Range of Ghosts (4 page)

Temur took up the tea in both hands and bowed once more over it to the matriarch of the Tsareg clan. “I am grateful.”

“It’s nothing,” she demurred, in a voice stronger than her cracked appearance would have hinted. She pushed a platter of boiled, fatty lamb across the cleared ground toward them. It had been picked over, Temur could see, but there was quite a bit of meat and fat left.

The tea was salty. He sipped it, then drank down the broth and the
airag
. With chopsticks from his belt, he worried loose morsels of lamb, dipped them in the tea, and ate. Sparingly, despite his hunger, for there were not that many more lambs where this one had come from—perhaps it had been stillborn, so early in the year?—and the Tsareg had a lot of women and boys to feed.

Beside him, Edene ate with similar reserve. The Tsareg watched them closely, all polite attention, and Temur found it difficult to chew and swallow under the regard of so many friendly eyes. After a few bites, though, Altantsetseg
humph
ed her satisfaction and turned back to partitioning out food among her horde of descendants and collateral relatives. As the edge came off his hunger, Temur enjoyed the leisure to watch others. Two of the youngest who were old enough to feed themselves—a boy and girl who might have been twins—argued over the remains of a plate of hard-baked dumplings that must have been wrapped in leather and buried in the ashes the night before.

Temur sipped his tea, eyes half closed, and allowed himself the luxury of imagining himself in his mother’s white-house, watching younger siblings or nieces and nephews quarrel. True, there was no white-house here—the Eternal Sky stretched overhead, and there was little point in setting up a white-house every night only to pull it down again, when simple hide tents would do—but that seemed like a quibble. This was more comfort than he’d known since Mongke Khagan died the previous summer—so much more comfort than the rough fire circles of a military campaign, if there was less food to be had.

The comfort and the companionship settled some deep craving in him. Something he hadn’t even been truly aware of until now, except as a sort of disembodied longing.

He set the
airag
down and picked up the broth, which had been replenished. There was no sense in letting it make him maudlin. What was gone was gone, and the future that unrolled before him was a mystery road whose destination only the Eternal Sky knew.

He glanced over at Edene and caught her looking at him over the top of her tea bowl. She ducked her head again, spilling tea, and whatever he had been about to say was sanded from his mind by sudden squealing, as the girl twin piled onto her teasing brother, yanking his long, ink-black ponytail.

Temur sighed and shook his head. Altantsetseg was grinning at him toothlessly. He raised his eyebrows in a question he wasn’t sure how to put into words.

She shrugged and tossed a lamb bone to one of the massive, lion-maned mastiffs that lay comfortably far from the fire. The Bankhar dogs were still in their winter coats, their black sides and enormous red-gold feet almost invisible under puffs of undercoat plate-matted like that of musk oxen. Bankhar were called the “four-eyed dogs” for the gold spots marking their eyebrows, said to be able to keep evil spirits at bay, and now the eyes and eyespots of every dog around the fire were trained on Altantsetseg.

Temur, amused, watched as she prised loose another bone for the pack. Dogs were not livestock; they were honored as near-brothers. No clan or tribe could long survive without its dogs—mastiffs to guard and shepherds to tend—and both breeds served as loyal hunting companions.

A good dog was sky-buried with as much honor as a good horse.

She gave the bone to Temur, and Temur—aware that this, too, was a test—offered it to the nearest mastiff, a great-headed dog whose yellowed teeth showed alongside a lolling tongue. Even a third of an
ayl
from the fire, he was too hot in his winter coat.

Gravely, the big dog stood and came to Temur, softly placing feet as big as a lion’s paws. Gravely, he accepted the bone.

Despite the heat of the fire, he lay down beside Temur to dispatch with it.

Over the splintering bone, Temur heard Altantsetseg say, “You have a good eye for a dog. That is Sube, the ‘Needle’s-Eye.’ He’s the best get of my old ruddy bitch.”

Temur looked up and smiled. “He was closest,” he said.

“He’s Edene’s dog, you know.” She picked shreds of meat from the bones with her fingertips and tucked them between teeth still strong if worn. “Maybe the way to her heart is through wooing him.”

“Grandmother,”
Edene said. But she covered her mouth with her hand and looked down as if her face were burning.

Temur looked from one to the other. “I know better than to war with women.”

Edene looked at him directly, her eyebrows lifting. “As if you have a choice,” she said archly, “when women would war over you.”

*   *   *

The open air burned cold and wide, blue-white with winter, around the wings of Shahruz’s mount. The wind of her passage cut through the heavy weave of his trousers, plastering the cloth to his legs. It seared his knuckles in his gloves and struck tears from his eyes, until he remembered the wood-framed, wool-padded goggles that hung on their braided cord around his neck. Even with those, and several wraps of his veil protecting his face, his cheeks and lips chapped and peeled.

The rukh’s body rose and fell between her wings as wide as sails, her crested head on its long neck stretched out before her. Shahruz straddled that neck just before her shoulders, legs bound to the saddle with an assortment of straps, and pretended the reins were anything but a suggestion. The wind served al-Sepehr because it feared his retribution, not because she was in any way tame or trained.

Lesser rukhs—the young of the mother bird, some no greater than falcons—flocked around them, sometimes landing to rest on their parent’s back and shoulders. The rukh herself was tireless, sky spanning. She never hesitated nor varied the clockwork of her wings.

And so they beat east, into the setting sun of the Uthman Caliphate, until they crossed the broad but bounded waters of the White Sea, and the sun was abruptly behind them, setting in the west. As they flew over the sprawl of Asmaracanda at the mouth of the Mother River, they entered Qersnyk-held lands, and the sky reflected it.

The rukh brought Shahruz so close to the sky he thought he could almost touch it, raise a hand to rip through its folds and catch a glimpse of whatever wonders lay beyond. But of course that was illusion: Not even a rukh—perhaps not even a dragon—could fly so high as to touch the tent of the heavens where it draped the Shattered Pillars and the Steles of the Sky.

From here, though, Shahruz could see both mountain ranges before they widened away to the north and southeast and were lost to blue distance. In the throat of the funnel they formed, the Mother River ran down to Asmaracanda, and beyond Asmaracanda the level steppe stretched to where haze concealed its reaches.

The rukh flew on through nightfall, and Shahruz dozed on her back. He never quite slept—far behind, in Ala-Din, his sister Saadet slept for him. He could feel her there, the warmth of her dreams as she gave him her rest and took his tiredness into herself. She asked no questions, though she must have felt the wind tangling his veils and the cold cutting his bones. She just warmed him and ate for him and gave him her womanly strength without stint.

There were too many moons, scattered across the sky like empty plates. When the sun rose, it shone into Shahruz’s eyes.

Not too long after, he spotted the distant smudge of a caravanserai. Perhaps a half day’s walk; not bad at all, and from the way the rukh’s head turned toward it with interest, he knew it was not deserted. Her keen eyesight told her there were animals within—animals big enough to be worth eating.

Perhaps there would be men there worth hiring, as well. At least worth hiring for as long as they lasted.

It was a sad truth, Shahruz reflected, that the nature of war was such that not everyone could survive it.

3

When word of the fall of Qarash first reached Tsarepheth, the Once-Princess Samarkar did not hear of it. On that cold spring day, Tsarepheth shone bright with prayer banners strung between its granite towers. Its walls hummed loud with mills that turned relentlessly under the force of waterwheels hung horizontally, borrowing the strength of the swift Tsarethi. Trade bustled through cobbled streets in the swinging belly of a crooked mountain valley.

Fourteen hundred
li
away, the center of creation shifted. The world’s mightiest empire fell, along with the walls of a place Samarkar would barely have recognized as a city, with its dusty paths and felted walls—though the beauty of the treasures those walls girdled round would have moved even a Rasan princess.

When the news of the fall of Qarash reached Tsarepheth, the Once-Princess Samarkar did not even know that a woman in red and saffron robes sat alongside her, because on that day Samarkar lay drowsy with poppy among rugs and bolsters in her room high up in the Citadel of wizards. Silk wraps wadded absorbent lint against a seeping wound low in her abdomen. When she woke—
if
she woke—she would no longer be the Once-Princess Samarkar. She would be the wizard Samarkar, and her training would begin in truth.

She had chosen to trade barrenness and the risk of death for the chance of strength. Real strength, her own. Not the mirror-caught power her father, his widow, her half brothers, or her dead husband might have happened to shine her way.

It seemed but a small sacrifice.

*   *   *

Samarkar was not sure how often she had opened her eyes before the time she managed to keep them open. A woman still sat by her bedside, and she had a fuzzy sense that that woman—or one like her—had been there for some time. Samarkar’s eyelids and lips stuck together; her tongue adhered to the roof of her mouth. Her belly cramped with emptiness and injury.

She peeled her mouth open to speak, but the only sound that emerged was a hiss of air. It must have been enough, because the woman turned. Samarkar saw now that it was Tsering-la, one of the teachers and mechanics and scholars—a wizard who was without magic of her own. Tsering’s black hair hung oiled and glossy over her shoulders, unbraided in her leisure. She wore a wizard’s high collar; it would be folly to let the uninitiated guess which sworn and neutered magician could defend herself with eldritch power and which could not.

No matter what, now Samarkar had earned that river-pearl-and-carved-jade collar. When she died, she would be buried in it. Whether the power blossomed in her empty belly or not.

Something of her own. Something she had bought with her own currency. Something that had not been given her.

“Don’t speak,” Tsering said. “I know what you need.”

Effortlessly she knelt on the thick rugs beside Samarkar’s mat. A tray of mahogany and gold held offering bowls and a pot. Into a round cup no bigger than the dish of her hand, Tsering poured faultless water, either filtered through layers of silk or drawn from some way upstream, where the Tsarethi’s tributaries crashed among the steep valleys of the mountains called the Steles of the Sky. Safe water, which would not transmit cholera.

Samarkar thoughtlessly reached out her left hand for the cup. If she could have made a sound, the stitch of pain in her abdomen would have had her cry aloud. Instead she gasped.

Tsering’s free hand fell gently on Samarkar’s shoulder, fingertips pressing her back against the bolsters. Samarkar had grown to womanhood scrambling up the slopes and across the ridges of the terraced fields, swimming the wild Tsarethi as befitted a princess of the Rasa dynasty. But even that slight pressure was more than she could resist.

“I will hold the water for you,” Tsering said. “You need
some
but still should not have too much. And no food yet.”

Samarkar nodded, grateful for even the small wetness on her lips, the three measured swallows she was now allowed. If the surgeon’s knife had perforated her intestine, she would probably be dying already. But there was no sense in taking risks, and the poppy destroyed her appetite anyway.

“My passionate thanks,” she said, when her tongue worked properly.

Tsering smiled and set the cup aside. She must have dipped a bit of felt in cool water, because now she bathed Samarkar’s face and scrubbed the crusts from her lashes. Samarkar sagged back on silk and wool and let her do it. The touch soothed and cooled, telling her by contrast how fevered she was still.

Fevered but awake and clear-headed. She was recovering.

The surgery was worse physically for women and emotionally for men, she had been told. Men almost always survived it. There were many fewer female wizards. In olden days, only those set aside as barren and those widowed and too old to bear had been allowed to present themselves before the Citadel of Tsarepheth. Now the surgery made wizardry an option for young widows such as Samarkar as well.

An option. Not a safe one.

I’m alive.
She tasted the words in her mouth without speaking them. There had been a good chance it would end otherwise.

Failed wizarding women were even more of a tragedy, in Samarkar’s eyes, than failed wizarding men. To take such a risk, and earn no magic …

Too late now for second thoughts. Either she would show the gift or she wouldn’t, and only experience would tell. And even if she did not manifest, there were opportunities. Harlot. Teacher. Regent or courtesan. Wizard-errant.

She was alive, and once-princess no longer.

“Your brother called for you.” Tsering dropped the rag back into the water.

“Half brother,” Samarkar corrected. “Which one?”

“Songtsan-tsa. He came as a supplicant and left his entourage in the road. The Old Master Yongten-la stopped him at the stair and explained that you were healing from your neutering. Yongten-la said to the crown prince that you are one of us now, and that when he met you again he must address you as
aphei,
Samarkar-la.”