The Initiate Brother Duology (62 page)

As out of place as a garden in the desert, Shuyun thought, for the man was richly dressed. The detail of his clothing was clear at a distance and they could easily see the gold worked into the hilt of his sword and onto the horn he wore slung about his shoulder. He leaned on a long spear and surveyed the view before him with some concentration.

“This is not a man asleep at his post,” Komawara whispered.

The tribesman nodded and held a hand to his lips. He led them up again through a narrow cleft, doubly careful to kick no rock free. Twice more, they came to vantages where they could see the guard, but he gave no indication that he was aware of their passing.

Farther on, they skirted a second sentry dressed identically to the first and again were struck by the man’s appearance. Shuyun found himself looking at their dust-covered guide and then at the guard again. These sentries do not seem to be of the desert, he thought.

They began to make their way down. A rim appeared before them and it was here Kalam finally stopped. Shuyun thought he heard chanting echoing up through the rock—low, eerie, haunting—but it may have simply been the wind.

Lying flat on his belly, the tribesman eased himself up to the edge and looked over. He signaled his companions forward and they did as the hunter did, sliding forward on their stomachs.

They peered over the edge of the rift and found a grotto into which a shaft of failing sunlight fell. Torches set into the rock mixed their red light with the rays from the setting sun and illuminated a sight that neither Shuyun nor Komawara expected.

“Ama-Haji,” Shuyun whispered and Kalam nodded his eyes wide with wonder.

“Look, Shuyun-sum,” Komawara said softly, and pointed to a part of the cliff face slightly hidden by an overhang of stone. Here, set into a bank of reddish clay, lay an enormous skeleton—large-jawed head, a snaking spine longer than ten men, the bones of small legs.

“A dragon,” Shuyun intoned. “It is the skeleton of an actual dragon! Botahara be praised. A true wonder! The beast of antiquity…” And he sounded for the first time like the youth he was; entirely swept away by what he witnessed. And from Komawara he heard a sound like a weak laugh and the lord rubbed his eyes.

Men in long gray robes were preparing a pyre before the skeleton, a pyre of stunted, twisted wood and they chanted the low chant Shuyun had thought he heard.

“Kalam?” Shuyun whispered.

The tribesman spoke only one word.

“What does he say, Brother?”

“Ritual sacrifice. The goat you can see.”

Kalam moved away from the edge, pushing past Shuyun, and he made a warding sign. Gesturing to the setting sun, he turned and made his way back as they had come; his companions from the great Empire followed him as silently as they could.

They sat in the darkness talking. Komawara could hear the sounds of the barbarian language from where he lay trying to rest. He wondered what had suddenly made the tribesman so talkative. But he did not wonder long, the memory of the dragon skeleton, the dragon that was etched onto the gold coins he had seen, returned to him over and over. It was as though the Five Princes had ridden down out of the clouds, lightning flashing from the hooves of their gray mounts. Impossible! Myth no grown man believed. A dragon! And he had seen it with his own eyes!

*   *   *

Morning saw a continuation of the eerie veil of high, thin cloud. The wind shrilled on unabated. The day was cooler. Only Komawara had dismounted, as though he needed to get closer to the ground to be sure his eyes were not deceiving him.

They had ridden to the center of an abandoned encampment—an encampment so enormous that the young lord’s mind would not seem to accept it.

“No…no. This cannot be. This cannot…” He looked around him like a man returned to his fief to find it razed to the ground—sick to his heart yet the mind still refusing to accept what he saw.

“Lord Komawara…Sire? We must return to Seh as quickly as possible. We dare not linger here. Lord Komawara?”

*   *   *

“How do you know he’ll return?” It was the first time Komawara had spoken since they had left the barbarian encampment the previous day.

“He is Tha-telor.” Shuyun said. “And he is frightened of the Khan.”

“Frightened of he who squeezes rocks into gold?—he who is as strong as twenty men?”

“The Kalam is in awe of the Khan, there is no doubt. But the Khan is cruel. The Kalam has heard stories.”

“Cruel? He is a barbarian chieftain. I hardly think he can shock another of his kind.”

“Perhaps, but a simple hunter from the steppe is another matter.”

“A simple hunter who tried to remove your head, excuse me for reminding you.”

“I pushed a man from the mouth of a cavern into the waters of Denji Gorge because he was the soldier of an enemy of my liege-lord. I do not think you would call me a barbarian. I pray that man will reach perfection in his next life, but his karma is his own, as is mine.” Shuyun paused and scanned the horizon. “Our barbarian guide did not act so differently, Lord Komawara; we are not, after all, his traditional allies. The Khan frightens him, perhaps only because he upsets the accustomed order of their tribal life.”

“Huh.”

They fell silent again, riding on as quickly as they dared without exhausting the ponies. A rider on the horizon brought them up short, but it was
soon apparent that it was Kalam returning to them. Behind him the dust cloud from the Khan’s army rose into the sky and swept away on the north wind.

“They can be seen from the next rise.” Shuyun translated as the tribesman began to talk, spouting words in his excitement as though he could not catch his breath. “Few outriders can be seen, they must not fear discovery. This is not the whole army, he says, and they have turned to the east, now.”

Again Komawara returned to the state of shock he had experienced in the encampment. “We must see for ourselves,” he said finally.

They did not hurry to the rise but kept their pace, perhaps even slowed it. There was no rush. Only their eyes lacked the evidence, but Shuyun and Komawara knew in their hearts what they would see.

Even so, the sight stunned them and they were silent for some time. Moving across the sand in the center of an enormous dust cloud was a mass of humanity.

“Fifty thousand?” the lord said finally.

“Not quite that,” Shuyun said, his voice taking on that strange quality that Komawara had noticed before, “perhaps forty thousand.”

“Forty thousand armed men,” Komawara said slowly, “and look how many are on horse! There has never been a barbarian army this large. Not in the days of my grandfather, not in the time of the Mori—never…. This dust cloud must blow all the way to Seh and the people will think it is merely a storm in the desert.”

Shuyun spoke to Kalam and listened carefully to their reply. “It seems you may have been right, Lord Komawara. These are warriors of the high steppe who have their lands to the east near to the sea. Kalam believes they return to their tribes to winter. If this is true, the campaign will not begin until the spring.”

Komawara hardly seemed to hear this. “In Seh we might raise forty thousand if we also count old men and boys. The plague stripped us of our people, of our fighters.”

Shuyun spoke quietly to Kalam, nodding thoughtfully to the tribesman’s response. “The Kalam says the scattered tribes have sent their sons from the breadth of the steppe and the desert. No one knew that there were so many. No one knew how many clans there were. This is but half the number he saw at the encampment, and from seeing that place I believe he is not wrong.”

“How do they feed them? You cannot grow food in the sand.”

Shuyun spoke to Kalam and the answer seemed to shake him. “He says that they drain everything but enough to survive from the tribes, and also much food and many weapons come from pirates whom the Khan pays in gold.”

“Gold he squeezes from rocks….”

“It is a mystery. We must return to Seh, Lord Komawara. We have seen all that we need to see.”

“You are right, Brother. And you were right in another matter.” The lord nodded to the barbarian tribesman. “We should release him now. He has given us true service.”

“I’m afraid, my lord, that it is not as simple as that.”

T
HE DAY WAS chill, the light from the sun filtering through high cloud that covered the sky like a layer of sheer silk. Despite the temperature, Shonto sat on a small covered porch overlooking the gardens of the Governor’s Palace. He progressed slowly through his daily correspondence, most of it official, routine, and of no great importance. A letter from Lord Taiki, however, required a second reading.

After describing how his son adapted to the loss of his hand, and praise for Shonto’s steward Kamu, who had visited the child several times, the Lord went on to matters of greater interest:

Shonto read the letter through a second time and then folded it and put it into his sleeve. He sat looking out over the garden for a moment. The obvious explanation for this was that the Kintari had been raided and the coins taken from them. If this was the case there was no mystery to the gold nor would it be difficult to discover if this was the truth.

Shonto clapped his hands and requested cha from the servant who appeared. Why, then, the lord wondered, were the sons of Lord Kintari so anxious to have these coins returned? If these were the same as the coins he had seen, then they would be new—hardly heirlooms.

Cha arrived and Shonto gladly accepted a cup, setting it on his writing table and turning it slowly, staring into the steam as though looking into the distance. Again he found himself wondering how Komawara and Shuyun fared, then shook his head. He should never have sent the monk to the desert…but what choice had there been? Shuyun was the only member of Shonto’s staff who had any chance of surviving capture by the barbarians. The only one who could possibly return with the information they so desperately needed. Even so, the monk was too valuable an advisor to be used in this way.

What would the Brothers think if they knew that one of their own Order wandered in the wastes with a Lord of Seh disguised as a Botahist monk?
The Brotherhood were, Shonto was well sure, pragmatists to the center of their much vaunted spirits—they would swallow hard and then look away. As defenders of the faith of the Perfect Master, they had been involved in some questionable practices themselves.

There was noise in the hallway close by, and Shonto found himself very alert. He did not have his sword at hand, but he touched the hilt of a dagger in his robes. Two voices muted by the walls: a woman’s and another that was certainly Kamu’s. Shonto was on the verge of rising when the shoji slid aside and there stood his only daughter, Lady Nishima.

She knelt immediately, bowing deeply before entering the room. Kamu’s face appeared in the opening and at a single gesture from his lord, disappeared. The shoji slid silently closed. Neither Shonto nor his daughter spoke for a few seconds.

“It seems, Uncle, that for once you have been caught without words.”

“This is not true; I have so many words I do not know which to speak first.”

They both laughed and then fell silent again.