by Anne Perry
She was ready to travel when they broke camp.
They moved steadily, always watching, waiting for attack. Around the fires at night she learned their history, how they had marched north at the command of the governor before Ortelios and secured the borders beyond Yba and subdued the last of the warring tribes. Then they had been cut off and lived from the land, their numbers dwindling with each battle and each bitter winter. No relief had come.
Then nine years ago the whole pattern had changed. The last fire-haired chieftain had been killed, and in his place with fresh troops from the west had come Yaltabaoth, fiercer than any before him, bloodier, and with a rage in his soul that allowed nothing to live.
She pondered long in the silence of the wide, star-burning night what she should say to them. Speech of ordinary life was purposeless, a denial of all that was their reality. They had no homes, no families, no posterity, and no hope. They had no trade in which to be honest or dishonest. They struggled to survive and knew even that was doomed in the end.
The only teaching was the bare truth: the murder of her family, her own journey to the Lost Lands, her return from Orimiasse with the Book, and how one people after another had learned it and taken or rejected its words.
She told them how she had struggled with the original language to translate it into Camassian and then Shinabari, so that all might read it easily and find the depth and the beauty of its meaning. She told them how Alexius had clarified the passages that spoke of the law and how the perfect order of it had touched his soul with an understanding of God, and how Ra-Nufis had loved its beauty above all things. She told them one evening in the soft, cold rain as they sat huddled by a dying fire, of her own failure in Shinabar. Isadorus had told her she could not teach truth on the heels of an army, and she had not believed him. But Shinabar did not want to know.
She told them of the prophet Iszamber, who had met her in the desert and spoken of the Island at the Edge of the World and the eleven priests who would stand at the last days, when all else was overtaken by darkness and the clashing of ignorance and evil in the ruin of nations.
“You marched on foot all the way across the desert?” one named Drusus asked her with amazement.
“I wanted to be part of the army,” she answered wryly, remembering how she had felt then: the terror and exhilaration of it, the sense of overwhelming power, the horror of wounds and death, the unity, the strangely fierce and tragic fellowship, the laughter that was half pain. “I wanted to go back to my own country in a way that would show I had fought to be where I was and earned it.”
“But it didn’t work.” Merdic looked at her in the firelight.
She turned away. “No. At the time I didn’t know why. I thought it was their fault, that I could change it if I tried harder. I thought I had failed God.”
“Did you not say His purpose cannot be thwarted?” Drusus frowned. “That was what you said, wasn’t it? How could He be God if mere human folly could spoil His plan?”
She looked up and smiled at him. “You are right. It can’t. I don’t think Shinabar was ever going to believe the Book, except a person here or there, like Tugomir and Arimaspis. In the end it is all individuals, not nations. I still did not understand choice. I thought I could lead Shinabar somewhere it did not wish to go because I wanted it so much.”
“Perhaps it was for your learning,” Merdic suggested, his eyes searching her face. “Perhaps it was never Shinabar that was the purpose. If Iszamber spoke truly, then it was something else, something yet to be.”
He was right, and she could see glimpses of a far greater pattern even as she sat, rain-soaked in the firelight. She could not see the whole, not even the hour ahead, but looking at the past with a greater wisdom, she found a new perception of how what had seemed to be darkness was now light, what had seemed loss was a different kind of gain. The most terrifying dangers had come not from external events, but from within herself. The greatest power for destruction had been her own loneliness and temptation as she had stood on the desert scree with Alexius. It was Ulciber who had wanted her to go to Shinabar! And Alexius to lead the army! Should she have seen evil in his eyes and recognized it?
She had been weakest when she had placed the crown of the Isarchs on her own head and imagined she could save her people.
Now she sat in the rain with two hundred lost soldiers at the very edge of the world and waited for yet another emissary of darkness to attack. Yet she felt through the chill of her flesh the burning peace inside her that God had promised He would never leave or forget her, and would not ask of her anything that was not possible.
She did not need to tell them that this was why she chose to ride with them, even though word had come that Yaltabaoth was now on their heels, and in another day or two he would attack again. She saw the understanding in their faces. They smiled with pity for her because she was a woman and Yaltabaoth would not spare her any more than he would them.
Two days later they knew with sinking hearts that the enemy was at hand. Birds fell silent. The wind dropped and ceased to whine in the heather. The sky was streamered with cloudlike flying mares’ tails as they stood together, two hundred horsemen in a close phalanx, swords drawn, waiting.
Suddenly there was a scream, high, unearthly, like a demon’s song, and Yaltabaoth galloped over the crest of the moor, his spear raised aloft. His black hair streamed behind him, and his cloak swung wide and flapped like the wings of some terrible bat. Behind him teemed three hundred horsemen, hooves pounding the earth, gouging out clods and sending them flying. Their black armor was without glint or gleam in the cold light.
The battle was fierce, desperate, and without quarter for the injured or respect for the dead. There were no prisoners.
Tathea fought even more desperately than she had in the desert. The horror of it was almost beyond belief. The black warriors seemed possessed by a hatred that drove them, screaming, to hack at enemies already fallen. And even when they themselves were crippled, staggering, and streaming blood, they still slashed at everything they could see, drowning in their own gore.
Tathea went beyond exhaustion into a state like a hellish dream, but she could not stop. Men fell beside her, and there was no time to help.
As the light faded and darkness dragged its pall across the east, Yaltabaoth was driven off for a little space. Merdic, his sleeves torn and soaked with blood, his sword scarlet, ordered the legion to retreat further north. There was no time to bury the dead, only to stand for a brief moment in silence and grieve for brave men perished and commend their souls to the God who had made them. Then the wounded must be lifted and carried, food and tents loaded, and the bitter journey begun again.
Casper was cut across the shoulder. Tathea dressed the wound with balm and walked beside him.
All night they traveled, weary of heart and flesh. The darkness and the ache of muscles seemed interminable, like an evil that has no ending. The horses were bruised and wounded from the battle, and close to collapse from exhaustion when finally before dawn they stopped in a deep gully between two buttresses of rock. They had walked along the bed of a stream so no tracks would be visible for the enemy to trace.
They had little wood for fires, and what heat they could raise must be used to warm the injured. All others must make the best they could of blankets and cloaks and one another’s weary and battered bodies. There was hot gruel of grain and herbs, nothing else. The dawn came pale and cold across the eastern horizon, hard followed by a thin rain.
Tathea lay huddled on the ground in a blanket, too tired to weep, too racked with pity for the suffering she had seen and the courage which knew no hope of victory, the selfless sacrifice of one man for another, and the white-faced, ever patient ministering of the surgeons. If this was the path that God had planned, it was bitter beyond imagining.
She thought of Alexius and wondered if she could ever have told him of this different, inhuman war. It was beyond her power to describe. Words convey only the known
or imaginable. And he was not here.
When she could rest no longer she sat up and found the sun low in the south, a watery light filtering pale and clean from the high rocks. The noise of the stream sounded sharp above the careful movement of men, and the muffled whimpering of those in pain. Beside the remains of the fire, Merdic stood gaunt-faced, his left leg bound in worn linen, and the blood already seeping through.
She rose, shaking with cold and stabbed with pain. She went over to him, walking awkwardly. There was nothing she could say, but she felt a great need simply to meet his eyes, to be sure that he knew she was with him, not only in body but in heart. When she reached him, without thought she put her hand on his arm. She meant it as a gesture of warmth, though her fingers were like ice.
He smiled bleakly. “I hope your God is right, and all pain has purpose,” he said too softly for anyone else to hear. “I confess I see none in this. One more such attack and we will all die, and this land will fall to the barbarian. He puts everything to fire and the knife. There will be no one left to be your eleven priests.”
“The purposes of God are not frustrated,” she answered him, her voice steady. “He knows the end from the beginning.” She spoke to comfort him, to ease the terrible burden of love and grief for his men that he bore. But even as she heard her own words, a warmth was opening up like a spreading sweetness inside her, a memory or a vision of someone she had loved with a wild and terrible wholeness, who had led another lost army through a cold greater than this, against an enemy he could not defeat. He had made mistakes and walked the bitter night of the soul alone, as all must. He had trusted God when there was no hope. He had remembered the light of the star he had once seen and kept its path in the darkness.
She would do the same, in the blind knowledge that God existed and her name was written on His hands.
Higher up the gully a sword hilt rapped sharply on the rock, and a second later an answering rap returned. Merdic stiffened, and all through the camp heads followed the sound, hands went to sides. Slowly each man staggered to his feet and stood ready.
Down beside the streambed, fantastic in the light, a solitary figure in multi-colored jerkin and breeches was walking with a light step. The left diagonal quarterings of his garb were in purple like the heather, the right in a shade that was one moment gold as the gorse of summer, another bronze like the dying bracken. He wore a cloak over his shoulders, and his shoes were dark as peat, the toes curled up at the ends. There were ridiculous tiny bells on them. He carried a staff in his hand, and from his waist hung a leather pouch. He was smiling.
“Who are you?” Merdic asked wearily. “This is no land in which to wander alone. Have you not seen the signs of battle, the bodies of the dead? Carrion birds darken the sky.”
“It is my land,” the man answered simply. “My name is Menath-Dur. I am a healer. I will treat your wounded.”
“We have our own surgeons.” Merdic barred his way, suspicion hardening in him. This man most assuredly was not of martial discipline. His features were mercurial, neither Camassian nor islander. If he walked alone, why should he help this desperate legion lost here in the Waste Lands with its back to the sea? And if he was an ally of Yaltabaoth, he wrought nothing but evil.
Menath-Dur was not disconcerted. His eyes moved to rest on Tathea.
“Ah, so you came north so soon!” he said softly. “I feared you would leave it late, and there would be few left.”
She stood up slowly and came towards him. “How do you know me? Are you of the Flamens?”
“No.” The thought seemed to amuse him. “I am far older than the Flamens—immeasurably older. Have you tended the sick?”
“As we can. Their wounds are grave.” She was puzzled at his sudden change from one subject to another. His name meant nothing, and his words were strange. Yet there was that in his face which held her, like sun on a far landscape, and his absurd shoes with their upturned toes woke a memory of hope in her—sweeter than reason, older than the death of Habi, or loneliness, or war and loss in Shinabar, older even than Azrub. It was a memory of light in a great darkness, swift, and then gone again.
“Of course they are,” Menath-Dur agreed. “It is the bitterest of wars, the hardest in all a man’s life. Come, let me pour ointment and balm in the wounds, that they may heal.”
Merdic did not move. He was afraid and confused, uncertain how best to protect his men, or which danger threatened them most.
Menath-Dur stood motionless in front of him, smiling very slightly, meeting his eyes in a long, steady gaze. “It is for you to choose,” he said at last. “Shall I leave or remain?”
Merdic searched his face yet again; then his body eased, and he stepped aside. “Stay.” He was too tired to argue. “Heal us if you can!”
For twelve days Menath-Dur remained with them. They traveled through the darkened, winter land north and west till the first snows fell and suddenly the moors glimmered white in the dawn light as far as the eye could see. He was as skilled a physician as he had said. Wounds healed with amazing rapidity, even scars disappeared. There were no fevers and no infection. He treated men and horses alike, and when he left them suddenly and without warning on the thirteenth day at noon, walking along the track between the pale mounds of snow, they were touched with an extraordinary sense of loss. But they were again a force of one hundred and seventy men, ready to face an enemy and armed in body and heart to fight.
The second battle against Yaltabaoth came as the first had, when the air was edged with ice and the sky filled with a mist of gathering chill. There was the thin, high, wailing scream on the wind, then the charge with Yaltabaoth in the van, black hair wild about his head. He rose in his stirrups, spear whirling about him and his black cloak flapping.
The fighting was harder than before. Merdic stood his ground. Three spears splintered in his hand and the enemy fell around him. Then he fought with sword, hand to hand, on foot in the old manner, before the legions took to the island horses.
The wounded were dragged away. Physicians tended, bound, and padded gashes and stanched bleeding. The dead piled up. Tathea fought in a nightmare of pain and dying, of courage, sacrifice, and the fellowship of those who have faced agony together and not found each other wanting.
When it was over, once again Yaltabaoth retreated. The remnants of the legion—a hundred whole men, forty wounded, many sorely so—stood before the walls of a ravine. Its rock faces were such that no man could climb them. They hung sheer and overwhelming, patched with moss and bracken and thin, silver threads of water. There was no escape except past the blood-drenched army of Yaltabaoth, wounded, enraged, and waiting.
“We will die,” Merdic said plainly and soberly to them around the glitter of the fire. “But we will cost them dearly. We first came north to protect the settlements from the fire-haired tribes who looted and burned. That, at least, we have done. It is better that we die with honor than that we should have lived in ease by the hearths of our homes and not have fought for the right. Tonight I shall listen to the words of Tathea, and I will covenant to serve the God of her Book. You may all keep this last watch however your heart chooses. Tomorrow we die.” He looked at Tathea a moment, then added very quietly, “We shall not let you fall into his hands, I swear.”
She smiled bleakly, knowing what he meant, and grateful for it.
All evening she taught from the Book: the law of love, its beauty, and the compassion in it for everything in all the worlds within and beyond the knowledge of man. She spoke of the redemption wrought by the pain of God, known only by the power of the spirit; of eternal brotherhood for all who wished it; of the long, marvelous, terrible climb to the glory of the stars and the light which never fades.
All of them covenanted to keep the word in their hearts, and on the morrow to die in the law of God, without hatred, arrogance, or any shadow of deceit. When the moon set, they rested, and a sleep of utter peace descended on them.
Even the watchmen did not hear the sof
t, strangely shod feet of Menath-Dur, nor see the shadow of his form as he stepped silently among them and poked the embers of the fire. It sparked upward, catching the last of the wood, and from no apparent place he put dark lumps of what seemed like stone upon it, but miraculously it burned with a wild, glorious warmth.
When the cauldron boiled, he woke Tathea, finger to his lips, his eyes brilliant.
“Waken Merdic,” he commanded. “Have the men drink. There is hot gruel in the cauldron with herbs that will give them strength. Then come. I will show you the way to the western shore.”
“We cannot leave,” she whispered back. “Yaltabaoth is camped behind us, and there is no pass south of this ravine.”
“Trust God, and hope in all things,” he said quietly. “Never lose hope! When you cannot see the light, walk in the path your heart remembers—and hope.”
“Who are you?” she asked him insistently, sure that in some forgotten corner of her mind she must already know.
“My name is Menath-Dur,” he replied.
“I know that; it means nothing. Who are you?”
“A servant of God,” he answered lightly, as if it were an easy thing to say, and nothing strange. “A companion through the journey.”
She opened her mouth to ask more, but words eluded her, the questions slipped through her mind without form.
“Do not forget,” he said softly. “When there is no hope—still hope! Now do as I bid, time is short!”
There was no purpose in arguing with him. There was nothing to lose, except sleep, and the ease of abandoning herself to accept death. It hurt to begin again when she had let go of hope and its labor and risk, but she did as he commanded.
Merdic awoke to the same pain, disbelief, and struggle to force life back after surrender.
When they had all eaten the thin gruel, which was surprisingly refreshing, Menath-Dur started, a strange spring in his step and the bells on his ridiculous shoes like some insect singing in the night.
