Restoration (27 page)

Aleksander's expression was such a perfection of astonishment that I grinned, thinking that perhaps I liked this woman after all. “Is he all right?” I said, crawling forward where I could see what she was doing. “Other than his tongue, I mean.”

She was wrapping a thin strip of clean white linen just above the Prince's ankle. Two other strips were already in place beside the dreadful red-and-purple scar just below his knee. “Sores from this boot,” she said. “Ate right through his tender royal skin. One almost to the bone. Has he no cleverness at all?”

“His cleverness has always been a matter of debate,” I said. “But no one can fault him for lack of persistence.”

The woman glanced up. She kept a smile at bay, except in her wide, dark eyes, where it settled as if in a familiar place. “I am W‘Assani. How is your head?”

“Seyonne,” I said. Her qualifications as guest-friend were unquestionable; thus I did not chafe at exchanging names. “It feels like your donkeys kicked it.”

“Looks like it, too,” Aleksander mumbled, pulling his haffai scarf down low over his face.

“Leave off the boot until these heal, lord of princes, or you'll have no need of boots.” With a quick rip of a small knife, W‘Assani trimmed off the end of the bandage and turned her attention to me. The line of her lip immediately informed me that I should not have used the gray haffai to clean my eye. “I thought Ezzarians were a cleanly people,” she said. Before she could get started on another lecture, urgent hoofbeats and a choking shower of red dust announced Malver's return.

“Caravan!” he shouted as he slid from the saddle.

W‘Assani slapped her hand on a wooden chest. “I knew Kavel would come this way.” She thrust a ragged square of clean linen and a small brass box into my hand. “Use
this
to clean it. Then put a bit of the ointment on it; only a bit, mind, or I'll take payment from your hide. When we stop again, I'll make mavroa to ease your head.” She jumped down from the wagon, grabbed the donkey harness, and hauled the beasts away from the mud hole, cursing at them in a mixture of Thrid and Aseol, the common language of the Empire. Malver leaped onto the wagon seat and grabbed the traces just as the wagon lurched forward.

“I'll make the arrangements,” W‘Assani yelled to Malver. “You get the cart to the road.” She snatched a trailing fold of her purple loobah, pulled it up between her legs, and tucked it somewhere in the other folds. Moments later she was astride Malver's horse, riding off the way from which he had just come, her berib boned black hair flying and her haffai streaming behind her like white wings.

I crawled over beside the Prince, leaned my back against the side of the wagon box, and closed my eyes, hoping that I wasn't going to have to wait for W‘Assani's tea to ease my head, content for the moment to contemplate her striking image behind my eyelids.

“Have you had a woman since you left Ezzaria?” I had thought he was asleep.

Even under the dirt and crusted blood I felt my color rise.

“I thought not.”

“I thought you couldn't read me anymore.”

“The donkeys could read this.”

“I have a wife—”

“—who tried to murder you, and will do it yet if you should cross her path. Worthy wives do not drop their wedding tokens into their husband's blood.”

Fiona must have told him about Ysanne and the ring. “I vowed to be faithful until death,” I said. “It makes no difference what she's done.”

Aleksander pulled his scarf lower and settled as if to sleep. “Well, if you should ever change your mind, I'd not start with this one. She would devour you as a kayeet eats a rabbit.”

 

An hour later, I was sitting in the back of the jostling wagon, dreaming of a bath. I had made one swipe at my face and was trying to find a clean spot on the square of linen to start on my hands. Unfortunately I made no progress on the stink, which seemed to be getting worse. A number of things had come to mind that were worth wishing for—food, rain, boots—and other nonsensical yearnings seemed to be written on my face for all to see, but I would have traded the prospect of any of them for a sliver of soap and an hour in a tub, pool, or river.

Aleksander had moved underneath the shade of the colorful canopy also, but had not shown any further inclination to talk. He sat across from me, his fingers tracing the engraving of his sword hilt. No pleasant thoughts there.

“I told Pujat Kavel that you were my new bond-servants,” said W‘Assani, who rode up beside the wagon and matched the horse's pace to the donkeys' plodding. “He thinks M'Alver there is my new partner, and I have acquired you—a cripple and a freed slave—to strip and clean the bones. You must show your diligence, or he won't believe me. When we stop at midday, you can start on those in the basket.” She spurred the horse and left us spitting dust, but not before I saw the crinkle in the corners of her eyes.

Aleksander had seen it, too. “Damnable smirking Thrid witch. I'll let Edik have his way with me before I do her bidding.”

“Bones?” I said. My head had eased considerably, but I was still confused.

Aleksander grimaced and shoved his sword belt back under an oaken chest. “Cast your sorcerer's eye inside the basket. No, the long one just behind you.”

The object to which he was referring was about the length and width of a coffin, but twice as deep and made of tightly woven reeds with handles of rope. The moment I cracked the lid, I realized that the dreadful stench I had assumed my own was from quite another source—two animals, very dead. “Foxes?”

W‘Assani had gotten us out of Karn'Hegeth through one of the closed gates, so Aleksander told me. Evidently she regularly needed a quiet way out of the city and knew several guardsmen who were willing to let her pass for a share of her profits. This time she had paid a man with Aleksander's horse and mine. The guardsman had poked around her wagon to see what was worth such an expensive bribe, finding only one battered, insensible slave, supposedly acquired in trade, her usual baskets and chests of woven goods, and a large, vile-smelling basket that held two fox carcasses. The foxes were sufficient explanation.

Ornaments of fox bone were prized by a good many men across the Empire, for they were believed to enhance virility. Derzhi from those hegeds that permitted multiple wives, and Suzaini who often had three or more, had been known to pay handsomely for fox-bone arm or finger rings, pendants, bracelets, or brooches. Especially valued were the bones of the elusive red Azhaki fox. As a certain Fontezhi lord who resided in Karn‘Hegeth maintained his own supply of them, captive, the guardsman had no difficulty understanding W'Assani's hurry. He was not in the least inclined to poke around in the smelly basket, so he failed to discover that just below the quickly ripening carcasses were a false bottom and his anointed Emperor.

“I thought I was going to cook in my own vomit,” said the Prince. “If she thinks I'll do any more playacting ...”

But of course she did. And we did. W‘Assani was very clever.

 

We rode with the caravan of one Pujat Kavel, a Hollenni trader in olive oil, spices, and dried fish. Though oil and spices were immensely profitable items, the trade in them was controlled by Derzhi hegeds, the Jurrans for spices, Gorusch for olive oil. By the time Kavel paid imperial taxes, the required heged shares, and bribes enough to keep his caravans moving, he earned barely enough to support his own business in dried fish. And he knew that if the dried fish business were ever to become truly profitable, one of the Derzhi families would take it over, probably killing him in the process. Though he was not yet thirty, the hard truths of the world had already sapped his hopes, and he wore a perpetually morose expression. Even his dark mustaches drooped.

At our first stop Malver—M‘Alver as W'Assani called him in the language of Thrid—helped me carry the basket of fox carcasses out of the wagon. The moment we left the basket to go help Aleksander out of the wagon bed, the caravan dogs were on it. W‘Assani screamed at them and threw stones, and then grabbed one of Aleksander's crutches and beat them off.

I suggested that it might be clever to let the dogs do the disgusting job of removing the decaying flesh from the prized bones, but W‘Assani said she could not have her precious stock ruined by teeth marks or cracks. Bad enough our urgent departure had prevented her skinning her prizes right away. The delay had likely ruined the pelt. Once the pelt was removed, we were to carefully cut away the meat and gristle. That should distract the dogs and vultures while we finished the job of stripping the bones. Whenever we made camp for the night, we would boil an earthen pot of hali—the bitter powder that the desert sun leached from bad water holes—and clean away the remaining bits from the day's harvest of bones.

In the midday heat, such tasks were no pleasure, but I had done much worse many times. W‘Assani would feed, shelter, and transport us for only a few days, but long after we were gone, she would ply these roads and towns, where informers would sell her life for a few zenars. To hold up our end of the deception seemed a fair exchange for her risk.

Aleksander did not so much object to the task—he had hunted the desert since he could draw a bow, and even Derzhi princes skinned their own kill. The unpleasantness resulting from three days' rotting in W‘Assani's basket was only a matter of degree. But to take orders from a woman... and from a Thrid, the most despised of all races... to labor at her command while others took their leisure, and to suspect how perfectly she must be enjoying her moment's dominance over the Derzhi Emperor-in-waiting...
that
left him near bursting.

“She's a devil.” His knife slid expertly along the inside of the fox's legs and down the centerline of the belly, detaching the soft pelt from the decaying muscle. I had a feeling that the dead fox wore a Thrid woman's face at that moment.

“She's clever.”

“What's she doing now?” Aleksander was sitting with his back to the wagon, his leg stretched out stiffly in front of him. To shift his position in order to observe his tormentor would be awkward and obvious.

“Drinking ale with Malver.”

“Gods, I'll flog him for this. She's laughing, is she?”

“Not at all. She's showing him some of her weavings.” Malver was easy with W‘Assani as I had not seen him with anyone else. I had thought him a man of few words, but the two seemed to find a great deal to talk about. I was surprised that he had revealed Aleksander's identity to her, but it seemed to have worked out for the best. She was taking her commission very seriously.

“You're enjoying this.” The Prince's glare was hotter than the sun.

“I can think of many things I'd rather be doing.”

Pujat Kavel strolled by, his hands clasped behind his back. He nodded to W‘Assani. “Another hour and we'll be on our way, mezonna.”
Mezonna
was the honorific for a businesswoman. Though the drooping Hollenni had been willing to accept W'Assani's fee and her story of a broken bargain with another caravan, he took care to make sure the Thrid woman was what she said. When the train of nine wagons and twenty chastou stopped to rest and eat and sleep through the hottest part of the day, he strolled by our position no less than four times an hour.

“She'll send Malver hunting to bring us more carrion to play with, won't she?” said Aleksander after Kavel had passed by.

“I would expect so. Gazelle or kayeet bones won't fetch the same price, but someone will buy her trinkets. At least we'll be able to cook fresh meat and eat it.” Though at the moment, with my hands buried in rotting fox flesh, eating meat was about the last thing I could desire.

 

We maintained our roles carefully as we traveled with W‘Assani. Aleksander and I rode in the wagon and worked whenever the wagon stopped. W'Assani rode our horse and laughed and talked with Malver, who drove her rig. She held no discourse with the Prince or me, only commanded us where everyone could hear. Sometimes she rode beside Pujat Kavel during the day, and she spent every evening at his cook fire. Her mellow laughter echoed through the camp as we skinned and boned, cooked and ate her kill, and sweated over her boiling pots.

My eyes would not leave her graceful form—walking, riding, speaking everything of life; they brushed her lusciously dark skin, and I imagined how it might be to loose her thick hair from its windings and let it fall about her shoulders... or mine. While Aleksander brooded and plotted strategy, I smiled to myself at her wit, and admired her cleverness, and wondered if the tales she told Kavel of her smuggling exploits were true.

But when the night grew late and I finished my work, I lay under the stars and tried to clear my head of this woman who had no rightful place there. I had a wife. Ysanne had been my very heart since I was fifteen, everything I wanted, everything I could imagine wanting. How could I consider intimacy with anyone else? Yet the only memory I could summon of my wife were the last words I'd heard from her lips.
Find the demon... bleed him until he's dead.
The wounding of those words was far deeper than the scar in my side.

The caravan crawled along the Vayapol Road, a well-traveled route that led southeast from Karn‘Hegeth across Srif Naj toward the distant trading city where I had first met Blaise. Well before we got to Vayapol, however, W'Assani planned to turn our wagon south and head for the fertile wheat and barley fields of Manganar, lands that Aleksander had once called his own. The Prince had granted a number of estates to the Bek heged at the time of his anointing, as he had done for every other Derzhi family. The knowledge that the hated Rhyzka now controlled his own vast holdings had been bad enough, but to hear that Edik had revoked his gifts came near driving him mad. He saw only one bright spot. Surely the Bek and other hegeds subjected to such humiliations would join him to throw down Edik.