To the High Redoubt

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

“Then we stay here and hope that we can keep the tigers away.” He came and patted her shoulder. “I’m glad you warned me, Surata. It’s easier to have a defense if there’s a warning.”

  “I’ll stay awake tonight. If there is reason, I’ll wake you,” she said.

  “You are as tired as I am,” he reminded her.

  “But I can sleep in the saddle tomorrow. You can tie me on. You must stay awake while we travel.” She hesitated. “If we lose another mule, we’ll have to leave some of our supplies behind, won’t we? The others can’t carry it all.”

  “If we lose another mule, then we’ll talk about it,” Arkady said, and went to work putting up their tent.

  Chapter 18

  Two nights later the tigers moved in, killing Surata’s mare and raking the flank of the smallest mule, leaving deep, bleeding furrows.

  Arkady had stumbled out of the tent, his bow strung and the arrow notched. He let four shafts fly after the tigers and struck nothing.

  “What about the mule?” Surata asked when Arkady came back into the tent.

  “She’s not going to be able to carry anything. I’m not sure she can walk. In the morning, we’ll see.”

  “At least we can ride together, the way we used to,” she said a little while later. “That’s something.”

  “I’ve missed it,” he admitted.

  “Yes. I have too.” She thought a moment. “The tigers won’t be back tonight. Do you want to ride the wave?”

  He had missed the solace and elation of her body. “I have wanted to very much.”

  “Do you still?” She was fussing with the blankets, trying to smooth out the rough parts where the ground protruded.

  “Of course.” He had thrown on his outer robe when he had left the tent to try to kill the tigers, but he was naked beneath it. He untied the belt and tossed it away, letting the robe hang open. “You are better than wine and the intoxicating smoke of the Turks.”

  She rose on her knees, arms around his hips, her cheek resting on the top of his thigh. “Arkady-champion.”

  His skin tingled as her lips touched his flesh, feather-soft kisses on his hip and abdomen, then moving down, to his rising manhood. She roused him still more, her mouth and hands finding new ways to excite him, until he was afraid that he would topple over on her. He breathed her name.

  Surata left off her tantalizing ministrations and reached up for him. “Come. We can be together, Arkady-champion.” There was a low, almost drugged sound to her voice as she pulled him down to her.

  “God and Saint Michael, Surata,” he cried softly as he opened her legs. In the next instant, her ankles were joined behind him and he plunged into her, his head flung back, his mouth open for the wonder of the luminescent colors that surged around him, filling this other place as far as he could see. This time he was as naked here as he was in the daily world, but a glow, silver-blue and glinting, surrounded him.

  “Surata?” he said tentatively.

  “Arkady my champion?” the glow responded, the voice a sensation almost like tickling.

  “What now?” he asked as he looked around.

  “We are trying to find the Bundhi. But we don’t want him to find us. Last time he was able to, but perhaps this time he will not.” The glow pulsated, revealing an emotion between ire and mischief.

  “Why?” Arkady wanted to know, thinking that she had gone beyond anything sensible when she said that.

  “Because there are ways to deceive him. To begin with, you may not believe it, but to anyone else but yourself and me, you are invisible. That is what this aura does for you. I have given you another kind of protection.” The silver-blue light shifted, turning the brilliant colors pale with its radiance.

  “And what good is that?” Arkady asked, trying to determine what was happening to him this time. “There isn’t any land.”

  “We haven’t made any, and we won’t. This time we will see what the Bundhi has done instead of letting him see what we are doing.” She laughed a little, glimmering around him.

  “Will it work?” He was feeling disoriented because there was nothing solid or recognizable emerging from the shifting lights. He felt the current between him and Surata more powerfully than before and tried to think why it would be so.

  “I hope it will,” she answered. “For now, we must…drift in this other place, looking for signs of the Bundhi.”

  “But…” he objected, trying to find a way to express why this troubled him.

  “Arkady my champion, you will know him if we find him. You will feel a stench on your soul, for the Bundhi is a charnel house. You will sense the reek of him.” There was quiet passion in her description. “You have seen what he can do. Now we will watch him do it.”

  “And if he’s waiting for us, as he has before?” He could feel a movement that was like wind, and he assumed that they were starting their search.

  “That’s a risk. It’s always been a risk. But I think he assumes we’re too worried about our animals and the tigers to venture into this other place tonight. He has always believed that those who follow the Right Hand Path are too cautious and too reluctant to act. This time we will not hesitate, and we will not give him a target to aim for.”

  Arkady considered this, and though it made him uneasy, he could not argue with it. “You’re basing most of your strategy on what you assume your opponent will do,” he pointed out to her.

  “What else can I do? What else have you done?” The brightness was different now, the areas of light larger and less iridescent. There was a quality about them of vast distances.

  “I don’t know.” He could not say that he felt too vulnerable as he was, that he feared her protection would not be adequate if they were pursued in any way.

  “Do not fear, Arkady my champion. You are as safe now as if you were girded in steel.” There was that note in her voice again, that determined implacability that he respected utterly.

  “Right,” he said, squinting into the expanses of brightness. Before he had been reminded of the wings of butterflies; now he thought of the light through stained glass.

  “The Bundhi is trying to stop us and to deceive us. We must not let him do that,” she reiterated. “I must do everything I can, you know that, Arkady my champion. If I do less, I would not be worthy of you.”

  Arkady sighed. “Surata, don’t let that trouble you. It means nothing to me.” He knew he had said it badly, but the smooth, facile compliments would not come to his lips.

  “But it does to me,” she responded. “You see, there is nothing that—” She broke off suddenly and Arkady had the sensation of coming to an abrupt halt.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re not alone here,” she said.

  “The Bundhi?” He had no inkling that their surroundings had changed in any way.

  “I don’t know.” She became very still, and he with her. “I think it is…someone else.”

  Then something was changing in the lights—the brightness became music as well as light, a deep, sensual, exalted melody that came from the throats of hundreds of singers and from instruments that had never been heard before.

  “It’s…wonderful,” Arkady whispered, the word wholly inadequate to describe the music. “What…where does it come from?”

  “From a musician,” she answered very softly.

  “But what is it?” It was so unlike any music he had known, and so total in its harmony that he listened to it in growing awe.

  “It is what the musician envisions his music to be. In the daily world, it will be an echo of this. It happens sometimes. There is a vision of the art, known only to the artist and those of us fortunate enough to stumble upon the vision here. I have seen statues here that the gods must envy for their sublime beauty.” She was barely speaking; her voice seemed to come through his skin rather than his ears.

  The music continued, growing more rapturous and vast. Then it faded, not quickly or distractedly, but from within the music itself, until it was two cry
stalline, pure, high notes suspended together like stars.

  (“Surata, Surata,” he murmured, finding music in her name.)

  Then they were in silence again, and sliding through the brightness toward an area of enormous blackness.

  “Does that trouble you?” Surata asked as Arkady grew tense at the sight of it.

  “It…” He had recollections of what the priests had said about limbo and thought that this must be what they meant.

  “It is like the night sky, Arkady my champion, huge but clear, clear as water.” She shimmered, carrying him a little way into the blackness. “You see?…clear and deep. This is not like what you fear, something muffling and enclosed. In this other place, the darkness is open and free.”

  Arkady tried to be calm, but he grew steadily more apprehensive. “Does a comet feel like this?” he asked her, trying to make a joke of it and failing.

  “Who knows what happens in the heart of a comet?” she replied. “In this other place, there are no comets. You and I are free to do as we wish.”

  This did not reassure Arkady, who still anticipated falling with every breath. “I…I don’t know if I can keep this up, Surata. It’s too…difficult.”

  The silver-blue glow around him grew brighter, larger, so that he seemed to float in an enormous bubble or a translucent pearl. “There. You see, you are quite safe now. You are not hampered by the daily world here, and you are taken care of differently.”

  Arkady almost smiled. “The best of both worlds? To have you this way and the way…we get here.”

  Surata did not answer this, but within the bubble, Arkady grew warmer, almost cozy. They continued into the darkness, going in contented silence.

  Arkady watched the darkness from the center of the silver-blue sphere, awed at the scope of what he saw. “Who would have thought that there were such expanses beyond us?” he said to ward off the isolation and panic that wriggled like an eel in his chest.

  “Not beyond us, Arkady my champion: within us. This other place is reached from inner transcendence.” She swung them through a long, slow arc. “Everything is within you.”

  Arkady nearly burst out with wild laughter, but he was able to control himself enough merely to say, “How can this be within me?”

  “Where else would it be?” she asked kindly. “If it were not, it could be reached other ways, but being within, we must be…within one another.” Once more she was quiet. “The Bundhi,” she warned quietly.

  “What? Where?” Alarm caught his attention once more.

  “Not far. He is…busy. He has released the tigers for the night and now he is going to return to his redoubt, the one in this other place, not where he is in the daily world.”

  “And where is he in the daily world?” Arkady inquired, wishing he could find a way to sense what she sensed.

  “A city, with domes, in blue and gold. There are cobbled streets and high walls, and pointed arches. There are tigers with the sun on their backs walking amid flowers.” She hesitated. “A garden, do you think?”

  “With tigers the way you describe?”

  “The walls are the color of the dry hills, and the gates are surmounted with blue domes.” She kept them hanging in the darkness, poised to react swiftly if they had to.

  “Another deception,” Arkady suggested. “He’s created a place other than his redoubt to confuse us or has disguised his redoubt to make you think that it is another place. You’ve told me he can do this.”

  “That’s true,” she said dubiously. “This does not have that feel to it.” The brightness of her sphere dimmed. “We must go carefully, so that he does not see us.”

  “You said that we’re invisible.”

  “And so we are, but as he leaves a presence behind him, so do we, and he has the skill to track us, whether we’re visible or invisible.” She sailed them away from the thing she had perceived, expanding the darkness between them and the Bundhi.

  “But he is alone, isn’t he?” Arkady asked.

  “He…has agents with him, two of them. They know me. They are the ones who followed me when I was sent into slavery.” There was real fear in her voice now. “They will recognize me, never mind what precautions I take. They are like hunting dogs, who can follow a scent anywhere but through running water. We leave a scent in this other place as surely as if we were crossing a field with hounds behind us.”

  “Then,” Arkady said lightly, “we must find some running water.” He chuckled, hoping that she would not be so frightened.

  “Yes,” she said eagerly. “But if we create it, then it will be the same as leaving yet another scent for them to follow. They leave us so little…” Her voice trailed off. “Arkady my champion, what would be better: creating water or making a false scent for them to follow?”

  “Can you do that—make a false scent?” He was intrigued by the idea as much as he was uncertain of the outcome of such action. “What would you do?”

  “I think I can create another bubble like this one, but empty, and send it far out into the void. They might think it was you and me, because of what we have done already.” She glowed a little brighter. “If not, they will find us in the daily world soon enough, and we will have to be ready for them. The Bundhi does not want me to return, and he warned me that he would do everything that he can to stop me.”

  “But why? Surely you aren’t so great a threat to him now.” Arkady reached out to her with his mind. “He could have killed you many times before now.”

  “But you know he does not desire my death. He wants my power to use, not my death.” Her strength thrummed through him. “He wishes to have what I have given you, and refuses to share it, not with me, or with anyone. You heard what he said when he blinded me. He has not changed his mind.”

  Arkady thought this over. “A false scent, then. Another bubble might confuse them, that’s something. They are not seeking to strand us here, are they?” He wanted her to be amused, but neither of them thought it was a joke. “They might not be aware we’re here, if they think that…”

  She did not respond at once. “When they serve the Bundhi and he transcends through the ministrations of his slaves, they will know we are here and that we have been here. And they will search for us, Arkady my champion.”

  “You’re certain.” He did not have to make this a question; he knew from the scent and the feel of her that she was.

  “Yes.” She trembled, and the light of the bubble glistened like frost on a winter morning.

  “Then it would be best to return before they know we’ve been here. We’ve learned a little something, and that’s to our advantage, Surata. If we can get away without the Bundhi and his agents knowing we’ve been here, spying on them, so much the better. They’ve found us out every time before. This time it can be different.” He felt her shrink in close around him, and the vertigo he had experienced when they had first entered that limitless darkness returned.

  (“Arkady-champion, you…” She took a long shuddering breath, then gave two small cries, the sound of birds at dawn.

  (He pulled in his breath sharply through his teeth. “Holy Saint Michael!”)

  “Come away, Arkady my champion.”

  Already the darkness was fading, and the glow that surrounded him expanded rapidly, pulsating, then burst into many brilliant colors, glorious sparks rising as the last light from the fire outside the tent made their skins glisten.

  “Did we get away?” Arkady whispered to the lobe of her ear, kissing her softly.

  “I think so,” she answered when she could speak. “They were not in that other place when we left it. They didn’t discover where we were.”

  “Then they won’t be able to follow us back here, not from that other place, will they?” He traced the line of her cheek with his fingers, wishing he had the means to tell her how precious she was to him.

  “Probably not. There are other agents, but we know about them, don’t we?” She caught his hand in hers and kissed it, holding the palm aga
inst her lips.

  “The tigers and the rest of it?” He saw her nod. “It means that we need only worry about being eaten or dying of thirst,” he jested, his smile genuine, marred only because she could not see it.

  “Which are minor matters,” she appended, going along with his lightly taunting mood. “To say nothing of collapsing from exhaustion.”

  “Are you exhausted?” His sympathy was mixed with contented pride.

  “Perfectly.” Her legs slid over his hips and along his thighs. “It is better to sleep this close to you, Arkady-champion, than anything else in the world.”

  Hearing this, he was consumed by a tenderness that was almost painful in its intimacy. “I will not lose you, Surata.”

  She held him fiercely. “No. Never lose me, Arkady-champion.”

  They clung together through the night, unwilling to be parted even in sleep.

  In the morning, Arkady decided to abandon the injured mule; the animal was clearly suffering and Arkady had no means to tend to the deep gouges the tiger had plowed in her hide. He looked at her pack saddle and tried to make up his mind what could best be left behind. He did not want to discard any of their food or water, but one of the bags contained their religious garments, and these, he knew, were expendable now that they were outside of Christian lands. He tossed the pack aside and divided the others between their other mules. While the extra weight would slow them down, Arkady was also aware that with Surata riding the bay with him, they would not travel quickly in any case. All that he had to do in the end was to make up his mind if it would be kinder to kill the injured mule. He walked to her side, making low, reassuring sounds as he bent to examine her flank. The wounds were puffy, with blood and watery fluid seeping from them whenever she moved. Arkady noticed that her breathing was labored, and she held her head low, long ears drooping. “Bad for you, old girl.” He patted her rump and nodded to himself as she shied, grunting. Regretfully he reached out and patted her cheek before going back for his maul.

  Surata touched his arm. “It is wrong to kill her, Arkady-champion.”

  “What else can I do? She’s in pain now, and the scratches are very bad. This afternoon or tomorrow at the latest, the wounds will be infected. She will die slowly, in thirst and in pain. This way it is over quickly and she will not have to suffer.” He lifted the maul. “I don’t like killing animals, Surata, but I don’t like seeing them suffer needlessly, either.”