Children of Earth and Sky

  He wasn’t alive. Two arrows in him and a broken neck from the fall, his body twisted strangely. They were still loosing arrows, the archers among the djannis, and he saw the flash of the occasional musket shot, which was foolish at this distance. Damaz didn’t have a bow, he was marching with a sword now.

  He still couldn’t hear. He’d been too close to the detonations again. He could have died, so easily. Alive, not alive. He wiped at his eyes and again there was blood. He’d need to have a wound tended, but that wasn’t going to happen, there were others much more badly hurt. He needed to help. He didn’t know who was giving orders.

  He couldn’t have heard them anyhow.

  He saw that the cavalry was pushing west again, towards where the Senjani had been reported to be. There were enough horsemen to destroy the enemy themselves. That, Damaz thought, would be a disgrace for the djannis! He looked around wildly and saw men running in the wake of the horses. Yes. There’d be enough here to tend the wounded. Someone had to fight and destroy in the khalif’s name and for the honour of his best-beloved infantry.

  Damaz ran. He didn’t draw his sword yet. That was an error they’d been taught to avoid from the start of their training. You waited until you saw who you were to fight. He kept wiping at his head, though, because blood kept dripping into his eyes. Eventually it was too much, he couldn’t see. He went towards the riverbank to clean himself with water but when he got there he saw it was even steeper here, a ravine, a gorge, the water far below.

  He used his knife and cut a strip from his tunic near the bottom, and started to tie it awkwardly around his head. Another man saw him and ran over and did it for him. He said something, but Damaz shrugged and touched his ears and shook his head. The other djanni nodded and pointed forward, grimly, and Damaz nodded, and they ran together.

  —

  ONE OF THE THINGS Hrant Bunic had learned through years of raiding was that if you could provoke an enemy to rage he was more likely to make mistakes.

  He hadn’t had a lot of time, but they’d rigged tripwires between the woods and the riverbank with archers placed to strike at the fallen, and then more bowmen for when the cavalry slowed, having seen horses fall. Horsemen moving slowly made easy targets if you felt no compunction about shooting the horses.

  They didn’t. Feel compunction. They had little expectation of leaving here alive. The thing was to take as many with you as you could. He just didn’t have enough men, and sending some forward was pretty much sending them to die right now. He told them to loose arrows quickly then get back here through the trees. A few did manage that.

  By late in the day, despite having picked off—it seemed—forty or fifty of the Asharites and their horses, an appallingly large number of Osmanlis had reached the narrow point between gorge and forest that Bunic had picked for their last stand. Better to die here, though, than chased down by horsemen. There were no legends about men killed in flight.

  They had planted stakes angled outwards, and contrived a barrier of branches, axes ringing in the woods from the moment they’d started setting up here. They needed more arrows, but they needed more of everything. This was not a battle he was going to win.

  The narrowness of the space helped. They fought back two assaults, one right after the other. It was good that there was no obvious leader of the Osmanlis now. It seemed as if some of them had simply ridden and run to get here, to hurl themselves upon the Senjani. Bunic decided they must have killed another serdar with the last explosions, which was a pleasing thought. He had little time for reflection, however. They were fighting. Men were dying beside him. He needed to make men die in front of him.

  They went for the horses whenever they could. Bodies of dead or thrashing horses in front of their barrier were an added bulwark. So were slain men. He knew of a fight where those under assault had plugged gaps with their own dead.

  He wasn’t going to do that here. Jad judged men by all they did in life, and he wouldn’t use a companion that way. Some fell in the front and you didn’t move them—you didn’t have a chance—but that was different. Goran Miho was on his left and the old man, Lubic, was on his other side, and the three of them stayed at the front. The sun had broken through behind them, setting. Another small good thing—it was in the eyes of the Osmanlis now. Even so, this was a place to die under the god’s late-day sun, not to triumph. They had done triumphant things, sometimes you paid a price for that.

  He saw a horse stumble approaching the barrier, stepping awkwardly on the body of a dead man. Bunic leaped forward, across the low wall. Goran Miho was right beside him with the same thought, no words spoken, and Miho drove his blade up into the horse’s belly as Bunic, on the other side, killed the rider as he struggled to leave the saddle. And so there were two more in front of them, bodies making that other kind of wall, and the raiders hurried back between the stakes and behind the branches.

  They were good, quick, strong fighters, the heroes of Senjan. Their methods were those of brigands, raiders. They were raiders and brigands. They’d scout a village or salt mine office, find a merchant ship in the narrow sea, come up in the night or as dawn was breaking. That was what they did.

  They couldn’t match swords and guns and arrows with red-saddle cavalry or the best infantry in the Asharite world, not outnumbered as terribly as they were.

  It was, accordingly, a bad time, defined by death. The sun made its way down behind them and the light was turning red and beginning to fade. Bunic watched men die around him that he’d known all his life, men who had come here without hesitation—to their end. He was unwounded so far. His sword was bloodied. They were lucky in another way: the press was so tight in this narrow strip of land that the Osmanli bowmen were kept largely out of the fight.

  Lucky. Not really the word for what was happening, he thought. He stepped sideways around a stake, then forward again, two quick steps, and buried his sword in another horse’s belly and withdrew. One of their archers sank an arrow in the rider as he tried to free his legs from the stirrups. The man screamed. There was so much screaming. Warfare was loud, Hrant Bunic thought. He remembered, suddenly, sunsets over the sea at home, the sounds of waves, wind in sails.

  He’d had about seventy men here, after those sent ahead to do what they could, and the four Mihos who had gone south and destroyed the cannons. Only twenty or so of the enemy could assault them at a time, but at some point they’d figured out that they could send archers and guns into the woods for an angle on the Senjani. Bunic had some archers there, too. Or he’d had them there. Dead by now, it looked like. There didn’t seem to be any of their own arrows flying as darkness came.

  The attackers called a halt when night fell. Someone had taken charge by then. There was almost always a pause at night for armies in battle (not for raiders). A fear of killing your companions in the dark was part of it, but the Asharites also knew they had the Senjani trapped here, and it was clear that they wanted the last ones alive.

  That wasn’t going to happen, Hrant Bunic thought.

  He watched from behind the barrier and the piled-up dead as the Osmanlis brought up even more men, some with gear for tents, some with food. They began gathering wood for fires. Another leader arrived. He was giving orders, staying out of arrow range. The Senjani also had food and drink, but only because so many of them were dead. There were—he counted twice—sixteen of them left. Sixteen.

  They would be overrun in the morning, clubbed down and disarmed, bound and taken away, stumbling on foot or in prison wagons, to be paraded and mutilated and killed for the glory of Ashar and the stars.

  No glory for any of you on this campaign, he wanted to shout across the space between himself and—how many were there?—five hundred Osmanlis, probably more. He saw their fires burning now.

  Miho came over, limping with a thigh wound. He reported that the enemy had—as expected—sent men to circle behind them through the forest. They h
ad cut off any retreat west in the dark, would attack from both sides when there was light enough to see.

  All predictable. If you fought long enough you could anticipate most tactics that would be used against you. It didn’t necessarily help. Not if you had only sixteen fighters.

  “Is it time?” Miho asked.

  “Not yet. Full dark, middle of night,” Bunic replied. “Say at moonrise. Ropes are tied?”

  “They are.” In the first starlight Goran Miho smiled thinly. “Needed to double them.”

  “Long way down?”

  “Yes. This is mad and foolish, Hrant.”

  “I know it is.”

  “And wonderful,” Miho added. “It is how we should die.”

  “I don’t propose to die, Goran.”

  “I know. But . . .”

  “But . . . yes.”

  They left it at that. He didn’t like Goran Miho, but he’d fight proudly next to him anywhere and die with him now, and face the god’s judgment beside him. You didn’t have to be a pleasant man to be a brave one.

  He drank, ate some dried meat, waited for the blue moon. He saw it rise. He gave the order.

  Four men went towards the woods, including the old tracker, Lubic. If you could track like a wolf, you could be silent as one, too. It was unlikely they would get through, but if they did, if even one or two of them could slip past the Osmanlis in the forest and away, it would be such a good thing. No one said farewell. They just went.

  The twelve men remaining went down two ropes in blackness under moving clouds and the stars. They went over the cliffs of the chasm there to the small, light boats they’d made in the woods in a day, knowing exactly how to do so, having done it many times before.

  Some axes they’d carried (they always carried axes), and some they’d taken in villages they’d attacked coming here. They could cut and sharpen spikes for a barrier, and cut down and carry logs and branches for a wall. And they could make boats. They knew everything about boats.

  Two rafts for a dozen men. Frail, open, not enough nails—they were mostly lashed together with cord. Not the best wood for a boat hereabouts, either. You used what you had, including memory and pride.

  The last man down, Zorenko, was the best climber. He untied the ropes and tossed them and the spikes over and down, then he descended that cliff in the dark. Bunic wouldn’t have ever wanted to try that. Zorenko did it easily. It was impossible down here to see if he was smiling at the bottom, but odds were, Bunic thought, that he was.

  With luck, with any kindness from fortune at all, the Asharites would not know where they had gone, or how. They would think they’d fled through the forest, would pursue—and not find them. Chase them for days in that direction, perhaps, past the wood’s ending, into the fields. If they’d caught any or all of the four he’d sent that way, they’d guess the others had slipped through. That had been part of his thought.

  There was a thin margin of wet earth here beside the river, which was fast, racing, loud, rushing towards what lay ahead to the west.

  What lay ahead were rapids and rocks between cliffs on both sides, then a waterfall. The land sloped down, gently to the south of the river, more steeply on this side. The river in its gorge dropped faster.

  They had seen the falls coming this way, looking down in rain. How we should die, Goran Miho had said this evening. They were children of the sea and a long way from it, but this river was headed towards salt water and seabirds.

  And the Asharites might never know what had happened to the captives they’d intended to take in the morning. They could become a mystery. An enemy failure. If anyone was ever able to tell the story.

  If any of them survived this, Hrant Bunic thought, they’d have such a tale to tell in the world.

  “Wait for first grey,” he told his men, this small cluster left from the hundred who’d set out through the gates of Senjan. “We need to be able to see something to have a chance.” He had to speak loudly, to be heard over the river.

  Someone laughed. “Hah! And what chance would that be?” But he shouted it with amusement, not fear, not any kind of yielding at all, and there was answering laughter by the rushing water in the dark.

  Hrant Bunic felt so much pride he thought it might burst his chest.

  A little later someone said, “I can see your ugly face, Bunic,” and a few moments after that he gave the order to get into the boats and push them from the shoreline, and the river took them all.

  —

  THERE WAS A STILLNESS AT SUNRISE.

  Damaz had been awake for some time, waiting, disturbed by something he couldn’t name. Not apprehension. This wasn’t going to be a battle. They were only about fifteen of the infidels left and they had five hundred men here. Their only challenge was to capture, making sure not to kill—that was why they were waiting for daylight. He probably wouldn’t be at the front of this, and it wouldn’t take long.

  They had men in position on the far side of the Senjani. He had hoped to be one of those but the new serdar, coming up late in the day, had sent experienced djannis there, through the woods.

  Taking a prisoner earned you honour, so veterans had priority. The serdar had decreed that if anyone killed a Jaddite today he’d be executed. There was a great deal of anger—and fear—among their leaders, Damaz thought.

  He didn’t see a great deal of honour in this coming fight, but that was a private thought. He’d killed that other boy in the forest, and killed or wounded at least two men at the barrier yesterday. He didn’t know if anyone had noticed him fighting bravely. They hadn’t had any leaders with them for those first assaults.

  At least he could hear again. Birds were singing, the sky was brightening. There would be sunshine this morning. Now there would be, after they’d been forced to turn back, after the cannons had been destroyed. By these infidels, he reminded himself. Respect or sympathy were errors, weakness, shameful. The Senjani trapped here had killed companions of his.

  Except, it turned out, the Senjani weren’t trapped here.

  There was no one beyond the barrier, past the dead horses and men.

  Word rippled back, uneasily. Someone shouted from the far side. No one there, either. Had they slipped through the woods in the night? There had been a hundred men at a time, in shifts, posted among the trees to stop that.

  It turned out three of the Senjani had indeed been found in the forest trying to escape. They were dead, though, not captured. It had been too hard to overpower and take someone in the blackness of the wood. Six of their own men had been wounded, four were dead.

  “How do we know there were only three?” asked the man next to Damaz, the one who’d bandaged his head and fought beside him yesterday.

  “We fucking don’t,” said someone else.

  The men on the far side of the barricade swore that no one had gone past them. The new serdar looked frightened now. Commanders were going to be executed as a result of these events, Damaz’s new companion had said last night.

  The serdar ordered the dead pushed aside, including their own, and the makeshift barrier, and he sent cavalry galloping west along the river. If the Jaddites had fled on foot they’d be hunted down like the animals they were, he shouted. And if they had escaped that way, even if briefly, the leaders he’d posted on the western side would be decapitated right here.

  “We need to check the forest, too,” someone said near Damaz. “We know they tried that. There are only the two possibilities,” he added, uncertainly.

  Damaz thought about that. He walked towards the cliff and looked down. Then he made his way forward, past those carrying away the dead from by the barrier now. There was no order or routine here among the army of the khalif. No one stopped him.

  He stepped over the fence, past bodies already beginning to smell, with flies at men and horses. There were carrion birds overhead and waiting in
the trees, he saw. He stood where the Senjani had been and he looked around. Some of their own men were going into the wood. Veterans again.

  He walked to the forest’s edge. He saw where the Jaddites had cut down trees to make their barrier. A lot of trees, he thought. Then he remembered that there’d been sharpened stakes, too, in front of the fence. He kept looking for something, a hint, a clue. He didn’t see anything, he didn’t know what he was looking for.

  He went back to the cliff and looked down at the river (fast here, approaching the rapids). Something was bothering him. They couldn’t have got down there, could they? And why would they? Why would any men choose death that way?

  The thought came to him, swift and hard: better than being captured and taken to Asharias. He was sure, in that instant, that he was right. And with that thought his life changed. As if a key had turned in some lock in his heart.

  He stood there, terrified, unsteady on his feet so near the long drop, above the roar of water. And now he thought: how could the world bring you to your sister the way it had, back south, and have her know you, and have it mean nothing in a man’s life?

  It couldn’t, he thought, his heart pounding. It couldn’t mean nothing. Not if you then encountered others, magnificently brave, from the town where she’d fled with your mother and grandfather—whose name you bore.

  If you tried to make it mean nothing, what were you denying? Everything?

  My name is Neven Gradek. I was loved, and stolen away, and I do not have to accept that as my life.

  That thought came to him, it was in him, by a cliff in Sauradia as a rising sun defined the arriving day. His mouth was dry. His head throbbed from the wound he’d taken and the explosions. But—and this was the astonishing thing—he had no doubts. None. Not from that first moment, or after, with all that was to follow.

  He closed his eyes. Roar of water below, birds calling above. My name is Neven Gradek. He opened his eyes. He turned and joined the men going into the trees. No one had posted him to that company but there was so much chaos that morning, he just went. He caught up to those searching the forest and stayed with a group of them all morning, and then some of them made their way out to the west, into a meadow.