion began to grow in Luthien’s mind. “Cerain, e
xactly how often have you met this friend?”
“Well, never, in point of fact,” the Dean said apologetically. “But we have conversed by letter quite often.”
Luthien stared at him. “He’s a pen pal.”
“He’s a scholar,” Cerain corrected. “A man who would hate to see books put to the torch.”
“You want to take eleven thousand books and scrolls across the mountains with an escort of students, and then store them with a pen pal,” Luthien said. It didn’t sound any saner this time either. “You’re out of your mind.”
He wasn’t really thinking of that, though. There was an unspoken part of Cerain’s plan, one which Luthien had seen at once: he himself was the logical choice to go with the wagons. Of all the faculty only he had fought, and the students knew that. Having the famous Luthien Bourrel along would do wonders for their confidence. More, it would take Luthien neatly out of Sarténe before the fighting began, thus saving him from the question of breaking his oath. Except that a wagon train of untried students would be bound to find trouble in the Raima: Luthien could think of nobody more likely than students to find trouble anywhere, let alone in those wilds. It might seem that the wagons protected his oath, but in truth, he thought it probably placed it at greater risk than ever.
But it was impossible to turn down. If Luthien tried he would only make himself look foolish, because he really was the best choice for the task. Besides, why would he refuse? So he could stay and watch Mayence burn, and the Academy, while his oath forced him to stand aside? And in any case, Cerain needed hope, or he would have nothing.
“We’ll have to be quick,” Luthien said finally.
Cerain nodded. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do,” Luthien disagreed. “The All-Church will send cavalry units out to scout the land, and to spread fire and fear among the people. Some might be here very soon. Perhaps within two or three days.”
“That’s hardly any time at all,” Cerain said.
“It means a long night for everyone on the faculty.” Luthien sighed. “Oh, all right. I’ll go along with this mad plan. Tell your students to go home, Cerain, and not to return until they’re sure it’s safe. The tutors from Alinaur or Temujin, as well. The All-Church won’t show them any mercy. You have to warn them in time to get away.”
“I know,” Cerain said sombrely. “I’ve been trying to put that off, but you’re right. I’ll do it right after I speak to the students. If you’re willing to begin hunting down some wagons, and preparing to load the books.”
“Of course I am,” Luthien said.
He would not take his armour though, or his weapons. Japh had asked why he kept them, if he truly never meant to use them again, and Luthien had not had an answer for him. He did now. He had kept them to remind himself of what he had left behind, and why he must never go back to that life. Luthien’s armour would stay in his rooms, to be found by the All-Church soldiers when they arrived, or perhaps to be used by one of the defenders. It didn’t concern him any more.
Thirteen
The Highland City
The sun was shining and already the day had begun to grow warm, though it was still only mid morning. Little puffs of dust rose about the horses’ hooves. The storm a week ago had laid down enough water to settle most of it, something Calesh was glad of. Riding in armour was unpleasant enough without having to breathe dirt as well.
The men of the Hand of the Lord stretched out in a long column along the road, winding in and out of rocks that dotted the top of the ridge. On their right groves of oranges and olives covered a south-facing slope with patches of green, while on the left the ridge’s northerly face was marked by plough furrows, through which the shoots of early barley had yet to peek. Every mile or two the riders passed a village, clustered down in the valley to the south where a small river splashed between jutting stones. The farm folk came to the edge of the houses, or stood in the fields and shaded their eyes, to watch the soldiers ride by. Village life was dull enough to make any diversion worth a moment, and the passage of nearly two thousand armoured men was not just any diversion.
Calesh wondered whether these people knew yet what was coming. Before much time had passed there would likely be a good deal more than two thousand soldiers in these high valleys, and they would do more than ride peacefully past. Armies on the march did unpleasant things, he knew: he’d seen some of them. Livestock and crops seized, houses burned, men murdered and women raped. Some of the villagers would escape in time, and find a cave or high crag to hide in among the stones, but they would have to abandon their goods. In any case, temporary shelter was one thing and safety something quite different. Even those who survived would creep back to the valleys to find their goods and homes taken or destroyed, and smoke still drifting from blackened walls. The winter would seem a long and bleak prospect then.
He remembered a day in Elorium, not long after the Crusade had taken the city, when a drayman’s horse had run amok and careered through the narrow streets dragging a cart behind it. Barrels tumbled from the cart and smashed on the cobbles. People who didn’t fling themselves aside in time, or who didn’t have room, were flung aside nonetheless. And alone in the middle of the street, her mother God knew where, was a little girl of perhaps two years old, her feet frozen to the street with fear.
Raigal had hurled himself in front of the cart and rolled, catching the girl as he did so and cushioning her against his ample chest. As he came back to his feet he uncurled like a blossoming flower and the girl sprang out of his arms, and now there was the mother, actually whimpering in fright. Not of the dray horse, though. Her terrified eyes had darted one glance at Raigal Tai before she hurried the girl away, retreating to the safety of a crowd’s anonymity before the evil foreigner could torment her child. It didn’t matter that he’d saved the girl. Mother had heard too many stories of the savage invaders, and their crimes, to delay long enough even to thank him. That was the fear that invaders brought, whoever they were, however pure their goals.
But Calesh couldn’t change what would happen here. He had to protect what he could, and try not to hear the cries of those he could not. It was always the same, for any commander. There was a price for every decision, and it was paid in the lives of soldiers and the blood of innocents. This time the bill would fall due first in Parrien, abandoned to the advancing wolves of the All-Church, because Calesh had ordered it so.
He made an effort to put that out of his mind and enjoy the sunshine of early summer. He kept catching momentary smells he had almost forgotten existed; damp earth drying in the sun, the tang of orange blossom, rosemary bushes straggling among the rocks, and a hundred other things. It was as though the air itself wanted to remind him that he was home, back in Sarténe after more than a decade away. In all honesty, he had never thought it would happen. He still half wished it had not. He’d been happy in Tura d’Madai, despite constant battle and danger. Happier than he’d ever been.
Whatever happened in this war, it had already brought him back, after he had stayed in Tura d’Madai when his three great friends returned home. There had been nothing for Calesh in Sarténe then. His mother had died when he was very small, and then the plague had taken Tavi and turned Calesh’s father into such a grim, unsmiling man that it had almost been a relief when he died as well, six years later. By the end of that summer Calesh had sold the farm, shedding it along with the griefs it carried. He used the money to buy a battered mailshirt with a hole under one arm, and a sword so notched and chipped that it broke in half barely a month later. The only purchase he got right was the horse, a bay for which he paid half its true value; he’d learned from his father how to judge horseflesh.
He didn’t even need the new gear, as it turned out. The Hand of the Lord provided its own weapons and armour, most of it bought from the master blacksmiths down in Samanta, in Alinaur. Calesh’s purchases were taken from him, to be melted down for scrap or else repaired and sold on. He hadn’t really minded. What matter
ed was that the Hand had accepted him.
There was nothing for him in Sarténe. Very well, then, he would not make his future there. A young man with talents might forge a respectable career in Alinaur or Tura d’Madai, fighting against the heathen Jaidi and Madai, and when the fighting was done there would be new lands to farm and wealth to enjoy. That the war was fought for a Church in which Calesh placed no faith didn’t matter. He was going for himself, not for God. For anyone’s God.
He had achieved more than he had ever really dreamed he might, except in those foolish boys’ fantasies played out with his brother among the orange trees when they were both so young. At the end of the five years of service the All-Church required as a minimum, Calesh had been famous throughout Tura d’Madai, and a captain. Soldiers he had never met stood up to salute when he rode past. The Madai began to call him the Sand Scorpion, and when the Church soldiers learned of the name they adopted it with enthusiasm. They would cheer his name and rattle spears against their shields, while Madai women snatched their children off the street with quick warding signs against evil, and hid until he was gone.
And then his friends had left, all three of them, when their five years were up. He could not understand it.
“We have other things we want to do,” Baruch said when he asked. “I love the Hand, Calesh. It’s my life, but I miss Sarténe. I want to see it again, and not wonder every morning if I’ll have to fight that day.”
“And I want to see the fog on the forests of Rheven,” Raigal Tai rumbled. “I miss fog.”
It was Luthien, sitting in a corner with a book propped on his lap and a wine glass in one hand, who found the words Calesh remembered best. Of course it was. Who else would it be?
“We all want to make a future for ourselves,” he said, and turned a page with one careful finger so as not to stain the paper. “You never have, Calesh. All you want is to forget the past.”
They had found the Lady’s book long before. It had taken a good deal of careful scurrying about, and some surreptitious digging through the catacombs beneath Elorium, all the while trying to make sure none of the Glorified or Justified noticed what they were doing. It was hard, to fit the search around their work of patrolling streets and chasing down raiders, but the Lady had told them not to trust anyone else, so they had to make the best of it. Sometimes when they had to ride out it meant nothing was done in the tunnels for a month at a time.
But they had stuck at it, and finally their efforts paid off. Baruch had emerged from a cloud of aeons-old dust with a cloth over his mouth, coughing like an ancient beggar and his eyes streaming, with a thick tome clutched in one hand and scraps of cobweb billowing around his shoulders. The book, when Raigal Tai seized it excitedly, turned out to be brass-bound and leather-backed, exactly as the Lady had told them it would be. But they could not read the inscription lettered in silver on the cover. They needed Luthien for that.
“It’s a dialect of the Madai language,” their resident scholar said when he blew the dust off the book and studied it with grave eyes. “Quite obscure. Kamandas of Temujin wrote a version of his histories in that tongue, so I’ve encountered it before. I’ll need time to translate it fully, and the style is new to me.” He ran his fingertips across the faded gold glyphs. “It’s rather distinctive, don’t you think?”
There was a moment of silence.
“By the blood of the God,” Raigal growled, “that’s the greatest lot of words I ever heard that didn’t say a damn thing. Stop flapping your tongue and tell us; is it the Book of Breathing or not?”
“Yes,” Luthien said simply.
They could not simply send the Book of Breathing back to Sarténe, of course. They kept it with them, nestled at the bottom of Luthien’s saddlebags, because nobody would think it unusual for him to have a book even if they saw the shape of it. Nobody would dare challenge him about it if they did, come to that. Luthien’s reputation was growing. Once he accepted a challenge from three men of the Order of the Basilica, furious that he’d spilled wine on their gold and white coats. It was cowardly of them to set on him while he was drunk, of course, but that proved not to matter. After less than a minute all three men were down, each of them groaning as he clutched wrist or thigh or elbow, and Luthien was raising a refilled glass of blood-red wine to them in elaborate, mocking salute.
So the book stayed until the three of them returned to Sarténe, when it travelled wrapped in a scraggy old piece of linen in the bottom of Luthien’s clothes chest. Luthien had sent Calesh a carefully-worded letter to let him know they had arrived safely, and that the book had been delivered to the Lady of the Hidden House. Their task was done.
Luthien wrote twice more, and Baruch once. Calesh replied to them all, but he had little to say except to relate the endless, brutal struggle that was life in Tura d’Madai. To tell them of things they had chosen to leave behind, in other words. The letters felt desultory, and somehow pointless. He wasn’t going back to Sarténe. They would never see each other again.
The Lady’s task might be done, but Calesh passed through life without touching it. He bought no land, owned no home, and had no family. He moved from day to day unchanging, as constant as the desert itself. He fought when he had to and merely marked the days otherwise, counting them off one by one, and never mourned their passing. In the end the letters tailed off. It was not so much that they had nothing to say to each other, but that there was no need for them to say it. Not yet. Looking back Calesh thought they had been waiting, a held breath not yet ready to exhale.
Then he had gone to Harenc.
Everyone knew of the town, of course, but few westerners cared to go there. It was too small and too far away from Elorium, and such scant pleasures as this austere land offered. But anyone crossing the eastern peaks came by one of three passes, and Harenc sat astride the lowest and best, in a smallish valley watered by several little springs. A patch of greenery amid endless arid stones. Its wealth, such as it was, came from tolls levied on passing traders. It was a nothing town, notable only for its strategic importance astride that pass. In seven years Calesh had barely thought of it.
But slowly the Madai were recovering their strength, after the terrible blows they had suffered when the Crusade arrived. They were recovering their courage too. That was the way of the war in the desert: the military Orders would bring new forces and drive the Madai out for a time, only for their soldiers to return home and allow the Madai to rebuild. Now the ships were sailing away, taking soldiers a handful at a time and leaving Elorium and its environs weakened. Around the edges of the conquered lands raiders began to appear, striking deeper and deeper as their confidence grew, and one of their targets was Harenc. Calesh led a company of the Hand to root them out.
Ten days later he rode into the courtyard at Harenc, swung out of the saddle, and turned to find a tall woman with her hair in a hundred braids staring at him from the steps.
That was where his journey home had begun, long before the letter from a sympathiser inside the Basilica. He missed her now, though they had only been apart for two days. He liked to be able to turn and see her eyes already on him. She always seemed to know when he was thinking of her, or about to glance her way. Now, without her near, he found his thoughts kept wandering, whenever he turned and she was not there.
You are all my world, she had said, a finger pressed to his lips to keep him from speaking. And if I am yours, my love, then you will not make a sound.
She explained later, as they lay tangled in bed sheets and drowsy again with each other’s warmth. Farajalla told him everything, including the Lady’s implication that their failure to have a child was due to something in him, and not her. He suspected that might have hurt her as badly as if it had been the other way around: hurt her for his sake, and for the pain of hearing it. Strangely, he didn’t very much mind, especially if they had conceived a child now after all. It would be worth it, ten times over, if it stopped Farajalla worrying he might leave her for a woman who could
bear him sons.
Leave her? Not in this world, and under this sun.
Raigal Tai rode where Farajalla normally would, with Baruch a little way behind talking with one of the other soldiers. Baruch had taken over Amand’s duties, since Amand himself had gone ahead to Mayence to check the situation there. As for Raigal, he was happy now he knew Kendra and Segarn were on their way to the fortress at Adour, where they would meet the Lady of the Hidden House. Twice already that morning he had broken into one of the long, mournful ballads of his homeland in Rheven, telling the tale of a love struck warrior whose passion led him to tragedy and death. He only chuckled when Baruch told him to shut up.
The world was nearly right again, Calesh thought as he followed the road down the ridge and into the southernmost valley. Raigal Tai was with him, and Baruch was trying to make the northerner be quiet. All they needed now was Luthien, and what did it matter that he was Elite? It would be enough for him to be there, trying to read a book in the saddle while his horse wandered all over the road, and likely at any moment to say something so abstract that the rest of them would shrug their shoulders, not even bothering to exchange puzzled frowns. The greatest lot of words I ever heard that didn’t say a damn thing, Raigal had said all those years ago. That was Luthien all over. But he was part of them, one of the group, and however irrational it might be Calesh didn’t believe anything could stop them if they were all together. He would stand before the wrath of God himself on the strength of that feeling.
The road rounded a shoulder of rock, and suddenly Mayence was spread out ahead, slightly above the column of soldiers and little more than a mile away. Fields and orchards filled the space between, bright and fresh after the bare stones around the road. In the Aiguille a traveller could come on places suddenly and without warning, almost stumbling into them before he knew they were there. Calesh reined in and reached for his water flask, glancing back to make sure none of his men had fallen behind. They were all in their places. He hadn’t really expected anything else.
“I’d forgotten how pretty it is,” Raigal Tai said.
Calesh nodded. He’d forgotten as well. Mayence glittered in front of them, seeming all spires and domes and minarets, and windows that flashed in the sun. In eleven years it seemed only to have grown more glorious, and his heart tugged at the thought of what was to come.
“I’d be happier if it was a bit uglier,” Baruch muttered. “Where are the crews working to reinforce the wall? Why isn’t anyone digging trenches beside the road, or across it? Riyand must be asleep, or lolling on cushions while his favourite bards pluck their lutes for him.”
“So must Darien,” Raigal agreed.
Calesh nodded again. He’d hoped as well, though without very much expectation. Everything he had heard of the Margrave portrayed him as a dilettante, wasting half his days and bungling the rest of the time. Still, that was a problem for another day, if all went well. One thing at a time.
“Our business isn’t with Riyand,” Calesh said. “Not today.”
He flicked the reins and started across the fields.