But twenty or so mounted men was more than an outlaw band, and they were in the open, on the imperial road, which made no sense, unless . . .
Good eyesight, always, and so she saw yellow, a sash, on the man at the front, riding a big horse. Yellow for the sun god, and maybe something else.
Oh, Jad! Danica, I might know who . . . her grandfather began. She heard wonder.
I see it. Is it possible?
We’ll know in a moment. Do not let anyone have a weapon out!
“No weapons!” she shouted. “Hold ground, but no challenges!”
Marin looked at her. She hadn’t been taking the lead among the guards.
“Listen to her!” he snapped. And then stepped forward from within the circle of guards, four on foot, four mounted, to stand in the road alone, facing the horsemen approaching.
It was brave, she thought. He could die now, she thought.
She moved forward too. Stopped a pace behind him, hands at her sides, weaponless. He was their leader, she was his guard. Her hair was under her hat; she wore a hemp shirt, leather vest, trousers, boots. People had been taking her for a man, unless they looked closely.
Marin glanced back. He said nothing, turned again to face east. It was a yellow sash, Danica saw. And the man wearing it had a red beard.
It’s him, her grandfather said. Child, I never thought to . . .
“You know who this is?” she said to Marin quickly.
“Jad help me, I do.”
They waited, standing in the road. Blocking it, in fact. The horsemen pulled up hard at a gesture from the man in the lead. They were mud-spattered, visibly tired, but bristling with something that might be called battle fury. The man in front, on a big grey horse, was the oldest. There was as much grey in his beard as red, Danica now saw. He had a lean face and a lean body.
He stared down at them, sizing up their party. He spoke to Marin Djivo. He said, “Looking to die?”
“Not for some time, I hope, with Jad’s blessing.”
“Then get off the road. Into the forest, behind those cabins.” He pointed north. “Keep your people quiet. Pray. But do it in silence.”
“You are pursued?”
“No, I just kill my horses for sport. Yes, we are pursued. And are about to fight here. You have the misfortune to be in the wrong place.”
“How many are chasing you?”
“Not your concern, Dubrava merchant. Not you or the pretty Seressinis with you—or the pretty girl guard you have.”
“We can fight with you,” Danica said.
No! her grandfather snapped, within.
“No,” the man on the grey horse said briskly. “Weak fighters hurt more than they help, and this isn’t your quarrel, with your signed and sealed passes.”
“It is mine,” Danica said. “I’m from Senjan.”
The man on the horse looked at her. Someone behind him spoke, she couldn’t hear what he said. “A long way from home,” said the one with the red-grey beard.
“My home was burned by hadjuks.”
“How sad. Get off the road with your merchants. We need to prepare what we’re doing here. Don’t make me ask again.”
Danica. Do it!
“I know who you are,” Marin Djivo said. “You may know my father.”
“I would expect to be known,” the horseman said. “Why would I care about your father?”
“He was one of those in Dubrava who voted to support you twenty years ago. You came for money after the fall of Sarantium, when the Osmanlis moved on you in Trakesia. He was outvoted.”
Slight change in a cold gaze. “He was, wasn’t he? And his name was?”
“His name remains Andrij Djivo. He is still with us, Jad be thanked.”
A nod. “I remember him. You are?”
“Marin, the younger son. I was a child, then. I remember feeling ashamed for my city. I am honoured to meet you, Ban Rasca.”
“Ban? No, no title. I am not lord of anything now. We lost that fight. Men call me Skandir.”
“I know that,” Marin said. “You have been nipping at the heels of the army? Dangerous, I’d hazard.”
The man on the horse looked at him for a moment before answering. He said, “Dangerous? Do you know how homes are built where my people come from?”
“No.”
“On stilts, set well above the ground. They can only be entered through a trap door, so anyone coming in may be killed if need be.”
“I see.”
“Do you, merchant? Do you know that there are men who have not left a sanctuary of Jad in Trakesia for a dozen years, while other men—their enemies—camp in rotation outside, even in winter, to kill them if they try to leave? Our feuds run deep.”
“I have heard as much,” Marin said.
“There are valleys where we have hidden from the infidels, and black forests that go back thousands of years. Still untouched, not like those here or yours on the coast.”
Marin smiled a little. “And the old gods dwell there, demanding blood?”
“Some say they do. I have given my blood. Dubrava might not understand.”
Marin’s smile faded. “Some of us honour courage. May I say that?”
The man called Skandir nodded his head again. “You just did. Now get off the road. Give my greeting to your father if you get home. You may not if you don’t move this party.”
The Seressinis were already leaving the road. There were three loggers’ cabins at the edge of the trees. They had to cross a drainage ditch, but there were plank bridges for the logging carts and a trodden path through tall grass and flowers, sloping up towards the trees. Danica watched them a moment, then turned back to the man on the horse.
Danica, no. Child, don’t do this. Please—
Not surprising, that he’d know.
She knelt in the road. This was a man who had spent more than twenty years fighting Asharites in lands his family had ruled. Longer than she’d lived. And he was still fighting them.
“Ban Rasca, if you are planning an ambush, will you not need archers? I am good with a bow. This is no boast.”
One of the mounted men laughed, said something to another.
The man called Skandir shook his head. “You’d risk your party. You are a guard for men licensed to this journey. We will do what we are here to do and you should not be in sight. I am being patient. It is not my nature. Go. You are putting people in danger.”
Child . . .
Danica stood. She turned, facing the forest and the cabins. They were a long way off. She took her bow, an arrow from her quiver. She nocked and loosed, a very high arc.
“The bird on the chimney,” she said as the arrow flew.
The bird died. Victim, truly, to a marrow-deep need to not be on the margins, to make redress for the lost. The borderlands scarred people, and they carried those scars into and through their lives.
The man on the grey horse—another of the scarred—looked at her, thoughtfully now. The one behind him was muttering again. Skandir lifted a hand. His man fell silent.
Then the big, red-bearded one said, changing her life, changing many lives, “You wish to join us? You will leave this party?”
Child, no, this is—
“I do. I will,” she said.
“Oh, Danica,” said Marin Djivo, who might be in love with her, she’d begun to think.
You had no space for that. Not with what lay behind you.
You met riders on a road in Sauradia, in the wilderness of it, and everything altered in a moment, with the long flight of an arrow, with a question and an answer, with the hard needs of the heart coming home.
CHAPTER XV
It is a day—a morning, and what follows—Marin Djivo will not forget.
Hearing horses’ hooves, seeing riders approach, he had th
ought the army was upon them. There was fear then. There was always fear on this road, even if you had made the journey before. If these were army horsemen they were probably far from authority. There were rules of military conduct, yes. They might be ignored. You bribed governors, carried papers—that didn’t always help with bored soldiers in a desolate place.
Then Marin had realized—seeing a celebrated yellow sash—who was coming towards them, and a different apprehension overtook him.
Later he will try to understand how his fear, from that first moment of recognition, was about Danica. His understanding will only ever be partial. We cannot always grasp how we know things, why we fear. What we fear.
Rasca Tripon, once ruling a good part of Trakesia, has no status now. He is, instead, the most hunted man in all the lands under Osmanli rule. The swath of Trakesia his family had governed (south of here, north of the city-states of antiquity) was a brutal place in the years after the fall of Sarantium, as the Asharites advanced that way. Those were hard lands, with little profit for the khalif’s taxation officers there. But open, deadly resistance by the man the world came to call Skandir could not be countenanced. Forces were sent after him.
They destroyed villages in retaliation for what his men did. They hanged men on branches, nailed them to tree trunks, or plucked out eyes and sliced hamstrings, letting them go free—as warnings.
They took women as slaves, gelded boys and sent the ones who survived east. They did this whenever word came of Skandir making an attack on tax collectors, on soldiers, settlers, when he raided a garrison’s cattle or sheep. He was obdurate, unyielding, hard as the ore in the old mines there, and they could never get close to him.
An iron warrior of Jad, and for his family and home—in whatever order of priority one might surmise, and at whatever cost to anyone else, and for a long time now.
The man who halted his horse in front of them is not young. Marin has known this, of course. It is different when you see something for yourself. He remembers—speaks of it—when Ban Rasca came to Dubrava, beleaguered and seeking aid. He remembers the city’s fear, and the so-clever arguments that his father reported afterwards at their table, the ones used to refuse him and send him away.
Dubrava was already engaged by then—it was always engaged—in weighing allegiances and submissions, preserving such freedoms as it could have among the strivings of the mighty.
They had no choice, it was decided. They could battle for trade with the greatest, with their own ships and shipyard, their harbour, their hard-won acceptance in all ports. But that acceptance was the key. They could not support a rebel. There were some who’d wanted to seize him, hand him over to the Asharites. They’d sent Rasca Tripon away with gifts (wine, a horse, a fur cloak), with words of praise and encouragement—and nothing else.
At least they’d let him leave.
Then they’d reported to Asharias that he’d come to them and had gone away. South again, was the assumption. Marin still remembers, on a morning in Sauradia, the shame in his father’s voice, telling of this long ago.
It has stayed with him. What a child remembers and is marked by is not always what one might think.
Danica kills a bird, a long, astonishing arrow sent towards the forest. She announces she is leaving them if Skandir will accept her. He does so after watching the arrow’s flight. It happens right here, in sunlight, other birds wheeling and rising against blue, wildflowers all around.
He wants to tell her not to go. He wants to ask her not to.
Instead, after a very little time, he finds himself taking up a guard post—against objections—in front of her at the edge of the wood north of the road. They are some distance east of the cabins behind which the rest of the party is hidden in the forest now.
His own stubborn folly, on a morning defined by folly.
But an archer, in any proper formation, needs a foot soldier as his guard. Or hers. He’d insisted that he be that guard. And Marin Djivo, who is defiant in his own way, cannot stop remembering his father’s shame describing what Dubrava had done to this man all those years ago.
We do what we do for reasons that are often without sense. He thinks that, waiting with her by the trees above the road. There is a darkness to this forest. More than shadow and blocked sunlight. It is very old. He imagines villagers and farmers have tales of these woods.
Or else he is just feeling too raw, exposed, in ways he’s had no time to think about. This is a reckless exercise, and not just his role in it. Skandir’s. And Danica’s.
She says, quietly, “You have no business being here.”
Anger comes, then. “Really? And you do?”
“I do, Marin. I am sorry to abandon my post with you. Apologize to your father for me. I need you to do that. You will find another guard, as many as you need, next inn. You know it.”
“Of course we will. And it isn’t as if we have any claim on you.”
Bitterness in his voice. Which he hates.
She says, still softly, “You do have a claim. But there are older ones. I don’t really live for myself.”
He knows that, in fact. “Did you know you would do something like this, when you came with us?”
He thinks she isn’t going to answer, then she does. “I was hoping I might have a chance to kill, at least . . . at least some of them. Can you not understand that?”
He hasn’t been looking back at her but now he does, behind him to his right. She holds her bow. The quiver is beside her against a tree, with a second one she has taken from a mule and brought up here.
She is looking at him. Not a woman who looks away. The light is good in the sunshine. He sees her pale-blue eyes, and in them something new—a wish to be comprehended, by him. There is that at least. She has touched him in the night. She has fallen asleep beside him. He has watched her sleep.
He says, “I do understand. You are the same as him. Skandir. If you were a man everyone would understand.”
“Thank you,” she says.
It was almost impossible to grasp what had happened to them, especially since Damaz had never been in a battle before.
They had been moving briskly along this wide road west, following a trail left by the group that had been raiding the supply train. There were fifteen horsemen keeping pace beside the djannis, with ten more riders ahead, out of sight now, scouting for the enemy. Their captain had said he didn’t think the Jaddites even knew they were being pursued.
Then the horse beside Damaz went down. It spilled its rider. In the same moment the man running just ahead of him fell, an arrow in his neck.
There was death here suddenly, and it made no sense! They were the hunters! They were here to kill bandit-raiders.
Men and horses commenced screaming and dying in what was—clearly now—a cleverly laid ambush.
Even so. They were the red-saddle cavalry of Ashar, and the djannis of the khalif’s army—feared on every battlefield the world knew. The captain shouted crisp, unpanicked orders and started off the road, up a slope to the south. The arrows were coming from a copse of trees between tilled fields.
Damaz hurried to follow. Seven or eight of them were down, men and horses. He didn’t know what had happened to those riding ahead. He took his bow, seeing the captain do that. Swords would come later. For now they were running towards arrows and needed their own.
But then he saw that the cowardly Jaddites were fleeing. Already! The bandits could be seen in the muddy field and then—this had obviously been planned—swinging astride horses left behind the trees.
His captain nocked an arrow, loosed it. He was swearing savagely.
Damaz sighted, adjusted for wind, released. A long flight, extreme of the djanni bow’s range—their archery was about speed, not distance. But Ashar was with him. He saw his man fall from a horse. Damaz shouted with triumph.
Another Jaddite dropped.
The captain was loosing swift arrows, so were three others beside Damaz. They were the khalif’s golden warriors. They were deadly as a desert sun.
Damaz didn’t know if his target was wounded or dead. He started running. Saw another Jaddite rein in his horse, dismount to help one who’d been struck. Damaz stopped running. Another arrow loosed. And this one, too, found its mark. He’d brought two men down. He was running again, right beside his captain.
“Good man!” he heard. “Dispatch those shit-smeared bastards if they’re not dead. Get their heads! We’ll carry them back.”
Damaz didn’t actually want to do that with the heads, but he understood. They came up to the fallen Jaddites. One of his two was dead—the second rider. The first had Damaz’s arrow in his thigh.
The captain was faster. He drew his curved sword. He brought the blade down on the man, who was screaming on the ploughed ground beside the horses, and he severed the Jaddite’s head with that blow, the sweet, honed blade burying itself in wet earth made ready for springtime seeds.
“You! You can ride?” the captain rasped at Damaz. Blood had spattered his uniform, his face.
“I can.”
The djannis disdained horses—they had forged their reputation as lethal infantry—but they were taught how to ride for when need arose. There was a need now. They had mounted men to catch.
Damaz took the reins of a Jaddite’s horse and hauled himself astride. Five others and the captain did the same.
“Back to the road!” the captain roared. “Eyes open! We find our scouts and we kill these infidels!”
The others shouted agreement. Damaz didn’t, but he rode hard, churning through the field to the road. The horse was well trained. It had a good saddle. These raiders might not be such a rabble. He wondered if he should say that, then decided that if he knew it the captain surely did.
He was thinking about two dead men behind them. Both heads had been cut off. He hadn’t done it, but he’d put arrows in them. His first gifts to Ashar of infidel souls. He had dreamed of this, of the starbright glory of it. And these Jaddites had killed men he knew, men he’d been marching beside, eating with.