by K V Johansen
But she was still a child in power, nothing any small demon or wizard of average ability could not equal. No strength woke that she could set against Tamghat.
More rasping of stone, as whoever had been walking settled down by a fire again. Pakdhala yawned and squirmed out of her bedroll, more or less fully dressed in shirt and trousers. She groped for her coat and boots and shook them out in case anything had crawled in during the night, finished dressing, and tiptoed away as quietly as she could, waving at Kapuzeh, who knelt shaving a brick of tea into a kettle at the further fire. He waved back. A star on the crest of the steep ridge over the camp winked, shadow passing before it, and almost the same instant she reached out, searching, touched…
Dog! Raiders!
“Up!” she screamed aloud. “Raiders! Gaguush, Father, wake up!”
She felt them, two-dozen souls, men and women, all hot and eager—angry, excited, predatory minds.
The gang had been attacked twice already this run, once in the Salt Desert and once in the Stone, both times by desperate men and women, the remnants of caravan-gangs who could no longer find merchants to employ them or goods to carry on their own behalf. There were too many like those, or folk left homeless by other bandits, even Serakallashi who had fled into the desert, godless and now without scruple towards those who still held a place in the world. But these were not so soul-torn and desperate, these felt of greed and the thrill of the hunt, Red Desert hill tribesmen stirred to some thieving lust enough to dare the scarred basalt wasteland along the Five Cataracts.
“On the eastern ridge!” Pakdhala shouted, dropping down by her bundled belongings to find and string her bow.
Shouting from above, voices accusing, who was it had been seen, one man’s voice roaring over them all, “Go! Just go!”
They came in a sort of scrabbling rush, dodging stone to stone.
The gang were all awake now, grabbing for their boots, for bows and spears and sabres. Pakdhala ran towards the ridge, aiming for a tumbled boulder she could shelter behind. Holla-Sayan grabbed her by the shoulder as she darted past. He nearly threw her down, he jerked her back so hard.
“Behind the baggage, out of the way.”
For a moment she stared into the Blackdog’s eyes, yellow-green like clear peridot, and she hoped no one else saw. He was fighting hard just to stay a man, here with the rest of the gang around them. She shouldn’t have woken him so abruptly, waking the Blackdog rather than her father. Pakdhala squeezed his arm and didn’t argue. I’ll be careful. You watch yourself.
She ran, crouched low, and joined cousin Doha behind the heaped bundles and chests of the merchants’ goods. The old man gave her a gap-toothed grin, picked a target on the hillside, and released his bowstring. The arrow splintered on a rock.
“Sayan curse you all!” he shouted, and shot again. His eyes were growing cloudy, but he wouldn’t admit it.
Pakdhala took a steadying breath and chose her own mark, the shouting man in the lead. Red Desert tribesman, braids flying, sabre raised, and her father and Gaguush together running to him. Pakdhala never missed. Rag targets, bustards for the pot, raiders—there was always a moment when they were all the same, and she never missed. Holla-Sayan jumped the desert man’s tumbling body and went on. Gaguush wheeled off towards a woman slashing at the picket-line beside short-tempered Lion. Bad idea. Frightened camels lurched to their feet, milling around. Lion kicked. The woman squealed and fled limping into Gaguush, fell as she turned to flee again. Gaguush speared her in the back, got her own back against a tilted slab of rock as more came too late to the fallen woman’s aid.
The raiders didn’t risk the camp, now it was roused against them, but kept to cover like foxes around the hen-yard.
The merchants, brothers from beyond the Malagru Mountains in the east, clustered wailing in the midst of their own guards and servants, who were doing precious little to help. Django and Judeh edged up towards Gaguush, their progress made hazardous by raider archers somewhere above. Holla-Sayan came back down the slope to her in a headlong rush and the two of them fought free, dashed back to the camp, sweeping Django and the camel-leech with them into the shelter of the stacked chests and bundles, where the rest of the gang joined them.
The panicked camels dragged their lines and headed down the road, shambling to a halt before they had gone far, tangled and confused.
Good beasts, Pakdhala thought. Stay there. Not real words, but a soothing of their minds. Great Gods help them if the whole herd plunged over the cliff in panic.
Pakdhala coolly shot a bowman when he showed himself a breath too long. Her father shoved her down below a canvas-wrapped bale of camlet cloth, arrow-studded, with a hand on top of her head.
Dog!
“Keep down,” he ordered.
“We should have camped on the ridge,” Bikkim muttered. “We’re trapped down here.”
Asmin-Luya snorted. “It’s all shattered shards of rock up there. You’d be the first to complain if you had to sleep on it. How about Zavel and I work around and get above them?”
Zavel swallowed, nodded, and took a firmer grip on his spear.
“What if there’s more over the hill?” Kapuzeh asked. “I swear, I didn’t hear this lot till ‘Dhala started yelling. Could be another bunch still to come.”
“There isn’t,” Pakdhala said. For a moment she could touch their minds. The raiders had left their horses two valleys over, and only one woman remained there, watching them.
“Like you know,” Zavel said with a sneer. Pakdhala gave him a dark look.
“Zavel,” Gaguush said. “Shut up.”
“What about it?” Asmin-Luya asked again, with a nod towards the broken black rock of the ridge. “Plenty of cover.”
“Not you and Zavel,” said Gaguush. “He makes as much noise on the stones as a Westgrass ox. Tihmrose, Holla-Sayan, Django, and Varro go up the hill. Half the rest of us make a rush—” she pointed north, through the camp “—to the rocks there, then we can shoot ‘em from both sides when they’re chased down into the camp.”
It’s all right. I’ll be all right. I’ll stay right here out of the way, Pakdhala told her father, before Holla-Sayan could protest he was staying with her and touch off yet another fight with Gaguush about his overprotectiveness, another sneer from Zavel about her being babied. At the same time, though, it was what she wanted most, Holla close under her eye where she could protect him, as she had not been able to Otokas.
Yeah, right. Don’t shoot Django by mistake, eh? Holla gave her a flicker of a smile, eyes human hazel again, and she wanted to hug him. He had to struggle with the dog, every time he let her claim some small freedom.
I can tell a Stone Desert man from a Red by now, I should think. I’ll aim for his legs if I can’t see his tattoos.
Django will thank you for that, yes.
Gaguush continued making her plans. “Holla-Sayan, are you listening? You four go round the south and up. Doha, Pakdhala, Thekla, stay right here. Kapuzeh, you too.” She raised her voice. “Master Singah! Hey, Singahs, both of you, get over here.”
In short rushes the merchants, Singah the elder and the younger, were moving with their men back beyond the road towards the cliff, finding what cover they could there. One of the Over-Malagru guards lay by the fire, moaning, an arrow low in his belly. Moopung, his name was. He bled around his clutching hands, and rocked from side to side.
“Hells.”
“Cowards. If they fall over the cliff, we’ll be well rid of them,” Tusa muttered.
“He’ll die of that,” Judeh said, white-lipped. “Not quickly, either. ‘Dhala, if we—”
“Leave him,” Gaguush said sternly, and looked around at them all. “Let’s go.”
They broke out in both directions, Gaguush and her handful yelling, noise and fury and distraction. Pakdhala let her attention follow Holla-Sayan, slipping through the shadows, the rocks, Varro, Tihmrose, Django following. Dark shadow riding him, the Blackdog on the edge of the world.
The sun was still not up over that eastern ridge; the others might not notice.
The sun would be in their eyes, when it rose, any moment now, and the raiders knew it, they waited for it.
If they did, they made their charge too soon, some tribesman panicked at a sudden rattling stone above. Half of them rushed screaming at the camp but the rest turned and fled, running into Holla and the other three. Pakdhala and Doha shooting from behind the baggage and Immerose and Tusa from the rocks to the north brought several down, but the raiders made for the shelter of the baggage themselves, scrambling and leaping over the low bulwark it made.
Pakdhala screamed, anger, mostly, slammed the heel of her left hand into a man’s face and her knife up into his ribs. She wrenched her blade free and shoved him out of the way. Doha gave a startled grunt and pitched into her. They both fell. The woman behind him, spear bloody, steaming, fell on them in turn, mouth gaping, as Kapuzeh whirled to slice halfway through her neck. Thekla, muttering a steady stream of what must be Westron curses, crouched by them, throwing stones at the two who then closed with Kapuzeh and edged him away, blades clashing.
Pakdhala clutched Doha close. He was very heavy for such a thin old man. Heat spread, soaking into her. “No,” she said. “You won’t die. You can’t, I won’t let you.”
He bared his teeth, desert-dry skin rough against hers, muttered something that was just breath.
“Cousin Doha! Doha! Sayan!”
His eyes were empty, spirit sliding away.
Doha! She could feel him there, on the road to the Old Great Gods, the long journey beginning, the reins of his soul still wound through his body. Pull him back, hold him…with his wounds beyond healing that would be to damn him a ghost just as much as leaving him unburied would.
’Lissa!
I’m all right, dog. But he would know that. It’s Doha…Father, Holla, I’m sorry.
Pakdhala rolled from beneath Doha, knife still in her hand, shoved the head-lolling body of his killer off him.
Gaguush and the others charged back then, seeing them overrun, and finally, five of the merchants’ men showed with grim efficiency that they were not mere decoration, as Immerose had taunted after the last raider attack, when they left the fighting to the gang. It was over, then, very quickly. The three bandits still on their feet threw down their weapons. Bikkim fended off Pakdhala’s strike, gone wide as she recognized him, and wrapped his arms around her.
“Ah, Doha.” Gaguush dropped down beside the old man, a hand on his cheek. Looked up at Kapuzeh. “Kill them.”
Judeh opened his mouth, closed it again before his protest found breath. Thekla kept up her muttering, prayer now, to her dead gods. Bikkim slumped and suddenly all his weight was on Pakdhala. They staggered down together and her heart nearly stopped when she saw the quantity of blood soaking his trousers. Knew what she would find before she had the trouser leg ripped off, and was screaming at Judeh for his needles and thread, for honey and myrrh and sesame oil. She barely noticed when Kapuzeh cut the throats of the shrieking, struggling bandit survivors, the merchants’ guards holding them down on their knees, only yards away.
She noticed only as an annoyance the blood trickling down her own face from a cut on her temple she did not remember getting.
Django, Tihmrose, and Varro came staggering in from the hillside. Varro and Tihmrose were both wounded, but nothing demanded immediate attention, and the merchants’ belly-shot man…was dead, Great Gods, one of his companions had stabbed him in the heart. He would have died, yes, slowly and horribly from the filth of the wound, but she could have tried…
There was only Bikkim, to lose or save.
Pakdhala was Judeh’s assistant in all his leech-craft, as able at stitching up wounded camels, drenching ill ones, as he. Better, though no one said that in Judeh’s hearing. “Help me,” she ordered, and Judeh did not argue, simply handed her what she asked for, pressed the edges of the gash together for her, agreed when she muttered they couldn’t close it completely; it would have to drain. Thekla hovered behind her, catching her long braids back out of the way, tying a bandage around her head to keep the blood out of her eyes, finding her hat to keep the climbing sun from dazzling her.
“Got two of them,” Django reported to Gaguush behind her. “The others dodged us in the rocks, headed off and with all the screaming down here I figured we were needed. Doubt they’ll dare come back, though.”
“Where’s Holla? Doha’s his kin.”
“Feondas.” That was Varro. It didn’t sound like any invocation to a god. “I don’t know. He wasn’t hurt that I saw. I’ll go find him.”
“Must have gone to follow them,” said Django. “Bloody idiot. He’ll be all right, boss. Probably a good thing if we know which way they ran—we can warn the ferrymen at the upper castle and the guilds of At-Landi.”
The merchants were fussing and clucking over their goods in their own half-Nabbani dialect, angry at the damage, picking their way around Bikkim’s prone form as though he were merely another bundle. Pakdhala heard everything, saw, smelt everything. It almost made her sick. She could feel Bikkim’s heart beating as though it were inside her own chest, feel Judeh’s when he put a comforting hand on her shoulder for a moment.
Dog…she pleaded, wanting her father here, but he would not answer her, or there was no Holla-Sayan left conscious in the dog’s mind to speak to her, only the Blackdog, which knew what it had to do when Attalissa was threatened.
They buried Doha and the Over-Malagru man Moopung under cairns of stone by the roadside, since there was no earth to dig in here. It took half the day to choose and carry sharp-edged chunks of rock, and they all had torn nails and bleeding hands before they were done. Pakdhala said the prayers to Sayan over her supposed cousin, because Holla-Sayan still had not come back and Varro had found no trace of him. Gaguush wanted to throw the Red Desert tribesmen over the cliff, to let the Kinsai-av deal with them, but Pakdhala said flatly, no. They were not Kinsai’s folk, and Kinsai did not want them. So the bandits were heaped together and another cairn made, though without nearly such care. Kapuzeh set the head of one of them on a broken spear rising from it, as a warning. Barbarians, both Masters Singah muttered at that. But it was Master Singah the younger who demanded Bikkim be abandoned, to die or recover alone as he could. Tusa caught Gaguush’s arm before her fist could strike.
“Feel free to travel on alone if you like,” Gaguush snarled, then. “But you don’t take my camels. If you think you can carry all your goods on your own, then do so and get out of my sight. I’m not civilized enough to abandon my folk, Bashra be thanked.”
Pakdhala left Gaguush pacing and cursing and harrying Judeh about tending the camels’ assorted scrapes and bruises, and went to sit by Bikkim, who breathed slowly and deeply, dosed with poppy-syrup by the leech.
“Better,” Thekla said, with a flick of her hand towards him, like a darting bird. “See?”
Pakdhala nodded. She felt very strange, empty, as though she floated in some dark place, nothing to hold her to earth. Or as though she’d been dosed to sleep herself. Drained of life.
“You’re ill,” Thekla said. “All tired out. You should sleep.”
Pakdhala pulled aside the blanket covering Bikkim and felt his thigh. It was warm, but not too warm, not fevered, not even very swollen.
The Westron woman put another blanket around Pakdhala, forced a cup of sweet tea into her hands, and watched like a cat until she drank it. “Now sleep.”
Kinsai was here; she shouldn’t feel like this, weak as in Serakallash or Marakand.
“Sleep,” Thekla insisted, and nudged her down by Bikkim, tucking blankets close around them both.
Sleep, little sister. Your young man will be fine, though how you’re going to explain that to the harridan, when he’s up and walking tomorrow…
Will you stop calling Gaguush that?
No. She is a harridan, a hag, a termagant. Your dog’s too good for her.
Told you no this ti
me, didn’t he? Why don’t you pester Immerose? She never turns anyone down. Will Bikkim be all right, really?
You tell me, you’re the one healed him.
Did I?
Not that it’s agreed with you, child. Go to sleep.
You should have warned us.
No. Raiders are your own problem, caravaneer. Besides, you felt them coming. You should have paid closer attention and not been thinking of young men with their shirts off. Kinsai giggled like a girl. But there was something I wanted to tell you…No. I don’t know. I can’t say. Be careful, little sister. There’s…something hunting you.
I know. But Kinsai had gone, and she was asleep.
It was dusk when Pakdhala woke again, feeling hardly any more rested than before. Judeh sat watching over Bikkim, and Tihmrose and Immerose came over the moment they saw her stirring.
“You look terrible,” Tihmrose said. “Like you haven’t slept in a month.”
“That cut on your head must be worse than it looks.” Judeh teased the bandages away, wincing as they stuck, but it was only dried blood and the honey he had smeared on it to prevent poison. The cut itself was just a thin scabbed line. Pakdhala put her hand up to feel it. She always did heal quickly, like the Blackdog.
“Huh. Well, that’s…better.” Judeh gave her an odd look. “Bikkim’s much better, too. Take a look, ‘Dhala.”
Pakdhala bit her lip, bending over Bikkim’s leg. It looked like a scar two weeks old, knit clean, pink and shiny against the hairy pale brown of his thigh. The stitches showed dark and ugly.
“Not too close a look,” Immerose added. “He’s got nothing on but his drawers.”
