by Kate Elliott
The prince stepped forward so quickly that the torch flames shuddered and danced. Ilya flung his head up, but whatever Soerensen said convinced him to leave the child undisturbed.
He climbed up onto the stack and laid the child down in the very center. Kneeling, he remained there for a long while. Whether he spoke, to the gods, to the baby, or stayed silent, Nadine could not tell from this distance. But his back seemed bowed under the weight of his grief.
At last he stood up and climbed back down. Soerensen handed him a torch. They stood, each at one end of the pyre, and Nadine felt, watching them, that between themselves this gesture had a meaning that the rest of those watching could not fathom. Josef Raevsky held one arm around Sonia, who wept. Kirill stood silent to one side, next to Aleksi. Niko Sibirin had come up from the hospital, and he wiped a tear from his eye and hugged his wife. The children—Mitya, Galina, Ivan, Katerina, and Kolia—all stared, but only Galina cried. Vasha Kireyevsky waited farther out, half hidden in the darkness, and Nadine could not see the expression on his face. Feodor loitered to one side, attention caught between the men at the pyre and Nadine.
They put the torches to the wood. Flame leapt up. The pyre burned.
They walked back together, the two men. For an instant, Nadine thought their expressions a perfect match. Then Bakhtiian caught sight of Mitya.
“Cousin, my armor,” he snapped. His armor was brought, and in the roaring light of the bonfire, he tied on his cuirass and slung his helmet over his shoulder. Konstans appeared, leading his horse, and Vladimir and one hundred of his jahar waited, lit by torches, in the half-light thrown off by his son’s funeral pyre. A thin thread of light limned the eastern horizon.
“Nadine?” he demanded. “You’ll attend me.”
She cast a glance back to see Feodor fuming, hands clenched, before she mounted on a horse brought by Anatoly Sakhalin himself.
“You will watch over my wife,” said Bakhtiian to Sakhalin.
“At your command,” said Sakhalin. His eyes glinted, reflecting off the firelight. Nadine wondered if he was disappointed to be left behind.
They rode. Dawn came, and they picked up the pace, switching mounts frequently. They rode steadily throughout that day. The clouds burned off and the sun glared down, unseasonably hot. When night came, Bakhtiian drove them on. Nadine dozed in her saddle. She woke on and off, once when scouts came in and rode alongside Bakhtiian, delivering a succinct appraisal of the ground between here and the Habakar army. At daybreak, they reached the vanguard of Yaroslav Sakhalin’s scouting net, and these scouts gave Bakhtiian a breakdown of the khaja forces and their disposition on the march. It had cooled overnight and they passed easily over several fields before the sun, rising in the sky, broke through the haze to bake down again.
They rode three abreast through a steep defile and over a range of rolling hills washed green by the rains. Two villages they passed, but nothing stirred there, either because the inhabitants had fled or because they had barred themselves within their houses. They traveled through the hills all day, passing twice through broad, flat valleys, changing mounts, driving on.
At dusk, more scouts joined up with them, and they rode south while Bakhtiian conferred with them. Twilight came, and then night, and finally, near midnight, one of Sakhalin’s young commanders rode in and greeted Bakhtiian. Vershinin and his men were sent left, to complete the encirclement. Out there in the darkness, not so far ahead of them, the Habakar army lay bivouacked. A line of scouts went out to watch the khaja army, and the rest hunkered down for what remained of the night. Most simply lay down on the cold ground and slept. The horses huddled in groups.
Nadine could not sleep. She rode out with her uncle and the young Sakhalin commander to the crest of a hill overlooking the broad field on which the Habakar army had camped. Fires burned in two rings around the encampment, one on the outside, one within the tent encampments.
“Every night,” said the young commander, “they stop before nightfall and dig a ditch around their encampment and a wall of dirt inside that, and they build fires on the earth wall.”
“So that horsemen can’t surprise them.” Bakhtiian surveyed the field beyond. The night sky was brilliant with stars.
“Their prince must be a wise commander,” said the Prince of Jeds’ soldier, Ursula.
“Wise, indeed,” said Bakhtiian. “We’ll pull back before his march in the morning until we reach the first of the valleys we passed, where we’ll form for battle.”
“Ah,” said the young commander, “my scouts know that ground. If we surround him there and leave him only one way to retreat, southward where the path is widest, we can pick off his men as they run.”
“If they run,” murmured Ursula. “Your men have ridden far, Bakhtiian. They and the horses must be exhausted. Two hundred kilometers in two days!”
“What’s a kilometer?” asked Nadine.
“My men and my horses will do what I ask of them,” said Ilya.
They retreated back to the lines. Before dawn, the army roused and began to pull back the way they’d come. Nadine, in the rearguard, could hear the rattle and pound of the Habakar army as it followed their tracks. Now and again she heard shouts and screams and the sing of arrows as the young commander’s men harried them, but as the jaran army struck up into the hills, most of her unit joined up with Bakhtiian, leaving only a line of scouts in the rear.
By midday they fell back into position in a wide field, the armored riders massed in the center, the light troops out on the wings and in the rear. Bakhtiian had brought four units of archers with him, many of them inexperienced girls not much older than Mitya mixed in with riders and those archers who had fought before.
Out of the hills, down into the valley, marched the Habakar army. The prince’s banner shone, white with a blue lion, under the noonday sun. At first, to Nadine’s sight, the khaja army flashed with a confusing profusion of colors. Men in imperial blue marched in neat ranks. Rank upon rank of chestnut horses caparisoned in gold followed them, and around the prince clustered men in silver and purple surcoats wearing plumed helmets and riding white horses. Their striped pennons drooped from their lances. Rows of shields glinted in the unit behind the prince, stretching out to each side, burnished armor shining in the sun. Spears bristled above the heads of these men, tipped with blades and hooks.
Ilya let the khaja army march down onto the field. Already Sakhalin’s young commander had drawn his troops back and to either side, far out of range and mostly out of sight, to cast around to eventually encircle the unit.
The Habakar army spread out to take positions, but before they could settle, Ilya lifted his lance up once, twice, a third time, and the center moved forward to meet the enemy. Archers rode up within their ranks and began firing. Arrows sang into the khaja, and then, just before impact, the archers turned tail back within the ranks. From behind, Vershinin’s lighter troops and two units of archers swung around to either flank. It was here that the attack concentrated.
Nadine sat next to her uncle. The noise and cries of soldiers and animals mixed with the sound of weapons clashing.
“Orzhekov. There, a gap to the right. I want you to drive through and reach the prince. Konstans—now, the charge.”
Nadine lifted her spear and her riders moved forward with her. To her left, she saw the bulk of her uncle’s personal guard riding forward parallel to her, gold banner flying, gold and red surcoats a bright glare in the sunlight. The sight of them gave her heart. She stood a little in the saddle, thrusting her legs forward, and tucked her spear under her right arm. An imperial blue infantry unit held its ground in front of her jahar, and behind it rode the blue lion, fluttering in the breeze.
They held to a steady pace, gaining ground, and then some fifty paces from the line she kicked her horse to a pounding gallop and her men howled, a deafening ululation, and they hit the khaja line.
She plowed over the first man, who vanished into the maelstrom, and lost her spear to a fla
iling hook and pull from a knot of infantry men who had held together under the weight of the charge. Yermolov and Yartseva rode on either side of her, and then a sword cut into Yartseva and a hook dragged him down from his horse. A face, a man thrusting at her horse’s head with his spear, appeared to her right. She cut at his arm as she passed but could not look back. As she recovered her saber, blood sprayed her armor—not her own blood but the blood of the soldier she must have hit.
A square of some nine men blocked the path in front of her, but at once four more riders, three still with their spears, joined her and Yermolov. Four of the nine khaja soldiers wavered and scattered, faced with the charge of horses. A spear thrust for her leg; she deflected it. Yermolov shuddered in the saddle, rocked back by a blow, and for an instant Nadine thought he would be toppled from his saddle. She parried; a man with his face screened by mail threw his spear at her. She knocked it away and then he was bowled over from the side by the hooves and spear of another rider. His dark eyes met hers for an instant, pain and anger and fear melded, and then he disappeared beneath the horses.
A moment later she came out into an empty zone. Ahead of her, the blue lion of the prince whirled away in a clot of fighting. Behind, the charge had disintegrated into confusion; unhorsed riders dueled: There was Yartseva, fending off a soldier in imperial blue, but then a line of horses obscured her sight of him, and when they passed, she could not see him.
Shrieks and moans; horses screamed and, to her left, a mare struggled up to its feet and collapsed again in a pool of blood.
“Orzhekov!” That was Yermolov, reining in beside her.
“Form up the men. We’ve got to reach the prince.”
A shower of arrows shaded the sun, arching over her head and falling with a sharp resounding clatter into the ranks of the Habakar prince. She saw, for one instant, Vershinin, far away topping a swell and then he rode down into—what?—she could not tell.
Behind her, bodies littered the field, most of them still moving or writhing, groaning in pain. Riderless horses reared and circled and stumbled over the dead and wounded.
The ranks of her jahar formed around her. Yermolov thrust a spear into her hand, and she sheathed her bloody saber.
They rode into the chaos surrounding the Habakar prince. A line of Habakar horsemen wheeled to meet their charge, but somehow the two units simply passed between each other. Nadine cast a glance back over her shoulder; she caught a glimpse of another wave of her jahar some fifty paces behind, narrowing the gap. The Habakar riders milled, turning this way and then that.
A rider shouted a warning. Nadine parried a blow with the haft of her spear and then thrust hard. The spear stuck in the man’s segmented armor and she flung herself back to let it ride past her, and drew her saber. Cut to her right as an unhorsed man attacked her. The Habakar soldiers were mobbed in groups, infantry and cavalry side by side, disorganized, and they began to give way before her troops.
Except there, some hundred paces in front, bobbed the green pennant of Vershinin’s jahar, and to her left she saw the gold banner that marked Bakhtiian’s own guards. The white horsehair plume of Konstans’ helmet trembled as he pressed forward through the ranks. Then he was hidden by a sheet of fighting. The arrow fire had stopped, at least into these ranks. She heard its sound from farther away, accompanying the louder crash of metal weapons.
They battled forward. Here, though disorganized, the Habakar resistance proved fierce. The clot around the prince’s blue lion shrank, and shrank, but each gain was hard won. Yermolov fell, and then a rider to her left. All at once, she came up beside Konstans. He grinned at her. Blood spattered his face and surcoat, and blood leaked from an arrow wound in his horse’s withers.
“The stubborn bastard won’t surrender!” he shouted. She could barely hear him. “Here!” he cried. “Pull your jahar back. We’re getting pressed too close together.”
Obediently, she shouted aloud and found a flag to signal the withdrawal. Bit by bit, she pulled her jahar back and at last, coming out into the open, they formed back into ranks. What was left of them. She judged she had lost a third of her men.
The field lay open under the sky, churned into mud. Wounded and dead lay everywhere, in some places heaped in piles where they’d fallen over each other; in others, a single form lay tumbled alone on a sodden stretch of ground. From here, Nadine could see off to the north the line of riders and the gold banner that marked Bakhtiian’s position. To the south she could not see, but she heard cries and the clamor of battle retreating away up into the hills. The clot around the Habakar prince shrank, and shrank, under the deadly press of two jahars. Abruptly, by a signal Nadine did not see, the jaran riders pulled away and a unit of archers rode up and began firing at will into the last knot of defenders.
“We’ll ride south,” said Nadine, surveying her men. They rode, and for a while they hunted, cutting down the fleeing Habakar soldiers, those who had gotten that far.
But as afternoon lowered toward evening, Nadine turned them back and returned to the field to hunt for their own wounded and to round up those horses that could be saved. Already many of the light troops wandered the field, killing the Habakar wounded and stripping and marking the dead. A steady line of casualties walked or rode toward Bakhtiian’s position, but Nadine noted that his gold banner had moved.
She found him by the corpse of the Habakar prince.
He glanced up, seeing her. He looked tired. “He fought bravely enough,” he said, although Nadine was not sure he was really speaking to her, to his niece, at all. She had a strange feeling that he was speaking to Tess, almost as if he was defending himself to her. “But he refused to surrender. Had he led the army on the field outside Qurat, the victory might not have gone our way so easily.”
Vershinin’s nephew was stripping the body, and Nadine examined the dead Habakar prince with some interest—with his chest-length black beard, dark hair looped in double braids, and his throat red with his own blood. Not particularly handsome, but so few of the khaja were; still, he looked strong, and the wounds his body had suffered—some fresh, some old scars—proved his courage in battle. Evidently he had cut his own throat rather than surrender to the jaran. Or the arrow in his eye might have killed him. Of his guard, none lived.
“Vershinin,” Bakhtiian continued, “I’ll leave you to follow after, but I’m returning to Karkand with my guard now. I’ll leave you three healers who’ve been trained by Dr. Hierakis. They’ll judge those who can survive the journey back to the hospital, and those it would be more merciful to kill now.”
Nadine got leave for a few minutes to find her men among the wounded. She marked them, and was relieved to find over half those who had been missing, although at least one she judged would not make it back to camp. She found Yermolov; a chance cut by a khaja axman had severed the straps of his thigh armor, and a better aimed one had cut his exposed leg down to the bone, but already a healer cleaned mud and cloth out of it, muttering about something called sepsis.
“What is sepsis, Mother?” Nadine asked the elderly woman.
“There, you’re done to fight again, young man,” said the woman to Yermolov, who wasn’t all that young except perhaps in comparison to her. She grunted and got to her feet and crossed a patch of baked-dry mud to crouch down beside a wounded archer. Two young men trailed after her, burdened with strips of cloth, with pouches filled with water, and a paste of herbal ointment. “Commander,” she said, looking briefly up at Nadine, “it’s what kills most of these men, or used to, at least. Dokhtor Hierakis has shown us how the wounds become infected with dirt and khaja blood, and so if we stop the infection, then the wound is likely to heal cleanly.”
“Ah.” Nadine left her to her work. “Yermolov, I’ll leave you to come with Vershinin. You’ll take command of those of my jahar who are wounded.”
He nodded, and she changed to a remount and found her uncle again. It was dark by now. He had formed up his unit—most of whom had come through the battle wi
th minor wounds or none at all—and was saying good-bye to the young Sakhalin commander and to Vershinin. Nadine waited patiently through the conference. She had no urgent desire to return to camp, but she could see that Ilya was obsessed with getting back to Karkand.
They started off. Nadine felt numb with exhaustion, and the torches bobbing up and down alongside her and all along the line disoriented her, making her dizzy. She rode without speaking, her jahar strung out in front of her where she rode beside her uncle.
“Dina,” said Ilya suddenly. He rode one of his remounts, a shaggy tarpan, and one of his guardsmen walked along to his left, bearing a torch to light the horse’s way. “I shouldn’t have let you come with me.” You’re more valuable to me alive than dead.”
“Thank you,” she said dryly. “Feodor reminds me of that all the time.”
“As well he might, since you’re more valuable to the Grekov tribe alive than dead, too. But you fought well, in any case.” They rode for a while in silence. A new torch-bearer came to take the place of the other one, and they switched mounts and went on.
“Dina.” The torchlight illuminated part of his face, shifting on him, highlighting first his eyes, then his mouth, then the straight line of his nose, then his beard, then his eyes again. Otherwise, he rode in darkness. “Why should Soerensen offer me Jeds? If Erthe defeats the khepellis, then won’t Erthe itself be a threat to us?”
“Erthe lies far over the seas, Uncle. Surely they’d need many ships in order to bring an army here.”
“But what if it’s the khepellis who have these ships? We know they can travel to any port along the coasts we know. And if the khepellis are as great a threat as Soerensen says they are, then we must unite against them. What if they want all the lands where humans now live?”
Nadine found herself a little confused by the conversation, since part of what he said made no sense to her. It sounded as if he had been negotiating with the Prince of Jeds. Over what, she wondered. “Then you really do believe that they’re zayinu? I never saw any khepellis. Those that came to Morava at the prince’s behest arrived after I left.”
