Hegira (7 page)

Kiril turned to the Khemite. “You're a Momadan, you should know the Prophet forbids such actions.”

“Then why is Paradise equipped with such pleasures for the faithful? Momad forbade those excesses that would weaken the body and prevent his people from performing their duties on Earth.”

Kiril shook his head. “It is a sin!”

“I don't understand the word,” Bar-Woten said.

“You wouldn't. Not with the conscience of thousands of murders — how many rapes, how many debauches without payment?”

The Ibisian put down his lap towel and reached across with a broad, wiry hand to grab Kiril's lapels. “I grudge no one's beliefs, but no one judges me. So I am a devil. I've been told that many times. I have never stolen or raped. I have never dishonored in battle. That could not be said for all Ibisians. I may be evil, but my evil has yet to rot my standards. Understand? It may eat at me every day, but the fiber remains, and I intend to purge myself with the knowledge we find. My crimes are my own concern.” He let Kiril go and cursed under his breath. “Eat, don't talk.”

Kiril sat trembling and wild-eyed at the table for a long breath, then stood and walked out. Barthel looked after him sympathetically and suggested the Bey shouldn't have lost his temper.

“He's young,” Bar-Woten said. “I'll apologize when he's ready but I won't beg forgiveness.”

Kiril ran to the end of the hall trying not to listen to the sounds that came from a few of the rooms. He walked stiffly down the stairs into the foyer, then stomped through the anteroom and stood in the slushy courtyard, trying to decide what to do. He had had enough of his own insanity.

The livery boy brought his horse out for him upon request and helped him adjust the saddle. Kiril didn't care if the others were going to be left with fewer provisions. “Let them spend their money on that instead of another debauch!” he whispered harshly to himself. The boy looked up at him with curious eyes. “Vasheesh?” he asked in the Pashkesh tongue — a tip?

“Mafeesh,” Kiril answered. “My pockets are empty.”

He spurred his horse forward and left the courtyard.

Horses were crowding the crest of the road. Kiril stopped short at the bottom of the inclined street. In front of the horses stumbled a party of bloody and tattered men in white uniforms, much like what he had first seen Bar-Woten wearing. The drive was heading in his direction, right for the courtyard. The men on horseback were Mediwevan.

The purge had crossed the border. The Holy Pontiff was running his quarry to ground even in foreign fields.

Shouts arose when they spotted him. “Stop!” And a shot rang out. For a long, paralyzed moment he stood his ground, wanting to cry out that he was one of them, that he was a Mediwevan. But he knew it was crazy to face them even as an accomplice. His insanity had come to the only possible end.

He pulled his horse around and galloped back into the courtyard. “Bar-Woten!” he called. “Barthel! Mount up! They're here!”

He saw the Ibisian's face in a small window on the second floor. He disappeared. Barthel replaced him. “Bring out the other horse!” the Khemite ordered.

Kiril dismounted and stopped. How long would it take the soldiers to get to the bottom of the street with men running before them? “Kristos!” he panted. He ran to the stables, pushed the boy aside, and knocked his hand on the beam beside each stall, trying to find the other horse. It was still blanketed but unsaddled. “The saddle!” he shouted to the boy. “The saddle!”

“Mafeesh,” the boy answered in a falsetto, waggling his hips. “Bastardi!”

Kiril threw open the stall door and avoided the animal's tentative back-kick, whapping it across the nose with the flat of his hand to make it behave. He pushed it out of the stall and breathed his thanks it was still haltered. The Ibisian ran into the stables with clothes dangling and took the horse from him. Kiril spied the saddle on a rack, whipped it off with surprising strength, and tossed it on the ground beside the horse. “Is there time?” Bar-Woten asked.

“How the hell should I know?” Kiril shouted.

He walked backward from the stable trying to keep his eyes on all things at once — the saddling, the courtyard, the frightened-looking stable boy who had stepped into more trouble than he'd expected. Kiril stumbled in his crabwise gait and fell on his side and hands, scraping himself and wetting his clothes. Cursing, he stood up again and ran into the doorway of the brothel. Girls and old men and women were flooding the anteroom. He couldn't break through the crowd. “I have the bags!” Barthel called from the other side.

“Then come this side with them for God's sake!”

The Khemite pushed and kicked his way through. He emerged with the leather pouches and they turned to the courtyard. They were just in time to see the chained Ibisians being shoved ahead of the mounted troops. The press of the crowd in the room behind pushed the two into the courtyard like corks from a bottle. The wet stones were suddenly crowded with running, shrieking whores. The Ibisian prisoners backed off as though they'd stepped in a nest of ants. The horses of their captors reared and plunged. The archway to the courtyard was a chaos of neighing animals and shouting men.

Bar-Woten rode out of the stable with his pistol in one hand. “Mount up!” he shouted to Kiril. “Get the other horse!” he told Barthel. Kiril took his offered hand, slipped on the stirrup, and nearly fell on his back, but found himself lifted bodily with great strain on his arm into the saddle, where the hard leather curve put excruciating pressure on his groin. To make it worse, Bar-Woten kicked the horse forward.

The courtyard had a small gate in the rear, barely tall enough for a riderless horse. The Ibisian headed for that, and Barthel followed. Kiril swung down only too gladly to open the latch. Then, remounting and hanging over the side, he plunged with the Ibisian through the gate into an alleyway crowded with gawking Lucifans. “Aside!” Bar-Woten shouted. “Aside, damn you!”

Behind them the troops found themselves mired in stumbling, groaning prisoners and screaming women. The Grand Pimp, splendid in his flowing red and gold robes, came out briefly to see what the confusion was, gawped and ran back to his inner office.

The alley opened onto another street paralleling the main boulevard. They turned on it and rode as fast as they could, scattering pedestrians and sidestepping carts. Kiril looked back and saw a pair of Mediwevans leap from a sidestreet and ride hard after. “They're all behind us!” he cried out. Bar-Woten shook his head angrily and turned onto another street, then around to the gate thoroughfare. “I hope that confuses them,” he called back to Kiril.

Kiril looked behind. He couldn't see anyone but Barthel. The gate ahead looked calm. The custom house had two guards standing idly in front, smoking long-handled pipes and talking. They saw the riders galloping toward them and ran inside to grab weapons, but the two horses were out the gate before they could return. More soldiers mounted and followed, almost colliding with their colleagues, who had tracked the chase back to the gate after the detour.

A dirt road ran around the outside of the huts clustered below the walls. They followed it, still riding at bone-jarring speed, and rounded the first major curve of the wall. Barthel called from behind. “They're following!”

In five minutes, they were on the north side of Ubidharm. Their luck was holding — a broad, well-paved road led away from the city, skirted the aqueduct, and rose into the northern mountains of the Uhuru Massif. The riders behind gave up in a few kilometers. The Mediwevans couldn't get out of the city gates — front or rear — before the chase was futile.

Bar-Woten slowed his pace after diverting them onto a dirty byroad. They dismounted next to a tumbling snow stream and walked the horses until they were calm and less heated. They watered them sparingly. Bar-Woten then let Kiril ride as he ran beside for a few kilometers.

Their prospects on the road ahead — with depleted supplies and sparse countryside — were not cheering. Barthel counted the rounds of ammunition in the pistols and the two boxes they had purchased in Mediweva. They had a little over sixty rounds and seven arrows to fit a fold-up bow that had been part of Bar-Woten's kit. “We're going to be limited,” Kiril said when the count was finished.

“We won't be able to fight it out if that's a tiling to worry about,” Bar-Woten agreed. “But I'm a fair shot with a pistol. Yourself?”

“An amateur,” Kiril said. “You were stupid to take me along. What good can I do you?”

“You'll prove your importance in time,” Bar-Woten said. They mounted again.

“I'll just have to grow up a little, hm?” He said it angrily, flushing at the thought that this man would think him immature. Bar-Woten didn't answer.

The road turned from a defile into a ledge, following the circumference of a wedge-shaped peak whose cap was lost in cloud. They saw that the main road, now fifty or sixty meters below, came to an abrupt end. “Our luck is holding so far,” Bar-Woten said. “Let's hope we don't run out of road this way.”

The Ibisian fell asleep very late, shivering and half-hallucinating fires and warmth. The three huddled together; their blankets kept them from freezing as night temperatures dropped below zero, but didn't keep them comfortable. Bar-Woten slipped in and out of a dream about his father and a trip to the Obelisk in Ibis. As he remembered it, they had passed the lakes whose birds gave Ibis its name, vast seas and clouds of white feathers, and taken the long road through the plantations of Thosala to the spire. In the dream people crowded around the circumference of the spire and stared up. The walls of the Obelisk were covered with writing, his father told him, but as they grew closer and pushed through the crowd — which was filled with mounted Mediwevans looking for children to harass — he saw the wall go blank. “It's a sign,” a tall woman near him said. “When the walls go blank it means there are no more reasons for people to exist, because there's nothing left to read.”

“The books,” Bar-Woten said aloud.

Kiril peered sleepily from his own mummy of blankets.

“No,” the woman in the dream said. “They're blank, too. No more reason to read, no more people to read.”

The crowds slowly vanished, first legs and arms and then torsos. The heads were the last to go. One head, his father, it seemed (though they were all hairless and hard to recognize), told him the words of the Obelisks still existed in their memories, and they would not be eradicated until they forgot. “No!” he said. “I'm a little boy, I don't know enough to be saved, that can't be the way it is!”

“Then why are you disappearing?” the head said. “Look, all of you is gone now.”

Kiril watched the squirming Ibisian and wondered what bloody nightmares he was experiencing. No doubt they were about battles and debauchery. Then he drifted off into his own fitful dreams.

Their trackers never appeared again. For six days they journeyed across the cold passes, and on the morning of the seventh day — which Barthel said was symbolic for Kristians and Momadans — they looked over the side of the road into a broad green valley. Several kilometers below, the rift extended into bluish haze, ending at the shores of the largest body of water they had ever seen. It reached to the horizon, and between distant peaks ahead, they could see its gray-blue line.

From the altitude the valley was a patchwork of farmland and unworked or dormant fields. On the shoreline a city rose. It looked as large as Madreghb.

The land reminded Bar-Woten of Ibis. Near sea level the ground was rich and fertile, and the slopes of the foothills were covered with terraced paddies and forests of camphor-wood and pine. He told them of his days in Ibis — stories Barthel had never heard before — and the memories made him feel warm and mellow. Twenty years of battle, misery, and bloodshed hadn't obscured the joy he had known as a child.

The weather was too warm and pleasant for any of them to feel gloomy. Coming through one last scattered patch of cloud into the valley proper, they chatted cheerfully.

Kiril forgot his distress in Ubidharm. He was somewhat ashamed of his prudery. He talked freely about his training as a scrittori. The balloons and their use along the walls of the Obelisk fascinated Bar-Woten, who asked many questions.

The road had fallen into disrepair in the mountains and was now a token trail with ruts where carts ran. Their horses were sweating and tired, so they stopped in the shade of feathery yellow-green trees near the trail for a brief rest. The wind whistling through the upper branches made Kiril drowsy, but Bar-Woten stayed alert. Barthel suggested a short nap, and Kiril agreed, but the Ibisian stood by the horses looking across the valley. He wanted to avoid more surprises.

After an hour's rest they continued along the farm sideroads until the city was little more than a kilometer away. Barthel examined the valley walls behind them. There was still that connection to make — why were some valleys unlivable to the Faithful? Because the darkness was too deep in them? Why did this valley fill with light and warmth? Others certainly didn't, no matter what season.

They made a small camp as night fell. Kiril greeted a few carriages that rolled past them on the improved roads. They were curious vehicles, orange as a darkling zenith, with glossy lacquer over wood, carved and embellished with inlaid shellwork and covered with a tapestry-like top fringed with tied leather ornaments. The beasts pulling them were not horses, but bluish and horselike with a touch of wild moose. Bar-Woten said he had never seen animals like them. The carriages rattled past, friendly and unconcerned.

The next morning they entered the city and discovered it was named Mur-es-Werd. It was truly a city, not a walled hideaway like Ubidharm. Its commerce extended up and down the coast of the sea for thousands of kilometers. This was the heart and the blood of Mundus Lucifa, then, not the little patch of mountain communities. Kiril had never heard of Mur-es-Werd, nor of the ocean beyond, and his ignorance

distressed him. Obviously his life in Mediweva had been extremely insular,