The Gathering Storm (71 page)

Sorgatani stared back, taking her measure, and they both smiled and, in unison, glanced down. Liath blew on her palm. The cooling touch of her breath and of the salve eased the pain.

“May no person touch you? Can you never have a husband?”

“No Kerayit woman will ever have a husband. That is the law. We are the daughters of the Horse people. Just as they have no husbands, so do I and my sisters have no husband. There was one of us who married many years ago—it was allowed because he was her luck. When he died, the luck passed into the body of her son. They are both dead now, mother and son. Such is fate.”

“Do you live always alone, confined in this wagon?” Such a fate seemed so ghastly to Liath that she struggled to hide the pity in her tone. Sorgatani deserved better than pity.

“We have puras, who mate with us and bring us pleasure and give us company. You have a pura, do you not? The prince who hunted in the grass.”

“He is my husband,” she said, amazed that her voice emerged so evenly despite the turbulence of her thoughts.
He is my beloved husband, but I scarcely know him
.

“Oh! You are allowed husbands in the western lands, are you not? It is a custom common among barbarian women. If you don’t want your husband anymore, then perhaps I might have him as my pura, if you are willing to trade him to me. It is true I get lonely.”

What an idiot she had been to think that walking away from Sanglant’s anger would make the trouble go away. Over
the years Sanglant had, perhaps, come to believe she would never return; maybe he had mourned her loss and, then, been blindsided by her reappearance. On top of that he was horribly wounded. The servant girl, Anna, had told her of his devotion to Blessing and how he had agonized over their daughter’s unnatural maturation. Anna had spoken a very little bit of their journey east, but only Li’at’dano’s words had brought home to Liath what a massive undertaking it was to lead a western army so far into the wilderness. Sanglant understood the threat Anne and the others posed; he was not afraid to face them down.

“He is still my husband, although we have been apart for so long. Have you no men in your own tribe whom you desire?”

Sorgatani’s shrug had an eloquent lift. “How is your hand?” she said instead. “Will it heal? Have I scarred you?”

Liath turned up her hands to expose the lighter skin of her palms. “It’s gone already,” she said, surprised to find it so. The merest sting, like the probing of a bee, and a sheeny pink flush shading the skin were all that betrayed which hand had touched Sorgatani.

“You
are
very powerful! I hope we can become allies.”

“I hope we can become friends.”

Sorgatani’s smile was, like a rare flower, beautiful and precious and bright.

Hammering blows stuttered against the door. The entire structure shuddered. In a cacophony of bells, the younger servant leaped up and slid the door sideways enough to peer through. Torchlight flashed through that gap. Outside, amazingly, night had fallen although Liath had no sense of so much time elapsing while she conversed with Sorgatani.

“Bright One!” The shaman’s powerful voice had the force of an avalanche. Even Sorgatani, unwittingly, trembled.

“Come quickly, Bright One! Prince Sanglant is missing. He has taken the child.”

PAIN made his head throb, and he knew that pain of such intensity, touching every point in his body, did not help him think straight. But he would not remain a prisoner in the centaur camp any longer. If he had no help from his wife in making his escape, so be it. He had survived four years without her. He had managed all that time. He could manage now.

“My lord prince! You shouldn’t try to stand, my lord!”

It was astonishing how much agony it cost him to stand. “My clothes, Anna.”

Dressing was child’s work, yet he grimaced as he pulled his wool tunic on over his under-tunic. He could not bend to bind on his leggings, so he sat on the chest and let Anna lace up his boots.

“Where is my spear?”

They had left his gear on the carpet next to his pallet, which suggested that he was not, precisely, a captive, but he ignored these distracting thoughts as he buckled his sword over his back, wincing, and threw his cloak over everything, pushed back on the left shoulder so he could draw his sword. Every time he moved, he felt a thousand daggers pricking him in each muscle; hot fire ran up his tendons. His chest ached horribly; each breath hurt.

“It’s here, my lord.”

“Are you strong enough to carry Blessing?”

“I think so, my lord. But—”

“Pick her up.”

“Her Highness Liathano has not returned yet, my lord. She went out with the shaman—”

“Anna!”

She knelt beside Blessing, got her arms around the girl, and heaved her up. Blessing wasn’t that much smaller than Anna but she was light, and Anna was strong and stubborn. She draped the unconscious Blessing over her shoulders like a sack of grain. Sanglant got a good grip on the spear. The extra weight of the sword across his back seemed like the hand of a giant, pressing him down, but he refused to give in to weakness.

The healer sat placidly by the door, watching his struggles without speaking, her kohl-lined eyes intent with curiosity and her broad face as expressionless as uncarved stone. As Sanglant reached the threshold, the healer rose.

“You are not healed,” she said in her gruff voice. “Not wise to walk.”

“I am returning to my army.”

He stepped out into the camp, leaning on the spear to support himself, and paused there, fighting to catch his breath, as Anna negotiated the threshold with Blessing and halted beside him. Twilight had descended, but the waxing moon gave off enough light that they might walk through the night grass with a reasonable certainty that they could mark their way.

The healer followed them. She was not much taller than Anna but considerably broader through the shoulders. She held a cured sheep’s bladder and a leather flask.

“Are you going to try to stop me?” asked Sanglant, feeling dangerous because his head reeled and the moon shone overly bright and the ground had a disconcerting sway to it.

“Nay, lord. I receive the duty to heal you. I follow you.”

“Don’t try to stop me.” Stubbornness was all the strength he had, that and this coiling, burning anger that drove him. Liath had abandoned him, stolen his victories, and chatted companionably with the creature who had kidnapped his daughter and refused to help him rescue the child from Bulkezu.

Something in this train of thought didn’t make sense, but he wanted to recover under the supervision of those he trusted—he did not want to be beholden to these uncanny creatures and their human companions.

He wanted allies who treated him with respect.

“They’re more like slaves, if you ask me,” he said to no one, or to Anna, as he hobbled through the grass toward the western ridge somewhere beyond which his army camped. The pain of healing had drawn his nerves so fine that he distilled the thread of his army’s campfires from out of the strong scents that surrounded him in the centaur encampment: boiled wool, blood, fermented milk, horse.

“Who is, my lord prince?” she asked, huffing as she walked.

Not many walked abroad through camp now it was dark and those who did made no attempt to stop him. Though he staggered frequently, he possessed sword and spear, even if he needed the spear’s aid to walk. Tents loomed as obstacles but proved easy to walk around although the extra distance took its toll.

After an eternity they reached the edge of camp. He surveyed the long slope ahead and wondered how any person could reach the top.

“Will you have drink?” asked the healer solicitously, holding out the sheep’s bladder.

It contained drugged wine, no doubt.

“No,” he said, although he was desperately thirsty. He glanced back to survey the camp. A group of centaurs gathered a spear’s throw away. They consulted together but made no move to come after him. One carried a lamp. Its light played over their torsos; illuminating the curve of their breasts, the drape of bead necklaces, a pair of coarse, auburn braids hanging over the shoulder of one and reaching to that place where woman hips flowed away into a mare’s body.

That long hair reminded him of Liath, the way her braids would fall over her shoulders and sway along her backside as she walked.

Where had Liath gone? Why had she barged out after those few reasonable things he had said to her? Why hadn’t she returned? No doubt she had more in common with the shaman.

Liath had changed so profoundly; she was not the person he had married. It was like meeting a stranger who wears familiar clothing—or an old companion who can no longer speak a common language.

“Where are all the male centaurs?” he asked suddenly. “Don’t they ride to war? Or do they wait in the wilderness and let the mares do battle for them?”

The healer waited, obviously expecting him to answer his own question. When Sanglant said nothing more, she spoke as if to a particularly slow child. “No male Horse people walk on Earth.”

“They’re all crippled? Dead? Gelded?”

“No males,” repeated the healer helpfully. “Only horses.”
She gestured toward the distant herds, mostly lost to sight on the opposite side of the encampment.

Sanglant shook his head irritably. He hated when things made no sense, but it wasn’t worth arguing about now. He started up the slope.

They made it to the top, one exceedingly slow step after the next, before Anna had to stop to rest, and he was grateful for the break although he dared not sit down for fear he would never get up again. She knelt and set Blessing down on the grass.

“I’ll carry her,” he said to Anna, who was clearly winded, breath rasping as she bent over double, clutching her sides.

Blessing had not stirred. Her eyes remained open, but she did not see anything around her. She did not react to sound or touch. All she did was breathe.

He had failed her. He hadn’t protected her after all.

“I can carry,” said the healer.

“It would be good,” whispered Anna, sides heaving.

He knew he hadn’t the strength, and that just made him angrier.

But eventually Liath and the shaman would return to the tent, and they would come after him. He would not be hauled ignominiously back to captivity like an injured dog.

“Very well.”

The healer squatted, got arms under and around Blessing’s slender body, and lifted her easily. Maybe it was the way her shoulders flexed under the felt jacket or the way her narrow hips fell in a line with her shoulders, or maybe it was the broad splay of her hands.

Maybe he was delirious and, like madmen, saw glimpses of truth beneath the falsehoods worn by the world.

The healer was a man, but a man dressed as a woman.

Sanglant shook his head and with teeth gritted against the pain set out again. No matter. He was hallucinating, or the Kerayit were stranger than he thought. It made no difference.

“Camp is—?” he asked, because the wind shifted and he lost the scent.

“That way.” Anna rose with a hand pressed into her ribs. “I saw the smoke. I know where we’re going.”

Downhill was harder than up because each footfall jolted
him from heel to skull. He plodded along grimly. He would reach the camp, and there he would rest, and he would not leave his daughter’s side until she recovered, or she died.

Ai, God. What if she were dying?

Nay, the Lord of Mercy could not be so cruel. And yet, why not? The Lady of Justice could not be so arbitrary, and yet, why not?

He slogged on while the moon reached zenith and began to sink, occluded now and again by streaming clouds. The passage of those clouds along the heavens made him dizzy, as though he were spinning, and it made him recall that infuriating conversation he had once had with Liath years ago now, when they had sheltered at Verna.

There, too, she had dwelt easy among her sorcerous companions, who had accepted her as one of their own while treating him as an outsider. The way she had chatted with the shaman had triggered those old feelings of being an interloper, less important to her life than the weaving and binding of magic woven into her soul.

She had been shooting arrows into the sky to determine if it were Earth or the spheres which rotated. These questions she asked at first had made no sense, and yet in a corner of his mind he could hallucinate—he could visualize—the Earth as a sphere turning endlessly as the heavens rested in eternal repose around it, or perhaps it was the Earth which rested unmoving while the other spheres rotated, spheres nested inside spheres and all spinning at a different rate and speed and direction.

Was it the turning Earth that made him reel? Or exhaustion and his injuries? The wound on his chest had opened up; a sticky oozing of blood pasted his tunic to his skin, sliding and ripping as it began to dry or got wet all over again. No ordinary man could ever have walked so short a time after having his chest half ripped away, but ordinary men weren’t cursed as he was.

He concentrated on setting one foot after the next, heel pressing into the ground and the foot rolling forward across the arch and onto the ball to begin the cycle again. Amazing how this most commonplace of movements might prove so daunting, so absorbing, so difficult. Even the curl of wind on
his cheek carried extraordinary significance. How far had that wind traveled? Did wind have a home or did it simply travel around and around the Earth? Perhaps it was the wind that caused the Earth to turn, or perhaps the Earth’s turning caused the wind.

He was dizzy, obviously. Why else would his mind stray along such tortured and unexpected paths? The tang of smoking fires caught his attention. They were now closer to his army’s camp than they were to the centaur encampment; he could separate out the disparate smells in the same way a discerning man can savor on his palate the blend of spices from a rich dish.

They might actually make it.

A shadow covered the moon but slid away quickly. The healer cried out in fear and dropped to her—his?—knees clutching Blessing close against her—his—body to shield her.

Anna screamed.