“Arkady my champion, this is for you,” she repeated, almost begging him now.
He made one last effort, infusing the delicate, fragile spines with his determination and his shattering fulfillment and release. He lay beside her, holding her, warming her, urging her back to him. “Surata, don’t ever do that again,” he whispered to her as he stroked her. “Never endanger yourself that way for me again.” He could not tell if she was responding, and he missed the profound link he had had with her only moments—if the time of that other place and the daily world were the same—before. He cradled her, rocking her gently, saying things to her that he could not remember as soon as he spoke them. His hands stung where he had been burned, and he forced himself to examine the weals on her hands as well. The sight of the burns shocked him, for though he had seen daily world echoes of injuries received in that other place, this was different, as if it were tainted with the malice he had felt in the presence of the bamboo redoubt.
Shortly before dawn, when the sky was slate and rose, she turned in his embrace, and her breathing changed, no longer shallow and slow, but the steady, deep rhythm of sleep. Her eyelids fluttered and then were closed, the lines at the corners of her eyes smoothed now, and at rest.
“What happened?” he demanded of her when she called out to him in the morning.
“The Bundhi very nearly had us. He is strong, with his redoubt in that other place anchored to Gora Čimtarga in the daily world.” She hid her hands as if unwilling for him to see the burns she had received. “Everything the Bundhi touches is contaminated by him.”
“But our castle in the salt marsh…” he protested, not knowing what else to say to her.
“It is a haven of sorts, but…ephemeral. It is not anchored to anything in the daily world, and that makes it much more vulnerable. If the Bundhi wishes to raze it, he could do it.” She sighed. “We worked so hard. But…”
“But what?” Arkady asked. “What is it, Surata?”
“Without an anchor, we cannot stand. I wanted to ask the guardian of the spring, but it wasn’t possible. With a place like that protected spring, the castle would have been able to stand against the Bundhi whether or not we were present to defend it, but since it wasn’t anchored, there was…” Her hands fluttered in distress.
“You speak as if it were no longer there,” Arkady said, unable to rid himself of the foreboding that crept over him. “After all you gave to that castle, it couldn’t simply…fade, could it? It was so…real.” He could still see it in his mind, and its indomitability was apparent even to him.
“It was real,” she said softly. “But it might not be now. I hope I’m wrong. I’m afraid to look for it, or to search.” Her eyes met his without the light of recognition. “If I had nothing else to do but give my concentration to it, then I could serve as the anchor, and for a time we would have it. There are too many things we must do in order to live. The castle…I hope it will still be there when we return to that other place, but Arkady-champion, I—”
Arkady held her face in his hands. “Surata, you are more to me than any castle in this world or any other.” He recalled his village priest describing Paradise as the palace of God, a great, magnificent castle of gold and jewels that floated above the clouds. He kissed her forehead. “What castle is worth you?”
In the next days, she recovered slowly. She was content to ride with him and let him care for her. She had few objections to anything he did, and only once betrayed her feelings, and that was when they came to the first empty city.
“It’s very old.” Arkady said, holding the bay near the ruined gates. “No one has lived here for generations upon generations.”
“What manner of people were they?” Surata asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this place before and there isn’t much left to see of it. I don’t know what they were like, Surata.” He stared at the gates, the wood almost entirely rotted away so that the ancient hinges hung in the opening like broken teeth. The massive walls of wind-polished stone were rounded and smoothed, so that if there had ever been crenellations along them, they could no longer be seen. “I think they must have been pagans.”
“I am a pagan,” she reminded him, reaching down to pat his shoulder.
“Not that kind of pagan,” Arkady said grandly and vaguely. “There’s a piece of decoration here,” he went on. “There’s a woman with many breasts and a…crown, I guess that is what it is, or a wreath. She has something on her head. There are horses at her dugs, feeding like children.” He was both curious and revolted.
“They say there was an ancient people who lived in this area who made gods of their horses,” Surata said.
“This might be their city.” He recalled that she had said the guardian predicted they would come to two empty cities and a tower of bones before they reached Samarkand. “This is one empty city,” he admitted grudgingly. “If there’s another one, that should indicate something.”
“There are many strange things in these wastes. My uncles said that there were once statues of cats as large as several tall men, and they looked out over a broken courtyard. The emptiness claimed them long ago.”
“Do we go in, or go on?” Arkady asked. “It’s a little after midday. We can cover much more ground before sundown.”
Surata shivered. “The Bundhi may be looking in these remote and empty places, thinking that we would hide in them. Let’s go on, and camp in the open.”
There had been no tigers for the last four nights, and Arkady was beginning to hope he had outrun them. “What agents would the Bundhi send to a place like this?”
“Anything,” she answered very quietly. “Men. Tigers. Scorpions.” At this last, she shuddered.
“I wouldn’t like to find a nest of scorpions in that place,” Arkady said, pulling the reins and turning his gelding away from the ruin. “We’ll go on, then.”
“Good.” Her relief was genuine, and she did not excuse her desire to be away from the arid, desolate place.
Four days later, they came to the second city. This one was older than the first, hardly more than mounds of rubble with scrub grass and thorn bushes growing out of the drast.
“What is it like?” Surata asked as Arkady dismounted, prepared to lead his horse through the declivities that might once have been streets.
“It’s like…nothing. It’s just…heaps.” He tried to imagine what the place had been like, but it was not possible. There was not enough left to give him any feel of the place. He stared around him. “We might get rain tonight or tomorrow,” he said inconsequentially as his gaze went from the wreckage around him to the horizon and sky beyond.
“It will not be tonight,” she said confidently. “Tomorrow before mid-morning, there will be rain, but not near us, I think. We will have to avoid low places—washes and riverbeds—if we do not want to get trapped in the floods.”
Arkady laughed. “Floods? Out here?”
“Oh, yes, most certainly,” Surata said in her most serious manner. “This country has floods. They come suddenly and are gone as quickly, but you can drown in them, just the same.” She turned her face toward the south. “Are there mountains yet? Can you see them?”
“Perhaps,” Arkady answered, squinting against the dry wind that frisked over the parched grasses. He wanted very much to see the mountains, to tell Surata that they were looming there at the edge of the world.
“Then you don’t see them,” she sighed. “They will be there soon. Tomorrow or the next day, you will see them, to the south. They are very tall mountains.”
“I’ll look for them,” he assured her. “You’ll know when I see them. I promise you that.”
“Thank you, Arkady-immai,” she said, relaxing, her hands wrapped around the tall cantel of the saddle. “You do not believe that the mountains are there, do you?”
“Of course I do,” he lied valiantly.
“Arkady-immai,” she rebuked him gently. “I know from the tone of your voice
that you do not expect to find the mountains—not tomorrow, not the day after, or ever. You will be satisfied if we find an inhabited city, and it need not be Samarkand.” She was able to laugh a bit. “Will it trouble you very much when we come to Samarkand?”
“I want to find the place,” he said carefully. “We’re down to nothing on supplies, and we can eke out a few more days without real strain, but after that, a marketplace would be much appreciated.” He paused. “We’ve been lucky in that respect—the foraging has been good, and there has been feed enough for the horse. There is still enough water to last us a little while longer.” He kicked at a loose stone and watched it bounce away through the weed-covered rubble. “I’ll say this for that other place: you don’t have to worry about food and water and all the rest of it.”
“Just bamboo staves that leave burns on your hands,” she said.
“How…?” He turned back toward her, rubbing his hands together guiltily. He had convinced himself that he had concealed his injuries successfully. “You didn’t mention it before.” There was a sulky cast to his expression and that embarrassed him more than her knowledge of his hurt.
“I have the same burns. We were together when the staff came through the window. The burns will heal, Arkady-immai. But it troubles me that you were not willing to tell me about them.” She held one of her hands out toward him. “See? Does this look like the burns you have?”
He glanced at her hand, recognizing the shiny, stretched-looking skin across the heel of her palm. “Yes,” he said. “It looks the same.”
“We shared the hurt, Arkady-immai. There is nothing wrong in that, is there?” She waited for him to answer her, and when he remained stubbornly silent, she added, “If we are to battle the Bundhi, Arkady-immai, we will take the same blows and feel the same pain. It is best to know that now, while you can get used to it.”
He wanted to argue with her, to insist that there was no possible way for them to have such close unity that they would have the same wounds. The half-healed scar on her hand matched the one on his, and he could not dispute it. “Look, Surata, what you say might be true, but you could be making too much of this.”
“If you want to believe that, it is your right,” she said in a soft voice. “I don’t wish to wrangle about it.” Her chin lifted and her manner became aloof.
Arkady led them through the tumbled wreckage, watching for animals and reptiles. He was very much afraid of snakes; he listened for the slither in the dry grass most intently.
“There are scorpions here, and lizards, Arkady-immai. They are in the hidden places, waiting. If you do not disturb them, they will not harm you.” She listened to the sound of the bay’s hooves, then said, “You do not like me to say these things.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Arkady snapped, perplexed by his resentment.
“You fear that I will intrude, that I am intruding, as we are intruding in this old fallen city.” She was confident of herself but saddened by what she perceived. “Arkady-immai, you have nothing to be ashamed of, not in your dealings with me.”
“It’s not that I’m ashamed,” he argued, glaring at an overgrown hillock. He knew that she was distressed, but he could not stop the words. “Talk about something else if you must talk, Surata.”
She was silent and said nothing until they were beyond the tumbled humps that had once been the city walls. “We will see the mountains soon. And then Samarkand.”
“Right,” he replied, and kept his eyes on the clouded horizon.
“The wind has shifted, Arkady-champion. There will be rain soon, I think.”
“Then we’d better find a roof for the night.”
The rain struck late in the afternoon, and by the time they found shelter in a grove of scrub, they were drenched and miserable.
“I don’t know if I can get a fire going in this,” he mumbled as he brought the bay to a halt. “The ground’s wet, and if there’s any kindling to be found, it won’t take a spark.” He had known other such nights, on campaign, and the memory of huddling in dripping tents, clothing damp and stinking of sweat and wool made him grind his teeth.
“It won’t trouble me,” Surata said, sniffing once. “It is a shame we had to leave the tent behind.”
“It’s a shame that the tigers got the mules. It’s a shame that the caravan became unsafe. It’s a shame that—” He made himself stop. “Don’t pay any attention, Surata. I’m disgusted with myself for not thinking ahead. I should have found us shelter before the storm broke.”
“I have no objections, Arkady-champion.”
The saddle groaned and squeaked as Arkady dismounted, and his boots squished as he walked. There was a finger of water down his back. He shook his head and water flew off his hair. “I’ll have to dry my weapons somehow. I don’t want them to rust. If we find the Bundhi, I’ll need them.”
“Yes, you will,” she agreed. “Are there boughs enough to bind them together, to make a shelter for us?”
“Probably,” he said, thinking that he could use a hatchet now. Cutting boughs would be bad for his swords. “There’s some thongs we can use to tie them.”
“That’s a start. If you will help me down, I will help you all I can, Arkady-champion.”
“Thanks,” he said curtly. He reached up to her and brought her down, noticing that the water in her clothes made her much heavier than usual.
“There must be a place where the trees are thick enough to block most of the water. If we go there, that will be a good place to make our shelter.”
Because that was exactly what he had been planning to do, he had an irrational desire to suggest something else, but he suppressed it. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said in the flattest tone possible.
Three hours later they huddled together under a makeshift lean-to, eating cold, dry fruit and shivering under their sodden blanket.
“Does the horse have enough food?” Surata asked Arkady, her teeth chattering.
“For tonight and some for tomorrow. We have some gold left, and when we find a village, we can buy food and new provisions.” He had been worried about the bay but hated to admit this to Surata, since without the big gelding, they would be on foot and almost helpless.
“Samarkand is not far,” Surata promised him.
Arkady bit back a challenge to her calm assertion. “I hope so,” he forced himself to say.
She leaned back, trying to sleep. “My bones hurt,” she said, not so much in complaint as in surprise.
“That’s not surprising in weather like this,” he told her, cuddling close to her, grateful for the warmth she provided.
“Tomorrow it will rain, as well. The day after it will be clear.”
“You can’t be certain of that,” Arkady protested but knew inwardly that she was telling the truth.
“Perhaps we should carry this shelter with us, so that tomorrow night, we will not be entirely without protection.” She did not wait to hear his comment but yawned and turned on her side.
Arkady dozed through the night, never fully asleep, and in the morning, he was dull and irritable. He saddled up and packed their belongings with little more than a few forbidding grunts, and as they resumed their way through the rain, he began to feel a certain grim satisfaction that they had come so far, endured so much, to end up this way.
Surata endured his surliness, willing to let him sulk. She suggested once that they might make camp early, to give the horse some relief and let themselves get warm.
“What good is that?” Arkady muttered. “We won’t be dry and it would mean using up our supplies faster than we have to.”
“It would give us all a chance to rest,” she ventured, making every effort not to be daunted by his mood.
“And then what?” He sighed heavily. “I don’t know where we are, and neither do you. If we stop, we might as well wrap up in shrouds and be done with it.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said, a faint irritation in her voice. “We are still going the
right way.”
“With nothing to guide us?” he sneered.
“I am here, and I know that we are going in the way that we have been sent.” She sounded stubborn now.
“More from that guardian, I suppose.” He wanted to shout at her, to force her into denying that she had known anything of what was ahead of them, that she was trying only to keep them from losing hope back there in the wastes.
“Yes, in part. You think we are lost because you cannot see the stars or the sun.” She was upset now, and she did not guard her tongue as she usually did. “Well, I cannot see the stars or the sun in any case, and I know that we are going to the east and a bit to the south. You may be lost without the stars, but—”
“Surata, don’t,” he said to her, embarrassed by his own callousness as well as wearying of their animosity. “I hope you’re right, but you don’t have to claim this to cheer me.”
“I am not trying to cheer you!” She grabbed his soaked brigandine in her hands and jerked at it. “I am telling you that I know this is the right way. If you cannot trust me so far, what has everything we have endured, in this daily world and in that other place, been for?”
Arkady shook his head. “I believe that you are convinced you’re right,” he said carefully, shocked at the depth of her feeling.
“Then what harm is there in trusting me? You have no better alternative to offer.” She released her hold on his clothes. “I do not mean to…impose on you. I want only to…bring us to a safe place.”
“I realize that,” he said, more kindly than before. “And you’re right, I have no better plan than you have. I suppose we might as well go where you think best as let the horse follow his nose.”
“Thank you,” she said, mollified by his change in attitude. “So far, the horse’s nose has been pointed in the right direction.”
Arkady did not think he could laugh, but he smiled a little and hoped it would be clear to her. “No harm in that.”
To the High Redoubt Page 31
