Children of Earth and Sky

  Men had been sent across the river and had returned with a report. By then he could hear again, through the ringing sound and the light-headedness. The Jaddites had left a banner, planted to be found on the northern bank. One of the advance party had brought it back to show the serdar. The man was soaking wet from the river, and crying tears of rage.

  Damaz, standing near again, heard his serdar say, grimly, “We will chase them as far as ever they flee. To the walls of Senjan if need be. They will die the worst deaths men have ever died.”

  Soldiers shouted and gestured approval of that as it was conveyed through the ranks. There was fear and fury, both. Damaz tried to shout too, but his throat was raw and gritty and his thoughts seemed as roiled as the earth had been when the explosions had gone up.

  In the event, the Senjani were found the next day.

  Most of the Asharites were on the northern bank by then, crossing at sunrise. They left men behind to deal with the dead and wounded.

  The serdar sent eight scouts west with instructions to be swift, and careful. Two came back. One was wounded. A bullet in his thigh. The others were dead, or taken. But their enemies hadn’t gone far, it was reported. They didn’t need to be chased to the walls of Senjan.

  Fewer than a hundred of the Jaddites, the two scouts reported. They outnumbered the infidels easily, and they were among the best fighters in the khalif’s army.

  They will die the worst deaths men have ever died.

  —

  ONLY ONE CRATE of explosives left, and the Asharites coming after them would be even more cautious now. Six of their scouts had been killed this morning.

  They had brought all the explosive material they’d had in Senjan when they set out. All of it. That hadn’t been a discussion, either. The intention was to write to the emperor and say they’d done so, and ask for more to be sent to defend the Holy Emperor’s most loyal town, which was always under threat.

  There had been some sour amusement as to the likelihood of any supplies coming to them, since it never happened, but the letter had been duly sent with both imperial couriers.

  Bunic now had the remaining explosives divided into two smaller boxes. Again, he asked for volunteers; again, every man raised his hand. To do the greatest damage, they’d have to be detonated with the Osmanlis right there. That meant an extreme likelihood of dying, either in the blast or after.

  He had explained, earlier, his thinking as to what should happen now. Why he didn’t think they could escape from here, even if they separated to try to make it back south and west. They were too far away, on foot, in enemy lands, where they’d be seen and informed upon, and with mounted men and djannis after them.

  No one disagreed, no one even considered the notion that a company from Senjan would flee before Asharites. Bunic placed men in the forest at first light, implementing one other idea he’d had, more a gesture than anything else. Gestures could matter, if anyone ever learned of them.

  They were all aware that their deaths would be bad if they were taken. This had become clear after the night events by the river and—spectacularly—far to the south by the enemy cannons and powder. They had done something legendary there, Hrant Bunic told his company. They all knew it, anyhow.

  He refused to pick the two remaining Mihos for this next task; they had done enough as a clan here. Glory and loss should both be shared among heroes. He didn’t pick the boy, either, of course, but Miro, intense and excitable, insisted on going with the two men chosen, so that he could run back with word of what happened.

  “They have horses to chase you down,” Bunic had said repressively.

  “I am faster than any infidel horse,” Miro had replied, to laughter.

  How did you refuse a boy who could say that? This was warfare, for the god and their own souls yearning for light. Miro Pavlic went with the two men, each of those carrying a box of explosives. Bunic made him promise to keep a distance, stay in the trees, watch, and run back through the woods to report.

  “What else would I do?” the Pavlic boy said. He took one end of one of the boxes, helping the smaller of the two men. Bunic watched them till they were out of sight.

  —

  THEY DIDN’T TAKE either of the two Senjani alive. Another failure.

  It was an expectation that they would, an order from the serdar, but the Jaddites killed themselves, crying the name of their god, when cornered in the trees. The explosives on the path this time had been seen and avoided, the infidels seen and chased. They were djannis, weren’t they? And red-saddle cavalry. How many times could someone expect to succeed with the same device of explosives and fire-arrows? Really.

  But Damaz had to admit he was shaken when both men plunged daggers into themselves after he and others chased them down in the forest.

  The serdars would be extremely unhappy: their own here north of the river, and the commander who had turned the army around and wanted captives to carry back.

  This company, this band, really, of Senjani had done terrible damage. Word had reached them by the river. All the big guns were destroyed, and most of the engineers and artillerymen were dead or horribly maimed and burned. There hadn’t been much doubt as they’d looked back at those vast fires in the night. The leader of the cavalry here, a much-admired man, was also dead—in the first detonation by the river. There would be consequences for their commanders back home from all of this.

  Mostly because of the guns, though. Men died in war, it was expected, acceptable, but the great cannons, when they worked, were precious—because they were so necessary and so often failed. It was almost intolerably difficult to cast big guns that held their shape and purpose, that didn’t crack. It was the lost cannons more than anything that might lead to deaths among the leaders. Even Damaz, young as he was, understood that.

  He heard a sound. He had shouted an alert and was sprinting after someone through the trees almost before he realized it.

  He was a fast runner. Even so, this Senjani—it had to be one of them—was faster, twisting like a deer or a rabbit through the woods. The sound he’d heard had been a choked-off wail of grief. Foolish man! Giving himself away like that. He redoubled his efforts. The other man might stumble, fall, the forest was dense with roots and fallen branches and branches that might hit you in the face. The light was dim.

  The other man might also turn and loose an arrow at him if he found a place to do that—a glade, say, where Damaz would have to run into open space in pursuit. He thought about that. They were alone, ahead of the others. Damaz heard them shouting and labouring behind. He wanted to take this raider alive, they had orders to do that. He needed to survive, first.

  There was a clearing. Damaz left his feet, diving forward and to his right, rolling, as he came into it. There were oak trees, in leaf now, it was thickly shaded, no flowers grew. He saw mushrooms and moss, and he heard—never saw—an arrow strike a tree trunk behind him.

  How did you take a bowman alive when you were alone? He thought of Koçi, remembered the inner voice he’d heard in that fight. It seemed long ago. He grabbed for his knife, rolled hard a second time—another arrow flew past where he’d been, hit the earth. Damaz came up, surging forward, and threw, hard as he could. You couldn’t aim to wound, not from this far, you could only hope.

  And sometimes hopes were rewarded. He hit the Senjani—a small man—in the shoulder. Shouting, unsheathing his sword, Damaz sprinted forward. There was enough light for him to see . . .

  That this other man, this infidel warrior, was younger than he was, truly a boy. And with a horror that clutched, and would stay, Damaz saw the boy draw a knife and plunge it into his own neck, and dark blood burst from the wound.

  He didn’t cry the name of the sun god. He just died. Right here, in this glade, edge of a small clearing in some Sauradian wood far from anywhere that mattered.

  A place in the world where nothing like
this ought to happen. Not to a boy. Damaz had no idea where that thought came from.

  He stood above the Senjani. He was breathing hard. He heard men crash into the glade behind him.

  “Fuck!” someone growled, striding up. “This one too? Why didn’t you stop him?”

  Damaz didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn to see who it was. He was looking down at this death, a young face, someone near to his own age with his own fair hair.

  “Shut up,” someone said to the swearing man. “They aren’t letting themselves be taken.”

  Damaz didn’t look back at this one, either. He bent and retrieved his knife from the boy’s shoulder. You always retrieved your weapons. There was a lot of blood from the neck wound. He wiped his blade on the earth, then turned and headed out of this forest, towards whatever light there was today.

  I didn’t kill this one, he thought. But that was foolish, of course he had. And there were others to kill up ahead, or be killed by.

  Senjan, his sister had said. Danica. She had gone to Senjan when their village burned. With his mother, with his grandfather, after he was taken as a child.

  CHAPTER XXI

  The tax assessors, the two they had discovered hiding off the road and had stripped naked and sent away, had been killed. Someone reported it to Skandir’s band in a village farther south. They’d been torn apart, it was said, left in a field.

  There might be reprisals if it was discovered. There almost always were, but this was a wild, remote place to the south and west, and the Osmanlis were concentrating their attention north just now. To a certain degree the star-worshippers had accepted that this part of the world, where Sauradia became Trakesia, was not an easy or a likely place to subdue. Not worth much, either.

  Danica searched in herself and found no weakness. No sympathy for those two men, even in the memory of seeing them stumble naked down the road. One had been weeping. Good, she remembered thinking.

  They set fire to the barn beside a small garrison after a long ride east along a stream. They had six new men with them by then; they needed exposure to fighting. So did Danica. Asharite soldiers came hurrying out through the fort’s wooden gate, carrying guns, which was foolish in the dark. Danica and the two other archers cut them down, by the light of the burning barn. The guns were fired, harmlessly. Skandir sent men to claim them, after. Guns had their uses, just not in a fight like this.

  But as they were doing that, two people, young ones, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, came running from the barn, half clothed, crying in fear, hands in the air. A boy and a girl. They’d found a place to be together at night. While Danica was watching, uncertain, Skandir and another man rode over and killed them both.

  They spent what remained of the night some distance back west in two adjacent farmhouses and the barns attached to each. One Jaddite farmer and his wife gave Skandir their bed, so Danica had that with him. He always accepted, she had learned by now, when such offers were made. He also knew where shelter might be found. It allowed people to feel they were playing a role, he’d said. That they, too, were resisting conquest: in Jad’s name, in the name of their fathers and mothers, children, grandparents living or dead.

  She said, in the dark, “Those were children, in the barn.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Yes you did.”

  He was silent in the bed beside her. A big man grown old, scarred and seamed, lean with the road and war through twenty-five years. He was slow to get up some mornings when it was damp.

  “Yes, very well, I did,” he said finally.

  “That girl died for sleeping with a boy?”

  “A boy? An Osmanli soldier!”

  “That was no soldier, Rasca.”

  “You know that? Do you?”

  “I do. So do you. That was some farmer’s or miller’s son, or—”

  “An Asharite farmer or miller, then, or a fucking smith come to dispossess our own! Tax our faith or kill us for it! Rot them all, girl! What would you have me do?”

  He was fierce, Danica thought. He was undyingly fierce. She could feel his rage like heat beside her.

  The farmer and his wife could hear them from the other side of the single, partitioned room. She wondered what they’d think. She said, softly, “The girl had yellow hair. She might have been their daughter, these two.”

  He didn’t reply. In the silence she thought about how many people would die, one way or another, in this long war. How many had already died. That girl should not have gone with an Osmanli boy into the barn. She told herself that.

  Eventually, she fell asleep. You needed to sleep when you could, and there was little of the night left.

  They saddled up at sunrise. They went south. The intention was what it had been from after the battle with the djannis and the cavalry, where her brother had been: regroup, train new men, then go back north. Raid and run, kill as many as you could. Make the infidels regret the day they’d come, and every day after. Live this way, do exactly this, endlessly. Or to an ending.

  She was all right with that. She was here for that.

  Far to the north her brother was encountering a company from Senjan by another river, and the army of Ashar had been ordered to turn back.

  They might be facing the best warriors in the khalif’s army, Hrant Bunic told his band, but their leaders could make mistakes, and they had never fought Senjan. The heroes waged war differently. They could do things here, between forest and river, that would not be forgotten.

  He didn’t know if that was true, but he said the words. When you led people they needed to hear certain things from you, and you needed to say them in a way they would believe. He did think some of them would have to live for this to be known and remembered.

  There had been no more explosions east of them, and the boy had not come back. Bunic had a bad feeling. He kept that to himself, although the others could hear the silence as well as he could. Birdsong, wind in leaves, and below them the low roar of the river approaching its rapids and then a cataract.

  Waiting, brooding, coming back (again) from checking the progress of the work he’d ordered among the trees, he had another thought.

  He sent six men with crossbows to climb trees farther east and stay hidden there. There were enough leaves to screen a man now, if he knew how to keep still. It was a milder day, no rain. Overhead you could even see the sun trying to push through windblown clouds to be seen. They had prayed at dawn, led by the clerics. I have lived, Hrant Bunic thought, a mostly good life. He did want to see his son again, and the sea.

  Late afternoon a man came running back. The Asharites were coming: cavalry at the front, djannis behind in formation. They were not yet strung out, not as they would be when they came nearer, because there was only a narrow space between water and wood here. Of course there was only that: was he a fool, the captain of the Senjani?

  Better, or less confident, or perhaps less angry leaders of the Osmanli force would have had men on the southern bank with arrows and guns, shooting across, forcing the Senjani into the trees. He took mild, brief hope from this failure. They might still do it, but he didn’t think they would. They were too sure of themselves, in their numbers. And enraged. You could fight savagely in that state, or make mistakes. Or both.

  It was important, Bunic reminded himself, not to be taken alive.

  And just then, on that thought, came two explosions, one and then another immediately after, shattering the day’s stillness, and this time he smiled.

  —

  AGAIN! AND ONCE MORE Damaz was knocked flying and hit the ground hard, and again he couldn’t hear anything at all. He had tears in his eyes, was fighting not to sob, which was shameful. Men around him were moaning, he could see it, but he couldn’t hear.

  An arrow struck someone beside him and the man died. Like that. He had been sitting on the ground, dazed, a hand to a blo
odied cheek, and now he was dead, a crossbow bolt in his chest. Alive, not alive.

  Damaz flattened himself behind the dead body, trying desperately to make his thinking work properly. He was hearing bells again, ringing and ringing.

  How had this . . . ? They had been watching for buried chests on the path! Surely they hadn’t missed any! And then he knew. The mistake. They had done something desperately foolish. They’d carried the two chests they’d spotted before, the ones that had led men into the trees to chase down the archers ready to explode them. It hadn’t worked twice, not against this company.

  But they’d carried them! And crossbow bolts could trigger an explosion as easily as an archer’s fire-arrow. And there were trees here, where a man might hide.

  Damaz looked at the forest. He wiped at his eyes. Not tears. Blood. He was injured. He couldn’t see well enough to spot where a crossbowman might be hiding in the trees. Then another man was hit, just ahead of him, and Damaz pointed, and he screamed “Up there!” And their own archers began loosing arrows that way, dozens of them, and then more, and a moment later a man fell from among the leaves, and then another did, and a third came spinning down, so slowly, it seemed not quite real.

  Rising to his feet—you couldn’t cower behind a dead man!—Damaz hurried to help the wounded around him. A cluster of men had gathered just ahead, and as Damaz came up he saw that their own serdar of the djannis was dead in the blast, his body mangled horribly. You could tell who he was only by the charred shreds of his uniform. Damaz felt a sickness in himself.

  Both leaders! The cavalry serdar and now their own. Killed by an accursed band of raiders they outnumbered vastly.

  More arrows were flying into the trees. Someone had spotted another crossbowman. Damaz saw this one fall, too. He ran that way. The man might be alive! They were to take them alive, to parade for the khalif. To show their triumph here.