by Chris Bunch
I’d generally dine with one or another of the family, talk for a bit, then go early to bed.
Occasionally I would have visitors — one of the local sorcerers who was well trusted, who wanted to know all I could remember of Tenedos’s great magical feats; a couple of the village lads I’d grown up with, who asked for tales of the outside world when I wanted to hear their stories of a calm farming life; and twice one of the maids came by to ask me if I wanted a walk in the moonlight, although we didn’t do much walking.
There were other days spent hunting. I’d be out well before dawn, and generally, by midday, have made my stalk and harvested a sambur, a boar, once a small fruit bear who’d been raiding our crops. Sometimes I brought my prey back to the family kitchen, dressed and butchered it, and gave it to the head cook, other times I gave the carcass to the first peasant I came across who looked as if he could use a hearty meal. This wasn’t altruism — the people I fed would not only be unlikely to yammer about my presence, but would give the alarm if any strangers came into our district.
Then I heard of the tiger.
It was a mankiller, fortunately not on our estates, but about three leagues distant. It had taken a farmer, out late seeking a strayed calf, then two women gathering wood in the fringes of the forest, where tigers always like to nap, then, most outrageously, a little girl in broad daylight who toddled behind her parents’ hut.
Half the peasants of that village wanted to hunt the beast down; the other half knew it was a demon, not a creature of this world, and so unkillable. The braver half convinced the latter half, and so they formed a line, armed with their flails and scythes and swept the forest.
They found the tiger — or rather, it found them, coming out of nowhere and batting down one hunter, then the man next to him before they could lift their spears, then leaping over the beaters and vanishing.
Now it was certain — the creature was not of this world, and there was nothing for the villagers to do but huddle in their huts and pray to their own gods and Jacini of the Earth to bring them relief.
I heard of the killings two days after the abortive hunt and felt my heart beat a little faster, remembering I was the boy who rode the tiger, and who would be, or perhaps already had been, savaged.
Perhaps it was time for me to chance the gods once more.
I took spears, bow, arrow, and two trustworthy servants and made my way to the village.
I paid little attention to their yammerings about demons but demanded to be given directions to the scene of the last killings.
The villagers refused to enter the forest and face death, but I felt no danger that day of alternately blazing sun and spattering rain. I found the place and the remnants of the two men’s bodies. There wasn’t much left — the tiger had returned to feed and then, content, left the rest for scavengers. I had a servant wrap a hand and a leg to return to the village for funeral ceremonies and examined the ground. I found where the tiger had lain waiting and how he’d come in a tawny streak of death.
The pugmarks in the soft ground were those of a young animal, probably male, but one print was markedly larger than the others, as I’d expected. I went back to the village, bought a bullock, and staked him in that clearing. For three nights, his terrified bawling kept everyone awake; then on the fourth the tiger came.
I was waiting in a tree-hide about ten feet above the bullock and drove an iron-weighted spear down into the tiger’s shoulderblades as he reared for the kill in bright moonlight.
He screamed once, rolled, claws reaching for me, then died. I sent a second spear into his guts, waited until I was sure he wasn’t faking, came down out of the tree. I looked at his corpse, saw the swollen paw, oozing pus from the porcupine he’d unwisely swatted, whose quills made it impossible for him to hunt normal prey.
The bullock was still alive, to his and my surprise. I went to the edge of the forest and called to the village, telling them the terror was over. They swarmed out, torches flaring, shouting praise to my name, offering what little money they had.
I refused, of course, told them to take the tiger’s skin, and as a favor, to allow the bullock to live until he died and honor him in the name of their dead.
In spite of the lateness of the hour, they brought out their best for a feast. I ate heartily of savory lentil stew, pretended to taste the wine they made from rice, watched their jubilant dancing to the tap of a drum and the whistle of wooden flutes.
I grew sleepy, thanked them for their hospitality, and returned to the hut they’d given me, which had belonged to one of the men the tiger had slain.
After a time a young girl, whom I’d seen eyeing me at the feast, tapped on the door frame and asked if I wished company.
After we’d loved, and she was sleeping, head pillowed on my arm, I thought of the last few days and how utterly content I’d been. Perhaps this was the tiger’s last gift, showing me protection of the weak from their enemies is satisfaction enough.
I thought further on Cimabue and how one of our greatest burdens is man-eating cats and occasionally a mountain bear, mostly because the poor tribes, far back in the jungles, think the way to honor their animal gods is to give them their weak, sick, and elderly. Animals develop a taste for this easy meat and then become adept at hunting the hearty and firm.
These cats, sometimes tigers, more frequently leopards, create havoc in Cimabue. It’s easy to believe they are demons, for some of them have slain as many as seven or eight hundred men, women, and children, desolating whole districts.
Ridding my land of them was a task, I thought, becoming sleepy, that might well suit a murderous fugitive, once first tribune, and put an arm around the girl. She made a purring sound, came closer, and then I slept.
Full of plans, I trotted happily back to the estates.
A servant was waiting about a mile from the compound and told me Mangasha had stationed him, and another dozen, one at every approach, so I wouldn’t miss the warning.
A man and a woman, escorted by armed horsemen, were waiting for me.
SIX
A SERPENT AND A SEER
Did you see them yourself?” I asked.
“I did,” the man stammered. He was trying to keep from shaking. Soldiers, those who led them, and those they sought could produce nothing good.
“What … or rather, how did they say they wanted me to Mangasha?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did they order him as if the knowledge was their due? Or did they sound as if they were asking for a friend they came to visit?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know how to tell things like that.”
I grunted in mild exasperation. “Very well. Where are they?”
“The soldiers are in front of the main house,” he said. “The other two and one big man, who acts like he’s their guard, are inside.”
I strung my bow, stuck three arrows through my sword belt, and bade my two servants to follow me at a distance.
We went around the back of the estate, to a low rise where a great tree stood. I slipped behind it, slowly peered around its trunk. Damn. No one was making great events out of little. About half a troop of cavalry was there. I couldn’t identify their uniform, but it was brown and would conceal them well. Yonge’s skirmishers had worn brown, but that formation was long dissolved.
I noted something else. The soldiers had small tents pitched, and their horses on a picket line, as if they were bivouacking. They also had only one sentry posted, and he was sitting on a bench outside the gate, very much at ease. Not exactly the way troops in enemy territory behaved.
A door banged, and four people came out of the house. The first was Mangasha, the second a big man who looked vaguely familiar.
A third I knew too well — Kutulu, the Serpent Who Never Slept, the emperor’s spymaster!
But he’d been sent away in disgrace before the Maisirian war began, to one of the outer states, like Chalt or Bala Hissar. And at least one of those had declared for
Tenedos. Whose side was Kutulu on? How had he found my home? Why did he want me?
Then the fourth person came out, and I stepped boldly out from behind the tree and strode toward the house.
She was a stocky, middle-aged woman, also wearing brown, as she had throughout her service with me. It was Devra Sinait, the seer who’d saved my life in Polycittara and who’d left my employ when I went to Maisir.
Mangasha saw me, looked alarmed. Evidently Kutulu had told him nothing.
Kutulu was the next to see me, and I saw a smile come. The small, wiry man with the utterly ordinary features bounded forward, hand outstretched.
“Damastes, my friend!”
He had me by the shoulders and actually hugged me, which was more emotion than the Sleepless Snake had shown in the ten years or more I’d known him.
“You do not know,” he said, “how glad I am to see you.”
“And I you,” I said honestly.
“You remember Elfric?” Kutulu said. “He’s now my bodyguard.” The big man knuckled his forehead, and I nodded. “Yes. Be welcome.”
I turned to Sinait.
“Seer, you honor me,” I said.
“You look like you did the last time I saw you,” she said. “I thought only men were supposed to pay deceitful compliments,” I said, and hugged her close.
“Mangasha, these are friends,” I said. “Move their soldiers into one of the barracks we keep for the harvesting crews, give them anything they want or need and send to the village for more cooks. Tonight shall be the celebration you wished to give me, which should now include these people, the best of the best.”
He looked skeptical, then nodded once and started away.
“You are still too trusting,” Kutulu said. “You have no idea what brings us here.”
“If it were just you, you’d be right to caution me,” I said, grinning. “And I might’ve come out of cover with an arrow nocked. But Sinait, at least, I don’t think means me any harm.”
“Be careful,” the woman said. “That also is not proven. But I hope you’re correct.”
“A question,” I said. “Whose wiles found me?”
“Actually,” Kutulu said, “both of ours. I knew, from your file in imperial records what district in Cimabue you came from. When one of my agents … yes, I still have sources in many places, including the service of the Grand Councilors, reported you’d been brought to the mainland for secret meetings, then killed that abominable traitor Herne and escaped … well, there weren’t that many places for you to go.”
“I, also, knew your home,” Sinait said. “Kutulu found me, perhaps six months ago. I was, well, I was where I was, remaining under cover since I foresaw anyone, especially a magician who’d been with you, might be of interest to both the former emperor and those two who rule in Nicias. Kutulu convinced me of what I should — what he said I must — do, and then, when he told me of your good fortune in escaping, I chanced a little magic, casting as I have before, and ‘found’ you where you could have been expected to be.”
“I must ask one question,” I said. “Is either of you in the service of the man who was once emperor?”
Even in this isolated spot, I hesitated to speak his name and somehow draw his attention.
“No,” Kutulu said. “Not ever, not again. He came to me in a dream two months back and summoned me to him. But I refused his orders and determined I must … for what I owe Numantia, stand against him.” His voice was determined, hard. “And that is why we need you,” Kutulu began.
“Not now,” I said. “First, give me a time for just enjoying your company. Later, after we dine, after we talk about old times, then you can tell me your business.”
• • •
Again, we banqueted, but I’m afraid my family was a bit excluded from the conversation, although I tried to make sure we talked of matters they’d be interested in. But names would come up, and one or another of the three of us would ask what happened to him or her. All too often the answer was “dead in Maisir,” or “I don’t know,” or “I think taken by the Peace Guardians,” or just a simple shrug of ignorance. It would have been easy to turn the occasion into a wake, but soldiers must learn when not to mourn, even after a catastrophe as great as we’d lived through.
Eventually the three of us ended up in one of the house’s sitting rooms, and the family made its excuses. Elfric stationed himself outside the door, and I made sure Sinait had a bottle of our best estate wine at hand. Kutulu, like myself, was sipping at fresh fruit juices one of our cooks had concocted.
I sat back and waited.
“We need you,” Sinait began, “to help us destroy the former Emperor Laish Tenedos.”
I’d expected something like that, but not quite that baldly put. I looked at Kutulu.
“He has about half a million men now, massed in Bala Hissar and Darkot,” he said. “We have about one hundred and thirty thousand in Amur, living in the villages and cities.
“Some trained soldiers, some are Kallians who fought against us under Chardin Sher or in the guerrilla war afterward, and the rest are serving for excitement or because they hate tyrants or because the emperor did some wrong to them, or they imagine he did.
“The Grand Councilors — the Government, which I suppose is what we still have to call it — have recently increased their forces to about six hundred thousand men, either in Nicias or moving south on the Latane and forming up in Khurram, using the old Guards Training Depots as their bases, getting ready to attack either us or the emperor, whoever is closest and looks weakest.”
“The odds aren’t overwhelming me,” I said.
“Of course not,” Kutulu said. “Who do you think we have to lead our men? Who do we have to plan our strategy, our tactics? Who do you think we have to sit on a white horse with a sword in his hand and say the words that’ll make them willing to die to destroy tyranny? Me?” He snorted. “The seer? She tries, but …”
“We need you, Damastes,” Sinait said. “We need the man who was first tribune. You’re the only one we think could rally all Numantia to stand against Tenedos, and also destroy those damned Peace Guardians and their masters, the puppets of Maisir.”
“We’re probably coming at this the wrong way,” I said, “but let me ask this. Why must Tenedos be destroyed? Don’t any of you remember the oath I swore? Kutulu, you made the same vow.”
“No,” Kutulu said. “Oddly enough, he never asked me to swear to him personally. Perhaps he thought the oaths I’d already taken, as a warder of Nicias, were enough, and my …” Kutulu bit his lip, “… overweening devotion to what I thought he promised, redemption for our country.”
“What made you willing to renounce it?”
“I saw a change,” Kutulu went on, “day by day, year by year, after you crowned him emperor. It was as if there were two Tenedoses: the one I first served, who would be the greatest ruler Numantia had ever known, then the one who fell in love with wielding power for its own sake, a capricious, even evil man. Little by little, the one I’d known faded away, leaving the new emperor, the one who brought everything down with his foolish invasion of Maisir.
“Or,” Kutulu added, a bit forlornly, “perhaps I’m fooling myself. Perhaps there was only one Tenedos, and I put what I wanted to see, the king I wanted to have rule Numantia, in place of that reality. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “For I did the same thing.”
“Damastes,” Sinait broke in, “you’re dissembling. I’m a seer, certainly not as great as Tenedos, but I made certain spells, and I have a good idea that, at the last, at Cambiaso, he was willing to put all on a single cast of the die.
“I also found … echoes, might be the only word that is suitable, of a great spell that was broken in the casting, a spell of monstrous evil.
“Damastes, I’m going to ask you … as a patriotic Numantian, to tell us what happened at Cambiaso. What happened before the battle?”
I stared at her. “How c
ould you know I know anything?” She stared, her gaze cutting into me, through me, forcing me back to the past.
I thought I’d never tell about Tenedos’s power being rooted in blood, nor that terrible spell of his I broke before Cambiaso, the spell that would again rouse the demon who destroyed Chardin Sher, all his people, and the huge castle they held.
But I did, and by the time I was finished, it was past midnight. My voice was hoarse, not so much from the amount of talking, but from the raw emotion that’d gushed out.
“Good,” Kutulu said firmly. “You did well.”
“You did very well,” Sinait agreed. “And I think I know what it cost you to do that to someone you’d sworn fealty to. But you didn’t destroy Tenedos.”
“No.”
“Don’t you have a duty to finish your task?” Anger swept me, and I was on my feet.
“Duty … honor … oaths,” I snarled. “Why in the hells is everyone so calm, so assured about what my gods-damned duties and vows are and how I’m supposed to honor them? I wish I was so certain about things!”
Sinait took a long breath. “You’re right. I apologize.”
“I don’t,” Kutulu said. “Damastes, don’t you think almost the same thing happened to me? Don’t you think my oath to Numantia tore at me when I realized the man I’d thought almost a god didn’t care a rap for his country? All he wanted was power, power to rule not just Numantia, but everyone, the whole world and beyond, gods and demons? How could I serve someone like that, do the bloody things some people thought evil, for someone who wants to make himself a dark godling, perhaps a manifestation of Saionji herself? Or maybe take her throne for himself? Doesn’t his evil automatically cancel anything I swore?”
I’d never seen passion in the man like this. I stared, and he ducked his head.
“You have the same problem I do, don’t you? You have all these nice, logical reasons, but what you did still eats at your guts, as it does mine.”
