Golden Daughter

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  But none of them came to pass. For down below, several voices cried out at once: “Great Hulan’s eye!”

  Sairu felt her heart stop then start again. Afraid of what she might see, she peered around Bouru into the camp below. “Oh, great Hulan’s eye!” she breathed in echo of the slavers.

  For Lady Hariawan stood just within the circle of firelight.

  She wasn’t wearing her cloak, and this little fact filled Sairu with such an unprecedented burst of rage toward Tu Syed that it was just as well the poor man was wringing his hands a good five miles distant, unaware how dearly Sairu wished to throttle him.

  The night blew a cold wind through the forest of the foothills, and the rocky valley seemed to gather it up and freeze it cooler still. Lady Hariawan shivered, blinking in the firelight like a new lamb just come into the world. She was very frail and very beautiful to look upon, and not a single man there was unaffected.

  This did not stop them from scrambling for their weapons. Once armed, however, they stood staring at the lovely apparition, as mute as she and far more uncertain.

  She took a step. They all backed away. Then someone said, “Is it a ghost?”

  All of them feared ghosts. All of them had left men and women dead or dying on this same trail. If the dead ever returned for vengeance, none of the slavers would dare beg for mercy.

  But another man scoffed at this suggestion. “She’s no ghost!” he snarled. Then his voice softened strangely, an appalling sound from his cruel mouth. “She’s an angel.”

  And Sairu knew by the tone of his voice that this man truly believed in angels. That he needed them somehow, as a man needs to know that dawn will follow the desolation of midnight. He needed them to exist so that one such as he, a man as far from an angel as any could become, wouldn’t ultimately matter that much. He could commit his sins—such minor sins in the grand scheme of the universe—and they didn’t really hurt anything, because the angels would work their greater good, and everything would be all right in the end. And they’d forgive him. Of course they’d forgive him. That’s what angels were for.

  “She’s a Dara come down from the heavens,” said the slaver whose name was Idrus, the leader of this band.

  Sairu clung to the lookout boulder, and her mind screamed at her, Go! Go! Go! Get down there! But she couldn’t make herself move.

  One of the slavers, a thin man with a scar down his face and neck, stepped forward suddenly, nocked an arrow to his bow, and pointed it mere inches from Lady Hariawan’s breastbone. Her pilgrim hat was gone, and only her long black hair—caught and snarled during her passage through the forest—veiled her face as she looked down at the bright tip of the arrow.

  “Who are you, girl?” the thin slaver demanded. “Who sent you? Was it Nhean the Butcher sent you to spy? To count our numbers?”

  “Back away from her, Eyso,” Idrus growled. “She isn’t the Butcher’s pawn. Look at her! She isn’t of this world.”

  Even as he spoke, Lady Hariawan lifted her face. Her hair parted, revealing her lovely features, her liquid eyes, her gentle mouth, her thin brows lightly puckered. She did, indeed, appear angelic.

  Save for the red burn across her face, which seemed to writhe in the firelight.

  The thin slaver gasped. “She’s no angel!” he declared, his hands trembling even as he drew back his arm. “She’s a demon sent from hell to—”

  He never finished. His scream cut off whatever else he might have said as Idrus’s cleaver struck him a death blow from behind. The arrow fell unused at Lady Hariawan’s feet.

  That scream awoke Sairu, and suddenly she was flinging herself over the edge of the boulder, scrambling for handholds and footholds she did not know were there, falling when she found none, catching herself when possible. She was down to the stream’s level in ten beats of her heart, and already another man was dead. Three of the remaining four fixed fury-filled gazes upon Idrus, Lady Hariawan’s defender.

  “Murderer!” one shouted, nocking his own arrow to the ready. Idrus roared and raised his cleaver, then roared again in agony as the arrow planted in his chest. He fell over backwards, convulsed, and was still.

  But Sairu saw none of this. Before the archer could ready a second arrow, she flung herself into him, knocking him over against his two fellows. They turned upon him, terror leaping in their eyes, and one, younger than the others, swung the weapon in his hand. He did not kill, but his blow struck home, and the archer fell to his knees, screaming and clutching his shoulder and useless arm.

  By then Sairu was across the stream and grabbing Lady Hariawan by her wrist. “Come away! Come away!” she urged breathlessly and tugged her mistress toward the incline and the trees.

  But Lady Hariawan seemed to slip like smoke from her grasp. Before Sairu could catch her again, she was kneeling, she was reaching out.

  Then she stood, poised, the dead Eyso’s bow in her hands, her arm drawing back the string. The bow should have been far, far too heavy for her thin arms to draw, but she bent it with apparent ease.

  Sairu, staring at her, thought suddenly, The Hari Tribe of the Awan Clan. The Emperor’s foremost artillery brigade.

  She learned more about her mistress in that moment than she had learned in all the previous weeks.

  “I have never killed a man,” Lady Hariawan said. Her soft voice filled the whole of the valley, and even the wounded archer swallowed the curses he’d been spitting at the younger slaver and turned to stare at the pale lady. She pointed the arrow-tip first at him, then at the other two, thoughtfully. “I should like to know how,” she said.

  Something moved inside Sairu. Don’t let her kill. Don’t let her!

  With a gasp she threw herself in front of her mistress, her arms wide, her chest open to the arrow. “Please,” she gasped, truly frightened for perhaps the first time in her life. “Please, you cannot do this. Put it down. Put it down, my mistress.”

  “My father slew fifty men in a single day. He was honored among the people.”

  “But you don’t need to kill. You don’t have to,” Sairu pleaded. She sensed the slavers gathering themselves behind her. She half expected to feel their weapons in her exposed back, but she dared not turn from Lady Hariawan and face them. Her own death was preferable to her mistress’s spilling their blood.

  “Put it down, I beg of you,” she said. Trying to catch Lady Hariawan’s gaze was like trying to catch starlight and hold it in her hand. Her mistress’s eyes wandered here and there, up to the sky, down to the stream, around in a world no one else saw.

  The hand holding the string began to quiver.

  Then, with a shudder and a deep, deep sigh, Lady Hariawan lowered her weapon and stood still, her head bent so that her black hair covered her face.

  Sairu whirled about in time to see the three slavers tripping and falling over themselves to escape, leaving behind their supplies, leaving behind their bound wares, fleeing into the darkness of the mountain forests.

  Trying not to think about what she did, Sairu knelt beside the dead body of Lady Hariawan’s erstwhile protector and found on his person a set of keys. Then, hardly knowing how she got there, so steady and dreadful was the pound of blood throbbing in her head, she was kneeling before the five bound slaves, undoing their chains, and sliding the poles out from behind their backs and arms. She only paused when she reached the chains of the largest slave, a huge brute of a man with murder in his eyes. She stared into his face and saw death there. But not her own death.

  She saw the death of a wife and of a child. She saw the burning of a village, of lands and of crops. She saw the death of dreams, simple dreams, dreams of life and love and growth, all vanished in fire and hatred.

  And she saw the death of the slavers as clear as a bloody dawn.

  Sairu undid his bindings and stood back as he shook his wrists and ankles free of the manacles and broke the wood pole. “Your captors flee into the dark,” she said. “If you hurry, you will catch them.”

  The slave
said nothing. He brushed past her, knelt at the body of one of the dead, took up a sword with a hewing blade, then vanished. Three more slaves followed after, and Sairu never saw any of them again.

  She turned to the last two slaves and focused on the one wearing a very tattered and dirty monk’s robes. She smiled at him and for once did not receive a cringing response.

  “O great daughter of all goodness and grace!” said the monk, whose eyes were so wrinkled as to have almost disappeared, but whose cheeks were as smooth as a child’s. “I thought I was bound for the Aja slave markets and a most unholy end! You and your great lady are indeed angels, even as that wicked Idrus declared. You are—”

  “We are come from Lunthea Maly, my mistress and I,” Sairu said, gently removing the manacles from around his hands. His wrists were raw where the chains had chafed, and one showed signs of a nasty infection developing under the skin. “Are you the guide sent from Daramuti?”

  “I am!” he gasped. “How did you know? How did you learn of my unlucky fate? Where—where is the rest of your company? Surely you are not . . .”

  But though the monk continued talking at a great rate, Sairu heard no more. For Lady Hariawan approached, moving unsteadily, her hands extended and shaking. Her gaze, more bright and aware than Sairu had ever before seen it, fixed upon the slave lying in the dirt, the one wracked with fever.

  “Don’t touch him,” Sairu warned, but too late. Lady Hariawan knelt and caught the slave by the back of his shoulders. Tatters of what might have been a shirt were mostly torn away, revealing welts and bloody flesh beneath. Whoever this man was, he’d been a nuisance to his masters, an unwilling product in their line. And he bore the many marks of his opposition. Some of the places where the slavers’ whips had lashed showed signs of infection far more advanced than the tender places on the monk’s bony wrists.

  Sairu shuddered at the sight. “Please, my mistress,” she pleaded. “Don’t touch him. You may do him more harm.”

  “Unbind him,” Lady Hariawan said, not letting go. Sairu obeyed, sliding the pole out from behind his arms so that he might collapse more completely upon the ground. She thought by the sound of his breath that he might be awake, and she pitied him. In that state of agony, he had probably not slept for some while.

  The chains fell away with thick-sounding clinks. Lady Hariawan touched the back of the slave’s head, putting her fingers into the mats of dirt and blood. Sairu winced again and wished she could draw her mistress away.

  Suddenly Lady Hariawan turned the slave over, rolling him so that he rested in her lap. Sairu’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t expected the fevered slave to be quite so well-made and fine-featured.

  “All right, put him down,” Sairu said sternly. “He’s getting blood on your garments. Please put him down, and I’ll see what I can do for him.”

  Lady Hariawan cradled him like a baby, one arm supporting his neck and shoulders, the other wrapped along his body and arm. He was heavy, but she held firm and rocked to and fro, gazing into his face.

  “I heard you,” she said. “I heard you calling. I came as fast as I could.”

  “I didn’t call you,” Sairu said, then frowned. Lady Hariawan had not been speaking to her.

  The slave groaned and his eyelids fluttered. Slowly, as though it pained him, he opened his eyes and gazed up into Lady Hariawan’s beautiful, serene face. He opened his mouth. His throat constricted in an effort to speak, and one hand even lifted, hesitantly, as though he sought to touch her cheek.

  Then, with a deep sigh, he sank back into the fevered stupor that was not sleep, that was nothing like sleep, but that was hardly wakeful either.

  Lady Hariawan’s eyes flashed suddenly to Sairu’s face. In that moment she looked almost . . . normal. Like a lovely palace princess giving orders to her slaves and expecting immediate gratification of every whim.

  “You will take him,” she said to Sairu. “You will heal him. And he will come with us.”

  “Yes, my mistress,” Sairu whispered.

  Sairu took the road back to where Tu Syed and the others waited. Had she tried to return through the forest in the dark, she was fairly certain she would have lost herself rather miserably. How had Lady Hariawan managed it, following without Sairu’s knowledge, without a guide? It made no sense from any angle she viewed it. This was another puzzle she would understand in time, but for now she must focus on the road, avoid the pitfalls she could just discern by Chiev’s blue light, and move as fast as possible.

  Of the cat she saw no sign.

  She shivered as she ran, despite the sweat gathering on her brow and the pound of her heart. Deep inside, beneath the action and the need for decision-making, a small, central piece of Sairu was very quiet and very still.

  She was no more than a mile from where she’d left Tu Syed and the others when she heard herself whispering, “It leaves a stain.”

  The Golden Mother had not warned her. Not of this feeling, not of this sensation. Perhaps she did not know it herself, though Sairu doubted as much. Princess Safiya knew everything, or as close to everything as a mortal under Hulan’s eye could know. If she had not experienced something for herself, she would have read the experience in another’s face, studied it, pulled it to pieces, and understood it with all the acumen of a Pen-Chan man of science dissecting a dog to understand its inner workings.

  But knowing the layout of organs and the function of circulatory systems is not the same as truly knowing a dog. No more, Sairu suspected, did Princess Safiya truly know this feeling.

  “It leaves a stain,” Sairu repeated. “One cannot encounter death and walk away unstained.”

  She found herself thinking suddenly of the first death she had caused. Of the young panther that—all according to a pre-arranged plan, no doubt—set upon her in the overgrown grounds of Manusbau. She had fended it off and successfully brought it to ground. In the end it lay broken at her feet.

  But in her memory it was not the panther lying before her, nor was it panther blood on her hands. It was the blood of Idrus the slaver and his men.

  Princess Safiya had never warned her. For the first time in her life Sairu resented the Golden Mother.

  She found Tu Syed and his brethren where she had left them, sitting in a huddled circle, their eyes wide with terror of the night around them. They startled and a few screamed when the three dogs abruptly started barking and raced into the night beyond the firelight. Sairu called out, “Dumpling! Rice Cake! Sticky Bun!” and the slaves, hearing her voice, relaxed into quivering puddles of nerves.

  “Lady Hariawan! Lady Hariawan!” Tu Syed exclaimed, blindly stumbling toward Sairu in the dark. He couldn’t find the breath to say more and was probably just as happy not to see the smile Sairu fixed upon him.

  “My mistress is safe,” Sairu assured him, which wasn’t exactly a lie, at least, not so far as she knew. She had last seen Lady Hariawan sitting with the injured slave in her arms while the monk guide bowed repeatedly and assured Sairu that he would protect them all until her return.

  There was no other choice. Lady Hariawan would not leave the valley without the strange slave, and he was too heavy to be carried by even the three of them combined, should such a thing be possible. The only way was to bring the donkeys and the big, stolid mule.

  “Pack up,” Sairu commanded Tu Syed; and none of the slaves, however much they might resent being ordered about by a girl, dared question or complain. “We must hurry.”

  She found sturdy branches, wrapped them in oiled cloth, and lit a few torches at the fire before kicking dirt over the embers and spreading the coals. Three of the slaves carried the torches, which made some of the donkeys nervous. But the end of the world itself could not perturb Lady Hariawan’s mule, and the donkeys all looked to him as their leader. So when he, led by Sairu and loaded down with the baskets containing her three dogs, followed her and the torches into the night, the donkeys fell into place behind.

  Tu Syed asked questions. He asked m
any, many questions. Finally, Sairu silenced him with a smile and a demure question of her own: “Where is Lady Hariawan’s cloak?”

  At that, Tu Syed bowed away, retreated to the back of the line, and said no more. None of the others dared come near her smile.

  The wounded slave could not sit on the mule’s broad back. Sairu saw this even before the slaves attempted to heave him into the saddle, and she stopped them before they caused the poor man further agony. He whimpered and pleaded, speaking just enough for her to discern his Chhayan accent and dialect, but not his words.

  “Put him down,” she commanded, and the temple slaves obeyed at once. Their gazes kept turning to the dead bodies of the slavers lying where they had fallen nearby. They knew such destruction could not be Lady Hariawan’s doing, nor that of the little Daramuti monk, who kept bobbing and grinning and offering various blessings of his order.

  And they looked upon their mistress’s handmaiden with more fear than ever.

  “You. Help me,” Sairu commanded Tu Domchu, and he, after spitting a brown stream out the side of his mouth, ambled after her into the forest, carrying a hatchet across his shoulders. At her command, he hewed down two stout saplings. The slender trunks bent and gave under pressure but did not break. They would do. For a short distance they would do.

  Sairu lashed them together to form an angle. Between the poles she strung more rope and fixed her own cloak, Tu Domchu’s, and that of another slave to fashion a rude sort of sling.

  “Steady the mule,” she ordered Tu Syed, who obediently held Lady Hariawan’s mule by the head. Then, with her dogs milling about her feet, offering snuffles and snorts of help, she affixed the narrow end of the triangle over the mule’s back so that the pole ends dragged out behind it with the sling strung between them.

  “Will it work?” Tu Syed asked breathlessly even as two of his brethren loaded the fevered slave into the sling and secured him with more ropes.

  “Better than leaving him here to die,” Sairu replied. But she glanced toward her mistress as she spoke, her eyes narrowed and searching.