Range of Ghosts (33 page)

*   *   *

For many days they traveled without trouble, and Samarkar felt the terror of that night ride through the mountains start to ebb. If she had ever been about to forget that they were running before a devil, though, Temur’s weariness, worry, and the way he checked the sky each moonrise would have kept it present in her mind.

He only spoke of it once, though, at dawn on their fourth day, when he came to her with bloody, seared meat—Hrahima’s kill—and hunkered beside her while she tore at it with knife and teeth. Payma had finished loading the mules, and only eating remained before they set out once more.

“Before my uncle Mongke died,” he said softly, “A rider could go from the Song border to Asitaneh in six weeks, with remounts and rest at the Khagan’s outposts along the way. But the roads are unmaintained, and the outposts emptied by the war.”

Hot juice ran down Samarkar’s throat as she chewed. She licked blood from the back of her hand. There was nothing she could say to address the loss in his voice, so she touched his hand and changed the subject. “We’ll reach the Celadon Highway in another quarter-moon or so.” She glanced at the skies, at the thirteen unchanging moons. “I mean, in a little more than a hand of days.”

If her failing manners made her less the once-princess in his eyes, it never showed in his courtesy. “Until we leave it for Nilufer’s Stone Steading. It might be better to move cross-country, where there is less chance of being overtaken by Songtsan’s men.”

“Or headed by al-Sepehr’s,” Hrahima said, from where she lay among long grasses, her broad hands propped on the meat-distended mound of her belly. The Cho-tse did not dine every night, but when she did, she dined in quantity. They would move more slowly today, in deference to Hrahima’s sluggishness, but they would make it up on the morrow.

The four of them were developing a sort of language of their own, a pidgin of Temur’s milk tongue and that of Samarkar and Payma, with Cho-tse words thrown in as Hrahima acquainted them with a few. But as the days wore on, Temur began insisting that they all practice Qersnyk, which was the language of Nilufer Khatun’s principality. Samarkar knew this was for Payma’s benefit, because Hrahima seemed to pick up human languages—“monkey-tongues,” as she called them—with ridiculous ease, and Samarkar already knew enough Qersnyk to get by.

But when Payma was elsewhere, Temur rode close to Samarkar and made her help him practice the Uthman tongue, dialects of which were spoken from Asmaracanda as far west as Ctesifon.

For the first hand of days, the mist-wreathed mountains still loomed so huge behind them it seemed Samarkar could just walk over there in an afternoon. Bit by bit, the haze of distance began to cut them off from their feet. Then they seemed to float over the earth, and Samarkar had to force herself to train her eyes on the blank and endless waves of grass crawling under the wind before her. Looking back was like pulling the stitches from an unhealed wound, too much like the view from her tower window in Prince Ryi’s palace.

On the tenth day they came to and crossed one river that had dropped from flood but was yet too deep to ford, though the horses could just about tiptoe across. Payma and Samarkar stripped and plunged into the water, which still ran cold from the snowpack that spawned it, though days of sun crossing the steppe had taken the worst of the edge off. Hrahima swam too, with apparent unconcern for how it plastered her fur to her body and twisted her ruff to dripping spikes. Temur, however, stood on Bansh’s saddle, keeping the water out of his boots, and held the women’s clothes above the flood.

The current was still fast enough to push them a
li
downstream in the time it took to cross, but fortunately there were gravel beaches along both sides of the ford. Samarkar stood up out of the water, dripping, gasping with cold, slapping her arms and thighs to feel anything in them. Payma was red all over her body, cradling her belly with one arm and wiping water from her face with the other, fingertips and toetips dusky with chill.

That was as far as they got that day, because having crossed, they camped on the far bank to build fires, spread their bodies and belongings in the afternoon sun, and fill their bottles against the next long dry stretch of steppe.

The river flowed northwest, and Samarkar wondered aloud if they could follow it to the inland sea whose trade fed the great port cities of Asmaracanda—once Uthman, now Qersnyk—and Asitaneh—which was Uthman still.

“Probably,” Temur said. He’d just finished rubbing the horses and mules dry with rough cloth and was giving them sweets mixed with mutton fat, for warmth and energy. “It’s the Red Stone River, unless I miss my guess.” He waved at the round rocks and jumbled boulders that filled its bed; they were indeed mostly of a dark pinkish granite. Then, as if what he’d said disturbed him, he turned away with some excuse about finding more driftwood for a fire.

Samarkar watched him go, frowning until she felt more than heard Hrahima come up beside her. The Cho-tse watched him go, and huffed. “Will you come with him to Asitaneh?” she asked. “Or will you stay with Payma and her son?”

Samarkar glanced at Payma. The princess’s hair was bleached to a reddish black by the sun, her face burnished as bronze as any Qersnyk girl’s. She was unselfconsciously laying wet clothes across clumps of grass to dry, like a peasant woman, her belly and breasts and back bare to the warmth of the sun. The dark wings of vultures drifted lazily overhead in the heat of the day, and Samarkar—reluctant though she was to succumb to it—felt a still peace steal over her.

“Asitaneh?” she said. “I thought once we found safety for Payma, he was raising a Qersnyk army to oust his uncle and wrest his woman away from your necromancer priest.”
And make himself Khan or Khagan, as the case may be.

Hrahima laughed, a
ch-ch-ch
with a rumble that seemed to come from deep in her chest. Samarkar remembered from legend that the Cho-tse could not lie; it was why they were so often paid as messengers. She wondered if that had something to do with the religion Hrahima claimed she had abandoned.

The Cho-tse said, “Do you recollect what he said about Ato Tesefahun?”

“Your patron? That his daughter married a horse-lord—”

Hrahima made a left-handed brushing gesture, as if dismissing the word
patron.
But she said, “Ato Tesefahun is Temur’s grandfather. Why do you think he has you teaching him the Uthman tongue? He means to go on to Asitaneh, to cross the White Sea and the Uthman Narrows and present himself to his grandfather.”

She paused. Samarkar was learning to distinguish that motion of Hrahima’s ears and whiskers as the Cho-tse equivalent of a smile. The tigers only curled their lips to snarl.

“I thought Ato Tesefahun was in Ctesifon.”

“He was,” Hrahima said. “But I am to meet him in Asitaneh.” She gestured to Temur’s back. “His grandfather will likely welcome him,” she said, confidingly. “Especially if he brings news of his mother.”

Samarkar pressed her hands together. “Don’t you think it strange—coincidental—that you met him, and me, as you did?”

Hrahima shrugged. Her tail lashed. “My people would say there is no strangeness. No coincidence in destiny.”

“But you don’t believe in destiny. Even when it presents itself at your door?”

The Cho-tse bent, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the rushing river. The smile left her ears. “Ah,” she said. “You remembered.”

Whatever Samarkar might have said next, she lost it in the shriek of a bird of prey. Something big beat blue-gray wings against the sky, mobbed by vultures behaving as Samarkar had never seen vultures behave. The larger bird side-slipped below the carrion fowl, as in turn they folded wings and dive-bombed it like angry hawks. Samarkar heard the impacts clearly, each time it failed to dodge the assaults. She winced as one last vulture struck the larger bird, knocking it in a tumble of limp plumage from the sky.

Instantly, Hrahima was off in pursuit, leaping through tall grass. A moment later, she returned, carrying some crested raptor that Samarkar did not recognize by its long, broken neck.

“What’s that?”

Hrahima shrugged.

Temur had somehow appeared beside them. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “Vultures attacking a—what is that?”

Hrahima held it up, pulling a wing wide to display the span. “Food?”

*   *   *

In her new freedom—if you could call veiled anonymity in such an inescapable fastness as Ala-Din “freedom”—Edene toiled with all her will. It was better than thinking, and Saadet’s company was pleasant. Because they did not share a language, Saadet had to first show Edene every task and how it was done. But Edene learned quickly, and in short order they began exchanging a few words. They developed their own shorthand language, and through it, Edene began to learn a little of the Uthman tongue.

At least there was enough sky, stretched out on all sides, even if it was the wrong color. And at least she had the filthy, exhausting, but ultimately rewarding work of caring for the mewed birds to distract her. She had always enjoyed caring for animals over other work. Now she lost herself in it, scrubbing and carrying as her belly swelled, and tried not to remember that she toiled as a slave.

She particularly enjoyed working with the male rukh. She felt a bond to him, in the clipped wings and chains he wore physically and she in her heart.

Though she worked almost ceaselessly, like any Qersnyk woman bearing, she still found time to explore the bastion of the Nameless—and to learn what she could of the group. They brought her to services, where she knelt with the other women, divided from the men by filigreed barriers. She heard al-Sepehr’s prayers in Uthman and learned a few more words, but not enough to understand the sense of the thing. His charisma moved her, though, and she noticed he still made time to dine with her a few times in a hand of days.

So it was not too unexpected when on one sunny day he came to her—rather than sending Saadet or a servant—and said, “Come and dine in my quarters today.”

Edene, who had just come in from bringing water to the rukh—which she did from beneath a metal grate, lest he decide to snatch up one of his attendants and make a meal of her—looked from al-Sepehr to her own sweat-soaked robes. She had sweated into her veil until it stuck against her face, but she knew better than to pick it away. She could not quite keep herself from covering the small rise of her belly with her hand, however. Qersnyk women knew about being raided away, willing or no, by men of other tribes. Edene’s own mother had been brought to the Tsareg clan by a husband who had cut her and her cart out of a traveling band.

If he kept that ring in the pocket of his robe, this might be her best chance to get it.

“When I have cleaned myself,” she said. And an hour later, she met him in his own austere chamber.

She knew not all the monks were celibate; some practiced with each other, some upon the women of the stronghold. To her surprise, however, al-Sepehr offered her no attentions beyond conversation and spiced lamb over some pearls of flour and water—dumplings the size of grains of sand. He made polite conversation, poured her tea, and averted his eyes from her face when she lowered her veil to place morsels of food in her mouth.

At one point, when he rose to fetch water, she took a moment to glance around his chamber. Spare, as she had noticed. Far plainer than her own. There was a low pallet, barely padded over stone. There was a chest at its foot.

And on the chest in a wooden tray lay a few personal articles, including a plain beaten band of green gold.

Edene might just have been about to touch it—her fingers trembling, twisted together behind her back, like those of a child who knows she’s not supposed to steal a preemptive bite of supper—when al-Sepehr returned with a tray of ices.

“I remembered you liked these,” he said, as she stepped away from the bed, grateful for the veil that hid her expression. “And it’s so hot out.”

She went back to her room frowning and contemplative. Her feet ached and her back ached, but her nausea was ebbing. If she was going to escape, she must do so now while she could still move and, no matter how uncomfortably, still run.

All the monks of the place spent their time each day in copying when they were not in the practice yard fighting. She began to get a sense of the rhythms of the place, the hours when things happened, the hours when things changed.

Until one day the pattern changed.

Edene awoke when dawn crept through the arched window of her room, painting the whitewashed stone window-ledge in rose and gold. Later in the day, the awnings would keep the afternoon sun from doing the same, but for now she had the glow. With it came unaccustomed raucous sounds from the courts below.

When she went to the window, veiling her face first, and leaned out, she witnessed a familiar kind of chaos. Everywhere, men bustled. They strapped on swords and piled goods into packs. They strode about with apparent ferocity of purpose, though Edene had no idea where they were going, and sometimes she saw the same one cross a courtyard repeatedly, seemingly at random.

These were monks and not Qersnyk, but an army preparing to march to battle looked the same at Ala-Din as it did among the white-houses of Qarash.

This,
Edene thought.
This is my chance.

*   *   *

Beyond the river, the steppe continued. It receded until it merged with the sky, gold and green, stretching out until Samarkar felt herself lost in the heart of something so vast and boundless that she took refuge in that emptiness she’d discovered in the dark under the Citadel. If she was nothing, then no vastness could make her small.

In that there was peace, as in the endless ripples of wind across tossing grasses racing to meet them, the endless bands of white clouds scudding across a windowpane sky. Her hair tangled in the ceaseless breezes; it blew from its braid and trailed across her eyes. They saw animals again—more Indrik-zver, antelope, wild horses with their dirty-black manes and dust-colored hides, the omnipresent vultures, and a steppe eagle with wings so broad Samarkar mistook it for a vulture, until Temur pointed out how its wings made the shape of a bow, not a triangle. Songbirds and crows harried at it as it flew, dwarfed by the spread of its wings.