Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert)

by Leona Wisoker

  The teyanain took their privacy seriously. Deiq wouldn’t get anywhere near that tent or the chest it was being stored in, not for the entire of the journey back to the Horn. He knew better than to even look at it for too long.

  If he’d known Evkit had three athain with him, he’d never have agreed to this madness. Ordinary travel with the teyanain was one thing, but three athain took it to an entirely new and much more dangerous level.

  One athain, two athain, clee; a children’s song from long before Alyea had been born. Clee, clee, all we three; clee, claw, into the maw . . . largely nonsense, as all children’s songs were, but drawn from a real fear and a real danger.

  Too late to back out now.

  Alyea, meanwhile, sat sipping thopuh tea with Lord Evkit, each sitting on a large, flat boulder dragged, centuries ago, to serve as seats for visitors camping outside the gates. Deiq inhaled the rich, tarry aroma and smiled; Evkit, at least, was serving the real thing.

  Deiq could almost see the centuries the block sat on a back shelf of a small tea shop, while wars and negotiations raged by outside, soldiers and merchants and whores taking their turns amusing themselves in the main and side rooms; could hear the rattle of stone dice and goat-ivory telling-chips, the slap of seer-cards and the laughter of a woman well-amused by her company of the night. . . .

  He sighed, opening eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed. Evkit’s tent was completely stowed away, and the teacups were being collected, Alyea and Evkit rising gravely to their feet and bowing to each other. Time to move on, then.

  “That was wonderful tea,” Alyea said, coming to stand beside Deiq. Her face held a glow of warmth and inner satisfaction. He blinked hard, forcing himself to stay in human-vision although he ached to see that glow tracing its way through her entire being in snaky, seductive spirals and swirls. “You should have tried some.”

  He blinked again, lazily, and said, “I’ve had it. I could smell it. One’s as good as the other, for me.” He offered a dry smile, knowing she’d think the self-mocking expression to be aimed at her; and as expected, she flushed a little and turned away.

  “Idisio, you should have tried it,” she said to the younger ha’ra’ha, as though determined to make the point to somebody. Idisio shook his head, expression grim.

  “I won’t drink anything offered by a hand I don’t trust,” he said in a low voice, then glanced around apprehensively.

  “Nobody heard,” Deiq assured him. “You did it right.”

  Idisio relaxed noticeably and let out a soft breath.

  Evkit turned from a quiet discussion with his athain and motioned the three forward.

  “We go,” he said. “Shoes all in packs? Good. Barefoot always best, you trust me on that, you will see. Escort around you, yes? Walk in middle, no harm come to you. Hai, we move slow at first, then fast; you keep up, or you are carry. Hot sun, hot land; teyanain not stop, not afraid. You have water? Good. Drink little sips, but drink often, and tell when skin empty. We give more.”

  “Don’t you need the water yourselves?” Alyea protested.

  Evkit grinned, a sharp white flash of teeth. “We teyanain,” he said. “We carry water for you, and we find water along way for us. We all have water, all for you; ask, ask, when empty, we give. No shame, you not teyanain.” His dark stare moved to Deiq. “You, though, you not need.”

  Deiq shook his head without speaking, all too aware of Alyea’s intent stare. Trust Evkit to start out the trip by highlighting their differences. And by pointing out that the teyanain wouldn’t be offering Deiq water, Evkit was, more subtly, putting him on notice: You’re not our ally, and we are not yours. Sharing water served as an unspoken bond when going out into the deep desert lands they had to cross.

  Just the first of many small repercussions from allowing Evkit to sense that Alyea had the lead role at the moment. There would be more; and Deiq would have to endure them, because any attempt now to put himself back into the dominant position would earn the hostility of the teyanain they traveled with.

  He returned a blank stare to Evkit’s mocking grin, refusing to give the bastard the satisfaction of a reaction. After a moment the teyanain lord turned away and yipped out orders. Nine teyanain guards took up places just outside arm’s reach, three each to left, right, and rear. The three athain stood two full arm’s lengths farther out, again to left, right, and rear; Evkit took the lead spot, some distance ahead of the party.

  Servants laden with packs, panniers, and carry-poles settled into rougher lines behind; then everyone in the lead group stood perfectly still.

  Alyea settled her pack on her shoulders again, fidgeting rather than truly needing to adjust the weight. Deiq stood still, knowing what was coming and unable to think of any way to warn her that wouldn’t interrupt the moment. The best he could risk offering was a carefully directed murmur: “Aqeyva.”

  She jerked a little, and then seemed to understand. Her breathing deepened and her nervous twitching calmed. Idisio seemed to have grasped it on his own; he was doing a creditable impression of a lightly-breathing statue.

  Deiq felt pressure growing in his ears and swallowed, clenching his jaw to redistribute the tension. Knowing it for a useless attempt didn’t stop the reflex. His ears popped, then filled again immediately. He worked his jaw three more times before managing to control his own instinctive twitching.

  He found the small noises of the servants in the rear group tremendously distracting. They weren’t trained to this discipline, and had no way to know what they were doing interrupted his focus a hundred times a breath. He blinked, slow and lazy, and forced himself to forget they existed for the moment.

  Gods, he hated traveling with the teyanain. And he’d only ever walked in a group with one athain before, not a full clee; he began to suspect that he would have a shattering headache by the end of the day. He cut his eyes to the side to check Idisio, but the younger ha’ra’ha seemed perfectly calm, his eyes half-closed and hazed with almost-trance.

  At last Deiq managed, knowing himself the last holdout, to master his breathing and ease his pulse into a matching rhythm with Alyea’s. A moment later he felt the dizzying shift over into being one breathing creature with many legs.

  It was a tremendous risk, a vulnerable moment no other living ha’ra’ha, and certainly no other First-Born, would ever have allowed—he discounted Idisio as too young and inexperienced to truly understand the implications of what was happening. But Deiq had no choice but to submit. To travel in a full clee there was no room for individualism. He had to let the athain lead the dance, or they wouldn’t travel a step; and under the dual pressure of protecting Alyea and keeping his own standing among the teyanain, he couldn’t back out.

  Dimly, he heard the athain howl their travel-welcome; a long, yipping ululation that seemed to go on and on and on—but then things blurred, and Deiq realized that his body had begun moving.

  There was no space left for fear, no space left for thought. The clee was moving, and nothing else mattered. The chill of the dawn moved into a scorching heat. Deiq adjusted his own temperature reflexively, soothed Alyea’s body to a reasonable warmth, nudged Idisio’s ragged breathing easy. He felt the athain working similarly with the warriors at each corner of the group, which now appeared to his altered perception as a diamond rather than a square arrangement.

  The tight hold of the clee loosened in spots, now that they had everyone moving in synchrony. Deiq found himself able to think again, and prodded about to be sure the athain hadn’t pried where they weren’t welcome. But they’d politely—and honorably—restricted themselves to controlling the motor centers, and left memory and mind alone; he relaxed into their grip a little more, relieved.

  If he’d wanted to, he could have taken sips from his waterskin. He could sense Alyea moving, with intense caution, to do just that at intervals.

  On occasion the clee broke out into variations on the travel-song, meaning they’d found some obstacle ahead: possibly a snake, or a desert-s
corpion nest. The athain never allowed that perception to filter into the guest-circle; whatever the issue, it disappeared under the hurricane-swirl of energies being channeled through Evkit and out ahead of them.

  Deiq wondered what Alyea saw; wondered if she realized she was in the midst of an honor not one in a thousand desert lords ever received. A full clee! It was the stuff of legends, and Deiq had seen some of those legends in true life. Even the most exaggerated-sounding tales didn’t miss the truth by much.

  The teyanain, as they often boasted, were different.

  And gods, was he glad of that; and, just as strongly, glad that he rarely needed to deal with them, let alone travel with them. But he was grateful that Alyea was experiencing this for herself. While similar to what he’d done for her during their initial walk to Scratha Fortress from the Qisani, this was an entirely different flavor of compulsion, and one she would only benefit from knowing about.

  She ought to come out of the clee-trance tonight with the much better understanding of just how godsdamned dangerous the teyanain were, at least; and that would make the next few days significantly easier on Deiq. She’d start listening to him again, and once she did that he could arrange a parting of ways with the teyanain, one that wouldn’t result in a disastrous, generations-long feud.

  Gods. The word tumbled over itself in the haze, and he almost laughed. For all that he used the terms and cant freely as any human, he’d never believed in the human gods. He knew what humans had worshiped before the emergence of the ha’reye, and it bore no resemblance at all to the Three, or even the Four; although, amusingly, the latter was probably closer.

  The travel-end howl rose, fractured, rose and fractured, and once more; shaking everyone out of the trance and into themselves again. Deiq dropped to his knees, unable to stop himself. His whole body vibrated in belated protest of the compulsion, and a reddish haze laced the corners of his vision. He shut his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest, wrapping his arms around himself, and fought to rein in his hoarse breathing.

  Violence crested and faded inside him. Again. Again.

  “Hai, ha’ra’ha,” Evkit said, close at hand. “Drink.”

  Deiq blinked, testing vision; blinked again, feeling as though sand scraped inside his eyelids, then looked up into Evkit’s dark, sober stare.

  “You drink,” Evkit repeated, shaking a waterskin in front of Deiq’s face. Seeing that he had Deiq’s attention, he upended it and squirted a brief stream into his own mouth, then offered it to Deiq again. “You drink.”

  Deiq very slowly unwrapped his arms from the fierce hug around his own ribs and closed the fingers of one hand around the waterskin. It scratched against his fingers; he could feel an inner bag sliding against the outer, rough-hide covering.

  He paused another moment to look at Evkit and raise an eyebrow to be sure. The teyanain lord nodded and said, “You do well, ha’ra’ha. Desert truce.”

  Deiq’s hand tightened reflexively around the skin, and he took a long drink to hide the slight convulsion of relief. The water hit the back of his dry throat like a blessing from the gods he’d just been thinking he didn’t believe in. He swallowed and coughed, took another drink, then handed back the waterskin with a deep nod of thanks.

  Evkit returned the nod and moved on, squatting to offer water to Alyea. On her hands and knees, she looked something like an exhausted asp-jacau; her head hung, her breathing came in harsh pants. Deiq let them be. Evkit had already named Alyea guest, he wouldn’t hurt her at this point.

  He looked for Idisio, expecting to see the younger ha’ra’ha in similar if not greater distress; but Idisio sat calmly cross-legged on the sand, eyes clear and bright, sipping from his own waterskin and watching Evkit tend to Alyea.

  Idisio glanced up at Deiq, as though sensing the attention, and his mouth quirked a little. Late afternoon sun caught against his light brown hair, raising glimmering arrays of color. His skin, unlike Alyea’s, hardly showed any darkening from the day’s journey. Another day’s travel under the hot sun and Alyea could begin passing for a full southerner; Idisio, as ha’ra’ha, could stand naked under a desert noon heat for days and not darken significantly unless he wanted to. Just one more detail Deiq needed to explain. He put it aside for later, hoping he’d remember.

  But the younger ha’ra’ha didn’t even seem tired from the long march; that part, Deiq didn’t understand at all.

  “It’s just an aqeyva trance,” Idisio said, accurately reading Deiq’s expression. “I’ve been practicing those a lot lately. It’s not so hard to do it while moving.”

  Deiq blinked, his pride stinging at being outdone so easily by a lesser ha’ra’ha; and found himself wondering if, after all, a hundred years with the Qisani ha’reye was such a high price to pay for walking away from this arrangement.

  He’d never thought of himself as old before, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After sunset, the desert, moonless, became black; and cold. The teyanain servants had each produced a number of thick fire-coals from their packs, then gathered a surprising amount of deadwood from the nearby brush. The resulting blaze largely chased away both the shadows and the chill air, and the circle of shalls set up around the campfire seemed to trap the heat.

  Alyea sat cross-legged on a mat, a heavy shawl wrapped around her torso, socks over a layer of salve on her feet. She kept her hands wrapped around a hot cup of thopuh, and shivered from nerves as much as from residual cold.

  “That was slow?” she said, and heard it come out more caustic than intended. Apologizing would do no good, not in this company. She tilted her chin instead and directed a flinty stare at Evkit.

  He grinned, his light shirt and breeches serving another reminder to Alyea that she wasn’t nearly his match. She thought, sourly, that he didn’t even seem tired from the day’s long march. If anything, he seemed refreshed, as though the impossibly long trek had somehow given him energy, not wiped it out.

  He laughed, not in the least offended by her snappishness, and said, “But that was slow, Lord Alyea. We go much faster tomorrow.”

  She stared at him in open disbelief. Beside her, Deiq made a soft noise, an almost-chuckle.

  “My feet are raw,” Alyea protested.

  “Salve help,” Evkit said, still grinning. “And you desert lord now. You heal fast. Tomorrow, you be fine. And then you have—” He lifted one foot out, waggled it briefly. “You have hard skin.”

  “Callus,” Deiq murmured.

  “Yes. Callus. So you not hurt so bad tomorrow night.”

  Alyea barely stopped herself from saying That’s not possible. Apparently she wasn’t beyond being shocked by anything these people said or did, after all. She glanced down at her one visible foot—cross-legged, the other was tucked up under the opposite thigh—and wiggled her toes thoughtfully. It didn’t feel quite as raw as it had at the end of the day’s march; still, she wasn’t inclined to peel off the covering to see the current state of the damaged flesh.

  Deiq said nothing, his gaze on the fire-pit. Shadow seemed to gather under his eyes and in the hollows of his ears and neck, moving just slightly off the rhythm of the flame-cast shadows around them.

  Alyea blinked and shook her head to dispel the illusion. From the other side of the fire-pit, Evkit’s grin widened.

  “How far did we travel today?” she asked abruptly.

  “No more than Qisani,” Evkit answered.

  Alyea frowned, and Deiq clarified, not looking away from the fire: “Due west from Scratha Fortress, about fifty miles.”

  “Tomorrow we go fast,” Evkit said, and stood. “Tomorrow we go double.”

  “Double?” Alyea said involuntarily. Deiq shut his eyes, a muscle twitching in his cheek.

  “Good sleep,” Evkit said, and turned away. Alyea watched him climb into his shall, and found herself yawning.

  “Gods,” she murmured, setting the cup of tea down on the mat in front of her. Almost immediately, a servant
snagged it up and away. Another servant stepped close, as though to help her to her feet.

  Deiq, glancing up, flicked a hand in peremptory dismissal. The waiting servant bowed and moved away without protest, and Deiq went back to watching the dancing flames.

  One by one, everyone else retired for the evening. Deiq and Alyea sat alone by the fire, save for one servant and the fire-tender. Alyea sat quietly, staring into the fire, and let the tension of the day relax from her muscles.

  At last, feeling the pressure of being watched, she looked to her right and found Deiq looking at her, his eyes glinting with tiny reflected flames. It gave him an uncannily demonic aspect, and she repressed a shiver. His mouth twisted into his usual sardonic smile; she knew he’d been reading her thoughts again.

  She said, low-voiced but sharp, “Stop that!”

  “Wasn’t,” he said economically. “Your face said it. I still scare you.”

  “Do you blame me?” she retorted.

  His gaze flickered to the surrounding tents, to the fire-tender, the now-drowsing servant, and back to her.

  “No,” he said, one eyebrow tilting, and grinned with more real humor. “But I’m not what you ought to be scared of right now.” Again his gaze made the rounds of the camp.

  She bit her tongue, well aware that the quiet only made voices carry more clearly, and thought through her reply before speaking.

  “Of all the things that worry me just now,” she said, “you’re not nearly at the top of the list.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, his stare turning oddly intense; she had the feeling that he was saying more than she really understood at the moment. Then he shook his head, the dry smile returning, and the shivery heat faded from his gaze.

  “I know,” she answered, not at all sure she believed her own words—or his.

  An Explanation Of Commerce

  (excerpt)