Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (59 page)

He could say nothing, and so did, and despised himself for the weakness of it even while he tried to comfort himself with excuses: that she'd prefer a patient silence to fatuous words, that she needed that silence to say goodbye to the boy, or to recover herself from grief and be ready to face him.

In the end, though - soon, though - she would have to lift her head and look at him. Because she was Julianne, because he was Imber. Because they were married, in every way except what the law allowed to married love.

Because she had to do it, so she did; and it was soon, too soon perhaps for her, dragged unwilling from her mourning by what must have seemed his quiet patience.

'I met him today,' she said, her voice hoarse with shouting, thick with unshed tears. 'Only today. He insisted that he come with me. I said, I said it was only to escape the kitchens for an hour, he was so angry
...'

He died with honour; I am glad he came;
both were still impossible. Nor could he reach to touch; the gap between them was small, but unbridgeable. He must speak now, though, her eyes demanded it.

'Julianne,' and it was something even to speak her name against that gaze, something else to speak it in her hearing, the first time in how long? Too long, week after unbearable week of trying not to speak it at all for fear of debasing it by misuse or hearing it debased by others. 'Julianne, how are you here?'

'How?' A dead note to the repetition, to match the corpse-light in her eyes. 'We were brought.'

By whom?
Who had fetched her from the
castle
, where was her allegiance now? He would not ask, not yet. 'Why, then?' A girl and a boy, unwatched in the heart of a war - it would have been unwise with any girl, with her it was unthinkable.
Great peril,
the djinni had said, but that needed little foresight here. Even without the 'ifrit, her peril must have been great.

'Why? To talk to you, I thought. I'm not sure now
...'
And her eyes strayed back to the body she was nursing.

'To talk to me? But - you couldn't know, how could anyone have known
...
?'

'The djinn know the future, Imber,' as her hands stroked the hair back from the dead boy's brow. 'Some, at least. Not everything, not enough; but enough at least to put us in your path.'

And in the 'ifrit's path also, so that Roald died
That was so clear, neither of them needed to say it.

But, 'What have the djinn to do with this?'

He thought she might be weary of so many questions, but if so, she made no protest. 'It was a djinni brought us here.'

He'd have liked to close his eyes to think the better, as he had done all his life; but that was a child's trick, and he was a man grown. A man grown and married, desperately parted from his wife and bewilderingly reunited, and he could not close his eyes to her face. But a djinni had brought her here, and a djinni had sent him in pursuit of her with a warning of her peril; and that djinni, his djinni had named itself as Esren Filash Tachur, the strange words were branded in his memory, and he had heard her crying 'Esren!' as he fought
...

He thought, he
thought
that his thinking was telling him that the djinni had placed her in the peril from which it had sent him to rescue her; he thought that Julianne was telling him that it must have known what it was doing. If it had known the outcome too, it would have known that Roald the boy would die; if not, it had risked his life and hers, and Imber's also, and for what
...
?

'What could you tell me, Julianne, that a djinni could not? Why do this,'
risk a girl and kill a boy,
'why fetch you here?' Where she could not have met him if he had not been chased by the 'ifrit, proof positive that the djinni had known exactly what it was doing, if it knew anything at all.

'I was to tell you - oh, that there was a greater danger than the Sharai, greater evil than the Surayonnaise abroad in this land. Well, that you have seen. Which I expect is why it fetched me here, to be sure that you would see. And survive, to say what you have seen.' Her voice had passed beyond bitter, into some depth of cold savagery that he had never thought to hear from any woman, never mind his gen
tl
e, politic Julianne. 'I was to tell you also that there is an army come up from Ascariel, hastily gathered but more potent than this raggle-taggle that you lead. They are to be found to the west, along the line of the river. There is no way to cross it now, I was to tell you that. They lack a commander of rank, and will listen to a lord of Elessi. And if there's a priest with them, have him bless their weapons. Have him bless yours, twice over; it works, you saw
...'

'I did — and this is yours, my lady.' He handed her the knife, and saw her shudder in the stars' dimness before she took it, the haft still warm from Roald s tight and clumsy grip. Warmer than his hand, perhaps, by now. 'But I will not go any further west, now that I have found you. I have what I came for. We'll leave this cursed land, I'll take you home
...'

'No,' she said, soft and determined. 'I am not free to leave — and nor are you, Imber. We've all of us been fetched. Besides, you could not cross the river now. The way you came is barred, and there's no path through the mountains south, only holds that shelter frightened people who have seen their lands in flame.'

'What, shall I go west, then, and take command of an army? This is a bad night to ask it, but I will if you are with me, Julianne. You're free to go where I go, nowhere else. You are my wife.'

'And another man's,' she said, confirming the impossible with a sad
little
smile, 'and can follow neither of my husbands now. No, don't touch me, Imber. There never was any force between us, and will not be. Esren
...'

This time it came, the dji
nni, a suck of darkness and a glit
ter string, starlight caught on a thread and spun around velvet.

'Esren, take us back, Roald and me.'

'Julianne, wait!'

'For what?' It seemed to him that she was half gone already, more than half, although she hadn't stirred from where she knelt; she'd moved no more than the boy had. 'I can't take you with me. Find your own role, Imber - go back to your people, warn them, lead them, be aware. And don't slay any more innocents.'

'I have not—' he began, and then thought that perhaps she meant Roald, and wondered if perhaps she was right. And choked down denials and confessions both, and said instead, 'Julianne, I'm lost in here. There is a curse on these fields, they lead me all awry
...'

'Call it a blessing, for those who live here. But there's a trick, they have to tend their crops.' And she smiled, just a little, as she said, 'When you pass through a gap turn left, keep your left hand on the wall and follow it around to the other opening. Even if that's directly opposite, even if it's only three paces to your right: always turn left, and always follow the wall. That's all, that will see you out.' The smile vanished all too soon, as she added, 'Roald told me that, while we were waiting. Now, please, Esren.'

And he thought she rose up and flew like a witch, with the boy
’
s body in her arms; except that he would not believe that of her, and it was hard to see with the sudden swirling lights and the suck of the dark that seemed to close around her, so perhaps it wa
s all an illusion of the djinni’
s.

One thing was no illusion, though, that she was gone. If it weren't for the aches in his body and her words bright in his head, he might have thought her an illusion altogether, just a fever dream.

But she had been his Julianne, and she had been there. The crops were flattened where she'd sat; there was the stickiness of blood on the leaves where Roald had fallen. She was his certainty, his rock. If she held true, then so did all about her. There was the 'ifrit, the boy, the news, the message; the urgency of the message confirmed by his own experience, brutally driven home by the boy's death. Even Julianne could never have persuaded him, he thought, if he hadn't seen for himself. How was he to persuade his cousin Karel?

Well, he would confront that when he came to it. He had to get there first. He put his left hand to the wall and leaned against it for a moment, dizzied by memory or anticipation, both; then he straightened, took a glance upward to see how the stars were set, and started walking.

Bhisrat was young to be full sheikh of his tribe or any, but the Saren were an exceptional people and he was an exceptional man.

Also he was a proud man, although there was nothing exceptional in that for a Sharai, among his tribe or any.

Tonight he was an angry man: cheated of his proper authority, he felt, betrayed by something he could not understand and so humiliated in front of his peers, the sheikhs of other tribes. They mocked him with their silence, and he could do nothing. If he spoke, if he gave a moment s notice to the issue, they would mock him with words instead. Then he would be forced to fight, and would die eventually although he would kill a few of those sneering elders first; and so his name would be written in infamy, as the man who lost his tribe in war and then in fury turned on other sheikhs -
as a child in temper turns on his playmates,
they would say - and so lost the war for all the tribes.

It could happen, it was there to be done. Already half the men had forgotten why they were here, whether that be to recover Hasan or to recover the land, drive the Patrics into the sea. They were content to raid and burn, to fight when they could find a fight; not finding fights enough, they were close already to fighting each other over a word, a gesture, a bolt of looted cloth.

Without Hasan they made a poor army, an ill-disciplined mob; and the sheikhs who led them were little better. The council could not meet without arguing, nor keep its arguments a secret, with firelight and wind its only walls. Let one of those arguments come to steel and there would be no Sharai army, only a dozen tribes more at war with each other than they were with the Patrics, though they fought on Patric land.

So Bhisrat held his peace against the silence, which was almost but not quite worse than spoken taunts; and he sat with his face to the fire, keeping his back ostentatiously turned to the high walls of the field-maze, where the dirt-grubbing Patrics laid their deceiving traps for honest warriors.

He had men watching the walls, of course, watching for any sign of his missing riders; it was not true that he had lost the tribe, though they were saying so at every fire but this. He had only lost the best of his tribe, the finest, the pride of his blood. And it should not have happened, it bewildered him, and so he was raging inside and ready to rage at a moments carelessness, water or words spilled accidentally around him. So long as the silence held, so long could he hold his fury leashed, but no longer.

In Hasan
’
s absence, no sheikh would risk giving orders to another,
scout that way
or
search there.
Instead they vied for the place of greatest danger, sent their men to outrace others to the fight, made promises of blood now and loot to follow.

There had been disappointingly little of either, this whole day's march. A Patric troop tracked them on the wrong side of the river, and could not be closed with; this morning they'd met farmers and peasants largely, as easy killing as their flocks and as poor as the land they tilled: 'rich in earth and wisdom' was a Surayon boast, contemptible to the Sharai. Meat and a few plough-horses were small recompense to a host promised conquest. Why fight, why ride at all for so little profit?

They fought, of course, because they loved to fight; but there was better fighting, better raiding in the Sands. Much better raiding, now that all the fighting men were here. It couldn't be long before one tribe or another would think of that, speak of that around its fires, slip away before the dawn to enrich its tents at the cost of its elders' honour.

Determined that it should not be the Saren that turned back first, Bhisrat had led them in a furious race to find the fighting men of Surayon. They did exist, he knew that; he himself had seen them, talked with them, fenced and wrestled with them. There had been truce and trade between Surayon and the Sharai for many years, more true a truce than ever with the rest of Outremer. He had fostered Surayonnaise children in his tents, had sent his own sons to learn what they could of the arts of the Patrics, and never once thought to call them hostage.

But that was in the past, all truces had to break and this was shattered, as it must have been when God and honour called together. And so he had led that charge in search of men to fight, ahead of those tribes that searched for gold amid the stores of barley; and had found only skirmishes and traps, tricks and sorceries that stole his tribesmen's courage and his own pleasure in the chase.

When the walls rose up around the fields, the only good running was squeezed down towards the river, but there was no one to run after. The cursed grubbers laid ambushes, appearing suddenly from behind the walls, shooting arrows or riding down stragglers and then vanishing into shelter again.

So of course he'd sent men in after, to flush them out. Not a sheikh in all the tribes would have act
ed differentl
y; he clung to that thought now, too late. He had held the bulk of the tribe outside on the grassland, used all his influence and command to make them wait while he sent in small bands of men afoot to chase the lurking Patrics out, like dogs who put up finches for the hawks.