“Come on,” he said to the three men beside him. “If they came through, this will be where they went. We can’t go back without finding a sign.”
They followed him. It seemed, he thought, that if you were decisive when no one else was, you could lead men, even if you were very young.
He led them all day. Late in the afternoon one of the others said, “This is too far, we’re exposed. If they came this way and we find them, they’ll kill us.”
“Go back then!” said the boy whose name had been Damaz when he woke in the dark and watched the morning come. “I’m not! We need to stay out here so we can look for a fire when it gets dark. They won’t imagine we came this far after them.”
“Do what the fuck you like,” the other man said. “Get yourself killed, boy.” And he turned and started back. A moment later so did the other two. “Come on!” one of them said to Damaz. They obviously expected him to follow.
He didn’t. His name wasn’t Damaz any more. He didn’t follow them back towards the wood and the river and the army of the khalif.
Neven Gradek went west, instead, alone in a sunset world, then alone under stars as darkness came on the first day without clouds or rain in a long time. He didn’t see campfires. He hadn’t expected to.
He came to a farmhouse in the night as the meadow turned into cultivated land with low stone walls. He called a warning of his presence. Dogs barked and were called to heel. He told them, keeping a distance, that he was a djanni, one of many out here searching for fleeing Jaddites. Had they seen anyone pass by?
A lamp was brought out from the small house. The old man holding it, with a younger one beside him clutching a spade as a weapon, saw someone standing there in the uniform of a djanni.
They ducked their heads in fear. The older one knelt in his own yard. They invited him in. They were terrified, he saw. They fed him and gave him a pallet for the night, and the young one and two even younger boys went out, taking turns, to watch for any campfires that might be lit through the night.
He left before dawn, accepting food (you needed to take any food you were given) and continued west and, later, across the river south, and away. Away.
Maybe, possibly, he’d get home, he thought. He didn’t expect to, but you could try.
—
TIJAN LUBIC, THE TRACKER, oldest of the Senjani who went east in Hrant Bunic’s company, wasn’t even certain how old he was. What did a number matter? Jad sent you into this world (there were other worlds, his mother had taught him) and brought you home when it suited him. In between, you did what you did for as long as was allowed.
Lubic was one of the four who went into the forest in the night, trying to escape that way. In truth, there was no expectation they’d do so, but neither was there any belief the frail crafts they’d built would survive the rapids, let alone the waterfall that came after.
But any men found in the forest might conceal the existence of the boats, in the event that some miracle of Jad occurred and one of the two, and some of the men in them, survived.
In the event, Tijan Lubic became the miracle.
He wouldn’t have put it that way, even devout as he was. He’d have said (he did say) that being a tracker meant you were also good at hiding. The skills were mirrors of each other, reflections in a midday pool. He wouldn’t have gotten away at midday, of course.
He’d put on a dead djanni’s uniform at darkfall, over his own clothing. The other three disdained doing that, the three who had volunteered with him to try to slip past the soldiers in the forest.
Lubic disdained nothing when it came to raids, battles, escapes. Disdain, he felt, was a luxury few men could afford. He would have said this was a reason he’d lived so long. Add a lifelong belief that there was nothing, really, that a Senjani hero could not achieve in the service of his god. Silence when he moved, endurance, and cleverness—those helped.
He went last of the four. He crawled along the edge of the trees alone, not entering the forest. He went east, not west, right along the margin of where the Osmanlis were camped between wood and water. He was there to be seen if anyone walked to the wood’s edge, to relieve himself, to fetch more firewood.
There were campfires, but none cast a glow that reached this far. Those soldiers sent unhappily into the forest (there would be bears here, hungry after winter, and wolves, and very likely snakes) were farther west, near where the remnant of the Senjani were. That was what Lubic had realized. He kept going east, silently. He passed tethered horses. Those were dangerous, they could become restless, but they didn’t.
He entered the forest, on knees and elbows, belly to wet earth, only when he was midway along that line of campfires and tents under the stars. It was easier from then on. He did hear shouts later, and from the triumphant sound he guessed that at least one of his companions had been found, probably trying to climb a tree and go west overhead. He had told them it would be too hard to move through late-spring branches, tree to tree, in silence.
Safer on foot, on the forest floor, away from the soldiers, and with a tread you learned through decades, light and quiet, even among the debris of a wet woodland. Hearing and smell mattered more than sight in this heavy dark. He did smell bear, judged it not recent, not close. It frightened him nonetheless. He had three gouged scars on his back from a bear. Must be thirty years ago. Lucky to have survived. You needed to be lucky.
Home was south and west. A long way. He went north.
It seemed the obvious thing, though when he’d mentioned it to the others they’d given him looks he’d grown accustomed to over the years. A man who preferred to live in and off the land in a coastal town that prided itself on skills at sea. Men who tended against the grain were often regarded strangely. He was used to it, for a long time now. He’d had a wife who liked him well enough. That was a long time ago, too.
Still, it really did seem natural to him, what he was doing. They’d been headed for Woberg, hadn’t they? That was the summons they’d accepted. They were far closer to the fort than to home. Better to go that way, then, take your chances with patrols, scouts, villagers, whatever passed for hadjuks here. If he couldn’t slip through the likes of those, Tijan Lubic thought, what had he lived this long for?
He did slip through. The uniform got him food twice at farmhouses chosen for their isolation. He had simply shown his sword, then grunted and pointed (his voice would have given him away), and frightened people in remote places had assumed he was too lofty and arrogant to bother speaking to them. A real djanni might have been that proud, he thought. Some of them might also have taken their pleasure with the second farmer’s wife—or his young son.
He’d have been able to kill in both places if he’d needed to, but it was best, when you wanted to leave as little trace as you could, not to have dead bodies behind you. Bodies were a trace.
There were two small rivers, neither swift, as the land levelled north. Once, he encountered three scouts on horseback. He heard them coming much too late (he’d been tired that evening) but it had been raining again and the scouts were unhappy and indifferent.
They probably knew their army had turned back by then, he’d thought after. They hadn’t seen him, though he was barely hidden in a gully of rainwater where they passed. You needed to be lucky.
After the second river he began looking about, and on a cloudy night he stole clothing from a farmhand asleep in a barn alone. He had to knock him out of course (you couldn’t take the clothing off a sleeping man!) but he didn’t think a case of theft would make any kind of trail to follow. He discarded his own clothes and the djanni uniform a day away. He was well north by then, and from the maps they’d had (he always looked at maps) he believed he was close to the borderlands here. Borders changed, mind you. Maps couldn’t tell you about that.
He listened carefully now when he hid from people: farmers bringing their oxen in at twilight, girls washin
g clothing at a morning pond (pretty girls, one or two, but he was old, mostly past such thoughts).
Then one day Tijan Lubic heard the god named and thanked in the accents of the empire, of the north. He gave his own thanks to Jad then. Silently.
He went another day north to be sure, to be very certain. You could die if you didn’t make yourself certain of some things. Sundown that next day he saw the small dome of a sanctuary in a village by another pond and heard the evening bells summon men and women to the god’s rites and—dressed in stolen clothing, no longer an enemy uniform—Tijan Lubic went into that sanctuary and knelt before the altar and the sun disk, and he prayed with the ten people there and a very young cleric, lifting his voice to be heard by those around him, and by Jad.
Only after did he ask for food and drink and a pallet for the night. Only after did he tell them, cup in hand near a fire, where he had come from—alone, yes, alone—and what had happened there, and request directions to Woberg where he was bound, to tell the tale of the one hundred heroes of Senjan who had answered their emperor’s summons, and what they had done to the army of the khalif before they died.
And in this way did that story—of serdars killed along with so many djannis and cavalry, and above all else, of that invading army’s great guns destroyed in explosion after explosion on a spring night—come to the great fortress of Jad’s Holy Emperor. From there it went on: to Obravic itself and the court, to Ferrieres, Seressa, Karch, Esperaña, Anglcyn, Rhodias and the Patriarch—to the world. To those who record the histories of the world.
To Senjan itself, by the islands and the sea.
He reached home that autumn, amid wind and blowing leaves and the first cold bura winds after the wine harvest, did Tijan Lubic. The only one from that company. None of the others made it home alive, none was ever found.
—
THE SMALL ENGAGEMENTS of a war kill as surely as do mighty sieges and sea battles or armies engaging each other, tens of thousands on each side, on a celebrated field.
Hrant Bunic did, in fact, navigate the rapids and the moonlit rocks, and he lived through the vast, wild roar of the waterfall, all of them tumbled out of their boat like chips of wood, smashing into the foaming chaos at the bottom. He actually made it to shore, pulling himself up, alive. But his leg was broken in several places and no one else was there to set it for him, even temporarily, and eventually the wolves found him, and they are not merciful.
The wife of the serdar of the djannis killed by the last explosion on the north side of the river took a knife to her wrists when the news reached her of his death and the manner of it. He had been a good and decent man from childhood and through his days.
Hrant Bunic’s small son, much loved, grew up hating the Osmanlis with a fierce hatred, vowing vengeance in his father’s name. He enlisted in the army of the next anointed emperor of Jad and died in a later war. There are always later wars.
We are children of earth and sky.
CHAPTER XXII
“We believe we will die soon,” said the last surviving empress of Sarantium to the Eldest Daughter of Jad on Sinan Isle.
They were on the terrace. They were often there when the weather permitted. Late spring now, a mild day, little wind, the sea calm. Three of the younger women were in the garden working under the supervision of the older one who managed their herbs. They could hear bursts of laughter like birdsong. The labourers were beyond, in the vineyards sloping towards the water.
In the days of the previous Eldest Daughter the men had worked shirtless on warm days. Leonora had instructed that this was no longer acceptable. There had been regret expressed by some of Jad’s daughters. Chastity and pure thoughts were an ideal of the retreats, but honoured in varying degrees from one to another.
Leonora was privately unsettled by how little she herself regretted the imposition of decorum. Desire seemed not to be a part of her any more. She couldn’t find it, didn’t feel any . . . wanting. It had been so important once, and not long ago.
Passion had changed her life. It had mastered will and obedience, led her to exile near Seressa—brought her here. She had loved Paulo Canavli with a need that reached past hunger. Later, she had lain with Jacopo Miucci in his home and on the ship, and now . . .
She did think about Pero Villani occasionally. Wondered if he’d reached Asharias. If he would live to return. He had spoken to her of love. From this terrace she could see the place on the harbour where they’d talked.
So there was that: she did think of him. I am not an inconstant man. But it couldn’t be said that her nights were restless with these thoughts, or his absence. It disturbed her. Where had passion gone?
On the other hand, she couldn’t find any ardent piety within herself either. No longing for that purer communion with the god that defined the truly virtuous.
It was possible, Leonora thought, that she’d had too much change too swiftly. She needed time to grow into what she was now, or decide what she was now.
It had occurred to her to confide in the empress, but Eudoxia was not someone who inspired intimacies. Fear, rather, an extreme sense of caution. She had been someone with very great power once.
“Surely none of us really knows that,” she said now to the older woman. “As to our dying. Unless you are ill. Are you?”
She kept her manner cool. It seemed necessary with this woman. Weakness was not to be shown. They heard laughter again. The sun was on the terrace at this hour, warm and healing, summer coming.
“It is a feeling, not a god-sent knowing, girl. We said believe, didn’t we?”
“You did. We are all dying, aren’t we?”
Eudoxia made the sound Leonora had learned was her laughter. “You’re a cold one,” the empress said.
A little near the bone, given her thoughts. Leonora shook her head. “I am careful with you. You have taught me to be so.”
The other woman looked at her. Eudoxia had a shawl over her shoulders, even in the sun. But her eyes were clear and her colour was good. She didn’t look like someone dying.
They heard girls’ voices rise and fall from the garden. A man shouted an order in the vineyard.
“We wish to be buried at Varena,” said the empress. “Beneath the mosaics of which you spoke. The two empresses.”
Leonora felt a chill. “You said they were . . .”
“A whore and a barbarian. We did say that. And you told us we were unjust. And you were right.”
“I don’t under—”
“You can be cold and be right, Leonora Valeri.” A thin smile. “We often were. Sometimes it is the only way to be right about the world.” She looked away, towards the sea, which was bright and blue and white in the sunlight.
“They were empresses,” she said. “We will be content to lie with their images above us.”
She died five days after. No signs of illness, no distress the evening before. She simply did not wake in the morning for prayers, was found lying in her bed, hands folded on her breast. Had lived twenty-five years too long, she would have said.
Leonora wept that night as if her heart was breaking piece by piece, the way she imagined a fortress or city wall might slowly crumble under the thunder of cannons drawn up close. She wasn’t a cold one. She wasn’t cold at all, she thought. And would never now have a chance to say that, in reply.
—
DUBRAVA DID SEND the body in a small coffin within a larger one, of sandalwood and silver, on a ship across the water and then by road to Varena. The Djivo family’s Blessed Ingacia was in harbour and carried her. The rector and Gospodar Andrij Djivo (widely seen as a likely successor) were on board, along with other dignitaries of the republic that had sheltered her for many years. The ship flew two lowered flags, Dubrava’s and Sarantium’s.
The Empress Eudoxia was laid to rest in a small chapel in a ceremony of considerable majesty, attended by high
-ranking clerics from Rhodias, accompanied by emissaries to the High Patriarch from across all Jaddite lands. She lay, as she had requested, beneath mosaics made by an unknown artist almost a thousand years before—works that included two other women who had worn porphyry in Sarantium.
They prayed, that glittering company, that her soul might rest with Jad in light, and they spoke of the lamentable fall of the City of Cities, and then they left and went about their days and duties and pleasures—as men and women do.
Afterwards, when the chapel was empty again, still and silent, with late-day sunlight coming in through high windows, one man returned.
He knelt beside where the empress had just been interred, and though he’d been only a child twenty-five years ago, he spoke above her body an apology, through grief he had not expected, that the terrible fall had been allowed—by all of them.
Then Drago Ostaja prayed, alone in that place, to the god of light, but also to his beloved son Heladikos, who had been worshipped in the east once, that mercy and grace be extended to the woman lying here. It mattered to him that Heladikos be named today. He had not known this would be something he needed to do. We do not always know.
Then he rose and made the sign of the sun disk above where the body was, and again before the altar, and then he left and was never in Varena again in his life.
But there were three empresses from that day forward in the simple chapel beside the larger sanctuary. Two rendered in tesserae on facing walls (one with love), amid their glittering courts, and one under red-and-grey marble in two coffins, no longer enraged and sorrowing, no longer remembering.
Danica woke from a dream of her mother. That didn’t happen often. It was as if that time was walled off in some way. On the other side of a barrier in her mind.
She was young in the dream. They were still in the village. She had Neven’s head in her lap. He was two years old perhaps, falling asleep, and their mother was telling them a story at darkfall. Danica’s father and older brother and grandfather were still in the fields but due back soon, and the small house would become loud and warm with their presence. With luck, young Neven would be asleep by then.