by Bell, Hilari
“I thank you, sir,” she said as they climbed the low steps to stand before the door, “for both myself and my unborn babe. You’ve aided the both of us tonight.”
“If I have done you a small service,” said Sorahb, “it is less than nothing compared to the service you have done for your city. And even that is little compared to what your city does for Farfala.”
“You have served too,” she said. “And I see you are weary with it. I only wish I could assist in the next task that will fail to you.”
“What task is that?” Sorahb asked. He prayed she was not about to request some further aid from him, for his bones ached with weariness. But the soaked cloth of her skirt outlined the bulge of her belly, and he knew that just as she had done all she could to fight for her city this day, it behooved him to do what he could for her.
Something of his reluctance must have shown, for a sudden, impish smile lit her face. “Your next task, sir, is to defeat the Hrum army in the desert.”
With that she went into the battered house and closed the door. Sorahb stood on the step with the rain running down his face, and for the first time he realized that he was dealing with the god Azura in disguise.
SO SORAHB DEPARTED from the city of Mazad, knowing it would be safe until the Hrum could bring reinforcements. He went into the desert and dealt with the Suud tribesmen. The Suud were wild and fierce, but they still bowed before the divine farr that Sorahb possessed in such measure.
Once they agreed to follow him, Sorahb showed them how to harass the Hrum. When the time came, he led his army to the Hrum’s desert camp and, with the assistance of his Suud allies, defeated the Hrum with flood and fire.
As Sorahb stood upon the charred wreckage of the battlefield, dealing with the duties and problems that arise from victory, a small Suud boy drew near. When the last who had petitioned Sorahb for aid had left him, the child approached. Sorahb was about to ask how he could help the boy, but the glint in the child’s eyes was too ironic for any mortal’s years. It seemed oddly familiar as well.
Sorahb folded hid arms. “I would offer you help,” he said, “but I doubt that you need help from any man. You have come to lay another test on me, have you not?”
The boy laughed, light and clear as any child. “All folk need help,” he said. “Thede tedtd are set by the Hrum, and not by me; I merely advice you which to take next, although I believe this will be the last of them.”
“And this test would be …?” Sorahb’d voice held the politeness that is half insult, for no man likes to be befooled, even by a god.
“Your last test is to abandon force of arms and use gold against the Hrum instead,” said Azura calmly. “When men serve only for gold, it forms the beating heart of their army, and becomes their greatest weakness, as well.”
Sorahb frowned. “But I have no gold! My army lived on the charity of the country folk, who have little enough to share, though they have supported us generously. How can I use gold against the Hrum?”
“That,” said the boy as he turned away, “is for you to find out. That’s what makes it a test.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JIAAN
THEY RETURNED TO CAMP late that afternoon. The prisoners carried the wounded, to encumber them, and Jiaan’s men carried the prisoners’ weapons. Only when they arrived did Jiaan learn that Tactimian Patrius had escaped.
“He was talking at us, sir,” the guard complained. “All the time! We were watching the fire—we could see it from here—and trying to figure out how things were going, and he just wouldn’t be quiet. So we finally tied him in one of the hutches, just like you did when you went to sleep, and he never escaped from you.”
So it’s all your fault, the aggrieved undertone in the man’s voice proclaimed. But how could Patrius escape his shackles without help? Hosah had sworn that all the men he recommended could be trusted with the prisoner. Was Patrius foolish enough to accept aid from someone who might be part of Fasal’s faction? If they’d offered to help him escape, he might have taken the risk, hoping to escape from them later. Jiaan’s heart began to pound, but he kept his voice level.
“Show me the hutch where you held him.”
One look resolved the mystery.
“We tied his hands to one post and his feet to another,” said the guard. “Just like in your hutch, and he never escaped from you.”
“I didn’t tie his hands to the post,” said Jiaan mildly. Relief flooded through him—it was impossible to be angry. “I used chains. I especially didn’t tie him in a position where he could reach the knots with his teeth.”
“Oh.” The guard blushed. “I didn’t think of that.”
Hosah, who had come up to join them, sighed. “Five minutes’ thought would have told you. Five seconds with another man, but with you … I’m sorry about this, sir.”
“I understand,” said Jiaan. “We needed every man we could muster for the fight. It was really the fact that the camp was empty that gave Patrius his chance.”
Alert guards could have made up for that, but Hosah had clearly left his least capable men behind to guard the prisoner. In truth, Jiaan would rather have had them here than blundering around on the battlefield in the dark. But with them guarding Patrius, the result was a foregone conclusion.
Looking at the scuff marks on the earthen floor, it was clear that Patrius had simply lifted the cloth at the far side and rolled out, so the only question was … “Did he take any weapons from this hutch? Any gear?”
“No weapons,” the guard replied, looking a little less embarrassed. “I’m not fool enough to leave a prisoner alone where there are weapons. But he did take my water skin and a thick cloak.”
“I wonder if he took time to look for a weapon elsewhere, or if he just seized his chance and ran,” Jiaan mused aloud. “I’ll ask the cooks if any knives are missing. But if he found a weapon, we’ll know it soon enough. Right now, what we need is a Suud tracker.”
THE SUUD DIDN’T SET out on Patrius’ trail till after dark. They’d already been up for a night and most of a day, and like the rest of the army they needed some sleep. Besides, they told Jiaan, the trail left by Patrius’ boots would be child’s play to track. And sooner or later the Hrum would have to sleep too.
Jiaan wanted to go with them, but he knew he couldn’t. The details of holding a group of prisoners that still outnumbered his own force, even with the whole Farsalan army assembled on the hilltop, ate a commander’s time. The only thing that made the task possible was that Fasal and his supporters, their grief and shattered pride soothed by this annihilating victory, made no trouble. The Hrum, so unaccustomed to losing that they almost seemed to be in shock, made even less trouble than Fasal.
Still, as Jiaan instructed the Suud to lead small parties to completely enclosed crevices, where they could lower the prisoners by ropes and leave only a handful of men to guard them. As he arranged guard shifts, food for the prisoners, water for the prisoners, and medical care for their wounded—almost a dozen of whom might die, even with the best care Jiaan’s healers and their own surgeons could offer. As he sent a request to the Suud council asking if their tribes could hold his prisoners, at least for the next four months, Jiaan received reports on how Patrius fared.
“He’s not a fool,” said the Suud woman who came to report to Jiaan the next morning, just before dawn. “He’s staying near the streams and doing his best to keep warm and dry at night, but he doesn’t know desert terrain at all. We took the hatchets you gave us and cut some bushes, right at the base. When he gets close to one of the passages out of the maze we block it with bushes, very thick, and erase all the tracks going in. When he comes he sees brush too thick to pass and no tracks, and walks right on by. He never seems to wonder why he finds bushes thick in some places and hardly any in others that look just the same.”
“He would not,” said Jiaan in Suud. “He is taught to see land to fight on, not to think of bushes.” In fact Jiaan, whose training was similar, wasn’t sur
e he would have noticed—especially if the Suud had done it well, and the Suud did things like that superbly.
“Well, it won’t be much longer,” said the woman. “He’s already tired, and we’re going to start driving him away from water tomorrow.”
TWO NIGHTS LATER she reported that Patrius had lost his water skin to a Suud spear.
“Onock says he was aiming for the flask,” she said, “but I think he just got lucky. None of us were trying to hit that close to the man, just near enough to drive him away from the stream. But now that he can’t carry water with him, it should only take two more nights.”
IN FACT PATRIUS LASTED four more days. At the end of the fourth night another Suud came for Jiaan.
“He may not be smart,” said the Suud youth, Abab, “but he’s tough. Six nights—days for him, I suppose—with no food and four with little water, and walking all the time. But then he just sat down, and he’s not moving. He’s not far off, if you’d like to go there. I don’t think he’ll fight you now.”
“Yes,” said Jiaan. “I’d like to … I’ll go to him.”
Jiaan told the yawning night guards where he was going, and after some deliberation left Hosah in command of the camp. Fasal would probably be insulted, but even though he’d calmed down considerably since they defeated the Hrum’s force in the desert, Jiaan wasn’t sure he trusted him with prisoners. Besides, Fasal might see it as a sign that Jiaan feared his influence and be pleased instead. If he didn’t see it that way, could Jiaan point it out to him? Subtly enough to keep Fasal from realizing that he was being manipulated? Probably not. But Hosah was in command, so how Fasal felt didn’t really matter, did it? Jiaan knew that his father had commanded deghans he didn’t like, some of whom had actively plotted against him.
I am not my father.
Jiaan sighed and put aside the squabbles of his officers as he followed the Suud youth out of the camp. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the sky in the east was fading from black to gray, and there was enough light for him to avoid the prickly plants if he didn’t walk fast.
Soon the sun flooded the desert, illuminating the gold, orange, and gray of the rocky spires. Abab stopped in the shade of one of the rocks and hastily donned his robe, pulling the hood over the white skin of his face and tying the sleeves closed to protect his hands.
Having seen the burns they risked at the slightest touch of the sun, Jiaan was often amazed by the courage it must take for the Suud to move around in the day, even though they kept to the shadows as much as they could. Abab’s pupils had shrunk to pinpricks, making his pale eyes look blind, but Jiaan knew that the Suud could see in daylight, though not as well as they could at night.
They set off once more, and soon reached the sheltered bend in the small canyon where Patrius sat, wrapped from head to foot in the thick cloak he had taken from the guard’s tent.
He sat upright on the rock, though his eyes were shut, and the lower half of his face bore a scruffy, half-grown beard. The Hrum, like Farsalan men, were clean-shaven, and Jiaan had allowed his prisoners to maintain that small dignity, though under close supervision from their guards.
He now realized how much it had mattered. Even chained to the posts of Jiaan’s hutch, Tactimian Patrius had possessed the authority of a Hrum officer.
This ragged, exhausted man had lost that sometime in the last long week. For the first time Jiaan realized that Patrius, in his late twenties, wasn’t that much older than Jiaan at eighteen—though there was a time, less than a year ago, when that gap would have seemed huge. But Jiaan was no longer a boy. In some ways he felt older than the man before him as he walked up to him and sat down.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently.
Patrius opened his eyes, studied Jiaan’s face, and closed them again. His skin above the bristling whiskers was almost as pale as Abab’s.
“I thought I could make it. I knew the Suud would mislead me if I followed their tracks, but I thought if I ignored the tracks and concentrated on getting out …” He stopped and shook his head, and Jiaan let the silence lengthen. The next question was the hard one. He would give Patrius time to summon his courage.
“We lost, didn’t we?” The tactimian’s voice was rough.
“Yes. Thirty-two of your men died, and fourteen more are severely wounded, though the healers think they’ll survive if their wounds escape infection.”
Jiaan saw no reason to mention the two prisoners who had died of their injuries over the last few days, simply including them in the count of the slain.
The muscles around Patrius’ closed eyes tightened. “I thought we had. The guards were talking about your plan. I could see the fire, even from your camp. I thought if I could get out … a rescue force … It was my decision, you know, to leave all those bushes in place. To add screens of branches from the bushes we cut down. Cover from those infernal archers of yours.” He stopped speaking and swallowed. His pale skin sheened with sweat. He toppled off the rock slowly as his balance gave way. He wasn’t quite unconscious when Jiaan lowered him to the ground, but he wasn’t exactly conscious, either.
Jiaan sighed. Patrius’ expression of it was quieter than Fasal’s, but it was just as destructive, and Jiaan was tired of dealing with command guilt.
“He looks pretty bad,” said Abab, staring down at the Hrum officer. “Hell need nursing to get enough water into him. Do you want to take him back to your camp, or should we take him to our healers?”
Jiaan looked up at him, startled. Four other Suud were emerging from the surrounding rocks.
“Is your camp close to here? I thought it was much days walking away.”
“We moved it,” said Abab. His voice was gravely polite, but laughter at Jiaan’s alien ignorance danced in his eyes. “We move around a lot, especially in winter when we’re replanting the stream banks. Now we’re sun from there”—he pointed to the sky, then swept his hand through a thirty-degree arc—“to there farther from your camp than from ours. At least, I think it’s about that long. It’s harder to tell time with the sun than it is with the stars.”
“Tell time with the stars?” Jiaan asked.
He chose the Suud camp, not only because Abab was right about Patrius needing nursing, but also to keep him out of Fasal’s reach. As the Suud bundled Patrius into his cloak and cleverly rigged rope handles to make the cloak into a sling in which it would be much easier to carry him, Abab told Jiaan that the Suud had no units of time like the Farsalans’ candlemarks. If they wanted to coordinate some activity, they would choose a star that would touch the horizon at the moment they wanted to designate and say something like, “I’ll meet you at the twin rocks when the Lizard’s Eye touches earth.” To specify a given amount of time they’d say, “It’ll take from the Needle’s first star to the second star of the Goat’s Horns to repair that basket.”
“It’s more accurate than your system,” Abab added smugly. “Because candles burn at different rates, no matter how hard you try to make them alike, but the stars always move at the same pace.”
“What about when it rains?” said Jiaan. “You can’t know time then, not at all.”
“And you can light a candle in the rain?”
Even with all five Suud and Jiaan carrying the sling, the tactimian’s weight seemed to increase with each passing mark. Jiaan was sweating when they reached the Suud’s camp in the early afternoon.
Jiaan hesitated to awaken them in the middle of their “night,” but Abab swiftly summoned several healers. Soon Patrius was carried into a hutch, while the others went for water and herbs.
Jiaan was about to follow the tactimian, when a cloth-covered hand grasped his arm and stopped him.
“They will care for him.” The Faran was fluent, if accented, and the voice was familiar. Maok’s voice. Jiaan was pleased to see her again, but …
“I should be there,” he said. “He’s still a prisoner. He’ll have to be guarded.”
Maok snorted. Her face was invisible under her hood, but Jiaan had
seen her impatient-with-fools expression before. “The healers will do more for your friend now than you can.”
“He’s not—”
“Besides,” said Maok. “I have your answer from the council.”
“About keeping the prisoners? What do they say?” His voice had risen, and Maok clucked her tongue disapprovingly.
“We will talk away from here. Come.”
Before Jiaan could apologize or protest, she led him down a trail beside the stream to a stony bend some distance from the sleeping camp. The old woman found a flat rock in the dense shade of the canyon wall and seated herself, pulling back the hood to expose her wrinkled face and flyaway milkweed hair.
“Can you take this much exposure to the sun?” Jiaan asked, slipping gratefully into the Faran she had spoken all along. “Even in the shade?”
“In the shade, yes,” said Maok. “For a time. It is so harsh, this light.” She gestured to the sun-drenched rocks on the other side of the stream. “No softness. No place to hide.”
Jiaan knew he should let her take the conversation where she wished, since she probably would anyway—but he needed to know. “Can you hold our prisoners for us for the next four or five months?”
Maok sighed. “A sunlight question, so I will give you a sunlight answer. No, not for even four months. They eat too much for us to feed them if they do not hunt, and if we give them weapons to hunt …” She shrugged. “Soon they are not prisoners.”
Jiaan’s heart sank. He had hoped not to have to deal with keeping those men himself. It would take men away from his forces, men he might need desperately. The next force Garren sent into the desert would be far larger, and in more of a hurry to win. Even with the Suud on his side …
“You have done good, very good, riding the tumbling of the world so far,” Maok said, interrupting his circling thoughts. “You have won a great victory, with few deaths even to your enemies. Do not lose your balance now. We can hold your prisoners for several weeks. Maybe two months, if you give us some food for them.”
