Which was only the truth.
—
LATE IN THE DAY, towards sundown. It is colder. Marin is at the prow, wrapped against the chill. They are running southeast now, crossing towards home with the sails up and a good wind. There is always trepidation when a ship leaves sight of land, even in the home sea, but they do know these waters.
The raiders are gone, north towards Senjan. They took their slain man to bury him at home. Drago has overseen the wrapping of Doctor Miucci’s body. He will be laid in Dubrava’s cemetery outside the walls, then exhumed and sent back to Seressa if a request comes.
This has happened so many times, Marin is thinking. Their ships have been boarded, men have died in raids, they have often lost far more than they did this morning. Darkness awaits even the sun as it goes down. Change and chance are the way of the world, and more so for those living on disputed borders, or venturing to sea. And Dubrava—their small republic caught between powers—partakes of both these things. The borderlands and the sea.
So does Senjan, it occurs to him, but he doesn’t linger on that thought. He isn’t feeling kindly towards the heroes. Not today.
“Were you going to fight him?”
She has a silent tread. He turns as the woman—her name is Danica Gradek, he now knows—comes up beside him. Her dog is with her. A big wolfhound, not one you’d want angry with you.
He shrugs. “Did you kill those men in the dark this spring?”
He isn’t sure why he’s challenging her, but you don’t always know why you do what you do.
She looks at him. “Why do you care? You want to hang me? Right in the harbour? Or hand me over to Seressa to do it?”
In the wind and the snap of the sail and with the birds crying, he has to strain to hear her. He remembers that her life has changed today—forever, it might be—as much as the other woman’s has.
He says, “You have my word. I will say what happened, what you did, how it saved lives. I will swear it before an altar when we land, if you like.”
“Men can lie at altars as easily as anywhere else.”
She looks out at the sea. There is only the sea ahead and behind now. Waves white in wind.
After a time, he says, “My father told me of a saying once. That the world is divided into the living and the dead and those at sea. He didn’t know where it was from.”
She is silent. Finally says, “If I hadn’t killed Kukar, and you’d fought him . . .”
“I was angry.”
“I saw.”
“Drago would have drawn his sword, then others.”
“And our men. We’d have killed many of you.”
“I am going to say all this to our council, Danica Gradek. Why are you . . . ?”
The birds around the ship are diving into the waves to emerge, wet and wheeling. He sees one with a fish caught, as it rises. Dive and rise, over and again.
She says, “I need a reason to have destroyed my life.”
“You are too young to think that. You have altered your life. Not the same.”
“Here’s an arrogant man. To tell me what I’ve done or not done.”
He smiles. He says, “Well, we’re arrogant in Dubrava. Not as bad as the Seressinis, but . . .”
“No, you aren’t as bad as them.” She doesn’t smile back. She says, looking at the sea, not him, “From the time I came to Senjan I wanted to be allowed among the raiders. Inland, though. Not this. I wanted to fight Osmanlis.”
Another borderlands story, he thinks. He has heard these before. But everyone’s story is their own, he also thinks. He wonders who died. Whose memory drives and aches in this woman. And how did she end up at sea? Are they raiding with women now?
He asks it. Why should he not, on his own ship?
She sighs. “This was my reward. They asked me what I wanted for saving our boats that night. I needed to be seen to be capable before I could go east. That won’t happen now.”
She’s addressed his earlier question after all, he realizes. Although, in truth, it will be obvious to everyone when they land. A Senjani woman is known to have killed Seressinis with arrows, a woman took part in this raid, carrying a bow, killing a man with it . . .
Nonetheless. “Thank you for answering,” he says.
She looks at him this time. After a moment she looks back out to sea.
He wonders what she is thinking. Doesn’t ask. His own thought: it is likely she’ll be killed after they reach Dubrava. Or handed to Seressa, as she’s just surmised.
Sometimes there is nowhere to hide in the world.
The ship rises and falls. Marin looks at her profile while she stares at the slowly darkening sea, and that is the thought that comes to him, as if swooping and diving, swift and hard.
—
HE HAD LANCED a painful boil for one of the mariners the day before. Had been looking in on the man in the sailors’ quarters at sunrise, a lantern held by another man. They had heard loud sounds above. Both seamen swore violently.
“Senjani!” they’d exclaimed.
Neither moved, even as boots were heard coming down and men began entering the holds. The Dubravae mariners gestured for Miucci to stay with them. He had understood this was not an occasion for resistance. He’d taken guidance from them.
Until he saw Leonora stumble past their doorway, protesting, still in her sleeping robe, a pirate’s hand on her arm, forcing her with him.
You didn’t plan every moment of your life, even if you were a man who tended to be organized, methodical, precise.
You didn’t plan your death either, usually.
He’d run to their own room, seized the first blade he found in his instrument case, hurried up the rungs of the ladder to the deck. And died there, to his very great surprise.
There had been a moment of extreme pain, white, fierce, a sword plunging into him, withdrawn. Then no pain at all. Nothing, astonishingly.
His body lay on the deck, bleeding from the belly, his knife beside it. He was dead and he knew he was—and he was seeing it, seeing all of it, from beyond, from somewhere. Outside himself, as if floating, like a dandelion seed in spring. It was spring now. He remembered those floating seeds outside their home when he was young, watching them in wonder.
Leonora was on her knees beside his body. She was weeping. He didn’t want her to be doing that. He didn’t want to be dead. It was . . . disappointing. There were, Jacopo Miucci thought, so many things he still wanted to do.
He watched an arrow kill the man who’d killed him.
He felt, in some hard-to-fathom way, satisfaction, seeing that. He didn’t know how he was seeing it. He didn’t know where he was.
He seemed to be drifting higher, far above the deck, weightless, without substance. He was aware of sunlight but heard no sounds. He saw waves below, men below, himself lying below. It was extremely sorrowful, he thought.
Men were talking. The merchants, the pirates. He couldn’t hear anything. He saw the Senjani boats. They seemed very small to have come all this way across the home sea to this western coast. He wondered who would miss him in the world now that he was gone, if anyone would. Leonora Valeri, for a little while, perhaps? Perhaps. She was crying beside his body. He saw her. He saw himself. He wondered what would happen to her now. That was a bad thought.
He drifted again. He was remembering those dandelion seeds, in childhood.
Stop her!
He had no idea who had said that. In his mind. How could he even hear? Who—?
Stop her! Now! She’s going over the side!
Then he saw it. Leonora had risen from by his body and was moving purposefully across the deck. The men down there hadn’t seen her yet, or realized what was happening.
Over the side? She was going into the sea!
How? Miucci cried (somehow). How do I stop her?
Tell her to stop! Help me hold her. Do something!
So he tried. He didn’t want her to do this. Tell her? He called her name, shaped it in thought.
And saw her falter for an instant, then continue on. It gave him hope, impetus, urgency, seeing that. Sometimes, he had told patients, you needed only to take the first step towards walking again, after a broken bone had been set, for example, and then the next ones would come more easily. Only take the first step, he used to say.
He’d been a good physician. He knew it. He’d been on his way to becoming a better one. He was sure of that, too.
She was at the railing, and now he saw (high above) men turning to look at her, understanding belatedly.
Do something! That harsh voice in his mind.
Miucci tried again. He forced himself downwards from this drifting height. He tried to move whatever of him was left here in the morning air above the Blessed Ingacia. And, by the grace offered by Jad to his children (could you speak of that when you were already dead?), he saw the railing nearer, and Leonora there.
No, my dear! he said, in his mind.
He was right next to her now, above the sea, beside the ship, and he made whatever was left of him, whatever he was now, hovering here, dead on the deck, push as she lifted one leg to the rail. He felt another presence, that harsh one, pushing her from beside him.
The sea was below. He thought, for an instant, that if she jumped they would be together in death today, and then he drove that thought away and he said again, driving it at her, No, my dear! Not yet, not this way.
And he realized that she was aware of him, or of something, because she stopped. She did stop.
He saw—floating, hovering, dead—the moment when her bare foot came back down to the deck. She stood as if becalmed, adrift, lost, confused.
My dear, Miucci said again, gently this time.
He didn’t know if she heard him. He saw that there were tears in her eyes, on her cheeks. For him? For her own lost future?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. He felt himself beginning to lift again, he couldn’t resist it now, he was the one adrift (dandelion seed in a long-ago springtime). He heard, more faintly, That was well done. And then, a different tone, I’m sorry.
And then he was high, really high, and still rising, the morning sun seemed to be below him, the sea and the ships so far below, and then they were gone because he was gone.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VII
They hadn’t castrated him.
They did that at eight or nine years of age to almost all Jaddite boys taken on raids. They waited that long to see which ones were bigger, stronger, showed signs of promise as a fighter. He had done that. They had left him intact and sent him to this barracks at Mulkar to be trained for the djannis, the elite infantry of the khalif, might his reign last forever and his name be blessed under stars.
He was fourteen years old now. You didn’t usually join the army and fight until you were sixteen, but sometimes you did, if there was a major war, west or east, in a given year. He hoped that might happen for him.
Training could be boring, the same things endlessly, but he never complained the way some of the others did. He understood that this was what training was, over and over so you didn’t have to think when it happened for real, you just did what you had to do. He knew this was the path to stepping forward. Possibly. Not everyone stepped forward into high rank, Kasim reminded them in his classes. You carried on with your life, even so. You still had a life.
He wanted more than just carrying on, though. He wanted to be on battlefields winning glory, his name coming to the attention (you could dream, couldn’t you?) of serdars, and even the khalif in Asharias, as a fearless warrior, a hewer and slayer of infidels.
His name was Damaz. It hadn’t always been, but he’d been four years old when they took him and renamed him, and he couldn’t remember his Jaddite name any more.
All the djannis, without exception, were Jaddite-born—seized as boys in raids and raised in the true faith of Ashar. They owed everything—their lives, their chance at fortune, their hope of paradise—to the khalif. It was a good way to ensure a loyal core to an army.
Sometimes at night, dreaming, he had thought he was close to reclaiming fragments of his childhood, drifting towards faces and names, but those dreams were rare, defined by images of fire, and he didn’t really need to remember such things. What would be the point? His life was here, and how could it be better, whatever it had been in some village on the borderlands?
The djannis—even the young ones—were a commanding presence in Mulkar, a garrison town south of the road between Asharias and the Sauradian coastline. Mulkar, too, had had a different name once, apparently. Damaz didn’t know what it was. He supposed he could ask Kasim, who knew such things.
In their green coats and high boots and the tall, emblematic hats bearing the crest of their regiment, the djannis strode through the city as if they ruled it. There was a governor here, of course. He would not cross them. No man was keen to cross the djannis, no woman inclined to deny one of them, even the boys being trained—though you could be gelded or even executed for causing trouble for a woman of rank or birth, so you avoided those.
They paraded and drilled in regiments, they fought each other with spear and sword, they trained with their bows. They went days without eating. They marched out from the walls, in winter, too, and they tracked wolves and bears in snow and killed them if they found them. They had to stay outside the walls at night if they didn’t find any. Some hated the hard bite of winter. Damaz wasn’t bothered by it. He just disliked the waiting. All this delay. He carried within himself a feeling that time was rushing past him. He couldn’t have said why he was in such a hurry.
He must have had a family but he had no images of them. He assumed they’d been killed in the raid when he’d been freed to come and train to be a djanni.
He had a mild aversion to fires, but he controlled it, and he didn’t think anyone had noticed. It was a bad thing, to let others see your weaknesses.
They had done march-squares and turning manoeuvres this morning in a steady rain. Rain was bad. If the army was to set out for Woberg Fortress in the north they needed the roads to be good enough (and the rivers not in flood) for the great wall-smashing cannons not to bog down in mud.
Only the rain, the saying went, could forestall the grand khalif’s designs. The rain hid the stars of Ashar, after all. It also blocked the sun and moons of the Jaddite and Kindath infidels, but that didn’t signify.
Damaz wouldn’t be part of this year’s army, in any case. Whatever glory came wouldn’t be his.
After the drilling the rain had eased. He’d walked from the barracks out to the marketplace in the city for a bowl of barley soup from a Kindath stall. Some of the infidels made good food, you needed to acknowledge that. There was a place for them among the star-born. The generous khalif tolerated infidels throughout his lands. They paid a tax to worship as they chose, and those taxes paid for soldiers and cannons, and gardens in Asharias. That had been Kasim again, explaining things.
When the bells for midday prayer sounded through the city, Damaz strolled to the nearest temple rather than back to the barracks. He left his boots and hat by the doors and knelt in prayer, invoking Ashar and the god who had given him his visions under the desert stars. There were stars painted on the temple dome, as there always were. In the wealthiest temples they might be made of metal, swaying from chains.
There was a new wadji here, younger than the last one. A thinner beard, a piercing voice as he led the chants. Damaz didn’t give him another thought until later in the day.
It was then, on the training ground after afternoon sword work (he was good with a sword, bigger than most of the trainees, and quicker), that he overheard Koçi telling his friends—followers was more like it, really—that the new wadj
i at the market temple had made an indecent suggestion to him after sundown prayers last night, and how he, Koçi, was not inclined to accept that from anyone, let alone a false, vile man pretending to serve Ashar in holiness.
Relations between men and boys were hardly rare among the djannis. A friendship with the right officer had been the key to many a young man’s rise. Damaz had never been approached by anyone of rank; he was too big, was his own thought, not pretty enough with his freckled features. But he knew—they all knew—that if it came from a man not within the regiments a proposition was an offence. And a young wadji new to a garrison city had no status at all. He could raise the shield of his piety, but he needed to actually be pious, and have friends.
Still, Damaz felt there was something wrong, not quite believable about the story. The wadji was truly just-arrived, would he be so reckless? Koçi could have reported the man immediately, right in the temple. He could have gone to his regimental leader, or one of their own wadjis here at the barracks.
Damaz was thoughtful in geography and history class. This was always late in the afternoon, after they’d worn themselves out with drills and might (sometimes) be able to sit and listen. The class was taught by Kasim. He had been an officer once, captured and mutilated by the Jaddites while scouting ahead of the army. He’d had his nose cut off by the savages and been sent west to the galleys to row until he died.
He’d escaped, instead, as a capable djanni could—and should. Had somehow made his way back. He didn’t talk much about it, even when the boys asked, as they did, of course. He wore a silver attachment to hide his severed nose, affixed with silk ties that went behind his head.
He was, given the life he’d led, a thoughtful, composed man. The djannis had made a place for him as a teacher in Mulkar. They were all expected to be able to read and write in two or three languages, but the history and geography class was voluntary after you were twelve years old. Damaz never missed it unless they were outside the walls on a march.
They could all speak the Trakesian of today, but under Kasim a few of them were learning to read the writings of the long-ago city-states to the south. Poetry, dramas, he even gave them medical treatises to struggle through. Much of what their own doctors did today apparently came from Trakesia in its glory, two thousand years ago.