Naamah's Blessing (40 page)

“You found word of them?” I asked.

The older
pochteca
clapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Pochotl did. Took a lot of asking. Your prince and his men passed the city by, but Pochotl finally found someone who saw the white-faced strangers on the road.”

“Thank you,” I said to the younger trader. “I am grateful.”

Pochotl went so far as to offer me a brief, unsmiling nod of acknowledgment.

Since it was too late to break camp, we resolved to pass another night on the plain. The men drew straws for sentry duty, the losers grumbling. Early on, some had questioned the necessity of posting sentries, but Temilotzin and Bao had been equally insistent. Now that
we’d passed beyond the boundaries of Emperor Achcuatli’s protection, no one questioned the practice.

I retired to the small tent I shared with Bao, a concession to modesty that Balthasar Shahrizai had surprisingly insisted on. The others rolled themselves in cloaks or mantles and slept beneath the stars.

Worn out by a day of worrying, I fell asleep quickly and slept without dreams.

I awoke to the sound of someone hissing my name, and the knowledge that someone else was in our tent.

For a moment, I was disoriented, imagining myself once more in a tent high in the thin air of the Abode of the Gods, with Manil Datar bent on committing heresy on me. But Bao came out of sleep moving quick as a snake, rolling over and whipping his staff in the direction of the intruder.

The shadowy figure pulled back. “Hold, for Elua’s sake, hold! It’s me, Denis!”

“Denis?” I sat upright, rubbing my eyes. “What is it?”

From what I could make out of his expression, it was grim. “It’s happened again. Someone’s betrayed us.”

“What?” My thoughts were fuzzy. “How?”

Denis’ voice trembled a bit. “I just found Clemente DuBois with his throat slit. He was on sentry duty.”

“What?”
I was fully awake now. “Why would anyone—?”

“Only one reason to kill a sentry.” Bao scrambled out of the tent, pushing past Denis, staff in hand. “We’re about to be attacked. Moirin, call your twilight and stay safely out of the way. Denis, get armed,
now
!”

Denis gulped and nodded.

Without waiting to see if I obeyed him, Bao raced to the center of our campsite, where the banked coals of our campfire glowed faintly beneath the silvery light of the full moon high overhead. He began banging furiously with his staff on the large iron pot resting on the ashes, sounding a clanging alarm. “Ambush!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Get up, get armed! Now, now, now!”

Not far away on the plain, howls of anger rose in reply.

Ah, gods! All that armor—the chain-mail shirts, the brigandines, helmets, vambraces, and greaves—that our men had labored under for so long had been removed for the night. Mayhap half of our sleeping fighters responded with alacrity, reaching to don whatever was closest at hand.

The other half blinked in stupefaction. Ignoring Bao’s order, I grabbed the nearest D’Angeline and shook him. Spotting links of chain-mail glinting in the moonlight, I hauled his armored jerkin free and threw it in his lap. “Get up, get armed,
now
!”

Moving sluggishly, he struggled into it.

Bao spotted me. “Moirin,
call your twilight
!”

“I’m doing more good this way!” I retorted, shoving a helmet on the fellow’s head.

Seeing what I was about, Septimus Rousse began to emulate me. Between the two of us, we managed to get a dozen or so of our men upright and partially armed. Those who were more alert worked at lightning speed to pull brigandines over their chain-mail and buckle valuable greaves and vambraces in place.

Temilotzin, effortlessly prepared and ready, leaned carelessly on his throwing spear and peered across the moonlit plain. “Here they come,” he remarked. In one smooth move, he fitted the butt of his spear into the throwing-tool and hurled it into the night.

There was a lone choked cry, followed by a fresh chorus of angry howls and the sound of feet pounding.

With a fierce grin, Temilotzin hefted his studded club. “And here they are!”

With that, the night erupted in chaos as our attackers fell upon us. I dashed into the tent to retrieve my bow and quiver, then retreated some distance from the fray, trying to identify a suitable target.

It was impossible. It was all hand-to-hand fighting, the combatants too closely engaged to risk a shot. It appeared our attackers outnumbered us, but not by a great many. Bao was a dervish in the thick of battle, his bamboo staff moving too quickly to track. Temilotzin
was singing a war-song, his obsidian-studded club rising and falling, his sandaled feet stomping out a rhythm known only to him. Here and there, D’Angelines I couldn’t identify were acquitting themselves with skill.

But some had fallen, easily recognized by their fair skin in the moonlight. I felt sick at heart.

“Moirin!” Septimus Rousse appeared beside me, pointing across the plain. Beyond the outskirts of the battle, a pair of dark figures were racing for our picket-line. “They’re after the horses!”

“Ah, no!” Giving the battlefield a wide berth, I ran to intercept them, my heart beating in my throat. I loosed my first arrow at a dead run, and it went wide. Skidding to a halt, I nocked another. The nearest fellow was trying to grab a frightened pack-horse’s halter and had his back to me.

Swallowing hard, I loosed my bow and shot him from behind. He toppled forward and lay still. The pack-horse squealed and tossed its head, tugging at the picket-rope.

The second fellow blinked in consternation, then came at me with a roar, raising a stone-headed war-club high overhead.

Reaching into my quiver, I nocked another arrow and shot him, too.

With a look of profound surprise, he sat down hard, glanced once at his chest, then slumped sideways.

Septimus caught up with me, breathing hard. “Nice work, my lady.”

“My thanks, lord captain.” All along the picket-line, horses whickered and stamped in protest. I caught sight of a third figure, stooped and lurking beyond the horses’ shifting bodies. Nocking and drawing another arrow, I moved around the end of the line to get a clean shot at him.

The figure straightened, an obsidian dagger in one hand.

I stared at Pochotl.
“You?”

He permitted himself a tight grimace and said nothing.

“Lazy, greedy, stupid, good for nothing sister-son!” Eyahue emerged
from the moonlit darkness, ranting with fury. Gnarled hands extended, he flung himself on his nephew, clamping his fingers around Pochotl’s throat and attempting to throttle him. “You did this, didn’t you? No-good, cowardly, idiot excuse for a
pochteca
! You disgrace us!”

With an effort, Septimus Rousse pried Eyahue loose and subdued him in a firm grip. Rivulets of tears ran down the old fellow’s creased cheeks, but his expression had turned to one of traditional Nahuatl stoicism, cold and hard.

“You disgrace us,” he repeated with dignity.

“You are a fool, old man,” Pochotl muttered. “Shall we both suffer for the Emperor’s whims?”

I moved between them, keeping an arrow trained on the traitor.

Behind us, the sounds of battle were beginning to fade. A cry in an unknown tongue was raised and repeated.

“The Cloud People are retreating,” Eyahue said in a flat tone. “Tonight, we are victorious.”

I wondered at what price.

FORTY-FOUR

S
ix dead, several others wounded.

That was the price of our victory.

Sensing through the bond of our shared
diadh-anam
that I was alive and well, Bao turned toward tending the wounded. As a result, the spotted warrior Temilotzin was the first to seek me out and discover the prisoner I guarded.

“What passes here, little warrior?” he asked in an ominous tone rendered all the more ominous by the fact that he was splashed with blood from head to foot. “What has this one done?”

I gestured with the point of my arrow. “Betrayed us.”

With a guttural roar, Temilotzin hoisted his obsidian-studded club. “Then he will die!”

“No, please!” Lowering my bow, I caught at his arm. It felt like tugging on an oak log. “We need to question him.”

Reluctantly, Temilotzin relented. The expression on his blood-spattered face was implacable in the moonlight. If I’d had any doubt that a stone face and a stone heart lay beneath his easygoing manner, it vanished then and there. He jerked his chin at Eyahue. “And him? Did he betray us, too?”

“Never!” the old man said with fierce indignation.

“I believe he speaks the truth,” I said. “But we need to know more. Can you guard them without killing anyone?”

He grunted. “I will try.”

Accompanied by Septimus Rousse, I went to help take stock of the situation. Brice de Bretel and another level-headed L’Agnacite fellow named Jean Grenville were working to stoke the campfire and give us more light by which to assess the damage to the wounded. Balthasar Shahrizai, who looked pale but otherwise unharmed, was directing other uninjured men to set up sentry posts farther afield where their night vision wouldn’t be compromised by the blazing fire.

It didn’t surprise me that Balthasar had maintained the presence of mind to fully arm himself. For all his insouciance, there was steel in him.

Aside from poor Clemente DuBois, the dead were those who
hadn’t
kept their wits, and whom Septimus and I hadn’t been able to aid in time. All five had plunged into battle bare-headed or with unbuckled helmets that had come loose in the fray. The war-clubs of the Cloud People may have been crude weapons, but they were capable of wielding them with deadly force on unprotected flesh.

Bao, kneeling beside a groaning warrior with a broken arm, glanced up at our arrival. “Moirin. You didn’t listen to me, did you?”

It occurred to me that if Bao wasn’t so skilled at keeping his opponents out of reach, it could well be him lying among the dead with a crushed skull. “No, I did not.” I pointed toward the picket-line. “Which is the reason we still have pack-horses, and Temilotzin is standing guard over the traitor Pochotl. Now, tell me what to do.”

“Pochotl, eh?” He sounded tired.

I nodded. “He’s safe enough for now. Tell me how I can help.”

“And me,” Septimus added.

Bao gathered himself. “I need the sharpest blade you can find. We’re going to have to cut off his brigandine. And branches, as straight as you can find. I’ll need to splint his arm once I get it set.”

“I’ll help.” Denis de Toluard limped into the circle of firelight, nursing a bruised thigh. “I understand a bit, at least in theory. Raphael used to discuss his practice with me.”

“Good,” Bao said with curt approval.

The aftermath of battle is a terrible thing. In some ways, this
was not the worst I had known. The scale of devastation wrought on human flesh by the weapons of the Divine Thunder in Ch’in was almost more than the mind could encompass.

But this time,
I
was responsible.

And we were deep in hostile, unfamiliar territory. Our victory was tenuous at best, and the road ahead of us long and hard. The dead would be buried far from home. There was no respite for the wounded, no safe haven where they could heal.

I found the sharpest knife in the camp—one of Balthasar Shahrizai’s well-honed daggers. I held Arnaud Latrelle’s good hand and hummed one of Sister Gemma’s healing Eisandine tunes to the best of my ability while Bao sawed relentlessly at the suede arm of his brigandine with Balthasar’s dagger.

He was a young one, Arnaud Latrelle, younger than me. “Guess I should have taken the time to put on chain-mail?” he gasped.

I stroked his sweat-damp brow. “Next time, aye, that would be a good idea.”

He choked back a scream of pain when Bao and Denis maneuvered the broken bones of his forearm into place, lashing them firm with strips of torn cloth and straight pine-branches Septimus Rousse had procured from a nearby copse.

There were others.

I checked the dilated pupils of two men struck hard on the steel helm by the war-clubs of the Cloud People, soothing them while they retched and vomited.

I comforted another with a broken clavicle, who bit his lip and writhed with agony as Bao eased his chain-mail shirt over his head, Denis holding his legs to keep him as still as possible while Bao wrapped him in makeshift bandages to stabilize the break.

All in all, it was a long night.

Dawn broke over the plain, finding us all weary and exhausted. Brice and some of the others had shifted the corpses of the slain Cloud People warriors some distance from the camp. Our own dead had been arranged in a somber row.

“Should we…?” Balthasar gestured uncertainly at them.

“Bury them?” Bao gave a tired nod. “We can’t leave them for scavengers.”

“What of their weapons and armor?” Balthasar looked ill. “No one wants them to fall into enemy hands, but we can’t afford the extra weight.”

“No.” Bao pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “And if we bury them in armor…” He dropped his hands and glanced across the empty plain toward the Cloud People settlement atop the mountain. It looked quiet and peaceful from a distance, but appearances were deceiving.