“Trustful,” Soukyan said. Lal made a wordless disrespectful sound. She ran both hands vigorously through her short white hair, shook herself once, and said, “I thought we were going to steal a couple of mounts, not sit here chatting all night. Your churfas can’t be any fiercer than the bugs in that bed.”
They slipped out of the silent inn without waking even the two Tazri watchbirds stationed at the back door to greet just such fly-by-night guests. The desert night was cool, almost cold, and tasted sour as they stood letting their eyes adjust to the blackness. There was no light to be seen anywhere, except for the half-moon overhead. Soukyan muttered, “We could have done without that, but at least it will quiet the churfas. They’re impossible in full dark.”
“Better and better,” Lal said. Soukyan, having gotten his bearings, started off down an alleyway behind the inn. He was invisible in two strides, but the old woman followed without faltering. Soukyan took a jagged route that dodged the town center, but then doubled back along its farthest edge, skirted a scummy stockpond, and finally scurried up a low rise toward the back of one of the private stables. Lal knew it by the smell, and by the guttural breathing that sounded like flames.
Soukyan halted abruptly, cocking his head. “Two. Only two, bless every one of the blessed gods for that.” He turned and gripped Lal lightly by her upper arms. “It has to happen very fast. Do you remember all I told you about churfas?” Lal’s response was quiet, precise and profoundly obscene, and Soukyan grinned happily in the hard silver light. “There’s my old Lal, ready for anything. All right, then. All right.”
There were two locks, heavy as anchors. Soukyan had them open so quickly and daintily that the breathing within never changed. He looked over his shoulder, whispering, “The one in the far left-hand stall. Don’t bother with saddle or bridle—just get the bloody beast out and gone. All right. Now.”
Lal had braced herself for the howl of the hinges when they dragged the stable door open, but in fact her own panting was louder in her ears than any other sound, until the churfas sprang to their clawed feet. They were little taller than horses, but far more massive, with thick coats of sticky-looking fur, tufted round ears and heads so disproportionately broad and blunt as to look truncated. Their lips were grotesquely soft, almost pendulous, which made the tusks protruding from their lower jaws appear longer and sharper than they were. Lal had no chance to take in anything more, because the churfas were raising their heads and opening their immense mouths to scream.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Soukyan come off the floor, one hand over the nostrils of a churfa, the other arm shoved crosswise as far into the slobbering mouth as the old man could force it. His legs were already grappling for a grip on the beast’s flanks. Smaller than he, and long out of practice at such things, she lunged up at the great reeking head swinging above her, catching hold at neck and nose, but not before the churfa had let out the first half of a freezing, shattering cry that seemed to set every bone in her body at lunatic war with her skin. But it did thump down onto its foreknees then, as Soukyan had said it would, and she scrambled high onto the burly neck and reached forward to push her arm between its jaws, feeling the rake of every yellow tooth as she worked the arm all the way back to gummy safety. The churfa fell shockingly silent on the instant, but still threshed its head this way and that, wild to be rid of her. Lal held on, methodically cursing Soukyan, a prison guard, the guard’s son, and the entire population of Doule in three languages.
On her left, wooden planks splintered under frantic claws, and Soukyan’s churfa exploded past her through the stable door. Her own beast surged to follow, and she had barely time to flatten herself into its harsh mane to keep from being dashed against the doorframe. Then they were outside in the dark, and Soukyan was leading them, not back the way they had come, but directly past the main house of the compound. Torches were showing in one window after another, and she could hear the voices of running men.
She had no idea of how to control the churfa, but fortunately she had no need. The creature kept close enough on the heels of its stablemate that the other turned and bit viciously at it several times. How Soukyan conducted them back down through the town without raising any alarm, and how he discovered the unattended gap in the thorn barrier, she never knew nor cared. She clung to the neck of her mount—astonishingly tractable now, even after she risked easing her numb arm out of its mouth—and she thought only, I am infinitely too old to be doing this, over and over.
The churfas were natural pacers, both legs on either side moving at once. Soukyan kept them traveling hard south and west, with the half-moon behind them, until dawn. Lal nodded in and out of dreams, wakened only by her mount’s hiccupy gait, and by the throbbing of bruises that Sailor Lal would never have deigned to notice. She sensed water near, off to their right, and could tell that the ground was rising and softening slowly under the churfas’ taloned feet. Despite the animals’ inescapably vile stench, she frequently caught the sharp woodsmoke scent of purple calocali, which grows in hill country everywhere. Twice, to her drowsy delight, she heard a female desidro calling softly to tell her mate and cubs that she had made a kill. Desidri are rare and beautiful, and are almost never seen below the timberline. Soukyan turned and smiled. In the moonlight he looked like a young man, a stranger.
They were not followed from Doule. Soukyan had doubted they would be; yet he rode wide arcs across their backtrail for the next two nights, to be certain. Even so, he hardly eased their pace, but drove the churfas steadily on through foothills that kept climbing, yet never quite became real mountains, being in their green hearts too soft and good-natured for the job. They were steep enough, in places, and their nights were chill enough that Lal and Soukyan often slept curled together, warming one another’s backs by turns (“Now this is something like—this is the past come again, say if it’s not!” “Old man, keep those feet to yourself, if you hope to wake tomorrow!”); and there were high-country birds and animals in plenty, like the desidri, and trees like the scarlet hajyll, whose dusty seedpods can cure half a dozen afflictions, and the mist-silver cromni, which cures nothing at all but gives joy to see. But for all that, they remained gentle, buttocky hills, with their bones well-covered by shrub and scrub and down, and Lal and Soukyan were thankful. The churfas appeared thankful too, though it was difficult to be sure.
In a life whose length had surprised her more than any of its events, Lal had never before encountered creatures remotely like the churfas. Close to, in daylight, their astonishing ugliness became almost endearing: there was a certain uncompromising grandeur even to the burnt-piss aroma, of which all she and Soukyan owned was long since redolent. Their manners, however, showed absolutely no promise of future charm, being far worse than Soukyan had had time to forewarn her. They shied and balked for deeply personal reasons, or for none, bit where the chance presented itself, screamed hideously at private demons on moonless nights, and shat in great semiliquid splatters of orangey-brown malice with an exquisite sense of placement and timing. They also ate everything from poisonous royak-bush to tree bark to entire rotten branches, and galumphed along tirelessly all day on wide padded feet with the blunt claws halfway retracted. Riding bareback, Lal nevertheless grew comfortable with her mount’s gait in time, learned in time to govern its direction by knee pressure, and gradually became at least accustomed to the stink; as for the biting, she cured it, to a degree, by biting the churfa’s vulnerable tufted ears in immediate retaliation. The night shrieks, however, remained a problem.
Since the first few days, they had spoken very little of Kulpai. The long ride on such strange beasts through halfstrange country made most of their talk: both Lal and Soukyan found themselves falling easily into past ways of speaking and moving, as well as taking on, with no discussion, the camp tasks each had assumed so long ago, time out of memory. Lal fought this backsliding at first, with considerable irritation; for all that, it was yet more than she could tolerate to allow Soukyan to fish fo
r their dinner when they came to a brook or a river, or to build the cooking fire. Her legs remembered, even this late, the slowswinging pace of the purposeful wanderer; her senses sharpened themselves gleefully against each other, so that she kept the old fierce watch for warning signs or sounds, while at the same time marveling like Choushi-wai at the morning song of small gray birds. Aye, I’m too old to be doing any of this, surely—but as that great fool said, who cares?
For his part, Soukyan placidly occupied himself in hunting with his bow, tending the churfas, and scouting the trail before and behind them every night. But for his grayness and the new scars, Lal would have seen no difference in him from twenty years before. He had always been a slow-moving man, slow enough that when he did move swiftly, the eye was not prepared for him; he had always chosen deliberately to mute his natural color, preferring to go as much unnoticed as possible, which was difficult work for a big, shambling person with remarkable eyes. Lal had known him to fade in and out of any background—wood or palace or town square—as it suited him; there, too, he was unchanged. He cooked what they killed quickly and inventively, talked too much or not at all, and complained as ever about the long, tuneless epic ballads of her own people, which she habitually chanted to herself as they rode. Yet it was he who noticed that the churfas seemed to find them soothing, especially in the dark. “Who am I to claim that I have finer taste than a churfa? Besides, anything is better than hearing them screaming. Sing. Please.”
All hills in the south country are bandit country; but they had met only three other persons since fleeing Doule: a woodcutter, an anchoress who made spectacularly appalling brandy in the tranquility of her cave, and a herdboy, whose gloomily bellowing rishus frightened their beasts into a serious attempt at tree climbing. Despite the quiet, Lal and Soukyan continued to take their regular turns at night guard, and to study the trail constantly for hoofprints, droppings, or a carelessly buried campfire. Once or twice, for the briefest moment, the wind did carry voices to their ears, distant as remembered dreams. Lal said, “There,” and Soukyan said, “Maybe. Maybe.”
The weather was slanting gracefully into autumn as the way began its descent toward the flatlands, now visible occasionally around the shoulder of an escarpment or through a gap between the hills. Soukyan said, “It is all farmers from here, and nothing even the size of Doule until we strike the Churush road and turn toward the coast. From there it will be easy sailing to Jahmanyar and Kulpai.”
“Kulpai,” Lal said sourly. “I had almost forgotten Kulpai.”
Soukyan touched her shoulder. “To tell the truth, so had I. I don’t look forward to Kulpai, Lal. As long ago as it all was, there’s never any joy to be had in confronting one’s own cruelty, nor any way to wake up from it, to make it not have happened. Nevertheless, this is what I have to do.”
“Stupid,” the old woman muttered. “I never could abide stupidity.” But she did not shrug away from his hand, and Soukyan smiled.
“A further confession. If you had utterly refused to accompany me on this undoubtedly ridiculous journey, I am not sure that I would have gone any farther than that white desert hut of yours. Oh, yes”—as she began to speak—“yes, you did say no, and I did leave alone. But I knew you would follow, because I know you. As you know me—as no one living knows either of us.” He touched her cheek quickly, and surprisingly shyly. “So I am even glad of Kulpai, in a way, because we would never have had this time together otherwise. Whatever happens there will have been worth it. As all the rest was, all those years.”
Lal did not answer him for some while. An upland breeze brought the sudden faint scent of new-harvested kohi grass, making the churfas growl like the loping stomachs they were. The tall, supple hill trees were beginning to give way to the ubiquitous harishi of the south, that are really only great thick shrubs, but yield a fine wood and a bitterly delicious yellow berry. The brook that had accompanied them sedately on the right almost all the way from Doule now broke into the open, raucously greedy for the sea, barely able to wait for the river waiting below. Lal heard the unmistakable let-me-be, let-me-be crying of a grasshawk, which subsists on small creatures turned out of their dens by the plow. She said, “We should try not to lose each other this time,” and nothing more.
It was getting on toward evening of that same day when they heard the breathing—first, before they heard the voices. The breathing was coming up the path toward them, rasping with a sound that comes only when the lungs are too weary to take in air. The churfas shied violently from it and Soukyan was almost thrown. The bow was already in his hand as he regained his balance, and the swordcane was off Lal’s shoulder, both of them fearing a wounded animal. When the boy dragged himself out of a thicket, they thought him indeed a beast for a moment, for he was going on all fours, and barely moving at that. As they gaped and the churfas pitched and yawped, he managed to stand precariously erect, gripping a tree branch for support, staring back at them out of a dead man’s eyes. He wore the dirty, patched half-smock and breeks of a southern farmer. His face was bloody, and his nose was obviously broken, and he could not have been more than seventeen.
The voices were coming up fast, and there were hounds. The boy started to labor on, but he fell down as soon as he let go of the branch. Lal and Soukyan looked at each other, and the boy looked at them: hopeless, fearless. Soukyan spoke to him in two languages, but he made no reply. Lal tried a third, gesturing for him to take shelter behind the churfas. He moved so slowly that he had not quite reached them when his pursuers came crashing out of the woods. The hounds were in the lead: three shaggy red Metzari dogs with sea-green eyes. Behind them, half a dozen men, all but two clad much as the boy was. The other pair carried double-edged shortswords, wore studded leather and grand long boots, and carried themselves with the insolent vigor of the backland lords they plainly were, for all their own grime and slovenliness. They had thick black beards and thick red faces.
The lead hound sighted the boy and sprang, its deep baying splitting shrilly in its throat. It would have flanked Soukyan’s mount to get at him, but Soukyan did something with one heel that Lal could not see, and the churfa erupted instantly into a spitting, bucking mass of indignation. It caught the red dog mightily with one clawed hind foot and hurled it twenty feet, end over end, into a “hello-friend” thornbush, from which the squalling victim seemed in no immediate hurry to emerge. The second dog charged in its turn, abruptly reconsidered and sat down, looking around for instructions. The boy clung to Lal’s boot.
The larger of the two armed men, first to take in the situation, strode forward and planted himself, gauntleted hands on his hips, facing Lal and Soukyan. His grin revealed yellow-and-black corncob teeth. Speaking in the second of the languages that Soukyan had tried on the boy, he said, “Give you good day, Grandmother, Grandfather.”
“Sunlight on your road,” Soukyan said politely. “I’d not stand too near, if I were you.” The churfa’s head shot out, the man leaped away with a curse and a ragged leather sleeve, and Soukyan slapped his mount’s neck and said, “Naughty.”
The second man wasted no time on civilities. Ignoring the riders completely, and moving faster than expected, he lunged between the churfas and actually had his hands on the boy before a long, thin blade nuzzled coldly at the back of his neck. He whirled and saw the white-haired black woman smiling thoughtfully at him. She said, “Gently, I think? He’s quite young.”
The man swatted the swordcane’s point away, free to deny its reality because of the age of the hands that held it. “Young, is it, hag? Aye, well, he was old enough to say no to his appointed master—he was old enough to come between his betters and their lawful desires. Old enough to defy those whom the gods have set over you is old enough to die, by my count. On your way, ancient ones—don’t trouble your venerable heads on his base account. My lord takes care of his own.”
Soukyan never moved. He said, almost absently, “This is quite interesting. I must tell you that no is very nearly my favor
ite word. I believe it to be my companion’s favorite word as well, unless I am wrong?” He slanted a bristly gray eyebrow at Lal.
The old woman pondered, as the armed men and their servants rumbled and shifted and laughed among themselves, as the boy waited empty-faced for life or death, as the Metzari hound still whined in the thornbush. She said slowly, “Of course, maybe is good, too—maybe is an excellent word. But at the last, when you come down to it, there is really nothing like no.”
Soukyan nodded, unsmiling. “I am glad you think so.” He glanced directly at the boy for the first time since Lal had offered him refuge. “What do they call you?”
It took the boy three tries to shape words with his cracked and bloody mouth. “Riaan. Cajli’s Riaan.”
“Cajli’s Riaan,” Soukyan repeated. “Ah, Cajli would be your father, then. I was called Jamurak’s Soukyan myself, long ago.”
The man, whose sleeve Soukyan’s churfa was still champing desultorily, now guffawed and swaggered toward them again, keeping a careful eye on the animal. “I am Cajli, Grandfather. This filth is my Riaan, and it is my right to dispose of him as I will. Doubtless you come from a civilized land, and will understand such things.”
“Yes,” Lal said. “Quite well.” She spoke so quietly that only Soukyan heard her. Cajli went on. “Not to offend respectable antiques like yourselves, but I’d long planned to throw this worthless tup of mine in with friend Boudrigal’s little yellow-haired nanny”—he thumped the other armed man’s shoulder—“and see what comes of it. And what happens? What do you think happens? He’ll not have it, if you please! She’s primed and willing—he’s the one just wilts and walks away, can’t be bothered, thank you very much. As though he had a bloody say in the matter. A bloody say!”
The boy’s voice was clearer when he spoke again. “She was not willing. And if she had been, I’d still not have touched her. The gods made us your servants, not your beasts.”