The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Praise was a thing rarely spoken among the desertfolk, and by the Nalzindar least of all. Praise was sweet as date-honey, and, once dripped into the ears, the hearing of it could make a man, a woman, a child, abandon all things to gain more. How then did praise make a better hunter or maker of tools? So she had praised neither Tiercel nor Harrier as they had done what no man of the Isvaieni could have done as well. Endlessly each of them had eaten the bread of rebuke and insult, accepted the lessons she and others sought to teach them of the ways of the Isvaieni, and even sought to learn more. And set beside this learning, each had fought always, in his own way, to win a battle that could not be won. It was not the battle to slay Ahairan—that had been a thing that could not have been won even before they four set foot upon the Dove Road that would take them to Telinchechitl. It was the battle to survive, to help the Isvaieni to survive, to bring about a day upon which Ahairan could be slain, though theirs would not be the hands that wielded the knife. She had watched, day by day, as Harrier had surrendered all of his hopes but that last, and had fought as viciously as any cornered pakh to keep the rest of them from knowing this truth until he must. It was upon Harrier’s strength that all of them, though he knew it not, depended now. Even Bisochim. Even Saravasse. Even Fannas, for all his bluster and pride.

  It was for that reason that fear pierced Shaiara’s heart now, like a thorn of ice.

  An Ummara must care for all and care for none, and so Harrier had been to all of them. His friendships and affections—his hatreds and grudges—had always been so open, so obvious to all, that none took them seriously, and indeed, he had treated Liapha and Sathan no differently one from the other, though all knew that Liapha coddled him as if he were the child who had never left her tents and Sathan had wished that Harrier did not wear the Blue Robes, that he might challenge him within the honor-circle. And indeed, Shaiara was nearly certain that if Sathan had done so, Harrier would have accepted, Blue Robes or no, yet he had left Sathan his honor even to his death. That this was so made all possible: the strange things Harrier asked of them, the terrible privations that Ahairan forced upon them. He had not been among them even one turn of the year, nor might any of them live to see the turn of another, but were it otherwise, with time Harrier might have learned their ways as fully as one who had been born within tents. To think so made Shaiara’s heart rejoice, and did no harm.

  But now northerners—many northerners—had come, and one was of his own blood kin. This was bad enough, for it showed the people a thing they had not seen before, that Harrier Wildmage had not set aside the bonds of clan and line to take up the Three Books. Worse yet was the thought Shaiara held so close she had not even spoken of it to Ciniran or Kamar: that these kin and Elders of his far-off northern tribe would speak their words into Harrier’s ears, and deafen him to the words to which he had listened for so long.

  It would not be a bad thing, Shaiara told herself, if only the northerner words held wisdom, but they did not. They were like the yapping of the pakh as it tried to drive the desert lion from its prey. From the moment the northerners had roused from the Healing Trance, they had done nothing but whine and cry and shout and make demands—for food, for clothing, for such luxuries as even Ummara Fannas in his greed could not imagine—and when they were not doing that, they were flinging themselves recklessly into danger, or thrusting themselves into the midst of the councils of the Ummarai, as if their questions were of more importance than the need to find the way to Sapthiruk Oasis. Their words held all the fear and foolishness of city-dwellers, of children, of those who claimed importance and pride of place merely because they wished it so, and would have their ways be the ways of all places.

  Shaiara knew not how to deal with such a matter, for this was a point upon which Darak’s counsel was silent. The Isvaieni could not lay the northerners’ bones upon the sand—it would be to make of them an offering to Ahairan. And to do such a thing merely because they were trouble—Shaiara knew well—would mark a trail down which the Isvaieni must not walk, for who next would be too much trouble to ride onward with? Fannas with his constant complaints? Or would it be Zin, who must be helped to mount a shotor because he had no legs? Mark that trail, and one must ride it to the end. Instead, she must hope that Sand and Star would grant them all three things: to Harrier, wisdom; to the northerners, as much wisdom—and to herself, the forbearance to take them into the tents of the Nalzindar, for she was certain that no one else would. For now, she would counsel herself to see good fortune in the fact that the weariness that followed a Healing, combined with the heat of the day and the unfamiliar exercise, meant that once Harrier had conducted them to her tent, they were too tired to continue to complain, and simply lay down upon their mats and slept.

  When it came time to break camp, the northerners still slept heavily. Shaiara thought carefully, then said to her people not to strike the tent until the last moment so that the northerners might sleep as long as possible. She would do as much for any of their own wounded. Next, she went to help with the hundred small tasks that needed to be done before they could all be on their way once more, and then to bring the shotors that they would need to carry the tent and carpets to the tent.

  “I don’t like this,” Harrier said, coming up to her and taking the lead-rope of one of the shotors from her hand. “Nothing from Ahairan since those atish’ban-barghusi yesterday morning. I don’t really count the Shambler army,” he added.

  Shaiara frowned. “How not?” she asked, walking beside him toward their tent.

  Harrier hesitated. “It’s not that I don’t think they would have killed us all if they could have. But you saw how easy it was for us to get away. I think they were just going somewhere and we happened to be there. I think Ahairan kept so many of the people alive in the beginning so that she’d have a supply of . . . durable ones. Kave and the others said that when the Shamblers came to Akazidas’Iteru at first, they were the kind that Ahairan called up out of the other Iteru-cities, but there weren’t any of those still with them when they reached us. I don’t know. Maybe they . . .” He laughed quietly in horror at his own words. “Maybe they just fell apart from walking so far.”

  “Perhaps they did,” Shaiara agreed soberly. “A dry twig will snap if it is bent time and again. And so if these Shamblers did not mean to attack us yesterday, it would not have been many days before they did.”

  “They can’t do it now,” Harrier said conclusively. “And that worries me. If Tyr is right about Ahairan being young and stupid, that has to mean she isn’t very imaginative. We haven’t seen Goblins lately, and I think that’s because she’s been keeping them away. They’ll eat anything, and that means they’d eat Shamblers as easily as they’d eat us. So she’s either going to try to make more Shamblers—and we’re the only source of Shamblers unless Vaunnel’s actually gotten worried enough to march a whole army down the Trade Road for her to bespell—or she’s going to bring back the Goblins. I don’t know which worries me more.”

  “I would rather fight Shamblers than Goblins,” Shaiara said feelingly. The Isvaieni had only faced the creatures once. Once had been enough. “Do you think the Ummara of Armethalieh has sent an army?” she asked.

  Harrier shook his head reluctantly. “No. But she’s raised at least some of the Nine Cities’ levies, I think. She might even have sent a troop of Militia south. They would have sent couriers back with reports along the way, and those would have stopped at some point. With the information she has, she’ll have set patrols on the northern Trade Road. An observation post on the Armen Plains. Nothing more.”

  The two of them reached the front of the tent. Three Nalzindar—Thadnat, Natha, and Narkil—were standing outside, waiting to strike the tent and Shaiara could see Larasan standing inside. The northerners were already on their feet, and Shaiara was about to tell the others that they could begin the preparations to take down the tent when she heard Larasan’s voice raised in anger.

  “Foolish dog of a northerner! Give m
e that!”

  Shaiara hurried inside, and she was just behind Harrier as the two of them entered. Larasan stood facing the northerners, an empty waterskin in her hands. The old one—Felocan—stood facing her, his face twisted in anger. He held his chadar in his hands.

  It dripped with water.

  “Don’t you squall at me, girl. If I want a wet rag against the heat, what business is it of yours?”

  “It’s her business because you’re wasting water. In the desert.” Harrier snatched the chadar out of Felocan’s hands. Shaiara looked at the others. Three of them—Eugens included—had damp chadars on their heads. “You don’t get to do that,” she heard Harrier say. “Water is for drinking. Nothing else.”

  “But . . . how are we supposed to bathe?” Perizel said blankly.

  “You don’t,” Harrier said. He walked outside with the dripping chadar. Shaiara followed, wondering what he would do with it. To waste water after lecturing the northerners against it would be wrong, but surely it would be just as wrong to let Felocan benefit from his wickedness. “Don’t leave any waterskins where any of them can get at them,” she heard Harrier tell Larasan.

  “Never again,” she answered, her eyes glittering with anger. “They are animals! Truly, Harrier.”

  “In the north, there’s so much water you can drown—smother—in it,” Harrier told her gently. He tilted back his head and wrung the chadar out into it. He wiped the damp cloth over his face and hands, and then shook it out and held it by one edge into the hot breeze of the afternoon. Shaiara smoothed the smile from her face. An elegant solution.

  “What are you doing?” Felocan demanded, striding toward him. The others had all followed Felocan out of the tent, so Shaiara began helping Thadnat, Natha, and Narkil to take it down. She kept a wary eye upon the northerners as she did. It was not difficult; they did not seem to see her at all. She found that puzzling, for neither Harrier nor Tiercel had ever pretended that she did not exist.

  “Drying your chadar for you,” Harrier said. She saw him hold it out to Lord Felocan. “Put it on. You don’t want to be out here in the sun without protection.”

  “You puffed-up, arrogant . . . You told us that water was free!” Felocan sputtered in fury.

  “I said that it was freely-given,” Harrier said. “This is a desert. There are six thousand nine hundred people in this camp, including the eight of you. There are nine thousand, two hundred, and eighty-four shotors, thirty-five ikulas hounds, Saravasse, and I’m not actually keeping an accurate count of the goats and sheep. Every single one of those people, shotors, hounds, goats, sheep, and Saravasse needs water. You do not need to be comfortable.”

  Felocan snatched the chadar out of Harrier’s hands with a wordless growl and stalked away. Shaiara straightened from her task to watch him go, hands on hips, not bothering to conceal her pleasure. But her contentment was short-lived, for now Eugens approached Harrier, his every gesture speaking of anger. “Oh, for Light’s sake, Harrier, what do you think you’re doing? Grow up, will you? He didn’t mean any harm. And he’s—”

  “Gens, if you tell me that he, or any of you, have ‘suffered so much,’ I swear in the name of the Eternal Light I will leave you all right here,” Harrier said, turning to face his brother and taking a long step forward. “You’re alive. The people here? Are all the Isvaieni left—except for a few kids that we’re all hoping are hidden too well for Ahairan to find. We started out from Telinchechitl about the same time you started out from Akazidas’Iteru with around eleven thousand people. And this time last year, I’d guess there were around eighteen thousand Isvaieni, if you counted all the people in all the tribes. And the four thousand one hundred and eight people who’ve died in the last three moonturns? I watched most of them die, Gens. I tried to save their lives. And right now I’m trying to save yours. So why don’t you shut up and let me do my job?”

  What came next was so swift that had she not been standing to watch, Shaiara would not have seen it. Eugens roared with anger, and swung a great fist at Harrier’s head. Harrier moved to the side, and Eugens sprawled full-length upon the sand.

  “Get up,” she heard Harrier say. “I won’t fight you. Get up, and find Lord Felocan, and tell him he needs to come back here and get his saddle. When the tent is packed, we can leave.”

  WHEN they rode out, the northerners did not ride together. The woman Perizel rode beside Liapha, both of them speaking together as if they had known one another many moonturns. Kave stayed beside Tiercel, and the silence they shared was filled with as many words as another’s speaking.

  Felocan and his cold-eyed slave-woman rode in silence, as far behind the Nalzindar as they could. It would have been well and more than well did Froilax and the two who both named themselves Oriadan ride before him, but they did not. Shaiara did, and felt Felocan’s eyes upon her back like the promise of an arrow, though she would not stoop to looking behind her to see his face.

  So far distant that he rode among the Adanate and not the Nalzindar rode the brother of Harrier, filled with such brooding anger as Shaiara had heard of only rarely among the Isvaieni, and her heart was uneasy to know of it. And though upon an ordinary day Harrier would ride among the Nalzindar, or at the head of the caravan, today he rode with the Lanzanur, at the side of Zanattar, and Shaiara knew not what to think of this. And so, upon the hours of their journey, Shaiara turned over in her mind all the teaching-tales she had heard since she was a small child, to see if she could find some useful wisdom there.

  At the Gatherings of the Tribes each year the Isvaieni would come together to trade with one another, to make betrothals and marriages, to pay debts, to settle blood-feuds, and to hear not only the recitations of The Book of the Light, but the songs of the great tale-singers. The greatest tales were those which taught while they amused, like The Song of Marasin, in which a hunter of the Zariban too lazy to properly mend her tools thinks she has caught a great many sheshu in a night’s hunt, only to find when she returns to her mother’s tent that she had a hole in her game bag and she has only caught the same sheshu over and over and over—or The Song of Baruthur, the tale of another of the Zariban (there had never been such a tribe, back to the beginning of days), who did so great a favor for a Wildmage that the Wildmage granted Baruthur a luck so powerful that he gained all he thought to wish for, no matter what it might be. Soon wish piled upon wish, and Baruthur went from being a happy shepherd with a fine family to a miserable city-dweller hemmed in by costly possessions and living in fear.

  It was not long since Shaiara’s heart had been uneasy to think that Harrier would follow the persuasions of the northerners or of his brother, yet today he had proven he would not. Yet having been given what her heart desired, it seemed as if it would have been far better—for her and for all—had she not received it. Anger in the heart is a jarrari in the tent was a saying her father had rebuked her with many times when Shaiara was a child, and it was a bitter truth that they could afford to welcome no jarrari into their tents, either of Ahairan’s devising or their own. It was almost as if she saw the black line of a Sandwind upon the horizon: distant, implacable, disastrous—and unavoidable. And the difference was that one knew precisely what ruin the Sandwind would bring when it struck, and Shaiara only knew that they carried ruin with them, as inevitable as the Sandwind itself.

  THE beginning of their great trouble was almost serene. When they stopped to make Night Camp, Liapha offered to take the three northern women into the Kadyastar tents, so that a comb might be found for Pallocons’s hair and it could be combed through—if it could be combed through—and braided properly. Shaiara expected no offer of assistance in the evening’s tasks from any of the northern men, and in this she was not disappointed, though the preparation of Night Camp was a busy time and there was work that even an untutored northerner could do. There was occupation for many inexpert hands to be found merely in unloading the packs of the shotors, and—once the tents had been set—arranging all their contents, and that was
only the beginning of the evening’s tasks. But she could not spend overmuch time in worrying over it, beyond telling Kamar to remain close beside the tent to keep watch, lest the northerners be as reckless in their handling of the possessions of others as they were in their misuse of water.

  Once the tents were set it was the task of all not busy elsewhere to make certain that all the camp’s waterskins and jars were filled—the nightspring was the first thing Bisochim Called, for just that reason—before Bisochim returned from ensuring that the evening’s Sandwind had properly run its course. Then would he release the sheep, the goats, and the shotors from the bespelling he had set upon them even before he had Called the nightspring, for had he not commanded them to stillness, the beasts would have muddied the spring with their hooves before clean water could be drawn from it. Then came the time of jostling chaos as the animals rushed to drink—and must be kept from plunging into the nightspring, the work of many hands—and after that, the time of planting the open space around it with the rootlings they had carried packed in wet sand from their last camp.

  As always, Bisochim stood watch over the unnatural meadow, causing grass and vine to sprout so quickly that its growth could actually be witnessed. As vital as this was for their survival, seeing it come about always made Shaiara uneasy. Even as Bisochim was engaged in that task, the sky above the encampment slowly brightened with globes of glowing mist. Equally vital, and equally unnatural. Shaiara’s heart would have yearned for honest night, save that she feared what that darkness now so often concealed.

  At last, after all these tasks were complete, the encampment settled into the quiet of the evening. If Shaiara had been helping with the livestock, she would savor the quiet walk back to her own tent, and if the evening meal was little more than hot salt water, and the Nalzindar—never a numerous tribe—could now be numbered upon her fingers, she could still say to herself that another day lived was another day of defiance to the Shadow.