Children of Earth and Sky

  One of the men was asleep, the one with the bad wound. The other two were sitting up. They had already been treated, Danica saw—while they were in the sanctuary, it must have been. Jelena went to these two in turn. She looked at their eyes first, setting a lantern down beside each. She held two fingers to their necks, oddly. But why is it odd? Danica chided herself. Why would I know anything about what she does?

  The healer examined the bandages she’d fashioned for them. She said something to her daughter, who went to a heavy table and began grinding herbs with a pestle and bowl. She worked neatly, quickly. Her movements seemed birdlike.

  Danica looked at the man who was asleep. His breathing was shallow.

  “That one will die,” the healer said quietly. “He is beyond me.”

  “We killed all of them,” one of the other men said proudly. “All the Asharites but one.”

  “We let that one go,” said the third man. “Running home like a frightened child. To say what we did.”

  Jelena looked at Danica but said nothing. The daughter finished what she was doing and brought over two cups. Each of Skandir’s men drank.

  “Thank you,” one of them said.

  “Sleep now,” Jelena said. “You,” she pointed to one of them, “ought to be fine. You”—to the other—“will need to be careful how you move for a few days, and have your shoulder cleaned and repacked every evening with what I’ll give to you. Does anyone left among you know how to do that?”

  “I do,” said the other man. “I’ll do it.”

  Jelena nodded. “I’ll look in on you tonight. Come,” she said to Danica. She carried her lantern back through the door to the first room and then out into the night. Her daughter remained behind.

  There were stars and the blue moon had risen. Clouds moved in the wind. It was cold. Tico detached himself from shadow by the house and came over. He brushed against Danica’s side again. He always did that. She spoke his name. He is still with me, she thought. Same thought as before—and it still felt weak. She wondered if she might allow herself one night of that.

  The path through the village was empty, they seemed to be the only ones abroad. The wind was behind them, whipping across the fields. Houses showed firelight in windows. It was spring, but it didn’t feel that way just now.

  He’d be north and east in this same dark and cold. She wondered if he’d found a good horse. How he’d explain getting back, if he did get back. If they’d execute him as a coward, or just in fury. She wondered if serdars in the Osmanli army did that, or leaders of lesser rank, wanting to show forcefulness. He’d looked like their father. Already.

  She had wept earlier today. It wasn’t going to happen again.

  They came to the sanctuary gate, Jelena carrying her lantern, and went through, came to the low door and entered.

  Jelena set the lantern down on the floor, not far from the door.

  “We are not here for Jad’s disk,” she said. “You did that before.”

  “Why, then?”

  Danica cleared her throat, her voice sounded thin. The place was gathered in gloom, she could barely see the disk up ahead, behind the altar. A brittle sound underfoot made her startle.

  “Mosaic tesserae,” the healer said. “They are falling all the time. They can cut if they hit you.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “Not often.” The healer looked around. “Sometimes animals get in. There have been wolves in winter.”

  “Shall I call Tico?”

  “No. We will be quiet and listen.”

  “For what? Stones?”

  Jelena shook her head, the lantern light catching her white hair. She held a finger to her lips. Danica shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had a great deal she wanted to say. There was nothing to hear but the wind outside. It was peaceful enough, though cold.

  Zadek? she thought, fruitlessly. But she knew he was gone, and fairly certain she knew how, and why. She’d kept Neven’s arrow.

  Tomorrow everything would begin to be different yet again. She’d ride south with Skandir into a life of war. She’d wanted that, hadn’t she? From the time they’d fled Antunic for Senjan. Vengeance could be a reason to live, she thought. In fact, it could even be the only—

  She heard singing.

  No one else had come in, she was sure of it.

  A woman’s voice. Wordless, as if a prelude to a song.

  It came from their left, towards the empty chapels along the wall to that side. There was nothing to see. No one there. She turned to Jelena, who lifted a finger to her lips again. Danica looked up for some reason. Nothing to be made out on the dome, not in this darkness, whatever might be there, crafted long ago, its stone and glass falling through space and years.

  Jelena raised a hand, palm out, and then turned it inward, bringing it towards herself, as if welcoming or summoning. Danica was never, after, able to decide which it had been. But the wordless singing became words in the sanctuary dark.

  Shall the maiden never walk the bright fields again,

  Hair yellow as midsummer grain?

  The horns of the god can hold the blue moon.

  When the Huntress shoots him he dies.

  How can we, the children of time,

  Live if these two must die?

  How can we, the children of loss,

  Hold on to what we leave behind?

  When the sun is in darkness under the world

  The children of light will cry.

  When fear is the master lives are undone.

  Time is an answer to sorrow.

  Darkness gives way to morning’s sunrise,

  Winter ends, there are flowers, birds fly.

  Honour the goddess, remember the gods.

  We are children of earth and sky.

  And it seemed she was crying again, after all. The voice ended, the last words floating up, fading like smoke might, towards the dome and the darkness there.

  There is more to the world than we understand, the healer had said earlier and, carelessly, Danica had replied, I know that.

  She did know, and she knew nothing at all. How can we live? she wondered. The words of a song, sung by no one. Or, no one alive, she thought. Because no woman or girl (it had been a very young voice) from the village was in this dark space with them, singing those words. A thought came to her. Not one she’d have had a day ago.

  “When did she die?” she asked, and the healer looked quickly at her, startled.

  “I do not know,” Jelena said, after a moment.

  “You are showing me that my grandfather was not the only one to . . . remain after he was gone?”

  The older woman sighed. “I have no simple messages. Or if they are simple they are difficult for me. I thought you should be here. I didn’t know what would happen.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly. I lie sometimes, but not now.”

  “And the words of the song? What do they mean?”

  Jelena looked at her in the light of the lantern on the floor beside them. She shook her head. “I didn’t hear any words,” she said.

  —

  THE BADLY WOUNDED MAN died in the night. The healer’s daughter, awakened by her mother, went to tell Skandir. Danica, who had not been asleep, slipped outside as well. She asked the girl and was given an answer, and with Tico following she went to the house where Marin was. He wouldn’t be in there alone, but he could come out, she thought.

  She called his name. Did that several times. No answer. She stood in the cold a long time. She couldn’t really blame him, she thought, but in a way she did.

  She went back to Jelena’s house. She helped Skandir and his men bury the dead man by the trees, not in the village graveyard. It was very cold, but it didn’t rain.

  They left before sunrise.

  —

&nbs
p; HE HEARS HER CALLING from outside. The two other men in this cabin, both Seressinis, stir on their pallets. One rises on an elbow and Marin can see him looking across in the darkness. It is Nelo Grilli, the oldest of them, the one who isn’t foolish. He says nothing. An unexpected courtesy, Marin thinks. There is bitterness in him, and sorrow.

  He doesn’t answer, or go out to her. It is, he supposes, wrong of him. She has come to say goodbye, given that her life now is not going to bring her back to Dubrava, and is unlikely to be a long one—taking the morning’s battle as an example. She ought to have died today, he knows.

  His difficulty is that it matters too much, not too little.

  If he goes out now he’s afraid he’ll plead with her (he is, in fact, certain he will), and you are surely allowed to keep some pride.

  She calls his name again. She says something else then, more quietly. He cannot make out what it is. And finally it is silent outside the cabin, except for the wind. He does not sleep, of course he does not sleep.

  Their party leaves mid-morning, east along the imperial road as before. As before.

  Damaz had found a bow and a full quiver at the ambush place where he’d killed his first infidels.

  He’d whistled in a red-saddle horse across the field. They’d had the very best cavalry with them, and still they’d been fooled, defeated. Killed, all but him.

  He rode back along the road they’d taken here. It was a windy, bright day. He saw few people—woodcutters, charcoal-burners, farmers in fields. It was ploughing season. He passed a small Jaddite sanctuary with a village beside it. He thought about killing some people, in revenge, and dismissed that as unworthy of a member of the elite infantry of the khalif. These were subjects of Asharias and had nothing to do with what happened this morning.

  His task was simple. He needed to get back to the army.

  They might kill him when he got there.

  His sister had taken his arrow in her heart, and lived.

  A voice in the morning air had cried, Children.

  He had heard it so clearly—and had somehow known this was the same presence that had been with him when he fought Koçi in Mulkar.

  She, the woman, Danica, had said it was her—his—grandfather. Named Neven. His own name, and he knew it. Just as he knew hers.

  Stay with us, she had said.

  Terrifying. But you didn’t overturn your life like a fruit cart in the marketplace just like that! Stay? Become a Jaddite? After everything his life had guided him towards? After becoming what he’d dreamed of being?

  He’d expected the old man to kill him.

  He’d been preparing to die with what courage he could manage. Jaddites beheaded you. Everyone knew it. They were barbaric, not entirely human. It was necessary and proper they be defeated everywhere, for the glory of Ashar.

  They’d let him go. Because the woman—Danica, his sister—asked them to. She’d begged on her knees for his life.

  The old man had even told him what to say when he got back: pretend he’d been sent away from the fight to carry word. As if a djanni would lie to his serdar!

  You were born in a village called Antunic.

  You have been loved. You never stopped being loved.

  They don’t get to decide what you are, Neven!

  And he had said, My name is Damaz, and walked away. To find weapons, a horse, his army.

  He was in considerable pain: his back, and a pounding in his head that left him unsteady in the saddle. But you could deal with pain, it was what soldiers did, and he did have the horse. He wasn’t trying to do this on foot, running.

  He was in a hurry, too. He needed to find the path they’d taken down to this road. He could easily miss it in the dark, and he didn’t want to be lost out here alone, riding the wrong way. There was food in the saddlebag. Figs, dried meat, a flask of watered wine. Damaz kept the horse moving while he ate.

  You never stopped being loved.

  How was that possible? Who lived their life that way? Even a girl, a woman?

  She had killed more than ten men back there with her bow.

  She looked like him. And he’d known her name.

  Danica, he thought. He made himself stop thinking it.

  His back started hurting more as twilight fell, but he was a djanni (even on horseback) and he made himself ignore it, pay attention to where he was riding, and so he saw the path when it finally appeared on his left—there were marks of boots and hooves where they’d emerged and met this road.

  He went that way. He had a considerable distance to cover, since the army would have kept moving north (even if slowly, with the cannons) while they came down, pursuing raiders. He would get there. Who was going to challenge a mounted soldier, even at night? Who would be so foolish?

  He never wept, not once, was not even really close to tears, he told himself. Or, if close, not so much so that he couldn’t take a breath, swear, keep going. He was scanning the muddy, uneven path as best he could, for the horse’s sake. There were woods on either side under emerging stars, and then the blue moon rising on his right, over where Asharias would be.

  —

  HE REACHED THE ARMY two days after. Late afternoon, rain. He came up to the supply wagons first—the wagons that had started all the trouble, because they’d been harassed by some local outlaws and fifty men had been sent out to teach a lesson.

  He passed by the cannons and saw—again—how slowly they were moving, pulled heavily on their wagons by labouring oxen and men under skies grey as iron. He rode past other infantry—ordinary ones, not djannis—then he saw some of his fellow djannis, different regiments.

  He found his own regiment. He dismounted, handed the horse’s reins to an aide. Told him to give it food and water then take it back to the cavalry. It was not his. He was a djanni, pride of the forces of Ashar.

  Heart thudding, he went to find his serdar. They were pitching the tents for the night, he saw. There was no point trying to go farther, with the cannon moving so slowly. They’d be dragged up here long after dark, then they’d all start again in the morning. The Jaddite fortresses were still a long way off, and spring was advancing, and there was always a day when they’d have to start home or be trapped by winter in the wild north.

  He didn’t follow that thought further. It wasn’t his place to do so.

  He was greeted as he walked. He didn’t reply. He found his commander under a canopy erected to keep the serdar dry while his tent was prepared. The space around was open, orderly. Men moved with precision, even in bad weather, performing assigned tasks. The army of the khalif knew how to do these things.

  He knelt in the rain beside the officer’s canopy and he made his report. He did expect he might die. He had known it was possible as he’d ridden this way.

  He was asked why he was alive. Why he had survived.

  He said—as the old, bearded infidel had told him to say—that he’d been sent back towards the end of the disastrous fight, so the army of the khalif and its esteemed serdars would know that it had been the hated rebel Skandir they’d found, not some rabble of raiders.

  “But why you? Why not a cavalryman on his own horse?”

  The next question, anticipated. The serdar had stood up by then, already rigid with fury, had moved close to Damaz. He wore his sword.

  And Damaz had said that he had been much the youngest of the fifty and he believed their leader had chosen him because of that.

  “So, if you left, you don’t know we lost.”

  “I do not, commander. But . . . but I can say we had only a handful left by the time I was told to report back to you.”

  “You didn’t just flee? Like a coward?”

  Damaz, on his knees, looked up. “Kill me, honoured serdar, if you believe this. I am here because I was sent to report. I obeyed the order I was given. I wish only to kill Jaddites, more
than ever, for the khalif and Ashar and for my companions who died.”

  And after a long moment, rain falling steadily, turning the earth where Damaz knelt to thick, cold mud, his commander nodded. “You wouldn’t have come back if you’d fled. You’d know I would read it in your face. You did well, djanni. This is information we needed.”

  “Will we go after them?” Damaz asked. Rain hit his face whenever he looked up, making him blink.

  The serdar shook his head. “They’ll be long gone, and we have no idea where. Our enemies are north of us. We will take a great vengeance there. Get yourself some food. You are welcome back and will be a part of whatever revenge we take.”

  Damaz, eating with companions later, vowed that someone would suffer among the infidels for his having been caused to tell a lie for his life—and seeing how easily it succeeded.

  When he slept, and he did sleep, exhausted, he dreamed of his sister speaking gently to him, and he woke in the night, cursing aloud, feeling despair. Someone threw a boot at him, snarling, and he fell silent in the blackness of the tent, listening to the misery of the rain.

  It was difficult to imagine a time without war. A Sarantine philosopher in the reign of Valerius II, almost a thousand years before, had written that. And offered examples, from the ancients to his own time.

  Conflict between faiths was only one cause, he wrote, although he added that it was among the most significant. Sometimes, he noted, religion could mask the ambitions of a king, an emperor, even a holy patriarch in search of a legacy to send his name ringing down the ages like sanctuary bells.

  At other times, the zeal of the pure of heart was a strong, true thing, the philosopher added. It rallied armies to fight with ferocity against unbelievers. Terrible things could be done in such conflicts. Had been done.

  It needs also to be said that for all the piety of men going to war, or sending others to distant battlefields (or praying for husbands and sons headed there), men and women cannot control the weather.

  There have been times when some thought they could. In the years herein chronicled, it was widely believed that the women of Senjan had access to magic. That this specifically involved their ability to conjure winds near their home—winds that destroyed enemy ships and men in wild seas while the Senjani, skillful in their small craft, could ride them through shallows to safety.