by Greg Keyes
“Very well,” Bone Eel said. “Haul on the tiller, and I shall command the dragons!” he called to a knot of sailors awaiting his orders. “Soldiers, I want to see bows and fire for the catapult! This is unknown territory, and who can say what we shall find?”
Moments later, their prow nosed carefully through the mouth of the River and entered, by way of water, the lands of the Mang. When they crossed that line—the one no one but he could see—Ghe felt a tremor, a wave of sickness that quickly passed. But it left undefined worry behind it. He noticed Qwen Shen’s batted eyes, the invitation they issued. She understood his moods and knew just as well what was good for him. After a few moments, he left the deck and went to his cabin to await her.
Ghan was already back in his room, deeply engrossed in yet another tome. How many had the man brought with him? In passing, he noticed a feeling like … triumph? Hope? It was hard to tell with Ghan. He must have found something in his book he had been searching for. Hezhi used to light up with that same sort of ebullience when she found something she suspected or hoped for in her research. Though then he had not the power or need to sense those feelings; Hezhi radiated them, the way the sun produced light.
Hezhi. Soon!
His body stirred, in anticipation of Qwen Shen’s arrival.
Ghan heard when Ghe went by; he had learned the ghoul’s gait long ago. Desperately he began reciting a poem to himself, over and over, trying to mask his true feelings, his precariously balanced hope and triumph.
Ghe passed, but Ghan kept repeating the verse:
“Often sweeps Death
The houses of living,
A menial task,
That brings into her fair, dark eyes
A sparkle of joy
At the little things she finds there.”
Only when he heard Qwen Shen enter and the sounds of pleasure begin in Ghe’s room did he return to the book, tracing his finger back to the point he left off, a paragraph or so below the bold caption that read, in the ancient hand:
On the Nature and Composition of Dragons.
XXV
Falling Sky
The shadow surprised Perkar when it settled upon him. Not because he hadn’t heard the methodical progress of someone climbing up the broken, stony face of the mesa; he had known for some time someone was coming up, presumably to see him. What amazed him was that the abundant silhouette could be cast only by Tsem, even with the cooperation of the westering light to lengthen it. Tsem, or perhaps some gigantic beast—but then, Harka would warn him of the latter.
Then again, remembering that Harka had been less than perfectly reliable of late, he turned to see from what shoulders the dark umbra fell.
It was, in fact, Tsem. Perkar’s face must have registered his amazement, for Tsem held out a hand signaling that, once he ceased wheezing and panting, he would explain what he wanted.
That took a few moments. Despite the coolness of the afternoon, the half Giant was sweating profusely; a faint breeze mingled pungent man-smell with the desiccated tang of juniper, sage, and yarrow.
“My mother’s people,” the half Giant finally managed to gasp, “Giants must live on soft, flat land. Surely we were not made for climbing up and down mountains.”
Perkar stretched his lips in a grin he did not feel. He had volunteered for the watch up on the mesa to be alone; he had much thinking to do, and he knew he was poor company. Still, he had a guarded respect—admiration even—for the half Giant, although time and circumstances had allowed them only the most cursory of relationships. If this were some overture on Tsem’s part, it couldn’t hurt to appear a bit brighter, though he would much prefer to sulk. His father always said that a friendship missed was like an important trail passed by, and Perkar felt that he had already passed by many such trails in his short life. Of late, his friends had shown a tendency to die, and he was left, really, with only Ngangata and perhaps Hezhi, neither of whom seemed to be speaking to him at the moment—with reason. He could use another friend.
So he smiled his difficult smile and waved at the mesa edge, and said, to be social, “This isn’t much of a mountain, either. Really just a ridge.” He turned his gesture beyond, jabbing an index finger toward a high line of peaks to the northeast. “Those are mountains. Be happy we skirted around them.”
“I am,” Tsem assured him, mopping his brow and looking around. “Nice up here, though. It reminds me of a place Hezhi and I used to go.”
“It does?” Perkar could hardly imagine that. What he had seen of Nhol had been impressive, and from a sufficient distance its hills and high walls of stone had a certain recondite beauty; but there was nothing of the Nhol he had seen that suggested the crumbling stone slope of the plateau they sat upon or the verdant, stream-etched plain five hundred paces below where Hezhi and the others were camped.
“In a way,” Tsem clarified. “It’s like being up on the roof of the palace, looking out over the city. The way the light shines, the smell. And there was a courtyard with flowers like this.” He waved a sausage-fingered hand at the white yarrow that blazed over the plateau, blushed pink by the sunset—an ethereal carpet of blossoms ruffling knee-high in an imperceptible breeze. They shone in vivid contrast to the stark black skeletons of ancient hills that bounded the tableland on its south and west.
“I never saw any sights like that in Nhol,” Perkar confessed. “My time there was short.”
“And spent mostly on the docks. I know.” Tsem’s massive features crushed themselves into a thoughtful frown. “I came up to ask you a favor,” he blurted suddenly.
“Ask,” Perkar said. “Although at the moment, I wonder what use I can be to you.”
“Oh, but you can,” Tsem said. He stopped, grinned. “It is so good that you ken my language. Even Hezhi speaks it only when we are alone, and lately not even then. She wants me to learn Mang.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m not very good at it.”
Perkar nodded understanding. “Neither am I, friend. I speak your language because the River taught it to me somehow. Or maybe Hezhi did, without knowing. But my Mang is at least as bad as yours.”
“Me bet we talk to each other good in Mang,” Tsem stammered in his broken version of the tongue.
“Yes. We speak good together,” Perkar answered in kind, and they both smiled. Perkar felt, once again, a warmness for the Giant that was difficult to explain; Tsem had threatened his life when they first met and had been at best brusque since then. But something about the quality of his loyalty to Hezhi, his genuine selfless love, demanded affection from Perkar. When the River transformed her, only Tsem had prevented Perkar from killing Hezhi, not by stopping him physically but merely by being there, by protecting her with his own wounded body. To kill Hezhi, Perkar would have had to kill Tsem—and he had been unable to do it. Perhaps because, in so many ways, the Giant was like Ngangata. Not just because they were both only half Human, but because they shared fiercely good hearts.
He had never gotten to know Tsem, though. Injured in the escape from Nhol, the half Giant had been unable to accompany the Mang to the high country for autumn and winter hunting. And of course Perkar himself had been injured immediately on his return to the lowland camp.
“You almost made me laugh,” he said, still grinning from their exchange of garbled Mang. “That’s more than anyone else has done for my mood lately. Ask your favor.”
“I think you should know something first,” Tsem said solemnly, and the smile fled from his face. “Something that shames me. When you were ill, I advised Hezhi to let you be, to give you up for dead.”
Perkar nodded slowly, narrowing his eyes, but did not interrupt as Tsem pushed on with his admission, eyes focused firmly on a yarrow plant two handspans away.
“She’s already been through so much,” he explained. “I understood that she would have to do this thing with the drum—this thing I don’t understand, only I understand how dangerous it is. I couldn’t bear the thought that she would—”
“I unde
rstand,” Perkar said. “You have nothing to explain. She didn’t owe me anything.”
“She thinks she does. Maybe she does. But that’s beside the point, because I owe you. You saved her when I couldn’t. You saved us both.” He frowned again, chewed his lip. “That really made me mad.”
Perkar did chuckle then, though it was a bitter humor. “I think I understand that, too.”
“I haven’t said the worst,” the half Giant growled. “After I got hurt, I just lay there, surrounded by these people speaking nonsense. I guess I had fun with a few of the women—” He shrugged. “That’s nothing. But Hezhi left, went off with you. I thought ‘I can’t save her anymore and I can’t keep her company.’ And I figured you two would get married and that it would only get worse. And I couldn’t tell Hezhi any of this, you see?”
“Married?” Perkar said, incredulous. “Whatever gave you the idea we were courting?”
Tsem shrugged his mammoth shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know. Nothing. But she cares for you, the way she has never cared for anyone except me and Qey and Ghan. It scared me. And when I thought she might risk her life for you, that scared me more than anything.”
“Because you love her.”
“No, that’s the worst thing—the very worst. Because I thought ‘What will I do out here without her?’ Not ‘What will she do without me?’”
Perkar regarded the Giant’s agonized face for a long moment. “Does she know any of this?” he asked quietly.
“She knows I’m useless out here. She thinks I’m pathetic. She tries hard to talk her way around it, but she does. She looks to the rest of you for help and strength, but for me she only feels pity. And she’s right. I am no use to any of you out here. Anywhere but in Nhol—in the palace. Such a little place; it was easy to be strong there, Perkar.”
Perkar honestly did not believe he had ever seen such a doleful expression. Like everything about him, the Giant’s sorrow was huge.
“And so what can I do for you, my friend?” Perkar asked gently.
“Teach me to fight with something other than my fists. Teach me to be useful again. Teach me about this country.”
“What? I don’t know this country. It isn’t my home. And I’m no great warrior.”
“I’ve seen you fight,” Tsem said. “If you don’t want to help …”
“Wait, wait, I just want you to understand. I fight well because I carry a godblade, not because of my own skill.”
“I don’t understand. It’s your hands that carry it.”
“True enough. But Harka cuts through ordinary steel, helps me know where to strike—and if I make a mistake and get stabbed, Harka heals me.”
“But you know how to use a sword, or none of that would do you much good.”
“True enough. I’m not a bad swordsman, Tsem, just not as good as you think. And as a teacher … well, I’ve never done that at all.”
“But you could teach me,” Tsem persevered.
“Why me?” Perkar asked, suddenly suspicious. “Why me and not Ngangata, Yuu’han, or Raincaster? Because I’m the killer? Because Perkar is the one you just point toward the enemy and say ‘kill that,’ like some kind of hound?” He tried to keep his frustration in check, but it was spilling out. Tsem thought of himself as useless. Was that better than being thought of as having only one use? And what good to be a killer if one were suddenly afraid of even that?
Tsem didn’t answer the outburst, but his brows rose high on his forehead.
“Answer me,” Perkar demanded again. “Why me?”
Tsem made a strange face—Perkar could not tell whether it was anger, frustration, or hopelessness—but then the wide lips parted from champed white teeth in what seemed a furious snarl. But it wasn’t; Tsem was urgently suppressing a smile. A giggle! Perkar’s anger evaporated as quickly as it had come.
“What? What are you laughing at?”
“I shouldn’t laugh,” Tsem said, hand across his chest, trying to hold in a series of deep, growling snickers. “But you looked so serious …”
Perkar watched him in absolute befuddlement, but the Giant’s laughter, however inexplicable, made him feel foolish, and more, he found himself smiling, as well. “What?” he demanded again.
“Well, it’s only that I chose you because you speak Nholish, that’s all.” And then he interrupted himself with a real guffaw. It sounded ridiculous coming from the man-mountain, and then Perkar could help himself no longer, joining Tsem in his laughter.
“Well, a sword isn’t for you,” Perkar said later, when they began discussing the matter again.
“No?”
“No. First of all, we don’t have one to spare, certainly not one that would fit your grip. Second, with your strength, you would probably break any blade you used. No, you would be an axe-man.”
“My mother carried an axe.”
“Your mother was a warrior?”
“She was one of the emperor’s guards. He usually has full-blooded Giants in his elite.”
“But you weren’t trained to fight?”
“Just with my hands. Wrestling and boxing. I think they were afraid to teach me to use steel.”
“I can see why. I would hate to have a slave three times my size that was armed.”
“No, that wasn’t it. My mother was larger than I, and the men of her people are larger still. But they aren’t … they aren’t very bright. It would never occur to them to try to fight or run away, as long as they are well fed and treated with some respect. But I was an experiment. The emperor ordered my mother to mate with a Human man. I’m told that it had been done fairly often, but that I was the first successful cross. The emperor thought I might be more intelligent than my mother’s folk, and so he never had me trained in weapons. He kept me at court for many years, as a curiosity, but then I suppose he grew bored with me and sent me to guard his daughter.”
“They crossed your parents like cattle? That’s disgusting.”
Tsem looked thoughtful. “It’s no different from an arranged marriage, is it? Your folk do that, I’m told.”
“Well, occasionally, but that’s different,” Perkar said, taken aback by the comparison.
“Why?”
“Well, because marriages are arranged for property, inheritance, or alliance. Not to create hybrid stock!”
Tsem grunted. “I am not as smart as a full-blooded Human, so you will pardon me if I don’t see an enormous difference. Anyway, in Nhol, marriages are arranged to concentrate the Blood Royal.”
“I …” Perkar frowned, shook his head. “Anyway, to get back to our real problem: we don’t have an axe, either. No, I think for someone with your size and strength, and given our situation, we shall have to find a club for you.”
“You mean a big stick?”
“I mean a wooden mace. A good, heavy branch or sapling with a solid, hard knot on one end. We can work it down with a knife until it’s right.” He nodded thoughtfully. “We could make a spear, too. And a shield!”
“Do I really need a shield?”
Perkar reached over and poked him in the ugly scar across his belly, where the assassin’s sword had nearly gutted him. “Yes. You can hold the shield in front of you thus—” He hopped to his feet and turned so that only his left side faced Tsem, left arm crooked as if bearing a shield. “—and you strike over it, thus.” And he cocked an imaginary club back to his shoulder, then swung it down past his ear and over the equally fictitious shield. “With your reach, no one could get close enough to you to fight around your shield or through it. With a shield and a club, you will be more than a match for most warriors, even without a lot of training.”
“But you will train me?”
Perkar nodded, oddly elated. “Yes.”
“Good. I will never counsel Hezhi to leave you for dead again. When do we make my club?”
“First we have to find one. I think I know what to look for.”
“Can we look now?”
Perkar shook his head. �
��Too late. We should either start a fire up here or go down. There are wolves in this country.”
“You can start a fire?”
“Sure. Go collect firewood for me. We’ll keep watch together.”
He watched the Giant lumber off, happy to see him enthusiastic about something—he had never seen that in Tsem before. This development did nothing to solve his own problem, but neither did thinking about it. The distraction was welcome.
“Who is that singing, Heen?” Hezhi whispered, reaching to scratch the yellow-and-brown mutt where he lay near her feet, nestled against the sprawling cedar she rested upon. Above, a few stars glittered, jewels in a murky sea. Heen nuzzled her hand indifferently. Whatever the chanting was, it did not worry him. Curious, Hezhi smoothed her riding coat and stood. Though the days were warmer now, nights were still murderously cold, and even in the tents they all slept fully clothed—she never took the heavy wool garment off. She felt a fleeting worry for Tsem; she had seen him climbing up the mesa and wondered what business her former servant could have with Perkar. Whatever it was, the two of them were likely to spend the night together up on the plateau—it would soon be too dark and chill to descend safely.
Her soft boots made little sound as she walked around the steep projection of the slope to where she heard the faint music—a man’s voice, a lovely tenor lilting in a haunting minor mode. It suddenly occurred to her that she might be going into danger; gaan were also known as huuneli, “singers.” What if this were her enemy, the Mang shaman, following more closely than any of them realized, even now invoking some god against her?
A hushed padding alerted her that Heen was accompanying her, and though she wasn’t certain what such a tired old dog might do in her defense, it gave her the courage she needed to round the prominence.
