by Bunch, Chris
“Far be it from me, great Jedaz, to feel anything but shame for having caused a problem for my new friends. How would you suggest I make amends?”
“If we were proper Maisirians, we would spend the rest of the day singing devotionals to various gods for your safe arrival,” Bakr shouted. “And you and I would sit around complimenting each other on our charm and bravery. However, my people need meat, and, since it’s early yet, we wish to hunt. Tell me, oh great Numantian, would this shame you?”
“Greatly,” I said. “But you may make amends by letting us go with you. After we wash.”
Bakr yipped. “Good! Good! Of course you’re welcome. We’ll leave as soon as we refresh.”
• • •
Bakr came to me as I was making the acquaintance of the horse he’d given me. With him was a thin, white-haired and -bearded man. He was painfully thin and not particularly tall, but I thought his leanness was that of the greyhound, and that he might be well able to run with a horse until it foundered. “This is my nevraid, Levan Illey,” he said. I knew nevraid was Maisirian for “magician.”
“Will your men hunt with our riders?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “At least until they sight something. Then they’ll dismount and use their bows.”
“Good,” the nevraid said. “I have an idea to make their day more rewarding. We Negaret hunt from the saddle, but it will be easy to accommodate your soldiers. Perhaps, Faquet, you could have a rider take them about half a league to the south of the herd? There’s a rocky outcropping there, the one that looks like a fat man squatting, and the herd will run past it when we attack.”
Without waiting for an answer, he bustled away.
“How does the nevraid know what path the animals will take?” I asked.
“Because he’s a nevraid,” Bakr said in some astonishment. “Can’t your magicians perform such a task?”
I’d never heard of any.
“Tsk,” Bakr said. “Hunting must be chancy in your land. Pardon me.” He called for a lieutenant and gave him orders. A few minutes later, my five were mounted and rode off with three escorts.
“Now, as for you?” Bakr said when he returned.
“I’d prefer to ride out with you, then hunt on my own.”
“As you wish.” Bakr grinned. “You are a most unusual man for a diplomat, Tribune. Going hunting … letting your escort ride off … not worrying about being in danger.”
I answered honestly. “I’m not a godling, nor are any of my men. If you intended us harm, do you think the six of us could do much more than worry you for a few minutes?”
Bakr nodded thoughtfully. “Since I’ve evidently proven I’m not an assassin, let us hunt.”
• • •
We rode to where the antelope were supposed to be and dismounted below the hillcrest, and three men crept up to the top. Illey spread his map on the ground, holding it down with rocks marked with magical symbols. The scouts slipped back. The herd was there — about forty of them.
“Good,” Bakr said. “Don’t take the leader. Kill no yearlings, either. Take young bucks and any female without offspring. One per man.”
We mounted. I unlimbered my hunting weapon, something I’d made from items borrowed at the camp, a weapon I thought the Negaret might find interesting.
“Now!” Bakr shouted, and we charged over the ridge at the gallop. The antelope saw us and stampeded. But then I heard a fierce roar, and two lions bounded over the far hillside. The antelope skittered aside, and for a moment I forgot them, cursing myself for having no better weapon to face charging man-killers. But the lions wavered and vanished and I realized it was Illey’s magic.
I lashed my horse into a harder gallop, picked one buck, horns curving almost to his back, from the pack, and forgot the others. He ran hard, but my horse was running harder. I rose in my stirrups and readied the weapon I’d made. It was four iron balls, each in a tiny net, each net at the end of a leather thong. I whirled it twice about my head by one ball, then sent it spinning away.
I’d spent days and weeks learning how to do this, as a boy, after my father told me about the trick he’d seen used by desert tribesmen in Hailu. It looked easy, but wasn’t, and I had gotten many rapped knuckles, a thumped head, and several lost snares before I felled my first guinea fowl.
The balls flew out, whirling at the ends of their thongs, and whipped about the antelope’s back legs. It pinwheeled onto its back. I pulled my horse up and slid off, dagger out as my feet touched ground.
The antelope thrashed to its feet, but too late, as I was on it. It swept once at me with its curved horns, then I was inside its guard and slashed its throat. Blood spurted, I sprang back, and an instant later the animal was dead. I bled it out, cut out the musk glands on its inner thigh, gutted it, saving the liver and heart, and used grass to wipe out its body cavity. I managed to shoulder its bulk — I guess the dressed buck weighed just under a hundred pounds — and staggered toward my horse.
Hooves thudded, and Bakr reined in. He dismounted, took the beast’s forequarters, and helped me load it. My horse neighed once, but didn’t otherwise object.
“You hunt like a wild man, Numantian,” Bakr said, and there was approval in his voice.
“I’m hungry,” I replied.
“So are we all,” he said, and pointed. Here and there, across the plain, were dismounted hunters, cleaning their kills. There was a rocky mount not far away, and I saw my men below it, busy at the same task.
“Not bad, Shum Damastes,” Bakr said. “Perhaps the gods heard my jest and made it true. Perhaps there are things to be learned from you.”
• • •
The meal that night was so memorable I can still name most of the dishes. It was chilly but clear, and several of the tents’ rain covers had been pitched together for a long pavilion. A fire pit was dug to the windward side, and dry wood emitting no smoke laid, so we were quite warm. On the other side were cooking fires. I thought it admirable that, while the women cooked, the men served, and women sat as equals among us.
“You might be grateful for several things,” Bakr announced at the beginning of the banquet. “First is we Negaret aren’t addicted to constant toasts, unlike other Maisirians. So there’s some possibility we may survive the evening and won’t wake with the drummers of the gods behind our eyeballs. Secondly, our priest died last year, and as yet no man of the gods has joined us, so there won’t be any long prayers to interfere with the gluttony. We feel terribly cursed.” Bakr tried to look pious, failed. I noticed only a few Negaret frowned at his levity.
“Third is we’re reprobates, every single one of us.” He waited, like any good jokester, for my puzzlement, then went on. “We no longer swill what’s supposedly the Negaret’s favorite drink. Which is mare’s milk, fermented in a treated stomach and mixed with fresh blood.” He grimaced, then said quietly, “I’ve always wondered if every people must have some sort of dish that no one can tolerate, merely to prove how tough they are. At any rate, my men and women now drink like civilized folk.”
He indicated a table laden with jugs. There were sweet wines and some brandies, but the favored tipple was yasu, which was made from grain fermented into a mash, then distilled. The clear liquor was flavored with various plants, such as citrus peel, fennel, dill, and anise. I’d gotten a gape of disbelief when I told Bakr I didn’t drink. Again, he proclaimed I was unworthy to be a diplomat, but there’d be that much more for him.
The meal began with tiny fresh fish eggs spread on tiny, hot biscuits. With that went hard-boiled eggs, onions, small spicy berries, or a bit of lemon juice. The second course was the livers of the antelope we’d killed that afternoon, sautéed with wild mushrooms, wild onions, and spices. Next were prairie fowls, stuffed with seasoned marsh rice. The main course was roasted antelope, larded with bacon. Served between these courses were vegetables, including an assortment of various mushrooms in soured cream, and a watercress salad in sesame oil.
The finale
was a dessert of goat cheese, egg yolks, nuts, currants, cream, and fresh and glazed fruit.
I could lie and say I was comfortably full, but in reality I felt as if I’d just been slopped, and now should go look for a mudhole to wallow in. Bakr belched resoundingly, and motioned me closer.
“You see the hard, austere life of a prairie nomad?” he said mournfully. “Do you not pity our harsh existence?”
• • •
We were roused the next morning for the journey to Oswy. The Negaret were civilized — there was little conversation on waking, and we were given a hard roll and strong tea after washing, then set to work. When the Negaret broke camp, or set it up for that matter, everyone worked, from the jedaz to the smaller children. Within the hour they were ready to move.
I saw how much they used magic. The tents, for instance, were in reality no more than a scrap of felt, various bits of rope, and some toothpick-sized pieces of wood, all ensorcelled. Illey bustled through the clamor. When a tent was struck, he’d stop, say a few words, and the heavily piled felt would vanish and someone would scrabble for the tiny bits that were its essence. Their sleeping robes, lamps, pillows — all were tiny items that might have come from a rich child’s dollhouse.
“It’s a pity,” Bakr said, “nobody’s found a way to magic chickens and such, so we could dispense with the wagons altogether.” He turned to watch a goat being chased by two small boys and then, an instant later, two small boys being chased by the goat. “Yes. Goats especially,” he mused, rubbing his thigh where he might have been butted once.
Then there was nothing left but the cooking fires and the pots and pans, the cooks bustling about them. Now we ate a real meal: eggs served with a sauce that would have cooked them if they hadn’t already been hard-boiled, so it cooked my mouth instead, fresh-baked rye bread, sweet cakes, and more tea. The meal over, the kitchens were struck. Their iron pots were miniatures, as were the great iron plates for frying. Illey told me he didn’t have the magic to create those to stand firm against fire, so they traded in the cities for them, built by magicians whose incantations were pleasing to the fire god, Shahriya.
And then we marched.
• • •
After two hours’ ride, it began misting, but it was pleasant to ride down the last of the rolling foothills toward the plains that stretched far into the distance. Bakr moved up beside me and asked, “How many men, if it’s not a secret, did you leave Numantia with?”
“No more than what I have now.”
“That is very good,” he said. “Most men who attempt the mountains leave some bones as they go.”
“I guess we were lucky.”
“Yes, lucky,” Bakr said absently. “The reason I asked is that I’ve never heard of a diplomat traveling so light. They like to be surrounded with pomp and pissiness, I’ve observed from my encounters with the king’s emissaries. Or is it different in Numantia?”
“It’s no different,” I said. “I guess politicians are the same everywhere.”
We rode in silence, companionably, for a while. “Another odd thing,” he said. “If you were Maisirian, holding a rank as high as you do, everyone in your party would be an officer.”
“Who’d cut the wood and cook the meals?”
“The lowest-ranking pydna, of course,” Bakr said. “The Maisirians don’t like to be around the underclasses, the calstors and devas, except to order them to go out and die bravely. Soldiers aren’t much more than animals.”
“So I’ve read,” I said. “And no officer who thinks like that can lead well. Maybe not at all.”
“No,” Bakr agreed. “Which is why so many soldiers desert to become Negaret.
“We’re an outlet for the Maisirians, just like a covered pot on the fire must have a vent. A man or woman can’t stand his lord, well, instead of waiting for him with an ax, he runs for the frontiers. If he makes it to us — he’s Negaret.”
“How do you know a runaway will make a good Negaret?” I asked.
“If he lives long enough to reach us, he’ll be a good one,” Bakr said. “He’ll have had to elude his master’s hounds, make his way through territory where a captured runaway’s worth a bit of a reward, deal with wolves, bears, cataracts … He’ll be tough when he reaches us. Or we’ll find his bones in the spring.”
Such a newcomer would then be assigned to a work group around one of the Negaret communities. When a column like Bakr’s, which was called a lanx, came to trade, the runaway could join the lanx if he or she wished. “After a time,” Bakr said, “the man or woman is a full Negaret, and allowed to speak in our nets, our assemblies. That was what happened to me.” I was surprised. “Ah yes,” Bakr said. “The lowliest can become the highest. At our riets, any man may become a candidate for leader, or others may name him. Every adult votes, and so the new jedaz is chosen. If someone doesn’t like that jedaz, he’s free to leave, and join another lanx. This is also good, for it lessens dissent, and also the blood in one lanx doesn’t become too intertwined, so instead of warriors we might end with men who stumble around drooling and fucking chickens.”
“Was there no supreme leader?”
“Of course. King Bairan.”
“But no one great chieftain for the Negaret?”
“What do we need of them? Our towns have kantibe, mayors. They’re chosen by the town riets. Lately the king has been sending his own men to our towns to administrate Maisirian interests.”
“And do you like that?”
Bakr started to say something, then caught himself. “Of course we do, being all loyal servants of King Bairan,” he said blandly. “And if we didn’t, it’s amazing the terrible accidents that can happen when a Maisirian shum goes for a walk by the riverside at night. Thus far, when a regrettable thing like that’s happened, his replacement is far more gifted and sensible.”
“At least about riverside walks.”
• • •
We came out of the hills onto the suebi. It was just as the travelers had written, land that went on and on to an impossibly distant horizon. But it wasn’t desert, or flat, and such a belief would deceive the unwary to their deaths. The suebi was riven with deep ravines a bandit column or a company of cavalry could set an ambush in.
Sometimes the land was marshy, sometimes dry, and a traveler had to pick his way carefully to avoid being mired or drowning. There were forests, not high pines such as we’d left, or the jungles of Numantia. The trees were low, twisted, bent, with thick brush between them. And always there was the wind — sometimes gently sighing, promising marvels just beyond, sometimes roaring fiercely.
I loved the suebi on first sight, loved the stretch and beckon of the sky, greater than any I’d known, any I could imagine. Some of us it made cautious, careful. Curti became even more wary than before, but wary of what, he couldn’t say. At least one, Captain Lasta, was terrified by the grand reach. But being the brave man he was, he spoke of it but once, when we were musing about some clouds, and he said, harshly, he thought a demon was sitting up there, waiting to scoop up an unwary soldier, as a hawk hovers over a scurrying mouse.
In the days to come, that sky, and the suebi, would make many Numantians feel that way. And there would be more than enough hawks to provide deaths for poor mice.
• • •
It had grown colder while we traveled, and there was rime ice on the riverbanks, and my breath came frosty. Illey stood on a flat stone about fifty feet out into the huge river, which was almost a mile from bank to bank, with sandbanks rearing here and there. “Cast now,” he shouted, pointing at what I thought was nothing more than a ripple.
I obeyed, hurling the long harpoon with all my might. The river exploded, and a great gray shape, coiling like a serpent, reared. Its face was an ancient evil, bewhiskered, fanged. My shaft was buried just behind its huge, water-drooling gills.
“We have him,” Illey shrieked.
“Secure him well,” Bakr ordered, and the men who held the end of the line ran to a nearb
y tree and whipped several lengths around its trunk.
The monstrous fish smashed to the end of the line, and the tree bent nearly double. The fish jumped, almost clear of the water, and I gasped, seeing how huge it was, almost thirty feet long. It ran hard downstream, trying to pull the spear out, trying to break the rope. But the line held firm. Again and again the fish tried to break free, but to no avail, and then it rolled on its back and was dead.
The Negaret cheered and dragged the carcass ashore.
I turned to Bakr. “You’ve honored me greatly,” I said, “allowing me to cast that harpoon.”
He nodded. “You and your men have been good companions to us. Good to travel with. We sought but to return a piece of that honor.”
“I thank you, Jedaz Bakr,” I said, bowing.
“Enough of such horseshit. We have fish to clean and egg pouches to cut away. We’ll be awake half the night up to our crotches in fish guts,” he said, as uncomfortable with sentiment as I.
• • •
Lightning erupted across the sky from horizon to horizon, and thunder slammed as if the gods were rolling stone bowls. Karjan and I had walked out from the camp after the evening meal. Behind us were lights from the guttering fires and, very dimly, from the tents. I was lost in my thoughts when Karjan suddenly said, “Y’ know, wouldn’t be bad, bein’ like this always.”
I blinked back to the present. My servant had been taken up by a slender woman about his own age, the widow, I learned, of one of the lanx’s best warriors.
“You mean, as a Negaret?”
He nodded.
“Not at all bad,” I said. “No slaves, no masters. No jobs that make you do the same thing, day in, day out. Hunt, fish, ride — there’re worse things than life like this.”
“Guess I never was too good at bein’ civilized,” Karjan said. I saw his teeth flash behind his beard. “Best treat me well, Tribune. Or one day you’ll commission me or do somethin’ equally shitty, and I’ll be gone.”
“Run fast,” I said. “For I might be right on your heels.”
