Reawakening (25 page)

“I will give you orchards,” Tarn promised. “Once the Shadow has fallen.”

“That’s always the condition, isn’t it?” Gard grumbled. “Never mind. I would grow lazy and sleepy and fat if I lay around and ate peaches all day. I was not made for an idle life.”

“And what do you do all day?” Tarn asked him, as the others began to bustle behind them.

“I watch over my desert,” Gard said indignantly, his shoulders rising. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep everyone and everything safe? There’s always some creature, or some entire caravan if we’re talking about humans, walking straight into trouble. The work I’ll have to do to put everything back in balance after this….” He trailed off and then asked quietly, “Tarn, if the Shadow destroys me, who will look after my desert? Will some new Alagard rise out of the wind and take my place?”

Tarn, whose fires burned eternally, at least while he sheltered within a physical form, had never been seriously forced to consider his own mortality. Unsure, he said, “I won’t let that happen.”

Gard twitched his shoulder irritably.

Tarn tried again. “You are the only desert I could ever endure.”

“Better,” Gard sniffed but leaned back when Tarn wrapped his arms around his waist. “Oh, is this how it’s going to be? I show a moment of weakness, and you use it as an excuse to grope me? Typical.”

But he had folded his arms over Tarn’s, linking their hands, so Tarn ignored his protests.

“Enough of that,” Cayl grumbled at them. “Here’s your Tiallatai clothes. Go and change. Gard, can you show him how to wear them without making the rest of us wait an hour while you two get distracted?”

“It doesn’t take me anywhere near that long to distract a man,” Gard said but pulled out of Tarn’s arms to take the clothes. “We’ll be good.”

The clothes weren’t much different from the ones they had worn to cross the desert, long-sleeved tunics and loose trousers. The colors were brighter, though, reds and oranges, and long ties hung from the cuffs.

“Only manual laborers show their forearms,” Gard told him, pulling Tarn’s tunic straight. “We’re supposed to be merchants who lost contact with our caravan in the storm. Tie your cuffs tight to show you have no intention of displaying your arms.” He paused, his hand resting on Tarn’s hip. “Hmm, before you start looking like some sour Savattin, I could….”

“Be considerate of Cayl?” Tarn suggested but stole a quick kiss anyway. “What’s next?”

The headscarf was a nuisance, especially when dressed long enough to cover Tarn’s hair, and it didn’t help that Gard stood back and immediately began to laugh. “I shouldn’t have worried. You don’t look Savattin at all.”

“Lucky for you,” Tarn grumbled. His head was already starting to sweat.

Gard grinned and tossed his own scarf on with the ease of long practice, flicking the tasseled ends over his shoulders. “You think that’s mad, you should see what the girls have to wear. The Savattin really don’t like women much.” He pursed his lips. “You wouldn’t think they’d be so terrified of handsome men either, given that, but it’s always so.” He caught Tarn’s look and grinned, slow and wicked. “What? They send caravans out too. Why should they be immune to my tricks?”

“You’re a menace,” Tarn told him, and they went back to join the others. Immediately he saw what Gard had meant—looking at Esen and Aline, all he could see were their eyes. The rest of their bodies were sheathed in layers of drifting fabric, their faces almost completely obscured. Esen made it look elegant; Aline just looked uncomfortable.

“I always end up chewing the blasted veil,” she complained.

Gard grinned at her as he swung into the saddle. “You could talk less.”

“You could wear it instead,” she retorted.

As they set out down the road again, Tarn fell back to ride beside Raif, who had been quiet throughout Aline’s complaints and Gard’s teasing. Now, without looking at Tarn, he said, “We wore this before the Savattin came.”

“For good reason?”

“There are some things only a lover or the eyes of God should see. The Savattin made it a matter of shame and power. It was beautiful once. My father’s most famous poem, the one that brought him the Shah’s favor, was called ‘The Unveiling.’ It was about my mother.”

“Your mother?” Tarn asked. He had not heard any mention of her before.

“She died, in the year the Savattin came. I should have had a sister, but the Savattin forbid women to practice medicine and banned male doctors from touching a woman’s flesh, and the midwife did not know enough to turn the child in time. And so I have neither mother nor sister.”

“I am sorry.”

“The worst of it,” Raif added, his voice very low and calm, “was that my mother herself was a doctor. She was the Shah’s own physician.”

“You must hate the Shadow.”

“No,” Raif said, surprising him. “It acts in obedience to its nature. There is a place for evil in the world. How else could we know that God is good? Those I hate are the men who choose to follow it. The Dual God shows us the way to live righteously. He who chooses to give in to the temptations of evil is more to blame than the tempter itself.”

Tarn stared at him, discomforted. The Shadow needed to be defeated. Only then could its victims be saved.

Gard rode up behind them. “You look very serious, for a day filled with sunshine and peaches.”

“We are discussing the nature of evil,” Raif said somberly. “No doubt it is a topic that would bore you, Great Desert.”

“Nobody respects me,” Gard complained. “And no doubt at all. We have to live with it. Why make things worse by talking about it as well? Now, off with you, boy. I want to shower Tarn with obscene compliments, and your blushing will put me off.”

Raif bowed his head politely. “Enjoy your obscenities, Great Desert.”

As he rode away, Tarn glanced over to Gard. “That was rude.”

Gard shrugged lightly. “I like the boy, and you were scowling at him. I don’t want to see him eaten.”

“I don’t eat people,” Tarn said, with exaggerated patience, and then narrowed his eyes. “I hope you don’t like him too much.”

“Why am I not surprised that you get jealous?” Gard sighed. “I’m in the mood for older lovers right now, which disqualifies, oh, most of the world. Satisfied? And I still do not believe that you have never nibbled on someone irritating.”

“Other than you? The most intelligent thing I have ever eaten was a goat.”

“Goats are people too,” Gard said earnestly. “Or, at least, they could be. How do we know that they do not see themselves as the equals of men? What, after all, makes someone….”

E
VEN
G
ARD
’
S
good humor had faded by the time they rode through the third village. The scars of war surrounded them—trees burned from the fields and houses with their upper stories charred and empty. The blazing red fields began to make Tarn’s eyes ache, and the thin papery whisper of the wind over the poppies set his teeth on edge.

As they rode past, farmers stopped in the fields, watching them with blank, wary faces. Women in dark, ragged veils pulled their hollow-ribbed children back into the houses. No one looked directly into their eyes, and even Raif and Namik were treated with suspicion.

The air had grown hot as they moved away from the mountain slopes into the valley. The soil was yellow and dusty, and it blew across the worn cobbles of the road in slow plumes. In places the road itself was broken, stones pried up to leave soft, slippery dirt that the horses labored through.

“They have taken the stones to mend their houses and repair their wells,” Raif said as Namik conferred with the headman of the village, who sat in the shade beside the well. “Few travelers pass this way now, and there is no work save grubbing in the dusty fields to survive. The Savattin burned the vines and trees of those who defied them and gave the land to their own supporters. Their eyes are on us now. Watch what you say and do.”

Namik came back to them, looking troubled. It was not until they were well away from the village that he shared what he had discovered. The villagers knew that the Savattin had marched on Istel, and approved of the action. More worryingly, they reported that more battalions had gone marching through to answer a summons to the capital.

“So the place will be crawling with soldiers?” Aline asked, lifting her veil to mop at her face. “Lovely.”

“To call them soldiers is a little strong,” Raif said, listening to his father. “They are, for the most part, men who have given up all chance of finding work and have dragged themselves, their sons and cousins, and any weapons they might possess, to the capital to join the army.”

“Untrained hotheads, then,” she said flatly. “Even better.”

T
HAT
NIGHT
,
Tarn was woken twice by Gard tossing and turning. Eventually, he gathered him close and rubbed his back until Gard stilled and then muttered sleepily, “I’m not a cat. Don’t stroke me.”

“You like it,” Tarn pointed out, because he could feel Gard’s cock swelling against his thigh. He reached down and stroked that instead, to be obliging, and asked, “Can’t sleep?”

“Mmm,” Gard murmured, lifting his hips into Tarn’s hand. “I can’t feel the desert. We’re days from the border now. Never been so far from home. Feels wrong.”

“For a few days, you are safe,” Tarn reassured him. “We held councils, and many elementals fought with our armies. As long as they returned home from time to time, they took no harm.”

“Well, that’s nice historical trivia,” Gard commented sourly, “but I still don’t like it. It itches.”

“Want me to distract you?” Tarn offered.

“So selfless.” But Gard closed his hand over Tarn’s own erection a moment later, and he turned his head to meet Tarn’s kiss.

Neither of them were fully awake, and they moved lazily against each other, building to a slow rise that suddenly had Gard groaning Tarn’s name as he came in a wet rush. Three more strokes against the slick heat pooling between them brought Tarn to his own climax, and he slumped against Gard happily, entwining their sticky fingers. “Mine.”

Gard sighed, but for once went to sleep without further argument, his hand still in Tarn’s.

T
HE
NEXT
day they caught their first glimpse of the army, marching along the road on the far side of the plains, their black-and-scarlet banners blazing under the sun. They seemed a vast and shambling mass from here, shrouded by the dust their march cast up.

Gard frowned at their direction and murmured fretfully, “They’re heading for the coast. I hope Essam is ready.”

“We have our own mission,” Tarn reminded him softly. “Trust Myrtilis to manage the desert.”

They didn’t come face-to-face with the army for a few more days. When they did, Raif and Namik had to talk fast to keep themselves and Zeki from being pressed. Once the suspicious officers finally released them, Namik led them off the side of the road and across the fields, trampling the bloodred poppies beneath their horses’ hooves.

After that, they traveled along tiny lanes and back roads, where the fields sometimes spilled across the road in bright trickles of papery red flowers. They met more people on these roads: old men leading donkeys weighed down with lumber, lines of solemn boys walking to schools in distant villages, old women in heavy black veils who were always, for some reason even Raif couldn’t explain, carrying chickens. The sound of distant trumpets haunted their ride, but the smaller villages on these quiet roads seemed more welcoming of strangers. They were greeted more than once by an evening gathering in the village square, filled with quiet music, played on flutes and three-stringed setars, and the solemn, gracious hospitality of those who had almost nothing but shared it anyway.

Here, Aline responded, producing little packets of medicine and seeds to exchange for the bitter tea and flatbread they were offered. In the first village, a crowd gathered immediately, and Zeki suddenly explained, “There are no doctors. Not since the war came.”

“I’m only a field medic,” she muttered, but after that she worked with Namik and Cayl to treat what she could, vanishing into low mud-walled houses with anxious women while Tarn paced outside.

“Whatever happens,” she told him that evening as they camped by a thin brown river, “if you survive this, tell Myrtilis we have to get some of our medics traveling through here in disguise. These women are dying of things even I can treat, all because the Savattin won’t let doctors see their bare flesh.”

“We may have more important things to worry about,” he pointed out.

“This
is
important,” she snapped back.

They were all growing short-tempered as they began to approach the capital, the ground becoming steeper and rockier beneath them. Cayl and Aline spent endless hours quietly discussing and refining their plan, but Tarn barely listened. He trusted them to get him to the Shadow, but after that, it would just be him against his most ancient enemy. When things were that simple, there was no more need for plans.

He spoke with Namik instead, picking his way through the few words they shared to discuss far more abstract and lovely things than war and suffering. Gard sometimes deigned to translate, but he only cared for poetry and quickly began to yawn when the discussion moved to more intellectual matters. It was, inevitably, Raif who did most of the translation. He, like his father, rejoiced in philosophy, but whereas Namik’s views were tinged with a dry cynicism, Raif was an idealist, ablaze with certainty on the nature of good and evil and the moral standards that all men should meet.

“I dread the day when he is disappointed,” Gard said that night, half serious for once. They were out on guard together, and he had clambered onto a sloping rock to survey the sky, where the stars were scattered in blazing arrays. “All men become cynics in the end, though, from what I have seen.”

Tarn thought on it, considering those he had known and loved. “Save those who die too soon.”