Some hours later, on a patrol through town, when the dozen of them were a street away from the market common, just across from the well, Uk glanced aside to see the redheaded girl, being hurried by her equally redheaded brother up some low steps and through a shack door. And that’s the woman Mrowky died for, Uk thought. No, it wasn’t fair.
And what about the crazed peasant who’d murdered Mrowky? Would I even recognize him, Uk had pondered, his face once more returned to normal, after that murderous frenzy—?
Later, crossed-legged on the ground, while he was eating his dinner, Uk was called for guard duty at Lieutenant Kire’s tent. And the lieutenant himself, on going out, stopped in a swag of black, his cloak a dark tongue thrust straight down behind, to ask in the evening’s slant-light: “How’s it going for you there, Uk?”
Clearly the lieutenant had heard the others speak of the big soldier’s loss. “I’m all right, Sir,” Uk answered—and wondered why even that absurdly small bit of concern made him feel better. Perhaps, he reflected, as, in the east, indigo darkened the village roofs, it’s because any and all concern in this landscape—by anyone or for anyone—was so rare.
Only a bit of light lit a few western clouds as Prince Nactor had marched up to Kire’s tent flap; when, outside, Uk heard the altercation within, he did not exactly listen to their converse. (That’s what Mrowky would have done then been back to whisper about it half the night …) Not that it kept their words from him. But while they’d talked, voices rising and lowering, he tried to move his mind years and miles away, to fix on a stream in his own village, with its dark and muddy bank rich in frogs and dragonflies—
Then light fell in his eyes, and Kire was saying: “Go into town, Uk. Take horses and two more men—requisition a portable light from Power Supplies. And bring back some woman of Çiron—”
Behind Kire, the prince laughed: “Go into town and find a young and pretty one. I really think this should be rather fun—I’m going back to my tent.”
Kire said: “Obey your prince.”
Surprised, the big soldier threw up his fist in salute.
Minutes later, with two other soldiers, their mounts stepping carefully in the dark, Uk rode off between the last of the cook fires, red and wobbling against a black so intense it was blue. One of the riders, the box holding the illuminating filament slung around his neck, reached down now and clicked it on. A beam of white fanned to the left of his horse. (In the bushes to the right, with twigs pricking her thighs and wrists, Naä pulled back in loud leaves—and stopped breathing.) Clucking at his stallion, while some animal thrashed to his right in the brush, Uk glanced over at the beam. “Douse that. We don’t need it.”
The light died.
What had been in Uk’s mind was that the moon’s sliver from the previous night should have grown a bit by this evening. But either the world had moved from crescent moon to moon’s dark, or overcast hid all illumination. Probably they could have used a light, Uk decided, as the horses left the smell of burning for the town’s dark streets. But that only resolved him, out of whatever stubbornness, not to have it on at all.
Really, he thought, later, it was not so much a conscious decision. Rather, as Uk led the other two soldiers through the night village, at a certain point he simply realized where he was going, what he had already started to do, and let himself go on to do it. The lieutenant had told him to bring back a village woman. What other woman should he bring? He knew where this one lived. If he started looking in houses at random, it could take forever. Between the dark shacks of the village, he let his horse take him out of the market square. “…Break her, violate her!” the prince had ordered. Well, he thought, reining to the left, it was only what had already started to happen to her.
In the light from one window, he made out the well, and turned toward where the door to the house should be—yes; there were the steps. He gave the order to dismount, dropped to the ground himself, stepped up on the porch and, with his fist, hammered on the door.
Then he hammered again.
When he struck the door a third time, a voice within, like a child’s, asked: “Yes…? Who—” so that, when light rose up along the crack in the door, he expected the figure standing behind it to be her.
But it was the boy, his hair coppery in the firelight inside, one braid falling in front of his strong little shoulders, one behind.
Uk pushed the door in. “Where’s the girl, Çironian?”
Stepping back, the boy said, “Sir… ?”
“Where’s the girl who lives here… your sister?” Certainly in a village like this, she must be his sister.
“What wouldst thou—?”
Surprised at his own impatience, with the heel of his hand Uk hit the boy’s naked shoulder. “Call her!”
A girl’s voice came, somewhere from within: “Abrid …?”
The boy’s fearful face looking up at Uk seemed wholly absurd. Behind, one of the other soldiers moved closer.
The frightened boy called over his shoulder: “Rimgia… ?”
In the part of the room that, outside the firelight’s immediate range, was shadow, a hanging moved. The girl stepped hesitantly in. The first thing Uk thought was how ridiculously young they both were! Surely this afternoon, when he’d glimpsed them in the glaring street, they’d been older than this …?
Her bright hair, unbraided, was tousled; her eyes looked sleepy—swollen with tiredness? Or was it something else? She came forward, with her face full of questioning.
Uk stepped, reached out, and grabbed Rimgia’s arm. Her eyes came immediately awake, as he said: “Come on! You’re wanted at Lieutenant Kire’s tent.”
Abrid said: “Touch her gently or not at all—!”
While the girl said: “Please, let me get my—”
Where the rage came from, Uk didn’t know. Really, they were only kids. But he released the girl, turned, and gave the boy the back of his hand, against his cheek and neck. Abrid went stumbling back, and sat down, hard, his head cracking against the wall—sat, blinking, terrified. “I have no patience with a silly boy’s playing at being a man!” Uk growled.
Rimgia, who had grabbed a shawl from some peg on the wall, froze where she had started to wrap it around herself.
“Go on!” Uk barked. “Cover yourself, you dirty hussy! If you’d done that last night—” The hand with which he had struck the boy was shaking. What he’d started to say was that the little guy might be alive now! But that was stupid. They’d never known his friend—even the girl. “Come on!”
The cloth went over her head, wrapped down tight on her shoulders. Her blinking eyes were suddenly shadowed by the indifferent print covering her hair.
Uk took her by the arm and pulled her outside, while she kept trying to look back over her shoulder at her brother within still sitting on the floor. “Rimgia—?” That was the boy.
She called out once: “Abrid . . !”
Which made one of the other soldiers with them grab her and push her further into the dark: “Come on, now—!” which, Uk realized a moment later, might have been to keep him from hitting her; for, at her cry, Uk had raised his shaking hand again.
Why could he not control this absurd anger at these silly, frightened children?
One of the other soldiers gave him the rope when he asked for it. He and the one with the light over his shoulder bound her, clumsily, in the dark; then the soldier who’d pushed her said: “Come, behind the horse—and don’t dawdle. If you’re thinking about running, forget it. We’ll just come back and kill your brother—before we catch you again!”
And a moment later, they were riding through the town, while, now and again, Uk heard—or felt—the girl at the tether’s end stumble or, once, cry out.
She’d winced with each of big Uk’s barks. She’d bitten down hard as he’d struck Abrid. Now, from doorway to doorway, Naä hurried on beside the three mounted soldiers, with Rimgia going, bound, behind. And Naä thought, as she had thought before: They really do
n’t look back.
And then: Suppose I did it …?
Fool, she thought. This isn’t some ballad or folk tale about some bit of bird-brained bravery! This is my life… but, she thought, it’s her life too…
Then she thought: This time, I am going to do it.
And, as she thought it, she realized she was, rather, going to do something else!
The web was bound wholly around her now, glittering against her back, her cheeks, her calves, her forehead, her thighs. (Let it, she thought, be an energy flowing into me, not a draining…!)
Naä thought: If I do what I know I’m about to, I am going to be killed. If I do what I know I’m about to, I’m going to be…I’m going to be killed—she repeated it in the darkness until it meant nothing to her. And dashed for the next doorway. But I have a knife—and so I will kill one or three or, who knows, even more of them. Maybe I’ll get away. And Rimgia will get free. That’s what’s important. That’s—
Then, in a movement that was beyond thought, she sprinted out to Rimgia, reached the stumbling girl, put one arm firmly around Rimgia’s shoulder and her other hand over Rimgia’s mouth, and kept her pace moving forward. “It’s Naä!” she whispered—less then whispered: mouthed rather, with just the faintest trace of breath, her lips touching Rimgia’s ear, and she was still sure the girl didn’t hear.
With her free hand, Naä tugged at the rope, loosening it, pulling it up to Rimgia’s shoulders. In the faintest light from some passing shutter, Naä saw Rimgia staring at her (their faces were only inches from each others’) in terror; yet her head shook a moment, with some recognition of what was happening. As Naä got the rope free, she glanced toward the horses before her, where none of the men had as yet looked back. “I’m changing places with you …!” she whispered suddenly to Rimgia.
There was a convulsive movement from the girl, beneath Naä’s arm, that, though it was wholly without sound, might as easily have been a laugh as a quiver of fear.
“Go!” Naä went on. “Get Abrid—take him somewhere out of the village, into the hills, the both of you!” She had gotten the rope over her own shoulder, when, from Rimgia, still against her, clinging to Naä even though she was no longer bound, there was abrupt movement—for a moment Naä was confused, and frightened, and sure that, in a moment, the whole thing would end. But Rimgia was pushing her shawl over Naä’s head, pulling it forward, tucking it down under the rope, now here, now there, all the time half running along beside her in the dark. “All right!” Naä whispered, again, in that whisper less than sound.
Now, at once, Rimgia pulled away—or perhaps Naä pulled from Rimgia. Naä stumbled for real, but did not fall. Ahead, the horse to whom she was bound made a corresponding adjustment in his step. And the big soldier astride him—once again—did not turn around to look! Beneath Rimgia’s shawl, Naä felt the length of blade at her belt; it seemed small and silly and the idea of killing somebody with it even sillier. Her mouth had gone dry. Her heart was thudding loud enough to make her stagger in her tracks. At least the children might actually get away—
I will be killed, Naä thought once more. But, blessedly, it was still without meaning.
They crossed a stretch that, from the smell and the stubble underfoot, was a burnt field. Fires were burning in the distance. Then other fires were closer. The black-cut gray of birches leaned off into the dark. In front of a tent, the soldiers stopped the horses; dismounted—and, believe it or not, still did not bother to look at her!
The big soldier, whose horse she was tied to, pushed back the flap and, leaning within, said: “I’ve got your girl for you, Lieutenant.”
The voice she’d heard before, the one called Kire, said: “Bring her in and leave us, Uk.”
Naä clamped her jaw, clutched the shawl tight over her hair, her other hand on the knife hilt under the long cloth, under the rope. Strike, she thought. Who? Which one? Would it be the brutal, vicious soldier who’d struck Abrid and bound Rimgia? Or the lieutenant? Or maybe the prince, if he were still there…? If things had gone this well so far, perhaps it was not so foolish to expect success after all? But she mustn’t get cocky. Bravery, daring, courage, yes—but don’t abandon common care and sense—though, she wondered, was there anything of sense about this? Remember, she thought, men who do what these men have done are not human, are without feelings, are dogs, are maggots, are worms. . .
Who will it be first, she thought. Will it be the lieutenant or one of his hulking, beer-gutted guards?
The big guard, Uk—what a name!—came back and took her arm. As he pulled her into the wedge of lamplight that was the tent opening, she started to look away, so that he might not recognize her. Then something made her stare straight at him.
His heavy featured face was looking directly ahead, neither to the right nor left. A soldier, she realized, following orders—doing nothing more, nothing less. For all his brutality to Rimgia and Abrid, that’s all he was. A pig, a dog, a worm; and yet as much without will, she thought, as without sensitivity. He really doesn’t see me at all, Naä reflected. Do any of them—
“Thank you, Uk. Dismiss the others and return to duty.”
And the big soldier, with a fist flung high, backed through the flap.
The lieutenant stood by the desk against the tent’s striped wall. There was a smell in the tent that made her recall both the smell in Qualt’s yard and the stronger smell in the malodorous basket from the afternoon—without it’s being exactly like either. Was it the mildewed canvas itself? But no, it was a spoiled scent far closer to animal than vegetable.
Like a black-draped statue, the lieutenant turned in the light of the lamps, one of which—a shallow tripodded brazier on a low table by the cot, where a puma skin, the skull still in it, had been thrown across the dark wool blanket (was that what smelled, she wondered)—had a yellow hue: the lamp hanging from the tent’s center by its several brass chains and the lamp on the desk’s corner both burned with the harshest white fire.
Outside the tent, Uk stepped to the left of the entrance, breathed deeply in the darkness, spread his legs, put his hands behind his back, taking the at-ease guard position, and thought: There, that’s done, however little it was. What am I? A man following orders, nothing more, nothing less. I’m a soldier. Forget this sensitivity. It doesn’t become me. Though the night had grown chill around him, there was almost a warmth in the realization, so that, for the first time that day, it seemed he could let his mind drift, let his eyes fix on a bit of light from the tent flaps, that fell on a grass tuft and a flattened stone, while he remembered a stream somewhere, with broken mud, dragonflies, frogs …
When the lieutenant looked at Naä, she lowered her eyes, to let the edge of Rimgia’s shawl fill as low across her face as it could, even as she thought: but he doesn’t know what I’m supposed to look like, at all!
The lieutenant walked over to her and pulled at the rope. It was tied so loosely that its two coils dropped down around her feet even as he tugged them once. (There had been three coils when Rimgia had first been tied.) Naä held the shawl closed at her neck more tightly. But he did not seem to think it particularly odd. The feeling that none of them, none of them at all actually saw her, became for a moment a dazzling conviction. I could be anyone here, and it would make no difference—
The lieutenant stepped toward the desk again and turned, his black gloved fingers on some parchments there. A day’s beard peppered his cheek.
“Thou lookest to be hard worked,” she said shortly, assuming the Çironian idiolect. Her own voice sounded breathless and faint to her. But the words would not stop. “Has doing injury worn thee down?”
He glanced up at her, with a smile which, she realized, looked simply tired. In the brazier’s light, his eyes were a smoky hue, as if the irises were circles cut from the undersides of oak leaves, around black pupils.
He said: “I haven’t slept much—or well, recently.” The oddly hoarse voice, with the carrion odor all around, made her feel
as if she’d entered some place more primitive, primordial, and basically lawless than any she recalled from her travels.
“Bad dreams?” Bitterness whet her voice to a greater sharpness than she’d intended.
Kire walked across the rug, reaching up to push a black pom through a black loop. His hood slipped from bronze hair. It and his cloak dropped to the ground to make a motionless puddle of night, frozen in the moment of its fall. Turning to sit on the cot’s edge, absently he felt the prairie lion’s skull with black-gloved fingers. Kire’s green eyes strayed back to Naä’s.
She pulled the shawl tighter; and felt her body tingling with impatience for him to make the move, say a word, give her one reason to lunge with the knife—at his neck. Yes, certainly in the neck. Could she slip beneath the back of the tent? And the stabbing itself—could she do it so quickly, so deftly, that there would be no noise? Should she wait for him to turn from her? Or should she move closer now—
“You’re not a very tall woman,” he said, looking up at her. “See over there?” He nodded toward the back of the tent. “One of the ground cords—” and she had the momentarily uncanny feeling that he had heard her thoughts—“at the rear wall has come untied. You can easily slip under the canvas there, if you like—yes, you can go. I have no reason to frighten you any more than you’ve already been frightened.” He gestured to the tent wall. “Go on.”
“You want me to go…?” she said, dropping the Çironian inflection, but realizing that she had only when he glanced back with raised eyebrow. “Suppose I don’t want to. Suppose I want to stay and find out what kind of man you are.”