Children of Earth and Sky

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  She looked at him. “Your head is no small triumph.”

  “No. It wouldn’t be.”

  “And so you feel . . .”

  “I do! I will challenge them anywhere and take risks doing it. But I won’t throw away forty lives, or give those bastards a chance at a victory when they have just been shattered! Let Asharias kill those serdars for us. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Not truly,” she said, being honest. “I would rather kill them ourselves.”

  He turned to her then. She felt uneasy under his gaze. She sometimes did, as if she was too clearly seen by him. He said, “Girl, do you want to die doing this?”

  “I don’t want it, but—”

  “Then don’t chase the dark. Danica, none of us help anyone if we’re dead.”

  “I know that!”

  “We aren’t heroes if we lead men into battles we will lose. Those battles may find us, but we need not race towards them. This is wrong. I feel it. I was about to make a mistake. Will you trust me?”

  Under his gaze she said, “With my life.”

  His expression became wry. “More likely your death, but maybe not right now.”

  They walked back to the others and they mounted up and turned back south a little distance, then east again, to raid there through that spring and summer, far from the retreating army of Asharias.

  —

  IT SAVED THEIR lives. They didn’t know anything clearly, beyond the instinct of someone experienced, but a chronicler can sometimes tell, piecing a story together afterwards.

  The serdars of the retreating Osmanli army were, indeed, casting about desperately for ways to appease the court and save their own lives. One remembered that the Trakesian rebel Skandir’s band had been roaming the main road east-west, had harassed their supplies, killed a force sent after him. Four companies of two hundred men each were dispatched to ask questions in villages and scour the countryside for signs. To find and kill the man called Skandir, after twenty-five years of failing to do so.

  People were interrogated. It was not an army in a state of calm. Some of those questioned died, some survived, though not necessarily in the same condition as before. A defiant Jaddite cleric was hanged outside a roadside sanctuary just east of where the rebel had fought the company sent after him.

  No one knew anything. No one had seen him. Skandir had, it seemed, ridden south after that battle. He would be down that way, everyone said. No one would lie for that man, they said. He brought trouble wherever he went.

  It was probably true. And the south, Trakesia, was large, wild, empty, dangerous, not yet pacified for Ashar. They were part of an army commanded to return to their barracks, with the leaders ordered on to Asharias.

  None of the officers leading the search felt personally at risk. It was the serdars who would be so. Indeed, promotions were likely when senior figures were executed. They turned back, all four companies, cavalry and infantry.

  The hanged man was cut down by people from the village and his fellow clerics two days later—when they felt it was safe to do so. He was buried with rites in the cemetery behind the sanctuary, another small person in the world, another victim of the wars.

  —

  DANICA GRADEK STAYED with Rasca Tripon until the end, which came a little more than two years later, in that same village, in fact.

  He had begun to experience dizziness, have trouble breathing. He had fallen once from his horse. It was autumn, not campaign season, and the Osmanli armies at that time were ferociously engaged in the east in the aftermath of changes at court and rebellion among the tribes there, who had never yielded to being ruled from Asharias.

  It was judged safe to bring him north.

  Four of them accompanied him to the village where he said the only woman he trusted as a healer lived. She had been his lover once. Danica knew that by then. She remembered the woman, too.

  The man known then and after as Skandir died in that house. Not in the treatment room but in the healer’s own bed on a morning bright and windy when the red-gold leaves had begun to fall. Two women each held one of his hands, one young, one old, both sorrowing.

  “I never thought it would be in a bed,” were his last words. “I believe I served Jad. I am sorry for some things.”

  They made a pyre for him that night, that the Osmanlis might never know he had been there, that no grave might lie anywhere to be despoiled. That people might even believe he was still alive, out in some unassuaged wildness of the world, red-bearded, riding a horse, tall and stern, ferociously unyielding, fighting the changes that had come, in memory of Sarantium.

  He gave his ring to Danica before he died.

  She stayed another season with what remained of his band in the south. She was an important member of that company by then, but it had been held together by the force and will of their leader and it drifted apart, as leaves scatter, as lives do.

  She went north alone with her dog, leaving behind stories and a memory for a time down south. Some newborn girls were named Danica in those years, though it had never been a name known in Trakesia before she was there with Skandir.

  Neven stayed on the four farms through the winter to let his Sauradian become fluent with use—that was what he told himself. There was also the difficulty of winter travel in this part of the world. The north wind came with a lean wolf’s bite. There was snow and there were wolves, hungry in the dark. On clear nights the moons and winter stars shone hard and bright. The stream south of them froze over. He had never seen that before. You could walk across it.

  The language was not a difficulty. It had been, he reminded himself, the first tongue he’d have ever spoken. He had no memories of doing so, but whatever stories his mother or sister had told him would have been in Sauradian. He wanted to be perfect with it now. He couldn’t really say why, and at some point began to wonder if he was delaying because he was afraid of the next step.

  When he became aware of that feeling, Neven knew it was time to go.

  In addition to which, he realized he was becoming a problem on the farm and he didn’t want to be. These people had been good to him. He had worked hard, but that didn’t always ensure that people were good to you.

  “If you ever touch my daughter,” Zorzi had said (mildly enough) when the offer was first made that he stay and work with them, “I’ll have to kill you.”

  “I don’t think you could,” Neven had replied, also mildly, “but I will never touch her. My word on it.”

  There had been a moment of tension when he’d said it that way, then Zorzi had laughed and said, “That will do for me.”

  One of the brothers (the older one, Mavro) had given Neven a narrowed look, but over time he’d come to easy enough dealings with Mavro, with all three men.

  Milena was different. He never said or did anything that could offend her (or her family), and he was aware, early on, that there were discussions going forward between her father and Jorjo, who owned one of the other farms and had a son named Dimitar.

  It was nothing to do with Neven, except that Milena seemed to want it to concern him. He liked her. She was pretty enough, strong and hard-working. She asked him questions about the world, and himself. She wanted to know things, Milena.

  He managed to avoid the questions that were about his own life. He just said he came from the east and had “reasons” for heading southwest. He stressed this: that he was going on. Milena asked questions all the time, at the table and in the field, or she’d come find him at workday’s end just to talk.

  “Do I smell of onions?” she asked once.

  “No,” he’d said. “And what’s wrong with onions?”

  “Some people say they smell bad.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe they do. But you don’t.”

  She’d nodded briskly, as if he’d said something important. He didn’t tell her that he’d spent
many nights in tents with large, unwashed soldiers.

  He’d have had to be more innocent than he was not to see she wouldn’t be unhappy if he approached her in the dark, or by the stream as the weather warmed. But he’d made a promise, and he had no wish to spend his life here. Not that it wasn’t a good-enough life they lived on these farms, but it wasn’t his life. Or, not what he wanted for his life. Though he wasn’t yet sure what that was.

  But at some point it became clear that plans for a marriage and the union of two farms were being made difficult by Milena, who was being difficult because of Neven.

  Not that she’d be able to refuse her father, but Zorzi was an unhurried man and he was being patient. He also appeared to have reservations about Jorjo’s family, going back a long way, and so perhaps he might not have entirely minded if the big young stranger had chosen to stay with them.

  Neven would never know if that was so. After the snow melted and the first buds and flowers appeared, he said at the end of a midday meal that he would stay through ploughing and planting and be on his way.

  Milena had given him the dregs of the broth and half portions of cabbage two evenings running, but never said a word. He did feel a little sorry, but Dimitar seemed decent, and there were reasons for those two to be together. Not everyone could go out into the world chasing dreams and difference, especially a girl.

  It seemed to him that people must pass through each other’s lives all the time, touch them, be touched by them. Leave something behind, maybe, like a star that fell—you became a memory. Teacher Kasim, for example. Kasim was that for him. And Koçi, too. And Skandir, that day above the road, having his life spared by that man. That was more than just a memory.

  He wondered how long he’d remember these farms, the sound of the wind, owls in winter nights, killing wolves with Zorzi and his sons with the moons shining on hard-packed snow. Milena’s body curved over the table as she poured soup for all of them, or standing beside the well towards the river at day’s end, looking at something in the distance no one else could see.

  He left before dawn one morning, the last stars still in the sky. He’d told Zorzi at twilight, coming in from the spring field, and they’d exchanged a farewell. He didn’t tell Milena that night, but he did receive her father’s permission to leave her a gift: he was going, it was all right.

  He had a silver Asharite neck chain with a silver star. He wasn’t going to wear it any more. He looped it over the handle of her bedchamber door and left.

  He spoke Sauradian like a native by then. He was a native, he told himself on the road as the sun rose behind him. And he did know where he was going now, after all. Probably always had, he thought.

  —

  HE WAS ATTACKED three days later.

  He’d known he was being tracked all morning. You might leave the djannis, everything you’d known, change your life (or try), but you didn’t leave your training behind so quickly.

  Three men had been moving with him, north of the road. He thought they might be hadjuks; the land kept rising, and high ground was their country. He hoped they were hadjuks.

  They came down exactly where he’d thought they might, where the slopes came close to the rough ribbon of road, with scrub and bush and a copse of trees for cover.

  Not enough of that.

  “Stop there!” he shouted in Osmanli. “Unless you are in a hurry to die.”

  They didn’t stop. He hadn’t expected them to. He was one man in a lonely place, and he had, at the very least, a sword and bow they could take. They stood up to be seen and came forward, spreading out. Two of them carried heavy guns. Most people, he thought, would raise their hands in surrender now, or kneel, seeing hadjuks with guns. Hoping to be robbed only, escape with their lives.

  “I don’t think we’ll be the ones who die here,” one of them said. He had a long beard and a wool cap.

  “Bad thought,” said Neven. “I don’t like hadjuks, as it happens.”

  “Is it so? How do you feel about guns, pretty boy?”

  “I think they aim badly and misfire often. I think those are old and I doubt you know how to reload at any speed.”

  They stopped walking. His calm causing that. Then the one who had spoken took aim.

  “Let’s find out,” he said.

  They did. Neven really had been one of the best with a bow in Mulkar. A natural eye, the archery teacher had said, not a man quick to praise.

  He killed the one levelling the gun first, as they’d been taught, and the explosion of its firing sounded as the hadjuk died, convulsively twitching his finger.

  The other two sprinted forward. One fired his gun, which was pretty much a waste of effort if you were running, it would just be noise. Neven didn’t even bother to duck down (you were taught to drop, men tended to aim high). He had time for the arrow that took this one, too.

  For the third he could have used his bow again—djanni archers were trained to speed, it was why bows were still better than guns, usually—but these were hadjuks, and he wanted to engage with one of those, kill him with a sword, see him fall from close.

  This was done, this happened.

  Silence, after. It could often seem quieter after loud sounds ended, Neven thought. There had been a wing and flap of birds from trees when the guns went off (he recalled that), but there was this stillness now.

  It ought not to be so easy to end a life, he thought. He wasn’t regretful, they had come down to kill him. But even so: they had been breathing, thinking of a woman, their herds, the brightness of the sun at midday, they were hungry or tired or excited, and now they were none of those things.

  It was likely, he thought, that others might come now from the hills, having heard the guns, so he picked up his pace after cleaning his sword and checking if the hadjuks had anything he could use.

  There was a little food. His own boots were better than theirs (they were poor men, ragged—not a life of ease, he thought). They had knives, but so did he. He left the guns. They were heavy, and he didn’t like guns. He did retrieve his arrows.

  The second man wasn’t dead yet. Neven looked down at him where he lay fighting for breath beside the road.

  “This was for Antunic,” he said. He bent and pulled out the arrow. “For my father and my brother.” He straightened and watched as the man died.

  He carried on. Days and nights. You were careful here, of men and wolves at night. He saw deer at the edge of the trees. Wild boar. A bear once. It rained, there was sunshine. The road turned to the south. He’d hoped it would. He’d have had to strike out off the path had it not. He wasn’t entirely sure where he needed to go. He asked people when he came upon them—when they didn’t flee at his approach. There were few farms. He’d reached wilder, hillier country as he continued south. Mountains to the west now, in the distance. Sheep and goats grazed. He hunted rabbits and game birds. The road dwindled and disappeared. He walked open country. He suspected he might have to go more to the west at some point but he didn’t know where.

  —

  IT WAS NEARLY summer when he found it.

  He spoke one morning to a brother and sister minding their flock. Caused them to understand he meant no harm, despite the bow and sword. He didn’t know if they believed that, but they didn’t run away. Or they were defending their sheep, showing courage.

  The brother was aggressive, trying to make himself feel braver. Neven understood how men (and boys) did that.

  “Don’t challenge me,” he said to him. “I have no ill intent.”

  “Do you even know how to use that bow? Did you steal it?”

  “If I stole it, I’d have had to do so from a djanni. Look at it.”

  They wouldn’t know a djanni bow here, he realized.

  “Show us, then!” the brother said. “Hit that tree.” He pointed south. Neven didn’t turn.

  “I did say don
’t challenge me. I see where you keep your knife. Don’t do it. You can’t stab me while I shoot at some tree. You can’t. I can kill you both, and your friends on the ridge. I don’t want to. I just have a question, then I’m away.”

  “Bartol, leave it alone. I think he means it.” The girl’s voice was surprisingly calm.

  Her brother looked at her—there was an obvious resemblance—then back to Neven.

  “What’s your question?” he said gruffly.

  “I’m looking for a village called Antunic.”

  “Why?” the girl asked, surprising him again.

  No reason not to answer. “I was born there.”

  “Then why don’t you know where it is?” she asked.

  “I was taken by hadjuks as a child.”

  “We’re hadjuks,” she said.

  “Cilya!” her brother said sharply.

  “He said he wouldn’t hurt us.”

  Neven nodded. “I won’t. I just want to go home.”

  “You won’t find much,” she said.

  It wasn’t, as it happened, very far. He arrived towards sunset the next day. There was a west wind, high clouds.

  —

  NOTHING HAD BEEN REBUILT. No one lived here. Neven had thought there’d be a new village settled, that some might even be here who remembered his father, his grandfather. Might even remember him as a child. Vuk Gradek’s little boy. He had wanted his language skills to be flawless, for when he came home.

  He looked around the emptiness left behind and he felt so hard a sadness he wanted to weep.

  He swallowed, spat into the grass. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined it would be. There were blackened ruins of houses you could walk past and look into. One of these would have been their own. He had no idea which. Ash was everywhere, you’d have thought it would have all blown away by now. Weeds and wildflowers. The wind blew, he rubbed grit from one eye.