Restoration

by Carol Berg

  “We’ve got to run, my lord. I was careless. Right now some stupid boy is telling a Rhyzka magistrate about what he saw in the stable yard behind the tavern. I’d swear they weren’t there while you were talking with Sereg, but we can’t risk it. We’ll hope it takes some time for them to come looking.”

  Aleksander reached for his haffai and pulled himself to standing. “I’ve no wish to sleep in this rathole anyway.”

  “I’ll saddle the horses,” said Malver, starting out the door.

  Ten minutes later, we rode out of the tavern stables. No sign of a hunt as we rode through the almost deserted streets. Slow. Agonizingly slow. Our horses’ hooves were already loud on the hard-packed dirt; we dared not draw notice by our hurry. But as we approached the market district, I knew something was wrong. The market in a desert town never truly slept. Too many things needed to be done in the cool night hours between the last of the evening shoppers and the first of the morning. Yet the dark square was illuminated by only a few flickering braziers, and the silence was oppressive.

  Aleksander felt it, too. Just at the point our narrow street opened into the market, he reined in, pointed to his ear, and then to me. I passed the back of my hand before my eyes and listened. Smelled the dry air that hung in the dark streets. Tasted the silence. Men were waiting in streets just off the square... a goodly number, ten or more. I heard their breathing. Shallow. Ready. I smelled the oil on their blades and the nervous sweat soaking their shirts. If we rode into the marketplace, we were going to have a fight. How had they gotten into place so quickly? The boy’s tale could not have set this in motion.

  I jerked my head toward the market and held up ten fingers, indicating five on the east side, five on the west. Then again three or four more at the gates. Caution demanded that we abandon W‘Assani and find a stealthier way to leave Tanzire. But Aleksander pulled back his haffai to expose the hilt of his sword. At the Prince’s gesture, Malver relaxed and exposed his own sword. Aleksander signaled that Malver was to go straight for W’Assani. The Prince and I would stand between him and the waiting Derzhi; then we would all make for the gates together. Aleksander cocked his head at me, waggled his elbows, then raised his eyebrows. I grinned, shaking my head, and drew my sword. As he split the night with a Derzhi war cry, I followed him into battle. No wings tonight.

  Bursting out of the lane, we made it more than halfway across the square before the first warrior reached us. Aleksander disarmed him with a single stroke and howled in victory. W‘Assani’s wagon was parked just past the middle of the square, about two-thirds of the way to the gate. At least she should be well awake by now.

  We were woefully outnumbered. Soon I was engaged with two warriors at once, one on either side, and not making much progress with either of them. Aleksander was somewhere to my right, battling a large man whose horse bucked in terror when the Prince’s sword cut him. Aleksander’s mount kept steady as he wheeled and struck. Keep your seat, my lord, I prayed. Fall off and we’re done for. But I had little time to worry about the Prince. A huge blade whistled over my head, and I came near falling myself. Fighting on horseback was out of my experience; demons did not use cavalry. Gods of night, if only we had Sovari. I stabbed at a charging warrior and wrenched my arm as he slipped sideways from his mount. Every stroke of my sword had my side screaming.

  Using my left hand to haul on the reins and keep my mount steady underneath me, I raised up in the stirrups and slashed at an attacking Derzhi. From his vociferous oath, I gathered I had cut him, but I was too busy countering another man’s blade to look. Duck. Slash again. Hold this one. Counter. Yes. The rhythm’s there. Just find it. Be still, you stupid beast. How can I get the feel of this if you’re running out from under me?

  “Seyonne!” While keeping my hand occupied with one fighter, my mind engaged in convincing another man that snakes were slithering up his back, and watching Aleksander dispatch a massive Derzhi who was aiming to slice off his arm, I cast a quick glance behind me. W‘Assani was mounted. Blade in hand, she was holding her own with a slender Derzhi, smiling as she fought, her lean body strong and agile. Malver, his sword in one hand and his long dagger in the other, skewered a warrior lunging for my back.

  “My lord!” I cried. “Time to go!” Past time.

  Aleksander dispatched one more opponent, then began his retreat, circling, slashing, always in control. His boot stuck out awkwardly, and one of the Rhyzka warriors struck at it. But the sword hit the steel rod and glanced away, and Aleksander ripped the man’s shoulder, laughing.

  I beat off another attacker and bent my mind to enchantment ... wind... sand... not the easy shifting to cover our tracks, though not a paraivo, either. Just enough to obscure our attackers’ vision and allow us to make a graceful retreat. A bit more in reserve. Ready . . . split the gale and hold it. Almost to the gate. Newcomers ran for the walls, but we were already through the gates. With an explosion of melydda, I released a blast of contrary winds that dug out the last of the sand piled against the gates and, with a thundering crash, slammed them shut in our pursuers’ faces.

  “I will find out how you do that!” shouted W‘Assani over the roar of the wind, wagging her long finger at me.

  I nodded. Something to look forward to. Promising.

  We had only a few scratches among us and were ready to set out on our way victorious, but our smiles died unborn when we looked back over our shoulders and saw what had been left for us to see. A wooden beam had been mounted atop the city walls, and from it a man hung by his feet. Just as with those in Karn‘Hegeth, his lips and nose had been cut off, and his shorn braid tied to his tongue. He was dead, at least. His belly was ripped apart until he could have had nothing left inside. An imperial sash dangled from his neck.

  “No!” Aleksander’s cry of anguish could have been heard in Zhagad, and it was all I could do to restrain him.

  So that was how they had known to lie in wait for us... and why they had not known where to find us. Sovari had yielded the one secret, but held the last. They had sent spies to every inn to search us out, the clumsy boys to the poor place where we were housed, never expecting to find the heir to the Empire meeting his subjects in the squalor of a tannery yard.

  “We have only minutes, my lord,” I said, my voice harsh in the sudden silence. “Make his sacrifice worthy. We must go now.”

  But we weren’t fast enough, and in my distraction, I had failed to hold the wind as firmly as I held the Prince. From the walls came a volley of arrows, flying true in the still air. From behind me I heard one make a solid hit... and then another. I whirled to see W‘Assani twice struck, slumping in her saddle. Malver reached for her, only to have an arrow slam into his back and another and a third until brother and half sister toppled in a grotesque embrace onto the barren earth. So much for victory. And promise.

  “We have to go,” I said, struggling to rein in the creeping... no, the raging darkness. “They’re dead. All of them dead.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Aleksander and I rode the paths of Manganar and Azhakstan for the rest of that summer, hiding, running, seeking shelter in herdsmen’s shacks and caravans, in villages and alleyways and stables, as the Prince tried to find a Derzhi lord willing to shelter or support him. I tried to act as intermediary as Sovari had done. With some effort I managed to alter my features to be more Derzhi-like, but no one would trust a stranger, and I never got past a steward. We dared not commit Aleksander’s presence to writing, for Derzhi lords did not read, and scribes were notorious for selling information. With no one to trust with his messages, the Prince had to risk approaching the houses himself. Twice he found the heged strongholds taken over by representatives of the Twenty, and he left without revealing his identity. Twice he was rebuffed completely. Five lords granted him an interview, but gave the same answer as the Mardek and the Bek; they would not commit to Aleksander without evidence of other heged support. Once we had to fight our way out of a walled garden and barely survived it. Yet the Prince
would not give up. He was grim and driven, speaking little save of how to get from one town to the next, constantly seeking news of houses he thought most likely to support him, stopping only long enough to keep our horses living.

  Though there were more than twenty prospects yet to approach, we were rapidly running out of time. Not only had we lost Sovari and Malver and W‘Assani in the debacle at Tanzire, but also most of the funds that Kiril had supplied. By the end of the summer we were dreadfully bedraggled and eating lean. We could scarcely muster a decent set of clothes for Aleksander to wear when meeting a heged lord, and he refused to wear a haffai lest they think he was hiding something.

  Two weeks after our flight from Tanzire, Aleksander had discarded his riding boot. Every time we got off our horses, whether in city or desert or village, he would walk for at least an hour, working to recover his strength and flexibility. By the time our plight got desperate, he had thrown away his crutches and used only a single walking stick. The healing had been straight and clean, and I had no doubt that he would recover full use of his limb, but what should have been a reason for rejoicing was only a reminder of everything he had lost.

  “Perhaps it’s time to contact your cousin again,” I said one night as we walked up a desolate track behind Andassar, the village where we had been hiding for the past few days, waiting for the First Lord of the Naddasine to return from Zhagad to his nearby castle. “We can’t let Avrel feed us anymore. Marya told me their village taxes are due in ten days. They’ve four months until their winter harvest is in, and I don’t know how they’re going to eat until then.”

  “I don’t want Kiril dead, if he’s not already. But we’ll leave if you wish. Eat grass if we need to. Go back to the desert and hunt.”

  The argument was always the same.

  “We can’t go into the desert,” I said. “We’ve nothing to feed the horses, and we can’t afford to buy anything. If the horses die, we’re afoot, and although you’re progressing well, I’m not sure you’re ready to walk to Vayapol. And we can’t get into a city because we haven’t bribe money to get us past the gates. Illusions of money never work; people handle it too much, look too closely. In a town of any size, I could scribe for wages, but only for someone who doesn’t question a scribe who looks like a beggar and smells worse. I could do any number of jobs, but the only people who can afford to pay anymore are Derzhi, and no one would hire an Ezzarian with a slave mark on his shoulder. My lord, I understand your urgency, but it’s time for you to stop and think.”

  I hadn’t meant to go so far. Perhaps what drove me to it was the view of the pitiful village just below us, the tiny hovels set in the midst of fertile fields of potatoes and barley. The twenty men and women of Andassar worked without respite to produce two crops a year of barley and one of potatoes, harnessing themselves to their plows because they had no beasts of burden, forbidden to hunt the abundant game of the nearby hills because it belonged to their lord. Yet the entirety of their crop could scarce pay their new tax levies, and if we were still here ten days from this, we would witness the harsh result.

  Everywhere we traveled we saw the evidence of Edik’s rule: markets with no goods a man could afford, caravan owners forced to sell their chastou, beggars everywhere, fighting each other over scraps, and slaves ... gods have mercy, I had never seen so many slave caravans. The Veshtar, the desert tribe who considered slavery as their god’s rightful punishment on weaker souls, flourished in the service of the Nyabozzi, the heged who controlled the trade in slaves. Meanwhile, the lords of the Twenty rode unashamed in splendor—silks and jewels, gold trappings on their horses, perfumed litters for their women—and unchecked in their arrogance of power. No town but had its shriveled heads or corpses on display. No region but had villages burned. No ale-house gossip but told of assassinations, theft, and willful cruelty untouched by law. And no women, girls, or fair youths, lowborn or high, were safe if a lord of the Twenty fancied them.

  “How can I leave it, Seyonne?” Aleksander paused at the top of the rise and leaned on his olive wood stick. The gold and red sunset seared the sky behind him. “Do you think I’m doing this for myself? Because I miss silk sheets and servants and fine horses?”

  “No, of course—”

  “Every corpse you see hanging in the cities is dead by my hand. Every new slave is chained by my failure. In one generation I have destroyed what my grandsires built over five hundred years, and every beggar’s hand is pointed at me in accusation. How can I stop?”

  Guilt is a cruel taskmaster. I had tried to make Aleksander see the truth of his empire, teach him to take responsibility, but I had never meant the lesson to destroy him. I leaned my back against a finger of rock that pointed accusingly at the heavens and rubbed my eyes that felt like the sands of the desert were permanently embedded in them.

  “You’ve not been sleeping. Weeks, it’s been.” He cocked his head at me and raised his eyebrows as he always did when he wanted to ask things he knew I would not answer.

  “I’ve got to go, my lord. Soon.” The ravaging of the world seemed an eerie reflection of the war being fought in my soul. Denas yet raged, demanding that I go to Kir‘Navarrin and insisting that I yield to him at the moment we crossed the gateway. So forceful was his will to speak, that it was all I could do to contain him. But I feared to loose his bonds, to risk my self-control just when I needed everything I had to face my dreams. For my night visions, too, had taken an unnerving turn. Every horror we saw in our travels, I revisited, not once, but a hundred times each night. Every cruelty I had experienced in my life, I lived again and again. Sometimes I was the victim. Sometimes I was the perpetrator. Sometimes, most frightening of all, I meted out punishment to those who did the terrible deeds, and I savored the unholy execution of justice. I could no longer bear my dreams, and so I had learned to wake myself up the moment they began. Nyel’s doing, certainly. He had admitted as much. I needed to find an answer to it while I could still think straight, while I could still control my own soul. “I don’t want to leave you, but—”

  “You’ve suffered enough for me. Go when you need to go.”

  And what would he do then? Push on alone. I motioned him back to his exercise. “Not yet. Soon, but not yet.” I didn’t want to think about my own journey.

  We had not planned to hide in Andassar. Marya, a stocky young woman with a crooked spine, had found us in the hills above the village, just as I was about to butcher a wild pig. She had wandered close while gathering herbs and quail eggs, and though I intended to remain hidden from the villagers, I wasn’t about to let go of the pig. Aleksander and I hadn’t eaten in two days.

  “Are you mad, stranger?” she cried. “Would you bring the lord’s wrath on a whole village for a runt of a pig?”

  “Not mad. Just hungry,” I said. “And why would the lord care about a wild pig?”

  “Taking game in these hills is forbidden since the Gorusch baron became overlord. Naddasine used to let each Andassar man take one boar or deer a season, but this Gorusch lord sends keepers out every few days to look for signs of poaching.” The pig, as if sensing its imminent release, set up a squealing. “You’ll have a village man maimed for the kill, if you’re not found to own it.”

  Sighing, I released the pig, sat back on the grass, and watched it trot away at astonishing speed. “Then tell me where I can find something else. I’m going to eat this nasty shirt of mine if I don’t come up with dinner. I’ve naught to pay but work, and I’ve a friend with me.”

  “Here.” She tossed me a wild plum from the heavy basket she carried on her hip. “Bring your friend to the last house in the village. I’ II feed you.”

  Marya had insisted that we move in with her and her husband Avrel. Only in the past year had the two become self-sufficient, allowing them to move out of Avrel’s father’s house and into their own mud hovel. “It’s Avrel’s bees,” said the woman proudly, pointing to the cone-shaped clumps of mud up a gentle grassy slope from her home. “Avrel went to
Vayapol once, and spoke to a man in the market who had fat jars of honey, and he learned about bees. And he thought that the meadow here might be a fine place for them, with the clover that comes after the rains and holds for so long in summer. The man in Zhagad wouldn’t tell him how he got the bees to stay, but Avrel watched the wild things and learned it of himself.”

  The young couple had no children as yet, but Marya was confident that Panfeya would bless them soon, now they were housed within their own walls. If the village could but pay their levies this year, all would be well, for Avrel was planning to make more hives and teach the other villagers to care for bees, so that next year they could pay the entire levy in honey.

  We told the villagers that Aleksander—I named him Kassian—was a dispossessed kinsman of the Naddasine. A wastrel, I hinted, come to his first lord to petition for reinstatement into the family. They looked on him with awe, a Derzhi in such sorry state as to seek shelter in their village. But they held a better opinion of the Naddasine than other Derzhi, and before a day had passed were offering Aleksander advice on how to approach the old first lord when he returned from Zhagad.

  “Respect,” said Kero, Avrel’s father. “Naddasine has always been one for respect. Not groveling. He don’t take to a cowardly mien. But I can stand up boldly and say, ‘Here is your share, my good lord,’ or ‘I’ve taken my boar this day, my good lord, and none else,’ and he will listen with gravity and say, ‘Well-done, goodman Kero, or ’A fine kill, fellow,‘ as if I were a proper man. This Gorusch, though . . . The Emperor, curse his—pardon. Lord Kassian—the Emperor sent his own troops to take the Naddasine lands, and all their houses but this one, and give them to these Gorusch. My cousin serves in old Naddasine’s house. She says his sons fear for his life.”

  “To hear that a Derzhi first lord fears for his life at the hand of the Emperor,” said Aleksander to me later. “Even after all this, I cannot fathom such villainy. Edik is a plague upon this land. If I could do it, I’d cut my arm to let out any drop of my blood common with his.”