‘Holding the baby?’ his mother Jarita exclaimed. ‘In the Lady’s holy name, you want us all to do this mad thing?’
Shaski looked at her. ‘I said that. Before.’
Really. Mothers. Did they ever listen? Did they think he wanted to do this alone? He didn’t even have any idea where he was going. Only that his father had gone one way on the road out of town, so he had gone that way himself, and the place he was at was called Sarantum, or nearly that, and it was far. Everyone kept saying that. He had understood that he might not be there by nightfall, walking alone, and he didn’t like the dark now, when his dreams came.
There was a silence. His mother Jarita slowly dried her eyes. His mother Katyun was looking at him strangely. She had let go of his hands. ‘Shaski,’ she said finally, ‘tell me why we mustn’t go to Kabadh.’
She had never asked him that before.
What he learned, as he explained to his mothers about the dreams and how he felt certain things, was that other people didn’t. It confused him, that the pull to go away, and the other feeling—the shape of a black cloud hovering whenever they said the name Kabadh—was not something either of his mothers shared, or even understood.
It frightened them, Shaski saw, and that scared him. Looking at their rigid expressions when he finished speaking, he finally began to cry, his face crumpling, knuckles rubbing at his eyes. ‘I’m— I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For run— running away. I’m sorry.’
It was seeing her son in tears—her son who never cried—that made Katyun realize, finally, that there was something very large at work here, even if it was beyond her grasp. It was possible that the Lady Anahita had come to Kerakek, to this insignificant fortress town at the desert’s edge, and had laid her finger on Shaghir, their darling child, Shaski. And the Lady’s touch could mark a human being. It was known.
‘Perun guard us all,’ Jarita murmured. Her face was white. ‘May Azal never know this house.’
But he did, if what Shaski had told them was in any way the truth. The Enemy knew Kerakek already. And even Kabadh. A cloud, a shadow, Shaski had said. How should a child know of shadows like that? And Rustem, her husband, needed them in the west. More north than west, actually. Among the infidels in Sarantium, who worshipped a burning god in the sun. Something no one who knew the desert could ever do.
Katyun drew a breath. She knew there was a trap here for her, something seductive and dangerous. She didn’t want to go to Kabadh. She had never wanted to go there. How could she survive in a court? Among the sort of women who were there? Even the idea kept her up at night, trembling, sick to her stomach, or brought dreams, shadows of her own.
She looked at Jarita, who had been so very brave, hiding the blackness of her grief at the tidings of Rustem’s elevation in caste, his summons to the court. The summons that meant they were to find her another husband, another home, another father for Inissa, little Issa.
Jarita had done something Katyun didn’t think she herself could have done. She had let Rustem, the husband she loved, go on his journey thinking she accepted this, that it even pleased her, so that his heart might not be troubled in the wake of such great tidings as he had received.
In Perun’s name, the things that women did.
It didn’t please her. It was tearing her apart. Katyun knew it. She could hear Jarita in the dark at night, both women awake in the small house. Rustem ought to have seen through the deception, but men—even clever men—tended to miss these things, and he’d been so greatly caught up in healing the king, and then the caste elevation and his mission to the west. He had wanted to believe Jarita’s deception, and so he had. And in any case, it was not as if a man could refuse the King of Kings.
Katyun looked from Shaski to Jarita. Rustem had told her the night before he left that she would have to do the thinking for the family, that he was relying on her. Even the students were gone, to other masters. She was on her own with this, as with all things now.
The baby cried from the other room, waking from her afternoon sleep, swaddled in her wooden cradle near the fire.
Kerakek. Kabadh. The Shadow of Black Azal. The finger of the Lady touching them. Shaski’s … feelings about these things. An understanding coming, late, of how he had always been … different from the other children they knew. She had seen it, actually, had resisted. Perhaps in the same way that Rustem had resisted knowing how Jarita really felt: wanting to believe she was happy, though it might wound his pride. Poor Jarita, so delicate and so beautiful. Sometimes there could be flowers in the desert, but not in many places and not for very long.
Sarantium. Even larger than Kabadh, they said. Katyun bit her lip.
She hugged Shaski and sent him to the kitchen to ask the cook for something to eat. He hadn’t had his breakfast yet, had left the house in the dark while they slept. Jarita, still white-faced as a priestess on a night of the Sacred Flame, went to the baby.
Katyun sat alone, thinking hard. Then she summoned a servant and sent him to the fortress with a request that the garrison commander be so good as to honour them with a visit when time allowed.
BOREDOM. A SENSE of injustice. A peace bought with gold. They all came together for Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, in that winter of bitterness.
He never used to find it tedious here in Kerakek. He liked the desert, the south: it was what he knew, the world of his childhood. He enjoyed the visits from the camel-riding nomads, going out to drink palm wine with them in their tents, the slow gestures, silences, words doled out as carefully as water. The people of the sand were important here, buffers against the Sarantines, trading partners bringing spices and gold from the distant, fabled south on the ancient camel routes. And they were advance troops in any war.
Of course some of the desert wanderers were allied with Sarantium and traded there … which was why it mattered so much to keep those tribes that favoured Bassania happy. The soldiers didn’t always understand that, but Vinaszh had grown up in Qandir, even farther south: the nuances of Ammuz and Soriyya and the nomads were no mystery to him. Or less of a mystery than they were to most men: no one could truthfully say they understood the peoples of the sand.
He had never nourished visions of himself in a more prominent place or role. He was a garrison commander in a world he comprehended well enough. It had been, until recently, a life that pleased him.
But this winter the court had come to Kerakek, and a good part of it—with the king himself—had lingered as an arrow wound healed, and the ripples that followed upon the deaths (some deserved, some not) of princes and royal wives subsided.
Vinaszh, who had played no small part in the events of a terrible day, had found himself altered after Shirvan and the court left. The fortress seemed empty to him. Bleak and echoing. The town was what it always had been … a dusty, eventless cluster of little homes. And the wind kept blowing from the desert. He had dreams in restless nights.
A disquiet had entered into the soul of Vinaszh the commander. The winter stretched like an uncrossable abyss, day passing, day passing, painfully slow, and then darkfall. The sand, which had never bothered him in his life, he now noticed all the time, everywhere, slipping through cracks in windows and under doors, into clothing, food, folds of skin, one’s hair and beard, one’s … thoughts.
He had begun drinking too much, starting too early in the day. He was intelligent enough to know that this was dangerous.
And it was as a consequence of all of these things that, when the doctor’s servant climbed the winding path and steps up from the town and delivered that household’s request for a visit when time allowed, time did allow, almost immediately.
Vinaszh hadn’t the least idea what they wanted. It was a change, however, something new in the blank, stolid routine of the days. That was enough. The doctor had left a while ago. He’d been planning to spend some days in Sarnica, Vinaszh seemed to remember. Depending on how long he’d lingered there, he might even be in Sarantium by now. The doctor’s women were pretty, he rec
alled, both of them.
He sent the servant back with a coin and word that he’d be down the hill later in the day. As it happened, it was easy to be agreeable when the request came from the household of a man about to be elevated in caste and summoned to the royal court by the King of Kings himself. Honour beyond belief, really.
Not that Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, had been summoned anywhere, or promoted, or honoured, or … anything at all, actually. Not that anyone in the court had paid the least attention while they were here to whose idea it had been to intervene in that mighty company and— at considerable personal risk—urge the summoning of a local physician to the king’s bedside that dreadful day earlier this winter. And who had then assisted the doctor and killed a murderous prince with his own blade.
It had crossed his mind to wonder if he was being— however unfairly—punished for the flung blade that stopped a treacherous son.
It could be. No one had said this, no one had even spoken to him, but someone like the round, shrewd vizier might say that his continued existence after such a deed was—or ought to be—seen as gift enough. He had slain royalty. Blood of the Great King’s blood. With a dagger drawn and thrown in the presence of the king, the sacred Brother to the Sun and Moons. And yes, yes, he had done that, but he had been ordered to be on the alert for danger when Murash came back to the room. It had been an act of absolute duty.
Was he to be abandoned, forgotten here in the desert, for having saved the life of his king?
It happened. The world of Perun and Lady could not be said to be a place where just rewards held sway. The presence of Azal the Enemy meant that this would always be so, until Time itself came to an end.
Vinaszh was a soldier. He knew this to be true. The army was rife with injustice and corruption. And civilians—perfumed, sensuous court advisers, sly and unctuous—could choose to block the paths of honest, rough soldiers for their own reasons. It was the way of things. Not that understanding this made it easier to be enduring the process, if that was what was happening.
His father had never wanted him to go into the army. Had he remained a merchant down in Qandir, none of this would ever have come into his life.
He would have sand in his wine cups and bed and wouldn’t care.
Men changed, Vinaszh decided, it was as simple—and as complicated—as that. It seemed that he himself had now changed. Things happened, small events or large ones, or perhaps time passed, nothing more than that— and you woke up one morning and were different. There had probably been a time, he thought, when Murash was content to be a prince of Bassania, son of his great father.
Difficult thoughts for a soldier. It would have been better to be in the field with an enemy to face. But there was no one to fight, nothing to do, and the wind kept blowing. There was sand in his cup right now, grit in the wine.
He ought to have been recognized for what he’d done. Truly, he ought to have been.
SOME TIME AFTER MIDDAY he went down the hill, riding towards the doctor’s house. He was received by the two women in a front room with a fireplace. The younger one was really quite lovely, very dark eyes. The older was more poised, did all of the talking, her voice modestly low. What she said, however, took Vinaszh’s thoughts abruptly from his own affairs.
Fate, chance, accident? An intercession of Perun? Who would presume to say? But the simple truth was that the soldier son of a merchant from Qandir, who happened at that time to be commander of the garrison at Kerakek, was a man more than a little disposed towards accepting such things as the woman told him that winter afternoon. The nature of the world was far beyond the grasp of men, everyone knew that. And here in the south, near the desert peoples with their inscrutable tribal rites, reports like this were not unknown.
At one point they sent for the boy at his request and Vinaszh asked him some questions, then they sent him back out again. He had answered readily enough, a serious child. He was happiest in his father’s empty treatment rooms now, one of the women said, almost apologetically. They allowed him to play there. He was almost eight years old they said, when Vinaszh asked.
He declined their offered wine, accepted a cup of herbal tea instead while he considered what he’d learned. The nomads had tales and names in their own languages for people such as this child might be. Vinaszh had heard such stories, even when young. His nurse had enjoyed telling them. He had seen a Dreamer himself, once, on a desert journey with his father: a glimpse, as a tent flap fell shut too slowly. A large-bodied, soft man among a lean people. No hair on his head at all. Deep, parallel scars on both cheeks, he remembered.
The woman’s story, therefore, was not one he was inclined to dismiss out of hand, but aside from finding it interesting, he remained unsure of what, exactly, they expected of him, why he was being told this, and so he asked. And so they told him.
He laughed aloud, in startled dismay, then fell silent, looking from one mother’s still, grave face to the other’s. They meant it, he realized. They really meant it. He heard a sound: the boy was at the doorway. He hadn’t gone to the treatment rooms, after all. A listening sort of child. Vinaszh had been one himself. Shaski came out when they called to him and he stood by the beaded curtain of the door, waiting. Vinaszh stared at him.
Then he looked back at the older of the two mothers, the one who’d done the talking, and said, as gently as he could, that what she asked was simply out of the question.
‘Why?’ said the younger, pretty one, unexpectedly. ‘You take merchant parties west sometimes.’
This was true, as it happened. Vinaszh, an honest man, and confronting two attractive women with earnest, steady gazes, was compelled to agree.
He looked back at the boy. The boy was still waiting, in the doorway. The silence was unsettling, actually. In it, Vinaszh addressed an unexpected question to himself: why, indeed? Why was it out of the question to provide them with an escort? There was no law being broken if wives wished to follow their husband on a journey. If the man was angry when they arrived that was, surely, their problem, or his. Not the escort’s. Vinaszh had to assume that the doctor had left his women with sufficient finances to pay for a journey. And once they all ended up at court in Kabadh, issues of money would become trivial for this family. They might be useful people to have in his debt. No one else seemed to feel indebted to Vinaszh, after all. The commander resisted an impulse to scowl. He sipped his tea, made the mistake of looking back at the boy again. The grave, watchful face. Waiting for him. Children. The boy ought to be playing, outside or somewhere, surely.
Under any normal circumstances, Vinaszh considered, there would have been nothing he’d have wanted to do about any of this. But this winter wasn’t … normal.
And the the too-obvious trust in the boy’s eyes arrested his thinking. He contrasted it with his own state of mind of late. He was in danger of drinking away the reputation he’d built up for himself over the years. Bitterness could destroy a man. Or a child? He sipped his tea. The women watched him. The boy watched him.
As commander of the garrison it was within his power to assign soldiers as escorts to private parties. Merchants, usually, crossing the border with their goods in a time of peace. Peacetime didn’t mean the roads were safe, of course. Normally the mercantile parties would pay for their military escort, but not invariably. Sometimes a commander had his own reasons for sending soldiers across the border. It gave restless men something to do, tested new soldiers, allowed a separation of those showing the tensions of being too much together for too long. He’d sent Nishik with the doctor, hadn’t he?
The garrison commander of Kerakek didn’t know— there was no reason for him to know—the arrangements proposed for the younger wife and daughter. If he had, he might not have done what he did.
Instead, he made a decision. Reversed a decision, actually. Swiftly, precise now, befitting his rank. Made a choice that might have been considered by any detached observer to be folly on a grand scale. As he spoke, both women began to cry. The boy
did not. The boy went away. They heard him a little later in his father’s treatment rooms.
‘Perun guard us. He’s packing things,’ the younger mother said, still weeping.
The folly of Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, resulted, at the end of that same week, in two women, two children, a garrison commander (that was the point, after all, and his second-in-command could use the experience of a period in control), and three chosen soldiers setting off on the dusty, wind-swept road towards the border of Amoria, bound for Sarantium.
AS IT HAPPENED, Rustem the physician, oblivious as all travellers must be to events behind them, was still in Sarnica on the day his family set out after him. He was buying manuscripts, giving lectures, would not leave that city for another week. They weren’t, in fact, very far behind him.
The plan was for the four soldiers to escort the women and children and do some inconspicuous observing of their own as they went west and north through Amoria. The physician would have to deal with his family when they reached him. It would be his task to get them all to Kabadh when the time came. And it would be the women’s problem to explain their sudden presence to him. It might be amusing to see that first encounter, Vinaszh thought, riding west along the road. It was curious how much better he’d felt the moment he made the decision to leave Kerakek. The doctor’s women, the child, this request—they had been a gift of sorts, he decided.
He and his three men would simply go north with this small party and turn around, but the journey, even a winter journey, would be so much better than lingering in the sand and wind and emptiness. A man needed to do something when the days darkened early and his thoughts did the same.
He would send a written report to Kabadh when they returned, containing whatever observations they had made. The journey could be couched, described, represented as something routine. Almost. He would decide later whether to mention the boy. There was no hurry with that. For one thing, the fact that such people existed didn’t mean this child, Shaghir, son of Rustem, was one of them. Vinaszh had yet to be persuaded of that. Of course, if the child wasn’t what his mother thought he was, then they were all making an absurd winter journey simply because a small boy missed his father and was having bad dreams because of it. Best not, for the moment, to think about that, Vinaszh decided.
The Sarantine Mosaic Page 73
