Lal did not speak for a long time. The old man watched her, studying her face as he might have studied himself in a mirror. She said finally, “There was a boy. I can see him, but I can’t recall….”
“The guard’s son.” Soukyan spoke now utterly without inflection. “Yes, he was there—asleep in the scullery, he must have been. And he woke up just after we took his father prisoner, and he came charging to the rescue, swinging a slop bucket or some such at my legs. But you stopped him.”
“I did not hurt him.” Lal’s voice had risen sharply. “That I know, Soukyan.”
“No, no, of course not,” the other agreed. “We only hurt his father. And he saw.”
Lal was on her feet in a single motion far too fluid for her age. “What are you talking about? All we wanted from that fool was silence and the key, and those we had of him in an instant. There was no question of hurting him.”
“This is how it was.” Soukyan’s flat tone did not change. “It was late summer, and very hot in the cells, and the food was dreadful—worst I’ve ever had in anyone’s prison. Also we two both had serious business elsewhere, which was making us irritable. Perhaps then we had some little excuse for what we did.”
“What we did? What did we do?” Anger continued to strip years from her movements as she paced the mud floor of the hut, her great stooped shadow lurching to keep up. “We never harmed him—do you think I’d forget if we had? He was a slow, thick sort—I remember that much—and he spoke that toothy lowlander dialect and affected to understand nothing we said. He was a guard, like all guards, he did what they all do. What of it? Why are we talking about him?
“Because we humiliated him in front of his son,” the old man said. Lal came to a halt and simply stared. Soukyan was standing too, pointing first at her and then to himself. “Both of us. Half-strangled, he was still struggling to keep hold of the keys. You had to drag his belt off, Lal, and when you did his trews fell right down his flabby white legs. Yet he kept flailing out as well as he could—he caught you in the eye, do you remember that?” Lal shook her head. “It was all more trouble than we expected, and it made us angry. I pinned his arms behind him against the bars, holding him with one hand hard under his chin, so that he looked like a bird stretched for slaughter, fluttering and squawking. It was you who took the keys and opened the other cell doors—I had my hands full with a sweaty, smelly, half-naked dolt who simply didn’t know when to give up. He even bit my wrist.”
In the complete blackness outside, a small wind was making the sand whisper. A pair of mardriu lizards quarreled piercingly over a mate; a tharakki scuttled by, tiptoeing on two long-clawed feet, taking advantage of the night hunters’ preoccupation. Soukyan said, “This is what happened. As they were freed, every one of those other prisoners ran past where I held that guard and spat in his face. There were quite a few of them.” His voice was very low, but very clear. “The boy saw it all.”
She shrugged. “Well? I never knew a prison guard I’d not have done the same to, and glad of the chance. You are forgetting whom we were then, Soukyan, and where we have been.”
“No,” he said. “No, I forget nothing. And I remember that he was decent to us, that one, anyway as decent as he could be. It wasn’t his fault that the food was so bad, and that there wasn’t enough water. He spoke politely to us. He actually tried to be kind. I have no idea why.”
“And I still have no idea why you are going on so about him. It was long ago, and whatever was done to him, it was surely his due. There are no innocent guards.”
“True enough, doubtless.” Soukyan dropped heavily back onto the mat, looking at his big clasped hands. After a moment, he said, “But the boy was innocent.”
Lal snorted without answering him. Soukyan continued, as though to himself, “And what was between them, him and his father, that was innocence.” He looked up at her, his face suddenly as young as Choushi-wai’s with confusion. “It plagues me, Lal.”
The old woman was plainly about to say something derisive, but she checked herself almost audibly and only stood looking silently back at him. He repeated, “All these years, and yet it plagues me—I am the one troubled by dreams now. The gray spittle running all down that fat, bewildered face, the look in that boy’s eyes. I never used to dream about it before.”
Still without speaking, Lal sat cross-legged facing him, reaching forward to put a hand on his ankle. In a little, Soukyan’s knuckly brown hand joined hers. She said quietly, “There is a song to chase away such dreams. It is quite a long and boring song, but it does work. Believe me, I would know.”
“But I do not want the dream gone!” he cried out. Anger and desperation were mingled equally in his voice. “I need it, I need to remember.” He paused, rubbing a hand fiercely across his forehead. He said slowly, “I need to go back there. Kulpai. To apologize.”
“To do what?”
The next ten minutes were entirely Lal’s, although Soukyan began to laugh during the last four or five. When she ran out of breath, he said, “There, I knew it. For all the talk of having closed your circle, having found your way home to true serenity, I knew my old Lal was here somewhere. Go on, don’t let me stop you—you cannot imagine what a comfort it is to have you berating my stupidity again. Oh, you are absolutely right—we were never supposed to have anything to do with each other, but who cares? Hello, dear Lal.”
“Be quiet,” the old woman said. “I am not speaking to you.” She stood up again and crossed the hut to a battered wood-and-leather sea chest hidden in the darkest corner. From it she withdrew a gray earthenware wine bottle, the seal on its neck so old that the edges were already falling to powder as she held it up. Behind her Soukyan laughed again, this time in amazement. “Dragon’s Daughter, I don’t believe it. Here?”
Without answering, Lal knocked the rest of the seal off with the hilt of a table knife and took a quick swig. She frowned, studying the bottle. “Probably all right. It’s hard to tell with this swill.” She handed the wine bottle to Soukyan.
“Dragon’s Daughter,” he said again. “The inn near Corcorua. It’s too much nostalgia for a man of my age.” He drank, wiped his mouth, and grimaced contentedly. “Dreadful as ever, thank the gods. So. Are you coming with me?”
Lal wheeled on the instant and pointed a swordcane finger at the bottle. “Keep at it. I opened that, after all these years, not out of sentiment, but to get you drunk enough that there would be no more babble about Kulpai this one night at least. Just keep drinking.”
The old man smiled bitterly. “A waste. I could have told you.” Nevertheless, he tilted the gray bottle again as she watched. When he lowered it, they looked at each other for a long while, until she said at last, “Kulpai will be a waste. I can tell you that.”
Soukyan nodded judiciously over the bottle. “Most likely.”
“Most likely. Yes, well, he will most likely be dead, the guard. And the boy, who knows? If he is even in Kulpai, he will most likely have forgotten the whole business by now. Like everyone else.”
“Everyone else but one ancient mercenary with a cramp in his conscience.” He offered the bottle, but she shook her head impatiently. “No,” he said, “no, the boy will not have forgotten. You’ve never had children, Lal, or you would understand.”
“And you never were a child, not for ten minutes together. And you never had a conscience—only loyalties.” She stopped herself abruptly, actually putting a hand over her mouth. The old man said nothing. Presently she lowered her hand and said, her voice determinedly clear and even, “Very well. We always did know one another’s unhealed places. I still think that it would be foolish and useless for you to make your pilgrimage all the way to Kulpai to say I am sorry. There will be no one to say it to, except yourself, and no forgiveness but your own. There never is.”
Soukyan set the bottle down and reached both hands toward her. After a moment she came and knelt by him, putting her long fingers between his. He said, “Dear Lal, I know that. And you are prob
ably right about my having nothing but my odd, meaningless loyalties in place of a conscience. But one of those loyalties is to my idea of myself. It was hard come by, and a weary time in the coming, as you know well, and now it is truly all I have. Is it different for you, at the last?”
Lal did not withdraw her hands—if anything, she pressed them closer into his—but she did not answer him. They sat so for a very long time in the flickering lamplight, while their shadows shivered on the walls.
Choushi-wai arrived with the false dawn, as she always did. The hut was empty, and the little girl’s quick eyes took in the fact that the few cooking pots and the swordcane were gone even before she saw the message scratched into the dark underside of one of the leaves that had wrapped yesterday’s meal. She mouthed the words over to herself several times—reading was recent, and Lal had not quite finished the job—and then went to stand in the doorway, unconsciously imitating the old woman’s posture as she stared out at the two sets of tracks leading away across the white desert.
She was a tracker born, like all her people, and it was not even a matter of conscious thought for her to realize that one of the trails was some hours fresher than the other. If asked, she could have predicted the exact place and moment when Lal must catch up with the big old man who had shared bites of food with her last night. But there was no one to ask her. After a time, she turned away, found the broom in its accustomed place, and began to sweep the floor. She would sleep here tonight, and all the nights until Lal returned.
They walked on side by side for a good while before either of them spoke. The old man said in time, “We’ll need horses. It is a very long journey to Kulpai.”
“I am still not speaking to you.” Lal’s feet made as little sound on the sand as they had on the floor of her hut. “I am not speaking to myself, for the matter of that—not until I can provide myself with one halfway adequate reason for my being here.” Despite the heat, she was clad all in rough, faded leather, from worn low boots to leggings and shirt, to the curious arrangement of black bands that covered her head. The swordcane hung down her back, between the jutting shoulderblades. Her sailor’s gait matched Soukyan’s pace easily, but she never looked at him as they plodded toward the thin dark-green ribbon that fluttered where the horizon should have been.
Soukyan said, “Unfortunately, there will be no horses to be found between here and Jahmanyar, at best—nothing but churfas in this country. Have you ever ridden a churfa, Lal?”
When she did not reply, he went on cheerfully, “You’ll hate them. They’re evil-tempered, utterly untrustworthy, they stink, and the worst of it is they’re a pure bloody nuisance to steal. Do you recall the nightmare it was lifting those horses out of Stro Gandry’s stables when we went to Kashak? Aye, well, that will be a fond memory after we’ve had a midnight hurrah with a couple of churfas. No choice, I’m afraid. Any luck yet in finding a reason to talk to me?”
But Lal kept her resolve and did not speak at all until late in the afternoon. They were resting at the bottom of a dry creek bed, taking advantage of the little shade offered by the crumbling walls. Allowing herself very small sips from her waterskin, she announced brusquely, “I have decided that I am traveling with you precisely in order to prove to myself that this is not my life anymore. You were right last night—every rare now-and-then I am troubled a little by thoughts of far places we saw together, strange folk I hardly believe we knew, happenings that I could never make tales of or talk about with anyone but bloody you. Plainly, the best way to be rid of this excess baggage would be to put myself through one last such journey—the most absurd, most pointless, most exhausting expedition a decrepit old fool might hope to survive.” She closed the waterskin carefully and smiled for the first time that day. “There. I do like to understand these things.”
Soukyan was using the halt to restring his bow. Without looking up, he asked, “Which decrepit old fool are we talking about?”
“Oh, as you please,” Lal said serenely. Soukyan bent the great bow, fitted the new string with only the slightest grunt of effort, and rose almost in the same motion. “There’s a waterhole to reach before nightfall.” He seemed unwearied by the distance they had traveled, but his cheekbones and the bones of his forehead were more prominent than she remembered them, the skin grown oddly taut with age rather than sagging. She took the hand he extended and pulled herself to her feet, feeling the familiar spark of pain in her left knee. Thirty, thirty-five years since that fight in the winecellar with what’s-his-name, and it’s never been right since. She slung the swordcane over her shoulders again, and straightened her spine to cradle it.
For the most part, they journeyed by night. The green ribbon seemed no nearer each dawn, except for the occasional shooting-star flurry of mirages, when they would be accosted by momentary rivers, assaulted by fleeting oases, lured along by shards of gardens, slivers of jungle waterfalls. At such times, they scooped hollows in the sand for themselves and dozed out the day, keeping their heads covered, moistening their lips and tongues every few hours to mumble a bit of dried meat or dried fruit. They hardly spoke after the first day; not until one late evening when the breeze brought at least a memory of coolness and the smell of what might almost have been a cooking fire. Soukyan said, “That will be Doule. A small place, but big enough to stable a few churfas. Tomorrow this time, if we keep this pace, we’ll be riding on our way like gentry.”
Lal was massaging swollen feet, and did not look up as she spoke. “You may as well know that I haven’t ridden a horse since that business in Kashak. Let alone stealing one. You’ll have a very old greenhorn on your hands when the big moment comes.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference if you had,” Soukyan replied. “Absolutely nothing that works with horses works with churfas, anyone will tell you that.” He beamed and waggled a forefinger at her. “Fortunately, I do know a trick that comes as near to working with the revolting beasts as anything ever will. What you must do with a churfa, old companion, is stick your arm in its mouth.”
Lal did look at him then, for quite a long time. She said finally, in a remarkably amiable voice, “I stick my arm in its mouth. I see. Which arm is that?”
“Oh, as you please,” he mimicked her impatiently. “What’s important is to shove the whole arm between its jaws as quickly as you can. All the way back, mind, where there aren’t any grinders. No matter how angry they are—and they’re always angry—something about having a nice arm to chew on always calms them down straightaway. Sweet memories of infancy, I think, or possibly of eating their young. It’s hard to say.”
“But boundlessly cheering to know. Whatever am I supposed to do with the other arm?”
“Ah. I’m glad you asked.” Soukyan was up and pacing now, not quite meeting her eyes. “The thing is to keep them from screaming. Forget the teeth, forget the smell, never mind rousing the watch—believe me, you do not want to hear a churfa scream if you can avoid it. So. As you force your arm into its mouth, you must at the same time cover the beast’s nostrils with your free hand. Squeeze tightly, tightly, and it will fall to its knees so that you can mount. And don’t ask me why this should succeed, Lal, because I simply don’t know. But it always does, practically.”
“Practically. Yes.” Lal forced her feet back into her boots and stood up. “Well. I am too eager to wait any longer to meet such wondrous creatures. If you’re ready.”
When the sun rose the next morning, they were near enough to Doule to hear the Nounos at their prayers, and to smell fresh rishu-dung in the streets. Grown too populous to be called a village, yet never a real town, Doule remained a thorn-walled enclave of dirty white huts, differentiated from the desert only by a whimsical rainy season and an increasingly put-upon underground spring. The huts were thatch-roofed and squat, with a scattering of larger dwellings set apart in fenced-off compounds. These had wooden or tiled roofs, hesitant flower gardens, proper windows, and their own stables, from which the early breeze brought a smell like burni
ng urine and the sounds of heavy claws scraping on wood.
Lal and Soukyan entered Doule through a side gate in the barricade, barely noticed by the porter, who was busy coercing a bribe out of a group of indignant spice merchants. The two of them moved wearily among the brown-skinned, caftan-clad farmers and shopkeepers without attracting attention, except for the occasional side-glance at the tall old man with the great bow. Lal pointed out the common stable in the center of town, but Soukyan shook his head. “Much too public. Too many beasts, too much noise, we can’t risk it. We want one of those,” and he nodded toward the wealthier-looking homes. “And right now we want a bed, a bath, and a decent meal. There’s a hard night waiting up ahead for us.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “I am glad of your company. Like the oldest old times, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lal said. They walked on, lifting their feet high to keep from stepping in steaming piles and puddles. She said, “I think I really disliked the old times. I’m trying to remember.”
The inn looked a decided step down from the public stable, but neither of them was of a mind to be finicky. They washed in tin buckets smelling of stale grain, dined on bread, weak ale, and the pottage of fermented milk and cheese that is the main dish of the region, and then slept until close on midnight in a bed apparently stuffed with knees and elbows. Soukyan woke first. He sat up slowly and leaned back against the wall, studying Lal’s sleep. She woke within a minute, and had her hand on the swordcane before she recognized him. “I hate that,” she said. “You know I hate being watched like that.”
“I know,” the old man answered. “I’m sorry. But it has always been my only chance to spy on your childhood, and I’ve never once been able to resist it. Forgive me.”
Lal was already off the bed and peering out of the room’s murky horn-paned window. “Can’t see a bloody thing,” she muttered. “Dark enough, anyway.” She turned back to face him. “What do I look like, then?”