The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (105 page)

Handy as it is, being able to see whatever you want takes a lot of getting used to.

The Grove of Doom was always a cruel and wicked place, filled with ancient darkness. The hidden folk hated it but they endured going in for Tobo’s sake.

Their devotion to the boy gets scary when I think about it too much.

Gromovol and Arkana were mending at a pace equaling Tobo’s, which was amazing but not magical. Gromovol’s arrogance remained undiminished by misfortune. Arkana was understandably withdrawn.

Soulcatcher worried me increasingly. Not only did she show no improvement, she seemed to be growing weaker. She was headed right down the grim trail Sedvod had blazed.

There was a lot of sentiment favoring letting her slide, and for possibly easing Gromovol along the same dark path while he was sleeping. The jury remained out on Arkana even though the hidden folk had exculpated her in all ways but calculation and manipulation. There were random moments, widely separated, when I felt sorry for the girl.

I remembered the loneliness.

I was the only one who would talk to her, excepting Gromovol. She turned her back on him every time he tried to do so. During our reluctant chats I tried to learn more about her homeworld and, especially, Khatovar. But she did not have much to say. She knew nothing. She had a full measure of youth’s indifference to the past.

Shukrat shunned Arkana completely.

Shukrat was almost pathetically eager to fit in. Shukrat really wanted to belong. I have a strong feeling she did not belong before she joined us. And maybe Arkana had, which might illuminate Shukrat’s spite toward her now.

80

The Taglian Territories: In Camp

Life is never like a canal, flowing gently through a straightforward and predictable channel. It is more like a mountain brook, zigging and zagging, tearing things up, sometimes going almost dormant before taking an unexpected and turbulent turn.

I was setting out some similar proposition to Lady and Shukrat while examining Tobo to see if he dared put any weight on the broken leg. He thought he was feeling better and was getting extremely restless, which is usually a sign that the patient is, indeed, getting better but is not nearly as far advanced as he wants to believe. We were in my VIP hospital. Soulcatcher and Arkana were present as well. Shukrat was putting on a show, fussing over Tobo while making it clear that Arkana no longer existed. Lady was on her knees beside her sister’s pallet, hands flat on her thighs, motionless. She had stayed that way for almost an hour. For a while I thought she was meditating. Or she had gone into some sort of trance. Now I was starting to worry.

The women looked more like mother and daughter than sisters. Poor Lady. Against the years all men campaign in vain. And of late, time has been particularly unkind to my love.

Now that we were settled and had little to do but wait for people to mend, Lady spent time with Soulcatcher every day. She could not explain it herself.

She finally came around, looked back, asked the question that tormented her. “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

“I think so.” I admitted. “And I don’t know why. It looks like the same thing that got the Voroshk kid. So I don’t know how to turn it around. Howler doesn’t know how, either.” Though the screaming sorcerer never had been renowned for his skills as a healer.

“Goblin must’ve done something to her but it isn’t sorcery.” I added, “Not that anybody recognizes. And it isn’t any of the diseases I see in the field.” In most armies more soldiers die of dysentery than fall to enemy arms. I am proud that that has never been true in my army.

Lady nodded. She resumed staring at her sister. “I wonder what it is. Something Goblin did. We’d have to wake her up to find out, wouldn’t we?” After a heartbeat, “The little bastard was right there when Sedvod took sick, too. Wasn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so.” I passed Tobo to Shukrat. “Take it easy on him, girl. Or we’ll need to get you two a separate tent.”

Tobo blushed. Shukrat grinned. I turned to Arkana. “You think you’re ready to take up your dancing career again?”

“Is nothing ever serious with you?”

She caught me by surprise. Frivolity was not a crime often attached to my name. “Absolutely. None of us are going to get out of this alive so we might as well grab a laugh while we can.” So One-Eye used to claim. “Cranky this morning?” I leaned forward and whispered, “I would be, too. Broken bones are no fun. I know. I’ve had a few. But try to smile. You’re through the worst of it.”

She put on her best scowl. The worst of it was still inside her head. She might never recover emotionally. She had not been brought up in a place and station where it was even conceivable that such horrors could overtake her.

“Look at it this way, child. No matter how bad you think it is right now, it can always get worse. I’ve been in the soldier racket a long time and I promise you, that’s a natural law.”

“How could my life be worse than this?”

“Think about it. You could be back home. Where you’d be dead. And you would’ve gone through hell getting that way. Or you could be a prisoner instead of my guest. Which means that every day could be like your one bad day. There’re plenty of guys out there who think we let you off too easy. Which reminds me of another natural law. Once you’re outside the circle of people who agree that you’re special, you’re just another human body. And that’s hardly ever a good situation for a woman. You’re actually better off here, where we have women running stuff, than you would be almost anywhere else.”

Arkana retreated inside herself, evidently thinking that I was threatening her. I was not. I was just thinking out loud. Maundering. Old men do that.

I told her, “You need to take it out on somebody, put Gromovol’s name at the head of your list.”

Lady said, “She’s the only connection I have left with ninety percent of my life. The only connection with my family.”

The stream takes its wild turns.

“You do anything that saves her, the first thing she’ll do when she gets on her feet is try to cut you off at the knees and make you dance on the stumps.”

Tobo started to say something. I poked him. We had discussed this several times. His opinion was bloody-minded.

“I know. I know. But every time I turn around it seems like someone else is gone and we’re getting to be more and more alien.…”

“I understand. I’ve felt completely dislocated in time since One-Eye died. There’s almost nothing left of my past.” The nearest thing was come-lately Murgen. Lady and I had chosen the way—and now we were refugees from our own place and time. Though why should I be surprised at this late date? That was what the Company always was: the gathering of the landless, the hopeless, the fugitive and the outcast.

I sighed. Was I about to start creating another past as an emotional crutch?

I knelt beside Lady. “I don’t think she’ll last more than another week. I’m having trouble getting food down her. And more keeping it there. But I’ve thought of something we can do to stall death. And maybe even get a sound diagnosis.”

Lady turned a gaze on me so intense I shuddered, recalling ancient times, when I was a captive in the Lady’s Tower at Charm and about to face the Eye of Truth. “I’m listening.”

I noted that, even now, she would not touch her sister. There was a strong selfish underpinning to her emotions. She wanted to save this mad devil sister entirely for her own sake.

“We can take her to Shivetya. We know he can cure Howler.…”

“He says he can. Telling us what we want to hear.”

What Howler wanted to hear. I had no emotion invested in the runt’s well-being. I thought the world would be improved by his extermination.

Lady’s tone did not support her words. A spark of hope had been struck.

I said, “Let’s have Howler get another carpet put together, then we’ll slip away to the glittering plain, get him fixed up and find out what Shivetya can do for Soulcatcher. Even if he can’t do anything we can stash her in the ice cavern till we have time to research what’s wrong with her. That ought to be a real challenge for Tobo.”

That was the course I preferred. I figured that once we installed Soulcatcher in the cave of the ancients Lady would lose interest eventually. The effect on the world at large would be the same as if we had killed her right away while Lady could sustain her tether to her roots via the pretense that she would jump in and resurrect her sister one day soon.

Lady said, “I like that idea. I’ll see how soon Howler can get a carpet put together.”

“All right.” I peeled back one of Soulcatcher’s eyelids. I saw nothing promising. I got the feeling that her essence might be absent, out wandering, lost. Paybacks, Murgen might say, if that was true.

As soon as she left, Tobo said, “You’re up to something besides what you told her, aren’t you?”

“Me?” I shrugged. “I have some ideas. Some of them I might have to clear with the Captain.”

Shukrat then said something that ruined her dumb blonde image for me. “You know the reason that Soulcatcher followed you all down here from the north is the same reason that Lady wants to save her now? I’ll bet that if she really wanted to badly enough she could’ve killed you all just about any time she wanted.”

I stared. I looked at Tobo. I stared some more.

Shukrat reddened. She murmured, “Neither one of them ever learned how to say, ‘I love you.’”

I understood. It was the same thing Goblin and One-Eye had had going for all those years, at a somewhat less lethal level. When they were sober. It was the sort of thing I see all the time amongst my brethren, who cannot, or believe that they dare not, express their real feelings. I added, “Only those two don’t even know they need to say it.”

81

The Shadowlander Military Cemetery: Laying To Rest

Willow Swan stuck his head into the tent. “Croaker. Murgen. Anybody who’s interested. Sahra’s ready to do her thing with Thai Dei and Uncle Doj.”

About damned time, I thought but did not say. There were moments, lately, when I wanted to have the whole damned Nyueng Bao Community lined up and spanked. They had dragged the two corpses a hundred fifty miles while they argued bitterly about what to do with them. I did manage to keep my mouth shut but kept wanting to scream, “They don’t care anymore! Do
something
! They smell. Bad!”

Not the sort of thing you do with grieving relatives, of course. Not unless you feel like you have developed a shortage of enemies.

*   *   *

The Nyueng Bao had prepared a pair of ghats in a prominent place near the center of the Shadowlander military cemetery. Though only a few swamp folk remained with us those survivors were gathered in cliques, according to the funeral option they believed best honored the dead.

Who would believe a funeral could become savagely political? But people can find reasons to squabble about almost anything.

Thai Dei’s send-off was less controversial, of course. He had not believed in much of anything but his own honor, himself. A ritualistic passage through the purifying flame for a warrior who would not bend, troubled only a couple of conservative old-timers who thought the ceremonies too foreign. Uncle Doj was the great bone of contention.

With Doj the burning group were in dispute with the exposure group, who wanted to lay the corpse out on a high platform and leave it till its bones were clean.

This was supposed to be the proper send-off for a high priest of the Path of the Sword—though no one could say how, why or when that idea had arisen. None of the men from Hsien, some of whom had grown up in Hsien’s martial arts monasteries, had heard of any such practice there. The people of Hsien buried their dead. Doj’s cronies insisted that his predecessors had been exposed exactly the way they wanted to do him now.

As we filed past the ghats, each tossing on an herb packet and a folded piece of paper carrying a prayer the fire would send along with the dead, Suvrin suggested, “They might have acquired the custom when they first passed through my country. Some of the peoples back home, back then, did expose corpses that they were especially afraid would be seized by skinwalkers.”

Skinwalkers again. One of those monsters no one has ever seen, like vampires and werewolves. With all the real monsters loose in the world, seen and suffered often enough, why did so many people trouble themselves about things no reliable witness ever saw? “Wouldn’t fire work just as well?”

“Burning wasn’t acceptable. It isn’t even in modern times, even though so many northerners have come across the Dandha Presh.”

I grunted. It must have to do with religion and religion seldom makes sense to me.

“The common people, the poor, anyone that wouldn’t attract a skinwalker, gets a normal burial. Just like here.” He indicated the graves around us. “People who might attract a skinwalker will be exposed. So there won’t be a good suit of skin to steal.” He gestured. “The above-ground tombs. They must contain priests and captains who were being stored temporarily, until they could be properly exposed. Their army must have been hard-pressed. They never got back to deal with it.”

Actually, I could see several fallen collections of poles with bits of rag and bone beneath that might have been exposure platforms a long time ago. “Looks like your skinwalkers never got here to take advantage, either.”

That earned me a scowl.

I was not quite sure why Suvrin was Sleepy’s favorite and probable designated successor. But I never understood why Murgen picked Sleepy, either. Yet he had chosen well. She had brought the Company through the Kiaulune wars and the era of the Captivity. And there had been a lot of raised eyebrows when I had chosen Murgen to become Annalist. And Murgen had managed despite never having been quite certain of his sanity.

Sleepy saw something.

Suvrin did not agree. Suvrin insisted that he was going to leave us. But I noted that he had passed up several wonderful opportunities to do so already.

As was her right, being Thai Dei’s closest surviving relative, Sahra asked Murgen to join her and Tobo in placing the torches into Thai Dei’s pyre. Fitting, I thought, although the old men grumbled. Murgen and Thai Dei had been as close as brothers for a long, long time.