Follow it for a little while, for the sake of moving fast and quiet, just as long as you're off it before any trappers come up from the farmland looking for forest meat. Remember to look for their snares while you're at it. You still can't risk discovery.
As he ran, he kept a wary eye on the strengthening light above the treetops as well as staying alert for any sound of voices or dogs. He had come far enough to be confident no search sent out from the fortress would find him, but encountering some hunting party returning from a night expedition would be just as bad. Apprehension lent new vigour to limbs aching from ceaseless effort. When the light brought a measure of true colour back to the scrub around him, Kheda reluctantly abandoned the track, climbing a little higher up the side of the broad valley for the thicker cover offered by the margins of the true forest. The denser growth forced him to slow but walking rather than running didn't come as much of a relief. The temptation to stop altogether grew stronger and more insidious.
Just a few moments wouldn't make any difference, not just a little rest to rub your exhausted muscles. Shouldn't you be stopping to look for a stream? You're so very thirsty. No? No. Don't be such a fool. Keep going and think about something else.
The smell of smoke distracted him from the wearisome repetition of such thoughts. After the first rush of alarm froze him among the dusty saplings like a startled deer, Kheda realised the pungent scent was no more than a taste on the breeze, carried up from the distant huts among the sailer plots that lay beyond the scrubby brush and the haphazard band of cultivation. Pounding heart slowing, Kheda moved on, smoke-prompted memory uncoiling before him.
'Of course this is a hunting trip. We'll be calling for men from the villages to carry the meat down for smoking on the shore every second day.' Daish Reik had smiled down, green eyes bright, black beard curling exuberantly now it was freed from the dictates of oil and comb. 'We'll eat well right through the dry season, us and all the islanders who lend a hand.'
'But that's not all this trip is.' Kheda could see several of his brothers had been thinking the same.
'Isn't it?' Daish Reik had cocked his head to one side, face alight with challenge. What is it then?'
All his brothers had been watching him, silently urging him on, encouragement in their half smiles, relief in their eyes that he was the one taking the risk.
'You're looking to—' Kheda had searched for the right words. 'You're looking to be sure of the well-being of the domain,' he declared abruptly.
'This is no progress with wives and servants, slaves to do my bidding.' Daish Reik had shaken his head, his gaze intent. 'I make those visits to each island at the start of the dry season, to hear pleas, give judgement and read the omens for each village. You know that.'
'When they know you're coming.' Kheda had stood straighter, head on a level with Daish Reik's shoulder. 'When any misfortune can be tidied away and everything set fair for the most propitious omens.'
'We're not staying in any of the villages.' Daish Reik had spread his broad, thick-fingered hands tn apparent puzzlement. 'We're scarcely visiting them'
'You're talking to everyone we meet on the tracks between them,' Kheda had countered, folding his slender arms across his slightly muscled chest. 'When they're not all tense and anxious that their village shows itself to best advantage, when all the women aren't fussing that the food they have to offer is as good as the next village's, better if possible, and the men are worrying if such generosity is going to leave them hungry by the end of the dry season.' He had looked around the half circle of his brothers, reassured by their nods of agreement. 'This way you're not talking to people shoved forward by the spokesman, to tell you how wonderfully he's leading the village, how the young men organise the work between them with never a cross word.'
Then he had stopped, unsure, seeing amusement twisting Daish Reik's full mouth.
'Very astute, my son,' Daish Reik had said cordially. 'I don't imagine these tracks see half this quantity of feet when we're not in the area with a hunting party.' Then he had dropped into a crouch, holding Kheda's eyes with his own. 'But you are failing to see I have one more essential objective in these trips.'
Kheda had managed not to flinch, aware that all his brothers were watching, cudgelling his brains for something else. 'We share our meat with the villages, rather than eating up their stores. I imagine that leaves them better disposed to our presence.'
'Very true' Daish Reik had agreed: 'But there's more besides that.'
Kheda hadn't been able to see it so he'd squared his shoulders, lifting his chin. 'What might that be, my father?'
In one swift movement, Daish Reik had scooped up a handful of leaf litter and thrown it at Kheda. 'Having some fun and getting filthy without your mothers scolding us all into baths and clean clothes!' Springing up, he'd flung more handfuls at the other boys. 'The first one of you to get leaves down my tunic can help me make the fires tonight.'
It had been Ajil, brother now lost, zamonn and assiduous in his duties as one of the lowest ranked of Redigal Coron's retinue, who had won that much prized duty.
Kheda paused as he found himself beside a little spring carving a runnel through the clutter of the forest floor. Kneeling, he cupped water from the leaf-stained trickle in his hand and drank, throat aching as he swallowed.
Running a dripping hand over his beard, he forced himself to his feet once again. He ached, all over, from head still suffering from the lingering remnants of Ulla Safar's smothering smoke to feet scored and bruised by missteps in the darkness.
Redigal Coron. What about this plot that Telouet has got wind of? Could you have used that knowledge to bring Coron into an alliance with the Daish and Ritsem domains, instead of opting for this insane course? But would Coron have believed you? How long would it take to unravel the threads of such a conspiracy? No, it would all take too long and you cannot afford to take your eyes off the Chazen threat.
With a groan, he pushed himself on, tendrils from untamed berry bushes catching at his ragged trousers now dried to stiff creases with the silt of the river chafing at his skin. Away from the thinner brush where the Ulla islanders gathered their firewood, the forest closed around him, hostile, unyielding. Kheda drew Telouet's sword and began reluctantly cutting himself a path, doing his best to leave as little of a trail as he could.
Forgive me, Telouet, I know full well this is a task beneath your blade's dignity but it's all I have to hand.
Not that this is the first time I've been out in forest like this with a blade in my hand. That was another of Daish Reik's purposes, on those hunting trips. Was that something else that counted in my favour, that I realised it?
'Why do we have to learn all this?' His brother Kadi hadn't been complaining, just curious, as he had paused in the pattern of sword strokes Daish Reik's slave Agas had been drilling them all in.
'Since we've left everyone but Agas and a few guards behind to look after your mothers, it's as well you learn to defend yourselves.' Daish Reik had been shaving a length of hard, aromatic lilla wood into a feathery tmderstick with rapid strokes of his dagger.
'With these?'
The boys hadn't been given swords, just the long blunt-ended blades that hill men and hunters carried for carving a path through the undergrowth.
'Learn the moves with something as clumsy as that and they'll come all the easier when you deserve a real sword.' Daish Reik's knife had resumed its regular rasp.
Kheda had done his sword practice earlier. He had been sitting nearby, checking his bow and his arrows. Archery was another skill that those hunting trips had taught him. 'What must we do to deserve that?'
'Earn the respect of those swordsmen you expect to go before you into battle, by showing them you can do yourself everything with sword or arrow that you are asking of them.' Daish Reik had pointed the curved blade of his dagger straight at him, emerald eyes hard. 'Deserve their loyalty by showing you value the work that goes into supplying all your wants and more, that you value
those who provide for you, whether it be the essentials of fire, water and food, or the luxuries of soft clothes, pretty trinkets and comfortable living.'
'Is that why you said we'd go hungry, if we couldn't catch our own meat on this trip?' Kheda had ventured, mindful of the chequered fowl he'd failed to bring down earlier.
'If you do not know what it is to lack such necessities, you won't see your people's anxiety if a spring fails in the dry season or a rainy-season storm leaves a village's saller rotting in the granary and all the firewood so sodden, aflame to dry it simply cannot be sustained.' Daish Reik's smile had been more challenge than reassurance. 'If you do not see such obvious things, how can you see the greater subtleties of portents? Share the concerns of the domain and its people and they will drive you to puzzle out the meaning of omens. Value the stuff of life, those that bring it to you and the domain that provides it, and people and domain both value you.'
I do value my domain and its people both and I'll risk the taint of magic by defying these wizards with a sword in my hand myself, before I let them stain and despoil the Daish islands. Redigal Coron can look to his own problems. I must find some way of defending the Daish domain.
Kheda cut down a half-dead tandra sapling rising from a stained tangle of last year's fibrous pods and suddenly found himself face to face with a startled hook-toothed hog. The beast grunted and shied away but it didn't flee. With the bristling crest running along its arched spine on a level with Kheda's midriff, it didn't need to. Planting its hooves in the remains of the rotting log where it had been foraging, it turned red-rimmed black eyes on Kheda with a belligerent snort. Its lips, slimy with spittle and dirt, drew back from the downward curve of its lower tusks, fangs the length of Kheda's dagger, yellow and spotted with leaf mould where it had been digging for grubs and beetles in the log. Its upper tusks curved the other way, coiling round to meet over the long flexible snout twitching at this new, intrusive scent. Kheda took a careful step backwards.
'Not fast enough to provoke it into a charge, nor yet slow enough for it to decide you're a threat and it may as well get its attack in first. If it does run at you, get out of its way, up a tree if you can. Those tusks can disembowel a man and leave him bleeding his life out on the forest floor. And remember, if it does kill you and no one finds your corpse, it'll come back when you're rotten meat and eat you itself.'
That's something else we learned on those hunting trips, isn't it, Daish Reik, that there are more ways than one of killing or catching every kind of prey and stealth a part of most of them. Challenging these wizards face to face would be a quick way of getting myself killed. I have to find some more subtle weapon. Show me I am on the right path here, hog.
Kheda halted and waited. The hook-toothed hog looked at him, almost comical as it peered past the twisted tusks in front of its eyes. With another snort and a shake of its mottled brown and black hide, it turned tail and disappeared into the all-enveloping leaves of a sardberry thicket, the forest soon muffling the sound of its retreat.
A flock of little scarlet-headed waxbeaks swooped down to land on the ravaged log, trilling with excitement as they pecked at insects disturbed by the foraging hog. Kheda realised the trees and bushes all around were bustling with birds of all sizes and colours stirring to greet the new day. He hurried on through the trees, moving back down the long shallow slope of the river valley. Cautious, he looked out across the patchwork of vegetable fields and sailer plots and to intermittent huts of Ulla Safar's people marking out the line of the distant river, narrower here but still wider than any in the Daish domain. Mists still hung in swathes across the low-lying land, drifting into rags and tatters where breezes tugged at them.
There it was. Indistinct yet unmistakable, a raw outcrop of black rock broke through the valley side, stark intrusion shocking against the soft green, irresistibly drawing the eye to its brutal shape. Sheer sides rose up as clean and glistening as meat fresh cut with a fine-honed blade. No plants had managed a foothold on that slick surface. On the foremost crest, a few scrubby bushes had sprouted, only to be crushed beneath the sprawling weight of an enormous nest, built by the silver eagles who had claimed the crag for their own. The ground below the crag was untouched. None would dare till it and risk being touched by the great birds' shadows, wide as the span of a grown man's arms, as they wove their portents in the skies. Only in the thirstiest season would they approach to draw water from the pool beneath the unfailing waterfall tumbling in gouts of brilliant white down the midnight face of the rock. No matter what the season, no one would approach the ornately carved gate in the high wall that surrounded the topless tower standing just to the south of the crag. No one except a warlord or his acknowledged wife.
Kheda began making his way towards it, finding a path winding through the remnants of the much-harvested brushwood. Soon stands of berry bushes and little lilla trees marked the edge of proper cultivation. There was no fruit to be had though, no matter how fiercely Kheda's belly griped with hunger. Then a few black-veined ruddy leaves wilting beneath a lilla sapling caught his eye. Hira beets. Dropping to his knees, Kheda dug with his dagger until he uncovered the roots. Hands clumsy, he peeled them, the dark juice staining fingers and dagger alike. Wizened and leathery at this season, they still had some sweetness as he chewed them resolutely.
Let that chance find be a good omen, like the hog, that I'm on the right path.
Meagre as it was, this food put new heart in him. Kheda hurried on, seeing the great black crag grow brighter with every touch of the strengthening daylight. The mists shifted and drifted around it, shapes half seen tempting his eyes and memory but disappearing before he could decide just what they were. Following the lie of the land, slipping gradually downhill, the path took him more than half the way to the great black crag before it swerved in a prudent detour back towards the huddles of close-shuttered houses. Kheda looked warily over towards the river. He could see a few figures now, tiny and indistinct in the mists, stooped over nursery beds where the sailer seedlings were being cherished, waiting for the longed-for rains to soak deep into the earth-banked fields lying hoed and ready.
There's a time for stealth and this isn't it. This is no time to be seen and hailed, asked who you are and what you're doing, half naked and filthy and yet carrying a sword twice the value of any of those houses and everything in it. Not that any of them would recognise you in this state, not as the mighty lord of the Daish domain, reader of portents, giver of laws, healer and protector of all his islands.
Leaving the track, Kheda cut a straight path towards the white stone wall surrounding the tower of silence. A perfect circle, it was topped with sharp peaks of opaque white crystal and broken only by a single gate of ebony stained with the verdigris that had long since dulled the bronze fittings to a murky green. Kheda laid a scratched and dirty hand on the latch and, pushing the gate open, slid inside the compound. His breathing sounded harsh and ragged in his ears as he leaned against the wall, relief suddenly robbing him of any strength for an endless instant.
The solid pillar of the tower rose above him. Broad, shallow steps wound up the outside in a slow spiral for those who would bring the honoured dead of the domain here, to lay them down on the empty, open platform at the top, its four pillars set in a cardinal square. There were no rails or barriers. For anyone engaged in such hallowed duties to complete them in safety or, by contrast, to fall to injury or death was a potent omen either way. Kheda walked slowly across the dusty space, intent on putting the tower between himself and the gate. Out of long habit, he noted the few plants that had seeded themselves inside the enclosure.
Sailer stalks rattling dry kernels cloaked in rough husks; a good omen that, for the fertile land all around supplying the vital harvest to come. That tiny sapling already has the distinctive leaves of the bloodfever tree, though it's a fragile promise of health for the people hereabouts. I wouldn't be any too sanguine for local villages, not with the size of that serpent bush thriving next to it.<
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That was one of your other purposes on our forest hunting trips, wasn't it, my father, teaching us to recognise our healing plants.
'See these upthrust ridged fingers hidden among the sard-berry leaves? This is a serpent bush and it's as vicious as any snake, its sap just as venomous. Never touch it; these spines will break off in your fingers and fester. Don't cut it; the juice will blister your skin. Make sure you never gather any in with dead wood for your fire. Meat cooked over it will kill you.'
'Then what purpose does it serve?' Kheda had stammered. He'd not long begun his herbal studies but the one thing he had already learned was every plant was supposed to have a function.
Daish Reik had looked at him for a long moment of silence. 'It serves as a warning. Let that be sufficient for now.'
It was only later, when I was left your sole son, searching the tomes of herb lore in the tower for all the teaching your untimely death had denied me, that I learned its full potential among the subtler means of attacking one's enemies, of inflicting timely indispositions and discreet wasting sicknesses. Is this one of the malevolent plants that Ulla Safar uses to clear inconveniences like Orhan's mother from his path?
Is this where Ulla Safar brings those pathetic little corpses he writes out of this domain's records barely before they've drawn breath? Does he deem them important enough to be raised to the silent heights, that the birds and the insects might disperse their essence as widely as possible over the domain? What influence could they have, such tiny children, for good or ill on the domain? Perhaps he simply buries them, like humble islanders with no greater ambition than returning all that they have become to the place where they lived out their lives. Or does he deny them even that grace, since he doesn't deem them worthy of even the chance of life, something even the scrawniest offspring of the lowest dirt farmer can claim in the Daish islands. Does he burn the tiny bodies or throw them to the tides to be washed far from the Archipelago? I wouldn't put it past him. Still, at least it doesn't smell as if he's murdered anyone with a blood claim on the domain of late.
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