To the High Redoubt (40 page)

“What is it?” he asked her, feeling how exhausted she had become
.

“It takes…strength to…keep such a place…real.” Her sigh was fluttery, so soft that there might not be any breath at all behind it
.

“Surata!” Arkady demanded, afraid of the sound of her
.

“I am both here with you and there in that castle,” she forced herself to say. “It is…what I know to do.”

“Almighty God!” he protested. “You're hurting yourself.” He felt it as keenly as he felt his own tenuous existence in the thistledown
.

“Not badly, Arkady my champion. Here we can defend…”

Her failing accents gripped him in fear. “No, Surata—”

“It is protection,” she insisted, so feebly
.

“Enough of this. I won't have you risking yourself to make a place for me to hide.” He attempted to change his form, or to be able to reach her in her efforts. “Surata!”

“It is…good, Arkady…my champion.”

“Not if it hurts you, it's not,” he countered, feeling her fading in his thoughts. “Stop, Surata.”

(“Surata! Surata!” He took her by the shoulders, then held her tight against him.

(“Arkady-champion,” she murmured, sounding a long way off.)

“Arkady my champion, the castle is for you.” She was struggling to be stronger. “Together we can be there.”

“Not this way, not losing you!” He wanted to be more than thistledown, more substantial than anything in this other place. “Damn everything!” He shook with the violence of his feelings and the spiky ends of the thistledown quavered for the inadequacy of their form
.

“The castle,” she pleaded. “Go there.”

He could not bear to listen to her, to know how much she had sacrificed of her own power to make him safe. He felt himself drift forward, over the shine of the salt marshes toward the castle and the safety of its massive walls. He strove to resist this, certain that Surata was so enervated that she would not be able to continue the transformation for long
.

“Arkady my champion, this is for you,” she repeated, almost begging him now
.

He made one last effort, infusing the delicate, fragile spines with his determination and his
shattering fulfillment and release. He lay beside her, holding her, warming her, urging her back to him. “Surata, don't ever do that again,” he whispered to her as he stroked her. “Never endanger yourself that way for me again.” He could not tell if she was responding, and he missed the profound link he had had with her only moments—if the time of that other place and the daily world were the same—before. He cradled her, rocking her gently, saying things to her that he could not remember as soon as he spoke them. His hands stung where he had been burned, and he forced himself to examine the weals on her hands as well. The sight of the burns shocked him, for though he had seen daily world echoes of injuries received in that other place, this was different, as if it were tainted with the malice he had felt in the presence of the bamboo redoubt.

Shortly before dawn, when the sky was slate and rose, she turned in his embrace, and her breathing changed, no longer shallow and slow, but the steady, deep rhythm of sleep. Her eyelids fluttered and then were closed, the lines at the corners of her eyes smoothed now, and at rest.

“What happened?” he demanded of her when she called out to him in the morning.

“The Bundhi very nearly had us. He is strong, with his redoubt in that other place anchored to Gora Čimtarga in the daily world.” She hid her hands as if unwilling for him to see the burns she had received. “Everything the Bundhi touches is contaminated by him.”

“But our castle in the salt marsh…” he protested, not knowing what else to say to her.

“It is a haven of sorts, but…ephemeral. It is not anchored to anything in the daily world, and that makes it much more vulnerable. If the Bundhi wishes to raze it, he could do it.” She sighed. “We worked so hard. But…”

“But what?” Arkady asked. “What is it, Surata?”

“Without an anchor, we cannot stand. I wanted to ask the guardian of the spring, but it wasn't possible. With a place like that protected spring, the castle would have been able to stand against the Bundhi whether or not we were present to defend it, but since it wasn't anchored, there was…” Her hands fluttered in distress.

“You speak as if it were no longer there,” Arkady said, unable to rid himself of the foreboding that crept over him. “After all you gave to that castle, it couldn't simply…fade, could it? It was so…real.” He could still see it in his mind, and its indomitability was apparent even to him.

“It was real,” she said softly. “But it might not be now. I hope I'm wrong. I'm afraid to look for it, or to search.” Her eyes met his without the light of recognition. “If I had nothing else to do but give my concentration to it, then I could serve as the anchor, and for a time we would have it. There are too many things we must do in order to live. The castle…I hope it will still be there when we return to that other place, but Arkady-champion, I—”

Arkady held her face in his hands. “Surata, you are more to me than any castle in this world or any other.” He recalled his village priest describing Paradise as the palace of God, a great, magnificent castle of gold and jewels that floated above the clouds. He kissed her forehead. “What castle is worth you?”

In the next days, she recovered slowly. She was content to ride with him and let him care for her. She had few objections to anything he did, and only once betrayed her feelings, and that was when they came to the first empty city.

“It's very old.” Arkady said, holding the bay near the ruined gates. “No one has lived here for generations upon generations.”

“What manner of people were they?” Surata asked.

“I don't know. I've never seen anything like this place before and there isn't much left to see of it. I don't know what they were like, Surata.” He stared at the gates, the wood almost entirely rotted away so that the ancient hinges hung in the opening like broken teeth. The massive walls of wind-polished stone were rounded and smoothed, so that if there had ever been crenellations along them, they could no longer be seen. “I think they must have been pagans.”

“I am a pagan,” she reminded him, reaching down to pat his shoulder.

“Not that kind of pagan,” Arkady said grandly and vaguely. “There's a piece of decoration here,” he went on. “There's a woman with many breasts and a…crown, I guess that is what it is, or a wreath. She has something on her head. There are horses at her dugs, feeding like children.” He was both curious and revolted.

“They say there was an ancient people who lived in this area who made gods of their horses,” Surata said.

“This might be their city.” He recalled that she had said the guardian predicted they would come to two empty cities and a tower of bones before they reached Samarkand. “This is one empty city,” he admitted grudgingly. “If there's another one, that should indicate something.”

“There are many strange things in these wastes. My uncles said that there were once statues of cats as large as several tall men, and they looked out over a broken courtyard. The emptiness claimed them long ago.”

“Do we go in, or go on?” Arkady asked. “It's a little after midday. We can cover much more ground before sundown.”

Surata shivered. “The Bundhi may be looking in these remote and empty places, thinking that we would hide in them. Let's go on, and camp in the open.”

There had been no tigers for the last four nights, and Arkady was beginning to hope he had outrun them. “What agents would the Bundhi send to a place like this?”

“Anything,” she answered very quietly. “Men. Tigers. Scorpions.” At this last, she shuddered.

“I wouldn't like to find a nest of scorpions in that place,” Arkady said, pulling the reins and turning his gelding away from the ruin. “We'll go on, then.”

“Good.” Her relief was genuine, and she did not excuse her desire to be away from the arid, desolate place.

Four days later, they came to the second city. This one was older than the first, hardly more than mounds of rubble with scrub grass and thorn bushes growing out of the drast.

“What is it like?” Surata asked as Arkady dismounted, prepared to lead his horse through the declivities that might once have been streets.

“It's like…nothing. It's just…heaps.” He tried to imagine what the place had been like, but it was not possible. There was not enough left to give him any feel of the place. He stared around him. “We might get rain tonight or tomorrow,” he said inconsequentially as his gaze went from the wreckage around him to the horizon and sky beyond.

“It will not be tonight,” she said confidently. “Tomorrow before mid-morning, there will be rain, but not near us, I think. We will have to avoid low places—washes and riverbeds—if we do not want to get trapped in the floods.”

Arkady laughed. “Floods? Out here?”

“Oh, yes, most certainly,” Surata said in her most serious manner. “This country has floods. They come suddenly and are gone as quickly, but you can drown in them, just the same.” She turned her face toward the south. “Are there mountains yet? Can you see them?”

“Perhaps,” Arkady answered, squinting against the dry wind that frisked over the parched grasses. He wanted very much to see the mountains, to tell Surata that they were looming there at the edge of the world.

“Then you
don't
see them,” she sighed. “They will be there soon. Tomorrow or the next day, you will see them, to the south. They are very tall mountains.”

“I'll look for them,” he assured her. “You'll know when I see them. I promise you that.”

“Thank you, Arkady-immai,” she said, relaxing, her hands wrapped around the tall cantel of the saddle. “You do not believe that the mountains are there, do you?”

“Of course I do,” he lied valiantly.

“Arkady-immai,” she rebuked him gently. “I know from the tone of your voice that you do not expect to find the mountains—not tomorrow, not the day after, or ever. You will be satisfied if we find an inhabited city, and it need not be Samarkand.” She was able to laugh a bit. “Will it trouble you very much when we come to Samarkand?”

“I want to find the place,” he said carefully. “We're down to nothing on supplies, and we can eke out a few more days without real strain, but after that, a marketplace would be much appreciated.” He paused. “We've been lucky in that respect—the foraging has been good, and there has been feed enough for the horse. There is still enough water to last us a little while longer.” He kicked at a loose stone and watched it bounce away through the weed-covered rubble. “I'll say this for that other place: you don't have to worry about food and water and all the rest of it.”

“Just bamboo staves that leave burns on your hands,” she said.

“How…?” He turned back toward her, rubbing his hands together guiltily. He had convinced himself that he had concealed his injuries successfully. “You didn't mention it before.” There was a sulky cast to his expression and that embarrassed him more than her knowledge of his hurt.

“I have the same burns. We were together when the staff came through the window. The burns will heal, Arkady-immai. But it troubles me that you were not willing to tell me about them.” She held one of her hands out toward him. “See? Does this look like the burns you have?”

He glanced at her hand, recognizing the shiny, stretched-looking skin across the heel of her palm. “Yes,” he said. “It looks the same.”

“We shared the hurt, Arkady-immai. There is nothing wrong in that, is there?” She waited for him to answer her, and when he remained stubbornly silent, she added, “If we are to battle the Bundhi, Arkady-immai, we will take the same blows and feel the same pain. It is best to know that now, while you can get used to it.”

He wanted to argue with her, to insist that there was no possible way for them to have such close unity that they would have the same wounds. The half-healed scar on her hand matched the one on his, and he could not dispute it. “Look, Surata, what you say might be true, but you could be making too much of this.”

“If you want to believe that, it is your right,” she said in a soft voice. “I don't wish to wrangle about it.” Her chin lifted and her manner became aloof.

Arkady led them through the tumbled wreckage, watching for animals and reptiles. He was very much afraid of snakes; he listened for the slither in the dry grass most intently.

“There are scorpions here, and lizards, Arkady-immai. They are in the hidden places, waiting. If you do not disturb them, they will not harm you.” She listened to the sound of the bay's hooves, then said, “You do not like me to say these things.”

“There's nothing wrong with it,” Arkady snapped, perplexed by his resentment.

“You fear that I will intrude, that I am intruding, as we are intruding in this old fallen city.” She was confident of herself but saddened by what she perceived. “Arkady-immai, you have nothing to be ashamed of, not in your dealings with me.”

“It's not that I'm ashamed,” he argued, glaring at an overgrown hillock. He knew that she was distressed, but he could not stop the words. “Talk about something else if you must talk, Surata.”

She was silent and said nothing until they were beyond the tumbled humps that had once been the city walls. “We will see the mountains soon. And then Samarkand.”

“Right,” he replied, and kept his eyes on the clouded horizon.

“The wind has shifted, Arkady-champion. There will be rain soon, I think.”

“Then we'd better find a roof for the night.”